The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  I’d told my family I was going out on a scrutiny—the first of my career, and the whole house was excited. But I’d made a joke of teasing them, keeping it a big secret: can’t tell, Vigil business, might be a bust-their-balls raid that’ll hit all the broadcasts. I’d held out till little Livvy’s bedtime, when I whispered in her ear I was just going to a water-treatment plant; she proudly-loudly announced the news to everyone else, they laughed, and that was that.

  “As far as I can remember,” I told Tic, “I never mentioned Pump Station 3 to anyone. I just said I was going to a water-treatment plant. Five of those in the city.”

  “As far as you can remember?” A squidge of emotion flickered across his face; but thanks to those blasted goggles, I couldn’t tell which emotion it was. “Ms. Smallwood…you realize your link-seed can delve into—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “They explained at müshor.”

  The same way my link-seed could package up memories for the police, it could rummage through my mind for forgotten minutiae stashed below the conscious threshold. The process wasn’t perfect—our brains are lazy buggers who adjust memories for easy storage, throwing away some details and approximating others with images that are already in our mental cupboards. Still and all, the night in question was recent enough that I shouldn’t find too much distortion.

  “It’s rather imperative for us to be sure on this,” Tic said. “If you explicitly told anyone you were going to Pump Station 3…”

  “Yes!” I snapped, “I know it’s important!”

  He peered at me owlishly through his shaded goggles. Then he asked, “Stick or bag?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “When I was a dewy-eyed novice,” he said, “my mentors took the direct approach in helping me deal with my fears. Whenever I hesitated to use my link-seed, they either hit me with a stick or put a bag over my head. I hated the bag most, so that’s what they usually used.” He sighed dramatically. “Such barbaric days—I swore I’d be more enlightened. By which I mean I’m giving you the choice. Stick or bag?”

  I boggled at him, wondering if this was just a joke. So far as I could see, he didn’t have either a stick or bag…but then, he wore the usual Oolom tote pack, a flat ort-skin pouch positioned at groin level, held in place with straps up around the neck and down to the ankles. The pack was just big enough to hold some escrima rods, and a sack or two.

  Even as I watched, his hand drifted down toward the tote pack’s zip-mouth.

  “No stick, no bag,” I said jump-quickly. “I’ll do this. Just give me time.”

  “At your convenience.” Tic folded his hands in front of him: the picture of a man willing to wait.

  Waiting for me to invoke my link-seed demon. To tweak fate’s nose by hooking up again.

  Look. This is getting stale for me too—the constant whining about my link, “Oh, woe, what if my brain goes splat?” You must be saying, “Snap out of it, honey. The seed is a gift, not a curse. And anyway, the thing is so thoroughly twined around your neurons, you have no choice but to live with it.”

  The same words I kept saying to myself.

  I hated the fear. It was so daft childish—to train seven whole years, then melt into drippy dread when I finally got what I wanted.

  Crazy. Witless. Typical Faye.

  But you don’t want me moaning how screwed up I was. Either you’re sick of that too, or you don’t believe me. Just a middle-class drama queen, blathering about her dodgy past when she seems pretty damned functional. Good health…addiction-free…loving family…not overly crippled by depression, neurosis or psychosis. Not even ugly with freckles anymore. Stop complaining, bitch.

  Fair enough.

  But hating the way you get the mopes doesn’t make it easier to step clear of the past. Or the present. Or the future when it scares the bejeezus out of you.

  Fear is fear. Pain is pain. Even when you know you’re being boring.

  It bored me too. Frustrated me. I kept telling myself, “Get over it!”

  Words, words, words. Words don’t make willpower…and anyway, willpower isn’t the right tool for some jobs. Instead of holding on with white willpower knuckles, sometimes you have to let go.

  So. There, in my office, scared of the world-soul Xé, worried about Tic’s sanity and shamed by his question, “Stick or bag?”…I finally threw myself back on my Vigil training. Meditation. Acceptance. Discipline without discipline. Like I’d been working on for seven years.

  Down into my center—the part that breathes if you just get out of its way.

