Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 107 Read online

  I had passed through it easily, and I moved to Olympia. I had goals, both short-term and long-term. First, I wanted to move my parents to Olympia. But I didn’t do it soon enough.

  Baylor Charmayne sat at the head of the table. He still talked about his mother, which is sad when you consider all the people who had to die on Titania just so he could become the head of his clan. Sometimes he cried when he talked about her, though he wasn’t doing it tonight. He was in a fair mood, which is as good as it got with Baylor. He, the food, the table, and his guests were all visible. But I could not see the plants that I could smell. I could not hear the rain falling.

  We, his servants, are beautiful. The Executives will tolerate nothing less. They are not as attractive as we, but they don’t know it. They seem enthralled with each other, and they never tire of arguing law—not even at this supper—or of playing at politics. That’s why the Tedd clan sent a representative to this supper, a cocky young upstart named Glen Tedd.

  “A toast!” cried Tedd, which was our cue to fill their glasses. We performed like clockwork, so they barely noticed us.

  “To Sheba Charmayne! Now there was a tough negotiator. We’ll never see her like again. We Tedds thank God for that.” He grinned. “We’ve done very well since her untimely demise.”

  All eyes shifted to Baylor, who didn’t seem inclined to sip his drink.

  “Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.” Tedd winked at Baylor. “Otherwise, she would be sitting at the head of this table.”

  Baylor had no obvious reaction, but his gaze flicked to Ryan, who wasn’t as good at schooling his expression. Tedd was going to die for saying aloud what everyone suspected. I wondered who else knew it. Ryan did, because it was his favorite sport. But I don’t think Tedd did. I think he believed his clan was too powerful to suffer those sorts of consequences. He drank his wine, and demanded more. The party continued its dreary pace.

  When the food and wine had been cleared from the table, Baylor and his guests moved inside, leaving us to stand at our posts. A group of lower-level Executives came into the garden. They were all clan members, but they had only slightly more status than the bureaucrats working in Titania’s skin. I recognized one of them, Terry Charmayne. I had seen him at our staging center many times, though I had never spoken to him.

  I could tell that some of these less-favored clansmen resented the fact that they weren’t invited to the fancy dinner, but I couldn’t tell whether Terry felt that way. They stood for quite a long while before Terry decided they should move out of the rain and onto one of the covered patios not being used by the elite. They left us alone.

  We stood patiently. All of us were experts at waiting. To entertain myself, I played Gamelan music in my head: slow, courtly pieces for orchestras of gongs and cymbals. It seemed to fit the scene, and I found it entertaining. But as the minutes slipped by, and no one dismissed us, an idea began to form in my head. Those flowers I had always longed to see were just a few feet away. I still couldn’t see them, but I could smell them.

  I took a slow step toward them. No one reacted. I took another. Altogether, it was four steps until I was no longer standing on the paving.

  I knelt and reached blindly. My hands encountered something soft and fuzzy. I explored further and found the ground—the fuzzy things were growing out of the soil, so this was a plant I was touching. It was not at all what I expected a plant to feel like, with big, soft lobes and a central stalk that had clusters of other fuzzy things near the top.

  I leaned over and smelled the stalk. It wasn’t perfumed like the flowers in Baylor Charmayne’s vases, but the aroma was pleasant.

  Someone kicked me in the butt, not hard enough to hurt me, but firmly enough to get my attention. I looked over my shoulder and saw Terry Charmayne. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked. “If someone sees you doing that, you could get terminated.”

  Terminated was an interesting term. I had a feeling he didn’t just mean fired. Yet his tone was not unkind.

  “Don’t get curious,” he said. “Just do your job and you’ll be all right.”

  I stood and let my hands fall passively. “Yes sir,” I said in the Girl Friday voice.

  One side of his mouth quirked in a sort-of smile. “Come on. I’ll escort you to the security lock. You may as well call it a day.”

  He led the way, so we all fell in behind him. I was able to study him more closely as we walked along. His clothing wasn’t that fancy, and the superiority was almost completely absent from his demeanor. He was a mid-level Executive from a powerful family, yet he acted more like a Ship Officer. He saw us to the lock, waiting until he was sure we were safely through, then gave me a brisk, “Pleasant rest.”

  “Yes, sir.” I didn’t look back. Instead, I searched the networks for the footprints of Terry Charmayne. He might be useful, some day.

  The other servants walked quickly, eager to be done with their day and reclaim what they could of their senses. But Nuruddin slowed his pace until he was walking beside me. “What did it smell like?” he rasped in what was left of his real voice.

  I had to think for a moment. “It smelled—green.”

  “Like tea?”

  “Very much, yes, but—stronger than that. It was pungent. It was a living thing.”

  “Is that why you risked so much to smell it?”

  “Yes.”

  Nuruddin was silent for a long moment. Then he said, “You are braver than I, Oichi. But you are no more curious.”

  We kept pace with each other in companionable silence, until the others had disappeared. I hope Nuruddin was enjoying my company, but for my part, I was pondering the wisdom of asking him questions. Questioning someone can be an adequate method of gathering information, but they may ask you questions in return. Nuruddin had already warned me of his curiosity.

