Living in Threes

by Judith Tarr

  The starwing pressed closer, as if it could sense the tangle of her emotions.

  It was pressing against the pocket with the stasis field in it. She shifted away from that small discomfort, and slipped the flower and the scarab out into her palm.

  The scarab was more than a connection to Meru’s other lives. Jian had held it, too, and discovered somehow what it was and what it could do, if it came into the right hands.

  Maybe Meru did not need Meredith. Maybe she had the knowledge here, in her mother’s memories.

  “Yoshi,” she said. “I’m going back on the web—down deep, where I was before. My mother left a message inside the clue. I have to try to find it.”

  “I’ll go with you,” he said.

  “I’m not sure you can,” she said. “It’s—keyed just to me. But if you can watch; make sure I find my way back again—”

  “I can do that,” he said. “But, Meru—”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  She did not wait for him to start a new argument. She plugged the scarab’s inscription back into her search bots, but this time she added Jian’s name to the string.

  As if it had been waiting for her to do just that, a data stream collided with her search bot and burst open.

  The sky was lavender and the sun was dim, more red than yellow. Stars shone at midday.

  Jian sat inside a dome above a sea of mercury, looking out across the waves of shimmering, surging silver. Most of the faces and forms in the dome behind her were alien, but the man who sat beside her was a perfectly ordinary human.

  Ordinariness was a mask he wore. Jian doubted that the face she saw was the one he had been born with, and she knew that his name was just a designation. He called himself Grey.

  There were creatures like him all through the known worlds. They bought and sold knowledge; they traded in rumors and in facts, usually without distinction.

  Most of what they had to sell was useless or worse. But once in a great while, and often unexpectedly, they happened on a glimmer of gold.

  She looked down at the data bead he had given her. Inside was the image of a blue bead carved in the shape of a beetle, with an inscription in a very old language indeed. The bead’s wrapping was equally old: a scrap of paper made from coarse brownish fibers, and a mummified flower.

  She almost laughed—at herself; at the hope she had still, after all these years and so many disappointments, dared to believe in. “This is from Earth,” she said. “It’s a common thing; there are thousands of them scattered across the worlds. What does it have to do with the answers I’ve been looking for?”

  “Perhaps everything,” he said. “Perhaps nothing. You are a seeker after answers. This is an answer to one of many questions.”

  Jian bit back a sharp rejoinder. What she allowed herself to say was not particularly gentle, either, but it was, at least, somewhat restrained. “That, if I may be so blunt, means exactly nothing. I came half across the galaxy on your promise of clear and certain information. Now you give me wind and platitudes.” She rose. “Others may have more patience for this game you play. I have no time, or credit, to waste.”

  “Time is running short,” he said, “indeed. For your search. For the proof you have been seeking.”

  She shook her head, making no further effort to hide her impatience. She turned on her heel, focused already on the exit; reaching out to the web for the schedule of flights away from this world, back to the site she had been excavating. That she should never have left, no matter how urgent the call.

  Grey was there on the web, blocking her access. His voice behind her said, “These are the questions you have asked, over and over through all your travels: What is the cause of all this ruin? What was it that killed these worlds? Where does it come from? Where is it going?”

  She stopped, spun. “More of the obvious.”

  He smiled. It was not a warm smile, nor a comfortable one. “You have an answer to the last. Do you not? It is moving. Circling. Turning back. Mutating as it goes. Your projections and mine—they agree. They know where it will strike next.”

  “Earth is protected,” she said.

  “Is it?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You’ll not cripple me with false fear.”

  “I merely asked a question,” he said, “as you do.” He tilted his head toward the data bead. “There is an answer here.”

  “Why? How do you know? Where did you find this?”

  “Just as any seeker of knowledge would,” said Grey. “I know a person who knows a person who heard a rumor who found a reference to a discovery that might be of interest. I made the connections. I found the sources. The rest is yours to resolve. For,” he added delicately, “of course, a suitable consideration.”

  “Why?”

  “Why does any being wish to make a living?”

  She bared her teeth. “That is not what I asked. Why is it mine to resolve?”

  “Because of who and what you are, and what you have been hunting for; and because of the world from which you come.”

  “Earth?” she said. “Are you implying that the plague originated there? That theory is old and rather extensively discredited. There is no single planet of origin for the waves of disease that run through the worlds.”

  “That is true,” he said, “but certain strains have begun in one place and spread with the expansion of space travel, and mutated as they traveled.”

  Jian had learned to trust no one, least of all a being who pandered to her own convictions. She believed that the cultures she studied had all been brought down by the same virus, one that happened to be ravaging a swath of worlds even now. She also believed, and in that she was all but alone, that the original strain had come from Earth.

  “Even if what you say were so,” she said to this man, or whatever he was, “what can you offer me that I haven’t so far discovered for myself?”

  “Very little, in truth,” he said, “but you would do well to ask yourself yet another question. Your world has eradicated all diseases that can endanger the human organism, or so it believes. Is it absolutely sure of that?”

