Living in Threes

by Judith Tarr

  Was that hope in his face? Or was he too tired to feel anything? “I don’t know if I have that power,” he said.

  “The Deciders do.” Meru said. She was proud of herself for saying it so calmly.

  “There are procedures,” he said. “Protocols. I don’t know if—”

  “So more people will die because it takes too long to make a decision?”

  “Consensus takes time,” he said.

  “You don’t believe that yourself,” she said. “I can tell. You won’t look at me when you say it. You were supposed to have gone to your laboratory after you locked me up here. What happened? Did you leave?”

  “No,” said Vekaa. “I…was put on leave. For refusing consensus. For arguing in favor of my sister’s thoroughly and conclusively discredited theories.”

  “But they’re true,” Meru said. “She was right.”

  “You can prove it?”

  “I know where to find proof.”

  He unfolded slowly, as if his bones hurt. She looked hard at him, holding back terror.

  He did not look sick. Only exhausted.

  Could she tell the difference?

  “I still have some of my clearances,” he said. “They may be enough.”

  “If you have them down to the third level,” said Yoshi, “I can take them the rest of the way.” He flushed as they both turned on him. “I haven’t done anything illegal! Often. Much. One of my uncles is a coordinator in Transport. I used to watch him when he worked.”

  “And you paid attention,” Meru said.

  “I’d get bored,” he said. “It was all there was to do.”

  “Do it,” said Vekaa, “but let me monitor.”

  “And me,” said Meru.

  Yoshi spread his hands. “Why not? We’re all going down to together anyway.”

  “I hope not,” Meru said.

  Meru was very good at hacking the web, but Yoshi was an artist. Vekaa’s clearances made his avatar dance with glee. Still dancing, he drew in the threads of sites and connections so quickly that Meru could barely keep up.

  He mapped a route and secured a bubble and a shuttle, with clearances that would pass them invisibly through Containment—and he left a ping for the Deciders, but set it to reach them after the three of them had arrived in what once was Egypt. It was better than hiding in plain sight: it was perfectly open and transparent, but by the time Consensus knew what they were doing, they would have finished doing it.

  “Clever,” Vekaa said. Meru could not tell if he approved.

  “You’re not going to stop us, are you?” she asked.

  “Could I?”

  “No,” she admitted.

  “So then.” He inspected the order for the bubble, and raised a brow. “That’s clever, too: summoning it for Family Nkomo. Do you realize how far that is from here?”

  “It’s not too far to walk,” Yoshi said.

  Vekaa rather carefully did not say anything.

  “I can walk that far,” said Yoshi. “Are you coming?”

  It might not be far, but it was hard going. Meru was not used to walking on raw earth, clambering over rocks and slipping on patches of ice. She took some solace from the fact that the others were struggling even more than she was—especially Yoshi, whose brilliance had brought them to this place.

  As soon as they had slipped and clambered out of sight of the house, the starwing came floating down out of the sky, singing a sweet and faintly drunken song. Its wings were shimmering with auroras.

  It wrapped itself around Meru. She was floating; flying. Swimming in cold fire.

  She could have lost herself in the sheer giddy joy of it. But people were dying. She had to extricate herself; to set her feet on the hard, cold track and lead her uncle and her friend toward the bubble.

  The starwing shrank to its smallest size and perched on her shoulder. She had not realized how much she missed it until she had it back again. Its soft trilling in her ear muted the whine of the wind. Its weightless presence made her feet light, even if she would not let it lift her above it all and carry her into the sky.

  Yoshi slipped and slid and went tumbling past her down the rock-strewn slope. He fetched up against the stump of a tree.

  Meru skidded toward him in a fit of pure white panic. He lay crumpled, legs sprawling. He was not breathing. He was not—

  He twitched. Wheezed. “What—”

  She pulled him to his feet. He wobbled, then steadied. “Don’t do that!” she snapped at him.

