Authors: Gregory Benford
*You have something we must possess.*
*Your Nought.*
*I sensed your small passenger while you were still in the Hive.*
*Know that I fathom your crosscurrents and dark broodings, Quath. We have not had a Philosoph in the Hive for a great while.
I decided to let you follow your inner compass.*
*Perhaps you kept it as a pet; podia have done such before. It is no crime. Indeed, your secret keeping of this mite is ample
evidence of the mysterious wisdom that comes, often unbidden, to a Philosoph. Care for your pet well.*
*Yes?*
*What?*
Alarm shot through the Tukar’ramin’s projected aura. *The Illuminates themselves now need it! It was a principal
on the ship that brought them here—a vessel we must have.*
*Find it!*
With that command the Tukar’ramin’s aura blew away as though a breeze had taken it. Quath had the sense of the Tukar’ramin’s
hurrying to convey this information to some distant place.
She should have felt some elation at this sudden turn. The slabs she and Beq’qdahl had found now proved more important than
any fabulous dream. Her Nought was somehow a key because of its ship. Quath’s transgression—hiding the Nought and lying by
omission to the Tukar’ramin—had been lightly passed over.
Yet she felt somber and vexed as she quick-stepped toward the forest ahead. If the Illuminates did not know how to answer
Quath’s questions, what authority in all the podia could? Was it possible that the terrible vision of an utterly empty and
meaningless universe was unquestioned, even at the highest levels?
Restless, Quath cast forward with her aura, hoping to pick up some pinprick taste of her Nought. Finding it would not be easy
if she relied on the few quick flashes its telltale emitted in a day. She had slipped it into the crude equipment it wore,
elemental augmentations like a crude parody of the podia’s sleek lags.
She had never thought that she would need to find that particular Nought again, only the pack it joined. What an irritant!
She caught an electro-savor of Noughts spread through the dense, leafy mass ahead. Here in the open it was difficult to taste
whether one of them was hers. She amped the signals—and gasped.
Ugly horizontals and verticals everywhere. Unchanging,
muted light. And mixed in with these blunt perceptions came a torrent of strong surges.
Silent colorations of fatigue and pain. Bitter red smells of fear. Yellows of shame.
Rasping pride. Banging, loud confusion. Acrid envy, livid malice, and incomprehensible muddy longings.
All seething, unknown, under an oily smear of senses. It was difficult to believe that these Noughts were so unconscious!
Cryptic semisentience floated through these minds. They suffered continually from forking senses. Their entire thought-train
was constantly interrupted for messages detailing their surroundings, their hungers, their incessant sexual signaling (even
when exhausted!)—their tumbled, vivid, small worlds.
Quath gingerly focused her aura down to a needlepoint and thrust it toward one particular Nought who lay several hills ahead.
Was this hers?
She could not tell, awash in the scattershot jostling of quick, coarse perceptions. In this sticky swamp she could not even
separate its subminds. Carefully she held its muscles rigid, made it stand up from where it crouched. Did this feel familiar?
One of its upper limbs was pressing a soft thing against its face. No, into the face. An awful salty burst told her that this
was a mouth, perhaps its principal one. Certainly it enjoyed an enormously augmented tasting system, for the food cast piercing
rivulets of lava-hot bile all over the interior of the mouth-pouch.
Its fellows were staring at the Nought. She perceived that they would find alarming the act of spitting the food out onto
the ground, where it could perhaps burn the foliage. These Noughts were gaunt; wasting of food would arouse suspicion. She
must not frighten them before she found her
own Nought, or they might all flee in a panic. Quath forced the thing to swallow the stuff, just to get the taste away.
What could this primitive form do? She had not entered her own Nought in this way; she was getting better at it. Curiosity
egged her on.
She made it stand on one foot, then another. The sensation of bipedal instability was strangely exhilarating. She made a pod
take a step, caught the body as it began to fall, and then brought the other leg up to join the first. This sensation of courting
disaster, falling and catching oneself, carried a delicious excitement.
