The Octagonal Raven

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “To the base of the hill there.” She pointed slightly to the left, over a low two-story structure. Over the top of the faded blue stone tiles rose several trees overlooking a red tile roof.

  A hundred meters ahead the street ended by running into a larger avenue, running perpendicular to the one we walked. A black wall rose on the far side of the cross street.

  The buildings we passed were now newer, with wider display windows, and we passed the first true uniquery I had seen in Tyanjin, with a chrome-trimmed door and mauve window hangings, and a tasteful inscription I could not read within a blue green oval. Under the oval was a smaller standard translation inscribed in silver letters: DINING WITH THE ARTFUL MANDARIN.

  As we came to the intersection, I realized just how impressive the wall on the far side of the avenue was, towering as it did over the flow of glider-taxis, electrobuses, and the ubiquitous magscooters. The wall was of black stones, set so closely that I could not discern a joint, stones polished as smooth as glass. It rose a good ten meters straight up from the narrow walk on the far side of the avenue, a structure so even and featureless that it might have been created by a VR artist, rather than being an actual physical construct less than twenty meters from me. To our right, perhaps fifty meters away, was a gate. Although the composite double gates were recessed into the wall, if closed, they would meld with the rest of the wall, and offer a barrier impassible to anything short of heavy military equipment.

  My personal scanners also sensed the nanite and electronic fields buried within and designed to protect the wall.

  I looked upward, beyond the deep black composite. Immediately beyond the wall were trees, and farther beyond were houses — some more like small ancient palaces with delicate minaret-like steeples, others with red tile roofs that shimmered damply in the gray day.

  “This is where most of the pre-selects of Tyanjin live,” Elysa said quietly. She did not move.

  Standing in the mist that was slowly turning into a steady light rain, I studied the wall, noting that, if the curvature were as gentle and as uniform as it seemed, it probably enclosed a space almost ten klicks across. The area above and beyond the wall appeared park-like, meticulously maintained in the open spaces between structures. A long black glider slid away from the dwelling with minaret-like steeples, then vanished behind an ancient fir of some sort. The scene beyond the wall was serene, peaceful — different from the scooters and electrobuses and crowds that sifted around and past us.

  I could sense the indirect attention from more than a few of the passersby when I finally looked down and at Elysa.

  Without a word, she turned and crossed the street we had been following. We walked along the avenue paralleling the black wall — past three other streets, before she turned back eastward once more.

  After another two blocks, Elysa stopped and opened a door under a faded marquee of some sort — one in Sinese and without a translation. Behind the door was a small restaurant — something I would have expected to have vanished centuries before, since anyone could get any kind of cuisine by simply lifting replicator parameters off one of the netsys libraries and programming them into a home replicator. At least in Noram, the replicator had greatly reduced the number of traditional restaurants, another factor, the historical economists had claimed, in contributing to the economic disruption that had preceded the chaos. I had never been that sure — restaurants as a major economic factor?

  The gray-haired woman standing beside a polished wood table on which rested a blue and white porcelain vase nodded at Elysa and murmured something in Sinese or a local dialect. Elysa replied, but I didn’t catch it, and probably wasn’t meant to.

  “This way …” Elysa said quietly.

  I bowed to the older woman as I passed. She actually acknowledged my presence with a minute head bow.

  Elysa led the way through the main room and past a curtained archway. I tried not to stiffen, but forced myself into greater awareness and alertness. But there was nothing in the second room, more like an overlarge closet containing a circular booth surrounding a table. She slipped to one side, I to the other.

  “What did you think about the wall?” Elysa asked.

  “It’s physically impressive. There are also electronic and nanitic defense systems built into it.”

  “The defense systems have been upgraded every few years,” she replied.

  “You’re suggesting that we have the same kinds of barriers in Noram.…” I paused. “Or barriers, in any case.”

  “The Sinese lands have been heavily populated for more than six millennia. Land is not inexpensive, and the experiments of holding it as a public trust failed miserably, several times.”

  “Market economies are the worse form of economic structure, except for any other kind ever tried.” I knew I was misquoting a statement about political structures, but it fit, even if I didn’t remember the original author.

  “You can change a market economy to make it reflect social as well as economic diseconomies.…” Elysa broke off as the curtain in the archway to her right was pushed back and the gray-haired Sinese woman appeared with a tray.

  The older woman quickly set down two platters, two small cups, and a teapot. She filled both cups, bowed to Elysa, and slipped back past the curtain.

  “I need to eat,” Elysa said.

  As she served herself, I took a sip from the small handleless cup — green tea, and like brewed Grey tea, better than anything from a replicator. Then I followed her example.

  I had no idea exactly what the food was, except that it had vegetables I did recognize — such as snow peas and water chestnuts and bamboo slices, with some I didn’t, with small chunks of chicken and a totally unfamiliar sauce. I took a bite. It wasn’t great, but it was hand-cooked and original, and I was hungry. Then, while it was barely midday for Elysa, it was past dinner for me.

