Living in Threes (21 page)

Chapter 20

Meru lay alone in the dark. For the first time since she could remember, she had blacked out the stars.

Waves of grief for her mother came and went. Down below in the family’s house, everyone else was meeting, discussing the news and coming to agreement as to what to do about it.

She should have been there. No one forced her, and no one particularly wanted her there. She was in disgrace and worse. She had committed a crime; she had disgraced the family.

That mattered much less than it might have once. The passion to know and understand, to find an answer that led to a cure for the disease that her mother had tracked to Earth and then died of, was still there. So was the conviction that no matter what happened, she had to get offworld. She had to become a starpilot.

It had all tangled up together when Meredith-in-the-middle shut herself out. Without her, nothing Meru did could reach down eight thousand years to Meritre, who might, who just might, know where to find the answer. She was out of range of whatever it was that made the connection possible.

They both needed the middle in order to find each other. And the middle had disappeared.

The starwing stirred in the dark, trilling to itself. Usually when it moved it was silent, but she heard its wings rustle. It came and curled up against her side.

The lift door whispered open. Yoshi stepped through: a shadow against the dazzle of light from inside.

The light winked out. Yoshi inched cautiously toward her. “Is this where you always go? To lie in the dark?”

“No,” she said.

“Ah,” said Yoshi.

Suddenly there were stars. Not only the stars of Earth, far out on its galactic arm, but stars upon stars upon stars.

He had found the feed from the center, from the galaxy’s heart. The light fell like rain; it blazed, it blinded, it emptied her of everything but itself.

“Better?” Yoshi asked.

“Better,” she admitted. “Am I cast out of the family yet?”

“Not that I can tell,” he said. “They’re arguing about Ulani now. Did you know she wants to join Family Cordere-Marais? She’s in love, she says. She wants to live in the sea, she says. She’s already applied for the body modifications.”

Meru sat up straight. “She has not!”

“She has,” Yoshi said.

“But she wouldn’t,” Meru said. “Not without telling me first. I knew about Aracele Marais, she’s been talking about her for—oh, ever. But to move there? To turn into a
fish
?”

“Maybe you weren’t there to talk to,” he said. “You’ve been a little preoccupied.”

Guilt stabbed, sudden and sharp. That night when Meru left to find her mother—Ulani’s pauses and shufflings had meant something. She had been trying to tell Meru about her decision. And Meru had not even noticed.

“I’ve only been trying to save the world,” Meru said to that memory as much as to the boy in front of her.

As soon as she had said it, she realized how nasty it sounded. And arrogant.

She
was
arrogant. She expected everything to be about her. Ulani had changed her life without asking Meru first. And the family had been discussing her all this time down below, instead of Meru.

Meru had done something terrible, and probably criminal. Consensus would demand a price for that. But that was done; there was no changing it.

Ulani was about to do something that would change her life, and the family’s life.
She
could change her course, if they all came to consensus. That was at least as important to the family.

Life did not stop because the world was trying to end. Or because Meru was trying to save it.

The starwing pressed closer, as if it could sense the tangle of her emotions.

It was pressing against the pocket with the stasis field in it. She shifted away from that small discomfort, and slipped the flower and the scarab out into her palm.

The scarab was more than a connection to Meru’s other lives. Jian had held it, too, and discovered somehow what it was and what it could do, if it came into the right hands.

Maybe Meru did not need Meredith. Maybe she had the knowledge here, in her mother’s memories.

“Yoshi,” she said. “I’m going back on the web—down deep, where I was before. My mother left a message inside the clue. I have to try to find it.”

“I’ll go with you,” he said.

“I’m not sure you can,” she said. “It’s—keyed just to me. But if you can watch; make sure I find my way back again—”

“I can do that,” he said. “But, Meru—”

“Thank you,” she said.

She did not wait for him to start a new argument. She plugged the scarab’s inscription back into her search bots, but this time she added Jian’s name to the string.

As if it had been waiting for her to do just that, a data stream collided with her search bot and burst open.

The sky was lavender and the sun was dim, more red than yellow. Stars shone at midday.

Jian sat inside a dome above a sea of mercury, looking out across the waves of shimmering, surging silver. Most of the faces and forms in the dome behind her were alien, but the man who sat beside her was a perfectly ordinary human.

Ordinariness was a mask he wore. Jian doubted that the face she saw was the one he had been born with, and she knew that his name was just a designation. He called himself Grey.

There were creatures like him all through the known worlds. They bought and sold knowledge; they traded in rumors and in facts, usually without distinction.

Most of what they had to sell was useless or worse. But once in a great while, and often unexpectedly, they happened on a glimmer of gold.

She looked down at the data bead he had given her. Inside was the image of a blue bead carved in the shape of a beetle, with an inscription in a very old language indeed. The bead’s wrapping was equally old: a scrap of paper made from coarse brownish fibers, and a mummified flower.

She almost laughed—at herself; at the hope she had still, after all these years and so many disappointments, dared to believe in. “This is from Earth,” she said. “It’s a common thing; there are thousands of them scattered across the worlds. What does it have to do with the answers I’ve been looking for?”

“Perhaps everything,” he said. “Perhaps nothing. You are a seeker after answers. This is an answer to one of many questions.”

