Maya continued her squeal, "Shoot, shoot, shoot!"… as if the word had stuck in her brain and wouldn’t let anything else out. The robot kept aiming dead zero on my face but didn’t have the smarts to do more than that; didn’t switch the gun to its good hand, or even use its free hand to pull the trigger.
All of which gave time for Festina’s pistol to pressurize. Bracing herself, firing with a two-hand grip, she landed a wad smack on the android’s sternum — making a beautiful splash pattern that scattered droplets as high as the robot’s throat, as low as its groin. Those pretty white mourning clothes boiled away in instants; then the acid began to eat through artificial skin into the circuits below.
The gooey thwock of impact snapped Maya out of her, "Shoot, shoot, shoot!" fit. She slapped the android on its shoulder and yelled, "Go after them! Throw them off the bridge! Now!"
For a split second, I let myself hope the robot was too damaged to obey. But no such luck. With a sudden lurch it broke into that full-out sprint I’d seen from the other androids, a thunder-footed run across the bridge toward us. I was on the ground; I only had time to scuttle backward, hoping that maybe when the robot came for me, I could knock it off-balance with a kick in the shins.
Only one problem — the robot wasn’t coming for me. When I’d ducked the robot’s first shot, Muscle and I had dropped down together. Now that I’d retreated a pace, the Muscle was closest to the android. Apparently that’s all Machine-Man cared about: never mind that Muscle was unconscious, while Festina and I were still threats. Simple-minded robot algorithms said if Muscle was closest, Muscle would take the high dive first.
Which I didn’t realize till the android reached down and grabbed Muscle by the leg. "Hey!" I shouted. "Leave him alone. I’m the one your boss wants dead. I’m the blessed Antichrist, aren’t I?"
Robots don’t know from Antichrists. Lifting Muscle by the ankle, the android jerked him up and over the abyss.
Festina fired — a close-range shot straight into the robot’s ear. The same second I dived forward; the android was holding Muscle head down in front of me, leaving Muscle’s arm dangling limp within my reach. I snagged Muscle’s wrist just as the robot toppled: Festina’s last shot had fried one too many circuits for the machine to keep its balance.
Clunk, the android hit the bridge… and now it was twitching with mechanical death spasms, half its servos cycling at random while others squeezed tight or snapped wide-open, clanky jerks shuddering through the robot’s body. Then like a fish flopping in the bottom of a rowboat, the android bounced clear up off the bridge, landed with a crunch, bounced again… and flipped over the side, smoke streaming off its body.
It kept its grip on Muscle’s leg. The robot’s hand was locked in place, clutched frozen on the dipshit’s ankle.
For one screaming instant, I held the full weight of Muscle plus the android by my one-handed grip on Muscle’s wrist… just long enough to dislocate my shoulder, a cracking pop, loud as thunder. I was lucky my arm wasn’t ripped clean off; but my fingers gave first, and I was holding nothing. Grasping at air as robot and dipshit plunged out of sight.
I might have fallen myself, pulled over the edge by the jerk of their weight… and dizzy-sick-nauseous from the wrenching agony of my shoulder. Teetering, teetering, wobbly on the brink; but Festina stopped me: grabbed my legs and pulled me back from the edge, till I was lying sweet-solid on the bridge.
"Bitch!" Maya shrieked. "The devil’s always on your side."
I couldn’t answer. The pain from my shoulder was driving me fast toward blackout. Festina called, "Let it go, Dr. Cuttack. There’s no reason to keep fighting. What do you want? To tell the world how wicked Faye is? I can arrange that; I’m an admiral."
Thanks a bunch, I thought.
"Just open the door so we can go back," Festina told Maya. "You’re obviously a gifted archaeologist; you’ve got full control over the nanites in this bunker. Just tell the nanites to open the door."
"Yes," Maya said softly. "I could speak to the nanites…"
I didn’t like the tone of her voice.
Next moment, she shouted something in a language I didn’t recognize — the ancient Greenstrider tongue, I guess, calling a command to the control center.
Under my body, the solid granite bridge began to turn gooey.
