Tides of Light (17 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
> The wobbling quadder lurched toward Quath, threatening.
Quath skittered aside. Another farted sourly in contempt, spewing an acrid yellow cloud. Beq’qdahl pretended indifference,
studying the grainy walls.
Quath ducked down a side passage and away, to the moist gossamer communal bedding, to sleep.
Sleep.
Yet sleep came fitfully, laced by hot lightning behind the eyes.
Quath tossed and clutched at her smooth bed weavings.
At times she awoke and then it was the long Dreamtime when they journeyed from her homeworld at far below light-speed. They
had hung in swaying pearly sacs and voyaged through the notsleep, bodies slowed, minds floating among fog-racked visions best
forgotten later….
Just before dawn the distant sounds of Beq’qdahl’s celebration finally died away. Quath expected deep sleep at last. Instead
she awakened soon with tingling palps, flushed with a vision.
The Tukar’ramin, shrunken and old, lecturing. Not the enduring, enfolding Tukar’ramin she knew, but a doddering old podia
who repeated the rote wisdom of the dead past. Despite the technical magic that let the Tukar’ramin span the gulf between
minds, and heal, she was still an ancient podder, no more.
In the dream Tukar’ramin had described how the mechs would fall before the podia and the cutting Cosmic Circle, vanquished
by life triumphant.
In the dream Quath had cried,
You know our mission is empty!
and the Tukar’ramin, shocked, fell crashing into brass and ceramic and gristle and withered bony parts. Thorax and antennae
clattered on the warren floor. She fell and fell and fell—endlessly, authority squeezed to nothing beneath the crushing weight
of remorseless time.
Awakening, Quath saw for a glimmering moment that her preoccupation with death held a clue. Somehow, this bore upon all events
here at Galactic Center. But how? The small races of Philosoph that laced thinly through her gave no clue.
Once more the Syphon sucked hard. Again the planet’s husk cracked and spat vast plumes of brown dust.
It was fortunate that this world had no major oceans, or a different fraction of the crumpled crust would have been submerged
with each Syphon firing, impeding the mines. That fact had helped select this world for the thermweaving. It overrode the
absence of moons, whose ripping apart would have provided convenient building materials. What’s more, there was a curious,
ancient orbital device at the equator, which the podia might find useful later.
But now, word came of disturbances aloft. The podia used the captured mech orbital station as a shipping depot. But something
had now intruded into the depot, delaying transports. This news was buried in the rush of Hive labor. Quath did not bother
herself with such large problems, though she still ached to work in orbit, above the seethe of dust and gravity. She did her
tasks and sought solace in marveling at progress beyond her Hive.
Already the podia had captured a small fraction of this yellow star’s light. Their weaving proceeded apace in orbit, deploying
broad planes ribbed with photosensitive silicon. When finished, the weave would be only a framework, of course, for later
expeditions. They would render the planets into light-sopping materials—a tedious task—in preparation for harnessing the star’s
total flux.
By the time that happened, Quath expected she would be long dead, and the dream of Starswarmers touching between galaxies
in the Summation would be, for Quath, dust. The others did not see this, or care. It was one thing to know in an abstract
way that one day you would die, and another to
wake in the night and feel your hearts thumping. To delve into your subtask brains and feel the prickly oxygen entering bloodstreams,
the slow sluggish purr of tissues rebuilding, a hydraulic tug where titanium met cartilage, the dull orange burning of stored
calories…and know they will cease, you will plunge into blackness.
With repetition these somber moments lost some of their bite. Quath began to see herself as a simple being, humble before
the brute facts of living. She labored with the ratlike robots, using her massive stapler when great strength was needed,
followed orders, and kept to herself. From murmurs of transmissions in the Hive corridors she overheard more talk of Beq’qdahl’s
successes.
Beq’qdahl is rising
, the myriapodia observed. As though Beq’qdahl were a confection baking, puffing itself up, and they were indirectly the cooks.
To Quath these matters no longer stung.
Thus she was not disturbed, when work teams reorganized, that Tukar’ramin ordered her to accompany Beq’qdahl as an equipment
carrier. Being a young Philosoph did not free one from the rub of the world.
Ahead rumbled the bulky Beq’qdahl, legs scrabbling on rocks.
Her crescents of phosphorus made a small splotch of day amid the night. Quath lurched behind, jumping at each tremor of the
rock for fear that another shifting of the crust had begun. Overhead hung the Cosmic Circle, its aura dull when not in use.
The sharp stars were eyes staring out of a swallowing abyss.
Quath labored forward under her load of acoustic sensors. The Tukar’ramin had given Beq’qdahl a complete analytical station,
so that tests could be made in the field. The
components were bulky. Quath also carried Beq’qdahl’s extra boosting rockets, for escape should magma spurt over the crumpled
hills.
Quath supplied it. Dawn broke as the sun ripened behind thinning clouds. Quath thought of Nimfur’thon and their gambols on
these lands, then sprinkled with green. A very long time ago.
From behind a tilted shelf of rock ambled a flock of animals. It was surprising, Quath reflected, that they had survived the
land’s heavings. The next round of Syphon firings would surely end life on this world.
Something whined off Beq’qdahl’s high turret.
The animals quickly spread among the shattered boulders. Something thudded into Beq’qdahl’s flank. A pod jerked in spasm.
Another shot sang off Beq’qdahl’s bronzed turret.
Two quick bursts caught Quath in the side. She drew up a battered palp. A salty pus oozed forth.
>
Beq’qdahl’s shrill cry pierced the air. Her fifth pod split ripely and belched a foul smoke.
