Idyllian (Amsterdam Institute)

by R. Z. Held

  “You’ll have to convince the ones who can hear you well enough that they pull in the others, I guess. I’ll hit the high points to start.” Gentiana opened the door and strode in, and Sienna let herself be swept along in her wake.

  About thirty people were inside, scattered around the tables, with half-eaten food and drinks, the picture of a bitching session much as Gentiana had described. Sienna wasn’t sure of the complex’s full complement, patients, doctors, and support staff, but she recognized representatives from each group she’d watched in the halls on Pen’s cameras. Minus a crew to search for her and Cyperus outside, and a few of the highest-ranked doctors to be harangued by Elantine, she suspected.

  And all of their eyes were on her now. Panic would have strangled her voice even if she’d had one. With so many of them, if they grabbed her, they could hand her over to Elantine without breaking a sweat. Gentiana held up a hand for their attention, stood hip-shot to confidently claim a space at the head of the room. “Yeah, I found the Idyllian, but we have a much fucking bigger fox problem to worry about now.”

  Sienna watched everyone’s faces as Gentiana efficiently laid out what she and Cyperus had told her. When Gentiana reached the end, a woman near the front scoffed. “Got any proof for this?”

  She had data paths, so Sienna could reach her over the local-area channel.

  The woman flicked a dismissive hand. “Still not proof, Idyllian.” Mutters and whispering started up around the tables, Sienna’s answer being spread and remarked on.

  Proof. She had to show them. Sienna’s instinct was visual, but maybe she could use that. She hadn’t been entirely sure where the wall screen would be in the room, but Pen promptly blanked it to black before bringing up the map, and Sienna stepped over to it.

  “And you could have programmed the Near-AI ahead of time to show whatever the hell you wanted to doctor up.” The self-appointed spokesperson crossed her arms.

  Sienna lifted a hand generally to the ceiling. A pause, while the woman did just that at excruciating length—had “the Idyllian” given her anything to display? Had the Idyllian even accessed any of this data before now? Etc.—and then she subsided back with a final scoff. Apparently that was permission to proceed.

  Sienna faced the map and focused every visual impulse she’d had in her life into her frown at it. She kept her directions on the local-area channel, transparent as possible. As quickly as she could, she sketched out what Elantine had done that morning, starting when Sienna woke in Cyperus’s bed. She hated to play into their assumptions about Cyperus’s motives, but it wasn’t like they were actually wrong about what they’d been doing last night, whatever his motives.

  Then back to the map. Label Cyperus’s quarters, timestamp the black cloud, watch it move down the hall, cast Cyperus’s quarters into darkness. Watch it move down the hallway again, zoom in the map sufficiently to plot Cyperus’s position on his bed, unmoving as one minute ticked into the next. Then the treatment room was dark and she choked on a whine of fear her throat couldn’t form, remembering what had been happening at the center of that lack of recording.

  Cyperus’s tag approached on the map, entered the hole. The walls of the treatment room pulsed with color, undirected by Sienna.

  “Anomalous sensor readings from the adjoining rooms,” Pen said, at her most bland.

  “Anomalous how?” someone shouted from the back. Sienna dared to turn around, found her audience—universal mercy, thank you—rapt.

  “Consistent with a gun shot.”

  With that, the background mutter surged to a wash of reactions and questions that would have drowned Sienna out, had she been speaking aloud. She edged back to the wall, leaving the screen and its proof unobstructed, and tried not to allow the urge to run to inhabit the entirety of her body as the argument crystallized over not whether to do something, but what.

  Perhaps someone had warned her, perhaps the chatter had spilled noticeably onto public channels; however she’d found out, Elantine was suddenly striding across the mess. In Sienna’s mind, her expression had grown murderous, even ravening, but in reality she looked mild. Angry, certainly, but in the manner of an officer drowning in fools.

  “Enough with the paranoid rantings,” she snapped. “Where’s Tehran? You didn’t hurt him further, did you?”

  Now was the time to run. But Gentiana was in her way—Gentiana was in front of her, protecting her? “I suppose you knew Isachne was dead the whole time, didn’t you? Is that why she was assigned here, for recovery? So you could keep an eye on the false prisoner? And good thing you were here, too, since that false prisoner looks like she holds the key to blowing up your whole project, you wet fox shit!”

  An echo quivered in Sienna’s muscles, a memory of pain from when Gentiana had beaten her at their first meeting. But now that particular pitch of anger was aimed away from her, to her benefit even, because rather than launching herself at Elantine, Gentiana braced herself, immovable defense. In a sudden spark of comprehension, Sienna saw in Gentiana part of what Isachne must have: utter loyalty.

  Two soldiers seized Elantine, including the woman who’d been most vocal in her objections, originally. Elantine growled, not quite losing her cool just yet, but Sienna could see in her eyes the poisonous roil of emotion of someone who sincerely wished Sienna had starved to death in the rain.

  “Have you all learned nothing? You’re going to let this new Amsterdam Genevieve worm her way in here, the better to betray us all?” When her captors started dragging her back, that was when Elantine’s manner transformed. “She is playing all of you, with her big eyes and ‘boo-hoo, poor me’ schtick!” She was spitting the words now. “Why the fuck would I be a fox?”

