Calandria threw open the paddock gate. The horses were a bit dazzled too, and skittish.
The cottage door opened, throwing new light across the clearing. Two men stepped out. One shouted at the dogs.
"Trust?" said Marya. "Yeah, I trusted this was going to happen."
"Calandria will handle it, you'll see."
Indeed, May was walking confidently across the paddock towards the men. One pointed at her and swore. Marya did a mental tally of the Ventus oaths she knew, trying to identify the language. Memnonian, of course...
Marya never found out what Calandria was planning to do next, because her own impatience and annoyance got the better of her. Marya stood up, unzipping her thermal overalls. "Hey, what are you-" began Axel, stopping as Marya disappeared from sight. She had tuned her holographic unitard to black, and before he had time to figure out what she was doing, she ran into the clearing.
The men were both burly, but short. They looked rough. Behind them another figure had appeared in the cottage doorway, hands bundled in its skirts.
"What you doin?" the first barked at Calandria. Pure Memnonian, she marveled. A rich strain of it, from the accent. She could almost trace this man's ancestry by the way he sounded his vowels.
Marya stepped between the men and Calandria, and said "Morph," in a loud and clear voice. As she did, she tuned her holographic clothing to another suit.
The men's eyes widened and they fell several steps back. Marya had gone from peasant clothing to a festival costume that was all feathers and rainbows. Marya knew her face glowed out of it like an angel's. That was the design.
"Uh, hello," she said carefully. The words sounded clumsy in her own ears. "I mean you harm—no, no harm, I mean you."
They both stopped short, a couple of meters away, and looked her up and down. Behind her, Marya heard Calandria muttering something. She chose not to listen.
The men were intimidated, but stood their ground. "W-what do you want?" asked the first, who looked older. "We have nothing. We've not harmed a single creature in this wood. Look, all we've got is horses—"
"Horses," she said, nodding. "We need three. One for me, and two for my human servants."
They looked so tragic that Marya wanted to turn and just walk away. The horses were all they had, after all. They were abjectly poor, and she was robbing them. Maybe there was something she could give them... but all the off-world paraphernalia she had would endanger them if they kept it. "I'm sorry," she said.
They glanced at one another. "Do you need saddles?" said the younger man. The older one shot him a dirty look.
They really did need saddles, but Marya couldn't bring herself to go that far. "No," she said.
"Marya," hissed Calandria.
"No saddles. Just horses. Thank you."
The dogs were recovering their sight, and whined and snuffled around the feet of the men. Reluctantly, they turned to walk three palfreys over to her. She had no way of judging the quality of the mounts, and would probably have turned down the best if she knew they were offering them to her. Silently, the men bridled the horses and handed her the reins. "Spare us," was all that the older one said as she led the horses out the paddock gate.
She could smell the animals—a spicy and enticing odor, but somehow... unsanitary. Her nose wrinkled. She made hushing motions as she approached them.
The walk to the woods seemed to take forever, and Marya looked back several times. The woman had joined them, and the three stood there with slumped shoulders watching part of their livelihood go. Marya felt so bad she nearly cried.
"That was a damnfool thing to do," accused Calandria. "You could have got hurt if they'd attacked us."
"I told you my plan would work better," Marya shot back. "And I told you yours wouldn't work at all, remember?"
For once, Calandria had no answer.
§
"You're crazy," said Axel Chan later that night. "He'll kill us."
"We have to try." Calandria stamped the dirt near the fire in an attempt to warm her feet. "Every day we wait he'll get stronger, and nearer his goal."
"But without the Desert Voice..."
"He's not invincible, Axel. None of them are."
"But we can't guarantee his destruction. You've said yourself every molecule of that body has to be vaporized."
Calandria patted the large case they'd taken from the Pan Hellenia. "This should be enough to incapacitate him. Then we get him offworld, and take care of him once and for all there."
