by Dave Duncan
“You can quantify environment?” Alya did not try to hide her skepticism.
The old woman nodded. “We think so—in this case. Cedric’s background has been very impoverished in stimuli. Dr. Wheatland has been encouraging this research, you understand. It is useful in evaluating potential employees. She set up parameters to model a deprived institutional upbringing, and we ran an HCP—that’s a Holistic Character Prognosis.”
“And what were the results of the experiment this time?”
“Very interesting!” Hubbard spoke as though she were discussing something pinned to a specimen board. “Apparently organages develop self-reliance. His tenacity estimate went right off-scale.”
“So?”
“So I can use Hubbard Cedric Dickson without fear of reducing him to gibbering moronship. Drop him out windows? No problem. Set an angry crowd on him—why not? He has tenacity, he hangs on. He continues to function. You saw him today—he’s virtually indestructible.”
Alya felt ill. She pushed herself to her feet, determined to leave before she blurted something dangerous. “I shall go to Cainsville now.”
Hubbard stayed sitting, staring across at her with what seemed to be quiet contempt. “You have missed the point, child.”
“What point?”
“That I have plans for Cedric. He is a pawn, but an important one.”
Alya leaned heavily on the back of the chair she had just left and stared into the hateful, mocking eyes of the evil old woman.
Mad as a moray eel.
“A pawn you plan to sacrifice?”
“Possibly.”
“Literally? Literally sacrifice? Kill him?”
“If necessary,” Hubbard said flatly. “I play for high stakes. This is the high table, Princess. No nickel bets here. And sentiment is a small-denomination chip. That is the point you missed. Don’t throw your heart at my grandson. You’ll only get hurt.”
“I shall go to Cainsville now.”
“I’m not finished. I have a question for you. This family intuition of yours—I understood that it only detected personal danger?”
Alya could guess what was coming. She waited, pretending that the question had been only a statement.
Hubbard frowned. “Well? Is it also self-referent?”
“Self what, Director?”
“Oh, don’t play dumb bunny with me, girl! Does your inherited intuition also pick out breeding partners to enhance itself?”
Kas thought it did. Alya shivered. “If it does, then I am nothing but a pawn also, a puppet of the buddhi talent, and anything I say on the subject might be a falsehood.”
“I see.” Hubbard considered that, showing her lower teeth in the nastiest smile Alya had seen yet. “Well, enjoy my grandson while you can, Princess. I saw how you kept trying to paw him. But remember that he won’t be available for very long. You can’t have him to keep. He is not going to Tiber with you, or whatever world you choose. He is mine to do with as I please.”
She rose, tall and straight in her gray suit, and deadly like a sword. “I shall give you a world, Princess Alya, and you may play Ms. Moses and lead your people to your promised land. But Cedric stays here. I caused him to be. He is mine.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Many have told me so. Most of them are dead now.”
The Institute had its own lev station, on a spur from the main tube. It ran private cars nonstop between HQ and Cainsville every two hours, thereby creating massive inconvenience for every other user of the artery.
Alya reached the platform with minutes to spare, flushed and puffing from an entirely unnecessary sprint. Flanked by his guard, Cedric stood among the crowd, as inconspicuous as a palm tree in a rice paddy. He was wearing a pale blue poncho, and his hair was neatly set in tawny ripples. The doors had just opened, and he was watching the passengers emerging, so he did not see her until she reached him. He looked down then, and joy blazed in his smile.
Alya’s heart rolled over and submerged in a swamp of guilt and dismay. She should have guessed what would happen! His grandmother had lied to him and betrayed him, his foster parents had been revealed as murderous ghouls, his childhood friends were all foully murdered—but a pretty girl had smiled and spoken kindly. If he was really nineteen, then he could not be more than eight months younger than she, at the most—or even slightly older. He must be forty centimeters taller. Yet compared to her, he was only an overgrown child.
He smiled sheepishly. “Hope you don’t mind the work clothes. The store had nothing in—”
“Anything but that green! Blue suits you.”
