Doyle Phoebe Heejanus
The door to Swamp #3 was closed. Phoebe fixed that. Time pressed on her as usual. A different
urgency played tail-twister — find out what had happened to Cliff — but the twinge in her tender
gut seemed no different.
Corridor light intruded delicately into the room. An ovoid hologram presented a frame full of
basic colors for the dervish who played inside. Odors drifted out, qahwah, nervous sweat, even a
touch of ozone, but Kanpa, whirling through his duties, didn't seem to notice.
His devotion touched her, his intensity, his intelligence, the sweet fervishness of his love-making
— a gut-inverting cramp snapped that line of thought. Some other time. I do hope we get that
time. Still prodding, obsession pushed her through the doorway, but she hesitated, borrowing a
moment from it to watch for a good time to interrupt. No use repeating their previous scuffle.
Kanpa consulted a domain apparently painted on the apparently curved wall. Stretching out a hand
to guide his concentration, he checked its status. A burst of red told its story with black text,
then stretched out with a steady lurching of pink that showed progress, then vanished on
completion. The virtual agent then pushed that bit of report up, scrolling previous bits along the
ceiling, and repeated its story with different data.
Just as he nodded acknowledgment of this information, the panel convulsed under his ticking
finger. For a moment, the domain vanished, leaving a shadowy cavity in the room's surface. In a
second or two, the display returned, but the stripes of accomplishment were twisted. The interface
tried again and formed a cascade of red splotches; however, the bottom one seemed stalled. Only
the data header showed, barely smudged with pink.
Even down here! Phoebe lamented. She'd already lost most of the afternoon to a thrashing Em-Deh,
sporadically interrupting every data flow her combine used. Voice communications, alarms, reports,
everything, fell prey to the unpredictable thrashing within cyberspace. Incidents stretched.
Victims suffered longer. Was Gastarbeiterbande as bothered as the anshin? Would she never find
them, hiding like viruses in her town? Were they responsible for this calamity also?
She'd hoped that Kanpa's skills and his more fundamental grasp of the mechanisms would've allowed
him to meet the goals she'd demanded of him. Gut it! she started, but her own gut flared in
reaction, stifling even this habitual release of stress.
Still unaware of her presence, Kanpa froze with inspection of the glitch, then slumped. "Central,
what happened to Swamp-domain three-dash-one?"
Phoebe noticed the foilscreen by her right shoulder respond with a series of diagnostic messages.
"Talk to me, Central!" Kanpa hollered.
"Lattice primitive, receiving, in-house, time out. Retry initiated, count now 12. Rollback
expected. Primitive restart recommended." The grainy nasal tones came from the ceiling.
"Abort retry!" Kanpa straightened his back with effort. "Rollback transaction. Abort receiving
primitive and restart. Restart transaction."
"Acknowledged. Executing."
The active splotch quivered, then settled down. A pink stripe emerged from it, spread across the
panel, then snapped away. The line slipped gracefully upward and a new splotch appeared. Things
had returned to normal.
"Greasy grimy gopher guts," Kanpa muttered.
Unexpected, those words, carrying his soulful frustration into the open, stirred a phantom caress.
Her nape pricked with the touch, but she twitched it away. Instead, she barked, "What progress?"
Confirm the bad news.
Kanpa startled, a violent spasm that quickly fell away. When he jerked around to face her, he
showed only exhaustion.
"Not a whole greasy lot." The reborn slimeball waved haphazardly at his work. "Your greasy
village — the virtual part of it, I mean — has been rolling like a stormwave. Nearly made me
sick." He visibly summoned strength for a positive spin on that bad news. "But I stuck with it,
after building a levy — to continue the metaphor — of checkpoints, rollbacks, and proctor
daemons. Do you want progress as a narrative or a basic count?"
"I can't find Cliff." That seemed more important now.
"Pardon?"
She copied his wave at the virtual world around them. "I've been fighting this upstairs, too, so
involved that I just now got around to checking with Cliff on his progress against
Gastarbeiterbande. No answer, even on Auto-Locate."
That sharpened Kanpa's attention. "That's rude."
"That's not Cliff," Phoebe corrected. "Even if tactician patterns didn't demand Auto-Locate, he
specifically promised me he'd stay in touch as long as the Rendezvous remained in town."
"This, uh, disturbance get in the way?"
"Not every time I try, even when it's calm. Something's wrong."
"I hope not. Cliff's an ante-deluvian rock."
"What does that mean?"
"He was one of the few who survived when Har Norma surged to the top of the consortium. He was
tactician on Byukan-Hamil's first continent-wide contract. He—"
"Tell me on the way."
