She smiled without humor. “We need something more specific than that, I’m afraid. I have a blood sample, and I intend to give my brother a demonstration of forensic replicant technology.”
So that’s what she was up to: vat-grown bodies to match the quasi-organic minds she built and instructed for the sus-Peledaen. With blood for a seed, she could replicate the form of Zeri sus-Dariv’s kidnapper. Except—“You don’t need a Mage for that.”
“I don’t want to stop there.” She stepped over to the nearest of the gel-vats and turned on the overhead worklights. “Have a look—I’ve taken the process as far as I can without a breakthrough, and I want an outsider’s eye on it this time.”
Kief gazed down at the shape in the gel-vat: blank, undifferentiated, only vaguely human. “I can see why. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t seem to be working.”
“This step isn’t the one that’s causing trouble. You have to expect an unseeded replicant to look like that.”
“If you say so.” Privately, Kief found the faceless, generic body to be disgusting, but he didn’t think that saying so would be a good idea. “The blood seeds it, then?”
“Yes. The process at that point requires a template—I’ve tried working without one, but when I do that the gel won’t stabilize.”
“But that isn’t a problem?”
“Not particularly. Blood samples are easy to come by—I’ve been using my own, so far.”
Kief tried to picture the thing in the gel-vat with Isayana’s face and form. The image was unpleasantly disturbing, and he put it aside with an internal shudder. “So what’s the difficulty with the next stage?”
“They’re just meat.” Isayana frowned at the thing in the vat. “I can make them and give them shape, I can grow them to full maturity—but when I take them out of the gel, they’re still nothing but meat.”
Good, Kief thought, but he knew better than to say such things aloud. “You believe that this is a problem for the Circles?”
“Yes. I caught myself thinking that ‘Rekhe would know what the problem was, and then I remembered that ’Rekhe was dead.”
Kief said, “I can tell you right now what the problem is.”
“What?”
“The eiran. They don’t connect to it—they don’t touch it anywhere at all.”
Isayana looked puzzled, an expression Kief had seen before on mechanics and artificers when something didn’t work that by all reason should have. “But the replicant lives, and ’Rekhe always said that the eiran touch all the living things in the whole universe.”
“’Rekhe hadn’t seen one of these when he said that,” Kief pointed out. “Maybe if you’d started it young, let it grow up in the world as a living thing, not forcing it in a vat—”
“This is what I can do,” she said. “Anything else is ordinary sperm-and-egg work. And why would anybody bother to hire that job done in a laboratory, when the old way is cheaper and easier and almost as dependable?”
Kief could think of any number of people who might want or need the kind of replicant that Isayana had dismissed so lightly, but it wasn’t his place to point that out to her now. “If you want to connect this thing to the eiran—to make it truly alive—I can only think of one way to do it.”
Her expression sharpened. “So you can help.”
“In theory.”
“What do you mean, ‘in theory’?”
“I believe that the only way to make one of your constructs into a living person is to draw a living person out of their old body and use the eiran to bind them into a new one.” Considered as an abstract problem it was interesting, Kief had to admit. “It would take a Mage to do such a thing—you’re right about that—with at least a full Circle to back him up. And I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t work unless you had a willing subject.”
“I want you to think about how to do this,” Isayana said. “Work it out now, so that when I’m ready for you to do it, we won’t be delayed by having to make whatever sort of plans and calculations your people need.”
Sudden and clandestine—Kief didn’t need to see the eiran to know that nothing going on here was a straightforward matter. “This is one of those projects that Natelth doesn’t know about,” he said. “Right?”
“He knows that I’m working for the best interests of the sus-Peledaen.”
So Natelth has absolutely no idea what his sister is doing, Kief thought. Any more than he knows what I’m really doing with the Mages in Hanilat.
I suppose this is what happens when you set yourself on the way to running an entire world—you spend too much time taking the long view instead of looking at what’s going on closer in. A mistake like that could be the death of a man … .
