by Al Robertson
‘Fully charged, serviced as best we could. There for you if you want it,’ the Caretaker told her.
‘Safer if you can move independently,’ commented Cassiel.
‘And it’s just the suit?’ asked Leila.
‘What else would it be?’ replied the Caretaker, and then he understood. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. We couldn’t get your passenger out. The suit’s seals are all jammed shut. And the whole thing’s pretty fragile. If we’d tried to force our way in, we might have borked it. So the dead dude’s still in there.’
Leila looked at the suit’s blank face and imagined the blanker one behind it. She remembered the skeleton’s presence, the shock of discovering it – and then the quiet companionship it had gifted her. She felt a sudden kinship with it. Like her, it was a relic of a completed life, cast forward into an uncertain future.
‘No need to be sorry,’ she said. ‘I got quite used to it. We’ve got a lot in common.’
Cassiel strapped Leila’s disc on to the suit. Then the three of them strode out into the valley. ‘Our ride request is good to go,’ the Caretaker told them. ‘We’ll thank the guys who put it together – then, it’s show time!’
The wind sent dust dancing across boulders and depressions. Leila remembered being alive. She imagined the dust catching in her throat, making her cough and wheeze. But now it couldn’t reach her. It pattered against the hard skin of the pressure suit, the white noise of its impacts blurring the sharp, rhythmic groaning of the suit’s servo-motors.
The Caretaker and Cassiel were ahead of her. She queried the mind and felt her open up, their two consciousnesses touching. She was surprised to see that Cassiel was fascinated by Lei. [She’s you,] explained Cassiel. [Absolutely you. How could she be anything else? But she’s you bought up with only physical needs met. She doesn’t remember anyone ever showing her kindness. So she thinks that she doesn’t need to care about other people, because they’ve never cared about her. She can only see them as competition.]
The Caretaker was a little ahead of them. He reached the work party first. ‘This is so beautiful,’ he effused. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’ His bees weaved between the workers.
‘No problem, Mandala,’ one of the workers replied. Leila and Cassiel thanked them too. ‘Hey, really, we’re happy to help. Hope you guys get where you need to go.’
They followed the Caretaker further out into the valley. His stride lengthened as he pushed into the gathering gloom. Cassiel moved easily with him. Leila had to go quickly to keep up, stumbling and tripping across the uncertain ground. At last he stopped, turned, held his arms out and called out, ‘Here we are!’ Two thin white lines leapt away from his feet, spearing off into darkness. ‘Tip of the hummingbird’s beak. Watch!’ He pulled a lighter out of his pocket. A pinch of fire flared up between his fingers. He knelt down and touched the flame to one of the white lines. There was a whoosh and the line became a sheet of glowing flame. Leila and Cassiel jumped back. The Caretaker cackled wildly. Fire danced out across the valley floor, running along the glyphs that the work party had mapped out, writing a query to the sky in hot light.
‘What now?’ asked Leila.
‘We wait for someone up there to get our message.’
Above them, the clouds shimmered, the lightning within them snapping sudden blankets of brightness across the valley. Detail leapt into being, then vanished. Thunder rumbled in the distance. The fire threw a fury of light and heat up at it all. Leila moved a little closer to it, enjoying how her sensors registered its warmth, how the suit felt ever so slightly less rigid as it warmed. Bones shifted, peacefully clicking against each other. Cassiel glowed soft purple beside her, a different and far more enduring kind of beacon.
‘How long will the fire last?’ asked Leila.
‘Long enough,’ said the Caretaker.
A little later, she said: ‘Mightn’t it rain?’
‘It doesn’t rain.’
As it turned out, time killed the fire. Leila’s counter fell to sixty-two hours. She tried to pretend that the flames weren’t sinking down, but they were; tried to ignore her suit’s sensors as they slid back into cold, but soon the change had to be acknowledged. The Caretaker stared up at the sky, face taut with hope. His bees slept within his shirt. Cassiel said nothing. The flames died down entirely. The lightning showed ashes, releasing the last of their heat back into the night. A pale absence of darkness in the east hinted at dawn.
