by Alex Oliver
He had known they were not real, but this - whatever was in here - it was. He had passed its tests. He was going to see it at last, and somehow he was going to use it to save Aurora and her world.
Nodding to himself, the buoyancy of his own cleverness returning to him, he took a deep, cleansing breath and stepped through.
Though there had been no barrier that his hand could touch, Bryant still passed through the wall of darkness as though it was a physical thing. He felt it fill up his mouth and his chest. His eyes shuttered as for three heartbeats he seemed to be nowhere at all. The psychic clamor in which he had spent the last weeks fell silent, as he was trapped, suspended outside reality. And then his forward momentum carried him onward and through. He took in a deep, hungry breath of stale air as light returned.
Not much light. The lamp-flowers didn't bloom here. Only a faint illumination dribbled down from a light-well in the ceiling, and that had been all but choked by a far off drift of fallen leaves and dust. The room might have been disappointing; it was a jade sphere, with a depression in the center, just large enough for an adult louse to fit itself, sinking itself into the floor like an extra-large tile. The walls' polished surfaces reflected Bryant's drawn face like dark mirrors, and strange perspectives of himself followed him as he walked.
He didn't know what he'd expected. Banks upon banks of computers, perhaps, disappearing into the darkness of a hollowed out world? Or an army of live things preserved in stasis tubes, or of imps like the launcher's imps - but decked out with weapons. He'd thought it would be bigger, this secret kernel of the world. Why would it be so strangely guarded, if it was so innocuous?
He moved closer to the light-well and poked one of his tent's supports up it. A reflective tube down which the daylight outside should bounce, it must be closed off somewhere along its length by a circle of glass, where falling leaves had built up, but he couldn’t reach or clear them from here. Bringing the pole back down, he looked at it in curiosity, aware that he was missing something. He tried again, standing on tiptoe, trying to work out what it was about the thing that struck him as wrong.
It came with a little frightened shock. The light-well should have been mirrored, but instead it was lined with a coating of processor tiles six foot deep. If the whole room was swaddled in such a covering--
He shuffled over to the dip in the floor as though he was approaching a precipice. It went down four feet, and was tiled with the same processors. The sheer numbers struck him with awe. Say this was a six foot deep sphere of tiles - that must be the minimum - it would still be more powerful than the most powerful human computer ever built. More powerful than he could even comprehend.
A stir of ambition, of want, lifted the hairs down his spine. What could he do with the most powerful computer ever built? Almost anything.
The operator must sit in the hollow. That was clear enough. Could he fit in that place designed for a creature of a very different body-type?
He edged closer to the recess. Felt nothing - but then his feet were wrapped tight in insulation and he was not touching any of the tiles anywhere else. Carefully, all the ghostly reflections of other Bryants around him hunkering down in imitation, he crouched by the operator's position and put one knee down.
Even through the barrier of his trousers, he felt the thing suck at him again, pulling, pulling on his blood and his brain. It was as though all the walls became semi-transparent, and he could guess at an intelligence behind them. He was an ant in the center of a city, and in every direction life was busying itself in all its dizzying complexity and strength. It hadn't noticed him properly yet. It had stirred and tried to swat him away as a sleeper raises an automatic hand to brush away a fly without fully waking. It wondered what he was, but it felt no great urgency to find out.
Bryant swallowed and sat down. He wished he'd worked some kind of long range transmission abilities into the bots he'd given Aurora. He wished he knew whether she was alive or dead. How vital was it to wake this sleeping behemoth? It was starting to creep him out, to be honest.
But he'd come this far - he'd damn well been burned alive three times to get here. That imposed some kind of obligation, didn't it? Some kind of imperative to make it worthwhile. He'd told Aurora that this was where their safety and their salvation lay. What would she think of him if he ran away from it now?
