Modesitt,L.E. - Adiamante

<<< I

If the conversation had been offline and spoken, neither of which was possible

within the working systems contained in the adiamante hull of the Gibson, the

words would have followed old patterns, patterns based on the spoken words

that seldom echoed within the bulkheads and networks of the Vereal ship.

"Are you certain?"

"It's Old Earth, all right. The geography is within parameters," answered the

cybnav, but since all the crew members—especially the line marines—were cybs,

her tag on the net was nav, navigator, subcommander, or, less frequently, her

given name.

"The DNA has the same base across all the samples," added the environmental

officer. "And there was no hostile reaction to the samplers."

"They were scanned," interjected the weapons controller.

"I don't like those terms—base, within parameters. Does the DNA match or

doesn't it? What about the geography? A planet doesn't change that much in ten

thousand years, does it?" asked Commander Gibreal, knowing the answer, but

seeking, as do all those of human DNA-type, confirmation of the obvious.

"There have been what look to be deliberate genetic manipulations, some

subtle, some not so subtle," signaled the envoff to the Gibson's commander.

"Certainly not enough to account for the reputation of the place as the planet

of death."

"What about viruses, bacteria, that sort of thing?" Gibreal knew the answers,

again, before he received them.

"The former colonies were pretty clear about that. So were their records.

Whatever the effect was, it wasn't anything known to their medical science.

People died in full clean-suits and armor, in extreme trauma, and without any

form of radiation, or any other trackable internal or external cause."

"Of course, there aren't any real records or tissue samples left." Gibreal's

words smoked across the net with the bitterness of aqua regia. "What some

people won't believe. Healthy bodies just don't die."

"What about telepathic auto-suggestion?" asked the envoff.

"Another rumor lost in time. No one's ever been able—not even the demis—to

master telepathy. Anyway," added the commander, "that was thousands of years

ago, and the old colonies have sent traders and envoys without harm for

generations. They don't stay long, but their technology doesn't approach

ours—or that of the old Rebuilt Hegemony." The commander snorted soundlessly,

and his disgust colored the net with brown and the unsmelled odor of animal

defecations. "Technology? Structures?"

"There aren't a lot of visible structures, except for those hundred or so

energy concentrations—and that mass of ruins east of the mountains in the

middle of old NorAm—that's what the records call it." The nav projected

laffodils across the web with her words.

The laffodils wilted under the image of a blazing sun. "No other ruins? Just

the one set?"

"There's the Great Wall—but we knew about that—and the non-talking heads.

There may be smaller sets, but nothing else that exceeds two hundred meters."

"Two monuments, one set of ruins, and one-hundred-plus energy

concentrations—that's it?"

"Within the system parameters so far, ser."

The sense of exhaled breath flooded the net, and the nav winced at the gale

that whistled through the circuits.

"What are the energy concentrations?"

"They look to be a combination of transport hubs, service maintenance and

manufacturing centers—with some transient housing."

"Everyone's there?" Gibreal's words lashed like a laser along the net

channels. "The whole population within some hundred enclaves?"

"Not a chance. There's almost an energy web across the planet. It's hard to

tell, but there seem to be a lot of independent energy generation points."

"So they've really regressed, have they?"

"Decentralized, anyway," temporized the nav, rubbing her forehead and blinking

back the water jolted from her eyes by the violence of Gibreal's slashes

through the net.

"Do we go in openly?" Gibreal's lashed words honed back toward the weapons

officer.

"Why not? If they're hostile we can flatten those centers, and that should

leave them helpless." Weapons projected fire and flames, and the ice of the

de-energizers. "It looks straightforward enough."

"It won't be," countered the nav. "They ruled this part of the galaxy once.

You saw what their fleet did to Al-Moratoros."

The image of the satellite of Moratoros three flashed across the net—a shining

polished sphere, lifeless after more than scores of centuries, a sphere

bathing an uninhabited planet in brilliant silver moonlight.

"That was then; this is now. They're coasting on the glory of a technology and

power that's long since faded. The asteroid cities are dead, and the

atmosphere of Mars is leaking back into space. No society has ever maintained

its power for that long."

"Not even us." No one owned to the thought that crossed the net.

"We've regained our heritage," the commander added, "and we've avoided them

for too long, just because of something that happened millennia ago." The

commander flicked his order at the comm officer. "Send the signal."

The same message went out in multiple forms—beginning with complex variwave,

then comm laser, UHF, VHF—all using the old protocols from the days preceding

The Flight.

It was a simple message.

"The Exploration Fleet of the Vereal Union greets you. We request the

opportunity to meet with the appropriate authority to discuss resumption of

contact between our peoples. Please respond."

