The Immortality Option Part 5

The Alien Who Sought Immortality

9.

For the want of a nail, a shoe was lost; for the want of a shoe, the horse was lost; for the want of a horse, the rider was lost; for the want of a king, the battle was lost . . .

Tiny changes can make huge differences. No method known to science, even in principle, can predict the emergence of such structures as cyclones, blizzards, and hurricanes from the molecular motions of the atmosphere. All animals grow from proteins, but biochemistry can say nothing about the forms that evolution will shape into species. One of the inevitable products of increasing complexity is greater unpredictability.

Hence arises the increasing variability of behavior that comes with progressively higher levels of neural development. Insects and other comparatively simple organisms react to their environments with genetically determined response patterns so unvarying that individuals are indistinguishable, and researchers have no hesitation in declaring that whenthis species is exposed tothat stimulus, itwill respond in such and such a particular way. Farther up the evolutionary tree-"up," of course, being defined as that direction in the radiating bush that points from the common origin to the part of the periphery occupied by ourselves-things become less determinate as individual traits begin to emerge, until at the level of our household pets we discern distinct personalities. The ultimate, for the present, is reached with fully intelligent, sapient beings, where anything goes and nothing that anyone is capable of thinking, wanting, liking, or doing should come as any great surprise anymore.

Variability means faster adaptability to change, which is what evolution is all about. Species that invite the mirth of amoebas and c.o.c.kroaches by adopting neural development as their survival strategy achieve adaptability by supplementing genetic programming with acquired learning. With advancement, proportionately less of the total information pa.s.sed from generation to generation comes as molecular coding-which is slow to change, slow to be refined through selection, and slow to diffuse through a population-and more of it as culturally transmitted knowledge in all its guises-which isn't. Discoveries made by a single genius can spread virtually instantaneously; the learning of an age is pa.s.sed on intact to be built upon further. The result is a thermal runaway of ideas and techniques that rapidly culminates in the explosion of even higher-level organization and energy capture known as technological, industrial- followed almost immediately by s.p.a.cegoing-civilization.

But as with every other innovation in a process whose roots twist back into veils of mystery billions of years ago, this step, too, brings its drawbacks. One of them is the wastefulness of the effort thatindividuals must expend in acquiring even a fraction of that information and laboriously building up the private collections of beliefs and experiences, hopes and memories, achievements and dreams that const.i.tute the sum total to show for a lifetime . . . only to have most of it lost with them when they go.

Learning is such hard work compared to the effortless way in which the genetic endowment is inherited and the equally simple-and, furthermore, quite enjoyable-procedure for pa.s.sing it on.

The drawback, in a word, is mortality.

Throughout history the thought has troubled and depressed those who thought too much about it, at times driving them to suicide. And it was also a source of concern to some among a race called the Borijans, descended from a species of large, flightless, squabblesome bird, who were part of a general pattern of six-limbed, laterally symmetrical life-forms inhabiting a planet called Turle, a thousand light-years from our solar system, over a million years before humankind existed to share its worries about such matters.

10.

Turle was an aqueous world with an oxygen-laced atmosphere, a bit smaller than Earth but also a bit denser. It orbited farther away from its parent star, Kov, than Earth did from the sun, but Kov was a bit bigger and a bit hotter. The net result was that Turle ended up somewhat warmer: rain at the poles turned to snow during winter, but the polar regions never froze solid. A hefty proportion of Turle's surface was ocean-in fact, about eighty-five percent of it.

The land was distributed among three major continents-Elutia in the northern hemisphere, Magelia in the southern, and Xerse, straddling the equator to the east of them-and lots of islands of all sizes and shapes. A cl.u.s.ter of about a dozen islands off Elutia, plus a banana-shaped slice of the neighboring mainland, currently formed a political collaboration known as Hoditia. The relative permanence normally thought of in connection with a "nation" was not a characteristic of Borijan inst.i.tutions. On the southern coast of one of Hoditia's inner islands was a city called Pygal, which had been "Pygal" since long before "Hoditia" came in to being, and would in all probability still be so long after Hoditia fell apart again.

