“You’re forgetting the Enemy Clans,” she said.
Unlike the real Lady Sheba, her smooth features hid no malice or murder. But though she spoke plainly, I thought she must be mistaken.
“Enemy Clans is the default term for clans with ambitions that run counter to our own,” she said. “They need not be opposed all of the time, as long as they are opposed most of the time. There is evidence of Enemy Clans in the databases, but they are not identified by name. They seem to be the reason we are bound on a particular course, but I cannot tell if they are chasing us.”
Chasing us! That was the first time I had heard the idea. And I had thought myself a freethinker, someone who resisted the indoctrination that filled our tutoring sessions. Yet I had accepted that the Enemy Clans had finished their business with us once they destroyed the Homeworld—which never existed in the first place, so at what point did we intersect with those Enemy Clans?
“Unknown,” she said, “but killing us would not be the only motivation they could have. Perhaps they would chase us if we stole something from them.”
That provoked a virtual itch that begged to be scratched.
“Something that is not included in the databases,” said Lady Sheba’s ghost. “So it must be hidden.”
* * *
Years later, the ghost of Lady Sheba was starting to make sense.
She seemed surprised. But she didn’t dismiss the idea.
Baylor and Sheba had killed Titania to accomplish that. But their own greed did them in. When Medusa and her sisters stowed away on ships carrying plunder from Titania, they had easily eluded capture by workers who hadn’t been told they existed. But that made me wonder—how come Baylor and Sheba knew?
My mother’s mother. I knew almost nothing about her. She had died while I was still too young to know her as anything but a kind voice and a gentle touch.
Which brought me back to square one. But I was used to that circular path. And I had more practical problems at hand. An alarm was sounding along my secret pathways. I looked for Schnebly—the man who had tried to kill me.
Several hours had passed since I was blown out of the air lock, but I found Schnebly still hanging around the 100-series locks. He was conducting inspections of each lock’s incident log. He wanted to know if any of the outer doors had been opened within the last three hours.
What an annoyingly thorough fellow.
The locator we had rigged on my empty pressure suit was still broadcasting Oichi Angelis as it drifted apart from the ship. I had erased my identity from my real locator; without an identity, it wouldn’t respond to inquiries. Yet Schnebly was still suspicious. I searched his most recent messages to his secret patron.
Everything seems to have gone according to plan, he reported. But I have concerns.
Clarify, demanded the patron.
All three targets who have been eliminated so far were too resourceful. They didn’t react the way most people do when they get shut into an air lock. They reacted like trained operatives. I wonder who trained them. I wonder if we need to look for an organization, rather than individuals.
Several minutes passed between that last communication and the response.
Stay on it, the patron ordered. And Schnebly continued his inspection.
Medusa and I watched him with interest. “Neptune, the Mystic” had concluded, so I played Mysterious Mountain by Alan Hovhaness, which was more or less in the same vein, and which also featured a celesta, an instrument whose sound always reminded me of the tiniest points of light in the star field.
Organization! I knew my mother and father had allies, but somehow I didn’t imagine how structured those alliances had been.
We spied on Schnebly. He continued his meticulous search. I put myself in his position and thought, He’s not exploring possibilities so much as he’s eliminating them.
So—what comes next?
PART TWO
WAIT … WHAT?
8
The White-Haired Girl
When you can eavesdrop on anyone’s communications, you may get the impression that you know what’s going on. But if you’re doing it on Olympia, you’re probably wrong. Or at least partly wrong.
Those were my thoughts as I suffocated a man in his quarters.
His death wasn’t any easier than it would have been if I had spaced him; it was just more convenient (for me). We pressed on arteries so he would lose consciousness first—no point in making him suffer. But we couldn’t allow too many bruises on his body, and Medusa’s tentacles would create a specific pattern if we held him too tight. Any bruising he received if we gave him a bit of slack would look more like what we were trying to present. So we let him thrash a bit, and he finally went limp.
We heard his heart stutter and stop. When his eyes began to film over, we felt confident we could lay him on the floor. We left the airtight sample bag tied around his neck.
I gazed at him longer than I probably should have.
I was sorry about everything that had happened to him. But he had done dreadful things, and I still had work to do before I could extricate myself from the trouble that had knocked me off course.
And all because one crazy girl noticed me at an Executive party.
