Four hearts: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and:
She realized through closing her eyes, opening to watch the ceiling spin, the gritting of teeth, fingers through hair, that the absence of stubble was a refreshing and welcome change, and that she could feel the inverse imprint of dimples on her inner thighs as Maire smiled, looked up, went back to work, the drape of raven locks, curled with effort, hours, sweat, hiding most of their collective sin:
The inhuman tongue shaped, re-shaped, the central division splitting, flicking, rearranging and reconceptualizing the meaning of pleasure, of desire, as the interior vocal cords housed within resonated reflexively, whispering without thought through muscle, through the tips of the snake’s voice, one ruddy finger caressing, one circling, both speaking into wetness and soft, soft magenta: do we and with a frantic shifting of position to the other tongue, to other, darker recesses, bound not with teeth, but with lips, kissing, dragging, inhaling the essence of have an agreement?
Maire arose from thighs, wiped moisture from her mouth. She smiled over a tongue closing upon itself, sealing with mucus both her own and another’s. Shattered voices repaired as one: Do we, sweet-ness? The tugging of a voice formed beyond the vibration of flesh, somewhere within the electricity, the halo.
The response was slow, not as a result of thought or consideration or reticence, but simply because Kath couldn’t calm her hearts enough to form words. Hands now idled from intertwining with hair danced lost across her bare thighs, abdomen, breasts, settled over her cardiac plate. La-la-duh-dub. La-la-duh-dub. Slowing, the edge of orgasm, the recession of the interior oceans of loss, of desire for a moment, an hour, a day with this dark partner, replaced with the richness of pleasure.
“Of course…Of course.”
“Good.” Her smile seemed misplaced, given the decision, the alliance. “Blinds off.”
The panels walling the entire chamber shifted from murky gray to reveal a projection of the planet surface far above them. Realized in four dimensions, the outside was a disconcerting veil of sensuality: the bitter wind, the brittle scrape of the lumber schools drowsing through waves of chlorostatic mist far above the surface, the heady intrusion of pine pitch into membranes just now waking from aromas hidden in uncovering, in opening, in sex.
Maire rolled on to her back and snuggled against Kath’s side. It started from above: the singing of the trees, lilting, howling, branches miles long quivering through the mists, sparks floating down, a lazy display of fireworks that sputtered out long before planet impact. The song…
“This is where it begins.” Maire looked into her eyes, lids narrowing, lips bracing with resolve. “This is how we win the war.”
Kath looked into a night sky brazen with perpetual sunset from the system’s binary stars, the great black forms of the sentient trees blocking out swathes of meager starpoints, their own shower of silver falling to ground, never reaching, never reaching:
Silver.
It was terror and it was beauty and it was all.
Michael made the final decision and launched the Zero-Four probe from a Gauss pipeline that stretched miles within the planet to the void between stars, between times: one hundred grams of alloys and plastics and the echoes of biology. The primary propulsion rockets separated and the solar sail deployed in a flash of gossamer golden filaments. The sail spread out to grasp the stars, and a fusion concussion fed the ever-increasing velocity of the precious spacecraft. At several million astronomical units and several hundred thousand years, the unit achieved nine-tenths light speed. The journey of infinity had begun.
Nanotechnological ramscoops collected the materials required to procreate, and in the night between the galaxies, the tiny vessel created an exact copy of itself. The two remnants of a civilization now eons dead separated, and for an instant, the first machine felt an emotion. It dismissed the feeling and began to replicate another child. The second vessel set off on an alternate trajectory, the translucent solar sail sweeping eerily before it, mute golden wings in the void of silence and nothing, forever departing from its immaculate and sole parent.
The process continued for billions of years. In time, out of time, the original machine died, but its infinite spawn carried the message forever onward. The universe became populated with the machines. The expansion of existence eventually forced the universal heat death. Organic life became an impossibility, and the technological lifeforms flourished. The machines continued onward, waiting for the time that their precious cargo could live again.
When the universe fell back together, having achieved maximum expansion, the machines fell silent. When they encountered a solar system, sometimes they could reconstitute organic life from the biological patterns recorded so long ago on a planet in a system long dust. All that they could do then was wait for that life to grow anew.
In those days between the death of everything and the rebirth of less than humanity, the Zero-Four probe hurtled into the dark and spawned. Its progeny spread outward and consumed everything in their path. Before Omega, it judged that all that it had created was good and redeemable, and it sent the newborns back into the blackness to save those unfortunate enough to have remained behind.
They would live forever in the ocean of silver fire. Omega would be the salvation and the nirvana and the extinction and the
wind bit at her still-flushed cheeks. She pulled her hood forward, forcing her hair into a flailing mane. She pulled errant wisps from her sticking lips. She’d left the scientist Kath drifting into sleep between silken sheets. A part of her still longed to be there.
Concussion from above of static thrust, cycling engines tracing the planet surface with gentle force, currents of dust and needles. The transport was magnificent, drawfed only by a migrating school above, the scavenging parasite herds trailing silently behind.
Clawed feet, jointed legs hinged from the transport’s belly. It more crawled to the surface than landed. As ramps descended, as sides split and smaller vessels thrust into the mist, as ground vehicles began rolling from the transport as a burst eggsac releases spiderlets, Maire was proud of the army she had gathered.
Her mind reaching, her tongue flicking behind parted teeth, no longer filed to barbarian standards, she tasted the communications blinking across the plain, the battle language, the grunts and hisses of action, of anger. Fear: hidden below bravado, hidden not deep enough.
A tracked vehicle approached the compound. Maire frowned, not at the approach, but at what she had begun to taste on the edge of the passenger’s thoughts, a strange, bitter, hazel confusion.
