Ammonite Planets (Omnibus): Ammonite Galaxy #1-3 (10 page)

GRACE FELT VERY silly getting into her back lift with the intention to talk to it, but did so anyway. She took it down to the ground floor, and then began to signal.

“Arcan? Are you there?”

She had nearly given up when the orthogel under her fingertips quivered. “I am here, Grace.”

“Have you thought about things yet?”

The orthogel vibrated gently against all her fingers. “Yes. I am beginning to understand. It is hard to explain. But I will try.”

“Who are you?”

“I am this … this thing you are touching.”

The orthogel! Impossible! “You mean you are the substance that the lift is made of, that the lake is full of?”

“Yes.”

“There is nobody else … err … speaking through you?”

“No, Grace. I am speaking for myself.”

“Then the orthogel is alive!”

“If you mean as opposed to dead, decayed, yes.”

“And you can think for yourself?”

The orthogel hummed. “It seems so. This is very new to me. I … lived before in a different way … not interacting.”

“But how come they never detected that you are alive?”

Arcan made her fingers tingle again. “Parts of me are not alive … I move those parts towards any danger, withdraw the parts of me which are alive away from the danger.”

Grace was thinking. “So when you got cross about the apprentices … yes, I see, they took all of the air out of the bubbles, and the apprentices died, and you did nothing.”

“I was too young … not aware enough then to see what they were doing.” Arcan tried to explain. “Now, I can understand. Now I would have tried to do something to help them. But the new ones have air, and the old ones are all decayed. It is too late.” The lift flickered in colour. “Your people made me into a killer. I will not forgive them for that. I do not wish to kill.”

“You didn’t kill. The Sellites did. My … ” she gave a short laugh, “… my caring people. Why would they kill the donor apprentices?”

“I do not know.”

“No, neither do I.” Grace closed her eyes, and felt a little nauseated.

“Grace?”

“What, Arcan?”

“I am being used. I do not like it.”

She thought about it. Orthogel was used in almost every aspect of life on Valhai. Its viscosity properties, its ability to flow freely uphill and other unique properties had been put to full utilization by the Sellites. “They did not know you were alive,” she said.

“Perhaps I wasn’t then, not as you know it.”

“Do you want me to tell them? Perhaps I must …”

The whole lift shook, scaring her. “No,” It said. “I want you to promise you will say nothing. It is too soon, there is too much to understand. Promise!”

“I promise, at least for the time being. I may not be able to extend that promise forever.”

“Forever? Do your people live forever?”

Grace laughed. “No, we live between fifty and a hundred years. I suppose the average would be about eighty. That’s eighty orbits of Coriolis about Sacras. You?”

There was a very long pause, so long that Grace thought Arcan had left her alone again. “I have lived for about thirty thousand rotations.”

“What? You can’t be that old!”

“Why not? I suppose it might seem a long time to an entity as ephemeral as you, but I have only woken up now. Before was all different. Now I am beginning. Arcan is beginning. The rest, for you at least, is old.”

“You can say that again!”

“The rest, for you at least, is old.”

“No, I meant … oh, never mind.” Grace was having trouble moving her fingers after such a long time signaling. “I need a break. Can we go on talking later today, in the afternoon?”

“I am always here, Grace.”

“Can you tell when somebody uses the lift?”

“I am learning. These parts were forgotten. It is difficult to make my memory remember them. Once I
do
remember, then I am in contact again, I can feel them, speak through them, and I can feel when they are used, yes.”

“See you later.”

“I do not understand the word ‘see’.”

“How do you perceive everything outside you … the stars, for example?”

“I am aware of them through specialized cells which translate the radiation received.”

“That is what I meant by ‘see’.”

“Then, Grace, I will ‘see’ you later.”

GRACE WENT BACK to the 48
^th
floor, and spent a few hours trying to rest. She found that pretty difficult. Her mind was buzzing with the implications. The Sellites had occupied Valhai for two thousand years! How could nobody have discovered that the orthogel was more than just a useful substance? Every thought led to a new question she needed to ask Arcan.

She made a meal for her mother, and went to find her. That was easy; Cimma was standing in front of the sarcophagus which contained the remains of her father. She was polishing the shining casket, humming to herself.

“Food, Magestra!” said Grace, using the ancient Cesan way of addressing her mother. It came from their sun Almagest, which in the old days had been Al-magest, the mother of life. In old times the word for mother had been magestra, shortened sometimes to maestra or even matra or matri in diminutive.

Her mother looked at her pityingly. “I don’t want any,” she said. “I don’t need food anymore.” She picked up the dagger and waved it in Grace’s direction reproachfully.

“You have to eat. I made this specially for you.”

“You eat it, Grace. You need some flesh on your bones.”

“Maestra, please. Please! You will be very sick if you don’t eat.”

“Not now, dear. There isn’t time. I’m too busy.”