  Don’t see this as an apocalyptic transformation; don’t think I grappled down my fear for all time. Nothing is ever so easy. But I sheltered back into my training and let myself take a step.

  Forward.

  The mind is a bottle filled with sugar syrup, salt water, and vinegar. Empty it.

  The mind is a book filled with poetry, laments, and curses. Click DELETE.

  Empty bottle.

  Empty book.

  Empty mind.

  If you dip your hand into the sea, then scoop it out again, what do you have? No more than a sheen of wet over your palm. You can’t capture handfuls of water by strength; you can’t possess it. But if you dip your hand into the briny and leave it there—if you let yourself feel the cold and smell the salt—then who’s to say you aren’t holding the whole ocean?

  Don’t seek, don’t avoid…just observe. If you want to activate a shy part of the brain, let the rest fall silent. When the consciousness shuts up, quieter voices may speak.

  Memory isn’t linear…except tiny patches, ten seconds here, half a minute there. Only flicky-brief flashes where you can track through a sequence of events without skipping ahead, without finding other memories dragged in by association. The meat of your brain squirms against linearity, terrified of falling into some autistic steady state that locks out the world.

  Then we Homo saps come along, and sludge-wits that we are, almost every activity we invent for ourselves moves in a straight line. Step-by-step instructions, agendas for business meetings, timetables and milestones for working on a project. Our whole culture = first A, then B, then C. Binding the tiger with a chain of one link after another.

  One thing at a time. Society pounds away at us, “It’s wicked-bad-sinful even to contemplate the possibility of experiencing everything all at once.”

  But I wanted everything—everything I said and did that night before Chappalar died.

  I opened myself to the memories: not commanding them to come, because the commanding part of my brain wasn’t the nub I wanted to activate.

  Open the inner eye. Just see what’s there.

  Chappalar and me saying good night in front of the Vigil’s office. The dear funny sight of him bouncing through the grove of other office trees in our neighborhood. Me walking down to the transit station, where I caught a scuttler for home.

  No sign of anyone following either of us.

  Off the scuttler and heading for my home compound. Preoccupied, gloomily self-absorbed: worried about the link-seed bomb ticking in my head.

  Sudden memories of a different time—don’t fight the change of subject, let it happen if that’s what my brain served up. The face of a senior student I’d known marginally, someone who died from data tumor early in müshor.

  An imagined picture of scalding blood, squirting from his eyes. The horror his family must have felt. The horror my family would feel if it happened to me. Our kids, trying all their hard-won attitudes, arrogance, outrage, coolness, and finding nothing that shook the grief. My husbands and wives with a few more funerals under their belts, but still deep-struck because they depended on me…depended that I’d be the one in trouble, the one who needed close watching, the first one all eyes turned to when someone asked, “What shall we do tonight?” because Faye might’ve got one of her moods…

  Moods. A torrent of moods flooding into me…not memory anymore, but Remembrance: touching all the moods I’d ever had, not jus
t the night prior to Chappalar’s death, but all the angry moods before, all the guilty moods after.

  Everything all at once.

  Not data tumor. The deluge didn’t come from the datasphere but from my own mind, chagrins and shames I’d tried to squash down, and joys that I’d run from because they were undeserved, too good for someone like me…

  My whole subconscious suddenly exploded to the surface, like an eruption of gas bursting out of deep ocean, wretched stinks and sweet lost perfumes, hates, loves, humiliations, triumphs…

  Subconscious becoming conscious for one gasping moment of totality.

  Then it was gone again, the ocean clapping back into place, subconscious plunging into drowned depths, the moment of revelation getting swallowed under heavy black water.

  I opened my eyes. Tic was watching me closely. He hadn’t moved; but he must have known what happened by the look on my face. Softly he said, “Some proctors grow addicted to that experience. That moment of knowledge. They don’t enjoy it, but they have to look again and again. Others would rather die than repeat it. Wisdom lies between those two extremes: use memory as a tool, not a drug. But. Fanobo roi shunt, aghi shunt po.”

