Kenmuir refused to think about the ugliest possibilities. This was the modern world, for God’s sake. Thus far he and she had done nothing illegal. If they were about to, well, it was not technically a serious offense, not in a society that recognized every citizen’s right to information. They’d be entitled to a public hearing, to counsel, to procedures that might well be too awkward for the secretkeepers. It wasn’t as though they were dealing with an instrument of an almighty state, KGB or IRS or whatever the name had been—
He wished he could believe that.
“What we must do is escape, and then take stock,” he said. A detached part of him jeered that he could also tell her the value of pi to four decimal places. “How?”
“That’s what I mean to check out.” Once more she got busy. Schedules paraded over the screen.
After a while: “All right. There’s no public transport out of Prajnaloka, and it’s sparse everywhere close around, as thinly populated as the area is. Mostly it’s local, which does ire no good. Figure ten minutes to run to my volant. Ten or twelve minutes airborne before anybody can intercept us, no more.
“The single place in range is Springfield. It has a twice-daily airbus to St. Louis Hub. There we could vanish into the crowd and quickly get seats to somewhere else big and anonymous. Trouble is, the opposition will know this too, or find out in a hurry. We’ll have to time our arrival at Springfield and departure from it ve-ery closely. The next bus is in about half an hour. Otherwise we’ll have to wait till evening.”
“That gives us time to prepare,” he said reluctantly.
“And it gives time for things to go wrong,” she retorted. “Obviously, the fact that we bounced off the edge of the no-no hasn’t raised an alert. Else we’d be under arrest this minute. But is a query going along the lines? Or—we are being chased. The data could be starting to point this way.” Her voice rang. “I say keep moving!”
He weighed it. If they must immediately cut and run, it meant abandoning their spare clothes and things in the dormitory. But those were easily replaced, all their cash being on their persons, and stuff left behind might even divert suspicion for a critical short span. Impulsively, he thrust out his hand. “Go.”
She returned the clasp, hers hard and warm. “Okay, aikane.” Then he understood why humans throughout history had time and again staked their lives on ventures that later generations saw as fantastical. It was the nature of the beast.
Aleka took up her bag, set it on her lap, and plucked forth a thing that appeared to be a brown cloth. Unfolded, it revealed itself as a gauntlet of thin material—material that was alive, like the mask she had earlier worn. She slipped it over her right hand.
“Lilisaire’s agent gave it to me in Hawaii,” she had told Kenmuir that night in Overburg while the fire died away. “Prepared special. She thinks we may find use for it.”
“What is it?” he asked.
“An organism with tissue reserves to last a couple of weeks. Made from a biospecimen of that synnoiont who visited her—Venator, she said is his name. Itcarries his DNA. If we should need to get past a biolock, won’t its keys be likely to include that high-powered a feljow, who’s working on the case?”
“But, but how’d she get a useable sample?” The scraps of skin and other tissue that everybody shed in the course of a day wouldn’t do. They were tiny, dead and degraded, mingled with dust and other debris. It took delicate equipment, most of which was only in the possession of police forces’, to find such stuff; and once you had mapped the genome, you would have to have independent means of ascertaining whose it was. “If she drew blood somehow, maybe faking an accident—but wouldn’t he surmise her intentions?”
Aleka grinned. “I didn’t ask. I did guess.”
He felt his cheeks go hot, and was angry that they did. “No, wait,” he snapped, “that’s ridiculous. A gamete has just half the chromosomes.”