Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  Nothingness.

  He cannot remember anything for a troubling long time. Then light again, thousands of lives his now—Jupiter was right to flee—here in the Well he will become something new. Already he’s begun to mix with the alien traces gathered here. He sends exploring fingers into the mindless ocean of biodata, becoming an entity greater than the Vasties ever knew—

  A black spike smashes into his world.

  He can see for millions of miles and feel the tides of the Well run fast around him but he can’t see his own core. Heat cuts him. The links unravel around him, tearing great sections of his mind away. A distant wind gushes howling in an animal voice and he is going blind. He would clutch at the core of his being but has no hands no mouth no eyes no senses at all only raw exposed nerves laid out over vasties and being trod upon pain driving him out into hopeless separation all sense of Communion fading fading and gone—

  —and Lot can hear his own voice screaming, startled that the sound of it is coming from his throat until a moment later he feels the pain and understands it, curling flesh, snapping threads, his skin peeling away, the nerves exposed to hands touching him, clots of darkness, every contact an agony, lifting him, dragging him, the mud like a bank of knives under his legs he had almost melted away. “Oh God Urban stop it!”

  “Lot?”

  It’s Urban’s voice. It hurts his ears. He can hear the unsynchronized panic of two hearts and that hurts too. Urban’s breath on his cheek: hurts. He blinks hard and the starlight sears, though it’s muted behind a watery film.

  “Lot?” Urban says again, his voice high and frantic.

  Lot thinks his skull might split. “God, don’t speak,” he begs.

  “You’re back.”

  Urban’s holding him in a half-sitting position. They are sprawled in the mud. Sypaon scuttles in staccato time all around a large mound, snatching up from the ground writhing, wormy things and tucking them into the gelatinous tissue of her arms. Her warden body casts a dancing red glow on the mound, revealing the recessed imprint of a spread-eagled man.

  “Alta,” Lot whispers. That imprint is his own shape. He knows it. The impression left by his body. There are fine wormy filaments trailing out of it. Other filaments emerge from the ground near him. They seek him like slim, hungry, blind worms. They move. Peristaltic motion pushing them gradually closer. The most vigorous of them tracks a scar his heel made in the mud when Urban dragged him.

  Urban watches this one too. Lot feels him stiffen; a swift intake of breath. Clot of darkness. Lot twists around to look at him. “I know your kind.”

  Dark and empty. Flaws in the Communion. In the Hallowed Vasties men and women like him had been driven out or destroyed.

  Urban lifts his hand. Glinting in it is the warden’s capsule.

  Lot is aware again of his sloughing, burning skin, his exposed nerve ends and he understands now that he’s been wounded by the assault Maker, that Urban has used it against him. He cringes. But Urban reaches past him, squeezing a fine jet of the stuff at the closest tendril. It recoils, bubbling, the wounded section suddenly amputated.

  “Come on, fury,” Urban says. “They’re hunting you now. You have to get away. Get clear.”

  “Yes,” Sypaon says, pulling up a long filament, tucking it into her arm. “You must flee.” Her many eyes glow like tiny embers.

  Lot shakes his head, unable to deal with things. “Alta,” he whispers again.

  “Shut up!” Urban screams, an hysterical edge on his voice. “Just shut up and do what I tell you!”

  Lot is on his feet now. His body’s numb, so he knows the painkillers have kicked in. He tries to do as he’s told. He walks. Urban keeps him balanced, steers him. Sypaon must be with them too, because her red light shows the glinting marsh water, the reeds, the mud under his feet disturbed by the wriggles of emergent tendrils, a communal network like a vast fungus underground. Finally, he’s stumbling on beach sand. It’s dry under his feet and apparently uninhabited. The swan burster rises, a bright round oh of surprise tut-tutting over his pitiful condition and some long time later Urban finally lets him fall to the sand, the grains against his lips and in his mouth, tasting sand, scattered grains unrelated to one another except by proximity, shed from the greater mass of some volcano or continental shelf. Individuals, on the beach.

