Devi held Jem, scratching the dokey behind the ears as Skye explained. “This is what we know about my lifeboat. It was sighted when the solar sail began to grow. The sail was huge, like a metal flag reflecting Kheth’s light, very easy to see. Tannasen was in command of Spindrift, and immediately he took the research ship to investigate.”
“Sooth,” Devi said. “That’s nothing new.”
“What happened after that?” Skye asked him.
“Tannasen rendezvoused with the lifeboat, and found you.”
“No. It was months before he reached the lifeboat. What happened next was, the solar sail started to shred. It was torn apart when it hit pebbles in the nebula. It was set upon by butterfly gnomes. Suppose the DI in command of the lifeboat mistook that for an attack?”
Devi stared thoughtfully at Ord. “Then it might have warned any other lifeboats behind it to stay quiet . . . just like you warned Ord.”
Skye nodded. “Their only defense is to go unnoticed.”
“Ord stayed out of sight until you told it everything was okay.”
“Sooth. Maybe the other lifeboats are doing the same thing—staying out of sight until they’re told it’s safe. But the DI on my lifeboat can’t deliver that message because it isn’t active anymore.”
Devi put Jem down. “This is an interesting idea.” He paced back and forth across the pavilion several times, his brow wrinkled in thought. “But something’s missing. The DI must have some way to contact the other lifeboats. It would be senseless to send them into dormancy forever. But how could it send an all-clear signal if it’s dormant too? It doesn’t make sense . . . unless it’s waiting for something . . . maybe for some kind of proof that things really are okay before—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, to stare at Skye. “It’s you.”
“What?”
“You’re the proof. It’s waiting for you. Think about it. Ord came only to your voice, not to mine.”
“So . . . ?”
“Maybe the lifeboat is tuned to your voice as well. It would make sense. If you survived, then the others would stand a good chance too.”
She shook her head. “I was only two! The lifeboat won’t know my voice.”
“Well, maybe it’s not your voice. Maybe it’s just you. Who you are hasn’t changed since Tannasen picked you up. Not at the level of your cells. Not in your DNA.”
“You think my lifeboat would recognize me?”
“Only one way to find out.”
Her mouth went dry. “You aren’t saying we should . . .”
Devi’s gaze didn’t waver. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. We should make an expedition to your lifeboat, and see how it reacts.”
“You’re crazy. There’s no way to get to the lifeboat. Its parked in the construction zoo. In space. Beyond the end of the elevator column . . . and the elevator column is tens of thousands of kilometers long. Tours don’t run up the column, Devi. So how could we get out there? Were you thinking we could climb?”
He laughed. “If we did, we’d be old enough to be real people by the time we reached the end.”
“So what do we do?”
He shrugged. “Well if you like, we could ask permission to go up. Maybe city authority will finally get interested . . . but maybe not. And if they say no, you can bet they’ll start watching us every minute. We got away with our excursion to Deception Well. If we give them any warning, we won’t get away with anything again.”
“So you want to sneak up there,” Skye said softly. “Aboard an elevator car, I guess.” There was no other way. She shook her head in wonderment. “Divine Hand, your mama is wrong. You’re wilder than I am, by exponential powers.”
Skye didn’t see how they could ever find a way to sneak up to the construction zoo. To succeed they would have to slip past city security, stowaway aboard a restricted elevator car, and ride it all the way to the top of the elevator column without being detected. The journey would take days, and once there . . .
They would have to sneak off the elevator car, and somehow make their way to the construction zoo, where a great ship was being slowly assembled.
The construction zoo was not really a place. It was more like a gathering of parts and materials and pieces of the evolving great ship, along with the tentacled construction beasts known as lydras, a worker’s habitat, and the lifeboat—all of it in orbit beyond the end of the elevator column. The trouble was, the zoo orbited at its own speed, and that was much slower than the speed at which the elevator column turned with the planet. So sometimes the zoo might be just a few kilometers away from the column’s end, but at other times it might be ninety thousand kilometers away, on the other side of the world.
Whenever Skye asked Devi how they were going to get around all that, he just shrugged and said, “We’ll work something out.”
