Darkness Rising Read online

  “Turn right at the intersection!” Carl ordered.

  Volka turned and skidded to a halt.

  “Go, go, go!” Carl said.

  Gaping, Volka craned her neck upward and took a step back instead. In front of her was a statue at least four meters high. Its head touched the ceiling, and its nearly three-meter width filled a huge section of the terminal walkway. Zipping by on either side of it were hover cabs, and Volka was afraid to tread in their path. Also, she couldn’t take her eyes off the statue. It looked exactly like Venus de Willendorf—a reality “holostar” who had had her body reconstructed to look like the real Venus de Willendorf, a famous Stone Age statue. Volka remembered the statue from books of art in her former employer’s library on the planet Luddeccea. Like that tiny Stone Age statue, this enormous modern work had a large, smooth belly as though she were pregnant and enormous breasts. Thick braids of dark brown hair fell in front of her eyes and nearly touched her chin. The skin tones were so lifelike that Volka half expected to see a pulse.

  “Volka, it’s a hologram,” Carl said, his voice gentle in her mind this time.

  Volka blinked. The “statue” shimmered slightly, and two men in the high-necked suits that were popular among businessmen in the Galactic Republic passed between the statue’s legs, their heads exactly at the level of its groin. Hands on the metal plates at their temples, the businessmen didn’t pause as they approached Volka. The metal plates were “neural interfaces” that allowed them to connect to the ethernet. Her business partner, Sixty, had described the ethernet as “like the ancient internet, but connected to the brain.” The ethernet allowed humans to connect mind-to-mind, to download apps that turned them into living calculators, encyclopedias, video recorders, and much, much more. Humans in the Galactic Republic had the interfaces implanted in their infancy before their skull bones fused. For Volka to get one, it would mean cutting through bone, and there would be no guarantee it wouldn’t be rejected. Volka was over 90 percent human, but she was also a weere—her genetic code was partially borrowed from the wolves of Chernobyl. Weere, like those wolves, had heightened immune systems.

  One of the businessmen caught her eyes, looked at her wolf ears, and smiled. It wasn’t a cruel or mocking smile, and he was handsome with dark hair and dark eyes, but Volka curled her ears down self-consciously. Human men didn’t smile at weere in public—at least not kindly—not where she was from. For a moment, she had a vivid memory of Alaric leaning on his elbow, tracing the lines of her ear with a finger, a soft smile on his lips, and then she felt a stab of anguish in her chest as she remembered how he tried to destroy her. Her nails bit her palms.

  “Volka, we must go,” Carl said, his tone still gentle.

  She stared in dismay at the naked legs she was going to pass through. She’d be part of the exhibit, she realized. On her homeworld, Luddeccea, people wore modest clothing, and there were no naked holographic statues to pass through. On Luddeccea, there was no ethernet either, just radio, although some people were lucky enough to have rotary phones. There were no hover cabs, just old-fashioned cars with pushrod engines. There were movies, but no holograms. She didn’t belong here. She swallowed. Her friend Sixty did belong here and he’d been missing for hours. Ducking her head and flushing, she passed through the Venus’s thighs and resumed her jog.

  A few minutes later, Volka took a running leap onto a moving walkway and paused a moment to catch her breath. Ferocious squirming in the pack she wore almost knocked her over.

  “Squeak!” said the source of the squirm, and Carl’s voice returned to her mind. “Why are we pausing?”

  “I’m checking the map, Carl Sagan,” Volka said, lifting her wrist. On it she wore an “ether bracelet” given to her by Sixty. Made of twisted copper-colored wires, it had a flat circular plate at its apex. Speaking into the plate, Volka said, “Bracelet, would you please show me the map to the maintenance shop again?” A hologram about two handspans high sprung from the central plate, and Volka’s brow furrowed in confusion. She could see where they were trying to go, but not where they were now.

  Wiggling from the pack, Carl Sagan leaped to the moving handrail beside the walkway. Carl Sagan was a member of The One, a “quantum wave” controlling alien species that could possess the bodies of wave-sensitive creatures like werfles, cats, wolves, and many others that, according to Carl, “humans haven’t discovered yet.” At the moment, he inhabited the body of a long-haired golden werfle, a sort of ten-legged, venomous weasel, with long golden striped fur very much like an orange tabby. Rising to his back four paws on the handrail, putting his brown eyes just about level with Volka’s own, he fidgeted with the collar he wore, a leather band with a metal piece like the one at the apex of Volka’s bracelet. Volka mentally corrected herself. Carl preferred the adornment to be called a “necklace.”

