"Lady to see you, Mr. Ambrose," the door said.

I was on my feet before I really woke up, stuffing my little nest of yellowed sheets back into the angle between my desk and the wall. One sheet caught under a corner of the cheap plastic flooring, and I had a hard time getting the flimsy stuff loose without ripping it. I was cursing my stubby fingers and thinking about using my teeth when the door spoke again.

"Mr. Ambrose, she says it's important."

"Give her number four." Numbering my excuses had been one of my best ideas. While the door told my visitor that I was, "speaking to a client about a matter of great urgency which should be resolved momentarily," I finally managed to work the sheet loose, climb into my highchair and make a pass at combing my face and chin. "Let her in," I said. Only just in time, I spotted a half bottle of Bambi's five/five, Blueberry Wine beside my also cheap but shiny name plate. "Chief Inspector for Provolve Affairs, Hodgepodge Orbital" wouldn't look very convincing next to a bottle of rotgut. Not that anyone would be too impressed if they knew how I got the gig.

The door slid sideways with a nasty screech. I've never been able to get maintenance to fix it. Maybe that was just my worn out heart stripping a gear when I smelled the high octane honey on the other side. She was lean and ripe and every inch a lady. She had a sleek, black coat of fur with just the right amount of blond on top. I caught a glimpse of her tail sticking up straight and full and sexy behind her. This was no jilted polecat out to get the goods on Pepe' le Pew. This was a streamlined kitty with a fluid drive. "I need your help," she said.

"Lady, you don't need anything." I licked an eyebrow and wrinkled my nose in what I hoped was a virile and cocky yet considerate way. I knew I look like a moth eaten, lecherous throw rug. But I like to think I have subtle charms.

She gripped the edge of my desk with dainty, manicured claws. "Roshi is dead."

"The old Alpaca?" I liked Roshi. He was an alright guy in a Cosmic Buddha, herd animal sort of way. I'd helped him sort out a grazing dispute with some rhinos in the point eight gee ring. But dead was curable and I was a civil servant, not a technician. "This ain't the restore clinic, lady."

"Kittely Fleur, call me Kittely, and there isn't going to be a restore. It was murder. The angelnet was compromised locally, so that it couldn't resuscitate him." She pulled out an aromatherapy ball and gave it a squeeze under her nose. I could smell the nicotine from where I sat. "All his backups are gone -- Erased."

Erased. "Look. Kittely, I don't do this sort of thing. And I don't approve of illegal drugs." I realized way too late that I should have used excuse number eight, "Inspector Ambrose is hibernating, please come back in two months." I hadn't hibernated since I was a kit but there were enough orthodox skunks out there to make it plausible. "Talk to Orbital Security they take cash."

"They're already looking into this." She clambered onto the visitor's bench and sat up, rolling the ball between delicate claws. "You used to be O.S. You should know."

If she thought proving she could grep a profile was going to soften me up, she was sniffing down the wrong hole. Me and Orbital Security tried to stay out of each other's way. Or, at least, I stayed out of their way, and they let me. "Look, Kittely, Ms. Fleur, I help sloths get better sleeping accommodations. I negotiate grazing disputes, and talk simian performance artists out of throwing shit at crowds. If your looking for Sherlock Fricken' Holmes maybe you oughta try AI row."

She turned my plaque around to face me, "I thought you represented us." She snorted like she was about to get all runny nosed on me. Well she could try, I'd seen worse. But instead of turning on the mucus march, she looked around like she was checking for something and tapped the side of her head. She wanted to link.

Her icon blinked on my head's-up. She had the encryption cranked way up, using extra Orbital Common Computing Resources, which was costing her plenty every second. So she was rich. I did some quick math involving my rental on the room and a couple of old Q-table debts and decided to accept the call.

"Solve this or not, Inspector Ambrose there's plenty of credits in it for you." She was apparently a good judge of character, or least of mine. I was just starting to like her when she decided to blow it again. "I think it was an AI that murdered Roshi."

