Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (11 page)

Ord stepped in front of him, its tentacles raised in an inverted V. That was Ord’s shot at a pleading gesture, but the sentiment wasn’t reflected in its pale eye disks. “Come home, Lot,” it wheedled. “Rest. Counseling.”

Lot stepped grimly over it, activating the panel that it occupied
No match
.

“Please Lot.”

No match.

“Come home.”

No match.

“Good Lot. Good boy. City authority doesn’t need to know.”

“They already know. Get out of my way.” He could hear Urban coming up behind him. They only had a handful of panels to go. They had to finish. At the least, they had to know.

Ord scrabbled back in front of him, its tentacles dancing around his ankles, not quite daring to touch. “Authority doesn’t know, Lot. Good Lot. It’s not too late.”

They rounded the curve. Lot had expected to see security forces at the lock, but there was no one. He stepped onto the last panel in his circuit.
No match
.

Only then did he notice the camera bee resting motionless on the floor in front of him. It lacked the green stripes that would mark it as a device belonging to city security. Instead it carried the emblem of a news service. An eerie feeling swept over him. Carefully, he stepped around the bee, then glanced back. Urban was just finishing his circuit. Gent had ten or twelve panels to go. And security still hadn’t arrived.

Abruptly, the camera bee lifted into the air. It hovered between Lot and Urban, its water-bead eye reflecting the dark, curving walls. “
How much do you know?
” it demanded, in a tiny, tinny, feminine voice. “
Do you know why cold storage is empty? No. I can see not. That shock on your faces. Shao? Stop recording. We have enough video to do the story. Now I want to know why.
”

Lot and Urban exchanged a glance. “It’s Yulyssa,” Lot said, recognizing the lilt of her voice even through the camera bee’s lousy audio. Yulyssa had taken an interest in him from that first day in the tunnel. Not a professional interest. Though she was a mediot, she’d never done a story on him. But in those first years she’d spent time with him, taking him on fun excursions to a soccer game or a concert, or to the surf pool in Spoken Verities, or for a wild ride in the VR crash chamber, which he hadn’t liked, or—most often—to lunch at tiny restaurants known only to the very real. She’d helped him with his accent and made sure he learned Silken table manners. He’d liked those times, but as he’d gotten older he’d seen her less, until finally she stopped coming around.

But apparently she hadn’t forgotten him. “We came looking for Jupiter,” he told her resentfully.

“
You didn’t find him.
”

Lot glanced questioningly at Gent; caught the slight, negative shake of his head as he switched off his mate finder. “No. City authority lied. He’s not here. He never was here—”

“Dumb ados will believe anything,” Urban interrupted. “But you’re one of them. You knew better, didn’t you?”

The camera bee dipped slightly. Was that an answer? Lot stepped forward, a fist clenched in frustration. “I saw the elevator car descend,” he insisted.

Yulyssa said, “
I saw it too.
”

Doubt had eaten at Lot so many years, this simple confirmation left him stunned. “You knew? But you never said anything. . . .”

The camera bee dipped again. “
It seemed right at the time. So many people had already died.
”

“At the time . . . ?” Urban mused, a look of fine ado cynicism on his face.

“
You weren’t there, Urban
,” Yulyssa said. “
You didn’t see it.
”

Lot felt his guts twist. “So what did they do to everybody?” His hand swept out across the panels.

“
That I don’t know. I don’t know why cold storage is empty.
”

“I do,” Lot said. “It’s because Jupiter’s alive.”

Yulyssa demurred. “
That wouldn’t be my first guess
—”

But Gent interrupted her. “It’s time to go. We only have a few minutes before—”

Urban cut him off with a sharp look. He turned to the camera bee, his eyes dark with a feral excitement only half-concealed. “Do your story,” he told Yulyssa. “We’re not afraid of that, though of course it’ll lead to our arrest. But if you’ve got any sense of justice, you’ll hold off releasing it until the rally tonight.” He grinned. “After that, it won’t matter who knows.”

He crooked two fingers at Lot. “Come on. Let’s go.”

Lot hesitated, looking back at the camera bee. Yulyssa had seen the elevator descend and yet she’d never said anything. What else did she know?

