by Linda Nagata
“It’s so beautiful,” she whispered. She glanced shyly at Nikko. The ghost had said very little since they’d started this journey on the Imperial Highway.
She’d heard of the Highway all her life, never understanding it. The Imperial Highway: a legend, a story, so she’d thought, like the tales the old woman had spun to keep her from crying on dark, hungry nights long, long ago. Yet here she was, a passenger in a building that rose higher and higher, climbing a magical thread stretched taut between the sky and the world.
She and Nikko were safely ensconced in a private room with two huge beds, a kitchen, and a TV. To Phousita it seemed both grand and alien. But it was only one room among a hundred, on an elevator car the size of a multistoried building.
Nikko sat cross-legged on the carpet, gazing out the window-wall. He’d taken off his woman’s clothes. He was shirtless, dressed in close-fitting pants, the camera pack strapped around his shoulders . . . Arif’s shoulders. Its glass eye gazed at her.
The ghost had been afraid when they’d passed through the police Gate in the port city. The terminal had been very crowded. The Gate had scanned their new ID chips and surveyed them for illegal substances. Nikko said that sometimes the police took days to analyze the scans. They wouldn’t know for sure if they’d made it through until they’d passed the second Gate at the top of the Highway. But for now they could relax.
Phousita walked over to one of the beds and sat down on it tentatively. It was plush and so comfortable, but the associations it stirred in her mind were not pleasant. A sense of entrapment closed around her. She left the bed and returned to the window, stretching out on the carpet beside Nikko. His violet eyes shifted to gaze at her. Arif’s mind-numbing fear pulsed in her consciousness.
She was beginning to understand the slave atrium. In her mind, she was comparing it to the atrium of Zeke Choy. She’d found that she could recall the structure of Zeke’s atrium in detail, though the last time she’d been with him in his shop, she hadn’t been aware of its existence. One of her spirit servants must have learned the device and brought its secrets to her.
Nikko seemed unaware of her efforts.
Her gaze roved out across the world again. “In the Spill they say that if you lead a good and generous life, when you die your soul will ride the Highway up to Heaven.”
Nikko was silent for a moment. Then: “I think I’ve died. Marevic won’t tell me of course, but I think it’s really happened.”
It was two and a half days later when they finally approached Castle. Up and down had reversed during the journey, and the car had actually turned over to compensate for this, so that they seemed to be descending rather than rising, sliding down toward a mountainous temple of white stone, its slopes studded with intricate towers divided by winding parks that made Phousita think of green, flowing rivers of vegetation. A transparent bubble enclosed the city. The elevator car slipped into it. The window clouded white. Seconds later they were on the other side, dropping down amidst the city towers toward a terminus at the center of a huge, circular plaza roofed with the woven branches of living trees. She could see people beneath the pleached canopy.
The elevator settled imperceptibly to rest. Phousita jiggled experimentally. Through the journey she’d felt increasingly light upon her feet, at one time even drifting off the floor. She still felt as if her arms and legs were winged by invisible fairies that tried to carry her into the ceiling with every step; as if her material substance had declined, and she had become more spirit than mass, a being caught part way on the journey between Earth and Heaven.
The room’s voice warned that they had one half hour to exit the elevator car before it was shifted onto an Earth-bound track where it would receive passengers for the return journey.
Curtly, Nikko told Phousita to put on her Islamic garb. He did the same. Then he stowed the camera pack in a small suitcase, and they left the room.
The hallway was narrow, and crowded with other passengers eager to disembark. They held on to handrails and moved in single file. At the end of the hall, a door opened directly onto an arrival corridor in the multilevel terminal. They found themselves in a passage slightly wider than the hall on the elevator car. A friendly female voice spoke from overhead, offering advice on the best way to move in the near-weightless conditions.
