THE SUSPICION, FOLLOWED BY THE CERTAINTY, THAT KATH TWO WAS being detained crept up on her. After a few hours, she was given clearance to move freely about the common areas of the Q’s no-man’s-land: eateries, shops, lounges, and recreational facilities strung around a torus with about half a gee of simulated gravity. This meant that she had passed all the biological tests. But the bracelet continued to blink red. The digits counted up to a day, then a day and a half. She shifted her sleep schedule to Eye time and began to experience jet lag.
The Q was pretty crowded—perhaps that figured into the delay. The Eye had, in the last couple of weeks, swept westward across the oldest, most densely populated regions of the Greenwich segment, headed for the Cape Verde boneyard and the Rio segment beyond. At such a location, close to a boneyard where the habitats were big and new, the Q would expect to see a large volume of “in transit” passengers: emigrants from older and more crowded places bound for big new habitats like Akureyri. It took decades to fully populate one of those things; their population was ramped up gradually as new housing was constructed and the life-supporting ecosystem was cultivated and tuned. In a short while the Eye would reach the Cape Verde boneyard and the census in this place would drop to near zero: just a few workers going to jobs on new habitats, and some patient long-range travelers. But for now the facilities in the no-man’s-land were operating at capacity and there were queues for food and drink, especially at places that catered to families. For people often emigrated when they had small children who they thought would benefit from being planted in a clean new place where they could run around.
So Kath Two told herself, for a while, that the delay was purely bureaucratic in nature, a result of too many emigrants and not enough Q staff on hand. But on the second day she noticed Beled in the recreation center, operating a resistance training device at some insane power level only usable by young male Teklans. Later, after he had showered, she caught up with him in a bar and he mentioned that he had seen Rhys headed for the exit with his bracelet flashing green.
“When was this?” she asked.
“Yesterday,” Beled said. “Eight hours and twenty minutes after we docked.”
A few hours later, Kath Two and Beled vacated their single rooms and moved into a slightly larger double. They began sleeping together without having sex, which was a fairly common behavior pattern for Moiran/Teklan couples who scarcely knew each other. When Beled got an erection, which was fairly often, he would go into the tiny en suite bathroom and masturbate. This way of dealing with it was sufficiently common that for him to have behaved in any other way would have been noteworthy. She knew that she could rely on him to show impeccable discipline, and he knew that this was her expectation, and so it could go on indefinitely until one of them signaled a change.
Unable to sleep, not as proficient as Beled at masturbation, she heaved his massive arm off her chest, a project akin to dragging an unconscious ten-year-old boy to the other side of the bed, and slipped out, looking for a place to kill time until she felt drowsy.
At the cafeteria, waiting in line for chocolate, she found herself standing next to a small, lithe Julian woman in her sixties. The woman had been reading a book, or pretending to. As the wait stretched on she seemed to lose interest. She closed the book, stifled a yawn, and fixed her gaze on Kath Two. “Back from the surface?”
This was obvious from the color of Kath Two’s wristband. But Kath Two understood that the woman was just trying to strike up a conversation. “Yes.”
“Home for you?” the woman asked, referring to the Eye.
“I’m sort of between homes at the moment. Survey duty makes it hard to settle down.”
“Ah, taking a little R & R on the Great Chain. Good for you.”
Kath Two understood perfectly well that this woman was a Quarantine agent.
This was how the Q operated: not by interrogating you in a windowless room but by striking up a casual conversation. The purpose of these common areas was to supply a range of venues and opportunities.
It was important not to be seen as dissimulating, so Kath Two said: “I expect some R & R might happen, but really I’m bound for Stromness.”
“Ah, visiting a friend at university?”
Was it telling the truth to call Doc a friend? “More of a mentor. A teacher,” she said.
“Well, I’ve heard Stromness is lovely. Never been.”
Many, perhaps most, who were probed in this way never even realized that they were talking to a Quarantine agent. That was because most people passed through the Q rarely, if at all; and when they did, they tended to be jumbled together with large groups of travelers in settings where this sort of conversation might easily be mistaken for idle chitchat.
Kath Two was a sufficiently experienced traveler to know exactly what was going on. And the other woman knew that she knew. They would carry on with the charade anyway. Kath Two resisted the temptation to make trouble by asking the Julian where she had come from and where she was going. The woman would no doubt have some plausible story cued up. Obliging her to rattle it off would only waste time.
As the queue crept forward, they came in view of a display panel above the counter, showing a scene from the Epic. The time code in the corner was A+3.139, placing it about a year and a half into the Big Ride. The footage was from an arklet—not Endurance—so this was most likely from the Swarm. There was simulated gravity, so the arklet had to be part of a bolo. Kath Two didn’t recognize any of the people at first. They were, of course, all rootstock humans, clearly recognizable as not belonging to any of the seven current human races, but close enough that she could still feel what they were feeling. They spoke, like everyone else in the Epic, in the archaic accents of five thousand years ago.
