by Linda Nagata
Lot wondered if the fly would have followed the sundew’s sweet scent if it could have comprehended the danger ahead of time. And he decided that it probably would have. Consciousness did not negate instinct. It only provided a post for self-observation.
The disembodied voice of the apartment’s majordomo interrupted these thoughts: “A call for you, Master Lot Apolinario. Madam Yulyssa Desearange. Will you receive it?”
He realized he’d been half-expecting to hear from her. “Hold on.” He got up and dug around in his cabinets until he found the headset for his rarely used phone. “Okay.”
He slipped on the visor and Yulyssa’s image appeared overlaid against the background of his room. She still looked much the same as she had that day in the tunnel, when she’d come down with Kona to view the dead. “I wish you had stayed home,” she said.
“Are you holding the story?”
“For now. I want to talk to you.”
“I have questions too.”
“Do you know where my cameraman Shao lives, in Vibrant Harmony?”
“No.”
“I’ll send a bee for you then. Twenty minutes?”
“Five’s okay.”
The fly still kicked and struggled on the sundew’s glistening paddle. Lot was aware of it, in the corner of his vision.
LOT NEVER LEARNED IF SHAO WAS HOME. The bee led him through an open gate to a garden patio behind the house, where Yulyssa was transferring two steaming plates from a service ‘bot to the table. He presumed Ord had followed him, though it had kept scrupulously out of sight.
“Lunch by Savuti’s,” Yulyssa announced. “Hope that’s all right.”
“We ate there once.”
“You seemed to like it.” She poured a pale wine into long-stemmed glasses. Her aura felt dry as afternoon air, marbled through with baked scents of pleasure and anxiety and vaguer things he could not quite name.
She took a seat. He sat down too, his fingers curling immediately around the stem of a wineglass while he asked the question he had never before been allowed to ask. “What happened to Jupiter after the elevator car left the city?”
“I don’t know.” She answered so smoothly she might have been practicing.
“What do you mean you don’t know?” he burst out. “You’re part of authority.”
“I’m not. I’m independent.”
He moved his head slowly back and forth, encountering something like truth on the air. Yulyssa was very real. In her news reports she often seemed to know more about city business than the junior council members. Yet she hadn’t known cold storage was empty.
He felt naive because he wanted to believe her. “Who would know what happened to Jupiter?” he asked, feeling gullible and penitent at once.
“Nobody knows.” Her hand rose in a gesture meant to slow his natural protest. “There’s been no sign of him in the Well. I do know that. I’ve accessed the planetary wardens and looked myself.”
“Somebody knows,” Lot insisted. “Someone’s seen him. It’s why they emptied cold storage. They’re afraid he’ll revive the army.”
Yulyssa picked up her glass, a half-smile on her face. “Try the wine, Lot. Shao found the recipe on a deep run in the city library.”
Lot was surprised to rediscover the glass in his hand. The wine tasted of honesty. Yulyssa gave him time to savor it, before indulging her own curiosity. “Did Jupiter ever talk to you about the Hallowed Vasties?”
A sourceless tension ran through him. He studied her warily, the fumes from the wine addling his sensory tears.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“I don’t know.” Still, he could feel a memory on the edge of recall.
“You know something.” She was very curious, leaning forward, her dark eyes hungry.
“I’m not sure. Maybe.” Did he want to satisfy her? He wasn’t sure. He picked up chopsticks, nipping at the marinated dumplings on his plate. Her curiosity mobbed him, though it was cut by a heavy share of anxiety.
“Lot?”
He put the dumpling in his mouth and chewed, but he didn’t taste it. “There’s nothing to tell. All I’ve got is a feeling.” A feeling of dread. But he knew he could pull more out of fixed memory if he tried.
His fixed memories were an eclectic collection. Jupiter had given him some: spare facts and essential data that could not be allowed to degrade in organic memory. Others had crept in when he’d been an infant and still others had been burned in by trauma. But most were of his own choosing: brief scenes and moments of no intrinsic importance, but that had appealed to him once, so that he’d taken a second to fix the image, seizing it with the same fleeting sense of conquest he might have felt stooping to retrieve a shiny sequin that had fallen from a girl’s dress, or plucking an unusual seedpod from the garden—childhood treasures that gave him a powerful connection to a past that sometimes seemed little more than myth. He didn’t often think about the past, but when he did he could unlock scenes that would play themselves out in his head like a virtual skit.
