Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (25 page)

Null Boundary wanted a replacement crew, but the Heyertorians spurned that intimacy, wanting only transportation out of hell. In hindsight, the falling-out could be seen as inevitable. From the start, the Heyertorians had refused to treat the ship as a permanent home. They kept most of their complement in cold sleep, and made no secret of their suspicions that Null Boundary had some hand in the destruction of their world. The emotional tensions must have been unbearable.

The break came eleven years into the voyage. Null Boundary claimed problems with his synthetics factories and announced that he could no longer support a human complement—though almost ninety-eight percent of the Heyertorians were in cold sleep and no draw on ship’s resources. Declaring emergency breach, he abandoned them at Deception Well.

It was all ancient history to the ados. Urban shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe his own news. “You should have seen the real ones, fury. They were about to shit on the floor. You know, I think they’d blow that ship out of the void if they could.”

“Be straight. Soon as they cool, they’ll be on their knees begging for passage out of this system.”

“I don’t think so. Not the way they were talking. Null Boundary’s the same as the old murderers in their eyes. They’d rather deal with the Well than trust themselves to him again.”

Alta shifted restlessly, her impatience like stinging cells. “You’re thinking it’s time?” Lot asked her.

“How much longer shall we wait? How many more signs do you need?”

He laughed at her.
Signs
. He’d never waited for signs, only evidence. No longer. “Soon,” he told her. “It’s playing out broadly.” Jupiter had left him here to persuade the Silkens, to bring them around at this cusp of crisis.

“Sure, the election’s tonight,” Urban said, oblivious of the taut demands stretching between Lot and Alta. “Tomorrow we’re real.”

The apartment majordomo inserted its masculine voice into the conversation. “A visitor for you, Master Lot Apolinario. Madam Yulyssa Desearange. Will you receive her?”

“Do it,” Urban said, before Lot could decide. And the majordomo, recognizing his privilege, obeyed. Lot tasted ire from Alta. “Why don’t you go home?” he suggested to her, as Yulyssa hesitated in the doorway.

That shocked her. Eyes too round, she started to object. “Lot—”

He only had to look at her. She nodded, though anger glinted in her eyes. “I’ll wait for you.”

But then he’d known that. He smiled in satisfaction as she slipped out past Yulyssa. The door whispered shut. Yulyssa seemed to listen for its closure, her lips turned down in disapproval. “You’re learning,” she observed. Beneath her casual demeanor he could sense a subtle field of fear. She still mistrusted him. Yet she’d come around. That pleased him too.

He let his tension flow away, rain sliding across the perfect curves of her face. Her skin seemed bloodless, but still beautiful. Her eyes though, looked tired and distracted. She glanced over his collection of carnivorous plants, then sniffed at the high humidity that kept dew beaded on the sticky paddles of the sundews. The slug crawled on the wall just beside the door, rasping at invisible patches of mildew. “Eccentricity’s supposed to come with age.”

Lot shrugged, baiting her with silence. Urban was into it, his amusement like silent laughter on the air.

Yulyssa waited a minute more, then sighed. “You had a lot of questions yesterday.”

“Yeah.” Yesterday, she had not been real.

She pressed her back defensively against the door, as if reconsidering the wisdom of this visit. “I just came here to tell you I may have found an answer. Authority tried to fire the burster last year.”

“Kona said.”

“I cross-checked the date with the commandant of wardens. It seems the first phantoms were recorded two and a half days after the test took place.”

Urban hissed. Lot felt his own chest tighten. “Do you think the two events are linked?” Did the phantoms know how dangerous the ring would be to use?

Yulyssa shrugged. “I don’t know.” A new resolve rolled from her. She stepped forward, placing her feet delicately between the glass pots, her brown legs as beautiful as anything Lot had ever seen. He scrambled up to a sitting position to make room for her on the pad. She slipped off her shoes, then sat down, casting a cool eye on Urban, who refused to yield his floor-level view of her thigh.

Lot felt pressure in her nearness. Her presence seemed to challenge him in a silent test of dominance. He didn’t like it. He’d begun to think he’d gotten all the important systems in hand, but now his control was cracked again. He didn’t let her see it. He held himself aloof, his gaze fixed on the bedsheets: a shimmering white sea of wrinkled waveforms, tangled inconsistencies. With the palm of his hand he brushed the sheet flat, feeling the demand of Yulyssa’s gaze.

