Queen of Nowhere

by Jaine Fenn

  Bez preferred not to remember her dreams. Dreams were chaotic and illogical, with a disturbing ability to play on the emotions. But there was one recurring dream she had come to grudgingly accept, despite the conflicting feelings it triggered in her.

  She thought of it as her ‘data nexus’ dream. In it she fulfilled her deepest wish, becoming a focus of information, able to assimilate and order data as efficiently as the most sophisticated comp, yet also capable of understanding all she processed. A miraculous fusion oflogical machine and intuitive human; all knowledge was hers to use and comprehend.

  She experienced the dream in two apparently contradictory ways. Firstly, as sensation and immanent knowledge: she felt the flow of data through her as physical pleasure. At the same time, her mind’s eye visualised the data nexus herlhislitself as a more-than-human figure. But the figure had a human face: Tand’s face. The point at which his familiar, forever-lost-to-her features became fully realised was also the point at which the dream climaxed.

  Literally. The data nexus dream usually ended in an involuntary orgasm powerful enough to wake her.

  The dream had visited her every few months since Tand had died, and she remained uncertain how she felt about it. On the one hand, the loss of control scared and embarrassed her. On the other, it was her last link to the only person she had ever loved, the person whose loss had shaped her life. And there was a part of her that wondered whether, should she manage to ride out the uncalled for physical release without being dumped back into the real, she might somehow attain the state of grace the dream initially promised.

  This morning when she awoke gasping, she struggled free of the sweaty sheets and lurched into the shower, running the water hot and long and not giving the visitation any more consideration than it deserved. At least she felt more clear-headed today: perhaps the dream was the last attempt of the local atmosphere to affect her brain.

  But when she checked the time, she found this alien world had fooled her. Its days were three hours too short and her body had failed to adjust fully. She had slept late and missed breakfast. She picked up the handset and asked her host what she should do about food.

  ‘Thou art free to help thyself.’

  ‘Is the servery still open, then?’

  ‘No, but all the fruits of the garden are for eating.’

  Trying not to draw parallels with accepted Salvatine dogma in Dena’s suggesticn, Bez went downstairs to find newly wiped tables with carafes of water on them. Retrieving a clean plate from the empty servery, she approached the central clump of trees while keeping a lookout for bugs. She found a bush bearing plump crimson fruits and picked one, then took it back to her table where she nibbled at it. The pink inner flesh was sweet yet refreshing, although she missed her morning caf.

  She used water from the carafe to wash the juice off her hands, took the remains of her meal over to the servery hatch, then returned to her table. Today, she intended to mine the popular media for inte!’ The guidebooks had been scathing about Gracen’s entertainments industry, and she soon found out why: spiritual debate was valued above storytelling, and Graceni cultural icons were mainly prominent philosophers and musicians, usually men.

  It was possible to access tailored news services (and porn - they had lots of that) but these required a registered subscription and she wanted to preserve her anonymity for as long as possible. She scanned the publicly accessible reports for any reference to Khea Foelin, but was unsurprised when she drew a blank.

  Bez could think of two reasons for Alpha83 having no presence in Gracen’s infoscape.

  Firstly, she did not exist and Bez had been deceived. In this case, she was in trouble. However, such a deception implied concerted Enemy action, and her previous conclusion - that the Sidhe would not expect her to come to Gracen in person - still held.

  The second, less paranoid, assumption was that Alpha83 existed - or had existed - but was not to be found in the information Bez had accessed so far. This implied three further possibilities.

  Alpha83 might have moved away, in which case Bez would need to widen her search beyond the Meneske area.

  Or she could have pulled her own profile data, although that should still leave basic facts in the public listings.

  The most logical, and disturbing, reason for her absence was that she was dead, and all record of her had been deleted.

