by Linda Nagata
Lot swallowed hard and looked away, made guilty by his doubts.
“Tell me,” Nikko urged. The others waited too.
Lot drew a deep breath, groping for words that would describe his vague suspicions. “It’s the Well. It classifies Sypaon as the enemy, right? So it keeps her neutralized. But it hasn’t done that to me, or to you, Nikko. She says she’s human. But the Silkens couldn’t even talk to her before I came.”
“You translated from the Chenzeme?”
“Sooth,” Kona said cautiously. “He was the link.”
“Where did you learn it?” Lot asked.
Nikko lifted his chin, while the cloak on his shoulders went utterly still. “From the weapon that I mated with in the void.”
Lot shuddered. He could remember asking Sypaon, What have you learned? And her laughing answer: Evil.
“You survived it,” Kona said softly, wonderingly.
“It survived too.” The way Nikko said it: as if that alone constituted another crime. “I can destroy this one, before its self-repair is finished.”
Revenge. It was a human aspect, a facet of consciousness unknown to the Well or to the plundering servants of the Chenzeme. Jupiter had unleashed his assault Makers on the column, to no real purpose except revenge.
Lot shook his head. “Let it go,” he urged Nikko softly. “Sypaon can’t use the ring. It’s harmless, and it’s not worth dying for.”
“I wasn’t planning on dying.”
Urban shifted slightly. “Then what are you going to do?”
NIKKO ACTIVATED THE CHAMBER WALLS, providing them a full view beyond the ship. Null Boundary skimmed past the Well, brushing the upper atmosphere. Nikko informed them that they’d safely passed the elevator column, though Lot never saw it. Sudden acceleration slammed him back against the soft gel image wall at the chamber’s aft end. He hung there like a fly trapped on the paddle of a sundew, struggling to breathe.
Beyond Nikko’s hovering figure, he watched an image of the tumbling swan burster. Sypaon must have finally guessed their purpose. On Lot’s shoulder, Ord stirred. “Message, Lot.”
“No.”
Sypaon ignited the ring just as it began to fully open to a circle in their perspective. It glowed brilliant white as it entered the excited state that would feed its gamma-ray burst. Brighter and brighter it grew, its light spreading in a twisted sheet across the dark interior, until its luminescence surpassed the display’s parameters and the optical system was forced to translate to safer artificial colors. Lot could see a spot of darkness at its center.
Nikko’s worry moldered in the chamber. “It will fire on us.”
“It can’t fire,” Lot whispered, past the constricting grip of acceleration.
“You deserve it, you bastard,” Urban croaked.
Nikko did not deny it.
The ring loomed before them, growing larger until soon it overwhelmed the scale of the display. The spot of darkness at the ring’s center also seemed to expand in size as they drew nearer. Null Boundary’s prow was aimed at its center. Were they going to pass through? Lot had not known that was possible. The space inside a ring was warped by severe gravitational gradients… .
But the central eye? He knew starlight could pass through there unmolested. But could the same be said for Null Boundary?
“Message, Lot,” Ord repeated.
Lot closed his eyes, trying to calm his pounding heart. “Okay then! Say it.”
He flinched as Sypaon’s voice hissed in his ear: “My purpose is satisfied if you die with me. Come forward. The geometry will tear you apart.”
Lot looked at Nikko, but his image didn’t waver.
“She’s right,” Clemantine warned. “You’re going to kill us.”
“I did try to avoid picking you up,” Nikko reminded.
“A small courtesy gone wrong.”
“Not for the first time.”
“We’ll live if we keep dead center,” Kona said.
The eye was a circle of flat geometry. Lot had seen stars shining there during evenings in the city that now seemed long ago. But the eye was also a rotating target. Nikko would have to thread the ship exactly through its middle.
The dark circle loomed before them, continuing to expand until it dominated the image wall. Faint stars became visible within that space. The ship’s hull groaned in a dark metal voice as they entered into it. “By the Unknown God,” Clemantine said. “I can feel it.”
