“My friend …” Arcan said slowly. “I am afraid I have some bad news for you.” And he told Six about the other apprentices, still decomposing in their respective bubbles.
Six was silent for a long time. Inside he felt a huge rage welling up.
“They have been force feeding us all this information …” he said quietly, “just to kill us?”
Arcan assented. “But it is not clear to me why.”
Six nodded his head twice. “They don’t want us to walk away with their precious knowledge. Once they have found an investor, then they have no further use for us. We are sterile, useless for their purposes. So they get rid of us. I did wonder if they might, but it seemed too extreme, even for the Sellites.”
“What can be done now?”
Six pressed his fingers for a moment to his forehead to rest them, and to force his brain to think more effectively. He gave a wry smile. “What I’d like to do is send them all up to see the Xianthes without the lightning cage,” he said. “But being stuck in a bubble is a bit limiting, unfortunately. I don’t know what we can do.”
“Perhaps Grace will be able to help.”
Six looked unconvinced. “—And perhaps Grace is part of the problem.”
Arcan was quick to reply, “No. I am sure Grace is good. She will help if she can.”
“Then all we can do is wait. I guess they aren’t going to kill Diva straight away, because they are still pumping air into her bubble, right?”
“Right.”
“We had better wait until tomorrow, talk to Grace, and sketch out some sort of a plan of action.”
“Very well, Six. You go back to sleep. I will wait. I will watch.”
“Fine. Thanks, Arcan.” And the boy lay back down on his bed.
DIVA GROANED AS she came to her senses. She knew she could feel a throbbing pain, but it was unclear to her which part was hurting. She tried to sit up, and that mystery was resolved. A black wall clamped around her stomach and prevented her breathing. A brief examination rectified her ignorance. She had a scar under her stomach that was sealed with surgical stitches. The pain brought tears to her eyes. Angrily she tried to push them away with her hands. I will never have children now. More tears ran down her cheeks. She felt a different person. Diva had gone. Lost. This new person was … a long way away from the rest of the world. She closed her eyes, and let herself lie back down on the bed.
As soon as her fingers touched the bed again, she felt them begin to move. Six was insistent.
“Diva?”
“Go away!”
“Are you all right?”
He got nothing but silence back. Arcan told him that Diva was awake, that she was lying on her bed staring at the ceiling of the bubble, but neither of them could get her to answer. She was indifferent to their attempts to talk. She lay passively on her bed, and wanted nothing to do with either of them. In the end they gave up. She was awake and recuperating. That would have to be enough. They could do nothing further to help her. She wouldn’t let them.
GRACE HAD SPENT two days trying to settle her mother into a more healthy routine, with mixed success. So she didn’t get into the lift again until she had a moment to make her way down onto the planet’s surface, to visit Arcan at the lake.
“Grace. Hello.” The walls of the back lift welcomed her.
“Arcan.”
“We have been waiting for you. There is a problem.”
“What happened?”
Arcan filled her in with all the details. “Since then she won’t speak to either of us,” he finished sadly.
Grace told him that she was on her way down to the lake, and that she would contact him again as soon as she arrived there. She made her way out bare planet down the metal steps, but this time she got no joy out of the exercise. She barely noticed her surroundings because she was too busy thinking about what they could do.
They had to do something to save Diva. Grace knew that Arcan wouldn’t sit back this time as a passive observer. She, too, was determined to stop the donors being disposed of. But if anyone were to find out … Grace knew that the repercussions would be deadly.
They had to find a way that remained secret.
By the time she reached the lake she had a vague working plan, but it depended on Arcan’s progress. She slid down to the edge of the black substance, and waited, wondering if she was going to be treated to another display of colours.
When nothing happened, she laid her hands on the surface.
“Arcan?”
“I am here, Grace, as you see.”
“I think I have a plan.” The dark surface shimmered a little, a mark of hope. She explained her idea in detail. “Do you think you will have time to do it?”
“I will try,” Arcan said. “It is a good plan, Grace. But do you think you can arrange your part of it?”
Grace nodded. “I think my part will be the easiest,” she assured him. The question is whether you will be able to learn how to do it in time.”
“Oy. Chatting behind my back again?” Six broke in.
“You were in class,” Arcan said severely. “I checked.”
“Yeah, well, not any more. What’s going on?”
“Grace has a solution for Diva.”
“Great!”
“Except …” Grace had found a slight flaw in the plan. “How will you be able to let me know in time? What if it happens when I am asleep?”
Six interrupted, “Can I hear the plan first? Maybe I can help?”
Arcan began signing rapidly. “We are going to wait until they disconnect Diva’s air supply, and then I must transport her here to the edge of the lake. Grace will be waiting with a few of these mask packs she has to wear when she comes bare planet, and then she will take Diva back to her skyrise. She says she can hide her in one of the lower levels, without anybody finding out. Apparently nobody lives in them anymore, and there is a plentiful supply of oxygen.”
“Terrific!” Six signaled. “And they won’t even know that she has been saved. Can you do it Arcan? Move her to the edge?”