“That’s the Castle Gate,” Nikko said, his voice low as he nodded toward a black arch at the corridor’s end. He took her hand and held it in a painfully tight grip. She could scent the fear on him. It was his fear, not Arif’s. He commanded the body more every hour. It was becoming his body. Arif was beginning to fade.
She mouthed a silent prayer for Arif to hold on. Even now her tiny servants were at work on his atrium, changing it to more closely resemble the atrium Zeke Choy had kept. In time, Arif would be able to force Nikko out. She’d take the ghost into her own head then. By then, her own atrium would be ready.
She looked straight ahead at the Gate. It was a black-walled tunnel about five feet long, narrow, but well lit. Stewards at the entrance instructed people to pass through it one at a time. Phousita listened to the other passengers laugh as they moved through the Gate, joking about being picked up by the cops. Then it was their turn. Nikko was first. His hand squeezed hers even tighter, slick with sweat. Then he let go, and stepped through. She followed him, and a moment later they were on the other side, swiftly descending on a moving ramp into the open-air plaza that she’d seen from the elevator window only a few minutes before. The plaza was lightly shaded by its lacy canopy of woven tree branches. And there were no cops in sight, no cops at all.
Phousita laughed in joyous relief. She tried to hug Nikko, but he would have none of it. “It’s not time to celebrate,” he growled at her.
She smiled at him in turn, understanding his fear, but not sharing it. Fear seemed a superfluous emotion. What was there to fear? She’d already died, there in the Spill, when the children had burned and her world had come apart. Now she was a spirit halfway to Heaven, enjoying the light, fine air of this city.
An empty bench moved up to them from an underground tunnel. It floated a finger’s width above the plaza tiles, as if buoyed on a cushion of air. It seemed to offer itself to them. Phousita stared at it, her eyes wide. Nikko took her elbow in a firm grip. “Sit down.”
She obeyed him.
“Destination?” the bench asked.
“Gold Wing terminus,” Nikko said.
They sat shoulder to shoulder, while the bench ferried them across the plaza. Phousita grasped the edge of the bench, twisting in her seat as she sought to see everything at once: the people, colorfully dressed, traveling swiftly on benches and chairs to disappear down dark tunnel mouths set in the plaza’s white floor, or into bright open-air alleys roofed in twining branches. The birds, as colorful as the people, flitting through the branches, filling the air with raucous songs. The tresses of flowers: purple, white, yellow; exuding pockets of scent into the air. And overhead: she craned her neck, peering beyond the network of branches and flowers to the city’s tall, sculpted white buildings with their hanging gardens; and beyond that, to the black thread of the elevator cable. The sky was a deep, dark blue, its periphery studded with a few dull stars, while directly overhead there loomed a dark circle, illuminated on one side by a wide blue crescent aswirl with white. That was the world, she realized. And by the stars she knew that night had fallen. Yet it was daytime here in the heart of the city.
The bench suddenly slid downward. She gasped as the light dimmed. They sped through a tunnel. A few minutes later the bench emerged on the edge of a small lobby, brown carpets on the floor, three rows of padded chairs, a window on the far side of the room that looked out on a gray metal wall only a few meters away. “That’s our ship, Phousita,” Nikko said, nodding toward the window. The room was empty. The bench ferried them across the carpet to a metal door. Nikko urged her to stand.
On the wall beside the door was an alphanumeric pad. Nikko punched a code into it. The
door hissed and then swung open in slow majesty, a shield of steel as wide as Phousita’s forearm. Beyond it, a short hallway edged with handrails led to an opulently furnished living room. “Home sweet home,” Nikko said. He started to lead her across the threshold, but she pulled up in sudden alarm.
One of her tiny servants had come home to her. From where? Back in the Spill, Nikko had commanded her not to release any to the open air until they were far beyond the reach of the police. And she’d obeyed him. Yet the servants were here, drifting like dust upon the air.
“Come on,” Nikko growled. “The ship’s ready. We need to go.”
“But Sandor is here.”
