The Very Best of Kate Elliott

  “You going to see the big head?” asked Eleanor in her lean, cultured voice.“The archaeological site is called after a saint. San Lorenzo.”

  “Yah.” She put on the bored, supercilious tone used by the others. “Sounds very slummy, a little Meshko village and all.”

  “Quaint,” said Eleanor. “The right word is quaint. It’s gauche and rude to say slummy. Saint Lorenzo was one of the seven deacons of the Church of Rome, this would be back, oh, way back during the actual Roman Empire when the old Christian—” She said it like a girl’s name, Kristie-Anne. “—Church was just getting a toehold in the world. Like all of them, he was made a martyr, but in this case he was roasted over a gridiron.”

  “Over a football field?”

  “No.” Eleanor laughed but not in a mocking way. She never used her knowledge to mock people. “No, it’s like a thing with bars you grill fish on. But the thing is, that he was burned, roasted, so you see perhaps he was in a prior incarnation related to some form of sun worship. The fire is a metaphor for the sun.”

  “Oh. I guess it could be.”

  Eleanor shrugged. Rose could never understand why someone like her ran with the Sunseekers. Only except they were, so everyone said, the jettest black of all social sets, the crème de la crème, the egg in the basket, the two unobtainable birds in the bush. That was why her father never came running after her after she ran away to them.

  Wasn’t it?

  She had seen a clip about two months ago as the night-bound told time, for up here in the constant glare of the sun there was only one long long day. He had referred to her in passing, with that charmingly deprecatory smile.

  “Ah, yes, my daughter Rosie, she’s on a bit of a vacation with that Sunseeker crowd. That’s true, most of them are older, finished with their A-levels or gymnasium or high school. But. Well. She’s a high-spirited girl. Fifteen-year-olds always know just what they want, don’t they? She wanted the Sunseekers.” The rest went without saying: The very most exclusive social set, don’t you know. Of course my child would be admitted into their august ranks.

  He had only to quirk his lips and shift his elbow on the settee to reveal these confidences without any additional words passing his lips. His gift consisted, as so many, many, many people had assured her as she grew up and old enough to understand what their praise meant, of the ability to suggest much with very little.

  But her elder siblings—long since estranged from the family—called it something else: The ability to blind.

  The engines thrummed. Rose set a hand against the pane that separated them from the air and felt the shudder and shift that meant they were descending. In the lounge, Eun-soo flipped through the music files. The mournful cadences of an old Lennon-McCartney aria, “I’ll Follow the Sun,” filled the cabin. Eleanor uncoiled herself from her seat and walked, not without a few jerks to keep her balance as the pitch of the Ra steepened, back to the dressing and shower room, shared indiscriminately by the almost two dozen inhabitants of the ship. She did dress, stubbornly, in fabrics woven from vegetable forebears. Rose admired her intransigence but more than that the drape of the cloth itself, something leather cured in the sun or spinsil extruded and spun and woven in the airless vaults of space stations could not duplicate. Style, her father always said, sets apart those who are watchable from those fated only to watch. It puzzled and irritated him that his daughter had no sense of style, but she had only ever seen him actually lose his temper once in her entire life: that day in the hospital when her mother had finally backed her up after she stubbornly refused, once again and for all, to undergo the simple laser operation that would remove the port-wine stain.

  He wanted to be surrounded by handsome things.

  The ship turned as it always did before landing, going down rump first, as some of the Sunseekers liked to say. Her hand on the pane warmed as the rising sun’s rays melted into her palm. They cut down through the clouds and the sun vanished. She shivered. Gray boiled up past her, receded into the sky as they came down below the clouds and could see the ground at last.

  Rugged mountains rose close beside the shore of the sea, receding behind them. The lowlands were cut by ribbons of muddy water beside which sprawled the brown and white scars of human habitation, a village. The old ruined Zona Arqueológica lay on higher ground, the centerpiece of a significant plateau.

