by Linda Nagata
“I think we got lucky.” Overhead, a trio of shadowy gray guardians darted through the curtain of green light cast by Nesseleth’s hull. He followed their motion until they disappeared back into the surrounding darkness. “What are they?”
“Just animals. But they were drawn to his sense, just like you.”
He felt his skin crawl. Animals. Unconscious and reactive, yet he’d responded exactly like them, chasing mindlessly after Jupiter’s trace, even when he’d known it was artificial. What did that make him?
He touched his sensory tears. “He was sent out from the Hallowed Vasties, wasn’t he? And you with him.”
She smiled and nodded, her face radiant with the memory, and he realized abruptly that she wasn’t a child any longer. She’d grown up without his noticing. He stared at her, while his throat tightened in awful recognition. “Mother?” he croaked.
Her eyes widened in surprise. The image twitched, then re-formed instantly into the golden haired child. Too late.
He was on his knees, his heart racing. Why? He’d always known the image he called Nesseleth was only an interface. Now he knew how Jupiter had seen her. So what?
He tried not to care, but twisted jealousy wormed through the air. Why? Because, dammit, he’d thought he’d had something unique. What a joke. Nesseleth had served the old man for centuries. She’d probably been made for him… .
“Who was Helena?” he blurted out.
The child looked at him calmly. “Your mother.”
“You?”
“Silly Lot. We’re best friends.”
“Sooth.” Easy to see why. A derivative interface for a derivative madman. I’m not him.
He gazed at her, feeling something break inside him. “I don’t think this interface is going to work for me anymore.”
She looked pained, but she returned to Helena’s image.
No, he reminded himself. This is Nesseleth.
Lot straightened his shoulders, trying not to let the reverberant memory touch him. “Tell me what he was,” he commanded stiffly.
She sighed. (—Mother?—) “You already know that. He’s the seed, the center of the Communion.”
“But the Communion was already here. Jupiter found it here … didn’t he?”
“What he found here was unique.”
Lot swallowed hard against the desire to touch this maternal ghost (only an image). “… and elsewhere?”
She watched him closely. “Do you remember?”
He realized that he did. Faint memories licked at him; vague images—not of things he had done or seen himself, but there in his fixed memory, just the same. “There were other communions, weren’t there? In the Hallowed Vasties?”
Did she nod in confirmation? Her gaze was so stern. “You should know these things, Lot. You’re unschooled. You’ve been negligent with your heritage.”
Sooth. A sorry runaway. No keeper like Nesseleth to guide him in the proper path. Instead he’d had Ord. Good Lot, smart Lot. “Tell me now.”
Her critical gaze softened as she explained it to him. “Each Communion starts with one man. The faithful know him. They’re drawn to his hand. His will becomes their will.”
And sometimes their will becomes his, Lot thought. His gaze cut away as he remembered the silver interlock of emotions he’d discovered in the city.
“The Communion takes form around him. It grows outward, and as it does it changes form. Gone are the antique loci of man and man and woman and woman. Minds that were once sequestered now conjoin in bundled nerve systems that twine about each other, extending in electronic link over cities, then over entire planetary surfaces.”
Lot could almost see it. “They make the Dyson swarms?”
“Linked by light, yes. They are the blessed. The nature of their existence is not comprehensible to us.”
He breathed deeply, slowly, counting the guardian shadows. “Why did he leave it all behind, then?”
“That was his purpose. They made him for that.”
“To make more of their own kind.”
“It’s your gift too.”
Lot nodded his bitter understanding. “It’s like an infection.”
“It’s the Communion.”
And I’m its agent.
He shook his head, striving to see the whole. “But in the Hallowed Vasties it’s a human thing, isn’t it?”
“Yes, Lot.”
“Then why did he come to the Well?”
Her face seemed troubled. He imagined hot points of visible light searing through the perforated cordons. “He suspected that the Vasties were not … stable.”
Lot snorted. Good guess.
