by Linda Nagata
She went down to Splendid Peace Park, following a path that led to the little pavilion by the outer wall, where she and Devi had talked that first night. She had just reached the final bend in the path when a flash of purple and gold fur jumped out at her from behind a tree. She yelped, while the dokey sprinted over her feet, only to turn around again, grabbing her ankles with its tiny monkey hands, while its bushy tail waved in delight.
“Jem!” She knelt, running her fingers through the dokey’s short fur. Then she froze. If Jem was here, then Devi …
She looked up, to see him standing in the path, watching her with troubled eyes. She flushed and looked away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were here. I’ll go—”
“No. Stay for awhile. Please?”
She picked Jem up. Then she stood, cradling the dokey against her chest. “You’re not angry?”
“Sure I am. I guess.” He shrugged. “I’m angry most of the time these days.”
“I’m sorry.”
“How did you know?”
Her cheeks burned. “Yulyssa told me.”
He nodded, as if he had already guessed as much. “I’ve got some fortune cookies. You want some?”
She wasn’t hungry, but it was a nice excuse to stay. “Sure. I guess.”
They sat facing the transparent wall of the canopy. By leaning forward just a little, Skye could look down on Deception Well’s equatorial continent. I’ve been there. It was a fact she still found astonishing.
“Here,” Devi said, lifting the lid on a small box covered in gold foil. “Have one. This is the forgiveness collection. I bought it for you.”
The fortune cookies were golden discs arranged in two neat rows. Skye picked one up and turned it over. A message scrolled across the middle in chocolate-brown letters. It proclaimed Obediance never requires forgiveness. She wrinkled her nose and fed it to Jem.
Devi laughed. “Well I haven’t looked at them all yet. Here, try this one.” He handed her another.
She held it, watching the chocolate words scroll past: I’m sorry I got angry … I shouldn’t have walked out on you … Forgive me?
She looked up at him, amazed. “How did you do that?”
A rosy flush underlay Devi’s brown skin. “Trade secret.”
“You had a right to get angry.” She nibbled at the edge of the cookie, while Jem batted the other one around on the pavilion floor.
“No,” Devi said. “It was stupid of me. It’s just that whenever I think about him—you know, my brother—I start to feel like … like maybe I’m not me. Only I’m not doing a very good job of being him either. He could do almost anything.”
“Sez your mom.”
Devi smiled. He threw Jem another cookie.
“Anyway,” Skye said, “we cured Compassion plague. That’s something.”
Devi grunted. “And if we could find those lifeboats, that would be something too.”
Several seconds passed in silence. Then Skye felt a touch against her hand. She looked down, to see Devi’s fingers resting cautiously on her own. “When you were sick,” he said, “I was really scared. I’ve never been that afraid before. I’ve never met anyone like you.”
Skye was in no mood to be impressed with herself. “Crazy and bad-tempered, you mean? With an out-of-control mouth?”
“Sooth. Exactly.” Devi grinned. “And smart and tough too. And pretty.”
His fingers closed around her hand. She felt a flush run through her, happy and fearful at once. She looked up, and it didn’t surprise her at all when his lips touched hers in a tentative kiss. It felt soft and slightly wet, and silly, and essential all at once. It felt demanding too, so that she had to trade a kiss with him a second time, and then a third.
She had never kissed a boy before. It alarmed her, the way that one simple gesture opened doors inside her that she had never dared to look behind. Frightened now, she pulled away. “I don’t think—”
“No. It’s okay.” Devi breathed the words into her ear, sending a delicious shiver running through her. He pulled back a little and turned his head, getting ready to kiss her again.
She stood up abruptly. “I need to think about this.”
He stared up at her, looking confused and a little angry. Then he drew a deep breath and nodded. “I understand. You’re young.”
Indignant now, she put her hands on her hips. “Right. Like you’re an old fart.” Then a new thought occurred to her. “How many girlfriends have you had?”
