Under Heaven's Bridge

by Ian Watson

  Captain Hsi squared up to the Kyber quintet, who had halted before him as a single individual.

  “Are you all from one family?”

  “We have no family now but you, if you will have us,” replied the Kyber who was marginally to the fore. The spokes of its halo glittered in the wash of the arc-lights by which Sixkiller and the mechs were working.

  “But you left two of you behind, isn’t that so?”

  “Indeed. How could we be of your family, had we not?”

  “What about them? What happens to them?”

  “Away alone alost aloved alorn,” piped a second Kyber voice. “They lie dead on the bier, later to awake.”

  “We have left their wake,” crooned the alien whose arm looked to be unsocketed.

  Captain Hsi glanced irritably at Keiko, but could not bring himself, she supposed, to ask for a gloss.

  “We ask refuge,” said the leader. “We beg sanctuary. Grant us asylum. Please take us with you, out of all this.”

  “Asylum?” asked the captain, seizing on the word. “Of what sort?”

  “From the burning of the sun, from the burden of our people.”

  “What burden? Surely it must lie on all of you if it has to do with the coming nova. How can you make an individual choice—you five—when your entire species shares a common mind? Or has this choice been made for you? Are you really free to act apart from the others?”

  “A joint mind need not be common, O Captain.”

  Captain Hsi shuddered in his coat and shook his head. “We don’t have time for this, my fine Kyber. Out there in your palaces you may play word games, but here,” gesturing at the access gantry beside the shuttle, “here is the moment of truth. You will pay for your passage, or you will remain on Onogoro.”

  Keiko saw that over by the gantry Sixkiller, having put the mechs to work, was weighing the risks of approaching the captain again. At last he made up his mind and fought the wind toward them.

  “Excuse me, sir, but there’s something you should probably know.”

  “And what is that?” asked Captain Hsi, turning slightly aside from the aliens.

  “One of the mechs,” nodding back toward them, “was in the observatory just before this group came up. While they were still waiting, and after another group of five had showed up, he followed the interaction of the two groups on the monitor screen. He says—” Sixkiller stuck, as if to heighten the captain’s suspense.

  “Yes?”

  “He says that the new arrivals were squabbling with this tribe.”

  “About who should get aboard the refugee ship?”

  “It looked more as if they were trying to pull them away, back into Kyberland. But they weren’t trying too hard. It looked—to the mech’s way of thinking—like a performance. An act.”

  Betti Songa addressed Captain Hsi: “He’s attempting to suggest that the Kybers are aggressive, sir—that we have something else to fear from them. The truth, though, is that we have no evidence that any Kyber has ever assaulted another.”

  “They restrained me,” said Keiko unenthusiastically. She tried to find the Kyber with the unsocketed arm, which it had probably injured in whatever awkward mêlée had occurred below. If any had. Perhaps the mech reporting that disturbance had misinterpreted what he saw. However, the Kyber in question seemed to have completely repaired itself, maybe by some internal retensioning of wires and micropulleys.

  “They restrained the floater,” added Sixkiller. “They interfered.”

  “That isn’t aggression,” protested Betti.

  Captain Hsi turned back to the waiting Kybers. “Why did you quarrel down there?”

  “We are now a broken family. When one of us dies for ever, also this breaking occurs. Be assured that this is the only kind of violence we know. When a second broken family arrived below, the urge to be whole again—to become sevenfold—overcame a few of their diminished number. There was among them a yearning to form a septa, which urge our own broken family must resist—for it might have drawn us back from sanctuary.”

  “Some element of the collective will was involved,” hazarded the captain. “Does the collective will wish you to stay or to leave?”

  “Sir, it was a put-on,” insisted Sixkiller. “A performance.”

  Keiko wanted to shout at the obstinate man, but at that moment a cry from the mech up on the access gantry interrupted them: “Sir, more of them are turning up! Fifteen or so! And the others—the ones under the Platform—they’re coming out! Hell, they’re climbing one another’s shoulders, trying to reach the deck!”

  Captain Hsi ran with the others to the railing. Keiko drew up behind him, panting in the cold.

