Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  Lot let the taunt slide past, refusing to be lured away from his own objections. “She’s lost track of history.”

  “She thinks you’re a hybrid, with the taint of the Chenzeme in you.”

  “She thinks we’re her people!”

  Kona shrugged. “Now we are.”

  “No. Her people are in the Well. Or some part of them anyway.”

  From a booth beside the display an officer, “Final systems check.”

  The room quieted. Lot turned to the projected image with some trepidation, remembering Sypaon in her endless journey around the ring, knitting each alien cell to her will. Kona might have read his mind.

  “The swan burster’s surface is composed of billions of cells,” he explained, his voice misleadingly soft. “Each of those contains a selective neural architecture with well-defined values.”

  “Like Kill aliens,” somebody muttered.

  Kona nodded. “That’s the essence. But Sypaon has modified those values. Before, a kill decision was reached by consensus. Now, she defines the target. Today it’ll be the spectral image of a distant star.”

  “Then you’ve tried this before?” Urban asked.

  “Not a full test, no.” From Kona, Lot sensed a sudden uneasiness. “We ran a preliminary test nearly a year ago. The swan burster attained a state of high activity before the sequence was stopped.”

  “Why didn’t you go all the way?”

  “It was only a preliminary action. Most of the burster’s cells are aggressive. When a fire/don’t fire decision must be made, they generally opt for action. Sypaon understands these cells; she has them under secure control. But a small percentage of the cells are passive. Unfortunately, they tend to be large and massively interconnected. On that first attempt at a test firing, they overrode Sypaon’s consensus, suppressing the aggressive cells. But she’s learned how to neutralize them. There, you see that?” He pointed at the holographic display, indicating three minute red pinpricks evenly spaced about the ring. “We’ve removed three of the meteor defense lasers from the column, and shifted them to the farside. In just a few seconds, they’ll fire on the swan burster.”

  “What?”

  Kona’s cheek twitched. Lot caught a puff of nervous unease. “When the aggressive cells detect the assault, they’ll cut off the passive cells, and retaliate. It’s part of the deep programming.”

  Someone growled, “Let us all pray to the Unknown God that the soulless bastards don’t retaliate against us.”

  “Sypaon controls the aggressive cells,” Kona insisted.

  “And who controls Sypaon?”

  The watch officer preempted any answer. “It’s time,” she announced. “Now.” On the display, fine lines of white light lanced from the red pinpricks, impaling the silver glow of the ring. “Targeting successful. Ring geometry is deepening. Radiation levels are rising at a proportional rate… .”

  “This is as far as we got last time,” Kona muttered.

  Lot watched the ring begin to blaze a brighter silver. Within seconds the blaze reached brilliance.

  “The geometric gradient is climbing astronomically. Readings are approaching the historical values recorded on Heyertori. Climbing. Climbing… .”

  The ring’s image burned with a painfully bright light. The dark interior filled with a sheet of silver fire, marred only by a small circle of darkness lingering at its center. Stars were no longer visible through that aperture, their light overwhelmed by the burster’s own painful luminescence.

  Then abruptly, the burster’s light began to fade.

  “It’s failing,” the watch officer announced. A murmur of discord ran through the assembly. “The burster’s geometry is declining to quiescent levels. Radiation levels are collapsing. It’s failed.”

  “It’s failed.” The comment soughed through the room like the passage of a ghostly chorus. Shock was the dominant expression on the gathered faces. Fear seeped onto the air. “It can’t be.”

  Lot looked in amazement at the wide open, foolish faces goggling like ignorant children. “Why are you surprised?” he demanded of them. Startled faces turned toward him. Urban laid a restraining hand on his arm, but he ignored it. “The Well protects itself. Everything fails in the Well. That’s what I’ve been hearing for ten years. From your mouths! And you knew the Well had caught the ring. Once, long ago. Did you think the passage of time had shortened its reach? Uh-uh. It has the swan burster, it has us within its reach and there’s no difference, no difference at all if we live in the city or in the Well.”

