And Now You Don’t
I saw. It started, like all adventures, in a stealthy and convoluted way. We went back to what had once been the Good Man’s palace, but Martha didn’t approach it the normal way. Or, frankly, in any sane way. She seemed to think it was very important to get in without anyone seeing us, even though she had a job within the building and I was a guest there.
“No, you see,” she said. “If they know we went in, they’ll track us, and figure out where we went. And while Lucius wouldn’t want you to die in Liberte any more than I do, any more than I want Simon to die, it’s very important that he be able to deny that he gave you any help, much less allowed you to get help from our expert in disguise and makeup.”
“Expert in disguise?”
“Yes,” she said. “What else? Oh, he would hate it if he heard himself referred to that way. He has a fancy title, something about tactical deception and infiltration, and yeah, what he does is way more than physical disguise. You’re going to need way more than physical disguise. But yeah, that’s what it comes to.” We were walking up a steep, winding street, towards the palace. To be precise, towards the back of the palace. I trusted her, because you have to trust someone, but I thought the whole idea was a little mad. No, a lot mad. It would be the equivalent of breaking into your own living room. “Royce is a Usaian, a convert, and a civilian contractor with the armed forces of Olympus. He is under the purview of the Daughters of Liberty, which are, roughly, under Luce’s control. If we use Royce’s services, it must be without Luce knowing it.”
And now we were on a beach, and I was wondering exactly why, and what this had to do with going to the palace. It was a very pretty beach, with golden sand, probably imported and set on the black dimatough frame of the seacity.
If I hadn’t known that the seacity was artificially built, grown on a poured dimatough frame, I’d have thought it was natural. Of course, the seacity had been built more than two hundred years ago, and it would have been at the mercy of natural forces ever since. This was a little beach, with golden sand extending to the ocean, a few boulders—real or artificial, I couldn’t tell—and, to the inland side, a growth of shrubs and trees near the rising black wall of a cliff that formed the structural support for the rising tiers of the rest of the seacity.
Martha plunged doggedly into a cluster of bushes, and it took me a moment to realize that she was doing it carefully, too, so as not to bend or break any of the branches, not to tear any of the leaves. I followed her, imitating her as best possible. She punched a part of the black wall that looked like every other part of the black wall, and then did something. There was a dancing of fingers on the dimatough, as though it were a screen and she were entering a complex code. I couldn’t see anything, and the movements were so intricate, it would take a long time learn, I thought.
Part of the cliff slid away. She reached back, without looking, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me in. I don’t like being touched by strangers. I really don’t like being touched by strangers. I ground my teeth together and endured.
She pulled me into a tunnel of sorts, as the unconventional door we’d used closed behind us. It was a tunnel, but it looked far more like the corridor inside a well-appointed home. The floor was some sort of tile, the walls and ceiling were off-white ceramite, and there was diffuse light from somewhere.
“Where?” I said.
“It leads to the palace,” she said. “To Luce’s room.” She looked over her shoulder. “It’s a great secret, and I only reveal it to you because I know you’d never—Because I trust you. It would be easy—”
It would be easy to send an assassin. Which meant that either Martha Remy was out of her ever-loving mind to be showing it to someone who would shortly be going into a place where she might be subjected to torture; or that Lucius Keeva was not as important to their war effort as one would assume. And then I started wondering if Lucius had told her to do this. It seemed unlikely, I thought, that she would dare reveal a secret of this importance, one that could lead to a neat assassination job, without his permission. It felt wrong.
This is how paranoid you could become when everyone was playing secrecy games. I started wondering if I was crazy or they were.
At the end of the tunnel there was another code typed on an invisible screen. It made me realize you’d have to have your hand just so, and in just the right place. I wondered what would happen if you were slightly off, and had a strong feeling it was the sort of thing I didn’t want to know, not really.
“It’s not as unsafe as it seems,” she said. “If more than two people are detected in here, and if at least one of them isn’t familiar to the surveillance AI, everything will lock, both sides, and Luce will know.”
“Surveillance,” I said. “Won’t there be recordings?”
She shook her head. “No recordings. Only an automated system. In the same way,” she said, in a low voice, as the door started to slide open, “this door won’t open if there’s anyone but Luce in there.”
“But Luce—”
“He won’t be there,” she said, and once more I wondered exactly what he knew, what she knew, and if they’d arranged all this together.
We left the hallway for a large, white-carpeted bedroom, furnished in polished pine furniture. It looked much like the guest room where I’d changed after showering, but the bed was larger. Then again, Lucius Keeva was a large man.
