Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (22 page)

She glanced nervously at the milky sky. The swan burster was hidden behind the overarching tree, but its light spilled like lace across the garden. An anxious smile flitted across her face. “We can conclude it has not killed us . . . yet. Oh Lot, you can’t seriously think—”

He snorted. “Sure, I’m slow.”

“Oh, stop it.”

He shrugged. “Sypaon built this city, intending to abandon it. She had to have some place in mind to go. And the records are clear as to why she came—she wanted to investigate the ring.”

“That was over five hundred years ago.”

“You’ve lived that long. What does time mean to a sculpted entity?”

She sighed uncertainly. “I don’t know. Do you really think she’s still there?”

He leaned back, his hands clasped behind his head. “You should ask Kona.”

“I will.”

He straightened. “I’ve been thinking about that day. Captain Aceret sent me to crawl through the air ducts. Our advance troops were trapped behind a sealed door. Their assault Makers wouldn’t work against it.”

He started at Yulyssa’s sharp intake of breath. “They used assault Makers?”

He looked at her in dull surprise. Could such a prominent fact remain unknown? But then Captain Antigua had been the only surviving officer. She might have kept quiet, seeing no advantage in promoting an image of brutality. And the regular troopers had probably never known. “The point is, the assault Makers failed to function. Why?”

“City authority must have neutralized them—”

“I don’t think so. Authority wasn’t ready for us. They had access to assault Makers—sooth, the wardens are armed with them. But they didn’t use that against us.”

She seemed puzzled. “What are you saying?”

“I’m not sure. But
something
stopped our assault Makers. And long ago, something stopped the Chenzeme ring.” He shook his head, trying to define his nascent suspicions. “We all know the Well has its own molecular defenses. The governors cause things to fail in the Well.” He held her in his stare, willing her to see the same connection. “But things fail here too. And even as far out as the swan burster. I have to wonder if the enemy we’re hiding from isn’t living in our midst.”

That drew from her a patient smile. “If that were so, Lot, don’t you think we would have noticed?”

“I think we have.”

Her smile faltered. “You mean the city gnomes. But they’re harmless. They’re almost extinct.”

“For all we know, the city gnomes are governors too.”

She shook her head. “If that were true, we’d all be dead.”

“You don’t know that. Jupiter survived the Well. And the Old Silkens lived with the governors for ten years—”

“Before they died.”

“Yes. We need to know why they died.”

The room slowly darkened, as the ring made its roll from zero to one. “You want to go down there, don’t you?”

“We don’t really have a choice. So I want to know what’s there before we have to go.”

That actually made her laugh. “Oh ho! That’s something Jupiter never would have bothered with.”

He felt mortified at that response. Like Gent, she
knew
how shallow his faith was. Could everyone see it in him? Still, he tried to defend himself. “I just want to be cautious, that’s all.”

“It’s all right. If you’re different from him . . .”

“I believe in him, Yulyssa. I do.” And maybe if he said it enough, he could convince himself. “We belong to him.”

“No, that isn’t true, Lot. No one owns you.”

“It doesn’t really matter. Yulyssa, don’t you see? The Well reached out across open space to take the swan burster. It reached up the column of the elevator to take the Old Silkens. It defeated our assault Makers only ten years ago, so we know it’s still here, in the city. And Jupiter’s part of it now. Don’t think he’s forgotten us. He’ll take us if he can.”

CHAPTER

16

H
E SAT IN THE DARKENED ROOM, SEVERAL MINUTES
after Yulyssa’s ghost had departed. Ord hung motionless in a corner, like a giant spider perched within the reaching branches of the projected tree. Gradually, Lot’s body began to accept the evidence of evening. He could feel his metabolism pick up—a half-nocturnal creature, always at his most active in the dark hours before midnight. In the cool air the only emotional scent was that of his own cold concentration. He breathed that in, amplifying his intellectual focus in a cascading feedback reaction.

He tried to move beyond the sticky web of questions that encumbered his mind. He sought to visualize himself one year into the future. Who would he be then? What would the city be like? Only a year. He could not make himself see the disaster predicted by all reasonable studies. In the long run, he had to believe there would be options. . . .

