This Alien Shore (6 page)

He blinked twice to call up his daily itinerary, shutting his eyes to give the words more clarity as they scrolled across his field of vision. This afternoon he had a variety of meetings scheduled, mostly connected with the university's upcoming graduation ceremony. There was only one event assigned to the morning period.
GUILD,
the notation said. Just that. He could have flashed an icon to bring up the details, but it wasn't necessary. The request was so unusual, the meeting so utterly out of sync with his usual routine, that he was unlikely to forget it.

The Outspace Guild wanted to see him. Him! Try as he might, he could guess at no reason for it. He had done work for them several times, most recently by designing a new set of antibody programs—their archival net was a constant target for data thieves—but that was years ago, and since then there had been no contact. What did they want with him now? Not a simple upgrade of his last program; that could have been requested by vidlink, as could any one of a number of other services. Even if they had a request sensitive enough that they didn't want to entrust it to the public datastream, they could have implanted that into a simple courier, biological or mechanical. Why would they send a Guild officer out to Guera itself, a trip of some six months' duration, just to meet with him?

With a sigh he dropped his briefcase into the delivery chute, coding it to meet up with him later. There was no way to anticipate the Guild, and he wasn't about to waste time trying. Another kaja might might have attempted it—a
simba
perhaps, obsessed with issues of dominance, or a
yakimi,
delighting in speculation for its own sake—but the
iru
whose pattern he wore took no pleasure in such pointless mental exercises. Already his mind was focusing on other things, more important things, and by the time his office door slid shut behind him he could hardly even remember why it was that the meeting had concerned him.

The walk from his apartment complex to the university's conference center took him across a narrow bridge that spanned nearly a quarter of a mile. Its clear walls allowed a breathtaking view of Guera's capital city, and he had allotted himself several minutes to stop and appreciate the view. Beneath him the university sprawled, five hundred acres that housed the best minds on the planet; its sweeping glass bridges and crystalline spires glittered in the morning sun like jewels, in places too brilliant to gaze upon. Beyond that, about that, rose the sleek mirrored skyscrapers of Guera's capital city. When the sky was clear and the angle of the sun was right whole buildings seemed to fade into the atmosphere, clouds moving from open air to mirrored wall and back again without any visible juncture. He loved to watch them. He was proud to watch them, proud to be part of a colony which had the time and the drive to create such things. Most of all he was proud of the special vision which fate had vouchsafed him, which gave his eyes the power to see the fractal dance of each cloud formation, the infinite mathematical complexity which bonded each moment to the next.

Guera had been lucky, there was no denying that. If the colonists who set their eyes upon its fertile shores had postponed their emigration by so much as a decade, history might have been very different. As he walked, Dr. Masada flashed an icon to bring up Ode of Thanksgiving before his eyes. The strangely bittersweet verses scrolled through his vision, poetry nearly three hundred years old now but no less powerful for its age. Though many of the sentiments it expressed were obscure to him and would remain so—he lacked the emotional template to make them meaningful—the poem was nonetheless effective in praising the fate which had brought Guera to supremacy, even as it mourned what that same fate had done to so many others.
Let Hausman be our Lucifer,
it urged,
born lustrous and pure, replete in beauty, now fallen to fix the pattern of man's fate.

Hausman. The name had been revered once, in the dawn of man's stellar affairs. When Victor Hausman had first developed his famous ship, making superluminal travel possible at last, it had seemed a timely miracle. Overcrowded, overstressed, Earth's trillions had embraced the dream of galactic expansion as a glorious panacea to their ills, and rushed to establish colonies on any and every planet within reach. Guera had been among the first such settlements. By the time Earth discovered that the same scientific miracle which had allowed men to race with light also worked irreparable genetic damage on anyone making that journey, Masada's ancestors were nearly self-sufficient. The sudden withdrawal of Earth's support was an inconvenience for them, but not a disaster. It wasn't like that for most other colonies. Some were still struggling to tame inhospitable worlds when the news came out, and they desperately needed Earth's help to survive. Some had been established so recently that they hadn't yet received their full quota of start-up supplies when their link with Earth was suddenly—and irrevocably—cut short.

God alone knew how many were still out there, Dr. Masada thought. God alone knew what shapes they wore, those forgotten children of Earth, or what manner of fury they harbored toward the motherworld that had abandoned them. The sad part was, it could have been otherwise. Earth could have relied upon machines to maintain contact, at least until the colonies had what they needed to survive. But Terran mobs had willed it otherwise. Terrified by a science that tampered with the very codes of heredity, betrayed—as they saw it—by administrations who had promised escape to virgin and uncrowded worlds, only to suddenly withdraw that hope, they reacted in true Earth fashion. What was it to them if half a million colonists were marooned on foreign worlds, each carrying the mutated seed that might give birth to monsters ? Those poor souls were doomed no matter what happened. What mattered now was making sure that no Hausman Variants could ever come back to Earth to infect the human gene pool, and the mobs saw to that. Not efficiently, but effectively. Such is the power of violence.

It took him little over half an hour to complete his walk, and he had timed the journey so perfectly that he entered the conference center at the precise moment he had planned. The room which his visitor had chosen for their meeting was unfamiliar to him, but his brainware contained a set of floor plans for every building in the university, and thus he had no difficulty finding it. It was a small room, suitable for no more than a handful of guests, and he nodded his silent approval as the door slid open to receive him. The iru does not do well in crowds.

