“Yes.”
“I just want to know if it’s some kind of fucking dukh shit, sir.”
“Oh, is that all?” Ty asked. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“No,” Arjun said, the tension suddenly gone from his voice. “There’s no dukh involved.”
“Because that bar he works for—”
“It’s not connected with any established kupol.”
“Then who the hell is it connected with, sir?” Yur demanded. “I made some inquiries with friends of mine in intel. That bar makes no fucking sense as a business proposition. Its ownership structure is . . . unusual. Connections to Red, I’m told.”
“One of the Owners happens to be of part Aïdan ancestry,” Ty admitted, “but be careful of making unwarranted assumptions about where his loyalties lie.”
“Does this have something to do with the Purpose?” Roskos Yur demanded.
Neither Ty nor Arjun answered. After a few moments of this silence, Yur heaved a sigh, then continued in a more moderate tone: “Never mind. I see it now. It’s some kind of Purpose thing. Above my pay grade. You should have just told me.” He drew himself up and saluted. “What are my orders, sir?”
“We march to the sea,” Ty said, “following the Cyc’s directions. And moving as fast as we can. Complicating matters is that our Moiran may have to be carried.”
“Actually,” said Langobard, who had been loping in their direction and was now in earshot, “we may have to work rather hard to keep up with her.” He extended one long arm, pointing down the slope of the meadow.
The first thing they all saw was the huge form of Beled, charging downhill at the near-sprint that, as they all knew, he could maintain for hours. Far ahead of him, then, they saw Kath Amalthova Three, moving even faster.
HOPE’S DRUGS AND PROBIOTICS HAD SETTLED KATHREE’S MOOD A bit and reduced the nausea to the point where she could almost ignore it. This had been resolving on its own, but she was glad of any pharmaceutical assistance she could get; her body had become ravenous and she needed to keep her food down. But the most important drug in her system right now—so important that Hope had strapped a little pump to Kathree’s arm, the better to keep dribbling it in—was one designed to home in on her amygdala and put the brakes on any slow neurological train wreck that might be under way there in reaction to the trauma she had seen four days ago. As such it was reaching her brain a few days too late—but apparently it was one of those “better late than never” things. It might help interrupt a vicious cycle in which her brain would keep replaying that little horror movie over and over, deepening the damage a little bit each time. The fact that she’d spent so much time asleep might also be helping her in that regard. Some tangible and biologically measurable benefit might have accrued to her as a result of having spent most of that time physically strapped to Beled, her cheek on his shoulder, all but sucking him into her nostrils. For his part the Teklan had shown no particular reaction to having an indolent, vomit-scented coma patient on his back during the day, and curled up against his belly during the night. The two of them had still never had sex, but she feared now that once she was cleaned up and feeling better she would be on him like a succubus. It was a well-known POTESH symptom, which had produced colorful and legendary results in Moiran communities that had survived collective trauma.
But since having rampant sex with everything that moved wasn’t really an option today, she sought other outlets for her surging physical energy. The hike from the meadow down to the sea was longer than it had appeared and she ended up ranging far in front of the others, obliging Beled to push himself hard just to keep her in sight. She could not see him because he was behind her, but she could sense his footfalls through the ground. She could hear his breathing and the faint clicking of the ambots that he carried on his person, and when the wind was from behind she could smell the institutional wipes that he had been using for hygiene, and the detergent that had been used to clean his uniform, the lubricant in his kat, his most recent meal. Her ranging so far out in front of the others was partly a way to burn off a physical energy that threatened to make her crazy but as much an effort to get into a place where she was not taking in an equal amount of sensory data from everyone in the group. One was enough.
