State Tectonics (The Centenal Cycle) by Malka Older

Author:Malka Older [Older, Malka]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780765399472
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2018-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 15

“A tunnel?” Maryam and Roz are sitting on the veranda again, and Maryam bites her lip: she said it too loudly.

Roz laughs softly. “It’s fine. I turned on the airscaping before we came out; I don’t think anyone can hear us. That was my reaction, too.”

“And it was full of comms cables?”

“Packed with them,” Roz says. “Well … lined with them—they left space in the middle for personal transport. An escape pod, maybe.”

“But why so many cables, when the tunnel only goes between two fixed points?”

“It depends, in part, on where point B is,” Roz says. Djukic is working on that. “But I think … I suspect Heritage was selling channels.”

“Selling channels to whom?”

“To other governments. We’ve only worked our way through a few of the data streams so far, but it looks like they’re all encrypted under different systems.”

“You mean other micro-democratic governments?” Maryam asks, sitting up. “They were paying Heritage to transmit data behind our back?”

Roz sighs. Her reaction, two days ago when the idea was first floated, was much the same. Now she wonders how it could be surprising for anyone in their line of work. “People are constantly trying to get around Information. There’s this addictive fetishization of privacy, even when it’s not for any particular purpose.”

“That may be,” Maryam says, taking a bite of candied kumquat. “But if you’re right, we’re not talking about chisme or petty private scandals. These are governments digging a secret tunnel through the mantle of the Earth to keep people—not just Information, the constituents they supposedly work for—from knowing what they’re doing.”

Roz nods agreement. “We’re considering the possibility that this may not be governments but the individual corporations within Heritage’s coalition. Corporations have secrets too.”

“Very true,” Maryam agrees, taking a piece of papaya this time. “Election time makes it seem like everything’s about governments, but that might make more sense than Heritage cooperating with other governments, even for money.”

“Of course, if they were talking to a null state without our knowledge…”

“Scary,” Maryam agrees. “So there’s still the possibility this could be Exformation.”

“Yes, but … I keep coming back to the question of why so many cables. You would think they would only need one.”

“When I started researching these weird tourist guides,” Maryam says, “I was baffled by the idea of data not available on Information. But now … there’s so much out there, so much we miss.”

There’s a long-enough pause that Maryam thinks Roz isn’t going to answer. When she does start to speak it’s slowly, as if thinking it through as she talks. “I started to see that in Darfur. The edges, the gaps in coverage. And then there are the null states, and the places near them. And then there’s everything people try to hide from us, successfully or not. And the things we don’t see at all, because we don’t think they’re important or we don’t know what to look for.” Maryam realizes that Roz’s measured tone is that of someone guiding a friend through an

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