The rogue reappeared before Patricia as she slept and awoke her by tickling her ear. ”Miss Patricia Luisa Vasquez, late of Earth—the late Earth;” he said. ”I’m here with some answers.”
She rolled over and rubbed her eyes. The rogue’s appearance had changed; he now seemed to wear baggy pants and a cardigan sweater. His hair was styled in a loose shag, and a watchless fob hung from a belt loop, terminating in a hemline pocket in the sweater. The rogue was in the height of 2005 fashion. She leaned over the bed and examined his shoes.
Huaraches and Japanese tabi socks completed his wardrobe.
“They’re on to me,” he said. ”I had to slip in a different way. I’m using the auxiliary pictor; the primary is locked. And I’ve reprogrammed the apartment privacy unit to edit us both out of any record while we talk. I’ve found there is a way to get into the city record. Very disappointing; to the Nexus, apparently nothing is sacred.”
Patricia blinked and then got out of bed, reaching for her robe.
“Do you do this all the time?”
“No,” the rogue replied. ”Takes a lot of effort to get this far. I’d much rather be playing games in City Memory, but my employers are handing out incredible advantages for the information. Luckily, I sent mine in just before the general release—now everybody knows you’re here.”
“We’ve been told that already.”
“Right,” the rogue said. The lights in the bedroom came up.
Patricia examined herself in the lavatory mirror and decided there wasn’t much that could be done in a hurry. She looked exhausted and her hair was tangled from restless sleep.
“Anyway, answers,” the rogue said, “more answers than questions asked. You’re going to testify before the full Nexus in a couple of days—nobody knows that yet but me and those who should. They you’re going to be included in the Last Gate ceremony. That’s not its official name, but that’s what it amounts to—you’ll meet the Prime Gate Opener at the one point three ex nine segment and witness the opening. They may close it just after—Jarts coming down fast.”
“What are Jarts?”
“Fleas, the Nexus will tell you—parasites, monstrously aggressive and not in the least cooperative. The Way was in place a thousand years before it was finally connected to the Thistledown—Way time, of course, which wasn’t congruent until the linkup. The Jarts entered through a test gate and took up residency before it was opened. They matured in the Way and we had to fight them back. They know how to open gates and they control between two ex nine and, we think, four ex nine. But look, this is all in the Memory and I don’t have much time. I have news about Olmy. You know about the orthodox Naderites and the Geshels?”
“Yes,” Patricia said.
“Well, they have two contingency plans should the Jarts overpower us, which seems all too likely now. The Geshels want to mobilize the entire Axis City, grab the flaw and ride it at near-light-speed over the Jart territories—and at the same time blow the Thistledown off the end of the Way.”
“What? Why?”
“That could seal the Way—cauterize it. And eliminate the danger of the Thistledown’s being reoccupied and having the entire Way controlled by Jarts. The other alternative is to guide the Thistledown to a habitable planet and simply abandon the Way—or close it down, eliminate it. The Axis City could escape by passing through the end of the Way, blowing off the Thistledown and going into orbit around the planet. That would take time ... or would have, until now. The Thistledown is in Earth orbit, an ideal situation for abandoning the Way. Everybody knows that. So the orthodox Naderites—especially the Korzenowski faction—”
“Who are they?” Patricia asked, all her muzziness vanishing at the rogue’s mention of the familiar name.
“They’re descended from the engineers who once supported the Way’s designer, Konrad Korzenowski. The core is a small, conservative group—return-to-Earthers, most of them. Oeshels regarded them as candidates for inactive Memory, until now. The Naderites and Korzenowski people are calling for reconsideration.”
“They want to blow up the asteroid and take the Axis City into Earth-Moon orbit?”
“That’s it. Now—my time’s running out fast. I’m going to trigger all sorts of safeguards shortly, and I won’t be able to visit you again—this is my last avenue. Olmy isn’t what he seems. He’s—“
What happened next, happened so fast Patricia could hardly follow it. The rogue’s image wobbled violently and something fizzled in the far wall. A jagged beam of red shot from the auxiliary pictor across the room and hit her slate on the nightstand. The rogue vanished. The bedroom lights dimmed.