"Where?"
"To find out what happened to Cliff."
"No, I've got work to do."
Phoebe had marshalled reasons to support the instincts that demanded Kanpa's presence. No one else
to know about Bande Gastarbeiter till she could prove they existed. A gleest in Cliff's woodpile
meant she needed techniker help. Even a sliver of just liking to have him around her.
But she couldn't spare the words. Not with seconds already wasted. Not with obsession slowly
squeezing her gut. Certainly, not with the memory of their last meeting hanging over them, her
demands, her tone, her apparent disdain.
She ground out two words: "Let's go."
Kanpa's brows lowered over eyes suddenly dry and bright. Angrily, he shot past her and led the way
to the roof.
#
Phoebe took the lead as they marched out of the evening into the building documented to contain
Cliff's office. It echoed with abandonment, reeked of neglect, shied from their inspection with
reluctant lights.
Cliff had awakened many buildings like this. Why did he keep his office in this one, stuck on a
path away from where zhuhndí had taken the Rendezvous? Loyalty? Superstition? Too busy working
elsewhere? A pool of quiet to hide and think in? All of the above, Phoebe decided as she stepped
up to the cluttered alcove reputed to hold his stuff.
She spotted Cliff's workstation in a puddle of food wrappers and infoplates, signs of recent
habitation. With a sharp gesture, she sent Kanpa toward it. He went, granting her no words in the
process, aping the silence in her patrolcraft as she'd flown it here.
Flying without Central's help — impossible through the flakey Em-Deh — definitely kept her busy.
Not only did she have to attend to the craft's needs — with the help of its automata, of course —
but she had to navigate, through a very dark night yet. But not too busy to talk if she'd wanted
to — and she hadn't. Not there in the intimate dark. How could she possibly make him understand
how she treated him? She could barely make herself understand it.
Phoebe kept looking around. Stacks of boxes squatted under drifts of ceiling plaster. A desk
peeked from this overlay of hurry and higher priorities. Shelves jutted with abrupt emptiness.
Nothing challenged the pattern she'd assumed outside. Nothing offered a place to start following
Cliff on the path that led to his disappearance.
"I'm no gleest!"
Phoebe turned to see Kanpa poking at Cliff's keyspace with a limp finger. The foilscreen showed
gray fuzz except for the default connection panel asking for fiducia.
"What does that mean?" she asked.
He wrenched himself upright and tossed a glare in her direction before marching out of the alcove.
From the lobby, he addressed her with patience apparently reserved for automata — and obtuse
tacticians.
"It means I can't break into his 'station, and a break-in is required. He uses touch-fiducia. The
'station needs to taste Cliff, just Cliff, nobody but Cliff, before it will become his private
entrance. Too bad you don't have a body; you could've brought his finger along."
"Would that work?" Anything, including corpse mutilation, to get past this void. First, though,
they'd have to find it.
"I believe you're serious!" he shouted. Sending her a tired glare, he added, "Yeah, it would work
if it were fresh enough. But we don't have a finger or anything else, do we? Are you sure we
should be doing this?"
Phoebe looked past the throbbing in her gut at the cluster of facts and suppositions about
Gastarbeiterbande they'd been working off for the last day. Had Cliff scoffed at their flimsiness
and plunged back into working on the Rendezvous? No, because then someone would know where he is.
He'd be flashing Auto-Locate so loud we could see him from orbit. A surge of dread, more intuition
than cognition, pushed all doubt away.
"I'm sure," she said.
Kanpa flapped his arms in disgust, but turned the gesture into a thinking circle, paced tightly in
the middle of the lobby. "Perhaps if I could get tactical access to the near-lattice."
"Call somebody!"
"Who?"
"His direct reports. The combine with the maintenance contract for this building. Our
Em-Deh combine. Jul Streicher himself! Call somebody!"
Kanpa palmed his llevar. "If I can get through," he muttered and sank his attention into
the device.
Phoebe resumed her scan of Cliff's office, walking slowly this time to stir different reactions to
it. She noticed a smear of clean on the floor behind the workstation. It led her to a line of
boxes sporting streaks of plaster dust instead of drifts. Shoved aside by Cliff in a hurry to find
something? Or tired of their getting in his way? That worked: tired, working late last night,
impatient with frustration. But would he have set them straight like that? Maybe, but then he'd
probably have finished the job and pushed them all the way against the wall.
Her gut tweaked her, dread more than obsession, so she hurried. Shadows crammed into the low
channel behind the boxes, though the scarce light did catch on a streak of color. Phoebe snatched
a torch from her belt and fixed that problem.
