Kingdom of Cages

by Sarah Zettel

  Maybe it would. Tam stood, automatically smoothing down his black vest as he did. If he could convince his family that action needed to be taken, that what was happening up on Athena was not just the Athenians’ problem. Perhaps he could even gain some leverage by pointing out that the station was being used by the Authority, just like Pandora was.

  Somewhat reassured in spite of himself, Tam stepped out of the grove that sheltered the comm screen and started walking toward the dome’s western edge.

  The family dome of the Alpha Complex was a huge open space, as much garden as it was living quarters. Tam sidestepped a pack of children as they barreled past him toward the play garden, followed by a smaller pack of parents and volunteers, talking and laughing with the easy familiarity of people who had lived all their lives together. A pair of seniors worked on their knees, aerating the roots of a newly grafted tree whose bright pink blossoms drooped lazily over their heads as if listening in on their conversation.

  The center of the dome held the common living and working areas—kitchens, bathing pools, class areas, and most of the comm screens, all of it open to the dome and to all the other family members. Everyone over eighteen did have a personal alcove where they slept, entertained visitors, and kept their personal possessions. These were staggered along the curving walls of the dome, modeled after ancient cliff dwellings. Most of their rooms opened onto the common dome. The family saw privacy as a villager’s notion, a stationer’s notion, and an unhealthy one at that. Privacy bred secrets, and secrets could only swell to divide family members from each other, the city, and Pandora.

  Tam sometimes wondered if it was his stunted Conscience that kept him wishing for a place where none of his family could see him. Surely, if his Conscience worked properly, he would want nothing better than the company of his kith and kin, especially when he was feeling troubled.

  But this was all part of the gift and the burden his parents placed on him and his birth sister, Dionte. They were assured that they were not the only ones, that there were always a few, in secret, and that they were needed to watch over the family. There always had to be someone who could think clearly without the threat of being overwhelmed by guilt or fear. They were to make sure that their branch brothers and sisters did not become completely suffocated by the insulation that the voices in their heads wrapped around them.

  Tam winced as he noticed his birth cousin Jolarie’s latest decorating idea for his alcove involved lurid yellow and red abstract blobs hung from the ceiling on twine nooses. Baidra, an experimenter visiting from the Gamma Complex, waved at Tam from her alcove where she stretched out on her bed with a reader sheet. She winked and gestured at him to come sit beside her, and Tam waved his refusal. Not today. There was too much in his head today to play the lover.

  Tam put one foot on the stair that led to his own alcove. Movement caught his eye. Dionte waited on the ledge in front of Tam’s alcove with two covered cups in her hands.

  Well, Sister, why am I not surprised? Tam waved with feigned welcome and climbed up to her, hoping by the time he got there his smile would be a little less forced. So, do you want to discuss the agenda for the administrators’ meeting, or the progress of the Eden Project?

  “Good Afternoon, Dionte,” said Tam when he drew level with his younger sister. Dionte had been a moon-faced child, and she had grown into a soft-faced woman. She wore her black hair in a pair of braids, which she coiled around her head and pinned in the back. She dressed in a simple garment composed of four alternating black and white panels, with one black sleeve and one white.

  Tam waved Dionte to a richly upholstered divan. He pulled a pair of fat pillows off the bed for himself and dropped them onto the floor.

  “Basante is upset with you,” said Dionte, handing one of the covered cups to Tam as he sat by way of both greeting and greeting gift.

  Ah. We’re going to talk about Eden. Tam accepted the cup handed down to him. “That’s nothing new.” He remembered the evening Bas-ante had come to him burbling about Helice Trust and the possibilities locked in her genes. By now Basante had seen Tam’s report of her second refusal to volunteer for the project.

  “It’s probably not extremely intelligent either.”

  Tam just sighed and lifted the cup’s lid, inhaling the steam appreciatively. Dionte’s blended teas were works of art. Tam smelled ginger, cardamom, jasmine, green tea, and just a hint of black pepper for stimulation and to startle the palate. He removed the cover and sipped.

