CHAPTER SEVEN
Adya’s mother began getting her ready for the simple informal tea party at the Nikunnu krill farm seven hours in advance.
The first order of business, as soon as Adya woke up, was to select the perfect outfit. Mutalali had already applied semiotic software and color analysis to narrow the options to a dozen possibilities, but she insisted on actually seeing Adya wear them before deciding which would strike just the right note.
So Adya tried to snatch mouthfuls of green-pea cheela for breakfast between trying things on while the printer hummed away, and rather grimly twirled and posed in the clothes her mother handed her.
“If you merely want to show off how attractive I am, I could just wear some slippers and a tiara.”
“Are you Kavita, playing a prank? Because Adya would know perfectly well that clothing is communication. We want you to show off your social position, your education and intellect, and what an asset you would be to an alliance. You can always change your body if you need to.”
“I feel like a Qarina.”
“I’m not even going to ask what that means. How about this one?” Mutalali handed Adya a newly printed outfit—a pair of loose trousers which gathered in at the ankles, paired with a long-sleeved, high-necked, but backless dark top.
“Your posture has always been good,” said her mother approvingly as Adya gave a spinning jump to rotate in midair.
“It feels a little old-fashioned,” said Adya. “Wasn’t this the kind of thing people were wearing at your wedding?”
“Respect for tradition is another quality we want to emphasize.”
“What are they wearing in Juren nowadays?”
“That is infinitely irrelevant. This is Miranda, and the Sixty Families lead fashion rather than follow it. I’m not sure about that color, though. Try the next one.”
The next was a simple stretchy tube extending from armpits to knees, in a green that was almost black with an iridescent sheen, with matching detached sleeves. Adya actually liked it, but tried to sound unconcerned. “I can tolerate this one.”
“Hm. Not very cheerful . . .”
“Serious. Restrained. Purposeful,” Adya suggested. Inside, she wondered what Zee would think of it. Elegant? Or intimidating?
“I see the sense of it,” said her mother. “And I see that you like it, which helps. Now peel it off and get yourself bathed and perfumed. We want the scents to have time to fade.”
When Adya was clean and wrapped in a furry towel, Mutalali helped her daughter select jewelry from her own collection. Just before Adya got dressed for action, her mother advised her on implant settings. “Make sure you regulate your neurotransmitters and hormones. Confidence, serenity—”
“And unthinking obedience.”
“Don’t be tiresome. We want to make a good first impression.”
“Hardly a first impression—I’ve known Entum Nikunnu since we were children.”
“They’ve changed quite a bit.”
“I hope so. When we were taking classes together I thought Entum was too boring. I wasn’t that fond of self-defense myself, but at least I tried. They just seemed to take naps all the time.”
Her mother chuckled very softly but then got a freshly printed copy of Adya’s outfit for her to put on.
Their departure was timed to the second. “The exact moment is important,” said Mutalali. “Exactly on time looks desperate. Too late and we would seem careless—or worse, trying to make an entrance. Ten minutes after the start time shows a nice insouciance without being disrespectful.”
“I like being on time,” said Adya. “It’s simpler. What if everyone else is thinking the same things you are? Then we’ll all be ten minutes late and poor Dipa Nikunnu will be sitting there wondering if anybody is going to show up at all.”
“I’ve already considered that. There is an art to arriving at any affair—it’s yet another kind of communication. If you always show up exactly on time people will think you literal-minded and pedantic.”
“Everybody already thinks that about me,” said Adya. “Maybe I should just send Kavita instead. She’s good at parties.”
“I specifically asked her to send her regrets. The last thing we want is for her to monopolize all the attention while you drift away and start looking at old artifacts or something.”
“Mother, I’m only going to this tea party because I don’t want to fight about it. I’ll eat some steamed buns and smile and nod and maybe try to correct some popular misconceptions about the War of the Ring or the Godel Trigger legend. That’s all.”
“Have you heard from your friend Zee recently? As I recall he left somewhat abruptly. He might be on a cycler back to whatever hab he came from already.”
“I know for a fact he’s still in Miranda,” said Adya. She suspected Daslakh might be helping Zee maintain privacy in the infosphere, but she had blanketed the spaceport with software agents, sniffing for any traces of his passage. They hadn’t detected Zee—or any suspiciously Zee-shaped areas of privacy, either.
It wouldn’t be like him, either. If Zee had actually decided to break up with her, he would come and tell her so, face to face. This current absence was just a time out. That was what her rational adult mind kept telling the anxious girl inside her head.
“All right, it’s time,” said Mutalali. They boarded a bubble and rode through the tubes to the Nikunnu manor, two hundred kilometers away.
The party was held under water, in a diamond sphere attached to the central spine of the Nikunnu krill farm. Guests arriving by bubble could walk in dry, while dolphins, cephalopods, or humans who lived nearby could enter through a membrane at the bottom of the sphere. Platforms scattered throughout the volume of the sphere offered places to sit in little groups, and serving bots hummed through the air with cups of tea or broth and platters of snacks. A corvid musician played a jhallari to smooth over any gaps in conversation.
Adya followed her mother into the sphere and looked around at the guests already there. Mutalali made a faint satisfied sound, so Adya figured they must have arrived at what she judged the proper moment.
Looking at the others present, Adya suspected her mother had “helped” Dipa Nikunnu draw up the guest list. Most were Elso family connections—including Adya’s sister Sundari and one of her husbands—and Adya noted with some dismay that she was literally the only unmarried person present.
Just to avoid the blatant stock-show aspect of the whole event, Dipa had invited one person of importance who was unconnected to either Elsos or Nikunnus, and who was neither in the marriage market nor had offspring who were. Yudif Al-Harba was the Marshal of Miranda’s armed forces. The job was one of the few important posts that the Sixty Families deliberately gave to an outsider. Yudif had spent ten standard years in the army of Luna, another couple of decades as a warrior-monk tending the Exawatt laser inside Pluto, and had been serving as Logistics Director in the big Talos hab complex between Earth and Mars when it was hired to command Miranda’s military.
