Authors: Gregory Benford
Furious Gulf (34 page)
“Yeasay, and now I’m not. No thanks to you.”
After your misadventure yesterday, I expect you could use a little help.
“Misad—oh, the purple flames? You were the one wanted to give it a closer look.”
You misremember. I alerted you to it when you were up to your chin in—
“Not the way I recall. You were at my back, pushin’ the whole time, wanting to touch it.”
You have edited out your own attraction.
“The hell I have. I wondered what it was, sure, but—”
Let’s not argue. We escaped without harm—together. That is the important point. As long as we remain together and alert, even
in such a strange and wonderful place we can stay safe.
This little lecture put his teeth on edge but he kept quiet. Directing thoughts to her would just make her say more and right
now he wanted inner silence, a chance to think by himself. For himself.
He went for a call of nature. While he was burying it so the smell would be hard to track, Shibo talked to him. He butted
her back—pressure against a stiff wall. He struggled silently, mouth twisting, and then came the shock: he could not get rid
of her. She was always there now, riding behind his eyes.
Why should you not want my help?
“Why? ’Cause I got no choice anymore.
You are too young to go forth without my aid.
“How ’bout
I
decide that?”
My point exactly. You can make bad decisions, you know.
“At least they’d be mine.”
We have such a closeness. Do not push me away.
Something about her “closeness” made him uneasy, but he could not find the words.
—a cloying sense of moist pressures, syrupy air that would not leave his heaving lungs, liquid running in through his nose
and ears and unwilling mouth, snaky fog-feelers sweet, so sweet—
When his breathing was back to normal he tramped back to Quath. She had warmed up some of his own field grub, stock she was
carrying for him.
He forgot about Shibo. The greasy excellences of the hot, oily food pushed her presence clear out of his consciousness. Which
was a relief. She had been hanging in him for days now, heavy as a wet boot. He only realized this when she was subdued.
“Uh huh. Dreams, I guess.”
“How would you know?”
“You read my face when I’m asleep?”
“Measurements of what?”
“My God! You work pretty hard.”
“Naysay, I just give people a squint and figure out—hey, you mean that’s how
I
know how people feel?”
“But for you it is?”
“And if you don’t?”
Toby knew that thought was a net of racing electrical impulses, the dance of atoms speaking through their fleet messengers.
But was that all his thoughts meant? He looked at Quath without knowing what to say.
“It’s Shibo. Something about her.”
“Yeah . . .”
“Hey, I’m better than
that
.”
Their errors tend to the static, the enduring face.>
“Hey, come on. That’s so simplified. Hell, I feel steady and composed plenty of times—just not lately, is all. And Besen,
lookit her. She’s as kick-ass as they come, when she gets riled.”
“You got sex on the brain, big-bug,” Toby said uneasily.
darkness. This is the strategy of your species. Merging them in a mind so young as yours is inherently destabilizing.>
“That’s what’s going on in me?”
“What’ll I do?”
the optimum cure would be to reinforce your own subcharacters.>
“Which?”
“So if I built up this ‘self-sense’ . . . ?”
“Ummm.” He was having trouble keeping his attention on the discussion. He felt a foreboding when he paid exact attention to
Quath’s words. But then an itch in his servo-couplers would make him scratch, or a yawn, or some small piping of his sensorium.
He would lose the thread of Quath’s argument.
It seemed as if all kinds of little things were poking at him, making his attention veer away from this problem. “The other
way—”
“Yeasay.” A deep breath. “Look, I’ll handle this on my own.”
“We got plenty more to worry about.”
“Leave me—and her!—alone.”
Toby leaped up, prickly with energy. He walked off, contracting his sensorium, cutting off discussion. Quath’s words were
still with him.
You are impelled to unsettled movement, androgen-agitated.
His boot thumped in frustration on a chunk of timestone.
He drank from the stream that muttered nearby. The water was sharp and fast-running. It cleared his head and quite suddenly
he became aware that he felt deliciously lazy from the sleep. The uneasiness in him was gone, soothed away somehow, and he
did not ask what had done it.
As he walked back to Quath a distant peak cracked apart and showered down glittering fragments. Pensively he gazed around
at the warped greatness. “Hey, y’know, we could name these.”
“Maybe nobody’s been in this particular Lane before. Could be, right?”
“How long?”
“Ummm.” Toby thought of history in terms of his Aspects, not in “years.” Isaac was of the later Arcologies. Poor fractured
Zeno was from even further back. History was people, not numbers. Impatiently he said, “So if we’re the first to be here,
we get to do the naming.”