Treads came to a rest. The passenger jumped from the top hatch.
“Maire—”
“What’ve you found?”
“We don’t know. Just—”
A tugging and she saw, heard, smelled: a ridiculous beeping, two sets of tones with silence interrupting: blip blip blip, beep beep beep, blip blip blip, silence.
She frowned.
From dreams, the warmth of the bed, the coolness and fragility of panic, she thought of the freedom that Black Space promised. She thought of Berlin, now so far from her on the planet of machines and nears. She had been unfaithful. She struggled to find calm, but the potency of memory intruded with yesterdays of stubble, stretching, and good pain.
She sat up in bed, drew the sheets around her still-nude form. She wasn’t cold, but she was.
To be so far from One…
To what end had she agreed? How could she ever tell Berlin of the plan that had been set into motion? He was due to return on the next outward tide with the harvesting fleet for the chlorostatic flora.
Black was on fire, had been for decades. The animals, the machines…Maire had told her of a childhood, living but not truly living. Underground with the fires above (literal and figurative), the horrible memories of feasting on the rotten flesh of her fallen parents, of her friends. The time when the plains of wheat had died in the chemical scourge and white light had shot the emergency aid shipments from the sky.
There were legends that they’d once made the machines, but Kath didn’t believe them.
Berlin’s mutterings in his sleep…The final battles before the nears, before the artificial lifeforms had made it all the way to Planet One. Hers was a species enslaved by automaton baubles.
He’d whispered of a tower of black falling from the sky, crushing the planet surface, a line of white through the sky, and then words fell victim to slumber’s confusion and grief’s overflow. Tears choked him and he turned over, coughing, pulled the covers closer over his shoulders. She’d reached out to touch him but hadn’t.
Pieces of a grand puzzle slid into place with liquid and silver precision.
She wasn’t cold, but she was.
Closing her eyes as the waldoes gripped the treadcar, swung it up through the chaos of troops, fighters, other land vehicles, coming and going, loading and unloading, up through sparks and static and jets of super-heated gelatin, she thought back to the calm of war, that moment before impact and combat, that moment when all becomes honed senses: the waft of the protein sludge sloshing in the bio-bombs, the tickle of phased silica shielding, that scream the weapons arms of land vehicles made, lacking lubrication, as pallet after pallet of twelve or fifteen medium-range slash-and-blow missiles slam into place, the muffled tinkling of contents: enough compressed shrapnel slurried with acid to disperse five square miles of unshielded ground soldiers, the stink, the stink of decay and exhaust, blood, sticking to sand, sticking to bones burst through flesh.
She opened her eyes.
The car bounced to a landing platform, quick-sealing deck fudge locking it into place. Maire jumped down from the vehicle, her stomach lurching into place under the pressure of ship gravity. Her first few steps were impressing, sucking, as the fudge completed its curing process.
She stood in place as an internal transport tube lowered over her body and flew her to operations. Her hearts pounded through thousands of feet of lowlight tubing.
Gentle landing.
“Where is it?”
Maire stepped forward into the ship’s core. Helmeted technicians worked at a ring of consoles, their manacled limbs projecting and determining the courses of vessels in wait above the atmosphere, hordes of ground troops spreading across the surface, things as simple as the waste reclamation system and limiting the level of toxic oxygen in the living spaces on-vessel. Dozens of distinct projection bubbles clouded dozens of consoles.
One bubble unclouded.
“We found it in the Seychelles Drift.”
Nude limbs undraped from its squat, shaking interface gauntlets loose to the floor. It stood, stretched, skin pale gray, the juncture of legs revealing nothing other than the signature evacuation slot of the unsexed neuter. Maire’s thoughts drifted briefly to the disgust and anger that even three decades of star travel couldn’t erase entirely from her mind, made even more potent by her lust for Kath, the evidence of their union still on her lips.
“Maire?”
“Hmm?” but that voice, that voice. She hated the middle species.
“Seychelles Drift. Remind you of anything?”
A cave, and teeth, and eyes. And silver. And a voice: reaching, reaching.
“Just show it to me.”
The lock cycled open in the chamber forty levels above the operations deck, in a secluded area housed between drives and weapons, just under the coolant pond. She felt the heat of engines, of lights, of something else, something just besind the eyes, just besind now.
Hiss and release of atmosphere shielding. Rivulets of steam and sparks.
“That’s it?”
The neuter walked in before her, fingers tracing over wall-mounted displays. “I’ll boost the outer barrier and run the interior down to visual. You have to see this.”
In the center of the circular room, tracing lasers faded, swept, intensified. Waves of phase shielding rippled out, slowing as force gradation shifted within the containment perimeter. The item hanging at the room’s center flickered into Maire’s vision.
“Readings?”
“Nothing atypical. It’s absorbed a lot of radiation, but that’s to be expected if it’d been in the Drift for a while.”
“What’s it made of?”
“Mostly gold, titanium.. But there are some elements we haven’t yet identified.”
“Metals?”
“Yes.”
“Anything else?”
“Trace biologics on the interior. We can’t sequence them.”
“How’s that possible?”
“Alien genetic patterns. Our printers haven’t been able to build from them yet.”
It was a ball of yellow and gray metal, an imperfect ball, flattened gently like the exterior reproductive shells of the flying reptiles that frequented the coastlines of ocean planets. It could fit in the palm of her hand. Maire leaned in closer. “What are those ports?”
“Propulsion, I’d imagine, although it appeared to have been free-floating for quite some time. Wait…” Its fingers activated something on the control mounted on the wall. “I’m lowering the solar range to half.”
