City of Golden Shadow, Page 89

  "Of course." Ptah was confident now, a bad sign. Osiris had half-hoped that TMX's earlier, in-house interrogations had been too vigorous. It was hard to convict on the evidence of dead witnesses, even with hologrammatic records—data could be so easily manipulated these days. Not that real-time VR was immune from manipulation, but the process was much more difficult.

  "Well, bring them in, will you? Isolated from each other, of course. And since you have brought what is tantamount to an accusation against me, you will permit me to do the interrogation, will you not?"

  "Of course," Ptah agreed, but now it was his falcon-headed crony who did not seem pleased. Osiris took some small pleasure from this sign that, at some level, they still feared him, worried about his legendary craftiness. He would do his best to justify that unease.

  The Lord of Life and Death waved his hand and the table vanished; the Ennead were now seated in a circle, each in his or her own thronelike chair. A moment later two figures blinked into existence at the circle's center, one stocky and one slender, both immobile as statues. They appeared quite human, and thus seemed strangely out of place amid the avid beast-faces. As befitted mortals in the land of the gods, they were only half the size of the smallest of the Ennead.

  "My employees, Shoemaker and Miller," said Ptah. "You have all their personal details in our submission."

  Osiris leaned forward and extended a mummy-wrapped finger. The older-looking of the two, bearded and strongly built, twitched as though awakening from slumber.

  "David Shoemaker," the god intoned, "your only hope is to answer all questions with complete honesty. Is that understood?" The man's eyes widened. He had undoubtedly gone directly from his last interrogation to the blackness of enforced sleep. Waking up to this, Osiris thought, must be disorienting to say the least "I said, is that understood?"

  "Where . . . where am I?"

  The Lord of the Two Lands gestured. The man writhed, his eyes squeezed shut and his teeth bared in a rictus of agony. After the brief burst of induced pain ended, Osiris watched the convulsive bunching of the man's muscles, knowing that the other members of the Brotherhood were also watching. It never hurt to remind them what he could do. He was a god here, with powers that the others did not possess, not even in their own domains. It never hurt to remind them.

  "I will try again. Your only hope is to answer all questions with complete honesty. Do you understand?"

  The bearded man nodded. His sim, generated by the holocell in which he was restrained, was already white-faced with dread.

  "Good. Please also understand that what I can do to you is not like normal pain. It will not damage your body. You will not die from it. That means I can subject you to it for as long as I like," He paused to let this sink in. "Now, you will tell us everything about the events that led up to your interfering in the normal workings of the Grail system."

  Through the course of the next hour, Osiris led Shoemaker through a minute examination of his and Glen Miller's work as systems engineers on the Otherland network. Slow answers, even hesitations while the prisoner tried to remember some small detail, were met with immediate activation of the pain reflex, which Osiris often held like an orchestral note, judging what duration should most promote quick and honest responses. Despite the continual razor slashes of agony, Shoemaker stuck to the story he had already told TMX Security. He had received what seemed a legitimate order to modify the tracking elements that sent back data on the subject's whereabouts within the system, but had no way of knowing that the changes would eventually make tracking impossible. The order had appeared to come through legitimate management channels—although TMX security had proved afterward that the management approvals were fairly obvious forgeries—and, most critically, had contained the chairman's own inimitable authorization.

  The chairman, the living Master of the Two Lands, was not pleased to hear himself indicted again. "Of course, if you were a spy within the system, you might say the very same thing. And if you had a high enough pain threshold, you might continue to say it no matter what kind of messages I pump into your central nervous system." He frowned at the panting, shivering simulation. "You might even have received some kind of posthypnotic block or neural modification," He turned to Ptah. "I suppose you scanned both of these men?"

  The yellow face smiled. "It's in the records. No detectable mods."

