Across a Star-Swept Sea (33 page)

Persis could already hear what Justen might make of that.

Isla’s expression had grown concerned. “Have you been tested?”

She shook her head.

“Persis …”

“I don’t want to know.” Her tone was wild, but she didn’t care. This was Isla. She’d been keeping this secret far too long. “We’re all going to die one day, Isla. I could die next week on a mission. Maybe … later, after—” but she couldn’t say anymore.

Isla understood anyway. She already knew what it was like to live in the
after
of a parent’s death. The girls joined hands there, in the quiet, dim room where they’d once played as children, long ago in a world where their genetics meant no more than Isla’s white hair and Persis’s beauty and cleverness, where their heritage hadn’t trapped the former into ruling a country that didn’t want her and the latter into running away from a sickness that had no cure.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Isla said at last. “Justen is going back into a sanitarium. He’s here to work on finding a cure for DAR, and I’m not about to let his past keep you or your mother from a cure. I don’t care what he might have done in Galatea. Remember learning about the ancients and how they first built nuclear weapons?”

“I don’t think that’s a good example for us to use.”

“They didn’t balk at hiring enemies if they could help. If I can take what I can get out of him in terms of public relations, which you have to admit he’s pretty awful at, then I’ll take what I can get out of him when it comes to his medical talents.”

“Which he’s pretty good at.” Persis could begrudge him that.

“And we’ll find out the truth about his past, too,” said Isla. “Have you even spoken to Remy about it?”

“She knows he invented the drug. She believes he’s a proper revolutionary, though, which doesn’t help his case.”

“Whatever Justen did, it’s clear he’s changed his ways. He wouldn’t be here otherwise, desperate to help the refugees.”

“If helping the refugees is really what he’s after,” Persis replied. “Of which we can’t be sure. What if he’s here, trying to ingratiate himself with us so he can cause the escapees further harm?”

Isla considered this. “If he is, he’s pretty bad at that, too. Persis, you have to stop thinking the worst of people. And that goes for me as well as Justen Helo.”

“You haven’t seen the Reduced, Isla. You haven’t seen what the Galateans have done to them. If Justen is responsible for that—I don’t care if he regrets it now. He deserves the worst punishment he can get.”

“And what would that be, Persis? What sort of torture are you imagining for your fake lover? Dungeons? Neuroeels? Reduction?”

Persis looked away.

“Nothing?”

And she found that for once, she didn’t have words to reply.

Twenty-four

T
HE VISITORS HAD BEEN
in Scintillans for an entire day with very little fanfare about their arrival. Though the Scintillans’ servants were known for their discretion, it seemed impossible that no one would leak such a juicy story. After all, unlike word of Heloise Blake’s condition, there was no one to hurt. Therefore, the fact that the presence of people from elsewhere remained a secret was a testament to Isla’s ability to shut down conversation before it started. However, her quest might have been helped along just a tad by the rather shocking stories sweeping through court that Lady Blocking planned to divorce her husband, that Dwyer Shift had had a row with his councilman uncle over some unmentionable situation with a pair of fishermen from Sunrise Village, and that Persis Blake was considering cutting her hair.

It was rumored that she said long locks were
so
last winter.

And yet, no matter how long the visitors might stay, or how many conversations Justen Helo might have with them, he thought he’d never grow used to their very existence. Every time he saw them he was struck with a sense of wonder that left him unsettled—he should not feel the same about seeing a human being as he did upon seeing a sea pony or a mini-orca or a hogfish. They were not otherworldly creatures; they were fellow human beings. No matter what the strange genetics of these people—and almost without exception, they were very strange indeed—there was more to them than their scientific potential.

But without real patients to observe, it was hard to resist. He’d yet to hear back from Noemi, and Persis claimed not to know exactly where the refugees had been moved. Isla, of course, said she was too busy to concern herself with his scientific whims.

