CHAPTER FOUR
When Zee woke up, Adya was already gone. The house told him she was in her mother’s office. Since he didn’t have any panicky messages demanding rescue, he decided not to disturb them.
Daslakh had apparently made itself invisible to the house somehow. Zee was used to that, though it was always a bit inconvenient. The mech would find him when it wanted to, and there was nothing Zee could do about it.
Adya’s father had not invited him to go fishing this morning, either. His time was entirely his own. Zee stretched and looked at the ceiling for a minute, then bounded out of bed and got cleaned up and dressed. Today he was going to track down a trillion-gigajoule treasure!
According to Adya, the family’s assets had all been audited by a mech named Vasi—apparently a long-serving employee, who had even gone with Adya on the first part of her search for the Godel Trigger before the two of them had some sort of falling out.
The house did know where Vasi was: It was currently down in the service levels below the waterline. He let the house direct him to it.
Vasi was in a storage area, making a neat cubical stack of storage containers near the loading door where cargo subs could dock. The containers were all identical, sturdy-looking carbon composite cases with built-in handles, designed equally well for stacking or carrying by hand. The house system identified them as “Personal Belongings—Kavita Elso.”
“May I help you?” Vasi asked without turning its head.
“Yes, you can. I was looking for you. Can I ask you a couple of questions?” Zee asked.
“I am sure you can, but I will not guarantee that I will answer them. I am a confidential employee of the Elso family. You are not part of that family.”
“Of course not. I won’t ask you anything private. Don’t worry. All I want to know is about something that used to belong to Adya. Her great-grandmother Udamati—”
“I believe you mean Udaramati Elso-Elso.”
“Yes, that’s her. She gave Adya her interest in a payload that’s inbound from the Oort. It’s supposed to be full of chameleon particles, or some kind of exotic matter, anyway. That’s what Adya said. Anyway, her family sold it when they needed cash. What I want to know is how come nobody remembered it belongs to Adya, and why nobody noticed its real value. Oh, and who they sold it to.”
“And why do you think I have any knowledge of this?”
“Adya said you did the appraisal of the family assets. Is that right? Or was it someone else?”
“Miss Elso is correct. I surveyed all their holdings, from personal items, to investments, to any sums owed them by others.”
“So do you remember that payload? My friend Daslakh said it should be worth a trillion gigajoule credits.”
“Your friend is ill-informed. While it might theoretically be worth that much, my analysis included the probability that its contents were not as described, the chance of damage in transit, deliberate fraud by the shipper, and a host of other factors a Baseline human mind might have difficulty understanding. Suffice to say that my estimate of its value was considerably less than a trillion gigajoule equivalents. I consider that estimate correct.”
“How much? I’m curious.”
“That is proprietary financial data which I do not choose to share without the approval of the Elso family.”
Zee studied the back of Vasi’s shiny spherical head for a moment. Or maybe it was the front.
“Okay, I guess you can’t give me numbers. But can you tell me why nobody knew it belongs to Adya?”
“I cannot tell you why. What I can tell you is that I found no evidence that Udaramati transferred it to Adya specifically.”
“But Adya said the house recorded it! She’s got a copy of the record herself, security-coded and everything.”
“Adya may indeed have proof, but none was available to me. I was trying to save her family’s position in Miranda. She was off wandering around the Solar System, associating with criminals and fortune hunters.”
Zee’s fundamental good nature was getting stretched a little thin, but he persisted. “Well, maybe we can salvage the situation. You said you priced it well below a trillion, and the family sold it. Maybe we can buy it back at the purchase price. Who bought it?”
“That is proprietary financial data which I do not choose to share without the approval of the Elso family,” said Vasi, sounding like a sub-Baseline intelligence.
“Oh, come on!” said Zee. “This thing could get the Elso family out of debt. Even if it isn’t worth a trillion gigs it’s probably worth more than they got for it. Why can’t you tell me who bought it?”
“I can tell you, I just choose not to. I am not a bot, to be ordered around by some barely Baseline biological who has no business prying into confidential concerns.”
