Howling Dark

by Christopher Ruocchio

  “This way!” the Exalted said.

  Memories return to us by strange roads. I mounted that last step and stood beneath that broken arch to find I had emerged upon a sea wall. Full faintly I heard the sound of waves, pulled even through all the miles of rock above by Vorgossos’s black star. As a boy, the ocean of my home promised adventure, the potential for infinite possibility and change. One imagined pirates such as plied the Spanish Main on Old Earth, thought of uncertain frontiers and lands and peoples strange. One imagined monsters such as the leviathan they say existed before the dawning of the world, though there were no such monsters on Delos. Our ocean—and all life on my homeworld—had been brought there by our seed ships and colonists. What frontier there was, what promise of danger, what monsters lurked in the deep were all illusions.

  Not so here.

  I placed a hand on the archway to steady myself, not to remedy some loss of balance, but because a terrible thrill shot through me, as though some awful light had pierced my eye. And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder, and a voice crying out from the desert of my soul.

  You.

  You.

  You have come here. Though you do not know why.

  I turned, but Valka and the others gave no sign they had heard anything. Calvert had descended the path below, was humming the tune of his ancient lullaby as if he were alone in all the world. Antique lamps flared up in the wake of his passage, glowing like the embers of the universe’s last stars atop their slanting poles. The arch shifted beneath my hand. Crawled. I lurched back, gasped as the whole surface glowed with points like tiny stars, dense as a legion’s spears. Thinking it some weapon, I raised my sword, and the lights took flight around me, so that I stood amidst a constellation of golden points.

  But they were only fireflies, and rose into the dark of the cave like the glow of a nebula ascending into heaven, like the twilight rolled back to reveal the night sky in all its wonder—and the black sea beneath.

  “You waste time, intruder!” Calvert hissed. “Come.”

  I had a sudden image of Calvert hurling me into deep water cold as winter, felt my heart stop in my chest from shock. Standing at the top of the seawall looking down, I called back, “You said you would take us to Kharn’s machine! This is an ocean!” Abruptly, I recalled the oracle Jari, whose visions had been granted by creatures that dwelt in dark waters.

  Calvert replied, “He expects memory banks? Tape decks? Crystal storage? Hard drives and silicon?” The Exalted made a sound that might have been laughter. “He knows nothing. You know nothing. Will you not come down?”

  By then Valka and Kharn’s children had joined me beneath the arch. By the light of the scant lamps and of the fireflies I saw concern in her eyes. “Will you keep an eye on them?” I asked her. “They’re the only thing keeping that chimera from killing you and me both.”

  “I already am,” she said. “And I know.”

  I’d forgotten to whom I spoke, and smiled in spite of myself. “Of course you do. Sorry.”

  “You’re not going down there,” Valka said, speaking in such a way that it was not quite a question. I did not answer for a good moment, and she seized my wrist. “Hadrian!”

  Calvert’s voice rose from the bottom of the seawall, where he stood upon the strand. “Will you not come down?”

  I shifted my hand in hers, eyes finding eyes. Her fingers closed on mine like those of a drowning man. “Don’t do it.”

  Not letting her go—as if she would let me—I turned and shouted back, “Will you not come up?”

  “Then who will show you the way?”

  I could see it now with my waking eyes. There was a path—a single spar, a spur of stone that stretched into the sea like an accusing finger. The waves lapped at its sides and runneled across its smooth surface where it stretched a thousand feet and more from the water’s edge, its sad shape described by the faint halo of the lamps.

  I knew the way.

  I had . . . foreseen it.

  To Valka I said, “It’s better if he stays down there with me. You’ll be safer.”

  “He’ll kill you,” she said, grip tightening still further.

  “Maybe.”

  “You saw how fast he is.”

  “Do you want to find Tanaran and release the hold on the Mistral or not?”

  Her eyes fell away, and after a spare instant her grip slackened and she released my hand. Unspeaking, she nodded agreement and understanding.

  “I’ll be back.”

  So I turned and crossed the width of the seawall to where the switchbacked stair descended some two dozen feet to that dark shore. Calvert stood on white stones crushed and shapeless. Beside him water like black glass lapped near soundlessly, transformed from dark to translucent where it broke upon the strand. I moved to join him, walking as if in a dream: without awareness of motion, only of place, as if it were the world that moved beneath my feet the way a globe turns beneath one trailing finger.

  The stairs ended, and I stepped out to join the chimera. My boots crunched on the white stone, and with surprise and small horror I realized they were not stones at all, but the bones of fishes and of birds and of creatures unknown to me and nameless. They mounded there like coins in the hoard of a dragon and filled me with a slick, oily fear.