  She was shaking him. She made herself stop. Breathe. Think—which was hardest of all. “Can you walk?”

  He was stiff and his left ankle was not bending quite as it should, but it got better as he moved. He looked up at Vekaa, who had come down much more cautiously, and said, “Next time I’ll try not to be so clever.”

  “One hopes there will be no next time,” Vekaa said dryly.

  Between them, Meru and Vekaa half-carried, half-supported Yoshi back up the slope and toward the track. Time ticked away while they struggled with the ice and the stones. Yoshi had far underestimated how much of it they would need.

  He had miscalculated where the road was, too. Distances on foot were nothing like distances by bubble or walkway.

  Meritre, who knew feet and boats, showed Meru how to keep a long and steady stride, even up steep hillsides and down rocky escarpments. It needed balance and confidence, and a great deal of patience.

  Meru could not let herself panic over how long it was taking. The bubble would wait. Yoshi had put a hold on it.

  The longer it waited, the more likely it was that Consensus would find it. She had to put that thought out of her mind, too.

  When at long last they came to the road, there was nothing on it. Meru started to sag in defeat—then she saw the shimmer hovering just above the silvery surface.

  The bubble was under full security. When she came to stand in front of it, it flickered into visibility.

  She had never been so grateful to see a transport bubble in her life. Yoshi acted for them all when he blew a kiss at it. He limped on board under his own power, and dropped with a blissful groan to the soft, warm floor.

  When the bubble began to move, it moved much more quickly than any Meru had been in before. “Consensus-level clearance,” Yoshi said a little smugly.

  “Sixth level?” Vekaa shook his head. “There’s clever, boy. And then there’s cocky.”

  That brought Yoshi down—but only a little. “If we save the world, no one will care how we did it. If we fail, there will be no one to care about anything.”

  “Then we had better succeed,” Meru said.

  “Yes,” said Vekaa. “Now suppose you tell me what we are doing. Since there is no turning back.”

  It struck Meru then, hard enough to knock the breath out of her, how much he had trusted both of them. He had asked no questions. He had given them what they needed, let them do what they must, and only asked to be part of whatever they did.

  That was more than trust. It was respect. Desperation, too, maybe. But he had given them a tremendous gift.

  She gave back what she could. It was not much, but it was the best she had. “I cracked the code of my mother’s message.” No need for him to know how, or with whom, she had done it. “She was on her way to Egypt, to a certain place. A tomb. The body in it died of a plague.”

  “There are thousands of tombs in Egypt,” he said, “and the newest of them is millennia old. Hundreds of the bodies in them died of illness. What does that have to do with an interstellar epidemic?”

  “Maybe nothing,” Meru said. “Maybe everything.”

  “And for that you enlisted this friend, who would be a starpilot with you and now will probably go down with you; broke a dozen laws; and endangered Consensus.”

  She bowed under the weight of that. “I didn’t enlist him, he enlisted himself. But otherwise, yes. Would you rather I hadn’t done anything, and let Earth die?”

  “I would rather your mother we
re alive and you were safe on your way to be a starpilot,” he said with an edge that made her flinch.

  She straightened her back and firmed her voice. “There are thousands of tombs,” she said, “but only one that held that particular scarab and the flower it was wrapped in. I think I know which one it was. I have to see it, to be sure.”

  He looked long and hard at her, studying her as if she had been one of the samples in his laboratory. Finally he said, “I’m going to trust you, just as I did my sister. She too did things that seemed illogical at the time, but they were always right in the end.”

  “Until they killed her,” Meru said. Her voice was perfectly flat.

  So was his. “That’s why I’m letting myself be part of this. For her. To make her death count for something.”

  Meru’s eyes stung with tears. She shook them off. “If I’m right,” she said, “you can take what I find to Consensus. Then they can do what they need to do.”

  He nodded slowly. He did not ask what they would do if she was wrong.

  She loved him for that. She would never say so, but as the bubble skimmed over the road, she moved closer to him and slipped her hand into his.

