Tides of Light (23 page)
Authors: Gregory Benford
Quath, though, went slowly. The presence inside her
throbbed. The Nought kicked and fought, its puny jabs an irritant impossible to ignore. Her ceramic sensors saw it as a burning
tangle of infrared deep in her guts.
But it was not this small nettling that bothered Quath. She knew what lay ahead of her, and so dawdled, picking at her cilia
as though grooming herself. Some tiny hatchlings approached and Quath let them police her carapace. They caught microparasites,
which were the inevitable inconvenience of strange worlds: native mites who had already learned to feast on the leaky joint
sleeves and porous sheaths of the podia.
Soon, too soon, the great glowing cavern of the Tukar’ramin opened before her. Its murky mouth seemed to swallow all the certainties
of her life.
*You have done well,* the Tukar’ramin greeted her from high in the glistening webs.
Quath preened at this ruby-flavored compliment, until she saw that Beq’qdahl had entered simultaneously from another of the
innumerable tunnels that gave onto the Tukar’ramin’s underbowl. Beq’qdahl did an artful dance with her many legs, accepting
the Tukar’ramin’s words as if they were directed at her alone.
Beq’qdahl, she shifted to first person.
have captured one of the pernicious Noughts who infested the station.>
*What breed of Nought is this?*
*Doubtless so, for it engaged that station and co-opted the mechs there. I had understood that we had total control there.
Yet these Noughts infested with humiliating ease.*
There was no doubt, from the grammatically past-imperative
hormonal inflections, that Quath and Beq’qdahl were among those humiliated.
Quath suppressed the impulse to cock her pods into a gesture of total apology and mercy-plead. Instead, she quickly transmitted
a set of images and sensory details of the thing. These were taken after she had stripped it of its suit and weapons, back
inside their ship.
some primitive way of gathering attractive musk about the area it would most like to have revered by others?>
*Doubtless some such business. Absence of a pelt does suggest a highly sensory life, serving as it does to expose the surface
nerves optimally.*
*We cannot be too careful here,* the Tukar’ramin said slowly. *This Nought may have intelligence and mastery beyond its apparent
mawkishness.*
Quath ventured to release a scent of confidence, edged with dangling, frayed filigrees of mature concern. She was
about to add that she had kept the sample Nought for further study, when the Tukar’ramin continued thoughtfully, plainly without
registering Quath’s words.
*Well that you disposed of them all, then. They are oddly able. Even one might cause hindrance to us.*
Both Quath and Beq’qdahl fell silent. Quath struggled to find a way to agree and yet not divulge the truth, so she was glad
when Beq’qdahl said,
The fierceness of this declaration could not cover the underlying sweet cut of self-doubt that Beq’qdahl leaked from her unruly
hind glands.
*Reentry fires, you mean?*
Quath bristled at Beq’qdahl’s use of
I
when they had both done the searching. She quickly felt better, though, when the Tukar’ramin said forcefully, *You should
have savaged them all!*
Beq’qdahl choked with mortification and farted a foul cloud of orange fear. She managed to get out,
*You were senior, Beq’qdahl. Can you assure me that these Noughts, who may even have the power to voyage between stars, are
vanquished?*
This was a deft diplomatic sally, mingled with pious fogs of humble oil, Quath thought. But it brought Beq’qdahl no credit.
*Then set about making sure of your task.*
task or mine alone?>
*You are senior in experience. You both now sport six legs. Quath seems to be gathering her wits quite ably. I suppose you
may call upon her for assistance. She acquitted herself well—perhaps better than you.*
Burnt-yellow splashes of barely suppressed anger/anxiety shot up and down Beq’qdahl’s thorax, but her voice remained crustily
formal. Pleased, Quath glimpsed a tinge of
bluegreen envy betraying Beq’qdahl in her milky proboscis hairs.
Beq’qdahl asked.
*What? What?*
Quath saw at once that Beq’qdahl had miscalculated. Waves of an unknown emotion jetted down from the Tukar’ramin. *Pursue
these Noughts! Drop your mining. I have received word that the Illuminates themselves have taken notice of these events.*
The very mention of these august entities stilled the chilly air of the great rock cavern.
*Beq’qdahl, do not seek to vainly augment yourself when a vital mission awaits.*
*You can begin with a task of some risk, since your errors precipitated this trouble. Witness—*
Into Quath came a picture of the station. Beside it, now clamped firmly by crosshatched stays, was the Nought ship.
Beq’qdahl began,
Chords of vexed concern sounded through the unfilled spaces of the image, sucking Quath along with the Tukar’ramin’s
*This little vessel is their conveyance. You ignored it. Perhaps some still cower within. Your task is to cleanse this craft.
Inspect, analyze! Find its inner minds. Flay them open for my inspection.*
Startled beneath this torrent of stench-commands and acrid air-cuts. Beq’qdahl tried to protest.
*Go! Now!*
The sudden spitting-green anger of the Tukar’ramin startled Quath. She was grateful that Beq’qdahl caught the force of it,
a yellow-white jet that scoured through Quath’s senso-
rium. Beq’qdahl, in the full stream, backed away with trembling legs.
The Tukar’ramin did not dismiss them, in fact took no further notice of the two scurrying forms. They scrambled away as the
Tukar’ramin’s bulk tugged itself up glistening damp strands into lofty darkness.
Quath felt Beq’qdahl’s jittery, addled state as the two scuttled away. On a subchannel Beq’qdahl sent her preliminary thoughts
about logistics, search patterns, weapons—assembled impressively quickly, considering the blistering she had received.
Quath’s thoughts submerged beneath a rising distress. She broke away from Beq’qdahl and fled down a narrow shaft, letting
herself fall in the hushed cool air until the depths of the warren rushed past. Somehow her petrifying fear of heights did
not occur in the cramped chute. Heights in the open—or, far worse, flying—terrified her race. Beq’qdahl had overcome this,
another reason to despise her.
