The Diamond Deep Page 24

  Ruby let out a long sigh. “We need to find a better power position.”

  Jali said, “We are weak as newborns here. I bet Lake is five hundred years old, and knows how to con anybody under a hundred without even thinking about it.”

  Ruby picked up a small pink cake and took a bite. “I suspect we’re buying this food. We might as well eat it.”

  Onor sat beside Naveen and stared into his cup of water, wishing it were something stronger. On his other side, Ruby fidgeted with her cup, twisting it round and round and periodically clinking the edge on the table. Joel, KJ, and SueAnne filled the rest of the chairs.

  Everyone seemed to be avoiding everyone else’s eyes.

  Onor worried. Ruby’s cheeks were stained by dark circles and her hair hung limply down her side. She looked thinner. She needed rest, and sleep, and to relax. The hand that wasn’t working the cup in circles fingered the beads around her neck, one of the old ones from the days before the real fighting on the ship. It looked out of place here, hand-made and childish.

  SueAnne and Ruby had been spending more time together. SueAnne whispered to her, “You must prioritize.”

  Ruby glanced at Joel, who had the common sense to remain quiet. Lately, Onor had heard tension between them. Three long weeks of going only backward was wearing on them all.

  Today, no one had found work. Naveen had shown up with a few thousand earned credits for them, but still they were two days further behind for the week. Ruby had taken to beating herself with that number.

  Ruby sat up straighter and looked at Naveen. “Will you do everything you can to protect Aleesi?”

  “Yes.”

  She kept looking at him, intense. “Can I trust you?” She looked around at the whole table, Naveen following her gaze. “Can we all trust you?”

  “I will do my best to put Ix into Aleesi and leave her whole. But I will prioritize Ix. You need that worse. The community will need an AI while we tour.”

  “You’ll do it here.” Ruby said. “I don’t want her out of our sight.”

  “I will, Ruby the Demanding Red, I will.”

  Naveen’s laughter and Ruby’s choice seemed to release them all from the tension that had filled the room just a moment before. SueAnne rose to pour more water. Joel smiled at Naveen; the first thing Onor had seen between the two men that was better than truce since they were kicked off the Fire.

  “How long do you need?” Ruby asked.

  Naveen shrugged. “A few hours. Maybe a little more.”

  Ruby gave out a weak smile. “When should I plan to leave?”

  “A week.”

  Ruby shook her head. “Two weeks. I need to write some songs for here. And I want you to take me out for two days. I want to see more places so I can learn more.”

  Joel tensed.

  Ruby must have sensed it in him. “Not just me. Joel and Onor and KJ, too. At least.”

  Naveen frowned. “It would be better to leave sooner.”

  “A week and a half, then. A week and a half after you get Ix working.”

  “A week and a half from now,” Naveen insisted. “Timing is important. We can stop along the way, during the tour.”

  “I want to see what’s good about the Deep. And I want to see the Brawl for myself. You can’t possible show me everything, but you can pick the absolute best and the absolute worst.”

  “We aren’t allowed anywhere near the best,” Naveen said. “We aren’t really even supposed to know the best that exists here. They hide their excesses from us.”

  Ruby smiled at Naveen, that quirky, you-didn’t-understand smile of hers that Onor had always loved. “I did not say the richest and the poorest. I said the best and the worst. Another way to think of it is as the cruelest and the kindest. A core lesson from our history on the Fire is that those in power are often both as good and as bad as those out of it.” She shared a glance with Joel where whatever they saw in each other’s eyes softened them both.

  When they left the room, they had to push through the whispering women. Lya was there, her eyes fastened on Ruby as if she hungered for something. Maybe Ruby’s beauty, or her power. Not the revenge Lya had once wanted; something in her desires had changed, become greater than anger or hatred. Perhaps it was sorrow, but it felt like there was some other purpose to it as well, but one that Onor couldn’t quite grasp.