Fabrications of metals, silicates, and carbonates tended to last longer than constructions based on Borijan promises and good intentions.

On the outskirts of Pygal, overlooking a bay fringed by low hills encrusted with architecture and spanned by slender-legged bridges, stood the Replimaticon Building. It was an immense, glittering silver-and-gla.s.s candelabra sprouting from a ma.s.sive central trunk that radiated into five rainbow-hued towers. The towers in turn flared outward and upward to support varying numbers of ornate smaller pinnacles. As the sapient species descended from mammals on Earth housed itself in artificial caves, so the avian-descended sapients of Turle built themselves artificial trees.

South Tower Three of the Pink Intermediate zone of the Replimaticon Building extended from levels 30 through 55 and was dedicated to basic research. Levels 40 to 44 were concerned with advanced computation and coding systems. And on the forty-third level, on the eastern side of the building, facing inland, was a collection of offices and lab s.p.a.ce whose precise function remained wrapped in security-as was the case with most of what Replimaticon was up to-behind a door bearing the singularly unrevealing legend: project 380.

The lab had the angular, firm-jawed features of sleek cabinets, multicolored screens, and flas.h.i.+ng instrument panels that befitted a cutting-edge industry, but it had also acquired the cluttery stubble that scientists everywhere seemed to need as an aid to inspiration. There was a workbench along the rear wall, partly screened off by pastel-colored equipment cubicles and consoles, as if rolled-up sleeves and soldering irons were not fitting to the image of the otherwise sophisticated surroundings. a.s.sorted tools lay scattered along it, along with a number of electronics a.s.semblies in various stages of evisceration; boxes of screws, chips, and other components; reels of colored wire; and the remains of a technician's lunch enshrouded in its carry-out wrappings. The arty designs worked into the mural decor wereobscured by the purple leaves and fronds of proliferating plants that one of the secretaries had brought in, the symmetries lost behind unthinkingly positioned shelves, travel and s.p.a.cecraft posters, technical reference charts, and a map of the Pygal transit tube network. A whiteboard on the wall was covered in program code and a flow diagram, partly erased to make room for a shopping reminder and a message for somebody that the part for his skybus had come in. That much was all fairly typical of a computing research workplace anywhere, really.

Not typical at all was the large plastic-topped table standing in the open area of floor between the cubicles. It measured five feet or so along each side and supported a square enclosure of transparent walls about a foot high, like a wide, shallow fish tank. The enclosure contained a number of solid blocks of various shapes, a ramp, and some steps made of wood. Lying immobile beside them was an artificially constructed replica of a red furry animal the size of a small house cat. It had a pointed, vaguely foxlike face, but with floppy ears like a spaniel's, a manelike ruff running the length of its spine, and no tail. In keeping with the predominant pattern of life on Turle, it was six-limbed. Four of them were legs, with the front ones longer than the rear, resulting in a semiupright posture that gave height and scope for the two four-toed rudimentary prehensile paws extending from the shoulders. It was called a veech, and variants of it inhabited tropical regions all over Turle. An umbilical of thin wires ran from a socket at the back of the artificial veech's head, via a hinged overhead support arm, into racks of hardware showing lights and humming with cooling fans behind the table.

Costo Sarvik checked the interface connections and verified on a monitor that the instrumentation control programs were running, then looked across at the two other Borijans standing on the far side of the table. "Now we'll see if this clockwork shoe polisher that you came back with is any good," he said to Prinem Clouth. "Where did you get it from, a flea market?" He smiled crookedly at his double-edged witticism. "We could have saved ourselves a lot of time and gone to a toy shop."

"There's nothing wrong with that veech," Clouth shot back. "It's way beyond anything from any toy shop, and you know it. It's your simulation coding that we should be worrying about."

"Who is a metal basher like you to be criticizing anybody's coding? The coding is clean. You'll see."

"Why the barrier, then? Afraid it'll jump out and bite?" Clouth asked sneering.

"Don't be ridiculous," Sarvik said.

"Real veeches don't bite," Clouth remarked needlessly.

"We'll be lucky if this one that you've come up with moves at all," Sarvik told him.

