Kingdom of Cages (15 page)

Tam clamped the cover on his cooling cup of tea. “Sister, I do not want to hear this.”

“Brother.” Dionte turned her face back to him, and he saw she truly was troubled and afraid. Mostly afraid. “If we try to
placate them, the Authority is going to overwhelm us no matter what we do. We have to go on the offensive.”

“If that’s what you believe, Dionte, then you need to take it up with the whole family. Not with me.” He handed Dionte back
her teacup.

“I have tried. You know the rest of our family does not want to hear it either.”

“A sign that you and I do not have a monopoly on wisdom.” Tam spoke the hard words and felt no guilt, no guilt at all. How
many debates had there been? A hundred? A thousand? In every family meeting since the Authority’s initial threat had come
down, someone had a proposal for how they could strike back, how they could prove Pandora was a force to be reckoned with.

“Then you will have to bring it up again and again, if necessary. You are free to say whatever you want during meetings.”

Dionte sighed. “I suppose it will have to be enough.”

“Yes,” replied Tam levelly. “I suppose it will.”

They regarded each other in silence for a long moment, until Dionte realized Tam really didn’t plan to say anything else.
Dionte stood and bowed slightly in farewell. Tam returned the bow, but remained seated while Dionte descended the stairs to
the main court.

Tam rubbed his temple where his Conscience implant was and for a moment hated his own decision. How had all these doubts come
to haunt him? Dionte never doubted herself, though her Conscience was as truncated as his.

Maybe he should just confess all at his next head dump and let them fix whatever organic flaws kept his implant from taking
full hold of him and then he could have peace.

What was it like to have a wholly integrated Conscience? Did it truly make life easier? Basante, at least, made it seem like
it did. Sometimes, though, Tam saw, or thought he saw, a look of yearning on the faces of his branch siblings, like they were
trying to remember something long forgotten.

Then again, maybe that was just a projection of his own confusion. Tam had no way to tell.

He sighed again and got to his feet. This was useless. There was still the meeting to prepare for. Maybe it wasn’t a total
loss. Maybe now that he knew the family would conclude Beleraja’s actions were treacherous, he could prepare a means to show
them that was not true.

“Becuase if I don’t, we slip that much further into our own arrogance,” he murmured.

They are your family,
said his Conscience.
You can trust them.

“Oh, yes,” murmured Tam, looking over the busy, happy garden of his home. “I can trust them very well.”

Dionte left her brother’s alcove calmly, carrying a teacup in each hand. She did not look back. She could not afford to. She
knew that if she saw Tam watching her leave, she would be tempted to turn around and try once again to make him see what was
really happening, and it wouldn’t work any more than it had the last hundred times.

Dionte had not been in the conference room that day the Authority had come to make its initial threat. She had been in the
laboratory with her kin and fellow students, watching on one of the video screens. She saw the swelling dust cloud and heard
the thunder, and she had known then that they were all prisoners. In dropping that bomb, the Authority had changed its whole
nature. Before this, they had clung to their statements that they were just go-betweens, importers and exporters, and mediators.
But with that show of force, they became something else. They became rulers, and Pandora became their subject, and that would
never change until Pandora took action, because no matter how far away the Authority went, they could always come back.

Father Mihran had spoken, and the council had spoken, and they had all listened to their Consciences and the city-minds, all
of them bred and trained toward compromise and getting along with each other, and they gave in. They gave in for the same
reasons their ancestors gave in when Athena Station rebelled against the idea of Conscience implants for its management board—because
in the end, they could not resist. They could compromise, but they could not unite. They could discuss and theorize, but they
could not truly comprehend the enormity of their guardianship of Pandora and all that it meant.

Tam was right that their parents’ decision to truncate their Consciences was a mistake, but he did not understand why. The
family did not need its children to be more separate from each other. They needed them more tightly connected. They did not
need a disinterested view, they needed a deeper understanding.

