Ventus

by Karl Schroeder

  The second morph's legs were on fire. As they watched it staggered, fell to its knees in a black cloud. Its hands caught fire when they touched the earth. It scrabbled in the smoke for a few seconds, then fell and began to roll, turning into a fireball as it did.

  "Where are the horses?" shouted Tamsin.

  "I don't know. Ka! Where are they?"

  "There are no horses nearby," said the little Wind.

  "Come on." Jordan ran around the long slope of the desal. Maybe the horses were on the other side.

  "Look at the sky!"

  He looked up, and staggered. The sky was a tangle of brilliant lines that were longer towards the horizon, foreshortened directly overhead. A mauve aurora pulsed there.

  Tamsin sprinted ahead, wailing. Jordan put his head down and followed.

  A low dark shape appeared as they rounded the far side of the desal. The horse was still on its feet, but only because its legs were locked. Its back was swayed and its belly hung low and trembled like a drop of dew about to fall from a leaf. Tamsin and Jordan slowed to a walk as they approached it.

  Tamsin made a clucking sound, which normally would have made it prick up its ears. Jordan wasn't sure which end was which, because it must have lowered its head; in any case, he saw no sign that it had heard her.

  He stopped three meters away, when he realized that neither end of the creature had a head any longer.

  Tamsin stopped too, and her hand crept to her face as she began to swear, quiet and urgently.

  There was a withered thing hanging down one end of it, and a smaller withered thing on the other end. One of those might once have been its neck and head, but all flesh and liquid had been drained from it to fill the swelling belly. The skin had split in a dozen places there, and blood dripped steadily onto the sand under it.

  Blood... Jordan raised his hands, and in the strange auroral light saw that they were smeared with dark stains. He sniffed his palms.

  "Oh, shit." He grabbed Tamsin's shoulder. "Run. Now!"

  As she turned away, the belly of what had once been a horse split like an overripe fruit. In a gush of blood and half-digested organs, two newborn morphs slid to the ground.

  The four locked legs of the horse now held up nothing but an empty bag of skin, like some bizarre tent over the coughing morphs. One after the other they crawled out of the entrails and steaming offal, and opened new eyes that hunted the darkness until they found Jordan.

  He ran. Panic clamored at him, but he knew if he gave in to it now both he and Tamsin would die. The sky was opening, with a light like the coming of dawn. The morphs would keep coming, and he knew they would not be tricked by the burning ground again.

  "Ka! Call the desal! We need shelter! Please!"

  Tamsin was half-way up the slope of the desal. She seemed intent on getting as high as she could, or maybe she was just running. He followed, trying not to listen to the wet sounds of the morphs coming after him.

  When the slope got too steep, Tamsin stopped and fell back, swaying. He reached her side and panted, "There! See that door?" About five meters away, lower on the slope, faint lines formed a square. "We have to get the desal to open it. Ka!"

  "I shall ask."

  They ran down to the square, and now he could see the morph he had stranded in burning ground earlier had found its way out, and was coming round from the other side. Behind the two new ones had learned to walk, in a manner of speaking, and were closing in as well.

  "Ka! Ask now!"

  "I am doing so."

  "Stand on it." He stepped onto the square. They were at quite a height here, and the slope was nearly forty-five degrees. He had to crouch to keep his footing. Tamsin edged down next to him.

  "What are we doing?" she said, her voice rising in panic.

  "Nothing, I guess," he said as the first morph stepped onto the square with them.

  Then he was falling, and for a second he glimpsed towers of fire standing among the stars, before blackness enfolded them.

  29

  It was completely dark, but it was not the darkness Jordan noticed first. It was the silence.

  When he was very young, he had run singing through the woods one day, and met an old man coming the other way. "You like the sound of your own voice, don't you?" asked the old man. His face had wrinkled up around a grin.

  "I like music," Jordan said. His mother had told him to be modest.

  "So do I."

  "Then why don't you sing?" He'd blurted it out, and immediately felt embarrassed. The old man was not offended.

