He stops being interested in me. "Coffee will be fine. Milk, no sugar." He disappears into the room, leaving his keys with the lock.
Now. Heart pounding, I head for the staff room. Janis is snoozing when I open the door. She sits up with a start, looking pale. "Reeve"
"It's all right," I say, crossing over to the kettle and filling it up. "Fiore's here, I let him in. Listen, why don't you go home? If you're feeling ill, you shouldn't really be here, should you?"
"I've been thinking about thinking." Janis shakes her head. I rummage around for the coffee and filter papers and set the stand up over the biggest mug I can find. I scoop the coffee into the paper with wild abandon, stopping only when I realize that making it too strong for Fiore will be as bad as not getting him to drink it all. "You shouldn't think too much, Reeve. It's bad for you."
"Is it really?" I ask abstractedly, as I peel the foil wrapping from a small tablet of chocolate I bought at the drugstore and crumble half of it into the coffee grounds as the kettle begins to hiss. I wad the foil into a tight ball and flick it into the wastebasket.
"If you think about getting out of here," says Janis.
"Like I said, I'll call you a taxi"
"No, I mean out of here. " I turn round and she looks at me with the expression of a trapped animal. It's one of those moments of existential bleakness when the cocoon of lies that we spin around ourselves to paper over the cracks in reality dissolve into slime, and we're left looking at something really ugly. Janis has got the bug, the same one I've got, only she's got it worse. "I can't stand it anymore! They're going to put me in hospital and make me pass a skull through my cunt, and then they're going to have a little accident and I'll bleed out and they'll give me to Hanta to fix with her tame censorship worm. I'll come out of the hospital smiling like Yvonne and Patrice, and there won't be any me left, there'll be this thing that thinks it's me and"
I grab her. "Shut up !" I hiss in her ear. "It's not going to happen!" She sobs, a great racking howl welling up inside her, and if she lets it out. I'm completely screwed because Fiore will hear us. "I've got a plan."
"You'vewhat? "
The kettle is boiling. I gently push away her groping hands and reach over to turn it off. "Listen. Go home. Right now, right this instant. Leave Fiore to me. Stop panicking. The more isolated we think we are, the more isolated we become. I won't let them mess with your head." I smile at her reassuringly. "Trust me."
"You." Janis sniffles loudly, then lets go of me and grabs a tissue off the box on the table. "You've gotno, don't tell me." She blows her nose and takes a deep breath, then looks at me again, a long, hard, appraising look. "Should have guessed. You don't take shit, do you?"
"Not if I can help it." I pick up the kettle and carefully pour boiling water into the funnel, where it will damp down the coffee grounds, extract the xanthine alkaloids and dissolve the half tab of Ex-Lax hidden in the powder, draining the sennoside glycosides and the highly diuretic caffeine into the mug of steaming coffee that, with any luck, will give Fiore a strong urge to take ten minutes on the can about half an hour after he drinks it. "Just try to relax. I should be able to tell you about it in a couple of days if things work out."
"Right. You've got a plan." She blows her nose again. "You want me to go home." It's a question.
"Yes. Right now, without letting Fiore see you hereI told him you were at home, sick."
"Okay." She manages a wan smile.
I pour milk into the coffee mug, then pick it up. "I'm just going to give the Reverend his coffee," I tell her.
"To give" Her eyes widen. "I see." She takes her jacket from the hook on the back of the door. "I'd better get out of your way, then." She grins at me briefly. "Good luck!"
And she's gone, leaving me room to pick up the mug of coffee and the other item from the sink side and to carry them out to Fiore.
THE simplest plans are often the best.
Anything I try to do on the library computer system will be monitored, and the instant I try to find anything interesting they'll know I know about it. It's probably there as a honeypot, to snare the overly curious and insufficiently paranoid. Even if it isn't, I probably won't get anywhere usefulthose old conversational interfaces are not only arcane, they're feeble-minded.
To put one over on these professional paranoids is going to take skill, cunning, and lateral thinking. And my thinking is this: If Fiore and the Bishop Yourdon and their fellow experimenters have one weak spot, it's their dedication to the spirit of the study. They won't use advanced but anachronistic surveillance techniques where nonintrusive ones that were available during the dark ages will do. And they won't use informational metastructures accessible via netlink where a written manual and records on paper will do. (Either that, or what they write on paper really is secret stuff, material that they won't entrust to a live data system in case it comes under attack.)
The ultrasecure repository in the library is merely a room full of shelves of paper files, with no windows and a simple mortise lock securing the door. What more do they need? They've got us locked down in the glasshouse, a network of sectors of anonymous orbital habs subjected to pervasive surveillance, floating in the unmapped depths of interstellar space, coordinates and orbital elements unknown, interconnected by T-gates that the owners can switch on or off at will, and accessible from the outside only via a single secured longjump gate. Not only that, but our experimenters appear to have a rogue surgeon-confessor running the hospital. Burglar alarms would be redundant.
After I knock on the door and pass Fiore his coffee, I go back to the reference section and while away a few minutes, leafing through an encyclopedia to pass the time. (The ancients held deeply bizarre ideas about neuroanatomy, I discover, and especially about developmental plasticity. I guess it explains some of their ideas about gender segregation.)
As it happens, I don't have to wait long. Fiore comes barging into the office and looks about. "Youis there a staff toilet here?" he demands, glancing around apprehensively. His forehead glistens beneath the lighting tubes.
"Certainly. It's through the staff common roomthis way." I head toward the staff room at a leisurely pace. Fiore takes short steps, breathing heavily.
"Faster," he grumbles. I step aside and gesture at the door. "Thank you," he adds as he darts inside. A moment later I hear him fumbling with the bolt, then the rattle of a toilet seat.
Excellent. With any luck, he'll be about his business before he looks for the toilet paper. Which is missing because I've hidden it.
I walk back to the door to the restricted document repository. Fiore has left his key in the lock and the door ajar. Oh dear. I pull out the bar of soap, the sharp knife, and the wad of toilet paper I've left in my bag on the bottom shelf of the trolley. What an unfortunate oversight!
I wedge my toe in the door to keep it from shutting as I pull the key out and press it into the bar of soap, both sides, taking care to get a clean impression. It only takes a few seconds, then I use some of the paper to wipe the key clean and wrap up the bar, which I stash back in the bag. The key is a plain metal instrument. While there's an outside chance that there's some kind of tracking device built into it in case it's lost, it isn't lostit moved barely ten centimeters while Fiore was taking his ease. And I'm fairly certain there are no silly cryptographic authentication tricks built into itif so, why disguise it as an old-fashioned mortise lock key? Mechanical mortise locks are surprisingly secure when you're defending against intruders who're more used to dealing with software locks. Finally, if there's one place that won't be under visual surveillance, it's Fiore's high-security document vault while the Priest is busy inside it. This is the chain of assumptions on which I am gambling my life.