The Naked God

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I agree,” Delvan said. “Sheerest bloody folly. Seen it before. People become obsessed with one idea and can’t let go. Don’t care how many die in the process. Well, I’m not going to help her. I made that mistake before. Never again.”

  “Yo, man, welcome to decentville.” Cochrane held out a silver flask.

  Delvan took a small nip, and smiled appreciatively. “Not bad.” He took a larger drink, and passed it on. “What exactly are you all looking for out there?”

  “We don’t know,” Sinon said. “But we’ll recognize it when we see it.”

  Jay spent twenty minutes correcting and castigating the universal provider after breakfast that morning. It kept reabsorbing the dress and extruding a new one for her. The variations were small, but Jay was determined to get it right. Tracy had sat in on the session for the first five minutes, then patted Jay lightly and said: “I think I’ll leave the pair of you to it, sweetie.”

  The design she wanted was simple enough. She’d seen it back in the arcology one day: a loose, pleated reddish skirt that came down to the knee, and blended smoothly up into a square-cut neck top that was bright canary-yellow, the two colours interlocking like opposing flames. It had looked wonderful on the shop mannequin two years ago, expensive and attractive. But when she asked, her mother said no, they couldn’t afford it. After that, the dress had come to symbolise everything wrong with Earth. She always knew what she wanted in life, but she could never get to it.

  Tracy knocked on the bedroom door. “Haile will be here in a minute, poppet,” she called.

  “Coming,” Jay yelled back. She glared at the globe floating over the wicker chair. “Go on, spit it out.”

  The dress glided out through the purple surface. It still wasn’t right!

  Jay put her hands on her hips, and sighed in disgust at the provider.

  “The skirt is still too long. I told you! You can’t have the hem level with the knee. That’s awful.”

  “Sorry,” the provider murmured meekly.

  “Well I’ll just have to wear it now. But you’re going to get it right when I come back this evening.”

  She hurriedly pulled the dress on, wincing as it went over the bruise on her ribs (the edge of the surfboard had whacked her hard when she fell off). Her shoes were totally wrong as well: white sneakers with a tread thick enough to belong on a jungle boot. Blue socks, too. Sighing at her martyrdom one last time, she picked up the straw boater (at least the provider had got that right) and perched it on her head. A quick check in the mirror above the sink to see just how bad the damage was. That was when she saw Prince Dell lying on the bed. She screwed her face up, riddled with guilt. But she couldn’t take him with her to Haile’s home planet. Just couldn’t. The whole flap over the dress was because she was the first human to go there. She felt very strongly that she ought to look presentable. After all, she was kind of like an ambassador for her whole race. She could imagine what her mother would say; carrying a scruffy old toy about with her simply wasn’t on.

  “Jay!” Tracy called.

  “Coming.” She burst through the door and scampered out onto the chalet’s little veranda. Tracy was standing beside the steps, using a small brass can with a long spout to water one of the trailing geraniums. She gave the little girl a long look.

  “Very nice, poppet. Well done, that was a good choice.”

  “Thank you, Tracy.”

  “Now just remember, you’re going to see lots of new things. Some of them are going to be quite astonishing, I’m sure. Please try not to get too excitable.”

  “I’ll be good. Really.”

  “I’m sure you will.” Tracy kissed her lightly. “Now run along.”

  Jay started down the steps, then stopped. “Tracy?”

  “What is it?”

  “How come you’ve never been to Riynine? Haile said it’s really important, one of their capital planets.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Too busy when that kind of sightseeing would have excited me. Now I’ve got the time, I can’t really be bothered. Seen one technological miracle, seen them all.”

  “It’s not too late,” Jay said generously.

  “Maybe another day. Now run along, you’ll be late. And Jay, remember, if you want the toilet, just ask a provider. No one’s going to be embarrassed or offended.”

  “Yes, Tracy. Bye.” She pressed a hand on the top of her boater, and raced off across the sand to the ebony circle.

  The old woman watched her go, over-large knuckles gripping the handle of the watering can too tightly. Bright sunlight caught the moisture poised at the corner of her eyes. “Damn,” she whispered.

  Haile materialized when Jay was still ten metres away from the circle.

  She whooped, and ran harder.

  <>

  “It’s a wonderful morning!” She came to a halt beside Haile, and flung an arm round the baby Kiint’s neck. “Haile! You grow every day.”

  <>

  “How long till you get to adult size?”

  <>

  “I’ll scratch you.”

  <>

  “Yes!” She did a little jump, smiling delightedly. “Come on, come on!”