  Sienna sent, in prison LSF French. Few of those who could hear it would understand it, but she saw it land in the snap of Elantine’s head to her. And Elantine did, though apparently only in service of a martyred act, departing bolt upright between her captors, no longer resisting.

  That was fine. Sienna would take it.

  ***

  Somewhere in the ensuing chaos, Sienna found herself unsupervised, hunched at the back of the mess, bolting a meal while she had the opportunity. Not only unsupervised, she supposed, but free to roam the complex for the first time without fear. Fear of capture, at least. Fear of silence remained. Even that didn’t give her a clear direction, however—Galax was their int-tech expert, should she ask him to look at her vocal cords? Paralyzers were…not quite int-tech. And did she trust him, after what he’d done? More than any other doctor here, she supposed.

  Pen’s words were breezy, matter-of-fact, as if Sienna requested that rather than Pen making the decision on her own.

  Cyperus was willing to forgive him, it seemed, which meant more to Sienna than she wanted to admit. All right. She’d finished stuffing herself, so she needed to find somewhere to wait. A bare room in the dark section? Even with the heat on there, she’d rather retrieve her jacket first, but that was on Cyperus’s floor, and his quarters would be locked.

  In the end, Sienna dragged her feet all the way to a treatment room—smaller, but unfortunately still outfitted in much the same manner as the others in which Elantine had attacked her—on the theory that if she was going to hover uncomfortably in any location, it should be one where Galax could easily examine her before he changed his mind.

  As the hours dragged on, Sienna regretted her choice. Too much had happened to her in rooms like this, and without e
xhaustion to drag her under, she found it far too quiet. It wasn’t that she missed the camp—mercy forbid—but the audible undercurrent of humanity seemed to have settled into her bones nonetheless.

  What remained to her was thinking, curled tight on her side, fingertips up against her throat as a side effect of her arms being against her chest. What if she could never speak again? Would that truly be so bad? She was alive, she was closer to traveling home than she’d been yet. Unless the Pax Romana had some sort of refugee bureaucracy they’d leave her to get lost in—no. Not thinking about that either. She could escape from that as well if she had to. In silence.

  Misery congested her throat, misted over her eyes. Oddly, it hovered there, short of the wracking sobs Sienna had expected. The implant, she realized at length, chemically grinding the most razor-sharp edges off her wallowing. Good for it. Sienna couldn’t bring herself to expend any effort in helping it.

  “Sienna?” Gentiana’s voice. Sienna had positioned herself so simply tipping her chin down would give her a view of the doorway, but the other woman had still managed to surprise her. Sienna scrubbed away some of the tears gumming up her eyes to focus on her properly. Still wearing her earpiece, fortunately, holding a bundle against her stomach. “Pen wanted me to check on you.”

  Sienna curled tight, shutting Gentiana and the world out as much as she could.

  “She also wanted me to give you all of Isachne’s stuff, since you don’t have anything of your own at the moment. I told her either she’s Isachne enough she gets to decide what to do with my late wife’s possessions, or she isn’t Isachne and I have to call her Pen, she can’t have it both ways. And then we had a screaming fight about it.”

  As the story unfolded, brushed with a surprising humor, Sienna relaxed enough to focus on Gentiana’s face again. Gentiana didn’t seem angry, though.

  “Nah.” Gentiana arrived, leaned a hip on the next diagnostic couch in line. “Isachne never screamed. She’d sit there, maddeningly calm, until I wore myself out. Sort of drives home that she isn’t my dead wife—and isn’t a Near-AI any more either, because a Near-AI would never use that kind of language.” She exhaled on a laugh, then approached cautiously. Sienna threw her a grimace of annoyance. She wasn’t going to run off.

  “She’s really worried about you, you know.” Gentiana’s voice dipped serious. She set a tablet aside, then shook out remainder of the bundle in her arms, revealing a well-worn blanket, original yellow shade faded to the palest pastel. “I couldn’t get your jacket, but this is mine, not Isachne’s at all, and you’re welcome to it instead.” She lofted it gently over Sienna’s shoulders.

  Sienna settled it as a wrap instinctively, petted the nap of the fabric. Such softness was oddly soothing, on a level even deeper than the implant’s efforts to keep her out of hysteria.

  “Funny you should say that.” Gentiana’s laugh rose beyond breath to a flicker of notes this time. She retrieved the tablet, offered it out. “She told me to tell you I want you to ‘make an art’ for me.” Her pronunciation of the Idyllian words was atrocious, but understandable.

  Sienna jerked upright when she remembered what she’d been doing immediately after the conversation being quoted. Anger was close, but laughter was closer, and Sienna let herself fall into it. What had she expected? Of course Pen had been watching.

  The tablet opened to the art program she’d cobbled together for Cyperus, and she set it to simple dark lines for the moment. she asked Gentiana, and received a cautious nod. She’d gotten a lot of practice with charcoal portraits in the camp, while the guards looked the other way. Not only had it kept her busy, but she’d treasured the small spark of pleasure the other prisoners got from seeing themselves captured on spare bits of wall between cleaning cycles.