  For several seconds after his outburst, no one spoke. Fear clouded the air, and suddenly Lot found himself leaning hard on a panicky memory of the packed corridor. He turned to leave, but the route to the door was blocked. People stopped him. Council members. Real people. They asked his opinion. Was a descent to the Well inevitable? Yes, he believed that. Were they already exposed to the governors, here in the city? The evidence for the Well’s influence was clear.

  Quiet expanded around him as he spoke. He found himself addressing the entire room. “Try to understand. Our situation is fragile. If we threaten the Well we’ll be consumed, just like the Old Silkens. We must abandon the ring.”

  In that moment, he felt as if he held them in his hand. They would do as he said. They would descend to the Well. For what choice did they have?

  Then, from the far side of the room someone muttered in angry syllables, “He’s a madman.”

  The words smashed against the budding confidence of the crowd. Lot felt his control crumble under a surge of denial; a feverish flush of anger.

  “Fanatic,” someone close to him growled.

  “Jupiter’s dog.”

  An ugly muttering arose on all sides: as if truth could be changed by name-calling. Their blindness sickened him. They could kill this city by sheer accident in their frantic struggle to deny truth. “Stop!” he pleaded with them. “Stop and ask yourselves why the Old Silkens died. Ask it and answer it, before you kill us all.”

  He left then, pushing his way through to the door, frantic to escape the room’s seethe of negative emotions. In the sudden stillness of the station platform, Ord’s background burr of begging, pleading, became the dominant sound. “Hush,” Lot said, as a car swept through the gray membrane that separated the vacuum of the tunnels from the pressurized station. Ord quieted: an unexpected obedience that confirmed for Lot just how much his situation had changed.

  CHAPTER

  18

  IN THE TRANSIT CAR HE FELT SICK, FEVER-FLUSHED AND TREMBLING. What could do that to his system? The Well was in him. Maybe it would take him first, absorbing him just as some ancient cell had once absorbed an independent bacterium, forcing its evolution toward a subjugate cellular organelle: the mitochondrial analog. Was that process beginning in him now? He half-closed his eyes, his head lolling on the seat back. And what if it was? He smiled, suddenly sure that could not be a bad thing. He’d waited for this all his life. Inside, he still held a narrow core of fear, but for the most part he felt only relief when he considered that the waiting might finally be over.

  Ord brushed his neck with soft tentacles. “Elevated body temperature. Lot needs to eat.”

  “Not hungry.”

  “Deprivation encourages unstable chemistry.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “I love you.”

  The car stopped in Ado Town at the Narcissus Street station. Lot stepped out on the platform amid a swarm of camera bees, Ord clinging under his hair.

  One of the bees told him, “City authority’s attributing the swan burster’s failure to minor technical problems. Do you agree with that assessment?”

  He laughed. Convince them that it’s right, Sypaon had enjoined him. She’d spent centuries cycling through the ring, learning a dead species’ mad language. Of the living Well she knew nothing. He told the bee, “The Well defends itself. It always has. It adapts. It consumes. In its consumption, it forces the adaptation of others, including the Che
nzeme.” Jupiter had seen all of that, long ago.

  Another bee, this with a feminine voice, then countered, “Yet the swan burster was not aimed at the Well. There was nothing to defend against.”

  “No?”

  Ados on the steps moved aside for him, unwittingly interfering in the flight of the camera bees so that Lot stepped out alone onto the street. Already his fever seemed to be subsiding, but not the free clarity of his thoughts, the acceptance that had come upon him. If this was not yet the plague that would draw the population of the city down into the Well, still, he knew that time must be imminent. He turned back, to so inform the mediots hiding behind the glassy eyes of the camera bees, but to his surprise he saw that they had already withdrawn, buzzing away over the rooftops in a slow, glittering flock. Had Kona recalled them? So.

  Silence filled the street. At the café tables, on the balconies, ados watched him with looks of expectation. The election was to take place today. Lot remembered that suddenly and wondered if it still mattered.

  He might have stood there longer, considering things, but it occurred to him that indecisiveness didn’t look so good. So he set off down Narcissus Street at a detached, determined pace. In the quiet of his breather he could think, and sort out what to do next.

