Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  The Silkens denied the concept of Communion. But Lot had to wonder if the governors could be its agents, set the task of blending all life into the matrix of the Well. If so, then the Old Silkens were not really dead.

  Nothing is lost in the Well. Though everything there was subject to brutal change, driven in a reeling dance of forced evolution. Molecular-scale data shuffled constantly between microscopic life-forms and sometimes even into macro-scale life. Inept results presumably died off quickly. Only the rare successes survived, but that was enough to feed the next cycle of the Well’s engines of diversity.

  How it all worked, and why, remained a mystery. It seemed likely the term “governors” itself was misleading. Rather than being subject to a single type of gnome, it was far more likely the Well worked on a biomechanical system containing hundreds, thousands or even millions of distinctly different components.

  So maybe city authority really didn’t understand the Well. Maybe no one did—except Jupiter?

  City authority insisted Jupiter had never reached the planet, and if the wardens had found evidence to the contrary, it hadn’t been reported to the library.

  Lot wanted to look for himself. He’d requested permission to link with a warden, but that was denied. Only a select few were allowed access—a safety measure, it was said, based on the untested theory that the wardens’ activity might disrupt the volatile biosphere. But to Lot the policy only suggested the presence of something in the Well the Silkens preferred to hide.

  He felt Urban edge up close beside him. “It’s only two hundred miles to Deception Well if you jump. Are you going to jump? Suicide sacrifice for your crazy cult leader?”

  “Shut up!”

  The retort was out before he could stop it. But he didn’t let it go farther. He stared at Kheth’s fiery disk, trying to deny his anger, trying to deny that he felt anything.

  But Urban wouldn’t let up. Urban was different from everyone else Lot had ever met. The charismata—if they were real—never affected him at all. “You’re a slave, fury. Jupiter’s got his fingers threaded through your brain. Is he your mastermind? You his toy?”

  The touch of Ord’s probing tentacle was more than Lot could stand. He reached out in a blind strike, and slapped the robot off the table. Then he wrenched his gaze away from Kheth, to the comparative darkness around him.

  At first he could see nothing. Then his pupils dilated. A more subtle light slid across his vision. Urban crouched beside him. “Everybody knows Jupiter’s dead. Why don’t you believe it?”

  “Because I saw the elevator car descend!” No matter what city authority said, Lot knew Jupiter had reached the planet. And he had to believe Jupiter was still alive, because if that wasn’t true, then everything Jupiter had ever said about the Communion was wrong. And if Jupiter had been wrong about the Communion, then he’d led seven thousand people to their deaths for nothing, and he’d been a madman, just like the Silkens said. And his madness was inside Lot, tangled in his brain, waiting only for the proper set of circumstances to emerge.

  Ord was back. It swung up on the table, hissing, “Good Lot, good Lot,” its raised tentacles glistening with some transdermal mood-stabilizing cocktail.

  Urban saw it, and snarled. His hand shot out in a snake strike too fast to follow. Fingers set like stiff prongs, he skewered Ord, sending tendrils of gold gelatinous ooze flowing across his wrist. He brought up his other hand to secure his grip, as the tendrils began to retract back into Ord’s main body mass. “Fury, you have such a gift. But you have to learn to control it. Use your aura, your charismata—whatever you want to call it. Use it when you need it, and you’ll be as good as your old man.”

  Ord kicked and squirmed, struggling to slide off Urban’s fingers. “I don’t want to be like him! He left us behind to die.”

  A sheen of sweat stood out on Urban’s forehead as he struggled with Ord. But he watched Lot closely, like a soccer coach, evaluating his star player. “You can hate him, fury, and still use what he gave you. He had a gift. You have it too.”

  Lot shook his head, confused at this sudden shift of direction. “I don’t hate him.”

  Ord’s little body had expelled Urban’s impaling fingers. But Urban still had the robot squeezed tight in his doubled fists. Ord looked half-melted by the effort to reach Lot, by the need to rock him back onto the calm plane city authority had decreed he should occupy. Lot wanted it too. “Let Ord go.” He could feel himself slipping down a dark emotional spiral. Ord’s cocktail could pull him back up. Happy monkey. “Let it go.”

