Звезда Пандоры

“Hum, well, it might be an attempted blackmail, someone looking for something incriminating. You’d be surprised what stays in an array’s transit memory cache, stuff from years ago. Whoever they are, they’ve got all that now.”

“I don’t have anything incriminating to keep. I mean, bills paid late, some traffic tickets when I was driving on manual—who doesn’t?”

“Nonetheless, sir, you are in the public eye now. It might be an idea to think about extra security, and you certainly ought to change all your access patterns after this.”

“Of course, yes.”

“We’ll notify the local patrol car,” Constable Brampton said. “They’ll include you on their watch detail in future.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re sure there’s nothing else missing?”

“No. I can’t see anything.”

“We’ll sweep for DNA fragments, of course, and try and trace the car. But it looks like a professional job. Chances are, if there’s nothing to worry about in the array memory, then there won’t be any follow-up.”

EIGHT

After the Commonwealth ExoProtectorate Council finished with its unanimous vote to send a starship to the Dyson Pair, Ozzie Fernandez Isaac excused himself and took the elevator down to the lobby. Outside, it was warm for spring, with just some slim banks of dirty snow lingering in the gutters where the civicservicebots had pushed it. He started down Fifth Avenue, one of a handful of people to be using the broad sidewalk. There were none of the street vendors he could remember from even a couple of centuries ago: the burger stands on every intersection, T-shirt sellers, stalls with quasi-legal software fixes, sensepimps with pornomemories. That would be too untidy now, too low-down for the city and its cultured inhabitants. These days quaint booths and boutiques occupied the ground floor of every skyscraper, offering quirky objects imported from every planet in the Commonwealth—all so strangely unappealing. It was all a sad decline, as far as Ozzie was concerned. You couldn’t sanitize a great city like New York without losing its original quality, the dynamism and grubby edges that made it an exciting vibrant place to live. Despite the buildings, which still impressed him, it was becoming just another suburb of Earth. Its manufacturing industry had long since moved off-planet, leaving only the research and design consortiums that remained on the cutting edge, staffed by billionaire partners. The advertising agencies remained along with media company headquarters; there were even still some artists down in SoHo, though Ozzie regarded them as talentless dinosaurs. It was the finance sector and government offices that dominated the employment market, for those who had to work. Many didn’t, having their idle lives taken care of by the innumerable supply and service companies that encircled Manhattan, all employing offworlders on medium-term visas.

Visits like this reminded Ozzie why he so rarely came back to the world of his birth these days. When he looked up, there was a jagged strip of cool-steel sky a long way above him, pushed away by the grand towers. Even in midsummer, the sun was a near stranger to the ground in this part of town, while today the trees and shrubs planted in the expensive plazas all had artificial lighting to help them grow.

Glancing down the impressive vertical canyon at one of the intersections, he saw the ancient Chrysler Building secure inside its glass cage, protected from the elements. “And which of us is going to outlast the other?” he asked it quietly.

The cars and cabs and trucks were sliding past him on the road, their axle motors making almost no noise at all. People in thick coats or black-tinted organic filament ponchos hurried past, not even looking at him. They were almost all adults. As far as he could see up and down Fifth Avenue, there were no more than three or four kids under ten years old. That was what he missed most of all; and Earth’s birth rate was still declining year after year as the rich sophisticates who populated the planet found other things to spend their time and money on.

There was nothing for him here anymore, he decided morosely, nothing of interest, nothing of value. He stepped back toward the base of the nearest tower and told his e-butler to give him a link to his home’s RI. Once the RI was on-line he gave it his exact coordinates. A circular wormhole opened behind him, expanding out to two meters in diameter, and he took a step backward through the neutral gray curtain of the force field. The wormhole closed.