by Linda Nagata
Skye laughed softly. “Sooth. I’ll go for that.”
Zia burst into the clearing, her hair a mess, and her eyes looking wide and wild in the upwelling light. “Say that again, ado.”
“Say what?” Skye asked, as the bee buzzed between them. It bumped against the transparent wall, sputtered a high note, then tumbled to the ground. Jem leaped on it instantly, and picked it up in his teeth.
“What you just said to him. Say it again, only say it louder.”
“I’ll go for that?”
“Louder, ado. Like you mean it.”
“I’ll go for that!”
“Slick.” She dropped cross-legged to the center of the little gleaming pavilion. Her gaze went to Devi. “Has she stopped being crazy?”
“Do you want her to?”
Zia grinned. “Never.”
“I have to go to the monkey house,” Skye said.
“Buyu!” Zia shouted. “Where are you?”
“Coming! I’m almost there. I crashed the bee again, didn’t I?”
“You did a great job,” Zia called. “You found them. Jem’s eating the bee, though.”
“Gutter-dogs!”
But Devi was already wrestling the device out of the dokey’s mouth.
Buyu clattered into the pavilion, still clutching the bee’s guidance screen in one hand. “Hey Skye. You okay?”
“Better,” she admitted.
“Uh-uh,” Zia said. “Too tentative. I want you to say ‘I’ll-Go-For-That.’ I want you to say it loud and clear, when Buyu shares with you the most beautifully elegant, yet simple plan you will ever have the pleasure of hearing. Remember now, ‘I’ll-Go-For-That.’ And if you ever call him Buyu-the-brainless again, I will cut off all your hair the next time I catch you asleep. Buyu?”
“She called me brainless?”
“In jest, dear. Tell her now.”
Awkwardly, he lowered his bulk to the pavilion floor, sitting between Skye and Zia. The faint light dimmed noticeably, blocked by his large body. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Ord said seven to ten days, right? So there’s time to experiment. Nobody’s going to get hurt if you don’t go to the monkey house right away.”
“If Ord is right,” Devi interjected.
“Oh sooth, but personal DIs like Ord, they just don’t get chemistry wrong.”
“Go ahead with it,” Zia said. Her eyes looked as sharp as Jem’s had, a moment before he leaped on the camera bee.
“Right. Well. We’re living above one of the strangest planets listed in the library, aren’t we?” Buyu asked. “Deception Well. Where nothing is quite what it seems. It’s a wilderness, but it’s watched over by some of the slickest tech anyone’s ever encountered. Remember the governors?”
Devi slapped his thigh. “Of course!” He sounded half-angry, half-elated.
“The governors are the microscopic guardians of this place,” Buyu went on. “They’re a nanotech system left here, 30 million years ago, by the intelligent species that used to call this planet home. They were designed to defend this world … against the Chenzeme, we guess. Luckily for us, they don’t attack unless they’re attacked first … otherwise we wouldn’t be here talking about it, because we don’t have any Makers that can beat them.”
Skye nodded. The governors were the reason no warship had ever been seen near Deception Well. Not only were they everywhere on the planet and in the city, but they inhabited the nebula too. She glanced up at the milky filaments shimmering in the night sky. If a warship entered the system, it would be infected by the governors. They would take it apart if it tried to attack.
Buyu stroked the fuzzy line of beard that traced his jawbone. “The Well governors can out-maneuver any nanotech systems the Chenzeme have too. Even Chenzeme plagues, Skye. Remember city history? You know it’s happened before.”
“Once,” Zia said. “It’s happened just once before. When a man named Jupiter Apolinario was dying of a Chenzeme plague he went down to Deception Well, and he was cured. You don’t need the monkey house, Skye. You don’t need to take a chance with them. Be like Apolinario, go down the Well and let the governors clean that Chenzeme death wish out of your cells.”
