I thought about the deepsleep units Medusa and I had found. “How long were you in stasis?”
“The first time,” said Sultana, “almost one hundred years.”
“And then Schnebly tried to kill you.”
“He tried.”
I wondered if she knew what an annoying voice she had. Was it typical of First Generation people? The rest of us had been conditioned for a hundred years to modulate our voices and to be courteous with one another. If these two ever made their existence known to the Executives, their lack of manners would be an unconscious betrayal of their arrogance—and their ignorance.
And it did seem unconscious—or at least partly so.
“What is your mission?” I said.
“Mission? This is not one of the movies you and Nuruddin are so fond of.”
I allowed some of my skepticism into my expression.
She relented. “Yes. It’s really none of your business, but I’ll give you a brief overview. You remember the Enemy Clans? We stole the Medusa units from them. It’s why we ran away from them. We built these generation ships and launched ourselves into the void. The hope was that we would learn to use the units before they caught up with us.”
Your father … Medusa had once told me, referred to people he called the Builders. He hypothesized that the Builders created the Medusa units and the generation ships. But they were nothing more than a conceptual placeholder.
These two conceptual placeholders seemed to be alive and kicking. They didn’t claim to have built the Medusa units, but if they had built our generation ships, that was impressive.
Or it should have been. But the news was delivered in that annoying voice, so I felt compelled to teach Sultana by example when I responded in Sezen Koto’s cultured tones. “Fascinating. So you and Tetsuko have your own Medusa units?”
“No. They won’t link with us.”
And there we had it. “Because you don’t have our DNA,” I guessed. “You’re like Gennady. Perhaps that explains why you had so little regard for the safety of our children. You gave them implants that could get them executed if they were discovered.”
At least that dampened Tetsuko’s smirk a little. Though what replaced it wasn’t more appealing.
Sultana lifted her chin. “How long have you had your implant, Oichi? Would you have chosen to wait until you were an adult?”
Interesting. Did she ask that because she knew the answer? Or because she didn’t?
“That decision belonged to their parents,” I said.
“And because we dared to make it for them,” said Sultana, “you now have some of the most talented collaborators you will ever work with. They were chosen for a reason, Oichi. In a few years, it should be safe to link them with Medusa units. For now, you’d do best to stay in hiding and stop interfering with us.”
I remained still, emulating the statue of the intrepid astronaut in our history museum. “It is you who are interfering with me,” I said.
Sultana smiled at me as if I were a precocious child. “None of you would exist in the first place if it weren’t for us.”
“So—you own us? Is that your claim?”
She frowned. “If you had been looking after your children properly, we could never have given them implants you didn’t want them to have. You are irresponsible. Stop distracting yourselves with petty intrigues and attend to your lives. The First Generation has been looking after Olympia since the beginning, Oichi. Don’t tell us how to do our jobs.”
“You’ve been looking after Olympia,” I said. “But not Titania. Or you would have prevented its destruction.”
Real anger sparked in her eyes. “We lost friends and colleagues on Titania—do not throw it in our faces as if you can comprehend our loss.”
I could have lost my temper then. There aren’t many things that can make me do that, but Sultana had managed to touch on one of the few subjects about which I bore a serious grudge. I’d like to claim that my iron will kept me in check, but two other things diffused my anger. One was the ghost of my mother, who perked when Sultana spoke of friends and colleagues on Titania.
The other was the restoration of Olympia’s communication networks.
Tetsuko came to attention. He and Sultana exchanged glances.
“We have to go,” said Sultana. “You’ll find a new contact in your address book. Use it if you need to talk to us. But don’t use it often, Oichi. We want you to back off, and there’s not much you can tell us that we don’t already know.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I had been holding.
I looked for the new SULTANA AND TETSUKO link in my directory. It was an icon that looked like a serpent eating its tail.
<Oichi,> called Medusa, <what are you doing in Lock 201?>
<I just had a conversation with Sultana and Tetsuko.>
<Do you need me to come? I’m pretty close to your location.>
<They have fled. But there’s a pressure suit I’d like you to inspect.> I went to the storage cabinet and pulled it out. I had no intention of taking it, but when Medusa and I put it back in the cabinet, we would hang it properly.
Few people ever came into the 200-series locks, and I doubted anyone else would see the suit. So Sultana and Tetsuko would probably leave it there. They wouldn’t risk coming back and being spotted by the Medusa unit who would be monitoring this location from now on. That remark about killing me if I took it had all been bluster.
If they had wanted to kill me, they would not have bothered to threaten me.
The fact that I still lived had nothing to do with their compassion. I was useful to them for some reason.
But I could choose to be useful on my own terms. It was time to carry out the plan I had made when I realized Ashur and his friends had implants.
It was time to protect them the best way I knew how.
26
The Fox Wedding
One of Nuruddin’s rescued movies is called Dreams, by a Japanese filmmaker named Akira Kurosawa (music by Shinichirô Ikebe). Dreams is a collection of stories, and in one of them a little boy spies on a kitsune (fox) wedding. He sees what he should not see—and the foxes find out about it. That boy can never be what he was before. His life changes forever.
