I would be risking quite a lot if I answered him. But I might learn something, too.
“You get this one as a freebie,” I said aloud in a voice I had constructed from multiple sources. “But if you want information from me, you have to give some first.”
He gave no outward sign of reaction. I wondered—if I had been linked with Medusa, would we have heard a change in his heartbeat?
“What did you learn from Gennady Mironenko?” he said.
“What did you learn from him?”
“I learned that someone calling herself Anzia Thammavong disguised herself as Sezen Koto and infiltrated the Charmayne visitors’ compound.”
Someone calling herself Anzia Thammavong. Schnebly knew Anzia had been a fabricated persona.
So I decided to drop a bombshell and see if he reacted. “I learned that Gennady Mironenko belongs to the Enemy Clans. They call themselves the Weapons Clan.”
That surprised him, though he showed less expression than most people would. “If that’s true, why were the Charmaynes associating with him so openly?”
Were. Meaning Schnebly hadn’t seen Gennady lately.
“No one has confided that information to me,” I said. “But I’m guessing some collusion was going on.”
That answer did not surprise him.
“Come out of your hiding place,” he said. “We should speak face-to-face.”
“If you’re going to insult my intelligence, I see no point in further communication.”
That made him smile. Not a great, big, happy smile, but I could see real amusement there, possibly even some appreciation.
“I’ll give you immunity,” he said. “I can protect you—”
I left him talking to himself. I would have preferred to stay and learn more from him, but my safety had been compromised the moment I gave away my presence. It was time for the worm to wriggle back into her burrows. I slipped into the panel I had eased open during our conversation and scuttled through the access tunnel into an adjoining passage.
Lagatha Oyeyemi would never perform another task for Maintenance—or for anyone else.
Despite that, Schnebly had won more points with me than I had with him. Thanks to our conversation, I liked him. That probably put me at a disadvantage, because I had to wonder—was Schnebly really my Moriarty?
Or was I his?
29
Dragonette
In all my life, I have never and possibly will never encounter anyone as immune to and disinterested in the concept of love as Percy O’Reilly.
I’ve seen plenty of people who form life partnerships for practical reasons and pursue romance outside that arrangement. And I’ve seen people fall in love, enter partnerships, get bored with them, and then start the whole process over again.
Some prefer to stay single and simply cultivate friendships. There are even those who want children, but not the marriages that usually go with them.
Percy stayed aloof from all that. He didn’t even pretend to have romantic feelings. He didn’t love, he didn’t need to be loved, his heart did not go pitter-patter. He was interested in politics and status; all other fields engaged his interest only if they contributed to his pursuit of those things.
Ryan Charmayne felt equally passionate about those two things. And so he and Percy were allies and, in their own peculiar fashion, friends. But true friendship requires fidelity (rather like a happy marriage). And while Ryan could muster some version of that, Percy could not.
I learned quite a lot about Percy when I studied the recording Nuruddin had made of Baylor’s dinner announcement. I didn’t start out with Percy, though—Baylor was the one who drew most of my attention at first. His eagerness to embrace the illusion we had woven seemed too good to be true. Did he truly support the idea of his mother influencing policy from the grave?
When I froze the images, Baylor’s face contorted in interesting ways. I searched my records for events during which he had revealed similar expressions. The only ones I found were from the time right after Titania had been destroyed, when those anguished queries about Mother had dominated his communications.
I pored over these records like a biologist searching for a new microbe (or maybe an old one). I’m not sure how many cycles passed while I did this, because I had taken myself out of the picture as completely (or so I hoped) as Gennady Mironenko had done. Schnebly had proved too adept at penetrating my false identities.
The stars on the other side of my observation dome came into focus.
I had given up lecturing him about the danger. Ashur and his friends (and their Medusa units) had proved to be far too resourceful to be discouraged by the limitations Nuruddin and I had suffered. At this point, we were willing to mount a Medusa-level war to protect our children from the consequences, if they were caught. It wouldn’t be a happy outcome, but we accepted it as a possibility.
He withdrew, and I returned to my contemplation of the head of the Charmayne clan. I had reached a conclusion. But something was still—off.
By then, Baylor had already written the bill he believed his mother had sketched out, and he introduced it in the House of Clans. It survived the first round. So I believed Baylor probably intended to get the bill passed. He had also ordered the implants from Med Freezer 1713 to be replicated. And the high-level technicians who were doing the job sent him an amusing communication:
Databases in the implants include extensive art and music libraries.
They seemed to regard the movie database as an extension of my mother’s art files.
