by Linda Nagata
Lot stopped, put on guard by some inner sense. Walking slowly now, he edged around the end of the sheltering hedge.
Urban sat cross-legged on a banquet table, his back to Lot. He looked out on the city, or perhaps to the planet beyond. There in the Well, the first pale arc of dawn light had already brightened, smearing across the atmosphere in a searing white band.
Lot walked around the table and sat down on it too. “What have you gotten Gent into?”
Urban leaned back on his elbow, to regard Lot with a teasing smile. “Trouble. You guessed it. But hey, he’s not in it alone.”
Like that mattered.
“You think you’re sharing the risk? Authority will put him in cold storage. They told me. It’s not like he’s Silken. It’s not like his daddy runs the city council.”
“Hey fury. It’s not like he’s a coward either.”
Lot winced at the sharp edge of unpleasant truth. On the rim of the planet mountains stood in silhouette against the dawn light, like tiny, rasping teeth.
“You’ve let them scare you,” Urban insisted.
“It’s not a game. You weren’t there.”
“Life goes on. Gent knows that. He’s working for you now. Everything he does is for you—and you won’t even talk to him.”
“If I did they’d arrest him.”
“He’s willing to take the chance. So am I. Everything I do is for you, too. I wrote the initiatives for you.”
“I know.”
Urban’s first initiative would turn ados into adults by lowering the age of majority from one hundred years to twenty. His second initiative would ease the psychological standards for citizenship, allowing Lot to qualify despite the entangling net of his moods.
A spear of sunlight lanced the city. Urban’s gray shirt responded, flicking on in an iridescent rainbow of colors seen through a haze of smoke. “The real people are laughing at us, Lot. They know it’s all for you, yet you won’t give us one word of support.”
Lot hunched his shoulders. He didn’t want to say it out loud, that he was scared—and not just of being bounced back into the monkey house.
Gold glinted at the base of the hedge. Lot watched with a sense of fatalism as Ord slipped into sight, scuttling across the alcove’s floor.
Urban hadn’t seen the robot yet. “There’s a rally tonight,” he said. “The ados want you to come.”
Lot shook his head, as Ord disappeared under the table. “I can’t.”
Urban’s displeasure bittered the air. “Why? It’s not illegal.”
“That doesn’t matter. City authority doesn’t want me there. It’ll be trouble.”
Ord’s golden tentacles slid onto the table’s surface. Its body followed a moment later. Lot drew back. Stay calm, he urged himself. Stay calm.
Ord stood on its short legs, its optical disks fixed on Lot. “Lot’s tired?” it asked with gentle concern. “Come home.”
Urban stared at the thing, his distaste brushing Lot’s sensory tears. “What if you don’t speak?” he suggested. And for the first time, he sounded uncertain. “Just be there.”
“Why? What good would that do?”
Urban’s mouth was half-open, already forming an answer when abruptly, he stopped. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing.”
“Nothing,” Lot echoed softly, enjoying the shape of the word in his mouth. Nothing.
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’re scared of what you might be able to do.”
Lot’s heart rate spiked. “That’s not it!” he lied. “I just don’t want to go back in the monkey house.”
Ord caught the change. Its tiny brow wrinkled in an imitation of concern as it reached out with a gold tentacle to softly tap-tap against the back of Lot’s hand, trying to extract a chemical measure of his emotional state. Lot slapped the tentacle away.
“What do you want?” Urban asked. “Have you ever thought about that?”
Lot didn’t answer. He stared at the emerging curve of Kheth’s searing face, his pupils stopped down so far against the light that the cityscape around him vanished behind a shroud of relative darkness, thinking I want to know what really happened. The grasping fingers of Deception Well’s northern continent raked at the expanding crescent of light. Scudding lanes of clouds ran perpendicular to the fingers of land.
What was happening down there? City authority had to know more than they were saying. They patrolled the surface constantly, via semiorganic wardens. The wardens could explore in both macro and molecular scale. The data they collected went into the library, and now and then a scholar would announce a tentative theory that sought to describe the structure of the Well’s elusive defensive gnomes: the “governors,” in popular parlance. The Silkens credited the governors with brewing new Chenzeme plagues. In Silken mythology, the governors were the villainous source of the mysterious plague that had destroyed the people of Old Silk while cannibalizing their biological data for the Well’s own growing library.
