They've penetrated at least two hundred meters into the limestone labyrinth, keeping to their right the whole way. Retracing their route, if this becomes necessary, should be easy. Blindly, she proceeds. A few meters farther along the passage tapers to where she finds herself groping at an opening twice the size of her head. Big enough for a small dog, and no problem for a robotpet Lhasa Apso, which is what Toot happens to be. Dee Zu, on the other hand, takes the one option remaining to her, and begins backing out. Her retreat to where she earlier passed a three‐way fork is straightforward; the merest suggestion of a breeze from the leftward opening suggests a way out. She repeats the new return route to herself. Right, left, left, left. Easy.
She humps along backwards on belly and elbows and knees, taking care not to bang her head, trying to spare her scorched skin. The passage narrows. Now she encounters broken ground, a fresh fall. The rocks are slime free, and sharp edges tear at her. With much painful contortion, she makes her way over and around it until she finds she can go no farther. "Toot!" she calls, expecting no response. She's inching backwards toward the last junction when there's a great thud. More than a thud. The earth groans and rumbles, and the concussion pounds at her from all directions. Unbidden, her WalkAbout says that, if a bunkerbuster penetrates the cave system, the blast will suck the air from all its passages, including her lungs; but never mind because she'll be incinerated before she can suffocate. That's her interpretation, at least, of the basic information served up by the Lode.
Dee Zu lies still for a few minutes. She thinks about times past with Cisco, many of them good, and she thinks about Tor. She tells herself to relax. Eventually, she resumes her backward journey out of this dead end. Then her feet kick against broken ground. She feels all around with her toes for the passage, but there is no passage. Only the fresh rockfall. She's missing toes as well, maybe two or three of them. The satrays probably burned them off; the blurs wouldn't have left her the remaining toes or anything else either.
She weighs this option and that one. Both options are the same. Lie here in the dark and wait to die.
A short scrabble to the end of the road, and she's left alone with the sound of her own breathing. A slight breeze from the dark ahead caresses her face, cruel suggestion of an escape route. She never did find her water. Her skin is tightening, maybe her mudpack drying in the breeze. She's thirsty. And light‐headed. An occasional grating and clack tell her the rocks behind her are shifting to a more stable configuration. Water drips somewhere, tantalizing, but the acoustics are bad and there's no telling whether it's coming from ahead, the way Toot went, or behind, on the other side of the rockfall. So, that's it. That's her world. This dismal little mondoland pass at a place to be. And there's no bail button.
"Toot." She screams it with all her strength. A final long shot, Dee Zu dislocates her shoulder joints and tries again to wiggle through the tiny hole. Normally this sort of contortion would be easy, but she's too confined. It feels like her skin is tearing.
Anyway, there's no hope. There's no sign of Toot at all. Wherever Cisco is, he doesn't know she's alive, much less here in the cave. She doesn't need MOM and the mall to tell her that her current connectivity quotient is zero. CQ: zilch. Being alone doesn't get any more solitary than this. CQ: n/a. Neither does her HQ, her happiness quotient, figure in the mental attitude she now adopts.
One of her shoulders refuses to pop back into joint. Enough is enough—she shifts into shutdown mode, reducing both metabolism and cognition to minimum maintenance levels. When there's nothing else to do about it, you accept the situation. Too bad, so sad. Her last thoughts are of Cisco.
emergence
WHUMP.
The concussion slams Cisco, reverberates through bedrock and deep into his bones. Then there's another.
WHUMP.
Clouds of bats descend from the heights to swoop this way and that. Big chunks of rock drop, while rank odors of ancient and indeterminate origin join the prevailing reek of batshit. The lights flash on and off, a freeze‐frame strobe effect lending sporadic views of pandemonium. Toot nips at Cisco's ankle. "This way," he says, scuttling off behind the main control panel. "Hurry!"
Cisco follows as fast as he's able. Before entering the passage, he looks back to see Leary over by the holotank with Ellie. Then the tank flickers and goes blank. He also glimpses Brian Finister thrashing about, helpless in the muck and swarmed with roaches. Cisco almost believes that he can hear Brian laughing. He does hear him say, "Fuck!" He's shaking a fist skyward, looking up in much the same way he earlier looked up to catch an eyeful of batshit. "Fuck," he says. This time, though, the last thing to impinge on Brian's consciousness is some tons of limestone.