  A targeted search of recent female death certificates turned up one for a Khea Foelin. It was a minimal document, giving only an age, a date and a cause of death. Bez translated the woman’s age into standard reckoning, and it sounded about right. The date of death stopped Bez in her tracks: it was four days after Bez had received Alpha83’s databurst. While accidents or incidents unrelated to Bez’s mission did occur - take BetaI6’s fate - the timing was highly suspicious. The cause of death was given as ‘natural’, with subcodes Bez had to look up. When she discovered that Khea Foelin had apparently had a stroke, her alarm deepened. It was possible that the woman had a pre-existing medical condition, but that sort of death was a trademark of the Enemy.

  Bez wondered if she should run now.

  She blinked her overlays away, for once seeking reassurance in the real. She had been peripherally aware of people around her, and now she paid them more attention. It was lunchtime, although the place was only about a quarter full, presumably because most of the women were at work. She turned unseeing eyes on the other guests while performing complex calculations in her head, trying to still the unfocused paranoia gnawing at her. So far, she hadn’t left any traces or attracted any attention, and even if she wanted to leave she was stuck on-planet until the next starliner departed.

  Although her instinctive reaction to any whiff of direct Sidhe involvement was to run, she had no firm evidence, and was not in immediate danger.

  Once she felt calm enough, she went up to the servery and got a bowl of thick, slightly sweet, soup. It occurred to her as she ate that something vital was missing from her findings. In her earlier searches, Bez had come across tributes to the recently dead: formal obituaries, personal recollections and lengthy ‘death poems’; she had also found accounts of elaborate funerary rites. Graceni culture was almost as obsessed with death as it was with sex. ‘Khea Foelin’, although apparently dead, had not inspired any such activity. This was an anomaly.

  During Bez’s initial vetting of Alpha83, her new agent had responded to a comment on a beevee board by a male Christos-sect Salvatine with a typically narrow interpretation of the Book. His original comment had been along the lines of God wanting sexual relationships to be limited to marriage between one man and one woman. Alpha83, with typical passion, had said she refused to believe she was damned for loving her wife. A spouse was a potential security risk, but Bez had needed an agent on Gracen badly enough to accept that risk, and now it gave her a new avenue of investigation.

  There was a reasonable chance that the last name Bez had for Alpha83 would be shared by the woman’s hypothetical wife: despite, or perhaps because of, the strict sexual segregation that defined their society outside of religious observances, Graceni marriage conventions included changes of name.

  The surname ‘Foelin’ was not common, but Bez still got several hundred hits. She discarded the men - Alpha83 had definitely referred to a wife, not a husband - then began checking profiles.

  Those that had no mention of a spouse she put aside as ‘possible’.

  Those that mentioned a wife became ‘potential’. The eighteenth ‘potential’ worked in the government records office. Further investigation revealed that Cusa Foelin’s department was located in the same building as Alpha83’s. It could be coincidence, but Bez found herself believing, or perhaps wanting to believe, that this was Alpha83’s wife. She checked Cusa Foelin’s profile. Her age and income fitted. Her address was not the one Bez had for Alpha83, but that wasn’t conclusive. And she was running out of leads. Before she could think better of it, she placed a com call.

  ‘The blessings of
the day on you, caller. If you wish to leave a message for Cusa or Khea, please sp-‘

  Bez killed the call and sat back, heart pounding. Acts like that-doing dangerous things on impulse - made her head spin. She still did them; like her data nexus dream, it was a kind of unconscious release. And sometimes it paid off.

  She double-checked some of her earlier findings and carried out further research. Then she went out, comming for a cab as she walked up to the surface.

