Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Fourteen: Teresa

Yes,” Teresa said. “I know. Okay. Let me get ready.”

Muskrat barked once as if she’d understood the words. Probably she had. Dogs could have broad functional vocabularies. It was a point Dr. Cortázar often made. The fact that humans were not the only conscious animals seemed very important to him. It had always seemed obvious to her.

Teresa set her room to high privacy and sleep, dimming the lights and locking her doors. No one would disturb her now unless they were evacuating the State Building. Muskrat wagged hard enough that her back legs looked unsteady as Teresa changed into the same simple tunic and pants she normally used for gardening. They had no technology, so they weren’t connected to the palace network. She started up an entertainment feed on her system on low volume as if she were dozing and watching an old Caz Pratihari adventure.

Her window had a sensor in the frame that alerted a security officer when it was opened. So Teresa had opened it every now and then over the course of weeks, trying different ways to get around it. Was it electronic? She tried keeping the window and frame touching with a copper wire. Security still got their alert. Optical? She searched everywhere for anything resembling a pinhole camera or light sensor, but never found one. Motion activated? She tried opening the window very slowly over the course of days, but on the fifth day security got their alert. Not motion sensing, and it only went off when there was an eleven-millimeter gap between window and frame. Interesting.

It had turned out to be magnetic. A low-strength magnet in the window, when moved too far from a sensor in the frame, set off the alert. She’d solved this by using a plastic letter with a tiny magnet in it from her preschool alphabet set. Moving it a little bit every time she tried to open the window, until one time she opened it and no one showed up outside to make sure she was okay.

Now she slid her magnet to the correct spot, manually undid the window, and lifted Muskrat carefully out. She climbed out after, pulling the frame closed behind her. Muskrat chuffed and started off along the path to the edge of the palace, and Teresa followed behind.

It had been too long. It was time to go see Timothy.

She’d found the secret tunnel almost a year before. It was hidden by a rock in a group of ornamental trees. She’d initially thought it might have been dug out by some local animal. There was a kind of underground wasp that left holes that looked similar to it when they died and their hives collapsed. It had turned out to be part of a flood relief system to make sure the gardens never drowned in heavy rain. It led under the walls of the State Building compound and into a small field beyond. Intellectually, she knew that a normal girl might not have gone down the tunnel with the spearmint smell of broken ground and the thin coat of slime. She had pushed through easily, joyfully even, and a few dark moments later had found herself on the far side of the perimeter and free for literally the first time in her life.

She’d gone walking. Exploring. Discovering. Engaging in developmentally appropriate rebellion. And, most importantly, she’d made her first real friend.

Animals had made the path she and Muskrat followed through the forest. Bone-elk and ground pigs and pale, shovel-faced horses, none of which had any relationship to Sol system elk or pigs or horses. She walked down the path, her hands in her pockets. Muskrat bounded through the dappled shade, barking at sun-birds and smiling a wide tongue-lolling grin when they hissed back. It had been too long since she’d been to see Timothy, and she had too much she wanted to talk with him about. It wouldn’t all fit in her head at the same time.

The forest at the edge of the State Building thickened at first, the gloom growing around her, and then the land began to rise. She started feeling her breath get deeper, and it felt good. Before long, the path led out of the trees entirely and into a clearing at the skirt of the mountain. She knew from her studies that the mountain wasn’t natural but a kind of artifact of some long-forgotten alien project. Like a sandcastle, but tall enough that the top seemed to touch the clouds. Not that she’d ever been to the summit. Timothy’s cave was much closer than that.

The entrance was in a little canyon not far from the clearing where she’d first come upon him. Muskrat knew the way better than she did. She walked down the pale sand along the path carved by water that had long since dried. Wide, fresh Labrador paw prints marked her way. By the time Teresa left the last scraggly trees behind, the dog was already at the bend that led there, barking and wagging her tail.

“I’m coming,” Teresa said. “You’re such a pain.”

Muskrat shrugged off the insult, turned, and bounded ahead like a puppy. Teresa didn’t see her again until she stepped under what looked like an overhanging shelf of sandstone and into the deeps of the cave. The natural stone gave way almost immediately to the soft glow of the cavern. Stalactites hung from the ceiling like bright icicles, and the walls were built with swirls and shapes in them like a seashell and a Euclidian proof had joined together and become an architect. Teresa always had the feeling that the walls changed to greet her, but of course she was only there when she was there, so she couldn’t be certain.

