The world's greatest TAP poet, shot by a word? It was a seductive idea—and I was surprised that the tabloids hadn't seized on it, weeks ago—but in the cold light of morning, I was finding it increasingly difficult to believe that Grace Sharp had died from anything but natural causes. The building had excellent security; the forensic team had found no sign of an intruder. The testimony of the black box wasn't watertight, but on balance it probably did exonerate the implant. And Helen Sharp herself had been convinced that the <> word was impossible.

  I spent the morning slogging through the rest of the transcripts, but there was nothing very illuminating. The experts had washed their hands of Grace Sharp's death. I didn't blame them: if the evidence supported no clear verdict, the honest thing to do was to say so. At most inquests, though, someone managed to slip a speculation or two into the proceedings: a pathologist's gut-level hunch, an engineer's unprovable intuition. A few lines I could wave accusingly in their face when I cornered them in their office—prompting them to spill the whole elaborate, unofficial hypothesis they'd been nurturing in their head for months. But there wasn't a single foothold here, a single indiscretion I could pursue; every witness had been cautious to a fault.

  So I had nowhere else to go: I steeled myself and went trawling through the archives for the enemies of TAP.

  Media releases (mainly from politicians and religious figures), letters and essays in edited publications, and postings to net forums gave me about seventeen thousand individuals who'd had something disparaging to say to the world about TAP. The search algorithm was multilingual, but I didn't trust it to pick up irony reliably, so even this crude first grab had to be taken with a mountain of salt. Twelve percent of the forum postings were anonymous—and the random sample I inspected made it clear that they came from the most vehement opponents—but I put them aside; textual analysis of a few gigabytes of invective could wait for barrel-scraping time.

  Clustering software picked up some fairly predictable connections. Two-thirds of the people I'd found were officially speaking on behalf of—or explicitly mentioned their membership or approval of—one of ninety-six organizations: political, religious, or cultural.

  The software drew ninety-six star-diagrams. The biggest cluster was for Natural Wisdom: a quasi-green lobby group set up for the sole purpose of opposing the use of neural hardware. Most members were European, but there was a significant Australian presence. Second largest was The Fountain of Righteousness, a U.S.-based fundamentalist Christian coalition; they had half a dozen local affiliate churches. Cluster size didn't necessarily measure the strength of opposition, though; the Roman Catholic church ranked a mere thirtieth—but only because it was so rigidly hierarchical, with a relatively small list of appointed spokesmen. Most Islamic authorities weren't keen on neural hardware, either—but many predominantly Islamic countries had simply outlawed the technology, largely defusing it as an issue. Islam's best showing was for a UK group, and that was ranked fifty-seventh.

  I cut the data set down to Australia only. Nineteen organizations remained—and the top six rankings stayed the same, for what that was worth. There was something of the flavour of a witch-hunt to this whole analysis; I wasn't publicly accusing anyone of anything—I wasn't libelling Natural Wisdom as murderous thugs for daring to speak out against the implant—but this kind of crude fishing expedition always made me feel distinctly uneasy.

  Still, if these were the people who'd feel most threatened by the prospect of children growing up with TAP … who among them could have known about the impending High Court challenge?

  I scanned the membership databases of legal and paralegal associations, and the mailing lists of relevant journals, scooping up anyone who gave an address care of Huntingdale and Partners—the firm who were preparing the "infant implant" brief.

  There was zero overlap with the anti-TAP set—which was no great surprise. I imagined the police would have gone at least this far, and they'd had better resources: they could have pulled the whole Huntingdale workforce from taxation records, with no chance of so much as a clerical assistant falling through the cracks.

  I gazed at the screen, dispirited. All I had to show for a day's work were sixty-three apartments with a view of Grace Sharp's study, and seventeen thousand people who'd done nothing more incriminating than put themselves on the record as opponents of TAP.

  The only thing left to try was intersecting the two.

  Finding apartment numbers to match the physical locations in the building plans was the hardest part; architects and developers didn't have to file anything so petty when they had their projects approved. I was actually beginning to contemplate doing the necessary legwork myself, when I discovered that someone had done it for me: an ad hoc consortium of sellers of insurance, fire-alarms, security equipment and climate control had commissioned a database for the entire metropolitan area, to help them target their junk mail. The suburb I needed only cost fifty bucks—complete with email tags.

  I cross-matched with the anti-TAP set.

  A single name appeared.

  John Dallaporta belonged to none of my organisational clusters, and I had only one piece of data on his attitude to TAP: a short essay he'd written, seven years before, decrying the implant's potential to "erode the richness of our ancient and beautiful tongues" and "invade the still, mysterious spaces of our minds". The essay had appeared in a secondary English teachers' netzine; I summoned up the whole issue, and flipped through its innocuous contents. The majority of the articles dealt with working conditions, and concerns arising out of new technology; there was also an earnest—almost painfully respectful—discussion of strategies for coping with parents who forbade their children contact with the filthy/sexist/atheistic/elitist/ superstitious/obsolete works of Shakespeare, et al. Not the kind of venue you'd seriously expect to lead you to a man who slaughtered his ideological enemies.

