by Greg Bear
We hear Borden’s voice, transmitted by sound through the saline solution, echoing and chirping. As usual, she brings good news. “Last transmission from Lady of Yue,” she says. “Big hurt is in the system—a Box and seven other ships. They’ll be in orbit around Titan in ten hours. Box can deliver hundreds more seeds, enough to overwhelm any Antag residues—or us. They aren’t transmitting to Lady of Yue and they do not appear to be here to help.”
“Fifteen to thirty klicks descent through the crust before we swim the deep ocean,” Joe says. “Catch up on your reading—this is going to take a while.”
“Payload is ready for delivery, right?” Jacobi asks. She means me and maybe DJ. I’d be flattered, but I’m still distracted—severely so. I feel the awful loss of control of my own thoughts, like I’m being funneled down another pipe. Another poison capsule is breaking open in my head, the second trap—the second instauration is on its way.
A suave, mellow voice asks, “What’s it like, Skyrine? After all these years. Look back upon your long and astonishing list of experiences, and tell us in your own words.…”
The velvet curtain opens wide, the stage fills.
I fall onto it.
NO NO NO FUCK NO
I’m standing on a huge platform, small and alone, before a dark, unseen audience of millions, maybe billions. I’m completely naked and flooded in light. I look down on my nakedness and see that my arms and legs are chewed and wrinkled, red and brown and leathery. I’m alive but uglified. The audience sighs with a far-off storm of sympathy. They love my ugliness. Fighting has made me into a fucking Elephant Man. Thank you for your service! War is so… so… evocative! My wrecked body arouses in that unseen crowd deep emotions they can’t otherwise imagine having, right? Emotions they don’t want to have, not in real life, but that’s entertainment, isn’t it? Horrorshow, as the Russians say.
Time to do my bit for the cause.
Somewhere above me the suave Voice lists in boring detail the actions in which I’ve participated, the war zones I’ve visited. Some I don’t remember or have never heard of—places on Earth and everywhere far and wide. There’s been war on Earth? Then we fucking screwed up, didn’t we? I don’t need this. I just want to return to the action, to wherever it was I just came from, to finish fighting beside my fellow Skyrines and learn whether we’re all going to live or die. I don’t want to be debriefed or celebrated or encourage folks to buy bonds. That’s true fucking old-school.
Business well over a billion years old.
And so—
I dig deep and find Coyle, beg of her, defer to her, she’s been listening close—
Enough. No need to be a ghost before you’re dead!
She seems more faded than the last time, but she somehow finds the means, the inner roots of this delusion—reveals them to me—and together, we put the poison back in the capsule, shut down this fucking engram, this instauration or whatever it is.
Attaboy, Venn. We’re so close! I know there’s something in here that will help you… A little more time for me to move around, and I’ll find it.
UNDER PRESSURE
What?”
The curtain closes. Gone in a flash. I open my eyes. I’m back in my hammock, listening to my fellow crew members as the giant bronze centipede probes the half-frozen water of the vent lake. No wonder I have a hard time distinguishing dream from reality. Time to get down to the real business at hand. I look left and right and see through a thick haze five other transports. Six in all. Arrows and symbols tell me Borden is taking point. She’s with Kumar and Mushran—a lot of honch in one vehicle. Maybe she’ll dive so deep the whole damned vehicle crushes. Bye-bye, brass. Bye-bye, whirly-eyed Wait Staff. Cap training prissily informs me this is not a good attitude. Maybe not. But Borden’s craft is definitely descending first. And what a craft! If ours is like a centipede, hers is a tank-tractor earthworm about ten meters across the beam, its eight segments equipped with rippling treads on three sides! And the first five segments are studded with robust grasping arms. The arms and grapplers and other Swiss Army knife extensions will grasp and cut and weld and do all manner of crazy shit. Borden’s earthworm can dig faster and swim deeper than any machine in our phalanx, our flotilla, whatever the hell we are. She’s not just taking point, she’s presenting a serrated edge.
