Suddenly their heads filled with a crash of static, white noise tuned to a deep F-sharp. It seemed to blank their perceptions and lock their muscles into an almost tetanus-like rigidity. Whatever it was reached through the control elements of their suits, right into their brains, and began activating the various centers . . . senses and ideas swirled in flux.
They were immersed in a deep, deep blue sea.
Kinesthetic suspension, in an unending void.
Cool currents flowed across their exoskeletons, their rigid, hinged exteriors. Though they had no eyes, a hard squid swam into view, jetting along point foremost. Anophagomotorapparatus ...
Though it had no mouth it spoke to them.
Baajood, it said. Baajood and awaah .
Little bubbles of gray-green oil broke on their armless, legless cephalothoraxes. Somehow the bubbles were meaning incarnate, and they saw the lifting body ship move through a series of animation frames as it detached from something that was much larger.
'Oh, God,' the squid shattered, burbling their names one by one. The sea turned black.
'Where the fuck are we?' gasped Krzakwa .
'Shut up!' screamed Sealock, agony trailing along his nerve fibers. Then, quieter, 'I'm trying to regain control.'
Silence, sore-kara, 'Ahhh, help me, Tem.' They could feel the water spilling from beneath his lids.
'What?'
'Push,God damn you!'
Krzakwapushed.
And the black sea burst into flame, licked up red around their bodies, and burned away. They were still standing in the control room, in the clearing among the sporophytes , of course, but everything had changed. Where this world had been a maze of interwoven mysteries, now there was an overlay of functionality. This
'Well . . .' began Hu.
'Look,' said Methol. 'What happened to the control nodes?' They looked around them and saw that the globes were now quite featureless. In their new, incomplete knowledge they understood that this could only mean something extremely bad, a malfunction wrought by some near-total failure of the system. Suddenly the portal through which they had entered began to shut, but it only closed halfway, then fell open, a relaxing sphincter, opening at the moment of death. The light seemed to grow dimmer, then dimmer still.
Krzakwafancied he could hear the sounds of machinery, gradually slowing down. ' Ummm. I think we'd better get out of here.'
They ran.
Animals and plants usually die one cell at a time, in an orderly sequence. An explosion may blow them apart, a fire may burn them up fast, but the standard is one cell at a time, in a logical progression. The cells of consciousness are usually the first to go. The heart stops, the brain blacks out and turns to a nasty soup, and the man is dead, but it's quite a while before the last ATP cycle turns over and grinds to ahalt. The chemical reactions in his intestines go on to equilibrium.
Technological items tend to mimic natural processes. An amoeba dies fast and so does a lawn mower, but then it's an interesting trip up the crooked ladder of evolution. . . . The four of them went through the dying spaceship as fast as they could, scanning the remote overhead for signs of a door, and nothing worked quite right anymore.
Somewhere, far ahead, something exploded with a radio-bang and threw its liquid contents to the floor in a quick eruption of globules. They were multicolored and made a wonderful low-g splash, oscillating as they sailed through space, in-out and in again. The ambient light continued to dim on an arithmetic decline and their suit rectifiers had to work for them.
The four climbed to a structural high point and stood scanning the sky. 'There,' said Sealock, pointing about half a kilometer away. 'A traverse node. Let's hope the system is still functioning.'
'And what if it isn't?' said Methol.
