The Fourth Sage (The Circularity Saga) (5 page)

"You knocked three times. It was on me to answer the door. And you are welcome."

There are several strings of thought going through Aries’s mind. One of them is the imminent door busting and pouring in of security personnel and them subsequently pulling her out of this room and straight into a jail cell. The other questions are all related to the library image on the screen. But before she can get clear enough to form another sentence, there is a weak flapping sensation coming from inside her sweater.

The hawk. She had completely forgotten about him. She’d been as careful as possible all the way through the duct not to crush the little guy, but for the last minute or so the bird had completely left her thoughts.

"So sorry. I'm so sorry. Hold on." She opens the zipper on her sweater and grabs the bird, gently taking him and holding him in front of her.

"No way!" Kiire whispers. "No freaking way! Where did you get him?"

"I found him in one of the secondary air ducts. His talon was caught in a piece of nylon netting. Isn't he beautiful?"

"He sure is. Can I hold him?"

She is unsure at first but then she gives the bird to Kiire.

"Poor little guy. He was so scared when I found him."

"I think it's not a guy. It's a girl."

"A girl? How do you know? "

"This is a red-tailed hawk, approximately four months old, and even though it's almost impossible to tell, I'm going to say it's female."

"How do you know this? How does anyone know this? And how can you have a library program on your screen and what are you doing up at two o'clock in the morning and how come nobody is busting in the door right now?"

Kiire lets the hawk sit on his arm. She spreads her wings and looks as if she is going to take flight. But instead she shakes out her wings and then folds them back in.

"To answer your last question first, nobody is coming for you for the simple reason that nobody knows you're here. At least not for another"—he looks at his watch—"fifteen minutes. Secondly, I was up because I thought I might hear something in the ducts, given that your loop went on at 1:38 a.m. But I never hear anything. You must be very good at crawling around in there. I have pretty good ears. As to your other question of how I know that our girl here is a girl? I studied
Ancient Birds of Prey
for a while. Did you know that red-tailed hawks can adapt to almost any climate and habitat? They are also really great for hunting."

"Hunting?"

"Yeah, hunting. Also an ancient form of—"

"I know what hunting is."

"Sorry, you were looking at me as if you didn't... It seemed like you didn't know what it meant. Sorry."

"It's okay. Don't worry," Aries says, stretching her arm out next to Kiire's. "Can I have her?"

"How do you want to call her?" Kiire asks, as he moves his arm so that it touches Aries. The hawk jumps onto her arm. She lets out a low scream, not expecting the force of the talons with which the bird clutches her forearm.

"She's... strong," Aries says.

"And she'll be much stronger once she's fully grown. She can get up to three and a half pounds if you feed her regularly. Speaking of which..."

Kiire moves to a small box in one corner of his room and takes out a plastic container. He sits back down next to Aries, opens it, and takes out a piece of cooked ham.

"You eat meat?" Aries asks.

"Yeah. You don't?"

"No! Absolutely not."

"That's awesome," he says, while holding a piece of ham in front of the hawk, who grabs the entire thing and swallows it whole.

"She's hungry," Kiire says, while handing her another piece.

"She obviously is. Do you have enough? I mean, will you have enough. For her and yourself later on?"

"I work in the kitchen. Don't worry about me. I'll always have enough to eat."

"It looks like it," Aries says.

Kiire looks to the side, a hint of embarrassment in his face.

"Sorry, I didn't mean it that way,” she adds. “At all. It just seems like you have enough to eat. Um, that didn't come out right, either..."

For the first time since she came into his room, she takes in his face completely. The brown hair surrounding it is disheveled and curly. His eyes are round and clear, and a boyish fuzz is developing in some areas of his face not yet able to cover the red, healthy-looking cheeks. His stature is stout but when he’d moved earlier, Aries had noticed that he was quick on his feet and in control of his body.

"Don't worry," Kiire assures her.

"No! I want you to know that... I don't share in what's going on in the dining room. And I'm not... judging you. In any way. I want you to know that. I just meant before that it looks like you can take care of yourself. Which brings me to the question of why is there still nobody busting through that door?"

"Can you keep a secret?" Kiire asks.

"I think we're past that point."

"Right. You're right. Okay. I'm basically an empty folder."

"An empty folder?"

"Yes. Imagine you have a folder on your pad that has 65,000 subfolders in it. They're all there and information flows in and out of all of them and you scan all the information that comes out of all of the folders—all the video surveillance, all the social habits, eating habits, what you do in your free time, etcetera. The mainframe has all this data. It knows everything at once but one thing it doesn't know is what it doesn't know. I'm an empty folder because there is no feed to my room. But nobody knows because nobody's looking closely.”

"So, they don't know when you're not in here and what you're doing?"

"Yes and no. They don't know that they don't know what I'm doing in here. They have no reason to look closer and so they don't. So far it has worked. As for you, you've got eight minutes before your loop runs out."

"And if I were to ask you how you are privy to this kind of information you would say...?"

"I would say I hacked into the mainframe computer to make them not know what they don't know, and while doing this I stumbled upon someone who was almost as clever as I was. Well. At least clever enough to get an hour a day."