In the nearest kitchen cluster, Dionte washed the cups carefully in the sink, chatting with Imanet and Mana, who were chopping
vegetables and sectioning fruit for an afternoon snack. She dried the cups and stacked them with the others in the glass cabinets
that curved above the counter, and then dried her hands on a cloth that had been hung over the gnarled branch of a dwarf willow.

Basante would be waiting in her alcove. She did not want to meet him until she was perfectly calm.

You’re not really angry at Tam,
she told herself.
You’re angry because you’re afraid of what’s about to happen. You’re not sure enough. You haven’t done enough testing.
She cut the thought off. She couldn’t afford it. Delay only served the Authority.

She lifted her eyes to pick out her own alcove in the dwelling wall, two tiers up on the left edge of the living spaces. Someone
was in there, pacing back and forth. Basante. He spotted her and started immediately down the stairs.

Dionte sighed and strode forward to meet him.

“What did he say—” began Basante breathlessly.

“Come with me.” Dionte took his hand and led him to a cushioned bench in the shade of a spreading lime tree. Its pleasant
scent enveloped them as they sat, and its heavy branches provided them with just enough shelter that their kin were unlikely
to hear anything awkward.

“What did he say?” repeated Basante.

Dionte looked at Basante with the trained eye of a Guardian. She could practically see the translucent filaments stretching
out from his temple, down his right arm, and up into the gray matter of his mind. If she needed to, she could call up a map
of those filaments. In fact, she had. She had pored over that map. She had obsessed over it, trying to understand how she
could change the nature of the filaments and the implant so that Basante would be able to help her help their family.

Unlike Tam, Basante had always understood the urgency of Pandora’s situation, but once Father Mihran, the family councilors,
and Aleph had spoken, his Conscience and its need for compromise would not allow him to stand against them.

In a few minutes, she would change that. Dionte swallowed nervously and hoped Basante did not notice.

“He will not help us bring Helice Trust in,” said Dionte.

Basante thumped his fist against his thigh once, but almost immediately he loosened his hand. “Well, we expected that.”

“But—for the next few days, at least—he will be fully involved in trying to keep the peace with Athena. That will give us
a chance to approach the woman directly. He also suggests it’s the pregnancy she is objecting to. We will need to develop
our arguments from that angle.”

“Yes, yes.” Basante nodded thoughtfully. “If she could be made to understand the child will be a member of the family…”

“It might help,” Dionte finished for him. “But the most important thing is that the Authority has escalated the threat and
Father Mihran still will not accept that the Authority and the Called must be fought.”

“Father Mihran said this?”

Dionte shook her head. “But Tam did, and that is sign enough.”

Basante looked down his nose at her in an expression as close to condescension as she had ever seen on him. “Tam speaks for
Father Mihran now?”

“No,” answered Dionte tartly. “But can you name me one open debate in the past decade where Tam’s side came out the loser?”
Bas-ante remained silent. “You see? There are plenty of reasons why my brother is the head of the Administrators’ Committee.”

Basante’s little smile grew uneasy. “You almost make it sound like he does not trust his family.” He turned his head just
a little, so that he was looking at her out of the corner of his eye. “Or that you do not trust your birth brother.”

“I would never say such a thing,” Dionte told him, a little shocked. “But the fact is, Basante, it may be up to you and I
to protect Pandora.”

The smile faded away. “Dionte, that isn’t possible. We can’t work without the family’s support.”

It will only be for a little while, I promise.
Dionte took Basante’s hand. The smooth touch of his data display activated the sensors under the skin of her palm.
Basante plus,
she subvocalized to her own implant, and the preset commands she had encoded under that name flowed down the filaments in
her arm, through her palm, into the biosilicate of his display, and to his implant.

“The family has decided not to protect Pandora from the Authority,” she said. “You see it as well as I do. You know this is
true.”

The human body was a hot, acidic, constantly shifting environment. Anything inorganic planted inside it had a tendency to
simply wear away over time. Although the Conscience implants were primarily organic, they each contained inorganic materials
to assure the necessary precision of memory and consistency of output. Those inorganics needed monitoring and adjustment if
they were to continue to function across the lifetime of their host.

