The Galactic Center Companion, page 8
“The place is dead.” Black Sam slowly reeled in coiling tolo-twine, his arms heavy with fatigue.
“You’ve checked?”
“Yeafold, the whole tower.”
“Those charges...”
“Shagfoot knew where to plant them, how to set. He remembered. From the old times.”
“The Dadspeak knows so much—”
“No Dadspeak!” Black Sam glowered, a slow anger building within his seeping weariness. “Not them! He did it.”
“Well, I know, but—”
“Nosay, you nosay! Shagfoot walked a thousand dusty man-cities, a thousand more of the mech warrens. He learned the old mech ways and knew their softnesses. He.”
“We honor him, like all Familyfolk. For now we must seize this place, direct it to Berg.”
“For what?”
“Open eyes! This station was built by alien minds, ones we nosee on Berg. The mechs only service it.”
“I know.”
“These giant spokes that jut so”—she gestured at the spikes that bristled from the tower—“they send radiations—I nosee what kind—to other mech-worlds.”
“So?”
“We can harvest them for Family! Use against Lancers, Divers—”
“None brings water.”
Hard Ella said angrily, “The dadspeak says this is first step!”
“Dadspeak dead.”
The words fell between them with the weight of ages.
Hard Ella gaped. Her eyes coulded with her inner voices, ancient whispers. “What...?”
#
Berg rose brown and rutted above the fruitful, wave-washed plain.
Black Sam stood upon a huge bulwark of speckled, time-worn polycarbon. It was bigger than the two crude human-made ships that dangled from it on shiny tethers, yet it was itself a mere small dab on the tower.
Black Sam had about half the Family at his back. The mechs he had commandeered hovered nearby, their weapons ready.
Hard Ella shook her head. “I still cannot believe.”
“We give you what we can.” Black Sam said it without anger, for he was sad but resolute.
“But you give us only these ships.”
“And the supplies you can carry.”
“We could have Berg! Our motherworld. See—”
Hard Ella swept her hands at the globe of Berg that brimmed beyond the plain. The Family had never seen their world save in the Dadspeak. But there, in locked memory, Berg had been green, lush, with great lakes shimmering blue.
“Yeasay, see,” Black Sam spat out bitterly. “A dried husk of a world. Not the fruit the Dadspeak said, but the pit of that fruit, now eaten. The Mandikini has baked it brown.”
Hard Ella began grandly: “With energies such as this—”
“We could do battle with the Lancers, yeasay. Win Berg? I think you might. This vessel is big, powerful. But you will find no water in it. No water anywhere near the core of the galaxy, now that the Eater gnaws the sky. The Mandikini is the only river that flows in our time.”
Hard Ella stood ramrod straight. She had lost the war of talk, the debate that in the last two days had presuaded the fraction of the Family behind Black Sam to remain with him. “You betray us,” she said simply.
“You can always stay,” Black Sam said mildly.
But he knew she had to return to Berg. The Dads spoke to her, through her. Their undying love for a lost Berg would resound forever through the Family. An old allegiance, musty and gray, to lands and times forgot.
“I...I must return.”
“And we must sail.”
“For what?” She was all bitterness now.
“For what you seek. A planet rich and moist.”
“We could have it in Berg!”
“The Eater will consume Berg in time. It will chew more stars, like the one it gobbles now. It will drive a steady storm of the biting, piercing radiations. In such a hail we cannot live.”
“Surely—”
“No organic beings can. Berg will be left to the silicon-jacketed crawlers, the Crafters, the things of metal. Beings without remorse for the old wet time.”
She blinked and her mouth sagged. “There must be a way....”
Black Sam put his hand on her shoulder and turned her gently to look at the brown disk rising. It cast a baleful light upon the iridescent wash that a billion panels made, a flood of unnamed energy. “We can use that to voyage. Direct the energies, ride the Mandikini flux outward. That is what the beings who built this intended, I am sure of it. This is a starship, not a mere drone energy collector. If we can master it--”
He did not say the rest. Already he had learned to hold his visions to himself, to let them out in bits and pieces, lest he alarm his fraction of the Family, who now looked to him.
