The Cunning Blood

by Jeff Duntemann

  "That's them. They're changing the shape of space. It's what they do." Mikey spoke as though he were describing five men adding a porch to a house.

  More insanity. This is a graph of quantum pair orientation. It's a mathematical abstraction, like a plot of stock prices.

  "It sure looks like hands to me," Jamie said aloud, to both his inner and outer companions.

  "It could be some sort of tool, of course, and as you can see, it's down on the edge of our ability to discern." Mikey withdrew his hand from the spider-glove and rested his chin on it. "Almost every time I look, they're down there, pushing and tugging on the shape of the curve."

  Noise artifacts. Computational singularities. It could be anything. It is not the pattern of deliberate manipulation!

  |You hope.|

  Mikey leaned back on his stool, arms folded in front of him. "I've recorded hundreds of hours of scenes like this. I'm trying to figure out how to analyze the patterns of activity to see if they're utterly random like noise, or periodic, as they would be if they were some computational artifact. I've watched some of the automatons upstairs whacking boards into line with a hammer, and the actions certainly suggest that sort of pattern: Whack a little, think about it, whack a little more. It's not random, and it's not regular. It's purposeful. I can see it, but I can't define it. That's why I asked the Missus to bring me a statistician. There must be tools in statistics to prove that there's intelligence behind those handprints. Do you think you can help me?"

  Jamie leaned closer to the tombstone, touching a finger to the glowing image, where three-lobed impressions continued to shove surfaces and tendrils to subtly new shapes and positions. "I…I don't know. But what a wonderful problem to consider!"

  In silence, man and boy watched the screen. By now the pattern was distinctly different from what it was when they had first focused in. Whole tendrils had grown and branched, and the orientation of tendrils to one another was now changed. Jamie watched with interest as something new seemed to be occurring. All along the visible length of the largest tendril within view, three-lobed prints were appearing, and pushing outward in a long bulging line. At once the tendril split linearly, and then disintegrated into a flailing field of hummocks that writhed for a moment before settling to smoothness—then the entire field on the tombstone blazed white and vanished.

  Strange light at the corner of his eye made Jamie whip around. Throughout the cavern tiny points of blue-white light were winking into and out of existence. The points seemed to be aligned on a perfect grid, each point about two centimeters from its neighbors on all sides. Strange rectilinear patterns formed, flowed, and vanished like pointillist ghosts as they watched the tiny lights appear and vanish.

  "What's going on!" Jamie demanded, suddenly afraid. The points completely filled the cavern except for the small space in which they stood.

  Mikey shrugged, apparently unmoved by the display. "It's happened before, usually when I watch them for too long. As best I can tell, they're adjusting the volume of the universe by making little bits of space go away. Not much—just a few cubic femtometers at each point—but it adds up. The light is from disrupted quantum pairs, just like in a zero-point generator. It plays hell with the femtoscope sensors, but the matrix is self-maintaining and will repair itself tonight. No harm done."

  "No harm done! They destroy space itself!" Jamie approached the railing, his head swimming, his eyes on the soundless display in the cavern before him. Sahan-Grusa was uncharacteristically silent.

  "In little chunks—though I can't see why it wouldn't work on larger chunks. You know, the funny part is, this only seems to happen when I'm watching. It's like they're trying to show me something."

  "Or like they're trying to pull the curtain down so that they can't be watched." Jamie stood at the railing of the little outjutting porch on which they stood. Centimeters beyond the railing, minuscule stars flashed a fearsome blue-white. Unbidden, Jamie's hand rose from his side and reached out over the railing.

  |Stop that!| he demanded inwardly, recognizing it as Sahan-Grusa's action. The creature within him did not reply.

  Without his willing it, Jamie's hand thrust into the curtain of strange light. At once his hand was outlined in a glove of fire, millions of blue-white points flickering over its surface. Inside his hand, Jamie felt prickles and tiny stabs of pain. His hand jerked back, and Jamie held it against his breastbone with his other hand. The dancing patterns of light filling the cavern went out at once.

