by Greg Bear
“I don't know,” Brion said. “It's at least tens of millions years old. If it's older, it comes from the era of shelly creatures that covered so much of Lamarckia with thick layers of limestone and made it so difficult to find metals and other minerals. How old do you think the ecoi are?”
“I've guessed hundreds of millions of years...” Salap said.
Brion shook his head. “Hsia was the first, and it may be less than twenty million years old. As for the rest, at most they're only a few million years old. Life was small and very simple before Hsia.
“When Hsia ventured out on land, there was very little oxygen, and no ozone in the upper atmosphere. It covered itself with a thick, protective layer. It may have taken fifteen million years for oxygen to reach its present levels.”
From ahead came a sharp, sweet smell. As we advanced to the inner cube, we passed through several varieties of this same smell, like veils of scent surrounding the body of a revered saint.
Brion stopped. The shriveled husks of what appeared to be human bodies lay crumpled at the spreading foot of an arch. The arch rose at least sixty meters to the vague red-suffused heights of the dome. The bodies ranged in size from less than a meter to over two meters, desiccated tissues stretched over internal frames that only crudely resembled skeletons. Blank hard-tissued faces stared at us with glazed eyes, the heads of dolls manufactured by a toymaker who had failed, and cast the inanimate results aside.
“These were experiments,” Brion said in a low voice. “She showed some to us the first time we came here. She knew what she wanted—something to communicate with us. She knew we weren't part of any ecos, and she desperately needed to discover what we were. The best way for her to learn ... her way of learning ... was to imitate us.”
The cubic frame ahead was larger and farther away than I had first thought. It lay fifty or sixty meters beyond the graveyard of rejected human-shapes. The last of the distinctive scents wafted around us, this one at once primally offensive and startlingly attractive: baking bread, hot tar, methane and hexane, smelling salts, and much more.
Brion approached the frame at the center of the hemisphere, walking like a tired old man. I tried to imagine his emotional state and could not. What he expected, what it was possible he might see, would have driven many men mad. As he walked ahead of us, he gave a broken explanation, in slow fragments, of his last visit. He had brought his dying wife inside the blood-bubble hemisphere, stayed with her, listening to her last breaths, her last words.
“She was in pain,” he said, voice shaky and hoarse. He wiped his face with the back of his hand, the string still wound around his finger. “Nobody could save her.” He touched the membranous wall of the frame and looked back at me. “She was extraordinary. We both prayed for the Hexamon to come and bring the medicine of Thistledown that Lenk left behind. He finally had his revenge on us. A lot of my people died the way she did. She lasted longer than most. Her liver and kidneys were rotting away. Such a simple disease to cure on Thistledown. But you did not come. When she died ... She died.” He pulled his hand back. “It was a relief. I felt as if I had died with her, and that was a relief, too. I placed her on the floor, inside ... I left and camped for five days on the edge of the lava field. Ser Frick brought me food from the launch. Nothing happened; nobody came out of the dome. I couldn't go back inside. We all returned to Naderville.”
Frick stared at the deepening shadows on all sides with a fearful squint. Hyssha Chung stayed close to Brion. Looking at me, she had only hate in her eyes. I represented all lost hope, final disappointment. I was a failure to all of them: no rescue imminent, no change and explanation, no reembracing in the arms of secure and all-knowing parents.
“She's in there,” Brion said huskily. “I mean, she's all around, but the heart of her heart is in there. Heart of Hsia's life.”
Outside the hemisphere, clouds must have covered the sun, for shadow enveloped us. All around, faint gleams pricked against the deep red and brown gloom, like stars in the heavens. Violet luminosity flickered within the frame. A low sound grumbled beneath our feet. Meters away, beyond several ranks of translucent walls and braces, something swelled like the throat on an enormous bullfrog, then subsided, expelling a sweetly repulsive scent of tar and burning resin.
