Existence

“There is a legend,” he said. “That one day will come a species who achieves the impossible. Beings who notice and wisely evade all traps and pitfalls, yet do so while moving forward. A race that soberly studies the art of survival, the craft of maturity, and the science of compassion.

“It is said this will be a new dawn. That long-awaited civilization will set forth to rescue all promising new races, teaching them the skills to make it and survive. And they will lift up those who tumbled earlier.

“They will light a path for all.”

With eagerness, Emily Tang asked M’m por’lock to elaborate. Only then the Oldest Member appeared, reminding them that time was up.

“Of course… it is only a legend,” finished the red alien, with Om standing alongside. “A tale for children or those in denial. Not for realists who can see. There is only one escape.”

61.

IT’S A BUOY

Ascent.

The ai inside his right eyeball wrote that ideogram, explaining the new path of the mechanical sea serpent that had swallowed Bin and the worldstone.

Sure enough, it felt as if the robot snake were now aimed upward, throbbing hard with swishing strokes of its long tail. Peering through the tiny window, Bin watched an extinct volcano pass by-its eroded peak now crowned by a coral reef that shimmered with sunlit surf. Was this the secret base of whatever group had sent the machine after him?

After the worldstone, that is? At best, Bin would be a helper, a tour guide, hoping for reward. Not death.

But this was no secluded outpost. Instead of entering the lagoon via a clear channel that Bin spied through the shoals, he felt the machine twist and undulate away, following one shoulder of the mountain toward a ridge of shallows, some distance from the main atoll.

It began slowing down.

During one of the snake’s looping movements, Bin caught sight of something ahead… a metal chain leading from an anchoring point on the mountain slope, tethering something that bobbed at the surface. A wave-energy generator? Was the robot only stopping here to replenish its batteries?

The thought that this might only be a brief stop, along a much longer journey, seemed to fill Bin’s body with sudden aches and his mind with new-formed terror of confinement. The tiny space was now even smaller and more stagnant. He flexed, involuntarily pushing with hands and feet against the close, padded space, breathing hard.

Peng Xiang Bin.

Focus.

It is a weather and communications buoy.

The words, floating boldly, briefly, in his lower right field of view, both chided and calmed him. Bin even had the presence of mind not to subvocalize his relief. No doubt this was a rendezvous point. The serpent would use the buoy to summon another vehicle. A seaplane, perhaps. Bin had been on a similar journey before. Well, somewhat similar.

And yet, after Nguyen’s penguin went to all that effort, covering our tracks while guiding me to sunken Pulupau, the Chinese Special Forces still found us. Found the worldstone. Did they have a spy on Newer Newport? Or did one of their satellites pick up some special color of light, reflected by the stone when it soaked in the sun?

Perhaps he would never know. Just as he might never learn the fate of Dr. Nguyen. Or Mei Ling and their child.

Anyway, it seems that someone else followed the Chinese assault team, taking advantage of the chaos to gain an upper hand and win the prize. Who?

Will my new masters even bother to tell me, when I’m fully in their power?

Through the little window he saw growing brightness, approaching daylight. The front end of the snake-bot broached amid spume and noise. Bin abruptly had to shade his eyes against a sunshine dazzle off the ocean’s rippling surface. Even with help from the ai-patch, it took a minute of blinking adjustment before he could make out what bobbed nearby-a floating cluster of gray and green cylinders, with arrays of instruments and antennae on top.

Wriggling gingerly, carefully, the serpaint moved closer to curl its body around the buoy and grasp it firmly. Then Bin saw its mouth open and a tendril emerge.

It will tap in

to communicate

with its faction.

The floating characters took on an edgy quality, drawn with strokes of urgency.

You must please act urgently.

This won’t be easy.

Blink twice if willing.

He was tempted to balk, to at least demand answers… like Willing to do what? For whom? To what end?

But when it came right down to the truth, Bin didn’t care about any of that. He had only one basis to pick and choose among the factions that were battling over the worldstone-and over his own miserable carcass.

Dr. Nguyen had been courteous and so was whoever programmed the ai-patch. It said please. The snake thing, on the other hand, had been threatening, dismissive, and rude. That mattered. He closed his eyes, two times.

Good.

Now you must press close to the window.

Look at the buoy.

Do not blink your right eye at all.

He only hesitated a moment before complying. It was where inquisitiveness compelled him to go.

At first he saw only an assembly of cylinders with writing on them-much of it in English, beyond his poor grasp of that language. Bin could make out various apertures, lenses, and devices. Some of them must sample air or taste water, part of a planetwide network, measuring a world under stress. On the other side of the floating platform, he spied the snake-robot’s tendril, probing to plug itself into some kind of data port.

All right… so what are we trying to…

He stopped, and almost jerked back in surprise as the scene loomed toward him, zooming in on one part of the nearest cylinder. Of course there was nothing new about vision-zooming. But it had never happened within his own eye, before!

Bin kept still as possible. Evidently, the patch had means of manipulating his organic lens… and using the surrounding muscles in order to aim the eye, as well. He quashed a feeling of hijacked helplessness.

When has my life ever really been my own?

Zooming and tracking… he found himself quickly zeroing-in upon one of those gleaming, glassy spots, where the buoy must stare day and night upon the seascape, stormy and clear, patiently watching, accumulating data for the great and growing Grand Model of the World. Suddenly, that gleaming lens filled Bin’s right hand field of view… and he closed the left eye, in order to let this scene become everything. His universe. A single disc of coated optical crystal…

… that flared with a sudden burst of bluish-green! More shocking, still, Bin realized that the color had come from within his own eye-spearing outward, spanning the gap and