Her magnetic brakes pulsed. A passing food-cloud brought stinging encrustations to her eyes—yet it was as though she ambled
in a dream.
She registered nothing, consumed by the unspoken lie that she now carried within. The Tukar’ramin and Beq’qdahl and all the
podia assumed that she had snuffed out the Nought after taking samples from it. They would expect immediate scrapes of skin
and nuggets of brain, to better understand the pests.
But the Nought rapped against her inner steel partitions. It thrashed and jerked and emitted foul odors. Perhaps the thing
had even excreted inside Quath. What a risk to incur, all for Nought!
Quath’s levered arms began to pry open her innermost carrypouch to pluck out the Nought—but she slowed, tugged by flickering
doubt…and stopped.
This puny thing was indeed the same breed of Nought which she had slaughtered with valor in defense of Beq’qdahl. In the moments
after her victory she had studied the carcass of such a Nought. That had helped her to cast off her fear of death.
So for this one last Nought she felt an odd sense of connection. She had told herself at first, on the way down from orbit,
that keeping the Nought alive was simply a way to be sure her samples were fresh. But once in the smoky, constricted warrens,
she had begun to feel vague musings, strange lacings of sensation, canted views of her world.
It was the Nought. At this intimate range, her probings of it had overlapped the Nought’s own surprisingly complex sensorium—which
felt to Quath like a spherical coil of brightly colored threads, writhing like languid serpents.
Try as she might, she could not penetrate the knot. A small, oily pocket of exotic zest now seeped into Quath’s mind. She
could not give it up. Not yet.
The thing inside interlaced with Quath’s electro-aura, giving forth images and undefinable tangs. They led her down into a
labyrinth of airless corridors, lit by scattershot, smoky fogs, brooding silences, lurid accelerations down unseen gradients.
This small creature dwelled in a slanted universe blurred by currents, hormones, scents.
Something in this tilted world caught in Quath. Blunt wedges of pinched obstruction bloomed bony-hard inside her. Her pale
certainties splintered. The already shifty terrain of her oblique interior landscape warped and canted.
But she had no choice, Quath thought. She
must
. The Tukar’ramin would banish Quath forever if she knew, cast her into a starved life of ragged foraging in the ruined lands
beyond the Hive….
Worse, she could not merely yield it forth, no—too late for that. Quath had to slaughter the unfolding thing within
her. Hide it. Mash the body into paste, pack it into porous walls where it could never be found, or recognized, or understood.
Could she? Quath teetered on the brink.
Killeen could barely breathe.
He swam in a cloying fluid, but when be opened his mouth to gasp it did not fill with the syrupy acid-tinged gelatinous stuff
that surrounded him, buoyed him, made his every movement sluggish and impotent.
Dreamlike, he thrashed. Swam. Punched angrily at torpid air that caught his fists in cobwebbed resistant softness, blunting
every movement.
Like a baby in an awful ambient pouch, he thought. Helpless and fearing birth.
His skin was a stretched, livid thing. The burning he had suffered now returned doubly. A searing, itching sheet covered him,
tight, a livid seethe. He ran numbed hands over his chest and thighs, and each touch brought an angry, prickly dart that launched
small storms of heat across him.
Something scratched at his mind.
A clawing itch that worked its way inward. A stuttering run down his spine.
Cool liquid pain. He braced himself against this sudden brute invasion.
A tentative, telescoped presence slid by him in murky shadow.
Tiny warm breezes licked him, feathering his hair.
Something massive and deliberate circled. It moved in tides of light, filigreed by dancing shadows that flittered like small
mad birds against the windowpanes of his mind.
Abruptly he was not in the tight, rubbery air. Before him welled a streaming aura. Red and pink scraped and rustled. Shifting
blobs drifted, eclipsing each other like sluggish planets. Their shadows played among blue traceries.
He squinted, or thought he did. His arms and legs still swam in the gurgling, patient fluid that forgave all movement, but
he smelled an acrid wind. Heard harsh clacks and clatters. Tasted blood and a biting, cool jelly. Glimpsed a tunnel projecting
away from him in ruddy, smoldering splendor.
He realized that the cyborg had tapped into his sensorium. It was sampling him—he could feel a blunt, chilly, awkward rummaging.
Astringent light played along rumpled walls nearby. Slithery harmonics played somewhere, lurking just beyond clear hearing.
And he had gained symmetric access to its warped world. A ledge studded with ornately shaped protrusions swept by. Without
something he knew for comparison he could not tell how quick this motion was, but a sickening tug in his stomach told him
of lurching acceleration, wrenching turns around corners, abrupt surges up seemingly impossible wall slopes.
Gobbets brown and sticky rained down everywhere. They were languid, oscillating spheres that blew on a warm wind, voluptuous
and fat. Killeen realized that a dim echo of the cyborg’s hunger had leaked through to him, making his mouth water. A savory
drop struck the wall and bounced, wobbly and fat and beckoning.
The cyborg ate it. A rasping tang shot through him, not in his mouth but somehow up and down his chest, striking hard into
his cock, squeezing his ass tight in an exquisite, ungovernable
reflex. Killeen felt a stretched sense of something plunging through him, blundering.
The cyborg accelerated. Kileen felt himself rushing with a rolling yaw toward a snub-nosed cylinder of white and orange. The
cyborg did not slow and Killeen instinctively braced himself for a collision—which did not come.
Instead, the cylinder swallowed them. What had appeared to be a protruding point was instead an opening. As they sped through
hexagonal tunnels, banking up onto the side faces with centrifugal ease, Killeen began to get a sense of the place outside.
Arthur said: