Authors: Robert Silverberg
“Good morning, Andy,” the newly arrived brother said, settling in for his shift.
“Morning, Martin.”
“I’m James.”
“Ah. Yes. James.” Andy acknowledged the correction with a nod and turned his attention back to the screen.
The yellow lines cutting across the pink field, the splashes of blue, the burning scarlet circle. It was all there, yes. He felt no particular sensation of triumph: a little of the opposite emotion, perhaps. After days and days of rummaging through the foul sewer that was the Borgmann archive, and then a gradual direct thrust through the area of essential Entity-relationship files, and now this sustained ten-hour burst of drilling down into the core of the matter, he had laid bare everything that Anson had asked him to find. Anson now could go out and strike the blow that would win his war against the Entities, and hoorah for Anson. What Andy was thinking in the moment of glorious attainment, mainly, was that now they would let him have his life back.
“I hear you’ve got some great news for us,” said a voice from the door.
Frank stood there, beaming like the newly risen sun.
“I was expecting your father,” Andy said.
“He’s still asleep. He’s been feeling poorly lately, you know. Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Andy decided not to stand on ceremony. If they didn’t feel like sending Anson over, well, he would explain things to Frank, and so be it. During the search Frank had appeared to understand more of what he was doing than Anson, anyway.
“Here,” Andy said, “this is where they keep Prime.” He indicated the scarlet circle. “Downtown Los Angeles, in the strip between the Santa Ana Freeway and the dry bed of the old Los Angeles River. That’s just a couple of miles south and east of the place where my father thought he was being kept at the time of the Tony episode. I tracked down an ancient city gazetteer that says the neighborhood is a warehouse district, but of course that was back in the twentieth century, and things may have changed a lot. The Entities’ own digital code for Prime translates out to Oneness, so our name for him was pretty damned close.”
Frank’s grin grew broader. “That’s terrific. What kind of security arrangements do they have for him?”
“A ring of three gates. They work just like the gates in the city walls, with biochip-driven gatekeepers.” Andy sent two clicks along the line that connected him to the computer and a batch of code jumped out into a window on the auxiliary screen. “These are access protocols, which I’ve derived from stuff that Borgmann had collected and stashed away in Prague. They were operative when Prime was being kept in the castle there, and I think they’ll still be good. From what I can tell, they don’t seem to have changed any of the numbers after the move to L.A. The protocols will take your man through the gates one by one, pretty much as far as he wants to go, and his mission ought to seem perfectly legitimate to the security screens.”
“What about the centrality of Prime to the Entity neural framework?” Frank asked. “Do you see any sign of a communal linkage?”
Those were fancy words. Andy gave him a quick look tinged with new respect. “I can only offer you an informed guess about that,” Andy said.
“Okay.”
“In Borgmann’s time, all the lines of communication, everywhere around the world, ran to Prime’s nest in Prague. I’m talking about computer access. There’s a similar heavy convergence on the Los Angeles nest today. Which is a good argument for the centrality of Prime to their computer system, but it doesn’t prove anything about the supposed
telepathic
linkage between Prime and the other Entities that Anson believes exists, and which I gather is critical to the whole assassination plan. On the other hand, if there’s no such telepathic linkage I think there would have to be a great many more strands of on-line communication than I’ve been able to find. And that leads me to think that a portion, perhaps the greater portion, of the communication between Prime and the lesser Entities must be carried out by some form of telepathy. Which, of course, we aren’t capable of detecting.”
“This is all a guess, you say.”
“All a guess, yes.”
“Show me Prime’s nest again.”
Andy brought the scarlet circle onto the screen once more, standing out brightly against the gray backdrop of a Los Angeles street map.
“We’ll blow him halfway to the moon,” said Frank.
