By Pinlighter
The flat rocks curved down into mist behind him.
He gripped with
his fingers and skittered sideways. Held by friction alone,
he strained to reach the proper hold.
Dull light laid its patina over every thing. The
eternal sun
shone fair in his eyes whenever he raised his head, and a giant shadow
was cast ahead of him over the void. He could gesture and see a
figure leap across a plane of red mist a mile below him, as red as
fire: yet it was cold everywhere.
He shuffled backwards down the flat wedges of lichen
smeared
rock. From time to time panic took him and plastered him flat
against the convex surfaces, hugging and holding. The smell grew
worse the lower he climbed down, and it grew hotter. He was
surely lower than anyone else had ever climbed: he was entering the
upper stratum of the mists. It was hard to breath, now, and fat
pulsing animals like grey throats the width of a finger clustered in
the windscour hollows, sucking the air slowly, their jelly flesh thick
with bacteria. He kicked each foothold clear, revolted at
the touch.
The infrequent plateaus were almost empty of vegetation
at this level,
but each cave and cranny had its webbed opening, a silken tunnel, and
little movements came from within. He threw rocks into the
largest, rewarded by no noise.
After each plateau he had to nerve himself again to go
over the next
edge. It is always harder to descend than to rise.
Six thousand feet down, he saw the thing.
***********************************************
Above him, the city of the Road Makers clung to forty
miles along and
three miles down of ridge and scree, crumbling rock, acid lava flow and
fertile ash slopes. The new Houses were strong and well
made, cut out of lava blocks and obsidian, nestled within their green
gardens: the older ones, higher up and furthur back, had fallen into
ruin, scavenged for electronics, furniture, and tools. A
snail's trail of discarded habitats tailed slantwise aftward to the
highlands, webbed together with walkways and covered tubes. At
the highest levels they were reduced to a trace of metal and stone
scribbled over the vast shoulders of the mountains, almost invisible
against cone and ridge: it seemed incredible that that thread and that
tiny crumble of stone shells had once been the heart of humanity, the
vibrant City. On the farthest, highest, slopes,
blankets of dirty ice and fluffy CO2 rime descended, erasing the rubble
and the Road at a few paces every year, leaving only the black marker
pylons built every few miles. No top was
visible.
The still sun shone diagonally down on the Road and the
City as they
crept into the abyss. Here and there people had flung up
Heliomancer's wheels in worship and hope, but far more numerous
were the black squares of the solar panels, the turning mills of wind
farms, the flooded fields of rice and maize and sweet potato and the
quarries and pits that cut new terraces out of the mountain
side. An infinite sky of copper black arched above, and to
either side the mountains cut down into the sea of mist which stretched
eastward to the darkness, opposite the sun. The slopes the
City clung to were uneven, broken, ugly, and raw, yet the line of the
Road across them was cunning, graceful and direct, and to each side and far away around the curve of the great valley the
black slopes showed the growth of quick life, snatches and smears and great clumps of
green sandwiched between the falling cold above and the dwindling
poison below.
In the centre of the City were seventy nodes made of
something that was
not metal and not stone. Like the man-fashioned
stone houses that surrounded them, they were individually immobile,
their slow transition downward being a function of the successive
disappearance of the aftmost one and its regrowth in a new location;
but they showed in a hundred ways that they were not mere fabrications,
and that they had once been part of something united and were still of
one mind. Structural members crept out of their own accord to
join and brace them, tubes carrying thick matter pulsed slowly, and a
black web of wires connected them together, growing and flexing.
Round the tall towers that clustered together in the very middle a net
of fine lights and whispered signals flashed: men who walked through it
caught a little of that mechanical knowledge, leaking into their
heads. So the City built by mens' hands surrounded
and imitated the organic City of ages past, and men dwelt in both.
The Road crept ahead and sideways and down the great
slope.
It halted its proper course at a definite limit: the Last Pylon, a
black pier of rock reared on the slopes just before the City.
Below and beyond that marker it had branched into several tentative
threads. Tiny temporary habitats dotted these, each one sporting
a slightly different clan marking. Some of these
exploratory tracks plunged nearly straight down into the abyss, while
others slanted to a greater or lesser extent horizontally along the
gradient. An observer in the heavens, hovering a little
below the dead and frozen surface of the world and so just within the
safety of the great forked Valley that now split its crust, would have
seen other ancient branches leading off the Road far back in time, far
aftward up the mountains: and if they were very keen sighted they might
have noted that the badges of allegiance seen on the dead cabins on
these dead branches were never seen again on any other track; nor were
displayed anywhere in the City.
