by Linda Nagata
“You think this place can get inside our minds?”
“It’s already there.” He stretched out on the ground, using the butt end of his pack for a pillow. The Well was in them. He had no doubt about that. In them, and waiting to act. He fretted now over the question of whether they would ever be able to get it out.
EXHAUSTION FEATHERED HIS BODY, BUT HIS MIND was jumpy, and he didn’t feel a closure with sleep. So he told Urban he would stay awake and watch for a few hours. The swan burster tumbled in a leisurely path across the sky. For a few minutes it was bisected by the elevator column, which had finally passed into the planet’s shadow. Silk glowed faintly against the velvet night.
Around him, the crater buzzed with a chittering, croaking, whooping concert of night sounds, some familiar, most not, alien reverberations that set his nerves on edge.
The ring had begun to drop behind the far rim when he saw the phantoms. He stiffened, but he did not wake the others. The silent figures glowed cool blue, just as Gent had. When Lot first saw them, they were near the splash pool: two men and a woman, nude, their hair clotted in feral manes. They crossed the floor of the crater, drawing closer, though they didn’t move directly toward him. He could hear no sound at all of footfalls, though he thought he heard voices: faint, almost imperceptible even with his enhanced hearing. He wondered if the erratic whispering might be only in his imagination … and if so, was it a product of his own mind? Or put there by something else?
The phantoms drew nearer. He could not tell if they were aware of him. The woman’s mouth moved as if in speech, but all Lot heard was a soft buzz. She swung slowly away from her companions and nearer to Lot. He watched her feet step gracefully across the tussocks. The grass didn’t bend at all beneath her step. Yet she had a presence. He caught it on his sensory tears. Anxiety. Anger. Anxiety. Guessing wildly, he whispered, “Sypaon?”
She did not answer. She squatted close to his side, staring at Alta’s sleeping figure. The two men had continued in their stroll across the crater floor.
The woman’s lips parted. “Another,” she said, her voice barely audible. She lifted her head to peer after the men. They were halfway to the far wall now. Their blue glow had faded, so that Lot could hardly see them. “Another comes,” the woman said, her accent thick, sounding like the recorded images that had testified about the plague that ruined Old Silk. “Within us.” She looked to the sky, but not in the direction of the setting ring or the elevator cable.
“Tell me what you are,” Lot whispered.
She stood, with no creaking of joints. Her gaze remained fixed on the spot where Lot had last seen the men, though they had vanished now from his sight. “Don’t go,” he urged her.
She stepped away, her path taking her over Urban. She seemed to float over him, walking on a thin cushion of air. Lot hesitated, debating over the sleeping figures. Then he made up his mind and followed her. She did not object, or even seem to notice.
He trailed behind her across the crater floor. The men did not reappear, but her own image held strong as she drifted over the tussocks. He looked ahead, wondering where they were going, or if they even had a destination. She seemed very real, but not at all human. He had a thought that maybe, the passage into Communion was gradual—a gestation—and learning the new consciousness was a long process, these Old Silkens now only mature enough to emerge from whatever slow womb had contained them over five hundred years.
He saw the mound ahead of them. It was not the same one he’d tried to breach before. This one seemed twice as large, its heat signature like banked coals on a barbecue, steaming beneath a cool, crusty surface.
The woman approached it, and without slowing or changing her stride, she waded into it. Lot watched in astonishment as her feet, her calves, her knees disappeared into the mound’s rising structure. A wave of denser blue color ran across her, from her legs upward, flooding her whole body. And when the wave crested her forehead, she burst into a blue-tinted mist that showered outward in all directions. Lot cried out in shock and surprise—he had seen it clearly this time, she’d been hollow. Nothing more than an inflated vessel. Nothing more? Without internal structural support she’d still seemed to move exactly as a human woman. She’d spoken to him. All this passed in the brief moment before her misty remains rained down upon him, wetting his sensory tears and he could feel himself backing away.