She said: “I find it hard to talk about Jupiter. What he believed . . . it disturbed me. It’s not what I want to believe.”

It seemed an odd thing to say. Yulyssa’s desires could not define the world. The Universe had come preloaded with conditions and did not care a jot if those conditions pleased the human psyche or destroyed it.

“Nobody’s talking about Jupiter in this election,” Urban said.

Yulyssa ignored him, her gaze in a gravity lock on Lot’s face. “I have avoided death for a very long time,” she went on. “I have not always wanted to, but it felt like a duty. In a universe that would destroy us, the most defining thing we can do is push on. Not for any real goal. There is no place of permanence, no golden existence, no finish line . . . not even in the Hallowed Vasties. Life can only exist on the edge of chaos, with all the turbulence that implies—or so I believed, until I met Jupiter.” She ran a fingernail up and down the wall of a glass pot, studying the twisting pattern of the white roots, how they ducked and turned away from the glass, minimizing their interaction with the light.

“He caught me for a while. He had a presence that was hard to deny. It was paradoxical: a more profound sense of self I could not imagine in any man. Yet still he denied any value in independent existence, driven always by his ‘mitochondrial analog,’ this insistence that we should surrender ourselves to some symbiotic communal state.”

“He only wanted us to live,” Lot said. He glanced up at Yulyssa, then down again at the bedsheet, smoothing another wrinkle with his restless hand. Her doubt played against his sensory tears, but in a peculiar negative reaction he’d never experienced before. Instead of enhancing his own uncertainties, he felt them begin to crumble.
It could be okay
, to be part of something bigger. He knew it could. He’d felt the edge of it, every minute he’d been with Jupiter. “In the Well we’ll become more than we are, safe from the Chenzeme . . . and from whatever is causing the Hallowed Vasties to fail.”

“So Jupiter said. But myths have always been used to veil the finality of death.”

Lot traced the curve of her cheek against the sheet, appreciating her doubt, but oddly unmoved by it. “The Communion is no myth.”

“I don’t know. Jupiter’s ‘surrender’ seemed too much like suicide to me. I pulled away from him. And then he was gone.”

Lot smiled. “You think you left him? He could have held on to you. He let you go.”

That angered her. “Why would he? He had no one. He left here alone.”

“He left you at the Well.” And finally, Lot saw that as a privilege.

“And why again? So I would survive? So I would live to be here with you? Talk to you about him? Make you angry enough that you’ll follow him just to spite me?”

“You’re the one who’s angry,” he pointed out.

“No one plans that well, Lot.”

But Lot wasn’t so sure. His fingers skated across the shimmering cloth, raising waves in their wake. “So you’re free then. Are you going to leave on Null Boundary?”

That set her back. He caught a flash of overt fear from her, quickly suppressed. “Are
you
?” she asked softly.

On the white sheet he traced with his index finger a slow, inward-turning spiral, a descending orbit that ended in the Well. “I don’t want to leave. I know that now. It’s begun, and I’m not scared anymore.”

CHAPTER

19

L
OT SPENT MOST OF THE AFTERNOON IN THE REFUGEE QUARTER
. Down in the cool bowels of Gent’s church, the dancing reflections in the holographic walls mixed up his image in a manic imitation of sexuality, a Well-redoubled blending of self and self. Before his image shredded, Lot caught a glimpse of his face and was startled at his gaunt appearance. His cheeks seemed sharp and thin and bloodless, while his eyes were red, brooding from deep within their orbits.

Then Alta was with him, as if she had coalesced out of the shadows. She crouched beside him, her hands on his shoulders as she watched their distorted reflections writhe within a wall. “I understand you better now,” she said.

“You’ve talked to Gent?”

“He didn’t send me here.” She leaned forward, and her lips brushed his sensory tears. “Your skin’s so hot!” He turned his head and she kissed his mouth with a fierce determination. Apparently she had taken his admonitions to heart. He shut his eyes, as a pleasing sense of completeness closed around him. Her kisses continued, and it wasn’t long before his exploring hands found her breasts beneath the restrictive architecture of her dress. She helped him get it off. She helped him with his shirt. Her fingers stroked his chest a minute; then she lay back, pulling him down with her. Her breasts swayed. He caught one nipple gently in his teeth, drawing from her a sharp gasp.