  The other Kybers who had come for sanctuary, or for some arcane purpose of their own, had indeed formed a spindly siege tower out of their own bodies. As Keiko and her fellow expedition members watched, the boomlike arms of one alien reached down to hoist yet another Kyber aloft, positioning and then propping it atop their living column, where it ultimately stood upright. This last Kyber’s crested head was only five or six metres below the Platform’s deck level, but it was looking down at its fellows rather than up at the astonished humans. The structure which it capped was perfectly balanced, even as the Kybers’ bodies methodically elongated toward their goal.

  Another alien languidly ascended the stack.

  Sixkiller unholstered his laser and leaned out.

  “All right,” whispered Captain Hsi. “Go ahead.”

  As this final Kyber perched on the shoulders of the alien now beneath him and pistoned its weird body upward, simultaneously extending its arms toward the Platform rail, the pilot fired. “Thus falls Babel!” he cried, squeezing the thinnest line of coherent light down at the base of the alien pyramid. Not, as Keiko had suspected he would do, at the Kyber reaching toward them with its imploring arms.

  Instead, the pilot tracked the laser beam carefully across a jumble of frosted rocks until it intersected a leg. The leg flared and fell away. Slowly, then, the spindly pylon of bodies also began to fall—outwards, away from the Expeditionary Platform.

  As if in a dream, however, the topmost Kyber boosted itself upward from its fellow—a powerful, thrusting leap. Its hands closed like padlocks around the uprights of the railing, and it chinned itself up until it was level with their feet.

  Sixkiller directed his laser at its face.

  “No!” shouted Naomi. “Don’t murder it!”

  “The goddamn thing is asking for more than murder!” Sixkiller replied, turning a look of baleful hatred on Keiko’s friend.

  Naomi grasped his wrist.

  He broke the woman’s grip and pointed the laser directly at the Kyber’s head. His body shook with ill-suppressed rage.

  “Please do not kill me,” said the alien with irrational placidity. “Grant me the sanctuary you have given to the others.”

  The pylon of Kybers that had toppled dreamily to the ground was now disentangling itself into separate beings, apparently undamaged. Keiko watched them sort themselves out. The one whose leg the pilot had severed stood up on its remaining leg like a flamingo; it stayed in this position, reproachfully, while all the others—dissuaded from any further assault on the Platform—began to filter slowly away into the icy mists, oddly acquiescent in their failure. What of the last one? Keiko wondered. Would it attempt to hop after them, an impossible pogo-stick being?

  After a moment or two Captain Hsi asked, “Did those others,” nodding after them, “want sanctuary, too?” Perhaps he was hoping that the Kyber’s grip would slacken and it would fall, thus disposing of the problem of dealing with it. The Kyber disappointed him, however.

  “They quit too easily,” said Sixkiller. “Genuine living creatures, with their hearts in it, would have rioted.”

  “Maybe they were only attempting to bring the defectors home,” said Betti. “I mean, the majority of them were—but it wasn’t worth losing any personnel.”

  “Well?” Captain Hsi demanded o
f the clinging Kyber.

  “Yes, very,” responded the alien. “Thank you. May I join you and the others of my kind, whom you so kindly save?”

  “I asked if those others also wanted sanctuary.”

  “I want it. The others have accepted their destiny, and it is too late to call them back and inquire of them their private preferences. There is a time for leaving and a time for cleaving, and never the twain shall meet.”

  Stymied by this verbal foolishness, the captain looked away. “Our time for leaving is now,” he said, perceiving that the Platform mechs had nearly finished dismantling and stowing the floater. “We’re late.” Abruptly, his questions still unanswered, he made up his mind. “Climb over. You may come with us. Mr Sixkiller, see the six of them on board the shuttle.”

  As the Kyber scaled the railing and strode to join the others, Naomi Davis hugged Keiko to her protectively, maternally. “We’re going home,” she whispered. “Isn’t it good to be going home?”

  “Andrik,” Keiko murmured.

  “There’s no way to fetch him back, child. No way, no time. He’s where he chose to go. Remember that. He’s where he chose to go.”

