Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life

2. Carbon Copy

Callista Praxis watched the dark-gray flyer circle once at high altitude, cued as a bright spark in the second sight of her neural eyepatch. It was shedding speed while it negotiated landing rights with the estate’s air defense system. She followed that exchange through her patch, too, and gave the final approval. Then the dart dipped toward the earth and changed shape as its wings unfolded and sprouted daisies. It descended smoothly on vertical thrust.

Last night her mail folder had included a bonded message from the San Francisco Attorney General’s intelligence concerning a transfer of wardship. A minor female named Angela Wells—age fifteen, no priors except three traffic citations for recklessness with a “suicide sled,” and no current wants—was being written off the municipal rolls and expelled at the request of her only living relative, an aunt, Antigone Wells, who was deceased as of sixty-seven hours prior to transmission.

Antigone again. Disposing of another “niece.” Well, this one would be her last.

Callie had instructed the family lawbot to accept the transfer of allegiance and assign Angela Wells provisional status as a ward—stipended but without shares—until the girl’s situation could be evaluated and her place in the family established.

The ariflect settled with just a whisper from its fans and a tiny bounce as the hydraulic gear took its weight on the estate’s landing pad. The door popped out of its seals and swung open. A young girl in a white blouse and corduroy jumper stepped out.

“The air’s thinner here,” she said with a little gasp.

“We’re at forty-seven hundred feet,” Callie said, then offered her hand. “I’m Callie, by the way.”

The girl took it, holding on for a second longer than customary, perhaps to catch her balance. “I’m Angela.”

“Yes, I know.” Callie busied herself with retrieving a single suitcase from the ariflect’s cargo hatch. She turned quickly then, before her own face could give the game away, and led their guest through the radiating pathways of the sunken formal garden and up a flight of granite stairs to the Gate Tower of Resurrection House.

Angela Wells was a slender girl, with as-yet unformed features and a still childish body. She had long, ash-blonde hair that was clearly used to regular shampooing and a bedtime routine of one hundred brush strokes. She was an unexceptional girl, except for her eyes, which were a pale, almost iridescent green, the color of old apothecary bottles, and seemed to glow with their own light. They were the same eyes that looked out of Callie’s vanity mirror every morning.

* * *

Angela followed the Praxis woman along the gravel path through a low-lying plot that was full of coniferous shrubs in geometric arrangements and long, orderly rows of roses and other flowering perennials in every imaginable color. She wondered how the garden fared when winter came to the mountains and the snow level fell to 4,700 feet of elevation. But then, her internal newsfeeds suggested, the family was rich enough that they probably could tent over this whole area, heat it all winter long, and provide a couple of mechs to maintain the flowerbeds.

Then the name she had heard almost in passing came into focus, confirmed by her eyepatch: Callie—Callista—Praxis. There had only ever been one. Daughter of John. The most senior woman of this fabled family. And she had come out to the landing pad personally to meet Angela. What was going on?

She couldn’t help noticing that Callie was not only beautiful, as reported, but also young looking. She moved with grace, poise, and a perfect centering, the way Angela’s yoga instructor had tried to teach her. Callie might have been only thirty or forty years old, judging by her face. Her hair was dark and luxurious, her skin still smooth and lovely, even around her eyes and mouth—the places where women, even those in regeneration, were quickest to age. By contrast, her aunt’s face had been a wreck, with wrinkles, indented creases, and the powdery look of old silk left hanging too long at the back of the closet.

The other thing she had noticed was Callie’s eyes. They were bright, green eyes like Angela’s own. Except that where Angela’s eyes were merely strange, like insets of cold green glass stuck in a mask, Callie’s were warm and alive, full of expectation and caring and … well, wisdom. Angela hoped one day she would have eyes like that.

From the rose garden the women climbed a short flight of steps, turned a corner, and came to a round tower. It was four stories tall, made of hard white stone, trimmed in gray granite, with a conical roof of black slate. The tower was remarkably bare of windows. All Angela could see was a single arched casement on the front of the first two upper levels, aligned directly above the door on the ground floor. But at the very top, right under the overhang of the roof, the wall was set with a series of small, black-framed windows, one every thirty degrees, like the numerals on a clock face. Angela thought they might be for lookouts—or for shooting arrows.

