The Octagonal Raven

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  Elysa blushed once more, again charmingly.

  “I’m a methodizer, currently under contract, for now anyway, to OneCys and to some smaller clients. That pays for my modest dwelling.” I smiled pleasantly as Kharl and Grete stepped down into the great room and slipped toward us — through the people who seemed to part without even being aware of their movement.

  “Not that modest,” suggested Kharl with a laugh. “He lives on the lower Hill. On the top.”

  “You live on the upper Hill,” I riposted. “On the very top.”

  “Why not? It’s only family creds.” He grinned. “I save my own earnings for supporting the arts.”

  “Kharl likes to distance himself from the family,” offered Grete.

  “I couldn’t say much to that,” I pointed out.

  “That’s why you’re always welcome,” he replied. “We need to stick together, we family outlaws.”

  “I’m the one who needs us to stick together,” I suggested. “You’re doing quite well on your own. Your own research and medcenter, scholarly articles, research breakthroughs …” I shrugged. “I’m just a barely known edart composer, and a contract methodizer to ensure I don’t have to ask Father for support.”

  “You’d die first before you asked for family support,” suggested Grete with a gentle laugh. “So would Kharl.”

  “They both sound stubborn,” offered Elysa, inclining her head to Grete, as if inquiring.

  “Are Gates distant? Are nanites small?” Grete arched her eyebrows.

  Rather than comment on any of those, I looked at the wineglass, then took another sip.

  Kharl smiled as I drank. “Good, isn’t it?”

  “Anything you have in your cellar is good.”

  “Not always … but it’s unique. That I can promise.” He smiled once more. “We’ll have to leave for the concert before too long.”

  “A half hour?”

  He nodded. “I’m glad you both could come.” With a last smile, he bowed, and then he and Grete slipped toward a group of five to our right, one that included Majora Hyriss, a truly nice woman I sometimes wished I’d pursued when I’d had the chance.

  “What do you do?” I asked the redhead, whose straight mahogany hair was swept back with a pair of jade and silver combs.

  “Me? I’m an medical researcher who’s lately become an adaptor in the field. Very junior … very poor.” Elysa smiled wryly. “I don’t move in these circles normally, but … Kharl and Grete are very understanding.” She stepped back, then glanced toward the doors to the outer terrace, empty, unlike the great room.

  “Do you work for a medcenter?”

  “A series of contract assignments for professionals and for research centers. This one is for … well … I can’t say, but you would know the name if I could.”

  I was intrigued and puzzled by the redhead. First, there were very few redheads left in our world, because the genelinks weren’t optimal. Second, while my readings of her indicated that her statements were generally true, the underlying anxiety level was higher than it should have been. Social concerns? Or something else?

  As I took another sip of the dolcetta, Elysa eased another step or two toward the French doors and touched her forehead with the back of her left hand.

  “Are you warm?” The press of people had warmed up the great room, not uncomfortably, but noticeably, and I was getting warm myself, notwithstanding my nanitic infrastructure’s efforts to balance matters.

  “If you wouldn’t mind … could we … go outside for a moment?” she asked.

  “Fine.” We stepped around a group of five, discussing something about why Holst had to be less accomplished than Uphyrd, and through the double French doors — phase-polarized armaglass set in real, if enhanced lignin oak — out onto the terrace. When I closed the door behind Elysa, the terrace was dark, not a photon of light escaping the phased armaglass, not that it mattered.

  The light breeze was welcome, though it held a hint of molding leaves.

  Below the terrace, the hillside sloped gently down to the stone wall that guarded the steeper bluff. Vallura lay below, and the lines of the dwellings and the paths and few hard-surfaced roads appeared clearly in my sight, even though the only lights visible in the valley were those from the south side of the city and from the scattered neighborhoods of supplemented housing.

  “It’s beautiful here,” Elysa murmured from close beside me.

  “It is. It’s also quieter. Does the noise bother you?”

  “Sometimes …”

  We walked to the edge of the terrace, out from beneath the balcony, and for several minutes, just stood in the fall breeze that was stronger away from the house.

  “I suppose we should head back inside, or we’ll be late to the concert,” I finally said.

  “You’re probably right. But it does smell so good.”

  For a moment, the fragrances of summer wafted around me, dispelling the previous scents of autumn — even though the chill of a fall night held Vallura. I took a deep breath, almost involuntarily.

  Nearly instantly, I could feel my system going into shock, a feeling compounded by the warning jolt of the nanites the massive histamine jolts delivered by the nanospray concealed momentarily by fragrance weren’t exactly subtle I turned toward Elysa …

  except she wasn’t there, or rather, her figure wavered, and she seemed to be stepping away from me.

  The dozen or so steps I took toward the terrace were the longest and slowest I’d ever taken, but I did manage to turn the door handle and take a step into the great room before my knees buckled and star-flashing darkness rolled up around me.

  * * *

  Chapter 3

  Fledgling: Yunvil, 414 N.E.

  * * *

  It was sixth period, and I was thinking about Ertis. I’d asked her to go to Helnya because I knew she wanted to see an exhibition at one of the galleries, and I’d even made a reservation for dinner at the best uniquery there. The only problem was that I hadn’t checked my free cred balance. Father insisted that we pay the distance tolls if we took the gliders anywhere, and I wasn’t sure I had enough to cover everything, and I wouldn’t get my stipend for my systems programming work at UniComm until the end of the next week. The tolls were automatic, and I’d probably lose all use of the glider for the next month if I couldn’t pay Father immediately — and that meant I couldn’t take Ertis anywhere because we weren’t that close to the induction tube.

  “Since marks appear to be the principal, if not the sole motivating force in determining your scholarly applications …”

  I tried not to sigh. I’d heard old Rosenn give the same lecture the term before, and when Tomaz had sighed, he’d gotten a real lecture on the arrogance of sighing.

  Still … Master Mertyn Rosenn paused. He was one of the strictest instructors at the Academy, and he looked even stricter when that long narrow face frowned, and he was frowning at me. “Mister Alwyn, I dislike supercilious expressions of boredom almost as much as I detest sighs.”

  There were muffled snorts and snickers from behind me.

  Old Rosenn turned and gestured at Brytt. “And I dislike expressions of mirth at the expense of others even more, Mister Ehler. So much so that any further expressions of either mirth or boredom will lower the grade I assign for classroom participation. One full grade this marking period. Is that clear?”

  That left the room silent. You could sometimes challenge a mark on a test with a master, but classroom participation could be weighed up to thirty percent, and it wasn’t challenged — not at Blue Oak Academy, anyway, and a failure in class participation meant a conference between the master, the student, and the parent. The last thing I wanted was my father getting together with Master Rosenn.

  So I sat and waited for old Rosenn to hand me the test. He also didn’t put his tests on the system. No one saw them until he handed them out — on paper. Very old-fashioned. I didn’t see why he just couldn’t implement decent system security.
<
br />   “As I was saying … since none of you seems to have an innate desire to learn, marks will have to substitute for that desire. I do not wish a mere regurgitation of facts. I do not wish high-sounding generalities without support.…

  I listened, even though I’d heard what he’d said too many times before. He was one of the few who insisted on a hand-composed essay test. The consoles in his classroom were strictly processing units, without a dictionary, thesaurus, or any memory. You couldn’t upload or download. If you didn’t know it, you were dead.

  As soon as he handed me the single sheet, I could see it would be tough. Just two questions, and that meant trouble. I read the first question.

  Discuss the following quotation with reference to the Noram collapse and the Diversist movement. Provide specific incidences and dates to support your contentions.

  “Life is never perfect. Even a good society is not perfect, and perfection is the enemy of all that is good. Those who seek perfection will destroy an imperfect good.”

  Perfection again. So he was a history instructor. I couldn’t see why he was so concerned about perfection and collapses. No civilization lasted forever. Greece collapsed. Rome collapsed. So did the Russian Communalists. And so did the Noram Commonacracy. People made mistakes, and everything fell down. That was history, but he acted as though it were something special.

  I looked at the second question. It wasn’t any better.

  It has been asserted throughout history that improvements in science and technology have been responsible for creating societies with increasing levels of personal freedom. Attempt to prove that this is not an accurate statement of the case.

  Attempt to prove?

  Great! An hour of writing answers to trick questions, and I still didn’t know what I was going to do about Ertis.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  Raven: Vallura, 458 N.E.

  * * *

  I woke in an unfamiliar bed. My eyes were gummy, my vision still blurry, and my fingers were the size of tennis balls, and whatever they rested on was gritty. In addition to all that, the sense of place was wrong — and there was no response from my internal nanitic monitors. None. “Mmmm …” When I tried to talk, I discovered that there were tubes down my throat, tubes that smelled of chemicals and acridity.

  “Don’t try to talk, Daryn. You’ll be fine.” Someone blotted my face and eyes, and I could see that the someone was Grete, but her voice reverberated in my ears so much that I hadn’t recognized it. “I’ll get Kharl.”

  Within moments, Kharl was standing there. Or maybe I had dozed off, and it had been longer. I couldn’t tell. My nanites and internal systems were still not working — or not reporting to me.

  For one of the few times I could remember, he wasn’t smiling. He spoiled the serious effect immediately. “You missed a very good concert, and you caused me to miss it.”

  I swallowed, wondering if I could talk, but the tubes were gone. So I had to have slept or rested longer than I had realized.

  “I guess I’ll do anything for family ties,” I finally mumbled. The words didn’t come out quite right, but he nodded.

  “You’ve been under my care for nearly two weeks,” Kharl went on. “The first days were pretty bad, but none of the damage was permanent.”

  I hoped he was right. All an edartist has is his mind — and his perceptions. For that matter, that was all I had as a methodizer, either.

  “The diagnostics confirm that. We had to keep you in an artificial coma to control the tendency of your brain to swell.” He shook his head. “Never seen an anaphylactic reaction like that before. Not personally. Not one that augnites couldn’t handle.”

  “I suddenly … developed an allergenic reaction to something new?” Halfway through the words, I found myself coughing. My lungs burned.

  Kharl waited until I stopped before replying. “It does happen, even now. Cases are more rare, but usually more severe.”

  Although I didn’t believe a word, I merely nodded. After a moment, I added, “Those of us who stray too far from the family develop ultra-severe allergies to life. Is that it?”

  “Allergies do happen, and they’re more likely in modern life.” A faint smile crossed his lips. “You know that. Besides, your father certainly wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”

  Even in my exhausted condition, I did know that. Father would want me to survive to see the error of my ways, even if it took years. “What happened to Elysa?”

  Kharl’s face blanked.

  “Don’t tell me … she wasn’t Grete’s cousin.”

  “She told you that? She told me that she was a cousin of Rhedya.”

  “I know … all Rhedya’s family — Gerrat suggested … politely … I should know his wife’s relations bet there’s no Elysa.”

  Kharl nodded. “I know. There’s no Elysa Mujaz-Kitab in the system. She’s not even in the family’s system. And no variations … even distant ones. I had Gerrat check.”

  “Great …”

  “In fact … no one like her exists,” Kharl said.

  “She wasn’t … VR projection. You’re not saying … she’s a duo-clone?”

  He smiled slowly. “You’re still interested after what she did to you?”

  “Have to admit it wasn’t boring.” I tried to laugh and ended up coughing. The coughs hurt, more than a bad Gate translation, a lot more. “Do I … have … any lungs … left?”

  “They’re fine, or they will be, if a little sore and stressed.”

  “What about Elysa, if that’s even her name?”

  “She didn’t behave like a full-imprint clone, either mono or duo, and I would have known if she were. I’d bet she’s genetically human. She’s just not in the system. She’s probably someone who wanted to get to meet you.”

  “So … you’re betting she’s a multiclone, raised from exobirth to adulthood?”

  “Hardly that. While she could have been gene-switched, and backaltered, the simpler explanation is just that she’s from off-planet where the databases aren’t as complete.”

  I frowned. The resources required for either genetic option were not inconsiderable. Nor the time in a full-sized exowomb, if she’d opted for backaltering. I couldn’t have afforded it, even if I’d dipped into my inherited holdings. And interstellar travel, by individuals not on Federal Service contract, was almost as expensive. But she had said she was from a colony planet, and she could have been traveling under the Federal Service.

  “You aren’t that unpopular, Daryn.”

  “I suppose you’re right. My royalties aren’t high enough for that.” I kept my voice low, not whispering, just low.

  “You don’t know what this sort of thing can do. Remember that. It could be some sort of off-shoot from the treatment of the pre-select plague. You weren’t here, but you had to have gotten the treatment when you returned. Some people ended up with allergies similar to this. There were some odd side effects.”

  “So I get blindsided years later?”

  “It happens. At least we’re all alive. Not that the Dynae and some of that ilk seem to approve in the techniques that made it possible.”

  I gave the smallest of headshakes. Even in my more strident edart commentaries, I hadn’t even bothered with the semisecret society and its members’ strident opposition to preselection and nanitic augmentation. They belonged to the long and honorable human tradition that had spawned the Luddites, the flat-earthers, various bible-thumping faithies, the scientographers, and the back-earthies, not to mention all the other forms of the true believers that had parasitized human society over the millennia.

  “How anyone …” I murmured.

  “The human mind remains a fractal,” Kharl observed. “Even down to the leptonic level, and to the levels of the sub-leptonic strings below.”

  “The mind is not the brain,” I reminded him. “And … that’s a good image. Irrelevant … but good.”

  “That’s my point. Nothing’s relevant. Wha
t happened to you shouldn’t have.”

  “Do you have any idea what triggered this … attack … seizure?”

  “In general terms …”

  I waited.

  “You reacted to something, perhaps someone’s altered floral fragrance … or something … who knows? Your system created a galvanic allergic reaction — the equivalent of thousands of bee stings or insect bites.”

  “What …?”

  “I don’t know. Whatever it was created such havoc that all that’s left are assorted nanites and nanite fragments and carbon compounds. We’ve got nanites everywhere these days. It could be anything. Once you’re more stable, we’ll set up a nanitic system that will protect you from anything like this happening again.”

  Even without my internal nanites, I could tell Kharl wasn’t telling the whole truth, again, but I let it pass, especially since I was in no shape to contest him, and there was no sense in starting an argument, one way or another. And he was probably right, if only medically speaking, and in terms of direct causes. I was already thinking beyond that. Kharl was trying too hard to convince me it was an allergic reaction. While it could have been, it also could be the beginning of something else.

  I’d smelled something — like an unfamiliar flower — and then I’d gone into massive shock. The problem was — if Kharl were wrong about the medical side and it hadn’t been an allergy — I hadn’t the faintest idea why anyone would want to give me such a reaction.

  Even the possibility of something like that made me more than a trace nervous. I wasn’t sure I wanted someone that sophisticated out to neutralize or eliminate me, especially since I didn’t even know why.

  “How long will I be here in your private ward?”

  “You should be able to go home tomorrow. You probably could today, but I want to give you some more protection. There’s no sense in taking chances. I’ve boosted your augmentation, and tomorrow, we’ll be adding some special nanites.”