The Galactic Center Companion, page 7
“We must revive Berg,” he said solemnly.
“Berg is vast. Know you that it was once covered in ice?”
Black Sam frowned, scoffed. “Nonsense!”
“I saw a frame of it—ancient, venerable time.” Shagfoot traced figures in the air with his gloved hands, eyes rapt. “Sheets of ice wrapped all, but for a tawny belt at our world’s belly girth.”
“No ice now,” Black Sam said doubtfully.
Suddenly sad, Shagfoot murmured, “Yea, the Eater waxes. Our star swoops near its hungry maw. When I was a thin-legged boy, the sky blazed with myriad star-points, jewels scattered in oil. Now the Eater flares. It blares across the night sky with its forked jets. The stars are dim beside it. Our ice is spoiled vapor, longgone. Berg will be a baked stone, ere I die.”
This was the longest speech Black Sam had ever heard the tough old man give. Some wellspring had spouted free after decades of running slow and silent beneath hard, wrinkled skin.
“If we tap the Mandikini—”
“We shall not eat hard Ella’s dreams.”
“Once we’re up there—”
“Mere gestures, we make.” Shagfoot’s voice was suddenly bitter, dry. He turned away to reprogram a small labor-robot, his face once more a weathered almond mask. The wellspring was capped.
#
They lifted just in time.
The Family vectored aloft in two separate launcher pods, orange flames pressing them skyward.
As they roared free, three blunt cylinders glided after them: Lancers. Swift death.
Only when Shagfoot ran their burn at the danger level did they leap ahead of the pursuers, gain the momentum to outrun the yellow nuclear fireballs that burst and licked aft of them.
The Family seared and blackened their ships’ acceleration chambers. They rose from Berg and thrust toward the shimmering veil of the Mandikini.
Then came the sunflower blossoming. Their stolen labor-robots had dutifully arrayed tall stacks of the sunflowers, all hinged and stored with that endless pinpoint care that marked the machines’ handiwork. Humans had long abandoned hope of matching the mechs’ craft and energy, their bountiful, forgetful wealth. All they could do was snatch fragments of it.
At Hard Ella’s order, the sunflowers unfolded. Great fans of them sprung from the Family’s ships, yellow motes blossoming in the blackness.
The Family waited. Hard Ella spoke little, though her teeth ground behind a working, muscled jaw.
At first the winds of Mandikini blew softly, a mere brush in vacuum.
In a day more, they strummed through the Family’s ships.
Inside, the air thickened with oil and sweat.
Food ran out.
The Mandikini’s voice rose. Deep bass notes ran the length of the ships, like the callings of great gray beasts.
Plates and bulkheads groaned. The gauzy wires that laced the sunflowers ran bright with surges of energy. Red lightning danced among them.
Hard Ella saw the truth first.
“The sunflowers—they harness the electrical currents of the River.” She laughed. “Of course! The Eater! The thickening dust-disk that orbits it—that stream forms a turning dynamo.”
“And calls up currents?” Shagfoot disbelieved, eyes crinkling.
“The Eater loosens electrons into its Mandikini. The outward flowing child-stream steals volts and amps and all the zoo of things electrical.” Hard Ella spoke rhythmically, almost like a chant.
She invoked the names of quantities the Family knew as entities, not measures. Long centuries of hardship and defeat had hammered their once-bounteous heritage of knowledge into flat, firm rules of thumb.
The Families of Berg had long since reduced the knowledge of science to a sea of animated guides, pictures, projections of the human need to animate the world with understandable cause. The mechs were driven by sciences the Family now saw as spirits, unfathomable. Their understanding of the world was precise and detailed, yet did not use the impersonal landscape of the ancient quantitative lore. Electrons were tiny beasts who willed the motions of larger beasts; such was obvious.
Black Sam frowned. “So the sunflowers tap...”
“And would return their bounty to Berg,” she said jubilantly, vindicated.
“Lucky we, who have made a craft of stealing,” Shagfoot said with his worn smile.