  Outside, the world burned as bright as ever. She found her eye drawn to a patch of shadow off to one side; about a hundred metres along the highway, there was an underpass - surely redun-dant given no one walked anywhere. Her cab was still en route so she paused and blinked for data on the odd arrangement. The glasses failed to identify the feature, but a moment later she saw movement. Something was coming out of the underpass. Or rather, many things: her overlays went wild, and it took her a moment to realise she was seeing the same thing, over and over: large quadrupeds, dozens of them, pouring out of the tunnel. She had read up on these: sika, semi-wild indigenous animals that the guidebooks said were harmless. Every animal had a separate reference tag, and these unformatted alphanumeric strings were clog-ging her overlays. The rush of creatures ended and a robed figure on a ground-trike emerged, riding at the back of the herd. Bez could hear his ululating shout from here. The creatures wheeled in response to his cries, veering towards the squat pyramid of the next building, kicking up clouds of dust as they turned.

  Bez’s cab pulled up outside the gate. As she walked towards it she tried to make sense of what she had just seen. She had encountered animals during her childhood, and many hub stations had biome areas with a selection of fauna, but these sika were so big, so wild. Except, they weren’t really wild: each animal had a serial number. The animals were all owned, kept for a purpose.

  They were farmed. Bez remembered how good last night’s stew had tasted. Why maintain expensive meat vats when you have the space to grow your own in the open air? The guidebooks had said something about being able to get ‘real food’ here. She swallowed uneasily. Although starliners served non-vat meat for those tourists whose tastes ran that way, she had never felt comfortable about eating food with a fully formed nervous system.

  The gate opened at her approach, and she climbed into the cab.

  As she settled back in the seat and braced herself for the ride, the true strangeness of the arrangement with the sika struck her: two worlds juxtaposed, animal and human, each independent and largely oblivious of the other. Like on a station, with hab-rats and citizens - except those two groups were well aware of each other’s existence. No, a better analogy was human and Sidhe, where the humans were the dumb creatures, happily going about their business oblivious of their role as victim, una ware of how the universe really worked.

  Bez decided to drop that line of thought. Instead she stared out the window at the flat red landscape, picking out the few annotated landmarks.

  She reached her destination and got out. This building had a smaller surface presence than her hotel. She endured the automated ID scan at the door. The apartment block had a unit to rent, and in theory any woman who was interested could request a look around. Why an offworld visitor would want to was a question Bez had to hope no one would ask; if they did, she would play up the anthropologist angle, claiming she was interested in a short-term rental so she could continue her studies.

  The door opened and Bez stepped inside.

  According to her comshades, this building’s reliquary was a vial of Saint Jera’s blood; Jera was one of the Protectorate-era saints, venerated for having actually fought the Sidhe rather than for merely being holy. Bez took this as a positive sign, before catching herself: all this superstitious rubbish was getting to her.

  The lobby had two elevators on opposite walls. Bez picked one, requesting the (minus) third floor. Her overlays didn’t reveal any cameras: the Graceni weren’t big on surveillance. After a short ride she emerged on an open walkway. The central atrium was not as large as that of the tanyen hotel, and was a tube rather than a cone, with alternating layers of walkways and private terraces.

  It contained a gently rotating light sculpture, but, Bez was glad to note, no bugs. Vines laden with creamy, bell-shaped flowers had been trained up the walls between apartments.

  Her glasses directed her to the correct door, which opened at her approach. The Graceni’s apparently trusting nature might stem from their high moral standards, but, according to the guidebooks, it was backed up by draconian punishments for lawbreakers, whether local or offworld. Bez reminded herself that what she was doing was not actually illegal, and went inside. The apartment was empty of both people and furniture. Bez let the door shut then called up an interface with the local systems direct from her headware. There was only minimal security, which she defeated easily; once inside, she found the overlay data sparse and the set-up basic.

  She stayed in the apartment for as long as someone looking to rent might do, using the time to fully explore the limits of the local infoscape. When she left she called the elevator, getting off on the next floor up. She strode around the walkway with a confidence she didn’t feel, heading for Cusa Foelin’s front door. Even before she came to a halt, she had blinked herself into the house system using her comshades, which gave a more comprehensible interface than her hub-orientated head ware.

  The set-up was essentially the same as the empty apartment, and it did not take long to fool the lock. However, unlike the apartment, this door did not open immediately. If local systems were going to react to hacking with delays, she needed to make allowances. As the lock finally clicked, Bez pushed the door.

