Vigiant (38 page)

The Bumbler's screen went blank. Then the playback kicked over again, the entrance corridor, the view zooming in for a close-up of the first anchor...

"Turn it off," I said.

Festina moved a dial; the video went black.

"So what do we do?" she asked, her voice a whisper.

"Can we set it free?"

"It's not hard to break an anchor," she replied. "One good smash with a rock should do it. But do we want to?"

Tough question, that. No doubt at all, the pinned-down Peacock was Xé—soul of the world-soul, friendly spirit who let me hear nanites giggle. Her body might be trapped, but her mind had roamed outward, melding with machine intelligences...

How?

An answer appeared in my mind: the obelisk in the next room was a computer, a Greenstrider computer. And Xé surrounded it, permeated it. Used it as a stepping-stone to all the other computers on planet. Xé had done her best to be kindly, helpful...

But my Peacock said
tico, nago, wuto.
Crazy. Evil. Dangerous. Was he just afraid of the anchors, or was he describing Xé? No matter how gentle-natured Xé seemed, she'd been locked down here a long long time. Probably the whole three thousand years since the Greenstrider colony self-destructed. Three millennia = thirty centuries = plenty of time to go mad.

Tico.

In stories, when you let a genie out of a bottle, sometimes it grants you wishes. Sometimes it decides to rip your head off.

"What do you think?" I asked Festina. "If we let Xé out, how dangerous could it be?"

She lowered her gaze. "I once knew a lunatic who planned to destroy a planet's biosphere with a Sperm-tail. I won't tell you how, but I think it might have worked."

"Ouch," I said. "If it was just us at risk..."

"Yes," she agreed. "It's harder taking a chance with other people's lives." She stared at me thoughtfully. "You can talk to this Xé with your link-seed?"

"Sort of. But she hasn't volunteered to explain what's going on."

"Ask a direct question. See what you get."

So I asked... and what I got was data tumor. Three thousand years of torment lanced straight into my brain.

Information exploded in... century after century, what Xé experienced. Imprisonment. Boredom. Suffering. Madness. Evil. Guilt. Contrition.

Everything all at once, pummeling into my consciousness. A damburst set off by the right question, at the right place, right time.

Drowning in the weight of data. Choked by it—the way I often choked on scalpelish thoughts when I brooded how much I'd made a mess of things. Black depression is all you see, all you touch, all you feel, frothing-foaming-muddling in your brain. Motion churns without moving forward, bleak images circling the same futilities, everything all at once, too much to swallow, too much to breathe...

Then, in the jumble of mental meltdown, blood-boiling death a millisecond away... the sweet strong image of a peacock's tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a million eyes open. Just as I'd seen during
müshor.
not long ago, but I'd been so naive back then, I thought it was a trick of my mind. Now I knew better. This was the touch of the Peacock,
my
Peacock: shielding me, stopping up the data flood, holding back the tide till I caught my breath.

And the sound of it, same as before—feathers rattling, like a true peacock.

Look at me.
Look
at me. A demanding peace.

Then the world was back... and only a blink had flicked by. Festina was just starting to move toward me, her hands coming up, grabbing me as I slumped. I let her take my weight—I didn't have the strength to stand because my head was so heavy, so full...

Not that I knew everything. My Peacock had thrown himself in the way of the data flood before I drowned. I'll never know how much of the download got pinched off short.

But I knew enough. More than enough. "Are you all right?" Festina asked.

"Yes," I said. "And no. Ouch."

I didn't move—just leaned against her and let her do the work because my brain couldn't exactly remember how to control my legs. When Festina saw I was nigh-on deadweight, she lowered me gently to the floor. "What happened? Faye. Faye. Come on, focus. What happened?"

"I got the explanation," I replied, still reeling. "No one else ever asked. Even Tic... so Zenned-out, he never questioned. Just accepted everything Xé sent his way. When I asked, Xé was so excited and relieved... she tried to control the memory dump, I think she did, but she was too blessed giddy."

"What did she say?"

"Give me a second to sort it out." I looked around. "Where's the Peacock?"

"It was moving so fast I could barely follow it, but, umm... I think it went up your nose."