There is something intrusive, I think, about seeing the bedroom of someone you’re not intimate with. Bedrooms are so much a part of a person, a place where you remove your clothes, where you are yourself, and safe from intrusion from the world outside. There’s always something, in anyone’s bedroom, that will surprise those who don’t know him very well.
In Lucius Dante Maximillian Keeva’s room, it was the stuffed giraffe. I’d met the man, I’d heard his history, I’d even seen him in action as part of an expedition to commandeer a strategic asset. The last thing I expected of Lucius was that he would sleep with a stuffed giraffe. And yet, there it sat, three feet high from chest to head, with a too-happy smile on its face, looking out at the world with shining glass eyes.
Martha saw me staring. I couldn’t help staring. I thought she was going to explain the giraffe, but then she shrugged, as though thinking that no explanation would be enough.
To this day I have no idea why Lucius Keeva has a giraffe on his bed. And I don’t intend to ask.
We crossed the bedroom, and then she got cautious. We went out of the bedroom, turned a sharp right, went through what looked like a closet, then up stairs that had a distinct “maintenance area” look and down another set of stairs, then through another closet, and into a different hallway. Every step of the way she looked out before we emerged, to make sure no one was around.
Not only didn’t we come across any guards, we didn’t come across anyone, until Martha knocked at a door at the end of a hallway lined with shelves piled with anonymous boxes.
From the other side, a voice said, “Yes.”
She opened the door, stuck her head in and said something. The voice that answered her spoke too low for me to understand the words, but it reminded me of Simon’s voice. Not in timbre or tone, but in some indefinable way. Indefinable, that is, until I met Royce Allard.
Martha led me into a room that looked like a laboratory’s offspring by a styling parlor. There were machines and screens, mirrors and vials, and then there were chairs, set in front of what were clearly vanities of some sort, if vanities were really serious and high tech.
Royce—introduced that way by Martha—was a large man, built on the mold of Lucius or Alexis. He had blunt features, a shock of reddish-brown hair, arms that looked like he lifted weights at his job every day, and eyes like a shrewd monkey. Which might sound unkind, but isn’t. Just like the eyes of a monkey can look out of place, staring out of incongruous features, so too Royce Allard’s eyes looked incongruous, much too bright and intent for his blunt features. He looked at me, and his eyebrows went up a little. Then his hands went to the side of his waist, and then he spoke and I understood why he reminded me of Simon. He had the same accent, which wasn’t quite like a French accent in historic casts, but was close enough. “You want her to pass unnoticed in Liberte?” he asked Martha, and sighed. “Wouldn’t you want me to do something easier, like, say, hide a full-grown elephant in my armpit?”
I frowned. “I’m not an elephant,” I said. One thing is not to wish to take offense, and another to remain quiet while people around you are acting like mental patients.
He smiled. “Indeed not. And that’s the problem. Most people, male or female, will see you and remember you.” He shrugged. “Well! This will be a challenge. I always hear it’s important to have a challenge, so one doesn’t grow stale. When I finish this work, I’ll be so fresh I might as well be a beginner again.”
He led me to a chair and sat me down. The work he did involved a lot of machines, both for measuring things and for changing things. I wish I could tell you precisely what he did, but the truth is, I couldn’t even follow it. He worked silently, and all I can tell you is that at some point semi-permanent caps went on my teeth, which changed their shape, and that something of the same sort went inside my cheeks, which changed the shape of my mouth and my features. And yet, none of it was permanent, and none of it felt any different once it was in.
All right, maybe the teeth. I kept getting the persistent and unshakeable feeling that my teeth were too long for my mouth, but I couldn’t tell which parts of them were different.
My eye color was changed too. Not lenses. There was something injected. There was something injected at various portions of the procedure into various parts of my features, and I can’t tell you exactly where or what it did.
At one point I asked if the makeup would survive bathing, and Royce shook his head, which alarmed me, but then he said, “Not makeup, as such, understand. It is subcutaneous. It will be absorbed, in a couple of weeks. Earlier if I remove it. But until then, you are completely safe in your new appearance, safe through immersion and baths, and exposure to sun and anything. Your new appearance is your new appearance, impervious to all the things your normal appearance is.”
When it was all done, he stood me in front of the mirror. I still looked like myself, though my hair was a reddish shade of brown, and my features were…
It’s hard to explain. They hadn’t so much changed as been made unmemorable. The changes were small, save for the coloration—both my skin and my eyebrows and eyelashes were darker, and my eyes were now brown—but I no longer looked like Boticelli’s Venus. I looked similar enough that someone would say “Oh, you remind me of,” if he were very well educated and had spent a lot of time staring at me. Still, I didn’t look like I’d been made to order.
