Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  CHAPTER

  10

  OUTSIDE, THE SWAN BURSTER HAD COMPLETED ITS HALF-CYCLE, folding into a thin line. The silvery light it cast over the city had declined in luminosity with the decreased surface area, making the streets seem to glow a brighter white. No one else was in sight, though Lot could hear voices and laughter carried in from some distant quarter, maybe even the amphitheater in Splendid Peace where the election rally must be getting under way.

  “Do you want to take a transit car?” Clemantine asked, her arm still around his shoulder, control disguised as affection.

  Lot could hear the sharp intake of David’s breath. “I don’t like the transit,” he said quickly. “You know that.”

  She chuckled. “Well, people change. I thought maybe, since you’d been down to cold storage, you might have lost your aversion to tunnels.” He didn’t answer, though he could feel the pressure of her gaze. “Why’d you go down there, Lot?”

  “To look for Jupiter, that’s all.”

  “Did you find him?” David asked softly.

  Clemantine gave him a harsh look. “Hush, son. There’s no need to ask when we already know.”

  She’d led them down through the Broken Fingers, to the broad promenade that topped the Height’s vertical apartment complex. A chest-high granite rail loomed ghostly in the silvered light. It formed a vast, U-shaped barrier, half hidden beyond the spreading branches of regularly spaced shade trees. The tournament soccer fields would be nestled in the curve of Old Guard Heights, twenty-one stories below. But this far back from the railing Lot couldn’t see them; the granite columns seemed to be holding back an abyss populated only by a thin scattering of stars.

  In the distance, Lot could hear a trampling vibration, a cacophony of excited voices. He tensed. Urban wanted him at the election rally tonight. How badly? Yesterday he would have said “not badly enough to interfere with city authority.” But that was before they’d gone down to cold storage. With that act, Urban had crossed over to a new territory where the factors that limited his behavior still needed to be defined.

  The distant crowd noise grew a little louder. Lot slowed, forcing Clemantine to slow with him; then he half-turned, to survey the slope. But he saw nothing.

  “You’re a good boy, Lot,” Clemantine said, her strong arm tightening around him and a sudden puff of tension rising from her pores. “Everybody has bad days.”

  “Hey, I guess so.” He moved quickly and without warning, shrugging out from under her embracing arm. “But I’m still going to the election rally tonight.”

  She smiled. “I don’t think so, son.” She reached for his arm in a friendly gesture, though irritation was rampant under that façade. He jerked away.

  He could feel Jiro close behind him. David didn’t move or say a word, but Lot could feel him getting frantic. The babble of voices hung like a mist in the air. In the still night, he couldn’t get a fix on distance, or direction. Clemantine’s expression hardened. “You’re a good boy, Lot,” she said again. “Why are you acting like this? Are you on something besides that trank?”

  Ord was still tangled under his hair, so he took another step back, deliberately bumping into Jiro. The robot hissed at the mild impact and dropped silently to the ground. “I’m always on something, Clemantine.” His eyes unfocused, as he tried to gauge the distance of the rowdy party. “We’ve all got pharmaceutical factories in our brains, always making drugs to roll us from one day to the next and the next and the next. I get so tired sometimes. Maybe I’ll be a sculpted entity someday and be done with all this.” Not human anymore. That’d be all right. But he had to wonder if it was possible. Dr. Alloin couldn’t do anything with him. “Maybe that’s what the Well’s all about,” he said softly. “Deconstruction. Rehabilitation.” The cluster of voices faded to silence. He raised his chin, listening, but no, the night had become ethereally quiet. A glance at David brought only a shrug of confusion.

  Urban wasn’t coming.

  Lot turned away, to look out over the starry void, knowing he’d screwed up. He should have waited for the rally. He might have used that chance to disturb the fixed certainty of city authority just a little. But now he was bound for the monkey house … without the satisfaction of having done anything worthwhile.

  He could feel a depression descending on him then, like a black mantle drifting down from the heavens, to furl around him, turning his blood to cold syrup.

