Too Like the Lightning Page 6
「I … didn’t want anyone to think I still … I can … 」
Her smile turned from teasing to forgiveness.「You can still do it, can’t you? You can still trick the tracker system, however you did before?」
「Yes, Princesse. Please don’t tell anyone! They’ll lock me up again, I know they will. But if I’d told them they would’ve taken the means away, and I didn’t want to lose it, I need it in case … in case I need it someday to help … somebody … 」
The mercy here was that she instantly assumed my ‘somebody’ meant her own bash’.「Of course.」She gave my hair a second stroke.「You did very well to protect that ability. I’m sure it is of great service.」
「Thank you, Princesse.」
Danaë turned back to her husband now, freeing me to look down at the hat in my hands. The sight of it kicked off one of those chains of association which leads in an instant through five links to realization, or, in my case, horror. What had I done? How could I have betrayed so much, so fast? The threat of the device, of being implicated in this theft, it had seemed overwhelming, but I was innocent, and Martin would have believed me. I was not innocent of deceiving the tracker system whenever Bridger or other necessity required. Now, and forever after, Danaë could hold that over me. And so could Andō. I cursed myself inside, although, looking back, I forgive myself now. She was irresistible. Remember, reader, though I use archaic words, I am not from those barbaric centuries when men and women wore their gender like a cockerel’s plumes, advertising sex with every suit and skirt. Growing up, I saw gendered costume on the stage, in art, pornography, but to see it in real life is unbearably different: her shallow breaths within constricted ribs, her round French breasts threatening to overflow the low Japanese silks. Here, as Andō wraps his arm around her waist, the costume makes me see them in my mind: the husband wrenching the kimono back to bare the honey-wet vagina. You see now, reader, why, to tell this history, I must say ‘he’ and ‘she.’ Danaë is a thing long thought extinct, reviving out of time ancient venoms perfected by a hundred generations of gendered culture. We around her—from my weak self to the gaping guards—grew up with no inoculation against this pox we thought our ancestors had vanquished. Movies and histories gave us just enough exposure to learn these ancient cues, weakness without resistance, and we can no more unlearn them than you could unlearn your alphabet when facing an unwelcome word.
Andō took control now, stepping forward so his shadow fell across me.「You will write up everything you know about the smugglers you bought the packaging from. Thirteen years ago is not beyond the possibility of reconstruction.」
「Yes, Chief Director.」
「I hold you responsible for this. If you had made it known in the first place that the device was still in dangerous hands, I would have worked to track it down. I expect a prompt solution if you want me to conceal this … error … from the Commissioner General.」
So fast, the price of my indiscretion.「I understand, Chief Director. I will take responsibility. Should I report my findings to Martin, or to you?」
He weighed that for a breath.「Did these smugglers have a nation-strat?」
「Japanese, Chief Director. I suspect the original thieves were Japanese as well.」I hesitated, but it was better now to say things openly.「Like its makers.」
His face both darkened and calmed.「Then bring the report to me first. Martin I trust, but, within the strat, my own inquiries will open more doors than a Mason’s.」
「Yes, Chief Director.」
He peered down at me.「Who do you think had the Canner Device built in the first place?」
「Please don’t call it that.」
More firmly,「Who had the Canner Device built?」
I kept my eyes on the floor.「I know you are innocent, Chief Director.」
「That isn’t what I asked.」
I squeezed my hat.「I believe the project was ordered by the previous head of the Japanese voting bloc, but your predecessor’s guilt doesn’t make you guilty.」
「It will in China’s eyes,」he snapped.「In India’s, Korea’s. In the other Hives’. The accusation alone would be enough to shatter the strat’s hopes, and without a strong Japan the Hive will go back to being brawled over by Shanghai and Beijing, not just at the next board selection, but for a generation.」
「You think one of the Chinese blocs planned this?」
「To scare the world with what the device we made can do.」
It was a possibility, now that I mulled it over. The thief must have folded the stolen paper around the device on purpose, to let us know they had it. In my selfish panic I had assumed they only meant to target me, not the greater forces that had created the Gyges Device—that’s what I call it in my mind, after the invisibility ring from Plato’s fable, which tempts even the most virtuous to crime.
「Bury this, Mycroft,」Andō ordered.「You have Martin’s ear, and the Commissioner General’s. Bury this before it plunges the Hive back into Chinese monopoly for another fifty years.」
「I’ll do my best, Chief Director.」
「And keep Tai-kun away from the members of the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’.」
You may not recognize this Mitsubishi nickname, reader, but by ‘Tai-kun’ Andō means the Head of Martin’s team, J.E.D.D. Mason. Since there are too many reasons for Andō’s nervousness to list here, I will say simply that J.E.D.D. Mason is trusted of Andō, trusted like a son, but still a bit too close to Martin’s Emperor.
