“That could change fast.”
“There is something you are not telling ve-who-speaks, Swar. Tell it.”
“Things are happening onworld, Kinok; we’ll be finishing up our collecting with the Imperator’s Palace. That’s bound to be noisy.”
There was a cool silence from the speaker. On the screen, Kinok’s plummy scattered eyes had a skeptical glitter that Quale had no difficulty reading. There were going to be some difficult days ahead. Damn all idiot religions, they never caused anything but trouble for everyone around them, believers or not. He heard the ting that announced the arrival of Slancy’s data and suppressed a sigh of relief.
“Talk to you later, Kinok; we’ve got some clearing up here.”
“… redundancy,” Aslan translated, sliding into the summary at the end of the dataflow, her voice husky, dry as her throat. Elmas Ofka sat in the kingchair, her eyes fixed on the great screen, on words she couldn’t read, numbers she couldn’t decipher; faced with Parnalee’s defection and the unhappy realization that he’d used her fears and prejudices to undercut her and threaten everything she was fighting for, she’d swung back to a tooth-end trust in Aslan. “It is rumored,” Aslan continued, “that even the mainBrain is duplicated; if it is damaged seriously enough, a sisterBrain takes charge. Oh, I see. Forget that, Hanifa, just me realizing what Parnalee is up to. Um, yes, these rumors call her the Dark Sister because she is supposed to be programmed to attack without cease until the ship prevails or is destroyed. Analysts studying the Warmaster have reported that they are unable to discover any clues to the location or even the existence of the Dark Sister. Some believe that the tales about her are put out to heighten the terror factor and its demoralizing effect on the enemy. These discount the rumors and believe that the Dark Sister exists only in the minds of Rummul information officers. There is nothing in Memory to substantiate either conclusion.” She drew a dry tongue across dry lips. “That’s it,” she said, “that seems to be everything that Quale’s ship knows about Warmasters.”
She watched her mother shut down the flow, pleased to be finished with the awkward job of translating technical details into a language that didn’t have reasonable equivalents, not all that happy with what she’d read. She wasn’t convinced by the disclaimers at the end. Like Jamber Fausse said, Parnalee might be crazy, but he wasn’t stupid. There were some hazy dark rumors floating like smoke through University subfiles, unsubstantiated speculation about the intent and purpose of that institute of his. Hmm, she thought, maybe I can talk Chancellor DizZawbawka into hiring Mama to worm in there and find out what Omphalos is hiding, he’s got a kink about secret societies. This is a note you don’t write down, woman, but you don’t forget it either. She smoothed her hand across her mouth and watched Elmas Ofka, interested in the Dalliss’ reaction to what she’d heard.
Elinas Ofka pinched thoughtfully at her lip. “There is a second Brain,” she said. “There has to be. Can you find it, Adelaar yabass?”
“I can try.”
Quale chuckled; he was sitting at a down station, feet resting on a pile of empty medpacs, arms folded across his chest. “You need stroking, Del? Hah! you know how good you are.”
“I also know the work of several of those analysts in that report; they might be a long time dead, but if they couldn’t find anything, it either wasn’t there or I’m likely to find the far side of Beyond before I trip over the clone.”
“And didn’t I not so long ago hear you say that this Brain is big, powerful and dumb? Dumb. That was the word you used, wasn’t it? And didn’t I hear you say we’ve learned considerable since this ship was built?”
“Quale, don’t play shitgames with me. It’d take a Memory the size of the one on University to record what you don’t know about penetration. What about a real game? A wager. Double your fee against no fee on whether the clone is actually there and I find it.”
“I’m a cautious man, aici Arash. I won’t bet against a certainty.”
“Then you’d better get ready to blow the Dark Sister the moment I find her. I have a feeling we’re not going to have much time to maneuver.”
14
Adelaar circled round and round that problem, then went at it obliquely, running the numbers of the corporeal essence of the ship, its dimensions and locations, ignoring for the moment the visual map, only the numbers mattered, matching and crossmatching, tagging subtle disparities, replaying the visuals with the disparities corrected, tagging discontinuities that appeared when that was done. Aslan could see that her mother had only the tiniest of threads to pull on, but that seemed to be all she needed; when an hour had crept past, it was obvious she was going to unpick the knot. The farther she got the easier it seemed for her, it was almost as if she were beginning to read the minds of the programmers who’d done the original work. Funny, Mama didn’t get along at all well with Sarmaylen or his friends. My friends, Aslan thought, maybe that’s why. She’s as much an artist as they are, I thought so before, I know it now. That’s not just skill, that’s a leap of… of… I don’t know, whatever artists leap at. She sighed. My father’s a poet, my mother’s a… well, whatever. What the hell happened to me? Ah well, as Xalloor says, deary dai, we do what we can. Missing Xalloor, she strolled to the panels, drew water from a spigot. It’s a good thing Churri took off with Quale, she thought, he made Mama nervous. She sipped at the water. It was lukewarm and tasteless, but her mouth was still dry from the reading stint. First time I saw Mama fluttery like that. Ooh-yeha and forty hells, four months in the insplit going home, that is not going to be fun for anyone, not if she starts after Xalloor. She can be a bitch on wheels when she’s jealous. Aslan wrinkled her nose as her mind flipped back to the time when she was fifteen and the boy she was sneaking out to see and what happened when Mama caught them. Deary dai, indeed.
She gulped the rest of the water and moved over to watch Pels work. His eyes flicked in an unceasing round from screen to screen to screen; the lifepod sector drawn in green lines was on one with an inset showing the Hordar packing the crew into the pods, another had a map of the Palace, the city, the landing field, on the third there was a map of the system with pinpoints of yellow light converging on the whitepoint that was them, or so she assumed. She touched his shoulder. “Are those something we should be worrying about?”
His ears twitched. “Grand Sech has been trying to talk to someone up here the past hour. Those are the stingers heading at us.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing.”
“Huh?”
“It’ll be at least an hour before they’re close enough to be a bother. Until then there’s no point. Besides, we won’t be able to get outside the skin before Adelaar’s finished over there. She going to be much longer?”
“I don’t know, I don’t operate in those realms.”
“Me either, I used to think I was good, but she’s a witch.”
“She’s never let me watch her work before. I don’t know why.”
“Huh.” He dug his claws into his neck fur, scowled at the pod area. “Almost ready to pop ’em. Igsala poong! That Proggerdi. We can’t sit around sucking our toes or he’ll stick a torp up our collective arse.”
Aslan glanced at her mother, grinned. “Right on cue,” she murmured.
Adelaar flung her arms up, wriggled in the chair, yawned. “Got it,” she said. “Where’s Quale?”
“Doing what you told him, getting ready to blow the clone,” Pels said. “The Grand Sech is birthing fidgets because he can’t get through up here; he sent stingers to see what’s going on. They can’t burn a way in, but unless I remember wrong, more than one of them will have overrides on the lockseals.”
“Transfer the trace here.” She watched the pinlights creep for a moment, sniffed, then began playing with the pad… “I’ll let them think they are in control till they’re close enough…” she broke off, concentrated for a moment, “to Tairanna, then all their little popbuggies will peel off and put them down where they’ll have a lot of privacy and time to contemplate their sins.” She sat back, yawned again, laced her fingers across her stomach and examined her thumbnails. “I think we ought to let him hear us.” She tilted her head back, smiled at Aslan. “Don’t you think we owe him a little sweat?”