Strings (17 page)

The comset was showing scenes of the daylight world above, and being ignored. They talked. She queried him about Meadowdale, and was impressed by the range of skills he claimed—tracking and shooting and rock climbing and horses and canoeing and cattle. There might have been more, but he grew shy and asked to hear about Banzarak.

“It’s a silly little kingdom,” she told him. “Too small to stage a musical comedy, Kas says. According to legend, it was founded by a refugee prince from India, a Buddhist fleeing the Brahmins of the Sunga dynasty. That’s not very likely, though. How would he have got to Borneo at that early date?”

“When?”

“Heavens knows! The timing is all confused, but it would have been before Rome became an empire. The real records only go back a thousand years—”

“Only?”

“A little more. Ninth century in European tally. Anyway, whenever it was, we’ve managed to maintain our own identity ever since—”

“How?”

The aptness of his queries surprised her. His ignorance concealed a good mind, and his naiveté let him batter questions at her like a child. “The sultans were smart, of course.”

“And the princesses beautiful?”

“That helped sometimes.” She told how the land was threatened now by the rising sea, as well as by the diseases and famines, radiation and refugee hordes that were the bane of the century. She was reluctant to talk about herself, but he pried, with sly, penetrating queries. Soon she had admitted far more than she had intended about the extent of her travels, her experiences, and even her studies.

“But I’m like you, really,” she said. “No doctorate; in fact not even a master’s. I’m ashamed! I’m just a mental bumblebee, buzzing around collecting knowledge.”

“What else,” he asked, “apart from nutrition, soil chemistry, marine biology, and meteorology?”

“Oh, that’s about it.”

“No genetics?”

She knew he must have felt her twitch. “How’d you guess?”

“Just seems to fit. Parasitology?”

“Cedric! How?”

He smirked down at her. “Pilgrim clubs. I’ve seen documentaries on them. They have a list of recommended skills much like that. But why should a princess need to know any of those?”

“I know one skill that you have and didn’t admit to,” she said. “Cross-examination!” And she reached under his poncho and pinched him.

“Arrh!” he said. “Do that again—lower.”

Obviously here was one child who would not object to molestation. Alya withdrew her hand quickly.

An attendant brought a snack and offered drinks. Alya stuck to coffee to combat her drowning sense of fatigue, while Cedric downed three large glasses of milk. He watched surreptitiously how she ate; he copied her. He had had a manicure, as well as a haircut.

They talked more. He wanted to be a ranger, he said, even if his father had not lived to be more than a trainee. She did not repeat what she had been told about his father.

“Maybe,” he said wistfully, “if I do a good job at this media thing for Gran…” He fell silent, in an uncharacteristic brooding.

Tenacity, Alya thought. In one day he had already withstood shocks that would have broken most men twice his age.

Then her subconscious mind gave up chewing over a problem and tossed it up to her to deal with.

“How,” she asked, “did you know I was going to be on this lev? You bought a rose.”

Cedric grinned pinkly. “I knew Gran wanted you to look at something called ‘Rhine.’ That had to be a planet—NSB, I mean. That meant the lev. I wasn’t sure you’d be on this one.”

“If I hadn’t, would you have waited for the next?”

He turned pinker and nodded.

And likely the one after that—Cedric was in love.

Bagshaw stuck his head in the door. “Evening news coming up. If it’s anything like what they ran earlier, it’s a hoot. Wonder where they dig up these clowns?” He leered, and was about to disappear—

“Wait!” Cedric said. “Anything about the President Lincoln Hotel?”

“No.” The bull looked blank. “Should there be?”

Cedric pouted, but he voiced the holo on and tuned to 5CBC. They caught a brief glimpse of Quentin Peter, and then a clip of the disastrous press conference. It was just as bad as Alya would have guessed—Agnes behaving like a madwoman, and Cedric’s shocked young face showing white above the mob of angry reporters, like a child standing on a table in the middle of a riot. The clip was cut off as soon as he admitted having no formal schooling, and before he asked what the media wanted from him. That was blatantly unfair, but only to be expected.

