Doyle Phoebe Heejanus
"Gut it!" Phoebe tore her gaze from The Ear's report of Ganj Dareh's Forum. All I need is a
little more time!
Deep in her gut, a cramp surged, the same one that had wrenched her from the first good night's
sleep in days. It had nagged ever since, but now, its pain seized her, bent her over. The
African-flamingo pink of her keyspace washed over her even through her clenched lids. "Stuff it!"
she groaned. Like she needed to crap, but something big inside her blocked the way. She wanted to
push, to purge herself, but if she did, this hard block of shit would rip her open from the
inside. Need fought fear with counterpoint agony.
"Mou — mou — mount it —" Aw, forget it. Why couldn't they just give me some time, some
more time? I've just about got this in hand. She dragged up fantasies of mass arrests,
re-invented them as motivating visions, and tried to soothe her gut with them. She followed with
thoughts about restored confidence as it rippled through Ganj Dareh. The Ear's Index of
Satisfaction capped the montage by scrambling still higher. Relief did seep slowly through her.
Phoebe straightened up with a growl that quickly lapsed into a moan. I just need proof of a
conspiracy. I just need a current location on the conspirators. Give me that, and I'll take them
out of the picture — and get my life back. I'm just waiting on —
She flicked her gaze to her calendar panel, to the alarmed item described as "Check Kanpa's
progress," cast in Pollyanna yellow against the panel's Belize-offshore-blue, then she checked the
current time. Still several thousand seconds yet. Another cramp surged against the wait. Every
second wasted, more people died. Then, a glimmer of anticipation lifted the pain slightly; a
glimpse of Kanpa's face eased her a bit. Let's go down there anyway. She checked a note from
Kanpa attached to the reminder — "Swamp #3" — stood with rigid determination and pushed through
her office's gate.
Kanpa had better have that data for me; he'd better have —
Phoebe caught the words parading through her mind — and hated them! Out in the hall, blue-gray
and pink-gray uniforms swarmed about her. She dodged back into her office to avoid being seen
arguing with herself, to refrain from planting any more seeds of speculation in her combine.
In private again, she used cold thought to ward off the sure-sighted single-mindedness of
obsession. I never demand performance from anyone; I expect it, and it happens — most of
the time. So, why should I treat Kanpa differently? Why treat him so harshly?
A blaze of memory broke through: an intimate caress in the dark amid the rustle of straw. Her
skin, her loins, her heart stirred at the thought. Paths of calm connected that moment with others
she'd shared with Kanpa, moments in which she'd forgotten about her job and just enjoyed life.
Again, thinking explicit words seemed to help her maintain perspective. This obsession of mine
fights dirty. It is — I am — scared. Of what? How does, how can Kanpa threaten me,
threaten it? Keeping matters straight took almost more reason than she possessed. How to
distinguish between her self and this other part of her, this obsession with its distinct
pattern of thought complete with raison d'être? How to balance taking care of her people,
direvnya and combine, and taking care of herself?
Kanpa's quirky smile interrupted, the memory bringing a light smear of happiness. She knew where
to get more.
A quick hint of cramp ripped through her gut. Get the data! Find out what Kanpa knows by now!
People are dying!
Phoebe bolted out of her office again, same destination. Satisfy both my urges with a single
mission. But she knew she avoided the real issue. Some day — soon — she'd have to choose. Her
obsession wouldn't leave without a fight that she might not win.
And Kanpa? How hard would he fight to stay in her life?
Phoebe broke into a trot. Most answers to that question frightened her.
The data-reduction rooms, labeled "Swamp #1" and so on, circled the infraware kiva in the
basement. Phoebe plunged into #3 without knocking. She knew the room was roughly square, but she
couldn't see that physical shape for the virtual overlays. Instead, it appeared to be the
top half of an egg with images and graphs and columns of data enveloping every curve from the
flattened top to the stark lines cutting them off at foot-level. Colorless gutters split the
wrap-around information into three domains. Kanpa posed before one of them, his head enclosed with
earphones.