Less than a stan passed before the variwave response came.

"This is Old Earth, Deseret station. . ."

As the transmission echoed along the net, the cybcomm and MYL-ERA ran the

analysis.

"A high power, tight beam transmission," observed MYL-ERA, her net projections

cool and sharp-edged, without emotional overtones.

"They know where we are."

"Not that difficult."

"In less than a standard hour—to receive, analyze, discover, find us, and

frame a logical response?" asked the comm officer.

"A high degree of efficiency," agreed MYL-ERA.

"Too high," muttered the comm officer offline and under her breath. "Far too

high."

"Still the same old demis, as arrogant in their knowledge as draffs are

immobile in their ignorance," added Gibreal.

Neither MYL-ERA nor the comm officer responded.

<<< II

I sat at the circular cedar table I had made nearly a half-century earlier and

stared out across the piñons, looking beyond the mist at everything—and

nothing, as I had for a string of uncounted mornings.

The age-polished timbers still lifted the steep-pitched ceiling above me, and

the wide windows still admitted the light, and the white, hand-plastered walls

held still held that light.

I sniffed, catching the faintest of familiar scents, and I swallowed and

looked back at the piñon-covered hills to the northwest.

Morgen was dead, and there wasn't much more to be said. Nothing changed

that—not all the linkages we had shared or the ability to block her pain, to

enjoy the last days as she had grown weaker. Nor had all the rationalizing

helped, not about how much longer she had lived than could have any draff or

cyb—not that Earth had any cybs left since The Flight.

She was dead. A half-century together had not been enough. Her soulsongs were

not enough. If only athanasia were possible, athanasia of the body and not

just of songs so painful they ripped through me, so beautiful that I still

listened—and wept within myself, if only. . . .

Yet I did not wish to follow her—and I did not want to remain, either. So I

watched the piñons, my thoughts floating out with the greedy jays, the spunky

junkos, and the perpetually frightened jackrabbits. Beyond those more

traditional auras loomed the darkness of the vorpals and kalirams and the

protective emptiness of the sambur.

In that limbo, because I could not or would not decide, I answered the inlink

when it chimed in my skull.

"Ecktor."

"Crucelle. The cybs are back. I thought you might like the charge." Crucelle's

thoughts were clear, with the practice of centuries, along with the pulsed

information on the cyb fleet, the dozen shielded ships that glittered power in

the underweb and overspace and the multi-form transmissions that they had

beamed at each locial point on Earth. Behind the information was the slender

red-headed presence of Crucelle himself, a formal red-bronze dagger of a soul,

and behind Crucelle was the ever-hovering soul-shadow of Arielle, swirling

stormangel on his linknet.

"Me?"

"Someone has to be Coordinator." The thought words reflected the tempered and

honed edge of a formal blade: seldom used, but always ready.

I understood the unpulsed thoughts. Someone . . . and Crucelle had Arielle.

Rhetoral had Elanstan. Even old Mithres had Dmetra. Coordinators took the

risks. And with Morgen gone, I could certainly afford the compensatory time

that would follow, assuming that I didn't follow the unwilling precedent of

many Coordinators.

"And I'm that someone?"

"I could ask around. ..."

I understood that as well. "The cybs? Might as well be me. Thanks."

"Thank you."

"Hello, Arielle," I added as Crucelle finished.

"I told you he would accept." Her words carried the whispers of the winds,

winds that could have dwarfed the great storms that still swept the mighty

west ocean. Winds, not the singing bells of dawn and twilight that I needed.

"He needs a challenge bigger than his pain."

Crucelle snorted, or that was the sensation that I received. 'You did; he

does, and he will."

"Have they said what they want?" I ignored Arielle's net-flashed smile.

"Not yet," answered Crucelle, his phrases as precise as though transmitted on

a print screen. "They're scanning the locials, almost as if they can't figure

out why we have so few discernible instances of technology. We have a little

time before responding."

Arielle storm-ghosted out of the shadow-link with the hint of a wink and

another smile as I thought about the cybs.

"They're after revenge, obviously."

"Elanstan opts for conquest, but I'd picked revenge," agreed Crucelle. "In

what form, though?"

"Revenge isn't revenge if the victim doesn't know it. That's why the call."

"They could be cautious."

"What did they ask for?"

"Here's the whole transmission." With the short message also came the

information on the multiple sending methods, including those that had

scrambled more than a few draff datanets.

"Just a meeting . . . requested with the hint of immense power. Twelve ships

each two klicks long, each with an adia-mante hull." I found my lips pursing,

and recalled Morgen's phrase about sealed lips being unable to kiss. I shook

my head.

