The Song of the Jubilee (The Phantom of the Earth Book 1) (17 page)

Maritza parted the Janzers and put her hand on his back. He shook forward. “Hey there, handsome,” she said, “relax! It’ll end soon!” The Janzers activated their Reassortment batons. “Nothing brash now! You don’t want my friends here to hurt you!”

Hans didn’t think artificial Reassortment from a baton jab could be worse than Reassortment on the surface, but before he could act upon the impulse to run, Maritza injected him. His mind cleared, and his fears, his worries, his aggression, his desire to flee disappeared as day into night.

Maritza unlatched Hans’s handcuffs and slung them on the cart. “Perfect!” She giggled. “In another minute, Chancellor Masimovian will impart his wisdom. After that, up to the Island of Reverie you go!” She grabbed an empty vial labeled REASSORTMENT TRIAL #5,786 and lifted it up as if scanning a rare bauble.

“This was the one we used on you,” she said, “injected ten days ago. That’s how long it takes for the medicine to become effective, so the transhuman body has enough time to adjust and build immunity.”

“Will it … work?” Hans said.

Maritza looked away, toward the cameras, which had just revealed the hall. “I just remembered, I’m not supposed to talk to the volunteers, Lady Isabelle wouldn’t approve—”

“I didn’t volunteer for this,” Hans slurred. The few thoughts that sloshed through his head were interrupted by the scene from the Valley of Masimovian projected over seven Granville panels lining the seven walls of Reassortment Hall. Hans’s vision blurred, but he could discern the sand and the river and the crowd and the chancellor when he stepped upon a malachite dais, received by booming applause and chants.

Hans slipped his hands over his face and hair. When he drew them away, an orange oily substance covered his skin.

“What happened to my hair?”

“Quiet,” a Janzer said. “Don’t speak. Your traitorous hair has been laced with synisms, so we can track you, just in case you survive.”

“So I might then … survive?” Hans said.

The Janzer smiled.

Hans slung his head here and there, his mind in another galaxy. Presently, his attention turned to the rhythm of drums in the valley and the corresponding pounding in his head. He knew this melody, the “Song of the Jubilee,” though it sounded all wrong. The chancellor’s hands swayed like a maestro’s, and the drums softened, replaced by the Phanharmonic Orchestra’s calm chords. Beimenians in the valley frolicked and sang their lullaby.

Hans quivered and blocked out the song, or tried to, as the crowd and the orchestra raised their pitch, modulating ever higher. His thoughts shifted to Mari on the amber settee, the day she pleaded with him not to go to Farino, the concern in her eyes, the uneasiness in her voice.
Mari,
he thought,
you had the right of it. I love you now and forever …

Maritza dropped the empty syringe on a medical cart, startling Hans from his daydream. He found that he could barely stand. She steadied him, and he noted the radiance in her appearance, which, unlike his, had been altered by a professional developer.

“Johann,” she said serenely. “It’s time.”

I hate this,
Damy thought. She frowned. The Valley of Masimovian closed in around her—the keeper bots, the flowing gowns, the shimmering jewels that sang when Beimenians retrieved glasses of champagne or tested the newest fragrances or dined on the latest delicacies.

Damy pressed her lips together and scowled when she heard the “Song of the Jubilee.” How could they celebrate this! She promised herself she wouldn’t disturb Brody before the trial. He’d left early, before she could try to convince him to call it off, but seeing and hearing the revelers in the valley, she couldn’t help it.

We should not be at another Jubilee,
she sent.

Marstone indicated Brody received her message and accepted it. She’d not expected him to answer.

We cannot speak about this here, now.

Then where, when?

Damy’s golden gown lifted in the artificial breeze and wrapped around her body. She stood at the valley’s edge, near the Dunes of Phanes. White specks of sand spattered her transparent high-heel boots. Beimenians streamed over Masimovian Crossing, heading west for the Jubilee.

