LEGACY BETRAYED (3 page)

Trimpot had not yet stopped talking. “. . . rally, but it’s a
trap
. I have a small personal assistant which is connected to the majority of CC followers. I could
use
it to send the message.
Then
, when everyone congregates, they’re arrested immediately. It would save a huge amount of time.”

Kaizen glared thoughtfully at the young rebel leader turned shrewd informant.

“Abner?”

“Yes, my lord?”

Kaizen glanced coolly at Abner, whom he had never liked, and took a vindictive relish in his next words. “You have been relieved of your duties as the personal advisor to the duke until further notice. You may return to Lion’s Head as soon as possible.”

“But– my lord–”

For the first time, Kaizen wielded his father’s scepter. He used it to point to the door, and Abner acquiesced to its command as if compelled by the late Duke Malthus Taliko himself.

“Trimpot,” Kaizen commanded. “I may regret this. On the other hand, it’s probably wise to keep a close eye on you. I’ll honor my father’s promise and bring you into the court of Icarus until further notice.” The scribe was scribbling furiously now, and the only member of the cabinet not wearing a definitive scowl was Claude, the hawk-nosed steward whom Malthus had always privately suspected a sympathizer. “I believe that is all, then, for tonight. I still haven’t slept. I should do that. You’re all . . . dismissed,” Kaizen finished, waving his hand, and hoping that was how these things concluded, though from the confused expressions on the faces of his courtiers, it was not.

“I’m going to need
protection
, you know,” Trimpot added casually, as if in afterthought. “Being a turncoat is dangerous.”

“I have hardly any protection myself,” Kaizen snapped. “Did you not know that my entire guard staff has been blinded? That I subsist on auxiliary defence from local establishments? Did you not hear that the Center itself is without sufficient staff to send N.E.E.R. new supplies? How could I send even two to Lion’s Head?”

“Perhaps you need send
none
from the castle walls,” Trimpot suggested. “Perhaps you could afford me a small wing of the palace. Ah! Yes! Why not the dismissed advisor’s vacant quarters?”

You devil.
“A home in Lion’s Head will be arranged until further notice,” he allowed. “However, you may stay in the castle keep, under the surveillance of the auxiliary sentries. You will always be free to go into Lion’s Head. If you feel unsafe, you may stay in the keep for this time.”

Trimpot silently deliberated. “I hate to be watched,” he murmured darkly, “but I’ll still take the castle keep.”

“I’ll accompany you there,” Kaizen replied. “We’ll send a man for your things.” In all honesty, he wanted to be able to control what the recent revolutionary had on his property. “I need to see the royal machinist, Master Addler, anyway. If any automata have been repaired yet, I’ll need to use it to contact Dyna and ensure that she maintain the claim that the condition of the late duke – I mean, my father – is stable.”

Master Addler’s wiry gray head was hunched like a surgeon over his worktable, an uncovered automaton sprawled before him. Most automatons had no porcelain coating left of which to speak. It had been crushed and lost in the massacre, or remained, horrifically stained. Seeing the bronze monster there, all the creations of gear and pulley, ball-joint and marble eye, slumped in a line against the wall, made the young duke slightly nauseated. Perhaps he had a touch of post-traumatic stress disorder, but then, he wouldn’t take that counseling.

“. . . be able to fix you up something,” Master Addler murmured to himself. “Though I still think you’re a very pretty–”

“Master Addler,” Kaizen announced his presence.

“Not you, too!” Master Addler sighed from where he dug in the brass guts, glaring over at Kaizen. His eyes were comically magnified behind the goggles he used for work with miniatures, perched at the tip of his bulbous nose. “Well, go lay down with the rest of them.” He continued fishing with his hook and his screwdriver, looking away. “Anyway, as I was saying–”

“It’s me, Master Addler,” Kaizen reminded him for the millionth time. “The duke,” he added.

“The duke,” a high-pitched, musical voice piped from the other side of Master Addler’s workbench, both smug and impressed.

“Sophie?” Kaizen darted to the opposite side of the bench and saw now that his illegitimate eighteen-year-old sister, Sophie, was bowed at the feet of the royal machinist, watching him work with her wide, wondering blue eyes. She used to be one of the most beautiful women in Icarus, with long, straight hair as pale as sunshine and a complexion as delicate as spun glass. But, born illegally under the Companion Laws, which prohibited any and all second children, she had lived an isolated and secret life within the castle walls. It had probably driven her a little mad.

Even now, she held a disabled automaton to her chest, idly spinning its cracked head.

Trimpot grimaced as his eyes swept this area. “I’m not staying
here,
am I?” he asked dryly.

