Lights in the Deep (32 page)

Plodding through the gravel and sand I thought about the one time I’d been to the Mojave, back on Earth. At least there, I’d had some mountains to look at in the distance, along with a few Joshua trees, and the occasional rattlesnake. On this world, everything had been worn flat and made unremarkable. Without the Professor’s telemetry to guide us, I suspected it would have been supremely easy to wind up meandering in circles. One dune or low bluff looked like the next.

After a while I noticed that the captain’s eyes had closed. She was slumped against the Professor’s back. If either she or he were bothered by such close contact, neither of them showed it.

“Military is as military does,” I said under my breath. Sleep anywhere you can, when you can.

Good for her.

I kept walking.

Chapter 11

Afternoon brought us to the edge of a narrow, deep canyon. A small river wound its way across the bottom headed northwest to southeast. The water tumbled and rushed against the rocks below, and a rumbling echo drifted out of the canyon as the Professor and I considered our options. I reluctantly woke the captain, helping her down off the back of the Professor’s disc, while he helped the Queen Mother down too. The two aliens spoke briefly in their insect language, then she scurried off to the Canyon’s edge, peering out over it while the captain and I counseled with the Professor.

“Have you detected any further signs of mantis signals or technology?” Adanaho asked. She didn’t sound as stuffed up as she had in the morning, and her eyes looked somewhat better too. I was encouraged by this. Maybe the extra sleep had done her good.

“No,” said the Professor. “But, given our new geographical impediment, I do not think it would matter even if I had.”

“Can’t your disc take us over?” I asked.

“The carriage is not an aircraft,” the professor said. “Its impellers operate according to proximity with solid and semi-solid mass, not gravity per se. I would sink like a stone until I’d reached within just a few of your meters above the canyon floor.”

“If we can find a way down,” I said, “maybe we can rig up a way of traveling on the river current. Plus, we’d have fresh water any time we wanted it. I bet that flood creek we filled our canteens in is a tributary to this drainage. If we follow it far enough, we might reach a lake or something larger. What’s your hunch, Professor? Would your people prefer such a location for setting up a temporary base of operations?”

“I believe that is a logical assumption,” said the Professor.

“How about it, ma’am?” I asked, looking at my superior.

“It’s as good a plan as any we’ve had so far,” she said. “We’ll have to make sure and get the Queen Mother’s opin—OH MY GOD!”

I froze, watching the captain’s arm shoot out with an index finger pointed behind me to the canyon’s edge.

I turned just in time to see the Queen Mother’s body drop over the side. The Professor nearly bowled me over as his disc shot after her, then he too was over the side. The captain and I rushed to the edge and flopped onto our bellies, sliding across the last few inches of sand before putting our chins at the lip, hands clawed across the precipice.

What we saw was the most improbably beautiful thing I’d witnessed since going to space with the Fleet as an older teenager.

The Queen Mother circled lazily around and around in the air, slowly spiraling with her wings spread to their maximum width, each beating in concert with the others, and together making a low rhythm that sounded not too dissimilar from a helicopter. She obviously weighed too much and her wings were too small for sustained flight, but while she flew—her body extended and piercing the air like a javelin, her beak aimed directly forward and her legs and forelimbs folded up tightly against her body—she was magnificent.

The Professor’s disc fell straight down the wall of the Canyon.

The speaker grill on the disc’s front was blaring amplified mantis speech. Which the Queen Mother appeared to happily ignore.

“She’s beautiful,” the captain whispered.

“I didn’t know they could fly,” I said, still astonished.

After a couple of seconds, Adanaho’s lips peeled back from her teeth in a wide, genuine smile. “I don’t think the Queen Mother knew either. Until now.”

We watched as the Queen Mother continued her slow descent, until at last she lightly touched down on a wide sand bar in the middle of the river. Walking to the edge, she lowered he mouth to the water and began taking in copious amounts of fluid.

The Professor zoomed up to her, his disc’s motors making funny shapes in the surface of the water as he moved across it. The Queen Mother appeared to ignore him for a few more moments as he hovered directly next to her, animatedly talking with his mandibles.

