Authors: Gregory Benford
Nimfur’thon said confidently,
Quath stopped to measure her position, using fixes on two nearby peaks. No moons circled this world; for easy navigation,
she sighted on the high station captured from the mechs by her brood. This glimmering spoil of warfare pleased Quath’s subminds,
a sign of their thundering success on this world. They had deftly gutted the mech-station superintendents, the Horde of Podia
descending with complete surprise and zestful courage. Quath was proud to be part of such a daring thrust into an inner mech
province.
Quath surged downhill—clanking, jingling, ringing—as
her pods found footing on skittering stones. She arrowed on Nimfur’thon’s peeping redness. Calmly, letting no color into her
warble, she said,
very close….>
Quath’s mind clogged for an instant as she sensed a servo whine hotly—
eeeeeeii
—in a forepod. She thought of the Tukar’ramin safely working in the Hive, beyond the brimming ridgeline. She and Nimfur’thon
should be there, celebrating with the rest of the Hive’s brood.
Quath had tramped these hills many days with Nimfur’thon as they labored together. They had struggled with the fluxtube cannisters.
Nimfur’thon had splintered a pod bone when a bulkhead tipped over. She had been unable to walk without agony until Quath fetched
an artificial replacement.
Nimfur’thon’s new pod shaft worked better than her natural organic one, as usual. Quath envied Nimfur’thon the fresh pod,
making her faster; she had no natural pods left at all. Nimfur’thon’s long, prickly body gleamed with purpose, nearly all
of it covered in metallic cowlings.
The Hive had seen cause to outfit both Quath and Nimfur’thon with the latest in advanced cybertech, whole subsystems of handsomely
self-powered organs and limbs and antennae. They were honored to be so chosen, but that did not leach from them the free high
spirits of the young.
I, we have!…I, we have!
on a sour sideband of her carrier, taunting.
Cicada
Quath. Your thorax trumpets, but at the cusp moment—>
Quath’s bravado rang false. Like all her ground-burrowing race, she was terrified of heights. And even more of flying. Her
subminds pealed their alarm. She mustered all her courage.
With a lurch Quath birthed a rosy egg of flame beneath her. She jetted up a granite-flecked cliff face. All through Nimfur’thon’s
chiding Quath had been planning, vectoring. Now, expending all her reserve in one spurt, Quath arced up the stony wall and—fuel
guttering out in black fog, rockets choking down—she scrabbled at the boulders of the peak.
Clutched.
Teetered on the brink.
Fanned the blue air—
—and caught.
—
Jitjitjit-eeeee
—screamed a linkage, but Quath scrambled to safety, feeling the safety-warmth as her center of gravity slid into snug position
above solid ground. Her hot fear changed to pride.
<
You
bray of wisdom?
You
, who jibed me into ambling here?>
Quath felt suddenly exposed on this high point. She spied sheets of phosphorescence hanging in the air—near, chillingly near.
Nimfur’thon’s rippling signal now betrayed a thin thread of doubt.
Yellow steam gouted from far hills. Mudworked buildings
crescented that ridgeline, temporary housings for the fluxtube formers.
Quath scrambled downslope, sending boulders clattering with her bumpers.
—Nimfur’thon squirted a vectored grid image—
Quath gave a heaving grunt as she geared up in haste.
Nimfur’thon called boisterously,
a good gaze at it. This is our first, not like a vinegar-souled multipodder who is bored with it all. We have labored hard
for these moments.>
Quath ignored these repeated justifications and focused on the skittering gang of rocks that herded before her, racing and
leaping downhill. No moment to be buried in the embrace of pebbles, no. She skirted a ledge, made a grinding controlled slide—
Quath turned and crosshaired Nimfur’thon on the plain. Dots jiggled about her graywhite disk.
the hills.
Nimfur’thon cried.
.> Chuffing, clenching, she jounced down the steep cleft.
the fluxworks—>
. Witless one !—We cannot call the Tukar’ramin. Forgotten, have you, that we are here without mandate?>
—I have flamed the last. If there be more—>
The sky crinkled. Golden wealth spun toward them.
<
Fly!
Time does not allow—>
The sky shattered.
Quath skidded to a stop, tucked in pods, and—
snick!
—clapped fast her ports and shields. Rushing air sang an ionized blue.
From beyond the low hills a golden wall advanced. The glowing line had passed to the north as its revolutions increased. The
grand Cosmic Circle revolved faster, its beats making a blur. The spinup had formed a steady cutting pressure. Now the wall
of gold moved outward from the pole, a nearly perfect cylinder that stood and pointed through the sky.
A nearby flux station sent forth its strumming magnetic whorls, which seized the passing distant string and flung it on its
way. Thousands of similar stations all tugged and
pushed the spindly, rushing line on its path around the planet’s pole.
This tube of dancing light, the Syphon, bled color into the bruised sky, fed ripening pink to red to orange. Wind howled and
clutched at Quath’s rim, thin fingers to tip her over. Quath tuned frantically to the brood’s channel, to call out. Instead
she was flooded by the brood’s view from the far ridgeline.
The fluxtube grew straight and true from the skirt of hills. It bit the ceiling of clouds, boiling them away in a purple flash.
Dark mottlings shot up, up—in an instant heat had cleared the ivory clouds.
Now the black of vacuum appeared, a spot forming high above, a target coming into being as the arrow shot through it. Stars
winked new.
