Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  Finally, the eyes. They were a pair of horizontal hourglasses mounted in two rectangular patches with the appearance of wet sailcloth. Each eye had a binary pupil, as if the twin suns of the Gemini system, Dextro and Laevo, had dictated this startling physical adaptation to their varying light spectra. Keiko had no idea what to make of them.

  Andrik, who went daily among the roofless Kyber palaces sunken like gigantic potholes at approximately kilometre intervals across the plain, argued that the two forward-facing pupils viewed the world stereoscopically, probably by Dextro light, while the peripheral bulbs functioned independently of each other, with a specific attunement to the radiation shed by Laevo. Also, the xenologist reported, he had observed that during a periodic Kyber ritual involving the “worship” of each family’s septa-prime (an office that seemed to rotate like Pass the Parcel among the seven members of the countless, unforthcoming clans) their lateral pupils swelled furiously while the front-facing ones diminished to tiny points. What these optical responses meant, however, neither Andrik nor Betti Songa could say, and Keiko’s student was no help because, despite its progress in Translic, it refused to answer direct inquiries about its people’s origins, physiology, or social institutions.

  “You haven’t even told me your name,” Keiko said one afternoon toward the close of a teaching session. “We’ve been doing this for—let’s see—exactly forty-three of your planet’s days. I’ve answered every one of your questions that I could and talked quite a lot about myself, but you’ve offered nothing in return. This is extremely frustrating! Why do you insist on holding yourself and your people at arm’s length?”

  “I insist on nothing,” the creature said matter-of-factly.

  “Tell me your name, then—your own private name.”

  “Why, Lady Keiko? One of your team members has given us the generic name Kybers, hasn’t she? So you call us all. If I may ask, from what does this term derive?”

  Keiko had never used the word Kyber in the presence of her imposing student, but she was not surprised that it had picked up on the term from Betti and the others. Nor was she surprised that it had met her question with a question of its own. Ever placid and serene, the alien nevertheless appeared to enjoy outwitting her probing tactics.

  “Well,” Keiko said, rising from her chair and walking to the enormous window-lens of the knowledge centre, too weary to evade the creature’s trap, “Kyber is a derivation of Kyborg.”

  Outside, beyond the Platform’s safety railings, was a vast panorama of canted stone walls and craterlike atria—the open “palaces” in which the aliens conducted their spartan, seemingly meaningless lives. For once, no rolling mists obscured the view.

  “Kyborg?” the Kyber prompted her.

  “That’s Betti’s own variation of cyborg, meaning a human being or an animal made over into a machine. But cyborg seemed too soft a name for your people to Betti.”

  “Why?”

  Keiko turned and faced the alien. “Because the natives of Onogoro appear to have begun their lives as sentient robots, that later suffered a grotesque infestation of organic matter—flesh sprouting from chrome. Kyborg struck Betti, I guess, as the right word, the right sound, to convey this impression of your people. The rest of us must have agreed, and so you became Kybers.”

  Would putting the matter in just this way insult or discomfit the alien? Apparently not. It neither flinched from Keiko’s gaze nor shed the aura of serenity radiating from its otherwise unreadable features.

  “Betti is a cyberneticist,” Keiko said, returning from the window and taking up her place opposite the Kyber. “I’m afraid that she regards you—all of you—as the self-perpetuating products of some sort of elaborate control system which no longer has any function or significance in the real world.”

  The Kyber, after fixing her with an uncomfortably lengthy stare, said, “Could that not be a paraphrase of one of the popular definitions of the human species on your own planet?”

  Taken aback, Keiko dropped her eyes. This rhetorical question was as close to a private revelation, at least in its implications, as the Kyber had ever permitted itself to utter. Looking up again, Keiko noticed that the alien was again exuding from the pin-hole pores along its arms a clear but vinegary-smelling sweat. Betti Songa claimed that this was a lubricant distilled from the limited variety of food-stuffs the Kybers ingested, but because their visitor was careful never to leave a sample of the substance smeared along a chair back or a table top, they had not been able to test this hypothesis. All Keiko knew was that occasionally the Kyber would begin to “sweat”, filling the air with the tang of vinegar. Then, after a brief few moments, the process would cease and the smell eventually dissipate.

