Vigilant

by James Alan Gardner

  “Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” Festina asked. She was still very close.

  “Xé,” I said. “She…it…is a consciousness laced through all the digital intelligences on Demoth. Including my link-seed. When I suggested maybe we shouldn’t keep going forward, Xé hit me with that colossal crying jag. Or maybe Xé herself had the crying jag, and I just got caught in the backwash.”

  “So,” Festina muttered, “this Xé desperately wants us to press on. And the Peacock doesn’t. Dandy.” She looked down at the Bumbler, clipped to her belt. “I suppose we could take a discreet peek from a distance…”

  Carefully she drew back from the Peacock, slipping out through the gap it’d left for us. With the slow steps of someone who doesn’t want to rile a hair-temper dog, she walked around the edge of the ribbon-tube of light. The Peacock fluttered jumpitty-jittery, but didn’t stop her. As long as I stayed safe, the Peacock wouldn’t prevent others from sticking their heads in the noose.

  Xé, I thought as Festina approached the hidden door, she’s a friend. Don’t be tico, nago, wuto.

  No response.

  Festina lifted the Bumbler and pulled out the scanner on its umbilical again. She took time for a glance back at me; I nodded. Then she planted the head of the scanner against the wall and gave a light push.

  It went in. Straight into a wall that looked like solid granite. The nanites of the stone slipped out of the way, yielding enough to let the scanner pass through—centimeter by centimeter, like pushing a wooden stake into soft mud. Half a meter in, Festina said, “Okay. We’re through.”

  “See anything?” I asked.

  She looked at the Bumbler’s vidscreen. “A short corridor and another room beyond. They’re both lit up, though I don’t see the light source. Oh, here’s something interesting.” She turned a dial for better magnification. “My, my, my.”

  “What?”

  “It’s an anchor. A Sperm-tail anchor. A machine that generates fields for holding Sperm-tails in place.”

  The dipshits had mentioned something about anchors—they were amazed the Peacock could stay stable without one. “These anchors lock down Sperm-tails?” I asked.

  “Right. Whenever Explorers ride Sperm-tails on planet-down missions, we send an anchor out first to hold the tail in place.”

  “No wonder the Peacock is jumpy,” I said. “A machine that can chain him down? That’s enough to give anyone the trembles.”

  “On the other hand,” Festina replied, “you have to wonder what an anchor is doing down here.” She fiddled with another dial on the Bumbler, “Let’s get more magnification and we’ll…holy shit!”

  “What?”

  She didn’t answer; she just stared at the Bumbler screen, her body blocking the view. “What is it?” I kept asking. “Festina? What?”

  Twenty seconds later she stepped back from the wall. With a bit of huffing and puffing, Festina tug-of-warred the scanner out of the false granite. Then she carried the Bumbler back to me, her face deliberately emotionless. “I’ve recorded what’s in the next room. Here’s a playback.”

  She held the vidscreen in front of my eyes. The Peacock rippled nervously, flowing like whitewater rapids between Festina and me, but not blocking my view of what the Bumbler showed.

  Like Festina said, the other side of the door was a corridor leading to a larger room. In the mouth of the corridor, a boot-sized machine sat on the ground—the anchor thingy. The view moved in for a close-up: a black box with a horseshoe-shaped inset of gold embedded in its lid. More golden horseshoes circled the box’s sides, all glinting faint as a whisper. Incandescent. Every surface clean, not a speck of dirt or corrosion.

  Then the view lifted away from the anchor, aiming out into the room beyond—a room with a huge black machine in the center, a great whopping obelisk stretched from floor to ceiling…and all around the obelisk, lights glowed.

  Purple. Yellow. Green. Blue.

  Flecks of color filled the room wherever I looked, everywhere, everywhere…till I realized I was seeing a single creature wrapped around and around and around, spun about the obelisk like thread on a spool. Wrapped around so many billion times, the windings went all the way out to the walls, bulging against them. Stuffed into the room, crammed tight.

  Another Peacock, locked down by the anchor.