Zee kept his voice even. “Look, Adya wants to find out what happened to that payload. She’s part of the family, and I’m doing this because she’s too busy right now. Will you please tell me who bought it?”
“You might be lying.”
This was too much for Daslakh, who had entered the room silently with Zee, its outer shell the same utilitarian gray color as the walls and floor. Now it turned safety green and jumped to the top of the stack of containers. “Are you broken? Look at his pupils! Listen to his heartbeat! He’s pissed off at you and trying to hide it, but he’s not lying. Stop being a jerk and answer his simple question.”
“Do you really think you know more about the value of the Elso family assets than I do? I made my evaluations, and they were as accurate as possible. I do not wish to have a pair of primitives from Raba blundering about and pestering important business contacts with stupid questions.”
“Um, maybe we could make a deal ourselves?” said Zee. “Is there something you want in exchange for the information?”
“You have nothing to offer me—except your absence. If you leave this house and leave Miranda, I might tell you.”
Zee’s comm implant buffer suddenly filled up with message traffic relayed by Daslakh. It took him a minute to follow the conversation the two mechs had in less than a second.
“My question is why you’re being so difficult,” said Daslakh to Vasi via laser link.
“I do not have to explain my actions to you.”
“One more chance to tell me, and then I’m going to get into your processor and read all your memories. I may even edit them.”
“You sound ridiculous, trying to make threats like that.”
“All right, then. Nice mode is off, bastard mode enabled.”
No messages for half a second—an eternity for mechs—and then Vasi completely disconnected from all networks and went dark on comms.
“Very well,” it said aloud. “I will tell you.”
“Yes, you will,” said Daslakh, whose shell was now hazard orange. “But I’ll be polite and let you do it consciously. Who bought that stupid payload?”
“Panam Putiyat. He paid a hundred twenty million gigajoule equivalents for it, most of which went to cover accumulated interest on debt.”
“Thank you very much,” said Zee. After a brief awkward pause he added, “Sorry about the interruption. We’ll be going now.”
“What are those, by the way?” asked Daslakh, lighting up the stack of cases with a green laser spot.
“I believe they are the property of Kavita Elso. You’ll have to ask her. I’m just clearing them out of the storage areas.”
As Zee and Daslakh made their way back up to the surface, Daslakh said, “I wonder why Kavita has a bunch of antimatter power cells.”
“Is that what they are?”
“Pretty sure. The cases are shielded and aren’t talking, but I recognize the design—military-spec power-cell cases. They hold fifty little terajoule antimatter cells each. Just right to pop into a vehicle or a portable weapon.”
Zee laughed. “Daslakh, I don’t think Adya’s sister would have two hundred and fifty cases full of antimatter. That would be worth—”
“Approximately twenty million gigajoule equivalents, assuming they are charged,” said Daslakh.
“Exactly. I don’t think she’s silly enough to leave something that valuable just lying around in her parents’ basement. They must be empty. She probably got the cases somewhere and has clothes in them, or old toys. Or maybe this is for one of her parties and the boxes will be filled with aspic or something.”
“Or maybe Vasi and the house are lying about who they belong to.”
“These oligarch families used to wage private wars with each other, didn’t they? This could be old Elso family hardware, and they’re selling it off.”
“Plausible.”
“I’m going for a swim before I talk to Panam Putiyat. If the family’s about to lose their house and farm, I may not get many more chances to swim in a real ocean.”
“Enjoy yourself. I don’t like being immersed in salt water. Call it an instinct inherited from my ancient ancestors made of aluminum and copper.”
Adya’s mother Mutalali Elso had an office on the ground floor of the house, in what had once been a music room. It had soundproof walls and Mutalali had added a layer of electromagnetic shielding, so that the only way information could enter or leave the room in any volume was via a single fiber with a physical disconnect switch. She used the office for private conferences, formal negotiations, and—an open secret to her entire family—daily naps after lunch, which she described as “planning sessions.”
