“Unless the outsider’s nature is itself proof that she owes no fealty to any potential rival,” he pointed out.
“What, you don’t think your enemies could spend billions of credits on a crazy infiltration scheme without you knowing about it?” I shot back with a grin.
“I should hope not. Although the stakes are rather high,” he mused. “You realize I’m also expected to marry before I take the headship? Father wanted me to take a wife from each of the Masu-kai clans, as if they wouldn’t murder each other within the week. Of course, no one else dares to put forward a candidate with that sort of competition waiting in the wings. Especially since I can’t expect to offer a proper lady the life she would expect.”
I stared at him.
“Ah, the light begins to dawn,” he said.
“You can’t possibly be thinking… what it sounds like you might be getting at,” I said weakly.
“Fortune favors the bold, Alice,” he said confidently. “It’s a bit too soon for making decisions, but I must carefully consider all available options.”
“Options. Right. Um, what do you mean, ‘the life she would expect’?”
“A proper lord is supposed to provide his ladies with a life of safety and elegant leisure, so that they can devote themselves to family matters. Unfortunately, a lady who ties her destiny to mine is more likely to find herself fending off assassins or imposing bloody corrections on a recalcitrant branch office. If I’m to carry out the reforms I intend, family will not be an option for years.”
“You want wives who can be your lieutenants? Wow. That’s like something out of those adventure romance stories. Next you’re going to tell me you want to turn the Masu-kai into a legitimate nation or something.”
He studied me silently for a moment.
“I may have had some thoughts along those lines,” he said.
“You’re way too good to be true, Akio.”
“I have had the same thought about you, Alice. Hence the need for a period of consideration.”
Part of me was ready to jump straight past all the boring judgment stuff, and get right into this life of wealth and adventure he was hinting at. But I still remembered the slave market. I hesitated.
“In honesty, there is also a question as to how much I can safely defy tradition,” he went on. “Bloodlines are very important to many of the clans, and a certain level of support is necessary if I am to secure my position. Recruiting a highly capable retainer would be far less complicated.”
“Simple is for wusses.”
Oh, Gaia. Did I say that? Why did I say that?
He smiled, and I swear my heart skipped a beat. “Is it, now? You know, it’s admirable how restrained you’ve been about showing off your abilities, but it occurs to me that what I’ve seen so far might not be impossible to fake.”
“What, now you have doubts? Fine, I can show you something impossible if you like.”
I took off my scent badge, and laid it on the table.
His look of astonished horror was priceless. The badge turned itself off the moment I let go of it, ending its performance with a distinctive puff of pheromones that instantly drew Marissa’s attention. The naga slithered out of the trees, and two others suddenly emerged from the pond to my other side.
But I’d already started my own performance. I’d been admiring the interplay between the scent badge and our surroundings during the whole conversation, and picking up on Akio’s version as well. His was very different, and a lot prettier. Sung in the key of his own DNA, if I was going to stick with the musical metaphor, while the scent badge’s responses were built around an ID code and time range.
So I woke up the chemosynthesis system hidden in my skin, and started to play my own scent melody. Fielding hundreds of independent queries from the plants all around us, and the naga servants as well.
This was going to be really embarrassing if it didn’t work like I expected.
All three naga stared at me suspiciously for a long moment. Then their expressions softened, and the two in the pond sunk back beneath the water. Marissa took a deep breath, and bowed low.
“My apologies, Mistress. We did not recognize you for a moment.”
I reached down and patted her head. “That’s all right, Marissa. I know I was being confusing.”
She pressed against my hand like a cat, so I gave her a scritch like one. She practically purred.
“Thank you, Mistress. I’m a good girl?”
“What do you think, Akio?”
He picked his jaw up, and shook his head. “Yes, you’re a good girl, Marissa. Why don’t you bring us fresh tea?”
“Yes, Master!”
She bowed again, and slithered off on her errand.
“How?” Akio demanded.
I grinned. “I’m pretty sure I’m not secretly your sister, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I let him sputter for a second before I went on. “Seriously, though, I’m not sure why I have the generic markers your security looks for in my DNA. I guess we must have a common ancestor somewhere a few generations back, but I’ll have to leave that question for your investigators. As for the rest of it, well, I have some baggage of my own. I can pick up all the signaling that goes on between you and the garden, so I just improvised my own version.”
“Just like that?”
I shrugged. “It’s just math, Akio. It’s kind of neat the way your location, identity and mood are all encoded in the same scent signal, but there’s so much chatter in here that it was easy to figure out the whole scheme. All I had to do was watch.”
“That’s impossible. The garden was designed to fool chemsniffers, and a standard fabricator can’t build some of the scent molecules. Even if you got around that somehow, no one could understand that much data in real time.”
I picked up a dumpling with my manipulator field, tore it in half, and put one piece in my mouth while holding the rest in the air between us.
“Hey, you wanted to see something impossible. Don’t blame me for giving you what you asked for. Is two examples enough, or do I need to come up with another one?”
He eyed the fragment of dumpling warily. There were industrial machines that could pull off the kind of fine control I’d just demonstrated, but there was no way you could fit something like that inside a person. Just the control computers would be bigger than I was.
“No, I think that’s sufficient. Alice, what did you mean about baggage? Do you have some sort of transhuman AI in your head?”
“No, it’s not like that,” I said with a grimace. “It’s more like being one of those AIs that can run a whole starship by itself. I’m not necessarily any smarter than the next person, and as far as I can tell I work pretty much like a normal girl most of the time. But I’ve got all these amazing analysis functions that figure things out for me, and I can pay attention to a lot of different things at the same time if I try. I think mom must have been involved in some kind of transhumanist project, but they were focusing on augmentations instead of general intelligence.”
“Yet you still must hide it, for fear of what others will think.”