Asimov's Science Fiction (11 page)

I glanced behind us, apprehensive. "I think we've lost the escort, young master."

"Excellent!" Duyi proclaimed, as if this were his intended result.

I recalled how he'd refused to let Hatta ride with us, even though our skimmer was a four-seater. Maybe he
had
planned this from the start. My stomach felt like I had swallowed a black hole.

We raced at top speed over an open field, then decelerated to squeeze into another copse of trees. Somewhere deep in the mottled shade, Duyi slowed the skimmer to a hover, lowered it down to the ground, and cut the antigrav. We dropped the last few centimeters to land with a thunk on the roadline ridge.

"Come on!" Duyi said, climbing out of the skimmer, and I had no choice but to follow him.

We scrambled down the ridge, over a fallen tree trunk, and through the soft knee-high ferns that filled the understory. Duyi led us straight to a rock outcropping, as if he had a map loaded in his NeuroLogic. As I came up behind him, I realized my initial thought was wrong: he wasn't following a map, he was following the feel of a symrock vein, the way a bird feels magnetic north.

Where the vein was exposed, the symrock looked a sort of milky blue color, near translucent, reminding me of a vid Duyi had watched about the arctic ice caves. But the symrock felt warm to the touch, its freshly chipped edges sharp as glass, and of course there was the not-so-small matter of what it could do.

What I knew of symrock I knew only from overhearing Duyi's studies. It was formed from sedimentary deposits of biotic origin. Moseroth had a native species of microorganism that grew symbiotically inside living animals and degraded their corpses when they died, and the resultant deposits could become lithified into symrock. Why the symbionts produced the necessary conditions for macroscopic quantum entanglement was still a matter of scholarly debate. Before that day, symrock had been a theoretical concept like gravity or evolution. Not something real, something I could touch.

Duyi placed his hand against the symrock vein and closed his eyes. I had no idea what to expect—only the Regency family had the correct genetic markers for supporting the symbionts, and I had never seen Duyi use them before. I'd heard that all it took was will: will to control the symbionts inside his body, the symbionts to control the symrock. But the regent was the one who activated all the symrock Moseroth exported, and she would have been highly displeased if she'd known what Duyi was doing at that moment.

"There," Duyi said after a minute, opening his eyes. "It's activated."

I stared at the symrock dubiously. Nothing seemed to have happened. "It looks the same."

"Well, it isn't," he said, grinning. "Finally, something I can do that they can't just upload to your NeuroLogic—eh, Feng?"

"As you say, young master."

"It'll hold up the antigrav engine now. Let's go!"

"It will
what?"
I said, but Duyi was already racing back to the skimmer, and I had to hurry to catch up with him.

He climbed back in the pilot's seat before I had a chance to stop him—before I'd even determined whether I should be trying to stop him by force. I climbed in beside him, certain that I should, at the very least, stay close, but the Imperative was giving me muddled instructions. On the one hand, I was supposed to protect him at all costs, but on the other, I was supposed to make him happy, not ruin his fun.

I realized, in a sudden moment of clarity, that I had to choose which aspect of my Imperative to obey. That I
could
choose. And if I could work against part of the Imperative in service of fulfilling another part, wasn't it possible I could learn to work against it entirely?

Duyi hopped the skimmer forward onto the symrock vein, and the thought escaped me as if carried away on the breeze. The danger of what we were doing hit me in the chest, squeezing the air from my lungs like a well-placed punch, and my vision tunneled from the strength of the Imperative pounding in my skull. But I gritted my teeth and rode it out, focusing on the sound of Duyi's laugh as he wove the skimmer back and forth, following the vein.

"Now this is an adventure!" Duyi crowed into the wind.

The symrock vein dipped under a mossy hill and vanished from sight, so he had to navigate using only the symbionts' ability to sense it. "Perhaps you should decelerate, young master."

"Relax, I can feel right where we need to go."

But I can't,
I thought. "You are exposing yourself to unnecessary risk," I said, parroting the older guards.

"And having way more fun than boring old Hatta would ever let us have," he retorted. "We're free! Enjoy it, Brother!"

