Another bombard blast shook the air. Bolts continued to rain from the walls. The men closest to her didn’t even turn to look. She was proud of them. They were soldiers. They would not let setbacks make them something less than they were. Neither would she.
The pages were already rushing to present their men-at-arms with lances. By the time the sallying defenders came round the wall, she and her men had formed a bristling wall, lances and swords. A contingent of company cavalry was swinging around to support them. Fia’s sword had not fallen loose in her tumble.
Fia tucked her commander’s baton in its sheath, raised her weapon. By the time her blade pierced skin, she had forgotten her losses and her pain. All of it sank beneath the flurry of combat. All except for a lingering question she could not shake.
Her inner voice had told her to take the leftmost ladder. It had never led her wrong before. It knew things that she couldn’t. If she had listened to it, she would have been destroyed. Chance had saved her.
Her inner voice must have heard her, but it did not speak.
10
Meloku held her hands on the edge of the shuttle’s acceleration couch, trying to steady her pulse.
Her safety harness hung loosely over her shoulders. She had space. She could stretch her arms and legs. The shuttle came with a bed, subsonic soporifics, and a pantry stocked with crumbless, oilless foods and treats. All a lavish expenditure for an interplanetary craft, which was why these shuttles were now restricted to ground service. Ways and Means could only produce a trickle of antimatter. It could not spare much for these shuttles.
Meloku could not be comfortable. She leaned back in her couch, and shifted again.
Since she had gone to see Habidah, she had lived in a state of constant irritation, fluster, bitterness. She could not stand still. Her skin seemed to belong to someone else.
She was always being watched. The shuttle’s NAI tracked her movement, her breath, the dilation of the capillaries under her skin. She was accustomed to being watched. She had lived with NAIs and AIs all her life. They knew her intimately.
Companion would have diagnosed it as cognitive dissonance. Guilt.
She had always hated Habidah for her ability to get under her skin. All Habidah had had to do was mention Joanna’s name.
Meloku had already scheduled a visit to Queen Joanna later this year. It had not looked odd to bump the trip up. Dahn had not even asked.
Meloku had made so many visits to the Queen of Naples over the years that, for convenience’s sake, she had asked for regular quarters. Joanna had at once agreed to provide them. She could not help but do so.
The shuttle breezed to a halt astride the palace balcony. The boarding ramp had just enough reach to touch the railing. As she strode down it, the roar of the thrusters battered her ears. The cacophony dwindled as she passed the blurred boundary of the shuttle’s stealth fields. The howl of its engines reduced to a low moan, like a wind.
A number of stories of hauntings had sprouted up around Queen Joanna’s homes over the years.
When Meloku turned her retinal infrared off, all she could see of the shuttle was the tongue of the boarding ramp. It evaporated into a gray haze, and blended into the light. Meloku leapt lightly onto the balcony.
The boarding ramp vanished, and, soon after, the windless howl died to nothing.
Meloku was stuck here until next sunset. The shuttle’s NAI would not fly during the day.
She had no trouble finding a safe path through the corridors. There were not many people about. Most were sleeping. The Kingdom of Naples was not in dire financial straits, but Joanna did not love luxury. She did not love much. She lived as simply as her situation allowed, in the palace that had been her father’s seat of power. She kept a modest court and employed only as many servants as would not make her contemporaries look askance at her.
To visit her, Meloku took the guise of a Poor Clare, a Franciscan order of nuns devoted to strict poverty. Joanna had received papal dispensation to have Poor Clares live with her. To explain Meloku’s frequent absences, Meloku played the part of Veroncia, a hermit. Veroncia stayed in confinement in her quarters.
Asking for the Poor Clares had been one of the few things Joanna had done on her own initiative. Joanna had her good months and her bad… everything else. Sometimes Joanna seemed wholly herself. She had always been a competent ruler. She still had the instincts, the ruthlessness. Meloku had not robbed her of that. She did not blink during public executions. More importantly, she knew her finances.
Veroncia’s quarters were cramped, half the size of the room Meloku shared with Dahn. Every surface was choked with dust. Every day, Joanna’s servants left food in the door slot. And every night, the matter disassembler Meloku placed there ate it. The disassembler clicked in the corner, crawling spiderlike over a desiccated bread crust.
Meloku lay on her wooden bed. There was no mattress or padding. Veronica would not have asked for any. Daybreak was an hour away. She folded her arms. She had become too stubborn to ask her demiorganics to tranquilize her. Ways and Means tracked that. She had nothing to do but stare and lay still. And think.
Thirty years ago, Meloku had broken Queen Joanna’s mind.
It had been trivial. She hadn’t even used the best of the tools at her disposal. She’d chemically induced a euphoria that had led to a powerful addiction. So powerful that, within a few days, a plurality of the neural pathways in Joanna’s frontal cortex had decohered to such a degree that she might as well have died.
There had been no surgery. Meloku had not cut Joanna’s brain with a scalpel. The drug she had used had “merely” encouraged Joanna’s brain to rearrange itself. A human brain would happily destroy itself with sufficiently artful urging. The drug had shut off dopamine receptors on some neurons and engorged them on others. Neural impulses naturally preferred pathways with engorged receptors.