***********************************************
The thing was wedged between two dead lava
flows. It was bigger than it seemed at first,
and the flat arena before it was larger and more cluttered than he had
assumed, and unpleasantly inhabited. As he approached he
saw rapid sinuosities scurrying across and between rocks, flexing waves
of legs. He scowled and loosed his gun.
As he grew closer the object became stranger. It
was
half-embedded in the ground, and its smooth surface told of ancient
time: pitted, corroded, and buckled, its wounds were yet layered over a
discolouration and an aging that was alien to any planet. It
looked half alive but not in the static vegetable way of the central
home Towers. Rather, its shape held the logic and attentive grace
of a living thing, forced into metal. The lines and curves told a
story, but not the story of a striding man, nor a scurrying insect, nor
even of the soaring lammergeyers that sometimes preyed on lone
wanderers like him, as if its environment had been different from any
of these and it had been compelled to a different
beauty. Sometimes, he knew, in legend, things fell
from the sky.
He was intelligent and this perception absorbed
him. It was only
the click of rocks that alerted him and made him
turn. The semicircle of centipedes approaching him included
several individuals that were longer than he was tall. He killed
one with a single shot, and the others fled.
Several of the gaps under the strange object were large
enough to hide
more predators. He stepped up onto its smooth flank and
crabwalked to the top.
There was nothing there: no entry, no door, no controls,
only more
overlapping curves of metal, seamless and blank beneath the
multicolored iridescent stains and the tiny pits that seemed to have
been carved by explosions just below the surface, pits that somehow all
pointed in one direction. He followed the flow towards the
object's smooth trifid prow, seeing now more of the logic of its
structure but finding no entry, and then crawled back in the other
direction until the downcurving surfaces of metal arching over the
abyss became too exposed for safety. He had a rope
but there was no where on the object to hitch it. He
walked back to the side he had mounted from: a cluster of centipedes
were eating the dead one, their jaws working with a tiny
chtorr-chtorr-chtorr and their bodies radiating out from it like a
black flower. He jumped down, landing as hard as possible,
and they fled. There were two suitable boulders near and he
fastened a double loop round both, pulling hard to test it, stamping
and swearing loud to keep the beasts away. He hitched the slider on his
belt to the rope and scrabbled back up.
When he let himself down the far side again, rappelled
on spread legs,
he was just able to see what looked like an opening on the surface
below him, a fathom across, puckered like a closed eye. He
strained to see it better, manoeuvring sideways, and
overbalanced, bumping out of control against the metal; and as he
twisted to control his sideways slide towards the opening or eye his
hands skated over the strange unblemished surfaces at its
edge. The rope would not have broken under the weight of
twenty men, and his knot was secure, but no climbers' wisdom could have
anticipated that the strange object would tremble and shift, now,
not as if his trivial weight had overbalanced it but as if it was awake
and responding to some call, uprooting itself. He froze,
gripping the rope in frantic tetany, but the rope was suddenly loose as
the boulders pulled free in the shifting ground, and he fell; cried to
his gods; and was caught and held by something vast and sure.
***********************************************
Far aftwards, far up, back along the Road, there were
tiny unstirring
glints, round like eggs, hard, glassy. Of all the things in
the world of the Valley they alone held some kinship to the thing
fallen on the slope.
Now they shifted and flashed: but no man in the City
could have seen
them. They passed a knowledge to each other, reached
agreement, and settled down to wait again. And the things
that surrounded them ignored their movements and did not perceive the
data they exchanged. It was as if the dark curling webs and
smoky candles of night that danced and flittered across the plains of
frozen air, up there, belonged to a different universe.
***********************************************
He was crushed into
the
ground.
That, alone, he was sure
of. His senses were
confused. His memory was dim, holding little certain but a gap
between the cluttered past and the sudden present. He had .
. . . swallowed some thing, a glowing core of life and
consciousness that animated him and made him real.
Without it, he was a mere mechanism. With it, now, he
Was. But that was his function, he remembered as he came
fully alive: to surround such cores of being, guard and serve them, fly
and fight with them.
The new central part of him
was ignorant, but that was
acceptable under
the circumstances. Untutored or not, it would serve as the
necessary fulcrum. More serious than its unskill was the loss of
information and memory he had suffered. Awake or not, he
did not know his past and he did not understand his present. He
knew only that he should not be so low. Not so far down in
a gravity well, blinded and stifled by dense impure fluids, pressed
against rock, unable to manoever, unable to see.
