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  But she made some more calls: to a general she’d met at a party and a brace of US senators (the best that money could buy, her people had assured her, though in the context of politicians, the statement had struck her as self-contradictory) and a nice scientist she’d smiled at once at a reception, causing him to walk through a plate-glass door without noticing. Eventually she got a name and a number, and made the call.

  The commandant of the top-secret ocean-bed repository sounded like he’d just been woken up from a thousand-year-long sleep under a mountain somewhere. But he’d heard of her. In fact, he had a picture of her taped to the inside of his locker door, so that was all right, sort of.

  “No chance,” he said firmly. “We weigh the deposit every hour, on the hour, and I can promise you, not a milligram’s gone missing, not ever. We’re quite” — short, mildly disturbing laugh —”obsessive about it, you might say. Ha.”

  The final syllable was spoken, not laughed; never a good sign. Lucy persevered. What about when the bank people came to collect a batch to make into banknotes? Could any of the stuff get lost or mislaid? Absolutely not, no way. They presented him with a release form, which had to be signed by the bank CEO, the presidents of six of the ten countries who jointly ran the facility, three Nobel laureates and either the chairman of the World Bank or the Dalai Lama. Then, if the release said 0.87442 grams, then 0.87442 grams was what they got; and they weighed it again after the required amount had been chipped off and sealed up, and again after that, and after that of course there’d be the next scheduled hourly check— That’s very impressive, Lucy said, grateful that there wasn’t a video link and she couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see her, but how about once it’s left your hands? Could someone at the printing works, or the bank—? No, I see. Quite. Absolutely. Thank you so much for your help.

  Resisting the temptation to go and have a bath, preferably in a mild solution of disinfectant, Lucy lifted the phone one more time and told Reception to hold all her calls for an hour. A dead-end, she told herself. It can’t be aposiderium eating my brain, because there was no way in hell anybody could get hold of the stuff; not unless they shredded a huge load of banknotes just to get the security strips, and that’d be— Suddenly the room was very quiet and her eyes were very wide.

  9

  New York

  The entity designated Mark Twain sat on a straight-backed tubular-steel chair in a bleak room on the seventh floor of the Credit Mayonnais building. He wasn’t alone. Next to him sat a young Dirter male in a dark blue suit; he had his hands folded, and was staring at the opposite wall, his lips moving silently. Prayer? The Ostar were aware that at various stages of its history Dirt had hosted a number of religions, and according to archive information, the devotees of several of these prayed by folding their hands and mumbling quietly. It was possible, therefore, that the young Dirter was calling on his gods for their help in the forthcoming job interview. Mark Twain ran a quick surreptitious scan, but no gods showed up on his fingernail-sized screen, cunningly disguised as the display panel of his portable temporal correlation device, known colloquially as a watch, which he carried Dirter-style, strapped to his left wrist with animal hide.

  Next to the male was a slightly older female. A puzzle. His scans had shown that Dirters had a rudimentary form of optical correction surgery, and had definitely progressed past the point where they needed to wear corrective lenses held on with thin metal bars. The female Dirter, however, had just such a set of lenses. His interest piqued, Twain zoomed in on the lenses for an analysis of their optical strength. They turned out to be plain glass.

  The female wasn’t praying. She was sitting perfectly still, frowning (a gesture signifying either disapproval or uncertainty; presumably, in this context, the latter, unless she objected to the male’s religious observances). She had brought with her a sturdy container: a box with a folding-back lid made of synthetic animal skin stretched over a plastic frame. The container, when scanned, turned out to be crammed with documents relating to the female’s education and previous employment. The male Dirter had nothing of the sort, so he wasn’t expecting to be called on to prove his assertions about his qualifications and experience.

  The third Dirter, another male, had a broadcast receiver stuffed in his left ear and was listening to some form of music. It was nothing like the music that had wrought so much damage on the homeworld, but Twain had to make a conscious effort not to let it seep into his brain and flood it. Instead, he addressed himself to one of the many disturbing anomalies he’d encountered since his arrival on the surface.