Very good, Baylor replied, which was his way of saying Whatever.
So they were getting it done, and now I could turn to an examination of younger rascals. I couldn’t dismiss Baylor from my consciousness entirely—I had a feeling he hadn’t dropped the other shoe yet. For all I knew, an entire closetful of footwear still hung in the balance. But it was time to revise my plans, because Ryan Charmayne did not seem content to bow to his father’s will this time. According to the communications that had passed between Executives after the session, Ryan had not voted with his father. Most of the young men in the House voted against Baylor. Percy O’Reilly had abstained, which meant that he was willing to be convinced by one side or the other.
Lady Gloria Constantin actively opposed the bill, and that might lead one to believe that she and Ryan were bedfellows (an appalling mental image if ever there was one). But opposition was her standard response to anything Baylor proposed. It meant that she also waited to be convinced—some concession would be due. If she stayed true to form, she would then abstain in future votes. I wondered what that favor would turn out to be, now that she could no longer gain influence by pressuring Sezen Koto into marrying one of her young kinsmen.
A young man named Adem Koto had become the head of his clan after Sezen was declared dead. I studied recordings of him from before and after his ascension. I wouldn’t call his before pictures carefree or lighthearted. In fact, at his best he looked haunted.
Now he looked downright grim.
Yet Adem Koto showed no fear of his fellow Executives. He had attended the party Nuruddin recorded for me, and his deportment at the table was elegant despite his youth. “No harm could come from the greatest music ever composed by our ancestors,” he said in his own toast. “This is an idea I can support without reservation.”
I froze Ryan’s image. That could have been an opportunity for him to sneer, but his response was one of studied neutrality. If I moved it frame by frame, his control wobbled a bit. But for the most part, it was the same face he used to show his father. What had changed?
May
be Ryan had. Next to Baylor, he looked young and vital. But next to Adem, his youth was fraying around the edges. Lines around the eyes made him look squinty when he was aiming for skeptical. The lines around his mouth, engraved there by snarls rather than smiles, made him look bitter.
So—Ryan’s response to Adem’s toast was neutral. And then Baylor hoisted his glass and made his pronouncement, and Ryan smirked. But then his eyes sought those of his ally and friend Percy O’Reilly, whose version of neutral is far more competent than Ryan could ever muster. And neutrality was not what Ryan expected to see from that quarter. His confidence stuttered.
Ryan wanted to challenge his father. He was tired of being a child and wanted to sit at the grown-ups’ table. Baylor knew it, because he had felt that way about his mother. But Ryan was too busy feeling to think. He could end up challenging—
A flash of blue-green light caught my eye. Something moved outside my observation dome.
My heart lurched. But I didn’t see a face outside. Something tiny clung to the outside of the dome. When I looked closer, I judged it to be perhaps six centimeters long.
It was a sea horse.
* * *
Dragonette wrapped her tail around the rung next to the inner door and clung to it while she waited for the lock to cycle. Her tail was much longer than the rest of her body, but she could coil it to make herself smaller or wrap it around things with the same sort of flexibility and strength you would expect from one of Medusa’s tentacles.
She looked adorable—and she seemed impractical. How was she going to move around in a pressurized environment? Bounce on her tail?
But once the lock had pressurized, Dragonette let go of the rung. The inner door opened, and she used jets to maneuver into Lucifer Tower. She floated half a meter from my nose.
I could not have kept from smiling if I had tried.
And, by golly—I did have a job for her.
Now she smiled. A smiling sea horse is remarkably charming. She said,
Her tail really was expressive.
Yes—she was Ashur’s.
Baylor, for sure. But Ryan and Percy were the ones who could make or break the Music in Education program. If they decided to break it, I would have to get proactive again.
When Dragonette exited the air lock, I quickly lost sight of her.
Mini-Medusas. That was the shape of Ashur’s revolution.
Mine was more savage. I inspected the shape of Percy O’Reilly’s communication trees. I couldn’t dress up as an Executive and infiltrate his inner circle. But there were other ways to sneak into that enclave. I looked to see if Percy received messages from anyone who was an overt rival of Ryan’s.
Lo and behold—there were messages to and from Winlyn Tedd. And Winlyn’s message pathway was convoluted—I wouldn’t have been able to piece it together without my Medusa-enhanced perspective.
I searched for and found plenty of evidence that Percy O’Reilly liked to play both sides of any given argument. The one thing these secret negotiations had in common (other than his duplicity) was the use of a convoluted pathway. So I selected one of those pathways and sent Percy a message of my own.
