by Alex Oliver
It came over her like someone had shaken a snow-globe full of glitter, and each glint and glimmer was an idea, and the fluid in which they swam was curiosity and glee and joy. She'd never felt anything like it before but God! She recognized it at once.
“Bryant?”
“Aurora. It's you!”
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
Bryant makes a choice
Ever since Nori joined the collective, Bryant had been keeping out of his way. Not because he was suspicious of the boy's motives anymore, but because they were simultaneously too alike and not alike enough. They rubbed each other up the wrong way. They had tried working together just the once, after Felix had whispered to Nori's avatar about the planet-bursting weapons Aurora had intercepted. Both of them had been eager to give something to the warmongers at Seraph Base to prove it was safer for the whole galaxy if they were left in one piece.
But even with that impetus for cooperation, they had not been able to get along with each other's methods. There'd been another blow up, and Bryant had withdrawn altogether, putting all his energies into finding and controlling the pontoth local to where Aurora was. He had kept the Eagle together for her sake until she'd offloaded all its crew back on base. He'd limited the damage done by the explosion on Prison Base Three Prime, so that it too could be evacuated before it was lost.
A part of him had been mutely watching and guarding her all along, and that was great – he wasn't going to knock it – but now Nori was here with him, fulfilling the controller's job like a pro, he had begun to wonder why he was even needed down here anymore.
Watching Nori and Mboge interact with each other in the mental interface was cute, but also kind of sickening. Sometimes he wanted his body back so he could kick them both up the behind and say “Why'd you have to steal my martyrdom? I was doing something useful. Something unique. You weren't all supposed to want a cut. Try looking less happy about it, okay?”
Which was frankly kind of petty of him, but he never claimed to be above that.
So that was why he was sulking and reading the latest bio-research journals from the InfiniTech spaceships' servers when the landscape of the connection flexed around him again. It was as though an earthquake was shaking the walls of his mind, or a bubble of plasma had forced itself into outer space and was bending reality to make room for it.
It was, curiously enough, Nori who flicked by and said “You might want to see this.”
He was sure with that introduction that he wouldn't, but Oh God. Oh God, he'd been wrong.
She was like a world in herself, the lines of her mind sleek on the outside like a well-designed spaceship, but teeming within like a sea. Full of life, full of strange things to discover. Sometimes as supple and adaptable as liquid and sometimes as strong as an ocean current. Even though he'd never touched minds with her before, he recognized her instantly, and then he wondered how he could ever have given her up, for this barren life or anything else.
She told you to, he reminded himself, and then laughed. What a fucking idiot he'd been to take that suggestion.
“That's not fair,” she thought back, obviously able to hear his thoughts and not liking them. “You could barely be held back from this. It was new and you were curious. I couldn't have held you back if I'd tried.”
“But you didn't try.” He wasn't sure why he was even arguing this, or what he felt about the words taking shape in his head. It was just such a fucking delight to be able to talk to her again, let alone like this, where he could all but feel her neurons firing. A surprisingly intimate experience, it bore noticing.
Just now, for example, her embarrassment and answering pleasure was like a bath of warm honey, just as sweet as he might expect, but also inconveniently sticky. “You haven't changed, at least. And yeah. I learned early that there wasn't any point in trying to tell you what to do. I could only let you do whatever the hell you wanted, and hope you'd think of me before you got too far. Hope you'd come back, when you wanted.”
Bryant had been thinking in eons recently, tracking the spread of dust in interstellar space. It was like watching a mayfly's life, remembering his theft of the Governor's ship, the shame he'd felt as he left Aurora to die, the sense of terrified rightness when he turned around to snatch her from the jaws of doom. Now he felt himself snap back to a human perspective and experience it again--the adrenaline, the mad buzz, the point at which he actually began to believe his own hype. He remembered that he was fucking brilliant, and it was his mission in life to use that brilliance to improve the lives of others, to heal, to create and to enable.
And to earn shed-loads of money, of course.
The Preserver lifted the thought out of his mind like a dog mouthing a toy out of its owner's hand, chewing it around in its mouth to get the flavor. It discarded the thought of money as something it didn't care to understand, and zeroed in on his love of his own cleverness. You all believe intelligence is the key to fixing things.
“That puzzles you?”
The creators believed it got in the way of their communion with nature and with their God. They believed they had done wrong in evolving beyond the simple oneness that had once been natural to them.
“Bigots.” Bryant thought, disappointed. He'd expected better from his aliens, over whom he generally felt a kind of proprietorial pride.
“That's not fair either,” Aurora cut in, and it was so good. So fucking good, to be arguing with her again. Another thing he'd forgotten how much he missed. “Some humans have thought the same thing. But fundamentally we believe that God--who must have been their God as well as ours--created intelligent beings in his own likeness. That means our intelligence is Godly. It’s to be used to bring good out of evil circumstances, to make life better for everyone. He gave it to us as a good thing, so it would be wrong to try to take it away. That's what we believe.”
