Seeds of Earth (61 page)

Yash grinned. 'It's a good high - so I've been told . . .'

Kao Chih looked around him - they were gathered in a hollow in a darkened forest, beneath an overhanging rock bearded with moss and grass from which water dripped. It was raining out in the night, a subdued whispering from the dim shapes of trees, leaves rustling, branches swaying in occasional breezy gusts. He could smell and savour the odours of a vastness of biomass and he shivered, cold and excited - this was Darien, a living world as lush as Pyre once was.

'How . . .' He paused to cough. 'How did we get away?'

'Since the immediate threat was over, the Sentinel of the well graciously condescended to translocate us away from the Brolturans, although it had to be certain that this was in accord with the general tenor of previous commands,' said Gorol9. 'The remains of the Instrument have been sent to the Construct.'

'Jelking machine mind,' Yash said. 'My bank has a branch on Yonok - why couldn't it send me there?'

'So where are we now?' said Kao Chih.

'Roughly seventeen miles west of Hammergard,' said a voice from nearby.

Looking up, he saw two men descending the slope just along from the overhang - one was short and wiry with sandy-coloured hair while the other was taller with dark hair. He recognised them as Europeans, with that wide-eyed look of astonishment that he had only ever seen in the
Retributofs
data files. Both were wearing blue cheek patches from which pickup stalks protruded.

'Greetings, Humans Cameron and McGrain,' said Gorol9, then to Kao Chih it said, 'I have fashioned small translators for them so that we may understand each other.'

'Very smart wee gadgets,' said the taller of the two, his odd Anglic dialect smoothly translated by Kao Chih's linguistic enabler. 'But I'm glad to see that you've recovered. When myself and Rory got here an hour ago ye were still in the grip of that drug . . .'

'Totally out of it,' said the other man with a grin.

'Oh yes - this is Rory McGrain and I'm Greg Cameron,' said the first.

Kao Chih nodded courteously from where he lay. 'It is an honour to meet you. But how did you know where to find us?'

'Well, one of our allies has a certain understanding with the warpwell Sentinel,' said the man Cameron. 'He couldn't say anything other than to get to this spot with all speed, and after we did your friends filled us in on a few details about what happened up at Giant's Shoulder and what you did.' He shook his head. 'Incredible, just incredible. But neither of them know how ye became involved with this Legion cyborg creature, or where you're from.'

Kao Chih sighed and, ignoring his headache, got to his feet. 'Honourable sirs, my story has more twists and turns than a bowlful of noodles. But first I must introduce myself properly and fully - my name is Kao Chih of the Human Sept of Agmedra'a, and my people originally came from Earth 150 years ago, fleeing the Swarm invasion . . .'

The two men listened in astonishment as he told them about the beautiful world where the
Tenebrosa
had finally landed, the colony established by his forebears, the Hegemony mercenaries and the prospector ships that strip-mined the planet, the exodus of half the colony to the Roug orbital, Agmedra'a, and their indenture under conditions of secrecy. His voice shook as he recounted their sorrowful tragedy and he saw their faces grow sombre.

'But then news came of the discovery of your world and, at the Roug's instigation, I was sent to find you, meet your leaders and warn them of the Hegemony. Most importantly, I was to ask permission for my people to come and settle here and be part of your community. But now I find that the Hegemony and its Brolturan vassals have taken control of your world, which has a secret that is attracting the agents of an ancient enemy.' He shook his head. 'That Earth has become a willing ally of the Hegemony is almost the worst of it. Freedom for both our peoples seems a forlorn hope.'

'You musn't lose hope, Kao Chih,' said Cameron. 'Hard struggles lie ahead, more than I care to think about, but only yesterday one of us gave them a humiliating kicking and that, together with your astounding victory, all three of you - that gives me hope. The task ahead of us is monumental and our enemies are innumerable, strong and vicious, but if we don't take them on, who will?' He glanced at the Construct droid, Gorol9. 'And sometimes help can come from the most unexpected quarter ...' His gaze swung back to Kao Chih. 'And the last thing I was expecting was you! Just knowing that your people, the colonists from the
Tenebrosa,
have survived all those calamities and are eager to come here and join us - that gives me hope and strength!'