"Forget it." I almost broke the link. What was it with the cute ones -- always running hot and cold? First she tells me life is good, and then she tells me it's over. One. Two. Happens every time. But I glimpsed my sheets clumped by my desk and wondered if maybe dying a couple of times might be a cheap trade for some spendable credit. I had a couple of spare backups where nobody was likely to find them. What the Hell. This was a beautiful woman who needed someone she could trust. My altruism got the better of me. "How much credit?"

"Well." She gave a little satisfied twitch of her nose and then stared at me with a look that was all lust and greed. "Whatever you were going to ask, double it."

She was obviously a skilled negotiator as well. If I could have survived a shot of whiskey, I think I could have used one right then. As it was, I pulled out the bottle of Bambi's and offered her a snort to seal the deal. When she shook her head I downed the dregs in one gulp. The burn going down helped me keep the hackles from going up on my back and relaxed my tail's reflexive cramp. She had said "murder" and "AI" in the same sentence. I still had to wonder if it was too late to use number eight.

"So why me? What makes you think I can do anything O.S. can't?"

"Roshi said your name just before he died. I was there. I'm, I was one of his students."

"You don't seem the religious type."

"I didn't say I was a good one."

"How did it happen? What did he say about me?"

"Sudden heart attack. He just said your name and two other words."

Murder sounded right. Nobody died of a heart attack. That was like dying of a sprained hind leg. "What words did he say?"

"He said 'manifold' and 'short,' that's all."

"So he was mad at me? I mean I'm no giant, but I'm tall for one of our kind of people." I was trying to be cute, but she wasn't having any.

"Please be serious."

I was more serious than she realized, just not solemn. I was mostly stalling for time to think. What could this have to do with the manifold? The Caravan Orbitals like Hodgepodge followed a path in the sky, an incredibly complex looping, hypothetical surface that was the solution to still more complex calculations. Anything on the manifold got almost a free ride through the solar system. Incredible fortunes had been made finding the manifolds, but traveling them was slow. The path Hodgepodge followed shuttled back and forth between Mars and Jupiter taking eighty Martian years to make the circuit. Over a hundred of the self sufficient trade orbitals, "The Mars Caravan," created a slow train between the two worlds as did another caravan from Luna to Venus and still another on the two hundred year Saturn-Jupiter route. There was a manifold from Luna to Mars as well, but no caravan plodded down it. The circuit time was ten-thousand Earth years. And Roshi's dying words had been my name, "Manifold" and "Short." So, you can see why I was deliberately slow to catch on. Besides being a leader in the Buddhist community on Hodgepodge, Roshi was the same mathematician that had solved the gravity equations, a "three body problem" that cut the length of the Mars-Jupiter manifold by eight months.

"Roshi was an avatar."

"What?" I'd got so deep in thought it surprised me when her voice came again in my head.

"Roshi was an avatar for Contemplation of the Null Proposition. He was an AI. And whoever killed him was a powerful AI. My patron couldn't save him." She squeezed the aroma ball one more time and it dissolved. "We think he found a short cut to a particular six-body problem."

"Six bodies?" This was tabloid stuff now, like big foot or Bill Gates sightings. Even with individual AIs more intelligent than all the bionts in the solar system together, no one had ever solved for more than a three body problem. The math was supposed to be easy, but there were so many variables that nothing had the cycles to calculate them all. Unless they found a trick. "So you think he found the Northwest Passage?"

"Yes the shortcut. I have reason to believe he found a ten year manifold route for Luna-Mars."

"How could you know that?"

"I'm also an avatar for Contemplation of the Null Proposition. Or at least, I am now."

"And you need me, why?"

"Being an Avatar doesn't mean having all the knowledge of your higher self. By definition I can't. And if an AI chooses, the avatar can have private memories and thoughts. Contemplation of the Null Proposition has always preferred that approach. I. We, don't know what Roshi was thinking when he died. I want to know why Roshi said your name."

