I turned the walker that way.
I wanted a good signal and less interference than I’d get on my palm if I contacted Mohammad down in the holding area. We had to sort this out without any more waiting.
The tufa towers thrust upwards into the stream of the eternal breeze from the east that for millennia had sanded the shapes of cones, fingers, phalli. Taller than these, the muezzin’s tower with its bronze figures gleamed hotly.
“See how we imitate,” I said, half to myself. “And strive to improve upon God.”
I looked at the example of that human failing beside me. And he—which I had referred to as it—looked back.
Engendered under a microscope. Implanted in the engineered ecosystem of an artificial womb. Washed for months in an amalgam of hormones and proteins.
Behind him the cliff bulked upwards. Volcanic eruptions of so many millions of years ago had laid down beds of volcanic ash and basalt, only to be carved open to the sky by wind and salt water through another million years.
What could humans do to Ubastis in only a hundred years?
And in a thousand years, what could Ubastis to do humans?
“In the medbay—” a decade ago, it seemed “—you said they wanted to discredit me. Who?”
“People’s Party,” he said. “Zhádāo and Bearce were part of it. They planned to sabotage your safari.”
“Except I managed that for them, didn’t I?” I recalled Zhádāo’s questions about my hunting, her greater barbs concerning Lasse. If her goal had been to incite me to violence against her, how far had she been willing to go? “And they got what they wanted. Crazy Vashti Loren, uploaded live to the Source.”
Everyone who could jack into the Source would be able to see me at the hearing. This was bad, but what was worse was where it was to be held: Lazarette 1, disjointed mix of offworld and Ubasti culture that some wrong-headed designer had hoped would ease visitors into the “Ubastis experience.” Lazarette 1, all high-polished plastic chrome and pastel, with its sudden pockets of simulation–plastic tufa rooms, an actor pretending to be an Ubasti vendor, selling Ubasti clothes for actual bank.
Where Lasse’s body reposed in state. And no doubt the journalists and pundits and other ghouls would batten again on his corpse, and the corpse of Wadjet.
I took out my palm and keyed in Mohammad’s code. While I waited for response, the number struck me again.
“There are—ten thousand of you coming.” In a child’s move I put my hand over my mouth. The stupid tears started in my eyes. “You and your bullies taking over Ubastis? We’re supposed to give in without a fight, to avoid seeing all our homes in rubble, in flames—”
He gripped my wrists, pulled my hand away from my face. He leaned in and I felt his breath wash over my face. “Stop. We don’t want to take over. We simply want a place to live that’s—” He shuddered, suppressed it. “That’s not a prison. But we need you for that.”
“Whose side?” I hissed at him. “Whose side are you on?”
“Yours, Commander.”
Mohammad’s elegant wrap unfolded with a chime. “Dr. Loren?” Mohammad, concerned.
“Just a moment, Mohammad.” All right. Think, goddammit. “O-389. When do they get here?”
“They’re already here, Commander.”
“Where?” It came out as a squeak.
The Beast tapped the palm screen. “Can you pull up a map on this while you’re in contact?”
I keyed in a series of Ubastis maps, each one on a wider scale than the last, until I found a Winkel Tripel map projection showing Ubastis as accurately as possible in a flat modality. The Beast studied it for a moment, then picked out the city of Enheduanna. I tapped for a zoom. Enheduanna, on the other side of Ubastis and up by the pole, on the edge of an inland sea. I groaned. “Why there?”
“Weak spot in the Ubasti Net,” he said. “We decided it would be easier to jam the satellites and get in undetected. It’s how we—” he touched his chest “—got in.” At my look he shook his head. “It’s not a big back door. Don’t get all jacked up thinking poachers are dropping down by the ten. We aren’t in the city itself. We don’t know precisely where. Outside of casual detection range.”
“There’s no way you can hide a bio sign that big,” I said. Horrible bloody scenarios suggested themselves. “Are they armed?” An Enhed Patrol & Rescue doing standard recon, stumbling across ten thousand Beasts . . .