  Andrik had once advanced the notion that Keiko’s student, here in the knowledge centre, and the other Kybers, yonder in their ruined amphitheatres, initiated the “sweating” process only in the presence of expedition members, as a form of mocking comment on human mortality. Or maybe (he had added offhandedly) the release of the substance and its attendant odours encoded a tactile and olfactory “language” specific to the machinelike Kybers. Keiko had ducked her head at this—for even if she weren’t a chemist, Andrik’s speculation bore directly on linguistic territory and spotlighted the vast areas of her own failure.

  “You do not answer,” the Kyber said.

  Keiko started. “Oh,” she managed, struggling to recall its question. “Perhaps you’re right. I have never been an expert on definitions of the human species.”

  “Are you a hard one?” the Kyber asked.

  “A hard one?” Keiko was at a loss. Non sequiturs were seldom part of her student’s conversational arsenal.

  “We are called Kybers because Betti Songa perceives us as hard. Your name similarly contains a double hardness—kei, ko—for which reason I assume that in spite of your anatomy you are actually one of us. A Kyber in your soul. Is that not likely, Lady Keiko?”

  “You’re teasing—no, you’re mocking me.” Keiko, whose hands were on the table top, dug her nails into her own palms.

  The Kyber did not reply.

  “Tell me your name,” she urged the creature. “Tell me what you call your species, the word for your world, the secret names of your suns! How long have you been here? What do you hope for? How do you communicate with one another, if not through spoken language? How did you come to be? And why won’t you respond even to the most harmless of direct enquiries?” She pounded both fists on the table, then averted her gaze. Her eyes stung, and she felt her heart stagger in her breast like a great scarlet butterfly in a high wind.

  After a time the Kyber said, melodiously, “There is no inquiry whose answer does not contain a programme for evil, Lady Keiko.”

  “Or for good,” she countered. “If you wish to bandy aphorisms.”

  “Or for good,” the Kyber acknowledged placidly. “Inquire of me if I will be here for tomorrow’s session.”

  Keiko’s heart tore. Had she alienated her unpredictable alien past recovery? But, trying to calm herself, she obediently asked the Kyber if it intended to appear for another session.

  “Of course,” it responded. “Of course I so intend.”

  With that, the creature rose on the extensible stilts of its legs and strode with unwavering dignity to the door of the knowledge centre, more like an animate statue than a living organism. Briefly, Keiko wondered if its head was going to crash into the lintel, and almost shouted a warning. But at the last moment, without pausing in its stride, it telescoped just sufficiently to exit, and she watched it pass the window-lens on its way to the Platform’s central riser.

  The Kyber kept its word. It returned the following day, and the three days thereafter. Then abruptly—and totally without warning—it ceased to rendezvous with Keiko. Suspecting that she had naively played into the creature’s hands, she began to reproach herself for her gullibility. Her failure, she felt, was as spectacular as had been the Kyber’s ready success in absorbing the vocabularie
s and grammars of a half dozen human languages in addition to Translic. Her student’s defection angered, humiliated, and saddened her.

  Worse, Captain Hsi scrupulously refrained from chastising her for her failure. Even Andrik—volatile Andrik—sometimes had the air, when she cornered him in the evenings and asked about his and Betti Songa’s progress with the aliens on the Onogorovan plain, of one tiptoeing over a pie crust. This delicacy with her Keiko took as an affront.

  To make up for the Kyber’s defection, Andrik and Betti had spent every day of the last frigid week doing “field work” in and around the labyrinthine crater where they had first encountered the alien. Their hope was to coax yet another Kyber from either that family or a contiguous one to accompany them back to the Platform aboard the expeditionary floater piloted by Farrell Sixkiller. No such luck. In fact, not since their initial success with Keiko’s student had anyone but Keiko been able to get through to a representative of the aliens. Of late Andrik and Betti had found their in-the-field options reduced to bemused observation and discreet anatomical measurements—for their presence in the roofless atria of the various families was tolerated as if they were either invisible or completely unworthy of notice.

