by Greg Bear
Yet—
“We are being sought,” the brood mind radiated. “Are the shapes ready?”
“Yes,” Aryz said. “The new teaching is firm. They believe they are fully human.” And, except for the new teaching, they were. “They defy sometimes.” He said nothing about the mutated shape. It would not be used. If they won this encounter, it would probably be placed with Aryz’s body in a fusion torch for complete purging.
“Then prepare them,” the brood mind said. “They will be delivered to the vector for positioning and transfer.”
Darkness and waiting. Prufrax nested in her delivery tube like a freshly chambered round. Through her gloves she caught distant communications murmurs that resembled voices down hollow pipes. The Mellangee was coming to full readiness.
Huge as her ship was, Prufrax knew that it would be dwarfed by the seedship. She could recall some hazy details about the seedship’s structure, but most of that information was stored securely away from interference by her conscious mind. She wasn’t even positive what the tactic would be. In the mocks, that at least had been clear. Now such information either had not been delivered or had waited in inaccessible memory, to be brought forward by the appropriate triggers.
More information would be fed to her just before the launch, but she knew the general procedure. The seedship was deep in a protostar, hiding behind the distortion of geometry and the complete hash of electromagnetic energy. The Mellangee would approach, collide if need be. Penetrate. Release. Find. Zap. Her fingers ached. Sometime before the launch she would also be fed her final moans—the tempers—and she would be primed to leave elfstate. She would be a mature glover. She would be a woman.
If she returned
will return
she could become part of the breed, her receptivity would end in ecstasy rather than mild warmth, she would contribute second state, naturally born glovers. For a moment she was content with the thought. That was a high honor.
Her fingers ached worse.
The tempers came, moans tiding in, then the battle data. As it passed into her subconscious, she caught a flash of
Rocks and ice, a thick cloud of dust and gas glowing red but seeming dark, no stars, no constellation guides this time. The beacon came on. That would be her only way to orient once the gloves stopped inertial and locked onto the target.
The seedship
was like
a shadow within a shadow twenty two kilometers across, yet carrying only six teams
LAUNCH She flies!
Data: the Mellangee has buried herself in the seedship, ploughed deep into the interior like a carnivore’s muzzle looking for vitals.
Instruction: a swarm of seeks is dashing through the seedship, looking for the brood minds, for the brood chambers, for branch inds. The glovers will follow.
Prufrax sees herself clearly now. She is the great avenging comet, bringer of omen and doom, like a knife moving through the glass and ice and thin, cold helium as if they weren’t there, the chambered round fired and tearing at hundreds of kilometers an hour through the Senexi vessel, following the seeks.
The seedship cannot withdraw into higher geometries now. It is pinned by the Mellangee. It is hers.
Information floods her, pleases her immensely. She swoops down orange and gray corridors, buffeting against the walls like a ricocheting bullet. Almost immediately she comes across a branch ind, sliding through the ammonia film against the outrushing wind, trying to reach an armored cubicle. Her first Zap is too easy, not satisfying, nothing like what she thought. In her wake the branch ind becomes scattered globules of plasma. She plunges deeper.
Aryz delivers his human charges to the vectors that will launch them. They are equipped with simulations of the human weapons, their hands encased in the hideous gray gloves.
The seedship is in deadly peril; the battle has almost been lost at one stroke. The seedship cannot remain whole. It must self destruct, taking the human ship with it, leaving only a fragment with as many teams as can escape.
The vectors launch the human shapes. Aryz tries to determine which part of the ship will be elected to survive; he must not be there. His job is over, and he must die.
The glovers fan out through the seedship’s central hollow, demolishing the great cold drive engines, bypassing the shielded fusion flare and the reprocessing plant, destroying machinery built before their Earth was formed.
The special projects sisters take the lead. Suddenly they are confused. They have found a brood mind, but it is not heavily protected. They surround it, prepare for the Zap
It is sacrificing itself, drawing them in to an easy kill and away from another portion of the seedship. Power is concentrating elsewhere. Sensing that, they kill quickly and move on.
Aryz’s brood mind prepares for escape. It begins to wrap itself in flux bind as it moves through the ship toward the frozen fragment. Already three of its five branch inds are dead; it can feel other brood minds dying. Aryz’s bud replacement has been killed as well.
Following Aryz’s training, the human shapes rush into corridors away from the main action. The special projects sisters encounter the decoy male, allow it to fly with them…until it aims its weapons. One Zap almost takes out Trice. The others fire on the shape immediately. He goes to his death weeping, confused from the very moment of his launch.
The fragment in which the brood mind will take refuge encompasses the chamber where the humans had been nurtured, where the mandate is still stored. All the other brood minds are dead, Aryz realizes; the humans have swept down on them so quickly. What shall he do?
Somewhere, far off, he feels the distressed pulse of another branch ind dying. He probes the remains of the seedship. He is the last. He cannot dissipate now; he must ensure the brood mind’s survival.
Prufrax, darting through the crumbling seedship, searching for more opportunities, comes across an injured glover. She calls for a mediseek and pushes on.
