Pla Cliff Derkinit
Cliff stepped off the qi-che in front of the building where he kept his office. The last half of
the night squatted around him, bearing mute witness to his solitary actions — and those of every
other person in the world. The night — and the day in its turn — knew what all of those people
were doing, but wouldn't tell on them. It took men to rig artificial spies, and it took men to
require those spies.
He trudged into the building. A few lights came on, hinting more than showing the cavernous
lobby. His office, an alcove really, stood open to that cavern. As he stepped into its space, his
desk lamp awoke in greeting, but he didn't sit down right away.
The office appeared more unsettled than not. He counted at least three stacks of boxes that hadn't
been touched since he'd set them down seventeen days before. His guest chair displayed a fine
sifting of ceiling plaster which meant nobody had used it in at least two days. He glanced at the
low ceiling, then around at the narrow walls enclosing his desk, then finally out at the lobby.
Even in shadows, it all seemed soft at the edges, not quite crumbling, but obviously uncared for,
just another empty floor in a building left vacant by the recession. He remembered how he and Zim
and Lotte had taken the first piece of realty on the list and rushed their stuff into it so they
could get on with the job.
What a job it had been, too! Thousands of people — at last count, 91,103 — arrived here in
Ganj Dareh, literally carrying their lives on their backs, and expecting him, and his initially
meager staff, to show them how to build their new futures. Promising and prosperous futures.
And they — the original three plus dozens more, hired from Gast- und einheimischer Arbeiter alike
— had done it! Despite the false starts, the faux pas, classes without instructors (and
vice-versa), adapting and adopting concepts new and old, filling the gaps with cooperation and
inspiration, they had done it — and were still doing it. They offered curricula now, expanded
beyond serious creativity. They worked in cooperation with local combines. They followed a
cycle: learn, apply, assess, and go around again. They practiced an aesthetic, too, life outside
the job that helped within it. Really good ideas for new products and services, and lifecycle
improvements to existing products and services, percolated out as proof statements to the
Rendezvous' effectiveness.
Soon, he'd have to start thinking about graduates and turning them and those proof statements out
to be tested by zhuhndí. With that threat of alumni and with a permanent campus under
construction, the Rendezvous of Futures took on aspects of an institution, one he could proudly
claim as a legacy.
A legacy. Cliff closed his eyes and imagined Trina's smile of pride and love. Too bad her health
would never allow her to come down to Ganj Dareh and see the results of his work. When and if they
brought up its virtual simulation on the Em-Deh, only then could she come close to the one thing
he'd ever built that was worth passing on.
Abruptly, faces and bodies invaded his homespun vision. Faces and bodies in motion, intent on
killing cop and citizen. Faces and bodies in freeze-frame, isolated by Kanpa, mugshots of
traitors, ingrates, garbage reeking of everything his Rendezvous meant to wipe out of people's
lives. Gorge rose, fouling the back of his throat.
Kanpa hadn't come out and said these gangsters belonged to the Rendezvous, but where else could
they be? No identity database admitted to their existence, and only his had been tampered with.
Who and why did not matter; only the unavoidable conclusion did. The Rendezvous of Futures, his
life's triumph, harbored the very envoys of hate and destruction that poisoned it. He had to find
them, find the nests of sedition from which they sprang, and expunge them!
He'd thought about that search on the way over from the stable where he'd met with Phoebe, Harlan,
and Kanpa. Typically, he avoided the virtual where he could, not that he couldn't make these
stupid machines do what he wanted them to. He liked and trusted the physical and the emotional.
He worked directly with people, sensing their essences, trusting their words where that seemed
right, translating them where necessary, turning self-deceptions, postures, and outright lies into
an approximation of their cerebral reality.
But that approach had failed for at least part of the people he walked among these days. They had
lied better than he had known. That conclusion hurt in so many parts of his pride, in himself, in
others, in the human battle with this unkind universe that contains us all.
