It had been the almost immediate attempts to match me to someone, anyone, who could have piloted the ship for me that had been at the root of my wanting to get away. What had made me stay away, decide to stay on Earth, come what may, was knowing that if I married again, it would be because I’d come to care for the other person very much. And if I cared for someone as I’d cared for Len, and found myself stuck out on a ship with him dying, no matter for what reason, nor how, I couldn’t endure it.
My life seemed to still tilt around that moment when I’d been alone with Len, knowing I couldn’t save him, knowing I’d have to shoot him. I didn’t want to have to do that ever again.
And so I’d escaped from Eden and, I thought, from its tight social circles, where everyone had known you since your decanting.
But I’d miscalculated badly. And what was more, Lucius, if he was indeed aware of what I was doing, and Martha had miscalculated with me. Liberte seacity might be larger than the world where I’d been raised. After all, all we had was a hollowed asteroid. And no, we didn’t know exactly how many people lived there, because in Eden everyone was averse to giving unnecessary information to the authorities. But while Liberte might be larger—probably not by much—it was not the same type of society. Liberte owned other territories and other seacities, and there were many more people under its control.
Here, in the center of its governance, there would be classes of people who worked closely with the Good Man. There would be those who served him as administrators, and, yes, doctors, and medtechs, and other white collar workers. Other than the Good Man himself, these people would have the most power.
And then there would be a panoply of people who would cater to the Good Man’s physical needs. Yes, all right, his intimate physical needs, too, if what I’d heard about Simon’s father was halfway true. But also his other needs: food, clothing, cleaning, gardening. And then there were the people who catered to all of those people, the vast class of people who lived in the lower levels of the seacity.
My mistake had been to look at that mass of people and see them as amorphous, undifferentiated, permeable. They were not. They were circles of people, each one as hereditarily closed, as guarded, as well known to each other as the navigators and pilots of Eden. For generations, their position in relation to the Good Man had made them better than the other people around them and certainly than the other people in the territories. I realized the rebellion in Liberte would not be people against people, but circles against circles.
The upper circles, those close to the Good Man, those close to Simon, had been consulted in his plans to declare “la revolution” and would have understood his motives, which I still didn’t fully understand, and his reasoning. The others…the kitchen drudge, the multitudes beneath that, who catered to the Good Man’s servants, those would have no reason to be loyal and were probably the ones who were trying to seize power with this coup. At least, I thought, most of the people I’d seen, with liberty caps and arms, most of the looters and fighters on the street had looked like people who’d have lived in the lower levels.
I sat at what had clearly been the family’s kitchen table, while the doctor finished bandaging my arm and looked at me out of curious hazel eyes. There was enough of Len in his features, in his expressions, that I understood the enquiry and worry and I said, “Of course. Of course, you will not trust me, unless you know who I am. I mean, surely this is a rebellion of the lower levels of the seacity against everyone else.”
His forehead creased, but he gave something not quite a laugh. “The lower levels? But no. There wouldn’t be…Most of the people here are young. Very young. They’re Sans Culottes from the territories and from Shangri-la, and from the prisons in Shangri-la.”
“Then why are you so curious about who I am?” I asked.
His look on me sharpened. Corin stood across the table from me, leaning against a wall. I had a feeling the hand casually in his pants pocket was holding one of those little burners he’d been firing out the window before. The doctor’s wife, a middle-aged lady who’d tried to cluck over me, had been escorted by her son somewhere in the depths of the house. “I mean, I understand you don’t trust me,” I said.
“Ah,” the doctor said. “Ah. Well, we don’t trust you because you are clearly a cultured person, from your speech and…ah…very unusual.”
“In what way unusual?” I asked.
He sighed, as though his confusion was overlaid with exasperation at my slowness of mind. A veiled look at his son and an almost imperceptible shake of the head, which I hoped meant that he shouldn’t shoot me just yet, and he said, “Alors, ’demoiselle, not many women walk abroad alone, on a night like this, and much less will they know how to shoot as well as you do.”
It was like a bucket of water. There are things you realize, when you’re a stranger to the culture, and some you won’t fully understand, and others you do but forget to take them into account.
In Eden, I won’t say that men and women are exactly alike. That would be almost impossible, would it not? Most unmodified women are not as strong as most unmodified men. In Eden, it would be frowned upon if a man challenged a woman to a fistfight, in the same way someone enhanced for speed would be shunned if dueling a normal human. But other than that, gender didn’t matter much. A woman outdoors and fighting in disturbed times would be no more strange than a man out doors and fighting.
I’d observed that Liberte was different, but I’d failed to take it into account. Of course, I seemed strange to them. In Liberte, even more than in Olympus, it seemed to me that women were protected. I had a vague notion this might come from the parent culture of the seacity, but I could be wrong.
“And then,” he said, “yes, we should know you, or at least have heard of you. There aren’t many people in our class, nor many who would risk their lives to defend Doctor Moreau.”
“I thought your name was Dufort?”
“And what is your name, M’moiselle?”
I took a deep breath. “Zen. Zenobia Sienna.”