He stiffened, suddenly aware that the quality of light within the room had changed. A dark shadow had appeared, pouring from a hole in the garden wall. It flowed across the masonry, eclipsing the reflected, silvery glow of ring light. It flooded the sky, extinguishing the milky wash of the nebula. It swept around and between the complex shapes of shrubs and trees, erasing their forms like black ink poured over a painting, before it finally swept the patio stones at his feet, replacing substance with black emptiness. The chair disappeared beneath him, and for a disorienting moment he imagined himself falling. Quickly, he let his assumptions go. Dropped his expectations so that this new environment could freely write its own definition in his mind. In another moment the garden had vanished entirely and he felt himself floating in undimensioned darkness. Fantastic illusion. His body seemed to drift like a camera bee, a pinpoint observer in a nonexistent world. Ord had become a dim companion object visible only in the infrared.

Then a faint, three-dimensional silver patterning began to emerge from the darkness, as if the vanished ring light would reassert itself within the chinks and flaws of this un-world. At first Lot could see the silver presence only from the corner of his eye: a dimly glowing net. None of his enhancements could bring the image into better resolution. Only time could accomplish that. Gradually, the silvery pattern brightened until it was revealed as a working field of innumerable tiny, interlocking barbs, myriad tool shapes seizing and clutching at one another, at many others, tugging, twisting, reshaping and reordering a delicate silver mesh of tiny parts . . . like the mural in Kona’s apartment and in the monkey house, except it didn’t exist on only one surface, but instead surrounded him, embedding him within the depths of its structure.

The taste of the air changed. Humidity rolled across him, the moisture acting as a vehicle for a complex sensual array. Abruptly, he felt himself immersed in a stew of communicative emotional states, more complex, more detailed than he’d ever experienced before, like a crowd-buzz conversation of the senses, except that every inhabitant of the crowd spoke the same words, in the same order, only slightly out of sync with one another so that Lot’s first impression was of chaos, but after that he swiftly began to discern a repeated and coherent sense of curiosity.

Speak to me.

He did not hear the words, yet he had them in his mind. “Who are you?” he asked, too startled to be afraid. “. . . Jupiter?”

The shivering machinework vibrated, flexed, pulled. It began to move past him in a slow, continuous stream, washing him with its substance until he felt coated with silver, a mineral being, the focused eye of a mob, briefly parting the current, only to have the silver stream close in again behind him.

The flavor changed: he sensed temptation. The current’s speed increased. Velocity blurred the interlinking barbs into an undifferentiated flow.
Trust me
.

This was not Jupiter. It could not be. There was no real taste of him here, none of the tidal pressure of his compelling presence. And yet a vague sense of familiarity tugged at Lot. “Who are you?” he insisted. “Explain yourself. Now.”

This brash demand solicited a wash of amusement. Lot felt it clearly. He had to smile in return. This game intrigued him. Who could have written this silent conversation? Who besides Jupiter? Evoked in the mood language of crowds. It was his own private language. In the city, he alone was conscious at this level.

He felt his silvered body extended far into the current. Details washed over him, and gradually, he grew aware of an unsettling strangeness layered within the human emotive pattern. An alien accent that he was shocked to find already within his memory. “Tell me who you are,” he urged.

But the answer that reached him was only more amusement:
Guess
.

Okay. He did not think it could be Yulyssa. She didn’t know him well enough to speak to him this way. Dr. Alloin, then? With her belittling pharmacy? He could not imagine Dr. Alloin playing frivolous games. He noticed Ord in the slow flow, its body disrupting the current like an insoluble stone.

“Ord?” he asked softly. “What do you think?”

The little robot seemed to come awake suddenly, snapping over in the current. “Psychoactive viruses line the chamber walls. They are producing olfactory elements.”

“Slick.”

“Bad,” Ord countered. But it seemed oddly lethargic, and did not elaborate on this moral judgment.