  “After a thousand years, I would think it might be.”

  “Indeed, you would think,” he said.

  She paused. Counted breaths. Remembered calm. “Tell me why I should believe you. I’ve been led into traps before. How am I to know this is not another?”

  “I may be no friend to you,” he said, “but I’m not your enemy. Find the original of this. The rest, my sources assure me, will come clear.”

  “Your sources? What are they? Who are they? Where do they come from? What—”

  He did not answer that, only smiled that uncomfortable smile.

  Jian reached toward him. She did not know if she meant to strike him or shake him or simply push him away.

  It hardly mattered. He was gone.

  She might have believed that he was a very good simulacrum, if the data bead had not still been in her hand. That was real. The artifact it led to was real as well. So was the country, and the culture, that it had come from.

  If Earth was in danger, this could be the best and only warning it would get.

  Consensus must know. She was one person; they were billions. If the plague had reached Earth, surely they were taking steps to destroy it.

  She should send the data to her brother, along with a recording of her meeting with Grey. Epidemiology was Vekaa’s specialty, after all, and she was certain that Grey, or whoever had sent him, knew that. Vekaa would deal with it, and she would go back to the expedition that was waiting for her.

  But as she stood by that window above that alien sea, she knew she could do no such thing. If this really was the proof she had been searching for, she had to hunt it down herself. She had to know; she had to be sure.

  She had to do it quickly. Her daughter would be leaving Earth very soon, traveling to the orphan planet where the young of a hundred worlds trained to become starpilots. If the virus really had muta
ted into a form that could infect Earthlings in spite of all their protections, Meru could get sick. She could die.

  But that was not the worst of it. If Grey’s implication was true, and the mutated virus was already on Earth and already infecting a population that had never expected to face such a thing again, Meru was not safe anywhere. None of the family was. Not Vekaa, not any of them.

  Jian ran a broad range of web searches. Some would take time to complete, but the most direct queries yielded answers almost as soon as she asked the questions.

  She called up a map of stars and worlds, stained blood red where the epidemic had already struck. Even while she had been in transit, the stain had expanded, the reach of the plague grown longer.

  Shaking, fighting for focus, she called up another map, one that was keyed to her alone, and laid it over the other.

  Her map showed a spread outward and then back, like a wave of the ocean that struck the shore and then withdrew. This new map, this The map of death came terribly close to completing it.

  Her knees buckled. The floor of the dome rose to catch her.

  Her mind at least was clear—the clarity of perfect terror. She left messages in places where the right people would find them, though not so quickly that any would be able to stop her. She let her staff and students know that she would be delayed in joining the expedition to the Caves of Song. Then she found a ship that would carry her to Earth.

  The trail of the scarab led to the port city across from the island on which Jian had been born. She knew which ancient culture the bead had come from and roughly how old it was, but she still had no idea what it meant. There seemed to be no connection at all between a scarab from Egypt’s Old Kingdom and an interstellar viral plague.

  The person who had the original was a collector whom she had met before, an Earthling who traveled often offworld but kept a shop in the old city where he sold the occasional artifact. Not everything he dealt in was legal, but he had a good reputation. He was trustworthy, if not always careful to stay within the limits of a complex and sometimes contradictory code of law.

  He had been away on one of his collecting expeditions, her sources told her, but had come back just a few days before. She took precautions: she made sure no one was following her either physically or on the web; she determined that all of the spybots around his shop were maintained or cleared by the collector himself. Finally she sent a message requesting entry, and received an answer keyed to her specific code: Come.

  It seemed she was expected. Even so, she did not rush in all at once. She approached slowly, in clear view of the bots.

  The shop’s door opened as she came to it. She paused to run a scan. No weapons were trained on her. It was all open and honest as far as she could see.

  She stepped inside.

  The shop was deliberately, almost ostentatiously old-fashioned, in a style that was frankly ancient: dim, dark, cluttered. Instead of clean surfaces and virtual images that one selected from a range of menus, it was full of the actual artifacts.

  Nothing there was particularly rare or valuable, but some of it was interesting. If Jian had had time, she would have loved to spend a few hours rummaging in the shelves and cabinets.

  She could not spare those hours. She had seen a man sitting on a doorstep in a posture she recognized from too many worlds less blessed than Earth. He was sick. He was not one of the outcast, either—one of those who had been cut off, willingly or not, from the web. He was fully and properly protected, and the virus had taken all the strength out of his body.

  She had the latest defenses, double-armored and fully charged. She would order them for Meru as soon as she finished here.

  The collector was not in the shop, but he had left a message, a trail for her to follow. It led her to the back and up a stair to room as deliberately antique as the shop.

  He was there, and he was dead. He had died quickly: he was sitting up with no sign of trauma, except for the blood trickling from his mouth and nostrils, ears and eyes.

  The packet lay on the table beside him. Jian had come prepared: she carried a decontamination module. It flashed over the packet and signaled that it contained no threat.