“Of course I remember you,” it said when Adya stopped to pay her respects. Yudif’s body was entirely smart matter, shaped for the occasion into a tall, broad-shouldered form, wearing a dress uniform in Uranus blue-green with a deep red sash. The clear diamond sphere holding its brain was perched on top, with colored lights to make the support fluid glow in the proper emotion display colors. “Your sister speaks of you often.”
“You’re a fan of Kavita’s?”
“Not her stream, if that’s what you mean. Not enough time for that. No, we do topiary together.”
“Topiary? With real plants?”
“Affirmative. Her husband’s uncle introduced us and I was surprised to learn she and I share an interest in all forms of plant art—bonsai, espalierage, ikebana, topiary, even fruit shaping.”
Adya was a little surprised to learn that as well, since Kavita had never shown the slightest interest in plants at all, but she did the proper thing and said, “That’s fascinating. Where is your garden?”
“Defense headquarters! One privilege of rank: I can start clipping and rearranging the plants in the roof garden and nobody can tell me to stop.” It sent her some images. “As you can see, I try to evoke a mood through the shapes of the branches and the colors of the leaves. Pride, enthusiasm, and duty.” The liquid in its brain sphere shone pinkish-mauve with excitement.
Adya closed her eyes to see the images better. She could see a little of what Yudif meant—the shrubs grew tall, spreading their leaves like bursting fireworks, all in neat rows like soldiers on parade. “Do you use semiotic models to come up with the forms?”
“That’s for dabblers,” said Yudif. “I started out that way, back in Talos. Now I trust my instincts and try to find the shapes that feel right.”
While Yudif spoke Adya did a quick search and found that, yes, Kavita actually had done many hours about plant art. Most of it consisted of her touring other people’s gardens, but there were a few episodes of her working on what Adya recognized as the rooftop of the Elso manor.
“Do you modify the genes, as well?”
“I know my limits. I leave that to—”
“I beg your pardon, Marshal,” said Adya’s mother, taking her daughter firmly by the arm. “I have to borrow Adya for a few minutes.”
“Of course, of course. I know all about the social round,” said Yudif, but Adya could see the fluid in the brain sphere turn a little bluer with regret.
“What is it, Mother?” Adya murmured as they moved away.
“Entum’s here.”
Entum Nikunnu was the last to enter the sphere, bursting in with a big smile and blown kisses all around, in a way that Adya found very reminiscent of her sister Kavita. Also like Kavita, Entum had dressed to draw attention. If Mutalali wanted to emphasize Adya’s social position and intellectual qualities, Entum’s outfit was all about their body: a mass of colored ribbons sliding through the air around Entum’s torso, hovering a couple of centimeters from the skin and alternately concealing and revealing everything.
In blade training a decade before, Entum had been a skinny, apathetic neuter. Even the changing colors of their skin had seemed washed-out and weak. All the Nikunnu children were born neuters to maximize their marriageability. But apparently the moment Entum reached the age of body autonomy they’d gone all-in on sexuality. Now they were a tall, muscular, buxom hermaphrodite with a winning smile and rosy skin.
“Adya!” they called from across the room, and covered the distance in a single jump. “It’s been too long—you’ve changed so much!”
“Just a little taller,” said Adya, still a bit overwhelmed.
“Nonsense. You’ve become a beauty!” Entum looked over at Mutalali. “Though at first I wasn’t sure which of you was which. You were wise to have clones.”
“Actually, there are some genetic differences,” Adya began, before her mother gently pressed her foot down on Adya’s toes. “Thank you, though.”
“The last time I saw you was at Himana Dumakethu’s betrothal party,” Entum continued. “I was just twelve.”
“I would have been thirteen. All I remember about that party was the decorations—the dome of the ballroom was zero-albedo black with a real-time image of the sky from the surface overlaid on it. For just a moment I thought I was actually seeing through the ice.”
Entum laughed. “The fanciest party that year and you spent the whole time staring at the ceiling! I remember the dancing. Everyone looked so lovely.”
“You are both too young to be nestling in nostalgia,” said Mutalali.
“I hear you’ve been having adventures,” said Entum, getting pinker with excitement.
Adya felt her mother tense up a little, and in response she willed her own skin to a rosy enthusiastic color and spoke a little more loudly. “Yes, it was all terribly thrilling. At first I was just doing some historical research, hunting the roots of a legend.”
“The famous Godel Trigger!”
“The same. And as I searched, I came to suspect that others were seeking it as well.”
“Adya, Entum doesn’t want to hear a lot of hoary old history,” said her mother.
“Oh, I do! I love to learn about life in other worlds and habs. You went to one of the Saturn cities, didn’t you?”
“Yes, a place called Paoshi. A balloon city floating in the clouds.”
Adya’s mother patted her shoulder gently and went off to confer with Dipa Nikunnu and another matron. Adya and Entum drifted over to the clear diamond wall of the sphere. Outside a couple of whales moved slowly past—customers enjoying the Nikunnu krill.
Entum was an excellent listener, which surprised Adya. They leaned close, eyes locked with Adya’s, as she described her course across the Solar System from Miranda to Saturn to the Uranus Ring to Summanus and finally to the surface of Mars.
“You seem fairly fond of this Zee fellow,” Entum observed. “What happened to him?”
“Oh, he’s here on Miranda. He—wasn’t invited to tea today.” Adya couldn’t avoid a momentary flicker of muddy blue.
“Is he a good lover?” asked Entum, bending their head a little closer to hers.
For just an instant Adya felt as though a bucket of cool water had poured over her head. All her social worries and frustration with her mother and uncertainty and guilt seemed to just wash away, down into the pool at the bottom of the sphere. Her brain was actually working for the first time in days.
She looked at Entum and took one of their hands in hers. “I love him. More than I’ve loved anyone else. I want to spend my life with him. This whole marriage alliance is just some scheme of my mother’s.”