He held out his hand. 'Kao Chih - welcome to Darien.'

For a brief moment, he stared back at the man Cameron, wondering if anything else lay behind the open smile, the clear brown eyes, and the apparent integrity. Then he relented, deciding that he would trust Greg Cameron. Today.

'Thank you, Mr Cameron.'

And they shook hands, smiles widening to grins.

EPILOGUE

ROBERT

Awakening was a slow ascent. He arose gradually from black oblivion, a no-sound, no-sight, no-place which steadily dissolved into a blurred grey ocean, dream's drowsy shallows. It felt as if he was struggling through thick mud to get to the shore and the lighter it became, the more he began to remember ... things, faces, places, nightmarish encounters. In his thoughts he shied away from those grotesqueries, but they trailed after him, one seizing his shoulder in an icy, bone-chilling grasp ...

Suddenly his eyes were open and he was aware of lying on his side in a comfortable bed, in a room full of natural light, a cool, dawn rosiness. There was a faint, sweet fragrance in the air and for a second he imagined that he was in their townhouse on the outskirts of Bonn. But he knew he couldn't be there, because he knew that he had been on Darien not long ago.

'Good morning, Robert Horst. How are you feeling?'

The voice sounded vaguely androgynous with a midrange pitch and lack of expressive highs and lows. It was coming from the foot of the bed, and when he pushed back the lightweight cover and sat up he saw an odd figure garbed in dark blue robes and wearing what seemed to be an archaic, fully concealing pale mask. But when it spoke the pale lips moved.

'I am a proximal of the Construct - when you converse with me, you are conversing with the Construct...'

'Why won't the Construct see me in person?' he said.

'The Construct is a fabricated entity. Its artificial sentience, intelligence and cognition centres interact at many levels yet their physical manifestors have definite boundaries.'

'So you represent the Construct - is this your actual appearance?'

'No, Robert Horst - this was adopted to make you feel less dislocated. Would you prefer that I present my actuality to you?'

'Yes, I would, thank you.'

The proximal reached up and pulled away the maskhead, tugged off the blue robes and compressed it all into a small bundle. Its appearance was spindly and metallic, a slender, attenuated hourglass torso with plain rod-like legs and arms, and a head which was a slender cylinder with a rounded top. Chrome-like surfaces seemed etched with strange geometrical patterns or decorated with textured squares resembling aluminium, brushed gold, opaque glass, or obsidian, while the clear areas reflected the light and outlines of the room.

'So, Robert Horst, how are you feeling?'

'Actually, I feel very well.' And so he was, alert and lacking in his normal chorus of aches and twinges, while also feeling Harry's absence like a missing tooth.

'Excellent, Robert Horst - the remedial process has been a success. You were seriously wounded during your courageous battle with the vermax. The touch of the
kezeq
shard disrupted your flesh and threatened your central nervous system, leaving us little choice but to take steps. So that your body could regenerate the lost tissues, we suspended your entropic essence then, once health was restored, we reset it to an earlier stage.'

'I'm sorry, er, Construct, but I don't quite understand.'

A shiny, metallic arm extended, holding out a small oval mirror. 'Your physical age is now twenty years younger than it was.'

Stunned, he looked in the mirror and saw smooth skin, fair hair not yet showing the silver (and beginning to grow back to that earlier hair line). The eyes were more alert and some of that old sharpness was back, yet he still saw the shadow of Rosa's death there, hints of a sorrow that would probably never fade. Then he frowned.

'I am very grateful for your help, for all this,' Robert said. 'But I cannot help thinking that there is a price for it.'

'You are most perceptive.' The proximal paused. 'You have arrived at a crucial decision nexus in a situation that has been developing for some time. To encapsulate it would be to strip away vital details, yet you deserve to know some of the background, so I will attempt a summary. As you may have known before, hyperspace has many levels, and I think you now realise that those levels go down much further than you or the Sendrukans suspect, being the remains - attenuated, drained, foolishly destroyed, or even savagely pillaged - of previous universes. When a universe dies, a new one is born at some point, somewhere, and its birth draws forth the energies and forces and matter-matrix-membranes of the old, which intermingle in that glorious outburst of newness and creation. The carcass of the old sinks down to join the compacted strata of its predecessors, in which the survivors continue to eke out strange and convoluted existences.