Maire watched as the light in the room dimmed to half-standard. The alien ball whirred to life, a panel slicking open on one flattened end, two tiny masts deploying, the silken sweep of a golden solar sail filling the space between.
“It’s a vessel.”
“Might be.”
“Has it opened before?”
“Not when I’ve been in here.”
“Scan it again. Maybe we can pick up something from the inside now.”
Maire watched as the neuter’s grotesquely long fingers traced over the control panel. A scan arm swung down from the ceiling, dug into the phase shield around the tiny golden vessel. The ball didn’t react to the scan; its sail still stretched out, reaching for purchase on the meager supply of photons the half-solar bombardment could offer. Its scan complete, the arm withdrew.
“Okay, I’m getting—Well, that’s different.”
“What?”
“Scan analysis usually takes a few seconds to complete, but the system’s locked up.”
“The system hasn’t had an outage in—”
“It’s back.”
The neuter activated room display, and the scan results began to stream across a virtual plane beside the vessel. Document after document, cross-referencing, linking, red-coded secret documents flashing and opening, photographs, four-dimensional re-presentations of centuries of accumulated scientific knowledge, all tore across the field of vision too fast for Maire to comprehend, such was the glut of the information ocean results on the scan query.
“It’s accessing the entire library of temporal sciences.”
“More than that…”
“Time sciences, threat science, metallurgics, genetic databases, megascale engineering, quantum—”
The image froze.
“—physics. What are we looking at?”
The neuter didn’t have an answer.
A representation of time and space: bent physics, a blinking dot linked through forty-thousand years of drift in the Seychelles, a line denoting forward travel through time traveling exponentially outward, the edge of another galaxy, another time, another blinking dot.
“Okay. Tell me if I’m reading this right.”
“Sure.”
“Either the libraries are fucked, or it’s telling us that this vessel has been sitting in the Drift since the machines appeared, and before that it traveled forward in time from a place on the other side of Black Space?”
“Um…Sounds about right.”
“How’s that possible?”
“It isn’t. It’s bent physics, time travel, deep space travel wrapped in one. This thing is ancient, but it’s from the future. Not even our future.”
“That explains the genetic patterns.”
“We’re looking at the machines’ creator. It has to be. There was nothing else in Seychelles that long ago.”
“If it’s true, this rewrites everything. We’ll finally know where the machines came from. We’ll finally be able to—”
Movement.
The solar sail retracted.
“Neuter?”
“Yeah?”
“What did threat science say about this thing?”
“No known weapons present. No toxins, minimal radiation, no—”
The phase shielding bubble around the vessel gave a last static burst and shattered to the floor, splashing across the expanse in a small wave. Maire’s boots and the neuter’s bare feet stood submerged in an inch of crystal sludge.
“Don’t move.”
Can one forget war? A succession of brittle images: a knife cutting through the flesh of a sister, calf muscle, open fire, black streaks in the sky and the scent of burning plastic. Can one forget war? Those humans, non-humans, eyeless, faceless, hordes falling, following, flying, the way she hid in the rubble, grew in the rubble, became an adult under the bloody rule of those who were not flesh, were not calf muscle, but who more resembled open fire, black streaks in the sky, the scent of burning plastic.
Maire screamed as the vessel opened, as the field of silver tore through her body, as the neuter beside her was stripped from the room, skin flayed, muscles and bone ground to dust against the wall, as she felt the same process begin within her, as silver, as silver, and then nothing.
The vessel closed.
Frozen in place, she hung next to the neuter inside the nothing. Dream, fog, without reason or movement. Her chest couldn’t move; she couldn’t inhale, but her lung bladder didn’t burn.
And where did the light come from?
All she could see, if it really was seeing and not a nameless sense, that ineffable crawl behind eyes and between times, was the neuter, its arms held before its face, mouth agape in horror of an end, frozen. Waves of
And she considered how horribly they’d always treated the slave class, the third sex (gender? or the precipitous lack thereof?). They weren’t even given clothing to hide that place between their legs where phallus or cleft appeared in the rest of the species. Realization: here in this dark, Maire was without clothing, uncovered, vulnerable, the only movement of her form her raven hair, swimming about in the nothing as if there were wind, a current, a prehensile ability to abandon her paralyzed form. It was cold, but she couldn’t feel it. Gooseflesh. Her nipples were erect on either side of the retracted cardiac shield cage, usually open to permit the free-flow of nitrogen into the inhale areas on the underside of her external ribbing, but now closed tightly around her hearts, making her chest a ridged plain crevassed by cleavage.
She thought the nameless neuter was trying to look at her, but its eyes remained clouded, fixed elsewhere.
Hundred of thousands of years of star travel and all her species had to show for it was a third division of the race, sexless, and enslavement at the silver hands of faceless machines from worlds buried deep in the Drift. The neuters weren’t treated as a part of the species. They were a workforce valuable only for their ability to withstand long flights without sterility and the occasional act of kink between non-breed partners in more-progressive joining communes.
She’d never fucked a neuter. The idea disgusted her.
But to treat them as a subspecies, to treat them as the machines treated the dominant groups of the race, to marginalize and persecute them for being breed-null…She wished she could have changed it.
With a wave of light, a tracing projection, the neuter was released from its motionless state for an instant filled with screaming, thrashing agony, and then it was gone. Maire was left alone in the nothing.
A tickle, an itching, a biting instant of pain between her eyes, and
the acrid sting of toxic oxygen, but she wasn’t choking yet, wasn’t feeling nauseous or dizzy. She reached for her cardiac plate to test the temperature of her inhale slits, but gasped and looked down: there was no plate. Her chest was smooth, unbroken by even the ridges of retracted secondary ribs.