  Urban glared at him. Lot knew that he hated Ord. Hated the way the little robot always fussed over Lot, calming him, damping his moods. “You want city authority to control you. You like it that way.” He shifted his grip, and with a snarl, he flung the robot over the railing. Ord’s golden body sailed in a long arc, dropping like a gleaming firework until it disappeared into a cluster of houses far down the slope.

  “Shit, Urban! Do you want Clemantine knocking on my door?”

  “It’s only a matter of time anyway. Some people get to change who they are. Not you. The monkey house docs couldn’t do anything with you. So now it’s my turn.”

  Lot felt the rasping bite of Urban’s dark confidence chewing down through his bones and he knew it was crazy. Crazy. They were all crazy and maybe it was inevitable. They were frontier people. Their ancestors had consistently fled the stable cultures of the Hallowed Vasties. Selection had worked on them from generation to generation. Those not restless enough, not deviant enough had been left behind. Only the crazy would dare to push into the Chenzeme Intersection—and here they were, trapped in Silk, a single election somehow critical to their lives.

  “Do you want to be a dumb ado for another eighty-two years?” Urban demanded. “Do you?”

  Craziness undulated in the air. “There are worse things.”

  “Not for me.” Urban’s hand closed over the lip of the table. “I’m going down to cold storage with Gent Romer. We’re going to find out if Jupiter’s really there. You can come, if you like.”

  Lot felt as if his breath had been pulled from his lungs by a sudden change of pressure. Cold storage was in the city’s industrial core, and access was strictly controlled. “Into the tunnels?” The proposition pleased and horrified him at once. To return to the industrial corridors… . His nostrils flared, haunted by a ghost aura of death. He didn’t ever want to go back there. But to prove that city authority had lied, that Jupiter was not there with the dead… .

  “Yeah,” Urban said. “Maybe if we find your old man’s body, you can stop waiting for him. Maybe you can start living your own life.”

  Lot did not understand this animosity. “He is my life.” Jupiter blazed in his memory like a sun holding his spirit in close orbit. In Urban’s mind that made him a slave. But was it any better to be like Urban … and believe in nothing at all? Could a man’s soul be as empty as the void and still be the soul of a man? But, Lot realized, the void wasn’t empty. It was prowled by the war weapons of the Chenzeme.

  His gaze rose, to the brilliant white column towering above the peak of the city, the great wall of the elevator cable hard and bright in the full light of Kheth. “We won’t find Jupiter in cold storage.” He stood up, defiance coursing through him. “You don’t believe that now. But you’ll come to believe it.”

  Urban laughed. His eyes were unfocused, dark windows where vague shapes moved, shadowy dreams of power. “Either way, I want you to come to the rally tonight. You’ll do that for me if I take you into cold storage. You’ll do it for Gent.”

  Lot felt his enthusiasm descend to a cooler plane. “You mean if we aren’t arrested for trespassing.”

  “That won’t happen.” He glanced over his shoulder, winking at a faint sheen high up on the green wall of the surrounding hedge—a slick, round reflection, no bigger than the cross section of a girl’s arm—all that was visible of a security camera mounted there. “We’re not alone, you know. Clemantine�
��s off-duty now. This shift is on our side.”

  “You’ve got security behind you?”

  “I’m not going to answer that, fury. Not until you’re sure you really want to know.”

  CHAPTER

  6

  THEY WAITED UNTIL THE STREET BELOW WAS EMPTY. Then they dropped over the railing and trotted east. Here, town houses clustered against each other under veils of climbing ivy, clematis, and thick-trunked wisteria. The vegetation split the morning sun’s horizontal rays into sprays of gold that glinted against address plaques and puddled water, so that a hundred times Lot thought he saw Ord returning.

  But each time he was mistaken, and they were still alone when they reached the first of the narrow green bridges that arched across Vibrant Harmony as the stream boiled down the stepped slope of the eastern city. Urban raced over the narrow span. Lot followed silently, a step behind. From there they bounded down the winding path that paralleled the stream, skirting the patios of opulent homes squeezed close upon the water.