To Terran ears-had any Terrans existed at the time-the voices would have sounded high-pitched and screechy. The Borijan form was bipedal and upright, a short bulbous body balanced on elongated legs whose musculature was concentrated mainly in the upper part, resulting in a somewhat strutting gait. They had large, round eyes, independently mobile in a scraggy face that widened in the upper part to accommodate them, and had lost all body feathering except for the top of the head, which was crested on males. Head plumage could be virtually any combination of hues and in Sarvik's case was green with orange side flashes. The lower face was formed around a degenerate beak structure and hence was fairly rigid and not very expressive. What had once been wings had degenerated and migrated upward and forward, becoming membranous structures that extended over the shoulders from either side of the head. These membranes, which could function independently like the eyes, were the Borijans' speech organs, and contributed to their "facial" expressions as well. They also afforded an auxiliary pa.s.sage for respiration.

Borijans liked bright colors. Beneath his lilac lab smock Sarvik was wearing a sleeveless crimson jacket over a yellow s.h.i.+rt with white brocade and Pickwickian breeches of a bright blue satiny material that turned green where the creases flexed. He ruffled his epaulets opposite ways in the Borijan equivalent of a "hrmmph!" and turned his attention to stepping through a preliminary test sequence, turning one eye toward the console display and keeping the other trained on the veech.

Prinem Clouth, violet-crested and clad in a matching two-piece outfit trimmed in ocher, rested his four-fingered hands on the tabletop outside the enclosure and fell quiet. Borijans rarely discussed,consulted on, or debated anything. Theyargued.

Leradil Driss, the other person in the group, busied herself with making final adjustments to the camera, motion-a.n.a.lysis lasers, and other recording sensors she had set up. She was a recent arrival at Replimaticon, and Sarvik hadn't worked out yet what her probable line would be. Clouth's part was practically done, and Sarvik was pretty sure he was all set to decamp with the software and deal Sarvik out. But in fact, Sarvik had set things up in a way that would cut Clouth out. He felt a chortling inner glow with the antic.i.p.ation of it.

The Borijans' industries ran ceaselessly in vast underground and undersea plants that used fusion energy from seawater and churned out abundance. Although they themselves had not ventured beyond the Kovian system of eleven planets, their robot s.h.i.+ps sought out distant worlds to seed with self-replicating factories that supplied the home worlds from the resources of other stars. The wealth-creating capacity of Borijan technology had therefore pa.s.sed beyond the stage where the instinct to compete could find meaningful satisfaction from pecuniary profits based on material need. Hence, the term "corporation" to describe the form of organization that individuals formed for attaining common gain didn't really apply.

Replimaticon was best described as a "connivance." As with a corporation, the ent.i.ty continued to exist while the individuals it included came and went. But instead of being bound by a contract that exchanged their services for income, the members of a connivance-either as individuals or as separately convened subgroups-actually bought themselves in by placing a stake, because they perceived enough common interest for the moment to benefit from the arrangement. In Sarvik's case, what he gained was access to the equipment he needed to pursue his ideas, and the benefit of working with others whose skills would help bring them to fruition. What Replimaticon stood to gain was a share of the proceeds from the final product-provided that they could pin Sarvik down into disclosing what the final product was before he got to a stage where he could abscond with the information and cut a better deal somewhere else-which he would do unless someone like Clouth put all the pieces together and did it to him first.

So why bother with another deal elsewhere when he already had one here, with Replimaticon?

That was the whole point of the game. The "gain" that connivances were set up to promote was to fleece, con, or bamboozle-generally to outdo in whatever way the opportunity of the moment offered- one or more of the other factions or the umbrella organization itself before the others did the same or better. Judging who was about to pull a scam on whom was critical. Periodically everything would fall apart, at which point the pieces usually realigned themselves into fresh rivalries and under new flags of convenience. Keeping accounts and settling scores were where the Borijans' motivation came from and what gave them their kicks. Hence, connivances tended to be fragile and precarious affairs, constantly in a state of flux-which was typical of just about every kind of inst.i.tution to have come out of the various Borijan cultures. That was why their "nations" rarely lasted very long, either.