You’re right—Ryan’s bid to defy his father is a losing strategy, I wrote. How would you like to be on the winning side?
And then I signed it:
—Messenger
I was curious to see how (and if) Percy would respond to that message. But what he did would be irrelevant. Because I forwarded the message to Winlyn Tedd, and then forwarded that communication to Gloria Constantin, with the record of its pathway intact.
If Gloria didn’t try to rub Ryan’s nose in that bit of betrayal, she was a lot less malicious than I thought.
It took her less than half an hour to forward the message to Ryan. I think she would have done it faster, but it probably took her a little time to work her way down to it in her queue.
It would seem, she wrote, that the communications snafu wasn’t sorted out as tidily as the comm techs thought it would be. Who knows what other flotsam and jetsam might appear?
So now Ryan would know he didn’t have as much support as he had hoped. If he was a wise conniver, he would rethink his position.
But I’ve already told you how and why Ryan died.
So, no. He wasn’t wise.
30
Welcome to the Magic Kingdom
What sort of killer am I? An efficient one. But nobody nails all the details.
We rolled Percy onto his back. His face displayed the same neutrality anyone who knew him might expect to see there, but now there really was nothing hiding behind it.
We measured the distance between his body and the door of Lock 212.
We moved him, careful not to create a smear. A little more blood leaked from his nose and trickled into the small puddle on the floor.
Ryan Charmayne would be able to see Percy from the door. He would know Percy was dead. The smartest thing he could do is turn right around and get out of there.
But we all know what Ryan did instead.
* * *
I am a worm, regardless of what else I may be.
I was modified to be partially deaf, dumb, and blind. The Executives believed they controlled what I saw and heard. They thought they could choose my voice.
I chose. That was something I controlled.
However, I did not control the House of Clans. I could put ideas under Baylor’s nose, but I couldn’t control the process. Even Baylor couldn’t.
So I was not a puppet master. Yet there were things I could do to facilitate the process. And increasingly, it looked as though killing Ryan Charmayne would have to be one of those things.
Ryan almost managed to kill the Music in Education bill the second time it came up for a vote. I mean kill it for good, kill it so utterly, I would have had to murder half the voting members to bring it up for a third vote.
I watched it unfold from a Dragonette’s-eye view. The interior of the House of Clans is ornate, and she blended easily with the decorations.
That fit with what I already suspected. But confirmation bias is dangerous. The vote that unfolded inside the House proved it.
I had felt so confident as I watched the voting members file into the rotunda, looking so official in their business attire, whic
h is much more conservative than their civilian dress—at least in style. There’s nothing plain about the quality of the fabric, or in the craftsmanship.
Baylor gave a speech about his mother’s concern for the education of children on Olympia, how high her standards were and how proud we should be of our children. All true, and he delivered it with more emotion than I had seen from him before, at least on that subject. “They have potential we shall never match,” he concluded. “Let’s help them realize it.”
Adem Koto’s speech was even better. “This is a gift for the children of Olympia,” he said. “It can only help them.”
I really was growing to like that fellow. But I ignored something in the bill that should have caused me concern, because it was a bit subversive. Baylor had written the law to include the option for adults to get the implants as well. I believed many would do so, because they would want to know what their children were hearing and seeing. And once friends in a group were talking about the music and the movies, other friends would want to know what they were talking about. Fiendishly clever, yes? Or so I thought.
Then the vote began, and I stopped congratulating myself.
I didn’t expect the bill to pass that time. To do so, it would have to beat the No votes by ten. Those extra ten did not all have to be Yes votes, some could be abstentions, but the total number of Yes votes had to be at least one more than the total number of No votes for a bill to pass. And if the total number of Yes and Abstain votes did not equal the total number of No votes, a bill would be killed.
I was pretty sure I knew who would vote No and who would be abstaining. I got my first surprise when Lady Chang stood. “Lady Chang abstains,” she said.
What the what? I looked for Baylor’s reaction. His stiff demeanor did not change, so I couldn’t tell if Lady Chang’s vote had surprised him. The two other Changs with voting rights stood and followed her lead.
The Changs’ neutrality proved to be a trend. Many of the people who I had assumed would support the bill didn’t want to make the leap. And all the people whom I expected to vote No did so with relish. Ryan Charmayne even got in a jab. “It’s time to stop humoring old women who want to rule us from the grave,” he said. “Ryan Charmayne votes No.”
Medusa Uploaded_A Novel_The Medusa Cycle Page 28
