Olympia’s Habitat Sector is so large, they have minor weather events in there. But if you’re a worm like me, and spend most of your time walking or crawling through the kilometers of tunnels in the worker sectors, your universe is both small and limitless. It’s small because the space is confining, and limitless because it doesn’t begin or end in a particular spot.
But the outside of the ship is a different story. It’s a landscape full of valleys, peaks, and plains, and its sky is full of stars. From my new perspective, I could see the blazing heart of our galaxy. I could see the Andromeda galaxy, too, its spiral shape more apparent. The beauty and grandeur of this view were beginning to overtake my panic—and possibly to cloud my judgment, because I started to crawl toward the series-200 sector. Lacking another plan, I decided I may as well go for it.
I couldn’t see that sector from where I was; I relied on schematics that I accessed through my links. While I was at it, I did a little research about my situation. I used the cameras in the tunnel outside Lock 113 and saw a guard posted at the inner door. I didn’t know him, but I recognized his military stance. Oddly, I felt comforted to see him there, because it validated my decision to venture into unknown territory and look for another way in.
But a quick inspection of my pressure suit revealed another problem. My jet packs were even lower than my air tanks. And since Olympia was spinning, I feared I could end up in a spot without a proper handhold when they ran out. I would have to pull myself along and use the jets only when I had no other choice.
That was probably going to take longer than I had. But I didn’t have a plan B, so I stopped debating the point and aimed myself for the 200-series locks, keeping my body close in and parallel to the ship. Since I was at the end of the spin arm, it wanted to spin me off, so it was very slow going. But I tried to use the rotation to some advantage, moving in a diagonal in the opposite direction of the spin.
One hour later, I checked my status. I was less than one-third of the way to my destination.
I wasn’t going to make it.
So I stopped and took stock. A quick check of the guard in the maintenance hall revealed that he was still there. Worse—I had gone past the halfway point for my air supply, and the math did not look good for a return trip.
Yet I felt calm. I regretted that I would never be able to share the gift my parents had given to me. But I didn’t regret this mode of death. The view of the outside of our generation ship was magnificent; it made me wonder why I had spent so much time wanting to see the Habitat Sector. From my new vantage point, closer to Fore Sector, I could see the distant sensor array on one end. I only had to consider for a few seconds to realize what music I should play in my head: “Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age” by Gustav Holst. As I listened to the sound of that grim and majestic procession, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies wheeled past. I accessed a chart and identified more galaxies in the star field.
Who ordered the hit? I suddenly thought to wonder. I poked around communication records, looking for messages that might be pertinent. While I was in there, a new pathway appeared—the same one I had used to trigger the alarm when Nuruddin had been in trouble. I recognized a link there.
I touched the link. Medusa stirred.
A schematic of Olympia’s exterior appeared in my mind’s eye. I found my spot on it and highlighted it for her.
I wondered why that would be sufficient, but I didn’t question her. Instead, I used the secret pathway that had led me to Medusa to look for my name in Security memos. It didn’t pop up, but I got a red flag for top secret documents. When I wiggled my way around the Security protocols, I still didn’t find my name. But I did find a name I recognized in the memo: Titania.
The message was short: Eliminate targets tied to dissidents from Titania, then erase their names from directories. It was signed B. Charmayne.
Connected to that communication were two responses, and my name finally popped up: So far have located only three targets. Med techs Sultana Smith and Tetsuko Finnegan eliminated. Servant Oichi Angelis in progress. Will use Lock 113.
It was unsigned. But a scan of the original directive revealed two recipients, P. Schnebly and R. Charmayne. So I thought the first response might have come from P. Schnebly. Probably he was the fellow standing guard in the tunnel.
The second response sounded more like something Ryan Charmayne would say: I think I know how we might kill two birds with one stone.
So, in a way, I was responsible for Glen Tedd’s death. True, Ryan would have looked for other chances to kill him, but I had accidentally expedited the affair. When I searched for the status connected with both our names, Tedd’s read deceased. Mine didn’t, but I assumed P. Schnebly would update it once he had confirmed his kill by waiting for my air supply to run out.