A flock of tiny, glowing gnats flowed past her like a wave. Like she was underwater. The air smelled thick and astringent, and a coolness radiated from the walls.

Soft padding sounds came from ahead. Not human sounds, and not Muskrat either. The footsteps weren’t even animal, not really. The repair drones were a little smaller than Muskrat, with dark, apologetic-looking eyes and multiply jointed legs. Totally alien, but they were the closest things to canine friends that Muskrat had, and the real dog ran around them, yipping excitedly and sniffing their rears as if there were anything doglike to smell back there. Teresa shook her head and moved forward. The repair drones made their query tone, trying to intuit whether Muskrat wanted something. The drones were surprisingly good at judging at least the rough intentions of humans. Real dogs still seemed to baffle them.

The repair drones, the light gnats, the slow, creeping, wormlike stone diggers were all in the weird space between life and not-life. Designed by an intelligence that evolutionary forces had taken in a direction very different from humanity. They weren’t exotic to her at all. As far as Teresa was concerned, they’d always been there, just like that.

“Hello!” Teresa called. “Are you here?”

The words echoed weirdly out of the deepness. “Hey, Tiny. I wondered when you were coming back.”

Timothy’s part of the cave was like another phase change. Nature to alien to human, if not exactly the kind of human residence she was used to. A backpack reactor leaned against the wall, thick yellow power cords going to a wooden rack of neat, well-maintained machines. She recognized the yeast incubator and the emergency recycler from her tours of the early settlements. Other decks she didn’t know. All together, it was enough that Timothy could live like a monk and a wise man in his mountain for more than a human lifetime. His bed was a cot against one wall with a blanket of woven polycarbonate that seemed never to show wear. He didn’t have a pillow.

The man himself sat next to a length of wood, a knife in his thick, callused hand. A pile of thin, curled slivers rested between his feet where they fell as he carved. He was bald and pale, with a thick, bushy white beard, wide shoulders, and arms with muscles like ropes.

She’d come across him months ago during one of her first excursions. She’d been trying to get high enough on the mountain to see the State Building, and there he’d been, eating his lunch and drinking from a scarred ceramic water purifier. He’d looked like nothing so much as an old cartoon of an enlightened guru meditating on a mountaintop. If there had been any threat in his smile, she might have been scared of him. But there wasn’t, and she wasn’t. And anyway Muskrat had liked him immediately.

“Sorry,” she said, sitting on the edge of his cot. “I’ve been busy. I have a bunch of new things I’m studying. What are you working on?”

Timothy considered the half-carved wood. “I was going for a marking gauge. I’ve got one already, but it’s a little big for the fine work.”

“And you can’t have too many tools,” Teresa said. The phrase was something of a joke between them, and Timothy grinned.

“Damned straight. So what’s up?”

Teresa leaned forward. Timothy frowned and put down the wood and the knife. She didn’t know where to start, so she started with her father’s plan to train her up.

He had a way of shifting his attention so that she felt like he was actually listening, not just preparing a reply in his head and waiting for her to stop talking. He focused on her the way he did on the wood he carved or the food he cooked. He didn’t judge her. He didn’t quiz her. She never worried that he would be disappointed with what she said.

It was the way she imagined her father would listen to her if he weren’t her father.

She wandered from topic to topic, telling Timothy about Connor and Muriel, the briefings and meetings her father was adding to her schedule, and all the day-to-day worries and thoughts that had built up without her even knowing, and ending with the unnerving conversation with Holden the dancing bear and the weird way he’d said You should keep an eye on me like it meant something more than it seemed …

When she ran out of words, Timothy leaned back and scratched his beard. Muskrat had curled up on the floor between the two of them. The dog snored softly, and one leg twitched as she dreamed. Two repair drones queried each other, their voices clicking in descending musical tones. Just telling the story left her feeling better.

“Yeah,” he said after a while, “well, for what it’s worth, you’re not the first person that felt like the captain was a splinter they couldn’t dig out. He has that effect on people. But if he says you ought to keep an eye on him, maybe you ought to keep an eye on him.”