  CHAPTER

  32

  OVER THE YEARS, LOT HAD WATCHED HUNDREDS OF TINY FLIES alight on the glistening paddles of the sundews that he grew in his breather. Never in all that time had he been moved to pull one of the mindless creatures from the sweet, entrapping secretions. What would be the point? The body could not come away intact.

  He awoke to daylight. Kheth was already high, its fierce light burning against his exposed skin. He sat up slowly, his muscles feeling peculiarly distant and heavy. Sand had stuck to tiny sores all over his body. He had no way to check how much interior damage had been done, but judging from the numb state of his peripheral senses he guessed that it had been significant.

  He looked around. The ocean was calm, small waves breaking in whispers against the shore. He could see Nesseleth’s long silhouette under the green water. Far down the beach, Urban pitched rocks across the reef. Sypaon stood with him, a vague figure, the color of sand.

  Urban’s pack was close at hand. Ord scuttled out from under a small-leaved shrub and pulled a bottle of water from it. Lot drank half, watching Urban’s distant figure as he bent to pick up a pebble, turned to pitch it into the water, bent to pick up another… .

  Lot sensed a sullen fury in his tight, choppy movements. Dread nestled in his chest. He looked at Ord. “Where’s Alta?” he asked, his voice hardly more than a dry croak.

  “Mistress Alta’s presence is not detected.”

  Gone over.

  He nodded, unsurprised. He’d known it already in some part of his mind. He could remember some of it. He knew he’d tried to go with her. He should have gone with her. That was why Jupiter had brought him here. It was why he’d been made.

  They were waiting for him.

  Alta and Gent and all the Old Silkens, caught in an unfocused, rolling consciousness, thoughts sustained for mere minutes at a time.

  He put the water bottle down and crawled across the sand to his suit. It was crumpled and covered with mud. Vaguely, he wondered if it had been Urban or Ord who’d retrieved it. He wormed his way into it without getting up. Winces of pain broke through the deadened sense of his muscles as he twisted and squirmed, sand scraping against his skin. He’d just sealed the front seam when motion caught his eye.

  He turned, to see Alta only an arm’s reach away. She crouched beside him, her body a faint blue nimbus, hardly visible in the strong daylight. Only it wasn’t her, not really. The eyes were hers, and the breasts, but the nose was only a suggestion. And she had male genitalia, though incomplete.

  He shrank away from her, sliding over the warm sand. Her expression made his skin crawl: she seemed to stare past him, as if she saw something coming that remained invisible to him. “Apart,” she said softly, in the Old Silk accent he’d heard before.

  He trembled, trying to hold himself aloof. The blue suspension that formed her was tenuous at best. It could burst at any moment, spraying him with a toxin that would force him under the skin. Why did he resist that? It was what he’d been made for.

  But made by whom?

  A gift from the void. His kind had come out of the void. Maybe they were only another weapon of the ancient war—or maybe they were the enemy. Death masquerading as salvation. The infection might take millennia to run its course. But what did that matter? The cult virus had abided eons since the demise of the old murderers. A few thousand years must count as nothing. Yet the Hallowed Vasties would burn themselves out in that span, briefly glorious, but in the end gone, gone, gone.

  He glanced at the phantom beside him. Ecstatic death was still death—and an ending—in a universe that might be infinite. How could he support that?

  Ther
e is no place of permanence in the Universe, no golden existence, no finish line. We live on the edge of chaos, with all the turbulence that implies… .

  “Hark,” he said softly, rousing the suit’s DI. “Seal the hood?”

  “Energy reserves do not support the action,” the suit informed him.

  Lot kept his voice carefully unconcerned, not knowing how much intent the phantom might perceive. “Emergency override, then. Do it now.”

  Ord watched him, a peculiar expression on its face.

  “Are you sure?” the suit queried.

  “Now.”

  “Now,” the phantom echoed as the hood lapped swiftly up around Lot’s tangled hair. Some of the matted skeins fell outside its reach. It couldn’t seal. The phantom looked directly at him, its color deepening, just as it had that night in the crater.

  Lot turned away, groping in his suit pocket, hunting for his copy of the warden’s capsule. He found it, just as a sharp pop! behind him announced the phantom’s dissolution. “No!” he roared, and scrambled away, squeezing the capsule so that its mist sprayed indiscriminately behind him.

