Saga (31 page)

“It’s true. They’ve all gone. The last post by any of them in the Defiance forums was Cindella’s.”

“Read it out again, would you, Athena?”

Even though we had kept the lighting inside the suite to a minimum, I could see Nathan’s pale face reflected in the window.

“‘To the people of Saga. The Dark Queen has removed the addiction that was poisoning the human beings of New Earth. Her condition for doing so was that we leave Saga. Of course, we agreed, but many of us now feel a deep regret that we are leaving you. On a personal level, you have become our friends. More generally, knowing that there is another world nearby is a marvel for us, and it seems a shame for our two peoples not to interact and share what we know. Perhaps at some future time, we will meet again. We hope so, but for now, the matter is outside our hands, as the Dark Queen has informed us that as soon as the last person from New Earth has left Saga, she will sever the connection between our worlds. For my particular friends, Athena, Ghost, Nathan, and Milan, I have the news that the Dark Queen has agreed to pardon any offenses that you might have committed. I hesitate to interfere with your political affairs, but I cannot leave you thinking that she was sincere about this, when I got the distinct impression otherwise. Please take care. Your friend always Cindella.’”

No one spoke, although the gusts of water being blown onto the glass in front of us had swells and lulls like the rhythms of speech. If I had known the language of storms, I might have been able to interpret the message that this one seemed to have for us.

What did I think of the humans leaving us? It was understandable, of course. They had their lives. Nor was it their choice; as long as the Dark Queen controlled the connection to New Earth, she could prevent them from being here. So, why did I also feel let down? We were on our own again. Perhaps that was for the best. Make no claims on the loyalty of others, and you cannot be betrayed. I had never feared being alone, but I had enjoyed the sense of being part of a great movement when we had led Cindella’s people into Newscast 1.

“How does she do it?” Nathan was the first to speak.

“Who? What?” Milan was picking his way through a bowl of fruit, and his voice was a little muffled.

“How does the Dark Queen sever the connection to them? What’s the mechanism by which she contacts their world?” Nath looked over at Athena; so did I.

“I’ve no idea. It’s an interesting question, though. Somehow they are able to connect with us, whether as a pattern of light or a flow of electrons, or even something weird like magnetic interaction. It doesn’t really matter,” she mused aloud. “What matters is that the Dark Queen has a way of stopping that flow. She has some way of acting in their universe. Otherwise it wouldn’t be up to her. They could come and go here as they liked.”

“Michelotto might know. Want me to ask him?” I took the pager out of one of my trouser pockets and examined it.

“Even better.” Milan spat a seed onto the carpet. “Let’s meet him. Cindella has made it pretty obvious we can’t trust any pardon from the Dark Queen. Now that the humans are gone, there’s no reason we shouldn’t take her down. Right, Nath?”

“True.”

I took out the encryption device and composed a message for the pager. A short while later, it buzzed with a reply.

“He’ll meet us, after the storm is over. Gilgamesh Square again.”

With that settled, we turned our attention back to the storm. My sense of loss eased as I gazed through the flow of cold water into the darkness beyond. What were we, after all, but a tiny flickering light in the night, so distant from any other source of warmth?

It always seemed
that there was no end to the old City: that you could travel through it all day, block after block, with the signs of inhabitation gradually diminishing, until you found yourself in dark and abandoned streets. Even here, beyond the limit of power supply and easy boarding, the streets continued for miles. It would be a depressing journey to struggle on in this direction, with the haunting thought that there was no end to the derelict houses.

The architecture here was quite different from in the living heart of the City. Hardly any buildings were more than two stories high. The houses were spread out, distributed upon regular squares of grass, marked off from each other by low wooden fences. The only tall buildings were civic ones, raised in a mock Romantic fashion, adorned with unnecessary pillars and bas-relief carvings. Disused now, they would once have been bathing houses, libraries, entertainment centers, and so forth, for the privileged guilds and cardholders of the district.

Ahead of me, Michelotto drove smoothly and quietly past the empty houses, sometimes checking in his mirrors that I was keeping up. He knew the answer to our question and had agreed to take me to a place that he claimed was the building from which the Dark Queen controlled communications with Erik’s world. Just me, though. Michelotto felt there was a chance that we might be lucky enough to come across her, in which case the others would be a liability; in a fight with the Dark Queen, we would have to deflect our powers to defend them. I agreed. So they were waiting for me back at our latest hideout, an old house on Amiens Street.

After a four-hour ride, we came to a huge, white stone building, capped by a copper dome that had turned dark green with age. He stopped the airbike and waited for me. Once the soft hum of my board ceased, quiet returned to these ancient streets, and with it a sensation of giddiness, which I accounted for by the fact that I was used to the constant background rumble of busy traffic.

“Innocuous enough, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” It had the look of an old library, except that the wide stairs rose to a surprisingly narrow doorway between two aged and flaking pillars.

“It was built to house the portal between our world and that of the human beings.”

Michelotto got off his bike and looked around, appraising the nearby buildings.

“She still comes here sometimes, to maintain stable conditions for Saga.” I must have looked blankly at him, as he continued patiently, “Saga is hosted on some kind of physical structure created by the human beings on Earth. I’m not sure what it is, exactly, but our universe could come to an abrupt end if there were an earthquake or similar catastrophic local environmental event that shattered the equipment on which it is hosted. It is the primary function of the King or Queen to transfer themselves to the human universe and maintain the uninterrupted running of Saga.”

“I had no idea that our existence was so precarious.” I stretched my arms high above my head, in part to relieve the muscular tension that builds up during a long session of boarding, but also because, listening to his words, I felt unsteady. My thoughts were jittery.