“So far,” a grim-smiling Quentin Peter told the world, “Director Hubbard has failed to refute her grandson’s own assessment of his qualifications. Her other deputy directors are believed to earn in the neighborhood of two hundred thousand hectos a year. Not bad for starters, you’ll agree! Now, for reaction to this extraordinary appointment, we go—”

With a snort, Cedric shouted the set off. Perhaps he thought he had suffered enough for one day. “If I’d known I was being paid that much,” he said, “I might have bought you
two
roses.”

“Easy come, easy go,” Alya said. She picked up his hand and kissed it, then laid it firmly back on the seat.

She wondered if the cabin was bugged and decided it certainly could be. “What are you going to say at your commeeting tomorrow?”

He brightened. “I was thinking…What those guys really want is the romantic stuff, right? Gallant rangers adventuring on Class Two worlds, or even Class Threes. System can sort that out and then feed it into a subsystem, another computer hook-up altogether!” He was obviously excited about this brainwave.

“How would that help?” Alya asked cautiously.

“It can be done on a
one-way
download. Then no one can access back up to System itself. We had a gadget like that at Meadowdale to stop the small fry scrambling the main board.”

She thought about that.

Obviously he had hoped for more enthusiasm. “Of course, we could add other stuff—life stories of the rangers; that sort of thing.”

It would never work. One thread would unravel a sweater. Given a single bone, a paleontologist could reconstruct the whole animal. With detailed information about 4-I’s explorations, the media would soon penetrate the secrets that Hubbard Agnes had defended so long—computers were very good at that sort of analysis. And of course it was for just that reason that Hubbard had fought her bitter lifelong battle with the media.

But Alya could not tell Cedric all that without revealing the great secret itself. And she was not going to—not because his grandmother had forbidden it, but because of what he would say:
Take me with you
.

He was not going. The director’s word was law.

“It sounds good on the surface,” she said. “Do you want my advice?”

“Please.”

“Don’t commit to anything at your commeeting. Just listen. That’s what it’s for, right? Why you called it? And don’t make any announcements that your grandmother hasn’t approved first.” She meant
in writing
, but probably even that would not help much.

“You think she’d cut me off at the knees?” he asked after a while.

“I’m afraid I do, Cedric.”

“And I think so, too!” He sighed. “I wish I knew why she’s doing this to me.”

So did Alya. Insanity still seemed the likeliest explanation. Hubbard Agnes had murdered her son and was punishing her grandson because of it.

But if Hubbard was insane, how long could she keep control of 4-I? And would Alya be able to escape to Tiber first?

Somewhere before it reached the St. Lawrence River, the lev supposedly surfaced, but it still ran in a tube and it still had no windows. Cedric called for exterior view on the com.

“No vid available,” he was told.

“
Why not
?”

There was no reply—apparently the car’s System was not up to such complex conversation.

“Nothing to look at, I expect,” Alya said sleepily. “It’s all dead rock up here now, I’m sure.” Why bother fitting cameras to look at that?

And she settled deeper into the crook of Cedric’s arm.

She awoke with a start and looked up to see his smile hanging over her. “I slept?”

“About an hour.”

She straightened, rubbing her neck. Usually napping like that made her feel terrible, but she felt very good, refreshed, calmer. Lord knew she had needed the sleep. “Did I kill your arm?”

He smiled blissfully. “Total gangrene! But the other’s long enough for two. I’ll get half transplanted.”

They had to be almost there—Alya saw what could only be Cainsville in the com screen. The Institute was an impressive complex, as big as a small city, but it was all one giant machine, a conglomeration of spherical domes and dish antennae, mysterious towers and ring structures—a thing unworldly, a dream of aliens.

“That’s a sim,” Cedric said. “Faked. Aerial view, see? But nothing can fly over Cainsville, because of the microwave beams. It doesn’t even have an airport.”

Alya yawned, which saved her from having to comment.

Some hoaxes succeed by their sheer enormity: If no one can see more than a small part of it, no one can comprehend the whole. As Kas said, an elephant sitting on a skylight is invisible.

It had been the start of deceleration that had wakened her. The lev was arriving at Cainsville.