  For a moment the world was depicted in silver: the ocean waves, the darting shapes of the guardians in the water, the miniature dunes that raced up and slammed against his face, and Ord, always before golden, melting now in a pool of pure silver radiance, flowing down over his face in a solid mask that blocked the air but kept out the poisons too.

  Lot got his feet under him and ran. He couldn’t see or hear or smell anything, but he could feel the sand sliding under his feet, and then he was splashing in the water. He pulled up sharply. Ord slid off his face, re-forming neatly against his chest while he gasped, drawing in great lungfuls of clean sea air.

  Urban was racing toward him down the beach. Sypaon’s shadow flitted across the sand as if she were dissolving then reappearing in frantic repetition. Lot looked back at a line of blackened, steaming vegetation, but no sign of the phantom remained. Apart.

  If it had to be that way.

  “Lot!” Urban skidded to a stop in the shallow wave wash. His shoulders heaved as he looked from Lot to Ord, now clinging contentedly at Lot’s shoulder.

  Lot knocked his hood back. “We have to get out of the Well,” he said, as he gathered up his hair and tucked it neatly behind his neck.

  “You’re a little late, fury. David’s coming down.”

  Lot’s hands froze in the act of pulling up the hood. “He’s got the tracks rebuilt?”

  “He said so. They’re organizing supplies at the top.”

  “When did you talk to him?”

  “Maybe half an hour ago. He’s got it bad, Lot. Worse than Alta.”

  Sure. Jupiter hadn’t left his trace to interfere with the loyalties of the Silken ados. “We have to stop him.”

  “Yeah, fury? You know how?”

  Lot hesitated, at a loss.

  Urban said, “I told him what happened to Alta. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t let me talk to Kona, and Ord can’t reach the old man. Sypaon can’t either. If you don’t control these crazies, Lot, we’re all going to die.”

  Control them? How? He couldn’t even control himself when he was around them. He looked to Sypaon, hoping for some bit of wisdom.

  Her pointillistic expression was stern. He remembered her last night, collecting fragments of the communal fibers. “Sometimes we forget to ask who the Chenzeme were fighting,” she said.

  Lot took a step back, acutely conscious of the warden’s capsule still in his hand. Had she guessed? “Jupiter said they fought themselves.”

  “Perhaps. Or perhaps it was something of their own creation?”

  The cult virus. A gift from the void, a parasite that had lain in wait, patiently seeking a new host, since the Chenzeme vanished millions of years ago. Fear sweat jammed like wires through his pores. Sypaon had once declared herself at war.

  She watched his growing panic, her mouths moving in slow asynchrony—until abruptly, her expression gentled. “We should know these things, if we hope to understand them.”

  Lot felt as if he understood too much already. “I need to get off this world. It’s the only way to stop it.”

  Urban touched his elbow. “Null Boundary’s coming in.”

  Sooth. Lot lifted his chin, remembering his vision of the great ship sliding in through the veils of the nebula. Null Boundary had felt wrong, but maybe that only marked him as an enemy of the Communion. Scarred and ancient and older than the Hallowed Vasties … his crew mysteriously gone. Did he know of the cult? Had he survived it?

  “Ord!” Lot snapped, suddenly desperate to make good his escape. “Tell David to bring a car down now. We need a way back to the city.”

  “There’s no need for that,” Sypaon said. “They’re already here.”

  SYPAON SEEMED WILLING TO DO WHATEVER she could to help them. She’d already assumed control of a second warden, walking it into the terminal building. Now it stood looking up at an elevator car stalled some eight hundred feet above the valley floor, where the tracks had been wrecked by deep scarring on the column. Back on the beach, she described the scene to Lot and Urban. “They have the doors open, though no one has descended yet. A device is being deployed. An aircraft. This first car carries almost three hundred individuals. You must stay away from them. They shed dangerous stimulants—”

  “Message, Lot,” Ord interrupted. “From David. Real time.”

  Lot nodded reluctantly. “Let’s hear it.”

  “Lot!” David’s voice danced with enthusiasm. “Lot, we’re down! Almost down. There’s more track damage than we anticipated, but that’ll be fixed in a few minutes. Half the city’s poised to come down behind us. Lot, we’ve won.”

