Aestival Tide (31 page)

Across the cavernous chamber a woman taking blood from a rorqual looked up and stared at Reive. Zalophus rolled over to shrewdly regard the gynander with his other eye. After a moment he said, “One of the margravines had a baby once. I heard them talking about it. A monster, a heteroclite. She sent it to the Chambers of Mercy; but the vivisectors did not kill it, they said it would bring ill luck. I remember, I heard them talking. I think you must be that monster. Come closer to me so that I can see you better.”

The gynander ignored him, then lowering her voice she took a step toward the tank. “Zalophus, the Aviator Imperator has gone mad. None of us will be safe, not even you. If you tell us of a safe place to hide for now we will find a way to free you—tomorrow, at Æstival Tide. We will find a way, we promise.”

Water raced down the zeuglodon's snout as he raised his head to stare at her. “There is a way, little thing,” he groaned, a sound like crumbling stone. A summer smell filled the air. “Last night I dreamed of the other one, the little man they killed to make me. He told me that the world Outside is closer now, closer than it ever has been before. When I woke I sounded to the deepest depths and it is true, heteroclite child: the world is waking and moving in its sleep.”

Reive shook her head. “There's no time,” she said desperately. “We have no time for your stories now, you must tell us of a way to escape.”

“Come with me.” Zalophus rose until his head hung above the dark water, a green-whorled sun blotting out the false daylight. “Come with me, little thing, and I will show you the new world. There is a crack where the water valves run into the Undercity. Each day it is widening. Soon it will be big enough for me to enter, and then I will find them, then my sisters will come to meet me—”

“There is no way out! You have no sisters!” Reive shouted. The woman bending over the rorqual looked over in alarm. “They have been dead for a million years! I hope you starve here—”

She turned and ran from the vivarium. The zeuglodon watched her leave, then rolled onto his back, sending another wave rushing from the tank onto the concrete floor. A moment later he disappeared, sounding the depths of his prison to where the chink in the walls was widening, and warm water poured in through a black mouth opening onto the world.

In a chamber on the vivarium level, Âziz Orsina sat gazing at the body of her sister Shiyung. Tubes and wires ran from the corpse to a series of vats and monitors, alembics and computers controlled by the Architects' rehabilitation nexus. It would be days before Shiyung could be restored as a
rasa,
certainly not until after Æstival Tide. Âziz wondered what effect this would have on the lower levels. Shiyung had always been the favorite of the moujiks and the biotechs, as much for her prettiness and childish enthusiasms as for her occasional sallies down to visit the toilers in the refineries and the vivariums. It didn't matter that Shiyung never did anything besides smile and share an occasional pappadam with carefully selected drones. The others, the rest of the work force, would see her in person and later that evening on the 'files and puppet shows. They would see her, forehead daubed with blue and black to show solidarity with the Church of Christ Cadillac, smiling as she ate fermented beans with the refineries' human supervisors, the
rasas
in pale ranks behind her, and still later they would watch as, her lovely white face flushed with excitement, she torched the pyres for the public burnings.

How would they react to Shiyung as a
rasa?

Âziz nibbled her fingernail and pushed her hair from her face. Beside her the biotechnician she'd chosen for the project watched nervously, making a great show of adjusting and readjusting the levels in the chemical bath that lapped at Shiyung's pale form.

“You can't do it any faster?” Âziz asked for the fourth time.

The biotech sighed, shaking his head. “We're already losing some resolution on her now, Margravine, doing it this quickly.” He gestured vaguely at the tubes curling up from the tank and into the brightly lit reaches of the lab. “There's going to be some failure as it is, with her long-term memory, and her—”

“I don't care,” snapped Âziz. She stood and paced to the other side of the tank, staring at her sister's white face. Already the skin had grown slack; Shiyung's mouth had drooped into a grimacing leer. “The festival is tomorrow. I need her by then. I need
something
by then.”

