Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  But the Well felt different. This was a greater thing. Ancient, wily, and powerful. Yet without ego, it remained curiously blank. Jupiter must have seen himself and his followers filling up that blankness, their Communion becoming the ego of a system that could pull every living thing of every clade into itself.

  “Lot?” A suspicious-sounding masculine voice spoke from Ord’s mouth, interrupting his thoughts.

  Lot groped to identify it while flies buzzed over the mud. “David? Is that you?”

  “Lot, we’ve won!” David crowed. “We’ve got wardens on the column, repairing the elevator system. We’ll be down in a matter of hours.”

  The Well had subdued the Chenzeme. It would always defend itself. “No assault Makers, okay, David?”

  “Sure, Lot.” But doubt had crept into David’s voice. “You okay?”

  Unity. Harmony.

  The promise of the Hallowed Vasties, but writ against the Well. The Well had healed Jupiter of plague. Had he believed it might also heal that greater flaw that was causing the Vasties to fail? Lot’s gut clenched as he glimpsed the gamble Jupiter had taken. Unconscious processes could operate on only a pragmatic value system: survivors survive. Foresight, mercy, sympathy, forgiveness, love—all these were inventions of conscious minds. The Well could not love them. Its governors could not forgive their mistakes. It could only react, according to its own, unknown protocols.

  “Lot?” David asked in soft concern.

  “Go slow,” Lot warned him. “It’s not a simple choice. There’s more.”

  “It’s endless, isn’t it?” David asked, with a mix of eagerness and awe in his voice that sent a shiver down Lot’s spine.

  Believe in me.

  Lot shook his head. He could not find his own faith, no matter how he groped. “It’s alien,” he whispered. The flies continued to buzz over the mud, tiny, oblivious immigrants from Silk.

  AT DUSK LOT WALKED ALONG THE BEACH, Ord clinging just under his hair. David had called a couple of times to report that the work on the elevator was going slower than expected. Packs of repair Makers had failed, and needed to be replaced. More time had been lost when city authority launched an electronic counterassault aimed at disrupting remote communications. “But we’ll get there,” David insisted.

  Lot urged him to be cautious.

  The ocean had lost its greenish cast in the failing light. Still, the waves rolled forward with unnatural lassitude, ponderous swells that only reluctantly crested and broke in a brilliant white froth. “Ord, why’s the water green?”

  “The color and texture of the liquid is attributed to an elusive colloid that may serve an information-storage function.”

  The Well’s library? Information moving through every facet of the Well’s biosphere, hitchhiking on the water cycle. He imagined he felt the probing touch of molecular hands, assaying his cells and the odd, hybrid structure of his mind. To what end? He shivered, wondering what would happen if he ordered David to stay in the city.

  CHAPTER

  29

  “LOT. WAKE UP. SOMETHING IS HAPPENING.”

  He came awake instantly, his body stiff, fear threading his heart. Jupiter’s presence hung thick in the still night air. There were no stars. A low cloud deck had formed while he slept on the beach. He could see the cloud bottoms, dimly illuminated by a reflected green light. He shoved himself up on his elbow and gazed out to sea.

  Beneath the breaking waves, the reef was aglow with a blaze of emerald green.

  Slowly, he got to his feet. He could make out the shape of the reef despite the refracting water: a long, broad spindle lying parallel to the shore. The waves dimmed when they passed beyond it into the near-shore shallows. And the expanse of the ocean beyond was dark.

  A large mound? He wondered. The mounds he’d seen glowed only in the infrared.

  Abruptly, the light began to pulse. It moved in swift ripples in a direction opposite the waves. Ord stirred, a tentacle tapping in soft concern against Lot’s leg. “City library identifies this pattern, Lot. It is the bar code of a machine alphabet.”

  Lot breathed slowly, carefully, trying to restrain an anxious expectation. “A message?” he asked softly. “Can you read it?”

  “City library translates it as Help, Lot. I am your friend. I, Nesseleth. Do not forget me.”