Marya watched them bicker wearily. This had been going on for hours now. She was beginning to wonder whether it wouldn't have been better to throw herself on the mercy of the farmers. At least she had studied them. These two were galactic citizens, like her, but they were also foreign mercenaries with completely alien priorities.
They had made camp in a hollow beneath a windswept hill. It was very cold again tonight; Marya could see her breath. She had never been so cold, for so long, in her life. Privately she was amazed and proud that she was still alive, much less mobile. Every day she battled bone-numbing cold, agoraphobia from being on the unprotected surface of a planet, and the onslaught of so many minor physical inconveniences that she was sure they were going to drive her insane.
To make matters worse, Axel had told her he thought it would rain tonight. Would it hurt? she wondered. The very thought of countless tiny water-missiles plummeting down at her from ten thousand meters made her shudder. But he seemed quite unconcerned. Show-off.
She scratched at the heavy, binding cloth garments Calandria had stolen for her the day before. She had been taught that clothing was primarily an invention for sexual display, but the people who told her that had like herself been raised in an environment of perfect climate and hygiene control. She wouldn't abandon the cloth now, uncomfortable as it was, because she needed it to keep her warm.
The argument across the fire had shifted back to whether they should continue with their mission, and attempt to stop Armiger, or whether they should try to escape the planet. Axel wanted to use their implanted radio to signal other ships that might be in the system; Calandria was adamant about retaining radio silence. She seemed frightened of attracting the attention of the Winds. And yet it was she who proposed that they confront this Armiger, whom Axel said might be hiding in the depths of a besieged fortress. The argument went back and forth, back and forth, and nothing was resolved.
Axel had told Marya the story as they walked, though he glossed over the extent of his and Calandria's interference with local affairs. Covering his ass, apparently. But this General Armiger was an off-world demigod, and somehow a young man named Jordan Mason had gained the ability to see through his eyes.
"I heard about the war with 3340," said Marya. "So Armiger is really one of that monster's servants?"
Axel nodded. "And devilishly dangerous, for that. 3340 corrupted entire planetary systems. He seduced people by offering them immortality and almost infinite power," he added with a glance at Calandria May. "Then he absorbed the resulting entities into himself. Armiger may have been an early victim."
"He was human, once?" She was surprised and disturbed at the thought.
"If he was, there's nothing left of that personality," said Calandria. She hugged herself as her gaze dropped back to the fire. "3340 absorbed millions of individuals, and then mixed and matched their consciousness as he saw fit. Anything he absorbed became part of the single entity that was him. He was ancient when the Winds were just being designed. Maybe aliens designed him—but he claimed to have made himself."
Axel harumphed skeptically. "So did Choronzon—our employer," he added in an aside to Marya. "An ex-human who had himself genetically rebuilt and made himself into a god. He's a few centuries old. It was his war with 3340 that got us involved in all of this."
Marya shook her head in wonder. "I've never met a god, unless you count the swans." She kicked at the wilting grass near the fire for a second, then added, "The Winds are gods of a sort.
But damaged. They're fully aware, even if they're not completely awake. That's the tragedy of it."
"They're not gods," said Calandria with odd vehemence. "They're just machines. Idiotic. Mechanical. You can see it in everything they do."
"What do you think they do?" asked Marya.
"She's thinking of the Heaven hooks," said Axel. "They acted like a horde of dock robots gone amok. As far as we could tell, that's what they were too—the aerostats are just big cargo carriers for the terraforming operation."
Marya nodded. They'd seen one that afternoon, a vagabond moon as the locals called it, moving as slowly as a real moon through the sky, but from north to south. It had glowed gorgeous red in the sunset, and Marya had almost cried to think she might never have seen that, had she'd stayed out her term here in orbit. Being on Ventus was affecting her profoundly, in ways she hadn't begun to figure out. All she knew was she was an emotional wreck.
