Kingdom of Cages (54 page)

“You’ll be glad to know that the Trusts will soon be home safe with us as well,” she told him. “Teal is being returned as
we speak, and Chena will be back soon as well.”

“Trusts… No, they are safe where they are.”

Dionte touched the probe’s command keys, strengthening the hormonal surge by a fraction of a percent. “You trust me, don’t
you, Brother? I am your sister and you trust me.”

“Yes,” he said, the voice full of exhausted relief. “I trust you. I must trust you.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

But his face twisted up the new struggle. “Aleph…”

“I’m here, Tam.” Aleph’s middle-aged woman appeared on the nearest wall. “Hello, Dionte.”

“Hello, Aleph.”

“I have no further adjustments on the schedule. Tam needs to rest and recover so that his Conscience may be fully integrated.”

Dionte felt a spasm of annoyance. Of all the times for Aleph to question her. “You know that the growing of a Conscience in
an adult is a delicate business. Numerous small adjustments must be made in order to assure proper integration, and sometimes
it is not possible to schedule them all. This is one of those times.”

“Dionte, I know you only wish to help your brother, but he is fatigued. Look at the monitors.”

Dionte’s patience snapped. She whirled toward the wall. “I am my brother’s Guardian! This is my judgment. This is not even
any of your business!”

Aleph’s image folded its hands and bowed its head. “It is my job to advise my family.”

“Well, then, you have advised! I have rejected your advice. That is my right. I will help my brother. I will help my family,
and you will leave me to do my work!” She faced Tam in the chair again, trying to focus on the monitor and what it was telling
her.

“Dionte…” said Aleph.

But Dionte did not turn around. She snapped the new cartridge in place and laid her hand on the input pad, subvocalizing the
necessary commands.

“Aleph,” she heard Tam say. “You promised—”

“Trust me, Brother,” Dionte said firmly, as if speaking directly to his freshly active implant. “You know you must trust me.”

“Yes,” he breathed, a childlike whisper. Then, even more softly, she thought she heard him say, “Help.”

“Hagin.” Aleph opened her visual lines to the synapses. Hagin sat at his station in the cluster of monitors and desks where
the tenders did most of their work. Absently she noted he was reviewing a follow-up report of her bimonthly examination.

“Aleph.” Hagin flicked the display to the report’s next page. “What can I do for you?”

“Hagin, there are records I want you to see. I am concerned about some aspect of my adjustments.”

“Of course. Show me what is wrong.”

Aleph saved the report and closed its file. Then she showed him all that she had showed the other city-minds.

While Hagin watched her records flow across his workstation screen, Aleph found Basante in Imaging Room Four, standing in
the middle of three different fate maps, comparative readouts flashing across the walls.

“Basante.”

“Aleph?” He did not take his eyes off the data. He lifted his hand to touch one minute line, adjusting its length a few centimeters.

“Aleph, I was hoping that you might speak with Dionte. You are her friend and an adviser to her, and I fear she has become
distressed. I do not want to have to alert her committee yet. She may just need a friend.”

Basante lowered his hand and blinked. “Of course, Aleph. If you think so.”

“I do,” Aleph said firmly.

“I’ll go as soon as I’m done here.”

“Thank you.”

Aleph felt secure. This was what she should have done in the first place. She should have alerted the family, and not gone
to Gem in hysterics. Dionte was troubled, that much was clear. Now her family knew. The family would take care of both her
and Tam, as was right.

All would soon be well. This time, at least, she had done the right thing.

C
hena peered between the reeds at the great white bubbles that made up the Alpha Complex. Gnats and mosquitoes swarmed around
her, seeking a crack in her camouflage suit. Despite its protection, the chill from the hip-deep water soaked in. She shivered
hard for a moment, from cold, but also from mounting hope. No one had come to get her. She had been standing here in a direct
line of sight of the complex for an hour, after a long trek through the marshes, and no one, human or animal, had been sent
out to grab her.

It’s working. This time I got it right,
she thought toward the shadow presence of Nan Elle hovering in the back of her mind.

“They find you by scent,” she’d said to Nan Elle. “That’s how the bugs found me. It’s got to be.” Ever since she got back
from Peristeria, she’d been delving into the whys and hows of the hothousers’ monitoring systems, looking for what she’d missed.
They shouldn’t have found her, but they did. So, even though she’d gotten away, she’d missed something. They still knew something
she didn’t, and that was no good. She didn’t know how long it would take her to figure out what had gone wrong, but she was
going to try. If nothing else, it kept her from wondering what was happening to Teal, wherever she had gone.

Chena combed through Nan Elle’s books and all the library disks and databases in both Stem and Offshoot. She was not surprised
that there was next to no information. The hothousers certainly didn’t want their secrets to get out. But there were enough
hints for her to see that the cyborged insects that patrolled Pandora did not really use cameras. They used transmitters that
coded the responses of the cy-bugs’ tiny brains, which meant the hothousers’ computers received information from normal insect
sensory impressions. Since insects relied primarily on scent, most of the analysis would have to be of suspicious chemical
traces. Mask those chemical traces, mask your human scent, and you could walk unseen.

But Nan Elle was not ready to hear any of this. “You don’t know that. We have no direct information on the mote cameras.”
Not even Administrator Tam could be induced to give away so much.

“We know they are using real bugs,” Chena persisted. She was right about this. She knew it. She might have been wrong about
everything else, she might have been completely wrong about Teal, but she was right about this. “We know they are not supposed
to interfere with anything in the natural order. Who knows what it would do to the local insect populations if there were
a few hundred fake bugs flying around in formation?”