  After several bites, I looked up. “What does all of this have to do with me — and with Elora? Except to show me that I haven’t looked into the lives and comparative isolation of the pre-selects? That isn’t a very good reason for you and others to attack me.”

  “It is a very good reason,” said Elysa after a bite of the spicy mixture she had spread over the rice. “You only know of the attacks against you and your sister. There have been others. Can you deny that someone has a reason?”

  “No. But a power grab by other pre-selects doesn’t seem to have much to do with the isolation between —”

  “You’ve created a hereditary elite. You deceive yourselves that it’s based on ability, and claim that anyone with ability can join you, and with the resources of the nets, and the socialization of UniComm and OneCys … and all the others … you’ve conditioned the world to believe it.”

  “And you’re not a part of this?” My eyebrows rose.

  “No. I never was.” Elysa took a small sip of tea.

  The calm certainty and lack of physiological agitation chilled me more than her words.

  “You don’t want to understand. You look, and still you don’t see.” She spread her hands, as if helplessly.

  I watched, wondering if I could say anything, anything at all. I had to try. “You had me see the barriers here, and you want me to come to the conclusion that pre-selection is just another form of human elite, and … pretty clearly, that it’s a tyrannical or halfway despotical elite. It may be both tyrannical and despotical in certain ways, but genetics doesn’t make that much of a difference in people. There’s less than a tenth of a percent difference in DNA between a pre-select and the norm that individual would have been. And even if it did, rebellions don’t start with attacks against people who aren’t in control of things, unless it’s a random uprising, and planned attacks against me don’t exactly qualify as random.”

  “Most honored edartist, I must beg to differ. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You give numbers. You express reasons. What do you really know about social structures and how they work? How many norms do you work with?
How many live where you live?”

  “You know the answer,” I pointed out. “Almost none.”

  “What percentage of the population uses pre-selection?”

  “Five to seven percent.” My answer was wary.

  “And how much of the world’s wealth and power is controlled by those five to seven percent?” Elysa was acting like a barrister.

  “Almost all of the power, by definition, obviously. Sixty or seventy percent of the wealth.”

  “How does the present situation differ from that in pre-Collapse days?”

  “Statistically, it doesn’t,” I conceded, “but as you were pointing out a minute ago in a different context, numbers aren’t everything.”

  “You’re right,” she said dryly. “They usually understate problems and overstate happiness and contentment, and they only show what exists now.”

  “What problem do you see that the numbers don’t show?” I asked.

  “The same one that’s brought down most societies in history — the growing dissatisfaction of most people with the cultural and governmental structure. It hasn’t been this bad since pre-Collapse times.”

  I wanted to ask her how she knew … but then, if RennZee were right, she’d seen more than I had, and she was clearly closer to the norms in Tyanjin — or anywhere — than I was.

  “It’s getting worse.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Maybe most people aren’t pre-selects, but most of the medical and gross hereditary deficiencies are gone. Except for those who choose to be poor —”

  “Do the faithies and the netless choose to be poor?” parried Elysa. “Or does their refusal to have the interconnected world intruding into every aspect of their lives doom them to lack of power and comparative poverty?”

  “… everyone is healthy. The average norm tests higher than all but the most gifted of the population would have a millennia ago, and he or she lives better, much better,” I pointed out.

  “Are you trying to be dense?” she snapped.

  I closed my mouth.

  “People don’t operate on absolute status, but relative status. Even before the Collapse, something like ninety-nine percent of the people in Noram lived better than all but the richest individuals had as little as two centuries before. Yet the sociologists kept classifying the twenty percent of the population with the least control of resources as poor — even when they would have been considered well-off on other continents. And these people truly believed themselves poor and deprived, and they acted that way.”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s no different today. Human beings are status animals. We haven’t taken that out of the genes, not with all the pre-selection. No matter how much people have, they consider themselves poor if others have a great deal more.”

  That got a shrug of acceptance from me. “Of course.”

  “I’d be happier if your calm were based on understanding rather than ignorant complacency.” Her voice could have sliced through the empty platters before us.

  I refilled my small teacup and waited.

  “Go on.…” I finally suggested. Even if her observations were correct, and I was beginning to believe that they were, which was disturbing enough, those observations didn’t offer much insight into why people were trying to kill me, as opposed to Father and Gerrat, but Elysa had also made it quite clear that she wasn’t answering my questions. Not yet, anyway.

  “As you pointed out, there’s virtually no difference on a genetic level, that is, between the genetic material of a pre-select — before genetic manipulation — and that of a norm.”

  “And?” I asked the question, even though I had a disturbingly clear picture of where her logic was leading.

  “You know what I’m going to say. You just won’t admit it.”

  “You’re suggesting that great differences in wealth and control of resources are the result of minute differentiations between human beings, and that the majority of those differentiations are created by pre-selection, because it obviates regression to the mean genetically.”