She still had that rootedness about her, blunt as a baseball bat to the face, but also just as effective. Her certainties somehow remained intact despite everything that had changed, and they were almost luminous by now with how finely they had been polished. Bryant didn't want to say that he knew the feelings of a millennia-old AI created by aliens, but everyone in this shared space knew that Aurora's certainty could win wars, and he wouldn't have blamed it for being overpowered.
It felt so good to be trampled over sometimes, after all.
Another wave of embarrassed hilarity told him she'd picked that thought up too. He wallowed in it long enough for habit to call out to his body, to wish they could touch outside as they were in. But he shouldn't have thought that, because it brought him back to yearning over what he'd lost, and the moment he started, she picked that thought up too and echoed it.
The Preserver pushing through this bond of mutual regret, mutual pain, was an inquisitive, clumsy relief.
You two also love, like them.
Bryant was kind of miffed that Nakano Nori was being held up as the gold standard of being in love. Bryant had got there months ahead. But he was also impressed that it could tell the painful, incomplete tug in his whole self resembled the finished perfection of Felix and Nori's relationship at all. “Yeah,” he agreed. Had he said this yet? If he hadn't, it bore repeating. “We love each other too.”
You are meant to be a unity, like them.
The ocean of Aurora's thoughts warmed, buoying him up. “We think so,” she said. “But there are three of us. Autumn's with me now, and she…” Some rapid thinking underlay this sentence, a sense that she was going out on a limb. Bryant got the impression of supplication, a kind of begging. “She needs a daddy.”
She'd got her child? That was scary – she'd have a new responsibility, an new source of love. She'd try and remember Bryant if he stayed down here, but it would be morbid to visit, morbid to bring a toddler into the control room. She'd find a new focus in someone who really needed her, and he'd be stuck here counting krill while his chances to be a father to her daughter slipped away. He would have swallowed if he stil
l could.
“So I'm asking you now,” Aurora continued. “Do you need to stay? Nori wants this. He and Felix are happy here. And if Felix can't persuade the Preserver to respect us and let us live, then no one can. Things have changed, Bryant. Surely you can come out now? Surely you can come home?”
There was no doubt anymore how much she wanted him. The connection between them rippled with desperation and with pleading, all the worse because she was so proud. But he had resigned himself to staying – had got to like the idea of being The Controller, Chosen One, descended from the last high priest, the fate of planets in his hands. Could he really give up immortality and power for an old dream of a family, a surgery, a mundane scramble of a life in a city made for people who didn't even have tables?
He could engineer new people one planetary population at a time, in here. Could he really go back to doing it for individual patients with the crude tools of a scalpel and his own two hands? Could he really do that for her?
Of course he could. The moment he turned his mind to the thought, it was obvious. Didn't even require a decision. Or perhaps he should say that he had already made the decision when he turned the Charity around the first time and came back to save her.
“You're right,” he said, thinking this directly to the Preserver, scarcely conscious of how much easier it was to hold himself together with her there, as though already he relied on her to tell him who he was. “We belong together. You can see, can't you, that there would be a flaw in the whole universe if we were not allowed to live and grow old together? To kill us before we got that chance would not be optimal, would it?”
Charm, remember. Bryant's opinion of his own charm had taken a knocking at Nori's hands, but it came back when he felt how much the childlike planet wanted to believe him. The poor creature had been alone for a long time in the literal dust of its creators. Maybe it was lonely. Maybe it didn't want to go through all that again.
“You could get to know our daughter too,” Aurora spoke up unexpectedly, cajoling the Preserver with him. They could all tell she wasn't keen on the idea of exposing Autumn to a planet-killing intelligence, but they could also tell she was determined to give it the benefit of the doubt. Bryant would even go so far as to say she was taking responsibility for it, like it was one of her people – a midshipman who was newly away from home and needed someone to guide and reassure it. “We'd teach her to love you too. Why the hell should you be the only one who doesn't get a happy ending, Five? This colony's all about people getting a second chance. One of those people could be you.”
Bryant wanted to kiss her so hard he almost reconnected with his body enough to try and spit his breathing tube out. He would have laughed, again, if he'd had a body to do it with. She was something, right? He'd never met another person who took a new idea and ran with it big time the way she did, reshaping the galaxy as she went. She'd just gone up mind-to-mind against a planet and now it was the planet that was in doubt.
They could all feel it--yearning and guilt like an abyssal trench--and beyond that, a kind of panic like any live creature facing its own death. I don't want to die, Cygnus Five said at last, as though it had shifted a tectonic plate. I want… to not have killed them. I have made an error. I want to unmake it.
“Sweetheart,” Aurora said, her mind reaching out to Bryant's as though they could give the thing a mental group hug. “Felix says you can bring them back – the people you killed? He says you kept blueprints?”
I did, the doglike mind was enthusiastic now. If had a body it would have been wagging its tail. I could bring them back!
Had they done this? Bryant marveled. Had four humans each with their own brand of self belief and hope changed the Preserver's mind? And in doing so, had they restored the lives of millions of people and--
“Please tell me you can bring the Lice back too!” He burst out, mind all but whiting out with the brilliance of that thought. “You can undo everything you did with the pontoth? Rebuild InfiniTech Utopia and the people who used to live there?”
