said Medusa.
I had been thinking along the same lines. I said.
I looked for virtual access to a keyboard. No such thing existed.
But I had used manual keyboards in school. So I touched the flat surface beneath the screen, and the space lit up to reveal the keys. I quickly tapped out a message: RESOURCE IS INTACT.
I hoped they wouldn’t insist on too much clarification.
WHY DID YOU DELAY RESPONDING? they demanded.
That was an easy one. BECAUSE THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM AROUND HERE.
NO SURPRISE THERE, came the response. And then the screen went blank.
But we might not be so lucky a second time.
I followed Medusa back to the air lock, walking just as carefully as I had coming in. The decision I had made about pairing the children with their own Medusa units was looking better every minute. Like Ashur, I had changed my perspective by seeing what I wasn’t supposed to see. And like him, I couldn’t get away with it indefinitely.
How long would it take these foxes to discover we had spied on their wedding?
27
What Is a Kitten Kaboodle?
You think all this talk of who votes and who does not is important, Gennady told the Charmaynes. Within two years, the Weapons Clan will claim their resource. Do you suppose you will get to vote about it?
That was the conversation I had in mind when I answered the query on Escape’s communication screen. I figured the word resource would ring true, regardless of who was on the other side of that transmission. And maybe I was right. But as risky as my contact with the unknown caller(s) might be, I had other consequences to deal with.
Sow the wind, and you shall reap the whirlwind. The false messages from Sheba Charmayne popped into the in-boxes of their targets once the communication network rebooted. The illustrious ID associated with the sender placed them at the top of the list as priority messages.
And the hive was abuzz.
Not that you could see it on the surface. We are a pathologically orderly bunch. In the tunnels of Olympia, worms crawled around doing our usual work. Midlevel Executives managed personnel and inspected reports. Servants observed protocols at important suppers. The higher I looked in the hierarchy of Olympia, the more staid and traditional were the responses to the new information.
But Medusa and I could see the communication trees. And the last time they were so wild, Titania had blown up.
I watched Baylor Charmayne’s messages and responses.
I had hoped he would say that. But at this stage, I could take nothing for granted. While I watched Baylor, Terry Charmayne paid special attention to what was happening in the Security sphere.
In the first few days, that amounted to nothing.
But they had fixed it pretty quickly. The Security experts declared that we were lucky. Communications had been out for only a couple of hours, and lost information had been recovered. A small failure had probably staved off something more catastrophic. (And that might even be true.)
Nuruddin served at one of Baylor Charmayne’s parties, ten cycles after the outage. “It’s an ill wind that blows no one any good,” Baylor remarked after Nuruddin filled his wine cup. “The problem has been fixed now, and I choose to see my mother’s lost messages as a treasure trove.”
That was his signal that the matter would be brought up at the next session of the House of Clans.
I studied Nuruddin’s recording of the supper. Indeed, Ryan was the Smirkmaster. And he made no attempt to hide this from Baylor, who leveled a heavy-lidded appraisal at Ryan that should have made that son wonder what his father was willing to sacrifice. If the beloved Sheba had been ground under the wheels of Baylor’s ambition, who else could be?
Perhaps Ryan thought he would be doing the grinding? I watched the recording several times, concentrating on Ryan’s cronies, most of whom made some small effort to conceal their contempt for their elders. Music in Education? Really? Once you learn how to debate laws, what else could you need? The only one who managed to look completely neutral was Percy O’Reilly, a fact that seemed to irk Ryan, his best friend—and biggest rival.
Ashur’s face popped into my in-box.
He showed me the smiling icon of his otter-boy persona, and disappeared in a cloud of virtual bubbles.
Ashur had averaged one pairing per day. But he spoke to me more often than that. Somehow I had given him the impression that I was a fount of knowledge.
And thus began my education of how brilliant Ashur would prove to be at asking questions for which I had no answer.
To his credit, when I didn’t know the answer to one of his questions, Ashur regrouped to think up better questions. In between his queries, I continued to get things done. I didn’t discourage him from asking. If I were busy, I didn’t have to accept the call. He waited politely for my responses. And the two of us continued to emulate Lady Machiavellia.
