Heart of Gold

by Sharon Shinn

  “You are not used to thinking,” Pakt said. “In your household, that little chore is left to women.”

  “That’s not true,” Nolan said with a small smile. “I think, but not about questions like these.”

  “I think about them all the time. And I concluded a long time ago that we are mostly what we have been made. It takes a cataclysmic event, I think, or great strength of will, to overcome our early training. And most of us are not burdened with either.”

  “Well,” Nolan said, handing Pakt the box of choifer soldiers, “it’s certainly been instructive talking with you, anyway.”

  Pakt smiled and took the box. “Go to sleep. The morning will come sooner than you expect.”

  And it did.

  The next four days passed in much the same manner, days at the Biolab, evenings at Pakt’s house. Hiram and Sochin, Nolan saw, began to enjoy themselves more and more at the guldman’s residence. They showed in subtle ways how much they liked the idea of a submissive woman catering to their basic needs, one who was far more silent and sweet-tempered than most of the blueskin women of their acquaintance. They were never rude to Pakt’s wife—they had far too much breeding for that—but it pleased and amused them to be lords over members of the gender they had, for most of their lives, been in awe of. Nolan saw them preening, almost expanding, in Pakt’s male-dominated household; he saw their gestures grow broader and their opinions more decided. The changes were so minute that he thought Pakt might not have noticed, but for himself, he began to loathe both of them.

  He had taken to staying at the lab later and later just to cut down the time he had to spend with the other blueskins at Pakt’s, and he hoped to be able to return to his apartment within a few days. Ariana Bayless had managed to stitch together a mass transit scheme that made the south gates accessible, but by all accounts, the buses and trolleys were so overburdened with commuters that the system wasn’t really working yet. But soon, he hoped. Soon.

  Meanwhile, he tried to avoid Sochin and Hiram while he was at the lab, and put in extra hours after closing time. Which he might have done anyway, since he was on a new project that he was having a hard time solving. It involved trying to come up with a drug for an infectious disease that had mutated to the point where it was no longer completely treatable by three existing medicines. Nolan’s first task was to understand exactly how it had mutated, and then to figure out how to nullify it. He knew he would spend the first few weeks of his research bent over his computer, learning and understanding, and the next few weeks experimenting. At the moment, he was still learning.

  “Are you still here?” Melina’s voice demanded one evening five days after he had moved into Pakt’s house. “Why don’t you go home? Do you realize everyone else in the building is gone?”

  He looked up at her with a smile, though for a moment her face was blurry with images transferred from his electronic screen. “That can’t be true,” he said. “Aren’t there politicians and security officers and even residents who are in the Complex around the clock?”

  “Well, you’re the last one in this office. Go home. What are you working on so hard, anyway?”

  “The model for the mutated ARS-B virus. What’s bugging me is that I’m pretty sure there was a mutation between this one and the model I’ve got. Isn’t that when Cerisa concocted the Moro-1 drugs?”

  “Mmm, yeah, I think you’re right. Two … three years ago. Well, she must have that model on her computer somewhere. Get it from her.”

  “She won’t be back till next week, Pakt said. I don’t know that I can wait that long. I basically can’t do a thing till I have the intermediate model.”

  “So go into her computer and get it.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Like I could do that,” he said with heavy sarcasm. He had not been joking the other night with Pakt; Cerisa’s office was considered sacrosanct. No one went in there uninvited—and even then, they rarely went willingly.

  Melina was laughing. “You could. No one else is here and I’m not going to tell.”

  “Even if I was willing to do that, you know she’s got a password on her system.”

  Melina came a few steps closer. “Yes, but I know her password,” she whispered.

  Nolan sat back in his chair. “You do not! Why would she give it to you?”

  Melina was grinning like a manic child let loose from the dungeon for the day. “Because once she needed something from her computer when she was away for the day. She called in from—I can’t even remember where she was—and had me go to her office while I was on the linkline. Told me the password, what screen to call up next, exactly what information she needed. I didn’t have a chance to sneak around in her other files—not that I would have, of course—because we were linked the whole time. But somehow I never forgot the password.”

  “I bet she’s changed it.”

  “I bet not. She’s careless about things like that. Besides, she trusts me.”

  “With good reason, obviously,” Nolan said, sarcastic again.

  “Oh, don’t be ridiculous. What are you going to do, steal her precious medical secrets? All you want is one dumb model.”

  He still couldn’t believe he was considering illegally opening Cerisa’s files. “Come with me,” he said.

  Melina was scrawling something on a piece of paper. “Can’t. I’m late as it is. Here. This’ll get you in, this’ll get you past the second security checkpoint. Then, it’s just a matter of scanning files until you find the ARS-B virus. Couldn’t be easier.”

  “Maybe you could stay late with me tomorrow night,” he suggested, but she was already halfway out the door.

  “Nolan. I told you. It’ll be fine,” she said in an irritable singsong. “You’ll be in and out in ten minutes. See you tomorrow.”

  And she was gone.