Brion leaned against the wall of the frame, a pale shape against the darker membrane. This time, there was no preference for Hyssha. The wall seemed to absorb him, and the tissue beneath our feet grumbled again.
We heard a remarkable voice, and Salap jumped as if poked in the ribs. High, sweet, like the chirrup of a large insect mixed with a whistling flute, childlike, yet mannered and mature, it came from within the frame.
“Names clear now,” it said. “Names all are and clear?”
24
Time has become very unclear. My recovery is going smoothly, the attendants tell me. I am a celebrity in the Hexamon. Yanosh floats beside my couch.
“Was it Brion's wife?” Yanosh asks me.
We are in the Way, in free fall, in the hospital unit of the Axis City. I do not know for certain if I am dreaming or even dead. I remember telling my story to Yanosh and perhaps to others, but it has taken some time—some indefinite time—to reach this point. Events are jumbled.
Yanosh has changed. He has assumed an older face, to give the appearance of many decisions made, of political maturity. Only a few years have passed here, perhaps ten. What does that mean?
“Was it Brion's wife?” he asks again, patiently. He is first assistant to the newly elected Geshel presiding minister but has been spending much time in my unit, talking to me, awaiting the return of all my memories.
I know I am an old man, ninety or ninety-one Lamarckian years. I must be dead, or dying, and this is all a shrinking fragment of imagination.
“She was dead,” I manage to say.
“What spoke to you, then?”
His curiosity offends me, as if his wishing to know what the seed-mother or the queen looked like betrays a childish and trivial frame of mind. So much else of more importance. What Lenk did, or allowed his people to do. The greening, a wave of change, a fluxing across the generations, Hsia's use of Brion's gift, his name.
All seems compressed to me, and I have to regather my thoughts and find the thread again. Flight added to pain and starvation. The migrations from wherever the greening struck, wherever Hsia dominated. And how the name of Brion's wife was given to this tide they had begun, this transformed ecos now called Caitla, a vast vibrant specter that had so much to do with that voice, and nothing to do with Caitla herself, for she was dead. Her body lay untouched where Brion had placed it, within the frame, in the depths of the seed-mother's arena, the huge foam-bubble the color of blood.
“Nobody behind the voice,” I say.
“You mean, no intelligence.”
“No me, no you. No her.” I remember pain in my legs, in my arms, all my joints burning, having burned for years. That pain is gone now. I move my fingers and their joints bend with a purity, a smoothness I have forgotten.
“I do have work to do, Olmy,” Yanosh says. “I can't stay here forever. I did order the massive effort to open the geometry stacks. I won't take credit for proposing you be given a second incarnation. You earned that and the Nexus approved it, and it will not even count against your allowed rebirths...”
I am not grateful. I understand the value of death. My body—the body I no longer have—prepared my soul by decaying across a full and natural span of life. Because of so many years of starvation and flight, of grief and trial, my body became tough, and refused to die easily. But my mind knew the value of death. I am not grateful if life is what has been given back to me.
I had outlived two wives. My people had settled in the Kupe Islands, embraced by Cape Magellan in the south of Elizabeth's Land. I only remember broken pieces of Yanosh's agents entering my hut and finding me on a soft cot of mat fiber reeds, a special bed for dying.
“Elizabeth knew how to die,” I s
ay to Yanosh.
“The ecos,” he says.
“Yes. The ecos. My wife's name was Rebecca.”
“She would not leave to come here,” Yanosh says. “She told us we were angels and we could have you, take you back to where you were born.”
“Yes.”
“She was your third wife.”
“Yes,” I say. “Do you want me to tell you everything that happened? I've lived a very long time, Yanosh.”
Yanosh appears genuinely distressed. “It was not our intention to abandon you, Olmy. You must believe that. The Naderites came to power and we could not mount the effort for years. When the Geshels took power again, the Jarts pressed us back. And when we finally returned, the geometry stack had become even more tangled, and we could not open a gate. We thought Lamarckia was lost.”