With a slight smile that anticipated seeing his, Phoebe tapped his shoulder. He shrugged it off.
She rapped harder. He shrugged again. Piqued, that gut-cramp urging her on, she grabbed his arm.
He jerked away and sent a distracted glare back over his shoulder. Normally, she would've gone for
an ear at this point, but they were covered. Instead, she took a handful of his puff-ball hair.
Abruptly, he stepped back, hooked her ankle, butted her groin, and dumped her backwards. She hit
hard, rolled out of trained habit, scrambled to lift herself on fingertips and toes, then snapped
up her head to gauge her next move. If he wanted a fight, she'd give him one.
With his eyes locked on a threesome of graphs, Kanpa slowly lifted one hand wrapped around an
llevarito with four buttons. It hovered in front of him, its tip circling vaguely, his thumb
gently tapping one of the buttons. Abruptly, his arm straightened in a lunge, his thumb mashing
the button, as he cried, "Got ya!"
A heartbeat later, obviously a techniker in hot pursuit, his cerebral reality filled with data
landscape and problem prey and cyber-weapons to bring it down, Kanpa pried the 'phones from his
ears and spun away from his work. "You petty, Geld-squeezing, schedule-crimping—" He faltered,
recognition dawning over his fury as Phoebe straightened before him. He raised his eyebrows,
quirked his mouth toward that smile she liked, and continued at a lesser volume, "Couldn't you see
I was working? You expected me to work, didn't you?"
"Yes!" Phoebe snapped. Adrenalin still swirled within her, mixed with the harsh tingle caused by
her fall. Her understanding of his mood did dampen her reaction, but the fight, even with —
especially with — Kanpa, had come easily, tasted so good. Still feeling its dregs, she planted
her hands on her hips and shot back, "And I expect you to report progress when I ask."
Confusion washed the righteousness from his face. He glanced at a foilscreen tacked on the wall by
the door. His brow dropping into a frown, he stepped closer to its display, then said in a
perplexed tone, "That's not for another 3-Three seconds."
Phoebe smiled at his precision. So techniker of him. "I couldn't wait."
He didn't notice her smile. Instead, he sighed at length, sounding like a slow leak, and his body
took it seriously. As his knees folded, he twisted and leaned ... but did manage to snag a rolling
stool, the only furniture in the room.
Phoebe jumped to his side and guided the last part of his collapse. She stripped off his
earphones, then pressed fingertips to check his throat pulse — fast, but strong — and the other
palm to test the temperature of his forehead — clammy and cool. Generally O.K. then, but in need
of short-term aid.
"Central!" she called, registering the word's shrillness after the fact. "Save all displays and
give me lights in Swamp #3."
zhuhndí flicked back. The room turned off-white again, its low vault of a ceiling full of
projector lenses, an inset shelf cluttered with user-interface devices, and the lone foilscreen
next to the door.
"Sorry," Kanpa whispered. "Guess I should have eaten something."
"Since when?"
"Last night. I came over here from the stables."
In her gut, the cramp eased, her obsession pleased by his devotion. It sought to reward Kanpa with
a smile. In her heart, though, her concern for him frowned. Phoebe clamped her mouth flat,
avoiding the conflict again, and headed for the door. "I'll be back in a moment with some rations
and qahwah. Just wait there. If you feel faint, put your head between your knees."
#
Kanpa washed the last bite of sandkage down with qahwah. He rested the mug on a knee and raised
his gaze to Phoebe. "Ready when you are, Chief!"
Leaning against the wall opposite, she studied his face. His eyes seemed brighter above fatigue
smudges. He sat straighter with shoulders lifted and back, but his movements lagged. Refreshed,
but still tired. Back to work! her obsession crowed. How long will this take? Will he be O.K.?
