THE BURNING HEART OF NIGHT
Page 55
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Kthulah flinched, but knew the truth of it. He was the enemy who had united these foes. He, the Keeper of the Roots of Wisdom, Radiance of the Pack of Gnosis. He, who believed in winning wars by not fighting battles. What irony!
The bitter smell of charred ghutzu stung Kthulah's mouth and eyes as the barge drew up against the skrag. The traitor Tlalok and the blank-one Jenette stood foremost on its blackened shore. Tlalok bowed his head, not in submission, but in the respect one hunter gives another, and his Khafra followed suit. As did Jenette, who motioned for her blank-ones and No-pact to do the same.
So many noble passions, Kthulah reflected. So many misguided failures. Was Kthulah himself one of those?
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Karr stood as close to the center of his ship as any human could stand without actually being incinerated. Here, striated rust and feeder cores the color of ivory branched out from the curving swell of the fugueship's fusion furnace, carrying current that fed both broken sections of its superconductor core.
It was a simple thing to do, really, Karr tried to tell himself. Just aim and fire.
This was probably his all fault, too. Probably, Karr reasoned, the superconductor core naturally failed during the spawning process. Probably that was why Feral prophecy demanded four radiances and not five. But Pilot Lindal Karr had always paid particular attention to the superconductor and its conduit, since without it Long Reach could not generate a ramfield or feed, and therefore not fulfill its destiny, wandering between stars. Even now Karr could see the heads of many non-resorbing qi needles, which he had implanted over the course of hundreds of years. They were still doing their job by stopping any deterioration of the superconductor dead in its tracks.
It was a thing no Pilot should ever have to do.
It would kill his ship. He understood that as strongly as any human could understand a concept. The only question was how soon? Would the spawning proceed? Would the baby fugueships be saved? He did not know.
Trust.
Karr raised the Gattler and fired. A cutting beam shot out, wide and just long enough to sever the superconductor connections. Two measured sweeps and it was over. Dissolved. Rendered ineffective. Somewhere in the distance, Karr heard a resounding crack, as of a large amount of electricity discharging. Long Reach did not even shudder, so he paid it no attention.
LIII
Now comes the time
When all bonds
Are broken
And all Pacts made anew.
—the Judges of Gnosis
Lightning sparked in the daytime sky. An immense flash hammered up from the tranquil surface of the ocean, high into the atmosphere. Thunder boomed over those on the water, deafening Pact, blank-one, and No-Pact alike, followed a split second later by the roar of hydrogen and oxygen igniting. Four pillars of Radiance reappeared.
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Kthulah shuddered. The Burning Heart of Night had not perished! The fourth gift of Radiance, the gift of Gamut, might yet come to pass. <
A groan of relief sounded from Tlalok's Khafra. The assembled blank-ones showed signs of relief also; when Jenette's bonded No-pact finished translating for them.
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The sixty-four hunters on Kthulah's barge tensed, ready to attack and squelch such a sacrilegious interruption of their leader, but the Judges held up their staves, rattling loops of black and white beads, which they never stopped tallying.
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The hunters backed down. Gathering courage, the blank-one Jenette continued.
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A committed rumble sounded from the assembled blank-ones as Jenette's No-pact translated her words. Kthulah was touched. He wanted to make a peace, but he could not alone bring himself to take such a gamble. Too much suffering had resulted from such a decision twenty years ago.
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The ascetic Khafra huddled to decipher the meaning hidden in their white and black loops of beads. They argued amongst themselves, becoming more and more agitated. When the four finally arose, the single blue dots in the center of their foreheads—which signified their commitment to live perfectly Balanced, on the knife-edge between life and Radiance, or death and Shadow— these dots had been swelled by shock to clearly discernible disks of glowing glowbuds.
Kthulah had never seen so strong a reaction from the four.
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As one, the heads of every Khafra and blank-one in sight swiveled, looking, searching, seeking. A hush descended. Not even the distant cry of blank-one pain, which Kthulah had been hearing in the background for some time now, intruded into the expectant quiet. The crowd on the charred skrag island shifted. It began to part, in a wave of motion from its center out to its shore. Equally confused as Kthulah, Tlalok and the blank-one Jenette also stepped aside as the parting of bodies reached them.
