Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  “Your little girl’s swimming just fine,” the doctor told her.

  Raincloud smiled. It was good to be “carrying” one again; even at the Nucleus they couldn’t tell her to leave this one home.

  “Fetal chromosome sequence is completed,” announced the doctor’s office.

  Blackbear looked startled. “Already?”

  “Twelve recessive lethals are present,” the voice added, “but none homozygous.”

  “No problem. Just keep up the vitamins,” the doctor added, helping Raincloud out of the apparatus and into a seat. She crossed her arms on the desk. “Well, it’s my pleasure to share care with you. Nonetheless, I should warn you that delivering here will cost you ten times what it would outside. I could send you to Kshiri-el, where the lifeshaper will do it for nothing.”

  Raincloud considered this. If only she could afford to take her family home to Tumbling Rock for the birth. There, the temple priestesses could prepare her and Blackbear for the time of labor, coaxing the little one out into their loving arms. And Raincloud would be in the proper realm for her dreams to reveal the infant’s name. For her firstborn, she had dreamed of an enormous hawk that swooped down to carry off a mountain goat in its outsized talons. An excellent omen for a firstborn daughter. Her son had inspired a field of golden flowers, taller than the tallest man, their faces broad as dinner plates, full of countless rich black seeds. But here in Helicon, what thing of nature could enter her dream?

  SHE TRIED AGAIN TO REACH ZHERON. STILL SHE COULD not get through. “All calls rejected,” said the servo voice.

  Raincloud frowned in surprise. “For how long?”

  “All calls rejected for the past week. Interference—repairs—contact Sector Oh-three-one…”

  Lem shook his head. “Something is wrong. That servo’s barely making sense; it ought to speak in full sentences, for one thing.”

  “Let’s go,” decided Raincloud. “Let’s see what’s up.”

  “You think so?” asked Lem. “Without permission?”

  “It’s a public facility, after all; the ‘cultural artifacts’ were still on view, remember? The worst they can do is refuse to see us.”

  So they returned to the diplomats’ sector. The threshold of the legation seemed unnaturally quiet. “Door, open, please,” said Raincloud helpfully. Lem had his train already removed and folded up by his trainsweeps. He stood with his legs spread slightly, his arms deceptively relaxed at his sides.

  No trace of a “door” could be seen in the downward sweep of the edifice, and nothing opened. Behind her, Raincloud’s trainsweeps fidgeted uncertainly.

  Lem cleared his throat. “Open, Door, by Foreign Affairs Security Order Oh-oh-six-ten.”

  For a moment nothing happened. Then at last a crack appeared in the nanoplast, opening with slow reluctance.

  The hall was dark and empty. Exhibition panels stood empty and scattered, while odors of spice and decay hung in the air. Raincloud hurriedly unhitched her train for the trainsweeps, then she took a hesitant step inside.

  “Great Helix,” exclaimed Lem. “The devils cut us off and jumped ship somehow, all without a trace.”

  “Why? Whatever could have happened?” Raincloud wondered.

  “Some imperial overlord reversed his orders, I’ll be bound.” Lem shook his head. “They gave us the slip, all right. Flors will be red in the face.”

  Lord Zheron, his men at arms, their wives and servants—all gone. Raincloud shook her head in disbelief. She took a step or two within the deserted hall.

  A spot of white caught her eye, across the floor. Warily she approached to examine it. It was a mask with a long wooden handle; the mask of a female, like the one worn by the goddess who had stepped out in front of her just before she left the legation. This one, however, was unadorned; a servant’s mask she guessed.

  It came to her, then. She must pursue Urulan, not just for Rhun or the sims, but for their goddesses as well. How could she have forgotten? And now, ironically, the chance was lost after all. There was nothing she could do.

  Chapter 12

  BLACKBEAR WAS BACK AT THE LAB REVIEWING THE results of his mutants. He had tried several permutations of the control sequence for Eyeless. One of them predicted germ cells that actually went through meiosis.

  He showed Onyx first, before telling Tulle. “I chose this part of the DNA sequence because it binds control proteins during egg production in a normal embryo. I mutated the Elysian sequence to look more like the normal sequence. This one mutant had no ill effects in the simulator, and it induced production of ovogen in tissue culture.”