Sophie’s eyes flashed to him and revealed the long stitch down one side of her face –once so flawlessly pretty. As if she had really been one of these porcelain non-humans. It had happened during the coronal massacre, though she seemed to hold no ill will toward the bots.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Neon
Trimpot,
” he answered.

“Of the CC? The one responsible for all of this?” Sophie shrilled, clenching her fingers. A bead of blood slipped down the cracked face of the automaton and she gasped, raising the hand to her face and peering at it thoughtfully. “Hm.” She suckled the finger and looked to Trimpot again. “You’re the one who killed my friends.”

“No, no,” Trimpot replied smoothly. “Not me. I was expressly opposed, and now, now I’m going to help the dear duke catch the bad people responsible and put them away for a long time.”

“We should kill them too,” Sophie seethed. She began twisting the automaton’s head again. “Kill them too and never turn their keys again.”

Kaizen sighed. This was bad, but he really didn’t want to think about it now.

“I think so, too, Sophie,” Trimpot said with a thick attempt at sincerity. He glanced inquisitively at Kaizen. “Dude, who the hell . . .?” he whispered from the corner of his mouth.

“No one,” Kaizen replied with a twinge. “Don’t worry about it.” He shifted his pitch to address the old machinist. “Master Addler, what’s your projection for a functional staff again?”

“Hm,” Master Addler answered. “This is Newton-2. He should be refurbished soon. Tell Kaizen it won’t be long.”

Kaizen shuddered. Newton-2 had been the one to punch him in the chest with knuckles of brass and broken glass. “That’s all right,” he answered. “No need to finish Newton-2 anytime soon. No general projection?”

Master Addler sighed dramatically. “Do you ask a painter how long the canvas will take to dry?” he demanded.

“Dude,” Trimpot said again. Kaizen’s jaw clenched. “I don’t want to stay in here with these loons.”

“In here or back at the domestic district, where I’m sure your friends are curious how their headquarters were ransacked,” Kaizen replied to the pink-haired turncoat with a clipped smile. “As always. Your call.”

Trimpot looked back and forth between the old man in the magnifier goggles and the blonde girl with the long stitch on her cheek. He grimaced. “Where do I sleep?”

              The City of Icarus Hospital was overrun with patients in dire need of blood transfusion to offset the lacerations given them by shattered porcelain; others were half-in and half-out of consciousness, having suffered the blunt force trauma of the literally brass knuckles on the attacking automata.

              One young man, bespectacled, with black dreadlocks, visage almost rendered unrecognizable by swelling and discoloration, had ridden the deluge of incoming wounded right to the back cot of critical care, where he still slept. In all the confusion of the throne-room-turned-battlefield, the boy had been brought forth with no identification card on his person, with nothing save his tattered tuxedo and the enormous top hat to which he’d been discovered clinging.

              At first, the difference was subtle. It started with her dreams that night. Coal 106 didn’t normally dream at night. When she did dream, she dreamed of plunging her shovel into piles of coal and sending up plumes of soot. It was just like her waking life, except she never grew tired. She supposed these were what they called “nightmares.” The only break from the monotony of the dig and the thrust and pitch and the thrust was the trudge back to the trolley with the other miners, and then, back to the dome. There, she’d receive her hosing down, her towel, and finally return to her unit. Unit 106. The narrow chamber, fragrant with mildew, and the threadbare cot. Her tiny window, and the distant moon.

              Then she’d wake up, and the alarm would be shrilling. A small gray tunic, freshly cleaned but permanently stained, would be hanging on her door, and the sun would be rising. The trolley would be waiting. The workers would be mulling forward.

But the night before last, something had happened that had never happened before.

The regularly administered shots–wide, mean-looking double-barreled syringes of glass, one of sickly yellow and another of deep, mossy green –were halted before she’d received hers.

Indignation wasn’t a common emotion to the inhabitants of Old Earth, and Coal was no exception. Her anxieties were muted by the chemical cocktail she received weekly. But, if she could have experienced indignation at that moment, she would have. There was a sublime relief which would tide over her as those fluids wove through her veins. Toward the end of the week, when its effects wore thin and she felt a painful stirring in the back of her brain, Coal 106 looked forward to the pleasure-pain prick of the needle. She looked forward to the way the world around her would darken and flatten, becoming familiar again. Less threatening. Less mysterious. A relief. A weight lifted. No, dissolved.

The shots came to a halt, and had not yet been re-administered.

The night of the missed shot had been filled with wild, colorful dreams. Pounding feet that melted into golden wings. A chorus of screams, no, a flute-like round of
hallelujah
trembling from within the clouds themselves.

