Kingdom of Cages

by Sarah Zettel

  Chena scrambled backward a few feet and then checked her comptroller. She swore. Inside, her client had already been waiting for her for twenty minutes. In another ten, they would leave, and she would have to crawl all the way back across the swamp and return to Off-shoot empty-handed.

  Taking one long breath, Chena rolled onto her feet and hurried around the hothouse perimeter, using the last of the daylight to dodge the fountains that sprayed water onto the outside of the dome, keeping it cool and comfortable for the people inside.

  The shadowy shape of the entrance lock loomed in front of her. She peeked again at her comptroller. Four minutes left. There would be a camera inside the lock. Any anomalies had to be gotten rid of out here. Quickly, Chena pulled the strings and straps of the camouflage suit and shucked out of it. She had practiced this for weeks. The swarms of bugs scattered, momentarily confused by the abrupt motion.

  That won’t last.

  She stuffed the suit into her pack, pulled out a small packet of things she might need, stowing them in her waistband’s inner pocket. The pack would have to stay out on the grass, there was no help for it. But if everything went well, she would be gone before daylight. No casual observer would notice an extra shadowy bump in the ground, and there was nothing in there to attract the bugs. It would be all right.

  Heart beating at the base of her throat, Chena walked to the entrance of the environmental lock. One long second later, the door slid silently open for her and Chena stepped into the Alpha Complex. The camera that looked at her saw a woman in straight black trousers and a long-sleeved shirt that had a white-on-white diamond pattern. Her long hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She did not like to think about how much the outfit cost, or how long it had taken her to finagle a pair of the soft-soled, machine-made black shoes that were the approved footwear inside the hothouse. The cost would be worth it. It would all be worth it.

  A short flight of ceramic stairs led up to the inner lock. Chena had not been able to obtain a complete map of all the sensors in here. If she was going to be stopped, it would be in here. For all she knew, they might even be checking the air for the chemical composition of her sweat. Well, if her plan did go that far wrong, there was always the fresh poison under her fingernail.

  But the inner lock opened as easily as the outer had and Chena stepped, blinking, into the foyer. A woman stood beside the inner door dressed in a black-and-white-striped robe. Her fingers scrabbled at each other, as if they were looking for something to hang on to.

  She swept up to Chena, the hems of her robe swirling around her ankles. “Follow me, quickly,” she murmured. “You’re a mess.”

  I’ve just crawled across a damn swamp. But Chena just smiled. “It’s good to see you too,” she said for the benefit of any of Aleph’s subsystems that might be moved to track this conversation. “I’ll need to freshen up a little before the meeting.”

  The woman gave her a sharp look that might have been approval, and turned away. She walked fast, with her hands locked together in front of her. Chena wondered if she was trying to hold them still. It was odd to see a hothouser with a nervous habit.

  Then again, this hothouser is breaking several thousand regulations.

  Chena’s client led her through the foyer door marked with parallel white lines on a black background. A warm smell of antiseptic and perfume touched her, followed by a morass of voices. Trying not to stare, she followed her client into a huge open space filled with hothousers of every age, wearing every shape and style of clothing, although all of it remained some variation on black and white. Some of them stood by workstations that looked a lot like Nan Elle’s plant-covered work-table. Some sat behind multi-comptrollers with dozens of screens and input pads surrounded by flickers and shivers of light that must have been video displays projected onto angled glass.

  The woman, her client, walked Chena rapidly through this maze of equipment and activity. Chena kept her eyes focused on the woman’s back, sneaking only occasional glances at the bustle around her. She glimpsed hothousers laboring over green plants in troughs of soil. She saw them observing hives of live insects, and sorting seemingly dead ones from piles of leaves and loam. She passed hugely magnified images of bacteria, DNA, or protozoa projected onto glass walls. Still other glasses showed images of crystals, or dirt, or hothousers.

  Her client led her up a slender open staircase toward the second tier of offices. On the way up, they passed a work area where three hothousers fussed with the wires connected to a set of flesh-colored pears about half the size of Chena’s torso. She flicked a glance at the glass screens as she climbed past, and her step faltered. The glasses displayed images of human embryos. She gripped the railing hard to remind herself where she was and who watched her, and kept on going.

  Her client led her into one of the tiny glass-walled laboratories. A double thickness of door sealed behind them, but did nothing to cut off the constant babble of voices. Her client slid two fingers down one of the walls, making a brief command of some kind, and the voices dimmed. Only then did she turn around to look at Chena.

  “What do you have for me?”

  Chena opened her waistband pocket and turned out a small envelope, which she handed to her client. Her client broke the wax seal and slid in one finger. She drew it out a moment later and inspected the brown powder clinging to the tip.

  She sniffed the powder and then stuck out the tip of her tongue as if she meant to taste it.

  “I wouldn’t do that,” cautioned Chena. “Not unless you’re ready for a truly epic light show.”

  Her client nodded once, as if Chena had said something only mildly interesting. She closed the envelope again, laid it on a counter, and washed her hands thoroughly in the miniature sink. “How is it used?”

