by Sarah Zettel
Hurry Adu!
The second one fired. Then the first fired again. The darts clattered to the floor and Eric’s breath came out in ragged gasps. They knew now. How could they not know? He saw his own bulging eyes and gaping mouth in their visors. One more volley and he was gone.
He screamed like a madman and lunged for the first of them. His arms and legs were weak as water, but he still outmassed the Vitae. They toppled onto the deck together. The fall loosened the Vitae’s grip on its gun just enough. Eric tore it from its fingers as the Vitae shoved him aside. Eric squeezed the trigger and shot his target in the torso, only because there was no way to miss.
The Vitae dropped onto the deck plates and Eric looked wildly around for the other one. Nothing. No one. Then, the drone of the engines died away into silence. The Vitae stepped out from behind the second level drive.
Eric fired and dropped. The Vitae fired and then it fell with Eric’s dart in its arm. Eric felt the sting and the shock as the dart drove its tip into his shoulder blade. Arms, legs, torso were all gone in an instant and his eyesight left him before he hit the deck.
The Vitae maneuvered the support capsule out of the airlock. Adu sat frozen in place on the bridge, doing nothing but absorbing the information about the U-Kenai’s status through Cam’s eyes. The quarantine lock was gone, but not through his doing. The Vitae had reported that the source of the contamination had been removed. The station had downgraded the alert.
The airlock door closed with a rush of canned air. Adu still didn’t move. Eric Born was gone. There was nothing left to tell him how to act. He opened all the instructions he carried in his makeup and examined them all minutely. Nothing there. Nothing to tell him what to do if the Vitae carried Eric Born away.
The comm board flickered and shifted again. Adu read the new status. The U-Kenai, formerly owned and commanded by Eric Born was now officially salvage, with ship and contents to be claimed by the Rhudolant Vitae.
Ship and contents. Adu’s attention froze on the phrase. Him.
The instruction sets were very clear regarding the Vitae. Interaction with them, unless supervised by Eric Born, was to be strictly avoided.
Adu pushed the android body into action. The quarantine lock had been lifted and only the normal security precautions held the ship in place. He had already established access to the security database. With less than a dozen key changes, he overwrote the holding order.
A regulatory override cycle kicked into play from Cam and Adu squashed it. The docking clamps lifted back and the U-Kenai fell away from the station.
Adu rolled himself to one side and prodded the Cam program forward to take charge of the flight calculations. As a precaution, he settled himself at the gateway between Cam’s flight instructions and the regulatory overrides. It wasn’t long before the alarm bells began ringing. The Vitae had already detected his ruse. The signals activated a swarm of overrides and cutoffs in Cam’s programming that charged toward the gate. Adu sat like a stone wall between the security programming and the flight programming. Cam continued measuring, calculating, and planning in a smooth, unbroken chain. Eight kilometers from the station, he lit the U-Kenai’s first level drive and shoved the ship toward the vacuum at its top speed.
No ships approached them, although Adu was certain the Vitae would be tracking them. He tripped another switch in Cam’s programming and although they were still too close to the station and all the security overrides battered at him, Cam cut in the third level drive and the U-Kenai leapt into the empty realm past the light barrier.
The security cutoffs fell back and Adu was able to move again. He threaded his way around behind Cam and made the android’s hands work the comm boards. The beacon was on its way to Perivar. The U-Kenai could overtake it and scoop it up on the way, and then the whole ship could fly toward this Perivar, who Eric said could get an undetected signal to Dorias. He could tell Dorias what had happened. Dorias had given him his original instructions. Dorias would give him more and they would be correct and they would erase the lingering image of Eric Born being removed in the support capsule, the image that hung inside Adu and would not go away.
8—Amaiar Gardens, Kethran Colony, Hour 05:12:36, City Time
The first and best occupation of the mind is to fight destiny. I do not mean run away. I do not mean trick it, or cheat it. I mean to face it on open ground, to raise whatever force is at one’s command, and to wage open, unflinching, and total war.
