Sly Mongoose (5 page)

Katerina had wide eyes, one of them green and the other, her right eye, silver. She had brown skin like Timas’s. Usually the Aeolians were black or pale, it surprised Timas to see someone that looked more like him. Maybe that was why she’d been sent, she could almost blend into Yatapek. Except for her hair. Yatapek’s citizens had straight, black hair. Katerina’s hair was frizzy.

“Good morning,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet your son, and thank you for the hospitality.”

She looked both of them up and down, very slowly, her silver eye taking them both in. It had tiny metallic veins that spidered off the corner of her eye socket and eyelids.

It was erie. Heutzin once told him that all Aeolians could see anything any other Aeolian with silvered eyes could see. A creepy thought.

Ollin left them both at the gate.

“So where do you want to start?” Timas asked. He couldn’t avoid staring at the silver eye.

Katerina waited for Ollin to walk back into the house. “We’ve seen Yatapek, we don’t need the tour. But I haven’t eaten yet since I left home this morning.”

They way she used
we
and
I
differently made Timas pause. He looked at the silver eye. If Heutzin told the truth, people all throughout the Aeolian cities looked at him right now through that silver eye of hers. Through their more advanced technology.

He shivered.

“Am I making you uncomfortable?” Katerina asked.

Timas considered lying for a moment. “Yes. A little bit. Knowing that other people see what you see, back in all the other Aeolian cities. It’s unusual.” And a little creepy.

“We’re all sorry.” She blinked and held her eye closed. It looked like a normal eyelid, except for the metallic veins. She grabbed his arm. “We can keep the eye closed, if it bothers you that much. But you’ll have to help me walk around if I’m doing it with one eye closed. It messes with my depth perception.”

Timas stepped back. “It’s okay, you can use your eye.”

“You realize we can hear you.” Katerina tapped her right ear.

“It isn’t metal,” Timas said.

“They don’t have to be. The eye is a marker, a choice, by us, to let outsiders know.”

“Are all Aeolians part robot?”

Katerina sighed and rolled her eyes. “Oh come on!” She bit her lip, paused, and then tilted her head. “We’re not robots, Timas. We’re people, like you.”

Timas considered it. “You’re all connected to each other, using your
devices and transmitters? Do you all have similar things in your head like that eye?” He also thought: If they ever chose to invade, they would swarm around Yatapek’s warriors, who had few or no radios to plan their defense. Yes, the Aeolians could invade easily enough.

“In a manner of speaking, yes.”

“Then you’re not anything like me.” Timas felt nervous around her as he contemplated the thought of hundreds of Aeolians with silver eyes taking over his city. “Are you?”

“I’m hungry, Timas. Can we go eat?”

Happy to change the subject, Timas nodded and led Katerina down the street. Along with several other roads it radiated out from the atrium like spokes in a wheel.

Timas walked them toward the outer edge of the city. The clusters of buildings that stood near the atrium petered out into the city’s farms and gardens. They made the bulk of the topmost layer, the dome curving up over all the greenery. A tiny mist of rain trickled down from the sprinklers in the dome top far overhead.

The oldest citizens of Yatapek said that the topmost layer felt the most like being back on the world they came from, New Anegada. The Aeolians said that as well. Tourists often stayed in rooms near the edge of the upper layer’s fields and gardens.

“Is that a harvester?” Katerina pointed at a rusted machine that sat in the center of the wheat section on their left, with several clusters of farmers standing around it.

“
The
harvester,” Timas said. It had broken down again. He kept her walking along, the harvester broke down more than it worked. Nothing unusual there.

“Where are we going?” Katerina asked. “Your maps don’t show any elevators on the inside of the city wall.”

“I’m taking you to the mezzanine gardens.”

Even this sophisticated delegate should appreciate the food and view there.

At the edge of the dome the land gave way to treetops.

“Oh, I’ve heard of this,” Katerina said. “Neat effect.”

They took the steep stone stairs down the wall and descended into the
trees and shrubs of the gardens that all carefully framed the clouds just outside the city. It made one aware of the fact that the whole city floated. They lived a hundred thousand feet in the air, following the currents near Chilo’s great storm in a regular circular pattern, far enough above it that they were not affected. The dirty brown spiral of the storm dominated the landscape before them today.