Rasheed had no implant, and Khalid didn’t want him to have one installed. Implants, Khalid said firmly, were devices of Satan. Since Andy saw no way to carry out the Prime mission other than by moving Rasheed through the Entity security fines by remote-control on-line impulse, this created a certain problem, which required weeks of negotiation to resolve. In the end Khalid backed off, after Anson convinced him that the only way to bring Rasheed back alive from the venture was to guide him via an implant. Without an implant it became a suicide mission or no mission at all, and, faced with that choice, Khalid opted to let the Devil’s gadget be inserted into his eldest son’s forearm, with the proviso that the dread thing be taken out again once the mission had been carried out. But by the time all that was agreed on, it was June.
Now the implant had to be put in, which was done by the man from San Francisco who had built the one for Tony. Rasheed’s was of similar but improved design, with all the tracer features that its predecessor had had, but a wider and more versatile range of audio signals by which the remote operator—Andy, that would be—could guide Rasheed through his tasks by wireless modem, or, if need be, by direct vocal instruction. Another three months went by while the implant was constructed and installed and Rasheed went through the necessary period of healing and training.
Andy was impressed by the swiftness with which Rasheed learned how to interpret and act on the signals he received from his implant. Rasheed, who was twenty years old, slender and fragile-looking and taller even than his long-shanked father, had the shy, alert look of some delicate forest creature that was always ready to break into flight at the crackling of a twig. To Andy he was an enigma of the most profound sort, elusive and remote, indeed virtually unreachable. Rasheed could easily have been something that had descended from space with the Entities. He hardly ever spoke, except in answer to a direct question and not always even then; and when he did respond it was inevitably with a parsimonious syllable or two uttered just at the threshold of audibility, rarely anything more. The extraordinary grace and beauty of his appearance, verging on the angelic, contributed to the extraterrestrial aura that forever cloaked him: the great dark liquid eyes, the finely chiseled features, the luminous glinting of his skin, the swirling halo of glowing hair. He listened gravely to everything that Andy had to tell him, filing it all away in some retentive recess of his inscrutable soul and giving it back perfectly whenever Andy quizzed him on it. That was very impressive. Rasheed had the efficiency of a computer; and Andy understood computers very well. Yet Rasheed was more than just a mechanism, Andy sensed. There seemed to be a person inside there, an actual human being, shy, sensitive, perceptive, highly intelligent. One thing Andy understood above all else about computers was that they were not intelligent in the least.
At the end of November Andy pronounced him ready to go.
“In the beginning, you know, I thought that this was an absolutely crazy plan,” he said to Frank. Andy and Frank had become friends, of a sort, lately. Andy was no longer under round-the-clock guard; but Frank was with him much of the time, simply to keep him company. They had both become accustomed to that. “I didn’t see, from the moment when Anson and your father first explained it to me, how it could possibly have any chance of succeeding. Send your assassin into a den of telepathic aliens and expect that he’d go unnoticed? Lunacy, is what I thought. Rasheed’s mind will be broadcasting his lethal intentions at every step of the way, and the Entities will pick up on them before he ever gets within five miles of Prime. And as soon as they decide that this is something serious, not just some deranged joke, they’ll give him a Push—hell, man, they’ll fucking give him a Shove—and it’ll be goodbye, Rasheed.”
But that, Andy went on, had been before his first meeting with Rasheed. He knew better now. His months with Rasheed had brought him to an awareness of Rasheed’s special skill, the great thing that Rasheed had learned from his equally mysterious father: the art of Not Being There. Rasheed was capable of disappearing totally behind the wall of his forehead. His training had taught him how to reduce his mind to an absolute blank. The Entities would find nothing to read if they turned their telepathy on Rasheed. It was Andy himself, far away, who would be the true assassin.
Do this, do that, turn right, turn left.
All of which Rasheed would do, without thinking about it. And even the Entities would have no means of picking up Andy’s remote-control computer commands with their telepathy.
