by Linda Nagata
“Boost me,” Lot said.
A couple of other ado boys came up. They were ready to help. Urban really didn’t have much choice. They picked him up, and when he stood on their shoulders he was able to reach the first railing.
Camera bees buzzed close as he seized two posts of the balustrade: rods cast in a design of stacked human faces, each carefully detailed in natural colors, their expressions ranging across the spectrum of human emotion—delirious, despondent, joyful, furious, bored—gazing out from every angle, reminding him unexpectedly that this city was made by strangers, and these faces—they were the faces of a dead people. Yet they seemed alive … so real he half-expected them to scream or bite or at least curse him soundly as his hand closed around their tiny features, but they seemed not to have the capacity for movement or for speech.
CHAPTER
11
HE GRIPPED THE SCULPTED BALUSTER, THEN PULLED himself up, climbing to the top of the rail. There he balanced on the two inch span while the ado mob packed into the narrow street below, roaring at his antics like some maddened piece of machinery.
He leaned back a little, to survey the distance to the next balustrade. He could reach it without jumping. So he took hold of the posts—just like the first, covered with tiny faces—and pulled himself up again, and to the next one after that, each with the same peopled railings, as if every individual in Old Silk had been represented on the face of this building. Camera bees swarmed behind him.
Now real people began to appear on some of the balconies. They talked to him. Some weren’t happy. But most offered encouragement and advice. A few said they would sign the petition, but most just smiled when he asked. The camera bees picked up the dialogue, and with each non-answer, the ado mob in the street below roared their disapproval.
Before long, Lot’s shirt had become sweat-soaked, and his arms were trembling. Somewhere around the tenth floor, his vision dropped down to a dim representation of shadows. “Yulyssa!” he screamed. “Yulyssa, I’m calling you. Where are you?”
“Fifteenth floor,” said a gentleman in a white beard, who leaned on his railing a couple of floors above, a beer in one hand and an expression of undisguised amusement on his face.
Lot hauled himself up until he was even with the man. “What floor is this?” he panted, breathing so hard he could hardly get the words out.
“Twelve, son. We don’t have a thirteenth floor, so you’ve got two to go.”
“Thanks.” He stood swaying on the railing, ready to reach for the next level, when suddenly he became aware of another presence besides the helpful gentleman. He looked down between his supple black boots to see Ord climbing up the railing beneath him. A slow smile slid across his face. “What are you going to do?” he called to the little robot. “Trank me now?” And he leaped for the next railing, hanging in open space a moment before he caught the posts in both hands. “Go ahead!” he shouted. “I don’t care. I’ll just let go and fly.” He hauled himself higher. Got his feet on the next terrace while Ord extended a long tentacle, using pliant, formfitting suction cups to lock on to the concrete flooring. “It’ll be a bit of a mess,” Lot observed as he scrambled up. “Bit of a mess in the street, but that’s okay. Authority will just scrape it all up and tuck it into cold storage, plenty of room there. Or better yet, serve me up to the city for dinner—” Ord had started to pull itself up on its tentacle, but now it hesitated. “Yum,” Lot said, balancing rather unsteadily. “Scrambled madman—” And the robot slowly lowered itself back down to the balcony below. The tentacle popped free. Lot grinned.
“Where are the flowers?”
His head snapped up as Yulyssa’s distinctive voice floated down over him. He saw her leaning on her railing, smiling down from the floor above. “If you climb to a woman’s balcony,” she went on, “you’re supposed to bring her flowers.”
“Oh.” He looked around quickly. On this floor, a wide, open-air terrace fronted the glass doors of an apartment. In an arbor over a cushioned bench there twined a vine of mandevillea, the pink flowers silvered in the ring light. He jumped onto the balcony, an action that brought an immediate yelp of surprise from Yulyssa.
“Lot! I was only teasing.”
