To Walk the Night
“That’s—” I took a deep breath. I’d seen images like that from the Turmoils, three hundred years ago. But it was three hundred years ago. Surely it couldn’t happen now. We were more civilized, even on Earth, weren’t we? “Why would anyone do that?”
“Intimidation,” Alexis said. He looked at me, as though trying to figure out just what I’d be prepared to accept. “They’re hoping that by being as barbaric as possible, they can get us to surrender before we think of fighting back.” He opened his side of the flyer and said, “Come, they might trace this. We must continue on foot, and fast.”
I got out and found him there, waiting, reaching for my hand. “I know the way,” he said. “At least the way to get away from this.”
I stopped. My hands grabbed at the stuff of my dress. “But we must fight back. They can’t be allowed—”
“We will,” he said. “Or at least I will as soon as I know what’s happening. You, on the other hand, aren’t part of this and I promised the Good Man to keep you safe.”
“It’s nonsense,” I said. “I’m stronger than you. I’m faster. I’m probably faster and stronger than Simon.” I saw his face cloud but couldn’t quite read the expression. “I’m supposed to protect others.” The last came out as a wail and even I couldn’t have known what I meant by it, except that since I remembered my foster parents had told me I should use my extraordinary strength and agility to protect others, rather than hurt them. They’d never told me what to do, I realized, when doing one required the other. They’d left me to navigate those waters on my own.
He frowned at me. Then unceremoniously grabbed my forearm, pulled me along. “You’re not stronger than all the people at once. You’re not stronger than a mob.”
He picked an odd path through the extensive gardens of the palace. I could feel roots and rocks under my feet. The ballroom slippers so perfect for dancing were not at all helpful in broken terrain. But I could hear sounds of people. Not peaceful sounds: shouting and screaming and occasional snatches of running and barbaric song; most definitely not peaceful sounds. If what my enhanced hearing could pick up was right, then the avenues of the garden, those paths that would be easier to walk, were full of the same people who had invaded the ballroom.
Alexis was doing a good job of keeping us away from them, given that he didn’t have my abilities. He steered us down slippery lawns and amid tree groves. We didn’t want to fight, and he was wearing the white, gold-braid bedecked uniform of Simon’s personal guard. I was not only wearing a conspicuous ball gown, but my holo-image had been all over local casts, as the Patrician’s special guest.
“You don’t understand,” I said. “I can fight. We don’t have to run away. I’m not…a normal human.”
There was a sound suspiciously like a chuckle, as he took a sharp turn at a cypress grove. It was hard to be sure of the song, as there was a whistling wind blowing from the sea and it carried with it the faint echo of revolutionary lyrics. His next words were clear, though. “I know,” he said.
The words took my own breath away for a moment. The implications of them made me a little dizzy. “You know?” I asked, my voice sounding like I felt.
He looked back and he was not smiling, which was good and might have saved his life. “The Good Man told me,” he said. “Come on. If you’re going to start screaming at me, I’d like to get further away from the palace first.”
“I don’t want to scream,” I said, which was true. What I wanted was to understand.
My origins weren’t so much a secret as they’d be unbelievable to ninety percent of the people on Earth old enough to understand them.
My ancestors, or at least the ancestors of the people who’d founded Eden, the tiny and secretive colony of my birth, had left Earth three hundred years ago.
They’d been bioimproved people created to serve the creatures who called themselves the biolords, but whom Earth history called Mules. The name came from their being all male and infertile with human females, thus designed so they couldn’t father a race that would supersede natural humanity.
They’d been created not as rulers but as servants: efficient, all-capable servants who would help rulers administer the massive bureaucracies of the twenty-first century.
They’d taken over. For over a hundred years, they’d ruled as lords of all. And, raised as slaves, insufficiently attached to the human race, their rule had been ruthless and implacable. When the revolt came, which they’d seen coming, about half of them had gathered all they could of their bioimproved servants and taken them away from the Earth, away from the massacres of the bioimproved by the normal, and to space in a ship called the Je Reviens.