Lot could feel the presence of the ring too. It grabbed him, slamming him across the aft wall to the chamber’s right side. Clemantine came down on top of him. He felt caught in the bite of an invisible vise clamped across the length of his body, all his muscles, his organs, and his nerves crushed and ready to snap as Null Boundary brushed the ring’s plunging gradients.
A holographic image of the ship suddenly appeared in the center of the chamber. Nikko loomed over it, watching it closely, waiting… .
“Now!” Nikko shouted in a distorted voice that seemed to enter only into Lot’s right ear.
Null Boundary shuddered. On the holographic image, Lot saw the flash of hundreds of small explosions all around the ship’s hull. Null Boundary’s hide and all his outer insulation shattered into thousands of tiny pieces that rocketed away from the ship in a storm of white-hot debris, leaving behind a glowing red, but intact, inner hull.
The crushing pressure climbed. Lot felt as if his lungs had flattened, as if his brain had flowed over to one side of his skull. The air that pooled around him moved liquid slow against his cheeks. His eyes had distorted too. The displays all blurred as the jettisoned debris rocketed outward, accelerating down the ring’s twisting gravitational gradient. Lot watched the debris shift into red, then infrared as it sped toward impact with the burster’s active surface. It hit, and beneath the crushing energy of impact the Chenzeme cells that coated the ring flared into plasma. Beyond the core chamber, alarms screamed overload as Null Boundary was swathed in an expanding bubble of radiation. The image walls flushed white. Lot told himself the ship’s core would shelter them from the worst of it. Then the wavefront was past, and a starfield could be seen again across the prow, veiled by the milky light of Kheth’s nebula.
As Null Boundary passed beyond the ring’s grip, the crushing pressure vanished, leaving only the relatively mild push of the ship’s continuing acceleration. “By the Unknown God,” Clemantine whispered again, shifting far enough to the side that Lot could peel himself free of the wall.
“And damn all the Chenzeme,” Kona added.
Lot rubbed at his arms. His muscles felt numb, indicating his medical Makers had gone to work on the radiation damage. He caught sight of the aft image wall.
Behind them, the swan burster still rotated from zero to one against the gleaming background of the blue-green Well. But its shimmering silver surface had been burned to volcanic red—a red-rimmed eye slowly closing over a plain of twisted darkness. Lot watched it, feeling himself set loose, adrift in the core as Null Boundary ceased to accelerate.
IN NATURE, THERE WERE SO MANY STRATEGIES for survival. The mitochondrial analog was only one, yet through the fusion of Chenzeme and human it had given rise to Lot, and Nikko, and even Sypaon, though for her it had failed. Though the ring still existed—its charred hoop still enclosing an inexplicable circle of twisted space-time—the Chenzeme cells that had been its mind and motivation were gone, and Sypaon was gone with them. The burster was a dead artifact, shining only dully with reflected light.
Why Sypaon had to die was still not clear to Lot. But perhaps there never were any real reasons. Survivors survived. And who could predict what combinations of traits would slide past the twin filters of rogue chance, and dire necessity?
Lot wasn’t at all sure of his own success. He didn’t even know how success should be measured amid the endless chain of disasters that marked the progress of life. Maybe success never could be measured except in the transcendent power of a moment, the grace of an hour, or a day, short
spans of hallowed time like brief poems, sparkling gems set in the flowing matter of space-time. There is no finish line. Only a collection of small victories, and the choice to go on. Choice was a privilege not shared by the Well or the Chenzeme marauders—
—and perhaps not even by the magnificently unbalanced human inhabitants of the frontier. Free will might be only an illusion generated by the unseen selective events within the human subconscious. But Lot chose to believe it was not. It seemed the ado thing to do.
EPILOGUE
RADIATION HAD DAMAGED THE FARSIDE OF THE WELL. There’d been a limited defensive reaction there, but it hadn’t spread to the city. The ados seemed chastened by the swan burster’s demise. The exodus to the planet had stopped. Negotiations had started. Kona conceded that they might tap the planet’s resources after all, if they went about it carefully. He said this as Null Boundary carried them ever farther from the city.