She stormed through a hedge of whippy plants that had been seeded in a dune above the beach and broke out onto the wet sand. Waves were breaking half a kilometer out and washing up toward her in fizzing sheets. The smell in her nostrils spoke of an incalculable density of marine life, akin to what she had scented when she had stood on the top of the bridge in Cradle, but much more finely resolved now. This despite the chemically induced suppression of her amygdala. Without Hope’s drugs in her system she might have spiraled into a sort of panic attack. As it was she felt her body overheating and looked down at her bare arms as if expecting them to crack open like sausages on a grill. Dropping from a run to a stride, she marched straight down the beach peeling off clothes as she went and depositing them in a ragged career over her footprints. Soon, but not soon enough, the surf was washing her ankles, then her shins. She dropped to her knees and let herself topple forward into an onrushing wave that caught her fall and let her down easy. Naked, she was floating facedown in the water, whose icy cold only made the exposed parts of her skin—buttocks and shoulder blades—feel as if they were under a broiler.
Pressed for a rational explanation of why she was lying facedown in the Pacific, eyes open, gazing at a starfish, she could not have answered. But it was having an effect. Her heart, which had been thumping out of control, dropped to something much closer to a normal rate, and a surprising amount of time passed before she felt obliged to plant her hands and knees in the sand, push herself up on all fours, and suck in a breath of air.
She got her legs under her and squatted, then pivoted so that her back was to the sea. Her legs and buttocks were still submerged, cooling off from the run.
Beled Tomov was standing a few meters away, surf washing around his ankles, breathing heavily, looking as though a dip in the icy Pacific might do him some good. But this was not his intent. He had been ready to pull Kathree out if she had gone too long without breathing.
They looked at each other, Kathree’s gaze saying I would do you right now, right here and his saying I know and hers saying I know that you know.
“Did you hear anything?” he asked.
That was unexpected.
“Just now,” he explained, “when your head was under.”
“You mean, in the water?”
“Yes.”
“Like what?”
“You haven’t been listening, have you?”
“Are you kidding? I’ve been listening so hard it’s driving me out of my mind.”
“To the conversation, I mean.”
“No. Everyone talks too loud.”
He considered it. Then he turned a little to one side and stretched out one arm, drawing her attention to a rocky headland that interrupted the beach a few hundred meters away. “There,” he said.
The thermal spike in her body had finally subsided, so she pulled her clothes back on and they walked along the beach toward the headland: an abrupt, almost artificial-looking rampart of shattered rock, held together by the roots of trees and scrub. It divided the beach like the blade of a shovel.
She did not even know why they had been going to the sea. Was someone going to pick them up there? Was there even a plan? Or had they simply run away until they could run no farther?
“The Diggers believe,” Beled said, “in the existence of people who live beneath the sea. The Pingers. Supposedly there have been contacts. At specific places along the coast of Beringia.” He nodded in the direction they were going.
“As in face-to-face contacts?”
Beled shrugged: a movement that, given the size of his shoulders, could almost be picked up on a seismograph. “I fancied you might have heard something while your head was under the water,” he said. “They use a tech called s
onar.”
Her disordered brain was a little while putting this all together. She knew a little about sonar. Survey used it to map the bottoms of lakes and to count fish. “No coincidence that we are traveling with someone of that name?”
Beled nodded. “She has been telling us about them, but much of it sounds more legend than fact.”
“Where do they live? Submarines?”
He shrugged again. “No one seems to know. Apparently they are good at holding their breath.”
The headland could not be skirted without a boat. They ended up cutting back inland so that they could get past it. This required gaining a couple of hundred meters in altitude and bushwhacking through vegetation that had grown thick on the south-facing slope.
When they reached a place from which they could look down toward the sea, it became obvious that they were on the edge of an impact crater a kilometer or so in diameter. The headland that had blocked their passage down the beach was part of its rim; this curved out into the Pacific, forming one side of a bay. A mirror image of it, as they could now see, formed the opposite side. The bolide that had formed the crater had struck very close to the shore. The central impact peak was a sharp rocky islet just a stone’s toss from the beach, precisely centered between the twin headlands. It was easy enough for the eye to fill in the missing shape of the rim. Out in the water between the headlands, it must be slung in a submerged arc. And indeed it was possible to see waves breaking as they tripped over it. On the landward side, the rim blended into the natural slope. The impact had hollowed out a bowl whose steepness now forced Beled and Kathree to make an awkward, skidding descent into the cove below. The beach there was more rocky than sandy, and many of the rocks had the translucency of wave-worn beach glass.