  It had been a week since they’d last landed. The texture of the earth, the lush green carpet of vegetation, amazed her anew. She blinked on her computer implant to get an identification of the river. A map of the region came up on the screen, not a real screen, of course, but the simulation of a screen that according to her tekhnē class was necessary for the human eye to register information in this medium. Sim-screens for primates, they would shout when they were younger, but it was only funny when you were young enough to find the parallel between simulation and simian amusing, like being six years old and getting your first pun. But like a bad pun or a particularly obnoxious advert balloon, the phrase had stuck with her.

  The lacy mat of tributaries and rivers floated in front of her eyes on the sim-screen, spidery lines that thickened and took on weight and texture, finally moving and melding into the landscape until they seemed to become one. Disoriented, she blinked the screen off and staggered back to find a couch for the final deceleration. The couch snaked a pressure net across her, calibrated to her weight, and she tilted her head back, closed her eyes, and waited for landing. Aria segued into gospel hymn,“Where the Sun Will Never Go Down.” Eun-soo hummed along in a tuneless tenor until Zenobia told him to shut up. Finally, they came to rest; the altosphere shades lightened away and everything went quiet. She felt giddy. When she stood up, her feet hummed with the memory of engines and she swayed as she walked, following the others to the ’lock and out onto the plank that led down to the variegated earth of the night-bound, the lost souls—all fourteen billion of them—who must suffer the sad cyclic subjugation to the endless and cruel celestial reminder of our human mortality, night following day following night. Or so Akvir put it. He had not seen night for nine months.

  The village itself was so small, so pathetic, and so obviously isolated that at first Rose thought they had inadvertently stumbled across the set for an actie, the kind of thing her father would star in: Knight in the Jungle, in which the liberation priest, Father Ignatius Knight, gives his life to bring literacy and the World Wide Web to a village under the censorious thumb of a Machine Age dictator, or Dublo Seven, Heritage Hunter, in which the legendary M. Seven seeks out and recovers artifacts hidden away by greedy capitalists so that he can turn them over to the Human Heritage Foundation whose purpose is to preserve human culture for the all, not the few.

  The air was so hot and humid that even her eyelids began to sweat. It stank of mud and cow dung. A pair of skeletally thin reddish dogs slunk along the tree line. Curious villagers emerged from houses and from the outlying fields and trees to converge on the landing spot, a cleared strip beside a broad concrete plaza marked by a flagpole and a school building. There were sure a lot of villagers, more than she had expected. A dilapidated museum stood by the river at one end of the road. The great Olmec head Akvir wanted to see rested in the central courtyard, glimpsed from here as a rounded bulk behind wrought-iron gates. Right now Akvir was head-hunting, as he called it. In the last month they had stopped at Easter Island, Mount Rushmore, Angkor Thom, and the Altai Mountains.

  A bird called from the trees. Eleanor stepped out in front of Akvir and raised a hand, shading her eyes against the early morning sunlight. But she was looking west, not east into the rising sun.

  Rose felt more than heard the cough of an antiquated pulse gun. Dogs yipped frantically, yelping and bolting, but the sound that bit into their hearing was too high for humans to make out.

  “Effing hells!” swore Eun-soo behind her. “My transmitter’s gone dead.”

  Who used pulse guns these days? They were part of the lore of her dad’s acties, like in Evil E
mpire where he played a heroic West Berliner.

  Eleanor shouted a warning as a dozen of the villagers circled in on them. Were the natives carrying rifles? For a second, Rose stared stupidly, thoughts scattering. What was going on?

  Akvir started yelling.“Back on board! Back on board! Everyone back on board!”

  Voices raised in alarm as the Sunseekers blundered toward the ramp, but their escape was cut short by the unexpected barking stutter of a scatter gun. A swarm of chitters lit on her skin. She dropped to her knees, swatting at her face and bare arms.

  The crash of a riot cannon—she knew the sound because her father had just premiered in a serial actie about the Eleven Cities labor riots of fifty years ago—boomed in her ears. A blast of smoke and heat passed right over her. As people yelled and screamed, she lost track of everything except the stink of skunk gas settling onto her shoulders and the prickles of irritant darts in the crooks of her elbows and the whorls of her ears.

