by Linda Nagata
Jupiter bent quickly, kissed him firmly on the head. “We’ll be together again.”
“No, wait!” Lot croaked, reaching for him. “I didn’t mean it. Don’t leave me.” But Jupiter was already gone.
CHAPTER
2
LOT COULD NOT REMEMBER A TIME BEFORE THE GREAT SHIP. He’d been born on the long outward passage from the star cluster called the Committee. Nesseleth had been his world. In her warrens he’d known a hazy, timeless sense of permanence, as if his life there might go on forever with no real change. The new world to which they were bound had seemed as theoretical as death, a phantom specter lying far, far over his personal horizon.
Then Lot had turned seven—over a year and a half ago now—and Jupiter had taken him to his strategic chamber aboard the great ship. There, he showed him a holographic schematic of their destination.
Lot studied the star system. A faint white nebula veiled the G-type primary, enwrapping it like the woven nests some spiders spun around their eggs. The nebula looked nothing like the warm, dark spheres that enclosed the cordoned suns of the Hallowed Vasties. “That star is Kheth?” Lot asked, unsure what was expected of him. Jupiter nodded.
Under the veil, Lot could see only one planet. Its image was exaggerated in scale, a lovely terrestrial world wrapped in a meld of living green and blue. Within the planet’s orbit, the density of the nebula was very low. Puzzled, Lot looked up at Jupiter. “Where are the other planets?” he asked. “Where are the moons and the asteroids?”
Jupiter gazed thoughtfully at the display. “This is all that’s left. If there were other planets, they’re gone now, or dispersed into the stony nebula. The Chenzeme must have scourged this system.”
Lot felt his heartbeat quicken. He knew all about the ancient war of the Chenzeme. It had been fought a long time before people even existed—a terrible alien conflict that had left no known survivors. The Chenzeme were gone. But their weapons still prowled the void, attacking great ships and frontier worlds at unpredictable intervals. Still, Lot had never heard of the Chenzeme actually tearing a planet to pieces. That would make them as powerful as the people of the Hallowed Vasties… .
An objection occurred to him. He looked cautiously to Jupiter, assaying his mood, searching for any hint of dark temper, but he uncovered only a quiet anticipation. “I don’t understand,” Lot said softly. “The Communion’s here, and you said the Communion ended the war.”
Jupiter smiled. His hand rested lightly on Lot’s shoulder. “Peace wasn’t made overnight.” He pointed to the green-blue living world under its nebular veil, and the view zoomed in, sending the edge of the image rocketing off into the walls. “What was fashioned here required millennia to accomplish, and millions of years to refine.”
Lot studied the planet, wondering what Jupiter wanted him to see. There was the gossamer thread of the space elevator, built by human settlers only a few hundred years before. He could make out the swelling of its anchoring mass some fifty-five thousand miles beyond the surface of the world. And low on the elevator, just above the main mass of the planetary atmosphere, a tiny bump that contained the city of Silk.
Except for the anchoring point of the elevator, the world itself revealed no evidence of technological life-forms, though the continents and seas were reputed to teem with living things—a biological mélange comprising many different genetic systems, including the coding structure of the insidious plagues left behind by the ancient regime.
Chenzeme plagues could be found on seemingly pristine planets, in the tails of comets, in the dust among stars. They were a constant hazard to great ships that mined almost all their raw materials from unknown sources. Jupiter had almost died when one such plague destroyed Nesseleth’s original crew. That had been a long time ago, maybe over a hundred years. Jupiter had been the only survivor and it had been the Well that healed him.
Lot’s gaze shifted, to a point some fifteen thousand miles beyond the swollen end of the elevator. There, circling the Well in an independent orbit, was a silver torus the size of a small moon. Lot pointed to it. “That ring is a weapon,” he said. “Will the Silkens use it against us?”
Jupiter scowled, and Lot felt his heart quail. He looked down at his hands, while Jupiter’s soft menace bedded itself in his sensory tears. “The Chenzeme war isn’t over. We all carry the seeds of destruction within us. Boys grasp for weapons as soon as they have learned to make a fist. The war erupts again.”
