by Judith Tarr
The persona lifted it out of the box. It had a hole through it, as a bead should. One like it hung around the persona’s neck.
As far as Meru could tell, the two beads were identical, except that the one from the box was older. Much older.
It lay in the persona’s trembling palm. Short pale fingers closed over it. Guilt rose and crested. This was stealing. And yet—if it did what it was supposed to, if it could help—
“Meru.”
Vekaa’s voice wrenched her out of the game. That was all the more shocking because it should not have happened. A person had to log out and shut down in order to leave a game, even when someone pinged from outside. This was like being roused abruptly from a dream.
Meru lay on the floor of the cell, blinking at her uncle. She must have fallen asleep. Of course she would dream of the web, since for the first time in her life she was cut off from it.
The dream refused to let go. She stared at Vekaa through it, sitting up groggily. While she dreamed or played the game or whatever she had done, memory of her mother had slipped away. Vekaa’s face brought it back.
He looked as empty as she felt. It was not kind of her, but she was glad. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for everything I’ve done to you and everything I’m going to have to do. I can’t let you out of this building and I can’t let you go home. I can’t even send someone to keep you company. But I can move you to a more comfortable room.”
Meru reached for the web instinctively, and flinched when she met the wall. Yoshi’s link was still there, but it seemed even thinner than before. She dared not send any data down it, or hope to get anything back.
She had to ask Vekaa a question that no one asked any more, because the answer was instant, woven into on the web: “How long has it been?”
“It’s morning,” he said. “You’ve been here all night. I’m sorry for that, too. Once the disease is fully contained, we can unlock the web, but until then—”
“You don’t want to panic people,” Meru said. “I understand. Can you at least tell me when you think it will be over? It must be contained by now, or nearly.”
His face tightened. “It’s been…unusually resistant.”
“I’m not sick,” Meru said. “I was decontaminated. You’re in here with me, so I mustn’t be a risk of infection. If I swear not to tell anyone what’s happening, even—even what happened to Jian, will you let me go home?”
She got that out without breaking down. She was proud of herself.
Vekaa had gone stiff. His voice when he spoke was cold, as if they were strangers. “We can’t do that. We’re all on lockdown until we know what it is and how it mutates. We’re not even sure that once everything is decontaminated, it won’t come back.”
Meru knew why he did that. He belonged to Consensus, and Consensus had to make its decisions for everyone, not just for one person. He must be hurting terribly inside.
But it hurt her, too. “I understand,” she said. “I do. But—”
“Then you understand that we have to consider all the possibilities,” Vekaa said. He held out his hand. “I promise I won’t let them keep you for one moment longer than they absolutely have to.”
Meru let him pull her to her feet. He would have held on, maybe to comfort her, maybe himself, but she slipped free.
She heard his faint sigh. Meru had always been prickly and fiercely independent. Neither was a virtue.
She got both from her mother. A wave of grief struck her, so strong she could hardly stand up.
She stiffened her knees and made her face as still as she could. Vekaa had not seen: he had stepped outside the cell and stood waiting for her to follow.
She braced as she passed the doorway, but the field was down. It was kind of Vekaa to trust her, and not surround her with Guards.
Vekaa knew as well as she did that there was no way out of here, unless the starwing could find one. At the moment Meru was not ready to ask. She wanted to escape, but she needed to know more.
There were things Vekaa was not saying. If she stayed, she might learn what they were.
Curiosity was a starpilot’s virtue, if not an Earthling’s. It also gave Meru something focus on. She followed her uncle out of the cells into a physical space so much like the web that she stopped, caught off balance.
The web was still out of her reach. But the heart of Containment was its own network of interlocking data streams. Where the web was all internal, this was actually visible: a enormous sphere interlaced with the glimmering ribbons of walkways, through which people moved, tracking the streams of data that were there already and building new ones with speed and skill that told her just how serious this crisis was.
Plagues and epidemics had always seemed remote to her, like stories of things that happened offworld, to other people. Meru studied them because her mother did, and because she was going to live off Earth; she had to know what they were like. But she never really, deeply felt any of them. She was sad, she pitied the people who were sick or died, then another tragedy swam up through the data streams and she forgot about it.
This was happening to Meru. It was real and strong and immediate. It had killed her mother.
Vekaa had stopped walking along the ribbon that led up from the cells to the center of the sphere, and turned to face her. Someone else had come from above to stand beside him, a woman Meru had never met but knew well from the web.
Her name was Lyra. She was a Decider. When decisions had to be made on Earth, Lyra was one of those who made them.
If she was here, this was more than serious. Meru could think of nothing to say, could only stand and stare.
Lyra smiled, which did not put Meru at ease at all. “We are most sorry for your loss,” she said. She sounded as if she meant it, though she moved on quickly, as if her duty was done and now she could get back to what really concerned her. “We hope you don’t mind that I’ve ordered breakfast for us.”
It would have made no difference if Meru had minded. She made herself nod and say something suitably grateful. Her stomach had clenched and would not let go.
