Deception Well (The Nanotech Succession Book 2) (39 page)

“I need help,” Lot conceded.

It squatted beside him, its tentacles folded neatly against its torso. “Yes, Lot, yes. Get food?”

“Maybe later. For now I need to know what’s going on . . . or if I’m going crazy—”

“Lot’s okay.”

He smiled. “Thanks. Do you sense any other people around here?”

Ord snapped upright and spread its tentacles on the wind. Several seconds passed. “No.” It folded in upon itself.

No people. No Jupiter. He couldn’t dodge a sense of crushing disappointment, though he’d suspected it himself. The trace was so pure, so strong, so unvarying. How could it be anything but artificial?

But where did it come from?

“Do you sense anything similar to human?” he asked. “Something that imitates human?”

“Yes, similar,” Ord agreed.

“Can you locate it?”

“From the ocean.”

Lot stared at the jumbled, glistening water. “Do you think it’s from those creatures we saw?”

Ord shrugged.

Frustrated, Lot got up and walked inland. The water in the marsh sat in gooey green ponds. Insects buzzed at the surface. He waded through the shallows, looking among the reeds until he found a mound, half-submerged in the water. The mounds in the crater had exhibited thermal layers. He pressed the flat of his hand against the surface of this one and felt the heat. What process produced it? He could detect no methane, or other gases of decomposition. No debris gathered over the surface. If it was alive, what did it feed on? What did it produce? He remembered the phantom, the way she’d waded into a mound and disintegrated. Was it coincidence? Or had the mound destroyed her? Why?

Maybe it had created her too.
An engine of the Communion?
He felt a brush of memory, but he could not hold on to it.

He glanced over his shoulder, to see Ord slinking through the vegetation. “Come here,” he said, crooking a finger at the robot. “Can you analyze this? Figure what it’s made of?”

“Sure, Lot.” Ord scuttled over, then climbed up on the mound. It spread its tentacles out across the surface, its face wrinkled in a synthetic frown of concentration. Then it pulled its tentacles back to its body. The tip of one of them flattened into a hard, pointed spear. Lot quickly backstepped several feet. Ord pierced the mound. A hiss erupted from the punctured surface and Lot backed off even farther as a peppery sting reached his sensory tears. The robot withdrew its probe, seemingly unaffected. It hopped down off the mound and scurried over to Lot. “Many components present. City library suggests—”

“You’re connected to the library?” Suddenly nervous, he glanced up at the line of the elevator.

“Yes, Lot. City library suggests a typical mix of common Chenzeme plague vectors, information storage links, Earth-clade genetic data—”

“Does city library suggest what the mounds are
for
?”

Ord frowned, its head cocked exactly like a real person under atrial link. “Guesses only. Information storage. Plague incubators. But a quandary exists. The mounds may be an historically recent phenomenon. The library’s original records contain no mention of these structures. Apparently they were unknown to the Old Silkens. This is considered remarkable given the thorough observations these people made of other aspects of the planet’s biology, leading some researchers to surmise the mounds did not exist in this period.”

“But the mounds existed when the new Silkens arrived?”

“Yes. A preliminary report on the structures appears within the initial planetary survey.”

The blue woman had spoken in the accent of Old Silk. Her people—or some part of them—still existed within the Communion, interlocking sparks of awareness awkwardly attempting half-forgotten ways of communication. . . .

Another comes within us.

Chenzeme plague vectors thrived within the mounds. Chenzeme neural patterns existed in his head and presumably in Jupiter’s head too, generating chemical sight. Jupiter had lived in the Well. He would have been aware on some level of these soluble ghosts and their latent connective patterns. Lot fit that pattern with enzymatic perfection.

Why?

Jupiter could not have created the Communion, yet he’d been part of it. Chenzeme plague vectors; Chenzeme neural patterns. Could other communions exist in other places?

Jupiter had come out of the Hallowed Vasties.

A teasing trace of memory touched him, but he could not pin it down. Worry clutched at him. He looked at Ord. “What’s happening in the city?”

“News brief?”

“Yes.”