The ship’s solenoids had been damaged during its sprint through the nebula. Nikko had chosen to conserve his limited fuel reserves. Null Boundary coasted now, on a trajectory that would eventually carry it out of the system, while packs of repair Makers set about the task of reconstruction.
Lot asked permission to stay. He didn’t see that anyone had a choice about it, but it seemed polite to ask. Nikko shrugged. “If you want to take the chance.” With the ship’s insulation gone, the outer halls were exposed to a constant sleet of hard radiation. So Nikko promised to convert sections of the cold-storage facilities into housing.
Kona seemed satisfied with the arrangements. He extended a hand to Lot. “You’re free now. For a while.” Lot clasped his hand, though he couldn’t make sense of Kona’s bittersweet mood. “I wish you luck, son. And stealth. There are still Chenzeme weapons out there.”
Lot’s confusion must have shown on his face.
“We’re going back,” Kona explained gently. “Null Boundary has the facilities to generate the code.”
“Sooth.” Lot nodded in understanding. Kona’s atrium could assemble a copy of his persona and translate it to electromagnetic code. Lot knew it was possible for Kona to do the same thing with his physical structure. Kona, Clemantine and Urban could return to Silk on a data stream that would be preserved in storage until new physical copies could be prepared. But only information would be transferred. The matter that had formed itself into the man before him would not go anywhere. “You’ll have to stay here too,” Lot pointed out.
Kona shook his head. “I’ve always had an aversion to a bifurcate existence. With only this one version of myself, I’ve already been at the root of too many disasters.”
Lot nodded. Then he looked to Urban and Clemantine. “And you?”
Clemantine grinned. “Those charismata are wonderfully persuasive things.” Lot didn’t believe her for a moment. “I’m going back with Kona, son. But I’m also staying here—if Nikko will have me.”
Nikko’s image shrugged, as if it meant nothing to him—though Lot could tell that wasn’t true. Nikko had been alone for a long time.
Urban shifted uneasily. Lot could taste his anxiety, and guessed what was coming. But for once he guessed wrong. Urban stunned them all when he announced: “Daddy, I’m not going back at all.”
Kona’s shock was a palpable rain against Lot’s skin.
“There’s no place for me in the city,” Urban said defensively. “You know it.”
“We have the planet now.”
“That’s not enough.”
The argument went on for over an hour, but in the end it made no difference. Their parting was bitter, and Lot held himself to blame, though Clemantine assured him he was not.
Several days after Kona had gone, Nikko startled them by appearing in physical form. He announced that most of the repair work on the coils had been done, and he invited them to walk the hull with him.
Lot was surprised to learn that Nikko required no skin suit: his scaled hide kept him intact under vacuum. The short membranous cloak that grew on his shoulders displayed its purpose by rolling up over his nose and mouth, where it served as an organ of respiration.
They emerged through a small lock onto what was now the outer hull. This had been an inner wall before Nikko’s assault on the swan burster. It had the look of a virgin surface, bearing none of Null Boundary’s fabled scars.
Spurning a safety line, Nikko set out first, skating from handhold to handhold on his long prehensile toes. There was no rotation to contend with. Still, Lot preferred to be cautious. He anchored himself with a long tether secured to a handhold near the lock. Urban and Clemantine clipped to the same line; then they set out after Nikko.
Null Boundary still coasted within the nebula. It loomed behind them as a wispy, white presence. But they were nearing its edge. Ahead of them, beyond the sheltering span of the working ramscoop, the nebula was hardly visible. That was the direction called swan. There, a plethora of stars blazed against the dark molecular clouds that traced the inner edge of the galaxy’s Orion Arm.
“Turn around,” Nikko said. He spoke through his atrium, his voice arriving over the skin suit’s comm-system.
Lot had almost caught up with him by this time. He anchored himself with a second tether, then pushed gently at the hull, so that he rose in a slow ascent above the plane of the ship. Urban and Clemantine had fallen several yards behind him. He could see them, silhouetted against the nebula.
