“Jeremiah controls the airwaves. What point is there in answering?”
“We’re recording here,” Minor said. “If we have to, we’ll put it together and rebroadcast it later. Director Sasaki, one way or another, I promise you that your answers will be heard.”
She frowned, looked to the floor as she marshaled her thoughts, then up at the camera. “The pioneers are a select group of very special people,” she said. “They have to be, to face and triumph over the challenges ahead. But they’ve chosen this for themselves, earned it for themselves. No one is being abducted. Thousands more would join them if there was only room.
“Even so, Memphis won’t be leaving the Earth poorer. The Diaspora Project has been the single greatest stimulus to education and self-development since the invention of the computer. It’s motivated people of three generations across every continent to say, ‘I want to contribute,’ and work to better themselves. Most of those people, and all of that human capital, will remain here.”
Minor turned back to his camera. “Jeremiah, you can’t dispute the fact that millions worldwide bought options for the Diaspora Project. The pioneers are volunteers, the lucky few. Why not let them go? Why is it important to you to stop them?”
“It is important to all of us,” Jeremiah said. “We need what they represent. We need their will and energy here. There is so much work left to do, so much damage to repair. We need to focus on stewardship, not starships. Otherwise this endless expansionism will exhaust us and leave us empty. We have a choice between living in the Sun and dying in the dark. We must raise our voices. We must reclaim the choice from the corporations and their collaborators. It is our future.”
“Director Sasaki—” Minor began.
“Gone,” said the Skylink operator, shaking his head. “Nothing up or down.”
Minor looked helplessly at Sasaki. “Director, believe me when I say that we had nothing to do with any of this.”
“I do believe you,” she said, rising.
“I can give you a chance to make a closing statement.”
“Thank you. It’s not necessary,” Sasaki said.
“You’re going to give him the last word? This story’s going to be in the A queue for the rest of the week.”
She turned and met his perplexed look with a gentle smile.
“My mission is not to win converts. My mandate is to build starships.”
“Mandate?”
“Have you ever tried to push a string, Mr. Minor?”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“Do you think that the Diaspora Project is something that was created from the top down?” she asked chidingly. “This is not something that we are doing to the Earth. This is something I do for the Earth. Those who can, already understand. Those who do not, never will.”
When Sasaki rejoined Dryke and Donovan in the inner office, the latter greeted her with a disapproving look.
“I should have been told,” Donovan grumped. “The board should have been told.”
“Told what, Mr. Donovan?” All sixteen cells of the display were occupied, and she began to scan them.
“Listen, I’m not an idiot. You set up this interview to sucker Jeremiah. Mikhail here spent the whole time itching and fidgeting like he was waiting for the main act to go on stage.”
She glanced at Dryke, a hint of a smile on her lips. “Jeremiah is his own master.”
“Bullshit. You were laying for him. You used the Singapore business as cover for changing your colors. The only thing I can’t figure is what you got from doing it.”
“I appreciate your help in preparing for the interview, Mr. Donovan,” Sasaki said, gliding toward the display. “Please thank the board for making you available. You can relay to them that I do not expect to be granting any further interviews in the near future.”
Donovan frowned. “Yeah,” he said as he stumped out. “I’ll tell them.”
As the door was closed behind Donovan, Sasaki asked for Privacy One. “Well, Mikhail?” she asked. “How did we do?”
Dryke pulled the plug from his ear and broke into a smile. “We have a piece of him,” he said. “A good piece.”
“Tell me.”
“The Jeremiah image was synthesized with a Palette HI broadcast animator. Images, I mean. There were three different ones.”
“Three!”
“An equal-opportunity air pirate. He blanketed Europe and North Africa with a vaguely Mediterranean synth through SIRIO, fed the Far East with an Oriental bounced up through AUSSAT, and gave us the mountain man through Hiwire.”
“All things to all people,” Sasaki said wryly.
Dryke continued, “The video lab says that if all three had the same root image, they may be able to correlate them and back-form a fair picture of the real Jeremiah.”
“Is that all we have—a hope?”
“No,” Dryke said. “More than that. You know, you can route a call to your neighbor around the world if you know how, and by ten thousand different routes if you want to be creative. Jeremiah knows how, and he was creative. All three images were scatter-routed to the uplinks in short bursts—too short to track back. Jeremiah used one hundred and eighty routes—good for three minutes. But thanks to Mr. Minor, he stayed on for seven. And with a second and a third look, we were able to map six of his routes back to a common entry node.”
“Which is—”
Dryke looked up at cell 4, which contained a map of North America. “Monterrey, Mexico.”
“Monterrey! Is that his base?”
“Almost certainly not,” Dryke said, shaking his head. “He’s not that foolish. But it makes the odds very good that his base is in the Americas. He needs land-line access to the node. Jeremiah’s a neighbor, Hiroko.”
“Or an insider?”
“Perhaps,” Dryke said. “Can’t rule it out.”
Sasaki crossed her arms and nodded. “This is very heartening, Mr. Dryke. I can see progress at last. I am comforted that I did not endure Mr. Minor’s questions and Mr. Donovan’s molding in vain.”
“I’m not finished,” Dryke said. “There’s one piece more. The best piece.”
“Oh?”
“We always thought that Jeremiah’s voice was synthesized. Nothing exotic to it,” Dryke said. “But there’s one kind of solution for a canned track like we’ve seen before, and another for a live exchange like we just had.”
“The difference is important?”
“Very. For live work, the easy way is to give an AI translator—maybe an IBM Traveler—a cross-file of another voice, just like you’d give it a cross-file for French, say, and let it do the substitutions on the fly. But something interesting happens when you throw a word at a translator that it can’t find in the file. It passes that word through unchanged.”
Sasaki looked suddenly hopeful. “Did that happen?”
“Yes. With Julian’s name. Your name. And ‘starships,’ near the end,” said Dryke. “All different from the rest. All in Jeremiah’s own voice.”
“Can you do anything with so little?” Sasaki asked. “A few syllables—”
“It’s as good as a fingerprint. It’s enough to do a cross-match search in the Memphis hyper. Enough to set up a monitoring program on the corporate com net.” Dryke smiled, a smile full of threat. “You know, you can’t hardly work for Allied without saying your name or ‘starship’ now and again. If Jeremiah is an insider, we’ll find him very soon.”
“And if he’s not?”
“A little longer. But not much longer. We’re coming up behind him in the dark. One more gag and we’ll have him.”