“This break-away sect, they had these things they called Goyathlay’s Throat, long clay tubes, about two feet long, real old. Ancient. Connie said they were turned on a wheel in the same tent where old Goyathlay would have his sing during the Peyote ceremony. She really believed that, you know, she revered this thing just like a Bible Belter would revere the personal pickled pecker of Jesus muff-ucking Christ himself. Anyway this clay tube she had, it was a gift from a roadman — a priest of her kin clan—”
“Did she tell you his name?”
“No, I don’t think so. I was surprised that Connie was telling me all this, but it had to do with something she had seen going on at her company. She worked as an acoustic laser technician at Red Shift. Far as I could tell from what she told me — she was given to prattle, the dizzy old bint — anyway, Red Shift techies was trying to figure out what sort of coating would work to stop laser surveillance from reading what was being said inside a room. You know, it reads these tiny variations in the movement of the window, from a thousand yards, and it can hear what’s being said. So Red Shift had come up with this film, looked like ordinary window tint, but it prevented all kinds of gear from peeping in on secret meetings. It’s on the Pentagon glass right now, why it looks green.”
Dalton waited her out, sipping at the rum, savoring the rich, dark tang of it. She had excellent taste in liquor, he decided.
“What this had to do with Goyathlay’s Throat, she got it into her head that since this cylinder had been cast right in the same tepee as old Goyathlay was living in, then it stood to reason that the sound waves from Goyathlay’s actual voice would sink into the wet clay as it was being turned on the wheel. You know about Hatshepsut’s Tomb, over there on the banks of the Blue Nile?”
A hard left turn, but since he’d flown in from Greybull with a pilot who flew the way Barbra Goldhawk talked, he stayed in his seat. “Not really. What about it?”
“There’s a big picture on the wall there, painted two thousand years before Christ, and it shows the Ka, the soul, of Amun himself, being turned on a potter’s wheel by the ram-headed god Chin-um. Right there next to a portrait of old Queen Ahmose. Interesting, isn’t it? So this is sorta like what Connie and her clan believed. That the soul, the voice, of Goyathlay himself had seeped right into the walls of this cylinder.”
She stopped short, and went a long way inside herself, her skin going blue-white and her cheeks flushing.
“Get me my puffer, will you, son?” she said, after a long silence.
“Where is it?”
“In the bedroom… table… by… the…”
He stumbled to the back of the trailer, scattering kittens and cats, and found the blue plastic ventilator on a TV tray by her cot. She had her hands out as he came down the hall and stuffed the mouthpiece into her tracheal tube, pressing down on the plunger. After a few gasping heaves her skin grew less deathly and the flush faded from her cheeks.
“Sorry. Not smoking enough, I guess. Say it’ll kill me, but it hasn’t yet. Pass me a cigarette, will you?”
“Maybe you should hold—”
“Maybe you should hold your tongue, kiddo. Pass me a smoke.”
Dalton reached for the Marlboros, pulled one out. He even held the lighter like a gentleman as she sucked the cigarette alight through her tracheal implant. She laid her hand on top of his and flashed him a ghastly coquettish leer as she did so.
“Okay… now… what all this has to do with Red Shift is that Connie Goliad figured — this was back in early ninety-seven — that if she could find some reason to stay late a couple nights (she sorta ran her own bench with nobody over her shoulder so long as she got her reports in), then she would have access to this top-secret laser scanner thingy that could read the most minute variations in the surface of things. She figured if she set this Goyathlay’s Throat thing into the machine, she could find out if there really were sound waves embedded in the clay.”
“And were there?”
“Hard to say. She got a lot of random variations that the machine translated as white noise. Tried the same thing with the cylinder spinning at the same rate as it would have spun while it was being made, and she did get some weird rhythmic sounds out of it, kind of a droning singsongy sound, sorta like somebody tuning a church organ. She played me a tape of it and it did sound sorta like chanting. But that’s not what her real beef was. While she was there in the lab running this stuff, her husband, Héctor, he was a pilot trainer in the Mexican Civil Air Patrol, he was wandering around the lab, waiting to drive her home, and he happens to be sitting at this computer trying to make it access the Net, when he looks up and he sees through the window that the manager’s computer has turned itself on. All by itself. You follow?”
Dalton said nothing, although the idea that a computer would turn itself on in the middle of the night did not, in this Microsoft world, strike him as more sinister than his McAfee program doing exactly the same thing at four in the morning to a billion other computers.
“So he calls across to Connie, who goes into the office. Security there was lousy. And she sees that this remote computer is talking to the manager’s machine. She pings the remote and sees all these interval linkages come up. Well, here she told me a lot of technical bull crap that she might as well have told to old Woodstein over there — for Chrissake leave off lickin’ your dick, Woodstein, ’fore you wear it to a nubbin! But it seems like she was able to determine that some machine in Paris, France, belonging to an Anglo-French consortium called FrancoVentus Mondiale — she Googled them and found out they designed turbojet engines — she realizes that this machine was exchanging what looked to her like encrypted technical data with the Red Shift mainframe.”
“Did she think this was routine?”
“No. And it damn well wasn’t either. She knew the entire Red Shift client list backward, and besides, Red Shift had what she called an Umbra-level security wall that directly forbade them from having any direct Internet linkage with any foreign firms. It was designed to prevent the illegal transfer of technology that might end up in the wrong place, North Korea or China for instance.”
“I know something about it.”
“I’ll bet you do. So do I. It’s called Echelon, isn’t it? Run by the NSA. Don’t bother shining me on with those movie-star looks. I know a con artist when I see one. Anyhow, Connie decides that the security of Red Shift has been broken. They been hatched into by a hatcher—”
“A hacker?”
“Hatcher, hacker, tallywacker. Some freaky-geeky spy boys of some sort. Her husband agrees with her, and they, being poor ignorant beaners and redskins and not knowing Penobscot from the Pentecost, well don’t they get all patriotic and call up the Red Shift chief of security, this Latino ex-FBI dorkwad named Zigismond D’Escarpa — known in the Red Shift cafeteria as Sigmoid O’Scopa, because he was always looking up somebody’s ass for security breaches. There’s a good one in there somewhere. Security breaches. Security britches. Well, when it comes to me, I’ll call you. Anyway, Sigmoid, he comes down on them like a ton of bricks.”
“Not grateful?”
“Grateful? It was all Connie could do to hold on to her job. Tampering with the mainframe. Use of company facilities without permission. Breach of confidence. Espionage—”
“They didn’t believe her?”
“No. Sigmoid and the techies ran a complete hard-drive scan and rechecked all the traffic logs going back six years. Turned Red Shift upside down for three and a half months, during which she was suspended without pay and her husband had to go back to training pilots in Guaymas to pay the mortgage. In the end it all came to nothing: they declared that there had been no breach and they told Connie to just forget all about it. Even let her come back to work.”