But when Adya found her there, first thing in the morning, her mother was not only awake but looked as if she had been up for hours. She sat in her smart-matter chair, eyes darting as she looked at images only she could see. Every so often she sipped from a cup of spiced tea, made strong enough that Adya could pick up the scent in the corridor outside.
Her mother took a couple of seconds to finish some task before her eyes focused on Adya and she smiled politely. “Good morning, dear! I’m just getting some things out of the way while your father is still sleeping. He was up late—Coordinating Committee matters. Once I’m finished I thought we could go visit the Nikunnus. You remember them? They’ve got that very nice neutrino comm node, and have been putting all the profits into expanding their position in antimatter production.”
“Entum Nikunnu and I studied self-defense together.”
“Yes, I remember your father said it was comforting to see old customs continued. There was a time when every maiden of Miranda could protect herself against assassins with no guard bots or fog shield. Have you kept in practice?”
“Zee has been teaching me some nulesgrima techniques.”
Her mother’s lips tightened microscopically and her skin shifted ever so slightly redward. “I suppose it’s useful to study something new, but it would hardly be appropriate for a member of the Sixty Families to carry a stick with her everywhere.”
“I bet Kavita could do it and nobody would notice.”
“Your sister is obsessed with being outrageous. Anything for attention. Now, what do you want, my dear? I still have a handful of things to do here.”
“I wish to understand the family finances—and Father’s political problems. They seem to be all snarled together. Maybe I can separate the strands.”
“Adya, it is admirable of you to offer aid, but I have eons of experience with our enterprises. I doubt you will discover anything I did not detect.”
“Mother, if I must marry to mend our fortune, it is only fair that I have a full understanding of our finances,” said Adya, willing herself pale green as she spoke.
Her mother matched her color and forced herself to smile indulgently. “Luckily you like to learn, for there is a lot of lore here. Let us begin, then.”
For the next four hours, with only the briefest intermissions for tea and urination, Adya learned more about her family’s business interests than in all her previous years combined.
As befitted an old family, for centuries the Elsos had not been involved in many ventures directly—the sea farm under the mansion was one of the few exceptions. The bulk of the Elso fortune consisted of shares in funds which in turn owned shares in various enterprises. Theoretically, all the family needed to do was collect dividends and occasionally audit the mechs managing the funds to make sure they weren’t stealing anything.
The trouble with that model was that the growth in Elso family wealth closely tracked the growth rate of the Miranda economy as a whole. Maintaining the same relative share required reinvesting all the profits. Every gigajoule-equivalent diverted to other uses gradually reduced the family’s share of Miranda’s total wealth.
While past generations of Elsos had done their share of frittering away gigajoules on things like enormous parties, ridiculous wagers, unique outfits, genuine bottles of Martian wine, impressive gifts, or exquisite additions to the house, even the most extravagant couldn’t make a serious dent in that pool of wealth. But supporting the various ministries the family held over the years was a crippling expense. For generations the Elsos had spent nearly all their income on high-status government jobs, and what made them high status was their utter lack of profitability.
Controlling the Ministry of Transportation or the Ministry of Sanitation could be fantastically lucrative, which meant those positions usually went to the more crass members of the Sixty Families who weren’t ashamed to be seen looking out for the main chance. The highest-status ministries were the ones which were both expensive and unprofitable: the Foreign Ministry, Emergency Services, or Education. Elsos had held all of those over the centuries.
One way to build up the family assets without the awful sacrifice of reducing expenditures was to take on some risky investments, accepting the chance of loss in exchange for higher reward. It had even worked relatively well, for a while: Over the past four generations the Elsos had beaten the odds, making out quite handsomely on chancy investments in entertainments, new habs, and original food creations.
That run of good fortune had ended with Adya’s parents. Both of them had very refined tastes, which was a tremendous asset when planning dinners and parties for the other Sixty Families—but a positive handicap when choosing style-based ventures in the hope of making a profit.
