Living in Threes (18 page)

The garden behind the tearoom was a bubble full of alien plants, strange flowers and stranger creatures that buzzed and flitted and sang. Except for Meru and Yoshi, there was no one in it.

Water bubbled up in a fountain there, and fruit grew on the trees that a human could eat. Meru sat on something like grass under one such tree and breathed in the humid warmth. The starwing flowed through the bubble’s field and draped itself over the branches, tossing down fruit for her to catch.

Yoshi stared at it. “Is that what I think it is?”

“It’s a starwing,” she said.

“You never told us you had one.” He was actually hurt. A little angry, even.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Would you have believed me if I had?”

“Yes,” he said. Then: “Well. I’d have wanted to see. Because they’re so rare. And they can’t be tamed.”

“They can’t,” Meru agreed.

He reached, shaking a little, and brushed the edge of a trailing wing.

Meru held her breath. He did not yelp or leap back, and the starwing did not vanish from the bubble. They stared at one another as if fascinated.

The starwing tossed a fruit at his head. He caught it, bit into it, and sat on the grass beside Meru.

His temper had improved tremendously. The tea and cakes arrived while Meru was still pondering what to say, floating in on their own table. There was no sign of the server, and no intrusion on the web.

Yoshi dived for the nearest cake. Meru was a nanosecond behind him.

Yoshi was as ravenous as she was. But Meru’s mind kept spinning while she devoured tea and cake and fruit. When she closed her eyes, data streams chased each other across the lids.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Yoshi said. He finished chewing the next-to-last red bean bun while she reached for the last one. “If we’re going to find out where this plague comes from, we have to get into Consensus.”

“There’s no ‘we,’” she said. “You’ll never be a starpilot if you get caught helping me.”

“If we don’t stop this plague, I won’t be alive to care.”

“Yoshi—”

“Meru. You can’t do this alone. Or,” he added, “even with a starwing. I’ve hacked systems before. I scored almost as high as you on that part of the starpilot’s examination. I can work my way into a network without being detected.”

“A house network,” she said. “Or school. And they weren’t hunting for you. For this, I have to hack the world.”

“That’s why you need me. Someone has to back you up. What if you get caught? Or maybe worse—trapped in the system?”

She shuddered. She had been trying not to think about that.

She tried one last time to save him from himself. “Go now. Just leave.”

He folded his arms and set his face and made it clear he was going nowhere.

She glanced at the starwing. It ignored her. As far as she could tell anything of how it felt, it liked Yoshi. It wanted him to stay.

“Traitor,” she said to it.

“It knows what you need,” Yoshi said. “You start. I’ll follow.”

There really was no choice. Not if she wanted to get this done before Consensus found her.

She slipped the scarab from its pocket and cradled it in her palm, rubbing the incised bottom lightly with her thumb. Yoshi’s curiosity brushed past her on the web, but he asked no questions. He was simply there, waiting, ready to move wherever she needed him to go.

She was already slipping away into that deepest of all deep portions of the web. She felt again the multiplying of sensation: her hand, the pale round hand, the thin brown one. They fit one on top of the other, all holding the scarab.

That was important. It meant something. She had to know what it was: a need so strong it knotted her stomach.

She plugged keywords into the web.
Scarab. Key. Plague. Triple.

Data streams flooded her interfaces. The scarab
was
the key—to the web, to the epidemic, and to something completely different. Something that had to do with the three hands that had held this same blue bead.

Triple
. She followed a single stream among the countless trillions, one definition of a simple and common word, that led to a most uncommon concept—suggestion—theory.

She looked into a mirror that reflected not her own dark, narrow, big-eyed face but a long pale-brown oval, green-eyed, with hair neither straight nor curly and neither gold nor brown. That one looked through another mirror at a softer oval, red brown, with long dark eyes heavily painted, and perfectly straight, thick and shining, blue-black hair.

The data streams marked and dated them. Pre-Stellar, Pre-Collapse, dawn of the web: that was the green-eyed one. The other, the one beyond her, was at least as old again: Egypt in the days of its empire, before there was even a dream of the web.

If what the data stream hinted at was true, the other two were not constructs on the web or personas in a game. They were alive. They had lived. They were real.

“Of course I’m real,” said the one in the middle. “You’re the imaginary one. You don’t even exist yet.”

“I do too exist,” Meru said. “It seems we all exist. And this”—she brushed the scarab with a virtual finger—”is the thing that binds us.”

“I don’t think,” said the most ancient of them, “that an amulet alone completes the spell. It’s larger than that. Stronger.”

“But it lets us see each other,” the one in the middle said. She narrowed her eyes at Meru. “Meredith. My name is Meredith.”

“Meredith,” Meru said. It was a sort of apology.

“And Meritre,” said the oldest of them all, though in her own world she was as young as the rest. “It’s good we give each other the gift of names. Names matter.”

“Maybe they’re a part of it, too,” Meredith said. “It’s like time travel. But—bigger. Somehow.”

“Yes,” Meru said. “Yes.” She hung on the edge of something enormous—some knowledge that would change the world.

The pieces of it clicked together, one, two, three. Three pairs of eyes met across the millennia.

