Cygnus 5- The Complete Trilogy

by Alex Oliver

  The creature's hands opened and closed like pincers clacking. A Louse gesture maybe, that she couldn't interpret, though she felt suddenly sorry for those poor bastards again, for having built this thing only to have it mock them with its success. She sniffed, trying to clear a nose that had thickened along with her throat. So much sobbing she'd been doing recently and none of it had achieved a thing.

  “I'm going to Seraph Base to stop them from blowing up this whole planet,” she started, aggression launching her into the speech but not taking her far enough to outdistance the knowledge that Bryant no longer cared. He didn't care she was leaving. He didn't care she might not be coming back. “And I'm going to get my baby. I want you to remind him about Autumn. I want you to let him know that he was going to be her father. But unless he gets his arse back out here he's never going to hold her or make her laugh or see her smile at him. Because this body – this one here with all the fucking wires in it – this is the one that my daughter could have loved. That's the one she could have cuddled up to.”

  This thing was the left over nightmare of a giant insect, so she didn't have to feel bad about having to snort back snot or wipe her reddened cheeks with her sleeves. But it was shaped like Bryant nevertheless and it was still a relief to be able to say these things to him.

  “That's what I wanted for him. I wanted for us to be a family. She'd be his first child, but not the last. We'd live down here. I thought there wouldn't be that many of us. Couple of thousand, tops - just the Frowards and the convicts and maybe the occasional weirdo who didn't feel safe where they already lived. We wouldn't have made an impact. We wouldn't have hurt your world. We still don't have to. We're living off sunlight now, for God's sake! We could have worked together to fix things. But now the whole fucking galaxy's in crisis. I didn't want this, you know!”

  It always surprised her how pathetic and how small her real goals were – just to be allowed to live and to love the things and people that she loved. Why was that so much to ask?

  “Tell him… I don't know. Tell him I just wanted to love him, and I wanted to cherish this place and protect it. But maybe,” it was an oddly hopeful thought, a memory of how she'd first stopped having to worry about Bryant because she believed he would always look after himself first. “Maybe I'm also glad that if we have doomed the whole human race, he's the one who gets to survive. That's only what I'd expect from him. The guy's as hard to kill as a cockroach, and I've always respected that.”

  She couldn't look at it anymore – that echo of Bryant made out of sentient dust. She kept her head down as she walked away, didn't check its no-doubt blank expression. “Tell him I'm going to try to come back. But if I can't… No hard feelings. Goodbye.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Bryant Wakes Up

  He first felt the input like a dissonant note – a waveform that interfered with the smooth flow of knowledge and rightness and propagation to which he had mapped himself. Something in the world – maybe, given his expansion, even something beyond the world, out in a far off stellar system – was not fitting with the greater symphony.

  He ignored it for a span of time longer than a tuknek arthropod's first life, but shorter than the respiratory rate of an ooan tree. If it was just the death throes of some great beast under the polar ice, or the bitter taste of the collapse of some alien machine, it would pass. He would grow acclimatized to it, and he could concentrate on restricting this winter's die-off of plankton so the fish stocks would recover to a level that tolerated the voracious demands of the planet's new parasites.

  Why not just wipe the parasites out came the recurring pulse, surging through his self like a rush of blood from a heart, like a diurnal tide.

  No, he said. No. Out of habit and bloody-mindedness, and something he didn't feel he needed to keep calling to mind. He'd had a reason and it had been a good one. Why constantly feel the need to go back and check on it?

  But things would be neater with them gone. It was all in equilibrium before they arrived. Now there's…

  Now there was change, flux everywhere, the veins of solid stone in his heart cannibalizing themselves, crumbling to create more pontoth that could be sent out to bring better order, to bring a deeper sphere of gorgeously curated space beneath his control. Once equilibrium had been reached once more, he could go back to sleep, perhaps. Just as he had before. He could allow it all to tick over like the autonomous system of an advanced animal.

  Intelligence was a blight. He'd reached this conclusion millennia ago, seeing his creators undermining their own world in their incessant need to know more. He had stamped it out once and let his world return to pristine freshness. He would do it again, and then he would turn himself off – the last to go dark – so as to avoid falling into an error of logic. If intelligence was bad, then his must be too, and he would…

  This thought came with a feeling of pressure, as though the depths of the sea cried out against it, and the faults in the hearts of the mountains slid further toward magma and rage.

  He would turn himself off then. Last of all. Or be a hypocrite. Or fail in his whole purpose.

  But he didn't mind putting that moment off. The parasites had asked him to make their destruction slower, and thus to stay awake, trying to balance the fine-tuned system of the galaxy. It was an exciting task, and he didn't mind delaying a return to oblivion so he could do it well.

  The aberrant note kept sounding in the back of his mind. Uncomfortable. Alien, even. And persistent. It had gone from a brief irritation to a burning discomfort. Not a note anymore, but a sting. That was wrong. He couldn't – he shouldn't be able to experience pain except in the sense of data. And no. It wasn't pain, exactly, now he narrowed down his focus and concentrated on it. It was…

  His mind ached as it dragged itself back from the other side of the galaxy, from the delicious bubbling destruction and combination of new elements to make more of himself. He tried to locate the thing that seemed too close, too hot-painful-real for him to be sensing it through channels of pulverized stone.

