“I can’t go?”
“We need you here.”
“Oh. And I have to watch Cricket.”
“Thank you.” He fell silent and was glad when she did the same. On the way, he spotted a tharp and pulled his stunner, stunning it long enough to pick it up and break its neck. Cricket’s dinner.
He gave the dead animal to her in the kitchen, raw. He had never done that before, but she had been through so much. While she crunched bones, he made the rest of her dinner and set some soup heating for himself and Gerry.
Three hours later Charlie woke to find Gerry passed out in the big chair, Cricket curled on the floor between them. He made a cup of stim and downed it as fast as he could, feeling the warm drink sink into his body. Careful not to wake the sleeping dispatcher, he took Cricket out for a brief walk under the fading starlight of early morning. The air smelled of damp leaves and the early rot of fall.
When he took her back, the tongat gave him a baleful look, obviously aware that he was leaving her.
He squatted and looked into her eyes. “I have no idea how you always know my intentions.”
If she did, she didn’t answer. She curled up close to Gerry and regarded him in silence.
He felt as guilty leaving her as he had felt leaving Manny.
By the time he arrived at the cave, the full light of morning bathed the opening. Yi stood at the edge, waving him in at an angle to help him miss the skimmer that was already parked there. After he landed, Yi threw open the door and said, “Thank you! So happy to see you.”
“And I you. I just left your other self. He was quite helpful.”
“Good.”
Charlie disembarked and found Nona and the others waiting in a scrap of sun. Nona’s face was turned toward the light, her eyes closed. When she heard him, she looked over at him. Her face looked shocked and pale. He took her in his arms. “It will be all right.”
“How can you know?”
He said the same thing he and Manny had been saying to each other. “We’ll rebuild.”
“Rebuild what?”
“The city.”
She pushed away from him a little. “What happened?”
He stopped and stared at her. “You don’t know?”
“I’ve been in a cave for two days.”
Did she know about any of it? “There was . . . almost a war. The Next stopped it, but they destroyed Manna Springs and almost every ship in orbit around the planet.”
She looked at him, a growing horror on her face, a shock adding to whatever had given her that look in the first place. “What about . . . the people? The townspeople? Manny and Amanda and . . .”
Neil had come up, and Chrystal, and a woman he hadn’t seen before, clearly a Next giving her nod to humanity in the form of shocking beauty. He addressed them all. “Almost everyone is safe. Nothing happened on the farms, just in town. We got almost everyone out.”
“Almost?”
“We haven’t got a final count. It could be that everyone is safe.” He glanced at Yi, who stood close, clearly listening to the conversation. “Yi saved most of us. Yi Two. It was pretty amazing.”
The soulbot looked surprised.
“You did save us,” he said. “I know you talked because you asked for supplies.”
Yi still looked slightly surprised. “I simply sent a message. We haven’t been physically close enough to know what the other is doing. Did you bring everything we asked for?”
“I think so. I didn’t pack the skimmer. I think maybe your family did. Yi Two brought it to me. We were pretty busy.” He turned his attention back to Nona. “There was a fire in town. No one’s gone back there yet, but I suspect your embassy is burned. I think . . . I think everything burned.”
“Oh.” Nona sat down on a rock and stared out over the valley below them. Neil sat beside her. Both looked subdued.
Birds called, a pair of raptors circling on an updraft. They were probably on their way to find a cool place to sleep through the heat of the day. Charlie held his hand out to the woman he hadn’t met. “I’m Charlie.”
She smiled. “Colorima. We’ve met.”
“Of course.” It made him shiver, the way they moved between bodies as if they were outfits. She must have known about the fight last night.
He didn’t get chance to ask her. She turned to address the others. “There’s nothing we can do for the people of Lym from here. Our people are doing what they can, and we think the threat is over now.”
Nona raised a hand, looking for a moment like a schoolgirl.
The Colorima nodded at her.
“Did you have to kill all of the spaceships? They couldn’t have all been attacking.” Nona took a deep breath, shaking a little. The color had drained from her face. “Some of my own cargo ships were probably up there.”
“The only way to protect Lym was to be decisive. After all, we did not force our hand.”
Silence fell. Charlie sat beside Nona, one arm around her waist. She felt stiff.
The Colorima spoke softly, “Yi, Chrystal, help me unload.”
Charlie glanced at her, but she waved his implicit offer of help away. Of course they didn’t need him. He swallowed and stayed beside Nona. After a while, Neil looked over at Charlie. “The fact that the Colorima is right doesn’t make their superior abilities any easier to accept. It might even make it harder.”
Charlie nodded and steepled his fingers, still watching the birds. “I have become accustomed to knowing we’re weak.”
“That’s not the message they want you to get from this,” Neil said.
“What is it?”
“That you are protected. They saved you, saved us. Ever since they came back they could have killed us all, or they could have ignored us all, but they haven’t done either. Nor have they tried to change us, except for cases like me where I’ve asked to be changed.”
