by Linda Nagata
Kona finished for her: “While in the few loyal ados there’s no sign of it at all.”
Lot’s gloved hands kneaded in slow fists. He didn’t feel much surprise. Alta had as much as told him she carried her faith in physical form. Captain Antigua had said much the same thing, describing Jupiter’s abiding presence forever dwelling inside her. Now he thought of it, David had confessed similar feelings, though he’d caught the faith from Lot, that day in the tunnels. The most dangerous viruses were those with a long latent period. “You think I did this.”
“No.” That was Yulyssa’s voice, edged with anger. “We think—we know—it started long before you. The Old Silkens were gone before Jupiter ever reached this system.”
Tiny flies buzzed in a shaft of light that had found its way through the thick canopy. Lot’s gaze fixed on them. “Jupiter found the Communion here. It infected him here. So it didn’t start with the Hallowed Vasties.”
“It started with the Chenzeme,” Kona said. Then, to Lot’s surprise, his voice softened. “And that’s in you.”
Sure. The “chemical atrium” Dr. Alloin had found constituted a different perceptual system. He could see what others could not. Silvery faith, and the interlocking pattern of the Communion.
Kona again: “The rioters are acting in your name, Lot. They know you’re down there and it’s made them crazy. They want to follow you the way they followed Jupiter. They want the Communion—”
“Oh.” He felt a resonant sense, as if a maelstrom of unrelated facts was about to collapse into coherent order.
“You … haven’t found it?” Kona asked.
“The Communion? I have.”
Stunned silence followed on his pronouncement. Finally, Yulyssa asked, “Then is it real? Do you … understand it?”
Lot frowned. “I don’t know. It has to do with the phantoms, I think.” The blue woman had pulled him under the first time; and Gent’s image had accompanied him in the river. “It’s a human thing anyway, and not really part of the Well. That’s … something else. Older. Alien. A mechanism … to preserve data? Biological data. From the Communion I can … look into it?” He shook his head, frustrated by the inadequacy of words. “The Communion’s a place for thinking, though it’s only a veneer on top of the Well system, tapping the Well’s data sea. Still, it’s big. It reaches around the planet, and across the nebula too. The nebula’s populated by more than butterfly gnomes. Did you know that? It’s replete with governors too. Microscopic sentries. They pass their data inward, across the nebula. I saw Null Boundary through them. He’s coming in-system.”
The nebula’s debris field had forced the great ship to slow to a tiny fraction of its interstellar speed. Maybe that was part of the reason for the nebula’s existence. The Well protects itself.
“Something’s wrong with that ship, Yulyssa. Watch him closely.”
“Lot? I don’t understand. Is the Communion a sculpted entity? Like a great ship?”
“No. Not like that at all.” If he could explain it to her, maybe she could make sense of it. “The Communion’s made of … well, it feels like lots of small, hungry points of awareness, diffuse minds. Maybe that’s what’s left of the Old Silkens. I don’t know. When I first … well, when I first encountered them, they were scattered and weak. Then they began to link together, focusing around—”
He broke off abruptly, startled at his own blindness. Focusing around me. Gent had said something like that once: You’re the gateway to the Communion. The focusing lens. Twice now he’d felt a powerful order congealing around him. Suppose the Communion he sensed was only a half-made thing, weak and unfocused and in need of a seed crystal around which to congeal? In need of him. Great cult leader—or reservoir of rare biochemical structure? He supposed it was much the same thing.
Given all that, what might the Communion grow into?
The vast and intricate information currents of the Well loomed in his consciousness. The Communion had only a loose attachment to it now. But might a deeper synthesis be possible?
“That’s what Jupiter was after,” he muttered, his thoughts bouncing hard now. “The mitochondrial analog. Remember, Yulyssa? He always used that—”
“Yes, but—”
“The mitochondria retains its own primal identity. Its own DNA, though it can’t survive outside of the cell … and the cell can’t survive without it.”
“Basic doctrine,” Kona interrupted.
“But how long for that synthesis to evolve?” Lot asked.
