I finished stretching, straightened the loose sweat clothes, checked the razored blade in the sheath, and walked along the path toward the western end of the ridge. A brilliant blue piñon jay squawked, then a second, and both flapped upward, followed by the rest of the small flock, as they swirled downhill to light on another broad-branched piñon, high enough that they would not be easy prey for a vorpal.
After a quick glance back at the thick brown walls that merged with the hillside and the one partly open window, I began to run, letting my mind free-associate on the thought of the cybs—of the coming meeting in Parwon.
As always, the lines of dialogue spooled through my nets, almost independent of moving legs and breathing.
Dialogue line one: The cybs seek an undefined goal, probably revenge cloaked in something, and are human enough to make it nasty, if given a chance. Old Earth has no ships with adiamante hulls—or any other kind of warship hulls—just twenty to thirty million talented demis. What do the cybs want in their revenge? Symbolic atonement? Destruction of Earth’s remaining demis? Acknowledgment of their superiority and that they were treated wrongly?
What would Morgen have said? Enter soulsong one:
“My songs for you alone will flow;
at my death none but you will know
cold coals on black stove’s grate, ash-white,
faintest glimmers for winter’s night … .”
Dulce, dulce, with the smoothed gold of a perfect pear, the gold hair of mountain dunes at twilight, and a funeral bell across the hills of Deseret.
Fighting the images, the ghost sense of silky skin I could no longer touch, I ran harder. I used all my other senses, full-extended, because my eyes blurred and burned, and I skittered thoughts toward the cyb-ships, the twelve adiamante hulls, hard and black in the void-wrapped nielle, that darkness deeper than black.
Downhill to the right, a jackrabbit thumped and jumped sideways behind a cedar, another ancient twisted trunk that felt as though it dated to the Rebuilding. Above, Swift-Fall-Hunter circled, his eyes on the jackrabbit.
Dialogue line two: Are the cybs people or aliens? Does it matter? No matter how deeply we feel, nor how much we try to develop a picture of an alien, or a concept of one—those concepts and descriptions are just humans masquerading as aliens … unless you believe that intelligence, as we define it, has as its goal survival—in which case there are no aliens, only humans with different shapes.
The jackrabbit darted to a halt under a piñon beside a washed-out scrub brush, and Swift-Fall-Hunter circled to the east on wings that spanned more than four meters. The golden eagle sought other prey, gliding silently over the valley that had once held, among other things, a longago town. Now only scrub and cedar rose from the red clay.
I kept running, westward, away from the vanished town and away from history.
Dialogue line one: Morgen, morning, morning in my twilight, what would she have said? Certainly something to the effect that revenge is human, all too human, and therefore a fitting vice to be overcome, except she would have said it, thought it, more gently … something like, “The cybs have human vices, too, Ecktor … .”
Not like that, either, I realized, as I started down between the hills, concentrating on putting my boots evenly between the rocks and depressions. Not even with the net and her songs could I construct what she might have said to the unexpected, like the return of the cybs.
Some demis run naked and barefoot, but that takes bodymods, even if they’re natural calluses, and that was carrying naturality to extremes—something I tried not to do. I could sense my oxygen demand rising, both physically and through the selfnet. My lips curled, and I forced my legs to stretch out despite the discomfort.
Dialogue line two: No aliens—not even the cybs? Next you’ll be saying there’s no difference between virtual-net real and whole-body real.
Conthesis one: Is there a difference between reality, symbolic reality, and representative/virtual reality? One might as well ask whether there is a difference between women, pictures of women, and mannequins dressed as women … or soulsongs of beloved women.
Soulsongs of beloved women … beloved woman … .
I ran with the breeze, breathing heavily, setting each foot in harmony, mind out ahead and scouting the trees and the path, relaying the information to my body. The scent of the meleysen leaves to the northeast drifted into my nostrils, and I stepped up the pace.
Conthesis two: I don’t have one.