He tripped and went down and though his body got up immediately, scrambling like a clumsy drunk across the uneven ground, he saw himself as if he looked upon another, and even that slim awareness of his own discrete existence began to fade, overwhelmed by a volant expansion of perception as he felt himself shunted through a gateway into a foreign sensorium, his own locus shrinking rapidly to inconsequence within the awareness that contained him.
Him?
There was no such distinction. He had unfurled, run liquid across a thin fabric of intentionality, at once touching upon the anxious dead of Old Silk, the serpent, the breath that flowed through Alta’s body, the struggling fly against the sticky cushion of the sundew’s paddle, a raging echo of the ado riot, and other, nameless things, little more than shadows, their substance hidden in a dark, ponderous ocean, its depths running far, far beneath his own shallow reach. Higher: flowing across the hide of descending Nesseleth, sliding the circle of the swan burster, murmuring voices in the accent of Old Silk and a sense of discrete nodes of human thought locking in around him, bound in place by the intoxicating molecular code of want, and of desire. All this at once and yet not at the same time.
Past time: cold, airless, void, the magnetic fields of a great ship that is not Nesseleth singing through his awareness as he follows the field lines, inward toward the hull.
Another comes. Skimming on the surface of the dark ocean of being.
He enwraps this other, and it feels wrong.
Present time: the nebula glitters overhead, faint wash of light and Urban screaming his name.
His name?
Past time: the ring swollen into a searing disk of brilliant light pure energy bearing down—it is wrongness—frantic thrashing reaction communicate panic panic panic across the void—skip time ski— disassemble, dissolve, destroy destroy destroyed—
“Lot! Come out of it, come back, come back.”
He winced as Urban’s hysterical voice roared in his ears. Icy water flowed across his face, got in his nose and he coughed hard, rolling onto his side, Alta’s hand against his back and Urban trying to hold his face above the shimmering film of water that pooled over the mosses.
In the distance, he could make out the chittering night song of the forest. But close by, all had fallen into stunned silence.
He shuddered, lying exhausted against the turf, water seeping into his ear, saturating his hair.
“Lot?” Alta whispered, her hands stroking his cheeks, his shoulders, as she instinctively used touch to focus his consciousness, fix him here in his own body.
But he had never left it… .
“What happened?” he whispered.
“We woke up,” Urban said. “You were gone. We ran to look for you, and Alta saw the other mound.” He stared past Lot’s shoulder. Lot sat up, twisting around to look at the structure: a black silhouette a stone’s throw away. He blinked into IR and the heat strata appeared. “You were on the ground,” Urban said. “Your whole body was trembling. Your eyes were moving beneath the lids. I thought it was eating your nervous system—”
“What was?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know! This place, the Communion… .”
“The Communion,” Lot echoed, putting a name to it. “It’s what we came for.”
“No! We came to find Jupiter.”
“… and the mitochondrial analog.” Did the analogy hold? The Communion he’d sensed had been no more than a thin fabric, the surface tension of a vast ocean of being. A dark ocean, the pull of it strong beneath him.
“You saw it, didn’t you?” Alta asked.
He nod
ded. Only a thin awareness, yet it had been so vast—
“Thought you were dying, fury!”
“Maybe.” He felt confused. “I don’t know… .”
“Is that what you wanted?” Urban demanded.
Want, desire. Lot trembled, remembering. “Once you’re in it, it’s all you want.”
“Are you in it now?”
“No. It’s over. It’s gone.”
But for how long? He’d sensed a compelling structure falling into place around him, as if an old, half-eroded intellectual pattern had begun to reassert itself in his presence, fitting him with enzymatic perfection …
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Urban said. “The old man was right. The Well is going to eat us alive.”
… locking them all into a foreign structure.
Fear crept over him, the same deep panic he’d felt that day when the troopers had begun to stampede. His sense of self wouldn’t last here—he knew it—and was that really any different from dying?