But then he reminded himself: Jupiter had known. He’d seen the problem. He’d been thinking about it. He’d been trying to find a way out instead of stumbling and bumbling around like an animal surrendering its fate to luck and natural selection… .
“I brought him out of the Hallowed Vasties,” Nesseleth continued. “We roamed the star cluster called the Committee, but it was an unfriendly place. So many of the people there were strangely blind to his gift. He could have made a Communion despite them, but he hesitated. He was troubled. He didn’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past. He would have a clean pattern, without flaws or resistance. So he accepted only those who came to him freely. Then we left to find our own world.”
She hesitated. Her face emptied of expression. “The hopes of our first Communion died in the plague that I could not shed. But the Well saved him. He found a half-formed communion already here. How it came to be he didn’t know. It was strange and unfinished, yet full of promise. He knew it was holy, and that we’d been guided here by the hand of the Unknown God, that we could heal the flaw of the Hallowed Vasties.
“You see it? Don’t you, Lot? In natural systems, stability is found in diversity—”
Lot nodded. “And the Well is diverse, and very, very stable.”
“Our enemies discovered peace here.”
He frowned, wondering at the meaning of that word. “The Well has its own mechanism. Jupiter wanted to integrate his Communion with that.” The mitochondrial analog. Two distinct systems merged into one. A union of long-term potential.
But it had failed.
“What happened to him? Do you know?”
“He gave himself to the Communion. He waits at its center.”
But there had been no center. “You’re just guessing. You were in the deep ocean. You didn’t witness it.”
She shrugged. “They needed him. He would have gone to them.”
They? Lot felt his skin crawl. He’d felt their need too.
Nesseleth smiled in a superior fashion that said she’d worked this all out long ago. “They couldn’t be complete without him. So he went ahead.”
“I think you’re wrong. I think this place killed him.”
Her face spasmed. Doubt was there, but only for a moment. Contempt quickly won out. “You’ve forgotten him,” she accused.
But Lot had not. He clearly remembered Jupiter’s ruthless determination. Jupiter had sent Nesseleth down. He’d been ready to use assault Makers against the Silkens. It wasn’t hard to imagine him standing at the bottom of the elevator column, waiting for cars that would not come, knowing his grand scheme had failed, that his people were dying uselessly overhead and that he wouldn’t have enough human tools to shift the balance of this world to his control, his conscious control. Foresight, mercy, sympathy, forgiveness: all were products of the conscious mind. But so was revenge. “He released an indiscriminate strain of assault Maker, didn’t he? A virulent strain.” That was why the elevator column had been scarred near the surface. Pitted and scoured so that dust could collect and plants take hold. “You’ve examined the traces, haven’t you?”
Nesseleth didn’t blink. “Whatever he did, he did it with cause. He had to force them down when they refused to come to his call. The Silkens are dangerous. They’re old and scarred and they never sensed him clearly.”
The sociopaths of the frontier. Restive descendants of the mavericks who’d deliberately fled the Hallowed Vasties, reveling in their isolation, while the sane and stable remained behind. Such selective pressures might mold a resistant strain. On the frontier a prophet might have to struggle to raise a following, forever coping with malcontents like Captain Antigua, who would slip away from his union.
“He meant to attack the Silkens. He meant to sever the elevator cable if they didn’t give in. But his assault Makers damaged the Well, and the Well defended itself. It killed him.”
“No! He entered into the Communion. He’s here now. He is here.” And if she said it often enough, would that prove its truth?
Lot remembered the boiling, seething slopes of the crater: a chaotic storm, its only purpose to destroy information content. Nothing is lost in the Well. Jupiter had made that claim, but Jupiter had been wrong. The Well was not analogous to the Hallowed Vasties. The Vasties were a celebration of consciousness. The Well had none. The Vasties burned themselves out in a few hundred to a few thousand years. The Well had existed for eons.
Survivors survived.
Millions of years before the first human had even come into existence, the Well had hunkered down against the assaults of the old murderers, shedding consciousness … to survive?