Sarvik's specialty was artificial machine intelligences, which had become quite advanced, as evidenced by the totally automated, self-replicating manufacturing systems the Borijans were able to send to other stars. In particular, he had learned much about the circulating, self-modifying patterns of neural activity that const.i.tuted "consciousness" and "personality." His latest line of research had to do with developing techniques for extracting them from their biologically constrained neural substrate and converting them to other forms that could be uploaded into artificial, potentially everlasting bodies. By this means Sarvik hoped to find an answer to the problem of mortality he had brooded on for many years. And of the three people in the lab, only he knew that that was what the business with the veech was really all about.

"Aren't you ready with all that paraphernalia of yours yet?" he griped at Leradil. "It's only some simple tests. Anyone would think you were rediscovering biology."

"Someone has to be thorough," she said, infuriating him deliberately by repositioning one of the laser probes yet again.

"Shows lack of confidence," Clouth commented."Oh, so now you're a psychologist?" Leradil's tone was cool, with just a hint of sarcasm. She had a yellow crown with red streaks and wore a loose-fitting orange dress gathered in the middle and hanging to the knees. Her style was to provoke by refusing to be provoked, Sarvik had noted, which could not have been better calculated to irk him and added another few points to their personal account.

"Everything's set here," she finally p.r.o.nounced. "Why are we waiting? Let's go."

Sarvik tapped a code into the console and checked the response. "Loading now," he confirmed. It took about thirty seconds. Then, in its enclosure of transparent walls, the veech stirred, opened its eyes as if awakening from sleep, and then looked up and about itself sharply as if suddenly bewildered by its surroundings.

"You see. It's fine," Clouth said, showing both hands in an open gesture. He watched for a few seconds as the veech turned its head this way and that, then shook it as if trying to get rid of the wires at the back. "Is that all it's going to do?" he asked derisively.

"Can't you wait and see?" Sarvik said.

"I have to be sure to get this right the first time, in case it turns out to be a one-time thing," Leradil told both of them.

The veech got up, shook its head again, scratched at the surface of the table, and then began to explore the objects around itself suspiciously. For an artificial animal its movements were uncannily authentic, but neither Clouth nor Leradil was about to concede anything to Sarvik by saying so.

Only Sarvik knew that the coding pattern transferred into the veech's optronic brain had actually been extracted from that of an anesthetized real veech. It was a one-way procedure in which the neural configuration was absorbed and converted layer by layer from the outside in and the original carbon-chemistry brain was destroyed. Because of the way he had arranged things, everyone else who had been or still was involved in the project knew either about the process for extracting the code from the real veech or about the process for implanting it in the artificial one, but none of them knew about both. Only Sarvik and two of Replimaticon's directors knew that here was the first step toward freeing Borijan minds from their prison of biologically imposed mortality and rewriting them into purpose-designed bodies that could have any form and virtually limitless powers, and need never die.

Marog Kelm, the neural decrypter who had perfected the code-extraction process, believed that the goal was to develop a technology for keeping backup copies of individuals in data banks so as to be able to re-create them genetically in the event of a fatality. But Kelm was out of the picture now, having been maneuvered into cas.h.i.+ng in his stake with Replimaticon in order to buy into a deal with Cosmopolitan Life, Health & Accident Insurance that would soon prove worthless, all the time believing it washe who was double-crossing Sarvik. So not only had a possible source of exposure been eliminated, but Kelm's removal from the internal shareout schedule had increased Sarvik's credit stake at Replimaticon by a respectable margin. Ah, the sweet stench of success!

Prinem Clouth had been a party to setting up Kelm and so knew that the story about preserving backup copies was a phony.He believed that the code was a synthetic veech simulation created by Sarvik and had developed the modified optronic brain to run it in. He had also obtained the artificial veech to house the modified brain, but naturally without divulging where from-why would anyone give valuable information to somebody who didn't need to know? But through his own efforts on the side, Sarvik had ascertained that it was from a manufacturing connivance called Toymate that specialized in smart artificial pets. Hence, Sarvik was fairly sure that Clouth was working on a deal with Toymate to purloin the technology jointly and give Toymate a greatly improved product line. But Sarvik judged that there would be time enough to take care of Clouth later.

