Great North Road (121 page)

“Thanks.”

A minute later the center of the reception chamber ceiling distended, and a translucent blue bulb surged down until its base touched the floor. The alien was inside, standing perfectly still as it was gripped by the smartfluid. It remained standing as the blue substance poured back up into the ceiling like an inverted raindrop splash.

Constantine waited for a few moments, but it still didn’t move. There was no hint that it was anything other than a statue of leathery rock. He zoomed his vision in, examining the creature’s eyes. That was the giveaway. The human orbs flicked around, searching the chamber.

“My name is Constantine North.” His voice filled the reception chamber. “And I must say, from a quantum dynamics point of view, you have a remarkable composition.” In case the creature wasn’t auditory-capable, the words also flowed along the curving wall in fifty-centimeter-high purple lettering. Constantine generously displayed what he was perceiving, projecting a hologram image into the air next to his visitor. A humanoid form, with shadows of internal structure.

“Your molecules have an odd quantum signature; they’re not quite in phase with spacetime. But they mimic our physiological layout, as if they’re embryonic, ready to become one of us, or maybe the opposite.”

The alien turned its head. Constantine studied the shift of the molecules’ quantum state that allowed the solid skin to become fluidic. It was an extraordinarily complex fluctuation pattern. One that would presumably allow the solid blade fingers to flex, to shred a human heart.

“I don’t know what additional abilities you have, but we will do our utmost to contain you. Should you manage to break your bonds, well, there are weapons of last resort that will be used against you. I did not have you brought here out of hostility. I simply wish to converse with you. If you are not capable of breaking out of this reception chamber, then you will remain here until you chose to initiate communication. That is really all I have to say.”

He sat back in the chair, swinging slightly from side to side, waiting …

The alien’s quantum signature abruptly altered again. Molecules flipped to a normal state, interfacing perfectly with spacetime. Becoming real. The visual manifestation of the change was impressive. Its tough hide gained color and texture in less than a second, materializing into a smart blue-gray business suit, worn with a white-and-gray-striped shirt and a natty purple tie. The face shivered into human skin, with dark brown hair cut in an expensive neat style.

An adult North took a slow breath and gazed around at the chamber with a mildly disdainful expression.

“Ah,” Constantine said in delight. “Nephew Aldred, I presume?”

*

Wide arcs of snow sluiced away from both sides of MTJ-1’s plow blade as Angela kept the power on to the axle hub motors. Wipers swept the windshield vigorously, clearing the constant impact splatter of the crystalline slush. She concentrated hard on the open ribbon of flat snow ahead, making sure there were no boulders in her path. The patchy radar image on the windshield wasn’t a lot of help—huge conglomerations of ice were clinging to the radar’s housing. That focus helped her to ignore the stink in the MTJ’s cab. Omar was in the passenger seat, jaw clamped tight against nausea and distress, trying to show an interest in the river that unrolled ahead of them. It was three days since they started driving along the tributary, and the rest of the convoy personnel were only just starting to shake off the illness. Elston and Garrick were on the passenger seats behind her, both of them wrapped in blankets and toughing out the discomfort as their bodies slowly recovered from the toxin.

It hadn’t taken Camm Montoto long to isolate and identify the poison. Microscopic narsberry spores had been injected into the composition gel. Even Angela had been worried when that was announced. Narsberry was notoriously toxic. The spoors were microscopic and airborne; poorly washed food resulted in dozens of hospitalizations each year. And this dosage level was a lot stronger than anything a dusty lettuce could impart; even
her
kidneys might not fully recover. Whoever it was, they’d come perilously close to murdering everyone in the convoy.

So now Angela was gunning the MTJ hard, chasing down the tributary as fast as she dared. As if that would take her away from danger, from the would-be serial killer and the monster in the trees. But Leif had been right, the river was a road through this difficult land, flat and level, in some places a couple of hundred meters wide. She’d learned to be more cautious in the wide areas; the river was shallower there, which meant there were boulders buried in the ice and snow the big vehicle was cruising over. There’d been a few strikes when she was taking point and hadn’t read the radar quite right. Not really watching out, not seeing the abnormal lumps until too late. Then came the frightening screech as the bottom of the blade shaved the rock, and the MTJ gave a lurch before settling back down again. But the MTJ could take it. She relished powering on with the brute of a machine—it was like taking revenge on the planet and everything it had thrown at her. She was leading them away from danger, from the past.