They spent the afternoon in the city library, going over every report ever filed on the lifeboat, learning as much as they could about its structure and capabilities. Tannasen’s reports were not nearly as exciting as Skye expected. Mostly, they recorded position information, spectral analyses, radar profiles, communications attempts . . . she almost nodded off more than once.
Then she found Tannasen’s personal journal. On the day the lifeboat was opened he had written, We have found a healthy baby girl. Nameless. Parentless. It is impossible to look on her sleeping face without wondering why. Why is she here? What miracle let her be found? We may never know.
There were also reports from the team of scientists who had examined the lifeboat after it was brought to Silk, and from a couple of researchers who had investigated it again during the intervening years.
By the end of the day they had uncovered two interesting facts.
First, the lifeboat was not the inert piece of abandoned equipment Skye had envisioned. Its life support system still functioned, so that even after twelve years in the construction zoo with no passenger to care for, it continued to maintain a livable habitat inside the pod. Even more intriguing, a researcher who had visited the lifeboat several years ago reported a surge of activity in the air filtration system during the first few minutes she was in the pod.
“That would make sense,” Devi said, “if the lifeboat was trying to identify her. It could pull a few loose cells through the air filter, analyze them, and know whether or not this visitor was you.”
The second interesting fact was that Tannasen and Spindrift were due to return to the city in only nine days. Devi’s eyes sparkled at this news. Skye could guess why: “An elevator will be going up the column to carry supplies to the ship.”
“Sooth,” Devi said. “And we’ll need to be on it.”
Skye tapped her chin thoughtfully. “Devi? I think I’m getting an idea.”
Skye’s plan required Zia’s help. That was a problem, because Skye didn’t want to drag Zia into another mess. “Let her make up her own mind,” Devi urged. “None of us are in this for the fun of it, Skye. What we’re doing really matters.”
So she set it up with Zia to meet them by the soccer fields in Splendid Peace Park. It was evening, and the clear canopy that enclosed Silk was pumping sunset colors over the city’s slopes. The rosy light was reflected in the windows of the towering apartment complex of Old Guard heights. Festival guns atop the heights fired pellets into the air that burst open into brilliant streamers that dissolved as they fell to ground, releasing delicious, tantalizing scents.
Skye and Devi wandered past the crowds of spectators gathering for the evening game, to an isolated stretch of lawn. Skye laid out a picnic blanket while Devi opened a basket of take-out food. Ord slipped out of it, melting around the edge of the basket.
Zia showed up a few minutes later. “So you two made up?”
Skye smiled. She was sitting cross-legged on the blanket. Devi was lying down beside her, watching the changing colors of the canopy. “For the moment anyway,” Devi said.
Zia nodded. “I didn’t think it would take long. So where’s Buyu?”
Skye’s smile faded. She exchanged a guilty look with Devi, while Zia’s eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell him? Skye! He was really worried about you today.”
Neither of them answered.
It didn’t take Zia long to draw a conclusion. “Skye! You traitor. You’re up to something, aren’t you?” She glared at Devi. “You and the boy stargazer.”
“Zia!”
Devi spluttered, trying to hide a laugh.
Zia wasn’t amused. She cocked her head back, staring down the length of her nose at him. She looked ready to take someone apart. “What’s going on, Skye? Tell me everything. Right now.”
“Tell her,” Devi urged. “Let her make up her own mind.”
“Zia, you could get in trouble!”
“I’ve been in trouble! Sometimes it’s worth it. But I hate it when people make decisions for me. Especially when they do it ‘for my own good.’”
Skye nodded guiltily. “Sorry.”
So. Nothing else to do now but talk. Zia would not shut up about it until she had the full story. “We need your help—”
“Wait,” Zia said, holding up a hand. “Ord!”
The little robot peeped cautiously around the corner of the picnic basket, one tentacle winding around the handle like a vine.
Zia said, “Ord, order a message bee for me. Send it to Buyu. Tell him to meet us here.”
“Message bee sent,” Ord assured her, then it ducked out of sight again.
“All right, Skye. You were saying . . . ?”
“I was about to say that we need your help getting into the lydra house.”
Zia’s face relaxed a little. She sat down on the blanket, looking thoughtful. “Now why would you want to do that?”