“OK, that’s about as secure as I can get, this side of the Sierras. Now we can talk.”
“Someone listening in?” Tully asked. “Mind if I have a swig of whatever it was, by the way?”
Adrienne raised an eyebrow, but handed over her flask. “It’s Seven Oaks brandy—from my own land,” she said. “And as to listening… I think that Nostradamus has been compromised.”
“Nostradamus?” Tom said.
“Formally, the Commonwealth Information and Communications System,” she said. “Nobody calls it anything but Nostradamus except in official documents.”
Tully handed back the silver flask. “Pretty good brandy, by the way. Sort of cognac style, hey? And Nostradamus is your Internet?”
She nodded. “Sort of cognac; Ugni Blanc grapes, at least, and the same style of distilling; this batch was laid down when I was six. Nostradamus is… Imagine…” She paused for thought.
“… imagine that the U.S. government ruled the whole civilized world, that it owned AOL, and AOL was the whole Internet, everywhere. That it owned and operated every ISP, and there was only one type of modem and one set of software for it, and the super-AOL owned all the cables and servers and the whole communications industry and the telephone net and all the TV stations and on-line databanks and the public library as well. It’s an intranet, a closed system. No computer-to-computer contact outside it at all, unless you use floppies, and those can be read anytime you upload to a computer in touch with the system. And you have to use your ID card and get a scan anytime you log on, even from a public terminal.”
Tully snapped his fingers. “Hey! Al Stewart! It’s named after the song, right?” He hummed, and then sang in a half chant:
Mortal man, your time is sand—Your years are leaves upon the sea I am the eyes of Nostradamus—All your ways are known to me!
“Yes, that one was popular about the time the system was first put together,” she said, and nodded with a tinge of surprised respect. “It’s been updated frequently since—all high-broadband fiber now.”
She turned to Tom and looked him in the eye: “All right; Bosco was the man behind that endangered-animal smuggling. He couldn’t have been doing it for the money; that doesn’t really make sense. And somebody got to Schalk—thanks, by the way—and if I wasn’t the nasty suspicious sort who never tells anyone anything until they need to know, he’d have screwed my investigation worse than he undoubtedly did. Schalk was willing to court almost certain death to shut Bosco up when it looked like he’d talk. You were a police officer—”
“Am,” Tom corrected.
She shrugged. “All right, are a police officer. What does that suggest to you?”
“What would Bosco have gotten if he confessed? In the way of punishment.” Because if you burn ’em alive, it would be perfectly natural. And how do I know you don’t burn people alive here? “He put up a lot of resistance, as if the stakes were extremely high.”
“Punishment for smuggling? As long as there wasn’t any question of revealing the Gate secret… ten or fifteen years ‘assisting in the dynamic growth of the mining industry so important to our beloved Commonwealth.’”
“Sent to the mines, hey?” Tom said. “I presume that isn’t a death sentence?”
“Of course not. Gray jumpsuit, monotonous but adequate diet, hard bunk, hard work, unsympathetic guards. Maybe half that time, if the Prime of his Family was willing to pay heavily and twist arms for him. He might get a trusty’s job in a year or two; after all, he was one of the Thirty Families. A pretty poor specimen of the breed, but the principle counts. Do you think he was just unable to bear the thought of a few years turning ore into ingots?”
Tom thought, then shook his head. “Hell no. He was hiding something big, very big. Something that would have gotten him killed if he confessed. Something that did get him killed because it just looked like he might confess.”
Adrienne’s lips skinned back in a notional smile. “Yes. I think he was a small part of a very big conspiracy; a conspiracy against the Gate Control Commission and the Gate secret. One of which Schalk was a tool.”
The big man nodded again. “Now,” he said coldly, crossing his arms, “tell me why we should care.”
For a moment she looked shocked, then shook her head. “All right, it’s natural you should still be thinking like FirstSiders. Reasons? Three reasons you should care.”
She held up three fingers, and turned them down one by one: “First, Bosco was a collateral… sort of a fictive-kinship thing… of the Collettas. If the Colletta Prime, the head of the Family, is involved in this… well, the Collettas have long memories, and they carry grudges. You were partly responsible for their boy’s death. If they were to take over here, your lives wouldn’t be worth squat. Second, even if they were willing to let you live, you’d still have to live here after they took over, and I doubt you’d like it—you’ll know what I mean when you’ve seen more of how things work here.”
“And third?” Tom said, expressionless.
“Third, if the conspiracy takes over, think about who they were operating with back on FirstSide, and how. The Commission—which we Rolfes and our friends run, more or less—believes in leaving a minimal footprint back there and limited expansion here; that’s why our faction is called the Conservatives. The Collettas are more ambitious…. Oh, hell, it’s complicated, sixty years of politics. The Collettas are the head of the Imperialist party here. They want to conquer this world, more or less, and rule all the natives as slaves, more or less. They don’t put it quite that way, and don’t mention that they’d also like to be kings, emperors, themselves. They’re buddy-buddy with the Batyushkovs, who I think still have political ambitions back FirstSide, not just here, ambitions in Russia. Think about the sort of mayhem someone in control of the Gate’s resources and the Commission’s wealth could create here and back FirstSide, if they got their hands on it.”
Tom exchanged a glance with his partner. They both nodded slightly, and he replied, “We don’t have enough information to decide on that… Ms. Rolfe.”
He thought she winced slightly, but she went on coolly enough: “That’s fair. Look, if you want me to do it, I’ll just drop you off in Rolfeston. That hundred dollars you each got will keep you for a month, two if you’re very careful, and there’s plenty of work here for men with your skills. Or, you can let me show you around, and try to convince you that you should help me.”
“Why do you need help, if you’re in the all-powerful Gate Security?” Tom asked.
Adrienne laughed bitterly. “Oh, if only you knew! I can just imagine going over to Colletta Hall”—she pointed in the direction of what should be San Jose—“and waving my little pistol at Giovanni Colletta and telling him he’s under arrest. For that matter, if Bosco had been caught here in the Commonwealth… Let’s say this isn’t the most centralized country in human history. And I’ve got to assume that Gate Security is compromised as well, after what happened with Schalk; there are Collettas and Batyushkovs and their affiliates all through it, of course. I need some help I can trust.”
He looked at her. She flushed, but continued to meet his eyes.
“This is my country, and I’ll do whatever it takes to protect it,” she said. “Including kill, lie and deceive. You never have?”
Tom nodded in grudging acknowledgment. “I’m an American,” he said. “And I’ll do all that for my country. Possibly we can work together.”