by Greg Bear
I haven’t a fucking idea what’s happening, really.
But fairly contented.
I’M SOMEWHERE BELOW the neck of the homunculus that is the Drifter, winding down. After a couple of hours, I realize this is way down. It’s getting warmer. The air in the darkness is rich and moist. Electric. I’m smelling that living planet again. The walls are damp. Then I’m on my knees, crawling, occasionally touching the grooves to coordinate the noise in my head with where I am, possibly who I am, which is not at all clear.
I hear somebody or something up ahead. Down this far, deep into the chest of the Drifter, more than likely I’m about to meet up with one or more kobolds. That doesn’t concern me, though it should.
I like kobolds.
Then human instinct kicks back in and tells me to get my shit together, think of something to counter the strong tea.
I remember reading an article about cat ladies.
Brain really digresses here: there is such a huge difference between a cat lady and Catwoman. Funny how that works. Not funny at all, asshole. Get it together!
Cat ladies—not the slinky gal wearing a mask with perky little ears, rather the kind that just loves kitties and can’t stop filling houses with them: this article I read back on Earth said that cat ladies were more than likely infected by a parasite found in cat shit, toxi something something, that is supposed to end up in rats, where it takes over their rat brains and makes them unafraid and bold, but also makes the rats love the smell of feline urine; well, cat ladies are probably infected with this parasite and it’s in their brains and so they never clean the litter boxes, just keep piling on the kitties and rising to heaven on the smell of cat pee…
SNKRAZ!
I’m thinking the green powder makes DJ and me love darkness and depth. Makes us seek something, I don’t know what. I sure as fuck hope I don’t acquire the urge to dig. To keep myself as human as possible, I begin to hum pop tunes but somehow end up with Grieg, “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” “Dump dump dump dump dump da da, dump da-da, dump da-da…” Finally, the tune runs out of my head. Legs getting tired. Nose clogging; I sneeze a lot.
There’s a kind of dream I’m having as I walk, not at all unpleasant, but in other circumstances it would be an honest-to-God nightmare. Funny stuff. Weirder and weirder.
Very strong tea.
I’m swimming across a muddy plain beneath upside-down hills of ice, blue-green and white, festooned with hanging meadows of luminous flowers, and the hills are dripping shiny twisters, downward-flowing rivulets of supercooled brine, and I don’t know what I look like but I’m sure I’m more like a crab or a trilobite or a spiky worm than a human because, of course, humans could not survive here.
I avoid the brine—tastes bad, too many minerals—but those glowing flowers are food as well as light, and when I meet up with dozens of others like myself, in a low ocean valley, we’re all very interesting and good-looking (ugly—the ugliest fucking shelly things I’ve ever seen, multiple joints and grooves, waving arms and shit I can’t begin to describe, and they all seem to be ridden by, I’m being ridden by, a skinny, spidery parasite with a set of odd, multi-faceted eyes—I love this parasite, it’s my best friend, it keeps me safe and warns me of bad stuff)—
We’re each of us big, maybe four or five meters long—and as we gather, we look up in admiration and pride at something we’ve all made, something immense and beautiful: a great pillar rising thousands of meters from the middle of the valley, all the way to a high, dark, inverted dome of ice.
Below us is the rocky, metal-rich core, the solid heart of our world, heated by internal radiation, heated also by tidal friction from outside, while above, the ice forms a protective barrier between us and the greater universe, allowing us to grow for a billion years—grow and develop in peace.
My God, how thick is that ice?
One hundred kilometers.
And only in the last thousand years have we managed to dig out and look around, like breaking out of an immense, frozen egg—
The cause of our long, gestating ignorance, and soon, of our destruction. Because we can infer what’s coming—
Moonfall.
We know it’s going to happen, we feel the changing tides, we’re no longer where we were, wherever that was, around a great, steady source of gravity and the constant rhythmic, reliable tides…
We’ve been knocked away from all that. Our world has been growing colder for a long time and we’ve been slowly dying off, but meanwhile building, encapsulating, encoding, and preserving.