It sounded crazy. Go down the Well? City authority would never let her go down the Well and hang out—la di da—until she was cured. It was mystic, magic, wishful thinking. Besides, there were microscopic governors everywhere in the city too. If they could cure her, why hadn’t they done it already? “I don’t think—”
“Ah, ah!” Zia said, pointing an accusing finger. “Remember what the right and proper answer is? You rehearsed it.”
“But why go down the Well?”
“That’s not the right answer.”
“Well then, how could I go down the Well?”
Her eyes narrowed. “Take the elevator, ado. What did you think? Tours go down every day.”
“Oh sure, but those people have to come right back up.”
“Not really,” Devi said. “They’re down for seven or eight hours.”
“Do you think that’s long enough … ?”
“Probably not,” Buyu said. “Apolinario was down there for days.”
“And his plague was active,” Zia added. “Skye, the fact that you have ‘puzzle pieces’ is a pretty good sign that the governors don’t even recognize your infection as a threat. But you know I’ve been interning with a planetary biologist, and believe me, Deception Well is a crazy world. With the help of the governors, the biosphere has learned to grow its own libraries. There are hundreds of thousands of communion mounds sprouting from the soil. They’re made up of thousands of different organisms, some native, some Chenzeme, some from Earth, all living together as one. Maybe that had a purpose once, though really I think they’re just a chaos of smart biology that learned how to get along. The point is, they act like libraries of biological data, especially human biological data. If there’s already a cure for Compassion in the biosphere of the Well, then we’re going to find it in one of those mounds.”
Skye felt her pulse quickening in anticipation. Communion mounds were not found in the city, but only in the Well. “We could bring Ord with us. It could sift through a mound, and find the molecular structure we need.”
“Exactly. Let the little chemist be useful for once in its pointless existence. Where is it, anyway?”
Skye shrugged. “Around.” Ord was always around. That was its deepest instinct.
“Aren’t the communion mounds off limits to tourists?” Devi asked.
Zia gave him a dark look. “I said we were taking the elevator down. I didn’t say we were going on a regular tour. Regular tourists are escorted by nasty little robot wardens, so that they can’t get away with anything. However” —she patted Buyu’s knee— “we are lucky enough to have a trained explorer in our midst.”
Buyu blushed. Even in the dim light, Skye could see it.
Zia went on with her explanation. “Buyu hasn’t been placed on an explorer team yet, but he is allowed to escort small parties down on day trips, so we won’t have to take a robot warden along. With any luck, we can tap a mound and city authority will never know the difference.”
Skye shook her head. Already she could see a hundred things wrong with the plan—not the least of which was that Buyu would be risking the career he wanted so badly. If it was discovered they were tapping the mounds, Buyu might be permanently suspended from the explorer corps. “It might be all right for me and Ord to try it,” Skye said, “but you three … you’ve got nothing to gain and everything to lose by defying city law.”
Zia pouted. “That is not the answer I coached you to say. Try again.”
“Sooth, Zia’s right,” Devi said. “Try it again, because we have a lot to lose too. Skye?”
Buyu nodded. “Don’t make me kidnap Ord and go by myself, Skye. Without you, the little guy would melt into a puddle at the bottom of my pack.”
She laughed softly.
“Say it,” Devi whispered.
“Say it,” Buyu muttered. “Please Skye?”
Skye closed her eyes, thinking of the thousands of lifeboats that might even now be falling in long slow orbits around Kheth. If there was no cure for this plague, they would be falling forever. She opened her eyes, and looked at her friends, one by one. “You all are crazy! Crazier than me. But okay. If you know how, if you want to do it, then I’ll go for that! Okay?”
“Slick,” Zia said, nodding in satisfaction.
“First elevator down tomorrow,” Devi added.
Buyu had already turned to more pressing matters. “We never ate dinner,” he moaned. “I’m starving!”
Chapter 8
No one was more real than Yulyssa Desearange. She was the oldest person in the city, and yet she had not let the years harden her thoughts and beliefs. Her eyes and mind were always open to the subtle changes of the world around her. She saw everything, and she could read meaning into every detail. When Skye walked into their apartment, Yulyssa took one look at her and asked, “Are you all right? What’s happened?”
