Lightless (23 page)

Ida stood in the center of the room as Althea and Gagnon rushed from console to console, watching their frantic motions, listening to Gagnon say, “It's not a machine error,” and Althea say, “It's not an internal alert,” and Gagnon say, “So what
is
it?”

The most they managed to do was shut off the wailing alarm, the most basic of tasks. Ida stood perfectly still and felt her fury grow.

“Found it!” said Althea, leaning so far over the screen that more frizzed curls popped free of her loose braid and dangled downward, as if reaching to connect to the machine below. “It's the proximity sensor. It's sending up an alert for…a weapon fired at the ship?”

“There are no weapons discharges in this area,” Gagnon reported from another screen.

“It's telling me about some danger heading toward us,” said Althea, sounding frustrated.

Ida said in her sweetest, politest tone with her heaviest of affected Terran accents, “You need to fix this computer.”

The tension in the room increased tangibly. They had been so absorbed that they had seemed to have forgotten her presence. When it became apparent that Althea was not going to respond, Gagnon said, “Yes, ma'am. We're doing our best.”

Ida could have stripped them of their jobs, their titles, their qualifications, for such incompetence on so important a ship. She could have done the same thing to their families and close associates if need be. Gagnon clearly knew it and feared it, but Althea Bastet—stubborn still, still resistant—did not respond to her.

It irked Ida, made her want to strike at Althea again, but she had no reason to do so—the woman was not actually being insubordinate—and so she controlled herself.

“Got it,” said Althea, although she sounded a little muted and her back still was to Ida. “It's the proximity sensor. Doctor Ivanov's ship just came into range. It triggered a reaction in the ship.”

“Got some wires crossed,” Gagnon muttered. Ida looked at him incredulously.

The intercom came on.

“I am in the white room,” said Domitian's even tones, made especially even at the moment. “Do not explain over the intercom. Send someone down to guard Ivanov. I will come up.”

Althea Bastet started to stand, but Gagnon was faster.

“I'll go,” he said, and Althea looked as if he had slapped her in the face as he hurried from the room, leaving the two women alone together.

Ida watched Althea and watched Althea avoid looking at her. Simply by standing there in silence, Ida could see that her presence was making Althea tense, but Althea said nothing to her, her downcast eyes scanning the screen before her with more attention than it deserved. Perhaps the mechanic had learned her place after all.

Something beeped, and the mechanic moved to look at the relevant screen while Ida stood in the center of the room and watched her, full of power.

“She's hailing us,” Althea said. She was obligated by regulations to report such a message to Ida; Ida was certain she would have said nothing at all if she hadn't been required to. “She wants permission to dock.”

“Grant it,” said Ida, as cool and calm as if she were indifferent to Althea's presence when Althea was so affected by hers. “And send Domitian to the docking bay when he arrives.” She took the moment as the perfect time to depart and leave Althea with an order, with Ida having had the last word.

Domitian caught up to her at the doors to the docking bay. They were sealed as an air lock; beyond them the vast mouth of the
Ananke
was opening to admit a small, gleaming ship.

“I'll escort the both of you to your room, then to the white room,” Domitian said quietly, clarifying, and Ida nodded slightly.

The ship landed lightly. It was sleek and small, the newest model from Earth. The great doors of the
Ananke
slid slowly shut overhead, and Ida waited until the light beside the bay doors turned green, indicating the repressurization of the space beyond.

She pushed open the glass doors and stepped out into the vast hollowness of the docking bay; across from her, out of the sleek ship stepped a sleek woman who glanced briefly around the room before fixing her attention on Ida.

The years, Ida knew from her study of the woman, had hardened Milla Ivanov into perfect clarity, as pressure did to a diamond. No expression showed on her face. The woman walking toward Ida had aged out of her beauty but kept her handsomeness, her blond hair lightened to white, her forehead and the corners of her mouth outlined in the marks of frowns. Doctor Ivanov was the type of woman who would go to slenderness and fragility as she aged, and indeed she had already started down that path, but even though her wrists seemed small enough to snap, when she took Ida's hand, her grip was firm.

