Asimov's Science Fiction (10 page)

"Hi," he said, and held his palm out in the high-class gesture of greeting.

My own hand automatically reached out and laid itself atop his, the Imperative commanding my body to respond too fast for me to belay the order. I stared at the back of my knuckles, willing my fingers to twitch, then slowly pulled my hand away. And still I felt that pressure behind my eyes, telling me I wanted nothing more than to protect him, and to please him.

Symrock, how I hated Duyi then.

I crouch down and press my hand to the glass. We're in the ballroom on the bottom level of the estate, and the windows along the outer wall curve down into the floor, allowing a view of the gardens directly below. I'm not looking for the gardens, of course, but for the navigation lights of skimmers launching from the flight deck.

"Nothing yet," I say, glancing up.

Against the darkness of the empty ballroom, Duyi—standing in a patch of moonlight—seems to glow, transformed into some unreal apparition. He touches his fingers to his temple, a gesture that means he's checking his NeuroLogic for the time, but the movement does little to dispel the ghostly illusion.

He says, "Santiago's late. The raid should be underway already."

"It may take some time to produce the desired effect."

Santiago's plan involves raiding a facility to the southwest of the estate that stores activated symrock—Moseroth III's major export to other worlds—and thus drawing security forces away from the estate itself. The estate's guards won't mobilize until it becomes clear the storage facility is seriously jeopardized, which means Santiago and the Freeminers can't bluff the attack. Anything less than a coordinated assault and the reinforcements won't leave their posts at the estate long enough to reinforce—or long enough for Duyi to escape.

"This has to work," Duyi says, the words coming out in a barely audible hiss. There's no need for us to stay quiet in here—the ballroom walls are soundproofed—but I think he doesn't want me to know how scared he is. Scared of the regent, and of what she plans to do to his mind in five days. Something inside me tightens at the desperation in his tone, though my muscles remain relaxed and ready, as always. My body is not in the habit of betraying how I feel.

A dark shape drops into view, silhouetted against the moonlit gardens below. It hovers for a moment, tacking clockwise, and the forward and rear nav lights flick on like stars revealed by a sudden parting of clouds. It darts off a mere second before the next skimmer drops down from the flight deck to take its place. This process repeats half a dozen times until all the reinforcements are deployed.

"Gone," I say, rising to my feet. "It's time."

We'd left our bags by the door, and now retrieve them. I shoulder mine, and my palm itches to reach out for the other one, too, but Duyi is already lifting it. He's become insistent lately about carrying his share—never mind that I'm strong enough for it all. If I try to reach for it, he'll shake me off and say,
it's the principle of the thing, Brother,
so I let him keep the bag.

We take the servants' lift up to the kitchens, cross over the central hub where the estate's antigrav engine resides, then down again on the east side. It's late and most of the staff is asleep, so no one sees us. Nonetheless, as we slip through the light-dimmed hallways, a wave of fear overtakes me. I am not often afraid, but the thought that, after all my assurances, the Imperative might stop me is terrifying. Duyi would hesitate to go on alone, and this would cost him precious minutes, and the guards would catch him.

Duyi's in the lead, his soft-soled shoes shuffling quietly on the bare floor. We both know the way, but he's used to leading.

"Feng!" someone shouts behind us.

I spin around at the sound of my name. It is Hatta, one of the regent's personal guards, and thus one of the few security staff who must remain at the estate no matter how dire the situation becomes with the Freeminer rebellion. Instinctively, I step away from Duyi, drawing Hatta's attention with me.

"What are you doing here?" he says, his surprise momentarily making him forget decorum.

I pull myself up straight. "Master Duyi wishes to go flying." Given our proximity to the flight deck, any other explanation would be an obvious falsehood.

Stiffly, he replies, "The young master is not permitted to fly without sufficient escort."

"I will escort him, of course."

We both freeze, staring each other down. He narrows his eyes with suspicion, the expression accentuating his epicanthic folds. Hatta knows I know that I do not count as sufficient escort beyond the bounds of the estate. How much else can he deduce? Will he guess the depths of my treason?

