High Tower Gods

by C L Corona

  "Now," Elian turned to hand the final cup to Martyn. "We're all ready to talk business."

  "I don't discuss business with people whose faces I can't see." Olsten set down his cup without drinking.

  The officer, noticing this, did the same, though he'd already had a sip of his beverage. Not that it mattered either way.

  "I didn't poison the tea," Elian said, and lifted her veil, carefully pinning it back to her bun. "It's really quite safe."

  "Forgive me," said Olsten, though his shark eyes were flat, and he did not smile. "Your reputation precedes you."

  "My reputation as an alchemist?" Elian shrugged. "I should bloody hope so, I worked long and hard for that."

  "And yet, none of it shows in your face." He stared. "Now, what is this proposal you felt was so important that you would call for a private meeting with me, only hours after my father was laid in the ground."

  "Romero's Syndrome."

  There was a palpable silence, and four faces stared at her in varying degrees of anger, incredulity or disinterest.

  "I have the cure," Elian said into the waiting silence. It was, partly, the truth. Even with her immunity to the truth drug, she couldn't flat-out lie about this. Not when Romero's Syndrome killed a significant amount of unborn children every year, not when the few who survived led such miserable and painful existences that most admitted wishing that they had died.

  Not when Theudor was considered one of the lucky ones to have made it to his thirty-fifth birthday and still be able to almost use his hands, still breathe without assistance. Though even that was drawing to an end, Elian knew. He needed oxygen at night, and he'd taken to using voice commands and auto-dictachines more often. She might have as little contact as possible with her family, but that didn't stop them sending her mail.

  "Fascinating, if unlikely," Tomas drawled. "You've had no access to the correct facilities to experiment with your little potion sets. You've had no financial backing. You are a ruined old woman who lives in the middle of a desert, and now you think you can lie to someone like me."

  "It’s not a lie." Elian glanced across at Martyn, who was watching her, his eyes narrowed in confusion. She'd told him nothing of the sort, and he knew Theu, loved him, even. "Though perhaps I am stretching the truth a little to get your attention. You are correct in that I have no access to human specimens, but there is a species of bat-"

  "The Carmaline ghost, yes, we know of it." Tomas had leaned forward a little now in his seat, eyes glittering, as though the shark had scented blood in the water. "Our own laboratories use it for trials."

  "It lives in desert caves, Master Olsten." Elian said flatly. "Or do you really think I chose to live in the desert because of some strange belief that I'm too good for other humans?" Even without the veil, she could feel how blank her face was. Almost like a chimera's, she thought. I can show him only what he wants to see, and I can put nothing in my voice that I don't want him to hear.

  "I have a breeding colony in my home labs," she continued. "As a species, the Carmaline have a low rate of live births. Professor Romero was the first to notice and study this, of course, and it was his research that showed the warping of the foetuses in the womb. I've been researching various drugs and alchemical compounds, and my latest figures have raised the number of live, unwarped Carmaline by several percent."

  "I see." Tomas tapped his fingers along the chair's arms, a slow, rippling series of thuds. Elian could almost see the numbers and figures rolling behind his eyes as he dreamed up drug pricing and revenue. "And this is why you called me here, to offer me your knowledge?"

  "I wanted to see your face," Elian said. "I wanted to see what you would say. What you thought your father would say."

  "My father would have wanted to see your bats." Tomas shrugged. "He liked flying things. He would have been far more interested in your research than I would have." Tomas stood, and the bodyguard tensed. In his lone chair, the officer looked more nervous than ever, spilling tea across his knees.

  Elian tracked Tomas as he began to walk the room. The truth drug would have kicked in fully by now.

  "I'm not my father, Doctor Maxwell. I do not have the time for projects like these. Romero's Syndrome is a problem, but not a great one in the grand scheme of things." Tomas faced her. "Olsten Pharm is under my direction now, and my father's excursions into these little side projects are no longer relevant. Had you spent your considerable time and intellect into something more pressing, then perhaps we could do business. But, it seems, as always, and just like a woman, you have confused the personal with the important."