Memories of Nori's creche, the people he had mourned, broke open and shared themselves wordlessly among them, and Bryant wondered what the hell the Louse priests had been doing to keep this from their creation, to give it only intelligence to work on and then to teach it to distrust that too. No wonder it was being blown away now, wired up directly into the human need for clan, family, mates.
I can bring them back, it agreed, adventurous and daring, not quite believing its own nerve, like a teenager disobeying the rules for the first time and getting a taste for it. I will reverse the pontoth and bring back my creators, and they will be pleased with me!
Bryant settled all the edges of his presence against the edges of Aurora's, feeling the strong beat of her thoughts. Autumn's going to have a very big elder sibling, he thought, and caught her amusement as if it was his own.
At least, I hope they'll be pleased.
“They will, sweetheart,” Aurora reassured it. “And if they aren't, it doesn't matter, because we already are, and we're going to look after you. Okay? You're part of the family now. You're not alone anymore.”
Bryant could feel her bracing herself for whatever problems might come with the reintroduction of the planet's rightful owners, figuring that not everyone would take to an influx of giant bugs. But she would weather it as she had everything else, knowing it was the right thing.
“Why don't you start working out how best to do that in a way that gets us through the winter, and in the mean time give Bryant his body back. He's their high priest now, right? We're going to need him on the outside as a liaison with the Lice.”
“We should also perhaps stop calling them that,” Felix suggested, laughing. They all felt like laughing at the moment. It was a celebratory fizz of a feeling, all-powerful and hopeful and electric. “What did they call themselves?”
Othrin, Cygnus Five said. It means 'the perfection of the pattern.' They may decide that your pattern is imperfect. You have too few limbs, for a start.
Bryant almost despaired at that thought. He'd been really excited about real live aliens, but of course it would just be one more problem after another. He tried to sigh and almost choked again on the length of hard tube down his throat.
“I'm going to leave you, Nori and Felix to brainstorm how to reintroduce them with least disruption,” Aurora cut in, her whole focus fixing on Bryant in a way that gave him a shiver of delight. “Bryant and other experts can come in and join you via the headset if you need to pick their brains, or you can come out via the avatars and talk to us that way. But right now, I want Bryant out. Yes?”
Yes. Bryant's affirmation was echoed by Cygnus's, like two instruments playing the same refrain. He was ready.
The darkness hit at the same time as the thought, and the pain an instant after that. For a long screaming second Bryant couldn't differentiate one agony from another. He was nothing but a bonfire of screaming nerves and white fire, while something tried to rip his skin off and withdraw his internal organs out of his mouth.
He flailed against the sucking, tearing sensation all over the surface of his body, shards of glass through his feet – he had feet! And he was choking. He was choking! His throat ached and watered and burned around something hard, rigid, that filled it to capacity and blocked off his air.
With a sucking rip, he spasmed enough to pull his hand off the floor. Trying to get a grip on the pipe in his throat, his out of practice arm just smacked him in the face. And then, with a burning like sun on spacer-pale skin, he felt someone else's fingers wrap around his wrist and pull it away from his mouth. The next thing he knew, the hands were carefully sliding the breathing tube out.
They went away briefly when he doubled over to retch up a thin soup of stomach acid and whatever kind of broth the planet had been feeding him. But when he'd done, they returned – one to rest on his back between the shoulder-blades, and the other to wipe his mouth with a handkerchief, like his own mother had never done.
/> He'd thought the AI's world was full of information, but it hadn't contained scent. Scent! He'd never thought of scent as a world of miraculous color to cherish, but there would never be a moment in the future where he forgot to be thankful for the smell of Aurora--clean sweat, dirty hair, baby formula and gun oil, something floral on top. Her arms were around his back, under his shoulder, lifting him.
He grabbed handfuls of her outfit--a beautiful blue flouncy dress that made her look like the ocean on the outside too--and turned himself in to her chest, resting his cheek on her breasts.
She would have shoved him away, before. When she didn't, he tilted his head to look up at her, found her with tears in her eyes and a fond, exasperated smile. There was a light blossom in her hair, like the one he had tucked behind her ear all that time ago, when he had first had the sense to see how truly beautiful she was.
“I like the dress,” he said, managing to get his feet under him and keep them there. The controller's chair had turned him and stimulated his muscles, and he was nowhere near as weak as he had thought he would be. It was more a matter of remembering how to work the limbs, how to be content again with only himself inside his head.
Aurora pulled him out of the room like she was afraid it would follow her and swallow him back up, but she shrugged the compliment off with her usual awkwardness. He feigned a little more weakness than he actually had, just so she would carry on bearing most of his weight and clutching him tight to her, with a manic grin and silent tears coursing down her cheeks.
“I've got the photosynthesizing thing going on now,” she said, verdantly green as an Earth goddess. “I like to wear something I can take off quick when the sun comes out.”
Still had that unbelievable naivety, Bryant saw, squeezing her back almost as tight as she was holding him. He was still a little scrambled, but getting more in touch with his body every moment. It perked up noticeably at the thought Aurora had worn something easy to remove.