Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (16 page)

“Umm. That won’t work either. No one in our knowledge path has ever succeeded in examining a functional Chenzeme weapon.”

She carefully left open the chance that somebody, somewhere, had done it. Not that it mattered. Knowledge moved slowly, if at all, across the gulfs of light-years. Radio signals might carry data in the Hallowed Vasties, but in the Chenzeme Intersection any radio signal strong enough for interstellar communication would draw the war weapons, so cross-fertilization between cultures was left to the occasional great ship. In the slow ecology of the void the spread of useful data was random and erratic. What was common knowledge in one culture might remain dark mystery in another as their knowledge paths diverged from a common root. Somewhere in the Chenzeme Intersection someone might have dissected a functional weapon of the old murderers, but that information had no way of reaching Silk.

Still, there was another possibility. “Would the weapon have to be functional?” Lot asked.

“You’re thinking of the swan burster.”

“Yeah.” He remembered the thoughtful way Kona had gazed at it, while standing at his apartment window.

Yulyssa shook her head slowly. “We examined the ring when we first came here. The Old Silkens investigated it too. That’s why they settled here, you know. They came explicitly to study it.”

“And?”

She shrugged. “We know the swan burster warps the structure of space-time within its circle. It seems to draw its energy from the zero-point field, though we haven’t begun to understand how . . . or why this particular specimen has become quiescent. The Old Silkens felt the decision-making structure within the ring had been corrupted so that it could not respond. That’s still the best theory I’ve heard.”

“Has any work been done lately?”

She shook her head. “Nothing’s been reported.”

“But city authority doesn’t report everything.”

Her eyes closed. “That’s true. So true.
Oh, Kona!
I always thought we were on the same side.” She shook her head and looked at Lot again. “What is he up to?”

“I don’t know. But what he said—it’s not true. It can’t be true. Not if Jupiter came out of the Hallowed Vasties.”

Her lips parted, and he caught from her a wisp of fear. “Did he? But you denied that.”

“I just don’t know! Okay?” She jumped at his outburst, and immediately he regretted it. “Yulyssa, I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said, but her fear was real enough to sully the air between them.

He started to get up, but she laid a hand on his thigh. “Security’s outside the door. They want me to open it.”

He frowned at the closed door. How did she know? The house majordomo hadn’t spoken. Then he remembered her atrium, and wondered if real people ever managed to be fully alone.

“I’ll find out what I can,” she told him.

“Yeah? Thanks.” He appreciated her interest, but it was hard to express that. His mood was closing in fast. In the quiet rooms of the monkey house, the doors never opened from the inside. Closing his eyes, he let his head tip back, feeling exhaustion press in around him. “What else do you know?” he asked softly.

The door swooshed open. Lot heard the step of a security officer on the threshold.

“I knew Jupiter those few months he lived in Silk. He survived a Chenzeme plague. He survived Silk and the void. Now, the commandant of wardens complains the Well is haunted. If it is, I think I can guess the identity of the ghost.”

Haunted?

Through the blackness of his closed eyes, Lot felt the faceless officer reaching for him. He raised his forearm to block the touch. “No,” he said. “No more tranks.”

“
Lot!
” It was David’s voice. “I can’t do this. I’m not going to do this anymore.”

Lot opened his eyes. David looked chagrined, and more than a little disgusted as he turned away. Lot sighed. David had gotten him free tonight. He’d risked his position to do it, and they’d never even been good friends.

Lot looked at Yulyssa, feeling cold and sticky and very, very tired. “I’ve got to go.”

“
I’m sorry
.” Her lips brushed his cheek.

David blocked the doorway. He’d popped off his comm wire and dropped it on the floor. Now he was stripping off his uniform shirt.

“David,” Lot said. “It’s okay. I’m ready to go.”

“It’s not okay.” David slung the shirt hard against the floor, his anger like sharp needles in the air. “It’s all wrong. I’m not going to bring you in when I know it’s wrong.”

“But this won’t change anything,” Lot said, puzzled. “They won’t hurt me.”

“It’ll change me. It’ll hurt me. Because it’s
wrong
. I won’t stand against you, Lot. Not ever again.”

