Involution Ocean

Chapter 15 The Dream

The sky was that blackness, and I was in the sky, float­ing weightless, disembodied. Far below me, baked in raw sunlight, was the shimmering, seething Nullaqua Crater. And as the landscape cleared, I saw before me a city of the Elder Culture, reborn.

The city was a miracle. It was whole, beautiful, charged with the energy of life, its fluted spires and broad black plazas shrouded from vacuum by a thin protective field, the iridescent essence of a bubble. As I watched I saw delicate, insect-wing tints chase one another across its translucent surface. It was far beyond anything made by man. This was the Elder Culture at its peak.

Something moved me closer. I slipped without difficulty through the geld surrounding the city. There was no sense of transition; suddenly I was watching a citizen at work. He was a reptilian centaurlike being, his skin one long sheen of tiny golden red scales. He had eight eyes circling his pink head like studs in a headband.

He sat alone in a small, hexagonal room, lit by a shifting geometric pattern of tiny bulbs in the ceiling. Incense smol­dered in a corner. Before him on a low black pedestal was a device that might best be called a sculpture. The core of it was a solid yellow cylinder, shrouded by a blindingly intricate linking and twisting of multicolored beads, glow­ing like winter stars through a cloud of mist.

I had an intuition that was not my own. I saw the ob­ject’s significance at once. It was at the same time a work of art, a religious symbol, and a physical representation of its owner’s persona.

He looked at the sculpture intently. He was dissatisfied. Out of the thousands of beads, three abruptly winked out. He had just destroyed a month’s work.

His latest work had been too rushed, too hurried. The stresses of the past months had affected him subliminally, and true soul sculpture required complete repose.

He wanted peace. Surcease. Electropsychic nirvana, the dynamic joy, the more than religious content that would come when, his personality was fused with the sculpture, and he died. Friends would launch his soul into an infinity of space, to float eternally.

Once this belief had been their faith, but now it was the literal truth. The Elder Culture had made it so.

Changing, I floated from the centaur’s room and into the city streets. There was an incredible throng, members of a race that took a pure hedonistic joy in the possibilities of surgical alteration. They switched bodies, sexes, ages, and races as easily as breathing, and their happy disdain for uniformity was dazzling. There were great spiny bipeds; slinking doglike things with the hands of men; big creeping bulks with multiplicities of crablike pincered legs; hairy, globular beings with long, warty, cranelike legs and huge, incongrous wings; things on wheels or tracks with great grapelike dusters of dozens of eyes and ears; things that flew, that did, that humped, that wallowed; things that traveled in colonies, or linked by long umbilicals, or moved in great multiheaded hybrids like whole families grafted together. It seemed so natural, rainbow people in the rain­bow streets; humans seemed drab and antlike in compari­son.

But there was fear, an underlying itchy unease, the knowledge that there were enemies below. There had been no opposition to the establishment of the two outposts, which despite their aesthetic qualities were only minor bio­logical waystations. They had been established high above the crater to avoid any possible biocontamination. The first years had gone smoothly, with only the disturbing presence of certain anomalies in the crater to disrupt routine.

Soundings didn’t work. The first real trouble came with seismic probing of the depths. Results were inconclu­sive; then came ominous rumblings from the depths of the crater. It might have been a fault; disturbed by the first explosions, seeking equilibrium. But the shocks seemed to come from random areas at random times.

There was a shift in the patterns of currents in the dust; directly beneath the two outposts, seventy miles down, slow gray vortexes appeared. Probes were sent down to investi­gate. The dust exhibited a previously unknown quality, ap­parently acting through static attraction, it leapt out of the air to cling to the probes, smothering them, weighing them down until their engines failed and they fell buzzing into the depths.

The Elder Culture scientists were intrigued. Was there intelligent life in the crater? Radio signals met with no re­sponse; after a few months, a heavily armored probe was sent into the dust It met no resistance; it sank two miles into the black depths, until it hit what appeared to be solid rock. When it tried to move sideways, there was a sudden shock; the sea floor gave way under the probe, and it fell into a blistering pool of magma. Its signals ceased.

