She had never thought that she would need to find that particular Nought again, only the pack it joined. What an irritant!
She caught an electro-savor of Noughts spread through the dense, leafy mass ahead. Here in the open it was difficult to taste whether one of them was hers. She amped the signals—and gasped.
Ugly horizontals and verticals everywhere. Unchanging, muted light. And mixed in with these blunt perceptions came a torrent of strong surges.
Silent colorations of fatigue and pain. Bitter red smells of fear. Yellows of shame.
Rasping pride. Banging, loud confusion. Acrid envy, livid malice, and incomprehensible muddy longings.
All seething, unknown, under an oily smear of senses. It was difficult to believe that these Noughts were so unconscious!
Cryptic semisentience floated through these minds. They suffered continually from forking senses. Their entire thought-train was constantly interrupted for messages detailing their surroundings, their hungers, their incessant sexual signaling (even when exhausted!)—their tumbled, vivid, small worlds.
Quath gingerly focused her aura down to a needlepoint and thrust it toward one particular Nought who lay several hills ahead. Was this hers?
She could not tell, awash in the scattershot jostling of quick, coarse perceptions. In this sticky swamp she could not even separate its subminds. Carefully she held its muscles rigid, made it stand up from where it crouched. Did this feel familiar?
One of its upper limbs was pressing a soft thing against its face. No, into the face. An awful salty burst told her that this was a mouth, perhaps its principal one. Certainly it enjoyed an enormously augmented tasting system, for the food cast piercing rivulets of lava-hot bile all over the interior of the mouth-pouch.
Its fellows were staring at the Nought. She perceived that they would find alarming the act of spitting the food out onto the ground, where it could perhaps burn the foliage. These Noughts were gaunt; wasting of food would arouse suspicion. She must not frighten them before she found her own Nought, or they might all flee in a panic. Quath forced the thing to swallow the stuff, just to get the taste away.
What could this primitive form do? She had not entered her own Nought in this way; she was getting better at it. Curiosity egged her on.
She made it stand on one foot, then another. The sensation of bipedal instability was strangely exhilarating. She made a pod take a step, caught the body as it began to fall, and then brought the other leg up to join the first. This sensation of courting disaster, falling and catching oneself, carried a delicious excitement.
She stepped again, and again. The legs carried the impacts of walking upward and she quickly learned to absorb these with the cumbersome knees. A single knobby columnar spine as though it rode on a cushioned pediment of hips and buttocks.
Worse, it ached at the lower back. The muscles there were firmly knotted, as though this was a constant condition. What poor design! And they were so unimaginative that they simply tolerated such irksome pains!
She rotated the head and saw a surprising proportion of what she knew had to lie outside the Nought—but missing the fine-grained texture Quath knew, and overlaid with freightings of emotion.
This Nought could scarcely see anything without immediately reacting to it. Passing a low bush with tiny red berries brought gushing forth a hard hunger. The shaded sky above demanded to be searched for threats. A moist breeze crept into its primary nostrils and visions of rain sounded warnings. A nearby face excited memories of happier times, laughter, a warm fire—
But Quath saw that this approaching face emitted sounds which disturbed this host-Nought. The face gave quick signals of alarm. A wrinkling just below the top hairline. Its single mouth parted and lips slightly reddened, bringing teeth further into view. A narrowing of the space between the hair-hedges above the eyes.
Apparently Quath was not managing this Nought well, despite her exciting discovery of two-podded walking. She thought she had done that quite expertly. How well could such a rudimentary construction perambulate, after all?
This nearing Nought said something incomprehensible. Its primary message lay in the timbre of the speech, rising higher as the crude acoustic stutterings came faster. Quath did not want to frighten away this pack before she had a chance to explore it. And there was some deeper element about them that she could not fathom. Even clotted sub-minds should have appeared by now. They must be oddly integrated.
