CHAPTER IV CHAPTER IV
THE AQUEDUCTS
Darkness that engulfed my senses. No light reached this far underground, not even a stray hint that might reveal the barest outline of my hands when I held them in front of my face. Silence filled the air, deeper than a sea, as if the world had gone mute, unable to speak its secrets. I brushed my hands along rocky walls on either side of my body as I walked, and the faint whisper of their touch might as well have been thunder. No voices broke the silence, no footsteps, nothing to indicate anyone existed in this dark, cool realm.
I knew better.
I’d hung a light stylus around my neck, but I didn’t flick it on. My hands hit a barrier. I felt along it until I found a tall crack in the stone. After I squeezed through the crack, I continued walking. My hands scraped over rippled rock formations. If any light had revealed their stark beauty, I’d have seen stalagmites that rose in cones from the ground, and stalactites that hung like stone icicles from the ceiling. Mineral-saturated water had created them eons ago, dripping relentlessly. No trace of that water remained; this cave had dried out long ago. The air smelled of dust, an aromatic scent from traces of benzene compounds, nothing poisonous, but enough to tinge the air. I loved it. I’d grown up assuming dust smelled good. That was before I shipped offworld at seventeen to train with all the other grunts in the stinking grit of other worlds.
Even in the darkness, I knew when I reached an open space. I tapped my stylus and light flared. After all the darkness, it might as well have been the blinding glare of a flood lamp. Gradually, as my eyes adjusted, the intensity eased until it was no more than a dim sphere around my body. I could see again—and it was worth the wait. I’d always loved to come this way, through the dark, revealing the beauty at the end in a flare of radiance.
This was the Undercity.
I had come out into an underground canal, part of what we called the aqueducts, though I’d never understood that name. This conduit was far too big to be an aqueduct, besides which, if water had ever flowed through here, it had disappeared ages ago. All that remained was a wonderland of canals, caves, and stone lacework that honeycombed the ground below the desert for many kilometers in every direction near the City of Cries. The Undercity dwarfed Cries, but most of it remained inaccessible unless you knew the ways and people of this hidden world.
I stood on a midwalk, a pathway large enough for two people to walk side by side. It was about halfway up the wall of the canal, midway between the ground and the rock ceiling. Arched supports reinforced the canal. At intervals, a long-dead artist had carved statues into the wall, ancient and detailed, work that survived the eons with the careful attention of the Undercity population. The statues showed deities and their spirit companions from the pantheon our ancestors had worshipped millennia ago.
Ixa Quelia, goddess of life and fire, stood near me with her hair streaming along the wall, engraved into the stone, her features chiseled, the high cheekbones, straight nose, and large eyes associated with the nobility. She held the embers of life, a quartz circle embedded in the rock. The statue beyond showed her spirit companion “Chaac,” a name my people spoke in the ancient manner, with glottals at the start and end of the word, a pronunciation rarely heard among modern Skolians. Chaac looked human from the waist up, but she had tufted ears and the body of a hunting cat. She held the axe of lightning and a shield painted with gold, red, and white rings, the colors kept bright by those of my people who tended these statues.
Modern sculptures stood in the canal below, shaped from dust and hardened by chemical applications we’d had passed down for generations. One showed a woman and man standing back to back, both turned forward. Muscled and beautiful, with their daggers drawn, they were modern-day warriors. They mirrored an ancient statue above them on the midwalk, a female warrior in a similar pose, holding a sword at the ready, her body turned forward. She had one hand on the shoulder of a man who sat facing the canal, his head lifted, his clothes those of a barbarian prince. The contrast of the men in the two statues spoke volumes. Cries might struggle to reconcile modern society with the ancient ways, but my ancestors had left those traditions behind thousands of years ago when they retreated to live underground. We had neither the interest nor the luxury of secluding our men. Even the older statue on the midwalk had a different quality. Although the man had a less aggressive pose than in the modern sculpture, he leaned forward with a fierce intensity that hardly fit the notions of cloistered, protected princes from the history books.
The entire scene glittered as the light from my stylus struck crystals embedded in the stone, thousands of them sparkling like a multitude of tiny stars. It was breathtaking, and it was ours, hidden deep beneath the desert. Even the archeologists who came to study the ruins, those few my people allowed to visit the aqueducts, had never discovered these depths of the ruins.
I set off jogging along the midwalk, settling into a familiar rhythm. An entire city of ruins existed here. Our ancestors had built some of this thousands of years ago; the rest dated from a time before humans came to this world, a reminder our species hadn’t originated on Raylicon, but on a blue-green paradise called Earth.
