by Linda Nagata
“No one else has plague. Eat.”
“I’m dying?”
“We don’t know that yet. Eat.”
“Arif.” She squinted against the glare of a lantern, searching for his nightmare face amongst the crowd that squatted around her.
“Here.” He touched her elbow.
She twisted around to face him. “Free me,” she whispered. She reached up to brush her fingertips against the hilt of the knife he carried strapped across his chest. “Don’t waste the clan’s food on me.”
His clown’s mouth fell open. He shook his head, but at the same time he started to reach for the blade.
The Chinese doctor batted his hand away. “No!” he barked. “You kidnapped me. You dismantled my office and brought it down here. Now it’s my turn! I want to find out which plague’s infected her—then we’ll consider the knife.”
He turned to the children behind him and began snapping orders. A flat blue-gray box was handed to him. He opened it, revealing a glass window flooded with tiny amber symbols. Phousita recognized some of them. She’d been to Zeke Choy’s shop many times. He’d shown her this computer before; taught her the names of the letters. He placed the device carefully on the ground, then accepted a small satchel from one of the onlookers. He opened it, examined the contents, set it aside, then looked around for the third and final item. A small sky-blue case was passed into his hands. He set it on the ground, then opened it carefully. On one side was a tiny keyboard and a black-on-gray display. On the other a glass window shielded what seemed like a thousand slender tubes, some containing colored liquids, some clear. The clan muttered in admiration. The Chinese doctor was a sorcerer of wide renown; still, to think he could command so many spells. . . .
Zeke Choy scowled at his audience. “Damn superstitious fools,” he muttered.
Phousita looked up as someone nudged her elbow. Arif. He smiled at her—a manic expression given the exaggerated features of his face. She knew it was meant to be reassuring. He helped her to sit up. She was weak, hardly able to support her own weight. Her head felt muzzy, and hunger still raged in her belly. But she tried to put her discomforts aside, so that she could attend to the doctor as he began the rite.
From the satchel he removed a tiny glass rod and a piece of paper. The paper opened to reveal a lancet. Phousita was familiar with this procedure. She’d performed it herself on plague victims who’d been too ill or unstable to journey to Zeke Choy’s shop. She turned her hand palm up. The doctor took it, lanced a finger and used the glass rod to capture a bit of her blood. He would use the blood to divine the nature of her affliction. If it were an old plague, perhaps he could cure it. If not. . . .
She watched him insert the glass rod into a small hole in the face of the computer. The onlookers muttered encouragement and whispers of hope. He was a great sorcerer. Everyone knew it, though the doctor himself would always insist it was not so.
A chime sang. Phousita shivered as a sense of fatalism settled over her. She was old, nearly twenty-five—even Arif was her junior. Most members of the clan didn’t live beyond fifteen.
Many times she’d imagined this moment, played out in her mind the feelings and fears that would haunt her in this inevitable time when she would finally face the reality of her own death after having witnessed the deaths of so many others. Her heart raced in a thready beat but she kept silent as Zeke Choy studied the pattern of letters on his computer screen.
He seemed puzzled. His brow knit, his scowl deepened. Phousita felt a cold sweat break out across her face. A wave of dizziness took her and she sagged against Arif, who held her tight. A wail of mourning arose from the gathered clan.
The doctor looked up in irritation, his thin hand chopping the air. “Stop it! Stop it, will you? It’s nothing!”
The wail cut off abruptly.
“Nothing?” Sumiati asked, her round face confused in the lantern light.
“Damn vultures,” the doctor muttered. A curse, but the meaning was unclear.
“Tuan,” Phousita asked timidly. “It is not plague?”
“No, no, of course not,” he growled. “The poor sap you found in the river must have been a civilized gent. He hit you with a registered defensive toxin, that’s all. He was probably from the EC. The fatal toxins are illegal there. This drug was designed to knock an attacker down fast and keep him under until the police arrived.”
“The Commonwealth Police?” Arif demanded, his fist closing tightly on Phousita’s arm. Sumiati moaned in fear.