These murmurs and shifts of her mind had been merely disconcerting at first. Almost like the mental whispers of a burgeoning schizophrenic.
What is that big land in the sky?
The faithful instinct to continue shoveling dented and fractured under the strain.
How did I even get here? Why am I doing this?
It had always felt as natural as divine destiny, though she’d never asked herself these questions. They were uncomfortable, like sitting on a chair above live embers. Prickling.

She’d continued to work. She could shrug this off. It must’ve been a spell of some sort. Influenza. It would pass. Like that pain when she breathed, or that strange sensation she only felt late at night, like there was a balloon in her heart. She could shrug this off, and it would pass.

But today had been different. The questions intensified, culminated, and it had started to feel good. This broiling thunderhead of resentment built and built as the shovel thrust into the piles of black stone, upending them into a bin. Today had been different . . . or was it tonight, now? She’d been here so long, and she couldn’t see the sky. How long had she worked? How long did she always work?

It was hard to tell. The mornings and the nights bled into one another. The work crews of Old Earth didn’t wake and sleep at conventional hours, but woke and slept by the demands of New Earth. Sometimes the alarms shrilled while the moon was still in the sky, watching them so bleakly as they trundled on toward the mine, suited in their tunics and rebreathers for another day. Sometimes the air horn signaling departure from their shift didn’t come until shovels were being dropped by numb hands. Until blisters were breaking and weeping and workers already collapsed.

Was it still today? Or was it night now? How long?

Why must we work for so very long?
she wondered, the heat of the question cutting through the fog in her mind like dawn. Coal sucked a breath through her industrial rebreather and immediately hacked it back out.
Why must everything be so miserable for us? Surely . . . there is more. Better. Something. We see doctors, don’t we? If we see doctors, then why do we always feel sick? Why is nothing ever done?

One of the wizened, glaring supervisors swept forward, examining Coal’s work and the work of her compatriots. This one was a woman, the skin of her mouth shriveled, her eyes shrewd and dark. She continued moving at a swift pace.

“Why are the old people staying so close to us now?” one of the other miners asked.

Coal normally had difficulty straightening her back after work, but she was suddenly capable of jolting upright. She dropped her shovel with an abrasive, echoing clatter.

No one had ever spoken to her before.

Not in years could she remember a single word, other than occasionally being told to lift her sleeve and get her tattoo scanned, or to open her mouth for a throat swabbing.

“They’ll be back now,” one of the others said.

Coal whirled on the second speaker as if they were monsters cropping up.

“They let us work alone before,” a third contributed. This one did not stop working. “Did everything alone before, didn’t we? Better keep it up, you.”

“Y-yeah,” Coal replied, coughing. Her voice was dusty with disuse. Realizing the third miner must have been talking to her, she snatched up her shovel and plunged it into the loose black rock. “Something must have changed,” she went on.

“Shh,” one of them said. “Here she comes again.”

The crew returned to their grim silence as the older woman approached. She was speaking into an instrument which, much like Coal’s coworkers, suddenly seemed to crop out of nowhere, never before seen. Yet, in her flat, gray memories, she knew that she had seen all of this before. It was only now gaining the color and dimension of newness, of significance. She knew these people. She had sat with them every day on the same trolley. She had seen them nude, hosed down, seen them collapsing from exhaustion and carried out of the shaft on the top of bins.

And she’d known these devices for a long time as well. Oddly shaped creatures of metal and mesh, figurines of man or insect, little spiders or birds, which the older people –and the others, their occasional visitors –spoke into, listened to, and carried constantly. But their antennae were springs rather than feelers, and their eyes and ears tended to be speakers or knobs.

“. . . left us totally unprepared! At least install some damn locks on the damn . . .” The woman’s voice faded as she receded, pitchy with frustration.

“Something’s going on,” Coal reiterated. She found herself loving this newfound sensation. Speaking. Thinking. Wanting. Wondering.

“Do you think it has anything to do with that big island in the sky?” one of the other miners asked.

Coal gasped, then coughed. “I was thinking about that too,” she confessed. “What is up there? And why are we . . . down here?”

The air horn blew, and for the first time, the sound brought a fresh, welcome welt of gratitude to Coal’s heart.

              “. . . shared several classes, too,” Miss Sotheby droned overhead, pulling Dax from his vacant stare into the 2312 census report.

              “Huh?” he asked, knowing fully how rude he seemed just now.

              Although she was technically his boss, Miss Sotheby was also a kind, matronly mathematician. Unmarried and long-since ineligible, perhaps she saw in him the son she’d never had. Her eyes softened. “Are you all right, Dax?” she asked.

