Let that be a lesson to monsters everywhere. If you document every atrocity you commit, be assured that eventually someone else will see it and judge you by it. True, some abusers may find that prospect thrilling, but it didn’t work out too well for Donnie.
Or for Lady Gloria. Now the other Executive clans knew what had been going on in her house, under her nose. Just how valuable is that DNA after all, that could make such monsters? they must have wondered. Or is Lady Gloria’s flawed nurturing to blame?
Her communications network remained silent for a few cycles. Unlike Donnie and Trent, she had the sense to wait for others to initiate contact.
Baylor Charmayne finally sent her a condolence message, since he had been the last to buy a bride from her. Her reply was brief, bordering on terse, but it didn’t violate protocol. And so the Constantin clan began to stitch up the shreds of its reputation.
Edna had put them on my radar. Now they were an ominous blip. I knew something about the Executives I had never imagined, though what had happened to Bunny Charmayne should have given me a clue.
What really happened to Bunny? Had she suffered the same treatment as Edna and Trent?
I had seen no evidence of that. The gang rapes practiced among the Constantins appeared to be an exception, rather than the norm.
But fourteen was too young to have a child—yet many Executive girls did. Among the worms, it was unheard of. We had to plan our births carefully. That was one advantage we had over the Executive class, and it was no small thing.
My trajectory, altered by Edna, had led me into strange territory. But I wasn’t the only one following new pathways.
Shortly after Nuruddin agreed to collaborate with me, I took him to a medical room Medusa and I had set up in the bowels of Olympia. Nuruddin had an earlier version of the implant—Medusa gave him an upgrade. “Your original modifications were good,” I told him. “These will take you further.”
His own Medusa unit waited nearby. He would be needing her.
“Oichi—I can’t become an assassin,” he said.
“Yes,” I agreed. “You can’t. Because I don’t trust anyone else with that work.”
While he was recovering, I placed a surveillance device in his quarters, where he and his family spent the most time together. I watched Nuruddin and Jon play a board game with their son and daughter. The affection and kindness I saw among them soothed me.
I dried my face.
Purity. This idea made no sense on a generation ship, in which a population of humans was trying to preserve our species. Diversity was essential in an isolated group who intended to produce healthy offspring, not purity. Our Executives were an arrogant bunch, but I had never thought them stupid. Why this cognitive glitch?
But it wasn’t a glitch. It would turn out to be a piece of that bigger picture Medusa and I were trying to see. That DNA the Executives so valued and so wanted to make part of their bloodlines was possibly the most important clue I had discovered so far. I didn’t guess it then; I simply filed it away.
I watched Nuruddin with his family a little longer. Then I killed the surveillance device. I wouldn’t try to watch him again.
He had given me something much more interesting to watch.
10
Kwaidan
Medusa and I bathed in the light of a million stars, under the observation bubble of Lucifer Tower. But it was the man-made landscape I watched, looking for a familiar figure on the access ladder.
Lucifer stood amid a city of observation and research structures on the leading edge of Olympia. It extended from a plate that was attached at the axis but isolated from the spin arms—so it was standard procedure for someone moving on the surface of the plate to use magnetic shoes to walk.
The two we anticipated did not need magnetic shoes. They had tentacles and jets.
We didn’t have long to wait before we saw them hurtling between towers and finally climbing the ladder much faster than anyone in magnetic shoes could have done. The warning lights blinked as they opened the outer door, then dimmed as the lock pressurized. When the inner door opened, tentacles gripped the frame and propelled a Medusa unit toward us. Once she had stabilized her position next to us under the dome, she disgorged Nuruddin.
He emerged smiling. “I don’t think I shall ever tire of this view.”
Every time I saw that smile, I was glad I hadn’t killed him.
“So,” he said. “Let’s have our subversive discussion. Do you think Cobb was still dreaming at the end? Or had he truly awakened?”
And so it was that four schemers who would certainly have been blown out of an air lock if we were discovered at this meeting came together to discuss a movie called Inception.
The main character was a man who had become trapped inside hyperlucid dreams. He used a symbolic device to warn himself that he was still dreaming, a toy top that would keep spinning. In the waking world, air friction would cause the top to slow and fall over.
