Palace (39 page)

‘Not exactly, and it’s already here.’ Samante glanced at the door into the bedroom.

‘Greenie!’

Out of the inner room came a young saccule neuter, wearing a dirty grey shift. In a cloud of horrible stink, it took two steps toward Vida, then stopped, cowering back, raising its webbed hands to its face. All its communication sacs hung flaccid and empty.

‘What’s wrong with the poor thing?’ Vida said.

‘It’s fresh out of the pens,’ Samante said. ‘Barely trained at all. Look at those cuts. That’s where they put the microtracker and the teacher.’

On each side of its head lay bright pink scars, freshly healed over. ‘Teacher?’ Vida said.

‘What’s a teacher?’ The saccule whimpered as if it understood the word. ‘It’s this little thing they implant. It gives them pleasure when they obey and a shock when they don’t.’

Greenie hissed air into a sac and let it out again in a moan. ‘Are you hungry?’ Vida said.

‘Food?’

The little creature whined and raised its eyes to her. Vida reached into her shoulder bag and pulled out a bundle wrapped in a napkin. ‘What’s that?’ Samante said.

‘The extra bread-hooks from breakfast. I didn’t see any reason to waste them.’

‘Oh Vida! How cheap! You’ve got to learn to act like a chief patron.’

Vida ignored her and unwrapped the bread-hooks. Apparently the saccule could smell them; its eating mouth twitched and it crept a cautious step closer. Vida held the food out with one hand.

‘Come here, Greenie,’ she said, as softly as she could manage. ‘It’s all right. This food is for you. It’s all right.’

Another step, then another - at last it could snatch the food with trembling hands. It stuffed the bread in, smacking and gulping, and matched the candy-scent with an effusion.

‘It’s starving, the poor little thing!’ Vida snapped.

At the anger in her voice Greenie skittered backward and let out a smell of rank decay. It sucked air fast into a pair of sacs.

‘Shorty shorry shorry,’ it hissed, then began to tremble.

‘Oh my lord!’ Samante said. ‘This won’t do. We’ll have to send it back. Vanna can just howl all she wants.’

Greenie whimpered and crumpled, sinking to the ground with breadcrumbs stuck all over its face. Smelly air hissed as it tried to fill its sacs.

‘No,’ Vida said. ‘Greenie, you’ll stay here. You’re safe now. Understand?’

The saccule looked up, looked back and forth between the two women while Samante sighed as loudly as a saccule herself.

‘Vida, you can’t let pity get in the way of choosing good servants. You’ve got a position to maintain and appearances to keep up. This neuter’s obviously the runt of its litter. We’ll have to send it back and buy another one ourselves.’

Greenie began to moan and move its head from side to side. Vida turned to the vidscreen. Just in time she stopped herself from summoning Calios and called up the clumsy search utilities instead.

‘Find: saccules and purchasing. Find: rules and regulations. Now: answer query. What happens to a saccule who is first bought, then returned?’

The utility answered briskly in a light mechanical voice. ‘A saccule that is returned is considered untrainable. Untrainable saccule neuters are killed.’

Greenie shrieked in a skirl of compressed air. Samante whirled round and glared at the screen.

‘That can’t be right,’ Samante snarled.

‘Cross-checking secondary databanks,’ the utility said. ‘Information is correct. Untrainable neuters are terminated by lethal injection. This procedure is fast and virtually painless. The drug used is -’

‘Stop!’ Vida snapped.

Samante turned from the screen and stared at Greenie with one hand over her mouth.

‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ Vida said. ‘That’s why I called that data up.’

Very slowly Samante lowered her hand.

‘It understood the word killed,’ Samante said. ‘I know they don’t train them to that particular word as a conditioned response. It picked it up somehow, on its own.’

‘Yeah, so?’ Vida was briefly puzzled. ‘Oh! I see what you’re driving at.’

‘Yes, I imagine you do. It can learn words - symbols.’ Samante turned back to Greenie. ‘It’s all right, Greenie. You’re going to stay with me and Se Vida. You must do everything Se Vida says, but first we’ll get you some more food.’

Greenie smelled like ripe fruit. For a long time Samante stood staring in its general direction.

‘What’s wrong?’ Vida said at last.

‘I’m just surprised, is all.’ Samante turned away and looked vaguely out of the windows. ‘At how blind we can be when we want to. When there’s a good reason to stay blind.’

‘Yeah,’ Vida said. ‘I kind of know that, growing up in Pleasure like I did.’