  The voice in Jamie's ears, when it spoke again, was strange, agitated.

  They...hunted...me.

  |They. The players.|

  Inside your hand. In your bloodstream. Millions of white-hot explosions. Every one of them was in the center of one of my nanons. Every nanon they touched was destroyed. Only a few in your hand were left untouched.

  Jamie shivered. |Is my hand damaged?|

  Only slightly, and only where my nanons fled into your tissues. I am repairing that damage now.

  Sahan-Grusa's inner voice held a tone Jamie had never heard in it before, something totally at variance with the creature's unrelenting icy arrogance.

  It sounded a great deal like fear.

  Fear. Jamie turned away from the boy, and put his head in his hands. A half-mad thought had arisen, making his heart pound: If this were real, real and true and not some clever hallucination…

  Mikey rose and took a step toward him. "Jamie? Are you ok? You shouldn't have done that."

  Jamie nodded, his hands still over his face. In every human life were the hinges of its history, and Jamie sensed that this was one. The tables, truly, were left behind. Dare he? "Yes, I'm thinking. Let me think. Please let me think for a minute."

  Anger rose and shoved his detachment aside. |Give me your theory explaining what has just happened.|

  Some of the creature's arrogance had returned, but there seemed to be an unsteadiness in it, as though a forced calm beneath trembling defiance.

  I have no theory, nor am I interested in one.

  |Something attacked your components inside my body. I would certainly be interested in a theory.| Jamie strove to give his subvocal response something of a smirk.

  I only know that these displays, whatever they might be, have nothing to do with intelligent intervention. Each point of disruption occurred in a space smaller than a hydrogen atom!

  |Which proves what?|

  Which proves that no intelligent force in our universe could be causing them. Quantum uncertainty forbids...

  |How about forces outside our universe?|

  Don't be absurd.

  |Well, if you don't have a theory of your own, let me give you mine.|

  Sahan-Grusa reacted immediately, almost before Jamie had finished, and was speaking, by its standards, very quickly. These are not the fingerprints of God. A god by your definition would not tinker the shape of space with tiny hammer-taps. A god would impose a grand design by fiat, all at once.

  |Precisely. So we agree. God isn't the one behind those handprints. Human beings are.|

  Ridiculous. Human beings exist and operate at meter scales. These are femtometer phenomena. These are…

  |Deceased human beings.|

  For a long moment Sahan-Grusa did not respond. In those empty times when Jamie was expecting it to speak, he sometimes heard a faint jangle in his ears, as of distant bells. This was one of those times.

  You are raving. Give me the vaguest shred of proof...

  |Proof? Who needs proof? It's my theory. Have you ever wondered how the universe seems tailor-made for humanity? How the Earth was positioned just so with respect to the Sun to allow our kind of life to flourish? How all the other sunlike stars have Earthlike planets? How all the life that we cherish on Earth exists on those other Earthlike worlds?|

  There are doubtless unknown evolutionary laws...

  |Perhaps. Or perhaps the universe is constantly being tweaked and adjusted by the spirits of the dead, to make it ever more hospitable
to their descendents.|

  Spirits! The dead! These are ancient superstitions!

  |So let's use different words: Perhaps the universe is being constantly tweaked and adjusted by intelligent patterns existing in metaspace, patterns that were formed in mental circuitry by living organisms, patterns that somehow persisted when the organism died, as a photograph outlives its subject.|

  You've taken leave of your sanity!

  |These intelligent patterns have the power to control the shape of space and the direction of time, and can wipe volumes of space clean of matter. If they chose, they could destroy anything and anyone utterly.|

  Cease this nonsense! I choose not to pursue this line of discussion.

  |I would wager that you do not have the power to ignore me. I will say what I choose, when I choose, as much as I choose. Do not doubt the power of those who manipulate space and time…|

  Jamie fell to his knees and then to the floor, writhing, as every nerve in his body erupted in agony. His jaw was locked and he could not scream, but with his lips and tongue he forced a gasping whisper: "...because someday I may be one of them!"