And Kanpa — poor kid hadn't been able to escape his technical roots after all — had shown that
the deeply virtual in Cliff's everyday life had been soiled by one of the people who stooped to
that kind of thing. But that gleest had a specific objective in mind, one that needed to stay
hidden even while the Rendezvous ran its daily life in its own little corner of the
Mirnaya Direvnya.
Hence, Cliff had formed a plan for his search: apply the seat of his pants to the seat in front of
his workstation and look for patterns in the Rendezvous' database. The gleest, simply by nature of
being human, couldn't have hidden everything about these gangsters, and Cliff would — with enough
close and focused attention — find those mistakes.
Close and focused attention. He groaned, literally, physically, and openly. After all these days
of working at the peak of his concentration and endurance, the rest of him did not want
more hard work, but his pride demanded it. With a lot of help, he'd built the Rendezvous into an
ark of hope, breasting the cruel waves of the future. Anybody else — Phoebe and Harlan —
wouldn't hesitate to tear it apart looking for skunks in its briar patch. He would do the job
himself and preserve his legacy if it was the last thing he ever did.
"Famous last words?" he asked quietly. "Moons, what a thing to say!" He immediately crossed his
fingers to counter the curse of accidental prediction — and smiled at his ego for thinking the
universe would care about something as small as him.
Cliff settled before his workstation. It awoke even as he slid its fiducia ring onto his left
pinky finger, then because he was him and in direct contact, it went on to open up every automaton
he normally worked with. Tapping methodically on the foilscreen, he closed down all but the
database's query panel. No distractions tonight. He had serious work to do.
First, he tried the primary columns of data about people, all the attributes captured explicitly
during the Rendezvous: names, former hometowns, gong-she and seminar assignments, and on and on.
He regrouped them, reformatted them, sorted them into every order he could come up with, a game of
virtual jackstraws. But quickly, despair crept over him, stinging the skin on the left side of his
neck. Nothing that obvious could work.
Cliff settled back, his chair creaking. All humans really had only a few things in common. He
didn't think eating, sleeping, talking, and making love would help here because of the enormous
variety in those patterns. However, there was one thing each human had only so much of: time.
While the gangsters were out causing trouble, they couldn't also be attending Rendezvous events.
Inspired, he looked for unauthorized absences. Not explicit reports because he couldn't rely on
those to be thorough. Instead, he set up a query that would account for every second of every day
for every person registered at the Rendezvous and show him people with gaps in that accounting.
Soon, the list appeared, and Cliff hunched forward to sift for patterns.
Patterns abounded: times, places, the whole manner of attributes he'd previously plowed. Some of
the clustering was interesting — how many people signed up for "feng shui" but didn't actually go
— but every one failed his primary test. He knew — seen them with his own eyes — that at least
twenty-seven different gangsters had come out of the Rendezvous and killed cops. How many more
infested his creation, he didn't know, but he had to account for at least that many. None of the
patterns could. His neck twinged again as zhuhndí cranked up his despair.
The lobby lights winked out, yielding their artifice to the stubbly gray of dawn seeping in through
windows.
Suddenly released from his zone of concentration, Cliff bolted to his feet. Long seconds lost
without progress, time he could ill-afford to lose, time he'd never get back. In the muzziness of
that despair, he noticed signals from his bladder and stomach he'd managed to ignore before. He
leaned toward the foilscreen, trying to resume his focus, but the urges wouldn't be denied — along
with practically every other muscle in him, rushing to complain about the recent abuse of posture
and tension. Those he did ignore as he trudged to the toilet, then to the servers, still dormant
from the night's disuse. They did manage a stale muffin and some yogurt. He took a few bites and
feeling some better, marched himself back to the workstation.
Standing there, he worked his neck and shoulders, twisting and stretching, hoping the sting of
despair would fade with the cramps. It didn't. He'd made no true progress.
"No," he scolded himself. Negative reports informed as well as positive ones. "By the myraid
moons of Yeibichai, what's it trying to tell me?" he demanded aloud of the walls and furniture
showing more sharply in the creeping dawn.