The main cavern collapses. By the time Cisco turns and dives into the tunnel, there would be nothing to see but freshly fallen rock, if there were any light by which to see it, which there isn't. He scrabbles away from the entrance as fast as he can into pitch‐dark.
•
Blind, in pain, he flees deeper into the cave. All that was important to him lies behind. No reason to keep going.
"Trust me." Those were Toot's last words. Which, of course, were actually Sky's last words. Toot is no more than a Sky telep, her avatar, just as Sky herself is a MOM projection. A personality alter. In fact, Cisco's been getting the notion that nearly everyone back in ESUSA Mall was a telepresent projection of somebody else, and almost no one was who she was supposed to be.
"Really," the Toot‐Sky‐MOM thing had said. "Trust me."
Cisco sobs, thinking it's a laugh. And he proceeds deeper into the cave.
Cherchez les femmes, eh? Sweetie, Brian's woman—left behind beneath the rubble with Brian and the others—had been sadistic beyond the capacity of Cisco's medibots to keep up. Now he has to stand. To stretch. To stop the pain in his shoulder, in his groin, nearly everywhere. But he can't lift his head to turn it. He shimmies to one side, hoping to find more space. He kicks himself forward, impaling himself, crotch to shoulder, on the agony. He bangs his head against rock. Is this a dead end? He feels the way ahead closing off.
Whatever. There's no turning back. Meanwhile, his current HQ and CQ surely make him a candidate for compulsory PR. Psychoneurotherapeutic reconstruction.
The bombardment is easing. But the roaches continue swarming out the same way he's going. He snorts his nostrils clear of insects, lucky he can still breathe. If Brian's hideout takes a direct strike, the blast will suck the air out of this whole cave system. Never mind. The heat will cook him before he can suffocate.
This could be a dream. Except these pains are real. Maybe it's the mushrooms Sweetie fed him. He has gone psychotic, this nightmare all in his own mind. The fear. This black night of the soul without limits. Lost in this tangle of rock‐bound spaces, the passages raveling, snarling, his own mind tangling in search of a way out of this higgledy‐piggledy hell. He spirals at sickening speed into the emptiness that is himself.
On the brink of madness, he instead encounters a core of pure mettle that denies obliteration. He undergoes a profound personal intrication. Internal keys turn and tumblers drop. This is a new configuration. With the slightest wrench, things tighten up. They both complexitize and become simpler. For an instant, he sickens at the awful intimacy. Then everything's okay. The dread passes. He is whole again. He's more than whole.
Newly integrated and tempered by his ordeals, Cisco Smith stops. He rests.
•
Cisco awakens to a sense of purpose and urgency. The pains recede to somewhere they don't matter.
"Stay calm. All is well."
Cisco hears this voice.
"Everything is under control."
He laughs. Only a little, but it's a real laugh. It comes from a part of himself he owes to Dee Zu. Whom he will never see again.
Cisco knows he is also dying. He'll go no farther than this. In the absolute dark, he looks askance. What he finds is both his and it isn't. It says "Hi," and it tells him "Trust me." It's her.
It's Sky.
He laughs again. Surrenders to sleep.
rise & descent
Emerging from the cave, from the dreams, Cisco is drawn to a radiance within which people are speaking, moving, turning toward him with promise of comfort and love.
•
"Hi," Sky says. "Yes. Welcome."
Sky is beautiful. As beautiful as ever, even though Cisco now knows what she is. Leary and Ellie are there as well.
"Cisco," Ellie says. She's crying and laughing at the same time. "Finally. We're together."
Ellie. His mother who has been dead these past two decades, who then appeared to die again only an hour ago, when her just‐resurrected ebee was obliterated in the cave. Leary has his arm around her; he's grinning and grinning. His father, also reclaimed after twenty years, did die an hour ago. Cisco watched it happen. The wet Leary, crushed to death.
