The Interfacer said quietly, “Why would mechanicals care so much about our origin—except to figure out how to undo it?”
SIX
Deep Down Superficial
Nigel did not like it, but Family Walmsley had to bow to the Interface. Other craft fluttered down the curved air and deposited defensive gear—intricate assemblies of ceramo-metal tubes, tapered carbon-web cylinders, power modules like huge brown bricks.
Nigel glanced at the shiny, white steel surface of the control console, then away. One reaches the age when mirrors are of no interest. As well, he had long given up hope of keeping track of technology’s relentless march and to him these did not even look like weapons. Nor did the attendants who crisply set up the defensive web, nodding curtly to him, look like soldiers. He was glad to finally see them ride their craft back down the Lane.
The family eyed the defenses skeptically. Supposedly they would keep the worm open by offsetting whatever the Grey Mech could do to it. “Think it’ll work, Mom?” Benjamin wondered.
Nikka shook her head. “People have tried such before. But it’s like a whip—easy to flip around, until the tail bites you.”
“Should we, well, move?”
Nikka was startled. “Our fruit is nearly ripe!”
That seemed to settle matters. The Interfacer had mentioned in passing that the Grey Mech sometimes struck at wormholes only long after they had erupted. No one knew why. Still, it removed any sense of urgency.
So did the very nature of the esty. As a self-curved space-time, it was in the ordinary universe of the galaxy, yet had other connections—to other spaces, other times. The Old Ones used the esty, had made and confined it, but nothing truly controlled it, any more than a man who cages a lion can necessarily make it perform tricks.
They had a quiet evening, sobered by the presence of automatic weaponry on hair-trigger alert, just over the rise behind the rambling house. War had so outsped human reflexes that battles lasted mere milliseconds. This had a curiously liberating effect, for it meant that no warning or action was possible. So the family went about life as usual, but talked little.
Getting ready for bed that evening, Nigel worked his fingertips along his scalp line where his gray, thinning hair began. He could have changed the gray readily to blond or one of the more fashionable hues—scarlet, say, or electric blue—but he liked the effect.
Carefully he ran his left hand down and to the side, opening his face along a barely visible scar that ran along his chin, around the neck and down his back. Electrostatic bonds ripped free with a sound like corn popping in the next room. He peeled his skin back in a straight line down the spine and drew the flap over his left shoulder and biceps, until he could painstakingly roll it up against his wrist with a moisty, sucking sound. The skin stripped back down to his buttocks, revealing moist redness.
He turned with exaggerated grace in a ballet pose. “The real me. Like it?”
Lounging back on their massive bed, Nikka laughed despite herself. “Can’t you do your medical some other time? I was just getting in the mood.”
“I’ll recalibrate my secretors. Add some hormones. Give you an even better run for your money.”
“I wasn’t planning on paying money, and I didn’t have running in mind.”
He groaned as he turned digital controls that the peeling had exposed. “A literalist! God spare the sacred erotic impulse from their kind.”
“You expect silky passions after you show me that?”
“Fair enough. But trust me to summon up your passion, madam. My specialty.”
She smiled. “Hurry up, then.”
He gave her a fond grin as he worked on himself: tuning, refilling small vials, scanning outputs. She was still sinewy and muscular, her skin smooth everywhere but at elbows and knees. Somehow, Nigel noted as he inspected his own, those spots and the backs of hands were not corrected by the elaborate chemical cocktails medical science provided. A minor complaint. Without his in-body systems, which he had to tune in this rather unsettling fashion, he and Nikka would have been dead for centuries.
“How is it?” she said suddenly—some mute inner pressure had finally found voice.
“Um. Not much change.” He turned slightly toward the shadows, so she could not read the indices. On a tiny digital display he used to communicate with his in-body systems a small light winked red. He silenced it with an adjustment, fingers working swiftly with long practice.
“How much change?”
At times like this he was decidedly rankled that he had, from all the flower of womanhood, chosen one with a bulldog tenacity for detail. “A bit. A small bit.”
“Which way?”
“Ummmm.” He shrugged and started packing himself up.
She let the evasion pass. He concentrated on his Earther tech, engineered to be maximally convenient. Like an employee in a candy factory, the key was knowing when to stop taking things for free. He and Nikka had adopted the truly useful and avoided the rest. There were other techno-delights open to them, but they used the minimum.
He had to shuck his right hand free a bit to get at a pesky lace of veins that had clogged. He pulled the epidermis loose as if he had on a tight glove, pinching each finger free separately. The veins needed a soothing application of some noxious stuff. When the smell was gone he pulled the supple skin back into place, feeling the tabs self-seal with a warm purr.
“It’s lower, isn’t it?”
He knew that ignoring her would not work; it never had. “It’s a hundred seventy-two point eight.”
“A full point down.”
He turned back and her face was quite suddenly older, mournful. “Nothing for it, luv.”
“If we go in to those specialists again—”
“They’ll nod and probe and do me no good. Remember?”
“It will kill you,” she said with abrupt energy.
“Something has to.”
“Don’t be so goddamned glib!”