Red icons slid up into her iris smartcell grid, and she gritted her teeth. “Son-of-a-bitch.” Still scouting the peachy-colored snow for hidden snags, she started reducing power to the motors. “Braking,” she told the other drivers on their ringlink.

Elston grunted out of his doze. “What’s happen—oh.”

“Sorry,” she said. “But we knew he wasn’t going to last.” The red icons were from Luther’s bodymesh. The severe sickness brought on by the narsberry spores had been too much for his organs, already weakened and strained by the accident. In one way, Angela had been impressed by how long he’d held on; but it had cost him dearly in suffering. Not anymore. The red icons were turning white—neutral. The same as Mohammed’s had turned ten hours previously.

“We need to refuel anyway,” Elston said.

Angela brought the MTJ to a halt and turned the wheel. The convoy vehicles slowly arranged themselves in a circle, sensors and remote guns pointing out across St. Libra’s icy wilderness. It wouldn’t be night for another couple of hours, but they switched the headlights on anyway, sending the beams out to scour the low cliff of crystalline tree trunks that marked the riverbank. Their radars swept about, scanning the surrounding environment as best they could. Nothing could sneak up on them now, and Antrinell’s orders were that no one stepped beyond the circle.

Angela took several minutes to get dressed for the outside. There was no wind, but the temperature had dropped alarmingly over the last couple of days. People were exhausted. Those who had avoided the poisoning had been doing all the driving, and most of the refueling. Mistakes came easy. Leif had taken his gloves off to deal with a tricky coupling at the last refueling. His skin had touched the hose’s metal nozzle. The cold numbed it instantly so he didn’t realize; then when he did try to snatch his hand away he tore off a long strip of flesh.

“Take care out there,” Elston said weakly.

“You know me.” The lightness was forced; she’d seen how he still shook under the blanket. And she’d been keeping track of how much all the invalids in her MTJ had been eating. It wasn’t nearly enough.

She stepped out onto the frozen river and made her way back along the MTJ to the inner circle. The glow of red taillights added to Red Sirius’s salmon glimmer, casting the world into a dapple of vermillion. There were nine of them standing in the dark light, the lucky ones, depending on your point of view: those who’d escaped the poisoning—Lorelei, Lulu, Leora, Antrinell, Karizma, and Leif—and those who had recovered enough to help drive and take care of the sick—herself, Madeleine, and Josh.

“This is a major logistics point for us,” Antrinell said to them. “I’ve been reviewing our fuel situation, and I want to dump truck 2. We can off-load all its remaining bioil into the tanker and the bladders in truck 1. One less set of fuel cells will extend our range considerably.”

Angela glanced over to Karizma, but the woman’s face was hidden behind bands of cloth and her goggles. She didn’t make any protest.

“Okay then,” Antrinell said. He’d clearly been bracing himself for an argument. “Josh, you and I will carry Luther to the sledge and put him with the others.”

“Why bother?” Josh asked.

“Excuse me?”

“What’s the point? Why exactly are we burning bioil we can’t afford lugging a whole bunch of corpses around the countryside? We should leave them here. Pick them up when all those Daedalus flights show up and save us. After all, it’s not like the jungle is full of wild animals—they’re not going to be eaten.”

Angela had to admit she admired the logic, even though the notion was intrinsically wrong somehow.

“For the record,” Leif said. “If the monster gets me, you can leave me behind, too. I don’t want to be responsible for holding the survivors back.”

“They are our comrades,” Antrinell said in a rasping tone. “We should show them the respect they deserve for their sacrifice.”

“They sacrificed shit,” Karizma said. “They were murdered. And if they slow us down, we’ll be next.”

Now Angela understood: It was another challenge to the legitimacy of the convoy, another corrosive gnawing away at the leadership. Introducing doubts, encouraging the undecided to question the goal. Elston would have faced them down; Antrinell was different, a good second in command but lacking his own authority.

