I didn’t know that was my destination. I had only one question in my mind when I turned inward and started searching the virtual hallways in my head: Why?
I remembered bits of that conversation from Baylor and Sheba Charmayne: How do we kill them …
The most dreadful thing about grief is that it hits you in waves, and they continue to crash against the shore for as long as you live. You just get used to the tides.
Anger, on the other hand, is a slow burn. I nursed it as I walked those inner paths.
Prior to that moment, I had envisioned my pathways as a giant circuit, its parts illuminated with different colored lights. The information I retrieved sometimes looked like the pictures you might see on a screen, but sometimes were full-blown analogues of ideas, things, places, and people. This was the first time the pathways themselves were represented as hallways in my mind. They were more expansive than the tunnels through which I made my daily life. Something had changed inside my head, and it wasn’t just because of feelings.
I heard the strains of a Japanese transverse flute, punctuated by a stick drum. A light blossomed inside those virtual hallways, in my head. It illuminated the ghost of my mother.
She knelt on a dais. She wore a stiff, formal shōzoku—in this case, the white robes of the dead. But in a Noh play, she would have been wearing a ghost mask. Instead, her black hair had fallen in a curtain to hide all of her face except for one relentless eye.
We are dead, that eye told me. You are alone.
But my mother didn’t say that. She said, “What do you want to see?”
In response, four hayashi-kata materialized around my mother’s kneeling form, each playing one of the four instruments that accompany Noh performers: the flute, the hip drum, the shoulder drum, and the stick drum. As they played, my mother gestured and the walls shifted into chaos. “Security footage,” she intoned. “It is fragmented.”
Exploded bits danced along with my mother and her hayashi-kata. I saw fragments of things that made no sense out of context. Darkness was interrupted by flashes of light, blurred images of objects passing cameras, and disruption as the cameras themselves were destroyed. But in the midst of that static, a central theme emerged: the spinning body of Titania wrenching apart, stars suddenly visible through gaps—and a strange lightning.
“Gravity bombs,” said my mother, and the flutist played tones that sent chills up my spine.
I had never heard of gravity bombs, but their very name is informative. I saw parts of Titania pulling away from each other and guessed that the bombs generated strong fields. If you had several of them on the hull of a ship (or even placed in strategic areas inside it), they could crush everything within their field, but they could also cause damage by conflicting with each other.
The Security footage of Titania’s destruction was a storm. It raged, my mother danced, the musicians played—and then everything stopped.
“No known survivors,” said my mother. The stick drum added a note of finality.
“Her escape vessel was in its bay and ready to launch. But it never did.”
I considered the plot I had heard Sheba and Baylor discussing. Rumors had circulated for several deca-cycles about repairs that needed to be done on Titania, about arguments among the Executives over whether they should spend the resources to make them. I had been one of twenty thousand people who immigrated to Olympia in the past year. But my parents couldn’t join me, because they were high-ranking techs, too important to be spared.
“Lady Sheba attempted to escape,” said the ghost of my mother. “She failed.”
I thought my mother was not a true ghost, that she must be an extension of me, a search engine I had created to guide me through this new analogue. She waited for another inquiry.
I had viewed such patterns often. They looked like models of trees, with leaves and branches that grew new tips and seemed to wave with invisible winds. That’s how this model started out, too, but soon I could see the faces that went with each member of the conversation. Those faces belonged to public profiles, and that lent the scene a nauseating cheerfulness. I couldn’t hear the voices, since I hadn’t asked for those details. For now, the pattern told me what I needed to know. Baylor Charmayne was the trunk of that tree.
“Mother.”
For one giddy moment, I knew how he must feel.
“No. But they have restricted all nonessential communications.”
Those restricted lines formed red branches. No leaves sprouted from them, no faces or voices were allowed from the worms who used them. But I imagined them in their burrows, waiting for the official notification of what they already had concluded when they couldn’t connect with colleagues or family on Titania.
The lightning of gravity bombs illuminated the hall behind my mother, to the tune of the stick drum.
“They predate ‘the Homeworld,’” said my mother’s ghost.
I wanted to learn more about the bombs, but the way she had emphasized the name of the world from which we had been driven made me pause. Her tone had been—sarcastic?
Her eye looked coldly into mine. “Don’t you think it’s odd that they didn’t give it a name?”
I had never thought about it. Or—I assumed I hadn’t, but could she wonder if I didn’t already? Unless she was not the echo I assumed her to be.
“The human race was born on a world called Earth,” she said. “We know quite a lot about it. The images in your database come from Earth.”
“Did she?”
I tried to remember. I wasn’t sure.
“People name suns, worlds, moons we have passed in our journey,” she said. “We even name asteroids. But we didn’t name the world where we were living? I don’t believe that.”
