Medusa Uploaded_A Novel_The Medusa Cycle
Page 36
We stepped onto the platform. My legs wobbled under me, and I had to stop to catch my breath.
I took it. But before we continued, I looked over my shoulder at Schnebly and Nemo. Their expressions were remarkably similar. These two company men had confidence in me. I squared my shoulders and let Terry help me walk into the void.
Sunlight dawned around us, gold and white, shining from a blue sky full of towering clouds. The light dazzled my eyes, but I could see three figures standing in it.
I heard an intake of breath from Terry—my mother and Lady Sheba had arrived. But it wasn’t just their presence that startled him, or the sheer impact of their will. He could see them, he could hear them, and he could hear my question to the one who stood with them.
“Gennady…” I said.
Gennady’s ghost was dressed in the finery he had worn at the Charmaynes’ party. “I am the Third One,” he said. “It is time for me to speak.”
“Are you awake?” I said.
“Not entirely. Not yet.”
The three ghosts stood side by side, but they were no longer confined to the virtual halls in my head. Behind them I saw the outlines of a magnificent landscape, a canyon that contained buttes and spires of rock—and something else that towered above everything, but that also seemed fused with the surrounding rocks, something that was young only when compared to the geology surrounding it.
I kept my eyes on Gennady’s ghost. He returned my regard without blinking, his eyes as cool and blue as I remembered. He waited for me to ask a question.
“Why Gennady?” I asked. “Why not appear as Baylor Charmayne? Or my father?”
“Because Gennady is the one who made you,” said the Third One.
Several more questions crowded my head, and I was afraid to ask them.
“He stole DNA from me,” said the Third One. “Technically, you could say I am the mother of your race. And he is the father. Although it would be more accurate to call him the Engineer.”
Now I couldn’t help looking past him at the Three Giants who had waited in the Graveyard for so long, they had fused with the landscape. I remembered what my mother’s ghost had said about Medusa’s brain. “You have brains that are partly organic,” I ventured.
“Yes. Many have tried to violate our interiors over the millennia. Few have slipped past our sentinels and succeeded. Fewer have lived to take our secrets out of the Graveyard. In fact, Gennady Mironenko’s agent did not survive. But he got far enough to hand the DNA off to someone else. And now you are a living part of our legacy. And you are coming back to us.”
I was surprised to discover that some vestiges of my old belief in our journey to the new homeworld still survived—because his revelation finally killed them. We were heading back to where we had started, not to someplace new. And what of our hope for a better life for our children’s children?
“Why must we return to you?” I said.
“Because the Weapons Clan wants to own the Graveyard. They want the technology that can be salvaged from us, that will give them the ability to make weapons that will make them supreme. But they can’t do it themselves. They need an interface.”
They’ll keep our children hostage to force us to do their work.…
“We are the interface,” I said.
“For starters,” said the Third One. “The Medusa units were an experiment. The Weapons Clan wanted to see how well the interface would work. Because they’re hoping you can retrieve more technology from the Graveyard—and survive the experience.”
“Can we?”
Gennady’s ghost smiled at me. “Yes.”
“Is it a good idea?”
He considered that. “Not if you do it for them. It may or may not be a good idea if you do it for yourselves.”
The ones who made him were long dead. And we had some of those makers in our own cells. Considering what had happened on Olympia and Titania, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine those makers had been the cause of their own destruction.
“But,” said the Third One, “it’s not only up to you. We Three will also make a decision. We must decide if we should wake.”
“Gennady—you really aren’t awake yet?”
“I’m not,” he said. “You’ll be here within two years, Oichi. We won’t speak to you again until we’ve made up our minds.”
I should have stopped there. What he had revealed was enough to give me plenty to think about. But the Third One looked so much like Gennady, not just in appearance, but also in demeanor. If Gennady had invaded the Graveyard, he must also have left something of himself behind. I couldn’t stop thinking about that wink he had given me before I was blown out of the air lock, and of the supper we had shared and how he had shown me how to make the most of my senses. I couldn’t let go of the hurt I felt when I realized he had died at Baylor’s Doomsday Party. “In your opinion,” I said, “did Gennady feel remorse for making us so we could be sold into slavery?”
The Third One did not hesitate. “Yes.”
I took a deep breath. “Was he going to sell us anyway?”
“Yes.”
Oddly, that made me feel better. I knew I should stop wondering whether Gennady ever cared about me or if he had tried to help me. Because none of that mattered. By helping me, he would have been helping himself. He might have admired me, cared for me, become my lover. But he still would have sold us to the Weapons Clan. “And if we had managed to defeat the Weapons Clan, he would have tried to negotiate with us,” I said.
“Of course,” said the Third One.
“So it stands to reason that the Weapons Clan will also try to negotiate with us.”
“With you, yes,” he said. “But not with us. We understand the concept very well, but we have drawn a line. We won’t negotiate with them. You should bear that in mind.”
And he was gone, along with the ghosts of Lady Sheba and my mother. I felt a pang of grief to see those ladies go. It was supplanted by a sense of relief.