We reach for our guns at the same instant, but his Imperative is confused—shooting the master's personal guard feels dangerously akin to attacking the master himself—and it slows him down. I, however, have been coaching myself against the possibility of confronting other guards, so my Imperative feels clear. I shoot him in the shoulder and the knee. He stumbles but refuses to go down, still trying to aim at me with his wounded arm.

"I'm sorry," I say, and shoot him in the head. I'm not, actually—not yet. With the Imperative singing behind my eyes, I am incapable of hesitation or regret. The NeuroLogic technicians didn't just give me the perfect aim of a guard, but the willingness to use it, too. I'll mourn Hatta later, when I come back to myself.

For now, I must do whatever is necessary to get Duyi out.

The estate guards were the ones who taught me the complex etiquette of my station. The technicians hadn't made a child guard on Moseroth III in more than a century, so some subtleties had been lost. In the guards' minds, I think I was more a curiosity to be argued over than I was a child.

In any case, I quickly learned I was allowed to stand by Duyi's chair while he ate, but never to be seen eating with him. On the second evening of my guardhood, he sat down to a formal dinner with the regent and I stood uncomfortably beside him, my too-keen sense of smell reporting all the delights I could not partake of. Lemongrass soup, braised duck, saffron rice, pickled tufa root. My empty stomach churned.

Throughout the meal, Duyi kept stealing glances at me. Finally he said, "Don't you want some food?" I didn't know why this occurred to him—he was accustomed to servants standing by while he ate.

My eyes flicked involuntarily to the other end of the long table, where the regent sat. She seemed absorbed in some document displayed on the table-screen beside her plate, her razor-cut dark hair curtaining her downturned face, but I didn't dare break the rules in her presence. I was expected to say, "No, young master," and so that is what I said.

When they finished the meal, I was excused along with the serving staff to take my dinner in the servants' mess hall. Later that night, Duyi's nursemaid pinged my NeuroLogic to inform me my presence was required. I hurried, but only because it was easier than fighting the Imperative.

The nursemaid opened the door to Duyi's chambers for me as if I were a guest, instead of staff. Duyi seemed to have been waiting impatiently, which made me nervous. None of my etiquette training had prepared me for this.

"It's nearly bedtime, young master. Don't play too long," the nursemaid chided, though I wasn't sure whether the warning was meant more for him or for me.

"Come on," he said, and grabbed my hand as if it were nothing for a lowly guard to touch the regent's brother. I was too shocked by the contact to know what to do. Pulling my hand away could only worsen the situation, so I let him hold it.

One of the sofas in his sitting room had been overturned and stripped of its cushions and pillows, the separate parts rearranged to form a fort. Duyi wriggled through the dark entrance and I ducked in after him.

"I saved this for you," he said, and produced a crumpled dinner napkin. Carefully, he pulled back the corners to reveal a round chocolate truffle, slightly mushed, stolen from that evening's dessert course. "It got a little melty in my pocket. Sorry."

I stared at the offering in his hands, and at his oddly hopeful expression. He didn't know how that single chocolate was worth two months' food to a family like mine. He also didn't know the missing napkin—genuine imported cotton grown from a plant, not synthed in a lab—might cost someone in the laundry room her job.

He was simply trying to be kind.

My heart felt as if it were constricting in my chest. He had everything in the world, except the one thing he needed: someone to share with. I ate the chocolate.

Later, I would chastise myself for it. He was alone, but fantastically wealthy; I was equally alone, and had nothing. I didn't owe him any pity, and I certainly would not let myself be bought with table scraps.

But the next day, it wasn't chocolate. It was playing hide-and-seek in the private walled gardens below the regent's estate. I remembered the game, though not whom I'd played it with before. It was the only game I remembered how to play, in fact, and as the heir of a regent he had only been taught strategy games. He put away his
weiqi
set and led the way down to the gardens, saying we could try my game today, and his game tomorrow.

I rush up to the flight deck entrance, Duyi hanging back a few paces. The security checkpoint wirelessly recognizes my NeuroLogic ID, and the doors unlock and hiss open for us. I duck my head in to check for guards, but the deck is clear, so I wave Duyi forward.

