Authors: Gregory Benford
Yet somehow this interior battle did not yield mere confusion and scattered indecision. Somehow a single coherent view emerged,
holding the vital, fervent factions in check. Its actions sampled of all the myriad influences, letting none dominate for
long.
Quath marveled at the sheer energy behind the incessant clashings, and at the same time felt a mixture of recognition laced
by repulsion.
This Nought’s inner landscape was far more complex than it should be. No wonder it had not attained the technological sophistication
of the podia!—it labored forward in a howling storm, its every sharp perception blunted by fraying winds of passion.
But by the same stroke, it had a curious way of skating on the surface of these choppy, alchemical crosscurrents. Some balance
and uncanny steadiness came from that. It was much like the way they walked—falling forward, then rescuing themselves by catching
the plunge with the other leg. This yielded a rocking cadence that echoed the precarious nature of the being itself.
Not a single mind… and not multiple, interlocking intelligences, such as Quath.
She should inform the Tukar’ramin, she knew. This discovery came as a complete surprise, with implications Quath could not
fathom. But for now she was unable to think clearly. Her smaller minds urged different courses, yelping and squirming. She
silenced them and imposed a stony resolve: keep far enough away from the Noughts to escape detection. She had to learn more
of what they were.
Cobwebs of the Nought mind still clung to Quath. They brushed across her field of vision, shimmering traceries of doubt. The
very air clamored with skeptic winds.
In rattled confusion Quath stumbled on.
Killeen was sleeping deeply when the first hard jolt rolled through the mountain. He came awake at once and rolled out of
the tent, coming to his feet as Shibo followed him out. A second shock knocked him down.
Jarred, his opticals took a moment to adjust. His eyes automatically cycled through to their most sensitive mode, because
he had left them set for night vision. But this made the landscape glare as if under a noonday sun.
Brilliance cascaded down, bleaching out colors and shadows. The entire bowl of the sky glowed with rich gold.
The Syphon. The cosmic string was again revolving, sucking the rich ore from the planet’s center. Imploding rock far below
sent immense waves. He felt through his feet the slow, rippling surge of colossal movements thousands of kilometers below.
“Out!” he called on comm. “Leave the ravines. Get into the open!”
He and Shibo had slept in their full boot rigs. They swept up their packs and were headed out of the arroyo when he saw that
Toby and Besen were sitting, pulling on their boots.
“Belay that!” he called. The ground wavered beneath him, making it hard to stand. “Run barefoot.”
Toby looked up at his father vaguely, still half-asleep. They had given him what pitifully few medical measures the Family
still had against the pain and infection of his wound.
Killeen scooped up Toby’s pack and Shibo got Besen’s. “Come on!” she yelled.
A rock as big as a man came thundering down the ravine. It rolled straight through two tents above them. It thumped
hollowly and rushed by. Edges smashed off, showering them with shards as it lumbered past. It took their tents with it.
They ran up the slope until they reached the scree. Killeen helped Toby stumble along the parts where recently settled dust
made slippery going. The boy was still groggy and cradled his left hand. Killeen kept an eye out for the stones clattering
down and steered Toby away from them.
The sky’s steady glow made it easy to dodge the debris and boulders that rumbled past them. Not everyone was as quick or as
lucky; surprised cries of pain came from the ravine below.
They stopped when they got onto a flat, open slab of rock. The tall granite buttress and angular crest above seemed already
scoured of loose stone. “Rally here!” Killeen called on comm.
—Shut up!—Jocelyn shouted furiously.—Bishops! Home on my point!—
“Jocelyn, it’s clear over this way,” Killeen said.
—Bear on me! Don’t rally to Killeen!—
The ground shook and rolled and trembled endlessly. Bishops crawled and ran up the flanks of the saddleback, fleeing the ravines
which funneled rockslides. Killeen said no more on comm.