  Inside the packet was exactly what the data bead had promised: a scarab cupped in the mummy of a lotus blossom, resting on a scrap of papyrus that, from its shape, must once have been a wrapping for the rest. A stasis field prevented the fragile organic material from puffing to dust.

  She ran the scan again, but this time she set it to detect and trace any viral contaminant. The search took so long that she had begun to sag in disappointment, sure that it had found nothing, when the scanner flashed.

  The sample held nothing that the scanner considered dangerous, but there were slight anomalies. Those anomalies were little enough in themselves, but they hinted at something more.

  It was maddening, because the traces were so faint, and yet there was no denying that they were there.

  The collector had left a message for her on the shop’s web. “I found this in a cache of artifacts on Alpha, last opened in the early years of the Lost Colony. I kept it because of your interest in that particular history. It seems a trivial thing to be so carefully preserved. Perhaps there is more to it than there seems to be.”

  Jian weighed the scarab in her hand. Trivial indeed.

  And yet—it came from the Lost Colony. The first great plague of Earth’s foray into space had destroyed every human being on that world.

  This bead and this shadow of a flower had been there; had survived the plague and the cleansing that followed, the storm of fire that swept the planet down to the bare rock. To someone, for some reason she did not yet understand, this small thing had been immensely valuable.

  Jian closed her eyes and sighed. She had been hoping to spend the night at home with her family—her daughter, her brother, all the aunts and uncles and cousins. But the hour was late and a storm was brewing, and suddenly she was tired. She had come a long way in search of an answer, only to find more questions.

  Maybe there was no answer. Maybe it was all a preposterous prank, a joke played on her by one of her rivals, or a colleague with a twisted sense of humor.

  She would know more tomorrow. And she would see Meru, which made her happy in spite of everything.

  She took a room in a hostel nearby. By then her head ached dully; she was more than ready to sleep.

  When she woke, she was dying. The being called Grey sat beside her.

  She knew he was not real, because she could see through him. Her fever had conjured him up; the sickness gave him words to speak.

  “Well done,” he said. “Now wait. The rest will unfold as it must.”

  Waiting was one of the few things she could do at the moment, but she would be done with that all too soon. She would have told him so, if he had stayed.

  Since he did not, she decontaminated the scarab and the flower yet again, even more carefully than before, and wrapped and sealed them and keyed the packet to Meru. She left it where she knew someone from Consensus would find it.

  She hoped it would be Vekaa. He was as close to a disease specialist as Earth still had.

  When that was done, she set her implants to record her memories of Grey and of the scarab, and to finish the recording here, soon, as the life left her body.

  She had done all she could. Probably she had done more than she should.

  She appreciated the irony. The plague she had hunted for so long had caught her at last, just as she came within reach of proving her theory. If there were still gods anywhere in the universe, they must be amused.

  Jian’s mind was breaking up; her streams of data were running dry. She tried to reach Meru, to tell her—something; anything. But her grip on the world had let go.

  The data stream broke apart as Jian’s mind had done, disintegrating into fragments of random information. It was dead, gone, erased, everywhere on the web. But it was burned into Meru’s memory.

  Meru lay in the light of
a million suns, with tears running down her face.

  Yoshi’s head blocked a fraction of the light. She could not make out his expression: the stars were too bright. But his voice was, as usual, worried. “Are you all right? What happened?”

  “I have got to stop doing things that make you ask that,” she said.

  “That would be good,” he said. “But since you’ve done it again, will you please tell me what’s wrong this time?”

  Meru could not decide whether to laugh or sob. The sound that came out could have passed for either or both. “I found what I needed to find. What my mother did. Why she—why she died.” She stopped, breathed, made herself go on steadily. “There’s one last thing I have to do. Since there’s no way I’m going to be able to talk you out of coming with me, will you just come? And not argue?”

  He dropped down from above her, so that finally she could see his face. It was tired and drawn and amazingly, incongruously happy. She could hardly help herself: she touched it, as if to assure herself that it was real.

  It was. He was. “When are we going?” he asked.

  He was as crazy as Meru.

  As he would be. He wanted to be a starpilot, too.

  Chapter 21

  Meritre felt strange. The spirits that had been inside her were gone, cut off by Meredith’s will. What she felt, she realized as she watched the sun come up over the city, was loneliness. She was alone inside herself, as every human thing was supposed to be—and it felt deeply and painfully wrong.

  She was not angry at Meredith. People did what they did; and Meredith had had a terrible shock. But Meritre did wish her other self had chosen a better time. Meru’s people needed knowledge that Meritre had, or could get. Now there was no way to pass that knowledge to her.

  Meritre could surrender and fall back into her old, ordinary life. Or she could do something. It might not be of any use, but at least she would have tried.

  Her blue bead, her simple and unremarkable scarab, seemed to be the key to the spell that bound them all. Meredith had said that her people had found it somewhere Meritre was unlikely ever to go: in a passage below the princess’ temple.