Janus by John Park Page A

visit to the lab that morning. “And this evening, I spent an hour practising on some of the equipment. Do they know what happened to her?”
    “They don’t know a damned thing. Those leaflets, the other morning, and that missing woman at the start of the show tonight . . . We were lovers, Barbara and I.”
    “I thought so,” he said, and abruptly risked asking: “‘Were’ or ‘are’?”
    “I . . . don’t know. There’s so much going on, and I don’t even know what’s inside my own head. I feel I’ve let her down. I always feel that. I have to find out what happened to her. She had something to do with the leaflets, I found evidence at home. I haven’t told anyone yet. If you can look at her computer files, can you see if there’s anything among them that looks like a clue.”
    “Yes, I’ll try,” he said. “What about Security?”
    “I don’t know. They were reluctant to go and search for her yesterday. Their priorities didn’t allow it. And if she was involved in something they’d call subversive . . .”
    “So you’d be on your own. I’ll see what I can do to help.”
    “Yes. Thanks.”
    They followed a path, staying close together, not saying much. Behind them, the street lights went out, all together. Above them, the sky was still flushed pink and mauve.
    “It’s late,” she said. “They use the lights to remind us it’s officially midnight. We’d better get back.” They turned. “I almost forgot. One of our staff is having a get-together tomorrow night. You should come—give you a chance to meet people. I’ll give you the address. Have you got something to write with?”
    “No. But tell me anyway. Trust my memory.”
    She laughed, and gave him Chris’s address.
    “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said.
    “Maybe we will at that.” She found herself giving him a genuine, uncomplicated smile. “See you tomorrow.”

FIVE
    Everyone called it the Factory, though it was actually a cluster of low buildings ringing a structure like a circular barn. It was where everything that had not been shipped to Janus for reasons of cost, convenience, forgetfulness or security was reinvented, imitated or faked. And it was where everything—whether crated in shockfoam, chromed and slick with grease, or put together from spare computer chips and parts of an arc welder—went for repair and maintenance.
    Freya ran the Factory. She was a small, round-faced woman, with wide, innocent-looking eyes in the face of a fading seraph. When Elinda went to the service counter, Freya herself was examining a circuit diagram with a man, and apparently counting on her fingers. “Give it another afternoon,” she said to him. “If you can’t come up with anything by then, I’ll tell them we don’t do voodoo without a blood price.”
    She turned to Elinda. “Sorry to keep you. I’ve got to get back in the shop in a minute, but maybe I can help you while Peter thinks about his homework.”
    “Actually, I’ve got a question rather than a technical problem,” Elinda said. She introduced herself and pulled out the leaflet Larsen had found on the cafeteria table. “I’m trying to trace where this came from.”
    Without giving too many details, she explained about Barbara and said she was looking for any clue as to what had happened to her.
    “Medium, or message?” Freya asked. “We deal in hardware and technical information, mostly by request in triplicate, with signatures in precious bodily fluids. I like to think what messages we give out are more reliable than what you’ve got there.”
    “I was thinking of the medium. The ink or the paper—is there a chance you could identify either of them?”
    Freya examined the leaflet. “One copier is much like another, and we don’t have a monopoly on them here. In principle, we could set up a little forensic investigation. But to get us to do it for an unofficial request, you’d have to have something we wanted pretty goddamned badly in