White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  “That’s going to be hard,” Toran said.

  The Builder rocked back and forth at its waist, then started to straighten its knees. It rose slowly until it was kneeling upright, then pushed one foot out. It was going to stand.

  Kali realized the machine would lift her wrist higher than she could reach. If it stood up to its full height, the Builder would hang her from her forearm, hyperextending her elbow.

  “Toran—you need to do something! It’s going to break my arm.”

  Toran circled and stroked his chin. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Get the thread gun. Tie it down.”

  Kali felt Toran shove a hand into her backpack and pull out the thread gun. He armed it and fired it at the Builder, wrapping the lines around its knees and legs, then pulling them tight. He anchored the tail end of the lines into the bedrock.

  The Builder raised its other hand toward Kali’s face. The index finger was extended, and Kali saw the gleaming edge of a diacom fingernail. The Builders cut sheets of steel with their retractable nails; it could slit her throat with a jab of its finger.

  “Give the children to me,” the Builder said, its fingertip hovering in front of her face.

  Toran looked around frantically, then grabbed an old piece of iron rebar from the crushed dorm. He approached the Builder and jammed the end of the bar into an opening in the structure of its forearm. Both hands on the bar, he pulled with all his strength, grunting with the effort. It worked—the Builder’s arm swung away from Kali’s face and out to the side. His boots slipped on the bedrock as he fought to hold the machine’s arm back.

  The bar shattered in the middle, in a cloud of oxidized dust and fragments. Toran picked himself up off the ground and wiped blood from his hands on his pants. The Builder swung its fist back to Kali’s face, its arm moving faster than before.

  “You do have them,” it said, its voice a deep rumble and its finger accusing.

  Kali turned as far away from the diacom fingernail as her shoulder would allow. The Builder let its hand drop and jabbed the fingernail into a thread line; it was cutting itself free. As soon as it managed to do that, it would stand.

  “You are hurting me,” Kali said to the machine, as clearly and firmly as she could. “You are going to seriously injure me. Your control laws don’t allow that. Obey my instructions: let me go. Put me down.”

  “No. You are not the First. Protect the First. No other law.”

  “Toran—get the knife!”

  Toran swung his pack off and fetched the knife from an outer pocket. He slipped it out of its sheath and the blade glinted in the sun. Kali’s eyes fixed on the saw edge on the back of the blade and she winced. This was going to hurt.

  Toran looked confused. “Now what?”

  “You have to cut my arm off.”

  “What?”

  “There’s a tourniquet in the medkit.”

  Toran looked horrified. “Why?”

  “You’ve got a better idea for getting out of this?”

  “Godshit!” he said. “Wait, I can get you some pain pills.”

  “There’s no time—they won’t take effect. Just do it.”

  The diacom edge would hurt, but at least it would be quicker than if she had to do it herself with flakes of rust from the Builder. She could grow a new arm on the way to Aestas.

  But wait—she had to think clearly about this. Was it better to cut through the elbow or the bones below it? Sawing the bones off would be a lot more brutal than slicing through the cartilage and tendon of the joint, but it would grow back faster.

  Toran looked back and forth between the knife and her arm. What was he waiting for? Did he want the Builder to break her arm first? That would only prolong the torture. But he was frozen in place.

  “Get on with it,” she said.

  The Builder creaked, rocking back and forth on its hips as its knees slowly extended. It lifted her arm and Kali felt her elbow joint locking up. She was already standing on her toes; there was no way to take any weight off it.

  “You have. Them. With you,” the Builder roared. “Return. Them. To me.”

  Toran shook his head and turned toward the Builder.

  He circled behind it, put one foot on its heel, and another on its hip. In a moment, he was on its shoulder. He swung a leg out and planted his boot in the crook of the Builder’s right elbow. Leaning forward, he held the knife with the blade pointed down and back. He stabbed it into the Builder’s forearm, driving the tip of the blade toward its elbow.

  The Builder’s forefinger clicked open and Kali fell backward onto the rough floor of the dome. Her hand throbbed as the blood returned. She scrambled away from the Builder and reached for the thread-gun.

  “Sorry,” Toran said, still perched on the Builder’s shoulder. “I couldn’t remember the order of the actuators. The thumb is the middle one, not the first. I worked on a restoration in…”

  “Spare me!” Kali snapped.

  The Builder rotated its hand in front of its face and flexed all its fingers. The forefinger snapped back into action, followed by its other fingers. Now its whole hand was working properly—Toran had fixed it. The machine started rocking back and forth on its knees, straightening them a few more degrees each time.

  “Crew lie,” it rumbled to itself.

  Kali didn’t wait for Toran to jump off the machine. She fired the thread-gun over and over again at the Builder, tying it up as thoroughly as she could.

  But with at least one of its fingernails extended, the Builder would make short work of the threads, and they wouldn’t hold it for long.

  ∞

  Kali descended to the plain as fast as she could, zigzagging down hills and piles of scree. The ground changed under her feet as soon as she reached the valley floor, the older surface giving way to new flows that could have solidified yesterday. The lava that formed the plain draped itself over cliffs to the east in a waterfall of viscous stone. Elongated gobbets of it hung over the edges like raw glass from the blowpipe of a careless glassmaker.