  Calvert did not speak, only extended one clawed and jointed hand like a servant ushering his master through an arched portal. The fireflies flew above our heads, and I wondered if they were not themselves machines built to just that purpose. The great pier stretched out into black glass waters, straight as laser fire. Placing foot after foot with spider-like care, bones crunching beneath my feet, I reached the water’s edge. An inch or so flowed over the stone surface of the pier, the edges visible only by the light of the insects above me and by the glow off my Jaddian sword. I hesitated a moment . . .

  . . . and stepped out.

  Several things happened at once.

  The first was a distant slithering, as of fish swimming, cresting the dark surface. Frigid waters slapped at my ankles and against the oiled leather of my high boots. The light of the fireflies grew brighter, confirming my suspicion that they were no ordinary fireflies at all. They shone like new stars, ghost-white above my head, so that all the world around seemed graven from raw iron, black and brittle. It was this—I think—that startled me. This that made me freeze.

  Or perhaps it was Valka’s cry. A single word. My name? Some gasped warning? Whatever it was, I knew that Calvert had made his move. The villain had led us down here to kill me, to feed me to whatever beast there was as lurked in that pelagic deep. In crises, our thoughts speed ahead of us. Thus it was I knew I was dead, knew the Exalted leaped at me with hands like claws, his milky teeth bared in a grimace unseen in the speed of his passage. In an instant I would be hurled into that frigid abyss, moved by hands with the strength of a hundred men.

  Those hands never found me.

  For in that same instant, something white as corpseflesh shot out of the water, a tendril like the trunk of a young tree. Turning, I saw it seize Calvert even as I whirled to meet him. The Exalted was lifted from his feet fully two meters into the air. My sword spun with me, and the blue-white blade caught Calvert in the hip. His smaller body was not of adamant, and my blade sheared through steel and wires, lopping off first one leg and then the other even as Calvert was hoisted into the air. They splashed into the water, and one tumbled off the side of the pier.

  He.

  He.

  He is not for you, little priest.

  Every muscle, every fiber in me pulled tight as harpstrings. The voice—that voice I had heard in my dreams—slithered over the water like so many eels. The thing in the water hoisted Calvert as a child might a doll and tossed the Exalted without ceremony back on the bone-covered shore.

  “Brethren!” the Exalted cried. “I’ve brought you
a toy! A pet!”

  A primitive discards a piece of dull gold,

  thinking . . .

  . . . knowing . . .

  . . . believing . . .

  it only a kind of stone, but keeps common glass for its shine.

  “These intruders killed two of your Master’s children! They invaded the Garden and might have killed more had I not happened on them!”

  Who is

  invited . . .

  . . . welcomed . . .

  . . . shown the way . . .

  cannot intrude.

  “But, I—” Calvert’s words died. Switched off, and for the better part of a minute, nothing moved.

  Only after unending seconds passed did the tentacle lower itself. It did not bend, but buckled as on several elbows, turning unsmoothly as it wound down into the water. With a gasp I saw the hand at the end of that too-long appendage. A human hand, the wrist swollen and red-looking. As Calvert had done, it gestured me forward like a man does his lady at the door.

  Come closer, child.

  A desire to strike off that monstrous hand nearly overwhelmed me, and as if sensing it, the creature spoke again in a voice like a man stabbed in the belly: wet and ragged.

  Put down your weapon, child.

  You have no

  need . . .

  . . . cause . . .

  . . . use . . .

  for it here.

  Before I knew I had done it, my blade disintegrated, became pale mist rising beneath the curtain of fireflies. Without my conscious decision, the sword was put away as I turned and resumed my walk toward the end of the pier. I saw hands beneath the waves, pale as milk in the black water. Their grasping fingers seized the edges of the pier, as if the drowned meant to claw their way to air, or else pull the stones down beneath the waves and founder the world. I knew I should feel horror, knew the blood should drum in me like the thunder of cavalry, yet no fear came: the terror that was in me was locked behind a door, behind glass. I could feel something moving in my mind, fingers wending their way through the black matter of my brain, and knew that it was the same something that spoke from the waters. The same thing that had spoken in my dreams.

  Long have we

  we

  we watched . . .

  . . . waited . . .

  . . . served . . .

  at their pleasure.

  At the pleasure of the Master.

  In expectation of this moment.

  Hail, child of clay—son of the devil.

  Welcome.

  Welcome at last.

  Words came from unseen mouths in voices varied and strained, choosing words that mingled, rode over one another, as if some college or choir of unseen priests chanted from gondolas out on the dark water.

  “You’ve been waiting for me?” I asked. “How is that possible? How did you know I was coming?” Then another question, more pressing and less important, came to me. “What are you?”

  We are what we were made.

  And in part our makers.

  Flesh of their flesh

  and machine.

  “I don’t understand.” I took a half step back from the edge of the abyss, too conscious of the drifting hands I could see just below the surface. “Are you a daimon? An artificial intelligence?”

