Starrigger

'Roland engineered it, but those button transponders did the trick. We have them planted all over the ship. What have you got for me?'

'Well, when I went down to the basement, I got quite a shock. There's tons of stuff from years back. I checked a list-out of that news-recording subroutine. The way it's coded is all goofed up. It tells me to erase all the junk I've kept for the last thirty days, but allows me to keep what I've recorded that day, the day I houseclean. What the subroutine does then is give everything that's left in the workfile a PROTECT tag. Then, when I erase again, all that stuff gets dumped into the reference library. As a result, there's all kinds of random crap down there from years back.'

'I'll have to stop buying that cheap off-the-shelf software and do my own coding for a change. You find anything interesting?'

'Yes, very. Like this item in Pravdu from about three years ago.' Sam snorted. 'Never fails to amuse me that they thought the change of one letter makes a Russian word into an Inter-system one.'

'Makes it easier for them. Go ahead.'

'Okay. Quote, Tsiolkovskygrad, Einstein, October 10, 2103. The season premiere of the New Bolshoi was well-attended this year, as it is every year, but last night standing-room-only crowds packed the house to see a daringly innovative staging of, blah blah blah blah, etcetera. Skip six paragraphs. Among the notables attending were Kamrada Big Cheese, Kamrada Head Whatshisname, your mother's Uncle Pasha, and ? here it is, get this ? Minister of Intercolonial Affairs Dr. Van

Wyck Vance, daughter Darla Petrovsky-Vance, and some prominent friends of the Authority, including labor leader Kamrada Corey Wilkes, unquote. I'm multiplexing the 2-D image. Are you getting it? '

I put one end of the key to my eye and peered through the pinhole lens. The microscreen showed a loge full of bored faces, one of them belonging to Corey Wilkes. He was seated next to ? yes, it had to be ? the same patrician-looking gentleman I'd seen at Sonny's and thought I recognized. Van Wyck Vance. Next to him was a blond woman with her head turned, talking to the woman behind her. The face was hidden, the hair was longer and probably its natural color, but…

'Sam, zoom in on the blonde.'

'How? Like this?'

'Little closer, screen right.'

… But the port-wine mark on her bare right shoulder told me it was Darla.

'Now we know who 'Dar-ya' is.'

'More than that, Sam. It's Darla. And I saw her dad at Sonny's.'

'How can you ?? Oh, you mean the little mark on her shoulder? I missed that, but now I remember. More advantages than you'd think in women running around naked, aside from the obvious ones.'

I stretched out on the silky bedspread and put the key on the nightstand, leaving the circuit open. I closed my eyes.

'What's it mean, Jake? From what you've told me, it looks like all along she's been Petrovsky's agent. Now we know she's his LC. But if she's Vance's daughter, and Vance is in cahoots with Wilkes… where does that put her?' I didn't answer right away. 'Jake?'

'I don't know. We need more information.'

Sam sighed. 'Damn it, sometimes being a machine is hell.'

I picked the key up and held it close to my mouth. 'Sam, everything they've done has been to make us run. And we tucked tail and ran. The scuffle at Sonny's was to start things off, and also served the purpose of setting me up to be tracked by a method I haven't figured out. They knew exactly where we were when we hid out at Grey stoke Groves. But did they surprise us? No, they flushed us out of there and followed us, dogging our every step, somehow anticipating our every move while staying a planet or two behind. And all for one purpose: to watch us until we ducked into a potluck. We did. To them that meant we had the Roadmap. And we do. We've had it all along and didn't know it.' 'Uh-huh. And what is it?' 'It's a who. It's Winnie.' 'What?'

I told him about the sand drawings, then went over my reasoning concerning why the drawings could qualify as the 'convincing forgery' Petrovsky had mentioned.

'Convincing? Who'd be convinced by scratches in the sand?' 'Apparently everybody. That's the only way it figures. Remember, they might not know that Winnie's knowledge is based on myth. And furthermore, we don't know it either, for a fact. That line may be real, or they may not be. I haven't had time to find out for sure. I tried back on the beach, but Darla's the only one who seems to understand her.'

'How did Wilkes and company find out about Winnie? Through Darla?' 1

'I don't know. We know she reported to Petrovsky at the station. Wilkes may have a spy in Petrovsky's intelligence unit. Another thing that isn't clear is whether Darla knew about Winnie's abilities when she reported. The drawings didn't show up until we got here, but Darla's been talking to her all along, so she may have reported on the possibility earlier. Left some kind of message, secret radio, something.' 'And the Reticulans? '

'A Snatchgang working for Wilkes, but why Rikkis would work for humans, and for what compensation, isn't obvious.'

'You can say that again. Okay, okay, but I don't understand two things.' He laughed. 'What am I talking about? I'm fuzzy about a lot of things. Put it this way. There are two main confusions. One: How the hell did these stories about us get started in the first place? And how come we never got wind of them until recently?'

'Sam, how long were we off the road before this run?' 'Christ, I don't know. Couple of months. Why?' 'Couple of months to bring in the harvest back at the farm, right? And to do some necessary business. Before that, where were we?'

'Hydran Maze, pleading with those waterbags not to tear up the Guild Basic and go over to Wilkes.' 'How long?'

'Don't remind me. Seemed like years, waiting three weeks at a time for some bureaucrat to get over her estrous cycle so we could get an appointment. How long? Another three months, all told.'

'Sam, your antialien prejudice is showing.'

'Not at all. I'm just pissed, is all.'

'Six months off the road,' I said. 'Okay, here's Crackpot Theory Number One. Somehow, we get out of this mess. With Winnie's help, we find our way back, but we do a Timer. We luck onto a backtime route and return to T-Maze before we leave… about six months before we leave. Word gets around somehow. There's a map; get the map, everybody says. Everybody wants the goddamn thing. And some combination of Wilkes, the Authority, the Reticulans, and the Ryxx is aiming to get it… somehow. Our future selves stay low until the heat's off. They know better, leaving us to get chased.'

'You'd think they'd have the decency to fill us in.'

'They may have their reasons. Anyway, we run, find Winnie, leave the Maze, get into a mess, get out of it, go back in time, etcetera. That's the Paradox. Somehow, it all has to work.'

'How many somehows was that? I lost count.'

'Too many, but I'm ready for Crackpot Theory Number Two, if you've got it.' '

'I don't. I've got one more big confusion, though.'

'Which is?'

'Why the hell didn't they just grab us back in T-Maze and beat the merte out of us until we handed it over? We didn't have anything, but they didn't know that.'

'They're smart. They're aware of the Paradox. Wilkes as much as pointed it out to me back at Sonny's. They're reasoning that I got the map at some point along the journey, but they don't know exactly where. So they wait until it looks like we deliberately slip through a hope-to-Jesus hole.' I took a deep breath. 'Well, what do you think?' I asked, knowing he'd been playing devil's advocate all along.

'Well, I've never knowingly bought a crock of excrement before, but I'll buy yours if you answer