  His fingers closed over hers. They were warm, and his clasp was firm. He would stay with her, it said. He would protect her as much as he could.

  She was glad he was here. Not just for his skills and his clearances, either. He was family. He had loved Jian, too. And he loved Meru.

  The shuttle port was crawling with security bots and crowded with Guards. They did not seem to be focusing on any shuttle in particular, but that was small comfort.

  The starwing had shrunk to the smallest she had ever seen or known it to shrink, hardly larger than her outspread hand, and shifted phase until it was all but invisible. It wrapped around her wrist and clung.

  Vekaa walked ahead of her, armed with his clearances, with Yoshi’s enhancements. Yoshi walked just behind, still limping slightly. Bots and Guards moved out of their way.

  Balance and confidence, Meru thought. She did her best to imitate them, to walk as if she had every right to be there.

  The shuttle stood in a bay near the end of the port. Most of the other bays were closed and dark. The few that were open were empty.

  They were going to be conspicuous when they left. Meru had hoped to hide herself in the welter of traffic, but everything had shut down. Nobody was traveling anywhere.

  The shuttle was ready, open and waiting. Its course was set. All Meru had to do was get in, strap herself down, and let it go.

  She stopped. “This could be a trap,” she said.

  Vekaa looked over his shoulder. “Not yet,” he said. His voice was low and a little tight.

  But soon there would be, he meant. Meru pushed herself back into motion, clinging as close as his shadow.

  Chapter 24

  As Meru and Yoshi and Vekaa stepped from the walkway into the shuttle bay, the atmosphere in the port changed. Guards had drawn together. Bots swarmed around them.

  One of the darkened bays opened, then another and another. Meru heard the unmistakable deep hum of shuttles readying for launch, multiplied more times than she could count, from end to end of the port.

  They were all leaving—every one of them. Breaking Containment. Escaping the power of Consensus.

  Vekaa caught Meru in one hand and Yoshi in the other and pulled them into the shuttle. He almost threw them into one of the double row of seats, and flung himself into the one opposite. “Strap in,” he said, almost snapping it.

  Meru and Yoshi obeyed without a thought of argument. Meru had hardly secured the last strap when the shuttle lifted: a faint tugging sensation and a popping in her ears.

  The port shrank rapidly below them. Shuttles darted all around them, swarming like bees—that image came from Meritre, still present after all this time, and Meredith agreed with it. They were properly awed.

  Meru turned to stare at Vekaa. He leaned back in his seat, eyes shut. There was a distinct grey cast under the warm deep brown of his skin.

  “You didn’t,” she said.

  His eyes opened. He looked angry and guilty and triumphant all at once. He reminded her, just then, of Yoshi—who was regarding him in open and astonished admiration. “We needed a diversion,” he said.

  “When they catch us,” she said, “they’ll lock us all up for the rest of recorded time.”

  “Not if we save the world,” he said.

  Under cover of the mass escape, the one shuttle that mattered to Meru soared from darkness into light. Then at last she saw below her the country that she knew as well as her family’s island, though she had never seen it before in this life.

  People still lived among the monuments, just as they had four thousand years ago, and four thousand years before that. There was a shuttle port; there were walkways through the newest parts of the city.

  Instead of a ferry there was a force bridge across the river, a nearly invisible arch. People crossing looked as if they were walking on air.

  The land of the dead was still much the same: the Red Land, bare and bleak, with its stark cliffs and barren valleys. There were more temples than Meredith had known, and many more tombs, each with its marker on the web. But in the world of the living, where human eyes could see, most of them were still hidden. No one had to dig any more, to know where a tomb or an artifact was. They had instruments that could see.

  The Guards were out chasing empty shuttles and hunting down false trails. Here in ancient Luxor, three strangers were hardly worth noticing, unless they wanted to buy a scarab or a scarf or a skewer of something savory and spicy.