Her fingers stroked his sparse beard, his ears, his lips. They pushed into his mouth, dry foreign objects trespassing on his body. Next he could feel her touches at his hips as she tugged at his pants. He eased them off and then her fingers were wandering through his pubic hair, the soft inside of her arm brushing against the silken smooth skin of his erection. Her hand slipped down to caress his balls. He leaned forward, his hair falling upon her in twisting, gleaming, golden threads. Her skin puckered at its touch. Slipping his hand behind her head, he lowered himself against her. He felt the wiry brush of her pubic hair against his belly, the delicious, smooth kiss of her labia across the head of his member.

Their reflections had become an abstract mingling of his body and hers, repeated hundreds of times in the shifting holographic glow. Lot couldn’t remember anymore why he’d been angry with her. She’d made him forget that. He could feel her smug satisfaction beneath the surface deference she wanted him to see . . . and something else. An influence that ran through
all
the refugees, and some of the real people too—he’d sensed it before, though he hadn’t understood it: a subtle division of loyalties . . . a division that didn’t exist in the ados of Silk.

He withdrew a little, suddenly wary, feeling a tenuous sense of danger.

“Lot?” Alta looked at him with questioning eyes.

Jupiter had been here before him.
He’d left his mark on her. Lot felt the hair on the back of his neck rise in an ancient defensive response: territorialism across the millennia, across a span of ten years.

“Lot, what is it?” Alta’s eyes widened as the threat of his defensive charismata brushed against her.

“I can feel him inside you.”

To his surprise, that made her smile. Pleasure blossomed across her aura. “We all belong to him.”

“No. I want you for my own.”

She felt his jealousy. Oh yes. Her body became a hard shield around this trace of Jupiter. “Stop it, Lot,” she warned softly, astounding him with her resistance. But then Jupiter would have armed her against sedition.

“We all belong to him,” Alta repeated. “Even you.” She touched the sticky droplets of his sensory tears. “Lot? It’s okay. He loves you still. He needs you.”

Her soft chiding had its planned affect. He lowered his head, feeling a rush of shame. He sought her neck, her breasts: a show of desire to hide his jealousy. If he didn’t look at it, maybe it would go away?

Her fingers slid through his long hair. His sensory tears rubbed against the treacly brew of her sympathy. “I love you too,” she whispered. “We all love you.”

“I know.”

“And all things are shared in the Communion.”

“Sooth.”

She ran her hands over his buttocks, encouraging his penetration. “
Now, Lot
.”

Her passion rode the exhalation of those words like a perfume, an aerosol intoxicant that brushed his sensory tears and sent his heart rate leaping. His metabolic processes accelerated too. Time burned faster, and his perceptions shifted in compensation. The shifting walls coalesced into a dull white haze, while Alta’s body lay washed in silver. Lot felt himself sucked downward, sinking, past the barrier of her skin, past her muscles and the deafening swirl of her blood, until—for a moment—he seemed entirely inside her, their bodies crushed together by some irresistible gravity.

He heard himself cry out, but not in pain.

I
T SEEMED THAT SOME BIT OF TIME
had been lost. Maybe only a second, maybe several. He found himself slack against her, a mean buzz in his head, his slick skin cooling in the shifting light while Alta’s chest labored for breath beneath his weight. Ord squatted beside them, one gold tentacle pressed against Lot’s neck, muttering some half-mechanical drivel: “
No good, no good. Not allowed
.”

Lot slapped the tentacle away. “Leave us alone.” He took his weight again, and kissed the cooling salt sweat of Alta’s neck.

Then he rolled to the side, sprawling utterly slack against the soft floor. He watched her breasts slowly rise and fall, imagining what it might be like to be an oxygen molecule drawn forcefully into her lungs, exposed to gas-exchange over the alveoli, helpless freight rammed through the arteries, O
2
exchanged for CO
2
in the capillaries, depleted blood moving back to the lungs, subsystem of human life. Every molecule of air in Silk must have been breathed millions of times. From Alta’s lungs, to his own, to the kids playing in the street outside, and from there around the city until everyone had shared the same breath.