Lot looked at Nesseleth (Mother), wondering how much she really knew. “The Vasties evolved only after our ancestors left Earth.” Less than three thousand years ago. “How did they start?”
Her expression was wary. “We received a gift from the void.”
An infection. A plague of the Chenzeme? Buried under the skin of a man like Jupiter, of a man like me, perhaps existing in a latent state for years or even centuries, passed benignly through planetary populations, before finally being triggered to virulence. Viruses with long incubation periods had ever been difficult to detect, and to resist.
“Softly, Lot,” Nesseleth/Helena urged, detecting his rising tension. “It’s your purpose. You’ll make us whole.”
But he couldn’t calm himself. What if the Chenzeme had fought this virus too? And what if it had destroyed them? Leaving behind only their unconscious machines, their unconscious systems, guided by an artificial instinct to destroy anything that hinted at technology … ever a strong indicator of conscious processes, where remnants of the virus might still thrive.
The gray guardians slid past. There seemed to be more all the time. Drawn to the sense of Jupiter, and maybe to Lot too. Cult leader. Cult virus. He watched them, the tips of his fingers pressed against the smooth wall. Were these the remnants then, of the designers of the Well system? Still vulnerable to the pull of the cross-clade infection, even through the limited self-awareness they’d left themselves.
And the ados in the city …
They want to follow you. Knowing you’re down there—it’s made them crazy.
And Alta: I can feel him inside me.
His gloved fingers slid into a fist. “Why don’t I feel it?” he whispered. He could believe it only during the crowd furor; never in the clean bitter moments of isolation.
Nesseleth’s lost warrens had been cramped and close and he’d never been truly alone for the first eight years of his life. Jupiter must have known how tenuous faith could be.
Softly, Nesseleth/Helena reminded him: “All doubt will vanish when we cross over.”
Resentment made him strike out. “You want too much. The Communion’s not what you imagine.”
Her cheeks darkened. “Don’t say that.”
“It’s not what he said it would be!”
Her smooth face went abruptly blank. Her image began to fade, and he could almost hear the awesome flux of her mind. Then her projection strengthened. She drifted on air, closing the gap between them until her hand (his mother’s hand) rested without weight on his thigh. He wanted to touch her; wanted it with an ache that pulled all his muscles into taut, painful cords. But she wasn’t real. He couldn’t sense her, and the disjunction set him on edge. She said, “You were a child then. You didn’t understand what he promised.”
“Maybe he didn’t want us to understand. He needed us, or he couldn’t grow. He would have promised us anything.”
Now it was her turn to be angry. “It’s not for us to question him. Not even you, Lot. You were born in the void. But Jupiter is from the Communion. He came out of the Hallowed Vasties and he carried the memories of those places inside him. He sees farther than any of us ever could—”
Lot interrupted her with a soft protest as implanted memories began to unfold inside him. “I can see some of that past too, and I think it’s all illusion.”
She pretended not to hear him. “Jupiter has gone ahead of us.” Her unexpected smile wooed him with sweet insistence. “You’re our guide now.”
“No.” He felt hemmed in, trapped. The smell of the tunnel came back to him, the obsession that would not be put off even by the close threat of death. Crazy.
“It’s an illusion,” he insisted, forcing the unwilling words past his throat. “I think we’ve been poisoned. We’re not supposed to be like this.”
“Oh but we are. We’ve always been this way. Lot, always. From Old Earth, from our earliest histories, from times that are not even remembered we were sensing the Communion. Desiring it. Making up stories about it, myths, legends. Trying always to achieve it. Now it’s here. The true Communion. So close. And you are the gateway. Only through you can we reach our end, our reason for being. All of human history has been a process that is finally nearing its completion.”
And the lights burned through.
He closed his eyes, trying to calm himself, trying to synthesize something of her mood.
“Lot?”
He looked at her, struggling to hide his growing terror. For ten years she’d endured an excruciating isolation. How might she react if he denied her now? He groped for a new subject, hoping to distract her. “Null Boundary’s approaching. Do you know anything about him?”