More than just the atmosphere was wrong.
Rain outside, its tattoo on the rooftop of the building. People sitting at tables, drinking from white cups, steaming, and the scent of smoke: a person sitting at the counter inhaled a smoker, exhaled.
“Who are you?”
She started at the voice, from a young man sitting across the table from her. A sip of black liquid, napkin to the corner of lips. She reeled from the flood of new senses, alien experiences all around her, the physical changes that her body itself had gone through.
“I—” And she heard, felt the difference of her voice. She attempted to modulate the sound with her ancillary vocal cords, but she had none.
“Hmm?” He looked at her with kind, gray eyes. “Cat got your tongue? Who are you?”
“Maire.” She sat up in her chair, eyes wide, surveying the people around her. “Who are you?”
He chuckled. “The name’s Michael Balfour. I bet you’re wondering where you are.”
She nodded.
He took another sip, swallowed. Napkin. “I’ll let you in on a little secret. See all these people?”
At tables, in twos and threes: a young couple, hands held, the woman’s now displaying a silver ring on one, a black glove on the other, another at a table of books and laughter, red curls and sighs, the two at the counter talking so closely they could have been one, muddy brown and blonde intersecting in gray streaks, a white dot, a single dimple. A spattering of others, reading, watching the moving images projected on the wall, sipping, sipping.
“This is heaven.”
The word meant nothing to her.
“Heaven. Dig?”
She shrugged her shoulders, and Michael wondered exactly how a species could have no concept of heaven but could still exhibit the same mannerism denoting confusion as his once had.
“We’ve been watching you for a long time, Maire. Coffee?”
She looked down at the steaming cup he held between mocha fingers, the nails bitten in true Delany fashion to the quick. Her new fingers were tipped by the same translucent (chitin? protein?) shields, each with a setting moon crescent at its base. “No. Thanks.”
He sipped. “Took us a while to make contact. We’ve been waiting out there, dabbling here and there. You’re an interesting species.”
Cup to tabletop. She was trying not to breathe too much, breathe too quickly. Her chest hitched under her blouse as she attempted to spread her gills plate, but it was no longer there.
“I myself only arrived in-system about forty-thousand solar cycles ago. I wanted to check to see what my kids had made. I must say, you’re among the most interesting pattern variants yet.”
“You’re a god?”
Michael smiled. “Not quite.” His smile opened to a grin. “I know what you’ve done to your gods before, and I wouldn’t want that to happen to me. Just consider me a neighbor. A cousin, sort of.”
“What are you? What is this place?”
Hands folded on the table. “You have no concept of virtual worlds; I’ve done my homework. Guess I’d better start by telling you of a
sky blackened by war and disease and centuries of gaiacide. The only lights studded the rim of the launch tunnel, and even they were murky in the dead air of the dying world.
“Almost time, Michael.”
“Yes.”
“There’s still time to change your mind, you know.”
He shook his head across his pause. “I can’t go.”
The earth shuddered beneath them almost imperceptibly. Men in clean suits ran to the vehicles and sped away from the edge of the launch tunnel, forty miles away. Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and wiped away the stale sweat that had collected on his eyebrows and in the hollows of his eyes.
“Starting final countdown sequence. Any more to board?”
Expectant eyes regarded him with almost pity. He shook his head.
“Shut down the upload link. Irrigate the lines and initiate primary engine test sequence.”
The earth began to resonate with the power of the massive engines that lay hundreds of miles beneath the surface. There could be no turning back now.
“Test shows positive across the board. Waiting for coordinate lock.”
The binoculars went back to his eyes. The edge of the launch tunnel looked deceptively calm, bereft of the hundreds of clean-suited workers that had toiled over every inch of its interior for decades.
“Coordinate lock achieved. Planetary position is a go. Launch window open. Launch on your order, sir.”
Michael nodded his understanding. All hope for the continuation of the human species lay in the precious golden machine bundled safely within the launch vehicle. Millions of emulated humans living emulated lives in emulated worlds where the emulated sun still shined and the emulated water was still pure. Someday they would come home. They were the ark. When the planet had finally healed, they could come home and live again.
“Engage Gauss cycle in launch tower.”
“Gauss engaged.”
“Engage primary thrusters.”
“Primary thrusters engaged.”
With this machine, all hope lay.
“Launch.”
“Launching vehicle.”
The binoculars revealed a tunnel entrance that flickered with the Gauss cycle. Michael held on to the bunker wall with one hand to steady himself; the ground beneath them shook noticeably and fiercely. Never before had a vessel of such size or power been launched from the planet surface.
Where is it?
“Gauss cycle at max. Vehicle launched.”
Michael took the binoculars from his eyes and replaced them with blackened blast goggles. The vehicle emerged from the launch tunnel with a stark white ferocity that painfully illuminated the bunker interior and flash-reddened Michael’s face immediately. The sound and heat and light were unbearable even from forty miles out, but then it was gone, and the vehicle was out of the atmosphere.
“Launch successful. Vehicle has broken orbit.”
Goodbye, my child. Goodbye, my children.
“All right. Good.” Michael regarded his launch crew. “Start the disassembly process. Everything has to be taken apart before we abandon the city. There’s sure to be a resistance attack now that they know we’ve
launched, and that’s where the story really begins.”
He regarded his empty cup, motioned for the server. She smiled, one bullet-hole dimple, and went behind the counter for another pot.
“We’re here to bring you home.”
“Where’s ‘home?’”
