interest. To pass on your own precious genes, some would say, but it was for more than that: the Self, lonely and communal both, and knowing the tension stretched between those two poles.
When humans had first come here they had snuck around and run when challenged. Later humans got better at war. Never as good as mechs, not in vacuum at least, but they held their own. In the Chandelier times humanity had valued total obedience, self-sacrifice, hard-minded courage, honor. It had been a big remorseless engine, with ranks and orders and unthinking compliance.
Killeen preferred what his Arthur Aspect told him was the old way: fighting with relish and art and risks chosen, not ordered.
Fighting was not a way to die but precisely the opposite. You did not concentrate yourself to break through your enemy because then you took bigger losses. There was always another day. The virtues of human warriors, after the Chandeliers got smashed to ruins, were the old ones: patience, avoidance, wearing down the enemy with stealth and surprise and speed. Tradition, morale, cohesion.
Family. Bishops. You could talk about genetics and links and all but it just meant Family.
And the fight was never over.
“Cap’n!”
Killeen was steeping in his own ruminations. Still pacing. He spun with alarm and had a weapon out automatically and there was Cermo.
“You real?”
“Damn-all right I am!”
Slapping and hugging and the smell was right too. Just in case.
Down through the years Cermo had always been solid and steady, an under-officer you could rely on at your back in a scrap, and Killeen had never seen him happier. “Come here, Toby’s—”
“Jazz!” Cermo’s big laugh boomed out. “Damn big you are, boy.”
Toby grinned. “No fat on you now neither.”
“I’m not so slow now, yeasay.”
He had been Cermo-the-Slow but somehow always ended up in the thick of a fight anyway. Killeen had honestly wondered if the man had any fear in him at all. “You got here pretty quick,” Killeen said.
“Not on my own. This funny thing comes visit me. I’m out in flatass empty nowhere and it just pops up.”
Toby stopped grinning. “What’d it say?”
“Says it wants to help.”
“Something like, ‘Do not think we are neglectful of you’?”
“Uh, yeasay. In fact—”
“The same exact words.”
Cermo grinned and nodded.
Nothing happened for a day, no call to battle or further revelations, and they got hungry.
Foraging was not easy in a landscape you didn’t understand.
This Lane proved that not all the esty had been made to please Man. Here the bluffs and ridges looked like they had been shaped hastily with a putty knife. The sole tree they saw thrashed in an angry wind, its topknot finally blowing off in a pocket of wind, fluttering and fraying over somber flats like a fragmenting bird. Eroded mesas topped in gray sent yellow streaks down their shanks, trickles turning to a burnt-orange tinge that suggested the rot of rust. Across the sky swam faraway, similar ground, curving like a vastly distant roof with its own business of twisted timestone grown over by persistent growth, greasy vegetation raked by winds. They foraged and got nothing. A thin cold rain started, falling onto a hardpan purple plain that looked poisoned by lurid wastes, a topographical monument to the worst in life.
They met people but conversations made no sense. They were tough, with outsized hands that looked as though they were made for handling lumber without gloves in freezing seasons. Killeen used his language chips, courtesy of Andro back in the portal city. That made people’s talk come through almost right:
“What cord it is?”
“For how come now you do that, you?”
“While I was popping the seams out, me, something come loose wasn’t s’posed and give it all to pieces sudden.”
But a party of them did give the three men something to eat. Most of it they could even keep down.
They had all passed through different Lanes, wildly different experiences.
Cermo described a thing that grew across an entire large Lane, somehow harvesting the differentials in gravitation along a twisty axis. People who lived near it said it was not a plant or an animal but some combination, which made no sense.
Toby described his life in what its natives called the River Lane. They thought it was infinitely long since nobody who went far down it ever came back. It had been risky taking artifacts far uptime, since that increased something called its “temporal potential,” and the slightest perturbation would cause it to snap back downtime, streaking yellow as it went. Attempts to drop electrodes into the river and extract currents led to a temporally unstable shoreline and splintering destruction.
Killeen found the people more disturbing. He had passed through a region ruled by a revered figure called the Tyrant. The term was an endearment, not a criticism. Killeen got to see this figure at a distance, holding open court. Beside the Tyrant squatted a dark brown woman on a leather mat. The Tyrant was holding audiences and when not pleased would simply wave his head in a rocking motion, a blend of a nod and a shake that came off as a wobble. The meaning was not something midway between yes and no, as Killeen learned when the squatting woman proved to be an executioner, conveniently nearby. The leather mat was to prevent blood from getting on the immaculate green tiles of the palace courtyard.
“They all seem so, well, occupied with themselves,” Toby said.
“Been under the umbrella so long, think it don’t rain,” Cermo explained, jutting out his jaw.
Killeen thought about how it was for Bishops and said, “We’re always lookin’ up from what we’re about, eyeing the horizon. That’s what it takes to stay ahead of mechs.”
