Palace (14 page)

‘Se Rico,’ she murmured.

‘Se Pukosu.’

‘I wonder, if you please, would you honour me with a moment of your valuable rime?’

‘Sure. What do you want?’

‘It is such a trifle, hardly worthy of your attention ...’

‘What?’

‘There is, oh you will laugh to hear it, the most absurd rumour.’

Rico rolled his eyes.

‘Get to the point, will you, Pukosu?’

He had the distinct pleasure of seeing her blush.

‘Yes. Well. There is a rumour that Master Hivel has named you as his heir, to replace the ... eh ... unfortunate Arno.’

She smiled when she said Arno’s name, just barely, but she did. At that moment Rico hated her.

‘Where’d you get such a stupid idea?’

‘Mm.’ Pukosu considered him, then shrugged. ‘Oh, who knows where these foolish rumours come from? I believe I might have seen a graffito on a wall in the Map.’

‘Right. Well, I’ve got to go.’

‘Of course, Se Rico.’ She started to turn, then looked back, just as if a sudden thought had occurred to her. ‘Ah, if such a happy event did come to pass, however, you would certainly wish to share the news with the other master-tracks?’

‘Oh yeah, right, of course.’

Her lips quirked a bit.

‘Look, I gotta go,’ Rico snapped. ‘I’ve got a project burning.’

‘Yes, naturally. My apologies for detaining you.’ She nodded slightly to him, then moved on. Rico turned and headed for the rank of lift booths across the lobby. At the door to a booth he glanced back once to find Pukosu still watching him. She wasn’t even the worst of the lot. He stomped into the booth and shoved his thumb against the ID plate so hard that the unit beeped in protest. He let up on the pressure.

‘Apprentice Rico Hernanes y Jons cleared for station access.’

‘Good. Floor seventy.’

The lift shot up, then bobbled to a stop. The doors opened with a snap, releasing him into a long grey corridor, lined with doors. No-one else was here, thankfully. He wasn’t even sure if his cubicle would be unlocked this early, but when he pressed his thumb to the ID plate, the door slid back. He walked in, shut it again, locked it, and sat down at his work unit, an older station, fitted with only a pair of cybernodes and a big flat screen instead of a holobox. The guild handicapped apprentices, doling out upgrades as rewards when they mastered some new technique.

For a moment he merely sat, staring at his reflection in the dead black and thinking about Arno. Although the official story had never mentioned drugs, his cousin had been expelled from the guild six months ago and committed to the special hospital the guild kept for its failures. Somehow or other Arno had escaped, and now he’d shown up again in Pleasure, the one place on planet where he could find cyberdrugs illegally - or at least, some compound that mimicked their effects. It all seemed to fit together, that Arno was just another regrettable casualty of the drugs, a tragedy, but not unheard of.

‘I don’t believe it. I just don’t.’

Rico knew all about cyberdrugs, though he’d yet to take any. Every apprentice studied them, had it drilled into them just how dangerous they could be if you didn’t follow the guild rules. Arno had always told Rico that the guild was right, too - odd of him, since Arno held most of the guild’s rules in utter contempt. Rico had never seen his cousin abuse anything, not even anything legal, like alcohol. Arno was on the strange side, maybe. Cybes who volunteered for that many implants always were more than a little strange. But a drug addict?

Rico grimaced. Would
be
end up like that, burned out and left to rot somewhere? He shuddered with a toss of his head, then leaned forward in his chair.

‘Unit on.’

The screen came glowing to life with green icons bright as jade-wings. Rico took the vizor from the drawer and put it on, then tilted his chair back and scooted forward, sliding half-under the desk. His left hand rested comfortably on a sculpted pad.

‘Jack.’

The jack-staple rose, slid forward, lowered and connected to his implant with the familiar jolt of electricity up his arm. ‘Transmit.’

The vizor darkened his view briefly, then cleared into a gateway that allowed Rico to step inside the screen, or so he perceived it -stepping inside a suddenly three-dee space. The icons, many-coloured now, hung in opalescent air before him.

‘Load personal icon.’

Through the jack he could feel the flicker of power that meant the command had been obeyed, but nothing changed on the screen. As he travelled through the Map, however, others would see the humanoid shape that represented him and be able to interact with him. He as well could now interact with the icons that he came across, whether they represented other Map walkers or mere objects. Mail always came first. When he touched the blue, winged icon, it opened like a flower and spread, listing out the items in clusters of words. When he saw a message marked with official guild glyphs, he flipped it open immediately. They’d put him on the list for an expanded work space, a holobox, and a larger cubicle. He’d been cleared as well for his second jack. His apprenticeship was nearly over. But were they doing this because he’d earned it, or because he was about to become Hivel Jons’s heir?