Thoughts of great schemers reminded me of Gennady Mironenko, who still had not surfaced. My pride made me want to believe that it was I who had caused him to go deep. I would have been flattered to think he had guessed I was as dangerous as he, and that I would not die when he blew me out of the air lock. Perhaps he imagined me to be like one of the queens in his chess set instead of one of the pawns.
But flattery is false. The more you want to believe something, the more it should be doubted.
said Miriam, who had more status among the foodies than she did among the VIPs.
No Gennady in the Lotus Room, no Gennady at Charmayne parties. No Gennady sending messages to anyone by regular communication networks. Terry didn’t spot him in surveillance; Medusa and her sisters found no trace of him on our Security overlay. He was back to being the ghost who had watched a century pass without suffering from the ravages of time or politics.
And just to make us feel special, eleven cycles after the Big Sheba Dump, Sultana’s suit disappeared out of its storage locker, and we never saw her taking it. So another one of my assumptions went up in smoke.
Since Sultana and Tetsuko had been getting around us for quite a while already, I couldn’t take it too much to heart. But I would breathe easier once all the children had been paired with units.
TeeRexxa!
I had quite a different proposal I wanted to make to her. I was pretty sure she’d like mine better.
* * *
Thirteen cycles from the Sheba Dump, Ashur paired the last child with his unit.
I left them to their discussion and dressed as Third-Level Maintenance Worker Lagatha Oyeyemi, whose persona I had begun building five years before. During those years, I had made sure that Lagatha left footprints where they ought to be. I put on the gear that obscured my form and made my face and hair as plain and unmemorable as I could.
Lagatha’s supervisor didn’t spare me a glance after checking her record. I wouldn’t be worth her notice unless I screwed something up.
“Med Refrigeration Unit 1713 is eating too much energy.” Her breath condensed in the air between us. The energy in question would not even be spared for comfort, this deep in the bowels of Olympia, let alone gobbled up by a malfunctioning refrigerator. “Probably someone just overstuffed the fridge, but we have to make an inspection. Once you’ve checked the machinery, they’ll do an official inventory, and we can all get on with our lives.”
“Got it.” I patted my tools and turned on my heel, heading deeper into endless tunnels. Near darkness enfolded me, reminding me that I had once walked in the light. I had sipped wine. I wondered if I would ever do those things again.
Less than ten hours earlier, Halka Chavez and I had walked together through tunnels just as dark, to a secret place where her life would change forever. She had wept when she received her implant and beheld the sheer breadth and depth of my father’s music database. Music was Halka’s life. Even if she had only received the implant, and had not been paired with a Medusa unit, she would have counted it the greatest gift.
Imogen, she called her Medusa unit. That was the name of Gustav Holst’s daughter.
The tunnels twisted this way and that. My pace, coupled with the solitude, reminded me of one of Lady Sheba’s favorite pieces of music, Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. It unwound in my mind, bringing light into the darkness. As I opened my heart to it, I became aware that I wasn’t alone. Sheba’s ghost walked beside me.
“I know why Baylor targeted Miriam and Halka,” she said. “They are both too kindhearted. They have that in common with Bunny Charmayne.”
Considering Bunny’s demise, it was not a happy thought. We got into a lift and I tapped the code for Med Level 17.
“And easier to manipulate if they thought those children might be in danger.” Sheba’s imperious features softened with concern. “I’ve extricated both of them from his clutches. He’s already moved on to new victims.”
The door opened, and Sheba’s ghost stepped through it, disappearing as quickly as she had arrived. She had double duty now, advising two midlevel Executive women. I was alone when I stepped into the corridor. I focused my mind on the task at hand: Med Freezer 1713.
It chugged along in a little-used room at the end of the hall. I could hear it laboring long before I found it. I opened its door and took a temperature reading. The interior was as cold as it should be, though the small freezer had to work harder to keep it that way.
As my supervisor had suggested, it was overstuffed. I inspected it, took readings, and wrote a brief report that I sent back to my supervisor. I flagged it PRIORITY.
