“Too old for this,” he told himself. “Far, far too old.”
He felt of the stone, finding it less searing, cooled enough to crawl on if he didn’t mind blistering a little. After two or three body lengths, it ran into another vertical passage, this one pouring heated air past his face to leak away through small fractures above him.
“Fringe!”
“Here, Zasper,” hysterical breathless laughter. “Coming. I’ve got the twins with me. So to speak.”
One of the twins, so to speak, came lurching up the shaft, battering against the sides, howling as it rose. Zasper grabbed the foremost part of it and passed it into the tunnel behind him, where it fled to the far end and lay there, still howling.
“Melt me!” shrieked a voice from below. “Please, Fringe. Don’t leave us like this. Melt us. Don’t make us live like this.”
“She can’t,” bellowed Zasper in his parade-ground voice. “It’s against Enforcer regulations. If you want to die, do it later, but you’re risking her life with all this delay!”
Then silence and more battering, banging as the second assemblage came up the chimney, lurching and clattering against the rocky walls, to be passed on in its turn.
Poor bastards, Zasper thought, oh, poor little bastards, not a clue how to move, moving on sheer panic and nine tenths of that wrong.
And then Fringe, burned, dirty, bloody, clambered from out of the chimney, and he retreated before her to make room.
At the far end of the horizontal, he sprayed the shaft again before pushing the boxes up, their tiny gravitics whining and hiccuping as the two made pathetic attempts at flight. “Keep the rock clear up there,” he screamed at Danivon, who seemed to be watching bemusedly and not paying attention.
Three things came howling through the stone at him. He got two of them, Fringe got the third, aiming an inch from his chin to do it.
“Sorry about that,” she muttered, climbing past.
When she was halfway up, a thing full of tiny bright teeth emerged from the shaft behind her and burrowed into her leg. She screamed, and Zasper killed it as her blood dripped down onto his face. She kept on climbing.
Then they were out, and Danivon was standing with his back to them spraying the surrounding rock, the dinks whimpering at his feet.
Fringe stared at the flier, shaking her head slowly from side to side. “I see some of us are going to walk out.”
Both Danivon and Zasper glanced at the flier, for the first time considering its size.
“Damn,” Zasper said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference, Fringe. It was the only one they had.”
“Fine rescuers you are,” she remarked.
“There’s room for one of us and the two … the twins,” said Danivon. “You, Fringe.”
“Why me? Let Zasper take them out.”
“Zasper can’t fly the thing. He tried on the way in and almost killed us both.”
“You, then.”
Zasper said, “You’re wounded and he’s not, not much.” There was no argument to that. She was indeed wounded, in several places, though not, Zasper hoped, seriously. Mostly cuts and punctures where toothed or bladed things had caught her. The worse threats, the tiny Doors, the little forcefields, may have been too delicate to force through the melted stone. Perhaps this place was at the forward line of the gods’ advance. Perhaps they hadn’t been totally ready when the Dove left Derbeck. Perhaps they weren’t totally in control yet—he hoped.
“There’s real bad things in there,” said Fringe urgently. “But there’s one that tried to help. He spoke to me through one of the … the dinks. Jordel.”
“Jordel of Hemerlane,” said Zasper. “He’s still there?”
“There, where, Zasper?”
“Never mind. There’s no time. Later.”
“Leave us here,” cried a box. “Leave us here. We don’t want to live like this. Without us there’ll be room….”
“Without you, there’ll be room for two,” said Fringe firmly, kindly, not looking at the assemblages. “Zasper and Danivon wouldn’t leave me; Danivon and I wouldn’t leave Zasper. And I certainly wouldn’t leave Danivon.”
“You wouldn’t?” he begged her. “You wouldn’t, Fringe.”
“Enforcers don’t do that,” she said stiffly, avoiding his outstretched hand. “Damn, Danivon. Move!”
“You wouldn’t leave me?” Danivon asked her softly.