“I understand,” I say. My tone is still that of a tired old man, though my voice sounds young. I do not care to press blame. I have had a long and full life. I knew Shirla, and after her, Sikaya, and finally, Rebecca, who was an old woman when I discovered her beauty and loved her.
With my death, I will finally be human. I will know where I am.
“You want to know what she looked like,” I say.
“Nothing of the field or the dome exists anymore,” Yanosh says. “The pillars are bare, the dome is gone. The jungle took over everything. Only what you saw and remember remains.”
He calls it a jungle, not a silva. And that is what it had become. “All green. The last of the old on Hsia.”
I see ghosts around him, incorporeal images of others listening in. I am telling all the Hexamon. I am a celebrity.
25
I approached the frame. Chung would not enter. Frick followed Brion next, for he had been here before. He did not like being here, but he was loyal to Brion. Salap was having an epiphany. His face glowed with enthusiasm, skin creamy with brown shadows in the redness and murk as blocks of storm clouds crossed the sky above the dome. He patted my shoulder, smiled broadly, and passed through the curtainlike membrane, into the inner chamber. The membrane sealed smooth behind him, like the inverted wall of a thick soap bubble.
The voice spoke again, perfect and high. I heard Brion sobbing like a child. I pushed my hand against the membrane, felt it rush around my fingers and wrist and arm like a lip of slick flesh.
Within the frame, she stood in the middle of a mass of shiny black hemispheres, studded with black spikes and surmounted by black arches. She wore no clothing and her skin moved, rippling slightly as if she were a badly projected image.
Brion stood two steps from her, Frick by his side. Brion shook his head, chest wracked with sobs. Salap came closer to the female shape, chin in hand, studying her. Her hair hung long and muddy red, motionless and dull, in tufts and spikes to her shoulders. Her face was crudely fashioned, the face of a puppet made by a talented amateur. She paid none of them any attention.
Her mouth did not move as she spoke. “Know not names.” Or, “No not names.”
“May I speak to it?” Salap asked.
Brion dropped to his knees and lowered his head to the floor, palms flat against the ridged, humped surface that slowly raised and lowered him as if on a swell of ocean.
Frick said, “It isn't what he was hoping for.”
Salap approached the shape. “My name is Mansur Salap. I would like to speak with you,” he said, as if introducing himself at a soirée.
The shape inclined its head in his direction, but its eyes—pallid gray-blue within fixed eyelids, without expression—could not meet his. It lacked refinements and could not express anything human except in broad strokes. Whatever it had learned, it was woefully incomplete.
“You represent another, don't you?” Salap asked.
“Brion with names not,” the voice said, coming from all around. The walls of the frame vibrated like diaphragms, making the sounds, along with other noises: windy flights of whispering, a steady low frog-throat grumble.
“Do you recognize Brion?” Salap asked.
“Talks.”
“I talk and my name is Salap.”
“I brought Caitla here. Where is she?” Brion asked. Another membrane of tissue withdrew, and the body was visible on a raised hump in the living floor, slack with death, months into its own private decay.
“You understand us,” Salap said.
Chung had entered without my noticing and stood one step behind me. “Star, Fate, and Breath,” she said.
The figure turned toward her voice. “Two speak gave and use what use. Two now here.”
Chung seemed aghast to be confused with her sister again. “I am not Caitla,” she said. “You've tried to become Caitla.” She shouted at Brion, “She's dead, and you wanted to bring her back!”
Brion had stopped weeping and stood before the figure, examining it critically. “You could try again. More work ... More detail.”
“It will take a long time to understand us,” Salap said.
“Why?” Brion asked. “Why so long? It samples us, it must know what we're like...”
“We've been mistaken,” Salap said.
The figure, I realized, had not taken a step. It grew from the floor and could not lift its feet. It was only a little more sophisticated than the discarded husks behind us.
