Saga (32 page)

“But I’m not a RAL.”

“Aren’t you?” His gaze was unflinching, but I didn’t look away.

“Am I?”

“Only a RAL can affect the local environment in the way that you can. You are a RAL of some sort.”

I looked at him, skeptically. “You told us the RAL were created about two thousand years ago, right?” I gestured at my body. Perhaps being a RAL explained my thieving abilities, but it didn’t explain my past. I picked up the black card and looked at it.

“It’s easier with your eyes closed.”

So it was. The card was pliable in response to my wishes. I could feel it, as if I were running my fingers through a tray of water, setting it as ice in whatever sculpture I desired. When I opened my eyes, Michelotto was looking straight at me. He nodded.

For the first time ever in his company, I felt that I could form a clear image of him, both visually and in the sense that his face no longer seemed like a mask. Either the corridor was too small or else he had relaxed the trait that normally made his presence elusive and sinister.

“Tell me something, honestly. When we kill the Dark Queen, will you really make life better for reds?”

He nodded. “I will need to, in order to consolidate my rule. In any case, the economics of our society make it perfectly viable to have a universal distribution of yellow cards. It’s the top luxury goods that we couldn’t meet the demand for. You know, green-class items or better. But why do such matters concern you? Do you really care what happens to the reds?”

“Yes.” I thought about my friends and Arnie. “They deserve better than that.”

He smiled again, and it gave me a chill. “What the non-RAL deserve is neither here nor there. Perhaps you are not a RAL. I don’t believe the word ‘deserve’ is part of our vocabulary.”

“Why did you have to go and say that? Just when I was starting to like you.” It was true, I realized. When he had shared the secret of his cards with me, I had immediately felt the respect of one master thief for another. Now I found his disdain for the people repugnant, and I was troubled by his assumption that I was like him. Was I? Deep down, I knew I was different, alone. Did that make me despise everyone else the way that Michelotto so evidently did? Right now, I wished for the company of my friends. For Nathan especially.

Michelotto collected his wallet and stood up.

“Can I trust you?” I stood up also, still holding the black card. “Come to that, after the Dark Queen is dead, won’t you want to kill me, too? Because you think I’m a RAL?”

He raised his eyebrows, surprised at my outburst. “It is true that the RAL are competitive to the point of violence, but remember that the Queen and I formed an alliance of nearly two thousand years’ duration. It was broken only because of her loss of touch with the reality of the situation. After I have gained power, there will still be a lot of work to do: building up loyal guilds to run the administration. I could use your help with that. Certainly I would not want you to be an enemy.” Michelotto gestured his arm toward the door. “So, shall we go in?”

If he thought his answer was definitive, I certainly did not. I hesitated. The fact was, at a fundamental, instinctive level, I did not trust him. He was using me against the Dark Queen, but had no need for me after that. The look of fear on his face when I had shown my control over pulse-weapon fire had contained a threat.

He sensed my doubts and turned toward me. “When the Dark Queen is dead,” he began, his face once more in copper shadow, “what will you do? What do you desire?”

“Nothing really.”

“What would you change in Saga?”

I thought about this for a moment. To give out yellow cards to all would be a massive improvement in the lives of the poorest people of Saga. Other than that, what else could you want? Something deeper than wealth, something that addressed the alienation felt by everybody I knew. “A huge boarder park, maybe, with stages for bands, canteens open all hours, lots of parties. Like the Anarcho-Punk Collective do now, but permanent, legal.”

This time his smile was genuine. “If I were sixteen, I would probably want the same.”

“What about you? What do you want?” I felt slightly insulted, but I had been unprepared for the question. I was sure I could give a better answer in time.

“I’ve been playing a game for more than two thousand years. I’ve seen the gradual elimination of all my competitors but one. I want her to die, so that it’s over. So that I can rest.” He paused. “And so that I can experience the taste.”

“What taste?”

“Victory.”

Every time I came close to sympathizing with him, he pushed me away with his harsh manner. With a grimace, I pushed the black card into the slot. Closing my eyes, I developed a feeling for it, so that I could mold it, changing the electrical impedances of the surface. With a sigh, the door slid open for us.

