She picked a green cherry and studied it.
I almost giggled, which is something I’ve done perhaps three times in my life.
When Medusa held the coffee cherry to our lips, I didn’t eat it—I touched it with my tongue. Though she could see, hear, feel, and touch, she could only experience taste and smell through me. But she didn’t complain when I didn’t chew the coffee cherry.
“I still think we’d do better to pick these by hand,” Lakshmi said. “We can feel which ones are ripe. Machines can’t quite get the right pressure for it.”
“Takes forever, by hand,” said Ogden.
“The kids should do it. Good way for them to get their thumbs greened.”
They moved away. Medusa and I continued to touch the coffee cherries. Lakshmi was right—the green ones felt firm, and the red ones had some give to them. But even some of the red ones were kind of firm. And others felt a bit mushy. I said.
It was cool and moist among those plants. I understood why my father missed working in this setting. But Ogden and Lakshmi were moving back in our direction, and they had a group of young gardeners with them. So Medusa and I slipped back through our hatch and pulled it shut behind us.
I had my mind on coffee cherries and sunflowers as Medusa moved us through the tunnel with her tentacles. But Medusa stopped halfway through and examined one side.
On the other side we found a small room, really more of an alcove. It had space for an oblong object that was longer than I am tall, and wide enough for me to fit inside. At one end we found a control panel with displays, most of which read zero. One might have been a temperature reading, since it matched the ambient temperature of the alcove.
Medusa’s eyes burned with fascination.
Deepsleep units had been briefly mentioned in the education tutorials about generation ships. They maintained a hibernation that cooled the brain and slowed heart rate and respiration. You might choose that option on a trip lasting hundreds of years, assuming you didn’t have the facilities to grow crops and recycle water and a spinning habitat to simulate gravity so bone and muscle loss would not occur in your passengers.
But Olympia did have those things. As long as repairs and maintenance were done properly, Olympia could sustain life indefinitely.
She probed, her face relaxing into abstract lines, then clarifying again.
Medusa separated from me and wrapped herself around the unit, probing its memories and exploring its contours. She seemed delighted with it. But she said,
We merged again. Without discussion, we had both moved to high alert. We put the wall back precisely the way we had found it, then popped up among the sunflowers. Bees buzzed around us, paying us no heed.
Caution advised us to stay in place and conduct a long survey before making our escape. We did it so thoroughly, I had time to notice that not all the bees were after pollen; a few seemed more interested in the leaves. I watched them cut little swaths out of the edges and fly away with them.
We made a final inspection of our Security overlay. No one was near. I took one step. Then Medusa said,
I had to shut my hearing down and tune in to Medusa’s so I could detect it.
We waited for the beat to change, but it didn’t.
she said.
Medusa had no such limitations.
I waited for her to name the other thing it must be. But she already had.
Time stretched. The sunflowers bowed their heads as the bees pollinated them and the seeds swelled in their centers. Medusa and I waited to meet the alien.
But the heartbeat was fading.
We listened as the sound cut off.
she said.
But she couldn’t say where that door was. Because it wasn’t on any blueprint.
The alien had a secret door.
* * *
said Medusa.
We used a 100-series lock to exit, obliterating the record as we went. Medusa hurtled across the outer skin of Olympia, toward the leading edge, with only the stars to witness our passage.
Which only reminded me of another thing I had to do. Or several things, because I had to track everyone who had been targeted for assassination by Schnebly, everyone who had immigrated from Titania with ties to the five dissidents. And I had to decide if they could be trusted, and in order to do that, I would have to observe them for a while, and inevitably I would have to take chances and just trust them, and some of them may betray that trust, and if they did, I had to make sure my other plans were far enough advanced not to be derailed, and, and …
Sigh.
We sighted Lucifer Tower between Shiva and Spider Woman. I called Lucifer home, now that Oichi was dead.
We climbed the access ladder and let ourselves in. Starlight poured through the observation dome, illuminating rows of tentacled Medusa units, hanging limp until they could unite with a user and become who they would be.
Her eyes sparked.