“We stand together,” she said to him. “No, I wouldn’t abandon you, Danivon Luze. Did you think I would?”
He touched her face and she let him do it as she said, “Can you two make it on foot?”
“Do you think these monsters have spread west of here?” Danivon asked.
“They may have blanketed a considerable distance,” Zasper said.
“Not logical,” Fringe contradicted. “Why would they waste time blanketing places where there aren’t any people.” “Good idea,” said Danivon. “That’s where we’ll go.”
“Where?”
“Where there aren’t any people. We’ll stay clear of the settlements, and that’ll probably keep us ahead of the monsters too. If you get out all right, you can come back and ferry us west. We’ll be along the river.”
Danivon busied himself stacking the boxes on top of one another in the flier, trying not to look at the eyes. The boxes still howled, but with diminished energy, as though they had worn out their terror, or been exhausted by it.
“The others have gone on west,” Zasper told Fringe. “Past the Great Wall. The captain told me there’s a gorge upriver, and you should find them not too far past the gorge, where Jory calls noplace.”
“I’ll be back for you.”
“Whenever. We’ll be all right.”
“Zasper. Thank you for coming.”
“It’s as you said. We Enforcers stand together.” He leaned close to her. “Get back to Jory, girl. Stick close to her. Promise.”
She gave him a preoccupied look. “Jory? If you say so, Zas.”
“Promise.”
“Promise.”
He stood back as the flier lifted. Something tentacular extruded itself from the stone, grasped the undercarriage, and tried to pull it back down. Both Zasper and Danivon burned it away and watched the flier lift and turn toward the west.
“Come on, old man,” said Danivon. “Unless you’d like to get more intimately acquainted with these devices.”
“Not really, no.”
Without further conversation the two began to run away westward, down from the rocky prominence they found themselves on and along the grassy verges of the river.
Above them, Fringe tilted the flier to watch them go: Danivon in the lead, Zasper not far behind. Her eyes blurred, and she blinked them clear, leveled the flier and dropped it low over the surface of the river to head upstream.
“Are they gone,” one of the boxes cried.
“Down below,” she said. “Nothing bothering them, so far as I can see.”
“You can drop us off somewhere. Go back for them.”
“I’ll do that. Once you’re safe.”
“Safe….” The box made a series of sounds that Fringe only belatedly recognized as sobbing.
“Jordel said safe,” she said. “I know you think it’s the end of the world.” She sounded pompous and patronizing, even to herself. “But …” But what. “Jory may be able to think of something….” Her vision blurred again, and she blinked it clear. She should comfort them! How could she comfort them. She couldn’t hug them, couldn’t hold them. They wouldn’t feel a touch. What words did she have? “Maybe….”
The flier lurched, and she leveled it, taking a deep breath.
“Listen,” she said. “Later on, if you want to … if you don’t want to … I’ll help you. Later on. But just now, you’ve got to be quiet. Quiet … as you can. So I can think. So I can fly. Because …”
Because what?
She couldn’t think what. She had to go upstream, that was it. Upstream where
she could drop the two of them off. “There are two of you, aren’t there?” she asked. “Two,” sobbed a voice.
Why had she asked that? She knew there were two. Nela. And Bertran. Was Jordel in there too? He’d been in there. For a little time. Using the voice box to talk to her. She was pretty sure….
She stared at the riverbank moving past, not too fast. Just keep it level, keep it going along the water. Can’t get lost following the water.
Not far to the west was a settlement of some kind. Small dwellings grouped into a village. More of them farther on. Beanfields. Ruled by Mother-dear and all her sister guards. And on the other side of the river—that was Thrasis. What did she know about Thrasis? Nothing. Nothing she could remember. The wall past that. Higher than she’d thought it would be. Who had built that? And when?
Was it possible those weapons had had some kind of drug on them? Some kind of poison?
Her vision blurred and she blinked.
Just keep above the water. Keep moving.
