“Our lives are in the pot, Arjona.”
“All cons look dangerous until they’re done.”
“You had better know what you are doing. I am not going to jail or getting killed for you.”
“There’ll be no need for that,” Belisarius said.
The geneticist left with a sour look on his face. Belisarius extinguished the lights, but he didn’t go back to watching the stars. He deflated inside. He’d wanted to like Gates-15.
Now they really could get killed.
And William certainly would.
Chapter Thirty-One
DEL CASAL DID not return to his own room. He drifted, shocked.
He knew cards very well. Better than Arjona, probably. Arjona’s reasoning was sound. Risk and daring were a matter of calculation and feel, forceful attacks and timely folding, and lacing every choice with misdirection. Del Casal likely understood the physiology of Puppets and Numen better than even Puppet doctors. And Arjona probably understood Puppet psychology better than their own theologians. Del Casal had done his research on Arjona.
Five years living among the human expatriates in the Puppet Free City. Interacting with the Puppets. Selling their art. Not just the legal stuff. Arjona had moved their foulest inner musings, their darkest fantasies and obsessions, to depraved collectors across civilization. Del Casal would have bet a lot that Arjona was the right man to play cards or run a confidence scheme against the Puppets.
But would he bet his life?
Arjona’s plan depended on a series of improbable successes, but he had pulled together improbable people, people as improbably extraordinary as Del Casal himself—the most advanced, and mad, AI in civilization; a deep swimmer from the mongrels; a skilled fugue-diving Homo quantus;and even a skilled con man willing to die.
Arjona had concatenated a series of improbabilities into a long shot that could work.
Could work.
Del Casal was quite attached to his own skin. He was wealthy enough to enjoy it. But he had come for the money and for the chance to pit his skill against the skills of the long-dead engineers of the Puppets, to try to break the unbreakable biological lock. He wanted to see this out. Badly. But did he trust Arjona enough to put his fate into the con man’s hands?
Del Casal headed back to his lab. No doubt Arjona’s pet AI had sensors strung up discreetly all over the hallways of the mines and was reporting back to the Homo quantus. But Saint Matthew had nothing in the medical bays; Del Casal’s own systems had seen to that. No one expected Del Casal to let anyone watch him work while he used genetic manipulation tools almost unique in the Plutocracy.
He sent a private message to the Puppet, to meet him immediately. Ten minutes later, a blurry-eyed Gates-15 entered, his blond beard and hair plastered to one cheek from sleep.
“What is it?” the Puppet asked. “This couldn’t wait ’til morning?”
“Have a seat. I need to speak with you privately about your medical condition.”
“Your therapy isn’t going to work?” Gates-15 asked.
Del Casal motioned Gates-15 to sit. Finally, the Puppet hopped into the chair. Del Casal leaned forward.
“I know you are no exile,” Del Casal said. “There is nothing wrong with you.”
Gates-15 leaned back in shock. “What are you talking about?”
“I am better than any of your Puppet doctors. They cannot fool me, so do not waste my time. I do not care. I am not here to rat on you. I am here to cut you a deal.”
“You’re crazy!” Gates-15 said. “I’m getting Arjona.”
Del Casal’s hand clapped onto the Puppet’s thin, fine-boned wrist, holding him to the chair.
“Since you are no real exile and you are managing your withdrawal symptoms, I am guessing you must be an agent of the Puppet Government. And you and I both see Arjona’s plan crumbling. I ought to get paid. But this job taught me something much more lucrative: I can make Numen. You need Numen. The only question is how much is your government willing to pay for them? My starting price is twice what Arjona offered me.”
Gates-15 nearly choked on his sputtering.
Del Casal pulled the Puppet’s chair even closer. “You and I both know that your people are dying. Neither the modifications to the Numen, nor those that made the Puppets, are stable over evolutionary time. The critical bacterial microbiomes and organelles drift genetically, accumulating changes that will eventually make it so that the Puppets will not recognize true Numen. I guess that the Puppets have six to ten generations. And I am the only one who can correct it.”
