Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  She caught an electro-savor of Noughts spread through the dense, leafy mass ahead. Here in the open it was difficult to taste whether one of them was hers. She amped the signals—and gasped.

  Ugly horizontals and verticals everywhere. Unchanging, muted light. And mixed in with these blunt perceptions came a torrent of strong surges.

  Silent colorations of fatigue and pain. Bitter red smells of fear. Yellows of shame.

  Rasping pride. Banging, loud confusion. Acrid envy, livid malice, and incomprehensible muddy longings.

  All seething, unknown, under an oily smear of senses. It was difficult to believe that these Noughts were so unconscious!

  Cryptic semisentience floated through these minds. They suffered continually from forking senses. Their entire thought-train was constantly interrupted for messages detailing their surroundings, their hungers, their incessant sexual signaling (even when exhausted!)—their tumbled, vivid, small worlds.

  Quath gingerly focused her aura down to a needlepoint and thrust it toward one particular Nought who lay several hills ahead. Was this hers?

  She could not tell, awash in the scattershot jostling of quick, coarse perceptions. In this sticky swamp she could not even separate its subminds. Carefully she held its muscles rigid, made it stand up from where it crouched. Did this feel familiar?

  One of its upper limbs was pressing a soft thing against its face. No, into the face. An awful salty burst told her that this was a mouth, perhaps its principal one. Certainly it enjoyed an enormously augmented tasting system, for the food cast piercing rivulets of lava-hot bile all over the interior of the mouth-pouch.

  Its fellows were staring at the Nought. She perceived that they would find alarming the act of spitting the food out onto the ground, where it could perhaps burn the foliage. These Noughts were gaunt; wasting of food would arouse suspicion. She must not frighten them before she found her own Nought, or they might all flee in a panic. Quath forced the thing to swallow the stuff, just to get the taste away.

  What could this primitive form do? She had not entered her own Nought in this way; she was getting better at it. Curiosity egged her on.

  She made it stand on one foot, then another. The sensation of bipedal instability was strangely exhilarating. She made a pod take a step, caught the body as it began to fall, and then brought the other leg up to join the first. This sensation of courting disaster, falling and catching oneself, carried a delicious excitement.

  She stepped again, and again. The legs carried the impacts of walking upward and she quickly learned to absorb these with the cumbersome knees. A single knobby columnar spine as though it rode on a cushioned pediment of hips and buttocks.

  Worse, it ached at the lower back. The muscles there were firmly knotted, as though this was a constant condition. What poor design! And they were so unimaginative that they simply tolerated such irksome pains!

  She rotated the head and saw a surprising proportion of what she knew had to lie outside the Nought—but missing the fine-grained texture Quath knew, and overlaid with freightings of emotion.

  This Nought could scarcely see anything without immediately reacting to it. Passing a low bush with tiny red berries brought gushing forth a hard hunger. The shaded sky above demanded to be searched for threats. A moist breeze crept into its primary nostrils and visions of rain sounded warnings. A nearby face excited memories of happier times, laughter, a warm fire—

  But Quath saw that this approaching face emitted sounds which disturbed this host-Nought. The face gave quick signals of alarm. A wrinkling just below the top hairline. Its single mouth parted and lips slightly reddened, bringing teeth further into view. A narrowing of the space between the hair-hedges above the eyes.

  Apparently Quath was not managing this Nought well, despite her exciting discovery of two-podded walking. She thought she had done that quite expertly. How well could such a rudimentary construction perambulate, after all?

  This nearing Nought said something incomprehensible. Its primary message lay in the timbre of the speech, rising higher as the crude acoustic stutterings came faster. Quath did not want to frighten away this pack before she had a chance to explore it. And there was some deeper element about them that she could not fathom. Even clotted sub-minds should have appeared by now. They must be oddly integrated.

  She put aside the matter and decided to leave the Nought. No need to alarm its fellows, after all. She disconnected smoothly. In an instant she was back inside her own electroaura.