  Then the Bumbler’s view shifted once more, zooming straight ahead, to part of the far wall. On the floor sat another anchor box; and a pace away another; and another, and another, out to both edges of the view, so I could imagine that the whole room, all the parts out of sight, had anchor boxes along the walls.

  Like pins holding down a butterfly.

  The Bumbler’s screen went blank. Then the playback kicked over again, the entrance corridor, the view zooming in for a close-up of the first anchor…

  “Turn it off,” I said.

  Festina moved a dial; the video went black.

  “So what do we do?” she asked, her voice a whisper.

  “Can we set it free?”

  “It’s not hard to break an anchor,” she replied. “One good smash with a rock should do it. But do we want to?”

  Tough question, that. No doubt at all, the pinned-down Peacock was Xé—soul of the world-soul, friendly spirit who let me hear nanites giggle. Her body might be trapped, but her mind had roamed outward, melding with machine intelligences…

  How?

  An answer appeared in my mind: the obelisk in the next room was a computer, a Greenstrider computer. And Xé surrounded it, permeated it. Used it as a stepping-stone to all the other computers on planet. Xé had done her best to be kindly, helpful…

  But my Peacock said tico, nago, wuto. Crazy. Evil. Dangerous. Was he just afraid of the anchors, or was he describing Xé? No matter how gentle-natured Xé seemed, she’d been locked down here a long long time. Probably the whole three thousand years since the Greenstrider colony self-destructed. Three millennia = thirty centuries = plenty of time to go mad.

  Tico.

  In stories, when you let a genie out of a bottle, sometimes it grants you wishes. Sometimes it decides to rip your head off.

  “What do you think?” I asked Festina. “If we let Xé out, how dangerous could it be?”

  She lowered her gaze. “I once knew a lunatic who planned to destroy a planet’s biosphere with a Sperm-tail. I won’t tell you how, but I think it might have worked.”

  “Ouch,” I said. “If it was just us at risk…”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “It’s harder taking a chance with other people’s lives.” She stared at me thoughtfully. “You can talk to this Xé with your link-seed?”

  “Sort of. But she hasn’t volunteered to explain what’s going on.”

  “Ask a direct question. See what you get.”

  So I asked…and what I got was data tumor. Three thousand years of torment lanced straight into my brain.

  17

  GERM FACTORY

  Information exploded in…century after century, what Xé experienced. Imprisonment. Boredom. Suffering.

  Madness. Evil.

  Guilt. Contrition.

  Everything all at once, pummeling into my consciousness. A damburst set off by the right question, at the right place, right time.

  Drowning in the weight of data. Choked by it—the way I often choked on scalpelish thoughts when I brooded how much I’d made a mess of things. Black depression is all you see, all you touch, all you feel, frothing-foaming-muddling in your brain. Motion churns without moving forward, bleak images circling the same futilities, everything all at once, too much to swallow, too much to breathe…

  Then, in the jumble of mental meltdown, blood-boiling death a millisecond away…the sweet strong image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a million eyes open. Just as I’d seen during müshor: not long ago, but I’d been so naive back then, I thought it was a trick of my mind. Now I knew better. This was the touch of the Peacock, my Peacock: shielding me, stopping up the dat
a flood, holding back the tide till I caught my breath.

  And the sound of it, same as before—feathers rattling, like a true peacock.

  Look at me. Look at me.

  A demanding peace.

  Then the world was back…and only a blink had flicked by. Festina was just starting to move toward me, her hands coming up, grabbing me as I slumped. I let her take my weight—I didn’t have the strength to stand because my head was so heavy, so full…

  Not that I knew everything. My Peacock had thrown himself in the way of the data flood before I drowned. I’ll never know how much of the download got pinched off short.

  But I knew enough. More than enough.

  “Are you all right?” Festina asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “And no. Ouch.”

  I didn’t move—just leaned against her and let her do the work because my brain couldn’t exactly remember how to control my legs. When Festina saw I was nigh-on deadweight, she lowered me gently to the floor. “What happened? Faye. Faye. Come on, focus. What happened?”