“What’s it doing to them?” Angela asked quietly. “To Mark Chitty, and the others? After all, they were carried away for a reason. Anybody want to guess what it is? No? Well, for the record I don’t want to be left behind for it to vivisect or use in its version of a satanic ritual, dead or alive. And while we’re still running that record, our fuel isn’t that critical, not yet. Their weight on a sledge won’t make any difference.” Which was bullshit. She knew it would be touch and go if they made it to Sarvar on what was left now. Her own private hope was that they could get close enough so the camp’s skeleton crew could drive a tanker out to them, or—even better—a Berlin helicopter.

“We’re not speculating about the fate of corpses,” Antrinell said, seizing the moment. “Start the refueling. I want to get it finished by nightfall. The aurora borealis is bright, so we should be able to make some progress this evening.”

The group broke up, trudging away grudgingly to their assigned tasks. Angela couldn’t help gazing at the trees along the nearest bank, the glittering ice that encased them and the vines made the trunks look like frozen tusks. Sky and earth the jaws that would slam together and crush them. But that was just her overactive imagination.

“Thank you,” Antrinell said.

“I just want to get the fuck out of here,” Angela told him. She watched Madeleine slog over to the tanker, which she was now traveling in with Atyeo. It wasn’t where she wanted Madeleine to be; the girl should be in the MTJ with her, where she would be safer. But that wasn’t something she could swing right now. In a few days, when people had recovered and duties were shared out again, maybe.

“I get that,” Antrinell said. “We should reach the Dolce in another day or so. After that it’s a smooth ride up to Sarvar.”

“Sure,” she said, and went off to sort out the food packages.

*

Aldred had vanished an a quantum twist as fast as he’d appeared. Constantine studied the alchemic entity that had mimicked his nephew, utilizing every sensor they’d crammed around the reception chamber. Its atomic structure had somehow reverted to abnormal phasing. Whatever the origin of its abnormality, Jupiter obviously didn’t possess a sensor to detect it. Not that he’d expected success in the first minute, but neither had he been ready for defeat on a technological level.

“I’d like to know what kind of avatar I’m talking to,” Constantine said. “Assuming you are an avatar. Or do you just remote-control Aldred?”

The thing in the reception chamber cocked its head to one side. A quest pulsed out, establishing a link to the chamber, with Aldred’s identity code. “I am Aldred as seen through my mirror.”

“Your command of language and syntax is excellent. Would you care to define your existence in a little more detail for me?”

“This is a copy of Aldred. It incorporates his biological structure and neural pathways, as well as his memories. However, it is not him—it is the bridge between me and your species.”

“Could you tell me who ‘me’ is, please? That is rather important.”

“I am the life of St. Libra.”

“Again: Could you expand that?”

“I evolved billions of years ago, on a different planet somewhere else in the galaxy. I am the pinnacle of my planet’s life, the endpoint. I became one. I now reside on St. Libra. Its star is young; I will have a long time living in its warmth.”

“May I know where you live? We never saw any signs of sentient life. If we had, we wouldn’t have settled there.”

The Aldred-avatar in the reception chamber tilted its head back a couple of degrees, as if listening to some strange noise. “Constantine, I think we both know that isn’t strictly true. It was obvious from the very beginning I was not native to St. Libra.”

“You’re talking about the jungle, the plants? We did assume St. Libra had been bioformed, yes.”

“You speak only of the physical, the individual. I am beyond that.”

“How exactly?”

“The plants, my plants, are my biological component. I reside within them.”

Constantine found his own mouth was frozen in a gentle smile of wonder. “The plants have a group consciousness? We never found any kind of cells that appeared neuron-equivalent.”

“There are none. As I said, the plants are my biological component. I have many facets, but the biological is what I grew out of. They are my roots into this quantum reality.”

“So the life on your origin planet evolved into a single consciousness?”

“Yes. As you aspire to take your machines to their apex, so they may become your gods and slaves, the singularity you crave; so my ancestors were content to let life flow to its destiny. As you can imagine, it is a longer but ultimately surer course. I believe that in their animal form those ancestors weren’t as short-lived as you. They never had your understandable impatience.”