IT WAS THE Thirty-Fourth InterOrion Congress for Astrophysics, and an impossibly spindly-legged man from Arkham’s Lesser Belt was holding forth on certain aspects of stellar evolution related to Type One Reinhart-sequence supernovae. Ruskin was trying to hear what the man was saying. His efforts were mainly futile, due to noise from a nearby Triune splinter group—a bonded trio of Human-female, Mandoran biped-phase female, and Thresko worker-male, who were vocally complaining about a procedural ruling handed down in the previous day’s session. Ruskin tried to move through the crowd away from them, far enough to hear some of what the speaker was saying, because he was just reaching the point that . . .
•
“Authorization withdrawn,” said a voice, much nearer.
With a flicker, the photodiary files closed. The screen darkened.
Ruskin blinked, breath catching. His voice rasped: “Wait! Go back on! Reopen those last files!” What was happening? What was he doing? Somehow he had gotten into his personal thinktank files.
But how? Was there a code-phrase? Had he blacked out again?
The console answered: “You are unauthorized to open those files. Do not try again.”
He closed his eyes tightly and took a deep breath. Not authorized. And yet he had just been in the files.
What is happening to me? He expelled his breath and reached for his glass of wine. His hand groped and found only air. He blinked, looking down. He was sitting naked on the carpet, his dinner nowhere to be seen, not even an empty glass. Had he cleaned up already? Of course. And you went to bed.
He stared dumbly down at himself, shocked to realize why he was naked. He’d undressed for bed. Then how long have I been—? He glanced at the time and was stunned to see that it was past five in the morning. Did I get any sleep at all?
He would have to be leaving soon if he was going to go to work—or to the address shown on his work I.D. The thought sent a shiver down his spine. This couldn’t go on forever. Sooner or later, he had to try to get help. But how, and from whom? Someone tried to kill me. Who do I trust? Would he know anyone at his work address? Would the memories return? If not—what then? Max had promised to see him when he knew more. He hoped that would be soon; hoped desperately.
There was no point in trying to sleep again; indeed, he was a little afraid to try, afraid of letting go of consciousness. But who was the person who was able to open these files? He sighed, rising. He might as well get dressed and go in early.
* * *
He noticed the bump again as he was dressing, but he ignored it until he’d left the apartment, walked to the nearest tube platform, and boarded the first car that felt right. Since he was early, he didn’t worry that he might get sidetracked by going the wrong way; he had the address, and he had plenty of time to try again. But he had an intuition that his body remembered the way to his office.
While riding the tube through the city sky he found himself picking with his thumbnail at the little bump on his index finger. It had not grown since he’d first noticed it at the lodge—it was the size of a small insect bite—but it felt harder, as though a bit of buckshot had become embedded in the skin. He wondered if it was a growth that he ought to have checked, but he remembered the med-scan at the lodge. If it was anything dangerous, Jeaves surely would have excised it, or at least informed him.
Unless there was some reason why they hadn’t wanted him to know.
He sighed and gazed out the window at the city skyline, flashing past as the tube passed among the spires. The view seemed familiar, and yet he felt as though he were being propelled along on a dream. Presumably, he would feel an urge to get off at the right time. The city was striking from this vantage, with a golden-red sun glowing over the eastern skyline, glinting off the spires and towers. He shivered, yesterday’s vision coming alive again in his mind:
A sun caught in the moment before its death-collapse: an explosion that would spew starstuff across the light-years . . .
The vision was etched so clearly in his memory that in the moment it took him to blink it away, his mind had transformed the landscape outside to a city of glass, on the verge of conflagration. He rubbed his eyes until shots of color against his eyelids replaced the image. The tube-car was slowing as it glided into a midair station. A few people got up to leave. Ruskin glanced at the platform in uncertainty, then leaped for the door just as it began to close.
A glassed-in causeway conveyed him silently into the nearest building, at the fiftieth floor. The lobby was nearly deserted. It was still a good hour before the morning rush. A directory glimmering in the air showed him the name he was looking for, on the sixty-fourth floor. He took the nearest lift.
