Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (38 page)

Frenzied breaking, splitting, boiling
. . . Lot saw it all again. The crater rim hadn’t vaporized. It had simply
dissociated
. Lost structure. A chill touched him. “Yeah,” he conceded. “That was the Well. Defending itself.” Tiny governors everywhere, poised to react, even at a distance, even in the city. The Silkens were only probationary members of this system.

“Authority won’t risk firing again,” Kona said. “They’re convinced of that, finally.”

Something in his voice worked at Lot. “You didn’t approve it?”

There was a knife edge of anger in Kona’s voice. “You understood it. The governors are everywhere. Even in Silk. We were wrong about the city gnomes. They’re not in decline. Their protective envelopes had changed to make them harder to detect. You were right, Lot. What happened to the Old Silkens could happen to us.”

“Yeah.”

“And the guns, they just weren’t
necessary
.”

Rarely were Kona’s emotions so exposed. Even with voice-only, Lot could pick up the flow. “I don’t know what happened to Urban,” he offered. “We went into the river. He was okay then. But if he got hung up in the gorge—” He caught himself, though the image played on in his mind: frantic fingers stripped of skin, bone dissolving. . . .

Ord’s mouth moved, emitting a simulation of muffled whispering. Then it spoke again in Yulyssa’s voice. “Lot, the city’s breaking down. Since you left, mobs of ados and refugees—they’re acting crazy. We’ve had vandalism and sabotage. We tried to calm them with a psychoactive virus in the air supply, but something’s breaking it down. Lot, we’ve had open battles in the street, and it’s all in your name. Silk is fragile. City security’s doing their best, but half the officers have deserted and . . . we think we know why.” He could hear in her voice a quaver of fear. “You wanted to know why the Old Silkens died.”

“Yeah.”

“We have a theory. It’s tentative—”

“Tell me.”

“They had trouble. Or possible trouble. They’d discovered a parasitic neuronal infection. One hundred percent of the population had it. It was a stealth structure—very difficult to detect, especially because it had no apparent effects beyond a tiny production of heat as it metabolized normal cellular energy sources. But as its structure was mapped, it was found that it shrouded the hypothalamus, the part of the brain that controls emotions—though it had tendrils elsewhere, with especially strong links to the olfactory bulbs. Not knowing its function, the Old Silkens decided to get rid of it. In their place, we might have made the same decision.” She sighed. “They designed and released a Maker for that purpose. Within thirty-six hours, they were all dead.”

Lot tried to make sense of it. “You’re saying the Maker killed them.”

“No. I don’t think so. They believed the Well killed them.”
A vast, opaque ocean, supporting the Communion, but not part of it
. . . “It’s only a guess,” Yulyssa continued, “but what if the Well’s defensive system detected the Maker, and coded it as a threat? The Old Silkens might have been inadvertently destroyed when the Maker was wiped out. . . .”

Destroy information content
: accidental death, on a massive scale. Chance hovering over every moment of every life. Lot shuddered, remembering the tunnels.

“Tell him the rest,” Kona growled. “You agreed we should.”

There was silence; then she said, “The parasitic structure appears to be a simpler form of the chemically receptive atrium you carry, Lot. And it still exists. We’ve found it. In me. In Kona. In sixty percent of the people we’ve tested so far. But in the rebellious ados it’s denser and far more active.”

Kona finished for her: “While in the few loyal ados there’s no sign of it at all.”

Lot’s gloved hands kneaded in slow fists. He didn’t feel much surprise. Alta had as much as told him she carried her faith in physical form. Captain Antigua had said much the same thing, describing Jupiter’s abiding presence forever dwelling inside her. Now he thought of it, David had confessed similar feelings, though he’d caught the faith from Lot, that day in the tunnels. The most dangerous viruses were those with a long latent period. “You think I did this.”

“
No
.” That was Yulyssa’s voice, edged with anger. “We think—we
know
—it started long before you. The Old Silkens were gone before Jupiter ever reached this system.”

Tiny flies buzzed in a shaft of light that had found its way through the thick canopy. Lot’s gaze fixed on them. “Jupiter found the Communion here. It infected him here. So it didn’t start with the Hallowed Vasties.”

“It started with the Chenzeme,” Kona said. Then, to Lot’s surprise, his voice softened. “And that’s in you.”

