Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (35 page)

“Lot.”

Alta stood close at his side, her breath laced through with nervous tension. She touched his elbow. “Did you see that over there? What is that?”

She pointed tentatively, as Urban puffed up on her other side. Lot looked in the indicated direction, but saw only a mound of upthrust soil. He’d seen many like it as they’d followed the stream. He hadn’t thought much about it. He’d seen the same thing that day he’d run the warden, and no one had suggested then the structure held any interest.

“Use IR,” Alta said.

The shadows were deepening, the land rapidly yielding its heat to the atmosphere. Lot blinked until his visual receptivity expanded far down the spectrum. The bog glowed softly warm, but brighter still was the mound. Its heat signature outshone even Alta’s mammalian intensity. “That’s not just soil,” Lot muttered. It wasn’t a plant either.

He started toward it. Alta hesitated only a moment, then followed. Urban swung wide, to come at it from the side.

It proved to be thigh-high, almost circular, and nearly five feet across. Like all the other mounds Lot had seen that day, it neither moved nor gave any other hint that it was aware of their approach.

The day’s light had faded further. Now Lot could make out a temperature gradient in the mass, zones that varied in warmth by two or three degrees. He crouched beside it. Water puddled in his footprint, and where the edge of the puddle touched the mound’s base, the water began to steam.

In the cooling air, Lot could feel the heat radiant against his face, probably fifteen degrees above human body normal. He reached out a gloved hand and tentatively touched the mound. Alta gave a small gasp, but the mound made no response.

Lot pressed against it. It felt spongy beneath his fingers. He pressed harder, driving his fingers into its tissue. He heard a faint hiss. A noxious odor exploded under his nose. He whirled away, an incoherent bellow ripping out of his throat. He was vaguely aware of Urban and Alta running, a fact registered and swiftly forgotten as a fiery pain swept across his eyes and his sensory tears. He tripped and went down, water splashing up on his face. It cooled the heat.

He pressed his face against the turf, scooped water from the hollows of his footprints and rubbed that against his cheeks while an uncontrollable stream of childish imprecations ran past his lips,
“I hate this place, I hate this fucking, dirty place . . .”

Urban squatted next to him, chuckling softly. “Well gee, fury, you didn’t like that smell?”

“Fuck off.” He was still dabbing water at his cheeks, but the burn had mostly faded.

“Let me see.”

“It’s almost fixed.” But he tilted his face up anyway, so Urban could check it out.

“Wow, your Makers are blazing.” Urban watched for several seconds. “You’re right, though. It’s fading.” He cocked an eyebrow at Lot. “You want to curb your curiosity a little?”

Lot looked back over his shoulder. The mound still glowed, an organic factory of unknown purpose. Alta had approached it again. She stood a few feet off, staring at it, an air of expectation rising from her. Maybe she sensed his gaze, because she looked at him then. “How did it know what chemicals to hit us with? That was the worst stink I ever smelled, but it didn’t stir up my defensive Makers at all.”

“It’s got a good defense,” Urban said. But Lot sensed uncertainty behind his words.

“Or maybe it’s adapted to people?” she asked softly.

“Yeah. Anyway, we’re not supposed to touch it.”

Lot stared at it too, feeling curiosity stir again.
Not supposed to
was sometimes pretty hard to distinguish from
Gotta try it
.

He started to pull his hood on. He could protect his eyes and his face while he took the thing apart—

“Uh-uh, fury.” Urban caught his wrist. “Just let it go. You’ve got Jupiter in your sights. Let the exploring come later.”

“But it’ll be at our backs,” Lot argued. “We don’t know—”

“Yeah, that’s right. We don’t know anything. So walk softly. Speak softly. Don’t pick any fights. Okay?”

Lot twisted his arm out of Urban’s grip. He wanted to attack the mound again, just to see if he could, just to try to wrest one small victory out of this miserable day. But he knew Urban was right. “Okay. Let’s get going, then.”

Alta was making her way back toward them. “It’s night. Maybe we should sleep.”

“Here?”

“Yes. It’s a good place. It’s open. We could hear things, see things coming.”

Lot looked again at the mound.

“And we can keep an eye on it,” Alta admitted.