I don’t actually see this. I remember it. I even know how to drive that talented bastard, should I need to. I receive another burst of pain-free pleasure as reward for accessing cap training. Your grunt can learn new tricks.
“Why does everything have to look like insects?” Ishida asks.
“Bugs made us,” Tak says.
“I do not believe that,” Ishida says. “Never have, never will.”
“What, then?”
“Angels,” she says primly. “Spirits. Kami and yokai.”
“Yokes? What?” Tak frowns as he peers ahead.
“Yokai,” Ishida repeats.
“That’s like fairies,” Jacobi says from up front.
“We are made by fairies?” Ulyanova ventures, first words she’s spoken since we sealed and departed in the Oscar.
Ishida sighs. “Not fairies, yokai.” I see someone has again scrawled Senketsu on one shoulder of her suit. Not ink. Blood, I suspect.
Oscar crawls over the floating wreckage, shoving big pieces aside, while we listen to hollow thumps against our outer hull. We’re trying to reach an open space in the slush where we can descend without getting hung up. Temp outside is fluctuating wildly. Inside, our suits pinch and adjust some more. I feel something slide up my rectum. Terrific. My guts twist like a tub of worms. But then, almost immediately, the other pains subside. My guts settle. Anesthetic enema? Small mercies.
Oscar propels itself with big cilia, arm-sized rubber strips rippling in sequence, scooping and shoving fluid behind, speeding up or slowing down to steer right or left. Buoyancy tanks in our tail and below the cabin fill with liquid. If Joe and Jacobi want to rise, the tanks boil some of the liquid into steam. Sluices eject the resulting thick salts and gaseous ammonia. When they cool, they suck in liquid again and we sink.… Makes a little singing sound behind us, like a chorus of crickets and birds, along with the deep chuffing of the cilia and the faint squeaking of the joints.
Ishida resumes. “I wonder what the spirits of this place are thinking,” she says. “Yokai do not enjoy intruders.”
“They don’t like humans much at all, do they?” Jacobi asks. “Ladies with long black hair and no eyes, right?”
“Not a yokai,” Ishida says softly.
“Well, let’s hope they don’t mind us taking a dip right… here,” Joe says. “Hold your noses.”
I suck in my breath as our forward view suddenly goes dark. Tiny sprinkles of the dimmest gray light blur and blink around us. We feel more impacting chunks of wreckage. There’s a body. Did I see it or just imagine it? A frozen face in the darkness. Now it’s gone. Nobody else saw it, or nobody will admit it. How long can a corpse float in this corrosive stuff?
“Releasing minnows,” Jacobi says.
“Tracking,” Joe says.
Little silvery lights brighten and flow ahead, five-centimeter drones that swim and corkscrew through the slush. They vanish quickly into the dark, but draw traces on the dive screen and in our plates. The minnows return what they are sensing tens and then hundreds of meters ahead. They’re our scouts and pickets.
Polymerized, membranous currents of almost pure water are flowing down here, held together by the powerful electrical fields. In our helms, they show as sinuous auroras rippling and waving deep into the fissure. We just passed through one—electric, icehouse cold.
“Strong current flow,” Tak says.
“Don’t rub your toes on the carpet,” Joe warns. “Whole ocean down here is like a giant battery. Lightning on the surface sparks up to the clouds. Cooks the hydrocarbons along the way.”
We’re all tied together, exercising cap-infused skills necessary to take charge of thi
s beast, guide it, expand its sensory range—
Hours pass. I don’t mind. Everything is fine. I can’t feel any more poison capsules. Maybe I’m done with them—or maybe they’ve already done their work on me.
We finish our long dive between the rough, massive walls, then level off at twenty-three klicks and keep station under an immense icy dome. Minnows tell us there’s nothing below but slushy ice, more current membranes—and then the deep, deep Titanian sea. No sensation of pressure. Nothing in the ears. The Oscar is intact and our suits are doing their work. We’re pretty broad targets in the IR, I think. Cap training does not contradict that opinion.