  Now rain came sweeping toward her, warming and oddly pleasurable. It reminded her of the tantalizing food-streams of the Hive. She basked in the soft caress of wind and air. Then she wearily crept forward. This business of finding her particular Nought might prove difficult. She regretted not giving it a steady, bright telltale. She had feared that even a dull-witted being would eventually notice. Very well; she crept on through the splashing torrent.

  THREE

  It was sunset again before they scaled the last foothills and straggled across the breast of the mountain.

  Killeen watched a ruddy sun sink beyond the next peak in the chain that marched up from the south. He had been slow to adjust his senses to this planet and to realize that it had milder seasons than Snowglade. Its lesser gravity and shorter days threw off his rhythms. The effect told on them all, he thought, as he watched the Bishop rear guard struggle up the slope of dark granite. A chilly wind had come up after the rainstorm of the night before, making marching harder. Once water got into their leggings, nothing worked quite right until they had a chance to stop and work on metal-shaping. But there had been no time for that. Killeen had cajoled and ordered and joshed, keeping the Bishops moving across silted mud and wrecked forests.

  He looked back now, searching for Cyber pursuit. His feet yearned to be set free of his boots, and he compromised by sitting on a boulder and releasing the pressure-catches of his shocks. The relief would have made him sigh, but Cermo was passing nearby and Killeen’s sense of discipline kept his lips closed.

  The land had been ribbed and ridged anew by the quakes. A river below was busily digging a fresh channel, having been tossed from its old one. Geology seemed to have hastened its pace, as if in fear of more disasters. The rain had clogged innumerable new streams with mud, and they spread like hands with snaky fingers across the plains, feeding brown lakes. Drowned stands of spindly trees poked from the waters, the slanted sun catching their doomed topknots.

  We are near the equator, so at least we have not suffered the cooling effects occasioned by the cosmic string. It seems to have stripped away some of the atmosphere, so there is less insulation against the cold of space.

  “Thought the land fallin’ would heat things up,” he answered his Arthur Aspect.

  The loss of air has a larger immediate effect. Deep heat must diffuse out from the interior. However, we can soon expect another excavation from the core. Note how the string pulses with more energy.

  Killeen peered up into the darkening sky and saw the razor-sharp curve against the mottled colors of the interstellar clouds. It had not moved in the sky all day, which meant that the Cybers were rotating it with the planet. If it began to spin they would have to prepare for quakes or worse.

  Only for dwellers in cities or Citadels are quakes a threat. In the open your greatest risk would be landslides, and I expect most loose soil has already been shaken free.

  “Maybe, ’less this whole mountain decides it’s better off in the valley.”

  He heard gravel scattering down the slope nearby, as if in forewarning, and turned to find Shibo coming from the advance party.

  “Tribe pickets up ahead,” she reported. They had been keeping comm silence since emerging onto the mountain face, because line-of-sight receivers could pick them up at a great distance. It meant greatly slower information flow, but Killeen felt too conspicuous here already. Every pebble could be a Cyber telltale, waiting for a foot to step on it or merely set down nearby.

  “Po
lice up the column,” he ordered. “Let ’em see us march in all formed up, gear in place.”

  He was proud of the Bishops as they passed through the Tribal lines, headed for the crown of the mountain. The Families were spread out on the jutting slabs of silver-flecked granite below the summit, but Killeen did not stop to pitch camp. He marched the Bishops straight into the center, where the large tent was already erected and billowing in the cold winds. Killeen gestured to his lieutenants to flank him and did not slow their step until they reached the broad clearing at the very peak of the mountain, where the tent flapped loudly.

  His Supremacy emerged to meet them. Standing beside his officers, he gazed stony-faced with empty, expressionless eyes as Killeen gave him the traditional salute.

  “You withdrew without my order,” the man said abruptly, without returning the salute.

  “I felt my Family would be overrun,” Killeen said formally.

  “Who could outrun those who turn tail so quickly?”

  “We took large losses. Eight—”

  “All Families sustained such casualties,” His Supremacy said. Then he repeated it loudly, tolling out each word. People heard and came running.

  Killeen watched as the Bishops were engulfed by the Tribe’s greater numbers. There was going to be a show.

