Faith

by John Love

  Something made him turn round and look back into the recesses of the crater. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw coming out of it to join him and stand by him, in the crater’s open mouth, facing the spiders.

  •

  On the Bridge they were dumbstruck as they looked at the single figure which stood, looking back at them, in the mouth of the midsection crater. The others saw what the figure looked like, but Foord saw what it was. He took in every detail of its body-language and posture and demeanour. He knew what was behind its eyes.

  The Bridge screen patched in a closeup of its face.

  “That isn’t just…” Foord began, then his throat closed up. He took a deep breath through his open mouth, his chest rising and falling.

  “That isn’t just a replica. It isn’t just a construct. It’s me, everything I am, soul and self-awareness and everything.”

  “How can you know that?” Smithson asked.

  “The same way you’d know, if that was you standing there. It knows it’s everything I am, but it knows it was made, and it’s trying to understand why. Not It, Me. I know I was made, and I’m trying to understand why…There aren’t words for this, words don’t work.”

  Foord looked through the Bridge screen into his own icy silver soul. He felt cold.

  On the screen, the figure turned round to look back into the recesses of the crater. Other figures were walking out to join it, one by one, and to stand at its side.

  •

  Foord turned to see them walking out of the crater to join him.

  Cyr was first. She too was silver and grey, the grey ranging from almost-white to almost-black. She raised a hand in greeting. Her fingernails, immaculately manicured like his and dark blue back on the Charles Manson, were here almost black, at the tips of long silver fingers. Her tunic and shoes, dark blue on the Charles Manson, were here dark grey. Her skirt swung gracefully as she walked, just as it always did, and Foord could feel himself getting the first stirrings of an erection, just as he always did.

  They even let me have erections, he thought. He wanted to take it out and look at it, but thought it probably wasn’t the time. He expected it would be silver and grey.

  She smiled at him. “Commander.”

  “Hello, Cyr.”

  And they’ve let me hear spoken words, open to space. You can’t hear noises in space. But you can’t stand in it or breathe in it either, and Cyr was breathing like him; her chest rose and fell under her tunic. And her voice sounded just like it did on the Charles Manson, just like he remembered.

  He looked her up and down. “I know you wear that to arouse me,” he said, “and it does. It looks good on you. You’re beautiful.”

  Before she could reply they were joined by Thahl, Kaang and Smithson. Thahl, slender and graceful like Cyr but slighter. Kaang, pleasant but unremarkable, a little plump, and looking terrified. And Smithson—

  Smithson was the strangest of all, because back on the Charles Manson he was naturally grey. Only his eyes really differed; normally they were warm and golden, here they were mid-grey. When he extended a limb in greeting, Foord heard the wet plop.

  They all had self-awareness. As Foord on the Charles Manson had realised when he first saw himself, something about them made it obvious. They had everything, physically and spiritually, which they’d ever woken up to every morning of their lives; yet they knew they were made, and knew they would defend the crater. They knew also that they should go back into the ship and find the people who made them, but they knew they never would.

  They came and stood at Foord’s side in the mouth of the crater, imagining (they could also imagine; they’d been given that too) what their other selves on the Charles Manson—no, their selves: words didn’t work properly for this—would be thinking.

  •

  “You see?” Foord said to the others on the Bridge. “They’re us. They’re everything we are. Tell me they’re not.”

  “What are we going to do, Commander?” Kaang said. She was looking at herself and the other four figures in the crater, and sobbing.

  “What are they going to do?” Cyr asked. She too was unable to take her eyes off the crater.

  “You already know,” Foord said. “She made them and She put them there. Put us there. To defend the crater against our spiders.”

  “But She could have made ordinary devices,” Kaang said. “Ordinary synthetics. Even if they looked like us, they didn’t have to be us.”

  “Yes they did,” Smithson said bleakly. “That’s the whole point. Make us fight them and kill them.”

  The silence returned. The way they each thought about family and loved ones, if they had any, varied with their biology and culture and circumstances, but the way they thought about themselves did not vary. Some of them could even imagine killing loved ones or family, but this was worse. Worse than suicide. Deliberately killing something with sentience, when that sentience was your own, and when you knew—unlike suicide—that you’d still be alive and aware of what you’d done….

  “We have to attack the crater,” Foord said.

  “I know, Commander,” Cyr said. “And if they defend it we have to kill them. Kill us. I wish the words would work better.”

  “She never did anything like this,” Thahl said, “when She last came to Sakhra.”

  “You said we’d find out new things about Her.”

  “Yes, Commander, I did. But this…”

  “This is because we hurt Her. Made her fight for Her life. Nobody’s seen this, because nobody’s done that before.” He took a long breath, and felt it rasp through his throat. “We have to watch ourselves die.” He nodded to Cyr, who sent out the signal to the spiders.

  •

  They stood together in the open mouth of the midsection crater, and watched as the spiders started moving towards them.

