Tides of Light
Page 12
To cover her fear and confusion she retreated into the ritual of Quath returned to knee-cock, raak, raak.
Podia nearby pinched their cilia in disapproval. Beq’qdahl openly jibed.
The unfalum, their shared holy food, passed from pincer to pincer. Quath took a strand numbly, engorged it, and began to pull the sticky wad into strings. The manipulae inside her mouth tugged the sweet filaments and spread them into sheets, expanding the surface area. Fine-boned manipulae pressed these against tasting buds, to heighten the sense. Quath sat and worked her mouth, as did the others.
Why was she alone burdened with these doubts? Quath wondered. Yet she could not give them up.
The confluence ended with singing and smacking noises as they devoured the last of the unfalum. Quath made a show of clenching her thorax, but no matter how thinly she pressed the unfalum, somehow Quath could not swallow, could not truly eat of the essence of their shared vision.
SIX
That evening she podded away from the Hive, which floated shadowlike above a wrecked dry plain. She wandered among the hills north of the Syphon. Tomorrow she would return to the ferment of work, but now something drew her out of the secure warrens.
The land trembled as though this planet were breathing. If so, Quath thought in her distraction, the world would begin to gasp its last quite soon enough. Inexplicably, the image disturbed her.
A roof of clouds drifted overhead, bellies bulging blue with rain. A wan glow from the setting sun drenched the landscape in lazy oranges and reds. Quath shifted to transopticals and saw the Cosmic Circle in orbit, inert and dull without the prodding of the podia’s magnetic fields.
She longed to labor up there, to help fling the incredible sharpness of the Circle into the breast of this dying mudball. That was glory, honor, destiny.
The Circle was the most precious of her race’s natural resources. The names of the podia who had found and captured the Circle would ring down through history forever. Possession of the Circle gave the podia the key to slitting the throats of whole worlds. They had used it against the mechs who opposed their move into Galactic Center.
It could be hurled against mech craft at immense speed. After it had chopped ships, there was a way to make it suddenly radiate enormous bursts of electromagnetic radiation, frying all unprotected mechs within an entire solar system. The Circle Masters were benefactors and warriors beyond all comparison in the history of the podia. Quath was proud to tread the ruptured ground beneath their handiwork.
On this rumpled plain mech ruins clogged the ravines. Smashed mech factories gaped like rotted teeth. Mech carcasses still smoked from past battles. Podia had stripped others of useful parts so that only the shell remained. Quath swelled with pride at the devastation her kind had wrought.
Even this lightly defended world had demanded the best of the podia. They had fallen upon it while the local mechs were beset by internal struggles. The Illuminates had detected signs of exceptionally vicious mech intercity competition. Those wise beings had then ordered the Hives to descend. Once enough of the surface was secured for construction of the magnetic clamping stations, the Cosmic Circle had been brought into play. Their victory here opened the possibility of penetrating into the mech fortress stars even closer to the tantalizing core of the whirlpool galaxy.
A herd of grazing animals caught sight of Quath and scattered, pell-mell. Even for animals, they seemed stupid and graceless. To think Nimfur’thon had hesitated a precious time too long, out of concern over such base creatures! This was a crude planet, incapable of hatching more than Noughts in its scum of sea and sky.
Some scattered Noughts—mere planet-bound creatures, with crude devices—remained here. Only after the mech defeat had the podia even noticed them. Disemboweling their world would finish such trivial beings.
Yet some podia still fell to their assaults. Even such minor creatures could hurl podia into the blackness that Quath now knew to be everywhere, behind each apparently solid object.
As it had swallowed Nimfur’thon, so it would, inevitably, suck down Quath, the Tukar’ramin, everyone, everyone and everything, making a vile joke of continuity.
Quath plucked up a boulder in irritation and flung it skyward, arcing toward a distant herd of dull-witted grazers. The stone smashed great holes as it bounded through them, felling a few. Smaller animals hopped in panic from their holes. They melted into the shadowed dusk and Quath turned, weary, back to the floating alabaster mountain that was the Hive.
The Syphon lanced skyward again. This time the Cosmic Circle held steady in its course and the Syphon did not snake sideways. No burning lash fell, letting streaming yellow gush forth.
The podia took special care with this first successful firing. The Circle spun perfectly, caressed by sinewy fields. They would have to repeat the exercise many times before abandoning this scrap of a world, each time made a bit more difficult because of the shifting pressures below as the planetary mantle collapsed.
Quath took refuge in the bustle of work. She volunteered for excess time at the feedback-stabilization monitor. Canted forward to sense the rippling green display, integrating differential inputs, she felt the pressing hollowness of life lift away. If there was no redeeming facet in things, atleast there was this: A blur of activity hid the fact that activity meant, finally, nothing.
