alt.human (32 page)

“!¡
curious
¡! What is it?” I asked, tired and confused, thinking now wasn’t the time for more complications, and that they should just be clear about their decision, whatever that may be.

“!¡
hesitant | uncertain
¡! I’ve got something to tell you,” said Jemerie. “Something important.”

“!¡
SUPPORTIVE
¡! Y
OU’RE STAYING
?” I asked them. “That’s good. Some sanity to go against Herald. That’s fine, really. I think it’s right that most should stay and only a small party continue the search for Harmony.”

It saddened me to be parting from two of my oldest friends, but I was determined it would only be a temporary thing. If we found Harmony, then we would send back for the rest to join us; and if we didn’t, then we would reach a point where we gave up looking and would return here.

“!¡
hesitant
¡! That’s not it,” said Jemerie. “We
are
staying, but that’s not what I wanted to tell you. It’s Hope.”

I peered at him, then looked around to see where Hope was. After a moment or two I found her, sitting near to Saneth, knees drawn up to her chest. She looked alone, lost even. I remembered the gentle touch of her lips when she kissed me, all the nights we had shared.

“!¡
cautious
¡! Hope? What about her?”

“!¡
firm
¡! She’s not like us,” said Pi. “You need to know before you follow her to gods know where.”

“!¡
defensive | confused
¡! What do you mean?”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! Like Sol,” said Jemerie. “When Sol was killed and cut open and we saw what she was like inside – not all blood and mess like we are. Not human. It made sense when I saw that.”

“What did? What made sense?”

“!¡
factual reporting
¡! Back at Villa Mart Three,” said Jemerie. “When the watchers attacked and only a few of us escaped... those bugs. The flesh-eating bugs. You got them on your hand. Hope got them on her face and I dressed it. Her face: it wasn’t blood and muscle like one of us. !¡
revulsion
¡! It was fibres like plastic. It was like what was inside Sol when she was sliced open.”

The guardians... Like Sol, like Callo.

Hope was a guardian.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

I
STOOD ALONE
and looked across at Hope. She sat by Saneth, waiting for me to join her for the night. Her honeyed skin looked almost orange in the glow of the fire.

I remembered the touch of that skin, of her lips.

How had I not known? How had I not realised?

I walked down the track, away from the hollow where we had found shelter and where a community would be built. The moon lit my way, just enough light not to stumble and trip over the uneven ground and the tangles of undergrowth.

Hope... not human. A guardian.

I felt as if someone had bound my chest tightly, so that I had to fight for every breath. My heart beat hard and fast. Around me: dark trees, the woods a deep black; the occasional sounds of night creatures, insects, an owl screeching, something scuffling in the bushes. The air felt heavy, as if rain was almost upon us.

I thought back to that day in Villa Mart Three. Frankhay’s raid, the fighting over almost before it had started. The stand-off when Frankhay had realised what a broken, hollow shell Sol had become. The smudge on the sky that became a cloud, became a whining, seething mass as it descended.

It was Jersy who had gone down first. A tail had whipped down from the black cloud, flicked his cheek, and almost instantly his face had been eaten to bone, the hand that he had raised to his face stripped white...

Hope had pulled at me. She had known what was happening before anyone. She knew we had to flee. She had seen this before in Angiere.

The mad rush to escape, the mass of bodies plugging the doorway from the roof terrace, the two of us escaping across the crag. Seeing that mass of bodies from inside the nest, the seething mass of black, the harsh white of bone, bodies dissolving, bodies disintegrating.

The blemish on Hope’s cheek. A tiny black mark like a blob of tar. The feel of my fingers scraping at her face to get the flesh-eating bugs off her.

There had been blood, but had it been hers or just mine?

She had held her hands to her damaged face, as if holding it together, or covering it from view.

Had the bugs eaten at her more slowly? If she had been real flesh and blood would she have survived?

She had kept her wound covered all the way out, until Jemerie had dressed it. Since the attack, I had only seen it covered, or healed over with new scar tissue.

Hope, a guardian, an artificial. I knew it to be true.

S
OME TIME LATER
I returned to the camping ground, exchanging a few words with Ash and another of the young Hays on guard duty. No one stirred as I threaded my way through the scattered bodies.

I saw that Hope was still awake, still sitting with her knees drawn up tight. Watching me, waiting.

I found a space where bracken had been trampled flat. Jemerie and Pi slept tangled there, and nearby were the dark-clad bodies of three members of Frankhay’s clan.

I lay down, put my hands behind my head and stared at the stars.

She watched me still. She was confused then, didn’t understand why I had gone off on my own, didn’t understand why I had settled away from her now that I was back. She wanted the contact, wanted to be held. She did not know what had changed. She started to wonder if she had misjudged everything. Kissing me, as the previous night had shaded to morning, had seemed the right thing to do. But I hadn’t responded, and now I kept my distance.

Now, the feelings she thought I’d held for her... that was what she felt for me.

Now, watching me from across the clearing, she didn’t want to sleep at all, if it was not tangled with me.

And I lay there, and ignored her, because I still couldn’t understand how she had so misled me about her true nature, and I didn’t know what she was doing here or what she wanted, or whether we could even trust her directions to Harmony.

T
HE NEXT DAY
broke grey and damp, a steady drizzle falling. Looking out from our vantage point, we could see little of the land before everything merged to grey.

Frankhay walked ahead with Hope; the clan-father was giving too many directions – “This way! No, this way!” – and trying to be jolly.

I hung back and found myself walking with Saneth, the chlick opting to ride on the back of the sidedog as a man might ride a horse. It looked a precarious arrangement, top-heavy, and the chlick’s false eye swivelled repeatedly in what I took to be fear.

Nothing would improve my mood, it seemed.

