Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (24 page)

Kona stood on the far side of the projection, a circle of council members around him. He looked up at their approach, soft satisfaction lying deep in his eyes. Lot could not understand such desire.

He pushed forward, while around him the hum of excited voices gradually faded. Geometries shifted, and suddenly Lot found himself separated from Kona by an empty gulf, while the crowd pressed in on all sides. “You can’t do it,” Lot said.

The crowd muttered. But Kona—he responded in a tone of calm reasonableness: “It’s only a test today.”

“But it’s wrong.”

“Compared to what? We’ll do what we need to do.”

Kona’s attention seemed only partly on him, and Lot wondered if he was really playing to the crowd, or perhaps engaged in some other, more significant conversation through his atrial link. Lot moved his head slowly back and forth, tracking Kona’s sense, trying to guess his thoughts. An exercise in futility! It was impossible to understand the very real. “You can’t bring Heyertori back by repeating the crime that destroyed her!”

Urban stepped up swiftly. “Easy, fury. It’s only a test today. There’ll be a plebiscite before any action is taken. We’ll have the vote by then.”

Lot considered. Urban could be right. After the election tonight the ados would be able to vote their opinions, and they didn’t carry the same scars as their elders.

Kona nodded, as if he approved of the rational progress of Lot’s thoughts. “I told you before, there are always options. I wanted you here, to witness that. You’re part of this city now. It’s time you learned to make responsible decisions. Don’t let yourself be pulled down by myth, or sentimentality. We’ll do what needs to be done.”

“You mean Sypaon will do it.”

Kona gave him an appraising look, his head cocked curiously. “Did you enjoy her company?”

“Did you send her?”

“I didn’t have to. She’s fascinated by you. She sees herself in you, and no wonder. We could hardly talk to her before you came here. But when we copied your neural pattern onto a translation DI the language became suddenly clear.”

Lot let the taunt slide past, refusing to be lured away from his own objections. “She’s lost track of history.”

“She thinks you’re a hybrid, with the taint of the Chenzeme in you.”

“She thinks we’re her people!”

Kona shrugged. “Now we are.”

“No. Her people are in the Well. Or some part of them anyway.”

From a booth beside the display an officer, “Final systems check.”

The room quieted. Lot turned to the projected image with some trepidation, remembering Sypaon in her endless journey around the ring, knitting each alien cell to her will. Kona might have read his mind.

“The swan burster’s surface is composed of billions of cells,” he explained, his voice misleadingly soft. “Each of those contains a selective neural architecture with well-defined values.”

“Like
Kill aliens
,” somebody muttered.

Kona nodded. “That’s the essence. But Sypaon has modified those values. Before, a kill decision was reached by consensus. Now, she defines the target. Today it’ll be the spectral image of a distant star.”

“Then you’ve tried this before?” Urban asked.

“Not a full test, no.” From Kona, Lot sensed a sudden uneasiness. “We ran a preliminary test nearly a year ago. The swan burster attained a state of high activity before the sequence was stopped.”

“Why didn’t you go all the way?”

“It was only a preliminary action. Most of the burster’s cells are aggressive. When a fire/don’t fire decision must be made, they generally opt for action. Sypaon understands these cells; she has them under secure control. But a small percentage of the cells are passive. Unfortunately, they tend to be large and massively interconnected. On that first attempt at a test firing, they overrode Sypaon’s consensus, suppressing the aggressive cells. But she’s learned how to neutralize them. There, you see that?” He pointed at the holographic display, indicating three minute red pinpricks evenly spaced about the ring. “We’ve removed three of the meteor defense lasers from the column, and shifted them to the farside. In just a few seconds, they’ll fire on the swan burster.”

“What?”

Kona’s cheek twitched. Lot caught a puff of nervous unease. “When the aggressive cells detect the assault, they’ll cut off the passive cells, and retaliate. It’s part of the deep programming.”

Someone growled, “Let us all pray to the Unknown God that the soulless bastards don’t retaliate against
us
.”

“Sypaon controls the aggressive cells,” Kona insisted.

“And who controls Sypaon?”

The watch officer preempted any answer. “It’s time,” she announced. “Now.” On the display, fine lines of white light lanced from the red pinpricks, impaling the silver glow of the ring. “Targeting successful. Ring geometry is deepening. Radiation levels are rising at a proportional rate. . . .”