Entum laughed with delight. “Wonderful!” They glanced around and then spoke more quietly. “I’m happy to hear your heart is his. That makes matters much simpler. All we need to do is skip the neurological bonding. Make the marriage alliance our mothers have managed, but stay free to love whoever we want. It’s the perfect solution to our problems! Your family gets my family’s money, we get your family’s status, you get your darling and I get—everyone else! We could even share him, once in a while. Always good for a couple to have something in common.”
Adya thought for a moment before speaking. Ten minutes earlier the idea would have been more than tempting. Satisfy her mother with the form of a marriage, without losing Zee—as Entum said, it seemed like a perfect solution.
But after the flood of clarity she’d just experienced, Adya could see it was a terrible idea. Her mother and Dipa would agree but disapprove, and neither was very good about hiding their disapproval. Entum meant well, but Adya couldn’t imagine the idea of sharing a household with a succession of their sexual dalliances, and the endless cycle of infatuation and breakup with all the obligatory drama. Zee would stay with her, honoring his promises as he always did, but he had no place in Sixty Families society. How long would their relationship endure the strain?
And, finally, there was Adya herself. In that moment she was suddenly certain that she didn’t want to spend the next century shoring up the family finances, attending social events she didn’t enjoy, and trying to run the lives of the next generation of Nikunnu-Elso offspring.
“We could slip away right now and seal the deal,” said Entum. “Shock our mothers and satisfy them at the same time.”
Adya smiled and leaned forward to whisper in Entum’s ear. “I can’t do this, Entum. I can’t marry you.”
They looked startled at that, and stared into Adya’s eyes for a second. “You’re willing to give up being in one of the Families for your lover?”
“It looks as if I have to. Can you get me out of here?”
“Come on. Pretend we’re going to my room.”
Hand in hand, they bounded across the sphere to a platform near the door, and left without looking back. On the lift platform Entum did try to change Adya’s mind one last time, by kissing her with great feeling and expertise, while their hands gently touched her in places she hadn’t even known were erogenous zones.
She pushed Entum away with one hand. They looked puzzled. “Are you all right?”
Adya actually had to catch her breath. The sullen little neuter child was gone, and Entum’s years of obsessive practice had made them amazingly skillful. They knew just where, how, and when to touch her. Any more of that and she might find herself agreeing to anything.
“I really do have to go,” she said. “I’m trying to save my family’s wealth so I don’t have to marry anyone, and I’ve got a meeting. Can you cover for me?”
Entum looked at her a little regretfully, their color shifting to a melancholy deep blue. “We really won’t wed.”
“No, we won’t. I’m sorry, Entum. I still like you. But . . . it wouldn’t work.”
“I agree.” They looked up at her shyly, purpling a little. “Sure you don’t want a farewell fuck? At least you’ll know what you’re giving up.”
Adya smiled and shook her head. “Not today.”
“You need to conquer your self-control,” said Entum. “All right, I’ll go up to my room and take a long shower, then go back to the party and act smug. Good luck at your meeting.”
“Thank you,” said Adya. As the platform reached the main floor of the mansion she took a step closer and gave Entum a peck on the cheek. They responded with a one-finger brush on the side of her neck which made her entire body tingle.
Adya turned determinedly away and summoned a bubble to the tube entrance just outside the front door. She had full privacy up, and her mother wouldn’t even start wondering about where she was for another hour or so.
Within minutes she was streaking along the seafloor to the city of Svarnam, which was the last known location of Pulu Visap.
Svarnam was big, dense city—a floating arcology in the form of a disk five kilometers across with a hundred levels, home to nearly ten million people. The top was devoted to parks and gardens, and in the center was Viranmar Plaza, a half-kilometer circular space four levels below the top and open to the sky. Adya left her bubble at the terminus at the edge of the plaza and walked to the center, where a statue of Sakigake, the possibly mythical first dolphin inhabitant of Miranda, stood balanced on a needle-pointed plinth so that the statue rocked and turned in stray air currents, as if swimming. Adya walked slowly around the statue, looking out at the edge of the plaza.
This was the center of public social life in Svarnam. A hundred bars, dance halls, restaurants, cafés, and theaters lined the rim. Adya could see at least a dozen empty storefronts, slightly shocking in such a popular location.
Of the survivors, which was the most fashionable? Normally Adya would simply look for a list somewhere, but she knew that for the ultra-hip of Miranda, any place on a list of “fashionable places” was by definition unfashionable. Fortunately Adya had an in-house authority on ultra-hipness. She pinged Kavita.
Her sister was on the surface, watching a display of plasma art at Trinculo Crater. She was suited up, in a crowd of people looking up at a kilometer-wide curl of blue-glowing nitrogen as it pulsed and writhed, kept excited by precisely tuned lasers and shaped by magnetic fields. For about a minute Adya (along with eighty thousand of Kavita’s followers accessing her feed) just admired the view.
Then Kavita responded privately. “Isn’t it great? The artist’s a Defense Service officer but I discovered his work and helped him arrange this show.”
“It’s lovely. I just have a quick question. I’m at Viranmar Plaza in Svarnam. If you were here, which place would you choose?”
“Right now? Velli’s, for prawns and wine. Then Midayi for tea and dessert on the balcony. See who’s playing at Kuthira’s and do some dancing, then finish up at Anpathi-Onnu.” Above Kavita the plasma began to branch into fractal filaments, spreading across the sky.
“Thanks.”
“Why are you hanging out at Viranmar? I thought you were at that party with the Nikunnus that Mother insisted I couldn’t attend.”
“I’m doing some research.” Adya knew from long experience that if she wanted to keep something secret, Kavita was the worst possible person to tell it to. If Pulu Visap had scrubbed her presence from the datasphere, she might make a run for it if she knew Adya was trying to meet her in person.
“Well, good luck, cutie. Tell me what you discover.”
Adya did her best to follow Kavita’s itinerary. At Velli’s she was a little surprised at the welcome she got. “You’re Kavita’s sister? So nice of you to stop in!” They put her at a table down in front, so that anyone coming in would see her. She didn’t mind as it let her get a good look at all the other customers as they entered.