  But when he got there he didn’t think at all, just threw himself down on the sleeping pad and lay at floor level staring at the sundews surrounding him in their glass pots. He heard Ord busying itself in the kitchenette, but he listened to his body, searching the pulse and wash of his metabolism for some sign of transformation… .

  The door opened itself for Urban. He had Alta with him. She came in only far enough to avoid the closing door. Her cool gaze took in the room, and then she looked at Lot. “I underestimated you. I’m sorry.”

  “He forgives you,” Urban said. Stepping long strides over the plants, he threw himself down next to Lot, his braids performing a jubilant dance against his cheeks as he grinned. “Fury, I’ll give you points on the dramatic exit from authority, but the fact is, you left too soon.”

  Ord squeezed up between them and plopped a cup under Lot’s nose. A pink paste filled it, shedding a vague, fishy odor. “Good Lot,” Ord murmured. “Good boy. Eat now.”

  Lot wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that’s foul.” He shoved the cup far to the side. “Don’t cook for me, okay Ord?”

  Urban laughed, while Ord protested: “Lot’s hungry.”

  “I like being hungry.”

  Ord patted tentacles against his arm. “Deprivation encourages unstable chemistry.”

  “Yeah, and you love me, I know.”

  Urban slapped the robot out of the way. “Will you quit playing with that thing and listen to me, fury? Authority picked up some radio gibberish after you left. They couldn’t figure it out at first. It was more like a data stream than a language, and it was aimed at the ring.”

  “Chenzeme?” Lot asked tentatively.

  “That’s what everybody thought, at first. But it turned out to be Null Boundary.”

  “The great ship that brought the real ones here?”

  “Brought ‘em here and abandoned ‘em. Yeah. The bastard actually came back … or at least he’s cruising the system periphery. Whether he’s got the mettle to actually come in-system—” Urban shrugged. “Anyway, he caught the telltales when the ring went hot, and went into a panic. Shot some decoy Chenzeme code at it to try to convince it to pass him by. He must have thought we were dust—again.”

  Lot nodded, recalling the history he’d absorbed during his years in Silk. Null Boundary had appeared like a scarred tramp in the thriving space above Heyertori only weeks before a swan burster swept that system. The ship had been an ominous sight with his dark hide split and pitted from some violent encounter, the wounds only half-healed. He carried no crew. For several days he’d prowled the outposts, trying to persuade some there to come aboard, but he got no takers and soon he vanished back into the void. The Chenzeme ring came soon after, moving undetected past the outposts until it stood in low orbit above doomed Heyertori. That it had followed the ship in from the periphery was an assumption never proved; nor could it be shown that Null Boundary had somehow effected the mechanical failures at the system’s outposts that had allowed the incursion. But the ship had survived where Heyertori had not, and when it ran again through the system a decade later a bitter faction of survivors had grudgingly contracted for passage out… . Has a forced wedding between scarred lovers ever found success?

  Null Boundary wanted a replacement crew, but the Heyertorians spurned that intimacy, wanting only transportation out of hell. In hindsight, the falling-out could be seen as inevitable. From the start, the Heyertorians had refused to treat the ship as a permanent home. They kept most of their complement in cold sleep, and made no secret of their suspicions that Null Boundary had some hand in the destruction of their world. The emotional tensions must have been unbearable.

  The break came eleven years into the voyage. Null Boundary claimed problems with his synthetics factories and announced that he could no longer support a human complement—though almost ninety-eight percent of the Heyertorians were in cold sleep and no draw on ship’s resources. Declaring emergency breach, he abandoned them at Deception Well.

  It was all ancient history to the ados. Urban shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe his own news. “You should have seen the real ones, fury. They were about to shit on the floor. You know, I think they’d blow that ship out of the void if they could.”

  “Be straight. Soon as they cool, they’ll be on their knees begging for passage out of this system.”

  “I don’t think so. Not the way they were talking. Null Boundary’s the same as the old murderers in their eyes. They’d rather deal with the Well than trust themselves to him again.”

  Alta shifted restlessly, her impatience like stinging cells. “You’re thinking it’s time?” Lot asked her.

  “How much longer shall we wait? How many more signs do you need?”