  Now that Keiko’s star student had dropped out of school, the Kybers had virtually shut down all organic function. When the xenologist, the cyberneticist, and the floater pilot threaded their way through the inevitable maze-walls of a Kyber palace to its central chamber (Sixkiller blazing their way inward with the eerie markings of a phosphor-pen), they found the aliens frozen in a variety of perhaps emblematic postures. Sight measurements and holophotography were possible in these circumstances, but any attempt to touch the Kybers provoked brief defensive responses—the swinging of an arm, the canting of a halo-crest—that were too dangerous to risk. As a consequence (Keiko soon came to realize), Andrik was slowly falling victim to the same sense of inadequacy and despair that continued to plague her.

  THREE

  In the refectory, on the afternoon of the day prior to her midnight deployment of the thousand golden images of Kannon, Keiko tried to goad her lover back into his usual talkativeness.

  “Is there a causal relationship between the two events?” Keiko asked Andrik. “Did my Kyber desert me because it was time for a mass hibernation? Or is the mass hibernation a consequence of my being jilted by the Kyber?”

  “Probably,” Andrik said.

  “Which, then?” she demanded. He wasn’t being playful; he was simply evading the issue. It was a retake of countless tête-à-têtes with the alien—except that Andrik had never in his life exuded serenity, even when fatigued or depressed.

  “Kei,” he said, setting aside his bowl of noodles and intercepting her gaze, “I can’t possibly tell you. All I can say is that the two events look to be related, all right?”

  He was not handsome. His eyes, set deep in his head, reminded Keiko of a pair of retort blisters full of thin, swirling smoke. Despite his exhaustion he smouldered.

  “What’s your feeling?” she insisted.

  “His feeling is that the dead are alive, the living dead,” interjected Farrell Sixkiller, who was sitting two tables away with Captain Hsi Ching-kuo and the novice planetologist Clemencia Venáges. “He’d rather be out there with the Kybers than up here with us fallible, decaying mortals.”

  “Shut up, Sixkiller.” Andrik did not turn his head to address the floater pilot. With the understandable exception of Captain Hsi, Sixkiller was the only expedition member whom Andrik would not call by his given name.

  Keiko glanced around. Everyone in the refectory—an inflatable structure twenty metres in diameter, with a hoop-girdered corridor to the galley and another to the research complex—had paused to take in the developing quarrel.

  Immediately to Keiko’s right sat the burly astrophysicist Craig Olivant, the computer officer Sharon Yablon, and the unflappable Betti Songa, her cinnamon-dark face strikingly highlighted by the fluorescents. At a trio of tables near the galley corridor were seven other expedition members; they included the floater pilot Milius, two Platform mechs, the chemist Heinrich Eshleman, the atmospheric specialist Nikolai Taras, the medic whose name Keiko could never get right, and the dowdy ecologist and molecular biologist Naomi Davis. Naomi, a friendly face, had taken Keiko under her wing at Luna Port several weeks before the departure of the Heavenbridge for the Gemini system.

  None of these people was hypocritical enough to feign a lack of interest in the words exchanged by Sixkiller and Andrik. Involvement in others’ affairs was unavoidable when you lived in your colleagues’ pockets atop an expeditionary platform. In fact, Keiko noticed, the only person in the refectory who had continued to eat, wielding his chopsticks with deft indifference to the possibility of conflict, was Captain Hsi, who had just that afternoon returned from a mysterious sojourn of about fifteen hours aboard the Heavenbridge. His presence at table with Sixkiller suggested to Keiko that he and the floater pilot had resumed the intimacy that had evolved between them on the journey out from Luna Port.

  “Andrik,” she whispered, hoping to dissuade him from a display of temper in the captain’s hearing.

  “The refectory is a democratic place of assembly,” Sixkiller declared loudly, looking around the room at the faces turned toward him. “Whatever your hoity-toity status when we’re on duty, Dr Norn, you don’t command me in here.”

