A Prison Unsought

by Sherwood Smith

  Dandenus had lost interest in the old gnostor, and to catch Ami’s attention, deliberately broke more of the blossoms hanging over the rail. Aromatic petals drifted down, resting on the hair and arms of the adults below. None of them noticed. Ami laughed softly.

  “Want to wager who beds whom tonight?” Dandenus whispered, leaning against Ami. Her hair tickled his ear, and her breath was warm and smelled enticingly of spiced smoke.

  “I can think of more fun than that,” she whispered back.

  Dandenus’ desire warmed into urgency, but not unpleasantly.

  Before he could frame an answer, Ami was gone, twirling about to beckon to two or three more people their own age.

  Because I’m my family’s heir now, he thought. Because Uncle Tau is paying attention to us.

  The realization was not a disappointment. This was exactly the way power was supposed to work.

  He smiled inwardly as the others chattered about the Ascha Gardens and the incredible free-fall gym there, better even than the one in—their voices fell to whispers—the forbidden Naval territory, where the young dependents had all the best free-fall sports going. The Gardens had been recently renovated, and someone—a Prophetae—was going to hold a party there. They would go as a group to scout it out, so they could commandeer the best jump pads on the big night.

  Dandenus agreed to whatever was proposed, without really listening. He reveled in Ami’s private smile, and her fingers twined in his.

  o0o

  Sebastian Omilov bowed a last time to Margot Ng, then sank back in the transtube seat and shut his eyes.

  With the disappearance of the captain, all his energy seemed to drain out. He breathed deeply, fighting claustrophobia, knowing it was mere stress. The tianqi in the transtube emitted the same flat, stress-damping scent found in transtubes all over the Panarchy. He longed for the freedom of Charvann—the night sky overhead and the cold breezes bearing scents of loam and garden.

  My home is gone. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, trying to force the desolation back.

  But it would not stay. He heard again the suave voice of Archon Srivashti at that damnable party: . . . shortly before Tared L’Ranja and I were confirmed to the Archonate—I to Timberwell and he to Lusor . . .

  The subject had been memory, so the comment could have been random; nonetheless it had sunk like a barb into Omilov’s heart. Might have been random, but probably wasn’t. Srivashti knew Omilov had also been there; had led the toasts to his best friend, Tared L’Ranja, on his triumphal night. What was the purpose? To warn me off from political involvement? I’m too old for politics, Srivashti. Too old and too disillusioned.

  Omilov ached at the memories he was too tired to ward: Tared’s face, so alive in laughter, alight with honesty and intelligence. The formality swiftly dissolving into hilarity, as often occurred when Ilara was there.

  Ilara, Ilara. That grief would never die, but joining now the ever-living image of her beloved face were those of his comrades, all young together, so full of promise and high plans, now so many dead.

  Nahomi. Tared. Ilara. Tanri.

  The transtube stopped, and Omilov hauled himself to his feet, feeling old and tired and an utter failure.

  He could not even help his old charge; when Brandon snapped his fingers in the face of the entire government by skipping out on his own Enkainion, leaving them all to Eusabian’s bomb, he, too, had moved beyond his old tutor’s aid.

  The door hissed open, but he stood, fighting for composure, for balance. His aching eyes studied the lights curving overhead. Stars . . .

  Stars. He remembered his work, and a vestige of the old energy stirred. He was not a total failure, he told himself as he walked down the ramp toward the Cloister. The Jupiter Project, the secrets of the Ur, waited to be unlocked.

  Politics were for the young. The Ur . . .

  Leave the ancients to the ancients, he thought, smiling grimly. He would bury himself in work and exorcise the ghosts at last.

  NINE

  Admiral Trungpa Nyberg shut his eyes, waiting for the first sip of coffee to perform its magic. Warmth spread through him, but the miraculous regeneration of energy was absent.

  Anton Faseult smiled tiredly at him, then tapped the console. “This one came through last night; I hate to spoil your breakfast, but I thought you ought to see it.”

  Nyberg turned his eyes to the console. An unfamiliar banner flashed across the screen, evocative of power and wealth.

  “The Syndics of Rifthaven,” Faseult supplied from the background.