She looked across at Calandria May. The mercenary woman looked back levelly, but it was the steady gaze Marya had seen from prostitutes and beggars—the challenging gaze of the emotionally damaged. Marya couldn't figure her out. She was so formidable in her talents, but incredibly brittle somehow in her fundamental character. Why did she care to argue, tonight, about whether the Winds were gods?
"The Winds are in everything," said Marya, watching Calandria carefully. "The air, the rocks, the soil, the water. But they're not just sitting there, they're working, all the time. Ventus is a terraformed world—a thousand years ago there was no life here. Our ancestors sent the seed of the Winds here by slow sub-light ship, and it bloomed here and turned a dead world into a living one. The Winds couldn't do that if they were just instinctive creatures."
"But they didn't recognize humans when we came to colonize," Calandria pointed out. "When the colonists landed, the Winds couldn't tell what they were. They couldn't speak, or interact with the colonists. They left them alone because as organisms they fit into the artificial ecology—they filled a niche, like they were designed to. But their machines looked like some kind of infection to the Winds, so they destroyed them, all the computers, radios, heaters, building machines. They pounded the people back into the stone age. A thousand years later, this is as far as they've gotten, and it's as far as the Winds are ever going to let them get." She shook her head sadly. "The Winds can't be conscious. They act like some sort of global immune system, cleaning out potential infections, like us or Armiger.
"Because of that," she said quickly just as Marya opened her mouth to speak, "Armiger could take them over. They were decapitated, or born without a brain. There was a flaw in the design of Ventus. Armiger is here to exploit that."
Marya shook her head. "Can't be done," she said. "He would have to reprogram every single particle of dust on the planet. And even if he could, the Winds are conscious. They'd see through it before he could get too far."
"You think he's harmless?" snapped Calandria. She stood up. "You're so enraptured by your beautiful nanotech terraformers you don't think there's subtler things out there?"
"I didn't say that, I—"
"This system is nothing like a real god," said Calandria. "3340 told me that even its thoughts were conscious entities. Conscious thoughts!" She laughed harshly. "3340 was like an entire civilization—an entire species!—in one body. With a history, not just memories. He could make a world like Ventus in a day! How do you know he's not the one who put the flaw in the Winds in the first place? He might have done that a millenium ago, intending to let the place ripen then return to harvest it. But he got distracted by another planet before he could do that. Hsing was a much better toy, he could forge it into his own private hell much more easily. Still, he sent Armiger here. How do you know Armiger isn't a resurrection seed? He may be planning to turn the entire planet into a single giant machine to recreate 3340. It's within his capabilities. Your precious Winds are no match for Armiger."
She turned and stalked off into the grass.
Marya turned to Axel. "Well!" she said.
Axel watched Calandria's silhouette recede for a few moments. Then he grimaced and turned to Marya. "You touched a nerve," he said.
"Obviously."
"We went to Hsing to destroy 3340," he said. "With Choronzon's help, and the backing of the Archipelago." Axel told Marya the story of how Calandria had beaten 3340 by becoming its willing slave. She shook her head sadly when he was done.
Marya shifted, finding that her rear had gone to sleep on the hard log on which she was sitting. She couldn't get used to such physical annoyances. "She's wrong about the Winds though," she said.
"Don't pursue it," he advised. "Anyway, nothing we've seen since we arrived here suggests the Winds are conscious. Little bits of them here and there, like the morphs, might be. I don't know about the Diadem swans." He glanced up uneasily. "But the system as a whole? No, it's just a planetary immune system, like she says."
Marya shook her head. "If Ventus hasn't spoken to you, it's because you're beneath its notice. You forget, this world is my subject. I know more about it than you do."
"But you haven't been here," he said quietly. "You've never seen it up close. You're here now—does it seem like there's intelligence to this?" He waved his hand at the ragged grass.
"I don't know what you see when you look at it," Marya said. "Maybe it's because you've been on worlds where life just is, like Earth. Where nothing maintains it. But everything around us is artificial, Axel. The soil: there may be a thousand years of mulch here," she kicked at it, "but there's meters of soil beneath that, layer upon layer of fertile ground underneath what's been laid down since Ventus came to life. Every single grain of that was manufactured, by the Winds.