Her parents had taught Adya to savor her meals, but her time off Miranda had made her more efficient about dining. She made an effort to linger over her prawns—they really were excellent—and had to guard against the human waiter’s attempts to keep her wine glass topped off. It was a nice white grown by a family she knew, but Adya wanted to keep her wits and senses sharp.
She did manage a quiet conversation with the headwaiter about Pulu Visap. “Oh, yes. A regular customer, very friendly and generous with the staff. No, I haven’t seen her here this afternoon, or yesterday, either, now that I think of it. Shall I mention you asked about her? I see. Well, you can rely on my discretion.”
When she transferred her observation post to Midayi the response was equally effusive. “Welcome, Miss Elso! This way, Miss Elso! Give our regards to your lovely sister, Miss Elso!” It was a little cloying, but the tea and cakes certainly were delicious. Kavita was always satisfied with the best.
From her little table on the vine-draped balcony, Adya could survey the plaza below. As the sky dimmed, the crowd thickened. Most of them were legacy humans or mers, but there were plenty of dolphins—either wearing walkers or just balancing on their tail flukes.
Here and there she could see cephalopods, the support gel on their skins glistening in the twilight. A couple of giant humans were showing off, juggling standard-sized humans and dolphins between them. More and more volunteers leaped into the game until the giants struggled to keep a dozen people aloft.
Overhead a few angels were skydancing with a flock of humans wearing wings, and high above them a dragon and a pterosaur wheeled and swooped impressively.
Even the sight of half a dozen of Kavita’s chongs—the obsessive fans who paid for licensed face copies and wore printed versions of whatever she had on today—didn’t diminish Adya’s contentment. They all displayed virtual tags with Kavita’s latest catch phrase “Feel the energy rising!”
This was the Miranda Adya loved—the cosmopolitan hub of wealth and culture in the Uranian system. It might lack the system-spanning power of Deimos or the sheer scale of Juren, but Miranda was a place people could fall in love with. The Sixty Families, for all their selfishness and folly, had accomplished that.
For Adya that sense of comfort and pride had a prickly edge. Her travels had taken her to many other worlds, so she could see more of Miranda’s flaws as well as its virtues. She loved it the way she loved her family: affection tinged with exasperation.
The human teishu in charge of the tea was too discreet to talk about any of the other customers, but the bot carrying a tray of sweets did respond to carefully worded questions. Pulu Visap was not present at that time. Did Adya Elso want any tea cakes? Pulu Visap had last visited Midayi Tea Garden ten hours previously. Did Adya Elso wish for a non-menu item? Midayi Tea Garden did not archive recordings of patrons for public access. Did Adya Elso require a Baseline staff member?
She paid up and hustled over to the Anpathi-Onnu nightclub. It might be unfashionably early, but if her quarry was in or around Viranmar Plaza, that was the best place to look.
Anpathi-Onnu was listed as a private venue, not open to the public. But unlike any genuine private club, there was no software to recognize members by facial features or comm implant tags. Instead, a corvid perched next to the entrance and scrutinized everyone approaching. For some the door swung open as they reached it, and they went on in, perhaps with a friendly nod to the bird. For others the door stayed shut. The bird ignored all complaints, offers of bribes, and threats.
The corvid looked at Adya and cocked her head to one side. After a nerve-wracking pause, the door opened and Adya went on in. Once again she found herself in the unaccustomed position of being glad Kavita was her sister.
Anpathi-Onnu was actually underneath the plaza. Inside the door there was a five-meter drop down a shaft decorated with masks of musicians, dancers, and storytellers who had performed there. Carefully designed air currents and a smart-matter floor cushioned Adya’s landing.
The club was dark and labyrinthine, with plenty of private nooks and secluded tables. Clever design gave every seat a sightline to the performance stage in the center. At the moment a pair of dolphins were singing a buzzing beat counterpoint.
Adya quickly discovered that the club didn’t reveal who was or wasn’t present, and that suggested she wouldn’t get much out of the staff, either. So instead she spent fifteen minutes trying to act like she knew where she was going as she explored the three-dimensional maze of Anpathi-Onnu.
When she was reasonably sure that Pulu Visap wasn’t at any of the shadowy tables, Adya took a vacant seat with a good view of the entrance.
By now her mother had figured out that she wasn’t at the Nikunnu house anymore, and the messages and comm requests were piling up. Adya ignored them, and felt a slight wicked thrill at doing so. She would probably have to endure a lot of more-in-sorrow when she finally got home, but for now she was on her own.
The dolphins finished their set, did backflips off the stage, and hopped on their tails toward the dressing rooms. An idea struck Adya, and she hurriedly scanned through the performance archive for Anpathi-Onnu over the past few weeks, then moved briskly across the club, trying to catch up with the singers before they got away.
She got in sight of them in the backstage corridor—which was almost as posh as the public areas of the club. Adya fired off a quick comm message to both of them. “I love your act. Can I talk about a private show?”
They stopped, looked at her, and then gestured for her to come into their dressing room.
According the tags in Adya’s field of vision, the dolphins were named Shinji and Kin-Ichi. Their dressing room was set up with everything at floor level, so the two could lie comfortably on the soft smart matter and not have to stand upright. They flopped down and Shinji gestured with one flipper-hand. “Make yourself comfortable! I think we’ve met your sister.”
Who hasn’t? Adya thought, a little grimly. “Thank you. Yes, Kavita’s my little sister. I love what the two of you were doing with overtones and rhythms. Was that all improvised?”
“Absolutely!” said Shinji. “Every time we perform it’s a unique experience, never to be repeated.”
“At each performance the song is different, the audience is different—and we are different,” added Kin-Ichi.
“Each breath contains molecules you’ve never breathed before,” Adya quoted. Kin-Ichi clicked approvingly.
“You mentioned a private gig?” asked Shinji.
