The Lion knew his reasoning was sound, but he also knew that such rationalizations burned from the hot fires of cowardice. I want to live.
"You are afraid. That is good. Your fear will help you to remember the importance of what I am about to show you."
The tway held up his left palm. Sharp green letters—some sort of holo display—clustered in the air above the creature's fingertips. “This is a message from Sappho."
Sixteen words. A simple transmittal. The Lion read it once, knew that it would remain engraved in his memory for the rest of his life.
Letters faded. Fingers retreated from the Lion's mouth. And then the tway was on its feet, racing toward the car.
"Have a nice day,” it offered, grinning as it hopped into the vehicle. The door closed. The car backed up, then accelerated southward, into another overgrown thicket. Branches quivered. The car disappeared.
For a long time, the Lion did not move. When he finally stood up, his heels sunk into a puddle of gooey mud.
What hope do we have? He recalled a conversation with Nick, weeks ago. They had talked about what they would do if the Paratwa conquered the Colonies. They had talked about never surrendering.
He wondered if Nick were still alive.
I am sixty-eight years old, and I want to live.
The thought shamed him.
O}o{O
Tumescent patches of gray and white whipped across the shuttle's window, obliterating the forward view. Not just clouds, thought Gillian, but radioactive, biologically poisoned smog as well. They blew together, the natural married to the unnatural in ceremonial rectitude, fathering this perversion of an atmosphere that had been Earth's legacy for over two and a half centuries. The residue of humanity's greatest accomplishments wedded to the very spirit of Gaia. An unholy alliance, scattering its tainted children to the winds, surrounding the globe, decimating all that had once thrived.
Gillian felt his palms tighten on the armrests of the acceleration couch. He sat in the pilot's seat, but he was not flying the shuttle. He had needed merely to insert Jalka's data brick into the craft's navcom and then sit back, relax, and enjoy the view while automatic sequences guided the vessel out of Sirak-Brath's orbital control.
The data brick had given Gillian access to an opulent bank account, supplying enough money not only for the shuttle rental but for the ridiculously huge deposit that the smuggler had insisted upon after Gillian had requested the vessel sans crew. Even then, the smuggler had remained uneasy about the deal, voicing his suspicions that Gillian might not return with his vessel: “This craft has great sentimental value to me,” the smuggler had said at last, his hushed voice curling into maudlin imagery, as if he were discussing a lost lover. “I simply could not bear the thought of losing it."
Gillian had asked the man whether he was also sentimental about insurance payouts.
The smuggler had liked that, and a wall had been breached. Chuckling, the man had shown Gillian the layout of the vessel, and after assuring himself that his new renter could indeed pilot such a craft, had departed, reasonably contented. Gillian had been tempted to urge the smuggler to get a head start on the lengthy insurance claim process. But there had been no sense in pressing his luck.
Besides, maybe I will be coming back.
He doubted it.
Outside, the gray and white continued to swirl.
Sit back and relax, Gillian urged himself. Enjoy the view. But such ancient codicils for pleasurable flight no longer carried any meaning for him. I no longer know how to relax. And there was no view.
Hours ago, there had at least been something to look at: the sun, the crisp beauty of the cylinders floating in the vacuum, cold and peaceful, like perfect glittering icicles snapped from their roots, motionless, as if they had been captured by some photographer in the instant of their fall. And as the early hours of the flight had passed, those mirrored icicles—the Colonies of Irrya—had compressed, shrinking into a compact mass, assuming inconsequential proportions within the vast blackness.
And then they were gone, and the shuttle was unfolding its earthly wings, plummeting into the density of atmosphere, on a spiraling descent toward the secret destination contained in Jalka's data brick. Perceptible references had vanished into the plodding smog/clouds, the cankerous gray and white of a polluted world.