  “Why have they brought me here, too?” Kaang asked. “I’m nothing to do with this, I’m only a pilot. We’ll die here.”

  Foord laughed. “Are we alive enough to die?”

  “Commander, we’re only five against…how many?”

  “Nearly three hundred,” Cyr said.

  “And we’re unarmed,” Smithson said. “Not even sidearms.”

  “Five against three hundred or three thousand. It hardly matters,” Foord said. “They didn’t make us like this and put us here just to be wiped out.”

  “Didn’t they?” Smithson said. “Maybe that’s the whole point. Make us, over there, kill ourselves over here.”

  The spiders were moving slowly towards the mouth of the crater; so slowly they were almost drifting.

  “I think,” Thahl said, “that when they made us, they must have given us some special abilities.”

  “I think,” Foord said drily, “that you have them already.”

  “No, Commander. Extra abilities. Otherwise why would they…?”

  “I’m not aware,” Cyr said, “of anything over here that I don’t have over there.”

  “We ought to go back through this crater and find them,” Smithson said. “But we know we can’t. That’s something we don’t have over there.”

  “Then,” Foord said, “over here we’ll die. Fighting our own weapons.”

  The spiders drifted closer. Without thinking, they all stepped back from the mouth of the crater, to allow room for the first ones to enter.

  “When they snip our arms and legs off,” Smithson muttered, “will we subdivide down to nothing?”

  “Nothing,” Thahl said, deadpan, “is ever completely nothing.”

  “Thahl, were we...” Foord began.

  “...like this over there?” Thahl finished. “I don’t remember, Commander. Maybe we left more things unsaid.”

  •

  Foord looked around the Bridge, and focussed angrily on Cyr.

  “Watch the screen! Don’t turn away. They’re us. We’d want that dignity. We wouldn’t want us to turn away.”

  “You’re right, Commander. I’m sorry.”


  Cyr had been the only one on the Bridge to turn away. Normally she would have been first to watch what her weapons were about to do. She enjoyed the use of weapons, but not against these opponents. She turned back to the screen, where her replica and the others stood blinking back at her through the cold light in the crater, and reached a conclusion. There was something she could do.

  She pressed a series of panels.

  •

  The spiders floated closer, and the first one entered the mouth of the crater. It was missing one of its middle limbs and had gouges all over its body. It crawled forward. It did not make for Foord, but for Cyr. She moved away from the others, to isolate herself. She guessed what she had done, back on the Charles Manson.

  “Cyr?”

  “I have to be first, Commander, not you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because back on our ship, I’m controlling them.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.”

  The spider approached her clumsily; almost, it seemed, by accident. The missing limb gave it an awkward rolling gait. Cyr saw it silhouetted against the silver hull of her ship, sixteen hundred feet away. On the Charles Manson, those on the Bridge saw it silhouetted against the silver figure of Cyr, slender and graceful.

  Cyr took another step sideways. As she expected, no other spiders had yet entered the crater. She looked into its nonexistent face. It was her weapon. She was controlling it on the Charles Manson. It stepped towards her, its feet clacking on the floor of the crater; it extended a couple of forelimbs as if in greeting, and reconfigured the claws to manipulator mode. Cyr was making calculations about how long she could engage it, how long she could hold it off before those who made her were triggered into revealing whatever abilities they had given her to counter it. While she was making her calculations, it rose on its hindlimbs and pronged out her eyes. She screamed. Foord thought it was more in horror than pain, but couldn’t be certain because he’d never heard her scream before. More spiders floated into the crater and settled, and more waited behind them. Cyr continued screaming. Her screams didn’t incorporate obvious phrases like My Eyes or Help Me, but were entirely wordless. Foord motioned to the others to fan out. This can’t be, he thought. If they made us, why would they let us be massacred like this? They must have given us something. But what?

  •

  On the Bridge, Cyr watched the local magnification on the screen. Her palms were bleeding where her fingernails dug into them; her manicured nails, painted darker than the blood they drew. In the crater, her nails and her blood were the same shade of almost-black. She could see it clearly on the Bridge screen, because in the crater Cyr had sunk to her knees and held her hands over her eyes and was screaming, and Foord had motioned to the others to fan out and face the spiders which had entered the crater and were now climbing over each other, pushing each other aside, to get at them.

  “You told that first one to go for you, not for me.”

  “Yes, Commander.”

  “And you told it exactly what it should do to you.”

  “Yes, Commander.” Cyr held Foord’s gaze. Her eyes were dark and unreadable. “It was one thing I could do for them, I mean us, in the crater. They’d know I’d order the spiders to attack them. So I did it to myself first, in the most vicious way I could.”

  Foord went to say How can you think of something that vicious, but he already knew; it was how she was made.

  In the crater they had turned away from each other; they were fighting separate battles, and they were going down. Cyr was still alive while the spider which had taken her eyes continued to work on her face, making it as featureless as its own. Only then did it finish her, slashing her throat. Her blood—dark grey, almost black—should have floated around her in globules, but gravity worked in the crater.