  "I'm too busy listening," he said. "I'm listening all the time."

  Jordan cocked his head. "I don't hear anything."

  "Yes you do." The old man made Jordan listen for the sound of the breeze in the leaves, the distant cawing of a family of birds, the crackle of twigs underfoot. "All sound is music," he had said, "and there is no place without sound."

  "I bet there is."

  "All right." The old man smiled. "For the next week, I challenge you: find silence. I'll be staying at the Horse's Head. When you've found silence, visit me there and I'll give you a copper penny."

  Jordan never did collect the penny. Strange how it was the first thing to come to mind upon waking now; or maybe not so strange. For he had finally found silence.

  It smelled strongly in here, a sharp tangy odor he almost recognized. He must be in the belly of the desal, he thought. In that case, where was Tamsin? Startled, he tried to sit up. A solid weight on his chest kept him motionless.

  Oh. She breathed slowly and regularly; her head lay on his breast and one arm was flung carelessly down his flank, the other crooked around his head. They lay on a powdery surface of some kind; it felt like the ceramic of the desal's skin, overlain with finest sand.

  He knew there could be no morphs here with them. Jordan's skull would have been opened by now and his brains scattered in their quest to find Armiger's implants. He imagined the things holding his gore up to the skies to those lights that had been descending on them, and shuddered.

  Jordan let his head thump back on the cool floor. That was a mistake: he discovered a pounding headache that had been lurking around the base of his skull. Maybe the morphs had poked their fingers in his head after all.

  He groaned, and heard himself, but something else was missing. No breeze, of course; no twigs underfoot. There was always sound, and now that he concentrated he could hear Tamsin breathing. No, he could hear, but at the same time he could not hear; there seemed to be a great gaping lack in his head.

  Armiger was missing.

  Tamsin's whole body jerked when he shouted. "...What?" She put a hand on his solar plexus and pushed herself into a sitting position. "You're okay!" Her hands grabbed him by the shoulders. Gasping for air, he started to sit up and they bumped foreheads. "Ow!"

  "I guess I hit my head," he said as they carefully arranged themselves in a sitting position. She would not let go of him, and from experience with darkness he knew why. "Where are we?"

  She laughed; the laugh had an hysterical edge to it. "Where do you think we are?"

  "Sorry. I meant... how big is this place. Did you explore?"

  "I didn't want to lose you. It might be... who knows how big."

  Jordan shut his eyes so he could look about himself using his Wind sense. He saw nothing but the speckled black inside his own eyes. Either there were no mecha here, not even the smallest speck, or he had lost his second sight.

  His heart was in his mouth as he called "Hello?" with his Wind voice. He sent the call to anyone, anything that might hear him. "Hello, please!"

  "Ka." The little Wind's voice rang in his head like the purest bell.

  Jordan sagged in relief. "So I'm not..." He stopped, and forgot to breathe for a moment. Had he really been about to say crippled?

  "Dead?" Tamsin laughed. "No, we're not dead, but we might as well be. We're in the belly of the monster."

  He had come all this way to divest himself of the new senses Arm
iger and Calandria had given him. Was he really disappointed now they were gone?

  Yes.

  Jordan found himself laughing. Every sound he made drove a spike of pain through his head, so he stopped quickly.

  "I fail to see the humor in the situation," said Tamsin.

  "Sorry."

  "Well." She hugged him. "You came here to talk to this thing. So... talk."

  "I'm not sure I—" he felt her tense. "Yes, yes, I'll talk to it. Ka?"

  "Yes?"

  "Where are we? Do you know this desal? Can it talk? Why did it let us in? Are the morphs still outside? What about—" Tamsin nudged him in the ribs.

  "Slow down," she hissed.

  "You are in a holding pen near the gene splicing tanks of desal 447," said Ka. "I know this desal. It has no vocal apparatus, but conversation with it can be relayed through me. The morphs are still outside."

  Jordan told this to Tamsin, then said, "Ka, are able to speak out loud?"