  “He suggested to me that you aren’t doing enough to convince Helice Trust she should be helping us,” said Dionte.

  Tam lowered the cup, frowning as if the tea had soured inside his mouth. “Basante wanted to force a woman who has broken no laws into the complex. Are you saying I should have let him?”

  “He showed me the report.” Dionte uncovered her own cup and blew on the pale brown brew. The steam swirled and clouded around her round face as she lifted her gaze to look at Tam. Amusement sparkled behind her concern. “In fact, he pressed it into my personal system without asking me.” Tam gave a soft chuckle and nodded. When Basante got excited, he insisted that everyone get excited.

  “She is nearly perfect,” Dionte went on. “Her presence would save a lot of work.” She paused. “We would need to recruit far fewer subjects.”

  Tam snorted in disgust and considered handing the tea back. You should realize by now I will not play along with you any more than I will play along with the rest of our family. “So, this one time, we should be like Basante and forget the villagers are human? I can’t believe you’d do that.” You are so used to close contact with so many kinds of mind, Sister. How can anyone be an outsider to you?

  When Tam and Dionte’s birth parents had told them that their Consciences would never grow to full strength, one of the ways in which they responded was by learning as much about the Conscience implants as possible. Dionte had turned that interest into her calling and became a Guardian. Now she spent her life monitoring, analyzing, and creating the implants for the family, as well as working with the organic countermeasures designed to protect Pandora and the domes from invasion or rebellion.

  Dionte drank her tea, cradling the cup in her palm. “Normally I’d be the first one to agree with your sentiment. But these are not normal times.”

  “Sentiment?” he said. “Don’t tell me you’ve started believing…” He looked at the way Dionte held her face, so still, so full of equilibrium. “You have.”

  “No.” Dionte shook her head. “I’m just saying that if we don’t show the Authority something concrete soon, we really will be under siege. They might already be moving to make good on their threat to destroy Pandora.”

  The intensity of her words startled Tam and lit a spark of suspicion inside him. What if that step had already been taken? What if that step was Beleraja’s news of her four hundred refugees?

  Ridiculous. Surely, if the Authority wanted to pressure Pandora, Pandora would know it. Two thousand years of being the sole provider of transportation and trade between the Called had not encouraged subtlety inside the Authority. Surely they would never hatch a scheme like this.

  Besides, Beleraja would never hazard lives in such a fashion. Or would she? Did he really know what she would do if she thought her actions would bring the Diversity Crisis to a swift conclusion?

  Tam looked down into his cup. The smell of spices was rich and pleasant, but he couldn’t make himself drink it. Whether or not his suspicions about Beleraja were the truth, that was how the family was sure to interpret her actions. How would they respond? The most likely possibility was that they would insist on the Eden Project being accelerated. The argument would be that they should give the Authority what they wanted. Then the Authority would go away and leave Pandora in peace.

  And how many would be forced into the experiment wing once that decision had been reached?

  “Helice Trust might be willing to contribute genetic material to the project,” he said, choosi
ng his words carefully. “I believe what she truly objects to is being made pregnant with a child that she will not be allowed to keep, and possibly having this happen to her more than once.”

  “If it was her eggs that were needed, her eggs would’ve been asked for.” Dionte ran her fingertip around the rim of her cup. “You know that the real difficulty here has been the interaction between the immune system of the mother and the enhanced fetus.”

  “Well, now that we have an idea of what we’re looking for, we can begin screening exclusively for other matches. We have four hundred new candidates aboard Athena Station alone.” There was no question in Tam’s mind that Dionte already knew about the refugees.

  “Yes, we do, don’t we?” murmured Dionte. She took another sip of her tea and lowered the cup, lacing her fingers around it. “Tam, I want…”

  “What?” he asked warily. Hesitation was not something Dionte was known for.

