by Brian Daley
Chapter
Twenty-Eight
The displeasure of the assembled Aggregate members hit Piper like a violent storm front as she stepped out of the security lock into the interior of Habitat. The air of the nest was charged with the constituents' hostile scentspeech and resentful kinesigns. Granted, she had been delayed in returning to Habitat, but the Aggregate was not scheduled to perform its tech presentation at the Lyceum ball for several hours to come and all the preparations had been made. So what had incensed them?
She did not need voicetalk from them to make their antagonism more emphatic. She recognized an anger whose olfactory nuances were as familiar and intimate as her own. The constituents were cuing from Byron Sarz, the nexus of their interconnected consciousness, and if Byron was irate with Piper to such a pitch of estrangement and antipathy, it would be like God turning his face away. She had to curb her own scent-speech to keep from tainting the air with fear.
In the despair that settled on her Piper had a torturous but vivid epiphany. This was what it felt like to be an Alone—any of the sundered and hermetically isolated conventional human beings walking the face of Periapt and the other Homo sapiens worlds.
Family members, lovers, boon companions—any contact an Alone had with another could only be a sad and wretched pretense compared to the rich, heady medium in which the Aggregate lived.
Byron's rule against letting the Alones grasp that difference was a wise one, and no one knew that better than Piper, who had just returned from a rare solo foray among them. Unconscious of their own scentspeech and the rest of their Othertalk, Alones poured out their emotions, phobias, and venalities. Far more tragically, they barely heard one another. They were almost completely insensate to the sea of Alltalk in which they swam.
If the Alones knew how harmonious the shared life of the Aggregate was, surely they would go completely mad with jealousy and wipe the Aggregate out of existence.
She had known Byron was standing off to one side of the group, for she had been tasting his disapproval since she had arrived. He stood out from the score of young men and women who made up the constituency. Gray-haired and somewhat overfleshed, he was bigger than any of them and, at forty-eight baseline years, more than twice the age of the eldest. Piper gazed at him and waited meekly for him to open a dialogue, but his Othertalk was mostly that of shutout, of withholding.
His voicetalk—much less its Alltalk context—would have been incomprehensible to an Alone. Aggregate phonetics, abetted by elisions, aphereses, surd words, and similar shortcuts, was too rapid for Alones. When he finally relented to speak, he was unsparing in his condemnation of her for having absented herself from the communal nest without his permission.
Piper wasn't permitted a moment to explain that the Hierarch laboratory that monitored the Aggregate's research and self-modification activities had demanded a tissue sample or that she'd decided to make the delivery herself merely to spare Byron and her fellow constituents another distasteful invasion by Alones.
As she showed her contrition in Othertalk, she became aware that Byron was concealing the true source of his ire. She couldn't avoid All-Auding the fact that she was being excluded from something. It ran counter to the group's whole reason for being. Yet she saw nothing out of place in all the tech clutter. Her hearing picked up no discrepancies, and her olfaction—the most sensitive in Habitat—brought her no trace of an accident or mishap that could have provoked Byron so.
A small, fragile-looking young woman to begin with, Piper shrank in on herself. She knew all too well that she had the look of a perpetual victim: huge and wounded gamine eyes, a head that seemed too big for her body, a spray of freckles across a snub uptilted nose, lips so full that they seemed to weight her mouth away from her lower face.
Byron made a kinesign that told the rest to resume what they'd been doing, and they dispersed at once to finish preparations for the Lyceum ball performance.
Piper looked pleadingly to Byron, her mentor, lover, and more, the one who had created her, who had elevated her from an Alone foundling to a constituent in the new order of the human race. But Byron only showed her a blankness she had never seen in a constituent, certainly not in him.
At that moment she no longer knew him, and he no longer knew her.
Scrolling furiously through recent events in an effort to determine what else she might have done to bring about this waking nightmare, she could come up with only one transgression. That very morning a confidential commo had briefly called Byron away from Habitat. He had been speaking into a shielded screen, but Piper had caught a fragment of the conversation: "Quantum College."
Had her inadvertent eavesdropping caused the change in him? she wondered. She was about to ask as much when Habitat's roof-landing platform nav system chirped and issued a burst of voice commo. The Peace Warrantor airvan that was to take them to Empyraeum was on final approach.
She saw, tasted, and almost felt Byron's anger escalate, though his expression, kines, and aromas provided no clues why. The Aggregate took up his unease like microwave repeaters as Byron opened a link to the airvan.
"Public Safety, you're early by nearly an hour," he told the pilot of the airvan. "We're not ready. Return at twenty hundred hours."
"Wasn't a request, fleshware. Schedule's been moved up. Get up here and board or we'll get you aboard."
Even an Alone could have read the contempt in the War-rantor's voice. Hatred wasn't all that unusual. Most Alones felt personally threatened by the very concept of subsuming individuality and free will to group awareness. They were ignorant of the fact that Aggregate life diminished sadness and multiplied joy. "Fleshware" was less pejorative than some of the other terms the Alones had for constituents.
Byron chose not to take issue with the Warrantors and ordered everyone to get moving. The constituents began covering their graceful bodies with clothing and misting on vulgar disguise smells so that the Warrantors and the Alones at the ball wouldn't be subconsciously disconcerted by scentspeech aromas.
Piper watched Byron lock down the access cowling of the DNA assembler's programming suite, the computer system that was the key to the new field-portable, high-speed synthesis module. Oddly, the programming suite had been locked down before Piper had left. There should have been no reason to reopen it in her absence.
Aware of her gaze, Bryon used Othertalk to make it plain that he wasn't about to discuss the matter.
The airvan was touching down. Abruptly, Byron sent Piper an Othertalk message she'd never apprehended before: a warning not to communicate. Then the bioengineering genius who had created the Manipulants, the gynanders, and the Aggregate sidled away to greet the Peace Warrantors, radiating deceit from his every cue and movement.
The Aggregate was all around her, but Piper felt no unison. Regardless, she grabbed hold of the DNA module to help haul it to the freight lift that would take everyone to the airvan.
* * * *
At Dextra Haven's insistence, Kurt Elide had been assigned to ferry the Exts from the Matsya to the Empyraeum. With him in the forward compartment was Tonii.
Abraxas at night was a celestial city, compelling Burning to concede that Periapt was firmly in possession of the kingdom, the power, and the glory and that the Exts would just have to live with it.
He had hoped to get a preview of the Lyceum ball on the airlimo's displays, but the Empyraeum traditionally went to press blackout for the event. There would be various PR opportunities on the cordoned-off terraces and elsewhere, but even the reporters who managed to gain entry weren't permitted to file reports.
Sorting through the aircar's hyperparsed data feed, Burning discovered that there would be nearly two thousand people attending: three hundred Hierarchs and their guests, the uppermost crust of the Hierarchate and LAW bureaucracies, and a scattering of heads of state and private sector moguls.
The Lyceum ball was part of the front the Hierarchate maintained to bolster its cynical relationship with a lethargic elector
ate. The politics of Lyceum and LAW was founded on the illusion that if the average citizen ever wanted to effect change, he or she could. Thus, the induction of new Hierarchs had to be propagandized as government by the people at its finest The worrisome silence from Trinity notwithstanding, the lavish circus went on.
The Empyraeum, astride a summit overlooking Abraxas and the ocean, was like a mountain of milky ice sculpted by protean winds. Built almost a century before as the pinnacle of the organiform movement, it was without a single straight line or geometric angle. Instead, there were mounded globules, flexed arches, and billowed domes, all lambent enough to throw back the darkness around them. Set against the rearing and audacious architecture of Abraxas, the structure was a frozen comet presiding over a brilliant polychrome nebula.
"Someone left the lights on," Lod assayed. With everyone deep into private preoccupations, the remark fell flat.
