White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  The Builder raised its fists to protect its face. As the stone clanked off the machine’s forearms, it shifted its lead foot back one step to stabilize itself. But the foot went into empty air. The Builder teetered on the edge of the arch on the other foot, mechanically struggling to recover its balance. Kali watched it swing its arms forward again and realized it wasn’t going to fall.

  She had no choice. Kali ran toward the Builder, closing the gap in a fraction of a second and leaping for the machine’s chest. As she hit it with her full weight, she wrapped her arms around its neck.

  Holding on tight, Kali reflected, for a few oddly long milliseconds, that it was done.

  The Builder started to tip away from the arch. It couldn’t stand, it couldn’t put the stones down in a controlled way, and it couldn’t grab onto her. It was all over.

  Except for the fall.

  The Builder tilted backward from the arch, toward the sea. Looking over its head as it fell, Kali saw the algae-stained waves breaking on the rocks below. Two and a half seconds to impact—time enough to watch the rocks rise up and hit her in the face. The rusting steel chest of the Builder wouldn’t cushion her fall; more likely it would break and cut her apart. But some instinct kept her arms clamped around the Builder’s neck.

  Let go! Let go!

  She had to let go, or the machine would drag her down with it.

  Kali forced her hands open and the Builder slipped free. It turned slowly in the air beyond her grip, its lidar beam flashing as it tried to measure the distance to the sky.

  She felt her climbing harness tighten under her flightsuit. The line she’d set with the thread gun was at its end, suspending her from the center of the arch and stretching as it slowed her descent. The Builder fell away from her, toward the rocks and the water.

  As the elastic line reached its limit and pulled her back up, Kali watched the Builder smash into the sea of Keto.

  She bounced on the end of the lines, unable to look away. For a moment, before the waves swallowed it, the Builder’s eyes continued to glow. Then its life seemed to slip out of it in a dim silver burst. The glow swept over the water in a ripple, straight to the cliff. Then it washed up the cliff slowly enough Kali could see it go, as if too exhausted by death to be bothered with the speed of light. In a moment, it was gone.

  As the Builder’s power failed and its eyes faded to black, Kali thought she heard it whisper its last words in a burst of static.

  “Don’t…trust…Eresh…”

  ∞

  Kali swung her leg over the edge of the arch and pulled herself on top. She brushed off her shaking hands, and looked down at the waves to see if the Builder was still visible. The surf glowed as it hit the rocks, but there was no sign of the machine.

  She glanced up the hill to see Toran huffing and puffing his way down, and thought, Oh, shit. It was going to be an awkward conversation.

  “What did you do?” Toran demanded. “Did you kill it?”

  Kali glanced over the edge again. “I sure hope so.”

  Toran looked as if his head would bleed lava like Fin Mountain in an eruption. “Why the hell did you do that?”

  Because it knew about the black seed.

  “’Cause you didn’t want to give it the child back,” she said, “and you didn’t have any other ideas.”

  Toran clapped his hands to his forehead and growled angrily.

  Kali wasn’t sure the machine was dead. The Builder’s steel shell was disposable, designed to protect its internal systems by crushing in an impact. Its diacom skeleton was almost indestructible. When the Builder was new, it could have survived the fall and scaled the cliff on its fingertips. Then it would have clipped on a new skin as easily as Kali put on her flight suit in the morning. Perhaps the Builder was crawling to the cliffs under the waves even now.

  “What did it say?” Toran asked.

  “It wanted its children back. It was stuck in a loop on that.” Kali watched Toran closely for his reaction. She didn’t think he’d heard the Builder talk about the black seed. She’d had to push the machine off the arch because of what it had said, and if Toran had overheard, she’d have to push him next. Then he would find out what his gods could do for a falling holy man.

  How did the Builder know about the twin? That was a mystery. There was no way it could have gotten the information from the paper by radio, even if the protocols were compatible. The paper and the Athenian NatNet didn’t know about the twin—Kaera had made sure of that.

