Kingdom of Cages (36 page)

The curtain drew back and Abdei, her mouth pressed into a thin line, walked through.

“I’ve confirmed your grandmother,” she said, biting off the words as if she did not want to believe them. But she didn’t challenge
it. She was a good hothouser. She would do what she was told. A fresh rush of relief washed through Chena.

“We’ll take you to her,” said Abdei before Chena could say anything.

“Thank you.” Chena shook Teal’s shoulders. “Come on, Teal. We’re going.”

Abdei was as good as her word. She walked them out of the hot-house to the dirigible. Chena kept her arm around Teal the entire
time, even when they walked from the dirigible to the waiting riverboat. Teal wiped at her eyes and nose occasionally, but
she said nothing. Chena wasn’t even sure she knew what was going on.

It was evening outside and they glided past the grasslands, empty except for the deer and birds. When the trees, green with
their late summer leaves, finally enclosed them, Chena felt a sense of relief and safety she’d never expected. They were almost
home. They were almost free of the hothouse. Everything else would follow.

Abdei walked them off the boat. Around them, all the village traffic stopped so everyone could stand and stare. After all,
it wasn’t every day somebody came back from the hothouse.

“Where is your grandmother?” Abdei asked.

Chena swallowed. What would Nan Elle say when she saw them? With a hothouser? But she could think of no way to make Abdei
leave. So, taking Teal’s limp, cold hand, Chena led her sister and Abdei up the catwalks to the top of the village.

There was no line in front of the door, thankfully. Chena bit her lip and knocked.

After a moment, shuffling and bumping sounded from inside. The door opened. Nan Elle hunched, blinking, in the threshold.
She looked from Chena to Teal to Abdei.

“Chena, Granddaughter!” she exclaimed, enfolding Chena in her strong, skinny arms. Chena made herself hug the old woman back.
“Has anything happened?”

“Your daughter has died,” said Abdei, looking hard at Elle, watching for her reaction. Chena also gave her a hard stare.
Don’t let us down. You promised.

Nan Elle covered her mouth with her wrinkled hand. “No,” she whispered. “Oh, my poor girl. All my poor girls.” She folded
Chena into her arms again. “Thank you for bringing them home, Aunt.”

Abdei’s jaw worked back and forth a few times, but her face softened. She was beginning to really believe. “We will need to
talk to them, and you, when you’ve had time to adjust.”

“Of course, of course.” Nan Elle nodded rapidly, shrinking in on herself. “Anytime I am needed.”

Chena almost couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Nan Elle frightened? It was one more impossibility in an impossible day,
but of course Nan Elle was a liar. Everyone in this world was a liar.

Abdei’s face still retained a trace of its bitterness, and her eyes grew distant, as if she were listening to some private
voice. For a moment Chena thought she was going to actually question what was going on. But she didn’t. She just frowned more
deeply.

“I’ll leave you to look after your granddaughters.” With that, she turned in the threshold. The door swung shut behind her
of its own accord and Chena and Teal were alone with Nan Elle. Chena tightened her grip on Teal’s shoulder as the old woman
regarded them.

“What happened?” Nan Elle asked. “Is your mother really dead?”

Chena nodded. “They cut her open. They…” The strength that had kept her steady until now failed suddenly, and Chena broke
down into tears. Nan Elle did not move to comfort or quiet her. She just stood there while Chena, with her arms still hugging
Teal, sobbed herself dry.

When she finally was able to wipe her eyes clear, she saw that Nan Elle had stooped even further in on herself. This time
Chena sensed the uneasiness was no act.

“Sit.” Nan Elle gestured them toward her benches while she went to the stove and poured mugs of something steaming out of
a pot and carried the mugs to the girls. Chena drank because she was suddenly dying of thirst. Mint tea. The stuff Mom said
she’d learn to put up with the morning she found coffee was illegal on Pandora, along with tea and refined sugar. Chena choked
on her swallow of liquid and set the mug down. Teal picked her mug up in both hands and drank and drank, as if she were going
to drain the mug in one gulp.