  I reread Dallaporta's essay carefully. It was passionate, but hardly inflammatory; he sounded very much like just one more plaintive, insecure technophobe letting off steam, to a no doubt largely sympathetic audience. I was inclined to be sympathetic, myself—in all honesty, the implant made my skin crawl—but there was a self-serving undercurrent which detracted from the force of his arguments. Certainly, portraying English as an endangered language was ridiculous, when more people were speaking it than at any other time in history.

  And though I could picture Dallaporta outside the court with a placard, once the challenge to the implant legislation began, I found it hard to imagine the author of these moderate words killing Grace Sharp in cold blood—and harder still to imagine him discovering the means to do it.

  I was growing tired of desk work, but I spent the next few hours studying the fragmentary portrait of the man offered by the net. He was forty-seven years old, divorced five years, with two daughters in their mid-teens. Presumably his ex-wife had custody of both children, since all the data suggested that he lived alone. He'd been a teacher in government high schools all his working life; in his late twenties, he'd published some poetry in literary journals, but unless he'd adopted an undocumented pseudonym, there'd been nothing since. He seemed to belong to no organization but the State School Teachers' Union, and if he subscribed to any religion, no marketing demographer had yet managed to pin it down.

  So much for the electronic profile. I didn't believe for a moment that he could have killed Grace Sharp—but I wasn't prepared to rule it out until I'd met him in the flesh.

  I found a calendar of events for the Laurence Brereton Memorial High School. There was a parent-teacher night in three days' time.

  · · · · ·

  I arrived late enough not to have to loiter outside for too long before catching sight of a few departing parents, still wearing their name badges. I got a good look at the style and the materials used—but I was even luckier than that: one man dropped his badge into a recycling bin right before my eyes. I'd come prepared with a variety of cardboard samples, safety pins and clips, but all I had to do was fish out this discarded one, match the font on my notepad's printer, and spray my own—borrowed—name onto the blank side.

  No one challenged me as I entered the crowded hall and walked straight past the desk where parents were queuing up to register their attendance and collect their badges. I spotted a row of work stations dispensing guidance; I walked up to one and tried to make an enquiry, but it was too clever by far: the only entry point was "parent's name"—apparently all it needed in order to highlight every relevant teacher on a personalized map of the hall. I stood back and watched other people use the software, until Dallaporta's name appeared.

  It seemed an odd time of year for an event like this; Mick's high school had held an orientation night before the start of term, but they hadn't yet invited me back. The buzz of conversation around me sounded remarkably amiable, though; maybe it was a good strategy to drag the parents in as early as this, and try to nip any problems in the bud.

  John Dallaporta was tall and slender, clean-shaven, slightly balding. He was being talked at loudly by someone's proud father—and though his eyes were glazed, and his smile a little wooden, he didn't strike me as a man who'd been sleepless with guilt for the past five weeks.

  When the father departed, I approached purposefully. Dallaporta offered his hand and said smoothly, "Good to see you, Ms. Stone." He hesitated. "I'm sorry, but I don't think I—"

  I smiled disarmingly. "No, you don't teach my daughter. But I wanted to speak to you, and this seemed like too good an opportunity to pass up. I hope you don't mind."

  "Not at all. But I should explain: I'm not the head of department this year. It rotates between the senior teachers, so Carol Bailey—" He glanced around, then pointed her out. "Do you see—?"

  I shook my head apologetically. "It's not a departmental matter. I just wanted to meet you. I read an essay you wrote, a few years ago: The Bit-Stream of the Rose. And I liked what you had to say there, very much. So when I realized you were teaching in my daughter's new school …"

  Dallaporta eyed me curiously, a little bemused, but he betrayed no obvious unease or suspicion. "That's so long ago now, I'm surprised you remember it at all. Let alone the name of the author."

  "Of course I remember! And I just hope the rest of the department share your values on those … issues. I used to teach English, myself. I know the kind of pressures you're facing. And of course I want my own children to be technologically literate—but some of us have to take a stand, or who knows what 'technologically literate' will mean, in twenty years' time?"

  Dallaporta nodded affably, but now I could see muscles tightening at the sides of his jaws—the ones which contract when you're trying too hard not to let anything show. Proving what? Nothing at all—except that he had stronger feelings about TAP than he cared to discuss with a total stranger in a crowded hall.

  I kept pushing. "When I started high school, myself, if you didn't have your own PC on your desk at home, you were marginalized. These days the work stations come for free—if you sign up for a thousand-a-month worth of 'vital' net access. And any child who can't interview Afghani nomads for a geography assignment—or get a live feed from the latest Venus probe via JPL—might as well quit and go work at McDonalds. When does it stop? When my grandchildren are twelve, what will 'entry level' be, for them?"

  Dallaporta laughed, not quite naturally. "I wouldn't dare hazard a guess. But I have faith in people. In common sense."

  I made direct eye contact, trying to decide if he was genuinely rattled—or just didn't trust himself to get on the soapbox, even for such an obviously sympathetic listener.