  “Do you know what sourdough is?” Chena leaned back against a high stool.

  Without turning around, her client nodded again. She reached for a thick towel and wiped her hands dry.

  “You mix two pinches of the powder with a quarter cup of sourdough starter. Then you add six or eight pieces of fresh fruit. Should be an Old Earth import, nothing native. I like bananas.” She waited for a moment to see if her client would make some comment. But no reaction was forthcoming, so she shrugged and went on. “Then you mix in an additional cup of warm water. You leave that to soak for two days, and you drink it. Preferably while lying down. It works very quickly.”

  Her client brushed her fingertips over the envelope, as if she were scanning it with her hand. “And the effect is?”

  Chena’s mouth twitched. “If you haven’t used too much of the fungus, the effect is euphoria and hallucinations, followed by at least four hours of complete numbness.” Mushrooms, Nan Elle always said, were the most precious plant in God’s garden. Nothing else produced such a range of useful effects, from wholesome to deadly.

  Client cocked one eye toward Chena. “And if you have used too much?”

  “It’s a good thing you washed your hands,” Chena told her. She pulled out a thick piece of homemade paper covered on both sides with the closest, most careful handwriting she could manage. “Here’s everything we know about its species, its preferred environments, the fermentation effects, and what chemical data we could work out.”

  Client took the page and opened it. As she read, she ran her finger down the page, as Chena had seen Nan Elle do to keep track of where she was. But Chena could not shake the idea that Client was reading with her finger as well as her eyes.

  Buying into the hothouse mystique, she told herself. I’m starting to think they can do anything.

  Client folded the page up again and laid it next to the envelope. “It is what we agreed on, and it is all satisfactory.” A small smile formed on her face as she gazed possessively at what Chena had brought. “Do you know, many of my colleagues believe it is a waste of time to study the ways in which the villagers have adapted to their environment over time?”

  Chena ignored the question. “I’m glad you’
re satisfied. Shall we take care of the rest of the meeting now?”

  Client’s hand lifted away from the papers and curled in on itself. “Yes. Now is a good time.”

  “I can handle this on my own.” Chena flicked a gaze at the transparent walls. “You don’t need to concern yourself with it.”

  Client followed her gaze, her lips pursuing slightly and her fingers rubbing against her palm. “Yes, you’re right, of course.” Her eyes swept the laboratory dome. “A colleague of mine did say we could use his station. It’s data-trained for what you need. Let me come with you in case it’s locked.”

  Triumph singing through her, Chena followed Client up to the very top level of the laboratory dome, where the far walls curved in, letting the people who worked there look out onto the blue sky during the daytime. As it was night, of course, the whole dome was opaqued to a pearly gray.

  Client stopped in front of an open laboratory that seemed to be all comptroller. Banks of processors rose from the floor to the height of Chena’s shoulders. The first sweep of her eyes counted twenty main screens, each with a separate input pad and listening grill.

  “You will be able to find what you need? You can call me if you can’t,” said the client.

  Chena shook her head. “No need. I can manage,” she said with a confidence she did not feel. She pasted on a smile and sat in the lab’s one chair.

  She felt Client’s gaze on the back of her neck like an itch. She didn’t start right away. She rubbed her fingertips together and steepled them, pressing them against her lips, as if lost in thought. Gradually the itch went away.

  Okay, Aleph. Now it’s just you and me. She laid her hands on the keys and began.

  As she suspected, the data trees were similar to the ones set up for the library comptrollers, only these were much more extensive, with innumerable sub-branches and cross-references.

  Chena found the branch for daily reports and report archives and followed it down. She did not go straight for Mom’s name. That would certainly be protected. She would not get that this trip, she was sure. She would have to be patient.

  Without delay or inquiry for identification, the comptroller presented her with reports sorted by wing: voluntary, involuntary, and home. Chena’s fingers tingled at the idea of going through reports on the involuntary wing and maybe finding out what happened to Sadia. That was too much of a risk right now. She only had a little time before Client came back for her. She turned down the branch for the voluntary wing.

  Pandorans were nothing if not thorough. They recorded how much food was consumed and what kind, water use and reservoir levels, CO2 levels, how much equipment and electricity was used to maintain the environment. Then there were the psychological records: education, behavior, sociability, sleep patterns, cooperativeness.

  My record on that score must be something to see, thought Chena with a tight smile. Her hands kept moving.

  Next came medical records, listed by date and whether they referenced physical maintenance or an experiment.

  Chena froze. All the experiment names spelled themselves out in front of her, cross-referenced with the patient names.

  It can’t be that easy, can it?

  The lists were extensive, but surely these were just the low-security experiments. They would have a separate security database for the high-level things, like what Mom had been involved in.

  Except the only people who have access to this terminal are hothousers, and hothousers have no secrets from each other because that work is so interconnected.

  That was what Administrator Tam told Nan Elle anyway, and nobody could lie to Nan Elle. Chena had seen people try. There were things he would not say, maybe, but he would not lie to her.