The point was that no one, male or female, would spend a lot of time staring at me. I looked like someone who could pass unnoticed in the street. I’d have passed myself on the street without noticing.
“The important thing,” Royce said, “and the difficult one is to change the way you move.”
I turned around and the stranger in the mirror turned around too, to face him. “The way I move? Why? Is that particularly memorable?”
He seemed to struggle for words. “Oh,” he said. “Well…yes. Or rather, it’s not memorable. No one is going to tell you he really likes or dislikes the way you move. It’s just…odd.”
“No one ever commented on it,” I said, frowning at him.
He smiled. When he smiled, he looked like a different person, and a much nicer one. “No, I imagine not. No one would notice it in your world, because it would be the normal way to move, or at least close enough. And here, on Earth, everyone knows you’re a stranger, so they would expect you to move and act like a stranger. But if you want to pass unnoticed, something will need to be done. People won’t know what makes them notice you, or what makes them sure you’re not from Liberte, but they will know—they will be able to have you followed and that’s the difference between your surviving and not—potentially. And then there’s the patois, but fortunately we have recordings for that.”
“Recordings?”
“Neural recordings,” he said. “Of the movements, too, but that’s harder to upload.”
“You’re going to upload things to my brain?” I blinked at him. I was used to the science on Earth being behind what we did on Eden. There was a reason for it. They had outlawed most experimentation and research after the Turmoils. Supposedly they’d only outlawed new biological research, but in fact all sorts of technical research and even incidental discoveries had been hidden and never hit the public consciousness. The reason for it was that the Good Men had liked society stable. Nothing destabilizes society like new knowledge and new gadgets and new inventions. They’d sold themselves to the people of Earth as bringing stability. And they had. Three hundred years of stability. Even if it required stagnation and massive deaths by attrition and neglect.
But even on Eden we didn’t have any way to access our neurons, bypassing the conscious act of learning to upload knowledge or training into the brain. “When I was in training,” I told him, “I often wished that there were some way to just upload all the knowledge directly to the brain, without my having to work at it.”
He chuckled. “Well, there isn’t. This isn’t it. It’s not knowledge of that type. I can’t use neural upload to teach you the multiplication tables, for example, but I can put it in your head so that if you’re prompted to answer two times two, your lips will say four. Does that make sense? Consciously you won’t know it, until you hear yourself say it. It is a lousy way to learn anything, because it will only apply in certain situations, and there will be no…control on your part. No…” he translated his verbal hesitation into a flourishing gesture midair with his right hand. “No way to use that knowledge, but the way that was imprinted. Also, it doesn’t last. It used to be believed, back in the dark ages around the twenty-first century, that eventually this mode of learning would replace traditional learning, that people would buy knowledge packs, and have it uploaded to their minds, as though they were a sort of meat computer. But it doesn’t work that way long term. Sure, if you absolutely need to speak a language for a week or so, we can upload some basic vocabulary, but you’ll speak it with atrocious grammar, unless you respond with a learned sentence to another learned sentence. You’ll be a clever parrot, not a real speaker of the language.”
“But then, what good does it do me?” I asked. “I thought you’d said I’d have to speak the local patois.”
“Well, alors,” he said, sounding very much like Simon. “It is the local patois. By which I mean, it is mostly Glaish, with a local overlay. If we give you the vocabulary to understand the overlay, all we need to do on your part is give you an accent, when you answer. You don’t need to speak the patois. Some people never do. Some people rarely. But you do need to understand it, and that’s easy. It is a list of words. You’ll understand the words when you hear them.”
“And it will vanish from my mind?”
A quick smile. “Like Cinderella’s dress, which is why this isn’t used for long-term learning, for things people need. Well, it’s not really used by anyone but the Usaian forces just now, but to the extent it could be used by everyone, after the revolution triumphs, and when science will be set free, it still can’t be used for long-term learning. The brain returns to its normal state.”
“So…How long do I have?”
He shrugged. “A month. Two. Who knows? Each brain is different. So…expediency and speed, highly recommended, yes?”
I nodded doubtfully, while he led me to a chair, sat me down on it, and put something that looked like a knit silver hat on me. Then he turned on an apparatus.
I can’t describe what followed, any more than I can describe the contents of a dream after waking. It partook that same nature of a dream, or at least of what one remembers of a dream once one awakes. Images and faces and sounds seemed to come out of somewhere, suddenly, with no preparation. Things happened. Most of them not physical things. Not things I could describe. At one point, there was a feeling of falling.
