by Ivan Cat
Fire started below in-bob, sputtering impotently from the nozzle cones. In-bob felt the heat. The Little Null was trying to wake up and escape with the Big Null's life, as the other three were. But it couldn't. Perhaps in-bob had succeeded after all!
But then in-bob smelled ozone. The smell of a cutting beam. The Little Null had somehow been freed; in-bob felt it begin to move. The smell of Pilot disappeared. In-bob felt the nozzle fire below dim growing stronger. Fire also began to spew from the hole he had chewed in the Little Null's body. The foul tasting powder was igniting. In-bob felt the Little Null move. Something separated.
The Little Null was free!
The fire surged. In-bob felt fleeting subjective sensations of realtime events, almost too fast to comprehend. He was moving through water, his extremities burning off from the force of the Little Null's fire, his armored body disintegrating. Then he felt sunlight and thin air. It was a waking nightmare. One that ended, not in escape or saving the Big Null, but in sudden, utter disintegration.
Fugueship spawn burst out of the ocean. Three missile shapes rode roaring thrust up to the stars. Smoke spewed out behind each of them; differing wind directions in the upper layers of New Ascension's atmosphere tugged the exhaust trails into luminous zigzags. As foretold, the Radiances were escaping.
But only three.
A fourth Radiance followed, spinning an erratic path skyward, trying to catch up with the others. It wobbled faster and faster as it rose, tearing itself apart, then suddenly exploding, raining fragments of itself—and thick clouds of fugue—down over the on-watching blank-ones and Pact upon the ocean.
A piece of the light had been saved.
Gravity was in revolt. The sensation of up jerked in one unlikely direction and then another. Karr tumbled helplessly, careening into the ceiling, slamming against the deck, falling into a wall. Bam! Thok! Krak! Muscle sheet bulkheads and girder-rib struts battered his frail human form. Long Reach was lazily tumbling in the realtime ocean, but the fuguetime equivalent was merciless in its vigor. Angry bruises sprawled across Karr's flesh where his new ghimpsuit could not absorb the damage. Finally, a sickening lurch changed the orientation of down while Karr was in midair— causing Karr a final, painful impact—and Long Reach settled in its familiar maw-down orientation. Karr's world was still not motionless, however. The deck vibrated under Karr's battered limbs—no doubt his accelerated perception of the ship bobbing on languid ocean waves. For a while the massage felt good, but the oscillation was soon more than his ravaged senses could handle. Nausea. Karr needed out, fresh air and solid ground, or at least the relative stillness of the ocean in realtime.
He had to get out of all of this fugue!
Karr crawled along a vibrating tunnelway, up a cartilage-lined shaft and back to the duct where he had so recently entered his ship. Retrieving the jumbled pieces of his kilnsuit and helmet from the floor, he put them on. Karr used a qi needle to force the entry duct open. He half expected water to explode in, but the iris-portal relaxed uneventfully and he squirmed out, down through its tight birth canal, struggling to get out.
Karr burst out onto Long Reach's exterior a few yards above sea level. Deep indigo and bright, sky blue strobed as night and day whirled around Karr with ungodly speed. Yellow light flared, morning shadows shortened and arched around, lengthened, blending with dusk and then stars wheeled giddily around New Ascension's south polar star. Night... day ... night... day.... It was kind of pretty. Karr had expected that. What he had not expected was the strange wall of green and gray which grew up from the horizon in every direction around him, up from the ocean itself, and which then hammered in at him, abruptly entombing him in motionless darkness.
LIV
Doing mission time is like doing a puzzle. You love the ship. You love the mission. But nothing changes. Each year is a day, but each day feels like ten years. Pieces of the puzzle cut themselves loose. Friends, family, entire planets disappear. The crux of the problem is, you somehow have to let them go and do your Duty. And then when that time of Duty is all over you have to build a new picture, without falling into negative things and using only the remaining mixed up pieces.
—Bondir Malda Pilot, fugueship Kismet,
One month after retirement.