Gent touched his elbow. “Come on. Urban’s right. We don’t have any choice now.”

CHAPTER

8

I
N
L
OT’S CARNIVOROUS-PLANT COLLECTION THERE WERE
several sundews started from seeds that Netta had given him. The sundews were tiny. If Lot made a circle of his thumb and forefinger, each plant could fit within it. They had no stems, only thin petioles growing from a central bud, each petiole supporting a sticky paddle at its end.

One of the seedling sundews had caught a small fly. Lot leaned closer, remote implications suddenly resonant in his mind. He had to wonder: Of what use were the tiny insects to the well-being of this city? They were pests. They dove into fruit salads and sweet wines and flew too close to people’s faces and died on countertops in untidy heaps. But they were here, having successfully tagged along with their human cousins through the waves of migration that had expanded the Hallowed Vasties, venturing uninvited all the way into the Chenzeme Intersection.

He watched the tiny antennae of the trapped fly wriggle helplessly, while its legs sank deeper into the sticky goo that coated the paddle of the sundew. The paddle itself was no larger than the white crescent at the base of Lot’s thumbnail. It sprouted minute, dew-studded rays in a breathtaking, delicate architecture. Some of these bowed over the body of the fly, sealing it deeper in sticky juices. Sweet juices, irresistibly attractive to the little insect. Now the fly’s body would slowly dissolve, becoming part of the sundew’s tissue.

Lot wondered if the fly would have followed the sundew’s sweet scent if it could have comprehended the danger ahead of time. And he decided that it probably would have. Consciousness did not negate instinct. It only provided a post for self-observation.

The disembodied voice of the apartment’s majordomo interrupted these thoughts: “A call for you, Master Lot Apolinario. Madam Yulyssa Desearange. Will you receive it?”

He realized he’d been half-expecting to hear from her. “Hold on.” He got up and dug around in his cabinets until he found the headset for his rarely used phone. “Okay.”

He slipped on the visor and Yulyssa’s image appeared overlaid against the background of his room. She still looked much the same as she had that day in the tunnel, when she’d come down with Kona to view the dead. “I wish you had stayed home,” she said.

“Are you holding the story?”

“For now. I want to talk to you.”

“I have questions too.”

“Do you know where my cameraman Shao lives, in Vibrant Harmony?”

“No.”

“I’ll send a bee for you then. Twenty minutes?”

“Five’s okay.”

The fly still kicked and struggled on the sundew’s glistening paddle. Lot was aware of it, in the corner of his vision.

L
OT NEVER LEARNED IF
S
HAO WAS HOME
. The bee led him through an open gate to a garden patio behind the house, where Yulyssa was transferring two steaming plates from a service ‘bot to the table. He presumed Ord had followed him, though it had kept scrupulously out of sight.

“Lunch by Savuti’s,” Yulyssa announced. “Hope that’s all right.”

“We ate there once.”

“You seemed to like it.” She poured a pale wine into long-stemmed glasses. Her aura felt dry as afternoon air, marbled through with baked scents of pleasure and anxiety and vaguer things he could not quite name.

She took a seat. He sat down too, his fingers curling immediately around the stem of a wineglass while he asked the question he had never before been allowed to ask. “What happened to Jupiter after the elevator car left the city?”

“I don’t know.” She answered so smoothly she might have been practicing.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” he burst out. “You’re part of authority.”

“I’m not. I’m independent.”

He moved his head slowly back and forth, encountering something like truth on the air. Yulyssa was very real. In her news reports she often seemed to know more about city business than the junior council members. Yet she hadn’t known cold storage was empty.

He felt naive because he wanted to believe her. “Who
would
know what happened to Jupiter?” he asked, feeling gullible and penitent at once.

“Nobody knows.” Her hand rose in a gesture meant to slow his natural protest. “There’s been no sign of him in the Well. I do know that. I’ve accessed the planetary wardens and looked myself.”

“Somebody knows,” Lot insisted. “Someone’s seen him. It’s why they emptied cold storage. They’re afraid he’ll revive the army.”

Yulyssa picked up her glass, a half-smile on her face. “Try the wine, Lot. Shao found the recipe on a deep run in the city library.”