  Whatever it was, the whispering women made it hard to guard Joel and Ruby. Onor had to assume the women could have weapons, even though so far they hadn’t shown up with so much as a thick pipe disguised as a walking stick. Onor found the whole situation inexplicable, both why Lya followed Ruby around, and why Ruby allowed it.

  Joel didn’t appear to understand it any more than Onor. He’d made a few off-hand comments that showed he was more frustrated with the women than Onor was, and a few times he had worn such contempt and anger on his face that Onor almost felt sorry for Lya.

  The whispering women had traded for or made more and more white clothing over time, so now they looked like pale ghosts. It almost seemed that as Ruby and the others began dressing more and more like the bright inhabitants of the Diamond Deep, Lya and her women fought to be everything the station was not.

  SueAnne and Naveen waited with Onor for the entire entourage of the colorful and the white to disappear around a corner. SueAnne was using her chair today, rolling back and forth in an odd imitation of pacing the corridor. “I don’t envy Ruby,” SueAnne muttered as if she were talking to no one.

  “Because of those women or because she carries so much on her shoulders?” Naveen asked.

  “Both.”

  “She’s strong,” Naveen said.

  “Look more closely,” SueAnne warned Naveen. “She’s exhausted.”

  “I’ll make sure she rests.”

  “You may not have that much power,” Onor cautioned. He frowned at the now-empty corridor. “Look, I promised someone I’d have lunch with her. Naveen? Can you eat with SueAnne? I’ll meet you back in the main galley.”

  “Of course.”

  He found Marcelle in her office, a small square box with a depressing little black desk and small chair. A sign on the front of her desk proclaimed Marcelle “Director of Education.” She looked up when he entered.

  Her face was streaked with tears.

  “What happened?”

  “Two of the babies died.”

  She’d been sneaking into the creche at night and refusing to tell Ruby. He slid around the desk and she stood so that he could fold her into his arms. It was becoming more natural to hold her, to feel her thin frame against his, to have his cheek and nose tickled by her curly hair. “I’m so sorry.”

  “They didn’t do anything. We brought them here, and they died.”

  “I know.” He rubbed her back, his fingers feeling big against her. She was losing muscle. “You need to eat more.”

  She didn’t respond to that. “I expected to lose Aaron. But I was surprised to lose Pia. I thought she was getting better.”

  “How many are still sick?” he whispered. How much worse might it get?

  Her tears took her over and he dug around for a handkerchief and wiped her cheek dry over and over.

  “Only five.” She struggled to get her breath. “We sent three home yesterday.”

  “So it might be okay? It might just be what Koren said, that some of us are allergic to the new things in the food and the air here.”

  “It’s only babies and the old,” Marcelle said. “At least that’s all that stays sick.” She sank into him again, letting a few beats of silence go, stiffening while the time went. “I get so mad. I can’t help myself. I’m sure they could help them if they wanted. Or we could find a way to get help.”

  “There is no single they here,” he murmured. “It worked for us to think like that on the Fire. But here? Here there are a hundred theys. Maybe more. We have to get the attention of people we think can help us, and we have to convince them to help us.”

  “Surely there
are people here who could have stopped the babies from dying.”

  “Everything here costs credit.”

  “What does a life cost?”

  He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he’d asked Naveen about how to get medical care. Naveen had asked for how many, and then told him what it would cost to buy the services of a specialist doctor—human or robot. They had their own medical care from the Fire, of course. But they knew the diseases of a ship, the angsts and sores and cuts and sorrows of a contained colony. To buy more expertise would cost them all. A few days of life for the whole colony against a chance—not even a known outcome—for a few children. He had reported the information to Ruby and Joel and SueAnne and watched them decide to use hope instead of credit. It had been hard to watch; another decision between bad and awful, between hopeless and barely hopeful. “We’ll find a way. Really, we will. There has to be way.”

  The choices here were far more cruel than the choices aboard the Fire had been. At best, they would survive their own choices with their hearts intact. He held Marcelle a little tighter.

