Maze-Born Trouble

by Ginn Hale

  Lake smiled at the supple, tough insects. If any creature could really represent Sisu Station, it had to be those engineered, three-foot-long, blind and exquisitely communal creatures. Two hundred years ago, when drones and nanobots had burned out in the electromagnetic onslaught of Sisu’s synthetic sun collapsing into a black hole, the genetically modified roaches had endured.

  Like the few surviving colonists, they’d thrived despite being abandoned and all but forgotten by Federalists. Over the years the roaches had transformed the mineral bulk of the fused, captive asteroids into vast caverns of oxygen and water, in the same way that their ancient termite ancestors still built towering habitats in the deserts of Earth.

  As a boy under the dominion of the Loviatar cult, Lake’s duty had been to tend the colony’s nymphs. The young roaches had smelled like popping corn and their papery, vestigial wings tickled his skin when he carried them against his chest out to the feeding streams of chemical runoff. He and all the children in his crèche had considered themselves lucky to have been chosen as caretakers for young roaches. When giant, older roaches greeted, groomed, and sometimes fed him fungal droppings, Lake had felt genuinely loved—truly part of a caring family.

  Not until Nam Yune had combed back his hair and offered him a cricket bar had he experienced the same kind of affection from a human being.

  Even now Lake couldn’t help but let out a low, nearly subsonic greeting hum to the surrounding adolescent roaches. The roaches nearest the descending clinic hummed in return. The vibrations of their songs brushed Lake’s exposed skin like warm velvet.

  One of the younger women sitting beside him gave Lake a friendly nudge, and she too offered up a low brief hum. Then she placed her right hand in Lake’s left palm and tapped out. Not too many of us Loviatars left anymore.

  Extending his right hand to her left palm, Lake replied.

  Not many. It’s mostly robots down in the nurseries nowadays.

  Federalists and their machines. Soon there won’t be honest work for anyone.

  Lake didn’t argue. No Federalist child would ever succumb to oothecae-fever or endure ritual blinding by a sect like the Loviatars. But neither would any of them ever experience the deep, primal joy of singing along with a cavern full of adoring nymphs. Nor could they feel the pride of overcoming a truly deadly challenge.

  Defending those delicate nymphs from Mountain Joki had probably been the most defining act of Lake’s entire life. He’d exposed himself as a traitor that day, and after he’d killed Mountain Joki there had been no going back.

  You know the name Lake Harmaa? The woman asked in an almost shy flutter of touches.

  I’ve heard it, Lake replied.

  I thought as much. I remember the feel of your hum.

  You come from the Kasvatta Crèche too? He didn’t recognize her voice or mass, but then there had been so many other children in the crèche and so much time had passed since the war.

  Yes. Two years below you, washing and singing to the oothecae, the woman told him.

  Lake went very still, awaiting the woman’s next decision and wondering if it had been good luck or bad that they’d both decided to descend to the Maze today. Her fingers hovered over his palm while his rested, still and silent waiting for the next words.

  I’m no Federalist supporter, she said at last. But Mountain Joki had no right to attack the nurseries. Killing him was the only right thing you ever did, as far as I’m concerned.

  I’m inclined to agree with you some days, Lake replied.

  They both sat there hand in hand for a few moments. Lake felt the pull of gravity growing and the thick hyper-oxygenated atmosphere wrapping around him like a heavy coat. The nano-implants that regulated his blood pressure up on the Arc shut down, allowing the powerful rush of his pulse to surge against the natural force of the Maze.

  The clinic descended through a wide communal chamber where the air seemed to ripple with the throbbing welcome of thousands of roaches. All four of them, stowed away, sang in reply. Lake thought he even heard Dr. Gim far back in the support of his high-grav suit singing as well—off-key but heartily.

  Then they dropped farther down. The woman beside Lake patted her fingers across his left palm once again.

  Go carefully, Lake Harmaa, I’m not the only one who’ll remember you, she told him, and then she withdrew from him to stroke and tap a silent chatter with her fellow smugglers.