Getting ready.
The walls of the pillar are made of tiny crystals from which slough great cascades of what can only be called slime, luminous, thickly elegant slime filled with writhing, transparent tubes that join and come apart within the cascades.
The pillar is working.
The pillar is ready.
Really bad things are about to happen, but we’re as prepared as we’re ever going to be.
I’m so distracted by this second life, this tea dream, that I barely notice I’ve bumped up against somebody in the darkness. Fumbling, I switch on my helm light, which is so dim and orange it barely illuminates anything. But it shows me whom I’ve bumped into.
Not a crab, no outer shell at all—very tall, very slender—female. Slowly I recall my humanity and this female’s name: this is Teal—nick for Tealullah.
She regards me with wide, calm eyes; no surprise that I’m here. Like DJ, she’s rubbed her pale face with green powder. Maybe I should do the same. Can’t get any weirder.
Then she looks beyond me.
I turn slowly and see Joe and DJ and Tak and Beringer and Brodsky. They were with me all along. I must have thought they were giant crabs.
Saying I’ve been confused does not begin to cut it.
“Didn’t want to interrupt you, Vinnie,” Joe says as if speaking to a child. “You followed the grooves. You found it.”
“Yeah,” DJ says in admiration.
Teal blinks at them, then focuses on me. “Come wit’ me,” she says. “Afore ’tis gone, you have a see it.”
“How’d you get away from the Voors?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Some are dead,” I say.
“I know. One would ha been a new husband. But he didna feel it. The ot’er life did not take. And I didna want t’at, with him na brushing old trut’…”
Even befuddled, I realize this is a new version of her story. Which do I believe?
“Other life?” I ask.
She takes my hand.
Jesus! Her touch fills my head with sparks. She whispers in my ear. “You are t’ere, you feel it, doan you?”
“Yeah. Maybe.” I can sort of see Joe in my peripheral vision. The others: not at all.
“Go ahead,” Joe says distantly. “We’re with you.”
Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t.
Teal walks beside me into the largest chamber in the Drifter: the Church, the void. Scattered strings of star lights glow along the outer wall, profiling one side of what might be a shaft hundreds of meters high—a great cylinder. Someone has raised nine or ten of the miners’ wide work light panels on tall tripods and connected them to the Drifter’s hydro power through thick cables. Teal walks from one panel to the next and switches the lights on, and now I see the galleries hewn high in the metal walls, all the way to the top.
The void, the Church, is like an inverted Tower of Babel.
The last thing that catches my eye, oddly, is the most startling and prominent, as if I’ve seen it so often before it can be ignored—but of course I haven’t and it can’t.
A pillar of glittering crystals rises through the center of the Church, big, though not nearly as large as the one in my waking dream—my green tea dream—and broken, cracked all over. The pillar is held by embracing spars of rock left in place, but also by hanging nets of interlinked tubules like those making up the kobolds, only thicker. Basic units of construction. Ti
nkertoys.
The void is the center, the focus of the greatest mining operation in the Drifter: a carved-out and liberated pillar of something like living diamond—a diamond skyscraper, struggling to restore and remake itself after billions of years of being trapped, encased in stone and lava and metal.
And now I can see the connection. The big story.
This pillar, like the one in my vision, oozes a glistening gelatin that slides down around the supports and braces, cascades slowly from level to level, pooling near the base—where unfinished kobolds stir sluggishly, trying out new connections, apparently without direction. Some, however, have begun a laborious journey back up the braces, climbing with agonizing slowness to become part of the thing that will eventually surround the pillar and reinforce the mined-out galleries, filling the deep heart—or mind—of the Drifter. Recreating the immense crystal pillar in those ancient, ice-roofed seas.
The green powder lies thick all over. It forms a thin scum on the churning slime. Maybe the powder comes from the slime.
