Authors: Gregory Benford
As Killeen left the tent he caught the sidelong glances of others and understood what a close call he had survived. His Supremacy
brooked no competition.
He had felt the urge to tell them of the odd perceptions that shot through him incessantly now. It was like being swallowed
whole, gripped in a moist mucous cloud. In lacy filaments he saw shifting dun-colored terrain. Huge Cybers ran quickly through
it, their shiny skins sprouting projections. Snatches of percussive talk came in a hollow, staccato language.
Killeen knew the valley they would try to cross, knew it in a deep, skin-tingling sense. He could close his eyes even now
and feel the taste of Cybers moving through it. But how?
He thought he knew. What the answer implied, though, he could not guess.
No doubt if he had spoken of this in the tent the proper interpretation would have been quite clear to His Supremacy. Divine
revelation, yes. And by now Killeen would have been groaning out his last on a stake atop this barren mountain.
Quath knew she should remain fixed in the present, moored in the reality of craggy reaches and massive buttresses. She had
to keep watch on the podia Beq’qdahl led in the plains below. They kept slipping nearer. Only Quath’s ranging shots kept them
at bay.
But the tangled world within beckoned….
She had found the one Nought, she was sure of that now. Edging closer, lightly touching the tiny pale spheres of their separate
selfhoods, Quath had finally pressed against one who had the tang and bite she recognized. The earlier Nought that she had
invaded, yes, she saw the resemblance—but not the same. This property in itself was intriguing, but she had no time to inspect
the myriad rivulets of meaning in these sublattices.
Quath now saw that with each close encounter she was learning a different pathway into Noughts. Each entrance brought fresh
perspectives. And pitfalls. The portals of her own Nought had ushered Quath into a miasma.
At first it had been like dusky radiance descending through murky memories, creaky with age. Yellowed filigrees rotted and
fell away, lace parted, cobwebs lifted from glinting, brass-hard facts… which themselves dissolved like singing dust beneath
the rub of remorseless time.
Inside the Nought, yes… But where?
Quath had felt herself walking through a broad courtyard like that which gave onto the Hive’s great hall of worship. The walls
cast an embroidery of shadow on stones—only the floor was not rock at all, but bones, white skulls, worn red carapaces, skeletal
cages of ribs and abdomens. They snapped as she clumped over them, making her way back
into a wide, gloomy past. Empty eyesockets seemed to follow her wobbly progress. Whispers and words bubbled from the street
of bones. Some were sharp and bitter, ripped from throats which still longed and yearned. She could not understand these twisted,
clangorous sounds. Abruptly she saw that they came from the podia past, stitching blood and marrow and desire and history
into a tight sound-knot.
Her solid footing grew flesh-soft. Quath plunged forward helplessly, each frightened step taking her up to the knee in the
cloying, mossy past. Suddenly she was falling, falling—and petrifying fear shot through her like red pain.
No!
her subminds cried. She landed in soft feathers.
Here beneath the street of the dead lay a labyrinth of sultry darks. Its angled corridors fanned like fingers into webbed
designs. Quath tried to follow. She was running hard now.
Though she knew that in some sense she was merely immersed in the falsity of another’s electro-aura, she could not extricate
herself. It was like the time before, with the Nought who had held her, but far worse. She was not pinned to the sliding experiences
of one Nought now, but caught in some swamp of deep desire, some collective mystery.
The shambling things came to her, finally. She had heard their feet slapping on the worn, ebony floors, not pursuing but still
coming. They loomed up in the dank darkness that seemed to come streaming out of the walls. Pervading and consuming shadows,
exhaled by far antiquity.
Quath lurched away from them. Whacked hard against a brittle corner. Stumbled on.
Though they had only two legs these Noughts were quicker than she expected. They drew closer in the alloyed silence and then
she saw their faces and knew it all.
The talus slope she slid down sent boulders crashing before
her, like heralds announcing the coming of a queen.
Her experience had jarred her deeply, but now the world was not muddled as it had been before. A hard-edged clarity pressed
toward her out of the congealing, sharp air.
*I feel you weakly.*
*I tried to send reinforcements but they were blocked and ambushed. Beq’qdahl and others have isolated your area. They serve
an unwise faction of the Illuminates. They seek—*
*Do not dismiss their threat—*
*What? How could—*
*Impossible. Little Noughts could not have—*
*You delved into them?*
*I… I see. This is even stranger than I had imagined.*
*From the beginning I sensed complex elements beneath the surface chatter of their minds. I was curious. That fact, and the
arrival of more Noughts in a ship—it all aroused my slumbering suspicions.*
Quath had thought that there could be no more surprises in this day, but a lancing thought came to her.
*Yes. If there were any uncovered aspects of these supposed Noughts, I knew you were the best of the podia to seek it out.*
*No. Your ability lies in the formulating of questions—and those cannot be assigned.*
*Anxiety is your lot.*
<
That
is what it means to be a Philosoph?>
*This
you
must discover. The genes express themselves in many ways.*
Quath felt empty, adrift.
*Quath, I master great weighty arrays of information, and have a bounty of technical skills far transcending yours—but I do
not and cannot have the queer talent you manifest.*
, to be related to these mites?>
*I can venture no answer.*
*You.*
It was at this moment, Killeen thought, when he could see the fight but was not yet in the middle of it, that fear rushed
up into his throat and clamped it shut.
No matter that he had flung himself into a hundred conflicts before—all the old sensations returned. Fear of injury. Of death.
Here, to be hurt badly was the same as dying, but slower—carried in the baggage train, suffering lurches and slow bleeds.
More acutely, Killeen felt the piercing fear of failure. To falter now would render pointless everything they had attempted.
If they lost, their long pursuit of a shelter for humanity,
any
shelter, was vanquished and would never return.
He knew how to loosen the tight grip that choked his breathing. Once engaged, training and instinct would take over. But as
his eyes searched the dry broken plain, flickering through the spectrum, there was still some trifling chance to back out.
The rational side of him pleaded for a reason, any reason, to halt, to reconsider. After all, he had been left here by Cap’n
Jocelyn, in charge of the reserves. Yesterday she had rightly claimed the overlay chips which gave a Cap’n a complete view
of all Family movements.
And a few moments before she had taken the reserves under her own direct command. Cermo’s advance was stalled below. Jocelyn
evidently wanted to break the impasse by quickly throwing more into the head of the attack. She had led them off to the right,
down a narrow ravine which afforded good cover from the prickly, long-range shots of the Cybers.
She had pointedly left Killeen nothing to do. Very well. He could join in the attack as the Family plunged down the long slopes
of the mountain, into the confusing welter of foothills.
Or he could simply stay here. So said the thin, hoarse cry of judgment. If he fell back he could provide cover for the Bishops
in the Tribal baggage train. That, too, was a vital role….
He had not felt this way in years. It was momentarily,
darkly delicious to skirt responsibility, take the easy way. Safer, too.
He sighed. He was a different man now. Not wiser, maybe, but aware of how he would feel if he carried out such a fantasy.
Wistfully he aimed downslope. He could never hang back while those he loved fought.
He found a fleeting Cyber target and fired. No sign of a hit, but that did not matter. His training carried him forward, running
and dodging now, and he let it.
Family Bishop was spread over the entire belly of the mountain. They moved down through the forests of spindly trees that
thronged the slopes. Slanted afternoon sunlight cast confusing shadows. His Supremacy had insisted on launching the action
even though not many daylight hours remained; his Divine judgment had, of course, prevailed over his officers’ advice.
Killeen had watched the valley beyond from a group of fat boulders above the tree line. As he entered the woods he glanced
up through the curious umbrellalike arches of the trees and searched the sky. No sign of any craft. That was a relief. Cybers
seemed never to copy the mech advantage in the air.
“Cermo! Bear left. You can bring enfilading fire down through that notch in the hill.”
—Yeasay,—Cermo answered on comm.—Taking some IR bursts here. Nobody hurt.—
“No point getting blinded. Damp down.”
—Already have,—Cermo replied primly.
Killeen reminded himself to let the officers have free rein. Jocelyn was Cap’n, even though Cermo and Shibo gave her only
grudging acceptance. In the heat of the fight, the officers would probably still react to his suggestions as though they were
commands.
He ran through the thick forest with a long, loping stride. Rich loam absorbed his footfalls. The dense woods seemed to listen
for the battle with a hushed expectancy. Fresh power reserves for his leggings gave him a buoyancy that carried him downslope
quickly, not even bothering to seek cover. The only useful information they had learned from the previous, disastrous battle
was that Cybers still devoted a lot of their energies to microwave pulses. Mechs saw the world principally in the microwave
and perhaps the Cybers thought humans did, too. Or else, he reminded himself, they thought so little of their human opponents
that they did not bother to refit their weaponry.
He broke from cover above the foothills as hoarse calls resounded through the comm. Jocelyn cried,—Form the star!—to the main
body. He saw her moving quickly across a barren scarp. The reserves were mere scampering dots at this range.
Turning to his left, he watched Cermo’s party firing steadily through the notch in a steep hillside. Landslides had opened
jagged opportunities in this terrain and Cermo was skilled at making use of them.
But Cybers could do the same, he noted, as a distant figure crumpled. Killeen blinked three times and into his left eye jumped
an electromag amplification. A crackling blue swarm was fading around the fallen Family member, signature of a microwave halo
strike.
—Dad!—
The shrill quality in Toby’s voice forked sudden fear into Killeen. Could the fallen figure be—but no, Toby’s signifier flickered
in an arroyo farther east. “Yeasay,” Killeen answered.
—Shibo’s cut off downslope.—
“Where?”
—Can’t tell. Cybers’ve thrown up some static screen.—
Killeen scanned for Shibo and found no answering color-coded trace. The center of his expanded sensorium was a gray sheet.
“Hold still.”
He set off at full tilt, damping his sensorium to the absolute minimum as he plunged downslope. Amid the brush and stubby
trees insects sang merrily, oblivious to the stinging death that arced through the air.
Toby was crouched at the rim of a narrow gully. As Killeen landed on loose gravel, a microwave burst reached down toward them,
then dissipated into a hiss.
“Down there.” Toby pointed. “See? Heat waves.”
But the rippling images on the next hillside had a fuzzy quality unlike the effect of refracting air. “False image,” Killeen
said.
“Hard tellin’ where the Cyber is.”
“Wish we knew more ’bout their tricks.” Killeen looked at Toby’s bandaged hand. Jocelyn had decided the boy could stay back
from the skirmish line, carrying reserve ammunition in his pack. “How’s it feel?”
“Not bad. Glad it wasn’t my right hand. Couldn’t shoot then.”
“Keep back, you won’t need shoot today.”
Toby bit his lip soberly. “You think so?”
On Snowglade Killeen would have given his son an optimistic, offhand remark. Here… “We’re point party for the whole Tribe
on this one. Be hard to pull back, once the Cybers are on us.”
“I figured the same.”
“One good thing ’bout not bein’ Cap’n, I can move around less.”
Toby grinned. “Almost as good as a burn hand.”
“Bum Cap’n, yeasay.” Killeen put his hand on Toby’s shoulder. “Look, stick close. We’ll cover for each other.”
Toby nodded silently, his eyes always following the
scanplane of his own sensorium. “Wish I knew where that Cyber is.”