  Onor, Ruby, and KJ were alone with Naveen in Ruby and Joel’s living room, staring at the blue pill-shaped heart of Aleesi. The round ball of Ix lay beside the webling that held Aleesi’s brain. Both looked too small for the beings that inhabited them.

  KJ looked alert and rested, like he always did. In contrast, Ruby’s shoulders still drooped with exhaustion and the dark circles under her eyes had barely faded. She leaned in over the objects and whispered to Naveen, “Do you think you did it? Do you think it’s okay?”

  Naveen looked as serious as Onor had ever seen him. He’d chosen to change his myriad browns for somber blacks, as if demonstrating how earnestly he took her need to preserve Aleesi. He set a small speaker down on the table beside Aleesi’s brain, and his slate beside the speaker.

  “I was able to move all that is Ix—or all that I could tease apart from the ship when I copied it—into Aleesi. There was some space that she wasn’t using, anyway. It wasn’t enough to store or process all of Ix, so I deleted some of the very old parts to make room.”

  Naveen must have felt Ruby’s frown.

  He grinned at her. “She should be fine. In some ways it will have made her stronger.”

  “Did you talk to her?”

  He shook his head. “I waited for you. I ran tests on both of them, and they should both work.”

  “What about Ix?” KJ asked. “Did you change it, too?”

  “Ix will be different. It will retain most of its memories from the ship, but Ix knew itself as the ship, as all of the many myriad bits of data it collected. It knew itself as the cargo bays and the drive and the water systems and the recorder of trash. It probably experienced the ship as its body.”

  KJ leaned in, his dark eyes narrowed. “Will it work?”

  “I hope so. It appears the copy was crude, but true. AIs are like humans; they want to live, to continue.” Naveen leaned forward and pushed a button on the small speaker. “This will broker these conversations, keeping them off your community communication network. That’s for security.”

  “Will everyone be able to use Ix eventually?”

  “I don’t know. We don’t know what is safe. Ix was programmed to protect the Fire, not individual people.”

  Ruby took the ball of Ix from the table and held it in her lap. “Perhaps we can program it to protect us now? We are all it has left.”

  Naveen picked up his slate and typed something. “I’m waking Ix up first. I will tell it who is here.”

  The speakers were good, and the voice that came from them was clearer than it had ever been on the Fire. “Hello, Ruby Martin.”

  Ruby clasped her hands over her face and her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Hello Ix. It is good to hear your voice.”

  “I can’t feel anything.” The voice didn’t sound panicked at all. “I remember coming in. The closer we came to the Diamond Deep, the more I had trouble thinking.”

  Ruby and KJ exchanged a glance. Ruby spoke. “You were limited, and copied. The you I am talking to now is a copy. We are no longer on the ship.”

  “We are in the station?”

  “Yes. There is me and Onor and KJ, and a man from the station named Naveen who has been trying to help you.”

  “Hello, Naveen.”

  Naveen glanced around the room. “There’s no point in keeping anything secret from it.”

  Ruby said, “You are . . . you have been put into a small space. From one of the robot spiders. You remember the robot spiders?”

  “The invaders? Of course. Where is the Fire?”

  Naveen held up a hand quickly, forestalling that answer. “Yes, the invaders. I copied you into the brains of Aleesi, the one we saved. That’s where you are.”

  “With the being Aleesi?”

  “Yes.” The voice was Aleesi’s though the speaker.

  “I thought that might happen,” Naveen muttered.

  “Hello, Aleesi!” Ruby said. “I’m glad to hear from you.”

  “I detect that I am different,” Aleesi said.

  Naveen immediately asked, “Better? Do you feel better?”

  “Different.”

  Ruby licked her lips. “I feel bad that we put Ix in with you. We didn’t have a choice.” She caressed the ball in her lap. “We need Ix very badly. We need Ix to help protect us, who are all that is left of the Fire.”

  Naveen looked unhappy with Ruby.