They could hear the remainder of the party on the slope high above, catching up with them.
The middle of the beach—just opposite the sharp little island—seemed like the natural place to make camp. A little heap of glassy stones had been made there—just big enough to make it clear that this was no natural deposit, but an intentional act. “Their signal,” Beled explained. “We should build a fire now.” He began ranging along the beach picking up driftwood. Kathree, drawn somehow by the cairn, squatted there to wait for the others. She could hear Sonar Taxlaw chattering as she negotiated the slope above, running circles around the others, whose footfalls and breathing were audible.
“Their history is divided into three Deluges. The First Deluge was of rock and fire. It chased them into the deepest trenches of the sea, where it never fully dried out, even after the rest of the oceans had boiled off. They bred a race capable of living in confined spaces. The Second Deluge was of ice and water.”
“The Cloudy Century!” Einstein said.
“Yes, when you dropped comets on them for hundreds of years. They noticed that seas were expanding, growing away from the trenches where they had been holed up, expanding their range. They transformed themselves into a race that could swim in the sea.”
“When you say they transformed themselves,” asked Arjun, “do you mean genetic engineering or—”
“Selective breeding,” Sonar insisted. “If wolves could become poodles in a few thousand years, think what humans could turn into, if there was a need! They began to explore the seafloor. They found a lot of industrial junk that had been washed into the oceans during the Hard Rain and sunk to the bottom. There is nothing of metallurgy that is a mystery to them.”
“Which is why you trade with them?” Ty ventured. “Because you are short on metal?”
“And they are short on things we have,” Sonar affirmed.
“You said there were three Deluges,” Einstein reminded her. “The Third Deluge?”
“Is now,” said the Cyc. “A Deluge of life, beginning with microorganisms and culminating with you.”
“Meaning, the Spacers,” Ty guessed.
“Yes. And the only Spacers they know about are the ones who dropped a lot of rocks into the Torres Strait and built the thing at Makassar.”
“How is all of this being imparted to you?” asked Arjun.
“Imparted?”
“Have you, Sonar, actually had face-to-face conversations with Pingers?”
“Me personally?!” she asked, sounding amazed and horrified by the very idea. “Oh no, just looked down on them from up here.”
“So you lurk up above while more senior members of your clan go down to the beach and talk to the Pingers.”
“Talking is difficult. Communication is mostly through the written word. They didn’t have paper until we gave them some of ours. We use slates and chalk.”
Kathree’s eye went to a detail she had noticed a minute ago: an unnatural-looking deposit of flat black rocks half buried in wave-driven sand. As the remainder of the party made their final descent to the water’s edge, she used a piece of driftwood to scrape sand and gravel away from these until she could worry one loose. Though it was rough around the edges, it had clearly been shaped by humans: a slab of black rock about as thick as her finger, big enough to hold in the crook of an arm, smooth enough to write on. Scattered in the muck around it she’d seen lumps of calcium carbonate: chalk. Traces of it were still visible on the slates. Not writing but a fragment of a diagram, a map perhaps, and a few numbers.
PROJECTING FROM ONE SIDE OF THE ISLET, JUST BELOW THE TOP OF it, was a snarl of driftwood: the stump of a tree that a storm had torn from the edge of a cliff somewhere along the coast and later hurled up here. As soon as he arrived, Ty dropped his pack, emptied his pockets, and picked up the boxy equipment case that Roskos Yur had delivered in his glider. Holding this up above his head to keep it dry, he waded out to the islet, cursing at the intensity of the cold. At its deepest, the water came up to his waist, with occasional waves clipping him under the chin. He tossed the case up onto the flank of the islet and then clambered up after it.