“This is as far as we got last time,” Kona muttered.

Lot watched the ring begin to blaze a brighter silver. Within seconds the blaze reached brilliance.

“The geometric gradient is climbing astronomically. Readings are approaching the historical values recorded on Heyertori. Climbing. Climbing. . . .”

The ring’s image burned with a painfully bright light. The dark interior filled with a sheet of silver fire, marred only by a small circle of darkness lingering at its center. Stars were no longer visible through that aperture, their light overwhelmed by the burster’s own painful luminescence.

Then abruptly, the burster’s light began to fade.

“It’s failing,” the watch officer announced. A murmur of discord ran through the assembly. “The burster’s geometry is declining to quiescent levels. Radiation levels are collapsing. It’s failed.”

“
It’s failed
.” The comment soughed through the room like the passage of a ghostly chorus. Shock was the dominant expression on the gathered faces. Fear seeped onto the air. “
It can’t be
.”

Lot looked in amazement at the wide open, foolish faces goggling like ignorant children. “Why are you surprised?” he demanded of them. Startled faces turned toward him. Urban laid a restraining hand on his arm, but he ignored it. “The Well protects itself. Everything fails in the Well. That’s what I’ve been hearing for ten years. From
your
mouths! And you knew the Well had caught the ring. Once, long ago. Did you think the passage of time had shortened its reach? Uh-uh. It has the swan burster, it has
us
within its reach and there’s no difference, no difference at all if we live in the city or in the Well.”

For several seconds after his outburst, no one spoke. Fear clouded the air, and suddenly Lot found himself leaning hard on a panicky memory of the packed corridor. He turned to leave, but the route to the door was blocked. People stopped him. Council members. Real people. They asked his opinion. Was a descent to the Well inevitable? Yes, he believed that. Were they already exposed to the governors, here in the city? The evidence for the Well’s influence was clear.

Quiet expanded around him as he spoke. He found himself addressing the entire room. “
Try
to understand. Our situation is fragile. If we threaten the Well we’ll be consumed, just like the Old Silkens. We must abandon the ring.”

In that moment, he felt as if he held them in his hand. They would do as he said. They would descend to the Well. For what choice did they have?

Then, from the far side of the room someone muttered in angry syllables, “
He’s a madman
.”

The words smashed against the budding confidence of the crowd. Lot felt his control crumble under a surge of denial; a feverish flush of anger.

“
Fanatic
,” someone close to him growled.

“Jupiter’s dog.”

An ugly muttering arose on all sides: as if truth could be changed by name-calling. Their blindness sickened him. They could kill this city by sheer accident in their frantic struggle to deny truth. “Stop!” he pleaded with them. “Stop and ask yourselves why the Old Silkens died. Ask it and answer it, before you kill us all.”

He left then, pushing his way through to the door, frantic to escape the room’s seethe of negative emotions. In the sudden stillness of the station platform, Ord’s background burr of begging, pleading, became the dominant sound. “Hush,” Lot said, as a car swept through the gray membrane that separated the vacuum of the tunnels from the pressurized station. Ord quieted: an unexpected obedience that confirmed for Lot just how much his situation had changed.

CHAPTER

18

I
N THE TRANSIT CAR HE FELT SICK, FEVER-FLUSHED AND TREMBLING
. What could do that to his system? The Well was in him. Maybe it would take him first, absorbing him just as some ancient cell had once absorbed an independent bacterium, forcing its evolution toward a subjugate cellular organelle: the mitochondrial analog. Was that process beginning in him now? He half-closed his eyes, his head lolling on the seat back. And what if it was? He smiled, suddenly sure that could not be a bad thing. He’d waited for this all his life. Inside, he still held a narrow core of fear, but for the most part he felt only relief when he considered that the waiting might finally be over.

Ord brushed his neck with soft tentacles. “Elevated body temperature. Lot needs to eat.”

“Not hungry.”

“Deprivation encourages unstable chemistry.”

“Leave me alone.”

“I love you.”

The car stopped in Ado Town at the Narcissus Street station. Lot stepped out on the platform amid a swarm of camera bees, Ord clinging under his hair.

One of the bees told him, “City authority’s attributing the swan burster’s failure to minor technical problems. Do you agree with that assessment?”

