Authors: Charles Stross
Oshi somehow dragged Boris after her, through the uncannily-human throat at the far end of the ledge, onto the gridded floor within. She looked down: below the gridded floor was a tunnel, an endless tube of yellow cartilaginous plaques, hot red veins and living flesh framing the mechanics of escalation. She was perched on a frail metal tray, about to be lowered down a gargantuan oesphagus.
The lift began to sink, bearing them gently out towards the floor of the cylinder. Oshi collapsed on the floor and lay face-up, drawing in ragged gasps of air. All she could see was the nightmare in her mind's eye when the Keeper of the Dead had summoned her.
Please don't ... I can't take it twice in one morning.
It was a long ride down to ground level. As they neared the bottom of the shaft, Oshi retreated to the furthermost recess of the lift and picked up her halberd. She looked round edgily, searching the inside of the funicular room for any kind of sign as to what had happened to her. She saw old stone blocks encrusted with some kind of lichen. The lift must be centuries old, maintained by biomorphic systems while its silicaceous foundations rotted. There were no bones; whatever she'd seen on the way in had been an artefact of the twilight. Light streamed in through the open door, making her blink. It was her first sight of the colony by daylight. Reflexive agoraphobia took over:
this can't be an artificial base ... it's too big!
Boris groaned. Oshi turned and pulled him up, leaned him against the wall of the lift, and dragged one of his arms over her shoulder. He wasn't quite so much of a dead weight. "Can you walk?" she asked.
"
No. Just.
" Still communicating via wisdom implants; a bad sign.
"You
are
in a bad way. Where do we want to go?"
"
Out. Memphis, the settlement block. Avoid open space. Goons --
" he sagged against her in a dead faint.
"That's cool." She glanced round, then looked
up
at a sky contoured with forests and valleys, shrouded by wispy cirrus clouds. She staggered, leaned on her weapon: "... shit, you're a mess."
I don't normally speak to myself
, she thought: "do I?" Her pulse sounded like erratic thunder, her throat ached, and the world was revolving above her head. The pain in her ribs from where the Goon had grabbed her was intensifying, but so was the urge to laugh -- a mad, idiot giggle that wouldn't go away if she ever let it get past her tongue. "This can't be real. I mean, it can't be ..."
"
It is
." Startled, Oshi glanced round. Boris: eyes open, regarding her with guarded interest. He looked a mess; as if someone had sucked the juices out of him, starting a process of mummification from the inside out. Only his eyes looked alive. "
We've got to move. Goons will be out searching soon. Weapons aren't grown yet -- we can't fight them off long enough to put one over Anubis. That's why Anubis had me ... see?"
"That's it. I've had enough. Let's go. Get to your friends." Even as she said it she harboured no great hope that they would manage it; just a dull, depressing fear that fate would overtake them on a silent breeze of too many tentacles and mandibles and many-jointed fingers. At the back of her mind there was a nameless fear; that she was hallucinating, that it was all still a dream that she could see through, and that at the last
he
would step through the curtains of reality, take her right back to her hot-dark childhood of pain. The Boss, somehow conflated with her uncle: the hated power-figure. Sometimes it had helped her in the past to imagine that she was talking to a friend, an advocate who could tell her the truth about her situation with wisdom and compassion. But this time she couldn't quite bridge the gap, couldn't make herself answer her own questions or cover her own loss of faith. Nobody answered her; or the answers she found were so uncomfortable she wished she hadn't asked.
Gravel rolled away beneath her foot. She stood up slowly, leaning into Boris's weight, rubbed a fist against one rib that jagged a needle of pain through her.
Got to get out of here
...
"Let's move."
Shuffling, Oshi started down-hill. Boris tried to walk, staggered drunkenly against her so that it was almost more trouble to keep him upright than to carry him. It was easy to ignore the looming sky when she reached the tree line; boojums stretched their hairy bifurcations overhead, blocking the light back to a turgid twilight. Small maintenance creatures twittered and scuttled in the undergrowth, following their passage with wary eyes. Everything in the forest had a purpose, however obscure -- these biospheres were the outcome of a thousand years of research, the dynamics of nature nailed down by a sharp technology. Insects rasped and chirred in the grass. It was hot, growing hotter with the day. Oshi was sweating almost before they started, eyes cast down to follow the red earth trail down from the funicular to what she hoped would be a semblance of civilisation.