The monitoring and adjustment were taken care of by Guardians like Dionte. Once a month Aleph downloaded any incidents each
Conscience’s tiny AI had thought were matters of concern, so that the family member could be counseled or advised. At that
same time, Dionte performed maintenance checks, injected alpha viruses loaded with fresh stem cells for the organic filaments,
and worked with a needle laser and a hair-thin probe to lay in fresh connections or etch new patterns into the chip itself.

The solution of how to bring the family closer together turned out to be simple. It was a matter of a few new connections
and a few new filaments, creating a new junction between the implant’s simple data-handling functions that connected the implant
to the display on the back of the hand and the Conscience functions that connected the implant to the mind.

“They are trying to compromise with the Authority the way they’d compromise with other members of the family and it isn’t
going to work,” she went on, keeping his gaze captured with her own.

If her own Conscience had been fully functional, she never would have been able to make the adjustments required, in herself
or in anyone else. She would have been overwhelmed by a guilty need to tell her kin what she had planned and why she thought
it would be a good idea. But that had not happened, and during Basante’s last appointment with her, she had made it possible
for her implant to speak directly to his.

If she had made no mistakes, Basante’s implant would respond to the signals it was receiving from hers with endorphins and
positive scents. Her own implant whispered in her mind, raw percentages and unfiltered numbers that made up the chemical analysis
of Basante’s mind. Dionte could not catch them all. She would have to work on that. Obviously, she needed a subprogram to
perform the analysis automatically and give her data she could use on the spot. Despite that, Dionte had to hold back a smile,
because the numbers told her that her adjustments were working. Basante would hear her words and feel safety and security,
not guilt. He would be able to answer her without contradiction from his Conscience. Even better, his implant spoke to hers,
telling her what it was doing, allowing her to order adjustments or reversals as they were needed. The method was crude now,
but she could improve on it. She would improve on it.

“You understand what I’m saying, don’t you, Basante? You see that I’m right?”

Basante stared at her, confused, but only for a moment. “Yes,” he said, sounding a little surprised. “I do.”

“I am not saying we should give up speaking in the meetings and gathering our support,” she said, grasping his hand even more
tightly. “Indeed, I am saying that changing the family’s mind must be our primary goal. But”—she held up her free hand to
stop any interruption he might be thinking to make—“we also must get ourselves ready in case that support doesn’t come, or
in case it comes late.”

A light came into Basante’s eyes and spread into his face as fresh confidence took hold of him. “We need Helice Trust.”

“We need the child she can provide us.”

“Yes.” He squeezed her hand, confidence blossoming into eagerness.

“So, you will help me? I can count on you?”
Say yes, say yes, Bas-ante. This has to work, or we’re all going to die. All of us, and Pandora with us.

Basante’s smile was warm and genuine and Dionte felt the warmth of it thawing her fears. “Always.”

“Thank you, Basante,” she whispered. It was going to work. They could still do it. The future had not been stolen from them
yet.

Was the change permanent? Despite herself, Dionte searched his face, looking for some sign. Would he be able to think about
these matters once she had left him? There was no way to know that yet. Yet.

“If you have doubts,” she said earnestly, “if you change your mind, you will tell me, won’t you?”

“Of course I will.” He squeezed her hand once again. “But I know you are right.”

“Thank you,” she said again. Then she made herself let go of his hand and stand up. “Now we both have our work to do. We will
talk about the steps we must take after the administrators’ meeting.”

“I will see you there.”

They bowed to each other, and Dionte started down the path, her heart singing. It worked, it worked! The system was not complete
yet. Time would reveal flaws and required additions, but there was still a little time. With Basante’s help she’d be able
to make it all right. She could make them understand what was really going on. She could show them directly, without clumsy
words, what they needed to do to protect their world and their family from the treachery of the Authority and the Called.