Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  “Goodbye, Lady Keiko,” crooned the Kyber who held her, lifting her to the ladder and placing her on its penultimate rung. “I am very pleased to have met you.”

  She scrambled up the ladder in the stinging cold, her mind empty of either fear or wonder. Then she paused to look down briefly on Andrik. He was dead to her, frost-bitten, a tiny figure kneeling in prayer with a Kyber. Gutted now of his human personality, perhaps he was at one with a god that she could not believe in. Was there tragedy in that? Maybe the tragedy was ultimately her own, for not being able to believe. …

  “Climb!” shouted Captain Hsi. “Come on, climb!”

  Keiko obeyed—as did Sixkiller, who had apparently assumed that the captain’s command was meant for him.

  The floater rose into the night. Glancing down as it ascended, Keiko surveyed the upturned faces of the aliens: Alice A in eloquent catatonia, Andrik dwindling to a shadow beside the death-sleeping Alice B, and the spirals of the labyrinth opening ever outward like an immense stone rose. She closed her eyes.

  Virtually one-handed, she hastened up the silicon ladder. Only when Captain Hsi grasped the utility epaulets on her parka and dragged her into the floater did she open her eyes again.

  Then the ladder was reeled in, and the hatch slammed shut.

  Inside the floater, perched head over knees in her seat, Keiko found that beneath her heavy clothes she was running with sweat. Her teeth chattered, and her temples knocked with a noise like water sloshing against a pier.

  “Welcome back,” said Sixkiller laconically. “What happened?”

  “Andrik’s gone,” she responded, not wanting to talk. Still, she forced herself to ask, “What happened to you?”

  “I don’t know exactly. Our Kyber sentries abandoned their posts and went traipsing together back into their maze. So we got airborne lickety-split and came looking for you. We were afraid—” He stopped.

  Captain Hsi, after a moment, said, “I am holding you personally accountable for the loss of Dr Norn, Dr Takahashi. Had you performed your duties as duty itself dictated, he would never have succeeded in coming out here. Had you comported yourself in accordance with both regulations and common sense, it’s highly unlikely that—”

  “Sir,” put in Sixkiller abruptly.

  The captain blinked. “It’s highly unlikely,” he resumed, “that Dr Norn would have—”

  “Sir!”

  “What is it, Mr Sixkiller?” the captain snapped, irritated.

  “Shut up,” Sixkiller told him. “Let’s all just keep our mouths shut until we get back to the Platform.”

  Keiko did not look up. She rubbed her temples with her fingers and stared at the featureless white floorboarding.

  Meanwhile, their floater skimmed over the surface of the world that had inexplicably given rise to the Kybers. Laevo appeared in the heavens like a lighthouse beacon in a season of hurricane, deathly white in spite of its promise of deliverance.

  NINETEEN

  When they set down on the Platform, Craig Olivant and Betti Songa were waiting just beyond the landing area, anxious to learn how they had fared and to impart some startling news of their own.

  Keiko was the first to exit the floater. She embraced Betti on the wind-swept decking and extended a gloved hand to Craig. The captain and Sixkiller clambered out into the night more reservedly, like caged creatures sceptical of the advantages of release.

  “Dismantle the floater,” Captain Hsi commanded Sixkiller. “Get a Platform mech, take the floater apart, and pack it aboard the shuttle.”

  “All right,” the pilot said. He glanced at Keiko’s professional colleagues with undisguised curiosity, then headed for the observatory to find a mechanic to help disassemble the aircraft.

  They had been gone from the Platform not quite two hours. In three more, their entire expeditionary party was supposed to bid Onogoro farewell for ever.

  “Andrik?” Betti Songa asked.

  Keiko found that she was weeping openly, shaking her head and clutching Craig’s monstrous hand as if it were her lifeline to everything warm, familiar, human. She had never felt especially close to the astrophysicist before, however, and she was conscious of a tinge of bewilderment in his readiness to support and solace. Betti, too, kept an arm around Keiko. The bearlike blond American and the pert black Tanzanian, her comfort on a strange planet; human beings; friends. For a long time no one spoke, and Keiko’s tears crystallized in her lashes and on the high planes of her cheeks. Like a warder awaiting the moment when he can return his prisoner to her cell, Captain Hsi hung back.