Cainsville, April 7—8

NOT LONG AFTER she arrived in Cainsville, Alya made an alarming discovery. She might have made it sooner, had she been given a chance to think.

But she had no such chance. A phalanx of red-suited bulls whisked her through security with a minimum of investigation—the whole complex was classified as a safe zone, she was told; she would need no bodyguards while she was there. Deputy Director Fish Lyle met her at the gate. She did not like him. He smiled with his lips, while the eyes behind his thick glasses looked long dead. Possibly she had merely been prejudiced by Kas, who claimed that Fish could raise goose bumps on him at fifty paces, and who muttered dark tales of mysterious disappearances at Cainsville.

Deputy Devlin would be her official host, Fish explained, but he had been delayed in Nauc and sent his apologies. Alya offered a silent prayer to several deities, giving thanks that she had been able to spend the last two hours with Cedric, rather than with the toothy Devlin Grant.

And then she was introduced to a young man in ranger denims, fair, fresh-faced, and superficially like an older version of Cedric, but thirty centimeters shorter, twice as wide across the shoulders, and probably considerably shrewder. Baker Abel was his name, Fish said, and he would be party leader for her expedition to…to wherever she chose. If either Fish or Baker had been told that Tiber was their destination, they did not say so—but Baker did say almost everything else imaginable. He started talking while shaking her hand and did not seem to stop thereafter. He had a cocky manner, an erratic limp, and an unending line of banter and commentary that would have done honor to a bazaar horoscope huckster.

Rangers were supposed to be strong, silent types, Alya thought—slayers of fearsome monsters. This one could have sold the monsters real estate or talked them into vegetarianism. He never paused for a reply, so she was relieved of any duty to make conversation. Yet he registered her fatigue without commenting on it; he deftly extracted her from the mob of obsequious officials and doting spouses without visibly offending anyone, and by snapping a few sharp words of command, he organized her and her companions and their baggage and attendants onto a caravan of golfies and got them moving at once. She detected a real competence behind the juvenile facade.

With Alya at his side in the lead golfie, Baker began a rapid commentary on the Cainsville complex, scattering bad wise-cracks like a tour guide—see the pyramids by moonlight, and they’re even better with your eyes closed…more than eighty hectares enclosed at Cainsville…nowhere to walk a dog—and he effortlessly spun webs of statistics.

Despite a heavy traffic of vans and bicycles and other golfies, the little cart built up a considerable speed on the straights, with Jathro and the others zipping along behind. System did all the steering.

“Just tell it where you wish to go, Princess,” Baker explained, “and it’ll get you there. Hang on for this curve. Lots of curves, because so many of the buildings are domes. Forty-two geodesic domes, and another thirty in plain chocolate…” He prattled on as the caravan wound and twisted along a bewildering variety of busy arteries. Most were large enough to rank as city streets, but sometimes Alya found herself hurtling at high speed along narrow passageways like hotel corridors, hoping that nobody opened a door in front of her. After the sharper bends, she would listen for Moala’s screams, far behind her.

“This must be a shortcut,” Baker remarked cheerfully. “Can’t say I’ve ever come this way before. I expect Livingstone Dome’s busy just now, with everyone heading home—whoops!” The golfie skittered on two wheels around a right-angle bend and shot through a doorway that was still opening. “Now this is Lewis and Clark Dome…”

Alya tuned his voice out, hanging on tight and holding a starched smile on her face to hide pure misery. Jet lag was really rattling her now. She had been up all night, in effect, and this was early morning, Banzarak time, and—and that was when she made the alarming discovery.

She was in Cainsville, and there was nothing at all she could do about Tiber until its window opened the next day. That should have been enough to satisfy the most relentless intuition. But it was not. Somewhere during her arrival she had become separated from Cedric—who most likely had been officially met also, to preserve the fiction that he was a deputy director. So now he was gone and her dread had returned. She felt a gnawing urge to ask Baker to turn the golfie and go back; she twitched and itched with the need. Apparently Cedric had become a permanent addiction for her.