A faint silver aura still clung to David. It brought a chill to Lot’s spine. “Thanks David.” He edged past him, out the door. “Thanks for everything.”

Believe in me.

Lot walked alone down the hallway, meeting a contingent of real officers at the elevator, so that they didn’t even have to step off the car to take him into custody. Good Lot. Not that he was worried.

He looked back down the hallway as the elevator doors closed. David stood on one foot, stripping off his uniform pants. Yulyssa stepped into sight beside him, her gaze seeking Lot among the crowd of officers. “I’ll have you out by morning,” she promised him. Lot nodded. Somehow, he’d already known that.

CHAPTER

12

H
E ROSE SLOWLY FROM THE GRAY STATE OF NONBEING
he always experienced during sleep, into a dull awareness that he was interned in the monkey house, though he couldn’t remember his arrival. He recalled riding in a transit car, the security officers talking to him, loud, jovial questions, their knuckles in his ribs as they tried to keep him awake. But exhaustion had dragged at him, blurring the cops’ faces, stripping their words of sense.

Now he was in the monkey house. He didn’t have to open his eyes to know that. One conscious sniff of the air, and his body dutifully notified him that the carbon-dioxide level was way too high—but that was just the monkey-house way of saying,
Be calm. Take it easy
. Dr. Alloin liked to employ the ethereal peace of oxygen deprivation. In her mind it was a safe trank. She preferred not to use anything stronger, never knowing for sure how his metabolism would react—even Ord’s custom brews were mostly guesswork.

Of course the docs were always refining their guesses, watching him every minute he was in here. Hidden cameras in the walls. Molecular sniffers. Microscopic blood analyzers. Breath analyzers. Semen and shit too, for all he knew. It made his skin crawl.

He opened his eyes—

—to find himself lying on his side, on a sleeping pallet identical to the one in his breather. On the near wall there vibrated a frenetic mural of interlocking silver machine parts, like the one in Kona’s apartment. Why had Dr. Alloin chosen that motif?

A tube led out from the wall and into his left hand. An IV needle had been slipped into a vein and taped down. They’d taken off his black shirt and his boots—probably analyzing his sweat—his skin felt clean, though the bedsheets still had a crust of crystallized oil on them.

He sat up, feeling heavy and slow. Carefully, he untaped the IV and slipped it out. Questions boiled in thick liquid circuits just beneath the surface of his mind, a potential hemorrhage kept in check by the deadening pressure bandage of CO
2
.

He turned to glance at the door, half-hoping he was awake because they’d sent him a stimulant through the tube, and any moment now Yulyssa would walk through the door, having secured his release.

The door failed to open.

Turning away, he briefly considered giving in to the urge to lie down again on the pallet and simply wait. But even under the CO
2
lethargy, anxiety had begun to bubble up from somewhere deep in his mind, breaking the smooth surface of his emotions. Physically, he’d taken himself to the edge last night. He should have been sick, exhausted and starved. He would have been, if he’d slept only the balance of the night. But he felt okay. Which meant he’d slept hours past dawn; maybe even through the next day. What had happened in the city in that time?

With an effort, he pushed to his feet. This room was larger than his breather. Ornamental grasses with rust red tassels grew in wall-mounted pots near the door. The carpet was thick and white, with pillows scattered on the floor. The furnishings were simple. Besides the sleeping pallet, there was only a small table with a phone visor and two chairs. Looking at this last, he grimaced, wondering how many hours they planned to make him sit and chat with Dr. Alloin. Then he remembered where he was, and carefully, he forced all expression to fall from his face. For they would be watching him, and he didn’t want to show them anything.

Responding to the needs of his body, he staggered to the far corner of the room, then pressed an icon on the wall. The toilet slid out of its chamber. He stared down into the smooth, peach-colored bowl.
Time to give them some piss to analyze
. When he was finished, the toilet retreated.

He tossed his hair back, out of his face.
Madman
, he thought, remembering his chemical vision: the electric aura of the crowd, the silver swirl of faces, the sense of control, of command, his body encased in an invulnerable silver armor. His heart beat faster, thinking about it. Immediately, he tried to suppress that reaction, knowing they would hear. But he couldn’t deny the memory excited him. To feel such a quantity of energy at his back . . .