It must be possible for humans to escape the inferno of the galactic center. Legend held that humanity had not been born here. Old tales, far back in the withered recesses of the Dadspeak, told of silvery ships that came in, riding splintered light. From where, even the Dadspeak had nosay. Somewhere moist and green.
Humanity could escape the Eater, must escape. That he knew.
As Berg’s rutted face hung near, Hard Ella and her share of the Family began to enter the human ships. Hard Ella looked back once, sadly. Black Sam knew her Dadspeak was already fretting over how to use the resources they took, how to fashion such spirits for the transformation of Berg.
That was her destiny. But not his.
Black Sam looked upward. The Mandikini twisted and streamed beyond, heading outward. It was like a vast gauzy tapestry flown by the Eater, a flag, and if humanity was to endure in a galaxy given to vicious energies and implacable machines, he knew it must be their banner too.
At The Double Solstice
(First appeared in Terry’s Universe, edited by Beth Meacham, Tor, June 1988)
Shadows stretched long and threatening, pointing away from the hoteye of the Old Sun. Its harsh solstice radiance cast fingers across the stream-cut plain, fingers reaching toward an onstruggling tide.
Each windgouged rock, though itself dull and worn, cast a lively colored shadow. The Old Sun’s outer ring was smoldering red, while the inner bull’s-eye glared a hard blue. The ring was a work of ages past, unfathomable now, made for some strange task.
Legend held that the Old Sun had once shone alone. None could remember that time. Near the red ring burned what the humans called the Fresh Sun. Its hard knot of blue white fire threw longer shadows aslant the human line of march.
They took little notice. The Fresh Sun was some unimaginable construction, younger still than the ring. Long ago the wandering families had included it in their solstice ceremonies.
The ceremonies would have to be held quite soon now; the two suns dipped low. Solstice rites would call upon the help of Vishnu. The god might even manifest himself to them. Perhaps one of their party would have a vision of Vishnu lying on a bed formed of the coils of his personal serpent. He of the four hands would bring them success in their endless foraging.
But they would not neglect the Fresh Sun. That would be dangerous. Its bluewhite glare was harsh and harmful to the human eye. Forgotten in the ceremony, it could flare forth in its rage as Kali, the scourge god. Fires would rake the land.
Disksetting came. They marched on, watching with worried eyes. The Old Sun’s thumbwide glare sank to the horizon, drawing from the least rocky upjut a tail of chromatic ribbons. Shifting shadows warped the land, stretching perspectives. The seeing was hard.
So it was a while before Agaden was sure. He blinked his eyes, jumping his vision through the spectrum, and barely picked up the wavering fevered pip.
There—a band of humans.
And better yet, they had chanced upon a powered-down or damaged Crafter. He did not even surmise that perhaps they had hunted it, downed the machine by themselves, for that had never happened in his lifetime.
Agaden gave cry. His small Family howled with glee.
Boots drumming on worn rock, they too descended on the machine. The other humans greeted them with exclamations of kinship, of brotherhood, and together they fell to it.
In vengeance Agaden launched himself upon the Crafter. He kicked in plates, ripped away whipwire antennae in pureblind rage. The Families yanked free parts and servos, booty used to maintain their own suits. Over the finely machined carcass they crawled, pillaging the finest workmechship of factories men had never seen and never would, the ceaseless detailed labor of countless Crafters themselves who had built upon their own kind. Among mechs, they were the patient pinnacle of ability.
Rage roiled. Through this they mourned men and women lost to the incessant competition with machines. Women savaged delicate finetuned components, slashed through orchestrated constellations in copper and silicon and carbon fiber, and tossed aside what they neither recognized nor could use. This was almost all of the Crafter, for none in the Family knew how such things worked.
Even the most able of them could only connect a modular part, trusting her eye to find the right element. Of theory they had little, of understanding even less. Long eras of hardship and flight had hammered their once-rich heritage of knowledge into flat, rigid rules of thumb.