  • • •

  The larger corridors of the Maze, those wide enough for two or three full-grown human beings to walk abreast and upright, were honeycombed with roach tunnels and shafts. Popcorn-scented air washed through, and rivulets of water poured down to pool in the lower chambers. Adult and juvenile roaches roamed every surface, undaunted by the intense gravity or the alien intrusions of Federally mandated cold-light fixtures. As Lake passed them, a cheery group of leathery adolescents resting on the wall fluttered their antennae over him, and he brushed his hands across them. Moments later they returned to daubing their aromatic fungal droppings over a bank of the Federalist lights. Thick mushrooms already poked up from a previously encrusted bank of lights. The cold-water motor of a squat Federalist robot grumbled and whined as the little machine attempted to chip away at the accumulations growing over a third set of lights; though it could do nothing about the cluster of mushrooms sprouting up from its own back.

  All the floors vibrated very slightly but constantly with the pulse of the ancient mass generator. The colossal old machine drank in the wild bursts of energy spewing from the black hole’s accretion disk and concentrated it into the condensed minerals that created gravity for the Maze and Arc. During the first century of Sisu’s shaky existence, only the roaches’ constant tunneling, feeding and jettisoning of excess waste had kept the overfed mass generator from building up an unbearably dense gravity. Now the Drift channeled surplus energy from the old generator to maintain the station’s equilibrium and consistent gravity fields.

  From overhead, a PSA echoed through dozens of ceiling shafts. The suggestion to pick up litter murmured out in Suomi and then Federalist Korean, Spanish and English. Lake wondered if the low, melodic voice belonged to Wind Vanhanen. Then, sensing the crisp shell of police armor just ahead of him, Lake ducked down a narrow corridor. He didn’t think every Maze officer played on Forest Joki’s team, but Lake wasn’t going to risk his life on the assumption that any given one of them didn’t.

  Lake took a roundabout route that led him past the deep condensation pools to get to Wind Vanhanen’s commune dormitory. There, a pregnant young woman, clothed in a dress made from filmy discarded molt-cases, informed him that her father was singing farewell to his other daughter in the old Loviatar Cathedral.

  “Holly?” Lake asked. “Holly Ryan?”

  “I think that was her name.” The young woman ran her hand over her distended belly in slow soothing circles. “They contacted Wind about her remains last night when I was still at work. But yes, he did say her name was Holly.”

  It struck Lake as strange that the parents who’d raised Holly hadn’t wanted her body. Had the idea of seeing her dead been too terrible to them—too real? Or did it reflect something else? Did it serve someone here to have her remains destroyed very quickly?

  “I didn’t even know Wind had another daughter until she showed up a few months ago.” The young woman shifted, and Lake sensed the skeletal mass of the heavy-boned fetus floating in her womb like a plump pupae curled up in an egg case. “She didn’t act all that friendly to either of us.”

  “No?” Lake asked.

  “Maybe it was meeting me. She got mad suddenly. Maybe she thought I was some kind of competition for his attention.” The young woman shrugged. “At her age, she should have been over that sort of thing, but you know how Federalists are. They stay babies forever, while us Maze-born grow up fast.”

  “Time dilations being the way they are down here, you’d think it’d be the other way around, wouldn’t you?”

  That won him
a short laugh from the young woman. Lake didn’t think she was even as old as Holly; but he had no doubt that she’d been earning a living for years already. From the faint chlorine scent wafting off her, Lake guessed she worked cold-water soldering Federalist robots.

  “True. But either way it wasn’t as if Wind or I even knew her. He hadn’t seen her since she was born. And then she was dead. I feel like I ought to be sad but…” Again she shrugged.

  “Sure.” Lake didn’t think there would be more to gain from the young woman, so he thanked her for her time and left her to get a little rest before her next work shift.

  He made his way down into the humid warren of the oldest sector of the Maze. The rock walls turned to latticework. The floor felt polished from two hundred years of feet smoothing the stone. Signs of Federal presence vanished—no lights or service robots. The dense, moist air tasted strongly of sweet corn and mushrooms. Here roaches flowed over the walls, floor and ceiling like streams. Those overhead fluttered their stubby wings, stirring humid breezes. The pervasive clatter of the guard-class roaches reminded Lake that the colony queen still held dominion beneath the towering fungal mound that made up the cathedral at the heart of the Maze.