As the Syphon steadied its rush of core metals, the Hive lifted farther. Quath watched from a viewing blister. The ground below heaved and broke, spurting fountains of dust. The land groaned. Pebbles rattled on the blister’s underbelly. Animals stumbled in panic as hills slumped. Pits opened beneath their feet.
Quath felt her resting strands quiver and she turned, away from the chaos outside. Beq’qdahl nimbly enveloped herself in a webbing, saying,
Quath allowed herself a glance at Beq’qdahl’s large, hairy mass.
Quath had not thought of mining that way, but Beq’qdahl’s self-assurance made the point obvious. With each sucking of the Syphon the crust churned, exposing fresh seams of rare minerals. Many ores were needed in the thermweb weaving now going on in orbit. To thread the great bands of coldformed nickel-iron required bonding pastes and weldings, so freighters lofted a steady stream of mixed materials from the surface.
Captured mech ships and a large orbital station aided this. Quath and Beq’qdahl had both been privileged to pilot flights to the captured mech station, the nearest they had gotten to where the orbital weavers conjured their deft magic.
No hope of such lofty labor now. All surface-working podia had to find rich upturned seams. All who could be spared became prospectors.
Quath bristled cilia.
Beq’qdahl leaned closer gracefully, her hydraulics wheezing.
Quath framed a reply and suddenly saw that Beq’qdahl would be a success. Beq’qdahl’s smooth, successful, uncaring manner came naturally because she was in touch with deeper wellsprings, she sensed the way things truly were. And in that clear world, the Syn
thesis was talk and the Summation a promised sugar dollop meant to quiet children, not a thing podia took seriously for long. That world was real. Relentlessly real.
SEVEN
Gathering call, came the beep, slicing through Quath’s concentration. She crunched over crumbling slag and looked for silvery green streaks.
Gathering call.
She slipped a needle into the flaking silver-green, measured and clattered her ossicles in frustration. The stuff wasn’t palazinia. Finding a lode of palazinia, the rarest of the bonding pastes, would have been a coup. This scrap, glinting falsely—Quath kicked at it—was worthless.
Gathering call.
She answered, dreading.
Rendezvous! Noble Beq’qdahl has found a deep seam of—
Savagely she clicked the message off. Another feat for Beq’qdahl.
This was the fifth important find since the prospecting and mining had begun, all Beq’qdahl’s. Most of the other podia were kept busy mining Beq’qdahl’s discoveries, leaving the field clear for Beq’qdahl to find more, to stand out even better. Quath had pondered giving up prospecting—she wasn’t good at searching; she moped and rambled when she should scuttle, ferretlike, poking into every cranny—and becoming a miner. But something inside made Quath keep on, trying to best Beq’qdahl. She would not yield the ground so easily. If only—
Quath’jutt’kkal’thon. Summons!
No. Do not rendezvous. Return to the Hive. To the Tukar’ramin.
Down slippery strands slid the Tukar’ramin, a great glistening mass of polished steel and grainy carapace. Gusts of warm well-being spread through Quath as feelers stole into her mind, sensing all. Nervous, jittery tensions smoothed away.
*Rejoice, small one.*
*No formalisms please; they tax the mind by seeming to mean something. Rejoice, because you need no longer slough the crumbled land. I know you dislike that.*
The Tukar’ramin drew Quath nearer, washing her with comfort and forgiveness.
*Your doubts drag at every step you make.*
The words came out more stiffly than she intended, but Quath clutched at the phrase out of a sense of dignity.
*Must you always go sober-suited?*
*But Beq’qdahl is solitary, too. Alone, seeking rare soils. Her pods do not shamble as yours do.*
Beq’qdahl again! Quath said primly,
*But you are none of you alone!* Faint, chiding exasperation. *We are bound on the great, final task. The thermweaves we spin around this star will clasp firm its burning energy. Our fellow podia will soon harness the crackling electrodynamics of the Galactic Center which rage nearby. Soon we shall combine all such energies. Thus gathered, and the mechs banished—and who can doubt that we shall do so, given our great victory here?—we can use the tamed power to communicate with other Starswarmers in far galaxies.*
*I lick you do not. We span the galaxy to bring meaning to matter. Not simply within our own minds—the castles of besieged reason—but in the stars themselves.* She made the eight-legged sign.
Quath shuffled, not knowing what to reply.
*I sense your unease remains.*
Quath sent a sharp command to her podding subtask brain, willing its nervous dance to cease.
