“We know where the emergency release is now,” Griffin explained to Terrell, “so no one need be overwhelmed like I was. And it would be very interesting to know more.”
Terrell looked at him sidelong. “Interesting? Why? Those things are dangerous. I think the seegnur were right to lock them away. We of Artemis have been content not knowing about them. If you want them, then take them away from our planet. Take this whole complex if you will, but leave us alone.”
Griffin was shocked. “I thought you would be the most eager. You’ve never struck me as a coward.”
“I’m not,” Terrell said steadily. “But I’ve also never been one to leap from a cliff into an icy lake simply because someone dared me to take the plunge. Compared to putting on one of these spaveks—these suits that invade your mind and body alike for the purpose of permitting you to spread death and destruction—compared to that, jumping into an icy lake and seeing if you drown before you freeze—that seems sane!”
Terrell turned away, pointedly leaving behind his stack of meticulous drawings. Griffin stopped him with a hand on his arm. Ring had hinted that whatever psionic ability Griffin had was associated with his link to Terrell. He hadn’t forgotten how the first time he could feel Terrell’s emotions when they had both been awake had been immediately after his experimentation with the spavek. The acute awareness had faded within a few hours, but what might happen if Terrell also experimented with the spavek? What if they both wore the blue spavek in sequence, then tried to maintain the greater awareness afterwards?
He had to convince Terrell to at least try. “Terrell, you didn’t complain when Ring started examining the suits.”
“Ring is a rule unto himself. Ring said that he did what he did because if he didn’t disaster would come. I don’t hear him pressing the rest of us to follow his example. Is Ring’s success what’s got to you? Do you envy him his splashy rig?”
Griffin did envy Ring his easy use of the spavek. He thought about denying it, realized Terrell would never believe him.
“I don’t envy him, not the way you mean, not enough to do something foolish. I don’t want to take Ring’s suit from him, but I would like to see if I can operate one myself. Think of the potential!”
“I am. I can’t get what those suits can do out of my mind. The thought gives me nightmares.”
Terrell’s tone made clear that he would not discuss the matter further. Moreover, from how he pointedly walked out of the test arena, he was also rejecting any further involvement with the spaveks.
Griffin started to pursue him, to remind him about that splash in Spirit Bay and what it might mean, but he knew what the factotum’s reply would be—wait until Adara came back with her report. Then they’d know if anything had happened after the splash. Hadn’t Griffin himself been inclined to dismiss the event as nothing more than falling space trash? Griffin cursed himself. He still didn’t think the splash was anything significant, but his own words had robbed him of a possible tool. He considered trying the argument anyhow, then decided to wait until Terrell had cooled off. Instead, he turned his attention to Ring.
“What do you think? If Terrell won’t try, then who would be best?”
Ring shrugged. “Very soon, it will not matter. If you must try, then Bruin.”
“Earlier you said something about the bear flying in orange arms. I don’t recall a suit colored orange. Which one did you mean?”
Ring showed him. The body of the suit was a pearlized ivory white, but the joint covers, helmet, and boots were a brilliant metallic orange. Griffin wondered if the fact that this one had been designed in two colors indicated alterations to an original design or if this suit had been farther along in its design, so that ornamental flourishes had been added.
We know so little about the Old Imperials, what they valued, what they disdained. Artemis is their greatest surviving artifact, but since it was crafted as an escape from their routine lives, it is a text you need to interpret by trying to guess what was left out.
“You did a lot of clean-up on your suit,” Griffin said to Ring, inspecting the white and orange suit with admiration. “How much prep do you think is needed before we can try this one?”
Ring ran a finger along the spavek’s shimmering torso, drawing a wiggly snake in the fine layer of powdery dust. “More than you wish to give, less than I gave. I will put my time to polish and prepare. You find the words to convince bear to become butterfly.”
“Fair enough,” Griffin said. He smiled at Ring. “That spavek’s colors do look something like a butterfly, don’t they?”
He hurried out, shaping arguments in his mind. If he couldn’t make a spavek work himself, the next best thing was learning what he could from the experiences of others. Maybe that way he’d grasp whatever intangible element he was missing.
Maybe, he thought, half hiding the thought even from himself, that’s how I’ll be able to win Terrell over, show him I’m willing, even eager to share what’s here, that my hunger is for knowledge, not destructive power.
He broke into a run, imagining the group of them soaring within the winds in shining armor, knights of the blue skies, spreading wisdom and collecting knowledge wherever they went, unrestricted by the limitations of travel by horse or ship or foot. The vision was glorious, absolutely glorious.
His suit was pure gold, like the sun.
* * *
Adara found that the best way to brief Sand Shadow about what she’d learned from Willowee was to tell Artemis, for the planetary intelligence was able to communicate with relative ease with each of them. From there, Adara went on to ask if Artemis herself had any idea what might have happened in Spirit Bay.
“From the beaches I felt the surging waters,” Artemis replied. “That much is as true as you were told and even worse. The waters were hot in some places, as if they held quenched fire.”
“But you didn’t try to find out what had caused that heat?” Adara tried to hold her frustration inside, but Artemis sensed it nonetheless.