Lot felt a hot flush burning in his cheeks. It was true. The weapon had beguiled him. He knew it to be a swan burster, an artifact of the ancient war. Swan meant something like darkness. Swan was the direction in which the looming silhouettes of molecular clouds occluded the star fields of the Orion Arm. It was the direction from which the Chenzeme had come. Had it been functional, the ring would have had the capacity to destroy all the life-forms of the Well … and deep down Lot had wanted to see that happen, just for a moment, to see what such a thing might be like, how it might feel.
“What is the proper name of this world?” Jupiter asked, still with that edge in his voice.
Lot swallowed hard. He wanted so much to please Jupiter. In the great ship’s records the world was called Deception Well. But Jupiter spoke of it as—
“The Communion,” Lot whispered.
Jupiter nodded, though he did not seem pleased, as if he knew Lot always thought of it by its other name. “Within the Communion all life is sacred,” he said, his voice soft, so Lot held his breath to catch every word. “No species is sacrificed to the greed of another. Within the Communion we will learn the ways of cooperation and peaceful coexistence, just as the Chenzeme were forced to learn. We will forget our yearning for weapons, and for power. We will become part of a greater whole that has endured despite the lingering evil of the ancient war for over thirty million years.”
“We will be safe,” Lot whispered.
Jupiter nodded. “We will be home.”
HE WOKE TO A SENSE OF DIRE FEAR. IT SEEPED through his sensory tears and into his veins. It forced its way past the membranes of each one of his cells. He cried out softly, and felt a responding ache in his lungs.
Jupiter.
A hand touched his shoulder. “Shh, Lot. It’s all right.”
He turned his head at the familiar voice. “Alta?”
She sat beside him in the half-light. Alta was Captain Antigua’s daughter, and already eleven years old. She was good at commando games. Sometimes she treated Lot like a baby, but she’d partnered with him once, and that time he’d lived.
Now she looked nervous. She kept glancing to the side. “You have to wake up quick, Lot. The medic doesn’t know I took the sedative patch off. She’ll be back soon.”
Lot remembered the medic, but he didn’t remember falling asleep. “I feel scared.” His voice was a hoarse croak. He coughed softly to clear his aching throat.
“I feel scared too. Everybody’s scared. The Silkens want to panic us. They’ve bombed the air with a psychoactive virus. It’ll clear soon. We’ll be all right.” She glanced again to the side. She had black eyes and black, wispy hair that clung to her chin and her throat above her armor. Her skin was very pale.
“You look funny in armor,” Lot said.
She frowned at him. “You look funny asleep, so get up, before the medic slaps another patch on your neck.”
Her anxiety pried at him. Coughing softly, he pushed himself to a sitting position. They were in the cavernous loading bay, though it was almost empty now. Light spilling in from the corridor was augmented by a few headlamps on the floor. Nearby, five women sat cross-legged, infants cradled against the hard breastplates of their armor. One of them rocked gently, her eyes squeezed shut. Lot could hear his heart running fast. “Why are we still here? We’re supposed to follow Jupiter.”
Alta leaned close. Her lips moved beside his ear as she spoke in a barely audible whisper. “Not everyone’s going to make it down.” She sat back a little. “That’s why you have to
wake up. We have to go now. Only a few elevator cars are running below the city. The corridor is packed with people waiting for a turn. It can’t last. We have to get to the lower terminus before it’s too late. Don’t be afraid. I’ve waited for you. We can do it together.”
His sensory tears grappled with her scent. A sticky, pervasive fear seeped out of her, but that was undercut by a gleam of confidence, delightful in its unexpected presence. He fed on it, and felt his own mood lighten. “Where’s the medic?”
“In the corridor. She’ll try to stop us—”
A strange sound stirred in the far distance, a muffled roar blended of deep bass notes and high-pitched accents that set Lot’s nerves on edge.
One of the huddled women muttered, “Oh, I hate that sound.” Someone else hushed her. A baby fussed.
Alta surprised Lot with a quick hug. “Don’t worry. That’s nothing. Just the Silkens, trying to scare us.”