She wondered with sudden dismay if her intuition could be faulty, if it might be misleading her and everyone else. That could happen. The history of Banzarak held many tales of sultans or their children being driven mad by a
satori
. The warnings were not specific, and they never gave reasons. A simple aversion was easy enough to understand—don’t take that plane, you don’t want the fish sauce, stay out of the water today—but sometimes the urge was not just a negative, it was a positive command to
do
something, a something that was never specified. Then the victim could only thrash around, trying everything possible in the hope that something might relieve the premonition. The urgency might be extreme, the directive incomprehensible—and that combination could bring on insanity very quickly.

That was the dark side of the family gift, an instinct for self-preservation bred into her genes by generations of clay pots and cobras, silk ropes and royal inbreeding. The people of ancient Banzarak had wanted sultans who were guided by the gods to make correct decisions, and so they had devised the puberty rite of the deadly snake and the harmless string. The youths who had chosen wrongly had died. Those with the right hunches had survived to bear children. Genetic selection had done the rest, and in time the Draconian test had created what it sought to find: an inherited intuition.

The sultans had served their land well, and their family, too. By repeated inbreeding, they had strengthened the gift and also retained it among their own relatives. None of them, it was said, ever swallowed a fish bone. None ever met with accidents—except for Alya’s own parents, who had died while rescuing people during the floods of 2040. Kas swore that they had known what was going to happen and had stayed on to prevent a panic that might have killed thousands more.

Yet sometimes the intuition went beyond the mere avoidance of danger, as Hubbard Agnes had guessed. All afternoon Alya had been trying not to think of Kas’s account of his first meeting with Thalia. “Instant bird song” was the way he described it.

Cedric had worn an aura of fire.

Oh, hell!

He was a nice kid, but unlucky, unpolished, uneducated…He had nothing to offer except mere physical satisfaction. And probably little of that—finesse would not be his forte.

Couldn’t her genes have found someone her own size?

And he was not available anyway.

“Columbus Dome,” Baker Abel said, bringing Alya out of her black reverie. The golfie had come to a stop before a narrow doorway that led into a stairwell—containing a very curious staircase.

“You’re not familiar with spiralators?” he inquired as Alya hesitated. “Just reach for the handle at the back and jump in. Now!” He took her by the waist and lifted her bodily inside. Then he moved to follow, tripped, and landed on his knees on the tread below her.

He rose, grinning up at her rather sheepishly. “Gimpy leg,” he explained. “Not quite healed yet. Got bitten by a rock. Well, it looked like a rock. There should have been a sign: ‘Danger: Do not feed the rocks.’”

Alya was certainly not familiar with spiral escalators. She watched with interest as a doorway to the next floor went curving by and vanished downward. “What happens at the top?” she asked.

“Not sure at all. We sent a guy up to find out once, but he never came back. Expect he’s still going.”

“Smartass!”

Baker grinned. “This column in the middle is the newel, okay? Well, there is a school of thought that says that at the top the steps level out like an ordinary escalator and then curve around and vanish into the newel. The treads are sliding up vertically on the newel tube, you see, and it’s the newel that’s doing the turning. The theory is that they flip over and come back down inside the tube. I don’t believe a word of it. It’s done with mirrors. Next door’s ours. Stand by to leap…”

Alya stepped out nimbly. Baker stumbled again and would have clutched at her to steady himself—had she been there. Moreover, in her hasty efforts to help him, she ineptly thumped him on the back of the neck with one hand and behind the bad knee with her foot, and thus spread Baker Abel flat on the rug. And then she trod on his fingers.

“Oh, I am extremely sorry,” Alya said. “That was clumsy of me.”

He scrambled up, completely unabashed. “Black belt?”

“Brown.”

He grinned with no trace of a blush on his pallid Nordic face. Cedric, had he tried that and been caught out, would have glowed like a neon lamp. Baker Abel was little older, but infinitely more confident than Cedric, and his foolery was hiding arrogance, not shyness. As he turned to help Jathro and the others emerge from the spiralator, Alya allowed herself a small smile.

Baker enjoyed watching her, and she knew that he would certainly accept the challenge and try again for a fast grope as soon as he got the chance, but her instincts told her that his intent was not serious. His real interest lay elsewhere; his heart was already mortgaged.