  There wasn’t time to figure it out; she could think about it later on The Child.

  Kali took one last look at the base of the cliff. It was good this plan had worked. She couldn’t outrun the Builder, and she didn’t have any other ideas beyond hanging from the arch until it lost interest. That wasn’t much of a backup plan: waiting for it to get bored and leave, or jump off on its own.

  “What time is it?” she asked Toran. It was getting darker; sunset was less than an hour away. “Give me your glasses. We need to get out of here.”

  She looked up the hill to Fin Mountain. Solidified lava poured like black paint down the slope and over the fault scarps. The route to the lander was parallel to most of the faults, but the plain was still going to be hard to walk on. A straight line would get them to the lander in time, but only if they marched all night. The glasses would keep her on course even in the darkness.

  “Twelve hours to the lander, two to hop, two to cycle,” she muttered to herself. “Fourteen hundred now. We need to be at the lander an hour after sunrise.” The twenty hour day gave them less time—dawn at 05:00, noon at 10:00. “There’s no slack.”

  The lander would be grounded at 10:00, destroyed sometime after that. The scenarios varied—whether Toran and Kali escaped with Galia and Manus or not, whether Alon and Ai made it with them—but the lander was leaving its makeshift pad at 08:00, regardless. The storm demanded it.

  Kali pointed the glasses at the arch, then at the ruined dome to the north, to re-initialize their inertial navigation. The glasses would lose accuracy more quickly in this terrain, but would hold long enough to get to the lander.

  There wasn’t a second to waste, but as long as nothing else went wrong, they would make it in time.

  Running

  Alon swung into the open tunnel with his feet out. He let the rope slip through his hands, and felt his boots hit the ground.

  The inside of the lava tunnel was cool but dry, still unaffected by the soft rain outside. That was a good sign; he would’ve worried if water was accumulating inside already. There was only a thin layer of dust on the ground and parts of the lava-worn floor were exposed. That was another good sign.

  He only needed one more good sign to make it a good day—he needed to see Ai standing in the tunnel. He tossed the ends of the rope back out and waved his arm to signal her down. The rope moved as she clipped on, and then it hung still.

  On top of the cliff, he’d shown her how to tie on an autoblock for backup, but it was possible she was having trouble with it. He held out a piece of paper set to mirror. Nothing—she wasn’t on the way down or looking over the cliff. He shook his head and waited. There wasn’t anything he could do now; she was on her own.

  The rope started to move. Alon stayed inside the tunnel and waited. If he’d been on the ground, he would’ve held the rope to belay it if she slipped, but from inside the tunnel he couldn’t do that effectively.

  Another glance in the paper showed Ai hanging off the edge of the cliff, stalled at the point of going from vertical to horizontal. If she could get past that, it would be easy, but that was where new climbers sometimes froze. Alon held his breath until she started moving again, and then he pulled his hand in and waited. With years of practice, he’d bounced down the cliff in seconds, hardly putting his feet on it. But as the minutes went by, he wondered if she could keep it up or if she’d get tired and let go.

  Finally, her boots entered the opening of the tunnel and he pulled her in. Alon tried to
keep his cool and not let Ai see how relieved he was. Now wasn’t the time to let her know he was afraid it would end any other way.

  “Jammed my hand,” she said.

  “Let me look.”

  “No. It’s fine.” She tucked her hand into her shirt and wouldn’t let him see. If she’d let it slip into the rappel device, that had to hurt. Sometimes people did that and let go, and then fell all the way. Rappelling wasn’t hard, just easy to screw up in a fatal way.

  “Couldn’t get that blocking knot right…sorry,” Ai said.

  “You made it down,” he replied. “That’s what counts.”

  She dropped her pack in the back of the cave and crouched down quietly in the darkness. He let her sit there for a while; she seemed to need it.

  “That was a test,” she said. “Did I pass?”

  “You’re only a third of the way through. Still have to get to the bottom.”

