by Jerry
Whiting clenched his teeth and tried to will his frustration back into whatever dark mental recess had engulfed it for so long.
A guard stopped them at the main entrance. Cariga stepped aside. Whiting tilted his gaze up at the looming figure, who brandished a shield bristling with steely points.
“Charles Whiting,” the guard said.
Whiting glanced at Cariga, who was impassive. He turned back toward the guard. “I—I beg your permission to enter the Palace, kind sir.”
“By whose leave shall you enter?”
“The King requests my presence.”
The guard stepped aside. Whiting caught his breath. Where were the paradoxes and conundrums?
Whiting waited for Cariga to move, but Cariga only inclined his head slightly backwards. Whiting stepped tentatively forward; Cariga followed.
They passed through the gates in this manner, Cariga following as if he were Whiting’s servant.
Unlike most interior walls on Ranaag, here the walls undulated in unpredictable waves. Many surfaces were hidden behind a dense thatch-work of interwoven matter rather like twigs, although Whiting had never seen any trees or bushes on Ranaag. At almost every turning, a glass-encased column of fire illuminated the way.
Whiting moved ahead, never uncertain of his direction, because a glow in the air preceded him. Fascinated, he moved deeper and deeper into the Palace. Cariga maintained a respectful distance a few feet behind.
When suddenly the glow vanished from the air, Whiting found himself in a great hall. He had no real idea of its size, because the walls appeared to be semitransparent, revealing a receding series of walls on all sides. What manner of illusion this was he could not tell, nor could he say which, if any, of the walls were solid.
Hundreds of Ranaagans filled the hall, many of whom were guards stationed along some of the multilayered walls, but others milled about, apparently those privileged enough to be present at this historic meeting. Some approached Whiting and offered greetings.
“I will say something important, Charles,” Cariga said.
“What is it, Cariga?”
“The King will be here soon. Do not speak.”
“Do not speak? But—”
“Welcome!” The hall fell silent at the sound of the King’s voice. He stood atop a shallow staircase, encircled by three horizontal rings of white light suspended around his midsection like three huge, fallen haloes. Whiting gaped; suddenly he felt almost giddy enough to lose his balance. “Hail Giracara!”
“Thank you, Cariga. Charles Whiting, it is good to see you at last.”
“Your Majesty, thank you for receiving me.”
The crowd seemed to gasp as one. The King turned and left. “Cariga, I—”
“You spoke.”
“Yes—I did. Cariga, I’m sorry, I know you told me not to, but I was overwhelmed by the moment.”
The onlookers were unobtrusively, yet quickly, leaving the chamber. “Charles, the King does not—receive—anyone.” The word carried a distinct impression of distaste.
“Cariga, I am truly sorry if I’ve committed an error in protocol—you see, I knew something would go wrong if I had no coaching in these matters!—but of course I will apologize right away.”
“You cannot. The King has lost face. He has been disgraced.”
Four guards appeared and seized Whiting’s arms.
“Cariga! I don’t understand!”
The guards dragged him away.
Cariga visited him in jail on the first day following the trial.
“The sentence is death.”
Whiting stared at Cariga between the bars, blinked, then backed away and sat on his bed. What could be the meaning of such an absurd and frightening statement?
“Cariga, what is the sentence?”
“The sentence is death.”
Again Whiting could not grasp it.
“Cariga, I don’t know why you have chosen to say such a terrible thing to me, but I will overlook it. Just tell me when I will be set free.”
“Today is day one of one hundred days.” Cariga summoned the guard, had him unlock the door, then swung it wide open and stepped into the cell. “Charles, you are here.”
“Well, no matter. As you say, I am here, although if that means all is well, I can’t say I fully agree. Yet if a hundred days is what it takes, then so be it.” He smiled. “What a scofflaw I am, eh? Of course I didn’t think it would cost so dearly to learn a bit about your protocol.”
Cariga turned and walked away.