"Oh shit," Festina said. "Oh shit."
The bridge was made of nanites too. Of course: the bunker’s last line of defense. If the place was under all-out attack, with enemy troops crossing the bridge in such numbers you couldn’t shoot everyone… then you just told the bridge to dissolve itself. Send everyone plummeting to hell.
The bridge surface had turned as soft as mud. The edges were beginning to drip into the chasm. Far to the opposite end, Maya laughed; the stone was melting under her feet too, but she didn’t care. "Got you!" she crowed. "This time I got you, bitch."
Festina grabbed my arm and pointed behind us. "Look!" The door sealing off the end of the bridge was starting to liquefy too. Crazy witless Maya must have ordered all nanites in the area to dissolve… including the ones blocking our retreat. Festina scrambled to her feet, dragging me up with her. "Let’s go, Faye! Come on, come on, come on."
My head was reeling, my shoulder throbbing, but I stumbled as best I could toward the exit. The bridge was as soft as mud in a rainshower. Each footstep sank a bit deeper. "You’ll never make it!" Maya screamed, nearly choking with laughter.
"Come on," Festina kept saying, "come on." Pulling me hard. I forced myself to keep moving, knowing I was slowing her down. If she just left me and ran, she’d get away clean — but I knew she’d never do it. Festina would rather die than abandon me… which meant I had to keep plodding ahead.
My foot suddenly splashed down, straight through the bridge. Like stepping into quicksand — another second and I’d sink clean out the other side. With the full force of my strength, I wrenched my arm from Festina’s grip and shoved her toward the open corridor. It might be the extra push she needed to get to safety… but no, she was sinking too, sinking through the bridge, liquid nano sludge, and we were both going down.
Something shot out of the corridor in front of us, something shouting in Oolom. Tic. He swooped over our heads… and I yelled at Festina, "Grab him!"
"You too!"
I’d never hold on to him with my shoulder out of commission. And Tic couldn’t support both our weights. With a sweep of my good arm, I pushed myself down faster through the goo of the bridge: out the bottom, falling free.
Looking up, I saw Festina falling too… but she’d caught Tic at the waist and he was slowing her descent like a hang glider.
"Faye!" she shouted. Angry to tears.
Survivor guilt, I thought. Welcome to Demoth, sister.
Then the world exploded into colors. Green and gold and purple and blue.
PROPOSALS
The shore of Lake Vascho.
I lay on the beach under the quiet blackness of a northern night — clouds still riding fast on the warm spring wind, but not so thick as in Sallysweet River. Stars shone through the cloud gaps, thousands of stars… and I thought of nights once upon a time, sleeping clear and girlish with the whole universe open above me.
The Peacock hovered gently over the water. He’d brought me here. Of course my father wouldn’t let me fall into a bottomless pit.
"Jai," I said. Thank you. Achy and woozy, I stayed flopped out on the sand. Nothing but stars overhead… till the Peacock fluttered up Dads-anxious, only a hand-breadth from my nose.
"I’m all right," I told him. "Well… if you can read my mind, you know I hurt like blazes. 8.5 on the getting-your-arm-torn-off scale. But it’s still minor. I think. How are you?"
Do no. Good.
"Where’s Xe?"
Tic.
"Did you say tico?" I asked.
Tic. Oov Tic.
With Tic.
"Short honeymoon," I said. "First time you two get together in three thousand years, and a day later,
she’s off Riding mortals again."
Ve hadadda shunt. It’s what we do.
"You Rode my father, didn’t you?"
Gaha efliredd po. Copodd.
I didn’t Ride your father. I fused.
"Tell me about it."
Bit by bit, in his shy Oolom, the Peacock let his story trickle out.
It started long before the plague — the birth of a baby named Zillif. Or even before that: the very clock-tick of conception. The Peacock slipped into the zygote and Rode through embryo, foetus, infant, child, woman… till mushor changed the woman to a proctor.
The Ride was never fusion; but there was still a tiny mingling. A leakage of energies, Peacock to baby girl… and maybe the other way too, for all I know. Zillif grew up in the Peacock’s glow — as if there were some special element in the air she breathed, giving the woman her own faint shine.
