Living in Threes (12 page)

She hung between the two, with the parts of her virtual self beginning to stretch and fray.

Yoshi reinforced the link with a hack she had never seen before. She wondered if he had, either. A nanosecond later, the starwing sent a surge of energy along it, locking it in place.

It was still very thin and fragile, and it was weak: what data could come through it came in drips and spurts.

“If anything about this comes through,” she said to Yoshi, “anywhere, at any time—”

“I’ll ping,” he said.

She sent a spark of gratitude. He slipped away, but the link held, a tiny, tiny gap in the firewall that barred her from the web.

She explored the edges of the wall, searching for any other crack or weakness. But unlike the force field around the old city, this virtual barrier was new and fresh and strong.

After what seemed a very long time, in a far, far corner, she found a glimmer of light. It was even stranger than the link to Yoshi: without discernible source, and clear in all dimensions, even taste and smell, but weirdly remote. In one way she was part of it, as if she were the one walking down the odd square corridor past rows of closed doors. In another, she watched from above, like a starwing.

In that strange doubling of senses, she understood that she, or rather the persona on the web, was looking for something. There was a sense of age around that unspecified thing, a taste of sun and sand, and a sense that it had something to do with sickness and dying, and a mother’s face.

Meru must have fallen into one of the endless games that ran across the web, some so old that no one remembered where or when they began. She found them dull and usually shut them off. When she could spare any time to play, she played at being a starpilot, sailing across the sea of stars.

This game for all its antique simplicity was oddly compelling. When the persona opened one of the doors—a thing so ancient it turned on hinges—and found herself in a high dim room full of shelves and boxes, Meru felt the same excitement and the same stab of guilty fear as the player, whoever it was, who ran the game.

The room had a distinct smell, sharp as a sneeze, like dust and ancient spices. At the far end was the steel door of the vault, locked and sealed. Everything outside it was either the archive—paper and printout: this game was truly ancient—or artifacts that were being studied or were not yet catalogued.

She was the only person in the room. Whoever had left the door unlocked would get in trouble for it, the persona suspected, then felt guilty all over again for being glad that someone had made a mistake.

She had to move fast. There was no telling when one of the students would come back. She scanned the room, trying to focus, to find one particular box in a room full of them. Her mind kept skipping over the numbers she had seen written on the box.

She stopped and took a deep breath. The box had come in today. No one had had time to do any archiving or filing. It had to be close to the door.

There—on the table labeled, of course,
New Finds
. The persona laughed at herself, breathed deep again, and lifted the lid from the box that sat on top of the rest.

It was full of beads or carved stones, most of them blue or green; a great many were identical. The persona looked at them in a wave of despair. How was she supposed to know which was the one she needed?

Meru could answer that. In games like this, the talisman had a marker on it, a tiny spurt of data that signaled when it was found.

The persona started slightly. Had it felt Meru’s presence? Its hand passed over the rows of stones.

Meru felt it when the persona did: not exactly like the crackle of a data spurt, but close enough. One blue stone, domed on the top, flat on the bottom, carved in the rough image of a beetle, was the one.

The persona lifted it out of the box. It had a hole through it, as a bead should. One like it hung around the persona’s neck.

As far as Meru could tell, the two beads were identical, except that the one from the box was older. Much older.

It lay in the persona’s trembling palm. Short pale fingers closed over it. Guilt rose and crested. This was stealing. And yet—if it did what it was supposed to, if it could help—

“Meru.”

Vekaa’s voice wrenched her out of the game. That was all the more shocking because it should not have happened. A person had to log out and shut down in order to leave a game, even when someone pinged from outside. This was like being roused abruptly from a dream.

Meru lay on the floor of the cell, blinking at her uncle. She must have fallen asleep. Of course she would dream of the web, since for the first time in her life she was cut off from it.

The dream refused to let go. She stared at Vekaa through it, sitting up groggily. While she dreamed or played the game or whatever she had done, memory of her mother had slipped away. Vekaa’s face brought it back.

He looked as empty as she felt. It was not kind of her, but she was glad. “I’m sorry,” he said, “for everything I’ve done to you and everything I’m going to have to do. I can’t let you out of this building and I can’t let you go home. I can’t even send someone to keep you company. But I can move you to a more comfortable room.”

Meru reached for the web instinctively, and flinched when she met the wall. Yoshi’s link was still there, but it seemed even thinner than before. She dared not send any data down it, or hope to get anything back.

She had to ask Vekaa a question that no one asked any more, because the answer was instant, woven into on the web: “How long has it been?”

“It’s morning,” he said. “You’ve been here all night. I’m sorry for that, too. Once the disease is fully contained, we can unlock the web, but until then—”

“You don’t want to panic people,” Meru said. “I understand. Can you at least tell me when you think it will be over? It must be contained by now, or nearly.”

His face tightened. “It’s been…unusually resistant.”

“I’m not sick,” Meru said. “I was decontaminated. You’re in here with me, so I mustn’t be a risk of infection. If I swear not to tell anyone what’s happening, even—even what happened to Jian, will you let me go home?”