Yet despite visual evidence to the contrary, the atmospheric poison levels were actually the lowest they had been in the past two hundred and fifty years. The present mixture of smog and cloud might appear just as vapid, but the relationship of natural atmospheric cover to human-created pollutants had changed drastically. Nick had pointed out the phenomenon to Gillian several weeks ago, and current data from the shuttle's external scanners augmented the midget's interpretation.
"The planet is finally healing itself,” Nick had announced one morning, not long after their latest stasis reawakening. “The pollution levels are diminishing; significant changes are occurring almost weekly. E-Tech claims credit, insisting that its long-range ecospheric turnaround projects are responsible. But E-Tech's role has not been consequential enough to create the kind of changes that are taking place. I believe we're witnessing a natural process. The Earth is coming back on its own."
If Gillian had faith in omens, he would have taken that as a good sign.
And he found himself wondering—yet again—if Nick were still alive.
The attack upon the Lion of Alexander's Irryan retreat had occurred only hours ago. Gillian had picked up the freelancer report on the shuttle's monitoring system.
"A brutal massacre of terrifying proportions,” the FL-Sixteen freelancer had growled. “A vicious attempt to rip into the very heart of the Costeaus! An act of cold-blooded villainy by storm troopers straight from the gates of hell!” Freelancer Karl Zork was a bear of a man with a zigzag red beard and a delivery styled to overwhelm.
Zork had raged on for several minutes, but he had offered little real news other than the fact that there had been a massacre and that the Lion of Alexander had been one of the few survivors. Names of the dead had not yet been released.
Nick could have been at the retreat. And Buff, delivering my message. And Adam Lu Sang. And Inez Hernandez. Maybe they're all dead. Maybe the Lion was the only one to escape.
Gillian did not want to know.
Following the initial report, he had turned off the monitor and disengaged the emergency call system. There would be no more reports from those distant icicles. Despite a continuing urge to learn about survivors—Nick and Buff especially—he had made the decision and would stand by it.
Only Jalka mattered now.
Since yesterday, since the run-in with the priest, Gillian had been consciously denigrating his time spent in the Colonies, trying to reduce the importance of all former liaisons. Someday, if he lived, he would likely pay the price for such self-repression; an eventual surrender, perhaps, to bitter nostalgia. Or worse.
But from the moment the priest had uttered the secret name of Gillian's former master, he had been struck by an overwhelming urge to stand again before a tway of Aristotle. Long suppressed desires had surfaced; Ash Ock memories had washed up on the shores of consciousness, depositing refuse from a past that could no longer be ignored.
Only Jalka mattered now. Even Empedocles seemed to recognize that truth.
Although Gillian's monarch continued to grow in strength, driving the two of them forward with relentless determination, driving them toward that ultimate fate, which Gillian could not bring himself to accept: the abomination of the permanent whelm—tway and monarch fused together in a complete surrender of personalities, consciousnesses grotesquely interlaced, like the clouds and smog, like the gray and white; even though that horizon drew closer, Empedocles had become less intrusive since their encounter with the priest. Gillian sensed that his monarch also believed that Jalka might know of a way to help.
Jalka had to have the answers.
That was truly what drove Gillian now, th
e desperate hope that Aristotle could suggest a way for himself and Empedocles to live in peace, to live distinctly; an end to monarchial lust for the synthesis of personalities.
If it can be done, Jalka will know how.
Outside, the sky abruptly wilted; relentless flows of gray and white dissolved into the deeper blue of calm ocean unfolding endlessly from horizon to horizon.
He checked the altimeter: three thousand feet and dropping fast. The acceleration couch's autostraps curled across his chest and thighs. A quick glance at the navcom indicated that the shuttle was about two hundred and twenty-five miles northeast of the Brazilian seaport city of Fortaleza, just south of the equator.
Eighteen hundred feet over the water now, and still descending fast. Gillian punched up a coordinate reference grid, wondering if there were some tiny island out here.
Nothing. No land masses. Only ocean, and fairly deep ocean at that—three thousand-plus feet throughout the entire grid.
