said his unit.
I felt a little embarrassed. I hadn’t expected quite this level of emotion from their linkup. But I had to admit, Nuruddin and Nefertari had also been affectionate. Perhaps Medusa and I would have been, too, if I hadn’t been about to suffocate from an empty air tank.
I raised nonexistent eyebrows.
* * *
We left Kumiko and Terry to get acquainted.
I sighed.
I had been holding my breath. I liked Terry, and I didn’t want to kill him any more than I had wanted to kill Nuruddin. But I would have done it if I had seen indication from either of them that they were hiding dangerous information from me.
Not that they weren’t allowed any secrets at all. After all, I had mine.
Medusa and I walked through empty tunnels on my legs. We had merged again, and I shared my memories with her. I couldn’t help revisiting the journey my father and I had made after I got my upgraded implants. I had felt both tired and happy then. I saw a similar mixture in Terry’s expression when we left him. Whatever doubts he may have about me, or life, or history, he wouldn’t be unhappy with the virtual world we had just given him. I felt sure of that.
I remembered Terry as a boy—the way he had looked when Lady Sheba killed his mother. But the boy he had been didn’t dominate that memory for long. She eclipsed him, her cold, smug expression reminding me why my mother called her the Iron Fist.
My mother. How she had cleaned my hair and kissed my brow—her gentle hands and her beautiful voice—the safety of our family burrow—I shared all these things with Medusa.
My mother and Lady Sheba …
The landscape of my inner hallways unfolded inside my mind. Medusa and I were still linked, so she traveled there with me. The real tunnels we walked through were almost completely dark, but those virtual hallways were full of light. Instead of being closed on all sides, they opened through many doorways. They were as grand as the Habitat Sector, as majestic as the exterior landscape of Olympia. What music would we hear now?
With the sound of the stick drum, the ghost of my mother materialized, her robes the color of dawn. She gazed at us with her single eye through her curtain of hair.
Lady Sheba’s ghost coalesced next to her, attended by the opening notes of Pachelbel’s Canon.
* * *
In the real world, I was wearing Medusa, so I couldn’t turn and stare at her.
We stood together, the golden light of imagination outlining our forms. My mother and Lady Sheba looked no more and no less real than they ever had. But how could they be like Medusa?
I studied both of them in turn.
Medusa’s virtual tentacles teased the air, not to threaten the ghosts, but almost as if they wished to explore them.
The ghosts regarded us with more fascination than I had ever seen from them—which helped to prove Medusa’s point.
“We’re in the Graveyard,” said the ghost of my mother.
Graveyards were not something you would find aboard a generation ship. We were cremated after death (those of us who were not blown out of air locks). But our history lessons included images of graveyards, so I knew what they looked like.
“No.”
“We’re sleeping.”
Sleeping in the graveyard. There was a very old colloquialism: sleeping like the dead. But I doubted that’s what they meant. I decided to try another angle.
“You will see it when you arrive at your destination,” said my mother. “It is there. It is here.”
“Do not ask,” warned my mother.
This time it was Lady Sheba who answered. “Because you must not wake us. If you ask to see where we are, we will look at ourselves. If we see ourselves, that may cause us to become more self-aware. That must not happen.”
“Yes,” they said together.
I wondered if I should continue that line of questioning. But my curiosity was too strong to resist.
My mother’s ghost answered. “Because the ones who made us are long dead.”
The ghosts bowed their heads, and the light around them died. With their departure, the virtual world in my head lost some of its life.
But not all of it. The geometry of my hallways had restructured itself like minerals forming a new crystalline lattice. Behind the structure of those halls, a larger landscape seemed to be waiting, a place of wide vistas and deep canyons. Was the graveyard there? Or was it an artifact of my struggle to grasp the unknown?
That would explain the landscape that was trying to form in my imagination. A large place to hold large—entities? Constructs?
As I pondered that framework, I heard Medusa’s voice.
