Alya emerged from the trees. Small and slim, wearing only a short wraparound skirt, her bare skin a swirl of tattoos. She smiled, and around her Mazar and about a dozen others emerged from the trees.
“!¡
controlled aggression
¡! Okay,” said Frankhay, coming to stand with me as I rose to my feet. “So what do we do now?”
We could fight, but Frankhay didn’t need to point out that defeating the human host didn’t defeat the watchers they carried.
“!¡
authority | alert
¡! Hope, Skids,” I hissed. Then, addressing Frankhay, I said, “!¡
deferential
¡! What can you do to buy us time? Any ideas?”
Alya still stood a short distance away, smiling. As I looked at her, her eyes appeared to bulge and it was as if the watchers were taunting us, showing themselves to us, no longer any need to hide.
“!¡
commanding
¡! Go now,” said Saneth. “Frankhay? Marek? We will do what is necessary.”
With that, the old chlick stepped towards Alya and the others. Frankhay and Marek stood shoulder to shoulder with the ancient chlick. “!¡
taunting
¡! When you play with the unknown you can never really know,” she-he said.
I edged back with Hope and Skids to the fringe of the atrium where our rooms were. We had to get to the starsinger. We had to put a stop to this.
“!¡
urgent
¡! How do we do it, Skids? Where do we go?”
“!¡
calm | determined
¡! We need to go under the caul,” he said. “All of us.”
I glanced at Hope, then nodded. We had discussed this earlier; we knew what a risky thing it was.
But our way was blocked. To get to the cauls, we had to cross the atrium, and right now that would mean getting past the citizens of Harmony. I looked from my friends and then back out into the gentle parkland of the spire’s interior.
Frankhay stood with his dagger-blade protruding, daring anyone to take him on. Marek looked uncertain, but he had gone with them, joined them when he could have fled.
And Saneth...
Saneth sang.
Saneth stood in that clearing with arms spread wide and her-his song swelled and filled the air.
I backed away until I was hard against the wall.
Marek and Frankhay had dropped to their knees, as had some of the citizens.
And then I saw the watchers bulging in the citizens’ eye-sockets again, swelling, popping clear, slivers of jelly, near-transparent, glistening in the morning light of the atrium.
They flowed down faces, down bodies, leaving their hosts buckling and collapsing.
A mass of clear jelly gathered on the ground before Saneth, and I thought she-he had won, did not realise then that the ancient chlick was merely buying time.
The mass gathered itself, congealed. A bulge rose from it, the form of a head, neck, shoulders. They rose, pulling a shawl of clear jelly with them, jelly that took form, became arms, torso, hips. The figure rose, towering above Saneth, a giant humanoid form whose face bore no features and whose body was a model of androgynous perfection.
It disintegrated, collapsing in an abrupt flow of individual watchers, an alien shower descending on Saneth, Marek and Frankhay, knocking them from their feet, and they were lost in the gluey mess; lost, I felt sure, forever.
Exogenesis
Chapter Thirty-Eight
“T
HIS WAY,
”
HISSED
Hope, tugging at my arm.
Skids and I followed her, and we worked our way along the wall until we reached a foyer.
We ran at the far wall and it rippled, thinned, spat us out.
The cold hit us, battered the breath from our bodies.
I breathed out, and when I tried to breathe back in again the air was so cold it felt as if it was stripping the lining from my throat and lungs. I put a hand to my mouth, and that allowed me to breathe, but the bare flesh felt as if it were freezing hard already.
Hope gestured, and started to move away.
The world outside the spire was white. Just as Hope had described it, snow piled in high drifts and swirled in the air and our thin clothes offered us no protection against the bitter chill.
I tried to move, but already my boots had frozen to the hard-packed snow.
I heaved and managed to shift one boot, and then the other.
My breath froze in the light fuzz of facial hair I had grown on our journey; my saliva froze on my lips. I kept my eyes slitted for fear that they, too, would freeze.
Ahead, Hope moved determinedly, small and hunched over against the blizzard.