  Then a stomach-twisting sight appeared: a gutted ship spinning with lazy slowness in space, against the backdrop of a scattering of stars. In one corner, the bruise-colored limb of a red dwarf sun identified the place, not far outside of Rifthaven.

  The ship, still glowing with heat, and so twisted and seared it was difficult to recognize the make, moved with inexorable slowness toward the viewer, until details appeared. What appeared to be blobs resolved into human beings, all exhibiting the ghastly bloat of death by vacuum. They were all tied to the hull by a line clamped to arm or leg.

  Nyberg’s stomach clenched. Someone had been to a great deal of trouble here to make this as vicious as possible.

  Abruptly the picture blanked, replaced by a view of a room, dark-paneled and rich. Three people sat in a row: a skeletal man with red, filed teeth bared in a feral grin; an enormous woman, decorated with jewels, a gloating smile, and little else; an old man, dark of visage, with cruel cold eyes.

  “The three most powerful Syndics on Rifthaven,” Faseult said. “Xibl Banth, Oli Pormagat, and Jep Houmanopoulis.”

  The Draco spoke in a hissing voice calculated for the maximum negative effect: “That ship was the Sword of Ahriman, captained by Teliu Diamond. You saw her floating right near the bridge viewport.”

  Pormagat spoke next, her voice an insinuating whine. “Diamond had just returned from her raid on Torigan, which apparently was quite successful.”

  “So much so,” Houmanopoulis grated, “that she ignored our new limitations on entry. Anyone else who wishes to trade with us will find the new statutes continually posted on the Sodality channel.”

  All three smiled. It was not a pleasant sight. “We look forward to doing business with you.”

  The window blanked out.

  Nyberg looked up at Faseult, who looked back, brows raised. “It would appear that Rifthaven is holding its own despite chaos everywhere else.”

  “Isn’t it a law of nature,” Faseult returned with a rueful smile, “that scum will always rise to the surface?”

  o0o

  Despite careful planning, Tate Kaga’s party was not a success.

  Or so it was said by some, mostly Downsiders, who claimed that the regrettable episode that terminated the gathering was almost inevitable, given the ancient nuller’s choice of the Ascha Gardens as the locale. Others, among them Highdwellers, seemed to prefer the term “amusing” to “regrettable.”

  “Like a small boy with a stick and nest of psando,” one of these latter murmured, a comment judged in bad taste by certain Douloi who resented the comparison to those industrious insects whose individuality is subsumed into the collective whole.

  When that simile was relayed to him, Tate Kaga cackled loudly and said, “Ho! I wish I’d had a bigger stick!”

  o0o

  “Tate Kaga told me I could invite anyone,” Ivard said. “I mean, besides Trev and Gray.” He patted the heads of the dogs at his either side. He’d been training them for days to move in free fall, with Tate Kaga’s encouragement, in preparation for the party.

  Vi’ya sat at the window, looking out as she tried to control her reaction of unreasonable anger, but Ivard sensed it anyway. Why she should be annoyed to be invited to a nick party—probably the best nick party ever—escaped him.

  She saw his question, and knew he thought her unreasonable. But it was reasonable for all that: the party would be held in nick territory.
She didn’t belong in nick territory. Brandon did. It was useless to be angry, except everything that brought her into Brandon’s orbit made her angry.

  “You’ll like Tate Kaga,” Ivard said pleadingly. “He’s a nick but he doesn’t talk nick. He’s old—old as Granny Chang, and you like her. Maybe he’s even older. And he’s funny.”

  “I have work to do.”

  “But you can’t work all the time, and I don’t want to go alone—” Ivard paused as a complex image flickered like blue lightning through his mind, too quick to follow. It was the Kelly Archon, that’s all he knew. He was getting used to that happening. “We’ll bring the Eya’a,” he said. “They’ll like the Ascha Gardens. They ought to see it once. That’s what Tate Kaga said.”

  Vi’ya sat silent for a long time, ignoring the guard escort waiting quietly by the outer door. Ivard could no longer tell what Vi’ya heard over the mental connection with the Eya’a, and what she didn’t. In any case, he was not going to say out loud that he wouldn’t ask Marim.

  Pain squeezed his heart when he thought of Marim. He ran his fingers along the silk stitching on the shirt that Tate Kaga had given him, when Ivard had admitted that his single good shirt, which Greywing had bought him on Rifthaven before Markham was killed, was way too tight now.

