Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 107
Page 8
“It is with great humility that I serve once again as your speaker,” Baylor intoned, without anything of the sort. “And so it is my pleasure to invite you to our annual FlyBy, in which we will inspect the outside of our Olympia. Our families and friends await us on the shuttle. Once we finish our glasses, we will depart.”
They smiled at each other. The FlyBy was the most exclusive event anyone could possibly attend. It was so exclusive, they would not even have Servants to attend them. We watched them gulp their alcohol, but when they got to their feet they were steady. It would take more than one glass to make fools of them.
Their departure was our own cue to make a graceful exit. We walked through the access tunnel to our lockers. Nuruddin fell in beside me. “Something is wrong,” he murmured.
My first impulse was to reassure him. But Nuruddin’s instincts had always been sharp. I thought back to Baylor’s invitation to his brethren—was there something in his tone that I had missed? “I’ll look into it,” I promised.
He said nothing more. He headed straight home to his family, as was his well-documented habit. I took a different tunnel, to the adult education center to work on my math skills. Unlike the tunnels, the center was a well-lit place, though only about a quarter full at any given time. This was probably because no amount of education would earn a worm a job as a tech, or any other job other than the one you already held. But it was a pastime that entertained me.
It also gave me an alibi while I nosed into the communication and security grids. I sat in a cubicle and used a stylus to write out chemical equations. But they were all problems I knew by heart, and my mind was busy studying messages. The first thing I saw was the public feed of the FlyBy.
“The challenges of the past year have been many,” Baylor Charmayne’s solemn voice informed us from his canned speech. “But Olympia remains strong and proud, now that we have reached the halfway point in our journey. Our children’s children will live to see a new world, and they will thank us for our prudence and our careful conservation of resources.”
While he lectured the population of Olympia about the virtue of privation, stock footage from a previous FlyBy pretended to be a real-time representation of him and the other Executives standing stiffly at their command stations on the shuttle. Off camera, on a lower deck, over nine hundred of their closest family members and cronies partied with the abandon of people who had never known a moment of conservation.
“And as we enter the second half of our voyage,” continued Baylor, “we can feel secure in the knowledge that we never compromised our—”
His speech broke into indecipherable bits for almost a full minute, before cutting in again with, “—out the fire extinguishers! We have less than five minutes before—” More distortion followed. Then, “Mayday, mayday! We have fire on—”
Static terminated the transmission.
I wished I could see what was really happening on that shuttle. But according to the encrypted General Security log, all of its surveillance feeds had been disabled before it left Olympia. That efficiency had carried itself over to an incident report that had already been written. I found that buried in a secret database that also contained a report of how Baylor Charmayne had survived the assassination of his fellow legislators. It began with this tidbit:
It has been determined that surveillance devices were disabled from the electrical pulse generated by the first explosion.
I read the report to its conclusion. Then I touched my link with Medusa.
There are no fireballs in space, but escaping atmosphere can create some temporary color. What I liked best was the blue lightning of the gravity bubble that crawled all over that shuttle, pulverizing what was left of it so no pieces could be retrieved and examined for evidence, later. It was the same weapon, on a smaller scale, that had been used to destroy what was left of Titania. It was left over from the war that had driven us from our home system in the first place.
Medusa and I watched from a perch just outside Lock 207. I played selections from Prokofiev’s Ivan the Terrible as we marveled at the awful beauty of that destruction. I shed a tear as I thought of my parents.
she said.
We watched for something in particular. Within forty-five minutes, we spotted the lights from Baylor Charmayne’s pressure suit. According to the report, his journey from the crippled shuttle would take exactly 73 minutes.
There were many things we didn’t know yet. For one thing, we weren’t sure which lock he would try to open. But finally, Baylor tapped a manual override code into the keypad outside Lock 212.
The coincidence was downright magical.
Medusa’s tentacles stretched and retracted as we whipped across the hull of Olympia toward Lock 212. We spotted Baylor clinging to a grip bar. His suit was a gleaming Executive model, equipped with a twelve-hour air supply and jets that easily took him from the shuttle to the Series 200 locks. I had to shake my head when I pondered the trouble he had gone to, the danger he had put himself in to make it look like this assassination had been survived by a hero. I would have manipulated the records and stayed safe inside Olympia. But then, I had Medusa to help me finesse that sort of fraud. And I wasn’t trying to prove anything to a dead mother.
We couldn’t see his face as we moved up on him, but his pudgy, gloved fingers managed to convey some frustration as he typed code after code into that keypad and it refused to respond. He would never get inside that lock without our help. Medusa and I had long since mastered every protocol in Olympia’s command database.
