by Kate Elliott
“Memory Palace,” he said aloud. He sat back on his heels. “This is another form of architecture that might be interesting to explore. Back when computers were first developed, people built multiuser habitats out of text and explored them.”
“What if you couldn’t read?” asked Ilyana.
“My mother can’t read,” said Anton suddenly.
“Shh!” It was true. That didn’t mean Anton had to tell everyone about it. Of course, Vasil couldn’t read very well either, but he had an excellent memory and a fine sense of navigation, so he had learned to negotiate in a world where visual landmarks were as common as textual ones.
M. Unbutu chose to ignore the remark. “It’s true that in those days people were dependent on the word for many things. Even farther back, before the wholesale diffusion of writing, people were dependent on the oral tradition for the transmission of knowledge. That’s something actors still do. They’re able to memorize at rates the rest of us usually can’t manage, because they’re practiced in the art of aural recognition.”
“I’m hungry,” said Evdokia.
“Evdi! We just ate.” Ilyana turned to M. Unbutu. “She isn’t really. She’s just bored.”
“I’m bored,” said Anton.
“Do you have a nesh port in there?” Valentin asked.
“Here it comes,” said M. Unbutu.
The lounge filled up with a gateway.
It was a pretty good representation considering that it came from a portable modeler. It only shimmered in a few places, although the sharp corners of the lounge caused the edges of the visual representation to fade toward transparency where the walls met.
A plain white arch represented the gateway into the labyrinthine sprawl of the memory palace. Literalists, Portia and Evdi clasped hands and, giggling, crossed under the arch. As they moved, the arch itself stretched out into a barrel vault, becoming a corridor lined with blank marble walls down which the visitor progressed until she reached the courtyard.
There was a moment of reorientation as the three-dimensional picture shifted, blanked out, and reconstructed a new chamber: a spacious courtyard ringed by arches and centered around a circular fountain.
Valentin sighed. “I hate this. It’s so flat. It’s so primitive. It’s jerky.”
It was true that a three-dimensional rendering that simply filled the room around you didn’t have the fluidity of nesh, where an icon of yourself inhabited the seemingly endless web of cybernetic space, but it had its uses.
“We’ll split up here,” said M. Unbutu. “I can maintain three separate chambers. Girls, where do you want to go?”
“Dinosaurs,” said Portia at once.
“Hmm. Menu, is there a Cretaceous room suitable for four-year-olds?” One of the arches turned blue. “That way. Anton, what about you?”
Anton yawned. “I don’t care. I’ll go with them.”
M. Unbutu shifted and let one half of the passenger lounge turn into a prehistoric landscape. Quickly enough, Anton had a Tyrannosaurus Rex and a Triceratops engaged in a duel to the death, while Evdi and Portia busily constructed odd-looking dinosaurs, mixing the head of one with the body of a second and the tail of a third, giggling over the results.
M. Unbutu turned his back on the jungle and regarded Ilyana and Valentin. “Do you mind if we just use discrete holographs? The modeler can maintain three chambers, but I can’t. I keep seeing both sides and overloading. We’ll just blank this side of the room and build models. That’s all I need to talk about tension and compression, anyway.”
“If you have a nesh port, I could excavate for those programs you talked about,” said Valentin.
“It’s back in my cabin. Why don’t you stick with Ilyana and me today? I’ll bring it next time.”
Valentin swallowed. “Yeah.” He wrapped the fingers of one hand in his pale hair and twisted them around and around.
“Now.” Freed of the younger children for the moment, M. Unbutu relaxed. “How does a structure stand up?”
Valentin took his fingers out of his hair and began chewing on his lower lip.
“Through tension and compression,” M. Unbutu continued, clearly taking pleasure in this subject. “Tension is ‘pull.’ Compression is ‘push.’ Let’s look at a column and an arch, which are both examples of structures that are in compression.”
