Read Patrimony for Free Online Page B

citizen’s request activated the booth’s visual and verbal privacy screen. Now no one could look in on him or hear any verbal commands he might choose to voice. Anyway, unlike occasions during which he had been obligated to perform illegal searches or scans, what he was going to do now was perfectly legitimate. Or so it would have seemed to anyone standing alongside him within the booth.
    They did not see him slip the mazr into an open port. It would not only mask his inquiries from anyone who might use the terminal after him but also thoroughly homogenize, shunt, self-encrypt, and rephrase his requests so that they resembled perfectly conventional searches for everyday, sanctioned information. Without the use of the mazr a deep-thrust query on “Meliorare Society,” for example, might trigger an automatic follow-up alert somewhere. That was unlikely, especially on a laid-back world like Gestalt. But Flinx had not succeeded in staying always a step or two ahead of those pursuing him by taking informational as well as personal security for granted. The hard lessons he had learned when he had illegally penetrated a main hub of the Terran Shell several years earlier had led him to take more proactive precautions prior to making such intrusions.
    Taking a seat in the booth’s single chair and slipping the tiara-like, featherweight, pale green induction band over his hair, he let it automatically adjust until the fit was snug against his forehead and over his ears. Detecting the presence of an operator, the terminal swiftly read his E-pattern and activated the neural connection. Above the concealed projector located within the shelf in front of him, weft space began to take shape. When the glow had strengthened sufficiently, he readied himself to input.
    Much to his surprise, he found that he was trembling slightly. Worried by the conflicting emotions she was receiving, a concerned Pip poked her head out from beneath his jacket. Though no overt threat was discernible, she remained edgy and alert. Reaching up and across with his left hand, he stroked the back of her head and upper body. It could be argued that the habitual response was intended more to relax him than her.
    Taking a deep breath, he double-checked to make sure the mazr was running before voicing the initial queryought as clearly as he could. “Does the edicted Meliorare Society have any history on the planet Gestalt, also known by its indigenous name of Silvoun?”
    As expected, the response of the planetary Shell was as near instantaneous as it was brief.
    “No.”
    Concise and conclusive, he told himself. Well, he had expected nothing less. Now that he was in, with a query that theoretically contained the potential to alert certain security nodes but had not done so, he found that some of the tension eased out of him. The mazr was doing its job.
    “What do you know of a Commonwealth citizen named Theon al-bar Cocarol?”
    As it had with his initial inquiry, the Shell came up empty. It was the same when he repeated the query using the now-deceased Meliorare’s alias, Shyvil Theodakris. Though he was already less hopeful than when he had sat down, he was not yet disillusioned. His preliminary queries had been blunt and undemanding. To ensure that the Shell had access to the full range of Commonwealth knowledge, he pulled up a general sybfile on the Society itself. That, at least, should be readily accessible to anyone with an uncontroversial interest in the straightforward history of Commonwealth science.
    The Shell hub responded immediately and exhaustively, presenting him with the complete official history of the Meliorares: how they and their activities had been discovered and quickly placed under edict, the nature of their banned eugenics experiments, how they had been hunted down one by one, tried, convicted, and sentenced, and an analysis of the small but sordid chapter they represented in the history of Commonwealth biological research.
    It was the