A second, temperature-resistant probe was launched. It was being closely followed when a sudden meteorite rain provided a distraction. Power was diverted to the shields; the static from the disintegration of the meteors in the atmosphere below caused a break in contact with the probe. It vanished without a trace.

Now the scientists were nonplussed. While they thought over the situation, there was a sudden, violent explosion across the crater, high above the atmosphere, at the south­ern edge of the rim.

There was no explanation for it The smooth, glassy crater-with-the-crater, still partially molten when the out­posts investigated, had no traces of radioactivity. There were no meteorite fragments or signs of any chemical ex­plosive. Apparently there had simply been a sudden release of energy from a point source, coming from nowhere, re­vealing nothing. It was odd that the new crater was of the same radius as fhe Culture’s circular cities. The message was unmistakable.

The two cities were determined not to overreact. They didn’t want to leave the planet, or act with cowardice, or call in a fleet—a distasteful act of aggression. They com­promised, deciding to set a large thermonuclear device in stationary orbit over the big crater. In the event of attack it would be a simple, if regrettable process to sterilize the cra­ter. They began work at once.

And the landscape shifted. Beneath the first outpost; something tendril-thin was snaking up the side of the cliff wall. It seemed almost threadlike in the distance, nearly invisible; it was a cylindrical pipe, only six inches wide and the color of a mirror. It was coming from the dust upwards along the wall like the extended tentacle of a monstrous silver octopus. It was apparently in no particular hurry....

Occasionally bulges traveled rapidly up its miles-long length, as if some thick fluid were being pumped upwards in surges inside it. At its very tip, which narrowed to nee­dle sharpness, it moved languidly back and forth along the cliff face, sometimes patting the rock with its sharp blind head, seeming to search, like an earthworm looking for the juiciest part of a corpse. ... It progressed effortlessly up­wards, supporting its miles of exposed length easily, as if gravity were somehow irrelevant It was already far above the atmosphere, now halfway up the cliff face, now stop­ping to slide greasily with a snake’s speed across a blasted, airless plateau, caressing the rock with its thin, silvered belly.

I was swept closer. Dread seized me. It was forty miles up now, fifty, sixty, still daintily kissing the rock with its pointed, featureless snout. Day came, left and came again. The snake continued to rise. The rainbow bubble over the city would keep it out I thought. Nothing could pierce the film as long as the city’s generators kept it going. It was only a few miles below the city now. Would the other out­post see it? Or were they too smug to look?

Across the crater I could see the second city. In the cliff face beneath it there was a soundless snap. A hole a yard across appeared in the rock, and an incredible torrent of dust—the pulverized rock—bunt outward like a horizontal geyser. Bach particle fell through airlessness like lead, cas­cading down the cliffside with incredible speed and without cohesion. The geyser slowed to a trickle and dust flowed like water.

And now the silver worm had found something, a thin vortical split in the rock, eight feet high, five inches wide. It slid its narrow head into the rock. Surely the fault was too thin for even its slender body. No matter. The snake slid confidently inward. A bulge came rippling up its sixty-mile length, did not even slow as it entered the crevice. Rock cracked, snapped, and split like hot glass dropped in ice-water. Jagged chips broke out from the cliff, falling sound­lessly mile after mile, fathering enough speed to be melted into tektites when they hit the atmosphere below.

Now the snake reversed its rippling, bulges traveling downward mile after mile to vanish in the gray dust sea. Ripple followed ripple like peristalsis, and I realized that whatever lived inside that grotesque metal worm was eat­ing its way upward, invisibly, through the last miles of rock.

Automatic sensors had picked up the dust geyser be­neath the second city. An alarm wait off; a catlike feath­ered creature awoke art his console, yawned, stretched, ex­amined the computer’s graceful Elder Culture hieroglyphs on a printout screen. He shut off the alarm, blinked sleepy green eyes, and tried to make sense of the information. It looked interesting; he decided to call his superior.

The worm came up in the center of the first city.