Quickly, he closed his eyes, breathing deeply to calm himself. The allure of power . . .

Why
, he wondered,
does it feel so good?

He remembered the swan burster, and the desire he’d felt that first time he’d seen it modeled in Jupiter’s strategic chamber aboard Nesseleth, and Jupiter’s rebuke:

We all carry the seeds of destruction within us. Boys grasp for weapons as soon as they have learned to make a fist.

An instinct as natural as breathing . . .

Jupiter had held fourteen thousand people in his fist.

There were over six and a half million people in the city of Silk.
Given the decline in oxygen, in hydrogen—how long before we notice our demise?
And what would be the first physical signs? He already knew. The first sign would be an increase of emotional pressure—and he could feed on that.

Uneasy now, he opened his eyes. The bed had folded itself into a couch with a blue floral print. A low table arose from the floor in front of it, bearing a plate of scenic cookies, each decorated with a different three-dimensional image. He picked one up. It showed a great ship moving in orbit over the slowly turning geography of the Well. At first he thought the ship was Nesseleth, but the lines were subtly different. Maybe it was Null Boundary, then, the ship that had brought Kona and Yulyssa and the rest of them from the ruins of Heyertori. He squinted, examining the planet’s image more closely.

There was no elevator.

The familiar continent rolled past, barren of any anchored thread. Intrigued, he inspected the ship again. The Old Silkens had built the elevator. Maybe this was their ship.
Sypaon
. That was her name. Yulyssa had talked about her once. Sypaon had been a great engineer.

He put the cookie down and picked up another. It showed a tournament soccer game, the crowds vibrant with motion as the players scurried around the field. Another cookie displayed a garden bright with day lilies and iris nodding in a subtle breeze. He picked up the last one. Silvery machine parts vibrated in intricate motion across its face: the same motif as the wall mural, both here and in Kona’s apartment. It was supposed to be a neural structure of the Chenzeme. It didn’t mean anything to Lot.

He tossed the cookie back onto the plate, wondering if Dr. Alloin had arranged the snack as a kind of psychological test. He couldn’t help but smile. Did she seek to gauge his sanity by the food he chose to eat? And what was sanity? Was it crazy to consider escape from a dying city?

Years ago, Dr. Alloin had sent him on a VR run of Silk—but not the Silk he knew. Urban’s people had been force-landed here 252 years ago, dumped by the damaged Null Boundary at the end of the elevator column, knowing only that the constant radio queries they’d directed at Silk had gotten no response.

As Lot thought about it, a deep chill wrapped around his spine, like the first touch of cold storage. Kona and Yulyssa and a handful of others had gone first down the elevator column. In the VR run, Lot had gone with them: part of the exploration party, living remotes for the 5,000 incarnates (and the 212,000 in hatch storage) all crammed into the cargo slug at the elevator’s end, every one of them waiting to learn if they had any future at all.

Closing his eyes, Lot could see again the skeletons that had inhabited Silk. City of Bones. That’s what they’d called it. Human bones had littered the streets. On the balconies, knee-high weedy shrubs with dark green leaves and blood red flowers sprouted from the detritus of decaying human bodies. In the park, skulls glistened like rounded mushrooms among overgrown meadow grasses. In a bedroom in Old Guard Heights he watched his own flesh-covered hand descend through a slow, reluctant arc (fully conscious of the skeleton biding inside it) to touch the smooth white skull of a child nestled in the center of a bed among parental ribs, enfolded like treasure within long, bony arms. The child had its baby teeth, and a second set of adult teeth embedded in the maxilla. Lot touched these, one by one, and more than the bones themselves those preemergent teeth testified to the potential that had once been.

The Old Silkens believed the Well had killed them. In the city library, their sweat-soaked, emaciated images described how their medical Makers had been decimated and their lives stolen by a plague spawned in the Well’s seething biomass. But no one really knew. The plague had died with its victims, leaving no evidence of its origin.