The furniture and walls were indistinct and gray. ”Brighter, please,” she said.
“Many regrets,” the room voice, now harsh and dissonant, replied. “Pictors in your quarters are malfunctioning. Please be patient. Repairs are in progress.”
She sat on the edge of the bed. As her eyes adjusted, she realized that all detail had gone out of the room. She sat on a basic white bed-form, surrounded by basic white furniture-forms.
The walls were blank. She picked up her slate to see if it had been damaged by the flash.
On the screen, a crude line drawing of the rogue in his high-fashion togs appeared, followed by a string of numbers and then an end-of-string triangle. Beyond the triangle, in the next register, were three equations and a code equivalency. She integrated the two registers and performed a basic operation with the equations.
Words appeared on the slate, flashing: Olmy knew Korzenowski. Knows him yet.
In Thistledown City. Olmy’s quarters were in Axis Nader most of the time; he never kept a residence beyond four months, but he did stay in that section of the Axis City more often than not. He never decorated his quarters, relying on a minimum of elaboration to make the rooms livable. He seemed, in fact, to avoid as many as he could of the services most Axis Citizens regarded as basic. Yet he was not an ascetic. He simply had no need for such accoutrements; he did not criticize those who did.
He sat in the all-white living room, waiting for his trace to be completed. Olmy had patterned his tracer after the central mental programs of an old terrestrial species of dog known as a short-haired terrier, supplemented with several of his own partial personalities.
It was a tough trace to elude, hardy and resourceful. It rarely failed him.
By Axis City law, rogues in City Memory were fair game.
Citizens could not wipe the rogues they located, but they could corner them and call down an immediate inactivation.
Olmy was not interested in inactivation. He simply wanted to maintain a steady trace on the rogue—and to keep pressure on him, to heighten the sensation of illicit activity. The rogue was of very high quality; he had outlived dozens of duels, some extending across decades, which meant virtual millennia in City Memory. He kept no name, not even adequate spoor; he had designed his active persona to be efficient, elusive and only as egotistical as necessary to provide motivation for duels.
The tracer had caught the rogue in Patricia’s quarters, and Olmy had then commanded it to back off, in such a way that the rogue would be led to believe it had escaped.
Olmy was well-acquainted with the personality of the average rogue.
Most had been born during the final stages of City Memory constructiona task that had taken over five hundred years, beginning in Thistledown City before the creation of the Way.
A number of citizens, generally young, had found ways to create loopholes and to circumvent the ultimate penalties being put into effect to deter crime—recycling of the citizen’s body and inactivation of the stored personality. The most popular method was making an illegal duplicate personality which would remain inactive in City Memory; if the citizen received the ultimate penalty, the illegal duplicate would be activated, guaranteeing continuity.
These “rogues” had then engaged in all manner of criminal activities, some of them resorting to acts of violence not seen in the Axis City since the expulsion of the orthodox Naderites from Alexandria.
Most were caught, tried and sentenced, and the punishment carried out—releasing a virulently destructive group of personalities into City Memory. As time passed, some of the rogues were convinced by Hexamon agents that the best way they could spend their time would be to engage in duels—searching out and eliminating other rogues. That solved much of the problem. Dueling caught on, and within a decade, half of the rogues had been eliminated by their own confreres.
Many had survived, however—the smartest and most inventive, and therefore, ultimately the most dangerous.
In recent decades, one of the Nexus’s most pressing problems was to make City Memory completely safe for all citizens. The Nexus had made little progress—a stubborn residue of resistance remained, creating mischief and occasionally disrupting important functions.
Hiring a rogue was always risky, Olmy knew. The patron could not expect complete loyalty—a rogue stayed loyal only so long as advantages and interest remained high.
To that end, Olmy rewarded the rogue richly with access to several private data banks—and made doubly sure that no one would ever discover who had done the hiring, especiaily the rogue himself.