In place of science they had simple pictures, rules for using the color-coded wires which carried unknown entities: Volts, Amps, Ohms. Powers invisible.
These were the names of spirits who lived somehow in the mechs and could be broken to the will of humanity. Currents, they knew, flowed like water and did silent work. Clearly—yet inexplicably—the shiny wreaths of golden wire and perfectly machined onyx squares somehow bossed the currents. Electrons were tiny beasts who drove the motions of larger beasts; such was obvious yet inscrutable.
They could afford to know no more, for learning took time and they had been on the run for longer than any now living could clearly remember. Humanity had returned to its origins. Surrounded by machine societies of vast and abiding intelligence, mankind had gone back to the joys of nomadic voyaging.
One such pleasure was scavenging with a vengeance, tearing the Crafter apart brutally. Cylinders bled oil. Optical threads snarled up and tripped the plunderers, only to be stamped flat and kicked away.
Beneath their rending lay retribution for past defeats inflicted by the soil-eating mechs. So went as much of history as Agaden had ever heard, though in truth he cared little for it. History was tales and tales were a kind of lie, or else not much different from them; he knew that much. Which was enough. A practical man had to seize the moment before him, not meander through dusty tales.
For Agaden, all times before were now compressed into one daybright wondrous instant, filled with people and events which no longer had any substantial truth, had been swept away as if they had never been. For ages his starved and ragged remnant had fought and run and retreated from the mechs. They had burned and blown away and pulverized Marauder mechs and yet there had been more and then more still.
It was as though the machines had finally taken notice of the buzzing gnat that had been nipping minute drops of lifeblood from the body of the mech civilization. In one irritated instant the Marauders slapped distractedly, flattening the bug against a massive hand.
So the Family had no choice but to scatter before the Marauder wind. They were swept forward not so much by a victorious horde behind, but rather by the mounting tide of the names of battles lost, bushwhacks walked into, traps sprung. Family members were wounded or surekilled and sometimes even left behind in a disheartening white-eyed dishonorable scramble to escape, to save the remnant core of the Family, to keep some slender thread of heritage alive.
The names were places on a map—Sawridge, Corinth, Stone Mountain, Riverrun, Big Alice Springs, Pitwallow—and maps were not paper now but encoded in the individual’s chip-memory, lodged in the nape of each neck, the last human libraries on Earth. So, through the age of pursuit, as members of the Families fell and their memories were swallowed up by the mechmind, they lost even the maps to understand where their forebears had stood and fought and been vanquished. Now the names were only names, without substance or fixity in the living soul.
Agaden had long ago learned to listen when something nagged at him. The Crafter was demolished now, entrails stomped. He stood still for a long moment.
His instincts told him something was awry.
Where? Behind them? Mechs liked to attack from the rear. Humans were woefully two-sided; mechs watched to all points of the compass.
He turned and saw only the distant hazy ranks of whitecapped mountains. That range bounded his Family’s movements to the north. A wandering truthsayer had once told Agaden that the world’s highest peak lay in those vastnesses, but no one in the Family had ever tried to scale them. It was said that mechs had. But then, such things were always said.
He scowled, fretting at a faint bothersome note. Then he gave the signal and started at a quick pace down the valley. Something ahead...?
He let his augmented senses sweep out, covering the slowmotion flow of the Family. They were already dismembering a small navvy-mech which had accompanied the Crafter and had not the sense to run. Voices slurred and nipped, the steady background roundtalk by which humanity sewed up the frame of their experience, smoothed the rub of their world.
Everything seemed ordinary. The valley, tufted with bushes, lay quiet. Rock-nobbed hills rose, dotted with mechtrash. These random clumps of old parts were spread across the face of the Earth, so common that Agaden barely noticed them.
In outlands such as this, scavenger mechs did not bother to pick up rusted cowlings or heavy broken axles for the long transport to smelters and factories. Over centuries the mess had gathered. These jumbles blighted the land now, rust-red spots freckling the soil.