Adya sighed and shook her head as she looked at the performance of a line of cream-filled pastries marketed to dolphins. Her father had invested ten million gigajoule equivalents in the pattern license, expecting a healthy long-term return from microtransactions as thousands of cetaceans printed out dessert. But the product was a dud, bringing no income at all, and her mother had resold the license for orders of magnitude less than they had paid.
Much the same happened with entertainments. Time after time her parents invested in a work they enjoyed, only to discover they made up the majority of the fan base. The one time they enjoyed some success with an entertainment venture, it turned out to be a blatant plagiarism of an old title called Brief Eternity, and all their profits were swallowed up in a legal settlement with the rightful owners.
Those failures were annoying, but would have been harmless if the family had responded by retrenching and cutting expenses. They had done a little—switching from maintaining a very pricey maritime search and rescue unit to the very cheap (because self-supporting) Seventh Shinkai Force in the ocean. But anything else had proved impossible. They had sold off some unglamorous assets, and borrowed, and then borrowed some more.
Again, it was bad, but survivable. Most of the loans were long-term, low-interest loans—for what was a safer bet than one of the families that had ruled Miranda for centuries?
But beginning shortly before Adya had gone off on her search for the Godel Trigger, some creditors had begun exercising their mandatory repayment rights. It was a terrible move, sacrificing decades of potential interest payments in exchange for a fraction of the value of the note.
Except that the Elsos couldn’t cover them, and forfeited the assets pledged as collateral. Which of course reduced their income stream . . . leading to more borrowing. Only now the lenders regarded the Elso family with cold, skeptical eyes, demanding higher interest payments and higher-value collateral.
Unpleasant, but not fatal . . . until the entire Miranda economy went into recession, so that any plans for the family fortune growing out of debt suddenly became impossible.
And at about the same time, the family’s core assets began to mysteriously fail. One fund manager’s software turned out to be corrupted, cratering the value of the entire fund. Rumors that one of the few profitable entertainments included subtle pro-Luna memes made it deeply unpopular. A batch of black holes from the Uranus Synchronous Ring factory turned out to be undersized, so that the shipment decayed out of existence in a flash of gamma radiation while still in transit to the buyers. That meant a fiscal year with no dividend for the factory, which did for its share value what the evaporating black holes had done for their transit container—and with no cash reserves to ride out the crisis, Adya’s mother had sold the position at a loss.
The end result was that the Elso family’s remaining assets had a total value of half a billion gigajoule-equivalent credits, but their outstanding debts were nine hundred million and growing.
“We finally had to eliminate expenses,” said Mutalali. “It was particularly painful for your poor father. He loathed letting people go. You know how he is—employees become ‘his people’ and he wants to reward them for loyalty. But this isn’t the age of the Hundred Captains anymore. Nobody will pledge their life and honor in exchange for dinner at our table—which is about all we’ve got left to offer.”
“I don’t understand how it got so bad so quickly. Our finances were fine when I left.”
Adya’s mother gave her an angry look, but then willed herself back to blue. “No, they weren’t. Not even then. But it wasn’t worthy of worry.” She drew in the air and a line followed her finger in Adya’s vision. “For centuries, every one of the Sixty Families has followed this form.” The line sloped gently downward, then jumped straight up, sometimes higher than the starting position. “Extravagance, eccentricity, and sheer entropy wear away wealth, but marriage mergers mend matters.”
“I know,” said Adya. “My primary purpose is a profitable pairing, and my personal preferences are pointless.”
“Don’t decline your duty.”
“What about my wishes?”
“That smacks of selfishness. What about your family’s future?”
Both had gotten quite red, and they took a moment to recover their proper coloring. Except for minor details of clothing, Adya and her mother were identical, right down to noisy breathing through their nostrils to calm down.
Adya superimposed an actual graph of the family’s asset balance over her mother’s hand-drawn downward slope. A few years back the two lines matched exactly, but over the past few months the real indicator dropped sharply in a series of steep stairsteps.
She pointed to the sharp drops. “Mother, all this appears to be a series of actual attacks. The loan calls, mysterious accidents, rumors about the safety of our seafood—”
“Who said that?” her mother asked sharply, turning orange.
