by Linda Nagata
He cried out and woke himself. Muted sunlight streamed in through the filthy window. The room was stiflingly hot, and he could feel the slick, sticky burden of perspiration on his cheeks. Alta and Urban had come back. They slept quietly at his side. But there was something more here. His hackles rose as he sensed a foreign presence in the room. He held himself still, trying to determine what and where it was. Until, near the door, the pattern of mildew blurred and shifted, briefly outlining a tiny human form.
CHAPTER
23
IT STOOD NO MORE THAN THREE FEET HIGH. LOT WATCHED its vague shape blur and shift as it moved cautiously along the wall, drawing slowly nearer to where Urban slept. He didn’t dare to even tense his muscles, lest it suspect he was awake.
He waited, while it crept to within a meter of Urban’s sleeping form. Then he launched himself on it, diving over Alta and Urban to hit it with the full weight of his torso. It disintegrated beneath him. A gelatinous mass splashed across his chest, then wrapped around his right shoulder in a smooth, hot flow that reached as far as his exposed neck. He hit the floor with only a thin membrane beneath him, and that was flowing away fast.
But the impact had weakened its camouflage function. He could see it clearly now: a pool of green liquid interlaced with gold wire, petite human arms and legs rapidly re-forming as the liquid congealed. The warden lifted a head to bear on him. “Lot, look out!” Alta shouted; Urban’s roar of outrage filled the room.
Lot kept his gaze fixed on the warden’s thickening tissues, searching the semitransparent ooze for an object of greater density: the green aerosol capsule that carried the assault Maker Placid Antigua had used. He hadn’t noticed the weapon when he’d run the wardens. He hadn’t thought to look.
A tiny green hand lifted toward him, still partly viscous liquid, the fingers not quite formed yet, but suddenly Lot knew the capsule would be there, embedded in the palm or the forearm. He struck the limb with his fist, over and over again, using his enhanced reflexes to smash the tissue against the floor. On the third stroke he felt the poison sack. It slipped like soft rubber beneath his coiled hand.
He changed tactics. Digging his fingers into the gelatinous mix, he groped for the poison capsule, determined to tear it out. Urban appeared at his side. Lot shouted at him to search the warden’s other arm.
He got his fingers around the capsule. The warden’s flesh tightened as it strove to use pressure to immobilize his grip. But Lot hooked the capsule anyway and wrenched it out. Urban was shouting, cursing, as he dug into the other arm. Alta screamed at them to “Get out! Get out!” Urban yanked the second capsule free and dove for the door.
The warden’s face was nearly complete now. Lot found himself eye to eye with soft green features vaguely sketched in beaded lines. It seemed familiar, and yet, not quite believable. Too abstract; too stylized. A generic representation of a human face.
Lot raised his fist. The warden’s self-repair function probably demanded a heavy load of metabolic energy. It had already drawn deeply on that. If he could damage it again, it might take longer to re-form. He drove his fist against its face, smashing down through the small nose, driving all the way to the floor below. The green tissue sloshed in grotesque, blunted fountains.
Then Lot was on his feet and squeezing through the doorway’s narrow opening, into the shadowy corridor. Urban and Alta were ready. They leaned hard on the smooth door. It popped forward on its track, sliding shut with a harsh snick!
Lot stood in the shadows, breathing heavily. A soft pounding played out against the closed door. He didn’t think the warden would have the strength to open it, but Alta wasn’t taking any chances. She leaned hard against the door, her eyes red-rimmed, silent rage on her face. She’d managed to toss their packs into the corridor. He started to reach for his, then remembered the capsule in his hand.
He looked down at it. It was about two inches long, teal green in color with a spray head at one end. An innocuous sheath for a deadly poison … could they use it?
Urban was already shouldering his pack. “Come on, fury. Let’s jump before the commandant brings up another warden. Now they know we’re here, we’ve got to get as far into the forest as we can before—”
“Where’s Ord?” Lot interrupted, looking up and down the corridor in sudden concern. He scooped up his pack with one hand while his gaze searched the shadowy junctures of ceiling and wall. “It was supposed to be watching.” He frowned, retrieving a detailed picture of the room from fixed memory. He searched it, but Ord’s spidery body was not part of that scene. “Where did it go?”
Alta could not bring herself to say it out loud, but the look in her eyes clearly communicated her opinion: he was a fool to waste concern over the device.
“It’s a tool,” Lot growled at her. “It’s got a design similar to the wardens. Maybe we could arm it with these capsules.” He held the poison sack out for her to see, but she wouldn’t look at it. The charismata of his displeasure had fallen across her, and she’d turned her head away. Once again her vulnerability was exposed. And she resented it. In a moment of sudden clarity, he understood that. For Jupiter she would have done anything. But he was not Jupiter, and she resented the power he held over her.
As if to confirm that conclusion, her small hand closed into a defiant fist. “You never get it straight,” she accused. “Authority would have used Ord against you. They made it. They controlled it.”
Lot felt his heart lurch. “What did you do with it?”
Alta just glared at him. Urban stepped close to Lot, dropping the second capsule into his hand. “We dismembered it,” he said. “Then we tossed the pieces into the wind. It had to be done, fury, or this expedition wouldn’t have lasted another day.”
Lot looked at the twin capsules in his hand. He tried to tell himself Urban was right, that it had to be done. But the viciousness stung, a brute execution no different from what the warden had attempted to deliver. (Or had the warden intended to hurt them? It hadn’t actually attacked.)
A sick feeling settled into Lot’s belly. His hand closed over the capsules, ready to fling them to the end of the corridor. But at the last moment he reconsidered, and instead put them in a small pocket at his waist.
Alta and Urban had already started trudging down the escalator. “Come on, fury,” Urban called. “If your old man’s here, it’s going to take some work to find him.”
BENEATH THE ELEVATOR CAR, THE COLUMN’S SURFACE appeared heavily damaged. Last night they’d seen shallow scallops in the wall where plants had taken root. That deterioration increased dramatically in the last thousand feet of their descent. Here the scallops were up to ten inches across, and some of them overlapped. Lot pulled out the vegetation, to find hollows as deep as his fist.
“It looks like an infection,” Alta said, stroking the curve of a smooth depression. “It looks like it’s eating right through the column.”
“It’s not,” Lot told her. “It’s quiescent now. Kona said it happened around that day.”
Lot went first in the rotation, leading the descent in a series of short drops, no more than fifty yards at a time.
The flat black roof of the terminal building spread out beneath them, filling the valley floor. It looked slagged; half-melted by some great heat. Thick patches of gray lichen filled the folds and furrows. Alta hissed as she studied the damage. “Did authority turn the deck guns against him?”
No one answered. Kona had sworn to them he knew nothing of what happened here that day. That day, the wardens had been lost, and the column had been damaged by some unknown mechanism. Lot almost wished it had been the deck guns. “Let’s just get down.”
The elevator column was anchored within the heel of a U-shaped bay cut into the side of the building. The open arms of the U embraced the beginning of the weathered road that ran out of the valley. The day was cloudless, and in Kheth’s noon glare the roof radiated a baking heat. As they drew closer, Lot pulled his hood half over his head to shield himself
.
He remembered the time he’d seen this valley through a warden’s eyes. Fog had draped the land, and possibility had seemed to lurk just beyond the obscuring mists. Today Kheth shone with the force of rational inspection. In its glare the forest appeared dully normal.
Lot looked closer. He studied the shapes of individual trees and the way they interlocked in clusters of shape and texture to make the weave of the forest. Here and there, distant trees flowered in mushrooming canopies of red and yellow. Leaf color varied too. Though green dominated, there was green seamed with yellow, or rimmed with red, green in a hundred variants of shade and shininess. Some trees sparkled as their waxy leaves moved in the slow breeze.
Lot squinted, trying to push his vision into telescopic. But the system kept falling back to standard. He sighed. It was just another symptom of his deteriorating condition, as his body reserved his declining physiological energy for more essential tasks.