As I panted up to the top of the next hill to the west, the breeze strengthened, cooling me, and bringing the slightest acrid scent of a distant vorpal. My hand touched the knife, and my lips curled, but no vorpal would come after me, not with my luck.
As I kept moving across the hilltop, dodging rocks and cedars and junipers, the coolness did nothing to unscramble the thoughts and emotions within.
Fine excuse for a demi I was, unable to break free of the hold of the past, the hold of the memory of floral essence on bare skin, the hold of … .
Too bad the cybs had forsaken integration in favor of crystalline clarity. I almost laughed at that, and had Morgen been there in more than soulsong, I would have.
Instead of staying on the path, I turned due south and darted this way and that downhill and through the piñons, trying to avoid any spot where I might have run before. The soil wasn’t cryptozoic, even away from the meleysens. It just hadn’t ever been that fertile, although it was richer under the trees and around the pale blue-green of the sagebrush. Lava takes millions of years to degrade in a dry climate, and the sagebrush hadn’t been working on the black stone anywhere near that long.
I kept running, and the pressure of the physical shut down my internal dialogues.
When I slowed to a fast walk near the top of the next rise, I was breathing heavily, and sweating. Through the trees to the north, I could see the grasslands and the hummocks of the prairie dog town, rising above the chest-high and browned grasses. Swift-Fall-Hunter circled, then passed on, looking for easier prey.
The sourness of my sweat and the panting confirmed that I’d neglected my physical condition more than I should have. With the slowing down, something from a pile of rocks caught my eye and senses—rather, the absence of something did.
Under another old and twisted cedar, among the lichen-covered dark gray rocks, lurked a chunk of darkness—a blackness that swallowed light, that turned seeking eyes from it: a curved fragment of black adiamante. I squatted, letting my fingers ease the adiamante up.
How long had it rested there, impervious to age, to deterioration, to anything but the mighty lines of force that had sheared it into a smooth-sided and round polygon whose exact dimensions still eluded the eye?
I lifted the adiamante, a relic of the great confrontation between the demis and the cybs that had led to the Rebuilding. Neither warm nor cool to the touch, neither seeking nor releasing heat, the smooth blackness—heavier than hardwood, lighter than iron, and stronger than anything made by man before or since—lay in my hands.
After a moment, I replaced it in the rocks and straightened up. Adiamante—harder than the diamond from which its name had been derived, and virtually useless except in a handful of applications like armor and spacecraft hulls … and, I supposed, swords, except no one had ever squandered that much energy to forge an adiamante sword. Once formed, you couldn’t mill it, work it, or change it, and only a gigawatt laser, a sun-fired particle beam, or a nucleonic knife could cut it.
And yes, it had taken a full asteroid complex to create it. I supposed the complex was still out there, beyond the night, fusactors cold, waiting for the resurgence of the Rebuilt Hegemony that could never come, or some future rebuilding of Old Earth necessitated by the workings of the Construct—and my failure. I shivered at that thought.
Under the tree lay a fragment, a faraway meteoric fragment that had dropped from the sundered skies of The Flight. I let it lie, wishing the cybs had been wise enough to let the hard fragments of the
ir past lie. But, being cybs, that was exactly what they could not do, not when for them net-reality was equal to whole-body reality.
After a few moments of deep breaths, I began to run again, back through the trees, away from the adiamante. I circled slowly north and uphill, back toward the past.
As I stopped outside the house, close enough to hold the comment, I pulsed a link to Crucelle, who answered as though he had been waiting.
“Any further thoughts?” he asked, red-bronze mandagger waiting for use.
“The ell stations … they need to be powered up. Isn’t that Elanstan?”
“I’ll tell her,” Crucelle volunteered, and I let him, shaking my head at the thought.
“Me, too,” he answered my unspoken concern. “There’s no guarantee that we could put Earth back together again. We almost didn’t last time, and the Jykserians weren’t nearly so strong.”