  Keiko wondered where exactly that was, and if her absent lover had survived the journey.

  Her last view of Onogoro, on the screen in the crowded passenger cabin, showed the solitary Kyber whose right leg Sixkiller’s laser had amputated still standing in the same position on the rimed rock beneath the dwindling, abandoned Platform. Apparently it couldn’t hop away like a pogo stick—though surely it could have dragged itself the few metres to where its severed leg lay, to use this as a crutch, a peg-legged pirate marooned on an island threatened by volcanism. The alien stood unmoving, perfectly balanced. No way forward, no way back. Perhaps it had died, switched itself off. …

  As the shuttle rose, and the Platform and the Kyber diminished, it did not raise its arm in farewell. Was there no real farewell to Onogoro? She searched briefly for the ruined palace where Andrik’s mortal body was, but she could not find it; and then they were too high.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Aboard the Heavenbridge the Kybers travelled in a chamber aft of the central passenger nacelle. Immediately after their arrival in orbit, Sixkiller had escorted them—an even half dozen—to this auxiliary cargo hold, and persuaded them that the trip to Earth would be more comfortably spent in kybertrance than in a state of useless wakefulness. After all, Captain Hsi, for logistic as well as security reasons, was not going to permit them to explore the ship, and they would be confined to the cargo room for the duration of the voyage. Fortunately, the trip would take only about five standard months, and they were cybergamically equipped with a cold-sleep ability not available to their human counterparts.

  Thus had Sixkiller mercifully murdered his charges.

  Keiko passed the first half of the return journey sleeping or sitting cross-legged on the low bunk in her cabin. Overtures from Naomi, Betti, and even Farrell Sixkiller to leave her insular haven occasionally, in order to join the others in either research assessment or recreational small talk, she politely turned aside. Her cabin became her cosmos and no one sought to pick the quintessential Keiko Takahashi out of the shell she had made of it. She would not be swayed, and, besides, she appeared often enough at meals and other obligatory gatherings to disabuse both the ship’s medics and her closest friends of the suspicion that she was lapsing into autism. Keiko’s problem, they resolutely assured one another, was grief, old-fashioned grief; time was the only effective cure—for which reasons they more or less permitted her to indulge the fierce but perplexing whims of her bereavement.

  As the Heavenbridge drew closer to its programmed emergence point beyond the orbit of Pluto, dreams terrifyingly reminiscent of the muffled sensory effects of kybertrance began to plague Keiko. A portion of her consciousness would convince her sleeping self that she was back on Onogoro, in the trapezoidal atrium of a Kyber palace, her hands linked with those of two imposing aliens, Andrik directly opposite her with pinwheeling suns for eyes and an envelope of luminous plasma for a body. The sky shone like the monochrome thermograph of a cancer, and the maze in which she knelt was a labyrinth of spiralling darkness. Andrik’s voice never got through to her in these dreams, but occasionally—more and more often the closer the Heavenbridge came to the Sol system—Keiko believed that she heard the irreducible uptempo whine of the Intelligence-Behind-Creation. It sought to synch with, and thereby overmaster, the rhythms of her own terrified consciousness; and she feared that if It were successful in this attempt, she would achieve not union with Absolute Godhead but extinction in the compulsive drone of its stereotypical mantra: OMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

  One sleep-period, then, Keiko awoke from an involuntary sojourn in the territories of kybertrance to find that resonances from this realm continued to haunt her: echoes, afterimages, displaced fragrances. They seemed to emanate from somewhere aboard the Heavenbridge rather than from her own disrupted dreams, and she left the cabin to seek out their source, knowing only too well that she would have to go to the cargo hold where the Kybers stood against one bulkhead in inadvertent parody of the statues of Kannon at Sanjusangendo.

  No one passed her in the corridor, and she entered the auxiliary cargo chamber aft of the main body of the ship with trembling hands and a pervasive dread insufficient to deter her from her purpose. The Kybers—not quite a family—did not move as she slid the door to behind her. The fact that they were closer to human-scale than she had ever seen them (a condition dictated by the hold’s low ceiling) bled away a little of her fear and made them seem approachable if not wholly familiar.

