The Octagonal Raven (28 page)

Sub-Pacific

I found a pubcomm station in the corner of the maglift train station and put in a call to Mother. The last thing I wanted to do was explain things, but she and Father needed to know. She didn’t answer. No one did, except the sim. So I blurted out a quick message.

“See if you and Father and Gerrat and Rhedya and their children can get to Kharl. Have him use the treatment he did on me when I got sick at his place. He’ll understand.”

Then I tried to get Rhedya, but no one answered there. I left a similar message.

I also left one with Majora. She wasn’t in, or couldn’t answer.

The last call was the direct line to Father’s office—with the same result.

I could have waited for hours to reach them, and I didn’t have hours. So I fumbled my way from the maglift train to the local induction tube platform to the main Byjin station, where I had to find somewhere to purchase a passage. It seemed to take forever, but it was only about thirty minutes to find the booth in the corner and wait behind three others—just long enough to miss the first departure. And, then, to get on the transcontinental induction tube train in anything other than a single seat, I had to purchase the luxury compartment, the one that cost four times what anything else did. I didn’t care about the price.

Taking the transcon was fairly safe, as matters went. Security against energy weapons was good, and there wasn’t much of a way the PST group or whoever could get a monoclone from wherever they kept them to where I was. With the restrictions on clones, they couldn’t have an unlimited supply all over the world. Besides, I was safer in Calfya where I could better note things that were strange than in the Sinoplex where everything looked strange.

But I did have to wait. I walked around on the platform under those high Sinoptic arches, and as I walked, I realized that there were only a handful of pre-selects on the platform, and all stayed well away from me—and from each other. In fact, all of the norms on the platform gave us space. I’d never thought that much about pre-selects being different enough to stand out, but we did, not by any one characteristic, but by the cumulative effect, and yet, except for generally greater height, I wasn’t sure I could have identified a single specific characteristic.

As I paused beneath one of the Sinoptic arches, my hands touched the box Nyhal had given me. It was warm, but that was all. I could only hope that it functioned as he had designed it. It should, since everything else he had done had worked. That thought, in itself, bothered me. His wife had died under mysterious circumstances, and I’d meant to pursue that as well, but…our conversation had been cut short. And within hours of her death, OneCys had news commentaries running against the man.

Kharl had confirmed I did have strange nanites in my system, and calls with my identification codes to Eldyn had been rerouted. Elora’s references to Eldyn hadn’t been coincidental, nor had her bequests of the UniComm stock. The very epidemic Eldyn had claimed to have begun was occurring. And, also rather convincingly, two rather impressive physical specimens carrying unauthorized weaponry had showed up and attempted, it appeared, to kill us both.

So, insane as Eldyn had sounded, especially with his talk about aliens sending octagonal nanites across the Galaxy, there was a great deal of something there, and I was getting more than a little concerned that he had been right about more than I’d wanted to accept. After all, Kharl had confirmed the octagonal nanites.

I glanced around, but I still had almost thirty minutes before the train was due to arrive. I’d also been debating with myself about whether to try to reach Majora again. In the end, I compromised. I waited until just a few minutes before the train was due, and then went and found the pubcomm booth, trying to convince myself that the positives outweighed the negatives.

Majora answered immediately. She was wearing a deep blue singlesuit with a cream vest. She looked wonderful.

“You look wonderful,” I said. “Did you get my message?”

“Yes…” She paused. “I can’t reach him.”

“Keep trying. Otherwise, keep to yourself if you can.”

“You look terrible. Are you all right?”

“Besides being exhausted, pursued, and a few other details I’ll mention later, I could be better. I met my friend. Things are worse than I thought. What should I know?” I decided against mentioning my travel plans.

“The Federal Union council will decide tonight whether to restrict travel. The analysts say that they won’t because the threat is largely to people with the resources to protect themselves by not traveling.”

“Somehow, that doesn’t surprise me. I take it that pre-selects are still dying.”

“The deaths have dropped off in places like Ankorplex where they started, but people are starting to die in Westi and elsewhere in Noram.”

“Majora…can you just stay home for a few days? Unless you can reach my cousin?”

Her lips quirked into a crooked smile. “I can manage that—if you’re not gone too long. But what about you?”

“According to my friend, when I got sick after the party months ago, I got an early version. So I should be immune.”

Her eyes widened, understanding exactly what I meant.

“It’s been a long couple of days, and the next few weeks are going to be most interesting.”

“You need to be careful.”

“So do you. I’ll certainly try. That’s been difficult lately.”

“Try harder,” she suggested.

“I will…for you.”

She smiled, and I wondered how I could have forgotten the warmth that her generous mouth and large eyes showed.

After the call, I headed back to the waiting platform, watching to see if anyone else happened to be following or monitoring me. If they were, I couldn’t tell. The only pattern that remained clear was that the norms were staying well clear of the handful of us who were pre-selects.