“My parents are talking about hosting an after party, right after the Constructors’ Jubilee. Are you available then?”
“Already booked,” said Shinji. “We’ll be doing an underwater show during the Jubilee, then we’re here the next day.”
“What about that morning?”
Shinji made a rude noise with his blowhole. “Sleeping and eating!”
“A labor of love is still tiring,” said Kin-Ichi.
“I understand,” said Adya. “I remember hearing about the two of you from Pulu Visap. Do you know her?”
“She’s been here when we played,” said Shinji.
“I’m trying to find her but she’s gone dark.”
“Why seek someone who doesn’t want to be found?” asked Kin-Ichi.
Time for another lie, Adya thought. She hoped she wasn’t getting too used to doing that. “I’ve got a hot tip for her, and it’s too good to just leave a message.”
“She usually hangs around with Janitha Velicham. At least, whenever they’re both here.”
“Great! I’ll check with her,” said Adya, who was still looking up the name as she spoke. “Well, I’d better get back to my table before they take away my drink. It was very nice meeting you both—a delightful dolphin duo.” She held her palms out.
“Fun to find a friendly fan,” said Shinji, casually waving one flipper.
Adya found her own way out, but by the time she got back to her table she was barely aware of her surroundings. She stared into the middle distance, her eyes darting about as she navigated the infosphere using her implant, looking for everything she could find about Janitha Velicham. And the one datum that stood out, as if in letters of fire, was that Janitha Velicham was listed as the Memetics Coordinator for the Miranda Polyarchist Alliance.
Zee spent twelve hours in a public medical pod in a little town called Cheriya, under induced sleep with a goo bot doctor covering half his face. Daslakh perched atop the pod, monitoring its idiot-genius mind. While Zee slept the bot glued the cracks in his maxilla and printed new teeth in place of the broken ones. It also discovered and fixed a crack in his right sixth rib. As the patient had requested only somatic treatment, the pod flagged, but did not adjust, some imbalances in key neurotransmitters.
Daslakh considered overriding the pod and doing something about Zee’s unhappiness, but decided not to. The bizarre evolutionary compendium of electrochemical kludges that biologicals used for information processing was riddled with design flaws, but over the centuries digital minds had learned that “fixing” them usually didn’t make anything better. An unhappy human was considerably more functional than a human who couldn’t be unhappy.
Once the medical treatment was done and Zee was just sleeping, Daslakh could leave a small fragment of its personality to watch him while the rest ventured into Miranda infospace.
It knew that Adya’s father was Commodore of something called the Seventh Shinkai Force, and some details about that were public information. Most of Miranda’s armed forces were up on the surface, guarding against invasion. But as a last resort, there were ten big autonomous arsenal subs lurking in the ocean. They were self-maintaining, able to operate for years without resupply—which meant that an oligarch with empty pockets like Achan Elso could still claim to be doing his share for Miranda’s defense.
All that was easy to learn. What was almost impossible to find was contact information for the subs themselves. Obviously nobody wanted Miranda’s final line of defense to be open to memetic attacks or attempts at subversion, but there had to be some way for the biologicals of the Sixty Families to talk to their mightiest weapon systems.
Daslakh had to make itself think like a Mirandan. The answer was obvious: It checked the list of authorized callers at the Elso manor. Daslakh spent a couple of seconds sifting through the list, but eventually it found what it was looking for: an individual named Makara, tagged as “Commanding Intelligence, Seventh Shinkai Force.” Achan Elso would never be uncouth enough to refuse to talk to the military unit he was responsible for supporting.
The contact code was routed through Miranda’s Defense Service in Ksetram, and Daslakh assumed someone there had the authority to monitor all attempts to contact operational military intelligences. So its message was brief and a bit oblique.
“Hi, I’d like to discuss matters affecting the Elso family. Get in touch with me by whatever method is most convenient for you.”
It expected some delay, but less than a second elapsed before Daslakh got a reply. The source was carefully anonymized, but the tag was not: “Responding to your note about the Commodore.”
Daslakh activated the direct link in the message, and instantly got a message, not in a virtual environment, or even in text, but rather a burst of meta-language, the basic signifiers all digital intelligences used to parse and generate natural languages.
name: “Makara”
title: “Intelligence-in-Command of the Seventh Shinkai Force”
status: patrol: ocean
status: duration: indefinite
question: purpose: communication
“I’m Daslakh. A friend of Adya Elso.”
Makara responded with links to a variety of data snippets from a dozen worlds, dating back five decades.
question: identity: continuity: “Daslakh”
question: location: miranda: purpose
“Yes, that’s me. As I said, I’m a friend of Adya’s. I want to talk to you about her family. They support you, right? Keep you operating?”
statement: “They support you, right?”: incorrect
statement: payment: source: elso family
statement: payment: description: “standard Captain-at-Sea salary”
statement: payment: amount: 1 gigajoule per minute
“That’s all? But you’re an arsenal sub!”
correction: battle group
That was followed by about half a gigabyte of data describing the arsenal sub and her sub-units, with most specific details omitted. It did mention that the whole group formed a networked intelligence with a rating greater than 1.8 times Baseline. Daslakh suspected that the actual level was probably closer to 3, at least.
Makara’s main unit had been built sixty-four years earlier by the Shimazu family, as part of an upgrade of Miranda’s defenses. The Shimazus, who were mostly dolphins, had been Commodores and paid Makara’s salary until eight years previous, when they had been persuaded to swap military responsibilities with the Elsos. Adya’s father became Makara’s new Commodore, while Nitin Shimazu took over the Fourth Maritime Rescue Unit, which had been the Elso contribution for a couple of centuries.
The data about Makara’s battle group explained the switch: The arsenal sub and her sub-units were entirely self-sufficient. She extracted deuterium from the ocean for power, sifted the water for raw materials, and printed all of her own parts and ordnance. That was the whole point of the Shinkai Force—a hidden deterrent with no supply line to cut. No one, except possibly her sister units during practice battles, had sensed Makara in the six decades since she put to sea.