For as long as I could remember, I had been so focused on my parents’ secret plans, on observing everyone around me, on staying alive—I had never wondered about our past. But she had asked an interesting question.
Mother knelt on the dais. “Because it didn’t exist.”
The hayashi-kata struck their final notes and disappeared—along with one of the central premises of my life.
My mother bowed her head, and the light that had framed her began to dim. “Oichi,” she whispered. “Look over your shoulder.”
I obeyed. At the other end of the hall, another figure waited.
The ghost of Lady Sheba.
5
Lady Sheba?
Lady Sheba Charmayne loved Pachelbel’s Canon in D. I know she did, because right after I moved to Olympia, she shuttled over from Titania a few times to have supper at her son’s estate, and every single time she insisted that Pachelbel be played in the background, along with a handful of lovely classical standards that no one but me recognized by name. Including Lady Sheba. Including Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which she simply called, “That music I like so much.”
Baylor indulged her, and not just because of love. Like everyone else, he feared her. In her lifetime, the Iron Fist killed many more people than I have. Though if you saw her at one of those suppers, you might think she was simply a difficult old woman who couldn’t stop telling her son what to do.
That sounds funny now, but I guarantee no one was laughing at those suppers—unless Lady Sheba told a joke. I can see her now, touching her dry lips with a napkin (that was instantly replaced by a servant at her elbow). “All the women come and go,” she says, “talking of Michelangelo.” You can tell she intends that to be humorous, because she telegraphs it by
quirking the left side of her mouth.
At those endless suppers, her son would gaze at her with genuine admiration and tweak his own face in an exact imitation of her expression, and then guests would laugh to show that they understood what she was referring to (in the case of “all the women” who “come and go,” a poem by T. S. Eliot that they were supposed to know she was misquoting—whether they did or not).
Some of them probably did understand her. The ones who didn’t, faked it. And we Servants showed no expression at all, which was a deliberate handicap but could also be a blessing for someone like me who was spying on enemies. I served them food and wine, placed fresh napkins just as they were about to reach for them, dabbed minor messes they made before they noticed they had made them. I may have been the only one who didn’t fear Lady Sheba, and only then because I was too busy trying to decipher her double and triple entendres.
“The music is pleasant,” she said of Pachelbel’s Canon in D, by which she also meant, I expect you to play it at all suppers and The pace of this dinner party better match the tempo of this music.
But that was easy to see; all Servants knew that about Lady Sheba. It was harder to know how much of what she said was really about legislation working its way through the House, or about contractual disputes between the clans. You could argue that the Executives were always talking about those things, regardless of what they said. That’s one of the reasons the remarks that Glen Tedd would eventually make about Lady Sheba’s death weren’t just rude; they were outrageous. He would come right out and say what he meant.
I savored the music at those dinner parties. Why not? It was beautiful, regardless of who else liked it. Pachelbel’s Canon in D conjured an elegant, clockwork universe in which everything had a place, everything functioned according to a celestial order that could be sensed even if it could not always be seen. It helped me perform my part in the precise drama that appeared to be a relaxed gathering (so long as you were watching the guests instead of the Servants) but was really a ritual about power and image.
Face, my mother would have said, which meant reputation rather than demeanor. Lady Sheba was slim, tall, perfectly put together, possessing a beauty that never dimmed with age. Her black eyes were sharp. They saw everything. And the lovely clockwork tones of the Canon in D conveyed a grace that seemed to belong to her. But when Lady Sheba made that remark about the women who come and go, she wasn’t expressing sympathy for a male acquaintance who hesitated to express his feelings to a woman of whom he was fond.
“You look pale, Alfie,” she remarked to Alfred Diouf, the voting member of a family closely allied to the Charmaynes. “I hope you’re taking care to eat and sleep enough.”
Alfred Diouf inclined his head in respect. “I shall apply myself more diligently to those things, Lady Sheba.”
I admired his restraint. Alfie had good reason to suffer from lack of sleep and loss of appetite. His wife, another member in the House of Clans, had voted against a bill that Lady Sheba favored. By doing so, she overestimated her standing within her own clan. She had been marched to an air lock for her misjudgment.
So what did all of this have to do with the women who come and go? Alfred Diouf had already lost two wives because the women in question had voted against Lady Sheba.
Oh—and the last one really admired the work of Michelangelo.
By then, I had already seen what must happen to people who defied Lady Sheba. I witnessed the result for the first time when I was still living on Titania.
I was fourteen, and spending several hours after my school–work shift in the Learning Center. Kids like me congregated there because it was warmer (if not actually warm), and well lit, and large enough for several of us to sit in a group. We weren’t allowed to spend long periods of time together unless we were working or studying, so we pretended to study while actually hanging out in the most low-key fashion we could manage. In their own way, the brief words we exchanged were as imbued with double meanings as those of the Executives.
