“No,” she replied, “very unlucky. He disappeared one day when he left school grounds. Now he’s probably chained in some brothel where he has to make sure the paying guests have a good time...or he’s playing gigolo to someone like Elizabeth Tzekich, who’ll beat him if he doesn’t give her orgasms on demand.”
Myoko’s voice had suddenly filled with bitterness...and her hand on my arm was an eagle’s claw, fingernails digging fiercely through my sleeve. “Come on...” I began; but she gave me a look that made me hold my tongue.
“Don’t try to comfort me, Phil. If you do, I might ram you through the wall. It’s...” Her voice trailed off for a moment. “The threat hangs over every psychic’s head. Always. Forever. The only protection is being too weak to interest the sharks. In a lot of psychics, the initiator attaches itself only loosely to the brain. You get a small intermittent power that isn’t much use...or a power that takes a lot of strength and effort to activate. People like that—like me—are usually safe: more trouble than they’re worth. But if you have a good strong power...”
“Like Sebastian.”
She nodded. “Like Sebastian. Then you’ll be a target your entire life...until someone finally gets you.” She glanced at Sebastian’s door. Her grip on my arm eased and I thought she might be ending the conversation; but I still had more questions.
“How do you know all this?” I asked. “About the nanites. How do you know things that scientists don’t?”
“Oh, that. Forty years ago, there was a psychic man named Yoquito—came from a five-hut village near the Amazon, never learned to read or write, died young from chronic tuberculosis...but he had a hellishly powerful initiator in some analytic center of his mind, and he was undoubtedly the greatest genius ever produced by Homo sapiens. He didn’t just think with his own brain; he could use all the nano around him like extra neurons. Yoquito wasn’t the first person to have a power like that, but he was far and away the strongest: he claimed he could draw upon the power of every brain-nanite in the whole damned rainforest.”
“So he was smart enough to figure out how psionics worked.”
“He didn’t just figure it out, Phil; the nanites literally explained it to him. As if they’d been waiting centuries for someone to ask, and were thrilled they could finally spill the secret. They told him about psionics and sorcery—”
“Sorcery?” I interrupted. “He knew how that worked too?”
“Sure,” Myoko said. “It operates through the same nanites...just invoked a different way. Sorcerers don’t have initiators in their brains; they initiate effects through gestures and invocations. If you say certain words or enact certain rituals, it triggers the nano to do specific things. Picture the nanites as trained dogs: if you say, ‘Sit!’ in the right tone of voice, they’ll do what you want.”
“Or,” I murmured, thinking it over, “picture them as library functions in an OldTech computer. You invoke the correct subroutine and the nanites behave in accordance with their programming.”
“All right,” Myoko said, “if you insist on getting technical. The nanites respond to people performing certain actions...and those actions are intentionally bizarre so the nanites aren’t triggered by accident.”
“You don’t think the aliens just invented crazy rituals so they could laugh at stupid humans dancing naked around a goat’s head?”
Myoko nodded. “Maybe that too...but weird magical rituals date back thousands of years, well before sorcery became real. The aliens may simply have designed sorcery to match existing Earth folklore.”
She was right—lots of human cultures had developed mythologies about what sorcery should look like, long before nanites made magic a reality. Those myths could easily have inspired the nanite-designers when they were deciding how sorcery would work. “What about the way the Caryatid controls fire?” I asked. “She never performs any fancy rituals.”
“She must have when she was younger. When you’re starting, you need exactly the right rigmarole; otherwise, you can’t catch the nanites’ attention. After a while, though, they begin to follow you around and pay attention to smaller and smaller signals. Like a trained dog again: at first you have to say, ‘Sit!’ very clearly and firmly...but once the dog gets the idea, you don’t have to be so formal. Dogs even read your body language and anticipate what you want. The nanites are the same way. Think of the Caryatid’s premonitions—they didn’t start happening to her until that ritual with the pony and the calliope. After that, the premonitions began to trigger themselves spontaneously.”
