by Jared Millet
Then the river calmed. When he opened his eyes, he saw that they’d come to a wide, still pool in a depression that looked more like a crater than a canyon. The current tugged gently upstream, but he had control once again. He took a gulp of water through the sip-straw in his mask and focused on the thudding of his heart. It was part meditative exercise, and partly to reinforce the thrill for his audience.
Beyond the rim, the gorge continued to Cyrano Falls, the last big lift before the uplands. The falls thundered from afar, even in the too-thin air. Dodds called over the radio in Hector’s earplugs.
“This is as far as we can go by boat. We’ll carry them up the slope and join the river again past the falls.”
Hector winced at the spike in volume. They’d have to mask that in post. Thrills and excitement were one thing, but needless irritation made for bad Sim.
“Gotcha,” he said, “but I want to paddle to the falls for a peek. For posterity’s sake, you know.”
“All right. There’s a pool just beyond the next rise, but there’s no way back out by boat. You’ll have to come out on foot to find the portage trail.”
Hector paddled across the crater and up the next bit of whitewater. While rough, it was nothing like the rapids before, more like running up a greasy slide. Thunder reflected off the canyon walls. Close up, Hector saw that the cliffs were coated in small chandeliers that pointed upward like icicle stalagmites. Their glimmering spires shone with a layer of the same microbes that bathed the river white. He had entered the realm of glass corals, but these were dwarfs compared to those ahead.
The stream spilled over a lip into the pool that Dodds had promised, but the water there wasn’t still. Hector had to fight with his paddle to keep from being pulled to the cascade on the other side.
Cyrano Falls wasn’t what he expected. He’d imagined something like a vid of a normal waterfall played in reverse, but here the water didn’t fall free. Instead, it hugged the cliff and bubbled like molten steel as it rose. Silver-white spray clouded the air, coating his skinsuit with a thousand milky droplets and shrouding the crest of the hundred-meter rise. Hector signaled Mora through his link. There was no way he could pass this up.
//Run me the numbers on the falls, babe.//
//No way, Hex. You’re out of your mind.//
//Come on, sweets. There’s no way we can’t do this.//
//There’s no way you can, moron!//
//Look, I can’t be the first to try. Someone else must have...//
Static exploded through his cortex as Mora shut him up with raw feedback. Hector cringed until his implant rebooted.
//Okay// she signaled. //Two or three whackos try it each year. Only one in four make it without wrecking, and those are experienced kayakers, not—//
“Okay folks, here’s the stupid stunt for the day. No one else will ever get to do this again, and I won’t have to worry about my camera-nanny killing me, since I’ll probably die right now.”
Hector stopped fighting the current. Mora screamed in the back of his skull, but he set his link on mute and paddled into the flow. If he made it, he’d buy her a beer and let her yell until she wore herself out.
The boulder at the base of the fall was the first problem. Eons of water rushing over it in both directions had chiseled it into a blade. A head-on impact would split his boat in two, but if he used one side of the rock as a ramp, it might lift him past the first stretch of the fall. He veered to the left, then swung to come at an angle, using his repellers for that one, crucial jump.
It was as if a god yanked his boat toward heaven. He almost slid out of it; he hadn’t thought of that until his ass hung exposed in empty space. He spread his legs inside of the hull to stop from slipping any farther. Another boulder loomed ahead while his bow leaned dangerously close to vertical.
He should have listened to Mora. Maintaining his balance and staying in the boat were too much to keep track of at once, never mind steering around barely-seen rocks. An outcrop slammed to the right. He thrust with his paddle, but his stern tipped even more to vertical. Leaning forward wasn’t enough. He extended as much of his weight as he could toward the bow, hoping that he wouldn’t slip the last few inches out of the boat.
His kayak tipped forward and he lost all ability to steer. His boat slapped hard on a rock and he hit his own face with his oar. Copper filled his mouth and a crack appeared in his mask. He lurched upright and readied himself for the river’s next attack.
It never came. Somehow he’d made it.
The falls were behind him. The river gurgled to either side and a channel formed in the center, letting him slide upstream like a marble down a groove. The canyon walls were gone – low hills rose beyond the banks to the barren plains of the surface. The sky seemed so much closer, as if he could reach up and touch it. Even in sunlight, the beacons of the galactic arm shone down.
He flipped Mora’s audio on.
//Hex, come back! Are you all right? Are you hurt? Do you need a medic?//
//Ice out, Mora. Tell Dodds I took the quick route, and to come on up on his own. You better follow too.//
Her silence stretched for several moments. //You’re a bastard. A no-good, fatherless, void-sucking bastard.//
//I love you too, sweetie.//
A shimmer to the right caught his eye. Something like a miniature ice sculpture twinkled just under the waves. Another followed, this one breaking the surface with a needle-like crest. On the left, three more appeared, brilliant crystalline outcrops where none should possibly be.
“Oh wow. This is fantastic.” He tried to think of something more clever, but a rock he never saw knocked his kayak into the air. Without thinking he wrenched about and threw himself into a spin. The offending boulder sped towards his face. The words commercial break flashed through his mind, then everything smashed to black.