Lot climbed to his feet, suddenly aware of his fatigue. And hungry again. The fruit wasn’t a very concentrated source of calories. “Maybe we should move a little farther away.”

They found an elevated site, where several tussocks had grown together to form a platform slightly higher than the water level. Lot blinked his vision back to native range, finding comfort in the darkness. They ate more rambutan and ahuacatl, and watched the gathering of stars overhead, and later, the swan burster rising over the crater rim. It looked like a thin gold rod when it first appeared. The color startled him, and he wondered if something critical had changed. But as it climbed out from behind low layers of obscuring atmosphere, it regained its perfect white surface.

Sypaon had saved his life on the road today. Why? Why had she even noticed his absence from the city? He looked at Urban. “You know that warden we smashed on the elevator car? I bet that was Sypaon too.”

“You think she’s keeping authority off our backs?” Urban asked. He lay with his head pillowed on a tussock, one arm around Alta as she snuggled against his shoulder.

“Seems like it. If she commandeered all the wardens in this area . . .”

“How many do you think there are?” Alta asked.

“Dunno.” He looked at Urban. “Not too many, I guess.”

“Don’t know how they make more, though.”

“Yeah.” When it came right down to it, they didn’t know anything about anything. “I really miss Gent.”

“Sooth.”

Alta shifted, her eyes glinting in the ring light. “Have you sensed him at all, Lot?”

“No.”

Her disappointment gusted softly over him. “The fall would have shattered him.”

“Sure.”

“But there could have been something left.”

“Tissue remnants,” Urban mused. “But there would have been a lot of heat on impact. Information content scrambled. Some of his Makers might have survived, but they wouldn’t have enough information to rebuild.”

Lot again went over the sequence of events in his mind: the shock-blast of lightning that had driven him off the wall. Gent’s scramble to catch him. Gent gone.

Alta’s voice whispered softly in the night: “I know he couldn’t have survived it. But do you think there was enough left that . . . do you think he was brought into the Communion? Or some part of him. It was all he wanted, Lot. The harmony. The union Jupiter had found. . . .”

To become part of something bigger than one’s self. It was a desire that had burned across the Hallowed Vasties, fusing cultures into the singular organism of a precisely integrated cordon, only the oddballs left on the fringes, but they held the desire too. Or maybe the desire had flared again, under the tutelage of fear inspired by the Chenzeme. The Well was not a human thing, but that only made it grander. Shared biological histories defined the clade of species whose ancestors evolved on Earth, or the clade of species descended from the Chenzeme. But such distinctions became irrelevant in the Well, where peace was literally mixed between warring clades.

Lot said, “I think Gent’s been known to the Communion since he descended the elevator that day. I think we all have.”

The ring was beginning its turn from zero to one. Lot looked away from it, seeking Alta’s face in the darkness. She still cuddled close to Urban. But standing behind them was the dim suggestion of another figure. Lot started badly. He was on his knees before a rational thought could slide past his instinctive panic. Through the figure’s torso he could see stars, and the hard line of the distant crater wall. But slowly, slowly, the apparition gained definition. It began to glow with a faint blue luminescence. The strong legs, the muscular shoulders and powerful arms and the face: Gent’s own smooth features.

He heard a tiny cry from Alta.

It seemed perfectly formed. Each finger of each hand carefully distinguished. The nipples on his chest, the pattern of his abdominal muscles, the vertical line of hair beneath his belly button spreading in a patch across his groin and the complexities of his genitalia. His hair was not arranged in the ringlets Gent had worn. It was a short, unkempt mane. But the eyes were Gent’s: a perplexed concern glinting in the night.
It looked so real
.

But Lot knew it was not. He could get only mechanical snatches of human emotion from it, a subtler replay of the previous night. “It’s an illusion,” he whispered. “A phantom.”

“
No!
” That was Alta. She dove at the apparition. But as her outstretched hand swept its belly, it shattered, collapsing in a shower of unlinked, half-liquid molecules like a breached soap bubble. Alta’s raw scream echoed across the crater, “
No!
”

Urban was on his feet, shouting his own indignation. “What was that supposed to be?” He turned his frustration on Lot. “Who’s playing tricks on us?”

Lot settled back against the spongy ground, his heart still running double-time. “Maybe we bring it on ourselves.”

“You think this place can get inside our minds?”

