A Lady of Danaë’s education knows the corpus of the Patriarch by heart. «A good answer, Mycroft.» Heartache’s remnants gave her French a somber tint. «Thank you. If he has been drawn into this by some cruel manipulator, I know you will protect him.»
I had meant to trade blackmail for blackmail here, but instead found myself drawn into pity, for Danaë, and for young Carlyle, too. My mind buzzed with measures to protect them, the lady from the enemies of Mitsubishi and Japan, the sensayer from the stern Major, from overcautious Thisbe, from himself, mistakes he might make in the first giddy hours after meeting Bridger. That thought warmed me, the strange, sideways kindness of Providence, which had stripped the Gag-gene of bash’ and past and family, only to give him a treasure which was, to any sensayer, a thousand times more precious: a miracle. «Actually, Princesse, I think he has both much knowledge and much happiness, at least where it matters.»
If some brave painter captured her smile on canvas it would draw crowds down the centuries. «Thank you.» Then again in Japanese, for all to hear,「Thank you, Mycroft. And we must thank my dear brother for calling you and Martin in to solve this. I know all feel safer in your hands.」
Director Andō nodded my dismissal, and Princesse Danaë passed me my Servicer’s reward at last, a round lunch box, tied and too heavy to be anything but sushi. My many masters don’t always remember they must feed me, that their toil-earned handouts are the only sustenance permitted to we the unfree. But Danaë—this monster from a more barbaric time—always remembers the protocols of servitude.
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
Aristotle’s House
I muse sometimes about where else in history I might have picked to be a slave, if I had had my choice. I could have been a slave in Aristotle’s house, when he reared Alexander. I could have midwifed at the birth of Caesar. As a slave-convict I might have added my sweat-drenched kilometer to the railroads that saddled the great continents, my heaven-bound cable to the first Space Elevator, or sweated in the rigging of the Santa Maria as she erased the dragons at the world’s end and knit the whole sphere closed. If we count apprenticeship as an unfreedom, I might have been the typesetter who forged Newton’s Principia letter by letter with his own black fingers, or the clerk who brought the coffee to Brill’s circle as the master ranted into the wee hours, with silent Cullen in the corner, already dreaming of her bash’es. In any of these servitudes I would probably have cursed the great works I touched, the great men I called masters, nor would knowing they were great have lessened my suffering one toil-smeared jot. Yet somehow the idea warms me, that, out of every thousand lives of suffering my ancient counterparts endured, one slave was building something that his soul, if it could view all from outside of time, might call Great. It cannot wash away humanity’s great cruelties, but Fate’s cruelties, those, I think, it mitigates a little, and, for me, a little is enough.
I was scrubbing spilled perfume from Thisbe’s bedroom floor when Carlyle Foster made his timid way back to the Saneer-Weeksbooth bash’house. I watched him through the security system which, for Bridger’s safety, Thisbe let me access. He started toward the little stair to Thisbe’s door again, but the main door opened for him, beckoning him across the walkway to the front hall, dark and empty.
<i see you, you salty yellow ball of light. come in.> The words appeared as text in Carlyle’s lenses, and the log of them makes it easy for me to reconstruct the scene. <come in, i said, in in in.>
The sensayer tiptoed across the walkway and peered into the spartan trophy hall. “Hello?”
<why are you back? mycroft said you’d be back, but you don’t come back, totally out-of-pattern. did you leave something behind?>
“Mycroft said I’d be back?” Carlyle crept along the empty hall, nervous as a new cat.
<they said to tell you they’re downstairs. they didn’t say why you’d be back. did you forget something? you don’t leave your things very often, 09.02.51 is the last i have.>
Carlyle’s breath caught when he reached the central room where Mukta hung in her place of honor, looking so like the textbooks. Or perhaps it was the two people sprawled on the floor who made him gasp. Both wore time-scuffed bathrobes over body suits of transparent conducting film, tight as a second skin. Thin, molded helmets covered their scalps and ears, and a strip of plastic taut across the eyes kept the real world’s light from interfering with the computer’s. The films over their limbs were pocked by the round red spots of tactile feedback discs, positioned far apart on the less discerning surfaces of shoulders and fleshy thighs, but dense as strawberry seeds on the nerve-packed skin of hands and faces where a millimeter’s difference is perceptible. One of the two snored softly, but the other waved.
<hello.>
Carlyle smiled. “Hello. You must be Member Eureka Weeksbooth?”
<bingo.> Perhaps Carlyle could see Eureka’s subtle wiggles as they texted, or perhaps he thought he could.
“And that’s Member Sidney Koons?” Carlyle gestured to the sleeping one before remembering Eureka could not see.
<you’ve read up on us.>
“I have to if I’m going to be your sensayer. My first appointment with you is next Thursday, I believe.”
<yup, 15:00. sit for a minute, i have questions.> Eureka flailed vaguely toward a couch to their left. I will use ‘they’ for Eureka, for there is nothing female about a creature to whom the body is no more than the mind’s imperfect interface, and the sex organ one more convenient place to cluster sensors. Even if Eureka’s robe falls so loose that this guest can see the spiral of peeking pubic hair, Carlyle would feel nothing but awkwardness. <why are you back? i have your stat trail here, i know how often you go back to parishioners’ places same day, it’s practically never.>
“My stat trail?” Carlyle scratched his head, his blond hair shining glossy in the light despite its neglectful overgrowth.
<past car usage. everyone has patterns. i don’t just have the system send cars when you call, i have to teach it to anticipate who’ll likely call cars when, so it can preroute them sensibly. why did you come back here same day? way out-of-pattern. so exciting! i see radical pattern breaks sometimes but i never get to ask directly why.>
I saw Carlyle’s flinch over the cameras: his first test keeping the secret. “Are you looking at my tracker data?”
<part of it. i only receive tracker data related to when you’ll want a car. my system doesn’t look at your image or audio feeds, just where you are, who’s called you, work people, home people, things to tell the system where you’re likely to want to go next. you never return to people’s houses same day like this, so why did you?>