  Her eyes were deep and almost sad. “And that means nothing to you?”

  “Well …” I suggested. “Since any parent can finance preselection, it would also seem that those who don’t are those who refuse to sacrifice for their offspring, and you’re blaming those who are willing to pay for a better chance for their children for the failures of those who won’t.”

  “It’s not that simple. You come from a family where the cost of pre-selection is a minute fraction of family wealth. You sacrifice nothing, except perhaps a new glider for a year or two or … whatever luxury is de trop at the moment. A less wealthy family gives up all but spartan comfort for close to twenty years for each child that they wish to gift with pre-selection. Don’t talk to me about sacrifice. You don’t even know what it is. You live more modestly than all your family — and less than five percent of the planet could afford what you call an austere life style.”

  Except … I didn’t think it was austere, and never would have said that.

  “So … you’re suggesting that the world is about to come apart and that there is a pre-select conspiracy which wants to consolidate its power over the communications nets in order to sway public opinion enough to allow it — or the pre-selects — to maintain power?”

  Elysa smiled. “You see. It wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

  “That still doesn’t say why people are after me.”

  “Oh? It doesn’t?” She slid out of the booth.

  I scrambled after her.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “I answered your questions, didn’t I?” She turned and drew aside the curtain enough to pass.

  “No.”

  She ignored me and kept moving.

  I didn’t say anything until we were back outside, where the misting rain had stopped, and the clouds were beginning to lift. She had turned back in the general direction of the magtrain station.

  “You still haven’t told me why you used the spray on me.”

  “You should be able to figure that out. To warn you. I was the one who set up the laser. Do you remember the old lady who was lost?”

  “You?”

  She nodded. “That way, it made it difficult for people to attack you directly. The wall was clumsy, and you had been prepared.”

  “Prepared?”

  “You had the special nanites in your system. You still do.” She turned down a side street that was more than an alley.

  Outside of a young man in black trousers and a black shirt, lounging against the wall a good hundred meters further on, near where the street dead-ended in a loading dock, the street-like alley was empty.

  “But why?”

  “To prepare you for what you need to do.”

  She extended a card. “You asked about Eldyn. He has the other answers.”

  I took the card, and opened my mouth, then jumped sideways as I saw her pull something shiny from her overcoat pocket.

  Light flared around me, and I reacted automatically, using scanners and senses to move. The nanites that protected my eyes helped as well.

  When I could see, I was fifty meters away … shaking my head.

  Elysa was gone, as if she’d never been there.

  “Got to be careful with that type … man … blind you and take what she can.” The language wasn’t quite standard, but the nanites came up with a rough translation. The young man looked at me, as if suddenly seeing my height. Then he backed away, and a filament knife came out. “Stay away from me.…”

  I was only too happy to avoid the filament knife … and I stepped back, my eyes still on the hard-faced youth, but he didn’t move as I eased away, checking the buildings and the muted shadows that suddenly seemed everywhere. There were still crowds on the street that ran between the pre-select wall and who knew where.

  I just stood on the corner for a moment, the oblong card in my hand.

  There wouldn’t be any point in waiting around
her dwelling — if it even happened to be her real dwelling. She could avoid me forever, since she knew Tyanjin and I didn’t.

  I looked at the address on the card, and it made no sense to me.

  Just like everything else hadn’t. On the surface, none of it made sense. She’d waited around for me to show up — promised me answers, given me a tour of Tyanjin, some philosophy, and an address — and vanished. It all reminded me of the kinds of tests Mertyn used to give, a good thirty years past — bits and pieces, and we were supposed to put them together.

  I was a methodizer … and having trouble … with conflagrations, tours of areas filled with resentful norms …

  I swallowed — hard, wondering how I could have been so slow. It was like the falling cemetery wall, all over again.

  * * *

  Chapter 47

  Fledgling: Cedacy, 450 N.E.

  * * *

  My first dwelling had been scarcely that — five small rooms on the bottom of the lower Hill in Vallura, and a glider hangar that had a manual door barely big enough to accommodate my glider — but I’d been determined to live within my projected means. The first year had been tough, but by the third year, I’d found a vacant hectare up for sale near the top of the lower Hill and purchased it. After that, I’d done the rough design myself before getting Kharl’s architect to finish it correctly.

  Then, I had to wait to gather funds — none from my inheritance — and find the right builder. Finally, while it was being finished, I took a trip, a very short one compared to what I’d done when I’d mustered out of the Federal Service — and I took the induction tube, far less costly than using the glider.

  Along the way, I found myself in Cedacy, the home of Southern University and one of the few places where the effect of the Collapse and the Chaos Years had been minimal. There were even two statuary relics that dated from well before then, untouched — a statuary ring called a Centurium for reasons that the guides couldn’t explain and a larger-than-life-sized bronze of a horse plowing through snow-drifts. According to legend, the horse had somehow made the university possible, although how a horse could have done that escaped me. Then, some legends are just that, and better left unquestioned.