To be accurate, the other kids pretended to study. I pretended to pretend. But I did appreciate their company, because it was so undemanding and because it gave me cover while I roamed the pathways in my head, monitoring activities and sampling conversations aboard both ships. During one particular cycle, while I was reviewing material I’d already memorized about the Homeworld, I became aware that Lady Sheba’s location indicator was flashing outside Lock 129.
Uh-oh, I thought.
My tutoring monitor shone with images of wildflowers and babbling brooks. <“Everyone prospered on the Homeworld,”> the narrator said through my earpiece, <“until Enemy Clans poisoned it.”>
The images shifted to burning cities and forests, dry lake beds and dead wildlife. The scenes were awful, but in my head I saw tragedy of a more immediate nature. A location indicator representing Bunny Charmayne moved into Lock 129. Sheba Charmayne stayed in the access hall, along with several other Charmaynes and a few Security personnel. The door spun shut, isolating Bunny inside the air lock.
Enemy Clans were supposed to have poisoned the Homeworld, but all Bunny’s problems seemed to originate within her own clan. I found her in the network and touched the icon for recent communications. I saw a flurry of messages from her to Baylor, and to several other high-ranking clan members:
Bunny was married to a man in another clan whose pedigree wasn’t nearly so stellar. I noticed he wasn’t present in the group outside the lock.
But her young son was. His name was Terry Charmayne. Interesting—he hadn’t taken his father’s name.…
The very last messages Bunny sent were to Terry. Her virtual voice echoed in my head when I accessed it.
“The War of Clans lasted for ten years.” The narrator’s tone sounded grave. “When it was over, less than half a million people survived. They knew the Enemy Clans would return someday. So they built the generation ships, Titania and Olympia.”
The action on the monitor shifted from desolation to images of the generation ships under construction. I wished they had documented that time better—I would have loved to watch them putting our ships together from start to finish. But these brief scenes were all that survived in the history library.
“They launched our ships toward the solar system that promised the best chance for a new life.” Massive engines fired, Titania and Olympia started their journey and began to spin up to simulate the g-forces we were now accustomed to feeling. Music swelled, and I could tell it was supposed to be inspiring. But it wasn’t from my father’s database, and I thought it was a bit lackluster. I would have suggested the “Saturn” movement from Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite. Our ships were worthy of that music.
“Now we are almost halfway to our destination,” the narrator said. “We have traveled more than one hundred years. We will travel more than one hundred more. Our great-grandchildren will see a pristine world.” New music informed me that I should be moved by this prospect. But it was even less inspiring than the other music had been.
Try the “Jupiter” movement, I suggested to people who couldn’t hear me. As long as we’re going with the Planets Suite.
Lady Sheba probably would have found the “Jupiter” movement too rambunctious. All her joy seemed to come from exercising power, especially over young upstarts in her own clan, like Bunny, who was—how old? Twenty-eight, according to her records. Which meant she would have been all of fourteen when she gave birth to Terry.
I was just fourteen myself, and I had already seen enough to wonder if her son wasn’t the reason Bunny Charmayne was about to exit that air lock without a pressure suit. (All these years later, I find myself wondering if Bunny neglected to laugh at Sheba’s jokes.)
I didn’t access the cameras inside that l
ock, or inside the hallway either. Watching someone die from suffocation and instant depressurization is not a happy experience. But I watched Bunny’s light stand perfectly still inside Lock 129. She didn’t hammer at the inner door or rush to the suit lockers to try to save herself. She just kept sending messages to Terry.
And then her light jumped from inside the ship to outside. I sighed, and my friends must have thought I was tired of looking at my monitor.
After a few minutes, Bunny’s locator told me she was well outside the ship, and therefore quite dead—but she was traveling at the same rate we were. Her path diverged, but she would stay within range of the locator signal for many cycles. Other people floated out there, too. I could still detect faint signals for three of them. They weren’t all Sheba’s kills, though. Quite a few Executives exercised air lock–disposal privileges.
The Charmaynes in the hallway outside Lock 129 moved away from it, toward the lift that would take them back to the Habitat Sector. But that’s not where they went. They continued down the hall toward a mover nexus. From there, they could travel to a destination on the same level. Sheba led the parade.
Give the woman credit; she was a genius at plotting the route that would require the least walking. That was necessary because Sheba insisted on walking at a particular pace—steady, but slow enough that her entourage had to concentrate in order to match it. Later, when I had observed her at a few dinner parties, I realized her pace exactly matched the tempo of her favorite recording of Pachelbel’s Canon in D. She believed it to be the soundtrack for her life. Even while she was murdering kinswomen.
But that wasn’t the music I heard as I watched them walk away from Bunny’s execution, young Terry stumbling in their midst. I heard the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, one of the loveliest and saddest dirges ever written. It didn’t match Lady Sheba’s mood, but it certainly matched Terry’s.
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