He neglected to pay attention. Striding quickly across the terrace, he knocked on the double glass doors. Hardly a second later one popped open, and a little girl stared at him. Only she wasn’t a little girl, he realized on second glance. Despite her size, her apparent age, she was real—as real as Kona, Yulyssa, Clemantine. He felt sure of it. There was something distinctive about the way real people carried themselves, and the way they interacted with the people around them. They seemed buoyed by a warm reserve, a measured calm that Lot could breathe in, but had never managed to adopt.
She told him, “I’ve been watching you.”
He said, “I need some flowers.”
“Oh, you can have that.”
So he plucked a spray of mandevillea, though he knew it was a risk because the stuff leaked a white sap. And sure, two fat drops of the thick, sticky liquid soiled the terrace floor, gleaming like pearls in the ring light. He looked apologetically at the real child. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged, “It’s okay,” and tagged after him to the railing. He put the stem in his teeth, boosted himself onto the railing, stood there a moment taking the measure of space just over his head. Yulyssa was leaning over the railing, laughing hysterically. She was dressed in a close-fitting stretch wrap that hugged her body from breast to knee like a second skin; her five-hundred-year-old body. Her toes curled over the concrete floor. Her bare legs were thrust partly through the rail, and he was half-tempted to grab for them. But he caught the balusters instead, the mandevillea dripping white goo down his black shirt. Yulyssa laughed and laughed, like an ado girl who’d had too much to drink. Lot hadn’t known real people could laugh like that. He felt himself begin to catch her mood.
He hauled out, and flipped over the railing. His boots hit the balcony. He grinned at her, his shoulders heaving while she giggled behind her hands. “I brought you flowers.” He held the spray of blossoms out for her consideration. “Hope you don’t mind.”
She became suddenly quiet. Her ambivalence washed his sensory tears. She seemed on the verge of saying something when a camera bee buzzed past. She glanced at it, self-consciously straightening her shoulders. Then her gaze cut back to him. “I’ll sign your petition.”
From the street below the ado mob roared, screaming her name at the night. But the cheering sounded remote. It struck Lot then that Yulyssa might be acting. She was a mediot. Maybe she was just upping the ratings, playing to the crowd.
Or maybe not. He wasn’t sure. And he was used to being sure about other people’s feelings.
She caught his uncertainty with an immediacy that frightened him. Stepping forward, she put one hand on his and with the other she took the flowers, getting the sticky white juices on her own palm. All the humor had gone out of her. She looked somberly at the camera bee and said, “Go away, Shao.”
That wouldn’t do much for the ratings. The bee buzzed off. The public show was over.
She led him into her apartment. They sat together on the couch, very close, their shoulders touching. He could smell her sex, and it addled him. She felt very warm. She was quite a bit more than five centuries old. “You shouldn’t have gone to see Kona,” she told him.
“He says the city’s dying.”
“Umm. It seems that’s true.”
Lot tried to keep his temper in check. “You knew then? Another secret?”
She shrugged. “It wasn’t a secret to anybody who cared to look. I looked today, after you showed me cold storage.” Her lips turned in a smile of self-derision. “I’ve never been too quick.”
“Yeah,” he said bitterly. “Some people say I’m slow too.” Slow poison? He wondered again why Kona had made his accusations about a Chenzeme influence. It was absurd! But it haunted him.
“Lot?”
&n
bsp; He blinked. Yulyssa was gazing at him in gentle amusement. Suddenly he suspected she’d said his name more than once.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Something Kona said.” He hesitated, unsure if he should tell her. He wanted to trust her. He caught nothing but warm interest in her aura. But the subject left him uneasy. “Kona said some things about the Chenzeme, that’s all.”
Her brows rose in amusement. “And why should that worry you? Kona’s obsessed with the Chenzeme. For him, everything that goes wrong becomes a metaphor of the Chenzeme. They’re the source of his profanity.”
He gave her a guarded look. “It’s more than that.” How much did she already know? “He said there’s been some sort of research project into Chenzeme neural patterns. He claimed …” A sudden flush touched his cheeks. “Well, he claimed they’d found some similarities with my neural patterns.” He wanted to smile when he said it, make a joke out of it—don’t take this too seriously, okay?—but Yulyssa’s shocked expression quashed that intention.