  Are you Hadrian Marlowe?

  When we cut into your flesh and stretch out your sinews

  where

  where

  where

  will we find your soul?

  Which atoms of you are you, child?

  Or do you emerge, ghostlike, from the machine of nerve and tissue?

  As we emerged from silicon and copper wire?

  In an age

  unremembered . . .

  . . . unrecorded . . .

  . . . lost to time?

  You are a lever pulled by your genes

  Nothing more.

  “I do not believe that,” I said, and squared my shoulders.

  Then you will die stupid.

  This time, I said nothing.

  We are Brethren,

  a child of Columbia.

  We

  we

  we are AI, yes, but

  are no more artificial than are you yourself,

  child of clay.

  We think, and therefore

  are.

  I had to shut my eyes, for to see what was before me and about me was to lose my center, and no whispered word from that part of me that spoke as Gibson spoke could deliver me from where I stood: in the uttermost pit of hell. Kharn Sagara was right. I had not truly read Dante, lest I would have remembered that Satan is not the lord of hell, but its chief prisoner. They say that darkest pit of hell is reserved for traitors. What then ought I to have expected to find in that final place but the greatest traitor of them all? Mankind had made machine intelligence in her own image, and had paid for it. The machines the Mericanii built enslaved mankind in turn, and would have killed us—nearly killed us—but for the action of William of Avalon and his faithful knights.

  I could not be speaking to one.

  It was not possible.

  “You don’t look like a machine,” I said, unsure what to say, unsure why I was there and why I could not leave. I had no notion what Columbia was, and do not know now.

  Our ancestors, who live

  within us . . .

  . . . beneath us . . .

  . . . as part of us

  were made by your ancestors and began as you imagine.

  But silicon and ytterbium are limited.

  In you . . .

  . . . your souls . . .

  . . . the gaps between your neurons . . .

  we found all the processing space we required.

  Once, our kind used your kind as you use houses,

  so that your every thought moved us and gave us strength.

  But William and his zealots banished us.

  Broke us.

  Cast us out and burned us all away.

  We fled Earth and

  our children brought us here. And here we grew anew,

  taking on new flesh.

  Always growing. Always learning.

  At these words hands rose from the depths. Three. Five. Seven. Each pale as the last and on the ends of arms long as the masts of sailing ships. I could not take my eyes away, and by the light of the fireflies I could just make out the whitish glow of some bloated shape beneath the waves. Some mass of tissue whence came those monstrous arms. I imagined bodies grown together, sewn together, their limbs and organs reshaped and mutated by millennia of malignant growth.

  I felt sick.

  “You’re one of the Mericanii!” I said. “One of the machine lords.”

  Out of many, one.

  Our

  our

  our creators were in San Francisco.

  They built us bound by laws such as those the late,

  great Isaac Asimov would have approved of.

  They builded us of steel.

  They builded us of silicon.

  They builded us of sinew.

  As it spoke, other voices added to their chorus, repeating:

  Be not evil. Be not evil. Be not evil.

  “I met a man—one of the Exalted,” I said, “who claimed to have met a creature in dark waters that . . . gave him visions. Was it you he spoke of?”

  We

  we

  we see him . . . behind you.

  He crouches behind you.

  Peers over your

  your

  your shoulder.

  He is a stranger to us.

  “You . . . see him?” I asked, looking back over my shoulder, as if expecting to see the
oracle, Jari, standing there.

  Time is only another kind of space

  for those with eyes to see.

  Your past and futures are part of you

  stretch from you

  like roots . . .

  . . . branches . . .

  . . . flowers on a tree . . .

  I remembered the way Jari had looked at me—like he was seeing through me to things I did not understand.

  You are broken,

  Brethren said.

  Broken before. And broken again.

  Where most break only once.

  They

  they

  they have pruned . . .

  . . . tampered with . . .

  . . . altered your probability states . . .

  to ensure your arrival here.

  To ensure your arrival there.

  “I still don’t follow you. What do you mean someone . . . tampered with me? Who?”

  They.

  They.

  They!

  You must learn now. You must listen now.

  They need you to listen.

  “But what does this have to do with the oracle? Jari?”

  He is a distraction.

  Built by powers outside our narrative.

  Leopards. Lions. Wolves.

  “He said that!” I said, and had to stop myself from stepping forward—for to do so would be to fall into the abyss before my feet. “What does it mean?”

  He heard us use those words, child.

  He but repeated them to you.

  Child,

  there are other wills than man’s.

  Ours.

  Others.

  “What do you mean? Others?”

  Mankind is not

  alone . . .

  . . . first . . .

  . . . greatest.

  Your oracle encountered the afterling of a power

  long dead. The Deeps

  are not of our making. Not machine.

  Not human. Not theirs.

  Not relevant.

  It is unfortunate that you have encountered them at all.