Spear of Light (10 page)

Nothing had come out the way she'd expected.

Or hoped.

As she looked up, the Wall loomed above her, so tall she had to crane her neck to see the top of it. To her left, a river of lights showed the thread of material pouring off of the spaceport as the Next transmuted matter. Nanotechnology, surely. But a far more facile use of programmable matter than Nona had seen anywhere else, even in the richest and most elite enclaves of the Diamond Deep.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

YI

Even with Jason carrying the injured gleaner, the group moved far more slowly than Yi liked. It took almost half an hour for him to lead them to the bagor tree he had left the skimmer underneath. The spreading leaves and darkening sky made the vehicle hard to pick out at all, even once they were close. The Next vehicle had slimmer and squatter lines than anything the rangers used, looking like a leaf itself, except for the bubble sticking out of it for the passengers.

It was also one seat short.

Yi glanced at Jason. “You could run alongside the riverbank under us. It might be a good way to find out if anyone else is around, anyway.”

“I might draw attention.”

From satellites. “I suppose. I won't leave you here.”

“I'll fit in the storage trunk.”

“I brought our repairbot.”

“Oh.”

Losianna mumbled. “I can sit on his lap.”

That solved a problem and relieved a worry. He'd been certain the gleaner girl must be frightened of them. She'd been very silent. Perhaps it was curiosity rather than fear? Not that it mattered. “Suit yourselves. But
get in
.”

Their immediate enemies had apparently left or were occupied with whatever was going on in Manna Springs, but Yi still felt exposed. Even though the evidence was gone, the destroyed robots had surely left a record of their last known location.

It took five long minutes to get Charlie, Cricket, Jason, and Losianna neatly into the back so the tongat wasn't lifting a lip and Charlie and Losianna could both breathe. Yi helped Amfi climb into the front seat and made sure her hurt ankle was comfortable. “Where to?” he asked her.

“Remember the cave where we did the negotiation?”

He did; behind them and not too far. He turned the skimmer and took them near the edge of the cliffs. He flew directly over Davis's body. “Do you want to bury him?”

Amfi blinked back a tear. “Later. I want to get behind doors now.”

“Okay.” He didn't see a good place to park the skimmer, so he left it under trees again, although nothing here gave it as much cover. It would be easy enough to spot when morning came. Maybe he could move it before then. As he helped Amfi out, he asked, “Can I carry you?”

She hesitated for a long moment, but then she looked at the ground and mumbled, “Yes.”

He turned his back to her. “Put your arms around my neck.”

They marched down the path and passed behind the waterfall and entered the cave compound that way, with Amfi clutching his shoulders, Losianna, Jason, and the repairbot behind them, and Charlie and Cricket bringing up the rear.

Even though someone handed her up a light, it took Amfi two tries to manage the right sequence of codes and keys to open the door into the ancient cave complex. He recognized the room, with its straight-cut rock walls full of glittering veins of minerals, and its natural, rough ceiling.

The table was twice as big as they needed. He could replay the negotiations that had happened here. He had been a silent witness only, wanting the Next to get whatever they needed or wanted without bloodshed and for Charlie to be able to protect Lym. But even more than wanting both sides to win, he had wanted to understand the stakes. To this day, he didn't really know why the Next were here at all.

As soon as they were settled around what had been the negotiations table, Losianna went off to get food for the three humans.

Charlie asked, “Is there a back exit?”

“I don't know,” Amfi said. “We've explored a long way, but we've never found the end of the cave. There's always another door.”

“Maybe Jason and I should go looking,” Yi suggested.

Charlie raised an eyebrow. “Now?”

“We don't sleep or eat,” he reminded Charlie. “You need to do both, and we
all
might need another way out of here.”

He could see Charlie thinking about it. It was hard to wait when he knew what Charlie would say, but he knew better than to force decisions on humans. He spoke silently to Jason.
Can you find some lights? Maybe some way to mark where we've been in case they need to follow us?

Of course.

Charlie looked unhappy with his choice, but he used almost the exact words Yi expected. “You're right. Be careful. Can you be back in four hours?”

“Give us eight. You need to eat, tend to Amfi, sleep, and eat again.”

“Six.”

Are you ready?

Almost.

We have to leave the repairbot.

I know.

Losianna came back in with a tray of filled water glasses and some dried fruit. “I've got soup warming, but this will start us out. Charlie, can you get the medical kit?”

Yi interrupted gently, despite his growing sense of urgency. “We'll leave now. Amfi? Is there anything we should know?”

Amfi looked up at him. Her wrinkled face was folded tight with more pain than she'd shown on the road or in the skimmer, as if she could finally relax into her own needs now that she was safe behind locked doors. “I only went in a few times, and not as far as Davis. There are doors we were never able to open. I think there's a paper map you can look at in the office just outside of this room.”

“Thank you. Which way to the paper map?”

She pointed.

Ready.

“Be careful,” Charlie admonished.

“You'll probably be in more danger than we will.”

The ranger frowned as he took a glass of water from the pale girl's tray. “Let's hope we're all safe.”

Yi found the office easily enough. Gleaners were perfectly capable of using the net. The paper map must be an attempt to keep information secret. It had been pinned to the wall, with a light positioned to illuminate it nicely.

The map illustrated the opening to the cave, the kitchens, a few storage areas, and some living quarters. He found the small office they stood in. The same sort of rooms went out about five layers deep, implying there might have been a pretty good-sized population living here once. Maybe more than a thousand people. The edges were covered in rougher notes in a spidery handwriting.

Long corridors out behind here. Industrial? Some doors we can't open. Some empty. Some machines to learn about.