For a crazy moment, a panicked resistance sets in; all my training and paranoia and battle fatigue and all the bad shit a Skyrine falls heir to rises up like a twister filled with knives and all I can think is that somehow the Antags have drugged me, drugged us all, or maybe command drugged the Cosmoline, and some unknown new enemy (maybe we’re our own enemy) has infiltrated the Drifter to create a literal fifth column, something big and awful and nasty-subversive… Something that if it is allowed to complete its work will spell the end of all that we fight for.
But none of that makes sense.
I’m caught between competing indoctrinations, competing information, and I drop to my knees in the glare of a work light panel, shade my eyes, and look high into the void to try to find that other life again.
The life that had purpose and majesty, yet is now gone.
“Very, very old,” Teal says, getting down on her knees beside me. “Te moon fell on Mars in pieces, long ago. T’is wor one of te pieces. Te Algerians and t’en te Voors part mined it out but at first knew not’ing… T’en te Voors found te Church, but broke a dike and let flow wild te hobo, and when t’ey fled, te old crystals had years and enow water a shape old servants… First of the awakening.”
“Kobolds,” I say.
“After te Voors abandoned te Drifter, te servants dug and searched.”
“The red and blue parts in the map,” I say.
“All yes. In te beginning, Fat’er lived an breat’ed te green powder all t’rough te old spaces, blown up from te deep hydraulics. He had time enow a feel te ot’er life, time enow a guess what t’wor.”
“He told you?”
“No need. He wor first gen. He inhaled green powder like all te rest… Gave him weak sight a life a te old moon. T’en, te Voors sent his first wife out a te dust. ’Tis why he went a Green Camp. Better t’em t’an Voors. And he fat’ered me. What he only slightly felt and dreamed slid deep inna my genes… and grew.
“But word got out. T’wor traitors in all camps. T’at’s why te Voors came a Green Camp a trade for me. By t’en, te doctors told, te child a te exposed man and woman will be te one—’tis t’ird gen will grow and finish te big story.
“De Groot had only sons—said he’d atone for what t’ey did and trade for me. Wanted a see te Drifter clear, work it, use it… T’ought it would give t’em power over te Earth and over te Far Ot’ers, too. And maybe ’twill. But look… Drifter can defendT itself…”
We follow more cables, thinner—leads from Skyrine demolition packages. Explosives have been rigged around the bottom of the void, around the pillar, and even more hang higher up from the growing tubules and braces—dozens of spent matter charges rigged to expend their energy all at once, a rather impressive show of force—what our sisters carried in those heavy packs when they arrived, hitching a ride with the very folks who could take them where they wanted to go.
All planned.
“Captain Coyle?” I ask. Joe and then DJ are right behind me, listening. My focus is on Teal, but they’re here, too.
“The Voors tried a stop t’em. Your women shot t’em,” Teal says. “I saw some die.”
Coyle and the ladies were assigned a special ops mission, a mission we were not privy to. None of us are expected to survive.
Teal walks ahead, crossing rock bridges carved from the mass of old stone, a kind of elevated maze over a slow lake of glass-clear, shining ooze, filled with half-made kobolds, rippling over a thick bed of glowing red and blue flowers, the foodstuffs and guides of my deep ice vision.
The old moon trying to come back to life…
Trying to remember.
Captain Coyle’s wires extend across the lava bridges, to the other side of the pillar, where more charges hang prepped and ready to blow. Collapsing the entire void, possibly pulling the head and shoulders of the Drifter down beneath the surface of the Red, ending all the labor that the Algerians and the Voors had put into this amazing formation.
Putting an end to all the possibilities, all the raw materials, and why?
“Why kill such knowledge?” Joe asks. And now I see it, too. Knowledge more dangerous than opportunity and resource. “Crazier still, why kill us?”
DJ comes into my filmy sidelong view. “Strong tea. We’ve got it, and they don’t want us to have it.”
“Abody dinna want knowledge,” Teal says.
“Which abody, I wonder?” Joe asks.