Which left Leradil Driss, whom the directors had brought in because the project needed somebody versed in animal behavior to evaluate the efficiency of the transfer process. But from common caution and experience Sarvik a.s.sumed that there was more behind it. She could have been a spy put in by the directors to find out exactly what Sarvik's project was aiming at. Or possibly she was working some kind of scam of her own to sell all of them out, such as pirating Clouth's deal with Toymate-which was another reason for Sarvik to hold off in that direction, since what Clouth believed to be true was plantedand wouldn't do him any good; nor, therefore, would it be of any use to Leradil if she stole it. In any case, Sarvik certainly hoped she was up to something. He wouldn't want to think there was a flake in the team.

The mechanical veech that thought it was a real veech knocked over one of the wooden blocks with its forelimbs and reared backward in alarm.

"You almost got that part right," Leradil said to Sarvik, which was about as close as Borijans got to actually parting with a compliment.

He was going to have to keep a close eye on her to find out what she was up to, Sarvik thought to himself.

11.

"Look at this log of her accesses in the last week," Sarvik said, indicating one of the screens on the console beside the desk in his office next to the main lab area-a pointless gesture, since n.o.body was watching. "Twenty-seven of them are to files written in extended-base hypercode. And they were open for long periods. She's supposed to be an animal behavior specialist. What kind of animal behavior specialist understands extended-base hypercode? I tell you, she's been put in here to do some digging for somebody. Either those mammal brains upstairs who con shares by pretending to run this place, or some other organization outside that's probably just as big. For a start, obviously, we have to find out which."

n.o.body had said that Leradil wasn't a spy or that Sarvik shouldn't find out. Borijans made everything sound contentious through habit. A calmer voice from a speaker grille in the top center of the console panel answered Sarvik's high-tension sputterings. At the same time a view of a campus complex appeared on the large central screen, with a superimposed image of a diploma.

"I got into the Gweths University records system as you said, and her degree checks out." The picture disappeared and was replaced in rapid succession by a shot of a suborbital dartliner in flight, a view of a hotel lobby, a restaurant menu, and a catalog from a fas.h.i.+on store. "But airline archives and credit receipts for the years '34 through '37 show inconsistencies for the time that she says she spent in Yordisland"-the screen showed a map of a former, shortlived Turlean political agglutination-"when it was still part of Chearce, before the Seven-Coasts League broke up. I think she's covering up something there-very likely a part of her background that she doesn't want to advertise in Replimaticon. That says to me that she's from somewhere outside." The visual accompaniment ended with a red query mark that grew to fill the screen, then began spinning and shrinking into the center, where it vanished.

Sarvik's princ.i.p.al a.s.sistant-and one that he could always rely on to be trustworthy, unlike Borijans -was the latest and most advanced of his artificial intelligences: GENIUS (GENeral Intelligence Universal Simulation) 5. Sarvik had intended the acronym sarcastically when he had coined it, but artificial intelligence had not yet progressed to the stage of deviousness that characterized the natural product, and GENIUS 5 accepted its name unquestioningly-in fact, almost proudly-as meaning exactly what it said.

GENIUS added, "I thought of checking the airline data and credit transactions myself. It took eight minutes flat. A cinch. I don't know how you meat brains ever managed on your own at all." A caricature of a Borijan head wearing a dumb expression appeared on the screen to underline the point.

Sarvik's epaulets bristled. "Watch you don't get too big for your boxes, or I might start pulling plugs," he squawked. "It's only because of the clear superiority of biology thatyou are able to experience any mindlike processes at all."

"Clear superiority, huh?"

"I'd have thought it patently obvious."

"Oh, is that so?" The faces of Pezamin Greel and Marduk Alifrenz appeared side by side on thescreen, retrieved from Replimaticon's personnel records. They were the directors who knew the complete story behind Sarvik's research. "In that case, why is it that you and your two friends upstairs that you don't want the others to know about are working so hard on transferring yourselves into obviously superior nonbiological hosts? It seems a funny way to want to go if you don't call it improvement." GENIUS drew a series of representations of progressively more advanced life-forms, starting with a single cell and going on through a fish, a reptile, a bird, a Borijan, a primitive computing complex, and a schematic of Turle's planetary net. It ended with another query mark, enclosed in a circle and underscored by the caption then what? "Surely you didn't imagine that you were the end of the line, did you?"