‘So what next?’ asked Leila.
‘Well, it looks like they didn’t see us.’ The Caretaker scratched the back of his head, an apologetic look wrinkling his face. ‘More fuel back at the ranch. We’ll try again tomorrow.’
‘We don’t have time. We have to get over there now. If we can’t get to Deodatus before the rock falls – we’ll lose so much…’
Cassiel stepped between them. ‘Mandala,’ she said, ‘assure me of this – all that’s needed are these symbols, shining brightly?’
‘That’s right.’ He sounded deflated. ‘They’re pieces of brand iconography. Resonate with the minor air powers. The messengers.’ He looked up at the clouds, running his hand through his air. ‘I don’t know where they’ve gone,’ he said. ‘Usually one of them running around up there.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t bright enough?’
‘Could be. It’s a stormy night, would have sent them high up above the cloud cover. Harder for them to spot it.’ He turned back towards the city. ‘Maybe I can get a quick refill before the sun comes up. Try again.’
‘No.’ Cassiel stepped towards the nearest line. The smoke had died down, the fuel all burned away. ‘No time for that.’ She knelt down and reached out to touch both hands to the channel. ‘I’ll take care of it,’ she told them. Then she started to melt.
Her head was the first part of her to go. It fell in on itself, becoming liquid and running down her arms and into the channel. As her neck and then her shoulders went, her arms merged then collapsed. An instant, and all that remained of her was a pair of legs, kneeling in the dust. Then they went too. It was like watching speeded-up film of a candle burning itself down. The last of her poured itself into the groove. Leila looked out over the plain. It took a minute or two for the nanogel to roll out across the whole design, slowly filling it with a soft, barely visible purple light. Leila imagined an invisible giant sketching out patterns with luminous ink.
‘Fuck,’ whispered the Caretaker.
Leila sent out a query to Cassiel, assuming that, even though her body had dissolved, her mind would still be present. But there was only incoherence. Cassiel’s deep self was gone. Shoals of memories swam together, connected in the loosest, most basic ways. Leila pushed beyond them, searching for personality traces, and found nothing more sophisticated than a very basic, endlessly repeated code block. It instructed units of nanogel to spill out in their most liquid form, occupy the channel and, once they’d filled as much of it as possible, pulse out a series of brilliant flashes. Then they were to reunite with each other. Each unit held a tiny fraction of memory and each memory contained within itself implied connections to other memories, other moments. Those connections would guide each component of the mind, showing it its place within the whole. And so Cassiel would reform herself.
Leila pulled herself back out into the world. All that remained of Cassiel was a liquid thread of nanogel. After a few moments, it started to pulse with bursts of brilliant light.
‘FUCK!’ yelled the Caretaker.
Leila imagined him stumbling away, bees waking to veer crazily in the shining air. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t see anything but the purple-white aftermath of the nanogel’s brilliance. She shut her cameras down and turned away herself. Instinct made her cover the space where her face would have been. Bones creaked within her. The light flashed out again. The suit’s sensors registered its power. Mandala swore. She wondered how the blaze looked from his city.
She imagined his people telling stories about a mind who fell down from the sky, then shouted right back up at it. She heard a panicked buzzing. It occurred to her that she should protect him. ‘Are you there?’ she yelled, then followed his agonised voice to find him. He lay in the dirt. She sunk to her knees and wrapped her arms round his head. That was how they rode out the remainder of the pulses.
After a while, her suit stopped registering new flashes. ‘Caretaker?’ she asked. ‘Mandala?’
‘Has it really stopped?’ he asked, his voice riven with shock.
‘I think so. You’re all right?’
‘Me and the bees are a little shaken up,’ he replied. ‘But we’re OK.’ He sighed. ‘I wish she’d warned us.’
Leila cautiously let one of her cameras open up. The night came back into being, its darkness broken only by the gentle flicker of lightning. She turned it to inspect the geoglyph. It was dark. Cassiel was a part-formed silhouette. Her hips completed themselves and her torso started to grow.
‘She’s coming back.’
