Part 9 (1/2)

My FAI floated over to her, and expanded to display a sheet of text. She waved dismissively at it. ”I don't use them. What does it say?”

”It's a ruling from the Neuromedical Protocol Commission, clearing a new design of biononic for human application. This particular module takes direct sensory integration a stage further, by stimulating selected synapses to invoke a deep access response.”

”We all stopped speaking Latin at the end of the First Era.”

”All right, Christine, it's really very simple. We can read your memories. I'm going to send you down to our laboratory, wire you up to a great big machine, and watch exactly what happened that night on a high-resolution, home theater- sized color screen. And there's not a thing you can do to stop me. Any further questions?”

”b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l! Why, Edward? What do you believe was our motive?”

”I have no idea, although this procedure will enable me to trace it through a.s.sociative location. All I've got left to go on now is opportunity. You and Carter had that.”

Her stubborn scowl vanished. She sat there completely blank-faced for a couple of seconds, then gave me a level smile. ”If you believe it, then go right ahead.”

On a conscious level I kept telling myself she was bluffing, that it was one last brave gesture of defiance. Unfortunately, my subconscious was not so certain.

The family's forensic department had come up in the world over the last century. No longer skulking in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Hewish Manor, it now occupied half the third floor. Laboratories were crypts of white gloss surfaces, populated by AI pillars with transparent sensor domes on top. Technicians and robots moved around between the units, examining and discussing the results. The clinic room which we had been allocated had a single bed in the middle, with four black boxy cabinets around it.

Rebecca greeted us politely and ushered Christine to the bed. Strictly speaking, Rebecca was a clinical neurologist these days rather than a forensic doctor, but given how new the application was she'd agreed to run the procedure for me.

As with all biononic systems, there's never anything to actually see. Rebecca adjusted a dispenser mechanism against the nape of Christine's neck, and introduced the swarm of modules. The governing AI guided their trajectory through the brain tissue, controlling and regulating the intricate web they wove within her synaptic clefts. It took over an hour to interpret and format the information they were receiving, and map out the activation pathways within her cerebrum.

I watched the primary stages with a growing sense of trepidation. Justin's murder was one of the oldest active legal files the Raleighs had. The weight of so many years was pressing down on this moment, seeking resolution. If we couldn't solve this now, with all our fantastic technological abilities at my disposal, then I had failed him, one of our own.

Rebecca eventually ordered me to sit down. She didn't actually say ”be patient” but her look was enough.

An FAI expanded in the air across one end of the clinic room, forming into a translucent sheet flecked with a moire storm of interference. Color specks flowed together. It showed a hazy image of an antiquated restaurant viewed at eye level. On the couch Christine moaned softly, her eyes closed, as the memory replayed itself inside her skull, a window into history.

”We're there,” Rebecca said. She issued a stream of instructions to the AI.

That March night in eighteen thirty-two played out in front of me, flickering and jerking like a home movie recorded on an antique strip of film. Christine sat at a table with her friends in the middle of the Orange Grove. Young, beautiful, and full of zest, their smiles and laughter making me ache for my own youth. They told each other stories and jokes, complained about tutors, gossiped about students and university staff, argued family politics. After the waiter brought their main course they went into a giggling huddle to decide if they should complain about the vegetables. More wine was ordered. They became louder.

It was snowing when they collected their coats and left. Tiny flecks of ice adding to the mush of the pavement. They stood as a group outside the restaurant, saying their goodbyes, Christine kissing everybody. Then with Carter's arm around her shoulder, the pair of them made their way through Oxford's freezing streets to the block where she had her artist's garret.

There was the baby-sitter to pay and show out. Then the two of them were alone. They stumbled into her studio, and kissed for a long time, surrounded by Christine's outre paintings. There wasn't much to see of that time, just smears of Carter's face in badly blurred close up. Then she went over to an old chest of drawers, and pulled a stash of cocaine out from a jewelry box. Carter was already undressing when she turned back to him.

They snorted the drugs, and fondled and groped at each other in an ineffectual manner for what seemed an age. The phone's whistling put an end to it. Christine staggered over to answer it, then handed it to Carter. She watched with a bleary focus as his face showed first annoyance then puzzlement and finally shock.

He slammed the handset down and scooped up his clothes. A clock on the studio wall said twenty-six minutes to twelve.

