• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1240 0

Merchants had become an import–export business between Earth and low orbit, almost as distant now from its innocent, fannish origins in the space-trash market as the latest SSTO boosters were from Goddard’s amateur rocketry. The International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, its nuclear teeth long since drawn, had changed its specialty to launch-vehicle development. The ISTWR had held out against the surge of Kazakh reunification, and Mutual Protection had a major presence there. And not only there: Mutual Protection now ran security and restitution facilities on three continents, usually guarding installations and extracting payback from any thieves or saboteurs foolish enough to mess with its clients.

It was weird to see that personal triangle between myself, Myra and Reid, replicated as a commercial connection, like the family relations of dynastic armies; but whether those connections meant anything was a different matter. (As I pointed out in Ignoramus!, my work on the counter-conspiracy theory of history, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who…(etc.), and it’s the easiest job in the world to inkin those pencilled lines; to speculate that the surprisingly few handshakes that separate the obscure from the famous are all funny handshakes…My incautious illustration of this with a diagram of my own second- and third-hand connections, ‘proving’ the existence of a mysterious Last International linking the world’s libertarians and futurists to each other and to a long list of historic usual suspects, had resulted in a certain amount of misunderstanding: for years afterwards I’d received anonymous mailings of what purported to be the Last International’s Central Committee minutes.)

Firewalls guarded most of the companies’ data, the remnants of recent hack-attacks fading on the matt virtual surfaces. I moved along, seeking entry nodes. Out of nowhere, something pinged my fetch. My hands, in the datagloves, felt warm. Warmer. Hot.

I was holding what looked like a sealed envelope, iconic equivalent of a personal message: based on an anonymous transaction protocol, it couldn’t even be read on screen, only in VR through the intended recipient’s fetch. It was also a delivery method of choice for target-specific viruses. I looked at it – damn, it was beginning to give off smoke – and hastily reached behind me and tugged the emergency back-up bat. Seconds trickled by as the contents of my home computer were transferred to isolated disks. When it was safe to do so I opened the now smouldering envelope.

dear jon, it read, it’s too fast. help me. love, myra.

Then it crumbled to bits.

Well, that was a lot of use, I thought as I backed out and sat blinking in chill daylight, Annette’s quizzical smile teasing me from the other side of the table.

‘You’ve heard from Myra,’ she said.

I stared at her. ‘How do you know?’

‘From your face,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’

I’d been in contact with Myra perhaps a score of times, in more than a score of years: when we’d had the Bomb, and on deals I’d brokered for the space movement in the Norlonto decades. There was a direct airship link between Alexandra Port and Baikonur, and I’d met her a few times when she was passing through, but most of our contact had been remote.

I reached for Annette’s hand. ‘You’re not jealous? Good God, it was seventy years ago!’

‘I know,’ Annette said. She squeezed my hand. ‘And I know you love me. But you loved her, too. I think she was the only other woman you were ever in love with. And it’s true what they say: love never dies. You can kill it, sure, but it never dies by itself.’

Her words may have echoed any number of sentimental songs and stories, but she spoke them as if they were a bitter, reluctantly accepted scientific truth. She laid a hand over my open mouth before I could protest, expostulate, explain.

‘It’s all right,’ she said. Then: ‘What does she want this time?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. I explained about the message, and where I’d found it. ‘She’s in some kind of trouble, and she wants me to help.’

‘“It