The brood mind settles into the fragment. Its support system is damaged; it is entering the time isolated state, the flux bind, more rapidly than it should. The seals of foamed electric ice cannot quite close off the fragment before Ya, Trice, and Damu slip in. They frantically call for bind cutters and preservers; they have instructions to capture the last brood mind, if possible.
But a trap falls upon Ya, and snarling fields tear her from her gloves. She is flung down a dark disintegrating shaft, red cracks opening all around as the seedship’s integrity fails. She trails silver dust and freezes, hits a barricade, shatters.
The ice seals continue to close. Trice is caught between them and pushes out frantically, blundering into the region of the intensifying flux bind. Her gloves break into hard bits, and she is melded into an ice wall like an insect trapped on the surface of a winter lake.
Damu sees that the brood mind is entering the final phase of flux bind. After that they will not be able to touch it. She begins a desperate Zap
and is too late.
Aryz directs the subsidiary energy of the flux against her. Her Zap deflects from the bind region, she is caught in an interference pattern and vibrates until her tiniest particles stop their knotted whirlpool spins and she simply becomes
space and searing light.
The brood mind, however, has been damaged. It is losing information from one portion of its anatomy. Desperate for storage, it looks for places to hold the information before the flux bind’s last wave.
Aryz directs an interface onto the brood mind’s surface. The silvery pools of time binding flicker around them both. The brood mind’s damaged sections transfer their data into the last available storage device—the human mandate.
Now it contains both human and Senexi information.
The silvery pools unite, and Aryz backs away. No longer can he sense the brood mind. It is out of reach but not yet safe. He must propel the fragment from the remains of the seedship. Then he must wrap the fragment in its own flux bind, cocoon it in physics to protect it
from the last ravages of the humans.
Aryz carefully navigates his way through the few remaining corridors. The helium atmosphere has almost completely dissipated, even there. He strains to remember all the procedures. Soon the seedship will explode, destroying the human ship. By then they must be gone.
Angry red, Prufrax follows his barely sensed form, watching him behind barricades of ice, approaching the moment of a most satisfying Zap. She gives her gloves their way
and finds a shape behind her, wearing gloves that are not gloves, not like her own, but capable of grasping her in tensed fields, blocking the Zap, dragging them together. The fragment separates, heat pours in from the protostar cloud. They are swirled in their vortex of power, twin locked comets—one red, one sullen gray.
“Who are you?” Prufrax screams as they close in on each other in the fields. Their environments meld. They grapple. In the confusion, the darkening, they are drawn out of the cloud with the fragment, and she sees the other’s face.
Her own.
The seedship self destructs. The fragment is propelled from the protostar, above the plane of what will become planets in their orbits, away from the crippled and dying Mellangee.
Desperate, Prufrax uses all her strength to drill into the fragment. Helium blows past them, and bits of dead branch inds.
Aryz catches the pair immediately in the shapes chamber, rearranging the fragment’s structure to enclose them with the mutant shape and mandate. For the moment he has time enough to concentrate on them. They are dangerous. They are almost equal to each other, but his shape is weakening faster than the true glover. They float, bouncing from wall to wall in the chamber, forcing the mutant to crawl into a corner and howl with fear.
There may be value in saving the one and capturing the other. Involved as they are, the two can be carefully dissected from their fields and induced into a crude kind of sleep before the glover has a chance to free her weapons. He can dispose of the gloves fake and real and hook them both to the Mam, reattach the mutant shape as well. Perhaps something can be learned from the failure of the experiment.
The dissection and capture occur faster than the planning. His movement slows under the spreading flux bind. His last action, after attaching the humans to the Mam, is to make sure the brood mind’s flux bind is properly nested within that of the ship.
The fragment drops into simpler geometries.
It is as if they never existed.
The battle was over. There were no victors. Aryz became aware of the passage of time, shook away the sluggishness, and crawled through painfully dry corridors to set the environmental equipment going again. Throughout the fragment, machines struggled back to activity.
How many generations? The constellations were unrecognizable. He made star traces and found familiar spectra and types, but advanced in age. There had been a malfunction in the overall flux bind. He couldn’t find the nebula where the battle had occurred. In its place were comfortably middle aged stars surrounded by young planets.
Aryz came down from the makeshift observatory. He slid through the fragment, established the limits of his new home, and found the solid mirror surface of the brood mind’s cocoon. It was still locked in flux bind, and he knew of no way to free it. In time the bind would probably wear off—but that might require life spans. The seedship was gone. They had lost the brood chamber, and with it the stock.
He was the last branch ind of his team. Not that it mattered now; there was nothing he could initiate without a brood mind. If the flux bind was permanent as sometimes happened during malfunction then he might as well be dead.
He closed his thoughts around him and was almost completely submerged when he sensed an alarm from the shapes chamber. The interface with the mandate had turned itself off; the new version of the Mam was malfunctioning. He tried to repair the equipment, but without the engineer’s wall he was almost helpless. The best he could do was rig a temporary nutrition supply through the old human form Mam. When he was done, he looked at the captive and the two shapes, then at the legless, armless Mam that served as their link to the interface and life itself.
