by S. J. Ryan
As days passed, the conversations among the prisoners dwindled to almost complete silence. They passed the forested hills of Frans and Espin, then had only blue water and other ships full of slaves to view through the tiny ports.
Gradually Matt retreated more and more into the virtual world inside his skull. Ivan had archives of music, games, and movies. Matt wandered through photo-realistic 3D simulations of places on Earth, his senses protected from the assault of the sensory horrors of the real world. Ivan periodically notified him of meal times, clay pot times, and one time a storm.
Matt reviewed Ivan's telemetry of all that had happen to them since landing on Ne'arth. He clipped stills from the Fish Lake video, so that he could look at Tret and Layal and the others he'd met there. Curiously, he felt he knew them better from this than when he had been among them.
Then he viewed his telemetry of the members of the rebel patrol. Right away, he noticed something disconcerting.
"Ivan, do you have any video of Carrot when she's not frowning?"
Ivan presented him with several examples.
"How about, do you have any video of Carrot not frowning while she's looking at me?"
It was debatable in one segment whether her expression counted as not a frown. In another segment, she was staring in his direction but seemed to be looking past him.
Matt was forced to face an uncomfortable fact. It wasn't just that Carrot didn't like him. She positively detested him. How could he have missed her attitude toward him? It was present in every glare and scowl and sarcasm. Only wishful thinking had prevented him from recognizing the reality.
Matt was not so small-minded as to be glad that she might be dead now. But he did resent that he had cared about her and that she couldn't even treat him with the courtesy that common decency would afford to a stranger.
“She didn't give me a chance,” he said. “She didn't even try to find out what I was like on the inside.”
“We have previously discussed that she has genetic mutations designed to enhance effectiveness in combat. It might be that as part of that, she also is genetically programmed to be combative.”
Matt stared at the video still of Carrot that Ivan projected. Her eye ridges were furrowed, her chin was set, her mouth was twisted in a frown as it was about to deliver another cutting remark.
“I don't think that's it,” he said. “Off.”
The image vanished and he was back in the hold of a ship filled with slaves. He felt almost relieved. What was she to him? Someone he had met for a few days and become infatuated with. And if instead he had kept his wits, if he hadn't been distracted at the crossroads while trying to save her, he might have noticed the approach of the soldiers and eluded them. And then he would be free in Londa right now, about to start his career as a successful and prominent healer.
I'm not going to think about her anymore, he thought. She's not worth it. I've got plenty of other people in my life to care about and think about.
A little later, he commented, "You know, it's funny, I hardly think about my family and friends . . . ." He paused. "Ivan . . . are you messing with my memories?"
"What do you mean by 'messing?'"
"I mean, are you controlling my memories in some way?"
Ivan paused. "It depends on what you mean by 'controlling.'"
“Ah. What are you doing to my memories?"
"I am constricting neural bandwidth access to all memories prior to arrival in the Delta Pavonis System that have a protein signature indicative of strong emotion."
"Why are you doing that?"
"You requested that I do so."
"I don't remember that. Uh, is there a reason I don't remember that?"
"At the time of the request, you also requested that I erase your short term memory."
Matt was silent for a while.
"Ivan, I'd like you to stop constricting access to my memories."
"Understood. Complying."
At first it didn't seem like anything had changed. But then when he thought of Earth, the memories were no longer faded and flat. His memories were infused once more with emotion. He vividly remembered the squirt gun fight with Mom. The hikes with Dad. The virtual medieval battles with Random. The time seven-year old Synethesia had stolen a kiss on his cheek and scampered away to plant one on another boy. He not only remembered the events, he remembered how he had felt about them, and how he still felt about them.
His extended family, all his friends. Bicycling down Ravenna. Flying kites at Sand Point. Sailing on Lake Chacuabs.
Most of all, he remembered smiling and laughing, and how that had felt, and how long since he had smiled or laughed freely. It had been before he had stepped inside Pod 3025H.
"It's all gone now. My whole life on Earth. I knew things would change a lot when I went to the stars, but I never thought it would be like this. We don't even know if there's a Seattle anymore. Or an Earth.”
“It is unlikely that Earth would be destroyed. Cosmic catastrophes are extremely rare.”
“Yeah, but what about artificial catastrophes? What if over the course of seven hundred years a super AI took over the System and built a quintillion printers and converted the entire mass of the planet into processing circuitry?”
Ivan paused. “That is possible.”
“Or there could have been an interplanetary war with weapons that create black holes to swallow entire planets. Anyhow, something's keeping the people of Earth from coming here. And maybe it's that they're not there anymore.”
“Do you no longer believe in the cosmic zoo hypothesis?”
“I don't know what to believe.”
Finally, Matt broke down in tears. This passed unremarked by his fellow prisoners. There had been enough weeping over the days of their voyage. Matt's home might be vastly different than theirs, but the reason for his tears was the same: he was homesick for a place he would never see again.
After a day of grief, he said, “Ivan, I can't take this anymore.”
Ivan paused. “Do you wish to initiate the euthanasia protocol?”