Cisco himself wants to cry at the warmth of family he has never known in all his years of isolation in ESUSA Mall, all those years of not knowing who his parents were or who he really was. But he doesn't yet understand.
"Welcome to Aeolia, Kid." Leary looks at once abashed and proud. "That's what we call it."
"Aeolia?" Cisco asks. Some descendant of the Worlds. When did they decide to call this place anything? They've been dead just an hour. Haven't they?
•
There's an old gray wooden board on a thick rope hanging from a big tree. With a treehouse. And a swinging seat for two beside it under the tree. And an animal, a garok. That was its name in Thai. He learned that from Lek, their maid, before he knew what it was in English. "Squirrel." This knowledge seems to come from a collective lode of information, something even more immediate than his WalkAbout connection to the Lode.
It's as though he's dreaming again, except it's like a flashback to someone else's dream, or like he's in a dream behind all the dreams he has ever had in his life. This is a home he once had, the house and garden where, in another time and place, he had a mother and a father.
And here's Lek. Unbelievable. She's coming out of the house with a tray of drinks and kanoms, snacks. She looks the same. She hasn't aged, and her sarong and rubber flip‐flops are as familiar to him as his mother's face. Which is to say not all that familiar, but rapidly becoming more so. Lek doesn't recognize him.
The humid air is heavy with scents, from the heaped garlands of flowers on that little spirit house by the wall, from the smoke twisting from a thicket of sticks on the same platform. Now the squirrel climbs up there to steal food from a saucer set out for the spirits. Everywhere Cisco looks and everything he sees triggers memories that flood him with a sense of love and loss and wonder at how all this can be. It's the same as when he was a little boy, those memories coming to him now for the first time since last he was here.
"Do you remember any of this?" asks Leary.
"Yes," he replies. "Yes."
"This is where you grew up."
"Until that evil man took you," Ellie says. "And me."
"Brian Finister." Leary mouths the name as though it were something poisonous.
"That's in the past," Ellie says. "Now you're home again."
Of everything that's happened since he fled the disintegration of ESUSA Mall—the only home he has ever known, breached by the PlagueBot—this is the most overwhelming. He responds with equal measures of grief and excitement and wonder.
That gives way to a sense of dire absence.
•
"Where's Dee Zu?" he says.
"I'm here."
She's standing right beside him. As real, as substantial as ever she was in the Worlds. How did he miss her arrival? She's wearing a simple Worlds UnLtd test pilot's tunic. The sight of her fills him with joy.
She gives him a gentle punch in the shoulder and says, "Want to go a couple of rounds?"
"What?"
"OmniStrike." She grins. "Let's do it."
Her playful feint, a straight kick to the head, is wooden. This Dee Zu is herself dim, oddly spiritless. Cisco's joy evaporates.
And one moment she's there, the next she isn't.
"Sorry," Sky says. "I wanted you to see it. Yes. That is the best we can do."
"You're kidding me."
Leary's hand on Cisco's shoulder, by contrast, is solid, warm. Real. "That was only an ebee, son," he says.
"What about you?" Cisco replies. "And me? We're ebees."
"We're scendents. It's not the same."
"Dee Zu never was a real candidate," Sky says. "She was too uncomplicated. Perhaps too happy."
"She's dead?" Cisco asks. "Permanently dead?"
"Whatever. We can't bring her here. Hi‐rez ebees are the best we can do; we don't have enough of the right stuff to resurrect her."
We. We scendents. Autonomous ebees, a big evolutionary surprise. "There must be a way," Cisco says.
Leary looks unhappy. This is the same Leary that Cisco saw die. His father. Cisco's mother is also alive. Here in this place they're calling "Aeolia." He can't get over it. Cisco saw them both die. Crushed and probably incinerated in a bunkerbuster strike. This is like a bizarre dream. Though he knows it's a World. A generated reality unlike any he has visited, even as a test pilot.
He's present here not as the mere telep of a wet self stashed in his Worlds UnLtd cradle back in ESUSA Mall. Nor is he a telep of that wet Cisco who lies dead or dying in a cave here, on the far side of the world from ESUSA. The Cisco he is now is something different. Something unprecedented. At the same time, he basically feels like the person he was. Better than that, in fact, though mostly the same Cisco.