I’d felt it myself. I adored her for it.
To the Peacock, Zillif was just another Ride; when he hitchhiked on someone cradle-to-crypt, it was common for his hosts to rise above the crowd. He liked that specialness. Maybe he even encouraged it to make the Ride more interesting, found ways to spill teeny bits of his brightness into his host’s life. But it was a teasy game, far from full fusion. He’d sworn he would never fuse again… not after the things he’d done while bonded to a Greenstrider, spurred half-mad by his fusion-mate’s lust to kill enemies.
(Oh yes, I’d been right about that. When the Peacock fused with the Greenstrider, the two-in-one creature seethed with all the black murder from the original strider’s heart. Xe’s germ factory may have scored the higher body count, but Peacock/strider fought hard to keep up.)
So. The Peacock Rode passively through Zillif’s life. He took no action, not even when the Pteromic microbe began slacking out Ooloms all over the world. The Peacock held himself back, because the last time he’d got involved, it led to disaster.
Or that was his excuse. Even superintelligent pocket universes lie to themselves, when doing the right thing seems like too much work.
Zillif herself became infected eventually. The Peacock watched, and thought now and then maybe something ought to be done. But not by him; he was out of it. He’d lived through the deaths of lesser creatures many times before: not just his hosts but the people they loved. Griefs and pains and rage at the dying of the light.
So what? So what if the Ooloms died? It wasn’t as if they were an important species. And if they didn’t get killed by this disease, they’d drop from something else. As an immortal, the Peacock prided himself on his sense of perspective.
Zillif resisted the paralysis better than most — part of the Peacock’s reflected shine, that tiny boost from his energies. But in time she succumbed; in time she landed on my roof and got carried to the Circus, where she dazzled a lovestruck girl a few days, then slipped off speechless. "Aaaaah gaah gaaaaaaah hah kaaaaaaaa."
At which point, you’d think the story would end: Zillif left mute, barely alive, waiting for the slacks to fall. The Peacock would Ride her to the end, then pick a new host — human of course, since all the nearby Ooloms were in deplorable Riding condition — and nothing would change. For damned sure, the Peacock wouldn’t intervene.
Except that Zillif was an old old proctor. And in her last three days lying slack, unable to talk, collapsing in on herself… Zillif Zenned out.
Here’s the thing, the crucial thing: Zillif somehow realized the Peacock was there. Maybe she felt the tiny spill of energy from him, maybe there was some burst of mystic intuition, or maybe (anything’s possible) Xe found a way to sneak the truth into Zillif’s brain. For all I know, the old woman may just have gone tico: not cosmic Zen anything, but plain old pre-death delusion. However it happened, Zillif got the idea an advanced alien entity was lurking in the neighborhood; and she began to plead.
She thought she was addressing some emissary from the League of Peoples — some telepathic thing watching from the aether. So she talked to it; she begged; she ranted; asking for a cure, not for herself, but for her people.
The Peacock found himself answering… the same way he talked to me sometimes, mind to mind. And for three days Zillif wrestled with him, angel by the ladder, fighting to break the Peacock away from passive watching, so that he’d goddamned do something.
I can’t tell you what she said; but her whole life had been devoted to speaking with powerful people, putting together common sense and good argument to shift folks away from ill-advised plans. To the last, Zillif was a member of the Vigil… and her silent one-on-one with the Peacock was the most important battle of her life.
The queer thing is I was there through it all, holding her hand, sponging her down, checking her IVs and catheters and monitor cords. I was there, I was with her, but I was pure bliss-ignorant that the war for the Oolom race was raging right in front of me. Zillif vs. the Peacock… doing something vs. staying aloof.
You already know who won.
When Zillif finally persuaded the Peacock to take action, he left her body — snipping off that tiny thread of spilled energy. Zillif died like a light clicking out, blink, like that. In the outside world, young Faye began to cry as her heart withered… not realizing that what looked like pointless defeat was actually the old woman’s greatest triumph.
Because now, the Peacock was flying.