  “I got the explanation,” I replied, still reeling. “No one else ever asked. Even Tic…so Zenned-out, he never questioned. Just accepted everything Xé sent his way. When I asked, Xé was so excited and relieved…she tried to control the memory dump, I think she did, but she was too blessed giddy.”

  “What did she say?”

  “Give me a second to sort it out.” I looked around. “Where’s the Peacock?”

  “It was moving so fast I could barely follow it, but, umm…I think it went up your nose.”

  “Oh,” I said. “They do that. It’s their nature. And since he stopped my brain from exploding out my ears, I can’t complain, can I?”

  “Are you sure you’re all right?” Festina asked, placing a hand on my forehead.

  “I don’t have a fever,” I told her. “Not yet. And I’m not delusional, I’m enlightened. Enlightened, lightheaded, delighted. Do you want to hear a story?”

  “If you want to tell me one.” She had the cautious tone of someone humoring a woman who might be tico. But I told her the story anyway.

  Start with the peacocks. A species that surfaced into sentience long long long before Homo saps. They launched their first rocket while Earth was still watching protomammals dodge out from under the feet of T. rex. Then came the peacocks’ space-exploration phase, their bioengineering phase, their evolution into immortal energy-beings phase….

  Yeah, sure, trite cliché. Simplistic at best, and God knows, maybe plain wrong. All I can share is the data scar left in my mind after the tumor: a mix of real information from Xé and approximations made by my overloaded brain as it tried to make sense of everything. If the input got trivialized and contaminated by junk already lying in my subconscious—well, that’s the way the meat brain works. Alien experiences get reinterpreted into things more familiar…even if that means drawing on fusty neural pathways laid down while watching Captain Action and the Technocracy Team.

  So. The peacocks. Sentient Sperm-tails. Don’t ask me what part was the actual peacock: maybe the Sperm-tail’s pocket universe, maybe the particle-thin field that contained the pocket universe inside our own. Xé didn’t give me details. Maybe she didn’t know the truth herself.

  Oh, another human prejudice there—seeing Xé as female. She wasn’t…any more than my own Peacock was male. But three thousand years ago, the two were a couple, a pair bond, friends, lovers, allies, interpenetrating energies…pick whatever facile description gives you the gooey. And the two wandered the galaxy together, looking for enlightenment/light-headedness/delight.

  Riding lesser beings.

  No big mystery what I mean by Riding: hitchhiking in another creature’s brain. Secretly experiencing its thoughts and emotions. Telepathic tourism. Peacocks could set up as squatters in the minds of lesser organisms, decoding neural transmissions as easily as we decode the snarl of light waves that hit our retinas. Xé and her paramour picked up the thoughts of everyone around them, clear as a summer’s day.

  Idle wandering took them to the Greenstrider home-world; hitchhiking brought them to Demoth. They Rode their unknowing hosts, sometimes for just a few hours but often from cradle to grave. That was their favorite way to Ride; traveling from birth to death gave them the full story, beginning, middle, end. The peacocks found each part fascinating…especially when the Greenstrider colony started breaking into factions.

  You can picture them, those peacocks, like some rich-as-sin tourists watching the locals disembowel each other. Civil war breaking out, while the peacocks sat amused, sipping a telepathic cocktail of hate and violence, with just a splash of genocide.

  The schisms that ripped apart Greenstrider society were so meaningless to Xé she didn’t try to understand. Too much bother. The striders may have been fighting rich against poor, heathens against believers, green legs against blue; but Xé couldn’t tell me because she hadn’t paid attention. All she could say was the Greenstriders fought: north vs. south, east vs. west, coast vs. interior, tribe vs. tribe vs. tribe.

  For a long time, it stayed a cold war. The League of Peoples was just as inescapable back then as it is today; if the striders had battled full out, nukes blazing, poison gas spreading like fog, Demoth would have been declared non-sentient: no one allowed out or in, total blockade and embargo. That threat was enough to keep hostilities mostly “polite”…like those nanotech weapons that gutted machines without hurting people. But let’s not pretend blood was never shed. Sabotage can kill. Suspected sympathizers got lynched. Raids turned vicious. As machines went defunct one by one, neighbors invaded each other, looking for food synthesizers that could still pump out protein.