  Onyx scanned the culture readings, the numbers floating above the holostage. Meanwhile Blackbear glanced over at Sunflower, who played with a light pen and a chunk of nanoplast in the corner.

  “Wow, that looks good.” Onyx snapped her fingerwebs till they hummed. “Wait till Tulle sees this.”

  The lab director was more cautious. “The problem with meiosis has more to do with the DNA modifications,” Tulle said. Longevity treatment modified the DNA so as to prevent chromosome crossover, which causes mutation and cancer in body cells but is needed for meiosis in germ cells. “Besides, our simulation is far from exact,” she warned. “As many as fifty percent of our parameters are untested assumptions: production levels of various embryonic proteins, timing of onset, stringency of control. Of course, we do better all the time; as the literature comes in, we put in the reported figures.”

  Onyx said, “It’s remarkable how well the results hold up sometimes. The first heart gene Tulle found fifty years ago looked promising in the simulator. And sure enough, the live embryos turned out.”

  Tulle nodded. “It cut the rate of defectives by half. All the shons use it, now. That discovery alone would keep the Guard supporting my research. But since then the data bank for our simulator has grown enormously; it’s a much better predictor now.”

  Blackbear nodded thoughtfully. “Still, with so many assumptions, can the results really mean much?”

  “Surprisingly yes,” Tulle assured him. “I think that real embryonic development allows more room for chance than our theorists admit.”

  “But couldn’t you also miss out on mutations that do badly in the simulator but really would work in live development?”

  “It’s possible,” Tulle admitted. “There are two or three cases in the literature. Most of the time, we have no way of knowing—until the simulator gets better.”

  Onyx shrugged. “A bird in the hand, as they say. Blackbear, let’s talk to Pirin about starting a simbrid.”

  Blackbear followed her down the hall, looking forward to testing a live embryo. Yet somehow he felt like a different person than he had been before the night he confronted Kal. The thought of a planet full of Elysians having ten children each, as Clickers did, was hard to clear from his head.

  What am I doing here? he wondered suddenly. Just as quickly he drew himself back. He had learned long ago in Founders City to live amidst contradictions.

  They passed the culture room where he heard Hawktalon stacking old culture dishes, then the whine of the waste disposal. “Where do our waste dishes end up?” he asked Onyx. “The cultures, the used reagents, all the stuff we dump?”

  “Nothing is dumped in the ocean,” said Onyx. “The Sharer treaty forbids it.”

  “So what becomes of it?”

  “It all flows into the atom separator. The organic elements are recycled into food, clothing, and so on.”

  He made a face. “Who would eat that?”

  “You do,” said Onyx. “Unless you go out and fish off a raft, like Draeg does.”

  “You mean—when I order a steak, it’s not real?” He felt slightly sick.

  Onyx laughed. “You think they slaughter a cow and roast it in five minutes? How do you think the food window works?”

  He had avoided thinking too hard.

  “Most food comes out essentially the same as the original,” she insisted. “It’s programmed dow
n to the molecular level. Really, would you want to eat a dead carcass, in the modern age?”

  Draeg came down the hall toward them. “Hey, Brother, I nearly forgot. How’d you make out with the Killer? Made it home alive, I see.”

  Blackbear muttered a guarded response, reluctant to discuss the enigmatic logen just then.

  On his next Visiting Day, Blackbear asked the house to replay on the holostage part of Tulle’s logathlon. While Kal’s claims sounded infuriating as before, at least now he could figure out what the issue was.

  Then he remembered what he had forgotten to ask. Kal had said the first Heliconians were taught “not to hope for children, but instead to live for beauty.” Whatever did that mean, Blackbear wondered. Surely the one need not exclude the other?

  Without quite knowing why, he found himself asking the holostage to locate Kal again. But the logen’s image appeared in a butterfly garden, surrounded by half a dozen Elysian students with short, gaily colored trains. Blackbear quickly disconnected and put it out of his mind.