  And line and shape was another kind of language, she supposed. One not denied to her. She sank so far into it, Galax had to call her name before she noticed he’d arrived. Gentiana nodded to her, encouragingly, and slipped out.

  Galax, expression haggard, hovered at a distance from her that edged beyond polite to diffident, and turned a scanner around in his hands. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here sooner. Once we realized the former commander hadn’t been attempting a replacement at all during Cyperus’s knee surgeries, he asked that I do it as soon as possible to heal the scars at the same time as the gunshot wound. If I’d realized someone else needed me, I would have told him he should wait.”

  Sienna set the tablet aside and found her fingertips up against her throat once more. That repair had no doubt been as necessary to Cyperus’s mental stability as the return of her voice was to her.

  Galax looked down, at the blank readout of the scanner aimed vaguely at the floor. “Time will tell. He’ll walk unassisted, certainly. Run, climb, though? I couldn’t say without seeing how he heals.” He offered her a lift at the corner of his mouth. “He was absolutely determined that he’d come to you after I was done. I told him he wouldn’t be walking anywhere near that soon, so I promised I’d take you to him, when I was done fixing your vocal cords.”

  Universal mercy, please let them be.

  “No guarantees until I see what I’m dealing with, but I’m optimistic—” He swallowed the rest of words convulsively when she flinched from his approach. She reminded herself that the worst had already happened—and he was trying to undo it and also Cyperus trusted him, then took hold of herself. She gestured him forward.

  When he touched her throat, just a gentle brush, she closed her eyes over the sting of tears, kept them from slipping free. An interval when his touch withdrew, scanning she assumed, and he exhaled in a rush. “Yes. With a batch of directed healing nanites—I can get most of the function back, if not all.”

  This time the tears did escape. Sienna put her fingertips up to her nose to hold them back, but instead they dripped down the backs of her hands, shivery when they crossed her rave lines.

  “That’s the good news—the bad news is I have to put you out.” Galax took a deep breath. “And before you refuse, I want to apologize to you. The same way the commander was working on the nanites in Cyperus’s system, she—she was working on me too. Through conversation. Asking my professional opinion about your mental health, planting seeds about how disturbed and divorced from reality you were, how he was letting his emotions draw him into believing you…I could see for myself how hard he’d fallen, and I just accepted the rest of it. I was wrong. I got you hurt—could have gotten you killed.”

  “Don’t forget to offer her heartfelt thanks as well, for flushing your fox for you.” Pen joined the conversation at her most Isachne-caustic. “And back it up with a little fucking kindness and whatever luxury you can scrape together on this benighted planet. We’d never have known about the new LSF weapon if not for you, Sienna. It looks to me like Elantine would have been ready to release it wide in an infectious form within a few months.”

  That wasn’t quite the word Sienna wanted, but it was good enough, because Pen laughed, short and acid.

  “Did we ever. Galax helped me with some outside calibration of my sensors, and I’ve been scanning everyone in the facility ever since. Cyperus is fucking teeming with them, obviously; the others with implants—excepting you, of course—have a medium load of the nanites; and everyone else has at least enough of a load for me to detect, though I think that’s below the threshold of effectiveness. For now.”

  Sienna winced. Were she Gentiana or any of the others, her skin would be crawling at the moment, just thinking of it.

  “The good news is, they can’t infect person to person yet, or you’d definitely be showing some.” Pen couldn’t technically leer, but Sienna damn well heard one anyway.

  she said primly, and let laughter rise up a
t the teasing, fueled in no little measure by hysteria.

  “I’m quarantining the planet on my fairly non-existent authority anyway.” Galax scrubbed at his face. “I know damn well by the time we assemble enough proof to get an official ruling, they’ll freak out and ask us to go back in time to start one immediately anyway. Then it will be a matter of developing a counter before we die of old age here.”

  That was what was bowing Galax’s shoulders, Sienna realized. Not just the betrayal of his friendship, or what he felt was the betrayal of his ethics, but the assumption that the search for the cure would fall mostly on him, as he was on the ground and no one was likely to risk coming in person to help.

  she told him.

  To see the hope dawning on this face—it hurt, it was so good. Sienna suddenly understood what drove so many over in Research, when she’d always assumed Counseling was the real place to spread mercy in the universe.

  She tipped her chin back, baring her throat to him symbolically. She frowned generally up at the ceiling. Still. She needed to know someone friendly was watching over her. Someone who was really worried about her. Given time, the fact that such people existed here was seeping into her.

  “I’ll sound all the alarms in the place if he so much as puts a finger wrong.” Pen’s voice was warm.

  Not yet home, not yet exclusively among friends, but safe, and with one or two friends nearby. Under the category of escape, Sienna would count this as an interim success.

  ***

  Sienna had rehearsed the words dozens of times today, and now, sitting next to Cyperus, they were all she could fit in her mind: Have you thought about coming back with me? She might have had the physical ability to say that out loud now, but apparently she didn’t have the emotional one, even with only a few days left before her opportunity was gone for good.