              The normally bright blue eyes were hemmed in wrinkles, and beneath his rebreather was two days’ worth of growth. He’d been staying at Glitch’s with Legacy, and the mattress had caused him to develop a limp.

              “Yeah,” he said. “I’m really sorry. What did you say?”

              “The girl with two Companions,” Miss Sotheby repeated. “I did some research on her, and learned that she excelled at building models in secondary school, which is just perfect, because one of the Companions placed as a civil engineer.
And
they shared several classes together. They probably even know each other.”

              Miss Sotheby always gleaned great satisfaction from a good match made. “Great,” Dax said. It seemed like the right thing to say.

              Miss Sotheby looked at him more closely. “Why don’t you take a break, Dax?” she offered. “You look exhausted.”

              As she progressed to the next station, Dax gazed back down into the current census report. He didn’t bother to inform her that this was not “work.”

              It was a report he’d pinched from the archives.

              The Compatible Companion Selection Services lab was usually a great place to work. It paid well, enough for him to live alone with modest savings, and he didn’t have to deal with the general public, which was a blessing. His problems and the tools with which he solved them were numbers, or machines, logic and probability. It suited him, usually. His head just couldn’t stay clear today. Or yesterday.

On the outside, CCSS was a simple building, located not far from the hospital and the schoolyard, but the interior more closely resembled a factory. The lab was composed of individual stations, each housing a difference engine. The gleaming, bronze machines were the size of three large adults side by side. Twenty-four spines of numerical value ran vertically and were churned by the turn of a crank, spiraling into one another like eight twisting double-helixes as they calculated the difference. The standard tasks of the day were much more complex than the turning of a crank, however. The results of each eligible citizen’s examinations were tallied –and these “results” were as intricate as pages of gene sequencing and a two hundred item personality profile –fed into the machine, exclusions defined, and the crank turned until the most complementary match was produced –or, otherwise, until the machine emitted smoke.

The lab was also home to a repository of citizen files: everything from the census data, which Dax now inspected, to school notes and placement scores to legal documents, every ticket, every form. At the Centennial, when Legacy had submitted her question for approval by the court steward, Claude, her identity and question had been marked and filed. Almost everything anyone born of Icarus had ever done was in these archives. They were intended as background research, but could easily be abused.

              For example, if a budding revolutionary decided to run the numbers on the possible influence of his sect on the whole of Icarus, it wouldn’t take too long to discover that Chance for Choice comprised less than .5% of the population, which was less than a sixth of the number requisite to tilt probability even slightly to their favor.

             
I just don’t see the way out anymore,
he thought, running his fingers through his rumpled brown hair.
Once, I thought that there was something we could do, but that was before everything went so wrong. Maybe the best we can do is just put Legacy onto that airship and send her off to Celestine.

              Because, as hopeless as his situation was, hers was infinitely worse. The monarchy was bound to be bloodthirsty after this affront to its power. If Trimpot didn’t quench that thirst –and he was oily enough to slip the noose, Dax was sure –then Legacy’s head would suffice. Of course, the girl would never agree. Not with her parents here, and him here, and then, there was that other girl Dax had discovered in the N.E.E.R. dome down on Old Earth. She was eerily identical to the silver-haired, golden-eyed metalsmith, whose features weren’t exactly plain, and in the records room, he’d seen an entry in the ledger from Legacy’s own parents, dated on her birthday.

              He hadn’t told her. And he probably wouldn’t.

              What good would it do? It’d only ensure that she’d never accept the lone logical conclusion to this mess: leave. Leave Icarus.

              But, as long as she had family here –and as long as she had Dax here–she never really would.

             
Would I go with her, if she asked me?
Dax wondered, closing the census report and standing to return it to the archives. That was a good question. A few weeks ago, he would have said yes without hesitation. But now?

              Dax strode down the center of two columns of stations, opened the door to the basement vault, and trod a long stairway into the dusty depository of files and files and files.

              Now, he wasn’t so sure.

              What if Legacy had only attached to him due to proximity? They’d come of age side-by-side. It wasn’t as if Legacy had been a social butterfly in youth, and she was still, after all, only on the verge of turning twenty-one. What if she just hadn’t met anyone better suited to her yet – like the earl. Kaizen.

              Dax replaced the 2312 census tome and just stood, staring, for a moment.

              He’d heard what Liam had said.

Liam Wilco, Legacy’s mandated Companion, had accosted her in Heroes Park several days ago. Liam was the stiff, law-abiding type, and he worked directly beneath Dyna Logan at
CIN-3.
He didn’t care for the connections repeatedly drawn between his reluctant bride and the rebels, and he’d been both furious and loud about it.