  THAT AFTERNOON RAINCLOUD CAME HOME EARLIER than usual. “The Urulites are gone,” she burst out. “They’ve vanished, bag and baggage; no one knows how. Foreign Affairs is having a fit.”

  “Too bad,” he murmured, trying to hide his considerable relief. “What did you expect of those barbarians?”

  Raincloud did not answer. She absently fingered an object in her hand, a white mask on a stick.

  Blackbear gave her a fierce hug. “It’s getting time for braids,” he reminded her.

  The next morning, a Visiting Day, he redid the braids for Raincloud and Hawktalon, a biweekly labor of love. First, the old braids, perhaps fifty or so, had to be undone, catching all the little beads as he did so, and combed out thoroughly. Once liberated, the black crinkled hair spread out in all directions. Then the spiral pattern was marked out with comb and pins; for Raincloud, a bold cross-squares pattern that accented her high forehead. At last he could braid the strands, trying to keep the tension even while adding on the beads at consistent levels. He loved the scent of Raincloud’s hair; it was a wonderful opportunity to enjoy her for an hour, stealing a kiss on her neck now and then.

  Hawktalon preferred the ram’s horn pattern, in which the braids spiraled out from the center. When hers were halfway done, the house called. “Security unit at entrance, Citizen.”

  “I’ll handle it.” Raincloud went to the door, her fresh braids glistening, still moist like a newly emerged butterfly. From the doorway, Blackbear heard muttered voices, one a servo, he thought. Then she returned, frowning. “They want to replace our trainsweep.”

  “What? Is one of yours defective?”

  “No; Doggie.”

  Hawktalon’s head jerked around, and the braid slipped from his grasp. “Doggie? Who wants Doggie?”

  “Goddess,” exclaimed Blackbear, “keep still, dear, please.” Doggie was crawling about Sunflower’s room at the moment, while the boy let out squeals and giggles. “Why should the factory replace it now?”

  “It’s not the factory, dear,” said Raincloud. “It’s Public Safety.”

  At the door stood a squat cubical servo with a hemispherical cap topped by a bright red light that revolved steadily. Behind the large servo stood a smaller bipedal one, carrying a shiny new trainsweep, identical to Doggie without decoration, as far as Blackbear could tell. “I must inform you, citizen,” spoke the square servo flatly, “that your trainsweep represents a possible danger to public safety. We are prepared to replace it now. The City of Helicon regrets any inconvenience, and congratulates you on receiving new merchandise in place of defective goods.”

  That word “defective,” again. “The trainsweep serves us well enough,” said Blackbear.

  “I told them that,” whispered Raincloud. “But they know something—they got some kind of data from that Valan servo-trainer.”

  “The trainer who bought the rights to Doggie’s network? But she was delighted; she found nothing wrong with it.”

  The square servo’s blinking light gave Blackbear a headache. “We are very thorough, Citizen. Innocent citizens have been strangled in their beds by faulty equipment.”

  “Great Hills,” muttered Raincloud. “You can’t be serious.”

  Blackbear agreed, yet he felt uneasy. The Elysian servos must know what they were talking about.

  “No!” shrieked Hawktalon. “You can’t take Doggie away, you can’t.” Her half-braided face glared up at him. “Or I’ll—I’ll never eat again!”

  Sunflower ran out and clung to his father’s leg. “Doggie,” he wailed.

  Above the din, the servo added, “Your replacement will be retrained at City expense.”

  Could any servo be trained to act like Doggie?

  Raincloud said, “We’re not interested. We appeal the ruling.”

  “No appeal. The trainsweep goes today.”

  Blackbear gave Raincloud a look of desperation. Sunflower released his leg and hurled himself against the offending servo; Blackbear caught him back just in time.

  “I’ll run away from home!” yelled Hawktalon above the din of Sunflower’s sobs.

  “Hush, child,” insisted Raincloud. She turned to the Safety servo. “Suppose we ship it offworld for a while?”

  The Safety servo considered this. “If the item is sent completely outside Elysian jurisdiction, including satellites, that is your choice. In that case, however, you receive no replacement.”

  “Doggie is irreplaceable,” stated Hawktalon.

  “We’ll do that,” said Raincloud. “We’ll ship her to Bronze Sky.”