Yulyssa’s voice startled him as it spoke from Ord’s mouth in a swift mediot summary. “The election-day riot has continued to expand in scope, threatening the safety of all citizens. Protesting factions—composed primarily of refugees and adolescent Silkens—are demanding free access to the Well. Very little information can be confirmed, but indications are that most city functions are now under the control of dissidents. Certainly the decentralized recycling and security systems have been appropriated. City authority denies there’s any immediate danger, but counsels everyone to check the pressure seals on their dwellings and to stay indoors until the emergency has passed. Scattered reports of warden activity in the city core and on the elevator column hint that this function too has been taken over by—”

“Stop it!” Lot barked. Yulyssa’s recorded voice cut off. Lot stood in the muck, his hands trembling.
Crazy
.

They were all crazy, a veneer of madness sweated out of the real core of human civilization. All sane stock had made stable communities in the integrated cordons of the Hallowed Vasties. Only the misfits and the madmen had wandered on, sociopaths gathering on the frontier in unstable patterns, spilling over the edge of chaos.

He sat down abruptly.

Chaos.

Muck seeped up around him. Instability had hit the Hallowed Vasties too, if the disappearing Dyson swarms meant anything. Captive stars blazing bright once again; consciousness burning off in the stellar winds.

Had Jupiter brought the seed of destruction out of that core? Had he known it?

He looked at Ord. “You have to find somebody in the city I can talk to. Somebody in control. One of my—” He could hardly force himself to say it. “—one of my
followers
.”

“Sure, Lot.”

Jupiter had reviled the Hallowed Vasties. He’d watched them fail. And he’d fled to the Well.

Nothing is lost in the Well
. On a molecular scale alien biochemical structures could be identified within Well life-forms, from Chenzeme plague vectors to human genetic systems. But they were changed from their source. Evolved. Augmented. Hybridized. Winnowed? Perhaps. Complex systems could evolve through selective processes, reaching high states of organization without the guidance—or interference—of a conscious mind. Beneath the veneer of the Communion, the Well did not seem to be self-aware, not in the way of having an ego. Yet it had survived, while the Chenzeme were long gone.

Could human consciousness find a place within such a system? Jupiter must have thought so. Could human consciousness become its ego? Providing it with goals?

Natural evolution had no goal. That which survived, survived, and survivors tend to reproduce, willing their survivor traits. But egos function otherwise. Egos establish goals (illusions), they prattle on about destiny, they go crazy, they self-destruct, they burn out their existence in allegro tempo, building on themselves until the illusions are finally ripped aside or the whole system collapses of its own unsupported weight, but in either case it finishes. It finished the Chenzeme and maybe it was finishing the Hallowed Vasties even now, pulling them under a closed horizon of inward-turning minds, sucked down in an irreversible closure.

But the Well felt different. This was a greater thing. Ancient, wily, and powerful. Yet without ego, it remained curiously blank. Jupiter must have seen himself and his followers filling up that blankness, their Communion becoming the ego of a system that could pull every living thing of every clade into itself.

“Lot?” A suspicious-sounding masculine voice spoke from Ord’s mouth, interrupting his thoughts.

Lot groped to identify it while flies buzzed over the mud. “David? Is that you?”

“Lot, we’ve won!” David crowed. “We’ve got wardens on the column, repairing the elevator system. We’ll be down in a matter of hours.”

The Well had subdued the Chenzeme. It would always defend itself. “No assault Makers, okay, David?”

“Sure, Lot.” But doubt had crept into David’s voice. “You okay?”

Unity. Harmony.

The promise of the Hallowed Vasties, but writ against the Well. The Well had healed Jupiter of plague. Had he believed it might also heal that greater flaw that was causing the Vasties to fail? Lot’s gut clenched as he glimpsed the gamble Jupiter had taken. Unconscious processes could operate on only a pragmatic value system:
survivors survive
. Foresight, mercy, sympathy, forgiveness, love—all these were inventions of conscious minds. The Well could not love them. Its governors could not forgive their mistakes. It could only react, according to its own, unknown protocols.

“Lot?” David asked in soft concern.

“Go slow,” Lot warned him. “It’s not a simple choice. There’s more.”

“It’s endless, isn’t it?” David asked, with a mix of eagerness and awe in his voice that sent a shiver down Lot’s spine.