The legend of our home world had grown misty with time. Six thousand years ago, an alien race had taken humans from Earth, stranded them on Raylicon, and then vanished, leaving the lost humans fighting to survive. Nothing remained of that unknown race except three crumbling starships on the shores of the Vanished Sea. However, those ships contained the library of a starfaring race. Much of it had been destroyed; what remained described sciences unlike anything we used today. Although it had taken centuries, my ancestors developed star travel from those libraries and went in search of their lost home. They never found Earth, but they built an interstellar empire. Based on poorly understood technology and plagued by volatile politics, the Ruby Empire had soon collapsed, and the ensuing Dark Ages lasted for millennia. Eventually we regained space travel and formed today’s Skolian Imperialate.
When Earth’s people finally reached the stars, they found us already here, building empires. We rejoiced to reunite with our lost siblings. Our origins remained a mystery, however. No civilization from six thousand years ago on Earth matched our culture. Our ancestors seemed too advanced to have come from any group in that time frame. But we could never be sure. Before they achieved space travel, the people of Earth had fought what they called the Virus Wars, which acted in both the cyber and biological arenas, devastating Earth’s population and her digital history. If a memory remained of our ancestors there, we had yet to find that record.
Here in the Undercity, my people lived with famine and wonder, pain and joy, deep below the desert in the magnificent ruins of an alien civilization that had been ancient before humans ever walked this world.
Torches shed light across the canal, set into the walls in metal scones that looked like roaring beasts. Their fiery light revealed two fighters on the floor of the canal locked in a sparring match. Red dust swirled around them and only the thud of muscle on muscle broke the silence. Three other fighters stood back, intent on the bout. Together, these five ranked as my top tykado students. They were in their early twenties, considered adults in the aqueducts even though by Imperialate law, they wouldn’t reach the age of majority until twenty-five. Down here, children grew up fast.
The two in the sparring match were members of the Ruzik dust gang, a tall woman named Tower and a man called Byte-2. Ruzik himself stood leaning against the wall with his arms crossed, studying the fighters. At twenty, he was the youngest of the five, but that took nothing from his leadership. Tats covered his shoulders, stylized depictions of his namesake, the giant reptilian beasts called ruziks that ranged across the desert above. People from Earth compared the creatures to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. So maybe a ruzik looked sort of like that dinosaur, but its front limbs were longer and more powerful, and iridescent scales covered its body.
Ruzik’s girlfriend Angel stood next to him. Dressed in dusty trousers and a torn muscle shirt that showed her well-defined abs, with her muscular arms crossed, she looked about as angelic as a barbarian warrior-goddess from Raylican mythology. The third fighter watching the match was Hack, Ruzik’s best friend. Hack fought well, yah, but his true genius was at creating tech-mech. He had become a cyber-wizard unequalled by anyone else in the Undercity even among the surreally tech-savvy cyber-riders.
These were my tykado experts, five violently beautiful youths, all surviving into adulthood, a rarity here. I stood by the wall, dressed like them, studying their technique as they fought. They called this canal Lizard Trap and claimed it as their territory, which they marked with dust sculptures of ruziks rearing up on their back legs. It reminded me of the gang I’d run with in my youth, protecting our circle of kith and kin. Ruzik’s gang looked after a large circle: ten children ranging in ages from a baby to older adolescents, and also a group of adults that included Hack. As the cyber-rider for the circle, Hack played the meshes for them like a virtuoso.
Tower dropped into a roll and kicked Byte-2 in the ankles. With a grunt, Byte-2 tripped and slammed into the ground. As Tower jumped up, I walked over, holding up my hand to stop her. I spoke in the Undercity dialect, short and succinct. “Illegal move.”
Tower scowled. “Good move.”
Byte-2 stood up. He looked more pissed at me than at Tower, even though she was the one who had cheated against him. “Smart move,” he said in his gravelly voice.
“Illegal,” I said. “Tykado rules forbid.”
Angel glowered at me. “Screw the rules. Move works, move good.”
Patience, I told myself. They knew tykado wasn’t the rough-and-tumble of their gang fights. Sure, they were good street fighters, and they’d been refining their skills all their lives, practicing every day for the sheer love of the challenge. They’d learned tykado fast when we started two years ago, but that didn’t mean they were ready to earn their first-degree black belts. Tykado was about more than knocking down your opponent. It was a way of life.
I crossed my arms. “No rules, no black belt.”
“Fuck black belt,” Angel rumbled.
I knew they’d never admit they were nervous about testing with an elite Cries Tykado Academy, grouped with city students who came from a wealth and privilege these five could barely imagine. So they blustered. They also worked hard, practicing every day.
A wicked smile played around Ruzik’s lip. “Not the belts,” he told his girlfriend.
Angel laughed, her tension easing. Then she remembered she was pissed and gave me a look that could have melted steel. “Tykado rules shit.”
“Only one rule,” Byte-2 offered. “Win.”
“Yah.” Tower brightened. “We fix tykado rules. Make them better.”
