A Working of Stars (19 page)
Read A Working of Stars Online
Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald
Over in the right-hand seat, the pilot was working with the control switches and the twist-knobs, her eyes fixed on the distance and horizon readouts. Arekhon thought suddenly of Elaeli, who had also been trained to do this and who had done it well, and looked away again to watch the sky turn from sunlit blue to violet to black with stars.
“In orbit,” Karil said at last, unstrapping her webbing. “Ready to try out those suits?”
Zeri sus-Dariv still didn’t know whether she was being kidnapped or being rescued. So far, she felt inclined toward the latter—which, she was prepared to admit, might have more to do with her reluctance to complete the process of becoming sus-Peledaen than it did with any rational assessment of the situation.
Her—abductor? rescuer?—her current companion had treated her with courteous efficiency, turning his back in the withdrawing-room while she stripped out of her wedding finery and put on the loose workaday trousers and baggy overshirt that he’d brought along with him. They’d stuffed the flame-red dress and the bridal crown into the paper shopping bag he’d brought the work clothes in, and taken the bag with them when they left the room by the garden window.
They dumped the bag and its contents into a back-alley trash bin a few blocks away, after she used a fold of her gown’s soft-textured fabric to wipe her face clean of ’Yida’s carefully applied maquillage.
“I won’t make a convincing nobody if I’m walking around Hanilat with a wedding-day face on,” she said. “The orange slippers are bad enough.”
Her companion—Len, was it, he’d called himself?—pointed at a puddle of something Zeri hoped was only mud. “Walk through that.”
“It looks disgusting,” she said; but he had the right idea, and she was already stepping into the puddle as she spoke. “And it smells worse. Stage two of this daring endeavor had better include picking up suitable footgear.”
“Blame your cousin, my lady. He’s the one who put the kit together.”
“I’ll be kind,” Zeri said, “and assume that he was trying not to copy anything he thought I would actually wear.”
That had been five city blocks and two transit stops ago, and now she and Len were strolling through Bricklayers’ Park hand-in-hand like a pair of slightly shabby young lovers out taking some fresh air during their noonday break. As a desperate getaway, it was a very low-key, almost slow-motion procedure.
“One would think that we’d be running for our lives at this point,” she said eventually. “The sus-Peledaen probably have every watch-patrolman in Hanilat looking for us by now.”
“Probably. And if we start running, we’ll draw their attention for sure.”
“Then by all means, let’s not run.” They continued along in silence under the rustling shade trees. Here in the depths of the park, the steel-and-glass commercial towers of central Hanilat were barely visible, and the noise of the city was muffled. Eventually she said, “Where exactly are we not-running to?”
“A safe house, or so your cousin says.”
“And then what? If I’m running away from my own wedding on Herin’s say-so, he’d better have some kind of plan.”
“I’m not your cousin,” Len said, “but if I were him I’d be planning to wait out the worst of the hue and cry before making another move. The first thing Lord Natelth’s going to do is close the spaceport, and there’s no point in trying to smuggle you off-planet while that’s going on. Not even if we put you up in a metal drum labeled ‘preserved greyfish in wrinklefruit sauce’ and export you as a local delicacy.”
“I don’t like wrinklefruit sauce,” she said. “Red-wine pickle, yes. Wrinklefruit, no. How long do you think we’ll have to wait?”
He shrugged. “Lord Natelth doesn’t confide these things in me, my lady. But I’d say not too long. The port can’t stay closed forever—sooner or later, cargoes have to start moving or the sus-Peledaen go hungry. And your husband’s fellow-star-lords won’t be much pleased with him, either.”
“I can’t imagine why,” Zeri said. “And all this talk of pickled greyfish is making me hungry. Did my cousin give you enough money to buy something to eat?”
“That part of the bold escape plan seems to have slipped his mind,” Len said. “But don’t fret about it—I just got paid off for delivering a cargo. I can afford to buy some lizard-on-a-stick for a pretty girl.”
Zeri felt herself blush, which was ridiculous considering the difference in their respective stations and the fact that she was wearing Cousin Herin’s idea of inconspicuous clothing. She concentrated instead on the pushcart vendor who’d set up his temporary shop next to the path up ahead. The writing on his menu card was in the antipodean script, and she didn’t recognize any of the food items being offered.
“Is that stuff really lizard-on-a-stick?” she inquired under her breath. “I’m sure it’s absolutely delicious, but I’ve never—”
He laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s ordinary spiced sausage. On Rayamet, now, it probably
would
be lizard.”
would
be lizard.”