She always hugged me before she pulled away. This kept our relationship affectionate. Or perhaps it was so I wouldn’t feel rejected when she separated from me. Either way, I appreciated it.
Her face hovered next to mine.
Watching Medusa arrive and depart was always a marvelous thing.
Before we set out on our field trip, my mind had been unfocused. Now I enjoyed more clarity. I opened Nuruddin’s movie directory.
His collection could be searched several different ways. For instance, you could sort them by title. You could sort them by country of origin (which by itself was subversive—our information allowed concerning Earth history was censored). You could also sort them by subject, genre, directors, actors, cinematographers, producers, studios, score composers, release dates, language (with subtitles), and by a category called NURUDDIN’S SPECIAL FAVORITES. He had even managed to retrieve images of posters, originally printed on paper to advertise the movies to audiences. He placed a thumbnail of the posters next to the movie title.
On my own, I would have been inclined to search by score composer, but Nuruddin had included a list titled FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION. On that list were movies from Japan and China.
The poster next to Kwaidan included the image of a Japanese ghost. She looked like the ghost of my mother.
The idea didn’t shake me in my shoes. What frightened me was the thought that what I knew about my family and my people was only a small part of a bigger truth.
As Nefertari had said, We examine our sense of reality, of memory, and we must conclude that it’s flawed.
Yes, it was the bigger picture I should have been looking for anyway. But up to that point, my life had been centered around one overriding purpose. I needed that focus to accomplish my goals, but now there was more to see. I had hoped I would get more done before I started to question what I thought I knew.
Enlightenment can be a bitch. So, all right. Kwaidan.
I meant to watch it once, then move on to The Hidden Fortress and Crimson Bat. But after I saw it once, I watched it again. And again.
First (because music is always first with me), I was delighted to discover that the film score was composed by Toru Takemitsu, whose music featured prominently in my father’s database. It pulled me into the story so completely, it wasn’t until the second viewing that I realized the entire film, including outdoor sequences and even an elaborate sea battle, was filmed inside a studio.
Life on Olympia could be described that way: a world inside a building.
That resonated, but it was subtle. What struck me more forcefully were the female characters. They overshadowed the men, even in the story about a samurai who was haunted by memories of a wife he selfishly abandoned. She was the ghost in Nuruddin’s thumbnail, the one who looked like my mother, with her fathomless eyes and her long, straight hair the color of deepest darkness.
My hair was just as black, but so curly, it didn’t straighten even when wet. My lips were fuller and my mouth wider; my skin was the same shade as my father’s. But I still saw more of my mother in my reflection than I did of my father, and I suspect that was a matter of temperament.
I watched the ghost wife with fascination. In her husband’s recollections, she sat at her spinning wheel, her eyes watching him from a great distance. He slowly came unglued under that gaze.
In the second story, a man falls in love with a sort of ice vampire. I decided that creature also reminded me of my mother, whether she played the loving wife or the relentless predator. I wasn’t able to contemplate whom else she called to mind until I had seen the third story, “Hoichi the Earless.”
Hoichi may be a version of my own name. Variations of it pop up in other movies about blind characters. A few movies in Nuruddin’s collection are about Zatoichi, a blind swordsman. In Kwaidan, Hoichi is a blind priest who is a gifted balladeer. His signature piece is The Tale of the Heike, about the Battle of Dan-no-ura, fought between two powerful clans (who reminded me of Executive families on Olympia)—the Tairas and Minamotos. The Tairas were destroyed in that sea battle, and during that scene, the most powerful character in the entire movie makes her appearance.
She is the dowager of the Taira clan. Her son, the head of the clan, is already dead. His son is the new lord, but he’s a toddler. As the top-ranking member of her family, she assumes stewardship. She and the young lord are present for the battle. Once she sees how badly things are going, and that she and her grandson are about to be captured, she makes an executive decision. She takes him in her arms and tells the other high-ranking ladies that she is going to jump with him into the sea, where they will drown instead of being captured alive. The ladies should be honorable and do the same.