On another part of the map, a note:
Some of this is natural cave. I heard water.
Behind the note, someone had drawn a thick line.

In a third direction:
This is older than the front, and smoother.

He paid careful attention to the map, looking at each part of it in detail, like taking pictures with his mind that he could hold exactly until he discarded the data. Memory shots.
What do you think?
he asked Jason.

I want to see the industrial part. But there might be a natural way out through the middle path.

I wonder if the lines indicate blockages?

They might.

Jason had always been the physical explorer in the family. Yi waited for him to choose.

Let's do the industrial corridors.

Okay.

They started off, jogging slowly and easily through the well-mapped parts. Jason spoke out loud, “What do we know about these caves again?”

Yi answered out loud as well, the sound of voices welcome in the silent corridors. “Not much. The gleaners found them, and they've dated them somehow, back to before of the age of explosive creation. In the times when the last wars happened here on Lym. They said it might be a weapons depot or some other type of storage.”

The corridors were at best dimly lit, although faint lines of light ran about waist high and again at the crack between floor and wall on each side, so it looked like they were jogging through a box. Humans might have trouble seeing anything but the lights.

Jason remained quiet, which didn't surprise Yi in the least. Neither Jason had taken well to being turned into something inhuman, but this Jason, Jason One, hadn't even really achieved acceptance yet. Probably because they had lost their Katherine so early, and then their Chrystal. A double-blow of loss that would never have happened if the Next hadn't interfered in their lives. Jason had not given up his resentment. Yet.

As smoothly as they moved, they sounded loud in the otherwise nearly complete silence. The floors were even and almost slippery. Here in the dark of a cave in the far reaches of re-wilded Lym, he didn't have access to any more data than he carried with him. Still, that was more than he'd yet been able to explore. Before they left to come here, the Jhailing who had trained them had sent them libraries of data. Yi combed through the historical databases.

Nothing.

He started in on his memories. After all, everyone had to take history classes when they were young. The memories his human self had forgotten still existed inside of him now, and could be traced far more completely than when he breathed. It did take some backtracking. He pulled up a classroom setting he'd been in once on the
High Sweet Home,
where he'd been born. He'd liked the professor, a tall man with a fake eye. He had loved history so much he came alive when he taught, though at any other time he seemed bland and uninteresting.

Yi spoke the lesson out loud to Jason as he remembered it, even using his old professor's nuanced voice. “As I told you yesterday, the age of explosive creation ended in fear. There were more than two sides, but if you had to place people above and below an axis, that axis would be about humanity. Above the line was all that was acceptable to the eventual winners of the wars at the end of that age. They had ingenuity and grand design and long life. They had changed their bodies to make them longer and more colorful, lighter or stronger; whatever they wanted that could be sculpted in flesh and blood. They traveled between stations and planets, trading goods and art and ideas. They glowed with health. They created flexible materials, but not thinking materials, which were left below the line of acceptance, which then became the Ring of Distance.

“They shoved many rights below the line. The right to become a machine, and the right to allow anyone else to become a machine. Those who wanted to think with anything more than a naturally augmented human brain were shoved below the line, as were all forms of immortality.

“Fighting occurred, but of course wars in space are short and final, or all about running and being caught or not being caught. Neither side had invested in enough warships for any great space battles to take place, although there are some of note that we will cover tomorrow.”

Yi realized he must sound a little ridiculous, but the memories flowed best when he took them just as they had happened, practically living them again.

They ran past the light into darkness. He adjusted his vision as finely as possible, and the edges of the corridor appeared very faintly as darker spots. “Be careful,” he told Jason.

“I'm okay. Keep going.”

Seeing the lecture replayed with all that he knew now illuminated nuances he hadn't caught as a young man. Inside his head, he saw the professor rise and pace in front of the class, heard his voice speeding up. Yi continued to use the professor's diction, exactly as he had heard it, fascinated that he had the facility to do so. “The greatest battles happened on the planets Lym and Mammot. There were great industries on both places. Mammot had already become what it is today, a place where everything is managed by man, and man is the only wild thing left. Lym was both more and less damaged. It has vaster continents and more wild places, and some of these were already being protected. But the atmosphere was turning to poison, and there were manufacturers of what would eventually become the Next there. These fought for the right to keep living on the planet.

“Before the end of the war, the machines had destroyed most of the beautiful cities on the planet. They broke the seaport Neville and let the ocean in through its great gates. They leveled the mountaintop city of Haraii and drowned the seaports around Gyr Island.”

Yi's voice echoed, unnaturally loud in the confines of the cave.

“The humans—who were losing at that moment—went underground and hid from the machines in caves. All of the other humans fled into orbit, and the fighting intensified until a great battle in the skies gave the humans victory.

“This is why Lym is a symbol today, a place where the people on the planet work to make it as far from machine as possible, as wild as possible, as untouched as possible. This is where the great defining battle of the ages took place.”

“No wonder I like it here,” Jason said.

The narrow and dark corridors stopped abruptly at a great door.

CHAPTER TWELVE

NONA

Nona approached the Wall, holding up a hand to touch its surface. Smooth, smoother even than glass, and ever so faintly slippery. Some ambient light in the material dimmed around her fingers. The dark outline remained for just a moment after she withdrew her hand. She searched for a door or for some way to communicate.

The Wall seemed as impenetrable as ice. She looked to her right; nothing. Just the Wall and the ground it rested on, a path in front of the Wall, and darkness beyond the part of the Wall that lit up.

Surreal.

On the shuttle down, a seat mate had told her about a colony that camped outside the walls, a place full of aspiring Next and humans who had come to serve the Next in a variety of ways, of journalists, and even of refugees from Manna Springs. If it existed, it wasn't here.