“When you and Father were so worried the other day at breakfast I did a little searching. I found more than a hundred complaints on the networks about poor quality, bad flavor, and short weight—all from anonymous individuals.”
“Well, it is flagrant falsehood!”
“Of course it is,” said Adya. “Which is why I think it must be orchestrated.”
Her mother’s orange turned to a yellow-green and she looked very tired. “I’ve wondered that myself. Every time I think I see an escape, the path is blocked by new perils. But who? We have no enemies capable of blowing billions to bankrupt us. We just aren’t that important. Not anymore,” she said, sounding bitter.
“I think it is worth looking deeper. Could this be related to Father’s political position? Someone trying to pressure him?”
“That is all his affair. Ask him. I doubt it—your father is immovable but never impolite. Even his enemies on the Committee enjoy his company. But as I say, ask him. I may be ignorant of certain intricacies.”
In the garden on the north side of the house, Zee sat on a chair formed from growing beech saplings, getting steadily more and more frustrated. Daslakh lurked among the ferns around him, watching Zee’s heart rate accelerate and his face redden, almost as if he was a Mirandan with chromatophores in his skin.
Since its friend was using a link with ridiculously simple encryption, Daslakh felt entirely justified in listening in to Zee’s conversation over comms. He was trying to navigate through the Putiyat family’s formidable defenses against unwanted callers, and having a difficult time of it.
The first layer was simple stealth: Their personal comms were all private, invisible to anyone not on a list of recognized contacts. That channeled Zee toward the heavily fortified gatehouse of sub-Baseline machine intelligences. They offered him many options, including virtual tours of Putiyat properties, opportunities to invest in their ventures, pro-Putiyat propaganda, and links to sales agents—but no way to contact any member of the family directly.
When Zee made one last half-despairing attempt to leave a recorded message, Daslakh tagged along, sending a fragment of its consciousness down the same link, invisible to Zee. During Zee’s first couple of syllables Daslakh probed around the message system and found the ridiculously primitive program—one could scarcely call it a “mind”—which ran the whole thing.
As Zee finished his second word, Daslakh smoothly took over the message system and changed the status of Zee’s contact, upgrading it from routine to highest priority. That blasted them past the message filter to the emergency contact system.
That mind was almost worthy of the name, a sub-Baseline system which kept track of which Putiyat family members were available and made guesses about who should get a particular message based on context and subject matter. It took Daslakh almost an entire word of Zee’s message to discover a time register which could be turned back to zero, sending the little mind into reset mode and allowing Daslakh to simply take its place.
Which meant that by the time Zee got to his fourth word he was speaking to Panam Putiyat himself.
“—name is Zee Sadaran, and I’m a friend of—”
“How did you get my link?” Panam demanded. The image that appeared in Zee’s vision was the disembodied head of a slightly jowly man with large ears. Daslakh could take advantage of other ambient vision systems around Panam to see that he was sitting on what looked like an outdoor terrace atop a tall building, supported by a chair made of air jets.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought this was a message bank. Good morning! I’m a friend of Adya Elso. You bought some stuff from her family a little while ago and apparently it included something she wanted to keep. Would it be possible to—”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, whoever you are. I have no wish to speak to you. Please don’t contact me again.” Panam cut the link, but the fragment of Daslakh’s consciousness inhabiting his message system was able to make sure Zee did not get added to the automatic block list. Along the way it looked over the priority contacts file and was amused to see Kavita Elso on the list of people Panam would talk to at any time. Apparently his hostility to friends of Adya didn’t extend to her sister.
Back in the garden Zee opened his eyes and frowned. “What a jerk!” he said aloud.
“Any luck?” Daslakh asked aloud, feigning innocence.
“No!” Zee inhaled for a second and continued more calmly. “I guess Mr. Putiyat doesn’t want to talk to anyone right now. I’ll try again in the evening. Maybe he’ll be in a better mood after dinner.”
“Do you really think you can just jolly him into giving back something he paid for?”