No one, not even in Eden, knew what had happened between the Mules and their servants abroad the Je Reviens. All we knew was that after less than a year of travel, it had been decided that the less-bioimproved people, the servants of the biolords, those who were still capable of reproducing with normal humanity and who were still more human than not, should be left in a hollowed-out asteroid, to found their own colony.
The separation had been achieved with such haste that the colony had not been provided with its own means to collect energy. Instead, it had to send raiders to Earth orbit to collect pods from the powertrees, the biological solar collectors seeded by the Mules in the days of their rule.
Those secretive collections were made in darkships. Dark, so as not to be noticeable against the massive, black trunks of the powertrees. The ships were also, even in comparison to transport flyers on Earth and on Eden, nearly blind and certainly stupid. Instead of improving them and risking their falling in enemy hands with all their information, Eden bioimproved their pilots and navigators, for agility and vision, and sense of direction and memory. I’d been the navigator and mechanic of such a ship for six years, half of a team with my late husband.
If we were disabled or captured, pilot and navigator were to commit suicide rather than let Earth know for sure we existed or where Eden was. I shied away from that thought and thought instead that the system had worked, that this was why darkship thieves were as much of a myth on Earth as elves or mermaids.
“You know I’m a darkship thief?” I asked.
He actually stopped. He’d been walking ahead, regardless of my attempts to talk. “I know you’re like the Patrician,” he said. “One of the Mules. I know you’re as close as possible to a female clone of Jarl Ingemar.”
And then I almost screamed. Jarl Ingemar was arguably the best of the Mules. Or possibly the worst, depending on whom you asked. His rule certainly had been more intrusive than others. You see, he was well-intentioned and brilliant. The powertrees, a lot of the bioimprovements to other humans, more innovations than could be listed were counted to his credit.
If you could imagine Leonardo da Vinci created and raised in a wholly artificial environment and encouraged to think it was his lot to improve not just humanity’s living conditions but humanity itself, you’d be pretty close to Jarl Ingemar.
He’d been the mind behind the conception and creation of the Je Reviens. He’d also been one of the two Mules who had chosen to stay behind with the almost normal servants of the Mules, to assist in the founding of Eden. And who, little by little, had encouraged people to forget he still lived, as he walled himself up in a fortress of solitude and isolation.
Perhaps it was to combat this that his best friend, and the other Mule left behind, Bartolomeu Dias, had conceived the scheme of trying to create female and male clones of themselves. Perhaps the scheme had been darker and designed to give the long-lived but not immortal Mules a chance at living forever.
Just before Jarl’s death, they’d created me and what I must for lack of a better word call my brother, Kit. All that I could forgive. I wasn’t sure I could forgive that they’d called me Zenobia, which means spirit of Zeus. Nor that I’d been given to a human couple to raise, a couple who’d always seemed bewildered by me. Bartolomeu Dias, even aged, might have made a better foster parent.
None of this, though, explained why Simon would have told this man that I was made from Jarl’s genes, assembled in a lab by a complex process that defeated the ability to recombine Mule DNA and make female Mules.
If few people on Earth would be able to believe I was a darkship thief, anyone who did believe I was Jarl’s clone was likely to try to kill me.
“He…Why?”
“He trusted me. Trusts me. With what he is, too, with being descended…no, created from the Mules who were left behind. He told me that the same Mule has been succeeding himself as the ruler of Liberte for centuries, having his brain transplanted to that of his putative son, so he could inherit from himself.”
“Why did he tell you? When?”
“Oh, years ago, when he hired me as head of his security,” Alexis said. “There were reasons. In the way I became his head of security, I mean. I can’t explain now. We need to get as far away from the palace as we can.”
My tongue felt like cork in my mouth. I realized I had been gasping through an open mouth, and closed it with a snap, and swallowed. “You don’t care?”
“I wouldn’t have believed him—about you—if I didn’t know that the Mules left behind had managed to create a female. I saw no reason they wouldn’t have created one on the darkship world, where I understand they’re more advanced.”