His fingers tapped one through four on the plastic tabletop. “I wasn’t even supposed to be on the probe. I guess one of my over-eager or over-compassionate technicians must have ghosted my pattern while I wasn’t watching. They always had far more respect for me than I had for myself. Difficult to believe in yourself when you’re nothing more than a fourth-gen clone.”
The dimpled server returned with coffee. On her way back to the counter, her hand went to her partner’s back, lingered as she whispered something to him. Maire saw: the scar on her fingertip, the prominent bridge of her nose, the way her lips brushed his ear, brushing and whispering, perhaps the scent of smoke, perhaps the taste of him.
Maire absently rubbed the place where her hearts should have been.
“I know of your ambitions, Maire.”
She frowned.
“I built a machine that would save a world. And this is what it made, a thousand variants of my species scattered about our universe, a million variants spread across a million timelines, forevers expanding and contracting, and here, only here, have I found anything remotely resembling me. You know how hard it is to talk to crystals? To bioneural sludge? To control that evolution, to hope beyond hope that somewhere, somehow, things have lined up to create a semblance of familiarity? I’ll tell you the greatest secret of life: we’re all alone out here. No little green men, no hives or alien queens, no beings of pure energy. All we have is us.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything at all.
“Those silver machines that you hate so much? I made them.”
Eyes drew to slits.
“Something happened after the heat death. Maybe it was that dark matter, the holes in the universe we’d not been able to explain. My machine bred, its children bred, and somewhere along the line, something went tragically wrong. They don’t yet know we’re here,” his hand extended to indicate the air, the interior of the coffee shop, its patrons, “and I intend to keep it that way. They have to be stopped before they reclaim it all.”
Laughter from the counter. Michael turned in time to see a playful bite on the cheek, man to woman, tip to tip of nose, bite from woman to man: he had known love once, albeit unreflected. He closed his eyes and saw Richter’s spectrums of gray there.
“Why am I here?”
He looked at and through her question as it hung in the acrid air between them. “I need you to do something for me.”
“What?”
“I need you to kill a god.”
and she slammed to the floor from her stance, the lifeless body of the neuter falling beside her in a heap of unclothed flesh, a sickly crack as its fragile skull gave to the floor, the slap of meat on metal as legs bounced once and fell still.
Her first breath was fire. Her second was fire. She remembered
i contain multitudes
everything.
Hand to heart(s?) and she knew it had been real.
Her third breath was easier as she adjusted to two lungs, one heart.
She fastened the closure on her chest, concealing her lack of cardiac shield to anyone she might encounter in this vessel. She stood, dizzy, but stopped to bend and gently close the open eyes of the dead neuter.
She left the chamber without looking back at the Zero-Four probe.
i contain multitudes
Kath stirred in the bed from hesitant dreaming, the games of flesh remembered, the reward all around her in that bed, the tang marking sheets and lips with memory.
A brush of and then
She heard hushed movement in the adjoining room and knew Maire had returned.
With schlick and hiss, the door opened to the bedroom and she entered, still believing Kath asleep, moving to the wall panel where clothes were stored. She removed a rucksack and began shoving clothes in. From under a pile of stockings, she took out a shiver gun, checked the vibration chamber, placed it in her sack.
A pattern of light in near-dark: Kath knew the outline of the weapon by the spaces between shadows.
“Maire?”
Her hands stopped over underthings, fingers curling to fist. “I didn’t know you were awake.” She didn’t turn around.
Something was wrong. Kath couldn’t place it, tried to, failed, considered, almost gave up. Insight and
“What’s wrong with your voice?”
Fingers dragged against the wall, and the room gently illuminated. Maire placed her bag on the floor and sat on the edge of the bed. Her eyes avoided the touch of Kath’s. Reaching, reaching still
“Maire?”
She looked and Kath knew it wasn’t right, would never be right again, could never possibly be right again. The eyes were swimming between black and gray, each blink swirling tendrils of color into non-color. Blink and
“I have to go.” That voice, the horrible flatness of its tone, the single pitch, and grating, wheezing breath…“I’m going.”
“But—What happened? Maire, what happened to you?”
She was silent.
“Please, just tell me. I can—” and she reached for Maire’s shoulder.
“Don’t touch me.” The shoulder shrugged away in time to her growl. She stood from the bed and lifted her sack from the floor.
Tears verged. Kath’s breath came in halts and stops, the choke of sob, the confusion of the not-knowing. “Whatever happened, let me help you.”
“I have to go away. Now. I don’t know for how long.”
“Will I—”
“You’ll see me again when it’s time.”
“Time for what?”
The illusions our eyes play in night, without light or reason: an instant of static, a halo of silver, and Maire’s form returned to normal. Don’t touch me
“When it’s time to strike.”
She turned and walked out the door, leaving Kath to an empty room, echo, and fear.
“You’re quiet.”
The observation platform hovered miles above the surface, the “grass” of thousand-foot trees, the embryonic stage of the lumbers. Kath had once seen a hatchery where a surrogate mother had nudged those infant flora into the sky with great cracks of vestigial root structures and the dusting of centuries-old branches to the forest floor. Those first hesitant leaps into the sky, that keening song, the wind made by the mature herd swimming above them…It had been beauty, steeped in the scent of pine pitch.
“Hmm?” Her gaze met his.
Berlin grinned. “Exactly.”
“I’m sorry.” Her fingers threaded through his, now wrapped tightly around the safety ring of the platform. She’d forgotten how disconcerting an observation flight was for those usually confined to galactic or surface travel. It was a different kind of falling. “Just thinking too much.”
