“A toast!” cried Tedd, which was our cue to fill their glasses. We performed like clockwork. “To Sheba Charmayne! Now, there was a tough negotiator. We’ll never see her like again. We Tedds thank God for that.” He grinned. “We’ve done very well since her untimely demise.”
All eyes shifted to Baylor, who didn’t seem inclined to sip his drink.
“Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.” Tedd winked at Baylor. “Otherwise, she would be sitting at the head of this table.”
Baylor had no obvious reaction, but his gaze flicked to Ryan, who wasn’t so good at schooling his expression. Tedd was going to die for what he had just said.
I wondered who else knew it. Ryan did, because it was his favorite sport. But I don’t think Tedd did. I think he believed his clan was too powerful to suffer those sorts of consequences. He drank his wine, and demanded more. The party continued its dreary pace.
When the food and drink had been cleared from the table, Baylor and his guests moved inside, leaving us to stand at our posts. A group of lower-level Executives came into the garden. They were all clan members, but they had only slightly more status than the bureaucrats working in Titania’s skin. I recognized one of them, Terry Charmayne. Though I had never spoken to him, I knew something of his personal history. Recently, he had appeared at our staging area on a regular basis, and I assumed he had become a useful liaison between Baylor and Security.
I watched him covertly. Ryan Charmayne thought of himself as a good-looking fellow, but Terry actually was. Like most of the people in his family, Terry had olive skin, black hair, and black eyes. He was slim and well toned, too. But if I were objective, I’d have to say that Terry’s good looks were partly a matter of demeanor. A face tends to be pleasant when the mind behind it is.
In my case, that may be less true.
Some of the less-favored Charmaynes resented the fact that they weren’t invited to the fancy dinner, but I couldn’t tell whether Terry felt that way. They stood for quite a long while before Terry decided they should move out of the rain and onto one of the covered patios not being used by the elite. They left us alone.
We stood patiently. All of us were experts at waiting. To entertain myself, I played gamelan music in my head: slow, courtly pieces for orchestras of gongs and cymbals. It seemed to fit the scene, and I found it entertaining. But as the minutes slipped by, and no one dismissed us, an idea began to form in my head. Those flowers I had always longed to see were just a meter away. I still couldn’t see them, but I could smell them.
I took a slow step toward them. No one reacted. I took another. Altogether, it was four steps until I was no longer standing on the paving.
I knelt and reached blindly. My hands encountered something soft and fuzzy. I explored further and found the ground—the fuzzy things were growing out of the soil, so this was a plant I was touching. It was not at all what I expected a plant to feel like, with big, soft lobes and a central stalk that had clusters of other fuzzy things near the top.
I leaned over and smelled the stalk. It wasn’t perfumed like the flowers in Baylor Charmayne’s vases, but the aroma was pleasant.
Someone kicked me in the butt, not hard enough to hurt me, but firmly enough to get my attention. I looked over my shoulder and saw Terry Charmayne. “What do you think you’re doing?” he said. “If someone sees you doing that, you could get terminated.”
Terminated was an interesting word. I had a feeling he didn’t mean fired. Yet his tone was not unkind.
“Don’t get curious,” he said. “Just do your job and you’ll be all right.”
I stood and let my hands fall passively. “Yes, sir,” I said in the Girl Friday voice.
One side of his mouth quirked in a sort-of smile. “Come on. I’ll escort you to the Security lock. You may as well call it a day.”
He led the way, so we all fell in behind him. I was able to study him more closely as we walked along. His clothing wasn’t that fancy, and the superiority was almost completely absent from his demeanor. He was a midlevel Executive from a powerful family, yet he acted more like a Ship Officer. He saw us to the lock, waiting until he was sure we were safely through, then gave me a brisk, “Pleasant rest.”
“Yes, sir.” I didn’t look back. Instead, I searched the networks for Terry Charmayne’s recent footprints. He may become useful someday.
The other Servants walked quickly, eager to be done with their day and reclaim what they could of their senses. But Nuruddin slowed his pace until he was walking beside me. “What did it smell like?” he rasped in what was left of his real voice.
I had to think about it. “It smelled—green.”
“Like tea?”
“Very much, yes, but—stronger than that. It was pungent. It was a living thing.”
“Is that why you risked so much to smell it?”
“Yes.”
Nuruddin was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “You are braver than I, Oichi. But you are no more curious.”
We kept pace in companionable silence, until the others had disappeared ahead of us. I hoped Nuruddin was enjoying my company, but for my part, I was pondering the wisdom of asking him questions. Questioning someone can be an adequate method of gathering information, but they may ask you questions in return. Nuruddin had already warned me of his curiosity.
Before I could reach a conclusion, someone pulled the plug on our senses.