  “That is the way… we must follow… if we are to defeat these monsters.” His Supremacy boomed out the long sentence with relish, a clarion call. An exalted expression transfixed his face with passion as he turned to Killeen. “Other Families have not bellyached about their dead. They simply bury their heroes and carry on, obeying.”

  “We buried no one,” Killeen said cautiously. “They were left on the field.”

  “Ha! The Niners brought out over a dozen dead.”

  “How many’d they lose doing it?”

  A rustle from the gathering crowd. His Supremacy scowled.

  “We do not count those losses as different. All fell in the noble cause.”

  “I’d rather get hit on the attack, not haulin’ bodies around.”

  “So I’m sure you would, Cap’n. I have noticed that you have little respect for our time-honored methods. Nor do you have any sense of your transgressions.”

  Killeen started to reply and held back. This was to be a public humiliation. Or worse. He tried to see a way to mollify the short man whose face had a transfixed, glassy quality.

  “Further, I have noticed that you have verged on disrespect toward My Holiness. I have until this moment been kind enough to ascribe this lapse to your origins around a foreign star.”

  Killeen could not resist agreeing. “Yeasay, that might be it.”

  His Supremacy’s eyes lost their odd blankness. A dark look narrowed them to menacing slits. “Perhaps you think that God’s rules do not apply to foreign Families?”

  Killeen’s effort to catch his tart reply made his jaw go tense. Then he said slowly, “Of course not. Your tongue is different from ours. I have trouble speaking in it, maybe my meaning gets garbled. We humans been separated a long time, ’member. How…” He clenched his jaw again, then went on. “How could anybody possibly imagine that I lack respect for His Supremacy? For the greatest mind in the history of our race?”

  The short, swarthy man nodded as though this last lavish compliment were simple fact. Killeen was relieved to see that flatout flattery did not bring forth the slightest suspicion. Such talk was probably a steady daily diet for this man who thought he was God Himself.

  “You have a strange manner of showing your reverence, Cap’n. The battle was going well.”

  “They swatted us like flies.”

  “Every battle costs us—that is the glory of it! Only by great sacrifice can we win great victories. That is the point which eluded the shortsighted Elders and Cap’ns before me, and which only Divine intervention, in the form of myself, has countered.”

  “I see, Your Supremacy.”

  “It is our fierceness, our sacred rage, our Divine fearlessness of mortal wounds and even of death, that places us above the monsters and demons which curse our mother-world!

  This brought a shout of agreement from the Tribe. Hoteyed, grinning, the mob was mesmerized. Their nostrils flared with anticipation. Killeen joined in their cheering tardily and so did his lieutenants. But His Supremacy noticed this and abruptly held his hands up, silencing the crowd.

  “I see a slowness in you, Cap’n. A reluctance to follow the commandments of My Holy Self.”

  “Naysay, I—”

  His Supremacy’s eyes flashed. “Naysay?”

  “Well, I—”

  “The God of Sacred Rage does not like this word naysay. Especially from a Cap’n who runs. I think you speak it far too much. Knees!”

  Officers instantly and expertly struck the back of Killeen’s knees so that he dropped forward to the ground. Someone pinned his hands behind his back, lifting them so that he bowed involuntarily. He looked up at the pendants that swayed from His Supremacy’s broad, scarlet belt. One was a tiny carved human head, grinning. Another seemed to be a fragment of a mech carapace fashioned to resemble a long stalk from which a large seed sprouted.

  “You realize that bodies left on the field are used by Cybers?”

  “Yeasay.” Killeen could not trust himself to say more; sarcasm crept in too easily.

  “They infest our heroic dead with eggs. Demon eggs!”

  “Yeasay.”

  “Yet, knowing this foul fact, you chose to disobey.”

  “Ah, I thought only ’bout my Family’s safety.”

  “And how will you feel when you see demons crawling the hills, demons born of your abandoned dead?”

  Killeen could think of nothing to say to this, so he simply bowed his head.

  “A portion of my godliness urges that you be erased from our cause. I could order you to the spit, to abide there until corrupt fluids have drained from you.”