Now the speed of the stream flow began to slow—no. Somehow his perspective had changed, and it was himself that swept like the point of a needle through the silver matrix so that his stomach clenched at his own perceived deceleration . . . now he moved only slowly against the flow. Once again he could perceive some of the frantic workings of the barbed network, and a presence. . . .

He caught her female scent a moment before he discerned her body. She surrounded him, carrying him through the current. He existed inside her . . . if she could be said to have an inside. Her body was not human, not silver-solid like his but like a woven net instead, or like beaded lace, each bead a mouth emitting a babble of scents, so that every part of her seemed to talk in chemical whispers: her feet, her calves, her thighs, hips, buttocks, belly, breasts, shoulders, back. Her face too.

He gazed at her face from behind her eyes, as if he were seeing a holographic surface from the wrong side. Her mouth seemed beaded of hundreds of tiny mouths; her eyes the same. Sketched lines of speaking mouths linked her features together, drawing a hollow suggestion of a woman, every part of her breathing incoherent histories that impacted his sensory tears, inspiring odd flashes of imagery in his mind: the swan burster aglow with a terrible white light that burns his retina; and himself, part of the ring, a mindless spark in a fascist rally, pulled to the will of all those other cells around him; and above him, blackened worlds; radio communications howling past him in languages that don’t even inspire his curiosity, signals that abruptly cut out; in the void, a sexual merger as alien cells infest the familiar matrix, intoxicating in their diversity, he must sink inside of the other, watch his worldview shred as his assumptions fail the test of her experiences, he will become something new. . . .

“Sypaon?” he whispered.

Her mouth (linked chains of tiny mouths) smiled. Thousands of lips parted, to speak in brief synchrony:
The ring light coats you
—a burst of tiny voices—
you see it even when the ring is in eclipse
.

“Sometimes,” he admitted, stretching slowly against a skin of silver armor so like the silver glow of the swan burster . . . the silver flow of Sypaon’s current? He could feel a sense of discord from the matrix, and a swift soothing coo from Sypaon that closed off the discontent. “This flow,” he said, “it’s endless because we’re moving in a circle, right? We circle the ring.”

The cells are ever restless. They have their own opinions, and the aggressive ones must be soothed . . . though they all were made with a contempt for complacency. In a war, one must always change.

He shook his head, not understanding. Around him, Sypaon bestowed calm and patience and concord on the matrix, closing off dissent like a zipper forever sealing a rent in an otherwise harmonious fabric, around and around the ring we go. . . . How many circuits had she accomplished in five hundred years? She had an alien accent, and it reminded him of Jupiter.

Speak of it
, Sypaon urged.
The Chenzeme influence. Where did you get it?

Lot shuddered, gazing at his silvered hand while the current swept past them, a seemingly infinite river of dissent that Sypaon somehow knit into consensus.

We both perceive with the neural patterns of the Chenzeme
, she insisted.

“No! I’m not like you.”

But he lost the thought as her will flowed through him, soothing him, just as she soothed the cells embedded in the matrix . . . each one of them a node of dissent? of thought? consensus mind.

. . .
we never want to change
, she mused.
Who made you?

He shook his head, wanting to back away but not knowing how.

Speak of it: Were you made to subvert the Chenzeme? Or have you been aimed at us?

“Neither!” His fist flared brilliant silver. “It’s not like that. We came out of the Hallowed Vasties.”

She closed around him again, calming him.
Aggressive cell
, she whispered.
Don’t fire. Don’t fire. I remember that time
.

He hesitated. What did she remember? “Sypaon . . . what happened to your people?”

Brief confusion spilled from her mouths. He felt a flaw in her will, but it healed quickly.
So very young. You don’t remember when I brought our people here. I’ve been away too long
.

Our people? Did she even know what had happened? Hesitantly, he asked, “When was it you left us?”

A twinge of guilt flowed from her mouths.
A few years, no? I’ve been distracted. Time is . . . hard to hold on to here. Oh, but it’s not a reason to be sad. . . . Child? Why do you feel this way?

If she didn’t know, he wouldn’t tell her.

She seemed apologetic.
The ring is my body now, and human thoughts are alien, very difficult to grasp.