No Eves were currently in the frame. The only Eves in the Swarm, of course, had been Julia and Aïda. So this was probably what they called sidestory, which was to say, video from the Epic that, while it didn’t capture the words or the deeds of any of the Eves, was still deemed important enough to have been incorporated into the canon and to show up on playlists in locations like this café. Kath Two had a vague sense that she had seen it before, many years ago, perhaps in school. She had lost track of days and time zones, but she was fairly sure that today was Julsday, and so any Epic scenes being broadcast in a place like this were most likely commemorative of something that Eve Julia had said or done. “Happy Eve Day,” she said, as a polite reflex, to the Julian standing next to her.
“Good day to you,” the woman returned, which confirmed that today was in fact Julsday.
Kath Two watched the scene long enough to get the gist of it. She was growingly certain that she remembered these people and their situation. The Seven Fat and Seven Thin was a bolo that had consisted of two heptads. One of them had experienced a breakdown in food production because of a contagious blight that had started in one of its arklets and eventually spread to the other six. The result was seven arklets full of starving people, connected by a long cable to seven arklets in which there was plenty to eat. They had worked out a system of sending spacewalkers up their respective cables to the center point where the two paws were latched together. There, care packages from the Seven Fat would be handed over to spacewalkers from the Seven Thin, who would descend back to the afflicted heptad and distribute the food. But seven arklets could not produce food for fourteen. All went hungry, and people in the Seven Thin began to die. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that this bolo had become separated from the main Swarm.
The particular scene now being broadcast was a video conference between the starvelings of the Seven Thin and the only slightly better-fed occupants of the Seven Fat, made more wrenching by the fact that family members and old friends had found themselves separated by that cable. Kath Two was sure she remembered it now. In a few minutes, they would establish radio contact with the White Arklet and bring Eve Julia into the conversation to ask for her advice. She would make a little speech about what they must
do. The story would end with the Seven Thin cutting themselves loose from the bolo. They timed it in such a way that the Seven Fat would be flung back in the direction of the main swarm, ensuring their at least temporary survival, while the Seven Thin went hurtling away in the opposite direction. In effect, the doomed ones used themselves as propellant to save the others. The tale was made more complicated, and more poignant, by other details that Kath Two would be subjected to if she stood here watching it long enough. The Seven Thin heptad was one of the few that contained part of the Human Genetic Archive, and so its sacrifice had been part of the seemingly inexorable series of mishaps that had led to the Council of the Seven Eves and the creation of the new human races. And their decision to sacrifice themselves had not been unanimous; it had been preceded by a mutiny, and hand-to-hand fighting from one arklet to the next as a minority of the starvelings had attempted to save themselves by donning space suits and ascending the cable. The man who had fought his way to the control panel and mashed the button that had severed the bolo was named Julius Mwangi. There was a habitat named after him at thirty-eight degrees, zero minutes east, hovering over his birthplace in Kenya. The “zero minutes” part being significant, since habitats lying on meridians were traditionally named after heroes of the Epic.
All of that came back to Kath Two’s mind during the time it took the café workers to make her coffee. For, since it had become obvious that she was being interrogated, she thought it best to change her order from chocolate to something with a little more caffeine. “This is on me,” she said to the Quarantine agent, since it was traditional to do small favors for strangers on their Eve Day. Had this been Moirsday, someone else might have paid for her coffee.
“Oh, no, I couldn’t,” the woman said. Which was probably true on a literal level; she could not accept a favor from someone she was interrogating. “But if you would allow me to sit with you . . .”
“Of course,” Kath Two said, and waited while the woman’s coffee was made. The screen above the counter had cut to a different part of the Epic, consisting of a conversation that had taken place aboard Endurance shortly before the Final Burn, in which Dinah and Ivy had talked each other into believing that Julia wasn’t as bad as all that. Kath Two had always found it a little cloying. People quoted lines from it all the time. It had served as the basis for political movements and parties that had sought to build stronger alliances between the Julians and other races. As such, its timing was fortuitous. Had Kath Two been of a Julian turn of mind, she’d have wondered whether the whole thing had been staged, the playlist’s timing rigged by someone behind the scenes at Quarantine so that she would see it just before sitting down to coffee with this woman. Because that was how Julians were. It was the choice that Eve Julia had made during the Council of the Seven Eves. Her strain, living in relative isolation in their segment of the ring, had intensified it through the selective breeding process known as Caricaturization. Julians had developed huge eyes, sleek ears, and small mouths as part of that; it was the single easiest way to identify one from across the room.
The woman saluted before sitting down. Julians saluted with their left hands, kept off to the side of the face so that the hand never passed through the eyeline. “Ariane,” she said. A common Julian name, derived from the rockets launched from Kourou, which Eve Julia had defended by nuking the Venezuelans. “Ariane Casablancova.” Meaning that she was the daughter of a woman named Casablanca, after the White House.
Kath Two saluted back. “Kath Amalthova Two.” For Kath Two’s mother had been named after the asteroid that had sheltered Moira and her lab through the Big Ride.
Ariane sat down across from her, huge eyes fixed impassively on Kath Two’s face.