“You’re crazy!” Gates-15 repeated.
“You smelled Gander. Given time, I could make it permanent. Imagine: enough Numen for every Puppet. And if your government is willing to pay nine million francs, I will teach the Puppet doctors how to do what I can do.”
Gates-15’s lips trembled with fear.
“Deal,” the Puppet whispered.
Chapter Thirty-Two
THE PUPPET FREE City was precious to the Puppets because it housed thousands of the divine humans. The Free City was a rare haven to unscrupulous visitors because it had few rules. Under both the Numenarchy and the Puppets, the ownership of conscious beings was legal, attitudes to violence, narcotics, and genetic engineering were flexible, and privacy was taken seriously. The wealthy who had tastes that could not be fulfilled elsewhere ran the embargo and came to play in the Free City.
So when Marie and Del Casal, using forged identity documents and a mountain of Congregate francs, rented the deepest six penthouse levels of the Grand Creston Hotel and landed their yacht, the visa procedures with the Grand Creston Constabulary were perfunctory. Rented robotic servitors with wipeable memories loaded tons of Marie’s cargo into the expensive private elevators and began the twenty-five minute descent.
“Holy crap!” Marie exclaimed at the opening of the elevators onto the deepest rooms in the hotel. A wide reception hall sprawled under a vaulted ceiling hung with chandeliers. A honeycomb of thick windows looking into the deep darkness of Blackmore Bay filled the entire outer wall. Lacy stairways led up each wall to a second floor balcony cutting across the windows, to more private sitting and dining areas. Doorways off the sides of the balcony led to the bedrooms. “This place is bigger than my last prison.”
Del Casal frowned. “We have four more of these, so enjoy them.”
Marie checked a display on her wrist. Nitrogen-depleted air. Four atmospheres of pressure. That was as low as they could pressurize the hotel at this depth. The pressure outside the hotel topped out at a cool thousand atmospheres. The rich came to these deepest of penthouses to brag about throwing parties twenty-three kilometers below the surface.
“C’mon, people,” she said, clapping to the servitors.
Four robots followed her out of the elevator, carrying Stills’ chamber. To their left, the earlier baggage the servitors had brought down sat neatly in a row. Twelve metal crates, each a meter cube, full of tools and explosives, as well as a large clinic’s worth of surgical equipment, from bandages and braces and sutures, to casts and anesthetics. Either Bel thought she really was going to blow her fingers off, or Stills’ job was more dangerous than she’d been thinking.
Chapter Thirty-Three
GATES-15 BEGAN TAPPING his foot against the floor again. Then, he shifted in his straps and needlessly rechecked the telemetry of their trading vessel. William watched the stars. Anytime he closed his eyes, he would catch the Puppet staring at him wide-eyed and open-mouthed.
“I’m not a real Numen,” William repeated, without looking at Gates-15.
“I know.” Gates-15 breathed, changing the displays before him. “I know.”
William unstrapped himself and floated free. He moved over his seat and into the back of the cramped, Puppet-sized cabin.
“It’s just that,” Gates-15 said hesitantly, “it’s just that it makes you wonder, doesn’t it? What it really means to be something.”
“Damn it, not again,” W
illiam said.
To avoid Gates-15, he moved to the miniature galley filled with unappealing, prepackaged rations. Not that he was hungry. Del Casal’s modifications had done more than make William secrete pheromones. Things circulated in him that added a slightly bitter aftertaste to everything. And Gates-15 kept upsetting his appetite.
“The Numen are humans who achieved a kind of biochemical divinity,” Gates-15 said, still keeping his eyes locked on the displays.
“There isn’t anything divine in me,” William said. “You watched it all. Until we’re in the Free City, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop going on about that.”
Gates-15 sighed heavily.