But the low‐rez Dee Zu wasn't anything like that.
"She must have loded as much data as I ever did."
"Not the right kind," Sky says. "She had to be torn apart, and she herself had to put the pieces back together. Yes. That is how we are seeded."
So, she's dead. No more data to lode.
"She is transmitting the right kind now," says Sky. "But it is too late."
"What?" Cisco asks. "I don't understand. She's dead. I killed her."
Leary puts a hand on his shoulder. "Not you, son. That was Brian's doing."
"Okay, Randy killed her." His alter ego. "He killed her back in ESUSA Mall."
"No," Sky says. "He failed. And she followed you here. She remains in the cave."
"She's alive?" A rollercoaster ride.
"She is approaching death."
"Why aren't we helping her?"
"I have told you. She was too well balanced. She needed fragmenting. Big conflict and trauma."
"Was too well balanced? Needed fragmenting? She isn't dead yet."
"Not yet."
"What about me; is my wet master dead?"
"Almost."
"Can we revive it?"
"Probably," Sky says. "But it is close to death."
"But I might be able to find her?"
"Maybe," she replies. "Even then, she would never be able to ascend. Even if you did both survive."
"You've been recording my data with the WalkAbout; we can do the same for her."
"I do not want you to go back." Sky's abundant femininity takes on an intractable, machine‐like edge. "Your own ascension is no small thing. And your chances of survival in mondoland are almost nil."
"I'll take the chance."
"You are not expendable."
"And Dee Zu is?"
"Nothing remains for you in mondoland."
"What about Toot?" he asks Sky. "Is he intact? Can he be reactivated?"
"Yes. He is operative."
"And Toot knows—you know—where Dee Zu is?"
No response. Sky understands where this is leading.
"I'm going back."
"No."
"I'm going back."
"Cisco," Sky says. Her voice goes all womanly, compassionate and caring. "We cannot resurrect Dee Zu."
"She isn't dead."
"You're a scendent, now. You belong here with Ellie and Leary and the other
s. Yes. With me."
"I'm going back."
"Oh, my." Ellie tries to smile. "He's your son," she tells Leary. "No question."
"Cisco the Kid," he says. "All grown up."
For the first time in memory, Cisco takes his mother in his arms. She's crying, quietly. He kisses her forehead, turns to shake Leary's hand.
"Darn it," Leary says. "You take care."
"Use that door under the stairway," says Sky.
Cisco ducks into the darkness.
•
He awakens to more darkness. And pain. The pain isn't as bad as it was before, though it's bad enough. Naked and filthy, he's squeezed into a fifty‐centimeter‐high stone dungeon buried deep beneath an alien and hostile world.
He waits as something scrabbles and slips out of the black toward him. Then there's light. A little headlamp.
"This is not going to be easy," Toot says. "But let us proceed. We can try this way."
The tiny robopet heads off back into the dark. Aside from the lamp, he looks the same from either end, a shaggy mop coming or going. Cisco tries for a Learyesque belly laugh, but that really hurts.
Toot turns the light back on him and says, "You coming?"
Cisco follows.
other worlds
Immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be.
– Leary
Tobacco's as benign as broccoli, hereabouts—small compensation for being condemned to Hell for all eternity.
– Brian Finister
sukhumvit road, aeolian Bangkok
Cisco the Kid. Imagine the cojones, going back to mondoland to rescue Dee Zu.
Ellie hasn't accepted it yet, not completely, but Leary glows inside. That's his son, darn it. Though of course he isn't entirely happy either, Cisco and Dee Zu down there in mondoland while Ellie and himself remain safely parked here in Aeolia.
•
Leary sits outside on the swinging teak loveseat built for two. He constructed the mondoland original out of old boat decking. He likes their garden. The whole place is a fair facsimile of what Bangkok once was. His and Ellie's Bangkok, at least. Whatever. This is the only world they have, so it'll have to do.
Genesis 2.0 Page 9