The biotech opened his hands in a hopeless gesture. “Margravine, there's no way—”

A rumbling shook the room, sending the lamps swinging wildly. Âziz started, grabbing the edge of a table until the shock subsided. She glared accusingly at the biotech. In the tank Shiyung's corpse rocked back and forth, nucleic fluid sloshing onto the floor.

The biotech steadied himself, his face white. “That's been happening lately,” he stammered. “We don't know why—here and in some of the other labs near the rim—”

Âziz looked as though she would throttle him. She pointed at her sister's neck, where a reddish bruise shaped like a half-moon creased the swollen flesh. “Do something about that,” she spat, and stalked off.

Back on Seraphim Âziz returned to the Four Hundredth Room. Nike lay on a divan, gazing at a polyfile projected onto the ceiling—another work of Karvo's, one that drew quite wittily upon ancient ecclesiastical motifs. It showed three
galli
in red and yellow cassocks singing, the sweetness of their voices marred somewhat by their expressions, which were rapt with horror. A disembodied hand appeared and one by one slashed the throats of the
galli
with a bright blue scalpel. In the past Nike had found the work moving; but in the wake of Shiyung's death it seemed rather hackneyed, sentimental in fact, and when Âziz entered the room she switched the sound off and turned to her, musing.

“I was thinking we should revoke Karvo's privilege,” she said, gesturing at the ceiling.

Âziz nodded wearily. She crossed to the divan and sank onto it. “Petra,” she called. A yellow-haired girl appeared in the doorway. “Bring me some warmed valerian, please. I've got a terrible headache.”

After the girl left she turned to her sister. “He says he can't do it any faster and we won't have her before Æstival Tide. Well, not before it starts, at least. There's some trouble with decay, memory loss, I don't know.” She raised her hands hopelessly, dropped them into her lap as the yellow-haired girl returned with a steaming samovar and two porcelain cups. She placed them on a table and left. “Now if this had only happened to Nasrani, Shiyung could have done the regeneration herself.”

Nike nodded, still staring with a frown at the silent images flickering across the ceiling. The last
galli
had fallen, lying atop a white rug with his fellows, their blood and their bright cassocks lurid against the calm background. “I can't believe I ever thought his work was subtle. I
am
going to revoke his privilege.”

Âziz made a disinterested noise, stirred her valerian and sipped it, wincing. “You know there's going to be an uproar if she's not there when we open the Gate. She's too popular, especially these last few days. With all these reports of structural problems,
she's
the only one of us they would trust—we've
got
to try to have her
rasa
on hand, something to make them believe she's still alive, still there to sympathize with them. But news of the murder has already gotten out, and with all this other confusion…”

She closed her eyes and inhaled the steam. After a moment she said, “I just need a little time to think of something, something to distract them. I don't want any riots this year, things are bad enough with these damn tremors and that fire yesterday. We need
something.
” She looked thoughtfully down at her cup. “Perhaps we could forgive Nasrani.”

Nike clicked off the polyfile and stood. Yawning, she crossed the room to where her sister sat. “That would be nice. I wanted him at the next inquisition anyway.” She picked up her cup of valerian and stared at it, then cleared her throat and asked delicately, “You've taken care of them? The guests from last evening—”

Âziz shrugged. “I've ordered that they be rounded up. The Committee Head told me most of them are already in the Reception Area—”

“Sajur?” Nike raised an eyebrow.

Her sister shook her head impatiently. “We can't detain Sajur. We've never arranged for his successor.” She tapped one front tooth with her fingernail and mused, “Although there is a woman, an ethical mathematician, who might be suitable….”

Nike nodded. “So we can't detain Sajur. What about that woman, what's her name—Waxwing. The biotech. The one we traced the morph back to?”

“She's to be detained with all the rest. Friser, the Ambassador, Planck—Sajur's going to be distressed about him.” Âziz finished her drink and put the empty cup on the tray, dipped her fingers into a small bowl of borage water and flicked them dry.

“Sajur.” Nike licked her lips and settled on the divan beside her sister. “What has he to say about all this? Have you seen him?”