She lay half-reclined on the sofa, a small woman of delicate build, several centimeters shorter than Skye. In the evening Yulyssa often lay on the sofa, visiting friends through the atrium in her head. Now she sat up. Her long, black hair slipped like a veil across her finely sculpted cheek. As with any real person, her age did not show in her face or in her body, but only in the weight of her gaze and the calmness of her bearing. Compared to Yulyssa, Skye felt that everything about herself was in a muddle: her health, her hair, her judgment, her dress. “Oh, I—” She searched for something to say. “I’m exhausted. It’s been a terribly long day.”
Yulyssa’s eyes continued to take her measure, but she asked no more questions. “I heard you and Zia set a jump record.”
“Sooth. It was a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
Ord had slipped into the kitchen. Now it came out with a glass of water for Skye. She drank it gratefully, while Yulyssa made a space on the sofa for her. Skye sat down. “I met a new boy tonight. I’ve never met anyone like him before.”
“Divine Hand,” Yulyssa said.
Skye turned to her, furious and frightened to think that Yulyssa had somehow been spying on her. “How do you know that?”
“Siva Hand called me an hour ago. She was in quite a state. Divine had gone out with this wild foreign girl and he hadn’t come home when she expected.”
“You’re not serious.”
Yulyssa’s smile was deliciously naughty. “Oh I am.”
Skye covered her mouth to stifle a giggle. “Poor Devi.”
“Don’t think too badly of Siva. Like most of us, she lost all her family when the Chenzeme warships wrecked our ancestral world of Heyertori. She never got over it. Not really. We were all refugees when we came to Deception Well. Siva worked as hard as anyone. She denied herself a family for years upon endless years. When she finally retired from public service, it was to have a child. Specifically, it was to have Divine.”
Yulyssa shook her head. “It was not a healthy choice. The past is the past. Siva should have let it go, as the rest of us have, and started anew. But she would not. She had Divine made from the genetic record of her first born son, who died with our world of Heyertori. Divine is a genetic clone of that young man. He is a constant reminder to her of what she has lost, and what she still could lose. Even the most logical of us can be haunted by a dread that the past will repeat itself … and Siva is not the most logical woman I have ever known.”
“So she worries over him all the time,” Skye said. How dreadful, to be the standin for a dead past. “Doesn’t she know that will only drive him away?”
Yulyssa shrugged. “The heart is ruled by its own kind of sense.”
“Or nonsense,” Skye said. “Did she really call me a wild foreign girl?”
“Yes. Those were the words.”
“Actually, that’s kind of slick.”
Yulyssa nodded, her tongue firmly in her cheek. “I thought so.”
Skye kissed her. “I’m going to bed now, before I fall asleep on my feet.”
Skye was up again before first light. Overnight, the Makers that lived on her skin had cleaned away the day’s sweat and oil, so that she woke up clean. Her bed was slightly stained, but a nanodrizzle, looking like a thread of glistening water that never got anything wet, was already flowing over the waste and absorbing it. Within minutes the bed would be clean too.
Moving quickly, Skye first stuffed her skin suit into a cloth sack, then pulled on a blue sweater and gray knickers. She ran her fingers through her short, soft brown hair, then glanced at herself in the image wall. A wild foreign girl, huh? Well, at least her nose had healed.
She went barefoot into the gray, predawn world, while Ord followed in the shadows, the light from the street glinting off its golden hide. Wild canaries were just starting to sing their morning greetings, while a gutter doggie wandered fat and stupid up the street, its sausage-like body bloated with the waste matter it had scavenged in the night. It looked at her with dull eyes, then headed on toward its tunnel, where it would unroll its sponge-like body into a great, flat sheet that it would press against the tunnel walls. The walls would absorb its waste, returning the matter to the city’s recycling system.
