Adiamante

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “That is not a verifiable proposition,” interjected MYL-ERA.

  “The power build-up isn’t quite complete,” said Gibreal. “Do you suppose we could provide them with a warning of sorts?”

  “What do you have in mind, ser?” asked Ideomineo.

  “Such as?” followed the cybnav.

  “Perhaps a demonstration might be in order for your demi friend, Kemra. Some moon-polishing, perhaps, in a remote area clearly visible from earth.”

  The image of ancient door creaking open filled the net, with a darkness oozing forth.

  “Sanitize it,” grumbled Gibreal.

  The cybnav’s lips clamped together.

  XXII

  THE CYB’S TALE

  Scan the files of old, and praise the copper wires that preceded the net and the fibrelines. Scan the tale of halfJack, the father of cybs, cyb before cybs. The tale is ancient, from before The Flight, from before the SoshWars, but true for all its age and obscurity.

  After Ibmer made the first cyb, there was Jack, and he was a hardcopy programmer, of that ancient cult that bears the same resemblance to cybs as alchemists did to chemists. In those names, without the clarity of identity, all humans were of the single undifferentiated type, and they all had many names. Jack’s name was Jackson Green Crossfield, and he was a times-removed ancestor of Greencross. That is another story.

  From the beginning, Jack marveled at the crystalline clarity of the logic, that binary clarity of yes or no, on or off. No analog shades of gray for Jack, disciple of forgotten Bebege, just black and white, on and off.

  But what could he do? He was flesh and blood, and the mechcybs of his youth were metal and plastic and composite. To bridge that gap was seen as less possible than reaching the distant stars. The early mechcybs had no souls and died when the power failed. They had no scanners, and no will.

  But Jack worked with a graphite stick and electroplastic discs and all the tools of the ancient age to reduce the illogic of human thought to the single-valued logic that admits of no indecision.

  While Jack struggled with his task, the mechcybs that had been the size of a starlander shrank to the size of a travel case, and Jack acquired one, and he began to program, shrinking his long chains and intricate punch cards, for those came before the commandlines, into shorter and shorter phrases. The punchcards were replaced with circular plastic discs and then with logic magbubbles.

  Jack created new languages, Basek, and Gummaul, and Fortable, and Debasted, and all of those that preceded mechlink and have been lost in the dead circuits of the past. And he used those languages to refine the crystalline clarity of logic, to turn the one-two, on-off, into a pattern that could not fail. A pattern that could not be changed by the ephemeral flow of hormonal secretions, or the instinctive and unreasoned reaction to a hot wind or the scent of flowers extracted and sprayed across exposed flesh.

  The work was arduous, and Jack’s limbs weakened. He built himself a chair that would carry him anywhere, and neural jacks in his hands to supplant the rigors of the keyboard. And he continued to refine the cybmech languages, and to create ever more simply complex logic operators.

  When his heart would pump no more, he had a mech-heart installed; and the heart was monitored by the lines that linked to his weak organic nerves. And when his lungs failed, he replaced them with blowers that were crosslinked to his second cybself.

  As his organic body disintegrated, he struggled to replicate his thoughts in the arcane and antique crystals of the ancients—to transfer his thoughts, his knowledge, and his understanding of the clarity of one-two, on-off. As his synapses would hold no more and began to leak their bytes, he replicated them and transferred them into his second cybself, a cybmech with multi-redundant circuits, and replicating and recharging power sources hidden deep within the recesses of OldCity. Jack called that second self halfJack.

  When the transfer was complete, his old body sighed once and then no more, and in time, it was rendered unto ashes, and a metal plate placed upon a wall, and a few humans looked and left.

  Within those recesses, his thoughts net-linked with the mechcyb, and the patterns flickered through the matrices and the soul crystals, and halfJack woke, and said, “I am halfJack, and more than Jack ever was.”

  And so it was, for Jack had never run the net-lines, or multilinked, or uploaded or downloaded, or duped and cross-checked. All of these and more could halfJack do, and he did, serving and sustaining even to the times of Greencross.