He gave me a cold, thoughtful smile. “Commander, we’re not helpless even if we’re without firepower.”
So, unarmed. Ubastis did not have the resources to scoop up ten thousand people and send them back wherever they came from. Someone had been counting on a reluctance to kill. Someone had been counting on the last two centuries of conditioning and genetic modification against the human propensity for violence.
And Lasse. My God, Lasse.
“You say my husband knew about this? Not just you?”
The Beast nodded.
“Prove it. Show me. If you can’t show me, I will be God’s left hand and call down a strike on your ten thousand brothers.” I leaned into him until once again we were nose to nose, and no blast shield to separate us. “You know I have no problem with killing.”
“Vashti.” He ground out my name in two slow harsh syllables, and I realized he’d said my name only once before. His lips parted in a grimace; he squinted with unknowable effort. “Wwhhyy-yi—”
Holy God, he was saying I.
“—know you have no problem with killing. Why know you’re ready to sow the earth with bones and feed it with blood.”
I was gaping at him.
“Vashti.”
“Yes?”
Again the rictus of strain. “Wh-I want to know that you have no problem with giving life.”
I stuttered. Words like a barbed hook caught in my throat.
“Wh-I want you to—” He visibly gathered himself. “—Tell meme that you can live.”
Tell me that you can live. “Because you were sent to take care of me, right?”
“So that you can take care of us. Us.”
And ah God, the bared throat, the upturned belly—Oh, Mother, Mother to all Ubastis, was I now to mother ten thousand—ten thousand and one genetic construct soldiers?
You are here because you believe in the open hand. Lasse, asking us to offer the open hand, not the closed fist. And I had been a closed fist for the last four years.
The mirage of renunciation that I had glimpsed when the Beast had pulled me up to stand next to him on the cliff solidified. My mind reeled and it was as if I heard Lasse’s voice, speaking to me across the gulf of death: Give it, Vashti. Give your hand. Be open.
Could I?
Could I?
Rolling the concept across my mind was as hard as rolling a boulder away from a cave mouth.
I could.
“Mohammad? This is a safe link, isn’t it? Keep your ears open. I want you to listen to both voices here.”
“Certainly, Dr. Loren.”
The Beast and I sat down together in the dirt, crouched together over my palm. Mohammad listened.
Ten thousand Beasts, of different clutches, had escaped Mustaine and dropped down through black space to land near Enheduanna. Despite the perception of them as prisoners, their primary cohesion as soldiers had provided them with the necessary discipline to prevent infighting and abandonment once they made landfall. They had their own provisions (although God knew how long those would last), they understood they were not to live off the land, they knew they could not take any risks in being seen.
Whoever had chosen the area around Enheduanna as a point of insertion for the Beasts had done their research. Geologically younger than the sites for the other cities of Ubastis, the terrain around Enheduanna was rough as hell. A narrow rift valley lay the bed for the freshwater sea. Volcanoes pocked the region, folded into sharp valleys that tectonic thrust and upheaval had smashed up out of the earth. Unlike the New Albuquerque area, this
terrain had seen little wind and water erosion. Just malpais, cinder cones, lava tubes—you could drop twice the number of Beasts and they could stay hidden, at least for enough time to get dug in and provide a serious challenge to any Patrol & Rescue who tried to go after them.
“What are they doing with any Ubasti they meet?” I asked. Since the area the Beasts had chosen was so geologically rich, there were bound to be one or two small exploration crews toiling in the field at any given time.
“Running from them,” the Beast said.
“And what are they waiting for?”
“You.”
When we were finished, Mohammad took so long to respond I thought we’d lost the connection.
“This is . . . incredible,” he said finally.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Before I do a damn thing, I’m going to have to confirm your story in every way I can.”
I knew it was not imagination that his voice had cooled. “I’m sorry,” I repeated, helplessly.
