“With myself mostly,” she replied sullenly. “Not with Danivon?”
“Well, him too. There’s Enforcement that stays with the letter of the Complaint and Disposition, and there’s Enforcement that tramps all over people.”
“And Danivon tramps all over people?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“Including you?”
“Well …” She thought about this, trying to be fair. “Yes, he does. But I’m afraid when he does, it’s because I let him.” “Ah,” said Jory. “And that makes you angry.” Fringe flushed and nodded. Of course it made her angry. Acting like that. Acting like any lovesick schoolgirl! Longing for … for whatever it was she had longed for all her life, and then forgetting that to lie down for Danivon, like any bitch in heat!
Besides, she kept remembering what Zasper had said to her about the child he had saved. Certainly Danivon had been that child, though Danivon didn’t know it. He could have been one of those skulls on the rack, but he didn’t know that either. Perhaps it was time he did know it!
She had no intention of betraying Zasper, but she wasn’t going to let Danivon get away with murder either.
City Fifteen was three-quarters occupied by dinka-jins, about half of whom were dedicated to the life of the mind. Why, after all, go through disassembly if not to free the mind from fleshly concerns? Why put one’s germ plasm on standby, one’s innards in cold storage, if not to focus upon the attainments of the intellect?
The other half of City Fifteen’s dink population had come up with reasons: reasons erotic, reasons financial, reasons political, reasons of custom. Dinks, so the aphorism said, begot dinks, so they were never in short supply.
The trick to City Fifteen, as Boarmus’s predecessor had told him at length, was to be sure you were talking to a brain dink and not one of the other kind. The creature who delivered Boarmus’s packet was certainly one of the others, a dilettante tourist dink who had lost heavily at Bloom’s—a debt he (she or it) had been unable to pay—and who had been given the choice of running the simple errand or being sold for parts. The dink to whom the packet was directed was Sepel794DZ, a brain dink of the highest order, to whose home/lab/study Boarmus was guided after arriving at a shielded location.
“I brought these things,” said Boarmus, dumping the contents of his pockets onto the table before him while carefully avoiding looking directly at Sepel794DZ. He had nothing against dinks. It merely distressed him to look at them.
“Sensory recordings,” said Sepel794DZ tonelessly. “Old ones, from the look of them. Where did you get them?”
“Down near the Core. Not in the communications room itself, but in the corridor nearby. There are cabinets full of them. I couldn’t bring many, so I picked the ones done by the faction leaders, and by someone called Jordel of Hemerlane. He shows up in the old … well, accounts, I guess you’d say.” Did one call children’s rhymes “accounts”? And why not. Tradition was tradition, no matter who maintained it.
“You haven’t accessed them?” asked Sepel794DZ. “You don’t know what’s in them?”
“I couldn’t access them without using Files, and I can’t do that without whatever’s in the Core knowing. It … they know everything I do, every breath I take!” He jittered, feeling the sweat dripping down his neck, under his arms, on his chest.
“Sit down, Boarmus,” said the dink in a dry metallic dinka-jin voice that somehow managed to sound kindly. “I had a chair brought in for you.”
Dinks didn’t need chairs. Dinks didn’t need much, Boarmus thought. Except answers. Dinks liked answers.
“I need help,” he begged as he sank into the chair, which was too small but no less welcome for that.
The dink tipped one of its boxes. It took a moment for Boarmus to recognize the gesture as a nod. “We’ve been monitoring the physical effects, just as you have, ever since Chadra Hume brought the matter to our attention. We feel the effects originate in the Core. We’ve postulated various ways they might be accomplished. Most of us believe there must be some kind of network coming from the Core and extending over wide areas. We’ve looked for it. Either we’ve looked in the wrong places or it’s shielded in ways we can’t even recognize.”
“You can’t … identify it?”
“We haven’t yet. And we may be wrong.”
Boarmus mused. “You postulate a network?” He tried without success to imagine what kind of network.
“It would have to extend over most of the planet, actually.
It would have to include miniature devices, tiny but synchronized….
“Devices that can make footprints in rock? Devices that can make imaginary things real? Devices that can tear off real arms and legs, kill people really dead? Devices that can hear everything, see everything….”
The dink twitched. “I know it sounds illogical. Of course, we may be wrong.”
“You keep saying that!”
The dink didn’t reply.
“If it emanates from the Core, what if we isolate the Core. We can’t get into it, but what if we dig it up? Suspend it? Cut it off?”
Sepel794DZ made a noise like a snort. “Chadra Hume asked that same question. From what we know, we can’t touch the Core; it’s too well protected from outside interference.”
“Well then, suppose we concentrate on finding this network. When we do, can we destroy it?”
“Yes. Given time. We could destroy it, if we could find it, but while we were destroying part of it, another part could be building. Besides, as I said, we could be—”
“Wrong!” shouted Boarmus. “I know, I know. Stop saying that!” He simmered, thinking.
“The power must come from the Core,” he offered.
“Probably.”
“Can we shut off the power?”
“Not from outside the Core, no.”
“So what do we do?” he cried, feeling tears of frustration gathering.
“Provost, we’ve been working on that for years! Ever since your predecessor came to us and told us what he suspected.”
Boarmus made a hopeless gesture toward the cubes he had brought with him. “Maybe there’s something in there that will help.”
The dink wagged one of its