I couldn't move from the clinic seat. I sat there with my head in my hands, not believing what I'd just seen. It had to be faked. The Locketts had developed false memory implantation techniques. They'd corrupted our inst.i.tute AIs. Christine had repeated the alibi to herself for so long it had become stronger than reality. Aliens traveled back in time to alter the past.

”Edward.”

When I looked up, Christine Jayne Lockett was staring down at me. There was no anger in her expression. If anything, she was pitying me.

”I wasn't joking when I said I knew people on our elder council,” she said. ”And let me tell you, you arrogant b.a.s.t.a.r.d, if this ... this mental rape had been in connection with any other case, I would have kicked up such a stink that your whole family would disown you. The only reason I won't is because I loved Justin. He was my friend, and I'll never forget him for bringing a thread of happiness into my life. I wanted his murderer caught back then, and I want it just as bad now.”

”Thank you,” I whispered feebly.

”Are you going to give up?”

My smile was one of total self pity. ”We're reaching what Bethany called the plateau, the end of scientific progress. I've used every method we know of to find the murderer. Every one of them has failed me. The only thing left now that could solve it is time travel, and I'm afraid our physicists are all pretty much agreed that's just a fantasy.”

”Time travel,” she said contemptuously. ”You just can't see beyond your fabulous technology, can you? Your reliance is sickening. And what use is it when it comes down to the things that are genuinely important?”

”n.o.body starves, n.o.body dies,” I snapped at her, abruptly infuriated with her poverty-makes-memorally- superior att.i.tude. ”I notice your happy stone-age colony isn't averse to using our medical resources any time something nasty happens.”

”Yes, we fall back on technological medicine. We're neither ignorant, nor stupid. We believe technology as sophisticated as ours should be used as a safety net for our lives, not as an integral part, or ruler, as you choose. The simple way we live allows us to return to nature without having to endure the struggle and squalor of the actual stone age. For all things there is a balance, and you have got it badly wrong. Your society is exploiting the universe, not living in harmony with it. The way we live allows our minds to prosper, not our greed.”

”While the way we live allows dreams to become reality. We are a race without limits.”

”Without physical limits. What use is that, Edward? What is the ultimate reason to give everyone the power of a G.o.d? Look at you, what you're doing-you h.o.a.rd entire planets in readiness for the day when you can dismantle them and fabricate something in their place. What? What can possibly need building on such a scale? Explore the universe by all means, I'm sure there are miracles and marvels out there just as great as the one we've created for ourselves. But at the end of the day, you should come home to your family and your friends. That's what's truly important.”

”I'm glad you've found a way to live with what we've achieved. But you're in a minority. The rest of us want to grab the opportunity this time has gifted us with.”

”You'll learn,” she said. ”After all, you've got eternity.”

FIVE Earth Orbit GO 2000 My flyer ripped up through the ionosphere like a fish leaving water. The gravatonic and magnetic flux lines which knotted around the little craft tugged a braided haze of auroral streamers out behind us, looking for all the world like some ancient chemical rocket exhaust. Once clear of the atmosphere's bulk, I increased the acceleration to twenty gees, and the slender scintillating strand was stretched to breaking point. Wispy photonic serpents writhed back down toward the planet as we burst free.

I extended my perceptual range, tracking the mult.i.tude of flyers falling in and out of the atmosphere all around me. They blossomed like silver comets across my consciousness, dense currents of them arching up from the Earth in a series of flowing hoops with every apex reaching precisely six hundred miles above the equator. The portal Necklace itself, which occupied that orbit, was visualized by nodes of cool jade light sitting atop the hoops. Each of them was nested at the center of a subtle spatial distortion, lensing the light outward in curving ephemeral petals.

The flyer soared round in a flat curve, merging with the traffic stream that was heading for the Tangsham portal a thousand miles ahead of me. Africa's eastern coastline drifted past below, its visual clarity taking on a dreamlike quality, perfectly resolved yet impossibly distant. I watched it dwindle behind the flyer as all the wretched old emotions rose to haunt me again. Although I'd never quite had the courage to deactivate the Justin Ascham Raleigh file in the wake of the debacle which was Christine's memory retrieval, I'd certainly abandoned it in my own mind. I couldn't even remember giving my cybershadow the order to tag all the old suspects and watch for any status change within the global datas.p.a.ce.

Yet when the information slipped into my mind as I awoke that morning I knew I could never ignore it. Whatever would Francis have said?