“And hauntings?” I asked. “The harp in the music room was more nanite activity?”
“Right. Rosalind had nanites in her brain, just like everybody else. Under certain conditions, especially traumatic death, the brain nanites imprint some portion of the dying person’s personality on nearby nanites in the air. It’s not an accident—the aliens who set this whole thing up wanted to create ghosts, in accordance with human ghost stories. If Rosalind suffered enough emotional turmoil when she died, her nanites were almost certain to create a ghostly manifestation. The ghost isn’t the real Rosalind, of course. It’s just an artificial reproduction of some part of the girl’s psyche: deliberately manufactured for melodramatic effect.”
I chewed on that a moment. What I’d seen in the music room had definitely been melodramatic—choreographed for heavy emotional impact. The soft weeping, the harp playing in an empty room, the blood...in a way, it was almost too faithful to the cliches of ghost stories. A real ghost (if there was such a thing) would probably be more original. Still...“These nanites are good at playing out scenes,” I said. “Very smart.”
Myoko shrugged. “What can I say? There are trillions of the little fuckers everywhere. And they were constructed by aliens who knew a lot more science than the OldTechs ever did. The nanites are smart and very powerful.”
“Is there any limit to their power?”
“They’re only present here on Earth, so you can’t use them to travel off-planet. Apart from that, they seem to up for anything humans can imagine. Transmutation of lead into gold...teleportation...time travel...”
I gulped. “Time travel?”
“Think about it,” Myoko said. “How can the Caryatid get accurate premonitions if the nanites don’t play fast and loose with time? Information travels from the future back to us in the present. And Yoquito said the nanites could make physical objects do the same thing. I don’t know of cases on record...but then, the records would have changed, wouldn’t they?”
Ouch. Time travel always gives respectable physicists the screamie-weamies. Not that we’re totally convinced it’s impossible...but we know enough about the universe to realize just how much of the natural order time travel would screw up. The cliché of killing your grandfather isn’t nearly as serious as killing the second law of thermodynamics. “I don’t suppose,” I said, “your analytic genius Yoquito ever mentioned how to avoid time paradoxes?”
Myoko shook her head. “Yoquito didn’t live long enough. When the nanites explained all this stuff, he decided he had to tell someone...and the nanites directed him to a school that housed people with powers just like his. My old alma mater: the school for psychics. It took Yoquito years to make his way out of the jungle and reach the school. After that, he told what he knew, and died from his tuberculosis within a month. One of those cases where a man with a terminal illness keeps himself alive by sheer willpower until he accomplishes what he wants to do. Then he just lets go.”
A short silence. After a while I had to ask, “If your school has known this for forty years, why haven’t they told anyone else? Scientists would kill for this kind of information.”
“That’s the problem,” Myoko said. “Some scientists would kill for it. At least we’re afraid they might. In case you haven’t noticed, we psychics don’t trust outsiders. The school where I trained has no incentive to divulge the truth, and every reason to play things close to the vest. If scientists understood how psionics work
ed, maybe they could use that against us somehow. We didn’t want to take that risk. Anyway,” she said, her voice suddenly brisk, “scientists will find out soon enough. Every psychic who goes through the school is taught what’s really happening; when that many people know something, it doesn’t stay secret for long. I’m surprised it’s lasted forty years.”
“As you say, psychics don’t confide in other people.” I looked up and met her eyes. “Which makes me wonder why you’re telling me.”
She dropped her gaze quickly. “Because Sebastian is missing. Because he might be in trouble and I want to save him. You’re a smart man, Phil, and who knows, maybe if you understand the truth you can use it to help.”
“I’ll try,” I told her. “What did you say the boy’s powers were?”
“Everything. As far as I can tell, he’s got every damned power in the book. Clairvoyance, clairaudience, telekinesis, telepathy...some more powerful than others, but he’s got it all.”
“How can that be?” I asked. “Could he have initiators all through his brain?”