  A businesswoman strode up behind her and pointed at Carl. “Is that thing possessed by those aliens…The Only, or The One, or whatever?”

  Carl lifted his chin and began to preen.

  Volka tried to answer. “It is a—”

  “If not, its venom better be milked,” the businesswoman muttered, striding by them.

  Carl’s whiskers twitched.

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Volka.

  “It’s actually coming back in,” said Carl, licking his lips. The woman didn’t hear Carl’s assessment. He was talking to Volka telepathically using “the quantum wave.” Besides possessing bodies, Carl’s species, The One, used the quantum waves for telepathy, creating the wireless frequencies of the ethernet, pyrokinesis, and, Volka suspected, for telekinesis. Carl was cagey when Sixty and Volka pressed him about the last.

  Since Volka was a weere, she was also part wolf, wave sensitive, and slightly telepathic. She could hear Carl’s thoughts and feel the emotions of their spaceship, Sundancer. As Carl explained it, wave-insensitive creatures, like humans, felt quantum wave shifts, but their minds couldn’t interpret the shifts. Humans either outright ignored the shifts or discounted them as dreams, “psychotic breaks,” or “schizophrenic episodes.”

  “Where are we in this maze?” Carl asked, bobbing his head and staring at the hologram on Volka’s wrist.

  Peering back at the confusing map hovering over Bracelet’s central disk, Volka frowned and then remembered a trick Sixty had taught her. “Bracelet, show us the route from our current location, please.”

  The holo shifted and displayed them as a dot with a glowing red thread of light that led to their destination: a maintenance shop Sixty had gone to for repairs. Sixty, Volka, Carl, and Sundancer had a delivery service—the fastest delivery service in the galaxy, since Sundancer was the only faster-than-light spaceship in the galaxy. They’d started the delivery service because Sixty owed money—he’d blown up a luxurious borrowed spaceship while rescuing Volka and Sundancer. They’d worked out a payment plan, and since their services were in demand, he wasn’t in prison. Since they could charge a lot for their services, they also did occasionally have time for leisure and maintenance.

  Sixty had gone to the maintenance shop after they’d done a delivery here on Copernicus City. Copernicus City had a time gate—one of the portals that allowed faster-than-light travel for ships and data between the stars. But Copernicus’s gate was very busy, and spaceship traffic suffered frequent delays. A trillionaire holomogul had wanted to send his granddaughter a “time-sensitive” birthday gift, and he had hired their services.

  After his “tune-up,” Sixty had left a message with Volka informing her his systems were 100 percent operational, and that he had a quick errand to run. He promised to be back in about an hour. That had been five hours ago. Volka ran a hand down Sixty’s coat. He’d left it aboard Sundancer, and she’d put it on almost as a talisman. Her hands ran over Sixty’s most treasured possession in the inside pocket—the ashes of his deceased lover, Eliza Burton.

  It was quite possible Carl and Volka’s business partner had stopped at a charging kiosk and paused for a reboot
on the way back to the ship. Probably. Hopefully. Thinking about other things that might have happened made anxiety prick like cold needles under her skin. Sixty, Carl, and Sundancer were Volka’s only friends in the Galactic Republic.

  On Luddeccea, sentient machines like Sixty and aliens were considered the ultimate evil, but now here Carl and Volka were, desperately trying to retrace Sixty’s steps. The maintenance shop he’d gone to was so small it had no public ethernet channel, though thankfully Sixty had given them the physical address. She hoped someone at the shop would have an idea where he’d gone.

  Pointing with a claw to a spot on the holo where the thread descended in a straight vertical, Carl said, “That’s the ped-elevator at the end of this walkway.”

  Nodding, Volka said, “Thank you, Bracelet, you may turn off now.”

  Carl smacked a paw to his nose. “Volka, you don’t have to thank it! It’s not sentient like Sixty.”

  Volka’s ears flattened, and her nostrils flared. “Good manners cost us nothing, Carl.” And how did he really know? No one had thought the giant time gate computer above her homeworld had been sentient, and then it dropped a nuclear and chemical arsenal on their heads. Better safe than sorry, in Volka’s opinion.