At the bottom of the stairs Timas turned around and let her look out into Yatapek’s second layer.

“This is the real view,” Timas said.

The mezzanine he’d taken her to hung underneath the topmost layer. From here they looked out over the farms and edge gardens of the second layer. And where the sun failed to reach at the edges, the layer’s streets, houses, and structures began.

“Very neat,” Katerina said. Weblike towers crisscrossed the inner area, and this high up you could see that the layer resembled a three-dimensional map. A diorama laid out for just them, with the edges of it receding into gloomy murkiness.

The city lights hung from long cables connected to the underside of the top layer. They vibrated and swung whenever the city trembled from super-gusts.

“But where’s the food?”

Very neat
, that was all she had to say about the mezzanine? Timas led her along the path by the large windows.

“Here.” A small booth with little tables and chairs scattered around flagstones hid behind a series of over-large hedges. Timas snagged a paper menu from the booth.

“So do you have anything like this in your city?” Timas asked.

Katerina looked over her menu. “Well, no, not anymore. Eupatoria’s edges are filled with developments now. Everyone wants an apartment ‘on the edge’ so that they have sky in their living room.”

“Then how do you grow food?” The edges of the layers and the top layer got all the sunlight.

“Hydroponic gardens, we keep them around the core of the city. Or vats.” More technological tricks up their sleeves, Timas thought as she tapped on the menu. “No beef, just chicken?”

“Meat, even for xocoyotzin, is not very plentiful,” Timas said. “We don’t have the land for grazing.”

“Grazing . . . animals.” Katerina looked upset for a second. “I’ll have beans and rice.”

Timas felt like he’d failed some test with her. She had this look on her face like his mother did when she’d had to visit one of her cousins in the lower layers, deep in the city near the recycling plains.

Katerina felt Yatapek was dirty and uncivilized, and Timas by extension, too, no doubt.

Timas walked up to the kitchen booth and ordered extra beans and rice, with chicken.

“Go sit with the young lady,” the tall cook winked, “I’ll bring it right out, xocoyotzin.” The cook’s teeth glinted with cheap metal caps when he smiled.

When Timas returned Katerina looked up. “You said ‘xocoyotzin,’ didn’t you? You work on the surface?”

Excited that some measure of respect had arrived, Timas sat up straighter. “Yes. I am xocoyotzin.”

She leaned forward, eager. “We would like to ask if you were on the surface when the debris hit your mining machine?”

“You say ‘we’ again.” Timas did not feel comfortable talking about the cuatetl. He didn’t want to say anything that the elders or his dad wouldn’t want him to. They might need to bargain or beg with this girl, and the people behind her silver eye, for the repairs.

“
We
is what we say when we are engaging you. When I use ‘
I
’ it’s just me talking.”

“Just you?”

“Katerina.” She smiled.

“How can you both be a robot and yourself?” Timas asked. “It’s weird.”

Katerina sighed. “You go to school, right?”

“My schooling is very technical.” Timas tapped the edge of the table. “I can continue school after I no longer function as xocoyotzin.” Die like Cen, grow fat like his father and Heutzin, or just grow old and not able to quite fit. He prayed for the last.

“We know you should know what a democracy is, yes? You have, what, forty thousand people living in Yatapek? In Eupatoria it’s more like a quarter of a million, and our city is the same size. The Aeolian Consensus uses techno-democracy to handle self-governance. We’re a little different than you. And there are dozens of Aeolian cities.”

“But you’re still controlled by that.” Timas pointed at her eye. He’d seen a silver-eyed Aeolian once, visiting his dad. That happened back before the Aeolians forced Yatapek to install a large communications bubble on top of the city. Back then, the man who’d visited had taken forever to answer the easiest questions. He’d had to wait on every diplomatic phrase to get vetted and then a response voted on and beamed back to him to speak out loud. Without advanced and fast technology, it had taken forever to get through dinner.

“Damn zombies,” Ollin had muttered late that night, apparently tired of the two-minute pauses.

“If you volunteer to be on a sports team of some sort, are you controlled by your team?” Katerina asked. “Or are you still you, but just within the team?”