.>
Quath abruptly pitched forward. Her rear bulkhead puckered around two steaming holes.
Beq’qdahl strapped on the blue cylinders. Sharp shots rang on her carapace.
a grub.>
away with a grating noise.
She finished hurriedly and made ready. Near
misses hummed in the air.
Quath felt a stabbing gouge in her third pod. The gray animals—no, Noughts, she corrected herself—were nearer. They were fanning
out. Metal glinted in their small feelers.
When Quath glanced skyward again, Beq’qdahl was a
yellow dot arcing toward the distant Hive. Quath knew that even if she had boosters, she would lose valuable moments overcoming
her own subminds. Their fear of flying was almost unmanageable.
Resigned, she turned to study the Noughts with no weapons to repel them. Small pellets ate—
snick! ping!
—at her skin. She hoisted her own boosters and locked them into sleeves, shrugging off the small bites as the Noughts’ shots
nipped at her. Small, but so many.
As she articulated a telescoping arm, something caught her attention. Her stapler gleamed in the dawnlight.
The humble stapler which drove forked brackets into the Hive rock. No weapon at all…
Quath started to run. And then stopped. The Noughts could follow, after all. If she stood she would retain at least her dignity,
if not her life.
Quath turned and faced the enveloping tide of piping Noughts. Something in her wanted this.
She raised the stapler and sighted along it with three eyes. A Nought charged into her center of focus and she fired. The
staple split a rock, missing the Nought. She corrected. Fired. Another miss.
Quath felt a strange soothing calm. Shots struck her palps, fracturing one away. Steadily she calibrated and aimed. The stapler
jerked. A Nought crumpled and fell into a gully.
The next gray target bobbed and weaved. Quath compensated and caught it on the third shot, splitting the thing in two. Beneath
the gray shell it oozed sap.
High, frantic calls piped from the Noughts. Many ducked behind outcroppings. Quath quickly shot three.
Their weapons peppered her, stings nicking at her concentration. She killed five more.
They crowded in now, skipping like mites from one shadowed
refuge to the next. Staples plowed through the soft, unarmored Noughts.
Her side dimpled and a hard wave of pain lanced through her. She lurched, gasping. Oil bubbled from two pods. Her remotely
actuated hydraulic cylinders did not respond. She was trapped here.
She dashed sideways to elude a wedge of them and a massed volley slammed her into a rock face. Her lenses fogged. Oxygen processors
rasped. Fiery fingers pulled at her guts.
Here it is
, Quath thought.
I have met it
. Blackness closed in.
Drifting…
Swimming…
Darkness came…slow…slow.
Yet time ticked on.
In her blurred sensate swamp Quath felt a brush of cool air, like the plasma wind which stirs the banks of dust between suns.
Watery images floated in her eyes. She oxidized sugars with nitric acid, splitting open her internal mucus pouches to hasten
the mix. She strained—
With a gathering rush her boosters fired, yellow columns singing. A cold fierce joy burst in her.
She landed unsteadily. Noughts swarmed after her. She set herself with a cool certainty and aimed. Fired.
Forked staples cut into the Noughts. Clanking, rumbling, surging, she moved—and boosted again, firing as she flew.
The Noughts in their gray suits exploded when the staples caught them. Guts spilled on crushed rock.
A pleasant fever swept over Quath as they fell under her hail of staples, puny voices screaming, rasping for a last suck of
air.
Quath pushed them back across the field. Their firing slowed, ceased. They fled. She swiveled and searched out
the few gray dabs remaining. They cowered in their hiding holes, bleating in fear, little better than animals.
Each became a small detail that Quath settled with the quick sharp stutter of the stapling gun. Each ended with a little cry,
as if what awaited were a surprise.
When she sliced the last one through, Quath stood alone, gasping, her mind fuzzed. She attached a hook and line to a Nought
body which was still in one piece and hauled it up for a better view. In the absolute silence of the battlefield her driving
servo scratched, demanding oil. Her joints trembled with strain. The Nought body turned on the hook. Quath plucked at the
gray skin. Filmy, it tore away.
The gray suit shucked off, much the way this world would soon become a husk. The Nought slipped free.
At first Quath saw only the gangling appendages with their awkward, splayed ends. Two for walking, two for manipulations.
The joints were slight pivots, surely not capable of withstanding much stress.
Yet as Quath studied the creature she saw how the wrinklings and knottings of its skin told how the thing lived. Patches of
curdlings at the midjoints of the shorter pods, evidence of wear. A funguslike growth above and below the eyes, to cup warmth
about the small brain. Another dark patch, lower, to shelter a tangle of equipment.
Quath traced the fine pattern of fleece that wove about the body, following what she could see were flow lines water would
make as the thing swam. A beautiful design. So this Nought was a swimmer, yet it could walk, after a fashion.
She clamped the skull and turned the spinal juncture until a click came. She sent a subsonic hum along the body. With care
she lifted the skull. The skeleton came free, sliding up out of the meat.
To Quath this gesture brought into the air a fresh and
wonderful vision. The chalky bones were not crude and heavy. They seemed delicately turned, fitting snugly together—thin where
waste would slow the beast, strong where torques and forces found their axis.
The center held a finespun cage of calcium rods. Ribs. They blossomed into a brittle and precisely adjusted weave, a song
of intricate design and wonderful order that Quath could sense trilling through the webbed intersections.
Yet this Nought-thing was a pest. It crawled on the ground and probably never noticed the stars. It had mastered at best the
trifling resources of its pitiful little world. Its crude weapons were barely better than the teeth and hooves of dumb animals.