  Between the sleek curtain of a collapsed inflatable and several crates of Onogorovan rocks, Keiko threaded a path to the bulkhead against which the Kybers were noncommittally arrayed. They were “dead”, without doubt. Was it possible that one of them, or all of them together, had infected the stuff of her dreams with their own spirit-nullifying concept of God the Controller …?

  “I’m here,” Keiko announced quietly. “I’m here.”

  Yes, it was like talking to statues. Truth to tell, the images of Kannon in the Hall of Mercy had seemed more responsive than these inscrutable zombie beings. Whereas the bodhisattvas had serenely accepted a pilgrim’s heartfelt reverence, the Kybers merely occupied space and dreamt their own mini-deaths. Was that a fair comparison? Keiko had no idea. She noticed that the lateral eye-bulbs of every one of the aliens were eerily dilated, bright with some shared inner conviction.

  “What have you been trying to do to me?” she demanded. “You’ve taken Andrik. What do you want with me?”

  A click, like a key turning in a lock.

  Keiko started at the sound, which had come not from the cargo hold’s sliding door but from the aliens standing three abreast and two deep directly in front of her. The head of the central Kyber on the front row swivelled to one side, like that of an amusement-park mannequin or animatron, in order to fix her in its vision. Then its head purred almost soundlessly back to its original position, and its front-facing pupils began to enlarge.

  “Here,” it said. It extended its mailed fists toward her, then opened its hands in a gesture obviously meant to invite her to clasp them.

  “I tried to go down that road with your people once before,” Keiko told the alien. “I didn’t get very far, though. My escorts were, well, clumsy.”

  “You lacked the proper frame of mind, Lady Keiko.”

  “A Western frame of mind? Andrik betrayed me—betrayed us—because of an engrained cultural bias to which many of the others on this mission are probably susceptible, too.”

  “Whereas your own cultural bias permits you to resist Ultimate Reality?”

  “It isn’t real, this dream you live!”

  “The Real is, Lady Keiko. Ultimate Reality is. Accept my hands, and I will show you how we Kybers evolve ourselves in response to the promise of pain bestowed upon us by the God-Behind-the-Galaxies.”

  Torn, Keiko hesitated.<
br />
  “Please,” urged the Kyber, its voice (she realized) a breathy duplicate of her own. The long slender fingers flexed invitingly.

  She accepted the invitation.

  The auxiliary hold and all its jumbled contents disappeared. As in the Kyber palace, she was blind, trapped in a dimension-less film of oil that glittered about its edges but glared blackly at its heart. She was the contracting pupil of a Cyclops’s eye, and there was a fire in that outer darkness that sought to burn her to a last combustible cinder. This happened, and the universe immediately began to reshape itself from the residues of her inner vision. She ceased to struggle against the metamorphosis, knowing that like everything else it was only temporary. …

  The hands of the Kyber were cold, cold.

  **Dextro burns when Laevo interposes itself between planet and blast,** the alien hymned in death-sleep, **but the carriers of each Kyber family—from whom we here aboard the Heavenbridge have divorced ourselves—lie conjoined in the biocybernetic pursuit of survival.**

  **While you survive by fleeing,** Keiko thought.

  She envisioned a negative of herself moving dreamily through the corridors of the light-skimmer … to a room that is a replica of the Kyber palace in which she helplessly abandoned Andrik. Sliding the door shut behind her, she finds that she is in just such a palace on Onogoro itself, but a shadow-Onogoro whose solidity is a function of her own altered consciousness and whose colours are white, silver, and black. There are no other colours. She is escorted by the Kyber whose hands she held in another continuum. …

  **While we survive by fleeing,** it echoed her. **However, attend the birth of one of our saviour offspring, whom we have directed in vivo toward the evolutionary end of our on-planet survival, every Kyber mind shaping its family’s foetus at the impetus of an impending evil but in accordance with the will of God. Yes. Lady Keiko, attend one of our births. Laborare est orare. Our labour is our prayer.**