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takes the belt from its case, loads the etching belt's spool on the reader,
then stretches the belt onto the secondary spool and tightens the continuous
loop. 'Thank you,' Aiah says, as nicely as she can, and adjusts the play head
over the belt.
The Filbaq is an old model and has probably been sitting unused in this alcove
for years. It's still functional, fortunately, and ozone scents the air as its
whining electric motor soon brings the belt up to speed. Dancing dust falls
from the reader's ornamental brass fins. The screen hasn't been cleaned in
ages, and Aiah swabs it with her wrist lace to no effect. She turns to ask
Damusz to bring her a spray bottle of glass cleaner, but he's already
disappeared.
Squinting through the smeared lens, Aiah presses worn steel keys, finds Kremag
and Associates in the directory, and calls up the data. Disappointingly, it's
all perfectly reasonable: the firm is twelve years old, is alleged to offer
'business consulting', and hasn't used an iota of plasm in all that time.
Business consultants wouldn't, would they? They just let it flow through the
meters.
She needs to come up with a plausible reason why she hands Kremag to Rohder.
None seems to be available from the data.
The most likely tampering would come with the matter of dates and names. She
asks the reader to search the entire belt for other businesses at that
address, a job that will probably take some time. While the read head whines
over the long strands of data, Aiah provides herself with some coffee in a
cardboard cup and finds a spray bottle of glass cleaner. She cleans the screen
and drinks half the coffee by the time the reader comes up with the
information she needs: no less than three other businesses occupied Kremag's
offices during the years Kremag has supposedly been there. And their plasm use
is identical to Kremag's, down to the last millimehr it seems that whoever
retroactively inserted Kremag and Associates onto this belt simply hijacked
the earlier firms' data.
It's all suspicious as hell, but still it won't provide Aiah with a reason why
she chose this particular address in the first place. Aiah gnaws a thumbnail
and stares at the screen and wonders if Rohder will even ask.
Possibly he won't, but at this point she's not willing to take a chance.
If the data were inserted retroactively onto this belt, she reasons, they
might not be inserted sequentially with the rest. The idea excites her. She
leans forward as her ringers hammer the clacking metal keys.
Yes! she thinks. Triumph skips along her nerves. When data are entered on a
belt in the normal fashion, it's done more or less sequentially, one month's
string after the next. But Kremag's data for the first years of its existence
were layered in separately and lie on the etching belt years out of sequence.
Whoever entered the false information should have overwritten the data from
the earlier occupants of the office, but either it hadn't occurred to him or
he lacked the necessary programming skill.
Aiah leans back in her chair and smiles, and then it occurs to her that, if
this particular programmer used this method more than once, she might well be
able to find more examples of his handiwork.
She writes down the Kremag data, then starts slowly scanning the data on the
belt, looking for data added out of sequence. There's a fair amount of it,
mostly gibberish, fragments of information slotted into empty or erased
channels, but some of it is laid in whole, months and years out of sequence.
Aiah jots these down as well.
The shift is almost over when she remembers that she forgot to eat lunch.
Aiah calls Rohder and asks him to wait past shift change, as she's found some
important information.
'I was going to stay second shift anyway,' he says. Aiah wonders if he ever
leaves.
Then she calls Constantine's accommodation number and tells Dr Chandros that
she will be late, but will have important information when she arrives.
She gets onto the trackline just in time for shift change. The mass of bodies,
swaddled close around her, keeps her from losing her footing on the long,
jolting journey back to the Authority.
No one works through second shift but Tabulation, Transmission, and the odd
emergency crew on standby, and the Authority building is almost deserted;
whole decades of stories are vacant. She can't remember the last time she was
alone in the building's elevators, let alone for a journey of over a hundred
stories.
When Aiah enters Rohder's office she finds him standing in front of his desk,
a slight frown on his face as if he can't quite remember how he came to be
there. 'Sir,' she says. 'I have a list of possibilities and this one,' she
points to Kremag, 'this one is the most promising.'
She explains that she acquired the knowledge by searching for data strings
laid out of sequence on the continuous belts. Rohder absorbs the information
without comment, his pale blue eyes gazing at her unwinkingly. Finally he
nods, his knob-wristed hand rising to stroke his chin.
'Do you think you could find others in this fashion?'
'Certainly. If whoever created the fake accounts made the same mistake.'
He nods and mutters something to himself, then says, 'Perhaps I will be able
to give you further employment. Your supervisor doesn't mind?'
i'm sure Mr Mengene would be happy to assign me here. My job is pointless
anyway I'm just holding down a place in the promotion queue until a real job
comes along.'
Rohder considers this. 'I've observed,' he says, 'that here at the Authority
the jobs never seem to get that real.'
When she leaves, a few minutes later, she carries Volume Fourteen of the
Proceedings with her.
There's no car waiting for her at the corner, but it doesn't dampen her glow
of accomplishment. She happily takes a cab to Terminal and reads Rohder's book
along the way.
We therefore recommend the complete reformation of human infrastructure along
the following lines .. .
Aiah's eyebrows lift. You had to give Rohder credit for ambition. Complete
reformation of human infrastructure ...
No wonder no one took him seriously. It cost a fortune just to lay a new sewer
pipe, never mind anything more ambitious than that.
She pays her driver, knocks at the factory door, is recognized and allowed to
enter. The factory looks like a military installation now, the windows painted
black and covered with tape from the inside, an iron-braced corrugated roof
over the accumulators and contacts, the control switches and consoles for
plasm sandbagged, a half-dozen guards pacing up and down. Even though, given
the threat from Rohder, no one uses plasm outside the factory or in Cara-qui,
there are still a pair of mages at the consoles, warding the factory itself
against intrusion.
Aiah hears raised voices, Constantine's voice booming over all. He's in the
factory office, raging up and down, arms slashing the air. Sorya, Martinus and
Geymard are with him, and two others that make Aiah's skin crawl.
They are twisted: one is small, hairless, with a moist and glabrous skin and
huge black eyes each the size of a fist all pupil, no whites. The other is
short, stocky and powerful, with arms like iron conduits that hang to his
knees. It looks as if all of Martinus's mass is jammed into a body two heads
shorter.
Allies, Aiah thinks, but cannot repress a shudder. She slips into the office
and stands in the back, as far from the twisted as she can get fortunately
they seem to have no foul odor and then she waits to see what the upset is
about.
The factory office has been made into a kind of headquarters for the coup:
there are maps of Caraqui with pins stuck in them, photographs and room plans
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