Kingdom of Cages (37 page)

Knowledge of Aleph’s cortical geography and neurochemistry, that was all that was needed. Oh, and a Conscience that had been
fore-shortened by birth parents who saw themselves as the latest in a long line of those who watched the watchmen.

Did you know that I’d be watching Dionte too?
he asked their ghosts. His Conscience made him smell smoke and ash. It didn’t know what he was up to, but it didn’t like
it. It worked to make him uneasy with smells of disaster. Blood, smoke, rot, all scents that went straight to his hindbrain
and conjured up nameless discomfort, which wandered around his mind unearthing old, unwanted, distracting thoughts.

Strong emotions created strong memories. Blood and rot. His birth mother dying the day he turned thirty-seven. Despite what
the villagers thought, they were not immortal in here. They did not prolong life. Such attempts led humanity to attempt to
dominate their world so it would be forced to keep them alive. It was wrong to alter the course of life, they were told. Humans
were part of the world’s life, and it was wrong to alter, to change what was natural, important, and needed. Change they were
told, over and over, should only serve Pandora.

“No,” he told himself. “I will do this thing.” It was a split second before he realized he had spoken aloud.

What are you doing?
asked his Conscience.
Why are you going into the Synapese?

He came to the bottom of the steps. Glowing pillars lit the world, the ceiling being reserved to hold the organic material
that made up Aleph and all its subsystems. It was an open space, the size of the whole dome, broken only by the support struts
that kept the entire complex from sinking into the marsh.

The tenders, those charged with taking care of Aleph, were in an uproar, of course. Sections of ceiling had been removed,
like plates of a giant skull, to expose the naked matter underneath. With fine needles they took their samples, injected their
hormones and epinepherines, trying to find where the process had gone wrong, trying to help Aleph remember anything of what
had happened to Helice Trust or to the project she was carrying. Especially to the project she was carrying. It had been almost
to term. It might be alive somewhere, even though its birth mother no longer was.

Because I was slow and stupid. Because I believed a little bureaucratic check could keep things in line and because I stayed
away from the children so that they would not associate me with anything bad if trouble came. I thought if that happened I
would have time to get to them, time to explain, time to stop it.
Tam’s jaw tightened.
But then I thought I’d be able to give them a free choice to come in or stay out, didn’t I? And I failed in that too. Failed
in every last one of my responsibilities to this family.

All his adult life had been spent in balancing the needs of his family against the needs of the villages and the villagers.
Hundreds of people, hundreds of lives, had passed in and out of his hands, and yet he had never cared for a family under such
pressure. He’d never had a family he had watched so closely, or who had struggled so hard to maintain what freedom they had,
not just Helice, but both her children.

Never had a family he’d failed so badly, never one of his own that he had allowed to die.

“Tam?” Hagin, chief tender and another of Tam’s uncles, noticed him standing there, probably alerted by Aleph’s voice in his
ear. “What do you need?”

“I was hoping to help.” Before he became an administrator, he’d been a tender. It was felt that the ones who had to work directly
with Aleph should understand her intimately. He spread his hands. “The Eden incubation was under my supervision. I feel…”
He shook his head. “I can’t stand back and do nothing.”

Trust your family,
his Conscience told him.
What if you make things worse? So much damage has already been done.

He smelled blood again, and in his mind’s eye he clearly saw Helice Trust on the floor. His smile was grim. The problem with
emotional recall. Sometimes it could raise exactly the wrong image.

Hagin was consulting the readout on the back of his hand. “We could use another measurement in the amygdala.” He looked Tam
up and down. “You still remember how, Nephew?”

“You can watch me if you want.”

Hagin shook his head. “No need.” He spoke over his shoulder, more of his attention on the work than on his nephew.

No time.
Tam filled in for him.

Tam clasped Hagin’s hand, and Hagin returned his grip. The action woke up Tam’s display and synched it to Hagin’s.

There were tool lockers in some of the unlit support pillars. Tam retrieved a needle probe as long as his forearm and checked
the calibration on the butt end. It was a familiar action, calming both him and his Conscience.

Aleph’s amygdala was in the northwest quarter, about a fifteen-minute hike across the broad open space of the Synapese. Tam
had been away from this work long enough that he had to glance at the ceiling map now and again to remember his way. Like
a human brain, Aleph’s had multiple redundancies, but it also had centers of activity. The amygdala did much of the work of
emotional memory. Theoretically, a family member murdering Helice Trust should have upset Aleph badly. Even if the memory
of events had been somehow repressed, she should remember being upset. If the chemical traces of that emotion could be located
and enhanced, Aleph might be able to articulate what had upset her, leading the tenders back further to the factual memory.

That was, of course, the goal of all the frenzied activity going on around him. Tam’s goal was somewhat different, however.
He needed to create a strong, positive emotional connection to a quite different piece of information.

Tam climbed a work platform and positioned himself so he sat cross-legged under the amygdala’s central locale. With clumsy
fingers, he unsealed the carapace and exposed Aleph to his view.

“Tam?” inquired Aleph, sounding a lot like his Conscience. “I am glad you have come to help. I do not understand what has
happened.”

“We’ll find out, Aleph. Try to be easy.” He lifted the needle and inserted it gently and smoothly into the soft flesh. Aleph
could not feel physical pain, only emotional.

“There should not have been a way for this to happen. What could have been done? Was the room tampered with? Was I?” The question
was soft and scared, almost childlike.

“We don’t know yet, Aleph,” said Tam as he adjusted the needle from the probe setting to the transmit setting so Hagin could
get his data.