  He’d made planetfall just outside a Dirt city by the name of New York. Everything in the Ostar records suggested that New York was the epicentre of every aspect of Dirter society. Naturally, he’d taken comprehensive scans as soon as he’d landed, and the results had been surprising, to say the least. If New York was the best place on Dirt, as the archive material maintained, he couldn’t help wondering what the rest of the planet was like.

  He’d run further scans, and a picture began to emerge. Fairly soon he had enough data to enable him to form a rough working hypothesis which, if correct, would explain quite a lot.

  Consider the evidence. The planet was way too hot, and the air was filthy. Infra-red imaging and back-track residual heat mapping showed that, at some point in the last fifty years, the surface temperature of the planet had suddenly soared, partially melting the ice-caps, changing the very climate. Atmospheric sampling showed an alarming level of pollution, particularly combustion-formed hydrocarbons. Population density was all wrong; most of the inhabitants of Dirt were crowded into a pawful of major cities, while most of the surfaces of the main land masses were barely inhabited at all. These, his historical, ecological and cyological databases told him, were classic signs, all pointing in the same direction. There must have been a war.

  Or something of the sort, anyway; some catastrophe that had led to potentially lethal overheating, wrecking of the ozone layer, disruption of normal society, poisoning of the atmosphere. He considered alternative explanations, but dismissed them as wildly improbable. Disasters on this scale weren’t the sort of thing that a species, even a primitive one like the Dirters, did to themselves if they could possibly help it. The obvious conclusion was that they’d had to fight for their survival as a species, most likely against an alien invader, and the horrendous collateral damage to their environment was the price they’d had to pay. That too would explain why the Dirters were huddled together in overcrowded slums — for safety, in the event of invasion — and why the planet bristled with military installations. Further sensor readings showed that the warming and the pollution had stopped (just in time) not more than five or so years ago, presumably after the enemy had been defeated, but not before they’d done something dreadful that had nearly wiped out the indigenous species and turned Dirt into a barren rock incapable of supporting life.

  Twain considered a number of further hypotheses — asteroid strike (no sign of that); a shift in the planet’s orbit (no, not so you’d notice); massive volcanic or magma-core activity (none of that, either) — and dismissed them. Which left only one possibility: the Mark One. When the planetary defences had taken it out, it had exploded somewhere in the upper atmosphere. The resulting heat had partially melted the polar ice-caps, while the fallout had filled the air with noxious garbage. A plausible theory, and one that (for obvious reasons) he needed to verify before he went much further. Silently he uploaded a command to the Mark Two in planetary orbit, ordering it to construct and send down a basic Dirtershaped level-2 probe, to collate data on the flooding and report back before self-destructing. A few seconds later he received the confirmation, probe launched. Meanwhile, the door connecting the bleak room to the conference room where the interviews were being held had opened, a Dirter had come out and the female had gone in. The young religious had stopped praying and was sending text messages through his handheld communications device. The music fan had his eyes closed, and h
is left foot was tapping the carpet softly.

  So, new hypothesis. The Mark One had hit the defence grid and exploded, causing widespread devastation, but failing to achieve its objective. The planet and its dominant species were still very much here — over six billion of them, according to preliminary scans, considerably more than there’d been when the Mark Two had been launched, but living on a planet that was now only just habitable.

  It stood to reason, then, that Dirt civilisation was still vigorous, in spite of the damage done by the Mark One; also that in the intervening time, made aware that they faced a serious threat from an unidentified but savagely hostile neighbour, they’d devoted a significant proportion of their species’ mental and material resources in improving the defence grid. That was what any sane species would do. In which case, the grid must be even more effective than it had been when it stopped the Mark One, and the task facing the Mark Two must, accordingly, be that much harder.