She did not know how far other women could judge men’s intentions, but she had never been wrong yet, so perhaps the
buddhi
helped. Baker would play for fun, with no attempt to follow through. The antler-moustached Devlin Grant had been calculating when he could make room for her on his calendar. To Jathro, she was a potential meal ticket. All three men looked upon her differently.

And Cedric had fallen hopelessly in love the moment she had spoken a kind word to him.

Baker made a sweeping gesture at the room. “Circular. You get sick of circles in this place. This is the guest lounge. Eating machines over there for snacks. Bar over there. Full cafeteria two floors down. You get Room One, of course, Your Highness. Dr. Jar, Room Two. Grant said he’d call for you at 0200. Until then, what pulls your string? Food, rest, dancing, swimming, exercise, stamp collecting?”

“Sleep,” Alya said.

“Alone?”

At that, of course, Jathro exploded in roars of pompous indignation, which was exactly what the jokester had intended. Baker’s juvenile silliness was going to be a pain in the posterior, but he had his moments.

Just after two A.M., with the lights dimmed to a moody gloaming, Alya found herself being graciously assisted into the down spiralator by Devlin Grant. Her efforts to sleep had been fruitless. She felt at once hungry and nauseated, exhausted and feverish. She had a headache again, and a hollow, used-up feeling. This journey to inspect a world called Rhine was a totally useless exercise, she was certain. It did not frighten her, nor did it excite her—it was merely irrelevant. The thought that she would see Tiber later in the day had power to stir her, but even that seemed less urgent than something else…someone else…someone she should go looking for. She cursed herself for being a brainless infatuated ninny even as she knew that what she was feeling had nothing at all to do with conventional physical desire. She certainly had no patience for the bedroom eyes and predatory scrutinies of Devlin Grant.

Jathro sat in glowering solitude in a second golfie, while Devlin squired Alya in the first. He chattered, although much less painfully than Baker Abel would have done. The golfie ride itself was considerably more sedate—Baker must have given System some very unorthodox instructions on the earlier occasion.

“We shall be using de Soto dome, princess,” Devlin explained. “We actually have six transmensors operational at the moment.”

That surprised Alya. “I thought one was the limit?”

He flashed his teeth at her. “We can only use one at a time. Prometheus Dome is the power source. About once an hour System turns on that equipment for a moment and cranks the temperature up a few thousand degrees. Stars are easy to find. You would never want to visit Prometheus.

“For exploration work, though, de Soto and David Thompson are our largest and best equipped, but with so many NSBs to investigate all at once, we may have to use Bering and van Diemen, as well.”

Under the orange dimness the passages and halls were eerily barren of traffic. Alya struggled to suppress yawns. Her eyelids weighed a ton apiece. The golfie halted at a door for an automated identity check, and Devlin paused in his lecture until they were under way again.

“We picked up Rhine’s shadow on prelim scan back in February—we always have a hundred or so leads ready to follow up. We’ve only made one real pass at it, and that was more than a week ago. The specs looked good, and we dropped a robbie. We’ll see what it has to tell us.”

The golfies came to a halt at an armored door. If the whole of Cainsville was regarded as a secure area, then some parts were more than just secure, for certainly the men who were rising from their poker game to inspect the passengers were guards, and there were two more checks before the drive ended.

Eventually Alya found herself being assisted into a person-shaped plastic bag. Apart from its sickly chemical odor and a tendency to whistle when she walked, it turned out to be surprisingly tolerable. Its air supply was cool, and it muffled voices slightly, which was not all a bad thing. It also fended off Devlin’s wandering hands, which was a very good thing. She shuffled along between him and Jathro, both similarly garbed, heading for the next stage. She thought she would give anything in the world—in any world—for about a week’s sound sleep.

They passed through two successive airlocks with circular doors a meter thick, like those on bank vaults, through a decon spray, and finally entered a gloomy, red-lit control center, loud with anonymous voices. Devlin guided Alya to a couch and then excused himself to go and attend to business. Fine by her.