"Now, we believe that this trend has gone too far in the opposite direction; the Rights Economy has layered its version of reality on top of what everyone sees and hears— strictly in the name of economics, they claim, and the alternatives could be far worse. True— they could completely control the appearance of reality if they chose. But as it is, though they think they are being moral, they are godless people, because they have made it appear that the essence of things is money— that a thing only really exists if it can be bought or sold. When you look at a rose, you no longer see the immanence of the thing itself; all you see is a price."
Michael contemplatively turned over the offline datapack he used to store kami. Crisler had neither taken it from him nor wiped the kami already stored in it. He was sure that was deliberate: Crisler was saying more clearly than words could express that he could take the pack away any time he chose.
The kami of Kadesh and the terrifying kami of Dis were still in there. He knew he should erase the kami of Dis, but even with those huge files in the system there was plenty of extra storage space left. Enough for him to try something he had not done since his final days at the seminary.
One of the reasons Dr. Herat encouraged Michael's religious activities was that the kami often revealed insights into alien places and things that Herat himself missed. The professor had a brilliant mind, but not everything could be seen with the rational faculty. On more than one occasion he had called upon Michael to scry an object using the NeoShinto AI— calling up a history half imagined, half inferred. Herat knew that the deepest engines of human thought are unconscious and he respected Michael's ability to tap those powers directly. Michael himself always found the experience disquieting.
He had gotten nowhere with his search of the databases he'd archived from the Banshee. Terabytes of data were arrayed about him in diffuse clouds and he was certain that the right kind of analysis would show a clue as to why Linda Ophir had been killed. If there was no such clue, that was also proof of something— namely that her murder had been one of opportunity.
His analytic powers and even those of the semilegal search tools he'd brought from Kimpurusha, weren't up to the task of finding that clue, or its absence. So he was faced with a choice.
Years ago, when he was testing the limits of his ability to touch the kami, Michael had tried to find the kami of inscape. He had no doubt that they were there; everything that came to human consciousness as a presence held kami. So one night he had sat down in the middle of a marble floor under the wan light of Kimpurusha's faint ring and summoned the kami of Data.
He activated the data storage unit now and held it up to eye level. He could feel a connection being made between the AI in his skull and the unit; he lowered it, closed his eyes and overrode the safety defaults of the inscape interface.
With a wrenching twist, all his sense of place and position vanished. He seemed to be hanging in a vast ethereal space, high above the misty galaxy of data he had been exploring. The illusion was total— vision crisp, murmurs of musical pattern thrumming all around him. This place was seductive, as always, in its perfection. And already he could sense the kami here.
When he was younger, the kami of Data had almost killed him. They were infinitely powerful and mercurial. They defied identity while greedily sucking it from everything in their domain. They embodied the spaces in between the blocks of information that were known to people using the Net. So they had come at Michael as answers to questions he'd never thought to ask; they had promised unifications of senses, like the texture of green or the sound of height. As soon as he entered their influence they fell upon him and he was trapped in their realm until his brothers found him in the morning and pulled him free.
The Michael of today was far more disciplined and his attention more focused than that younger man. As he felt the kami beginning to swirl around him like the precincts of a hurricane, he pulled them deliberately, one at a time. He examined the towering half-minds each in its turn and discarded it. The kami of this data resembled those who had stored information here; after months or years of being constantly half-connected to inscape, everyone left tracks. The papers written by the science team were here, each hyperlinked a thousand ways to notes, observations, citations, and personal logs of the authors. Many links trailed off into private inscapes whose data were not replicated in Michael's archive; but most were public. They made a collective music that came to him as ghosts of the authors' personalities.
He was looking for one ghost in particular and it didn't take long for him to find it. Linda Ophir lived on in her writings and in the thousands of small personal touches she had left in her public inscape galleries. The NeoShinto AI took hints of connection and spun them into personality. In seconds Michael found himself standing in front of Linda— or a composite of her whose age was indeterminate, sometimes childlike, sometimes wise and of dizzying depth. It stared back at him quizzically and opened its mouth to speak. He heard a thousand recordings of her voice— notes, voice messages, recorded lectures— blur together into a single yearning for meaning and in that yearning he understood completely why she had chosen science as her religion.
The ghost's eyes were mesmerizing; Michael was falling into them, disoriented, overwhelmed by her voice and the force of her character. He clutched for something else to hold onto and found, strangely, the hollow emptiness of Dis. Remembering it, he was able to look away from Linda's eyes.
"What are you hiding?" he asked her. He sensed turmoil and looked back.
Unlike most of the scientists in the expedition, Linda had kept almost nothing private. Her whole life was open in her writings and recordings. So the single, tiny block of files that were conspicuously missing from the continuum of her work were as instantly visible to Michael as a crack in a pane of glass.
He reached down, grabbed the absence that should have been several hours of Linda's work and pulled. As he did he shut down the NeoShinto AI. The ghosts fled and he was left holding a set of files.
He blinked, returning to the strange little airlock and now finding it homey. For a minute he just sat there, breathing, trying to forget the ghosts and the electric power of the kami of Data. Eventually he looked up from the floor between his knees. Several files were rotating in the air in front of him— photographs, by their icons. They had been stored in a public photo archive called "Waste Disposal Systems: Schematics."
Hidden in the open.
This guile was suggestive— was Ophir trying to hide her data from her own people?
When he felt ready, Michael opened the first, then, in puzzlement, another and finally all of them. This was not what he had expected— not that he knew what it was he'd expected, really.
The images were all of the Lasa habitat, the final one being a holo globe mapped with the pictures to create a miniature model. The black sphere with its red cuneiform lettering was instantly recognizable. These images were all tagged B. G., which hyperlinked to Blair Genereaux— but they had been annotated and the annotation layer was initialed L. O.: Linda Ophir.
He opened all the annotations. He rotated the globe; it looked like the one in the public archive all the scientists were using. Nothing odd there.
But in the annotated version, several of the photos had some of the background stars and certain Lasa words circled. With those highlighted, it was easy to see that four of the photos were in fact duplicates. He looked closer: The coordinates on the photos were different, suggesting that they had been taken at different points in an orbit around the habitat. But no, the photos were the same.