I've always been one to know when I've been sprayed and this was an old classic -- the Northwest Passage, AI conspiracy, Murder and a cute tail. I couldn't believe I hadn't caught on earlier. It was the six body problem that did it for me. The gods couldn't do that kind of math. In fact, they hadn't or there would be asteroids following that route. Asteroids naturally fell into manifold routes and couldn't escape. That was one of the clues that had led to discovery of the better route from Jupiter to Mars. Spotting an asteroid in a tiny, ten year orbit would have been much simpler than calculating it from scratch and everybody had looked. If the Northwest Passage existed it would have been found a long time before -- the easy way.

"Your considering the possibility that I've lied to you. Please check your credit balance and a news feed. Also, I believe you have a message waiting."

The message waiting was from Contemplation of the Null Proposition, personally signed. It just said, "Listen to her." Roshi's death was in the news along with the accidental deletion of his backups. And my credit account balance had grown a couple of tasty zeros, like sweet little curled grubs waiting under a root. Maybe I was being played -- probably even -- but for the moment, the game seemed to have something to do with making me rich.

"You're sure he said my name? It wasn't, 'Anne knows' or 'So it goes' or something like that?"

"You're stalling."

"Look the only thing Roshi and I ever talked about was gophers."

"Gophers?"

"Sure, you know that little patch of grass in the point eight gee ring?"

"Strawberry Boson?"

"That's the one. It's full of gophers. Original issue, ground-digging gophers. Roshi used to like to stand around out there and get his hooves in the dirt. I go there sometimes to grub hunt."

"You don't strike me as Orthodox."

"I didn't say I was a good one. Anyway, I was out there and we started talking. That first time I didn't even know who he was."

"And you talked about the gophers."

"The gophers. And we talked about their holes. See the loam was just about a foot deep in most places but there were deeper places where the under deck dipped for one reason or another. The gophers found the deep places really well through trial and error. It was like they had the schematic. But they had missed one. It seemed like small talk at the time."

"What did he say about the holes?"

"I think he was telling me something that was on his mind. He said that the tunnels had interested him, and he had mapped them, found that the gophers were right after all. If they had mined out the leftover hole, the entire warren would have collapsed." Things came together for me while I was talking, and I could see from her face that she got it too. Just then another message popped into my inbox. The mail was from Contemplation of the Null Proposition. It said, "Thank you."

Kittely broke the link, "Yes, thank you," she said aloud. "So, how come your not in security? Seems like you have the head for it."

"Let's just say, I'm paying off an old debt. The old inspector was a provolve worm. I had a couple of drinks too many one night and well... did what comes naturally."

She shuddered and pulled out another aroma ball. "Tough break."

"Yeah."

"I meant for him."

"Me too."

She left without another word, and I was sorry to see her go, even if her chaperon spooked me. As I sat there thinking of the various ways I could word my retirement letter and which bills I would pay off first, a thought stuck it's head up like one of those clever gophers. There weren't any asteroids in the Northwest Passage. Sure, that's what Roshi had been telling me, but there was something more. Maybe some amount of mass traveling the Northwest Passage from Luna to Mars would collapse the current manifold, maybe it would do more. It was like a big silent snare out there under the grass in that field of stars, and unless I missed his hint entirely, he was saying that was the way somebody wanted it.

I started the emergency memory back-up just as I noticed the aroma therapy ball on the bench. I had a hunch the angelnet was "locally compromised" again, but the bomb exploded an instant too late to stop me.

Somebody murdered Roshi alright, and I had a pretty firm suspicion it was the same AI that had just paid me off and then whacked me. Somewhere out there, somebody was getting ready to knock all the billiard balls off the table, so I did what any of my forefathers would have done. I posted the whole thing on the wire with every footnote I could dig up, mailed a couple of my backups here to Nova Terra 12 light years away because two is better than one. That is to say, I hoisted my tail and sprayed a nice fine cover and then ran as fast as my four little legs could carry me. So whatever happened next, happened ten or twelve years ago, maybe. I'm just waiting for news to catch up out here. The part that worries me most though, is that I can't help thinking this is all just what Contemplation of the Null Proposition wanted.

AIs don't make mistakes.

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