He could try to rise.
He could wake, stir, shake
his limbs.
He moved and there was
pain. He moved again, and
the pain eased
and flared in the complex ways that signalled damage, but not the
maiming crippling damage that forbade action. He explored his body,
shifting and changing stress and orientation, but he could not yet move
freely.
Memory was returning, but he
could not bear to wait for
it. He
was trapped. He was too low, too crushed.
But the pain was
easing. Now he moved
more
freely. Soon, he would be able to rise.
***********************************************
A great noise washed over the City. It was not the
noise of a
volcanic eruption, nor a landslide, nor a thunderstorm, nor a great
wind: but it held some element of all those things. The
noise welled up from below, from the margin of the mist, where no man
could see its source.
They ran to stare; gripped weapons; and were stunned
when a line of
light was drawn through the sky, reaching up from the ground below,
clawing up toward the dead heavens.
***********************************************
The gas he was immersed in
was dense and served as
adequate reaction
mass. He pulled free of the surface and rose, sucking the
fluid in and expelling it at a fraction of a mile a second, slowly
increasing power. He lifted rapidly, vertically, straining
against the planet's strong gravity, and tried to extend the seeds of
Wings. Instantly he was bruised as their field lines warped to
nullity and the plasma cores dispersed. He was still below
the geonorm, it seemed, in some sort of crack or valley in the planet's
surface, and the subsurface magnetic currents apparently forbade
magnetohydrodynamic propulsion.
He strained upward by brute
force alone. As he
lifted out of the
valley the damping effect ceased. The planet surface showed
some activity, transmissions that might have been directed at him, but
in the fury of early flight he could not sense any thing clearly, nor
could he pause at this stage. He rose further, to the level
where he was able to extend fans of plasma and grip the planet's strong
magnetic field. Now inertia, geomagnetism, gravity and the
thinning gas offered him multiple contrasting holds to play against
each other and he flew more easily. The world rededed beneath
him. The tropopause fell behind him and his Wings spread into mile-long
fans as he completely abandoned reaction drive and soared effortlessly
and noiselessly upward, a tiny speck at the junction of two flowers of
light. The plasma web he rode expanded in exact proportion
as the atmosphere grew more rare. He flew higher and
higher, clawing towards vacuum, and his senses came alive. He
gathered photons and hearkened to the beat of radiation, he
entered fully into the realm of nothingness and his Eyes opened.
***********************************************
For the first few
seconds what he saw denied
analysis. The planet
had risen from had a dense atmosphere and the radiations of its sun
included a high-energy ionising component. This was normal
enough, and much of the activity he saw near him was
normal. The layers of the ionosphere around him showed the
typical array of self-organising systems trembling at the threshold of
animation, most of them as simple as vortices and whirlpools and waves,
but some spontaneously recomplicating and iterating and storing
information that keyed back in to their ability to survive and to grow
and to divide, and beginning to reach toward the ambiguous state called
Life. Sprites and red leaders rocketed up from the
stratosphere and back, and weak aurora flashed toward the poles, and
further out, as the thin gas faded to vacuum, larger and more enduring
entities rode the waves of the ionosphere and harvested the flow of
electron and proton radiation from the system's sun, migrating back and
forth round the poles.
Yet this was not
all. It was not the
harmless half-living
natural entities native to the plasmas near gravity wells
that predominated here. This world was infested by his
enemies.
All round the planet, just
outside the atmosphere,
threads and crystals
of darkness crept and darted. The metal core of the world
radiated a strong magnetic field which had trapped concentric belts of
radiation out to six planet radii, and in these belts the invaders
writhed like maggots. Higher, the geopause itself was
dotted with regularly spaced Nests, their aetheric flesh reaching
tendrils out into the solar realm and dipping into the quiet cool
plasma controlled by the planet, bleeding the enthalpy gradient to
structure and life. And as he tuned his Eyes to the
greatest resolution and looked into the realm ancient savants had
called the Outer Circle he saw that even the Sun of this system was too
cool to keep the pneumavores far away. The tides of plasma and
magnetic force they fed on still erupted from its surface, but
they swarmed close to it, tunneling through the interfaces of the
of tubes of radiation that filled space out to the heliopause,
feasting. Their substance was vastly attenuated in that
realm, but they moved correspondingly fast. If he rose that far
he would be Eaten instantly.