  “You’re welcome, Miss Volka,” Bracelet replied. Volka arched an eyebrow at Carl.

  Spreading his top paws, he said, “It costs us time, that’s what it costs us!” With that, he hopped onto her shoulders. “Let’s move!”

  Clenching her teeth, Volka idly wondered if he only saw her as a beast of burden.

  “You’re not my beast of burden!” Carl exclaimed, sliding into her pack. “You’re my pet. Now go quick, the elevator is about to depart!”

  Thinking of Sixty, Volka broke into a run.

  Jumping into the nearly packed elevator, Volka bent over and caught her breath. Her ears popped as the doors whooshed shut and the elevator started to descend. Straightening, she frantically scanned the elevator and realized there was no operator or buttons. “Carl,” she whispered to the werfle hiding in her pack. “How do we get to level 163?”

  It was as if she’d shouted. Everyone in the elevator turned to stare down at her—she was shorter than most Republic citizens.

  A woman’s eyes went to Volka’s temple and got wide. “You have no neural interface!” The other occupants of the elevator blinked at her. Most lifted their hands to their temples and their own interfaces as though afraid her state of ethernet-less-ness might be contagious.

  “You need to enter the floor you want over the ether,” the woman who’d noticed her lack of an interface said. She had long black hair, a perfect complexion, and a perfect figure. She didn’t look a day over twenty, but that didn’t mean anything. Plastic surgery was popular in the Galactic Republic.

  Volka smiled weakly. “Thank you,” she murmured and lifted her wrist. When she’d navigated the elevators before, 6T9 had been with her. He must have been sending directions over the ethernet the whole time. “Bracelet,” she whispered. “Would you please make the elevator stop at level 163?”

  “Yes, Miss Volka,” Bracelet replied.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Someone tittered.

  “You’re welcome, Miss Volka,” said Bracelet.

  “And please tell me when we get there,” Volka added.

  “Of course,” Bracelet replied.

  “Thank you.”

  There were more titters. Volka’s ears flattened against her head, and she stared at her boots.

  “You can move your ears,” a woman exclaimed.

  Volka’s head snapped up and her ears snapped forward. There were gasps. Another young-looking woman, this one with elven ears, put a hand over her mouth. Her eyes, dyed completely black, got wide.

  On Volka’s homeworld, plastic surgery was only done when injuries were debilitating—a split cleft, for instance. In the Galactic Republic, plastic surgery and body modification were as popular as makeup was on Luddeccea and much more creative. She’d gotten used to it in the last few weeks. When she’d boarded the elevator, she had barely noted the men with beads inserted beneath the skin of their noses to get the popular Lizard Look, the girl with fairy wings, or the woman whose body was carefully sculpted into the Venus de Willendorf to look like the holostar. No one in the elevator looked older than thirty-five, either. In the Three Books religion, the prophet before Muhammad had said, “Judge not, that ye not be judged,” but it was hard not to think that all the plastic surgery was superficial and a waste.

  Someone at the back of the elevator said, “Where did you get your ears?”

  Someone else said, “I love the tattoos around your eyes! They look so natural.”

  “And your contacts are amazing,” said someone else. “Or is that retina staining?”

  Volka’s ears rotated madly in the direction of each new voice, and Volka patted them self-consciously. “My father. I got them all from my father,” she replied. Her mother’s ears had been almost human, only slightly pointed with tufts of gray velvet at the tips. Her mother’s hair had been long and black. Her eyes had been blue, not yellow like a wolf’s, and her mother’s eyes didn’t have the natural black pigment that surrounded Volka’s and made her look like she had outlined them with kohl. “I got all these features from my father.”

  “Your father was a plastic surgeon?” asked the woman with the blackened eyes.

  Volka’s mouth fell open. Of course, they thought her weere appearance was artificial. “No,” she murmured, once again feeling out of place.

  The woman’s brow furrowed, and her gaze roamed from the top of Volka’s head to her boots. Her lips turned up. “Is that real leather?”

  “Yes,” said Volka, lifting one of the soft, brown boots Alaric had given her.

  The elevator opened and nearly half the occupants left.

  “From…a real animal?” said the woman.