The outer wall of the spire curved gently, and we worked our way through the snow, following the building’s base. We had escaped, but we could not survive out here for long. Our best chance was to find another way back in on the far side of the building, closer to where Skids had found the cauls. After a time, we came to a great groove, as wide as a human body, and I realised this was one of the joins between the wide ribbon-walls that wrapped around the tower.
We came to a bank of snow that was taller than any of us, and now Skids and I caught up with Hope.
She paused for breath, then launched herself at the snow, plunging her hands and feet into it and hauling herself up. Skids and I followed. My hands were already numbed by the cold, and now I saw that they were bloodied, torn to shreds by the packed snow and ice, the blood freezing instantly.
At the top of the snow drift we walked for a short distance, then slid down the far side, and here Hope turned to an expanse of blank wall and said, “It’s an entrance. It has to be.” She was close to collapse.
The wall stood blank before us.
I approached, raised a hand, as if that would make any difference.
At first there was nothing and then, thank the gods, there was a ripple, a thinning.
We tumbled through and lay on the smooth, warm floor as we thawed out. I looked at my damaged hands and saw that Skids had suffered similar injuries. Hope’s hands had been scraped raw, too, exposing twists of pale fibre, no blood. She looked at them, and then at me, and then we stood, turned to the foyer, and looked for a way through into the atrium.
W
E TOOK THREE
cauls from the tanks, in a room not far from where we had re-entered the tower. Skids selected them and handed one each to me and Hope before taking one for himself.
The thing in my hands was a livid purple, and felt like a slab of meat with a tough, leathery skin. It glistened in the low light, and I expected it to be wet and slimy, but it was dry.
As I held the caul it responded to my touch, swelling around my hands, pressing and scuffing, as if tasting me, sampling me.
Going under the caul was not a thing to do lightly. The chemical rush alone could stun a user into a coma from which they might never emerge; the sensorial shock of embracing the starsinger’s window into the All could break minds.
But we had to get through to the Singer of the City.
“!¡
scared | decisive
¡! Where do we do this?” I asked Skids.
“!¡
factual reporting
¡! Best is as close as possible to the ’singer,” he said. “I just shut myself in one of the rooms off the atrium, but it was weak... The ’singer is really stifled and all its energy is going into maintaining this reality.”
“You heard it,” said Hope, to me. “You went underground and heard it. That’s what you said.”
W
E SLIPPED AWAY
from the caul tank and threaded our way through the fringes of the atrium park, fearful that at any moment we would be confronted by the citizens of Harmony, or by the monstrous reconstituted alien that had smothered Saneth, Frankhay and Marek.
We found the foyer, found the wall with the strange symbols, or artwork, or whatever it was, and descended the spiral ramp.
Darkness again, but the cauls gave off a dim glow. We couldn’t see far, but we could see each other, and where our feet fell.
I strained, but caught no hint of the ’singer’s presence.
We paused, and I asked, “Where now?” and in the dim light from the cauls I saw Skids shrug.
Then Hope clutched at my arm and I saw that her eyes were wide. “The voices,” she said. “I can’t hear for them, they’re so loud!”
She put hands to her head, dropping her caul with a dull thud. Skids ducked to grab it quickly, and I held Hope as she weakened, and then it was only me holding her up as all strength departed from her legs.
W
E HAD NO
choice. We had to go through with it. We knew the risks and we had agreed that this was what we would do.
Skids gave me one of the cauls, and then he kneeled by Hope.
She was still conscious, still breathing, eyes sometimes shut, sometimes snapping open and dancing wildly up and down and from side to side.
He smoothed her honey-brown hair back and carefully eased the caul onto the crown of her head.
It spread out immediately, its body thinning, clinging, wrapped like a wet cloth around her skull. In the low light I could see the alien symbiont pulsing rapidly, its purple hue shifting in waves towards a fiery crimson.
“!¡
urgent
¡! Quick!” said Skids. “She can’t be alone.”