A creeper brushed her face; she dodged it, slowed. Let Boris stop. "
Here.
" She leaned him against a tree trunk; he didn't fall over, now. "
I'm slowing you. Go on, get away. Leave me.
"
She stared at him. "You're crazy, you know that?"
He smiled feebly. "Ack." A faint whisper from his voice. "
Walk soon.
"
Oshi nodded, suddenly feeling ashamed of herself. Her throat and ribs still ached, but that wasn't critical.
I don't know enough. Who else could I --
She sat down. "No," she said. "I'm not going to leave you."
"Aah." He closed his eyes for a moment; she thought he was about to faint, then understood it for the anger that it signified.
"I have questions."
"
Damn your questions. Why did you rescue me?"
"It seemed like a good idea at the time. I was improvising." Oshi glanced round, ignoring her aches and pains, taking the opportunity to breathe deeply and scan the undergrowth for trackers. A myriad of upload links pulsed digital call-signs between each other, but their signature tune was empty; the dreamtime support network existed, but there were no destination signals, no entrypoints into the wisdom or afterife net. "This was not what I was expecting when I came here. I want answers."
"Oh. I suppose you deserve some, then. As soon as I have the breath for it. Anubis can be quite -- insistent -- with his hospitality."
"So I gather." A long stem of grass sprouted near Oshi's feet. She plucked it, delicately nibbled on the end and rotated it between her teeth. "You were part of a pathfinder expedition?"
"I thought you were one of us."
He seemed surprised.
"Raisa was unclear on the concept," Oshi said absently. "You were a pathfinder team sent out in a desperate emergency, to prepare the way for a big migration. Refugees from the imperialism of an alien power, no?"
"
They unleashed berserkers; self-replicating destroyers targetted on our worlds. The expansion processors were not enough for them: they wanted everything. No negotiations: just a flat ultimatum to get out.We hoped there would be a gatecoder terminal somewhere in our path ...
"
"There was. Why are there so few of you?"
Without warning, Boris slumped down against the tree trunk. Oshi spun round then paused. Tears trailed lucent slug-tracks across his sunken cheeks. Despite herself, Oshi felt the breath catch in her throat.
"I see."
"You don't. We knew what the probabilities were; it was a risk. But there should have been something. The enemy must have disrupted Heimat completely, placed the planet in orbit around its own centre of gravity. Nothing less would have ... the silence. Unless it was Anubis. Unless he knows where the eight hundred million have gone."
"There is no Dreamtime access in this colony." Oshi rolled the grass stem between her fingers. "Do you suppose Anubis shut it down deliberately -- to stop anything following you?"
"But you --"
"I came from the other direction, from the frontier heading inwards. Please, consider that Anubis, while quite mad, need not be stupid. At least, not back then; I can't say what degenerative processes a Superbright can undergo, but under the circumstances it would make sense for him to sever his Dreamtime links to the Centre, and to shut down his links to all other destinations. Playing dead, in other words, as a defensive strategy."
Oshi stopped, and contemplated the devastated shred of grass. "Of course, that may be what drove Anubis over the edge. Terror induced isolation can bring its own nightmares ..."
"It's plausible; as good an explanation as anything else. Whatever, it doesn't change our situation. We are prisoners. Anubis will not let us leave, will not give us access to the Dreamtime for wisdom, afterlife, or any other reason, and grows stranger and crazier by the year. What were you saying? Why you came here?"
"I'm a messenger. But I think my message just self-aborted ..."
"Some messenger." He opened his eyes again, turned his head slightly towards her. His voice was hoarse and stale from lack of use, but real: he'd dropped the direct-brain-contact. "
Messengers
don't kill squaddies with pointed sticks."
"And you were not imprisoned in Anubis' dungeon for nothing, my friend. Tell me: what is going on here?"
Boris twitched, spasmodically: trying to sit up. Oshi moved to help him, but he shook her away irritably. "I'll do it on my own." He shuffled back against the tree and she noted that his legs and arms were terribly thin. "I don't want to tell you everything, for two reasons. Firstly, you have given me no proof that you do not belong to Anubis. He isn't normally this subtle, but we can't afford to take risks, as you will understand. Secondly, if Anubis recaptures you ..."