He glanced uncertainly at the night sky. Fear existed within the Communion too. “There’s something wrong out there.” Another comes. Null Boundary? The Silkens had long suspected that ship. Could their misgivings have been communicated to the Communion? Despite its vastness, the awareness he’d sensed was only an overlay on deeper processes. “We still have to find Jupiter.”
“Jupiter’s dead,” Urban said.
“He’s not.” Lot could sense traces of him even now, a dilute mist on the still night air. “Down by the ocean. We could get there tomorrow.”
“Fury, it’s over and you know it. We barely made it this far.”
Across the crater, some small creature called in a soft, three-note song. Lot listened, trying to devise inside himself an analog of calm. “So what do you want to do? Wait for your old man to find us?”
Alta responded first, as he’d known she would. “Kona would have killed us, if Sypaon hadn’t held the wardens.”
Anger flared in Urban’s aura. But then his gaze cut away. Lot could see his braids swaying slowly against a milky background of thinly scattered stars. “Sooth. You’re right.”
Lot nodded. “So we’ve got to go on. Find Jupiter. He knows more about this world than anyone.”
“There’s no way out, is there?” Alta asked him, her voice soft, resolute on the cool air.
“He planned it that way, when he sent Nesseleth down.” But Jupiter had made mistakes. “We have to find him, then maybe, we’ll find a way.”
CHAPTER
26
LOT OPENED HIS EYES TO A DAWN SKY, broad wash of deep velvet blue with the white points of the Committee still peeking through. Translucent wings soared overhead, and he felt rested, for the first time in days. He sat up and tested the air. Jupiter’s presence was strong, mixed with an image of the ocean, tang of salt spray over the mellow rotting scents of the bog. Alta was awake. She looked at him, her expression questioning. Urban lay between them, still sleeping. “Did you see anything?” he asked her.
She shrugged. “Some ghosts. They didn’t come near.”
Lot smiled at the casual way they’d already come to treat the phantoms. Alta misread his mood. She turned away, struggling with something. Lot was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to talk about it. “Let it go,” he told her.
“I have to tell you why—”
“No. It doesn’t matter.”
Lot got up, the sun flashing glitter across his eyelashes. He squinted at her. “You still feeling Jupiter in you?” he asked tentatively. “Same as always?”
She nodded. “It’s not changed. Not at all.” Her hand touched her chest. “He’s here.”
No change. Faith as a chemical concept Jupiter had implanted in those around him. Not even a DI to adjust its measure.
He was not Jupiter, and she knew that. She’d tried to pretend otherwise, but it hadn’t worked.
“We should go soon,” she said.
He nodded. Here on the ground it was still fairly dark. He could hear the hiss and gurgle of the splash pool at the upper crater wall, though he couldn’t quite make it out. “Why don’t you wake up Urban? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He headed across the crater, enjoying the freshness of the dawn. He thought he could sense others besides Jupiter, but the traces were faint, not like the night he’d first opened his hood. That had been the night Gent died, his tissue smeared across the land. Had the Communion been reacting to that?
Nothing is lost in the Well.
But the Well and the Communion were different things. He’d learned that, anyway. The Communion was a veneer, like the conscious mind of a man vibrant over the older, deeper, unconscious mental patterns.
Jupiter had found the Communion here. Lot chewed over that odd fact as he made his way across the crater.
In the predawn darkness he felt almost alone. The air tasted cleaner and freer than any he had ever breathed. He reached the edge of the pool. In the dim light, the thick green water looked almost black as it moved in slow waves away from the trickling splash of the little waterfall. Lot split the front seam of his suit and peeled it off, throwing it into the water, then wading in after it, the cold liquid closing hard around him, squeezing his lungs so he could hardly pull in a breath. He forced himself under the water anyway, shaking out his hair, letting the water work against his skin. His Makers would always keep him clean, but there was something satisfying, sustaining, about the touch of water, even fake, thick green gooey water. It still felt clean. And it tasted good. He drank some, then popped back up to the surface, his skin puckering and his balls trying to climb up into his body. He grabbed his suit and swished it around, letting the water fill up the sleeves and the pant legs.