* * *
It wasn’t because I’m good-looking—the other Servants attending the Chang party were, too. Nuruddin was there, so she would have noticed him first, if that were her problem.
I can’t even tell you at what moment she noticed me, because I was too busy freaking out over the fact that Nuruddin had. I had taken pains to avoid him, but a last-minute substitution put him right in my path.
My makeup was very different—I had shaved off my eyebrows and had become adept at drawing new ones that changed my appearance. And I had adjusted the color of my artificial eyes to hazel. But when Nuruddin spotted me in the staging area, his eyes went wide. We’re forbidden to fraternize with each other, so he took pains to avoid staring at me after that.
But his gaze lighted on me from time to time. And I could see the wheels turning in his head.
“You clumsy fool!” snapped the girl. She had spoken to me. Others were shocked as well—even the Executives who sat next to her—b
ecause I had made no error. My movements had been perfect.
“What’s wrong?” hissed the Executive woman to her right.
“She spilled tea on my sleeve. Look at this.” The girl lifted her arm to show a length of embroidered silk.
“Nonsense,” said the woman. “It’s spotless. Hush, or I’ll have you removed.”
The girl flushed and shot me a look of pure hatred. Her outburst was designed to discredit a Servant who could not fight back. It was a petty attack, and that was her undoing—at least in this instance. Because the Changs conducted their parties like elaborate Chinese Kunqu plays, with every gesture and word choreographed, and even a bit of musical performance. The girl had generated an unpleasant ripple.
At the first opportunity, I traded places with another Servant in a spot where the girl couldn’t glare at me. The party resumed its precise movements, and everyone breathed easier. When I could do so without losing my focus, I spied on the notes Lady Charlotte Chang was taking about the party. If she registered a complaint about me, I would have to abandon my persona as Servant Kumiko Estrada. But she hadn’t even noticed me.
Disinvite Edna Constantin to future gatherings … was all she had to say about the incident.
Edna Constantin had appeared on my radar in much the same way Glen Tedd had—by making a nuisance of herself at an Executive party. So I began to search for her records.
I almost wish I hadn’t.
* * *
Unlike Lady Sheba, Lady Charlotte knew the origin of the music she played at her parties. She directed her Servants to depart to the strains of the overture of a Chinese ballet, The White-Haired Girl. We were a lot more graceful about it than her Executive guests had been, but we received no applause from the Changs. They were a meticulous bunch who paid attention only to errors.
And that suited me just fine. Exit Stage Left, and into the access tunnel we went. Nuruddin walked near the front of the group and I trailed behind.
Once in the staging area, we were closely supervised by lower-level Executives, a job they took seriously since they hoped to someday be upper level. So Nuruddin could not have questioned me even if he had wanted to. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t thinking about my resurrection.
Unhappy plans were beginning to manifest in the halls of my mind. They were bloody-handed creatures.
But first things are first. I left the staging area and entered the tunnel that would take me to Kumiko Estrada’s quarters. On the way, I passed a maintenance tunnel. Instead of continuing, I opened the access door and slipped inside the work space behind it. Anyone who monitored Kumiko wouldn’t see that action—they would see an analogue of Kumiko going to her quarters. At the instant she would have passed the maintenance junction, I became No One. Even the tools sitting in the workbox had a stronger signal than I did.
I felt derailed. I served at Chang parties so I could size them up. I had read plenty of communications from the clan heavyweights, but it’s tough to judge someone’s character if you’ve never seen them in person. Now that I had served the Changs in a dozen social functions, I was beginning to get a feel for them, and I had been sure I could do this surveillance as invisibly as I always did.
Now Edna Constantin had drawn attention to me. The careful thing to do would be to find a way for Kumiko to take her final bow.
Six months had passed since Oichi’s official death. I considered the possibility of moving Kumiko to another job away from Central, to the Fore or Aft Sectors. It was a tedious operation to go back and alter any records involving that persona by erasing any reference to her. Should I insert a plausible substitute instead? Those were my usual procedures.
But previously no one had taken any notice of me. Kumiko’s exit from this scene could draw more attention than her continued presence. It was the sort of thing Schnebly would eventually spot as he conducted his meticulous search for discordant occurrences.
I felt irritated with Edna. It was not a useful emotion.