I could just imagine what the ITF, or Interstellar Tykado Federation, would say to that idea. “Tykado rules fix you. Make you better.”
Angel gave me an exasperated look. “Always you say this. How am I better?”
“Smarter than city slicks,” I said.
That answer got approving looks from them all. Ruzik spoke quietly. “We’ll do their rules better than them. Don’t need special treatment.”
The others quit arguing then. Ruzik had chosen a good approach; it was a point of pride for them to achieve the same honors as Cries students without special consideration.
I called a rest, and they gathered on stone benches by the wall. Statues of winged reptiles supported the seats, their heads tilted back, their fanged mouths open in roars, their massive tails curled on the canal floor. The works sold by Concourse vendors didn’t come close to this artistry. I couldn’t interest any of those vendors in taking work by our artists on commission, though. Even if they’d been willing to share profits with Undercity artists, which they weren’t, they didn’t believe my people could make anything worth selling. They thought the craftwork I showed them was fake, that I meant to cheat them. The few who realized they were seeing the genuine article were even less willing to sell them. They’d rather refuse whatever they could earn than admit Undercity artists created better works than them. Well, screw that. It just strengthened my determination to get Concourse licenses for my people.
As the fighters did their cool down, I went to another bench. The gash in my abdomen ached, and I needed a pause, so I sat and considered our options. My students had participated in two tykado tournaments, the first ever sanctioned events between Cries and the Undercity. Before that, interactions between our cultures had consisted of Undercity kids sneaking to the Concourse to steal food, cops chasing them back to the aqueducts, clandestine visits by the Cries elite to Jak’s casino, the drug trade, secret trysts between forbidden lovers, and other whacked out misbehavior. Those two tournaments, for all their simplicity, were unprecedented. They almost hadn’t happened because no Cries academy wanted anything to do with Undercity teams. That changed when Lavinda Majda offered to give out the awards. She was the closest I had to an ally in the House of Majda. It also helped that another ally of mine, Professor Ken Roy from Cries University, knew people at the Cries Tykado Academy and put in a word for us. With two such distinguished supporters, CTA agreed to a tournament. Their students had expected to win easily, but the fights had been close and my group bested them in several matches.
My fighters sat together now, dark hair shaggy about their faces as they talked about their technique. Good. They’d caught the interest of the Cries coaches, so I was negotiating for them to test for their official tykado belts. But which ones? They trained every day, often for hours, far more than most Cries students. They hadn’t started out in tykado, though, and they still had gaps in their technique. Although they already had the equivalent of the lower belts, they hadn’t earned them at a school accredited by the ITF. The Cries Tykado Academy agreed to test them for first-degree black belts anyway, because in return I agreed to work with the academy students. It was a good bargain: As a sixth-degree black belt, I needed to teach as part of the training for my next level. I worried, though. As much as I didn’t want to hold back my students, who burned with dreams, if I let them test too soon and they failed, it could backfire. These five were trailblazers, informal ambassadors from the Undercity to Cries. The last thing I wanted was for them to feel humiliated in front of the city students, who already considered them inferior.
Footsteps sounded down the canal, muffled by dust. I looked up to see a huge figure walking in the shadows beyond the golden torchlight. As I stood up, he came into view. He towered, with wide shoulders, powerful arms, and legs like tree trunks. Yah, Gourd was big. Fortunately he liked engineering better than beating up people. Of course, no one here called him an engineer; our dialect didn’t even include the word. He was a mech wizard.
“Eh, Gourd,” I said as he came up to me.
“Eh, Bhaaj.” He nodded, and a curl of gray-streaked hair fell into his eyes. When had it started to change color? It seemed only yesterday we’d been kids, running with Jak in our own gang. We were both in our forties now, but he had no nanomeds in his body to delay his aging.
My efforts to improve medical care in the Undercity sometimes felt like wading through quicksand. Cries preferred to forget about the inconvenient slum under the desert. My people wanted nothing to do with Cries and would never accept anything they considered charity. Although I’d been making progress, seeing Gourd’s graying hair brought home how far I still had to go.
Gourd settled next to me onto the stone bench. “Heard whisper. You looking for me?”
“Yah,” I said. “You need to see Doctor Rajindia.”
“What for?”
I touched his hair. “Get health meds.”
He shrugged. “Feel fine. Like my hair.”
“Meds keep you always feeling fine.”
Gourd grimaced. “Don’t want them in my body. They never go away.”
I understood. I’d been uneasy when I got mine in the army. But now I took for granted the advantages of having little molecular laboratories cruising my bloodstream, taking care of my health. “Worth it. Live better, live longer.”
He crossed his huge arms and scowled. “Jak says this, too. Him and his meds.”
I’d never figured out where Jak got his, but I was glad he had them. “So yah, it’s good.”
“Won’t take charity.”
