by Alex Oliver
Green tiles that had made decorative lines on the floors throughout swept up here and joined each other, spreading up the walls and onto the ceiling until the doors stood in an arch of jade. Given that each of the tiles was a processor, it meant that these shut doors kept him out of an area that must have a phenomenal amount of computing power. He hated being left out.
"What is it?" Aurora asked, unimpressed.
"I think this is the hub," Bryant whispered. That was superstitious too, but he couldn't help but think it might hear him. "What we've switched on so far, what we've cobbled together up in my surgery is... like a hand held com. This is the main server. I think. But I can't get in."
Aurora looked at it with the blank expression of someone who was expecting to be more impressed. "You think something in here might help?"
He didn't understand much of the Lice's religion - actually it was hard to tell their religion from their philosophy from their science. The whole thing folded together into a world view he hadn't managed to decipher, and he wasn't going to say 'I've got a gut feeling that it all leads here.' If he said 'I think there's some kind of defense system, but the Lice had religious prohibitions against using it,' she was going to want to know what those prohibitions were. Then she'd wonder whether her God felt the same way.
And then where would they be? With all that knowledge hidden away from him, and her on the side of leaving it be. "There's bound to be something. I just can't get in. See this?"
This was a small depression about knee height for him. "We think this is a DNA scanner and lifesigns detector. We think it's like a keyhole. It detects a living Louse and it opens up. Trouble is, there are no living Lice left, and it doesn't accept human DNA."
He held out his left hand to show the sliver of skin sliced from his little finger. "I tried."
That was when the idea came to him--so simple that he didn’t know why he hadn’t thought of it before. There were no living Lice left, but there was a dead one, preserved in his laboratory, and it must be possible to isolate Louse DNA from that. A living host could be provided…
As Aurora begain brainstorming battle plans with Ademola and Dr. Atallah, Bryant returned to his surgery, where the preserved remains of a number of Lice being devolved into animal form had been set up in what he could only assume was a proud statement of what they had achieved.
He still didn't see how any race could think that was an acceptable thing to do, but that wasn't the point right now.
The most complex of the corpses - the one which looked like an organic version of the mechanical imps - still retained biological integrity inside its preservative gel.
He opened it up and took samples. Sequenced it. Crawling about on his knees to use the Lice equipment, he engineered a batch of nanobots that would work both with the alien DNA and with his own. By the end of the day, when Aurora radioed him to come and share the evening meal, he was sitting on the floor with his back to the sequencer and a syringe of new bots in his hand.
His com crackled, "Are you coming? We've said grace, and everyone's starving. There's milk and cat-rush-root porridge and I'm going to eat yours if you're not here."
"I'm on my way," he said, pressing the syringe to his elbow and hearing the nano hiss its way under his skin. "Don't start without me."
He felt a little nauseous as he dropped the syringe in the sterilizing bin to be irradiated. She probably wouldn't approve of him making himself technically just that little bit less human. If she freaked out about gills made from traits left behind by human ancestors, she wouldn't be happy about him knitting Lice DNA into his own flesh. But well, he wanted to see what was behind the door, and she didn't have to know.
He squinted his eyes shut against the jabbing of the lights as entirely expected fever made his head throb. That was just the DNA transcription, producing RNA. The gene expression would stabilize soon enough, things would clear up and he'd feel able to walk back to the temple then. Right now, maybe...
He staggered as he tried to lurch through the door. Two frames, and he hit the overlapping area in the center of them, which turned out to be hard. Reeling back, he tripped over his own heel and fell. Which was better. Right now, he would lie down. The floor was cool. Especially the computer tiles, cool and soothing against his burning cheeks. The action of this nano was maybe a little more vigorous than he'd expected, but nothing to worry about. Nothing to--
Oh God, his head.
He closed his eyes, curled his arms around his splitting skull and held on while it all went dark around him.