I thought about what waited in the research towers on the leading edge of Olympia, row upon row of Medusa units who were not quite awake but not asleep, either. I tried to imagine them abiding in those cold towers for centuries, for millennia, after the human race died out. Did that really have to be their fate?
Medusa seemed to know more than she should about these sleepers. But I detected no deception. It was as if she were feeling her way into territory that was both new and old, something she sensed rather than something she had learned from experience.
I began to see what she meant. But it was a challenge for a worm who spent most of her time in narrow tunnels.
I felt the ghosts waiting behind that hidden landscape. They could hear us. But they did not speak, because we had not asked them questions. They were interested. The sleep Medusa had mentioned was not the illogical, insensate thing that it was for humans. And if that were the case, I had to wonder about the minds that had conceived them, the ones who were now gone.
Those minds could not have been human.
Medusa’s perfect face appeared in my mind’s eye, though I still wore her.
The endless tunnels of Olympia coiled around us. My fellow worms moved through them, to and from work, leaving their families or coming home to them. They tended our machines, cleaned our spaces, grew our food, and served our Executives. They did all of that because they believed we were heading toward a new homeworld where their children’s children could have a better life.
But at the end of that journey, in a graveyard, giant, alien intelligences were sleeping.
14
This Little Piggy Had Some After All
If we don’t control the piggies, they’ll overrun us, Lady Sheba once said to Baylor Charmayne. We didn’t make all these sacrifices and come all this way just so our inferiors could outvote us and ruin everything.
I sat in Anzia Thammavong’s tiny quarters and played this recording in my head, obsessing over Lady Sheba’s use of the word piggies. I’d always assumed it was Sheba’s nickname for worms. But now it struck me as odd—why not call us worms, as the other Executives did? I couldn’t get over the feeling that she meant something more than that.
For one thing, she said she didn’t want to be outvoted. And worms don’t vote.
But—piggies? She didn’t use that word to describe Executives in her other communications.
I leaned back and made myself relax. I used to take refuge in my father’s database when I felt flummoxed, playing my favorites and looking at the images my mother had compiled as if they were a real landscape through which I could wander. But I couldn’t take those familiar things for granted anymore.
Did Father know about the deepsleep units? I thought as I listened to the “Playful Pizzicato” movement of Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony. And when I saw the images of canyons and mountains that must have come from Earth rather than our false Homeworld, instead of marveling at the natural processes that shape a world, I wondered, Did Mother know about the Graveyard?
And if Mother knew, did Lady Sheba? Or Baylor Charmayne?
My ghosts, along with the two deepsleep units and the pale man, had shed a new light on things, but instead of revealing truth, they cast more shadows.
Still—even darkness can teach you something. I listened to Lady Sheba complain, and I realized something I hadn’t seen before.
Lady Sheba complained about piggies because she was worried about something.
Perhaps it had been the upcoming destruction of Titania? Sheba must have known she was cutting it close.
But if the Iron Fist lacked any qualities, courage wasn’t one of them. Neither was confidence. If Sheba felt nervous about something, it must have been a pretty big thing.
The Graveyard was a big thing.
It had been many cycles since the ghosts in my machine spooked Medusa and me with their talk of Sleeping Giants who should not be awakened. Since then, I had felt my mother and Sheba walking around in the halls of my mind, but they had remained respectful of my reticence. Should I ask them questions now?
I resisted the urge to pester Medusa with my indecision. She had turned her mind to decoding Lady Sheba’s messages, and I had grown impatient for that to be finished. Once she felt confident that we should proceed, we could get back on track getting people the implants that came with my father’s music database. The seeds of our revolution would be well sown.
But all of that seemed abstract. I wanted to do something now.
Instead, I went to work as Anzia Thammavong. I put on my uniform and reported to the checkpoint, where Ellington scrutinized me with his customary thoroughness. He was not a man to take anything for granted.