The tesselated pavement split, small brown and white tiles snapping and crumbling, and the worm flowed out in the middle of a multicolored crowd. It paid no attention to the screaming, or to the panic flight, even though some citizens tripped over it or stepped on it. Instead, it wriggled quickly across the street, still feeling its way, tapping nas­tily with its tapered head. It encountered a building, a ten-story white octagon ribbed with blue metal, and suddenly increased its speed, all doubt removed now, moving with the speed of a cracking whip. It circled the building, leapt through an alley, circled another building, smashed through the plastic panes of a geodesic cylinder and killed five of its inhabitants almost incidentally, smashing them against walls and bulkheads to leave them crushed in broad pools of blood: a red puddle, a green puddle, a copper-colored puddle. ...

It ran and moved and slid with dizzy grace, spearing through some buildings wrapping others in casual helixes of its length, moving through every quarter of the city, crossing its own path a hundred times in a drunkard’s walk of fear, until at last it returned to its point of origin at the city center. There at the crumbled hole a huge being, a metal-hoofed satyr at least eight feet tall, was stamping re­peatedly on the body of the worm. He must have weighed over a ton and the hooves on his bristled legs were sharp, but it was like stamping on a bar of stainless steel.

It was all happening at once. Smoke rose in the eastern part of the city, where a group of citizens had tried to use a radiation weapon on a segment of the worm. The beam had glanced off, melting a dozen bystanders and most of a building. Elsewhere, despairing citizens threw themselves into incompleted soul sculptures, convulsing as sections of their psyches were shorn away. Others made frantic at­tempts to supply a ship for takeoff. Yet others were begin­ning to radio warnings and pleas for help to their sister city.

The snake stopped. It was convoluted, wrapped around and through the city’s buildings like a tapeworm through intestines. Now it took up the slack. A barely perceptible trembling shook it. Metal began to buckle. Masonry disin­tegrated. The length of the snake went through, buildings like a wire garrote through a human throat, spilling water, hemorrhaging electric fire as it cut through cables and conduits, messily severing dozens of trapped inhabitants, toppling buildings onto the crowds in the streets.

Then it began to retreat down through its hole, sliding slickly inwards like the extended tape from a tape measure. The satyr was still stamping insanely. With its last few yards, as a final gesture, the worm looped itself around and around him, ignoring his wrenching, twisting hands. Then it squeezed him till he burst.

Hundreds had died, but dozens survived, hidden under­ground or in buildings strangely untouched. There was one cargo ship in the city still functioning; its cyborg pilot had had the great presence of mind to leap the coil as it slith­ered around the ship. The ship’s reactionless drive had cur­dled a building nearby with great loss of life. But the ship, with its cargo of refugees and hastily salvaged soul sculp­tures, was intact.

The ship was already trying to pick up survivors when the snake slithered out of the crevice in the side of the cliff and collapsed downward, simply falling, threadlike, in mile-long loop after loop after loop. ...

The city’s atmosphere immediately began to rush out the hole. A cloud of frost appeared as moist air puffed out and froze, glittering in raw vacuum sunlight like the dust of diamonds.

The rainbow film that roofed the city began to collapse as the air whistled out from under it. It settled slowly, dents and ripples forming on its surface, pale bands of insect-wing color chasing one another faster and faster across its surface. Soon it would touch the top of the highest remain­ing skyscraper.

The second city was in a state of frantic activity now, readying rescue craft, searching for weapons. The first res­cue ship was about to lift off when a subtle grinding regis­tered on the outpost’s seismographs, a grinding from di­rectly beneath the city.

A circular area all around the outpost suddenly gave way, as neatly as coring an apple. The city immediately fell fifty feet. Rock met rock with incredible impact There were strong buildings in that city; some of them actually remained standing. But the rainbow film instantly gave way, and a sparkling gust of air leapt upward and outward from the newly formed crater. It was a mercy, really the freezing vacuum ended the pain of these few still alive. A little disturbed dust loosened by wind, sifted over the freez­ing ruins like a scattered benediction.

There were no witnesses. The rainbow film on the first city was still collapsing. A final long indentation touched the leaning top of a battered skyscraper. Blinding white en­ergy sleeted outward from the area of contact; the top of the building dripped hot slag into the street. The film burst.

Death was immediate. Even as the few survivors died in their underground shelters, coughing blood of different col­ors, the last starship lifted off. Its reactionless drive, at fran­tic full power, melted a few of the remaining buildings, and it surged away from the planet’s surface. Seeking free space.

