Andrews asked Dorthy how she felt, and she confessed, “Nervous as hell.” Even now his thoughts were beginning to nag at the edge of her Talent.
“But you have read them before.”
“That was before they had reached their goal, before they started on their text. This place dominated them just as it dominates the caldera. Inside…I don’t know. Which is why I’m here, I suppose.”
Andrews, who’d been about to say that, said instead, “How is your Talent coming on?”
“I’m ready.” She looked up, but now the central peak was hidden by the subsidiary spires that surrounded it. “God, it’s so big.”
“I feel like a knight come to rescue a maiden,” Andrews said. His face was just visible within the blurred outline of the cloak’s hood: he was smiling.
The causeway was wide enough to take three crawlers side by side, its surface blackly reflective so that Dorthy had the illusion that she could see a little way into it; beneath her boots it felt grainy, slightly spongy. Either side of its black ribbon, phosphorescent rafts of scum ceaselessly washed.
Beyond the moat, the causeway rose, a wide ramp passing between two towers that divided and divided upward, studded with smears of red light glowing as fiercely as furnace mouths. Scylla and Charybdis, Dorthy thought, as she and Andrews passed between them. The ramp widened into a great concourse that gently sloped upward in a lazy curve. Twenty metres wide? Thirty? Smaller ramps spiralled off it like wood shavings, turning around subsidiary pinnacles that rose to different heights, some smoothly tapering, some flanged, some few bristling with sharp thorns. The keep did not look as if it had been planned and built, but instead sprung from some immense seed.
The ramp swept around a mass of dark vegetation, lines of light scribbled above, curved in to hug the wall again.
“There,” Andrews said. “That’s where the inscriptions begin.”
It was a single line, a flowing unbroken script like an incredibly complicated trace from an electroencephalogram, characters and ideograms flowing one into the other, clustered in groups of four, each group a single concept, each concept part of a greater group just as DNA codes for amino acids that, linked together, make a protein that in turn twists and coils, primary, secondary, tertiary spirals which determine its final functional form.
Andrews held up a little machine, intently watching its little screen; because his chameleon cloak blended indetectably with the wall, his face and the machine seemed to hang eerily in empty air. “I’m picking up traces of the last group to enter this place,” he said. “There’s a probe watching them, a hundred, a hundred and fifty metres on up.”
“Wait here, then,” Dorthy said, and walked on alone, her palms pricking with anticipation, her cloak making her a mere shadow sliding across the wall. The line of script was at about waist-level, and as she walked she trailed a hand across it; but for all that the line looked slightly sunken into the surface, it felt as if there was nothing there at all. The stuff of the wall seemed to sting her fingertips, cold yet slightly flexible like the hide of a sleeping dragon. She wondered how old the keep was, if it was as old as the transformation of this world, and if it really was in some sense alive. No structure could resist the erosion of a million years unless it was self-replenishing. She thought of the complex molecules strung through the matrix of molecular iron, a nervous system that even now might be recording her footsteps. Then she sensed the by-now familiar trace of a new male’s mind ahead of her and all speculation dropped away. But the trace grew no clearer as she walked on around the wide curve of the ramp, and she saw nothing.
Andrews’s voice said in her ear, “You should see the remote soon.”
Dorthy, concentrating on the tide of her breathing, the pulse washing her mind clear as she slowly climbed, didn’t reply.
The trace was suddenly clearer, a distinct cloud of sensations but the sense of self somehow distorted, smothered, habitual frames overlaid with some unclear imperative. A fringe of fat vines covered with black scale-leaves spilled down the wall like monstrously magnified medusa’s hair. As Dorthy passed this, the new male skittered around the curve ahead, almost falling over in its haste as it bounded towards her. She froze in panic, but just before it reached her the new male flung itself at the vines and began to swarm up them hand over hand, incredibly lithe considering the bulk of its darkly furred body. Then it scampered over some high edge and was gone.
“Christ,” Dorthy breathed.
Andrews’s voice said in her ear, “What was that?”