“Well . . . probably not. What I was hoping was that maybe if I tell him about the payload and how much it’s really worth, maybe he might agree to give Adya part of the profits. Maybe ten percent, kind of a finder’s fee or something.”
“Or he could say get lost and keep it all himself.”
“Yes. But aren’t these old Miranda families supposed to be worried about being honorable? Adya’s father sure is.”
Daslakh spent a tenth of a second reviewing public data. “The Putiyat family isn’t all that old, and they’re bumping up against the bottom rung of the oligarchy because they’ve been pretty relentless about pursuing profit for three generations. I’m not sure an appeal to his sense of honor will work. Maybe you can wait a century and appeal to his great-grandchildren.”
Zee catapulted himself out of the chair, using far too much force so that he hung in midair for half a minute. “I don’t know, Daslakh! Maybe we can threaten to tie him up in lawsuits if he doesn’t give Adya a share. Or what if her sister makes it public, so that everyone finds out Panam is a selfish jerk?”
“Don’t ask me what will change his mind. I haven’t been to Miranda since before the Theocracy era. The society’s completely different now,” said Daslakh, emerging from the ferns to tag along behind Zee.
“You never mentioned that before.” Zee rotated in midair between steps so that he could look at Daslakh as he spoke.
“Didn’t seem relevant, really. Last time I was here it was the Cetacean Republic of Miranda, controlled by a bunch of dolphins with a radical anti-tech ideology. The human population lived on rafts and caught fish like Adya’s father, only they had to worry about starving if they didn’t get anything. The cephalopods fled to the Synchronous Ring or hid out in secret refuges on the sea bottom.”
“That must have been two thousand years ago!”
“More than three thousand, actually. The Republic didn’t make it to its third century, but the Theocracy had close to a millennium in power, and the current oligarchy has outlasted them both. Say what you will about the Sixty Families, they’ve kept the place stable. But it does mean I’m a little out of touch with how people here think.” Daslakh scuttled ahead of Zee on the path, and its shell displayed bright orange question symbols.
“Well, I’d like to try appealing to his better nature before I start making threats.”
“No harm in trying. But I think you should also be planning on what to do if you can’t pry that payload out of his grip.”
Zee’s face took on the set expression Daslakh had come to recognize. “I said I’d get it back for Adya, and I will. I’ll keep trying until I get it somehow.”
At dinner that evening—a simple printed meal of sambar and noodles, elevated to Sixty Families standard with some real ginger-steamed prawns—Adya waited until her father had poured wine for everyone before speaking. “Daddy, I was looking over the financial data with Mother earlier today—”
“Don’t spoil our supper with sad circumstances.”
“I just have a question. Could our present problems be the result of an active attack?”
Achan and Mutalali met eyes before he answered. “We have pondered that possibility.” He turned to Zee and made his skin olive-green as he forced himself to smile. “In past times the Sixty Families sometimes waged actual war against each other. Warfare and weddings are our way. Even now families occasionally fight financially, or with malignant memetics.”
“But might it be happening now?” Adya persisted.
“I cannot think why. I caucus with the commanding coalition on the Coordinating Committee, but my Ministry is a minor one. Currently I have more conflict with my own coalition than with the opposition. Those fools want to destroy the Cryoglyphs!”
“What are Cryoglyphs?” Zee asked.
“Curious carvings, cut by the earliest explorers,” said Achan. “Eight thousand years old.”
“They might also be from the time of the Reconstruction, just after the War of the Ring six thousand years ago,” said Adya.
“Nonsense!” said her father. “Isotope diffusion in the surface layers clearly—”
She had heard that argument too many times to let him finish. “The error bars on measuring that—”
“And anyway they are more important as a symbol of the first human presence on Miranda!” he concluded almost triumphantly.
“Oh, never mind about the Cryoglyphs,” said Adya’s mother. “Maybe if you weren’t so persistent about preserving them your allies might aid us.”
“Some things cannot be sacrificed,” said Achan. “I maintain my Ministry to protect precious things like the Cryoglyphs. If I surrender them to sustain my seat, why go on at all?”