Jocelyn was clinging to a chimney slope nearby. It looked safe as long as the shoulder range above didn’t slide. Few Bishops
joined her. Most made their way to the ground below Killeen. The quakes eased slowly. Jocelyn’s area held. After a while she
inched down the slope and led her small party across the saddleback. She came onto the open slab where by now over a hundred
Bishops had spread out so they could easily dodge the tumbling rocks.
“You’re undermining my Cap’ncy,” Jocelyn said, panting, as she approached.
Killeen shook his head, not trusting himself to say any-
thing. From downslope came crashes and shouts. A deep, slow rumbling swept up the mountain, as though the whole were breathing
in painful gasps.
—Assemble! Assemble!—came the harsh call of His Supremacy.
“Let’s go!” Jocelyn cried to the Bishops.
“Safer stay here,” Killeen said.
“You’ll do as His Supremacy orders!” Jocelyn snapped.
Toby and Besen had gotten their boots and packs in shape. The four of them set off across a granite plain scarred by rockslides.
The tremors muted somewhat, as though the gnawing at the center of this world had ceased. Killeen studied the shimmering curtain
of gold overhead but could see no sign of the extruded core metal. Something dark moved high up, a mere scratch against the
glow, but nothing more.
When they arrived at the next broad rock shoulder His Supremacy was already speaking to the Families that were raggedly assembling
before him. “This is yet another attempt by the demons and devils released upon us, a
failed
attempt to make us disperse, to miss our conjunction with our sole remaining thread of hope. The Skysower shall arrive soon,
my Aspects calculate. Prepare!”
The other Families began to gather gnarled branches and bushes for a large fire. They stumbled and fell as the ground shook,
but they kept on. Killeen and the others stared in disbelief.
Then His Supremacy cried, “Behold! The moment is upon us!”
Killeen looked up. A thin band hung above the mountain, visible only as a black segment against the glow. It moved. The nearly
straight line slowly shortened and grew wider.
Killeen had the sense that he was looking along the length of something far larger than it appeared. The band curved slightly
with an almost languid grace. The gossamer
glow behind it added to the perception that the band was moving rapidly, sweeping across the sky like a black finger that
turned adroitly, serenely. Killeen thought that it looked absurdly like a stick thrown so high that, twirl as it might, it
would never come down.
Then the sound of it came. At first Killeen thought he was hearing a deep bass note that came up through the soles of his
boots, but then he realized that the slow, gravid sound came pressing down from the sky. It boomed, a single note that frayed
into a chorus of shifting overtones, plunging deeper and deeper into frequencies that he felt rather than heard, wavelengths
resonant with the entire length of him, so that he listened with his whole body. It was like the beating of great waves from
space itself, driven by tides of light to hammer against the small pebbles of planets and stars, washing over them in rivulets.
Something came climbing down the sky.
The slow, rolling notes brought long-reverberating fears. The rock below them had betrayed its ageold promise of solidity
and now the strange dark ribbon above opened its own chasm of doubt. Killeen wondered if the thing could be some Cyber device,
like the cosmic string. If so, there was no escape. Clearly it was headed down toward them here on the bald, exposed crown
of the mountain. He sensed the immensity of the thing without being able to see any detail in it.
Then he began to hear strumming notes that hung in the air. They rose like the sound of wind streaming through tall trees,
as though a gale swept the huge thing above, as though it were made of wood and leaf.
His Supremacy was shouting something, religious phrases that ran together and made little sense to Killeen.
“Behold, a sower went forth to sow. And to those chosen it was given to know the mysteries of the kingdom of
heaven, brought by the sower. And to all things mechanical it was
not
given!”
He saw suddenly that the ribbon above, expanding gradually, was slowly curving down to point its long, tapered end directly
at the ground. At them.
Now that it drew closer, Killeen could make out details lit by the skyglow. Great sinews like cables stretched down, interrupted
by knobby bulges, like the vertebrae of an immense spine. It groaned. The thing rushed down the sky at them, emitting vast
twangings. Taut strands split the air with great hard cracks. A symphony of snappings and protracted pops sounded, building
to a torrent of noise—
—and something smacked into the rock near them. It smashed open, showering Killeen with aromatic juice that caught in his
beard. He jerked back, but the smell was pleasant, sweet, cloying.
