Primary Inversion

by Catherine Asaro

The man indicated the metal studs on my jacket. “Those will set off the alarms.”

  Oh, what the hell. I took off the jacket and handed it to him. I could pick it up on the way out. Underneath I was wearing a Regulation Class Six Garment, upper body issue, type three; in other words, a black pullover. But when the man glanced at my pants, which also had metal studs, I said, “I not give you those.”

  He turned bright red. “I didn’t mean—of course not.”

  I tapped my torso, then my head, then my thighs. “Got biomech in here.”

  He blew out a gust of air. “Well, give it another try and see what happens.”

  I went around and walked under the arch again. The alarms were just as loud as the first time. The guards were very polite while they scanned me for more weapons. They were very polite when they asked me to go through three more times and submit to three more scans so they could verify it was the tech on my uniform and in my body that set off the alarms. By then, I thoroughly I wished I had found somewhere else to walk. Meanwhile the line of people behind me grew longer and longer.

  Finally the woman said, “She’s clean.”

  “All right.” The man exhaled. “You can go on through, Primary.”

  Someone in the line clapped. I laughed—and half the waiting people jumped like scared rabbits. Huh. They must have seen too many Jagernaut-runs-amok movies.

  Once I made it through the checkpoint, though, I had no idea where to go. So I just walked. And walked. Eventually I stopped near a deserted gate. I stood in front of its door, staring at my reflection in the windowpane that made up its upper half.

  “Want to retire?” I asked the woman staring back at me. Maybe it was time to rest, to give myself the peace I needed to clean out that file of suppressed memories.

  Small footsteps sounded nearby. A child spoke in English. “Do you have a motorcycle?”

  I looked down to see a girl of about five gazing up at me with big eyes. I smiled and tried out my English. “What is mutter-psi call?”

  She smiled back. “It’s like a big bicycle.”

  “Oh.” I didn’t know what a bi-psi call was either. “Have you mutter-psi call?”

  She shook her head. “Just a trike. A red one. The wheel had a hole in it.”

  Ah. She meant cycles. Of course. “I am sorrow about the hole.”

  “It’s okay.” she said. “My Daddy fixed it. The tire was all empty and he made it full.”

  Something about what she said was important, but I couldn’t figure it out. Then I noticed a man hurrying up the hall. He spoke quickly to the girl. “Kimberly, don’t bother the soldier.”

  I smiled. “Is okay. I enjoy.”

  He stared at me, and I caught a flash of his thoughts, surprise that I responded like a normal human being.

  Kimberly waved. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” I said.

  As the girl walked away with her father, it hit me why her words were important. It’s okay. It was empty and he made it full. That was what was wrong with the Aristo. He wasn’t empty. He didn’t need anyone to make him full. That cavity, that horrible emptiness wasn’t there.

  After my experience with Tarque I knew how an Aristo’s mind felt. It was hollow. But the Aristo in the bar hadn’t been hollow. He didn’t have something wrong, he had something right.

  “He’s not an Aristo,” I told the deserted hallway. “I don’t care how he looks, talks, moves. He’s not an Aristo.”

  That made the whole incident even stranger. His guards, the people in the bar, even my squad mistook him for a Highton. Hell, Comtrace did. Only a trained telepath who had also been a provider would know he was a fake.

  How had he done it? As far as I knew, no exceptions existed to their caste system. Aristo babies had their DNA verified to prove it came from Aristo parents. His heredity must have been thoroughly scrutinized before the Hightons acknowledged him as one of their own. The testers were supposedly above reproach, though I had my doubts any system existed that couldn’t be corrupted. But it stretched credibility that even a Highton could buy off all the necessary verification units. Aristos all felt the same: they didn’t want their bloodlines “polluted” by non-Aristos. More than any other human race, they acted collectively rather than as individuals.

  Something strange was going on, and where Traders were involved I didn’t like strange goings-on. It was time to find out why they had come to Delos.