  "Have I?"

  "It's a numbers game, Doctor Maxwell. Find me a cure for something that effects twenty per cent of the population, and I can use that. But Romero's Syndrome—you think it important because of your grandson, but the numbers work against you."

  "And you've confused the evidence with the obvious," Elian said softly. "Why did you kill your father?"

  "Because he-" Tomas stopped, stepping back. It took a moment for the confusion to pass from his face. "I did not kill my father, Maxwell, as the records show. It was a chimera. And I may be many things, but even I can't reprogram a chimera."

  "You wanted him dead."

  Tomas shrugged. "Doesn't every son? Wanting and doing are different things. Don't mistake desire for action. No, in this you are right, I don't mourn my father's passing. He was a sentimentalist, and our stocks were floundering because of his foolish old man's dreams. But it was the chimera that took a garden fork to my father's face. Not me."

  He could still be lying, Elian knew. "We have only your word on that."

  "Where is the chimera?" Tomas asked.

  "And what makes you think I have it?" Elian kept her voice cool, easy enough to do. Fear had receded almost completely in the last five years.

  "Because I was informed. By a most reliable source."

  Judakael. But why and how? She'd not told him anything more than her desire to speak with Olsten. But he had Ursa, and the communication between Ulixes and Ursa must go both ways. And Ursa was loyal—programmed to be so.

  "You will return the chimera to me,' Tomas said, very slowly. He indicated the men who had accompanied him, including the rabbity little Metro officer. "Out of deference to your position as one of the creators, I wanted to allow you the chance to turn the chimera over of your own free will, but you have stood in the way of the due process of the law. I will not hesitate to use legal means against you. And I will destroy you."

  There was no point in trying to pretend otherwise now. Elian felt her throat tighten in irritation. "No need to resort to threats, Master Olsten." She nodded toward the door separating the lounge from her bedroom. "The chimera you want is in there." She very deliberately took a small plate and helped herself to another thin slice of strawberry cream cake. "It's yours—all in one piece, still functioning." There, let him carry on with his posturing now. What could he actually do if she handed the chimera over?

  Tomas snorted. "I suppose next you will tell me that you were on your way to turn it in."

  "Nothing of the sort," Elian said. "The chimera did not kill anyone..." She faltered. What if it had. What if this was righteous anger on Tomas' part. She was convinced the chimera was not capable of murder because of the failsafes they'd worked in, but it was not like she'd had spare humans to waste.

  They'd preformed tests, of curse, little psychological traps designed by other students, and there had been subsequent trials conducted by others. But perhaps there was a breaking point in chimeras that no-one had reached, and Ulixes had been brought there.

  The metro guard appeared to be fumbling for his handcuffs, while the two body guards took their places—one at the door to block Elian from leaving, and the other to retrieve Ulixes.

  "You're actually going to arrest me?" Elian got to her feet.

  "I merely want you to come down to the metro station and answer some simple questions regarding what you know of the chimera's moveme
nts after the murder of my father. And then I want you out of my city." Tomas smiled, a sight that was the very opposite of reassuring. "Should you not want to accompany me downtown, I can always extend my influence to others. I believe your apprentice here has some small record." He looked to the metro officer. "I am assured it would not be a problem for me to have him arrested on suspicions of making and trafficking in at least three illegal hallucinogenics."

  And Martyn would end up in prison this time. Elian did not need to be told as much. She'd grown reliant on him. If he was gone, Elian would be forced to do her own grocery shopping.

  "I'm waiting," Tomas said, as the silent stand-off lengthened.

  Groceries aside, she could admit a certain fondness for the idiot. "I see," Elian said. "Well, in that case, I'd be utterly thrilled to accompany you and your pet orang-outangs to the metro so we can clear up this little misunderstanding."

  "Hardly a misunderstanding," Tomas replied.

  The metro officer cleared his throat. "Uh, Mrs Elia-"

  "Doctor."

