by Linda Nagata
“It’s got to be a fake!” he hissed. His gaze was focused inward, to the image of Nikko. “Some trick of the cops to lure us out.”
But Phousita wasn’t sure. As she studied the image of Nikko in her own atrium, she felt touched by a sense of déjà vu, as if on some level she’d already known of Nikko’s presence in the House. She reexamined her memories, and discovered a packet of data that had come to her sometime during her sleep. It described Nikko. There was no doubt. He’d been adrift in the basal tissue of Summer House while his injuries and debilities gradually healed. She looked at Sandor’s anxious face. “The House doesn’t recognize him.”
“Summer House!” Sandor commanded, sending his words out through his atrium. “Locate corporate citizen Nikko Jiang-Tibayan.”
The response arrived in both their atriums simultaneously. Nikko Jiang-Tibayan was not resident at the House.
“Then who is the being who shares his pattern?” Phousita asked softly.
The House couldn’t answer.
“He has no atrium,” Phousita said. “The House doesn’t know him.”
“Then he’s been here all the time? We have to get to him!”
Phousita shook her head. “It’s too late,” she realized. “The walls have gone up.”
Nikko spoke to the camera for several minutes, hoping for some kind of response, some kind of acknowledgment. Hoping that the walls would dissolve and take him in again. It didn’t happen. After a while he waved the camera lens away and turned his mind to his predicament.
Perhaps there was something about this section of the chasmal hall that prevented him from contacting the plexus. He should move down the corridor. Sooner or later he had to come in range of someone’s atrium. There had to be people still awake, still aware. The whole city could not have gone dormant yet.
The moment the thought formed, he sprang away, loping down the hall, not in a panicked sprint, but rather, at a fast, determined pace, his gaze scanning the walls for any discontinuities as he moved around the hall’s slow curve. He continued to transmit, muttering a monologue, still composing his documentary:
“The dim illumination is fading. The light tubes are dissolving, being taken in by the obsidian walls. If you can hear this transmission, please alert Fox. This is Nikko Jiang-Tibayan. I’m alive, and trapped in a hall. Love and Nature! The light’s gone!” He stumbled, then caught himself. Picking up his pace again, he bounded forward in the dark.
“I can’t see a thing. It’s pitch-black in here. The only sound is the rhythm of my footfalls, the harsh wash of my breath. The air seems to be thinning rapidly. Is that good? It means the walls here are still active. Can anyone hear me? Find me, please. This is Nikko Jiang-Tibayan.”
His throat burned as the fiercely cold air dragged in and out of his lungs. His kisheer began to lap up around his cheeks. The low O2 had confused its sensory system, so that it hovered uncertainly, ready to engage.
“I’m running blind. Doesn’t this corridor have an end? Doesn’t anybody hear me? Am I alone?” He stumbled, shaken by the possibility. Suddenly, he felt like the last man on the last day of the Universe. “Where have you all gone?” he shouted into the darkness. “Why have you forgotten me? This is Nikko Jiang-Tibayan. Respond if you can.”
Sandor called Fox. Fox assembled a quorum of corporate officers. Everybody’s atrium was tuned to Nikko’s ongoing broadcast as they huddled together in a cramped transit bubble and debated what to do.
“It’s got to be a trick of the cops,” insisted Caroline Bukey, the corporate vice president in charge of security. Her choleric temper was reflected in the grim set of her face. “We have no corroboration that this transmission is actually originating with Nikko.”
“You’re not listening!” Sandor snapped. “Phousita has already provided independent corroboration.”
Bukey turned a skeptical gaze on Phousita. “After the fact,” she said. “And I’d like to point out that she’s not a corporate member. We don’t know what her motives are.”
“Nikko is alive,” Sandor said, barely reigning in his temper. “Phousita wouldn’t lie.”
“But it seems impossible,” Fox said. “If Nikko had survived, the House would have reported it.”