She put aside the matter and decided to leave the Nought. No need to alarm its fellows, after all. She disconnected smoothly. In an instant she was back inside her own electroaura.
Now rain came sweeping toward her, warming and oddly pleasurable. It reminded her of the tantalizing food-streams of the Hive.
She basked in the soft caress of wind and air. Then she wearily crept forward. This business of finding her particular Nought
might prove difficult. She regretted not giving it a steady, bright telltale. She had feared that even a dull-witted being
would eventually notice. Very well; she crept on through the splashing torrent.
THREE
It was sunset again before they scaled the last foothills and straggled across the breast of the mountain.
Killeen watched a ruddy sun sink beyond the next peak in the chain that marched up from the south. He had been slow to adjust his senses to this planet and to realize that it had milder seasons than Snowglade. Its lesser gravity and shorter days threw off his rhythms. The effect told on them all, he thought, as he watched the Bishop rear guard struggle up the slope of dark granite. A chilly wind had come up after the rainstorm of the night before, making marching harder. Once water got into their leggings, nothing worked quite right until they had a chance to stop and work on metal-shaping. But there had been no time for that. Killeen had cajoled and ordered and joshed, keeping the Bishops moving across silted mud and wrecked forests.
He looked back now, searching for Cyber pursuit. His feet yearned to be set free of his boots, and he compromised by sitting on a boulder and releasing the pressure-catches of his shocks. The relief would have made him sigh, but Cermo was passing nearby and Killeen’s sense of discipline kept his lips closed.
The land had been ribbed and ridged anew by the quakes. A river below was busily digging a fresh channel, having been tossed from its old one. Geology seemed to have hastened its pace, as if in fear of more disasters. The rain had clogged innumerable new streams with mud, and they spread like hands with snaky fingers across the plains, feeding brown lakes. Drowned stands of spindly trees poked from the waters, the slanted sun catching their doomed topknots.
We are near the equator, so at least we have not suffered the cooling effects occasioned by the cosmic string. It seems to have stripped away some of the atmosphere, so there is less insulation against the cold of space.
“Thought the land fallin’ would heat things up,” he answered his Arthur Aspect.
The loss of air has a larger immediate effect. Deep heat must diffuse out from the interior. However, we can soon expect another excavation from the core. Note how the string pulses with more energy.
Killeen peered up into the darkening sky and saw the razor-sharp curve against the mottled colors of the interstellar clouds. It had not moved in the sky all day, which meant that the Cybers were rotating it with the planet. If it began to spin they would have to prepare for quakes or worse.
Only for dwellers in cities or Citadels are quakes a threat. In the open your greatest risk would be landslides, and I expect most loose soil has already been shaken free.
“Maybe, ’less this whole mountain decides it’s better off in the valley.”
He heard gravel scattering down the slope nearby, as if in forewarning, and turned to find Shibo coming from the advance party.
“Tribe pickets up ahead,” she reported. They had been keeping comm silence since emerging onto the mountain face, because line-of-sight receivers could pick them up at a great distance. It meant greatly slower information flow, but Killeen felt too conspicuous here already. Every pebble could be a Cyber telltale, waiting for a foot to step on it or merely set down nearby.
“Police up the column,” he ordered. “Let ’em see us march in all formed up, gear in place.”
He was proud of the Bishops as they passed through the Tribal lines, headed for the crown of the mountain. The Families were spread out on the jutting slabs of silver-flecked granite below the summit, but Killeen did not stop to pitch camp. He marched the Bishops straight into the center, where the large tent was already erected and billowing in the cold winds. Killeen gestured to his lieutenants to flank him and did not slow their step until they reached the broad clearing at the very peak of the mountain, where the tent flapped loudly.
His Supremacy emerged to meet them. Standing beside his officers, he gazed stony-faced with empty, expressionless eyes as Killeen gave him the traditional salute.
“You withdrew without my order,” the man said abruptly, without returning the salute.
“I felt my Family would be overrun,” Killeen said formally.