“No; there's no answer in his chambers. But what is there to say? An unknown morph, a murderous interloper from the lower levels, what else can one expect? We make some new appointments to the appropriate cabinets and as soon as possible call another inquisition. Perhaps tomorrow night, that would be appropriate….”

Nike drummed her fingers slowly on the edge of the brass divan. “But your dream.” Her dark eyes when she raised them to her sister were clouded. “The morph said—what if what she said were true?”

“The Green Country? The storms?” Âziz sniffed and poured some more valerian. Nike watched her, then pulled a morpha tube from her pocket, tipped its contents into her cup, and drank it in a gulp. “Sajur says it's impossible for a storm of that magnitude to be undetected. The Architects, the weather stations… HORUS would have notified us of anything strange.”

Nike shook her head. Already her pupils dilated and her voice grew slurred. “But we lost the NASNA Prime station last fall, and the others in the Net took such a hard hit from the Commonwealth. We needed someone stronger up there to oversee the repairs. We never should have sent Margalis to the Capital,” she finished angrily. “He should have stayed on HORUS—”

“He would have been immolated with the rest of his substation if he had,” said Âziz; but her sister ranted on.

“… knew it was a mistake—that whole business with the Capital was a fiasco!”

“You went along with Shiyung at the time,” Âziz remarked dryly. “As I recall you agreed with Margalis that the old weapons centers should be reactivated. You seemed to think Shiyung would do a very good job of administering the place, once Margalis had taken over as Governor. You seemed quite eager, in fact, to have Shiyung gone from here.”

Nike sputtered but said nothing. There
had
been a brief resurgence of a petty childhood rivalry about the time of Tast'annin's failed venture to the Capital. Finally she spat, “All the same! Personnel wasted on
that
instead of keeping up the celestial surveys—there could be a storm out there
right now
and we'd never know a thing—”

She stopped, and walked unsteadily to the window. Her voice shook as she went on. “The 'files said that a retaining wall on Virtues collapsed early this morning. The warning systems didn't go off. The Architects did
nothing
—I accessed the scrolls from yesterday, they didn't even record it.” She turned to her sister, her face suddenly pale. “Âziz, it's like in the prophecies of Fasidim and the story of John Bingham's wife. It's—it's the sort of thing they say will happen, before the city falls—”

Outside the distress lights still slashed the domes with white and blue. Three fougas rose from their hangars, trailing the long incantatory pennons advertising the start of Æstival Tide. Âziz raised her cup and smiled, but her eyes were bitter.

“Don't be absurd,” she said. “A dream, it was only a dream.”

“
The
dream—the morph said it was the dream of the Green Country! The Architects are failing us! What if—”

“Listen to you, Nike! You're talking about Mrs. Bingham and listening to a
hermaphrodite!
I can't believe this—you sound as crazy as Shiyung. There'll be no need to regenerate her at all, just pop her crown on your soft little head!”

Nike bit her lip and stared at the floor. Her voice was whining. “But
why,
Âziz? Why would a morph kill her?
How
could she kill her? It doesn't make sense.
None
of this makes sense. The Architects have blinked off, there've been reports of cracks in some of the vivariums, a tremor on Principalities. Malva Circutus from the Toxins Cabal told me that on every level below Thrones there's been some kind of tremor, and now they're saying it's the storms coming. If the lower levels hear about your dream…”

Âziz glared at her, stood and walked to the window. For several minutes she watched the fougas drifting up and down, their turquoise banners rippling and snapping in the air rising from the refineries. Her mouth grew tight.

“They should be towing funerary pennons,” she said at last. Her head snapped up and her eyes blazed angrily. “I don't know how or why that unfortunate morph did it, and I don't care. Shiyung is dead, and we can't let these other rumors go any further. We have to find the right way to deal with this before the Gate opens, or we'll have a revolt on our hands. I want to see that morph now. And the one she's been living with. Shiyung's healer, Ceryl Waxwing.”

She pressed a button on the windowsill and summoned the yellow-haired serving girl. “Tell the Head of the Reception Committee to bring the gynander Reive here, and the biotech Ceryl Waxwing. And get some 'filers: I want 'filers here for the sentencing.”