Silver - Inverted Frontier, Book 2, page 19
Even as he looked with his eyes he still felt linked to the flow of silver—aware of it as if it was part of him, as if he was within it, or it was within him. More than an ocean of information, it was a reservoir of potential action, awaiting a motivating force, the application of a sense of direction.
He yearned to immerse himself in it. What could be learned? What might be done with it?
“Careful!” Jolly said sharply. “You’re calling it in.”
Urban flinched. He looked down to see a streamer of silver, like a giant glowing serpent, rising against gravity, flowing toward him up the cold stone of the temple wall.
Moki whined, prancing nervously.
“Push it away,” Jolly said tensely.
Urban did not need to ask how. He knew. Using the new sense that inhabited him, he leaned against the oncoming streamer, not physically, but using his will, and it gave way, curving back down, conceding again to gravity.
“You’ve done something like this before,” Jolly said. It was not a question.
“This is a new sense,” Urban mused. “But engaging with it is similar to the way I engage the intellect of my starship, Dragon.”
“Maybe that puts you at a higher level.”
“My codes are set the same as yours,” Urban reminded him. “We’re at the same level.”
“It’s not that simple,” Jolly said. “Do you remember I told you I can enter the silver?”
“Yes.”
Did he have that skill now too? Was there a way to test it without risking his life?
Jolly must have guessed what he was thinking. He warned Urban, “You don’t want to try it.”
“No?”
“No. If it doesn’t work for you the way it works for me, you could die, or be lost.” He held up his palm. “That’s why I traded the ha with you. If one of us is lost but still alive, the ha will link us and let us find each other.
“When I was first taken by the silver, I thought I had died. It took me a long time to understand I hadn’t. And I had to learn to move through the silver. It was hard to do at first but I got better at it. So you can have an ability, but still need to learn the skill. Right?”
“Okay,” Urban said. “Then it’s possible you have skills you’re not aware of.”
Jolly frowned at this. Then, sounding unconvinced, “Maybe?”
Urban pressed his point. “Yaphet didn’t know he had the ability to make those tokens, but he did it anyway.”
“Can you perceive a way to do that?” Jolly asked him.
Urban considered the problem—within his own mind and within the intersectional space between his mind and the flow of potential all around him. As he did, he felt the silver begin to rise again. No. He pushed it back. Not like that.
He said, “At its simplest level it would be assembly, not creation. Assembling an object from a pattern stored in memory . . . what I would call a library.”
“I don’t know how that would be done,” Jolly said.
“You’d first have to find the pattern,” Urban mused. He thought about it, thought about the flow of information he sensed within the silver. Then he beckoned to Jolly. “Come.”
They walked to the end of the wall with Moki following. Turned the corner. The meadow below them now, flooded with silver, only the flowering heads of the grasses visible.
Moki sat down a few steps away, gazing out at the luminous night. That shape, Urban thought. He envisioned the pattern, the shape of a little dog with alert ears. He envisioned a token in that shape.
Again, he drew the silver to him, this time on purpose, a heavy tendril rising toward the top of the wall.
Moki stood up at its approach, started growling.
“You’re doing it again,” Jolly warned.
“I am,” Urban agreed. “Follow my lead. Feel the structure.”
The tendril continued to rise.
“Push it back!” Jolly urged, fear in his voice. “Don’t bring the silver into the temple ground.”
“I won’t. Trust me.”
“No. Why should I trust you? What do you know of the silver?”
Urban chuckled softly. “You’re right,” he said. “You’d be crazy to trust me.”
The tendril of silver reached the top of the wall, spilled over . . . but only a few centimeters. Urban felt a force attempting to push it back. That was Jolly, his presence and intention so easy to sense through the silver.
Gently, Urban rejected the interference. He held the tendril where it was, sensing the structure being assembled within it. Seeing it on a level deeper than sight, like visualizing the workings of Makers as they assembled an object, forcing it into existence, molecule by molecule.
He didn’t even notice when Jolly stopped fighting him, aware of the concession only after the last molecule was in place and he released the silver, though it did not leave until he made the mental gesture to push it away.
There on the edge of the wall, another little token. Jolly ran to pick it up. Gazed at it in wonder. Urban didn’t need to see it to know it was a tiny bit of statuary made to look like Moki.
“How did you know you could do that?” Jolly demanded, sounding angry. “How did you know how to do it?”
Urban shrugged. “Maybe because I’ve spent more time working with complex—”
He broke off as a submind dropped in, integrated. Abruptly he had a memory that sent adrenaline surging through his system. “Shit,” he whispered. “Jolly, I’ve got a signal. We’re running out of time.”
Both his satellites had detected a gravitational perturbation—the signal he’d been waiting for, that he’d dreaded, that meant a ship was incoming. “It’s not Dragon. Not yet. The signal is too weak. Probably an outrider, an advance ship, but Dragon can’t be far behind.”
“You mean the god?” Jolly asked in disbelief.
“Yes. Lezuri. We might have only hours.”
“What can we do?”
“Yaphet made that deletion kobold, right?”