Lot thought she might be wrong. “I want to look.” He got to his feet and edged toward the door. Alta followed, her approval sliding coolly over his sensory tears.
In the corridor Lot saw more people—several hundred armored troopers sitting on the floor, their backpacks on. There wasn’t room to walk between them. They were silent, but their anxiety spoke loudly in the absence of words. They stared vacantly: at the walls, at their hands. Lot knew they were listening. He listened too.
The distant roar grew louder, the keening overnotes more strident. Lot could almost believe he heard Jupiter’s name in that wail. Alta nudged his elbow. “If we stay calm, we’ll be all right.”
“Something’s wrong down there.” He could taste it on the air, panic and terror like dark sparks flashing against his cheeks.
“It’s not good,” Alta admitted. “But Lot, you could get through. The troopers will let you pass, and I’ll take care of you. We can get there together—”
A startled voice interrupted her. “Lot, what are you doing awake?”
He looked up, recognizing the medic who’d taken him away from Jupiter. Sweat glistened on her cheeks. He could smell her quiet terror. Still, she tried for a reassuring smile. “Come back inside. You’re not well. You should be sleeping. You need to give your medical Makers time to heal you.”
“I don’t like to sleep.”
“He can’t dream,” Alta said. Lot could tell she didn’t like the medic.
The medic didn’t seem too fond of her, either. “We all have our duties, Alta Antigua, and mine is to keep the two of you safe. Come inside. We’ll be following Jupiter before too long.”
Alta caught Lot’s hand. He looked in her eyes, and knew she wanted to run. But there was no room to run in the packed corridor, and the sense drifting up from below was only growing worse.
“Let’s go inside, Alta. Just for now.”
Her anger cut sharply across his senses. He felt suddenly self-conscious. The troopers were watching them. He felt their tension climbing, a cloud of flammable emotions building over their heads. He didn’t want it to ignite. “Please, Alta.”
Accusation lay in her eyes. But she went with him back into the loading bay, where the medic gave them both a drink and a ration packet before taking up a protective position at the door.
Lot ate standing up, listening to the murmur from the corridor. The wailing had faded, but the fear was thicker than ever. Lot could feel it tripping through his heart. He tried hard to ignore it. “I saw your mama,” he told Alta. “She went down ahead of Jupiter.”
“I know. If I were nine years older, I could have been in the advance troops too.”
Lot remembered the flash of the incendiary grenade and felt glad that she was only eleven. But he didn’t say it out loud.
He thought about his own mother. She was a captain too, and had her own troops to look out for. “They’ll wait for us in the Well.”
“Hey.” Alta’s mood suddenly brightened. She stuffed the last of her ration packet into her mouth, then caught Lot’s hand. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”
She wouldn’t say what it was, but her gaiety was infectious, so he ran with her across the loading bay’s open floor, toward a faint glow of white light. As they drew closer, he could see that the light was seeping up from a crescent-shaped pit. It lit the surface of a massive, curving wall on the pit’s opposite side. A narrow channel ran in a vertical path up the wall’s face.
Lot edged closer. A transparent shield surrounded the pit, sealing it off from floor to ceiling. He stood with his hands against the shield, looking down. Alta stood behind him, grinning.
The curved wall descended deep into the pit. Several levels below, a bright light shone against it. Lot could see a scoring, a warping of the wall’s surface there, as if it had been partially melted. Below the damaged section the wall was dark. But he could see it again farther down—much farther down—where it plunged into a glowing green crescent. Except it wasn’t a wall anymore. Distance had resolved it into an infinite silver cylinder.
“The elevator column!”
“You’re right, Lot. They’ll be waiting for us. They’ll be waiting down there.”
He stared into the pit, knowing he was looking at a two-hundred-mile drop into Deception Well.
Into the Communion, he corrected himself, feeling a nervous tingling on the back of his neck, as if Jupiter might overhear him.
Movement caught his eye. Far below, something was sliding along the elevator column: a tiny black capsule. It burst out of shadow and into Kheth’s brilliant light as it sped down the shaft. “Alta, look!” he shouted. “There! An elevator car.” In seconds, it was lost to distance. But even before it disappeared, Lot had sighted another capsule, this one moving upward, toward the city. It vanished into shadow just as Alta craned her neck to look.