The Silkens denied the concept of Communion. But Lot had to wonder if the governors could be its agents, set the task of blending all life into the matrix of the Well. If so, then the Old Silkens were not really dead.
Nothing is lost in the Well. Though everything there was subject to brutal change, driven in a reeling dance of forced evolution. Molecular-scale data shuffled constantly between microscopic life-forms and sometimes even into macro-scale life. Inept results presumably died off quickly. Only the rare successes survived, but that was enough to feed the next cycle of the Well’s engines of diversity.
How it all worked, and why, remained a mystery. It seemed likely the term “governors” itself was misleading. Rather than being subject to a single type of gnome, it was far more likely the Well worked on a biomechanical system containing hundreds, thousands or even millions of distinctly different components.
So maybe city authority really didn’t understand the Well. Maybe no one did—except Jupiter?
City authority insisted Jupiter had never reached the planet, and if the wardens had found evidence to the contrary, it hadn’t been reported to the library.
Lot wanted to look for himself. He’d requested permission to link with a warden, but that was denied. Only a select few were allowed access—a safety measure, it was said, based on the untested theory that the wardens’ activity might disrupt the volatile biosphere. But to Lot the policy only suggested the presence of something in the Well the Silkens preferred to hide.
He felt Urban edge up close beside him. “It’s only two hundred miles to Deception Well if you jump. Are you going to jump? Suicide sacrifice for your crazy cult leader?”
“Shut up!”
The retort was out before he could stop it. But he didn’t let it go farther. He stared at Kheth’s fiery disk, trying to deny his anger, trying to deny that he felt anything.
But Urban wouldn’t let up. Urban was different from everyone else Lot had ever met. The charismata—if they were real—never affected him at all. “You’re a slave, fury. Jupiter’s got his fingers threaded through your brain. Is he your mastermind? You his toy?”
The touch of Ord’s probing tentacle was more than Lot could stand. He reached out in a blind strike, and slapped the robot off the table. Then he wrenched his gaze away from Kheth, to the comparative darkness around him.
At first he could see nothing. Then his pupils dilated. A more subtle light slid across his vision. Urban crouched beside him. “Everybody knows Jupiter’s dead. Why don’t you believe it?”
“Because I saw the elevator car descend!” No matter what city authority said, Lot knew Jupiter had reached the planet. And he had to believe Jupiter was still alive, because if that wasn’t true, then everything Jupiter had ever said about the Communion was wrong. And if Jupiter had been wrong about the Communion, then he’d led seven thousand people to their deaths for nothing, and he’d been a madman, just like the Silkens said. And his madness was inside Lot, tangled in his brain, waiting only for the proper set of circum
stances to emerge.
Ord was back. It swung up on the table, hissing, “Good Lot, good Lot,” its raised tentacles glistening with some transdermal mood-stabilizing cocktail.
Urban saw it, and snarled. His hand shot out in a snake strike too fast to follow. Fingers set like stiff prongs, he skewered Ord, sending tendrils of gold gelatinous ooze flowing across his wrist. He brought up his other hand to secure his grip, as the tendrils began to retract back into Ord’s main body mass. “Fury, you have such a gift. But you have to learn to control it. Use your aura, your charismata—whatever you want to call it. Use it when you need it, and you’ll be as good as your old man.”
Ord kicked and squirmed, struggling to slide off Urban’s fingers. “I don’t want to be like him! He left us behind to die.”
A sheen of sweat stood out on Urban’s forehead as he struggled with Ord. But he watched Lot closely, like a soccer coach, evaluating his star player. “You can hate him, fury, and still use what he gave you. He had a gift. You have it too.”
Lot shook his head, confused at this sudden shift of direction. “I don’t hate him.”
Ord’s little body had expelled Urban’s impaling fingers. But Urban still had the robot squeezed tight in his doubled fists. Ord looked half-melted by the effort to reach Lot, by the need to rock him back onto the calm plane city authority had decreed he should occupy. Lot wanted it too. “Let Ord go.” He could feel himself slipping down a dark emotional spiral. Ord’s cocktail could pull him back up. Happy monkey. “Let it go.”