I could see nothing but white void. My hearing was gone, too, without even the ringing that accompanies natural silence. I probed for a surveillance camera and linked with it. Nuruddin and I stood in the tunnel with two Executive boys who could not be more than twelve years old. They had eliminated themselves from our audio and visual feeds so we wouldn’t know they were there. I hadn’t smelled them at first, because the ventilation had blown their scent away from us, but now that they were close, my nose detected an undertone in their sweat that raised the hair on the back of my neck. They both held knives, and they grinned at Nuruddin, nudging each other as if to say, I dare you to do it.…
Nuruddin’s face was calm, but I could see concern trying to surface through the strict muscle controls that we Servants must endure to keep our demeanors serene. He must be wondering why our senses were being blocked. I doubted he would guess the truth until he felt the first slice. I would have to take him to the hospital once they let us go.
“I’m going to cut his lips off.” The boy giggled. “And then I’m going to cut his nose off.”
So no. Nuruddin would not be able to recover from this assault with some minor medical attention. I would have to intervene.
The order would have to originate from someplace outside the normal grid. I searched desperately, my mind racing along the network.
And suddenly I found an unknown pathway. I used it to trigger the alarm.
Our hearing and eyesight returned as the klaxons sounded. “ATTENTION,” warned a gigantic voice, “EXPLOSIVE DECOMPRESSION IS IMMINENT. ALL PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE TUNNEL H17 IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT…”
The two boys jumped as if they had received electric shocks when they lost control of our sensory feed. They forgot they were Executives facing Servants, and they raced away—though not before Nuruddin saw the knives they were brandishing. As soon as they were gone, the alarm cut off, along with the warning voice.
Nuruddin stared at me, his face stiff with shock. “Explosive decompression?” he croaked. “Is that even possible, this far in?”
I shrugged. “I guess it would be if something catastrophic happened.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t want to imagine it.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have to imagine, because I had seen fragmented Security footage of what had happened on Titania. “Anyway, it seems to have been a glitch.”
“In the future,” he said, “I guess we’d better stick with the others so we’re not in here alone.”
I nodded, and the two of us hurried down the final stretc
h of corridor to our staging area.
* * *
Servants are not allowed to socialize with each other when we’re off duty. I went back to my quarters without seeing or speaking to a soul. I bathed, sipped nutrient broth, and bundled myself into my cubby. I had hoped to listen to more gamelan music, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the remark Glen Tedd had made at supper.
Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.
Sheba Charmayne didn’t make it off Titania. But like everyone else, I had assumed that disaster overtook her on the way to her escape shuttle. I never thought it had been sabotaged.
True, I knew she and Baylor despised worms. When Titania was destroyed, I suspected the two of them. I had even overheard some of their plotting, through my secret link. But I was still a child then, and what they had said at the time didn’t make much sense to me. So instead of trying to figure it out, I recorded it.
I still had the recording. I had never replayed it, because I never heard them overtly say they were going to blow Titania up. What was it they had said?
How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba had asked. That was what got me to start listening.
But Baylor’s answer didn’t make sense. Couldn’t we just dismantle them? Use their components for something useful?
Dismantle? I thought. Components? It sounded as though they were talking about machines. But why would you talk about killing machines?
They’re too complex for that, said Sheba, managing to sound impatient, even though she wasn’t using her throat to speak. Too sophisticated. They have a self-defense system, and they would suspect what we were up to. No—if we want to destroy them, they can’t appear to be our main targets. They can’t appear to be our targets at all.
Back then, this was the point in their conversation when I began to lose interest. Their discussions had turned to inventories of supplies, energy consumption and production, that sort of thing. But now I realized they were talking about Titania’s statistics in a particular sort of way; they were debating whether they could afford to sacrifice her, even though they never specifically said they were going to do that. These stats were incomplete, too, as if they had discussed them many times and no longer had the patience to go over them in detail. Amazingly, I almost lost interest again, almost stopped listening.
But then Sheba said,… their pathway is not part of the known network.…
When I triggered the alarm that saved Nuruddin, I had discovered a pathway outside the normal network. Now I had time to explore it and figure out what it was. I reached for it again, but it wasn’t the same this time. A new link had appeared on it.
The link had no name. I touched it anyway.
I was flummoxed. I hadn’t rung the link, I had simply touched it—and now someone was talking to me.
I tried to disengage from the link, but I couldn’t. I felt alarmed. I couldn’t just struggle; I needed to take action.
The voice did not sound like any human voice I had ever heard, either inside or outside my head. It was unique.
That sent a chill up my spine. Lucifer Tower was not a pressurized habitat—it was in the mysterious sensor array, at the leading edge of Olympia. Tech personnel no longer visited Lucifer Tower; it had its own repair drones. Yet something abided there, something with a voice that was almost machinelike—but not quite.
I said. It wasn’t so impulsive a remark as it may seem.
