Daughter of Elysium

by Joan Slonczewski

  “I did not support our present course, either.” The voice of Jerya Tenarishon carried above the rest. “I offer a replacement motion—that we direct the Prime Guardian to initiate a treaty conference immediately.”

  No one seconded her motion. Apparently Hyen was not the only one reluctant to “give in.”

  Suddenly Jerya rose to face Loris, her sash glittering as she leaned forward, her hands on the table. “Why do you want this now?” she demanded. “You backed off, before. What have you cooked up now, that makes you so eager to run the show?”

  “Not I,” replied Loris, his gaze sweeping across the others around the table. “I’m not at all eager to take the helm in such parlous times. But if others insist, I will consent, for the good of Elysium.”

  The question was called. Guardians Dryashon, Inashon and Apaturashon voted in favor; Verid felt a chill behind her neck. But the next two voted against. Loris overcame his modesty to vote in favor, and Hyen voted against. The room was quiet now, as the Guardians waited, hands clasped upon the table.

  Jerya hesitated purposefully. “I abstain.”

  Verid clenched her hand. They always counted on Jerya’s support, but she had reached the end of her patience.

  The vote continued, reaching four in favor, five against, with only Deliashon and Papilishon remaining. Guardian Deliashon cleared her throat. “It’s time for a change. I favor rotation.”

  Then Hyen would lose, Verid realized with shock. A cold tightening passed through her to her toes. Their time was up; she could take the next shuttle back to Anaeon.

  But before Guardian Papilishon could cast his vote, Jerya interrupted. “Excuse me, Guardians.” Her tone of voice made clear her distaste. “Upon reflection, I vote against.”

  Hands and arms relaxed, and talars rustled against shoulders as people sat back, talking in whispers, even before Guardian Papilishon had cast his defiant vote. The motion had to carry by a clear majority; it had failed, but was hardly a victory Verid would care to celebrate. The Guardians seemed to think otherwise. Two of those who had voted to replace Hyen bowed to Jerya with congratulations, rather like shonlings relieved to see their generen take them in hand.

  The next day, the bejeweled Valan ambassador appeared in person at Verid’s office, the first time he had done so since her promotion. “I must say, my people are getting worried about this crisis,” the ambassador confided, as if Verid had no idea that this might be the case.

  “I understand, Lord Sardonyx,” Verid assured him. “We’re working night and day to resolve the matter.”

  “Well you’d better do it soon,” he added, a bit imperiously. “Our houses of trade are deeply concerned about the banks. We can’t allow the slightest loss of confidence in our investments. We stand to lose billions in falling rates.”

  “I’ve assured you, the banks are in absolutely no danger.” The ambassador ought to know Elysians better than that, she thought. “Our banks have been in business for centuries.”

  “Yes, Verid,” he said, “you and I know that; but what if ordinary Valan investors start pulling out their accounts? Who knows where it might end.”

  She sat forward and faced the man, her eyebrows raised. “So, let’s settle the crisis. What shall we do?”

  “Hold a treaty conference, of course. What’s the matter—you always do that.”

  She eyed him coldly. “That’s exactly what I tried to do, two weeks ago.”

  “Well, go ahead and do it then. Talk all you like, that’s what the Sharers want. So long as they’re getting attention, they’re happy.”

  “There’s no telling where it may lead,” she warned.

  Lord Sardonyx waved his hand. “That logathlon is out of the news now. Whatever Sharers talk about makes no difference to us.”

  He really was worried about the banks. And yet, Verid thought, something did not add up. Why had he waited till now, just after the challenge to Hyen? She wondered about it, after the Valan had left.

  Then at once she saw. The Valans had held out, hoping for Hyen’s early downfall. With Loris, Elysium would move closer under Valan influence, for Loris held many Valan investments and he tended to share their outlook. In fact, the Valans must have tipped off Loris that they were ready to settle—else he would not have dared attempt to take over the Guard.

  She found Hyen in a better mood than she’d seen in months. “Well, well, I think we can wrap this bit of trouble right up, don’t you?” He chuckled. “Foreigners are always so nervous about their cash. I think for once we owe a logen a great favor,” he said, meaning Alin.