Damy took in the scene, like so many before, the hope that waltzed in the air. She transmitted it all to Brody, letting him see through her eyes and hear through her ears. Ignorant Beimenians entranced by the Granville sky and the dunes, the white swirls and rolling yarns of sand that surrounded the sinuous river. Beimenians who licked the chocolate from their fingers or bit into juicy drumsticks, crunching through skin and bone, who commented how it had been too long and the turnips were delicious or that the linguini was al dente but the pudding was warm and heavenly. And farther west, those who swayed, singing the “Song of the Jubilee.”

Gods,
Damy sent. She moved away from the rudest of them, including a couple who chewed on chocolate-slathered strawberries and kissed and nibbled. Damy felt nauseated.
How do they sing and how do they eat all this food?

We’ve reworked the formulas,
Brody replied, ignoring her.
We’ve done everything we can to extend life on the surface, to give the commonwealth hope
.
The chancellor will understand if the serum fails. He’ll be merciful.

Or he’ll demote you,
she thought. Damy clumped her curled hair in a fist, a nervous tic she’d had from early development. She took controlled breaths, recited her mantra:
The negativity is your enemy. The enemy is your negativity. Ignore the negativity and defeat your enemy.
She reminded herself that Brody stood a better chance of success during a transhuman trial on the surface than he did underground.

She turned. A waiter bot held up a tray with crystal glasses of Loverealan wine. Damy refused. Around her, the conversations shifted, one Phanean bellowed, “Oh my stars!” another added, “Here we go!” Someone behind her shouted, “The gods will be with him this day!” and, on the other side, “Hurry along, they’re about to begin!”

Damy tried to steady her pounding heart. The singers and conversations softened. Brody must’ve been in the terradome by then.
I love you.
Her message didn’t go through. Brody had disconnected! Damy shivered. She wiped the sweat from her forehead with the back of her hand.

The crowd pointed and Damy turned. The highest government officials—Chancellor Atticus Masimovian, General Corvin Norrod, and Lady Isabelle Lutetia—stirred from chairs upon a malachite dais near the river. They wore pressed organic suits as dark as smoke and lined with gold buttons. The crowd grew silent. Bracelets jangled. Crystal glasses clanked on trays.

The chancellor glowed, his skin as smooth as the sands of Phanes, his brownish-gold hair curling over his ears. General Norrod had thundered onto the dais and now sat tall in his seat, but Lady Isabelle—as bewitching as the nearby jasmine bouquets—appeared no more excited than the fossils Damy collected for Project Silkscape.

Isabelle swiveled her head, and her long lavender hair, twirled through narrow gold chain links, swayed side to side. She strutted to a podium, her colorful gown sweeping behind her. “Good people of the Great Commonwealth of Beimeni,” she began, “it’s my pleasure to open today’s Jubilee. I’m uplifted by the advancement afforded by our scientific research. I ask that each of us bow our heads for a moment of silence in thanks to the gods, and in thanks to our chancellor, he who will
always
serve.”

The crowd dipped their chins and closed their eyes. Five holograms behind the dais displayed the masses throughout the commonwealth. Citizens had gathered in Underground Northeast, East, North, South, and West: hundreds of millions of Beimenians bowed together. Damy conformed as the hologram of the volunteer along with his name and origin, JOHANN OF PISCATOR, sprouted above the podium.

A glass enclosure ascended around Hans’s platform, rising up, up, up. The motion vibrated his feet so violently he couldn’t stand any longer, so he sat, his arm outstretched on the cool cement. He searched for Maritza, who, it seemed, had snuck into the area labeled MECHANICAL.

He watched the scene created by the Granville panels. In the Valley of Masimovian, the chancellor raised and lowered his arms and flashed his white teeth at the crowd. “I love speaking to Beimenians,” he said, “especially when I have good news!”

“Thank you!” he said, waving. “You’re too kind! Thank you!” He waited for silence. “On another joyous day in our commonwealth, I’m thrilled to join my fellow Beimenians for a clinical trial, one we neither asked for nor expected, but which has been thrust upon us by the Reassortment bane above and the faction within our society below who seeks to take away the freedom our ancestors fought so hard to protect. A trial that can lead to the true freedom we all seek, more than any new precept or communiqué, more than a new synism or gadget, more than an eternal partner or heir.

