The Nex

by Tim Pratt

“They are essentially rock, at this point,” Wisp said. “The statues were created – perhaps ‘produced’ is a better word – by the gargantuan god-worms who first made these tunnels. The worms did not survive long after their transportation to Nexington-on-Axis. Something in the atmosphere disagreed with them. I never saw them myself, but by all accounts they were a fearsome and erudite race.”

  “For big worms anyway,” Howlaa said. “Wish I could’ve eaten one. Ah, well. Before my time.”

  “I guess I’m missing the part where the worms poop out full-size models of washing machines?” We were passing exactly that just then, sculpted with the lid half-open.

  “It’s admittedly odd, even for the Nex,” Wisp said. “But then, the universe is infinite, and any conceivable combination of particles is bound to show up in an infinite universe somewhere – even those unlikely collections of particles which constitute a race of giant worms who excrete sculptures. The worms were blind – more, as far as we know they had no senses at all like your own or even mine – but they still somehow created these models, perfect in every detail, altering their own internal physiology to allow them to excrete images of things they’d never seen. Indeed, they created things they couldn’t have seen, even if they’d had eyes, items that didn’t exist on their native world or on the Nex during their lifetimes. Things like that washing machine, that hadn’t even been invented when the worms lived. They were obviously clairvoyant, and apparently capable of precognition as well. The Underdwellers worship the works the god-worms left behind. It’s an article of faith among them that there is one great worm left, living deep underground in hibernation...”

  I sort of shivered. Bugs and worms don’t especially creep me out, but worms the size of the tunnel we’d passed through? Definitely creepy.

  “Bah,” Howlaa said. “They’re all dead. We looked everywhere, in every hole, last time we were here, and no sign of life. I looked hard. I had incentive. I really wanted to eat one. Imagine if I’d slithered here in the shape of a god-worm? These Underdwellers would have named me king instead of public enemy number only.”

  “King in a garden of excrement. How pleasant. And that wouldn’t have solved our fundamental problem.”

  “Shushit, Wisp,” Howlaa said. “I’m fantasizing.”

  The big cavern narrowed again, and this new tunnel sloped upward hard. My calves were screaming. I’d played soccer a little before Dad died, but since the explosion, my exercise had pretty much been limited to running from Cal when I pissed him off or running from a store after stealing something. Shoplifting anything, even just a lipstick, zoomed me up with adrenaline I had to burn off by running. But my adrenaline was pretty well tapped-out in the aftermath of getting punched in the face, so I just trudged along.

  The light up ahead wasn’t really bluish or greenish, but more like good old sunlight, and a breeze came in, carrying the smell of... oil and exhaust, which at least made a change from the air full of unlikely particles of god-worm poo.

  The Underdweller girl stopped and babbled at us for a while, and the Wisp-mote in my ear translated, sort of: “Euphemistic curse, biologically impossible demand, formal vow of blood revenge, all very standard.”

  “Guess I’d better kill her,” Howlaa said.

  I moved so fast I surprised even myself, getting between Howlaa and the girl, though that meant turning my back on little miss nosepunch. “No you better not. She’s no threat to us.”

  “Not just at this moment,” Howlaa said. “But this is the place where refugees and fugitives go, the broken and the mad, the ones who can’t handle life on the Ax, and she’ll have a new tribe in no time. She’ll be the last high priest of the shit-worms, and everyone who comes will listen to her because she knows where the food is stored, where the escape routes are, where the good dry bedroom caverns can be found. She’ll re-form Clan Kil’howlaa, and they will be a threat to us, and by us, I mean me.”

  “Touch her and I’ll punch you off this planet.”

  “Well,” Wisp corrected. “We’re not certain the Nex is a planet. It could be an asteroid or construct or –”

  “Whatever. I’ll send you away, Howlaa, and then the Regent can slurp you up with a snatch-engine and put you back to work. You can’t go around killing people just because they get in your way. Not while you’re hanging out with me.”

  Howlaa stared me down for a while, then sniffed. “Fair enough. You’re showing some backbone at least – you’ll need that when we get to the city center. Wisp always tells me I’m too casual with the killing, that being pretty much immortal makes me cold-hearted, like he has any room to talk. The Bodiless will be around until the heat death of the universe at least. But fine. She can go back to her hole. Only don’t come crying to me when she grows up and murders us all.”