“That's not what I'm talking about. I can't take this ship anymore. I can't take being trapped in here anymore with nothing to do. Even in VR, I know my body is still here and I can't stand it.”
“Are you asking to be placed in autopilot mode?”
“Take me out when we get to where we're going.”
“Initiating autopilot mode . . . autopilot mode terminated.”
For Matt, it was that one moment they were at sea in mid-voyage, and in the next the ship bumped a dock.
The crew tied the ship fast and soldiers entered the hold, reconfigured the chains, and led the prisoners to shore. It was not the island of Italia. There was a bay, but instead of a city and a dormant volcano, Matt faced barren hills that rose sharply from the shore. Satellite view, which Ivan had been monitoring all along, indicated their location as thirty kilometers north of Rome. The island was small and uncharted by the Fish Lake atlas.
The Romans, however, seemed to think it was important. There were heavily armed soldiers everywhere, and dozens of naval vessels circled the waters. The building up the trail ahead had siege walls crowned with crenelations and bristling with crossbow mountings. Perched upon the highest hills, towers watched the sea.
The prisoners, exhausted and hungry and bewildered, did not struggle as they were led inland. A squad of soldiers poked the prisoners up the slope into the central region of the island. Ahead lay roads that branched toward holes in the mountain sides. Men carrying picks and shovels were entering and exiting the holes. Matt was unchained, given a shovel, pushed inside a shaft, and commanded to start digging.
The air was oxygen-poor and the lowest galleries were knee-high with water, which was sucked out by a steam-driven pump. Matt reflected on the technology and concluded that Ne'arth's Rome could be on the verge of its own version of the Industrial Revolution. Not that remarkable, given that many historians had concluded that Earth's Roman Empi
re had actually taken a few faltering steps toward an industrial revolution of its own.
In the drudgery of the mines, Ivan could tune out the noise and block the pain. Ivan could not do the digging for him. Matt reflected on the irony of using autopilot mode to escape the monotony of the ship to immediately encounter an even greater monotony on land.
"Where are we?" Matt asked a haggard prisoner who had been in the mine when the prisoners from the ship had arrived.
"Palras," the man muttered.
"What is this place?"
"Silver mine.”
The man's eyes, like those of the others who had been there a while, were glazed into a zombie stare. Matt decided not to ask any more questions. He wasn't sure whether he had any.
When Matt and the others were finally permitted to emerge from the shaft, it was night. Soldiers with torches shoved the work gang down a path toward a cluster of tents. Inside each, the prisoners were fed slop and made to sleep on bare dirt. Where the ship's hold had been hot, the ground here was cold. Several prisoners awoke in the morning with hacking that Ivan identified as pneumonia.
Throughout the camp, several of the new arrivals had died during the night. The soldiers bossed prisoners into carrying away the limp bodies. Matt wondered at the fatality rate, and asked a fellow prisoner, “How long have you been here?”
“Shut up,” came the reply. But when the guards weren't looking, the prisoner said, “A year and a moon.”
The man's beard was long and flecked with white. His cheeks and eyes were hollow. He looked old and young at the same time.
“How old are you?”
“Twenty-four.”
Barely nineteen in Earth years, Matt thought.
Over the course of the day, in conversations equally as terse, he learned that the longest that any prisoner had been there was three Ne'arth years. Matt surveyed the gray hairs and wrinkled skin and haggard forms, and concluded that unless Rome favored old men as mining slaves, the years on Palras were hard.
“We've got to escape,” he subvocaled.
But when evening came, another day of constant digging had left him exhausted. Even Ivan's powers of regeneration could not operate without a source of energy, and the food was barely edible, never mind nourishing. Matt fell asleep despite Ivan's prodding.
The next day, however, he gathered enough mental energy to begin laying plans. First, collect information. Ivan photographed shackle keys whenever they were revealed in the hands of the guards, and generated a digitized model. Using that as guide, Matt fashioned a bit of stray wire (which had come off the tip of a soldier's whip) into the proper shape. Now he could escape even when the chains were on.
Using satellite view, they mapped a path through the hills and identified the currents that would carry him near a neighboring island which they knew was visited by fishermen because fishing nets were spread over the rocks by the beach. As it was a thirteen-kilometer swim, they searched the shoreline of Palras for driftwood that could serve as a paddle board.
The more he planned, the more holes Matt saw in the plan.
“The soldiers will stop us if we leave the tent under regular conditions, so we'll have to wait for a storm like the one the other night. But then the waters will be rough, and I don't know if I can make it against the current even in the best weather. And then the soldiers count prisoners in the morning, and they'll know I escaped, and they'll send ships to the island as the first place they'll look. So I'll have to leave as soon as I get there. But how do I get a fisherman to take me anywhere else in his boat?”
“You could give him silver.”
“Or he could kill me and take the silver. Or turn me over to the Romans and get a reward on top of getting to keep the silver.”
But silver did seem part of the answer to the puzzle of escape, and in that he had enjoyed a lucky break: the ore veins on the island were rich. The very dust he was caked with daily in the process of digging in the mines had an intrinsic value that he knew from his observations at Londa Market was well respected on this world.