Found biopackages with an Executive ID on them, I reported. The name on them is Lady Sheba Charmayne.
Lagatha Oyeyemi had just discovered the implants for Lady Sheba’s Music in Education program. Lagatha’s supervisor would take charge of the find, the credit for which would certainly be claimed by some midlevel Executive in Security. And Baylor Charmayne would soon have one hundred implants that he believed had been designed by his mother, ready to copy and transplant into the brains of every child on Olympia.
We were uncertain how Baylor would react when he discovered the movie database included in the implant. We weren’t even sure he would look that far, once he saw his mother’s ID on the implants. Soon enough, the children who received them would mention the movies bundled in with the music, but it wouldn’t necessarily cause a scandal. The movies had been shredded decades before anyone who currently lived on Olympia had been born.
Everyone but Gennady. And Sultana and Tetsuko.
But surely Sheba approved of the movies—they were part of the implants she had designed. Her name on that biotech meant no one would dare to inspect it closely enough to find the codes hidden inside the music. Anyone who questioned her judgment would have Baylor to deal with.
I left Med Level 17 and headed for Lagatha Oyeyemi’s next assignment.
Ashur’s icon appeared, requesting to ask another question. I allowed it.
At last! Something I knew!
Someone was following me.
28
My Moriarty
I could have told him that if his definition was based on how predatory those arms could be, he was wrong.
I got on a mover, wondering if that would be enough to dislodge my tail. That would be the most desirable outcome.
Or would it? Why would anyone follow Lagatha Oyeyemi? Unless my cover had been compromised. It would be better to find out who that was.
Better. Not safer.
I got off the mover, behaving as if I had no cares beyond doing the work I had been assigned. But I was tapped into Security surveillance, and I caught sight of a figure about ten meters behind me, a tall, lean man.
Schnebly? I wondered. Or Tetsuko?
Together we moved deeper into the bowels of Olympia (though anyplace other than the Habitat Sector would qualify as deeper into the bowels—with so many tunnels, what else would you call it?). My next task was to inspect a ventilation intake duct that was reporting a minor blockage.
My suspicions ra
n more deeply in one direction than they did in the other. If I was right about who it was, then I had to admire my follower. His dogged pursuit of me, for so many years, reminded me of a character from a series of movies in Nuruddin’s movie database. The character was named Sherlock Holmes.
But his pursuit had a predatory edge to it as well. If he had possessed arms like Medusa, they could rightly be called tentacles. So it wasn’t just Sherlock Holmes who came to mind when I envisioned the man who followed me through the tunnels. I was reminded of Sherlock’s great nemesis, a man he called simply Moriarty.
That evil genius looked for ways to trip Sherlock up. How would my Moriarty do that to me?
I continued to behave like a worker with maintenance on my mind. When I reached the section where the blockage had been reported, I shined my penlight on it—and found what was blocking it.
A sheet of paper had been sucked against the intake vent and held there by the current of air. It was larger than the one Edna Charmayne had used to warn Sezen Koto.
On the paper, someone had written, Hello, Oichi.
I slipped the paper into my repair kit and sent a quick report. Foreign object blocking intake vent 12-0097 has been removed. Vent functioning normally.
My follower had stopped when I did, maintaining the ten-meter space between us. If he was waiting for a reaction, I didn’t give it to him. Instead I used a penlight to inspect nearby vents, as if I expected that more foreign objects might have blown there. Using this ruse, I moved toward a junction and wandered around a corner.
Briefly out of sight, I ran like hell. By the time he rounded the corner, I was gone. I could have gone down several adjoining tunnels. If he was looking at a Security overlay, he would find that Lagatha Oyeyemi no longer seemed to be anywhere on Olympia.
He walked to the center of the juncture and stopped there. An amber beam from an emergency light illuminated Schnebly’s face.
“I know you’re still alive,” he said.
If I had been younger, I would have withdrawn silently and refused to confirm his suspicions. Because that’s all they were. He risked nothing if nobody was there to hear his challenge.
Medusa Uploaded_A Novel_The Medusa Cycle Page 27