‘I suppose so. Oh my lord, this past couple of days! I feel like I hardly know who I am any more.’

‘Huh? Why not?’

‘Well, I -I don’t even know why I said that.’ Samante shuddered with a little toss of her head. ‘Let me just call Service and get some proper food sent up for Greenie. Then we’ve got to start hiring the rest of the staff so I can get some furniture into our suite.’

* * *

The first thing Hi had installed in his new suite in East Tower was a transmit link. It allowed him to splice the Map terminal that came with the rooms into the photonics of guild headquarters. Since no furniture had arrived yet, he stood in the room that was going to be his office and called up onscreen Dian Wynn’s report on the damage to Pansect Media. While her team had found plenty of traces of the mysterious candle’s destructive path, they’d failed at tracking it to an origin point. Whoever had created the candle must have had some powerful utilities at their disposal, the sort that would only run on the Map itself. Besides, the thing had obviously been drawing power from some on Map socket. Yet as far as Wynn could tell, the candle had been written off Map and its icon then dumped right into the middle of it. Hi shook his head and swore. Why? All the questions kept coming back to that. Why would anyone be writing objects to damage the Map? If he could find the answer to that, he would have some idea of the psychology of the vandals, which in turn would tip him off to their way of working.

‘Se Hivel?’ Nju leaned round the doorjamb. His voice boomed in the empty room. ‘Jak has arrived.’

‘Good!’ Hi said. ‘I’ve been thinking that maybe the guild should just go on paying his wages, as a favour to the new patron of the L’Vars.’

‘That would be an excellent gift.’ Nju walked in and looked round the echoing white room, set with floor to ceiling windows on one wall. He paused to glance up at the inlaid and painted ceiling that hung a good eighteen feet above the marble floor. ‘These quarters seem quite satisfactory. Will we be accepting them?’

‘If you think they’re defensible.’ Hi powered off the Mapscreen with a few quick commands.

‘Been meaning to ask you about that.’

‘Oh yes. I like this arrangement with the single public door. That other suite - it had too many ways to get in that didn’t require an entrance code.’

‘Which is why Dukayn tried to foist it off on us. He must be dying to do a little snooping.’

‘Se Dukayn dying is, I trust, a mere metaphor.’ Nju smiled and showed fang. ‘I also trust that I will not need to make it a reality.’

‘So do I. Let’s take Jak to Se Vida’s rooms. That way I can make my offer.’

The Cyberguild’s new installation at Government House stood two floors above the guest room level in the East Tower. Flanked by two unspeaking Garang, Hi took the lift booth down and headed for Vida’s rooms. As they passed the corridor where the first suite offered them stood, Nju glanced down, then muttered a laugh.

‘Hah! Workmen are leaving. They seem to be carrying some sort of equipment out with them. It drips wires.’

‘I think we can guess that the place was pretty thoroughly bugged, yeah,’ Hi said, grinning.

‘So was the one we have now. I ran a blow-out and fry utility on it as soon as I got the transmit link set up. We were meant to demand a new suite, Nju. They were hoping we’d accept the new one as a spur of the moment choice and not look too closely at the photonics.’

‘Amazing!’ Nju turned to Jak. ‘Consider how Se Hivel is always thinking. You should aspire to the same.’

Dressed still in his cyber blue, dark against his golden fiir, Jak allowed himself a curt nod. Even for a Garang, Hi decided, he was a dour soul.

Warned by a call from Jevon, Vida and her factor were waiting for them in the white and blue living area of the guest rooms. Hi was preparing to make some pleasant remarks and then lead up to his offer, but Jak forestalled the courtesies. When he saw Vida, crowned with her gene-glyph, elegant in her silk clothing, the Garang spread out both enormous hands in her direction, palms up.

‘Jak!’ Vida said. ‘I’m so glad to see you. I asked Se Hivel for you specifically, you know.’

‘Did you, Se Vida?’ His voice growled with some deep emotion. ‘Did I not tell you that you were meant for great things?’

‘You sure did. Now I’ll have to live up to that. You’ll have to help me make it come true.’

Vida was smiling a little, speaking casually, but with a supple twist Jak flung himself down and knelt at Vida’s feet. She flinched, then held steady, the smile gone.

‘Your life is of value. Mine is of no value,’ Jak rumbled. ‘I will spend my life freely to preserve your life.’

Standing next to Hi, Nju nodded in satisfaction.