  I went back for my jacket and weapons. After I left the port, I returned to the Inn, but only to get my Jumbler. The gun fit in a holster on my hip, with a strap fastened around my thigh for support. Jumblers had to be big; each contained a particle accelerator. Despite its size, it was relatively light, molded from composite materials. It carried abitons for fuel, antiparticles of the biton, a subelectronic building block. Bitons, what we affectionately called “wimpons,” were the most weakly interacting particles found that coupled to the electromagnetic field. Their rate of pair-production was miniscule, and like quarks they were rarely found in isolation. Electrons consisted of bitons—hundreds of thousands of bitons.

  When I fired the Jumbler, abitons whipped around the accelerator and ejected in a beam. Abitons annihilated bitons, creating photons, which meant a Jumbler turned electrons into light. If even a fraction of an electron annihilated, the remains decayed into other particles. A Jumbler beam could travel short distances in air reasonably well, but solids were another story. Coulomb repulsion and the instability of the mutilated electrons made the material blow itself apart. The gun got its name from the way solids looked after we shot them.

  I had no intention of shooting the Aristo; regardless of what people seemed to think, Jagernauts weren’t violent by nature. Besides, killing an Aristo, even a fake one, would achieve nothing except destroy the shaky truce negotiations we periodically tried to conduct with the Traders. What I wanted was information, and the Jumbler could make an excellent tool to persuade him that he should give it to me. Of course after I left, he could call the police. But Aristos hated to look weak in front of non-Aristos. As long as I caused no damage to his exalted person, I was betting the potential for humiliation would stop him from calling in the authorities.

  I headed into the hills north of the Arcade. The “houses” up there were mansions separated by parks that covered more area than the spaceport. An Aristo was far more likely to have rented one of those than a room in a hotel suite. The problem was to find which one.

  Lamps lit the estates, shedding pearly light across the grounds. The houses were shaped like ships and built from green stone with foamy accents that swirled through the rock. Vines draped them like delicate fronds of pale green sealace. The translucent blue-violet stone used for the roofs evoked the sky and clouds. The “masts” of the ships were gold spires, each adorned with disks in hues of platinum, silver, green, white, the palest rose, and ocean shades of blue, all chiming together in the stray breezes. Even the nervoplex streets were beautiful: silver and glittering when still, as now when no traffic skimmed over them; shimmering and rippling when I walked on them. I still didn’t like the stuff. It made me feel vulnerable. But I had to admit it looked good.

  I followed a path winding through the low hills of a park. I was already tired. Although the Delos atmosphere had a high oxygen concentration, it wasn’t enough to compensate for the thinner atmosphere. I felt as if I had been jogging on a high mountain. I stopped in a field of downy clover, my chest heaving as I gulped in air. Flowers nestled in the clover—and they sang.

  I knelt down to peer at the blossoms. Each was a cluster of purple tubes that whistled as the wind blew across them, the notes varying with the shape and size of the tubes. It blended into a soft music that floated through the night. It reminded me of tunes my brother Kelric used to play on a flute-reed he had cherished as a small boy. Actually, “small” was the wrong word; Kelric had grown into a giant who could hold the entire flute in the palm of his hand. But I remembered him as seven years old, from that day we had taken re
fuge in the spine-cave.

  I bit my lip. I wasn’t going to find the Aristo by getting maudlin about my childhood. I headed down the path again, and as I walked, I schooled my mind into a meditative state. The scenery made it easy to relax, easy to let my sphere of thoughts expand. Without a psiphon to amplify my mind I couldn’t do much, but if a strong empath were close enough by, I might detect glimmers…

  Pain!

  His face hung above me, his eyes like rusty flakes from an incinerator. The iron rod descended, its end glowing red from heat—I looked away—

  My body jerked as the iron seared my skin, and the stench of its burning mixed with the stink of scorched nervoplex. A boy screamed, his ragged voice begging for mercy—my voice. I struggled to shut out the pain, to imagine myself home on Tams, a young man in the Ivory Garden, relaxing, happy—NO! My arms jerked above my head, trying to come down and push away the iron. But the harder I fought, the tighter the nervoplex bonds pulled my wrists. He leaned over me, and I fell into the hole of his mind, fell, fell—

  Something slammed my body. Gasping in a breath, I realized I had fallen. I was lying on my stomach, the dull point of a rock pressing into my cheek. My arm lay next to my face, the gold band on my jacket sleeve reflecting the faint light from a distant lamp.