  So where was this confounded grid? Sensors had so far failed to find any traces of any form of technology that could conceivably be connected with such an elaborate and efficient defence network. Hardly surprising. A high priority for the grid’s designers would be concealing it from orbital observation, to make sure it couldn’t simply be knocked out with a few judicious disrupter bolts. As far as Mark Twain could tell, they’d hidden it real good.

  Hence his plan: to establish himself as a brilliantly innovative systems designer, to get himself hired by the defence authorities and assigned to the grid programme. Once installed, he’d have no trouble finding out what to shoot at, and that’d be that. It was simple and straightforward, and he could see no possible way in which it could fail. He was, after all, Ostar-made, loaded with Ostar systems technology which made the best the Dirters had look like notched sticks. A few trivial scraps of advanced tech would have him acclaimed as a computer genius. The military would inevitably recruit him. Easy as that.

  Yes, but. There remained the matter of the grid, now revealed to be potentially even more sophisticated than originally assumed. To have stopped the Mark One, the Dirters must have had some form of superior technology. That no trace of it was visible anywhere was beside the point. Clearly, advanced, better-than-Ostar tech existed and was a closely guarded monopoly of the military. The unsettling question was, therefore; would he be good enough for the military to want him? Suddenly he wasn’t quite so sure about that.

  Doubt: an organic-life-form-specific emotion. Apparently it came bundled with the hardware he was now inhabiting. He glanced down and noticed that his hands were clenched together, much as the religious Dirter’s had been. He didn’t know if his lips had been moving too.

  The door opened; the female came out, cuddling her document carrier in her arms (a scan revealed that one of the catches had malfunctioned) and the religious man went in, leaving Twain alone with the music lover. He reinforced the blocks to keep the music out of his head, and considered his options.

  He reminded himself that the interview was for a job with a civilian corporation, a bank, not with the military; accordingly, the relevant technology level should be primitive, and he’d stroll through. The competition— He brought himself up short. His sequence of thought had been The competition are all just Dirters, and I’m Ostar. But that wasn’t a good way to think about it. For the time being he was a Dirter too, albeit an incomparably superior one. Also, given the barbaric nature of this society, it was possible that other factors beside raw intellect might be taken into account by the interviewers. Personality. Whether or not they liked him. Stuff like that.

  He checked to make sure the music guy was still engrossed in his headset, then ventured a smile. It hurt. The contortions required to lift the corners of the mouth while keeping the upper lip level put a considerable strain on the cheek muscles, which in turn put pressure on nerve centres around the eyes. Presumably Dirters were used to it, having practised since infancy, but this was Twain’s first time. Would it be necessary, he wondered, to maintain this facial arrangement through the whole interview, or would it be all right if he relaxed after, say, the first ten minutes?

  Smiling. Cross-reference with cultural database, under Classical Literature. Large number of references. When you’re smiling, when you’re smiling, the whole world smiles with you. Mid-twentieth-century vernacular lieder; presumably an exaggeration, or at least he hoped it was. It takes thirty-seven muscles to frown but only three to smile. Twentieth/twenty-first-century folk wisdom, North American continent. A downright lie.

  He had no firm data to go on, but his level-9 artificial intuition told him that the quality of his smile probably wasn’t going to be enough to get him the job. In that case, it’d be better to rely on his known strengths. He made a few preparations and tried to relax. It wasn’t easy. The music (inaudible to Dirter ears but painfully obtrusive to his weapons-grade sensory array) was getting harder and harder to ignore. There was one particular melodic line, tum tumpty tumpty tum tum, that went straight through his interference barrage like a disrupter bolt through custard. He tried to fight it, but that only seemed to make things worse. The pattern of numbers and intervals sent cascades of pure mathematics, meaningless but irresistibly tantalising, racing through his circuits, flooding the buffers with pseudo-equations and arithmetical white noise. Infuriating, but it reminded him of why he was here, the vital importance of his mission. He was, after all, a machine; a machine, furthermore, skilfully designed to resist music attacks. What must it be like for the poor defenceless organic Ostar, who had no way of blocking the stuff out? When he’d left Homeworld, things were so bad that parents were having their children’s auditory centres surgically removed at birth. Obviously, something had to be done if the Ostar were to stand any chance at all of surviving as a species. It was, Twain reminded himself, up to him and him alone. Getting the job done was all that mattered, by all and any means necessary, and if that meant smiling, he’d smile.