  “Very well. You have twenty-four hours.” The two servos departed, hauling off their rejected trainsweep.

  “If Doggie goes back to Bronze Sky,” Hawktalon asked more quietly, “can I go back, too?”

  Sunflower was still carrying on at the top of his lungs.

  “Hush, both of you,” said Raincloud. “To your rooms, now. Daddy and I need to talk.”

  With the children settled away, Blackbear started to think. “How much will the freight cost?”

  “On short notice? A thousand credits, at least.”

  His heart sank. “We were just getting out from under.”

  “I know,” she sighed, stroking his arm. “And the children love the thing so. ‘Strangled in bed,’ indeed.” She frowned. “I wonder…”

  “Couldn’t we just keep her out of sight for a while?”

  “No, servos all have transmitters. The City can track her at all times.”

  “Maybe out on a raft? The signal might not carry.”

  Raincloud snapped her fingers. “That’s it! The Sharers are ‘completely outside Elysian jurisdiction’; legally, their territory is another world. If they’d take the machine, that is,” she added doubtfully. “You know how Sharers feel about machines.”

  “Draeg will take her!” he exclaimed. “Of course—Draeg lives out on a raft. I’m sure he’ll help out; and then, the children can go and see her now and then.”

  The holostage located Draeg in the lower west octant, at a bar that catered to foreigners. “Hullo, Brother,” called Draeg, sidling into the column of light. “The logens after you again?”

  Blackbear tried as quickly as possible to explain. When he had finished, Draeg was silent for a moment.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Draeg. “You want me to fly you this instant out to Kshiri-el, at the height of the seaswallowers, so that you can leave some dumb servo with the Sharers—the most machine-hating folk in the Fold?”

  “Not this instant; this afternoon will do.”

  “I’ll be the one to go,” corrected Raincloud. “I speak Sharer; I’ll explain to them.”

  Draeg grinned. “See you then. Hope you’ve got a strong stomach.”

  THE SHUTTLECRAFT LOOKED THE SAME AS THE ONE WITH the chatty servo voice that had landed the Windclans on Helicon some four months before. The window gave a fine panoramic view of the descending afternoon sun shedding its gli
tter across the waves; it nearly blinded Raincloud’s eyes, accustomed to the dust-filtered blood-red of Bronze Sky.

  “You’re a brave one,” Draeg commented from his buckled seat. “None of my sisters would’ve come out in your condition.”

  Raincloud said nothing. If Blackbear had gone instead, he would have been honor-bound to bring along their firstborn daughter. Besides, back in earthquake country the home was the most dangerous place to be.

  Her morning sickness was subsiding; even so, the heaving of the craft in strong wind gave her stomach a jolt. She nibbled continuously on corncrunch, one kernel at a time to make them last. At her side crouched Doggie, quivering miserably; odd, to imagine a machine feeling miserable. Next to her, Raincloud had brought a recharger, a brick of nanoplast with a solar membrane to keep the poor trainsweep “fed.”

  “Going home early, aren’t we?” the voice of the shuttle asked Draeg. “Thought we’d spend another day out on the town, didn’t we?”

  Draeg only grunted in response. This shuttle was even chattier than the last one. “All for a bloody servo, too,” he added to Raincloud. “Never thought I’d see the day.”

  “You’ve never heard of a servo hurting anyone, have you?” she asked Draeg.

  “There are accidents, now and then. The whole city structure is a servo, come to think of it. You can’t escape it—except the way I do.”

  The floor began to drop perceptibly beneath her feet. Below, the ocean’s surface was rising up to meet her. Much of it was packed with green-brown raft seedlings, but here and there a great blue clearing appeared, as if the seedling growth had been scooped out. Within the nearest clearing, she could see the waves spiraling into a whirlpool at the center. Her hair stood on end. “Is that…”

  “A seaswallower, all right,” Draeg told her. “You’ll never see the beast itself, a great tube of flesh that can suck down the surface for two kilometers across. They migrate north this season, then back south six months from now.”

  “Is Kshiri-el raft too big to be swallowed?”

  “I hope so. Besides, grown rafts have other defenses—”