  “Stop it!” Clemantine hissed. “Don’t play that game with me, Lot, or I’ll see to it you never get out of the monkey house again.”

  He looked at her in surprise. The last of her humor had evaporated. Shadows pooled around her eyes. “You aren’t going to tell me how to feel,” she warned him. “We don’t need another Jupiter around here.”

  “I’m not doing anything!” he protested. But he could see that wasn’t true. Jiro was shaking, his trembling hand poised over his trank gun. David looked stricken; silver glinted on his features, more than could be accounted for by the ring light. He stepped forward tentatively; Lot felt the wispy touch of his faith. It brought with it a sense of power. Lot’s mood rose on the faint edge of its tide. His mind opened again to possibility.

  Clemantine must have seen the change. She lunged at him: a smooth shift from perfect stillness to absolute motion. But she didn’t have the same enhancements as Lot, and her effort seemed comically slow. He jumped back out of her reach, just as her fingers brushed his sleeve. He collided with David. “Be careful, Lot!”

  “Sure.” But an ado recklessness had swept over him. He was not going to the monkey house. Not until that journey became inevitable, and worthwhile.

  Jiro had his gun out. He pointed it at Lot’s face, aiming for unprotected skin. David tried to slip between them, but Lot held him back. “Shoot,” he told Jiro, and Jiro did, even as Clemantine screamed “No!”

  The patch—as small and sticky as the paddle of a sundew—hit with a sharp slap against his cheek. Lot took a couple steps back, opening up the distance between himself and Jiro, while David stared at him, eyes wide with a kind of horrified fascination. Clemantine’s gun was still in its holster, but she was looking openly pissed now, like she knew the assignment was screwed. Lot reached up and scraped the patch off his cheek, squinting into night vision so he could read the label.

  “That’s supposed to drop you within one point two seconds,” Jiro said. His voice didn’t sound too steady.

  Lot smiled. He staggered back another step. His legs felt wobbly, but his heart was pumping hard, systems on full call-out, energy coursing through his body like a scouring current—feeling better already—his smile spread into a smeary grin. “Standard tranks never work the way they’re supposed to on me,” he told Jiro. “Because I’m not human.” It was a raw boast, inspired by ado cockiness, but once the words were out he remembered Kona’s accusations about the Chenzeme neural patterns, and suddenly he had to wonder if it might be true.

  “Take it easy, Lot,” Clemantine said, trying to ease in on him again, talking softly as if he were some frightened VR dog. He hadn’t done the VR in a long time. There weren’t any scents in the VR and it just never felt real for him. Tonight didn’t feel real either. Sometime in the last minute reality had tripped and fallen flat on its face, leaving the world to stagger on without the defining structure of social laws, and every object around him—the people, the promenade, the balustrade, the stars and the slopes glittering with lights—seemed suddenly spongy, malleable, as if their definitions could be changed with a swift kick, a hard punch.

  Jiro seemed to feel it too. On his smooth face an expressive symphony played out—variations on comical confusion. He still held his trank gun, apparently unable to bring himself to holster it, but it was no longer pointed at Lot

  —perhaps—

  they couldn’t control him, unless he allowed himself to be controlled?

  David touched his shoulder in an intoxicating, silvered gesture. His astonished gaze met Lot’s briefly, then
shifted upslope. Lot’s heart rate spiked. He swung around, to see a tide of darkness rolling down the illuminated streets of the Broken Fingers, a voiceless mob plunging down onto the promenade like an opaque gas of heavy molecular weight, rolling across the level surface, bouncing off the balustrade, sweeping around Lot and David and Jiro and Clemantine in an irresistible ado tide. Individual faces flashed in and out of focus. Shoulders bumped against him; fingers brushed him. He felt heated, accelerated by the contact. Bodies squeezed in between him and David and Jiro and Clemantine, inevitably separating them, blending them into the volatile matrix, leaving them no choice but to go along.

  He wanted to go along.

  He felt good.

  He felt radiant.

  He belonged nowhere else but here; he knew it.

  It felt solid. So real.