“Lot!” Urban’s voice rang out across the crater. Dawn light had begun to pick out the gray shapes of tussocks, and the sky over the crater rim glowed.
“Yeah, I’m coming!” Lot yelled, his voice echoing in the quiet air. Still in the water, he pulled the suit back on. He was wading out onto the spongy turf when a familiar voice broke into his reverie: “Messages, Lot. Busy morning.”
He jumped three feet in the air, landing with a splash back at the water’s edge. “Ord?”
The robot crouched on a tussock, its long tentacles folded accordion style across the front of its tiny body.
Lot squinted at it, sputtering his surprise. “But Urban said he—”
The DI stood on its squat legs and looked quickly around. “Master Urban’s aggression is treatable.”
“I doubt it.” Lot grinned. “You okay?”
“Messages,” Ord repeated.
Lot squinted at it. It seemed whole, though now that he looked, its tentacles were distinctly shorter. “You put yourself back together?” But that was not a question Ord could really answer. Self did not exist for it, and the pronoun “you” Lot so casually used had no referent in its system of thought. It considered his query, then declined a response.
“Urgent messages,” it said this time.
Lot found himself reluctant to receive any “messages,” suspecting that any such must be either threat or entreaty. He especially dreaded encountering Kona’s so-reasonable and knowing manner as he voiced the same doubts and implausibilities that already plagued Lot’s own mind. But he knew Ord would not shut up about it until he’d done the task.
So Lot held a hand down to it and Ord caught hold and swung up, then shinnied to his shoulders. “Go ahead then,” he said, without enthusiasm. He started back across the crater floor, just as Urban bellowed for him again.
Suddenly, Ord was speaking in Yulyssa’s voice. “Lot! Stay out of sight. Stay under cover. Oh, I don’t even know if your attendant is still with you, or even if … if you’re still alive. Kona thinks you are. Oh Lot, if you can hear me, hide yourself. The deck guns have been recalled. Shao is certain of it. He believes they were remounted tonight. Things are falling apart up here. City security has collapsed. Half the officers were ados, and they’re in open rebellion.
People are going crazy, and authority’s blaming you. They’re hunting you. They’ll use the guns against you, if they get a visual sighting—”
Lot didn’t wait to hear more. “Urban!” he screamed. “Alta!” He bounded across the crater floor. The dawn was cloudless, and in the open bog there was no shelter at all from the sky. They were camped at the center of a bull’s-eye, and full light was only minutes away. Maybe authority didn’t need visible light to resolve them. Maybe IR was enough. But they were still alive… .
Urban and Alta were on their feet, silhouettes in the dimness. “Get the packs!” Lot roared at them. “Grab them and get over the crater wall. Get under the trees!”
A flock of tiny brown fliers sprang up in front of him, their chittering as alarmed and incomprehensible as Yulyssa’s voice in his ear. A glance at the sky showed him brightening blue, only two or three of the Committee still present, almost invisible beside the blazing, bisecting line of the elevator cable that had long since caught the full light of day.
Urban grabbed his pack. Alta already had hers on. Lot bounded between them, scooped up his own pack, shrugged it on—“Come on!”—and together they ran toward the edge of the crater, while Lot’s shouted explanation tore out of his throat in coarse lumps: “Deckgunsback—aimed at us—gotta get outtasight—’foresunup.”
Light drenched the land. It would be only a moment before the search programs in Silk spotted them. The rim wall loomed ahead, only about twelve feet high, but nearly sheer. How could they get over it?
“There!” Alta said, pointing at a small rockslide. She scrambled up the unstable slope, Urban and Lot on her heels, then caught herself just before she spilled over the other side. “Oh Jupiter,” she whispered.
The outer wall of the crater fell away beneath them in mossy ribs of exposed rock that dropped in a sliding descent of some twelve hundred feet, ending in a wide green river that tracked the bottom of a gorge. Vegetation kicked in maybe six hundred feet below.
“We have to do it,” Lot said.