Justen had started out frustrated, but now he was just scared. Noemi wouldn’t go to the trouble of moving an entire ward of patients without a good reason. What if Vania’s visit the other day hadn’t had anything to do with tracking down the Wild Poppy? What if it had been about finding the refugees? She’d left in such a hurry, and right after that was when Persis had told him about Noemi’s plan to move the Galatean refugees.

If the revolutionaries tried anything on Albian soil—what would that mean for both nations?

And he hadn’t heard anything from Remy since he’d left. In the first few days, he’d figured she was just angry with him, but her continued silence boded ill, especially since his fight with Vania. Then again, if she had turned against him completely, then maybe she’d be safe in Galatea.

Today he and the male visitor, Kai, were sitting in the shade of the terrace, overlooking the cliffs while the Reduced woman played on the lawn with Slipstream. She squealed with laughter as she chased the sea mink and it wove skillfully around her legs, chattering and dragging along the ground a faded green scarf Ro—whose real name, apparently, was Tomorrow—had been wearing around her hair. Neither sea mink nor girl seemed the least bit hampered by her heavy, long skirt. Justen had wondered why she’d wear such a thing in the equatorial heat of New Pacifica, but the other visitors had all shrugged and said that fighting with Tomorrow would not have been worth it. “She’s a creature of habit,” Chancellor Boatwright—or Elliot—had said at the time. “If she’s hot enough, she’ll ask for different clothes.”

“Everyone here stares at her,” Kai said now. “Is it so easy to forget, in two generations, what Reduction looks like?”

“Yes,” said Justen. “Apparently it is.” Now that he saw real Reduction,
born
Reduction, he regretted even more the name he’d offhandedly suggested to his uncle Damos of the effects he suspected his experimental drug would have on healthy patients. What was happening to the victims in Galatea—that was not Reduction. This girl had grown into and beyond her limitations. Her nature breathed in her and through her like a tree that springs from a rock. It might grow stunted because of the poor soil around its roots, but there was beauty and majesty in the way it clung to life and thrived in its own way.

By contrast, the drug was merely an artificial shade, smothering its victims. Tomorrow was beautiful, whole, human. People under the influence of the Reduction drug were broken. Broken by
him
.

“Everything all right?” asked the stranger.

“I wonder what my countrymen would think to see her. If they’d be reminded to honor our past, not exploit it.”

“You’re talking about the civil war.” Kai nodded. “I have friends back home who wonder if that’s where we’re headed, too. In so many ways, your society is far advanced. But I guess some things don’t change.”

Justen turned to his companion with a knowing look. “Actually, about that. Most here won’t recognize it, but I have medic training and couldn’t help but notice. Your eyes … your reflexes. Your people still practice ERV?”

Kai started, a subtle movement, and his crystalline eyes widened. “No. Not usually. Our people don’t practice much of anything.”

They must not, if they were still using such quaint and clumsy gengineering. Extreme endogenous retroviral enhancement had been designed to push human capacity to its limits. It had caused the Reduction when it was first invented, and was better consigned to the waste bin of medical procedures, like trepanning, leeches, and systemic chemotherapy. The gengineering on Kai and the other captain, Andromeda Phoenix, was like looking at something out of an ancient history text.

Or a project that would flunk even an intro gengineering class.

“We don’t do much in the way of science back home,” the visitor added. “The things you have here are like something out of a dream. Those palmports look like magic.”

Justen made a face. “They’re an appalling perversion of science. Wasteful. Dangerous.” No one yet knew the long-term effects that their nutrient leeching could have on the system. You couldn’t fix everything with a supplement or two. Then again, who was he to talk? He regularly railed against palmports and genetemps, but it was his own achievements that had caused the most damage.

Kai chuckled. “Where I come from, it’s the … well, I guess you’d call them the aristos who disdain science. It’s strange to hear it from a Post’s mouth.”

“A Post?”

“A … what do you call yourself? Regular? Reg?” Kai shrugged. “Same thing. We say Post-Reductionist, or Post. The ERV was … a desperate move. My friends and I—we had very little choice. We needed to escape, and we needed enhancements to do it. Elliot is still terrified that we’ve single-handedly brought back the Reduction.” He shook his head, frowning. “She’s—you’d call her an aristo, I guess? Except not like the aristos here. They don’t seem to have anything against technology.”