A cloud of dust arose from the crater beneath, a small cloud, no more than two or three tons worth.

It accelerated upwards. I estimated that by the time it reached the lip of the cliff it was doing at least three-quarters of the speed of light. It moved faster than percep­tion; there was no evidence of its existence at all until the hull of the starship was suddenly turned into something like metal cheesecloth. The loss of air was only incidental. Everyone aboard was riddled with charred holes, thousands of them. There was no blood; it was all cauterized. And they were all dead.

The hulk drifted off serenely into blackness.

The sun was setting over the rim of the Nullaqua Crater. The sea below was calm; the slow vortexes of dust that had disturbed its surface stilled into eddies and vanished. The whole Crater seemed to settle into the peace of complete satisfaction, a state like the quiet joy of drawing in one’s first cool breath when a fever has finally broken. Stasis. Peace. Stability.

The sound of coughing woke me.

I opened my eyes to a vast unfocused glare, and blinked away a gritty film pf tears. The dust was all over my face, clogging my eyelids, crusting inside my nose, coating the inside of my mouth with a nauseating mealy dryness. I was floating on my back on the surface of the sea.

I tried to clear my mouth. My lips split their dusty scabs and thickened blood flowed over my dessicated tongue. My mouth revived a little in the wetness and saliva began to flow, turning the dust to a thick nastiness. I began cough­ing convulsively.

My dustmask was still hanging by a strap around my neck. When I reached for it I felt the first red-hot jolt of pain penetrate the numbness of shock. I felt it like a burn­ing bubble inside my right elbow. As I moved weakly oth­ers sprang up like flames in my joints and muscles—knees, thighs, arms. Tears of agony channeled through the dust on my cheeks. I had the bends.

An aeroembolism in my heart could kill me. I lay very still, feeding the dust with the tears clearing my eyes and the blood oozing through caked clots from wounds in legs and hands and ears. I tried to control my coughing; I was beginning to suffocate. I reached for my mask again and felt red-hot spikes rip through bones and nerves and ten­dons. I realized that death was very near, and the thought called up deep reserves of animal vitality.

I spat wet sludge and said, “I want to live. Just let me live. I can help you, I’ll be your Mend . . . you gods . . .”

I reached for my mask left-handed, and the pain was not so bad. As I lifted the mask to pour the dust out of it, my head sank a little and I was forced to kick my legs to keep my face from going under. My knees and hips began to burn from the inside out, little trapped fires boiling under my kneecaps. My hands trembled uncontrollably as I put the dustmask to my face. Its adhesive edge, form-fitted to my face, pushed grit into my skin. I wheezed outward to clear the filters. Dust fell from the little rubbery creases around the lenses, inside the mask, to torment my nose and eyes. I lay still again, waiting for the pain to burn itself out.

In the absolute stillness there was a sort of numb stasis of pain. But when I moved, it seemed as though my move­ment cracked a shell around the pain and let it ooze out, burning cells and nerves.

I kept weeping, and my eyes began to clear again. I turned my head a little to look at the cliffs, expecting to find them red with evening—it seemed as if hours had passed—but they were gleaming white.

As I looked I saw a black speck move slantwise across their mighty faces.

The black speck was a disturbing presence in a world of walls and bitter dust. It was Dalusa. I lifted my left arm, crusted gray on gray. Could she see the movement amid the miles of bleakness? I could barely move my right arm. Beyond the burning nexus in my elbow was the hot mashed numbness of bleeding fingers. I kicked my legs, raising a little plume of dust, clenching my teeth with a crunch of grit at the stabbing pain in my knees.

There was hope. I kicked and splashed in the dust for as long as I could, stopping when I had to fight a choking fit. My eyes kept oozing tears; I felt more than saw the shadow flit across me. There was wind, and the dust slurred over my cracked lenses and Dalusa settled into the dust beside me.

She knelt in the dust, sinking into it waist-deep and sta­bilizing her position with the extended edges of her wings, like outriggers. She stretched out her pale hands over my face, put the heels on her hands together, crooked her fin­gers like fangs and meshed them together, once, twice.

There was no mistaking that gesture—sharks. She pointed their direction, half-sinking as she did so.