"Oh," I said. "They do that. It's their nature. And since he stopped my brain from exploding out my ears, I can't complain, can I?"

"Are you
sure
you're all right?" Festina asked, placing a hand on my forehead.

"I don't have a fever," I told her. "Not yet. And I'm not delusional, I'm enlightened. Enlightened, lightheaded, delighted. Do you want to hear a story?"

"If you want to tell me one." She had the cautious tone of someone humoring a woman who might be
tico.
But I told her the story anyway.

Start with the peacocks. A species that surfaced into sentience long long long before
Homo saps.
They launched their first rocket while Earth was still watching protomammals dodge out from under the feet of
T. REX.
Then came the peacocks' space-exploration phase, their bioengineering phase, their evolution into immortal energy-beings phase...

Yeah, sure, trite cliché. Simplistic at best, and God knows, maybe plain wrong. All I can share is the data scar left in my mind after the tumor: a mix of real information from Xé and approximations made by my overloaded brain as it tried to make sense of everything. If the input got trivialized and contaminated by junk already lying in my subconscious—well, that's the way the meat brain works. Alien experiences get reinterpreted into things more familiar... even if that means drawing on fusty neural pathways laid down while watching
Captain Action and the Technocracy Team.

So. The peacocks. Sentient Sperm-tails. Don't ask me what part was the actual peacock: maybe the Sperm-tail's pocket universe, maybe the particle-thin field that contained the pocket universe inside our own. Xé didn't give me details. Maybe she didn't know the truth herself.

Oh, another human prejudice there—seeing Xé as female. She wasn't... any more than my own Peacock was male. But three thousand years ago, the two were a couple, a pair bond, friends, lovers, allies, interpenetrating energies... pick whatever facile description gives you the gooey. And the two wandered the galaxy together, looking for enlightenment/light-headedness/delight. Riding lesser beings.

No big mystery what I mean by Riding: hitchhiking in another creature's brain. Secretly experiencing its thoughts and emotions. Telepathic tourism. Peacocks could set up as squatters in the minds of lesser organisms, decoding neural transmissions as easily as we decode the snarl of light waves that hit our retinas. Xé and her paramour picked up the thoughts of everyone around them, clear as a summer's day.

Idle wandering took them to the Greenstrider home-world; hitchhiking brought them to Demoth. They Rode their unknowing hosts, sometimes for just a few hours but often from cradle to grave. That was their favorite way to Ride; traveling from birth to death gave them the full story, beginning, middle, end. The peacocks found each part fascinating... especially when the Greenstrider colony started breaking into factions.

You can picture them, those peacocks, like some rich-as-sin tourists watching the locals disembowel each other. Civil war breaking out, while the peacocks sat amused, sipping a telepathic cocktail of hate and violence, with just a splash of genocide.

The schisms that ripped apart Greenstrider society were so meaningless to Xé she didn't try to understand. Too much bother. The striders may have been fighting rich against poor, heathens against believers, green legs against blue; but Xé couldn't tell me because she hadn't paid attention. All she could say was the Greenstriders fought: north vs. south, east vs. west, coast vs. interior, tribe vs. tribe vs. tribe.

For a long time, it stayed a cold war. The League of Peoples was just as inescapable back then as it is today; if the striders had battled full out, nukes blazing, poison gas spreading like fog, Demoth would have been declared non-sentient: no one allowed out or in, total blockade and embargo. That threat was enough to keep hostilities mostly "polite"... like those nanotech weapons that gutted machines without hurting people. But let's not pretend blood was never shed. Sabotage can kill. Suspected sympathizers got lynched. Raids turned vicious. As machines went defunct one by one, neighbors invaded each other, looking for food synthesizers that could still pump out protein.

Ugly stuff... but not to Xé. She just found it
interesting:
like watching ants squabble, colony against colony; vicious but not important. For all her years of soaking up Greenstrider emotions, she still didn't identify with them. They were animals—so far beneath her, they didn't
count.
Even if the League considered the Greenstrider species sentient, they didn't act that way on Demoth; murdering each other with barely an excuse, believing their petty squabbles mattered. If the strider she was Riding grieved for a fallen comrade or raged as his clan sank into low-tech barbarism... well, wasn't it just so cute how they took themselves seriously?

