Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (21 page)

“Gent!” Lot stopped in the street, a hot point of panic suddenly awake in his belly. If he couldn’t hold Alta, if he couldn’t even hold Gent, how could he expect to convince more than a handful of real people to vote for the initiatives?

Gent watched him closely. “Have you abandoned him?”

“No! You know that’s not possible.”

“But you doubt him.”

Lot stiffened. “I have questions,” he admitted.

Gent nodded somberly. He started walking again. Lot leaped after him. “I do believe in him! I intend to follow him someday.”

Gent’s eyebrows rose in mock surprise. “Do you?”

Lot stopped again. A camera bee buzzed into sight. It glinted metallic orange, reflecting the color of the flowers overhead. Lot watched it slow, seeking the best camera angle. “Go on!” he shouted at it. “Leave me alone.”

The city’s privacy laws required the mediot to obey. Gent watched the bee until it was out of sight. Then he spoke. “The Silkens like you, Lot. They say you have a pleasant aspect. But they don’t trust you.”

Lot could feel miserable truth descend around him. The campaign had been going well; he’d had some confidence. But now: “You think we’re going to lose the election.”

Gent shrugged. “If you do, it’ll be because you’re supporting a lie.”

“
What lie?
Gent, all we’re asking for is to vote.”

“That’s a surface issue. You’re asking the Silkens to accept
you
—by denying Jupiter.”

He winced. Miserable truth indeed. “
Sooth
,” he whispered, his arms stiff at his sides. “But what else can I do? They’re afraid of him.”

Gent shook his head. “You’re the one who fears him. You’ll never recover your faith by foraging through the library. Everything you need to know, you’ll learn in the Well.”

Lot considered that, then smiled. “You know, it’s a bit easier to get to the library then to get to the Well . . . unless you’ve convinced the Silkens to allow us down?”

“You don’t need permission. You could go there now.”

Lot stepped back, stunned at this pronouncement. He sought some hint of deceit, but found none. Gent crossed his arms over his broad chest and nodded. “I could take you to the Well. I’ve been ready for a long time.”

“But . . .
how?
”

“Silken security is naive, at best.”

“I don’t understand. If you have the means, why haven’t you—”

Gent’s patience snapped. “Our people are still here! You’re still here.”

Lot turned away, thinking,
I’m not ready for this
. The orange light around him seemed garish and hot. “I’m going to the library.” He started again up the lane. “We’ll talk about this later.”

“Later. Sure, Lot. There’s time.”

T
HE LIBRARY WAS A PLACE OF ADOS
. It had been inherited from Old Silk, whose people had used no atriums, living as detached from the city’s information flow as modern youth. Constant access or accessibility had not been important to them—though neither had they cherished isolation. Their city had been designed with myriad social centers, the library being one of the most frequented.

It was a vast, half-round building that seemed to shore up the grand walk as it stepped down the city’s slope in three neat levels. Lot crossed the first enclosed courtyard. Here the afternoon light was softened by the lush green leaves and pale blossoms of the white garden: roses, bougainvillea, jasmine, lilies, salvia, protea, and a host of others, all in milky monochrome. Flower scents mixed with the lusher smells of the cabana restaurants where ados clustered in knots of small talk. Lot slipped past them, out of the sunlight and into the calmly lit lobby. From the corner of his eye he saw the gold flash of Ord’s small body, following him inside.

The lobby was crescent-shaped, at least a hundred yards from end to end, with a vaulted ceiling that soared some forty feet overhead. Aside from the glass entry, stacked shelves lined the walls, each supporting a swarm of hanging racks and boxes for storage of original works in degradable media. He crossed the ruby carpet, threading a path around clusters of couches and arm chairs, nearly all of them occupied. He slowed, his gaze scanning the patrons, all the while responding with unconscious grace to the soft greetings, the glances that ever marked his progress. Perhaps one in five of those present seemed real.

Why had they come here?

The library’s resources could be accessed through their atriums from any point in the city. Had something else drawn them, then? A need for community . . .