He took a caul from me and without any preparation pressed it to his head. He rocked back onto his haunches and his eyes widened, glazed. A smile spread across his face, a junkie with a fresh hit, and then he slumped to the ground.
I
DID IT.
I raised the thing and I slapped it to the crown of my head, and I felt the All in a sudden, dizzying rush.
T
HE CAUL STUCK
to me, with a grip that might never let go. Needles stabbed my scalp. Sharp pains – I hadn’t expected this pain! – lanced through my skull and down my neck. And something happened that felt as if all my perceptions, all that I had ever perceived, had been put together and shaken up and left to settle, seen and felt and heard all over again, but more intensely so, and my head spun and I felt sick and I knew I was crying, crying, crying.
Skids had described the Singer of the City as a mere whimper, a hollow, retiring presence. But something had woken it, something had stirred it up. I could not believe that what struck me next was only a shadow of the real thing.
A sudden blast took me, and I felt like a wisp-seed in a gale. All my bundled perceptions were gone, and I was numbed for a time, deadened. And then the blast came again, and again, and I was a bloodied, broken fighter whose legs would not give in, pounded and battered and beaten. With every wave that swept over me, my head was left ringing, booming, and my body was a single dull mass of pain.
And the blast came again, and again.
I
CAME TO
on a floating platform of wood, all twisted and gnarled as if partly cut from trees and partly made from driftwood washed up from the river. The wood was white with dark knots in it, the floor smooth, polished.
Overhead hung a great sphere, swirls of white like foam smeared across the deepest blue.
I had seen images like this before. This was our home planet, hanging above us.
My mind rushed, but I didn’t care about explanations, was just thankful for the reprieve.
“!¡
calming
¡! Thank... you came through,” said Skids, and I looked around, away from the hanging Earth, and saw my old friend sitting cross-legged nearby.
“!¡
fear | concern
¡! Where’s Hope?”
Skids looked down. “!¡
concern
¡! I can’t find her. This is a bubble reality where the ’singer has confined us. I think it may have cordoned Hope off somewhere else. It’s scared of her. She channels so much that it can’t know.”
“We have to find her,” I said.
“!¡
factual reporting
¡! We have to find the starsinger first,” said Skids.
He stood, and so did I.
The tangled wooden landscape seemed to go on forever, a dead forest, a ghost forest. “!¡
dismayed
¡! How do we find anything here?”
“!¡
calming
¡! We listen for the song,” said Skids, and we started to walk.
“!¡
intrigued
¡! What
is
this? A ‘bubble reality’, you said?”
“!¡
factual reporting
¡! We’re in our heads,” said Skids. “But it’s more than that, it’s a shared thing. Our heads are channelled through to the All that the starsingers know. But we can’t know what they know... They see things differently; they see things so much more deeply, more precisely. Everything is known to them, and these realities are their attempts to sketch out part of the All in terms we can understand.”
“!¡
contradiction
¡! But not everything is known to them,” I said. “We’re not. The voices in Hope’s head...”
“!¡
factual reporting
¡! She scares them. They can handle small levels of uncertainty, but massed together in the condensate it’s too much. It’s a fundamental shock to them. Saneth says the starsingers are like gods even to gods, but Hope brings them to their knees.”
We walked, over roots and branches, for a time that seemed immeasurable.
I listened, but all I heard were our footfalls and breathing.
I longed to know what had become of Hope. She could be lying dead on that basement floor, for all I knew, and I would have lost her and this whole thing would be in vain.
I started to despair and then I heard the song, a child’s voice, humming the kind of tune we learnt as small children back in the nest.
It came from beyond a screen of ragged tree stumps, shining a harsh white in the light of the Earth.
We scrambled up over the tangled wood until we could peer over, but the next hollow was empty.
I climbed over the stumps, clambered down to ground level again, and then I kept crawling, kept tumbling, as wood splintered, fragmented, and the ground dissolved beneath me, and the child’s song rose to a sing-song screech that filled my head and made my skull feel as if it were about to shatter.