“Nearly four centuries ago, Chancellor Noriel Livelle proclaimed that humanity would rise again to the surface of the Earth, and I swear to you, my fellow Beimenians, as solid as the slab on which I stand, I will see his dream to reality!

“We will achieve conversion!

“We will solve Reassortment!

“We will conquer the demons that poison the nectar of our forefathers!

“We Beimenians are one! We live together, we serve together, and one day we will charge through the Earth’s crust and take back what’s ours!”

Chancellor Masimovian grinned and reached out his hands as if to touch each Beimenian one by one. He glanced at Lady Isabelle, who smiled and straightened, posing like a deity.

The Granville panels behind the podium in the Valley of Masimovian shifted to the Island of Reverie, as did the panels elsewhere in the commonwealth.

Above Hans, the ceiling glowed with crimson light. The platform lifted. His capsule entered the lower portion of the portal, and his world darkened, the only sounds those of clanking carbyne and the vibrations of the pulley system that raised him to the maglev tube. The capsule fired through the Earth, then slowed. A scentless vapor sprayed Hans’s face, and the trance that had engulfed his consciousness eased a bit. He closed his eyes. He opened them. He saw as if for the first time. His heart thumped. His mouth burned. He shivered.

Whether minutes or hours passed in the darkness he couldn’t say, but when he emerged upon the island, the reality of the situation hit him like a flood on the fishermen’s Block—unexpected, peculiar, engrossing. Above him, clouds swarmed in a blue sky. Genuine sky!

The enclosure descended, leaving him on the platform aboveground. Weeping willows swayed near a stream close by, where white water washed over rocks. A dove sang, and morning sun flooded the blooming forest. Hans took a deep breath, the one he’d dreamed of taking his entire life. He took a cautious step with his bare feet, then he ran, faster, faster. He found himself enjoying the scents of greenery, of pine and primrose and poinsettias, until his nose tingled and his throat closed …

He stopped—

He wheezed—

He put his hands on his knees and let the snot drip. He wiped his face and trotted through the forest, splashed through another stream and chopped the water with his right hand, then waddled to the other end. He threw the water over his face and guffawed, pondering the unthinkable—that the commonwealth had set him free.

Try as he did to focus on the impending clinical trial, the chancellor’s speech shook Brody’s concentration. To what faction did the chancellor refer? Did he mean the terrorists who perpetrated attacks in the Northeast? The commonwealth never formally recognized or referred to the terrorists, though all scientists who operated in the RDD knew about them. Would the chancellor allow a terrorist to volunteer for a Jubilee? Perhaps the chancellor’s message was more benign—

“The subject is ready for release when you are, Captain.”

Nero’s declaration brought Brody back to the terradome, the workstations, the true sky, the holographic images of the island, the slab labeled PORTAL 13 in white paint, the “Song of the Jubilee,” and the Reassortment Strain, doing that dance it did as it encrypted portions of its genome, which made Brody want to break it with his hands.

He turned away from the strain to a set of workstations that rendered views of the celebration from the Valley of Masimovian. The revelers were on their third or fourth repetition of the song:
Our trial fearing, freezing, roams. The island filled with fertile loam. Reassortment waning, weary. Weeping island now not dreary.
Brody blocked it out, for he disliked it as much as Damy did. He angled away from the celebration, which the chancellor required them to watch, and refocused on the island, the portal, and the subject.

“Lift the subject to the island.”

Nero obeyed Brody and sent the signal to execute, and Verena transmitted the live feed to the research team. The holograms above most workstations under the dome rendered the words PORTAL 13. The cement slab rumbled and parted. The subject emerged upon the surface. He raised his hand to shield his eyes from the light. The capsule that had carried him from Reassortment Hall opened, then retracted back into the Earth.

Five seconds.

Reassortment detected at standard concentrations near the subject,
Nero sent.

Data feeds streamed round and round the holographic sphere above the striker’s workstation.

Brody connected to the subject’s neurochip, to his body, and to his cells. Using the CRISPR system and recombinases in the serum injected into the subject, Brody determined the portions of his genome the research team could alter in order to confuse the Reassortment Strain. He also brought up the current iteration of the Reassortment Strain’s genome and sent instructions on how to disable it to the subject’s immune system.