The Path of the Four

Ariana stood up, and that might have been too sudden a movement, because Roselle’s hand went to the small, silver laser pistol he wore in a holster on his hip.

“Can I go over to the bar?”

She waited for an answer.

“Wait a minute,” Roselle said. “You want a drink now or something?” He took his hand away from his gun.

“No. I want to explain something.”

“Ariana,” Joe said. “What is this?”

Roselle nodded and said, “Go ahead.”

Ariana eased out from behind the table, moving past Billy.

She ambled over to the bar, moving around some hulking H.S. men.

Behind the bar, she looked around, and then placed a typical-looking silver and black striped A/V cube in front of her.

“This is the recording of the song that was playing when the shooting started.” She stepped away from the audio cube. “Where does the song exist?”

A H.S. man with a slouch and a chin beard took the question.

“What do you mean, ‘Where?’ You just told us it’s right in front of you.”

“No. I just told you that this is the recording of the song that was playing when the shooting started. Listen to all those qualifiers. It’s a recording, of a studio recording from the twentieth century, and it’s this copy. Is the song the digital information on this example of the medium of the audio cube, or is it just the digital information itself? Or is the song the sound waves it put out in this club before the shooting, or the way it vibrated the inner ear of everybody who heard it, or is it anybody’s memory of the song?”

“I hope there’s a point to all this,” Captain Roselle said.

“What’s the current working theory on Brother Chaos, Captain?”

“Miss Orlando, I can’t discuss details of an ongoing investigation.”

“Human? Zah-Gre?” She paused. “Member of another extraterrestrial species?”

Roselle walked over to the bar. He said, “We have a group of investigators that like that last theory, that last thing you said. Their nickname around the office is ‘the Second Contact Gang.’”

“Well, I can’t prove anything of course, Captain Roselle. But I think ‘the Second Contact Gang’ is right.”

“Mine telling me why, Miss Orlando?”

“My pleasure. Science is all about looking for the truth, deciding what the big picture is, and fine-tuning our image of the big picture as we find out more facts. Before First Corridor, Earth’s scientists never considered the possibility of a planet whose only land masses would be five islands on one hemisphere, crowded near the equator, or a species with five genders involved in the reproductive process. Maybe we have to make another adjustment. One way to think of us, think of Humans, is as the electronic-magnetic impulses that are the stuff of our thoughts, or those impulses combined with certain functions in our body chemistry that make up our emotions, and all this played out on the media that are our brains and bodies.” She paused, and hoped this was coming together and making sense. “Maybe this Brother Chaos is some type of pattern of energy that, several times now, played out in the media of that weird, masked image, and on Human technology.”

“Hold up,” Joe said. “You’re saying this character is just pure energy?”

“I’m saying yes and no. Maybe he’s this distinctive pattern of energy, maybe he’s this pattern of energy when played out in the masked image and on our technology. Maybe he’s both.”

Roselle furrowed his heavy eyebrows at Joe, and Ariana sensed his unhappiness at Joe taking over the conversation for a moment.

Roselle asked, “Is that enough of an explanation? Of everything this character can do?”

“No, Captain, it’s not,” Ariana said. “I think, maybe, just like Yamato found shortcuts through space-time, using the shortcut of hyperspace, with the Drive and the Corridors, maybe this ‘Brother Chaos’ thing can do the same stunt, only with more precision and flexibility.”

“That sounds all very scientific, Miss Orlando. But that business about people being chemicals and energy, and the brain and the body as playable media.” He pointed at the cross and pentagram, resting on her chest. “What about the soul?”

“I’m trying to give you a perspective cops can use.”

“Captain,” said the H.S. man with the limp. “Then how do we track this ‘Chaos’ character?”

“I’m not sure. Top priority is this shooter. There’s a connection, sure, but at least we can hunt some clown with a weapon like the Krink-Gaffin Two Thousand.”

Ariana, in a twinkling, thought of another question. “There’s something else I can’t answer,” she said. “Why is Brother Chaos so interested in Earth and Zah-Gre?”