  I sat up, willing my body to stop shaking. The path. I was Soz, on a path in the park. Soz. Not that youth there, bound and screaming. But where was there? And whose Aristo face had that been above him? I kept seeing Tarque, but it couldn’t be him.

  Recall, I thought.

  Memory file degraded, my node thought.

  It didn’t surprise me. The human brain couldn’t make perfect records of memories even with processors as advanced as my node, which had been upgraded a few months ago. But a reasonably good record had to remain for an event as intense as the one I had just experienced.

  Play what you have, I thought. But put a filter on it.

  Replay activated.

  I saw the Aristo leaning over me again and felt the iron branding my skin. Mercifully, the filter gave the memory a diffuse quality, muting its intensity.

  Freeze, I thought.

  The image froze on the Aristo’s face. He wasn’t Tarque, but neither was he the false Highton. It was his guard, the tall one whose Aristo blood had shown in his eyes and hair. I guessed he was at least half Aristo, probably more, certainly enough to make him want a provider.

  Release, I thought. The memory faded.

  I had found the Highton, or at least his guard’s provider. I closed my eyes, trying to reach the youth. He was my clue to the Aristo. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t force myself back to his mind.

  I climbed to my feet and started down the path. Gradually, as I walked, my pulse slowed and my breathing calmed. I called up a menu that said my adrenalin levels had returned to normal. Taking a breath, I reached out again with my mind. This time I searched more carefully—there! I jerked back from provider, but not so completely that I lost the link, just enough so I didn’t submerge into his experience. Gritting my teeth, I probed at the rusty-eyed guard. Normally I couldn’t have reached him from so far away, but his link to the provider gave me a bridge. I hung on to the edges of his mind like a swimmer hanging onto a strut, fighting a whirlpool. A scream from the provider cut through my consciousness, and the guard groaned like a lover in the grip of an orgasm.

  I was dimly aware of the park, of a tree where I had halted, leaning against its trunk. How could I stop the guard? I couldn’t change his damn brain structure. But I had to do something.

  Boring. I hurled the thought with as much strength as I could marshal. Boring! This provider has become immensely, excruciatingly BORING.

  Lethargy settled over the guard, dulling his interest and also my link with him. I was losing the image. The echoes of pain from the provider stopped, and his relief flared so intensely that I saw the guard, too, and even the room around him. Another provider was there, a girl lying bound to a divan on her back with her arms stretched tight over her head.

  As the first provider’s responses faded into exhaustion, my link with him weakened. Where? I thought in the Eubian language. Where are you?

  He was passing out; soon I wouldn’t sense him at all. The guard had left the room—wait, the second provider, the girl—he must have freed her before he left. She was running to the boy, and the intensity of her frantic concern yanked me back into the link.

  I jumped to her mind. Where are you? WHERE?

  She untied the boy, crying, cradling him in her arms. As he collapsed against her, my link weakened. Before it faded altogether I caught up the faint image of a mansion shaped like a huge galleon. I had no idea if either provider tried to send the image; it felt more like an overflow from the girl’s agitated thoughts. Whatever the reason, I had the hint I needed.

  Or maybe not. After searching for an hour, I still hadn’t found the galleon. It was time to go back to the hotel. Disheartened, I walked around a graceful fountain that spouted fragrances instead of water, my footsteps muted on a lawn of rose-bells. Beyond the fountain, a road glistened in silvery light from the street lamps. I looked across it—straight at the galleon mansion.

  The house “floated” in its gardens, surrounded by bushes sculpted like swells of water, with white flowers that resembled sea foam. The masts glowed with streaks of phosphorescence, and their furled sails looked, at this distance, like sheets of gold. The disks on them chimed together, their pitches blending into a song that evoked water and wind.

