An empty table stood by the wall. I sat at it, hesitating. If I tried to access the interface—there surely was one—I might give my attempt at espionage away. But if I didn’t, I’d learn nothing at all.
“Activate,” I said firmly.
I managed to persuade the system into thinking that I was Arienti. I almost wondered at how easy it had been, when an additional layer of security presented itself.
“I’ve noticed an unusual pattern in your access,” the holo said. It was a woman’s face: older, black, with an accent I couldn’t place. “Let me ask you a question.”
I drew a sharp breath. I could synthesize Arienti’s voice and mimic his speech pattern, true, and it might be enough—if I could answer.
“Where and when did we first meet face to face? Not quite this face, though,” she smiled.
I was lost. “I have to go. Switch off,” I said and hurried away.
Just in time. Arienti’s and Oladapo’s voices sounded in the corridor. I vanished into my room.
Shortly thereafter, Arienti appeared in my doorway. “We’ve found something today with Ike. I want you to come with me to see it.”
I tensed a little. “All right.”
Neither Oladapo nor Virtanen joined us. We traversed quite a distance in the rover, but the terrain grew too hard near the end. As we walked carefully across a spiky lava field, Arienti spoke: “Have I mentioned that I’d visited two other systems before this one? Tau Ceti. YZ Ceti. It was an interesting time. But as soon as I learned what I needed, I came here. Actually, I pulled a few strings to help make this expedition happen.”
“Really? I had no idea!” I acted properly surprised. “What inspired you?”
“Something that happened back at Tau Ceti. Did you know that a few of the colonists decided to establish a base at the outermost planet’s moons instead of the inner planets?”
I recalled it vaguely. He continued: “They found something there. A wreck of a failed spacecraft. Very, very old. The resemblance to the Ramakhi probe was uncanny.”
“That’s impossible,” I breathed out. “Everyone would have known.”
“If they’d made the discovery public, yes. But they didn’t. You might not know, but the political regime on-site wasn’t very friendly toward that approach. However, a few people who learned about it escaped and were… inspired.”
I could imagine his predatory smile, the teeth exposed in half-threatening, half-boasting fashion.
“The isotopic composition spoke clearly. The probe likely originated in the same system as the one that spoke to us. I boarded the first ship out of there. YZ Ceti was a good location for my purposes. I already had an inkling about where to start digging.”
Why are you telling me all this now? I almost asked, but stopped myself in time. We still walked side by side. I had the feeling of a prisoner going to her execution. Could I make it to the rover in time? But where could I go? I wouldn’t have enough fuel to go back to Olympus, and I couldn’t contact the base from here. No; my only chance was facing Arienti if I must. Perhaps I was just being paranoid.
“Aren’t you going to ask why?” he spoke and a shiver went down my spine. It took me a second to realize he was refering to his inkling. Or so I hoped.
“Why?” I said. My throat felt very dry.
For a moment, Arienti was silent. Then, very quietly, he said: “Who sent you here?”
“What?”
“I know you’ve spied on me. I repeat: Who sent you?”
I felt strange. I wanted to tell him. I almost did. He must have released something into my air, I realized. So far I was able to resist it. Would it stay that way?
“Well, you’ve come from Epsilon Eridani. So Bellugi, I guess? Or Iwamoto? Or… no, she wouldn’t…”
“What are you talking about? No one sent me here!”
I could hear him sigh in the speakers. “I should get the information out of you. But if the meds don’t work on you, that could be tiresome… Better to get it over quickly.”
Suddenly, I was gasping for air. My suit!
I fell to my knees. One of the shards ruptured my suit as I did and sliced into my knee. I cried out in horrid pain. Desperately, I fumbled around for my repair spray.
What are you going to do? You can repair the damage on your leg, but not what he did.
Black spots appeared in my vision. The air grew thinner. Words came to me from nowhere.
“Aster Sebai,” I wheezed.
Arienti stopped and turned abruptly. “What did you say?”
But I could not speak anymore. My precious air was escaping too fast.
Arienti’s blurred face—wait, not this Arienti’s, but another, also his—was the last thing I saw before blackness encompassed me.
She had been growing old. Felt the wear and tear of age pull at her body and render it weak. No longer could she run if someone on the street decided she wasn’t a good enough citizen for him. No longer could she defend herself, let alone the millions she wanted to speak for. No longer could she raise her voice high enough. Cancer ate at her body. With treatments, she might fight it. Without them, she would have at most two years left, likely less.
Looking back at her life, she felt bitter disappointment. None of the goals she’d striven for had come true. She’d wanted to save people. And what had come of it? Ruins, scorched earth, and a country divided by bloodshed. The hospital never reopened, although it was needed more than ever before.
At first, she’d tried to prevent more violence and ruin where she was. All in vain. Finally, she’d fled with hundreds of others. Abroad, she tried to speak for those less fortunate. It was difficult at first, but then she established herself as a known peace and civil rights advocate. She ran lectures, debates, fundraisers, and film screenings. She started petitions. She kept sending out letters.
The impact of it left her sad, angry, and disillusioned. True, she had her little victories.
But these were doused by much bigger defeats.
The war continued. People kept dying and suffering, while others gained immortality.
None of the attackers who’d killed Feven, none of the war criminals, had been punished to date.
In the first years, she’d feared for her life for speaking out loud. Then she realized they didn’t care. She wasn’t an enemy worth notice for them. She could do nothing.
Oh, if she could take it back, all the idealism and playing by the rules… if only she had the time.
So she bribed the gift administrator in town. The selection of people who would receive the gift was supposedly random across the world, but no one with eyes to see believed that. She was an aging, bitter, unaccomplished refugee woman. Had she waited for her turn, she would have died before her name came up. The bribe consumed all of her savings and set her deep in debt, but it worked.
A year later, suffering from multiple metastases and feeling ever so weak physically from the disease as well as the treatments, it was her turn to accept the gift. The procedure was entirely painless. She didn’t even feel the time spinning around her, until it was just four days later, and she emerged in excellent health and, if she opted for repeating the procedure every couple of decades, possibly at the start of her life everlasting.
She felt young again. And so, so full of rage.
Aster Sebai.
I woke with the name on my lips.
I woke.
Alive. Breathing. With a patched up leg; hurting, but already almost healed. I took in my perceptions at once: the undersuit I was still wearing, the responsive foam beneath me, the walls of molded regolith. Less than four hours had elapsed since I’d almost died, unless someone had tampered with my sense of time. I was likely still at Castello’s Castle.
Aster Sebai. Who was she?
I could recall a face to that name. No, more than one face.
“I’d like to apologize for that earlier misunderstanding.” Arienti stopped in the door and looked me up and down. I was momentarily distracted by flashbacks of other faces, male, his earlier faces.
How did I know? Bellugi never showed them to me.
“Why did you spare me?”
I took him by surprise. “You still don’t know!”
Faces, names… fragments. What do they mean?
“Your failsafe probably hasn’t kicked in fully yet. I should leave you to it… but I’m curious.” He sat in a chair across from my bed. “It’s such a long time since we’ve last met. I wonder what happens when we meet again.”
His words made no sense to me. But I remembered seeing him before. Flirting with a stranger amidst the freezing clouds of Saturn. Watching him fall into the endless pit of the gas giant’s atmosphere.
A starship, one of the first built outside the Solar System. A different face this time, and behind it the same man, alive and well.
“How could I have gotten someone else’s memories?” I spoke. But even as I was saying that, I already knew full well that wasn’t the truth.