She had forgotten about the microphone that clung to the skin of her throat. “Nothing,” she said. “I’m just screwing my courage to the sticking place. Please, be quiet. I must concentrate.”
After a minute she was able to go on. She could sense more minds ahead, the communal purpose any group of new males shared, but shot through with vivid current of informed yet unfinished intelligence, complex as sunlight on the restless sea’s surface. Even as Dorthy approached, she felt herself submerging like a surfer racing through the toppling closing curl of a huge wave: she did not even have to prepare herself properly.
And suddenly the new males were revealed by the curve of the ramp, four of them crouched at the wall, running their oddly small, naked hands over the line of script, reading it with a plodding patience quite unlike the skittering haste of the average human reader whose eyes skip ahead of understanding, leapfrog passages perceived as banal. The new males read symbol by symbol by symbol…Dorthy could not understand precisely what they read, but its sense came to her as a line of melody rises out of the sullen dissonance of a Mahler symphony, as a dolphin breaches the mutinous waves. It was a slow unfolding perception of the entire ecology of the keep, all of it interwoven; the swift patterns of the animals, the slow weaving dance of growth of trees, of grass, the conjoined cycles of earth and air and water, all meshed: all. She saw that hunters must understand the land in which they lived in a way only dimly grasped by those who were not dependent on its caprices. They did not subjugate it as farmers did, push it to balance at a single point and pump in energy to keep it at unstable equilibrium, but instead accepted and moved with the constant cycles that worked in slow stately pavane beneath the seethe of the little lives…
All this came to her in an instant, and for that moment she was overwhelmed: as if she had seen herself reflected in a funhouse mirror, and was held by the shattered gaze of her reflection.
The moment passed. Ahead of her the new males rose, their loose hoods suddenly flaring around their faces. There was no doubt that they could see her despite the chameleon cloak. New knowledge rammed into her forebrain like a spike. Trying to think around it, Dorthy turned to flee.
And something crushingly strong clamped an arm around her waist and hoisted her into the air, and seemingly without transition she was watching the curve of the ramp dwindle as her captor, holding her over his shoulder with one hand, swarmed up a vine using his feet as well as his free hand. Shock made everything seem clear and small and remote, as if seen through the wrong end of a telescope. The other new male: she’d forgotten about him, dismissed him when she’d seen him flee. He must have waited for her to pass before descending, come up behind her…
Softly she called to Andrews and he answered instantly. “Are you done?”
“In a way. At the moment I’m hanging over the shoulder of a new male, a caretaker, while it carries me up. Hey, damn you! Watch out!” Because the new male had pulled itself over a terrace, bounded along the ramp beyond, and without pause begun to climb the vines that draped the next wall.
“You’re okay?”
“Dizzy. It’s a long way down.” At the back of her mind was the crazy thought that she’d seen something like this before.
“Do you know where you are? I’ll break radio silence and Ramaro can have a remote on you within a minute.”
“Not—” She gasped as the new male swung sideways, continued to climb using another vine. Far below, the ramp was a thi
n line scribing the black vertical cliff; the other towers were a cluster of pencils seen end on. She could just make out the clotted phosphorescence in the moat. “Not exactly,” she said. “I have the feeling we’re going all the way to the top.”
“Can’t you tell what it wants?” It was Sutter’s voice.
“I can’t concentrate.” But although her Talent was blurred by the as-yet unassimilated knowledge she had garnered from the momentary contact with the other new males, she sensed that there was a bright edge to her captor’s thoughts, as if it were driven by something else.
Sutter said, “I can get the thopter pretty damn close in. If I can get above you there might be some way—”
“No,” Dorthy said. “I don’t think it intends to hurt me. And if you bring the thopter up here it might just let go.”
She had closed her eyes because the drop was making her dizzy. Now, as she felt the new male clamber over an edge, she opened them again. They were on another part of the ramp that spiralled from base to tip of the keep. Dorthy’s captor squatted on its hams, gently but irresistibly holding her over its shoulder. Then she was lifted through the air and laid on the slightly rubbery surface of the ramp.
“I’m coming after you anyhow,” Andrews was saying. “Keep the channel open, as long as possible. I’ll follow the carrier wave.”
