FIFTEEN

Thistledown City

The tracer transferred itself to Olmy's library terminal and signaled with the black and white pict of a grinning terrier that it had completed its search. Olmy switched on blowers to collect the remnants of a meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit, pushed himself off the couch and stood before the teardrop terminal, concentrating on the tracer's picted condensation of its findings.

No relevant file sources in Axis Euclid or Thoreau or copies of library records of Nader and Central City. AH file sources classified in Thistledown libraries; classification limit has expired, but no records of access to files since the Sundering. Last access-52 years remote from Axis City, no identification, but likely from noncorporeal in city memory. Thirty-two files containing references to Fifth Chamber Repository.

By law, all security classifications in libraries and city memory storage were voided after one hundred years without application and approval for renewal. Olmy inquired of the tracer how many applications for extension had been made on the files. The tracer replied Four. The files were all' older than four hundred years.

"Records of file authors," he requested. AH author records deleted.

That was highly unusual. Only a president or presiding minister could approve of deletion of authors or originators from file records in libraries Page 157

or city memory storage; and even then, only for the most pressing reasons.

Anonymity was not an approved concept in Hexamon history; too many of the Death's perpetrators had hidden themselves away from responsibility before and after the holocaust.

88 GREG BEAR

"Description of files."

,4ll are brief reports, in words only.

The time had come. Olmy was surprised to realize his reluctance. The truth might be worse than what he had imagined.

"Show me the files in chronological order," he said.

It was worse.

When he had finished and stored all the files in implant memory to mull over at leisure, he gave the tracer its reward--the free run of a simulated grassy field on Earth and released the meager cloud of pseudo-Talsit into the room again.

His decision was made infinitely more difficult by what the tracer had retrieved.

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Reading between the lines--the whole story was by no means con-mined in the files, which were adjunct files only, bare scraps left over after some hasty and none-too-thorough purge---Olmy put together his half-educated surmise.

A living Jart had been captured some five centuries before, under what circumstances there was no knowing. It had died before being returned to Thistledown and its body had been preserved after its mentality was crudely downloaded. Not knowing Jart psychology or physiology, the downloading had been only partly successful. How integrated the Jart mentality was, how true to its original, not even its captors had known.

They had even suspected the body; several researchers felt that Jarts, like humans, could adapt their biological forms and even their genetic makeup to fit the circumstances. Hence, the Jart's physiology had been studied, but the studies were inconclusive; they had not been passed on to military commanders or other researchers.

At first, the investigations into the downloaded mentality had conducted in secure but relatively open situations, with perhaps ten or fifteen individual researchers. Nine had died in the process, two irretrievably their implants hopelessly scrambled. Direct or indirect mental links with the downloaded personality had been forbidden at that point. Research, so encumbered, came almost to a halt.

Even then, Olmy knew, indirect examination of mentalities had been a Page 159

highly developed art. He found it difficult to believe that a Jart, fragmented or whole, could injure investigators in such circumstances. And yet, Beni had been killed and Mar Kellen damaged . .

Olmy controlled another hormonal surge. Were he not so altered and augmented, the surge would indicate a condition called fear.

For centuries, there had been a law in cybernetic research: "For any program, there is a system such that the program cannot not know its