Medusa touched me through the link. No one had ever been able to do that before. The secret part of my brain was stimulated, and I saw her face. She seemed too beautiful to be mortal, as if she were a mask. But then the mask spoke:
I woke with a start. Had I fallen asleep and dreamed Medusa up?
I looked for the link again. I couldn’t find it.
Yet the pathway remained, and I traveled its length. Though it existed outside the known network, it could form links with that network at any juncture, then dissolve the link when the user was finished with it.
Medusa hid at the other end of that pathway. And she mentioned my parents. Had they known about her? How had she known about them? Was she one of the sophisticated machines Sheba and Baylor had talked about killing?
Did they destroy Titania and kill two hundred thousand people—just to get rid of machines like her?
My heart had been a burning coal since my parents died. But the anger didn’t blind me; it gave me ideas about the secret link, my recordings of Sheba and Baylor, and possible uses for the biotech hidden inside my father’s music database. My new plans were beginning to take shape.
But other people’s plans were already in motion. And they had quite a head start on me.
4
The Death of Titania
Imagine a galaxy-class generation ship. I was born on one, and even I can do so only in parts.
If you’re a worm, what you know is endless, narrow tunnels. It’s dark or dimly lit in most of them, though your home burrow and some of your work spaces are brighter. It’s at least a little chilly if it’s not just above freezing, and most of the warmth you know comes from heated clothing or blankets, or the shared warmth of your loved ones.
If you’re a high-level Maintenance technician, your universe is more expansive, because you spend some time on the outer hull of the ship. You can see the galaxy wheeling; you can even see other galaxies. If you perched on a high point at the midway, the ship would seem to pinch toward vanishing points if you looked at the engines on one end and then at the sensor array on the other.
If you belong to the Executive class, your view is also expansive, but it curves up instead of away. Far above your head, the other side of the Habitat Sector is partly obscured by thin clouds.
If you were a member of the Executive class on Titania, and you survived the jolt when the gravity bombs went off, you would have seen the Habitat Sector twist apart just before the escaping atmosphere swept you out into space.
That had to have been an amazing experience, because Titania was kilometers wide, and many more kilometers long. You would have traveled a bit. The view must have been incomparable. I’ve never seen one uninterrupted sequence of the thousand-plus people who were in their homes and gardens in the Habitat Sector when Titania twisted apart, but they might have seen each other in the current of air, sailing helplessly toward the rift.
I’ve seen that view in my dreams. On Olympia, I’ve impersonated people from many walks of life, so I can imagine what it must be like to die as one of them.
I think my parents might have died instantly, along with most people inside the skin of Titania. You’re not necessarily aware that the surface you’re standing on is moving when you’re in a ship that spins to simulate gravity—unless it stops because of an impact with something. The spin rate is relatively slow on a ship the size of Titania, but the gravity bombs caused sudden wrenches in odd directions, which is what twisted the whole thing apart. It’s possible most people died before they were aware that anything was wrong.
Or that’s what I like to think.
If Titania hadn’t been destroyed, she could have traveled from one end of our galaxy to the other (though by the time she reached it, we would probably have collided with Andromeda). In a way, she’s still making her journey. Most of her parts should still be traveling as a clump of debris. Technicians and repair drones no longer maintain her systems, essential elements are no longer mined from asteroids
and refined and made into replacement parts. People can’t grow crops inside her habitat or cultivate protein in her nutrient vats. But in her own way, she will continue indefinitely.
She was magnificent. She was a wonder.
Most of his return communications were garbled by panic. But at the last moment he looked at me and said,
I watched until no spark of life remained. And I remembered the day he had bitten my lip, six years before—and what it was like to sit inside the medical center at the end of my first day on the job and fail to contact my parents on Titania.
* * *
The NO SERVICE messages I kept getting when I tried to call my parents were not out of the ordinary—they happened all the time to people trying to communicate between Titania and Olympia. But my link didn’t go through the public network; mine was much faster and more reliable. I knew our sister ship was gone when I felt the emptiness at the other end of that link.
“Keep applying this ointment for as long as it hurts.” The med tech painted my lip. “It contains a numbing agent along with an antiseptic. It should heal pretty fast if you keep using this stuff.”
He was a nice fellow, gentle and thorough. He guessed, based on my Servant’s garb and my demeanor, that an Executive had inflicted the wound, because he added, “I’ll send a medical note excusing you from work until your lip is healed.”
No other profession on Olympia would consider excusing a worker because of a fat lip. But Servants must present a perfect face. So our health care is actually quite good (so long as no Executive decides to maim or murder us).
“Thank you,” I rasped.
He squeezed my shoulder. I accepted his sympathy, though it soothed a much more catastrophic injury than the one he thought he was treating. When he finally sent me off with my tube of antiseptic painkiller, I made my way back through Olympia’s tunnels without seeing them. Other tunnels unfolded in my mind—the ones that led to history.
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