“It’s all over then,” I said inside the mask, but she must have heard only a mumble. She swam around to my head with quick sculling motions of her wings. She took my left hand and gently wrapped it around her left ankle. Then she tried to fly.

Her impetus broke my grip at once. As I turned over onto my stomach, wallowing in the dust, I saw a flash of green zip by. Dalusa flinched aside, then snapped opt with one preternaturally long arm, snatching a pilot fish out of the air. I heard the rattle of its thin wings against her wrist as she quickly, reflexively, bit through its spine. She threw it aside, and pointed behind me.

I got my hands together and grabbed her ankle in a dou­ble panic grip.

She couldn’t quite fly; my weight was too much for her. Instead she flopped and splashed, and swam, dust bursting up in dirty plumes beneath her. She would leap upward from the dust to fly foward with great powerful surging strokes, fall to dust again, scrabble and swim with wings and hands and her free leg, and leap up once more to fly through the hot, sterile air as if she had to rip her way through it.

We didn’t look back. The pain in my arms was filling up the whole crater and spilling out over its edges. I felt fresh blood on my palms, and the slickness of sweat. I felt the skin of Dalusa’s ankle beginning to blister, its texture roughening as her skin was devoured with hives.

I couldn’t see the blistering because of the dust. I like to think that I would have let her go if I had seen it, accepted my own death rather than hurt her.

But we were always at our best when pain united us. I wanted to live—for her sake almost as much as my own, for the hope we could give each other. In my pain and confusion I could hardly comprehend the sacrifice she was making. It was only later that I grew to understand it.

I didn’t let go until we stopped moving. I didn’t know how long she had been towing me. It felt like days or weeks. I felt the harshness of rope around my chest I felt it tighten around my ribs, and, as the sailors hauled me up out of the dust to the deck of the Lunglance, I blacked out.

I was vaguely aware of movement beside me before I awoke.

“Here Mr. Cookie. Drink some of this.” Meggle, the cabin boy, was holding a ladleful of thin, yellowish broth. I lifted my head and tried to steady the end of the ladle. When I saw the bluish, broken nails of my right hand I started and spilled a little of the broth on my quilt I drank the rest feeling the flat saltiness of it sting myjnouth and soothe my raw throat Meggle set down a kettle of it.

“Drink it all,” he said. “Mr. Flack says you need lots of water.”

I sat up, wincing at the pain in my hand Someone had’ sponged the dust off me. I was naked under the quilt “What time is it?” I said, almost croaking.

“Cfifflight.”

I drank some more soup. “So Fm rescued,” I said. I started to cough rackingly and dropped the ladle with a clatter on the kitchen floor. Innocently, Meggle picked it up and handed it back to me.

“Have you seen anything unusual?” I asked him at last.

“Anything big moving under the dust—sharks—like that?”

Meggle looked at me incuriously. “No,” he said. He seemed unhappy with my questions, as if my forcing him to answer was an imposition.

“Well, what about Dalusa? Is her leg all right?”

“I dunno Mr. Cookie,” Meggle said, reaching up uneas­ily to tug at a strand of his coarse and incredibly dirty-looking hair. “I only saw its leg when it brought you in. Then it flew off to look for the captain.”

“No!” I said, stricken.

Meggle ducked his head guiltily into hunched dioulders. “Mr. Flack tried to stop it,” he said. “But it said it had to go look while it still had the strength. Its leg was really awful-looking, all swelled up past the knee and everything, but it said it had to go look for him. The captain I mean. It said it had to find him before the sharks bit all his blood out. That’s just what it said: ‘Bit all his blood out.’ Mr. Flack tried to stop it” Meggle looked away.

“How long has she been gone?”

“Three . . . hours.”

“Then we might as well go home,” I said. “We might as well all go home. She won’t be back.”

“It might Mr. Cookie. Mr. Flack put bandages on it and stopped the bleeding. Are you all right Mr. Cookie? Your eyes are red as fire.”

I couldn’t say anything. I only waved him away as I looked down into the soup kettle. Meggle put on his mask and went up the stairs out on deck. Salt tears fell into my broth, adding a lingering bitterness to my lonely meal.

It was her last act of faithfulness to those who hurt her, a last misguided act of sham humanity. She must have found the captain, because she never came back.