And her spaceship had a name etched into its sleek flank: ESCAPE.
Escape had small thrusters for maneuvering. But as we approached the rear of the craft, where one would certainly expect a main engine nozzle to be, we found only more small thrusters.
said Medusa.
The only engines I understood (and then only with the most basic grasp) were the chemical engines that drove our generation ships. They were marvels, to be sure, but mostly because they were so gigantic. The whole idea behind a generation ship is that you can’t go faster than light, and therefore it’s going to take a very long time to get to the closest solar system, let alone the one that you’re trying to reach. I had seen the elementary star charts on my education screen, and the computations that had been used to calculate how long it would take us to reach our new home (which was as unnamed as the one we had allegedly left behind), but I had never received formal education about any other kind of propulsion system. So I couldn’t imagine how the elegant gizmos that adorned Escape could propel it.
On the other hand, Medusa had said move, not propel, and those might be two very different ideas.
Escape was large enough to hold perhaps fifty passengers. I wondered how much food and water it could store. Or would they rely on deepsleep units?
Was it possible that it could get somewhere so fast, they wouldn’t have to take many supplies? If so, it would carry at least twice as many passengers.
We climbed up another of the structures and gazed down at the marvelous ship. Escape gleamed under the starlight. Hella Major and Minor seemed to be feasting their bright eyes on her, and their distant partner, Charon, lined up with her nose.
Where will you be when it goes down? Baylor had asked Gennady. This shuttle won’t take you far.
Which meant I had to find it.
What a pain in the butt.
* * *
A week later, I floated with my mother’s ghost, having accomplished absolutely nothing. I didn’t know if Medusa and I should continue with our music/implant project, even though she had worked out a code we could use to introduce our false Sheba messages. Should we answer the big questions first, about Escape and the Engineered and blah-blah-blah? If we didn’t get those answers, would we make fatal mistakes by blundering ahead?
And if we didn’t proceed, would the delay cost us our ultimate success? Because things were happening on Olympia; other people were certainly pursuing their agendas—so I needed to make a decision.
Medusa wasn’t idle—she prepared a timetable and a list of recipients for the Sheba Communiqués. The recent echo from the general direction of the wreckage of Titania would help convince Executives that those bits and pieces were authentic.
Nefertari looked through Nuruddin’s movie database for more references to wormhole space travel, and she had already found quite a few, though most of them were pretty sketchy and seemed designed more for entertainment value than as scientific hypotheses.
Kumiko spent most of her time trying to track Gennady, whom she considered to be a possible threat to Terry—for which I could not blame her.
And I—floated. My mother’s hair swirled like seaweed in our undersea fantasy. Light penetrated from overhead, and seemed to bend in the blue and green ripples. The sirens sang, Debussy’s music played inside my head, and a whimsical undersea kingdom began to emerge.
I had to admit, the fantasy had some allure. I had seen plenty of images from my mother’s database, some of them static and some of them moving, but I had never been immersed in one before. My mother’s ghost could have been responsible for that—she had woven immersive experiences for me before, many of which had a dreamlike quality. Understandable, considering that she was asleep.
But she had never used Debussy for her music before. Had it truly been her idea? Because she seemed as dazzled by the undersea kingdom that was emerging from the shadows as I was. These waters were shallow; the sunlight played on coral reefs that looked like castles made out of living creatures. Starfish, octopuses, rainbow-colored fish, and sea horses moved on the terraces and between the spires. We swam toward them hand in hand to get a better look—and that was when we saw other figures darting between the reefs, playing tag with each other, creatures with human heads and hands, but also flippers and fins.
“I’m not. I thought it was your fantasy.” Her hair drifted like clouds parting to reveal the moon. I glimpsed the ghost’s true face. It was even less human than mine, though she was beautiful. Perhaps it was the face of the beings who had created her, the ones who were long dead. It was a countenance devoid of emotion, until she looked past me and saw something that transformed her, first with wonder, and then with something transcendent, an emotion so glorious, I almost forgot to turn and see what it was that had inspired her.
A smiling creature swam toward us, his otter-ish body cleaving effortlessly through the water. He had long, webbed fingers and the face of a boy.
“This is no database.” My mother’s voice was oddly pitched as it passed through the liquid medium. “This is a progra
m.”
Turbulence obscured the scene for a moment, and then the otter boy emerged from a burst of bubbles. He planted a kiss on my cheek.
Nuruddin’s son.
Ashur grinned impishly and disappeared in another burst of bubbles.
She had no answer. Like Lady Sheba’s ghost, she had encountered something that had shaken her. She drifted away from me, and her hair obscured her features again, until I was left to wonder if I had dreamed that marvelous countenance and the emotion I had seen lighting her from within, one that I could interpret because there was some of her in me, if Gennady was to be believed.
Was it love?
Before she disappeared, I glimpsed the orb that was normally hidden, but no eye looked back at me. Instead, I saw the light of a star.
Then it winked out. It was as if my mother’s ghost had become an icon on a screen, a symbol of something that was there rather than a presence.
I didn’t call to her. If she chose to go away, she must have a good reason.
And I had other things to worry about.
23
The Mermaid Program
He paused for a long moment.
I wanted very much to ask Ashur that myself. But I didn’t want to frighten him, or his father.
Somehow I doubted that. But at least the conversation could begin. And then I would get to the bottom of it. A good way to do that would be to figure out just where the blazes Ashur got an implant.
Medusa, Nefertari, and Kumiko prowled through the research towers, counting our supply of ready implants. said Medusa,
They counted each implant. My father and his cohorts had manufactured thousands of them. When Titania was destroyed, I had assumed they were lost, but the Medusa units moved them to Olympia when they rescued themselves, and had hidden them in the research towers. Since that time, we had made more of them (well, Medusa had) because we were moving forward with the fake Sheba messages, which would promote my father’s music database and the interface hidden therein.
But no one outside our circle had accessed those towers in many decades. And that raised some unhappy suspicions.
Kumiko’s mother-hen impulses caused her distress. So I set up a meeting with Terry as quickly as possible. I waited for him in the same room we had used to give him his own implants, and he wasted no time joining me there. I got right to the point.
His face revealed no comprehension.
As Medusa had warned, preconceptions could blind you in an investigation. But I doubted Terry could fake the bafflement he was showing. Or his alarm when I told him what was going on.
From his abstract expression, I could tell Terry was talking to Kumiko. He focused on me again.
Terry had been curious when he arrived at our meeting, and then baffled. But now he looked certain.
He was right. But I didn’t add my suspicion that we were going to get one of those, no matter what we did.
And if we did, we wanted to get the one we would win.
* * *
Ashur was not a shy boy. In fact, he was a bit of a flirt. And he had no lack of confidence.
But he felt terrible about breaking a promise.
I sat facing him and his father in their tiny social room. The three of us had the place to ourselves because Jon was at work and Ashur’s sister was attending an event with her math club. I harbored serious concerns, but Nuruddin guided the questioning. He was not my subordinate; he was my cohort. He had a right to lead the questioning.
Ashur lit up.
Well, that was true—as far as it went.
Ashur looked confused.
Nuruddin frowned, because he had never heard the names Sultana and Tetsuko. But I recognized them immediately. I had seen them in a message to Baylor Charmayne, after he tried to have me and other immigrants from Titania killed:
So far have located only three targets. Med techs Sultana Smith and Tetsuko Finnegan eliminated. Servant Oichi Angelis in progress. Will use Lock 113.
Nuruddin’s face was admirably calm.
He frowned.
He fidgeted for a long moment.
Nuruddin raised an eyebrow.
I sighed.
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