She had the same brilliant blue eyes as her son and the same intensity in her stare.

“Miss Stays,” said Milla Ivanov. She had a soft voice. At lectures, she always needed a microphone.

“Doctor Ivanov,” said Ida, and smiled charmingly. “A pleasure to meet you. Please call me Ida.”

Milla Ivanov neither acknowledged the liberty nor returned it. She simply released Ida's hand when Ida released hers and said, “I assume you have a room prepared.”

Milla Ivanov had been the subject of more interrogations than Ida had ever performed. It put Ida at a slight disadvantage, perhaps, but in the end she still had Milla's son.

She smiled and said, “Of course. Right this way.”

Doctor Ivanov seemed not to notice or simply not to care that Domitian followed them at a politely dangerous distance. She kept pace beside Ida, her flats striking the ground more softly than the
click, click
of Ida's heels.

Ida said nothing until they reached the door to the second interrogation chamber. This chamber was smaller, almost cozy; the room had been used for storage of various valuable equipment that Ida had had removed. The ceiling was a trifle low, not enough to bother Ida but enough to induce the faintest feeling of claustrophobia when combined with the dark uniform metal of the walls, ceiling, and floor. The only object left inside the room was a table rather like the one in the white room but smaller, with two chairs on either side.

Ida led the way inside and signaled to Milla to take the chair with its back to the door, seating herself opposite. Milla Ivanov sat with her back perfectly straight and her hands folded loosely in her lap and did not even blink when Domitian swung the creaking door shut behind them.

For a moment, Ida simply enjoyed the setting. Milla Ivanov sat across from her in the very same way her son had every day for a week. The resemblance between mother and son was impressive: the same blue eyes, the same shape of jaw and lip, the same close, careful attention. The only differences that Ida could see were that Milla Ivanov did not waste her time with charm as her son did and that unlike Ivan, Milla was not in chains.

Not yet, perhaps.

“Doctor Ivanov, I'm afraid I'm going to have to confess I'm a bit of a fan,” Ida said with the slightest bashful smile. “To be perfectly honest, you were one of my role models as a child. A brilliant, successful woman who rose in spite of all the adversity that surrounded her.” Ida sighed. “It is something I have always admired.”

She had admired even more the way Milla had lied and performed at her husband's trial, using her infant son as a prop to save her own skin.

“I am glad to inspire,” said Milla Ivanov, her voice crisp, tonally perfect, and perfectly empty. She tilted her head ever so slightly to the side, and Ida had a sudden flash of Ivan making the same motion. “I have heard something of you, too. Of your impressive and rapid rise to fame.”

If Ida had not been paying attention, she might have mistaken that for a compliment.

Ida held her smile for a moment while she reconsidered. Charm, then, was out. So directness it was.

“Doctor Ivanov,” Ida said, leaning forward onto the table and looking serious and concerned, “are you aware of the events surrounding your son lately?”

Perhaps the briefest flicker of blue eyes. Milla said, “I haven't been in contact with my son since he left home.”

“But you are aware.”

“Through what has been told me through System news broadcasts,” said Milla Ivanov, “and the occasional ill-timed System questioning on the subject.”

This barb seemed to cut especially deeply for being spoken in Milla's crystalline Terran accent, unsoftened by a childhood on Venus or an adulthood in the outer planets.

“I apologize for this inconvenience,” said Ida. “I'm afraid it was quite necessary.”

“Every time my son steals from a grocery store, the System comes to question me about his habits, taking me from my studies and from my lectures,” said Milla. She cocked her head to the side again, even more strongly reminiscent of her son. “What is one more interruption in the middle of my vacation?”

“I will try to make this interrogation as brief as possible,” said Ida. “But it is, of course, for the good of the System.”

“I will do my duty as a citizen,” Milla Ivanov said. “You went through all the trouble of blindfolding my computer's navigation system and bringing me to a ship in the middle of nowhere. I assume this is important.”