When the train did glide out of the tunnel and drop into the platform channel for boarding, I forced myself to saunter toward it, rather than run, letting others scurry. Even so, I was among the first to step into the second car. It was probably my imagination, but I could almost feel the scanner run over the shouldertab.

Compartment one is the last compartment to the left
. I followed the resonating-nanite instructions, eyes and systems trying to watch everything. Everything felt as it should, and I hoped I wasn’t deluding myself.

The first compartment was indeed luxurious, and opened after a scan of my passagetab. It was empty, and I quickly checked the bathroom/fresher to make sure it was as well. Then I locked the compartment door, and sank into the overstuffed armchair set beside a club table.

A small replicator rested in a recess above the table, and on the far side was a door into a another compartment—just big enough for a triple-width bed, and to turn around.

The faint scent of freesia or something similar disguised the sanitary air that circulated through the other compartments.

The train is departing. Please be seated. The train is departing. Please be seated
.

I sat down and tapped in the codes on the replicator for a cup of tea. Nothing happened. I shook my head and extracted a cup from the alcove beside the replicator. The tea was a black tea, mild, and not bad. I still missed my Grey tea, but I sipped slowly as the train accelerated, almost without vibration.

After finishing the tea, I rose and stepped into the bath-fresher. That was one of the luxuries that came with paying multiple times what anyone else did. I looked at myself in the mirror, and I looked surprisingly good—if I discounted a smudge of grease or something on my right cheek forward of the ear. Or the dark stains on the cuff of my jacket, blood, no doubt, but barely visible against the dark gray. Or the dark circles under my hollow eyes.

Somewhere along the line, I’d left my bag—in Nyhal’s exploded safe house, I thought, and that left me without toiletries. I did shower. It helped. I didn’t feel so grimy when I stepped out onto the thin floor mat—until I dressed in the same old singlesuit.

I slipped back into the main room of my cramped luxury compartments, and, after checking the compartment door to ensure it was still locked, I took out the folder I’d thrust into the inside vest pocket and opened it slowly.

There were five names with, as Nyhal had said, backgrounds and other information. The names were Grant Escher, Mutumbe Dymke, Darwyn TanUy, Anya St. Cyril, and Imayl Deng. All that they had in common, on the surface, was pre-selection, wealth, and membership on the board of the PST Trust.

Escher was from Austrasia, where he was the operating director of his family’s engineering firm—EDQ, and apparently very private. There were business addresses, and the locations of three dwellings, and what looked to be a standard business resume.

Dymke and Deng were about the same—different locales, different enterprises, but both carrying on long-established family concerns. Anya St. Cyril was the only woman in the group, and had apparently created her own multinational operation, something dealing with fasteners of all classes.

My eyes started to close, and I started in the chair, but forced myself to keep thinking.

TanUy was another case; he was the descendant of a famous cultural psychologist. I remembered we’d studied some of his work…on the PIAT…at The College. It came back; the older TanUy had been one of the pioneers in establishing methodologies for accurately quantifying PIAT results—in short, for making the test useful and replicable, so to speak—and more than that, if Eldyn had been right.

I’d have to check, but I began to wonder how many years ago the PST Trust had been established. I smiled to myself. That history might prove useful…if I could survive to use it.

I sat in the compartment, thinking about the whole situation: special nanites in my system, norm resentment, the PIAT issue that had been on the news, some group of pre-selects wanting control over the main information nets and systems. A whole, up-to-now-near-silent, civil war was about to erupt within the Federal Union. Maybe the public would only see scattered riots, but there was definitely a power struggle, and it seemed to revolve around UniComm.

The one thing that nagged at me was the alien connection. Eldyn had been brilliant. He’d been publicly recognized as stopping the pre-select plague. Could he have engineered it? I shook my head. There was little to go on, but what I’d heard, seen, and sensed told me that he hadn’t created it from scratch. His resentment at the way he’d been treated had been all too real. But…if the octagonal alien nanites/pathogens were real…why? Why would an ancient race spread them across the Galaxy?

Were they just pre-programmed and self-replicating nanitic machines designed to act against certain cellular constructions? There had been several “plagues” of unknown origin…even before the pre-select plague. Had they been earlier manifestations? And the alien Gates…they’d been designed not to be detected from planetary systems. Were the distant or long-gone aliens just trying to keep competitors down? Then why hadn’t they just developed really lethal nanites? I shook my head.

I didn’t have solid answers, and I was having trouble keeping my eyes open, and the only things I knew were that someone had created octagonal nanites, and that Eldyn had manipulated them into something selectively lethal.

I jerked forward, realizing I’d almost fallen asleep in the chair—again.

With that, I put away the folder and went through the narrow slider into the bedchamber, or bed closet, where I lay down. I definitely did not feel like an eagle, but like an exhausted, bedraggled, and bedeviled raven.

I hadn’t thought to use the time on the induction tube to sleep, but my body wasn’t about to give me that much choice.