~
Bryant woke slowly, feeling as though he lay on fluffy clouds of many colors, every one of them a scent. He could smell the feverfew-like perfume of the dried ribbon leaves stuffed into the mattress, and a faint whiff of sheep's lanolin from the wool of the blanket in which he was wrapped. Fur from the shiny-eyed lemurs made a soft stuffing for the pillow, smelling faintly of cumin. And wrapping round all of that, a heavy, sensual swirl of the smell of Aurora. He sighed and turned his nose deeper into the bedding, everything in him giving a contented hot little thrill at the realization that he was in Aurora's bed.
Now, if only someone would quiet the child he could hear sobbing in the distance, he might drift here forever in perfect contentment.
"You awake?" Aurora's voice. He felt the dip of the mattress as she sat down next to him. And really for proper contentment, she should have been lying down beside him, preferably naked. Maybe...?
He opened his eyes hopefully, but no, she was almost fully clothed, except with her jacket off, her burly arms bare under the little straps of that golden silk blouse. But she was close enough that he could walk his fingers up her ribs and stroke the curve of the underside of her breast. She allowed it for a moment, her lips quirking up, her eyes reassured, and then shoved the hand away.
"What happened?" Bryant asked. He meant 'how did I get to be in your bed?' but Aurora frowned.
"You don't remember? I was hoping you would tell me."
Wait. There were no children on Cygnus 5 yet. So what was he hearing? If he put a hand over his eyes and concentrated, it still sounded like a four or five year old, lost somewhere. Not crying out because they knew there was no one to hear, but just weeping quietly to themselves, alone. Was it an hallucination due to the fever?
He took the hand away and gestured with it towards the edge of the bed, where he hoped his trousers had been dumped. "Thermometer. In my pocket. What's my temperature?"
But he felt too good - clearheaded and rested, ready to bound up and take on the world - to be running the kind of fever that would cause him to hear things. When Aurora found his pocket scanner and checked, it confirmed a body temperature of thirty six degrees. Definitely not high enough.
"We found you in your lab unconscious," Aurora put the scanner away and rested her right hand on Bryant's corkscrew curls, petting them gently, affectionately, like they were dear to her, or Bryant himself was. "Did someone attack you?"
Fortunately he could laugh at that. By now, his defensive bots had propagated through the entire colony, and he could have stopped any physical threat before it could happen. "No, I uh..."
She would only freak and demand he reverse what he'd done and give him a lecture on accountability and how he should run these decisions past her first, because what was the point of being the defacto queen if nobody told her anything? Marriage or no, he certainly wasn't ready for that. "I just made some new nano, and it turned out to take more of a toll on my body than I expected. I always forget we're not eating right. I don't have the reserves I used to."
"Yeah," she directed a considering glance at one of the white flowers that hung from the ceiling. The sort that he had once given to her to wind into her hair. "Well, if we're not wiped out in the short term by battleships, things should improve once Mboge gets back from Snow City with supplies. I... uh,"
She fished what looked like a bread roll out of her pocket and offered it to him. Real bread, made of white wheat
flour. He could smell it from here, smell the yeast in it, and the overwhelming, buttery smooth sharp smell of high fat cheese. "I saved you this. It's maybe a little stale, but--"
Bryant snatched it out of her hand and gnawed into it - it was stale, and hard, and magnificent, and the cheese? The cheese almost brought him to tears. "Fuck, that's good!"
"You sure you're okay?" Aurora asked, smiling more widely now. It was good that she liked his voraciousness, even if she didn't always pander to it. Case in point, she was getting up now, almost too fast for him to reach out and skim his palm down the curve of her hip. "You and your nano, you're like an addict."
"I'm like an artist," he corrected, sitting up and stretching, so she could get an eyeful of his physique. She seemed to appreciate it, looking him up and down with a lazy grin. "I can't stay away from my work no matter that I'm literally starving in a garret here."
"You're 'literally' starving in an alien city," she corrected.
