Reclamation (33 page)

“My line will remain open for your message,” said Zur-Kohlbyr. The Director did not even stand. Basq’s scarlet robes fluttered as he left the room alone. Iyal wondered if the Vitae Ambassador knew he’d just been insulted.

I’ll bet he does. If he knows enough about my private politics to come across with the fact that I’m holding up their pullout, he surely knows about our manners.
Killian’s calm, blue eyes gazed up from his portrait. She laid her hand across it to keep herself from seeing his face. She did not need a reminder of how alone she was right now.

Zur-Kohlbyr touched a key on the wall and the door to the waiting room slid shut. He leveled a wide grin toward Zur-Iyal. “I knew I could count on you, Cousin.”

“Forgive me, Cousin Director.” Iyal took her hands off the table and folded her arms across her chest. “But this sudden reacknowledgment of our family connection has got me a little confused.” She shifted her expression to a glower and her tenses to across-table casual, which was one step from insubordinate. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

Zur-Kohlbyr’s smile was indulgent. “Iyal, these are serious events here. We have the chance to take the lead with them and shape Kethran’s future as a power in the Quarter Galaxy.”

Uh-oh.
A gleam shone softly in the Director’s eye. He was smelling power and he had a keen instinct for it. It was a genetic tendency reinforced by the First Family environment. His branch had been particularly successful at applying it for a hundred years.

“The Vitae want our Arla.” He settled back and lifted his drink. “They want her more than I’ve ever seen them want anything since that business with passing the anticontraband measures. Now, why?” He sipped his gold liquid. “Would you like a drink?”

“No, thank you.”
I don’t think my stomach could handle it right now.

He swirled the liquid in the glass meditatively. “She must be unique in some significant way.” He smiled at Iyal again. “If we knew how, we, you and I, Cousin, could give Kethran what the rest of the Quarter Galaxy would sell their lives to have, a step up on the Vitae.”

“Well, it’s not like we haven’t been trying to work on it, Zur-Kohlbyr,” Iyal reminded him.

“We’ve been trying within very strict boundaries.” He swallowed the last of his drink. “I suggest that the importance of speed in this matter removes those boundaries.”

Iyal felt the blood drain out of her cheeks. “What do you want me to do, Cousin Director? Take a sapient woman apart to see how she ticks?”

“Zur-Iyal.” Zur-Kohlbyr rested his hands flat on the table. “We need this. Things are building quickly in the Quarter Galaxy. The Unifiers are becoming a real force, and we don’t know how power will go to their collective heads. The Shessel are beginning to colonize and spread in their own right and we don’t know what they will do either. The Vitae are pulling back to this little world they’ve found, perhaps permanently, perhaps not. Without some leverage, Kethran, this world our parents built from a dead rock, is doomed to be tossed around the political storm like a feather in a stampede.”

Iyal said nothing.

“Cousin, I know you have limited your considerable talent for intrigue and manipulation to the occasional interaction with contraband runners. Since it was proper to your postmarriage status and beneficial to the labs, I’ve never said anything about it. Now I’m asking you to remember your birth family and your place in the soul-politic and do not make me force you to hand this artifact over to me after I’ve seen to your arrest.

“Where is Arla Stone now?”

Iyal gripped her wrist until the edges of the portrait bracelet dug into her palm. She saw Arla in the lab, reading. She saw her, narrow-eyed and plainly frightened, as she arrived by Perivar’s side. She heard her own voice talking to Perivar:
And I’m not crazy about the idea you’d think I’d get her in here and put her in a processor …

And she heard Basq promising to leave as soon as they had Arla, and she saw Kethran forced to crawl back to the Parent World because they couldn’t manage on their own. And she heard Cousin Director’s threat again and she knew, she knew, that he meant it. And she saw Arla in the lab.

Iyal stood up. “Arla Stone is on field assignment, Cousin Director. I’ll have her recalled immediately. You’ll have to give me eleven hours, though.”

He nodded. “I think I can give you just that, Iyal. Remember, we need her alive, but I’m sure we can explain away any other … aspects … of her physical condition.” His smile grew conspiratorial. “I knew, I knew, you would hold true on this.”