“Don’t worry.” He looked carefully at me. With concern? Or calculation? “From what I was told, the planet itself, Earth, should be good for another two billion years. Past rulers arranged a reserve energy supply for Saga, to keep us safe for thousands of years, even if none of us ever crosses through the portal. Judging by comments the Dark Queen has made in my presence, I think she has set us up for over a hundred thousand years. That would be in keeping with her character; she makes plans for the very long term.”

“But still, something needs monitoring?”

“Yes, she has to come here sometimes.”

“Do you know what’s inside?”

“No. I can’t get in.”

“Oh, really?” I ran up toward the door, curious. I’d never come across a lock I couldn’t defeat.

“Careful. Don’t set off any alarms.”

As I approached the building, I let the universe slow down and stretched out my feelings, heightening my perceptions. He was right; there were motion detectors set high on the walls, focused on the entrance. Now that I had an interesting challenge to concentrate upon, I felt confident and sharp. The unease that had been seeping through my thoughts had dissipated entirely. From the inside pocket of my hoodie, I drew out my tools and went to where a cable ran down beside a pillar, carrying the alarm signal from the motion detectors toward the City. I made a careful insertion into the cable and reset the tolerance on the detectors so that even an elephant charging into the building would not trigger them.

Beside the door was a very old standard card and iris reader. I carefully slipped my highest card, a blue, into the slot, sensing for alarms as I did so. The card was rejected, naturally. Anything else would have been too easy. I withdrew the card, then sprayed the surface with one careful tap on the top of a tiny bottle of plastic-conducting polymer. It was possible to mold the microscopic layer of polymer even while the card was in the reader, so I could systematically rework the pattern of the card by trial and error. It took me fewer than a hundred attempts and about ten minutes before the reader accepted the card. I couldn’t help sneaking a proud glance at Michelotto. He was watching hesitantly.

The retina detector came on. Once I had established contact with its processor and disabled the error alert, I leaned forward to let it read my eyes. They were as good a start as any for a similar method of pattern building. A light flashed, I blinked and the door opened with a hiss and a brush of cool air. The processor showed a 100 percent match.

“You’re in!” Michelotto was surprised.

“How did it come to have my retina pattern as acceptable?”

“Did it really?” He came up the stairs and looked at the reader, then at me. I shivered, feeling goose bumps. This building was vaguely familiar; it had something to do with my lost memory, my lost childhood.

If Michelotto derived any meaning from the fact that the lock was prepared to admit me, he said nothing, but instead looked through the open doorway. I stood beside him. It was a short corridor with another reader in the wall beside the far door, this time a silver voice-recognition panel.

“Try it,” he said, gesturing, but waited outside when I stepped forward.

“You’ll either have to wait for me, or come in. These systems don’t allow both doors to be open at the same time,” I pointed out to him.

Michelotto frowned, looking back down the stairs at his bike. He clearly didn’t like being confined, but eventually he stepped into the corridor and closed the door behind him. When he did so, a strip light in the roof came on, giving us a copper glow to see by. I stood in front of the voice panel.

“Consume more. It is the measure of your life.” I spoke the first sentence that popped into my head. The door opened. With a shared look, we stepped through to another short section of corridor, this time with a panel for reading a palm, like the police cells we had been detained in. No sooner had I pressed my hand against the screen than the door opened. One more stretch of corridor, one more card reader. The building was welcoming me.

“This is a much more recent addition.” For a start, the slot itself was a much tighter fit around the card. I knelt down and inserted microfibers to get a look at the workings inside. They were sophisticated, but I felt relieved that I at least recognized the principles of the system. It was designed to measure minute current differentials on the surface of the card. The key card would, no doubt, be made of many layers of material whose conductivity varied considerably.

Despite a growing urgency to get inside, to discover why my retina, voice, and skin were acceptable as keys into the building, I squatted down on my haunches to consider the lock.

“Problem?” In the orange glow, the lines of Michelotto’s face were deeper and darker than usual. He looked severe.

“Kinda. Even though the other doors allowed me through, this one needs a card that I don’t have. I’m going to have to improvise one.”

“Here.” He threw a wallet down beside me. It was full of cards, all the colors of the rainbow. There were indigo and violet cards, which I’d never seen before. I took them out, feeling their texture with my fingers, holding them to the light. Interestingly, they were somehow richer, with a more subtle variation of chroma than a blue. The material the violet was made from was a plastic so hard it felt like cold metal. There were three other cards in the wallet. One was entirely black. I’d never heard of a black card. Another was gray with a silver wolf design on one surface. The third had an emerald snake’s head looking out from a gold background.

Michelotto slowly lowered himself and sat on the corridor floor, leaning against the wall, face impassive, although I had looked up from the cards I held with an expression of inquiry. This whole break-in would have been so much easier if Athena had been with me. At least she would have talked to me.

I tried my tools upon the cards. The black one had an extraordinary surface. It seemed stable until I looked microscopically, then it seemed to run like mercury, in a flow that eluded my most sensitive pointer. The gray one contained an immense amount of data, namely the social status of millions of people. The snake, however, began to stir as I touched it and to eat at my tools. I snatched them away.

“Well?” Michelotto asked.

“The wolf is a kind of doppelgänger card, right? It would look to the reader like a particular user of your choosing had inserted their card.”

He nodded.

“The snake destroys the reader it’s inserted in?”

“Yes, but not the hardware. The snake carries a virus, which infects the processor of the lock, making it unstable. The virus tries to get the processor to spew out the entrance codes as it disintegrates. But it doesn’t always work, so I have it as a measure of last resort.”

“And the black card?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“No, I haven’t a clue. I couldn’t read it.”

Michelotto gave a rare smile. “That’s my own design. It’s a master card that only a RAL can use. It’s based on a kind of stereolithographical process. Only instead of fixing the fluid surface resin with lasers, the RAL alters it with the same kind of control you used when dealing with the pulse weapon. Try it.”