  She jogged south, parallel to the coast. One glance over her shoulder told her the Builder had cut itself free—it was following her trail down the slope with steps two or three times as long as hers. It had giant diacom foam pads on its feet and the rough terrain wasn’t giving it any trouble.

  Another glance back told her it was getting closer—less than a kilometer away. At the same time, the sound of Toran’s footsteps was becoming quieter; he was already struggling and out of breath. Kali slowed to let him catch up. “Keep moving,” she shouted.

  In between breaths, he asked, “Did you really want me to cut your arm off?”

  Kali flinched at the thought. She wasn’t going to admit it to Toran, but she liked his solution better than her own. Getting to the lander was going to be hard enough without a tourniquet on one arm and a case of shock.

  “That thing was taking too long to break it,” she said. “Didn’t have time for that.” She needed to maintain a positive attitude, even if that made her come off as kind of perverse.

  The Builder was already halfway down the hill. Kali could see the terrain ahead of her would change in a few minutes. The next lava flow was red and blocky—it was the apalhraun Alon had warned about from the air. He’d been very proud of that stuff, as if he’d extruded it from his own ass.

  “I have a confession to make,” Toran said.

  Kali rolled her eyes. Now what?

  “I took one of the skeletons from the graveyard. It’s in my pack.”

  Kali spun around, instantly enraged, and lunged for Toran. “Drop it now!”

  “The Builder can’t know!” he protested.

  She grabbed the shoulder straps of his backpack and pulled on them. “Take it off. Give it back!”

  “That machine can’t know—it’s got no sense of smell.”

  “Like it’s got no power and no brain? Give it back, or I’m going to pound you into the ground before it even catches you.”

/>   Toran pushed her away. “This is what we came for. We don’t have anything without it.”

  Kali looked back in the direction they’d come. The Builder was loping along at a regular pace, about a half kilometer away, kicking up a trail of iron oxide dust and dark volcanic ash. Whatever strength and power it had lost over the years was more than made up for by the mass of the steel rusted off its skin.

  “Why are we running?” Toran asked. “We can talk to it. Tell it what we think happened. It’s a rational machine—it’ll understand.”

  “Even with its control laws gone? We don’t have time to explain the last three thousand years.”

  “Call Manus. There must be something on the lander we can use to disable it. Let it follow us there, then we can shut it down and take it with us.”

  “Or it trashes the lander and we can’t leave.”

  “You have another plan?”

  “We need to lose it on the plain. Keep moving!”

  Kali started running again. If Toran could keep up with her, they could give the Builder the slip. If the machine lost sight of them, it would never find them again. It didn’t know where the lander was, and wouldn’t be able to find it as long as they didn’t go directly toward it. That was pretty much impossible anyway in this terrain. Once they’d lost the Builder, Kali could get them back on track with the inertial navigation in the glasses. There was still time left to take an indirect route if they walked all night.

  Kali reached the apalhraun and waded into it. It was littered with boulders of rock, from the size of her fist to the size of a house, with vesicular surfaces the texture of boiling glass. The blocks surrounded her like containers streaming out of an automated factory on a conveyor belt to the sea. Except they were stuck solid in this flow of clinker and she had to go over or around them.

  Immediately, she found the increased gravity of Keto working to slow her down. It threw off her reactions and she stumbled. The last thing she needed to do was fall—a broken ankle or injured knee would end the whole mission right here.

  “Drop the child where the Builder can see it,” she said to Toran between breaths. “That’ll distract it.”

  “I’m not leaving Keto without these bones. You don’t know how important they are.”

  “They’ll look real good in the museum with your epitaph on them.”

  “And if dropping them doesn’t work?”

  “We’ll make real nice bloody patches in this rock. Almost the same color.”

  “Those are lousy odds. It’s not worth it. You don’t have a better plan?”

  Kali looked ahead. The hill rose in the direction of the touchdown site, but the lander was still many kilometers over the horizon. The coast was to the right, ending in a cliff before the blue-green algae-stained sea. In the distance, a natural arch projected out from the cliff, a tenuous spit of basalt held up by a resistant pillar of rock. Dirty waves crashed at the base of the pillar.

  She looked back. The Builder had entered the flow of apalhraun. It’s joints and actuators were giving it no trouble, and its footpads were making quick work of the rocks, like snow shoes for lava. It showed no sign of slowing down, and it was only three hundred meters away.

  “You go right, I’ll go left,” Toran said. “See who it follows. If that doesn’t work, we’re going to have to talk to it.”

  “Okay, you win,” Kali replied. “But do this for me—when you get over the next ridge, go behind a rock. Get your sleeping bag. Turn it gray side out and get in. Make sure that thing doesn’t see you.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’ve got a plan. Just do it!”

  “And what if it doesn’t work?” Toran shouted.

  “Then you’re on your own!”

  Kali handed Toran his glasses back—if her plan didn’t work, he’d need them to find the lander. She turned toward the sea. It was getting darker, the sun falling behind the clouds on the horizon. Night was only an hour away.

  Without Toran slowing her down, she could reach the arch before the sun set and the Builder caught up with her.