  It swung open to semi-darkness. The apartment she had just visited had lit automatically; perhaps some residents modified this default to save power. Bez had not seen anything in the house systems to indicate this; maybe there was a manual control somewhere near the door. She dialled up her visual acuity-And froze as she made out the figure standing in the unlit corridor, no more than three metres away. The figure had something in its hand that looked an awful lot like a weapon.

  RISK FACTORS

  As far as I know, the Sidhe don’t have anyone in the Commission. This appears to be related to an aversion to hubs. The only explanation! can think of is that, while the hub-points are the heart of human commerce, the Sidhe’s interests lie elsewhere. But it’s still odd, given that although the Commission’s hand is light, the Treaties they enforce are ubiquitous throughout human-space.

 

  ‘Do not move.’

  Bez squeaked, ‘M-my mistake. Wrong door.’

  The woman shook her head. ‘Liar,’ she said. She sounded as scared as Bez felt.

  ‘Is that a gun?’ Bez asked the question to buy herselftime. What for, she had yet to work out. She had briefly considered trying to get hold of a weapon herself before coming to Gracen, but had discarded the idea, both because of the impracticality and because if it came down to pointing guns, she had already lost. She regretted her decision now.

  ‘Aye, ‘tis a gun.’

  ‘Are you going to shoot me?’ Another dumb question, but looking down a gun barrel did nothing for her ability to reason her way out of situations.

  ‘No,’ said the woman. ‘But thou will come inside, moving slowly.’

  ‘So you can kill me without witnesses?’ Bizarrely, the longer the insane conversation went on, the less actual fear she felt. Probably her body over-compensating.

  ‘So I can speak with thee.’

  ‘I much prefer talking to shooting,’ said Bez, earnestly.

  ‘Then enter!’

  She could still try to escape, and hope the woman’s nerves threw her aim. Some hope. She stepped into the hallway. The door closed behind her and the lights came up.

  The woman standing before her had ash-blonde hair and skin so pale it was almost translucent; behind her comshades she wore a resolute expression. She held the compact weap
on in both hands, grasping it like a talisman. It looked like a dartgun, probably firing tranq, but that didn’t make it any less dangerous.

  ‘See thou this?’

  Bez realised the woman meant the gun. ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Thou would be shocked to know how 1 gained possession of it.’

  Bez had no idea how to respond to that.

  ‘We shall talk through here.’ The woman nodded towards a half-open door. ‘Thou first.’

  Seeing no alternative, Bez pushed the door open and walked in.

  She found herself in a comfortable, lived-in lounge complete with soft furnishings and knick-knacks. Being in such a personal space added a’n extra level of unease to the already grim situation.

  From behind her the woman said, ‘I know thee.’

  Bez paused. And she had thought this couldn’t get any worse.

  ‘Or rather,’ she continued, ‘I know what thou art, what thy plans entail. Or what thou claimed to Khea, anyway.’

  ‘So you’re Cusa.’ Though it was the logical conclusion, Bez had not wanted to make assumptions.

  ‘Of course!’

  Bez’s gaze fell on a holo on the shelf in front of her. This woman and another, somewhere dark with strings of gaily coloured lights in the background; they were laughing, happy and at ease. Cusa and Khea, together. And Khea’s name was still on their voicemail.

  Bez said, ‘Where’s Khea?’

  Cusa said, ‘Turn around.’

  Bez obeyed, careful to keep her hands in sight.

  ‘Now sit thee down.’

  Bez lowered herself onto the saggy couch, perching on the edge of a buttock-shaped indentation.

  Cusa remained standing and said, ‘Thy expectation was that I would be at my work-place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What didst thou plan to do here?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure. I’m trying to find out what happened to your wife.’ There was no point dissembling.

  ‘Thou travelled all the way from the hubs in search of Khea.’