Tides of Light

by Gregory Benford

  As Killeen left the tent he caught the sidelong glances of others and understood what a close call he had survived. His Supremacy brooked no competition.

  He had felt the urge to tell them of the odd perceptions that shot through him incessantly now. It was like being swallowed whole, gripped in a moist mucous cloud. In lacy filaments he saw shifting dun-colored terrain. Huge Cybers ran quickly through it, their shiny skins sprouting projections. Snatches of percussive talk came in a hollow, staccato language.

  Killeen knew the valley they would try to cross, knew it in a deep, skin-tingling sense. He could close his eyes even now and feel the taste of Cybers moving through it. But how?

  He thought he knew. What the answer implied, though, he could not guess.

  No doubt if he had spoken of this in the tent the proper interpretation would have been quite clear to His Supremacy. Divine revelation, yes. And by now Killeen would have been groaning out his last on a stake atop this barren mountain.

  TWELVE

  Quath knew she should remain fixed in the present, moored in the reality of craggy reaches and massive buttresses. She had to keep watch on the podia Beq’qdahl led in the plains below. They kept slipping nearer. Only Quath’s ranging shots kept them at bay.

  But the tangled world within beckoned….

  She had found the one Nought, she was sure of that now. Edging closer, lightly touching the tiny pale spheres of their separate selfhoods, Quath had finally pressed against one who had the tang and bite she recognized. The earlier Nought that she had invaded, yes, she saw the resemblance—but not the same. This property in itself was intriguing, but she had no time to inspect the myriad rivulets of meaning in these sublattices.

  Quath now saw that with each close encounter she was learning a different pathway into Noughts. Each entrance brought fresh perspectives. And pitfalls. The portals of her own Nought had ushered Quath into a miasma.

  At first it had been like dusky radiance descending through murky memories, creaky with age. Yellowed filigrees rotted and fell away, lace parted, cobwebs lifted from glinting, brass-hard facts… which themselves dissolved like singing dust beneath the rub of remorseless time.

  Inside the Nought, yes… But where?

  Quath had felt herself walking through a broad courtyard like that which gave onto the Hive’s great hall of worship. The walls cast an embroidery of shadow on stones—only the floor was not rock at all, but bones, white skulls, worn red carapaces, skeletal cages of ribs and abdomens. They snapped as she clumped over them, making her way back into a wide, gloomy past. Empty eyesockets seemed to follow her wobbly progress. Whispers and words bubbled from the street of bones. Some were sharp and bitter, ripped from throats which still longed and yearned. She could not understand these twisted, clangorous sounds. Abruptly she saw that they came from the podia past, stitching blood and marrow and desire and history into a tight sound-knot.

  Her solid footing grew flesh-soft. Quath plunged forward helplessly, each frightened step taking her up to the knee in the cloying, mossy past. Suddenly she was falling, falling—and petrifying fear shot through her like red pain.

  No! her subminds cried. She landed in soft feathers.

  Here beneath the street of the dead lay a labyrinth of sultry darks. Its angled corridors fanned like fingers into webbed designs. Quath tried to follow. She was running hard now.

  Though she knew that in some sense she was merely immersed in the falsity of another’s electro-aura, she could not extricate herself. It was like the time before, with the Nought who had held her, but far worse. She was not pinned to the sliding experiences of one Nought now, but caught in some swamp of deep desire, some collective mystery.

  The shambling things came to her, finally. She had heard their feet slapping on the worn, ebony floors, not pursuing but still coming. They loomed up in the dank darkness that seemed to come streaming out of the walls. Pervading and consuming shadows, exhaled by far antiquity.

  Quath lurched away from them. Whacked hard against a brittle corner. Stumbled on.

  Though they had only two legs these Noughts were quicker than she expected. They drew closer in the alloyed silence and then she saw their faces and knew it all.

  she called.

  The talus slope she slid down sent boulders crashing before her, like heralds announcing the coming of a queen.

  Her experience had jarred her deeply, but now the world was not muddled as it had been before. A hard-edged clarity pressed toward her out of the congealing, sharp air.

  *I feel you weakly.*

 

  *I tried to send reinforcements but they were blocked and ambushed. Beq’qdahl and others have isolated your area. They serve an unwise faction of the Illuminates. They seek—*

 

  *Do not dismiss their threat—*

 

  *What? How could—*

 

  *Impossible. Little Noughts could not have—*

 

  *You delved into them?*

 

  *I… I see. This is even stranger than I had imagined.*

 

  *From the beginning I sensed complex elements beneath the surface chatter of their minds. I was curious. That fact, and the arrival of more Noughts in a ship—it all aroused my slumbering suspicions.*

  Quath had thought that there could be no more surprises in this day, but a lancing thought came to her.

  *Yes. If there were any uncovered aspects of these supposed Noughts, I knew you were the best of the podia to seek it out.*

 

  *No. Your ability lies in the formulating of questions—and those cannot be assigned.*

 

  *Anxiety is your lot.*

 

  *This you must discover. The genes express themselves in many ways.*

  Quath felt empty, adrift.