Out of Zillif, into the closest available healer — bonding, fusing with Dr. Henry Smallwood, because the Peacock needed to work through a pair of physical hands. In a way, my father died scant seconds after Zillif herself: he became a two-in-one creature, half man, half Peacock, the old submerged in the new. Not that Dads would consider it a bad deal; I imagine he’d leap at any chance to stomp the Pteromic microbe’s vicious little butt.
It needed a joint effort to construct the cure — not just Dads and the Peacock, but Xe too. Xe knew how the germ factory worked, and she was hooked into all the digital intelligence in the world. It only took a few hours for so much processing power to come up with a medicine… after which, Dads/Peacock/Xe hacked into the recipe database and made the change in olive oil. Epidemic closed.
All that time, the Peacock still believed Xe was tico, nago, wuta; he thought he was just using her, exploiting the way she was bound to the obelisk computer. Poor Peacock never realized Xe was eager to help: that she’d gone sane-sorry-sentient over the years, and was heartsick dismayed how her germ factory was near to pulling off another genocide. If their places had been switched, the Peacock imprisoned, Xe loose, she wouldn’t have needed a marathon debate with Zillif before she took action.
So I tell myself. Maybe Xe would have been just as don’t-get-involved as her mate. Both of them needed to damned well grow up… which they eventually did.
Seven months passed after the cure was tossed out to the world. Dads and the Peacock stayed fused all that time — fused for life. At unguarded moments, they glowed in the dark: my mother saw the flickery peacock colors shining just under my father’s skin.
Then the afternoon shift at Rustico Nickel set off a bomb on the outer defense perimeter of the Greenstrider bunker. Cave-in alarms started clanging, and Dads/Peacock faced a decision. The Peacock could rescue the trapped miners, but only by cutting the connection with my father. That would, of course, be fatal. To save the miners, Henry Smallwood had to die.
The Peacock told me Dads didn’t hesitate an instant.
So the Peacock separated itself, threaded its tube-body through the rockfall, and ferried the miners to safety. Yes, Dads died — energy ripped from his human body like a gusher of blood, leaving him cold, cold, cold. But… the Peacock still held on to a chunk of my father’s memories, motivations, sentiments. Such as a love for his daughter.
Guess who the Peacock caught a Ride with next — a quiet little nonfusion ever-watching Ride. And guess whom the Peacock protected off and on through the next twenty-seven years.
Now we’d come full circle: same crisis, same solution. Peacocks weren’t fitted for getting
things done in our human world; not when it meant working hands-on with computers, security interlocks, things like that. The simple ways they could communicate with us (telepathy, link-seed) were too slow-awkward-clumsy to whip up a cure for Pteromic B and C — like shouting instructions through a wall at a not-too-bright child.
That was the Peacock’s analogy, not mine. From my side, the communication seemed fair successful — yes, the Peacock spoke Oolom rather than English because he’d been immersed in the language for nine hundred years… but I’d been immersed in Oolom all my life too, and I understood it just fine. Apparently that wasn’t good enough: mere words were too limiting for a superintelligent pocket universe trying to get life-and-death information across to a half-wit meat-woman.
All right. If the Peacock believed the only way to produce a cure was fusing with someone, how could a meat-woman argue?
"Fusing," I said. "You or Xe — you have to fuse with someone to make the medicine."
Dooloo. Yes.
"No other way."
Po. No.
The Peacock waited, lights dappling the ice and water.
Giving me the choice. You can have this, daughter, if it’s what you want.
God knows, there’d be any number of volunteers if I nellied out. Who wouldn’t want to hook up with something so far beyond yourself? Suddenly being able to hear the thoughts of everybody around you… understanding so much more about the universe… escaping the mumbly, sweaty, witless, gross, ungracious, unlovable, cowardly, lazy, parasitic, not-good-enough self that you hated so goddamned much…
Except at that moment, I didn’t want to lose me. Me. Our wayward Faye. Here I had the chance to become a fused creature, wise, amazing, important… and all of a sudden, I found myself thinking it would be a sorrowful loss.
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