The Tyrannosaurus roared triumphantly on the other side of the room. Ilyana plopped down cross-legged in front of a plain Doric column and an arch bridge that materialized next to the modeler, little holographs complete in detail, if lacking solidity. Content, she listened as M. Unbutu began to discuss the compressive strength of stone. Sitting down beside her, Valentin had put on his polite mask, but he worried at his lower lip until he drew blood.
That night, she woke up when she heard the sigh of the door. She and Valentin shared a tiny four-bunk cabin with Evdi and Anton, but the two younger children slept so soundly that an explosion wouldn’t have woken them up. Ilyana cracked open her eyes in time to see the dim lights of the nightshift corridor flash and disappear as the door slid shut again.
She was out of bed instantly. By the time she pulled a skirt on, belting it closed over her nightshirt, and got out into the corridor, Valentin had already disappeared.
She cursed under her breath. Kneeling, she examined the floor, but its sheen was uniform, hiding any trace of Valentin’s passage. The entrance to her parents’ cabin was closed. The distant murmur of voices whispered along the corridor. The air itself seemed charged, scented differently, as if during nightshift the aliens allowed a breath of their atmosphere to infiltrate the human passenger deck. Under the dim lights, the walls of the corridor gave off a light of their own, a pattern manifesting under the surface of the wall, slowly revealing itself. Ilyana stood, then headed to the left.
Whoever had designed the ship had spent more thought on the lounges than the cabins, which were cramped and utilitarian. Just as the inner walls of an etsana’s great tent could be shifted around to create a variety of different chambers, so could the public chambers the humans called lounges be rearranged to create greater or lesser, or more private, chambers. Rather like, Ilyana thought, a physical Memory Palace whose walls could be altered at will.
Owen Zerentous was rehearsing Vasil and Dejhuti in a scene from Oedipus Rex; the actors were screened from Ilyana’s view by a white trellis. The trellis spread out from a single trunk in the floor, like the ivory channels of a delta reaching for outlet in the sea. It grew into the ceiling, and Ilyana could not help but wonder if it reappeared on the deck above, or if it was, like ganglia, some kind of nerve outgrowth of the ship. She dismissed this fanciful idea and paused inside the door to see if Valentin was anywhere in the rest of the lounge, which was cubbyholed into a series of cubicles by the arrangement of walls of various height.
Owen said, “Vasil, you’re not in the interactives anymore. This is theater. Use your voice and your body, not just your damned face.”
Another lattice, polished and sharp like obsidian, veiled four shapes sitting around a table. Ilyana crept closer, draping herself along a bench, trying to find an angle that would allow her to see faces through the lattice.
“Let me go home,” said Vasil, and she jerked, startled. Then froze, one hand clutching the curve of the bench. Her heart raced. He was just saying lines from the play. “ ‘Bear your own fate, and I’ll bear mine. It is better so: trust what I say.’ ”
She breathed again, and discovered that she could make out the party around the table with perfect clarity: Anatoly Sakhalin, David ben Unbutu, the actor Gwyn Jones, and a woman named Wingtuck from the tech crew whom Ilyana didn’t know. Sakhalin sat carelessly, one arm flung over the back of the chair next to him, the other hand resting on his belt. Somehow, the acoustics of the room had clarified as well with her change of position, and she could hear them, interposed with the soft tones of her father’s voice. She could not quite hear Dejhuti, playing Oedipus the king to Vasil’s blind seer, Teiresias
.
“The actors and the crew are covered. They have a reason for being here, and since all of them are legitimate and only a handful actually part of the survey, the cover deepens. How do you determine which are seeking information and which are simply doing their job?” That was the woman.
Anatoly stirred. “That is one way Bakhtiian would get intelligence in a region. Not only would he interview every merchant and traveler from that place, but he would send a group of merchants out on selected routes and put spies in with them, but men and women who could also trade.”
“ ‘You are all ignorant. No; I will never tell you what I know. Now it is my misery; then it would be yours.’ ”
“What about you, then, M. Sakhalin? You’re neither fish nor fowl.” This, again from the woman.
“I beg your pardon?”