“I think he was awake,” I said. “The toy was beginning to topple by the time the movie ended and the credits came up.”
“But the top may have been misdirection,” said Medusa. “His children were a better indication of reality. They did not seem to age throughout the movie, and they should have been older at the end.”
Nuruddin said, “If Cobb were asleep from the very beginning of the story, then really woke up at the end, his concept of his children may have been based on his expectations.”
Our eyes turned to Nefertari. Though she was a Medusa unit, she had her own distinctive features. “I think there is no answer,” she said. “We aren’t meant to know. The result is that we examine our sense of reality, of memory, and we must conclude that it’s flawed.”
We pondered that. Then Nuruddin arched an eyebrow. “I’m most curious to know your reaction to the society in which these dreamers lived. Because when I first pieced the movie together, I was shocked. I thought they were rude.”
Medusa’s lips curled with amusement. “To me they seemed more callow than rude.”
“But their behavior fit their circumstances,” said Nefertari. “Too much courtesy could have been a disadvantage in their society.”
I agreed with all of that. But for most of my life, I had been an observer of the people on Titania and Olympia. I had learned not to have emotional responses to what they said and did, because my reactions would have been noticed. So when I saw the interactions between people in the movie, my strongest feeling was—
“Fascination,” I said. “I could learn to navigate in their society, but it would take time. And the possibility for danger and error would be much higher.”
“Danger, yes,” said Nuruddin. “But also freedom. And I suspect that is why the movie was data-shredded and consigned to the trash.”
I could see his anxiety whenever he spoke of the near extinction of his beloved movies. “The work you must have done to put it back together!” I said. “Your dedication is astonishing.”
He shrugged. “My obsession is more like it. When I serve the Executives, I am merely biding my time until I can get back to what I truly love.”
I would like to say I felt that way, too. But it would be only half true. I did not love my life’s work, though I may have been even more obsessed with it than Nuruddin was with his celluloid stories.
“The rudeness I perceived when I began to see these movies,” said Nuruddin, “was what led me to dig deeper. Could we have come from such people? The behavior was so persistent, I expected to see it in every movie. But I didn’t. Oichi—that is why I would like you to view more of the movies from Japan and China.”
&
nbsp; “Yes,” I said, but it wasn’t a promise.
Because I had seen a few of those movies. And I was afraid to see more.
* * *
Nuruddin had a family to go home to; he still had his identity with all its attendant obligations. So we kept our talk brief, and we agreed to discuss a film called Kwaidan at our next meeting, in ten cycles.
Kwaidan was a Japanese movie.
Maybe the wiggly part was the fact that my mind didn’t want to light on one subject. It especially didn’t want to focus on Kwaidan.
She swirled around me like a sea creature. The motion was soothing.
Something tightened in my chest. I breathed slowly until it unwound.
She said,
Just in case you’re curious, there is a difference between killing individuals, or even a handful of people, in one event and killing many people—serial killing as opposed to mass murder. I didn’t like mass killing. Yet I knew I could do it again.
But what to do about my grand plan? Oichi didn’t exist anymore; I could concentrate on fabricating Lady Sheba’s diary and planting bits of it where the Changs could discover it. But now that I realized how little I really knew about the Executives, I couldn’t stop wondering what else I didn’t know and who else might be plotting at cross-purposes to Medusa and me.
… we examine our sense of reality, of memory, and we must conclude that it’s flawed.…
Medusa’s face hovered over mine.
She brightened.
That was a fine rationalization, but for my part, I was simply curious. I doubted the field trip would teach me more about the Executives.
But I was wrong.
Boy, was I wrong.
* * *
I could not dream of leaving Medusa behind—her curiosity was even greater than mine. So we conspired to move unseen. The Habitat Sector was so huge, we could travel through its sections without meeting anyone. Using Medusa’s superior eyes and ears, we could detect people long before they noticed us.
But being unseen on Olympia is also a matter of leaving no security trail. Since we could see everyone else’s trail, we had a pretty good idea who was where, what they were doing, and even what their history was. And that’s when things got fun.