  Lake encountered four of the vigilant guards at the mouth of the cathedral. They stood higher than Lake’s hip, and the jagged spikes adorning their oversized jaws rang like steel plates as they clacked them together in greeting. Lake extended his hands, and the guards tapped their antennae over his palms, tasting his intentions in the chemistry and scents of his skin. Three of the guards turned away, easily satisfied, but the much larger, older guard rose upright on two of its massive barbed hind legs. Its jaws brushed Lake’s throat as it angled its head to stroke its antennae over the planes of Lake’s face. Then it placed a long-clawed front foot on Lake’s open palm.

  Kasvatta Crèche, it tapped into his hand. Not in Morse but much older Suomi.

  Lake assented and was rewarded with a throbbing, familiar hum from the old guard as it fluttered its stubby wings. Lake returned the welcoming nursery-hum. For a moment they sang together. Their harmonies rippled the thick air, creating a mandala of sound waves. Lake’s chest filled with a rush of pride and wonder; at least one of the soft little nymphs he’d raised had survived eighteen molts to become a massive, armored guard. They had not all died after he’d fled.

  Kasvatta Crèche. The guard’s antennae fluttered over Lake’s palm leaving traces of pheromone and marking him as an intimate—one who belonged in the colony.

  “Thank you,” Lake murmured. He didn’t imagine the guard understood his words, but he felt certain it could taste his gratitude at being recognized and accepted even after so long. Even after he’d turned traitor. A moment later the guard returned to its post, though it continued to hum softly as Lake passed it and entered the gaping rocky entrance to the cathedral.

  Inside, the walls glinted with the hard masses of hundreds of guard and attendant roaches resting in alcoves. Their exhalations saturated the air with humidity and that familiar, warm scent of popped corn. High up on the ceiling, vast carpets of fungi ate away at the rock and pumped vast clouds of oxygen through the multitude of ventilation shafts. Leathery, adolescent nymphs crawled through the fungi, trimming them back and drinking in droplets of excess metals that beaded up within their crenulations. Eventually, symbiotic bacteria would synthesize the iron from the runoff into the nymphs’ shells and build it up into the ferocious claws and mandibles of adult guards and attendants.

  As Lake progressed farther into the cathedral, he felt the vibrations of human voices drifting through the whirr of roach wings. Still farther in, the voices echoed and boomed through the corridors in powerful waves. Millions of old attendant roaches perched in the alcoves lining the walls, while a small gathering of human beings gathered around the open circular pit that dropped fifteen meters down to the level of the roach queen’s gardens. Even deeper down—almost at the base of the mass generator—the perpetually pregnant queen lay hidden within chambers of hyper-compressed stone and warped space-time.

  Lake removed his hat out of respect and stuffed it into his coat pocket.

  Magnificent cascades of sound adorned the cathedral chambers as incense and gold decorated the sacred space of a Federalist chaitya. As Lake walked through the song, its intent rolled over him with the force of a storm. Over the constant hum of the roaches, a chorus of human voices wailed, piercing and agonized. They called to Loviatar, the blind daughter of Death, recognizing her power over their suffering and sorrow. One woman’s howls filled the air with the shuddering form of the gaunt, hard-boned child-hag—the goddess who ruled a kingdom of famine, plagues, pain and pestilence. The singers entreated her—as their ancestors had begged for hundreds of years—for the strength to endure her dominion.

  Loviatar was not a goddess who offered mercy; she granted hardship and left it to her worshipers to forge their privation into armor—their sorrow into swords. Or so the song went. Lake didn’t cherish too many illusions about how his own deprivation had shaped his character. He’d been the boy who’d turned traitor and hurled grenades down dormitory airshafts in return for a couple of chocolate cricket bars.

  But then this cathedral was no longer a sanctuary for a man like Lake, and these rituals weren’t meant for him any more. So he stepped aside, leaning against a damp stone wall between two roach alcoves. He waited for the rites to conclude.