“You didn’t see what the sky looked like on fire with burning ships. It happened at night, and so fast it must have been easy. It was bubbles of fire, each one tens to hundreds of lives, all of them going in pain and shock, if quickly.”
Neil’s eyes rounded. “I wish I had seen it.”
“I wish I hadn’t seen it.”
“For the sake of history,” Neil elaborated.
“And you still want to be one of them?” Charlie asked.
“Of course. From the beginning of the age of exploration, it’s always been smart to be aligned with the stronger force. The Shining Revolution chose not to do that, and look at them now. The Next can’t have left more than fragments alive, at least anywhere near Lym.”
“I don’t think it’s that black and white,” Nona observed. “You can’t always let strength win.”
Charlie tightened his grip on her, a way to agree without contradicting the Historian.
Neil stood and stretched. “This place is so beautiful. I hope I have time to explore all of Lym.” He turned back toward the cave, watching the soulbots finish unloading. “In the meantime, we have our own task. We might as well get to it.”
“What?” Charlie asked.
The Colorima must have heard Neil. She came up beside him. “We have found . . . some things we want to show you. Some truths. It’s important that we document them. We want to lay out our thinking for you, since you are influential here. We want to make sure we’re telling the story in a way that other humans will understand.”
“Okay. I’m ready.”
“We’re waiting a few more minutes.”
For what? He went back to watching the skies. He was the first one to spot the third skimmer. Even though there was less room now by far, the pilot landed it smoothly. Jason hopped out and turned to help Amfi and Losianna out of the back seat.
It took a few hours to get everyone to the bottom of the elevator. The humans used that time to catch up. Once they were all down, Neil led them to the viewing wall.
“This is all fascinating,” Charlie told Neil. “But isn’t it even more interesting
that they put a window wall here? Did they bring people down to watch whatever they were doing?”
Neil frowned. “That’s one of the best questions I’ve heard.”
Amfi looked around at the lightly glowing walls of the cavern, walking from one to another, sliding her palms across them. “Davis found a room like this once,” she said. “He took me and we explored it, including cutting at the walls and trying to change them. They resisted everything we tried. They’re not natural stone. They’re some kind of nano.”
Neil looked approving. “At first I thought it was a paint. But I think they’re fabbed like the great Wall of Nexity.”
The Colorima shook her head. “A little. But we wouldn’t know how to make this. These are as new to us as they are to you.”
Her candor surprised Charlie.
“Let’s tour,” she said. “I want to walk you through a few rooms.” She squatted by Amfi, so she had to look slightly up into the old woman’s face. “Would you like me to carry you?”
Amfi glared at her. “I can walk.”
Losianna stayed near Jason, who had clearly been here before, as he pointed out features to Losianna from time to time, and once in a while he talked to the whole group. After a time, he held his hand out to Amfi and she took it, leaning on him a little. She had lost most of the limp, but for her, there was no way to lose being old. At one point, Nona leaned over close to Charlie and whispered in this ear. “Is Amfi all right? I feel sorry for her.”
“She chose to grow old. She wouldn’t want you to feel sorry for her.”
“My parents died of old age.”
“I remember. You brought them here. That’s how I first met you.” Absurdly, Charlie felt grateful to her parents for dying. “Amfi wouldn’t want your pity.”
“I suppose not.”
An hour later, even his feet ached.
Right after they turned around to start the long journey back, Amfi went to Jason and spoke in his ear. He picked the old woman up easily, and carried her like a child.
So they traipsed back into the cave by the viewing wall, he and Nona and Neil and Losianna trailing Jason, Amfi’s legs swinging gently as Jason walked.
Jason put the old woman down and sat so that he could be a backrest for her.
The Colorima directed the others to join them, so that they made a loose circle on the floor. She passed out food and water, and everyone fell quiet while the humans ate and drank. The entire time, Charlie felt the Colorima’s curious regard even though she didn’t look at him directly. When he felt full, he asked her, “Well? What did I see?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think it was built by humans, although this part—” he waved a hand around “—obviously has had humans in it. It looks old, too. Older by far than the parts that the gleaners live in.”
Amfi nodded.
“We can’t date it for sure,” Yi said, “but we think it predates the age of exploration. Come to the window.”
They did, all five humans standing at the window and the soulbots arranged behind them, as if they no longer needed a visual. Yi continued. “My first hypothesis was that this is where we were created. Not like we are now, of course, not so long ago. But that this might have been the lab where the first human minds were uploaded into what must have been simpler bodies.”
Charlie saw how it could work that way. Rows of beds, machines. Lots of room between the beds: surgery or nursing or visits or something had happened for each of the now long-dead patients. “You have a different hypothesis now?”
“You had a simple question,” the Colorima said. “Why was this place a window wall? That was one of the first things you asked.”