“Dr. Masada.” There was only one man in the small room, and he rose as Masada entered. He was Guild through and through, from the intricate black lines of the natsiq-kaja which swept across his forehead to the full black robes which obscured the lines of his body. “Thank you for coming.” In addition to the
natsiq,
which was a traditional design for both outpilots and the men who served them, he wore the delicately refined pattern of the
nantana.
It was the mark of a man who communicated with such finesse that each word, each expression, could contain volumes of information, and as such it was a kaja that Masada despised. He recalled that it was the custom of the
nantana
to begin important conversations with a period of small talk, a discussion of unimportant issues during which time patterns of gesture, tones of expression, and a hundred other subtle variables might be judged. The
iru
had no skill at such games, no patience for them, and—fortunately—no societal obligation to indulge them. (Praise the founders of Guera for that! Who in their wisdom had established an order of precedence for the kaja, so that strangers of alien mien might converse without confusion.)

“You called for me,” Masada said shortly, and because he didn't feel like standing, he took a seat. “Why?”

The Guildsman hesitated. Most likely his
nantana
spirit was ill prepared for such a sudden immersion in business matters, and it took him a few seconds to switch gears. “The Guild has a job to offer you,” he said at last. “The pay would be excellent and we believe the work would interest you.”

“When?”

It seemed to take the Guildsman a moment to understand him. Perhaps he had expected a different question; the
nantana
liked to anticipate. “You would need to begin as soon as possible. I regret that it would require your leaving the university for a time—”

“I have obligations.”

The Guildsman shook his head. “Your classes are all but finished. You have a paper to present at Graduation Seminar, which you've nearly completed; it could be read by a colleague. You have three advisees to lead through their final application process; the Registrar assures me that others can handle that. Aside from attending the graduation ceremony itself—a purely ceremonial appearance—that accounts for everything, does it not?”

Masada said nothing. He visualized an icon to awaken his brainware, which quickly analyzed the time and effort required for the Guild to obtain such information without his passcodes. Impressive.

“Why?” he said at last.

The Guildsman pulled out a chair and settled into it; his full sleeves fell upon the tabletop as he leaned forward, his posture stiff with tension. “One hundred and ninety E-days ago, a Guild outpilot was badly injured while returning to safespace. Analysis of his personal log shows there was a malfunction in his brainware at the moment of transition. It lasted only seconds, but that was long enough. In that instant he believed himself to be an alien creature, surrounded by beings whose brains didn't function like his own. He believed that these beings had fed programs into his brainware which would make it impossible for him to think clearly, and that they had surgically implanted a mechanism in his arm which would feed drugs into his bloodstream, altering the very essence of his identity. With only seconds in which to act, he did what he could to disable the perceived mechanism, and then attempted to smash his skull open so that he could tear out his wiring. Fortunately for him, the latter effort failed.”

“Since his basic assumptions were correct,” Masada said evenly, “I find it hard to comprehend your objection to them.”

The Guildsman shook his head. “That moment of awareness should never have happened, Dr. Masada. You know the kinds of programs we use. You know how finely tuned they are. The moment he exited from the ainniq there should have been enough medication injected into his bloodstream to counteract any paranoid episode. Only there wasn't. There was a delay. And that delay was deadly.”

“He was himself,” Masada said quietly. “For one moment longer than perhaps you would have liked, he saw the world through unaltered eyes. Is that a crime?”

“He was
infected,”
the Guildsman retorted. “Our people have isolated a programming virus they think was responsible, and they believe they know when and where he picked it up. What they don't know is where it came from. That's why we need you.”

A virus. That was interesting. A virus implied origin, context ... and purpose. Who would want to disable an outpilot? And why? People might hate the Guild—most did—but who would risk being blacklisted for life, just to hurt one of their pilots? Not any people who had stations in the outlands; the risk of being cut off from the ainniq was too terrible even to contemplate. Some isolated planet, perhaps? But no, there were none who were so independent of the Guild system that they could afford to risk complete isolation. Even Earth, a full three years' distant from the nearest transport line, had a host of commercial interests which would collapse if the outworlds became inaccessible.

So perhaps a single programmer was responsible. Some would-be terrorist perhaps, or a hyperactive prankster. There had certainly been enough of both in recent history. But a terrorist would have declared his intentions by now, and as for an amateur effort ... the level of sophistication required in this case made such a source highly unlikely. The Guild's antibody programs were among the best in the outworlds—Masada knew, having helped design them—and besides, for a virus to attack an outpilot's brainware like that, it would have to have detailed knowledge of the programs it was infecting. Who would have access to that kind of knowledge besides the Guild itself? It was an intriguing puzzle.

“Why me?” he said at last.

The Guildsman leaned back slightly, as if this new phase in their negotiations required some new posture. “We need someone from outside the Guild. Partly for a new perspective, but mostly ...” His lips tightened; a muscle along the line of his jaw tensed. “The creator of this virus will have to be punished, severely enough that no one is tempted to follow in his footsteps. Whether it's one man or a group of men responsible—or even an entire planet—the Guild will cut them off from all contact with the human worlds for as long as they exist. That isn't going to be a popular move, Dr. Masada, as I'm sure you can imagine. We've blacklisted men before, but never on such a scale. Before taking such a drastic step we need to be absolutely sure who we're punishing and why ... and we need to have the justice in this matter clear enough that no questions are raised regarding our motives, or the nature of our investigation. We need an outsider of impeccable reputation, someone whose work is respected throughout the human realms, someone whose kaja is incapable of subterfuge. In short, Dr. Masada, we need you.”

“I'm Gueran,” he reminded the man. “And Guera and the Guild are synonomous, as far as many are concerned. Wouldn't you be better off with a true outsider, whose allegiance wouldn't be questioned?”

“Indeed we would. But whoever does this work for us must have access to the Guild's own files, and there are no ‘true outsiders' we would trust with that. So we compromise.” He paused. “You've earned our highest security clearance, Dr. Masada. You helped design the very programs we're fighting to protect. And the
iru
is known for its objectivity. Who could we possibly find more qualified than you?” When Masada said nothing, he pressed, “Are you interested?”