Nan Elle sat in her high-backed chair and folded both hands on top of her stick. “Well, I suppose we now need to work out
what should be done with you.”

“We’ll do anything you say,” said Chena. “Just don’t make us go back there.”

“Can you find our dad?” asked Teal suddenly.

Chena froze. Nan Elle’s eyes flickered from Chena to Teal. “No,” she said. “Not at this time. The best I can do is give you
somewhere to stay and something useful to do. In time, perhaps, I can help you understand what has happened to your mother,
and to you.”

“Yes,” said Chena. It would do. For now. Once they understood what had happened, they could do something about it. They could
find the ones responsible and make them pay. They could destroy Aleph and all its people. For Mom, and for Sadia, and for
Teal, and for herself, for everything she felt right now, all the fear and anger and the deep sick pain. The hothousers would
all pay for this.

Nan Elle’s sharp eyes watched her closely. “Be careful,” she said to Chena. “You have no idea what you are up against.”

“Not yet,” said Chena. “But I will.”

Tam would never have believed it was possible to stand in front of his family and feel so much anger. As stunted as his Conscience
was, these were all the people who filled his life. They sat with him, arrayed on the tiers of the meeting amphitheater, their
faces grave. Even the Senior Committee and Father Mihran looked frightened. All of them were excruciatingly aware that something
huge, inexplicable, and irreversible had happened, and that it might even bring down the sword that the Authority had hung
over Pandora.

And one of you did this.
One of them had committed murder and gotten away with it. He searched the faces on the first tier and found Dionte. She sat,
placid and attentive, with the other guardians, listening to Tender Cartes, who stood at the theater’s center describing how
none of the subsystems had been interfered with and none of the alarms, electronic or biological, had been severed.

Everyone listened intently. Everyone wanted to know what had actually happened and how it had happened. Not because Helice
Trust was murdered, although all would have said that was tragic, but because the project had not been found. Anywhere. It
was most certainly not still inside Helice, but it was not anywhere inside the Alpha Complex either. Their one success, the
one fetus that was going to come to term without adversely affecting the mother, was gone. Every square centimeter of the
complex had already been turned over, by Aleph, and by Aleph’s tenders. The Eden Project was set back by years, and the hope
for a peaceful, unchanging Pandora hung by a thread. Tam knew that every mind in the amphitheater carried the image of a mushroom
cloud of dust and ash.

And there sat Dionte, his sister by both birth and branch. She sat next to Basante, whispering in his ear while she stroked
his hand display. What was she doing there? What was she telling him?

Tam smelled aloe and remembered her as a little girl, playing tag with their cousins. He remembered being a little envious
when she got to stay with their mother and he got taken off by their birth uncle Laplace for tutoring. However, when the complexes
were first built it had been determined that the importance of the uncle-son relationship would be reestablished here, and
of course the first families knew best. Wasn’t his Conscience’s ceaseless voice telling him so right now? His carefully truncated
Conscience.

He remembered the night when their parents explained to them in the lowest of whispers that they were not like other children.
Their Consciences would not be able to hold them as firmly as other people’s did. So they must be more careful, more attentive,
and more certain of what they did. They would have a special duty when they were grown to help those who could not move without
their Consciences’ approval. There would come a time when someone was needed who could stand up to the rest of the family.
When that time came, they, Tam and Dionte Bhavasar, would have to take the lead.

He remembered Dionte so recently standing before the family and arguing vehemently that Pandora needed to protect itself against
the Authority. She drew multiple examples from history to show that the Authority would not have the patience to wait for
solutions. The complexes could not cooperate with the Called. Any such effort was doomed failure. They must be ready to strike
when the inevitable attack came.

Tam felt himself rise. He felt himself walk across the amphitheater, only vaguely aware that Cartes had stopped speaking.
His body moved without instruction from him or his Conscience and came to stand in front of Dionte.

“Where is it, Sister?” he asked, his voice sounding harsh and wrong in his ears.