He reached down and slowly unwrapped his left foot, pulling off the shoe underneath, having to unpick fragments of sock from around the inch long wires that now curled beneath his sole. A shiver went through him as his gloved fingers touched the metal wires - a near short circuit, the taste of aluminum and potassium bright and metallic in his mouth.
To be fair, Aurora wouldn't blame him for running away from this. She'd long ago figured out that running away was one of his specialties.
But he wanted to know. This thing had been trying to keep secrets from him, and he wanted to know. Maybe he couldn't wake the Lice's sleeping children - not literally - but if this thing was their creation, he could still bring something of them back into the universe. All their knowledge, all their history.
He paused for a long, motionless moment, like the moment before a skydiver steps out of a plane. Then he set his bare foot down in the depression, and felt it fasten itself to the tiles like it was greedy for them. He thought it soaked right into the glass to the ankle, as though it was being absorbed.
A prickling, itching pain swept across his scalp and his hands and the other foot, as they too pulled towards the contact. He had just enough time to re-wrap the insulation around his fingers and clamp the palms into his armpits before it felt like his brain was siphoned off down his leg and into the floor.
He was sinking into the stone, being absorbed by the planet. It was as though stone swelled up and closed over his mouth and eyes, and even though a part of him was aware that he had not moved - that he sat like a bather at a seaside pier, with only one foot touching the immensity - his mind was all but sucked under.
It looked at him now, almost completely awake, and he began to understand what it was that he was seeing. They had networked their whole world. The tiles were just more refined, more conductive, less impure versions of the green rock that encircled and protected their cities from sensor detection. When he thought, now, he could feel the pulse of his idea travel through the veins and pathways of artificial connectivity, and then through the very core of the planet, through the heart of Cygnus Five itself.
When he shivered, his tiny alarm was echoed back by a world. He held himself as still as he could, as unthinking as he could, and gradually the head-splitting nausea of having an entire planet in his mind eased enough for him to begin understanding.
The vast majority of it was still asleep - still dealing with being broken up as sand on the sea shores, or reconstituted in new matrices at the abyssal pressures of the deep. Bright pictures flashed brief and all-consuming before his notice - the taste of the earth in a cave half a mile down into the crust, where weight was squeezing water out of the rock. The rush into the sky of a particle of stone drunk up with that same water into a tree's roots. A sense of peace, of things going on very much as they should.
And then closer, a sense of watchfulness and fear that wanted to cut him to the bone and work out what he was - a protective mind whose duty was to keep the planet whole and well.
There was enough of Bryant left outside the matrix to feel triumph, red and human, at that realization. He had been right. At least part of what this thing had been designed to do was to defend its world.
At his prompting, it opened creaky doors to memories of the Lice's weapons caches. Imps equipped for war, waiting to be awakened like a hero in his cave. Air defense systems that even its planetary mind regarded as terrifying. But when he tried to get a clearer picture of what exactly they were, the only answer was a crawling of his skin towards further contact, a thirst for union that had him stepping down into the user's niche before he knew he was moving.
Th
e shock of his insulated shoe against the interface was like a bucket of ice-water thrown over a lustful dog. It stopped his breath to have been expecting consummation like that and have it denied, and he wanted - he wanted - to twist the insulation off hands and feet, crouch down like a neolithic burial and fit his hands and feet and head into that hollow and become one with the world.
But if he did, would the colony ever get him back? Aurora had asked him to do this, but she had also asked him to marry her, and he felt that it was one or the other. Either he committed to this, or he committed to her. If he chose this, he was pretty sure there would not be anything left to have children with her. His hands and his head would grow into the rock. He would be a human interface with the planet for the settlers - and that would be useful. But he would no longer be the kind of creature that had any use for a wife, or children. The dream they had cherished, on and off, of snuggling with one another while the baby slept in the cot in the corner? That would be off the table.
He raised his hand to his mouth, picking at the wrappings around the fingers with his teeth. The pull to unwrap and put the hand down was almost sexual, it was so irresistible. And after all, Aurora might be dead by now. Probably was. Didn't he owe it to everyone else to do this? To step in, to activate this defense system that they so badly needed?