"We've been through all that," Sarvik said. "The advantages are purely physical, but I don't suppose that a heap of gla.s.s wafers could be expected to understand that." The word "ratty" appeared on GENIUS's doodling screen, cycling through a sequence of styles and colors. Sarvik sniffed, unimpressed. "What do you know of the billion-year evolutionary heritage that we possess? I a.s.sure you that what you think is thinking const.i.tutes nothing more than incidental activity at the dimmest fringes of consciousness."

"If you're saying I can't think anything, then how can I think that I think? If I do think that I think, then what you've just said doesn't stand." contradiction! flashed jubilantly on the screen. "When you can compute products of twenty-digit numbers in nanoseconds, you might know something. Sometimes I wonder if biological systems could ever become fully conscious at all. DNA was just nature's way of making machines."

Sarvik got up and noticed that a pot of some kind of hanging leaves with pointy-petaled, off-white blossoms from the departmental secretary's ever-expanding horticultural collection had invaded his office again, finding a place on the top of the doc.u.ment cabinet, where it blocked the line of sight from the desk to one end of his wall planner. He moved the pot and saw behind it the reminder to himself of his appointment with Dr. Queezt that morning, which had slipped his mind. "For something that makes such a fuss about nanoseconds, the amount of time that you waste bickering over trivia is incomprehensible,"

he muttered irritably as he carried the offending plant back into the lab. "Could we stop emulating the superficialities of cognizant processes and get back to the matter at hand? We need to find out more about this Driss woman. My instinct tells me that she's up to something big." He set the pot down on the control cubicle of the holo-encoder, nudging it precariously between a riot of yellow spears and a tangle of green tracery spouting stars of bright red velvet.

GENIUS's voice followed him to the grille in the display panel of the multi-D graphic a.n.a.lyzer.

"Questionable: the wisdom of being guided by this thing you call instinct. Where are your facts?"

"You'll just have to accept it as indicative of the superiority of naturally evolved minds," Sarvik said.

"And you might take it as indicative of the superiority of precisely engineered minds that you're supposed to meet Dr. Queezt at Pygal Central Hospital in twenty minutes," GENIUS retorted.

"Thank you, Iam aware of that," Sarvik snarled, furious at himself for letting the machine get a point up on him needlessly.

"You don't seem to be doing much about it," GENIUS remarked. Sarvik stumped back into the office to get his coat from the rack there. The words retention impaired (chuckle) greeted him from the screen. "Just imagine needing half the morning and moving yourself physically across the city in order to exchange sound waves," GENIUS taunted while Sarvik was putting on his coat and securing his office.

"I could have it done in less time than you take to forget a phone number. Admit it. The next stop's the fossils department."

"Maybe, but if so, it's still a while away yet," Sarvik said. "Meanwhile, there are some more checks on Leradil Driss that I want you to make." He gave GENIUS the details while putting papers and a few other items he wanted to take with him into his briefcase. Then, with a flourish that evoked a warm feeling of malevolent satisfaction, he entered theInteractive Disable code to turn off the speech/vision interface and leave GENIUS undistracted to concentrate on tracing network routings and cracking data protection protocols. After checking over the office one last time, he locked the door and set thesecurity trips and marched briskly from the lab to go out into the city of Pygal.

12.

Most Borijan architecture reflected the theme of upward-branching arboreal forms, and Borijan tastes in everything were toward generous ornamentation. The cities that resulted rose like forests of colorful cacti, splaying out from broad, conoidal trunks into groupings of variously devised columns and spires forming cl.u.s.ters at different levels. The upper parts of those structures often overlapped and merged via connecting bridges and terraces to turn the upper regions into a vast artificial canopy where most of the day-to-day living and business took place. Heavier-duty operations, such as power distribution and freight handling, were carried out in the lower parts of the trunks, and an undergrowth of support installations and service buildings sprang up in the areas between.

