Something’s afoot, as Kitten had said. Baylor is acting like a feudal Japanese lord who has committed to a strategy that will win him everything if he succeeds or will destroy his clan if he fails.
Miriam promised.
Seriously, there is little our small circle doesn’t find out. And to prove it, Terry Charmayne called me.
I passed the information on to Kitten.
34
Thirty-seven Ronin
My mother’s ghost had taken up residence in Ashur’s Mermaid program.
For cycles, bits of Debussy’s suite had been teasing the edges of my mind, and I had thought it was because I had too much to do. Medusa and I spent much of our time modifying the tunnels of our new home, and every moment I had to myself was spent dithering over the people on my list.
I thought I knew whom I should approach first. But something nagged at me. I needed special advice.
Lady Sheba’s ghost remained busy with her two charges. I didn’t want to distract her. And the question wasn’t quite in her wheelhouse anyway. My thirty-seven candidates were worms, many of them working in fields similar to what my mother had done.
She had not tried to talk to me after her startling introduction to Ashur. But lately I had felt her around the edges, watching Medusa and me as we modified our new home, listening in to our debates about whom to approach and how. She manifested as bits of music, and that’s how I knew where to find her once I decided to approach her for advice.
My mother’s ghost lived in the courtyard of one of Ashur’s undersea castles. Her robes were blue and green and every tint in between. They were sea-foam and breaking waves; they were lagoons and atolls. Yet somehow they were still recognizably the robes of a Japanese noblewoman, tied and folded in the proper spots.
“The place in which we Three abide was once an inland sea,” she said. “The shoreline advanced and retreated many times, but the water never grew so deep that the light couldn’t penetrate.”
As she spoke, I glimpsed the world on which she resided in her true form, inside the canyon that had once been a very different landscape.
“Corals lived there,” she said. “They built their castles. Life flourished, then was buried many times over. The seas dried up, and sand dunes covered the salt flats. They moved in the direction of the wind, one grain at a time.”
“I did. I am.” She gestured, and I watched the dunes shift back and forth. The continent collided with island chains, and compression formed mountains to the south-southwest. Snowmelt eroded rivers and streams in their flanks, and carried new sediments to cover the sand. Then rifting and faults stretched the landscape, and the canyon system formed. It became home to the Three—and to others whose histories were still unknown.
She nodded. “I don’t disagree. But you must listen to their heartbeats before you do anything else. Determine whether they are like you, or if they are like Sultana and Tetsuko.”
Holy moly! That was so obvious, I should have banged my head on it. That was exactly what had been lurking in the heart of all my doubts.
“Oichi,” said the ghost of my mother, “your success matters to us very much. We can’t help you as much as we would like, and we don’t remember the reason for that, but we remember that we’re not supposed to remember—yet.”
Her hair swirled back and forth with the tide, revealing much of her face but never quite exposing the orb she always hid from me.
“We can feel you getting closer to the Graveyard,” she said. “Our memories will move to the surface as you do. So you don’t have any more years to work on your revolution. You need to act now.”
Her hair drifted around her again like obscuring seaweed, until not even her single, staring eye was visible. My mother the ghost had ended our audience.
So I surfaced, my plan in tow. I saw my tunnels again, and Medusa waiting patiently nearby.
I told her what my mother’s ghost had said about heartbeats.
A plan! And a deadline. Both are essential if you’re going to get anything done.
* * *
Oichi, if you’re seeing and hearing this, I am dead, my father had said in his recording. These are the Medusa units. They were created for us. But when the Executives realized what the Medusa units could do for people, they felt threatened. So they kept finding reasons to stall the introduction.
He and four other dissidents had been tied to the thirty-seven people I found in various databases.
Eliminate targets tied to dissidents from Titania, then erase their names from directories, Baylor had ordered, and so I had scrubbed the records to protect those immigrants.
Nuruddin had been one of them. He had known my father, and he had known something of the aspirations of the dissidents. But were the other people on the list as aware as Nuruddin had been? Or were they more like me, unaware of the Medusa units?
How many of them were human, like Sultana and Tetsuko?
Medusa and I began our journey to find out. We picked an immigrant who was a high-level technician, as my mother had been. Her name was Kristin Kahele. She had been assigned to the group that was replicating the implants we had left for Baylor to discover.