“Look there,” Alta said. “There. Just a few feet out.” He followed the white glare of her pointing arm until he sighted a transparent … insect? hovering on buzzing horizontal wings in the updraft that rose from the terminal roof. Its body was shaped like a rounded fin, deep in the belly, but extremely thin, perhaps three inches long. He could see the shadowing of its internal organs through its transparent flesh. Another glass fin glinted just beyond the first. Then abruptly, he was aware of the creatures all around him, hundreds of them, hovering innocuously in the rising heat. They showed no awareness of the intruding humans.
A pack of black-winged flyers appeared suddenly from one end of the valley. They remained distant, staying close to the valley wall as they skirted the forest canopy.
“Looks like no bogeymen today,” Urban said. His tone was cocky, but his nervousness worked on Lot like a high-pitched whine.
URBAN STOPPED THE DESCENT WHEN THEY WERE LEVEL with the roof. A horizontal gulf of some sixty feet separated them from the slagged rooftop. “We don’t have any way to get over there,” Urban said. The heat had raised a ruddy sheen in his dark cheeks.
Lot nodded. He looked down, examining the base of the column. Where the elevators had once come to rest in the heel of the open bay, there was now a broad, sunlit apron of ferns interspersed with spindly trees. The vegetation spilled out through the bay, only gradually giving way to the valley road. Jupiter would have gone that way. But nobody knew how far Jupiter had gotten. Alta dangled overhead, silent, her mood sharp and critical. “We’ll go all the way down,” Lot said.
The heat eased as soon as they dropped below the level of the roof. Once they’d descended several feet, they stopped again. The terminal building stood only four stories high. Each floor opened onto the elevator terminus. Daylight fell dimly on the smooth expanses, finally giving way to full darkness in the building’s cavernous interior.
Wherever Kheth’s light touched, there was vegetation. Trunkless plants like ribbed fins were most abundant, clinging to the floors and the soaring pillars, their emerald green faces spread in overlapping clumps. There were a few small trees too, and a trailing, fernlike growth in the distant zones that enjoyed at best a half-light. Small bright shapes whirled in the air just on the border of light and shadow, turning erratically like falling leaves, but never quite descending. The same sixty-foot gap separated them from the empty floors. Apart from the epiphytic vegetation, it all had a very utilitarian look, reminding Lot of Silk’s industrial core, rather than the graceful city itself.
He wondered what great project this building had been made to serve. Looking at its empty decks, he suspected it had never seen real use. The Old Silkens had been taken away so soon.
They started down again, examining each level as they dropped past it. On the ground, they paused to gather up their climbing gear, stashing it in their packs. Ferns crunched under their boots, the broken fronds releasing a tight, dusty odor. Lot listened carefully, but heard only the skittering of tiny, hidden creatures.
Since awakening this morning, he’d caught no sign of human presence. The jumbled auras of last night had taken on a dreamlike quality in his memory. He shouldered his pack, gazing out of the bay, to the road … and the forest. Something was out there. He couldn’t sense it. Not yet. But anticipation pulled threads of tension through his body.
He felt Urban looking at him, so he turned his head, to encounter that familiar, cocky grin. “So where to, fury? You do have a plan?”
Lot smiled, as the tenuousness of their situation rolled in on him. Leaving the city had been something of a spur-of-the-moment decision. Now they were isolated on a potentially lethal and little understood world, without food or communications or transport or data analysis. His smile faded. With Gent gone, they didn’t even have good advice. He winced under a sudden surge of harsh emotion. Gent had died to save his life, to get him down here. Why? What was he supposed to prove? That he could die here too? Or that he could live here?
No. Something more.
A tiny flitting creature landed on his gloved hand. He looked down to discover a fly, a perfectly ordinary little fly, exactly like the ones so irresistibly drawn to his sundews. Its triangular wings lay like glass panes across its back. He squinted at it. Had its kind been here since the days of the Old Silkens?
Part of the system.
He could not say yet just what that meant. So. Perhaps he was here to find out.
He looked tentatively at Urban. “We should probably get out of this valley. Away from the elevator column. There’s bound to be more wardens around. We might as well make ourselves a little harder to find.”
