"Rusch,_Kristine_Kathryn_-_The_Retrieval_Artist" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rusch Kristine Kathryn)

"How long will this investigation of me take?"
"I have no idea," I said. "It depends on how much you're hiding."
IV
Clients never tell the truth. No matter how much I instruct them to, they never do. It seems to be human nature to lie about something, even when it's something small. I had a hunch, given Anetka Sobol's background, she had lied about a lot. The catch was to find out how much of what she had lied about was relevant to the job she had hired me for. Finding out required research.
I do a lot of my research through public accounts, using fake ID. It is precautionary, particularly in the beginning, because so many cases don't pan out. If a Disappeared still has a Tracker after her, repeated searches from me will be flagged. Searches from public accounts -- especially different public accounts -- will not. Often the Disappeared are already famous or become famous when they vanish, and are often the subject of anything from vidspec to school reports.
My favorite search site is a bar not too far from my office. I love the place because it serves some of the best food in Armstrong, in some of the largest quantities. The large quantities are required, given the place's name. The Brownie Bar serves the only marijuana in the area, baked into specially marked goods, particularly the aforementioned brownies. Imbibers get the munchies, and proceed to spend hundreds of credits on food. The place turns quite a profit, and it's also comfortable; marijuana users seem to like their creature comforts more than most other recreational drug types.
Recreational drugs are legal on the Moon, as are most things. The first settlers came in search of something they called "freedom from oppression" which usually meant freedom to pursue an alternative lifestyle. Some of those lifestyles have since become illegal or simply died out, but others remain. The only illegal drugs these days, at least in Armstrong, are those that interfere with the free flow of air. Everything from nicotine to opium is legal -- as long as its user doesn't smoke it.
The Brownie Bar caters to the casual user as well as the hard-core and, unlike some drug bars, doesn't mind the non-user customer. The interior is large with several sections. One section, the party wing, favors the bigger groups, the ones who usually arrive in numbers larger than ten, spend hours eating and giggling, and often get quite obnoxiously wacky. In the main section, soft booths with tables shield clients from each other. Usually the people sitting there are couples or groups of four. If one group gets particularly loud, a curtain drops over the open section of the booth, and their riotous laughter fades to nearly nothing.
My section caters to the hard core, who sometimes stop for a quick fix in the middle of the business day, or who like a brownie before dinner to calm the stress of a hectic afternoon. Many of these people have only one, and continue work while they're sitting at their solitary tables. It's quiet as a church in this section, and many of the patrons are plugged into the client ports that allow them access to the Net.
The access ports are free, but the information is not. Particular servers charge by the hour in the public areas, but have the benefit of allowing me to troll using the server or the bar's identicodes. I like that; it usually makes my preliminary searches impossible to trace.
That afternoon, I took my usual table in the very back. It's small, made of high-grade plastic designed to look like wood -- and it fools most people. It never fooled me, partly because I knew the Brownie Bar couldn't afford to import, and partly because I knew they'd never risk something that valuable on a restaurant designed for stoners. I sat cross-legged on the thick pillow on the floor, ordered some turkey stew -- made here with real meat -- and plugged in.
The screen was tabletop and had a keyboard so that the user could have complete privacy. I'd heard other patrons complain that using the Brownie Bar's system required them to read, but it was one of the features I liked.
I started with Anetka and decided to work my way backwards through the Sobol family. I found her quickly enough; her life was well covered by the tabs, which made no mention of her clone status. She was twenty-seven, ten to twelve years older than she looked. She'd apparently had those youthful looks placed in stasis surgically. She'd look girlish until she died.
Another good fact to know. If there was an Original, she might not look like Anetka. Not any more.
Anetka had been working in her father's corporation since she was twelve. Her IQ was off the charts -- surgically enhanced as well, at least according to most of the vidspec programs -- and she breezed through Harvard and then Cambridge. She did postdoc work at the Interstellar Business School in Islamabad, and was out of school by the time she was twenty-five. For the last two years, she'd been on the corporate fast track, starting in lower management and working her way to the top of the corporate ladder.
She was, according to the latest feeds, her father's main assistant.
So I had already found Possible Lie Number One: She wasn't here for herself. She was, as I had suspected, a front for her father. Not to find the wife, but to find the real heir.
I wasn't sure how I'd feel if that were true. I needed to find out if, indeed, the Original was the one who'd inherit. If she wasn't, I wouldn't take the case. There'd be no point.
But I wasn't ready to make judgements yet. I had a long way to go. I looked up Anetka's father and discovered that Carson Sobol had never remarried, although he'd been seen with a bevy of beautiful women over the years. All were close to his age. He never dated women younger than he was. Most had their own fortunes, and many their own companies. He spent several years as the companion to an acclaimed Broadway actress, even funding some of her more famous plays. That relationship, like the others, had ended amicably.
Which led to Possible Lie Number Two: a man who terrorized his wife so badly that she had to run away from him also terrorized his later girlfriends. And while a man could keep something like that quiet for a few years, eventually the pattern would become evident. Eventually one of the women would talk.
There was no evidence of terrorizing in the stuff I found. Perhaps the incidents weren't reported. Or perhaps there was nothing to report. I would vote for the latter. It seemed, from the vidspec I'd read, everyone knew that the wife had left him because of his cruelty. My experience with vidspec reporters made me confident that they'd be on the lookout for more proof of Carson Sobol's nasty character. And if they found it, they'd report it.
