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“What was your involvement with her?”
“I was involved,” the bureaucrat admitted. “There was an emotional component to our relationship.”
“And then Gregorian killed her.”
“Yes.”
“In order to trick you into making angry statements he could use in his commercials.”
“Apparently so.”
Muschg leaned back, eyebrows raised skeptically. “You see our problem,” Philippe said. “It sounds a highly unlikely scenario.”
“This case grows murkier the longer we look at it,” Korda grumbled. “I can’t help but wonder if a probe might not be called for.”
A tense wariness took the group. The bureaucrat met their eyes and smiled thoughtfully. “Yes,” he agreed. “A full depart-
mental probe might be just the thing to settle matters once and for all.”
The others stirred uneasily, doubtless mindful of all the dirty little secrets that accreted to one in the Puzzle Palace, did anyhow if one tried to accomplish anything at all, things no one would care to see come to light. Orimoto’s face in particular was as tightly clenched as a fist. Korda cleared his throat. “This is after all just an informal hearing,” he said.
“Let’s not reject this too hastily; it’s an option we should explore,” the bureaucrat said. His briefcase handed around copies of the bottle shop’s list of suppressed materials. “There’s a preponderance of evidence that someone within the Division is cooperating with Gregorian.” He began ticking off points on his fingers. “Item: Evidence important to this case has been suppressed by order of Technology Transfer. Item: Gregorian was able to pass off one of his people as my planetside liaison, and this required information that could only have come from the Stone House or from one of us. Item: The—”
“Excuse me, boss.” His briefcase held out the phone. With a twinge of exasperation the bureaucrat took the call. Himself again. “Go ahead,” he said.
He absorbed:
Philippe was alone in his office with himself. They both looked up when the bureaucrat entered.
“How pleasant to see you again.” Philippe’s office was posh to the point of vulgarity, a lexitor’s modspace from twenty-third-century Luna. His desk was a massive chunk of volcanic rock floating a foot above the floor, with crystal-tipped rods, hanks of rooster feathers, and small fetishes scattered about its surface. French doors opened onto a balcony overlooking an antique city of brick and wrought iron, muted by the faint blue haze from a million groundcars.
“I’ll handle this,” Philippe said, and his other self returned to work. The bureaucrat had to envy the easy familiarity with which Philippe dealt with himself. Philippe was perfectly at ease with Philippe, no matter how many avatars had been spun off from his base personality.
They shook hands (Philippe was agented not in two but three, the third self off somewhere), and Philippe said, “Five agents! I was going to ask why you weren’t at the inquisition, but I see now that you must be.”
“What inquisition?”
Philippe looked up from his work and smiled sympathetically. Nearer by, he said, “Oh, you’ll find out soon enough. What can I do for you?”
“There’s a traitor in Tech Trans.”
Philippe stared silently at him for a long time, both avatars motionless, all four eyes unblinking. He and the bureaucrat studied each other carefully. Finally he said, “Do you have any evidence?”
“Nothing that could force a departmental probe.”
“So what do you want from me?” Philippe’s other self poured a glass of juice and said, “Something to drink? It’ll taste a little flat, I’m afraid, all line-fed drinks do. Something about the blood sugars.”
“Yes, I know.” The bureaucrat waved off the drink. “You used to work bioscience control. I was wondering if you knew anything about cloning. Human cloning in particular.”
“Cloning. Well, no, not really. Human applications are flat out illegal, of course. That’s a can of worms that no one wants to deal with.”
“Specifically I was wondering what practical value there might be in having oneself cloned.”
“Value? Well, you know, in most cases it’s an ego thing rather than something actually functional. A desire to watch one’s Self survive death, to know that the one holy and irreplaceable Me will exist down the corridors of time to the very omega point of existence. All rooted in the tangled morass of the soul. Then there are the sexual cases. Rather a dull lot, really.”
“No, this is nothing like that, I think. I have someone who sank most of his lifetime into the project. From his behavior, I’d say he had a clear and definite end in view. Whoever he is, he’s in a very exposed situation; if he’d been acting odd, it would’ve shown sometime long ago.”
“Well,” Philippe said reluctantly, “this is highly speculative, of course. You couldn’t quote me on it. But let’s say your culprit was relatively highly placed within some governmental body or other — we shall name no names. Spook business, say. There are any number of situations where it would come in handy having two valid handcodes instead of one. Where two senior officers were required to enact an off-record operation, for example. Or an extra vote to sway a committee action. The system would know that the two handcodes were identical, but couldn’t act on it. The privacy laws would prevent that. Hell of a loophole, but there you are; it’s in the laws.”
“Yes, my own thought had been trending that way. But isn’t that u
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Graft a patch of your skin, make it a glove, and have an accomplice wear it. Or record your own transmission and send it out again on time delay. Only they none of them work. The system is better protected than you give it credit for.”
A chime sounded. Philippe held a conch shell to his ear. “It’s for you,” he said. When the bureaucrat took the call, his own voice said, “I’m back from the map room. Do you want to take my report?”
“Please.”
He absorbed:
The map room was copied from a fifteenth-century Venetian palazzo, star charts with the Seven Sisters prominent replacing Mediterranean coasts on the walls. Globes of the planets revolved overhead, half-shrouded in clouds. Hands behind back, the bureaucrat examined a model of the system: Prospero at the center, hot Mercutio, and then the circle of sungrazing asteroids known as the Thrinacians, the median planets, the gas giants Gargantua, Pantagruel, and Falstaff, and finally the Thulean stargrazers, those distant, cold, and sparsely peopled rocks where dangerous things were kept.
The room expanded to make space for several researchers entering at the same time. “Can I help you sir?” the curator asked him. Ignoring it, he went to the reference desk and rattled a small leather drum.
The human overseer came out of the back office, a short, stocky woman with goggles a thumb’s-length thick. She pushed them back on her forehead, where they looked like a snail’s eyestalks. “Hello, Simone,” the bureaucrat said.
“My God, it’s you! How long has it been?”
“Too long.” The bureaucrat moved to give her a hug, and Simone flinched away slightly. He extended a hand.
They shook (the cartographer was unique), and Simone said, “What can I do for you?”
“Have you ever heard of a place called Ararat? On Miranda, somewhere near the Tidewater coast. Supposedly a lost city.”
Simone gri
“Tell me about it.”
“First human city on Miranda, planetside capital during the first great year, population several hundred thousand by the time the climatologists determined it would be inundated in their lifetimes.”
“Must’ve been pretty rough on the inhabitants.”