Directly in front of the two women, at ground level, was an arched door of ancient-appearing oak, supposedly darkened with age, although Angela knew the whole estate could not have been built much more than thirty years ago.

“That door’s big enough to drive a truck through,” she said in admiration.

“If we allowed any truck to get that close,” Callie said over her shoulder.

They walked into the Gate Tower’s central chamber, thirty feet across and empty except for a single reception desk. The receptionist—or rather, a guard with holstered side arm—recognized Callie with a nod and passed her and Angela through into the Gallery.

During the circling descent of her ariflect, Angela had studied the layout of the Praxis Estate and compared it with feeds from her patch. The Gate Tower stood on the northern shore of Cherry Lake, a man-made body of water at the southeastern edge of the former national forest lands. From the lake side of this tower the Gallery crossed the water on five stone piers supporting six high, rounded arches. These in turn supported two tiers of white stone arcades pierced with square windows in granite frames, while the top tier was roofed in steeply-pitched black slate with round windows set it white dormers.

At the far end of the Gallery was the Chateau proper, built right out to the edges of a rocky island that was set deep into the lake. The building rose three stories above its foundation, a wedding cake in white and gray masonry, with rounded towers built into each corner. The top floor presented more pitched slate and white dormers with tall, peaked windows as well as chimneys topped with granite lintels. On the east side of the Chateau she had noted an anomalous structure, like a hexagonal half-dome clinging to the outer wall, which spanned the first and second floors with tall, gothic-arched windows in stained glass. Her patch had confirmed this extrusion had been designed as a chapel, although the database showed it as having no denomination or actual sanctification.

She and Callie entered the Gallery, which was more than two hundred feet long and thirty feet wide, floored in an alternating pattern of black and white marble and brightly lit by the morning sun coming in through the line of east-facing windows. Angela did a rapid internal scan of available architectural studies. One leapt out at her.

“You modeled this house on the castle at Chenonceau, in the Loire Valley.”

“That’s very perceptive,” Callie said, “since you’ve never been there.”

“But I have seen pictures. My aunt said she adored the place.”

“You should definitely travel one day. France is lovely.”

“But with your choice of almost any architect—”

“Why copy a design over six hundred years old?”

“Well, yes. You studied architecture, didn’t you?”

“It’s a form of homage. Good design is timeless.”

As they made the long walk through the Gallery, Angela looked up, expecting a low ceiling. From outside, the arcades and tiers of windows had suggested three separate levels. But inside it was one massive hall whose wooden hammer beams soared fifty feet overhead between the white-stone dormers.

“I would call that a waste of space,” she observed.

Callie Praxis gave her a brief smile. “This might look big and empty to you now. But wait until the whole family gathers here for a wedding—or a proxy fight. Then you’ll see how small it really is. The high ceiling helps with the acoustics, not to mention claustrophobia.”

“Oh!” Angela said. “And how many …?”

The woman gave another smile. “Why don’t we let John explain these things? He’s expecting you.”

She led Angela through a smaller, arched passage and into a narrow hallway of polished limestone with a vaulted ceiling at the center of the Chateau. It was dark, lit only by a window at the far end, but glowed with the whiteness of the stone. They crossed to a granite stairway, went up two flights, and entered another stone-flagged hallway. At a far door—more antiqued wood—Callie Praxis waved her signet ring, which obviously had an embedded radio-frequency chip. A very modern-sounding
click!
freed the door in its stone frame.

“This is the Residence,” she explained, and Angela could hear the capital “R” in her use of the word. “Very few people come up here, and none without being asked.”

Callie conducted her past what was obviously a lounge area with chairs, a sofa, and ottomans in butterscotch-colored leather, arranged for conversation, as well as a wet bar. The side where they crossed contained what looked like a workout area—half filled with machines for weight and cardio training, half left as open space with mirrors for floor exercise. Hurrying through, Angela caught sight of a piste, laid out on the floor in black stripes, for fencing, with a rack of swords against the paneled wall.

