Michael Kube-McDowell - The Quiet Pools

“I can’t accept that,” said Matt Reid, skylinked from Takara. “We can’t just sit still and let them come get us.”

“The study makes clear that we can only hasten our decline by matching their tactics,” said Sasaki. “We have seen already, in the Singapore incident, that we are judged by stricter standards.”

“Maybe I’m the only one here,” said the supervisor, “but I don’t take the study as gospel. I’m not seeing any of this up here. And I hate like hell to hear this kind of negativism on the committee.”

“Takara is a special population,” said the woman. “It will reach there last.”

“I don’t see why we can’t fight this,” the supervisor persisted. “And I’d put finding some way to silence this Silverman at the top of the list. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone willing to go head-hunting.”

“No,” Sasaki said forcefully. “It is already too late for that. Mr. Silverman made his statement with his hands. His words are merely echoes, and you cannot silence an echo.”

“So we’re going to do nothing,” said the supervisor, disgusted.

“We will do what we planned to do, three years ago,” said Sasaki. “We prepared for a contingency no one wanted to believe in. Mr. Marshall”—she nodded toward the man by the window—“said that we would laugh at ourselves for fools the day that Knossos sailed. Is there anyone on the committee who truly believes we will see that day?”

She looked at each of them in turn. No one spoke.

“I accept the inevitability of the inevitable, the reality of the real,” she said. “But this is no surrender. Memphis must sail. We cannot allow the success of the Diaspora to depend on a single ship.”

“Is there any better news from Ur ?” asked the woman.

Sasaki shook her head. “The trouble continues. There is no danger to the ship at present, and apparently little danger any more that they will turn back. But the new governor holds out little hope for a return to normalcy.”

Marshall shook his head. “If he can’t deliver, then we may have picked the wrong boy to overthrow Milton.”

“The truth is that there is little we can do from here to influence events on Ur ,” said Sasaki. “The threat of a communications embargo is rather a feeble lever. Our focus must be on that which we can control—the future of Memphis .”

“Are you putting Contingency Zero in effect?” asked Marshall.

“Yes. As of this meeting. Your individual responsibilities are contained in locked files which were transferred to your private libraries earlier this evening. The key is ‘Lights out.’ ” She smiled wryly at Marshall. “That was your phrase, as I recall.”

“Last one on the planet, turn out the lights,” Marshall said. “Yes. That was me.”

Sasaki continued, “When you review your files, keep in mind that the first priority will be to establish a firm timetable for the move—”

The slate on Sasaki’s lap suddenly began to chirp insistently. At the same time, the skylink displays blanked to white, and the black-bordered box of a flash alert appeared in the center of each. In the center of the box appeared C. Gustav Feist, site director for the Munich center. His face was flushed, and his hands slashed the air as he spoke.

“Director Sasaki,” he said hoarsely. “Where is Dryke? He won’t answer his page. Where is he?”

“He’s gone to bed, I presume. He may be off-net. What is happening, Mr. Feist?”

Feist’s eyes were pleading with the committee. “The gateway was closed, just as he instructed. Closed! Not thirty minutes. The com staff swears to it. None too soon, I thought. Now this.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You haven’t been told?” Feist looked away from his camera as he listened to someone off-screen. “ Gott in Himmel . It’s still going on.”

“ What’s going on?” Marshall demanded.

“It must be Jeremiah,” Feist said agitatedly. “There’s a virus in the engineering network, tearing up the development systems. We can’t freeze it, we can’t kill it, and it won’t let us shut down. I’ve got to go. We’re being brain-burned, Director. Brain-burned while we’re talking.”

In a private room in a private place, a private man put on his mask and went to work.

He was David Eng and Roberto Garcia, Lila Holmes and Sandra Stone. His alter egos lived in an apartment overlooking the Chicago River, and a stately house on Avenida Manquehue in Santiago—claimed offices in anonymous towers on the fringe of Phoenix and in the heart of Vancouver.

There had been other names through the years, a dozen years now, a parade of identities, some invented, some borrowed. There had been a chain of locked rooms and secret spaces, inhabited only by obedient machines put in place by trusted hands.

And behind those masks, another mask—the constant, the connection. His name, taken from a man forty years dead, was never spoken, for no one knew better than he how the nets were watched, what tricks could be played with the bit stream of the skylinks. He spoke with other voices, always changing voices, but those who heard him knew that the words were Jeremiah’s.

A construct in a silicon engine, an idea in the mind of a man, a weapon in a war of deceptions—Jeremiah was all of those. In the beginning, Jeremiah had been nothing more than these. But now the mask had been in place so long that the man who wore it had nearly disappeared, and it had become more and more difficult for him to leave the shadow places where Jeremiah was real and face the light outside, the world where he himself was real.

Necessity rescued him from that struggle. So much demanded Jeremiah’s attention, so many clamored for an audience, that there was little enough chance even to escape into sleep. The world never slept.

He had allowed himself but three hours this night, the merest nap. Yet when he awoke, he found nearly one hundred new messages awaiting him, captured and forwarded by the relayers, coders, and recorders, collated and sifted by the comsole’s secretary.

A third of them were reports from members of the Homeworld network. Another dozen announced new volunteers to join the order of battle. Fully half were answers to queries issued earlier. The remainder were nuggets of gold: a scattering of technical, financial, and logistical gifts offered for his consideration.

But the message list was only the beginning. Also waiting in queue were more than seventy news stories collected by the secretary’s search engine, as well as a hyperlog of real-time intercepts of new and ongoing skylink conversations. Too much. Far too much. He could not review it all, not nearly so. His spies were too good, his sources too many.

Undisguised, the sheer volume of traffic would have been a threat to the operation’s survival. But he had learned many tricks, invented several others. Intercepts were fragmented and dumped to null skylink addresses for his unregistered receivers to pluck out of the air and rebuild. Reports came in as innocent-looking packets quickposted as delete-on-receipt to the subscription services. Messages relayed from the four “mail drop” sites were laundered through a high-traffic business front.

But that was not the only danger.

Once, he had had it all in his hands, knew every thread in the weave. No longer. This thing he had created had its own heartbeat, and though he still guided it, he no longer controlled every movement. More and more of the correspondence was in the hands of Lila, the secretarial engine. More and more of the ancillary reports were archived unseen. The growing archive troubled him. It represented missed opportunities, needless errors, eager volunteers frustrated by his silence and driven to act on their own.