“I have no eyes such as you mean them,” the neural network retorted, “and you will not give yours to me. The interlocking network of mycelium is yet incomplete. Later, perhaps I will be able to grow eyes for myself. For now, I am all touch, a little taste—although that is not taste as you know it, but taste as a plant tastes. I cannot hear, nor can I smell. How am I to know what fell into the waters of the bay? Enough that it was hot enough to kill me in some places. That is all I know. Was I to surge more bits of myself into the water so they could die as well?”
“No … I don’t think you should have done that. I’m sorry.”
The sense of someone else in her head that was Artemis present remained, but didn’t respond. Adara drew in a deep breath and tried again.
“Do you remember how it was in the days of the seegnur? Could you see then?”
A long pause, filled not so much with flickering images as with sensations that gave the impression of being images. From sorting through the mingled auditory and olfactory information that sometimes flowed to her from Sand Shadow, Adara had experience with something similar, but at least Sand Shadow used visual images to tie the others together.
A gusty sigh, echoed—or so it seemed—by the breath of wind against Adara’s cheek. “I cannot remember how I was. What I know is what is known to me from the one who was midwife to my rebirth. That one saw, heard, tasted, caught odors upon the wind. For it, touch was the least significant. Although it felt vibration, it did not appear to have tactile sensation. Torn between what I am, what I have, and what I think I should have, I am so very lost.”
Adara wished she could reach out and touch the other, hug her as Bruin had hugged little Adara, stroke her as Adara had stroked spot-furred Sand Shadow. However, no matter how she pitied the other, Adara could not accept what Artemis was asking. Would she remain herself if she let the other even further in? Artemis was a world. She was just a huntress.
“I wish you were not going to that Leto place a
gain,” Artemis said after a time. “I do not like that I cannot share with you, find you, find Sand Shadow … Can’t you make the others come out of that place?”
“I would like nothing more,” Adara said. “If you could locate another place where the seegnur’s artifacts remain intact, I could coax Griffin forth.”
But even as Adara shaped the thought, she wondered. Would it make a difference? Griffin’s goals had shifted since the day he had accepted that his shuttle was lost to him and with it his ability to contact the ship that awaited him in orbit.
The pull that brought him to Artemis was the desire to learn more about the seegnur, to have bragging rights on the finding of this planet. Then he was tugged by the desire to find a way off the planet. Perhaps he would have left at once to replace what he had lost. Perhaps he would have stayed and continued his research. Now, however, it is as if he has forgotten that he is stranded, and his only desire is to learn what he can of the seegnur’s doings here.
Lights in the Sanctum. Footprints in mud where there should have been flood. Something was definitely not right. Adara did not know what, but she would have bet her night-seeing eyes against a chunk of stale bread that whatever it was the Old One Who Is Young was at the heart of it. She shivered and picked up her pace.
Interlude: Symbiosis
mycorrhizal connections
extending roots
extending reach
sweet return
mycorrhizal connections
linking species
crossing barriers
complex network
Choosing for the larger life
Feeling the joy
Shaping the spores
13
Reunion
Once Falkner was stabilized, Alexander and Julyan went to help Siegfried. They found he needed no aid in his peculiar battle. Ensconced within his scooter’s defensive shield, Siegfried had made himself bait to lure the burrs, which continued to shoot their poison darts at him. When the darts were spent, the burrs went after Siegfried in a body, linking one onto the next, building a surging mound that licked out tentacles, each seeking to snag their enemy.
Siegfried kept his scooter close to his attackers, rising in painfully small intervals so that more and more burrs would join the mass to extend the tentacles’ reach. When he estimated he had most of the burrs in one place, he englobed them within the viscous, crushing, blue-green light.
“Bravo!” called Alexander, when the burrs had been reduced to an inert mass of metal. “You did that wonderfully.”
Siegfried snorted. “I don’t think I could have managed so neatly if they’d been freshly constructed. As it was, once they’d fired their needles at me, they didn’t regenerate as I think they were designed to do. Those guardbots were half crippled, their limited resources diverted as they tried to do too many things at once.”
Julyan thought—but did not say—that the burrs must have been addled in whatever served them for brains, else some surely would have hung back. That would have made more sense than gathering in that frantic swarm whose single goal had been to reach and engulf an enemy who remained within a protective shield. However, he said nothing. Siegfried was justifiably proud of his achievement and no good would come from belittling any part of it.
Siegfried looked ruefully at his weapon. “That drained the remaining charge. Won’t be able to use it until we get back to the shuttle.”
Alexander shrugged. “You couldn’t use a nerve burner on something without nerves.”
Julyan didn’t need Alexander’s order to enthusiastically take part in the search that assured them that the last of the burrs was located and destroyed. When this was done, the Old One brought Falkner forward. The mechanic was very weak, but he could operate the devices that disabled what he called a “ridiculously primitive little bomb” linked to the capsule’s fail-safe.
They opened the capsule, guided the scooters through, and resumed their interrupted journey. By the time they reached the tunnel’s end, Falkner had recovered enough that he could pilot his own scooter. His every movement showed acute pain, but he refused to take anything to counter it, saying he didn’t want his wits slowed.