Lot was surprised to rediscover the glass in his hand. The wine tasted of honesty. Yulyssa gave him time to savor it, before indulging her own curiosity. “Did Jupiter ever talk to you about the Hallowed Vasties?”

A sourceless tension ran through him. He studied her warily, the fumes from the wine addling his sensory tears.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“I don’t know.” Still, he could feel a memory on the edge of recall.

“You know something.” She was very curious, leaning forward, her dark eyes hungry.

“I’m not sure. Maybe.” Did he
want
to satisfy her? He wasn’t sure. He picked up chopsticks, nipping at the marinated dumplings on his plate. Her curiosity mobbed him, though it was cut by a heavy share of anxiety.

“Lot?”

He put the dumpling in his mouth and chewed, but he didn’t taste it. “There’s nothing to tell. All I’ve got is a feeling.” A feeling of dread. But he knew he could pull more out of fixed memory if he tried.

His fixed memories were an eclectic collection. Jupiter had given him some: spare facts and essential data that could not be allowed to degrade in organic memory. Others had crept in when he’d been an infant and still others had been burned in by trauma. But most were of his own choosing: brief scenes and moments of no intrinsic importance, but that had appealed to him once, so that he’d taken a second to fix the image, seizing it with the same fleeting sense of conquest he might have felt stooping to retrieve a shiny sequin that had fallen from a girl’s dress, or plucking an unusual seedpod from the garden—childhood treasures that gave him a powerful connection to a past that sometimes seemed little more than myth. He didn’t often think about the past, but when he did he could unlock scenes that would play themselves out in his head like a virtual skit.

“The Hallowed Vasties,” Yulyssa urged.

“Yeah.” Her curiosity had worked its way inside him, to become his own. “Yeah, I do remember something.”

H
E REMEMBERED WAKING ABRUPTLY DEEP IN SHIP’S NIGHT
, brought instantly to full consciousness by a wiry sense of foreboding. He’d been maybe five, six at the most. Sliding out of bed, his heart had hammered with the harmonic stirrings of his own answering fear. Around him, the soft breathing of other children blended in a pneumatic chorus, their dreams filling the darkness with madly jumbled sense.

He stepped cautiously out of the creche, his commando training letting him move across the planking of the garden deck without a sound. Torches burned low over the vegetation, casting quivering shadows that grabbed and scraped at the night. He moved his head slowly back and forth, letting Nesseleth’s humid air run over his sensory tears, its message of dread etching stark lines of shadow across his mind.

He glanced back. Other doorways opened onto the deck. He half-expected his mother or some other member of the marriage to emerge from one of the dark arches and testily order him back to sleep. But all he heard was the soft fussing of a baby.

So he stepped down onto the path, his fingers trembling and a cold-messy sense chewing at his gut. Through the garden and out the arched gate into the warrens. Dim footlights came on. He passed the gates of neighboring compounds, though he didn’t peer within at the gardens, the private courtyards. From unseen fountains the trickle of water reached him. Night blossoms pumped their heavy perfumes onto the air. This was his world, and in his mind it had taken on a sense of permanence despite Jupiter’s admonitions that Nesseleth was only one step in a journey to transcendence that had begun long before Lot’s birth. Tonight, for the first time, he felt the evanescence of their lives.

Down four levels on a spiraling stair, his weight growing in oppressive increments as he descended. A round foyer at its bottom, on its opposite side an ornate black and red lacquer moon gate that opened on to Jupiter’s strategic chamber.

Lot edged across the foyer floor. A dim illumination spilled out from the room. When he peered past the round gate he could see that the light came from an astronomical projection. At the room’s center, embedded in a field of white and reddish stars, a dull red sphere glowed faintly—a cordon of the Hallowed Vasties. It appeared to be a solid object, but really it was a swarm of orbiting habitats so dense they hid the light of the central star . . . or they should have. This cordon looked shattered, as if some recent blow had opened in it a network of wire-thin cracks through which a blazing white light glowed.

Jupiter sat in an armchair to one side of the projection pit. He watched Lot with eyes sunken into shadows. The dread that had pulled Lot from his sleep had now grown into a tidal pressure, and Jupiter was its source.