Kristin was forty-eight years old. She led a large group of technicians. But at the end of the day, she made her way home alone to quarters that she shared with no one. Kristin had lost a husband and two children when Titania blew up. She hadn’t remarried, and she had no more children. From what we could see in her records, her work had become the center of her life.
Medusa and I had planned to confront her in her quarters. But halfway there, Kristin seemed to sense something.
She froze. Slowly she turned, and she stared at the spot where we hid just around a bend in the tunnel.
“You survived,” she said so softly, I’m not sure I would have heard her without Medusa’s ears.
I wasn’t 100 percent positive she was talking about me, or about the Medusa units, or maybe about both—but I moved into the pool of an emergency light so she could see us clearly. What we did next would depend upon what she did.
Fortunately for her, she walked toward us. She didn’t walk quickly; she stumbled a bit, too. But her face revealed more wonder than fear. She got within eight paces of us before she stopped. “You survived,” she said louder. “We thought all of you had been destroyed with Titania.”
Medusa answered her. “We saw the writing on the wall when Baylor Charmayne began to move so many resources from Titania to Olympia. We stowed away on those t
rips.”
She exhaled a breath that would have been a laugh under less stressful circumstances. “So his greed foiled his plan. I wish I could have moved my family here before he destroyed our sister ship.”
This time it was I who answered. “Me, too.”
“Who are you?”
“My name is Oichi Angelis.”
Her heartbeat spiked at the sound of my name. “Teju and Misako’s daughter. I worked with your mother. How I admired her elegance! And since you have linked with Medusa, I must assume Teju gave you the implant he perfected.”
“Yes,” I said. “And we have a lot more of them.”
Her heartbeat calmed. But even if I hadn’t been able to hear that, the relief in her face would have told me all I needed to know. “That,” she said, “is the best news I’ve heard in a long time.”
* * *
Kristin Kahele turned out to be the best person with whom we could have made first contact. She knew all the other thirty-six, and she was happy to share information about them. She offered to introduce us, and she was eager to link with a Medusa unit. “I knew something was up when our records were purged,” she said. “For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out who was protecting us.”
One by one, the thirty-seven ronin joined our ranks. None of them had heartbeats like Sultana and Tetsuko. As each of them linked with Medusa units, I became more confident that we could fight effectively if the Weapons Clan decided to attack us.
I should have been looking closer to home. I had now done so much to antagonize Sultana and Tetsuko, I had guaranteed a confrontation, one that would eventually have me inside yet another air lock, trying not to die. But they weren’t even on my radar at that point. I had more familiar enemies to cope with, people I thought I knew well.
But I was wrong about that, too.
PART FIVE
OICHI THE CLUELESS
35
The Doomsday Party
Every time I think about the procession of VIPs who filed into the air lock to board the party shuttle for Baylor’s Flyby, the music that plays in my head is “The Mooche” by Duke Ellington. And that line of Executives is so long, once Ellington’s music is done, I hear “St. James’ Infirmary” by Cab Calloway. The tempo of those songs perfectly matches the saunter of those self-important Executives. The clarinet and trumpet blend perfectly with their voices as they congratulate each other for their very good sense and taste.
Lady Sheba would not have approved. She thought things should move to the tempo of Pachelbel’s Canon. But that wasn’t going to happen with this bunch.
The Executives had changed from dinner clothing into something that looked like military dress, though the only insignia they displayed were family crests—no one had epaulettes or medals. Lady Gloria walked near the front, wearing a satisfied smirk that was beginning to look permanent. The people around her pretended not to see it or to care, but she knew otherwise. That moment must have been the pinnacle of her life. That would have been sad even if you didn’t consider what happened next.
Marco Charmayne’s pace in that crowd was close enough to Gloria’s to cause him some discomfort, but he did not seem displeased. Marco had been learning the ropes, and he wasn’t nearly so invested in old feuds as his uncle. Probably he hoped Edna would be at his side next time. After all, she was doing what she ought to be doing.
The Chang and Charmayne clans were well represented, but so were the others. I counted sixty family names. Every voting member in the House of Clans was there, along with their close family members, including young children. Only one person begged off at the last moment—Adem Koto. He arrived at the staging area looking pale and unsteady. He informed the Security personnel that he wasn’t feeling well.