Nan Elle had straightened her neck, like she always did when she was particularly disapproving. “It’s a bad gamble, Chena.
You should have learned that in Peristeria. You have your route into the hothouse. Let that be enough.” A week ago, Farin
had been passed a message from a man in Stem. It had come from someone inside the hothouse who wanted access to a certain
narcotic compound that Nan Elle used for surgeries. Nan Elle had wanted to just send back a sample of the stuff via the connections
she and Administrator Tam had set up, but Chena had convinced her that it would be useful to have more than one reliable contact
in the hothouse. It had taken Nan Elle all of three seconds to guess what Chena really wanted—a way back into the hot-house,
a chance to get to the hothouser computers, where she might be able to find out what had really happened to her mother. She
also knew that Chena would never give up until she had gotten what she wanted, so she had reluctantly agreed.

“It’s not enough,” snapped Chena. It wasn’t. Nothing would ever be enough until she had wormed every single secret out of
the hothouse, until she knew enough that they could never steal another person from her. They were the real reason Teal ran
away. They had Teal so scared she couldn’t stand to live in Offshoot anymore. “You know why we’ve never been able to break
their system? They have got us all locked in cages. We need to open the doors.”

Nan Elle sighed and thumped her stick impatiently. “This is not about locks and cages, Chena, it never has been. This is about
survival, for ourselves and our village. That is our work.”

“You said you’d help me defy them,” she shot back.

“Defy them, yes, but not conquer them.” Nan Elle shook her head solemnly. “The villages and hothouses have been using each
other for fifteen hundred years. It is the way it is here, and it will not change for your wishing, or your daring. Leave
it.”

“But—”

“Leave it.” Nan Elle’s eyes flashed. “You belong to me until you are an adult in your own right, and I have told you to leave
it be.”

But Chena couldn’t leave it. She was right. She knew it. Confuse the cy-bugs with a different scent, something strong, but
appropriate to the location—you couldn’t go with a citrus, say, in the marsh, but there was plenty that could be done with
mint and loosestrife. Use the concealing scent along with the camouflage suit to disguise both the chemical and visual signatures
from her body, and Aleph would never know where she was.

She could stipulate to her client that part of the price was that he get her in through the marsh airlock. That way she could
start training Aleph to get used to the idea of her coming and going through there. Before long, she’d have free access to
the hothouse.

It could work; she could do it. She would do it.

She pleaded with Nan Elle. She coaxed, cajoled, and, in the end, threatened—to withhold her work, to run away, even to go
to the constables, until, at last, Nan Elle brought her stick crashing down on the worktable.

“Enough. After all this time, after all your disasters, you still do not see…” Spittle flecked her lips, and Chena had cringed.
Had she finally said too much?

But Nan Elle subsided and shuffled back to the stove, sniffing at the potions brewing there. “If you are determined to commit
this suicide, you had better do it before you learn anything else that might harm the village when the hothousers dump your
brain into the city-mind. Oh, and when they do catch you, leave Tam’s name out of it for as long as you can. I have no other
insider to turn to.”

So Chena had passed some additional conditions to her client, assembled her formulas, packed food and water, wrapped the camouflage
suit in a bundle of old clothes, calculated the shortest route, and set out. She’d take the railbike to Stem, duck the fences
at the lake-side, and set out overland to the marsh and hothouse.

Nan Elle said nothing to her as she left, and Chena had said nothing back.
Everything can be said when I get home,
thought Chena.
When she sees that I’ve found the missing piece of the equation.

A clear blue twilight now settled over the marsh. As the light faded, the hothouse domes dimmed from white to pearl to gray.
Mustn’t have an anomalous light source around at night,
thought Chena, pressing her lips tightly together.
It might upset the ducks.

Now or never. There was just enough light left to see by, and it wouldn’t last. Slowly, Chena began to wade through the swamp.

Mud sucked at her boots, making each step a struggle, but the waterfowl, ignorant of humans, seemed to think she was just
another of their kind and only ruffled their wings as she passed. The frogs and crickets set up their own chorus at her movements,
but they did that every time a bird moved too. She hoped that whatever monitors the hothousers had on them would not be alerted.
The cy-bugs were most certainly the first line of defense. If they did not send out the wrong pulse, nothing else became active,
and the cy-bugs thought she was a big cluster of water plants.

So far, anyway.
She wondered if she should stop and make another application of her “insect repellent.” Sweat prickled her skin. She’d be
perspiring freely soon, and if the cy-bugs caught one whiff of her real scent, the interceptor teams would spring into action.
This time she might not be able to run fast enough, or they might send more than two, and then she’d never get to see the
look on Nan Elle’s face when she found out what happened. Not even Nan Elle could get her out of the involuntary wing.

Wonder if Sadia’s still in there. Maybe she is. Maybe, if this works, if I can start coming and going when I need to, I can
pull her out. Maybe there is a way.
The idea drained some of the fear out of her blood.

At last the muck began to slope gently upward. Fortunately the concealing reeds stayed about head-high. The water was soon
thigh-deep, then knee-deep, then ankle-deep, and the reed curtain parted to make room for a jumble of waist-high plants and
stiff, rough-skinned grasses.

Chena sank to her belly and began to crawl. Every fifty or so yards she stopped and mopped her face with a sponge soaked in
her heavily scented goop. Her pack pressed her down into the rich earth. Her shoulders and arms protested each movement, and
there were still a hundred yards to go.

Panting, Chena closed her mind to the overwhelming distance and concentrated on the way in front of her.

Knee, elbow, knee, elbow, breathe, breathe, breathe, don’t worry about the stink, don’t swat at the bugs, you might hit a
camera, and that would alert somebody to something. God’s garden these straps pinch, knee, elbow, knee, elbow, knee, elbow
…