Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (43 page)

“He’s
dead
, fury.”

Lot nodded. Out on the water, the phantoms stared at the shore debate in cool blue constancy. “Sooth.”

“
No
.” Lot was suddenly aware of Alta, circling slowly round them, a shining, shimmering entity. She pointed toward the phantoms. “He has to be with them.”

Lot shook his head. “I remember what it was like in the Vasties.” His voice was hoarse, his grip on Urban never lessening. The tide ran past him, like a physical force. “Not like this.”

“They’re Old Silken, aren’t they?” Urban asked.

“I think so.”

Alta tentatively touched his shoulder. He flinched. He could feel the buzz of her, a high, tight silver vibration. “But they’ve made a Communion,” she insisted.

“Sooth. It’s so. The cult virus must have been latent here.”

“It killed them?” Urban asked.

Lot shook his head. “I think it was the Well that killed them. The virus took over what was left—when they had no way to resist it—tried to knit it together maybe, but there was no focus, no center.”

“No Jupiter, you mean.”

“Or a man like him.”
We are always men
. He could sense the predecessors vaguely, like shadows in his memory. Imprints of each other, stamping out their silvered shapes against a dark background of collapsing worlds.

“But Jupiter’s here now,” Alta insisted.

She glistened silver. He felt the gleam of it flood his own skin. Felt his heart racing. Deliberately, he kept his senses fixed on Urban, lightless well in a glistening net. “Jupiter used assault Makers on the column. The planet reacted. It destroyed him.”

“You can’t know that!” Alta cried.

But he could. The Communion made here was flawed and corrupt. It had no center, no focus, and so it could not grow by conquest but only by slow accretion, a confused, disjointed intellect operating forever out of sync.

“You’re a liar,” Alta said. “You’re jealous of him and you never really
believed
anyway. But I know. He brought us here. He has to be here. He brought Gent back from death. He bound him inside his own soul, and he’ll come for me too.”

Lot felt himself falling into her tide. She was so close, her body hot, liquid, a mercuric fluid that melted through his skin, all the way down to his bones until he felt more her than himself, and she—

He looked in her eyes and saw only himself, eyes wide in awe, and then her again, inconstant perception like the fluttering of a falling leaf, self/other descending to a silver core. “
You don’t need him
.” Lot knew the words were his, though they were said in Alta’s voice. And in his own speech: “
I am him
.”

From somewhere close by he could hear Sypaon’s cool warning. “A feedback reaction has begun. A biochemical dialogue in the Chenzeme way. The suspended data patterns seek consensus.”

But it was only background chatter, a temporary flux in the silvered tide. The tide ran through him strongly. Entities whispered around him. Not wholly human. Partly made into something else that was at once new to him and deeply remembered. They brought him the history of Silk, swift joyous years in the city and then dissolution, their biosystems crumbling. They are captured. Suspended in a slow disjointed union they had never sought. Now with him, sinking into him.

A spike plunges into his awareness, a black needle in the silver flow. He is cognizant of his body once again, and a fiery eruption that runs along his skin beneath his suit. He claws at the seam, scratches it open, a mechanical voice pleading with him
are you sure? are you sure?
Shrug out of the shoulders. A half-seen crowd presses close around him. He peels the leggings off, mud between his toes, ring light casting his skin unnaturally white, small animals leaping away from his running feet, Alta just ahead of him, her body already a dissolute blur as she throws herself upon the tide he jumps—

—and does not come down. He floats in suspension, the tide winding around him. He is the core cell in a plane of awareness that locks in place as his perceptions expand, until he can see the full surface of the world and the broad sweep of the void that holds it.

The geometry is not flat. Yet it seems flattened somehow—or else he’s been raised beyond it, because he can see it all in a glance linked through an hours-long interval of time.

They cling to him. Bright points of awareness. He is many at once, the same in all places, tendrils of man reaching outward to gather the selves to him, he can see with their eyes, feel with their hearts and they with his, one feeding the other—

He leads them.

They lead him.

Synchrony building between them and the sense of self fading

Becoming another

Awestruck

Jupiter knew.