I kept the flyer's forward perception primary as we approached the portal. The circle of exotic matter had a breadth of nine hundred yards, the rim of a chasm that could be seen only from one direction. Its pseudofabric walls glowed green where they intersected the boundaries of normal s.p.a.ce-time, forming a tunnel that stretched off into middle-distance. Two lanes of flyers sped along its interior in opposite directions, carrying people to their new world and their hoped-for happiness.

I wished them well, for the next portal led to Nibeza, one of the Vatican-endorsed societies, with complex proscriptions built into its biononics. Essentially they were limited to medical functions and providing raw materials for industry, everything else had to be built the hard way. A society forever frozen on the cusp of the nineteen sixties, where people are kept busy doing their old jobs.

Fully half of the new worlds were variants on the same theme, the only difference being in the level of limitations imposed on their biononics. There were even some deactivated portals now; those that had been used to establish the Restart worlds. There were no biononics on such planets, nor even the memory of them. The new inhabitants had their memories wiped, awakening on arrival to the belief they had traveled there in hibernation sleep on an old slower-than- light colony s.h.i.+p that left Earth in the nineteen forties. They remained free to carry on their lives as though the intervening years had never happened.

I believe it was our greatest defeat that so many of us were unable to adjust naturally to our new circ.u.mstances, where every thought is a treasure to be incubated. It was a failure of will, of self confidence, which prevented so many from taking that next psychological step. The adjustment necessary was nothing like the re-education courses which used to mark our race's waves of scientific progress; an adaptation which could be achieved by simply going back to school and learning new skills. To thrive today you had to change your att.i.tude and look at life from a wholly new perspective. How sad that for all its triumphs, the superb society we had constructed and systematically labored to improve for two thousand years was unable to provide that inspiration for everyone at the end.

But as I'd been told so many times, we now had the time to learn, and this new phase of our existence had only just begun. On the Earth below, nearly a third of the older adults spent their time daysleeping. Instead of the falsehood of enforced technological limitation on colony worlds, they immersed themselves in perfectly activated memories of the old days, trading such recollections amongst themselves for those blissful times spent in a simpler world. The vast majority, so they said, relished the days of childhood or first romances set in the age of horse drawn carriages and sailing s.h.i.+ps.

Maybe one day they would tire of their borrowed times and wake from their unreality to look around anew at what we have achieved. For out there on the other worlds, the ones defying any restriction, there was much to be proud of. Fiume, where the gas giants were being dismantled to build a vast sh.e.l.l around the star, with an inner surface capable of supporting life. Milligan, whose colonists were experimenting with truly giant wormholes which they hoped could reach other galaxies. Oranses, home to the original sinners, condemned by the Vatican for their project of introducing communal sentience to every living thing on their planet, every worm, insect, and stalk of gra.s.s, thus creating Gaia in all her majesty. All this glorious playground was our heritage, a gift from the youth of today to their sulking, inward-looking parents.

My flyer soared out of the traffic stream just before we pa.s.sed over the rim of the Tangsham portal. I directed it round the toroid of exotic matter to the station on the other side. The molecular curtain over the hangar complex entrance parted to let us through, and we alighted on one of the reception platforms. Charles Winter Hutchenson, the station chief, came out to meet me. The Hutchensons are one of our partners in Tangsham, a settlement which is endeavoring to transform people into starvoyagers, a species of immense biomechanical constructs that will spend eternity exploring s.p.a.ce. Placing a human mind into the core of such a vessel is simple enough, but its psychology must undergo considerable adaptation to be comfortable with such a body. Yet as I saw on my approach to the portal, there was no shortage of people wis.h.i.+ng to join the quest. The solid planets in the Tangsham star system were ringed with construction stations, fed by rivers of matter extracted from asteroids and gas giants. Energy converter nodules had been emplaced deep within the star itself to power such colossal industrial endeavor. It was a place of hard science; there was little of nature's beauty to be found there.

”Pleasure to welcome you on board,” Charles Winter Hutchenson said warmly. ”I didn't know elder representatives concerned themselves with incidents like this.”

”I have several motives,” I confessed. ”I met Carter Osborne Kenyon a long time ago. Attending to him now is the least I can do. And he is one of the senior nuclear engineers on the project, he's ent.i.tled to the best service we can provide. Is he back yet?”

”Yes. He arrived about an hour ago. I halted the transs.h.i.+pment as you asked.”