The doctor snorted. “No, the municipal police,” he said. “Crimes of assault are prosecuted in the EC.”
Phousita didn’t know what he was talking about, yet she sensed the words were a veil, intended to hide a more significant discovery. Apparently Arif suspected too.
“There’s more,” he hissed, deliberately omitting the polite address tuan. “You’ve found another curse in her blood. What is it?”
“Nothing!” the doctor barked. “Give her a decent meal and she’ll be fine. Phousita!” Phousita looked up, startled. “You’re the shaman here. Now that your wayang goon has dragged me halfway across the city, I might as well get some work done. Who needs medical attention?”
Over the next hour he saw five children as well as Sumiati, then he shared dinner with the clan. From time to time during the meal he glanced at Phousita, his gaze searching. But he said nothing, and despite the return of her strength, she began to grow afraid, certain now that he hid something from her.
At the end of the meal, he announced his intention to call for a cab to take him home. “You hauled me on foot across the city, but I’ve no intention of walking back.” He retrieved the computer, opened it, and tapped thoughtfully at the keys. “Where are we?” he asked after a moment, looking up at Arif.
Arif shrugged disdainfully. “There is no address here.”
“The street, man! What is the name of the street?”
“Riverside. That’s all.”
The doctor muttered angrily under his breath, while tapping quickly at the keys. He seemed to find the results satisfactory, because his scowl softened as he sat back on his heels. “They know the place. I’ll wait on the street.”
“It’s not safe to wait on the street,” Phousita said quickly. Arif started to argue with her—of course his Knives would be watching—but she silenced him with a look. “I’ll wait with you. No one will trouble you if they see me there.”
“You’ve got a dangerous reputation, eh?”
She bowed her head, mortified. “The street people here know I belong to Arif.”
“Ah.” He gathered up his bags and she hurried to assist him, but he wouldn’t accept her help. The clan bowed deeply as he turned to go. Remembering his manners at the last, he turned back and executed a peremptory bow, then left by the room’s only door. “Phousita!” he bellowed, when he discovered himself blind in the lightless passage.
Arif stood beside the door, an evil grin on his face. He dropped a flashlight into Phousita’s hand as she hurried past him. She squeezed the tube and the darkness in the corridor scurried away.
“That’s better,” the Chinese doctor sniffed. “I thought for a minute I’d have to feel my way out.”
She led him in silence to the front of the building, past the guards and onto the street.
The wayside was crowded with hovels—pitiful shelters made of woven mats, cardboard, and plastic sheets. The street was slick with rain. A baby fussed nearby, and someone sang in a deep, guttural hill tongue. “Ah, there’s the cab,” Zeke Choy said, seeing a light approaching in the distance.
“We’re alone now,” Phousita said. “Please tell me what else you divined in my blood.”
The doctor looked suddenly uncomfortable. “That’s the trouble,” he said softly. “I can’t tell you. I don’t know what it is.”
“But the computer—”
“I try to keep the database accurate, but new plague appears all the time. You know that.”
Her heart thundered. “Then it is a plague.”
He shook his head. “Phousita, I don’t know what it is. But I’ll find out; I’ve still got the sample. In the meantime, well. . . .” He shrugged.
The light of the cab drew nearer. He raised his satchel to gain the driver’s attention. But he jerked his hand back down as a woman screamed in terror from a nearby alley. Immediately, the street village was plunged into silence.
Phousita grabbed the doctor’s elbow and drew him backward until they were pressed against the door of the warehouse. “What is it?” he hissed. She shook her head, uncertain. The street was dark. Gas fires, stars, a few scattered flashlights: in the diffuse light she could make out the thoroughfare and the village that crowded the wayside, but she saw nothing that would—
She caught her breath as two great beasts trotted into view from the alley. They paused for a moment in the center of the thoroughfare, their armored heads swinging slowly back and forth as their nostrils tested the air. She could hear them snuffling. “Police dogs,” Zeke Choy muttered. He said it like a curse.