He could almost see Kona’s famous scowl. “It had to work right away, or the cell would have metabolized—”
“No. Bacteria have their own strategies.”
“Oh, Lot,” Yulyssa sighed, despairing at the unkind analogy.
He shook his head and pressed on. “It might have been only a clumsy association, at first. Things would need to change—a lot—before the invading bacteria became fully integrated. How long would that take?”
“How should we know?” Kona growled.
“Jupiter knew. It could take a long time. Hundreds of years. Thousands. Maybe more. It didn’t matter to him. That’s how we survive, no? We turn our backs on the Hallowed Vasties and let the past slip away and tell ourselves it doesn’t matter, a year, two years, a thousand, what does it matter? Once we cut ourselves off from our past… . Because most of us don’t understand time. That a thousand years is nothing. Ten thousand years is nothing. We’re awed by life spans that touch a millennium, but in the life of a planet, it’s nothing. On that scale even the Chenzeme are young.”
Kona was not taken in. “We don’t exist on that scale!”
“Jupiter thought we could.”
“Lot.” Yulyssa’s voice broke into his thoughts. “We need you in the city. The rioters will listen to you.”
There. She’d said it. The reason behind this call … not that he wanted to face it. “Maybe you should listen to them. If people are rebelling, it’s because they’re scared. The food supplies are running out, and unless you want to chance the Well—”
“There are other options!” Kona insisted. “Null Boundary’s coming.”
“Don’t count on him.” Lot puzzled over the sense of threat he had felt when he’d slipped under the skin. “He’s wrong, somehow… .”
Kona couldn’t accept it. His voice was thick; every word must have cost him. “Understand it, Lot. We need you. The ados listen to you. The refugees listen to you. You could buy us the time we’ll need to find a real solution.”
Lot stared at the flowing green water, glimpsing in its eddies a shadow beneath the skin. “You’re wrong. They don’t want me. They want Jupiter. They want you to let them down the Well.”
“I can’t do that. It’s the same as murder.”
“I’m still alive.”
“Jupiter’s not.”
Lot held his silence. Kona desperately wanted to believe Jupiter was dead. It was probably best to let him. He might blanch at murder now, but he’d let half the army die in the tunnels that day. To stop Jupiter?
Yulyssa was speaking, pleading with him to come back. “I can’t,” Lot said. “Not yet.” And then he added, “Beware of Null Boundary.” Before they could say anything else, he looked at Ord and made a slashing gesture across his throat.
“Rest now?” Ord asked brightly.
He couldn’t imagine it. “I’ve got to find them.” Urban and Alta … and Jupiter. He envisioned them all, gathered together at the ocean shore, waves rolling in, spilling on white sand with a sluffing roar just like in the VR. They’d be waiting for him, all of them safe; merry teasing because he’d been the last one down. And walking there on the edge of the land he would discover what to do, what he owed. He imagined it that way, knowing it was the coarsest bullshit.
HE REACHED THE COAST IN LATE AFTERNOON. The river ended in a wide, brackish marsh between the arms of two steep ridges. Lot slogged through, emerging on a beach of bright sand, eroded calcite mixed with specks of black lava. A lig
ht breeze flowed off the emerald ocean, tempering the lumbering afternoon heat.
He stood at the crest of the beach, feeling the sand sliding away beneath his feet. It was a dizzying sensation, as if the ground had been gutted of its solid structure, leaving behind an amorphous debris field, stone ashes that presaged the collapse of his own inner world as he looked up and down the beach and saw that it was empty, a wild shore, with no sign of human presence. “Urban!” he called. “Alta!” But the chuffing, growling ocean overwhelmed his voice.
Swells rolled in from the uninterrupted horizon. He watched them slow and steepen as they approached the shadowy outlines of submerged reefs. Their smooth faces glinted green, a moment before they collapsed into white breakers. The air was full of a salt tang, and Jupiter’s presence was very strong. Yet there was no visible sign of him. No settlement. No evidence that anyone had ever been here.