My coworkers did not display that sort of vigilance, but they weren’t required to unless they rose in the ranks—as Kalyani Aksu had recently done.
Prior to her promotion, Kalyani took the allegiance of her coworkers for granted. Now she cultivated the same watchfulness Ellington had mastered. When I arrived at my workstation, she showed up with a substitute to relieve me. “We need to have a conference,” she said, her face revealing nothing of what was up. That’s the best possible hint that any worker could have that it was something serious.
Once we shut ourselves into her new office, she got right to the point. “There was an incident you failed to report.”
I stood for several seconds, hoping she would tell me which incident she was talking about. But she was expecting me to reveal that.
Unfortunately, she could be referring to several incidents, all involving Baylor or Ryan Charmayne or both being places they weren’t supposed to be—in the company of a certain alien. If I guessed, I would probably cough up the wrong one. So I decided to be direct, too. “Which incident?”
She almost smiled. But Kalyani was a remarkably restrained woman—I’m sure it’s one of the many reasons she was promoted. “Don’t play games,” she said. “This is very serious.”
I wasn’t surprised this situation had come up—not after the way Schnebly confronted Terry Charmayne. Kumiko and Terry had been monitoring Schnebly’s communications since then, and Schnebly hadn’t said another word about the pale stranger who did not officially exist. But Kalyani may not have been referring to the stranger at all, and if she didn’t know about him, I didn’t want to involve her in something that could get her (or me) killed.
“It’s serious,” I said. “That’s why I’m not interested in sticking my neck in a noose. You say I’ve failed to report an incident, Commander. Show me the proof.”
This time she did smile—sort of. It was more of a grimace, but Kalyani’s face didn’t like sour expressions, so it looked rather sweet. She took a deep breath, let it out again, and said, “I can’t.”
I nodded. “Then—you should ask me what you really want to know.”
“I want to know what’s going on,” she said, making my heart skip a beat. This was another situation where blurting what I thought she might be referring to would be a monumentally bad idea.
“Me, too,” I volunteered. “Could you give me a hint?�
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She gazed at me for several moments. I don’t think she was trying to intimidate me; she was taking my measure. I hoped my face didn’t look as blank as it usually did. I would have liked to look trustworthy and ethical, though I doubted she would approve of my personal definitions of those qualities. “Who is he?” she said at last. “Why is he here?”
I had to give her credit, because this was yet another moment when a less paranoid person would have assumed she meant someone in particular. But I could think of at least two people she might mean. “Describe him?” I said.
“The pale man,” she said. “The one with no records.”
Bingo. “I don’t know who he is,” I said. “But I’m afraid to say anything about him.”
“So you’ve seen him.”
It had never been my intention to deny this. I only wanted to make sure we were talking about the same thing. “A few times,” I said.
“And you never reported it.”
“I don’t report Executives. Especially not the two I’ve seen with the stranger.”
She rested her face in her hands and stared past me. I relaxed into parade stance and waited. “I don’t intend to discipline you,” she said at last. “I will not report you. I have the same concerns you do. I’ve worked here since I was eighteen—almost ten years—and I did not report the same incidents you did not report.”
“You’re not recording this meeting,” I said.
She looked me in the eye again. “That won’t strike anyone as odd around here. You’re right to assume that what they say they want us to do and what they really want us to do can be very different things. We look after their safety and security, yes. But we do those things only so far as we dare. I can’t imagine that was any different in Aft Sector.”
I couldn’t imagine it was either, though imagining was the most I could do, since I had never been there.
“So—” I said, “you called me in here—to ask my opinion?”
“Yes. You’re discreet, Thammavong. And you’re—a good daughter.”
That last part referred to a conversation we’d had the night before, over table tennis. Much as I liked being Anzia Thammavong, I couldn’t be her forever, and I really didn’t want to risk another fake death. So I pleaded family troubles: an ailing father.
Medusa Uploaded_A Novel_The Medusa Cycle Page 14