“It’s gone now, but I saw them. I saw two cars.” He sucked in a sharp breath. The army was leaving Silk. And Deception Well was waiting for them, looming like a trap, just beneath the floor.
Believe in me, Jupiter seemed to whisper.
I do.
Alta’s mood played slick and steely against his recurring doubts. “We have to get on one of those cars,” she said.
“I know.” Yet fear resonated in his blood. It flooded the air. A thousand variations of a common emotion. Holding Alta’s hand again, he tracked the scent back to the door. The medic crouched in the entrance. She was staring down the hall, past the huddled troopers, her mouth open as she sucked in little gasps of air. Alta squeezed Lot’s hand. “I want to go now.”
In that moment, the keening took hold again, starting in ragged bursts, like the terrorized cries of individual voices, then rapidly gathering force. In only a few seconds it was fully orchestrated, and far louder this time than it had been before. This time, Lot was sure he heard Jupiter’s name in the ghastly chorus. This time, there was no denying that the macabre roar was a melody of human screams.
The startled troopers mounted to their feet. An anonymous woman’s voice rose over the anxious murmur. “Jupiter’s down there!”
“You’re right,” a man said. “They’re calling to him. I can hear his name.”
“They’re calling him back,” someone else cried. “He’s leaving without us. He’s leaving us behind!”
The medic stepped into the corridor. Alta pushed after her, dragging Lot along. “No, wait.” Lot tried to pull free of her grip. The air in the corridor was thick with an emotional energy poised to ignite. He didn’t want to get caught in it. This wasn’t what Jupiter had planned. “Alta, let me go!”
As if sparked by his voice, the troopers surged forward. Lot felt pressure from behind. He found himself stumbling down the sloping corridor, people shoving forward all around him. Alta held on to his hand while he struggled to keep his feet. The pace picked up. The troopers were running now, pushing to get around the bend and down, down the long corridor to the lower elevator terminus. Lot was forced to run too. Bodies pressed upon him from all sides. He felt himself lifted off his fe
et. He tried to scream, but there was no air in his lungs. Alta’s grip slipped. Instantly, she was swept away. Knees and elbows bumped against him. Then the floor was under his feet again, and he was struggling to stop, to go back. Someone hit him in the shoulder. He spun, slamming up against a wall. He clung to it while troopers brushed past him, the static-roar of their voices mixing maddeningly with the raw scent of their terror.
“Jupiter!” he screamed. “I’m not going with you! I’m not. I’m not.” He spun around, preparing to defend himself against anyone who would force him to go on. But the corridor was empty.
IT TOOK A LONG TIME TO WORK UP THE COURAGE to follow. Lot sat hunched against the wall, listening to the distant screams, afraid for Alta but too frightened to go look for her. Listening for her to come back. The lights went out, and he was left sitting in darkness.
Hours passed. The screams had long faded to silence when he found himself walking. He moved slowly, the beam of his headlamp picking out the abandoned armor, the backpacks, the bead rifles left lying on the floor. The corridor descended in a slow spiral. Bay doors stood sealed at intervals on the inside wall, their manual levers buried beneath white, scaly growths, unusable. Tunnels branched away on the opposite side. Lot peered up each one, moving his head slowly back and forth as he sought a human presence, but the only sense he got was stale. The tunnels seemed well placed to take people up to the city. Debris littered their floors, and he guessed that a lot of troopers had gone out that way. So he wasn’t the only one who’d been scared. But Alta wouldn’t have turned aside, he was sure of that. So he pressed on, determined to find her.
After several minutes he came across a cluster of three bodies. Two of the troopers were facedown, but the other—a young woman—lay on her back, her dry eyes gazing at the ceiling. After that he found bodies every few feet: mostly infants and children, but young women too, and even a few men.
None of them was Alta.
He reached the lower terminus without realizing it. The corridor came to an abrupt end at a set of bay doors that stood half-open, their runners blocked by fallen bodies. Loathsome vapors drenched the air.