And then—he was removing the helmet. I stood up. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of a stranger before turning around to look and realizing it was a mirror. The stranger in the mirror turned, too, and stared at me with brown eyes.
“Not bad, is it?” Royce Allard said, a hint of pride in his voice. “You will do. You will pass.”
“Certainly I will pass,” I said. And then I realized I’d said it with an accent like Simon’s. And that Allard had spoken in a language that included at least two French words, and one whose provenance I couldn’t identify.
I blinked at him, and he chuckled. “It will do,” he said. “It is better than I thought I could do without a staff. And now, we should get you something to wear and your equipment, because if you leave soon, you should be able to approach Liberte in the dark of night. This will not help you against military defenses, but it’s not the military you should be afraid of.”
“The Sans Culottes are the military, aren’t they?” I said.
He shook his head. “Some of them. Some of them are trained and might rise to that description, but most of them, really, are just…a barely trained rabble. Certainly not well equipped. But even so, I think your greatest danger, in Liberte proper, is from people rendered hysterical by fear.”
“Fear of what?” I asked.
We were standing in the middle of his laboratorylike beauty parlor. I stood in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror, and saw him reflected in the glass behind me. Taller than I. Probably around forty years old, with his reddish brown hair starting to recede and at this point in time doing nothing more than giving the impression he had an abnormally tall forehead. His clever-monkey eyes looked at me in the mirror. “I was a Sans Culottes once, you know. Then there was…a moment, an experience.” He seemed to be weighing what and how much to tell me. His eyes narrowed. “I was raised as a Sans Culottes, you understand. Just like Martha,” he gestured towards her, and I realized she was still there. She’d been so quiet through the whole procedure that I’d forgotten her, or as near it as it was possible. “Just like Martha was raised Usaian. You don’t question it. I had training, and times of practicing for the revolution. And then, one day, while out with a group of young partisans like me, they found out something…different about me. The results were not pleasant. I was brought before the authorities on the principle that I was not equal. I did not wish to be equal. I was not trying to submerge myself to the whole, to be a good member of the unit. At the time, I had a friend who was Usaian, from one of the devout families. I…ah…converted, and eventually moved to Olympus to carry on my daylight occupation as a clothing designer.”
Beyond his hesitations, I could feel the lacunae in what he told, but I was momentarily diverted from wondering by the idea that someone who looked like he should carry stones for a living had made a living designing dresses—presumably—for fashionable women.
“That is the culture of the Sans Culottes,” he said. “And there are a lot of them in all French-speaking territories. They want to be equal. Really equal. Which is a good thing to aim for if you can, I suppose, but it means that sometimes you can’t be equal. Like Simon can’t be equal. And now that it’s been revealed that there are people among them who can’t be made equal, they will be afraid. Afraid, more than anything,” he said, “of the brittleness of their beliefs. The Good Men ruled for centuries, you see, on the understanding that they were superior. Denying that and destroying that belief was part of what the Sans Culottes were about. But then, when it’s revealed they really are superior, superior at a physical and mental level…Well! What is to stop people from binding themselves in subjection to these people once more; from wanting to be taken care of?”
“But,” I said. “Just because you’re faster or stronger, or even smarter, it doesn’t mean you make a better ruler.” I thought back to the man from whose genes I’d been built. By all accounts, he was faster, stronger and smarter, not just than the normal run of humanity, but than his own kind. “The way the early Mules ruled was no recommendation.”
“Yes,” he said. “But you’re talking reality.” His eyes looked grave in the mirror. “That’s not what we’re dealing in, you understand. My entire work, the daylight one, and the hidden one, requires me to be aware of what people think and believe that is not openly mentioned or openly spoken of. Humanity will undoubtedly always believe that someone very smart—smarter than they think they can hope to be, someone born endowed with gifts they can’t have, can only have one of two purposes towards them: to protect them or to harm them. And they in turn just want such people to go away. Those who are liberty-inclined because they fear that other people will submit to the superior men and the other people because, having endured the tyrannical rule of those people, they’re afraid of being subjected to it again, and being too weak to throw it off once more. The only way they can feel free is to kill those people; to make them stop existing and as if they’d never existed.”
“But I am one of those people,” I said.
His eyes went very serious. He’d been talking to me, somewhat in the way an adult speaks with a child, with the same assumption of amusement in his eyes and voice. But now his eyes went very serious, and he looked at me with a mix of something that might be worry or perhaps pity. “I know,” he said.