by Linda Nagata
Urban came by and they set out together for the authority offices. A small group of mediots met them in Reini Lane. Yulyssa wasn’t one of them. Lot stopped to talk while Urban stood quietly on the side. The questions were friendly. They complimented him on his media interest factor. Very high.
After that, it took half an hour to get down Narcissus. Ados wanted to chat. Some tagged along. Urban paced in circles, watching the shifting activity with wary eyes. “We’ll have to take the transit from here,” he said at last. “We’ll never get there if we walk.”
CHAPTER
14
URBAN WAS IN A QUEER, STIFF MOOD. ON THE TRANSIT RIDE he kept glancing at Lot, as if he had something pressing to say but couldn’t quite get it out. “You’re scaring me,” Lot said after a minute. “You know something?”
Urban shook his head, his gaze downcast. “Do you want to find him?”
Lot felt his heart lurch. “Sure.” The word was off his tongue fast, say it quick before he could change his mind.
“I’m getting scared,” Urban admitted.
So that was the strangeness Lot felt.
Urban said, “He was supposed to be gone. Long gone. Now we don’t even know if we have a future.”
The car stopped at the authority platform. It was an empty white cavern, with no direct access to the surface. Authority offices existed entirely underground … a controlling biochip secreted beneath the city’s skin.
Lot got out first. His arms had started to hurt, and his neck ached from the weight of the slings. He flexed his fingers, staring across the platform to a pair of double doors, with RESTRICTED embossed over their surface.
A soft chime announced the pending arrival of another car. He turned curiously, just as the vehicle’s bullet-shaped nose penetrated the gel curtain that confined a near vacuum to the tunnels. The car brushed to a stop with a soft whoosh. The door opened, and to Lot’s pleasant surprise, Yulyssa stepped out. He felt a silly smile upon his face, and then a warm flush to back it up as he realized how much he’d missed her attention. She hadn’t come to see him since he’d gotten out of the monkey house… .
Doubt touched him. Dozens of mediots had flocked around him, but not Yulyssa. That fact took on a new significance when, instead of joining them as he’d expected, she remained rooted by the track, watching him warily. Only after several seconds did she break the awkward silence. “I thought you’d be inside by now.”
“We were slow getting here.” His sensory tears tingled as he tried to untangle the skeins of her mood. He could sense no animosity, but that wariness … where had it come from? He took a step toward her. Immediately he felt her tension rise, and he pulled back in surprise. “What’s wrong?”
Her gaze cut to Urban, then back again, to settle on his wounded arms. “I don’t like what happened the other night.”
“You mean the rally?”
She nodded.
“It got a little crazy,” he admitted.
“But it’s not going to happen like that again,” Urban quickly assured her.
Her doubt filled the air. “I wish I could believe that.”
Lot turned his head slowly from side to side, trying to puzzle out her mood. “But you were there. You were having fun.”
“I was caught up in your tide! Just like the ados—except I don’t like being manipulated.”
Manipulated? He didn’t remember it that way. Emotion had been shared in the communal tide. He’d given up as much as he’d taken. Now her retreat left him feeling vulnerable. He wanted to smooth over her doubts, and quickly. He took another step toward her. This time she actually backed away. He pulled up again, astounded at her resistance. She’d felt so close the night of the rally. So open and sympathetic. How could that change?
“I’m not going to sign your petition,” she said. “I wanted to let you know that.”
Urban touched his back. “Come on, fury. I told you she was too real.”
“No.” Lot couldn’t look away from her. She’d promised her help. She couldn’t just walk away from that.
“Stop it, Lot,” Yulyssa warned softly.
He let out a sharp breath, breaking eye contact as her tension rose yet another notch. Ord stirred restlessly under his hair.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry. But there’s just so much we don’t know. If Jupiter came out of the Hallowed Vasties—”
Lot grimaced. “If he did come out of the Vasties, he fled it, like everyone else on the frontier. He was scared too. He knew the cordons were failing.”
Urban stepped forward indignantly. “Who cares where Jupiter came from? The cordons are a million years away. The Vasties don’t have anything to do with us.”
“Sooth,” Lot said. “It’s what I’ve told her.”
“But you’re only guessing,” Yulyssa insisted. “You don’t know what you are, or where you come from. We need to be cautious. Placid Antigua’s breakdown was a warning sign. We’re under pressure—”
“Sooth,” Urban sneered. “And we don’t need real people making decisions for us.”
“We don’t need Jupiter’s ghost in charge of our decision making either. I’m sorry, Lot, but if there is a Chenzeme influence—”
“Yulyssa!”
His protest came too late. Urban had caught the reference. “What do you mean ‘a Chenzeme influence’?” he asked.
Lot turned away, reluctant to explain, fearing how Urban might react. “It’s just a stupid theory.”
“A theory about what?”
“About Lot,” Yulyssa said, watching him with suddenly playful eyes. “He didn’t tell you? I guess he’s more independent than I thought.”
Briefly, Lot met Urban’s suspicious gaze. “We’ll talk about it later.” Then, before Urban could ask questions, he set off toward authority’s double doors, telling himself it really didn’t mean anything, that Kona had said it just to rattle him.