  This new shirt was old, though it didn’t look it. But it smelled like something someone long ago had loved, with faint scents from worlds that Ivard had never seen, overlaid with the pleasant aroma that Tate Kaga had said was real cedar, from the ancient chest in which it was stored. The colors the shirt had been woven in had faded a long time ago, but still bright were the animal shapes embroidered at the cuffs and collar, in brown and black and gold silk, interspersed with red cottonwood flowers of a tree that Tate Kaga’s ancestors had held to be sacred.

  The shirt helped him deal with the hurt. Ivard knew that people bunked other people out all the time, but did Marim have to talk about her lovers over meals, as if Ivard had turned into a plant or something?

  Ivard’s nose twitched, responding to a scent too faint to identify, and the blue fire leapt inside his head again. The image this time was more complete, and he sensed the proximity of the Kelly healer trinity. The Archon’s images were always clearer when Portus-Dartinus-Atos were nearby.

  Then the Eya’a appeared in the doorway to their chamber, their faceted eyes glittering. So the Kelly had somehow let them know about the party—though he wondered if they even knew what a party was. They moved to the outside door and stood with eerie stillness, ignoring Gray, who gave them each a sniff before padding back to Ivard’s side. Trev only looked, ears turning alertly.

  Vi’ya raised a hand. “You win. Let us go, then.”

  She left her console and followed him out, just as she was, clad entirely in black with her black hair pulled high behind her.

  The Kelly joined them at the transtube portal, fluting a welcome at the Eya’a and the dogs. Trev and Gray beat their tails in welcome, taking long, excited sniffs at the Kelly ribbons, as the Eya’a chittered on a high note.

  Nobody else got on the tube with them.

  When they debarked at the entrance to the Ascha Gardens, Vi’ya turned her attention to the Eya’a, who stilled, their faces lifted. Their thoughts flickered too fast for her to follow.

  Ivard stood transfixed by wonder. What he saw here was impossible, frivolous, magnificent, revealing a kind of elegant humor that Ivard, through the multiplicity of new experiences, was just beginning to discern, and hadn’t thought a part of the Douloi world.

  But Tate Kaga is a nick, and this is his party. The blue fire flared up inside his mind with the Kelly equivalent of a chuckle, and Ivard understood that the nicks were as complicated and different from each other as Rifters—and that the Ascha Gardens was just as much a part of the nick world as the blank-faced politeness he’d always associated with the Douloi.

  The formal garden stretched away under the faux night sky of Ares, looking at first glance like any Downsider garden cradled in the safety of planetary gravity. Its measured stateliness lulled the mind into an expectation of deadly symmetry, framed by gravel pathways and marble stairways, with sinuous balustrades along terraces rising up in gradual steps toward the fragile construct at the Gardens’ center. But the stairways continued rising until they attained impossible angles, some vertical, sideways, even upside down, framing in a disorienting tangle a bubble of free-fall at the center.

  Walkways, balconies, platforms, and portals snarled around the central edifice, and everywhere adults and children alike walked, gesticulated, drank, ate, danced, ran. Their heads pointed in all directions; Ivard saw two Douloi talking to each other from different staircases, each upside down with respect to the other. Nearby, a gang of children raced about in a demented game of tag, jumping from wall to floor to ceiling. There had to be gravitors everywhere to maintain multiple gravitational planes.

  From one of the landings at right angles to the surface of Ares, far above, someone launched into the free-fall zone. For a painful moment the null-gee grace of the diver seemed familiar, but then he saw that the diver, with blue hair flagging behind her, was his own age. He watched as she joined a crowd of others on a platform in one corner of the free-fall section of the Gardens.

  A sudden breeze ruffled his new shirt and the Eya’a looked up at something over his head. Ivard smelled the welcome scent of pungent herbs and smoke. “Tate Kaga!”

  The nuller brought his bubble to rest at head level, right side up for once. “Ho! Little Egg. I see you brought the Listener.”

  Ivard caught a hint of something—a scent?—from Vi’ya. She regarded Tate Kaga, her face as ungiving as always.

  “Welcome, Vi’ya,” he said to the Dol’jharian, and for the first time Ivard heard the voiceless “th” in her name from someone else’s lips. “Welcome, I say again. Convey the same to your two friends. May you hear only what you need to.”