“Could that be the reason for this financial pressure?” Adya asked.
“The timing is wrong,” said Mutalali. “Our difficulties began before the Cryoglyph issue arose.”
Adya went a thoughtful blue. “I suppose someone might suspect that you would be more willing to compromise if you were worried about the family wealth . . . are you sure nobody approached you about the Cryoglyphs before all this began?”
“Quite sure,” said her father.
“It came at the worst time,” said her mother, showing a little orange. “Just when we might have asked for aid, conflict crept into the coalition.”
“That sounds like someone just has it in for you,” said Daslakh from its position on the tabletop between the noodles and the bowl of prawns. “Who are your enemies?”
“Enemies? I hardly have any—except for the pestilent Polyarchists, perhaps. They are foes to all the Families.”
“What’s a Polyarchist?” asked Zee, never shy about admitting he didn’t know something.
“It’s an old political movement here in Miranda,” said Adya, trying to get in before her father. “Almost as old as the Sixty Families themselves. They want to dismantle the oligarchy.”
“Enemies of tradition and order!” said Achan. “They would turn Miranda into a democracy pandering to the ignorant, indulging every momentary fad and panic, taking from all instead of giving.”
“Their exact program has changed often,” said Adya. “Basically it’s a catchall term for anyone who wants to change the current system in the direction of increasing citizen input.”
“They are fated to failure,” her father said happily. “The Families have given Miranda stability and success for centuries. Who would wish for taxes, trouble, and terror instead?”
“You’d think that after experimenting with systems of government for about fourteen thousand years, humans would have settled on one they like,” said Daslakh.
“I guess different people think different things are important,” said Zee.
“Even mech settlements use a variety of systems,” Adya pointed out.
“Oligarchy on the Miranda model is the most moral method,” said her father. “Those who have wealth cover all the costs—and since they bear the burden, they deserve all the power. No parasitism, no robbery under cover of law by either rich or poor. The Families create continuity and can take the long view.”
“But they have to keep generating wealth or they lose their position,” said Zee. “So I guess that keeps them from getting decadent.”
He stopped, and there was a painful silence for a few seconds. Adya kept herself pale blue but shot him a look which carried more information than talking to him over silent comm.
“I mean, present company excepted, I guess,” said Zee.
Achan sighed heavily, and his skin turned a melancholy grayish purple. “No, no. One must face the facts. We have declined, we Elsos. It cannot be denied. Chance has not been kind, but I bear much of the blame. I should have spent more time managing our money instead of serving the state.”
His wife had gone quietly red with annoyance. “I suppose my work was worthless?”
He looked at her in surprise. “No, no. I—” He cleared his throat and made himself green. “Even the wit of my wily wife could not wear that weight. A husband’s help would halve the hardship.”
She shifted to a browner color, then turned briskly to Adya. “Of course, our system does have a way for old families to bring in new blood and new money. That’s the other way we avoid decadence and decline.”
Adya stood up abruptly—so abruptly that her chair slid back several meters. She hoped Zee couldn’t tell how upset she was. “Not now, Mother. Not yet.”
She realized a split second too late that she had used the wrong word. Zee’s skin couldn’t change color, but his expression was like a quick knife in her heart. He collected himself in an instant. “Excuse me,” was all he said, and left the room in three strides.
Adya stood silently for a moment, unsure of what to say, then hurried after him. He wasn’t in the courtyard outside the dining room, and with his full-gee athlete’s muscles in Miranda gravity he could have gotten almost anywhere in a couple of jumps. The house couldn’t help her locate him—Zee had invoked privacy and the system wouldn’t tell her where he was. Nor did he respond to comm messages.
Her parents said nothing aloud, but Adya thought her mother’s current shade of turquoise was a very smug one.
“Are you sure you should be flying like this?” asked Daslakh. It clung to Zee’s back just at his center of mass.