Neil tapped on the glass. “One idea is that it’s a crèche. Whoever built it needed to keep it sterile, but they also wanted people to see in. Maybe students, maybe families, maybe inspectors.”
“That makes sense,” Amfi said. “But how do you tell who or for what?”
“Turn around,” the Colorima said.
The robots had stepped back, creating space between them and the humans. A display shimmered in the air. The image was familiar. “Weren’t we just there?” Losianna asked.
She was right. They’d been in this room. The one with many small boxes, which could have been incubators for babies, except they varied so much in size.
The Colorima looked at him. “How did you first begin to rebuild here after the waves of destruction?”
Nona took his hand, and the look she gave him made him apprehensive. She expected him to need her support.
He took a deep breath and did his best to answer. “Well, I wasn’t here then. Some species survived, of course. Grasses and some trees, some birds, some fish, a lot of algae and mosses and insects. We had to engineer some of these to reset the atmosphere a little. That took years, and mostly people lived on the stations then, and just came down here to work. After that, we had to reintroduce key species one at a time. That took lifetimes. Now we mostly monitor and count.”
“But you don’t introduce new species anymore?” the Colorima asked.
“No. Not at all. We just work to keep the balance.” He thought about it for a while. “Some people wanted to, when I was younger. They wanted to irrigate Entare and plant grasses, to turn it into a wetter ecosystem. But eventually the rangers voted to leave it dry. Deserts are good for the planet.”
Neil went up to the image and pointed out features. “We think these boxes would have worked to create mammals and maybe even birds. We thought we’d find someplace good for marine mammals, but then we decided a cave didn’t make sense for that. There must be a better place. I’m beginning to think it’s under Neville.”
Charlie felt slow; he wasn’t quite keeping up. “So you think the ecosystem was destroyed and rebuilt once before? That our ancestors had to do the same thing we did?”
“No.”
All of the robots were watching him. Nona squeezed his hand tighter.
Losianna said, “No. Of course not. These are fake walls. All through the mountain. We know the top is rock. We know we have earthquakes and a living planet. But we also know we have designed places like Ice Fall Valley. And this place, this place was clearly designed, a long time ago.”
The Colorima had shifted her attention to Losianna.
He saw where the slender gleaner girl was going. The word escaped his lips. “No.”
“It’s all built.” Losianna’s face filled with wonder. “The whole damned thing was built for us.”
He looked from Neil to Nona, waiting for one of them to contradict Losianna.
Everything he had done here was to save the natural order of things. That was what his family lived for. Everyone on the planet lived for it. Restoration. Re-wilding. Saving. Conservation.
Nona nodded, her eyes on him.
There was no place to hide. He couldn’t bury his face in Cricket’s fur and hope for a different answer. “How sure are you?”
“We found evidence out there,” the Colorima said. “Symbols that we believe were planted for us. Things that no one could find until we developed space travel and learned to live way out where you exiled us. They were like breadcrumbs that led us back to Lym.”
He stared at the beautiful robot, unwilling to believe she could be right. But two years ago he wouldn’t have believed she existed. And now?
Now his whole world had gone sideways.
What did it mean if Lym wasn’t natural?
Did it change how he felt?
The cave felt constricting, the perfect walls like a trap. “Can we go back to the surface? Please?”
Yi stood up. “I’ll take you.”
Nona brushed dust from her pants. “I’ll go, too.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY
CHARLIE
They had been deep in the mountain for a whole day. Charlie and Nona sat side by side on a rock near the edge of the cave, looking out over the dark folds of the mountains at night. Stars filled
the sky, an arm of the galaxy visible as a brighter, deeper field.
“I always knew we colonized Lym,” he said. “Legend has it that we came in a great starship from some other place.”
Her answer was soft, as if she were speaking to a child. “That is what happened.”
The prey of a night-hunter screamed from a nearby ridge. “We were made here. The animals, too. Everything.”
“Even a colony ship might have required that. Unless it was a generation ship like the Creative Fire.”
A puff of night wind rustled the trees.
“The DNA—our DNA—it came from somewhere. There has to have been a beginning.”
She was right. It simply felt . . . so big. As if someone had changed the world so the sun rose in the west and set in the east. She let him be still with it all for a long time, touching him lightly from time to time but holding her silence.
A rare thing, people who could hold silences.
He spotted the lights of one or two ships where there had been a hundred before. He supposed that even a ship or two could be a good sign. Perhaps it was help coming, or simply someone who had been far enough away to be safe from the firestorm.
Nona held his hand and leaned her cheek against his shoulder.
“Will you stay with me?” he asked.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“Of course I will.”
“I mean forever. Will you live your whole life with me? As a person, a human. Will you die with me as well? Raise my children?”
She wound her fingers through his. “Of course I will.”
Maybe nothing was really permanent. No idea, no place, no thing you believed. But he could work to make this relationship as permanent as possible.
PART FIVE
THE SPEAR OF LIGHT
CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE
YI
Spear of Light Page 41
