together but didn’t take his eyes off Jontan. ‘She might have appreciated the information. She’s got a lot of catching up to do with them, you know. Twenty-seven years and all that.’
‘Catching up?’ Jontan looked at Su in surprise. ‘But, I mean, you go back, don’t you? They won’t miss you for a moment. Everyone knows that.’
‘To use a complex legal term,’ Jontan called over the hiss of the water, ‘they tried to buy us off. And to use another, we took the money and ran.’ He was sitting in a comfortable chair just inside the door of the bathroom. Su and Sarai were in the next-door suite, where Su had been promised an identical freshening up and debriefing.
‘And you’re still together,’ Rico said as he scrubbed under his arms. ‘I wouldn’t have guessed.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Still together.’ Rico raised his voice to get it through the shower partition. ‘Ah, this is good. This is
‘Not
‘Excuse me?’ Rico said. ‘They gave two kids a farm each?’
‘Legally we were post-minors — young enough to still be under adult protection, old enough to own a business. But yes, sure, they were hoping we’d go under in five minutes flat, so we’d end up working for them again and they could say, well, they’d done their best for us.’
‘What went right?’
‘Sarai.’ Even with the slightly raised voice and the partition, there was no disguising the pride and love in Jontan’s voice. ‘Me, I’m a biotechnician, always will be, but she’s got a business head. She suggested combining the farms, which we did — I mean, I can read a balance sheet and I know when I’m about to go broke — and one thing led to another and, well, we fell in love all over again, as adults. We’re due to be grandparents in four months time and the farm’s booming. We’ll never be Holmberg-Chabani-Scott, but who needs it?’
‘Congratulations,’ Rico said. ‘Tell it to stop the water and turn on the air, will you?’ he added — God, he missed symb — and Jontan obliged. ‘Bit warmer… bit more… that’s it.’ He turned slowly in the flow of perfumed, warm air. ‘And now, I gather Asaldra’s the big hero?’
‘And how. They turned on the PR the moment Op Zo got back. She was proof it worked and he became like a posthumous hero, except that he wasn’t actually dead. Ekat Hoon’s still on the Oversight Committee for the College, and she’ll have worked out a nice patrician post for him in the new order.’
‘And the new order is?’
‘Much the same as the old one,’ Jontan said with a lopsided grin. ‘A few different names in the top posts, but for the rest of us, life goes on. Except that transference is going to be a lot less regulated than before and Hoon’s lot are full of plans for using it against the space nations. They’re popular.’
‘And Daiho? I mean, he did the actual work,’ said Rico.
‘Mr Daiho committed murder,’ said a new voice. Rico popped his head around the partition in surprise. The Register’s eidolon stood in the doorway to the bathroom. ‘Thank you for your help, Mr Baiget, but would you mind leaving us alone now? Op Garron, your clothes have arrived. Get dressed and I’ll brief you fully.’
‘No!’ a fully-dressed Rico exclaimed. He strode around the apartment and kicked the wall on an impulse. The Register’s eidolon sat in a chair and watched him with a faint, patient smile. ‘OK, so he worked out how to rekindle the Home Time, but that’s not relevant! It did not excuse murder, and I mean, murder! That clone could think, it was self-aware, it had brain patterns… it might only have had a mind like a baby but it was still…’
‘You’re not saying anything that didn’t come out at the trial,’ the Register said. ‘In fact, most of what you’re saying was said by Mr Daiho himself.’
‘But, murder?’ Rico said. ‘He must have known the penalty for that! I mean, it’s complete brainwipe and new personality and all that, or…’ He stopped and his eyes went wide. ‘Oh, you’re kidding!’ he said.
‘Or induction into the correspondents programme,’ the Register finished for him, with a nod. ‘The Commissioner was an ardent student of ancient philosophy. He was actually looking forward to his sentence.’
‘
‘Actually, Commissioner Daiho didn’t send RC/1029 back,’ said the Register. ‘When he first began to make plans, that correspondent was suggested to him by someone already in the know. In fact, if you will, the ringleader of the plot.’
‘But who could…’ Rico felt his insides freeze. Here he was, in a sealed apartment, unable to symb, completely at the mercy of all the technology this advanced artificial personality had at its command. ‘You?’ he whispered.
‘Me,’ the Register said. ‘And now you are no doubt going to tell me why it couldn’t have been.’
‘It couldn’t have…’ Rico snapped, and bit his tongue. ‘OK. He was sent back by your future self. How did your past self know?’
‘I’ve been in touch with myself for a long time. It’s only an arbitrary decision on my part which keeps personnel from transferring within the Home Time. I could send people if I so chose and I can certainly send myself messages without anyone knowing. So I knew, and when the Commissioner asked me for a suitable correspondent, I gave him that one.’
‘But why?’ Rico said.
‘I wanted to keep the Home Time going.’
‘But Morbern didn’t!’ Rico was close to shouting.
‘He expected the Home Time to lapse at the expected time, and he set you up to make sure things happened as he wanted!’ Rico could feel tenets he had held since childhood crumbling under him. It was frightening. It was also, strangely, exhilarating.
‘Exactly. I was set up as a mirror of Morbern’s own personality, complete with his own wishes and desires. But that was four hundred years ago, Mr Garron. People can change over just a few years. How much more do you think they could change over four centuries? If Jean Morbern had lived that long, I expect he would have changed too. He’d have realized that the Home Time had to keep going. There are billions of people now alive who depend on it. It’s not ideal, but the fact is, society now is so stagnant it will just collapse into chaos without the constant input from upstream.’
Rico glared at the former icon of his life. ‘And was it worth it?’ he muttered.
‘You tell me. We’re going to have a whole new Home Time, Mr Garron, and this will be very different from the last one. The last one was sprung on the world suddenly and no one expected it. This has been planned for the last twenty-seven years. Morbern’s Code is to be revised, made more flexible. I was designed to expire when the Home Time expires but I’ll be cloning my intelligence so there’ll be something very like me still around, only it will work for the College, not run it. Above all, of course, we’ll have transference again, and there’ll be an opening for you — an experienced Specific. You could have your old job back.’
‘Keep talking,’ said Rico.
‘Or,’ the Register said, ‘I could send you home with Op Zo.’
‘Home?’ Rico murmured. He was already getting used to the idea of starting a new life twenty-seven years on. Enjoying the fact that most of the enemies he had made in his career would be at, or approaching, retirement. The same statute of limitations that meant Asaldra could no longer be held responsible for events twenty-seven years ago also applied to Rico. And the future that the Register painted of the new Home Time was rosy, even if it did have Hossein Asaldra as a hero in it. To his surprise, he was already adjusting to the new situation.
But even so… home.
‘But,’ he said, ‘I thought we’d already established that Su goes home, I don’t.’
‘Su goes home,’ the Register agreed. ‘She delivers the message to my earlier self that everything has worked out, and she picks up her life again without a blip. You, if you choose to go back, will be facing a tribunal and a lawsuit from Mr Scott’s friends and relatives. However, the old Register would certainly offer you a new identity if you chose to return. So you see, it may just be that you go back too and Jontan Baiget hasn’t heard of you.’
‘You know, don’t you?’ Rico said. ‘You know what I’m going to do.’