"I felt that headshake." Crucelle laughed. "Clearly, the mythology of death

hasn't stopped them, unlike the released systems."

"Of course not. They're brilliant, rational cybs, and they haven't changed in

millennia."

"There aren't as many of us now as there were then," Crucelle reminded me.

"Twelve adiamante hulls indicates there are more of them and a significant

technological and industrial base. You don't create adiamante in a small

locial. What do you suggest?"

"Agree to their meeting to begin with. Let me think about the rest of it."

'You're hoping to find another way?" Even his question was formal-dagger

sharp.

"Who wouldn't?"

Who indeed wouldn't? If Old Earth indeed needed to return to being the planet

of death, the costs on all sides would be high, perhaps too high. That was

always the risk posed by the Construct. I sighed as I broke the link.

<<< III

The morning after Crucelle linked, I was up early, as always. With Morgen's

soulsongs soft-pealing through my mind, I wanted to hold her, talk to her, not

to her images. Words and songs and memories . . . they were better than the

emptiness of nothing. I did not call up a full-body holo, nor had I ever,

especially not since her death. Life is whole-body, not net-images, and that

was something the old cybs had never understood—and something I feared had not

changed.

Nor had I opted for deep-soul thought-reality, for I was too much an intuit to

accept such a shallow construct, and too rationalist to let myself be

deceived, no matter how welcome such self-deception might be.

Instead of continuing with memory, I turned on the burner for the kettle, a

small luxury, and ate a pear, one of the last ones off the tree in the side

garden, firm with a hint of tartness in all its aeneous glory. Then I toasted

another slice of heavy homemade bread. The maize was holding out, despite my

increased appetite for carbohydrates, and that was fine. Between the firin

cells, the solgen, and joba stocks, I had plenty of power.

Then, again, between the cybs and the duties of being Coordinator, the power

stocks for the house were scarcely likely to be a problem. Coordinator duties

carried both a comptime burden and a hefty admin offset credit—and every bit

of that offset was usually earned. I shook my head.

The kettle began to boil, and I brewed, in the old-fashioned way, a cup of

tea, wondering absently if tea would outlast all our heritages and worries.

Then I sat and ate and sipped my way through two cups, letting the steam

wreathe my face between sips as I held the cup two-handed below my chin. The

crunchiness of the few sunflower seeds in the bread was another reminder of...

what? I wasn't feeling that philosophical, but they tasted good.

Coordinator? Against the largest fleet seen since the Rebuilt Hegemony? As

Arielle had said, it was definitely a challenge, but not bigger than Morgen's

death—just different, and my loss made me the best candidate. Wonderful.

I ate a second slice of toast before I left the table and dressed for

exercise: yet another form of escape from reality, an escape created by

seizing the moment so tightly that the reality of the past faded—while I ran,

at least.

The sun hung unrisen below the eastern mountains as I stepped out of the house

into the gray light. From one of the top branches of an ancient piñon on the

southeast side of the long hilltop, the golden eagle—the one with the

self-concept/image of "Swift-Fall-Hunter"—flapped into the dawn, then glided

into the shadowed silence of the west gorge over the scattered meleysen trees

that remained. Although the dwindling meleysens continued to clean air and

ground and spread their pervasive faint orange perfume, the scent usually

didn't reach the house.

As Swift-Fall-Hunter vanished, I smiled and stretched each leg in turn,

placing it on the waist-high pile of hand-sawn deadwood, gradually stretching

and leaning forward, avoiding any rocking motion. I had left the bow saw

inside—no wood gathering when I needed to think. Besides, I had enough

deadwood, and Morgen had been the one who really liked the fire in the antique

cast-iron stove that dated back centuries or longer.

The breeze carried the scent of cedar and juniper and piñon, the air barely

damp from the quick evening rain of the night before. A light dusting of snow

had covered the higher mountains to the east, and to the north the Esklant

Peaks glittered white, as would the hills around me before much longer.

I finished stretching, straightened the loose sweat clothes, checked the

razored blade in the sheath, and walked along the path toward the western end

of the ridge. A brilliant blue piñon jay squawked, then a second, and both

flapped upward, followed by the rest of the small flock, as they swirled

downhill to light on another broad-branched piñon, high enough that they would

not be easy prey for a vorpal.

After a quick glance back at the thick brown walls that merged with the

hillside and the one partly open window, I began to run, letting my mind

free-associate on the thought of the cybs—of the coming meeting in Parwon.

As always, the lines of dialogue spooled through my nets, almost independent

of moving legs and breathing.