  Lot’s knees ached and his lungs were burning by the time they reached the broad pond at the bottom of the city’s long slope. He pulled up, to stand with his hands on his hips, head thrown back, drinking in lungfuls of sweetly humid air. In the pond, orange and white koi saw him and swam over, their heavy tails splashing loudly as they harassed each other, seeking the best begging position. Here, the stream path joined a white-paved street that ran beneath the arched entrance of the walled refugee quarter.

  “Come on, fury,” Urban urged, his breathing already beginning to slow. “We have to meet Gent.”

  Lot gazed anxiously into the quarter.

  Jupiter’s people had settled here, moving into a cluster of ornate pyramids separated by lines of street trees. The pyramids loomed over the neighborhood’s enclosing wall. They were fifteen stories high, with balconies around each floor, and progressively fewer apartments on the higher levels. They’d been unpopular with the Silkens because they were at the base of the city, across from Splendid Peace Park, and the view wasn’t so good.

  Lot had never tried to enter the refugee quarter before.

  Such a good boy.

  He grimaced. Ado defiance began to work at him, and finally, he trotted after Urban.

  IT STARTED WHEN THEY WERE ONLY A FEW STEPS into the quarter. Some kids kicking a ball through the white street stopped their game abruptly when they saw him. The ball bounced away into a bed of ferns while the kids huddled together, their whispered debate easily audible: “It’s him. It’s him.”

  “Jupiter?”

  “No, stupid, that’s Lot.”

  “Shut up, you dumb ados! Remember what Gent said?”

  Farther down the street, two women stood chatting beside a doorway. Recognition sparked in their eyes. “It’s him.” One stepped forward, but the other laid a gentle hand on her arm as if to hold her back. They exchanged a quick look.

  Lot felt his pulse rise. His sensory tears tingled subtly, and suddenly he felt linked to these women, bound to them by a tenuous connection that glinted faintly silver in his awareness. His will flowed outward upon molecular links. Their will flowed back to him.

  His pace slowed. A few dozen steps away, an open-air restaurant filled the alley between the broad bases of two pyramids. It was packed, and many of the patrons had already noticed him. They stood at their seats, jabbering excitedly. His name leaped out from all the meaningless noise, Lot, Lot, Lot … the same way Jupiter’s name had threaded the chaos of panicked human screams down in the tunnels.

  Lot felt his perceptions begin to slip. Over a period of seconds the light around him brightened, blurring the structures and vegetation into an increscent silver glow while the people themselves became fluid, melting into humanistic icons, their individuality seeping swiftly away. He stopped in the middle of the street, blinking hard. What was he seeing? His natural vision ran from the visual down through the infrared range. He could see heat as well as light. But this vision did not fit anywhere in the electromagnetic spectrum.

  A different interpretation, then?

  Chemical sight. He was seeing faith … like a silver wash spilled on the world, dissolving it, homogenizing it, melding it into a skin that enwrapped him, an invulnerable silver armor. He owned these people. He could command them; he could wear their will like a flawless silver hide… .

  The tide shifted. Against his throat he felt the cold press of a hand. His own hand shot up, to close hard around a wrist.

  “Look at me, Lot.” The voice fell like a shadow across the silver glow. “Listen to your heart. It’s flowing like a river. Try to slow it down. Slow it down.”

  He could hear his heart. It rumbled like the rake of air across a ship’s skin as it dipped into atmosphere, dumping velocity. Fear darkened his vision, and his grip tightened on the wrist. “That’s right, Lot. Listen to me. Try to see me.”

  “Gent?” His voice was an ugly croak in the fading light.

  “Sooth. It’s me. You’re okay now, aren’t you? Sure.”

  Lot’s hand ached. He looked down, to find himself still clasping Gent’s wrist in a grip so tight the veins stood out, red on white against his knuckles. He let go and Gent quickly lowered his arm, to rub at a band of four parallel purple bruises.