Sure. The “chemical atrium” Dr. Alloin had found constituted a different perceptual system. He could see what others could not. Silvery faith, and the interlocking pattern of the Communion.

Kona again: “The rioters are acting in your name, Lot. They know you’re down there and it’s made them crazy. They want to follow you the way they followed Jupiter. They want the Communion—”

“Oh.” He felt a resonant sense, as if a maelstrom of unrelated facts was about to collapse into coherent order.

“You . . . haven’t found it?” Kona asked.

“The Communion? I have.”

Stunned silence followed on his pronouncement. Finally, Yulyssa asked, “Then is it real? Do you . . . understand it?”

Lot frowned. “I don’t know. It has to do with the phantoms, I think.” The blue woman had pulled him under the first time; and Gent’s image had accompanied him in the river. “It’s a human thing anyway, and not really part of the Well. That’s . . . something else. Older. Alien. A mechanism . . . to preserve data? Biological data. From the Communion I can . . . look into it?” He shook his head, frustrated by the inadequacy of words. “The Communion’s a place for thinking, though it’s only a veneer on top of the Well system, tapping the Well’s data sea. Still, it’s
big
. It reaches around the planet, and across the nebula too. The nebula’s populated by more than butterfly gnomes. Did you know that? It’s replete with governors too. Microscopic sentries. They pass their data inward, across the nebula. I saw Null Boundary through them. He’s coming in-system.”

The nebula’s debris field had forced the great ship to slow to a tiny fraction of its interstellar speed. Maybe that was part of the reason for the nebula’s existence.
The Well protects itself
.

“Something’s wrong with that ship, Yulyssa. Watch him closely.”

“Lot? I don’t understand. Is the Communion a sculpted entity? Like a great ship?”

“No. Not like that at all.” If he could explain it to her, maybe she could make sense of it. “The Communion’s made of . . . well, it feels like lots of small, hungry points of awareness, diffuse minds. Maybe that’s what’s left of the Old Silkens. I don’t know. When I first . . . well, when I first encountered them, they were scattered and weak. Then they began to link together, focusing around—”

He broke off abruptly, startled at his own blindness.
Focusing around me
. Gent had said something like that once:
You’re the gateway to the Communion. The focusing lens
. Twice now he’d felt a powerful order congealing around him. Suppose the Communion he sensed was only a half-made thing, weak and unfocused and in need of a seed crystal around which to congeal? In need of
him
. Great cult leader—or reservoir of rare biochemical structure? He supposed it was much the same thing.

Given all that, what might the Communion grow into?

The vast and intricate information currents of the Well loomed in his consciousness. The Communion had only a loose attachment to it now. But might a deeper synthesis be possible?

“That’s what Jupiter was after,” he muttered, his thoughts bouncing hard now. “The mitochondrial analog. Remember, Yulyssa? He always used that—”

“Yes, but—”

“The mitochondria retains its own primal identity. Its own DNA, though it can’t survive outside of the cell . . . and the cell can’t survive without it.”

“Basic doctrine,” Kona interrupted.

“But how long for that synthesis to evolve?” Lot asked.

He could almost see Kona’s famous scowl. “It had to work right away, or the cell would have metabolized—”

“No. Bacteria have their own strategies.”

“Oh, Lot,” Yulyssa sighed, despairing at the unkind analogy.

He shook his head and pressed on. “It might have been only a clumsy association, at first. Things would need to change—a lot—before the invading bacteria became fully integrated. How long would that take?”

“How should we know?” Kona growled.

“Jupiter knew. It could take a long time. Hundreds of years. Thousands. Maybe more. It didn’t matter to him. That’s how we survive, no? We turn our backs on the Hallowed Vasties and let the past slip away and tell ourselves it doesn’t matter, a year, two years, a thousand, what does it matter? Once we cut ourselves off from our past. . . . Because most of us don’t understand time. That a thousand years is nothing. Ten thousand years is nothing. We’re awed by life spans that touch a millennium, but in the life of a planet, it’s nothing. On that scale even the Chenzeme are young.”

Kona was not taken in. “We don’t exist on that scale!”

“Jupiter thought we could.”

“
Lot
.” Yulyssa’s voice broke into his thoughts. “We need you in the city. The rioters will listen to you.”