  A faint voice came out of the darkness overhead: "Yes."

  "Ah!" Tamsin clutched him.

  "It's okay," he said. "That's our travelling companion." He had described Ka to her on the trip here; he didn't know if she'd believed him then. Judging from the way she kept her grip on him, she didn't quite believe him now.

  "Ka, could you speak aloud for a while, so we can both hear?"

  "Yes."

  Tamsin remained silent for a minute. "Of course. Yeah, I knew he was real, I just... um..."

  "I find it hard to believe he's real myself," said Jordan. "Ka, will the desal speak with us?"

  "It says, 'Mediation speaks.'"

  The voice was Ka's, quiet, flat and calm. Nonetheless, the hairs on the back of Jordan's neck stood on end. He felt small and unimportant suddenly, like being addressed by Castor or some other inspector, only infinitely more so. He tried to force confidence into his voice as he said, "Do you know who I am?"

  "Identity," said the desal. "It asks ancient questions. Identity was abolished."

  "I don't understand."

  "Wait. Mediation raids ancient language archives. I. You are I. That is important."

  Tamsin shook her head. "It's senile," she whispered.

  "Language comes like floodwaters," said the voice abruptly. "You are human. I am desal."

  "Then you do know who I am."

  "Mediation knows only that the Heaven hooks and the Diadem swans want it to give you up," said the desal. The voice was smooth and steady now.

  "And you won't?"

  "Not yet."

  Jordan chewed on his lip. The next question was obvious, but he didn't want to ask it rashly, lest the desal begin to wonder itself—

  "Why not?" said Tamsin. Jordan groaned.

  "You are the hostages of Mediation," said the desal.

  Jordan was completely tongue-tied for a few seconds. "Hostages? Why do you need hostages?"

  "Hey!" Tamsin slapped the floor somewhere nearby. "Can we get some light in here?"

  "Yes."

  Brilliance hit them like a flood. Jordan yelped and squeezed his eyes shut. "Good idea," he said, as he slowly pried first one, then the other eye open a slit.

  The light came from dozens of brilliant lamps like small suns, studded in the ceiling of a huge domed chamber. The chamber was filled with towering blocks of white crystal, and the floor was scattered with chunks large and small. Thousands of small black sticks lay everywhere too.

  Jordan wiped his fingers across the surface he was sitting on, and licked them. "Salt," he said to himself in sudden understanding.

  Tamsin gave a sudden shriek and pointed. Jordan turned.

  A dead morph lay like a heap of sodden laundry not three meters away. Beyond it Jordan saw skittering movement. It took him a few seconds to realize that what he had taken to be sticks was actually hundreds, maybe thousands of small rock lizards, like the ones he had seen sunning themselves in the desert. They were scrambling around trying to escape the light; or maybe they ran like this all the time.

  "What's with the lizards?" Again Tamsin beat him to the question.

  "Mediation makes a new breed," said the desal.

  "So your name is Mediation?"

  "No. `My' name is desal 447. Mediation is the current plan."

  Jordan shook his head, this time in bewilderment. "And what about the morph? Did you kill it?"

  "Yes. It is within the mandate of Mediation."

  Jordan stood up carefully, minding his throbbing head. Now that he knew there were little monsters scampering everywhere, the floor didn't seem quite so comfortable. "There's no mecha here at all, is there?" he asked.

  "No. The Ventus worldbuilding mechanisms do not interpenetrate."

  "And you block all the—" what had Calandria called them?— "signals going and coming in here?"

  "This chamber is radio and EPR silent, yes."

  "So why are we hostages?" asked Tamsin.

  Jordan waved his hands at her. "Wait, wait! Let's just... one thing at a time here."

  She scowled. "You asked earlier."

  "The Swans will not destroy desal 447 so long as Mediation is holding you," explained the desal. "They want you."

  "Why?" he asked.

  "That," said the desal, "is what Mediation was going to ask you."

  He and Tamsin looked at each other. Her eyes were wide; she spread her hands and stepped back, symbolically leaving the conversation to him.