  Either in the morning or after the storm, they’d have to rappel another hundred and twenty meters to the valley floor. That’d have to be on a single line, as well; he didn’t have enough of the monofilament-core to double-up. It was unlikely it would break, anyway.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Give me a moment. Let me take some things off.”

  “What is it?”

  “Soon. I don’t want to ruin it. You’ll see.”

  Alon didn’t know what she had to show him he hadn’t already seen. He sat by the opening and let her have the end of the tunnel. The rain had stopped and the clouds were softening; perhaps they would even break up. But the light was failing; the sun must be setting, or perhaps it had already set.

  She unrolled her sleeping bag, snapping it to get it to lay out flat near the mouth of the tunnel. “Take your glasses off,” she said. “Point them out—that way. It’s very beautiful, and it’s very soon.”

  He wondered why, but did what she said. He put his glasses gently on a rock by the entrance, pointing down the valley in the direction of the sea.

  Ai lay on her face on the bag just in front of him and propped up her head with her hands. She checked the time on a piece of paper. “My back hurts,” she said. “From the climbing—the harness.” She pulled the end of her shirt out of her pants at the small of her back. “Give me a rub.”

  Alon hesitated before kneeling beside her. In the Old Service, the operators had come to refer to the civilians in their lives as “collateral damage.” The saying was: if the first victim of war is truth, the second is friends and family—and the Service is always at war.

  He brushed his hands together. Were they too rough—chapped by the rocks, the rope, and the time in the dojo practicing with the fighting machine? He spread the silk shirt down her back and pressed the heel of his hand through it into the muscles beside her spine. He didn’t want to touch her skin.

  Alon remembered what Jutiel had said about his hands. The two of them had had a good, long run, but at the end Jutiel had changed from the best of friends to the worst of enemies. It had happened when he told her he was going to Haffay, heading toward the fight instead of away from it. There would always come a point in any relationship when his partner found out what he really trained for, and the outcome was unlikely to be good.

  Ai moaned a little as he rubbed up and down each side of her spine. He looked out the cave—he could see the whole valley, down to the shore. The rain had stopped and the clouds opened up; he could see the stars through a hole in them. As his eyes adapted, he could see a faint green glow between the stars.

  “Aurora…” he said.

  “Hmm.”

  “No magnetic field—we can see them at this latitude. But they’re diffused. You’d think the atmosphere would sputter off, but maybe it was very thick…” He felt like he was rambling; did she even care?

  “There’s something else,” she said. “Don’t stop now—keep looking.”

  He ran his fingertips up and down her back, each hand going in opposite directions.

  “I tried to find Athena in the night sky the other day,” she said. “But I didn’t know where to look. The sky was green then, too.”

  “Don’t know if it’s up. Have to look into it.”

  His eyes stopped on the shore. Along its length, he could see a faint shimmer of light—a hint of blue coming from the waves breaking on the rocks.

  “Do you see it?” she asked. “We have nothing like it.”

  The light on the shore was becoming more intense. Every wave provoked it, and the ocean splashed on the invisible beach as if lit from beneath by a kilometer of glow-paper.

  “Bioluminescence?”

  “Yes! I sneaked a sample into the sequencer. I knew it would happen. It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

  “It is.”

  Alon formed an idea of what his glasses would see: The aurora rippling in sheets, the stars leaving trails as the sky turned, and the last few meters of ocean transformed into a shimmering strip of blue by luminescing microorganisms. To truly see Keto, you needed to see it with the slowness of machine eyes. The glasses would condense minutes to seconds and integrate multiple exposures, capturing what human eyes couldn’t.

  So much of what we do, he thought, is written in space and lost in time, of no meaning to anyone beyond the moment. But once in a long while, we do something lasting. This one image might live on. It could be the iconic image of Keto, the one everyone remembered for decades, if he and Ai got out of this tunnel and back to The Child.