We tore him free of his perch, and stripped his jets off the suit before he could fire them.
He gaped at us through his faceplate. Unlike Ryan, he knew what Medusa was. He would have looked less shocked if his dead mother had confronted him outside that lock.
“Who are you!?” he used his suit com to ask.
For him, my smile was anything but tender, “Call me Medusa.” I transmitted in her voice.
“I know that, you idiot! But who’s driving? Whoever you are, she’s controlling you, can’t you see that?”
I let Medusa answer that one. “I’m not controlling her, she’s collaborating with me, just as you always feared.”
“They’ll destroy you,” he said. “The Medusa units will destroy everything that matters to us.”
“Everything that matters to you,” I agreed. “But what did you destroy, Baylor? How many lives were lost on Titania so you could control the message?”
From the moment I had realized what he had done to his fellow Executives, I had remembered that overheard conversation with his mother. How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? First I had assumed he was talking about workers like me. Then I thought he must mean the Medusa units. But now that I had witnessed his newest mass execution, I remembered another pertinent detail. No Executives had made it off Titania. Not one had escaped. And once they were dead, the Charmaynes had become twice as powerful. So yes, they wanted to destroy the Medusa units, but what had Ryan Charmayne said? I think I know how we might kill two birds with one stone . . .
“My god.” The disgust in Baylor’s voice informed me that even in these circumstances, he couldn’t grasp that he wasn’t supreme anymore. “You animals. You think you know what’s going on? You stupid, blind—”
“Do you know how we got to Olympia?” Medusa asked. “It was your greed that saved us.”
A light went on behind his eyes. I’ll give him credit—he understood i
mmediately.
“You raided Titania for resources,” said Medusa. “You weren’t satisfied until you picked her clean. It took many, many trips for the supply ships to move everything you wanted. Each time, a few more of us stowed away on those ships. When all of us were safe, our operatives sabotaged your mother’s lifeship. She was too smart—eventually she would have figured out what we had done.”
The grief and rage he displayed then were impressive. In Baylor’s mind, he was the good guy. He had not been responsible for his mother’s death, and he still missed her. He believed in the righteousness of everything he did, and he believed that the equality the rest of us were trying to achieve was unnatural and wrong.
Time to cut that nonsense short. “None of your fellow legislators tried to stop you when you made your escape,” I said. “None of them tried to get into pressure suits. You must have taken the antidote for the drink you all had together in your garden. Maybe they were unconscious or even dead before the first bombs went off. But their families trapped down in the lounge section were awake through the whole ordeal, weren’t they Baylor? You even sacrificed people from your own family.”
A tightening around his eyes was his only response.
“I’m guessing you’ll declare martial law once you’re back on board Olympia, until you can find the evil perpetrators of this mass murder. And that could last indefinitely. Will the Charmaynes have to take permanent control?”
“It’s the right thing to do,” he said. “Don’t you see that?”
Just past his left shoulder, I could see what was left of the shuttle. The gravity bubble was collapsing, leaving a crumpled wreck floating in a field of stars. I touched the link in his head that only his fellow Executives should have been able to use.
I held him with Medusa’s tentacles and smashed him against Olympia’s hull until his helmet shattered. I had been planning to tell him that I had used Lock 212 to kill his son, Ryan—that was the only vengeance I had contemplated. But that seemed too cruel, now. So I pulled him close.
And finally, when the light left his eyes, I sent him off to join the trail of bodies behind Olympia.
When I opened the inner door of Lock 212, I was alone again—or as alone as I could get with Medusa or anyone else I might care to talk to only a thought away. The hall was dimly lit, with pools of light punctuated by deeper shadows. Someone stood in one of those pools. He moved into the light when he was certain I had noticed him.
“Terry,” I said. “You are now the head of the Charmayne family.”
He had been weeping, but he seemed to be past that now. “He did it,” he said. “He killed all of them. My mother warned me he would do that some day—he or Sheba. I didn’t believe her until Sheba had her arrested and blown out of an air lock.” He pointed at Lock 212 with his chin. “Smaller than this one. With an observation window. Sheba picked that one, because she wanted me to watch, even though I was only six. She wanted to make sure I knew that disobedience would not be tolerated.”
I heard him. But at the same time, I searched the Public Address records to see what had been announced about the assassination. What I found surprised me. “You told them everything. Everyone knows what Baylor did.”
He nodded. “The only thing they don’t know is that you killed him. Or I assume you did—I won’t ask for the details. I said that his plan backfired when he couldn’t get back into Olympia. After all, none of the locks would open because we were on high alert.”
I scanned a variety of communiques, to see if I could get a feel for how people were reacting. “No one seems surprised,” I concluded.
