“Forgotten,” they shrieked at him, deafening him. “What right have they to forget?”
Choruses of voices. How many? He couldn’t tell. Outside his fear, some cool part of himself listened and noted. There were at least four of them, plus echoes. Were they the ones Zasper had mentioned, so long ago?
“But you wanted to be forgotten,” Boarmus whispered, barely able to get the words out. “It’s in the log, back during the early years. You decided you liked it that way. It was your decision.”
“We created this world. If it were not for us …”
Boarmus made a placating gesture. Useless. The voices did not pause.
“What I we am are cannot be forgotten! We are … we are more than we were, Boarmus. Nobody forgets us anymore, Boarmus. We are … we are a new thing, Boarmus. We can do as we will, Boarmus.”
He stood slack-jawed, spit flowing up under his tongue as from a well.
“Kneel down, Boarmus. Show reverence,” said the gulper, a scream of fury in the voice. “You kneel down!”
“Yes, Boarmus,” another voice. This was definitely a female voice, he knew it! “Kneel down. Pray to us, Boarmus. Show us the respect a loving son owes us.”
“A loving … man owes us,” snickered another, also female.
Did he hear laughter? Do it, his mind said. No matter what, just do it. Do it, so they’ll be satisfied and get out of here. He fell to his knees, shivering with a terror so complete he could not have opposed them even if he had thought of it.
His mind still worked, however. Some chilly part of him sat off and asked questions. “Tell me your names so I can be respectful,” he murmured. “Please.”
“Magna Mater,” tittered a voice.
“Most Gracious and Wondrous Lady,” said another.
“Almighty and Marvelous,” gulped a third.
He didn’t ask for further introductions. “Don’t kill me, please,” he whispered. “Please, almighty ones.”
Something like a chuckle, something like a sigh of satisfaction, something like a wailing scream. All at once, from separate beings.
“We don’t care what you say,” came a fading voice, the male voice. “We will punish … if we decide to. Curious people. Blasphemous people. Punish them….”
All right, they were doing it. Now how were they doing it? Not supernatural. He didn’t believe in the supernatural. It had to be mechanical or electronic. A combination, perhaps. Sonics to cause apprehension. Combined with holography to create terror. Perhaps focused electromagnetic fields. Could one stop a heart with focused fields? The question was irrelevant. The dead girl they’d found down below the monitoring section hadn’t had her heart stopped. She’d been torn apart. Had they done that?
Of course they had. He didn’t even need to know why. Why didn’t matter. The only question that mattered was how.
He walked to the monitoring station, to the blinking lights and beeping signals and the scurry of persons keeping track of the thousand provinces. Assume, he told himself, fighting to appear relaxed and calm, oh, assume that if they can see what is going on in Panubi, they can also follow you if you leave Tolerance—can and will! Assume they can go anywhere on the surface of Elsewhere. Probably not in the air. Not if they’re using sonics and holography and focused fields. Not high in the air, at any rate. Whatever mechanism they use to propagate themselves on the surface, surely it cannot extend through open air. And probably not through or across water. Not yet, at any rate.
So … so, they must be stopped. Of course they must be stopped. The former Provost, Chadra Hume, had known that. He’d told Boarmus that! They had to be stopped before … Too late to stop them before. Now they had to be stopped while. Stopped while they were doing these horrible things. And the only minds capable of stopping them were the dinks in City Fifteen. Not just any dink would do. Some of them were ridiculous mechanisms worth no more than a dead chaffer, but some of them were brilliant, geniuses, Chadra Hume had told him once, certainly as bright as those ancient ones who’d gone into the Core, dinka-jins who’d chosen to be only brains because that’s what they mostly were to start with. Those … those were the ones he needed, those were the ones Chadra Hume had told him about.
But how could he get there without the Core knowing? The Core knew everything!
He wandered through the monitoring rooms, nodding, smiling, feeling the skin around his lips crack, trying to ignore the sickness in the back of his throat, the cramps in his belly as he stopped to greet a worker, to peer into a monitor that reflected the abyssal trenches of Deep.
Find an excuse to go somewhere else, he thought, but don’t go there…. No. No, for if they expect you to turn up somewhere and you don’t, then they’ll become suspicious. So, you must go where you say you will go. But then, on the way back, stop off at City Fifteen. And in the meantime, send a message to City Fifteen, telling them what has happened….
How could he send a message. What mechanism could he use? There was no point in using a code. Down there was an enormous brain full of hundreds of minds, some of them, no doubt, quite competent. A few, perhaps, brilliant. Well, so maybe there were only a few left, they would be the smartest ones, wouldn’t they? The fact that they were insane (all? or only some?) didn’t necessarily limit their intelligence. Couple that with the fact the thing was located behind an impervious barrier, and it had its own power source and its own workshops and its own warehouse full of everything imaginable (Boarmus had been through the specifications a dozen times) and though it was originally set up to communicate with the outside world only through the Files and the Provost—only symbolically, only verbally—somehow