A H.S. man Ariana had never seen before came in through the door to the street.

“Excuse me,” he said. “But there’s a native lying in the street under some type of spell or something. The bodyguard said the name of the one having a fit or whatever is ‘Ab-Druh.’”

Ariana remembered clamoring over the bar, hating the long, awkward dress she wore, the rest of her hair coming undone, ducking between the large, uniformed men who were too slow.

Out on the street, Voh-Heem stood watch over the prone, sleeping, or twitching, or both form of Ab-Druh.

“It’s nothing,” he said to her and the other Humans. “Inner Clan Zah-Gre are sensitive to -- This place had a disruption of--”

Voh-Heem couldn’t find the right words in Human English. Ariana, at last, coaxed out of him (Human Security was useless) that, yes, the rumors were true. The Inner Clan had psychic inclinations. Voh-Heem said it wasn’t just a matter of the violence that had occurred in the Two Worlds Club; something important had happened, and Ab-Druh would meet her in the Rim Village of Kah-Zee, when she had time. When she got there, Ab-Druh would be there waiting.

Three days later Ariana and Ab-Druh stood on a hill. The village of Kah-Zee lay on one side. They stood facing the coastline, on the other side of the hill. Off to their right stood a mountain, towering over the village, and dotted with cave openings.

However, much more interesting was what was on this section of the coastline.

Moving away from the tide, there was a slender stretch of sand, but then, a labyrinth, a maze, about twelve feet high, and half a mile long in all directions. Ariana could look down into the maze and it seemed like the tide had carved it, over endless millennia.

“That’s amazing,” Ariana said. “It’s like the world ocean designed it.”

“Or the One. The Turning.”

“Yes, or God.” She looked at him. “I won’t ask how you knew when I would get time to meet you. I’ll just accept that.”

It was early evening. The fires from the village below were starting and the stars were coming out.

“Good. I couldn’t explain it to you anyway. How are you?”

“Oh, tired. Tense.”

“Well, Ariana, you don’t have to stand -- What’s the Human expression? ‘At attention’?”

She sat on the grassy hilltop. He walked a few feet closer to the village below.

“I was born down there.”

Looking up at the stars, she heard him sit down behind her, his back to the maze.

“Hey.” She lay back, rolling down onto her back, on to the ground. After a few seconds, she pointed up at the sky.

“And I was born out there somewhere.”

“Yes. I think I heard something about that.”

She couldn’t see his smile, but she felt it.

“You,” she said, still looking up at the sky. “You have told me, taught me so much. I should pay you back, somehow.”

“You will. Such is the Turning.”

“And the Greater Turning?” She was referring to the most enigmatic part of Zah-Gre theology. The Greater Turning--some grand, great future endeavor; unknown Zah-Gre hands wrote of it in the Garb Ock and surrounded it with vagueness.

“Perhaps,” is all Ab-Druh said.

“I want to give you something now.”

Both of them let the silence linger.

“Help me understand how the Akira Yamato Drive works, Vur-Zah’s amazing creation.”

“Ab-Druh, lots of times I don’t understand how it works.”

“I bet you explain things well.”

She thought for a moment.

“You get ‘flashlight,’” she said. “Yes?”

“Small object that produces light using Human technology.”

“Yeah. OK. It’s like long stretches of space-time--”

“I’m sorry--‘space-time’?”

This isn’t a physics lecture, moron, Ariana thought.

“It’s like vast stretches of space was, were, whatever, was darkness. I mean, I know a lot of outer space is darkness, but pretend it was only darkness. The Yamato Drive is like a really good flashlight, cutting through the darkness.”

“OK. I think I can see that.” He paused. “Let’s play a game.”

“Do I have to get up for this?”

“It’s a simple game, Ariana. Short. All your Earth religions, in one word.”

“That’s easy. The word is ‘love.’ Now your turn. The faith of Zah-Gre. In one word.”