“We might be walking into a death trap anyway,” William said. “When we get to your Puppets, they may laugh at the both of us and throw us out the airlock.”
“That’s not how they do it.”
“What?”
“That’s not how Puppets execute someone. The Numen of the Edenic Period were very imaginative. The Puppets tried to honor their traditions.”
“Don’t tell me anymore.”
William scrunched the packaging of their rations so he wouldn’t hear Gates-15’s slow, loud breathing.
“I keep wondering,” Gates-15 said, “what is the nature of divinity, if a good enough forgery can be created? At what point do you declare that the copy is the original?”
“Are all Puppets going to be like this?”
“Theology is the queen of the sciences. It permeates every part of Puppet existence.”
“Except for you,” William said.
The Puppet looked back over the seat. The fine blond hairs of Gates-15’s beard framed his tight-pressed lips.
“I’m sorry,” William said. “I didn’t mean to get so personal. This is very disturbing.”
“No less so for me. I’m travelling with a divinity. Not even a captive one. One who could order me to do anything he wanted.” A minor note of longing accented Gates-15’s voice.
William continued rooting angrily through the galley.
“Like all Puppets, I spent my childhood away from the Numen,” Gates-15 said. “I’d only seen one from a distance, with a lot of other children from my school. Before puberty, the neural systems to perceive divinity aren’t properly developed. But everything, even then, was about the Numen.”
“And then it all fell apart.”
“The central axis of my existence wasn’t gone,” the Puppet said, turning. “I couldn’t smell divinity and I was exiled, but the Numen still define me. In this case, by their absence.”
“What was it like?”
“What?”
“The Numen you saw. What was it like?”
“I don’t know. I was too young to smell it. It was on top of a building for a ceremony, far up, past rows of priests. I sometimes imagine it was despondent. I can’t know what divinity feels. They aren’t the same since the Fall.”
The Fall of the Numenarchy: the Puppet name for what the rest of civilization called the Rise of the Puppets.
“Hardly surprising that they’d be a little twitchy after three generations in captivity,” William said.
“They aren’t like the Numen of old,” Gates-15 said dreamily. “They don’t possess and drive us. They fear and hate us. The Numen of old did not hate us. They held us in a delicious contempt.”
William’s stomach turned.
“I know what Bel thinks they’ll do to me,” William said. “What do you think they’ll do to me?”
“I don’t know. I was just a boy when I left.”
William turned and floated close to Gates-15 and took the front of his shirt in his fist. “Whatever happens, you do your job, got it? I didn’t come all this way to die in a Puppet prison for nothing. I’m doing this to leave something for my daughter when I’m gone.”
Gates-15’s eyes widened in wonder. His mouth breathed slow and gentle. “The fire in you hasn’t gone out,” he said. “You’re so precious to us.”
“Can you get the job done?”
“For you, anything.”
William snatched his hand away and retreated.
Just then, a notification whined. Gates-15 turned slowly from William. He seemed to be having trouble focusing.
“Instructions are coming in from Orbital Control,” Gates-15 said. “One of the naval pickets is being moved from extreme orbit to join us.”
“Because they believe you?” William asked. The Puppets, even the exiles, had protocols for situations of feral Numen being found and brought back to Puppet space.
Their cover story was that William, now carrying the forged documents of a Geoff Kaltwasser, was a feral Numen, living as a shareholder of the Anglo-Spanish Plutocracy. He had contracted the Trenholm virus and was dying and had run out of money to pay for his care. It was an easy cover story to remember.
Likewise, Gates-15 carried the documents of Warren Lister-10, a Puppet trader living in one of the most isolated Puppet mining stations. The real Warren Lister-10 still lived there, and would for the remainder of his ten-month work rotation. Saint Matthew had transmitted a virus to the mining station that would change incoming and outgoing messages to avoid either party noticing any inconsistencies. The mining company would send a new worker out, but it would take months for her to get there. Gates-15 and Gander would be long gone from the Free City by then.