Either way, she had to understand what he'd found out.
Without moving, she said, "Let's see it."
"Central!" he called from his stool. "Restore displays in Swamp #3."
The egg enclosure returned, its surface smothered in data representations and bestowing irregular
shadows on the interior space.
"History is full of classic conflicts," Kanpa began. "Offense versus defense, freedom versus
security, haves versus have-nots, man versus the elements—"
He's feeling pretty good, after all. Phoebe cleared her throat to warn against digressions.
Kanpa chuckled — from a different spot in the room. "Here we're particularly interested in the
conflict between capacity and consumption. Every advance in infraware capacity, produced by its
resident apparatus and/or logiciel, has allowed automata to expand in complexity, data usage,
interface sophistication ... and so on. Initially, of course, 3 or 4 Niners ago, the system
constrained the applications. Then, during our expansion to the stars, capacity outran —"
"Do you have anything or not?" Phoebe demanded.
Kanpa moved again as he said, "I'm just trying to explain that although our capacity is large, the
problem is—"
"Larger?" Her gut twinged with returning despair. Hasn't he found
anything?
"To some degree," Kanpa continued. "I've had to improvise to help my agents along. The human
brain still recognizes patterns better than they do, especially when I aligned the data access with
my innate strengths ... as a human."
Still, she couldn't squeeze him too hard, too fast, risking his rebellion or collapse, without
defeating herself. She spelled it out, hoping her obsession would take note. Patience paid best
here. After all, the techniker in him did want to brag. "Meaning what?" she prompted.
From right beside her, Kanpa said, "Let me describe the problem sets first." His hand rested on
her hip, then lifted away, leaving a swirl of delight that softened any and all impatience.
In a moment, he stepped into visibility, face-on to a domain that curved from the floor to the apex
and laid stripes across his front.
"Set #1: take formatted data related to all Incidents since Har Norma's proclamation. Join that
with unformatted data relevant to the locations of said Incidents. I started with your anshin
database, defined a view that included the last twenty days in ascending order, filtered that for
Incidents with violence level at 'verbal exchange' on up, filtered that for non-resident
participation. I used that view to give me date-time and location indices — subtracting 2000
seconds from Incident start-time and adding 2000 to anshin On-Location-Time.
"Knowing when and where these Incidents took place, I waded into Beobachtung data. It's all
publicly available on the Mirnaya Direvnya — if you know where to look.
"Oh yeah, I also mixed in your Common-Surveillance Program, that indoors Beobachtung you've been
collecting. Doesn't fill in all the gaps, you know.
"Then, I had to find transient storage, someplace to park all my working sets, interim results, and
so on. Since there wasn't enough here, I found it in BH Direvnya—"
An expense panic squeezed Phoebe's chest. Old habits die hard even when they're laughably
outdated.
"I charged it all to my proposal effort," he said immediately, salving the panic he knew he'd
started. Bands of plain pink, equal parts of red and white dumped together, covered his face.
Phoebe returned a half-smile, unsure if he could see it.
"Then, finally, I could start dragging over the raw data, filtered of course down to
visible spectrum, to keep storage demands down: even the Kiva-in-the-Mountains has limits." He
lifted a hand to skim the holographic surface in front of him. "That agent is still working.
See?" He sunk a fingertip into black-on-red text. "Incident ident, date-time, Neighborhood
XRef." Next to that, more plain pink for a progress stripe cut by hash-marks. "Connect to Em-Deh
and start pipe. Filter spectrum. Transient store complete. Over and over again, bringing me
great hunks of filtered data, raw filtered data, though. Not that I have to mind it
anymore. Ee-oh?"
Phoebe waited, then abruptly understood his terse question. She nodded, realized that he couldn't
see that, then blurted, "Yes!"
In reaction, he side-stepped and nosed another domain, this one small, rectangular, plain-blue
background, fat plain-yellow graph lines and legends, and plain-green vertical bars. Like looking
at a bruise. Will he let me teach him about colors? flitted through her mind chased by the hope
for a chance to do so.