Never has anyone seen so far. He is whole. All.

What had confused him

Now clear.

He understands why the Well abandoned all conscious mind:

Because that’s what I attack and subsume, now, and in my ancient past.

What beings would deliberately choose mindlessness over this glory-state he’d just begun to taste?

The alien is a strong chord within him, blended with the newer harmonics of human desire, a natural desire for union, for something greater. Human culture had welcomed him. Human culture had sought this state for millennia.

He recalled the wonder of the Hallowed Vasties, long flowing skeins of thought encircling a captive star while sub-minds chattered endlessly on—

—until the light burned through.

Nothingness.

He cannot remember anything for a troubling long time. Then light again, thousands of lives his now—
Jupiter was right to flee
—here in the Well he will become something new. Already he’s begun to mix with the alien traces gathered here. He sends exploring fingers into the mindless ocean of biodata, becoming an entity greater than the Vasties ever knew—

A black spike smashes into his world.

He can see for millions of miles and feel the tides of the Well run fast around him but he can’t see his own core. Heat cuts him. The links unravel around him, tearing great sections of his mind away. A distant wind gushes howling in an animal voice and he is going blind. He would clutch at the core of his being but has no hands no mouth no eyes no senses at all only raw exposed nerves laid out over vasties and being trod upon pain driving him out into hopeless separation all sense of Communion fading fading and gone—

—and Lot can hear his own voice screaming, startled that the sound of it is coming from his throat until a moment later he feels the pain and understands it, curling flesh, snapping threads, his skin peeling away, the nerves exposed to hands
touching
him, clots of darkness, every contact an agony, lifting him, dragging him, the mud like a bank of knives under his legs he had almost melted away. “
Oh God Urban stop it!
”

“Lot?”

It’s Urban’s voice. It hurts his ears. He can hear the unsynchronized panic of two hearts and that hurts too. Urban’s breath on his cheek: hurts. He blinks hard and the starlight sears, though it’s muted behind a watery film.

“Lot?” Urban says again, his voice high and frantic.

Lot thinks his skull might split. “God, don’t speak,” he begs.

“You’re
back
.”

Urban’s holding him in a half-sitting position. They are sprawled in the mud. Sypaon scuttles in staccato time all around a large mound, snatching up from the ground writhing, wormy things and tucking them into the gelatinous tissue of her arms. Her warden body casts a dancing red glow on the mound, revealing the recessed imprint of a spread-eagled man.

“
Alta
,” Lot whispers. That imprint is his own shape. He knows it. The impression left by his body. There are fine wormy filaments trailing out of it. Other filaments emerge from the ground near him. They seek him like slim, hungry, blind worms. They move. Peristaltic motion pushing them gradually closer. The most vigorous of them tracks a scar his heel made in the mud when Urban dragged him.

Urban watches this one too. Lot feels him stiffen; a swift intake of breath.
Clot of darkness
. Lot twists around to look at him. “I know your kind.”

Dark and empty. Flaws in the Communion. In the Hallowed Vasties men and women like him had been driven out or destroyed.

Urban lifts his hand. Glinting in it is the warden’s capsule.

Lot is aware again of his sloughing, burning skin, his exposed nerve ends and he understands now that he’s been wounded by the assault Maker, that Urban has used it against him. He cringes. But Urban reaches past him, squeezing a fine jet of the stuff at the closest tendril. It recoils, bubbling, the wounded section suddenly amputated.

“Come on, fury,” Urban says. “They’re hunting you now. You have to get away. Get clear.”

“Yes,” Sypaon says, pulling up a long filament, tucking it into her arm. “You must flee.” Her many eyes glow like tiny embers.

Lot shakes his head, unable to deal with things. “Alta,” he whispers again.

“Shut up!” Urban screams, an hysterical edge on his voice. “Just shut up and do what I tell you!”