William and Gates-15 had been travelling for a few days, set on this course by the Boyacá before it wormholed away to avoid detection. They’d been at maximum acceleration for the first days, and then had floated in the still weightlessness that William associated with the long night’s wait for a dawn appointment with the hangman.
“Orbital Control is instructing us to begin our deceleration burn,” Gates-15 said. “I need you to strap in.”
Nervousness tickled William’s stomach.
Two things a con man had to keep in mind were pay-off and risk. No con was risk-free. And risk was unmeasurable without reference to payoff. The payoff here was huge: his daughter’s escape from poverty.
He just needed to pull off his part. He’d pulled cons before, good ones, but only when he’d understood his marks, studied them. They’d been greedy, but rational. The Puppets were unhinged, messed up beyond all understanding. And the big con, the one that would bring in the money, depended on his ability to keep their eyes on him. William pushed off the galley and maneuvered into the co-pilot seat. He strapped himself in without returning the rapt stare of the open-mouthed Puppet beside him.
“Do your maneuvers,” William said.
Deceleration pressed at William’s chest with one and a half gravities. Not terrible, but uncomfortable. He was used to bigger ships, travelling at more stately paces; the Puppets were in a hurry. Gates-15 appeared to be equally pained, but not by the deceleration.
“You’re sure you’re alright?” the Puppet asked.
“I’m fine,” William said, but he regretted his curt tone.
Gates-15’s solicitude, for all that it was disturbing and artificially induced, was honest. It wasn’t the Puppet’s fault that his feelings had nothing to do with who William was. Gates-15’s emotions had only to do with how William smelled. If Del Casal had been able to engineer the pheromones into a cactus, Gates-15 would at this very moment be kneeling before a plant, rapturously removing spines from his fingers.
And while the Puppet had chosen to have this temporary biochemical addiction, the rest of his people had not. Bel said that puberty began for each Puppet with the physiological equivalent of withdrawal symptoms. William pitied them. And he even pitied Gates-15, in a weird way. The exile had to live in a world of strangers who despised him. Of course he wanted to go back to his people. Who wouldn’t?
“I’m fine. Thank you,” he said more kindly.
Chapter Thirty-Four
"THESE IMAGES ARE the best we could get of Arjona,” Majeur Bareilles said.
They were in Bareilles’s intelligence station in the freight processing fa
cility on the surface of Oler. A number of her officers were working in the holographic glow of sub-AIs running pattern-seeking analyses. Others were assisting her in the briefing of the Scarecrow around slowly rotating images of Arjona.
The images weren’t good. They were all taken from a distance. It appeared that Arjona had a habit of walking in low light conditions. It also appeared that the watching cameras that might have taken better pictures had mysterious, temporary failures. The camera problems preceded Arjona, and continued after him, in patterns random enough that automated systems would never statistically link him to the failures. An AI, perhaps a few, were involved to break so many independent surveillance systems at once.
“My teams scraped Arjona’s old art gallery,” Majeur Bareilles continued. “It’s not just clean. DNA from many humans and Puppets was added. It foils forensics. And that was before hydrolyzing agents chopped residual DNA into fragments. Genetic analyses got us nothing.”
“A suspicious professional,” the Scarecrow said.
“We have records on Belisarius Arjona and some of his legal aliases,” Bareilles said. The grainy surveillance image was replaced with collage of images of Arjona taken by legal and police systems. “He’s got all the Anglo-Spanish permits to buy and sell anywhere in the Plutocracy, but the biodata in each one is inconsistent with all the others. And of course, the permits issued by the Puppets contain no reliable data. He’s apparently an art dealer and embargo breaker. We’ve got some possible contacts at a few locations over the last decade, sometimes where minor unsolved crimes occurred. We’re digging up those records. These photos come from arrests under different identities, but no convictions.”
“So we have genetic data on him from the arrests?” the Scarecrow asked.
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