He laughed.
Convince them that it’s right
, Sypaon had enjoined him. She’d spent centuries cycling through the ring, learning a dead species’ mad language. Of the living Well she knew nothing. He told the bee, “The Well defends itself. It always has. It adapts. It consumes. In its consumption, it forces the adaptation of others, including the Chenzeme.” Jupiter had seen all of that, long ago.

Another bee, this with a feminine voice, then countered, “Yet the swan burster was not aimed at the Well. There was nothing to defend against.”

“No?”

Ados on the steps moved aside for him, unwittingly interfering in the flight of the camera bees so that Lot stepped out alone onto the street. Already his fever seemed to be subsiding, but not the free clarity of his thoughts, the
acceptance
that had come upon him. If this was not yet the plague that would draw the population of the city down into the Well, still, he knew that time must be imminent. He turned back, to so inform the mediots hiding behind the glassy eyes of the camera bees, but to his surprise he saw that they had already withdrawn, buzzing away over the rooftops in a slow, glittering flock. Had Kona recalled them? So.

Silence filled the street. At the café tables, on the balconies, ados watched him with looks of expectation. The election was to take place today. Lot remembered that suddenly and wondered if it still mattered.

He might have stood there longer, considering things, but it occurred to him that indecisiveness didn’t look so good. So he set off down Narcissus Street at a detached, determined pace. In the quiet of his breather he could think, and sort out what to do next.

But when he got there he didn’t think at all, just threw himself down on the sleeping pad and lay at floor level staring at the sundews surrounding him in their glass pots. He heard Ord busying itself in the kitchenette, but he listened to his body, searching the pulse and wash of his metabolism for some sign of transformation. . . .

The door opened itself for Urban. He had Alta with him. She came in only far enough to avoid the closing door. Her cool gaze took in the room, and then she looked at Lot. “I underestimated you. I’m sorry.”

“He forgives you,” Urban said. Stepping long strides over the plants, he threw himself down next to Lot, his braids performing a jubilant dance against his cheeks as he grinned. “Fury, I’ll give you points on the dramatic exit from authority, but the fact is, you left too soon.”

Ord squeezed up between them and plopped a cup under Lot’s nose. A pink paste filled it, shedding a vague, fishy odor. “Good Lot,” Ord murmured. “Good boy. Eat now.”

Lot wrinkled his nose. “Oh, that’s foul.” He shoved the cup far to the side. “Don’t cook for me, okay Ord?”

Urban laughed, while Ord protested: “Lot’s hungry.”

“I like being hungry.”

Ord patted tentacles against his arm. “Deprivation encourages unstable chemistry.”

“Yeah, and you love me, I know.”

Urban slapped the robot out of the way. “Will you quit playing with that thing and listen to me, fury? Authority picked up some radio gibberish after you left. They couldn’t figure it out at first. It was more like a data stream than a language, and it was aimed at the ring.”

“Chenzeme?” Lot asked tentatively.

“That’s what everybody thought, at first. But it turned out to be Null Boundary.”

“The great ship that brought the real ones here?”

“Brought ‘em here and abandoned ‘em. Yeah. The bastard actually came back . . . or at least he’s cruising the system periphery. Whether he’s got the mettle to actually come in-system—” Urban shrugged. “Anyway, he caught the telltales when the ring went hot, and went into a panic. Shot some decoy Chenzeme code at it to try to convince it to pass him by. He must have thought we were dust—again.”

Lot nodded, recalling the history he’d absorbed during his years in Silk. Null Boundary had appeared like a scarred tramp in the thriving space above Heyertori only weeks before a swan burster swept that system. The ship had been an ominous sight with his dark hide split and pitted from some violent encounter, the wounds only half-healed. He carried no crew. For several days he’d prowled the outposts, trying to persuade some there to come aboard, but he got no takers and soon he vanished back into the void. The Chenzeme ring came soon after, moving undetected past the outposts until it stood in low orbit above doomed Heyertori. That it had followed the ship in from the periphery was an assumption never proved; nor could it be shown that Null Boundary had somehow effected the mechanical failures at the system’s outposts that had allowed the incursion. But the ship had survived where Heyertori had not, and when it ran again through the system a decade later a bitter faction of survivors had grudgingly contracted for passage out. . . .
Has a forced wedding between scarred lovers ever found success?