  An Oolom proverb: ACTING WISELY IS EASY, UNTIL IT ISN’T.

  I said nothing. Speechless. Breathless.

  In the quiet, Tic’s goggles hissed out a puff of mist to keep his eyes moist.

  “I didn’t tell anyone about Pump Station 3,” I whispered. “Not by name. Chappalar must have mentioned it to someone. His lover. Maya.”

  Maya.

  “Who is this Maya?” Tic asked.

  “A human woman. I’ve never met her myself—just heard some of the other proctors talk about her. Chappalar said she was a hundred and ten years old.”

  “And Chappalar saw her the night before he was killed?”

  “So he told me.”

  “Long-term friendship or recent acquaintance?”

  “Recent, I think.”

  Tic raised his eyes to the ceiling a moment, then lowered his head again to look straight at me. “There’s no such woman in Bonaventure.”

  I was a hair away from asking, “How do you know?” but stopped myself in time. Tic must have used his link-seed to call the world-soul and check our city census database. The search wouldn’t take long—since Homo saps had only lived on Demoth half a century, there weren’t a lot of us aged 110. Sure, a few of Demoth’s original humans arrived in their fifties or older; but not many. Colonization was a sport played mostly by the young.

  “She might not have told Chappalar her right age,” I said. “Humans sometimes fudge how old they are.”

  “And a charming foible it is,” Tic answered. “Never trust a species that tells the truth about everything— they’re either stupid, arrogant, or only interested in documentaries. But there’s no human, male or female, anywhere over the age of one hundred with a name that’s close to the word Maya…not on the voters’ lists in all Great St. Caspian.”

  Oh. Pity.

  “Maybe she lives elsewhere on Demoth,” I suggested. “It takes next to no time for someone to travel here by sleeve…”

  Tic looked away again, then turned back. “No one fitting Maya’s particulars has taken the Bonaventure sleeve in the past two weeks.”

  I stared at him in great gaping shock. Sure, the Transit Board required sleeve operators to record who passed through when…but those records were kept confidential except by court order. Police could get warrants to track criminals; accident investigators could find the names of travelers splattered or spaced by malfunctions; but members of the Vigil had no authority to check the movements of private citizens. If I tried such a thing, the world-soul would stonewall me with INFORMATION DOES NOT EXIST OR IS NOT VALIDLY ACCESSIBLE. It might also notify my superiors, who’d demand to know what in merry hell I thought I was doing.

  “Transit records are tight-sealed,” I told Tic in a low voice. “How can you search through them—”

  “I can’t,” he replied. “But the world-soul can. And Xe’s a dear old girl who’ll do her utmost to be obliging if you ask your questions persuasively. One: I am interested in locating a murderer, who is by definition a dangerous non-sentient creature. Two: we have honest reason to believe this Maya passed information, knowingly or not, to our murderer sometime between her evening with Chappalar and Chappalar’s death the next morning. Three: it’s my duty as a citizen of the League of Peoples to warn other sentients about potentially lethal risks…which means I should notify Maya she spoke to a dangerous non-sentient at least once and presumably may do so again. Four: I direct the world-soul to warn Maya posthaste. Five: the world-soul asks how to contact the woman, and I provide all the leads I can, including that she might have recently traveled on the Bonaventure Sleeve. Six: the world-soul anxiously replies it can’t send the warning because no woman fitting the criteria appears in the transit records.” He shrugged. “Perfectly straightforward.”

  The shrug was a nice touch—Tic’s face looked wholly sincere, as if anyone could have strung together that chain of reasoning in the half second it took to link with the datasphere.

  No thought at all of trying to impress me.

  Whether or not I was impressed, I swore I wouldn’t show it. “So this Maya…” I stopped, struck by a thought. “Conceivably, ‘Maya’ is a nickname that has nothing to do with her real name. That would make it hard to find her in the city database or the transit records.”