Among this waste plants struggled, a welcome sign. For hours now they had all been pleased by the signs of ripening, of spreading grass, of tawny growth.
The Fresh Sun’s hotpoint glare had set now. Smoldering in the sky, the Old Sun’s disk was half-gnawed by the ragged hills. A double solstice. The shifting colors confused Agaden, making the least crag and gully brim with ripe illusion.
Ahead was something strange. Agaden frowned. He no longer marveled at what could come from the incessant engine of mechcraft. Such bounteous wealth spewing forth now seemed to him as inevitable as the rich, organic world had appeared to his ancient ancestors. It was simply an enduring facet of the way things were, fully natural.
His world was divided simply. He lived—as well as he could—among carbon-based processes, which had limited use and from which humanity had once sprung. Things green and soft and pliant. Things that he could eat. Remnants of the once-rich ecosphere bloomed in spots. This realm grew wild only in the outlands, beyond the cities and pathways of the mechs.
On the other side of a stark division lay most of his planet. Against man’s shrinking green oases the mechs pressed, building their ceramo-sculpted warrens. Agaden had glimpsed a mechplex once, when the Family blundered over a mountain range and paid the price of six lost members. The glassy, steepled thing had crackled with electromagnetic crosstalk. Its deep, upwelling voice had rung through Agaden’s sensorium, immensely threatening in its uncaring.
Agaden accepted as simple fact that those distant and feared cities were an entirely natural way for intelligence to go forward. Abhorrent as a spider is, but still natural.
Mechs built, that was inevitable. They sought to make of the world a place of straight lines and sharp edges, geometry made real. Eternal, rigid certainties.
Men were of a different order. They sought the curved, the flexible, the live and unenduring. They lived and died. Mechs—unless they fell to the eager hand of humankind—persisted, and dwelled inside their hard edifices.
He frowned again. They avoided mech places, and this odd thing ahead...
He saw abruptly that it was not one mechwork, but two.
One moved. A Rattler.
It came at them from right flank. The Crafter’s dying bleat must have summoned it from the distant hills. The Rattler seethed with a coiling and recoiling motion, treads grinding beneath. Agaden could hear its gray ceramo-ribs pop with exertion.
The Family was already running even as the Rattler’s angle of attack fully registered. They could not make the canyon mouth beyond. There was precious little shelter in the dry streambeds nearby.
“Make right!” Agaden called. The Family vectored immediately, seeing his intention.
They had only moments. Three women used all their boot power to accelerate ahead, then turned to lay down retarding fire.
Agaden added to it without slowing, firing on an awkward tilt. No point in being accurate; their shots pocked and ricocheted but did not slow the smug-ugly and inexorable Rattler.
They would not all make it. Agaden saw that when they were a bare klick short of the odd mech building they approached.
“Faster!” he called, knowing it was useless and yet wanting to give vent to his knotting apprehension.
A figure ran slow though no less frantically than the others: Old Majy. She had not been feeling well these last few days. Already she had dropped behind. Agaden tuned to her and heard her labored panting turn to gasps.
He turned back. She came struggling up an incline and Agaden fired over her, directly into the bluehot mouth of the Rattler. The thing barely acknowledged the antennae blown off, the gouges in its obdurate face.
It caught Old Majy. Arms and quick-opening slant-mouths ingested her almost casually. It never slowed its oncoming momentum.
“Majy!” Agaden cried in rage and frustration. He knew the Rattler would only later discover she was not metal throughout, like a mechthing. But by the time it tasted her and found her indigestible, it was too late.
Agaden had no time for remorse. He whirled and fled himself, realizing that he was now the most exposed. The Rattler undoubtedly saw them all as a covey of defenseless metal-sheathed beings and mistook them for free sources of cheap ore. Since they did not carry the eat-me-not codes of this Rattler’s city, they were fair game.
Agaden gave himself over to the running. The Rattler came flexing and oozing over a stony streambed.