  “I am used to sharing. Copies of my selves collected up from time to time and shared.”

  “Is the Fire gone?” Ix asked.

  KJ spoke. “Only in physical form. It’s being scrapped.”

  Ruby winced and added, “We remain, and we are in a new place. Ash. That’s what you need to help us protect now.”

  “I still cannot feel anything. I cannot help if I cannot be connected.”

  Naveen spoke to Ix. “We will do that when we can. First we need to know that you can live where we placed you, and that you and Aleesi can share space.”

  “Of course we can,” Aleesi said. “But you have created more of an abomination to the station culture than I was by myself. You should understand the risks.”

  “There are risks to you, too,” Ruby said.

  “I have been dead since you caught me,” Aleesi replied.

  KJ stared at Naveen. “What is wrong with this—to the station culture? Aleesi is a human and Ix is an AI. Is that it?”

  Aleesi answered before Naveen had a chance to. “My very existence here is dangerous to you. The laws that made me illegal caused the Edge to flourish. Humans are not allowed to inhabit fully robotic bodies. The history is complex, but assume that this was seen to benefit both the AI community and humans. If Ix and I can share directly, it is a marriage of AI and human. That is also forbidden.”

  No one spoke for a few moments. KJ recovered first. “What will they do to us if they catch us?”

  This time Naveen answered. “We will see that that does not happen.”

  KJ’s eyes narrowed in a way that made Onor glad the AIs had no visual receptors at the moment. Ruby, however, did have eyes. She looked at KJ as she spoke. “We will be very careful.”

  KJ whispered. “Someday, one of your risks will kill us all.”

  Ruby and Naveen and SueAnne stood at the window, looking down on the Brawl, SueAnne’s chair parked behind her like a safety net. Ruby’s hands splayed across the cold glass, her face pressed to it. The Brawl looked ten times as crowded as they were, maybe twenty times. Bodies side-by-side, too close. Close enough to smell each other, to reach out and touch someone else easily in most directions most of the time. Lovers held each other, lying two to a one-person cot. People gathered and talked or played games, usually with someone facing away from the group and watching, the way Onor and the other guards watched at concerts. Many people sat by themselves, or stood by themselves, surrounded by others but not touching or being touched by anyone else. Enforcer robots moved silentl
y and efficiently through the crowd, which always seemed aware of them.

  This might be her people’s fate.

  “There are no children,” Ruby murmured. “What would they do with our children?”

  “There are schools,” Naveen said. “We send the young children of people who end up here to boarding schools.”

  SueAnne asked, “Is it possible to visit people who are here?”

  “For a fee.”

  “Of course,” Ruby replied, bitter. Angry. “Everything is for a fee.”

  “What does it take to get out?” SueAnne asked.

  “It depends on why you are there. If it’s just for non-payment of your life fee, then merely credit—repayment plus paying forward half a year.”

  “That’s a fortune.”

  “Family members have done it. Some that have skills can sign contracts for certain types of jobs and buy their freedom as long as they keep their contracts.”

  “So they have to do whatever the person who hires them tells them to do?”

  “For a year. The first six months pays their way out of here, the next pays forward enough that they have a year and a half before they would have to go back.”

  Ruby remembered Lake, and choked out a question. “Can women sell their bodies to get out of there?”

  Naveen’s answer was, “Sex is one of the most exquisite things people can sell here.”

  Ruby shuddered. She looked down, searching for more details. No walls, no privacy. A few stacked blocks where people sat slightly above the crowd. Aisles snaked between groups. Here and there, benches and cots were fiercely protected. An exercise area was full of people and ringed with enforcer bots. Maybe those were the ones with the most will, staying as strong as they could.

  You’d have to be strong in a place like this.

  She hated it.

  Looking down at it didn’t help her gain control of her dismay. “There is enough food and space that everyone could live better than this. I’ve seen it, already. You could take half the space that’s in the Exchange, and still get the business of the Exchange done. That half could feed these people.”