“I understand,” he said. “Make your replicant, my lady. I’ll gather my Circle and begin working out what should be done.”
11:
ERAASI: HANILAT ENTIBOR: STANDARD ORBIT GG-12
Len sat at the table in Iulan Vai’s Hanilat safe house, drinking lukewarm uffa out of a kitchen tumbler. Zeri was in the bedroom, changing out of the drab garments her cousin had provided for the getaway, and into other clothing, this time provided by Vai.
“I suppose you got into their customer files somehow,” Zeri had said, after a quick glance at the boxes from her favorite downtown boutique. “So much for privacy.”
“Privacy’s all an illusion anyway,” Vai informed her. “And somebody may have already spotted you in the grey work pajamas, so you might as well go ahead and change. There’s makeup and hair color in the necessarium if you want to play around with some of that.”
Zeri muttered what might have been thanks and disappeared into the bedroom.
As soon as she was gone, Vai grabbed Len’s injured hand and pulled it out into the light. “This looks nasty,” she said. “Human bites are dirty. If you get an infection in there you could lose the finger.”
She was probably right, Len decided. He was surprised to see how deep the wound was, and how sticky with drying blood. He hadn’t noticed it much at the time. Excitement, he supposed; it wasn’t every day that a mere contract-pilot got the opportunity to carry off a fleet-family heiress from her bridal bower.
He’d probably also left a blood trail all over Hanilat, which could make things difficult before much longer. But Syr Vai was obviously a professional at this kind of work, and so was Zeri sus-Dariv’s cousin Herin—even if they were both Mages these days as well. They would know when it was time to cover their tracks and leave the neighborhood. He hoped.
Vai brought him a basin full of warm water and a scrub brush. “You know what has to happen next,” she said. “Do you want to do it, or shall I?”
“I’ll do it.” He picked up the scrub brush and began the painful process of making certain that his bitten finger got thoroughly clean. “Do you have body-glue and bandages?”
“I’ve got better than that. If you can tolerate eibriyu, that is.”
“No problems there.” A few unlucky people had body chemistry that couldn’t handle the quasi-organic healing gel; most people—Len among them—simply couldn’t afford it. “If you’ve got that stuff in your kit, somebody must really love you.”
“Never mind where I got it from. Keep scrubbing.”
She kept the eibriyu in a sealed jar on the lower shelf of the safe house’s preserving-cupboard. From where he sat, Len could see that the rest of the shelf was empty; Syr Vai hadn’t used this particular hiding place for quite some time. As soon as he’d finished scrubbing the bite to her satisfaction, she scooped up some of the gel on a sterile pad and dabbed it into the open wound.
The gel was pinkish in color, and felt cool and tingling against his skin. Vai put on a light bandage over it, and stood back. “By this time tomorrow, nobody will be able to tell that you got bitten,” she said. “Which under the circumstances is just as well.”
“I’m all in favor of anonymity, as far as that goes,” Len said. “This place here wouldn’t be a part of the
sus-Dariv property, would it? Because if it is, it’s going to be one of the first places people look.”
“No, it’s not sus-Dariv. Whose it is … well, frankly, that doesn’t concern you.”
“Keeping all the blood inside my skin concerns me,” said Len, looking at his bandaged finger, “and so far I haven’t even managed that.”
“You’re doing all right,” Vai said. “I should have told you to wear gloves—it wasn’t your fault that the little sus-Dariv turned out to have teeth.”
“Sharp teeth,” said Len, remembering. “And no hesitation about using them, either—I bled all over the sus-Peledaen’s upstairs carpet. If I get caught now, the city watch can match me to it in a heartbeat.”
“The idea is not to get caught.”
“Easy for you to say. Whatever happened to all that luck you were supposed to be working for me?”
“How do you think you made it in through the upstairs window with a wedding in full cry down below?” Vai asked. “Fiddling with the sus-Peledaen security hardware was the easy part of that particular job.”
Len felt his temper—already worn thin in places—beginning to fray. “So the help stops now. Is that it?”