P. Schnebly had not discovered any more names of targets from Titania yet. When I retraced the inquiries connected with my profile, I could see it had not been easy for him, and that puzzled me. He had been forced to plod through each file individually. So it was a minor miracle (if one was inclined to look at it in that light) that he had found me at all.
I checked my air supply. I had twenty-seven minutes left. Counting your life out in minutes is not a happy thing.
So I distracted myself with history. We were all supposed to be tied to dissidents from Titania, but I could find no mention of them. I assumed Schnebly was hunting for immigrants. Olympia’s current population hovered around three hundred thousand people, and over fifty thousand of us had come from Titania within the last ten years. Those were a lot of records to plow through. But I did have two clues: Sultana Smith and Tetsuko Finnegan. Whom did we have in common? I would have to compare our contacts.
“It will take you forever to search your secret directory. It’s too inclusive.”
I twitched at the sound of that voice. It hadn’t come from my suit comm; it came from inside my own head. Images came with it, the inner hallways I associated with my search engine. The voice was coming from the virtual space behind me.
I turned and saw Lady Sheba’s ghost. As always, she was elegantly dressed and perfectly coifed. I had become accustomed to having her pop up from time to time when I used my search engine. But her features never held the characteristic stiffness the living Sheba had displayed.
“Schnebly has limited access to Baylor Charmayne’s network,” she said. “The speed at which you can sort data is vastly superior to his, but if you want to find the dissidents, you’ll get results faster if you limit your search to that one.”
The light illuminating Sheba dimmed, and she bowed like an actress leaving a stage.
I searched Baylor’s directory for contact history for the three of us who had been targeted. The hallways blurred as names and faces flew past me, and I scanned them all. When I found people we three had in common, I pinned them in place and continued to sort. When I was finished, five people gazed at me from their personnel files. I didn’t recognize four of them, though they were tied to me in my records.
But the fifth was my father.
Using those five names, I searched through the histories of all other immigrants from Titania. Thirty-eight more names popped up. I scrubbed any mention of the dissidents from their records. I did this while still listening to Holst and gazing at the glorious man-made landscape and the stars, and within seventeen minutes, I saw Medusa in person, for the first time.
She used her tentacles to propel herself across Olympia’s hull. She seemed made for that sort of activity, though her body hung oddly limp. It wasn’t until she got closer that I realized the limp body was a pressure suit. Medusa was meant to be worn.
She enfolded me with a membrane that sealed and pressurized itself. Once that was co
mplete, she removed my pressure suit and expelled it from the membrane in a way that seemed organic. The suit drifted away from Olympia in much the same way Glen Tedd had.
Throughout this process, her beautiful face hovered before mine. She saw me with eyes that could stare into the heart of a sun without flinching.
I slipped into her pressurized suit. It was unlike anything I had worn—it seemed to sense me as I entered it. Once on, it felt like an extension of my own skin. Her face rotated and settled over mine.
Inside my head, the implants my father had given me came completely awake, and I saw his face.
He was fundamentally different from the two ghosts who resided inside my search engine. He was like an image on my tutoring monitor.
An image of Lucifer Tower appeared inside my head. The blueprints listed it as a research center within a sensor array—it was among the towers on the leading end of Olympia. It really was a research center, but no human had ever used it.
No human.
It was not currently pressurized and heated. But it wasn’t empty.
How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba Charmayne had asked.
Her tentacles stretched and released, hurtling us forward.
I could feel the impulses that drove her movement as if they belonged to my own muscles.
It felt like more than that.
I drank deeply of the air supply in Medusa’s reservoir. Minutes before, I had been facing certain death. Now I suddenly had a weapon—a collaborator—who could help me achieve my goals. We might not develop a meritocracy with Medusa’s help, but it would be harder for anyone to lie about why we didn’t have one.
7
Lucifer Tower
And then she showed me how she faked her own demise.
She had recorded her journeys back and forth from Titania to Olympia, both audio and visual. Her wisdom in doing so was verified when I was able to watch those recordings. I saw what the Medusa units could do even when they were not self-aware.