  This time Ivard was sure of the extra . . . scent? Taste? Tate Kaga’s comment had startled and irritated her. She didn’t show it, but Ivard could taste her reaction. The blue fire whirled briefly behind his eyes, and Portus, the Intermittor of the Kelly trinity standing nearby, honked a brief confirmation. That’s using your tongue, was the sense of it.

  The transtube hissed open, discharging a swarm of new people. After greeting their host, they joined the crowd making its way toward the gardens. Ivard noticed that they split into two groups as they approached the central tangle, but not into Polloi and Douloi.

  Instead, one group—they had to be Downsiders—shied away from the improbable geometries of the fragile edifice, eddying in small sets around the periphery, their shoulders tight and elbows drawn in close. The others, Highdwellers no doubt, strode without hesitation toward the gravitic maze.

  Another pod arrived, and Ivard saw the High Phanist among its Polloi passengers. She looked up at the maze, a trace of nausea tightening the skin around her nose.

  “Ah!” Tate Kaga brought his bubble to rest over her head, upside down. “Need something for your stomach, Numen?”

  Eloatri breathed a low chuckle. “I’ll be just fine, as long as you don’t sling me into that gravitational obscenity over there.”

  The nuller cackled. “Mudfoot, eh? You need to come flying with me someday, like Little Egg has done.”

  Ivard did not see Eloatri’s reaction to this invitation. His attention was caught by the arrival of another group, Douloi this time, centering on a gray-haired man with wolfish yellow eyes. His stance and the way he moved reminded Ivard of Jaim, but he was dressed like a high-end nick, and everybody else in the group seemed to move around him, as though he were the sun and they the planets.

  Trev and Gray pressed up against Ivard’s sides, on guard.

  The breeze coming from Tate Kaga’s gee-bubble changed subtly; Ivard’s new Kelly sense of smell revealed that the nuller didn’t like this new arrival any more than the dogs did. Another waft told him the feeling was mutual. But there was m
ore. He sensed a link between the two. The blue fire pulsed within, a whisper on the edge of intelligibility.

  The man’s indifferent gaze swept across Ivard, who shivered.

  Vi’ya’s eyes narrowed as she tracked the tall man, whom Tate Kaga had addressed as Young Tau; no, she was watching the thin, neutrally dressed man with long black hair who followed at the wolf-eyed man’s left shoulder, like a bodyguard. Ivard sensed deep unease in her. He drew in a breath in the funny way he was learning made taste and smell work better. Then he snorted all the air out, trying to expel the wrongness-scent of Srivashti’s bodyguard. Trev and Gray growled softly, their hackles rising.

  The Kelly honked agreement. Death breathes through his nostrils.

  Before Srivashti moved into the Gardens, Ivard sensed from his haughty countenance that he was a Downsider and didn’t like the distorted parts. But he didn’t avoid them.

  The transtube opened once more. Brandon and Jaim stepped out. Jaim wore gray, which Ivard wasn’t used to. Brandon was dressed like a high-end nick, but otherwise he was the same Brandon of the days on Telvarna; he grinned at Ivard as Vahn stepped up and took Jaim aside.

  “Hau! Now my party is a success!” Tate Kaga sketched a formal deference within his bubble. The fact that he was hanging sideways made Ivard snicker.

  Brandon smiled. “You don’t need me to make your parties a success, Old One. And I’m certainly not the first Arkad you’ve hosted.”

  “No!” Tate Kaga cackled. “Old Burgess was a wild one. Ha! Never missed my parties.” The nuller’s face assumed a thoughtful mien. “Until Desrien took him.”

  Ivard smelled discomfort in Brandon, who said, “No more would I miss your party.”

  A number of liveried servants filed out of the pod bearing numerous wooden objects, ornate and bizarrely twisted. Ivard was about to ask Jaim about the objects, but then the blue fire surged up with almost blinding intensity, and Portus-Dartinus-Atos swarmed forward, honking so fast that Ivard couldn’t follow their speech. The Aerenarch greeted them with Kelly-sign, and the voice of Portus, the Intermittor, rose above the melodious blatting of the other two, who began patting and stroking the wooden things.