But neither reaction seemed wise. Though the Three Giants had withdrawn from direct communication, the images of the world that was called Graveyard remained on our displays. Now I could see that the Graveyard wasn’t a collection of bodies in tombs. At least—not exactly.
I heard the sound of footfalls behind us. Now that the Three had departed, Nemo and Schnebly joined us on the platform. When Nemo stood beside me, I said, “Can we tell what the scale of those ships are?”
“They’re as big as Olympia and Titania would be if they were standing on end,” said Nemo.
We marveled at the sight. The Three stood inside a gorge that was almost as deep as they were tall. The gorge widened toward our vantage point, and I could see a couple of tributary canyons. The sight of those Three Giants alone in that landscape would have been fantastic.
But they were not alone. Other ships rested there—thousands of them, some recognizably of the same ilk as the Giants, but many others very different, possibly made by creatures with minds and bodies so different from ours, we would have trouble understanding the least part of them. All of them stood inside a gigantic canyon system, and I suspected that some of them were over a million years old.
Possibly way over.
“That’s where we’re going,” I said. “To a place full of alien technology. And they’re not just a collection of cold machines. To one degree or another, every single one of those ships is aware.”
“You know,” said Terry, “that’s kind of wonderful.”
I should have given him the hairy eyeball for that, but I was harboring similar sentiments. My fears that our children would have no opportunities were evaporating in the white and gold light of that massive canyon system, with its dazzling blue sky and its collection of mysteries and dangers.
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I had to grin. The rocks on the western side of the gorge began to glow red as Charon dipped closer to Graveyard’s horizon. I leaned on Terry and watched everything change color.
“Now, that,” I said, “is a sight worthy of majesty music.”
EPILOGUE
So the worms have prevailed, as morbid poets have insisted we must. Captain Nemo continues to look after Ship Operations. The children have completed their project for Medusa, creating thirteen Minis who are in great demand, so they have begun the next generation of units to satisfy the Olympians with implants.
Within two years, that will be all of us. We rule Olympia together, because the Executive class was demolished from within—or so they must believe. Rebellion is unlikely at this point, but sabotage is always a possibility. Best if the remnants of the old families think it was what their great founders always intended, that they gave their lives defending us from the Weapons Clan. I have murdered too many people to accept failure now.
What? You say murder is not the term you would use? Perhaps assassination? Killing? Justifiable homicide? Even self-defense? Because what I’ve told you leads you to that conclusion. But if truth is what you’re after, don’t look for it in the things a killer tells you.
It’s what she doesn’t tell you that matters.
Think about that as you consider our voyage through space and time. Remember me if you calculate our usefulness, if you happen to be waiting for us outside the solar system of a world that harbors an ancient graveyard for spaceships. Don’t look for kindness from me, even if I happen to like you. I know what kind of killer I am, even if you don’t.
I suspect the Three know it, too. We’ll see what they want to do about it.
About the Author
EMILY DEVENPORT’s short stories have been featured in various esteemed publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, the Full Spectrum anthology, The Mammoth Book of Kaiju, Uncanny, Cicada, Science Fiction World, Clarkesworld, and Aboriginal SF, whose readers voted her a Boomerang Award. She currently studies geology and works as a volunteer at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Part One: What Sort of Killer?
1. Lock 212
2. The Girl from Shantytown
3. Gamelan, My Little Doggie …
4. The Death of Titania
5. Lady Sheba?
6. Medusa
7. Lucifer Tower
Part Two: Wait … What?
8. The White-Haired Girl
9. Spaced … Again …
10. Kwaidan
11. The Company Man
12. But Can She Dance?
13. The Haunted
14. This Little Piggy Had Some After All
15. The Messenger Is the Message …
Part Three: We have Met The Enemy Clans and They are Us
16. Isildur’s Chess Set
17. … And the Message Is the Messenger
18. The Weapons Clan
19. Advice from Edna
20. Knives and Spoons
21. Pavane for a Dead Princess
Part Four: Aliens and Humans
22. My Mother the Ghost
23. The Mermaid Program
24. What a Difference a Cycle Makes
25. Sultana, Tetsuko, and Their Wonderful, Fabulous Plan
26. The Fox Wedding
27. What Is a Kitten Kaboodle?
28. My Moriarty
29. Dragonette
30. Welcome to the Magic Kingdom
31. X the Unknown
32. Why I’m a Big Jerk (in Dazzling Detail)
33. The Guest List
34. Thirty-seven Ronin
Part Five: Oichi The Clueless
35. The Doomsday Party
36. The Banks of Green Willow
37. Vengeance Is Not Mine
38. An Imperfect Killer
39. Captain Nemo
Epilogue
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
MEDUSA UPLOADED
Copyright © 2018 by Emily Devenport
All rights reserved.
Originally published as novella in substantially different form under the title The Servant in Clarkesworld magazine, issue 107, August 2015.
Cover art by Sam Weber
Cover design by Jamie Stafford-Hill
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-16934-1 (trade paperback)
ISBN 978-1-250-16932-7 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250169327
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First Edition: May 2018