  “Oh. True.” Tic’s face darkened. Literally. Went a shade grayer in the gathering dusk. “Nicknames are such a flippant human custom. Impertinent. Jaunty. If you don’t like your old name, go through a proper rechristening like decent people instead of just deciding…” He fell silent a moment, his face distant. “All right,” he said, after a few seconds, “the world-soul will phone every woman in Great St. Caspian over the age of one hundred, and tell her there’s an urgent message if she goes by the name Maya. It will do the same for anyone in the right age range who traveled here by sleeve recently. If there really is a Maya, we should flush her out.”

  “If there really is a Maya?” I repeated. “Why do you think she might not exist?”

  “I took a quick peek at the language database,” he replied. “The world ‘maya’ appears in several human tongues; but in Sanskrit, it can be translated as ‘fleshly illusion.’ I find that thought-provoking, don’t you? Especially when we know our murderer uses androids.”

  Ouch.

  We waited for the world-soul to send its messages. It wouldn’t take long to get a response—any woman who got an emergency beep on her wrist-implant would answer it pronto unless she was under anaesthetic. Or under a twenty-year-old stud with rock-hard dollies.

  But I digress.

  Night was falling faster now: a cold-looking night that would freeze puddles and frost the trees. One of our tiny moons, the fast one called Orange, floated gibbously above the Bonaventure skyline; its usual apricot color looked faded tonight, like a shrivelly yellow pea.

  Three stories above us, Jupkur launched off his window ledge, gliding home for the evening. His breath steamed…which showed it really was cold, considering the coolish Oolom body temperature. I watched him disappear into the gathering darkness, his skin turning purple with the sky.

  And me standing by the window. One hand against the un-glass, letting the nano-puppies lick me again. Bored with waxing poetic about the dusk and the moon, wanting to do something.

  Tedious thing, waiting.

  Elusive thing, patience.

  Mother used to make me say that prayer, “God grant me the serenity, etc.” but I could only chant it through twice before getting the screamy-weamies. Then I’d bound out of the room and go for a run or something.

  It wouldn’t look good if I ran out on a master proctor…especially with him sitting pond-placid on the edge of my desk, staring out at the twilight. And how much longer would we really have to wait? There could only be a few dozen women of the right age in Bon
aventure. Half that number in the mining towns and outports. Maybe half again among travelers who’d recently used our sleeve. A hundred people? On that order.

  And if none was Chappalar’s sweetheart?

  Now that Tic had planted ideas in my mind, I couldn’t help harking back over the past few days. Maya hadn’t shown up at Chappalar’s funeral, had she? And she hadn’t sent flowers or a card, or even a white stone in the Oolom tradition—I’d checked over the memorials at the burial service, and hadn’t seen anything from her.

  Was she a robot spy, sent to watch him? Possibly: top-price teaser androids could fool lonely chumps into thinking the artificial was real…at least for a while. And duping an Oolom would be easier than fooling a Homo sap; Chappalar might dismiss glitches in the android’s programming as normal human idiosyncrasies. Why should he know how our species behaved when things got breathy?

  If Maya was a robot…but then, what about the other proctors who got killed? Did they have robot spies watching them too?

  No need. According to news reports, three of the proctors were killed in their homes, and another two in their offices—no inside information required to find any of them. The final two were attacked together as they waited to present a report to a parliamentary committee…a presentation that was publicized days in advance.

  So: the killer/killers had no trouble finding seven of the eight dead proctors. The exception was Chappalar…whose schedule that morning was known only to me and Maya.

  “Let’s check Chappalar’s office,” I said suddenly. “See if we can find anything about this mystery woman.”

  “The police searched the place carefully,” Tic answered. “So did I.”

  “But neither you nor the police were specifically looking for information about Maya. Were you?”

  Tic frowned, then said, “True.” He headed for the door.

  8

  MINDLESS MACHINE

  Three of the four walls in the elevator were vidscreens, showing a panoramic view of the city around our office—what you’d see if the elevator were glass and the tree trunk transparent. Oolom architecture used that trick a lot: cramped enclosed spaces like elevator cabs were prettied up with airy visuals (not to mention wind sounds and artificial breeze) to make them seem wide-open to the world.