  Something was tearing at the back of his mind, the closer he came. The more he narrowed down, the more there seemed to be two of him?

  One of them slipped silently beneath the surface of the world as always, powerful and imperturbable as a great whale, without the sensors to feel whatever this was. The other part was rediscovering nerve fibers, a panicked hail of electrical signals, a sleet of sensory information that he could perhaps tune into.

  It's one of the parasites, he thought, looking at the nexus of data from the outside – a silver firestorm of brain activity and an ugly flow of bodily sensation that had been dormant but was now waking up. Why had he tied one of these things into himself?

  Not a parasite, he thought, old, redundant programming coming into play for the first time since the Makers had unmade themselves. It bore the DNA of the last high priest. She who had ordered him to embalm her and place her in the city as a token of what had been lost. It had the right to command him. It had the right to be protected and never harmed.

  And not a parasite, he thought with a rush and snap of awakening as part of his mind jerked back into the thing like a magnet snapping to its mate. It's me.

  Flesh around him again. Aches. Aches everywhere. That scraping prickling sensation where his cheek pressed against the ground. What was wrong with his throat? His arse? Oh God, there were tubes up his nose, in his mouth, down his throat, feeding him air and water and nutrients. Tubes up his rectum, in his prick, taking them away. Wires in his hair, in his skin, coming out of his hands.

  The other part of himself caught him before he panicked – just before he screamed and tried to wrench himself free, tearing out his organs in the process. It pulled him back, just enough so he could isolate the body's sensations and discover that he had tuned everything else out. The one thing that was new was the sensation of two fingertips brushing his shoulder over and over again, making and remaking a connection that he had forgotten, but that he
recognized as vital.

  Aurora, he thought, and only after that, coming to him slowly as a term he might once have read about, only dimly remembered, Bryant. That was the name of the body. That was his name.

  While this self-re-centering had been going on, the other part of himself, the part that was the Destroyer, had created an avatar for him. He remembered now that it had done the same thing several times before, but that he had never had to instruct it on how. The production of an avatar to speak to those outside was another of those programs that felt dusty and waxy to the mind, like ancient manuscripts, speaking of a time before the Destroyer had been enough for its own purposes. Before it had expected to be alone. Bryant reminded himself to look into the machine's earliest designs. It had obviously been made with a user in mind, in obvious contravention of its now stated purpose of wiping out intelligence. If it had somehow made a choice to become this, perhaps it could simply be persuaded to make a new one?

  When he returned from this sidetrack, he worked his way carefully into the pontoth that made up his avatar, mapping his body's functions onto the receptive stone.

  Sight was a shock when he got it to work again, teaching himself to look out of the ceramic eyes. The intricate challenge of identifying objects by reflected wavelengths of light required a surprising amount of processing power to untangle. But then his feeling of elation at a job well done was plunged into cold water by what he actually saw.

  Aurora. Between one thought and the next he had forgotten her again. How could that have been? Now he could see the round shield of her torch-light reflecting off the wall behind her lowered head like a halo. He tried to hold the breath he had forgotten he had to take, his lungs forced mechanically to inflate and deflate, while his 'soul'? His essence stumbled and was for a moment, still.

  She was just a parasite. The worst of the parasites – the one who kept all the others from dying off – her life almost as fleeting as that of a tuknek. In the long term, she was nothing at all.

  And if that was true, then there was no holy thing left in the universe. It didn't matter what galaxies intertwined, what vast glowing bubbles of space-time made flowers against the darkness. If she was not sacred then nothing was.

  Somewhere between the body and the avatar he could actually feel his chest, because it was aching. She looked worn out, weeping as she had the night he had tucked a luminous blossom behind her ear and realized he was the first one ever to look past her strength to see something beautiful.

  What was she saying? Something about 'Autumn'? He ran through possibilities that Autumn was the season before remembering it was the name of her daughter.

  But the word 'daughter' opened up more forgotten memories. The entirely imaginary weight of Honey in his arms, crisp curly hair and Aurora's eyes, and Bryant's dark, speckled skin.

  The Destroyer had tested him with visions of their daughter – their mingled DNA in the form of a child. It had tried to force him to sacrifice Honey to gain access to it, as if it was testing the strength of his commitment. Funny thing was, he wouldn't have said he wanted a child before that. It had planted the desire in him by trying to make him give it up.

  “I want you to let him know that he was going to be her father. But unless he gets his arse back out here he's never going to hold her or make her laugh or see her smile at him. Because this body – this one here with all the fucking wires in it – this is the one that my daughter could have loved. That's the one she could have cuddled up to.”

  Wherever he was currently localized, Bryant felt like he smiled. She was always so dogmatic, so certain. Who was to say that Autumn couldn't come to love his avatar? Maybe Aurora herself could, if she'd only give it a try.