"Anubis mentioned an escape committee. You're part of it?"
Boris said nothing. Only her deep infrared vision picked up the teltale flush of his cheeks, the ruddy betrayal of the pulse in his emaciated wrists.
"You're part of the escape committee," she confirmed. "Looking for a way to crash Anubis' defenses. There'll be dumb backups on a colony this size, even inferior AI's, spaceship autopilots --"
His pupils widened. "How did you know?"
Oshi shrugged, thumped the ground between them with one hand. "This didn't come from nowhere. I'd guess there's an extensive mining fleet out there. Maybe warships, too; anything Anubis trusts to help defend him from the inevitable. The Ultrabright attack."
Boris shook his head. "We were
afraid
they would follow us. We never even saw them enter our system, you know. We had the usual defenses against rogue colony probes: a hundred thousand orbiting combat drones, coilguns on the near moons, distant warning links in the outer asteroid belt. All for nothing when the berserkers appeared. They came from nowhere, nowhere at all. And we were afraid they'd follow us. So we ran at random, uploading and beaming out blind without waiting for a return packet to confirm the link."
"That was a bad idea," Oshi said absently. "All you did was demonstrate a bolt-hole to the Ultrabrights. According to my briefing they're not good at thinking in normal spacetime terms -- they're not native to this universe: they evolved in the dreamtime, where the normal rules don't hold -- but they can learn. And Anubis pulling in all his antennae probably didn't do any good either. It made my Boss send me here. It will have been noticed elsewhere. And then committing genocide by omission, by refusing to download the stream of exiles who followed your team out here on a blind ticket to nowhere -- it wouldn't surprise me if Anubis is terrified of being found out. He's the self-appointed guardian of souls and gatekeeper of the land of the dead. Losing a few million won't have done his self-esteem any good."
She noticed that Boris didn't seem to be paying any attention. He was looking away from her. "
How can you say that?"
he sent, too overcome by emotion to speak out loud. "
Millions dead, and all you can do is talk about the self-esteem of their murderer
--"
"It's a dangerous galaxy out there. I've seen enough of it to know." Oshi threw her grass stem away. A momentary wave of self-disgust, exquisitely sharp, swept over her: "I've been part of it for too long. There are things you don't want to know, believe me."
"Oh, I believe you." He was talking again. "I'm not some innocent colonist expecting a primordial paradise world tended by robots, you know.
Some
of us had to know what it was like out there. I had to negotiate with Superbrights; you have to know how to dine with the devil with a very long spoon. I'm a diplomat -- I know the score. To tell the truth, I expected to die when I lay down on the gatecoder pad and let them feed me into it. It's just that this exceeds my wildest dreams." He chuckled painfully. Oshi looked round quickly, but there was no sign of movement; nothing disturbed the peaceful chirruping of the digital insect life or the rasp of the omnipresent cicadas.
"We'd better be moving," she said. "Do you know anywhere secure to go to ground in?"
Boris coughed, clearing his throat. "The necropolis," he suggested. "Anubis modeled the colony area on an historical scenario, something to do with his identity. Where he came from. There's an entire quadrant of the town given over to tombs. Nobody lives there; mostly nobody goes there. Even the goons stay out. There's nothing there but a load of dry bones."
"Whose corpses are they?"
"We don't know. Ours maybe, from earlier download attempts while Anubis was fine-tuning the gatecoder. Whatever, it will be a good place to wait. When I make contact --"
"What?"
"You don't need to know ... just yet."
The day grew hot and bright, chasing the whisps of fog away from under the trees and baking the air into a quiet inferno. Oshi carried Boris deeper into the trees, then fashioned a hide in the deep grass; then she hunkered down.
"What are you waiting for?" Boris asked after an hour.
"That question, more or less." Oshi sat up cautiously, glanced round, and lay down again close by. "Lie low. Stay off wisdom. Let's just wait and see. My bet is, if there's a massive response the city will be the first target. Don't want to be on-line or visible when Anubis starts interrogating the upload transceivers throughout the colony."