Heir or no, he had a scutwork group waiting to be read, the results of bOring database searches left for him to route, then fresh orders from masters and study assignments from teachers. Migel had Rico down for sanitation work on the Map, and Hondro wanted him to test a collection of error-checkers. Next to these hung his manifests for completed projects, each tagged with master critiques. He ran his hand down the tags, flipping them over and reading the comments. ‘Acceptable work’, ‘successfully concluded’, and finally a ‘publish this in the Library’. Rico grinned. He’d been getting a lot of this sort of praise lately. The last tag, though, carried Hi’s route marks. He could count on that one being a scathing critique of all the flaws that the other masters had missed, and he left it for later. Personal messages next: Rico skimmed them fast, but he found no note from Jodi Sanchis, a girl in Bio that he’d been corresponding with. Thinking about Jodi made him remember Darla. He felt himself blush, so hot that for a moment he slipped out of the screen. If he could - and with Jodi? He forced his mind back to the icons and stepped inside, closing his mailbox with a sweep of one virtual hand. He could open docks for those scutwork projects later. His own projects clustered under an icon he’d designed, a human skull with red flowers growing out of the eye sockets. Although Hi laughed at him for what he called its ‘drama’, Rico insisted on keeping it. When he expanded the dock, though, a set of more conventional icons, glyphs on disks, appeared. They led to hook-ups with the only AI unit that apprentices were allowed to access, Caliostro. ‘Poor old Caliostro’, the masters called him, a once-powerful AI who’d been damaged first by the neutrino wave that had wreaked havoc on all the Pinch’s AIs, and then again later, during the Schism Wars. Mere apprentices never learned the details of Caliostro’s crippling, though of course everyone had a theory. The guild had cannibalized and reconfigured the AI dozens of times over the years, until nowadays it functioned mostly as a virtual chamberlain utility for Government House.

The masters had, however, kept part of its function space as a training ground for the guild, a safe area where apprentices were supposed to stay. Of course, being apprentices, they never did, and there was a kind of unspoken tolerance for those apprentices bold enough to push the limits, provided they didn’t push too far. If you strayed into a high security area and got caught at it, the masters broke you back down to a neophyte. Getting caught more than once meant automatic expulsion. Being unguilded put you at the economic level of saccules. You’d need a lot of luck to so much as get a work permit over in Service Sect to collect the garbage that the street cleaning bots missed.

Rico had heard the lectures a hundred times. He’d seen a couple of apprentices publicly stripped of their blues and turned out into the street. But he kept thinking of Arno, mumbling about metas and the Son of the Morning.

‘Time?’

The numbers appeared in the nacreous haze around him. Twenty into the sevens. His supervisor, Dian Wynn, tended to run late. Probably, he had a good hour of free walking before she jacked into tandem with him. He slipped off his vizor and shook his head, relaxing his neck muscles, then lay back in his chair and flipped up the leg rest. When he was plugged in, he saw the world as if he stood within the screen, but his body was always present, nagging him about comfort. Only the cyberdrugs could set your mind truly free from physical reminders, but Rico knew a trick or two.

Once he was settled, he put the vizor back on, but this time he plugged in the earpiece as well. When he went back into the screen he could hear the low tone of audio going functional. Caliostro’s icon hovered above him. When he touched the glyph, a blood-red wand, it turned hot and disappeared. The gate opened before him like the petals of a silver flower. Rico stepped through into the apprentices’ meeting room, which he saw as the interior of a green sphere pimpled with doors, each labelled with a Master’s gene-glyph. Although each guild drew on many families, each family tended to belong to a single guild, apprenticing out their young people to uncles or aunts over the generations. The Jons and the Hernanes clans had fallen into this pattern for nearly a thousand years. Yet as large a clan as each was, they never could have supplied the guild with enough sapients to fill it. That morning Rico recognized none of the other apprentices -or rather, their iconic bodies who, travelled in the sphere, some hanging upside down from his point of view or walking across the ceiling. When a female form floated past, upside down and at a sharp angle to the vertical of his own icon, he felt himself twisting automatically to match her, then caught himself. The visual conventions of Mapspace took a long time to master. While he could see everyone else’s icon, for instance, he could see nothing of his own. He was aware of reaching and touching various icons, but he never saw a hand when he did so. The sensations of reach and touch were only neuronic conventions, his brain’s way of symbolizing the manipulations of objects in the ancient stylizations of the Map.