“Oh. No, we were working on other things. The flying machine, and . . . library books.”
Urban turned to him in exasperation. “Yaphet doesn’t believe Lezuri is coming, does he?”
“No . . . I mean, maybe he didn’t before, but I think he does now. I told him what I saw, what Lezuri said about ‘brutal challenges’ and ‘inevitable war.’”
Urban nodded, remembering that his ghost had showed Jolly his last encounter with Lezuri.
“Wake Yaphet up,” Urban instructed. “If he still remembers how to make that kobold, he needs to—”
Urban ducked, dropped to his knees as a harsh boom! slammed down through the atmosphere, a shockwave he felt in his chest. He looked up, mouth agape in astonishment, as a deep rumbling rolled across the sky, loud at first, slowly fading.
“Look there!” Jolly said, still on his feet.
Urban stood up again. Turned to look.
Far to the east and faint: twinned golden flares, receding until, on the edge of sight, they traced a wide arc far out over the desert as if intending to come around. The flares winked out before the turn was complete, but the distant rumbling went on and on for many seconds, sound waves slowly propagating through the atmosphere while Urban inventoried the feeds from his cameras.
Neither satellite was in position to image this region of Verilotus. The cameras on and around Fortuna could see nothing beyond the rim of the Cenotaph. But two of his far-wandering scout-bots, each passing the night on a high point of terrain, had a view of the eastern sky.
They recorded the swift journey of a distant delta-winged glider, the lingering heat of atmospheric entry causing it to glow brilliantly in the infrared. If this had ever been an outrider, it did not resemble one now.
Urban watched the image projected onto his sensorium. He sensed Lezuri had followed the same chain of reasoning he’d used on his own approach to Verilotus: Come in stealth, minimizing use of the reef while surveying the system for a sign of the presence of the goddess. Then a hard deceleration and a quick descent to the Cenotaph—the only anomalous feature on the face of the world.
He checked Fortuna’s status. It remained flush with the ground and camouflaged. During the day it might have gone undetected, but not at night. Not on this night, when a thin film of silver surrounded it, held off by the replicated vapor of temple kobolds so that Fortuna lay in brilliant outline.
Lezuri would have already seen it. He might not recognize it for what it was, but he would surely investigate.
Urban messaged his ghost on Fortuna, telling it, *Defend yourself.
The reply came in the form of a partial submind bearing only a sense of cold determination.
*What’s that supposed to mean? he demanded. A full submind would have synchronized memories, but this wordless sharing . . . it told him there was something his other aspect did not want him to know. *What’s going on? What are you planning?
A reply came, but it explained nothing: *You need time.
All the ship’s cameras turned east, waiting for the glider to appear.
Urban queried his satellites, thinking his other aspect might have had news of Dragon. But no, there was still no sign of the great ship.
Shouts from the courtyard. Jubilee and Yaphet, awakened by the sonic boom, demanding to know:
“What happened? What was that?”
“Jolly, are you all right?”
“The god has come,” Jolly shouted back. “An advance ship.”
Urban stood frozen, blind to his immediate surrounds as he watched the long glide of the incoming ship, first as seen by the farthest scout-bot, and then the nearer one as the glider soared west.
A patter of footsteps, low questions, a hand on his arm, and Jubilee speaking from close beside him: “Urban, I’ve brought your tablet. Activate it for me. Let me see what you see.”
Urban issued a silent command through his atrium, waking the tablet and instructing it to accept Jubilee as an approved user. Then he set it to mirror what he saw—the glider, descending rapidly toward the rim of the Cenotaph.
The camera view shifted again. Now it was as if he stood beside Fortuna.
“There it is,” Jolly said. “I can see it now with my own eyes. There’s a faint glow of silver all across its surface.”
“I see it too,” Jubilee said. “But why doesn’t the silver expand to consume it?”
“The god created the silver,” Yaphet answered as if that was explanation enough—and of course it was.
Urban continued to watch the camera feed. The incoming craft might have plausibly picked the ruins of the goddess as its target, but it did not. Its course took it directly toward Fortuna.
*It’s coming for you, he messaged. His ghost would know that, but in his anxiety, the need to communicate was irresistible.
*I’m ready.
*Wait . . . something’s off. It’s coming down too fast.
The craft’s steep descent looked to bring it to ground at least half a kilometer before—
A sharp crack! The vessel burst apart. There was no fire, no roar of an explosion, but it disintegrated. Urban watched in shock as it crumbled into thousands of hand-sized pieces, each one a wing shape, creating a flying swarm that air-braked in unison, dropping to the silver-covered ground all around Fortuna. And where the fragments touched, the silver churned. It roiled up from the ground, rising around Fortuna in a thick circular wall, higher and higher, cutting off the camera’s view of the Cenotaph.
The camera swiveled up to watch the wall of silver as it continued to grow. Stars and streamers of dark clouds could still be seen until the silver rolled in overhead, expanding from all sides to form a domed roof. Just before the roof was complete, the signal dropped out.