  Meru kept a grip on the scarab that was hers three times over. The starwing had taken to the air again. It danced for a while with a hawk that hunted the coverts on the east bank of the river, then darted off westward.

  She and Yoshi and Vekaa followed much more slowly. They were safe in the crowds, invisible and unremarkable. When those thinned, out past the clutter of houses and shops and museums that hugged the riverbank, they were still only three of many.

  Meru had not expected to find so many people here. A notable number of them came from offworld. This was a great place of pilgrimage, it seemed; and with Earth on lockdown, they had nothing better to do than explore old monuments.

  The walkway carried them to the edge of the Valley, but from there it was its old self: sandy, dusty tracks leading to temples and tombs. The sun was well up, and the heat with it. Meru’s older selves well remembered the taste of it, sharp and dry.

  She had relied on them to find the princess’ temple for her. But all the tracks they knew had changed. There were so many temples, restored or rebuilt, and so many tombs that neither of them had ever known.

  Meru had to try the web, though it might be a very bad idea. Through the starwing at least, she was harder to track.

  She paused at the top of the hill. Vekaa handed her a bubble of water and a protein bar. She almost refused them, but both of her other selves had more sense. “You need fuel,” Meredith said.

  “And water,” said Meritre.

  Meru sat with Yoshi and Vekaa on a flat stone and ate and drank, and looked out across the valley. From this height it was like a map on the web, but without labels or markers.

  It was still recognizable, if she focused on it. Meredith called this the Valley of the Queens. She knew where some of the tombs were, and whose they had been.

  It was Meritre who stopped Meru’s slow and almost despairing scan. “There!”

  Meru blinked. She felt Meredith’s frown. “What? Where?”

  “There,” said Meritre. She pointed, which was a strange sensation: like a shadow stretching out in front of Meru.

  It stood a little apart from the other temples and the tomb entrances, near the sheer wall of a cliff. Someone had restored it: there were pillars and a roof. Gilding flashed in the sun.

  “That is how it looks,” Meritre said. “The colors, the gold—that’s how it is.”
r />   “It’s beautiful,” said Meredith.

  Meru was not thinking of beauty then. She was thinking of what had come out of it, and what it had done to people on so many worlds, and now was doing to Earth.

  She tucked her half-empty bubble of water inside her suit, took a last bite of protein bar and swallowed it as she walked. She was aware of the others starting to ask what she was doing, then giving it up and simply following her.

  It was not so easy once she was down in the valley, in the maze of tracks and temples. She aimed roughly where the princess’ temple had to be.

  The starwing hovered above her. It still could see what she had seen from the hill. With its help she mapped a course.

  She was so focused on that that she forgot both of her companions. She remembered when Yoshi gripped her shoulder, stopping her short. “What is that? What are you doing?”

  “What I need to do,” she said.

  He frowned. She braced for a fight, but he let her go.

  “Later,” Vekaa said, “you’ll explain. In detail.”

  “Later,” she agreed. With everything else that she had done, that was hardly anything to be afraid of.

  For now, she had a route to follow. The knots of people turned to stragglers and then to sun-dazzled emptiness. There were just the three of them and the starwing, turning onto a track that, at last, her inner selves recognized. That precise angle of the cliffs, that tilt to the land, they knew. It had not changed.

  The temple was smaller than Meru had expected. It was also closed off behind a force field. The seal of the Department of Antiquities was on it. By permit only, it said.

  “Damn Department of Antiquities,” Meredith said.

  Meru laughed, because she wanted to cry. She could get in, but if she did, Vekaa would know how. And so, eventually, would Consensus.

  It was all over for her anyway. She called the starwing down.

  There was a brief, terrible moment when she was afraid it would not come; then when it came, that it could not shield all of them.

  It stretched to cover them. Through it she felt Vekaa’s shock and sudden burst of understanding—as if this answered a whole throng of questions. Yoshi was simply lost in the wonder and delight of it.