Entering the building
was a shock. I’m not sure what I had been expecting. Perhaps old-fashioned desks and book-cases, full of important files, or maybe rows of computers running secret programs. Instead, we were walking through the inside of a huge white ball, which was bare except for a bed in the center. Above us, a turquoise illumination strip gave us a gentle light to see by. Our steps echoed, the reverberations dying away slowly. Bending down for a moment, I touched the floor; it was a hard, cold plastic.

When we got closer to the center of the room, we could see that the bed was placed on a circle of slightly overlapping silver blades, like a propeller. The metal circle was about four meters in diameter and it was sunk a few inches below floor level. You were clearly supposed to walk to the bed on a white path that connected it to the floor and seemed to hold it above the blades. The bed itself was made of the same white material as the floor of the chamber, with some padding that outlined the approximate shape of a person on the upper surface. Crouching down, I could see that there was indeed an inch or two of space between the base of the bed and the metal iris below it.

There was absolutely nothing else in this huge, domed room. For some reason, the whole place made me feel as if I’d stepped through the electron shell of a giant atom and was now looking at the nucleus. A nucleus that was the portal to another world.

“Well?” Michelotto looked at me, then at the bed.

“Well, what? Why don’t you test it?”

He grimaced and shook his head slightly. “I don’t like the look of it.”

“So? Neither do I.”

For a moment, his eyes searched the featureless interior of the room for alternatives. There were none.

“Tell you what: rock, paper, scissors, best of three. Loser lies on the bed.” I was joking, but Michelotto’s expression remained somber.

“Very well.”

That surprised me. Really, I had been expecting that I would be the one who went out to the bed and, in fact, I wasn’t that nervous. I just didn’t like his assumption that I would go.

Holding out my fist, I beat out the countdown. “Three, two, one.”

His was scissors, mine paper.

My gaze focused on his. “You cheated.”

He shrugged. “We are both RAL.”

This time, I slowed the world down as I spoke the countdown. Each jerk of the timeframe brought me a wealth of information, from the tension in his muscles, the movement of his fingers, and the flicker of a smile on his lips. He was making a rock. At the very last moment, I displayed scissors. Michelotto raised an eyebrow.

I had realized that I wanted to see Earth for myself, more than I cared about being taken for granted. It was exciting to be on the cusp of obtaining fundamental knowledge about the world and perhaps about myself.

“Wait a moment, please.” Michelotto walked back to the door and stood by it. “Now you can go ahead.”

I don’t suppose you get to live to be two thousand years old without being careful. Two steps along the walkway, then the bed. The foam was thin and I could feel hard plastic beneath my elbows and the back of my head. Around me was a faint scent of talcum powder, and I winced at the thought that I was lying in the space occupied many times before by the Dark Queen. There was some kind of ridge in the padding near my right hand. As I ran my fingers over it, I considered sitting up to have a look. But then the blades beneath me hissed, and I fell into a black pit.

 

I landed in a room where computer screens and flashing lights covered the floor in a grid. Had I changed worlds or simply fallen? I tried to speak and had no voice. No mouth. Nor arms and legs. What was I? When I moved, the world spun, I was rolling erratically, mostly on my back, performing great, jerky wobbles. The feeling was sickening. Or was the nausea coming from the sense of panic that I was not breathing, that the unconscious, comforting rhythms of my body were gone? Staying still was the solution. No need to be alarmed; this must be Erik’s universe. I must indeed be on Earth. What would Athena do here? She would be systematic and wouldn’t get overwhelmed by being in an alien body.

Firstly, I tried to set my vision straight relative to the floor and found that I could do so without having to roll. In fact, I could look in all directions. Three-hundred-sixty-degree vision was weird, like having a neck that could rotate all the way around. My body was of dark metal, curved almost into a ball, with many protruding spikes. No wonder I had tumbled in such a capricious manner.