Teresa leaned back against the wall and pulled her knees up. “I just wish I knew why he bothers me so much.”

“He don’t treat you like you’re special.”

“You don’t treat me like I’m special. We’re friends.”

He considered that. “Maybe it’s because he thinks your dad’s an asshole.”

“My dad’s not an asshole. And Holden’s a killer. He doesn’t get to judge other people.”

“Your dad’s kind of an asshole,” Timothy said, his expression philosophical, his voice matter-of-fact. “And he’s killed a lot more people than Holden ever did.”

“That’s different. That’s war. He had to do it or else no one would have been able to organize everyone. We’d just have stumbled into the next conflict unprepared. My dad’s trying to save us.”

Timothy held up a finger like she’d made his point for him. “Now you’re telling me why it’s okay he’s an asshole.”

“I don’t—” Teresa started, then stopped. Timothy’s comment made her think of a philosophy lesson, and Ilich talking about consequentialism. Intention is irrelevant. Only outcomes matter.

“I don’t tell anyone how to live,” Timothy was saying. “But if you’re looking for moral perfection in your family? Prepare for disappointment.”

Teresa chuckled. If anyone else had said the same thing to her, she would have bristled, but it was Timothy. That made it okay. She was glad she’d made the time to come out to see him.

“Why did you call him captain?”

“That’s who he is. Captain Holden.”

“He’s not your captain.”

A flash of surprise passed over Timothy, like it was a thought he’d never had. “I guess he ain’t,” Timothy said, and then a moment later, and more slowly, “I guess he ain’t.”

“Dad says he’s afraid,” Teresa said. “Holden is, I mean. Not Dad.”

“They both are,” Timothy said, picking his knife back up. “Guys like them always are. It’s people like you and me that aren’t scared.”

“You’re never scared?”

“I haven’t been scared since I was younger than you, Tiny. I had a rough start.”

“Me too. My mom died when I was a baby. I think my father doesn’t like having women around me because it feels like replacing her. All my teachers have been men.”

“I never knew mine either,” Timothy said. “But I put something together later that I could sort of pretend was family. It wasn’t bad for someone that grew up on my street. While it lasted. I’ll tell you what, though, as fucked up as my childhood was? It’s got nothing on yours.”

“My life’s perfect,” Teresa said. “I can have anything I want. Anytime I want it. Everyone treats me well. My father’s making sure I have the training and education to govern billions of people on thousands of planets. No one has ever had the advantages and opportunities I have.” She paused, surprised by the hint of bitterness that had crept into her voice.

“Uh-huh,” Timothy said. “That’s why you’re always looking over your shoulder when you sneak out to see me, I guess.”

That night, back in her room, she couldn’t sleep. The small nighttime noises of the State Building took on a weird power to distract and startle her. Even the gentle ticking of the walls as they radiated away the day’s heat felt like someone knocking for her attention. She tried turning her pillow to press her cheek against the cool side and playing gentle, soothing music. It didn’t help. Every time she closed her eyes and willed herself down toward dream, she found herself five minutes later with her eyes open, halfway through an imaginary debate with Timothy or Holden or Ilich or Connor. It was past midnight when she gave up.

Muskrat rose with her, following her from bedroom to office, and then, when Teresa sat on one of her workbench stools, curled up at her feet and fell immediately to snoring. Nothing bothered her dog, or at least not for long. Teresa pulled up an old movie about a family living in a haunted apartment on Luna, but her mind slid off the entertainment as quickly as it had off the pillow. She thought about going out and walking around the gardens, but that annoyed her too. When she realized what she actually wanted to do, she’d already known it for a while. Admitting it to herself felt like a surrender.

“Security log access,” she said, and her room’s system shifted from the haunted corridors of Luna to a businesslike user interface. Even as honored and important as she was, there were logs that she didn’t have access to. No one except maybe her father and Dr. Cortázar could have access to the recordings from the pens, for instance. That was normal. And it didn’t matter for what she needed. No one was worried about preserving Holden’s privacy. She could have watched him sleep if she’d wanted to.

She set the system to generate a full track for Holden over the past week, then scrubbed through it. She knew that the State Building had ubiquitous surveillance built into it, but it was interesting to see where exactly the microlenses were and how much they could capture while staying invisible themselves. As she scrubbed through Holden’s passage in the buildings and the gardens, she thought about all the other things she could watch on the feeds. Connor and Muriel, for instance.