“The House can’t recognize him without his atrium, Dad! And his atrium was annihilated. He didn’t have an ID chip because he never traveled. He has no identity, so the House evicted him along with every other noncitizen. We can’t even talk to him.”
“He’s in one of the interstitial halls,” Phousita said.
Fox shuddered in open horror. “Those halls are the seams along which the House will fission.”
“We have to retrieve him, Dad. You know it’s him. Just listen to his monologue. It’s pure Nikko. The cops couldn’t fake that.”
Fox looked doubtful; scared. “Where exactly is he?”
“Moving parallel to cells 412 to 433, Dad.”
Fox blanched. “Love and Nature,” he whispered. “There are nearly three hundred walls between this cell and Nikko. It’d take hours to get through them.”
“And we have only twenty-three minutes,” Bukey said.
“We don’t have to go through them,” Sandor insisted. “All we have to do is open one of the walls and let him through.”
But Fox was shaking his head. “It’s not that simple. Those cells are all tiny, uninhabited units. There’s nobody there! Their interior mass has been reduced to undifferentiated matrix, and there isn’t enough of it to support a corporeal person anyway. Even their industrial Makers are dormant.”
Sandor frowned. His head moved slowly back and forth as he sought a solution. “But all noncitizens were evacuated in the vicinity of the primary elevator column, right? Can Nikko access the elevator? Is it still operational? Could it take him to a habitable cell?”
Caroline Bukey held up a hand for quiet. Her habitually grim expression had deepened to a forbidding solemnity. “The House plexus reports that Galapagos has begun to disengage from the station,” she announced. A stir went through the small assembly. “Time is critical. Do any of you doubt what the ultimate solution will be?”
“You want to abandon Nikko, don’t you?” Sandor demanded.
Bukey looked at him as if he were a petulant child. “We don’t even know if it is Nikko.”
“I believe it is,” Fox said. He caught Bukey’s eye. An inaudible exchange seemed to pass between them. “Clear?” Fox asked tentatively.
Bukey scowled and nodded. “Command priority one,” she said aloud, though her unfocused gaze made it clear she was speaking through her atrium. “Modify fission procedure: delay disassembly of prime elevator column until further notice. Restore any sections which may have already been disrupted.” Her cold gaze fixed on Sandor. “There’s a cluster of large cells near the bottom of the elevator column. They’re not inhabited, but we will modify the programming of their industrial Makers to develop a life-sustaining habitat—if we can get him down to that level.”
Kirstin had half expected the elevator to be inoperable. But it was still functioning when she disembarked from Galapagos. She took two police dogs with her, each one inhabited by the ghost of a police officer. Their artificial eyes would record everything that happened below. Since the House plexus would no longer relay police communications, she strung a land line along her route, an ultra thin cable that would carry her transmissions past the radio-opaque walls of the House. The line was wired to one of the dogs. If communications failed, Galapagos was under orders to fire without hesitation.
Kirstin entered an elevator car and descended the tether, letting the land line unreel with fiery speed through the shaft. She emerged from the elevator near what had once been the corporate offices, only to find herself in total darkness. Switching on the headlamp of her environment suit, she keyed its broad beam up to a brilliant maximum.
The light ran out in a semicircle around her, illuminating what appeared to be an immense hallway. The nearest walls were perhaps a hun
dred meters apart. Like the floor, they appeared to be smooth, hard, and dark as obsidian.
She tilted her head back and the beam swept overhead. The light rays grew diffuse with distance. She couldn’t make out any ceiling. Slight tremors testified to the hallway’s flexible composition.
The dogs whined nervously. “God, it looks like the end of the world in here,” one of the ghosts said through Kirstin’s atrium. One dog snuffled at scents wafting from the hallway beyond the reach of the light. The other appeared to listen. Kirstin couldn’t hear anything beyond her own ragged breathing. Her lungs felt touched with fire. The air must be very thin. Certainly, it was supercold.
“Can you pick up anything?” she asked the ghosts.