~
Consciousness came with a jolt, like forceps prying his head apart. Cold lapped around him and buzzed in his skull. His face felt oddly numb. He put his hand to his head and it came away covered in blood. His earplug was gone, and so, most likely, was his eardrum. He was surprised there wasn’t more pain. He decided it was probably shock and wondered if he was transmitting.
“Mora?”
He couldn’t hear his voice, or Mora’s either. His downlink must have died or else his camera jockey would have been pitching a fit to melt his brain. He sat up and let the current wash around him.
The river came up to his chest. The bottom was glassy smooth. A low rock had kept his head above the flood, but it wasn’t the one that knocked him out. Nothing around him looked familiar, and there was no way of knowing how far he’d come. His kayak was gone – dashed to pieces and carried away, he supposed.
He checked himself over before trying to stand. His arms were intact, though his right wrist was swollen. His vision was fine, but there was a bulge on his forehead and a gash on his neck. His blood mixed with the milky flow of the river, either giving the microbes a feast or indigestion. His bodysuit felt loose on his shoulder, as if it was torn somewhere he couldn’t reach. He pushed to his feet and his right knee gave out.
/ don’t stop keep moving /
He splashed as his leg crumpled. Pain shot through his confusion over what had just come through his implant. Was it a signal from Mora, or just his imagination?
/ keep moving silly almost there /
That wasn’t Mora. Those weren’t even words, just impressions through his downlink from somewhere outside of his skull.
/ come to the surface come to the starlight come as we reach for the sky /
“Oh, wow.” Hector’s lips formed the words, though he couldn’t hear them. He dragged himself up on the rock and turned to look upstream. The current bubbled around him toward a gradual stair. Just over the banks were mere dunes, and he knew that if he climbed them (an easy feat if his leg had been working) he would see the endless plain of the planet’s upper surface. The stair to the top was watched by silent coral s
entries like minarets of blown glass. Their surfaces shimmered as the river rushed between them.
/ join us join us join us /
Hector blinked.
//Who are you?// he transmitted.
/ move feast light shadow fall rise dance /
Well, ask a stupid question. Maybe he was hallucinating. He checked his oxygen collector, and though its display was smashed his breathing felt normal. If he was suffering from hypoxia, was he too far gone to notice?
/ air is good but walker use too much /
“Okay, that’s enough. Who am I speaking to?”
/ you are speaking /
“Yes, but what…?”
/ long time since walker speak /
/ thought you were dumb like fish /
Was this real? Hector struggled to think straight. Tali Westrin had said that on Ben’s Grotto there wasn’t a sharp distinction between individual life forms and the environment. Was this the voice of the microbes? Was the river itself intelligent? Could it think?
/ everything thinks even fish /
/ everything is we except walker /
/ will walker be we now too ? /
That last thought was a question, the first that the voice had asked. Hector had the feeling that whatever he was speaking to wasn’t used to asking questions. It was used to simply knowing.
“Walker,” he said, “that is, me, I, um… I can’t be ‘we’ but I’d like to talk. I’d like to… Oh god, how do I explain what an interview is? The other ‘walkers’ will think I’m nuts.”
/ be we with them so they know /
He saw a sea, its life intermingled, all of a single mind. Then tendrils broke off, shooting up the valleys to the reaches where the light was clear, then flowing back to the source to be ‘we’ again. He pictured all the lakes and valleys that linked across the planet as the rivers flowed where they wanted. He wished his implant was working so he could tell someone. Assuming he hadn’t gone crazy, the life on this planet had a sentience more fleeting and ephemeral than any ever imagined.
And in two days it was going to die.
/ what is die ? /
They didn’t know. Of course they didn’t know about the supernova, but could they even comprehend the end of their existence? How could he explain? More than that, should he?
/ walker fears die /
/ silly /
/ the river ends the river flows again /
Not this time, but Hector buried the thought. “Walkers are like fish. We’re dumb.”
/ join us follow us come to the end /
/ we will show you not to fear /
He tested his leg, but it wouldn’t take his weight. At best he’d torn a muscle, but it felt like he broke something too. Grotto’s gravity wasn’t quite a full gee, so he crawled on his other limbs while his bad leg floated behind him. In his mind, he heard the river laugh.
The steps to the plateau were a problem. There was a channel down the center which would have been great for his kayak, but it was too smooth for hands and knees to get traction. Instead he made for the rocks on his right. Their edges were smooth but had enough of a shelf for him to drag his body up from one to the next. Glass grew from every surface, but he buried the urge to touch it – partly because of how sharp it looked, but also because he feared disturbing the microbes’ habitat. At last he pulled himself over the final ledge and almost stopped breathing.
He lay in a forest of glass in a sky with no horizon. He hung in a sphere of eternal blue along with the sun and a handful of stars, alone in the void but for the crystal forest.
The river had spread across the plain, changing from milky white into a perfect mirror. There were glass corals everywhere, gigantic crenellated spires of which the shards he’d seen before were mere sketches. A billion, trillion microbes scaled every one of those towers, leaving parts of themselves behind and taking bits of those that came before, soaking the sunlight and exploding into millions of offspring.