“ ‘I do not intend to torture myself, or you.’ ”
“A figure of speech.”
“I think what Wing is asking is this,” said Gwyn Jones with a glance toward the woman, who flipped her long black braid over her shoulder so that she could play with its tip. Ilyana did not know Jones well, but she did know that he was the only actor her father actually respected enough to leave alone. “Should we pass you off as part of the Company’s crew?”
After some thought, Anatoly replied, more to the group at large than to Jones specifically. “It seems to me that only a fool would believe that none of the humans wish to discover more information about the khepelli. I do not believe that the khepellis can be fools, to have become as powerful as they are, to have sailed between stars and to control so many different peoples. Think of the logistics! Clearly their women are wise and efficient, to have created such an empire.”
“Their women!” M. Unbutu chuckled. He seemed different. Ilyana thought him the most unpretentious adult she had ever met, diffident without being dithering, but after all these years with her father she had learned to read lines of authority, and it was clear that he sat at the focus of this conversation. Although, of course, the flurry of energy stirred around Anatoly. “We’re not sure their females have any position at all, any status, any real power, in their culture.”
“Is it not women who run the camp and the wagon train? It is on the strength of its supply lines that an army can move. Everyone knows that my grandmother knows how to organize a camp better than any other woman of the tribes, and it is true as well that Mother Orzhekov built the great system of logistics and supply on which Bakhtiian feeds and maintains his armies.”
“ ‘I have gone free. It is the truth sustains me.’ ”
M. Unbutu set a brown hand on the table and stared at his nails. “I saw that myself. But that doesn’t mean that it is the same everywhere. We do know that Chapalii females are secluded, and that under their law a Chapalii woman who marries loses her birth status and takes on her husband’s status completely and irrevocably. The judgment xenologists have drawn from that is that Chapalii females have a lesser and markedly unimportant status, compared to the males.”
Anatoly digested this information in silence. “You khaja are very strange,” he said at last. “It is no wonder you have fallen to the armies of these khepelli, if everything I have read about your history is true. It seems to me that you think they are khaja like you, but they might not be.” He frowned.
“If only Bakhtiian and the tribes could breed horses that could sail the seas of night….”
“ ‘Are you tempting me?’ ”
Jones laughed. “Now there’s a thought.”
“You’ll have to fill me in on the joke,” said Wingtuck caustically.
“Which doesn’t bring us to a consensus,” added M. Unbutu mildly.
“I mean to say this,” said Anatoly, now addressing himself to M. Unbutu. “The khepelli must know we will seek intelligence about their Empire and their emperor. If we do not seem to be seeking such information, then they will become even more suspicious. So there must always be one person who is clearly a spy. That will be me.”
“That puts you in a vulnerable position,” said M. Unbutu.
Anatoly shrugged. Ilyana admired the lack of concern with which he greeted the prospect of such danger. On the other hand, he had put himself in as great a danger years before, riding, as he was now, into enemy-held lands.
In the quiet, she heard Dejhuti.
“ ‘You child of endless night! You cannot hurt me or any other man who sees the sun!’ ”
Her father’s voice was oddly calm. “ ‘True: it is not from me your fate will come.’ ”
At that moment, Sakhalin turned and looked straight at her. Instantly, she realized that her thin nightshirt exposed her arms, and that the lace trim at the neck drew attention… but as quickly as he saw who it was, he looked away. By then the others had all seen her.
“Yana!” M. Unbutu beckoned to her. “Come here.” He said it so pleasantly. But however easygoing the words, and his expression, might appear, he expected to be obeyed.
She crossed her arms over her chest and slid around the obsidian lattice, and stood there, shifting from one foot to the other while the three khaja examined her and Anatoly Sakhalin looked at her obliquely.
“Damn,” said Wingtuck. “She does look like her father. Is she past the age of consent?”
“Mother’s Tits, Wing,” snapped Gwyn Jones. “Shut up.”
“Were you looking for someone?” asked M. Unbutu.