  Nolan sat stubbornly at his own computer for another twenty minutes, pretending he was working, resisting the urge to break into Cerisa’s files. If he was caught, he would be fired; no question. He should wait till the next day, get Pakt’s permission, open Cerisa’s computer with the guldman standing by to oversee. Except Pakt would refuse to do it. Pakt never deviated from strict protocol within the office. Well, then, neither should Nolan. He knew it was wrong, and he didn’t need any guldman to tell him so.

  But he honestly could not proceed a step farther without the previous model. It was a choice between a small misdemeanor that would harm no one and a week of wasted work. And Melina had practically ordered him to do it, and he had a long history of obeying the dictates of indigo women.

  He came to his feet suddenly. All right. He’d do it. In and out in ten minutes.

  Feeling a bit like a fool, he crept to Cerisa’s office and turned on only the shaded desk lamp, so no telltale light would spill out the windows (should anyone from the streets happen to be looking). In the semidark, he settled himself before her computer and switched it on. The amber graphics on the screen seemed much more baleful than the friendly teal he mixed on his own monitor. It was hard to be in this room and not feel Cerisa’s accusing presence all around him. It was hard to be at this screen and not feel as though her face was peering at him from inside the glass and circuitry. Hastily, he typed in the code that Melina had given him, and, when the screen prompted him with a new question, the second set of symbols she had written down.

  And damned if he wasn’t in. Who would have expected Cerisa to be so slipshod?

  But that was not the only sign of negligence that he came across immediately. Her files were in no discernible order, and the directory was almost useless. Some of her projects bore recognizable names; others were coded with letters and numbers that must mean something to Cerisa but held nothing but mystery to anyone browsing through her data. Nothing bore the ARS-B designation, or even Moro-1. He would have to open the files one by one and scan them.

  Cerisa might be sloppy, but Nolan
was methodical. He started with the first file listed, opened it, closed it, and went to the next one in the directory. His plan was to merely skim the opening words, looking for key phrases, and quickly put away anything that was not meant for his eyes. But curiosity got the better of him a couple of times when his searching led him to famous epidemics and well-known drugs that he hadn’t even known Cerisa had helped formulate. He could not help himself; he sat and read the entire histories contained in two files, and began to pay more attention to the details of every new case that he opened.

  The designation “GGP” meant nothing to him but, by the time he had reached the G’s in the alphabetical listings, he had gotten into his rhythm. Open a file, scan the headers; if it sounded interesting, read on. If not, close it back up and move down the list. So he opened the file, ran his eyes over the reference line at the top of the page, and nearly fell out of his chair.

  He read the reference line again, but it still said the same thing.

  He read the introductory abstract, the paragraph outlining the project, its goals, its methodology, and its probable rate of success. He read the next twenty pages, describing the experiment as it was theorized and then enacted on a few carefully selected subjects. “One hundred percent success,” Cerisa had written. Based on her limited control group, she could not guarantee the same results on a larger case study, but she thought the results of the test were so positive that they could risk going ahead with the project without further experimentation.

  Which, in her addendum, she noted had been done.

  Nolan read the whole thing a second time.

  He felt his heartbeat slow to a rate that would barely sustain life; he felt his body cool to the degree of hypothermia. He felt like an iceman sitting before Cerisa’s computer, a body so traumatized by shock that all its systems shut down. Not possible. Not possible. None of this could be true.

  He read the report a third time, but by now that was unnecessary. He had memorized the whole thing, the analysis of the data, the cellular model arrayed in rotating 3-D on the screen. He could shut down Cerisa’s computer, go back to his own, and reconstruct the entire file.

  He turned off the computer and sat for ten minutes in the shadowy room, staring at the blank screen, body motionless and the clattering activity of his brain at a complete standstill.

  Then, he suddenly leapt to his feet, ran down the hall, skidded into his office and punched keys to clear the images from his own monitor. He had aborted one file and called up another before he had even toed over his chair to sit down. His fingers scurried over the keyboard, desperately typing in data, calling up formulas, trying one speculative model after another and then running simulated tests. No; impossible; never work; no; maybe … maybe …

  When he finally looked up from his screen, haggard and ferocious, dawn was coloring the windows of his office with a furtive spring gold. He had been here the entire night. Within two hours, the others would arrive.

  He could not possibly face them. He could not tell any of them—Melina, Varella, Pakt—what he knew. None of it might be true. He felt lunatic and hallucinatory. Perhaps he had created this fantastic despair in his own disordered mind.

  But what if it was real? What if it was true? What was he to do?

  Shakily, he pushed himself to his feet and tried to straighten his crumpled shirt and trousers. In the men’s necessary room, he scrubbed his face as if to soap away the whiskers and the proof of a disastrous night. In the mirror, he was astonished to see that his face looked ordinary as ever—blue, mild, unalarming. He looked tired, but hardly horrific. It was hard to believe.

  He left a note for Pakt, explaining that he would be gone for a day or two, then took the back stairwell down. At street level was the corporate pharmacy where the biologists took all their experimental prescriptions. As he had hoped, the head pharmacist was already on duty.