  “More than once,” she muttered, thinking of Jerya.

  “So go ahead with the treaty conference,” he urged. “You said you could do it without losing face.”

  “I’ll do my best, but the Sharers are pretty disgusted by now.”

  “You’ll manage, you always do. Now perhaps we can move on to the matter of your staff retreat,” he said, meaning the cover for their trip to Urulan.

  Before the subject changed, however, Verid shot Lem a glance, as she had coached him ahead of time. Perhaps Hyen would be more receptive to advice from junior staff.

  “Excuse me, Guardian,” said Lem, “before we leave the question of Sharers and terraforming—”

  “There’s no question about terraforming,” Hyen interrupted. “That’s settled. But go ahead,” he added generously.

  “Of course, I’m new at this, but, I wonder how much the Solarian loan is really worth to us? It’s a drop in the bucket, as far as actual terraforming is concerned. Bank Helicon might sell off the investment, say, to a Bronze Skyan bank—they would pay more than it’s worth, just for the prestige of having it. Then the next time we get into…such things, we can cover our tracks better.”

  Hyen looked at the man. He considered the idea, rubbing his hand beneath his chin. “You know, that’s just the kind of thinking we need around here. Verid, why didn’t you come up with that weeks ago?” He tugged Lem’s sleeve. “Why don’t I hear more from you, Lem? You need to loosen up more. You ought to join us at the Houris tomorrow night.”

  So that one would fly, too. Only two problems remained: how to back down with grace, as Verid had promised, and what to do with Raincloud.

  OUT AT SEA, RAINCLOUD WAS BEGINNING TO AGREE WITH Leresha. Four nights with Sharers at the wall of Helicon had altered forever her view of her Elysian hosts. Never in her life had Raincloud seen goddesses treated with such disrespect and indecency. To be carried off by eight-limbed swimming machines, without so much as a word of apology, while all the time their Elysian masters kept themselves safe and aloof in their prison-sphere of Helicon…

  The Sharers took it all wrong, she thought. “The least you could do,” she told Yshri, “is to learn rei-gi and share-defend your honor. It might share no good, but at least you’d go down fighting.”

  Yshri dipped a raftwood oar into the water. Little eddies formed and swirled away like microscopic seaswallowers. “You may be right,” she said, “but this is our way. You will see.”

  Overhead, an amphibious shuttlecraft loomed closer, settling carefully to land on the water. Yshri eyed it with indifference, Raincloud with stony contempt. Waves from the landing rolled toward the boat and rocked it precariously.

  “Raincloud Windclan,” called the shuttle. “The Subguardian wants to see you right away. You may board immediately.”

  Raincloud looked away.

  Yshri said, “Verid wants to talk. That’s a good sign, in my opinion.” Other Sharers disagreed; Leresha still unspoke all Elysians.

  “I don’t like it,” Raincloud muttered.

  “Well, I would go,” said Yshri. “But someone has to row the boat home.”

  “Oh, then, of course I’ll go,” Raincloud quickly agreed. As the shuttlecraft floated near, she hoisted Blueskywind onto her back and leaped onto the entrance ramp. The nanoplast soon oozed shut behind her.

  “You can drop me off at the Third Octant entrance, please,” she tol
d the shuttle. “I’ve got a few things to do first.” At the very least she had to reassure her worried family, wash the salt out of her skin, and let Blackbear redo all her tangled braids.

  “So sorry, Citizen, that won’t be possible,” the voice purred. “Our instructions cannot be altered.”

  A moment of fear hit her, intensified when an octopod met her at the entrance. It occurred to Raincloud, she had figured her job was lost—but was it worse? Was it a trap, coming back to the Nucleus? Her arms unconsciously swung to rei-gi position, and she held up her head with the look of the Goddess.

  At the Nucleus, the Subguardian did not look particularly happy to see this mother and child, salt-encrusted like weeds plucked from the ocean. She sat straighter than usual, and there was not the usual trace of humor in her eyes. The Owl looked decidedly ruffled. “You can tell the Sharers we’ll have a conference,” she said without preamble. “It’s late, by Helix, I know; but better late than never.”