Those who occupied the Core, in addition to creating a network that covered most of Elsewhere, had also duplicated chunks of the Core matrix, a node here, a node there, inhabiting one and then another more or less randomly, as impulse moved them. There was one such node on Panubi, in a vault beneath the coastal mountains west of Deep.
Orimar Breaze, so it seemed to him, came there to find the others. They had been distant; they became adjacent. They had been outside his awareness; they came inside, a clot of roiling egos much occupied in an inquisition of Fringe and the twins. Though Orimar observed what occurred thereafter, he took little part and remained securely in the node while the others seemed to go raging off in pursuit of the escapees.
“Where have you gone?” he asked plaintively and rhetorically, not really expecting an answer. “Where is everybody?”
The voice that answered him was familiar, even after all these years.
“There are only four of you left,” it said. “And three of them are chasing after their prey, Orimar Breaze.”
“Jordel?”
“Yes,” said the voice. “Indeed. Jordel.” “I have this feeling they’ve changed, you know,” said Orimar Breaze, still plaintively.
“You’ve all changed, Orimar. I said you would.”
“I haven’t changed!”
The voice seemed to laugh, chokingly. “Oh, Orimar, if you could see yourself as I do!”
“I’ve grown, perhaps. I’m not merely human now.”
“A god, are you? Like the others?”
The being who called himself Orimar Breaze considered this. “Well, perhaps. Yes. But not like the others. What you have to consider is the others have no … panache. Clore’s a monster and Thob is a swollen udder. Magna Mater indeed. I don’t know what you could call Bland, but Gracious Lady wouldn’t be it. She’s a hag. She’s always been a hag. No style at all.”
“You have style, do you?”
“I will. When I set my mind to it. I had style even as a human! What happened to them? Jordel?”
The voice whispered, almost menacingly, “Do you really want to know?”
“I wouldn’t have asked otherwise.” A hint of the old asperity there, the old dignity, offended.
“What happened was what I told you would happen.”
“All that nonsense about staying asleep when we didn’t want to!”
“All that nonsense, yes. You all went into the Core as dynamic patterns with no sensory feedback to anchor your thoughts, no automatic procedures to correct your patterns. As each of you acquired experiences similar to the others, the edges between you started to blur. Something of Clore lapped over into what had been you, Orimar. Some of you became part of Mintier Thob, some of her became Therabas Bland. Patterns became less individual; personalities became less sure where themselves began and others ended. Attitude and identity scrambled….”
Orimar whined, “Nonsense. All nonsense!” Jordel overrode him. “Part of our patterns were the carefully inculcated civilities our mothers had taught us as children: customs and mores and manners, the behaviors that mask our primitive urges. They’re learned, of course, not instinctive, so they detach easily under stress, or when they’re not reinforced….”
“There was no stress….”
“No reinforcement, either! So civilities detached and were lost, then the old beast urges came surging up. All minds have them, and they amplified one another, they resonated….”
Orimar whined in his throat.
Jordel whispered, “All the minds of all the Great Question Committee, bubbling around in the Core like an ugly stew, bobbing and bumping against one another, getting soggier and less distinguishable the longer they cooked.”
“I don’t believe you,” he cried. “I won’t….”
“Believe or not, I don’t care. Besides, I’m not finished.
“Every personality acquires intellectual fringes: not memory, but opinions, reflexes, and responses. A lot of those bits and fragments also came unglued and went floating around loose. When the matrix came upon these free-floating scraps, it simply eliminated them.
“Aside from faces and names, those were often the traits that most distinguish any one of us from any other. With those gone, many of your minds were virtually alike, so the Core identified them as redundancies and aggregated them.”
Orimar cried, “You’re saying we were melded, combined….”
“Melded. Yes. Amalgamated. Every time I was wakened, there were fewer of you….”
“What do you mean when you were awakened? We voted not to….”