When the Tukar’ramin spoke again, gaudy hormonal spurts brought a new gravity to the resonant words. *You are a manifestation of a rare trait in our kind, Quath’jutt’kkal’thon.*
Afraid of exposure, she answered,
*No. The deep secret behind our expansion from our home system I shall now reveal to you. Long ago, we encountered a race of small beings who explained the nature of the coming mech onslaught. Our savants of that time saw that our own lazy nature meant that we would fall before the mechs. So we blended genetic material with the small ones, to amplify our aggressive side.*
*They were. I do not know what physical form they took, but they were both canny and persistent. In selecting these subtle mental traits from their DNA—for we shared that fundamental helical carrier—we necessarily incorporated other facets of them. One such is a capacity to doubt, to question.*
Quath said with false bravado.
*Perhaps. But you are surely the rare form we call a Philosoph. The conventional wisdom of the Synthesis, as handed down by the Illuminates, is enough for most. Even those who do not believe—such as Beq’qdahl—function well within that context. But leadership of our race depends on the Philosophs.*
*Eventually, yes—if you display the questing mind we need.*
*This deep trait is what has plunged you into bleak despair after Nimfur’thon’s burning. It brings pain, but can also bring wisdom.*
Quath said bitterly.
On the Tukar’ramin’s great wrinkled hide flashed a hormonal code. *We will encrust you. A small addition for your new task.*
*Is not spiritually fitting for you. We are lacking labor in the Hive itself, due to the mining. Here I will sense you better, as you work. There—you have the code? Apply to the Factotum and be encrusted with your new tool.*
A gesture told Quath her audience was done. She skittered away. Liberation from prospecting! And an encrustation—!
Next to promotion, which would mean an added pod, encrustation was the highest tribute to a podder. Quath could preen in the warrens, displaying her addition without baldly announcing it. A plus, definitely. Yes. Her spirits rose.
Quath clattered past Danni’vver, hurrying to the nearest terminal. She beeped the code number and awaited the news, her servos humming. She could ponder the odd news of her nature later, when there was time. After all, she was a Philosoph—whatever that strange name implied.
The screen flickered fretted ivory. An image of the new tool formed.
Gorge rose in Quath, an acrid blue that rasped her thorax. Swimming before her was a stapling gun. A simple, brainless tool. A simpleton encrustation so low as to be an insult.
EIGHT
The days passed with an ache in each hour.
Quath had some use of the stapling gun, occasionally tacking machines and crates to the Hive walls in the company of a rabble of robots she directed. The small Hive creatures squeaked and jibbered in their stuttering minilanguage. Quath felt a stab of embarrassment whenever an acquaintance happened by.
But in time this faded. After all, she was laboring, like all the podia, and gradually she came to feel that this was her rightful station. Facts had their own hardness, but one could sleep upon them.
Quath did not mind the studied way some myriapodia now ignored her conversation. There was always someone to talk to, anyway. The myriapodia were distant and boring, in truth; they cared only for their many mechanical jewelments, and how to acquire yet one more.
Aeons ago the idea must have seemed a good one, Quath thought: augment the podia as they aged, to use their experience and shore up the stiffening organs. But now these encrusted mammoths preened more than they worked. And the Quath they snubbed, the quadpodder they passed without seeing as she labored among brainless robots—that Quath knew that these bright myriapodia would inevitably vanish forever, no matter how many stringy muscles and clogged veins they replaced.
One night Quath passed a gang of miners and prospectors as she returned alone to the communal webbing, down the inert gray arterial corridors. One called out,
h asked, tired.
Beq’qdahl came into view. Three podia escorted her. The fresh leg gleamed silver and Beq’qdahl bowed toward them, articulating well, with color splashes at her throat that were almost convincingly humble. But her eyes drifted randomly, fogged, unattended by a saturated brain.
Quath skittered aside. Another farted sourly in contempt, spewing an acrid yellow cloud. Beq’qdahl pretended indifference, studying the grainy walls.
Quath ducked down a side passage and away, to the moist gossamer communal bedding, to sleep.
Sleep.
Yet sleep came fitfully, laced by hot lightning behind the eyes.
Quath tossed and clutched at her smooth bed weavings. At times she awoke and then it was the long Dreamtime when they journeyed from her homeworld at far below light-speed. They had hung in swaying pearly sacs and voyaged through the notsleep, bodies slowed, minds floating among fog-racked visions best forgotten later….
Just before dawn the distant sounds of Beq’qdahl’s celebration finally died away. Quath expected deep sleep at last. Instead she awakened soon with tingling palps, flushed with a vision.
The Tukar’ramin, shrunken and old, lecturing. Not the enduring, enfolding Tukar’ramin she knew, but a doddering old podia who repeated the rote wisdom of the dead past. Despite the technical magic that let the Tukar’ramin span the gulf between minds, and heal, she was still an ancient podder, no more.