"Pedant."
"You say the nicest things."
That damn child! The sobbing grew more irritating the longer he ignored it. He tilted his head, trying to narrow down where exactly it was coming from, and Aurora's smile faltered. "It turns out Hiraku has some experience with homemade explosives, so I'm off to plant mines at the old colony settlement, but maybe you should go to the infirmary before you get back to work. Let Lina look at you."
"Yes," he agreed, because it was a sensible suggestion, however much he didn't need Lina Atallah's input. "I'll make sure I get a clean bill of health before I start on anything, but I must get that door open today. It's not like we have a lot of time."
She swooped back to kiss him, forceful as always but with a new edge of protectiveness. "You don't have to kill yourself for this, okay? I'll defend us, that's my job. You've got time to be safe about this. I don't want you suddenly getting heroic ideas. You be the self-centered survivor I fell in love with and look after yourself. Okay?"
He laughed again, because it was better than feeling guilty about how much he wanted to find out what was down there. How very much he was doing this almost entirely for himself. "Believe me, you'll never find me and danger willingly in the same place."
"Good." She gave him an approving look that made it imperative for him to take her face between both hands and guide her back for one last kiss, and then she was gone, hurrying away to make preparations for a war he honestly didn't think she could win.
He pulled his trousers on, tested his legs and was relieved to find he felt fine. No different from always. A faint discomfort in the small of his back meant his kidneys were working overtime but the arsenic-rich plants on this planet tended to have that effect regardless. He'd have been perfectly happy, if it wasn't for that damned noise, pitiable and desolate, that he could not shake off.
Returning to his surgery, where the breached tank of mummified alien sat on top of the ceremonial polished stone table in a bowl of empty seats, he sat at his workstation intending to run a full scan of himself, work out what exactly the Louse DNA had done when coupled to his own. He pulled his clumsy keyboard closer (the computer itself ugly, out of date and taken from the citadel in their first wave of settlement here). Then he reached out to attach the data-cable to the closest green stone tile.
His fingers stuck to it, as if they were coated in light tacky adhesive. He could, and did, wrench them away easily enough, sat rubbing them together as if he could wipe the feeling off. The initial jolt of horror gave way to a scaling up of fascination and realization that made him grin.
They'd made their technology responsive to their bodies, and now it recognized him. Now he could touch it as a part of it, not as a stranger. Cautiously, he reached out and rested the very tips of his fingers on his left hand on the green stream of tiles that curled away from the operating table, out of the door.
Again, a sensation washed over him as though his skin had grown hooks - tacky barbs like those on the feet of spiders. It was almost like reaching through the surface of the stone and plugging into the sluggish flow of thoughts underneath. He'd been right. There had been something holding him back, locking him out. The highly interlocked web of processors that ran through every building in this city and every city on this world was not fully engaged, not switched on, but it was complex enough to be slowly dreaming under the surface. Dreaming alien dreams.
He was brushing, light as a mayfly, over the surface of the mind of a completely alien creature, and he was scientist and philosopher enough to be humbled with awe and afire with curiosity at the same time.
But he was also, as Aurora said, self-interested enough to remember his own peril. "I need a defense system," he thought, trying to refine the concepts to their most basic level. Protection. Something to destroy the invading pods while keeping his own people safe.
There was a sense that something immense had almost heard him. A shock of fear and desire rattled through him as it might if he had touched a sleeping giant, and it had threatened to wake. Only then did he take stock of the fact that this thing was bigger than he was and that, in the echoing vastness and alien architecture of this AI, he might lose himself.
But God! What might he find?
Something was coming up through his hand, a kind of nosing warmth and interest. He felt it expand and then dissipate through his blood stream, like the planet had licked his face in welcome, and then the weeping - which he had almost ceased to hear over the last half an hour - rushed back, louder and more insistent than ever.
There were children behind the door in the temple. Children who needed his help.