  Urban caught him on his shoulders and spun him around, both of them still stumbling in the rapid mob flow, and Urban was laughing out loud, his thick hair swaying in its confining braids while camera bees darted past his shoulders. “We will have our rally!” he shouted. “Now. Here. On the promenade.”

  Like David and Jiro, most of the ados had come wired for sound tonight. Even Urban wore the gold metal strand half-hidden in the spongy mass of his hair. He must have been the center of a multicast, because at his declaration the flow slowed as if it had hit an opposing current, and the direction of their progress shifted, turning gradually until the ados swirled in a broad eddy that had Lot and Urban at its slow-turning focus, and as Urban slid round a new face came into view, electric in her unexpected presence.

  “Alta!” Lot shouted his surprise, feeling as if he were looking on a mirage. “How could you be here?”

  Her smile unfolded in sly hooks. “We have friends!” She had to shout too, to be heard over the tumult around them. “More all the time! They gave me an open pass.” She turned her hand palm up, revealing the dim blue glow of a data stamp. Lot touched it. His fingers were silver. They seemed to slide beneath her skin. Her smile faltered as silver oozed like blood to fill her upraised palm. She looked at him with astonished eyes. Her exclamation almost fell into incoherence: “I can feel him! I can feel him inside you.”

  She snatched her hand back, rubbing at the blue stamp. But her palm was undamaged. “I didn’t understand!”

  Her cry was a protest. But her retreating fingers had traced a silver arc that still hung in the air between them. Silver glistened on her skin and in her hair. It burned on her fingertips, cool points of light like St. Elmo’s fire that leaped outward as Lot watched, expanding in a rush to meet the surge of ados still spiraling down around them, haloing the anonymous bodies in an encompassing silver glow. Chemical sight. Lot was taken by awe as he watched the infection of faith spiral out across the crowd. They received it, and redoubled it, sending their devotion spinning back down on him like water accelerating down a funnel, superheated water, steaming, melting the faces around him in the same blur of devout communion he’d felt only that morning in the refugee quarter, faith flowing over him, hardening around him in an invulnerable silver armor. These people belonged to him. He could cuckold their will. And this time, Gent wasn’t here to pull him back.

  Alta surprised him again with her sudden proximity. Her hands were on his shoulders. Her eyes glistened slyly only inches from his own. Her astonishment had all gone and she seemed to have found the night to her liking after all. She stretched up, her lips moving against his sensory tears. “We all love you!”

  Then hands were grabbing at him. Her laughing face fell away to vanish into a silver sea as he felt himself lifted into the air. Shoulders like living earth supported his buttocks and thighs, boosting him into full view of the ado mob. The crowd roared at this sudden incarnation, and Urban leaped up beside him, screaming, “Twist them! Make them hear you.”

  A bright light flared from a droning festival lamp hovering over the crowd. Its beam fell square on Lot’s face, addling his nocturnal vision. He couldn’t see beyond it, but he didn’t have to. If he had no optical facilities at all, he would still be able to perceive this congregation. He had them in his mind, a liquid-crystal composition of passion, curiosity, resentment, even outright anger. He could use it all. He knew he could use it.

  “Lot!” His name, chanted across a chorus of adolescent howls. “Lot! Lot! Ow-ooo …”

  He knocked the hair back out of his face then raised his hands, as if he could embrace every individual present. Gradually, the shouts fell off beneath the breadth of this gesture. An eerie silence rolled away from him in a circular wave, broken only by the high buzz of the camera bees, the low drone of the light. He stared up into the blinding white beam, suddenly aware that a remote congregation must be participating too, hovering ghosts on the farside of a radio link, shades of influence, the real people, in their homes, in their offices. “Time is running out!” he roared at them. Swiftly, his early elation became something more stern that gushed out over the heads of the silent ados and buffeted the small bodies of the camera bees. “Nothing lasts forever.

  “Certainly not the supply of oxygen, the supply of nitrogen, the supply of hydrogen this city needs to survive.

  “Cold storage has been plundered! For the oxygen, the nitrogen, the hydrogen locked up in the physical mass of my people. Their bodies are gone. That’s how close to the edge Silk has come.”