“The word is ‘trust.’”

She snapped up to a sitting position, and turned her head with such speed to look at him, she hurt her neck.

“‘Trust’?”

“Not the word you expected, I see.”

“Well, no. Zah-Gre seems so loose and open, compared to even the best places on Earth. And religion usually fills up the holes in society, in a culture.”

“Trust, Ariana. Trust. I think you said worship was about looking for truth, more of the truth.”

“I thought you said that.”

“Did I? I don’t remember. Anyway, looking for the truth, there’s always that question. Who do you trust?”

About twenty-four hours later, Joe called her into his office. A large package sat on his desk. The beige square looked like the manufacturer had used one of the newer, more exotic plastics, which people usually reserved for perishable materials.

All of what Joe wore Ariana couldn’t quite concentrate on because Joe wore a tie with five huge pink dots on it against a brown background. Ariana wore khaki pants and a poncho with the decorative trim worn off. A song that Joe told her once the songwriter called “The Idiot Bastard Son” played. The songwriter had been somebody named Frank -- Zapata? Zazu? -- The song played on Joe’s office sound system, but Joe had the volume down.

“First, I did make a buddy on Human Security. Not Roselle, God knows. But my new little friend says H.S. turned up all zeroes on the phrase ‘Paladins of the Promise.’”

Ariana raised a quick eyebrow on that.

“Second, sit down and get comfortable. You’re going to be here for a while.”

Ariana sat.

Joe leaned back in his chair.

“The Damrosch Helix. You’ve heard of it?”

“Yeah, but I’ve heard of Atlantis and the Tooth Fairy also. Damrosch claims he can make a microcosmic, functional model of Earth’s Meta-Net.” The Meta-Net was the successor to the Internet. It had some rough equivalency to an artificial intelligence program, like Babe.

“Carne-Tischler hired Damrosch a year and half ago.” Joe tapped the package on his desk. “Damrosch did it, and this is the test model.”

“You’re kidding! Well, crack it out and let’s fire this baby up!”

“Whoa, slow down. There are a couple of things you need to know before. First, this is only a model of the Meta-Net as of a week ago.”

“That’s obvious. The Meta-Net grows one percent every day.”

“Second, to get around some technical problems, Damrosch took some radical steps. The media storing the data is unstable.”

“Unstable, how? Christ, Joe. This thing isn’t going to blow up on us, is it?”

“No, but the gases and liquids storing the data will break down and become useless, an hour after I open this box here. Actually, the memo said fifty-eight minutes.”

“Then what are we supposed to do with this thing?”

“We take it on a test run, see what it can do, write up a report and send it back to Damrosch, so he can, we hope, lick the technical problems.” Joe paused. “And when I say ‘we,’ I mean ‘you.’ You are, by far, the most qualified to evaluate this sucker.”

Joe got up and had her sit in his chair, right in front of the package.

“I don’t want you disturbed, at all, when you do this. I won’t tell you how to best check this thing and see what it can do. You know better than me.”

Joe stood on the other side of his desk, his fingers posed over the large package’s security access keyboard.

“Ready?”

“I’m wondering how Edison felt before he tried the telephone, or the Wright Brothers before they--”

“Answer the question, lady.”

“Yeah. I’m ready.”

“OK.”

Joe punched in the eight-digit access code. As the package started to open, Joe headed to the open doorway.

“Babe, level five security lock, one hour, this room, on my mark.”

Joe stepped through his doorway.

“Now, Babe.”

Joe looked at Ariana as the two halves of silver door with SECURITY painted on it in black letters, four letters on each half, slid close and the light in the office took on an orange hinge and a quiet hum one could not quite perceive started.

“Good luck, Ariana.”

“Thanks, Joe.”

Ariana’s attention barely took Joe’s good wishes in because the package had stopped unfolding itself and the test model of the Damrosch Helix laid revealed before her.