  Craig released Keiko’s hand. “Captain Hsi,” he said, “there’s a group of Kybers at the base of the Platform, near the elevator riser.”

  “Kybers?” the captain exclaimed. “What are they doing here?”

  “I think they want to come up. We locked the elevator capsule in place not long—well, not long after Andrik must have left us. The door at the foot of the riser’s tight, too—they can’t get up here unless we countermand the locks and extend an invitation.”

  “But what do they want?”

  “I think they realize we’re leaving, sir. I’m sure they do. The ones who have presented themselves here want us to take them off-planet. They’re seeking asylum aboard the Heavenbridge. Don’t ask me whether it’s political, religious, or biological asylum, though—they just want our help.”

  “Defectors? Alien defectors?”

  “Yes, sir. That’s how it looks.”

  “We have to take them,” Betti Songa said, facing the captain without removing her arm from Keiko’s waist. “We have to take as many as we can, at least. There may be more coming,” gesturing sweepingly, “from out there, from too far away to get here before we’re ready to go.”

  “More?” Inside the plush ring of his hood, Captain Hsi raised his thin eyebrows; his eyes bulged noticeably in the electric glow of the colliding solar winds. Then he lowered his head and, signalling the others to follow, made for the Platform’s forward railing.

  Keiko, at Betti’s silent urging, tagged after the men. At the rail she was astonished to see several incomplete Kyber families picking their way through the boulders and the great purplish pseudo-boulders toward the Platform. She counted fourteen individuals in three separate groups, each group negotiating a different isthmus of frost-inscribed rock. The Kybers’ bright ligneous haloes moved from side to side like tracking discs, and their legs collapsed or extended so that their heads appeared to float along at a single unvarying altitude despite the unevenness of the terrain. Under the prismatic arc of the auroras the aliens’ promenade struck Keiko as dreamlike and vaguely threatening.

  “Of course,” said Craig, “you can’t see the ones already under the Platform. The monitors in the observatory suggest we’ve got about five down there, patiently waiting for official approval of their petition. Naomi’s been talking with them through the intercom system, or with one of them, anyway. All that’s really clear is that they want to escape the consequences of Dextro’s going nova. They know—every single Onogorovan does—that we’re leaving tonight, and these are the ones who want to entrust their lives and future security to us.”

  “O Kybers of little faith,” intoned Keiko plaintively.

  “Defectors,” said Captain Hsi again.

  “Yes, sir,” Betti Songa interjected. “But it’s surprising only because we had implicitly begun to assume that the Kybers are less a species of autonomous individuals than a kind of vast computer intelligence whose units are simply parts of a governing whole. That’s what I had begun to assume, anyway. What Keiko and Andrik told us about their first conversations with the aliens certainly suggested that the personalities of the Kybers were interchangeable. Which is why it’s hard to accept the idea that these creatures do have distinct personalities, and that it’s possible for them to come to decisions different from those dictated by a majority of their kind. … Yes, sir, that’s a fitting way to put it—these Kybers are defectors.”

&nb
sp; Keiko considered, her hands gripping the Platform’s rail and her mind casting out to the alien palace where Andrik had willingly forfeited his humanity. If the Kybers were the experiments of a faceless and spiritless control system operating at superspeed to keep at least this part of the cosmos functioning smoothly—through pain’s periodic crisis, and the promise of imminent destruction—then even these “defectors” owed that system their allegiance. They did its bidding in spite of themselves. They were programmed for obedience, and all their intelligence, ingenuity, and savvy ultimately redounded to that end. How much free will does an automaton have?

  By simple definition, none.

  “We have to take as many as we can,” Betti Songa was saying.

  “No!” Keiko blurted. Then she flushed, aware that by a route rather different from that taken by Sixkiller she had nevertheless arrived at a xenophobia as virulent as the pilot’s.

  “What’s the matter?” Craig asked her.