It was ghutzu, of course, the root matter that formed the structure of New Ascension's floating islands. Karr had anticipated the apparent acceleration of the world around him, but had completely forgotten about the already hyper-accelerated rate of plant growth on the planet. That, together with the explosion of the fourth spawn, which doused the local area in fugue, and which he would learn about later) produced the apparently instantaneous phenomena of his entrapment. Brown-gray root tendrils pressed in tight against his helmet bowl, looking like so many crowded worms in the faint light of in-suit readouts; they pried into the helmet's many fractures, widening the cracks enough for air to leech into the suit. They kept Karr immobilized, except for what little movement he could make inside the kilnsuit itself. It was a claustrophobic moment. Fortunately, a warning gage began to blink, distracting Karr. Fugue concentration was diminishing in the atmosphere within the suit. He steeled himself as fugue level dropped to zero. Soon enough his body wrenched, kept from doubling over by the confined space. Fugue withdrawal hit, the familiar throbbing, thought-obliterating torment of a thousand hangovers. It seemed to last forever, Karr's perception popping in and out of realtime so that a hundred times the torment ended, but then resurged and stretched on again—as Karr knew it always did—which made the experience worse, for there was no naïve hope of a quick reprieve, only the resigned knowledge that he must tough it out.
Finally, Karr vomited in the kilnsuit.
Vacuum slots automatically sucked the mess away.
Realtime.
And with it, the temporary euphoria.
Even though morbid thoughts wandered loose in Karr's head, he giggled. He was entombed under the ground, no trace of light visible. No one could possibly know where he was. He was completely on his own. He could not scratch his nose, let along dig himself out. Aaaaah, quite humorous! How long would it take to starve to death underground? No, he corrected, thirst would kill him before starvation set in. He made a lighthearted attempt to use the suit's comset. The device appeared to be in working condition, but there was no response on any of the colony channels. Where was everybody? Had the null-fusion explosion gone awry and vaporized them? If not, why weren't they looking for him. Didn't they know he was buried alive? Buried alive? Karr laughed hysterically. Time passed. Later, when the giddiness passed, Karr screamed and thrashed. Eventually, exhaustion set in and he slipped into a sort of waking coma, the last vestiges of his reason shutting off the unnecessary parts of his mind, as it also rationed sips of water from the supply nipple and turned off non-vital insuit systems.
A lot of unpleasant realtime passed.
A very long subjective time later, there was a crackling from within the kilnsuit, followed by a scorched plastic smell and a dimming of readout diodes. Karr turned off all the suit systems, vital and non-vital.
Karr began to hallucinate.
It was stuffy, hard to breathe. There were scratching sounds, as of insect legs or rodent teeth, gnawing. They got nearer, making his skin crawl. He could almost feel the unseen swarms taking bites out of his boots, his life-support powerpak, countless hungry things filling his suit, drowning him in crawly bodies. And there were blades! Sharp, raking knives, slashing at Karr from the dark. Zing! Zing! Searing gashes of light opened before his oxygen starved face. Karr clenched his eyes tight against the illusory brilliance. The blades tore at his cocoon. His helmet bubble collapsed, raining fragments into his suit.
Whoosh! Fresh air rushed in.
"Kruff, kruff, kruff?" asked the blades.
Karr shook his head, inhaling deeply. Gradually, his head cleared. He was not hallucinating. He was at the bottom of a burrow. Above, framed against a patch of blue sky, was an unfamiliar Feral.
"Kruff, kruff, kruf
f?" it repeated.
"I'm all right," Karr said with a thick tongue. He did not expect the Feral to understand, but a response seemed appropriate. "Just stuck," he added.
The Feral reacted as if it understood and began to burrow around Karr, freeing first his shoulders, then each arm, and working on downward. Karr flinched as tooth and claw slashed uncomfortably near his face, but the Feral was precise in its aim. Karr choked on root dust and itchy debris fell inside the kilnsuit, but that was the worst of it. A few rest breaks later, the Feral had chewed and ripped enough ghutzu away to grasp Karr under his arms and, digging in with its rear legs, drag him out of the pit.
Karr rolled onto his back, coughing and blinking. He was on a wide mound looking skyward. Long Reach's stern protruded into his field of view like a great religious obelisk.
Karr elbowed himself up.
A foreign world met his gaze. Rich, green turf sloped down from the fugueship, forming gently rolling hills that stretched off into the distance, dotted here and there with tousled patches of jungle growth, but never showing a sign of coastline, sinkhole, or ocean. What Karr had assumed was a ring-island was not a ring-island at all, or even several islands crammed together, but a small continent, sprawling as far as his eyes could see.