“Now,” Nikko said. In magnificent silence, a blue fire stabbed from Null Boundary’s distant stern, a fusion torch that sliced ruthlessly through the filmy nebula, burning dust, and the history bound up in it.
For a while they watched in silence. Their acceleration was almost too small to notice at first, but gradually it began to mount. Finally, Urban’s voice came doubtfully over the comm. “I don’t understand. The magnetic coils are sweeping a huge path through the nebula, and the jets are vaporizing even more material. Why do the governors tolerate that level of damage?”
Lot frowned. He’d never thought about it in quite this way before, but the nebula must be an almost irresistible target to a ramship. With an abundance of raw materials ready to harvest, and hydrogen for fuel, what ship could resist an investigation? He’d always seen the nebula as defensive, but it could also be interpreted as a lure.
“Probably, the Well recognizes scales of disaster,” Clemantine mused. “The nebula’s bigger and simpler than the planet, so it takes more damage to solicit a reaction.”
Lot shook his head, unsatisfied with that suggestion. “The best way to defend the Well would be to simply disassemble any approaching ship. Break it down to dust.”
“You couldn’t do that soon enough with anything moving at relativistic velocities,” Urban said.
Nikko chuckled darkly. “Anything moving at relativistic velocities would burn itself up in micro-collisions on the system’s edge.”
Lot squinted at the milky haze behind the ship. “So maybe this is a sundew.”
“What?” Urban asked.
Lot’s hand swept in an expansive gesture. “Like a sundew attracts flies by offering nectar, the nebula attracts ships.”
“A sundew eats flies. The nebula doesn’t eat ships.”
“But it captured the ring.”
“One ship in thirty million years.”
Clemantine added her agreement. “Most Chenzeme weapons attack on a hyperbolic orbit. Sypaon’s ring was probably the exception, culled because it assumed a circular orbit before attacking. Anyway, Nesseleth and Null Boundary were both able to leave the system.”
“And they both returned.”
“For their own reasons.”
Lot nodded in grudging agreement. “Sooth.”
Still, there was something tantalizing in this image… .
His eyes widened, as insight flooded him. “It’s infesting them!” He turned around to look at Nikko. “The Well is infesting the Chenzeme weaponry—and not just those weapons that come through the nebula.” He recalled his experience with
Sypaon, when she showed him the workings of the ring, and let him feel the ecstatic mingling of alien cells in a multiplex information dump as the robotic weapons met one another in the void. “The dust could attack any information system. Infest it with Well protocols. When the weapon meets its own kind in the void, the information is spread—and spread again at the next meeting, and the next.”
Urban sounded unconvinced. “But the Chenzeme must have developed defenses against viral pirates.”
“I know I have,” Nikko said in a cynical voice.
Lot countered that: “You’re not Chenzeme.”
For some reason, Nikko found that funny. He laughed, while a blush warmed Lot’s cheeks. Lot turned back toward the nebula. Still, he was determined to make his point. “Think about it,” he urged. “Evolution runs at a fast pace in the Well. Variation is forced; clades are blended. Keys capable of corrupting the Chenzeme system have already evolved, and they continue to evolve.”
“But the Chenzeme are still out there,” Nikko pointed out coolly.
“Or their weapons anyway.” It was an important distinction.
“Right,” Urban agreed. “They’re here … in the Chenzeme intersection.”
“Meaning, not in the Hallowed Vasties?” Clemantine asked.
Lot could see bright blue reflections from the fusion torch as Urban turned around. “Yeah. So maybe we live on a border, where the Well is taming the Chenzeme threat.”
Cautiously, Lot nodded. “That’s what Jupiter believed.” He hesitated, remembering. Jupiter had said the Well belonged to the peacemakers. “Maybe he was right.” It pleased him to think Jupiter had seen that truth, even if others eluded him. He’d wanted to find shelter, a sanctuary from the failures of the Hallowed Vasties and the lingering evil of the Chenzeme. He’d been trying. And maybe that wasn’t enough excuse for what had happened, but it was better than nothing.
Clemantine had resumed her crawl across the hull. “New populations of weaponry must still be coming into this area, from some other direction,” she said.