  He made long strokes over Ai’s back with the flat of his hand. She breathed deeply, relaxing and letting her head fall onto her hands. After a while, her breathing changed—became more regular and a little heavier—and he knew she’d fallen asleep. With his head on his backpack, he lay beside her, one hand on the small of her back.

  As he looked out of the cave, the gap in the clouds closed, swallowing the glow of the aurora and the light of the stars.

  ∞

  Kali’s boot slipped from a rock as it shifted under her weight, and she fell forward, grinding her shin into a lava mound before landing on her palms.

  She breathed out, ignored the pain, and wiped the dirt off her hands. Thankfully they weren’t grazed. Probably her leg was bleeding, but there was no point checking.

  Looking over her shoulder, she could see Toran thirty meters away, stepping carefully over the broken surface, his eyes focused on the ground in front. “You’re too slow,” she shouted to him.

  “The evidence suggests otherwise,” he shouted back. “‘Only the wicked flee when none pursue,’” he quoted.

  “Oh, spare me the Classical English!” Kali stood on top of the lava mound and looked beyond Toran, down the slope to the sea, to the arch in the distance.

  The sun had just fallen below the horizon, leaving a diffuse band of light under the clouds. The plain ahead went on in black sameness for kilometers, waves of rolling stone and frozen streams of lava, broken into slabs and shoved up from below by later flows tunneling to the sea.

  Toran stepped close and addressed Kali from two meters away. “If we’d gone up the valley, we’d have missed the dome,” he said. “God guided us in the right direction.”

  “By trying to kill us with a storm and a robot? Give me less of that guidance.”

  The lander was over the slope of the hill, at a forty-five degree angle from the coast. The wind streamed in from the sea; Kali could feel cold air on her right cheek. The stars overhead—they wouldn’t help, given the clouds. The magnetic direction in her glasses probably wouldn’t either. As they’d left the last valley, the compass indicator had pointed back at the walls. In the river of old, red clinker, the indicator had spun around, and now it just pointed down, into the hill in front. It was reacting only to local influences.

  She knew there had to be a general organization to the lava field—both surface and subsurface flows originated in Fin Mountain and flowed downhill to the sea—but it was hard to see o
n the maps and impossible to find in the land. Perhaps Alon could have seen it, but she couldn’t. The ridges seemed to wind about in no particular direction, one cutting off another.

  Already she was becoming dependent on the inertial navigation of the glasses, much sooner than she expected. Eventually, they would see the navigation lights on the lander, and she hoped that would draw them in the last few kilometers.

  Kali wondered if the First had ever walked on this plain, or if the Mothers had forbidden it. Or the children hadn’t lived long enough to come this far.

  She continued on, letting her momentum take her down the side of the hump and up the next ridge. She moved rapidly, and Toran followed at a steady pace, catching up with her each time she stopped to check the way ahead.

  As the twilight faded, Kali set her glasses for night amplification. But the green haze that dropped over her view ahead brought her to a sudden stop—the amplification was worse than nothing.

  She searched for the flashlight in her backpack. The blue-white light lit up a small pool around her feet, but the beam was swallowed up more than a few meters ahead, except for a small hotspot that reached twenty or thirty meters out. The night had closed off the world beyond their flashlights. As they walked, her beam and Toran’s moved in opposite directions—fluttering back and forth without a common rhythm.

  Kali stood waiting on another ridge top, aiming her flashlight back at Toran. He stepped from stone to rock with careful movements, his long legs moving purposefully, hesitating now and again, and then advancing confidently. He moved as if his life depended on it, and perhaps it did. But if he missed the launch, Kali thought, it wouldn’t matter if he hadn’t banged his knees.

  “I could be your worst enemy, or your best friend,” she shouted to him. She remembered her lead instructor on the first day of basic training. “Which would you prefer?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” he replied.

  “I don’t do ambiguity.”

  “Then you’ll have to do ambivalence.”

  “It wasn’t a hard question.”