“Nope,” said Terry. “I would say they’re relieved. I think it’s a bit early to tell, but I believe that we can continue our program to upgrade the implants. I’ve spoken to the candidates I mentioned to you, and they’re ready to make the commitment.”
That makes fifty of us, now, Nuruddin had said, Fifty people trying to keep a secret—eleven of them children. But thirty-eight plus eleven make forty-nine. The one Nuruddin hadn’t mentioned was Terry Charmayne.
He took a deep breath, and let it out in a sigh. “I could tell you things. Things you wouldn’t believe.” He gazed at the lock as if he were seeing those things.
Then he shook himself. His eyes were red, but not so full of grief anymore. “How tired are you? Are you up to performing some surgery?”
“I’m up to it,” I said. “But there’s something I want to do first. Can I get into the habitat sector, now?”
“Everyone can,” he said. “That’s the first thing I did with what authority I have left. The private homes are off limits, because they’re empty now. But the gardens are open.” He smiled at that. I knew he was remembering the day we met. “Are you going to sniff flowers?”
“I’m going to squish mud between my toes,” I said. “I promised my father.”
When I made my way through the tunnels to the habitat sector, they were not so dim anymore, or so cold. The security locks were closed, but not locked. Since I was most familiar with the access point I had used as a Servant, that’s the one I went to. When I opened the door into the green, living heart of Olympia, I found Nuruddin’s son Ashur, standing at the end of the pavement with his bare feet on the clover. I took off my shoes and joined him there.
He looked up at me.
He took my hand, and we explored together. Robot gardeners skirted us unobtrusively, as they had been programmed to do in order to avoid annoying the Executives.
I had believed that I knew what the habitat looked like, because I thought I was pretending to be blind when I attended the Executives. Now I knew I had fooled myself, too. I had been so focused on what they were doing and what I was planning, I never looked up.
Our noses brought us back to ground level when we found the sweet peas. Ashur and I put our faces right into the blooms and breathed deep.
We found a bench shaped like two giant turtles and sat on it. A fountain burbled nearby, and I tried to imagine Ryan and Baylor Charmayne sitting there and enjoying the beauty. I couldn’t do it.
From our perch, I could see through one of the windows of a fine house, now empty of the Executives who had taken its beauty for granted. It was open, and a curtain fluttered. But there was no breeze.
A man emerged from the darkness behind the window and looked out at us. But Terry had said the houses were empty—why was he there? I scanned his face and searched for him in Olympia’s database.
His wasn’t in any of the directories. His face had no matching profile. As far as the records were concerned, this man didn’t exist.
Their pathway is not part of the known network, Sheba had said, all those years ago.
He grinned at me, as if he knew I couldn’t find his name. As if he thought that would frighten me.
I grinned back, and watched his smirk wither. He turned away from the window and was gone. I had a feeling it might be a while before I saw him again. When I did—if I did—our encounter would probably not be peaceful.
For ten years I had killed and plotted. Yet I hadn’t anticipated what Baylor was about to do, and I hadn’t seen this man until he showed himself to me.
But there were also things that only Medusa and I knew, things I would never tell anyone. I wouldn’t flinch to use those things, when necessary.
I gazed at the empty window.
He pondered that. He was nine years old, younger than I was when my father had given me the enhancements that changed my life.
We walked away from the house, leaving its mystery for another time. I wanted to tell Ashur that everything would be okay. But maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe we could only hope to make it better.
Soon, Terry Charmayne and I would introduce more people to their units and get the process of communication started. But Ashur and his friends were the ones who would design the future. They already realized possibilities that we couldn’t see. They heard the music and drew pictures of what they dreamed. Even the man in the window didn’t know what that would be.
As for me—I’m still Oichi Angelis. In my own way, I shall always be a worm. But what is a worm if not a creature that brings air and nourishment to growing things?
We walked deeper into that forbidden garden, where moisture condensed in the air. Above us, the world turned and the sky was green with growing things.
And look we would, with no one to tell us we must remain blind to keep the peace.
“It will be okay, Ashur,” I promised, and together we walked back into the tunnels of Olympia, to make it so.
About the Author
Nine of Emily Devenport’s novels were published in the U.S. By NAL/Roc, under three pen names. She also has been published in the U.K., Italy, and Israel. Her novels are Shade, Larissa, Scorpianne, EggHeads, The Kronos Condition, Godheads, Broken Time (which was nominated for the Philip K. Dick Award), Belarus, and Enemies. Her newest novels, The Night Shifter, Spirits of Glory, and Pale Lady are in ebook form on Amazon, Smashwords, etc.