“It’s already there.” He stretched out on the ground, using the butt end of his pack for a pillow. The Well was in them. He had no doubt about that. In them, and waiting to act. He fretted now over the question of whether they would ever be able to get it out.

E
XHAUSTION FEATHERED HIS BODY, BUT HIS MIND
was jumpy, and he didn’t feel a closure with sleep. So he told Urban he would stay awake and watch for a few hours. The swan burster tumbled in a leisurely path across the sky. For a few minutes it was bisected by the elevator column, which had finally passed into the planet’s shadow. Silk glowed faintly against the velvet night.

Around him, the crater buzzed with a chittering, croaking, whooping concert of night sounds, some familiar, most not, alien reverberations that set his nerves on edge.

The ring had begun to drop behind the far rim when he saw the phantoms. He stiffened, but he did not wake the others. The silent figures glowed cool blue, just as Gent had. When Lot first saw them, they were near the splash pool: two men and a woman, nude, their hair clotted in feral manes. They crossed the floor of the crater, drawing closer, though they didn’t move directly toward him. He could hear no sound at all of footfalls, though he thought he heard voices: faint, almost imperceptible even with his enhanced hearing. He wondered if the erratic whispering might be only in his imagination . . . and if so, was it a product of his own mind? Or put there by something else?

The phantoms drew nearer. He could not tell if they were aware of him. The woman’s mouth moved as if in speech, but all Lot heard was a soft buzz. She swung slowly away from her companions and nearer to Lot. He watched her feet step gracefully across the tussocks. The grass didn’t bend at all beneath her step. Yet she had a presence. He caught it on his sensory tears. Anxiety. Anger. Anxiety. Guessing wildly, he whispered, “Sypaon?”

She did not answer. She squatted close to his side, staring at Alta’s sleeping figure. The two men had continued in their stroll across the crater floor.

The woman’s lips parted. “
Another
,” she said, her voice barely audible. She lifted her head to peer after the men. They were halfway to the far wall now. Their blue glow had faded, so that Lot could hardly see them. “
Another comes
,” the woman said, her accent thick, sounding like the recorded images that had testified about the plague that ruined Old Silk. “
Within us
.” She looked to the sky, but not in the direction of the setting ring or the elevator cable.

“Tell me what you are,” Lot whispered.

She stood, with no creaking of joints. Her gaze remained fixed on the spot where Lot had last seen the men, though they had vanished now from his sight. “Don’t go,” he urged her.

She stepped away, her path taking her over Urban. She seemed to float over him, walking on a thin cushion of air. Lot hesitated, debating over the sleeping figures. Then he made up his mind and followed her. She did not object, or even seem to notice.

He trailed behind her across the crater floor. The men did not reappear, but her own image held strong as she drifted over the tussocks. He looked ahead, wondering where they were going, or if they even had a destination. She seemed very real, but not at all human. He had a thought that maybe, the passage into Communion was gradual—a gestation—and learning the new consciousness was a long process, these Old Silkens now only mature enough to emerge from whatever slow womb had contained them over five hundred years.

He saw the mound ahead of them. It was not the same one he’d tried to breach before. This one seemed twice as large, its heat signature like banked coals on a barbecue, steaming beneath a cool, crusty surface.

The woman approached it, and without slowing or changing her stride, she waded into it. Lot watched in astonishment as her feet, her calves, her knees disappeared into the mound’s rising structure. A wave of denser blue color ran across her, from her legs upward, flooding her whole body. And when the wave crested her forehead, she burst into a blue-tinted mist that showered outward in all directions. Lot cried out in shock and surprise—he had seen it clearly this time,
she’d been hollow
. Nothing more than an inflated vessel. Nothing more? Without internal structural support she’d still seemed to move exactly as a human woman. She’d spoken to him. All this passed in the brief moment before her misty remains rained down upon him, wetting his sensory tears and he could feel himself backing away.

He tripped and went down and though his body got up immediately, scrambling like a clumsy drunk across the uneven ground, he saw himself as if he looked upon another, and even that slim awareness of his own discrete existence began to fade, overwhelmed by a volant expansion of perception as he felt himself shunted through a gateway into a foreign sensorium, his own locus shrinking rapidly to inconsequence within the awareness that contained him.