As Kurt Elide descended, magnetic anomaly scanners, IFF radars, resonating spectrometer munitions sniffers, and other security gear gave the aircar a close-range inspection. Heavy weapons were nearby, discreetly concealed in what pretended to be catering marquees, mobile support trailers, and renovation worksite domes scattered over Empyraeum's roofs and upper works.
Dextra was on hand to meet her guests. The three Exts debarked to some whistles and cheers, plus a number of cat-calls, as press gangs got what images they could. Tonii blew Dextra a kiss but remained in the cockpit. Kurt reboarded after standing by the passenger door and taxied the aircar on surface effect toward the parking area.
The Hierarch Haven had emerged from the Empyraeum with an articulated gauzewing mantelet held about her. She and the Exts rejected the ghdestrips and transfer platforms that would have conveyed them inside quickly; the meters of imperial purple carpet, flanked by stiltbooted news crews and throngs of security-checked sightseers, was too good a PR opportunity to pass up.
The crowds creamed over Dextra's gown and celebrity hair. When she drew back the pinions of the gauzewing mantelet, her bare breast and jeweled piercewear drew applause. Lyceum chasubles and workaday business attire had their place, but her Rationalist partisans required their champions to shine in the spotlight when the occasion demanded it.
As expected, the Exts received equal acclaim. Even Lod understood the importance of showing only a reserved martial bearing, barely reciprocating with a nod here and there. The cams couldn't get enough of Ghost's stunning face, arrowy shapeliness, and primeval scarification.
Also at Haven's direction, the Exts were wearing their midnight-blue, gold-buttoned ceremonial outfits, epauleted and mutton-leg-sleeved, with narrow cuffs reaching almost to the knuckles. Over their right shoulders were looped aiguil-lettes braided with gold and coarse cord, and their tight britches were adorned with gold-piped seams. When Dextra and her guests reached the checkpoint at the foot of the main entrance, the Exts made a grand show of retrieving the various blades they wore skean-dhu style in their spit-shined boot tops.
Burning drew his issue ka-bar, Lod revealed a gold-chased dirk, and Ghost unsheathed her ripsaw-hilted heirloom blade. The weapons were relinquished haft first to Warrantors in regimentals while Dextra stood to one side, allowing the cameras an unobstructed shot. There was a slight pause as the Warrantor sergeant at arms refused to move aside for Ghost. Without batting an eye, she slid a flat fighting knife out of the other boot and a brace of three-sided throwing blades thin as pencils from her left sleeve and added a spit needle from inside her cheek.
Passing into the Empyraeum was like entering a vaulted pleasure palace of chalky quartz and frosted glass. People of every type, size, and mode of dress milled and mingled, displaying a theatrical sense of their own presence. The range and flamboyance of the costumes lent the hall an atmosphere of cross-cultural pageantry.
The Empyraeum was teeming with notables, yet heads turned and conversations died away when Dextra Haven's name was announced. Eyes went to the trio in somber uniforms as well, and a number of people started for them as Haven led the way onto the floor.
Burning recalled a legend he had heard about such lions' dens and wished for angels to appear to hold unfriendly jaws closed.
For that matter, mine, it occurred to him.
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
In the silence of HauteFlash's guest bedroom Claude Mason's thoughts ran murky yet certain. Reaching the Matsya by helipod and making his plea to Haven and the assembled press was only half the task with which Farley Swope had charged him back at Blades Station.
The villa was well appointed with surveillance and security equipment, but Mason learned early on how to sneak in and out of it without being confronted. He had attended very expensive essentials forms and prep and upper schools, where he had absorbed the wiles and wisdom of fellow students who were career escape artists.
In the case of HauteFlash, it helped that along with observing the au pair's security routine, Mason had managed to filch her security key.
He took the guest room monitor off-line, cracked the door, and listened. Ben, Haven's faithful steward, was off somewhere keeping close tabs on the triple crises of Exts, Trinity's silence, and Aquamarine; Maripol was looking after Honeysuckle; and the other servants were preparing the household for the marathon sessions that went into staging a political offensive.
