“Welcome to gargle goosh—” There was air on the other side of the hatch; our shock fluid poured out as gas bubbled in, drowning out the canned announcement. I spluttered and heaved, unlatched all seven straps, sat up, and vomited runny blue foam until my chest hurt. Finally I was able to inhale, panting and shuddering. We were not, it appeared, destined to die horribly just yet. The breathing mix down here had a sharply astringent edge, almost ammoniacal. “—Ustoms and immigration. Please proceed to the interview area as directed once you have disembarked.”
“What are we (cough) supposed to—” I asked, but Rudi was already climbing through the hatch, closely followed by Dent.
Marigold gave me a look. “What?” I asked.
“Proceed to the interview area.” She sounded just like the canned announcement, only three degrees colder.
“I’m proceeding! I’m proceeding.”
Sloshing through the residue of shock fluid (it still filled our sarcophagus to the lower lip of the hatch) I clambered out onto the sloping aeroshell, then slid down onto the metal grid it had come to rest on. I looked around. We were parked inside an underwater dome, beside a well of some sort—a well through which the docking tentacle had lifted our capsule and deposited it in this parking area. Just how we had managed to land so close to a submerged dock mystified me momentarily, but I dismissed it for now as irrelevant: We had arrived, and now I would have to deal. Rudi and Dent were already at the door on the other side of the dome, about thirty meters away. I stumbled after them, nauseous and uncoordinated from the sudden transition into a deep gravity well. It could be worse, I suppose: I gather the Fragile used to take whole days before they could walk again after returning to their home world following a period in microgravity. (Just another of the countless ways in which we are better adapted to spaceflight than they.)
Not many people arrive in an undersea polity by ballistic reentry capsule: the laminar republics are generally paranoid about off-planet contamination. Consequently, I found myself funneled into a receiving station with a coffin-sized capsule waiting for me. “Speak your full formal name,” said the wall, “under penalty of perjury.”
“Krina Buchhaltung Historiker Alizond-114,” quoth I.
“Place of origin.”
“I was initialized on New California, but my last instantiation was—”
“Purpose of visit.”
“I’m here to look for my sister, who is missing—”
“Get in the capsule.”
I glanced round. The door behind me had merged seamlessly with the wall. Suppressing my apprehension, I climbed into the coffin-sized cylinder and lay down. The last thing I remember is the lid coming down, sealing me in.
When I opened my eyes again I found myself in a very different place. The upper half of the cylinder had risen again, and I was staring at the high, vaulted ceiling above an almost claustrophobically small chamber. The ceiling itself gleamed with the luster of aragonite, illuminated by bright pinpoints of bluish light. I tried to sit up, gasping for breath in the hot, moist air, and looked over the edge of my transport cylinder. There was no floor, only water: and, waiting to talk to me, an instance of the Queen.
“Welcome to Argos immigration control,” she said, her voice a slightly lighter echo of my interrogator from the arrivals terminaclass="underline" “We have some questions to put to you, Ms. Alizond, in view of your irregular arrival here.”
There is an eccentric custom among the monarchs of the laminar republics (or, indeed, the laminar kingdoms): They originally carved out their kingdoms by making multiple duplicates of themselves, working together briefly, then merging their deltas. It’s a risky strategy—let a copy of yourself run around gaining experiences for too long, and it will eventually become, effectively, a separate person—but if bodies are cheap and minds are expensive, as in the early days of a better nation, it’s the way to go. As a consequence of this custom, the small principalities have no need to employ civil servants for most purposes, and indeed, many of their rulers have a positively paranoid aversion to doing so—a fear of la trahison de bourgeoisie, the treachery of the unaffiliated individual professional—and so they only use out-lineage employees for tasks they do not want to be associated with. (Such as the secret police, or the judicial bench when it is convenient to convey the appearance of impartiality). This was clearly the case with Medea, Queen-creator of Argos: which is why the first person I met upon my arrival was Medea herself, incarnate in her role as Senior Immigration Comptroller.
But I didn’t know she was an instance of the Queen at this point. Rudi hadn’t explained her somewhat eccentric approach to human resources to me, and as an outlander, I was insufficiently aware of such local quirks to have investigated how I could expect to be received. All I knew at the time was that I was about to be questioned by a mermaid with close-cropped green hair and a condescending, officious manner.
(And, hovering discreetly behind and above her head, the menacing black shapes of a pair of police hornets, primed to paralyze or kill on command. Like any other monarch presiding over a hotbed of intrigue balanced above a lawless hinterland, Medea was not shy about displaying her monopoly on violent force.)
“Ask away,” I said, looking at her in some puzzlement (I believe I was wondering where Rudi and the others had gone).
“You said you came here to find your sister. But you’ve never been here before. What did you mean by that?”
At this point an icy-cold awareness of my precarious position should have overwhelmed me with an urge to caution: But for some obscure reason, I didn’t feel remotely perturbed. My emotional affect was entirely flat, comfortably numb. “My sister Ana?” I explained: “Ana immigrated to Dojima System about seventy-one point six years ago. We—I mean, my mater—originally sent her here to handle the family accounts and provide currency triangulation services to SystemBank Hector, our own New California Credit Union, and other agency services as specified, while continuing her work as a—”
“Define your relationship to Ana—Ana Graulle-90.” The mermaid was scowling at me: Her left cheek dimpled, slightly detracting from the intimidating effect, but the slow lashing of her fluke below the surface of her pool created a churn that almost reached the surface, lifting her halfway out of the water. “She’s not of your lineage, is she?”
“She is,” I protested (but not too hard): “She’s just offset to one side. Mater—Sondra Alizond-1—has refactored herself more than once. The Graulles are descended from her last-but-one incarnation. They took up a new name to avoid confusion, they’re very different in personality. She used to be a risk analyst and commodities broker—” I managed to rein myself in as much as I could before my tongue ran away with me again. It was disconcertingly hard. “Why, what else do you want to know?”
“Why are you looking for her here?” the mermaid persisted.
“Because Argos is her last-known address.” I tried to focus but couldn’t quite detach myself from the need to answer her questions. “I was going to stay with her for a year, studying: She was in one of the outer habs, but when I got to Rosen, she’d sent word that she was moving down-well to Shin-Tethys, some sort of scholarship arrangement. She said she was getting involved in tracking demand flows in real commodities, part of a consortium investigating long-term sustainability of transport energy economies. Then when I got to Taj Beacon, she’d disappeared with no forwarding address. So I came here as fast as I could.”