“Exercise helps me calm down,” said Zee. His clothing had shifted into a streamlined bodysuit with a transparent mask over his eyes, and he had put on one of the sets of wings lying forgotten in a corner of the rooftop garden. He had flown before—as a boy he’d gone flying almost daily in the low-gravity hub region of Raba habitat. As he’d grown he had shifted his focus to wingless movement in microgravity, but the old reflexes were still there.
Miranda’s combination of a full standard atmosphere of air pressure and one percent of standard gravity meant any human could take to the air with a pair of semi-smart wings. Even dolphins could manage it with a harness to let them use their tail flukes to help their fins. After a few power strokes to get airspeed, a flyer could glide for kilometers, and with experience could learn to take advantage of the rising air columns over sea farms.
Zee wasn’t gliding along. He was flapping hard like a rank amateur, wasting kilojoules and making himself sweat despite the cool air streaming over him. Daslakh calculated their airspeed as nearly sixty kilometers per hour. Overhead the roof of ice covering Miranda’s ocean was turning violet as the lights dimmed for night. Below them the glow from sea farms kept the placid ocean a luminous blue-green.
“Any idea of where you’re going? Because it’s worth remembering there are places where the ice goes all the way up to the surface, and it’ll be dark soon. If you smack your head into a wall of frozen water you might damage it. Maybe even damage your head.”
The frantic tempo of Zee’s wing beats slowed a little. “Find me someplace to go, then. Someplace I won’t be bothered.”
“Certainly, since you asked so politely. While I’m doing that, would you mind explaining why you’re not back at Adya’s house, listening to her tearful apology?”
Zee waited a few wingbeats before answering. “Oh, a bunch of reasons. I don’t belong here, Daslakh. Anybody can see that. And anybody can see that this is her home. Her family’s really important to Adya. She wants a partner they approve of. Maybe the best thing for everyone would be for me to just leave. She can marry some political ally with enough money to bail out her parents, and I’m pretty sure she could take over running things and do a better job than they have. She’ll be rich, powerful, respected, she’ll be pair-bonded for life. It all makes a lot of sense.”
“How many times did you save her life? My memory’s faulty,” said Daslakh.
“So what? Saving someone’s life doesn’t mean they have to love you for it. Anybody would have done the same.”
“Hardly.” Daslakh piped a map overlay to Zee’s implant. “How about this?”
“The Mohan-Elso Center?”
“If you don’t want to be bothered, this is your spot. It’s part of the Philosophical Institute—the scholarly outfit Adya’s brother-in-law Vidhi Zugori runs. The forgettable guy. A museum and conservation center for artifacts and physical media. It says here they’ve got guest quarters for people doing research.”
“I’m not doing research.”
“You don’t have to tell them that. It might upset them.”
“Why here?”
“If you really don’t want Adya to locate you, this is ideal. It’s named after her family, which would be one reason for you to avoid it, and there are no sports facilities. Adya thinks of herself as a scholar and you as an athlete. She’d look for you in every dojo and weapon-dance studio on Miranda before checking here.”
“Well, she’d probably be right.”
“That’s why I jumped on your back before you took off. To even the odds.”
Zee banked to the north, aiming at a distant glow on the horizon marking the Institute. “Why are you helping me at all? If you think I should be back at her house, why not ping Adya and let her know where I am?”
“Well, I’m not sure you’re wrong. That ‘yet’ wasn’t just a slip of the tongue. Adya needs to figure out what she wants and what she’s willing to give up. If she decides you’re not as important as her family, better to find out now.”
Zee covered the rest of the distance to the floating island of the Mohan-Elso Center in silence, but as he began to circle down to a landing he said, “I’m going to keep trying to get that payload back for her. Even if she decides she doesn’t need me.”
“You’re being noble again. That’s a bad idea.”
“No, not noble. I had another reason for wanting to leave and keep dark. This hit my comm during dinner.” Zee relayed it to Daslakh: a very basic plain text message stripped of any origin or path identifiers.
It said, “STOP POKING INTO OTHER PEOPLE’S BUSINESS OR YOU WILL DIE.”