Silence. Then shuddering and deep breaths: And in an archaic reflex, a drop of water trickled from the prisoner’s eye, running down the side of her head. A gasp. Then: “Yes. I remember being Krina Alizond-114, in New California. I have her memories. From her upload, archived when she went on pilgrimage. Memories but no I-ness, no me. I’m not her. I’m new. I have no memories of my own before I awakened here.”
The prisoner fell silent for a while. Then: “This person was created by Sondra Alizond-1 to clear the way. To catch and replace Krina, to bait the line and trap the runaway sib. A false brood. This person is to masquerade as Krina and find Ana and take her treasure and kill her, then bring it to Sondra on her arrival. This person is not an I but an it. I think that was the idea. I am . . . not able to be what I should be.”
“Fascinating.” The Queen stared at the prisoner. “You had no self-consciousness? Only now you do. Marvelous! A newborn!” She clapped her hands: “You have so much to learn!” A nod to the head surgeon-executioner: “Be sure to teach her everything you know about pain. Teach her well.” And, without further ado, she sank into her pool and dived headfirst through the underwater tunnel back to the light and the surface, where she could imagine herself serenaded by the screams of the newly damned without being confronted by the distressingly physical realities of the process of torment.
“Interrogative: Identify: You are shoal-sibs? Other is coming?”
The squid rolled in the water, pointing both great golden eyes at me, its mantle flashed silver and red and yellow when it spoke: It took the translator pod seconds to catch up.
“Confirm interrogative,” said Ana. “We are shoal-sibs. Assertion: We need to talk, alone, in my office. Can you leave us?”
Alef rolled again, looking at Ana. “Assertion: Committee summons you. Much to ask you and shoal-sib Krina. Interrogative: Available soon?”
“Available soon,” Ana reassured them. “We’ll be going now.” She gestured at her bodyguards, dismissing them, then at me. “Can you follow . . . ?”
“I’ll try.” I confess I was angry: But I was also spooked by Ana’s blunt confirmation that Sondra knew about our little conspiracy. “How do you know about—”
“Hush: Follow me, I’ll show you.” She turned and swam straight down, toward a shadowy recess at the bottom of the Palace.
“What is this place?” I called after her as I followed, my assumption being that she might be willing to talk about less intimate affairs while on the move.
“It’s the People’s Palace. These are the People.” Her gesture took in a small clump of rapidly flickering squid, hovering nearby as we dove past them. “It’s their talking hall, their parler-a-ment. They do everything by committee, instinctively.”
“Instinctively?”
“They modified their neural connectome heavily when they came down here, to make it easier to work in teams when mining the blue smokers. Speech was too low-bandwidth for the job of coordinating thousands of tool-using limbs in three dimensions. So their neural architecture is human-derived, but so different that even without the body-plan changes, they might as well be another species.” Abruptly, we passed out of the great luminous space and into a constricted tunnel, gulletlike. It was round in cross section and narrower than I was comfortable with, dimly illuminated by flecks of bioluminescent coral. I forced my imagination back and concentrated on following Ana. She’d obviously worn this form far longer than I, long enough that her swimming was instinctively fluid, elegant, and abhumanly beautiful. I could envy her that grace: But I had every intention of ascending to the surface and reclaiming my lost legs at the first opportunity—then giving her hired kidnappers a piece of my mind.
“Here.” A section of what I had taken to be wall proved to be a curtain when she turned and tunneled through it. “Behold, my office.”
“What is”—I looked around—“I mean, what are you doing here? With an office? And what were those books about, in your apartment in Nova Ploetsk? What’s going on?”
“Patience.” She waved me across the spherical space, toward a foam sleeping platform not unlike the ones I had encountered at the waypoint buoys. Then, while I waited, she slid a circular door across the opening we had entered through. A gesture across a retina surface, and the luminous flecks embedded in the walls brightened. “We can speak here.” She reached over and handed me a small message chip. “Andrea sent this to me a bit more than a year ago. You’ll want to review it: It’s why I cut and ran.”
“You ran because she told you to?”
“Not exactly.” For a moment, Ana looked shifty. “But it told me that if I didn’t run now, then sooner or later the long arm of She Who Is Not To Be Named would catch up with me.”
“You mean”—I caught her drift—“Mother?” I glanced around. “I thought you said we could talk here?”
“Yes, but not totally freely. They usually ignore me when I hang out the privacy sign, or at least they pretend to, but if there’s juicy gossip to be had, you can’t be so sure. They tend to overshare, and they don’t understand when others object to being listened in on, so if you mention something, it might come back up later. Or not. They’re not malicious; they just don’t understand privacy very well.”
“Wait, who are we talking about?” My mind was a-spin with possible candidates who resembled her description.
“The squid-folk.” She looked at me as if she was wondering if I had left my wits on the surface. “They’re communists, sis. They hacked their mirror neurons. And the uncinate fasciculus, whatever that is. There are no sociopaths among them: Everyone has an enhanced empathic sense, optical signaling mostly replacing verbal linear speech with a system that allows them to simultaneously converse with multiple others in parallel—so it’s hard for them to understand privacy. They think we’re weirdly deformed, emotionally crippled for wanting it. It took me ages to explain that it was hurting their negotiating position.”
“Neg—” I blinked, transparent inner eyelids that blur the room around us. “They mine the blue smokers, right? What, how—”
“They’re squid-people, sis, because they’re uranium miners. They’re jet-propelled. They can sense currents with their acoustic sensory nets, and they’ve got neutron sensors in the backs of their eyes. They mix up boron salts and other neutron absorbers into the water in their siphons, then squirt it into the prompt-critical zones to damp the reactions down below the danger level. They find the blue smoker outflow vents, damp down each rising criticality bubble and split it up into safer volumes of concentrated uranium salt solutions. Then they send them upstairs, in balloon trains. If they sense a smoker that’s too big or dangerous, they can scatter and run away from it: By the time you or I could see the Cerenkov glow it would be much too late to dodge. You or I, we couldn’t do their job or make a living exporting concentrated, enriched, uranium salts. Trouble is, they’re mostly so specialized they can’t cope with life near the surface. Even with pressure mods, it’s too bright and too loud for them, and they go crazy if they’re cut off from each other. Like I said, they’re instinctive communists. So someone has to handle their interface with the planetary economy.”
I unblinked, stared closely at Ana. This wasn’t like her; she sounded fierce, almost protective. “You sound like you’re going native, sis.”