  He picked Wind out from the circle of five mourners, recognizing the unique mass from the reading on Aguilar’s depth screen. Tall for anyone Maze-born and shot through with augmentations that enabled him to endure radical changes in pressure and gravity as called upon for his translation work. His flesh struck Lake as desiccated and tough as leather, though Lake knew from security files that the man only turned thirty-seven a week ago. He’d been eighteen when Holly was born.

  The other four people, Lake didn’t recognize, and he wondered why they’d come to send Holly Ryan off. Then they quieted, and the swirling distraction of their sound waves receded into the drone of surrounding roaches. Lake realized that it wasn’t just one naked body laid out at the edge of the gaping pit but three. The same three bodies had filled the autopsy reports on Aguilar’s depth screen. Leaf and Clay were being disposed of less than twenty-four hours after they’d been killed.

  More than likely the two couples standing near Wind had been caregivers for the two young men—they felt too solid and aged to have been members of the same crèche. Lake scowled, contemplating how warm of a welcome he was likely to receive from this gathering. Did any of them know that Leaf and Clay had likely murdered Holly? Did they know that he’d dropped Leaf?

  Wind knelt and lifted Holly’s stitched-up body. He said something but his words didn’t carry clearly to Lake. Then he dropped his daughter over the edge of the chasm to add her flesh to the great mounds of dead that were fed to the immense roach queen by her army of attendants. Clay’s and Leaf’s corpses followed. Each impact echoed through the chamber, rousing the attendant roaches. In moments, a few hundred of them descended the walls and crawled into the pit to disassemble the remains. Flesh went to the fungal compost to ferment, while bones were chewed into a pap and fed directly to the queen.

  Nothing went to waste in the Maze.

  The mourners slouched out from the cathedral and Lake followed at a distance. Outside in the narrow corridor just past the guards, he called to Wind. The man turned back and walked to him in slow subdued strides. The other four paused, and Lake wondered if one of them didn’t study him a little too long. But then they moved on.

  “Do I know you?” Wind asked. He possessed a nice voice, warm even when uncertain.

  “I don’t think so,” Lake replied. “I was hired a little while ago by the Ryan family to find Holly Ryan—”

  “You’re late for that.” Wind sounded sad but not heartbroken.

  “I know. Now I’m investigating her death.” Lake let Wind assume that it was at the bequest of the family. “I
understand that she came down here to visit you—”

  “She did but I swear I didn’t do anything to her. I hardly got the chance to talk with her. I certainly didn’t have any reason to hurt her—”

  “I know, I know,” Lake said as soothingly as he could. “I’m not interested in setting the blame at your feet, just hoping that she might have mentioned something to you about her circumstances.”

  “We didn’t talk much.” Wind sounded more calm. He shifted his head, and Lake felt certain Wind scanned him for a mass signature or comm ID—neither of which Lake wore openly. Though if a person knew what to listen for, Lake’s voice was easy enough to recognize. “She said something about meeting you up in the Drift… You gave her a contact-chip.”

  “I did.” Lake briefly weighed the fact that Wind had known right away who he was. Had Forest Joki already put out an alert for him? He considered bolting back for the speed lift. But what would the point of coming this far have been if he didn’t bother to question Wind?

  “Do you recall her mentioning anyone else?” Lake asked. “ Maybe someone who’d done wrong by her or that she’d crossed?”

  “Oh.” Wind paused and seemed to ponder. “Well, there was something that didn’t seem quite right. I think she wanted me to help her get something from someone. I know that sounds vague, but she wasn’t very clear and then Ivy got home and that infuriated Holly for some reason. She just stormed off.”

  “She didn’t contact you again?” Lake asked.

  “Once. But it was the middle of the night here and she sounded…like she’d had a little too much smoke and salt…if you know what I mean.”

  Lake nodded. He held no illusions about Holly Ryan’s sobriety.

  “She must have said something though,” Lake prodded.

  Wind sighed heavily. “It was months back but, let me think… She said that she was going to make him pay.”