“One.”
“One?”
“You.”
Her eyes narrowed as she glared down at him. “I’m not your girlfriend.”
He stiffened. He studied her for several seconds, as if trying to see the landscape inside her mind. Then he shrugged. “My mistake. I must have had a vision of our future relationship.”
“That must be it.” She moved a safe distance away before she sat down again. Not really sure why. Her skin felt hungry—that was the only way she could describe it—hungry to be touched by him, but at the same time something around her heart was afraid. There’s time, she thought, and she left it at that, hoping Devi was willing to leave it alone too. For now.
After a minute or so of silence she said, “I’m not ready to give up on finding the lifeboats.”
Devi had been staring down at the cloud patterns over Deception Well’s coastal mountains, 300 kilometers below. Now he turned to her with an expression of surprise. “Of course not. But we aren’t going to get city authority behind us unless we can explain why no other lifeboats have been seen. It really is an interesting question.” He smiled, and she thought that maybe she had been forgiven.
“Let’s start over again,” he suggested. “Take a look at things from the beginning. Tannasen must have filed a detailed report on the discovery of your lifeboat. We need to pull that out of city library. We can go over it in detail, and maybe we’ll turn up some clue suggesting why the lifeboats have been so secretive. Where’s Ord?”
Skye realized she hadn’t seen Ord for quite awhile. She glanced around, then shrugged. “Somewhere … why?”
“Ord could do the library work for us. Hey Ord. Come here.” The little robot did not appear. “Ord?” Devi stood up, then circled the pavilion, scowling into the bushes and frowning at the path. Jem darted playfully around his feet. “Ord!” he called, louder now. “Come here, okay? Ord?”
Still the robot did not show itself. Skye stood up too, alarmed now. When was the last time she’d seen Ord? Sometime before the press conference. She hadn’t thought to look for it, because Ord always tagged after her. It never got lost. She ran a few steps down the path, peering among the lower branches of the trees. “Ord?”
“Maybe it was trapped in the building where you had the press conference,” Devi suggested.
“No way. It would just wait for a door to open, then it would slide out.”
“Maybe it did, but it couldn’t figure out where you’d gone.”
Was that possible?
She tried to remember the last time she’d seen Ord … and a second later, she burst out laughing.
“What?” Devi demanded.
She laughed some more. Then, struggling for breath, she tried to explain. “I warned Ord … to keep out of sight until I said it was okay. It doesn’t usually obey me this well.” Skye knelt on the ground. “Hey Ord, it’s okay. Trouble’s over and it’s safe to come out now.”
The shrubbery rustled. Then Ord slid onto the pavilion. “Skye is not eating right. Cookies are toy food. Come home to eat well, good Skye.”
Skye hardly heard the words. She stared at Ord, wrestling with a sudden, terrifying thought. “Devi? I … I think I’ve figured it out. I think I know what happened to the other lifeboats.”
Chapter 15
Devi held Jem, scratching the dokey behind the ears as Skye explained. “This is what we know about my lifeboat. It was sighted when the solar sail began to grow. The sail was huge, like a metal flag reflecting Kheth’s ligh
t, very easy to see. Tannasen was in command of Spindrift, and immediately he took the research ship to investigate.”
“Sooth,” Devi said. “That’s nothing new.”
“What happened after that?” Skye asked him.
“Tannasen rendezvoused with the lifeboat, and found you.”
“No. It was months before he reached the lifeboat. What happened next was, the solar sail started to shred. It was torn apart when it hit pebbles in the nebula. It was set upon by butterfly gnomes. Suppose the DI in command of the lifeboat mistook that for an attack?”
Devi stared thoughtfully at Ord. “Then it might have warned any other lifeboats behind it to stay quiet … just like you warned Ord.”
Skye nodded. “Their only defense is to go unnoticed.”
“Ord stayed out of sight until you told it everything was okay.”