/ this is the end and beginning /
/ be with us and reach for the sky /
/ can you hear the stars as they sing ? /
He couldn’t, even through his connection to the river. All he could do was weep at the beauty. All this life, all this wonder, and it was going to vanish before anyone else would know. The humans who lived here had gone into exile and those stupid Ascensionists were blind to anything but their own ‘special destiny.’ This life, the true life of this world, would soon be wiped out. If only Westrin and the other Muirists had managed to recreate this environment offworld. They hadn’t found the one crucial element…
Hector gasped. He knew what it was. He knew how to save them.
~
An hour later, a rescue flyer arrived. He waved and shouted for it not to land; he didn’t want its antigrav to disturb the microbes. Somehow the pilot understood and the craft lowered a sling instead of coming closer. Through the pain, Hector could barely strap himself into the harness and let them reel him up.
A pair of cameras circled as he drew skyward, while a third sped away to film the coral. Mora waited in the flyer, her eyes creased with worry.
“Don’t you ever, ever do anything like that again,” she said, “or so help me I’ll cut off your head and make you film the rest of your shows from inside a jar.”
A young medic pulled Hector fully into the flyer. Marten Dodds was right behind her.
“I’m sorry the rescue took so long. It was Westrin’s fault. She didn’t want to spare any shuttles from the evacuation.”
“Where is she? I need to talk to her right now.”
“So do I,” said Mora, “with a pipe.”
“Not like that. Did you get anything from my implant? Is it still sending?”
“Yeah, but there’s some weird interference in the signal.”
“I’m not surprised,” said the medic. “You’ve got a crack in the back of your head full of river slime. Let me clean it—”
“Don’t!” said Hector. “Don’t mess with it. I need you to do something else. What’s your name?”
“Jean. Look, Mr. Crade, you should really —”
“Jean, I need you to cut my head open. Can you do that?”
Everyone in the flyer stared at him in silence.
“Okay, that’s enough,” Mora finally said. “Doc, just trank him and do what you need to.”
“No,” said Hector. “No one’s tranking anyone. Somebody get me Tali Westrin, and Mora, you call Janos right now. There’s something we need to set up and we haven’t got much time.”
~
On the viewing deck of the Daystar Majestic, Janos Xin’s black suit and hair made him almost disappear into the starscape. Hector limped over to the huge transteel bubble and watched the receding speck of Ben’s Grotto, his leg encased in a splint as healing nanobots did their work. Tali Westrin stood nearby, while Mora sat behind a bank of monitors arranged across several dining tables. The light from the oncoming supernova wasn’t visible yet, and the Majestic would flick into hyperspace before it actually arrived.
“Such a shame,” said Janos. “We’ll have to get Hector to break his head more often. Who knows how many great discoveries we’ve missed by observing simple safety precautions.”
“You’ll leak what we found, right?” said Hector. “That should spike the viewership, especially if we pretend we’re going to cover it up.”
“For ratings?” asked Westrin.
“Yes, for ratings.” Hector turned to her. “You told me I’d never understand what was being lost here. Well, I want as many other people to understand it too.”
“How are the databanks holding up?” asked Janos.
“Surprisingly well,” said Mora from her fortress of monitors. They showed a vast stream of incoming data, a flood of digitized consciousness greater than the collected minds of all the Ascensionists still waiting their turn on the link. Those would upload in the last few seconds before the deadly wall of gamma rays swept through the system. Until then, the
Muldon River made one last ascent to a realm it had never imagined.
“It was tricky until I figured out how to pick the microbes’ voices out of all the distortion,” said Mora. “The consciousness upload is smooth, though I don’t think the captain liked us wiping the entertainment library to make room for it.”
Janos sighed. “Some people don’t understand priorities.”
“And the bio tanks?” asked Westrin. In the ship’s hold, tied into the feed from Mora’s upload, were enormous tanks filled with over a hundred thousand liters of river water, microbes, coral, and every other bit of fauna Westrin’s people could harvest. Normally it would have all died, separated from its home, because even that volume of biomass wasn’t enough to maintain the tenuous groupmind of the river. However, with the ship’s computer serving as a virtual backup for their consciousness, the life forms were holding on.
“So far so good,” said Mora. “Looks like Hector’s guess was right. As long as we keep the consciousness plugged in, the microbes and everything else seem perfectly happy.”
“Relax,” said Hector to Westrin. “They’re in good hands. The best.” He winked at Mora, who was single-handedly accomplishing what decades of Grotto researchers couldn’t. The problem had simply been one of scale – Westrin could never have evacuated enough native life to maintain the group consciousness. Once it had been identified, though, it was simple enough to use Ascensionist software to keep the river-mind running.
“You know,” said Westrin, “you weren’t the first to communicate with the Consciousness, or whatever we want to call it. There have been encounters before, but no one took them seriously. I never… It was always assumed that the reports were hallucinations or cries for attention. That we should only find out now…”
“We found out in time. That’s all that matters.”