I still go back to look at her face as she stands on the prow of that ship, the young lord in her arms, just before she leaps in with him. Her expression fascinates me. Is it courage? Despair? Cold acceptance of reality? Could it even be love? I can never decide. But I knew from the first moment I saw the dowager, She’s the Iron Fist in that family. Not the generals she commands, not any of the samurai fighting for her, and certainly not that toddler in her arms. And another face surfaced in my mind.
It belonged to Lady Sheba Charmayne.
I don’t know how many times I watched Kwaidan that first cycle, seeing ghosts who were not the ones abiding in the machine, visiting memories of the two most powerful women in my life. At some point, I began to see someone else in the ghost wife, the ice vampire, and the Taira dowager. I began to see myself. That’s when I realized what I had to do next.
I had to recruit the haunted man. I just hoped I wouldn’t have to kill him instead.
11
The Company Man
What does an alien look like? I had plenty of references from Nuruddin’s movie database, and none of them were comforting. Quite a few seemed to be big and slimy, with steel teeth and claws and a nasty disposition. Others were parasites who invaded people’s nervous systems and drove them around like robots. Still others looked like Japanese men in skintight clothes, who always wore dark glasses. It was all pretty mind-boggling.
I knew one thing for sure: the alien had a heartbeat. And the heartbeat was the same lub-dub my own heart made, only faster. So the alien had a vascular system. And if it had been the one to use the deepsleep unit, it must be shaped at least roughly as we are. It might look just like us.
So I couldn’t rule out a slimy clawed thing that liked to crawl around in dark tunnels—especially not on Olympia; we were made almost entirely of dark tunnels. But my instincts argued for the Japanese-men-in-skintight-clothes model. Though without the sunglasses. Those would have been spotted fast on Olympia.
Where should I look, then? And how? So far, the only alien we had seen (heard, actually) had been in the Habitat Sector, where Executives lived and worked. In a way, I needed to do the same thing I had been doing already: spy on the Executives. That may have been too convenient a conclusion, but I could reach no other, even though I stayed
up all night worrying about it. The next thing I had to decide was which job would allow me a wider perspective.
Servants and Maintenance workers intersected with Executives in ways that were useful for spying. But in all the time I had assumed those roles, I had never seen (okay, I know, heard) an alien. One other group on Olympia had jobs that could help me learn more. These were the Security staff. They came as close to Executives as worms could get. And for that reason, they were supervised by lower-level Executives.
The Overheard Alien had shown up in an area supervised by the Chang and Charmayne families. I had learned much about the Changs recently as a Servant (and consequently way too much about the Constantins), but I knew the Charmaynes better than I knew anyone.
The guy who supervised the nondomestic Security staff for the Charmaynes was Terry Charmayne. And here was my dilemma, because Terry was the lower-level Executive I thought I knew the best, and I could fabricate a persona that would work well with him—but he might also recognize me.
He had kicked me in the butt when I was Oichi and watched me being marched to my death as Kumiko. If I showed him my face one more time, something might click.
However, current styles favored by young Security personnel could be used to obscure my identity. Unfortunately, one of those styles required me to shave my head and my eyebrows.
My eyebrows were no big deal—I had done that already, and I was adept at drawing on different brow patterns. Which was too bad, because these young lions didn’t bother with eyebrows—they just left them bare.
But I loved my hair. It’ll grow back … I kept telling myself as I suffered the close shave, but then I contradicted myself by applying growth inhibitor. Granted, I could turn around and apply a stimulator when I was ready to grow it out again—hair and makeup styles were one of the few forms of self-expression we worms were allowed, and we could be very artistic about it—yet I felt solemn when I confronted the result in the mirror.
And you know—I didn’t look bad. I might get to like it. I felt even better after applying designs to my head that I had seen on Security personnel from Aft Sector, angular patterns that created the effect of a hairline while also mimicking the energy symbols that could be found on doors leading to the engine section of Olympia. I chose a black pigment that wouldn’t fade or wash off until I applied another chemical. Inspecting the result, I concluded I was good at it.
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