He narrowed his eyes. “The Good Man’s friend? But no. I met her many times.”
“I…they did something in Olympus,” I said. “To make me fit in. Temporary changes to my features and also to the way I move and speak. I’m not sure how they did it, but—”
He studied me through narrowed eyes. He didn’t say it was impossible. He nodded once. “Yes. I see. It is possible at least. But why did you come back, if you’d escaped as far as Olympus?”
I shrugged. “The Good Man is imprisoned. I couldn’t leave him here, at the mercy of his captors.”
At that moment there was a sound of something, like a loud hiss, as though of a projectile or a rocket. And then an explosion rocked the house, and the doctor fell, bleeding from his chest.
“Father!” Corin shouted, hurrying near. His mother came from wherever she’d been, holding some source of light in her hand, that was more or less covered by her cupped hand, save where it was directed. Where it was directed was the doctor’s chest, from which a piece of shrapnel protruded. He bled slowly, the blood trickling out onto his clothes forming a dark stain. At least it wasn’t gushing, which of course could be good or bad.
I knelt and set my fingers on the beat of a strong pulse on his neck. “He’s alive,” I said.
Madame Dufort was looking down. She seemed strangely unaffected. Then I looked at her again, in the half-light of the fires ignited in the explosion, and realized she wasn’t so much unaffected as carefully controlled. She nodded to me. “We must take him where we can care for him.” She had a light accent—French, I thought—but more perceptible than her husband’s or her son’s.
She disappeared and came back moments later with what looked like a tray, which she unfolded into a platform. It didn’t surprise me. It was a floating platform used for carrying the sick in hospitals. In my world of origin, Eden, we used something more akin to a sheet, but Earth and Eden had developed separately for three hundred years.
Another bomb hit the house, but nothing touched us.
The three of us, carefully, got the doctor onto the stretcher. He did not wake, nor give any sign of being aware of what we were doing. The fragment that protruded from his chest was a dull gray, probably a piece of ceramite.
Another bomb and I felt the whoosh of air go by behind me. I moved around to place myself between the front of the house and the stretcher, nudging Madame Dufort aside. She gave me a quizzical look, as she pressed the areas in the stretcher that made it rise, then she half-ran down a corridor to the left. Corin and I followed, managing the stretcher between us as if we’d rehearsed this. We carried him past family pictures showing Corin growing from baby to a young man.
In the half-light the pictures looked like something left over from another time, forgotten like debris left behind by the receding tide, lost and out of place on the shore.
When we were almost at the end of the hallway a door opened at about waist level, taking up part of the hallway floor. Mme. Dufort stood by a panel operated by a genlock. She had clearly opened this passage and we hurried past her carrying the stretcher down what turned out to be a long slightly twisting ramp, into a straight hallway. As we hurried half bent over the stretcher, it seems to me we went past shadowy forms in the darker areas around us. I didn’t stop to think, but these forms seemed to be vast glass cylinders in which undefined bulks appeared to move.
From above us came the sound of more explosions and of something heavy falling. Mme. Dufort moved ahead of us and opened the door to a room on the left. The room was almost cramped, small and crowded with instruments and machines, some of them covered in material and others showing rows and rows of undecipherable dials and displays.
The only lights were a sort of diffuse emergency lights, concentrating on where we were, and everything else was cast into obscurity save for where light glinted on reflective surfaces. It was like moving in a world of half-perceived glistening great beasts, none of them making much sense.
Doctor Dufort lay on the table. He was still unconscious, though we saw no reason why.
“Shock,” his wife said, after examining him with instruments I didn’t understand and couldn’t see clearly. And then, “Corin, I think they’ve entered the house and it would be time…”
“Yes, Maman,” he said, and he ducked into the hallway. I followed.
He looked, surprised, over his shoulder at me, his face reflecting the scant light, and looking very pale. “Why?” he asked, and it was understood he was asking me why I’d followed him.
“Your mother said there are people in the house. I thought you might need a helping hand.”
He shook his head. “No. We have made…arrangements to protect us, and our…and what Father knows. There is a device in the house. It will detonate. If the party in the house knows what they’re looking for…They might not be the only ones, but they are doubtlessly the most interested.”
We walked back almost the same way we’d come, then ducked into a different room, which I’d missed on my way down. Part of the reason I’d missed it is that it looked exactly the same as the wall around it, save for one small spot, where Corin had pressed his finger.
The room was very small—about the size of a regular closet—and empty.
It was also better lit than the rest of the basement, probably because it was so small and the walls were stark and glistening white. Corin looked over his shoulder at me again, but I couldn’t read his expression, and I didn’t know what he was looking for. He shrugged minutely, as though giving up on whatever had concerned him, then put his finger on one point of the wall. Then on the other. Something beeped. A faint voice said, “Press—to confirm.”
And just as Corin was—I presume—about to, there was a whooshing sound from the door between the house and this annex. Corin slammed his whole palm against the wall, and I jumped out into the hallway.