No one had.
I didn't know if that meant Sobol had learned his lesson when the wife ran off, or perhaps Sobol had learned that mistreatment of women was bad for business. I couldn't believe that a man could terrify everyone into silence. If that were his methodology, there would be a few leaks that were quickly hushed up, and one or two dead bodies floating around -- bodies belonging to folks who hadn't listened. Also, there would be rumors, and there were none.
Granted, I was making assumptions on a very small amount of information. Most of the reports I found about Sobol weren't about his family or his love life, but about the Third Dynasty as it expanded in that period to new worlds, places that human businesses had never been before.
The Third Dynasty had been the first to do business with the Fuetrer, the HDs, and the chichers. It opened plants on Korsve, then closed them when it realized that the Wygnin, the dominant life-form on Korsve, did not -- and apparently could not -- understand the way that humans did business.
I shuddered at the mention of Korsve. If a client approached me because a family member had been taken by the Wygnin, I refused the case. The Wygnin took individuals to pay off debt, and then those individuals became part of a particular Wygnin family. For particularly heinous crimes, the Wygnin took firstborns, but usually, the Wygnin just took babies -- from any place in the family structure -- at the time of birth, and then raised them. Occasionally they'd take an older child or an adult. Sometimes they'd take an entire group of adults from offending businesses. The adults were subject to mind control and personality destruction as the Wygnin tried to remake them to fit into Wygnin life.
All of that left me with no good options. Children raised by the Wygnin considered themselves Wygnin and couldn't adapt to human cultures. Adults who were taken by the Wygnin were so broken that they were almost unrecognizable. Humans raised by the Wygnin did not want to return. Adults who were broken always wanted to return, and when they did, they signed a death warrant for their entire family -- or worse, doomed an entire new generation to kidnap by the Wygnin.
But Wygnin custom didn't seem relevant here. Despite the plant closings, the Third Dynasty had managed to avoid paying a traditional Wygnin price. Or perhaps someone had paid down the line, and that information was classified.
There were other possibles in the files. The Third Dynasty seemed to have touched every difficult alien race in the galaxy. The corporation had an entire division set aside for dealing with new cultures. Not that the division was infallible. Sometimes there were unavoidable errors.
Sylvy Sobol's disappearance had been one of those. It had caused all sorts of problems for both Sobol and the Third Dynasty. The vidspecs, tabs, and other media had had a field day when she had disappeared. The news led to problems with some of the alien races, particularly the Altaden. The Altaden valued non-violence above all else, and the accusations of domestic violence at the top levels of the Third Dynasty nearly cost the corporation its Altaden holdings.
The thing was, no one expected the disappearance -- or the marriage, for that matter. Sylvy Sobol had been a European socialite, better known for her charitable works and her incredible beauty than her interest in business. She belonged to an old family with ties to several still-existing monarchies. It was thought that her marriage would be to someone else from the accepted circle.
It had caused quite a scandal when she had chosen Carson Sobol, not only because of his mixed background and uncertain lineage, but also because some of his business practices had taken large fortunes from the countries she was tied to and spent them in space instead.
He was controversial; the marriage was controversial; and it looked, from the vids I watched, like the two of them had been deeply in love.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. A waitress stood behind me, holding a large ceramic bowl filled with turkey stew. She smiled at me.
"Didn't want to set it on your work."
"It's fine," I said, indicating an empty spot near the screen. She set my utensils down, and then the bowl. The stew smelled rich and fine, black beans and yogurt adding to the aroma. My stomach growled.
The waitress tapped one of the moving images. "I remember that," she said. "I was living in Vienna. The Viennese thought that marriage was an abomination."
I looked up. She was older than I was, without the funds to prevent the natural aging process. Laugh lines crinkled around her eyes, and her lips -- unpainted and untouched -- were a faint rose. She smiled.
"Guess it turned out that way, huh? The wife running off like that? Leaving that message?"
"Message?" I asked. I hadn't gotten that far.
"I don't remember exactly what it was. Something like 'The long arm of the Third Dynasty is impossible to fight. I am going where you can't find me. Maybe then I'll have the chance to live out my entire life.' I guess he nearly beat her to death." The waitress laughed, a little embarrassed. "In those days I had nothing better to do than study the lives of more interesting people."
"And now?" I asked.
She shrugged. "I figured out that everybody's interesting. I mean, you've got to try. You've got to live. And if you do, you've done something fascinating."
I nodded. People like her were one of the reasons I liked this place.
"You want something to drink?" she asked.
"Bottled water."
"Got it," she said as she left.
By the time she brought my bottled water, I had indeed found the note. It had been sent to all the broadcast media, along with a grainy video, taken from a hidden camera, of one of the most brutal domestic beatings I'd ever seen. The images were sometimes blurred and indistinct, but the actions were clear. The man had beat the woman senseless.
There was no mention of the pregnancy in any of this. There was, however, notification of Anetka's birth six months before her mother had disappeared.
Which led me to Possible Lie Number Three. Anetka had said her mother traveled pregnant. Perhaps she hadn't. Or, more chillingly, someone had altered the record either before or after the clones were brought to term. There had to be an explanation of Anetka in the media or she wouldn't be accepted. If that explanation had been planted before, something else was going on. If it were planted afterwards, Sobol's spokespeople could have simply said that reporters had overlooked her in their rush to other stories.