Something dripped on his lip, warm and thick. He put out his tongue and tasted blood. Nosebleed. Great. This fucking tearing need was probably not doing his brain any favors. Aurora would be so fucking mad with him if he broke himself while she was gone.
With some contortion, he managed to get the strip of insulation he had taken off his foot back underneath his toes. Wiggling and pulling and tearing until the sweat ran into his eyes, he worked it under the whole foot and lifted it away. A headache landed on his cheekbones like a rock. The walls seemed to turn aquarium-clear and something swam around him like the trailing tendrils of a man-of-war. It wasn't pleased.
Feeling shaken and guilty, Bryant wiped the blood from his nose on his sleeve and staggered back towards the dark-curtained door. "I hope you appreciate that I chose you instead of a whole world," he croaked to the appreciative Aurora who lived in his head. Suddenly he was crying, watering the gore into thin pink streams, not even sure what he was crying about; was it the world he'd given up, or his fear that Aurora was already gone, and he had made this sacrifice for a ghost? "Come home soon, please, sweetheart,” he muttered as he plunged back through the veil and into the real world. “Please don't be dead."
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Invasion
Aurora imagined she could feel the trace of Keene's targeting laser as a spot of heat on her top lip - where most of the face would be burned off when the lethal pulse hit. She held his gaze for the second in which he hesitated, seeing fear and uncertainty beneath the theatrical outrage. Maybe she'd always gone for men like frightened little rodents, because there was something terribly mouse-like and pitiable in the back of his eyes, even now.
"Admiral Keene! How dare you threaten my prisoner!" Inquisitor Swann had swooped to her bag and come up with a syringe of something yellow-green. Aurora preferred the imaginary burn of the targeting spot to the thought of finding out what that stuff did in her veins, but the third torpedo had still not struck, the threat to her world was still active, she couldn't afford to launch herself down the barrel of Keene's gun as all her instincts told her to do.
Chances were he wouldn't be surprised by the move at all. Chances were he'd be expecting it, he'd just kill her and call it justified.
"Please remove yourself from my interrogation room," Swann continued, imperious as the grandmother of some elite, military dictator.
Military dictator was such an ugly phrase, Aurora thought apropos of nothing - her brain misfiring as it tried to struggle with the overload of information from two ships. She was a military dictator herself. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing.
"I'm going to kill her," Keene repeated, faint tremors in his arm beginning to make the mouth of his gun visibly shake, but by now she knew he wouldn't. Not in front of his adoring public. All those eyes! At least some of them would condemn him for it, and he wouldn't dare do anything so controversial.
Swann sighed and nodded to Aurora's guards. "Please put him outside and return. I'll need you to hold her down while I administer this."
Maybe, while the doors were open, Aurora could get between the guards and escape. Go to ground somewhere where she could wait for her final data-stream from the third ship. Better to wait in the bilges in hiding than here. Better not to chance the yellow drug--who knew what it might do to her already overburdened brain? She shifted her weight, tried not to visibly watch as the taller guard touched Keene's elbow, guided him to holster his gun and turn his back on Aurora. Three steps away and the guard hit the door control.
A whirr and hiss as the doors slid aside. Keene was going through, the guard behind him. Second guard was behind Swann. Swann had reached for something on the table. She was looking down. Aurora's instincts cried 'now!' in a voice like a screaming guitar riff, and she threw herself across the room, knocked Keene out with an elbow to the temple, swept her left leg in a snapping kick at the back of his guard's knee, pulling it out from under him and sending him tumbling. The other foot came down, her leg bent, ready to push herself into a bounding leap over the two tumbled bodies, the corridor receding to a lit white square like a sugar cube that spelled freedom. They couldn't stop her now--
It felt at first like fishing cord tangled around her shin, holding her back gently, delicately. She looked down and saw the very tip of a transparent filament that had hit her ankle and curled upward around her leg. She tugged, and couldn't move. Tracing the filament back to its origin showed it emanated from a whip-like grip in Swann's hand. The old lady looked at her chidingly, raising her eyebrows as if to say ‘That's not the kind of behavior we expect in the service.’ Then she pressed her thumb down onto a button in the handle, and the cord came alive with electricity.