Ord tapped his hand. Lot smiled at the little robot, then hefted it up so it could climb onto his shoulders. He presented himself at the librarian’s station and was greeted by a guiding bee that hummed ahead of him, leading him through the tangled caverns beyond the lobby. Archival access booths hung at short though uneven intervals on the wending, intersecting maze of corridors, the whole laid out in the common chaotic fashion of Old Silk, as if that people had some deep fear of order, or predictability, of efficiency or the dictates of a central authority. Within seconds Lot knew he was hopelessly lost. But the bee plowed on, leading him finally to the black membranous door of a booth isolated at the end of a short cul-de-sac.

He pushed his way through the forgiving membrane. “Yulyssa?”

The room on the other side was dimly lit, the gray walls shimmering faintly, like stone in ring light, an impression that deepened and grew in detail until he felt himself to be in a walled garden, with vines crawling over the stonework and the dark bulk of a tree looming overhead, silhouetted against the backdrop of the nebula, while the glow of the swan burster filtered through its leaves. Yulyssa manifested then, as part of the holographic display. She sat cross-legged on a wooden bench, her antique diamond clips winking in her black hair.

Lot felt a sudden dark rush of disappointment. “I’d hoped you’d be real.”

Her smile seemed apologetic, though he couldn’t be sure. The projection failed to replicate the breath of her emotive mood—a minor flaw in the senses of most, but for Lot it felt like an amputation. “It’s better this way,” she said. “I can access library systems much faster.”

“And besides, you don’t want to be near me.”

She sighed. “No, that is
not
true. But as we agreed once before, I’m old enough to know better.”

Unhappily, he nudged a wooden armchair with his foot, and when it proved solid he sat down in it. Ord slid off his shoulders, dropping softly to the ground. He remembered his manners at last and said “Thank you for coming.”

“I hope I can help.”

Crickets chirped in the rampant shrubbery. In the cool, nocturnal setting, intimacy should have been easy—would have been, if she were real. “I’ve been wondering,” he asked hesitantly, “what happened a year ago? Kona said the phantoms first started appearing then. Why? Did anything significant occur, that might have inspired it? The librarian helped me search the archives, but I’ve found nothing in the public files.”

She frowned. “Secure files aren’t within my reach . . . but I can petition the council for you.”

“I’d hoped you would.”

Her diamond clips glittered with the slight movement of her head. “That’s done. And next?”

“I’ve been thinking about Old Silk. Who were the people who built this city? Why did they die?”

“But that’s well documented. Their own histories say they came to study the swan burster. . . .”

“There’s history, all right. But little interpretation.”

“Oh.” She leaned back, her gaze seeking the thin light of the projected nebula. “You’re after reason, not mechanism.”

“Both, I guess.”

“Their death is documented.”

“Though not at all understood. We blame the governors and pretend that explains it.” He could see uneasiness on her face, but it didn’t move him. He felt isolated. Sealed away from the resonant influence of human presence, he felt as if his emotions were slowly settling over the base of his brain in nonreactive layers, leaving his cerebrum unencumbered, slick with a machinelike efficiency. “The Old Silkens lived freely on the planet for ten years, without incident. They must have felt themselves safe.” He watched Yulyssa closely. “Now Kona wants to make the planet ‘livable.’ How? If he can’t dominate the governors, how could he ever be sure we were safe?”

She nodded slowly. “You’re fearing a new plague might arise, even after decades.”

“No. I only wonder what method Kona would use to insure that couldn’t happen.”

She closed her eyes. “All right. The librarian is searching for suggestions.”

“I’ve done that already.”

Her dark eyes opened. “I can’t access closed files.”

And neither could any of Gent’s nameless Silken friends. Lot frowned, struggling to put the right flavor on his words. “I thought you might know someone. . . .”

Her sharp gaze cut him off. “I won’t violate council security for you, Lot.”

He nodded and looked away, a flush warming his cheeks. His dignity seemed destined for repeated trampling this afternoon.

“Next?” Yulyssa’s gaze did not soften.

Lot swallowed his misgivings, groping to express a line of thought that had puzzled him for days now. “The great ship that brought us here: her name was Nesseleth.”

“Yes.”