“I mean, you don’t care that the Mules survived the Turmoils and eventually became the Good Men?”
“What is there to care about?” he asked. “It happened.”
“But…aren’t you afraid of Mules?” I’d read the history books on Earth. Though I suspected the Good Men, who were after all the same people, were just as ruthless as the Mules had been, the history books made the Mules much worse. “Don’t you want to stop them?”
I swear his lips trembled upward. “Aren’t we?” he said. “Didn’t the Patrician declare the Glorious Revolution?” He seemed to suddenly remember how the Glorious Revolution had evolved. He shrugged. “I mean you no harm, at least. On the contrary. The Patrician said to get you to a safe place, and I intend to, even though it’s going to be harder than I’d imagined.”
“I don’t need to be gotten to a safe place,” I said. “If you know what I am, you know I’m as strong as the Patrician, and as capable of defending myself.”
He rolled his eyes. “And as full of yourself. Don’t either of you see virtue in planning? Are you in the habit of throwing yourself into danger with no thought?”
I’d come to Earth with very little thought, except to escape bad memories and certain social obligations. I didn’t think I was full of myself. I certainly wasn’t like Simon. On the other hand, I’d been telling Alexis that I could fight a mob singlehanded. Which seemed foolhardy if not stupid. So I shut up and let him lead—stumbling and skulking through the palace grounds. At an outer building, almost at the edge of the grounds, he made me wait, and came back moments later wearing coveralls of the sort that manual laborers wore, and carrying what looked like a green sheet, which he folded around me as a cloak, that covered me from head to the hem of my dress.
After that, he led me out of the grounds to what looked like a ramshackle stairway which led us into a labyrinth of derelict alleys and thus, eventually, to a cheap rented room, in a not so good section of Liberte, the area that was the domain of servants and less reputable avocations. We had chosen the cheapest of automated motels and paid for it with an anonymous credgem.
In the dingy rented room, Alexis ditched the coveralls to appear again in the splendor of white satin and gold braid. It went badly with his appearance. He was a middle-aged man, at least ten years older than my twenty-five, with short dark hair and a square face that only a mother could love, and which, indefinably, put one in mind of a bulldog. Seeing me look, he gave me a feral grin and said, “Alexis Brisbois, at your service, Madame Zenobia Sienna.”
I didn’t know what to answer, so I didn’t. I dropped the sheet. He locked the door, then stood by it, with a burner in his hand, and his ear set against the dimatough panel.
“Just making sure no one followed us,” he said. Though he’d ensured that the camera over the door was broken—not unusual in this type of lodgings, of course—he didn’t trust that someone might not be looking for us or might not have caught a glimpse of us by other means.
While he went over the room, looking for hidden cameras and disabling a couple of gadgets that might or might not have visual-pickup capacity, I stood in front of the mirror that took up an entire wall—and I tried not to think exactly what it was meant to reflect, fully turned towards the bed as it was. But even thinking about that was better than thinking that I was in an enclosed space with no help anywhere near.
I must go out. I didn’t want to hide in this ratty room forever, with or without Brisbois, and I thought his idea of getting me out of the seacity was cowardly as well as futile.
Fortunately, he had no authority over me. No one did. First I had to get out of this room. Unfortunately, it seemed whatever was happening out there was definitely a revolt against the ruling classes. That meant that being known as the Patrician’s special friend told against me. I had to figure out how to make myself less remarkable-looking, less memorable, if I was going to move unremarked through Liberte seacity.
In my mind, I had only the vaguest idea of what I could do once I got out of here. Rescue Simon, of course, both because I owed him for his hospitality and to pay him back for trying to protect me, as though I were helpless without him. Pay him back in more than one sense.
I hated to admit that Alexis Brisbois had a point, though. When going against one enemy, force and intelligence sufficed. When going against a multitude, one must manage anonymity and surprise. And anonymity was going to be a problem.
It’s not that I think I’m beautiful, or that I know I am. I do, both. And it’s not personal opinion. Like everything else about me, it’s a certainty—what I was designed to be. No choice or opinion involved.