The opaque doors opened and Kona himself was there, his expression carefully blank as he glanced over the scattered trio. “I’ve asked Yulyssa to be the public witness,” he said.
Urban stepped up beside Lot. “So you’ll broadcast this?”
“After the fact.”
They followed Kona into a large heptagonal chamber that opened onto four long, diamond-shaped rooms. The offices weren’t labeled, but Lot knew the divisions: city environment, city security, space systems, and planetary security. Work stations lined the office walls, each with a large video pond over it, at least five feet by five. Below each dark pond were consoles outfitted with grips and data-entry systems. There were only a couple of officers in each room. No video ponds were in use. “Where is everybody?” Lot asked.
Kona chuckled. “You’re not impressed?”
“I thought it’d be busier.”
He shrugged. “We conduct oversight from here. Not much else. Our officers work through remote links. And DIs subsidize the systems. Security’s been decentralized since that day.”
Lot nodded, remembering the now-demolished control room where Captain Aceret had won command of the elevators. It would not be so easy again to seize a city function. “But the environmental systems are controlled from here?”
“Only for the industrial core. The city is self-regulated, operating on a feedback mechanism involving a decentralized network of DIs. The Old Silkens seemed to have mistrusted the idea of a central authority.”
“But resource supply is handled from here?”
“It can be.”
They passed the first office and entered the second. Kona introduced them to the commandant of wardens, a grim-faced man in a security uniform who did not seem pleased at the idea of sharing his post with ados. He took delight in telling them that almost no “activity” had been observed in the past twelve hours. “Yes, yes. Unusually quiet. You could be disappointed.”
Lot exchanged a glance with Urban. “And what is it we’re not likely to see?” Urban asked.
“Let’s wait,” Kona said. “I�
��d like your unbiased opinion.” He turned to the commandant. “The wardens are in place?”
“Four have been convened, as you requested.”
“How many do you run?” Lot asked.
The commandant glanced at Kona, who nodded permission. “We try to maintain some seven thousand, on all landmasses and a sampling in the oceans. The number fluctuates. They’re not long-lived.”
“Why not?”
The commandant didn’t try to hide his condescension. “It’s the Well. Nothing lasts there.”
Lot snorted softly. “Everything lasts there.” The Well was a genetic museum and the governors were its curators. But he let it go. “Are the wardens armed? Captain Antigua said—”
“It’s a precaution,” the commandant interrupted, his Adam’s apple bobbing nervously in his throat. “The spray has never been used.”
Lot’s smile was cold. “At least not in the Well?”
Kona said, “Our security’s being reevaluated. But we can discuss that later. Let’s get started, and see what we can find.”
They followed the commandant to a side room outfitted with crash couches. The room was dimly lit, the air colder than in the outer chamber. Ord slipped off Lot’s shoulder and disappeared under a couch.
Kona got them bracelets from a sidewall. He tossed a set to Urban, then helped Lot slip the bands over his wrists and ankles. The bracelets were about an inch wide, slick and soft and semitransparent. As each contacted his skin, it unfurled, dissociating into hair-thin tendrils that slipped up his arms, under his casts, and onto his bare shoulders in a branching pattern designed to sense every twitch of his external musculature. The bands on his ankles similarly mapped his legs beneath his slacks, so that his motion could be translated by a DI to the warden he would link with in the Well.
In the Well: the reality of it finally hit him. Until now his mind had treated this venture as an abstract potential. Now the Well loomed as the central element in his mental landscape. He felt irresistibly drawn to it, frightened and exhilarated at once. He would not be there physically, no. But it would seem as if he were. Almost.
Kona lay back on a couch, indicating that Lot and Urban should do the same. Lot turned to look for Yulyssa. She hung back, lurking just outside the darkened chamber. “You’re not coming?” he asked.
“I’ll be watching over your shoulder.”
“Have you seen it before?”
“No.”
He nodded, and settled into a couch, carefully guarding his balance against the dead weight of his arms. The air’s chill seemed concentrated in the chair’s fabric, and the bare skin on his back puckered in instinctive protest.
“Ready?” Kona asked.
From somewhere to his right Urban answered in the affirmative. Lot did the same. Before he had the word fully out, a shield slid down over his face, wrapping him in darkness, muffling the sounds from the room. The darkness lasted for a heartbeat; then Lot found himself blinking in the muted light of a cold cloud forest.
For a moment he felt unbalanced. The forest seemed to lift and spin around him, and he had to fight against a sensation that he was falling over backward. But after a few seconds, his mind accepted an artificial center of gravity, and his perspective stabilized.
He looked down to discover himself balanced atop an arch. Further inspection proved the arch to be part of a tangled system of tree trunks rising in short jags and loops so that the whole structure had the appearance of having been flash-frozen in the midst of an octopus-crawl across the slope.
The vegetation seemed startlingly tall, until he realized the warden he occupied was diminutive, perhaps only two feet high at most. He looked down at tiny, fragile gray-green hands. He tried flexing them, and after a few fumbling attempts, he got them to close. His body had become an undetailed blank of humanoid shape, gray-green like the hands, suggesting a sculpture that had never been quite finished.