Phousita stood very still, wondering whom the dogs sought tonight. They were the servants of the Commonwealth Police. Their massive heads reached as high as a man’s shoulder. Phousita had seen one crush a woman’s skull in a single bite.
The dogs trotted slowly down the street, pausing now and then at a rickety shelter to lower their heads and examine visually the cowering inhabitants. In the harsh headlights of the approaching cab, their armored skulls glinted purest silver.
“Bloody useless corruption of science,” the Chinese doctor muttered.
The lead dog stopped at the sound—a great black beast with mottled brown patches in its fur. Its eyes seemed to be made of glass laid over a gaping black abyss. It approached.
Phousita felt her heart begin to thud. She pressed herself against the door, guided by some instinct that insisted against all reason that maybe, maybe, she could make herself invisible. She dearly wanted to be invisible.
Zeke Choy though, seemed unconcerned. He stood quietly as the dog sniffed him, its sensitive nostrils carefully examining his hands, his clothes, the bags he carried. “Nothing illegal there, you fascist, imperialist pigs,” he muttered. “Every molecule is licensed and registered.”
Phousita stared at him, dumbstruck. She didn’t understand what he’d said, but she was used to that. But who had he said it to? The dog? And did he expect the animal to reply? He was a great sorcerer, yet. . . . She looked at the animal. But it made no attempt to speak. Instead it turned its attention on her, its great, hot breath whooshing across her skin. Its companion joined it, standing back a few paces, examining her with its soulless eyes.
“Leave her alone,” the doctor growled. “She’s nothing to do with you.”
Did the dogs obey him? They backed off, still sniffing suspiciously as if they were unsure of what they’d found. But finally they moved off, continuing their search farther down the street.
“They’ve no business here, no jurisdiction,” Zeke Choy said. He looked at Phousita. “Don’t let them scare you. The Commonwealth isn’t interested in people like you and me.”
Phousita had never imagined herself as a peer of the doctor. But she bowed her head and nodded.
The cab had stopped a few meters down the road. It pulled up now and Zeke Choy threw his bags in the open door. “Come to my shop in a few days. I’ll examine you again. And don’t worry . . . there won’t be a fee.”
She started to object, but he shook his head and ordered the cab on. Phousita ducked inside the shelter of the old warehouse as soon as he was out of sight.
Chapter
4
“You were with her again, weren’t you?”
Nikko started at the unexpected voice. His gaze shifted from the dark eye of the camera lens to the door of his apartment. It had opened, admitting his father.
Wordlessly, he turned back to the camera. The four-centimeter lens floated on the end of a tentacle. The tentacle sprouted from a data-storage plate lying beside him on the couch amidst a jumble of straps that would allow him to wear the camera as a backpack. Guided by a Dull Intelligence, the camera had turned, recording an image of Fox.
“Why do you continue to visit her, Nikko?”
Nikko’s ghost had left Kirstin and come home to Summer House nearly an hour ago. He’d absorbed its impassioned memories, and now he was involved in dictating them into the camera’s database. For the past several weeks he’d been assembling a documentary exploring his struggle against his own preprogrammed death. He felt it to be the most important piece of work he’d ever done. He did not like to admit, even to himself, that it would probably be his last.
He held up his hands, so that Fox couldn’t overlook their ugly twitching and trembling. At this level of Summer House the spin-generated pseudogravity was nearly two-thirds Earth normal, and his shaking hands reflected the strain. “Kirstin’s star material,” he said, staring into the faithful lens of the attentive camera. Sarcasm put a bitter edge on his voice. “What better way to get people to watch a documentary detailing my state-sanctioned murder than by including the antics of the ever-popular Chief of Police? Her involvement guarantees the biggest audience any treatise of mine has ever enjoyed.”
“You won’t hurt her,” Fox said. “She’ll deny everything. She always does.”