DJ’s moved ahead of us, over a high bridge, but Teal calls for him to stop, holds up a finger, points out an extrusion from the base of the pillar: a dark, hard, shiny material we have not seen before but which has been described to us. Not rock, not metal. Throwing up a dark meadow of sharp spines, thick as grass, silvery black, translucent, at once beautiful and frightening.
The spines are growing.
“Te anTent knows how a fight,” Teal says. But the look on her face tells me she dinna know what this is, what it means, only that we should not come near, should not touch. She keeps us back, but DJ is already in the forefront and he stoops to look at the growing spines, then turns, rises again.
“Fuck!” he cries. “You gotta see this. This is important.”
Cautiously, Joe and I push around Teal’s blocking arms. We cross the bridge, extra cautious around the spines, around the dark, spiky growth, clinking and spreading through the clear, gelatinous lake. Where the spikes intrude the lake itself and the kobolds within are also turning dark, hardening.
“It’s like silicon,” Joe says, wondering despite the danger, the strangeness. Maybe the dust is slipping deep into his thoughts. Maybe we’re all touched by the strong tea.
We’re all turning first gen.
And then comes a soft, girlish voice, half hidden behind the extrusion, calling to us.
Asking for help.
Another few steps.
It’s Captain Daniella Coyle. She must have hauled fresh detonators and another satchel of charges to this side of the pillar. She must have slipped and brushed up against the spines, or maybe they reached out…
She lies across one side of a wide arch of ancient stone, partly covering the satchel, hand grasping the straps to keep charges from falling into the squirming ooze. Her lower body, clothing, flesh, bone, even her sidearm, has gone dark. Shiny. She’s turning into whatever this hard, shiny shit is. The silicon darkness is moving rapidly up her torso, freezing her one remaining arm, stilling her grasping fingers around the straps of the satchel, holding them in mid-twitch. Only her chest and head are left and she’s having difficulty catching a breath. Her eyes are filled with fear but she doesn’t seem to be in pain. Even so, she can barely speak.
Coyle murmurs, “Get me out. Help me up. Get me out.”
The satchel and the charges have themselves become dark. God knows what happens to high explosives when touched this way.
DJ kneels close. He tries to take hold of her shoulder, but the spikes crawl up the fabric of her skintight, bristling to
ward him, aiming for his reaching hand, or warning him away—and he shakes his head violently. He’s crying, by God.
“No can do, Captain,” he says, but then his voice falls into soft reverence, and his next few words shape a kind of prayer. A soldier’s prayer for a fatally wounded comrade. I would never have expected this of DJ but here he is, ministering, caring, coaching Coyle across the unknown border in a way that Joe and I could never manage: instinctive, inappropriate in any sort of polite company—divinely foolish.
“It’s out of our hands,” DJ says, eyes fixed on hers, and now she’s watching him intently, like a newborn watching a mysterious father; his is the last human face she will see and know. “You’re a very brave sister, Captain Coyle. Sorry I can’t join you, not yet anyway. Soon though. We all know we’re short. Just ease into it, Captain. Don’t fight it, go with it. There. There it is. Tell all of them hello for us.”
Then, gentlest of all, “Semper fi.”
Where Coyle has been touched and turned, little reddish lights move in the depths of the dark material, terrifyingly pretty, growing into beauty, like thousands of fireflies in an endless night.
Captain Coyle’s last words rise through the Church, high, soft, even girlish, “Momma! Momma! I’m not ready, Momma, hold me, please wait… Momma!”
All Skyrines are children, before, during, and even inside the end.
Her lips freeze in polished translucency. The fireflies move up inside her neck, gather behind her eyes. Her eyes become greenish torches in the perfect sculpture of her face. Then the lights spread out, flow from her transformed body, back into the greater mass, the extrusion.
Coyle’s eyes go dark.
There’s quiet between us for the longest time, silence but for the gentle, slippery noise of wavelets within the clear, thick lake, and the light, wind-chime tinkle of the dark spikes as they strike and grow.
DJ rises and lets out a shuddering breath, then brushes past us, wiping his face, leaving green streaks across his cheeks, and stands with the others back beyond the maze of bridges.