Childhood recollections encumbered him: the tight corridors, the close, sweet scent of a child’s sweat, soft sounds of lovemaking in the night, and the voice of the stream in Jupiter’s garden. Nesseleth had been his playmate, the projection of a pretty little girl, just his age. It had been her delight to show him secret places, and to share with him memories from her own youth on a world that was now gone, its mass broken and transformed into one of the swarming cordons of the Hallowed Vasties. “Nesseleth was human once.”

“Sooth. That’s the way of great ships.”

“She died for him, you know. She didn’t go down because of accident or sabotage. She did it to herself, at his request. So none of us could back out.”

Yulyssa’s face paled. She didn’t answer.

Lot felt an inexplicable stirring of anger. “That was a very human thing to do, don’t you think?”

“Lot—”

“Sorry,” he said swiftly, and out of habit he averted his gaze, though of course the charismata couldn’t affect her image. “Really, I’m thinking of Sypaon.”

“The great ship of the Old Silkens?”

“Sooth. The librarian says she created this city, using her own body as the seed.” Sypaon had become the city. She would have existed within it, as he existed within his own body . . . at least for a time. “She wouldn’t have been susceptible to the plague that killed her people. So what became of her?”

Yulyssa sighed. In the cool glint of the ring light, her expression seemed infinitely sad. “Her people . . . they must have been like children to her. It’s cruel, to ask a mother to survive that.”

Lot marveled at his cool reaction. He could not be drawn in by the synthetic pain of a projection. He told her, “Sypaon might not have been such a loving mother. She seems to have left the city at least a year before the plague hit. At least, there’s no record of her in the library after that.”

Yulyssa looked up in surprise. “No?” Her expression blanked, as she accessed her atrium.

Lot laid his central question across her questing silence: “Where could she have gone?”

“Perhaps another great ship came by—”

His brows rose at that speculative response. “And she joined with it? Two entities in one body?”

“I suppose it’s not likely.”

“No record of any visitors, anyway.” His fingers tapped thoughtfully on the arm of his chair. “She made the city to run without consciousness.” He looked up at Yulyssa. “That was why it was alive and still habitable when you came here.”

Yulyssa nodded a slow yes, her gaze distant, remembering. “The parks and streets were overgrown. Everything so lush. The air was good.”

“Could a great ship exist without consciousness?”

She frowned. “A great ship is active. It must navigate and forage, balance its environment, plan for lean times, and the appearance of Chenzeme weapons, negotiate with its human complement, and seek out others . . . like itself. . . . In short, the analog of a motile animal.”

“And by contrast, this city is sessile.”

“Yes,” Yulyssa said. “Like a plant, anchored in one place, drawing energy from the sun, a constant source. And protected from the Chenzeme by the Well . . . ?”

Lot shrugged. “We do know the city’s internal systems were designed to operate by feedback mechanisms, with no need for an overseer, no central control.”

She nodded, cautiously following the thought. “And there was no need to forage for resources. Sypaon must have planned for the city to draw up all that it needed from its roots in the Well. So, Sypaon
intended
to leave—that’s what you’re saying.”

“I’m asking: Where did she go?”

Personas were often transferred from one substrate to another. Real people did that when they ghosted, gifting copies of themselves to dwell in the atrium of another. Yulyssa spoke to him now as an independent copy of her original persona, residing within the machinery of the archival booth. The great ship that had been Sypaon’s body must have received her original persona in the same way. Sypaon had been a sculpted entity. Not a natural creature, but an electronic ghost that haunted the body of the great ship. He knew of no reason that would force her to remain in that body, if she had another place to go.

“You think there’s a structure on the planet,” Yulyssa said.

Lot started. “No. I hadn’t thought about that. There’s no evidence for it?”

“No,” Yulyssa admitted. “Still, we don’t know the planet well.”

“The commandant of wardens would disagree with you.”

Yulyssa frowned. “You have another idea.”

Lot nodded. “The Old Silkens came here to study the swan burster. Sypaon was supposed to be a great engineer, and very curious.”

“The ring’s not even a human artifact. She couldn’t have found a proper substrate there. And besides, the ring’s quiescent.”

He cocked his head. “But what can we really conclude from that?”