When he signed off, I studied the ground. I should be ashamed, but I could not help it: my mind conjured an image of me facing an array of ten thousand soldiers, like Cyrus ready to take on his brother Artaxerxes. Twice as many people as any Ubasti city. And all of them loyal—to me?
“How if I ran?” I said.
“We would follow,” he said.
“Follow to drag me back.”
“No. Only to follow.”
“Without you—all of you others?”
In the sunlight his eyes were very bright.
“O-389,” I said. “You were sent. How if you fail?”
He lifted his hand and gestured toward the tufa homes, the minaret. “This—” Palm up to the sky above. “This. We haven’t failed.”
“‘We?’”
“This.” He patted the front of his shirt. Then touched my shoulder. “We.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I found myself being arrayed once more, yet ten times finer than for Moira’s party of months ago. However technologically advanced our species has become, still we cannot slough away the paleolithic being that decorates its body to intimidate.
Bozana had freed my hair from its usual braids. Without the tension on my scalp, or the weight of a headscarf, my head felt light, loose. I turned my head from side to side, scrutinizing the corona of hair. Nothing like Moira’s torrent, no way to hide any scabs or fading bruises. Beneath my cosmetics I saw that sun and wind had begun to etch their presence onto my skin, making me look older in a way no offworlder could.
I tried to keep from picking at the beading on the dress. With every slightest movement light splintered against the thousands of black cylindrical beads encrusting the dress. Not one centimeter of flesh showed below my collarbones, but the black facets clung to every arc of flesh and jut of bone.
“It’s immodest,” I said. “What’s the matter with my best salwar kamiz?”
“Your best salwar kamiz,” said Bozana, “is tangerine and saffron silk. Offworlders see those colors, and that cut, and think you’re a savage. It could’ve been worse,” she continued. “We could’ve done a lost-wax dress. But that would’ve taken hours.”
“A lost-wax dress?”
“I cover your body with hot wax, we let it cool, and then I paint the dress fabric over the wax. The wax crumbles underneath and falls away, and you have a dress that looks as if you were dipped in liquid silk. But you can only wear it once. Very wasteful, total offworld fashion. You can wear this dress as many times as you like.”
“I hope it’s only once.”
The image in the mirror fascinated and repelled me. She did not look like flesh. She looked like a woman knapped from obsidian.
I could have dressed in a flounced skirt and let my breasts show, and I would have felt more honest in impersonating a Minoan snake priestess than I did wearing this offworld garment.
“Hold still,” Bozana said, moving to stand in front of me.
“I can hardly do anything else.” And then when Bozana lifted something that glittered as blackly as the dress, “Oh, not a—a what, a tiara?”
“No, my sister, it’s a diadem.”
She lifted it as if crowning me. From the thick band dangled pendilia of black and gold beads; jutting up from the front of the headpiece was a shape I could not make out until she settled the thing upon my head and I looked once more in the mirror.
A rearing cobra, black enamel like the diadem, stylized hood and scales and eyes picked in what looked like gold. Knots of gold studded the band around its circumference. Clashing liquidly, the beads slid along my skull as I turned my head. I was dumbfounded.
“This is a uraeus,” I whispered. “This is a holy crown of pharaohs.” For a moment—of both vanity and worship—I looked into the mirror, into the gold-and-black painted eyes, the piece of woman-shaped night—and who saw me? My mother, who taught me so much of humanity’s heart. Hathor, mistress of the flood, the natal waters, the Milky Way. Isis, divine widow who sought the pieces of her butchered husband all the length and breadth of the land to put him together and bring him back to life. Sekhmet, whose breath created the desert, herself created as an instrument of vengeance.
“Where did you get this?” I said.
“It was found in Moira’s things,” Bozana said. “One of those little goodies she’s apparently secreted away over the years. A gift, maybe, from someone who fancied the planet’s Egyptophiliac naming system.” She reached up and smoothed one of the pendilia to lie coolly against my cheek. “I thought it would look good on you. And I was right.”
I know just the person for the job.
Christ, would the bitch never stop whispering at me?