"Look at the grass! I know it looks like Earth grass, it's uneven in height, looks randomly patched over the hillside. Maybe in the past few centuries things have settled down to the point where it can be allowed to spread on its own. But I doubt it. The grass has been painted on, by the nano. Look at the clouds. They look like the clouds I see in videos of Earth. But if the Winds weren't busy sculpting them right now, do you think they would look like that? Axel, Ventus is not like Earth. Its sun has a different temperature, it's a different size, the composition of the crust is different, so the mineral balance in the oceans is—was—totally different. As a result the composition of the atmosphere, and its density, are naturally very different. This weather is not natural." She held her hand up to the breeze. "The air's been made by the Winds, and Axel, they have to keep making it. The instant they stop working, the planet will revert, because it's not in equilibrium. It's in a purely synthetic state.
"You don't honestly think the distribution of bugs, mice, and birds around here is natural, do you? It's planned and monitored by the Winds, on every square meter of the planet. Bits of it are constantly going out of wack, threatening the local and global equilibrium. The Winds are constantly adjusting, thinking hard about how to keep the place as Earth-like as possible. It's what we made them to do."
He shook his head. "Well, exactly. It's a complex system, but it's still just a big machine."
"Surely you've wondered why the Winds don't acknowledge the presence of humans?"
"The Flaw? Sure, whole religions exist here to try to answer that," he laughed. "You think you know?"
"I think I know how to find out. Listen, in your last report to us before the Heaven hooks incident, you said that Controller Turcaret claimed to be able to hear the Winds."
He glared at her. "Not claimed. He did hear them." Calandria still didn't believe that part of the story, and it obviously annoyed Axel.
"We've heard of people like that," said Marya. "But we've never been able to verify a case. If we had one to study, I'm sure we could crack the problem."
He laughed shortly. "Too bad Turcaret's dead."
"I'm not sure that's a problem," she mused. "As long as there's bits of him left..."
She heard the grass rustle; Calandria was returning. Marya saw the woma
n's eyes glinting like two coals in the darkness, and shivered. "We go after Armiger," said Calandria. "You know we must."
"No," said Axel. "We can return with reinforcements. I'm going to keep signalling for a ship, Cal. You can't stop me."
There was silence for a while. Then Calandria shrugged. "You're right, I can't stop you."
The atmosphere around the fire suddenly seemed poisonous. Marya stood up quickly.
"Think I'll turn in," she said, smiling at them both.
Across the fire, Calandria nodded, her perfect face still as carven stone in the firelight. Her eyes betrayed nothing, but Marya thought she could feel the woman's gaze on her back as she knelt and made her bed.
§
Marya dreamed about home. Outside her window she could see the gently upcurving landscape of Covenant, her colony cylinder. Sunlight streamed through a thousand lakes and pools, turning the hills and cities into translucent lace and backlighting the spiral of clouds in the center of the cylinder. As always, thousands of winged human figures drifted in the air between her and those clouds.
She walked the deep moss carpets of home. She breathed the warm honeyed air, felt it drift over her limbs finer than any cloth as she passed through room after room of her parents' apartment. Her family were here, she knew, in other rooms she had yet to reach. Then, in the back of her own bedroom, she found a door she had never seen before.
She waved the door open, and gasped to find herself in a giant library. She recognized paper books, had held a few in her hand as a student, feeling then the tremendous age and dignity of pre-space knowledge. It was this sense of ancient dignity that had driven her to anthropology.
Here were thousand upon thousand of bound books, arrayed in shelves that towered to an invisibly distant ceiling. Marya walked reverently among them.
She stumbled, knocking over a side-table. The echoes of its fall went on and on, almost visibly reaching into every distant crevice between the volumes. When it finally died, she heard a growing rustle, as if the books were rousing from slumber.
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