  Nesseleth? He frowned, trying to discern some relationship between the narrow spindle of the reef and the vast structure of the lost great ship. “I don’t understand,” he whispered to Ord. “Nesseleth went down. She burned in the atmosphere.” A shudder passed through him. There was no way she could have survived it. Her hull would have been burned away, her insulation, her engines, her decks, all the way down to—

  “Her core!” Lot shouted. He leaped high into the air. The core shelter, where the ship’s mind was housed. It was the sternest part of her construction, the last refuge for ship and crew alike. He ran down to the water’s edge. “Nesseleth!” he shouted, on the chance that she could hear him. The pulsing lights ran on, and he felt as if he could almost read them now: I am your friend. I am your friend.

  Ord was speaking, demanding his attention. “Good Lot, the city calls you. Speak to your friend David in the city. Lot?”

  “Later,” Lot said. Nesseleth had survived. Ignoring the objections of his suit’s DI, he pulled on his hood, sealing it over his face. The respirator kicked on. Ord’s tentacle wrapped around his gloved hand. Lot gently removed it. He waded into the surf until the water ran past him knee-deep. Then he dove under the froth of a wave and stroked hard.

  NESSELETH’S CORE WAS COVERED WITH WEEDS like fine, emerald streamers. The light pulsed beneath them, a softer green. Dark shapes circled over the electric ground. They moved in neat groups of two or three, like guardians on patrol. They were twice Lot’s size and fishy-sinuous, propelling themselves with strong strokes of their long, trailing tentacles. Undulating fins on both sides of their smooth torsos seemed to provide balance and steering. A pair of the guardians jetted toward him. Lot decided to make for the bottom. He kicked hard, fighting his own buoyancy to get down among the weeds. The pair spun off into darker waters.

  He grabbed the soft sea plants with both hands to keep himself low. The pulsing light of Nesseleth’s core blazed up from beneath their holdfasts, pressing against his retinas, feeding the anxious pace of his nervous system.

  Then the light went out.

  He felt blind in the utter darkness, until a small green glow caught his eye. It grew swiftly brighter. He kicked hard for it.

  A trio of guardians passed in front of him. He could see their eyes, bedded in sockets on their bullet-shaped heads. Gill slits flared like skirts just above the tentacles. They rounded the light, then swept back, circling several feet above him. He pulled himself through the weeds, toward the light. One of the creatures dove to intercept him. In the faint glow he could see its eye rolling back, tracking him as it passed only a few inches away. Then another one charged. As it came at him the lower half of its snout peeled back to expose a wide star-shaped gullet filled with tiny, needle-sharp teeth. He twisted aside, but it rolled with him, catching his arm in the crushing rim of its maw. He yelped in pain and surprise. Then his suit froze at that point, preventing further damage without discouraging the guardian at all. It remained locked on to his arm; already he could feel his hand going numb.

  So with his free hand he jabbed at its eye. But it blinked, raising an armored lid to protect the orb. He glimpsed another guardian darting toward him. He didn’t think they could breach the suit, but they might be able to keep him under until his sparse energy reserves ran out.

  Angry now, he used the leverage from his pinned arm to throw himself against the guardian’s side. He reached far down its torso, plunging his gloved fingers into its gill slits, the suit translating for him the rough, bony texture. It reacted violently, thrashing in the water so that he was snapped back and forth by its convulsions. Then its grip slipped. He tumbled a few feet. Another guardian
swept past, brushing against him, knocking him toward the bottom. He spun, searching for Nesseleth’s light. There. Only a few feet away now. He pulled for it, reaching the glowing membrane just as another guardian lunged at his lower leg. He kicked hard, hitting its snout and at the same time knocking himself into the grip of the gel lock. The membrane seized him with a gentle pressure. It ferried him through its glowing expanse, then spilled him unceremoniously onto a curving white floor.

  WHITE: THE SOFT GLOW OF IT SURROUNDED HIM, emanating from the walls of a small vaulted chamber without furnishings, equipment, or inhabitants. The chamber’s orientation was wrong. It lay at a right angle to the pull of gravity, so that he sat on the curved wall, white light welling up around him. After the long trek through the forest, after the emerald green glow of the water, white seemed almost a magical color, a symbol of artificial forms, the chamber itself a bubble of pure order.