  Foord went down easily, more easily than he expected. A spider simply stabbed him in the stomach—his entrails glistened silver and grey—then slit his throat. He didn’t call to the others for help but just fell forward, shaking his head No, this can’t be, and the spider stepped delicately over him and over Kaang, impaled on the claw of another spider and already dead, towards Smithson and Thahl. They knew Smithson and Thahl would be more difficult, because their programming said so.

  On the Charles Manson, Smithson watched on the Bridge screen as five of them surrounded him and took it in turn to slice him, vertically. He felt grief but concealed it beneath outrage. He swore at them, as he was swearing at them in the crater while they sliced steaks off his body; his flesh in the crater had the same moist consistency as it did on the Charles Manson. They had severed one of his two main forelimbs, but he extruded a secondary limb, picked up one spider and used it to dash two others to pieces, then collapsed as the spiders halved and rehalved him.

  Then there was only Thahl. They surrounded him, nine against one, with more and more entering the crater. He concentrated on disabling them by breaking their limbs with blows from his hands and feet. He had already disabled five, moving among them like a Sakhran customarily moves in combat—not only using his own speed and grace, but seeming to radiate something which made his opponents slow and clumsy. Just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly, but he knew he couldn’t disable them faster than they were entering the crater. He knew that those who made him, and made the others, had put them in the crater to face the spiders, but he was puzzled.

  There must be something they’ve given us to fight the spiders with.

  The others hadn’t revealed it, and neither had he, but it must be there. He wondered again what it was, and when and how it would show. He kicked away a couple of disabled spiders to make room to face the newcomers who were surrounding him. Then he realised what it was, and smiled.

  •

  On the Bridge, Thahl carefully studied himself as he fought in the crater.

  The others on the Bridge had done what Foord demanded. They had watched themselves die, even when their emotions were insupportable. Thahl did not allow himself to show any emotion, even when he saw what they did to Cyr, though there was an irony about it because that was what Cyr over here—words didn’t work properly—had told them to do to herself. He continued to show no emotion when Foord went down so easily, and still showed none now, when he watched himself fighting—though he studied the screen closely, looking for but not finding any modification of his abilities.

  He knew there had to be more.

  She made us and She put us in the crater to defend it. She must have given us the ability to defend it, something extra beyond ourselves, and he wondered how and when it would show. He watched himself moving among the spiders—just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly—and then it occurred to him that just as he made the spiders look slow and clumsy, so had Her spiders, each one a match for at least six of theirs until they…

  Then he knew, and smiled to himself. On the Bridge screen, which had focussed on him in closeup as he was the last of them left, he smiled back at himself from the crater.

  •

  In the crater the spiders Thahl had disabled were strewn around him, most of them limbless or broken-limbed but still rocking backwards and forwards to get at him. Now others had entered the crater and surrounded him: nine, ten, eleven. They made cautious feints to draw him out, but did not yet attack directly. More were joining them.

  That was when he had smiled to himself.

  I’d like to have lived longer, he thought, which is reasonable considering how they made me. They gave me self-awareness, and all my memories and motives. He might have added, And my soul, but Sakhrans—perhaps because of how they reproduced, or how they organised themselves socially—were not particularly religious. So not Soul, he thought, but my sense of what I am. And because they made me like this, I can do what comes next more easily. It won’t be as complete as dying, because I also live over there.

  He became still. He folded his arms across his chest, and collapsed into himself.

  The
process began at the top of his head and worked down through his body to his feet, like an ice-sculpture melting. He turned, from his head downwards, into liquid silver. Because it started at his head, his consciousness dissolved away while the rest of him was still collapsing. His last thought was They didn’t make us telepathic. I wish I could tell them over there that our opponent is not just a Her or an It, there are people living here. Perhaps they’ll find out. Even see them.

  The liquid silver which had been his head cascaded down his body, which in turn cascaded down his legs to pool at his feet, which in turn became part of the pool. When Thahl was gone, the same thing happened to the bodies of the others. Cyr, Foord, Kaang and Smithson collapsed into themselves, leaving silver pools; five pools, including the one which had been Thahl. Suggestions of rainbow colours swirled across their surfaces, but otherwise the pools were inert. The spiders peered and poked at them, indifferently, because they did not signify opposition.

  Simultaneously the five pools burst into thousands of separate silver beads, each the size of a fingernail. For a moment they stood apart from each other, quivering; then flicked across the floor of the crater, between and around the clacking feet of the spiders, combining and recombining until they became a single thing: a floorcovering of rippling silver, only molecules deep. Its shape was like a map, defined by the spiders around which it flowed and formed. It moved back into the depths of the crater, through the out-of-focus dark curtain, to where the silver-grey coils of the Rope festooned the walls. It rose and touched the Rope’s coils, welcoming it down from the walls and into itself; the coils entered it, and continued and continued to enter. Then it flowed back towards the mouth of the crater.