“No,” said Vai. “I pulled you into this, and I’m not going to abandon you. But working the luck does get harder once other Mage-Circles become aware of what’s going on. And the sus-Peledaen have a lot of Circles.”
“Do what you can, all right?” Len said. “The last thing we need right now is for some foot-patrolman from the city watch to notice those bandages. If that happens, the next thing you know it’s going to be, ‘Step right over here, Syr Irao; we have a few questions we’d like you to clear up.’”
“I’ve got a few of those questions myself,” said a voice from the kitchen doorway.
It was Zeri sus-Dariv, back from changing clothes in the necessarium. She was wearing one of the new outfits Vai had provided, tapered trousers and a snug jacket in deep midnight blue—not the sus-Peledaen blue but darker, nobody’s family colors this time. Len noticed that she’d also put on more cosmetics, applying the paints and colors with a bold hand; whether she’d meant to disguise herself, or to bolster her self-confidence, he wasn’t sure.
She came into the kitchen, but didn’t bother to sit down at the table. Instead, she looked across it at Vai with an expression on her face that didn’t belong to either the resigned bride or the young woman on the run. She was sus-Dariv, the ultimate holder of his current contract, and right now she looked it.
“First question,” she said. “Where is my cousin Herin? If you were going to use his name to make me come with you, then you really ought to have had him available later. Otherwise I might start to think that you’ve been lying to me all along.”
Vai didn’t look as impressed as Len felt—maybe she dealt with fleet-family higher-ups all the time. “Your cousin went on ahead to prepare the next stage of your escape. There are places I shouldn’t be seen, and people I shouldn’t be seen with, and I’ve empowered Syr Arayet to act in my name.”
“Those people wouldn’t be the same nicely anonymous people who own this apartment, would they?” Zeri asked. “Exactly who are they—and do they even know we’re here?”
“This is a safe house,” Vai said. “It’s mine, to do with as I like and as I need to, and it’s been mine for longer than you’ve been out of school. As for who ultimately owns it, that’s a name better left unmentioned—what you don’t know you can’t tell. All that’s relevant right now is that you can stay here as long as you need to.”
Zeri’s expression grew, if anything, chillier. “You know, I’m starting to get tired of mysterious strangers appearing from nowhere and offering to do me good turns for free. At least Len here has contract-carrier status with what’s left of the sus-Dariv, which makes him the closest thing I have at the moment to family. I think I’m going to leave this safe house of yours with him, and I think I’m going to do it right now.”
She strode off in the direction of the front door. Len stared after her, then shook his head and, reluctantly, got to his feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Iulan Vai. “But until I get a new contract, my obligation’s to her.”
“She feels the need to be elsewhere, and she may be right.” Len had expected Vai to be angry at Zeri’s outburst, but she appeared more distracted than anything else—as if she were looking at something around him that he couldn’t quite see. She made a shooing motion at him with her hands. “Go, go. The last time that young lady ran out on a meeting, the whole building blew up not long afterward.”
When Len and Zeri had gone, Vai sat back in her chair, drinking a cup of uffa. The girl Zeri was a luck-maker, or a luck-bringer. Time would tell which. The only problem was that luck couldn’t be relied on, not for those around her.
The way luck works, Vai thought, leaning back and putting her feet up on the table, cradling the cup in her lap, is that what seems bad at the time turns out later to be the best that could possibly be. And the bad luck could be very bad indeed for those around the luck-maker.
So, Vai concluded, she should be off to make some luck of her own. She put down the cup, wiping it down out of habit in order to remove finger and lip prints, stood, and slipped out into the night.
Not much later she had reached the sus-Radal office building. This was the hour of the lunar observance; if her own luck remained equal to the occasion, Theledau would be in his moon-room at home. As far as other watchers might be concerned, she was dressed in the inconspicuous drudge-garb she usually wore to visit Thel’s offices—black shirt and trousers and many-pocketed cargo jacket, with nothing except her staff to show that she was a Mage. And it wouldn’t take much in the way of working the eiran to keep the staff unnoticed in a pinch.