He stopped at the edge of
the atmosphere, hovering
on magnetic
blades that were now the size of continents, and directed his sensors
down onto the planet surface. Drifts of frozen gas covered
everything, with black mountains rearing above them, but here, too, the
Eaters paced and flitted, moving across the white plains like flames,
dancing in odd patterns, compressed to a size that apparently allowed
them to endure the cold still remnant atmosphere without
disruption. Ancient structures miles long, frozen and
still, fluttered with superfluid ghostly life as their memetic content
was mined. He would have focused on these structures to learn
more except that he was stunned to see pneumavores on the very surface
of a planet. It was unprecedented to see them even in
vacuum this close to an active sun: and though in theory they could
endure thin neutral gas no memory he could summon recorded their
presence on a planet surface. Yet they, who had been known only
in interstellar space, were here, infesting even the rocks of this
ruined system. He wondered if the Eaters had changed, had
evolved: and how long he had slept.
Only one thing broke the
wasteland - the great
Valley he had
risen from. Here heat and geomagnetism combined in a nexus
that made it impregnable to the Eaters, too hot and dense for their
whispy flesh to retain integrity. It would therefore be the
only spot in the entire system that could support biological life.
He looked up
again. Where was
he? What was this
system? Where were his comrades, and the great Ships of
command?
He started to take sitings
of the more distant stars,
but there seemed
to be few stars in the local region, all dull and red like the primary
of the planet and none immediately recognisable.
He looked beyond for
the brighter beacons, but they too
were
absent. The stars looked not merely dim, but wrong. Where
was the background radiation of the galaxy? Where was the
galactic core?
The system primary itself
was following no possible
rational stellar
evolution. It was a medium sized hydrogen burning star that
should have been evolving towards helium flash, yet the photosphere was
uneven, with vast speckles of light and dark marring it, spots
occupying up to a tenth of the visual disk, as if fusion in the core
had ceased and the normal convection in the upper layers had become
disordered. He tuned his sensors to their maximum and studied the
star core, stripping it down through successive shells of neutrino
emmission . . .
But he had been fatally
distracted. His instincts
flared alarm as
something darted down on him from the Night, stooping like a
hawk. He fell faster than it, leaving blinding light that
slew by energy alone, rendering the stingray thing into a sifting of
inert dust, but he knew the only thing that was saving him was the
inescapable drag on the pneumavores manoeuvring in even thin
gas. The Eaters had seen him, and come to hunt.
A thousand jets of night
lanced toward him from the high
sky. He fell swiftly, returning to Earth.
***********************************************
The lower atmosphere
stripped his Wings and he tumbled,
righting
himself by sheer power. Now sudden exhaustion clutched him.
He had gathered some energy from the sick sun, but his reserves were
depleted and he was desperate, and he was in terrible dread of the
pursuit. He fell as fast as he dared, trusting to the lower
air to cushion his fall when he reached it, the low calm airs which he
had once spurned, and the only thing that saved him from an out of
control crash was the fact that he had directed his retreat to
the Valley. He regained control within it a little below the
geonorm, scanning desperately for a landing spot but safe at last from
the threads of darkness that speared down behind him from the
heights. There was nowhere obviously flat or safe,
the Valley sides were steep, the tiny clutter of the City was too
delicate to go near, but there were signals, the same signals he had
ignored on his Promethean rise, and they gave him just a little
advice. There. There.
He was able to sense the
same tiny flat area he had risen from, and he had no time to look
further, no time, no strength, he was half blind, and in disastrous
haste he fell back not far from the barren clutter of rocks he had quit
not an hour before, crashing and splintering the ground, raising a
second thunder and a cloud of ruin and rock fragments.
Pain and darkness swept over
him: yet he still had time
for his last
duty; to disengage, release his rider back to the life he had plucked
it from. The pneumosomatic links split, and the core fields
protecting the delicate biological entity that had been the source of
his borrowed soul tuned down, gently depositing its flesh onto the soft
metal of his centre. Surrendering life to duty, he
died. Consciousness left him, but for a dim sylvae-thread of
daemon mentation. He remembered Being, he remembered Life,
but he had given the thing itself back to its owner.
***********************************************
Darkness, and the taste of blood.