Toby and Cermo nodded and agreed that people here could take punishment from mechs well enough, but they were different. And that certainly no Bishop would ever want to be like these folk, not at all.
They pieced together their stories, particularly of the chaos after the mechs destroyed the portal city. Cermo had been with the main body of Bishops and had seen many fall. Killeen knew of Jocelyn’s death and Toby knew of none. Killeen could see that Toby brooded over his abandoning the Family just before the attack. Instead of talking it out, he simply hugged his son and later the three of them did some Ranking-talk, each taking turns hurling insults at the other, the more pointed the better. Plenty came out that way and the code of the Ranking forbade anyone taking it hard, so that ranking cleaned out the dark corners and threw away the trash there, without studying it much.
They felt better afterward and even got some liquor from a passing local in trade for some extra leggings Cermo had. They were feeling pretty fine by the time the Mantis appeared.
THREE
Some Terrible Wonder
This world was raining instructions.
Nigel Walmsley crouched under an immense, billowy tree and watched downy seeds pucker out on the great limbs. Plants in this Lane had proceeded upon a different line of evolution than any he had seen. They coddled their seeds internally, giving vegetable birth to them when conditions were good for their taking hold on nearby soil. Parent trees exuded a sap, too, which followed the wind-borne, gossamer seeds on the prevailing wind. The sap was either a nutrient or an insect repellent or both; Nigel could not quite work it out from his spotty biological education. He had graduated from Cambridge only a generation or so after Crick and Watson had discovered the double helix, and that was nearly thirty thousand years ago. He felt a bit of allowance was in order.
The cottony parachutes of the seeds flavored the air. They blew in gusts of restless wind, snagged in oily bushes, fell fruitlessly into ponds. Their downy cellulose was fluff, packages delivering the essential DNA. Or perhaps here some other entwined matrix carried the genetic instructions; the galaxy had produced a profusion of copying tools. No matter; whatever molecules curled about each other in a snaky mating dance, the pur
pose was to spread orders for making more enormous trees—or better, seeds giving away free directions for making more of themselves. The tree’s apparent charity was in fact self-promotion; the foundation of life. Trees rained down—in the language of the long-dead TwenCen when his own concepts got imprinted—programs, written in the ancient style: as digital as a computer disk. Algorithms: tree-growing, seed-sending, atomic algorithms.
Other programs flitted through this air, too—mech signals, compacted into narrow bursts that fizzed with energy. Alarm, fear, panic. Or so he would have termed them once. Mechs had what he called uber-programs, or meta-instructions, not emotions. They corresponded to the drives and deep, unconscious impulses that humans carried like prehistoric baggage.
And their calls echoed in Nigel’s sensorium, uncannily like the high cries of flocking birds.
Warily he duck walked from under the canopy to the edge of a cliff.
He looked up. The resemblance was perhaps an example of evolutionary convergence. On Earth, the marvel of the eye had come forth in several different organisms, octopus and mammal alike. Here, the strange, diaphanous mechs swarming above looked a bit like a flight of pelicans.
From them forked fire. It crackled down and struck the fleeing forms on a broad plain.
From below came fainter signals of terror and grief. There were many aliens here in the Labyrinth, couched away in their respective Lanes. Now the gliding, killing mechs herded them and interrogated them electronically, inflicting death with casual error. All part of the work of searching for certain pesky primates. And others.
He had come here because of faint, scattershot signals he had picked up. They carried the tinge of the alien, yet with a lacy, human flavor too.
Their source was fleeing up the cliff. A good target for the airborne mechs. He felt it below, sensed two broad-winged mechs vector on it.
A startling flash leapt from the sky. It struck the cliff. No pain-jab, no response at all—until something zipped back up, like a return stroke of lightning. Then the two mechs were turning, burning, winged pyres.
Whatever was coming was formidable. Nigel backed into the trees.
A big half-mechanical body darted with startling speed over the cliff edge. It came toward him. He knew better than to run. It sent,
“It’s been a while since my last bath,” Nigel said, but he knew what this thing meant. They were about the same business, in a way that mere lumpy words could not convey. The big alien was of the Myriapodia, an alien kind that had long ago outfitted their Natural bodies with augmentations. Yet the Myriapodia were not mechanical in true nature. They hated the mechs, who had long sought their extinction.
“How so?” Nigel had met Myriapodia before but it was best to be wary of anything so different.
“You’re their . . . ally?”
“I know your Phylum.” No point in taking any defensive measures against this many-legger; it could kill him in a twinkling. He noted abstractly that he felt no fear; if he allowed himself, he might even feel a nostalgia for that emotion. It came infrequently now. “I remember your Illuminates, their elaborate hive-mind diplomacy—yes, I was involved with them once.”