“This is yesway, I say,” Hard Ella boasted.
“We can tap this fountain from the Eater?” Black Sam asked wonderingly.
“Can! Must!” Hard Ella’s eyes narrowed with stern authority.
But Shagfoot only snorted. “Berg needs ticklings of water, not the dance of electron-beasts.”
Hard Ella bristled. “We take first riches first.”
“May be last,” Shagfoot said mildly.
“You challenge my rule?” she demanded.
“Naysay, victor.” Shagfoot pointed a stubby finger at the screens, where the shadows of worlds and ships glided, their own centermost. “But glance you.”
Hard Ella gasped. Black Sam nodded grimly, his suspicions confirmed.
Black blobs swelled ahead.
“The swimmers of this river draw us near,” Black Sam said. “We are small enough to swallow.”
And something in him relished the coming of these huge beings, these mountain-minds in the sky he had heard of from the old, weathered Dadspeaks. Something in him wanted to see such massed purpose, no matter what the cost.
#
The thing that swallowed them was a luminous, perfectly circular disk, cut through at the center by a spiky, bristling tower.
Its axis harvested glimmering, racing yellow arcs which shot across the plain in phosphorescent waves. Webs of green spiraled inward to the tower, carrying something unknown. This was some alien product, made for a machine civilization that was as incomprehensible to the Family as was a whirling helicopter to a cringing field rat.
The light-encrusted central tower of the disk jutted hundreds of kilometers above them. Huge web antennas poked at distant star-targets. And in the distance glowed the forking Mandikini flux, silent and ivory and somehow spongy, soft.
Their tiny elliptical ships seemed sucked across the plain by luminous traceries. Their walls crackled; the battered deck groaned and heaved like something roused from sleep.
“The Dadspeak sotold once,” Black Sam whispered.
They had gathered before the swell-screen, the Family mute and staring.
“I heard no hotspeak of such craft,” Hard Ella said, her voice bone-bare and trembling.
Shagfoot laughed dryly. “Described it was. But only by Dads about to go down its gullet.”
“We must escape,” Hard Ella said.
Black Sam studied her for a moment, for once could see behind the hard carapace of her training. She had always held herself apart. He had thought she was following the primacy of command, an aloof exactness. But now he sensed the real cause.
The Dads drove her, through their ancient encrypted voices. And as well, they whispered wise urgings through the Aspects they could cast upon her, through the tap-in drodes in her helmet.
The Family took the presence of the Dads as a welcome legacy, a vital link to stored knowledge. But Black Sam suddenly saw that the Dads jerked strings in Hard Ella, made her dance to their musty programs. Knowledge was imperative. Her face was rigid, a wall behind which old furies raged. She held vast energies in check. With them she guided the Family, even now in its ever-dwindling numbers.
Once there had been more than two hundred in the Family. But time had whittled them down. They numbered a mere seventy-three now.
Deaths had come from a thousand sources:
Mechs who hunted organic forms.
Accidents among the tattered, gilded cities left by unknown machine societies.
Simple mind-blow, from jacking into cyberspaces which no stunted human brain could navigate.
And machine-made diseases, in water or food among the old ruins, like poison left for vagrant animals—which, to the mechs, humans were.
The Family had suffered, was now a mere echo of its old self. Their sure slide had begun when they left their comfortable haunts, driven by encroaching mechs and by the whisperings of the Dadspeak.
Black Sam paced with undirected anger, jamming his fists into his jacket pockets, face raw from the cold of the cabin.
All the pain, all the loss...he felt it flood through him.
All to restore Berg to watery life, to bring again the moist glory of the Dadtime.
Hard Ella was talking, describing ways to slip free of the flickering forces that clasped their ships.
“These beings, they’ll expect that,” Black Sam said suddenly.
“So? We vex and fight them,” Hard Ella barked. “Say I!”
“Would not better to zag against their zig?” Black Sam said calmly.
“Black Sam fears these river-drinkers?” Hard Ella taunted.
