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By Root 1338 0

she were merely a hanger-on. “Nobody lives up here—and I mean nobody. The work of repairing the effects of the ecocatastrophe hasn’t even begun, even though we’re practically in LA’s backyard. Nothing grows here except lichens and the odd stalk of grass. The land’s never been officially reclaimed, not even for wilderness. It’s just rock and dust. The names on the map are just distant memories.” “Something must be up there,” Wilde said, shifting uncomfortably as the car took another corner with unreasonable haste. “Rappaccini wouldn’t bring us up here if there were nothing to see. If there were no real reason for this expedition he might as well have left us kicking our heels at the Majestic, or your headquarters in New York. Perhaps it’s the fact that no one ever comes here which recommended it to him as one of the bases of his secret operations.” “But none of these ghost towns is cable-connected to the Web,” Charlotte objected, drawing her finger across the screen in an arc.

“Which might be reckoned a considerable advantage by anyone intent on hiding,” Wilde pointed out.

It was easy enough for Charlotte to follow the line of thought. Land as derelict as this might be a very good place to hide. A man living up here would not be entirely deaf and blind, provided that he had equipment to receive information broadcast by comsat, but he could be effectively invisible as long as he made no longdistance purchases or person-to-person contacts. If he always kept a roof over his head during daylight hours he would go unnoticed even by surveillance satellites.

The hire car had been designed for highway travel, and its speed had slowed considerably when it first began to follow the winding road up into the foothills of the mountain range, but its AI did not seem to have mastered the art of mountain climbing. Although the road surface was getting worse and the bends were becoming sharper and more frequent, the car still seemed to be making haste. As she was forced to sway yet again Charlotte cursed the AI driver for not being sloth enough, although it could not have had wit enough to qualify as a silver, but she assumed that she was being oversensitive. A driver’s prime directive was to ensure the safety of its passengers.

The map disappeared from Charlotte’s screen, replaced by a list which Hal Watson had posted there.

“There are twenty-seven names here,” Hal said. “So far as we can ascertain, it’s a complete list of living men and women who attended the University of Wollongong while King, Urashima, Kwiatek, and Czastka were also in attendance.

We’ve now contacted all of them but one—Magnus Teidemann—so we’re fairly certain that any other bodies that turn up will break the pattern.” Michael Lowenthal patched the list through to his own screen, but no sooner had he set it up than his beltphone buzzed. Rather than displace the list, he picked up his handset and put the mike to his ear.

“What!” he said—not very loudly, but with sufficient emphasis to command the attention of his companions.

“What is it?” Charlotte asked—but she had to wait until Lowenthal had lowered the handset again. When he turned in his seat, it was Oscar Wilde that he transfixed with his triumphant gaze.

“I asked my employers to check the record of Jafri Biasiolo’s DNA against Walter Czastka’s,” Michael Lowenthal said proudly, peering back through the gap between the headrests.

“And were they identical?” asked Oscar Wilde, raising a quizzical eyebrow.

“No,” said Lowenthal, “they weren’t identical.” Charlotte wondered why, in that case, he looked so immensely pleased with himself—but he had only paused for effect. “The comparison gave much the same initial estimate of similarity as the comparison between Biasiolo’s and the woman’s—forty-some percent. Closer analysis of key subsections, however, suggests a consanguinity of fifty percent, blurred by substantial deep-somatic engineering.” “I’m not sure that lends any support to your hypothesis,” said Wilde. “Indeed, it suggests—” Lowenthal didn’t let him finish. “That’s not all,” he said. “When they uncovered