  "Uh, Doctor Elian Maxwell, you are under arrest on suspicion of aiding and abetting the chimera model U-38, known as Ulixes, in the murder of Francis Olsten."

  Martyn stood next to Elian, his face ashen. He put a hand to her elbow and whispered, "Say nothing, go with them, and I'll get hold of Ganthes." He was right; time to keep her trap shut and trust in her lawyer. Or at least, her lawyer's son. The old one had moved on to the Bone City some time ago. She vaguely recalled sending flowers and condolences.

  Elian shook her head and laughed once. She held out her arms, her wrists thin, sinewy. "Go on, then, cuff the old lady. This will be very amusing."

  Spectator Sports

  It was, in the end, not all that amusing. Tomas had been thorough with his threat, and Ganthes had only been able to have Elian released seventeen hours later. Seventeen hours of statements, and of sly-eyed metro guards and detectives questioning her, picking her apart. Asking her all about Ulixes and her motivations for helping the chimera.

  "Because I made it," hadn't appeared to cut it as an answer.

  She'd left the guard station in stale clothes, with her face unmasked, and found a milling sea of reporters and cine-cams tracking her. Their questions were brittle and sharp. After years of hiding alone in Wilderstrand, Doctor Elian Maxwell, one of the two surviving Chimera Three, was revealed to a public that was rather less than adoring.

  Within a few hours, her face, veil-free, was on every news paper front page, on every wide-screen news feed, and a litany of her crimes called out. Aiding and abetting, hiding a known murderer, infiltrating and breaking into a private residence, pharmachemical espionage—Elian raised an eyebrow at that one—and a host of sticky little misdemeanours.

  "Does Olsten own the press?" she asked Martyn. They were back in the hotel suite, and Elian had been informed that she was to stay available for any further questioning.

  Her assistant was hunched over a hired work station, accessing the search daemon. The daemons were a worrisome way of getting information. In theory. all recorded information was accessible to the public, but since the daemons were triggered by any sensitive searches—and almost anything could turn out to be sensitive if you weren't careful—they could lead to a not-so-friendly visit from your not-so-friendly neighbourhood metro guard. It was better to get information the old-fashioned way, through gossip and second-hand rumours.

  Martyn unhunched his shoulders for a moment. "Not according to public record," he said. "They've set the deactivation and destruction date for Ulixes."

  Elian stared at the wall. There had been a painting here of hills and valleys and skyline, done in a broad impressionist swathe of colours. Elian had taken it down so she could stare at the blank wall instead. Now she focused on the faint grain of paint and plaster, and concentrated. "Perhaps I was wrong."

  "About Ulixes?"

  "About everything." She broke her staring competition with the wall and gave Martyn a thoughtful look. "When we first began making the chimeras, the idea was that in a perfect system, the drudge work would be done by automatons, leaving time for a populace to become highly educated, powerful, strong, artistic."

  Martyn raised one eye-brow and Elian managed a dry laugh.

  "We weren't complete idiots. We knew there would be a percentage of humanity that would struggle under the new order, but with the pharma industries doing so well, and with a land so fertile, we knew disease and hunger weren't the problems. We thought humanity hadn't moved on to the next step because they were held back by how little time they had to truly advance."

  "So you created a slave race."

  It was unexpected. Martyn had never mentioned any such thoughts before. There were always protesters who waged a minor war against the use of the chimeras, demanding that they have equal rights to humans, but for the most part, they were ignored. Chimeras did exactly what the Chimera Three had wanted them to do.

  "Is a slave a slave if he is made wanting only to serve?" Elian asked.

  "You made them like that, you tell me." The bitterness was palpable.

  "What's this about?"

  "This?" Martyn dismissed the search daemon and let the screen power down with an electronic sigh. He stood up and walked over, his expression grim. "This is about you sitting here, reading the papers, while Ulixes waits to be executed."

  "There's—there's nothing we can do for it now." Elian clenched her jaw. It was too late. Tomas and his men had taken the chimera off to whatever high-security stronghold they had, and Elian was under strict instructions to stay put and stay silent, unless she felt like being arrested again. "You remind me of Aleksia," she said.