She stepped again, and again. The legs carried the impacts of walking upward and she quickly learned to absorb these with
the cumbersome knees. A single knobby columnar spine as though it rode on a cushioned pediment of hips and buttocks.
Worse, it ached at the lower back. The muscles there were firmly knotted, as though this was a constant condition. What poor
design! And they were so unimaginative that they simply tolerated such irksome pains!
She rotated the head and saw a surprising proportion of what she knew had to lie outside the Nought—but missing the fine-grained
texture Quath knew, and overlaid with freightings of emotion.
This Nought could scarcely see anything without immediately reacting to it. Passing a low bush with tiny red berries brought
gushing forth a hard hunger. The shaded sky above demanded to be searched for threats. A moist breeze crept into its primary
nostrils and visions of rain sounded warnings. A nearby face excited memories of happier times, laughter, a warm fire—
But Quath saw that this approaching face emitted sounds which disturbed this host-Nought. The face gave quick signals of alarm.
A wrinkling just below the top hairline. Its
single mouth parted and lips slightly reddened, bringing teeth further into view. A narrowing of the space between the hair-hedges
above the eyes.
Apparently Quath was not managing this Nought well, despite her exciting discovery of two-podded walking. She thought she
had done that quite expertly. How well could such a rudimentary construction perambulate, after all?
This nearing Nought said something incomprehensible. Its primary message lay in the timbre of the speech, rising higher as
the crude acoustic stutterings came faster. Quath did not want to frighten away this pack before she had a chance to explore
it. And there was some deeper element about them that she could not fathom. Even clotted sub-minds should have appeared by
now. They must be oddly integrated.
She put aside the matter and decided to leave the Nought. No need to alarm its fellows, after all. She disconnected smoothly.
In an instant she was back inside her own electroaura.
Now rain came sweeping toward her, warming and oddly pleasurable. It reminded her of the tantalizing food-streams of the Hive.
She basked in the soft caress of wind and air. Then she wearily crept forward. This business of finding her particular Nought
might prove difficult. She regretted not giving it a steady, bright telltale. She had feared that even a dull-witted being
would eventually notice. Very well; she crept on through the splashing torrent.
It was sunset again before they scaled the last foothills and straggled across the breast of the mountain.
Killeen watched a ruddy sun sink beyond the next peak in the chain that marched up from the south. He had been slow to adjust
his senses to this planet and to realize that it had milder seasons than Snowglade. Its lesser gravity and shorter days threw
off his rhythms. The effect told on them all, he thought, as he watched the Bishop rear guard struggle up the slope of dark
granite. A chilly wind had come up after the rainstorm of the night before, making marching harder. Once water got into their
leggings, nothing worked quite right until they had a chance to stop and work on metal-shaping. But there had been no time
for that. Killeen had cajoled and ordered and joshed, keeping the Bishops moving across silted mud and wrecked forests.
He looked back now, searching for Cyber pursuit. His feet yearned to be set free of his boots, and he compromised by sitting
on a boulder and releasing the pressure-catches of his shocks. The relief would have made him sigh, but Cermo was passing
nearby and Killeen’s sense of discipline kept his lips closed.
The land had been ribbed and ridged anew by the quakes. A river below was busily digging a fresh channel, having been tossed
from its old one. Geology seemed to have hastened its pace, as if in fear of more disasters. The rain had clogged innumerable
new streams with mud, and they spread like hands with snaky fingers across the plains, feeding brown lakes. Drowned stands
of spindly trees poked from the waters, the slanted sun catching their doomed topknots.
We are near the equator, so at least we have not suffered the cooling effects occasioned by the cosmic string. It seems to
have stripped away some of the atmosphere, so there is less insulation against the cold of space.
“Thought the land fallin’ would heat things up,” he answered his Arthur Aspect.
The loss of air has a larger immediate effect. Deep heat must diffuse out from the interior. However, we can soon expect another
excavation from the core. Note how the string pulses with more energy.
Killeen peered up into the darkening sky and saw the razor-sharp curve against the mottled colors of the interstellar clouds.
It had not moved in the sky all day, which meant that the Cybers were rotating it with the planet. If it began to spin they
would have to prepare for quakes or worse.
Only for dwellers in cities or Citadels are quakes a threat. In the open your greatest risk would be landslides, and I expect
most loose soil has already been shaken free.
“Maybe, ’less this whole mountain decides it’s better off in the valley.”
He heard gravel scattering down the slope nearby, as if in forewarning, and turned to find Shibo coming from the advance party.
“Tribe pickets up ahead,” she reported. They had been keeping comm silence since emerging onto the mountain face, because
line-of-sight receivers could pick them up at a great distance. It meant greatly slower information flow, but
Killeen felt too conspicuous here already. Every pebble could be a Cyber telltale, waiting for a foot to step on it or merely
set down nearby.
“Police up the column,” he ordered. “Let ’em see us march in all formed up, gear in place.”
He was proud of the Bishops as they passed through the Tribal lines, headed for the crown of the mountain. The Families were
spread out on the jutting slabs of silver-flecked granite below the summit, but Killeen did not stop to pitch camp. He marched
the Bishops straight into the center, where the large tent was already erected and billowing in the cold winds. Killeen gestured
to his lieutenants to flank him and did not slow their step until they reached the broad clearing at the very peak of the
mountain, where the tent flapped loudly.
His Supremacy emerged to meet them. Standing beside his officers, he gazed stony-faced with empty, expressionless eyes as
Killeen gave him the traditional salute.
“You withdrew without my order,” the man said abruptly, without returning the salute.
“I felt my Family would be overrun,” Killeen said formally.
“Who could outrun those who turn tail so quickly?”
“We took large losses. Eight—”
“
All
Families sustained such casualties,” His Supremacy said. Then he repeated it loudly, tolling out each word. People heard
and came running.
Killeen watched as the Bishops were engulfed by the Tribe’s greater numbers. There was going to be a show.
“
That
is the way… we
must
follow…
if
we are to
defeat
these monsters.” His Supremacy boomed out the long sentence with relish, a clarion call. An exalted expression transfixed
his face with passion as he turned to Killeen.
“Other Families have not bellyached about their dead. They simply bury their heroes and carry on, obeying.”
“We buried no one,” Killeen said cautiously. “They were left on the field.”
“Ha! The Niners brought out over a dozen dead.”
“How many’d they lose doing it?”
A rustle from the gathering crowd. His Supremacy scowled.
“We do not count those losses as different. All fell in the noble cause.”
“I’d rather get hit on the attack, not haulin’ bodies around.”
“So I’m sure you would, Cap’n. I have noticed that you have little respect for our time-honored methods. Nor do you have any
sense of your transgressions.”
Killeen started to reply and held back. This was to be a public humiliation. Or worse. He tried to see a way to mollify the
short man whose face had a transfixed, glassy quality.
“Further, I have noticed that you have verged on disrespect toward My Holiness. I have until this moment been kind enough
to ascribe this lapse to your origins around a foreign star.”
Killeen could not resist agreeing. “Yeasay, that might be it.”
His Supremacy’s eyes lost their odd blankness. A dark look narrowed them to menacing slits. “Perhaps you think that God’s
rules do not apply to foreign Families?”
Killeen’s effort to catch his tart reply made his jaw go tense. Then he said slowly, “Of course not. Your tongue is different
from ours. I have trouble speaking in it, maybe my meaning gets garbled. We humans been separated a long time, ’member. How…”
He clenched his jaw again, then went on. “How could anybody possibly imagine that I lack
respect for His Supremacy? For the greatest mind in the history of our race?”
The short, swarthy man nodded as though this last lavish compliment were simple fact. Killeen was relieved to see that flatout
flattery did not bring forth the slightest suspicion. Such talk was probably a steady daily diet for this man who thought
he was God Himself.