The upper link was forged as the tube opened on the clean vacuum of space. Quath watched writhing amber and gray motes climb,
her eyes smarting, awed. The brood sent forth a chorus of applause, popping and frizzing song.
*Complete!* came the Tukar’ramin’s warm signal.
Now the Syphon hummed with new life deep in the rock. The tube walls kept back the pressing solid rock on all sides—except
at the core. There immense pressures forced more metal into the tube with each revolution. Vast stresses fought along the
tube walls. The strumming tube gnawed, burning a cylinder of stone free of its mother world. The top faced vacuum, while below
liberated pressures pushed the freed rock upward.
*Flowing is,* the mellow, unhurried voice of the Tukar’ramin came—and the fluxtube suddenly filled.
Pearly, transparent walls of force dulled to gray. A plug of rock was streaming out.
Quath called, <
Nimfur’thon!
> in the roaring, pelting
gale. The wind’s pebbled teeth clattered on her skin. <
Nimfur’thon!
>
A rolling blast burst over the hills. The fluxtube brightened. The cylinder filled, gold to red to white.
—And out it spurted.
Their lance had now struck to the treasure of this world. The tube throat was artfully shaped, fattening slightly as the whitehot
metal funneled up. The gusher of molten metal rushed from the vast core pressures into the void of space. Riches squirted
up and out, fleeing the groaning weight.
Quath squinted. The fluxtube walls’ glow hurt her many eyes. She submerged in the flood of the Tukar’ramin’s view.
Delicate streamers of green and amber danced—precious metals, the only hoard this wretched world boasted. The Tukar’ramin’s
view tilted, following a black fleck of impurity up the glowing pipeline, starward, into sucking void, high beyond air’s clutching.
There, flexing magnetic fields peeled away streamers, finding orbits for the molten pap. The yellowing, shuddering fluid,
free of gravity’s strangle, shot out into the chill. Returned to the spaces it once knew, the metal coldformed, mottled, its
skin crusted brown with impurities. The birthing thread creaked and groaned in places as it unspooled. It fractured in spots,
yet kept smoothly gliding along its gentle orbit.
Cooling, it grayed.
Graying, the threads wove.
Dazed, she fixed on Nimfur’thon. But the signal cut off.
She sent a burst to the Hive through a haze of noise. An answering tone came, and the brood view at once tilted back down
the glowing strand of metal, veering into the slumped hills. A hurricane wind had flushed clear the air. The eerie light of
the core metal dappled the plain with shadows. But something wavered—
The tube. It twisted, hummed, curled into a helix, straightened again. Light surged the walls.
A bulge formed. Grew.
Quath watched the image, awash in it. The fattening flux-tube rippled. Flexed. And looped suddenly, faster than the eye could
follow. Out, across the plain. Its metal soup escaped. A blinding white ball spilled over, splintering rocks, spreading.
The gray pancake of Nimfur’thon crouched in a shallow draw. Rock above her singed where the bubbling liquid touched. The tide
hesitated and then lapped over, blackening, blackening, blackening everything.
Now the images came too fast to comprehend.
The legs jerking. A ripping scream. Footpads melting where they touched bubbling white. Nimfur’thon turning, her pods splintering.
Skin popping open. Guts pouring out—to flame into brown smoke.
Nimfur’thon’s walking pods melted slowly into the ooze. Her manipulating pods clutched frantically at the sky, as if to pull
herself up.
Orange plumes cracked the upper bulkhead. Armpods beat at the flames in spasms. Yellow tongues ate. A bulkhead blew open.
Gobbets spattered.
This was the way Quath would remember Nimfur’thon. The vision seared away all other memories. For what seemed a long time
Quath could see nothing but this licking moment of death. Her opticals registered other inputs, but
her mind rejected them. She stood frozen. Silent. She began to tremble.
The Syphon guttered out. Colossal magnetic knots crimped the flow. The glowing wall of pressure became again the lone cosmic
string, its golden razor beauty hanging at the poles of the planet. A calm returned. Above, a dark tangle of coldhardened
core metal orbited. Forms moved among this newly grown maze, polishing, cutting, making vast works.
The helical instability was diagnosed. There was indeed sign of Nought interference.
Labor parties crossed the plain toward the fluxworks. They carried Nimfur’thon’s remains, sectioned, back to the Hive. Few
spoke to Quath, not because they considered her shamed—inspection of Nimfur’thon’s tracer log showed the risk was her own—but
rather because they were busy restoring the fluxtube projectors, which had fused to slag.
As the teams labored, Quath sloughed back to the Hive. Her joints and seams ached from pinprick damage. Danni’vver, assistant
in training to the Tukar’ramin, sent beeping questions during Quath’s march, asking details of how the two had maneuvered
so close, and—from supple dartings of phrases—sensed the cloud that now descended over Quath.
There followed a rest period which Quath tried to embrace. She failed. She felt in the warren walls the strumming of motion
from other multipodia, who did not rest. She listened
to the urgent, fever-shot data that would not let her sleep.
The looping instability was a setback, throwing off their schedule. Legions of their fellow strandsharers orbited far in space
beyond the Cosmic Circle. They awaited the gouts of metal to begin their weave. The pace in the Hive must quicken, then. Finally
she silenced her subminds’ irksome voices. She fell into a slumber gratefully, legs folded close and tight in the slick webbing;
for something dark pursued her.