Imagine something shaped like the classic idea of a diamond, only about the size of a large suitcase. Only it’s not diamond, but looked more like a synthesis of glass and plastic, but it was clear and yellow, blue, red, and green gases and liquids flowed and floated and swirled inside the thing that was not a diamond. The keyboard was white, and the video-frame beige, shaped like the keyboard, only a little larger. On the keyboard, a tiny red light glowed next to the word “POWER.” The damn thing had booted itself up.

How should she start? She had to make a decision, fast.

The shape of most of the Damrosch Helix made her think of the old comic book superhero who could change a piece of coal into a cut diamond, just by applying superhuman pressure with his hands. She thought about the tricks of the early twentieth-century escape artist, Houdini, and the pressures he must have felt for each stunt. She thought about how some breed of birds taught their children to fly for the first time by tossing them out of a nest resting on a branch hundreds of feet in the air. The most amazing things can happen under pressure.

H.S. turned up all zeroes on the phrase “Paladins of the Promise.”

Uh-huh. The Tooth Fairy is going to take me on a tour of Atlantis.

Whom do you trust?

Joe, for one. Despite anything that might happen. Maybe it was just stupid, blind instinct, maybe it was her belief that maybe he used up all his allotted hours as scoundrel back when he was a hard case for the Universal Resistance League.

As far as trusting any other Human she had met in the recent past –

She let Joe’s office sound system play on. During this time in Joe’s office, she heard songs about boys, and girls, and dead teenagers, and parents who didn’t understand, and people all coming together for groovy love and revolution, and cops that needed killing, and somewhere in there, the system circled back to being about boys and girls, but maybe that was a new set of songs.

Ariana got to work on the keyboard:

UNIVERSAL SEARCH--“PALADINS OF THE PROMISE.”

The answer came back in a few seconds, the words spilling across the screen.

“SYSTEM SENSES SECURITY LOCK.”

Senses security lock? That wasn’t coming up zeroes!

NEXT ACTION?

Ariana typed.

PROBE FOR BREECH IN SECURITY LOCK INTEGRITY.

A response took a little longer this time:

PERSON/PERSONS UNKNOWN CONSTRUCTED SECURITY LOCK INTERNATIONALLY. ENCRYPTION OF COMMUNICATIONS NECESSARY FOR EARTH/GLOBAL CONSTRUCTION NOT ONE HUNDRED PERCENT BECAUSE ENCRYPTION SOFTWARE JUGGLING MORE THAN A DOZEN LANGUAGES.

Ariana was typing her next query even before the Damrosch Helix was done with the reply.

“NOT 100%” MEANS WHAT?

The response was immediate: 99.2684%.

Ariana’s response to that was faster.

ENGLISH TRANSLATION OF ANY WORDS, PHRASES IN REMAINING POINT SEVEN THREE ONE SIX PERCENT.

PROBING -- SECONDARY LOCK ON THIS MATERIAL. PASSWORD IN PLACE.

Damn it!

There were, however, certain exotic techniques for getting by an obstacle like this. It didn’t involve understanding computer science so much as it involved knowing some underground psychological tricks. Folks in the “spacejacks” subculture knew that people often ran in patterns when it came to picking certain computer code words. Standard pet names, birth months, anniversary months, names of favorite TV and film characters, favorite sports teams -- Once a “spacejack’ ’puter operator asked a system the right question, in the right order, the lines of probability and the code word selector would have, for example, been more likely to have picked a common girl’s name rather than the name of a western city in the United States.

There were other obstacles in her way as well, and getting around them meant accessing the raw programming language of web distractors, sub-digital firewalls, auto-gerards, and other security measures, accessing that language and rewriting a few key lines before still more further security measures kicked in. As an incidental benefit, Ariana did get to see what the Damrosch Helix was like, in actual operation.

As the test hour neared its end, Ariana’s prize was another mysterious phrase to accompany “The Paladins of the Promise”:

THE ALPHA COVENANT.

Joe’s office sound system started to play a tune had heard in this same room, weeks ago:

“Sympathy for the Devil.”