Some machine, that’s our Oscar, our centipede, and some crew, sinking into almost unknown waters to see what we can see. I laugh in my helmet.
Keep it together, Venn!
I can barely hear or feel the captain. It’s like she’s slowly turning glass all over again.
OLD AND COLD
All of our sensors are tuned on the world beneath the crust. The deep saline sea that winds its way around Titan, around the equator and extending fingers north and south, with isolated lakes both saline and fresh, as if springs from far below access pure ice down in the mantle. The clarity of the sea around us is remarkable. The current flows seem to attract all the debris from the water and channel it deeper, to spread out across the seabed. Titan’s seas are constantly being purged. Based on what I learned in the textbooks at Madigan, that doesn’t make any sense. Such a process would have to be guided and controlled—implying at least a living ecosystem, if not a civilization.
But Jacobi’s feed to our helms is undeniable. We’re swimming through crystal-clear waters, way below freezing, with occasional cloudy globs of ammoniated, debris-laden slush being drawn toward the current flows—disintegrating and descending in long charged plumes as they glide past like UV rainbows.
We pass under a low-hanging arch of crustal material. The Oscar switches on its brights and scans the surface of the arch. Another icy dome, shot through with veins of black gunk. Where it’s most purely ice, it sparkles with a million reflections, a galaxy of glints. Farther along, we encounter a breccia of ice and clumped boulders held in place by a thick mortar of brown, gray, and black tar. Our lights warm the mix and rocks fall away.
“This could get hairy,” Joe says.
The falls reveal fresh underlying material—and frighten big worms or insects—fifty or sixty meters long! They escape from the sudden brilliance, burrowing deeper into the matrix.
“Jesus!” Jacobi says. “Sure those aren’t Antag weapons?”
“Pretty sure,” Joe says. “Alive?” he asks me.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Your bugs?”
“Much younger.”
“They’re not talking to you?”
“No.”
“Maybe our cousins?” He gives me a sour grin.
A few of the worms are large enough to kick out more boulders. We dodge two such rockfalls, then get a glimpse of huge mandibles on a wide, plated head—mandibles that pinch in from five sides, a pentagon of grasping, cutting jaws. These creatures are at least ten meters long, their serpentine bodies covered with bristles.
Borden communicates from the lead vehicle. “Serious question, Johnson, Venn—are these things intelligent? The ancestors of your bugs?” she asks.
“I’ve never seen anything like them,” DJ says. “But that isn’t exactly an answer.”
As we glide along a cleft exposed in the archway, we see more of the bristling worms. They dance in our lights as if in some sort of ecstatic ritual, then gather along their lengths and link clasping bristles to form triads. Each bristle tip has a minuscule claw—small by comparison to the bulk, but maybe as big as a human hand. The bristles cling together like Velcro, then let go, and the triads break free to burrow up into the breccia. As quickly as they appeared, all the bristling worms are gone.
“Easy come, easy go,” Jacobi says.
“Like in sand or aquariums,” Ishida says. “Acorn worms. Priapulids.”
“I’ll bet you’ve eaten them with rice,” Joe says. “Maybe they’re out for revenge.”
“No, sir!” Ishida sounds alarmed.
The crystal waters and the ice above again look empty and pristine. A wavy purple flow comes close to our Oscar on the left wing of the formation, so we move off—the entire squadron banking and retreating like birds in a flock. The cilia hum along our hull—hum with intermittent slapping sounds. Maybe they’re not in complete sync. Maybe they’re getting old. How long does a machine last down here? Longer than our Mars skintights, I hope.
The bottom of the ocean rises beneath us, low gray hills studded with boulders as big as Half Dome.
“Everybody stoked?” Joe asks. “All cheery-bye?”
“Tol’ably so,” Tak says.
“Don’t be,” Joe says. “Don’t let the tech use you. Stay sharp and independent. Remember—everybody else who came down here is dead.”
“We don’t know that,” Jacobi says.
Ulyanova makes a little sigh.