  "Hmmm." Osiris gestured again. An array of glittering metallic arms sprouted from the floor, spread-eagling the prisoner. "Perhaps a more subtle approach is called for." Another gesture brought forth more jointed arms, each of these veined in transparent tubing and barbed at the end with a huge needle. "I understand from your employee profile that you have an aversion to medical procedure and Pharmaceuticals. Some bad experience in your childhood, perhaps?" He pointed; one by one, the arms tilted down like the jaws of some strange, venomous insect, the needles plunging into different soft parts of the prisoner's body. "Perhaps this will help you to rethink your story, which I find woefully inadequate."

  The prisoner, who had been struggling to find his voice, found it. As different colored liquids began to pulse through the tubing, oozing inexorably toward him, he let loose a bone-rattling scream. As black-and-green stains blossomed around the needle entries and began to spread out beneath his skin, Shoemaker's ear-piercing shriek jumped to a newer, higher level of madness.

  Osiris shook his head. He dulled the man's ragged cries to a faint piping, then flicked the second prisoner into life. "I'm not going to tell you where you are, so don't bother to ask." The god was beginning to feel quite cross. "You are going to tell me things instead. Do you see your friend?"

  The second man, whose thick black hair and high cheekbones suggested an Asian heritage, nodded, eyes wide with anticipatory terror.

  "Well, Miller, the two of you have been very naughty fellows indeed. You have interfered with the proper functioning of the Grail Project, and worst of all, you have done so without authorization."

  "But we were authorized!" Miller shouted. "Oh, Christ, why won't anyone believe us?"

  "Because it is easy to lie." Osiris spread his fingers and Miller was suddenly surrounded by a glassy cube three times his height. Several of the Ennead leaned forward, spectators at an evening's entertainment. "But it is not easy to lie when you are fighting to maintain your very sanity. Your records indicate you have a morbid fear of drowning. So, while you think about who put you up to this little prank, I will give you a chance to explore that fear at first hand."

  The cube began to fill with water. The prisoner, who must have known that his physical body was still in restraint somewhere in the Telemorphix offices while only his mind was being tortured, but could not enjoy the distinction, began to pound on the transparent walls.

  "We can hear you. Tell us what you know. Look, the water is already at your knees."

  As the brackish water rose to his waist, his chest, his neck, Miller babbled shrilly about the order he had received to turn on the thalamic splitter for what he had thought was some kind of testing. He had never imagined for a moment that the splitter was still enchained, and that his action would complete the subject's release. Even as he was forced to leap to keep his mouth above water, he swore that he knew nothing beyond what he had been directed to do.

  The cube was filling faster. The prisoner swam in rapid, dog-paddle style, but each moment brought him closer to the roof of the cube and diminished the pocket of air. Osiris suppressed a sigh. This Miller's terror was so palpable it almost made him uncomfortable, but the man showed no sign of changing his story. More importantly, the Lord of Life and Death was rapidly losing the confidence of the assembled Brotherhood.

  The cube was now completely filled. The prisoner's desperate thrashings, which had reached their peak, suddenly stopped as Miller took a great gulp of the greenish water, trying to hasten the end. A moment later he took another. The look of frenzied panic on his face abruptly grew even more acute.

  "No, you won't die. Your lungs w
ill burn, you will choke, you will struggle, but you will not die. You will continue to drown as long as I wish it." Osiris could not keep the frustration out of his voice. He looked to the other prisoner, a swollen lump of blackened, pustulent flesh now barely recognizable as human, still spiked beneath a dozen needles, still screaming through a ragged spiracle that had once been a mouth. This was all sideshow, now. These men knew nothing.

  Sensing victory, Ptah stood. "If the chairman has no further questions for these two unfortunates, perhaps he would like the chance to offer an explanation to the rest of the Brotherhood?"