He blushed, as she had known he would.
And she felt better already, as she had known she would, just being near him.
She felt mean, using him as an antidote.
Then he shyly pulled a single red rose from under his poncho and offered it to her without a word.
Mean? She was as bad as his bitch of a grandmother.
The Institute’s private lev cars were considerably cleaner and more comfortable than Nauc’s usual. Furthermore, a deputy director had status. The little VIP compartment at the front was snappily appropriated by a group of venerable scientists who thought they deserved it more than Cedric did. His burly bodyguard explained their error. When words failed to convince, he led the eldest out by the ear, and the others followed meekly. Then Jathro tried to accompany Alya, and the bull threatened to burn off his beard with a torchgun. She suspected that was the bull’s own idea, not Cedric’s, but Cedric was grinning gleefully and obviously not averse to having her all to himself.
Even first-class seating would not normally have been adequate for his legs, but when acceleration was over and the seat backs reversed, he stretched out and laid his astonishingly large feet on the opposite bench. Alya raised the armrest between them, expecting him to accept that as an invitation, but he was apparently too shy to believe the signal. At first he made no move. Still, just being close to him relieved her pain.
Supported on magnets and flashing through vacuum at a thousand miles an hour, a lev was normally a smoother ride than even a super. The Cainsville express was an exception because it ran nonstop in a tube designed for stops. The curves were all gentle, but not all had been designed to be taken at full speed, and some produced a crushing gee force. On the first bend Cedric tried to keep his weight off Alya, but on the return she just relaxed and leaned. He caught the message and encircled her with a long arm. She fitted neatly into the crook of his elbow, his shoulder a good headrest, if bony; giants did have their uses. Thereafter they rocked in unison.
And that was the cure she had needed. The long arm banished the ghosts. The gnawing of her intuition died away at last—she was traveling to Cainsville and cuddling as close to Hubbard Cedric as decency permitted, and for the first time in days she felt peace. A satori never explained, so she could not guess why he should matter, but she was very relieved to know that mere proximity was enough. Whatever the buddhi wanted, apparently it was not going to drive her to coitus with him. She was relieved to make that discovery—bedding Cedric would be child molesting.
The comset was showing scenes of the daylight world above, and being ignored. They talked. She queried him about Meadowdale, and was impressed by the range of skills he claimed—tracking and shooting and rock climbing and horses and canoeing and cattle. There might have been more, but he grew shy and asked to hear about Banzarak.
“It’s a silly little kingdom,” she told him. “Too small to stage a musical comedy, Kas says. According to legend, it was founded by a refugee prince from India, a Buddhist fleeing the Brahmins of the Sunga dynasty. That’s not very likely, though. How would he have got to Borneo at that early date?”
“When?”
“Heavens knows! The timing is all confused, but it would have been before Rome became an empire. The real records only go back a thousand years—”
“Only?”
“A little more. Ninth century in European tally. An
yway, whenever it was, we’ve managed to maintain our own identity ever since—”
“How?”
The aptness of his queries surprised her. His ignorance concealed a good mind, and his naiveté let him batter questions at her like a child. “The sultans were smart, of course.”
“And the princesses beautiful?”
“That helped sometimes.” She told how the land was threatened now by the rising sea, as well as by the diseases and famines, radiation and refugee hordes that were the bane of the century. She was reluctant to talk about herself, but he pried, with sly, penetrating queries. Soon she had admitted far more than she had intended about the extent of her travels, her experiences, and even her studies.
“But I’m like you, really,” she said. “No doctorate; in fact not even a master’s. I’m ashamed! I’m just a mental bumblebee, buzzing around collecting knowledge.”
“What else,” he asked, “apart from nutrition, soil chemistry, marine biology, and meteorology?”
“Oh, that’s about it.”
“No genetics?”
She knew he must have felt her twitch. “How’d you guess?”
“Just seems to fit. Parasitology?”