Associative Frontiers Institute. The door winked open in response to his handprint, and the smell of herbal tea filled his nostrils. He almost closed his eyes as he walked into the reception area, so starkly did the room suddenly appear in his mind: smoked-glass desk to the left, dark-eyed woman named Fariel at the desk, holopainting of the galactic center filling the right-hand side of the room.
His eyes had trouble focusing for a moment. The room was empty, the holopainting turned off. But in the alcove just beyond the desk, a flask of aromatic herbal tea was steaming. He poured himself a mug and walked into the back offices, trying to think of who might be here early; whom he might know. No names came to mind.
The offices were arrayed in a starburst pattern. He found his own office at the end of the leftmost hallway. The name Willard J. Ruskin was etched on a small carbon-and-chrome nameplate. He touched the nameplate with a frown, then tried the handprint lock. The partition winked open.
His office was half eggshell, half cockpit. The curved white wall was unadorned, and the desk was really just a ledge following the curvature of the wall. The chair, however, was a swiveling command seat festooned with keyboard pads and interface controls and holographic projection lenses. He set his mug down on the ledge and ran his hand along its smooth, clean surface. Several patches lighted as his hand passed over them, and one section silently rotated upward, revealing a rack of storage slivers and bound books and notepads.
He started to pull out a random selection of materials, then hesitated, touching the spines of several books. He felt a tingle of familiarity in his hand, like a glow of static electricity that went up his arm, and as his breath caught, seemed to fill him. What is it? He ran his fingers along the labels of the storage slivers, and his breath tightened further.
Something in him wanted to be let out; and the key could be here. But where?
He closed his eyes and pulled out half a dozen slivers, plus the notebooks he had already touched. He laid them out and scanned their titles. They ranged from a tattered volume labeled Project Notes—Political, to a sliver called HYperSpace/HYperProfits, to another entitled Gravimetric Factors in Large K-space Interactions. Frowning, he flipped open the notebook. It was filled with scribbled handwritten notes and scraps of hard copy. Nothing looked familiar about it; he could not say whether the handwriting was his. But as he paged through some notations on political conflict between the Auricle Alliance and the Tandesko Triune, he felt a sudden flush, remembering feelings of anger.
Someone had been trying to defend the indefensible: the supposition that the Tandesko worlds somehow held a moral high position because of their interracial linkages . . . the supposition that the “enhanced free trade” policies of the Auricle Alliance somehow led to greater involuntary leverage over weaker colony-world economies. . . .
Closing the notebook, he climbed into the chair and placed the storage slivers into their slots. He rested his arms on the armrests, closed his eyes, took a deep breath. If his body remembered; if the system would allow it . . .
His hands found their control-nudgers. The headrest self-adjusted, cradling his skull. Squeezing two of the fingertip nudgers, he counted to three and opened his eyes. The office was darkening, the holoprojectors coming to life. The walls vanished; he was surrounded by reddish-orange space. A finely traced spherical grid enclosed him, giving dimension to the space, extending outward to infinity. A blank cogitative workspace. His fingers nudged again, and one of the slivers—he didn’t look at the title—was drawn into memory.
A title drew itself across the bottom of the grid: Expansion and Deformation of K-space through Ultralong Warp-thread Connections: A Reference Design Study / Classification: Secret. He read the title three times. He wasn’t sure what it meant. But bells were ringing: Was this something he should know?
“Open file for scanning,” he murmured. He prayed for luck. If his system at home had rejected his identity, what would this one do?
“Present ident-chit and handprint,” said a low, synthesized voice. He complied. “Opening file,” the system said a moment later. “Welcome back, Willard.”
“Thank you,” he grunted, surprised. Was his home security more rigorous than his office system, then? Or more fallible?
There was little time to think about it. The space around him was filling with diagrams and figures, and another voice, a teaching voice, was providing narration. He used the nudgers to highlight, to slow and speed the motion, to direct the narrator to points of interest. The material was all dimly familiar, like a subject once studied and now nearly forgotten. Soon he had lost track of time, forgotten everything except the grid and the bewildering array of facts, and the voice:
“. . . The reference design calls for a folding K-space warp-thread process to be extended over a distance of five light-years in a testing configuration. No effort will be made to transmit material objects through the connection; however, in-situ measurements of the spatial deformation will be made by preset monitoring beacons. Application to more ambitious schemes must await analysis of test results, under the methodology outlined by Rumley and Thompson in Appendix C to this proposal. . . .”