  "In a moment." He pretended an interest in the maddened struggles of the two TMX employees, while quickly reviewing the report Wells and Yacoubian had submitted. His expert systems had been combing the material for anomalies, and had compiled a short list of things that needed clarification. As the superimposed information flickered across his vision, a heaviness settled on him. The expert systems had turned up nothing but noise, discrepancies in testimony that indicated little but human sloppiness and imprecision. Everything else fitted Wells' interpretation. Within moments, control of the Brotherhood, and over the Grail Project, would slip from the chief god's hands. In its cocoon of metal and expensive liquids, Felix Jongleur's real body stirred, his heart seemed to labor. Osiris the immortal god suddenly felt his age.

  His colleagues were murmuring, their patience exhausted. He scanned the report again listlessly, trying to think of something that could be done to save the situation. Adamant denial? Worthless. Delay? He himself had demanded speed, hoping to catch Wells and Yacoubian unprepared for a real showdown. He could not renege on that demand without ensuring a loss of control. Could he hold the project itself hostage? The others might have difficulty finishing it without his expertise, and most importantly his control over the Other, but an aborted Grail Project did him no good, and without the resources of the Brotherhood he could never duplicate the work that had gone into it. Not in time.

  Desperately, he called back up the actual authorizations, hoping against logic to spot something his expert systems had not. The embedded dates were correct, the authorizations-for-work were real, and the authorization code had clearly been generated from his own machines.

  "Chairman? We are waiting." Ptah was in a good humor. Comparatively speaking, he had all the time in the world.

  "Just a moment." Osiris stared at the data before him, realizing absently that none of the Brotherhood could tell what he was doing, that they would only see him sitting motionless. Did they wonder if he were having some kind of breakdown? He called for some other records and compared them with the fire-bright numbers before him. Somewhere—it might have been another universe—his heart began to beat faster, like an ancient beast awakening from slumber.

  Even the best expert systems could make assumptions.

  Osiris began to laugh.

  "Chairman?"

  It was too perfect. He paused for a silent moment of exultation. "I would like to direct the Brotherhood's attention to the code sequences in question." He waved his hand. Line after line of numbers appeared on the council chamber's nearest roof column, carved into the very stone like the other names of power etched on the walls and doors of the Western Palace. It was appropriate: these strings of numerals were the incantations that would preserve Jongleur's most magnificent and audacious dream. "Please check to make sure they are the sequences you have submitted, the sequences that authorized action and allowed the subject's escape."

  Ptah and Horus exchanged glances. Ibis-headed Thoth answered. "They are the same, Chairman."

  "Good. As you see in the report, embedded between the larger random sections are other nonrandom sequences. These sequences indicate the kind of order it is, the date and time, the person who authorized it, and so on."

  "But we've already established that this code came from your own generator. You admitted it!" Horus could not restrain his impatient anger.

  If his funeral mask had permitted it, he would have grinned at him. "But you do not know all the sequences and what they import. You see, this is an authorization for action, and it did come from me—but it did not go to either of . . . those creatures." He indicated the perpetually drowning man and the puddle of twitching slime, then turned back to Horus."It went to you, Daniel."

  "What the hell are you talking about?"

  "All the orders generated from me carry a short sequence that indicates where they are bound. These were sent to the military arm of the Brotherhood, not to TMX. Someone has penetrated your system, Daniel. They intercepted what were probably fairly unimportant orders—likely something to do with that business in New Reno, the dates would be about right—modified them slightly, then used the coded authorizations to issue quite different orders of their own to the TMX engineering department,"

  "That's preposterous!" Horus groped in empty air, looking for a cigar on his RL desk.

  Ptah was a little more cautious. "But we have never known that about your authorizations, Chairman. Isn't that . . . isn't that a little convenient?"

  Osiris laughed again. "Bring up all the records you want. Let us have a really good look at prior authorizations. Then tell me I'm wrong."

  Ptah and Horus glanced at each other. At the long table in the Western Palace they were silent, but the Lord of the Two Lands felt quite sure that conversation on the sidebar channel had suddenly become white-hot.