  “I don’t believe they’re defecting. I believe they’re here at the behest of the others, who see us as yet another survival option—although not so good an option as the exercise of prayerful control in kybertrance.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Craig wondered aloud. “We are a survival option.”

  “The problem is that it’s not defection, it’s …” She hesitated.

  “What? What is it, Kei?”

  “It’s infiltration,” she told the astrophysicist. “They’ll go back with us, if we let them, in order to colonize Earth for a new variety of kyberlife. That’s what their survival option amounts to finally: they hope to displace us, replace us, take over—because they have evolved beyond us here on Onogoro, under heaven’s bridge, and they see no hope of our ever putting a foot on that span if left to ourselves.”

  “They’re technologically backward!” Craig exclaimed. “You’re fabricating motives they couldn’t possibly have.”

  Said Betti Songa gently, “You sound like Sixkiller, Kei.”

  “They’re their own technology,” Keiko responded, still feverish, uncertain of her ground but determined to test it. “They don’t need starships, refrigerators, oscilloscopes, motorcars, any of that diverse and complex gadgetry! They’re their own technology, which means they’re so sophisticated, so advanced, that we wrongly perceive their culture as primitive!” She caught her breath and looked at Betti and Craig in turn. “Besides, you weren’t out there. Neither of you was out there.”

  “Viewed objectively, their culture is primitive,” Craig countered. “Human beings aren’t replaceable by Kybers. Surely even they understand that. The motives you impute to them just don’t wash, Kei.”

  “Their culture is internalized, shared broadly across the entire spectrum of Kyber society, and these petitioners that Captain Hsi calls defectors are here at the bidding of the general will!”

  “Which is fine,” said Betti. “Which is altogether fine, Kei.”

  At that moment Sixkiller exited the central balloon of the observatory with a Platform mech. Captain Hsi brusquely hailed the floater pilot, calling him over to their group.

  “How many Kybers could we take aboard the shuttle to the Heavenbridge without sacrificing necessary equipment or personnel?”

  “Am I necessary personnel?” Sixkiller asked. “Is Dr Takahashi?”

  “You know what I mean, Mr Sixkiller. How many Kybers could we realistically carry aloft from the Platform?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Roughly, Mr Sixkiller! Roughly!”

  “Considering that we’re pretty heavily packed for this last run, no more than a single family—roughly. Less than seven if we’re being really ‘realistic’. None if we’re being safe. Are we actually going to take home representatives of the local sentient life form as souvenirs? Jesus!”

  “We’ll take home the ones who are already at the central riser,” said Captain Hsi. “There’s nothing we can do for the others.”

  Keiko’s heart shifted in her breast. “Sir—” she began, chagrined to find herself supporting Sixkiller’s cynical position out of a fear as demeaning and cowardly as his. “Sir, there’s a Control that dictates what they do. If they come home with us, it will eventually dictate what we do, too.”

  “God,” said Craig Olivant, and Keiko was unable to tell whether he was defining that Control or simply despising her fear.

  What Betti Songa whispered to her then, apparently in an attempt to soothe and console her, was even more chilling than the possibility of Craig’s contempt: “Perhaps, Keiko, we will then begin to fulfil our destiny as a species. Hush now. Hush. We must do what the moment demands.”

  “Only five or six,” said Captain Hsi. “If they give birth only every thousand years or so, it will be very difficult for the Kybers to replace humanity as the dominant sapient species on Earth.” He smiled dismissively at Keiko.

  TWENTY

  But she was not so easily dismissed.

  “Wait. You forget something.”

  “Indeed? I should have thought, on the contrary, that it is you who have forgotten not only your duty but the etiquette appropriate to your present status!”