  Blackness plucked both of them away.

  The falling sensation didn’t bother Jay at all now. She just shut her eyes and held her breath. One of Haile’s appendages was coiled comfortingly round her wrist.

  Weight returned quickly. Her soles touched a solid floor, and her knees bent slightly to absorb the impact. Light was shining on her closed eyelids.

  <>

  “I know.” She was suddenly nervous about opening her eyes.

  <>

  Haile’s tone was so eager Jay just had to look. The sun was low in the sky, still casting off its daybreak tint. Long shadows flowed out behind them across the large ebony circle they’d arrived on. It was out in the open air, with the rumpled landscape sweeping away for what seemed like a hundred kilometres or more to the horizon. Flat-cone mountains of pale rock, crinkled with pale-purple gorges, rose regally out from the lavish mantle of blue-green vegetation; not strung out in a range as normal, but spread out across the whole expanse of steppe. Large serpentine rivers and tributary streams threading through the vales glinted silver in the fresh sunlight, while tissue-fine sheets of pearl-white mist wound around the lower slopes of the mountains. The vista was nature at its most striking. Yet it wasn’t natural; this was what she imagined the inside of an Edenist habitat would be like, but on an infinitely larger canvas.

  There was nothing ugly permitted here; designed geology ensured this world would have bayous rather than dark, stagnant marshes, languid downs instead of lifeless lava fields.

  That didn’t stop it from being truly lovely, though.

  There were buildings nestled amid the contours; mainly Kiint domes of different sizes, but with some startlingly human-like skyscraper towers mingled among them. There were also structures that looked more like sculptures than buildings: a bronze spiral leading nowhere, emerald spheres clinging together like a cluster of soap bubbles. Each of the buildings was set by itself; there were no roads, or even dirt tracks as far as she could see. Nevertheless, undeniably, she was in a city; one that was conceived on a vaster, grander scale than anything the Confederation could ever achieve. A post-urban conquest of the land.

  “So where do you live?” she asked.

  Haile’s tractamorphic arm uncoiled from her wrist and straightened out to point. The ebony circle was surrounded by a broad meadow of glossy aquamarine grass-analogue bordered by clumps of trees. They at least looked like natural forests rather than carefully composed parkland.

  Several different species were growing together, black octagonal leaves and yellow parasols competing for light and space; long smooth boles, capped with a fuzzy ball of pink fern-fronds, had stabbed up from the tops of more bushy variet
ies, resembling giant willow reeds.

  A steel-blue dome was visible through the gaps in the trees half a kilometre away. It didn’t look much bigger than the ones back in Tranquillity.

  “That’s nice,” Jay said politely.

  <>

  “I’m sure. So where are all your friends?”

  <>

  Jay gasped as she turned to follow the baby Kiint. There was a huge lake behind her, with what she assumed could only be the castle of some magical Elf lord. Dozens of featureless, tapering white towers rose from its centre; the tallest spires were those right at the centre of the clump, easily measuring over a kilometre high. Delicate single-span bridges wove their way through the gaps between the towers, curving around each other without ever touching. As far as she could understand it, they followed no pattern or logic; sometimes a tower would have as many as ten, all at different levels, while others had only a couple. The whole edifice scintillated with brilliant red and gold flashes as the strengthening sunlight slithered slowly across its quartz-like surface.

  It was as dignified as it was beautiful.

  “What is that?” she asked as she hurried after Haile.

  <>

  “You mean like a school?”

  The baby Kiint hesitated. <>

  “Do you go to it?”

  <>

  “Oh, I get it. That’s like the way we do it, too. I have to receive a lot of didactic courses before I can go on to university.”

  <>

  “I suppose so. I don’t know how on Lalonde, though. There might be one in Durringham. Mummy will tell me when she comes back and things get better.”

  <>

  They had reached the lake’s shore. Its water was very dark, even when Jay stood on the shaggy grass-analogue right at the edge and peered over cautiously she couldn’t see the bottom. The surface reflected her image back at her. Then it started to ripple slightly.

  Haile was walking out towards the white towers. Jay paused for a moment to watch her friend. There was something not quite right about the scene, something obvious which her mind couldn’t quite catch.

  Haile was about ten meters from the shore when she realized Jay wasn’t following. She swung her head round to look at the girl. <>

  Very slowly, Jay cleared her throat. “Haile, you’re walking on the water.”

  The baby Kiint looked down at where her feet-pads were dinting the surface of the lake. <>

  “Because it’s water!” Jay shouted.