She had spent her whole life in a room barely eight by ten meters, and not much taller than her own height. With her had been Grayd and the silent round creature whose name—if it had any—they had never learned. For a time there had been Mam, then another kind of Mam not nearly as satisfactory. She was hardly aware that her entire existence had been miserable, cramped, in one way or another incomplete.
Separated from them by a transparent partition, another round shape had periodically made itself known by voice or gesture.
Grayd had kept her sane. They had engaged in conspiracy. Removing themselves from the interface what she called “eyes shut”—they had held on to each other, tried to make sense out of what they knew instinctively, what was fed them through the interface, and what the being beyond the partition told them.
First they knew their names, and they knew that they were glovers. They knew that glovers were fighters. When Aryz passed instruction through the interface on how to fight, they had accepted it eagerly but uneasily. It didn’t seem to jibe with instructions locked deep within their instincts.
Five years under such conditions had made her introspective. She expected nothing, sought little beyond experience in the eyes shut. Eyes open with Grayd seemed scarcely more than a dream. They usually managed to ignore the peculiar round creature in the chamber with them; it spent nearly all its time hooked to the mandate and the Mam.
Of one thing only was she completely sure. Her name was Prufrax. She said it in eyes open and eyes shut, her only certainty.
Not long before the battle, she had been in a condition resembling dreamless sleep, like a robot being given instructions. The part of Prufrax that had taken on personality during eyes shut and eyes open for five years had been superseded by the fight instructions Aryz had programmed. She had flown as glovers must fly (though the gloves didn’t seem quite right). She had fought, grappling (she thought) with herself, but who could be certain of anything?
She had long since decided that reality was not to be sought too avidly. After the battle she fell back into the mandate into eyes shut—all too willingly.
And what matter? If eyes open was even less comprehensible than eyes shut, why did she have the nagging feeling eyes open was so compelling, so necessary? She tried to forget.
But a change had come to eyes shut, too. Before the battle, the information had been selected. Now she could wander through the mandate at will. She seemed to smell the new information, completely unfamiliar, like a whiff of ocean. She hardly knew where to begin. She stumbled across:
that all vessels will carry one, no matter what their size or class, just as every individual carries the map of a species. The mandate shall contain all the information of our kind, including accurate and uncensored history, for if we have learned anything, it is that censored and untrue accounts distort the eyes of the leaders. Leaders must have access to the truth. It is their responsibility. Whatever is told those who work under the leaders, for whatever reason, must not be believed by the leaders. Unders are told lies. Leaders must seek and be provided with accounts as accurate as possible, or we will be weakened and fall
What wonderful dreams the leaders must have had. And they possessed some intrinsic gift called truth, through the use of the man-date. Prufrax could hardly believe that. As she made her tentative explorations through the new fields of eyes shut, she began to link the word mandate with what she experienced. That was where she was.
And she alone. Once, she had explored with Grayd. Now there was no sign of Grayd.
She learned quickly. Soon she walked along a beach on Earth, then a beach on a world called Myriadne, and other beaches, fading in and out. By running through the entries rapidly, she came up with a blurred eidos and so learned what a beach was in the abstract. It was a boundary between one kind of eyes-shut and another, between water and land, neither of which had
any corollary in eyes-open.
Some beaches had sand. Some had clouds—the eidos of clouds was quite attractive. And one—
had herself running scared, screaming.
She called out, but the figure vanished. Prufrax stood on a beach under a greenish yellow star, on a world called Kyrene, feeling lonelier than ever.
She explored farther, hoping to find Grayd, if not the figure that looked like herself. Grayd wouldn’t flee from her. Grayd would. he round thing confronted her, its helpless limbs twitching. Now it was her turn to run, terrified. Never before had she met the round creature in eyes shut. It was mobile; it had a purpose. Over land, clouds, trees, rocks, wind, air, equations, and an edge of physics she fled. The farther she went, the more distant from the round one with hands and small head, the less afraid she was.
She never found Grayd.
The memory of the battle was fresh and painful. She remembered the ache of her hands, clumsily removed from the gloves. Her environment had collapsed and been replaced by something indistinct. Prufrax had fallen into a deep slumber and had dreamed.
The dreams were totally unfamiliar to her. If there was a left turning in her arc of sleep, she dreamed of philosophies and languages and other things she couldn’t relate to. A right turning led to histories and sciences so incomprehensible as to be nightmares.
It was a most unpleasant sleep, and she was not at all sorry to find she wasn’t really asleep.
The crucial moment came when she discovered how to slow her turnings and the changes of dream subject. She entered a pleasant place of which she had no knowledge but which did not seem threatening. There was a vast expanse of water, but it didn’t terrify her. She couldn’t even identify it as water until she scooped up a handful. Beyond the water was a floor of shifting particles. Above both was an open expanse, not black but obviously space, drawing her eyes into intense pale blue green. And there was that figure she had encountered in the seedship. Herself. The figure pursued. She fled.