But Dorthy didn’t reply, nervously watching the new male’s narrow face above her, large eyes glinting darkly in the shadow of its flared hood, as it intently scrutinized her whole length. After a moment it pushed aside the chameleon cloak and began gently to manipulate her left arm, then her right. Dorthy tried to stay limp as it moved her joints; it was particularly interested in the rotation of her wrist. Huffing softly to itself, it started on her legs, bent her knee, then her ankle, again testing the rotation of each joint. It fingered the snaps of her boots, then came back up, pressing at her abdomen hard enough to make her cry out—then stopped as Andrews and Sutter said, “What’s happening?” in the same instant.
Dorthy said without moving her lips, the words humming in her throat, “It’s okay. Don’t worry.”
“You are a terrible way up,” Andrews said. “Look, there is a kind of ladder I’m following, but it seems to be taking me the wrong way. Tell me if you start moving again.”
And Sutter: “Where the hell is that remote?”
Dorthy watched as the caretaker pulled at the belt of her coveralls, lifting one by one the knife and few tools that hung there, not detaching any but studying each closely before letting it fall. Dorthy’s feeling of déjà vu was strong now, and then she had it: an old, flat, black-and-white trivia show she’d once seen—one of the students at Fra Mauro had had a whole collection of them, pre-Age of Waste stuff. King Kong, that was it. Dorthy stifled a laugh as the new male’s face peered into her own, its breath sickly sweet but undercut by a whiff of acetone. Large eyes sunk in smooth black skin, no trace of lids but once, twice, nictitating membranes closed across the smeared horizontal black on black pupil.
What she sensed was a spark of self and reefs of newly acquired knowledge submerged by something simple and rigidly connected, the kind of thing she would have expected to sense had she been able to scan, say, a moderately complicated pocket computer. There was a programmed need to classify her within a rigid hierarchy of experience. Trying and failing.
And something else, flickering at the back of everything, something bright…
“What’s going on?” Andrews asked in her ear, and the new male started back then peered closely again, puzzled by the faint sounds it could hear.
“Stay quiet,” Dorthy said softly. “It’s trying to figure out what I am.”
For a moment she feared that it would try to take off the microphone at her throat. But it simply fingered it, its touch hot and dry, then stood and bent and scooped her up, started along the gently rising spiral of the ramp until it came to more vines falling across the wall and the embedded script. It began to climb again, and Dorthy reported this.
Andrews said breathlessly, “I very nearly ran into a bunch of them just now. I’m a level up, but you are perhaps two hundred metres above me. That thing is climbing fast.”
“I know,” Dorthy said. Now the moat was a thin stripe beyond the jumble of spires. She could see the wide meadow, the forest beyond rising into darkness.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Dorthy?”
“I wouldn’t put it like that, but unless it loses its grip I’m in no danger. Please, keep quiet. I don’t want it disturbed.”
The vines ended at a narrow terrace where their roots spread like great flexed fingers. Ducking around these—one almost brained Dorthy—the new male nimbly sprinted the length of the terrace and leapt across a wide gap, landing—with a rush and a shock that knocked the breath out of Dorthy—on a ledge that hung out over a deep gulf. Dorthy looked straight down past the new male’s furred back at a cluster of needle-pointed towers and closed her eyes, then opened them again as once more the new male leapt. She glimpsed something like a huge, slow bullet trawling the gap—Ramaro’s remote—and then the new male gained the next spiral of the ramp. It was narrower here, and the braided script covered the wall from base to vegetation-shrouded top.
The new male shifted its grip on Dorthy’s back, ambled on purposefully. She could sense a grouped mindset again, separate nodes of bright, dangerous intelligence within it.
The new male stopped, emitting a low, almost plaintive piping. Bright now, and close. After a moment Dorthy was lifted from the new male’s shoulder and carefully set down. Her knees unhinged, she staggered against the wall, looked up.
Four new males, narrow faces within their cowls of skin compressed by the bulge of their foreheads, returned her gaze.
