Killeen gaped. His father launched into a song he knew, a beautiful passage from the most hallowed of the musics Bishops carried in their sensorium store. They had played it on the long marches together, knew its lines by heart. He filled his lungs and joined in himself, letting the high passage roll out of him. The highest of arts, the Mose Art.
Four humans, one Myriapod, and the shimmering Mantis. None moved.
All seemed transfixed by the ancient cadences, lilting refrains, accelerating notes that piled atop until they seemed certain to topple into chaos. But the Mose Art suspended the airy energies. They skated buoyantly across impossible gaps.
I see the connection. The unused sites in the Bishop DNA—that is the key. The notes of this piece, arrayed in harmonics, yield the solution. I relay this to the Exalteds now.
“Good boy,” Killeen said happily.
Abraham kept singing.
—DNA?—Toby asked on comm.
The old dwarf sent,—Our genetic code. The information telling how to build a human is inscribed on a molecule. Two helices, really, twining about each other. Instructions in how to make proteins—bits of organic matter essential to us—are lodged like beads along those helices.—
A sudden, sharp, many-channel squeal cut into everyone’s sensorium. The Mantis was spreading the word.
Toby frowned.—How’d we build Trigger Codes on top of our own, uh, breeding stuff?—
The dwarf Walmsley waved his hands impatiently, brushing aside detail. —Our genetic code tells cells how to operate. But that information takes only about ten percent of the DNA space. The rest is “junk”—freeloaders along for the ride. They get reproduced each time, but they make no difference in us. All life has hobo code like that. So long ago, the Naturals started preserving the Trigger Codes in those useless spaces.—
Killeen thought he saw the point. —We’d never know it? Because it didn’t turn up in somebody’s baby?—
Toby looked with wonder at his own hand. —It’s been there all the time? Inside us?—
Walmsley said, —The mechs could read our DNA, of course, but they are good technicians. They knew the junk was useless, so they ignored it.—
Killeen asked, —How come it didn’t change? I mean, Toby’s eyes aren’t the color of mine, or of Veronica’s, his mother.—
Walmsley grinned, creasing his face with a hundred lines. —The Codes were repeated over and over. Just in case a mutation, a change, messed up one version. There were still plenty of duplicates.—
—Seems a damn funny way to keep somethin’.— Killeen said. His father was still singing and the sound took him back to his boyhood, when Abraham had belted out this very aria in the shower. —I’d put it on a monument or bury it. Keep it safe.—
Walmsley grinned. —Like that Taj Mahal I had built back on your world?—
Killeen blinked. He remembered leaving it, looking back. Big initials on the side of it, NW. —Damn!—
—Bit of a dustup, that was. Got control of an army of mechs for a while, decided to have a touch of fun.—
—And who was buried there?— Toby asked.
A flicker of pain crossed the crusty face. —No one of consequence. Point is, how long do you think that stack of stone will last?—
Killeen shrugged. He was not one for permanent places.
—A few thousand years, that’s all.— Walmsley smiled. —Nothing lasts at Galactic Center. On average, stars collide every hundred thousand years or so, stripping away their planets. Snowglade we had to make from scratch. What a job! And it won’t last.—
Toby said, —But puttin’ it in us . . .—
—Seems risky, yes? So the Naturals stretched it out, making the data intelligible only if one assembled versions from three consecutive generations. Neat bit. Humans can’t really be understood in one generation, anyway. They’re about continuity.—
Abraham came to the end of the aria and smiled broadly. “Bet you never suspected, did you?”
Killeen shook his head in wonder. “How come you never told me?”
“Too dangerous. Mechs were moving in. I figured you were out in the field, more likely to get picked up, interrogated. I was an old bastard, stayed in the Citadel. Safer, I thought.”
Killeen hugged his father and remembered the Calamity. The spires reduced to rubble. The walls of the home he had shared with Veronica and Toby, just jagged teeth amid the flames. “How’d you get away?”
“This bird came—”
A violent screech sounded in Killeen’s sensorium.
They all doubled up, shutting down. The hills around them shook. Deformed. Shattered into sprays of tumbling mica.
“The Mantis—” Killeen had wondered how they would escape it and now he saw that the entire surround was illusion. They stood on bare, charred earth, a recent battleground.
Across it a shape lurched. It sent desperate notes, brittle stutters of data.
Something—the pleasure—it is awful—and magnificent—but it eats—chews—
“Works fast,” Killeen said. He stood up cautiously.
They were in a huge pouch of the esty. Rumpled mountains loomed in the distance against somber, yellow-topped clouds.
Walmsley said, “I believe the pleasure plague will manifest differently in the many levels of mechs. This one has defenses. It is dangerous.”
Killeen felt an ancient anger rising in him. “It’s got something coming from us.”