How do you recognize people? In the half-light, with my burner drawn and ready to shoot him, there was only one thing I was absolutely sure of. The man running towards me was Alexis Brisbois.
He ran with the lumbering gait of very large men, but fast, so fast that I hesitated on the burner for a moment, and he was on me, taking the burner from my hands, shouting out, “Corin, Corin.”
EGALITE
Something Wicked
Corin came running out of the inner room as I was struggling to get hold of the burner. “Alexis,” he said, then a string of words in French, and then, “I’m so glad it was you. I thought—”
“They’re right behind,” Alexis said. “I have arranged to get you out of this. Were you about to blow up the house?”
Corin half nodded and made a sound in his throat that might have been suppressed laughter or a barely contained sob. “I almost blew you up,” he said.
“Never mind that,” Alexis said. “Can you resume the sequence? They were right behind me, and although it will take them time to find the proper place and force the door open, you and I know it must be done. For that matter, blowing up the house will only buy us an hour, maybe two. I can get you out of here. I have made arrangements.”
A closed, mulish expression passed through Corin’s features, and I thought, for just a moment, that I knew that expression, that I’d seen it on Len often enough, only this time I couldn’t imagine what it applied to.
You see, my husband was the nicest man in the world. He was also the only man I could neither bully nor seduce nor budge once his mind was made up. And when that expression appeared on his face, I had to come up with a better plan because Len was going to do what he thought was right and even I couldn’t stop him.
But I couldn’t imagine what Corin thought he was going to do. As he turned to go back into the room, Alexis Brisbois took advantage of my distraction to pull the burner out of my hand. As I turned to him, he said, “As for you, Madame, it’s hell’s own time you gave me. I thought you were dead, and what was I going to tell the Good Man?”
I was thinking of Brisbois talking to the man in the dark and seeming to arrange Simon’s execution. Was he going to try to convince me he was a loyal servant all the way? Or was it possible I had the whole thing wrong? Unable to decide, I glared at him, and said, “I have other burners.”
Was that the twitch of a smile at the corner of his lips? People had found me scary and cold, meddling and commanding, annoying and useful, but I didn’t think anyone ever had found me amusing. Except, apparently, Alexis Brisbois. He let go of my arms, as though he didn’t think he need concern himself with being shot. Which he probably didn’t, because I couldn’t bring myself to shoot someone who didn’t expect it of me. We all have these little disabilities. “I saw you, in the dark,” I said. “I saw you talking to—”
There was warning in his eyes, and Corin was there, saying, “It is done,” and covering his ears. We covered ours, too, just in time to deaden the sound of the explosion, and feel it mostly in vibration all around. A heavy thud followed the explosion as, I suppose, the house fell in above us. The ground rocked under us.
Alexis turned, lowering his hands from his ears, and asked Corin, “How long do you think until they send another party to find the entrance? Or for the survivors of this one to try again?”
“As soon as it stops smoldering and is cool enough to enter,” Corin said, in a tired voice. “At which point, I hope we’ll be out of here.”
Alexis nodded. “Where is Father?”
I noted he didn’t say “your father.” Nothing in this mountain of a man with the blunt face resembled the Duforts, except that he was presumably human and that they all walked on two legs. But I had seen worse genetic surprises. It would certainly explain why he was here.
“My father,” Corin said, and it seemed to me he underlined the first word just slightly, “is in that room there.” He gestured with his head. “The one that’s open. My mother was tending to him, and I thought it was better to prevent surprises.”
The massive hand of th
e man who had once been on death row clapped Corin once on the shoulder. “Good thinking, that,” he said, and then turned and pelted down the hallway, going in the door where Dr. and Madame Dufort were.
It seemed to me that Corin’s face was frozen for a moment. Like there was something unpleasant in the association with Alexis; like there was something about the whole situation that both bothered him and angered him.
I heard Alexis speak briskly, and a male and female voice answered him. “Absolutely not,” Madame Dufort said. “My husband has a broken rib, and is still very weak. You cannot move him within the hour.”
I was aware of Corin coming up behind me, and moving to stand beside me. The two of us filled the door, and the people inside the room ignored us.
“Father,” Alexis said, turning to Dr. Dufort. His tone was both questioning and anguished, a plea, I wasn’t sure for what.
The doctor looked up at him. He was very pale, and obviously shaken, but he looked better than I expected. Through the rent in his shirt, I could see a patch on his chest, not unlike the patch on my arm. That he was awake at all seemed to me a miracle.
“Of course, I must go,” he said, hoarsely. “Now, Madeleine, my dear, you know I must go. It’s not a choice between what I wish and what Alexis wishes, it’s a choice between death and life. I must go if I am to live. You know they’ll keep coming, you know why. If I don’t get out of here…And don’t even think of staying.”
“I’ve arranged for transport off of the isle,” Alexis said. “I can carry you to it.”
The doctor gave a laugh like a hiss and said, “You’ll have to. Unless you want to creep out of here and get caught. Are you sure of the transport? I heard that no one could leave by air.”
Through Fire (Darkship Book 4) Page 12