The men who created me had thought themselves if not gods, something very close. And though I’d been created to be the female version of one of them—built in a lab, protein by protein, gene by gene—they’d made me both beautiful and memorable. I looked as close as anyone living could look to the central figure of Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus.” My eyes were a little less innocent, I suppose, and I kept my hair long enough to hit the middle of my back, not falling in a red-blond mass almost to my knees, as the hair of the painted Venus did. But I did look like her. I knew.
Simon had taken me to where the painting was kept, in a vault to which it had been moved after the destruction of Florence. I think he believed the resemblance would flatter me. Instead, it had made me shake my head at the folly of the man from whose genes I was created and his old friend who’d helped him to make me. I’d known his friend. He’d been a sort of an uncle to me growing up. Until I saw that painting, I’d never realized he was insane. Broken, divided, lost, yes, but not mad.
So in that cheap hotel room, looking at my all too memorable reflection, I thought I must dye my hair brown. I must have said it aloud, because Alexis made a sound from the door. When I looked at him, I found him glaring back at me, over his shoulder. “You’re going about it all wrong,” he said. He looked disgusted or perhaps pitying. His face was hard to read.
I lifted my eyebrows at him, in an enquiry I didn’t know how to phrase, then said, “But I can’t stay here,” I said. “You must understand, I wasn’t made to sit and watch. I was told—”
He sighed. He sighed as though he were faced with all the stupidity of the world. He shook his head, shrugged. “I can’t convince you to be sensible, can I? At least allow me to represent to you that going out there, like this, with no idea of what you face and no more ability to move unnoticed in this world than a twenty-foot butterfly, is little less than suicide. If the whole seacity has decided to turn against the Good Man and anyone associated with him, you can’t fight them alone. If, on the other hand, it’s a small group causing all this, we can plan and overcome them.”
I was about to argue but stopped. I wasn’t completely stupid. It was just his assumption of mastery that bothered me. But he was right.
Alexis’s voice was low and raspy, and had just the edge of an accent. “Let me go and reconnoiter. I’ll bring you more clear intelligence, which you can use in your decision. You might still choose to risk yourself, but you’ll do it under advisement and that might fulfill what the Good Man meant by keeping you safe.” For some reason, unlike the edge of an accent that made Simon sound aristocratic and intriguing, it made Brisbois sound like a peasant, slow of thought. I realized the hands holding the burner were large and rough-looking, as if he tilled fields or built houses by hand in his spare time. “I doubt this entire riot is targeted at you specifically, but it doesn’t need to be particular to be fatal. And if you have to disguise yourself, dyeing your hair brown is all wrong.”
I looked back at the glass, and spoke to his reflection in the glass.
“What do you think is happening?” I said. I scanned his face for a hint of alarm, a look of…something that would give me an idea of what was likely to happen what the limits of possibility were. He was of Earth and more likely to understand better than I. I didn’t want a disaster to take me by surprise. Not again.
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t like to say. I can’t be sure. I suspect, but…” He took a long, deep breath. “Only, in this situation, acting on a suspicion and being wrong might land us in worse trouble than we’re in already.”
“Right,” I said. “But not acting can kill us too, no? We can’t hide here until they track us down!” He’d lowered his eyebrows over his dark eyes, as though in deep thought. “Look, people broke into the palace. Into the ballroom. They weren’t the troops of the Good Men.” I remembered people in everyday outfits, normal looking people. I remembered blood and fire. “They can’t be that powerful. We should be able to do something, to rescue Simon.”
“No,” he said. “No. I’m almost sure they were…just people. And the people who fired at our flyer were the same. People from—People from here, people from Liberte. The transports never left the water, and I’m sure the Good Men aren’t behind this. But I’m not sure…” He made a sound of exasperation, as though his mind refused to formulate the words he needed in this situation. “I’m not sure who they’re hunting for, you understand? If it’s a list of names, I’m on that list or you are. Or are they just trying to kill a certain type of person? Or it might just be a spasm of rebellion against anyone perceived as wealthier or more powerful. I don’t know, and neither do you.”