“Did you think I would let you control me with your vote? I bribed the technicians! They put me and my colleagues in a nice quiet corner of the Core, and I’ve been asleep there ever since except for my annual updatings, during which I counted you all. By the end of the first decade there were only a hundred or so. A hundred years later there were only a dozen. Now there are only four monstrous egos plus a few fragments. And me, of course. And my colleagues.”
“Liar….”
“All of you had a full complement of biological data when you came in here, all your muscletwitch and lungfill, heart-speed and footrun, ability to fight or flee, to bellow and blink and bark. It was all there when you came in, all the left luggage of evolution. It’s virtually the same for everybody! Crawling is crawling. Sucking is sucking. But the matrix was programmed to detect and eliminate redundancies when necessary to create storage space, and what did you all do? You began to create worlds of your own, whole universes of your own. Space was needed so the matrix deleted all but one set of the bio-data. Among the four of you, you’ve only got one set of breathe, jerk, blink, crawl, walk, run, shit, suck, fuck, bite!”
“But there are still a thousand faces, a thousand names.”
“Yes, a thousand faces, a thousand names, whole clusters of them attached to a single ego. Clore thinks he has followers still, when all he really has trailing after him are pieces of himself, like the tail on a comet!”
“You lie,” hissed a new voice, one returned from other business. “Don’t listen to him, Breaze.”
“You lie, Jordel.”
“Jordel, peeper and pryer, sneaker and liar,” cried a third voice. “Not one of us, Orimar. Not one of us.”
“Not one of you,” agreed Jordel, his pattern vanishing, too quickly for them to follow, his voice fading: “Not one of you, thank God.”
“Liar, liar,” chanted a chorus. “Jordel the Liar.”
“Did you catch them?” Breaze asked. “Did you catch the ones that got away?”
Hatred. Consternation. Loss. The captives had escaped! They had flown away!
Clore trumpeted, “They know something! They know something important! I’m going to get them back, and I’m going to stay here until I do!”
“They belong to all of us,” said Thob. “We’ll all stay!”
“It wastes time,” Clore screamed. “All of us being in the same place. That’s why we lost them. We weren
’t paying attention because we were distracted by one another. We’d be more creative if we were apart, really apart!”
Momentary silence in the network. The matrix sparkled with pulses of light, with wandering thoughts.
“It would be more interesting,” said Thob. “More interesting to be separate.” She’d been doing some things separately, of course, but always with the possibility of interference.
“We could divide it up,” Bland whispered. “Some for me, some for you. I could have my own places.”
“My own places,” echoed Breaze. Not that he hadn’t taken some places as his own already. Brannigan was his. Just let any of the others try to get into Brannigan!
They glittered in the matrix, considering. It was Thob who moved first.
“I’ll go,” she said. “I’m going. I’m taking my share.”
“Go, go, go,” they echoed. “Our share.”
“Separate me,” Thob instructed the matrix. “I’m going.”
For an instant the matrix hesitated, baffled by its own efficiency. If the original specifications had been in effect, none could have been separated until complete biological functions, reactions, behaviors had been restored. There were no such specifications. When Magna Mater Mintier Thob ordered the matrix to separate her, the matrix did so expediently, taking the consciousness labeled Thob (an assemblage including several hundred face-name patterns) and attaching to it a random quarter of the personality fragments and biological inventory.
Clore got a third of the balance.
Bland got half the remaining.
Breaze took what was left.
Three of the Brannigan assemblages moved off toward fresh nodes and pastures new. Clore remained, aware of space around him, of pressure removed. What had been a crowded boundary now stretched in all directions as open possibility. Places to fill with himself. Places to inhabit, to environ, to possess.
And, somewhere else, Orimar Breaze oozed around the boundaries of himself. At one time he would have walked. Still, he retained memories of walking, what walking was, of people walking, but these were only random images, without sense or application. All that complex of muscular and nervous instruction that makes up the movement concept of “walk” had gone to the others. Great Lord Breaze was left with earlier means of locomotion, with crawling and oozing and slithering around the boundaries of himself.
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