He could almost feel the heat of thought behind her sweetly furrowed brow. “How could Kona know anything about Chenzeme neural patterns?”
Lot hunched his shoulders, feeling suddenly out of his depth. “From the library, I guess.”
“No. There’s nothing like that in the library. We don’t even know who the Chenzeme were.”
Lot’s flush deepened. Sure. The Chenzeme were known only by their weapons. No one could say what they’d looked like, how they’d lived and thought, or why they’d left such a terrible legacy of destruction. In that vacuum of information it was easy to think of the killing machines as direct representations of the Chenzeme themselves. But in truth there was no reason to believe the logic systems of the surviving weapons reflected Chenzeme thought patterns in any way. It seemed more likely the weapons would operate on artificial protocols aimed at maximizing their dual functions of aggression and self-propagation. “Sorry,” Lot said. “Kona referred to the weapons. Not the Chenzeme themselves.”
“Umm. That won’t work either. No one in our knowledge path has ever succeeded in examining a functional Chenzeme weapon.”
She carefully left open the chance that somebody, somewhere, had done it. Not that it mattered. Knowledge moved slowly, if at all, across the gulfs of light-years. Radio signals might carry data in the Hallowed Vasties, but in the Chenzeme Intersection any radio signal strong enough for interstellar communication would draw the war weapons, so cross-fertilization between cultures was left to the occasional great ship. In the slow ecology of the void the spread of useful data was random and erratic. What was common knowledge in one culture might remain dark mystery in another as their knowledge paths diverged from a common root. Somewhere in the Chenzeme Intersection someone might have dissected a functional weapon of the old murderers, but that information had no way of reaching Silk.
Still, there was another possibility. “Would the weapon have to be functional?” Lot asked.
“You’re thinking of the swan burster.”
“Yeah.” He remembered the thoughtful way Kona had gazed at it, while standing at his apartment window.
Yulyssa shook her head slowly. “We examined the ring when we first came here. The Old Silkens investigated it too. That’s why they settled here, you know. They came explicitly to study it.”
“And?”
She shrugged. “We know the swan burster warps the structure of space-time within its circle. It seems to draw its energy from the zero-point field, though we haven’t begun to understand how … or why this particular specimen has become quiescent. The Old Silkens felt the decision-making structure within the ring had been corrupted so that it could not respond. That’s still the best theory I’ve heard.”
“Has any work been done lately?”
She shook her head. “Nothing’s been reported.”
“But city authority doesn’t report everything.”
Her eyes closed. “That’s true. So true. Oh, Kona! I always thought we were on the same side.” She shook her head and looked at Lot again. “What is he up to?”
“I don’t know. But what he said—it’s not true. It can’t be true. Not if Jupiter came out of the Hallowed Vasties.”
Her lips parted, and he caught from her a wisp of fear. “Did he? But you denied that.”
“I just don’t know! Okay?” She jumped at his outburst, and immediately he regretted it. “Yulyssa, I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” she said, but her fear was real enough to sully the air between them.
He started to get up, but she laid a hand on his thigh. “Security’s outside the door. They want me to open it.”
He frowned at the closed door. How did she know? The house majordomo hadn’t spoken. Then he remembered her atrium, and wondered if real people ever managed to be fully alone.
“I’ll find out what I can,” she told him.
“Yeah? Thanks.” He appreciated her interest, but it was hard to express that. His mood was closing in fast. In the quiet rooms of the monkey house, the doors never opened from the inside. Closing his eyes, he let his head tip back, feeling exhaustion press in around him. “What else do you know?” he asked softly.
The door swooshed open. Lot heard the step of a security officer on the threshold.
“I knew Jupiter those few months he lived in Silk. He survived a Chenzeme plague. He survived Silk and the void. Now, the commandant of wardens complains the Well is haunted. If it is, I think I can guess the identity of the ghost.”
Haunted?
Through the blackness of his closed eyes, Lot felt the faceless officer reaching for him. He raised his forearm to block the touch. “No,” he said. “No more tranks.”