  When they finally took the vote an hour later, it was unanimous: even Ptah and Horus displayed the good grace—or political savvy—to vote for his retention as chairman. Osiris was well pleased. Both Americans had received heavy blows to their ambition, and would be on the defensive for some time. First their own systems had apparently been penetrated, then they had been seen to blame that on their venerable chairman.

  He particularly enjoyed ordering Horus to shore up his security, and to get to work locating and defining the incursion. "And while you're at it, excise those two." He indicated Miller and Shoemaker, neither of whom was now capable of making anything but bubbling noises. "I suggest a car accident. A couple of work chums on their way to some dreadful TMX morale-raising picnic. You know the sort of thing."

  Ptah acceded with stiff grace, passing a message to his security service. The two sims disappeared, which gave the room a far more pleasant aspect.

  As Khepera rose to his hind legs and began delivering the first of what promised to be a string of testimonials to the re-elected chairman—establishing to the best of his dung-rolling ability that he had never once doubted, that he had been astonished by the charges, and so on—the god received a signal on a designated outside line. His priestly minion, forced to dispense with honorifics after the first few singsong phrases, announced that Anubis had an urgent message for him.

  His absent attention unnoticed by the others, Osiris received his underling's report while the beetle-man droned on. His young minion seemed strangely calm, which troubled Osiris slightly. After such a triumph, Dread should have been at his strutting worst. Had he come across something in Atasco's records which had given him ideas?

  There was also the issue of the actual adversary, the person who had so cleverly subverted TMX security and freed Paul Jonas. That would have to be the subject of many hours' contemplation all by itself. Still, Osiris had known there was an enemy out there somewhere, and in a way was glad of it. The Americans had certainly proved an insufficient challenge.

  When Anubis had finished his report and signed off, Osiris raised his gauze-shrouded hand for silence. Khepera stopped, his tribute uncompleted; he stood awkwardly for a moment, then lowered himself back into his chair.

  "Thank you, my dear friend, for those inspiring words," the god said. "I will never forget them. But now I have an announcement to make. I have just received word that the Sky God Project has come to a successful conclusion. 'Shu' has been neutralized, along with his intimate circle, and we have possession of his system. Losses—of information—were negligible, and cleanup is finished
. In short, a complete success."

  The Western Palace echoed with cheers and congratulations, some of them sincere.

  "I think today is an auspicious day to declare that we have begun the final phase of the Grail Project." He raised his other hand. The walls of the Western Palace fell away. The Ennead were now seated in the midst of an endless, twilit plain. "In only a matter of weeks our work will be completed and the fruits of our long labor available at last. The Grail system is about to become operational. Now we are truly become gods!" A red shimmer appeared along the far horizon. Osiris spread his arms as if he had summoned it into being—as, in fact, he had. There was a dramatic rumble of tympanis, a thundering crescendo of percussion.

  "Rejoice, Brotherhood. Our day has come!" The great disk of the rising sun edged upward into the heavens, bleaching the sky, scattering gold across the plains, and bathing the hungry, upraised animal faces in fire.

  The docks were only a short distance from the broad front steps of the palace, perhaps less than half a mile judging by the rigging lights that glimmered between the buildings. Orlando and his new allies did their best to form a coherent group before setting off on foot.

  This scans utterly! Orlando fumed. This is a VR simulation, the most powerful one anyone's ever heard of—and we're going to walk! But any loopholes for instantaneous travel or other useful reality-molding tricks that might be built into the structure of Temilún were lost to Orlando and his new allies. If we only had one of the Atascos with us. . . .

  They marched as quickly as they could, just beneath the threshold at which their anxious haste would be obvious. The city was busy at this early evening hour, the streets full of traffic, motorized and pedal-driven, the stone sidewalks crowded with Temilúni citizens on their way home from work. But even in this crush of pseudohumanity, the band of travelers attracted attention. It wasn't that surprising, Orlando decided—there were few cities, virtual or otherwise, where someone as flamboyantly outrageous as Sweet William would not at least briefly draw the eye.