  Dionte gazed across the dome, as if searching for a particular face among the various gatherings of their kin. “Brother, we are in danger.”

  Tam chuckled ruefully and shook his head. “Yes, Dionte. That’s why things are such a mess.”

  “You don’t understand me.” Dionte’s hands tightened around her cup. “We’re not acting like we are in danger. We are acting like this is the old days and some bunch of colonists have come to us to ask for advice. The Authority has declared war on us. They did it ten years ago when they dropped that bomb in the Vastness, and we decided to pay no attention.”

  “We paid attention, Dionte. We surrendered. It was all we could do.”

  “All we could do then,” Dionte said. “But not all we can do now.”

  “What are you getting at?” asked Tam, even though he was sure he did not want to know the answer.

  She still didn’t look at him. She spoke to the steam, to the tea, perhaps to herself. “I am saying there are other possibilities for the Eden Project. We do not have to give it over to the Authority and the Called to save ourselves. There are more effective ways it could be used.”

  Tam clamped the cover on his cooling cup of tea. “Sister, I do not want to hear this.”

  “Brother.” Dionte turned her face back to him, and he saw she truly was troubled and afraid. Mostly afraid. “If we try to placate them, the Authority is going to overwhelm us no matter what we do. We have to go on the offensive.”

  “If that’s what you believe, Dionte, then you need to take it up with the whole family. Not with me.” He handed Dionte back her teacup.

  “I have tried. You know the rest of our family does not want to hear it either.”

  “A sign that you and I do not have a monopoly on wisdom.” Tam spoke the hard words and felt no guilt, no guilt at all. How many debates had there been? A hundred? A thousand? In every family meeting since the Authority’s initial threat had come down, someone had a proposal for how they could strike back, how they could prove Pandora was a force to be reckoned with.

  “Then you will have to bring it up again and again, if necessary. You are free to say whatever you want during meetings.”

  Dionte sighed. “I suppose it will have to be enough.”

  “Yes,” replied Tam levelly. “I suppose it will.”

  They regarded each other in silence for a long moment, until Dionte realized Tam really didn’t plan to say anything else. Dionte stood and bowed slightly in farewell. Tam returned the bow, but remained seated while Dionte descended the stairs to the main court.

  Tam rubbed his temple where his Conscience implant was and for a moment hated his own decision. How had all these doubts come to haunt him? Dionte never doubted herself, though her Conscience was as truncated as his.

  Maybe he should just confess all at his next head dump and let them fix whatever organic flaws kept his implant from taking full hold of him and then he could have peace.

  What was it like to have a wholly integrated Conscience? Did it truly make life easier? Basante, at least, made it seem like it did. Sometimes, though, Tam saw, or thought he saw, a look of yearning on the faces of his branch siblings, like they were trying to remember something long forgotten.

  Then again, maybe that was just a projection of his own confusion. Tam had no way to tell.

  He sighed again and got to his feet. This was useless. There was still the meeting to prepare for. Maybe it wasn’t a total loss. Maybe now that he knew the family would conclude Beleraja’s actions were treacherous, he could prepare a means to show them that was not true.

  “Becuase if I don’t, we slip that much further into our own arrogance,” he murmured.

  They are your family, said his Conscience. You can trust them.

  “Oh, yes,” murmured Tam, looking over the busy, happy garden of his home. “I can trust them very well.”

  Dionte left her brother’s alcove calmly, carrying a teacup in each hand. She did not look back. She could not afford to. She knew that if she saw Tam watching her leave, she would be tempted to turn around and try once again to make him see what was really happening, and it wouldn’t work any more than it had the last hundred times.

  Dionte had not been in the conference room that day the Authority had come to make its initial threat. She had been in the laboratory with her kin and fellow students, watching on one of the video screens. She saw the swelling dust cloud and heard the thunder, and she had known then that they were all prisoners. In dropping that bomb, the Authority had changed its whole nature. Before this, they had clung to their statements that they were just go-betweens, importers and exporters, and mediators. But with that show of force, they became something else. They became rulers, and Pandora became their subject, and that would never change until Pandora took action, because no matter how far away the Authority went, they could always come back.