“We will also have to talk further, Cousin Director,” she said with what she hoped was a knowing leer.

She let him walk her to the door and salute her as she left.

Back out in the corridor, she used her torque to call Allenden.

“Where is she?” she asked under her breath as she skirted two interns who were deep in their own discussions.

“Sweeping the attic, actually,” came Allenden’s reply. “Iyal, what …”

“I’ll tell you later. Just sit still for now, all right?”

“All right, Iyal, all right.” There was a peeved note in his voice. Iyal swallowed. She couldn’t risk getting Allenden angry right now. There was too much she might need him for later.

“Allenden,” she said. “We need to move with extreme caution on this. It could shape up into a family war if we don’t.”

She could tell by the length of the pause that she had gotten to him.

“I’m waiting on the news, Iyal,” he said, and shut the connection down.

In no mood to wait for the service lift, Iyal ran up three flights of stairs.

The attic was actually a lab that had been shut down three years ago when the Vitae had finished implementing their plans for controlling the genetic engineering industry on Kethran. The loss of business had forced Amaiar Gardens to cut its staff. The unused lab had never been officially converted into storage, but unused equipment, broken furniture, and anything else that anybody wanted to get out of the way turned up there. Every now and again some intern in trouble with his supervisor would be sent up there to clean it out and organize it.

Inside, Arla was lugging a polymer crate full of anonymous cables from its spot in the middle of the floor. Iyal stood in the threshold and watched her for a moment. Arla wore the plain moss green shirt and trousers that most of the interns favored when doing heavy jobs, but she still kept her spill of dark hair wrapped under her black turban. The thick tool belt around her waist had a cattle prod dangling next to the bumpy leather pouch she always carried, because even though they weren’t supposed to, the newer handlers had taken to quietly getting Arla out into the pens to help deal with balkier specimens. She had, as near as Iyal could understand, been some kind of animal handler back on her homeworld. She never complained about the extra work. She never even asked why she was being tapped. She just waded in and did whatever she was told to with an eagerness to please that bordered on groveling sometimes. For the past couple of weeks, Iyal had been wondering what all that ingratiation was covering up.

Now she was still wondering.

Arla stacked the crate on top of a container of silicate blocks and turned around. She saw Iyal in the doorway and flinched.

“Zur-Iyal,” she said as she recovered. “Sorry. Was … I was startled.”

“Don’t worry about it.” Iyal stepped all the way into the room and let the door slide shut behind her. “I need to talk to you, Arla.”

“All right,” said Arla, without hesitation, like she always did. Sometimes, Iyal had the feeling she could tell the woman to go jump off a cliff, and Arla’d still say “all right.”

Sometimes. Other times, out of the corner of her eye, Iyal caught Arla studying her with her innocent, brown eyes turned to black slits like she was memorizing Iyal’s motions, and calculating … calculating what?

Iyal shot the bolt on the manual lock. “Arla Stone, you’ve got two minutes to explain why I shouldn’t hand you over to the Vitae Ambassador who was here looking for you.”

Arla blanched until she was nearly as white as a Vitae herself, but her voice remained steady.

“Do you understand what you are saying, Iyal …”

“You’re lying.” Iyal said. “Now you’ve only got one minute.”

For a moment, Arla did nothing but rub her hands together and stare at their scarred backs. She murmured softly in her own language. Then, abruptly, she switched to Iyal’s. “I should’ve known,” she said, without a trace of accent or awkwardness. “You’re not like the Nobles in the Realm. You’ve got no expectations about what I can and can’t do. You’re not so easy to bluff.” She faced Iyal. “The Vitae. What is it they want from me? Did they say?”

“Yes. They say you’re their property. That you’re an artifact that was stolen from them and that they want you back.”

Arla sank into a rickety chair, wrinkling a short stack of polymer sheets that rested on the seat. “You do not like them.”

“No.” Iyal folded her arms. “But right now I’m trying to decide if I like you less. I’ve got security footage of you breaking into secured documents, Arla.”

Arla’s head jerked up. “You’ve got what?”

“Don’t try to go back to the country girl act, Arla Stone …”

“No! No!” Arla waved her hands violently. “I don’t understand. Security footage. What is that?”