Ilyana was struck by revelation. Looking at M. Unbutu, who had, by the evidence of two empty cups sitting by his right hand, been here for some time, she knew where Valentin was.
“ ‘But I say that you, with both your eyes, are blind.’ ”
Ilyana gulped. “I…I was just looking for Valentin. He said he wasn’t feeling well, but I guess he must have gone to… the infirmary.”
“Go on,” said M. Unbutu gently. “If you need any help with him….”
“No! No.” Freed, she backed away, bumping into the lattice. It felt warm. A hum like distant singing throbbed through her. She stepped away, smiling stupidly, knowing they were all still looking at her, hugged herself even more tightly, and sidestepped toward the door.
“Vasil,” said Owen in a voice that combined patience, disgust, and excitement, “you’ve picked up so many bad habits in the last four years that I don’t know what I’m going to do with you. Maybe I should have left you on that Mother-forsaken planet. I don’t know where your mind is right now, but I want it here with me! Go on.”
As Ilyana paused by the door, she saw her father direct his next line not at Dejhuti but at Owen. “ ‘I would not have come at all if you had not asked me.’ ”
She fled into the anonymity of the corridor. There, she took in three deep breaths. She knew where M. Unbutu’s cabin was. She and the children had escorted him there just hours before, while she had peppered him with more questions about suspension bridges, elasticity, and plasticity. He had only escaped because it was dinnertime. She ran. Once she had to slow down to a walk and, breathing hard, she smiled blandly at two of the actors—new ones, whom she didn’t know—who were evidently headed down to the lounge for their scene. She crossed into the sleeping ring and counted doors until she stopped in front of a door as unremarkable as the rest. Not knowing what else to do, she touched the wall panel. To her shock, it was not locked. It opened immediately.
She groaned. Remembered where she was, and darted inside. The door closed behind her.
Valentin had a look of bliss on his face and a trail of spittle running down his chin. He was curled into a fetal position on the bunk, two transparent patches covering his eyes so that she could see the movement of his eyeballs underneath. Spasmodically, his hands clutched an egg-shaped control sponge that was slightly smaller than his head.
Ilyana felt sick and furious at the same time. This was the kind of stuff kids were not allowed to use. She didn’t even know how to work it. Worse, Valentin had broken in here and was stealing time, blundering into places he wasn’t supposed
to be. She wasn’t an idiot. David ben Unbutu worked for Charles Soerensen. What if there was top secret information on here? What kind of awful trouble could Valentin get in if they were discovered?
Strewn on the bed were two additional pairs of eye patches. Not knowing what else to do, she sealed one set over her eyes. It was odd to be able to see the room through the patches, even mottled with a distant, because tiny, grid. She knelt on the bed beside Valentin and twined her fingers between his, and touched the sponge.
She fell. From clear to opaque to blinding light, her sight vanished. First she felt. Wind tore at her skin and sand blasted her hands and fingers. Then she saw, first her hand and the sleeve of her school tunic, then the yellow screen of sand whipped into a wild dance. Her nostrils choked on it. When she opened her mouth to breathe, her tongue was instantly parched by the grit. Last, the sound: howling, howling. She had been here before.
“Valentin!” She didn’t really say it, but the shout emanated out from her. “Valentin!”
Like a ship pitched on stormy seas, he stumbled and fought forward not twenty paces in front of her. Except it wasn’t quite him. The wind had flayed the skin from the muscle and scoured through layers of tissue until bone gleamed like a beacon against the overpowering blizzard of sand. His hair was black and twisting, and as she struggled nearer, she saw it was snakes, hissing and writhing like an echo of the storm.
He turned, although he couldn’t have heard her frail voice over the roar of the wind and the clashing din of earth cast up into the air. He had no face, only a skull.
“Valentin! What are you doing here? Where are you going?”
“I’m trying to get there! I’m trying to get there! Let me go home!”
She grabbed for his arm before he could walk on. Her fingers oozed through his flesh as if through butter, closing at last on dry bone. “Come home with me!”