  “Yes,” Volka confirmed, her ears flattened, this time with annoyance.

  “Do you eat real meat too?” asked a man, voice laced with disdain.

  Volka could lie, but she loved fresh meat still warm from the kill. On Sixty and Carl’s asteroid, she hunted rats with Carl, and deer with Shissh, a Bengal tiger possessed by the spirit of Carl’s big sister. Sixty found their hunting “barbaric,” but if they didn’t hunt, the rats and deer would still have to be culled. Sixty didn’t want that job, and the “carnivore way” meant their meat wouldn’t be wasted. “Yes,” said Volka, narrowing her eyes. She thought about licking her lips for emphasis, then bowed her head in shame. There was no need to be rude, even if these people were.

  Everyone left in the elevator took a step back, and Volka didn’t raise her head until Bracelet declared, “This is floor 163, Miss Volka.”

  She stepped out of the elevator and blinked. Level 163 was much different than the terminal and the neighborhood the holomogul’s granddaughter lived in. It was darker and the ceiling was lower. There were children running about and people who looked older than thirty. She didn’t see a single Lizard Look, though she did see tattoos on bare arms. There were no windows that Volka could see, but somehow, natural light was being piped in. Ovoid spots of sunlight lit patches of cement. In those patches were pots of climbing beans and even a few renegade flowers.

  Carl poked his nose out of her pack. “This area looks very residential.”

  Volka peered around. “Well, that makes sense. It’s a small maintenance shop that is only known to a few people and isn’t in any phonebook.” Her former employer on Luddeccea used to take his car to a repairman in such a place. He swore he got the best service there.

  She felt Carl’s whiskers twitch against her cheek. “I guess so.”

  Lifting her wrist, Volka politely requested Bracelet show her the map again. Ducking her head, she followed the glowing red thread of light. She came to a stop outside of a pair of heavy black doors. Etched into their surface were the words, “The Madison Residences.”

  The doors were ja
mmed open with a piece of cardboard, so Volka let herself in. The ceiling, if anything, was lower inside. It was also darker and smelled like antiseptic cleaning fluid and urine. There were placards with directions to the various apartments, and Volka followed them down a hallway not wide enough for two people shoulder to shoulder, up a rickety elevator, and down another narrow, dark hall. When she got to the correct door number, she heard a man and woman laughing within. Gathering her courage, Volka knocked. The laughter stopped, but no one approached on the other side. Volka knocked again and heard a man whisper, “Don’t answer. Maybe they won’t know we’re home.”

  “I hear you!” Volka shouted, ears straining for the sound of footfalls. When none came, she took a deep breath and shouted, “I’m sorry to bother you, but my partner Sixty is missing, and—”

  The door whooshed open and an older man wearing thin shorts appeared. He was fleshy around the middle, balding, with white hair. The woman next to him had the softness of late middle age. She was hastily pulling a pink robe over her undergarments and tossing her gray-streaked hair over her shoulder. They smelled like each other and sex, but Volka also detected the very faint scent of Sixty—his own scent and the scent of the forests of the asteroid and Sundancer’s interior—so it was her Sixty, not another android of the same model.

  “Something happened to 6T9?” said the man.

  “Our 6T9?” said the woman.

  Volka’s ears flattened at the word “our.” Recovering, she stammered, “He was here…at your…maintenance shop?”

  Their lips pursed and eyes got wide.

  “Oh, for chaosmos’s sake,” Carl grumbled into her mind. Sliding out of her pack and taking a position on her shoulder, he squeaked aloud and mentally muttered, “Now how to make this thing work?”

  Volka’s eyes slid to see him playing with his “necklace.” Carl could talk to humans over the ether with the power of the quantum wave, but he needed to know their ethernet channels, and they had to answer. On Luddeccea, when the rotary phone had rung in her employer’s house, Volka and her employer, Mr. Darmadi, had sprinted up and down stairs and from the farthest reaches of the eight-acre garden to answer. The people of the Galactic Republic didn’t feel the same urgency toward ethernet callers. They often ignored people they knew, and Carl always showed up as “Unidentified” on the ethernet ID. He was mostly ignored. So Sixty had come up with the collar—or, as Carl called it, “necklace”—an ingenious ethernet-to-speech device for Carl to use to “speak” out loud so humans could hear.