  Someone grabbed her wrist and yanked her up into the cloud. Her eyes teared madly, melding with sweat; the smoke blinded her. But the grip on her arm was authoritative. She stumbled along behind, gulping air and trying to bite the stinging sour nasty taste of skunk gas from her lips. The rough dead earth of the lander clearing transformed between one step and the next into the soggy mat of jungle; an instant later they were out of the smoke and running along a sheltered path through the trees.

  Eleanor held her by the wrist and showed no sign of letting go. She didn’t even look back, just tugged Rose along. Rose blinked back tears and ran, hiccuping, half terrified and half ready to laugh because the whole thing was so absurd, something out of one of her father’s dramas.

  Instead of elegant gold-and-brown robe and trousers, Eleanor now wore a plain but serviceable ice-green utility suit, the kind of clothes every and any person wore when they did their yearly garbage stint. Woven of soybric, it was the kind of thing fashionable Sunseekers wouldn’t be caught dead in.

  What had happened to the others?

  She tried to speak but could only cough out a few hacking syllables that meant nothing. The skunk gas burned in her lungs, and the awful sodden heat kept trying to melt her into a puddle on the dirt path, but still Eleanor dragged her on at a steady lope while Rose gasped for air— such as it was, so thick you could practically spoon it into a cup—and fought to stop the stitch in her side from growing into a red dagger of pain. Her ears itched wildly.

  They hit a steep section, and got about halfway up the slope before her legs started to cramp.

  “Got . . . to . . . stop . . .” she gasped finally and went limp, dropping to her knees on the path. Her weight dragged Eleanor to a halt.

  “Shit,” swore the woman. “Damn, you have been spending too long with the do-nothing rich kids. I thought you weren’t like them. Don’t you ever get any exercise?”

  “Sorry.” It was all she could manage with her lungs burning from exertion and skunk gas and her elbows and knees itching as badly as her ears from the irritant darts, but she knew better than to scratch at them because that only spread the allergens, and meanwhile she had to bite her lip hard and dig her nails into her palms to stop herself from scratching. The skunk gas and the pain made her eyes tear, and suddenly she wanted nothing more than for her mother to be there to make it all better.

  That made her cry more.

  “Aw, fuck,” said Eleanor.“I should have left you back with the others. Now come on.”

  She jerked Rose upright. Rose had enough wind back that it was easier to go than to stay and deal with the itching and the burning lungs and the pain again, the memory of watching her mother die of a treatable medical condition which she was too stubborn to get treatment for because it went against the traditional ways she adhered to. Rose touched her blemished cheek, the habitual gesture that annoyed her father so much because it drew attention to the blemish and thereby reminded them both of those last angry weeks of her mother’s dying.

  Sometimes stubbornness was the only thing that kept you going.

  Eleanor settled into a trot. Rose gritted her teeth and managed to shuffle-jog along behind her, up the ghastly steep path until it finally, mercifully, leveled off onto the plateau. The jungle smelled rank with life but it was hard enough to keep going without trying to look around her to see. Wiry little dappled pigs, sleek as missiles, scattered away into the underbrush.

  By the time they came out into the clearing—the Zona Arqueológica— Rose’s shift was plastered to her body with sweat. Eleanor, of course, looked cool, her utility suit—wired to adjust for temperature and other external conditions—uncreased and without any of the dark splotches that discolored Rose’s shift. At the tuft of hairline, on the back of the woman’s neck, Rose detected a thin sheen of sweat, but Eleanor brushed it away with a swipe of her long fingers.

  They stepped out from under the cover of jungle onto a broad, grassy clearing, and at once an automated nesh-recorded welcome program materialized and began its preprogrammed run.