The answer, when it came, pumped vigor into his despair. "They weren't unauthorized
absences. Someone gave them permission to wander forth and wreak havoc on our innocence. Gave
them permission! Who?" A leader of some kind, one of the specially trusted. He'd personally
selected and interviewed every leader. One — or more — of them had fooled him completely.
Betrayal returned in its guise of vomit burning his throat.
Cliff dropped his carcass into the chair again and reached for the query into unauthorized
absences. He brushed it away, and the full glory of the Rendezvous' data flaunted its columns
again.
"How do I find people accounted for, but not attending recognized events?" he whispered. Quickly,
he subtracted out base can-feels, meeting rooms assigned during registration according to former
hometowns, because everyone had those in common.
"Subtract every can-feel with a leader's name?" No: one of those leaders had betrayed him.
"Subtract every can-feel that produced a status report?" A flare of hope, soon dashed by that
leader-as-traitor realization.
He stared at the foilscreen. What was it trying to tell him? He didn't mind pushing words into
these contraptions and wringing them back out again. He had grown comfortable with that method of
managing concepts, but data followed a whole other paradigm. Data grew in the recesses of the
Em-Deh, according to exotic rules, like mold, stalactites, and contemporary musicians. Only
statisticians pretended to know the relationships between data and zhuhndí.
Suddenly, Benjamin Disraeli reminded him about liars, damn liars, and statisticians. If only that
man could see the data epidemic they lived in now, over two centuries later.
"Enough stalling!" he called out. Everybody had to be somewhere all the time. He threw out
everything but participants with basic attributes and their attendance data. "And how is that data
ordered?" Embarassed by the clarity produced by talking aloud, he poked at the foilscreen to find
the answer anyway. Ordered by time of arrival. "Try another sequence." What could he sort by
that had any consequence out there in reality? Names? No. Ages?
He tried that: tiny gaps appeared, but he could see no pattern in them.
"Hometowns? No." He'd just taken that attribute out of the game, in the guise of the base
can-feels. Jik Dain had ordered that connection, but now, Cliff could use it again without
those can-feels to clutter the results. He tried it — and pools of correlation flooded the
screen. Five gaping holes told him that zhee-tely from these particular direvnya had attended none
of the Rendezvous' common events. They did not go to any of the training, recreational, or
cultural sessions that everyone should have gone to. According to the data, they'd spent
all their time at their bases.
"Or so someone wants me to believe." Cliff almost chortled with relief at finding something, at —
apparently — making some progress.
He brought out the names of those hometowns: Deir ez-Zor, Broken Glass, Tuol Sleng, Sand Creek,
Tiananmen. He called up the seminar leader responsible for their base can-feels: Ges Lugar Sailie
times five. He checked other base can-feels under Lugar's supervision: none.
Suddenly, Cliff's skin crawled, like the data had climbed down off the screen and swarmed over him
with icy feet. His gorge and the stinging on his neck faded before the chill.
Memories and guesses counterattacked. Lugar, aloof and proud, watching over his lean and hungry
"students" as they streamed out of their base can-feel and past Phoebe's checkpoint. Lugar's glib
words about "rougher, less educated zhee-tely," about "pockets of atavism around the continent" —
all academic blather to camouflage Gastarbeiterbande. Cliff, as Director of the Rendezvous of
Futures, had provided shelter, food, even meeting rooms where these, these hashshashin
could gather, plan, then sortie out against the innocents of Ganj Dareh — and of the Rendezvous
itself, the very people who had come to him for help.
"I promised you," he whispered in the gathering day. "I promised you that I would re-establish
your faith in yourself and in others. I promised you a new future, a bright future, not one full
of fear and despair. I will revive that promise today."
Cliff would no longer allow guilt, shame, and failure to cut into his physical reality. Only
determination set the path for him.
And Phoebe? Should he tell her? Should he bring her in to clean up this cancer within the
Rendezvous?
