Sea green and luminous, it glowed from within, almost dazzlingly bright after the days I had spent in Hadean darkness. As my eyes adjusted, I saw a planar maze of walls and crevices spiraling out from a central hub, fractally not-quite-repeating into the distance. I could not gauge its size but guessed that it was kilometers across, maintaining its depth through neutral buoyancy. Whatever gelatinous layer I had crashed through absorbed and diffused the light from beneath, rendering the fantastic structure invisible from above.
Schools of tubular beings with rippling, frilled fins darted across the labyrinth, their brilliant chromatophores flickering signal flashes of light. I hung in the water above the city, looking down: There were uncountable thousands of them, some isolated individuals swimming alone but most flocking in enormous shoals. “What are—”
“Krina, attention. Follow the guide light.”
I blinked, then began to swim again. My huge, dark-adapted eyes began to take in more detail. The maze harbored voids, zones of open water surrounded by porous walls. I saw signs of techné, of manufacture: artificial structures, nets and tubes and right angles bolted to the surfaces. This palace was no accident but a vast, engineered structure adrift in the depths.
The guide beam angled toward the bulbous central node, where the fractal coils of its walls folded in on themselves into ever-tighter spirals until they formed an almost solid surface. As I swam toward it, getting an impression of its size (vast: at least two hundred meters in diameter), I heard a fizzing sound, rapidly becoming louder: The walls of the palace were a vast reflecting surface, diffusing and channeling the conversation of thousands, if not millions, of beings—
A bright red cylinder flashed past me from behind and spun round to block my descent path. A huge dark eye stared at me. The trailing end of the cylindrical body appeared to be multiply bifurcated: I blinked, recognized tentacles. One of them clutched a small pod, not unlike my guide capsule. The tentacle flushed delicate pink, then a pattern of green lights flickered across the entity’s skin from one end to the next, signaling in some language I had no reference for.
“Identify: You are Krina Alizond-114.” I recoiled slightly: The pod in the tentacle was a translator or voice box of some kind? Luminous patterns rippled across the being’s skin just before the box uttered each phrase. “Declare: Welcome to Hades-4. Please: You will follow now. Please: Maintain proximity. Please: Confirm?”
“I, uh”—I swallowed my double take—“yes, I will follow you.” Not that I had any sensible alternatives hidden up my nonexistent sleeves. “Yes, I’m Krina. Who are you?”
“Self-identify: This is Alef Blue taste-of-sulfur 116. Identify-macro: Call me Alef. Declare: Please: Come now?”
I forced myself to flex, swimming slowly toward my decatentacular optoconversationalist. Who in turn pulsed and, with flickering fins, moved ahead of me—smoothly and rapidly, clearly far better adapted to motion in water than the ugly and ungainly hybrid humanopiscine that my kidnappers had made of me. As xenomorphic adaptations went, borrowing the body plan of a deep-dwelling creature of Old Earth made plenty of sense down here: But Alef’s presence, not to mention that of the entirety of Hades-4, raised more questions than it answered.
Alef led me down toward the central dome. As we approached, I saw that its surface was an intricate network of smaller domes, each defined by a spiral pattern: and each smaller dome mirrored the whole. Yes, it was a fractal—someone had grown it from a seed algorithm. Close up, there was no surface, just more tiny bubbles, scaling down as far as the eye could see. There were voids between them all, and voids in the largest patterning. We swam through one such gap, and I found myself in a disconcerting space.
“Other-identify: the People’s Palace of Hades-4.” Alef rolled through a full circle, banked, came to rest with tentacles agape, facing me with both palm-sized eyes. I looked round, blinking, momentarily dazzled. The luminescence of Hades-4 was barely brighter than a starry night sky on the surface: But inside the People’s Palace, a million point-sources flickered all the colors of the rainbow, as brilliant as the solar-night sky on a gas giant’s moon. Within the shell, dozens of squid-people darted and hovered, flashing intricate conversational beacons. There were other things here, artifacts or radically xenomorphic people: beings that glittered and flashed like a living treasure chest. Even in mermaid-draggy form, I was one of the most humanoid beings present. Disoriented, I drifted through the upper reaches of the People’s Palace, trying not to panic at the sudden proliferation of information flooding in through my eyes after so many days spent adrift in stygian darkness. “Declare: Your shoal-sib is coming!”
As I rolled to face the bottom of the sphere—where a gaping void coupled it to dimly lit and yet larger spaces within the city—I saw a mermaid erupting toward me out of the depths, accompanied by a pair of squid-folk, one of them taking the lead as the other peeled off to hang behind her in the water, their attitudes leading me to identify them as bodyguards.
“Krina!” A human voice, modulated through water, raised shivers through my lateral lines. “Is that you . . . ?”
I rolled with agitation, then stroked downward to close the gap. “Ana?” I asked, as we locked gazes. She looked just like me, complete with the same huge black eyes and tiny, underdeveloped jaw that had been inflicted on me by my body-sculpting abductors. I felt a flicker of anger but forced it back. “Just what exactly is going on here?”
“We need to talk,” she said, reaching out to take my hand. “In my shell. Where nobody will overhear us.”
Finally, given a target, my anger overflowed: “Wait, what? Just wait a minute. You had me grabbed and did this to me, and you disappeared a year ago, and you want to talk? What about? What makes you think I’m happy to listen?”
“But you’ve got to!” She flinched, disconcerted: “You’re our only hope!”
“Yes? That justifies kidnapping and coercion—”
“Krina, please! There was no other way. It’s because of the Atlantis Carnet.”
“What?”
“You did bring Sondra’s half of the transaction, didn’t you? Because I found the other half . . .”
The Queen chose to supervise the interrogation of the prisoner’s corpse in person, in a dark and watery dungeon grown from a variety of artificial coral that, thanks to the tiny ferromagnetic crystals embedded in its matrix, were completely opaque to both electromagnetic signals and purely acoustic screams.
Any authoritarian polity—and ultimately that includes all money-based states, for of necessity they all have the capability to resort to violence in order to force people to honor the debts that the government deems worthy of respect—requires organs that exist for the purpose of injecting terror into the minds of their subjects. Those that pay lip service to the rule of law may conceal such raw and hideous institutions behind a scented mist of euphemisms—interrogation facilities, debriefing centers, extraordinary rendition—but ultimately, they boil down to the same thing.
Medea, Queen of Argos, had no truck with such circumlocutions. As Queen-in-multiple and absolute ruler of her domain, she desired the means to instill a healthy frisson of fear, to burnish the glamour of her palace and crown jewels and court in stark contrast with the darkness and terror of the dungeons and torture chambers hidden beneath the surface.
To be a monarch, as opposed to merely a rich, free, autonome required one to be free-er than those around one. And as a reminder to herself of what this meant, and perhaps as a partial brake on any tendency to overuse such tactics (and risk thereby nudging her subjects from a healthy fear of her into outright revolutionary hatred), Medea made a point of attending all vivisections in person.