into hesitant light.
None of us will survive this
intact, but it’s not a good chance. If she’s in the Stream already, chances are she’s started all over again.”
“And you’re convinced this Jag When is the crossover point?”
“It’s Delta. Silver is off the scale, and Enemy pattern exhibits a sharp decline. It’s where she broke through.”
“No good…No good.” Judith activated the display. A glowing representation of the Timestream flickered to life. “Okay, we can divert forces from—”
“It won’t be enough.”
“The Fleet’s—”
“She’ll equip the Enemy with silver. If she’s focusing on Delta Point, I wouldn’t be surprised if she has forces en route to the trees right now.”
“Shit, never thought it’d come to this.” West tapped nervous fingertips on the display surface. “Place any bets, Miss Maths?”
Benton thought for a moment. “Negative to at least five decimals.”
“That’s reassuring.”
“Enough.” Paul’s fingers went to his temple: throbbing with the silver ache. “We gather forces, we travel back, we take out the Zero-Four probe before silver infestation.”
“Easier said.” Judith smirked. “But you can do it. Get out of here.”
“See you tomorrow, Jud.” Paul rose with West and Benton. “Whenever tomorrow might be.”
“Watch your ass.” As the chamber door sizzled shut, something crawled between her hearts, took residence there, and began to gnaw. She shuddered.
They left.
OF LOSS, OF RUIN
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:
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:
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.