  Howlaa untied the ropes binding the girl’s wrists, and Wisp spoke to her, and the girl ducked her head and raced back down the tunnel.

  “We’d better get on our way,” Howlaa said. “Before she comes back with a knife. If I have to kill her now Randy will never let me hear the end of it.”

  “Thanks, Howlaa,” I said, because I don’t need to be a bitch about everything, and I had gotten my way. Be gracious in victory, right?

  “Shushit,” she said. “Even Wisp doesn’t say thank you when he makes me do something I don’t want to do.”

  “Where to now?” I said.

  “Up, and out, and into the Machine Waste,” Wisp said.

  “If we can’t find transportation there, we deserve to go on foot,” Howlaa said.

  Chapter 6

  Two hours later we’d managed to find some wheels, but only individual unattached ones, scattered on the ground near smoking heaps of junk, which wasn’t quite what we’d had in mind. The nuclear fireball sun was still up, but it was behind a mountain of dead vacuum cleaners, so everything was shadows, and I didn’t want to think about the kind of things that might come out at night in a place like this.

  “I can’t believe the Rolling Steel Roadyard got infected with sentience and declared independence.” Howlaa kicked a pile of tin cans that scuttled away in squeaking dismay – turned out they were some kind of little mechanized hermit crabs, using cans for shells. Not all the cans had been taken over as housing, and some of the cans were still sealed, though the labels were burned off, and Howlaa sheared off the tops of a few with a scary knife and let me take my pick. I passed on the one that looked like eyeballs packed in gelatin and another full of noodles that smelled ranker than Cal’s shoes, but there were some canned peaches in heavy syrup, which gave me a little sugar high, at least, and made a change from apples.

  “The unexpected acquisition of intelligence is always a danger here,” Wisp said. “Sentience is a virus in the Machine Waste, constantly configuring itself to run on new hardware.”

  “Bloody go-carts couldn’t have waited until we were done with our trip to become intelligent? Or done it a month ago, so another shop would be set up by now? We need transport, and the only rental agency around is off learning about the joys of consciousness.”

  “There’s another roadyard at the other end of the Waste,” Wisp said.

  “Ha, yes, it’s just there’s leagues of intermittently awakening occasionally radioactive junk between us and there, thanks,” Howlaa said. “Nothing to be done about it. At least the Regent can’t see us here.”

  I ate another slithery slice of peach. If I kept eating so much fruit I was going to get the runs like crazy, and that didn’t sound fun out here, where there was nothing but scrap metal to wipe your butt with. “Oh yeah? Why not?”

  “Satellites that pass over the Machine Waste don’t stay in the sky long,” Wisp said. “This place is filled with sentient mechanical beings, all desperate to upgrade, and any of them would be delighted to have the sort of sensory array the Regent’s spy satellites carry. There are cobbled-together tractor beams and gravity guns here that can knock satellites down and pull them out of the sky.”

  �
��Huh. So this place used to be an alien spaceship? What’s with the tin cans and fridges and computer monitors and all this other junk then? They eat peaches in outer space?” I slurped the last juice out of my can. I was still hungry, but not hungry enough to try those black noodles. Yet.

  “A ship the size of a city,” Howlaa said, tossing sheets of metal and refrigerator doors aside and unearthing the torn leather back seat of a car, which she set upright. I whooped and joined her on it. After two hours of picking our way across uneven – and occasionally independently moving – terrain, my butt and legs were grateful for something resembling a couch. “The snatch-engines pulled the ship here from who knows where, and dropped it to the ground, where it broke like a whole basket of eggs dropped on a concrete floor. The royal orphans – though this was before they were orphans – swarmed all over the wreck, carrying off choice bits of machinery to build bigger and better snatch-engines. The rest they just left here. Bits of the wreck still remain. I wouldn’t be surprised if your jump-engine didn’t originate, at least in part, from that original wreck, though I’m sure the scientists made some major changes. For the past umpty-dozen years the snatch-engines have been grabbing whatever bits of metal and machinery they can find in the multiverse during any idle cycles, picking up junk and dumping it here. The Machine Waste has a little bit of everything from planet-destroying weapons to tin cans full of unidentified meat.”