After gazing curiously at the stump for some moments, he squatted down, gripped it by a couple of protruding roots, and overturned it, causing it to tumble into the surf. He then edged back out of the others’ sight line to reveal what had been hidden beneath it: a vertical section of stout steel pipe, about a hand’s breadth in diameter, rising to the height of a person’s knee, topped with a flat disk of battered steel the size of a dinner plate. The pipe wasn’t rooted to the boulder itself. It was part of a longer object that extended out into the sea. The part above the waterline was lashed to spikes that had been driven into crevices in the rock, in a style that they had already learned to recognize as typical Digger improvisation.
Ty’s attention strayed to something he had noticed at his feet. He bent down and heaved it up so that all on the beach could see it: a sledgehammer improvised from a length of pipe and a chunk of steel. Then he looked at the Cyc. Looking back at Ty she held her hands out, palms toward the gray sky, as if to say: See? Just like I said.
Ty turned away from them, gazing down into the sea before the boulder. After a few moments he turned back around. “How far does it extend?” he shouted.
“The pipe? A few score yards,” answered the Cyc. “The crater is as a horn, channeling the sound out into the deep.”
She had scarcely finished the sentence before Ty hauled off with the sledgehammer and brought it down with all his might on the steel plate. The result was a blindingly loud metallic ping, drowned out, as it faded, by a scream from Kathree, who sank to her knees in the sand with her hands clamped over her head.
“Better get her out of here,” Ty said—she could hear him through her hands. She felt Beled reaching around her from behind, crooking her in one arm below her breasts, heaving her to her feet. Which was welcome on one level. But she was tired of being the one who had to be carried, and so she unwound herself from him, turned her back on the sea, and marched up toward the belt of scrub that marked the limit of the beach. Ty gave her a respectable head start before shouting, “Plug your ears.” She did so, and a moment later felt another ping go through
her like an icicle jammed into the base of her skull. A moment later came another and another, not in a steady rhythm, but sporadic. And by the time she had climbed up to a place where she could look down over the cove, fingers in her ears, and not suffer pain from each stroke of the hammer, she had made sense of what Ty was doing.
Each of the human races had its own set of cultural traditions that it traced back to its respective Eve. These were propagated from one generation to the next by social rituals, school curricula, and youth groups. Young Teklans learned zero-gravity gymnastics with a martial arts flair, competing on obstacle courses that reproduced specific maneuvers that Tekla had performed during the Epic. Julians competed on debate teams and went on lengthy retreats intended to symbolize their Eve’s exile and ordeal in the Swarm. And so on.
Young Dinans learned Morse code. It was used very rarely.
Moirans most certainly didn’t learn it, and so Kathree had no idea what message Tyuratam Lake was banging out into the deep.
Everyone, of course, had watched the scene in the Epic, at the beginning of the Hard Rain, where Eve Dinah had made her final transmission to Rufus. This had trailed off with many repetitions of the code QRT, which—especially after Dinah had dissolved in sobs, and slowed her transmission speed to a crawl—had a kind of solemn fanfare-like rhythm to it, beginning with pahm, pahm, pa-pahm. The letter Q. Kathree recognized that pattern, at least, more frequently than you would expect in normal English sentences. So, Ty was using ancient Q codes to shorten his message. But she hadn’t a clue what he was actually saying. He belted it out over and over again, a syncopated phrase of long and short strokes that started to get under her skin after a while. He stopped when Sonar Taxlaw waded out to the rock and assured him that, if the Pingers were about, they would surely have heard the message by now.
“How long now?” he asked. He was shouting over the rush of the surf and because he had probably gone deaf.
“Depends on how far away they are,” said Sonar Taxlaw. “Maybe a day. Maybe three.”
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