The streets were empty, the restaurants closed. Skye saw only two ado boys, making their slow way into an apartment building. Judging from their haggard faces, they must have just barely survived a hard night of partying. She hurried on to Shachi Street, then down a short flight of steps into a transit station. An empty car was already waiting on the platform. Its door slipped silently open as she approached. Ord scuttled after her, then reached for her sack with its tentacles, and climbed aboard. Skye dropped onto the seat. “Elevator terminus,” she said.
The door slid shut, enclosing her in an airtight capsule. The car accelerated away from the platform, following the track through a white gel membrane that sealed the station from the airless tunnels of the transit system. As soon as the car shooshed through the membrane, there was nothing to see, for the transit tunnels were pitch black. Skye could feel the car turning though, as it shot through the city’s industrial interior, making for the core and the elevator column. Only moments later the car slipped through another gel membrane, and once again, the clean white light of a transit station spilled through the windows.
Zia and Buyu were already waiting on the platform. Skye waved, then hopped out when the door opened.
“Feeling okay?” Buyu asked, his thick brow wrinkled in dire concern.
Skye was relieved to see that he had removed his nose bell. “Sooth, dweeb. I’m not contagious yet.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Buyu? I’m joking.” She turned to Zia and they smacked their palms together. “I’m scared.”
“And I’m your mother.”
Skye grinned. Buyu and Zia were already wearing their skin suits. The garments were required gear planetside, an intelligent hide that would protect the wearer from scrapes and jabs and encounters with unfriendly beasties. Buyu’s skin suit was the muddy brown color of the explorer corps. Zia’s gold suit gleamed beside it like hot metal.
“You’re not dressed,” Zia observed.
Skye hefted her cloth sack. Ord’s little golden head peeked out of it. “I’m going to change now. I didn’t want Yulyssa to know that we were … you know. She’s so smart. Sometimes I feel like she knows what I’m thinking before I do. I didn’t want her to guess … Well, it’s silly. I’ll go change now.”
When she came back, Ord was on the shoulder of her glowing blue skin suit, the sack had been stashed in a locker, and Devi still hadn’t arrived. Buyu had bought breakfast though, so the three of them sat on the station stairs, eating, while they watched transit car after transit car arrive at the station. Only a few ados got out. Most of the new arrivals were real people, dressed in skin suits for the journey down to
the planet where they had been forbidden to go for most of their lives.
“What if the elevator car fills up?” Skye wondered.
Buyu said, “I reserved four tickets. We’ll get on if we’re at the gate on time.” Then, after a pause, “Maybe Devi changed his mind.”
Skye felt a flash of temper, but she bit down on a retort. Hadn’t she been thinking the same thing?
“How much time do we have?” Zia asked.
“Couple of minutes.”
“Zeme dust.”
Skye stared at the white gel membrane that sealed off the transit tunnel, willing another car to come through.
None came.
Apparently, everyone who was going on the dawn tour had already arrived.
Well, Devi was under a lot of pressure at home.
She thought about sharing with Zia the things Yulyssa had told her last night, but she was pretty sure Devi wouldn’t like it. He would probably be angry if he knew she knew. Maybe he did know. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t come.
She stood up, then pitched the remains of her breakfast into a recycle slot. “Let’s go.”
“You don’t want to wait just another minute?” Zia asked.
“Why? If he were coming, he’d be here. Something must have come up, but that doesn’t mean we should miss our ride down—unless you’ve changed your mind?”
“Knock it off, Skye. You’re talking like a dumb ado.”
Zia got up and dumped her trash too. Buyu devoured his last bite, then pitched his rubbish and grabbed a pack he’d left lying on the stairs. He hefted it. “Food and a few supplies. We’ll be on our own for hours.” He grinned, obviously delighted at the thought.
They passed through the gate and into a huge loading bay, its roof lost in shadows far overhead. The elevator car waited behind a transparent wall. Perhaps “car” was the wrong word, for this car was the size of a building nine stories high. Through its tall window walls Skye could see people milling about between rows of benches on the lower floors.