Iyal stabbed a finger toward the boxy camera over the doorway. “Pictures from a camera like that one. Security surveillance. Yards of tape with your picture on it, pulling off ninety-nine different illegal maneuvers.”

Arla stared at the camera. Her mouth moved silently and her face went from white to green. For a moment, Iyal thought she was actually going to be sick. Then, Arla let out a cluster of syllables so bitter and explosive that Iyal couldn’t imagine them being anything but curses.

“No more time,” Iyal said. “Start talking.”

“All right.” Iyal didn’t have to strain to hear the new tone in her voice. This was not innocent trust. This was considered acceptance. “What do you want to know?”

A dozen different questions leapt to the front of Iyal’s mind: What are you? Why do the Vitae want you? How did you learn to read so fast?

At last, she said, “How did you manage to access the Diet transcripts?”

“I saw Zur-Allenden do it once.”

“Once?”

Arla nodded. “That is all I need. I was resetting one of the research tables and he was paying no attention to me.”

“So, you’ve got a photographic memory?”

Her lips moved, repeating the term, and her brow wrinkled. “Something like that, yes.”

“So you can read. The illiteracy was an act.”

“Sometimes, now. It wasn’t when I first came here.”

“Then how …”

Arla fumbled with a pocket on her tool belt and pulled out a pair of gloves; then she opened the leather pouch she carried with her and drew out an ice white sphere.

“This is one of my namestones.” She kept it cupped in her hand as Iyal leaned over it. “They give me the ability to remember everything I have ever seen, or ever heard. But they also let me have a base for those memories …” She frowned. “They correlate what is in my head so it makes sense to me. If I have a question, I hold the stones and they find the answer in my mind and give it to me. The more I have seen, the better the answers get.

“Before I came here, I was in a Vitae holding cell and a ship called the
U-Kenai.
I saw a great deal. I knew something about computers and I’d heard at least spatterings of your language. The stones were able to”—she frowned again—“create relationships for me so I was able to learn very fast.”

Iyal felt her mouth move as she tried to form the words “that’s impossible.” She couldn’t get the sounds out, because in the back of her mind she knew that was not a valid argument. Arla was impossible, yet there Arla sat, relatively calm and collected and holding a stone in her hand that was really … what?

Can’t be an AI, there’s no way for her to interface with it. Can’t be any land of computer I know about. Artificial total recall? AND the ability to create contextual relationships? How? HOW?

Iyal stumped over to one of the old research tables and, with one sweep of her arm, dumped a pile of miscellaneous debris and dust onto the floor. She slammed her hand against the ON key and as soon as the screens and boards flickered to life she began activating the scanners.

“Arla, let me see that.” Iyal extended her hand and was not surprised to see it was shaking.

After a moment’s hesitation, Arla laid the stone against Iyal’s palm. It was heavy, smooth, and cool as polished crystal. She cupped her fingers carefully around it. Its surface did not warm up. It was as if it resisted her body’s heat.

Iyal set the stone gently into one of the table’s scanner pockets and closed the lid over it. Arla gripped the arms of the chair until her knuckles turned white. Iyal said nothing. Arla knew this would not hurt her precious stone, she must know that or she never would have let go of it.

The main screen lit up with the preliminary information. First there was a shell, primarily constructed of crystallized carbon, but there were several trace elements. It had a micro-level capillary construction. Capillaries? In a doped-up diamond? Inside, primarily liquid … then how had it not evaporated over time … proteins, ribonucleic acids, electrochemical traces, and a filament structure …

Iyal blinked up at Arla and down at the screen again. The stone was a hollow, porous, enriched diamond filled with a miniature nervous system and a whole stew of unidentified virus chains.

And I’d bet my marriage contract that each one of them has binders that match that host of extra receptors Arla’s carrying around inside her … but no
…
the scan only identifies ten variable strings and Arla has twenty-two unused receptors …

She’s not a tool then, she’s a system component. And this thing still can’t be an artificial intelligence, but it might just be a real one.
Iyal wished there was a spare chair for her to collapse into.

“Where did this come from, Arla?”

Arla shrugged. “I was told that the Nameless Powers left them to my family in case they needed to send another servant to the Realm. This might be true, but I don’t know what it means.”