  <>

  Jay glared at her friend, though intense curiosity was a strong temptation. Tracy’s warning rang clear in her mind. And Haile would never trick her. She put a toe cautiously on the water. The dark surface bent ever so slightly as she began to apply pressure, but her shoe couldn’t actually break the surface tension and get wet. She put even more weight on her foot, allowing her whole sole to rest on the water. It supported her without any apparent strain.

  A couple of tentative steps, and Jay glanced from side to side, giggling.

  “This is brilliant. You don’t need to build bridges and stuff.”

  <>

  “You bet.” She started to walk towards Haile. Slow ripples expanded out from under her shoes, clashing and shimmering away. Jay couldn’t stop the giggles. “We should have had this in Tranquillity. We could have got out to that island, then.”

  <>

  Smiling happily, Jay let Haile’s arm tip wrap round her fingers, and together they walked over the lake. After a couple of minutes the towers of the locus seemed no closer. Jay began to wonder just how big they were.

  “Where’s Vyano, then?”

  <>

  Jay scanned the base of the towers. “I can’t see anybody.”

  Haile stopped, and looked down at her feet, head swaying from side to side. <>

  Promising herself she wouldn’t yelp or anything, Jay looked down. There was movement beneath her feet. A small pale-grey mountain was sliding through the water, twenty metres beneath the surface. Her heart did sort of go thud, but she clamped her jaw shut and stared in amazement. The creature must have been bigger than any of the whales in her didactic zoology memories. There were more flippers and fins than Earth’s old behemoths, too. A smaller version of the creature was swimming along beside it, a child. It curved away from its parent’s flank, and started to race upwards, its fins wriggling enthusiastically. The big parent rolled slowly, and dived off into the depths.

  “Is this Vyano?” Jay exclaimed.

  <>

  “What do you mean cousin? He’s nothing like you.”

  <>

  “No we don’t!”

  <>

  “Well, yes, but … Look here, there’s none of us live underwater. That’s just totally different.”

  <>

  Jay recognized that particular mental tone of pure stubbornness. “They probably have,” she conceded.

  The aquatic Kiint child was over fifteen metres long; flatter than a terrestrial whale, with a thick tractamorphic tail that was contracting into a bulb as it neared the surface. Its other appendages, six buds of tractamorphic flesh, were spaced along its flanks. To help propel it through the water, they were currently compressed into semicircular fans that undulated with slow power. Perhaps the most obvious pointer to a shared heritage with landbound Kiint was the head, which was simply a more streamlined version that had six gills replacing the breathing vents. The same large semi-mournful eyes were shielded with a milky membrane.

  Vyano broke surface with a burst of spray and energetic waves, which churned outward. Jay was suddenly trying to keep her balance as the lake’s surface bounced about underneath her like some hyperlastic trampoline. Haile was bobbing up and down beside her, in almost as much trouble, which was slightly reassuring. When the swell had eased off, a mound of glistening leaden flesh was floating a couple of metres away.

  The aquatic Kiint formshifted one of its flank appendages into an arm, tip spreading out into the shape of a human hand.

  Jay touched palms.

  <>

  “Thank you. You have a lovely world.”

  <>

  “I’d like to go back, too.”

  <>

  “Richard says we’ll pull through. I suppose we will.”

  <> Haile said. <>

  “How could you visit the Confederation? Does that jump machinery of yours work underwater as well?”

  <>

  “But there wouldn’t be much for you to see, I’m afraid. Everything interesting happens on land. Oh, except for Atlantis, of course.”

  < and come to dwell among us.>>

  “No thank you very much,” she said primly.

  <>

  “I suppose what I mean is, you wouldn’t be able to see what humans have achieved. Everything we’ve built and done is on the land or in space.”

  <>

  “You mean you’re like our pastorals?”

  <>

  “Pastorals are people who turned away from technology, and lived life as simply as they can. It’s a very primitive existence, but they don’t have modern worries, either.”

  <> Haile said. <>

  “This is the bit about you which I don’t really get. Free to do what?”

  <>

  “All right, try this. What are you two going to be when you grow up?”

  <>

  “No no.” Jay would have liked to stamp her foot for emphasis. Given what she was standing on, she thought better of it. “I mean, what profession? What do Kiints spend all day doing?”

  <>

  <> Vyano said. <>

  “Transcend? You mean die?”

  <>

  “I’m sure doing nothing but thinking is all really good for you. But it seems really boring to me. People need things to keep them occupied.”

  <> Vyano said. <>

  “Yes. I suppose so. But you can’t all spend the whole time admiring new things. Somebody has to make sure things work smoothly.”

  <