‘My blood will pour out to preserve your blood.’ Jak flicked one long golden hand. All at once, he was holding a steel-bladed dagger, which he proffered to Vida hilt-first. When Hi made a hasty pantomime, Vida took the dagger and held it steady. Jak darted his head forward and kissed it so hard that his lip split against the blade’s edge. Dark brown blood welled and oozed into the golden fur on his chin. Vida yelped and without thinking leaned forward to wipe the drops off with her free hand. Damn! Hi thought. I should have coached her! Nju winced, then shrugged.

Jak was looking up at Vida in a spasm of devotion as, still reflexively, she licked the blood from her finger.

‘I shall serve you till I die,’ he whispered. ‘May the gods be kind! May my last sight as death gelds my eyes be your face.’

When Vida offered him her hand, he took it in both of his and kissed it with bloody lips. She stared down into his golden eyes as if she were looking into the deep of interstellar space.

‘So much for a temporary job,’ Hi muttered. ‘This is going to cost the Cyberguild plenty.’

‘Destiny,’ Nju said. ‘It must be destiny. And none of us, Se Hivel, can argue with that.’

Samante had watched all this with one hand over her mouth. When Hi glanced at her with a questioning eyebrow raised, she lowered the hand.

‘Se Hivel?’ Samante said. ‘There’s one thing I don’t understand. How did Jak get that dagger into Government House?’

‘Madama Samante.’ Nju spread his hands and bowed to her. ‘Most beautiful Madama Samante. It was not a dagger when it entered.’

‘Then the assassin could -’

‘No. But what if he did?’ Nju gestured toward his brother.

All three of them turned toward Vida, who still allowed the kneeling Jak to clasp her hand. He stared back at her in a rapture close to sexual as the blood welled from his wound and ran. Nju called out a few words in his own language. At that, Jak bowed his head, let go Vida’s hand, and rose, nodding to his elder brother.

‘Well, we’ve all witnessed your vow,’ Nju said in an oddly conversational tone of voice. ‘May you never regret it. Now let’s find a heal-strip to put on that cut.’

* * *

Gaining journeyman status in the Cyberguild meant cyberdrugs. Without them, the farther reaches of the Map lay beyond the range that an unsedated body would allow a consciousness to travel. Journeymen who either could not tolerate the drugs or preferred to live drug-free could make a decent living Maprunning or performing lower level guild work, but anyone who aspired to master rank had to learn to use them. Adjusting to their effects took time; it could make you sick for days; it could kill a human with a weak heart or a Hirrel whose renal filter-glands were too small. Rico had heard all the strictures, over and over ever since he’d been accepted as an apprentice at twelve.

‘If you’re scared,’ Barra said, ‘you’re not going to tell me anyway, so I won’t ask.’

Rico laughed. They were sitting in the gather at the Jons compound, where he’d gone to pick up a few things from his old room on his way to his first drug-testing appointment. The things -download cubes and some clothing - lay near his feet in a synthskin travelling sack, gleaming pale brown in a stripe of watery sunlight. Outside, beyond the polarized windows, the afternoon sun tried to fight its way through fog.

‘Not scared exactly,’ he said. ‘Nervous, sure. But I don’t have any doubts. The Chameleon Gate showed me what the Hypermap looks like, just that one glimpse. I want to go back there by myself, so I can look around.’

‘You got the Gate to take you up? How?’

‘I think I said the meta by mistake. I was scared, and I remember saying "Eye of God" out loud.’

It was Barra’s turn for the laugh.

‘That’s it, all right. An old joke - when you’re on the Hypermap, you see with the Eye of God.’ She turned serious, considering him. ‘I was wondering how the idea of the drugs would strike you. Because of Arno.’

For the first time Rico realized that his mother believed Arno’s cover story, that Hi had never let her into the secret of Arno’s work for the guild. He hesitated, wondering if he should tell her now that Arno lay dead and beyond all danger. But would she guess that he’d taken up the job?

‘You look troubled,’ Barra went on. ‘I don’t blame you.’

‘Well, yeah, if the drugs could take him over -’

‘You’re a different sort of man than Arno. He could never admit that he was wrong, you know, or that he’d got himself in trouble. Sometimes I wondered if the idea that he might be wrong ever occurred to him.’

‘Well, yeah, that’s true, isn’t it?’

‘Unfortunately. Look, you’d better run. You don’t want to be late for your appointment.’

‘And you’ve got to pack, too. When do you meet this kid they saddled you with?’