  *Quath, I master great weighty arrays of information, and have a bounty of technical skills far transcending yours—but I do not and cannot have the queer talent you manifest.*

 

  *I can venture no answer.*

 

  *You.*

  Quath said with sudden conviction.

  THIRTEEN

  It was at this moment, Killeen thought, when he could see the fight but was not yet in the middle of it, that fear rushed up into his throat and clamped it shut.

  No matter that he had flung himself into a hundred conflicts before—all the old sensations returned. Fear of injury. Of death. Here, to be hurt badly was the same as dying, but slower—carried in the baggage train, suffering lurches and slow bleeds.

  More acutely, Killeen felt the piercing fear of failure. To falter now would render pointless everything they had attempted. If they lost, their long pursuit of a shelter for humanity, any shelter, was vanquished and would never return.

  He knew how to loosen the tight grip that choked his breathing. Once engaged, training and instinct would take over. But as his eyes searched the dry broken plain, flickering through the spectrum, there was still some trifling chance to back out. The rational side of him pleaded for a reason, any reason, to halt, to reconsider. After all, he had been left here by Cap’n Jocelyn, in
charge of the reserves. Yesterday she had rightly claimed the overlay chips which gave a Cap’n a complete view of all Family movements.

  And a few moments before she had taken the reserves under her own direct command. Cermo’s advance was stalled below. Jocelyn evidently wanted to break the impasse by quickly throwing more into the head of the attack. She had led them off to the right, down a narrow ravine which afforded good cover from the prickly, long-range shots of the Cybers.

  She had pointedly left Killeen nothing to do. Very well. He could join in the attack as the Family plunged down the long slopes of the mountain, into the confusing welter of foothills.

  Or he could simply stay here. So said the thin, hoarse cry of judgment. If he fell back he could provide cover for the Bishops in the Tribal baggage train. That, too, was a vital role….

  He had not felt this way in years. It was momentarily, darkly delicious to skirt responsibility, take the easy way. Safer, too.

  He sighed. He was a different man now. Not wiser, maybe, but aware of how he would feel if he carried out such a fantasy.

  Wistfully he aimed downslope. He could never hang back while those he loved fought.

  He found a fleeting Cyber target and fired. No sign of a hit, but that did not matter. His training carried him forward, running and dodging now, and he let it.

  Family Bishop was spread over the entire belly of the mountain. They moved down through the forests of spindly trees that thronged the slopes. Slanted afternoon sunlight cast confusing shadows. His Supremacy had insisted on launching the action even though not many daylight hours remained; his Divine judgment had, of course, prevailed over his officers’ advice.

  Killeen had watched the valley beyond from a group of fat boulders above the tree line. As he entered the woods he glanced up through the curious umbrellalike arches of the trees and searched the sky. No sign of any craft. That was a relief. Cybers seemed never to copy the mech advantage in the air.

  “Cermo! Bear left. You can bring enfilading fire down through that notch in the hill.”

  —Yeasay,—Cermo answered on comm.—Taking some IR bursts here. Nobody hurt.—

  “No point getting blinded. Damp down.”

  —Already have,—Cermo replied primly.

  Killeen reminded himself to let the officers have free rein. Jocelyn was Cap’n, even though Cermo and Shibo gave her only grudging acceptance. In the heat of the fight, the officers would probably still react to his suggestions as though they were commands.

  He ran through the thick forest with a long, loping stride. Rich loam absorbed his footfalls. The dense woods seemed to listen for the battle with a hushed expectancy. Fresh power reserves for his leggings gave him a buoyancy that carried him downslope quickly, not even bothering to seek cover. The only useful information they had learned from the previous, disastrous battle was that Cybers still devoted a lot of their energies to microwave pulses. Mechs saw the world principally in the microwave and perhaps the Cybers thought humans did, too. Or else, he reminded himself, they thought so little of their human opponents that they did not bother to refit their weaponry.

  He broke from cover above the foothills as hoarse calls resounded through the comm. Jocelyn cried,—Form the star!—to the main body. He saw her moving quickly across a barren scarp. The reserves were mere scampering dots at this range.

  Turning to his left, he watched Cermo’s party firing steadily through the notch in a steep hillside. Landslides had opened jagged opportunities in this terrain and Cermo was skilled at making use of them.

  But Cybers could do the same, he noted, as a distant figure crumpled. Killeen blinked three times and into his left eye jumped an electromag amplification. A crackling blue swarm was fading around the fallen Family member, signature of a microwave halo strike.

  —Dad!—

  The shrill quality in Toby’s voice forked sudden fear into Killeen. Could the fallen figure be—but no, Toby’s signifier flickered in an arroyo farther east. “Yeasay,” Killeen answered.

  —Shibo’s cut off downslope.—

  “Where?”

  —Can’t tell. Cybers’ve thrown up some static screen.—

  Killeen scanned for Shibo and found no answering color-coded trace. The center of his expanded sensorium was a gray sheet. “Hold still.”

  He set off at full tilt, damping his sensorium to the absolute minimum as he plunged downslope. Amid the brush and stubby trees insects sang merrily, oblivious to the stinging death that arced through the air.