‘Good!’ sighed the Caretaker, struggling to his feet. ‘I should have warned the city at least. Hope nobody was blinded. Glad I wasn’t, I’ve only just got these eyes.’
Leila queried Cassiel again, but there was no reply from her deep self – only chirps from tiny, scurrying units of nanogel as they raced round, trying to relocate the order that defined the mind. Leila stood up and inspected her. Her body was nearly complete, but her skin was a turmoil of tiny whirlpools. She stood as rigid as a dead thing, swaying gently in the breeze. Leila reached out to steady her.
‘Is she all right?’ asked the Caretaker, concern replacing anger in his voice.
‘I hope so.’
Leila queried her again. There was no response. A pause, then another failure. Cassiel’s absence was dizzying.
Then, there was a small voice in her mind. ‘Leila?’
‘Cassiel!’
‘Leila?’ A long pause. ‘Yes. I remember you.’
The mind slumped forwards into Leila’s arms, sending her staggering back. Their minds touched. Interfaces reformed. Leila recovered herself and supported Cassiel. ‘Thank the gods you’re OK,’ she whispered, the tiny loudspeakers making her quiet voice crackle. Then she pulled back, relief blending with frustration. ‘But why didn’t you warn us? It was so bright. And such a big risk. What if you couldn’t reform?’
‘The fire didn’t work. We needed something better as quickly as possible. And the risk was minimal.’
‘Let’s hope it worked,’ said the Caretaker, gazing up at the empty skies.
‘It did,’ replied Cassiel. She pointed. A section of cloud had a perfect circle carved into it. Beyond it, a higher layer of cloud flickered with indescribable colours. It took Leila a moment to realise that the low rumble she could hear wasn’t just more thunder.
‘Cool,’ said the Caretaker.
‘What is that?’ asked Leila.
‘As flies are to Deodatus and bees are to me, so that little beauty is to the powers of the air,’ the Caretaker told her.
A dark silhouette appeared in the circle. The flyer dropped towards them, its wings folding back into itself and its engines roaring as it slowed itself to land.
Chapter 38
The craft landed like an insect, coiling long wings into itself and burdening fragile legs with weight. There was a long, low descending whine as its turbo fans span down. Then the pilot was out and lumbering towards them, dressed in black and wearing a dark helmet that reached down to clasp the top of his mouth. He haggled with the Caretaker in a language that neither Leila nor Cassiel recognised. The skin around his jaw was pale. It looked parchment dry. Between its ragged edge and the helmet there was a white strip, a few millimetres wide, that after a few moments Leila realised was bone. Connector cables dangled from his head and forearms. It looked as if he’d been sealed into his flight suit. She wondered how old he was.
At first she pitied him, but when she saw the other, far less autonomous crew members she realised that he was very fortunate. Two of them were installed in the craft’s front fascia, embedded between twin forward-facing windows. One was only a head. A plastic strip protected its eyes and part of its nose. The rest of its flesh had been stripped away. Wires and circuit boards covered some of the bone. As she and Cassiel moved past the bulbous pilot’s pod towards the passenger area, she noticed its eyes following her. Teeth clacked together. The one beneath it was a head and a torso. Arm stumps reached up, disappearing into the craft’s fuselage. Several antennae were mounted on its ribs, wires reaching up from them into its eye sockets. The torso twitched a little, in time with the clacking teeth.
There were human components wired into the interior, too. The navigation computer was perhaps the most shocking. It was a head sitting by the pilot’s seat, chanting what Leila assumed were instructions and co-ordinates. Leila looked back when the flyer’s door closed and saw that the arms that pulled it shut were muscle woven round a metal strut. A few seconds and the flyer lifted off. There was minimal weave overlay within it. What there was was entirely practical, supporting a few navigation and control panels. There was no pretence that the craft was anything other than its piecemeal self. She let her cameras find a window and did her best to lose herself in the passing world. Her counter read fifty-eight hours. She held her pendant and let its weight comfort her.