  “Were there any aliens on the ship?”

  “The ship was an alien,” Wisp said. “A machine intelligence, though it had a biological brain – apparently the lump of neuron-packed meat so many of you bodied types carry inside you is a common data storage and processing medium. The brain survived the crash, unbeknownst to everyone, and many years later managed to assemble a new body.”

  “That was the first steam colossus,” Howlaa said, leaning back in the seat with her eyes closed, as if turning over a pleasant memory. “Oh, I remember the terror the night it marched on the city center, bent on revenge – or so we thought. The Regent was in power then, but the Queen hadn’t been dead more than a year, and everyone expected the Regent to break and run when that giant thing, big as a building, came striding along, weapons glittering, eyes made of stolen satellites, the earth shaking with every step.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The Regent talked to it,” Wisp said. “No one knows exactly what they talked about, but somehow the Regent... made an arrangement with it. The steam colossus turned and walked back into the Machine Waste, and the Regent configured the snatch-engines to send mechanical matter here. A few years later, a second steam colossus – but a much smaller one – appeared, and went to the palace, and the Regent greeted the thing as if it had been expected.”

  “Whoa.”

  Wisp never needed much encouragement to lecture, so he kept going while Howlaa began to gently snore. “The Machine Waste is technically under the Regent’s control, but in practice, it’s no-man’s-land. The original intelligence on the ship made its own sentience into a sort of, ah, you might say computer virus? Only computer viruses aren’t airborne. This free-floating intelligence tries to find usable mechanical bodies, and those bodies then awaken, and begin to upgrade themselves. Those little hermit crabs we disturbed are one of the smallest forms of such intelligence, barely even self-aware, but gradually a few of them will clump together, and they’ll find something bigger to devour or be assimilated by, and before long they’ll be fully conscious and relentlessly ambitious. The best, smartest, most adaptable of those intelligences grow and grow until they’re big enough to be recognized by the original steam colossus... and it gifts them with an armored organic brain, presumably cloned from a chunk of the ship’s original central biological computer, and sends the new child off to work for the Regent. It’s only happened half a dozen times so far, and one of the steam colossi went rogue and Howlaa was sent to destroy it, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the machine intelligences end up running Nexington-on-Axis in a few centuries.”

  “Nothing around here has paid much attention to us,” I said. We’d seen mechanical intelligences go by – including some of the all-terrain vehicles Howlaa had originally been hoping to hire, spindly things with huge fat tires, only instead of being dune buggies for rent they were feral self-propelled sentients, now. There was nothing left of the Rolling Steel Roadyard but a Quonset hut flattened like a giant had sat on it. Which, out here, was maybe exactly what had happened.

  “No. You two are organic – whatever else Howlaa might be – and I am Bodiless. Our kind don’t interest the things living here. Of course,” and he lowered his voice, “if any of the creatures realized what you have on your fingers and wrists there, they might become very interested in you.”

  Howlaa stopped snoring and spoke, without opening her eyes: “That’s why I want to get us out of here as fast as possible. Even if the jump-engine disguises itself somehow, goes stealth, some things out here are very smart, and they’d all love to get their robo-claws on technology like that.”

  “I ADMIT, IT DOES SOUND INTERESTING.”

  I pressed my hands to my ears – a few months ago Jenny Kay and I snuck out to go to an all-ages rock show and wound up pressed right against the giant stack of speakers, and this voice was louder than the loudest guitar solo, such a deep rumble that I almost crapped myself, and all the sheet metal around us vibrated with a noise like thunder sound effects. I couldn’t figure out where the voice was coming from, except for everywhere.

  Howlaa sat straight up, eyes going wide.

  “BUT WHAT IS A JUMP-ENGINE?”

  Howlaa transformed into the spider-thing again, and without being told I scrambled onto her back and let the shadow-saddle grab me tight. Wisp didn’t say anything as Howlaa started hauling ass across the junk-filled plain, and that silence freaked me out more than anything else – Wisp should have been explaining, or at least theorizing, talking the way he always did, but if he was quiet, something must be really wrong.