On one of her screens, Holden sat on the grass, looking out at the same mountain where Timothy lived. The accelerated scrubbing made his casual gestures and adjustments seem spasmodic. Like he was vibrating. Then Muskrat was there with him. Then she was. She didn’t like looking at herself on camera. She didn’t look the way she felt like she did. In her mind, her hair was smoother and her posture was better. Without meaning to, she shifted on her stool to sit up straighter. Holden flopped to the grass and sat up with his back wet, and then she and Muskrat zipped out of the frame. She forgot her posture again and leaned forward.

Holden fidgeted on the screen, then rose and sped off. Her scrub was at twenty times faster than base. In under an hour, she could take in the shape of his whole day. Holden at his dinner reading something on a handheld. Holden walking through the same common area her class had been in, pausing to talk to a guard. Holden in the gymnasium, exercising on the old-style machines that they used to use on ships. Holden sitting at a table on a veranda overlooking the city with Dr. Cortázar and a bottle of wine—

She tapped the feed, dropping back to normal speed, and found an audio track.

“—also jellyfish,” Cortázar said. “Turritopsis dohrnii is the classic example, but there are half a dozen more. An adult reverts to a polyp colony form under stress. Like an elderly man turning into a fetus. That’s not the model we’re using, but it means the organism has no set maximum life span.” He took a long sip from his wineglass.

“What model are you using?” Holden asked.

“The original inspirations for the work were corpses that the repair drones got hold of. Not really immortality at all, but the new organisms had some improvements. That’s where the breakthrough comes. That’s what we should really be focusing on, sacrifice or no. Healthy subject with a well-recorded baseline instead of this …”—his voice rang with contempt—“this fieldwork. How to achieve a more robust homeostasis. Just because it’s difficult to do doesn’t make the principal science unsolvable.”

“So not unnatural at all,” Holden said, tipping a little more wine from the bottle into the doctor’s glass.

“Meaningless term,” Cortázar said. “Humans arose inside nature. We’re natural. Everything we do is natural. The whole idea that we are different in category is either sentimental or religious. Irrelevant from a scientific perspective.”

“So if we get to a place that we can all live forever, that’s not unnatural?” Holden sounded genuinely curious.

Cortázar leaned in toward the prisoner, gesturing with his left hand while he swirled his glass in his right. “The only limits on us are what we can do. It’s perfectly natural to seek personal benefit. It’s perfectly natural to give advantages to your own offspring and withhold them from others. It’s perfectly natural to kill your enemies. That’s not even outlier behavior. That’s all in the middle of the bell curve all the time.”

Teresa rested her head in her hands. She was pretty sure Cortázar was drunk. She’d never been herself, but she’d seen some adults at state functions get the same vague focus and sense of being a little off their own points.

“You’re right, though,” Cortázar said, “You’re exactly right. The foundation needs to be broad. That’s true.”

“Immortality is a high-stakes game,” Holden said, like he was agreeing.

“Yes. Plumbing the depths of the protomolecule and all the artifacts it opens up is the work of a hundred lifetimes. Making the researchers die and be replaced by other people with a less advanced understanding is clearly—clearly—a bad idea. But that’s policy. This is the way forward. So this is the way forward.”

“Because Duarte made it policy,” Holden said.

“Because we’re primates who hold valuable things for our own bloodlines at the expense of everyone else,” Cortázar said. “Only one person can ever be immortal. That was what he said. But then he changed the rules. She can be too because he’s found a justification for her. That she’s really just an extension of him. I’m not mad about that. That’s just the organism we are. I’m not mad. But it doesn’t matter.”

“That’s good,” Holden said.

“The important thing is that we get good data. One person. Lots of people. All the same. But bad experimental design? That’s what sin really is,” Cortázar slurred. “That’s not me either. Nature eats babies all the time.”

Holden shifted, looking directly up into the surveillance camera as if he knew exactly where the hidden lens was. As if he knew she would be watching. You should keep an eye on me. Teresa felt a crawling sensation coming up her neck and the feeling, even after he looked away, that he saw her as clearly as she saw him.

She shut down the feed, closed the logs, and went back to bed, but she still didn’t sleep.