THEY DEBATED WHETHER THEY SHOULD USE THE ROAD. Alta wanted to seek the depths of the forest, hide themselves as quickly as possible. Urban wanted to keep to the open, arguing that their presence here was no secret, and that it would be easier for them to spot a warden on the road than under the speckled shadows of the trees. Lot stepped away from the circle of their tension.
Beyond the sheltering walls of the terminal building, the old road struggled to hold back the advance of the forest. It was not in good condition. The pearly gray surface looked as if it had been preserved at the peak of a fine-grained boil, each tiny, rising bubble flash-frozen at the moment of bursting. Where overhanging trees provided some shade, rainwater glistened in the hollows. Lot stepped out onto the surface. With a disheartening crunch the fragile bubble walls collapsed into dust.
Yet despite the damage, the road retained much of its former glory. No weeds had taken root on it. In fact, only a handful of leaves and a few scattered blossoms cluttered its tortured surface, hinting at the survival of at least one class of maintenance nanomech. And it cut an impressive swath through the forest: 150 feet from edge to edge. Trees crowded up against it though, in dense, leafy walls that sight could not penetrate. A slow thermal current rose from the artificial surface, setting some of the leaves asway. Anything could be hiding in there.
Lot squinted along the roadbed, trying to remember exactly where he’d seen the phantoms the day he’d run the warden. Suddenly, he blinked hard, trying to get his eyes to focus on a spot about a quarter-mile away. “Hey!” he called to Alta and Urban. “Check that.” He glanced back at them. “There. Where the road begins to curve.”
Urban trotted to his side, his gaze fixed on the point Lot had indicated. He wasn’t squinting. Maybe his eyes were working okay. “Banana trees, fury!”
“They’re fruiting, no?”
“Ripe and ready!” He looked at Lot. “But where’d they come from?”
“The Old Silkens. Must be. Nothing’s lost in the Well.”
“’Cept people.”
“Maybe.”
The presence of food decided them. They stuck to the road. To Lot’s surprise, the condition of the road improved steadily as they left the terminal building behind. By the time they reached the banana grove, they were walking on a smooth, flawless surface.
The bananas seemed as normal as any in the gardens of Silk, unaffected by the manipulations of the
elusive governors. After that they found other fruit trees growing along the road: mango and rambutan, lychee and ahuacatl. They stood in dense groves, the vigorous descendants of what must have been an allee of young fruit trees in the days of Old Silk.
Lot climbed one of the ahuacatl trees. It was hung with spiderwebs. He brushed them aside and climbed higher, up to the pendulous bearing branches. Reaching out, he plucked one of the heavy green fruits, then dropped it for Urban to catch. Soon they had enough to fill one pack, and he jumped down. Alta had gathered some of the spiny rambutan.
They ate quickly, squatting in the shade of the trees. “We need to refuel the suits,” Urban said, looking thoughtfully at the green rind in his hands. “I wonder if they can use this stuff?” He started playing with the tubes that fed out of his pack, while carrying on a soft conversation with his DI. Lot listened for a while, but the food in his belly had made him sleepy and soon his attention drifted to the darting pattern of a swarm of tiny flies as they buzzed over a rotting ahuacatl that had smashed against the leaf mold. Another spoiled fruit looked half-eaten. He could see the scrape marks of small, sharp teeth in the exposed green flesh. Some of the flies were buzzing very close to him now, their black bodies like darting specks in his vision. He jumped at a sudden, sharp sting on his cheek.
Alta looked at him, eyes wide. “There’s blood there.”
He swiped at the spot. A minute smear of blood reddened his finger. Biting flies?
Urban crouched at his side, taking a closer look. “You think it’s poisonous?”
Lot shrugged, wondering the same thing himself, but not wanting to admit it. “Our Makers can handle it.”
Alta’s fear touched him then, like a dark mist under the trees. The city suddenly seemed very far away. What was going on there, in the aftermath of the riot?
“Let’s get out of here,” Alta said.
They slipped back up to the road. Lot emerged last. As he stepped out onto the gray surface, he thought he heard a rustling noise behind him. Turning quickly, he saw a blurred smear of motion deep in the shadowed brown world under the low-hanging branches. The disturbance took only a second to slide out of sight and into the deeper forest.