  “‘Late’ is the least of it,” observed Raincloud. “It’s a total disgrace. Why should any of them listen?”

  “They’ll listen to you. This is how we do things on Shora. Elysians and Sharers, we’re two very different kinds of people, remember.”

  “Very different,” she agreed.

  Verid clapped her hands on her chair. “Did we hurt a single one of them,” she asked, “even a single hair on their hairless heads?” Her voice was low but intense. “What other world do you know that handles differences as we do? Do you dare to sneer at us? You worked for Founders City; what kind of people are you? What’s the population of Bronze Skyan prisons—and the survival rate inside?”

  Founders City was very far away just then, but Raincloud remembered.

  “You’ll tell them to give us a week,” Verid went on. “A week after they withdraw, we’ll call a treaty conference. Later, we’ll quietly sell off the Solarian loan.”

  Raincloud blinked incredulously. “You expect them to agree to that?”

  “They will. At least some of them will. They won’t all agree to anything, before the next World Gathering.” Verid paused. “You’ll do it?”

  She shrugged. “I’ll pass it on.”

  The Subguardian visibly relaxed, her shoulders slumped back owlishly once more. “That’s settled then. Afterward, you’d better take three Visiting Days straight, since you’ve overrun your work week.”

  Raincloud’s jaw fell. “You mean I’m still—but I haven’t been—”

  Verid silenced her with a look. “Yes, you’ve been on the payroll all week. As ‘Sharer negotiator, special assignment.’ But,” she added, shaking a finger at her, “this is absolutely the last time I’ll cover for you. Understood?”

  Raincloud said nothing, her head spinning.

  “Why didn’t you warn me ahead of time,” Verid grumbled. “It would have made this a lot easier.”

  Perhaps—or perhaps, Raincloud thought, a friendly octopod would have stopped by, and the shuttle would have refused to take her out that day. She realized with sadness that she no longer trusted Verid as she once had. But Verid had trusted her enough to keep her on; she owed her credit for that.

  “When you come back,” Verid added, “you’ll find a raft full of intelligence to review. Our Urulite friends have managed to hit another Valan freighter.”

  THE SHARERS AGREED TO CALL A TREATY CONFERENCE. Their boats took off immediately, their occupants happy to return to their children and fishing nets.

  “Is that so wise?” Raincloud wondered, as Yshri departed. “What if the Guardians don’t keep their word? You’ll have to start all over.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” Yshri assured her. “If it did, of course, we’d be back to share much worse.”

  “It’s not right, though. The Elysians can pretend they lost nothing.”

  “No one likes to share loss,” said Yshri. “No one likes to lose face. We have a saying, ‘Fish wear their scales, humans wear their face.’”

  Raincloud thought this over, along with other thoughts all jumbled up inside her feverish brain. Back at the apartment, she gave way to exhaustion. As Blueskywind nursed in the crook of her left arm, her right arm fumbled through a drawer to find a clean nightshirt; perhaps, she thought irritably, it would be easier to ask the house to produce one.

  Something stiff and white came out of the drawer. Her hand drew out a mask. It was the mask of an Urulite female, left behind in the haste of Lord Zheron’s departure so many months before. Idly she held it by the handle up to her face. There in the mirror she stood, masked, just like that masked goddess who had stepped out in her path to get a look at her.

  The Urulites had just hit another Valan freighter, full of microwave generator components headed for L’li. The recollection of it came over her in a wave. Was it really the bad old days again? Would the secret trip be canceled after all?

  Chapter 9

  WHILE RAINCLOUD HANDLED SIMULTANEOUSLY THE Sharer negotiations and the latest Urulite crisis, Blackbear’s work took a new direction. In the laboratory he had identified several novel mutants of his Eyeless gene. Two of them had control sequences that might prevent the early-onset heart disease in three-century-old Elysians. Pirin wanted to test them in simbrid embryos right away.

  The call from his old clinic at Founders had renewed Blackbear’s enthusiasm for his work. Let the Elysians shut down their fertility work—in the long run, it made little difference to him, because he would set up his own lab on Bronze Sky. The main thing was to learn as many techniques as he could while he was here with the experts.