Mason reached the villa's grounds undetected, using Mari-pol's key to forestall various alarms by means of its identity-füend-or-foe transponder. Then he exited HauteFlash itself, deactivated the key's tracer function, and headed into Abraxas, his stride brisk on the footpath's energy-return nap.
He was not unduly worried about Peace Warrantors, with the ball having diverted a lot of personnel. Even as media-exposed as he had become, he was reasonably anonymous behind a half-mirrored datanet half cowl he had lifted from HauteFlash. He didn't know how to play spy or spot a tail, so he could only be cautious and hope he wasn't being followed.
Abraxas had changed greatly in the generation he had been away, but he had had abundant time in the Blades to catch up on developments. Mass transit, in any case, was still user-friendly and straightforward. At a public commo carrel a mnemonic phrase Farley had given him, combined with an alphanumeric group, gave him reference to a specific public key cryptosystem sequence. Using the combined data at a street TechPlex booth, he received instructions to board a people-mover cartridge and tap in a destination at the Metro-Core, where he rerouted and shot for the city's industrial borderlands.
Fifteen minutes later he was standing before a blank, heavy vehicle door at an anonymous warehouse. Doubts and fears worked on his resolve, but images of his wife and child trying to survive the hardships of Aquamarine pushed him on.
He roused himself only to realize that he'd already signaled for entry, and a moment later the door rose just high enough for him to enter without stooping, then lowered behind him with a whisper of displaced air. Inside there was nothing but immeasurable darkness and silence.
The gloom closed around him as the door was secured loudly. Instinctively, his hand went to the pocket that contained the Optimant dice Farley Swope had given him, but the Holy Rollers were gone—lost during the helipod flight across the waves to the Matsya or possibly pickpocketed by one of the Exts onboard the ship. Then a voice spoke to him from the total blackness.
"You nearly took the wrong route at Interchange Sienna, Administrator Mason."
It was true, but Mason did not bother to ask just how the voice knew. Given synthesis 'wares, the speaker might have been either sex and any age, though he sounded male, adult, and somewhat affable.
"Mason, once the lights go up, you'll be part of what you encounter here. There'll be no turning back."
"There's been no turning back since the Blades," Mason said.
Light sprang forth all around him, and he looked up, gasping for breath and words. Under a perspective-distorting sky, staircases ran upside down and aqueducts fed uphill. In place of clouds, faces and animals formed inverse an
d intersticed patterns, playing out their progressions, only to be replaced by subsequent optical sleights.
Mason panned over to the only human figure in sight, a fat-faced and big-bellied Buddha, head radiating a divine nimbus. He was cooling his feet in an upside-down aqueduct twenty meters above. The aqueduct's course bent through several tricky shifts of perspective to pump water back into itself.
"So what do I call you, Gautama?"
"The name is Yatt. If you wish, you may consider this place a campus annex of the Quantum College."
"What I wish, Yatt, is to talk about Aquamarine. And time's short."
"Or in any case not to be frittered away." Yatt stepped out of the streaming water and headed for wrongside-down steps. "Follow the guide path through the grotto and we'll meet you beyond."
The radiant walkway took bizarre dips and climbs through vision-deceiving stonework and foliage. The forced perspectives made him feel dizzy. What lay close at hand was solid enough, though he dismissed the more outrageous and inaccessible eye teasers as holography.
He emerged from a sideways-leaning descent to find himself standing near the end of the aqueduct where Yatt had been wading, and he saw the Buddha clone sitting on a bench toweling off his feet. Mason glanced back and saw the far side of the grotto, where he had started, hanging nearly vertical according to his perception of up and down. Of the warehouse door there was no sign.
They had gone to the trouble of mounting part of the place on gimbals, he told himself. That was all it was. They could have spared themselves the effort. He didn't need to be sold on their knack for cute tricks, especially when the Quantum College was the only side in the game that would have him.
Yatt indicated their surroundings. "You think you've sussed out our artifices, yes?"