I would have worked a few more shifts in the Chang enclave, had it not been for Edna. My plan for the rest of that cycle had been to become 4th-Level Technician Andor Fitzgerald so I could get a good look at their In-Skin Command Center—that job employed a work suit that effectively hid my gender.
I opened the locker where the suits were kept. But then I closed it again.
Something I had glimpsed in the flurry of communications that had gone to and from Edna Constantin within the last few cycles demanded an explanation. Specifically, the last message from a cousin named Trent Constantin:
You think you can get away from us that easily? Think again! REMEMBER WE RECORDED EVERYTHING!
Get away from us implied that she was a prisoner. And if they had RECORDED EVERYTHING! they had proof of something that would get her into trouble.
That could be useful. She might forget who I was, but her behavior at the party suggested she would continue to target Servants with her petty games. My mission was more important to me than anyone or anything, but I felt more sympathy for my fellow Servants than I did for Edna. If she could be knocked out of the party circuit, that would be for the best.
But—had she already been knocked out of it by Lady Chang? Because there was a reason I felt the Chang clan was worth researching. They were the second most powerful family on Olympia, next to the Charmaynes. The two clans were reputed to be top rivals.
And that was the point. Because I suspected they were allies. Their division into two separate camps was an illusion that allowed them to play other clans against each other. This was why I had decided that the Changs were the best people to discover Lady Sheba’s lost diary.
I’m not referring to the real one with the entries about defecation. I mean the one I was fabricating that would eventually promote my father’s Music in Education program. Medusa and I had scanned her every communication in order to mimic her voice. And that’s when Medusa discovered a code.
At first we thought she used it only to send secret messages to Baylor, but Medusa was beginning to suspect a second recipient, too, with whom Sheba used a different code. Medusa called this mysterious person X.
And I had plenty of reconnaissance that needed to be done, so it had seemed logical for us to split up and work on separate parts. But now I wished I could ask her advice. Because I wasn’t seeing the big picture.
Well—Medusa wasn’t my only source of guidance. I folded myself into a dark cubby and entered the virtual halls in my head.
I searched for Trent and Edna Constantin in the networks. They were both young, so their output was prodigious. Their tone should have sounded formal and musical, since the voices were constructs. But they were the opposite.
Both of them had created custom voices for different recipients. Most of these voices were odd, bordering on obnoxious. I had to squelch my offended feelings—worms do not abuse each other in messages. We use courtesy and tolerance as default settings. We do not always like each other, but we can’t afford not to get along. That is an indulgence for Executives.
Edna and Trent exploited it. I winced, but I listened carefully to the voices that yammered at each other as their images blurred and distorted. Provocations flew in both directions, but eventually I zeroed in on Trent, because he was the one with the piece of blackmail. I found it in an attachment. As I reached for it, a bassoon played the opening strains of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, a sound that balanced persistent life with desolation.
The music died when I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. An eye stared at me through a curtain of ebony hair.
“You will want no music to accompany these images,” said my mother’s ghost. “They will taint the music.”
Really? As the images of the death of Titania had not? But then she opened the attachment and showed me what she meant.
Trent Constantin’s blackmail footage, the sword that he held over Edna’s head, was a recording of the gang rape of a girl who appeared to be about ten years old. Trent was one of the rapists, along with seven of his kinsmen. I estimated their ages to be between sixteen and twenty-four. I recognized the girl, though her age was closer to fourteen now.
She was Edna Constantin.
The footage ran for almost half an hour. The actual assault must have gone on longer, because the people in the recording kept jumping forward in time. Edna cried and pleaded with her kinsmen, and in the beginning, she kept asking them why. All of them had the same answer: “Because this is what happens to little whores.”
I memorized each rapist’s features. It was easy to do, because they kept grinning proudly at the recorder. I matched them to names in the database. None of them were related to upper-level Executives, but as members of the Executive class, any of them could technically rise to a loftier position.
It would be harder for a Constantin to do that than it would be for someone like Terry Charmayne. The only Constantins who currently lived in the Habitat Sector were women married to upper-level Executives. The rest of their clan resided in quarters in the innermost part of Olympia’s skin.
The rape recording shredded in the flow of new information. I saw faces in a family tree, Constantin women who were sought for marriage by other clans. Even for an Executive family, the lines seemed complicated.
She focused her eye over my left shoulder.
I turned to see the other ghost.
“Their lineage can be traced to a time previous to the settling of the Homeworld.”
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