Anson, who had kept out of the picture all summer long, now emerged from his seclusion to issue the final directives. “Four cars,” Anson said crisply, when all the relevant personnel had gathered in the chart room, “will be dispatched to Los Angeles at intervals of ten to fifteen minutes. The drivers are to be Frank, Mark, Charlie, and Cheryl. Rasheed will ride with Cheryl at the outset, but somewhere around Camarillo she will drop him off to be picked up by Mark, and Mark will hand him off to Frank in Northridge—”
He shot a glance toward Andy, who was sitting slouched at his keyboard, languidly bringing all this stuff up in three dimensions on the big chart-room screen as Anson laid it out.
“Are you getting all this, Andy?” he asked, using the hard, crisp tone that everyone at the ranch thought of as the Colonel-voice, though the Colonel himself might have been surprised to know that.
“I’m right with you, commander,” Andy said. “Just keep on rapping it forth.”
Anson glowered a little. He looked haggard and there were dark rings under his eyes. In his left hand he held a zigzaggy walking-stick that he had carved some time back from the glossy red wood of a manzanita branch, and he was tapping it steadily against his left boot, as though to keep his toes awake.
“Well, then. To continue. Over in Glendale Frank gives him to Charlie, and Charlie takes him on eastward and then down through Pasadena and gives him back to Cheryl near the Monterey Park Golf Course. Cheryl is the one who’ll take him on through the wall, by way of the Alhambra gate, as we’ll discuss in a moment. Now, as for the explosive device itself,” Anson said, “which has been produced at the Resistance factory that’s located in Vista, in northern San Diego County, it will be brought up to Los Angeles in a nursery truck loaded with poinsettia plants for sale as Christmas decorations—”
So, then. The big day. Second week in December, bright and clear and warm in Southern California, a little high cloudiness, no rain in the offing. Andy in the communications center, wearing a headset with one earpiece and a throat-pad microphone, with a phalanx of computers all around him. He was ready to go to work. He was going to become a great hero of the Resistance today, if he wasn’t one already. Today he was going to kill Entity Prime by proxy, reaching out across some hundred fifty miles to do the job as puppet-master for Rasheed.
Andy would, in fact, be controlling everyone involved in the mission, guiding them into position, moving them about from place to place as things unfolded. His hour of glory; his greatest hack ever.
Steve was sitting beside him, ready to take over if he should grow weary. Andy didn’t expect to grow weary. Nor did he think that Steve, or anyone else except himself, would be capable of managing an operation that involved maintaining constant simultaneous contact with four vehicles plus an ambulatory assassin, and auxiliary spotter input besides. But let him stay, if he liked. Let him get a good look at what kind of hacker he had brought into the world. Eloise was there, too, and Mike, and some of the others, a constantly shifting crew. La-La for a while, with little Andy Junior in tow to stare at his still unfamiliar daddy. Leslyn. Peggy. Jane. People came and went. Nothing much was happening yet, anyway. Anson, though he was nominally in command of the mission, was in and out every half hour or so, very fidgety, unable to remain in one place for very long. Cindy stopped in for a while to watch things too, but likewise didn’t stay.
The first of the four cars, Charlie’s, had set out at eight that morning, with the others leaving soon after. Two had gone by the coast road and two the inland route, all of them zigging and zagging like Anson’s walking-stick to get themselves around the various blockages and pitfalls that the Entities, over the years, had whimsically established on the highways linking Santa Barbara with Los Angeles. Andy had each driver pegged on the screen. The scarlet line was Frank; the blue one, Mark; the deep purple, Cheryl; the bright green, Charlie. Whichever car was currently carrying Rasheed got a halo in crimson around it. Right now Rasheed was traveling with Frank, in the San Fernando Valley, heading around the northern side of the Los Angeles city wall toward his rendezvous with Charlie far to the east in Glendale.
There was no indication of unusual activity on the part of the Entities or the LACON police. Why should there be? At any given moment there might be half a million cars in motion in and around the Los Angeles area. What reason was there to think that some villainous conspiracy had been launched, aimed at taking the life of the supreme Entity himself? But Andy had spotters located all around the periphery of the L.A. wall, Resistance people from the subsidiary organizations down there, just in case. They would let him know what was going on, if anything did.