Medusa shepherded them on the supply ships Baylor Charmayne used to loot Titania before he set off the gravity bombs. The Medusa units reacted as if they had an autonomic nervous system; they had an inherent sense of self-preservation. They moved like the octopuses I had seen in my mother’s image database and were able to draw themselves into tight balls or extend their tentacles to cling to ceilings. They could pull themselves into air ducts and squeeze into gaps between walls.
Medusa went back and forth, moving dozens of her sisters with each trip, until every single one was safe in the research towers. Then she sealed herself in with them and waited for contact with the Primus who would become her partner. Or in my case, the Prima.
Medusa witnessed the death of Titania in much the same fashion that I had.
Now it was I who would discover the benefits of a fake death.
Oichi Angelis had been eliminated from the database. Her pressure suit continued to diverge from our course. Only I remained. I floated in the weightless environment of Lucifer Tower, which was as isolated from the spinning bulk of Olympia as I had become from my former identity, and I contemplated the star field visible in the transparent dome at its leading edge. My choice of music seemed obvious: another selection from the Planets Suite—“Neptune, the Mystic,” which included a women’s choir that sounded like mermaids singing at the edge of a sea of stars. Because from my new vantage point, those stars weren’t wheeling overhead. They looked static and eternal.
Medusa floated beside me. She had heated and pressurized Lucifer Tower for my benefit.
Sometimes you forget that your parents are not named Father and Mother. Teju and Misako Angelis were biotechnicians who created education implants, reference databases that could be accessed at will; they had earned the respect of their peers on Titania and Olympia. Medusa had also been gifted with their legacy. It was comforting to know that the music my father and I treasured would survive, even if I did not.
I said.
I showed her the hallways in my head. We wandered them together.
she said,
* * *
Why Lady Sheba? I had wondered when I saw her standing at the other end of the virtual hall in my head, right after she and Mother were killed on Titania.
But I didn’t ask her that question. I said,
“The Homeworld is a useful fiction,” said Lady Sheba. “It is designed to give workers an origin story.”
Quite a few questions could be spun from that answer, but I decided to start at the beginning.
“Calista Charmayne was the architect of the myth of the Homeworld.”
“Yes.” The ghost was certainly more direct than Sheba had been.
“Unknown,” said the ghost. “That information is not included in any database to which I have access.”
I pondered the ideas that had always been part of my education. What was real?
“Yes. Earth is the world of human origin.”
“Unknown.”
“Define last hope.”
“Unknown. But it seems unlikely.”
The hallway around me dissolved into schematics of Titania and Olympia that included measurements of resources that had been use
d to build them. As Lady Sheba’s ghost gestured to indicate details, Pachelbel’s Canon in D began to play, and at last the music seemed appropriate. I saw the mathematical ideas it was meant to exemplify—and I understood why Lady Sheba had become a ghost in my machine.
“The construction of the generation ships indicates a high capacity for expenditures,” she said. “This suggests a sophisticated infrastructure that one could expect to accompany an advanced and prosperous civilization.”
As she spoke, the processes by which our generation ships had been built were demonstrated with three-dimensional animated line drawings that looked even more interesting than the real-time recordings of the construction I had seen in tutorials. Titania and Olympia grew like living things, like flowers with precise, geometric centers and petals, but also like beehives woven for strength and resilience, or like crystals under heat and pressure, growing together to make giant forms that mirrored their inner structures.
I had planned to ask Medusa if that advanced civilization she had mentioned could have been in decline at the time of construction. But as I watched those animations and listened to the Canon in D, I changed my mind. Nothing about them suggested decline. The opposite, in fact.
I got so caught up in listening to the music and watching the lines and numbers turn themselves into generation ships, no more questions occurred to me until the final notes of the Canon ushered our animated ships toward a particular point in the star charts.
“No,” said Sheba’s ghost. “It is our destination. It has a habitable planet that is described in the databases as Earth Normal.”
“Perhaps they planned to name it once we arrive. But the omission seems suspicious.”
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