“Tradition, we call it. A right, really.”
<“Rights” are not a useful concept here.>
“Hey, come on. We could use some of those fancy names. Places the Aspects go on about.”
Instantly there flooded into his idling mind a shotgun blast of names, titles, all tinged with faint echoes of silvery memory.
Tombs of Ishtar. Grand Palace. Altars of Innocence. Goddam-mountain. Bamboozle Bridge. Androscogginn. Pinnacle Prime. Dassadummakeag.
Ever-rest. Pike’s Pyramid. Isis. Mount Olive. DoDeDeed. Angry Sink.
Something in her tone made Toby blink. It was an odd human vanity, he saw, a desire to grab and hold. Shibo helped him see
what every nomad knew in his sinews—that the world was to see and use and move on, part of the flow and trek of life. Naming
the land didn’t fit.
“Well . . . Let ’em name themselves, then.”
But a part of him felt frustrated. He hid that from Shibo. Or tried.
Hard Spark
D
espite steep passes and rough ground they made good time—whatever that meant, in a twisted esty-place that kept confusing
Toby’s ways of thinking. Several times the air and rock swayed like things seen under water and he felt sick.
Weather, Quath said. The esty adjusting to the infall of mass. His inner ear told him that “down” was a matter of opinion,
shifting as the timestone groaned and flakes popped off.
They entered wind-whipped desert. Jumbled terrain curved up and away into a burnt-orange sky. The other side of the Lane was
so far away he could not make it out even under highest closeupping.
“Big place. Gravity’s opposite over there?”
“Uh huh. There’s somethin’ more, though. You feel it?”
“Yeasay. I can’t pin it down.”
“Not mech, I’d say. Doesn’t smell like them.”
“Some ways, maybe.”
Quath was getting jittery. She said little and her legs fidgeted when she wasn’t using them.
It got hotter, then suddenly cold. A dry wind sucked and chimed like faint music. Small esty waves rippled by. The whispery
tones were clear but mysterious, inhuman but pleasant to a lonely ear, deeply still and yet moving with the flexing of the
esty.
“Sure not much water here,” Toby said, trying to keep some talk going against their shared uneasiness.
“You figure it was made for us? I mean, humans?”
“I remember you saying once that you’d mingled genetic stuff with some species, way back in history. Was it with us?”
“Oh yeasay? How high?”
Toby wasn’t sure what “advanced” might mean, and was not much impressed if it meant you were huge and had to clank around
in a hard carapace and knock over things without noticing.
He had tried to shave in the mornings here but the water and soap had the fluid sucked out of them by the air before he was
half through. Aridity squared, air like a sponge.
Breezes of thwarted gravity led them into a territory of demented vegetation. Corkscrew ferns twisted in tight loops all around
them. Giant fronds feathered to catch the sporadic light of the distant esty walls.
Each corkscrew was a scaled-down woodland. Their helical sheets were veined in green and orange, concealing pockets and crevices
packed with creatures who clicked and chattered and whistled, calling from the coiling complexity of the parent tree. For
fun he tried to catch a mouse with wings and ended up with a skinned elbow, from snatching futilely at nothing but air.
He was eating some delicious purple fruit when he felt a twinge in his sensorium. Not much, just a wrinkle. Then a pale ghostly
wedge shot through his senses. Blunt inspection. Not the earlier subtle sense of eyes just beyond view.
He looked up. Something long and tapered came gliding high up in the brassy sky.
He had felt such cool, remorseless force before.
Quath called,
Toby followed. To watch Quath go up a slope was to see the job reduced to its essentials. They got under some dense trees.
He was running and trying to identify the skittering sensorium traces when a massive boom hammered down through the forest.
It flattened them both. His sensorium rang. Limbs crashed nearby. Helical fronds rained down.
“Mechs. They’re high up.”
“Damn!”
“Double dog damn!”
“They must’ve broken in.”
“I remember some of these patterns and—” Something in his sensorium, coming fast.
“Quath . . . It’s the Mantis.”
A long silence. Striations moved at the edge of his sensorium.
“Dangerous as hell, too.”
The Mantis shape moved in a strange zigzag way. One moment it was shrinking, seeming to go further down the Lane—and next
he caught its movement along a ridgeline nearby, half hidden by the glowing rock.
Smaller forms flitted among puffball clouds. One skimmed whispering over the canopy, veered, was gone.
“We thought we killed the Mantis back on Snowglade.”