  Chena stared at the path and the list of reports on the screen. Did she dare? It looked like she could. It looked like she could have it all now. She could know, right here and now, who was ultimately responsible for Mom, who had allowed her to die.

  Chena’s fingers started moving before she was even sure of her decision. She entered the search for her mother’s medical records, the experiment she was involved in, and all other data pertaining to and about Helice Trust, in order of decreasing relevance to the experiments. When she finished, her hands fell into her lap, as if all the strength had flowed out of them and into the machine.

  Chena waited. In the space of a heartbeat, the data all came spilling out onto the screen, all of it under the heading EDEN.

  Chena read, drinking in the information until she felt she would burst. Eden was a genetic construct. It was supposed to be the answer to the Diversity Crisis because it had a “rapidly adapting and aggressively proactive” immune system—a set of antibodies and T cells that could take anything the worlds could throw at it and spit it back out.

  There had been a debate then, and Chena brought up the sub-branch for it. Most of the family wanted to give over the cure to the Authority and the Called, and believed firmly that Pandora would then be left alone. But some of them… Chena’s eyes took in the words and she felt herself go cold. Some of them said the cure could be used as a weapon. Immune from all kinds of infection, Eden, or a host of Edens, could go out into the Called and spread diseases engineered in the hot-house labs without having to worry about accidentally getting sick themselves or bringing anything unwanted back with them to Pandora. They could take out what remained of the Called, and all of the Authority cities. With the rest of the human race gone, and Old Earth content in its own system so many light-years away, Pandora would be safe forever.

  No. Chena wiped her palms on her trousers and then flicked over to the next major thread. They couldn’t, even them. They wouldn’t.

  Designing Eden had given the hothousers all kinds of problems. Chena skimmed that section. Most of the trouble seemed related to making the immune system fast and agile, and yet not make it so it would turn on its host and all the host’s beneficial bacteria, or fail to recognize what was just the normal changes of the human body over time.

  Eventually they thought they had the formula right. They just needed to find out if such a fetus could be brought to term in a human woman without the fetus producing an adverse reaction in the mother, or developing one to her.

  They decided to start with a host mother with the most compatible set of alleles and genetic expressions they could find.

  Helice Trust had been within three points of perfection.

  Tears blurred Chena’s vision, but she blinked hard and kept on reading. A mountain of reports followed, documenting every aspect of Mom’s “pregnancy.” There didn’t seem to be a bodily detail small enough to be left out. Chena flicked past them, looking for the last day, the day Mom died.

  Because surely there was a report on that.

  There it was. A subject autopsy. Subject Helice Trust had died of blood loss and heart failure due to severe lacerations and massive hemorrhaging. That was about all they had to say about Mom.

  What was really important was the construct they’d put inside her was missing.

  Missing?

  The lacerations, it said, were concentrated in the abdominal and uterine areas… Chena blinked and looked away. Someone had killed Mom, had cut her open to steal the thing they’d put inside her…

  And they couldn’t find it. It was out there somewhere and the hothousers didn’t know where.

  So now the poor babies have to start over again, thought Chena with a bleak humor.

  So they’d need someone who could carry another one of the things. So they’d need…

  Chena shot to her feet.

  No! No, no, no!

  But there it was. It shone on the screen. There was no mistaking it.

  Chena backed away as if she thought the screen would bite her. I’ve got to get out of here. I screwed up. They know I’m here. I’ve got to get—

  Then Aleph’s voice whispered in her ear. “I knew you would come back to me, Chena.”

  Chena’s hands went instantly numb. Before she could bli
nk again, the screen in front of her blanked out. Chena froze. What good would running do? Aleph had her marked and was on alert. She couldn’t breathe without the city-mind knowing it.

  Her chest heaved as if she had just raced a mile. There was no way out, no way out, no way out.

  “How did you know?” she croaked to the invisible watcher.

  “Oh, Chena,” said Aleph sadly. “I know you. I’ve been waiting for you to come back in search of your mother ever since you left me. You could have walked in and had this information at any time. All you had to do was ask.”

  Chena couldn’t think of anything to say. Her whole body began to shake. She’d thought she’d done it. She’d thought she’d been so smart….

  She licked her lips and managed to force a few words out. “When did you know it was me?”

  Aleph didn’t answer. “Dionte will take you to a waiting room so that your case can be evaluated.”

  Chena’s paralysis broke and she was able to turn around. Her client stood on the other side of the door, tall and stone-faced, one hand curled in on itself, fingers rubbing lightly against her palm.

  “Did she tell you?” whispered Chena.

  “Go with her now, Chena,” said Aleph. “We will talk soon.”

  The transparent door opened. Chena felt the breeze, and the unabated curtain of noise wrapped around her.

  Client—Dionte—did not move. She just stood there and waited for Chena to walk across the threshold and stand in front of her on the catwalk.

  “How much did you know?” she asked the woman, not really expecting an answer.

  “I only know what Aleph tells me.” She extended a hand, gesturing for Chena to descend the stairs. Chena looked down and saw Aleph’s arrow waiting for her on the floor, ready to guide her steps in case she got lost.