"Any progress from Harlan on those mug-shots?" Kanpa asked.
"What?" Phoebe scrambled to understand what he'd said. Kanpa wasn't the only tired one in this
room. Harlan's canvass of Ganj Dareh. "Oh," she breathed, then labored after that connection.
First, the llevar mating back at the stable, then her approval of Harlan's mission, then the series
of negative reports from all communities ever since. Confirming her lack of hope about Harlan's
chances.
"He and the others lost a night's sleep — for nothing. They haven't found any of the gangsters."
"Well, I've got some hits on them," Kanpa bragged. "See this?"
Twin opportunities flashed electric through Phoebe. She leaped to interrupt his lecture. "You
know where those gangsters are?"
Overlaid by projected images, Kanpa answered, "Not now, I don't, but I can show you places they've
been in the past for which I have filtered data. They've been pretty busy, out and about our
little town."
"Causing Incidents?"
His finger assumed those bruise-colors as he poked some commands into a holographic panel Phoebe
couldn't quite see. The graph changed immediately, and after a moment, he said, "A high degree of
correlation, it seems, but I don't know much about it."
"Why not?"
"FIFO, Phoebe!" Then he capped his gushing exasperation. "Top priority: identify these
perverts. I was getting around to telling you about that. Next: put faces on more perverts. And
that's about all I've got hands-on time for."
Why can't he understand that I want to lay my hands on the actual gangsters, not their
pictures, and I want to do that now?
Despite that urgency, Phoebe slowed herself down. "You can find specific people you've identified
as gangsters in the Beobachtung?"
"Once I flag a specific bit-stream, the automata are pretty good at finding it again in
the same kind of raw data, like filtered
Beobachtung. I've allocated an agent for every gangster I've found." With that bruised-looking
finger, he tapped graph lines as though they explained everything.
Phoebe plowed on. "Then you can follow the gangsters back to their headquarters?"
"Where?"
"To wherever they hide between attacks."
"No. Sorry. I tried that. They're too good at using shadows in both outdoors and indoors
surveillance. I always lost them in public places. No correlation to them either. So I gave it
up: other cyber-fields to plow."
That opportunity fizzled with an almost tangible twinge. Another crackled with renewed
importance. Phoebe charged toward it. "Can you find the gangsters in the Beobachtung that's being
collected now?"
He turned to her then. That close, she could see him frown at the new approach. "There is a
certain latency before the data's available on the Em-Deh. Then there's filter and transport
time." As his thoughts moved along, so did his expression — toward dismay. "I was working my way
forward, starting twenty days ago, following ascending date/time. That's more logical, you know.
Fewer Incidents to resolve back then. Gave me a chance to work out my technique." His eyes
changed from a flat sheen to a twinkling glisten. He knew now how he could've better served
Ganj Dareh — and her, she hoped. "Once I got the agents working, I just didn't think ... I am
sorry."
Part of Phoebe wanted to kiss away those unshed tears and ease his mind about his error. But most
of her railed against the time lost:
* these moments spent learning that Kanpa had no results to report yet (otherwise, he would have)
* the mass of people-seconds that had moved unretrievably from future through present to past while
she'd listened
* the gigantic room of the past in which someone somewhere had stacked up an advantage, a
headstart, a chance at victory in a game she didn't even know existed yet
* the tiny, impenetrable gleam of the future that would zoom past her as big as life ... and as
sharp as death
Her gut-cramp spread like acrid vapor through her, the exhausted burn of failure torquing every
muscle. Yet, it invoked myriad seconds of experience engendered by that same past. And the
oft-repeated realization that she succeeded only through the cooperation of other people. With an
effort, Phoebe mitigated her despair with effective leadership once again and asked mildly, "What
kind of lag are we talking about?"