“Letting them destroy the locials? Would that be enough?” Arielle’s storm-currents pulsed darkangel-like.
“That wouldn’t give them enough revenge, I suspect,” I pulsed, sensing Crucelle’s nod even before I finished. “People who feel they’re right, and who’ve been humiliated …”
“They’ll want to reduce us to a bloody pulp?”
It was my turn to nod.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
“We’ll need to concede whatever it takes to get their marcybs …” I stopped. “No … that will just encourage them to act immediately. Give them full access to the locials. Treat them as honored guests, but not too honored, as if they were not quite equals.”
“That’s true enough.”
“That’s also the problem. They’re sitting in orbit with enough power to make a large mess, and they’re looking for an excuse to do it without any understanding of the repercussions.”
“I think they understand,” interjected Arielle. “They just don’t care. If we use force to stop them, then we fuel another millennium of cyb-based technological development. At the end of that development, they’ll have developed devices that will nova an entire system, or worse. If we surrender, they’ll find an excuse to commit some range of atrocities or try to sterilize the whole planet. The Construct forbids either, in any case.”
“Like the way the Construct forbade what our forbearers did to Al-Moratoros?”
They both winced. That memory had not faded, though it was not ours, nor our doing. And that wince said all there was to say about why we wouldn’t break the Construct, no matter what the cost.
“Either way,” Arielle concluded, “that’s our payback for using power in forcing The Flight.”
“Thanks, Arielle,” I flipped back.
“You are most welcome, puissant mage Ecktor. And Coordinator,” she added ironically.
I continued to concentrate, but nothing new or original came to mind. I finally concluded, “We’re still left with the fact that Old Earth is the planet of death where only demis and draffs can live. Proving that could be hard, if they still fit the typical cyb profile.”
The sense of a nod followed from Arielle, along with a sigh and a frown. “That’s going to be hard. I’d estimate a twenty percent mortality, maybe as high as fifty percent for those in direct contact.”
I sent back a shrug, not a disinterested one, but a resigned one. So far, I didn’t have any alternatives.
For a moment, stillness dropped across the net like a niellen shroud, and I could understand that.
“You’re breathing hard,” Crucelle finally responded.
“I ran a while.”
“How far? How long?”
“Not quite thirteen klicks … in half a stan … but I’m not in shape, and I was scrambling through the woods.” If I had been in better shape or followed the path, I could have done close to twenty klicks in the same time.
The dialogue box in my head pointed out that while I could run from grief, running wasn’t going to solve the cyb problem. It hadn’t millennia earlier, and it wouldn’t now.
IV
“Two before upper entry.”
The warning clipped across the lander’s net, and the nav checked her restraints.
“It’s all superstition,” snapped Commander Gorum, his words strong enough to flex the net. “That’s why I’m here. To show that it’s just that. To look at Old Earth and its demis logically and factually.”
“To send down the head marcyb does seem like overkill,” pointed out the second pilot.
“Someone with an overview has to see these people—if they’re still people—before we act. That means me or Gibreal.”
“Marines are more expendable. Not much better than marcybs.” No one owned the thought, cold and direct.
“There’s not likely to be any expense.” Gorum laughed. “Besides, Henslom or Ysslop or any of the majers could do the job. The demis retreated from all the systems of the Rebuilt Hegemony. As soon as one system revolted, and then another, they just folded. Then they created this myth of Old Earth as the planet of death as a last defense. Because the demis still had a fleet then, everyone bought it. It was a handy excuse for the old colonies—they didn’t have to fight a war that would have been costly. So they went along with it. There aren’t any medical records that show anything because nothing really ever happened.” “What happened to Old Earth’s fleet?” asked the lander’s second pilot. “It was never broken.”
“Same thing that happens to all old fleets,” answered the marcybs’ chief. “Fell apart and disappeared. You don’t maintain weapons, you don’t have them when you need them.”
“What about the shuttle craft we spotted?” asked the nav. “The one heading for that asteroid in the stable orbital position?”