  Keiko went on doggedly: “There are five Kybers down below. Entrust their lives? Their security? Five, Captain Hsi! They’ve just abandoned their own unborn child! They’ve left behind the pair who are locked in paracybergamic union. They’ve run out on the birth. What kind of trust and security is that? What sort of survival? I don’t believe it. Whatever has sent them marching here with this phoney request is something that supercedes questions of ordinary individual survival. It has to be something collective that—”

  Captain Hsi cut her off. “As you said. Perhaps it is simply the height—or should I say nadir?—of individualism to run out on your offspring. Indeed, this reassures me still more. How can there ever be more than five of them, however long they live! They have conveniently neutered themselves.” Hsi paced about the ice-furred decking. “Still, while I complain about dereliction of duty in one direction, should I condone an even more shameful performance by our would-be guests?”

  “Exactly,” said Sixkiller, locking eyes with Keiko as though to mesmerize her.

  Betti spoke up: “I hardly think we can prescribe standards of ethical behaviour for aliens.”

  Naomi Davis, who had stepped out of the observatory in time to catch the last few exchanges, said bluntly, “Fried baby is no baby.”

  Sixkiller swung about. “Oh, and I suppose that five adult Kybers couldn’t have managed to pick up the other two and brought them along? It would hardly seem much of an athletic feat, would it?”

  Naomi opened her mouth to reply.

  “Don’t look at me,” said Sixkiller hastily. “You might like a well-balanced Kyber ecology on board, but I’m not going to be your ambulance man to ensure it.”

  “Maybe they assumed that lift-off would be too much of a strain,” suggested Craig Olivant. “For the foetus, I mean.”

  “Oh, you contradict yourself beautifully!” cried Keiko. “First they have a primitive culture, but now they know all about G-forces!”

  “Surely you pumped enough technical manuals into your student for them to work that one out, Kei. Would you take your pregnant wife riding up to orbit?” Craig faltered, embarrassed. “I mean, if you—”

  “Anyway,” put in Betti Songa diplomatically, “they may have rigid customs associated with the birthing. We still have our share of them. Maybe the pregnant parents are not permitted to travel under any circumstances—they have to stay in the hut.”

  But Keiko was thinking not of abandoned pregnant wives but of an abandoned “husband”, pregnant with knowledge, undergoing a variety of labour pain which she—for a while—had shared. Stillborn Andrik, dead while trying to give birth to himself …

  Sixkiller smiled in a way that struck Keiko as wicked, as if determined to complicate the argument further—so that the ensuing delay would thwart the Kybers’ effort to come aboard. “How do we know,” h
e asked, “that those five down below are all from one family, minus the pregnant parents? How do we know they aren’t from separate families, and aren’t all pregnant themselves? suppose they wrenched themselves away from the other supportive parent, who may—for all we know—simply function as a sort of extrasomatic energy-source or placenta. How do we know we aren’t proposing carrying Kyber within Kyber back to Earth?”

  “That’s nonsense,” snapped Naomi. “I’ve seen your holos of that couple on their bier. They’re—”

  “Inseparable,” said Sixkiller, turning aside. “How touching.”

  Captain Hsi waved a hand. “Enough of this. I shall interview these Kyber supplicants before we grant them passage. They shall, for once, explain themselves fully. See to it, Mr Sixkiller, then carry on with that floater.”

  Soon the five Kybers had ascended through the Platform’s central riser to the deck, and the elevator capsule was locked into place again. A second incomplete family had already arrived below by now, and indeed had been there for some minutes. Meanwhile, the other two renegade groups that Keiko had counted from the rail were just now—she saw—disappearing beneath the Platform.

  None too soon, she thought anxiously. Although, in another sense, far too late.

  As the Kybers followed the pilot toward Captain Hsi, Keiko told herself that there was something odd about one of the refugees. One of its arms looked—yes, out of joint. And it moved less smoothly than the other aliens, virtually limping in their wake.

  “Sir,” called one of the Platform mechs, emerging from the observatory.

  “Not now,” barked Captain Hsi. “We’re falling behind schedule. Lend Mr Sixkiller a hand.”

  The mech trotted obediently to the pilot’s side, then followed him to the floater where another mech was already at work. Sixkiller’s new assistant said something to him which made the pilot start and frown. It looked as if he might come back in their direction—but he changed his mind and set about dismantling the craft, albeit with a portion of his attention apparently upon the Captain’s interview, straining against the wind to hear what was being said.