He stared blankly back, his mind probably whirring. "Fifteen to twenty seconds." He essayed a
small grin. "A long time." He waved at the assorted information cloaking them. "Might as well be
yesterday from my point-of-view."
Phoebe chose to laugh — a guffaw, really — instead of cry. "Can you do it now? Send image and
location to Harlan as soon as your agents pick out a gangster. I'll come back for the rest of your
report."
"Where are you going?"
Phoebe could offer him a genuine smile now. Progress lifted her obsession's fog of focus. "I've
got to organize Response Teams to bring these gangsters in, so we can start getting some real
answers out of real people."
Kanpa scowled at that, but she touched his lips even as they parted for a protest. "FIFO, Kanpa,"
she said gently. "First, we protect the people of this town, then we'll worry about
elegant solutions."
Phoebe stepped toward the door, her mind already sorting through rosters and schedules. And she
ought to check on Cliff's progress, too, just a comradely can-see between tacticians.
"Don't you want to know who these gangsters are?" Kanpa asked sharply behind her.
Opportunity arced once more through her mind, a blazing misfire short-circuited by betrayal. Dark
folds of obsession blanketed her again. Her gut echoed with more cramping. She didn't bother to
whirl around before snarling, "How could you not tell me that before?"
"I was getting there." Kanpa's voice carried rebuke through his defensiveness.
Phoebe swung her gaze around, but she couldn't find any trace of his body amid the holograms. And
words seemed so inadequate at this point. "You know who these gangsters are?"
"I think so."
Anger, obsession, opportunity, all folded like one large, balloon pricked by techniker braggadocio,
collapsing over her thoughts. "What does that mean?"
"Here." Colors rippled as Kanpa scurried to the third and largest virtual domain, a drape of data
painted in black and white on an odd blue-green background.
"Em-Deh journals everything. Each of us appears in only one identity database at a time, but you
can track back through the transfers using those data journals. When I couldn't clean up the
Rendezvous' database, I—"
"Stop right there!" Between the cramp, her obsession's new guise, and its mists that excluded
other priorities, its old form, Phoebe drove after only relevant data. She'd depended on Kanpa
doing what he'd said he could do. She'd double-checked his commitment last night. She'd expected
his skills to be adequate. Yet here, he glibly noted failure and tried to move on.
Phoebe needed to see Kanpa, his expressions, his body language, so she ordered, "Central!
Lights!" In the abrupt glare of zhuhndí, she demanded, "What do you mean you couldn't clean up
Cliff's database? You said it was trivial."
He floundered, squeaky voice, shapeless gestures. "No, I said it was not trivial, but only
complicated enough to work. That's elegance for you. Advanced enough and it looks like
simplicity.
"So I tried a simple filter that should've cleaned out the nulls. It didn't. They came back,
never went, something, I don't know! So I tried an agent-for-culling. It reported success, but it
really didn't."
"A 'lofty putrid' after all," Phoebe sniped.
Kanpa met her eyes with hurt appeal in his. She just stared back.
He plunged on, "I wrote a purge pixie. It didn't work! By then, I'd wasted so much time,
I gave it up and tried another way. I knew you wanted these gangsters identified, so I went
another way. Which I'm trying to tell you about!"
Phoebe flipped out a hand. "Go ahead."
"Uh, right. Central, my displays." Holograms dropped over them again like fences, colorful, but
fences nonetheless. "Using your imprimatur, I requested journals on all transfers into the
Rendezvous. There were 91,217 of them at the time, more now probably. The Rendezvous just keeps
growing! I got my hands on them just fifteen-kay seconds ago.
"Using them, I traced prior direvnya. Using your imprimatur again, I contacted those Collectives.
Using—"
"Kanpa!"
"Right. I started working on the Em-Deh registration images I'd copied after, uh, getting
requisite permissions, but the agents-for-identification were too slow. Especially after all the
time I'd wasted. Registration images are very dense data-wise.