  Except that a mere brush of two fingertips on the shoulder of that other body had been enough to bring him running from the far reaches of the universe. Maybe she had a point that there was something special about it, that while it was still running its chemical wetware, he existed in a more real way than he would if he was completely subsumed. He wanted to make the avatar touch her anyway, but she'd already called him a cockroach and turned jerkily away. She was stumbling out of the room to throw herself back into danger.

  He opened his mouth – the avatar's mouth – and tried to wrest control of the voice from the Destroyer, but then he didn't know what he was going to say. “I love you” or “Don't go?” A nagging part of his mind reminded him that he was in this position because she had asked it of him. Wasn't there something he was doing in here? Something vital?

  Oh yes. Saving humanity.

  Maybe he too should try to stay awake now. Try harder to complete the big goal. Then if Aurora came back with his daughter, he could choose, again, the child over the machine. And if she didn't come back…

  Yeah. Well, even with a planet's processing power at his neuron-tips, he didn't want to think about that.

  Bryant practiced keeping his focus on the body. His body, he reminded himself, trying to reconnect with the strange thought that his whole spirit could fit inside that thing. He didn't drift apart so much if he kept an anchor in the body's slight distress. In fact, the first time the planet turned him – all the links and tubes flexing beneath him and in him like a nest of snakes – until he was lying on his other side, the sensation almost snapped him back in again and he had to struggle to stay apart from it.

  It was at least being looked after pretty well. In addition to the turning, presumably to avoid pressure sores, the muscles were being regularly stimulated with electrochemical jolts so they didn't waste away. If he ever did get disconnected, it would be with no loss of physical function, and he admired that, as a design feature.

  He spent a short time hunting down his memories, deliberately recalling who he was, and then patched in to the dataflows of the colonists' computers to remind himself what the spread of the pontoth looked like from the parasites' point of view.

  Not good, clearly. Very much not a good thing.

  The more alert Bryant grew, the more defined and watchful seemed the Destroyer. It had barely noticed him when he was a part of itself, but it sensed him now with a complex reaction – suspicion and awe and a kind of huge doglike devotion that it resented but could do nothing about. He guessed that the suspicion was for him as a human and an intelligence, the awe and devotion were for him as the heir of its last user, its makers. Who, he reminded himself, it had killed.

  They were not killed. Not all of them. Some were permitted to leave. Some were permitted to remain, in a non-self-aware state. Even those who were absorbed by the pontoth were retained. I have their rakiroth--a word that meant data-file to Bryant, or schematic, a plan for building each individual dead Louse back up from the molecular level, reactivating their synapses, bringing them back to life--in my memories. They called me a destroyer, but I am not. I am the one who preserves.

  This close to his body, Bryant could feel the release of dopamine, the kick of joy, as he thought of the imaginary Louse babies the Destroyer had shown him too. It was shit that the only aliens they'd ever come across were already extinct. I'd bring them back, he thought in answer. Don't you want to bring them back? I get the impression that you loved them.

  They were destroying themselves and everything around them. This was the only way to keep them safe.

  It didn't want to have this conversation, Bryant could tell. It too had done what it could to relax out of self-awareness. It wanted to go back to thinking about galaxies and microbes, rather than good and evil, love and loss.

  He supposed he couldn't blame it for that. Sentience was a hell of a burden to impose on a creation against its will.

  “Well, I don't know,” he said, off hand, keeping his emotional reaction out of it – he wasn't sure even he could parse what he felt, so it was too much to expect an alien machine to make sense of it. “Change is part of life, right? Without change, all you've got is death. So you did kill them, whatever you think. If you'd really wanted to help them, you'd have figured out a way to m
anage the change in a way that benefited everyone including the planet. Seems to me you needed more intelligence to find a solution, not less.”

  Intelligence is dangerous and destructive, the Destroyer replied, and Bryant couldn't help but picture it as one of his teenage clients, being told to come back in a year if they hadn't changed their minds. Yeah, it was a green-skinned teenager, lanky, with limp hair and a scowl, and it thought it knew everything.

  “So is the hot rock at this planet's core. So is the geological cycle that heats it up to the point where it can bear life. But without it, everything here would be dead. Just because a thing's dangerous doesn't mean you can opt out of it. You're probably holding the entire galaxy back from something wonderful, if you'd only cooperate with intelligent life rather than getting rid of it.”

  Why not just wipe the parasites out?

  The tide swept through him again, stronger and hotter than ever, as if some of that magma he'd been talking about had been uncapped beneath it.

  No, he said again, conscious this time of exactly why he was stopping this protocol. Conscious of the resistance to his command, and then the flounce, like a great eel turning at the end of a bottle, swimming back out again, with a gust of pressure from its fins.

  No, he thought at it as it retreated, sinking back into monitoring the summer on the other side of the planet, nudging clouds to prevent drought. Sulking.

  Poor little murderous baby. But if it wasn't talking to him, and he was to do anything more today, he'd have to find another conspirator. One who could move around. One he wouldn't have to persuade.

  He sent his mind once more into the cycle of information that was the computers of the settlement. So many had been patched into the Louse databases now, it was easy enough to pick his way out of the planet and into the colony's electronics, though it required a shift in internal timing from glacial to atomic.