  He laughed at her. Signs. He’d never waited for signs, only evidence. No longer. “Soon,” he told her. “It’s playing out broadly.” Jupiter had left him here to persuade the Silkens, to bring them around at this cusp of crisis.

  “Sure, the election’s tonight,” Urban said, oblivious of the taut demands stretching between Lot and Alta. “Tomorrow we’re real.”

  The apartment majordomo inserted its masculine voice into the conversation. “A visitor for you, Master Lot Apolinario. Madam Yulyssa Desearange. Will you receive her?”

  “Do it,” Urban said, before Lot could decide. And the majordomo, recognizing his privilege, obeyed. Lot tasted ire from Alta. “Why don’t you go home?” he suggested to her, as Yulyssa hesitated in the doorway.

  That shocked her. Eyes too round, she started to object. “Lot—”

  He only had to look at her. She nodded, though anger glinted in her eyes. “I’ll wait for you.”

  But then he’d known that. He smiled in satisfaction as she slipped out past Yulyssa. The door whispered shut. Yulyssa seemed to listen for its closure, her lips turned down in disapproval. “You’re learning,” she observed. Beneath her casual demeanor he could sense a subtle field of fear. She still mistrusted him. Yet she’d come around. That pleased him too.

  He let his tension flow away, rain sliding across the perfect curves of her face. Her skin seemed bloodless, but still beautiful. Her eyes though, looked tired and distracted. She glanced over his collection of carnivorous plants, then sniffed at the high humidity that kept dew beaded on the sticky paddles of the sundews. The slug crawled on the wall just beside the door, rasping at invisible patches of mildew. “Eccentricity’s supposed to come with age.”

  Lot shrugged, baiting her with silence. Urban was into it, his amusement like silent laughter on the air.

  Yulyssa waited a minute more, then sighed. “You had a lot of questions yesterday.”

  “Yeah.” Yesterday, she had not been real.

  She pre
ssed her back defensively against the door, as if reconsidering the wisdom of this visit. “I just came here to tell you I may have found an answer. Authority tried to fire the burster last year.”

  “Kona said.”

  “I cross-checked the date with the commandant of wardens. It seems the first phantoms were recorded two and a half days after the test took place.”

  Urban hissed. Lot felt his own chest tighten. “Do you think the two events are linked?” Did the phantoms know how dangerous the ring would be to use?

  Yulyssa shrugged. “I don’t know.” A new resolve rolled from her. She stepped forward, placing her feet delicately between the glass pots, her brown legs as beautiful as anything Lot had ever seen. He scrambled up to a sitting position to make room for her on the pad. She slipped off her shoes, then sat down, casting a cool eye on Urban, who refused to yield his floor-level view of her thigh.

  Lot felt pressure in her nearness. Her presence seemed to challenge him in a silent test of dominance. He didn’t like it. He’d begun to think he’d gotten all the important systems in hand, but now his control was cracked again. He didn’t let her see it. He held himself aloof, his gaze fixed on the bedsheets: a shimmering white sea of wrinkled waveforms, tangled inconsistencies. With the palm of his hand he brushed the sheet flat, feeling the demand of Yulyssa’s gaze.

  She said: “I find it hard to talk about Jupiter. What he believed … it disturbed me. It’s not what I want to believe.”

  It seemed an odd thing to say. Yulyssa’s desires could not define the world. The Universe had come preloaded with conditions and did not care a jot if those conditions pleased the human psyche or destroyed it.

  “Nobody’s talking about Jupiter in this election,” Urban said.

  Yulyssa ignored him, her gaze in a gravity lock on Lot’s face. “I have avoided death for a very long time,” she went on. “I have not always wanted to, but it felt like a duty. In a universe that would destroy us, the most defining thing we can do is push on. Not for any real goal. There is no place of permanence, no golden existence, no finish line … not even in the Hallowed Vasties. Life can only exist on the edge of chaos, with all the turbulence that implies—or so I believed, until I met Jupiter.” She ran a fingernail up and down the wall of a glass pot, studying the twisting pattern of the white roots, how they ducked and turned away from the glass, minimizing their interaction with the light.