Her sweetheart didn't see it like that. Humorless dud that he was, he actually tried to stop the fun; and in a gag-down disgusting way. Here's the thing: peacocks could do more than Ride in a passive way. They could actually fuse with their hosts, mind to mind, heart to heart. A conscious union, two brains in one, lasting for the lifetime of the host. Once twinned in, the Peacock couldn't withdraw without killing its Greenstrider partner.

To Xé, whole fusion was like doing the dance with a monkey. Obscene. Uncleanly. But the other peacock, my Peacock, didn't balk at grossness when it was necessary—he picked the leader of the strongest faction and zoomed in for a merge. The result was secret symbiosis: full Greenstrider on the outside, but inside half Peacock. Two minds becoming one... and the Peacock half was set on ending the civil war.

It made Xé sick. It made Xé furious. It made Xé blind-screaming jealous.

Her lover—her soul mate—getting heart-mind intimate with a lower animal. Disgusting. Sordid.
Insulting.

Like many jealous lovers before her, Xé blazed back tit for tat: her own fling at bestiality. But she wasn't looking for a productive working union; she wanted someone she could rape and use. Xé chose the leader of another faction, and shredded the Greenstrider's brain as she made it her own. Blew the poor bugger straight off the edge of insanity. Then she set about using his body and his clan to rack up revenge.

It goes without saying Xé had ungodly intelligence compared with paltry minds like the Greenstriders. Intricate technical projects were child's play... like creating the most lethal biological agent she could imagine. Not a germ, but a germ
factory
—a cloud of nanites (microscopic, invisible) that could analyze an organism, then build a microbe ideally suited to giving that organism a slow inescapable death.

Got it? Germ factory = Pteromic Central. The Mother of all Plagues.

My Peacock's Greenstrider host operated from a bunker in Great St. Caspian. Xé sent the germ factory there—a microscopic troop of nanites, bent on making disease. The factory found a Greenstrider... analyzed the sad bastard's biochemistry... came up with a killer bug. As Yunupur had observed, the germ was designed to spread far and wide: a long latency period when carriers were contagious but showed no symptoms. It infected everyone in the Peacock's bunker, and the Peacock never noticed.

But.

The Peacock was working to restore peace on Demoth. That meant sending out envoys. Diplomats. People carrying offers of truce.

People also carrying the plague. Infecting clan after clan after clan.

The Greenstrider version of plague affected their skeletal structure; that's what the germ factory decided was most vulnerable. Slowly, ever so slowly, bones began to shrink. Subtle, subtle. Bone cells just stopped reproducing, never replacing themselves. Ostrich legs grew thinner till they snapped like matchsticks. Just flexing a thumb might be enough to rip one of their spindly insect arms to flinders: thumb stressing the wrist, stressing the forearm, stressing the elbow joint, and so on up to the shoulder, everything going in one sickening crack.

Greenstrider lungs and diaphragm were seated on bones, using them for leverage during inhalation. Once those bones turned to tinder... breathless.

So Greenstriders began to die, all around the world. Leaving saggy corpses that soon decayed to humus and powder. Precious little in the way of skeletons for future archaeologists to study.

Long after it was too late, the Peacock realized what had happened—who was to blame for the epidemic unstoppably scouring Demoth free of Greenstriders. He never managed to develop a cure; but he did have time to settle the score with his former love.

Taking revenge? Or just locking up a mad dog? Neither Xé nor I knew whether the Peacock acted in anger or sorrow. But he
did
act. He built dozens of those Sperm-tail anchors. He tracked Xé down to Mummichog, to this bunker, where she still lived in fusion with her Greenstrider host. He ambushed her and imprisoned her and walked away without looking back.

Her prison was more than just the ring of anchors nailing her in place. The obelisk in the middle was also a key component: a computer, designed to run off Xé's own energies. The computer controlled a team of nanites to serve as jailers—keeping the anchor boxes in good repair, collecting solar energy from the world outside, and bringing it down for Xé to feed. (That was the source of light in Xé's chamber: nanites releasing their sucked-up mouthfuls of sun.)