  To this day, we honor halfJack, the first cyb, the cyb who ensured that logic was logic and not emotion, cyb before there were cybs.

  XXIII

  After another shower—to wash off the sweat of a too-long run and take away the chill of snow and soul—I looked in the mirror, wondering if I’d find a thatch of silver hair, bloodshot watery eyes with bags beneath, sunken cheeks, and yellowed teeth. I didn’t. The short hair was still black, the eyes green, the cheeks red from the weather, and all my teeth were still there. The circles under my bloodshot eyes hadn’t been there a year earlier, and neither had the lines in my forehead. I rubbed my fingers along the jawline, but the muscles seemed firm. I’d opted against a beard and never regretted it, even when Diogen had made them the fashion for a time a decade or so back.

  I showered and dressed in black trousers and shirt—more suitable for appearing behind the wide desk of the Coordinator than were the running clothes—then poured a last cup of lukewarm tea from the green pot.

  Outside the wind was rising, and the snow had stopped falling. The sky showed patches of cold china blue to the north, with clouds swift-scudding southward. I peered out the western window. The piñons remained snow-covered, and Swift-Fall-Hunter perched or circled skies elsewhere.

  Finally, I sat at the table and tried the longlink.

  Surprisingly, Yslena was available. Often she was out of link range, working with her team on reef restoration.

  “Father! Are you all right?” I could picture the quizzical frown above the flashing green eyes. The eyes were mine; almost every other physical feature had come from Morgen—the sandy hair, the higher than average cheekbones, the almost elfin jawline, the wiry figure.

  “Relatively.”

  “You’re tired. You always say ‘relatively’ when you don’t want to admit things aren’t going well.”

  I could sense the concern, some concern anyway, and pulsed back the answer. “It is tiring, especially when you’re dealing with people who see nothing and don’t want to. I understand the Construct, and I know it works, but at times I just want to tell the cybs that what they’re doing will end up killing a whole lot of us and just about all of them. But if I do that, then they’ll get even nastier, and so will the results.” I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see that. “So I keep showing them Old Earth and hoping they’ll learn something.”

  “And they don’t do they?” my daughter responded softly. “It must be bad, if they asked you to be Coordinator.”

  “Any time we need a Coordinator, it’s bad,” I admitted, then asked, “How are you doing?”

  “Tired, but it’s a good kind of tired, from hard work and lots of exercise. It’s rewarding and frustrating. The ecochain of the sea was bent, but not totally wiped out the way it happened on land. We don’t have anything developing like vorpals. Of course, sharks were already like that, but they’re not as bright.”

  “Not nearly, from what you’ve said,” I interjected, half-amazed at the calm competence that had once been a laughing child, who had dodged behind trees and rocks while one of us had scanned the undergrowth and hillsides.

  “The cetaceans treat them like stunted children, but they don’t tease them, and they do have a function.”

  “So do the vorpals,” I said dryly.

  “It’s not the same.” She laughed. “You know all that already. Why am I telling you?”

  “I like to hear you talk,” I answered, and I did like to hear from her, but she was also sticking to
the facts because it was easier. Talking to Yslena was hard, always had been, and that was probably because she took after me, without a deep emote sense. Non-emote intuits always have trouble that way, unless they’re linked to someone like her mother, who linked us both. Then, suddenly, we’d lost that link.

  “The reef work is so tedious. I won’t live to see whether what we’ve done really works, and it won’t even be obvious to my great-grandchildren. That assumes I ever find anyone and that we get around to children.”

  “You will,” I assured her. “You will.” Yslena had always had trouble reaching out, just as I had, but now that Morgen was gone, what choice did I have? “It takes time.”

  “And luck. You practically ran into mother with a flitter before you two noticed each other.”

  “I wouldn’t suggest anything quite so drastic.” My fingers stroked the chunk of adiamante. Sometimes I felt as distant as the untouchable niellen darkness it held.