  The crowd murmured with animal anticipation. Killeen saw Toby begin to edge a hand closer to his rifle. Killeen shook his head slightly. His son reluctantly let his hand drop. Killeen caught Shibo’s eye and saw there something he could not deflect. She stood still and compressed in a way he knew well.

  “We Bishops,” he said hurriedly, “we hunger for your cause.”

  “Fiercely? Despite the sky demon we all witnessed?”

  “A deep hunger. Yeasay, yeasay.” He made himself shout, “Show us the righteousness.”

  Catcalls and jeers came from the crowd.

  A puzzled expression swept over His Supremacy as his eyes went blank. His lips trembled and he gazed up as though seeking celestial advice. The mob rustled. A chilly wind swept across the mountaintop.

  Finally His Supremacy said, “Yet generosity is sometimes wise. Mercy can flow from me as well as punishment, Cap’n.”

  The crowd groaned with disappointment.

  “Still, I cannot allow a Family to suffer the guidance of such a Cap’n.

  Killeen opened his mouth, closed it. The man’s moods flickered so fast Killeen could not keep up.

  “So! I shall appoint a new Cap’n of the Bishops. In time of trial—and this is surely such—I retain that right. You”—he pointed at Jocelyn—“you will be the new Cap’n. Step forward!”

  Jocelyn took a pace forward and saluted smartly.

  Hands released Killeen and helped him to his feet.

  “I expect instant obedience in all things.”

  “Yessir!”

  “We begin planning immediately for our next battle, a great struggle which shall turn the tide against the legions of monsters. And this time the Bishops shall lead.”

  “Very good, Your Supremacy,” Jocelyn said. “We are honored.”

  “Prepare, Bishops!” His Supremacy called. “And tonight, celebrate with your holy exalted Tribal fellows the victories to come!”

  He waved her away. She stepped back, bowing. The crowd yelled halfheartedly and began to break up. Bishops glanced at one another uneasily.

/>   Jocelyn came to where Killeen stood, still unmoving. Only when she came to attention next to him did he realize that he should return to the ranks. Mutely he swiveled and went. Behind him His Supremacy went on, announcing the celebration of some religious event. The idea of carrying on a festival that evening, after the withering losses every Family had taken, gave Killeen a bitter taste. Family members, shocked by the abrupt change in Cap’ns, stared at him as he passed their sharply squared-out squads. Some in the formation gave him hidden signs of salute and others nodded in respect. The world seemed crisp and fresh to him as he just kept walking on blistered feet.

  FOUR

  Quath hurried up a steep raw cliff. She should not expose herself so, but she needed to search these mountain passes quickly for her Nought. She had thought she was following it closely, but then she had come upon a large pack and had to slip away to avoid detection.

  The Tukar’ramin agreed that she should avoid alarming the Nought packs until she was sure of snaring the right Nought, the one who knew the workings of the Nought ship from antiquity. To be certain her Nought was not caught in the ambushes that her fellow podia were springing on the fleeing stragglers, the Tukar’ramin had called off all attacks. Now all attention turned to Quath’s search.

  But where was the Nought? Its telltale had not reported on time. Probably it was damaged.

  This complication irritated Quath. She cast her electroaura outward and caught fragrances of Nought lacing the senso-air of the mountains. They were congregating here, yes. What an opportunity! The podia could annihilate these pests by the thousands, once Quath had her catch safely encased.

  This vantage, scrabbling up the rough face of canted rock, gave her an umbrella coverage of the jumbled, sharp peaks of the entire range. She quelled the simmering panic among her subminds that height brought on. Only her sure grip saved her from succumbing to her deep fear of heights.

  Strangely, here at the planet’s equator the effect of the Syphoning had thrust tortured crust still higher. It had compressed the basaltic underpinnings, splitting great seams and poking them into the underbelly rock of the range. Far away she saw a cone spitting sooty gouts into air already laden with churned dust. Calamity had cut broad swaths through the forests and plateau brambles. Mech mines had caved in. Their railways were smashed and buried.