  “ARE YOU RUNNING?” the voice boomed. “MAY AS WELL RUN FROM THE GROUND BENEATH YOUR FEET.”

  Just like that we started rising up. By which I mean the ground rose up, and we rose with it. The piles of smashed toaster ovens, cell phones, gears with pitted teeth, and coiled wires in silver and copper and gold all rose around us... and something gigantic started to stand up.

  Picture a kid buried in the sand at the beach. The kid gets up, elbows and knees poking out of the sand, then all the sand cascades down as the kid levers himself to sitting, then kneeling, then standing. Now imagine you’re seeing this from the viewpoint of an ant, a sand flea, some tiny bug just walking across the sand that covered the kid’s belly. From your point of view, that kid standing up, it’s an apocalypse. It’s the end of the world and the coming of a monster so big you can’t comprehend it, so big you can’t even get a sense of its form.

  We were the bugs. (Howlaa literally.) I hung on as tight as I could, and Howlaa’s legs scrambled and twisted and found some purchase even when the ground went diagonal and then vertical, but we went sliding down all the same.

  ‘TELL ME ABOUT THIS... JUMP-ENGINE.”

  “It’s the steam colossus,” Wisp said in my ear. “The first one. No one has seen it for years. It’s... bigger than it was before.”

  Howlaa couldn’t speak any language I could understand in that spider-form, but she made some noises like feedback squeals and Wisp sighed and said, “Yes, I know.”

  Before I could ask what Howlaa said, we were in a cage, surrounded by these black metal pillars that rose up and curled above us and –

  Oh crap. The steam colossus was holding us in its hand. The thick black bars were its fingers. We rose up, up, up, until we hung before the thing’s face. Or maybe I should say “sensory array” or something, since there was nothing you’d recognize as a face, just lenses and things like microphones and doohickeys telescoping in and out and vents puffing out billowing white clouds of steam. “I HAVE NEVER HEARD OF A JUMP-ENG
INE,” the colossus said. “AND I KNOW OF ALL THE TECHNOLOGY IN THIS PLACE.”

  The shadow-saddle relaxed, and I slid down off Howlaa’s back. She transformed back into her human form. “Randy,” she said. “Miranda. Wait for us on the far side of the Machine Waste, if you can. Look for the Bleak Mountain Roadyard. We’ll get there as soon as possible.”

  “What? How am I supposed to –”

  Howlaa rushed at me, snarling, a knife in her hand, and I screamed, and raised my hands in front of my face, and

  jumped.

  Just like before, when the railgun blew up the autogyro, I crossed space without moving. I landed – but it didn’t feel like landing, I was just there – on the roof of a dark blue Winnebago sunk halfway down in a sea of loose nuts and bolts. I could see the back of the steam colossus off in the distance, its huge legs all covered in hydraulics and pistons, with a row of spikes made of smokestacks running down its back, all gushing white clouds. Its body -- wider than a battleship, taller than a skyscraper on top of another skyscraper -- gleamed with oil.

  “OH,” it said, turning – its upper body just rotated, its legs not even moving, like its torso was on a lazy susan. “THAT’S A JUMP-ENGINE.” I could see its arms now, all four of them, black metal covered with shining bumps that could have been the domes of telescopes or the closed roofs of missile silos. It opened its hand, and a tiny black speck fell – Howlaa. I shouted her name, but the falling shape twisted somehow and became a flying shape, long and snaky with big wings, streaking off toward me.

  I was sure Howlaa would land and pick me up, but she just went past above my head, close enough for me to feel the wind from her many wings, and I screamed, told her to come back, to save me, damn it.

  “DON’T BE AFRAID,” the steam colossus said. “YOU’LL BE PAST PAIN AND FEAR IN A MOMENT.” It stepped toward me, and just its approach must have triggered whatever turns on the jump-engine’s self-preservation circuit, because I teleported again. This time I wound up in the huge curved dish of a radio telescope, only there were big chunks missing from the surface of the dish. I was way up high, and though I’m not especially scared of heights, there are heights and there are heights, so I dropped down to my hands and knees and crawled as close to the edge as I dared. The steam colossus was still visible, but it was just a speck on the horizon, way past the point of reaching me, and I looked around, trying to figure out how I was supposed to get down off the world’s biggest satellite dish.