  Jumping

  The Builder approached Kali, shuffling over the span of the arch one foam-padded foot ahead of the other. Its red eyes glowed at her intently.

  Kali waited at the end of the arch, listening to the waves crash on the base of the pillar thirty meters below. She stood with her arms folded, catching her breath as the smoke blew around her. Three rocks—two small and one large—rested at her feet, pinning down burning sheets of paper. The smoke was thick and noxious, and probably toxic; she tried not to breathe too much of it. But she needed the fire to make sure the Builder saw her in the failing light.

  The Builder put one foot in front of the other—it was a third of the way out on the span of the arch. Kali worried it would be too heavy for the basalt. If the Builder fell through it, her plan would fail. Most likely she would go down with it as the arch collapsed. Otherwise, she’d be trapped on the pillar, and getting back to the mainland would be dangerous and time consuming. The arch had to hold up.

  The Builder shuffled closer, leading with its right foot. The arch was so narrow, and its feet so wide, it couldn’t walk normally. It reached the center of the arch and stopped, only about four or five meters from Kali.

  When she and Toran had split up on the plain, it had followed her, but what did it want from her?

  On the hill above the sea cliffs, in a ravine a half kilometer away, Toran emerged from his inside-out sleeping bag. The ruse had worked, and the Builder hadn’t given him a second look as it went by. Kali wanted to wave at him to stay hidden or run up the hill, but she couldn’t risk it—the Builder would notice. If Toran had the sense to get out of sight on top, that would be one thing less to worry about. But he was advancing slowly down instead.

  The Builder glowered at her silently. Kali backed up as far as she could without falling into the sea of Keto. The machine was too far away; she needed it to get closer. Night was coming and she couldn’t wait indefinitely. Her heart rate was picking up; there was no way out now, and she had to tell the machine some of the truth.

  “I don’t have your children,” she said.

  “Where. Are. They?” the machine growled.

  “Dead—in the dorm or in the graveyard.”

  The Builder was silent for a moment. Was it having something like an emotional reaction or just reprocessing?

  “Crew lied,” the Builder said, its voice functioning more smoothly than before, but still reverberating with noise. “Crew lied about staying. Crew lied about rebuilding. Crew lied about the children.”

  “I never said any of those things. I never lied to you.”

  Beyond the machine, Toran was halfway down the hill. Kali gritted her teeth—of course he was going the wrong way. If he distracted the Builder now, he’d ruin everything.

  “Who do you think I am?” she asked the Builder.

  “Uniform and insignia cross-check,” the Builder said to itself and paused, its eyes glowing at Kali. “Symbology is consistent. Crew identification confirmed.” It advanced another step. “Crew lied. Explain yourself.”

  “Who exactly do you think I am?”

  “Individual identification uncertain.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Imaging malfunction.”

  Kali sucked her breath in. “Come closer.”

  The Builder moved forward another step. “Kali Hakoian,” it read from her name tag. “Individual unknown; records unavailable.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Storage malfunction.”

  Kali needed the machine to get closer, but not too close. Her heart was beating quickly—this needed to work. She had no alternative, no backup plan.

  “What year do you think it is?”

  “No time signal detected. System clock not set.”

  “Your clock is three thousand years off. Whoever you think I am, that’s not who I am.”

  Kali pulled out the last sheet
of paper—the only one she hadn’t set on fire—and tapped it for a standard-time clock. She held it out to the Builder. “It’s five thousand, three hundred and fourteen, by the old calendar. That’s what year it is.”

  The Builder was silent. It leaned forward as if trying to read the paper better in the failing light. Without external power, Athenian paper functioned only by reflection. The display had low contrast in dim light, but that wasn’t a bad thing.

  “Come closer. Take it.” Kali shook the paper. “It’ll tell you everything.”

  The machine took one step closer. Almost there, Kali thought.

  “Where is the black seed?” the Builder asked, its voice more fluid than before.

  “In orbit, where it belongs. In the ship’s drive.”

  “No. Not that one,” the machine said quietly. “The other one—the twin.”

  Kali froze. What was it saying? There was no way for it to know about the other black seed. She looked up the hill anxiously. Where was Toran—could he hear this? Now she really needed to finish this thing.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said quietly.

  “You have it,” the Builder accused.

  “I don’t. There’s only one. It’s in orbit above us.”

  “Crew lie.”

  Kali waved the sheet of paper. “Take this. It’s all the truth I have. Download it.” She was certain there was nothing about the twin in the paper, even if the Builder could read it.

  “The black seed is dangerous,” the Builder said. “You cannot have it. Only evil will come of it. What have you done with it?”

  Now was the time—this was as good as it got. She had to stop the Builder talking before Toran was close enough to hear what it was saying.

  Kali stuffed the last sheet into her pocket and bent to scoop up two rocks, each wrapped in burning paper. Before the flames could singe her hand, she tossed each one underarm to the Builder. Its right hand, then its left, reached out automatically to catch the stones. Kali squatted to grab the biggest of the stones and hoisted it two-handed straight at the Builder’s glowing eyes. The stone sailed through the air trailing burnt flakes and smoke.