Thoughts that traveled along the other pathways withered, and died.
Meloku had imprinted her image on Joanna’s mind. The chemical rewards had been the strongest when she had done as Meloku asked. Joanna’s mind rewired itself to think as Meloku wanted.
Joanna had become a different person. She was utterly in thrall to Meloku. The addiction had routed her synapses in such a way that she could no longer think about anything Meloku told her, she could only do.
All the old patterns of her life had been rewritten. Weighed against such a stimulus, ambition and happiness and dignity mattered not at all.
Meloku had never been an anthropologist. Not really. She had never been interested in these people. She had understood their reasoning, sometimes, but that had just been another way to hold them in contempt.
Back then, Meloku’s plans for this plane had been much different. She and Ways and Means intended to colonize it. This plane was to provide a home for Unity refugees. Taking Joanna had been a blunt instrument, a quick means of providing Meloku an inroad into the sovereigns of Europe. Joanna had been the only monarch Meloku had broken, but she was only supposed to have been the first.
Ways and Means’ exile had changed things. Ways and Means had become a ship of nothing but refugees. For its own unfathomable reasons, it had decided against colonizing this world.
That still left Meloku with Joanna.
Meloku had, on other missions, done to other people what she had done to Joanna. She was not accustomed to staying around afterward. She certainly had not wanted to.
She had not thought much of Joanna. Joanna had not been a sympathetic character. Her life, her privilege and her power and her misery, were symptoms of this plane’s many social diseases. Ways and Means and the Unity were coming to provide a cure.
Meloku had been convinced that Joanna had murdered her first husband, a seventeen year-old Hungarian duke, Andreas. Joanna publicly claimed she had been locked in her bedroom while a bevy of conspirators, only one of whom had been identified, had forced Andreas onto a balcony and hanged him. Ce
rtainly removing Andreas would have worked to Joanna’s advantage. Andreas had been a megalomaniac, freed Joanna’s rivals from their prisons. He had made himself unpopular in every stratum of Neapolitan society, but most crucially among the rich and the powerful. And Joanna had moved quickly to reconsolidate her grip on the powers that Andreas had taken.
Joanna could not tell her the truth. The neural pathways that contained that memory had decohered. The first time Meloku had accused her of the murder, she sat numbly accepting. The second time, she had wept. She had been willing to believe anything Meloku had told her had happened.
It hardly mattered now. Thirty years ago, Meloku had seized on the murder as a means to see Joanna as little but guilty. Guilty or not, Joanna had only acted as any sovereign in her environment could have. She had protected her interests. She had been good at it.
Her rule survived a Hungarian invasion. She had traveled to Avignon during the darkest months of the pestilence to stand trial for Andreas’s murder. That was when Meloku had met her.
Then Meloku had taken that person and removed her. What was left of her was barely present. A shade. Somehow she still lived and ruled.
The bells for Mass boomed beyond her walls. Joanna began each morning with Mass. Meloku did not believe she was a religious person any more. One more thing she had lost. Before Meloku, whenever Joanna had gone to visit her parents’ graves, she had showered coin on the crowds, a display of charity. When Meloku asked her why she had stopped, she had not remembered ever doing so. She had immediately started doing so again. All that was left of her was what was expected.
Meloku waited until she heard footsteps. She opened the door. A freckled and reedy servant girl was bringing Veroncia’s morning bread and water. The girl jumped.
It had been so long since “Veroncia” had last moved that the palace workers had started to think of her as another ghost. “Look down, girl. Do not meet my eyes.” After she hastened to do so, and Meloku said, “I will speak with Queen Joanna.”
Asking a serving girl to disturb the queen was a hell of an imposition, but the girl did not know how to say no to Veroncia. The girl brought her to a sitting room. Azure curtains covered its foggy windows. The minutely tiled floor reminded Meloku of the mosaics that ran throughout NAI hospitals on the plane on which she’d grown up.
In the next chamber, Joanna sat in conference with her closest adviser, a dark-skinned North African. There were two other men farther away: Joanna’s seneschal and the captain of the porters.
The moment Meloku saw Joanna, she knew this was not one of Joanna’s good months.
Joanna’s eyes were shadowed, her voice too even. She spoke fluently, cogently, but without looking at anything or anyone. Her courtiers glanced aside at the intrusion. No one entered the queen’s presence without announcement unless by accident, even a Poor Clare. The serving girl bowed her head, as if just realizing what trouble she might have gotten into.
Then Joanna spotted Meloku. It was as if a current had switched on behind her eyes. She stood.
“Please leave us,” she told the others.
Her advisers did not bother to hide their offense. Her seneschal started, “My Queen...”
Queen or not, he would have kept speaking, over her if necessary, had she done anything other than whirl on him with an urgency he could not have been accustomed to.
After they cleared the room, Meloku sat on the stool the captain of the porters had used. That display was exactly why she had decided to appear unannounced. So that she could see how Joanna would react to her.
Joanna sat, and folded her arms. “What would you like of me?”
“Nothing,” Meloku said. A test.