Justen frowned. It was
he
who’d brought back the Reduction, not a bunch of primitive gengineers. “You mean she’s afraid for your children?”

Kai looked away. “Not in so many words. Elliot … doesn’t like to use so many words. But I know her, and I know she must be.”

Justen smiled, the medic to the patient. “Well, you can tell her not to worry. You’re a natural reg, right? That means your neurostructure has already bypassed the architecture of Reduction. ERV shouldn’t undo that. But if you like, I can do some tests. If you’re vulnerable, you can just take the Helo Cure and your offspring should be fine.” There were no supplies of the cure lying around anymore, of course, but it was simple enough to compound a dose. The formula was universally known. If he were in Galatea, he could probably find some stock in the storage rooms of the royal labs along with the rest of Persistence Helo’s belongings.

Except for the oblets he’d stolen, of course.

Kai laughed again, incredulous. “The things you say—I can’t believe you’re so casual about it. Where I come from, they hardly believe in surgery, let alone biotechnology.”

“You sound like you lived in the Dark Ages.”

“I did.” Kai pointed at Tomorrow. “Back home, there are a hundred thousand just like her. They’re born and live and die in slavery, and there’s no other choice for them.”

Choice. What an interesting thought. Justen wondered if Tomorrow, offered the choice of the cure, would choose to take it. There was nothing in the history of Reduced refusing the cure. Of even being given the option. He did recall reading about debates among natural regs with Reduced siblings about waiting, worrying that the cure was a second-rate solution to the regularity they were sure was going to come to their family within the next generation. Worrying that it might even set them back. He also recalled reading in the histories protests on estates where aristos forced even the natural-born regs to take the cure.

At any rate, it had no known effect on those who weren’t Reduced. Persistence Helo took the cure herself as a publicity stunt to show it was harmless to regs.

“Here on …” Kai faltered.

“New Pacifica,” Justen offered.

“On New Pacifica,” Kai said, amused, “you’ve cured everyone and ended the Reduction. But if we took your cure back to our homeland, it would be a battle to get it to the Reduced.”

“It was a battle here, too,” said Justen. “And it was only the first of many.”

Kai looked around him. “This place seems like paradise.”

Justen nodded. “Yes.
Seems
.”

P
ERSIS HAD SPENT THE
last few months as a spy and the last week as the admirer of Galatea’s most celebrated mad scientist. But today, she played tour guide, taking the single aristo among the visitors for a trip around her estate. Apparently back in her homeland, Chancellor Boatwright—whose name was actually Elliot North—owned one estate and managed another, despite being an unmarried teenage girl. From Elliot’s descriptions, Persis gathered the visitor’s holdings were almost half as large as Albion.

It shouldn’t be Persis this young woman was talking to. It should be Isla.

“Now, Chancellor, if you look down there, you’ll see the fleet of fishing boats. This should be especially interesting to you given your family’s traditions.”

Elliot said nothing, but peered politely over the side of the skimmer and down the pali. “Is your diet mostly fish?”

These days, Persis’s diet was mostly palmport supplements. “We’re islanders, Chancellor. Of course we eat a lot of seafood.”

All day long, Elliot had seemed very concerned with how the people of Scintillans—and of New Pacifica in general—ate. Persis had never thought as much about food production in her life as she had today. No one starved in New Pacifica. She had a difficult time imagining anyone living the way these visitors claimed to, with coal stoves and gas lanterns and hardly enough food to sustain the fields of Reduced slaves that labored in rags and died in their thirties. Practically all the visitors were wearing rags, especially this Elliot, who was supposed to be the highest born of all of them. Persis had offered them new clothes, but Elliot in particular had seemed scandalized by what Persis had considered very conservative garments.

“It’ll be high summer back home,” Elliot said wistfully, looking out over the fishing village and the fields that lay beyond. “My lands lie along the sea as well, but our islands are not quite so … lush.”