  “Buenos días!” it sang as outrageously bedecked Olmec natives danced while recorded pre-Hispanic musicians played clay flutes, ocarinas, and turtle shells, and shook rain sticks, beating out rhythms on clay water pots. Fat, flat-faced babies sat forward, leaning onto their knuckles like so many leering prize fighters trying to stare down their opponents, and jaguars growled and writhed and morphed into human form in the interstices of the background projections. “Bienvenidos al Parque Arqueológico Olmeca! Aquí es San Lorenzo, la casa de las cabezas colosales y el lugar de la cultura Madre de las civilizaciónes Mexicanas! Que idioma prefieren? Español. Nahuatl. Inglés. Japonés. Mandarín. Cantonés. Swahili.” The chirpy voice ran down a cornucopia of translation possibilities.

  The place looked like a ruin, two reasonably modern whitewashed buildings stuck on the edge of the clearing with doors hanging ajar and windows shattered, three thatched palapas fallen into disrepair. A herd of cattle grazed among the mounds, which were themselves nothing much to look at, nothing like what she expected of the ancient and magnificent home of the mother culture of the Mexican civilizations.

  But the technology worked just fine.

  Eleanor gave her a tug. They followed a path across the ruins toward the larger of the two whitewashed buildings. Every few meters 3-D nesh projections flashed on and began their fixed lecture-and-display: the old ruins came to life, if nesh could be called life or perhaps more correctly only the simulation of life.

  Poles stuck in the ground were the storehouses for the treasure— the knowledge, the reconstruction of the past. Between them, quartered, angled, huge image displays whirled into being: here, a high plaza topped with a palace built of clay with a stone stele set upright in front; there, one of the great stone heads watching out across a reconstructed plaza with the quiet benevolence of a ruler whose authority rests on his unquestioned divinity; suddenly and all of a piece, the entire huge clearing flowering into being to reveal the huge complex, plaza, steps, temples, and courtyards paved with green stone, as it might have looked three thousand years before during the fluorescence of this earliest of the great Mesoamerican civilizations.

  Eleanor yanked her inside the building. Rose stumbled over the concrete threshold and found herself in a dilapidated museum, long since gone to seed with the collapse of the tourist trade in nesh reconstructions of ancient sites. All that investment, in vain once the novelty had worn off and people stopped coming. Most tourists took their vacations upstairs, these days. Mere human history couldn’t compete with the wonders of the solar system and the adventure promised by the great net, and affordable prices, that opened out into human and Chapelli space.

  The museum had been abandoned, maybe even looted. Empty cases sat on granite pedestals; tarantulas crowded along the ceiling; a snake slithered away through a hole in the floor.

  “Shit,” swore Eleanor again.“Did it have bands? Did you notice?”

  “Did what have bands?”

  “The snake. G
oddess above, you ever taken any eco courses? There are poisonous snakes here. Real poisonous snakes.” Dropping Rose’s wrist, she stuck two fingers in her mouth and blew a piercing whistle. Rose clapped hands over her ears, but Eleanor did not repeat the whistle. Her ears still itched and with her fingers there in such proximity, Rose could not help but scratch them but it only made them sting more. She yanked her hands away and clutched the damp hem of her shift, curling the loose spinsil fabric around her fingers, gripping hard.

  A trap in the floor opened, sliding aside, and a ladder unfolded itself upward out of the hole. Moments later a head emerged which resolved itself into a woman dressed in an expensive business suit, solar gold knee-length tunic over plaid trousers; the tunic boasted four narrow capelets along its shoulders. She also wore tricolor hair, shoulder length, all of it in thin braids of alternating red, black, and gold—the team colors of the most recent Solar Cup champions. Rose knew her fashionable styles, since in her father’s set fashion was everything, and to wear a style six months out of date was to invite amused pity and lose all one’s invitations to the best and most sunny parties. This woman was fashionable.

  Two men, dressed in utility suits, followed the woman up from the depths. Both carried tool cases.

  “Eleanor,” said the businesswoman. They touched palms, flesh to flesh, by which Rose saw—though it already seemed likely given her entrance—that this was the real woman and not her nesh analogue.“All has gone as planned?”

  “I’m afraid not. The Ra is disabled, but we seem to have run into some competition.” She gestured toward the two men.“Go quickly.We’ll need to transfer the array to our hover before they can call in reinforcements.” They hurried out the door.