「I’ll do my best, Chief Director, but you know I only serve, I have no power to decide.」
Danaë broke in,「We know you’ll always do your best for us, good Mycroft.」I can’t express quite how, since there was no threat in her words, but something in her tone, her smile, spoke of my parole, how now she could shatter it any instant with just three words to the Commissioner General: “Only the packaging.”
I shuddered, and the Chief Director seemed contented by my fear.「Then you may go begin.」
「Thank you, Chief Director.」I scrambled up and bowed, but felt my failure as the couple turned away, the new leash around my neck called blackmail. I could not leave myself, or those who depended on me, so deeply in their power. There was no resort but French. «Do you know who else came to the bash’house today, Princesse? Apart from Martin?»
Both turned, and the princess relaxed at the music of her birth bash’ tongue, returning slow French syllables which flowed from her lips like kisses. «There was someone else?»
I could not guess whether her ignorance was feigned or real. «There was a certain sensayer.» I scanned the back room to confirm that Michi Mitsubishi—the one adopted child interning with Europe and likely to know French—was absent. It was safe to press on. «A foster child. Dark blond. Blue eyes.» I searched Danaë’s face, but the illusion of eternal youth which masks the matron’s decades masks fear lines also. «A Gag-gene,» I added. «Twenty-eight years old.»
A statue of cream-white marble seemed to stand before me in that instant, so rigid she became. I felt my hands twitch with the impulse to catch her should she faint. «What a marvelous world.» She whispered it, less to me than to the world itself, and her lashes fluttered, fighting back a tear.
«You did not know? I have to ask, Princesse, I’m sorry.»
Danaë stepped toward me, away from her husband, who frowned but backed away, respectful of his bride’s right to her separate tongue, and separate sphere. «I have never known him.» She brought her alabaster hands up to her breast, as if cradling an infant, real again in her fingers’ memory.
I glanced back to the inner chamber, where her many adopted children sprawled and stared, all so different: Hiroaki Mitsubishi with Thai features, Jun European pale and freckled, Ran with Middle Eastern tints like Martin, but none like their mother. No one had been surprised when Andō—proud of his pure Japanese breeding—and Danaë—just as proudly French—had adopted instead of mixing their blood. But still, to have held a child of her bo
dy for a day and never again, even imagining it made me ache.
«You must at least have asked where he was taken to be raised?» I asked. «What Hive he joined?»
Another tear-gilded blink. «No, nothing. It was judged kindest that way.»
«Who took the child away? His Grace your brother? Your honored husband?» I avoided the French for ‘Chief Director,’ since even Andō could recognize that.
«He was handed to the doctor.» The ghost of a smile softened her sadness. «He didn’t cry. Brave little one.»
«I told him nothing. I’m sure he doesn’t know.» It was the best comfort I could offer.
«Thank you.»
Her thanks warmed me, made me bold. «I found it hard to believe that he, of all sensayers in the world, would be sent to that bash’ by chance. Can you think of anyone who might have traced him? Any reason anyone could have to dredge this up after so long? To embroil him in this mess with the theft and the device?»
Three times she parted her lips, a different syllable shaped each time, but only the third time did she voice it. «Is he happy?»
I lowered my eyes. It was the right question, the only real question a loving heart would ask. And had she had a different upbringing it might have been hard to answer. «The Patriarch wrote that the halfwit is always happier than the philosopher, but the philosopher would not trade knowledge for ignorance, not for all the happiness in the world. Your son seemed to me half a philosopher, but still half happy.»
Do you know the reference, reader? Or does your age, forgetful of its past, no longer know Le Patriarch by that worthy epithet? Have you forgotten the first pen stronger than swords? The firebrand who spread Reason’s light across the Earth, battled intolerance, religious persecution, torture, forced kings to bow before the Rights of Man, and introduced wit into philosophy again? Is Aristotle not still known by the honorable title of the Philosopher? Shakespeare the Bard? Brill the Cognitivist? How then can you forget the Patriarch? Perhaps you protest, Thou accusest me unjustly, Mycroft. History has not swallowed this great man, rather he has swallowed history. I do not know who created the first government, or built the first wheel—it is so ubiquitous that I do not need to. Just so, my better era does not teach me who first fought for these good heresies you list, for they are now Truths, and the blind age that doubted them is well forgotten. Perhaps you are right, reader, it is honor, not dishonor, if you forget the Patriarch. We now doubt Aristotle, understand Shakespeare only with footnotes, poke holes in Brill, but the Patriarch, whom all Earth follows without thinking there could be another way, he has indeed swallowed us up. But he has not so swallowed Danaë, reared, as she was, as if in his own age, when he—her Patriarch—needed defending. Voltaire, reader, the Patriarch of the Eighteenth Century, the era which has just remade your own, it was Voltaire.