"Can you help me with the rest of the time?"

"If you're asking whether or not I can make the mainframe believe that it knows you when, in fact, it doesn't? Yes. But I need your pad."

"That's going to be a problem."

"I know. It can't leave your room and it's traceable."

"Yes."

"I'll think of something. In the meantime, what're we going to do with our new friend here? She can't go to your room. Not if you want to keep her."

"Can she stay here?" Aries asks. "Sorry. I am asking too much. I can't ask you to do this. I don't know you."

"Are you kidding me? To see a red-tailed hawk on a screen and spend a week's worth of pay on it is one thing. To have one as a
roommate
would be
fantastic
!"

"Really?"

"Yes!"

"Okay. It's settled then. Can I come by to visit?"

"You can come here every day for one hour if that's what you want."

Aries smiles. "I'd love that. Thank you! And thank you for... being here and for... having this room and no other room in this building and for being unnoticed and..."

"You need to go, Aries Egan, D."

"Okay. Thanks. Thanks so much."

"You said that already. About twenty times. I'm going to blush if you keep this up."

"Okay. I will see you tomorrow. Maybe in the dining room—”

"No! Sorry, but I don't think it's a good idea if we even look at each other down there. There can't be any suspicion. Otherwise they begin to want to know me and that's the last thing I need."

"Yes, you're right. Good. I'll see you around."

Aries kneels in front of the vent.

"You can try to think of a name for her," Kiire says.

"I have. It's Leila. It means Born-of-Night."

Kiire grins. "Born-of-Night it is."

Aries crawls into the air duct and away from the vent. When she hears Kiire closing the vent screen, she's already at the intersection and moving toward her room. She thinks about the baby hawk with her dark-feathered wings and soft, white belly, and when she reaches her room she enters it with the comforting realization that she did not make a friend today. She made two.

//Taken from**recording// M.L. [mainframe log] .1/-/770.45.19000.008FTL//

"Who are you? ... No!... What are you... Let me GO! ... No! ... No! ... You can't do that! ... You can't!... NO!... Where are you taking m—?"

**End of recording M.L. [mainframe log] .1/-/770.45.19000.008FTL//

Chapter 4 — Fluctuations

"Any electric charge, if the particles are moving, has a magnetic field associated with it: electrons, with a negative charge, attract protons or ions, with positive charges, and vice versa. Gravitational fields are associated with such magnetic fields. So yes, it is apparently possible to warp space-time with just an electric current."

[Ford and Roman,
Negative Energy and Wormholes
]

Aries wakes up from a strange dream. She was back in Kiire's room but she was eating ham and walking around on his futon and Kiire spoke to her as if she were a baby. She decides that she must have taken last night's encounter with her into her sleep. When she enters the dining hall, she scans the room for Kiire but can't see him. She looks into the camera above the monitor at the food counter. Her name appears and the two small compartment doors open. She takes two bottles out of one and a piece of bread out of the other.

There is an almost empty table in the far corner of the cafeteria, but she decides not to risk getting into any kind of fight today. She sits at the only empty chair at a table surrounded by younger kids. Except for the occasional giggle, they eat quietly. There are security personnel—two men and one woman—dotted throughout the room. They are mostly here to watch the younger kids and are only to interfere if or when something gets completely out of hand. Only twice has Aries witnessed them going into action: Once during a medical emergency when someone choked on a piece of apple. The other when one of the older boys suddenly started screaming without any previous inclination to do so. He had been sitting alone at his table when he’d suddenly begun to scream until the two men had physically taken him to the floor while the woman injected him with something. It wasn't clear what he had screamed at but from where Aries sat, she thought it might have been one of the flat screen monitors. But she could have been wrong. The whole thing hadn't lasted more than forty-five seconds. But the incident had left a permanent impression on her. Sometimes she thinks about what could have driven the boy to freak out like that. The screams were filled with rage and anger, but Aries could hear the pain in them as well. The pain and the sense of utter powerlessness. She has not seen him since.

She opens the cap to her first drink—a mixture of synthetic algae and amino acids in liquid form. It tastes nasty and she usually washes it down with the content of the second bottle—vitamin enriched water. The slight iron taste of that she gets rid of with the bread. She takes a sip of the water while watching the room and letting the individual voices of the kids meld together into one sound, into one big murmur. When she looks at the bottle, she sees a handwritten arrow drawn on the label. It points downward.

Now she sees that there’s part of a napkin stuck to the bottom of the bottle. She picks it up nonchalantly and palms it. It's upside down. She has no trouble deciphering it in one glance, despite its small letters:

Like the wind o’er forgotten plains

When the storm clouds whisper names

Like the girl that came from light

Like the bird ’twas born of night

1:38

Aries smiles at the fact that there is possibly a poet hidden away in a small room somewhere, flying below the radar, and as of yet completely undetected, despite the Corporation's airtight social surveillance system. For reasons unbeknownst to her, this note, this scribbled piece of barely average phrasing, gives her more hope than anything she has encountered in a long time.