  So, he told himself. Be strong. Concentrate. Tumpty tum tum. “Excuse me,” he said. The Dirter with the earphones didn’t react; hadn’t heard him. He raised his voice. “Excuse me.”

  The Dirter looked up.

  “Would you mind turning the music down, please?”

  The Dirter looked at him. “You can hear it?”

  Twain nodded. “Turn tumpty tumpty tum tum,” he said. “It’s driving me nuts. Would you mind terribly?”

  The Dirter shrugged, pressed a tiny button on his plastic box. The music stopped. It was wonderful. “Thanks,” Twain croaked.

  “You could really hear it?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “You must have ears like a bat.”

  Cross-reference. Bats. Bats’ ears. Correlate and compare; relevant cultural reference found. Evaluate cultural reference. On balance, he decided, it was probably meant as a compliment. He raised one eyebrow, lifted his right hand and spread the fingers.

  “Live long and prosper,” he said.

  That just seemed to disconcert the Dirter, who looked away. No matter. The music had stopped, and he could think.

  Think— Yes! So blindingly obvious, and yet the finest minds on Ostar hadn’t even considered it. Of course, it was almost inevitable that the finest minds on Ostar, when they’d been contemplating the question, had been fighting back waves of tum tum tum-tum tumpty; perfectly understandable, therefore, that they might have missed the screamingly obvious.

  The defence grid was music-based. Possessed of a weapon capable of reducing even the Ostar to mumbling idiots, naturally they’d used it as their last, best hope for survival. The Mark One, on reaching planetary orbit, must’ve been assaulted with a deafening burst of Dirt’s catchiest tunes, sufficient to blank out all its primary systems and strand it paralysed in space, mindlessly humming and flashing its warning lights in time to the music. Presumably some last-ditch failsafe had triggered the self-destruct — hence the big bang, the melted ice-caps, the heat and the hydrocarbons; but there was no way to spin that into anyth
ing remotely resembling a victory. If that was what he was up against, Twain decided, this wasn’t going to be easy.

  The door opened. The religious type wandered out, looking as if he’d just been turned loose minus his brain. The music fan got up and went in.

  Right, then, Twain thought, tumpty-tum. Plan A still looked like his best bet, but a Plan B would be a good idea, tumpty. Now all he had to do was think of one. Tumpty-tum.

  He thought for a long time, but nothing came. All he could think of was the spiralling, scintillating paths of numerical progressions sparked off by the repeated sequence, tum tumpty tumpty tum tum. He tried to resist, but it was nearly impossible. He was, after all, designed to process data, to crunch numbers, and every time he let his attention drift even for a split second numbers of all shapes, sizes and colours filled his silicon pathways, begging, ordering, pleading, commanding to be crunched. Under any other circumstances he’d simply have deactivated his central processing unit and run a garbage-flush/defragmenter routine until every last semiquaver had been purged from his drives; but that would take at least an hour, and he didn’t have time. He’d just have to cope, somehow.

  The door opened. The music fan came out, deliberately avoiding looking in Twain’s direction, and left the room. The open door. Time to go in there and knock ‘em dead. Tum ti tum.

  He raised a smile and locked it. One small step for a probe, he told himself. Then he stood up and walked across the room.

  There were five Dirters; three male, two female. None of them, he noticed, smiled back at him, though two stared; presumably that was some sort of etiquette thing. He sat down in the only unoccupied chair and swivelled his head slowly, playing the smile on each of them in turn, like a searchlight.