Lot is on his feet now. His body’s numb, so he knows the painkillers have kicked in. He tries to do as he’s told. He walks. Urban keeps him balanced, steers him. Sypaon must be with them too, because her red light shows the glinting marsh water, the reeds, the mud under his feet disturbed by the wriggles of emergent tendrils, a communal network like a vast fungus underground. Finally, he’s stumbling on beach sand. It’s dry under his feet and apparently uninhabited. The swan burster rises, a bright round oh of surprise tut-tutting over his pitiful condition and some long time later Urban finally lets him fall to the sand, the grains against his lips and in his mouth, tasting sand, scattered grains unrelated to one another except by proximity, shed from the greater mass of some volcano or continental shelf. Individuals, on the beach.

CHAPTER

32

O
VER THE YEARS,
L
OT HAD WATCHED HUNDREDS OF TINY FLIES
alight on the glistening paddles of the sundews that he grew in his breather. Never in all that time had he been moved to pull one of the mindless creatures from the sweet, entrapping secretions. What would be the point? The body could not come away intact.

He awoke to daylight. Kheth was already high, its fierce light burning against his exposed skin. He sat up slowly, his muscles feeling peculiarly distant and heavy. Sand had stuck to tiny sores all over his body. He had no way to check how much interior damage had been done, but judging from the numb state of his peripheral senses he guessed that it had been significant.

He looked around. The ocean was calm, small waves breaking in whispers against the shore. He could see Nesseleth’s long silhouette under the green water. Far down the beach, Urban pitched rocks across the reef. Sypaon stood with him, a vague figure, the color of sand.

Urban’s pack was close at hand. Ord scuttled out from under a small-leaved shrub and pulled a bottle of water from it. Lot drank half, watching Urban’s distant figure as he bent to pick up a pebble, turned to pitch it into the water, bent to pick up another. . . .

Lot sensed a sullen fury in his tight, choppy movements. Dread nestled in his chest. He looked at Ord. “Where’s Alta?” he asked, his voice hardly more than a dry croak.

“Mistress Alta’s presence is not detected.”

Gone over.

He nodded, unsurprised. He’d known it already in some part of his mind. He could remember some of it. He knew he’d tried to go with her. He
should
have gone with her. That was why Jupiter had brought him here. It was why he’d been made.

They were waiting for him.

Alta and Gent and all the Old Silkens, caught in an unfocused, rolling consciousness, thoughts sustained for mere minutes at a time.

He put the water bottle down and crawled across the sand to his suit. It was crumpled and covered with mud. Vaguely, he wondered if it had been Urban or Ord who’d retrieved it. He wormed his way into it without getting up. Winces of pain broke through the deadened sense of his muscles as he twisted and squirmed, sand scraping against his skin. He’d just sealed the front seam when motion caught his eye.

He turned, to see Alta only an arm’s reach away. She crouched beside him, her body a faint blue nimbus, hardly visible in the strong daylight. Only it wasn’t her, not really. The eyes were hers, and the breasts, but the nose was only a suggestion. And she had male genitalia, though incomplete.

He shrank away from her, sliding over the warm sand. Her expression made his skin crawl: she seemed to stare past him, as if she saw something coming that remained invisible to him. “
Apart
,” she said softly, in the Old Silk accent he’d heard before.

He trembled, trying to hold himself aloof. The blue suspension that formed her was tenuous at best. It could burst at any moment, spraying him with a toxin that would force him under the skin. Why did he resist that? It was what he’d been made for.

But made by whom?

A gift from the void
. His kind had come out of the void. Maybe they were only another weapon of the ancient war—or maybe they were the enemy. Death masquerading as salvation. The infection might take millennia to run its course. But what did that matter? The cult virus had abided eons since the demise of the old murderers. A few thousand years must count as nothing. Yet the Hallowed Vasties would burn themselves out in that span, briefly glorious, but in the end gone, gone, gone.

He glanced at the phantom beside him. Ecstatic death was still death—and an ending—in a universe that might be infinite. How could he support that?

There is no place of permanence in the Universe, no golden existence, no finish line. We live on the edge of chaos, with all the turbulence that implies. . . .

“Hark,” he said softly, rousing the suit’s DI. “Seal the hood?”