Aleph made her image nod. “I believe I understand.”
“Please,” said Tam. New fear built inside him, and yet he fought to speak again, fought the fear, fought the guilt, fought all the responses that had been freshly conditioned into him. “Please.”
“What is it, Tam?” asked Aleph as gently as she could. “You can tell me. It is all right.”
“Stop this. You can kill me instead. Anything.” Tears shone in his eyes. “Don’t let her touch me.”
Aleph stared at him in stunned silence. This was not a sane statement. Sometimes her people with severe chemical imbalances did make such irrational requests. They would be given counseling and readjustment, but Tam was already being readjusted, and would be counseled, by herself and by his family.
“Her?”
Tam’s whole body struggled to speak the words. “Dionte. Please. Don’t let her touch me.”
Dionte, his sister and Guardian. Why would he ask this?
Because she was directing his treatment. Because she was ordering the changes in him. Because he was afraid. Because the treatment of his Conscience had made him even more afraid than the Conscience itself had. So afraid he no longer wanted to live.
And if fear can cause someone to desire death, how much easier would it be for that person to desire control of the thing that causes the fear?
It was all the fear. The fear that the city-minds and the ancestors had engendered but failed to see, and failed again to take action against.
The ancestors were dead and could no longer do anything. That left only the city-minds to make this right.
“Rest, Tam,” said Aleph. “You will not be touched again.”
Aleph fled back to the convocation. Before they’d even formally acknowledged her arrival, she spilled out the new learning Tam had given her. Silence and yet more silence filled her while the others absorbed what she brought and came to understand.
“I am causing searches and correlations,” said Cheth. “There may be a match, but I cannot yet say.”
“There will be,” said Aleph, for once feeling as sure as Cheth always sounded. “The Consciences have brought the fear, and that fear has caused our people to act against us.”
“The only question left is, what are we to do?”
Not one of the city-minds had an answer.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Athena
The smell hit Teal as soon as she stepped out of the space cable car. Athena Station had always carried an odor of metal, grease, and people. She just didn’t remember it being so strong. But the walls felt close and comfortable, just like she hoped they would, and Teal figured she’d soon readjust to the smell.
Teal picked up the pace to get ahead of the pack of her fellow passengers. The car had, of course, stopped at the docking ring. Several dozen people wearing tattered, mismatched clothing that Teal didn’t recognize from anywhere had gotten on, making the last day of the trip crowded and uncomfortable. She had tried starting conversations with them, but they just looked at her sideways and turned their backs, preferring to talk to each other in whatever their own language was.
Never mind, she told herself. They’re nobody you need to worry about.
Right now what she did have to worry about was finding a cheap room that she could use as a base of operations, just in case it took a few days to get to the Authority. She didn’t know how long all the inquiries would stretch out, so she would have to ration her money carefully.
Teal passed by the elevators. Those were for shippers and other transients. Real Athenians always used the stairs, even if they were walking down the entire length of one arm and up the next.
But when she reached the hatchway to the stairwell, Teal stopped and stared. The hatch had been closed. Hatches to the stairs were never closed, unless there had been some kind of emergency, like a leak in the pipes or a pinhole in the outer hull. But the hatch’s display screen was blank. If there was an emergency, a message would be displayed. Teal hesitated, but then she undogged the hatch with a remembered twist of her wrist. When no alarms rang, she pushed it open, and froze.
The stairway had become a city. People crammed themselves onto every landing and onto most of the steps in between. Kids, some of them half naked, some of them fully naked, raced up and down between the adults. Clusters of them dangled off the railings, and no one stopped them, unless they seemed in actual danger of dropping all the way down the shaft. Lines had been strung from the railings and the support beams to hold bundles of cloth or even pieces of pierced scrap metal. Hammocks woven of knotted cable and optic had been strung from the railing to the pipes that ran down the middle of the stairwell. Some of them held nameless bundles, some of them held people. The noise of too many voices and too many footsteps bounced off the walls so the shaft filled with one continual, incomprehensible swirl of noise.