“Caitla and I gave her the chlorophyll,” Brion argued. “She took the bottle and used it. She made Caitla plants for her garden, working with the real plants Caitla showed her.”
Salap looked back at me. “Can you tell him, Ser Olmy? Bring the sophistication of the Thistledown to this little exercise in monstrosity?”
For a moment, I hadn't a clue what Salap wanted me to say. Then a thought that had been below conscious expression for some months broke through. “They've never sampled our genetic structure.”
“Yes?” Salap encouraged, face seeming to glow again like a beacon. The figure shivered, some rudimentary adjustment in turgor.
“Sampling is a way of identifying other scions. Each ecos carries its own markers, its own chemical scheme. We don't fit any schemes. We don't come from other ecoi. They can't analyze our structure from the level of our genetic material. So they have to copy us from the evidence of other senses.”
“But what about the chlorophyll?” Brion demanded.
Salap said, “It understands chemistry. It can test and find uses for organic substances. You must have provided the final clues necessary ... given the pigments a context it could understand. But it can't break our genetic code. We are too different.”
“Names,” the figure said. “Names know not.”
Chung seemed startled. “Does she actually understand what we're saying? Or is she ... is it just stringing words together?”
“She understands,” Brion said.
“That's a miracle by itself,” Chung said. She stepped closer to the figure and to Brion, overcoming some of her repugnance.
“What did you talk with before?” Salap asked Brion, pointing at the figure: before this was created.
“When Caitla and I came here, this inner room was filled with tissues ... tools. It was a prototype factory. Part of a scion could be grown here, another there ... We saw them being carried by giant hairs—cilia—across this chamber, and matched with other parts. And we watched them being dissolved in large pools, turned into jelly or slime. Rejected.
“Caitla realized what this was. She said that we were in a huge cell, all of its parts made large, but because of that, not a cell at all ... None of us knew why we had been allowed to come in here. On our last visit, before Caitla became ill, the seed-mother...” He gestured around the chamber. “She showed us the best of her human-shaped scions, still much cruder than this. It could only hum and whistle and make parts of words. Caitla spent a week teaching it, her, before we had to return to Naderville. We knew she wanted to communicate with us directly.”
“Bring,” the voice said. “Know bring names.”
“I brought Caitla back here when she was dying. Cai
tla told me to leave her here. ‘Put me where we put my plants,’ she said. We knew she could do better.”
Brion turned, staring up at the red walls of the frame. He seemed uncertain whether to address the figure directly, or speak to the frame, the hemisphere as a whole. “There is so much more you can do!”
“No making more for this child,” the voice said, acquiring a cello-like timbre. It had also taken on a quality I might have called conviction if it had been human. “New names, no making more, no making more, for this child.”
“Why?” Brion asked, dismayed.
The figure swelled again, filling itself with fresh fluids from below. It raised its arms. The color of its skin improved, and the motions in the skin subsided, coordinated, more nearly like the movement of muscles. I watched with queasy fascination the development of its facial features, the refinement of abdomen and breasts, still doll-like, but a better imitation of what Caitla might have looked like. Or Hyssha.
“It's learning from you,” Salap said to Chung. She looked up at the gloomy heights of the frame, searching for eyes among the glints and tiny sea-floor glows.
Brion seemed stung by this. He took a step back. “It isn't Caitla,” he said.
“It never will be,” Salap said. “You've misunderstood what the ecos can do ... We've all misplaced our nightmares and our hopes.”
The figure turned its head, opened its mouth, and the voice issued from the mouth now. “Sounds like smells, names deeper than I know. Two are not one, yet cling. Make third, but within. Third is child, but not like this child. Not of I, not of any I, from where.”
Then it added the lilt of question: “From where?”
None of us quite understood.
“We're not from this planet,” Brion said quietly, as if this were a devastating admission. I think he was trying to shed the last hope for Caitla, and it was costing him dearly. He had some courage or some curiosity left, to speak with the figure at all.