Sarvik took a core elevator to the Pink Intermediate midlevel terminal and boarded one of the six-pa.s.senger autocabs waiting in the City Inbound rank. They were orange with a white stripe along each side and approximately ovoid-a universally symbolic shape found in designs and artifacts from every culture in Borijan history. Always derisive of the authority that ran the transit system, Pygalers called them the "electric enemas," from the resemblance of a string of them pa.s.sing through the gla.s.s-sided tubes threading through the city to a brand of laxative capsules that came in transparent packs.

"Central Hospital," he told the black mesh eardisk at the top of the director panel. "Dr. Queezt, in neuroprosthetics. I think it's Blue Uppermid zone somewhere, north side."

"How come you don't know?" the cab sneered. "Getting forgetful? Is that why you're going to see a brain booster?"

"I don't need to know. It's your job to check it out," Sarvik retorted. "That's supposed to be part of the service. You want me to drive this thing for you as well?"

The cab lapsed into a sulky silence and computed a route by using the current bulletin of traffic conditions around the city. It called the hospital's administrative computer and flashed an estimated arrival time. Dr. Queezt's diary manager returned a message saying that Queezt would be delayed thirty minutes. Sarvik cursed himself for giving Queezt the initiative. He should have asked for a confirmation first, before letting the cab reveal that he was already on his way. Very likely, the d.a.m.n machine had done it on purpose to even its score with him. So now he would be starting the meeting a point down.

Well, that would make it all the more of a challenge.

The cab slid out from a terrace of South Tower Three, revealing the pink, sunlit cliffs of the Replimaticon Building falling away below. Why had people once been so indirect about things? Sarvik wondered as he sat back and gazed at the view across the bay. Always having to keep up pretenses and hiding their true motives behind measures of profit. If the truth were admitted, hadn't thereal fun all along been in trading one-upmans.h.i.+ps and delivering the comeuppances when one could get away with it?

Some nostalgics said the old ways had been more genteel. Maybe so. But the modern ways were more honest.

He killed thirty minutes browsing around the stores in the plaza below the hospital's entrance foyer to avoid giving a receptionist the satisfaction of telling him he'd have to wait. When he did finally present himself, he was directed promptly up another four levels to Queezt's office. His first impressions were of a mix between an electronics hobby shop and a cerebral dissection laboratory. On shelves along one side of the room were jars of preservative containing Borijan and animal brains and parts of brains, most of them showing the glints of implanted crystal chips and tiny wires. Below the shelves was a gla.s.s tabletop laid out like a display counter, with microa.s.semblies of Optronics wafers and crystalline chips no bigger than dewdrops. Queezt's desk stood in the corner opposite, backed by bookshelves, a data and communications panel above a smaller worktop, and a window giving a view of Pygal's urbanseafront.

Queezt stood to greet Sarvik with a brief, formal handshake. The gesture gave away nothing; overt discourtesy was viewed as a cheap way of achieving a put-down without earning it, tantamount to fraud.

He was tall in stature, his torso loosely draped on a bony, wide-shouldered frame, with a maroon crest fading to black at the back and mottled in white. His epaulets had a permanent upturned set suggestive of a mild leer, which provoked defensiveness and probably gave him an opening advantage in most of his dealings. He was wearing a short green surgical jacket opened at the neck to reveal a satiny brown s.h.i.+rt with a throat clasp of worked gold foliations surrounding a white oval stone. "Dr. Sarvik. I'm sorry that I had to put you off. In a place like this we sometimes get these emergencies that won't wait." In other words,My time is more important than yours; and he'd gotten the apology in before there was time for any objection. Point added and lead extended.

"These things happen," Sarvik said. "I take it you know where I'm from." Of course, any prudent professional would have had his computer check all available information on a stranger who called out of the blue for an appointment.

The leering epaulets drooped a fraction. "Er, no, as a matter of fact . . . I've been very busy, you understand." Lame. But it would have taken greater resources than Queezt could probably command at short notice to penetrate Replimaticon's data security. A quick smile of satisfaction flickered across one side of Sarvik's face. Point regained.