But of course, Whiting thought, there can be no real intention to execute me. They must intend to punish me with the threat of it, and with these hundred days’ imprisonment, and if I bear my punishment nobly, surely I will be released.
“Cariga, will I see you again soon?” Whiting called. He felt himself tremble behind his smile.
The hundred days passed, each indistinguishable from the last.
Every day Cariga visited his cell, and there would always come a time when he would open the door, stand just inside it and announce, “You are here.”
Whiting would stare at the open door and think, I could easily run past him, escape in an instant. And then he would invariably think, But that would be dishonorable.
Whiting awoke.
He was strapped, spread-eagle, onto a table. Electrical wires pinned his eyelids, fingertips, groin. Cariga looked down into his eyes.
“Your life was,” Cariga said.
“Cariga, I didn’t find any answer!”
“You think you were supposed to learn a way to right the wrong.”
“Wasn’t I?”
“I told you many times that you are here.”
“That’s right, you did, damn you! What good was that?”
Cariga trembled at the profanity, but did not shrink away. “All possible good.”
“How could it be? It’s just a simple, stupid, obvious truth. What does it even mean?”
Cariga paused, cocked his head. “You are not disgraced, Charles.”
“What?” Whiting said.
“Many expected that you would choose to live by accepting disgrace, but I was not of them. I am glad I was right; if you had, we could not have stood your pain.” Cariga paused, and brushed some of his arms down the front of his robe; it was a gesture of confusion. “But, Charles, I must have changed through knowing you. I rejoice—I must rejoice—that you chose to stay; how then do I find myself sad that you will not live?”
Whiting tried to answer, but his voice would not come; he was paralyzed by the realization of how he had forfeited his life, paralyzed even more by the fact of nearly understanding why it was so. He almost understood—he almost understood what Cariga had said. For the first time since he had come to this planet, he almost understood something, and with a suddenness like the shock that would soon fill the wires, he saw the closeness and the chasm—he saw the uncrossable, though minuscule, distance between himself and the ability to understand only this one simple, lethal, irony.
And this small vision awakened a larger relative. Something glimmered inside the paradox, some kind of meaning leered out at him from within the self-contradictory admixture of everything his life had been on Ranaag; some kind of truth called to him from within the pain and the freedom of learning not to want to understand, blended with the joy and the imprisonment of suddenly, now, wanting once again to understand.
He tried, but could not reach the gem that sparkled and winked amidst the brambles, he could not follow all the diverging paths back to the single spot where they intersected, and all of it, all crammed at once into one place—the one finite place that was his mind—was too profound an agony to bear for long, but the electricity came then, and was merciful.
BURNING BRIGHT
Fergus Bannon
“Guess what I found, Professor?” When Mikey smiled his skin patterning made him look like a tree with teeth.
Still bleary from a long night’s sleep, I peered into the cramp
ed Lander’s main viewpit with its perspective on the caldera. Most of the pit was filled with a 3-D back-projection of the scene below the water but an inset volume gave a wider perspective. In it the distant blue-white sun was getting low, making the caldera’s jagged lip cast razor-sharp shadows across the water.
Careful scrutiny doesn’t always pay in this game. Sometimes it’s best to shift focus so that you’re looking a little beyond. That way you don’t get hung up on details. And sure enough as I stared blankly at the underwater scene I became aware of the incomplete pyramidal shapes lurking beneath the extravagant organic filigree and the overhanging collateral structures.
“Shit! Where did they come from?” I breathed.
Mikey snickered.
He was a nice kid but sometimes he irritated me. Right then I envied him his lack of experience. I’d spent too long on too many worlds mired in relentless cosmic cruelty. It had distanced me, numbed me. Of late I’d been comfortably losing altitude on the long glide to early retirement. Now was not the time to find what I’d been searching for all my life.
“What are they made of?”
“Can’t say for sure yet, I was just getting the bounce beam ready. Marble possibly.”
“How many klicks to the nearest outcrop?”
“Just over twenty, and yeah they’ve got a channel open.”