“You’re still you . . . .”

“I’m on a very big team.” Katerina hunched forward. “There are three hundred thousand people from a random variety of Aeolian cities, live, voting on my every word because I’m their avatar, emissary, diplomat, or whatever you would like to call me. I agreed to this when I became a citizen. Three days ago I was studying for finals when I got the message that I’d been randomly selected for citizen’s duty. And here I am, representing Eupatoria’s interests.”

So when she said
we
the masses behind that silver eye spoke through her. And when she said ‘
I
’ it was only Katerina. “It takes getting used to,” Timas said.

“Try having all this sitting behind your skull,” Katerina said. “A public face of the citizenry is never an easy task. Fail to do your job properly and you get fined, or exiled and stripped of your citizenship.”

The cook interrupted them, staring openly at Katerina’s silver eye as he set their plates down and grinned at Timas.

Timas waited for her to start eating.

“Timas, we’re not here as tourists. We have an offer for your city.” Katerina pushed her plate aside. “An offer we want you to deliver to your city’s leaders later tonight.”

She wasn’t eating. Timas rolled up a corn tortilla and scooped rice and chicken up with it. Before biting into it he responded: “To the pipiltin? Why would you want me to do that? You should speak to them directly, or maybe even my father.”

He bit into overheated rice. He breathed around it and realized he was awkwardly eating in front of hundreds of thousands of people.

Timas felt horribly aware of his gangly elbows, loud chewing, and uncomfortable posture.

“We feel . . .” Katerina looked down at the table with a slight smile. “We feel that the pipiltin would be more willing to listen to someone from their own city. The voting is running two-to-one in favor of this theory. We feel that if we, with our reputation for being robotic and arrogant, stand in front of your leaders and give terms, that some will refuse on general principle.”

Timas snorted. That sounded about right. He put the rice-filled tortilla down. “And what are you offering?”

“We’re offering complete repair services on your mining machine. We know how desperate your situation is. Your city will founder without it.”

“In exchange?” Timas was curious.

“We want the man who hit your city,” Katerina said. “And we want to talk to him. Tonight. It’s very important. He has given our cities information about a possible threat to them. We need more information.”

Timas sat and looked at her. “What, you think the man lived through that?”

“Judging by your lack of surprise, and analysis of your body language, pupil dilation, we think you know he did. You just confirmed the suspicion for us. Let’s not lie, Timas.” She turned cold and expressionless. Timas felt out of his depth. He couldn’t bargain about Yatapek’s future! The pipiltin negotiated those things. Not xocoyotzin. “He lives and we want to see him. Your people would be foolish to turn down what we offer. What is one stranger to you?”

Apparently one stranger equaled at least a repaired mining machine.
At least. Timas looked at his plate. “You’re all so very sure of yourselves, aren’t you?”

Katerina nodded. “The votes are decisive.”

“And if they weren’t?”

“I’d be eating and making polite small talk while the debate went on,” Katerina said.

“I’m not going to finish my meal here, am I?” Timas asked.

“No.” Katerina laughed. “I think we’re about done.”

Timas pushed his plate away. “I have no idea whether this man exists or not, but I don’t see what your hurry is.”

“The hurry is that he is, at the least, an incredibly dangerous man, we think, and the sooner we investigate, the sooner we know for sure. He might also be an early warning. Either way, we need to get him into our custody. Then we will decide what to do next.”

Timas stood up and left enough money on the table to cover the food. Katerina picked up one of the bills. “Paper money?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool!” She rubbed it between her fingers. “Very cool. Can I keep it?”

“No.” Timas shook his head, slightly annoyed. “That pays for our meal. If you want more I’m sure your city can provide some.”

Katerina dropped the bill back down on the table, looking disappointed. “Okay.”

“And Katerina,” Timas added as they left, “please don’t mention that I ate anything to my parents.”

“Okay.” She didn’t ask why, thank goodness. Timas didn’t feel like explaining more about the nature of being xocoyotzin. Although he imagined there would be more trouble for him in revealing that the man who’d hit the city still lived, even if unintentionally, than in anyone finding out he’d eaten too much for the day.