They ambled over to the pushcart, where Len purchased two of the grilled sausages and a couple of bottles of chilled red
uffa,
and from there they went to a cool stone bench set in the shade of the trees. Zeri took a tentative bite of the hot, highly seasoned sausage, and found it delicious. She hadn’t realized how little appetite she’d had for the past few weeks—nothing had tasted worth eating, and half the time she hadn’t bothered—but she thought she could have eaten a dozen of the sausages. It wouldn’t be right to impose upon Len, though, when he’d used his own money once already to make up for Herin’s deficiencies.
uffa,
and from there they went to a cool stone bench set in the shade of the trees. Zeri took a tentative bite of the hot, highly seasoned sausage, and found it delicious. She hadn’t realized how little appetite she’d had for the past few weeks—nothing had tasted worth eating, and half the time she hadn’t bothered—but she thought she could have eaten a dozen of the sausages. It wouldn’t be right to impose upon Len, though, when he’d used his own money once already to make up for Herin’s deficiencies.
Instead, she licked the last of the sausage grease off of her fingers and said, “So when do we go looking for this safe house my cousin told you about? I don’t want—”
“—to sleep out in the rain all night?” said an unfamiliar voice. “I don’t blame you one bit.”
The new speaker was an older woman, trimly built, dressed in an all-black and better-fitting version of the plain work clothes that Herin had provided for the getaway bag. She carried a hardmask in one hand—which implied that she was well known enough in some quarters to go incognito—and she wore a Mage’s staff at her belt. Her hair was a brown so dark it looked like a rusty black, and her expression was cheerful and amused.
“Good afternoon, my lady,” she said. “Shall we be going, then?”
When Kief returned home from his day with Ayil syn-Arvedan and, later, with the Institute Circle, he found a summons on his desktop waiting for him: a time, now scarcely two hours distant, an address, and a block of encrypted text that served as a signature.
Isayana sus-Khalgath,
he thought.
On her brother’s wedding day, no less
.
he thought.
On her brother’s wedding day, no less
.
Curiosity as much as anything else spurred him into quick movement. He made the journey across town in street clothes, taking only his staff with him—if Natelth’s sister wanted a full-scale working, she wasn’t going to get it before tomorrow at the earliest. It took time to gather a Circle, if its members weren’t already living under the same roof. There would be messages to send out, and last-minute arrangements to make—somebody would have to cancel a business meeting, and somebody else would have to find a neighbor to take the children; it was no wonder that Garrod had kept everybody together at Demaizen.
Garrod had also possessed a private fortune and nothing else to spend it on, and he hadn’t been trying to reinvent the structure of the Circles from the ground up, either. He would never have thought of subordinating another Circle to Demaizen, feeding its energies into Demaizen’s working and focusing them through Demaizen’s intent. But Kief
had
thought of it—intrigued by tales of the antipodean Circles ending a drought by directing all their separate workings toward the same end—and Kief was doing it. On his own, with no money to speak of, and with an official patron who would undoubtedly be horrified if he realized the implications of what the First of his personal Mage-Circle was doing.
had
thought of it—intrigued by tales of the antipodean Circles ending a drought by directing all their separate workings toward the same end—and Kief was doing it. On his own, with no money to speak of, and with an official patron who would undoubtedly be horrified if he realized the implications of what the First of his personal Mage-Circle was doing.
Isayana, on the other hand, wouldn’t care. She had her own plans, Kief was sure of that much, and someday Lord Natelth was going to be sorry he’d taken his sister and her skills for granted. Considering the timing, this might even be the day.
The address Isayana had given him wasn’t far from the sus-Peledaen town house. She had a set of workrooms on the building’s basement level, full of examining tables and biomedical
aiketen
and deep rectangular vats full of quasi-organic gel. She met him there, still dressed in wedding-banquet finery beneath her work apron.
aiketen
and deep rectangular vats full of quasi-organic gel. She met him there, still dressed in wedding-banquet finery beneath her work apron.
“Kiefen
etaze,”
she said, “my brother has a problem. Someone has spirited away his new-wedded bride, and he desires very greatly to find out who.”
etaze,”
she said, “my brother has a problem. Someone has spirited away his new-wedded bride, and he desires very greatly to find out who.”
“Look for somebody with the young woman’s best interests at heart,” Kief suggested.