  “Have a little project for you,” Nolan said in a casual voice. “Do you have time? I’d like the test pills generated by this afternoon. Two different sets.”

  “Let’s see the scrips,” the pharmacist said, and Nolan handed over his notes. “Sure, I think we can put these together. How many of each?”

  “Hundred, I guess. I haven’t narrowed down my subject field. I’m not sure exactly how many I’ll need.”

  “Hundred. You got it. Be done by two.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be back.”

  Nolan stepped out into the weak sunlight and stood stupidly on the sidewalk, trying to think. Sleep. He needed sleep. He needed fresh clothes. He needed a meal. He needed … he needed to turn the clock back a day and unknow what he had learned. But that took more magic than he could muster. Sleep first. Then he would figure it all out.

  Half a mile from the Complex was a row of hotels that served politicians and other city visitors who had business with the mayor. Nolan stumbled to the nearest one and requested a room for the day. Five minutes after being shown across the threshold, he was lying facedown on the white bed, fully dressed, completely unconscious. He slept unmoving for the next seven hours.

  When he woke, before he remembered anything of the previous night, before he even remembered where he was, he was conscious of a numbing sense of doom. Dread had riddled his heart and made it malfunction; his breathing was labored and unsatisfactory. And then memory leapt in him like a blaze through withered grass, and he scrambled to his feet, all his senses seared and jagged. What would he do, what would he do, what would he do?

  He would tell Pakt. He had no other choice. The guldman would be able to advise him. The guldman would have the answer.

  There was no answer. Pakt would be of no use whatsoever.

  He didn’t know what to do.

  He showered, wished he could shave, donned his dirty clothes, and almost could not stand their texture against his skin. They felt contaminated by the knowledge he had absorbed last night, sticky with outrage and disease. He didn’t have time to return to his own apartment or even Pakt’s house to retrieve clean clothes if he was going to make it to the Biolab before it closed for the day. So, as soon as he had paid his bill at the front desk, he headed to the nearest men’s clothing store and bought three complete new outfits, retaining only his shoes and Leesa’s medallion. One outfit he wore out of the store, and as he passed a trash receptacle on the street, he tossed away his bundle of old clothes. The gesture—meaningless as it was—made him feel fractionally cleaner.

  There was nothing else to do. He would return to the Complex and tell Pakt. First he would stop at the pharmacy and pick up his experimental drugs, and then he would tell Pakt. And together they would solve this insoluble puzzle.

  At the pharmacy, his drugs were ready, big bulky pills stored in tough plastic containers. “That one’ll pounce on the lining of the stomach,” the druggist told him. “Tell your subjects to take it with food or maybe an antiacidic medication.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Nolan replied, though it had not occurred to him. He hadn’t actually envisioned who might be taking these pills. “The other, though—”

  The pharmacist shrugged. “Like a vitamin. If you’re the type who gets a stomachache with drugs, take it with food. If not, don’t worry about it.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  Nolan tossed the containers into his shopping bag and stepped from the pharmacy into the Complex proper. This was the far end of the building, a city block from his usual entrance. He would walk very, very slowly to his accustomed stairwell and decide on the way what, exactly, he would say to Pakt.

  And then he spotted her, leaning against the wall as she had been that first time he had seen her, in almost exactly the same place, though this time she looked a little less despairing. And on the instant, he knew what he must do. The plan blossomed in his head and crowded out every other thought and question. Before he could change his mind, before he could critique his theory, he crosse
d the wide hall at a near-run and grabbed her arm so she could not slip away. She looked first frightened and then quelling, but he did not care. She would do exactly as he said; she had to. He had no choice and neither did she.

  “Kitrini Candachi,” he said, and she gasped out an affirmative. “If you don’t come with me now, I’ll see to it that your gulden boyfriend dies. We have to leave instantly—you and I—for Gold Mountain.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  He was certainly a madman. Despite the expensive clothes, despite the cobalt skin that marked him a highcaste purebred, he was clearly deranged. They were in a public place; she was relatively safe. She had merely to scream and someone would come to her rescue.

  But she did not scream. She said, “How could you hurt Jex?”

  His hand tightened on her arm, and he gave her a little shake. “Never mind how I could hurt him,” he growled. “Just know that it’s in my power. And I will, unless you take me to Gold Mountain to see Chay Zanlan.”

  Kit felt an odd squirt of panic shoot through all the junctures of her bones. “Why would you need to see Chay?”

  “Why are you asking questions? Don’t you care what happens to your boyfriend? Don’t you care that I have the power of life and death in my hands? Do what I say, and everything will be fine.”

  His speech had a bizarre, melodramatic quality to it; he delivered his lines as if they came uneasily to his tongue. As if he was not used to threatening people, as if his ability to deal in death was not one he relished. Of course, he was crazy. He had no such power.

  But.

  “Tell me why it’s so important for you to see Chay,” she said in what she hoped was a calm, sane voice. “Then I’ll decide.”

  For a minute, his fierceness wavered. A look of utter desolation crossed his face and set ghosts to dancing in his eyes. Then his expression hardened, and he tossed her arm aside. He took one long stride away from her.