She got that out without breaking down. She was proud of herself.

Vekaa had gone stiff. His voice when he spoke was cold, as if they were strangers. “We can’t do that. We’re all on lockdown until we know what it is and how it mutates. We’re not even sure that once everything is decontaminated, it won’t come back.”

Meru knew why he did that. He belonged to Consensus, and Consensus had to make its decisions for everyone, not just for one person. He must be hurting terribly inside.

But it hurt her, too. “I understand,” she said. “I do. But—”

“Then you understand that we have to consider all the possibilities,” Vekaa said. He held out his hand. “I promise I won’t let them keep you for one moment longer than they absolutely have to.”

Meru let him pull her to her feet. He would have held on, maybe to comfort her, maybe himself, but she slipped free.

She heard his faint sigh. Meru had always been prickly and fiercely independent. Neither was a virtue.

She got both from her mother. A wave of grief struck her, so strong she could hardly stand up.

She stiffened her knees and made her face as still as she could. Vekaa had not seen: he had stepped outside the cell and stood waiting for her to follow.

She braced as she passed the doorway, but the field was down. It was kind of Vekaa to trust her, and not surround her with Guards.

Vekaa knew as well as she did that there was no way out of here, unless the starwing could find one. At the moment Meru was not ready to ask. She wanted to escape, but she needed to know more.

There were things Vekaa was not saying. If she stayed, she might learn what they were.

Curiosity was a starpilot’s virtue, if not an Earthling’s. It also gave Meru something focus on. She followed her uncle out of the cells into a physical space so much like the web that she stopped, caught off balance.

The web was still out of her reach. But the heart of Containment was its own network of interlocking data streams. Where the web was all internal, this was actually visible: a enormous sphere interlaced with the glimmering ribbons of walkways, through which people moved, tracking the streams of data that were there already and building new ones with speed and skill that told her just how serious this crisis was.

Plagues and epidemics had always seemed remote to her, like stories of things that happened offworld, to other people. Meru studied them because her mother did, and because she was going to live off Earth; she had to know what they were like. But she never really, deeply felt any of them. She was sad, she pitied the people who were sick or died, then another tragedy swam up through the data streams and she forgot about it.

This was happening to Meru. It was real and strong and immediate. It had killed her mother.

Vekaa had stopped walking along the ribbon that led up from the cells to the center of the sphere, and turned to face her. Someone else had come from above to stand beside him, a woman Meru had never met but knew well from the web.

Her name was Lyra. She was a Decider. When decisions had to be made on Earth, Lyra was one of those who made them.

If she was here, this was more than serious. Meru could think of nothing to say, could only stand and stare.

Lyra smiled, which did not put Meru at ease at all. “We are most sorry for your loss,” she said. She sounded as if she meant it, though she moved on quickly, as if her duty was done and now she could get back to what really concerned her. “We hope you don’t mind that I’ve ordered breakfast for us.”

It would have made no difference if Meru had minded. She made herself nod and say something suitably grateful. Her stomach had clenched and would not let go.

Breakfast waited on the edge of the sphere, high up on the side opposite the cells, in a bubble that seemed to float under the sea. Bright fish swam all around it; now and then through the watery silence came the song of a whale.

This was meant to be a refuge, an island of peace. Meru had no peace in her. She did not think she ever would again.

In spite of everything, she was ravenously hungry. She only realized that the others were barely picking at their food as she reached for the third kelp roll. They were waiting for her to finish eating.

She set the roll down uneaten and folded her hands in her lap. The knot in her stomach had come back; the food she had gulped down only made it worse.

Lyra glanced at Vekaa and nodded slightly. He closed his eyes, then opened them, and reached under the table, drawing out a package wrapped in shimmering fabric. He slid it across the table toward Meru.

She made no move to take it. “What is this?”

“Your mother left it,” he said. “It’s keyed to you.”

Her hands twitched, but she held them still. She could see the seal on the package, with another over it, declaring it decontaminated.

She was not afraid of catching the plague. Something else made her hesitate. Both of the others were trying hard to seem calm, but the tension was so strong she could taste it.

“We believe,” Lyra said when it was clear that Meru was not going to move, “that your mother knew something of what was happening here. She broke off an expedition that had been years in the planning, talked her way onto the first ship that would take her within jump distance of this system, and came on-world under diplomatic cover. She left no records, no clues as to why—only this.”

Meru would not be angry. She would
not
. “My mother was an interstellar spy?”

Vekaa bit his lip. Meru could not tell whether he wanted to laugh or cry.

Lyra was in better control of herself. Of course she would be. Jian had been nothing to her but a name.

That made Meru angry, too, but not so angry that she missed what Lyra was saying. “We don’t think she was a spy,” the Decider said. “Some of what she did might have skirted the edges of local authority, but she was always careful to stay on the side of the law. She was following the path of a particular colonial expansion, outward from Earth to worlds that were uninhabited when the colonists came to them.”