Kingdom of Cages(3)

It is true, answered his Conscience. You know it is true.

“Yes,” Tam breathed with a sigh. It was the approved answer. It would shut his Conscience up and give him time to think for himself.

Satisfied, the implant lapsed into silence, and Tam started walking again, hands folded behind himself, trying to be content with the sight of fish on the one side and drooping ferns on the other.

Once, the Conscience implants had just been communication devices connected to personal data displays. They accepted subvocalized commands, monitored physical health, and assisted with data reduction and sorting. They followed the orders of the ones who carried them. But that was long ago, and now they were also personal guardians, making sure all members of the family remembered who they were and what they owed to their family, and to Pandora.

With room in his head to think his own thoughts again, Tam turned back to his conversation with Basante. It was very clear that Basante wanted this immigrant woman in the experiment wing. He probably wanted her in the involuntary wing, where he wouldn’t have to bother explaining things to her.

Tam wondered abruptly if Dionte knew about this woman. Probably. Basante was wedged very tightly into her plans and saw very much through her eyes.

Tam hoped the woman was smart and strong. Otherwise, both Bas-ante and Dionte could quite easily get what they wanted.


Chena Trust lay awake in the darkness, blinking at a thick, blank, silent wall.

After a few million seconds of this, she rolled over on her back and listened. Beyond the breathing, rustling, snoring people, she heard another world. It chirruped, peeped, and murmured with a whole set of rhythms that followed no pattern Chena could make out. It was nothing like their home on Athena Station, which she, her little sister, and their mother had left a week or so ago. On the station, she could tell what was happening in the world by the clicks, creaks, and whooshes that filtered through the ancient walls. Here, it was just noises all piled up on top of each other.

Chena burrowed under her covers, but sleep didn’t come back.

What are you afraid of? she asked herself. You’re here now. It’s stupid to be scared of the place. You’re not going back.

She wanted a light, an info screen, and a jack for her wrist comptroller, so she could find out something about this place she was in, but none of that stuff existed here. The walls stared back at Chena, blank, immutable, silent. Everything she knew was up in the sky somewhere—the curving, insulated hallways with their cameras and input screens, the kilometer-long spiral staircases, which were always too cold or too hot and forever too loud no matter how much sound damping they’d put up, their tiny apartment with its peeling carpet—these were all the past. And the future…

Was the future really a mud hut in the jungle? That was what Eng and King said. Chena poked her head out from under the covers again.

“They give you a spear and make you hunt things.” King had hopped around grunting, with a big grin on his face, like he thought he was doing a public service. “You’re going to look real sweet swinging from a vine, Chena. This is how you’re going to look.” He grabbed a corner bracket and let himself swing back and forth until the caution alarm buzzed at them, with Eng laughing that stupid horsey laugh of his the whole time.

They can both just piss off. What do they know? They were born on Athena too. They just know what they see on the screen. Chena scratched at the gauze bandage sealed to the back of her hand. This place isn’t mud. It’s stone and wood. It isn’t anything like mud.

Mom wouldn’t really make them live in the jungle. She wouldn’t do that to them. This was just a temporary stop. They’d move someplace real in maybe a week or so. Mom had a job. They weren’t going to stay here.

Chena rubbed the bandage harder. Her skin still stung where they had inserted the new ID chip and then imprinted a multibranched tattoo on top of it. All that had been done by the same woman in white overalls who’d spent the morning quizzing Chena. Where was she from, what did she weigh, what did she eat, how often had she been sick, was she sick now, how did she do in school, did she go to school, or did she just learn off the computer? Where did they live on Athena, had they always lived on Athena? Who was her mother, her father, her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins…?

When she couldn’t answer all the questions, especially the ones about her family, the woman in white overalls looked disgusted, pulled out a syringe, and gestured for Chena to hold out her arm.

But they’d finally had enough of that and had put her in a sterile-walled waiting room already filled to bursting with people—men, women, kids, and babies, none of whom had been in the car on the space cable that had brought Chena and her family down to Pandora, and none of whom smelled like they had shower stalls in their apartments. Their old apartments. All of them were immigrants, like she was now.