Another slammed into the mountain, then another. They pelted the whole mountainside. Families shouted with glee, not terror,
as more of the big, oblong shapes rained down on them.
Killeen dimly realized that he had not felt fear as the band rushed toward them. Somehow he had quickly sensed that this was
not a Cyber machine, not a threat.
Pops and cracks still rained down, but ebbing now, as he saw the long thin line, slightly curved, drawing away again. It had
seemed to come nearly straight down, spearing through the sky as though to point a finger of accusation—or beckoning?—at the
huddled humanity upon the mountaintop.
Wonderingly, he walked over to the nearest fallen object. The egg shape had split, spattering moisture everywhere. Small gray
spheres were mixed in with the juice. Killeen scooped some up and smelled a light sweetness. Without
thinking, his normal caution swept away, he bit into one. A pleasant, oily taste flooded his mouth.
“No! No!” A Trey rushed up to him. “Save—for the cooking.”
Killeen watched as the man gathered up the split pod and staggered off with it, scarcely able to carry the weight. Everywhere
on the mountainside people ran to collect them. Others stoked the growing fires. Some already spitted the pods on sticks and
began roasting them over dancing flames.
Killeen let himself be caught up in the jubilation. The Tribe, worn down by its long retreat and short of food, needed a celebration.
Without questioning why, he knew that this manna brought literally from heaven was good, healthy. The thick, heady aroma of
the roasting promised delights to the nose and mouth. Even the continuing shocks that surged through the mountain did not
bother him.
He watched the dark blade that had cut the sky recede farther, making the sky shudder, curving slightly as it rose. It had
spent only a long moment at its farthest stretch, hovering over the mountain summit as though to deliver a benediction—which
it had.
Through the cold mountain night Quath felt a massive presence descending.
She had taken shelter in a fissure beyond where the Noughts lurked. From this vantage she could pick up their effusions and
leakage radiation. They plainly thought their small bubbles of electric perception, damped to the minimum,
could elude the podia. Quath penetrated the tiny, wan spheres with ease, inspecting the fitful firefly radiances that simmered
there.
But she could extract little of use to her this way. Certainly she learned nothing that went beyond her scorching revelations
while actually encased in the Nought. Rivulets of Nought thought slipped through the chilly air and snagged in Quath’s electro-aura,
flapping like tiny flags in the perception-breeze. And the telltale she had planted on her Nought was silent.
Still she was reluctant to approach the mountaintop. Another incident might alert them fully, scattering them and making Quath’s
quest harder.
Then she had felt the first high, tenuous note sounding down from far to the west. The high treble skated on the air, pursued
by booming bass notes. They rolled like steady thunder. The source came down and forward at a speed that Quath thought at
first must be an illusion. Stuttered Doppler images came too fast for her. Old fears welled up.
The podia had come from ground-grubbing origins. Heights brought acute, squeezing panic to them. That was why they did not
hunt for enemies from the air, no matter how efficient such searching could be. It had taken millennia for the podia to be
able to tolerate the keening sense of falling that came in orbit. Only genetic alterations had made space travel possible
for them… though it did not erase the persistent terror that flight over the nearby landscape brought, with its gripping images
of precipitous possible falls. Quath and the others managed to loft for short distances only by turning control over to a
submind, reducing the task to distant mechanical motions.
But this thing!—it plunged as though oblivious to the ram pressure of air. A ship?
No—the dark line spanned a quadrant of the sky. A
falling chunk of the podia’s construction? Impossible—its browns and greens were unlike the enormous gray labyrinths they
built.
Down it came. Quath broke her aura-silence and called to the Tukar’ramin.
The swelling intelligence came at once, flickering in the crisp air.
*I understand your panic. Had I not been concerned with more grave and pressing matters, I would have warned you.*
*No. It will not touch the ground at all.*
*Attempt no such foolishness. Here.*