—Zur-Ishen ki Maliad, from “Upon Leaving Kethre"
Evran was beginning to get on Aria’s nerves. Most of the other students had adopted a normal speed for talking around her and had begun to assume she understood what they were saying unless she told them otherwise. Not Evran. He talked to her like he might to a three-year-old, and when she bothered to respond long enough to let him know she thought he was a fool, he’d smile indulgently and say she just didn’t understand yet.
He’d taken to following her around the lab, lecturing as he went. Right now he was leaning his buttocks against one of the unused analysis tables, delivering his unbroken stream of philosophy, or science, or whatever it was, and trying to touch her on her arm if she was stupid enough to get close to him. It was just about enough to drive her insane. Not because the tasks were particularly difficult, but because she was still learning how to read without help and she needed all her concentration to get the notes of new instructions that Zur-Iyal and the others had left for her.
She cast a longing glance out the window toward the fields and cattle pens and then a quick one at the clock. Two hours before her shift was over. Two more hours for this fool to sit there and yammer.
“…I know Allenden and the others are trying to tell you that your genetics, your body, you understand, Aria? are the final determination of your existence, I mean, that you’ve got no choice, you understand, because you were so carefully built, but in reality you’ve got more choice than we do, you understand, because…”
Aria bent more closely over her notepad display, trying to decipher the instructions Myra Lar ki Novish had left for her…check the monitors on the B series protein cross sections. If any of them read over…Her lips moved while she read on her own, a habit she was trying to break. Her free hand dropped down to her pouch of stones, as if just touching the leather could help her. She pulled her hand away.
“…You aren’t carrying the excess genetic baggage that the rest of us are, you understand? The survival instinct, the macrogenetic tribal survival instinct, I mean, it’s not natural for you to want to pass on exclusively your genes, I mean, you are not naturally inclined to warlike behavior the way we are, you understand?”
…Sixteen to the twenty-third power, is that what that says? Nameless Powers preserve me from this idiot. Yes, that’s what that says…For the HT6E enzyme concentration, call me immediately. I’ll be on line at…
“…that means, Aria, that you aren’t motivated by, I mean, you understand, you don’t cling to irrational, instinctive behavior, like we do. You make your decisions exclusively, you know that word, right? On the basis of personal experience, and that means that…”
“If you’re going to try to corrupt impressionable young minds, Evran fa Kell, you really ought to do it in a lower tone of voice.”
Aria almost cried out in relief. Zur-Allenden ki Uvarimaya-nus strolled through the doorway. As usual, mud covered his boots and breeches. A smile glowed on his pointed face, but it didn’t reach his eyes while he looked over Evran. For reasons Aria hadn’t gone out of her way to understand, the pair regarded each other as Heretics and would avoid each other whenever possible.
Evran stuck his chin out toward Zur-Allenden. “We’re not on Quapoc ground, Zur-Allenden. There’s no law against my talking to her.”
“But I’ll bet she wishes there was.” Aria turned away to hide her smile. “And face it, Sar Evran, Manager ki Maliad catches you trying to make her into a Determinist, she’ll boot you off-planet so hard you’ll reach Stat
ion Eight without a shuttle.”
Evran sniffed. “You are the ignorant child of an ignorant people.”
“And the Balancers decided there weren’t enough self-satisfied little shits in the universe so they sent us you.” Zur-Allenden stumped over to his corner table, leaving a whole trail of squashed leaves and earth behind. Aria groaned inwardly.
Why can’t he use the clearing room like everybody else? she thought as Zur-Allenden began stripping his boots off and leaning over the tabletop to check the results of whatever experiment he had brewing under the glass, showering more dirt everywhere.
Fortunately, Evran’s stock of insults was smaller than his stock of pedantic speeches. “Aria, think about what I’ve said and come find me when you’ve got any questions.” And he stalked out.
Zur-Allenden shook his head. “What amazes me is he says that like he thinks you’ll actually do it. Like he thinks you don’t have a brain in your head.”