“I will try. I must learn much to do this. I hope that it will not be soon. I need very much time to learn all these new things.”
“You’ll do it.” Six was confident. “And Grace, I think I know how we can let you know … I just might be able to hack into the interscreen and reconfigure it to be able to speak to you …”
“Oh, you might, might you?” Grace grinned. “I thought you seemed like a very resourceful person.”
“I try to please,” said Six modestly, “but we will have to practice, too. We need to be sure that it is going to work.”
“But Six …”
“What?”
“You will have to stay here. We can’t get you out without them finding out.”
“I know. Let’s just take things one step at a time, shall we? Cian and Valhai don’t go round Almagest in a minute, you know.”
“Fine. I will keep my interscreen with me at all times, but you may have to be discreet. We can’t risk anyone finding out, and the screen I’m using was lent to me by someone I don’t want to get into trouble.”
“Sure.”
“And you’re going to have to carry on here as if nothing had happened.”
“I will be the perfect student,” promised Six.
“I bet you won’t!”
“Well, Atheron won’t notice any difference, at any rate. Hey, don’t worry about me! I can look after myself. No sweat.”
“What is this sweat you keep mentioning?” asked Arcan. “Why do you not have any?”
“It’s an expression … Oh, I give up … you tell him, Grace.”
Six conveniently disappeared from the conversation, leaving Grace to a long and involved explanation of heat loss through perspiration which only served to confuse Arcan totally. “I transmit any extra heat right through me,” he said loftily. “So I never need to lose heat. This concept is very wasteful. I do not think it is efficient.”
; Grace had to laugh. “You give the expression a whole new meaning!” she agreed.
“Good.” The lake scintillated, pleased with itself.
Chapter 15
DIVA JUST LAY back and vegetated. Since the operation it seemed that they had no further use for her. Atheron hadn’t made an appearance and she had felt too tired to reply to Six’s annoying attempts to talk to her. She had nothing to do, and there was nothing that she wanted to do. It was all the same to her. Nothing mattered very much anymore, she thought. Getting up felt like being hit in the stomach by Sacras so she stayed nearly all the time on the bed. She had little appetite, and delayed eating as long as she could. When there was no choice she moved over to the food lift doubled-up, like an ancient with spacebone disease.
As she shuffled listlessly over on this day, there was a sound in her bubble, and she turned. The pain as she did so made her cry out.
“Diva!” Atheron’s smile filled the interscreen.
“What do you want?” Diva rather thought the time for niceties had passed.
“Just checking on you. Everything all right?”
“As if you cared!”
“You will be pleased to know that the transfer of your genetic material went very well. The client is most satisfied. You have become a Valhai, your genes are at this moment being used to strengthen the next generation on Xiantha.”
“Oh boy, bully for me!”
“Exactly. It is an achievement of great transcendence. How many Coriolans could claim to have engendered hundreds of thousands of embryos?” He shook his head in wonder.
“Now what are you going to do with me?” Diva growled.
“Ahh. Well. Of course you are still recuperating at the moment, so it would be unfair of us to expect you to follow the usual study plan. No, I think it is best for you just to relax for a couple of weeks. See how it all goes, you know?”
“No more classes?” That made her look over to where his face was suspended, on the central column.
Atheron seemed to be looking at something outside her view. “N … no,” he told her. “After all, they are no longer necessary, are they? In your case the client required no further proof that your genes would represent an asset to their gene pool.”
“And now I’m a Valhai?”
“A Valhai,” Atheron agreed. “Congratulations.”
“Thank you. So what is my future?”
“I don’t think we need to worry about that now.” Atheron had looked down again. “I will leave you with some documentaries on the interscreen, in case you get bored.”
“You will not be coming to see me anymore?” Now, warning bells were going off up and down her spine.
“That will not be necessary. Goodbye Diva. Thank you for your attention in class.” The face gave a funny sort of nod. “Valhai Diva.” And on those words the face disappeared, to be replaced by a documentary on the Almagest solar system.
Diva began to shake. There was something tremendously wrong. Were they just going to let her rot in this bubble? She felt immediately stifled, unable to breathe. She gave a wry grimace. So things do matter after all, Diva! The will to survive was still inside you somewhere.
She tried to calm her breathing down, and stop trembling. Then she went back to bed, but not just to lie inanimately this time. As soon as she had drawn the flimsy cover over her she began to signal to Six.
“And ABOUT TIME!” The reply came back with three times the normal pressure. “Kind of you to deign to talk to us, milady.”
“I wasn’t feeling well.”
“Well I know that,” Six snapped. “Big of you to bother about us at all, I guess, with all the important things going on in your life.”
“I’m sorry. I suppose I was a bit thoughtless.”
“You suppose right!”
“I just couldn’t get my brain around anything much. And it all hurt so much. I don’t know.”
Six didn’t feel very sorry for her. He didn’t do sympathy. “Well, are you all right now?” he demanded.