Two blank-ones, a large male and a fatigued female assisted by other females and No-pact, made their way into Kthulah's view. The large male and the fatigued female each held two cloth-swathed bundles in their arms. Standing reverently, they held the bundles up for Kthulah to see. The two blank-ones spoke.
Jenette's No-pact translated, <
Kthulah squinted with his old eyes. The bundles were newly born blank-one nurslings!
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A warmth enveloped Kthulah's old heart. The Balance wa
s wise. Here was the portent to end all of Kthulah's uncertainty. He bowed his wizened head.
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After the superconductor was disconnected, things really began to change inside Long Reach. Muscles, unneeded bones, entire systems of organs began to shrivel and resorb, their amino acids, minerals and other life-sustaining building blocks diverted to the of the nourishment and development of the spawn. Spaces began to open up in the normally crowded and constricted inner hull. Karr had no time for the sorrow he felt watching this process. He focused on one thing and one thing only.
He must locate and terminate in-bob.
It required no leap of genius to know where the in-human could be found. The creature's last words had made that clear enough. Little Nulls are sucking Big Null's life out. Little Nulls must die.
Working his way back up to the midsection of the fugueship, Karr located four critically strong junctures in Long Reach's rib system, from which the fugueship spawn sprouted. Of course Karr could not see the booster-rocket shape of the baby fugueships as they appeared from outside the parent ship. Karr saw only the business end of the spawn: the growing superconductor cores, the blast nozzles which would channel the thrust necessary to set the spawn free of New Ascension's gravity well, the angle of umbilical arteries and veins and other conduits carrying nutrients from Long Reach to the spawn.
The first spawn was uninjured. Karr found the second in distinctly different condition. Its umbilical connections were ripped and torn. Long Reach's lifeblood pumped out of them, collecting in growing ponds. The spawn was perishing. Karr consulted his subdermal chronometers. It had only been five realtime hours since in-bob had left the brainroom. That was not much time in comparison to a two hundred and fifty-six day spawning cycle. The spawn had a slight bluish tinge to its tissues, Karr saw, but perhaps the damage could still be reversed.
Karr set to work, repairing wounded umbilicals by first pinning the severed ends together with qi needles, and then hand applying surgical adhesive from a Gattler canister that he broke open with a pry bar. When all the veins and arteries were reconnected, there were still many leaks, so he retrieved a barrel of quick drying flexicrete, which he had seen while searching the storage units, mixed it up, and applied it over the entire traumatized area with a shovel. The improvised cast worked. The leaks were plugged. The booster-spawn began to look healthier right away.
"Bad, bad Pilot," hissed a voice behind Karr.
Karr whirled to see in-bob perched on a raised juncture of two gigantic ribs. The creature fell onto Karr, slashing and biting, and slamming Karr to the ground. Dagger sharp teeth gnashed inches from Karr's jugular, held back only by the stock of Karr's Gattler. Karr kicked his boot heels into the creature's fractured rear leg. Shrieking in agony, in-bob fell back. Karr swung the Gattler to bear, fumbling to activate the cutting beam. He fired, but not before the blind in-human attacked again, slashing with a forearm and knocking Karr's aim off. The cutting beam burned a hole in a cluster of enormous glands nearby. The sacks ruptured, inundating Karr and in-bob in ejecta; both of them disappeared under the flood and came up choking, fague-rich fluid in their eyes, throats, and nasal passages. Karr attempted to stand, but he was suddenly dizzy and fell. He could not seem to focus on the in-human. He struggled to his feet again, this time keeping his balance, and raising the rudimentary Gattler to his shoulders, but he still could not take proper aim at in-bob. The creature's four-legged form seemed to blur in and out of view, first standing, nearly paralyzed, and then streaking out of sight. The strange phenomena repeated several times before Karr figured it out.
He and in-bob had become saturated in fugue.
They were transitioning into fuguetime, where one subjective day equaled one realtime year. The freezing and streaking away was a side effect of the differing rates at which their dissimilar physiologies were adjusting to the change. Karr felt ill and then, as that sensation passed, great weight. He felt as though the gravity of a gas giant was pressing down on him. His slow moving muscles were overwhelmed. The ghimpsuit was all that kept him from collapsing into a feeble pile of skin and bones.