“Simon said to get me out of there, but he didn’t come with us. He thought I was in danger and he was not, clearly.”
“No,” Alexis said. “I don’t think he thought he was in no danger. Don’t you know the Good Man would be gallant enough to rescue you while sacrificing himself? I do wonder what Good Man St. Cyr knew that—” He stopped. I didn’t say anything. Neither of us were sure of anything about Good Man St. Cyr, including being sure that he was still, at this moment, among the living. Remembering the invaders into his house and ballroom, the explosions, the destruction of what seemed like immutable order, I doubted it. On the other hand, I had the very strong impression that the ci-devant Good Man, by his own words Protector of the People, was not that easy to kill.
A long silence fell. Alexis kept his ear against the door. After a while he sighed. “Do you trust me?”
I wanted to say yes, but did I trust him? Define trust. I’d learned from the earliest age that I was different, and that trusting other people—even my adoptive parents—to know what was best for me could be bad. Very bad. I’d learned early on to make my own way, to forge my own path.
I’d trusted one person in the world. Len, the pilot of my darkship. I’d married him too. And then I’d had to kill him, because the alternative was far worse.
But here, on this strange world, with this strange man I’d been thrust upon, what was trust? Could I trust him as I’d trusted Len? No. Could I trust him to not try to overpower me and take me away from danger, as he’d been ordered to do?
“You have orders,” I said. “From the Good Man. Would you lie to fulfill them?”
Alexis laughed, a mirthless cackle. “Let me rephrase that,” he said. “Do you trust me to tell you the truth if I promise to do so?” He seemed to search my face. “Yes, I promised to protect you to the best of my ability, but the Good Man transferred my loyalty to you. That means I protect you, but tell you the truth and let you decide what course you take. I don’t think I could overpower you forever.”
I thought of Simon ordering him to protect me. In the same way that I felt Simon would be very hard to kill, I had a strong feeling—belied by Simon’s effete, frivolous appearance—that the ci-devant Good Man would be a very bad person to cross; and that Alexis, being his servant, would know that at an instinctive, deep-set level. On the other hand, I suspected Simon was remarkably intolerant of the lower classes giving him their opinions, and he would have trained this man to know that. So why was Alexis talking of having transferred his loyalty and of telling me the truth? “Who are you?” I asked. “And don’t tell me Alexis Brisbois. Who are you? What are you to the Good Man St. Cyr?”
“Head of his security force,” Alexis said. “If he’s still alive, and if not—” He stopped. “Do you trust me to scout for you and do my best to protect you in whatever course of action you choose to take? If I promise to report to you faithfully, to help you rescue Simon and anyone else we can if at all possible?” He nodded at me. “Come. Surely you don’t think I want everyone I worked with, my colleagues, my friends, my subordinates at the palace to die? If I hadn’t been ordered to get you out and protect you, I’d be up there fighting. If we can save anyone, I’ll accept your help. Do you trust me?”
It took me a moment, and I confess the answer came more from gut instinct than from reasoned thought, but I said, firmly, “Yes.”
He pushed the safety on his burner, handed it to me. “Then, trust me to disguise you. I can’t stand to be here and not be sure what’s happening out there, nor how much danger we’re in,” he said. “Or the danger everyone else is in. Nor what to do about it.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going out. You stay here. If anyone—anyone at all—knocks, ignore them. If anyone manages to open the door and it’s not me, shoot them. If…It might be better if they don’t capture you alive. If I don’t come back in…in two hours or so, you’re on your own. Try to make your way out, and Que Dieu—And try to be safe.”
I appreciated his not spelling out that if the burner was almost out of juice and I was out-shot, I should off myself. It was clear enough from what he didn’t say, but he didn’t say it. I’d made that decision of “better dead than captured” for Len once. I might have been wrong. Could I make it for me?
“When I come back, I shall knock this way,” he beat a distinctive rhythm on the sideboard by the bed. “Do you understand?”