The flight deck has two long walkways on either side of a wide opening in the floor, through which we can glimpse the moonlit gardens below the estate. The skimmers are lined up between the walkway and the gap, lashed to a section of deck that slants down toward the open air. Many of the skimmer attachments stand empty, thanks to Santiago's plan, though enough skimmers remain for us to choose from.

I select the smallest one, a fast little two-seater that will be hard to spot in the sky, especially at night. Duyi hands his pack to me and climbs into the forward seat.

"You haven't flown this model before," I point out.

"How hard can it be?" he says, running through the pre-flight checks. "Besides, I won't be any use shooting down pursuers."

This is a fair point, and we can't afford the time for hesitation, so I climb into the rear seat. I stuff the packs down into the foot well and swivel the seat to face rearward.

Duyi doesn't need to ask me if I'm ready—we've flown together enough to know each other's patterns and movements. He releases the wheel catch and we roll forward toward the edge. With a sickening lurch, we drop through the opening and freefall for a couple of seconds before the antigrav engine catches us, buoying the skimmer in the air.

I realize my breath has caught in my throat and force myself to exhale. I hold out my hands, expecting them to betray me, but the Imperative doesn't give me so much as a whisper of a command. Duyi is free, and I feel no compulsion to stop him.

As we hover below the estate, Duyi tacks the skimmer around, then he expertly hops it forward onto the symrock roadline leading northeast. Activated symrock repels other symrock with a force analogous to magnetism—though it's actually a product of quantum entanglement—so the symrock in our engine lets us skate above the roadline, flying without wings.

In a well-calibrated skimmer, antigrav feels like nothing, so smooth you only know you're moving when your eyes are open. But now isn't the time to close my eyes and enjoy it; I keep my gaze locked on the estate, the massive structure hovering ostentatiously over its bed of symrock buried beneath the gardens. It occurs to me, for the first time, that a floating fortress is perhaps a bit crass—too large a waste of valuable resources, too flamboyant a show of power. It was our home, and so we accepted its existence as a matter of course, but seeing it for the last time somehow strips away the veneer of familiarity and I can finally view it objectively.

When the estate fades to an indiscernible smudge behind us, I switch to distance vision, and the structure blooms back in magnified detail. Yes, it really looks absurd. What a strange life we led there.

Movement to the southwest, and my ruminations are cut short. A cluster of skimmers converge on the estate, their nav lights glowing like a swarm of fireflies as they hover below the building, rising into the flight deck one at a time.

"Symrock," I curse. "They've returned earlier than Santiago projected." Perhaps I should have taken the time to hide Hatta's body; they'll know something's gone wrong as soon as they enter the hallway, and it won't take them long after that to figure out what happened. "They'll be after us soon."

"I guess I'll have to take this bird off-road, then," Duyi says over his shoulder.

For his own safety, Duyi is strictly forbidden from off-roading, which means we've only ever tried it once. The Imperative clenches reflexively at the thought of danger, and I must pry its fingers off my psyche before I say, "Yes. I see no alternative."

Duyi slows the skimmer and dips the nose down to lower our altitude until we're skimming a mere meter off the ground. We keep following the unnaturally neat and straight mound of earth where the symrock roadline is buried, even when it passes between the trunks of a copse of trees. I barely recognize the place—the copse is thick with brambles growing right up to the roadline. They're an invasive species, seeded deliberately to deter Duyi from returning.

"Here it is," Duyi says, pulling the skimmer to a standstill. He casts a grin over his shoulder at me. "Don't you remember, Brother?"

Hatta taught him how to fly when he was thirteen. I already knew how, of course—it was one of the aptitudes programmed into my NeuroLogic—but Duyi insisted he wanted to learn for himself. The regent did not entirely approve of him studying such a plebian task, which made everyone nervous about it, but she did not forbid his lessons. Duyi took to skimming as if he'd been a pilot in a past life, and I think he enjoyed it twice as much because it displeased his sister.

On one particular outing, Duyi and I were in the lead, Hatta and another guard following in a second skimmer. We were supposed to be riding the east roadline, but Duyi angled low between the trees and made a sharp turn onto a connector that took us to the northeast line.