“Of course he’s here. I told you the cops were bringing him up to Castle.” He tugged at her wrist.
Phousita fought his demanding hands. “No! I have to find him. I swore to him I would.”
“Leave him alone! He’s safer without you.”
“He’s not!” She shook her head, trying to make sense of the news her tiny servants carried. “That’s not what I feel. He’s afraid. He believes he’s to die very soon. The trial—it went badly.”
Nikko froze. He dropped her hand and edged away. Then he turned, grabbed a handrail and launched himself into the ship.
She followed him into the living room. They were alone. There would be no one else aboard the ship. Computers would guide it.
Nikko leaned over a console set into a wooden desk on one side of the living room. He barked orders at it as she came up behind him. She touched her small hand against his back and felt him flinch. “You’re right,” he told her in a hollow voice. “The court found Sandor guilty of conspiracy. A party to the theft of the Bohr Maker.” He turned to look at her, violet eyes searching, as if she kept the answer that eluded him. “But Sandor’s not guilty. The cops have to know that.”
“Maybe they want to draw you out,” Phousita said.
He nodded slowly. “That’s it. That must be it.”
“Don’t go to them.” She put a gentle hand on his arm to stay him. “Let’s wait here a few minutes. Things may change.”
Chapter
16
Sandor sat huddled in the corner of a bunk in a windowless cell on Castle. He stared at the walls. They were a plush, soft gray, very businesslike. He pulled his knees closer to his chest, breathing shallowly. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe. The medic who’d been in earlier said his ribs had been broken. The shattered bone ends had punctured both his lungs. He’d been more or less dead, there in the Spill.
He shifted, trying to find a more endurable position, but only managed to shove himself away from the wall in the almost nonexistent gravity. His last memories before waking here were of a painless state of grace, lying in the mud at Phousita’s feet. He had no idea how much time had passed between now and then.
The cell door slipped open. Two police dogs entered the little chamber, shuffling forward, their feet never breaking contact with the floor, so that Sandor knew they’d been dealing with the micro-G all their lives. One took up a post by the door. The other glided to him as if it were the family pet, shoving its hideous head into his face, its nostrils whuffing hot air. He started to twist away, then winced in pain.
Behind the dogs came a uniformed cop. She paused at the door, studying him with eyes the color of honey in a pot. Her hair was long, full, kinked and coppery; she kept it off her face with a black sash across her forehead—a style that seemed vaguely African. He recognized her, of course. Most citizens of the Commonwealth would. She was the Chief of Police, Kirstin Adair.
She approached him, then knelt at the side of the bed, her gaze still fixed on his face, studying him as if he were some mindless exhibit she’d come to view, and not a self-aware being at all. He felt his heart hammer in his chest. His lungs burned.
She said: “I knew your brother Nikko. We were very close, you know.”
Sandor’s voice cracked. “The medic told me he was dead.”
She nodded. “He is. Even his ghosts are gone.”
Sandor thought about the copy of Nikko’s ghost that had accompanied him on the flight to Sunda, wiped out by the kem-wand of the municipal police. That had been his fault. If he’d followed Nikko’s advice, if he’d stayed in the terminal, maybe things would have been all right. Maybe the local cops would have left him alone and—
“Why did you let Nikko get you involved in this mess?”
He blinked and looked up at Kirstin, suddenly aware that his attention had wandered. “What mess?” he asked. “Why am I under arrest? I didn’t do anything. I was assaulted by the municipal police in Sunda. Why aren’t you following up on that? Why am I here?”
Kirstin’s heavy lips turned in a slight, hungry smile that belied her kindly voice and made him shiver. “You’re involved in a very serious crime, Sandor. You’re presently in possession of an illegal Maker that is functioning as a beacon inside your body, continuously shedding information packets that advertise your position. We’ve identified it as a derivative of an antique Maker whose pattern was stolen from police files.” Her eyebrows rose in question. “Are you expecting a rescue?”
