“I would be devastated with remorse and grief if I thought I had forever eliminated her chance of being resurrected again. But I’m sure that she must have another recording in the Computer file. I doubt that we can reach it, though. She would have inhibited the Computer from enabling us to find it.”
“We’ll see,” Burton said. “You’re probably right, though.”
“Who the hell was she?” Frigate said. “What was she doing here? Loga said that all the Ethicals and their Agents were dead. If he was right, then she wasn’t one of them. But what else could she be?”
“One of Loga’s enemies, otherwise she wouldn’t have eliminated him,” Nur said. “But if she wasn’t an Ethical or Agent, what reason would she have to do away with him? If she just wanted complete power, why didn’t she kill us?”
Aphra said, slowly, “Perhaps Monat the Operator was more far-seeing than Loga expected. Perhaps Monat made arrangements for an Agent, this woman, to be resurrected if certain events happened. Certain events in general, I mean. Monat could not have anticipated all events in particular.”
Burton requested the Computer to identify the dead woman. It replied that the data was unavailable, and it would not or could not say why.
Burton asked it if the dead woman’s body-recording was in its files.
The Computer said that it was unavailable.
“One more mystery,” said Frigate, and he groaned.
Burton asked the Computer for the location of the machine that had broken through the barricade walls. As he had expected, he was told that that information was also unavailable.
“I’ve seen all the robots the tower contains,” Burton said. “I had the Computer show them on a screen. That machine was not among them.”
The woman might have had it made for her by the Computer just to break down the walls.
Nur and Frigate dragged the body from the corridor and laid it down by the body near the cabinet. Stretched out, face up, they looked like identical twins.
“Shall we have them disintegrated in the converter?” Nur said.
“One of them,” Burton said. “I want the Computer to examine the other.”
“So you can see if she has a black ball in her brain?”
Burton grimaced. Nur always seemed to be able to read his mind.
“Yes.”
The two dumped one body into a cabinet and ordered the Computer to get rid of it. White light filled the cabinet, and, when they looked through the window in the door, the cabinet-was empty. There were not even ashes in it.
The other corpse was placed on a table above which was a huge dome-shaped device. Though there was no display of energy, the interior of the body was shown on a screen in a series of images. Burton had the Computer run the images back to the one he wanted. There was a tiny black sphere on the forebrain. This had been surgically implanted and, acting at a subvocalized codeword, would release a poison into the bearer’s body, killing it instantly.
“So … she was an Agent.”
“But we still don’t know when she came here or what her ultimate intentions were,” Frigate said.
“For the moment,” Burton said, “we don’t have to. It’s enough that we’ve gotten rid of the Snark. Now we’re on our own, free.”
They were, however, free only in some senses. Burton asked the Computer if the overrides installed by the woman were now removed. It replied that they were not.
“When would they be released?”
The Computer did not know.
“We’re stymied,” Frigate said.
“Not forever,” Burton replied. He was not as confident as he sounded.
10
On that perhaps forever-lost Earth, so far in distance and time, in a.d. 1880 in the city of London, England, appeared a privately printed book. It was titled The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi, A Lay of the Higher Law. Translated and annotated by His Friend and Pupil F. B. The initials stood for Frank Baker, a nom-de-plume of Captain Richard Francis Burton. “Frank” was from his middle name; “Baker” was his mother’s maiden surname. Not until after his death would his true name be appended to a reprint.