  The simbrid embryo testing would be crucial, whatever problem he chose to work on. So he might as well work with Pirin on the Eyeless mutants. Their goal was to replace the Eyeless sequence on simbrid chromosome seven with one of Blackbear’s mutant sequences, then watch the embryo develop—normally, they hoped.

  “How much DNA will you need?” Blackbear asked. He could program the synthesizer to build any mutant gene, a few thousand copies at a time.

  Pirin considered this. “How many base pairs of your mutant differ from the parental sequence?”

  “Twenty-three positions differ, over a region of three hundred bases.”

  “That’s not too bad,” said Pirin. “Instead of cutting out and splicing the whole region, we’ll send in a molecular servo to modify each base chemically.”

  That made sense. The four different nucleotide bases, or “letters” of the DNA alphabet, were chemically interchangeable except for the inward-pointing tab of each structure. The inward-pointing portions, which determined the DNA sequence, could be converted by adding or removing methyl and amino groups; rather like changing a c to an e by adding a stroke.

  So the two of them spent the next half hour programming the molecular servos to perform the correct series of reactions, at the correct base positions. Since each servo could store only eight operations (there were atomic limits, after all) three servos had to be programmed, which took longer than Pirin had thought. But by the afternoon they were ready to put the servos into the fertilized egg cell to modify the chromosomal DNA.

  They watched the tabletop holostage as it formed the image of the transparent egg. Within the sphere of granular cytoplasm, the two pronuclei were suspended, one each from the egg and from the disintegrated sperm which had fertilized it. Each pronucleus contained the parental chromosomes entwined inside, decondensed and invisible at this magnification.

  From across the table Hawktalon leaned over to get a better look, her braids sparkling as they caught some of the light. “Daddy, did I really look like that once?”

  He blinked, taken aback. “You certainly did.” Seven standard years ago that was, eight counting gestation. I’m getting old, Blackbear thought.

  “Fertilization is not yet complete,” Pirin pointed out. “It will take several hours before the pronuclear membranes dissolve and the chromosomes migrate together. At that point, the chromosomes will condense for the first cell division. Once co
ndensed, the chromosomes will be impenetrable. So we need to get the servos inside now.”

  At Pirin’s spoken command, two microscopic needles pierced the cell, one for each pronucleus. Each needle pulled three molecular servos into the pronucleus. Of course, the servos could not be “seen” at this resolution, but the holostage gradually focused in. First the cytoplasm, with its reticulum of molecular transport enlarged, then fell away as the bubble of the nucleus expanded to fill the stage. Then the nuclear membranes and most of the chromosomes expanded out of range. “We need more contrast,” Pirin said. Another command, and the elegant curves of a DNA helix snaked across a foglike background. Blackbear made a mental note of this command.

  “Do the servos find their own way to the proper gene sequence on the chromosome?” Blackbear wondered.

  “That’s what we’ll find out,” said Pirin. “They should; they’re all programmed for that. Here we’ve focused on the Eyeless sequence. It shouldn’t take long for the servos to show up.”

  Hawktalon asked, “Is that really a DNA gene?” She sounded disappointed. “Where are all the oxygens and nitrogens?”

  “Atoms aren’t really colored balls on a stick,” Blackbear reminded her. “They’re just fuzzy clouds of electrons.”

  Pirin looked up. “They can be colored balls, if you’d like.” At a command, the DNA turned into a winding collage of blue oxygens, red nitrogens, and tiny black hydrogens dotting the zigzag skeleton of carbon atoms.

  “What’s that crawling alongside?” Hawktalon put her hand into the image. A chain of atoms shaped like a leech with a sucker on each end was creeping end-over-end along the major groove of the double helix. At one point it slowed to a halt, tapped several times about the groove, then settled and rearranged itself.

  Pirin said, “That’s the nanoservo. It’s sitting at a cytosine base, the first one you wanted to mutate. The servo will replace the cytosine’s amino group with a hydroxyl, which immediately isomerizes to the ketone of thymine, the transformed base.”

  Before Blackbear could speak, Hawktalon added, “You need an extra methyl group, too, to make thymine.”