Aside from the nominal commander’s salary, the Seventh Shinkai Force cost the Elsos nothing at all. Which immediately inspired another question from Daslakh.
“How does Achan Elso fit into that, then? Can he give you orders?”
title: “Commodore”: honorary
She added a public access file outlining the Shinkai Force’s chain of command. Makara and the other subs answered directly to the Military Subcommittee of the Coordinating Committee, with broad discretion to act autonomously if civilian authority was disrupted. Achan Elso did not appear anywhere in the command structure, which Daslakh decided was best for everyone concerned.
Daslakh noted a slight delay between its own remarks and Makara’s replies. Interestingly, the delay varied between a third of a millisecond at the low end and two milliseconds maximum. Given Makara’s stated intellect level, the delays couldn’t be hesitation for thought. It finally decided that she must be randomly delaying her answers so that there would be no way for someone to figure out her location from comm time.
“I was wondering if someone might be messing with Elso family finances as a way to degrade your effectiveness. Achan Elso might not be able to afford your salary any longer. What will you do if that happens?”
status: makara: operational
status: projected: makara: operational
definition: salary: non-essential
question: reason: daslakh: need-to-know: achan elso
“I’m curious. Even if I don’t like the guy very much, I still want to understand what’s going on, and why.”
Makara’s reply was a decade-old opinion statement issued anonymously by several mechs in Miranda’s military services. “In the past the biological oligarchs of the Sixty Families have employed mercenary forces against each other in political conflicts. The active Miranda military units do not participate in such actions. Our duty is to Miranda and all its inhabitants, not whichever faction is currently dominant within the Coordinating Committee. We decline to involve ourselves in political warfare and consider any commands to do so to be illegal orders.”
“So you’re just going to sit back and eat puffed shrimp while mercs shoot it out in the streets?”
Makara re-sent the statement with one sentence highlighted: “The active Miranda military units do not participate in such conflicts.”
statement: shinkai force: mission: primary: protect: miranda
statement: shinkai force: mission: secondary: deter destroy: invaders
statement: shinkai force: assets: strategic: stealth
statement: action: political: effect: loss: stealth
The fragment of Daslakh’s consciousness that was watching Zee sleep noticed movement consistent with the early waking process. Time to wind up this conversation.
“Thank you, Captain Makara,” said Daslakh. “I understand Miranda a little better than I did before.”
statement: projection: communication: daslakh: approved
“That’s very generous of you.”
request: daslakh: communicate: kavita elso: makara: communication:
request
statement: evaluation: datastream: kavita elso: inadequate
statement: makara: conversation: kavita elso: request
“If I see her, I’ll pass it along.”
status: communication: end
When Zee finally woke up, he wanted food, which Daslakh considered a good sign. So it sat patiently on the table at an outdoor cafe in the central square of Cheriya while he shoveled puttu and buttermilk sambar into his mouth. Zee avoided anything too firm—while the new teeth were fine, his gums were still tender.
“So who is this Dai Chichi? Panam Putiyat acted like I should be worried about meeting him.”
“Not hard to find out,” said Daslakh as it found out. “Dai Chichi runs a nightclub and gambling parlor called the Abyss. It’s down on the sea bottom, about a hundred kilometers west of here—Dai Chichi’s a cephalopod, by the way. Interesting trend in how the club manifests in the infosphere. Up to about a standard year ago, coverage was uniformly negative. Lots of unproven allegations: rigged games, template piracy, gene stealing, crooked loans, extortion, money laundering and outright thuggery.”
“Sounds like a rough place. Who would go there?”
“There’s a sucker born every microsecond. And if you’re one of the people who does the extorting or face punching, it might have some appeal. Anyway, over the past fifty weeks or so, the Abyss has become quite the edgy-fashionable hangout. Young Sixty Families idiots go there to rub fins and tentacles with real live grifters and racketeers. Adya’s sister been there a dozen times to watch the marlin races.”
“Do you think that’s what Sundari was talking about when she was complaining to Adya about Kavita hanging around with ‘impossible people’?”
“High probability. So now most of the mentions are about how cool the place is, and Dai Chichi’s been upgraded from ‘notorious’ to ‘controversial.’ Apparently being run by a gangster is now just part of the place’s quaint ambiance.”
“Gambling—I can guess why Putiyat handed over the Oort payload. I wonder if Dai Chichi knows how much it’s worth. Maybe we can buy it back!”
“In my experience your hard-core crooks tend to focus on liquidity and short time horizons. A thousand gigs today beats ten thousand tomorrow, and cash is king. It might be worth a try.”
“If it’s on the seafloor, we’ll have to swim down. Can you stand being in the water again?”
“I’ll endure it. But when we’re done with Miranda I’d like to go someplace nice and dry.”
Zee took a couple more bites before speaking. “I don’t know if we ever will be done with Miranda. This is Adya’s home.”
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life here?”
“I wouldn’t mind,” said Zee.
“You’re an absolutely pathetic liar.”
“She’s happy here. If I make her leave, she’ll be miserable. I don’t want that. Maybe I can figure out something I can do here.”
“I don’t know why you think she’s happy. Her stress levels get higher whenever any of her family are nearby.”
“There’s the house, and all the things she showed me. She loves Miranda, the place.”
“She loves you, too.”
“I don’t want to make her have to choose.”
“Talk to her about it.”
“I will—but not yet. I want to get to the bottom of this first, and I don’t want to put her in danger.”
“Let me point out that while there’s no direct evidence, it’s certainly plausible that this Dai Chichi person was the one who sent you that threatening message.”
“I hope so, because otherwise that means there’s someone else out there I need to worry about. Are you ready?” Zee hit the “clean” spot on the table and watched as his used dishes sank slowly into the surface, dismantled into component molecules.
Daslakh climbed onto Zee’s shoulder. They rode a bubble a hundred kilometers west, to a big floating city called Svarnam. At one of the sea bottom anchor points for the city, Zee rented a gill pack and a pair of fins. He sealed up his suit and slipped into a moon pool leading outside. Daslakh clung to his chest as he swam and helped to navigate.
