Now Amu arrives in the control center. I can tell he is upset by his expression, by his elevated body temperature. His head is shaved smooth, but his generous silvery beard, and eyebrows, and eyes give him a charismatic appearance. He is raising his voice to Theowane, but I cannot pay attention to their conversation.
The PEACE escape pod heats up, leaving an orange trail behind it as it burrows deeper into the atmosphere. It seems to have evasive capabilities, and it knows the piranha is behind it.
The interceptor also picks up speed, bearing down on the escape pod. But their velocities are so well matched that the piranha causes no damage when it bumps its target.
A few moments later, the interceptor—with no shielding to protect it from a screaming entry into the atmosphere—breaks into flying chunks of molten slag.
Amu seems mollified when Theowane explains to him that the intruder was a PEACE ship. I know Amu wants nothing to do with religious fanatics; he has had enough of them in his past.
I pinpoint the splashdown target for the escape pod. Without waiting for an order, I dispatch one of the floating ubermindist harvesters across the oceans of Bastille. No matter how great a hold Theowane has over my Simulated Personality, she can do nothing against my life-preservation overrides, except when the security of the colony is at stake.
Ostensibly to allow it greater speed, but actually just out of spite, I tell the harvester to dump its cargo of ubermindist before it churns off across the sea to reach the pod.
Amu stands in the holding bay of the cliffside tunnels. His bald head glistens in the glare of glowtablets recessed in the ceiling. His eyes flash.
A second rinse sprays the outside of the escape pod. Black streaks stain the hull from its burning descent, but the craft appears otherwise undamaged. After its dunking in the corrosive seas, Amu waits for purified water to purge the acidity.
Theowane follows him into the chamber. Amu listens to the last trickles of water come out of the spray heads; drips run through a grate on the floor where the rinse water will be detoxified and reused.
For the hours it has taken the floating harvester to retrieve the escape pod, Amu has waited in silence with Theowane. He keeps his anger toward her in check.
Sensing his displeasure, she twice tries to divert his thoughts. Normally he would acquiesce just to please her. She has been his lover since before the revolt. But he doesn’t like her making such important decisions on her own. It sets a bad example for the rest of the prisoners.
On the other hand, Amu knows that Theowane tried to keep Bastille free of the PEACE ships. And he approves.
Both of Amu’s parents had been involved in a violent, fanatical sect and had raised him under their repressive teachings, grooming him to be a propagator of the faith. He had absorbed their training, but eventually his own wishes had broken through. He fled, later to use those same charismatic and mob-focusing skills to whip up a workers’ revolt on his home planet. If the revolt had succeeded, Amu would have been called a king, a savior. But instead Amu had ended up here, on Bastille.
He wants nothing more to do with religious fanatics. Now this one PEACE survivor presents him with an unpleasant problem.
Theowane runs her fingers over the access controls. “Ready,” she says. She keeps her voice low and her eyes averted.
Amu stands to his full height in front of the escape pod. “Open it.”
As the hatch cracks, a hiss of air floods in, equalizing the two pressures. Then comes a cough, then sputtering, annoying words. A young boy wrestles himself into a sitting position and snaps his arms out, flexing them and shaking his cramped hands. “What took you so long? You’re as bad as PEACE.”
Theowane steps back. Amu blinks, but remains in place. The boy is thin, with dark shadows around his eyes. His body appears bruised, his hands raw, as if he has been trying to claw his way out of the escape pod.
Amu can’t stop himself from bursting out with a loud laugh. The boy whirls to him, outraged, but after a brief pause he too cracks a grin that contains immense relief and exhaustion. With this one response, he proves to Amu that he is no PEACE convert.
“Why didn’t you let yourself out?” Theowane asks. “Isn’t there an emergency release inside?”
The boy turns a look of scorn to her. “I know what’s in the air on Bastille, and in the water. I couldn’t see where I was. It might be bad to be cramped in this coffin for hours—but it would be plenty worse to take a shower in sulfuric acid.” He pauses for just a moment. “And speaking of showers, can I get out of here and take one?”
After the boy has cleaned and rested himself, Amu summons him for dinner. The other prisoners on Bastille have expressed their curiosity, but they will have to wait until Amu decides to make a statement.
“Dybathia,” the boy says when Amu asks his name. “I know it sounds noble and high-born. My parents had high expectations of me.” He stops just long enough for Amu to absorb that, but not long enough for him to ask any further questions.
“I ran away from home,” Dybathia says. “It took me a week to make it to the spaceport. When I got there, I slipped onto the first open ship and hid in their cargo bay. I didn’t care where it was going, and I didn’t plan to show myself until we were on our way into hyperspace. I figured anyplace was better than home, right?” He snickers.
“It turned out to be a PEACE ship. They wouldn’t let me off. They kept me around, constantly quoting tracts at me, trying to make me convert. Do my eyes look glazed? Am I brain-damaged?”
Amu allows a smile to form, but he does not answer.
Dybathia says, “They shut off their servo-maintenance drones and made me do the cleaning, scrubbing down decks and walls with a solvent that should have been labeled as toxic waste. Look at my hands! The captain said monotonous work allows one to clear the mind and become at peace with the universe.”
Theowane breaks into the conversation, “Why were you the only one who got to an escape pod?” Amu looks up at her sharply, but she doesn’t withdraw the question.
Dybathia shrugs. “I was the only one who bothered. The rest of them just sat there and accepted their fate.”
This rings so true with Amu from his memories of his parents that he finds himself nodding.
Dybathia looks at the mind-scanning apparatus; this will be the most dangerous moment for him. The device is left over from the first days of Bastille, when human supervisory crews had established the colony. That month had been the only time when non-prisoners and prisoners cohabited the planet; as a precaution they had used intensive search devices and mental scanners, which had remained unused since those other humans had turned Bastille over to the Warden.
“You do understand why we have to do this?” Amu asks.
Dybathia sees more concern on the face of the leader than he expects. This is going better than he had hoped. “Yes, I understand perfectly.” He flicks his gaze toward Theowane, then back to Amu. “It’s because she’s paranoid.”
Theowane bristles, as he expects her to. She makes each word of her answer clipped and hard. “Your story is too convenient. How do we know you’re not an… assassin? What if you’ve been drugged or hypnotized? We can’t know what the Praesidentrix might do.”
Knowing it is imperative for him to allay their suspicions, Dybathia submits to an intensive physical search that scans every square centimeter of his body, probes all orifices, uses a sonogram to detect any subcutaneous needles, poison-gas capsules, perhaps a timed-release biological plague.
They find nothing, because there is nothing to find.