The Waters Rising (60 page)

She sighed, nodded, conceded. “We’ve been arguing over that for several generations. One group of us has been experimenting with vegetable body parts for humans, hoping we could live on sunlight, soil nutrients, and water . . .”

Blue turned his head to stare at her, his mouth half-open as he considered Abasio with branches. “What would that look like?”

“The volunteers looked like themselves with green wings added on. It worked, but the vegetable system is so much slower that the volunteers had to spend most of their time just sitting in the sun. If they were awake, thinking took up most of the energy they were accumulating. Moving was very slow and difficult. Talking was at a rate of about one word a minute. When we took the wings off them and let them go back to eating, they described it as a kind of dream world. Ideas were slow; images were slow; they couldn’t even hear speech—it went by like a burst of sound with no meaning in it. Some of the volunteers came out of the experience convinced that trees think all the time, it’s just so slow that we can’t detect it.

“We’re still working on the possibility that people could sleep in the daytime while they accumulate energy, then take off the wings and work at night.”

“So, I’m right. If you don’t turn us into vegetables, carnivores will have to eat fish and herbivores would eat seaweed.”

Blue stared out through the door while she attached and assembled tiny parts in the light of the window. He was trying to imagine talking with wolves. How does food talk to someone who is hungry? Does a hungry person want to take time to talk to food? If they could talk to one another, could they still eat one another?

He mused, “So you’ll grow vocal cords in the wolves. Then you’ll teach them to talk. Then you’ll see if they actually can. Then you’ll ask them if they want their young born able to talk?”

Precious Wind picked up one assembly and attached it firmly to another, setting the linked devices into the sunlight. A tiny wheel began to spin. She said, “That’s the last step in the process, inserting the right sequence into the reproductive organs. Once we find the right sequence.”

“Keeps you from being bored, I suppose,” said Blue. “Keeps you from feeling seasick. I’d like to make a suggestion.”

“That being?”

“There’s a thing called a . . . wampus? A sea thing. It’s about my size, I think. Abasio read me a book about it.”

“I think you mean walrus,” she replied, starting a new assembly. “But they need dry land to have their babies on. A lot of the creatures that were originally land animals that returned to the sea and evolved further while in the sea still need dry land to bear children on. Walruses. Seals. Sea lions. All those. Whales and dolphins bear their young in the water, but they have to boost the babies up to the surface to breathe until the babies learn to do it themselves.”

“I’d prefer to think of my foals as turning into something like the wampus, if it came to that.” Blue brooded over this for some time, forgetting completely to be seasick. “Or a very large herbivorous sea otter that could live on seaweed. They make nests in the weeds and lie on their backs in the sun. That looks very pleasant to me. I remember rolling on my back as a colt. It was comfortable.” He went back to his railing, so full of thought about sea creatures and eating seaweed that he forgot to be seasick for the rest of the day.

O
ut on the deck, Justinian was continuing his conversation with his daughter while Abasio listened from where he leaned on the rail. He had never really seen the ocean until now, on this ship, and he found it endlessly fascinating. He found equally fascinating the things Justinian was telling Xulai. How he had loved Xu-i-lok. How they had met. How they had been married. How frantic they had been when they found out she had been “cursed,” though they knew it hadn’t been a curse. Whoever had done it had done it badly but repeatedly. If it had been done right, the princess would have died within a season instead of lingering all those years. How they found out it had been Alicia. What they had learned about the Old Dark House.

“The Old Dark Man sounds like an ogre to me,” Abasio commented. “I met a few, back in the wild lands. At first I thought they might be trolls, but trolls weren’t intelligent. Both were the results of unhindered genetic experimentation, and I’ll bet your Old Dark Man was the same, at least partly. Why does he want to kill Tingawans?”

Precious Wind, who had finished assembling her devices, emerged from the cabin with Blue behind her. “Now that you’re talking of the Old Dark Man, there’s something I have to tell Xulai. Well, tell all of you, actually. May I interrupt you?”

Justinian nodded and gestured toward a large, square hatch cover where they could sit near one another. As the others arranged themselves, Precious Wind sat down, her booted feet neatly together. From her pocket she took a red, ovoid object and a sheaf of papers, holding them before her. “I found this where you hid it in the wagon, Abasio. I should have given it to Xulai long ago, but I put it off.”

“That’s not like you,” said Xulai chidingly. “You don’t put things off.”

“You had just learned who you were and how old you were, and I thought any additional responsibilities might be crushing. It was to ease your life that your mother left you this,” Precious Wind replied, holding up the red oval she had been holding: “This is
ug ul xaolat.
”

“What is it?”

“In Tingawan the words mean ‘a thing master.’ It has a number of ‘things’ that it can order and direct. You can speak to it or simply press it with your fingers to summon a hunter, or to move very swiftly to a place of safety, or to have something carried to another place. Whatever thing you want, this master summons it. It can move you faster than a slaughterer can move. It is why it was entrusted to your mother, so she could escape, if necessary. Unfortunately, this device could not protect her from the peril that came upon her.”

“Why has it not been used since?” demanded Xulai, in that voice they had heard only a few times before. “Why has it not rid us of this monster?”

“It was not designed as a weapon. It was meant to be used by scouts, by people moving in the wild. It helps in getting across steep canyons, up and down cliffs. It will carry equipment. It will kill prey, but it will not kill anything that looks human.”

“Unfortunately, our monster does seem to look human,” said Abasio almost angrily. “And we have no immediate need to be transported across a canyon. Was there something else?”