“Nah,” the same voice said. “It’s a blank out there. Sensorially empty. Spookiest thing I’ve ever sensed, like every molecule more complex than carbon dioxide has been sucked right out.”
The second cop made no comment.
“I’m going to try making contact,” Kirstin announced. But with whom? Was there really anybody left alive? She adjusted her atrium, then sent a call through to the House. “This is Chief of Police Kirstin Adair, requesting communications with the corporate offices of Summer House.” She received no answer. Similar hails on different bands brought no more success.
They set off down the hall, but there was nothing to be seen besides the radio-opaque black walls. Several minutes later they reached the hall’s end: a vertical obsidian wall that confounded her search for a door, a passage. “Those poor, dumb bastards,” the same ghost muttered. “They’ve really done themselves in this time.”
They jogged back to the elevator, reeling in the land line as they went.
Kirstin explored another level, another hallway as vast and empty as the first. Her attempts at communication, both with the House and its inhabitants (did they still own a corporeal existence?) continued to produce no results.
As she stepped onto the brightly lit elevator car once again, the dogs at her heels, she began to regret the ploy of magnanimity that had brought her here. She was achieving nothing. And the prospect of facing her own death no longer seemed quite so easy, now that the time was drawing near. It was true that her ghost would escape, her persona would survive the nuclear immolation she planned. But another copy of her consciousness would be trapped here, forced to face the blast.
For a moment she considered recalling the Galapagos. But that would be the equivalent of backing down. Bad PR for sure, and after the city blew, she was going to need all the public support she could muster to keep her job. So she’d just have to stick it out.
But there was no reason to explore every empty hallway. Beryl was reporting that the blue oceans that had once sheltered Summer House from cosmic radiation had blackened, congealing into the same dark material that walled the interior of the House. It was an eerie, unsettling end to a great city. What was under construction here she couldn’t guess, but she sensed the transformation was nearing completion. She would have to act soon, if she wanted to be sure of annihilating this dangerous little world, so frighteningly out of control.
But she had her own role to finish first, that of the magnanimous police chief, striving through the last moment to rescue the doomed citizens of Summer House.
She scratched one of the dogs behind its ear. “Let’s go to the lowest level,” she said. If the situation there echoed what she’d already seen, there would be no point in further delay. She would order Beryl to carry out the strike.
They’d just stepped aboard the car when the same ghost spoke up again. “I’m picking up some untranslatable radio activity.”
Kirstin scowled. She didn’t really want to find anybody. She didn’t want a reason to hold off on the strike. “Someone trying to contact us?” she asked, suspicion in her voice.
“Probably not,” the ghost admitted. “Just a leak from the plexus, maybe.”
The land line glistened like a spider’s thread where it hung down from the elevator shaft, an unblinking witness to the play of events. Kirstin knew her role in the drama. “Let’s go lower,” she said, in a deliberate effort to please her invisible audience. “If we change position, we may get a better signal.”
Fox, Sandor, Phousita, and even Caroline Bukey listened in silence to Nikko’s ongoing transmission. Fox and Sandor were grinning. Phousita felt her own heart lighten despite Nikko’s apocalyptic mood. Nikko was jogging toward the elevator! He was going to find his own way out. In a few minutes he would step aboard the car and be whisked away to safety.
Suddenly, Phousita stiffened. Like the others, she was continuously monitoring House progress reports. One had caught her attention.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered to Sandor. “There are police dogs in the city.”
Sandor smiled absently. “That’s good,” he said. “If the cops are still trying to root us out, then they’ll hold off their assault a bit longer.”
But Phousita shivered. In the Spill, police dogs had always been a harbinger of death. She remembered terrible fire; lost children. “It’s a bad sign,” she whispered.
Sandor didn’t seem to hear her. She raised her hands and gazed at the sparkling glands there. She’d learned the dogs’ pattern on that horrible day. She’d sent them into sleep there on the edge of the conflagration. Almost instinctively, she began weaving the spell again.