Rico used his personal meta to unlock the Jons family’s access door. He floated through and found himself hovering over what seemed to be an immense wheel with hundreds of narrow gates, shaped like longtubes, spoking up from the rim. The entrance to the gate leading to his personal work space, a simple arch enclosing dead black, carried no meta-lock; apprentices had to earn that much privacy. For a moment, though, he hovered in the wheel room and looked out over the portals to other clan work spaces, research virtualities, and storage areas. Somewhere here, too, hidden from any outsider that might drift this way, lay the Jons clan’s jealously guarded secret, the Chameleon Gate, an ancient artifact brought online at least a thousand years ago, maybe more, so long ago that no-one even knew why or how it had fit into the original schemata of the Map.

Accessing the Map by all the known and legal means - and this definition covered the vast majority of possible means - left routing marks and ID codes visible to anyone but the rawest apprentice. If Rico tried hunting for Arno from his own work space, he might as well send mail about it to Hi and every other master around. But if he used the Chameleon Gate, he would leave no trace at all. At his level he wasn’t even supposed to know how to access it, but Arno had taught him a shortcut. Of course, he really should just go into his work space, finish that icon-stacker, and forget all about the encounter with Arno in Pleasure Sect. Hadn’t Uncle Hi ordered just that? And Hi was his family patron and guildmaster both. But he found himself remembering Arno, his filthy clothes, his desperate voice, his tendrilled eyes, glancing this way and that, tearing in the bright sun.

No-one else flew or hovered in the clan Mapspace.

‘Open sesame,’ Rico said.

Arno’s shortcut program began to run.

In the Mapspace an icon formed, thin and pale at first, then turning solid: Arno himself as he’d looked when he’d written this routine - his face all flesh, smooth and clear, grinning at the risk he was running, blue eyes snapping - yet since the icon only showed his head and shoulders, he was disembodied, a floating portrait in the pale Mapstuff. The routine chugged on, cloning the icon exponentially, flashing the clones like sparks through the clan space until an Arno hovered before every portal.

‘Doorbreaker,’ Rico said.

The submeta clicked in, searching for the right unlock routine for every single portal in the clan space. Since the Chameleon Gate only mimicked a portal, its image alone would be left, an imitation of a locked portal, once the meta finished its work. Rico hovered, waiting, watching the monitor numbers flickering in his peripheral vision as the meta found and stored the lock code. At any minute a clan member - even Hi or his mother - might casually enter the space. He would have only a bare moment to shut the meta down before they would see what was going on. He heard a faint bell as the meta announced it had completed the search; now it had to copy code so that it could lock the doors again before any master or professor noticed them open. Rico had written this part of the meta for Arno; he cursed himself for not doing a more elegant job. The numbers built up slowly, it seemed, painfully slowly. Another bell sounded. Now! ‘Open!’

In the centre of the clan space, a ripple of colour appeared like a waving curtain. The doors sprang open, hung that way for a heartbeat, then slammed shut. Along with them the crowd of Arno-icons vanished, all but one, standing before the open portal to the Chameleon Gate. Rico rushed forward and flung himself through the portal. Behind him the Arno-icon ran a verbal component.

‘Good luck!’

Then it vanished as well, and the door shut with a spray of rainbow like a breaking wave. Rico found himself floating through an ice-blue mist. He could see nothing, hear nothing, but he could feel. It seemed that invisible hands moved in the mist and wrapped his entire body with thin sheets of pure cold. When something much like a membrane of cold settled over his face, he felt as if he were suffocating and lifted his hands to claw at it. The wrap of cold remained, fused to the seeming-skin. Needles of lightning played over his entire body, making,him writhe until he could steady his form by sheer will. His real body was getting all the air it needed, back in its chair in his cube. His station and the jack in that body’s hand were only translating his psychodynamic contact with the Chameleon Gate. He knew all that. He knew that the Map only mimicked bodily sensations. The sensations were just more data. He knew that, he knew it all, he could repeat his textbook definitions over and over, but still he felt as if he drowned in a sea of ice. He gulped and shook and repeated all the definitions once more; the sensations never vanished.