A thousand feet above the water now, a wall of liquid rising to meet the shuttle. His thoughts churned: Am I going to be smashed against the sea? Was Jalka's message just an elaborate ruse?
Six hundred feet. Too close. Decision time.
He typed the disengage command into the navcom keyboard, tried to free the unit from its domination by Jalka's software.
No response. The navcom refused to disengage. Jalka's data brick must have launched its own override tracers into the system.
Navcoms possessed safeguards against such sophisticated software, ways for a vessel's pilot manually to override the entire system. But Gillian knew that it would take at least ten or fifteen seconds to accomplish such an override and regain control of the ship.
He did not have that much time. The ship was less than two hundred and fifty feet above the water. In about three seconds, he would plow into the ocean at a thirty-degree angle.
The acceleration couch's emergency system was triggered. Restraint clamps tightened across his arms. Hydropads bubbled up from the seat's interior, curling into his groin, his armpits, the back of his neck, providing extra cushioning against the immense G-forces sure to be generated by the impact. He forced himself to relax, knowing that he had a far greater chance of survival if the couch's smart sensors were allowed to regulate body motion.
Suddenly the engines cut off. Retros fired, braking the shuttle, quickly reducing his airspeed to less than one hundred and twenty miles per hour.
Seventy miles per hour. Thirty-five.
A quiver went through the ship as the vertical landing jets erupted, blasting the tranquil surface of the sea with full-powered streams of fiery exhaust. Wild ripples spread out from the vessel, disturbing the ocean's stillness, forming an ever-widening perimeter of resonance.
The forward acceleration indicator fell to zero. The shuttle settled effortlessly onto the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. Vertical landing jets shut down. Sensors freed his body from the couch and he stood up and leaned against the window frame and gazed out at the rippling sea.
What now?
The shuttle continued to rock gently for another few moments, then became perfectly still as internal gyros achieved stability, balancing the craft on the plane of liquid as easily as if it were resting on the solidity of shuttleport remac. Waves lost their momentum, dissipated. Slowly, the ocean returned to its calm state.
Gillian turned to the scanners, hoping that they would display a nearby microisland, something new perhaps, a volcanic upthrusting, something not listed within this vessel's navcom. But there were no signs of land. He set the scanner range to maximum, checked the surrounding airspace for another incoming craft. Nothing.
And suddenly, heavy mists poured over the vessel.
The fog seemed to lift itself out of the very water, as if the surface of the ocean had mutated into a sheet of dry ice, releasing great billowing clouds, murky specters, expanding and merging into one another until there was nothing left to see through the flight deck windows except an endless wall of gunmetal gray. Gillian was not overly familiar with the planet's current ecosystems, but he suspected that whatever was occurring was not a natural phenomenon.
The ship tilted slightly to starboard, then righted itself. On the control panel, a sensor blinked, calling his attention to the external audio scanners. He touched the stud.
The sounds were like nothing he had ever heard before.
A rhythmic dance of liquid in motion, pouring, dripping, as if the shuttle had become centered amid dozens of waterfalls. Scanners began outputting impossible data. If the equipment could be trusted, a solid mass was rising from the water on all sides of his ship. Something huge, with leading edges like serrated lances, as if the ocean were being pierced by a hundred irregular monoliths, each one already a hundred feet high and continuing to rise, monster harpoons, cascading torrents of salinated liquid down their sides. Spears from the depths, each creating its own seemingly endless waterfall, as if the sea were being pumped up from within each one, infinitely recycling, keeping the lances wetted, oiled by the ocean.
Like a ring of teeth. Like the gaping mouth of some nightmarish sea creature.
But the scanners gave no indication of organic presence. And Gillian suspected that the massive spears must represent the upper portion of a mechanical construct of incredible proportions.
The teeth were high over the shuttle now, hundreds of feet above the ocean surface. They began to bend toward the center, close in upon one another, preparing to swallow his shuttle as if it were an insignificant bit of the ocean's flotsam. Grinding and slithering sounds now filled the flight deck as the ring of teeth sawed into one another. Soft and hard noises seemed to be combined, as if this monstrous thing were somehow both organic and mechanical.