A Lady of Danaë’s education knows the corpus of the Patriarch by heart. «A good answer, Mycroft.» Heartache’s remnants gave her French a somber tint. «Thank you. If he has been drawn into this by some cruel manipulator, I know you will protect him.»
I had meant to trade blackmail for blackmail here, but instead found myself drawn into pity, for Danaë, and for young Carlyle, too. My mind buzzed with measures to protect them, the lady from the enemies of Mitsubishi and Japan, the sensayer from the stern Major, from overcautious Thisbe, from himself, mistakes he might make in the first giddy hours after meeting Bridger. That thought warmed me, the strange, sideways kindness of Providence, which had stripped the Gag-gene of bash’ and past and family, only to give him a treasure which was, to any sensayer, a thousand times more precious: a miracle. «Actually, Princesse, I think he has both much knowledge and much happiness, at least where it matters.»
If some brave painter captured her smile on canvas it would draw crowds down the centuries. «Thank you.» Then again in Japanese, for all to hear,「Thank you, Mycroft. And we must thank my dear brother for calling you and Martin in to solve this. I know all feel safer in your hands.」
Director Andō nodded my dismissal, and Princesse Danaë passed me my Servicer’s reward at last, a round lunch box, tied and too heavy to be anything but sushi. My many masters don’t always remember they must feed me, that their toil-earned handouts are the only sustenance permitted to we the unfree. But Danaë—this monster from a more barbaric time—always remembers the protocols of servitude.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
Aristotle’s House
I muse sometimes about where else in history I might have picked to be a slave, if I had had my choice. I could have been a slave in Aristotle’s house, when he reared Alexander. I could have midwifed at the birth of Caesar. As a slave-convict I might have added my sweat-drenched kilometer to the railroads that saddled the great continents, my heaven-bound cable to the first Space Elevator, or sweated in the rigging of the Santa Maria as she erased the dragons at the world’s end and knit the whole sphere closed. If we count apprenticeship as an unfreedom, I might have been the typesetter who forged Newton’s Principia letter by letter with his own black fingers, or the clerk who brought the coffee to Brill’s circle as the master ranted into the wee hours, with silent Cullen in the corner, already dreaming of her bash’es. In any of these servitudes I would probably have cursed the great works I touched, the great men I called masters, nor would knowing they were great have lessened my suffering one toil-smeared jot. Yet somehow the idea warms me, that, out of every thousand lives of suffering my ancient counterparts endured, one slave was building something that his soul, if it could view all from outside of time, might call Great. It cannot wash away humanity’s great cruelties, but Fate’s cruelties, those, I think, it mitigates a little, and, for me, a little is enough.
I was scrubbing spilled perfume from Thisbe’s bedroom floor when Carlyle Foster made his timid way back to the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house. I watched him through the security system which, for Bridger’s safety, Thisbe let me access. He started toward the little stair to Thisbe’s door again, but the main door opened for him, beckoning him across the walkway to the front hall, dark and empty.
The words appeared as text in Carlyle’s lenses, and the log of them makes it easy for me to reconstruct the scene.
The sensayer tiptoed across the walkway and peered into the spartan trophy hall. “Hello?”
“Mycroft said I’d be back?” Carlyle crept along the empty hall, nervous as a new cat.
Carlyle’s breath caught when he reached the central room where Mukta hung in her place of honor, looking so like the textbooks. Or perhaps it was the two people sprawled on the floor who made him gasp. Both wore time-scuffed bathrobes over body suits of transparent conducting film, tight as a second skin. Thin, molded helmets covered their scalps and ears, and a strip of plastic taut across the eyes kept the real world’s light from interfering with the computer’s. The films over their limbs were pocked by the round red spots of tactile feedback discs, positioned far apart on the less discerning surfaces of shoulders and fleshy thighs, but dense as strawberry seeds on the nerve-packed skin of hands and faces where a millimeter’s difference is perceptible. One of the two snored softly, but the other waved.
Carlyle smiled. “Hello. You must be Member Eureka Weeksbooth?”
“And that’s Member Sidney Koons?” Carlyle gestured to the sleeping one before remembering Eureka could not see.
“I have to if I’m going to be your sensayer. My first appointment with you
is next Thursday, I believe.”
“My stat trail?” Carlyle scratched his head, his blond hair shining glossy in the light despite its neglectful overgrowth.
I saw Carlyle’s flinch over the cameras: his first test keeping the secret. “Are you looking at my tracker data?”
“I wanted to talk to Thisbe again, or to that Servicer named Mycroft who apparently comes here a lot?” Carlyle’s voice had that slight shrill edge of someone who fears he might be less than plausible. “Yours is a very important bash’, and this is a very special situation. When you all have the same sensayer and something happens to them you all need to mourn at once, but you’ve just lost the one person who could help you do it. I need to help you get comfortable with me as quickly as I can, and sometimes that’ll mean repeat sessions.”