That’s what happened to Ashur. But unlike the boy in Kurosawa’s movie, Ashur felt happy about the change. He didn’t want things to go back to the way they were. So he was solemn when we put him on the operating table, but not because he was afraid.
<Will I lose my work?> he asked Medusa.
Medusa smiled for him, her expression more tender than I had ever seen it. She worked on him with her tentacles, but she positioned her face as if she were a mother bending over her child. <We’re not destroying your old implant,> she said. <It is identical in structure to the one Oichi has. We are only adding information to your databases, not taking it away. You are receiving your father’s database of movies.>
She didn’t tell him the whole truth—that she was inspecting his implant to make sure Sultana and Tetsuko weren’t using it to spy on him. Ashur could get his father’s database through his unit, once they bonded.
<It’s okay,> Medusa messaged me privately. <There are no Trojan horses in here.> She sealed Ashur’s skull with instruments extended from her tentacles, tugged his scalp back into place, and glued it together so one could hardly tell it had been opened. Nuruddin stood by to hold his son’s hand, but after one hearty squeeze, Ashur decided to treat his upgrade as a rite of passage.
<I’m a big boy now,> he said. <I have a lot of responsibility.>
<There’s just one more thing for you to do,> I said.
Ashur sat up and focused on the Medusa unit who waited nearby. She stirred.
Nuruddin said, <What will you call her?>
<Octopippin!> said Ashur
.
I wondered if the rest of the new generation would make up fanciful names for their units.
When Ashur drew his friends to us, he would be the one to attend their pairings, since their parents knew nothing about any of it. It was a violation of their family rights—and I judged it to be our best chance of protecting them from the consequences of Sultana and Tetsuko’s actions. Nuruddin had seen the logic of that when I told him what I wanted to do.
But there were other consequences to consider. As we watched Ashur bond with Octopippin, Nuruddin sent me a private message:
<Oichi, when this eventually comes to light, I think it’s going to end my relationship with Jon.>
I didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t sound either lame or defensive.
<I don’t blame you for what’s happened,> said Nuruddin. <This is the Pandora’s box I opened when I decided to rescue the movies from the trash.>
I could have pointed out that I was the one who had recruited him when he realized who I was, because I was the one who would have killed him otherwise, even though (in retrospect) I could have trusted him to keep my secret without getting him so embroiled in my doings. But I decided to count my blessings and keep my mouth shut.
Ashur and Octopippin merged, and her face slipped over his. He was about to see and do things that Nuruddin and I never dreamed of at his age. And I remembered that boy from Kurosawa’s movie, hiding behind his tree and watching the stately procession of foxes in their wedding finery. They wore human guise, but their faces were utterly devoid of compassion. When they realized someone was watching them, they turned their heads in unison to stare at the intruder. The boy suffered consequences for his forbidden knowledge.
That must never happen to Ashur.
<Octopippin will keep him safe,> I said. <All our units will put the children first.>
<Yes.> Nuruddin smiled, and he looked less worried. <But Jon is his father, too, and he was not consulted. It comes down to that.>
We stood in silence for a moment, the two of us steeping in our guilt and regret—and our hope. Then somehow I managed to think of something else to say. <Olympia has always been dangerous for people, Nuruddin. And we haven’t deserved it. They didn’t have to make it so hard for us. And they didn’t have to make it so hard for themselves. You and I have responded to a threat the best way we could. Sultana said Ashur and his friends are extraordinary. She said they would be the best collaborators we could possibly find. I hope we’re giving them a chance to prove that.>
<They will prove it,> said Nuruddin. <My children prove it to me every day.>
I thought I knew what he meant. I didn’t know, because I hadn’t learned it yet. Ashur’s link with Octopippin also linked him to me, and through me to giant entities who might still find reasons to be astonished by the imagination of a child.
<We’ve made our move,> I said. <Let’s see how our First Generation friends respond.>
I looked for Sultana and Tetsuko’s icon in my directory.
It was gone.
* * *
<They won’t like it,> I had predicted after my unpleasant interview with Sultana and Tetsuko in the air lock. <They said it would be safe to link the kids with Medusa units in a few years. They’re going to see my actions as more interference.>
<All the more reason to do a little exploring on our own.> Medusa inspected Sultana’s pressure suit as thoroughly as she had examined the deepsleep units. <You’re right about this technology. It’s superior. It reminds me of something else we’ve seen recently.>
Medusa placed the pressure suit inside the storage locker much more carefully than Sultana had. It didn’t quite fit the fixtures, but it was an improvement to simply stuffing the thing in there.
<I have a hunch I’d like to follow,> she said.
<Follow it where?>
<To Escape. I want to see what’s inside that ship’s storage lockers.>
<More suits like this one?>
<Maybe.>
<Can we get inside?>
<Shall we find out?>
We went out one of the smaller locks. Once on the surface of Olympia, we traveled at speeds that would have made Sultana jealous. But we had a long way to go.