  Lot felt drained. He glanced around: at the street, at the pyramidal buildings rising past the trees, at the breakfast crowd in the restaurant, now returned to their seats though Lot could feel them still, vibrating just beneath his vision. His gaze shifted again. Urban stood behind Gent, his arms crossed belligerently over his chest while tangled skeins of jealousy and anger ran off him. Finally, he looked at Gent.

  In Lot’s personal mythology, Gent didn’t stand out as a big man—an impression derived, perhaps, from the quiet way he’d always moved on the periphery of Lot’s life. So it surprised him that he had to look up to meet Gent’s gaze. When Gent reached out to squeeze his arm, Lot felt the strength in his hand, and knew that Gent could have broken the grip Lot had held on his wrist, if he’d chosen to. “You shouldn’t have stayed away,” Gent said, his voice softly chiding. “We’ve tried to respect your wishes on it, but it hasn’t been good for you.”

  Lot felt a bit of color return to his cheeks. “It wasn’t my choice.”

  Gent’s face was all sharp angles and narrow planes, as if some slow inner heat had melted all the softness out of him. His hair was a mix of blond and black threads woven into eight braids that were waxed and formed into perfect rings pinned just beneath his ears. Lot touched his shoulder. He wore a thin gray shirt, and through it Lot could feel the warmth of his skin, and the rough vibration of blood stumbling through the capillaries. He could wear Gent if he wanted to. He knew it. He drew in a sharp, startled breath and turned half away, shaking with the temptation.

  Was this how Jupiter had felt?

  He closed his eyes, forced himself to breathe long and slow, calming himself, the way the monkey-house docs had taught him … trying not to hear the distant chorus of screams reverberating through the darkened corridors. The taste of bile was suddenly in his mouth. “Why are we here?” he croaked. He turned around, his gaze seeking Urban. “Why did you bring me here?”

  Urban’s face was stony, his resentment a foul simmer in the air. “Everybody wants something.” He jerked his chin at Gent. “He wants you. He brought you here, fury. Not me. That was his price. Best if you know that.”

  Cautiously, Lot raised his gaze, to look into Gent’s eyes again. Steady eyes, that looked back at him with quiet affection. Lot could feel the subtle field of his faith. “You’re not like the Silkens.”

  “Let’s go inside,” Gent said. “We only have a little time.”

  What am I doing here? Kheth’s rays fell hot against his face. The air was very still. He could feel himself at a threshold. A soft voice whispered that it wasn’t too late. He could turn around. He could walk out of the refugee quarter, take the transit to Skyline, where he worked every morning tending estate gardens that belon
ged to families of the very real. As easily as that he could be back inside the boundaries of his routine, and city authority would show its approval by leaving him alone, leaving him the hell alone.

  Maybe he’d been alone too long. Good monkey.

  Ado defiance nibbled at him. Gent had been part of his family once. Together they were the last surviving members of Jupiter’s household. Maybe Lot wanted some of that relationship back.

  “Okay,” he said, trying not to see Gent’s faint silver aura. “It’s good.”

  “It will be,” Gent said. He held his arm out, inviting Lot to accompany him.

  THEY CROSSED THE STREET, THEN WENT THROUGH heavy plastic doors cast in a stylized solar design. Urban caught his eye. “You okay, fury?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.”

  Urban looked doubtful. “You looked … half-gone. Vacant. I’ve never seen that before.”

  Lot didn’t know how to answer him. He looked to Gent. “Did you know it would be like that?”

  “There was a chance.”

  “So what was it? What happened out there?”

  Gent gave him an odd look. “You know.”

  “I don’t.”

  For just a moment Gent looked impatient. “You’re the gate to the Communion, Lot. The focusing lens through which we’ll all pass. You gather the essence of your people. Through you, they become one.”

  Lot shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Urban said, “That’s because it’s shit.”

  Gent glanced at him, and shrugged—a gesture that chilled Lot. If doubts translated to defensiveness, then Gent had no doubts at all. Lot rubbed nervously at his sensory tears. “I never felt this way with Silkens.”

  “That’ll come,” Gent assured him. “Given time, you can touch anyone. The difference is, we’re ready to give ourselves to you, while the Silkens, I think, still resist.” He looked to Urban, and gave him a broad wink.