When he took his hand off the stone and rubbed it this time, his fingertips felt rough, lumpy, but his mind felt claustrophobic, shut in, with only himself for company. He took a head torch from his work bench and went to open the door.
The louse god no longer looked so unappealing, ruby sticks on its antennae and plaques of copper and green enamel strong blocks of color in the dark. Underfoot, he felt it when the merely decorative tile gave way to processors. His feet wanted to sprout hooks and sink into the stone the way his hand had done. Even separated by boot leather, he could feel the slow, sleeping pulse of the planetary mind, and when he stood in front of the door this time he knew he had been right. Something was watching him. A mind made thousands of years ago was waiting for its creators to come home.
It felt entirely appropriate to go to his knees in order to set his ring finger into the keyhole, where he would be tested to see what he was. His knees too felt tacky, alive with someone else's thought.
Pain bright as a glitter of steel lanced up from his finger as it was pierced. He felt the welling and the drop of a single bead of blood into the oily bronze cup beneath the hole, and then a tick, tick, tick that hadn't happened before. Something sucked at him hard. Without being able to tell whether it was his mind or his blood it was siphoning off, he leapt back to his feet and the sensation stopped.
It occurred to him somewhat belatedly that whatever was behind those doors, there might not be any returning from it. That he might not get out of this experience entirely himself. That he should have told Aurora "Good bye. I love you." Before it was too late.
But it was too late now, as a black crack ran up from the keyhole, and down, and widened, as the door slid open, just wide enough for him to come in. Because really, there was no way he was going back to Aurora just now. He had to see.
~
Through the bottleneck of the door, the lines of green tiles split apart again to spiral around a spherical cavern. A miniature of the city had been built in its centre, and where the temple stood in the outer world, in this room there was a hole. All the trails joined back together there, like water spiraling down a plug hole.
Bryant strode through the model city like Godzilla, hearing the crying coming up from the deep. He was half afraid it would be a borehole indeed and he would have to jump down, but the walls were speckled with hand holds, and about ten feet down the drop turned into stairs,
like the shallow stairs that had brought him into the city the first time.
It was hard to climb when he wanted to cling to the walls and let the bots in his blood commune with the thing sleeping all around him, but the voices pulled him on.
Once he'd dropped to the top of the stairs, he found himself in a passage clearly made for a single imp - tubular, and not high enough for him to stand up inside. He pulled his sleeves over his hands to minimize the distraction of touch and crawled onward. The entire tunnel was made of processor blocks, fitted together so closely there wasn't even room for the usual clawholds. Even the Lice, when they came down here, must have had to travel on the floor alone, slipping off the glassy roof.
Bryant's head torch picked out another brass door. This one with stylized cogs and dynamos incised all over it, the scored design filled in with a paler, silvery metal. Either artistic appreciation had something to do with DNA, or he was simply getting used to the Louse aesthetic, but he found the doors beautiful. He found this whole combination of green and gold and silver lovely. Why not show off one's technology? Make it artistic. Flaunt it? Better than the purely utilitarian machines the humans used.
This door didn't need blood to open it. He simply put his tacky hand in the center of one of the round designs and shoved. Grit clogged it underneath, but it ground open over the piles of dust, smearing the heaps into a thin layer beneath it.
Inside, the ceiling rose until he could stand up again. A third door, opposite, appeared locked even at a glance - the design on it brought a portcullis to mind. Or a net, perhaps? It managed to have a forbiddingly shut aspect, as if it meant business. Bryant's eyes felt drawn to it against his will, as if it was taunting him. Look, I'm here. You thought you'd got in, but you can't.
As soon as he had straightened up, he marched over there and examined it. Yes, he'd call that design a cage. And there was no keyhole, no depression of any kind into which he could force a crowbar. He might have thought it was an unbroken wall of metal, except that the dust spread out from it in a fan, as though the doors had stood open at one point, and had closed, smearing through the grit to match the patterns he had just made by coming in.