“About what?” His fingers squeezed. That scar, those infinitesimal hairs, the ridge of callus denoting the bellies of knuckles.
Her answer hid in the tilting down of her eyes, the thin exhalation of carbon triox evidenced in the cool of the upper lower atmosphere. He smiled at the redness of her ears and the flush of her cheeks.
“What? ((Cat)) got your tongue?”
She frowned, awash in a memory not hers and a word not possible. Maire and smoke and bitter, bitter
“What did you say?”
“Kath, what’s wrong? You’ve barely spoken to me since I arrived in-system.”
“It’s just…” The thought was lost somewhere between wind and the long fall down.
“If it’s about the lumbers, I’ve told you. They won’t feel any pain. We need to do this. It’ll all be over in—”
“It’s not that. It’s not just that. I mean…”
She unlocked fingers and wrapped her arms around him. He pulled, squeezed, noting her height, the tickle of her hair in the scattering wind, and the scent of
In the distance, he saw the first harvest vessels begin to chase a small school of the enormous trees. Flash and snare, the screaming of wood, the foul defensive odor of burning and something intensely sweeter than sugar could ever be. She jumped in his grasp at the screams, and he pulled her closer.
The harvest continued.
Just a taste at first, a few hundred lumbers. They took the screaming specimens into orbit, held them in dissection freighters, took them apart and looked inside for that shimmer, that echo.
They found it in the tricarboxylic acid cycle, mitochondria resonating with an energy, a metal, a something they couldn’t explain. They took more samples.
The machines were confused. Concerned.
A breakthrough: isolation of a limited flux passage, buried deep within the pattern, teased forward and brought to the rippling surface. Vacuole inversion. They could ride on poisons. Liquid space travel became not a dream but a soon-to-be-realization.
Planet One sent orders.
Weeks, months and
the air burned with cold above the lumber plains on the night that she’d been so convincing. Winter had arrived in the hemisphere. The embryo forests stood snow covered in their first hibernation, sleeping through the frigid night until a spring that wouldn’t arrive. The platform didn’t offer much protection against the wind.
It wasn’t dancing, and it wasn’t singing, but the flora hovered in formation below them, basking in the phosphorescent hydrostatic mist of the mid-atmosphere. The canyons echoed with their midnight song.
Berlin wrapped his arms around Kath, hands clasped in front in a bundle of their intertwined fingers. Squeeze. Sniffle and one hand went to her face as demure form shook with sob and fear. In moonslight, twin tracks on windburned cheeks: just two tears, but they were two too many.
“They’ll all be harvested.”
“Analysis was conclusive. We can isolate the flux ability.”
“Then why—”
“Because they can. And they don’t want anyone else to figure it out.”
“So that’s it? They take a few lumbers for sampling, isolate the tech, and kill the rest?”
“That’s the way we work.”
“No.” She turned around in his arms. Gray eyes swallowed by black pupils. “That’s the way they work.”
“I can’t—”
“You can’t. But we can.”
She slipped from his grasp, walked to the other side of the floater, leaned precariously over the edge. The vehicle swayed in the wake of a forest passing above them. Berlin walked to join her.
“We?”
Kath hesitated, cleared her throat. “You don’t have to know about this.”
“Do you think I’d—”
“No.” She squeezed his hand, let go. “But they’d kill you if they knew about it.”
“Tell me.”
“I’ve met someone.”
Berlin stood in a silence only that phrase can assemble.
Kath remembered her indiscretion, stumbled through clarification. “There’s a woman who can help.”
“Help what?”
“She comes from the outer. Came in months ago on a transport. Just something about her…”
“Who?”
“She knows what to do. To make it right.”
“Kath—”
“She’s not like us.”
“If you’re talking about—”
“She wants to help. Not just this planet. She can make it right again.”
“Make what right?”
Kath’s hands balled to fists at her side. “The last war.. Nothing’s been the same since. Planets in slavery, One ruled by machines and nears. Gods dropped into the slumber. Nothing’s right anymore.”
“We had to fight that war.”
“But we didn’t have to become this.” Her fingertips traced the insignia on her chest, moved to her temple, where the metallish uplink writhed under her skin. “We didn’t have to give up our—
“It was for the best.”
“Whose best?”
“Our best. It had to be done.”
“We’re killing the system! The stars can’t support us anymore. The energy load alone between the two—”
“That’s why we need the lumbers. Deep galactic survey missions, colonization hives—”
“We have all that we need right here. We’ve just forgotten how to live within our means.”
“We can’t turn back now. We’re pushing the saturation mark as—”
“We don’t have to be pushing the saturation mark.”
Berlin felt the throb of the comm uplink, but kept it static. “You can’t be talking about—”
“Planet One alone uses eighty percent of the system resources.”
He said nothing.
“A lot of bad people on Planet One.”
“Not all.”
“They started the war.”
“The war’s over.”
“It’s not over. Not yet.”
He’d never heard her talk like this: such determination. Passion. He never suspected that she felt so strongly about the civil war that had split the binary system a decade before.
“If we take out One, we solve everything. Decentralize the machines’ power. Make room for real people again.”
She reached out. His response was uncertain, but he did hold her hand.
“And you know someone who can do this?”
“A woman from the outer, where the planets still burn. She says she can kill the machines.”
“And her name?”
“Maire
shook from the release of the shiver, stilled. The headless form in front of her fell to the floor in a splash of destabilized proteins.
The gun an extension of her arm, she turned, slowly enough to stir a ripple of widening eyes and furrowing brows in the circle of people before her weapon.
“I’ll ask again. Who can give me a ride into the Drift?”