“Cedric! How?”
He smirked down at her. “Pilgrim clubs. I’ve seen documentaries on them. They have a list of recommended skills much like that. But why should a princess need to know any of those?”
“I know one skill that you have and didn’t admit to,” she said. “Cross-examination!” And she reached under his poncho and pinched him.
“Arrh!” he said. “Do that again—lower.”
Obviously here was one child who would not object to molestation. Alya withdrew her hand quickly.
An attendant brought a snack and offered drinks. Alya stuck to coffee to combat her drowning sense of fatigue, while Cedric downed three large glasses of milk. He watched surreptitiously how she ate; he copied her. He had had a manicure, as well as a haircut.
They talked more. He wanted to be a ranger, he said, even if his father had not lived to be more than a trainee. She did not repeat what she had been told about his father.
“Maybe,” he said wistfully, “if I do a good job at this media thing for Gran…” He fell silent, in an uncharacteristic brooding.
Tenacity, Alya thought. In one day he had already withstood shocks that would have broken most men twice his age.
Then her subconscious mind gave up chewing over a problem and tossed it up to her to deal with.
“How,” she asked, “did you know I was going to be on this lev? You bought a rose.”
Cedric grinned pinkly. “I knew Gran wanted you to look at something called ‘Rhine.’ That had to be a planet—NSB, I mean. That meant the lev. I wasn’t sure you’d be on this one.”
“If I hadn’t, would you have waited for the next?”
He turned pinker and nodded.
And likely the one after that—Cedric was in love.
Bagshaw stuck his head in the door. “Evening news coming up. If it’s anything like what they ran earlier, it’s a hoot. Wonder where they dig up these clowns?” He leered, and was about to disappear—
“Wait!” Cedric said. “Anything about the President Lincoln Hotel?”
“No.” The bull looked blank. “Should there be?”
Cedric pouted, but he voiced the holo on and tuned to 5CBC. They caught a brief glimpse of Quentin Peter, and then a clip of the disastrous press conference. It was just as bad as Alya would have guessed—Agnes behaving like a madwoman, and Cedric’s shocked young face showing white above the mob of angry reporters, like a child standing on a table in the middle of a riot. The clip was cut off as soon as he admitted having no formal schooling, and before he asked what the media wanted from him. That was blatantly unfair, but only to be expected.
“So far,” a grim-smiling Quentin Peter told the world, “Director Hubbard has failed to refute her grandson’s own assessment of his qualifications. Her other deputy directors are believed to earn in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand hectos a year. Not bad for starters, you’ll agree! Now, for reaction to this extraordinary appointment, we go—”
With a snort, Cedric shouted the set off. Perhaps he thought he had suffered enough for one day. “If I’d known I was being paid that much,” he said, “I might have bought you two roses.”
“Easy come, easy go,” Alya said. She picked up his hand and kissed it, then laid it firmly back on the seat.
She wondered if the cabin was bugged and decided it certainly could be. “What are you going to say at your commeeting tomorrow?”
He brightened. “I was thinking…What those guys really want is the romantic stuff, right? Gallant rangers adventuring on Class Two worlds, or even Class Threes. System can sort that out and then feed it into a subsystem, another computer hook-up altogether!” He was obviously excited about this brainwave.
“How would that help?” Alya asked cautiously.
“It can be done on a one-way download. Then no one can access back up to System itself. We had a gadget like that at Meadowdale to stop the small fry scrambling the main board.”
She thought about that.
Obviously he had hoped for more enthusiasm. “Of course, we could add other stuff—life stories of the rangers; that sort of thing.”
It would never work. One thread would unravel a sweater. Given a single bone, a paleontologist could reconstruct the whole animal. With detailed information about 4-I’s explorations, the media would soon penetrate the secrets that Hubbard Agnes had defended so long—computers were very good at that sort of analysis. And of course it was for just that reason that Hubbard had fought her bitter lifelong battle with the media.