Joanna tilted her head, and then waited. It was as if she hadn’t heard.
After a while, Meloku said, “I only came to see how you were doing.”
“I am surviving,” she said. Not a lie, Meloku recognized. An evasion – the best her condition would allow.
“Tell me how you feel,” Meloku said. Joanna would interpret that as an order. She would not be able to refuse.
The pretense fell away as cleanly as though it had never been there. “I feel like shit all the time,” Joanna said. “And worse every day.”
That, Meloku thought, was to be expected. But she had hoped Joanna would have acclimated to it, learned to manage the symptoms.
Joanna had been looking at Meloku during her first high. The drug had glommed onto Joanna’s fusiform gyrus, the area of her brain responsible for facial recognition. It had associated the highs with Meloku, the person she’d been looking at when the drug had found her.
Meloku had tried to “cure” Joanna with the best technology Ways and Means allowed her to use. Two small implants were lodged on the undersides of her temporal bone. They jammed current into her brain, stimulated them just like a lower-dosage version drug. Joanna would never experience the hell of withdrawal, but her dependency would never get better.
The only other solution was to give her neural demiorganics like Meloku’s. Demiorganics could route Joanna’s thoughts around the affected receptors, or brute-force the damaged pathways. But Ways and Means had placed an absolute bar on the introduction of demiorganic technology to this world. That would have given the natives too much power.
Joanna waited, anxious. Whatever she wanted to hear, it wasn’t an apology. It would have meant nothing. It would not have meant anything even to Meloku.
Meloku told her, “Explain that feeling to me as you would your doctors.”
“It’s worse in the mornings and the late evenings.” So – when she was exhausted, full of fatigue poisons. “I try to keep my thoughts straight, practice meditation as you asked. It’s all such a tangle.”
Joanna was a thoughtful woman, but, with Meloku, she spoke without a pause. She was not thinking about her words. They were spilling out. Her social barriers did not function with Meloku.
Meloku felt as though she had plunged into freefall.
The last time she’d visited, Joanna had been doing better. Meloku had hoped that she would no longer need to caretake for her.
“What would you like of me?” Joanna asked again, with some desperation.
It was not that Joanna had not heard her answer the first time. It was that Joanna had not believed her. This was as aggressive as Joanna was capable of being with her.
Meloku had come with a set of questions, a battery of tests: “Have you been attending Mass?”
“I have.”
“How did you feel about it?”
Joanna blinked, caught her off guard.
With anyone else, Joanna would have invented an answer. But Joanna was not capable of lying to Meloku. The thought of lying could not occur to her.
Meloku asked, “Do you believe what you were told?”
Joanna blinked again.
“Do you believe Jesus of Nazareth is your savior?”
Nothing. Not yes. Not no. No reaction. The question was irrelevant.
The last time she had asked the question, a year ago, Joanna had hesitated and given a tiny nod. At the time, Meloku had believed Joanna was making progress. That she had actually started to experience religious feeling again. Maybe she had underestimated Joanna’s ability to lie.
Her demiorganics had recorded that moment. Infrared showed the capillaries in Joanna’s cheeks were engorged. Her pulse had quickened. Her eyes flickered over Meloku’s face. Not symptomatic of a lie. She had been searching.
With a shock, Meloku realized that Joanna had only nodded because she believed it was what Meloku wanted to see.
Joanna’s chemical block against lying had not functioned because it had not been a lie. There had not enough imagination left to register it as a lie.
Meloku gathered herself, and asked, “Did you order Duke Andreas killed?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said.
“Do you remember hating him?”
“Dearly.�
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“What about James?” Joanna was multiple times a widow. Her last and also late husband had been James IV, king of Majorca. His power had only been titular. Another lord ruled Majorca. James had died on campaign, fighting and failing to retake that land.
Meloku had arranged their marriage herself, trying to find a suitably powerless husband. James’s equal rank had meant that he would have no claim over Naples, and would not usurp Joanna’s powers. That had been the second worst mistake Meloku had ever made.
Joanna said, “I do not need to think about him any more.”
“Are you glad he’s dead?”
Joanna looked at Meloku carefully, searching again. “Do you want me to be glad?”
“He abused you in public.” He had scandalized Joanna’s courtiers by seizing her arm in front of them, threatening her life. “You must have felt it.”
“I felt nothing,” Joanna said.
She would pretend to be glad if Meloku told her to be glad.
Meloku leaned back into her chair. Massaging her forehead did not help the ache growing there. She could not figure out where to go from here.
She had come here to make herself feel better. To give her something to think about other than Habidah and the Company of the Star and the altered data she’d discovered. All she had done instead was add another chip of guilt to her pile.
She had made so many wrong decisions on this plane. She would continue to make them. She could not pretend that, presented with the same options, she would not do the same again.
Joanna had few of her own feelings left, but the drug had conditioned her to be very responsive to Meloku’s. “Is there some way I can help you?” she asked.
Meloku lowered her hand, eyed her balefully. “I’m looking for an answer you cannot give me.”
“I could try,” Joanna said. A deeply buried part of her would always be convinced that she could get another, better dose if only she made Meloku happy.
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