The cipher locks in the sus-Radal building had ceased to hold mysteries for her years ago. She locked all of them properly behind her as she passed through and made her way upward to the top floor. Thel’s office was dark and empty, the big executive desk powered down and inactive. The room’s security access panel was on the wall by the office door, behind a framed watercolor sketch of syn-Grevi House in midwinter.
Vai opened the panel and made certain that nothing would be triggered by any changes in the room’s power flow. Then she crossed over to the desk and turned it on.
A long time ago, or so it felt like to her now, Theledau syn-Grevi sus-Radal had wondered why Vai insisted on resigning as his Agent-Principal when she went to the Mages for good. At the time, she hadn’t been able to explain—most Mages had day jobs, after all, since they had the same financial needs as other people.
That was then, she found herself saying to the absent Theledau as she deftly circumvented the office-mind’s security systems and proceeded to make free with the desk’s contents. This is now.
If you ever learn about this, you’re going to think that I sold you out to the sus-Dariv.
She found what she was looking for—the plans and star charts and associated files for Theledau’s system of hidden bases on the far side of the interstellar gap—and started copying them onto data-wafers that she stashed one by one in her inside jacket pocket.
It’s true, little Zeri is going to need a place to go hide for a while where the sus-Peledaen can’t find her. But I’m not doing this for Zeri sus-Dariv.
I’m doing it for the sake of the great working, and there’s no way you’re ever going to understand that.
Once the shuttle was safely on course for its rendezvous, Arekhon left Karil Estisk at the controls and joined the rest of his Circle—less than a full-strength Mage-Circle, it was true, but more of Demaizen in one place than he’d known in years. With the added strength of the Void-walker Maraganha, they might even be able to finish the working.
Narin and Ty had unstrapped themselves from their safety webbing by the time he reached the passenger compartment. Ty sat cross-legged on the foot of his couch, with his new long staff in the Adepts’ style lying on the
cushions beside him and his eyes gazing into the middle distance. Narin stood a few feet away, staff in hand, looking tense—he remembered that she had never cared for takeoffs and landings during her time aboard the sus-Peledaen exploratory ship Rain-on-Dark-Water
“Ships go on the ocean,” she’d said to him once. “Not in vacuum. I don’t trust it.”
The only one who seemed truly at home in space was Maraganha. The shuttle’s light gravity—only a few steps above nonexistent, and likely to vanish in an instant if Karil decided to take nonessentials off-line—didn’t appear to bother her; she moved in it easily as she made a slow circuit of the compartment. Arekhon wondered what other ships she was comparing the shuttle with in her mind, and whether the vessels of that future day made this one look clunky and primitive by comparison.
But that was pointless speculation, and not likely to provide useful answers. “Let’s get the suits warmed up and fitted,” he said. “We may need them for the transfer to the Daughter.”
Ty turned his head enough to look at him curiously. “Night’s-Beautiful-Daughter? After all these years?”
“It’s one of House Rosselin’s assets,” Arekhon said. “It’s been tended.”
“Has it indeed?” said Maraganha. “I’m looking forward to seeing this.”
The pressure-suits were supposed to be in the shuttle’s main cargo hold. Arekhon went to the after end of the compartment and opened the door to the cargo bay. The inside of the bay was pitch-dark; Arekhon found the switch for the worklights on the bulkhead outside the door, and flipped it on.
The bright lights revealed a compartment empty except for the baled cubes that held the suits. Arekhon reached for the nearest bale and unslipped it from its cords. In the lower gravity it lifted easily from the deck. It was clumsily shaped and its mass made it awkward to maneuver, but he had no trouble hauling it forward into the passenger compartment.
Maraganha said, “You’re the man with the local knowledge. Care to educate us on the finer points of Entiboran pressure-suits?”
A Working of Stars Page 17