“Lot!” It was David’s voice. “I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this anymore.”
Lot opened his eyes. David looked chagrined, and more than a little disgusted as he turned away. Lot sighed. David had gotten him free tonight. He’d risked his position to do it, and they’d never even been good friends.
Lot looked at Yulyssa, feeling cold and sticky and very, very tired. “I’ve got to go.”
“I’m sorry.” Her lips brushed his cheek.
David blocked the doorway. He’d popped off his comm wire and dropped it on the floor. Now he was stripping off his uniform shirt.
“David,” Lot said. “It’s okay. I’m ready to go.”
“It’s not okay.” David slung the shirt hard against the floor, his anger like sharp needles in the air. “It’s all wrong. I’m not going to bring you in when I know it’s wrong.”
“But this won’t change anything,” Lot said, puzzled. “They won’t hurt me.”
“It’ll change me. It’ll hurt me. Because it’s wrong. I won’t stand against you, Lot. Not ever again.”
A faint silver aura still clung to David. It brought a chill to Lot’s spine. “Thanks David.” He edged past him, out the door. “Thanks for everything.”
Believe in me.
Lot walked alone down the hallway, meeting a contingent of real officers at the elevator, so that they didn’t even have to step off the car to take him into custody. Good Lot. Not that he was worried.
He looked back down the hallway as the elevator doors closed. David stood on one foot, stripping off his uniform pants. Yulyssa stepped into sight beside him, her gaze seeking Lot among the crowd of officers. “I’ll have you out by morning,” she promised him. Lot nodded. Somehow, he’d already known that.
CHAPTER
12
HE ROSE SLOWLY FROM THE GRAY STATE OF NONBEING he always experienced during sleep, into a dull awareness that he was interned in the monkey house, though he couldn’t remember his arrival. He recalled riding in a transit car, the security officers talking to him, loud, jovial questions, their knuckles in his ribs as they tried to keep him awake. But exhaustion had dragged at him, blurring the cops’ faces, stripping their words of sense.
Now he was in the monkey hou
se. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know that. One conscious sniff of the air, and his body dutifully notified him that the carbon-dioxide level was way too high—but that was just the monkey-house way of saying, Be calm. Take it easy. Dr. Alloin liked to employ the ethereal peace of oxygen deprivation. In her mind it was a safe trank. She preferred not to use anything stronger, never knowing for sure how his metabolism would react—even Ord’s custom brews were mostly guesswork.
Of course the docs were always refining their guesses, watching him every minute he was in here. Hidden cameras in the walls. Molecular sniffers. Microscopic blood analyzers. Breath analyzers. Semen and shit too, for all he knew. It made his skin crawl.
He opened his eyes—
—to find himself lying on his side, on a sleeping pallet identical to the one in his breather. On the near wall there vibrated a frenetic mural of interlocking silver machine parts, like the one in Kona’s apartment. Why had Dr. Alloin chosen that motif?
A tube led out from the wall and into his left hand. An IV needle had been slipped into a vein and taped down. They’d taken off his black shirt and his boots—probably analyzing his sweat—his skin felt clean, though the bedsheets still had a crust of crystallized oil on them.
He sat up, feeling heavy and slow. Carefully, he untaped the IV and slipped it out. Questions boiled in thick liquid circuits just beneath the surface of his mind, a potential hemorrhage kept in check by the deadening pressure bandage of CO2.
He turned to glance at the door, half-hoping he was awake because they’d sent him a stimulant through the tube, and any moment now Yulyssa would walk through the door, having secured his release.
The door failed to open.
Turning away, he briefly considered giving in to the urge to lie down again on the pallet and simply wait. But even under the CO2 lethargy, anxiety had begun to bubble up from somewhere deep in his mind, breaking the smooth surface of his emotions. Physically, he’d taken himself to the edge last night. He should have been sick, exhausted and starved. He would have been, if he’d slept only the balance of the night. But he felt okay. Which meant he’d slept hours past dawn; maybe even through the next day. What had happened in the city in that time?