[For Chapter III click here. To start at the beginning; click here.]
Lang’s fury was a cold and quiet one.
“There had better be a damned good explanation for this,” Lang growled in a low voice. Had circumstances been different — say, had Penrose not been its target — Penrose would have found Lang entirely justified. Lang smacked the button on the side of the door. It hissed shut slowly, incongruous with the mood in the air. For her part, Emmy looked unperturbed. She made no effort to get up from her seat, instead slowly arcing her piercing green eyes from Penrose to Lang and back again.
Penrose, on the other hand, had lost his wits and felt unlikely to get them back soon. “I, well, er, nothing bad, Lang,” he stammered. “We — we just happened to bump into each other and I invited her back here to talk.” Emmy rolled her eyes at this, which Penrose was sure he had been intended to see.
Lang looked Penrose up and down. “You were just out floating around in that bathrobe of yours, then?” Penrose flushed. “I know what this is,” Lang continued, his voice still quiet and tense, his gaze swinging to Emmy. The woman returned his stare, impassive.
“What is this, Stephen?” she asked him.
“This is — you know what this is!” he spat, unable to bring himself to put a name to it in front of Penrose, but likewise unable to let it pass for the few minutes it would take to get her alone.
“Yes,” she said calmly, “I do. Do you?”
Lang looked confused. “Well, what else is it?”
“Just talk, Stephen. I thought you were asleep and I wanted to talk to someone. In person, for once, and those women up there are imbeciles just like all the rest. Tom here is the only interesting person we’ve met since we left the moon. I came down here, by myself. Don’t take it out on him.”
Lang to Penrose: “Then why did you tell me you ran into each other outside?”
Emmy interrupted before Penrose could say anything. “Tom was probably trying to spare me.” Penrose shrugged, hoping this would be taken for a yes. This woman, who clearly knew something about his involvement in the conspiracy, was trying to minimize trouble for him. Penrose didn’t trust himself not to say something stupid and ruin it. “Gallant of you, Tom,” Emmy said, and gave him a smile that made Penrose believe that she meant it, for all that she had rolled her eyes at his gallantry a second ago. She turned back to Stephen. “We didn’t really get a chance to talk about much before you got here.”
“Will you take a seat?” Penrose asked Lang, who shook his head. “Do sit, Stephen,” Emmy said, gesturing to another chair. Lang refused. To Penrose, Lang clearly wanted to believe that every word his wife said was true, but was having trouble convincing himself of that.
Emmy saw this, too. She undid her straps and pushed herself up toward Lang, who tried to recoil — not very effective in zero gravity.
Emmy connected and the two slowly floated back in the direction of the chamber door. She pulled herself close to him — almost indecently close, thought Penrose, before he remembered what they had all been talking about. She had been cool, even cold, only a few moments ago, but now Emmy purred at her husband, “Stephen, Stephen, Stephen,” until he met her eyes. When this happened, as Penrose knew well, it would only be a matter of seconds until Lang’s implicit trust in his wife was restored. A fatal flaw we share, thought Penrose of Lang, himself, and most men.
Lang tried looking at Penrose but was obviously having trouble tearing his eyes away from Emmy. The woman can really transform at will, Penrose thought. Now she’s an empty-head, now she’s some kind of steely-eyed secret agent, now she’s the doting wife. It was a common enough pattern in marriages like theirs. Lang desperately wanted to believe in his wife’s fidelity and would accept the flimsiest assurances to that effect. Penrose wondered how many times Emmy had had to reassure her husband like this. Probably often.
“You should be careful, Penrose,” Lang said, but with his wife pressed against him and cooing in his ear, his heart obviously wasn’t in it. “I thought you were a good man when I met you, and I wouldn’t do such a thing, but it’s easy to get a black mark on your name for something like this.”
Lang was obviously referring to a formal notice in one or several of the social networks. Something like, “Thomas Moore Penrose, Jr. of Calgary has disrupted the marriage of So-and-So and his wife and should not be trusted alone with respectable women.” This would, of course, destroy his own marriage, and likely most of his friendships with married men. Such things weren’t often done though, because just as often the shame came down on So-and-So and especially his wife. It was truly a nuclear option. Penrose thought, but didn’t say, that, on balance, he would rather be known as a philanderer than as a cuckold. Instead, he said, “Nobody wants that, Lang. Will you stay and talk with us?”
“No, Penrose. In fact, I think we’ll both be off.” After a pause and a significant look at Emmy, “Breakfast in the morning?”
“Certainly,” Penrose said.
Lang nodded. “Very good,” Lang said. “Good night.”
“Good night, Tom,” Emmy said.
The pair had to pull themselves on handholds the rest of the way to the chamber door. As it was shutting, Emmy turned to palm the door closed. Penrose caught her eye. Her look was hard and pointed. As it vanished behind the sliding gray door, he was surprised by how tense he’d been.
It was still early, he realized. The whole business with the Langs, from the moment she’d entered the room to the moment her stare had disappeared behind the door, hadn’t taken more than ten minutes, Penrose thought. He glanced at the clock on his nightstand. Not even 22 yet. He read his book, taking notes — speculation, mostly — in shorthand. Best kind of crypto, he thought sourly. I’ll be lucky if I get half of what he’s trying to tell me.
After a few minutes, his desk chimed. He had received a message, but it too had been encrypted, this time mechanically. Most messages were sent unencrypted these days, and for good reason. Nobody had ever managed to find a better encryption scheme than the asymmetric model thought up toward the end of the XX. century, over a hundred years ago now. This meant that anyone could generate a public key which could be used to encrypt messages to him, and these messages could only be decrypted with the matching private key. The only trouble with this model was a matter of trust — how could one be sure that a key claiming to belong to, say, Thomas Moore Penrose, Jr. of Calgary, really belonged to Thomas Moore Penrose, Jr. of Calgary? In the same way that a notice on the social networks naming Penrose a philanderer could be known to refer to the same man — people who knew that this was the same Penrose were known and trusted by people that you know and trust. Since there were only four or five degrees of separation between any two people most of the time, and significantly less in the Kingdom, such a system was relatively robust.
Most people, and Penrose was no exception, had such a public/private key pair. Indeed, most people had them officially associated with their social standing. It was just the way things were done, thanks to an army of professionals who handled such things. But because messages were typically sent and received on public kiosks (if one didn’t have servants who handled such things), encryption was trivial but decryption was immensely inconvenient. One’s public key was a matter of record, but his private key had to be securely kept, usually somewhere he couldn’t get to it safely.
Penrose, being an engineer and not having a servant, kept his key with him at all times. So he took to the laborious task of transcribing the ciphertext by hand into his own computer, then checking it, double checking it, and triple checking it. When he was confident he’d gotten the correct message, he decrypted it. It said:
Penrose,
You have become involved in a criminal organization whose ultimate aim is the overthrow of the Royal Family. Because of the obfuscation of both the command structure and the distribution of information within this organization, it is not clear to us how much you are aware of, nor the reasons which you found sufficiently convincing to allow yourself to be recruited. We know that the conspiracy recruits individuals under a variety of pretenses, but all its members work, perhaps unwittingly, toward this singular end.
In any case, you can no longer be said to be ignorant of the true aims of this organization. You are now fully responsible for this knowledge. We trust that you will use it wisely.
Don’t make this mistake any worse, Tom.
-E
Penrose laid his head back on the wall. He had some thinking to do.
[For Chapter V click here.]