  Before I could reach a conclusion, someone pulled the plug on our senses.

  I could see nothing but white void. My hearing was gone too, without even the ringing noise that accompanies natural silence. I probed for a surveillance camera and linked with it. Nuruddin and I stood in the tunnel with two Executive boys who could not be more than twelve years old. They had eliminated themselves from our audio and visual feeds so we wouldn’t know they were there. I hadn’t smelled them at first because the ventilation had blown their scent away from us, but now that they were close, my nose detected a chemical undertone in their sweat that raised the hair on the back of my neck. They both held knives, and they grinned at Nuruddin, nudging each other as if to say, I dare you to do it . . .

  Nuruddin’s face was calm, but I could see concern trying to surface through the strict muscle controls that we Servants must endure to keep our demeanors serene. He must be wondering why our senses were being blocked. I doubted he would guess the truth until he felt the first slice. I would have to take him to the hospital once they let us go.

  “I’m going to cut his lips off.” The boy giggled. “And then I’m going to cut his nose off.”

  So no. Nuruddin would not be able to recover from this assault with some minor medical attention. I would have to intervene.

  The order would have to originate from someplace outside the normal grid. I searched desperately, my mind racing along the network.

  And suddenly I found an unknown pathway. I triggered the alarm.

  Our hearing and eyesight returned as the klaxons sounded. “ATTENTION,” warned a gigantic voice, “EXPLOSIVE DECOMPRESSION IS IMMINENT. ALL PERSONNEL MUST EVACUATE TUNNEL H17 IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT . . . ”

  The two boys jumped as if they had received electric shocks when they lost control of our sensory feed. They forgot they were Executives facing Servants, and they raced away—though not before Nuruddin saw the knives they were brandishing. As soon as they were gone, the alarm cut off, along with the warning voice.

  Nuruddin stared at me, his face stiff with shock. “Explosive decompression?” he croaked. “Is that even possib
le, this far in?”

  I shrugged. “I guess it would be if something catastrophic happened.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t want to imagine it. Anyway, it seems to have been a glitch.”

  “In the future,” he said, “I guess we’d better stick with the others so we’re not in here alone.”

  I nodded, and the two of us hurried down the final stretch of corridor to our staging area.

  Servants are not allowed to socialize when we’re off duty. I went back to my quarters without seeing or speaking to a soul. I bathed, sipped nutrient broth, and bundled myself into my cubby. I had hoped to listen to more Gamelan music, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the remark Glen Tedd had made at supper.

  Convenient that her escape shuttle was destroyed before she could use it.

  Sheba Charmayne didn’t make it off Titania. But like everyone else, I had assumed that disaster overtook her before she could board her escape shuttle. I never knew it had been sabotaged before she could get into it.

  True, I knew she and Baylor hated worms. When Titania was destroyed, I suspected them. I had even overheard some of their plotting, through my secret link. But I was still a child then, and what they had said at the time didn’t make much sense to me. So instead of trying to figure it out, I recorded it.

  I still had the recording. I had never replayed it, because I never heard them overtly say they were going to blow Titania up. What was it they had said?

  How do we kill them before they figure out what we’re up to? Sheba had asked. That was what got me to start listening.

  But Baylor’s answer didn’t make sense. Couldn’t we just dismantle them? Use their components for something useful?

  Dismantle? I thought. Components? It sounded like they were talking about machines. But why would you talk about killing machines?

  They’re too complex for that, said Sheba, managing to sound impatient, even though she wasn’t using her throat to speak. Too sophisticated. They have a self-defense component, and they would suspect what we were up to. No—if we want to destroy them, they can’t appear to be our main targets. They can’t appear to be our targets at all.

  Back then, this was the point in their conversation when I began to lose interest. Their discussions had turned to inventories of supplies, energy consumption and production, that sort of thing. But now I realized they were talking about Titania’s statistics in a particular sort of way, as if they were debating whether they could afford to sacrifice her, even though they never specifically said they were going to do that. These stats were incomplete, too, as if they had discussed them before, and no longer had the patience to go over them in detail. Amazingly, I almost lost interest again, almost stopped listening.

  But then Sheba said . . . their pathway is not part of the known network . . .

  When I triggered the alarm that saved Nuruddin, I had discovered a pathway outside the normal network. Now I had time to explore it and figure out what it was. I reached for it again, but it wasn’t the same this time. A new link had appeared on it.

  The link had no name. I touched it anyway.

  said a voice in my head.

  I was flummoxed. I hadn’t rung the link, I had simply touched it—and now someone was talking to me.

  repeated the voice, with relentless patience.

  I tried to disengage from the link, but I couldn’t. I felt alarmed. I couldn’t just struggle, I needed to take action.

  I asked.

  came the reply.

  The voice did not sound like any human voice I had ever heard, either inside or outside of my head. It was unique. I asked.