  Ugly stuff…but not to Xé. She just found it interesting: like watching ants squabble, colony against colony; vicious but not important. For all her years of soaking up Greenstrider emotions, she still didn’t identify with them. They were animals—so far beneath her, they didn’t count. Even if the League considered the Greenstrider species sentient, they didn’t act that way on Demoth; murdering each other with barely an excuse, believing their petty squabbles mattered. If the strider she was Riding grieved for a fallen comrade or raged as his clan sank into low-tech barbarism…well, wasn’t it just so cute how they took themselves seriously?

  Her sweetheart didn’t see it like that. Humorless dud that he was, he actually tried to stop the fun; and in a gag-down disgusting way. Here’s the thing: peacocks could do more than Ride in a passive way. They could actually fuse with their hosts, mind to mind, heart to heart. A conscious union, two brains in one, lasting for the lifetime of the host. Once twinned in, the Peacock couldn’t withdraw without killing its Greenstrider partner.

  To Xé, whole fusion was like doing the dance with a monkey. Obscene. Uncleanly. But the other peacock, my Peacock, didn’t balk at grossness when it was necessary— he picked the leader of the strongest faction and zoomed in for a merge. The result was secret symbiosis: full Greenstrider on the outside, but inside half Peacock. Two minds becoming one…and the Peacock half was set on ending the civil war.

  It made Xé sick. It made Xé furious. It made Xé blind-screaming jealous.

  Her lover—her soul mate—getting heart-mind intimate with a lower animal. Disgusting. Sordid. Insulting.

  Like many jealous lovers before her, Xé blazed back tit for tat: her own fling at bestiality. But she wasn’t looking for a productive working union; she wanted someone she could rape and use. Xé chose the leader of another faction, and shredded the Greenstrider’s brain as she made it her own. Blew the poor bugger straight off the edge of insanity. Then she set about using his body and his clan to rack up revenge.

  It goes without saying Xé had ungodly intelligence compared with paltry minds like the Greenstriders. Intricate technical projects were child’s play…like creating the most lethal biological agent she could imagine. Not a germ, but a germ factory—a cloud of nanites (microscopic, invisible) that could analyze an organism, then build a microbe ideal
ly suited to giving that organism a slow inescapable death.

  Got it? Germ factory = Pteromic Central. The Mother of all Plagues.

  My Peacock’s Greenstrider host operated from a bunker in Great St. Caspian. Xé sent the germ factory there—a microscopic troop of nanites, bent on making disease. The factory found a Greenstrider…analyzed the sad bastard’s biochemistry…came up with a killer bug. As Yunupur had observed, the germ was designed to spread far and wide: a long latency period when carriers were contagious but showed no symptoms. It infected everyone in the Peacock’s bunker, and the Peacock never noticed.

  But.

  The Peacock was working to restore peace on Demoth. That meant sending out envoys. Diplomats. People carrying offers of truce.

  People also carrying the plague. Infecting clan after clan after clan.

  The Greenstrider version of plague affected their skeletal structure; that’s what the germ factory decided was most vulnerable. Slowly, ever so slowly, bones began to shrink. Subtle, subtle. Bone cells just stopped reproducing, never replacing themselves. Ostrich legs grew thinner till they snapped like matchsticks. Just flexing a thumb might be enough to rip one of their spindly insect arms to flinders: thumb stressing the wrist, stressing the forearm, stressing the elbow joint, and so on up to the shoulder, everything going in one sickening crack.

  Greenstrider lungs and diaphragm were seated on bones, using them for leverage during inhalation. Once those bones turned to tinder…breathless.

  So Greenstriders began to die, all around the world. Leaving saggy corpses that soon decayed to humus and powder. Precious little in the way of skeletons for future archaeologists to study.

  Long after it was too late, the Peacock realized what had happened—who was to blame for the epidemic unstoppably scouring Demoth free of Greenstriders. He never managed to develop a cure; but he did have time to settle the score with his former love.