Stuart Jackson - Water_玖贝云文库

Book One

The Koyculture

Book Three

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Water

Book Two

Novagaia

Chapter One

Tennys had had his doubts about his transport when it had arrived, and now it felt as if those doubts

were justified. The Bus was falling out of the sky, completely out of control, its long legs dangling. To

make matters worse, its belly had become transparent allowing him to see the toy landscape of

Novagaia, upon which he was soon going to be a protein puree.

He screamed.

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He had arrived at the Hub complex at the centre of the Novagaian orbital only an hour previously,

aboard a small reaction shuttle from Memecast. The view of the approaching structure through the

vehicle’s imaging systems was spectacular.

The Novagaian Hub was ellipsoidal, 10 kilometres in length along its greatest axis. Innumerable docking

spines sprouted from both ends of it, many more than a kilometre long. Looked at from directly above,

the Hub was a spiky, squashed disc. Seen from the side, in line with the inner surface of Novagaia itself,

it was a spiky, flattened lozenge, three kilometres thick, studded with ports, blisters, lights, windows and

shadows. The volume above and below this central section was transparent, flecked with green and blue,

apparently unprotected from vacuum.

After disembarking from the shuttle, his first proper look at Novagaia through the long transparent wall

of the docking spine revealed a world not just ostensibly open to vacuum, butactually open to vacuum.

Having been raised on a sealed Austerity micro-orbital, and being used to the closed environment of

Memecast, the concept of living on such a potentiallyleaky structure alarmed him greatly.

He must have stood gawping for longer than he thought when he arrived because when he turned around

at the sound of a noise behind him, he was alone. A hoop of striped black was rolling toward him. It

stopped a few metres short. Ivory coloured graphics flowed across the thing’s black surface.

I am Hub courtesy, the words spelt.Can I do anything for you? Secondary scrolling requested his

preferred mode of access, while the machines grew flexible manipulators with small hands. The machine

offered the hands, palms open, in a curiously polite gesture to accompany the silent graphics.

Ah, thought Tennys,a porter. He adopted his usual condescending tone when talking to constructs.

‘Verbal access. I am Tennys Smolensky. Tell me how I get down to the orbital surface and how I find

Chapel Halls.’

‘A Bus can take you to Chapel Halls direct, Tennys Smolensky,’ replied the machine smoothly. ‘Hub

courtesy will provide your internal resource with the necessary directions if you wish?’

‘Yes. I do.’

‘Complying. Thank you.’

With that, the machine folded its hands quickly, in the manner of a ritual bow, its appendages intruded

back into itself, and it rolled away. Tennys was left, his mouth hanging slightly open, staring after the

machine as it moved around the curve of the corridor and disappeared. He was used to a little more

deference from constructs. For a moment, he felt a little silly.

Tennys accessed his resource. It interfaced his visual cortex and a map appeared, apparently hanging in

the air in front of him. Black and grey graphics wriggled into position showing him his position and route.

He began walking and the map stayed with him, a little over 30 centimetres from his nose until he

backgrounded it. His route took him, via a lift, to the other side of the Hub complex. He emerged into a

wide, deserted corridor, very much like the one that he had left. Movement caught his eye as he was

passing the big curved window.

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Something was approaching the Hub.

Tennys was reminded of pictures he had seen, of the kinds of invertebrate insects that had abounded on

Earth before Water. A dark, bulbous body trailed two enormous legs, monstrously thick where they

joined the body, tapering to broad, flat feet. The thing was drifting in towards the Hub feet first, its legs

slowly retracting, drawing into its body. When its feet touched the outer surface of the Hub wall, the

strange form began to shuffle sideways towards an access port, whilst its body continued to move, its

legs telescoping until it was squatting over the airlock blister. It extruded part of its belly, and smothered

the port, and then was quiescent. Curious, Tennys queried his resource.

‘Comm, do you have access to the Hub?’

‘Yes,’ said his internal resource, tapping his auditory nerve.

‘Well then, could you find out what the hellthat is?’ Tennys asked, pointing.

‘One moment.’

Tennys looked again at the thing suckling the airlock blister. It was mostly black, overlain with stripes

and whorls of a lighter brown shading. It looked like it was made from dirty coal.Must be a construct of

some sort , he thought but it did not look like any kind of machine that he had ever seen. An icon blinked

in front of his nose.

‘Proceed.’

‘Summary: The construct is a choo machine, a species of organic, sentient agent unique to Novagaia,

engineered by the orbital ecosphere. Its designated function is transportation within the confines of the

orbital. This form is known colloquially as a Bus.’