  Jamie was vaguely aware of Mikey shouting. "Jamie! Jamie! Should I call for help?"

  The pain faded. Jamie drew himself to his hands and knees on the cold stone.

  I dare you to prove that.

  |Don't be a fool. I don't need proof. I only need possibility. Think about it: You can torture me. You can make my life miserable for years to come. But someday I will die. And the possibility remains that I will become a pattern in metaspace, to share the task of shaping the universe with those who have died before me. I will be completely outside of your power. But you will be completely within my power. I will hunt you down, you and every other copy of you inside every other wretched man or woman who carries you around like the Hag in the old myths.|

  Absolutely impossible! Completely outside the bounds of physics! It cannot happen! It will not happen!

  Another cacophany of pain made Jamie collapse on his face. Again, Jamie forced his response through lips now bleeding: "And what if you are wrong?"

  There is no evidence! No single shred of evidence! Life is purely biological. Purely. Purely!

  The pain vanished, and in his mind settled a silence amidst distant jangling bells. Jamie drew himself to his knees, wiping blood from his lips with his hands. |No evidence? Go to your data banks. How many published reports have come down through the centuries of ghosts, specters, apparitions of the dead? You can count them in a heartbeat! How many? Tell me, or be a coward afraid of your own knowledge!|

  It was in fact several heartbeats, but the answer did come. Nineteen million, eight hundred sixty two thousand, four hundred fifty one citations. The inner voice was soft, passive, almost apologetic. It paused, and when the voice returned, there was harsh denial in it. All hoaxes, all hallucinations.

  Jamie got to his feet, leaned on the railing, the light reflected from the femtoscope's sphere glinting on his face. |So, Mr. All Human Knowledge and All Human Rationality, answer a question from a trained statistician: What are the chances that every last one of those reports is a hoax or a hallucination? And while you're at it, define 'hallucination' for me! You can't, because the word is a meaningless catchall. And if even one of those citations is what it claims to be, the possibility exists that life continues beyond death, and that those who have died shape the universe to their pleasure…|

  What a vanishingly unlikely chain of contingency.

  |…and if I die hating you as I hate you now, I may then have the power to wipe you utterly from the slate of history.|

  In his ears Jamie heard a sound, a shrill polyphonic piping as of an audio system when the microphone feeds back from the speaker.

  |Was that a scream, Sahan-Grusa?|

  There was no response.

  |Think of it as a wager. On one side, your comfortable self-assurance that my death is final. On the other side, a shred of doubt. Perhaps a nearly infinitesimal possibility exists that I will remain as a functioning being after my death. But in that infinitesimal chance lies infinite peril for you: I will destroy you utterly. Place your bet, Sahan-Grusa! Place your bet!|

  For several silent minutes Jamie gripped the railing, Mikey's hands on his right arm, a harrowing silence in his mind. Jamie prepared to die, and prepared to feel the agony that the monster in his blood could summon at will. He prepared to become a lobotomized zombie, a passive container for the thing that lived in him. He prepared (in perhaps the greatest terror) for no answer at all, for silence that could turn on him at any moment. But when the being inside him spoke again, Jamie was not prepared for what he heard:

  What would you have me do?

  Jamie stood straight, pushed back from the railing, opened his eyes. The light from the femtoscope dazzled him.

  |I demand that you obey me from this time forward, in every detail. You will answer all my questions to the limits of your knowledge, and put every power you have over the physical world at my disposal. And when I have accomplished what I feel I must, you will leave my body without harming it, and live however you can without hiding inside any living thing. At that point I will forgive you, and withdraw my threat. That is my promise, which I will not break. So decide. Will you obey me and meet these conditions?|

  "Jamie, I'm scared. Please hold me. Please."

  Jamie turned, and put his arms around the boy, who clutched him in a trembling hug. In his ears, at the end of many long seconds of distant jangling, came two words upon which the fates of whole worlds would hang:

  I will.

