Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (12 page)

Lot cowered at the door until Jupiter crooked a finger. Then Lot sprinted across the dark space, scrambling into Jupiter’s lap. “
What is it?
” he whispered, as if there was something sacred in the night’s silence. “
What’s gone wrong?
”

“There, look, you can see it,” Jupiter said, nodding at the projection of the shattered red sphere.

Lot stared at it, thinking that perhaps the blazing lines of light had widened. “Is it a cordon?”

“It was.”

“But it’s broken.”

“Yes.” Jupiter’s arms tightened around him.

Lot frowned at the projection. Now he was sure the lines had grown wider, and more intricate too. Very softly: “What does it have to do with us?”

He felt a brief burst of surprise from Jupiter. Then a sigh ran past his lips, and with it his foreboding began to change, strengthening to a wry determination. “What would I do without your counsel, Lot? Of course you’re right. It has nothing to do with us. Not anymore.”

L
OT TURNED AWAY FROM
Y
ULYSSA, DISTURBED BY THE MEMORY
and by a sense of complicity, for Jupiter had warned him never to speak of what he’d seen that night. But now Yulyssa was expecting an answer. He took a long draft of the wine, as if to numb himself for the task. “Jupiter said the Hallowed Vasties had nothing to do with us.”

“Umm. I wish I could believe that.”

He picked up a slight, disturbing tendril in her sense. “You’re scared.”

“Sooth. Just a little. It seems we have a new star in our sky. Or should I say, an old star listed in the astronomical catalogs has been observed from Silk for the first time.”

Lot frowned at her, not understanding.

“We don’t have good astronomical facilities, and living within the nebula we don’t have good viewing. But we do have several dedicated hobbyists.”

“So?”

“So have you ever heard of Ryo?”

He felt a sudden tightness across his chest.
Ryo
. “Yeah. It was one of the cordoned suns of the Hallowed Vasties.”

“Was . . . ?” She seemed to hold the word in her mouth like wine, tasting its implications. “Yes, you’re right. It disappeared under its Dyson swarm almost sixteen hundred years ago. But it’s visible again. I saw it last night. Our astronomers noticed it only a week ago, though they say it could have been visible for months, or even years before that.” He could feel her probing gaze. “You’re not surprised, are you?”

Two tiny flies with glassy wings rested on the rim of his plate. “I’ve seen grand schemes fail before.”

“I guess you have.” She poured more wine. He could feel something dark and menacing under her calm demeanor, but none of that came through in her voice: “Ryo isn’t the only one, you know. Quin-ken and Bengali are also out in the open again.”

One of the flies began walking toward the cooling dumplings. He shooed them both away. “Why are you telling me?”

“Just to see what comes of it. Placid Antigua claims that Nesseleth wasn’t made in the Committee.”

“Sooth. Nesseleth came out of the Hallowed Vasties.”

“How do you know that?”

Lot drank more wine and considered. “Nesseleth told me. Only it wasn’t the Vasties then. The star was called Talent, and there were still planets. When she was a little girl, she lived by an ocean, and we’d go swimming every morning when the tide was low—”

He stopped himself, startled at the intensity of the recollection. He’d known Nesseleth through a personal interface, a little blond-haired girl, always just his age. He’d spent far more time with her than with any of his brothers or sisters. They’d played in her memories, and sometimes it was hard to distinguish what was his own past, and what was hers.

“I don’t know what happened after that, or who made her into a great ship, or why. It didn’t seem to matter then.”

Yulyssa filled his glass again. “Did Jupiter come out of the Hallowed Vasties?”

Lot couldn’t stop a soft chuckle. “I don’t think even Jupiter was
that
old.”

“Why?”

He blinked, unsure how to answer. “I don’t know. Don’t people get . . . strange? After a while?”

“You mean real people?”

He wondered how old Yulyssa was. She’d come from Heyertori, so she had to be over three hundred years. Except for a couple of officers like Captain Antigua and Captain Hu, the crew aboard Nesseleth had been relatively young, still ados by the standards of Silk. Comprehensible. By contrast the real people he’d met in this city felt . . . well yeah—
strange
. Half the time he couldn’t tell where their feelings were coming from, or why. Their reactions were so weighted by experiences invisible to him, he could never hope to understand the process behind their moods.