Tennys absorbed this information for a moment and gave a little high-pitched harumph of pleased

surprise. Then, belatedly, his mouth dropped open, and his eyes became a little wild. This was also his

transportation!

‘Comm, confirm please: Thisparticular Bus is here to take me to Chapel Halls?’

‘Confirm.’

Tennys reluctantly hoisted his bag onto his shoulder and walked toward the port. When the inner lock

doors opened onto the interior of the Bus, the first thing that he noticed was the smell. Or rather the

smells. He wrinkled his nose, trying to identify the spicy, unfamiliar scents of cinnamon and cloves and

lime. He selected a seat from the dozen or so spaced evenly in the fragrant belly of the machine and sat

down tentatively, wondering if anyone else was catching this Bus. He smelt liquorice and pine - twice -

quiet strongly, causing him to sneeze. Abruptly, the opening through which he had come closed and a

portion of the wall to his left became transparent, allowing him to see the exterior of the Hub. He felt a

trifle heavier for a moment, and the Hub wall began to fall away.

The Bus was in transit.

He sat and let his thoughts drift before asking: ‘Comm, how long is this journey?’

‘The journey will last just over 23 minutes.’

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He stared out of the Bus window as the Hub slowly receded, resolving into a spiky ellipsoid.

‘Comm, tell me about the Bus. What is it made of? How does it work?’

‘The machine is composed of synthetically innervated carbonsponge,’ replied the resource. ‘Molecular

pockets within the material are innervated by a network of viral nchoo agents with which the machine is

infected. The nchoo are able to effect local expansions of these molecular pockets. The executive control

of the nchoo infection belongs to the Bus’s choo Host.’

He harumphed. ‘I get it. The Host - that’s the "brain" right? - sends a command to its "muscles" to flex,

and it pushes away from the Hub, just like I would push away from the side of a swimming pool.’

‘This resource believes your last statement to be a visually useful, but mechanically inaccurate, analogy.’

‘So how does it get from being up here, to being down there? It just falls out of the sky, does it?’

Tennys laughed at the thought.

Pause.

‘Yes.’

‘What?!’

‘What?’

‘It just falls to the surface? That’s crazy! I’ll die!’

The resource made no reply, its linguistic performance capacities stymied by irrationality. Tennys looked

round the interior of the Bus wildly.

Wait a minute! This is a sentient construct. I can justtalkto it .

‘Uh, hello, uh Bus?’ He cleared his throat. ‘Bus, I am telling you to stop!’ There was no response. ‘Bus,

turn around! Take me back to the Hub!’ Nothing.

How can a construct be sentient if it can’t fucking speak?

The Bus continued to give no indication that it heard or understood.Or had it?

The Hub appeared to be moving, sweeping away to his left. No, theBus was turning. It was orientating

itself, pointing its legs toward the surface of Novagaia.

How did it do that?It must have reaction mass! Enough to brake its fall?

‘Comm, can you interface the Host? Ask it to turn around?’

‘No. The Host and this resource speak different languages.’

Tennys groaned. He was only 21 years old. He didn’t want to die, yet this smelly machine was about to

impact the surface of the Novagaian orbital at some monstrous speed and splash him all over it. He

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wondered how fast he would be travelling when he died. He queried his resource, feeling slightly giddy.

‘One moment.’

Tennys watched as more of Novagaia began to become visible, a broad swathe slicing across the Bus’s

transparent side from the upper left. He could make out patches of colour, browns and greens, through

white, wispy clouds.

An icon winked. ‘You will be travelling at...’

‘Stop.’ He had forgotten his macabre request. ‘How much longer?’

‘Is what?’ whispered his resource, after a short pause.

‘How much longer is thisjourney? And why are you being so dense all of a sudden Comm? Anaphoric

processing is supposed to be one of your specialities isn’t it?’

‘Your journey will last another seven minutes.’

Pause.

‘Comm, how come you and the Bus speak different languages?’

The icon winked open again. ‘The Host of the Bus is choo. This resource is choi. These two different

types of computational mechanism do not communicate easily. It may be possible for this resource to

construct a rudimentary common working language, but that would take several days.’

He was about to frame another question when, abruptly and simultaneously, the walls of the Bus became

opaque while the floor of the Bus became transparent.

He shrieked.

Through the transparent skin of the machine’s belly, he could see the Bus’s dangling legs trailing away

into thickening vacuum directly below him. Far below, on the moist inner surface of Novagaia,

distinguishable features were rapidly gaining in resolution. Hills and valleys, bodies of water, clusters of

structures.