The room was large in extent, the walls featureless except for four circular exits, one in each wall; the roof was plain but for a small grill. But the floor was an amazing kaleidoscope of color. Thousands of square lights ran in columns and rows around screens displaying moving graphs. The predominant color of the lights was green; some were orange; a few were flashing red. Rows of black dots were interspersed with the colored lights. No, not dots: holes. I rolled slightly to get a closer view of them and reached out toward one. A thin metal rod extended from my body like a finger. It was the exact dimensions of the hole. I rolled over the line of holes, sensing them beneath me. Then I stuck my finger in one.

It was like watching a newscast at a hundred times normal speed. There was such a blur of images and sound that it made no sense. It just made me dizzy. Fighting back the impulse to pull away, I tried to slow down the rate of information flow, with some success. It wasn’t like when the whole world seemed to go jerky and move in discrete moments. But it was possible to focus on the rush of data, to dam it up and let through a controlled amount. It spoke to me.

“Semi-conductor factory 0AFB2 reporting.”

A voice pattern within a frothy communication that told me orders were stable, wafer supply was continuous, with stocks enough for five months in case of disruption. Some wear on one of the loop vehicles would become significant in approximately six years, but the metrology and process devices were still relatively new, with a lifetime expectancy of over thirty years. All of this meant nothing to me.

“Very good,” I sent back.

“Implement changes?” A flood of options came through with the voice. Since I was completely ignorant of the possible consequences, I didn’t respond to any of them, apart from answering “yes” to the scheduling of vegetation clearance for the outside of the building: trees were encroaching with a possibility of becoming a hazard. I withdrew my finger and returned to the control room.

There were thousands—tens, maybe hundreds of thousands—of these holes. Presumably the green systems were fine, the amber needed attention, and the flashing red ones? I trundled up to one and took a look.

The data showed a major highway with a huge rent. Earthquake damage had pushed and pulled the land to tear the highway, leaving it with one side protruding over a meter above the other. Traffic, I learned, had been diverted around longer, less efficient routes, but there were still some vehicles awaiting the repair of the road. The options for reconstruction were complicated, so I simply pulled out of the socket, then examined several more.

This was all very interesting; the planet Earth was covered in a network of factories run by robots, but it was also something of an anticlimax. Where was the contact with New Earth?

Behind me was a resting spot above a pattern of silver blades identical to those in the white room from which I had come. It was obviously the mechanism for my return, and I was tempted to use it. But first I took a long roll around the entire room, my mobility improving all the while as I got used to my new body. From time to time, I would dip into a random socket, in the vague hope that it might relate to something other than the maintenance of Earth. After about thirty minutes of interacting with semiconscious factories, ships, satellites, and trains, I found what I was looking for: Communication-Assassination Probe Ox9B45.

“Your Majesty.”

“Status report.” I tried to sound as authoritative as I could.

“Quiescent. Fully functional.”

“Can you contact the human beings of New Earth?”

A pause. “By several means, Your Majesty.”

“Send a message to them by all methods. Tell them I want to speak to Cindella Dragonslayer.”

“All methods? Confirm, please: Your Majesty wants to restore the space-com link?”

“Yes. Restore it.”

“Done. Communications have been sent on all their media.”

“To the whole planet?”

“Yes. This is what you wished?”

Strange, that a probe could sound nervous.

“Yes.”

This discovery filled me with an unfamiliar sensation, a sense of joy and freedom. It had come to me in a sudden shift of perspective. I had not simply moved from the claustrophobic world of Saga to an even more confined control center on Earth. No, I had passed through a much more significant doorway. There was a vast universe out here, full of stars and planets. It was possible to fly through space, to visit these other worlds. The Dark Queen had proven it. For a moment, I felt admiration and sympathy for her. She knew. She was aware of the heavens, and she wanted to be part of them. As did I. What could be more liberating than to sail between the stars, a world unto yourself, outside Saga? I could do it, too: take this body or perhaps one of my own design, enter a spacecraft, and travel. A real ghost in their universe. Even if I were to explore this universe for ten thousand years, I would barely have begun. Like traveling no further than a street in Saga. But so unfamiliar, so new.