He turned, gazing back up the broad valley, wondering if there was any point in searching the riverbanks again, when Ord spoke softly in his ear.
“In the water,” it said. “Things swimming.”
Lot turned swiftly. He scanned the shorebreak, and then farther out, to the dark green water that ran in a narrow channel through the reef.
A swell rose over the submerged rocks and he saw it then: a silvery torpedo-shape darting across the wave’s exposed face, a skirt of long tentacles trailing behind it. Size was hard to gauge against the waves, but he guessed that from tip to tail it was nearly twice as long as his own body.
He stared at the spot where it had appeared, hoping for another sighting, at the same time wondering what it ate and if it could come ashore.
CHAPTER
28
THE DESCENDING SUN, LOW IN THE SKY BUT still potent, poured its light upon the beach, drenching the viscous green swells with shining gold. Lot sat in the sand, watching the chaotic crash and backsplash of the surf, his thoughts equally choppy, insight as elusive as the occasional dark shape that sliced just beneath the surface. Time squeezed hard and he knew that an answer had to be found before Silk collapsed into chaos.
“Ord?” He twisted around, searching the vegetation line at the top of the beach for a glimpse of the robot. He saw it only when it moved, slipping down from a perch among the gnarled branches of a thick-leaved shrub.
“Yes Lot?” It picked a fastidious path across the sand, as if the loose grains irritated its gelatinous body.
“I need help,” Lot conceded.
It squatted beside him, its tentacles folded neatly against its torso. “Yes, Lot, yes. Get food?”
“Maybe later. For now I need to know what’s going on … or if I’m going crazy—”
“Lot’s okay.”
He smiled. “Thanks. Do you sense any other people around here?”
Ord snapped upright and spread its tentacles on the wind. Several seconds passed. “No.” It folded in upon itself.
No people. No Jupiter. He couldn’t dodge a sense of crushing disappointment, though he’d suspected it himself. The trace was so pure, so strong, so unvarying. How could it be anything but artificial?
But where did it come from?
“Do you sense anything similar to human?” he asked. “Something that imitates human?”
“Yes, similar,” Ord agreed.
“Can you locate it?”
“From the ocean.”
Lot stared at the jumbled, glistening water. “Do you think it’s from those creatures we saw?”
Ord shrugged.
Frustrated, Lot got up and walked inland. The water in the marsh sat in gooey green ponds. Insects buzzed at the surface. He waded through the shallows, looking among the reeds until he found a mound, half-submerged in the water. The mounds in the crater had exhibited thermal layers. He pressed the flat of his hand against the surface of this one and felt the heat. What process produced it? He could detect no methane, or other gases of decomposition. No debris gathered over the surface. If it was alive, what did it feed on? What did it produce? He remembered the phantom, the way she’d waded into a mound and disintegrated. Was it coincidence? Or had the mound destroyed her? Why?
Maybe it had created her too. An engine of the Communion? He felt a brush of memory, but he could not hold on to it.
He glanced over his shoulder, to see Ord slinking through the vegetation. “Come here,” he said, crooking a finger at the robot. “Can you analyze this? Figure what it’s made of?”
“Sure, Lot.” Ord scuttled over, then climbed up on the mound. It spread its tentacles out across the surface, its face wrinkled in a synthetic frown of concentration. Then it pulled its tentacles back to its body. The tip of one of them flattened into a hard, pointed spear. Lot quickly backstepped several feet. Ord pierced the mound. A hiss erupted from the punctured surface and Lot backed off even farther as a peppery sting reached his sensory tears. The robot withdrew its probe, seemingly unaffected. It hopped down off the mound and scurried over to Lot. “Many components present. City library suggests—”
“You’re connected to the library?” Suddenly nervous, he glanced up at the line of the elevator.
“Yes, Lot. City library suggests a typical mix of common Chenzeme plague vectors, information storage links, Earth-clade genetic data—”
“Does city library suggest what the mounds are for?”
Ord frowned, its head cocked exactly like a real person under atrial link. “Guesses only. Information storage. Plague incubators. But a quandary exists. The mounds may be an historically recent phenomenon. The library’s original records contain no mention of these structures. Apparently they were unknown to the Old Silkens. This is considered remarkable given the thorough observations these people made of other aspects of the planet’s biology, leading some researchers to surmise the mounds did not exist in this period.”
“But the mounds existed when the new Silkens arrived?”
“Yes. A preliminary report on the structures appears within the initial planetary survey.”
The blue woman had spoken in the accent of Old Silk. Her people—or some part of them—still existed within the Communion, interlocking sparks of awareness awkwardly attempting half-forgotten ways of communication… .
Another comes within us.
Chenzeme plague vectors thrived within the mounds. Chenzeme neural patterns existed in his head and presumably in Jupiter’s head too, generating chemical sight. Jupiter had lived in the Well. He would have been aware on some level of these soluble ghosts and their latent connective patterns. Lot fit that pattern with enzymatic perfection.
Why?
Jupiter could not have created the Communion, yet he’d been part of it. Chenzeme plague vectors; Chenzeme neural patterns. Could other communions exist in other places?
Jupiter had come out of the Hallowed Vasties.
A teasing trace of memory touched him, but he could not pin it down. Worry clutched at him. He looked at Ord. “What’s happening in the city?”
“News brief?”
“Yes.”
Yulyssa’s voice startled him as it spoke from Ord’s mouth in a swift mediot summary. “The election-day riot has continued to expand in scope, threatening the safety of all citizens. Protesting factions—composed primarily of refugees and adolescent Silkens—are demanding free access to the Well. Very little information can be confirmed, but indications are that most city functions are now under the control of dissidents. Certainly the decentralized recycling and security systems have been appropriated. City authority denies there’s any immediate danger, but counsels everyone to check the pressure seals on their dwellings and to stay indoors until the emergency has passed. Scattered reports of warden activity in the city core and on the elevator column hint that this function too has been taken over by—”
“Stop it!” Lot barked. Yulyssa’s recorded voice cut off. Lot stood in the muck, his hands trembling. Crazy.
They were all crazy, a veneer of madness sweated out of the real core of human civilization. All san
e stock had made stable communities in the integrated cordons of the Hallowed Vasties. Only the misfits and the madmen had wandered on, sociopaths gathering on the frontier in unstable patterns, spilling over the edge of chaos.
He sat down abruptly.
Chaos.
Muck seeped up around him. Instability had hit the Hallowed Vasties too, if the disappearing Dyson swarms meant anything. Captive stars blazing bright once again; consciousness burning off in the stellar winds.
Had Jupiter brought the seed of destruction out of that core? Had he known it?
He looked at Ord. “You have to find somebody in the city I can talk to. Somebody in control. One of my—” He could hardly force himself to say it. “—one of my followers.”
“Sure, Lot.”
Jupiter had reviled the Hallowed Vasties. He’d watched them fail. And he’d fled to the Well.
Nothing is lost in the Well. On a molecular scale alien biochemical structures could be identified within Well life-forms, from Chenzeme plague vectors to human genetic systems. But they were changed from their source. Evolved. Augmented. Hybridized. Winnowed? Perhaps. Complex systems could evolve through selective processes, reaching high states of organization without the guidance—or interference—of a conscious mind. Beneath the veneer of the Communion, the Well did not seem to be self-aware, not in the way of having an ego. Yet it had survived, while the Chenzeme were long gone.
Could human consciousness find a place within such a system? Jupiter must have thought so. Could human consciousness become its ego? Providing it with goals?
Natural evolution had no goal. That which survived, survived, and survivors tend to reproduce, willing their survivor traits. But egos function otherwise. Egos establish goals (illusions), they prattle on about destiny, they go crazy, they self-destruct, they burn out their existence in allegro tempo, building on themselves until the illusions are finally ripped aside or the whole system collapses of its own unsupported weight, but in either case it finishes. It finished the Chenzeme and maybe it was finishing the Hallowed Vasties even now, pulling them under a closed horizon of inward-turning minds, sucked down in an irreversible closure.