Myoko shook her head. “Yoquito said that was impossible. If a baby already has an initiator, other initiators stay away.”
“Hmm. Did you ever ask Sebastian to describe what his powers felt like?”
She nodded. “Like the world was filled with happy puppies, eager to do tricks for him. If he wanted something, he asked the puppies and they fell all over themselves to help him out...whether it was lifting heavy objects, displaying pictures in front of his eyes, or telling him the answers on exams. They’d even act without being asked—like once, he almost got kicked by a horse; but the air between him and the horse’s hoof suddenly turned into a solid wall and stopped the kick before it made contact.”
“Okay,” I said. “So the boy’s happy puppies are actually nanites. And they want to do him favors: help him, protect him. Maybe the initiator landed in some part of his brain that deals with social relations. Friendships. Every bit of nano on the planet has become Sebastian’s loyal pal.” I pondered the idea a moment, then made a face. “No: that doesn’t sound right. I’ll have to think some more.” I gave a sideways smile at Myoko. “Though it sure would be nice to have thirty percent of the entire world as my doting chum.”
Myoko gave my arm a squeeze. “Sorry, Phil, you’ll have to make do with me.” Quickly she turned away, toward Sebastian’s door. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
When I’d entered the room in the dark, I’d thought the place had been cleaned up. Now that I had more light, I saw it was not so much “clean” as what the maids called “boy-tidy”: clear in the middle of the floor, with clutter shoved against the wall and arranged in balanced stacks. This was still an improvement over the usual state of the room; Sebastian must have spent hours picking things up (or having his nanite friends do the work). That showed the boy hadn’t run off on the spur of the moment—he’d put things in order first.
Myoko, standing in the doorway, surveyed the piles of oddments around the edge of the room. “What do we think we’re looking for?”
“Clues to where he went,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Coach schedules perhaps. Or a note from some priestess willing to marry two teenagers without parental consent.”
“No one in Simka would perform such a wedding,” Myoko said, “and if any kid asked, the church would inform the academy. Opal makes hefty donations to all the local chapels to keep them on our side.” Myoko shook her head. “If I were eloping, I wouldn’t make wedding arrangements ahead of time; I’d just hightail it to a big city, then look for someone bribable. Heaven knows, Rosalind has enough cash to smooth the way—I’ve heard kids talk about how much gold she carries. Almost as much as you do.”
I thought about that. “It would be nice to know where Rosalind’s gold is. Is it still in her room, or has it gone missing?”
“The only way to find out,” Myoko said, “would be to search Rosalind’s room for her money-belt.”
“And entering Rosalind’s room,” I said, “is an unhealthy thing to do.” I turned back to the jumble heaped around Sebastian’s dorm. What were we looking for? The boy was too smart to leave obvious hints of where he was going. If we did find a coach schedule with a destination circled, it would likely be a red herring to send us in the wrong direction.
Still, we couldn’t give up without looking. Maybe we’d be brilliant enough to deduce where he’d gone from the things he took with him. If, for example, he’d left behind all his warm clothes, we could assume he was heading for the sunnier south.
Either that, or he was a typical teenage boy who didn’t think ahead when packing.
Myoko and I began to search: she rummaged through the closets and drawers, while I checked miscellaneous stacks of paper. Five minutes later I was scanning some barely legible history notes when Myoko called, “Phil, can you give me a hand?”
She was kneeling beside the boy’s bed. Tucked underneath was a polished wooden case, half as long as the bed itself and thick enough that it just fit between the floor and the bed frame. The case had bright brass handles, gleaming in the lamplight; I grabbed one handle, Myoko took the other, and together we dragged the case out.
There were no markings on the exterior...and no lock either, just a small hook-and-eye to keep the box shut. Myoko slipped the hook and lifted the lid to reveal an interior lined with plush green silk. A light fencing foil lay in a pre-shaped cradle amidst the silk; beside it were three more cradles, empty but obviously intended to hold other swords. Judging by the size of the cradles and the indentations in the silk, I guessed the missing weapons were a saber, a rapier, and a broadsword.