Adem looked like a man who had tried to tough it out, but failed. Since no one particularly wanted to deal with vomit (or other bodily fluids) in the party shuttle in zero-g, no one seemed to mind when he left.
I should have paid more attention to Adem. But Dragonette’s eye was caught by someone else who arrived at the staging area without much concern about where he should be in the pack. Gennady Mironenko looked his usual poised and confident self, his pale eyes watching this one and that one without apparent reaction. He entered the boarding area with everyone else.
The door stood open. Within seconds, it would spin shut.
Dragonette waited for Medusa’s answer.
* * *
The night before the Flyby was scheduled, Nuruddin and Ashur visited me in my tunnels.
The three of us lurked in my tunnels beneath the Habitat Sector because we were waiting to meet the newest Mini.
Or Nuruddin and I waited. Ashur had tested the newcomer thoroughly, but he wanted us to see a special feature.
Ashur had chosen a length of tunnel that was fairly long. We three stood at a juncture that veered off at an angle. We watched the far end with unmodified vision (if you didn’t count the fact that two of us had artificial eyes), so there were some dark spots along the tunnel. But at the farthest end we could see before it curved out of sight, something moved.
The ball rolled up the walls, over the ceiling, and back down to the floor again, traveling with a corkscrew motion. We thought it would roll right past us, but it came to a halt directly in front of us, sprouted arms and legs, and walked the rest of the distance on its back legs, in a sort of waddle.
Teddy’s voice had a medium timbre, but he sounded male—that was a first.
Nuruddin knelt in front of the new Mini.
replied the Mini.
said Teddy, and he shifted his shape into a remarkable imitation of a cleaning machine. he promised.
I nudged Ashur with my shoulder.
He grinned.
When he said, Even the Medusa units, I felt glad our conversation was private. My glorious Medusa would not know she had been consigned to the obsolete pile by a ten-year-old boy.
Teddy shifted back into bear shape (or toy bear shape, if you want to get picky about it).
* * *
Teddy’s sighting of Gennady Mironenko was confirmed, and other Executives had attempted to communicate with him concerning the Flyby. But before the Flyby commenced, all the feasting and drinking would happen in the place Baylor Charmayne loved best. And Gennady didn’t show up for the preflight supper.
Nuruddin reported to
service in Baylor Charmayne’s garden. The table was set for one hundred, and Gennady wasn’t on that list, either.
Nuruddin filled Baylor’s glass with the same carafe from which his guests drank. Baylor raised it. “A toast to the new congress. Halfway through our voyage to our new home, we’ve got a lot to be proud of.”
The new congress was not an accurate description. These Executives were not elected representatives. They were clan leaders who would select their own successors. They had jockeyed with each other their whole lives for power, stabbed each other in the backs numerous times when they weren’t conspiring together. Now they hoisted their glasses and toasted each other.
Nuruddin stood at their backs with ninety-nine other Servants. Dragonette perched in a spot where she could see Baylor clearly, and she relayed the images to the rest of us.
I had been tempted to attend as a Servant. In all the years since I was supposed to have died, most of these Executives had never looked directly at me. But I hadn’t been sure Gennady wouldn’t show up, despite the lack of his name on the guest list. That would have been his style.
“And to Sheba Charmayne,” added Baylor. “She was a tough old bird. But she came through for the children. Thanks to her, they will always have music.”
Since they had all supported (or at least not opposed) his bill for the Music in Education initiative, they drank to this toast as well. Many of them had sincere smiles on their faces. They had discovered, once their own children received the music and image database (which many of them really believed had been designed by Lady Sheba herself), that their children had become experts in the most intellectual music ever created by humankind. Their math skills had improved, and improvements in other areas had been noticed. Now, even the most stubborn opponents to the initiative were applauding the woman my mother had named the Iron Fist.
In some ways, I couldn’t help but pity her son, though this was his victory. He seemed a man who could see happiness in others, but never feel it himself.
“It is with great humility that I serve once again as your speaker,” Baylor intoned, without anything of the sort. “And so it is my pleasure to invite you to our annual Flyby, in which we shall inspect the outside of our Olympia. Our families and friends await us on the shuttle. Once we finish our glasses, we shall depart.”
Medusa Uploaded_A Novel_The Medusa Cycle Page 31
