“Your own design? You have no design. You’re just wreaking havoc that you can’t control. You’re a vandal, that’s all. And that’s what you call ‘influence’?”
Asmus ponders this and then stands. “I shouldn’t do this, but you do tend to make me do silly things. Come with me.” He exits the room and Mancini shoves me to follow. The two guards bring up the rear, sporting breeches and assault rifles. He leads us through a door under the grand staircase on the other side of which is a long, thin hallway that ends at another door. We walk down it single file and as he faces the far door I hear it unlock–some kind of biometric mechanism I assume although there’s no scanner in sight. We follow him inside.
It’s the height of anachronisms. The furniture is Georgian: plush chairs and mahogany tables strewn around the room, the wall lined with fine art–portraits of white-wigged men and rosy-cheeked women, landscapes of meadows and brooks. But this room is not lit by flame. I see a black cubic unit in the corner of the room that’s humming, likely an electrical generator: maybe a micro-reactor. The cylinder against the far wall, set between portraits of be-wigged generals, I’d guess to be an tachyon shield, maybe containing an accelerator and arrival area. It’s ten feet in diameter and about as tall. Two slovenly eighteenth century goons are lifting a crate out of it. My guess is that it’s full of twenty-first century arms. They place the crate on what looks like an oversized dumbwaiter and it descends from view. In the middle of the room is a baroque table at which a small woman with short, spiky red hair is sitting. Her clothing is twenty-first century and over her eyes she’s wearing something that looks like a more compact version of a virtual reality headset. Her table is bare and seemingly redundant. Asmus looks at me for a reaction and I resist giving him the satisfaction.
“Controls rooms, big chairs, monitors, analysis stations, accelerator facilities, staff of twenty,” says Asmus with a smirk. “None of that. This room and one operator equals and exceeds the capability of all that, and the art is a nice bonus isn’t it? Exadata analysis algorithms you never dreamed of, my friend. I’d try to explain some of it to you but you never did have time for that, so why start now? By the way, we’re sitting on a tachyon detection array less than a thousandth the area of your TMA’s yet with double its T1 detection accuracy score.” I raise my eyebrows despite myself. “Yes, indeed,” he says. “Not all my ingenuity I admit. I had mid twenty-first century tackychemical technologies to draw on, but then I made all this happen, with a little help from my friends.” Mancini smiles toadishly. “Right here in 1777.”
“You’re pretty proud, huh?” I say.
“Proud? Sure, why not Joad? But how would you recognize something to be proud of? You have no experience of that, you see.”
It occurs to me that being shown all this is a prelude to being killed. He’d only take the risk if it were moot. But then, maybe he thinks my being stuck here is as effective as being dead. The goons reopen the tachyon shield and remove another crate.
“Anyway, you caught me on a busy day, Joad. I’ll let you get back to your team.”
THIRTY-SIX
I’m left to walk back to the barn. The thought of seeing Gallie is the helium that lifts my mood.
I enter to what, by TMA standards, is chaos. From a knot of people there comes shouting and they seem to be vying for position. I part the throng with sheer brute force and what I find at its center is Gallie holding two men apart. Don Marlowe and Hugh Wagner are red-faced and yelling incoherently at each other.
“Enough!” Gallie shouts louder than both of them. “If you wanna fight then fight with me.” There’s a ferocity in her voice that scares even me. I suddenly see a younger sister who’ll now take nothing off the table. But Wagner is dumb enough to push forward. “I mean it. You testing me? Are you?” She’s facing away from me and her fine couture is now crushed like an old handkerchief and layered in straw. The two men each take a step backwards. “Wise. Listen to me: If this happens one more time ...” The threat is left unfinished. The two men walk toward opposite corners of the barn. Gallie turns and it takes a moment for her to register me. Then everyone turns, including Arun Ramuhalli and I glower at him.
“We need to talk,” I say to Gallie and escort her out of the back door, navigating people who are throwing questions at me. Once out, I shut the door and walk Gallie backwards until she’s crushed between me and the barn wall. I kiss her, my palm on her cheek, and she kisses me back just as hard. I pull back and look at her. There are no words for a while. Then she leans forward to kiss me again, this time less urgently. I walk her away to put a few trees between us and the barn.
“What was all that?” I ask.
“Just Marlowe and Wagner being jackasses,” she says. “The tension’s getting worse. It was bound to happen.”
“Let them fight it out. No point you getting hurt.”
“By Wagner and Marlowe?” she asks?