  Lot drew in a shaky breath. Urban gave him a warning look. He nodded, closing his eyes. “It’s up to us, David. Jupiter’s gone.”

  “Into the Communion?”

  Lot breathed slowly, deeply. He had to make it sound right … and nothing convinced like the truth. “No, David. I’ve been under, and Jupiter’s not there. He’s dead. He failed. He let anger get him. There’s no place for anger within the Communion.”

  Ecstatic death.

  David didn’t answer for a moment. Maybe it hadn’t occurred to him yet that the Communion could be anything but automatic nirvana. When he did respond, doubt had crept into his voice. “But you can show us the path?”

  “I need to be with you.” The words came out in a rush.

  “No—” Sypaon started to object. He raised a hand to hush her. He did not want to be with David, or with anybody else who was susceptible to the cult virus that he carried, manufactured nirvana, short-term plan … and that meant almost everybody except the few, dark souls like Urban.

  But David misread his mood. “We want to come get you, Lot. We manufactured a plane from out of the archives.”

  “Good, David. Good. You’ve planned well. Send it down to us, then.”

  “Right, right. Uh, is Urban still with you?”

  Lot tensed, wondering exactly what Urban had said to David earlier that morning. “We’ve had a rough time,” Lot said.

  David’s voice was suddenly wary. “He’s not one of us.”

  Lot met Urban’s tense gaze. “You’re wrong, David. Urban’s fallout from the Hallowed Vasties, just like me.” An unconvinced silence followed, and Lot knew he’d stumbled badly. So he fell back on arrogance. “Send the plane, David.”

  “Sure, Lot. Right away.” But his voice was flat, a poor mask for his suspicions.

  Lot jerked an angry hand across his throat, signaling Ord to cut the transmission. “Shit.”

  “That plane won’t get here empty,” Urban predicted.

  Sypaon said, “They’re launching it now. You must avoid direct contact with them.”

  “Can you communicate with the DI that’s piloting it?” Lot asked her.

  “No. It’s not listed in the city registry.”

  “David’ll have exclusive codes,” Urban growled. “Anyway
, it doesn’t matter. So long as it gets us to the elevator column, we’ve got a chance.”

  “They won’t let you on the plane.”

  “They’ll do what you tell them.”

  Lot shook his head. “More than the cult virus has come down to me. I’ve been remembering things out of the Hallowed Vasties. David’s right. You’re not one of us. And when they feel that, you won’t last.”

  Urban stomped off a few steps, muttering obscenities, more angry than scared. Lot followed after him. “It’s not their fault,” he said. “They can’t help the way they feel. I’ve put that on them.”

  Urban turned around, his temper exploding. “So they can’t help it? They’ll kill me and sacrifice you and we just go along with it?”

  Already, Lot thought he could hear the buzz of the plane’s engines. “I think we can fool them for a while. We’re the same size, aren’t we? Almost the same build. Put your hood on, darken the lenses. Let them guess who’s who.”

  Sypaon nodded in approval. “This could protect you for a necessary interval.”

  “You think they’ll be that patient?”

  “I won’t leave them any choice,” Lot said. I’ll just tell them the truth: that I’m on the edge.” He couldn’t see it now. He couldn’t feel it. Still he knew the Communion was near, growing stronger and more coherent every time he entered it. Next time it might not let him go.

  Great cult leader. He shook his head, knowing he was as vulnerable as any ado. He caught them with his charismata. They caught him with their silvery faith. It was a feedback reaction, notably devoid of choice. “If they don’t want an early meltdown, they’re going to have to put up with my eccentricities.”

  Urban frowned. His gaze cut away. “So then. Tell Ord to get clear, or it’ll give you away.”

  The droning of the plane was suddenly loud. Lot reached for his hood. He pulled it up over his head and down across his face.

  The suit spoke in a disapproving voice. “Without further supplies, the rebreather function has an estimated life of forty-two minutes.”

  Urban had fifty-three. “That doesn’t leave us much time to convince them to let us on the cars,” Lot said. He could see the glitter of the plane in the bright light of late morning.