  “I’m glad you linked,” she offered. “But it worries me. You never do it unless there’s something important.”

  “I was thinking about you.”

  After a silence, she asked, “Do you think I ought to come home? I’ve got more than enough of a balance. I’d never use what I have in years.”

  “No,” I said quickly, too quickly. “I’d rather … I mean, you …” What could I say? She was safer there, far safer, yet I didn’t want to act the over-protective parent.

  “Oh, father …” Her words were soft. “I think I understand, and I won’t embarrass you, and I’m glad you care. Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. I’d like to see you, but now’s not the time. Being Coordinator is going to keep me busy for the next few days, maybe longer. After that … well … then we can see. Maybe I can come see your reef.”

  “There’s not that much to see. I mean, there’s plenty to see, but you can’t really tell what we’ve been doing.”

  “I understand. That’s like most solid accomplishments.” What I said was true, and I meant it, but even as I said the banal words, I wanted to say more, and didn’t.

  “It doesn’t feel all that solid. Designing and planting coral to replace those that the hothousers’ tides destroyed feels like trying to build a house with sand on sand.”

  “I know. I know. At times, everything feels that way.” I paused. “That sounds patronizing, and I don’t mean it that way.” My fingers tightened around the small chunk of adiamante.

  “I understand, father. I know what you mean. That’s only sometimes. Other times, like when I glide after the orcas, everything feels so … so interconnected and right.”

  “Those are times to hold on to.” I hadn’t had many of those lately, but I remembered them, like the last words of Morgan’s soulsong: … our joys will last the endless years.

  “I try to,” pulsed back Yslena.

  “Good.” I tried to convey the sense of a smile.

  “Father … I’m supposed to be at the dock before long, and I’m not like you. I can’t hold netlinks in my mind and do three other things.” There was a pause. “I could come home any time.”

  “I know, and I’m glad to know that. I’d feel a lot better if we held off on that, sweetheart.”

  “I just wanted you to know.”

  “Thank you. Take care of yourself in that big deep ocean.” That big deep ocean and its ancient god that erased all of the land that it could.

  “Oh, father, I will. You take care of yourself.”

  After I dropped the link, I took a sip of the tea, but it was cold and flat. Cold and unsatisfying, like a lot of things recently. Like the Construct, the Power Paradigms, and links with my daughter that weren’t quite what either of us needed or wanted.

  With a look at the adiamante that lay wrapped in its niellen depths on the table, I stood and walked to the sink where I dumped out the cold tea and washed both pot and cup and racked them. Then I stepped back to the wide window and studied the view to the west.

  In the clearing air over the valley immediately west of the house soared a winged shape. I studied the eagle until I was sure it was Swift-Fall-Hunter, and a smile came to my lips.

  Then I headed out to start up the flitter and to fly north to the chaos that awaited.

  XXIV

  The sun was struggling through the parting clouds, and with the snow, had turned the flitter trip up the valley to Parwon into a flight over sparkling white, white so fresh that I could see no tracks, not even in the valleys. The only signs of motion were the hot mists simmering up off the scattered meleysen groves like silver fog rising into the light.

  A light layer of fog rose from the locial landing strip as I turned the flitter onto its final approach. I got a couple of warning blips from the traffic control system, and that showed how distracted I was. Most of the time, I could set the flitter down without even a flicker.

  “Coordinator?”

  Keiko’s netcall meant more trouble, but that wasn’t unexpected. It was close to mid-morning, and I’d run and linked with Yslena, and all that time the cybs and the Construct had been battling each other.

  “Yes, Keiko?” I began to button up the flitter.

  “There’s a ground shuttle awaiting you.”

  “Why?”

  “Kaluna is out here, and he’s angry.”

  Kaluna? Who was Kaluna?

  “The draff—his mate was the one the cyb attacked,” Keiko prompted.

  “And he saw the same cyb, right?”