Really fun—I’m not being sarcastic. We had never found a reason to investigate the people who grow the fancy food and make the products from them. I knew they were lower-level Executives who had no chance of advancement in their families. If I thought of them at all, I imagined resentful people forced to do work that used to be done by worms. I had forgotten how much my father missed doing that work.
Medusa and I glided through worm tunnels and into a bright storeroom used by gardeners. The door leading to the Habitat Sector stood open, and I saw a bit of green. I stopped and caught my breath.
I could have said that the Executives controlled what Servants see, blocking out what they didn’t want us to observe. But I had been cheating that system for years. And yet—I still hadn’t seen.
We walked through the storeroom on my feet, her tentacles lightly touching things that we passed, both of us smelling compost and pausing briefly to look at hand tools and mechanized harvesters. Many of the crops were picked and transported by these machines. People rarely supervised them, unless a breakdown was noticed. But gardeners liked to use their senses to monitor the health and fruitfulness of the plants. By doing so, they were able to spot problems before they became dire enough to gain the attention of automated systems.
Our surveillance located the gardener working far out among the rows, so we could feel safe walking right up to the door. When we stepped over the threshold, I knew that the risk we had taken to satisfy our curiosity had been justified.
Indeed they did. But what would Van Gogh have painted if he could have seen our Habitat? As my eyes sought the vanishing point in the rows that stretched away from us, I was forced to follow those lines up, and up, and up.
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. I never saw the fine clouds and the sky that was made of ground, kilometers away. I felt vertigo, as if I could fall up if I let myself understand what I was seeing.
The music that played in my head was the theme song for one of Nuruddin’s movies, Around the World in 80 Days, composed by Victor Young and played by a string orchestra with a tempo and melody that made one want to float away in a hot-air balloon. That alone made the field trip worthwhile.
But we were there to learn other things, too. I shifted my gaze from up to over, about one hundred meters, where we could see a greenhouse with white, semitransparent walls. Big fans were rigged at regular intervals, and pipes ran up the sides and over the roof.
We consulted our blueprint. Coffee was grown in there. It needed sixty to ninety inches of rainfall within a 365-cycle period.
Two gardeners worked inside the greenhouse. I contemplated a side entrance, but Medusa highlighted an alternative route.
A humming. Or buzzing. A hum-buzzing. As we looked closer, through Medusa’s eyes, we saw movement among the flowers.
Honeybees were the first creatures that came to mind when I saw the furry little pollen baskets on the back legs. I had heard the buzzing many times while watching footage from my mother’s database, or even in the education vids. And many of the yellow-and-black insects harvesting the pollen from the center of the sunflowers were those colony-building, honey-making beauties.
But a closer look at the tiny creatures floating from flower to flower revealed at least a dozen different pollinators. Some of them were chubby little bl
ack-and-white-striped gals. Some looked like tiny versions of honeybees. Others were giants—so big, I had to wonder how they kept themselves aloft. And I saw black and reddish-brown giants as well, and wondered if they were a separate species.
She sent me the virtual image of a grin, then added floating hearts and cartoon bees.
We returned our attention to the hatch. I had thought we would need to hunt for a code, but it was unlocked. We opened it and slipped inside.
The dim corridor under the crops was oddly comforting. But after all, it was a worm burrow. We slithered through it until we were under the greenhouse and emerged from another unlocked hatch into air so moist, we closed it behind us quickly, so we wouldn’t create a dry spot.
We heard voices, two people talking in an animated fashion about the coffee. “—don’t understand why the cherries on this side get ripe faster,” a woman was saying. “The conditions in here are uniform.”
“We need to introduce more genetic variety,” said a man. “This lot is getting finicky.”
So maybe it was a problem they were discussing. But they sounded happy.
What does happiness sound like? I don’t think I can describe it. Yet you know it when you hear it, just as your nose can identify the smell of rain that never fell on you before. I looked these two gardeners up in the directory and found Ogden Schickele and Lakshmi Rota. The Schickele clan was closely aligned with the Charmaynes, and the Rotas with the Changs. Apparently at this level of operations, no one felt compelled to pretend that the two clans were enemies, and it struck me that I may have been investing too much attention on the upper ranks of the great families. One could learn something about politics from gardeners, too.
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