Here Killeen lost track utterly of the man’s jargon. Biological information came so fast and casually that his head swam. It was enough to fathom that people carried their genetic information in double helices, without layering that fact with slabs of meaningless words.
Pictures, that was how Killeen thought. Words were just ways to fool people, more often than not.
TWO
A Fog of Flies
They decided to move. For shelter they used high arching trees that led in a curving arc up toward the distant esty walls above. The trees were billowy and tall and Killeen doubted that they truly gave much cover. They went slowly and the light was fitful and it was a long time before they came to the small pyramid.
Killeen looked at it and felt both dismay and a sad pride. “This is . . . wonderful.”
Andro walked around the crudely shaped four-sided stack of stones, twice as tall as Killeen. “Pretty primitive.”
“It’s ours.”
“Snowglade Families? They took the time to build this?”
“It’s for our suredead.”
“Huh? They’re buried in here?”
“It’s our old way. Mechs don’t take the trouble to pull apart rock like this.”
“You had some sort of code with them?”
Killeen walked around the rough sides. He could see where rocks had been hastily wedged into place. “There was a time, ’way back. We had a kind of understanding with the mechs. We didn’t scavenge too much and they let us alone. They were busy with other things, something about herding pulsars.”
“But it did not last.”
“Naysay. My father Abraham said that truces with them never did, really.”
Andro’s mouth curved in perplexed disbelief. “You ground-pounder types had it easy. We never got a break from mechs, ever. They kept trying to punch through, to find the Library or some damn thing.”
Suit cowlings and personal gear were piled a short distance from the pyramid. Another Snowglade tradition. It said to passing mechs that they need not scavenge the pyramid for scrap; here it was, now go away. Reluctantly Killeen poked through them, dreading what he would find.
A faint, buried image came drifting to mind. From his Arthur Aspect . . .
A far grander pyramid slanting up from tawny sands, its point thrusting at a pale scrubbed sky. It dwarfed the puny humans peering up at it. They were smaller than the carved stone blocks that built the enormous steps, a giant’s stairway leading to the sky so blue it seemed solid.
The image wavered before him, floating up unbidden from Arthur’s deep historical storage. Old Earth, came a whisper. The vision faded. It had made him pause with its majestic, silent, and eternal rebuke of the mortality that had struck down even the best, since time immemorial.
His hands scrabbling in the scrap found something and jerked him out of his musing. “Jocelyn!” he cried.
Andro came over. “Somebody you know?”
“My . . . under-officer.”
“I remember her. Damn.”
Again Killeen felt the sensation that had marked his life so often—that in the face of flat facts there was nothing to say. The world was like this and talk could not change it.
Jocelyn’s burnt-blue ankle bracelet hung on her leg shanks. There was a small triangular hole in the shank and blood on the inside. Killeen took the bracelet and remembered how he had once long ago made love to her, a simple thing in an open field while they were on the run. He walked away wearing the bracelet and for a while did not answer any of Andro’s questions.
He estimated which way his Bishops might have gone and went that way. Andro had trouble keeping up and Killeen became restive at the delay. At one point Killeen thought he heard traceries of Bishop talk, but they faded. Andro seized the opportunity to argue for a path through some wrenching timestone. Killeen went along with the man mostly because he was spiraling into a growing sense of futility. He had lost his Family and didn’t know where to turn.
There were plenty of bodies in the fields and among the strange trees. Back in the portal city, at their Restorer, he had learned of mech diseases targeted on humans. And here they were.
Boils that shined tight and purple. They burrowed into yielding flesh and made sores that sloughed and bled foul and yellow. Bodies attended by a fog of flies.
And who carried those from Old Earth? he wondered. He saw no reason for people to bring a pestilence like insects to this fresh new place. Life required balance, he knew that as an act of faith, but sometimes it was hard to accept the implications.
Only later did he recall that to mechs, Bishops were a pestilence.
One woman lay streaked with a rash gray as ashes. Oily pus sleeked her skin. Whirlpools in it squeezed down as he watched. They spooled wetly shut like eyes when he moved. Her head was splitting open in leaves, as though someone had been browsing through her and had left, leaving the book open. Exfoliating, the sheets of brain curled back and made him think of the timestone, like petals of a gray cliff-flower.
“They would work us woe,” Andro said.
They marched on quickly, fearing contagion.
A haze came and Killeen went into it, his mind still on the bodies behind. At least they had not been Bishops.
In the mist they passed through a verge of dizzying forces. It was a transition, Andro explained. A kind of slipping downhill in an esty gradient. Near the portal cities were tricky manifolds where “indeterminate geometries” formed and merged.
“You can think of it as like doorways opening and slamming shut,” Andro said.
“Where does this end?”
“It doesn’t.”