  “How did you guess?” My assistant’s question was barely that, more of a dark acknowledgment.

  “I’m naturally brilliant.”

  That brought a snort from my aide.

  I walked across the damp permacrete toward the waiting groundshuttle. Dvorrak gestured through the open door, and I waved back. “What else has happened?” I asked Keiko on the net. “I’m not here at the crack of dawn—”

  “You are never here at the crack of dawn. I am. That’s so you don’t have to be. That’s also why you already owe a lifetime of compensatory service.”

  “Don’t remind me.” I stepped into the shuttle and sat down. “I’m in the groundshuttle, and we’re headed your way.”

  Dvorrak closed the door, and we whined toward the admin building.

  I hadn’t even reached Keiko when Kaluna bounded across the carpet toward me.

  “That same cyb—he still is here.”

  I forced a smile. “Then we will have to remove him.” I paused. “Did Nislaki ever receive any apology?”

  “Apology? We heard nothing.”

  I nodded and pulsed Keiko on the net. “Keiko … I’ll need a restraint squad. Say ten. Black uniforms with stunners and slugthrowers. Have them meet me at the statue in a quarter stan. Then a magshuttle. Is Lieza available? If not, someone else with that level of experience.”

  “Is that all?”

  “The shuttle should be float-tied right above the open space south of the residential bloc. That way, the marcyb is stunned, webbed—”

  “You want a web-restraint unit, too?”

  “Sorry. Yes. Anyway, I want that poor construct webbed and enroute straight to their flagship. I’ll have to do it.”

  Kaluna’s eyes flicked back and forth between us—between two silent demis in black.

  “Next, we’ll need to know which marcyb and where he is.” I turned to Kaluna. “Would you recognize this marcyb? They all look similar.”

  “Yes.” Kaluna’s voice was hard and certain.

  I went back on the net. “Crucelle?”

  “He’s out, Ecktor,” answered Arielle.

  “Do you have images of the marcybs in the residence bloc? Ones you can put on the mechcyb system?”

  “Of course. When do you need them? Is this about that assault?”

  “How did you guess? You calculated?”

  “It wasn’t hard,” she pulsed back dryly, the storm currents swirling around her even over the net. “We’ve tentatively identified him, and I’ll put that i
mage first. Give us a few minutes.”

  “Keiko,” I said aloud. “In a few minutes, Arielle will have the images on the console system. Have Kaluna identify him, and then make up a profile, such as you can, for me.”

  I looked directly at Kaluna. “I promised I would take care of this, and I will. It will take a few minutes to organize.”

  “A few minutes?” he asked.

  “You have to identify the cyb, and I have to gather the restraint squad and the necessary equipment.” I also had to put on the silly black cloak and dig out some armament—a stunner and a knife. The cybs knew I could use the knife. I gestured for Kaluna to join Keiko before her console while I went back into my office to change my heavy jacket for the damned cloak.

  “Ecktor!” Locatio whined in on the uppernet before I even reached my desk.

  I needed not to talk to him in the worst way, but when you’re caught on net, there’s not much escape.

  “You’ll have to make it quick. I’m in the middle of another mess here.”

  “You were right. They sent two agents—one into the power complex, the other into admin.”

  “Did you get them?”

  “Without a casualty—except them, of course.”

  “Good. Make sure no one else knows. Destroy everything, and act as if nothing happened. They’ll try again within twenty-four hours, probably with much larger teams. Be ready.”

  “Is that all?”

  “I’ll link with you later and explain this mess. You might also have an incident where a cyb assaults a draff, unless it’s happened already.”

  “Not yet.”

  “If it does, let me or Keiko know. Request an apology from the cyb officer in charge and request immediate evacuation of the guilty cyb. Then wait until you link with me. All right? I’ve got to move.”

  I broke the connection, pulled on the cloak, and checked the knife and stunner that had been laid out on the desk for me.

  The net wavered as the magshuttle arrived, and I took a deep breath and stepped out of the office.