“Used to it.” Aria ran her thumb along the bottom of the monitor display to make sure she got the numbers right. I hope I get faster at this soon. Her hand dropped to her pouch again, and she stopped it midway. She stuck the pad into the feed-out slot on the edge of Myra Lar’s table so the two machines could talk to each other.
“Wouldn’t have thought so.” Zur-Allenden planted his stocking feet on the tile floor and folded his arms across his skinny chest.
Aria bent over the table and ran her finger down the line of glowing figures, slowly reading each one. Myra Lar had been overly diligent in explaining the importance of a manual check. “Be surprised, you would.”
Zur-Allenden sat silently for a moment and Aria tried not to wonder what was going on inside his head. She’d used every trick she knew to try to get him to drop his guard around her. She’d worked diligently. She’d volunteered to run extra errands. She’d been overflustered and profusely apologetic when she’d made mistakes. She’d occasionally “let slip” remarks about her children and her sisters. The performance had gained the confidence, even the friendship, of almost everyone else in the lab, but not Allenden, and Aria was beginning to wonder why.
Blasted Skymen. You all look alike but you all act differently. There’s no way to tell who’s going to do what. Why can’t you just mark your hands so a person can tell who you are by looking? Her hand twitched like it wanted to move to her pouch. She pressed it harder against the tabletop.
She had asked Iyal if there were other places where the people were marked so they could be told apart, and had received a strangely sad smile from her. “Almost everywhere has a social hierarchy, Aria. It seems to be part of being human. Some places use tattoos, or natural appearance to enforce it. Some places use family names or histories…” Her sentence had trailed off, and her face had turned thoughtful. “I’d be willing to speculate that maybe your world’s hierarchy came from genotype…family…but if that was it, what’re you doing on the bottom?”
“Oh, I forgot.” Allenden snapped his fingers, interrupting her reverie. “Zur-Iyal wanted me to remind you to make sure you’ve got the lab cleaned and locked down by hour six. Maintenance is running the building check tonight and we all have to clear out early.”
Blast, blast, blast. I had work I wanted to do tonight. Her eyes flickered involuntarily toward Allenden’s keyboard. Aria was glad she had her back to him so he couldn’t see. “Thank you, Zur-Allenden. I’ll have it done.”
“Good enough.” Boots under one arm, computer pad under the other, he shuffled out, trying to keep himself from sliding on the tiles.
When the door swung shut, Aria let her shoulders sag. She couldn’t have said who wore her out more, Allenden or Evran.
At least Allenden tries to keep a lock on it. She sighed and started on the next set of numbers. Why do they nag at me like this ? The Nameless Powers have seen me deal with worse, most of my life, in fact. The Skymen just give me words.
Words and plenty of them. Iyal and her cohorts honked like geese sometimes about the contents of Aria’s blood and bones.
“You are saying that some person decided how I should be?” Aria had asked Iyal once.
Iyal had come into the lab just to stare at her. A recent analysis had just come out of the machines and Iyal was more confused than usual.
“Basically, yes. Not you, personally, of course, but at least one set of your ancestors. Probably more than one.”
And the Nameless Powers spoke the names of all the People that would be and in each name declared the soul and life that it would have…
“That’s not unheard of.” Iyal leaned against the wall. “I’ve met GE descendants before. What’s incredible about you is what your…engineers bred for.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know.” She threw up her hands. “That’s the problem. Usually it’s obvious. Strength, speed, intelligence, creativity. You, though, you make no sense.”
Neither do you, but she didn’t say that.
Zur-Iyal spread her hands. “Let me try to explain this. We’ve talked about cells, right? Cells in a body communicate via a series of messengers. Chemicals emitted by one cell cause a reaction in second cell. That second cell might undergo an internal change, or it might send off its own messenger. That’s extremely simplified, of course.”
“Of course,” said Aria humbly.