Killeen knew when he was being patronized but he was too busy being sick to mind. The stretching and reforming of the esty meant torturing gravities, swerving accelerations, tidal tensions that jerked his arms and legs in opposite directions and popped his shoulders until he thought he would rip apart.
Andro took it with irritating calm. The little man remarked on the curvature of the esty and how a cockroach could crawl over a fresh-picked apple without ever knowing that it was traveling on a curve until it passed the same stem a few times and got the idea. Its world was curved and finite but had no boundary, no wall. Apple everywhere, without end. A savvy cockroach would stop trying to escape the apple after a while.
Killeen was feeling somewhat cockroachy at the time, bent over with nausea as they fell in a pearly fog. They had entered it without his quite noticing how and his sensorium gave him no bearings. His Aspects chattered at him with useless advice. He shut them up to be miserable on his own.
In the churning mist hollow rasps buffeted them. He tasted a fiery wetness. Andro was saying something about the esty being designed so that even the flux points where curvature changed rapidly were not too strong. That seemed to mean that the stresses would not actually rip an arm out of its socket, though they might come close. At the time he was grateful for any reassurance.
They did not so much fall as they popped out. Into—a swamp. Killeen splashed and flailed to keep from sprawling face down in the rank mud. He staggered to a hummock of blue-green grass.
“Damn!” he called hoarsely to Andro, who was struggling up from the muck. “How come we—”
The blue-green grass had already looped around one leg and was inching up his other. Killeen fought his way off the hummock and onto a spit of dry land, where Andro already sat resting. “I, I, how’d we get here?”
“It’s stochastic,” Andro said. “No one to blame, really.”
“Stow what?”
“Chaotic, to you.”
Killeen’s Arthur Aspect put in,
The shifting esty coordinates are completely governed by the classical Einstein field equations, of course, in the strong field limit. But even completely determined relations will yield unpredictable outcomes, if they run long enough.
Killeen shoved the Aspect back into its niche. This esty thing was beyond Arthur’s experience, but Aspects yearne
d to get out of their confinement loops, so they spoke up at every opportunity. Sometimes it was like running a classroom of bright but too energetic children, their hands always raised with some smartass answer. “So you dunno where we are?”
“Safer, I’ll bet. That’s why I wanted to go through that timestone.”
“You knew it would work?”
Andro touched his nose. “Smelled right.”
“You’ve got a tech tells you when timestone opens?”
“No, intuition. Let the ol’ subconscious do the work.”
“Um. Mechs might’ve come this way, too.”
“I’d rather play the odds—”
Andro leaped up as if hearing something—and sprawled into the mud. He surfaced and whispered, “They’re here—mech signals.”
Killeen had heard nothing. He turned very carefully. Trees like balls of fluff swayed and breathed soft mutters above.
Killeen’s nerves were jumpy. With all he had learned at the Restorer, with all the ungainly, blood-rich tapestry of human history he now carried as an unwelcome weight, trudging through muck was just about what he expected. That was what humanity had been doing for an ageless, painful time.
He caught a whisper of scrambled, spiky cues. He knew from field experience that these came when you were in the secondary emission lobe. Sideways angling waves interfered with each other to form small, fast-moving peaks. Abraham had explained it to him once. It was a facet of physics, a telltale nobody who used waves could avoid. Particles were tight and waves spread out, and in their spreading left clues.
Skreeeeeee—
Close. He slogged up onto rocky ground. A vacant plain beyond.
That meant nothing. The Mantis had been invisible to his sensorium and there were higher forms here, had to be.
“What do you think it is?” Andro asked from behind.
“Quiet.”
Mechs hardly ever used crude acoustic sensors, but you never knew.
They moved around the edge of the plain for a while but nothing came of it. A gully ran into the swamp and Killeen headed up it. They came to a wide depression. Both stopped. Killeen’s breath came faster as he watched the pile heaped into the bowl below.
“God . . . what did they . . .” Andro backed away from the sight.
“Something got them.”
This time the dead were not human but the effect was chilling anyway. The piles of skeletal, greasy, mech carcasses were immense. Every kind Killeen had ever seen was here, steel and carbon-fiber, globular and angled, huge and tiny. Some had smashed themselves against each other and spilled out their elegantly machined guts. Their arrogant angles and ribbed solidity had struck fear into Killeen more times than he could ever recall. Now they seemed empty gestures. In stillness they were just assemblies of parts. Fodder for mech scavengers now, a bowl of the rusting, unresisting dead.
“What could do this?”
Killeen shook his head. The Cap’n who had taught him so much, Fanny, had always said, Savvy the mechthink before it savvies you. The crammed-together mech cadavers were here like some sort of lesson, but . . . what kind? “Damn awful, all I can say.”