Karr scanned around for in-bob, but the creature was gone. The only evidence of its having been there at all was a blood-streaked trail winding up away from the base of the booster-spawn, out into a connecting passage. Karr determined that the spawn had not been effected by the rupture of fugue-containing glands and then lumbered off along in-bob's track. The ghimpsuit actually emitted a scorched electrical odor as it strained toward the limit of its capabilities to keep his body functioning in the high gravity environment.
Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
Kthulah's Radiance was fading, one blow at a time. Sixty-four for forgiving actions against Prophecy.
Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
Sixty-four for allowing traitor Pact to remain, unostracized, within the bounds of the Radiance of Gnosis.
Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
Two hundred and fifty-six for making peace with blank ones.
Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
Five hundred and twelve for allowing blank-one nurslings to make Pact Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
One hundred and twenty-eight more for passing his own sacred Pact on to two of the nurslings (the doing of which had given him much contentment).
Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
One thousand and twenty-four in all. The Judges wept as they administered the punishment.
Thwak, thwak, thwak, thwak.
Kthulah had not quite made the sixteen thousand days of his forty allotted years, and he had not seen the escape of the Burning Heart of Night, but he had lived a life worthy of the Roots of Wisdom and he had passed without shadow in his heart.
Thwak, thwak, thwak... thwak.
The Judges of Gnosis glowed with the crimson stigmata of grief.
The trail of blood and fugue soon dried up. Karr followed the dusty residue. A few subjective minutes later, even the residue was gone, resorbed by the ship's realtime biological processes. Karr kept going. In-bob's tracks had been heading clockwise around Long Reach toward the next booster-spawn. There was little question in Karr's mind that the creature would reach its objective. He only hoped that the in-human's adjustment to fuguetime had maintained a steady progression from weaker to stronger fugue-states. If there had been any aberration in the change, any regressions back toward realtime, in-bob might have had weeks or even months in which to act while Karr dawdled along in fuguetime. In which case, all the spawn were already dead and Karr just did not know it yet.
Days and weeks elapsed. Clashes of Radiance came and went. But none who had been drawn by the Prophecy, or who gathered seeking a second chance at life from the fugueship, left. No one died, either, not even Panya Hedren, who came down with fullblown Scourge after giving birth. Jenette saw to it that Dr. Marsh and the best Feral healers pooled their knowledge; the mother of the Sacred Sign infants could not be allowed to perish. It was a near thing, but Panya was still alive on the two hundred and fifty-sixth sunrise after Tears had fallen from the sky, two hundred and forty sunrises after the blossoming of the Burning Heart of Night.
On that morning, humans and Khafra ringed the four pillars of flame as closely as they dared in their many vessels large and small, to await, they hoped, the fulfillment of Prophecy. Through that clear morning, nothing occurred, but then as New Ascension's sun reached the highest point in the sky overhead, the pillars of Radiance suddenly began to dwindle.
They fizzled completely.
A great submerged rumbling began to vibrate the mirror-like surface of the ocean. Every assembled sentient felt as though its heart was in the back of its throat.
In-bob was failing. Horror, horror!
He could not keep the Big Null safe. It was dying. The Little Nulls were sucking out its life. The cursed Null-Pact had stopped him. It slowed him down too much. He could barely breathe. He could not move upon his legs. All he could do was crawl, l
ike a spineless thing, his mind fogged by pain, inch after labored inch. And when he got to the third of the Little Nulls, he could not rip and shred as he had before, but only slither up to it and begin to gnaw with his teeth into its body at a point above one of the nozzle cones. Chew and chew and chew. He must kill it. He must. Hours of pain. Then he broke through the Little Null's thick, strong hide. Foul chemical powder spilled out. In-bob choked. He could not burrow deeper, but he could make the hole bigger. He chewed and chewed and chewed some more.
The Big Null began to vibrate. Something bad was happening.
Something smelled. Protesting neck muscles dragged his head around to smell better. In-bob smelled Pilot. And he smelled the sterile odor of the Pilot's weapon. It would be aiming at him now. He could not see it or hear it. But in-bob knew. That was what others always wanted to do to in-bob. Kill him. Why had the Big Null not let in-bob kill the Pilot? Why did it want to die? Why did it want in-bob to fail? In-bob wept, burbling in self-pity as the Pilot fired. In-bob felt more stabs of pain in his already agonized body. Metal pins nailed in-bob to the Little Null. He could not move.
The shaking of the Big Null increased. The roar of three Little Nulls coming to life rattled in-bob's bones. WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!