When he had first ensured that Chena and Teal would be acknowledged as Nan Elle’s grandchildren, he had only needed to alter
computer records. This was different. This time he needed to alter experiences that Aleph had undergone herself. From his
pocket he pulled an injection cartridge and tucked it into the socket at the end of the needle. A touch of the release key
and the entire contents shot straight through into Aleph’s mind.

“Aleph, listen to me,” said Tam, low and urgent. “Chena and Teal are with their grandmother, Elle Stepka. They are safe with
her. They need to stay there, otherwise what happened to their mother might happen to them. This is true. It’s absolute. It’s
got to be this way. This is important.”

“This is important,” repeated Aleph. “It is good. I feel that.”

Tam adjusted the needle back to its probe function and slaved it to his display. The readings he’d preprogrammed into the
display transmitted across to Hagin, just as if they had really come through the needle. In ten or so minutes, his hormonal
injection would dissipate into the generally heightened anxiety chemistry all around it, but it would take the positive impression
with it, down into all the separate structures that made up long-term storage, and, if he’d judged the dose and the words
right, it would remove Aleph’s need to worry about the remaining Trusts.

Remember, Aleph,
he willed the mind all around him.
Remember that this is the way it is and the way it always has been. You feel it. You know it’s the truth.

Nothing happened. No alarmed voices called out to tell him he’d failed, but no quiet confidence stirred inside him to tell
him he’d succeeded. All he could do was climb back down to the floor and head toward the home wing, and hope that someday
Chena and Teal Trust would find a way to forgive him.

Tam sighed. No. To earn that kind of forgiveness, he would have to find a way to bring his birth sister to judgment for killing
their mother. To do that, he would have to find where Dionte had hidden the Eden Project, before she found a way to convince
the family that she had done the right thing.

Wild Birds

C
hena!”

Nan Elle’s shout sounded through the window. Chena snatched up her half-full basket of rose hips and trotted down the rickety
stairs that led from the chaotic roof garden to the rear of the house.

Nan Elle stood in the main workroom, bent almost double over her mortar and pestle. She did not look up as Chena rushed inside.

“Shan Tso was just here.” Nan Elle tipped the brown powder from the mortar onto a clean white cloth. “They will need willow
bark, seaweed, and concentrated penicillin.”

“Oh, no.” Chena felt blood drain from her face as she set her basket down on the table. “Mila…” Mila was the Tsos’ six-month-old
baby. Chena had helped at the birth.

“Is already sick.” Nan Elle bundled the white cloth into a small bag and tied it closed with string. “They will need foxglove
infusions by this evening. I’m getting those ready now.”

Chena bit her lip and gripped the table’s edge for a moment to steady herself. Nan Elle called the fever burning through Offshoot
the “red-and-whites,” for the blotches it brought out on its victims’ skin. It was a bacterial infection, but remained extremely
resistant to their home-brewed penicillin. It worked fast, raising a person’s temperature so high so rapidly that their heart
couldn’t handle the strain. They had seen their first case two months ago. Now ten people were dead. Three of them were children.
Twenty-five more people were down sick.

Twenty-eight, if you count all the Tsos.
Chena resisted the urge to slam her hand against the table in frustration. She never expected to care about any of these
people. She had expected to remain as indifferent to every living human being as she had felt after Mom had died. But she
had begun to care despite that. After years of nursing them, setting their bones, dressing their wounds, and helping deliver
their babies, she had come to care very much. Now, when they needed her the most, there was nothing she could do for them.

“Chena,” said Nan Elle sharply as she turned to reach for the pot of boiling water on the stove. “They are not getting any
better. Move.”

The order jolted Chena into what was becoming an all-too-familiar routine. She grabbed two clay pots and a precious glass
jar off the shelf over the tubs they used for washing and sterilizing. She filled each with as much as she could of the required
medicines, being very careful not to take the last of anything. They were going to be up all night again brewing fresh serums
as it was. She sealed the vessels tightly with beeswax and wrapped them in cloth so that she could drop them into her rucksack,
sling it over her back, throw the door open, and run.

During the past five years, she had learned the names of everyone in Offshoot and knew the catwalks and paths better than
she had ever known the corridors on Athena Station. The Tsos lived on the first level overlooking the dormitories.

It was shift change and the catwalks were crowded. “Out of my way!” Chena bellowed. By now people knew her voice, and they
knew her business. They pressed themselves against the railings to let her get by, murmuring or cursing as she raced past
them.

“Who is it?” hollered someone as she pounded down the stairs. A second later she identified the voice as Madra’s.

“Tsos!” she shouted back, gripping the rail post to swing herself around onto the lowest catwalk. The boards rang and shuddered
under her thundering footsteps. Tension alone robbed her of her breath. Chena could run from the bottom of the village to
the top and back down again without any problem, and sometimes she had. Time was slowly worsening Nan Elle’s arthritis. Chena’s
most constant work as her apprentice was to run her errands.

The Tso house was tiny and it listed toward the trunk of its tree, but the roof garden was trimmed and tidy and its walls
free of moss and lichen. She skidded to a halt in front of the door and heard the thin, high wailing of an infant in pain.
Gritting her teeth, Chena knocked, but did not bother to wait for a reply before opening the door and walking inside.

The last time she had been in this neat, dim, sparsely furnished room, it had been to help Mother Tso deliver Mila. The memory
of sweat, blood, and screaming assaulted her with almost physical force as she stepped into the room. Then, it had been Mother
Tso screaming, and Nan Elle, and Chena herself. Now, it was just one voice. Just little Mila howling in her mother’s arms
because she hurt and did not understand what was happening to her.