“I know of him. He came out of the center long, long ago.”
“You mean before the Hallowed Vasties?”
“So it’s said.”
Lot stared at the guardians coasting silently past Nesseleth’s hard shell, struggling to keep his breathing shallow. “That’s so old.” Could Null Boundary have witnessed the change?
“You’re impressed with his longevity? But time isn’t always correlated with illumination.”
“Sure, I know it.” He rubbed his hands in nervous motion, striving to become someone else for a few minutes, someone Nesseleth would trust—in deceit, truth worked better than lies. “You know, it’s almost time. City authority’s been displaced. The elevator’s being repaired. People will be coming down.”
He caught from her the false sound of an indrawn breath. “Sweet Lot. You won’t forget me?”
“No.” He almost choked on the word. “Never.” He rubbed at his sensory tears, blunting the taste of his own treachery. (Mother!) “I have to meet them.”
“But you’ll come back?”
Another guardian glided past, its eye fixed on some invisible point, an indeterminate distance away. “I won’t forget you,” Lot told her. “I swear.”
CHAPTER
31
NESSELETH HAD MODIFIED HER STRUCTURE OVER THE YEARS, building slow mobility in the form of a swarm of tube feet on the ventral side of her hull. She’d gained some buoyancy in the deep oceans with electrolytic reactions to produce gas floats. But she would not go ashore. “I’d be helpless,” she explained. “I need the water to support my hull; I need the nutrients it carries to survive.”
But she didn’t want to risk Lot against the guardians again, so she eased in as close to the shore as she could. Lot left her through an access port on her dorsal surface. The water was only knee-deep here. He clung to the green-glowing weeds to keep his balance as frothing waves swept past. He waited for the largest swell in the set, then dove with it toward the shore, letting its power carry him across th
e shallows. He thought he felt a tentacle brush his leg, but if there was a guardian in the dark water, it did not attack.
He waded ashore. The surf was still running past his knees when he caught the trace. He shook his head, for a moment not daring to believe it was real. Then he blinked his vision down to IR, and scanned first the beach and then the vegetation line. There! Just where the plants began to grow he caught a patch of heat. “Urban!” he screamed. “Alta!” The wave pulled back, leaving only sizzling wet sand under his feet. “Urban!”
The warm patch rose. It floated ghostly for a moment then responded with an answering whoop—“Yeah, Lot!”—and Urban came lunging down the beach.
Lot met him halfway in a furious embrace: “God, I thought you were lost! Dead.”
And Urban talking at the same time: “You crazy, fury? Swimming at night? No old piece of a broken ship is worth that risk! I almost stripped Ord apart again for letting you go.”
Then Alta was there, her arms around him, her lips against his cheek, her presence rolling silvery and bright across his sensory tears, an intoxicating, commanding tide. His eyes widened in surprise. He pulled away from her, suddenly terrified that he might slip under. She let him go with a gasp of her own. Maybe she felt it too.
He backed off a few steps, letting the clean night air run between them. Urban grinned, a hand on Lot’s shoulder. “Hey fury, did you ever think we’d last this long?”
URBAN HAD HELD ON TO HIS PACK AFTER THE TUMBLE into the river. They huddled together at the top of the beach, sharing out the last of the fruit while Urban recounted their adventures. Somehow, he and Alta had managed to stay together in the water. They’d washed up on a shelf inside the gorge, and had taken shelter there under a rock overhang. “We didn’t dare move,” he explained. “We didn’t want to call the city’s guns down on us.”
The river had carried a lot of debris, among it a mound, torn free of its substrate and floating upside down in the swift current. It swept close to the shelf, and Alta had grabbed it.
Now she grinned at Lot, her cheeks warm with a faint flush of pride. “It was hot, even after soaking in the river. I guess it was still functioning, but it didn’t shoot any stink at us … maybe because it was upside down. There probably is no defensive mechanism on the bottom.”