"Then I thought about using this old clunker—" he tapped the side of his head with an exaggerated
gesture "— which led me to turn the whole problem on its side. It turned out to be relatively
easy to convert both Beobachtung and reg-pix into music, then—"
"Music?" Delight in his wit wriggled past her defenses, set up that phantom caress again.
"More like whale songs, like on Gë, which accounts for the background."
Phoebe inspected the domain that stretched high to low, right to left. The background was indeed
aquamarine, uneven, slowly wavering. Undulating, she guessed, a simulation of underwater ... in
slowframe. Maybe there is some hope for him and colors.
"This is how I do it." Regaining energy, Kanpa stabbed the llevarito at the scene. Below waist
level, three black squares overlay the bluish background.
Another click and sound flowed over them even as a jagged line grew in the leftmost square. Phoebe
searched for a rhythm, finding none. Then, silence; the line froze.
"The Beobachtung image, nine-point-six seconds," Kanpa explained. "I try to retain it as a
gestalt. The scene helps me do that. I've lost it now, but this is just a demo. Now for a
reg-pic."
He pressed a button and another song phrase played. In sync, the right square started its own
graph while the middle one showed a similar trace superimposed on the first sound's chart. Phoebe
could hear a vague likeness, but couldn't tell more than that ... and the pictures didn't help at
all.
"Often, I can move on within a couple of seconds. I can't tell exact matches, but my
approximations are about six seconds faster than the agent's and three times as accurate. That's
where the time savings come. But it still takes time."
"How many?" Phoebe asked quietly.
"Well, I matched my first one using my new technique, you know, a few minutes ago ... when you were
trying to arm-wrestle with me."
Contrite, Phoebe turned her gaze away, but after a second, asked, "So who is it?"
"Pardon?"
"You identified a gangster." Her gut twinged as she refocused. "Who is it?"
"I'm not sure."
Exasperated, Phoebe started, "You just said you're faster and better than the agent and you'd found
somebody."
"Actually, those comparisons came from my prototype work." With a flick, he popped her picture up
on the wall. "Looking for you in Ganj Dareh's database." He leaned into a shaft of white light to
show her a boyish grin.
It didn't work. Phoebe repeated herself grimly, "You identified a gangster."
"I think I did. I have to go back and confirm it. Look at the images myself, let the
agent double-check, that sort of thing, before I can be sure."
Phoebe swung toward the door. Why did I even get involved? Thoughts and feelings washed through
her. A torrent so fast, smells, desires, pictures, needs, touches, fears. She clutched the door
handle to anchor herself against her own confusion. What did I expect? That fucking this
child-man, this techniker, would instill him with my obsession? Make him want this as much as I
do? Well, it didn't.
"I'll know soon," Kanpa called after her.
Priorities lined up in her mind. Direvnya and combine. She had to protect them. Nothing else
mattered. Her gut eased, a reward from her obsession.
Back on track, she didn't look around as she ordered, "First, work on that image-matching you
promised. Connect its results directly to Harlan.
"Next, identify every gangster you've isolated, including the new ones since yesterday. As soon as
you confirm an identity, send it to Harlan. Don't leave this room till you do all of
those.
"Then, go back to the Beobachtung and find more gangsters. Identify each one and let Harlan know.
And keep doing that till I tell you to stop."
"What about — ?"
Phoebe marched out the words, regular, orderly, without emotion. "I'll send in a server with food
and drink. I'll send over a Nurse with fatigue-scrubbers. Get your work done. That's all I
ask."
"You didn't give me enough time," Kanpa complained.
"Join the crowd. Zhuhndí never gives anybody enough time."
Phoebe walked out. She had made some progress. Harlan should be able to arrest a gangster
sometime today, as soon as Kanpa told him where. Yes, that progress felt good in her gut, in her
fog-focused mind. It didn't matter what had happened in her heart.