He tried to rise. In an instant the
nightmare memory swept
over him, and in a crazy second he tried to repeat the actions of the
last hour by analogue, moving his legs as he had once shifted the
conductive veins of a metal flying body, gasping for air as he had once
pumped electricity through storage cells.
He could still see, somehow, though his eyes were
closed.
The rocks of the mountain side surrounded him in ghostly
images.
Pain dragged him back to his authentic
flesh. Weaker than
metal, he dared not move, but he could open his eyes. As he did,
that other vision faded and he saw where he really was. He was
inside a hollow duodecahedral sphere, and from eleven of the twelve
faces, what seemed a thousand thin whips twined and penetrated his
body, holding him in mid-air. They were a little like the
strange threads that linked the High Towers and like nothing else he
had ever known. They pierced his skin without blood or pain
and when he moved they slipped free without leaving marks; and when the
last left him, pulling from his temples as thin as a hair, so did the
last ghost of that other-vision of the landscape outside. Now
only his true fleshly eyes reported to him in the dim light that shone
in here. The twelfth side was open, and through it came the
only thing he could understand in this new environment - the scent and
world-noise of the lower slopes of the Valley.
He was naked, but as the threads slid back into
the walls his
gear and clothing appeared, crumpled but undamaged, as a seamless part
of one face everted.
He fell onto the bottom of the duodecahedron, rose,
staggered, fell
again. After a very long time he was able to dress, take
his gun, and crawl out of the short tunnel.
***********************************************
He climbed slowly, painfully, back toward the
City. Every so
often he stopped as exhaustion took him, and as he sat or lay panting
he remembered how in another life he had leapt up from these rocks like
an armoured god. But he did not look up, remembering what filled
the sky.
The beasts of the lower slopes, drawn by the flavour of
his sick and
stumbling footfalls, approached, and when he killed them more
came. There was no end to them. When he shouted
and stamped they fled, but then they crept back behind him, flowing
over the curved rocks towards him with hundred-clawed
surety. It became a race between the exhaustion of his
ammunition and his physical endurance. He climbed as fast as he
could, killing only the closest.
At last he approached the lowest Houses. Here he
saw what he had
seen an hundred times before: the scattered huts of the very poor,
piles of filth, hollow-cheeked children running, and the eyes of the
Low City, ever ready to find some prey. He was safe enough
here with his gun, for none of these were permitted to bear arms or
could legally speak to him without first being addressed by him.
He walked forward, climbing toward the low poor dwellings, and found a
road that would lead him towards his home, avoiding the places where
the shacks clustered.
The people came out to stare and some started toward
him, posturing
through the familiar ritual of supplication. He had despised scum
like this, and thought of them as less than nothing, yet when he faced
the first vagabond beggar it was as if his new vision returned and he
flew again far above the Earth, looking at one of the dark things that
twisted in the sky. An entity confronted him.
It was a moving thinking thing. The spirit that dwelt in it was
human, but seeing it unblinded by ordinary senses he felt the same
ruthless mechanical horror, the same vastness, the same ancient
practiced cunning, that he had seen with borrowed eyes in the vacuum
above. He faced the survivor of countless trials and failures,
and the descendant of a million generations of such survivors,
endlessly refined, packed full with the instructions of war and death
behind a smooth mask. It would kill and consume him on every
level of being if it could, and the fact that he was just such a
beast himself and kin to it meant nothing.
The beggar whined and came forward with its hand
extended. He was
unable to prevent himself cringing back in fear, and his sight edged in
black as the new vision intensified. He tried to govern
himself, but the thing facing him learned, varied its strategy, and
crept closer to him, exuding some sort of vibration. He
grabbed for his weapon and poised it, and the thing halted, silent,
then signalled to others like itself.
He tried to regain his normal blindness. It was a
beggar, just a
poor filthy beggar.
But he could see all of it, every thing inside it, and
in truth, it was
terrible.
His hands trembled, holding the gun. He
forced himself to
walk forward, silent, ignoring the thing. Beyind it were
others, and yet others. He was scarcely able to force himself
through the City to his home, and his terrified demeanour eventually
drew whole packs of human predators after him, laughing at his threats
to shoot, patently stalking him, blind and armoured and self
assured. He saw them clearly now: therefore they also saw him
clearly. It took him half a day to creep to his house, hiding and
stumbling away from the gangs.
He hammered on the panels of the door. It opened
and he fell
inside. Sharp noises assaulted his ears, and something grapped
him and pressed itself against his face.
to Part 2 . .
© pinlighter
9 Jan
2005
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