  “I thought you were dead,” he said softly, speaking into the suit’s mike.

  Perhaps Nesseleth no longer had radio capabilities; she didn’t answer.

  He sat up amid a puddle of green seawater, eyeing the membrane with some suspicion. But no guardians burst through. He queried the suit about the quality of the atmosphere, and it expressed no concern. So he pressed the seam of his hood and pulled it back over his face and head. His hair spilled free. He sniffed at the air, and suddenly he was shaking.

  Nothing had changed.

  The atmosphere aboard Nesseleth was a thick, complex, nurturing stew of warmth and humidity—nothing like the cool clarity of Silk. He’d tried to duplicate this air in his breather and he’d failed at it, he knew that now. Childhood memories came flooding back, the cradling air, dense with floral scents from the gardens and—

  Emptiness.

  Empty.

  There was no hint of human presence. The complex weave of the ship’s company was absent. And worse, there was no trace of Jupiter at all.

  He bowed his head, understanding coming as a crushing loss. Nesseleth had manufactured Jupiter’s sense to call him down to the shore. So? Hadn’t he known all the time it was an artificial lure? And still he’d let himself hope.

  He rose to his feet, sliding a little on the curving surface while his fists clenched inside their gloves. “Nesseleth!”

  His own sense had begun to permeate the air in the little chamber: an unsettling combination of joy and sadness; loss, fury. He ignored it, trying to reckon where he was. A diagram of the ship came to him from fixed memory. He studied the layered sections, frowning.

  Nesseleth had been a long ellipsoid, her warrens turning in countermotion beneath the tanks of water that had been her shielding. Her core had been stationary. It had housed the ducts that funneled the dust gathered by her ramscoops. And beneath more insulation, it had housed the core shelter—an armored spindle that contained the ship’s mind and her records, as well as the cold-storage units that could preserve her crew should all other systems fail.

  Lot stepped carefully up and out of the chamber, balancing with some difficulty on the curved, seamless wall. The chamber opened onto a crawlway, with grab slots all over the wall for fast travel in free fall, and a flat path for use under acceleration. But the path was turned on its side, and Lot had to scramble on the curving wall, bent at the waist as he tried to match the topography of the core with his mental map. He’d come in through a receiving chamber. There were twelve of those, scattered around the spindle’s hull. Soon now—

  Yes. A few more steps and he reached a tunnel that led to the cold-storage facilities. He scrambled down its short length. A gel membrane sealed the end. He slid through it—

  —and almost plummeted over a sheer edge. He jerked back, lost his balance, and went down on one knee. He knelt there at the aperture, the membrane still clutching at his shoulder and looked—up and down—at a vast wall of cold-storage cells on the other side of a narrow chasm. Three and a half feet of open space separated him from the stacked ends of the square-footed boxes. They were packed together like cells with no space between them, climbing in a slow curve from far below him, rising over his head at a similar slow turn, a long curving bank facing its mirror image across the open chasm.

  Looking down the chasm, he could see openings like the one in which he knelt, scattered at wide intervals on both the inner and outer walls. Those openings would have been easy to access in zero gravity. Now …

  He shook his head. The cold-storage cells did not appear to be active. They measured about three feet square, a blank indicator panel on each hatch. He could not remember hearing of any of the chambers ever being in use.

  “Nesseleth?” he called softly. Her mind had existed on a substrate at the center of the core, protected by the double banks of storage cells. But her senses had extended throughout the ship. She had been ever-present. “Nesseleth?”

  No answer. This armored spindle had been only a small part of the ship; now it was all. He wondered how much of her mind could have survived such extreme truncation.

  He activated the climbing pads on his suit and edged cautiously over the precipice, fly-walking across the outer wall of storage cells until he arrived opposite an aperture on the inside wall. He reached across the chasm with first one hand, then a foot; then he swung over and eased through the gel membrane.