Then she hesitated. How could the tiny servants pass through nearly three hundred impenetrable walls?
Nikko’s breath was whistling in and out of his lungs now, raking his throat with painfully cold fingers. It was getting harder to speak. But up ahead: his gaze fixed on something.
“What’s . . . that? A tiny green light . . . in the darkness.”
His eyes had played tricks on him before, reacting antagonistically to sensory deprivation by filling the dark with false colors. But this light did not diffuse or float away. It held steady, a small green point that gradually resolved into a numbered column. He approached it with a sense of wonder and laid his fingers upon it, forgetting, for the moment, to speak. He could feel a vibration in the wall surrounding the panel. The elevator shaft! he realized. And it was working.
The camera peered over his shoulder, reminding him of its presence. “You see this, Fox?” he shouted. “I’m on the twenty-first level. By the elevator shaft. Come get me, Fox. Send somebody for me.”
In the descending elevator car, Kirstin caught Nikko’s transmission, static free. She slapped the stop button and chuckled incredulously. “Nikko?” she asked aloud, studying the dim picture that came in over her atrium.
“That transmission originated only a few hundred meters away,” the ghost cop announced.
“Sure,” Kirstin said. “On the twenty-first level.” She punched the revised destination into the panel and the car began to ascend.
“The cop!” Phousita cried. “The cop is tracking Nikko. Look! Look at the House reports. She’s gone to meet him.”
Her frantic gaze swept round the small group in the transit bubble. Fox looked stunned. Sandor confused. Caroline Bukey had turned a ghastly pale color.
“Nikko knows enough to recognize the biogenesis function, doesn’t he?” Bukey asked.
“He won’t give us away,” Fox said.
“Maybe this is good,” Bukey muttered. “He can engage the cops’ attention while the House completes fission.”
“You can’t sacrifice him,” Sandor said. “You can’t.”
Chapter
30
Nikko was blinded by the light that spilled from the elevator car. He ducked his head and backed off a step, as his eyes fought a painful struggle to adjust. When he looked up, Kirstin stood bathed in the white glare like some foul goddess emerging from the netherworld.
“You!” he growled.
She studied him warily, a half-smile on her face. “Who were you expecting, Nikko? Were you expecting Fox?”
Nikko’s worldview underwent a sudden convulsion. The chasmal hall had
left him in a state of psychic isolation. Now Kirstin was here, intruding on his fantasy of apocalypse. In an instant the outside world became hard reality once again. If Kirstin were here, then the Galapagos with its nuclear missiles could not be far off. Real apocalypse faced the House if those missiles were fired.
The camera hovered beside his face, studying Kirstin with its unblinking eye. Nikko noticed the glistening thread of the land line then, as it hung down in front of the open elevator door. So Kirstin had a link to the outside world. She could command the Galapagos to fire . . .
Or to hold its fire?
His ragged breathing was not entirely from exertion or the declining levels of oxygen. He wanted to get past Kirstin, past the dogs, onto the elevator and lose himself in the depths of the House. But with visceral certainty he knew it was too late. He could not leave Kirstin now, not when she held a voice trigger on a nuclear missile aimed at the heart of the House.
The only thing left for him to do was buy time for the process of fission to reach its own conclusion. It wouldn’t be long now.
He drew in a deep breath, and with a mental effort steadied his kisheer. “So you received my transmissions,” he said, his voice only slightly hoarse.
Her hands twitched in a slight gesture. The dogs responded by moving out on either side of him. “What’s going on here, Nikko?” she asked, in a voice held carefully neutral for the cameras. “What’s become of the corporate citizens? Are they dead?”
“No, they’re alive. You have to help them.” He surprised himself with his own words. They emerged instinctively. But a moment’s thought convinced him he’d stumbled on the right strategy. If he could plant doubt in her mind, she’d have to hold off on the nukes. The land line would carry a record of this transmission to the Galapagos. It would be part of the public record. She could not destroy Summer House while there was still a chance the city could be saved.