Finally she looked up at him.

She said something.

The Professor backed away from her and went across the water to the canyon wall directly beneath us.

I gauged the distance to be two hundred meters down.

Now he really did look like a bug. Smaller than my thumb.

“We are committed,” he said, his speaker grill turned up to maximum. His vocoder-voice echoed long and far, up and down the canyon.

“We can’t climb down at this point,” the captain yelled, then began coughing.

“Let us travel downriver until there is a place where you can join us,” replied the Professor.

“Agreed,” I called at the top of my lungs. Then I stood up and retrieved my load from where I’d dumped it on the ground. The captain stood up too. She trudged over to me.

“Sorry ma’am,” I said. “Looks like you’re hoofing it again.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I need to work the knots out of my muscles. Here, give me my pack, I will carry it.”

I eyed here, but decided to follow orders.

She took the pack without complaint, and off we went. Staying just close enough to the canyon edge that we could see down to the Professor and the Queen mother, but not so close as to give me and the captain vertigo. After-images of the Queen Mother’s sudden, elegant, altogether astounding flight ran across my vision as we walked. Until that time I’d still considered the mantes to be an ugly race. They were also vicious and brutal in combat. But for a minute or two, I’d seen a mantis take flight—soaring and spectacular.

“What a story you’ll have for the intel people,” I said as we walked.

“What a story,” the captain agreed. “Nobody’s going to believe this. I wish I’d had a camera or a recorder on me to get evidence. She looked as natural as can be. Free as a bird, one might say.”

“Amazing that her instincts were that good,” I said. “She jumped off that cliff purely on faith, apparently.”

“Apparently,” said the Captain.

I sensed something else from her, though she didn’t speak for several more minutes.

“Chief,” she said.

“Yes ma’am?”

“Is it true what you said?”

“About what?”

“About you not having had a woman in your arms for a dozen years?”

“You were eavesdropping again,” I chided her.

“I have good ears,” she said. “So, it’s true?”

“Uhh, yes ma’am.”

“How come?”

“Beg your pardon?”

“How come you didn’t have a lady friend on Purgatory? Someone to share your sorrows with?”

“That’s a good question. I’m not really sure. Granted, I am not the world’s most handsome fellow, but that didn’t stop a lot of the other prisoners from getting the attention of the opposite sex. I think once I built the chapel and took over where the Chaplain left off, people viewed me like I’d been set apart. The chapel and I became synonymous.”

“That’s too bad,” she said. “It must have been hard.”

“Yes it was,” I admitted.

It took a couple of seconds for the unintended double entendre of my reply to sink in, then she and I both burst out laughing.

For a moment we stopped and doubled over, until our diaphragms hurt. Then we got back to walking, the laughter dying to giggles, and then spastic coughing on Adanaho’s part.

She drank water while I waited, then we started out again.

“Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t mean to make you gag up a lung.”

“I think it’s allergies,” she said. “Something here—in the dirt, on the dust of the wind—is rubbing me wrong. I’ll be okay. FIDO.”

“Fuck it, drive on,” I said, smirking. The motto had been around in one form or another for as long as men and women had saluted and marched. Contrary to my first impression, as an intel officer the captain didn’t seem averse to physical challenges. In fact, the longer we walked and the more I watched her, the more I came to believe she actually relished the effort. Every stride was a statement. Her back held straight and her head up, swiveling occasionally so that her eyes could take in the landscape.

“Ma’am,” I said.

“Yes Chief?”

“What have you and the Queen Mother
really
been discussing the last couple of nights?”

“Like I said, it’s hard to discuss anything with someone who doesn’t speak our language,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about that, and I’ve decided I’m wrong. They may not be able to speak as we do, but they can hear us just fine. You don’t have to be able to speak a language to hear it, or understand what’s been said. I’m now wagering that the Queen Mother understood every word out of your mouth. Back on the
Calysta
she stated that our beliefs and rituals were of no interest to her. Why’s she suddenly become curious now?”

Adanaho knit her brow while she considered my words.

“I can only speculate,” she said. “

“Speculation’s better than nothing,” I replied.