But Alya could not tell Cedric all that without revealing the great secret itself. And she was not going to—not because his grandmother had forbidden it, but because of what he would say: Take me with you.
He was not going. The director’s word was law.
“It sounds good on the surface,” she said. “Do you want my advice?”
“Please.”
“Don’t commit to anything at your commeeting. Just listen. That’s what it’s for, right? Why you called it? And don’t make any announcements that your grandmother hasn’t approved first.” She meant in writing, but probably even that would not help much.
“You think she’d cut me off at the knees?” he asked after a while.
“I’m afraid I do, Cedric.”
“And I think so, too!” He sighed. “I wish I knew why she’s doing this to me.”
So did Alya. Insanity still seemed the likeliest explanation. Hubbard Agnes had murdered her son and was punishing her grandson because of it.
But if Hubbard was insane, how long could she keep control of 4-I? And would Alya be able to escape to Tiber first?
Somewhere before it reached the St. Lawrence River, the lev supposedly surfaced, but it still ran in a tube and it still had no windows. Cedric called for exterior view on the com.
“No vid available,” he was told.
“Why not?”
There was no reply—apparently the car’s System was not up to such complex conversation.
“Nothing to look at, I expect,” Alya said sleepily. “It’s all dead rock up here now, I’m sure.” Why bother fitting cameras to look at that?
And she settled deeper into the crook of Cedric’s arm.
She awoke with a start and looked up to see his smile hanging over her. “I slept?”
“About an hour.”
She straightened, rubbing her neck. Usually napping like that made her feel terrible, but she felt very good, refreshed, calmer. Lord knew she had needed the sleep. “Did I kill your arm?”
He smiled blissfully. “Total gangrene! But the other’s long enough for two. I’ll get half transplanted.”
They had to be almost there—Alya saw what could only be Cainsville in the com screen. The Institute was an impressive complex, as big as a small city, but it
was all one giant machine, a conglomeration of spherical domes and dish antennae, mysterious towers and ring structures—a thing unworldly, a dream of aliens.
“That’s a sim,” Cedric said. “Faked. Aerial view, see? But nothing can fly over Cainsville, because of the microwave beams. It doesn’t even have an airport.”
Alya yawned, which saved her from having to comment.
Some hoaxes succeed by their sheer enormity: If no one can see more than a small part of it, no one can comprehend the whole. As Kas said, an elephant sitting on a skylight is invisible.
It had been the start of deceleration that had wakened her. The lev was arriving at Cainsville.
12
Cainsville, April 7—8
NOT LONG AFTER she arrived in Cainsville, Alya made an alarming discovery. She might have made it sooner, had she been given a chance to think.
But she had no such chance. A phalanx of red-suited bulls whisked her through security with a minimum of investigation—the whole complex was classified as a safe zone, she was told; she would need no bodyguards while she was there. Deputy Director Fish Lyle met her at the gate. She did not like him. He smiled with his lips, while the eyes behind his thick glasses looked long dead. Possibly she had merely been prejudiced by Kas, who claimed that Fish could raise goose bumps on him at fifty paces, and who muttered dark tales of mysterious disappearances at Cainsville.
Deputy Devlin would be her official host, Fish explained, but he had been delayed in Nauc and sent his apologies. Alya offered a silent prayer to several deities, giving thanks that she had been able to spend the last two hours with Cedric, rather than with the toothy Devlin Grant.
And then she was introduced to a young man in ranger denims, fair, fresh-faced, and superficially like an older version of Cedric, but thirty centimeters shorter, twice as wide across the shoulders, and probably considerably shrewder. Baker Abel was his name, Fish said, and he would be party leader for her expedition to…to wherever she chose. If either Fish or Baker had been told that Tiber was their destination, they did not say so—but Baker did say almost everything else imaginable. He started talking while shaking her hand and did not seem to stop thereafter. He had a cocky manner, an erratic limp, and an unending line of banter and commentary that would have done honor to a bazaar horoscope huckster.