In the fuzzy brightness of sidewalk chalk, Cliff had written on the sides of boxes, "The gangsters
work out of Rendezvous buildings at these locations:" The following list matched coordinates and
enrollment counts with names, Tiananmen, Sand Creek, Tuol Sleng, Deir ez-Zor, Broken Glass.
Then, "Tactician for these seminars, and no more: Ges Lugar Sailie." A flash of pale skin, blond
hair, and glib words came to Phoebe.
Finally, at the bottom, "Phoebe, tell Trina I love her."
Tears welled in Phoebe's eyes. She let them break free and stream down her cheeks. Cliff had been
bright, compassionate, insightful, but above all, well-grounded in the vagaries of zhuhndí, and he
did his best to keep it from defeating him and those he cared for. Phoebe would miss that.
In the meantime, she would not let his sacrifice go to waste. "Kanpa!"
"I'm talking here!" he hollered back.
"We don't need that anymore. I found what we're looking for."
A moment later, Kanpa touched her arm. "What?"
He stared at her tear-washed face with such blatant concern that Phoebe just had to smile. Then
she handed him the torch, stepped aside, and waved at the message on the boxes.
"Let's go get 'em," Kanpa snarled a moment later.
"Not just yet." Phoebe stared blindly across the office. Instead, she juggled bodies — hers and
theirs — locations, and times into a rough set of tactics.
"Why not?"
She looked over. "We want to take Gastarbeiterbande in one fell swoop, including their boss
Sailie. Leave no stragglers to hunt down through the population. Even then, they out-number us.
We need surprise, we need riot-tek — what I wouldn't give for working dreamsticks — and we need
coordination, lots and lots of coordination."
"The Em-Deh—"
"Yes, I know. I've got to find a workaround tonight."
Kanpa frowned as ideas seemed to blossom in his mind. "Possibly. I could—"
Phoebe touched her lips with a finger, shushing him with a tiny smile to ease the override. "My
toadstools can work on that. I want you to tell me when they've collected back in their roosts."
"Watch the buildings? Sit on benches outside the places and match faces to regpix?"
Phoebe gave her head one fierce shake. "How do you think Cliff got his brains released?"
Kanpa sagged. "How do you know that?"
"I don't, but if it wasn't that, it was something else. He's not coming back from whatever he
thought he had to do before telling me what he'd found out."
"What could be important enough to get killed over?"
Once again, just like last night, Phoebe connected with Cliff, tactician to tactician. The same
pride and determination that made them both good would send them both down the same path here,
fixing whatever they'd messed up. In some ways, the realization made the loss easier. zhuhndí had
not duped Cliff. He'd met it straight-on, eyes wide open to possibilities, hence his message
here. Hidden, in case he came back. Available, in case he didn't.
"It's a tactician thing." Phoebe pressed on, "What about Beobachtung? Can you watch through
that?"
Fascination burned again in his techniker eyes. "If we connect into its near-lattice, we should be
able to monitor the direct feeds."
"Who does that?"
"It's a continental contract. I've met the tactician at consortium seminars on policyware. It's
all automatic locally, of course. No one's here."
"Getting a message out to them would be tough, right?"
Kanpa nodded. "Couldn't count on it getting out soon, nor getting an answer back reliably. I
could try manually selecting the routes. Try lots of different paths. Maybe some are more
reliable than others."
"And then?"
"Baru's a reasonable sort ... for a lofty putrid. If I invoke anshin priority, I can probably get
him to exceed his contract's scope, give me fiducia to link in."
Phoebe released her legs. They took her out of Cliff's office. She stopped and pinned Kanpa with
one more look. "Let me know when you start surveillance."
His face blanked. "What about my, the agents, Swamp #3?"
"Don't need that anymore."
"My work! How can you just throw away all that beautiful work?"
Phoebe's gut rumbled with a cascade of twinges. "Do you want to lock up these gangsters?" She
swept the air between them with a claw-hand. The gesture promised them both some relief.
"Hai!" The most definite Yes of all human languages.
"Then watch these gangsters for me. Start as soon as you can."
"Hai." Disappointed, but agreeable. "Are his counts accurate?"
"Don't trust them. Get the Rendezvous to tell you who worked out of those buildings. Match them
to detentions, Exiles. We've probably processed a few gangsters unknowingly along the way." She
gave a sour grin. "If you find any still lying in our cells, tell Harlan. Oh,yeah, match against
deaths, too."
"Hai." Kanpa stretched himself with a deep breath. "How soon is 'soon?'"
Planning action always improved Phoebe's mood. And here and now, it even pleased her obsession.