No. What if he were wrong and he wasted her time and resources? She had too much to handle as it
was.
He'd look into it himself. Find out what these people did with their days. If he proved Lugar's
students were the gangsters, then he'd — what? Notify Phoebe? Have her anshin swoop down on this
foul conspiracy and root it out?
Maybe.
"No!" Cliff flared and reared up before his workstation. Lugar had used the concept of an
identity database against him. Now he would turn that same table on Lugar. He'd simply fire Lugar
and dismiss all his "students," cancel their privileges at the Rendezvous, cut off their meals and
lodging, and order them out of Ganj Dareh. He would also threaten to expunge them all from the
Rendezvous' database — not a simple delete that would cause Em-Deh to revert them back to these
very hometowns — but expunge them, casting them adrift, throwing them virtually out of
Yeibichai society. That threat would drive them away.
"Pick up and begone, gangsters!" That, at least, was worth a try.
The plan eased his mind. Just find out where to go, and he'd be off to fulfill his promise. He
labored with his screen, poking it until it showed him maps, then he downloaded them to his
llevar. He stood up to go and see things for himself.
And threw himself back down again.
"Old fool," he muttered as images of death swarmed through his mind with the speed of life.
Kanpa's videos, direct as only pure data can be, showed how deadly these gangsters were. The
statistics — over four-hundred anshin dead, nearly all by these hashshashin, and who-knew-how-many
zhee-tely as direct victims — showed how deadly these gangsters were. "How dare I think I can
withstand such skill? There's nothing I can do about the 'old,' but I sure can beat the 'fool'
part."
But there was no way he could not do this, not take action against — the words just came
— "the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune." Cliff smiled and roared, "Praise be the
Classics!"
Settled to his future once again, he also said, "So I'll just be careful."
At his workstation, he found a place to confront Lugar — surprisingly, the seminar leader no
longer conducted the Rendezvous seminars himself; he spent his time at a new office, apparently
running his bid for the anshin contract.
Then, Cliff set up a message that would carry his conclusions and all the data to support them to
Phoebe in case he did not return. But he didn't send it.
Finally, he went rummaging through his office and the others nearby, initially occupied by Te and
Ger, long since moved on to other duties and other places to perform them. He found opti-tek to
give him to ability to spy on the gangsters at a distance. He found his pulse-tek to give him a
deadman's switch — such a name! — when he confronted Lugar. And he found sidewalk chalk.
For the gangsters were not dangerous just in physical reality, but also virtual reality. That
gleest might still be around, might be able to interfere with his fail-safe message. "Not that I
doubt the stupid machines. Just that they are stupid and will do what people tell them."
He needed a way to leave the same message zhuhndí. Paper and pencil were things of the past. He
remembered them as a child back on Earth, er, Gë as they'd all agreed to call it here on Yeibichai,
to have a common word for their home world. And he kept some back at home as mementoes, but here?
No paper and pencil. He did have boxes, however, flat, empty surfaces just ripe for writing, a
skill that hadn't completely evaporated over the long seconds. He thought of blood, the classic
solution to the problem, but dismissed that as too melodramatic even for Pla Cliff Derkinit. When
he found the chalk provided for the kids of the Rendezvous, he knew it would do the job.
Cliff allowed himself some fun as he set up a line of boxes as a canvas, but facing the outer wall
so they couldn't be casually seen. He then reproduced on their fronts enough of his message to
Phoebe to guide her in case it came to that. Settling back on his heels with a wry grin, he said,
"Put that on my epitaph," he declared, then added in a whisper, "Bury me at the Rendezvous — no,
wait! Trina!"
He whirled to his workstation. He had one more message to compose, also delayed to give him time
to unsend it after he'd dealt with Lugar and his gangsters. One more message, the hardest set of
words he'd ever had to compose.
After he told Trina why he had to go do this thing, even in the face of danger, and he told her
everything she meant to him, then he could march out zhuhndí and rescue his legacy from the evil
that only men could do.