Things had changed while he was entombed.
"Where are we?" Karr wondered at the sight.
Now the Feral spoke a word that he recognized. "Gnosis."
"Gnosis?" Karr repeated. "All this? Gnosis?"
"Gnosis," the Feral repeated and pointed off to Karr's right. In that direction on the horizon was a pyramid shape, almost exactly as large as the portion of Long Reach that protruded above the ground. Once that pyramid had been the island of Gnosis. Now it was the mountain of Gnosis.
"How can this be?" Karr asked, looking around, incredulous.
The Feral, who Karr noted was rather small and delicate for a Khafra, did a strange thing. It bowed down before him on forelegs, eyes averted, its glowbuds glittering like metallic gold, and uttered more alien words.
"Ghrrikitakadishtriss."
The Feral stayed prostrate for some time. Karr couldn't make sense of the behavior, other that the fact that is seemed to be thanking him for something. Touching the alien gently on its head, he urged it to its feet. "No, no. Don't thank me. Thank you for digging me out." Karr pointed at the nearby pit as the Feral rose to its feet trying to understand. Karr decided to try another strategy. "Karr, Karr," he said, thumping his chest like a fool. "Karr. Understand?"
The alien pulsed happily. "Pilot Karr," it said in a windy voice. Then, with a twinkle in its eyes, it thumped its own chest, rather theatrically, and said, "Kitrika."
"Aaaah!" said Karr, remembering that this was the female who hung around with Tlalok. "I'm pleased to make your re-acquaintance, Kitrika." Karr looked around. There was no Tlalok to be seen, but there were other Khafra scattered about the manicured-looking landscape. They were pacing individually, heads to the ground sniffing, or gathered together digging clusters of holes in the new earth. "I don't suppose you've seen Jenette or Arrou, have you?" Karr asked.
Kitrika made an effort to shrug like a human.
Karr checked out his fugueship. It did not look dead yet, he refleeted, wondering how long it would take a creature, whose blood was fugue, to die. Weeks? Months? He hoped not years. It appeared to be rooted into the living continent. He stripped off his kilnsuit and walked up to it. Its pulses were weaker than normal, but steady. Its exterior flesh, once raw and bloody after planetfall, was thickening into rough hide. Perhaps it could still be kept alive—NO! Pulling back a shuddering hand, Karr told himself that he must resist the urge to prolong its life. Long Reach wanted to die. He must respect that. He must let it die.
Forcing himself to turn away, Karr set off down the slope in search of other humans. Kitrika followed.
Their wanderings took them past several solitary, digging Ferals before encountering a group that was pulling a naked human out of a freshly burrowed pit. Karr hurried over to look. It was a man Karr did not recognize. The Ferals had cut him out of his clothes in order to extract him from the ghutzu. Based on the shreds of uniform cloth in the pit, Karr concluded the man was a Guard. He lay limp and his skin was bluish and clammy. It would have been easy to assume he was dead, except that Karr was quite familiar with the signs of fugue-coma. As he had done to so many colonists in Long Reach's dreamchamber, Karr bent and checked the Guard's vital signs.
"Peculiar," Karr said, resisting the urge to look back at his distant ship. Long Reach could not possibly be exuding enough fugue to put the man into suspended animation. If it had been, Karr would still be in fuguetime. "In fact, impossible."
The Ferals, who were of the sophisticated sort who held patterns immobile on their glowbuds like body paint or badges of rank, gestured for Karr to follow. There was nothing else to do for the Guard but let the fugue-coma run its course, so Karr arranged him in a comfortable position and walked along with the quadrupeds.
Over a small rise, around a copse of shooting-star palms and on into a bowl between several rolling hills they went. Lying at the bottom of the depression was physical evidence that answered Karr's confusion. The segments had originally been ring or pipe shaped, between ten to twenty feet in diameter and six to ten feet tall. Now they were twisted and charred. Quite a few were missing, probably having fallen to the bottom of the ocean, still the Ferals had done a reasonable job of placing the sections into a semblance of their original, missile-like, shape, right down to positioning the remains of a bulging nose cone on the proper end.