  Martyn frowned. "Your...partner?"

  Aleksia, dead so many years now, but still an echo, voicing the uncomfortable truths.

  Elian dipped her chin. "She was never a hundred percent for the chimera program—oh, she wanted what we wanted, of course—but she thought making the system a biochanical one, instead of sticking to code and wire, was pushing the chimeras too far into a new territory."

  "She was right."

  "Perhaps. But she still agreed, in the end. And if she had any further objections, they are buried now." Elian flicked through a dozen memories, some from their days together as students, bright-faced and with minds so full of ideas and potential, to later when they were bowed under the pressure of reality and finances and paperwork. She paused at a moment where Aleksia, with her cloud of greying hair tied firmly back, had smiled at the awakening of a U-model, saying, "All right, maybe I was wrong. This is beautiful."

  But perhaps Aleksia hadn't been wrong. Elian's forehead puckered, and she cracked her knuckles. "Call up your daemon again," she said. "And run as many searches as you can on Judakael Seren before the metros arrive."

  The searches came up clear. No metros arrived at the door, ready to arrest them.

  "What are you going to do?" Martyn asked.

  There was nothing to be done. She had bats that needed feeding and watering, experiments that needed tending. Martyn, presumably, had some drugs that needed taking.

  "I think," Elian said, still thinking, still trying not to think. "That, much as it pains me to comply with the junior Olsten’s suggestion to leave his precious city, there is no reason to stay here. Pack your things, have Ganthes leave word with the metro that we are returning to Wilderstrand, and if they need us for further investigations to contact me there."

  "That's it?" Martyn carefully closed down the now cooled-off computer and stared at her incredulously. "You're just...packing up and leaving?"

  "I came here to prove that Ulixes was not a murderer. And I failed." Elian shrugged. "My reputation is in tatters, and I've made an enemy of one of the wealthiest men in the city. What would you have me do now?"

  "Well, certainly not go crawling back home with your tail between your legs-"

  "I'm not crawling," Elian snapped. "I am making a strategic exit."

  "Strategic exit? Is th
at what you're going to call it?" Martyn stood, his hands clenched against the desk. "You are an impossible bloody old bat, do you know that? I—no, don't interrupt—I came to work for you thinking I'd learn something, and bloody hell, I have. I've learned that you're all ego, all sourness. Whatever it was that made you Doctor Maxwell, made you a legend and pioneer, you've managed to throw it away and become nothing more than a crazy hermit who lives in the middle of nowhere and treats the rest of humanity like a vaguely amusing disease."

  "I don't recall asking your opinion on my life," Elian said softly. "I suppose you would respect me more if I lived in a fancy high rise social project designed to make me look like some kind of saint?" She stepped toward Martyn. "There are things I've done in my time, things I've fought for and lost. I'm not a callous old fraud, Martyn. I'm just someone who knows when they are beaten. Olsten has money and power and he can wreck everything around me if he wants. Including you."

  "Don't make this about protecting me," Martyn said. "It isn't, and both of us know that. This is about you not being able to handle defeat. Instead of trying again, trying better, you're just going to curl up and pretend you were never interested in doing anything in the first place. You poked a murderer with a stick, and now he's snapped at you. So maybe, try less of the poking and more of the trapping—use a net instead of a bloody stick."

  Use a net. "You're a genius, Martyn." Elian shrugged off the jacket and threw it over the back of an armchair. "I don't tell you this enough. Don't pack. Forget everything I just said."

  "What?"

  Elian grinned. "Exactly. We need to go to an execution—wear something sensible. Good running shoes."

  ◆◆◆

  It was not exactly what Elian would call fun, going to watch the show. Most of the country was watching via cine-cam. After all, it was far from an everyday occurrence for a chimera to turn murderer and be sentenced to death, or whatever the press wanted to call it.

  Termination of a Biochanical PseuodoForm.