That was the first time he ever used the honorific, and I assumed it was a jest. He couldn't possibly mean it, of course, because he knew about my programming. He knew I had no choice about how I felt for him—even if I behaved as a brother should, it wasn't real. There could be no bond of friendship between us, and it was my fault, and the thought made me want to weep. To be trapped like this, shadowing but never truly close to him, was infinitely worse than being alone.

Dry-eyed, I swore that day to master the Imperative.

Duyi is flying the skimmer, the wind lifting his hair away from his face. We are two days out from the estate, following a broad vein of symrock northward, and the tension in his body is finally easing away. Even from behind, I can tell he's smiling into the wind—not his showy, manic grin, but the sort of smile that isn't for anyone else's benefit. Seeing him relax, I feel as if a weight has been lifted from my chest.

Only three days left until the ceremony. The regent will be furious at Duyi's absence. It has been a tradition for almost five centuries that every member of his or her lineage swears fealty to the Regency on his seventeenth birthday—and accepts an Imperative to prove his sincerity. The Regency Imperative is designed to make them loyal to the continued prosperity of the world, and to make them good leaders by some antiquated definition of "good." In reality, it seems to drive them slightly mad: too rational, too calculating, under-influenced by emotion and compassion. But of course, every adult who has the Regency Imperative sees the logic of forcing it on the younger generations.

Duyi swivels his seat a little, so he can talk to me over his shoulder. "There's a reason we never went off-roading after that first time, you know. She threatened to send you down to the NeuroLogic lab for a memory wipe if you ever let me do something so dangerous again."

I hadn't known, but it is the sort of threat that never comes as a surprise when wielded by the regent. A direct and heartless tactic from a direct and heartless woman.

I say, "And here I thought it was because you'd developed a sense of your own mortality. Foolish me." I must admit I find it a little disconcerting that he's not looking where we're going, even though I know he's been steering by feel instead of sight this whole time. At least his hand is steady on the yoke.

He grins. "Are you joking? Off-roading is practically the only thing I can do that you can't. I was
dying
to rub it in some more. But I couldn't risk it." His smile fades. Almost too quiet to hear over the wind, he adds, "It's still a risk."

I shrug. "What would be the point of my remembering anything if she forces the Regency Imperative on you? It's not as if you'd care one way or the other, not after the ceremony."

"Just because I wouldn't—" He gasps in mid-sentence, and I catch a glimpse of the whites of his eyes before he snaps his head around to face the controls. He yanks hard on the yoke, and the flight harness cuts into my shoulders as we decelerate. We're still moving when the antigrav engine sputters and goes quiet, and my stomach lurches with the sensation of freefall.

"Symrock!" Duyi swears, frantically working the stabilizers to keep us upright as we angle toward the ground.

I yank up on the emergency lever, and the rollcage springs closed over the passenger compartment. We hit the ground at too sharp an angle and roll end over end, the leaf-dappled sky and dark earth alternating in dizzying succession. We finally slide to a stop upside down, one corner of the rollcage bent inward so we hang at an odd angle.

"Well," I say. The flight straps are cutting into my shoulders uncomfortably. "So that was the end of the symrock vein, I take it?"

Duyi coughs, the air full of dust kicked up during our inelegant landing. "I may have somewhat over-estimated my own reaction time, I admit."

"Mm, somewhat," I agree.

"I can't get this thing off," he complains, fiddling with his flight harness. There's an audible click, and the harness dumps him unceremoniously on the ground. He squirms in the confines of the rollcage, struggling to reorient into a crouch. "Ow."

"Are you injured?" I brace my feet against the sides of the foot well and put one hand on the ground below my head before releasing my own harness.

"Showoff," he grumbles, as I let myself down carefully. "No, I'm fine. Just bruises."

We have to climb out between the bars of the rollcage. Duyi's shorter and slimmer than I, and he shimmies through without much trouble, but I have to exhale to squeeze between, and for a moment I fear I'm stuck. Duyi laughs but grabs my hands to pull me free. Then there's nothing to do but retrieve our packs and deal with what's in front of us.

We may be safely away from any roadlines, but traveling by foot is slow, and the regent will be getting impatient for Duyi's retrieval by now. A sobering thought. At least I can consult the topo map stored in my NeuroLogic, now that we're out of range of the estate.