  Beneath him, shoulders shifted. He heard a grumbling of concern, of disbelief. He looked blindly out across the crowd, his exhausted retinas struggling to gather up a shadowed image. “Believe it!” he commanded. “The evidence is ready for anyone to dissect. By morning there won’t be a question. The only issue then will be What will we do? And Who will decide?

  “Who will decide?

  “It won’t be me. It won’t be any of you here tonight. Ados! Fully half the population of this city—we can’t vote. We have no voice in our own future.

  “But the real people can change that.

  “The election is in ten days. We need ten thousand signatures to put two initiatives on the ballot. One to lower the voting age to twenty. One to allow citizenship for our immigrant population. And after that, we can link on our collective future.”

  The DI in his retina finally tweaked his optical system, getting him a rough silvered image of gleaming faces. Their shock rolled in on him, immediately cooling his tirade. He became aware of his own heaving shoulders, of the sweat that poured off his face and the exhaustion in his muscles like a slow poison more potent than any trank.

  Whispering broke out around him, sibilant arguments. The ado mob teetered on a pinnacle. He watched them, waiting to see which way they would fall.

  It started by the balustrade, that ado howl again, and then the scattered hooting of a nascent ovation interspersed with deep bass screams of L-o-t! Ado boys feeling high, a natural contest to see who could be more wild. The hooting swept across the promenade, and an angry roar accompanied it as ados began to process what Lot had said, not really believing it, not yet, but asking themselves What if it’s true? and What would Silk be like if we could vote?

  There were so many of them; to have that kind of power! The Heights seemed to rumble, howl. Lot raised his hands again and shouted over the cacophony: “Ten thousand signatures! And I know where to start!”

  He twisted around, sliding off the shoulders that supported him. The crowd loomed around him in silvery, anonymous volume. He pressed through, disturbing their array like a magnet in a field of iron filings. They clung to him. They fell in behind him as he moved swiftly through the streets. They believed in him. He’d caught them in Jupiter’s cult tide and it felt good. He could give them what they needed, he could fill up all those chemical sockets in their brains that needed filling, that they couldn’t feel whole or safe without having filled. He could draw out of each and every one of them a neurotransmitter mix that would keep the innate human fear of death at bay. He could give them the illusion of a future, and maybe that was all anybody needed: faith. Better
than food and drink and sex and kids and love. Faith is love at its most intense and selfless. Society was built on faith.

  Overhead, the swan burster had begun to expand into a feminine oval. Lot felt as if a goddess had opened her eye to look down on him. Yulyssa.

  Yulyssa was well over five hundred years old, and she had known Jupiter.

  The congregation was strung out behind him in a long running wave that filled the narrow streets between the Heights and Spoken Verities. Lot had brought them to the base of a tower. He gazed speculatively up at its face. “Yulyssa lives here?” he asked, and looked to his side, surprised to see Urban still there.

  “I think so.”

  Lot stared at him. Alone among the crowd, Urban did not seem to be touched by the melting, silver wash of faith. Why? Lot felt suddenly uneasy. He wanted to patch up the deficiency, or eliminate it altogether … but not now. A sense of urgency had come over him. He looked again at the tower. “Yulyssa will sign the petition. Once we have her support, half the city will follow.”

  Urban laughed. “You’re crazy, fury. No one’s more real.”

  But somebody had already scampered around to the entrance, to check the doors. “We’re locked out!”

  “She’s probably not home anyway,” Urban said, his presence like a cold thermal cell in the heated night. “Let’s move this thing into Ado Town, before someone gets hurt. Let the real people come to us.”

  Lot studied the building. It had a vertical face, at least twenty stories high. But each story had wide balconies, their rails glinting in the light of the ring. He could climb it. A hedge of oleander grew around the base, but Urban could boost him past that. “Come here,” he said. He crushed a path through the tall bushes, twigs snapping and grabbing at his shirt.

  On the other side he faced a concrete wall almost ten feet high. Urban moved up beside him. “You don’t want to do this, fury.”