A Feral with white accents on its paws pantomimed objects rushing skyward. "Frrooooosh, frooooosh, frooooosh, frooooosh— FOOOOOM!" It pantomimed an explosion and debris spreading out and fluttering down.
Karr needed no further explanation. One of the booster-spawn had not survived the attempt to escape its birth planet's gravity well—most likely the one in-bob had chewed the hole in. The burned segments were all that remained of a baby fugueship. It was sad, but Karr did not allow himself to be too morose. The dead spawn was part of a larger, near miraculous scenario, he reminded himself. Up, far beyond New Ascension's azure stratosphere there were three baby fugueships. Probably they were making their way to CG-423's single gas giant, to feed and grow strong on the fodder of its atmosphere and rings. That was a glorious thing in itself, but in addition to that, the last spawn's demise had spread an enormous amount of fugue in the area around its parent ship. The local flora, having evolved over tens of millennia, constantly battling Scourge to stay alive, had been unexpectedly freed of that struggle. It had suddenly been able to use all of its energy to grow at a phenomenal rate. The death of the spawn had lead to the birth of an entire continent.
"It seems a worthy trade," Karr decided quietly.
At which point Kitrika and White Paws and the other Ferals again prostrated themselves before him.
"Ghrrikitakadishtriss."
Karr and the Ferals wandered.
The Ferals spent their time sniffing for buried fugue dreamers. Sometimes they dug up humans. Many times they unearthed other creatures: large grazing animals, small fuzzy beasts, serpentine things, all in suspended animation. The Ferals did not eat any of the helpless creatures, but laid them in groups of their own kind and returned to sniffing and digging with unflagging dedication. It was, Karr noted, as if the Ferals were midwives to the rebirth of their world, and in this role they somehow could not kill.
Karr was not of much use. His olfactory senses were insignificant next to the Ferals. He could not dig through roots with his bare, feeble human hands, nor could he accelerate the revival of dreamers from fugue-coma. Karr had gone through withdrawal quicker than they because his body had suffered the process so many times. He did not know why the Ferals had come out so much quicker than he, nor what it was about the local fauna that allowed it to keep on growing instead of being paralyzed, but as he wasn't likely to discover those answers soon, he didn't worry abou
t it much.
With nothing else to do, and a strong desire to be alone, Karr split off from the Ferals. Kitrika stayed with the others, helping as Karr could not.
A few days went by.
The new land was vast and beautiful. Flowers of untold numbers in different shapes and colors grew in fields, gems on green velvet. The color brushed off on Karr's legs like wet paint and rich perfumes arose, temporarily overpowering the smell of fresh-grown soil, which pervaded the continent. While there were no creatures to make noise, the new world was full of sounds, for the flora continued to grow rapidly in the Scourge-free environment, so fast that it made a soothing, rustling whisper, which eased Karr to sleep each evening. Every morning he would twist free of the growth that had blanketed him over night. Karr ate fruits shaped like barbells and drank water collected in plants formed like pitchers. His loose goal was to find open ocean. He wasn't sure why, but the water was still there, deep under all the ghutzu. If he closed his eyes and stood motionless, Karr could feed the ocean's movements, ever so slight, like a faint ground tremor on Solara. And it was somehow important to see it.
One afternoon, Karr spotted a great platinum arc on the horizon. He did not know what he had expected to see when he arrived, but there was only endless open water, reflecting clouds and sky in its alien, mirror-like surface. That sight was comforting, though, to know that New Ascension was still the ocean world Karr had seen from orbit, a silvery-blue sphere peppered with green ring-islands—and one large green continent. Pilot Lindal Karr had not screwed things up too badly. Perhaps that was what he had wanted to see.
Karr was sitting in a patch of yellow flowers, staring over nearby cliffs down at the ocean and listening to the trees grow when he saw her. She stepped out from behind a hillock, young and lithe, her short hair grown a bit wild and looking more yellow-blonde than Karr remembered it being before. The crystal starlure hung from her neck and it was her only garment. She did not see Karr at first, but moved sprightly through sights, sounds, and sensations of the world reborn around her, seeing with childlike eyes, gasping and reveling at each new discovery. She ran and dove into a heap of soft blooms.