The granite caldera was about fifty klicks in diameter and the water at the bottom was up to fifty metres deep. Until now this had been big enough for the Bugs who were about the size of your thumb. Big enough while they were blowing each other away in numberless wars, but not if they were starting to attain real social cohesion.
They looked like amoebae but weren’t. Rather than evolving out like true amoebae they’d evolved in. Their single-celled bodies had gained greater internal complexity. Right at the start we’d bagged one of the little runts and analysed it, thankfully taking full biohazard precautions. We weren’t biologists but our onboard AIs were pretty smart and, after their examination, pretty shocked. The cell was a mass of subnuclei that communicated with each other mainly by percussion arrays, sending pulses through the intracellular fluid. Apart from the similarity in appearance, and the fact that it was DNA and carbon-based, it had little in common with the terrestrial amoeba.
“Let me see the channel!”
Mikey blinked up the sat-view. The channel lay like a transparent snake caught in mid-slither across the uneven terrain. It skirted the small hills and larger depressions and the clumps of sage-like plants so common on this part of the planet.
We’d seen its like before but rarely on this scale. Hundreds of channels led out between breaks in the caldera’s walls making it look from the air like a giant glass octopus.
Though you could kill the better part of a score of bugs in one incautious step they ruled this mudball. Apart from plants and a few “controlled” species everything else had been eradicated. We’d found fossil evidence of vertebrates that had spread out from the other hemisphere. They’d been doing okay until they’d met the Bugs, then they’d disappeared in the flick of a geological eyelid.
I did a quick mental calculation based on the pit’s calibration grids. Their pyramids would be even larger to them than ours were to us.
I tried to keep my voice even. “Want to estimate the cusp point?”
Mikey turned to look at me. His leaf patterning was now in autumn, giving his skin a disturbingly scalded appearance. “A month, maybe less.”
“They may not make it.”
He regarded me thoughtfully. I shuffled my sparse frame, knowing I’d lived too long and too closely with Mikey to have any success with the Emeritus Professor of Neuroarchaeology act.
“I don’t get it, Dan. Why are you so . . .? I mean forget TV Specials. Screw the Nobel. We’ll be up there with Darwin!”
I shrugged, casting around for a metaphor. It wasn’t easy. “Remember your first time with a woman? You’d probably had to work pretty hard to get her where you wanted her. You’d had to overcome all your shyness and selfconsciousness. Then when everything was set, when it was all arranged and the door was about to swing open, you suddenly found you didn’t want to know. Remember that?”
“Nope.”
“Define ‘dread’ for me, Mikey.”
He hesitated. “Aged funk,” he murmured and looked quickly away, fearing he’d gone too far even after all our cheek-by-jowl time together. He really wasn’t such a bad kid.
“Sure,” I sighed and blinked up a zoom of the channel.
Ed, our coordinating AI, had told us that the channel sections had originally been some sort of autonomous animal which the Bugs had selectively bred then bioengineered into bloated, expandable chambers with virtually no brain. Locked mouth to anus so that they formed pressure seals at both ends, they were strung out in chains to form fluid-filled Interstates for the Bugs.
Not nice, but then “nice” was a word rarely found in evolutionary vocabularies.
A timebomb cord virus was the main reason for the Bugs’ supremacy. It went like this: some poor conglomerate of proteins with pretensions to vertebrate status would eat a Bug. After that it’d have a couple of months left to associate with its own primeval kind, really get a chance to spread the DNA nibbler around a bit, then it’d die, ultimately taking heaps of its misbegotten pals with it. The planet was fertile enough to support a Biodiversity Quotient about twenty times higher. The Bugs made sure it didn’t.
Of course Mankind at its worst had managed to lower Earth’s BQ by a similar factor, though we’d had to resort to less elegant means like deforestation and high-velocity lead. The Bugs were our kind of people.