Dorthy stepped back, and her captor gripped her shoulder so hard that she cried out.
At once Andrews asked what was happening.
“Shut up! I’m trying to—”
And light split her apart like lightning leaping the gap between heaven and earth. Through a haze of tears she saw the four males back away. One was looking from side to side as if dazzled. She felt their fear and a complex incomprehensible jumble of images. In some part of her mind something alien was trying to hide.
As a child she had accepted the intrusion of other personalities, had allowed them to talk and weep and rant in the calm mirror at her centre while she asked questions of them, able somehow always to find the answers within the intruder. It had not seemed strange until after she had left the Institute and she had realized, newly arrived in the huge shuttle terminal at Melbourne, that the myriad minds around her were all closed to each other, a revelation that had loosed a sudden formless panic. That had been five years ago.
Now she felt that disorientation all over again.
Now she thought that she saw the stars stirred apart. Here was the danger, here! The danger that had awakened them was revealed, to be acted upon at once, too dangerous to be left alone now that it had penetrated so far.
Something was holding her back and impatiently she tried to pull away, but her captor slapped her down casually. On hands and knees on the resilient surface of the ramp she shook her head, thoughts jarred loose, drifting. Her captor was gesturing with both large and small pairs of arms to the other new males, slowly advancing on them, one naked hand slapping the wall and its tangled braids of script. It was trying to tell them that here was the danger, not in the stars but here, now. Dorthy was dazzled by its burning imperative. Nova-bright, yes, and oddly like the glimpses of planetary doom she’d glimpsed in the minds of Kilczer and Andrews and Colonel Chung. As if it wanted the world to burn…Piping, it slapped the script, gestured at Dorthy, slapped the wall again. For a frozen moment she thought that it wanted the others to kill her; but they simply turned and scampered away, gripped by subtle triggers of instinct.
Dorthy tried to stand, but something spasmed her joints and she collapsed, legs pushing weakly, helplessly. The unwelcome mindset at her cen
tre had somehow meshed with her control, deep down at the crossing of the medulla. Not the ships of orbital command but the remotes; that was what they were going to destroy. The remotes and the driving force behind them.
She stuttered, “S-switch off. Get off, off the, off the—”
The thing within clamped down. Calm, she thought, calm, concentrate on the centre, act out from the centre. She visualized the words she wanted to say, focused on them through the bucking welter of contrary alien impulses.
“Switch off your radios! They’ll track you back and destroy you if you don’t!”
“Dorthy, say again! What’s happening up there?”
She rode the wave within her. Andrews’s voice made it easier to focus. “Switch off right now or they’ll kill you!”
He didn’t reply.
Something shifted within her mind, but she knew it now, could map its edges. It was no more than an analogue, a wave function locked in the electrochemical balance of her forebrain. What seemed to be deliberate behaviour were only pseudo-impulses parasitic on her own actions; it was a model of a consciousness, not a real personality. It could do no more than respond.
To know was to act. She rode it, cut through the channels that converted impulses to action, thought into deed. She breathed deeply. She was Dorthy Yoshida. She was herself.
After a moment she was able to reach up and switch off the microphone, the receiver in her ear.
Ahead, her captor turned, its vestigial arms clasping and unclasping their shrunken hands across its chest, and she understood that the bright-edged web that had overridden its mind was gone, leaving only a single fading impulse she barely had time to grasp before it vanished. The new male herder, unfettered, tracked her as she stood, opened its mouth to show wet ridges of sharp-edged horn. She saw its growing intention and stepped back as it stepped forward, then staggered as a wave of movement seemed to pass through the keep. All around, black walls seemed to glow slightly within the illusionary depths of their sheen. The scribbled script was shadowed against it. When the new male moved forward uncertainly, lines of light shimmered in the air around it as if drawn out by the movement. Something seemed to be crawling over Dorthy’s head; it was every hair trying to stand apart from its fellows. The receiver in her ear howled, for all that she’d switched it off, and the new male wrapped its arms around its head and keened, rocking from one clawed foot to the other, its black fur bristling.
Four Hundred Billion Stars Page 21