“Sooth. Maybe the other lifeboats are doing the same thing—staying out of sight until they’re told it’s safe. But the DI on my lifeboat can’t deliver that message because it isn’t active anymore.”
Devi put Jem down. “This is an interesting idea.” He paced back and forth across the pavilion several times, his brow wrinkled in thought. “But something’s missing. The DI must have some way to contact the other lifeboats. It would be senseless to send them into dormancy forever. But how could it send an all-clear signal if it’s dormant too? It doesn’t make sense … unless it’s waiting for something … maybe for some kind of proof that things really are okay before—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, to stare at Skye. “It’s you.”
“What?”
“You’re the proof. It’s waiting for you. Think about it. Ord came only to your voice, not to mine.”
“So … ?”
“Maybe the lifeboat is tuned to your voice as well. It would make sense. If you survived, then the others would stand a good chance too.”
She shook her head. “I was only two! The lifeboat won’t know my voice.”
“Well, maybe it’s not your voice. Maybe it’s just you. Who you are hasn’t changed since Tannasen picked you up. Not at the level of your cells. Not in your DNA.”
“You think my lifeboat would recognize me?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Her mouth went dry. “You aren’t saying we should …”
Devi’s gaze didn’t waver. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. We should make an expedition to your lifeboat, and see how it reacts.”
“You’re crazy. There’s no way to get to the lifeboat. Its parked in the construction zoo. In space. Beyond the end of the elevator column … and the elevator column is tens of thousands of kilometers long. Tours don’t run up the column, Devi. So how could we get out there? Were you thinking we could climb?”
He laughed. “If we did, we’d be old enough to be real people by the time we reached the end.”
“So what do we do?”
He shrugged. “Well if you like, we could ask permission to go up. Maybe city authority will finally get interested … but maybe not. And if they say no, you can bet they’ll start watching us every minute. We got away with our excursion to Deception Well. If we give them any warning, we won’t get away with anything again.”
“So you want to sneak up there,” Skye said softly. “Aboard an elevator car, I guess.” There was no other way. She shook her head in wonderment. “Divine Hand, your mama is wrong. You’re wilder than I am, by exponential powers.”
Skye didn’t see how they could ever find a way to sneak up to the construction zoo. To succeed they would have to slip past city security, stowaway aboard a restricted elevator car, and ride it all the way to the top of the elevator column without being detected. The journey would take days, and once there …
They would have to sneak off the elevator car, and somehow make their way to the construction zoo, where a great ship was being slowly assembled.
The construction zoo was not really a place. It was more like a gathering of parts and materials and pieces of the evolving great ship, along with the tentacled construction beasts known as lydras, a worker’s habitat, and the lifeboat—all of it in orbit beyond the end of the elevator column. The trouble was, the zoo orbited at its own speed, and that was much slower than the speed at which the elevator column turned with the planet. So sometimes the zoo might be just a few kilometers away from the column’s end, but at other times it might be ninety thousand kilometers away, on the other side of the world.
Whenever Skye asked Devi how they were going to get around all that, he just shrugged and said, “We’ll work something out.”
They spent the afternoon in the city library, going over every report ever filed on the lifeboat, learning as much as they could about its structure and capabilities. Tannasen’s reports were not nearly as exciting as Skye expected. Mostly, they recorded position information, spectral analyses, radar profiles, communications attempts … she almost nodded off more than once.
Then she found Tannasen’s personal journal. On the day the lifeboat was opened he had written, We have found a healthy baby girl. Nameless. Parentless. It is impossible to look on her sleeping face without wondering why. Why is she here? What miracle let her be found? We may never know.
There were also reports from the team of scientists who had examined the lifeboat after it was brought to Silk, and from a couple of researchers who had investigated it again during the intervening years.
By the end of the day they had uncovered two interesting facts.
First, the lifeboat was not the inert piece of abandoned equipment Skye had envisioned. Its life support system still functioned, so that even after twelve years in the construction zoo with no passenger to care for, it continued to maintain a livable habitat inside the pod. Even more intriguing, a researcher who had visited the lifeboat several years ago reported a surge of activity in the air filtration system during the first few minutes she was in the pod.
“That would make sense,” Devi said, “if the lifeboat was trying to identify her. It could pull a few loose cells through the air filter, analyze them, and know whether or not this visitor was you.”
The second interesting fact was that Tannasen and Spindrift were due to return to the city in only nine days. Devi’s eyes sparkled at this news. Skye could guess why: “An elevator will be going up the column to carry supplies to the ship.”
“Sooth,” Devi said. “And we’ll need to be on it.”
Skye tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Devi? I think I’m getting an idea.”
Skye’s plan required Zia’s help. That was a problem, because Skye didn’t want to drag Zia into another mess. “Let her make up her own mind,” Devi urged. “None of us are in this for the fun of it, Skye. What we’re doing really matters.”
So she set it up with Zia to meet them by the soccer fields in Splendid Peace Park. It was evening, and the clear canopy that enclosed Silk was pumping sunset colors over the city’s slopes. The rosy light was reflected in the windows of the towering apartment complex of Old Guard heights. Festival guns atop the heights fired pellets into the air that burst open into brilliant streamers that dissolved as they fell to ground, releasing delicious, tantalizing scents.
Skye and Devi wandered past the crowds of spectators gathering for the evening game, to an isolated stretch of lawn. Skye laid out a picnic blanket while Devi opened a basket of take-out food. Ord slipped out of it, melting around the edge of the basket.
Zia showed up a few minutes later. “So you two made up?”
Skye smiled. She was sitting cross-legged on the blanket. Devi was lying down beside her, watching the changing colors of the canopy. “For the moment anyway,” Devi said.
Zia nodded. “I didn’t think it would take long. So where’s Buyu?”
Skye’s smile faded. She exchanged a guilty look with Devi, while Zia’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell him? Skye! He was really worried about you today.”
Neither of them answered.
It didn’t t
ake Zia long to draw a conclusion. “Skye! You traitor. You’re up to something, aren’t you?” She glared at Devi. “You and the boy stargazer.”
“Zia!”
Devi spluttered, trying to hide a laugh.
Zia wasn’t amused. She cocked her head back, staring down the length of her nose at him. She looked ready to take someone apart. “What’s going on, Skye? Tell me everything. Right now.”
“Tell her,” Devi urged. “Let her make up her own mind.”
“Zia, you could get in trouble!”
“I’ve been in trouble! Sometimes it’s worth it. But I hate it when people make decisions for me. Especially when they do it ‘for my own good.’”
Skye nodded guiltily. “Sorry.”
So. Nothing else to do now but talk. Zia would not shut up about it until she had the full story. “We need your help—”
“Wait,” Zia said, holding up a hand. “Ord!”
The little robot peeped cautiously around the corner of the picnic basket, one tentacle winding around the handle like a vine.
Zia said, “Ord, order a message bee for me. Send it to Buyu. Tell him to meet us here.”
“Message bee sent,” Ord assured her, then it ducked out of sight again.
“All right, Skye. You were saying … ?”
“I was about to say that we need your help getting into the lydra house.”
Zia’s face relaxed a little. She sat down on the blanket, looking thoughtful. “Now why would you want to do that?”
Chapter 16
Lydras were artificial animals, designed to work in the zero-gravity environment of the construction zoo where the great ship was being assembled. They ranged from pocket-sized midgets to huge, tentacled construction beasts. Farmers like Zia’s dad raised lydras in water tanks in the industrial levels beneath the city. Skye was interested in them, because a cargo of freshly grown lydras was sure to be sent up to the construction zoo every time an elevator car made the run.
“We don’t all need to go,” Skye said as she pushed one of Ord’s tentacles out of her face.