“Just like you said,” he conceded. “Strange like real people. Only worse. I mean, to reach the edge of the Hallowed Vasties it’d take . . .” He groped for a reasonable figure.

“Maybe five hundred years?” Yulyssa suggested.

“Yeah. Maybe.”

“I’m quite a bit older than that.”

Lot felt something rise in his throat. He swallowed hard against it, then gulped more wine.

“You didn’t know.”

“I heard it’s possible.”

She smiled in sympathy. “Most people become sessile long before they reach my age. Maybe that’s how the cordons start. Maybe I would have gone sessile too, but it’s different here in the Chenzeme Intersection; stability’s more elusive.”

“Sure.” He felt obliged to agree with her. How could anyone who’d been alive so long be wrong?

“Don’t look so scared, Lot.” Her amusement warmed the air between them. “I’m not Jupiter. It’s not like I ever learned the secret of life.”

“
Shit
.” He knew she meant it as gentle ribbing, but it irritated him just the same.

“Now you’re angry.”

“I’m not.”

“You are, and I don’t like the way you’re making me feel.”

He sighed. The charismata again. His influence seeped out around him, whether he meant it to or not. “Sorry.” He rubbed at his sensory tears, feeling suddenly dizzy. “I think I’m drunk.”

“Eat some food before it’s cold.”

So he did. There was more wine. By the time they were done he was feeling warm. He gazed unself-consciously at Yulyssa, her finely sculpted face mottled by sinuous patches of greater and lesser darkness where the branches of a shading tree cast shadows. “You knew him, didn’t you?” Lot asked.

Her smile felt like soft fingers against his skin. “You never asked that before.”

The diamond studs of her earrings sparkled within the black strands of her hair. They cast a silver tint over her brown skin. He blinked, but the silver wash didn’t go away.

Uneasiness stirred in her. “Don’t look at me like that.”

But he couldn’t look away. “Did you love him?”

“No. He scared me. I don’t like being intimidated.”

“I’m scaring you now.”

“You’re not like him.”

He thought of Alta and the slick surface of her aura, hard and smooth and not given to damage or change. “Sooth. I know.”

“Don’t be sorry over it. You’ve got your own life.”

“And you?”

“Sometimes. . . .” He thought he felt the gentle brush of her desire, but it was fleeting, lost too soon to a bemused smile. “I’m old enough to know better.”

Dumb ado.

He stood up. Ord was skulking on the path and the sunlight seemed too bright. “I should go now.”

Did she hesitate? It didn’t last. Now she was nodding, giving approval to his decision. “Be careful, Lot. There is a difference between you and Jupiter, but that’s not clear to everyone.”

CHAPTER

9

H
E WAITED OUT THE AFTERNOON IN HIS BREATHER
, watching the slug move slowly across the ceiling. He’d promised Urban he’d get some sleep before the rally, but it was hard. He kept thinking how city authority had lied to him. For ten years, everyone from Placid Antigua to Dr. Alloin to Kona Lukamosch himself had claimed Jupiter to be just another corpse in cold storage. They’d quashed his denials, repeating the lie over and over again until he’d begun to doubt his own senses, his own sanity, his own beliefs. Until he’d begun to doubt Jupiter.

Resentment simmered in his chest.
Happy monkey
.

Even Yulyssa had abetted the lie by keeping her own truth hidden.

He started to think about finding something to eat. Though Yulyssa had fed him well—with both food and information—it was never enough. Like most people, he lived life on the torch of a metabolism souped up so high hunger was almost a constant thing.

With a sigh, he got up, pulled some packaged paste out of the cabinets, and tore off the seal. The presence of oxygen set it to heating. He sniffed suspiciously at the aroma, wondering if Dr. Alloin had known the truth, that Jupiter
had
escaped the city. Eventually he decided she probably had not. Even Captain Antigua, in all likelihood, had only parroted what her Silken masters told her. Yulyssa had known. And Kona Lukamosch . . . ? Kona was the grand old man of Silk, the chair of the city council, the personification of city authority. He had to have known the truth about Jupiter, yet he’d lied to Lot from that very first day.