She smiled without humor. “We need something more specific than that, I’m afraid. I have a blood sample, and I intend to give my brother a demonstration of forensic replicant technology.”
So that’s what she was up to: vat-grown bodies to match the quasi-organic minds she built and instructed for the sus-Peledaen. With blood for a seed, she could replicate the form of Zeri sus-Dariv’s kidnapper. Except—“You don’t need a Mage for that.”
“I don’t want to stop there.” She stepped over to the nearest of the gel-vats and turned on the overhead worklights. “Have a look—I’ve taken the process as far as I can without a breakthrough, and I want an outsider’s eye on it this time.”
Kief gazed down at the shape in the gel-vat: blank, undifferentiated, only vaguely human. “I can see why. Whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t seem to be working.”
“This step isn’t the one that’s causing trouble. You have to expect an unseeded replicant to look like that.”
“If you say so.” Privately, Kief found the faceless, generic body to be disgusting, but he didn’t think that saying so would be a good idea. “The blood seeds it, then?”
“Yes. The process at that point requires a template—I’ve tried working without one, but when I do that the gel won’t stabilize.”
“But that isn’t a problem?”
“Not particularly. Blood samples are easy to come by—I’ve been using my own, so far.”
Kief tried to picture the thing in the gel-vat with Isayana’s face and form. The image was unpleasantly disturbing, and he put it aside with an internal shudder. “So what’s the difficulty with the next stage?”
“They’re just meat.” Isayana frowned at the thing in the vat. “I can make them and give them shape, I can grow them to full maturity—but when I take them out of the gel, they’re still nothing but meat.”
Good
, Kief thought, but he knew better than to say such things aloud. “You believe that this is a problem for the Circles?”
, Kief thought, but he knew better than to say such things aloud. “You believe that this is a problem for the Circles?”
“Yes. I caught myself thinking that ‘Rekhe would know what the problem was, and then I remembered that ’Rekhe was dead.”
Kief said, “I can tell you right now what the problem is.”
“What?”
“The
eiran.
They don’t connect to it—they don’t touch it anywhere at all.”
eiran.
They don’t connect to it—they don’t touch it anywhere at all.”
Isayana looked puzzled, an expression Kief had seen before on mechanics and artificers when something didn’t work that by all reason should have. “But the replicant lives, and ’Rekhe always said that the
eiran
touch all the living things in the whole universe.”
eiran
touch all the living things in the whole universe.”
“’Rekhe hadn’t seen one of these when he said that,” Kief pointed out. “Maybe if you’d started it young, let it grow up in the world as a living thing, not forcing it in a vat—”
“This is what I
can
do,” she said. “Anything else is ordinary sperm-and-egg work. And why would anybody bother to hire that job done in a laboratory, when the old way is cheaper and easier and almost as dependable?”
can
do,” she said. “Anything else is ordinary sperm-and-egg work. And why would anybody bother to hire that job done in a laboratory, when the old way is cheaper and easier and almost as dependable?”
Kief could think of any number of people who might want or need the kind of replicant that Isayana had dismissed so lightly, but it wasn’t his place to point that out to her now. “If you want to connect this thing to the
eiran
—to make it truly alive—I can only think of one way to do it.”
eiran
—to make it truly alive—I can only think of one way to do it.”
Her expression sharpened. “So you can help.”
“In theory.”
“What do you mean, ‘in theory’?”
“I believe that the only way to make one of your constructs into a living person is to draw a living person out of their old body and use the
eiran
to bind them into a new one.” Considered as an abstract problem it was interesting, Kief had to admit. “It would take a Mage to do such a thing—you’re right about that—with at least a full Circle to back him up. And I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t work unless you had a willing subject.”
eiran
to bind them into a new one.” Considered as an abstract problem it was interesting, Kief had to admit. “It would take a Mage to do such a thing—you’re right about that—with at least a full Circle to back him up. And I’m fairly certain it wouldn’t work unless you had a willing subject.”
“I want you to think about how to do this,” Isayana said. “Work it out now, so that when I’m ready for you to do it, we won’t be delayed by having to make whatever sort of plans and calculations your people need.”
Sudden and clandestine—Kief didn’t need to see the
eiran
to know that nothing going on here was a straightforward matter. “This is one of those projects that Natelth doesn’t know about,” he said. “Right?”
eiran
to know that nothing going on here was a straightforward matter. “This is one of those projects that Natelth doesn’t know about,” he said. “Right?”
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