“What about it? It’s a nickel-iron asteroid. Energy dead even on EDI levels, both underweb and overspace …”
“Al-Moratoros,” snapped the nav.
“That was at least two millennia ago. At least.”
“And that asteroid up above us had to have been moved there.”
“Old technology,” answered Gorum.
The net crackled, cutting over the interchange, and pins shot through the net and the cybs as the lander slashed deeper into the ionosphere. Except for the static, the net was still.
V
I should have run up to Parwon to watch the cybs bring down their welcoming groups in landers. You don’t land a two-klick-long interstellar ship on a planet, not even a cyb-ship with an adiamante hull. In the shape I was in, I didn’t even try to run the distance. I should have, but I didn’t.
I rolled out the small flitter from the hangar attached to the back of the house, then ended up spending more time on maintenance than it would have taken to run up and back. A strand of sandy hair on the second seat didn’t help my mood, but spending more effort on cleaning the already spotless turbine exterior did.
The flitter was one of my luxuries—hydrocarb fueled, and that meant a special refining module for the joba processor—plus a few stans a week doing screen-pushing at the Deseret locial to compensate for my toy and the technology that supported it. Plus growing the joba, and that meant regular flights south to the Fireo Desert.
The flitter itself wasn’t especially advanced—deployable rotors and turbines integrated into a lifting body—but it was dependable.
After a last check, including the knives and the rest of the survival kit stowed under the seats, I pulled on a one-piece coverall over my browns, donned the lightweight helmet, and strapped in. Again, I could have had a flitter with automated restraints and a full-sound-insulated hull, but that would have had me working half my life at Deseret in arduous heavy maintenance.
Under the timeless thwop … thwop, thwop of high speed rotors, I held the flitter steady on the ground cushion, then dropped the nose fractionally, letting the flitter build up speed as I eased it down the lane that ended in the dry snye of the creek. Before the point where the snye joined Kohl Creek, the lifting body was functional, and I turned the flitter northward, c
rossing the higher grasslands and the prairie dogs and flicking a pulse through the transmitter to Deseret station to lock our track into the traffic scanning. There was another new burrow complex on the north side of the prairie dog town. Before long the mountain vorpals would be raiding again, and the kalirams would be waiting for the vorpals’ return.
For all my maintenance efforts and dependable technology, the faintest scent of hot metal and lubricants tickled my nostrils. So I cracked the vent valves, and the whistling cold air removed the odors, and most of the heat, from the two-place cockpit.
I leveled off in the green zone, high enough to allow the safety seats to work with the rotors deployed, and thwopped northward. The trip was too short to retract the rotors and go high-speed, as I would have on a trip to the Cherkrik ruins or the Ellay locial.
No more than ten klicks north of the house, splotches of snow showed on the north sides of the cedar- and piñon-covered hills. A small herd of sambur grazed in one of the fire-meadows, and, despite the stolidity of composite and metal around me, I sensed a cougar slipping through the piñons toward the ruisines.
The sambur scattered at the sound of the flitter. Beyond the fire-meadow was a large stand of meleysen trees, thriving as they detoxified yet another remnant of either the Chaos Years or the decades that precipitated The Flight.
Then the flitter thwopped over a stand of ancient cedars, their age seeping into the cold blue sky, and left sambur and meleysens behind.
Parwon was less than fifty klicks north, but even the lower meadows on the south sides of the hills around the locial, and the shaded spots in the lanes, bore traces of snow.
After pulsing the station, I linked momentarily with the net, and began the descent. I could have flown the easy way, linked with the pilot module, but I used the old-fashioned stick and collective controls the whole distance, though I did have to link in the overrides for safety purposes on the approach. The transnet didn’t even flicker—that’s how smoothly I slipped the flitter onto the apron beyond the tower, and that smooth an approach would have been hard even for a demi whose collateral was transport.
Adiamante Page 2