It felt like having stepped in a shoal of piranhas - like all the flesh was being stripped from her by tiny, razor-sharp mouths. Her blood boiled and her muscles seized solid. Burned alive! She wanted to scream, but her throat was spasming and no breath would pass through it. A haze of red washed over her eyes as though all the blood vessels there had burst. Agony filled her as water filled a balloon, stretching her, distorting her mind until there was no human thought left, and then she popped, and there was dark.
She woke on her back, conscious that she did not deserve to live, very aware that she sullied the air just by breathing it. There seemed to be a thickness around her head, a swaddling of dirty gray clouds, or of medical grade cotton wool that had been trodden underfoot, used to clean the latrines and then slapped on her open wounds to heal them. "Why is the inside of my head so filthy?" she asked herself, not expecting a response.
But a woman's voice answered. A nice voice, with the accent of the upper classes, and a grandmotherly air - firm but fair. "You have been a very great sinner," it said. "You've done terrible things that mean you have to be put to death. But don't worry, my child, you can still be saved. Even in the hour of your death, it is not too late to repent and be cleansed."
Aurora smiled. Just the thought seemed to ease some of the suffocating pressure in her head. Her body ached all over. Had she been beaten up? If so, she had doubtless deserved it. This was the Kingdom - they didn't punish unless punishment was deserved. That meant if you had been punished, it must have been your fault. You must have done something very bad.
"I want to be clean," she confessed, slurring her words because talking was such an effort, because putting one word after another was so complicated, so hard.
Why was it so hard?
Part of her seemed to remember that the grandmotherly voice had been talking for some time. Didn't it sound weary! She felt a moment of self hatred for having forced this good woman to spend hours trying to draw her back into the fold. But... ha
dn't she been asleep? Why would the woman have talked to her while she was asleep? Why wouldn't she have waited until Aurora was awake?
"Of course you do," said the voice. It sounded pleased, and Aurora smiled inwardly at the thought that she had pleased someone, here at the end of all things. When she had done so many other things wrong, that at least she had done well in this. "Of course you do. The good person that God made is still inside there somewhere. When you have paid for all your disobedience, he will welcome you home."
Aurora wasn't sure she liked that idea. Wasn't there something she had to do first? Why couldn't she remember? She tried to rub her closed eyes with her fist and discovered that her wrist was strapped down. The jolt of that realization seemed to thin the clouds in her head, and the thinning made her thoughts speed up, made her aware that her sense of self lay beneath three thrumming blue data-streams. Three of them. That was significant, wasn't it?
She tried again to open her eyes. This time she succeeded and blinked at the woman who was smiling down at her.
"You're awake," said the woman. Inquisitor Swann. Something about her expression said 'startled', and Aurora almost buckled under the self-reproach, knowing that yet again she had done something wrong. "Well, that's good. You can say the service along with me, and then you'll know that your confession has been heard, you're forgiven, and you can go in peace."
Confession? Aurora wasn't aware of having made any confession. What exactly were these things about which she felt so terrible? As her head cleared, she noticed that yellow-green liquid was flowing into an IV port in the back of her hand. "I don't remember," she slurred, but she did - she remembered the syringe in Inquisitor Swann's hand, the pain and the pinprick it concealed.
She'd been drugged. Swann had fucked with her mind while she slept, insinuating all those beliefs that were so far from Aurora's own, but sounded so insinuatingly close, so reasonable. But if that was the case--brainwashing under the influence of drugs--how was she pulling out of it now?