  "Common sense? I hope you're right. I've heard some rumours lately which don't bear thinking about—"

  Dallaporta blanched visibly. Meaning he knew about the court case? And now assumed that I had some connection to whoever had given him the news? I offered him a conspiratorial smile: Relax, I'm a friend, we're on the same side.

  I said, "Look, I didn't mean to take up so much of your time. But it was so nice to meet you, finally." I held out my hand, and Dallaporta shook it, slipping back onto autopilot with obvious relief.

  I walked out into the warm evening. There was a real Lydia Stone, with a daughter who'd just started Year 8; Dallaporta might check the records, but I didn't think he was likely to confront the girl's teachers and ask them to sketch an identikit for comparison.

  I glanced up at the washed-out sky, at the handful of visible stars—and thought once more: this moment would be a single word, in TAP. <> A moment skewered like a butterfly? A ten-thousand-bit digital corpse of the world, shedding dead pixels in the mind's eye? Or a moment captured like a mood perfectly evoked by a phrase of music? No one had ever felt the need to murder a composer, just to safeguard the languages which couldn't compete on equal terms with fugues and sonatas. No one had ever taken a human life just to stop eccentric parents bombarding their offspring with Bach and Mozart in the womb. What made TAP so much more threatening? The fact that it could evoke images and emotions beyond the reach of any symphony? The fact that it was so much better?

  I'd actually meant most of what I'd said to Dallaporta—but the more I thought about the issues, the more ambivalent I became. No one was trying to "force" TAP onto anyone, except their own children—and to raise a child at all was to impose a set of choices, one way or another. Actively or passively. Consciously, or through sheer conformity or neglect. The prospect of TAP-heads meddling with their children's brains—just so they could share an artificial language—still filled me with instinctive, visceral outrage … but was it any more virtuous for the rest of us to insist that no child be given the implant until their brains were fully formed in the ten-thousand-year-old mould of our own Stone Age preconceptions? Weren't both sides just attempting to shape future generations in their own image?

  And putting aside prejudice, instinct, and nostalgia … which first language really would provide the best tools for dealing with the modern world?

  That was a good question. It just wasn't the one I was being paid to answer.

  · · · · ·

  I planted a dozen small recording devices in pay phones near Dallaporta's apartment, and the school. Which was highly illegal—but both less risky, and more likely to succeed (if he was actually guilty of anything), than trying to bug his home. I'd sampled his voice at the parent-teacher night, so the bugs could discard everyone else's conversations. I cycled by and queried them daily.

  I finally tracked down Tom Davies, Grace Sharp's domestic aid—a TAP-head himself. The curtains of the study were always left open, he said. Grace liked to work looking out across the skyline; she'd chosen the apartment for the view.

  I couldn't help asking, sarcastically, "Wouldn't it have been cheaper just to visit some rich friend's apartment—and memorize the TAP words for everything she saw?"

  He laughed. "Of course. And she could have written scenery in her head to put any ten-million-dollar harbour view to shame."

  "So why didn't she?"

  "Do you know how Grace defined 'reality'?"

  "No."

  "The ten thousand bits that are left when you've argued everything else out of existence."

  · · · · ·

  After weeks of persistent harassment, I persuaded Maxine Ho, one of Third Hemisphere's senior engineers, to talk to me off the record. She stuck to the official line, though: the <> word was impossible. Whatever Grace Sharp had imagined, or whatever TAP sequence some would-be assassin had confronted her with, all the safeguards operated on a separate level, independent of the language protocol—and when the implant had been examined after the autopsy, there'd been no trace of damage or corruption to the relevant hardware or software.

  "Of course a neural implant can kill you. A pacemaker can kill you. A work station can kill you. Any piece of technology can fail. But if someone died sitting at a work station—and when I took it apart there was no sign of a loose wire or a break in the insulation—I wouldn't say: 'She must have been running the legendary <> program, which instructed the machine to electrocute her.' I'd go looking for another cause of death."

  It was a specious analogy. Perfectly functioning TAP implants routinely sent signals to the hypothalamus, which in turn stimulated the adrenal gland; perfectly functioning work stations weren't set up to dispense electric shocks at any dose.

  Still, I thought she was being basically straight with me. If she believed that the implant had failed at all, she believed it was a one-in-a-million glitch: less a design flaw than a tragic proof of the intrinsic unpredictability of any real device out in the real world—the kind of thing which would have been excused as "natural causes" if an equally robust biological system had failed.

  · · · · ·

  On March 5th, the High Court challenge to the implant restrictions became public knowledge. The case wasn't scheduled to be heard until September—but the reaction to the news was immediate.

  Helen Sharp had been right about one thing: her mother's death was seized upon by almost every commentator as proof that a successful challenge would amount to the legalization of infanticide. Not that Their Honours could be influenced by emotive editorials—perish the thought—but even if they weren't, it was clear that the Federal government would be ready with the necessary amendments within days of any decision which put the State criminal law in doubt. I set my knowledge miner digging, but reasoned debate about the merits of the case—the actual merits, not the legal ones—could barely be found outside obscure neurolinguistics journals. (TAP speakers' netzines were in TAP, and I had no translation software.)

 

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