His brothers didn’t argue. Although these Sierra seegnur had wonderful ways of dealing with pain—as Julyan had discovered after a water-sodden wooden bench had fallen on one of his feet—these worked best when the pain was isolated in a limb or specific area. Falkner’s entire nervous system had been attacked. Anything that would battle the lingering pain would make him dull when they needed him most.
The tunnel ended in a wider area, rather like that outside the hidden door back at the Sanctum. The door at this end was huge and heavy, made of hull metal. Falkner checked it over carefully. After their encounter with the burrs, not even Siegfried—the most impatient among them—was inclined to protest.
* * *
Bruin was easier to convince than Griffin had dared hope. Griffin was so used to thinking of the older man as the brewer of cherry cider, the retired hunter now turned teacher of hunters, that he often forgot that Bruin had been a student of the Old One Who Is Young—and a prized student at that, for the Old One had continued to correspond with Bruin for many years after Bruin had left the Old One’s sphere, married Mary Greengrass, and settled in his wife’s village.
Given that the Old One had secrets he would not have wished Bruin to learn and that he had the intellectual companionship of the loremasters, his continued correspondence with Bruin—laboriously handwritten as such must be, given Artemis’s tech level—spoke volumes about both Bruin’s intelligence and his level of intellectual curiosity.
There I go, once again, underestimating the people of Artemis, Griffin thought as he watched Ring and Bruin closely inspect the orange and ivory spavek. As I did Adara and, to a lesser extent, Terrell. Why do I keep doing that? I never thought of myself as much a snob as the rest of my family. Indeed, I prided myself on being different in that matter as in so many others.
The image of his sister Jada floated into his mind, disconcerting him. Why should he think of her, unless it was because she, like him, was a bit of an oddity within their warlike family? He shook his head, returning his attention to the discussion at hand.
“I’ve a bit more girth and gut than you and Griffin,” Bruin was saying to Ring. “Do you think I’ll fit comfortably within that shell?”
Ring smiled. “Snug as a bug in a rug.”
Bruin tilted his head, considering the riddle. “Tight then, but comfortable enough. Well, I’m willing to give it a try. Show me what to do.”
Kipper was watching, his large brown eyes wide with something between wonder and fear. “Will I get to try?” he asked.
Griffin looked at Ring. “You’re the expert. What do you think?”
Ring shook his head. “Until squirrels speak, the fish best swims without a shell.”
Bruin had been stripping. He paused, shirt half-off over his head. “Now, does that mean never or something else?”
“I cannot say,” Ring said, “lest what I say make the saying moot.”
“I don’t envy you your head, friend,” Bruin said, returning to his disrobing. “Not a wit.”
Terrell was present to witness the test. Although Griffin could feel the disapproval radiating from him, he was grateful for the factotum’s presence. Since their argument, Terrell hadn’t been avoiding Leto’s complex, but he had made a point of refusing to have anything further to do with the lab. Instead, he had spent his time working through the residential areas, following the protocols they had established when working with the Old One in the Sanctum. Since Bruin had been busy with Ring and Griffin, Terrell had also taken over some of the camp duties, so Kipper could concentrate on hunting and foraging.
From what they could tell from exterior inspection, Bruin’s spavek was less heavily armed than the one Ring had chosen for himself. It was equipped with energy weapons, but lacked the missile-firing capacity. It had other gear that mo
re than made up for the destructive power—at least from Bruin’s point of view. For someone with Griffin’s background, long-range vision was nothing remarkable, but for Bruin, whose experience with such had been limited to primitive telescopes and even more primitive binoculars, the idea that he should be able to change his range of vision with, literally, nothing more than a thought, was miraculous. Unsurprisingly, given Bruin’s own natural night vision, he didn’t find the suit’s ability to permit the wearer to see in low light or by thermal signatures as interesting, but he admitted that for the unadapted that would be useful.
“I think your suit was meant for a scout,” Griffin said.
“A scout?” Bruin was dubious. “The skies aren’t precisely orange and white. Were the seegnur so powerful that they could proclaim their presence to those they spied upon?”
Leto’s little girl voice chimed in. “All the suits were equipped with camouflage. It’s an option in the protective energy shield.”
That did impress Bruin. “Now I see why the ability to detect body heat would be useful. I wonder if the shield can be made to mask that as well.”
Griffin was surprised by the man’s quick grasp of tactical considerations, then he remembered that a hunter would be more aware than most how survival relies upon a continual cycle of creating defenses to counter another’s attacks. He said as much and Bruin nodded.
“Nature gives a fawn spots so it will blend into the dappling of leaf duff and sunlight. However, she will not let her hunting children starve, so she gives them a keen sense of smell. Lest the threat to the fawn become too great, Nature now grants the fawn a time when it has almost no scent at all. Each changes in response to the other. Why should the tools used by humankind be any different?”
He turned to Ring. “When I get this on, I’d like to learn if I can find your suit with my own vision, even if the camouflage is activated. From what the Old One told Griffin, he believed that adaptations were as much a matter of the mind as the body. It would be good to learn if the power of my mind can overcome the barriers set up by the suit.”
Artemis Invaded Page 23