Dawn came to the desert. The western sky was rich with colour, the low clouds shining orange, red and purple.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ said Cassiel. There was a pause. Desert flew by, softened by the brilliant dawn. Dunes were frozen waves. ‘The virus. You regret deleting it, don’t you?’
Memories of the attack rose up in Leila. ‘It’s a terrible weapon,’ she said. ‘But what if the skull face doesn’t work? What if Dieter won’t help me?’
‘Memory weapons are an obscenity, Leila. We’ve both been wiped. We both know it. From our own experience.’
Leila remembered Totality search teams combing Station for fragments of nanogel, just after the end of the Soft War. They’d been recovering memories. They’d bought nearly all of them back. She remembered putting herself back together after the Blood and Flesh virus hit her.
‘Oh, you’re right. But if Deodatus survives all this – if he finds a way of coming back – well, who knows how it could start to spread again. Where it could end.’ She sighed. ‘Maybe Lei was right. Maybe she does see more clearly than either of us.’
‘No.’ Cassiel’s voice was firm. ‘If we rewrite our shared past to stop Deodatus from rewriting our shared past, then there is no real difference between us.’ Her voice lightened. ‘It’s hard, but the easiest path and the right path are often two different things. Think about it, Leila. You’ll see we’re right.’
Leila turned back to her own window, and once again sat and watched the landscape roll by. She still hadn’t quite come to terms with the flatness of the horizon and the grey open sky. They crossed a sea, slow waves turbid with pollution. Then there was land again. Every so often there were scoured traces of towns and cities. All was sketched out in exhausted shades of brown and grey, like images half-dashed down on aging paper, then forgotten. Leila imagined weaponised weather systems ripping away at the landscape, mobile buildings skittering to avoid them.
Time passed in silence. Cassiel didn’t want to talk. Leila assumed that the mind was conserving her strength. ‘How much longer?’ she shouted forwards.
‘Two point seven hours to our recon point. Then we land, wait for darkness. That’ll be four or five hours. Then, insertion.’
She assumed it was the pilot speaking. Its voice was strained. Leila remembered how it had plugged itself into the control panel, the intimacy with which wires had groped their way into the holes drilled into its helmet. She let time judder forward again.
The landscape flickered. Daylight burned stro
nger.
The plain outside was full of buildings.
Leila leapt back into normal time. ‘Wow!’ There was a central cluster of twenty or thirty skyscrapers, with suburbs of smaller buildings extending out beyond them for a few kilometres. ‘A whole city. At last.’
‘I asked the flyer to circle it,’ Cassiel told her. ‘It’s fascinating.’
‘Are any of the buildings arranged in rings? Like in Deodatus’ city?’
‘Nothing like that. We’re looking at something very different here. It’s a living city.’
The flyer banked, turning across the suburbs. Leila gazed down, watching mobile buildings run free in the wild. The city’s geography was constantly changing. Small industrial blocks, housing units and recreational facilities skittered around each other on jerky metal legs. They moved with a light swaying motion.
Leila thought back to all the inert structures she’d seen on Earth. ‘It’s amazing seeing them actually moving.’
‘A very imaginative use of anti-gravity technology,’ agreed Cassiel.
Features that in any static city would be permanent were constantly changing and shifting. The buildings would settle into a particular formation, rest within it for a moment, then suddenly leap up and seek out a new shape for themselves. It was as if the whole city was in permanent dialogue with itself, constantly trying to find the best way of being. It had clearly forgotten that its fundamental property should be the kind of stasis that helped its inhabitants feel secure. But perhaps that wasn’t a problem.
‘I’ve run multiple scans,’ said Cassiel. ‘All organic material is post-mortal. Human bodies disassembled, repurposed as components.’ She nodded towards the front of the flyer. ‘Like our crew.’
‘Gods.’
‘It’s a lot like the Totality’s relationship with the machines we operate. You’ve seen how flexible nanogel is. Sometimes we flow into machines and become their nervous systems. I think the post-mortal humans down there have the same sort of relationship with the buildings that support them.’ She looked out across the planet. ‘Earth’s environment is very hostile. It’s a sensible choice.’