“I think I get what you’re doing,” Meredith said. “You’re web searching, right? We have the web, too. Much smaller. Much, much more simple. We can’t link directly to it. Yet. But soon. I think. We’re close.”

“You are,” Meru allowed. “Yes, I am searching.”

“I don’t know what this web is,” said Meritre, “though it seems to have something to do with what spiders do—threads woven into a pattern, yes? Like certain kinds of magic. Magic of weaving, and of patterns. But also magic of words. Words are power. Speak them just so, and they can break worlds.”

“Or make them,” Meru said.

“Those are best of all,” said Meritre.

Carefully she closed her fingers over Meredith’s, and over Meru’s. “Let us be hunters of words. Where do we begin?”

Now there was a question. “Stay with me,” Meru said. “See what I do. If something looks familiar, tell me.”

“I can do that,” Meritre said. Meredith, between them, nodded.

Her face was tight. Meru’s felt much the same.

That was comforting, in a strange way. She used that fear to sharpen her senses; to deepen and broaden the search.

As little good as it did. Every search string led to the same blank wall.

Access Forbidden.

The first, she bounced off, startled. The second, she tried a sub-string, and for an instant was sure she had breached the wall. Just as she braced herself to slip through the crack, it slammed shut.

The third wall rose up like a storm of fire. It seared her edges; it licked toward her center. She reeled backward.

The Egyptian reached through her. It was clumsy, because she could not have ever done such a thing before, but she found her balance remarkably quickly.

“Keywords,” she said. “Search strings. Here we call them incantations. They fit into patterns. Look; see.”

“I can’t—” Meru stopped. Yes, she could see. The search strings clicked together in particular and perceptible ways—ways that led to a trap.

“Something doesn’t want us nosing around in here,” Meredith said. She sounded a little breathless, as if she was fending off fear.

“My mother died for those answers,” Meru said, very level and very calm.

Neither of those things had anything to do with how she felt inside. She reeled herself in before she did something frustrated and angry and very badly advised.

Meritre was not paying attention. She was singing to the web and the wall. “Ra of the Horizon, Ra-Harakhte, Mother Isis, Great Osiris, hear us. Look on us. Guide us. Grant us the key to the door; the secrets of the plague; the truth of those who live in threes, who dwell in the house of life, from age to age and into eternity.”

She had a beautiful voice. Its clarity pierced through the hiss of the fire. The words it carried took shape in the web, shaping patterns that Meru could not have imagined, search strings bound to concepts that no one in her world would have thought of.

The trap dissipated in a cloud of random data. They all slid through, the three of them bound together into a single persona.

“Whoa,” said Meredith, just as Meru said, “What did you—”

“I gave it my heart,” Meritre said.

Someday Meru would understand that. Maybe. For now it was enough that it had worked.

Though what it had worked on, she was not exactly sure. There was nothing there except another reference, a pointer to a database that had long since been taken out of Earth’s web. Meru would have howled, if it would not have brought the whole web down on her.

“What’s the matter?” Meredith’s voice was sharp. “What is this? Why aren’t you celebrating?”

“Because it’s not an answer!” Meru almost shouted back. “It’s barely even a question. And it’s not here. Not on Earth’s web. It’s out
there
.”

She flung her hand outward, toward the near-infinite ocean of the interstellar web. “Starpilots go to school for years to learn how to surf that web. I haven’t even set foot off Earth yet. I’m good. I’m well trained—for Earth. But this…”

“We have to try,” Meredith said. “We’re here, aren’t we? That must mean something. We’ve got a key, somehow. Somewhere in us is a password to the locked data.”

“Maybe it’s the scarab,” Meritre said. “Have you read what it says? It’s a simple prayer, but then there is nothing simple about prayer.”

“Why not?” Meredith said. “It couldn’t hurt.”

With no expectation of anything happening, but because she could not think if anything else to do, Meru gave the web the inscription on the scarab’s bottom, exactly as it was carved, in writing that almost no one alive could read.

The firewall fell. All the data in the universe roared and surged around her. Warnings flashed and strobed and screamed.

Forbidden! Felony! Unauthorized entry! Insufficient clearance! Do not enter! Do not enter! Do not enter!

The storm of data reduced Meru to an infinitesimally tiny speck. Before she could quite wink out, the starwing’s insubstantial warmth wrapped around her. At the same time she felt a hand in each of hers: one shorter and wider, and one wiry and narrow.

The Triple was still together. Still holding on.

“You have us,” Meredith said. “You are real.”

“
We
are real,” said Meritre. “We are whole.”

The starwing trilled and spread its wings. It was as much at home riding the streams of data as it was soaring on the physical winds of Earth.

And why not? The web was energy, and so was the starwing, mostly. Who knew; maybe this was its native environment.

All three humans rode inside the creature like passengers in a starship. The data stream that had brought them there glimmered ahead of them. Meru sent the starwing after it, skimming the streams and darting through eddies and currents.

At the edge of a wave of data, just before the stream melted into it, Meritre caught it. Meredith batted it back toward Meru. Meru triggered
Save
, and then,
Download.

Even as she captured the last of it, the web turned against her. Security bots swarmed over her. The starwing melted from around her. She hardly had time to react to the betrayal before she crashed out of the web.

Chapter 18

“I’m sorry,” Yoshi said. He did not look apologetic. He looked furious.