  Faint light rippled around the house like an aurora borealis. I knew those colors; I often saw them around the Triad—my aunt, my brother Kurj, and my father. By order of the Assembly, when a Triad member went in public, those rainbows also went. They were the only outward sign of a cyberlock, a brain implant. I had one, though I rarely used it. When activated, the lock produced a field tuned to its owner’s brain waves. Low-keyed fields sounded an alarm when penetrated, mid-keyed fields repulsed intruders, and high-keyed fields killed them.

  Birds were flying through the rainbows, so the field had to be low-keyed right now, a warning system to catch intruders. But it would permeate everything around the house, leaving no hole to sneak through. Was this lock tuned to the Highton? That would mean he had undergone surgery to have it implanted, a grueling process few people cared to undertake. That so young an Aristo should be so thoroughly protected was as disturbing as everything else about him.

  Toggle combat mode, I thought.

  Toggled.

  I studied the mansion, trying to decide how I could best utilize my augmentations. In combat mode my body relied on bioengineered hydraulics that ran along my skeleton, with living motors that linked to my fiberoptic web. The only limit on my reaction speed was the time it took the hydraulics to move my limbs. And that was fast, far faster than any muscle could contract. I often fought by reflex, automatically accessing the extensive libraries of fighting maneuvers in my node. And I used combat mode sparingly; despite reinforcements to my bones and joints, the system strained my skeleton. Fast reactions did me no good here in the park, though. I had to get inside the mansion without being detected, which at the moment looked impossible.

  An idea came to me. I smiled. No, I couldn’t do that. I really couldn’t.

  “Well, hell, why not?” I said.

  I crossed the road, and its nervoplex shifted under my feet. On the other side I walked through the cyberlock rainbows and up to the front door. Then I knocked.

  The door opened immediately, revealing two guards armed with laser carbines, power packs hung on their belts. Their confusion hit me like a blast of air; had his lordship actually been lunatic enough to invite me here? Had I been lunatic enough to accept?

  “My greetings,” I said—and whipped up my leg, kicking one carbine out of its owner’s hands while I sent the other man’s gun flying with a sweep of my arm.

  Neither guard had a chance to summon help before I knocked them out. But as I ran into the
mansion, another eight guards appeared, running down the stairs in the entrance foyer and coming through archways on my right and left. What the hell? Although Hightons always traveled with bodyguards, the usual complement was four. I had expected only the five I had seen at the bar.

  As I focused on the guards, my mind went on boost, changing my perceptions so that everyone seemed to move in slow motion. The guards reacted as if they were underwater, barely changing position while I leveled my Jumbler at them.

  Weapons link established, my node thought. A grid of cross-hairs appeared over my view of the foyer while stats flashed in a corner of my mental display:

  Fuel: abiton

  rest energy: 1.9 eV

  charge: 5.95x10-25 C

  magnet: 0.0001 T

  max radius: 0.05 M

  I swept the Jumbler beam across the ground in front of the guards. Only orange sparkles showed as it cut through the air, but when it touched the floor, that parquetry exploded. Debris flew everywhere and rained down into the trough I was gouging. Dust swirled around us. I doubted the owners of the mansion would rent to the Aristo again. His guests were too ill-mannered.

  The guards skidded to a stop at the trough, their arms rising in slow motion to protect their heads from flying debris. It wouldn’t delay them for long, and I couldn’t knock out this many even with my enhanced reflexes. Either I was going to have to take the irreversibly drastic step of shooting them or else find another way to reach the Highton.

  I ran back outside into the garden. A laser shot came so close to my ear that strands of my hair sizzled. Someone cursed and shouted in Eubian about wanting me able to talk, not crisped to cinders.

  I sprinted with accelerated speed toward a tower at the south edge of the mansion. It had to be the security center; Traders rarely varied in their procedures. They didn’t comprehend innovation, opting instead for sheer strength. Unfortunately for us, sheer strength went a long way no matter how much imagination its producers lacked.

  I reached the tower in seconds and annihilated its lock. Another guard was inside, his carbine already up and aimed. Even before my mind registered his presence, my leg was kicking into the air. My boot heel hit the carbine and it flew out of his hands, its shot going wide and burning into the wall instead of me.