Again we came to that. He wouldn’t take anything for free, and he was one of the few people in the Undercity who understood how much meds cost. I knew how to reach him, though.
“Make a bargain,” I said.
He uncrossed his arms and regarded me curiously. “You get me meds, I do what?”
“Work for me. Do research.”
“Like what?”
I reached behind the bench and grabbed my backpack. Opening it up, I took out the sphere from the Quida mansion. “This.”
Over on the other bench, Angel lifted her head. “Pretty,” she said. She and the others nodded their greeting to Gourd, who nodded back. They then went back to their tykado talk.
I handed the sphere to Gourd. He turned it around, letting it catch glints of light. “Bright.”
“Puzzle,” I said.
“Why?” He tossed the ball into the air and caught it. “Round. Puzzle solved.”
I smiled. “Check it out for me.”
“Check for what?”
“Not sure. Was twisted.”
He gave a hearty laugh, deep and rumbling. “What, evil or just kinky?”
I couldn’t help but grin. “No kink. Just turned on its post. It was on a stair rail.”
“In a Cries place?”
“A mansion.”
He snorted. “Pretty and useless.” It summed up how most of my people felt about the city.
I took the ball and stuck it on my thumb. “Should fit like this.” I twisted the ball around, lifting it slightly. “I found it like this. Strange.”
“Why care?”
“Got job. City job. Woman gone. City exec.” I paused. “Maybe dead.”
He stopped smiling. “And this ball matters?”
“I don’t know. Cops say it’s fine. Cleaning bot twisted it.” I offered him the ball. “Seems wrong.”
He held the ball, testing its weight. “Wrong why?”
I wished I knew. “Not sure. Bots are smart. Wouldn’t move the ball. But it’s moved. You find what cops missed, eh?”
“I’ll look. Problem might be the cleaning bot, though.”
He had a point. Although the police had found no problems with the bots, you never knew. Even so. Gourd could maybe come at it from a different angle. “We’ll see. Check, yah?”
He slid the ball into a pouch hanging from his leather belt. “Will do.”
I nodded my thanks. “Got good news, too. For water.”
He perked up. “You can get new mech for my filters?”
“Get you city mech. Top-notch.”
He stopped looking interested. “Not news, Bhaaj. I always get city mech.”
“Not stolen mech. Not salvage, either. Legal and new.”
“Nahya!” He thumped his big fist on his thigh. “No charity.”
“Not charity.”
He still didn’t look interested. “Can’t buy it. Don’t have optos. Don’t want optos.”
“Don’t need optos.” Most Imperialate economies used opto-credits, a currency transferred through electro-optical systems. You never saw an opto, which was why my people considered them a scam. The Undercity economy worked on an exchange of goods or services. Gourd either traded his skills for what he needed on the black market or else mined salvage from the city tech-mech dumps. If people in Cries threw it out, then taking it wasn’t charity.
“Got a trade,” I said. “With Ken Roy. You talk to him.”
“Why?” He sounded more puzzled than anything else. “Ken looks at ruins.”
“Not exactly. Not an anthropologist. Terraformer.”
Gourd smirked at that. In our dialect, using a word with two syllables was considered emphasis. Three syllables either meant the speaker wanted to show importance with the word, as in “aqueducts,” or else they meant it as ridicule. A four-syllable word implied incredible importance, a great insult, or a huge joke. My people considered Undercity two words: Under-city. The words I used to describe Cries amused them no end. I’d given up trying to explain I wasn’t insulting Ken Roy when I said he chaired the Terraforming Division at the university.
Gourd waved his hand at me. “Jibber, Bhaaj.”
I regarded him sourly. “Not gibberish. He wants talk to you.”
“Why me?”
“For his study on the aqueducts.” I’d met Ken Roy last year. He was studying the failure of the terraforming on Raylicon, as our world slowly became uninhabitable. He wanted to understand what motivated my ancestors to move underground, retreating to these ruins so many millennia ago. Of course, no one in the aqueducts wanted anything to do with him. So he was trying to work out bargains they would accept.
“Talk to Ken,” I said. “Get good tech in return.”
Gourd considered the idea. “Need new filters,” he acknowledged. “Need more drinkable water. Many new births. That doctor you sent, she helps babies survive.”
Ho! That was welcome news. Our population had one of the highest mortality rates in the Imperialate. Convincing a doctor to visit the aqueducts had taken some doing, but now that the military realized we had value to them, with so many empaths among us, they were more willing to help. Of course the charity business had reared its head, but Doctor Rajindia was no slouch. She learned fast how to bargain in the Undercity. She never came down without permission and the protection of a gang. She would treat anyone who asked for help, and in return, she asked to study the psions among us. Rajindia remained discreet and careful, never intrusive with her bargains, and gradually she earned the trust of my people.
Change was coming to the Undercity.