“Yes, a great deal else.” She sighed. “Be patient,” she said. “It is a long story. I will tell it not as we discovered it, in bits and pieces, but as a whole, as it happened.

“Late in the Before Time, humans everywhere had divided into tribes, clans, sects that were constantly at war with one another. Each group hated others because of the language they spoke or the god they worshipped or the color of their skin or the food they ate or their personal habits. Few of their hatreds were based on reality; many of them were brought into existence by people who used something called ‘media’ to whip people into frenzies of hatred. All these hatreds resulted in violence and death.

“One or two tribes among them, we’re not sure which ones or how many, put all their ingenuity to work and developed terrible weapons to kill their enemies. There was nothing new in the killing, only in the weapons themselves. Some of the brilliant technologists did a prideful, stupid thing. They invented killing machines that could . . . smell intelligence.”

“Smell?” cried Abasio.

“We call it that. The machines could sense intelligence. These men, whoever they were, sat down together and codified their own beliefs. They wrote them down precisely, defining the words they used, making them explicit. A set of beliefs might go something like, ‘
We believe in Oog, the only true god. We believe women were made to be inferior to men and take orders from men. Oog rightfully directs some men, Oog’s high priests; only those men may rightfully direct other men; all men may rightfully direct women and children. Women’s task is to have children and obey men. Oog directs that all Oog-believing men convert or kill all other men who do not believe in Oog or the rightfulness which Oog asserts. Women and children who refuse to believe in Oog must be killed.
’

“In order to belong to their faction, their group, their tribe, their clan, Oog people had to believe exactly what was written down, all of it, just as it was written. Then these inventors recorded the brain waves of those who believed these things. We think they averaged them in some way, and the resultant pattern was called the ‘pattern of acceptable belief about Oog.’ They put this pattern into their new machines.”

“So the machines would believe?” cried Xulai. “Machines?”

“No,” said Abasio, feeling sick. “So the machines would recognize what thoughts about Oog were allowed.”

“Exactly,” said Precious Wind. “The inventors then directed their machines to kill anyone whose thinking about Oog did not match the pattern.”

Justinian got up and went to lean over the rail, his face ashen. “What one man may devise, another may steal,” he said.

“Exactly, again,” said Precious Wind through her teeth. “What one may devise, another may steal or reinvent. The slaughterers were very hard to build. We know each one used the brain and body parts of a human volunteer. Only volunteers would have the basic mental pattern. Before long there were dozens of slaughterers going about the world killing people with differing ideas about Oog. Then a group decided that a different language should be banned and anyone thinking of a word in that language was killed. Then a group decided that certain foods should be banned, so anyone thinking about that food or raising that food was slaughtered. Then certain ideas about sex were held to be anathema, and those who thought about those things were slaughtered.

“When the slaughterers had killed off languages A through L and all who worshipped gods 2 through 100, and all who raised parligs, and all who thought about unusual sex practices, some of the zealots refined their objectives. Each in their own region had killed most of those who had
different ideas,
but there were many still alive who thought mostly about other things. They didn’t think about Oog or any other god, they had never raised parligs, they didn’t really
think
about sex that much, so the tinkerers decided that instead of killing people who held incorrect ideas, they would kill all those who
did not hold the correct ideas.
The devices were told to find all those who did
not
think P or Q and kill them.”

“All,” grated Abasio. “Not merely men.”

“In their pride, the original creators of the killing machines did not realize that intelligence permeates all living things to some extent. The machines were taught to smell intelligence; they smelled it in all living things that did not think P or Q, including animals, birds, bees, ants. The result is what we now call the Big Kill.”

“When it was over,” said Abasio, “ninety percent of all creatures living on land were dead. Only creatures on remote islands survived. Some of them.”

Silence gathered. Eventually, Precious Wind said, “As I said, each slaughterer was made from a volunteer. Back then they were called ‘terrorists.’ Each slaughterer began with a real human being, a real human brain, though very little of the human being was left when they were completed. Some of the personality survived. Each of the creatures had a name, for example. The tissues that were removed from the original human being were banked for their future use during
maintenance
. Human cells had to be renewed at intervals. The slaughterers mimicked humans in being able to reason, plan, move, adapt. They had memory. They could remember, if vaguely, who they were, what they had done, who they had been. In their folly, their creators had made them and their associated devices self-maintaining, self-repairing. They had been given a very long lifespan. However, they did have to have periodic maintenance, and each one had a maintenance device to which he—they were all male—retreated from time to time for renewal.

“There were a few rebel scientists at the time who fought against the slaughterers. They found out how the creatures were made. They could not destroy them because the killing machines moved around too swiftly. So the rebels retreated to some secret redoubt and developed a way to reach the part of the whole system that did not move around: the maintenance devices. They found a way to change the routine of the maintenance devices so that when the slaughterers went to be maintained, they would be kept in perpetual maintenance. They were not dead, but they were immobilized. In the words of the men who did it, they were ‘stuck in the maintenance loop.’ If those rebel scientists had failed, or if there had been a few more of the slaughterers, all life on earth would have died except trees and grass.”

Justinian murmured, “Why doesn’t everyone know about this?”

Precious Wind said, “The few humans who were left knew how most of the race had died. They knew why. They probably wanted to forget it. In any case, it became taboo to speak of it on the theory that speaking of it might make it happen again. In a few generations, the truth was forgotten. The killers became the ogres of future fairy tales. The historic episode came to be called simply ‘the Big Kill,’ a terror that had happened at the end of the Before Time.”

“But you of Tingawa learned the specifics,” said Justinian. “When?”