Chapter 13 #2
John Wyndham could have been a cuckoo like me or Angela, divorced from the ancestral memories that were supposed to dictate his life and trying to find a way to navigate existence in a world that was disinterested in his success.
It was an oddly appealing thought, the idea that some of the people I’d grown up trusting were the same sort of creature I was.
I wouldn’t have needed to guess if I’d been allowed to grow up on Johrlar. I would have known. Every role model I had would have bled clear and spoken without opening their mouths, and I would have been surrounded by a society of my peers.
And based on what I’d seen so far, that wouldn’t have done much to make me a better person.
I breathed slowly in and out, focusing on what was going to happen next.
The collective knew I was here. Of course the collective knew I was here: they were the ones who’d chosen to bring me.
But they knew I was loose, and that was new information.
Had Annalist been under their control the whole time?
Now that I’d had a moment to think, I was pretty sure he must have been, since he’d drugged my salad before their message about my escape came through.
Were they also controlling Fetch and Carry?
If that was the case, the collective had wanted me to escape, and that was a distressing thought.
How much of what had happened since my arrival had they been manipulating?
Did it matter? Even if everything had been scripted on their end, I’d been reacting naturally, and I was going to have to deal with the outcome of my actions. The collective was only as in control as I allowed them to be.
So: plan. Get back into the administrative building, locate Arthur, break Arthur out.
Once we were free, I could attract the collective’s attention on purpose and find out how to get us home.
They’d been five strong when they came to study me, and they hadn’t been able to stop me from blocking their entanglement.
I didn’t think I was necessarily their equal, but I was definitely something they hadn’t been expecting, and I could exploit that.
Taking another deep breath, I pushed away from the wall, turned, and stepped back onto the sidewalk, rejoining the general flow of traffic.
None of the people I could see seemed to be upset, or to be hurrying for any reason beyond efficiency, which clearly motivated much of what happened here on Johrlar.
I still didn’t know what their society was based on, or what most of these people could possibly be doing for work.
Did they have accountants? Dentists? I supposed they must have a medical career track, although even that felt a little odd, given the level of technology I’d seen so far.
I tugged on the cuff of my jumpsuit as I walked, then paused.
The fabric felt like heavy silk of some kind, mixed with a slick textile that was definitely synthetic.
They might have more-advanced technology that they were simply not choosing to share with prisoners and tourists.
That would make more sense than them being a completely green-tech pastoral society, given everything I knew about the Johrlac from records and, yes, sometimes prejudicial stories told by people who’d survived them long enough to write their experiences down.
A whole life spent thinking my people were monsters hadn’t exactly left me prepared to judge them fairly, but fair or not, I really didn’t see how they could have built all of this with nothing more than bamboo and natural fibers.
I rubbed the hem of my sleeve again, trying to decide what it felt like. Silk and … rayon, maybe? Something slick and sturdy and stain-resistant. I wasn’t the seamstress in our family, and Elsie wasn’t here. Not that she was speaking to me at the moment anyway.
Arthur still thought he loved me. Intentionally or not, I’d programmed him that way, and he couldn’t just shrug it off because he was tired of it. Elsie, though … Elsie knew she hated me, and nothing I could say or do was going to change her mind about that.
And it shouldn’t. However sorry I was now, I killed her brother. I was the reason he was no longer walking in the world. Mistake or not, I did that. Only me. She deserved to hate me for the rest of her life, if that was what she needed. I was pretty sure that was what she was intending to do.
On the sidewalk ahead of me, a man stopped walking and turned around, looking in my direction.
His eyes flashed momentarily white. I met his gaze without flinching or looking away, allowing him to reach out and touch the partition I had so carefully constructed.
I felt him pushing against it, checking it for weak spots, and pushed back, shoving him out of my mind.
His eyes flashed again, brighter this time.
My apologies for the intrusion, said a voice in my mind, mild, male, and polite. We have been informed of an intruder in our midst, and your presentation matched the information I had been provided. Please tender your forgiveness.
How would a civic assistant reply to that, I wondered?
With no idea what message his jumpsuit conveyed, I could only guess, and decided erring on the side of politeness was unlikely to get me into any real trouble.
I am on my way back from afternoon leisure, I replied.
I apologize for wasting your time with unnecessary suspicions.
There: show humility and take responsibility for his mistakes. Not that they’d been mistakes, but I wasn’t telling him that, and if he believed me, he might never know.
Apologies accepted, he said. Please continue. I would not want you to be late on my account.
He turned and began walking briskly away, not sparing me another glance. I rolled my eyes and turned back toward the administrative building, pausing to watch the people going in and out.
They all seemed to be moving with the same level of urgency, not rushing as I would have expected if they’d been responding to news of a dangerous criminal’s escape. I approached the doors as calmly as I could, sure with every step that the guards were going to realize I wasn’t meant to be there.
As I drew closer, I could hear the people entering giving their explanations for their presence. I waited to hear an assistant explain his presence, then stepped forward and did the same for my own, changing only the name.
There was a pause as the guards considered my story, and I tensed. If they decided I was lying to them—
“Case?” asked one of the officers on the door.
Ah. This, I knew. “The unauthorized instar detected in the dimensional cluster designated,” and then the long algebraic equation.
I was suddenly, fiercely grateful that the Johrlac used math in their naming system.
I could no more have recited a phrase that long than I could have sprouted wings and flown away. But an equation? That was child’s play.
The guard’s eyes glazed over for a moment. “Your co-workers have already returned to work,” he said. “You departed at the same time.”
“I was delayed by the collective’s announcement,” I said. “I am not customarily assigned to this location. Several people have stopped me to ask whether I had seen anything that might lead us to the missing prisoner.”
The guard gave me a hard look, glaze blooming into earnest white.
I pushed my partition toward him, holding it high and steady.
I felt him pushing against its edges, checking their solidity, looking for holes in my defenses.
When he didn’t find any, he pulled back, the light in his eyes shutting off.
“The prisoner is unlikely to be found anywhere near here,” he said. I nodded, taking this as an informational statement. That was apparently the correct response; he pulled the lever and the doors slid open, allowing me to step inside.
In a way, this was the real test. Outside, it had been me, the guard, and all the room in the world to turn and run if he hadn’t believed my story. In the airlock, it was me and the two guards stationed there, their faces masks of impassive neutrality. They barely even looked at me.
Before when I’d been in the airlock, I’d been leaving.
This was an arrival, and that came with the same wind-based decontamination as my arrival at Fetch and Carry’s home.
The air hit me and the bugs went flying, impacting with the far wall and sticking there as the plants in the corners unwound their tendrils and pulled them to their deaths.
I wanted to study the various insects that had been blown off of me, to see what I could learn about this dimension from the shape of their wings and the shine of their bodies.
But a civic assistant who had lived here all her life would have no such curiosity.
She would already understand. So I buried my questions beneath another layer of partition and continued staring straight ahead, waiting for the doors to open.
When they did, I proceeded forward, into the vast atrium on the other side.
Johrlac of every caste strolled in all directions, distinguished only by the visual cues of their jumpsuits, walking with the calm, unified purpose of people who had never been required to make decisions for themselves.
I loosened my partition slightly, letting myself hear the ambient hum of the minds around me.