Jian bit back a sharp rejoinder. What she allowed herself to say was not particularly gentle, either, but it was, at least, somewhat restrained. “That, if I may be so blunt, means exactly nothing. I came half across the galaxy on your promise of clear and certain information. Now you give me wind and platitudes.” She rose. “Others may have more patience for this game you play. I have no time, or credit, to waste.”

“Time is running short,” he said, “indeed. For your search. For the proof you have been seeking.”

She shook her head, making no further effort to hide her impatience. She turned on her heel, focused already on the exit; reaching out to the web for the schedule of flights away from this world, back to the site she had been excavating. That she should never have left, no matter how urgent the call.

Grey was there on the web, blocking her access. His voice behind her said, “These are the questions you have asked, over and over through all your travels:
What is the cause of all this ruin? What was it that killed these worlds? Where does it come from? Where is it going?
”

She stopped, spun. “More of the obvious.”

He smiled. It was not a warm smile, nor a comfortable one. “You have an answer to the last. Do you not? It is moving. Circling. Turning back. Mutating as it goes. Your projections and mine—they agree. They know where it will strike next.”

“Earth is protected,” she said.

“Is it?”

“Oh, no,” she said. “You’ll not cripple me with false fear.”

“I merely asked a question,” he said, “as you do.” He tilted his head toward the data bead. “There is an answer here.”

“Why? How do you know? Where did you find this?”

“Just as any seeker of knowledge would,” said Grey. “I know a person who knows a person who heard a rumor who found a reference to a discovery that might be of interest. I made the connections. I found the sources. The rest is yours to resolve. For,” he added delicately, “of course, a suitable consideration.”

“Why?”

“Why does any being wish to make a living?”

She bared her teeth. “That is not what I asked. Why is it mine to resolve?”

“Because of who and what you are, and what you have been hunting for; and because of the world from which you come.”

“Earth?” she said. “Are you implying that the plague originated there? That theory is old and rather extensively discredited. There is no single planet of origin for the waves of disease that run through the worlds.”

“That is true,” he said, “but certain strains have begun in one place and spread with the expansion of space travel, and mutated as they traveled.”

Jian had learned to trust no one, least of all a being who pandered to her own convictions. She believed that the cultures she studied had all been brought down by the same virus, one that happened to be ravaging a swath of worlds even now. She also believed, and in that she was all but alone, that the original strain had come from Earth.

“Even if what you say were so,” she said to this man, or whatever he was, “what can you offer me that I haven’t so far discovered for myself?”

“Very little, in truth,” he said, “but you would do well to ask yourself yet another question. Your world has eradicated all diseases that can endanger the human organism, or so it believes. Is it absolutely sure of that?”

“After a thousand years, I would think it might be.”

“Indeed, you would think,” he said.

She paused. Counted breaths. Remembered calm. “Tell me why I should believe you. I’ve been led into traps before. How am I to know this is not another?”

“I may be no friend to you,” he said, “but I’m not your enemy. Find the original of this. The rest, my sources assure me, will come clear.”

“Your sources? What are they? Who are they? Where do they come from? What—”

He did not answer that, only smiled that uncomfortable smile.

Jian reached toward him. She did not know if she meant to strike him or shake him or simply push him away.

It hardly mattered. He was gone.

She might have believed that he was a very good simulacrum, if the data bead had not still been in her hand. That was real. The artifact it led to was real as well. So was the country, and the culture, that it had come from.

If Earth was in danger, this could be the best and only warning it would get.

Consensus must know. She was one person; they were billions. If the plague had reached Earth, surely they were taking steps to destroy it.

She should send the data to her brother, along with a recording of her meeting with Grey. Epidemiology was Vekaa’s specialty, after all, and she was certain that Grey, or whoever had sent him, knew that. Vekaa would deal with it, and she would go back to the expedition that was waiting for her.

But as she stood by that window above that alien sea, she knew she could do no such thing. If this really was the proof she had been searching for, she had to hunt it down herself. She had to know; she had to be sure.

She had to do it quickly. Her daughter would be leaving Earth very soon, traveling to the orphan planet where the young of a hundred worlds trained to become starpilots. If the virus really had mutated into a form that could infect Earthlings in spite of all their protections, Meru could get sick. She could die.

But that was not the worst of it. If Grey’s implication was true, and the mutated virus was already on Earth and already infecting a population that had never expected to face such a thing again, Meru was not safe anywhere. None of the family was. Not Vekaa, not any of them.

Jian ran a broad range of web searches. Some would take time to complete, but the most direct queries yielded answers almost as soon as she asked the questions.

She called up a map of stars and worlds, stained blood red where the epidemic had already struck. Even while she had been in transit, the stain had expanded, the reach of the plague grown longer.

Shaking, fighting for focus, she called up another map, one that was keyed to her alone, and laid it over the other.

Her map showed a spread outward and then back, like a wave of the ocean that struck the shore and then withdrew. This new map, this The map of death came terribly close to completing it.

Her knees buckled. The floor of the dome rose to catch her.

Her mind at least was clear—the clarity of perfect terror. She left messages in places where the right people would find them, though not so quickly that any would be able to stop her. She let her staff and students know that she would be delayed in joining the expedition to the Caves of Song. Then she found a ship that would carry her to Earth.