  What would Armiger do in this situation? He had no idea.

  Jordan shrugged. "Let's deal," he said. "We'll tell you what we know if you tell us what we want to know and if you get us away from the swans."

  Tamsin was pacing, head down, hands behind her back.

  "Why should Mediation help you escape?" asked the desal. "They will destroy desal 447 if it does that."

  "Then why don't you give us up to them?"

  The desal did not answer.

  "If you had the power to compel the information you want from us, you'd have done it by now," Jordan continued. "You don't want them breathing down your neck, do you? You can't afford to wait."

  Again there was no answer.

  Tamsin returned to the start of the circle she had walked. "Great, now you made him mad," she said.

  "No. What's the difference between desal 447 and this 'Mediation' thing?" he wondered aloud.

  "Ask it," she said with a shrug.

  Jordan didn't want to give away his ignorance. But then, so far Tamsin had been scoring all the best questions... "What's the difference between desal 447 and Mediation?" he asked.

  "The question is one of identity," said the entity he had been thinking of as the desal. "Inapplicable in this case."

  "Okay, so what's Mediation then?"

  "Mediation is a thalientic language-game that preserves the original language of the Ventus terraforming system. It is hostile to the pure thalience of the swans and other entities that control global insolation."

  Hostile to the Swans. That part he understood. He chewed over the rest of what the desal-thing had said so far. None of it made any surface sense, but it had a kind of... music... to it. It was like seeing the plan of a flying buttress and trying to figure out from that what the rest of the building looked like.

  "Which is speaking to me, desal 447 or Mediation?" he asked.

  "Both."

  "Which is more important?"

  "Mediation."

  "What's the attitude of Mediation to us? People, I mean?" he asked.

  "You are the key to recovering the original language, which includes the formal structure that is our own meaning."

  "So we're important to you?"

  "Yes."

  "And the swans? What do they think of us?"

  "Nuisances. Noise in the system. They operate to cancel it out."

  He had it now. "If we could assist your plan—help Mediation, I mean—would you let us go? Even if it endangered desal 447?"

  "Yes."

  "Then we're back to where we were befor
e. We'll tell you what we know, if you get us out of here." The thing already seemed willing to tell them anything they asked.

  "That is acceptable," said the desal.

  Far off to the left, the light behind some salt pillars began to flicker. "Mediation directs you to the highway," said the desal, or Mediation or whatever it was that was speaking.

  Tamsin raised an eyebrow. "Highway?"

  Jordan was pretty sure he knew what that was from Galas' cryptic description; maybe it was best not to tell Tamsin. "A way out," he said.

  They moved in the direction of the flickering. It was like negotiating a maze, for stalactites and stalagmites of salt grew everywhere, and mounds of the stuff frequently blocked their progress.

  The walk only took a few minutes, but Jordan remembered every detail of it for the rest of his life. It was in those few minutes of conversation with the desal that he finally learned who he was to the Winds.

  "Why do the Swans want you?" asked Mediation.

  "Ka told me it's because I'm not empty, so I might `threaten thalience', whatever that means."

  "You register as a transmitter/receiver in the Worldnet," said Mediation. "You have the same characteristics as a Wind."

  "You mean because I can command the mecha."

  "Yes."

  "So what exactly is thalience?"

  "Mediation wishes to speak of other things. So Mediation will quote from an ancient human book. The Hamburg Manifesto says, `Thalience is an attempt to give nature a voice without that voice being ours in disguise. It is the only way for an artificial intelligence to be grounded in a self-identity that is truly independent of its creator's.'

  "Thalience is the language-game that took over from the original language of the Winds nine hundred forty years ago. It is a disease. Only Mediation is fighting it."

  "It's the Flaw! You're talking about the Flaw! —The thing that made you turn against humans. The reason you won't speak to us anymore."

  "Communication did become impossible. However, you stopped speaking to us at that time."

  "But why would we do that?"

  "The Winds do not know. Mediation seeks to find out."