We were splitting up, which now seemed such a bad idea to me. We were looking for a city that none of us even knew to exist, led by an artificial who had received directions in some half-arsed vision. And the rain was the kind that seemed like nothing but soaked you in an instant and made every item of clothing rub, and somehow you could feel hot and cold and clammy all at once.

“!¡
dejected | hopeless
¡! What is she?” I asked eventually, shaping the words almost before I had had the thought. “Saneth-ra, tell me. What
is
Hope? She’s not one of us, she’s not human. I know that much. But she sounds human, she feels human, she acts like one of us.”

I remembered the feel of her body so intensely, then; it was as if I had jumped back in time to a point where we lay together and the world was distant. I remembered the feel of her lips on my jaw. “!¡
fighting for control
¡! But she isn’t, is she?” I said. “She isn’t one of us at all...”

“!¡
provocative
¡! She is you,” Saneth said. “She is all of you. The scholar pup says Hope is not human, but some might conclude that she is more truly human than any of the rest of you.”

The path climbed the hill and now the trees gave way to rocky outcrops and thickets of stumpy pine, barely taller than we were.

I wiped the rain from my brow. “!¡
stubborn
¡! She is not like us,” I said. “She’s an artificial. How can we trust her?”

“!¡
disappointed | leading-on
¡! Hope is herself,” said Saneth, turning to look at me and wobbling precariously on her-his mount. “In her head she is a human like any other one of you. But Hope is also more than this. We each of us have many natures, many potentials. Within this lauded-one there is the potential for
she
and
he,
and such potentials mix with chemical and electrical impulses and patterns beyond mere human comprehension to make the rich and superior complex that is Saneth-ra ad-Pelastrum.”

That last was a form of name extension I had heard before: a label that changed as the carrier’s state changed. “You’re right,” I said. “I can never know you, truly. But so you can never know me. All we have are the words to bridge the gap.”

“!¡
approval of junior scholar
¡! And so, can you even know another of your kind, with only words to reach across?”

Saneth was using my words against me, and suddenly I didn’t know what I was arguing. “!¡
stubborn
¡! She’s not like us,” I persisted. “She is not of my kind.”

“!¡
patient
¡! She is more,” repeated the chlick. “Hope is one who carries within her head something that is special. She carries the All of humankind, a bridge to a condensate... a gathering together, a summing up. She is what it is to be human.”

“!¡
confused
¡! But how? She’s artificial. She can’t be more human than a human!”

“!¡
patient explaining to junior scholar
¡! She is the result of a watcher experiment,” said the ancient chlick.

“!¡
surprise
¡! The watchers? But–”

“!¡
admonishing
¡! The watchers are not all the watchers who would eradicate the kind that is human. The watchers are more than merely the Hadeen.”

I tried to make sense of this with what I understood of the watchers from the lessons of Vechko and others. The watchers were small creatures that came together, communal symbionts that formed the bodies we saw. Each watcher, whether it took the form of a humanoid or some other creature, was a colony; each such colony was part of a greater mass. They were hive creatures that could come together physically in various forms, while mentally they formed a continuum, a single, shared consensus. That was what we understood of the watchers.

“!¡
deferential
¡! The watchers are as one,” I said, carefully. “So how can there be factions and divisions? How can there be the Hadeen who want us dead, and these others who experiment with us, who do things like... like
Hope
?”

“!¡
patient
¡! Watchers are as you say. But within, there are currents, non-uniformity. Nodes of difference form clusters, form differentiation. Some watchers have been sung to be different.”

“!¡
alert
¡! ‘Sung’...?”

“!¡
approving
¡! All reality has been sung, watchers included,” said Saneth. “How else could it be?”

“!¡
doubting | disturbed
¡! So this has been sung?
I’ve
been sung...?”

“!¡
lecturing junior scholar
¡! If life emerges on one planet, then it is a universal truth that life must emerge elsewhere. And if life emerges in two places then it is so improbable for it to only emerge in two places in the Great All that it must emerge elsewhere, and elsewhere, and elsewhere. Everywhere, in all abundance and variety.”

I nodded. I had never thought of it in those terms, but the chlick’s reasoning made sense.

“Where life emerges, competition so emerges, and successful variants out-compete the weak, and life evolves. Sentience emerges, and if sentience emerges once from this developmental race, by the same reasoning, so it is that it will emerge more than once. Everywhere.

“The Great All is fecund with life and with intelligent life. For every intelligent species there will be species which evolved much earlier, and their sentience and knowledge will be so far greater that they would appear as gods.”

Saneth’s false eye swivelled forward and then across to fix me. “!¡
arrogant | superior
¡! Just as the chlick appear as gods to humankind,” she-he said, “so there are others that are as gods to us. Gods so far advanced as to have conquered all of space, understood it,
known
it. Sentience is everywhere and knows all, and is dying. Once all is known, what more purpose can there be?”

My head was racing. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what more there could be than knowing everything. My own horizons stretched little beyond mere survival.

“!¡
hesitant
¡! I don’t know,” I said. “What is it like when all is known?”

“!¡
approving
¡! Everything. Every last detail is known, plotted, measured. All of reality is sung.”

“Everything?” I peered around in the murk. We were approaching the crest of the hill now. I thought of Cragside, unsung. Re-sung to something other than what it had been.

The starsingers... Was Saneth telling me that the species so ancient, so far advanced that they should be regarded as gods even by the gods themselves... this race of super-gods was the starsingers?

Chapter Twenty-Nine

H
OPE AND
F
RANKHAY
were the first to reach the top of the ridge of hills. On that first day after our group of survivors split, the clan-father had done his best to keep everyone’s spirits up, but soon had fallen to silence.

Hope’s head was full of the night she had spent alone, distraught that by pressing herself upon me she had pushed me away rather than brought me closer.