Each night when he returned to the tent, he brushed off his skin and clothing and made a little pile of silver dust on the floor. It was barely concealed in a corner, but it wasn't the target of theft in a place where silver was abundant and no one thought they would have the opportunity to spend it. If he could reach the outside world, however, it would be a different matter, and a handful of silver might be enough to buy his continued freedom in situations where otherwise all hope would be lost.
A stormy night finally came again. Filled with trepidation, Matt found excuses to delay an escape attempt. Then something happened that ended up derailing his escape plans entirely.
It happened a few evenings later, when he was coming out of Shaft Four. He heard a boom and saw a pillar of steam billowing from Shaft Three. Men staggered from the hole, their clothes sopping. Most moved as far as they could from the pool that had filled the mine, but one man tied a rope around his waist and dove into the water. Seconds later, he emerged gasping, but gulped in a lungful of air and dove a second time.
When he arose again, the lead guard said, "We're due at camp. We'll drain the shaft tomorrow."
"That's my son!" the diver shouted.
By then a crowd had gathered, and the guards stood by, apparently deciding to let the drama play out. And it did on the third try, when the diver finally climbed out of the water, sobbing.
Matt then acted without thinking. If had been thinking, however, he wouldn't have thought that he was being particularly heroic. For him, this wasn't going to be a big challenge. If he had thought about his reasons for doing it at all, he might have replied that he was simply doing the right thing, or, if he was expected to be cynical, that it might win the approval of the prisoners and guards alike, and become one more step toward his liberation.
Before the guards could act, he pushed through the crowd and dove into the pool The water was utterly dark and filled with fine particles of dirt so that he had to keep his eyes shut anyway.
“Sonar on,” he subvocaled.
Ivan's sensors pinged from Matt's forehead against the walls of the cave. Though his eyes were closed, Matt saw a three dimensional computer-generated representation of the interior of the shaft. He swam down the gallery quicker than he could have walked it. Mindful of the 'health bar' showing that he had three minutes of air, he investigated the side shafts and galleries.
The boy's body was a level down. He was limp and unmoving and Ivan ascertained that he was unconscious and his lungs were full of water. Matt was surprised at how small he was and realized he would not have been more than twelve in Earth years. But there was no time to think about that. Matt pried off the rocks and freed the body and carried it to the surface.
When he rested it beside the pool, someone shouted, “He's dead!” and the father wept.
Matt pulled the shirt off and placed his hand firmly on the boy's chest. Ivan's microscopic interstitial tentacles went to work.
The boy convulsed, and out of his mouth and nose flowed water and all the accumulated silt as well. He blinked and sat up. The boy's father cried and hugged his son.
Matt stood and looked around. The prisoners stared stonily. Then the guards converged and beat him senseless.
21.
Carrot leaned against a cracked plaster wall at the corner of a back street in Londa, wearing a simple white dress that she had taken from a Lowlander's clothesline the day before in exchange for her worldly goods – which, at the time, had been the warrior's clothing she had been wearing.
Since fleeing the scene of the battle that wasn't, she had spent days foraging off the land. She had dodged and outrun Roman patrols. She had risked sentries' arrows to scale the walls of Londa. But she would do it all over again, she thought, if she could avoid this next step.
Three doors down was her uncle's clothes shop. It looked more decrepit and much smaller than she remembered from the last time she had stood at the entrance and li
stened to King Letos accuse his brother Ral of treason.
She drew a breath, walked to the door, and entered. The interior of the shop was dim but the man tending the counter was unmistakable, though shorter and wider and grayer and balder than she remembered.
"Uncle – " she said.
He looked at her with a stunned expression for only an instant and then pasted a smile and said loudly, "Oh yes, miss, you've come for your uncle's robes! Sit in the back room and I'll be with you soon."
He had been making sideline glances while he spoke in the direction of another man inside the shop. Carrot recognized the wine-red fringed robes of the Roman provincial civil service. The official in turn appreciatively eyed Carrot's figure. His bodyguard frowned at the wrinkles of her dress and the dust on her sandals, as if they were telling him a story.
After animated bargaining, the men left and her Uncle Ral put out the closed sign, drew the curtains, barred the door, and led her into a back room. Hobbling with his cane over to the stove, he measured tea and poured from a simmering pot into a cup before her and sat down.
"Arcadia, you've grown, but I knew you in an instant. You have your mother's face."
"I – I'm sorry to bother you, Uncle. I know that relations have been bad within our family – "
"Carrot, relax, I don't hold you responsible for anything that passed between your father and me. I'm sorry that I didn't contact you before this. Despite the bad blood between us, I should have attended his funeral."
"We held no funeral." Holding the cup in both hands, she sipped with care. "The Romans, they paraded his head and body through the village, then disposed of them in secret, so that they would not become relics of veneration."
Ral nodded slowly. "I hadn't heard of that. Only that all the leaders were executed and half of Umbrick was burned to punish the uprising. But what have you been doing since?"
She set the cup down. This was going to be a risk, but she was almost certain of her suspicions.
"Fighting in the Leaf." She looked at him directly. "The same as you."