  The passage on the other side was nearly ten feet long and very narrow. He crawled through, the soft white glow of the walls so consistent it dazzled his eyes and seemed to vibrate at the edge of his vision. He could still smell the garden scents, though he felt sure that was synthetic; there’d never been gardens in the core shelter. Maybe the scent had always been synthetic, a selected environmental parameter in the ship’s systems.

  He went on, pushing through the final gel lock into the central chamber. As he emerged, he slipped down a curving slope; it was only a few feet to the bottom. The chamber was oblong, shaped like a bullet lying on its side, and about four feet high: no point in trying to stand, so he remained sprawled on the floor. The walls projected an image of the surrounding water. Nesseleth must have switched on her hull lights again, because he could look out through the clustered holdfasts of glimmering green weeds to see the tentacled guardians cruising past in small groups of two, and three. At the chamber’s curved end drifted the human image that served as Nesseleth’s personal interface with Lot, its angle of vertical orientation slightly skewed from his own.

  CHAPTER

  30

  HER INTERFACE APPEARED JUST AS HE REMEMBERED. A young girl, eight years old, her skin as brown as her eyes, her hair long, golden. He felt a smile on his lips. He’d never noticed before how much she looked like him. She might have been his sister. “Nesseleth.”

  The child’s mouth opened in a soft, round circle of pained surprise. “Oh! You’ve grown up. I forgot … to do that.”

  “It’s okay. I like it this way.”

  Her eyes chided him. “You always wanted to be older than me.”

  He laughed softly, while a sudden, fluttering sensation slid through his arteries. Nesseleth had used other interfaces with other people, but to the boy he had been those were only masks. This was her real face, and she’d revealed it only to him. A devoted, secret playmate. Not even Jupiter had stood between them. He closed his eyes, feeling almost at home. “I missed you.”

  “Did not!” she accused. He looked, to see her pretty lips turned into a pout. “Did not, or you would have come for me sooner. I’ve been so lonely here.”

  That stung. “I thought you were dead. They said you’d burned in the atmosphere.”

  A sudden pallor affected her face. “Jupiter wouldn’t let that happen to me. I’m still here. I’m just the same. I am the same.”

  “Sure,” he said quickly, hoping she wouldn’t observe his doubt. “I can see that.” But she retained only a fragment of her former self: this core shelter was all that was left of her.

  Perhaps she guessed his thoughts. Her hand rose to her mouth in an anxious gesture. “I w
as scared that day,” she admitted. “It hurt a lot to come down through the air like that. I said bad things. But I didn’t mean them! I didn’t mean them. Why didn’t he come for me, Lot? I did everything he said, but he never came.”

  There was bewilderment in her voice and on her face, but he could get no sense of it. He frowned, realizing he’d never interacted with her that way. As a kid it hadn’t bothered him; maybe he’d just been used to it. Not anymore. Without supporting traces playing against his sensory tears, her grief seemed false, an act designed to touch his own emotional core and extract the truth of his flawed convictions.

  He pulled back: a gesture at once both physical and emotional. He wasn’t going to let himself be put on trial. “Maybe it just wasn’t your time.”

  She shook her head, her small white teeth clamped down on a trembling lip. “No. It’s just that I got scared and did it wrong. I went too deep, and he couldn’t find me. I couldn’t call him. I couldn’t see anything, or hear or talk or move. The water tried to smash me open!”

  Lot glared at her. Without an accompanying chemical sense her grief felt mechanical. He tried to conjure some sympathy for her by imagining what it might have been like alone on the ocean floor, her sensory gear seared away, the world outside this core shelter an impenetrable blank. But the hovering sense of his own impatience spoiled the exercise. “You survived it,” he pointed out coldly. “You rebuilt your senses.”

  “Too late! He was gone.”

  “Yeah, well I’m not.”

  Her image froze at that suggestion. Then it seemed to run backward for a few seconds, her gestures oddly stripped of meaning as her hand dropped stiffly into her lap. A little smile flitted across her lips. “I’ve been thinking about that since I sensed you in the world. Do you think he knew … ?”