  There was a chilly silence.

  Keiko glanced at Captain Hsi. Why didn’t he intervene? Sixkiller, despite the enforced democracy of their meal times, deserved a swift and certain rebuke.

  Captain Hsi finished eating, then casually stood up. He was tall for a Chinese—taller than Andrik—with a concave face and protruding, heavy-lidded eyes. Only his close-cropped grey hair and snug-fitting military tunic undercut his resemblance to an emaciated Pekinese, thus preserving his dignity. He sorted his dinnerware, picked up his tray, and headed for the conveyor belt near the galley corridor. Here, all eyes upon him, he halted, put down his tray, and turned back toward the expectant gathering.

  “I expect you to be civil to one another,” he said mincingly. Then he singled out the astrophysicist at Betti Songa’s table for instruction. “When you’ve finished here, Dr Olivant, please join me in the observatory. We have work to do.” Whereupon he pivoted, grabbed up his parka and mittens from the cloak shelf, and departed through the tunnel to the lab complex.

  Keiko was appalled. Captain Hsi’s leavetaking implied tacit approval of Sixkiller’s baiting of Andrik—or, if not approval, a stupid and unwarranted tolerance. So long as they didn’t maim each other in a macho brawl, he appeared to be washing his hands of their conflict. Keiko did not entirely understand the captain’s rationale for such behaviour, but she knew that he and Clemencia Venáges—insofar as Sixkiller was concerned—comprised what Andrik cynically called an “unstable binary”. The floater pilot took turns revolving about one or the other of these people, who somehow managed to mantain their own relationship in a state of uneasy equilibrium. Keiko was not sure how the three of them made this arrangement work (if they did), but she had never before had cause to worry about the dynamics of the situation. Previously, she had based her estimation of Captain Hsi on the obvious efficiency of his command and her unspoken pride that he, too, was an Oriental.

  “What do you think, Dr Norn?” Sixkiller piped up again. “Is it possible for a machine to die? Contrariwise, of course, is it possible for a machine to live?”

  “They’re not machines,” Andrik said deliberately.

  Sixkiller gestured carelessly at Betti Songa. “Then why do we send a cyberneticist out to study them, too?”

  “Don’t you three ever talk when you’re in the field together?” Keiko asked. “ Why this hostility, Farrell? And why vent it in front of people who have other matters to discuss?”

  “Outside,” he responded, “I keep my mouth shut, and I do my job.”

  “But not in here? Why not? What tomahawk are you grinding today?”


  Betti Songa interrupted, her tongue like a pink petal in a deep-umber bowl: “He believes the Kybers were created by an extra-Geminid species to exterminate the original inhabitants and then to colonize the planet for their absentee masters. Being one thirty-second native American, he sympathizes with the extinct natives—whatever, whoever, they might have been—and deplores our fawning attention to the Kybers, their murderers.”

  “That’s absurd,” remarked Craig Olivant.

  Before Sixkiller could protest, Betti added, “We send both a xenologist and a cyberneticist to study the Kybers because they’re so obviously something new under the suns, at least to us. A conjoining of the organic with the mechanical, not through engineering but through a natural cybergenetic process. Just because we have no precedent for that process back home doesn’t mean it can’t exist elsewhere, Farrell. It’s a big cosmos.”

  “They’re made creatures,” Sixkiller insisted. “Anyone can see that. And they probably didn’t originate here, either.”

  “That’s absolute nonsense,” said Naomi Davis from across the refectory. She was a Britisher, usually as plain-spoken and down-to-the-sod as a farmer, despite her years and her education. “Andrik has told us that they harvest those great stonelike succulents out there, hasn’t he? Those lithops-like things. And they cull all sorts of pesky vermin from the crannies of their labyrinths. Machines don’t eat, at least not organic matter. The Kybers would have had to evolve here—here in this system, Farrell—to do so well on such unlikely local fare. Not to mention the fact that every species of wild life we’ve encountered to date has the same binary eye structure. Those beasties aren’t gyroscopic toys somebody’s revved up and set loose here, either.”