‘How much longer Comm?’

‘130 seconds.’

He let out a small wail.

‘How much longer Comm?’

‘110 seconds.’

He gave another small wail.

‘How much longer Comm?’

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‘90 seconds.’

He began to feel strangely calm.

OK, so I won’t get to meet any Cardinals. Never mind. Could be worse.

Then he thought again.

Yeah right, like dying a horrible impersonal death in the belly of a smelly machine.

He looked down. Beneath his feet he saw a circle of lumps with little blue lines wriggling around their

bases. Hills and rivers. He saw structures and colours and little moving objects that he couldn’t make out.

His nose began to twitch as an incredible range of citrus, spicy smells began to assail his nostrils.

‘60 seconds.’

The Bus grew flexible black restraints from the seat and strapped him in across his chest. He decided to

close his eyes. The Bus lurched suddenly sideways so he snapped them open again. He looked down.

The huge legs hanging below him were attenuating quickly, stretching like hot toffee, the broad pads at

the far end probing the air ahead of the descending Bus.

The surface of Novagaia was now so close that he could make out individual structures, and both it and

they were getting bigger and flatter every second. He wailed again and began to feel sick. His stomach

churned and his bowels began to loosen. He farted and whimpered and as he looked down, the surface

of Novagaia rushed up to meet him at a hideously fast rate. He felt a scream begin in his throat, which

warbled up to a full-throated roar as the Bus plummeted downwards towards destruction.

The huge feet-pads hit first.

Just before they did however, the machine’s viral nchoo infection became active, expanding the

carbonsponge in the lower portions of the legs at an enormous rate: for just an instant, the broad feet

actually travelled faster than the rest of the Bus. The enormously attenuated legs of the machine - over

200 metres long at the end of its descent - damped the great velocity of the machine’s descending mass.

The viral nchoo agents effected the contraction in peristaltic waves. The previously thin appendages

telescoped and grew into two enormous stanchions, whilst the bulbous body of the machine decelerated

rapidly, and came to rest some 50 centimetres from the orbital surface, hanging between legs that were

now 10 metres high, and six metres across at their lumpen top.

The Bus had landed.

Tennys only opened his eyes when he became aware of a change in the air. The spicy warmth of the

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machine’s interior was being replaced by a green coolness wafting through the open hatch in the side of

the Bus. He looked down. Two small vestigial horns on the arms of his seat were all that remained of his

restraints. He looked around him. He was alive, though he didn’t know how. He smiled, shook his head

and then quickly paled. His hands flew down to his genitals. Finding them safe inside his trousers, he

cuddled them ferociously. Next he checked his head, then his torso, and then his legs. He was intact.

‘Comm, did you know that was going to happen?’ He paused, frowned. ‘In point of fact, whatdid

happen?’

‘The Bus landed.’

The Bus landed, he thought.Heavy shit.

The Bus was perched at the flat top of a conical hill. Perhaps half a kilometre away in either direction

was another, identical hill, smooth and chopped off. And beyond that, another. And beyond that, another

and another. They formed a line curving off into the distance.

Tennys invoked an optics tool and his apparent visual acuity leapt by a factor of 50. There, 20

kilometres away, he saw an identical truncated cone. Diminutive figures sat on an identical wall. He saw

one of the figures point upwards with a matchstick arm. He looked up, past the boundaries of the acuity

window and saw a tiny black speck plummeting downwards, seconds away from impacting the top of

the hill. He returned to the acuity window, re-focused on the matchstick figures climbing into the belly of

the distant Bus. The side of the machine closed up and it vanished. With unaugmented eyes after the

grid-work of the optics tool melted away, Tennys thought he glimpsed a black dot arching away from the

distant hill, moving incredibly fast, before he lost it against the glare of the sky.

Bus stops.

A ring of them spaced equidistantly around the circumference of a 20 kilometre circle.

‘Comm, where am I?’

‘You are on the outer boundary of Chapel Halls.’

‘You meanthis is Chapel Halls?’ Tennys swept his arm across the view. All he could see was thick

wood. ‘Where are the structures? Do the Cardinals live in the tress or something?’ The thought struck

him as funny, and he sniggered to himself. There was a pause as the resource searched the download it

had received from Hub courtesy.

‘There are structures within this valley but they are presumably hidden by the larger resident species of

flora.’

‘Oh right. So where do I want to go?’

‘Is that an epistemological question?’

‘What?No, it isn’t. And just tell me how to find the Cardinals.’

‘Following this path will take you to a significant population of Cardinals. Would you like a map?’