This time the music in my head fit the dissonance of my mood: the Stokowski arrangement of The Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky, from an animated movie called Fantasia. We were so far from our destination, I had worked my way through The Rite and was well into the score Prokofiev wrote for Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible by the time the scarp of the engine rims loomed ahead.
Medusa made the leap from the spinning bulk of Olympia to the massive drive plate on which the interface panels were grafted. In zero gravity this shouldn’t be as scary as it is, since you can’t fall into the gap between the spin arms and the pressure plate.
But it sure looks as if you could. I made myself stare into that space anyway; the machinery exposed there is both marvelous and instructive.
Then the engine rim grew in my field of vision until it was all I could see. I felt a jolt as Medusa’s tentacles struck the rim and absorbed our impact.
As she hurtled toward the terminus, I felt a pang of anxiety. What if Escape is gone? What if someone moved it?
But it was right where it had been the last time we saw it.
<How are we going to get inside?> I said, determined to find something to be anxious about.
<I’m going to see if I can talk to Escape without alerting anyone who may be monitoring her,> said Medusa.
I remembered seeing an access lock the last time we visited. Medusa crawled over to it. I could see the virtual control panel through her link, but the code that she exchanged with the ship’s security system scrolled by too quickly for me to make much sense of it. I wondered how long we would have to perch there.
Then, <Bingo,> said Medusa. The outer hatch opened, and Medusa stuffed us inside like a cephalopod claiming a new shell. The hatch closed, and we waited for the air lock to cycle. Once there was atmosphere to breathe, we separated.
My feet touched the floor. <A gravity field! It’s light, but it’s here.>
<The flip side of gravity bomb technology.> Medusa sounded annoyed. She liked the freedom zero g gave her movements. But she adapted quickly, grasping things that protruded from the bulkhead to propel herself through the interior of the ship without touching the floor. I followed in her wake, walking cautiously in gravity that felt weak enough to throw me off balance if I moved too quickly.
Storage for pressure suits was located near the inner door of the air lock. We popped open the lockers and searched them. The pressure suits we found were just like the suits you would see in any of the storage lockers on Olympia. Medusa made a low noise that was her version of Hmnn.
<You’re surprised to find these here?> I said.
<It would have been convenient if they were like Sultana’s fancy suit. I thought the technology might be the same. But my reasoning for that could have been shaky. Both things are anomalous, so I wondered if they belonged in the same group.>
<Sheba built this ship,> I said. <Would she have any reason to associate with First Generation people?>
<If you can believe what they told you, she was dead shortly after they came out of their deepsleep units the first time. But if they helped design Olympia, they would know that things could be hidden in Olympia’s engines, now that they’re no longer in use. So I wondered if this could have been the source of their pressure suits—but they must have those cached somewhere else.>
Yet her remark about anomalies rang true, especially as we continued to inspect the interior of Escape. The dazzle fizzled once you got a good look at the inside. It seemed improvised. The pressure suits from Olympia looked clunky when viewed in that context.
The medium can’t be the message when you don’t understand the medium, I thought.
But we learned something about the interior of Escape. It had little room for storage of supplies, and we found no deepsleep units. So either Sh
eba wasn’t planning to go very far in it—or it could take her farther and faster than we dreamed.
We searched it from the air lock to its nose section. The shuttles had seats and controls for pilots and copilots. But Escape had nothing more than banks of conventional monitors. A couple of chairs were bolted to the floor, but they seemed an afterthought.
Medusa inspected the monitors. <These are from Olympia. What would they be like if they came from the same tech that made the engines? Would they even need monitors, or would it all happen inside our heads?>
I had half a second to ponder that, and then the central screen lit up.
MISSION STATUS? it said.
I had never seen Medusa look so flummoxed. It was like watching an octopus who can’t decide if she should pounce and crush something—or jet away, leaving a cloud of ink behind.
<How do they know we’re here?> I said.
Together, we reviewed what we had done since entering Escape. Our Security overlay told us there were no cameras or listening devices trained on us, and no sensors that would detect movement. But what had we touched since entering?
<My limbs would have detected any sort of feedback mechanism they touched in here.> Medusa scanned the bulkheads—then focused on my boots. She pointed with a tentacle. <It’s the pressure of your feet on the floor. Someone can tell that one person is moving around this ship.>
MISSION STATUS? began to blink on and off, as if impatient.
Unpleasantly surprised, would have been my honest answer.
And then another line appeared beneath the first: YOU’LL REGRET IT IF YOU KEEP US WAITING.
Aha! Us. So Gennady wasn’t sending the message. It sounded more like Sultana.
Yet MISSION STATUS? sounded long-term and wide-ranging. The word mission, in a professional context, describes a range of activities rather than one short-term directive. And if Gennady was unhappy to see the two deepsleep units from which Sultana and Tetsuko had emerged, it seemed unlikely he would give those First Generation agents a status report. He knew about Escape because Sheba had built it. But did Sultana and Tetsuko know about the ship?