Zur-Iyal’s eyebrows went up. Her puckered mouth twitched into a half smile. “Deserved that, I suppose.” Iyal was quicker than most of them to pick up on when Aria was acting. Around Iyal she had to be extremely careful how she played the Notouch.
“All right,” Iyal went on, “your people are, obviously, from the same Evolution Point as mine. That should mean you have the same messengers in your cells, plus or minus three or four to allow for your native environment.
“As far as I can tell, your cells will react to twenty separate messengers that aren’t present in any other known Human variant. Then there’s your brain.” She shook her head. “The brain, as we know it, is a complicated, disorganized organ with three or four backups for every function. It stores information, but it stores it wherever there’s room and reacts according to a branch of chaos theory. That doesn’t even begin to cover how it decides whether the information gets stored as short-term, or long-term, or muscular memory.” She scowled at Aria. Aria didn’t flinch. She had learned fairly early on that Zur-Iyal’s scowls had nothing to do with her personally. The woman was annoyed with her cells, or her brain, or whatever it was that she couldn’t understand today. “Your brain, on the other hand, is more tightly organized than a Vitae datastore. I can predict, PREDICT, where a given piece of information is going to end up, down to the cell. Your short-term memory is ridiculously huge, and your long-term memory defies description, and you’ve got no backups.” She frowned even more deeply. “You should be a flipping genius, but you’re not. You should be totally impossible, but you’re not. Although for the life of me I don’t know why.” Again she shook her head. “I find it hard to believe that someone so carefully constructed has no idea of her function.” Zur-Iyal looked at her very hard, as if trying to pull the ideas out with her eyes.
“Would help if I could, Zur-Iyal,” Aria told her honestly. “But there’s too much I don’t understand.”
“I was afraid you were going to say that.” Iyal had sighed and stumped out again.
I could tell her the apocrypha, but, Garismit’s Eyes, how would I make her understand it? Aria stared out the laboratory window. There were fifteen separate stories about the Nameless and the Servant that the Teachers had declared to be lies. One of them told about her family and her namestones.
The gardens’ flat, cultivated land spread out in front of her. The window frame gave it just enough shape to keep her leftover fears quiet. Silver drones bobbed between the long rows of plants, checking soil quality, watching for parasites and fungi, administering fertilizer or pesticides as necessary, or harvesting the mid-season crops. Not all of what they harvested would be used as it
was. Even through the window, Aria could catch the faint green scent of the processing sheds, where the raw organic materials were augmented with artificially produced animal products and turned into a variety of unpronounceable things that had mechanical or medicinal uses.
The cleanliness and precision of the place was the most completely and utterly alien sight for Aria on the entire world.
She leaned her hip against the counter and watched the drone’s movements. She remembered the smell of animal pens where she spent what felt like half her life in the Realm. She remembered the ache in her shoulders as she dug out the manure and mud. Chilblains broke through her hands from spending hours up to her knees and elbows in water harvesting grain. She lived with the rain, the stink, the ache, and the Teachers coming once a month to her village to tell them all it was what the Nameless meant for them. And she had believed. From the time she could hear and understand, she’d believed because everyone around her did.
Then came her Marking Day. At the end of that day, she lay on her mat, her hands wrapped in bandages and throbbing from the pain. The leather belt her old grandmother had fastened around her chafed her waist and legs miserably. Outside, the night’s hail clattered against the roof. The wind rocked the house on its stilts. Its fingers found their way through the cracks in the walls and drew themselves across her. She stared into the darkness, hearing the sounds of her father and little sisters breathing and snoring all around her and wishing for sleep to come.
The floor had creaked from gentle steps and she smelled her mother’s musky breath.
“Get up, Aria, I’ve something to show you.”
She’d sat up, blinking. Mother had taken her by the arm right above the ragged bandages and led her out into the other room. The fire on the central hearthstone was nothing but red coals buried in ash. Mother poked them carefully with a stick until the tiniest flames flickered up. The dim orange light showed up her wrinkled, leathery face and Aria wondered why her mother was smiling. She never had before.