Her gut uncoiled, letting her think more clearly. "Is there any way to tell the gangster-related
Incidents from the ..." Had Bande Gastarbeiter been responsible for all Incidents? Or had
they just stirred the pot and the Collective had done the rest? Suddenly, everything she thought
she knew about the past twenty days collapsed into random bits. No patterns remained. Just the
work to figure new ones.
"What do you think?" she whispered in her confusion.
Kanpa gazed back, his dark eyes suddenly soft and glistening.
A knot in Phoebe's chest eased. Swamped by obsession as it twisted her gut, she had seldom
acknowledged the worry that clutched her heart, a worry that relaxed now with the concern she saw
in Kanpa now.
"Surely, these gangsters come together on occasion," he began quietly. "They've got tacticians,
too, right?" That lopsided grin hitched up one cheek.
Phoebe nodded. Teasing is a form of affection, right? She'd never liked it before. Now it awoke
that phantom caress.
"Tacticians like control. Nature of the beast. And gangsters probably need more control than
other people, such as Technikers, like me, or constables or Nurses. So the gangsters meet often.
Can-feels for security reasons." He grinned suddenly and waved at the boxes beside them. "In
those buildings!"
"Every morning? Early?"
"Then we can sweep them up first thing tomorrow!" Kanpa crowed.
"No."
Kanpa jerked from the sudden stop.
Phoebe regretted that, but her gut dominated her heart once more. "We have to be sure,
Kanpa. Guesses, even insightful ones, don't make us sure. Data makes us sure.
"Be ready by dawn, then. Account for the gangsters leaving. Account for them coming back." She
sighed to squelch another guess, but mentioned it anyway, "They don't have any other place to go
between, uh, missions, so they will be coming back. Maybe. Probably. When every one who left
returns, tell me, and then we'll pounce." She swept the air between them again and felt
better. "When we're sure. O.K.?"
Kanpa let his frustration show, twisting cheeks and lips.
Too quick to stop herself, Phoebe stepped up to that cute mug and planted a kiss on it. Reaction
set in — a gut full of panic, a heart perked with cheer — and she spun away. "Go," she ordered.
"Let's get this done."
"Yessir." Probably grinning behind the word.
When she looked around, he'd darted from the office into the lobby. Slowly, she followed him out
of the building, already thinking about everything else she had to arrange so his work wouldn't be
wasted.
Can we do it again? Can we rise once more above fatigue and frustration? How many times has it
been?
Phoebe dredged her memory for life before the Rendezvous. No, before competition reared
its exotic head. Twenty, no, twenty-two days ago. It all seemed so fuzzy, then a picture
of Za Leez bitching about budgets broke through. That last will-see before Gatogrebok threw in
their intent to bid on her contract, a rock that started an avalanche that now threatened to bury
Phoebe — and Ganj Dareh along with it.
Even back then, we were barely holding our own against karoshi. The demands-of-the-job nearly
always exceeded our capacity, but we got the job done despite that — most of the time — though
the Collective didn't seem to care for what we did very much. She tossed that regret at Leez's
memory and it vanished ... to be replaced by Har Norma.
We shifted patterns for a competition that's no longer plug-and-play. Worked longer. Did a bit
less for the customer, a bit more to save our jobs. Only to have Har Norma drop the Rendezvous of
Futures in our laps!
Gastarbeiter appeared, first a trickle, then a rush, now a constant cascade arriving at the drome.
We reconfigured once more. Worked even longer. Took even more shortcuts trying to cover more
ground. Despite that, disaster crept up around us. Or was it because of our shortcuts?
Phoebe lurched with fear. We couldn't have done any more ... but we did, we have. So we should
have done more in the beginning, been smarter, faster —
With a roar, obsession rumbled out of her gut. Wordless, flawless, the swarm of obligation blocked
the distorted clarity of hindsight and rubbed away her doubts.
Refocused, sure of herself again, Phoebe saw Die Gastarbeitern as a constant stream of pebbles
dumped on her direvnya by an entire continent. Thrown together, einheimischer and Gast
alike boiled into violence that rolled across Ganj Dareh in waves that rebounded within the
direvnya's banks, criss-crossing and twisting everyone tighter and tighter.
After that, she remembered, the only constant was change. Work-time doubled, even tripled.
Reserves and expanded recruiting helped, but then demand surged ahead of our supply once more,
especially when our dreamsticks failed. We adjusted ... and adjusted ... and adjusted.
Phoebe stared into the vast dark that surrounded her. Ganj Dareh filled it, and her people worked
to keep it safe. They worked now like they never worked before. And they will continue to work.
We'll find a way. I'll find a way.