A jagged chuckle from behind was the only response to her inquiry. Its distance from perceived origin to her ears spoke of safety, but the whisper behind her eyes still warned her to be wary of a drawn weapon. Weapon and head first, body trailing not far behind, she met the source of laughter with a sharp inhalation and her firing finger poised on her shiver gun’s trigger.
“You’re already in the Drift, woman. Come on, sit down.” His hands waved off the concern of onlookers. Business returned to that particular brand of normal that only the edge of Black thrived upon.
He wasn’t short, but short enough, and he wasn’t fat, but fat enough. He leaned forward in his chair and poured another steaming cup of fermented protein gruel for himself. Tilting it toward Maire, he wordlessly offered and she wordlessly refused with the wrinkling of her nose bridge and the downturn of her lips.
“You’re looking for something, this far out. What is it?”
His enormous brow sloped down into a hooked nose. Underneath, two black eyes blinked away drunkenness and crawled over her body, darting imagined tonguetips over erectile tissues. A badly repaired cleft palette barely drew attention away from the ledge of his underbite. His voice reflected more than simple physical impairments.
“Speak to me, woman. I’ve saved your life by inviting you to my table. You stink of sex, of women. Blood and fear, rage. You’re desperate for something out here, looking for something, and I’m the man who can lead you home.”
There were no machines on this vessel, at least none of the thinking machines from the last war that now held the inner planets of the system in a death grip. Her thoughts flashed to Kath and the trees, Michael and the
“You’re a mercenary?”
“A trivial term at best.” He sipped from his meaty cup. “An appropriate term at worst.”
“I need a ship, and a team of—”
“Slow down, woman.” Black beads surveyed the mess interior. “You can’t just come to my home, kill a member of my crew and expect service immediately. First I have to get to know you.”
Her gaze was the empty that encompasses all of fury.
“I’m going to ask you a bunch of questions, and I want them answered immediately.”
“And if I—”
“If you refuse, I’ll have my troops space you into Seychelles. Not a nice way to die.”
Eyes dimmed.
“What’s your name?”
She placed her shiver on the tabletop and thumbed the echo chamber release.
“Maire.”
“Where you from?”
“Seychelles Edge, two-seventy under.”
“A local girl!” He grinned through teeth that were somewhat there, mostly broken. “But you’ve been gone a while, haven’t you?”
“Long enough.”
“Fantastic.” Another sip, his eyes still gouging into hers, and now a playful flash. “So that’s where your taste for flesh came from. Your entire family? Friends? Did you have to eat your children, or did you escape before—”
Her bared teeth and a barely-audible hiss cut him off.
“Poor girl. You stink of inner worlds. Why’d you come back?”
“Business.”
“Yes, business. You need a ship, and troops. And you’re heading deep into the Drift, looking for something. Sounds like standard fees are in order.” He pulled a data panel from a pocket at his side, placed it on the table. His fingertip traced over schematics. “We can work together.”
“This isn’t your usual fuck-and-run. I’ll need the best vessel you have, your strongest troops, your—”
“Tall order from a stranger.”
Her eyes scanned the ceiling, fell back to meet his. “I can see you fought in the wars.” She tapped her temple, indicating the regiment brand not gracefully gracing his own. “And this vessel,” she waved around them, more indicating the raucous crowd drinking goofy gravy, smoking the copper from old wires, and savagely fucking in the darkened corners of the mess than the superstructure of the gutted ship itself, “is an Inner Worlds destroyer from the machine conflicts.”
“Your point?”
“You hate the machines. I’ve not seen a single thinker since I arrived, save that glorified abacus with which you’re about to take my order.”
His frown, a constant until now, explored deeper definitions of itself.
“There’s something out there in the Drift right now. I need to go get it.”
“And why’s this ‘something’ so important to you?”
“It’ll be important to you, too.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because when I have it, we’ll use it to kill all the machines forever.”
He smiled.
Back arched, she swung down through the cockpit tube, her grasp on the ladder releasing when she felt the not-unpleasant suck of the vacuum chair on her buttocks and thighs. She adjusted her robe to allow a better grip.
“You don’t have to wear that here, you know.”
Cork had paused long enough from his startup routine of toggling switches and locking interface ports to his wrists and eyes to crawl his vision over her drab-draped form. His tongues absently explored the corners of his mouth.
“I get cold.”
“Right.”
She wondered how the mercenary had managed to squeeze through the access tube into his nest. Rolls of hairy flesh poured over his pilot chair, pulsating to the suction. His breasts dwarfed her own. Above, his cardiac shield heaved for breath. She checked and double-checked the enclosure on her garment.
“Comfy?”
“I guess.”
“Okay. I’ll lock you into waste systems—”
“No.” She couldn’t take the risk of slaving into the ship if the urethral, vaginal, and anal links were fully aware biosensors. Cork would find out in an instant that she wasn’t exactly normal anymore. “I can hold it.”
His eyes narrowed. “Suit yourself.” His hand waved over the dashpanel. He grunted as his body loosed to the ship’s probing and gave a satisfied exhalation. “You can clean up the mess yourself if we hit rough water. And shitting on my boat costs double.”
The bulbous drives forward and above the cockpit began the resonance cycle. Maire felt the vessel shudder and jerk against the docking grips.
Tickle.
She studied the panel, the levels, the systems. “What’s your mix?”
“Dark, seventy over.”
“How’s she run?”
“She gets by.” Cork patted the viewshield affectionately.
“Try boosting the dark level to seventy-two five. It’ll compensate for outside interference from resident dark streaks as we get farther out.”