A graphic display unwrapped around him, both fascinating and bewildering. He skipped ahead.
“. . . Update Five, on testing of reference design at sixty light-years. Following are results determined through a compressed time-line test, under additional constraints imposed by the Budgetary Committee of the Alliance Scientific Council. . . .”
He squeezed the nudgers to jump ahead again. . . .
•
. . . and the two people facing him across the table started. He blinked, hiding his astonishment.
“Well come on, do it, Willard,” a blond-haired young man said.
“Do what?” Ruskin whispered. Not again. Another blackout.
The young man laughed and pointed to a holographic display that was flickering with static bars. “Just when you’re getting to the interesting part, you scramble the picture! Is that your way of showing us what you got done on your vacation?”
Ruskin frowned at the disabled image and realized that his hands were on the controls of the conference room projectors. “Oh.”
The other person, a tall, wispy-haired woman with enormous eyes, was shaking her head. “We didn’t really expect you to have it done yet, Willard. Why didn’t you just tell us, instead of making us go through all this? I know you’re feeling the time pressure, but really!”
Ruskin swallowed, trying to still his trembling hands. “I—I had something here. But I don’t seem to be able—” He fiddled futilely with the controls. “I must have done something wrong in transferring it over,” he mumbled. And was that an out-and-out lie, or had he really had something to show? What the devil had he been doing while his conscious mind was locked up in a closet somewhere? And who were these people? Flushing, he turned the projection off and took a chance. “Nelly, how soon do you need to see it?” The name had just popped into his mind; he wasn’t sure which of them it belonged to, but he was sure it was one of them. And as soon as he’d said it, he sensed he’d done something wrong.
There was a long silence, while the young man blushed crimson. It was the woman who answered, and her voice was reproving. “He doesn’t need it—I do. As you well know.” Her eyes flashed from the young man to Ruskin. “You should have it within the week, at the very latest.”
Ruskin’s face burned as he tried to think what he’d done wrong. This was a nightmare; it was absurd; he should confide—
No. He didn’t dare.
The young man spoke softly, angrily. “What you just called me, Willard—you have no right to use that name. I’m—surprised at you. Judith—” He cleared his throat and rose. “I’ll speak with you on the other matter later.”
Ruskin stared helplessly after him, and when he was gone, turned to Judith. She was scowling in puzzlement. “Why did you do that, Willard?” she asked finally.
His voice was hoarse. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t remember . . .”
Her eyebrows went up. “Don’t remember? That he nearly quit when Ankas called him that? That we all agreed his private life was his own? That just because he said some things at a party once—”
“No, I don’t remember,” Ruskin said, his voice tightening with shame, which stopped her in midsentence. “I’m sorry. Please tell him I’m sorry. I . . . forgot.”
Judith gazed at him in incomprehension. “Jesus,” she said finally. “What did that vacation do to you?”
He closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Well . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she sighed. “I’ll tell Galen you’re sorry. But you might tell him yourself.”
Ruskin nodded as she left. “Thanks.” Thanks for telling him Galen’s name. What was the name he had used? Nelly. Some sort of pet-name, maybe—or love-name. Who or what did Galen love? he wondered. He sighed and looked around at the empty conference room. White walls, translucent amberine table, handy projector controls. Apparently they didn’t go in much for decoration here, except in the reception room. Holo thinktanks everywhere, and white walls for projection. The place looked neat, and uninformative as a blank page.
Damn it, when would he come back to reality?
He fiddled with the control-nudgers, bringing the static-filled projection back to life. He tried adjusting it, but the most he could do was turn the static bars into hash. Backtracking, he found a series of unfamiliar figures and graphs. He was about to switch it off when a stocky man stuck his head into the room. “Hey, Willard—how was the trip?”
He looked up, trying not to appear startled. “Great,” he said. “Just great.”
“Wonderful. Look forward to seeing your presentation,” the man said and continued on his way.
Ruskin rubbed his forehead wearily. He switched off the projector, extracted the sliver that contained his presentation, and tossed it in his hand. Whatever it was he was supposed to be doing, it must be in here. He closed his hand around it and hurried back to his office.