Abruptly, the sounds ended. Outside illumination disappeared entirely; viewports became darker than the blackness of deep space, where at least the pinpoint glitter of distant stars existed to temper the void, provide a relationship between what was inside and what was outside. But now there was no outside. Now the only light emanated from within.
Gillian found himself recalling a story told to him in childhood, perhaps by Aristotle, perhaps by one of the Ash Ock scientists who had created the Royal Caste. It had been the tale of an ancient mariner who had been swallowed whole. Swallowed by a whale.
This was no whale, he reasoned. This is...
Sensors erupted into a tantrum of throbbing cries, warning him that the shuttle was now being drawn beneath the surface of the Atlantic, trapped within the closed jaws of this monster, this whale, this thing that now sought to return to the depths from where it had come. And Gillian felt something strange at the edge of awareness—something new, something old—a kind of feeling that he had not experienced since the early years of childhood, a sensation of unbridled awe at the very strangeness of the world.
Empedocles felt it too. His monarch seemed to exhale a breath of wonder, a neural discharge that tickled Gillian's spine, a dragon of pure feeling cascading down their common backbone, like water rushing over an upthrust spear.
"What do you think it is?” Gillian asked, vaguely aware that he was speaking aloud.
Empedocles's reply came as another wave of tactile impressions, breaking across their shoulders, running down their arms; a torrential downpour, soaking skin, muscle, and bone, as invigorating as a spring rain.
We'll find out soon enough.
Gillian could not say whether that last thought came from himself or from his monarch.
O}o{O
—from The Rigors, by Meridian
Shortly before one of my tways was scheduled to depart, I was summoned to an inner chamber of the Biodyysey. Over the past few days, I had been attempting to prepare myself emotionally for the reality of my upcoming separation; internal tension levels were running high. Weird dreams plagued my rest periods, fantasies of what it would be like to exist as a solitary creation, a unit that could not be separated. I dreamed of humans. I dreamed of Gillian.
> I had never before been disassociated for more than a few days. But this time my tways would be forced to tolerate several months of physical solitude: one would remain aboard the Biodyysey, the other would make the advance journey to the Irryan Colonies. I did not know how I would endure the extended deprivation of body-to-body contact. In fact, I was a bit surprised—and relieved—that my turmoil manifested itself only through these odd dreams. One might have expected nightmares.
The place to which I was summoned had been designed as a standard interface chamber. My side of the wall consisted of a small darkened amphitheater. Beyond the translucent partition, which was constantly in motion as if swept by invisible breezes, lay the Os/Ka/Loq portion of the room. Although the wavering interface barrier permitted me to see only dark blurs on the other side, the partition freely allowed the passage of sound.
There were seven of them over there, all tways from different Paratwa, or so it seemed. They were braying and cackling and producing a rich cacophony of noise that I assumed to be conversation, though one could never be quite sure. The Os/Ka/Loq were capable of a nearly infinite variety of sounds, utilized for a nearly infinite variety of reasons, and I was certainly no expert in tonal translations. Nevertheless, I had acquired some proficiency over these many years, at least in terms of recognizing the repetitive signature patterns of particular individuals. The creature on the right was definitely Sappho's tway—Colette's other half. Two of the others I recognized as well, mainly via their distinct olfactory airs, which also permeated and penetrated the interface. Their Os/Ka/Loq names were unpronounceable, so I had assigned them my own derivative nomenclatures: Thyme and Rhubarb.
The com panel in front of my two seats ignited; the sparkling green letters of a holotronic interpreter took shape in the air as the Os/Ka/Loq brought me into their discussion. It turned out to be a forceful debate.
The topic was all too familiar. I repressed twin sighs, assumed poses suggesting keen interest, and watched as their braying and cackling was reformed into modest English sentences.
The Paratwa (#3 in the Parawta Saga) Page 11