‘No.’

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He brusquely disabled the auditory tap and looked out across the landscape of greens and browns

rolling away from him. He turned his head to the left. In the distance, he could see a large body of water,

sparkling in the sun. He became drawn to the distance, and found that he had to raise his head to take it

all in, his eyes having to constantly track somehow - curiously -upward, as if he were looking up the face

of a mountain from its base. He did a double take, realising what he was seeing. He looked to his right.

The same. Of course it was the same.

This was anorbital .

The inner surface of Novagaia rose away up into the sky, went up and up and over his head, going all

the way around, and came back down on the other side. Tennys felt humbled all of a sudden.

How could Water possibly have built such a structure?

No one knew. No one knew anything about the builders of the Koyculture. Except the Cardinals.

And that’s partly why I’m here.

He drew a large breath, and another, quietening his fearful exhilaration. Shouldering his bag, and with a

last look at the unbroken expanse of green that stretched away from him, he turned and walked towards

the gap in the wall. Halfway down the path, he stopped and knelt down to examine the surface. What he

had thought was a chalky compaction was in fact a natural weave of fine branches, sprouting from roots

at the edges of the path. Tennys realised that miniature tress, growing horizontally instead of vertically,

were actually co-operating in small scale civil engineering. He straightened and continued walking until he

reached the outer margins of the greenery.

He peered into a natural cathedral, vaulting 30 metres above his head. There was bird song, strange

squeaks, whistles and clickings and dark forms moved in the higher reaches of the canopy. Breathing

deeply, he felt cool, moisture laden air fill his lungs and he strolled into the outer margins of Chapel Halls.

The path turned lazily this way and that in the forest, the vegetation stopping short a uniform couple of

metres from its borders, as if maintained by fastidious gardeners. He recognised none of the species that

he saw. Which was no surprise, because he knew nothing about botany at all. His home for the last six

years had been the closed, sterile torus of Memecast and his only other experience of natural flora had

been the marsh grasses and gnarled ambiguous bushes that grew around his parents morose, windswept

home on Austerity. Thoughts of his distant birthplace, always cold, mostly always raining, made Tennys

shiver.

What a contrast to this!

The quality of the light around him changed as the path’s variegated roof thinned. A faint spicy tang

reached his nostrils, and he suddenly had the curious feeling that he was not alone. He fought an irrational

desire to turn around and walk rapidly back the way he had come. He stood, uncertain how to proceed.

‘Comm, access the milliradar. Is there anything ahead of me on this path?’

‘One moment.’

The millimetre-wave radar and its micro-mesh antennae - one of the augmentations to his resource - sat

unobtrusively behind the bone of his forehead.

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‘Millirader active. Object detected.’

He squeaked.

He accessed his resource and keyed for a graphics window. He looked at the ghostly see-through image

from the radar. A tall, bulky shape stood 20 metres ahead around the next bend in the path. The wall of

the forest next to the shape kept swaying violently, as the extension leant in toward it. Tennys watched

as, again and again, the shape moved, and the forest wall quaked.

‘Comm.’ He backed away down the path. ‘What is it?’

‘What is what?’

Shit, this resource was being cranky!

He keyed the control window for the milliradar and the amorphous shape became outlined in thick

yellow lines. ‘Analysis! What isthat? ’ He waited for machine to probe the image, swaying from foot to

foot.

‘Object not recognised.’

He snorted violently. ‘Is whatever it is likely to want toeat me?’

‘No.’

‘So why didn’t you say so before?’

‘Is that a rhetorical question?’

He disabled the machine’s auditory tap with disgust.

Well, it isn’t going to eat me,but all the same...

He darted over to his left and fell into a semi-crouch. He made his way slowly along the path, hugging

the forest wall. He could hear vegetation ripping and rustling as he approached. Then the shape became

visible. His eyes went wide and his jaw dropped.

It was a charcoal and mahogany-striped giant, easily four times his height. It possessed three huge legs, a

barrelled midsection, a flexible extensible neck and two bundles of appendages where arms might once

have been. Tennys watched as the long neck extended and swayed in a small circle about the vertical,

like a snake triangulating a petrified mouse. Then it reached up, stretching to almost the very roof of the

artificial cathedral and pulled away some loose vegetation. It sank slowly back down and the monstrous

legs shuffled the thing down the path.

Fastidious gardeners indeed.

It was a choo machine, another different species of organic Novagaian construct. Tennys laughed at his

own timidity and shook his head.

The effect of so innocuous a sound was profound.

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Stuart Jackson - Water

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