“This Tierlaw Verick fellow was here,” Kresh said. “But there’s nothing unusual about there only being one person in a house. If anything, Verick spending the night is the unusual thing. ”
“Let me understand this,” Melloy said. “ Apart from Verick and the Governor-and the assassin-there was no one in the house? In a house this large? There were no other humans at all? Just robots?”
“That’s right,” Kresh said, a trifle bewildered. “What is it you’re getting at?”
“What I’m getting at is that there wasn’t a room to be had in Limbo last night. The city was packed to the rafters-and yet Grieg’s enormous residence stands empty on the night he wanted to play the host. If that happened back on Baleyworld, and the host woke up dead, I’d be damned suspicious. I’d think someone had arranged to keep the place empty so the killers would have a clear field.”
Kresh frowned. “That honestly never occurred to me. Sharing your home-giving up some of your own turf-is a very difficult and unusual thing for a Spacer to do. We value our privacy very highly. Probably too highly. I suppose from the Settler point of view, it does seem very implausible. Not to a Spacer, though. We’ll feed you dinner, care for you if you’re hurt or sick, rescue you from danger, defend your civil rights to the hilt. We’ll even put you up for the night-someplace besides our own home.”
“Hmmph. Some things about you Spacers I never will get used to. I’m sure you’re right, but it still seems more than a little odd to me. ”
“Well, it couldn’t do any harm at all to look into the point,” Kresh said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe Grieg was used to a house full of people and last night was the aberration. ”
“Mind if I take enough people off traffic duty to check it out?” Cinta asked.
Kresh hesitated a moment. Sandbagged. She had set him up and knocked him right over. The last thing in the world he wanted to do was let her choose what part of the investigation to head up. Suppose this was the very point she needed to muddy up in order to protect herself? How Grieg’s choice of slumber-party guests could possibly matter, Kresh could not imagine, but never mind that. The problem was he could not see any way of saying no to Cinta without flatly stating that he didn’t trust her. And he was far too tired to deal with the twelve kinds of hell that would be sure to kick up. “No, Cinta,” he said. “You go right ahead.”
But even as he spoke, he found himself wondering if he had just made the first big mistake of the investigation.
FREDDA LEVING POINTED her finger at another party guest and watched him disappear. It was a strange sort of game, but one that needed playing. She rubbed her eyes and sighed.
“That’s as many as I can get in this pass. Run it back again, Donald,” she said. “Let’s try that sequence again.”
The integrator’s three-dimensional images scrolled back to the beginning again and started over. Fredda sat and watched as the party guests started to filter into the Residence. By now well over half of the people at the party were missing. Every time Fredda or Donald or the computer managed to identify a person, they would eliminate his or her image trail from the integrator’s event sequence for the evening.
The imagery integrator was a Settler machine that was a close cousin to the simglobe, designed to take in all manner of visual images and combine then into a single three-dimensional whole. Four dimensions, if you counted time.
And the more people that were missing from its images, the better. They needed to know if there had been anyone who did not belong at the reception, and what better way to do that than by eliminating those who did?
It was a shame that the Settlers’ access recorder system wasn’t useful in these circumstances. It could automatically record comings and goings of each person, and identify each against its access authority list-but such systems were designed to work in more orderly settings than a massive reception. Even the sophisticated access recorder in use at the Residence had been overwhelmed by the crush of bodies at the reception. Too many people, too many strangers, too many people coming in too quickly.
They had fed the integrator everything-the architectural plans of the Residence, all the news video and 3-D imagery taken the night of the assassination, detailed 2-D and 3-D still images of the Residence’s interior and exterior, still pictures of all the guests, and whatever other information Donald had been able to get together.
The integrating simulator had swallowed it all up, and used the masses of data to produce the computer model that Fredda and Donald had been watching for entirely too long. The integrator could present any view of the interior or exterior of the Residence, at any scale, as seen from any point in time in thirty-two hours, the time period under investigation. It could run its imagery forward or backwards at any speed, or freeze it at any point.