“I guess. It still hurts a lot.”
“So get used to it.”
“Thanks for the kind advice!” she flared.
Six laughed. “Now you sound more like yourself. Welcome back.”
She told him about the strange interview with Atheron, and then he let her into Arcan’s secret guilt, telling her where the previous generations of donors were.
“All of them?” She was horrified. She must still be weak from the operation, she decided, because tears had started to stream down her cheeks onto the pillow on either side of her head. I never cry, she told herself angrily.
“Then that is what will happen to me?”
“We think so, yes. You are no longer any use to the Sellites, and they have no reason to keep you alive. Since they didn’t kill you straight away we imagine they are keeping you temporarily as some type of back-up, but we don’t know how long that will last for.”
Diva was shaking again. “—Then I shall die.”
“We have thought up a plan, only we need more time.” Six explained their idea.
“Can Arcan do that?” she asked.
“Well, not just yet. But he is practising. He told me yesterday that he managed to move one of the old donor bubbles a few feet. And he learns really fast.”
“And have you managed to contact Grace through the interscreen?” her fingers demanded.
“Nearly.”
“Nearly!”
“I’m working on that too. The good news is that they haven’t killed you yet.”
“Yeah. Terrific.”
“And Grace’s idea is really good. It just can’t happen quite yet, you see.”
“I know, Six, thank you. But it is kind of hard to be dispassionate about it. You know it’s funny … earlier I just wanted to die; and now I might really die, today, some huge ravening monster has raged into existence inside me screaming ‘NO-O-O!’.”
“I always feel like that. Welcome to my world.”
“No wonder you’ve always been touchy.”
“Comes with the monster kit. You’ll find out.”
“I certainly don’t feel much like Divina anymore,” she admitted.
“Thank Kwaide!”
“Why you …!” Then she thought better of it. Now she came to think about it, Divina had been anything but divine from time to time.
“Don’t much like yourself either, eh?” Six could smell her weakness through her fingers, apparently.
“Don’t like you!” she retaliated.
“Yes you do. Couldn’t live without me … literally.”
A very small smile finally appeared on her wan face. “You will have to save me if you want to use that one in the future.”
“All part of the service. Anything else her madamship desires?”
“Just get me out of here.”
“Sure. I’ll wave my wand, shall I?”
“I wish.”
“Goodnight, Diva. Try to rest; you will need to get your strength back. Eat properly.”
“Yes, nanny!”
“Just do it,” he admonished. “There’s not a lot of point in us rescuing you if you have starved yourself to death by that time.”
“I promise. You said that just like Atheron would.”
“You want somebody to save you or what?”
“Sorry. Please!”
ALTHOUGH GRACE COULD speak with Arcan via the back lift, she preferred to go bare planet, down to the lake. There she could really feel this strange entity. In the lift it all felt rather surreal. But here … here she could sense how utterly alone Arcan had been for all those thousands of years … here where it was never day and never night, and where the light bathed everything into grey, where it was perpetually freezing cold … here it was different.
“Arcan?” She placed her hands carefully on the lake.
“Grace!” The lake shimmered, pleased at her visit.
“How is it going? Have you managed to move anything yet?”
“No, I am looking for a ‘volunteer’!”
That didn’t sound so good. Grace wasn’t too sure that she wanted to be a guinea pig for his trials. What if he found it was all too complicated? She could end up in the middle of the lake with no source of oxygen once her mask pack ran out.
“Err …”
“I knew you would be happy to help. It is very nice to be able to depend upon another being.”
“Err …”
“Just step into the lake, until you are fully covered. Don’t worry, I won’t drop you!”
“Ha-ha!” She gave a hollow laugh, but found herself wading into the lake as ordered. It felt very strange, because she knew the lake consisted of a very thick substance, yet there was no resistance to her movement at all. She was able to glide smoothly into the lake until she was out of her depth. Heart flipping over unhappily, she took an unnecessary gulp of air from her face mask, and dipped her head under the surface.
There was enough time for three more ragged breaths, and then she managed to make herself open her eyes. She had felt nothing, but she was in a different place. Her eyes could see through the lake, she found, although it pressed in on them. She was floating beside a bubble, and she could just discern the shape of a skeleton inside. She gasped, and then had to steady her respiration so that the mask pack could cope. She felt slightly sick, closed her eyes again, and when she reopened them the bubble had disappeared. She flailed around a little, feeling panic overcome her, and then she felt herself lightly break the surface.
Even though she was moving from one unbreathable atmosphere to another, she felt easier. She let her breath out slowly through a rounded mouth.
Arcan showed how he felt, by causing the lake around her to wave so that she bobbed up and down like a cork. Happily, her feet touched the bottom and she managed to wade her way out. Once she stretched her hands back to the lake he erupted into an exultant chatter.
“See! How about that! I did it!”
“Fantastic!”
“How did it feel? Did I shake you?”
“No. It was fine, I didn’t even know that I was moving!” Then honesty found its way to her lips. “Though I was a bit scared.”
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