A misty rain fell from the heavily clouded skies, beading every leaf in glistening crystal drops. Animal sounds came from the slope behind them: a high chirping, repeated in beats of three. And once, a low rustle of disturbed vegetation.
Motion drew his eye to the right. Another warden stood beside him on the branch. It was hard to make out against the mottled background of leaf and bark. Still, Lot could discern its vague, fragile physiognomy. It had Urban’s face, cast in gray and green. His short braids looked as if algae were growing in every depression.
Lot couldn’t suppress a grin.
Urban’s pseudolips twisted in a crooked smile. There was no mouth behind them. They skated on a solid marble surface. “I couldn’t look half as goofy as you, fury.”
“You say so.”
But Kona’s voice interrupted them. “We’re not here to admire one another.”
Lot turned. Kona stood on his other side, his stern face like a bas-relief sculpture in marbled algae-wood. Beyond him, a fourth warden had assumed the commandant’s disapproving air. It looked out, away from the slope, and Lot followed its gaze to discover below them a bowl-shaped valley. From ground to sky, like a fault in his visual system, a broad, gray band neatly bisected the vista. “That’s the elevator cable!”
He studied the prospect. An overlay in his optic field informed him that the elevator column was some 1.5 miles distant. It was anchored on a black platform that filled the circular valley floor, looming at least a hundred feet above the tops of the nearest trees. He could see the dark lines of the vertical tracks on the column’s gray face. Three tracks were visible from his position, though all were partly obscured by tufts of vegetation that had begun to grow on the structure. Almost hidden by the dark bellies of rain clouds, a single elevator car hung some twelve hundred feet above the terminal building. Lot felt a chill on his spine, wondering if that could have been Jupiter’s car. Softly: “What happened that day?”
Kona said, “We don’t know.”
Urban hissed his doubt, and immediately the commandant rose to the defense. “It’s true!” he insisted. “No one was monitoring the wardens that day. We had other things on our minds.”
“But the wardens are guided by DIs—”
“Yes, and their experiences are recorded, and uploaded to authority, yes. But not that day. Not from this area. We found no records in the archives. When we investigated this region, we found no wardens.”
“They’d apparently been disassembled,” Kona said. “It’s not unusual. It happens.”
“Not like that,” the commandant countered. “When they vanish, it’s always one at a time. But not that day. We maintain a force of at least ten wardens in the vicinity of the elevator column. That day, every one of them vanished, in a radius of some eighty miles.”
The frustration, the anger in his voice: it startled Lot. He’d believed for so long that authority knew.
But apparently, no one knew.
Except Jupiter?
“There was damage to the column too,” Kona added. “We found minor pitting and scarring over the lowest half-mile. That’s where the plants took root.”
“That’s right,” the commandant agreed. “It seems Jupiter stirred up the wrath of the governors against all things human-made: the wardens, the column, and his holy self.”
Lot grimaced at the sarcasm. “You’re just guessing,” he accused. “You don’t know.”
The warden shrugged. “It’s just a good thing the column held together, or we’d all be in cold storage now, adrift a million miles from nowhere.”
Lot let his gaze wander as the commandant talked. A broken mist swirled slowly through the valley, chased by brief rain showers. The land smelled wet, and full of the healthy rot of microscopic life. He found it beautiful, and did not want to believe that sinister, molecular-scale guardians lay everywhere beneath it.
A sudden hiss from Urban made him jump. “Shift your optics to long-range, fury.”
“Yes, yes, there,” the commandant muttered, pointing into the valley, toward the base of the elevator column. �
�Look there. It’s what you came to see.”
To the north of the terminal building, where the mist tumbled around the ruins of the road that led out of the valley, Lot thought he could see something moving. In the mist, it seemed to be a gray, nebulous shape, human in outline, but not in detail. Like the shadow of a man, rather than the man himself. Shifting. Shimmering as it walked slowly down the road, like a warden suffering a failed camouflage function, except it was far too big to be a warden. Measured against the road, it seemed to be fully man-sized. He sighted another off to the right of the first.
Then the mist thickened. The men—or whatever they had been—were no longer visible. But several seconds later he saw them again. Now there were three. They were a good hundred yards from their previous position, near the trees that crowded the periphery of the roadway. The forest seemed to pour mist out across the open road. Soon, the images were obscured once more.
But in the brief time the apparitions had been visible, they had seemed to be gazing directly at Lot.
“We call them phantoms,” Kona said, with a note of grim satisfaction in his voice. “You can see they’re not human. It’s a phenomenon only, that has nothing to do with Jupiter.”
“But what is it?” Urban insisted. “What creates it?”
“No, no, we don’t know that,” the commandant said. “It’s unknown—like the rest of this poisonous world.”
“A phenomenon,” Kona said again, as if by repetition he could force some standard of meaning on the word. “It registers faintly in the infrared, but it doesn’t seem to have any solid physical structure. It may be a projection. It lasts for only a few minutes at most, and doesn’t generate or respond to radio frequencies.”
Urban moved up close beside Lot. “Do you know what it is, fury?” he asked. “Do you recognize them?”