“No!” Sandor blurted out. He gazed at her in stunned disbelief. “I don’t know anything about a stolen Maker. I’ve never accessed police files. I don’t—”
His protest broke off in mid-sentence. Once again he was seeing the odd little glands on Phousita’s hands. He felt a cold sweat break out across his face. “She was poisoned,” he whispered. “She didn’t know what she had.”
“You mean Phousita, don’t you?”
He stared at Kirstin, dread flowing like cold water through his veins. “Did you arrest her too?”
Kirstin’s expression stiffened into a macabre facsimile of a smile. “You’re in very serious trouble,” she told him. “The research scientist who committed the theft named you as a willful accomplice.”
“No! That’s a lie. I don’t even know—”
She interrupted him, her voice gentle, sympathetic, insistent. “You resisted arrest by the Sunda police.”
“No. They never gave me a chance to—”
“You refused to cooperate with their lawful interrogation. You escaped from their custody by employing an illegal physiological modification. Immediately following your escape, you joined your accomplice, this Phousita. How long have you known her?”
“She wasn’t my accomplice. I didn’t know her at all, until then. The municipal police assaulted me! She helped me survive.”
“Helped you? By turning over to you an illegal Maker. How much did you pay her for that?”
“I didn’t pay her anything. I’m not part of anything. Neither is she.”
“You deny it?”
“Of course I deny it.”
“Yet you carry an illegal Maker. How do you explain that?”
“Have you ever been down there? It’s a sewer of illegal Makers. Why don’t your officers do anything about that?”
“Why were you named as an accomplice?”
“How should I know? I don’t even know the person who was supposed to have—”
“Enough!” Kirstin said. She rose to her feet, her eyes flashing. “I was hoping you’d give me some reason to stay your execution. After all, you’re only a child.”
Sandor felt his heart trip. “Execution . . . ?” he whispered.
“The judiciary has already ruled against you. Your original body at the mausoleum on Summer House has already been destroyed.”
“You can’t—”
“We have to, Sandor. The laws of the Commonwealth were not made lightly. And it is the duty of the police to enforce them with an absolute hand.”
Kirstin felt a trifle dejected as she left Sandor’s cell, the two police dogs at her heels. She’d had Sandor interrogated before he’d been returned to full awareness, but he’d revealed no more under the unconscious influence of drugs than he had under the conscious influence of fear. Whatever he might have known must have been lost when the muni
cipal police destroyed his atrium. She liked her cases to close neatly. A confession would have quieted the protests from Summer House. And a confession might have led to bigger game in the corporate hierarchy.
A motion sensor followed her progress down the corridor, past other, unoccupied cells. After assessing her identity, it opened a second locked door, and let her through. A handler waited on the other side. He leashed the dogs and led them away, leaving her alone in the narrow passages of the detention facility. The musky scent of the animals clung to the air. For a moment, Kirstin wondered if Sandor might really be innocent of conspiracy. Not that it mattered.
Molecular law was not a system of justice, it was a system of enforcement. Personal innocence could not be a mitigating factor. The judiciary could only be concerned with personal involvement. If an individual carried an illegal Maker, that individual must suffer the consequences, or the use of illegal Makers would spread beyond the ability of the police to control them. In this way, molecular law was analagous to natural law: shove someone over a tall cliff, and that individual, though personally innocent, would still die. There was no mercy in the application of the law of gravity. There could be no mercy in the application of Commonwealth law.
Sandor Jiang-Tibayan was in possession of an illegal Maker derived from the Bohr Maker. The seriousness of this association alone had persuaded the magistrate to consider this as a potential capital case. When police attempts to eradicate the derivitive Maker failed, the verdict of execution was assured. But at that point the case might have been considered only second-degree terminal: Sandor’s original physical copy at Summer House as well as his ghosts might have been spared if they could be shown to be free of a similar violation.