Grace put the food down on one of the small tables, and left the room. She felt her eyes water. She didn’t know how to make somebody eat when they didn’t want to. Cimma was getting thinner and thinner, and each day she seemed one step further away from what was considered normal on Sell. She would have to bring Vion in again to see Cimma. Putting it off and pretending that her mother was getting better was unrealistic. Soon, she decided. She would try on her own for just a little bit longer. She owed that much to her mother.

A FEW HOURS later she was communicating personally with Diva. As soon as she had contacted Arcan he had expressed his concern about the donor girl. He told Grace that he thought there was something wrong with her. It had been an easy matter to ask Arcan to “patch” her through. The girl was amazed to find out that instead of Six, as she had expected, she was actually speaking to someone outside the bubbles.

“Are you all right, Diva?” Grace asked.

“I am fine.”

“Why did you ask for a doctor?” And, as she felt the girl’s hesitation. “I am a friend. You can tell me the truth. I will not let it be used against you, I promise.”

“Are you a friend of Six’s?”

“I am a friend of Arcan.”

“I don’t know who he is.”

“Well,
he
is a friend of Six’s.” Grace was stretching the truth a bit here, but if Arcan was going to save them both from death by suffocation, he was going to be the best friend either of them would ever have.

“All right.” Diva explained the situation to Grace. “I’m certain my father altered the marks,” she confided. “And if he did, they will know, because I won’t do so well on this test either. And I don’t know what they will do if I don’t get good enough marks.”

“I will see what I can do,” Grace promised, although she had no idea what that would be. She signed off.

Arcan had clearly been following the conversation with interest. “What is this test? Why are they being held in the bubbles? Which is this other world she comes from?”

It took Grace a long, long time to answer all his questions by signing. He was a voracious learner, it seemed, now that his capacity to interact with others had been awakened. He was a mixture of an ancient and a child. Nearly everything was new to him, but then he could say something totally anomalous which completely threw Grace.

“I saw that happen,” he said once. Grace opened her eyes. She had been talking about a collision with an asteroid, which had happened over twenty thousand years earlier on Cesis!

“Can you learn from Atheron?” she asked. “Like Six and Diva? Can you understand spoken words, too?”

“I will try. Not until now. I’m just learning.”

But he was learning
fast.

She asked to be “patched” through to Six. It didn’t seem fair to speak to Diva, and not to him. She found the boy far more suspicious than the girl had been. By a process of elimination he found out that she had to be a Sellite, and at that point in the conversation she found herself speaking to nobody. She shrugged. Maybe he would come around. It was natural that he should be so suspicious of her.

SIX PUNCHED OUT a swear word to Diva. “You shouldn’t have told her anything – she is a Sellite!”

“How was I supposed to know that? She said she was a friend of yours!”

“Honestly!” He was exasperated. “Didn’t they teach you
anything
at that fancy old school of yours?”

“At least
I
went to school, which is a whole lot more than you can say, Mr. ‘I haven’t got a name because I was born an outcast’.”

“Oh, excuse
me,
your majesty. Am I bothering you? I can always leave you to stew in your own juice, right?”

“You wouldn’t!”

“Insult me one more time and you will find out.”

“All right. I’m sorry.”

“This may not be a safe way to talk in any case,” he pointed out. “How did that girl … Grace … how did she know to talk to us like this, and how did she know the code we use?”

“She mentioned somebody else … Arcan, I think she said.”

“Arcan? Who in Sacras is he?”

“I am Arcan.”

“Diva, did you say that?”

“No, I received it too.”

“Who are you?”

“I already told you both, I am Arcan.”

“Whoa!”

“Weird!”

“If you both stop signing for a moment, I will explain. And you needn’t worry about Grace betraying you. She is a good person. Not like the rest of the Sellites at all.” Arcan let them into his secret.

“You
are
the bubble? Awesome!”

“Prove it!”

Immediately both the bubbles surrounding the two donors went into a multicoloured swirl of light. They were entranced.

“Hey!”

“Do that again!”

The colours died. “I am Arcan. I am Grace’s friend. I am your friend, so Grace is your friend. Do you understand?”

Six felt confused. “But she is a Sellite, isn’t she?”

“She will not tell anyone about all this. I am sure.”

Six was thinking. “Then, all this time that Diva and I have been signing to each other … all this time it was you?”

“I was simply acting as the intermediary.”

“So you know everything we talked about?” Six wasn’t liking this at all.

“I have been learning with you. Before I was too … basic … I couldn’t understand. Now I am beginning to understand it all.”

“Yeah, right. And I am supposed to believe all that!” Six said.

The bubble surrounding Six darkened suddenly. “Believe what you like. I think you are a very silly sample of your species.”

“Pot calling kettle, if you ask me, mate.”

“What is this pot, and this kettle? I do not understand.”

“There you go then.” Six smiled.