“The Hallowed Vasties,” Yulyssa urged.
“Yeah.” Her curiosity had worked its way inside him, to become his own. “Yeah, I do remember something.”
HE REMEMBERED WAKING ABRUPTLY DEEP IN SHIP’S NIGHT, brought instantly to full consciousness by a wiry sense of foreboding. He’d been maybe five, six at the most. Sliding out of bed, his heart had hammered with the harmonic stirrings of his own answering fear. Around him, the soft breathing of other children blended in a pneumatic chorus, their dreams filling the darkness with madly jumbled sense.
He stepped cautiously out of the creche, his commando training letting him move across the planking of the garden deck without a sound. Torches burned low over the vegetation, casting quivering shadows that grabbed and scraped at the night. He moved his head slowly back and forth, letting Nesseleth’s humid air run over his sensory tears, its message of dread etching stark lines of shadow across his mind.
He glanced back. Other doorways opened onto the deck. He half-expected his mother or some other member of the marriage to emerge from one of the dark arches and testily order him back to sleep. But all he heard was the soft fussing of a baby.
So he stepped down onto the path, his fingers trembling and a cold-messy sense chewing at his gut. Through the garden and out the arched gate into the warrens. Dim footlights came on. He passed the gates of neighboring compounds, though he didn’t peer within at the gardens, the private courtyards. From unseen fountains the trickle of water reached him. Night blossoms pumped their heavy perfumes onto the air. This was his world, and in his mind it had taken on a sense of permanence despite Jupiter’s admonitions that Nesseleth was only one step in a journey to transcendence that had begun long before Lot’s birth. Tonight, for the first time, he felt the evanescence of their lives.
Down four levels on a spiraling stair, his weight growing in oppressive increments as he descended. A round foyer at its bottom, on its opposite side an ornate black and red lacquer moon gate that opened on to Jupiter’s strategic chamber.
Lot edged across the foyer floor. A dim illumination spilled out from the room. When he peered past the round gate he could see that the light came from an astronomical projection. At the room’s center, embedded in a field of white and reddish stars, a dull red sphere glowed faintly—a cordon of the Hallowed Vasties. It appeared to be a solid object, but really it was a swarm of orbiting habitats so dense they hid the light of the central star … or they should have. This cordon looked shattered, as if some recent blow had opened in it a network of wire-thin cracks through which a blazing white light glowed.
Jupiter sat in an armchair to one side of the projection pit. He watched Lot with eyes sunken into shadows. The dread that had pulled Lot from his sleep had now grown into a tidal pressure, and Jupiter was its source.
Lot cowered at the door until Jupiter crooked a finger. Then Lot sprinted across the dark space, scrambling into Jupiter’s lap. “What is it?” he whispered
, as if there was something sacred in the night’s silence. “What’s gone wrong?”
“There, look, you can see it,” Jupiter said, nodding at the projection of the shattered red sphere.
Lot stared at it, thinking that perhaps the blazing lines of light had widened. “Is it a cordon?”
“It was.”
“But it’s broken.”
“Yes.” Jupiter’s arms tightened around him.
Lot frowned at the projection. Now he was sure the lines had grown wider, and more intricate too. Very softly: “What does it have to do with us?”
He felt a brief burst of surprise from Jupiter. Then a sigh ran past his lips, and with it his foreboding began to change, strengthening to a wry determination. “What would I do without your counsel, Lot? Of course you’re right. It has nothing to do with us. Not anymore.”
LOT TURNED AWAY FROM YULYSSA, DISTURBED BY THE MEMORY and by a sense of complicity, for Jupiter had warned him never to speak of what he’d seen that night. But now Yulyssa was expecting an answer. He took a long draft of the wine, as if to numb himself for the task. “Jupiter said the Hallowed Vasties had nothing to do with us.”
“Umm. I wish I could believe that.”