There. She’d said it. The reason behind this call . . . not that he wanted to face it. “Maybe you should listen to them. If people are rebelling, it’s because they’re scared. The food supplies are running out, and unless you want to chance the Well—”

“There are other options!” Kona insisted. “Null Boundary’s coming.”

“Don’t count on him.” Lot puzzled over the sense of threat he had felt when he’d slipped under the skin. “He’s wrong, somehow. . . .”

Kona couldn’t accept it. His voice was thick; every word must have cost him. “Understand it, Lot. We need you. The ados listen to you. The refugees listen to you. You could buy us the time we’ll need to find a real solution.”

Lot stared at the flowing green water, glimpsing in its eddies a shadow beneath the skin. “You’re wrong. They don’t want me. They want Jupiter. They want you to let them down the Well.”

“I can’t do that. It’s the same as murder.”

“I’m still alive.”

“Jupiter’s not.”

Lot held his silence. Kona desperately wanted to believe Jupiter was dead. It was probably best to let him. He might blanch at murder now, but he’d let half the army die in the tunnels that day. To stop Jupiter?

Yulyssa was speaking, pleading with him to come back. “I can’t,” Lot said. “Not yet.” And then he added, “Beware of Null Boundary.” Before they could say anything else, he looked at Ord and made a slashing gesture across his throat.

“Rest now?” Ord asked brightly.

He couldn’t imagine it. “I’ve got to find them.” Urban and Alta . . . and Jupiter. He envisioned them all, gathered together at the ocean shore, waves rolling in, spilling on white sand with a sluffing roar just like in the VR. They’d be waiting for him, all of them safe; merry teasing because he’d been the last one down. And walking there on the edge of the land he would discover what to do, what he owed. He imagined it that way, knowing it was the coarsest bullshit.

H
E REACHED THE COAST IN LATE AFTERNOON
. The river ended in a wide, brackish marsh between the arms of two steep ridges. Lot slogged through, emerging on a beach of bright sand, eroded calcite mixed with specks of black lava. A light breeze flowed off the emerald ocean, tempering the lumbering afternoon heat.

He stood at the crest of the beach, feeling the sand sliding away beneath his feet. It was a dizzying sensation, as if the ground had been gutted of its solid structure, leaving behind an amorphous debris field, stone ashes that presaged the collapse of his own inner world as he looked up and down the beach and saw that it was empty, a wild shore, with no sign of human presence. “Urban!” he called. “Alta!” But the chuffing, growling ocean overwhelmed his voice.

Swells rolled in from the uninterrupted horizon. He watched them slow and steepen as they approached the shadowy outlines of submerged reefs. Their smooth faces glinted green, a moment before they collapsed into white breakers. The air was full of a salt tang, and Jupiter’s presence was very strong. Yet there was no visible sign of him. No settlement. No evidence that anyone had ever been here.

He turned, gazing back up the broad valley, wondering if there was any point in searching the riverbanks again, when Ord spoke softly in his ear.

“In the water,” it said. “Things swimming.”

Lot turned swiftly. He scanned the shorebreak, and then farther out, to the dark green water that ran in a narrow channel through the reef.

A swell rose over the submerged rocks and he saw it then: a silvery torpedo-shape darting across the wave’s exposed face, a skirt of long tentacles trailing behind it. Size was hard to gauge against the waves, but he guessed that from tip to tail it was nearly twice as long as his own body.

He stared at the spot where it had appeared, hoping for another sighting, at the same time wondering what it ate and if it could come ashore.

CHAPTER

28

T
HE DESCENDING SUN, LOW IN THE SKY BUT
still potent, poured its light upon the beach, drenching the viscous green swells with shining gold. Lot sat in the sand, watching the chaotic crash and backsplash of the surf, his thoughts equally choppy, insight as elusive as the occasional dark shape that sliced just beneath the surface. Time squeezed hard and he knew that an answer had to be found before Silk collapsed into chaos.

“Ord?” He twisted around, searching the vegetation line at the top of the beach for a glimpse of the robot. He saw it only when it moved, slipping down from a perch among the gnarled branches of a thick-leaved shrub.

“Yes Lot?” It picked a fastidious path across the sand, as if the loose grains irritated its gelatinous body.