“Naysay,” Black Sam said, gesturing at Shagfoot for confirmation. “But why struggle now? Wait until they draw us in, think us dead craft.”
“I...” Hard Ella frowned, confused as if by inner crosstalk.
“Lie doggo,” Shagfoot murmured. A nod. “Many times, I have.”
Hard Ella confronted the Family. But heads turned away, pretending to study the shifting lux-screens. Black Sam saw that they were awed by the vast sparkling landscapes surrounding their puny ship, and felt in their bones the brooding strangeness outside. Hard Ella began to speak to them of their warrior legacy, of battles fought against Lancers and Divers, of great dead deeds.
But Black Sam glimpsed in the Family their true nature, after generations of being hammered down by relentless mechs an the raw wind of the splintered sky. They were things that scurried now, not zestful hunters.
They could regain the legacy—Black Sam was sure of that. Not by listening to the hard sure voice of Hard Ella, but by experience alone. The time for talk was past.
“I yeasay we doggo,” he broke into Hard Ella’s orders. “What says the Family?”
They hesitated, glanced guiltily at one another, faces gathering shreds of courage. In each face lurked the wan, scurrying bravery of the sought, the hunted.
Their halting chorus held a tinge of hope.
“Yea.”
“Must.”
“The Dads would nod, I knowso.”
“Yea, yea, yea.”
#
Their ships’ hulls worked with fine-spun traceries of violet as the tower drew them into itself.
Low bass notes sounded.
Something felt for clicking purchase on the outer skin.
Across the glittering alien plain, Black Sam saw the crescent of Berg rise. He was shocked at this first full sight of his home world. This was not the Berg he held in his mind’s eye, not the rich verdant land. It was a disk of browns, grays, blasted blacks.
Hard Ella rasped impatiently: “Let’s go out the aft lock.”
Shagfoot shook his head, took a belaying torch from a young man. “They’ll have wrapped them in that green soft ply. Remember how Obie died?”
Hard Ella pressed her mouth into a firm white line. “That was on Berg. Here—”
“They’re smarter. Quicker. The Dads knew that.” Shagfoot took the torch and began shearing through ribbed support girders.
“You’ll carve up our ship?” Hard Ella demanded.
Shagfoot murmured simply, “Must.”
Hard Ella opened her mouth, then closed it slowly, reluctantly. Respect for Shagfoot flickered in her face. She stood aside.
Shagfoot began. But before the white-hot glare cut full through the metal, he turned to Black Sam. “There were things that carved the air of Berg once,” he said in a voice of gravel. “Like us. Organics. They waved themselves in air and flew.”
“Yeasay? No! Impossible!”
“Was so. No mech could do that.” Shagfoot frowned, remembering. “The Dads called it bird. So it may be with this place. It is like a bird too.”
Black Sam shook his head, seeing nothing in the words. Shagfoot shrugged and turned to make the cut.
“Once I’m outside, I’ll go up,” Black Sam whispered on comm. “Send five Family down, then cut around toward that V-hatch, the one we saw coming in.”
The ship’s hull separated raggedly, servo-bolts popping under the wrenching forces.
Time to go. Black Sam slipped out and veered wildly. Something shot at him and missed, wreathing the whole hull with golden fire.
He sped around a huge cylinder. It was lined with parabolic bowls, and in the distance tiny robots labored.
Airless, silent, the metallic landscape rose against the distant hard black. Black Sam wheezed, tasting the tired suit air. He allowed himself a high-oxygen gasp, then got himself under control.
The tower was even larger than they had estimated. He could see it curve away, and under max mag of his opticals could make out indent-pouches on the more distant robots. The tower was at least ten kilometers around, probably more. Twelve antennas ringed the tower, each far larger than the makeshift human ships.
He flew over a team of mechs, who launched themselves at him. He threw tolo-twine and caught them mid-waist. The program tripped in upon contact, boring into them with jammer signals, burning away their surface command structures.
In an instant the mechs forgot entirely the signals they were receiving from some command nexus. They struggled, and as Black Sam flew on, they followed the embedded command the twine sent and carefully untangled themselves from it.