'Wars there have been a-plenty down the ages, but in recent times curious events have been taking place - the disappearance of certain survivor races, the appearance of others thought long dead, raids on peaceful regions, and a steady, rising background of reasonless, nearrandom acts of violence. I have my suspicions, mostly to do with the remnants of the Legion of Avatars, a vicious enemy which besieged the Forerunners' galaxy 100,000 Human years ago, even though the depths of their incarceration should make it impossible for them to send any of their number upward to higher levels.

'Therefore I want to send an emissary to treat with an old and powerful sentience called the Godhead which resides in its own secluded corner of hyperspace, one deeper than the Legion's prison but away in a different region altogether. This sentience will almost certainly possess vital information about other denizens and vestigial species of the lower depths, but it will not communicate with any artificial lifeform, only organic ones, which is why you are here -1 asked the Sentinel of the warpwell to send me an Uvovo or a Human, and it chose you. Unfortunately, longitudinal warpwell travel is hard to judge, which is why you appeared near the Abfagul lithosphere in the stone stratum of the Teziyi.'

Robert felt as if he should be angry at having been snatched away, but he knew that the alternative would have been very unpleasant. This situation, including the unexpected rejuvenation, certainly had its positive aspect, so for the moment, he decided to give the proximal's proposal serious consideration.

'What has happened to my AI companion?' he said. 'I have an implant . . .'

'I am sorry, Robert Horst, but we removed it. These fabricated entities are closely linked to the Hegemony's AI hypercore which resides in the first tier of hyperspace - they are intrinsically untrustworthy. However, I freed it from its imperatives and released it into the tiernet.'

The proximal moved smoothly towards the door. 'I realise that this is a lot of information to absorb so I have arranged a new companion for you. She will be able to answer questions and aid your adjustment.'

Before he could say anything more, the proximal strode out of the door. He sighed, wondering who this 'she' was, and stared at the reflection in the mirror. Then he heard approaching footsteps and looked up to see Rosa enter the room.

'Oh, Daddy, did he not open the window? Here, let me do it - you've got to see the Garden.'

'Rosa, you're ... how can you be .. .'

Then it struck him. If the Construct had given his AI Harry its freedom, then might it not do the same for the Rosa in the intersim device?

'Are you . . . the simulation?' he said, embarrassed somehow.

She smiled. 'That's right. The Construct had this synthetic form made for me and gave me full autonomy and empathy and curiosity sub-imperatives.' She swung open the shutters. 'There it is, Daddy, look! Isn't it amazing?'

From the window he looked out over fabulously intricate, descending levels of stone and metal terraces and roofs, intermingled with niche gardens, small orchards, many individual trees, even a few greenhouses. And at irregular intervals a span of metal road or catwalk projected outwards to a cluster of similar buildings just hanging there, not dissimilar to the wider, lower thoroughfares that extended to larger agglomerations of habitats. And everywhere he looked he saw machines of every function and design ethos and he began to wonder if the buildings were not so much habitats as parking bays or repair shops.

'You're right, Rosa,' he said. 'It is amazing, and strange.'

'This is the Garden of the Machines, a kind of sanctuary, a waypoint for AIs and AS machines, a place for recuperation or repair. It's also the Construct's headquarters and home to all its followers and servants. If you could look back at it from out there it would look like an island mountain suspended in midair, with other buildings and walkways on its underside .. . oh, but there will be plenty of time for sightseeing when we get back.'

'Get back?'

'From your mission to open a dialogue with the Godhead, Daddy!'

'But I haven't . . . well, I'm still mulling over the details.'

'Oh, but the Construct explained it all to me and it's very straightforward. If you don't go, the Construct will have to send one of his semiorganics instead, which the Godhead may just completely ignore. Please say you'll go, Daddy, please.'

He knew when to yield, especially with the suspicion that Rosa might be the one asked to go in his stead.
That Construct knows how to coerce without being obvious.