He picked up a slight, disturbing tendril in her sense. “You’re scared.”
“Sooth. Just a little. It seems we have a new star in our sky. Or should I say, an old star listed in the astronomical catalogs has been observed from Silk for the first time.”
Lot frowned at her, not understanding.
“We don’t have good astronomical facilities, and living within the nebula we don’t have good viewing. But we do have several dedicated hobbyists.”
“So?”
“So have you ever heard of Ryo?”
He felt a sudden tightness across his chest. Ryo. “Yeah. It was one of the cordoned suns of the Hallowed Vasties.”
“Was … ?” She seemed to hold the word in her mouth like wine, tasting its implications. “Yes, you’re right. It disappeared under its Dyson swarm almost sixteen hundred years ago. But it’s visible again. I saw it last night. Our astronomers noticed it only a week ago, though they say it could have been visible for months, or even years before that.” He could feel her probing gaze. “You’re not surprised, are you?”
Two tiny flies with glassy wings rested on the rim of his plate. “I’ve seen grand schemes fail before.”
“I guess you have.” She poured more wine. He could feel something dark and menacing under her calm demeanor, but none of that came through in her voice: “Ryo isn’t the only one, you know. Quin-ken and Bengali are also out in the open again.”
One of the flies began walking toward the cooling dumplings. He shooed them both away. “Why are you telling me?”
“Just to see what comes of it. Placid Antigua claims that Nesseleth wasn’t made in the Committee.”
“Sooth. Nesseleth came out of the Hallowed Vasties.”
“How do you know that?”
Lot drank more wine and considered. “Nesseleth told me. Only it wasn’t the Vasties then. The star was called Talent, and there were still planets. When she was a little girl, she lived by an ocean, and we’d go swimming every morning when the tide was low—”
He stopped himself, startled at the intensity of the recollection. He’d known Nesseleth through a personal interface, a little blond-haired girl, always just his age. He’d spent far more time with her than with any of his brothers or sisters. They’d played in her memories, and sometimes it was hard to distinguish what was his own past, and what was hers.
“I don’t know what happened after that, or who made her into a great ship, or why. It didn’t seem to matter then.”
Yulyssa filled his glass again. “Did Jupiter come out of the Hallowed Vasties?”
Lot couldn’t stop a soft chuckle. “I don’t think even Jupiter was that old.”
“Why?”
He blinked, unsure how to answer. “I don’t know. Don’t people get … strange? After a while?”
“You mean real people?”
He wondered how old Yulyssa was. She’d come from Heyertori, so she had to be over three hundred years. Except for a couple of officers like Captain Antigua and Captain Hu, the crew aboard Nesseleth had been relatively young, still ados by the standards of Silk. Comprehensible. By contrast the real people he’d met in this city felt … well yeah—strange. Half the time he couldn’t tell where their feelings were coming from, or why. Their reactions were so weighted by experiences invisible to him, he could never hope to understand the process behind their moods.
“Just like you said,” he conceded. “Strange like real people. Only worse. I mean, to reach the edge of the Hallowed Vasties it’d take …” He groped for a reasonable figure.
“Maybe five hundred years?” Yulyssa suggested.
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“I’m quite a bit older than that.”
Lot felt something rise in his throat. He swallowed hard against it, then gulped more wine.
“You didn’t know.”
“I heard it’s possible.”
She smiled in sympathy. “Most people become sessile long before they reach my age. Maybe that’s how the cordons start. Maybe I would have gone sessile too, but it’s different here in the Chenzeme Intersection; stability’s more elusive.”
“Sure.” He felt obliged to agree with her. How could anyone who’d been alive so long be wrong?
“Don’t look so scared, Lot.” Her amusement warmed the air between them. “I’m not Jupiter. It’s not like I ever learned the secret of life.”
“Shit.” He knew she meant it as gentle ribbing, but it irritated him just the same.
“Now you’re angry.”
“I’m not.”
“You are, and I don’t like the way you’re making me feel.”
He sighed. The charismata again. His influence seeped out around him, whether he meant it to or not. “Sorry.” He rubbed at his sensory tears, feeling suddenly dizzy. “I think I’m drunk.”