Through the long afternoon Lot stewed over the injustice of it. His outrage seeped into the close air of his breather, circling back to clog his sensory tears in a feedback reaction that steadily amplified his mood. Ord got nervous. It scuttled in agitated circles, its tentacles soft against his neck as it sought a clear measure of his emotional state. “
Good Lot. Calm Lot
.”

“Leave me alone.”

The hour marched on to early evening. He was supposed to meet Urban in half an hour, at a little restaurant just a block away. But a new resolve came over him. Kona knew what had happened to Jupiter. Now it was up to Lot to confront him, to demand an explanation. After ten years of baseless lies, Kona owed him at least that much.

T
HE NEBULA WAS FAINT TONIGHT, ITS GLOW WASHED OUT
by the bolder light of the Well’s artificial moon. The swan burster soared high in the west, a ring shape glowing almost incandescent with its own light. Seventy thousand miles up, and eighteen hundred miles in diameter, the burster tumbled around an imaginary axis, undergoing a fifty-four-minute conversion from a circle, to an oval, to a one, to an oval, to a circle. The interior of the ring was velvety black, a region of twisted space-time that would crush any object unlucky enough to fall into it. Even light could navigate the interior in a straight line only through a small aperture of normal space at the burster’s center, so that if the ring’s own light was masked, it was possible to see there a blurred circle of stars.

It occurred to Lot to wonder how many of the nebula’s butterfly gnomes died inside the crushing geometry of the swan burster every hour. Did they know the danger? Did they ever try to nibble at the neutral mass on the outside of the ring? Or were their erosive activities limited to more familiar nebular material?

As he left Ado Town, the swan burster turned face-on to become a perfect circle. As its luminous surface increased, its light brightened: a silvery glow that fell across streets full with the usual evening crowds. Lot slid silently through them, individual faces registering as little more than heat signatures in his mind, objects to be avoided. No one called his name, though he could hear whispering in his wake.

He crossed the bridges of Vibrant Harmony, passed through Serenity Gardens, and finally reached the partitioned edifice known collectively as Old Guard Heights. The foundation of the Heights was a massive complex built against a U-shaped cove that cut into the slope of the city, forming a twenty-one-story windowed cliff that surrounded the tournament soccer fields at Splendid Peace Park. Above twenty-one stories, the Heights became five segmented “towers” that lay back against the slope like broken fingers, each phalange an estate separated from the next by walls and narrow gardens.

It was the best address in the city.

Lot dropped two levels, then followed a narrow, luminescent street under a canopy of flowering jacaranda. Blossoms were strewn on the ground, glowing like purple glass against the lighted paving. He reached the third address, then followed a narrow brick path to the door, past a stand of fruiting banana trees on one side and a sweep of waist-high ornamental grasses on the other.

At the door the house majordomo greeted him in a sprightly male voice. “Hello, hello. Such a surprise to see you, Master Lot Apolinario. And our most humble apologies are offered, for your gracious visit cannot be immediately entertained—”

“Is he home?” Lot demanded, cutting off the DI’s social niceties.

The door pulled open, and he got his answer visually. Kona Lukamosch stood against a rectangle of yellow light, staring out at Lot with a faintly amused expression, his fine black braids loose down his back, and a glass of amber beer in his hand. Surprise predominated in his aura, but beneath it Lot could sense an emotional turbulence that included solid doses of wariness, annoyance, and a kind of low-level, cautionary fear.

He looked Lot up and down, and then he stepped back from the door and beckoned with his glass for Lot to enter. Ord took that moment to scuttle out of the stand of feathery grasses, slipping through the door ahead of Lot. Kona eyed the robot sardonically. “Do you think you’ll need it?” he asked, cocking one eyebrow.

Lot felt a cold emotional cloak pull down around him. Ord existed at this man’s insistence. “I don’t need it.”

“Not at the moment, anyway.”

It felt odd walking into the apartment. He hadn’t been here since that day, when Urban had fed him crepes, and the lies had first begun. The living room was as vast as he remembered, with its island cluster of sofas, its white carpet, its view out over the soccer fields and the adjacent slope. The projection walls were tuned to an image of silvery mechanical parts moving against each other in silent, slow-motion copulation, several thousand variations on it around the room’s two open walls. Lot walked slowly past them, examining the details of shape; trying to discern function. Kona watched him curiously, as if expecting some reaction. “Does it mean anything to you?” he asked.