Urban glared at him. Lot knew that he hated Ord. Hated the way the little robot always fussed over Lot, calming him, damping his moods. “You want city authority to control you. You like it that way.” He shifted his grip, and with a snarl, he flung the robot over the railing. Ord’s golden body sailed in a long arc, dropping like a gleaming firework until it disappeared into a cluster of houses far down the slope.
“Shit, Urban! Do you want Clemantine knocking on my door?”
“It’s only a matter of time anyway. Some people get to change who they are. Not you. The monkey house docs couldn’t do anything with you. So now it’s my turn.”
Lot felt the rasping bite of Urban’s dark confidence chewing down through his bones and he knew it was crazy. Crazy. They were all crazy and maybe it was inevitable. They were frontier people. Their ancestors had consistently fled the stable cultures of the Hallowed Vasties. Selection had worked on them from generation to generation. Those not restless enough, not deviant enough had been left behind. Only the crazy would dare to push into the Chenzeme Intersection—and here they were, trapped in Silk, a single election somehow critical to their lives.
“Do you want to be a dumb ado for another eighty-two years?” Urban demanded. “Do you?”
Craziness undulated in the air. “There are worse things.”
“Not for me.” Urban’s hand closed over the lip of the table. “I’m going down to cold storage with Gent Romer. We’re going to find out if Jupiter’s really there. You can come, if you like.”
Lot felt as if his breath had been pulled from his lungs by a sudden change of pressure. Cold storage was in the city’s industrial core, and access was strictly controlled. “Into the tunnels?” The proposition pleased and horrified him at once. To return to the industrial corridors. . . . His nostrils flared, haunted by a ghost aura of death. He didn’t ever want to go back there. But to prove that city authority had lied, that Jupiter was not there with the dead. . . .
“Yeah,” Urban said. “Maybe if we find your old man’s body, you can stop waiting for him. Maybe you can start living your own life.”
Lot did not understand this animosity. “He is my life.” Jupiter blazed in his memory like a sun holding his spirit in close orbit. In Urban’s mind that made him a slave. But was it any better to be like Urban . . . and believe in nothing at all? Could a man’s soul be as empty as the void and still be the soul of a man? But, Lot realized, the void wasn’t empty. It was prowled by the war weapons of the Chenzeme.
His gaze rose, to the brilliant white column towering above the peak of the city, the great wall of the elevator cable hard and bright in the full light of Kheth. “We won’t find Jupiter in cold storage.” He stood up, defiance coursing through him. “You don’t believe that now. But you’ll come to believe it.”
Urban laughed. His eyes were unfocused, dark windows where vague shapes moved, shadowy dreams of power. “Either way, I want you to come to the rally tonight. You’ll do that for me if I take you into cold storage. You’ll do it for Gent.”
Lot felt his enthusiasm descend to a cooler plane. “You mean if we aren’t arrested for trespassing.”
“That won’t happen.” He glanced over his shoulder, winking at a faint sheen high up on the green wall of the surrounding hedge—a slick, round reflection, no bigger than the cross section of a girl’s arm—all that was visible of a security camera mounted there. “We’re not alone, you know. Clemantine’s off-duty now. This shift is on our side.”
“You’ve got security behind you?”
“I’m not going to answer that, fury. Not until you’re sure you really want to know.”
We hope you enjoyed this sample of Deception Well, by Linda Nagata. Links to print and ebook versions can be found at:
Mythic Island Press LLC (MythicIslandPress.com)
or the author's website MythicIsland.com.
Books by Linda Nagata
The Nanotech Succession is a collection of four stand-alone novels set in a shared story world, beginning in the present day and reaching into the far future. Following the timeline of the story world the books are:
Tech-Heaven
The Bohr Maker (winner of the 1996 Locus Award for Best First Novel)
Deception Well
Vast
Other Story Worlds
Goddesses (winner of the 2000 Nebula Award for Best Novella)
Limit of Vision
Memory
Skye-Object 3270a (young adult)
Writing as Trey Shiels
The Dread Hammer
About the Author
Linda Nagata grew up in a rented beach house on the north shore of Oahu. She graduated from the University of Hawaii with a degree in zoology and worked for a time at Haleakala National Park on the island of Maui. She has been a writer, a mom, a programmer of database-driven websites, and lately a publisher and book designer. She is the author of eight novels including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella "Goddesses," the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.
Find her online at:
MythicIsland.com
twitter.com/LindaNagata
facebook.com/Linda.Nagata.author