Frown. “Ever sailed the Seychelles, woman?”
“Just trust me.”
“Fine.” He bumped up the level of dark matter in the shred drive to 72.5%. The vessel immediately calmed, the drives above them shivering steadily instead of randomly. “Well, shit. You’re just full of surprises, aren’t you?”
“I try.”
The shred peeled away from the belly of Cork’s destroyer and fell into the black endless of Seychelles, the jungles of empty, the machinery of night. Maire felt the ratcheting of the mercenary sleepers as the pods fell into place in the chain of the vehicle. Snaking through the debris of ancient and [recent] wars, the shred spermed around the hulks of abandoned warships, metal worlds whose interiors had been torn into the suck and cold. Occasional freeze-dried soldiers sparked and ceased before the forward energy sweeper.
“How long’ve they been asleep?”
Cork’s fingers traced over the biologics readings. “Brand new batch. Twenty, thirty years.”
“Good.”
“What’s it matter?”
She shrugged. “I prefer fresh meat.”
His eyes performed unmentionables. “I bet you do.”
The passage through the vessel graveyard was uneventful. Maire froze images as Cork’s ship increased speed: the shell of a destroyer, a planetship scuttled and taken apart for spares, smaller shreds transporting reclamation teams through the complex of spinning metal and hollowed asteroids.
Cork yawned.
He caught Maire’s glimpse and tossed it back.
“You’re different.”
“Hmm?”
“Exactly.” He wagged his tongue from his mouth, the tips circling and rubbing together. “Your voice is different. Flat.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s alright. I’m different, too.” He wiped saliva from the badly repaired cleft on his lip. “But you…There’s something wrong with you.”
Maire smiled. He disgusted her.
around and never through those nonspace tendrils, the black matter that stippled, and swung, and reached
All time went flat.
She’d gasped for a while as the cockpit bubble flooded with nitrox gelatin. Cork’s breathing was steady; he’d been sucking the shielding for decades, and inhaling that bittersweet fluidish was a comforting return to the non-womb of space.
“Let me know where to point this thing.” The voice was choked, slurred. His tonguetips flicked over slicked lips, teeth. Sludgy echoes. Flat time.
“Give me flight control.”
“Listen, no one flies this shred but me, and I’m—”
“Give me flight control.”
Eyes narrow, relent. Cork thumbed the panel release and slid the sticks across to Maire’s side of the bubble, where they locked into place. Her considerably smaller hands gripped the shafts.
“You know how to run one of these?”
“Should’ve asked that before you slid these over.” Smirk.
He watched as she expertly adjusted the shred axes. She boosted the dark mix to 75%. “You’d better know what you’re doing with that mix.”
She gunned the engines. “I was a pilot. Don’t worry.”
They flew.
She locked coordinates and eventually lilted off to sleep in the sway and slosh of the mineral slime’s warm caress. Cork took the opportunity to extrapolate the path she’d set into the vessel’s slave. She was taking him deep into the Drift’s crotch, that hook of realspace bordered with dark matter so thick that entry was a suicide and exit was just as deadly.
He scratched an itch buried beneath suck.
Maire shifted in her seat. Her face rolled toward Cork, her mouth open, struggling to inhale the bubble sludge.
Gotcha.
He leaned closer. There was something different with her; her tongue was deformed. He absently fingered the scar of his cleft palette. He’d seen other deformities who’d been born in the wake of the trinary collapse, but never anything like that…
Her robe had come unsecured in the bubble’s tide.
He considered.
He acted.
Reaching out, his hand navigated around her shoulder, below and through the loosed interfaces above her eyes. He tugged on the front slit, gently enough to mimic the natural pull of the sludge. The robe flapped open.
Her chest was smooth, marked only by the small canyon of her cleavage between two breasts and a scattering of moles. No cardiac shield. No—
Her eyes opened.
She struck out at him, a savage blow to the throat with a backswing that shattered the bridge of his nose. The bubble blackened with the blown ballast of his blood.
For an instant, just an instant, Cork could have sworn that Maire’s eyes were silver.
She pulled her robe shut. “How dare—?”
Klaxons roared to life.
Maire spun to the flight control sticks. In her sleep and Cork’s distraction, the shred had pirouetted dangerously close to a tendril of dark matter. She flailed the sticks and the vessel spun away from the reaching black, over a ridge in the texture of space, down through a valley and
the ships, if they were ships, lay in wait.
Maire gasped.
They scattered, converged, enveloped. Michael had told her what to expect, but what she saw was beyond expectation or reasonable comprehension.
A wave of light swept the bubble. The vessel shuddered.
All around them, the ships swam through space, the tendrils of dark matter licking and following. It was a dance of horror and beauty, the magnificent school of black spiders thrusting through light and something deeper, something ancient and
a tug and
Maire sat alone on the floor, vomiting shield gel into and out of the spot of light in which she wretched. Cork was gone; the shred was gone. Beyond the circle of light, all was the absence of light, but she sensed something there, someone there, someones there. Another fit of coughing wracked her as bubbles of gelatin worked their way out of her lungs.
It was cold.
a heap of shattered images and
zero
flicker
zero one
flicker
one zero one
resolution
you are
fear and
you are ((?))
Maire stood, covered her now-nude breasts with goose-pimpled forearms.
you are ((?))
“I—I’ve been sent.” She struggled to remember what Michael had told her. “I’ve been sent by your creator.”
silence and
you are of loss, of ruin
“I am.”
purpose. completion. forevers.
One heart: one, and frequent exhalation, shudder, the scrape of exquisitely-manicured nails over flesh, over metal, over flesh and
“I am Omega.”