“Eat some food before it’s cold.”
So he did. There was more wine. By the time they were done he was feeling warm. He gazed unself-consciously at Yulyssa, her finely sculpted face mottled by sinuous patches of greater and lesser darkness where the branches of a shading tree cast shadows. “You knew him, didn’t you?” Lot asked.
Her smile felt like soft fingers against his skin. “You never asked that before.”
The diamond studs of her earrings sparkled within the black strands of her hair. They cast a silver tint over her brown skin. He blinked, but the silver wash didn’t go away.
Uneasiness stirred in her. “Don’t look at me like that.”
But he couldn’t look away. “Did you love him?”
“No. He scared me. I don’t like being intimidated.”
“I’m scaring you now.”
“You’re not like him.”
He thought of Alta and the slick surface of her aura, hard and smooth and not given to damage or change. “Sooth. I know.”
“Don’t be sorry over it. You’ve got your own life.”
“And you?”
“Sometimes… .” He thought he felt the gentle brush of her desire, but it was fleeting, lost too soon to a bemused smile. “I’m old enough to know better.”
Dumb ado.
He stood up. Ord was skulking on the path and the sunlight seemed too bright. “I should go now.”
Did she hesitate? It didn’t last. Now she was nodding, giving approval to his decision. “Be careful, Lot. There is a difference between you and Jupiter, but that’s not clear to everyone.”
CHAPTER
9
HE WAITED OUT THE AFTERNOON IN HIS BREATHER, watching the slug move slowly across the ceiling. He’d promised Urban he’d get some sleep before the rally, but it was hard. He kept thinking how city authority had lied to him. For ten years, everyone from Placid Antigua to Dr. Alloin to Kona Lukamosch himself had claimed Jupiter to be j
ust another corpse in cold storage. They’d quashed his denials, repeating the lie over and over again until he’d begun to doubt his own senses, his own sanity, his own beliefs. Until he’d begun to doubt Jupiter.
Resentment simmered in his chest. Happy monkey.
Even Yulyssa had abetted the lie by keeping her own truth hidden.
He started to think about finding something to eat. Though Yulyssa had fed him well—with both food and information—it was never enough. Like most people, he lived life on the torch of a metabolism souped up so high hunger was almost a constant thing.
With a sigh, he got up, pulled some packaged paste out of the cabinets, and tore off the seal. The presence of oxygen set it to heating. He sniffed suspiciously at the aroma, wondering if Dr. Alloin had known the truth, that Jupiter had escaped the city. Eventually he decided she probably had not. Even Captain Antigua, in all likelihood, had only parroted what her Silken masters told her. Yulyssa had known. And Kona Lukamosch … ? Kona was the grand old man of Silk, the chair of the city council, the personification of city authority. He had to have known the truth about Jupiter, yet he’d lied to Lot from that very first day.
Through the long afternoon Lot stewed over the injustice of it. His outrage seeped into the close air of his breather, circling back to clog his sensory tears in a feedback reaction that steadily amplified his mood. Ord got nervous. It scuttled in agitated circles, its tentacles soft against his neck as it sought a clear measure of his emotional state. “Good Lot. Calm Lot.”
“Leave me alone.”
The hour marched on to early evening. He was supposed to meet Urban in half an hour, at a little restaurant just a block away. But a new resolve came over him. Kona knew what had happened to Jupiter. Now it was up to Lot to confront him, to demand an explanation. After ten years of baseless lies, Kona owed him at least that much.
THE NEBULA WAS FAINT TONIGHT, ITS GLOW WASHED OUT by the bolder light of the Well’s artificial moon. The swan burster soared high in the west, a ring shape glowing almost incandescent with its own light. Seventy thousand miles up, and eighteen hundred miles in diameter, the burster tumbled around an imaginary axis, undergoing a fifty-four-minute conversion from a circle, to an oval, to a one, to an oval, to a circle. The interior of the ring was velvety black, a region of twisted space-time that would crush any object unlucky enough to fall into it. Even light could navigate the interior in a straight line only through a small aperture of normal space at the burster’s center, so that if the ring’s own light was masked, it was possible to see there a blurred circle of stars.