My eyes might not be as innocent as those of Botticelli’s Venus, but they clearly had a way of looking startled and not fully sure of anything much. I knew this because throughout my life people had asked me if I fully understood unpleasant things and tried to prevent me from fulfilling my duty.
I nodded at Alexis, with a touch of impatience. “I understand,” I said. And I did. I might not understand the precise danger we stood in, but I understood that I was in danger.
He looked dubious, as though something in my look failed to reassure him, but he put his ear to the door, then opened the door a crack and looked out.
Turning back, he said, “I’ll try to be back. If I’m more than two hours, you’re on your own.”
And he left.
I stayed by the door, burner at the ready. The clock embedded into the wall above the mirror worked. Surprising, given the state of the rest of the lodgings. Looking at it, reminded me that time could pass much slower than any objective measurements showed.
It lacked five minutes to two hours since Alexis had left, when the knock came. I’d been considering what to do on my own and had almost decided I’d leave and search for a derelict building that I could occupy and from which I could range out to figure out what I could do to prevent more chaos and death.
Alexis knocked and I opened. He came in and tossed a bag onto the bed. “I got you hair dye. And an outfit. They’re in the bag,” he said, gesturing.
“But I want to know what’s happening out there.”
“I’ll tell you. We’re going to have to leave. It’s…madness. Chaos unleashed out there. We’ll have to get away. Clear away from Liberte. There’s revolutionary guards; there’s organized patrols. And then there are unorganized mobs, out for the blood of anyone who—of anyone connected with the administration.”
“But Simon—” I said.
“We can’t save him on our own,” Alexis said. “Not against this. We’ll need help. Remember I told you that you couldn’t fight a multitude all by yourself? You can’t. There’s mobs, but behind them there’s covert and implacable organization. I have some idea who is behind this, but no way to get at them on my own. They are seeking anyone connected to the Good Man, anyone who is—Anyone they can eliminate. The Good Man has friends outside the seacity. We must reach them and ask them for help.”
“He could die while we do that!” I said.
“Then he’d be dead already,” Alexis said. “But I don’t think he is. I think the chaos is just dressing on the real action. I think this is a planned revolution; I think there are people in charge, people who’ve been waiting for an opportunity, and they know that the Patrician is worth more alive than dead.”
“More?”
“As a hostage.” He sounded impatient.
“A hostage to whom? The Good Men?”
He shrugged. “Them, or anyone else. The Good Men don’t like their kind killed, not visibly, not even if they’re rebels. They certainly don’t like their kind killed by anyone but themselves. It might give people ideas. As for the Usaians, they don’t like rebels killed, and they might intervene to save him just because of that. They might be willing to pay or sign a nonaggression pact in exchange for Simon. First we need to get out of here. Then we’ll figure out how to save him. We’ll find outside help.” And then, “You should be disguising yourself.”
“I thought you said there was a better way than dyeing my hair!”
“You’ll see.”
I took the bag into the attached fresher and saw. Or thought I did. The hair dye he’d got me was not brown, but a cheap, obviously fake red. The bag also contained just as cheap, and equally obviously false makeup, contact lenses that changed my eyes to dark brown, and a dress that appeared to be made of some sort of plastic. It felt uncomfortable against the skin, but it changed my look completely. I’d been considering dyeing my hair brown or black and wearing a unisex suit of the sort that manual laborers used to cover up their real clothes. I now realized that would have made me stand out like someone who was trying to disguise herself.
This, though—from the obviously fake hair color, to the overdone makeup with my now-unremarkable brown eyes surrounded by black liner and highlighter, and with the cheap, but ruffled and ornamented pastel-pink dress—looked like I was trying to call attention to myself and had nothing too remarkable to make note of.
As I put the makeup on, it occurred to me that Alexis’s competence in this particular situation was very odd. It didn’t strike me as something people could simply think their way into. But who would the head of security of the Good Man St. Cyr have conspired against? And why and how would he have needed a disguise?
Whatever he was, whatever he had been, Alexis seemed like he had a lot of experience with conspiracy.