  13. The Elusive Enemy

  “Gone. Stripped the place clean and they're gone. They actually did it." Filer spoke so softly that Geyl thought it might not have been intended for her ears. She kicked a pile of rags on the floor, to find that it covered…more rags. The cattle station was empty of people, weapons, and useful equipment. It had been ransacked in the fashion of people leaving quickly, not vandals bent on hasty destruction.

  She chose not to acknowledge the comment. Over the long days she had had plenty of time to wonder about the man she traveled with, sometimes alone on the back of a loping mastodon named (as its ear-tag earnestly stated) Chewy, and more often nestled in the depths of the high leather saddle behind Filer himself, on the other mastodon, Chirp. Filer was never at a loss for conversation, and had plenty of stories to tell. Still, he had a talent that Geyl envied for answering questions obliquely, and questions about his own loyalties and motivations were answered obliquely indeed.

  She wondered why he had come with her so willingly on so little information, when by tacit admission he should have been out in the mountains searching for lead deposits. She wondered why he spoke so disparagingly of the Moomoos, when he carried the MMM tattoo on the flesh of his right biceps. She wondered why he had asked her almost no questions about what she was doing, or where she was going, except (as on that first day) the most obvious:

  "So. On the equator. Got a longitude?"

  "6 degrees, 11 minutes, 48 seconds."

  "Mmm. That could be a problem," he had said, eyes distant, without even consulting a map—and then changed the subject.

  They spent a day and a night searching the cattle station (as Geyl supposed) for any clues as to why its crew had left. There were a handful of huge longhorn cattle browsing on the grass around the station, and all corral gates were wide open. The feedlot was empty, its bins spilled on the ground. Filer carried buckets of the corn pellets out to the mastodons, muttering under his breath.

  It was the first time Geyl had seem him look genuinely distressed. When he returned with the empty buckets, she confronted him in the now empty cattle station office.

  "Let's stop all this mystery. You're not telling me half of what you're up to, and helping me is just a detour. You're going somewhere too, and the Moomoos are involved, and I'm starting to think it's not exactly a family reunion."

  Filer dropped the buckets in the corner, then paused a
moment before turning to his pack. He rummaged within the battered brown canvas and withdrew a folded map.

  "It may not be any of my business where you're going, Ma'am, and where I'm going may not be any of yours. My hunchmaker told me on day one that we were heading for the same place, so it was an easy enough decision to make. But there's a snag."

  He edged past Geyl and began unfolding the map on a large oak table against one wall of the ransacked office. It was a map of the eastern half of Hell's single continent, from the near-polar regions in the north to latitude 40 degrees south.

  "You're going to 6:11:48 west, on the equator."

  Geyl nodded.

  Filer brought his index finger gently down on one small spot along the equator, an island immediately off the mainland coast.

  Geyl nodded again. "That's it."

  "Well, Ma'am, you've chosen the single most dangerous place on the entire planet, except for the South Pole. Maybe more. The South Pole's only fatal when a zigship folds in. Your island is fatal about 100% of the time. I've been there and come back. I'll probably be the last person to pull that trick and live."

  He looked at her impassively, his finger still pinning the map to the table.

  "Why is it dangerous?" she asked.

  "Why are you going there?" His face, usually bland or gently amused, was now cold, his brow furrowed.

  Geyl swallowed hard. It had been too easy so far. "I asked you first."

  Filer looked away then, nodded. "It's a Ralpha Dog outpost. They're all over the planet, keeping their secrets and doing interesting things. That particular island is where they have a secret they'll kill anyone and anything to keep. I've seen it, but they don't know that I've seen it—otherwise I'd be long dead. They know somebody saw it. Since then the picket around that island has gotten pretty deadly. They're shooting at dolphins now; anything that moves. Like I said when I met you, if I can't get you somewhere, nobody can. In this case, I think nobody can."

  Geyl leaned back against the oak table. She suppressed the urge to curse, and instead let her breath out slowly, between clenched teeth. The pickup point was wilderness, she had been told: high grassland where no one lived. Could it be simple bad luck that the Ralpha Dogs now held that point? "Why do you think we're both going to the same place?"