  Toby was crouched at the rim of a narrow gully. As Killeen landed on loose gravel, a microwave burst reached down toward them, then dissipated into a hiss.

  “Down there.” Toby pointed. “See? Heat waves.”

  But the rippling images on the next hillside had a fuzzy quality unlike the effect of refracting air. “False image,” Killeen said.

  “Hard tellin’ where the Cyber is.”

  “Wish we knew more ’bout their tricks.” Killeen looked at Toby’s bandaged hand. Jocelyn had decided the boy could stay back from the skirmish line, carrying reserve ammunition in his pack. “How’s it feel?”

  “Not bad. Glad it wasn’t my right hand. Couldn’t shoot then.”

  “Keep back, you won’t need shoot today.”

  Toby bit his lip soberly. “You think so?”

  On Snowglade Killeen would have given his son an optimistic, offhand remark. Here… “We’re point party for the whole Tribe on this one. Be hard to pull back, once the Cybers are on us.”

  “I figured the same.”

  “One good thing ’bout not bein’ Cap’n, I can move around less.”

  Toby grinned. “Almost as good as a burn hand.”

  “Bum Cap’n, yeasay.” Killeen put his hand on Toby’s shoulder. “Look, stick close. We’ll cover for each other.”

  Toby nodded silently, his eyes always following the scanplane of his own sensorium. “Wish I knew where that Cyber is.”

  “Let’s circle ’round.”

  They used standard fire-and-maneuver. One loosed a quick, gaudy infrared pulse while the other sprinted in the cover provided by the afterimage effect. They covered ground rapidly this way, leaving the last stands of umbrella-topped trees. Tangled scrub in the foothills beyond offered a thousand pockets for human concealment, but few spots big enough to hide a Cyber. Toby went dashing freely from cranny to cranny, Killeen noted, far faster than his father could. There was also a certain unthinking bravado in his son’s manner, despite the Snowglade years Toby had spent on the run.

  “Getting somethin’ over left,” Toby called.

  Killeen cut through some brambles and reached his son, puffing hard. Through a swampy clearing he saw a large form moving in the trees beyond. “Don’t shoot yet.”

  “You figure one Cyber’s puttin’ out this whole screen?”

  “Could be.” But the creature seemed to be staying as well camouflaged as it could. It did not fire, even when a distant Bishop momentarily appeared in the open, charging downhill.

  “What’s it doin’? Listenin’?”

  Killeen whispered, “Or looking for somethin’.”

  “What?”

  “Maybe wants His Supremacy for supper.”

  Toby laughed. Killeen settled down and watched the Cyber clamber up a far rock shelf. The gray slice in Killeen’s sensorium narrowed and thinned.

  He watched telltale Bishop spikes work their way through the surrounding hills, headed for the valley. It was a plausible-looking excursion, designed to draw the Cybers in force. But how long could they go without being cut off and systematically hunted down? He handed Toby a sugar-rich lump saved from breakfast and got up. “Let’s go left from here. Keep low—no high jumps.”

  “Yeasay. Besen’s with Shibo, y’know.”

  A crisp buzz snapped by Killeen. Both of them dropped flat.

  “Damn!” Killeen spat out dirt. “Somethin’ close by.”

  Toby fired a burst toward the last place they had seen the Cyb
er. “Looks like we do it the hard way,” Toby said.

  They crawled away, banging into rocks with their heavy leggings and shank shields.

  Killeen stopped and examined his shoulder padding. With a small thrill he found a neat brown burn-hole through it. The laser pulse had not severed any important control systems. To his surprise he felt no fear, only exhilaration.

  “Squeeze down your sensorium,” Killeen said tightly.

  They cut through a draw half-filled with fresh slumped soil and pebbles, evidence of the latest quakes. The Cyber was on the far side. It was a tubular sheath of glistening, moist skin that seemed to be sweating. Insets of brushed metal and tan ceramic made a patchwork across the crusty brown hide.

  Toby shot it first, burning its hind antenna. Killeen knew they had only an instant before retaliation. Into his mind flashed a sudden understanding of the Cyber’s underlayers, a picture sharp and sure and unbidden. He snatched at a projectile from his precious hoard and clicked it into place on its stubby launch rod. He aimed at a middle bulge in the shiny carapace and snapped off the shot without thinking. The small, birdlike cylinder blew away a small hatch—seemingly insignificant, but Killeen knew the master controls for its transmitters ran close to the skin there. Abruptly the gray screen vanished from his sensorium.

  “Come on,” Killeen said, not waiting to see what the Cyber would do. As they slipped away it went into what looked like spasms, effervescing a yellow electrostain. Killeen sensed the thing was immobilized and did not question how he knew.

  Shibo’s telltale winked, not far away. They scrambled through two patches of scrub and rushed up a fractured face of dark strata. Besen was guarding her party’s flank and could have tripped Toby as he came charging forward. Shibo was approaching from the other direction, calling orders as she ran. Killeen found himself panting so hard he could not speak, and just gazed inquiringly at her.

  “Starting take hits,” she said calmly, but Killeen could see the small signs of worry in her thin, drawn lips.

  “We knocked out two already!” Besen said cheerily.