"Pashazade" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grimwood Jon Courtenay)

Chapter Four 29th June

'Merde, merde, merde , ..'

The dark-haired girl hit a key and switched search engines. Looking for one that worked. So far she'd spent twenty highly illegal minutes learning precisely nothing about her future husband, who was probably even now at the al-Mansur madersa, delivered there from the airport in some smoke-windowed Daimler stretch.

al-Mansur

Nothing.

Ashraf Bey.

Nothing.

Pashazade Ashraf.

Nothing.

It was enough to set off another litany of swear words. Zara bint-Hamzah spoke Arabic but swore in perfect Cairene French for the simple reason, established in childhood, that neither of her parents understood it.

She also spoke English, as did her father, though she spoke hers with a New York twang. Two years studying at Columbia did that to you. Only that bit of her life was dead now and she was back home. And didn't she know it.

Ashraf Bey might as well not exist for all the record he'd left of his life to date. 'Putain de merde ...' Without thinking, Zara gulped the last of her slimmers' biscuit — rolled oats, rolled wholewheat, glycerol, sorbitol and xenical — total calories fifty-seven — and ruined any calorific benefits by pouring herself another coffee and mixing the liquid with a large teaspoon of what looked like dirty diamonds but was really raw sugar.

Just looking at the ragged crystals made Zara long for a few good old-fashioned pop rocks of freebase, something to heighten her courage or stupefy her nerves: because misusing the Library's LuxorEon3 terminal didn't come easily — not to her, anyway. Only these days she was clean, had been since she was fifteen, and all she had for courage was a Sony earbead. So she upped the volume on DJ Avatar and went back to her flat panel.

The fact that Ashraf couldn't be found on the empire-wide voting list held at the Library of Iskandryia Zara put down to his rank as a bey. Sons of emirs were probably too rarefied to be recorded on an openly accessible database. More puzzling was his complete absence from the Library's proscribed database and from the web itself. Out there Ottoman law meant nothing. So, on the web at least, there should have been some ghost of a record.

This was a man who'd spent seven years in America. That was the point her father had used to sell the marriage: how much they'd have in common. (By which he meant they'd both been corrupted by the same culture.)

But according to every credit agency she'd accessed, the bey's rating wasn't so much bad as simply non-existent. No charge cards, no bank account, no mortgage had ever been issued in his name. More bizarrely still, he'd never posted to any internet newsgroup, never chatted, never had an e-address — at least, not under his own name. The man to whom she was days away from becoming very publicly engaged had left no trace of his life to date, no shadow. Not out there in what Zara now thought of as the real world, and not in the Ottoman world, either.

It wasn't a good feeling.

Her own entry in the city register was brief, short and depressing. Though flesh would be added to its bleak bones at the end of the week when data was updated to take account of her father's new rank.

Zara had no illusions about how he'd attained the rank effendi. A bey could not be expected to marry the granddaughter of a falah. So her elderly, half-blind grandfather was to be moved from his mud-brick home in Siwa to a new house on the outskirts of Isk. With the new house were promised orange trees he couldn't see, irrigated lawns he'd consider a criminal waste of precious water and the honorific effendi. The fact that his father was now effendi made her father effendi, which made her respectable enough to marry.

Zara was the price and her dowry was the prize. Love didn't enter into it and nor, for once, did complicated family alliances. The only alliance that interested the bey's aunt was with her father's money. The deal stank and was morally wrong; but as her mother had angrily explained, this was how things were done. And the very fact that — for once — her mother managed to keep her hands to herself told Zara just how worried the woman was that her daughter might do something stupid, like refuse.

Mind you, first off, they'd been worried that if they let her go to Columbia she wouldn't return when her two years in New York were over. Then they'd been worried she might disgrace herself while over there. Now ...

Merde indeed.

A mouthful of now-cold coffee warned Zara that she'd overrun her own safety margin. It was time for her to log off and go pack up her little cubbyhole before Zara's boss realized what she'd been doing with her last day in the department. Breaking every regulation she could find, starting with unauthorized use of a LuxorEon3.

There was only one computer matrix in the city: IOL. Available through subterranean snakes of optic that crawled in conduits beneath the sidewalks to feed everything from cheap edge-of-network devices in local schools to the complex hierarchy of information appliances used in the Library itself.

The network was wired with optic rather than relying on radio because cable withstood EMP and those inconvenient, mujahadeen-inspired charged-particle things that scrambled radio signals elsewhere in North Africa. The wiring of the city had been done in record time, with roads ruthlessly ripped up, rivers drained and inconvenient buildings bulldozed. What Ove Amp had insisted would take twelve months minimum had been finished in six and even then General Koenig Pasha, the city's governor, hadn't been happy: he'd wanted it done in three.

And though the city streets were an open and fluid mass of architectural styles, crammed with all races and religions, the network running beneath those streets was anything but... It was utterly hermetic, completely sealed. Only the room where Zara sat, a cupboard-like alcove of the Library, acted as a node for those with permission to swim in the wider, wilder waters where information apparently wanted to be free but mostly seemed to expect you to buy it.

Zara clicked her way out of a credit-check site that kept demanding an account number for a charge card she no longer owned and shut down the connection.

If she was traced then Zara could undoubtedly count for help on the fact she had no previous record. Besides, the new marble floor of the triangular foyer below came directly out of her father's pocket. Disgrace her, and the director definitely wouldn't get his new roof.

Money was power. Zara was about to add Even dirty money, then amended it in her head to Especially dirty money. Dirty money carried with it the threat of unpredictability. Of course, dirty money eventually turned into new money, with all the scrabble for respectability that the term suggested. And new money lay on its back and opened its legs, or did it by proxy.

Zara shuddered.

Somewhere out of sight, beyond the sweep of the Eastern Harbour and beyond where the peninsula of the old Turko-Arabic quarter jutted into the sea to separate the Eastern Harbour's elegance from the warehouses and squalor of the West, somewhere out there flames lit the approaching evening like dancing devils, signature of the Midas Refinery.

A $1.8 billion complex that processed 100,000 barrels a day.

Out there on the edge of the desert, low-value heavy oil got an upgrade to petroleum gas, naphtha, aviation fuel and diesel for export to Europe. Though the public face of Midas was a minor Napoleonic princeling, her father owned 27.3 per cent through a holding company. It was more than enough.

Reaching into her bag, Zara pulled out a page torn from an American student magazine and began to read it for the fifth time. This was how she had to erase her traces from the network to become a ghost. There was much talk of command lines, Linux and Mozilla which she ignored, skimming down the page until she got to a paragraph for users prepared just to do what they were told.

Zara did exactly what it said. If the article was right she was now in the clear. If not, well, too bad ... Did they want a new roof or didn't they?

When she returned to her job — if her new husband ever allowed her back — it would be to a different department of the Library. None of her male bosses would talk to her, except to give orders or collect information. Most of them would not even look in her direction in case their glance was seen and misinterpreted.

She'd made plenty of mistakes in her nineteen years, but the biggest by far was ever turning up at the airport in New York. Her parents had been right to be worried, whereas she was just naive for not wondering why they wanted her home for the summer. Leaving Columbia for Isk because she was touched they'd been missing her was about as stupid as anyone could get.

Now she was stuck with an arranged marriage and Zara could just imagine to what ... Some spoilt, prissy little coke-head dressed in PaulSmith International. She'd watched enough episodes of Rich amp; Famous to know what to expect.