Reassuring, but not much.
It was only three days past the 3-D interview, yet they had decided to act and put together a sweep. What would they be doing to the Station itself? He ached at the thought. After all, she resided there…
And she was here. He was talking to a manifestation that was remarkable, because he had opened his inputs in a way that only a crisis can spur.
Benjan grimaced. Decades working over Gray had aged him, taught him things Fleet could not imagine. The Sabal Game still hummed in his mind, still guided his thoughts, but these men of the Fleet had betrayed all that. For them, ritual and the Code were a lulling drug they dispensed to the masses. They thought, quite probably, that they could recall him to full officer status, and he would not guess that they would then silence him, quite legally.
Did they think him so slow? Benjan allowed himself a thin, dry chuckle as he ran.
They entered the last short canyon before the launch fields. Tall blades like scimitar grasses poked up, making him dart among them. She growled and spun her tracks and plowed them under. She did not speak. None of them liked to destroy the life so precariously remaking Gray. Each crushed blade was a step backward.
His quarters were many kilometers behind by now, and soon these green fields would end. If he had judged the map correctly—yes, there it was. A craggy peak ahead, crowned with the somber lights of the launch station. They would be operating a routine shift in there, not taking any special precautions.
Abruptly he burst from the thicket of thick-leaved plants and charged down to the verge of a cliff. Above him lay the vast lava plain of Oberg Plateau, towering above the Fogg Sea. From that muddy, scum-flecked sea below came a warm wind, ruffling his hair, calling to his nodules. Come.
He undipped his panels and attached them at shoulder and wrists. Here was a handy spire, ancient volcanic thrust out above the hundred-meter abyss. He paused, called Geronimo!—the ancient cries were always the best— and jumped.
In a sixth of Earth grav, with an atmosphere nearly Earth-thick, the winds were the easiest conveyance. Wings scarcely longer than a big man’s arms could command the skies. He flapped a bit, but holding hawklike and still lifted him steadily. He rose through clouds of condensing murk, so no vagrant satellite spy could find him… and let Gray-world push him softly, silently up the rough-cut face of the mesa. Streams laughed at him, sawing their way into the fresh flanks. Moving with the wind, he hung in stillness. Banked. Even got in a moment’s meditation.
And rose above the launching field. A mudflat, foggy, littered with ships. A vast dark hole yawned in the bluff nearby, the slanting sunlight etching its rimmed locks. It must be the exit tube for the electromagnetic accelerator, now obsolete, unable to fling any more loads of ore through the cloak of atmosphere.
A huge craft loomed at the base of the bluff. A cargo vessel probably; far too large and certainly too slow. Beyond lay an array of robot communications vessels, without the bubble of a life-support system. He rejected those, too, ran on.
She surged behind him. A satiny self, a delight… yet they had to keep electromagnetic silence now.
His breath came faster and he sucked at the thick, cold air. He had to stop for a moment in the shadow of the cruiser to catch his breath. Feeling your years? she sent, and he nodded. Part of him was centuries old, to be sure, but only inside his skull.
Above, he thought he could make out the faint green tinge of the atmospheric cap in the membrane that held Gray’s air. He had labored to lay that micron-thick layer, once, long ago. Now he would have to find his way out through the holes in it, too, in an unfamiliar ship.
He glanced around, searching. To the side stood a small craft, obviously Jump type. No one worked at its base. In the murky fog that shrouded the mudflat he could see a few men and robo-servers beside nearby ships. They would wonder what he was up to. He decided to risk it. He broke from cover and ran swiftly to the small ship. The hatch opened easily.
Gaining lift with the ship was not simple, and so he called on his time-sense accelerations, to the max. That would cost him mental energy later. Right now, he wanted to be sure there was a later at all.
Roaring flame drove him into the pearly sky.
Finding the exit hole in the membrane proved easier. He flew by pure eyeballed grace, slamming the acceleration until it was nearly a straight-line problem, like shooting a rifle. Fighting a mere sixth of a g had many advantages.
And now, where to go?
A bright arc flashed behind Benjan’s eyelids, showing the fans of purpling blood vessels.
He heard the dark, whispering sounds of an inner void. A pit opened beneath him and the falling sensation began—he had run over the boundaries this body could attain. His mind had overpowered the shrieking demands of the muscles and nerves, and now he was shutting down, harking to the body’s calls…
And she?
I am here, m’love. The voice came warm and moist, ancient warmth wrapping him in it as he faded, faded, into a gray of his own making.
She greeted him at the Station.
She held shadowed inlets of rest. A cup brimming with water, a distant chime of bells, the sweet damp air of early morning.
He remembered it so well, the ritual of meditation in his Fleet training, the days of quiet devotion through simple duties that strengthened the mind.
Everything had been of a piece then.
Before Gray grew to greatness, before conflict and aching doubt, before the storm that raged red through his mind, like—
—wind, snarling his hair, a hard winter afternoon as he walked back to his quarters…
—then, instantly, the cold prickly sensation of diving through shimmering spheres of water in zero gravity. The huge bubbles trembled and refracted the yellow light into his eyes. He laughed.
—scalding black rock faces rose on Gray. Wedges thrust upward as the tortured skin of the planet writhed and buckled. He watched it by remote camera, seeing only a few hundred yards through the choking clouds of carbon dioxide. He felt the rumble of earthquakes, the ominous murmur of a mountain chain being born.
—a man running, scuttling like an insect across the tortured face of Gray. Above him the great membrane clasped the atmosphere, pressing it down on him, pinning him, a beetle beneath glass. But it is Fleet that wishes to pin him there, to snarl him in the threads of duty. And as the ship arcs upward at the sky he feels a tide of joy, of freedom.
—twisted shrieking trees, leaves like leather and apples that gleam blue. Moisture beading on fresh crimson grapes beneath a white-hot star.
—sharp synapses, ferrite cores, spinning drums of cold electrical memory. Input and output. Copper terminals (male or female?), scanners, channels, electrons pouring through p-n-p junctions. Memory mired in quantum noise.
# Index. Catalog. Transform. Fourier components, the infinite wheeling dance of Laplace and Gauss and Hermite.
# And through it all she is there with him, through centuries to keep him whole and sane and yet he does not know, across such vaults of time and space… who is he?
# Many: us. One: I. Others: you. Did you think that the marriage of true organisms and fateful machines with machine minds would make a thing that could at last know itself?
This is a new order of being but it is not a god.
# Us: one, We: you, He: I.
# And yet you suspect you are… different… somehow.
The Majiken ships were peeling off from their orbits, skating down through the membrane holes, into my air!
They gazed down, tense and wary, these shock troops in their huddled lonely carriages.
Not up, where I lurk.
For I am ice ball and stony-frag, fruit of the icesteroids. Held in long orbit for just such a (then) far future. (Now) arrived.
Down I fall in my myriads. Through the secret membrane passages I/we/you made decades before, knowing that a bolt-hole is good. And that bolts slam true in both directions.