Believe in me.

Lot shook his head. He could not find his own faith, no matter how he groped. “It’s alien,” he whispered. The flies continued to buzz over the mud, tiny, oblivious immigrants from Silk.

A
T DUSK
L
OT WALKED ALONG THE BEACH
, Ord clinging just under his hair. David had called a couple of times to report that the work on the elevator was going slower than expected. Packs of repair Makers had failed, and needed to be replaced. More time had been lost when city authority launched an electronic counterassault aimed at disrupting remote communications. “But we’ll get there,” David insisted.

Lot urged him to be cautious.

The ocean had lost its greenish cast in the failing light. Still, the waves rolled forward with unnatural lassitude, ponderous swells that only reluctantly crested and broke in a brilliant white froth. “Ord, why’s the water green?”

“The color and texture of the liquid is attributed to an elusive colloid that may serve an information-storage function.”

The Well’s library?
Information moving through every facet of the Well’s biosphere, hitchhiking on the water cycle. He imagined he felt the probing touch of molecular hands, assaying his cells and the odd, hybrid structure of his mind. To what end? He shivered, wondering what would happen if he ordered David to stay in the city.

CHAPTER

29

“
L
OT.
W
AKE UP.
S
OMETHING IS HAPPENING.”

He came awake instantly, his body stiff, fear threading his heart. Jupiter’s presence hung thick in the still night air. There were no stars. A low cloud deck had formed while he slept on the beach. He could see the cloud bottoms, dimly illuminated by a reflected green light. He shoved himself up on his elbow and gazed out to sea.

Beneath the breaking waves, the reef was aglow with a blaze of emerald green.

Slowly, he got to his feet. He could make out the shape of the reef despite the refracting water: a long, broad spindle lying parallel to the shore. The waves dimmed when they passed beyond it into the near-shore shallows. And the expanse of the ocean beyond was dark.

A large mound?
He wondered. The mounds he’d seen glowed only in the infrared.

Abruptly, the light began to pulse. It moved in swift ripples in a direction opposite the waves. Ord stirred, a tentacle tapping in soft concern against Lot’s leg. “City library identifies this pattern, Lot. It is the bar code of a machine alphabet.”

Lot breathed slowly, carefully, trying to restrain an anxious expectation. “A message?” he asked softly. “Can you read it?”

“City library translates it as
Help, Lot. I am your friend. I, Nesseleth. Do not forget me.
”

Nesseleth? He frowned, trying to discern some relationship between the narrow spindle of the reef and the vast structure of the lost great ship. “I don’t understand,” he whispered to Ord. “Nesseleth went down. She burned in the atmosphere.” A shudder passed through him. There was no way she could have survived it. Her hull would have been burned away, her insulation, her engines, her decks, all the way down to—

“Her core!” Lot shouted. He leaped high into the air. The core shelter, where the ship’s mind was housed. It was the sternest part of her construction, the last refuge for ship and crew alike. He ran down to the water’s edge. “Nesseleth!” he shouted, on the chance that she could hear him. The pulsing lights ran on, and he felt as if he could almost read them now:
I am your friend. I am your friend
.

Ord was speaking, demanding his attention. “Good Lot, the city calls you. Speak to your friend David in the city. Lot?”

“Later,” Lot said.
Nesseleth had survived
. Ignoring the objections of his suit’s DI, he pulled on his hood, sealing it over his face. The respirator kicked on. Ord’s tentacle wrapped around his gloved hand. Lot gently removed it. He waded into the surf until the water ran past him knee-deep. Then he dove under the froth of a wave and stroked hard.

N
ESSELETH’S CORE WAS COVERED WITH WEEDS
like fine, emerald streamers. The light pulsed beneath them, a softer green. Dark shapes circled over the electric ground. They moved in neat groups of two or three, like guardians on patrol. They were twice Lot’s size and fishy-sinuous, propelling themselves with strong strokes of their long, trailing tentacles. Undulating fins on both sides of their smooth torsos seemed to provide balance and steering. A pair of the guardians jetted toward him. Lot decided to make for the bottom. He kicked hard, fighting his own buoyancy to get down among the weeds. The pair spun off into darker waters.