Breakfast waited on the edge of the sphere, high up on the side opposite the cells, in a bubble that seemed to float under the sea. Bright fish swam all around it; now and then through the watery silence came the song of a whale.
This was meant to be a refuge, an island of peace. Meru had no peace in her. She did not think she ever would again.
In spite of everything, she was ravenously hungry. She only realized that the others were barely picking at their food as she reached for the third kelp roll. They were waiting for her to finish eating.
She set the roll down uneaten and folded her hands in her lap. The knot in her stomach had come back; the food she had gulped down only made it worse.
Lyra glanced at Vekaa and nodded slightly. He closed his eyes, then opened them, and reached under the table, drawing out a package wrapped in shimmering fabric. He slid it across the table toward Meru.
She made no move to take it. “What is this?”
“Your mother left it,” he said. “It’s keyed to you.”
Her hands twitched, but she held them still. She could see the seal on the package, with another over it, declaring it decontaminated.
She was not afraid of catching the plague. Something else made her hesitate. Both of the others were trying hard to seem calm, but the tension was so strong she could taste it.
“We believe,” Lyra said when it was clear that Meru was not going to move, “that your mother knew something of what was happening here. She broke off an expedition that had been years in the planning, talked her way onto the first ship that would take her within jump distance of this system, and came on-world under diplomatic cover. She left no records, no clues as to why—only this.”
Meru would not be angry. She would not. “My mother was an interstellar spy?”
Vekaa bit his lip. Meru could not tell whether he wanted to laugh or cry.
Lyra was in better c
ontrol of herself. Of course she would be. Jian had been nothing to her but a name.
That made Meru angry, too, but not so angry that she missed what Lyra was saying. “We don’t think she was a spy,” the Decider said. “Some of what she did might have skirted the edges of local authority, but she was always careful to stay on the side of the law. She was following the path of a particular colonial expansion, outward from Earth to worlds that were uninhabited when the colonists came to them.”
“Some of those worlds had had intelligent life,” said Vekaa, “but it was long gone.”
“Plague?” Meru asked.
He nodded. He was steadier now that he could be a scientist and not a brother. “That was her specialty, after all: the effect of epidemics on starfaring cultures. We’re looking for patterns in the research she did, but so far we haven’t found any that would lead her to Earth. Maybe she left something in that package.”
Meru understood his meaning perfectly. If it was keyed to her, nothing and no one else could open it.
They were desperate for answers. So was she. But she was—not afraid, no, but uncertain. What if the answer was something none of them could bear to know?
People were dying. Jian was dead. What could be worse than that?
Slowly Meru drew the package toward her. She took a deep breath and tried not to shake. When she touched the seal, the wrapping folded back. Inside was a packet in a crackly brownish wrapper, with words written on it in ancient ink: This is the key.
Something was rolled up inside, tumbling out onto the table. Meru stared blankly at the thing her mother had left her.
It was a stasis field; it contained a withered flower and a blue bead. She had seen a bead exactly like it, and held it in her hand, during the game that she had thought was a dream.
Chapter 13
I had the scarab in my hand. I could put it back and walk away and avoid stealing it, and keep out of trouble. I could just sit there and let the world spin down the drain, too, taking everybody with it.
Or I could borrow it. All right, steal it, but I’d put it back when I was done. There were so many in that box, and hundreds more in storage. What difference did it make if one went somewhere else for a while?
I wrapped it in the napkin I’d brought and shoved it in my pocket. Then I got out of there.
I’d never done anything like that in my life. I could feel it in there, as if it was literally hot. Any minute I expected alarms to go off and buzzers to buzz and Aunt Jessie to leap out of a cupboard chanting Thief! Thief! Thief!
The silence was almost worse. Somehow, before it broke and I got busted, I had to figure out how to get to the marketplace, bazaar, whatever they called it.
People would expect me to want to play tourist, at least I hoped so. I also hoped they wouldn’t ask too many questions about what I wanted to buy.
Some of it maybe wasn’t legal. Then there was the question I really needed to ask. Does magic work if you don’t believe in it?
I was afraid I already knew the answer to that.
Everything’s on the internet somewhere, and normally that’s the first place I would have gone to look. But artifact storage was right above the library, and I was going by the door when the questions started crowding in. Instead of diving for my room and my computer, I went really old school. Ancient. I dived for the books.
So many of them were in languages I didn’t know. The ones that were in English were all tangled up in their own words. I was ready to give up and head for the beautiful, simple, searchable internet when I found the box at the end of the shelf.
The label on it was typed, and so old it had gone yellow and started to peel. All it said was, Misc. Notes on Magical Texts.
Why not? I thought, pulling it out and lugging it to the table I’d staked out at the end of the aisle under the window.
The box was full of hand-written notes. There were sheets of hieroglyphs, drawn and painted with care that must have taken hours, and then there were the translations. They were scribbled and crossed out and rewritten all over the place, but they surprised me by being easy to read. Whoever wrote them—I couldn’t find a name anywhere—had round, clear handwriting. It was as careful, in its way, as the hieroglyphs.
Nobody writes like that any more. I was glad this person had, whoever he or she was, because when I started to piece it together, I realized what I was reading. It was Meritre’s book of magic.
I don’t believe in coincidences, either. My hands shook when I spread the pages across the table.
There it was, the spell Meritre was going to—had intended to—must have gone ahead and worked.
This time-traveling thing was making my head ache.
There it was, anyway. It was a recipe for wiping out evil. It called for a crocodile’s egg, crushed beetles’ wings, a jug of beer, and the dung of a white cow.
I pulled out my phone and took a picture of the translation. Then I took a picture of the original. And after that I snapped bits of the rest, more or less at random, until I stopped short.
“This is stupid,” I said.
I’d been thinking about how to make the spell work. Egypt isn’t ancient any more. Food has changed, though not as much as you might think. Spells might change, too.
I could get an egg, though it probably wouldn’t be a crocodile’s. Beetles were all over the place. Beer, no problem, though I’d have to sneak it out of the kitchen. The cow…well…
It was stupid. All the spell did was make the world’s worst plate of scrambled eggs.
I shuffled the papers together and dropped them back in the box. Just after it slid into its place on the shelf, Aunt Jessie opened the library door and squinted down the aisle. “Meredith, is that you?”
“Coming,” I said. “Sorry, did you lose me? I just couldn’t resist—”
“Of course you couldn’t.”
I held my breath, but it seemed I didn’t have either Thief or Liar painted on my forehead.
Aunt Jessie wasn’t really looking at me. She had an odd expression on her face. “You have visitors,” she said.
Now that was odd. Who in the world…?
Who’s the world traveler in the family?
Dad was waiting for me in the lounge outside the dining commons. It had a lot of leather chairs and couches and bookshelves full of anything and everything, a piano that Jonathan had told me belonged to Howard Carter—the man himself, the one who found King Tut’s tomb—and a television set so old it didn’t even have a remote, and a sound system so new I wasn’t sure if some of its components had been invented yet.
I wasn’t at all surprised to find Dad fiddling with the sound system. He had it playing a funky mix of Beatles songs, which was a totally Dad thing to do.
I love my Dad. When he can be bothered to be around, he’s more fun than anybody I know. He’s been everywhere and done everything, and there isn’t anything he isn’t interested in.
Mom used to be like him, everybody tells me. By the time Dad bought the sailing schooner and started running charter cruises out of Key West, I’d come along and Mom was ’way over her experimental phase. She bought the house on the mainland and joined the law firm, and Dad stopped by in between cruises.
The visits got further and further apart. By the time I taught myself to read, one of the first things I figured out was a postcard from Dad from the Bering Sea. He’d signed on for a season on a crab boat, then he was headed to Mongolia to run a trekking company. Ponies on the steppe, nights in a yurt—every horse kid’s dream.
That’s how I got into horses. I was determined to learn to ride and then go and help Dad with his company. Dad moved on; he always did. I stayed with the horses, and Florida, and Mom.
The last I heard, he was in India doing something high-tech. Or training elephants; his messages weren’t too clear. Now here he was in Luxor, looking just the same as always, long and tall and sunburned.
He didn’t have a beard this round, and he’d cut his hair. I liked him
that way. His bright blue eyes hadn’t changed even slightly, or the wide white grin. He picked me up and hugged me so tight my ribs creaked.
I was getting old for that, but just before I started to go stiff, he put me down. “Fancy meeting you here,” he said.
“That was my line,” I said. “What are you doing here? Aren’t you supposed to be in an ashram or something?”
“That was last year.” I couldn’t tell if he was laughing at me or not. “I just got off a Greenpeace cruise in the Indian Ocean. Since I was so close, relatively speaking, I thought I’d stop by and see how you’re doing.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. Dad would think like that, for sure, but he never had just one thing going on.
“If you’re not too tired,” he said, “I’d like to take you to dinner. You up for it?”
I glanced at Aunt Jessie. She wouldn’t hesitate to tell either of us if she thought he was full of it, but she spread her hands. “Up to you,” she said.
I was tired and jetlagged and I had more on my mind than a sane person ought to have, but if Dad was up to something, I wanted to know it now instead of days or weeks from now. “All right,” I said. “I’ll go get changed.”
Trust Dad to stay in a hotel that looked as if you’d find Indiana Jones in the next room, or the kind of lady archaeologist who’d stow a sword inside her parasol. It had actual, modern air conditioning, but the big ceiling fans were still there and still turning, and the dining room was full of potted palms and people in khaki. There was at least one busload of German tourists, and the British accents were out in force.
The waiter was a disappointment. They wear the same uniform in Florida, white shirt and black pants. The fact he was drop-dead cute about halfway made up for it.
The table he took us to had someone sitting at it. She was tall and narrow like Dad, with short blonde hair and serious cheekbones.
I’d kill for those cheekbones. I could see her in a long white dress and a parasol, though what she had on was a light green sundress and clunky sandals.