“Yes, sir.” He tapped out. He got up from his chair and numbly gathered up the items he’d brought in, to take back to the kitchen. Breakfast wasn’t sitting at all well on his stomach.
Dress appropriately. That was a major problem, too. He worked in sweatpants, socks, and a tee. His Trendy go-to-dinner clothes certainly weren’t going to impress any Earther at 1000h in the morning.
He did have his reporting-to-the-office suit. The suit his parents wished he would wear every day.
He rode the lift upstairs to deposit the day’s unused snacks back into storage.
Reaux was going to give him further details when they met: that was simple enough to grasp. The governor, who didn’t—wouldn’t—couldn’t—use a tap, wasn’t going to use the phone to transfer information to him, either, and a personal courier from the governor, coming here to Grozny Close to deliver him a message, would start gossip racing from one end of the Trend to the other. So it was better, his going there.
And as for the level of what he was allowed to say— nohad to be his favorite word for the occasion. Noand no, sir.Security wouldn’t allow a member of Brazis’s staff to discuss any sort of Project business, or even what he did inside the Project, outside the department’s secure environs. Brazis was right. That instruction wasn’t hard to fix in his head: it was the rule he lived by. His own father couldn’t get the truth about his job out of him. He wasn’t about to give things away to Earthers, just because they asked.
And for that matter, and a cold second thought—these being Earthers, and neither the governor nor the ambassador having any internal tap, they wouldn’t completely understand the tech involved, its limitations or its abilities, and they wouldn’t like disrespect.
That was what he was dealing with—ultraconservatives. Think of the parentals—and their priest. Black suits and no earring, no flash on the fingers. Like dinner with the parents and all the relatives at once. Like a family funeral.
With the possibility of some really scary, state-of-the-art truthers, constantly reading everything he said and probing for what he might be hiding behind every blink of his eyes.
Don’t even think of tapping back to the PO while you’re there…
A hack? The PO’s system being a completely different piece of equipment than the public tap system—that made interference with it a whole different operation than the common variety of tap-hackers, whose routine business contacts—and their customers—ranged from Earth security to the criminal underworld. The public tap system was worm-eaten with hackers—which was why the Project tap absolutely had to be a whole different system on every level.
And because the Project tap was nanocele-based, for all the ages of its existence, it remained unhackable—so the PO insisted. So far, the Project was impenetrable.
But if anybody thought of hacking it—if anybody was going to try that—that effort, if concentrated on him, might do physical damage. He’d felt overload—he’d felt the tap-output spike when he was recovering from the implant, when it was brand new. He was going where he couldn’t even thinkabout using equipment that was supposed to be absolutely secure, equipment that was as natural for him to use now as his sense of sight or hearing. It had bioelectronic components, notably the relays that interfaced with the nanocele. That meant electronics couldinterfere with it. Could attack it.
Scary games he’d been dragged into. Marak’s World held the only politics he ever wanted to study. That world ran smoothly in the hands of those that had managed it forever, and he was at orbital distance. But now if his one teenaged flirtation with Freethinker idiots had somehow attracted the attention of authorities outside the Project, damned right he was upset. He had a right to be upset—and tooth and nail, he’d fight any implication…
Only if he had to. He had to remember he hadBrazis’s political protection. Brazis wasn’t going to have Earthers of any stripe telling him who to assign where, or demanding he fire anybody. Brazis would hire two more questionables right off the street tomorrow if only to tell Earth to go to hell.
And, always a fact of the universe, always, both inside the Project and wherever the Treaty itself was at issue… Marakhad the ultimate say about his taps. Nobody, absolutely nobody, challenged him to a duel of wills.
No. He was safe. Politics couldn’t remove him, no matter how this went. Earth could throw a screaming blue fit and it wasn’t going to scare Outsider authority, let alone Marak, who could shut down cooperation for a century or two and annoy the ondatin the process. Marak’s displeasure could shake an economy. Ruin a career. A dozen careers. Bring down governments.
Which only argued that an otherwise very junior tap should just go in calmly and confidently, do what he was told to the letter, keep his eyes and ears wide open as requested by the only authority he answered to, and do his job without making his superiors any unnecessary trouble. It was scary, but it wasn’t fatal. He just needed to look good, sound respectful, do it and get back.
Dark suit. No flash. He went upstairs, opened the closet, searched for the dark blue shirt that went with the parental-approval suit. He searched the whole closet three times and finally located the missing shirt in the shadowy back end of the freshener, where he recalled he had put it after the last holiday dinner with the parents and the relatives.
He found the conservative collar, dug up both matching socks. Head to toe, he became a good boy, as churchly-straight as possible, void of any breath of the Trend—
Well, except the hair, but he wasn’t going to cut that, not even for the Earth envoy. He clipped the locks back into head-hugging simplicity.
Rings. And earring. He stripped those off and put them in his house safe. No hint of show or display of extravagant salary. No controversy. No hint of arrogance. No problem. He looked sober as clergy.
5
THE TRACKS HAD tended down along the terraces, over drifts of sand, then grown dim on sandstone. Marak and Hati looked for signs at several opportunities for their fugitives to have taken another downward path, but they found none. The wind-blurred traces led instead across a vast flat sheet of sandstone, staying on their level. This gave them hope that if the dust should settle a little, they might catch sight of the group. They quickened their pace.
They advised the Refuge to advise the camp. The relay had gone up. Auguste said so, and communication had now become reliable. “The leader of this band,” Marak said, “will be skittish. This may take a while.”
His own old bull would not have bolted repeatedly and zigged and zagged along the terraces. The young one had. And the herd, indecisive as their new leader, veered slightly southward now, generally down the long spine, still on this level of the terraces. Sandstone spires rose ghostly and strange in the lingering dust, and generally obscured their direct view of what was ahead, even had lingering fine dust not hazed the air.
Marak had faith that even the spookiness of a new herd leader had to steady down with repeated tremors. But right now their young bull would bolt at every shaking in the earth, every breath of wind, taking the females farther and farther from the old bull he had robbed, and would do so until the females grew annoyed with his skittishness and grew slower and slower to follow. Beshti had their quirks, but they were predictable in their ways.