“They always had good judgment.”
“Reasonably. And I read a lot.”
“A part. Most of it I can’t fathom.”
“Yes?” The huge thing’s transmissions had an odd, many-layered flavor. It was gingerly touching a deep, ancient question.
“Your interspecies merging? That was a fair time back.”
“As I recall, it wasn’t us.”
Involuntarily, it radiated confused reactions: relief, excitement, all underlaid with a wistful sadness.
“Sorry, no. We came later. Recent uninvited guests here, we are.”
“There’s a word for the organic, Natural races which haven’t been domesticated by the mechs—extinct.”
“We’re different. You’re harder to kill, and we’ve been kept alive in the Center because the mechs don’t know quite what to make of us.”
“Um, dead right. Cat’s out of the proverbial.”
“Even dilapidated old me, yes—though only partially. Genetic glide or drift or some other jargon I’ve long since forgotten.”
“Nigel Walmsley. Your name means something, I’m sure, but mine is just a sticker slapped on me.”
The killing was still going on across the plain below but they both had blocked it out. Now the gyre of broad-winged mechs came lower, finishing up their business. Nigel pointed. “They’ll go for me if they sniff me out. I haven’t got your defenses.”
An intriguing jibe. But the birdlike mechs were getting closer. “What are those?”
“Ah. Photovores.”
One shot at him then. The burst ignited a tree and Nigel survived only because Quath instantly sent out a blanketing shield. It was an intense bubble of electromagnetic energy, veining the fractured air. Enough for the instant, but— “Afraid I have to call on those hidden reserves, Quath.” Nigel sent a signal, warbling oddly in his sensorium. He had been given a calling circuit and of course did not have a clue as to how it worked.
The filmy bird was enormous this time. At first he thought it was a mech, but as it came flapping over the trees he saw it was translucent, a delegate of the Highers. It hovered and piercing eyes gazed at them.
Nigel took its quick bleep of information and said, “Their wings are still light-sensitive, these photovores?”
Quath was still peering up at the huge nonbird of shifting, buzzing parts. It was clear in such a gross manifestation that millions of tiny motes made up the thing—whether insectlike motes or something odder, Nigel could not tell. He never had been able to figure it out, though it chose this manifestation often recently. He knew the physical form was meaningless and that whatever lay behind it was trying to make this easier for him and for Quath. “Quath?”
“Good. It needs to know. Details are not its strong suit.”
Not true, actually, he thought. But it was finite.
The timestone high above suddenly flared into a rich, golden-orange arc. The bleat of intense flux hammered Nigel down and he crawled under one of the trees. He could tell it was mostly infrared, but the visible alone nearly blinded him.
“It prefers simple solutions.”
Vapor burst from the tree decks. The sudden fog hissed and through it Nigel could see the photovores. They were instantly overloaded and their wings burst into smoldering black. Parts fell away.
The entire high stack of them, a gyre of hundreds, began tumbling in slow motion toward the plain. They would join those they had so recently dispatched with nonchalant abandon.
“I’ve seen these buggers work before,” Nigel shouted into the steam that cloaked them. “They’re beautifully engineered, but not for this.”
A photovore tumbled into a tree nearby. The thick trunk went down with a sharp crack.
“Damn, where’s that bird? We have to get out of
here.”
He knew the mechs used esty bombs now, destabilizing a patch of space-time so that it tried to straighten out and go flat. That ripped apart anything nearby. Anything that needed geometric structure to exist, maybe even a Magnetic Mind. No defense.
“You said you carried a human, right?”
“I’ll trade you a ride for that human.”
He couldn’t, of course. But the bird was somewhere here and to it, matter itself was a soufflé of empty space and furious probabilities.
“That human—bet I can guess his name.”
“Quite. Where’s that bird when you need him?”
Nigel sent a blaring call. Sure to attract photovores, even in their final torment. But there were only shaved seconds left. As had become his habit of late, he thought of Nikka for an instant, savoring it, just in case this was truly it. This time.
FOUR
Finitudes
No use running, of course.
The Mantis came as a fast flickering at the edges of Killeen’s vision. He was tired and something went out of him when he caught the swelling blankness, mute evidence of how easily it could avoid them.
Killeen got up slowly from their campfire. Toby and Cermo followed suit; Bishops stood, ready to move, even when it seemed pointless. He wished they had not indulged in the liquor, but then, that probably would make no difference.
Foolish to fire at it. Like shooting at the wind to bring on sunshine, his father Abraham had said once, describing a dumb idea on long-ago Snowglade. Well then, try bravado.
“Surprised to see us?”
* * *
We do not properly have a reaction like your surprise. All orderly forms integrate new data instantly, remaking themselves. They retain no memory of their attitude in the moment before, so no comparisons are possible.
Sailing Bright Eternity Page 31