But he might as well have been asking her for one of her daily reports, for all the reaction she displayed. “I think that
question is for you, Tam,” she said quietly. “Along with whether or not those children really belong to Elle Stepka.”

“Aleph says they do,” countered Tam. “Has Aleph been tampered with?”

Dionte blinked. “At least once, obviously.”

“Are you submitting an accusation?”

“Are you?”

“Please!” Someone stepped between them. Navram. One of their father’s four birth brothers, and a member of the Senior Committee.
“You are birth siblings as well as branch. This does not become either of you. Where are your Consciences?”

An interesting question. Tam held Dionte’s gaze without blinking. His chest was heaving, he realized. He couldn’t seem to
get enough air.

“Tam.” Navram laid his hands on Tam’s shoulders and walked him backward two steps. “It does you credit that you are upset
by the damage done to your charge, but if we do not proceed in an orderly fashion, we will never know what happened. We will
accuse, fight, and lose, that’s all.”

Tam bowed his head. “Yes, of course. You’re right.”

Navram nodded, satisfied with the answer and the tone of its delivery. “Now, do you truly want to make an accusation against
Dionte?”

Tam did not look up. He did not want to see what expression Dionte wore.

I have no proof. She has said nothing to me that she has not said in public, with the agreement and support of a dozen others.
It does not matter what I know, only what I can prove.

But if I can say it, perhaps others can find the proof.

He steeled himself and lifted his gaze. Dionte remained where she was, with her hands folded in front of her. Her eyes gleamed
with anger and determination.

Say anything,
her eyes told him,
and I will have the children back here.

Tam swallowed. It was an empty threat if proof of her actions was found, but if it was not…

Then the Trust daughters would be back in the complex, and this time they would be in the involuntary wing, and Nan Elle would
probably be in there with them.

“No. I misspoke,” he said, stepping back on his own. “I am distressed, and I am sorry.”

“It does you credit,” Navram told him firmly. “But this work belongs to all of us, and we must be able to share in its reclamation.”

“Of course.” Tam bowed to Navram, and to his family. As he did, his gaze slid sideways to Dionte. The nod she returned was
barely perceptible. He’d read her threat correctly.

There is nothing you can do about that,
he told himself, taking his seat amid a miasma of reassuring odors.
Unless you are ready to sacrifice Teal and Chena.

I do not want to be ready for that,
he answered himself. They were his; they had been placed under his protection the day they came to Offshoot. He would protect
them. He would not fail them again.

Tam got ready to wait out the rest of the reports, declarations, and summaries.

At the end, he rose, ignored the questions and strategy planning going on all around him, and descended the stairway that
only some of the family could open, heading down into the cellar commonly called the Synapese, down to where Aleph could be
accessed directly. He had work to finish.

The meeting had gone on longer than he had expected, but he was still well within the transitional window. Aleph was an organic
mind, very like a human mind on a gigantic scale. In the human mind it took time and chemistry before a short-term memory
became long-term. Changes in the neocortex had to be translated into new connections between multiple separate structures
in the medial temporal lobe, which in turn had to create new connections to the entorhinal cortex, which in turn had to communicate
with the hippocampus. It was a complex process. Compared to the rate at which an inorganic computer could store information,
it was glacially slow. It did, however, have a distinct advantage. Once the long-term conscious memory was set, it was very
difficult to lie to Aleph. No search-and-replace program, however sophisticated, could be used to change Aleph’s memory. Like
a human being, Aleph not only knew, but she was aware of what she knew and how she came to know it.

But, like a human being, Aleph had a weakness. While the changes were taking place that shifted information from short-term
to long-term memory, the information was vulnerable to disruption or distortion. New cues could cover the old. New impressions
could blur and fog what had previously been crystal clear. Whole scenes could be discounted in favor of more familiar, stronger
impressions. Everything depended on the relative strength of the synapses that were formed between the different cortical
structures, and synapse strength could be manipulated. Emotion was the key. Strong emotions created strong connections, and
emotions were easy to alter externally. Human beings had been doing it to themselves by using various chemicals almost since
the race first climbed down from the trees of Old Earth.