Even as Ida kept her smile fixed at the reminder of the difficulties she had been forced to go through to obtain this interview and the increased pressures from the System that now weighed on her, the thought occurred to her that Milla was fishing for information on the nature of the
Ananke
. Even if Ida had been so inclined or so foolish as to answer, she would have nothing to tell the other woman.

“The last time you spoke to your son was ten years ago; am I correct?” Ida asked.

“Yes.”

“I'd like you to describe the incident for me, if you please,” said Ida.

“You have it all on camera,” said Milla Ivanov. Briefly, Ida enjoyed the comparison of Milla's protest to the ones Ivan had been making all week long. “My accounting will not be so detailed.”

“Even so,” Ida said, and wondered if the mother would have the same flair for storytelling as the son.

“Leon woke up late,” said Milla. “It was a few days after he had graduated. He came downstairs. I had circled some job opportunities for him in the paper and left it at his place. He read them, said that he had somewhere to go, and left. There is nothing more to it than that. I said nothing to him.”

She spoke in the clipped, emotionless tones of a woman who had repeated this story many times, reporting with the same bare factuality as a machine. Ida remembered watching the scene from the Ivanov house surveillance. Milla Ivanov had been sitting at the table with her back to the glorious sunrise coming up over the mountains that was visible through the glass wall behind her. She had hardly looked up from the notes in front of her as Ivan came down, looked at the paper his mother had left him, and then stood and watched his mother for a long, silent span of time.

Milla Ivanov, drumming her fingers arrhythmically against the tabletop, had not noticed her son's attention. She looked up only when Ivan told her he was leaving and looked at him for perhaps a moment too long—or perhaps that was only Ida reading into what she saw—before nodding tersely.

Ivan had left, and Milla had gone back to work. She had not even looked up when the sound of Ivan's ship roared through the house and rattled the dishes he had left untouched. Ida had wondered if Milla regretted not saying anything that last time her son left or regretted not realizing he was leaving, not trying to stop him, but with Milla Ivanov in front of her now, regret seemed like it would be a foreign thing to her.

“Did you not have any idea your son was leaving for good?” Ida asked.

“No,” Milla said. “My son has always been very good at hiding what he is thinking, even from me.”

Ida would not even have wasted a guess on who he had learned that particular art from. “Would it surprise you to know that your son has a series of your lectures saved on his ship?”

This time Ida was certain that something passed over Milla Ivanov's face, something like surprise, or grief, perhaps.

“I know nothing of it if that is what you're asking,” she said. “Which lectures?”

“Computer science,” said Ida.

Milla nodded more to herself than to Ida and for the first time looked away from Ida. It freed Ida to let her mask slip slightly, to let her focus more on the mask Milla Ivanov was wearing.

“I assume you did not bring me here to ask me about my son's viewing habits,” Milla said.

“You have to understand that the recordings were a little suspicious.”

“Suspicious?” Milla's expression could have frozen the sun. “The lectures were publicly broadcast. Computer science is his preferred field. And he is my son. There is nothing suspicious about that at all.”

Ivan's interest in the subject would make the lectures the perfect method for passing along a message, and Milla Ivanov had to realize that. “Have you ever tried to get into contact with your son?”

“No.”

“Why not?” Ida asked, and when Milla simply looked at her as if the answer to that question should be obvious, clarified, “Surely as a mother you would want to save your son from himself.”

“Blood will out,” said Milla Ivanov in her chilly distant way. “That is what the System says, is it not? If the parent has…anti-System tendencies, then so will the child. It was only a matter of time before Leon took after his father.”

The utter lack of emotion briefly stymied Ida. She relied so often on her own relative poise to crack open the people she interrogated along the cracks created by their sentiment, but Milla Ivanov, she was starting to realize, was as impervious as a diamond. She had not expected to be able to break Milla; other investigators with far more time and experience had failed to do so, but now she was starting to fear that neither would she be able to get Milla Ivanov to slip.