“Pretty,” Myoko said, looking at the foil. “Nice workmanship.” She tapped her finger on the button at the end of the blade, the little nubbin that prevented the sword from impaling opponents during a friendly fencing match. “Odd that Sebastian would have such a good weapon. I thought his family was poor.”
“Only in comparison to the rest of our student body. The Shores run a local metalworks...and they make good money catering to the lordlings of our academy. Custom weapons, repairs, that sort of thing.” I gestured toward the case. “When Sebastian was accepted at our school, I’ll bet his family gave him a set of their best blades. So he wouldn’t feel outclassed by the other kids.”
“Hmm.” Myoko looked into the case again. “Where are the other three swords?”
“Good question.” I ran my fingers over the empty silk cradles. “He probably took one with him—a reasonable precaution if you’re wandering the countryside at night. Maybe he brought one for Rosalind too.”
“Surely she had a sword of her own,” Myoko replied. “People talk as if her mother armed the girl with every weapon under the sun.”
“That was the real Rosalind. A false Rosalind might not have access to the real one’s arsenal.”
Myoko gave a grudging nod. “All right: one sword for Sebastian, possibly one for Rosalind. What happened to the third blade?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he hocked it. He often complained about needing cash to keep up with the other kids.”
“He said the same to me,” Myoko agreed. “That’s why I thought he was poor. But he despised himself for feeling that way, and refused to go on spending sprees to impress what he called those rich nobs.”
“But what if he needed money for something special?” I asked. “Like eloping with Rosalind.”
“Yes,” Myoko said slowly, “he might pawn the sword then. If he needed money to get away. And he’d want to pay for everything himself, without using Rosalind’s gold.”
I nodded. Sebastian might have been a psychic prodigy, but he was still a teenage boy. Romantic, proud, and stubborn—to prove he was a man, he’d want to finance the entire elopement by himself. So why wouldn’t he decide to sell a sword or two?
Again I looked at the box’s empty cradles: a saber, a broadsword, and a rapier. Sabers and rapiers were practical weapons, but broa
dswords were too heavy for anything but ceremonial combat. (Of course, the academy trained its charges in ceremonial combat as well as normal fencing— many of our students were destined for ceremonial fives.)
If I were Sebastian, I’d sell the broadsword first. But where? Not to another student: too much risk someone would blab to a teacher. Selling the sword to a store in Simka would also raise problems. People there knew the boy; if he tried to hock a high-class sword, word would get back to his family. Sebastian was smart enough to avoid such trouble. So where had he...
I smacked my head with my palm. “What?” Myoko asked.
“Those fishermen tonight,” I said. “That Divian with the broadsword—he had no idea how to use it. As if he’d never had one in his hands before. And it was a fancy-looking weapon: more ornamental than practical.”
“You think he got the sword from Sebastian?”
“Maybe.”
I closed my eyes to think. The sword was easily worth enough to purchase passage for two on any fishing boat in the Dover fleet. The boat captain involved would demand payment in advance—well in advance—so Sebastian must have gone down to Dover immediately after classes ended in the afternoon. He’d just have time to go to the docks, hand over the sword to pay his fare, then return to the school for supper. Meanwhile...as soon as the boat captain got the sword as payment, he’d send away any crew members who wouldn’t be needed for the trip. That would be about five o’clock: plenty of time for the fishermen we’d met to make their way to Simka and get rip-roaring drunk before they showed up at The Pot of Gold.
And why had the Divian been carrying the sword? My guess was that the captain wanted the little blob-eared swamp-rat to sell the blade in Simka—hock the weapon and turn it into cash. Either the Divian hadn’t found a buyer, or he wanted to swagger around for a while with the sword in his hand before he had to part with it.
Yes. It all made sense...and the timing held together.
“Let’s find Pelinor,” I told Myoko. “He saw the weapon close up...and our noble knight knows about swords.”
Trapped Page 10