“I believe the Queen Mother is in a state of flux. Pulling her out of her disc terrified her almost to the brink of insanity. But in the days since we left the escape pod, her perceptions have been pure. Unadulterated.”

“Unadulterated?” I said, somewhat incredulous. “You make it sound like her disc was an impediment, rather an advantage. Five will get you ten the Fleet would kill to replicate a functional disc. That’s a nifty piece of the mantis puzzle we’ve still been unable to unravel. Imagine that kind of advance technology adapted for human use.”

“I can,” she said, with a slightly sour expression. “But we’re already so dependent on our own technology—for what we eat, how we travel, how we live, even how we play, and for what we
think
and
how
we think it—that we forget what it was like before computers, spacecraft, faster-than-light travel—”

“Do I detect the sensibility of a Luddite?” I said archly.

“I do
not
hate technology,” she replied. “I simply think we’ve gotten lazy. Did you know that the bulk of our major scientific discoveries came to us without the aid of modern equipment? Hell, Chief, they built the first atomic weapons using long math and vacuum tube processing power. The first true spaceplane, the X-15? Also built using nothing but slide rules and a lot of shrewd paper-and-pencil figuring. Then came the Information Age, and suddenly anyone could know anything via Internet search engines. Why waste time memorizing or synthesizing? Click, the info’s at your fingertips. Entertainment too. The immersive games became addictive. People forget about the danger of the Virtual Reality Plague.”

“Nobody’s forgotten about that,” I said. “There are still millions of people on Earth going through therapy and rehabilitation.”

“After how many decades?” she asked, stopping in her tracks and facing me. Her eyes had begun to sparkle keenly. I could tell from her posture that we’d hit a sore point.

“There are whole generations of people addicted to VR. Why come out and face the real world when make-believe is so much nicer?”

“Plenty of people recovered when the mantes attacked,” I said.

“Sure, when we were forced to, we snapped out of it. Sort of. But if the mantes never existed and we’d been left to just toodle along the path of least resistance…I am not sure any force could have reversed the trend. We built ships in virtual bottles, then climbed in after the ships and pulled the corks tight behind us.”

I couldn’t deny the ferocity or facts of her argument. Every family had a member, or members, who’d become addicted to VR. Minds lost to imaginary spaces existing purely inside the global information networks. Each man or woman a fairy king or cyber queen, a god or goddess of his or her own private electronic realm. Wealth, luxury, power, all limitless and beyond belief.

Just sit down, plug in, turn on, and tune out.

An infinity of sweetly alluring lies.

I shuddered.

“So how does the VR Plague tie back to the Queen Mother?”

“Have you ever seen the bad cases? The ones who went into VR as kids only to come out as adults? Everything you and I take for granted, even eating and drinking and shitting, is an alien experience for them. They don’t remember the real world, and because there are no rules in VR there’s no need to bother with the mundane functions of ordinary existence. Most of those recoveries take years, and the patients hate it.

“But a very few of them delight in escaping. Like being reborn. They can’t get enough of the
real
around them. Every morning they wake up is a chance to feel real hot and cold water from a real tap, running through their real fingers. To hear real music played on real instruments with their own real ears. To see a really blue sky with real clouds and a real sun with real warmth on your face when you….”

She trailed off. I stared at her as she walked. Her eyes were looking straight ahead, but she was clearly lost in reverie.

Instantly, I intuited the truth.

“You were one of them, weren’t you,” I said.

She looked over her shoulder at me.

“Yes I was.”

“How young were you when you went in?”

“Six.”

“Jesus, your parents let you get on VR at that age?”

“It’s the world’s most amazing baby sitter.”

I swallowed hard.

“How old were you when you came out?”

“Fifteen,” she said. “The war was hurting us. The govern-ment began cutting off and rationing resources. My parents unplugged me and sent me to a state rehab school for VR kids. When I was sixteen, they said I was well enough to go stay with my mother’s sister in North Africa, since my parents were denied custody. Auntie hated VR, considered it a tool of the devil, and took me in like the daughter she never had. When I was 18 I joined the Fleet through an ROTC scholarship. When I was 22 I went to space, and never looked back.”