“I never heard . . .” Andro gulped. He was tiring out.
The gully was deep here. Steep-sided, like a ravine.
Killeen started scrabbling up out of it and Andro followed and that was when he caught the side lobes again.
He quick-tapped his left molars to bring up the reds in his vision. Blues washed away and he saw in the far infrared a glowing, rumpled land seething with liquid fire. The esty roof above faded to a blank white and across the jutting ramparts of timestone swept crimson tides of temperature.
He held steady so his periphs could come up. Searching, searching.
He went to fast-flick. Something swayed among sheets of wintry-gray light to the left. Something gangly and arabesqued with worms. Traceries danced in filmy air. The fleeting image merged with rock and was gone and then swam up out of the slate-black vegetation farther away. For shaved seconds he could see it and then not. The thing was responding to his systems with a false image it projected to match its background as it moved. Tubular legs and a long flat cowled head and prickly antennas swiveling.
“What do you see?” Andro asked.
Killeen opened his mouth to tell him to shut up.
Something poked a hole in his eye and dove through.
THREE
The Pleasure Plague
The Mantis was larger this time.
He had been here before. On the island of undulating sand that floated impossibly on a blue sea.
Killeen had never seen a body of water bigger than a smelly, dying pond. He knew the sea only from his immersion in the Mantis itself. The thing had caught him years before on Snowglade and tucked his mind into the larger canvas of its own, almost as an afterthought.
The boneyard of human skulls was there too and he walked over it this time. It crunched beneath his boots.
When he did that the ground buckled for just a flashing moment. Then it went solid again.
And Andro was suddenly there and somehow they were both walking across the unending sand island and trying to reach the sea. Yet Killeen felt himself still scrambling up the steep clay gully side and Andro panting behind him. His arms and legs did not stop their working. Part of him was still there in the gully and another was here with a sadness and a leaden certainty that this time he would die in the Mantis’s grip.
* * *
I hope my lesson was clear.
* * *
The Mantis’s dry rattle boomed, resounding in his mind as acoustics never could.
“We’re not quite as slow as you think, y’know.”
* * *
I have always savored your humor, holding forth in even the most difficult of circumstances.
* * *
He could not see it; humans seldom did. It could be within arm’s reach or dispersed in a planet-sized net. Or both.
* * *
It is a pleasure to once again be your archiving receptacle.
* * *
“What is this—” Andro began but Killeen waved him into silence.
They were still hanging by fingers and toeholds and inching their way up the hard clay. Somewhere.
“What do you want?”
* * *
I am sure you believe I am simply here to kill you.
* * *
“I don’t think you do anything simply.”
* * *
Once again I savor the delights of an ambiguous rhetoric. Yet I am simple.
* * *
“Not by me you aren’t.”
* * *
All my thoughts are known to myself. All of myself. What could be simpler?
* * *
“Leaving us alone would be. For a start.”
* * *
I cannot. You are my primary work materials, as an artist. Now, alas, rude survival intrudes even upon this sheltered venue. I come to you seeking aid.
* * *
Killeen laughed. And pulled himself up into a crevice where he could lean down and give Andro a hand.
* * *
You quite rightly use your immortality-
* * *
* * *
simulating rite.
* * *
Killeen laughed again. Anything to keep it amused.
* * *
It is a wonderful adaptation to your predicament. As its discoverer, I am most proud. My superiors commended me roundly.
* * *
“For ‘discovering’ that we laugh?”
* * *
No. For discovering what it means. For that brief stuttering vocal instant you live as we do. Outside the clench of time. Of mortality.
* * *
“What does it want?” The naked terror in Andro’s voice made Killeen look down as the man edged his way into a toehold. Andro was sweating and his eyes were rolled far up showing the whites. Somehow he could still climb. His muscles st
ood out, vibrating.
“It wants us. Some kind of slice, right? Or maybe this time the whole goddamn cake.”
* * *
I wish I could dally as an artist, I do. Unfortunately, you are correct. I am here to glean information from you and perhaps a last sample.
* * *
“I’m fresh out of information.”
* * *
I want you to understand that I do understand your need to speak to me this way. I do fathom the needs of a centrally directed intelligence, even though I am not one. I am a scholar and an artist and I can appreciate the ancient needs and structures you represent.
* * *
“I represent myself, that’s all.”
* * *
You need—indeed, desire—the autonomy of the sense of self. I admire that, I truly do. But I have little time now and must be direct. Not artful.
* * *
Andro’s voice trembled. “We’re not about to help you, damn you.”
* * *
I can aid you as well. You, Killeen, seek your son and your father. So do I.
* * *
Killeen said guardedly, “What for?”
* * *
Information. In the end, everything is information.
* * *
“Can’t eat it.”
* * *
Sailing Bright Eternity Page 21