  Father Mihran had spoken, and the council had spoken, and they had all listened to their Consciences and the city-minds, all of them bred and trained toward compromise and getting along with each other, and they gave in. They gave in for the same reasons their ancestors gave in when Athena Station rebelled against the idea of Conscience implants for its management board—because in the end, they could not resist. They could compromise, but they could not unite. They could discuss and theorize, but they could not truly comprehend the enormity of their guardianship of Pandora and all that it meant.

  Tam was right that their parents’ decision to truncate their Consciences was a mistake, but he did not understand why. The family did not need its children to be more separate from each other. They needed them more tightly connected. They did not need a disinterested view, they needed a deeper understanding.

  In the nearest kitchen cluster, Dionte washed the cups carefully in the sink, chatting with Imanet and Mana, who were chopping vegetables and sectioning fruit for an afternoon snack. She dried the cups and stacked them with the others in the glass cabinets that curved above the counter, and then dried her hands on a cloth that had been hung over the gnarled branch of a dwarf willow.

  Basante would be waiting in her alcove. She did not want to meet him until she was perfectly calm.

  You’re not really angry at Tam, she told herself. You’re angry because you’re afraid of what’s about to happen. You’re not sure enough. You haven’t done enough testing. She cut the thought off. She couldn’t afford it. Delay only served the Authority.

  She lifted her eyes to pick out her own alcove in the dwelling wall, two tiers up on the left edge of the living spaces. Someone was in there, pacing back and forth. Basante. He spotted her and started immediately down the stairs.

  Dionte sighed and strode forward to meet him.

  “What did he say—” began Basante breathlessly.

  “Come with me.” Dionte took his hand and led him to a cushioned bench in the shade of a spreading lime tree. Its pleasant scent enveloped them as they sat, and its heavy branches provided them with just enough shelter that their kin were unlikely to hear anything awkward.

  “What did he say
?” repeated Basante.

  Dionte looked at Basante with the trained eye of a Guardian. She could practically see the translucent filaments stretching out from his temple, down his right arm, and up into the gray matter of his mind. If she needed to, she could call up a map of those filaments. In fact, she had. She had pored over that map. She had obsessed over it, trying to understand how she could change the nature of the filaments and the implant so that Basante would be able to help her help their family.

  Unlike Tam, Basante had always understood the urgency of Pandora’s situation, but once Father Mihran, the family councilors, and Aleph had spoken, his Conscience and its need for compromise would not allow him to stand against them.

  In a few minutes, she would change that. Dionte swallowed nervously and hoped Basante did not notice.

  “He will not help us bring Helice Trust in,” said Dionte.

  Basante thumped his fist against his thigh once, but almost immediately he loosened his hand. “Well, we expected that.”

  “But—for the next few days, at least—he will be fully involved in trying to keep the peace with Athena. That will give us a chance to approach the woman directly. He also suggests it’s the pregnancy she is objecting to. We will need to develop our arguments from that angle.”

  “Yes, yes.” Basante nodded thoughtfully. “If she could be made to understand the child will be a member of the family…”

  “It might help,” Dionte finished for him. “But the most important thing is that the Authority has escalated the threat and Father Mihran still will not accept that the Authority and the Called must be fought.”

  “Father Mihran said this?”

  Dionte shook her head. “But Tam did, and that is sign enough.”

  Basante looked down his nose at her in an expression as close to condescension as she had ever seen on him. “Tam speaks for Father Mihran now?”

  “No,” answered Dionte tartly. “But can you name me one open debate in the past decade where Tam’s side came out the loser?” Bas-ante remained silent. “You see? There are plenty of reasons why my brother is the head of the Administrators’ Committee.”