Finally, Callie knocked softly at an interior door and opened it to reveal a man’s study with a wide desk and wall cases on three sides for books—not disks or memory blocks but real paper books bound in cloth and leather. Hundreds of them. The room’s fourth side was bare stone with one of those granite-cased and mullioned windows that pierced the outer wall of the Chateau.

Standing by the desk was the oldest man, the oldest person, Angela had ever seen. She knew this not by his face or posture, which might have been those of a vigorous man in his early sixties. Instead, she had the authority of the newsfeeds into her patch. This was John Praxis, patriarch of the family, who at the age of 161 was certified to be the world’s oldest living human—so far.

He waited for her to approach. His expression was quizzical, not quite smiling. He looked as if he was expecting something strange or wonderful or terrible to come from their meeting.

Callie hung back, allowing her to walk up to the edge of his personal space. Angela didn’t know whether to offer her hand, or curtsey, or just stand there. She wanted to drop her eyes under the pressure of his gaze, but something told her that would be a mistake.

Finally he said, simply, “I see.”

“The city releases her to us,” Callie said. “Antigone is dead.”

He glanced across at his daughter. “When?”

“Three days ago. Natural causes.”

“I was afraid of that,” he said. Then he turned his attention back to Angela. “What do you know about your mother?”

“My mother died, sir,” Angela said, expecting such questioning. “Both my parents died when I was a baby, so I never knew them. My aunt took me in and raised me. She was always very good to me—well, until today, when they read to me the terms of her trust document.”

John Praxis absorbed this quietly but without showing any sympathy. “And what was your aunt like?” he asked.

“She was—” Angela hesitated. She knew she must not speak ill of the dead.

“—the warmest, most caring, fun-loving, sweetest little old lady you’ve ever known?” he suggested with a grin. “All lace doilies, gingerbread, and chocolate milk?”

Angela had to smile at that. “Well, no. She liked to have her own way, sir. Have everything just so. She could be pretty strict, too. But she also encouraged me to go out and try new things, learn things. She said she wanted me to grow up strong.” Angela paused to reflect, because this man’s face and stance demanded a level of personal honesty. “I think, in some ways—some important ways—she was really disappointed with her own life.”

“Yes, exactly!” he exclaimed. “That was Antigone to the core.”

This made Angela brave. “So why am I here?” she asked.

Rather than answer her question, he asked, “Did your aunt
give
you anything? Oh, isn’t that a foolish question! Of course she gave you lots of things. But did she, in particular, give you a token to wear? A locket?”

“You mean this?” She fished the blackened heart out of her blouse.

He stepped closer, reached out his hand, and held the pendant gently, without pulling on the chain. After a moment, he said: “You are here because we need to establish your true identity. The contents of this locket will do that.”

“But it doesn’t open, sir. So it’s not really a locket.”

“It opens with the right tools,” he said. “And inside is a chip with a message written in the world’s oldest code. We’ll need to take a sample of your blood to see if it matches.”

“But I know who my parents were! My father was Antigone Wells’s young nephew. So Miss Wells was my great aunt.”

“You look like an intelligent child,” the senior Praxis said. “But do you know how to count? Antigone Wells’s true age was a matter of public record, as is mine. So how old would her sister have been? How old would any hypothetical son of her sister’s be—and still able to father a child your age? That story fails by at least two generations, more likely three.”

Now Angela was really confused. She took the locket out of his hand and stepped back. “But then it can’t be
my
DNA in there. This heart is an antique. It’s more than eighty years old, or so my—aunt—said.”

“Of course it’s old. You don’t you think you’re the first girl to wear that heart, do you?”

“What are you telling me, that I’m a
clone?
”

“No, you’re real, but a genetic remix.”

“How is it that you know all this?”

He smiled. “Because I gave Antigone that locket.” He turned to his daughter, who straightened attentively. “Angela is to have provisional acceptance, with the usual benefits. Oh, and you might tell Alexander he has a new baby sister.”