The tentacle swung around, tracking Fox’s part in the debate. The image it recorded was of a tall, pale man with a head of thinning red hair and a system-wide reputation in molecular design. Oddly for a designer who specialized in physiological applications, he actually looked well aged—near sixty on a physiological scale, though his chronological age was even more—ninety-seven, according to the records. Fox would claim he preferred the dignity of obvious maturity. Nikko figured it was just another act of penance on the part of a guilt-ridden father, but on the subject of Fox and Fox alone Nikko kept any such acerbic opinions to himself.
“You’re wasting your time with her, Nikko. She’s using you. She’ll never grant you a reprieve, no matter what you do for her.”
“I know it, Fox.” Nikko felt this truth as a knot deep in his gut. To ease his own tension, he asked, half jokingly, “I don’t suppose you’ve added a new Maker to your bag of tricks lately? Something that might help her change her mind?”
It was the wrong thing to say. Despite Nikko’s unique beginnings in his father’s lab, Fox had proved to be a typical parent, given to self-doubts and worry over his own role as a father. He’d spent much of the last thirty years tormenting himself over the wording of the research permit. And now Nikko had inadvertently given him a chance to indulge in another round of guilt. “Nikko, you know what my behavioral Makers will do. If I had one that good, I would have used it by now.”
“Huh.” His kisheer trembled briefly about his shoulders. “You could make one that good. But you won’t.”
To Nikko’s mind, that was the wound that lay between them—not the damned research permit. Fox was Summer House and Summer House had made its reputation on marginal-tolerance Makers: those programmable molecular machines that came questionably close to modifying human, environmental, or artificial intelligence systems beyond the limits imposed by Commonwealth law. But the law was an artificial constraint. Its restrictions had created a seething, boiling frontier of creative energy, crushed between the successes of the past and the limited present. It was an unstable situation, ripe for provocation. . . . But Fox had always refused to cross the line.
“Camera off.” The tentacle sank down against the storage plate, while Nikko’s tremulous fingers hammered against his thigh in an angry, staccato beat. “You really want to help me, Fox? Then design a Reaper Maker that can reach Kirstin. Let me take her down before I go under.”
Fox gave him a look of open contempt. “You want me to risk the security of the House for a simple revenge killing?”
“Gotta start somewhere.” His kisheer rippled like an angry cat’s tail. �
��You’ve been playing it safe too long.”
The Commonwealth had been created to keep people safe from the new technologies, to protect them from themselves and from one another. Its creation hadn’t ended the existence of the old nations of Earth. The EC, California, the Atlantic Seaboard Union, Australia, Japan, and hundreds of other countries were still functioning political entities, with their own laws and their own customs. But like the newer Celestial Cities, they’d ceded some of their sovereign rights to the Commonwealth. They’d all agreed that biological and technological law would be determined by a Commonwealth judiciary, with severe penalties for any transgression.
Not every country on Earth had joined the Commonwealth. Many had retained a paper independence, for reasons of nationalism or because of religious ethics. But even in these backward countries Commonwealth law was enforced, by specific agreement if possible, but if not, then by espionage. For no independent body could be allowed to develop technology surpassing that of the Commonwealth, or the police would become helpless and the Commonwealth would crumble overnight.
Perhaps the effort to control technological change had been laudable in the early days. But to Nikko’s mind it had gone on too long, imposing too many rules, too many restrictions, too many limits in what could be a limitless world. Why designate the present human form as the end result of evolution when there were so many other possibilities? Nikko dreamed of the day when he could blow it all wide open.
“We can’t win by defying the police,” Fox told him. “You’ve got to stop thinking like a child.”
“I don’t want to defy the police. I want to break the Commonwealth.”
“I want it too! You know that. And it will happen. But the time’s not right.”
“The time?” Nikko’s kisheer moved across his face like a mask, its tendrils starting to fuse with his skin and the soft tissue of his mouth and nose. He yanked his head back. With a mental effort, he forced the kisheer down. “There won’t be any other time for me, Dad. I’ve done all I can. You’ve done all you’re willing to do. Nothing left now but to close up accounts.” He fought to calm the trembling kisheer, hating it for all that it revealed about him.