As he touched down beside a lock with worn gasket seals, the twine retracted, sending him a confirming yelp of victory. It sounded like a dog, a creature Black Sam had never seen but once knew accompanied the Dads and fought with them. A dog had told the story of the Farnfax War in an old Aspect history, its voice a low growl in Black Sam’s mind. Black Sam had wondered if the ancient dog-form truly had walked on four legs, like a mech.
He flew swift and sure, leading the Family in.
Shagfoot met him, coming in hard and landing against a conveyor complex.
“Lost two women at the ship,” Shagfoot said.
“How? We—”
But Shagfoot had already swept ahead. Black Sam tumbled into the lock after Shagfoot. As it sealed he saw Family spilling from their makeshift small-ships.
The two men dodged through C-shafts. Killer bursts of microwave spat at them from intersecting corridors, but they had shut down their inboard receivers. A mech always thought it could kill you with mech weapons, never believing that organic forms could shut out the electromagnetic spectrum and still function.
Shagfoot set a fast pace, two centuries of experience behind each move. Hard ceramic yellow greeted them as they entered a vast bowl. Black Sam had seen a design like this, in an ancient city made by spindly walker-type mechs. He stayed away from the center, where he knew fusion pellets sometimes blossomed into momentary suns, for some unknown purpose. Mechs swarmed at the far side of the bowl but they did not recognize the men immediately. By the time they did, Shagfoot had guided them through to another tunnel. Acceleration slammed Black Sam forward.
Ahead were convoluted conduits, wiring, huge slabs of machine rep units...and something Black Sam recognized.
“Is that...?”
“Yea. The mainmind.”
It took only moments to attach the charges he carried, find the right cables, and check it over carefully. Shagfoot called quick timing signals while he worked the hard part—the override inputs that would deflect incoming help. Even so, bolts snarled around them from different mechs. Overloads arced along the cylinders and shafts, voltages seeking vulnerable human forms.
“Yeasay?” Black Sam called.
“Cut free!”
Black Sam ram-accelerated for the outer skin.
Behind him came a high whine—
—a crump he felt through his suit—
—and then a sudden silence. He realized he had been in a bath of suppressor electronics signals for the entire time inside the tower, and now they had ceased.
“Shagfoot!”
“Behind you.”
“There’s something following.”
“Yeasay.”
“It’s fast!”
“I think I can—”
“This way.”
“Wait, I—”
Black Sam came clear of the tower as blue flames licked from the tunnel behind him. He knew nothing could oxidize in this vacuum, but the escaping gases yielded up their stored energy with a dancing, fitful radiance. They forked out behind him, ghostly arms reaching for something to scorch.
And drifting from the tunnel mouth, tumbling, came something the blue things had found.
Shagfoot had died without a parting sound. He spun in stately revolution, like a planet in a dying gyre. Black Sam approached. He saw within the carbon black that mercifully blanked the swollen, distended helmet, concealing the head that had exploded inside.
#
The giant gray clamper-arms that embraced the human ships grew still, their jaws crimping the burnished steel.
The tech team tapped into the racing communications of this vast plain and discovered that the mainmind was hurt, not killed. It was confused for a while. Yet the vast circle-world still roiled with collecting energies.
Black Sam landed on a scraped hull and watched waves gathering inward. Enormous surges rushed in at the base of the vast tower.
He had fought now for hours. Had seen Family members blown to frags by pulses of energy he did not comprehend. Had dodged searing deaths. It seemed this vast artifact was alive with sleeping resources, huge reservoirs of unfathomable wealth, amid terror.
The man he had been was no more. He shook his head, still swamped with the strange things he had seen.
But he knew what it meant. Shagfoot had felt it too. Now Black Sam sensed something he could not easily put into words. Yet he knew what to do.
Hard Ella met him. Her boots clasped the hull with a ringing clank. “We singsay our ceremony for Shagfoot when there is time. First we must consolidate, take—”