“Look,” Kath Two said, “I’m no good at this. I don’t belong to any kupol and I don’t want to join. Just ask me what is on your mind.”
“Just wondering if you saw anything interesting on the surface.”
“My whole point in going there is to see interesting things. I hardly see anything that is not interesting.”
Ariane just sat expectantly.
“I filed a report,” Kath Two said.
“And discussed its contents with Beled Tomov?”
“Yes.”
“But not with Rhys Alaskov.”
“Rhys was asleep when Beled and I were talking.”
“You slept quite a bit as well,” Ariane remarked. “Ten hours on the flivver.”
“I had been flying a glider all day.”
“With frequent naps.”
“Every time a Moiran sleeps in a little bit,” Kath Two said, “it doesn’t mean that we are going epi. Sometimes we are just tired, is all.”
“Time will tell. Now you are journeying to have a face-to-face conversation with your mentor,” Ariane said. “Or so you think.”
“What does that mean?”
“Dr. Hu is not on Stromness. You would know as much if you had coordinated with him. But you didn’t. Instead you made an impulsive plan, spur of the moment, to visit a place with which you have good associations. Something’s troubling you. You are aware that you might be starting to go epi. You won’t discuss it with ‘Doc’ until you are face-to-face with him, in a place where you feel safe. It must be something you observed on the surface. Something unexpected.”
Telling Ariane Casablancova to read Kath Two’s report wouldn’t help. Probably she had already perused it several times. She wanted to hear the story fresh.
“I might have seen a human,” Kath Two said.
“Might?”
“It was a glimpse. From a distance.”
“Not another surveyor—or else you wouldn’t see anything remarkable in it.”
“Surveyors wear bright clothes, for visibility.”
“Beled didn’t.”
“When he was passing near the RIZ, no, of course not. I’m speaking in general.”
“Go on.”
“This person was wearing the opposite. Sort of like—”
“Like what?”
“You ever see pre-Zero videos with hunters? They used to wear clothes that would make them less visible.”
“Camouflage,” Ariane said.
“Yeah. I think this person was in camouflage.”
“Not a surveyor, then.”
“So—military, perhaps?” Kath Two asked. “But the only purpose of military is to fight other military. And I’m pretty sure there’s no other military down there. Unless there’s been some kind of infraction. But if there’d been an infraction, I’d have been warned of it before I was dropped. Hell, they’d have sent a Thor after me.”
“Did it occur to you that it might be a fresh infraction? Which you were the first to notice?”
The question kind of hung there. Ariane’s implication was clear. If Kath Two had witnessed anything of the sort, she ought to have reported it immediately instead of sleeping for ten hours and then making a harebrained effort to find Doc in a place where he wasn’t.
“No,” she said. “That’s not what this was.”
“How do you know?”
“I was making passes over the lake for a long time. I was clearly visible. Anyone who was there for no good reason would have simply hidden in the trees until I was gone. That’s not what this person did. They were down near the shore in a place where they could get a clear view of what I was doing. Like—”
“Like what?” Ariane asked.
“Like they were gawking.”
After a long silence, Ariane repeated the word, “Gawking.”
“Yeah.” Until this point, Kath Two had felt uncomfortable under Ariane’s gaze, but now she looked directly into the great penetrating eyes for a while.
“When this person moved,” Ariane said, “did you get any sense as to posture and gait?”
“I don’t think it was a Neoander,” Kath Two said, shaking her head. “That I would have reported.”
Ariane blinked and said, “The simplest explanation is, of course . . .�
�
“An Indigen. Which is the possibility I discussed with Beled.” She was feeling a little on the defensive now. “But what would one be doing there? So far from the nearest RIZ.”
“It is a mystery.”
“Yes.”
“That explains why you broke profile,” Ariane said, nodding.
“I don’t even know what ‘broke profile’ means to you people.”
“Did you ever get the sense that you were being watched? Followed?”
Ariane Casablancova had the damnable habit of asking good questions.
“You have to assume, when you’re down there, that—”
“That you are not going unnoticed by local megafauna. Of course.”
“Over time, hiking solo, trying to be aware of that, it can make you sort of, I don’t know—” She didn’t want to use the word “paranoid” around a Julian, since it was a racially charged word. Ariane seemed to sense this, and found it ever so slightly amusing. She leaned forward slightly, trying to help Kath Two over the sticky place.
“You develop a heightened awareness. Perhaps, to be safe, you interpret the sounds of the wilderness—”
“In the most conservative possible way, yeah. Like, the morning of my departure I was awakened by patches of light moving around on my tent. I thought for a minute that it might be caused by the movement of a large animal, passing between me and the sun. Then I emerged from the tent and saw that it had just been my imagination, that the light was shining between tree branches that were moving in the wind.”
“Interesting! That heightened awareness of things, over a long enough span of time, does seem just like the sort of stimulus that could trigger an epigenetic shift in a Moiran,” Ariane said.
“The thought had occurred to me.”
“You didn’t mention it in your report.”
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