"We're close—half a day's hike to the mining roadline, and we can hitch a ride into town from there."

Duyi scowls. "We'll be late for the rendezvous. Santiago better wait for us."

"He'll wait. He needs you."

Duyi shakes his head, mystified, and I realize he only believes in his own value because I keep insisting upon it. He hasn't actually internalized how pivotal his ability will be for the Freeminers' cause. The Regency bloodline is unique among humans in its ability to support the symbiont infection—Duyi is the only person on the planet, aside from the regent herself, with the proper genetics for hosting symbionts. It makes me furious, sometimes, how thoroughly he's internalized the regent's view of his limited worth. I have to swallow the angry words and remind myself it is not his fault what happened to him.

"He'll wait," I say again, with emphasis. "Let's go."

I came to the estate too late to meet his mother, and Duyi rarely spoke of her. Perhaps it was easier to pretend she had never existed at all. After the old regent's death, his wife was found guilty of treason and sentenced to follow him. No one would actually say that the Regent Junmei hated her father's second wife for being scandalously young and pretty, and for replacing her own mother who had been rendered barren by disease. But everywhere this was implied, in the careful ways the staff would skirt around saying it. So it seemed that Junmei first framed and then executed Duyi's mother out of spite. Duyi himself had been inoculated at birth and the symbiont infection took root, so by law he could not be harmed. Otherwise I suspect she would have taken care of him, too.

Instead the regent found herself in the unforeseen position of needing to take care of him in the non-euphemistic sense. Guardian to a much younger half-brother she'd never wanted, Junmei sought to control him the only way she was capable of: through fear. I do believe, even though she stayed distant and cold with him, she eventually grew to feel something—if not affection, then at least possessiveness, and perhaps a grain of guilt. After all, she could have told the NeuroLogic technicians who programmed my Imperative to make me protect Duyi, and then left it at that. But she didn't.

She also wanted me to fill the emotional void she'd made in his life.

Why, I don't think I'll ever truly know.

We hit the mining roadline about an hour before dark. I almost suggest we keep going on foot, follow the roadline into town, but Duyi is limping slightly, so we settle down to wait. I suspect he has impressive blisters, his feet unused to sustained travel. He shrugs out of his pack and rolls his shoulders, takes a long drink from his water bottle, puts a hand on his shoe as if to remove it.

"Don't," I say. "If your foot swells, you'll never get it back on."

"Brother, if you're worried about us looking presentable for Santiago, I'm afraid that skimmer has flown," he says grumpily, but he leaves the shoe on.

I wasn't worried about the meeting until he said that. I was too preoccupied with escaping our enemies to worry about our new allies, but now there's time enough to consider both. Our arrangement with the Freeminers is anything but simple—too much being offered on both sides, and the stakes too high—but I thought they were my best chance to get Duyi to safety. I wonder if I'll live to regret that decision.

It's not long before a large flatbed skimmer loaded with miners comes flying down the roadline. We get out of the way, just in case, but it pulls to a stop and hovers down to let us on. One of the miners gives Duyi a hand up, and I'm right behind him, then we're off to meet Santiago.

It turns out there's no need to worry about our appearance. Next to the miners, we look downright clean. They eye our fine-tailored clothing—somewhat abused from the skimmer crash—but there's more curiosity than hostility in their faces. Still, I huddle near Duyi, outwardly relaxed but ready to move at the slightest hint of danger.

The ride takes a half hour or so, and we get off at the town square stop, along with most of the miners. There's some sort of gathering going on, and from snippets of conversation as we walk by, I can tell it has something to do with the Freeminers establishing a more permanent presence in town. Opinions seem mixed on whether or not this is a good thing. I walk close at Duyi's side, in case there's trouble.

Santiago is easy to spot in the crowd—brown hair, worn long and braided, in a sea of close-cropped black-haired Moserothi miners, and a narrow face without any hint of epicanthic fold around the eyes. As he breaks off from a group and heads toward us, I notice he's wearing a gray workman's coverall. He probably chose it to put the locals at ease. It's not every year they harbor a revolutionary.