 

  That sent a chill up my spine. Lucifer Tower was not a pressurized habitat, it was in the mysterious Sensor Array, at the leading edge of Olympia. Tech personnel no longer visited Lucifer Tower; it had its own repair drones. Yet something dwelled there, something with a voice that was almost machine-like—but not quite.

  I said. It wasn’t as impulsive a remark as it may seem.

  Medusa touched me through the link. No one had ever been able to do that before. The secret part of my brain was stimulated, and I saw a face. The face was too perfect to be mortal.

  said the face.

 

 

 

 

  I woke with a start. Had I fallen asleep and dreamed Medusa up?

  I looked for the link again. I couldn’t find it.

  Yet the pathway remained, and I traveled its length. Though it existed outside the known network, it could form links within that network at any juncture, then dissolve the link when the user was finished with it.

  Medusa hid at the other end of that pathway. And she mentioned my parents. Had they known about her? How had she known about them? Was she one of the sophisticated machines Sheba and Baylor had talked about killing?

  Did they destroy Titania and kill two hundred thousand people—just to get rid of machines like her?

  I couldn’t shed a tear. My heart had become a burning coal. The anger didn’t blind me, it gave me ideas: about the secret link, my recordings of Sheba and Baylor, and my father’s music database. My plans were just beginning to take shape.

  But other people’s plans were about to get in the way.

  FOUR

  Medusa

  You cannot kill in a void (though on Olympia, you can sometimes use the void to kill). When you’re a killer, everyone around you is at risk, if not from your direct actions, then from the consequences of your actions. This is not a fact that most killers consider. But I do. I even considered it the very first time, perhaps because I didn’t set out to kill a target then. Instead, I was someone else’s target.

  Prior to that event, my playbook consisted of feeding misinformation to people in order to influence events. Rescuing Nuruddin with the decompression alarm was a classic example of that. It’s still my main tactic, but shortly after that incident, things took a turn for the violent. And as unplanned violence often does, it started out very normally. I simply went to work.

  I dressed in my Servant’s mantle and rode a tube in toward the habitat access tunnel. I was alone, which struck me as odd, but not impossible. It was rare for Servants to report individually; we were called up in groups, but sometimes you get called because you’re filling in for someone who’s sick. So I felt fine about it until the lift stopped, then reversed and took me out to the maintenance level. I hadn’t punched that coordinate. The door opened, and Glenn Tedd stood there.

  Glenn Tedd, who made the snide remarks to Baylor Charmayne about the Lady Sheba’s untimely demise.

  “You,” he snapped. “Follow me.”

  “Yes sir.” I was alarmed to discover that he had selected the Penitent voice for my responses. That alarm grew as I followed him into an access corridor for the Series 100 airlocks—the locks used most often for executions.

  My mind raced. I scanned communication records for any indication of what he might be planning, and found nothing that jumped out at me. I had never served Glenn Tedd alone before, but he had a reputation for being furious one moment and weeping the next. He had never apologized to any of my fellow Servants when he got into the weepy state; in fact that was the time when he expected Servants to apologize to him.

  That’s why he’s crying, Nuruddin told me once. Out of frustration, like a small child.

  Based on Glenn Tedd’s reputation, he could get worked up about something minor, so an abject apology might be all he expected of me. But our journey into the realm of airlocks kept me on high alert. No one used those locks except for maintenance workers and Executives who wanted to kill someone—and neither of us was a maintenance worker.


  He stopped short in front of Lock 113 and turned to face me. “Stand here.” He pointed at the floor, as if I were the most dense person he had ever met. I obeyed him, since we were still outside the airlock. But then he opened the inner door. “Get in.”

  I didn’t move.

  His mood had not been good to start with. When I ignored his order, it got a lot worse. “You heard me! Get in!”

  I plan everything before I act. I knew I had to kill him then. But I couldn’t do it with my bare hands, and I wasn’t sure I could scrub the event from the security monitors in time to prevent consequences if I just tossed him into the lock.

  He snorted in disgust and marched into the lock, leaving me even more flummoxed. He wrenched open a suit locker and pointed inside. “Look at this!” he said.

  He couldn’t very well blow me out of there if he was inside. So I stepped through the inner lock and joined him at the locker. I saw what he was trying to show me. All air tanks on the suits in the lockers are supposed to be near 100%. The indicators on the suits I could see were just below 30%.

  “Explain this!” he demanded.

  I felt mystified. I’m not a maintenance worker, so I’m not in charge of keeping the suits up to snuff—at least, as far as anyone knows. In fact, I have poked around quite a lot in the air locks, and I always check the air levels in the suits first thing, out of sheer paranoia. It’s a safety rule my father taught me. But Glenn Tedd should not have known that. Had I been exposed?

  “Maintenance didn’t fill the tanks properly,” I offered.

  “That’s right!” he grinned like a shark. “And you’re my Servant. So what are you going to do about it?”

  For the life of me, I couldn’t fathom why Glenn Tedd had a bug up his butt about the air tank levels on the suits in this particular locker, or why it gave him satisfaction to address the problem in such a circuitous fashion.