The door chime made both of us jump. No more sand in the hourglass. Numair and András came in just in time to see me lifting the diadem from my head. András looked unconcerned, but Numair gave me a questioning glance.
“I wondered if you’d wear it,” he said.
“I’m not going to wear any of it,” I said.
Sounds of dismay from all around. “But, Vashti—you look—”
“That’s the problem. I’m going to go up there and defend myself in the clothes we all wear every day. Like a good citizen and scientist of Ubastis. Not like some vainglorious queen.”
Christ, I did not want to go there and do this again. The last time rage and grief had rendered me insensate, and I could endure the interrogation, the attempts to trip me up, and so many eyes all trained on me.
At least, I thought I had been able to endure.
Now, on the magrail to the spaceport, I felt like a wulanghari in a trap, ready to bite whatever hand was extended to me. All of my escorts on the train sat well away from me, ostensibly to give me the privacy I needed to confer with Mohammad, but I’d snapped at Numair, was short with Z. Ismail, and refused to speak to the Beast. Par for the course for him, he didn’t seem to mind; but Numair’s upper lip grew even longer and more camelid, and Z. Ismail kept throwing hurt little glances when she thought I wasn’t looking.
Well, I wasn’t looking, most of the time. I sat with my feet very rudely up on the opposite seat, my arms folded on my knees, my forehead on my arms. Trying to think of how to find my way with Mohammad nattering in my ear.
“Before linking, did you ensure this was a closed channel?”
“Of course. I do that for all my clients.”
“I know you’ve researched Moira’s case.” As the agent for a member of UBI, he would have had to have access to any other legal matter of import, no matter whom it involved. “And I know you’ve researched all the actions between her and whatever officials on Mustaine were involved.”
“That’s not the half of it,” he said. His calm, matter-of-fact voice—one that managed to soothe me even in my cranked-up mood—wavered into what I could call trepidation. “I was able to get my hands on communiqués—and vid—”
“You’ve got the corroboration you needed.”
“They’ve manage
d to keep it hush-hush, but I’ve got security vid of a breakout—Dr. Loren, my dear . . . are you sitting down?”
“They don’t allow us to stand up when the train’s in motion, Mohammad, and you know what a good little law-abiding citizen I am.”
I looked at the Beast. O-389, sitting with Z. Ismail, meek and mild as baby Jesus, in his good Friday-go-to-mosque clothes.
Ten thousand of that. The new moon of Ramadan, reflected in ten thousand shards of mirror.
I had no idea what he saw in my face, but his neutral expression sharpened. I flinched.
He said something to Ismail; she swung her legs out and he got up and moved over to sit opposite me. I moved my feet to avoid any accidental touch.
“Dr. Loren? Ya Allah, is there another sunspot?” Mohammad, thinking he’d lost the link.
“Just a moment, Mohammad, I’m conferring.” My mouth felt dry as silica. “O-389. He’s confirmed it.”
“See? We can’t lie to you.”
“Mohammad,” I croaked.
“Yes, Dr. Loren?”
“What was the ETA? Can you get that for me?”
“Blackspace makes it tricky . . .” Static on the line.
“That was the idea,” the Beast said. “X-class Hades ship. Phantom hull, jammed full of Net-breakers.”
“Christ, who’d you kill to hire a ship like that?”
“No murder. Just civilized bribery.”
Sweet God, the money this would’ve taken. No way Moira could have done this alone. I turned to look at my companions, my fellow citizens, people who had worked and slaved and sweat tears and blood for Ubastis.
At Numair.
I know just the person for the job.
Husbands and wives could make an unbreakable team. Unbreakable, as I had thought, even in death.
I would be declared a traitor. P&R would have orders to kill me on sight. The Commonwealth would have to step in and throw its weight around. No planet under scientific exploration could have a standing army. Formation of a military was a declaration of autonomy.
Formation of a military was a declaration of autonomy, self-determination, and sovereignty and so could not have its fate decided by an outside ruling body.
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