That help was appreciated, as the sea bottom under Svarnam had almost zero visibility. The water was full of particulates brought in by cold deep currents pulled toward the city by the fusion reactors heating the ocean for the sea farms. Those same reactors powered banks of lights extending all the way to the bottom of the floating city, so all the gunk in the water was lit up, limiting Zee’s vision to about the span of his arms.
Here and there warning strobes could pierce the murk, but it was impossible to see how far away they were, or what they were warning about. Daslakh’s laser link to the local infosphere was useless, so they had to rely entirely on its inertial sensors to stay on the right heading, and outright guesswork to tell speed and distance.
Swimming against a strong current, blind in the cloudy water, cut off from the infosphere, Zee was perfectly calm. Daslakh could hear his heart working steadily, and no flutter of adrenaline affected the regular motion of his arms and legs. He’d been considerably more worried at the dinner table with Adya’s parents.
The light dimmed bit by bit as they moved slowly away from the city, working against the current. “Let me give you some hands,” said Daslakh. It adjusted four of its feet to the shape of little fins, and began to vibrate them at the optimum frequency, helping to push Zee along.
“Don’t drain yourself. I had a big breakfast.”
“I’m fine. I’d rather be low on joules then put up with the tedium.”
Two kilometers out from the city they passed a line of marker lights on the sea bottom, and just ahead Daslakh could see a chaos of flashing colors shining through the murk. They both could hear music through the water. “I think this is the place,” said Daslakh.
The Abyss was a big dome, easily a hundred meters wide, standing ten meters above the bottom on five legs. The underside was open to the water, and half a dozen small submersibles were moored to a floating platform in the center. A ramp for swimmers led to a walkway running around the perimeter of the dome. Zee climbed out of the water and took a deep breath. “Wow,” he said.
Every sense was under assault inside the Abyss. Images—both projected and virtual—filled the air. Music, sound effects, and voices hovered just below ear-damaging volume, with minimal sound damping to create a feeling of activity and excitement. The damp air was laced with active molecules: stimulants, intoxicants, pheromones, and scents engineered to evoke high status and exoticism. The decor reminded Daslakh of the Putiyat mansion, with lavish use of offworld materials, handmade sculptures proudly displaying virtual provenance tags, and printed furniture made artfully irregular, as if crafted by some biological holding tools in clumsy hands.
The ramp coiled upward through the interior, vanishing among a tangle of platforms and bridges filling a dozen levels. The customers were roughly equal proportions of humans, dolphins, and cephalopods, with a scattering of borgs and a pair of orcas hanging their tails over the edge of one platform.
Zee didn’t know what a Miranda gangster looked like, but he could see that the people in the Abyss seemed to fit into two categories: young ones in fashionable outfits loudly having fun, and a more varied contingent who dressed to intimidate rather than impress. The latter group were quieter and did a lot of watching, in the same way nulesgrima competitors watched potential opponents. He was uncomfortably aware that at the moment most of them were watching him.
Tags and images advertised the various gambling games. Most were straightforward random-number lotteries or the equivalent, with a payout ratio that left the house a comfortable profit. For those who thought they could win by skill, card and tile games provided an entertaining illusion.
Just above Zee’s head a diamond tube full of seawater ran around the edge of the dome, with a start pen and finish line for fish races. Daslakh spent a tenth of a second researching the subject—the sport originated during the Cetacean Republic era, and probably would have died out from lack of interest but attempts by the Theocracy to suppress it had the paradoxical result of inspiring a few dedicated dolphins and orcas to keep it going in secret. It still had a somewhat low-status reputation, which made watching the races a perfect way for trendsetters like Kavita Elso to be daringly transgressive with zero actual risk.
Zee found a mer staff member, dressed only in a tall, gold-plated tiara decorated with geometric designs and figures of cephalopods. “I’d like to speak with Mr. Dai Chichi about a business matter,” he said.
The mer looked at Zee and laughed dismissively. Daslakh felt a tickle of electronic attention as their comm tags were interrogated. “Sawa handles business complaints.” She waved her tail at a dolphin on a cushioned platform in the center of the dome.
“Thank you,” said Zee, and took a step in that direction, but spun in midair and stopped himself when the mer spoke again. She looked a lot more serious—and maybe a bit scared herself.
“Never mind Sawa. Go on up to the top level, right now. The boss is waiting.”
With Daslakh on his shoulder, Zee made it up to the top level in three jumps. An iris door in the center of the uppermost level—a thick armored sandwich of titanium and graphene—snapped open long enough for them to pass through.
The top of the dome was a single room, and most of it was too low-ceilinged for Zee to stand upright. Dim green light filtering through a transparent roof lit the center of the room, but the rest was dark. The air was downright misty and Daslakh could tell it had elevated oxygen. Unlike every other part of the Abyss, the top floor was quiet.
“Hello?” Zee called out. “Mr. Dai Chichi?”
“You are Zee Sadaran. You came to Miranda with Adya Elso. You’ve been sticking your nose into a private deal between me and Panam Putiyat. You don’t know when to quit,” said a voice over comms. It was coded deep and echoey, almost at the bottom end of human hearing.
“I want to buy back the inbound payload from the Oort he transferred to you.”
“You have nothing.”
“Well, I guess you could say I’m acting on behalf of the Elso family.”
“You are not.”
“Not officially, no. But—look, you know I’m a friend of Adya’s. Adya Elso. That payload belongs to her. Her family didn’t really have the right to sell it to Panam Putiyat in the first place. I’m here to fix up the whole mess so that it doesn’t become a huge legal bother for everyone. Do you really want to go up against one of the Sixty Families in court?” As Zee spoke, he turned, trying to figure out where his host was hiding in the darkness.
“Behind you,” said Daslakh via comm. “A radian to your left.”