We all saw the wreckage around the station. And the condition of the station itself. Did everybody just give up? Antags and humans at the same time? Before the Antags could find or confirm, or destroy, what Captain Coyle believes is at the heart of…
Watch yourself, Venn.
This time, I can almost see Coyle. She’s standing in a long hallway between rows of black columns. She’s found a relevant cache of records and is trying to communicate what she’s found to me. We’re here. This place is incredibly deep and strong. I’ve been checking out newer history. And you’re in. The library accepts you as a legitimate user.
“What history?” I ask softly.
Coyle says, Our shelly friends broke through their crust, then retreated, but centuries later, they did more than that. Much more. They sent spaceships. Some of the ships reached Titan and other moons. Others went much farther—all the way to the Kuiper belt, even the Oort cloud. Huge places out there. Sun-planets!
“How long ago?”
Got to slow down. Got to rest. I’m not going to be a guide much longer. I’m becoming part of the archive. I just looked at myself—shit! All of me. My DNA, my memory, scars and breaks—everything. It’s all being preserved, fixed. No words to describe how that feels.
Then—fuzzy quiet.
“DJ!” I say.
“Yeah. They’re fading,” he murmurs. “Something else is coming.”
“We’re going to meet our makers?” Ishida asks.
“Are they still alive down here?” Jacobi asks. “Is that why we’re here?”
“Electrical strong to port,” Joe warns. “Ocean’s opaque ahead.”
In our helms, we see our cloud of minnows zipping forward from our phalanx, spreading, darting little waves of lights, and a purplish glow off to our left, signifying the superflow of salty ions that could melt our Oscar if we intersect the boundary. Like touching a giant power cable. What keeps the current from smearing out through the water? Salt gradients. There’s a fresh thermocline separating that flow and our own like an insulating blanket. Oh, we’re bathed in ions—but nothing the Oscar can’t handle. Whereas over there, in the purple, deadly potential is being shunted from the depths to the crust, and carrying curtains of debris along with it.
“Could melt through and make another vent,” Ulyanova says. Smart sister. Smart Russian sister. With a round face and a ballerina body, not that I can see any of that through the suit.
“Uh-huh,” Jacobi says. “Just keep us out of the purple.”
The Oscar hums and vibrates. I’m still trying to orient and remember what I read in the textbooks back at Madigan—trying to encourage the web cap training to fill in details—but things have changed a lot down here since our caps were programmed. There are wide gaps in our education.
Then, instead of Coyle all casual in a Karnak of black columns, I see pale brilliance. Quiet, bright silvery spaces. I close my eyes.
The silvery void is infinitely dense, filled with infinitely thin lines and figures—like pressing knuckles into your eyes in a dark room. Geometric eyelid movies—only bright. I have my eyes closed and it’s still bright. Will I ever be able to sleep again?
The silver wants something. It expects something—a response. But what’s the question? It’s flowing through my mind. It’s practiced on the record of Coyle, I presume, but it still stomps around like a bull. Christ, I feel like a man about to be drawn and quartered, my hands and feet tied to snorting horses, and there’s an idiot-faced fuckhead with a hammer, about to stroke down on—
Inquire.
Not a voice. Not even a word, but immediate, coming from all around and shivering my head like a gong. I jerk up so hard in my suit that everything hurts, joints, feet, hands, neck—all the wires tugging as my muscles tense. If I don’t stop jerking I’ll be sliced into bloody pieces!
Again:
Inquire.
“Yeah! Yes. Right here. Don’t go away.” I keep my voice low, but that doesn’t stop the others from hearing. They’re busy. I have no idea what they’re thinking, what Joe or Jacobi is concluding about my little whispers in their helms. I know they can’t hear what I’m hearing. Maybe DJ can. Maybe he’s hearing the same thing.
“I’m listening. What are you? Who are you?”
Again the holographic presence, not words, not sound:
You have an ancient port of entry.
I don’t know what to say. In confusion, I open my eyes to the helm display of the saline sea, our flashing minnows, outlines of the other machines powering ahead, leveling off.