“Is that sound the computers?” Martin half-whispered, not daring to touch the walls, which hummed as if channeling some distant stampede.
“Generators,” Ockham answered. “We can power the system for two weeks even if main and secondary both fail. The processors are farther back.”
He led Martin on to the bash’house’s central chamber, a high, broad living room ringed with cushy gray sofas, with a glass back wall that looked down over the next tiers of the sloping city to the crashing blue of the Pacific. The western sunlight through the window cast a halo around the room’s famed centerpiece: the pudgy pointed oval silhouette of Mukta. You know her from your schooling, duly memorized alongside the Nina, the Pinta, and Apollo XI, but you do not know her as we who walked those halls know her, her shadow across the carpet, her texture as you coax dust from the pockmarks scored in her paint by the bullet-fierce dust of 9,640 km/h.
“Is that the original?” Reverence made Martin’s words almost a whisper.
“Of course.” Ockham gave Mukta a careful caress, as one gives an old dog, not strong enough to leap and wrestle anymore. “Heart of the family business. Coming up on four hundred years it’s never left the bash’.”
Martin gazed up through the glass wall to the sky, where today’s cars, Mukta’s swarming children, raced on, invisibly swift until they slowed for landing, so they seemed to appear over the city like eggs laid by the chubby clouds. “And the computers? How deep would an intruder have to get to reach them?”
“Deep,” Ockham answered. “Many stories, many tiers.”
Thumps through the ceiling made both glance up, the footsteps of a bash’mate upstairs.
“How about to reach an interface?” Martin asked.
“The next room has some interface nets.” Ockham nodded to his left. “But they’re set-set nets, Cartesian, no one who wasn’t trained from birth could get them to respond.”
Mason: “Your security is mostly automated?”
Humanist: “I could have fifty guards here in two minutes, three hundred in five, but human power is less than four percent of my security.”
Mason: “You think there’s no danger this intruder could return and cause a mass crash?”
Humanist: “A mass crash is not possible.”
Mason: “You’re sure?”
Are you disconcerted by this scriptlike format, reader? It was common in our Eighteenth Century, description lapsing into naked dialogue; to such Enlightened readers all histories were plays, or rather one play, scripted by one distant and divine Playwright.
Humanist: “A mass crash is not the danger. The system will ground all the cars if any tampering’s detected, and they can self-land even with the system dead. The problem is shutting down all transit on Earth for however long it took us to recheck the system, could be minutes, hours. The Censor told me a complete shutdown would cost the world economy a billion euros a minute, not to mention stranding millions, cutting off supplies, ambulances, police. That’s your catastrophe.”
Mason: “Or at the very least the century’s most destructive prank.”
Humanist: “Utopians?”
Confess, reader, the name had risen in your mind too, conjured by stereotype, as talk of secret handshakes brings Masons before your eyes, or war brings priests.
Martin frowned. “Not Utopians necessarily, though such mischief is not beyond them.”
Humanist: “They have a separate system. They’re the only ones.”
Mason: “Do you think they’d reap a profit if they shut you down and then let the other Hives rent out their cars?”
Humanist: “They wouldn’t.”
Mason: “Rent their cars?”
“They don’t have the capacity to put that many extra cars in the sky, they don’t have the reserves we do. They’d be overrun.”
At Ockham’s signal the house summoned its second showpiece: a projection of the Earth in her slow spin, with the paths of the cars’ flights traced across in threads of glowing gold. Hundreds of millions crisscrossed, dense as pen strokes, drowning out the continents so the regions of the globe were differentiated only by texture, oceans smooth masses of near-parallel paths, like fresh-combed hair, while the great cities bristled with so many crisscrossing journeys that Earth seemed to bleed light. Each car’s position en route was visible like a knot in the thread, crawling forward as the seconds crawled, so the whole mass scintillated like the dust of broken glass. The display is functionless, of course, a toy to dazzle houseguests, but a Humanist bash’ must make some amends for a shabby trophy wall.
Humanist: “Gold is my system. The Utopian cars are blue, and Romanova’s Emergency System cars are red. Can you see them?”
Martin squinted as the end of a baseball game in Cairo made the city blaze with fresh launches. “Not a trace.”
“Exactly. I have eight hundred million passengers in the air at a time. Making them compete for thirty million Utopian cars would do a lot more harm than profit. A shutdown helps no one.”
More footsteps on the stairs above. “¡Ockham!” a voice called down in Spanish. “¿Can you come help move Eureka’s bed? A mango fell behind it. Well, most of a mango. ¿Can you bring a sponge?”
“¡Busy!” Ockham called back. “¡Ask Kat or Robin!”
“¡Kay!”
The click of Ockham’s boots erased the interruption. “I didn’t catch your name, Mason.”
“Martin Guildbreaker.” His eyes widened as he realized his mistake. “I mean Mycroft, my real name’s Mycroft, Mycroft Guildbreaker, but everybody calls me Martin. But I’m not in a cult or anything, it’s just one of those nicknames that happens.”
Ockham nodded. “And Mycroft isn’t an easy name to live with anymore.” He was unable to resist glancing at the corner, where I sat on a work stool, picking away at a scrubbing robot whose self-cleaning function was not quite equal to the combination of gum and doll hair.
“Martin is worse, actually, but…”
Words died. Martin’s eyes had followed Ockham’s to me: my uniform, my ear, my face. Martin froze. Ockham froze. Both held their breath in a kind of stalemate, searching each other’s faces as the questions flowed: Does he know? Why does he know? Does he know I know? What can I say when he asks me why I know?
I tried to ease it for them, interrupting with motion, though I dared not speak first. I rose and bobbed an awkward half-bow to Martin, reaching by instinct to remove my hat, though it was already on the ledge beside me. Ockham caught the gesture, and his face relaxed into the first expression that morning which one could call a smile. “Have we both been feeding the same stray?”
Martin gave a laugh, a quiet one, politely brief, but enough to make his stance less tightrope-rigid. “So it seems. Good morning, Mycroft.”
I renewed my half-bow. “Good morning, Nepos.”
Ockham frowned at Martin’s title, an unwelcome reminder of this Mason’s intimacy with his distant Emperor. “Of course, Mycroft was also a Familiaris.” He nodded at Martin’s armband. “You know them from that?”
“Yes and no.” Martin had no obligation to be so honest. “I commission Mycroft frequently.”
“What for?”
“Mostly languages. Hive-neutral translators aren’t easy to come by, and a sensitive case like yours may turn up documents in any Hive language, or all of them.”