Zee turned to see a tentacle emerge from the darkness, dark red at the tip but otherwise deep black. A second followed, then two more, stretching past Zee all the way across the room. The suckers gripped the floor and then Dai Chichi pulled himself into the circle of green light.
He was big. Very big. Most of the cephalopods Zee had met were about his own mass, but Dai Chichi was far bigger—a couple of tons, at least. Only an orca or a whale was bigger, in Miranda’s ocean anyway. His massive body was a great sagging sack of muscle, pulsing softly in the moist air. Two eyes, each as big as Zee’s fist, were nearly hidden in the folds of flesh that made a sort of face. His arms were easily twenty meters long, tapering from as thick as Zee’s waist where they joined Dai Chichi’s body to a tip smaller than a child’s finger.
Dai Chichi’s skin went from black to luminous crimson all over, almost bright enough to cast shadows. “You are trying to scare me with courts and lawyers. That’s very funny. I know how to scare people, too. People like lawyers, and witnesses, and judges.”
As he spoke, two of his arms coiled loosely around Zee’s feet, and a third curled around from behind to rest solidly on Zee’s shoulder.
“You run a business,” said Zee. “I’m here to offer a deal. The value of that Oort payload is very uncertain. Wouldn’t you rather have the gigajoule credits now?” He ignored the fact that Dai Chichi’s arm had slowly wrapped around his neck.
“You want it but you have nothing to offer me.”
“If you return it, I can promise you a share of what we get for it—with no legal challenges, no problems. And the Elsos have plenty of business contacts. They can get a better price than you can.”
“If I keep it, I get all the profit, not just a share.”
Zee stood a little straighter, bearing the weight of Dai Chichi’s arm on his shoulders. “Name your price, then.”
“You can’t pay it.”
“I said name your price. I’ll find a way.”
After about two seconds Dai Chichi replied, and his skin dimmed and shifted to a reddish-brown. “You’re too late. I already sold it.”
“Who did you sell it to?”
“I run a business, as you said. I don’t make gigs by giving things away. You want to know who I sold it to, you need to make it worth my while. Give me something.”
“All right,” said Zee, trying not to sigh too loudly. “What do you want for the information?”
“I know you haven’t got any gigs, so I’ll trade data for data. You say you’re a friend of the Elso family. Maybe that’s true and maybe it isn’t. Achan Elso’s part of the ruling coalition. He knows all the Sixty Families and is related to most of them. If you’re his friend, you can talk to some of the political bosses, the ones who run the big ministries.”
“I think I can manage that,” said Zee. Once again his vitals were as calm and steady as when he’d been swimming blind at the bottom of the ocean.
An image accompanied Dai Chichi’s words, a long-distance still shot of a medium-sized male human in a Martian-style cape sitting at a table with three older Mirandans in sarongs. “There’s an offworlder spreading bribes around in the Coalition. His name’s Qi Tian, or that’s what he says, anyway. I can’t find out much about him, and that bothers me. I want to know what he’s doing and who’s behind him. You find out and I’ll tell you who’s got the rights to that payload.”
“Why not ask one of your Sixty Families customers?”
“Smart question. Here’s the answer: I don’t know who this guy has in his pocket. Anyone I ask might pass the word back, and I don’t want that. You’re new here, so I figure Qi Tian hasn’t had a chance to get to you yet. And if you’re asking questions, that pulls eyes to you, not me.”
Zee nodded. “Okay, I’ll find out whatever I can.”
Dai Chichi’s arm around his neck tightened gently. “Find out everything, and the sooner the better. Info gets worthless when it gets old.”
All the arms pulled back into a tangled mass in front of Dai Chichi, and his skin dimmed to a barely visible brown. He said nothing more, and after a moment Zee went to the armored iris in the center of the floor. It snapped open and he fell back into the noise and glare of the club.
As they slowly fell forty meters to the bottom level, Zee suddenly stiffened. “Is that Adya?” He then quickly answered his own question. “No, it’s Kavita.”
Daslakh looked where Zee was looking—a private platform chosen for maximum visibility. “Adya doesn’t have an entourage, unless you count us.”
They touched down on patch of floor floating on the water. Zee was still looking up at where Kavita and about half a dozen sycophants burst into whoops and applause as a serving bot brought them a tray of flaming drinks.
Daslakh was more interested in the local infosphere. Kavita’s comm tag was big and loud and intrusive, sending out little autonomous agents to everyone in line of sight. The agents were surprisingly sophisticated, able to worm their way through most commercial filters and take up residence in the victim’s implant, where they would send out endless reminders about where Kavita was, what Kavita was doing, and which products and services she was using.
Daslakh quietly sent a fragment of its own personality into Zee’s implant, where it hunted down and exterminated Kavita’s agents with gleeful brutality, taking them apart to create custom filters they’d never be able to penetrate.
Meanwhile Daslakh’s main consciousness took a closer look at the group on the private platform. Kavita naturally was the center of attention, orbited by a swarm of her sycophants. From their tags Daslakh classified them as a lot of wanna-bes, has-beens, and never-weres. A surprising number of them were from the security and defense services—not normally a hotbed of hipness.
Kavita’s husband Vidhi sat off to one side, a little apart from the chattering knot of fans, his gaze directed outward. Daslakh looked at the data streams and saw that while Kavita was broadcasting, Vidhi was harvesting, checking info about everyone in the club. He spotted Zee and looked a little startled, and Daslakh saw him exchange a quick glance with Kavita.
“She hasn’t pinged me. Should I go say hello?” asked Zee.
“Do you want to?”
Zee watched as the little party began squirting flaming mouthfuls at each other. “Not really,” he said.
“Then, although it means another dip in salt water full of microscopic organisms and metabolic waste products, let’s get out of here.” Evidently Kavita—or maybe Vidhi—had decided Zee wasn’t someone her fans would be interested in, and Daslakh didn’t want to see if either of them changed their minds.
“Right,” said Zee, and Daslakh could feel him relax as he said it. He took a breath, turned on his gill pack, and did a forward somersault into the water.