Urban switched cameras, looking through the viewpoint of the nearest aerial-bot, stationed at the crater’s rim. It showed a great dome of silver enclosing Fortuna.
He could not recover a signal from the ship.
The dome continued to grow.
THIRD
You are formidable.
You willed yourself into existence within the Swarm.
You resurrected yourself after she destroyed you.
Against all odds you returned across light years to your own world, risking her renewed wrath, the very real possibility that she would murder you again.
And at the last, when faced with the presence of an anomalous object of unknown hazard bedded in the floor of the impact crater, you risked all, guided by the credo that allowed you to rise above the Swarm: Strike first. Take without hesitation or be taken.
So you struck hard and you took it, dissolving the intruder within a cloud of corrosive silver while you proceeded to embed yourself in this, your world.
It is all yours now. She is nothing. Her remains lie not far away, dry cognitive bones without the least flicker of awareness in them. You have won the argument, won the right to stage the creation again. You will remake this world as you had meant it to be: a world of challenge, competition, personal evolution—a means to find those few among your players who could rise as you rose within the Swarm.
You remember telling her, The victorious few will be our children, and our formidable allies against the hostile gods of other stars.
And she said, No. I did not escape the Swarm to create that hell again.
The argument is won.
Even so, your grief runs deep as you contemplate an endless future empty of her presence. You ask yourself, Is the past truly unrecoverable? And you resolve to take up this question at some point in the future, when you have become a greater being than you are now.
For now, your task is to grow. The moon-sized sacred sphere that contains the larger fragment of your surviving self has perforce been left behind in the void—but you make do. You sink roots into your world, the world you made, building out your consciousness, linking point by point with the subterranean capillaries of silver that are the lifeblood and the memory of your world.
But as those links form, you discover the silver is not as you remember it. It has evolved. There are new functions within it, their purposes opaque to you.
You pause your expansion, suspecting a trap, one she left.
Lezuri, she whispers.
No more than that, but you recoil, fearing she will rouse, rise up from the memory of the silver and strike at you. Strike hard.
But she does not.
After a time, you reach out again, cautiously. You sense no trace of her presence. So what was it that brushed your mind? An echo, you decide. A fragment of what once was. Nothing more than that.
You resume your expansion. You must grow, regardless of what’s out there, of what’s changed. There is no other way to recover yourself, to restore your reach, your power. There can be no retreat for you.
An aphorism to rally your confidence: No way out but forward!
But as your senses expand, you encounter a new concern. The corrosive cloud of silver you raised around the intruder was meant to dis-assemble whatever lies within to constituent atoms. That has not happened. The intruder holds off the silver by some mechanism you do not understand. It is the same phenomenon you observed from the passing probe.
Worse, you have detected remnant biological matter with the genetic markers of that one you know as Urban. He should not have survived! And yet he is here ahead of you. He has set a trap for you. And you have fallen into it.
Chapter
26
“Get off the wall,” Urban said quietly.
I looked up from the glass face of the tablet, confused by the simplicity of this command. Its lack of information engendered questions rather than action. Why should we get off the wall? What had changed?
And when had he learned to speak our language? His words had not been in the ancient tongue.
Urban turned from the far vista of the Cenotaph. He threw out his arms, at the same time rephrasing his words as an urgent command: “Get off the wall now!”
I fell back, shocked. And then I nudged Yaphet. “Let’s go.”
Jolly was already running for the nearest stairway, Moki at his heels. I followed, with Yaphet close behind me. Clambering down the stairs, my hand trailed against the wet stone of the wall for balance. A glance back showed me Urban descending too, but halfway down he jumped, so that he reached the courtyard before I did.
He turned toward us, waving his arms again and yelling, “Against the wall! Get down against the wall!”
I dropped into a crouch, clinging to the mossy surface of the dripping stone, terrified of I knew not what. Jolly was a few feet away, holding on to Moki. Yaphet held on to me. Urban crouched, his back against the wall, breathing hard. More out of fear, I thought, then exertion.
“What is going on?” I whispered to him.
“I don’t know for sure,” he panted. “But I think I—”
If he said more, I didn’t hear it. All my attention was taken by a flare of yellow light overhead. The ragged clouds above us lit up as if the sun had suddenly materialized beneath them. Those few stars that had been visible between the clouds were washed away and the courtyard was as bright as day.
I squeezed against the wall. Yaphet’s arms tightened around me. Seconds passed. The light faded. But then the ground trembled and a roar of long, drawn-out thunder filled the night. I felt it in my chest. And it shook the temple. Birds flew from the eaves and bits of broken glass sparkled as they fell from the damaged window frames.
Moments later, silence returned, and darkness with it. It took a few seconds before I could again make out the glow of silver from beyond the walls. By the time I did, Urban was halfway up the stairs.
“Are you all right?” Yaphet demanded of me.
I assured him I was. We all were. We went up to the top of the wall again, to see what had become of the world.
<><><>
It was as if the silver had gone mad.
I sensed it: a chaos of turbulent currents.
I saw it: the flood in the meadow rippling like the surface of a wind-blown pond, casting off puffs of luminous mist from the wave crests.