They lived life in the fast lane. Our DNA analyses indicated they’d evolved into this form only a few tens of thousands of years ago. That they could so quickly build and sustain so complex a civilization when their lifespans lasted little more than a year implied a genetic transfer of memory. This was no small potatoes nature v. nurture-wise. We’d been working with the AIs in the struggle to crack the mechanism and see if it was transferable to other species. Say, for the sake of argument, man himself. It passed time and might make us some money but was still only a sideline for the main event. Like selling chili dogs on Krakatoa.
I watched the Bugs goading their teams of spiderlike workhorses as they dragged the marble fragments over the steep lips of the pressure seals. Neither species massed much, so it was tough going.
And all this effort to build a few pyramids. The weird thing was that just about every substantial civilization on Earth and elsewhere had done the same thing at one time or another. Were pyramids really as useless as they seemed or did they form a focus, perhaps a concrete symbol of the first true externalization of thought? A sign that a species had started to look out rather than in?
Or were they just the logos of an egotistical creator slavishly recreated by its bondsmen?
The latter explanation was my bet.
As I watched the Bugs’ huge endeavours I felt my first sneaking pity for the savage little brutes.
In fact it took nearer three months to reach the cusp. Safe and sound in the Lander, one thousand klicks from the caldera, I actually saw it happen. I was refining Neivson’s Progression, incorporating the few slender inferences we could make about the Bugs’ social, philosophical, technological and bioengineering complexity into the conglomerate models of the sixteen other alien races we’d studied up to that time. The viewpit was tuned to one of four remotes set up to scan a small sector out to the SSW of the caldera. One second it was filled with a hundred thousand or so frenetic Bugs, the next it wasn’t.
I watched open mouthed as the little bodies settled slowly like sediment, drifting down between the arching tubular habitation structures and work pods to form a misty carpet on the caldera’s algae-covered floor. Within minutes the gloriously coloured and convoluted aquatic plants they had cultivated in such profusion to garland their buildings began to fade.
Sickened, I rapidly flicke
d the viewpit through the rest of the caldera and was relieved to find the sector membranes holding. I summoned Mikey and within a few minutes he staggered in, still befuddled from his play stims. By then I’d located the ruptured industrial storage pod and had got a spectrum back from the bounce beam.
“It’s some sort of chlorinated compound.”
“Accident?” I felt a momentary anger at his enthusiasm. He hoped it wasn’t an accident. And somewhere deep inside me where the seeker after truth still lived, neither did I.
We found the best remote angle and replayed the sequence. A single rogue, its body already attenuating from the hypermetabolic burn (“Yes!” Mikey yelled), could be seen churning its way towards the pod. A chain of pulsers, perhaps making up to ten times its mass and jerking with the Bug’s frenetic efforts, slipstreamed away behind it.
We’d seen them use pulsers before. It was how they usually killed each other. Pulsers were tiny creatures bred down to be portable, their abdominal tubes focusing waves from their own internal sound generators. They produced enough energy to breach a Bug’s outer membrane at a distance of a few body-lengths.
Reaching the pod, the rogue flattened out impossibly like a cartoon animal hitting an invisible wall. Bugs’ bodies were flexible, but there were limits. I imagined the rogue’s delicate internal structures tearing, severing nutrient pathways, shearing sound channels.
The pseudopod holding the pulser chain retracted, dragging them over the flattened face which erupted with smaller pseudopodia to greedily grasp the pulsers. Immediately the nearest section of the industrial pod began to flake under the concentrated sound waves.
Other Bugs arrived with their own pulsers. They blasted away at the rogue, causing gouts of intracellular jelly to erupt from its body. They’d almost disintegrated it when the pod burst.
There were a few seconds of silence before I looked at Mikey. “No accident.”
He grinned and beat his fists against the air. “They found the Glyphics!”
“Time to send back a capsule,” I said heavily.
After nearly a year and a half the compressed accommodation of the Lander was getting t severely on my nerves. And so were Mikey and his bizarre enthusiasms. Stims and a mountain of work kept us from tearing each other’s heads off, as did the desperation which was always lurking below the surface. We were a long way from home. We were all we had.