Dialogue line one: The cybs seek an undefined goal, probably revenge cloaked

in something, and are human enough to make it nasty, if given a chance. Old

Earth has no ships with adiamante hulls—or any other kind of warship

hulls—just twenty to thirty million talented demis. What do the cybs want in

their revenge? Symbolic atonement? Destruction of Earth's remaining demis?

Acknowledgment of their superiority and that they were treated wrongly?

What would Morgen have said? Enter soulsong one:

"My songs for you alone will flow;

at my death none but you will know

cold coals on black stove's grate, ash-white,

faintest glimmers for winter's night. . . ."

Dulce, dulce, with the smoothed gold of a perfect pear, the gold hair of

mountain dunes at twilight, and a funeral bell across the hills of Deseret.

Fighting the images, the ghost sense of silky skin I could no longer touch, I

ran harder. I used all my other senses, full-extended, because my eyes blurred

and burned, and I skittered thoughts toward the cyb-ships, the twelve

adiamante hulls, hard and black in the void-wrapped nielle, that darkness

deeper than black.

Downhill to the right, a jackrabbit thumped and jumped sideways behind a

cedar, another ancient twisted trunk that felt as though it dated to the

Rebuilding. Above, Swift-Fall-Hunter circled, his eyes on the jackrabbit.

Dialogue line two: Are the cybs people or aliens? Does it matter? No matter

how deeply we feel, nor how much we try to develop a picture of an alien, or a

concept of one—those concepts and descriptions are just humans masquerading as

aliens . . . unless you believe that intelligence, as we define it, has as its

goal survival—in which case there are no aliens, only humans with different

shapes.

The jackrabbit darted to a halt under a piñon beside a washed-out scrub brush,

and Swift-Fall-Hunter circled to the east on wings that spanned more than four

meters. The golden eagle sought other prey, gliding silently over the valley

that had once held, among other things, a long-ago town. Now only scrub and

cedar rose from the red clay.

I kept running, westward, away from the vanished town and away from history.

Dialogue line one: Morgen, morning, morning in my twilight, what would she

have said? Certainly something to the effect that revenge is human, all too

human, and therefore a fitting vice to be overcome, except she would have said

it, thought it, more gently . . . something like, "The cybs have human vices,

too, Ecktor. ..."

Not like that, either, I realized, as I started down between the hills,

concentrating on putting my boots evenly between the rocks and depressions.

Not even with the net and her songs could I construct what she might have said

to the unexpected, like the return of the cybs.

Some demis run naked and barefoot, but that takes body-mods, even if they're

natural calluses, and that was carrying naturality to extremes—something I

tried not to do. I could sense my oxygen demand rising, both physically and

through the selfnet. My lips curled, and I forced my legs to stretch out

despite the discomfort.

Dialogue line two: No aliens—not even the cybs? Next you'll be saying there's

no difference between virtual-net real and whole-body real.

Conthesis one: Is there a difference between reality, symbolic reality, and

representative/virtual reality? One might as well ask whether there is a

difference between women, pictures of women, and mannequins dressed as women

... or soulsongs of beloved women.

Soulsongs of beloved women . . . beloved woman. . . .

I ran with the breeze, breathing heavily, setting each foot in harmony, mind

out ahead and scouting the trees and the path, relaying the information to my

body. The scent of the meleysen leaves to the northeast drifted into my

nostrils, and I stepped up the pace.

Conthesis two: I don't have one.

As I panted up to the top of the next hill to the west, the breeze

strengthened, cooling me, and bringing the slightest acrid scent of a distant

vorpal. My hand touched the knife, and my lips curled, but no vorpal would

come after me, not with my luck.

As I kept moving across the hilltop, dodging rocks and cedars and junipers,

the coolness did nothing to unscramble the thoughts and emotions within.

Fine excuse for a demi I was, unable to break free of the hold of the past,

the hold of the memory of floral essence on bare skin, the hold of. ...

Too bad the cybs had forsaken integration in favor of crystalline clarity. I

almost laughed at that, and had Morgen been there in more than soulsong, I

would have.

Instead of staying on the path, I turned due south and darted this way and

that downhill and through the piñons, trying to avoid any spot where I might

have run before. The soil wasn't cryptozoic, even away from the meleysens. It

just hadn't ever been that fertile, although it was richer under the trees and

around the pale blue-green of the sagebrush. Lava takes millions of years to

degrade in a dry climate, and the sagebrush hadn't been working on the black

stone anywhere near that long.

I kept running, and the pressure of the physical shut down my internal

dialogues.

When I slowed to a fast walk near the top of the next rise, I was breathing

heavily, and sweating. Through the trees to the north, I could see the

grasslands and the hummocks of the prairie dog town, rising above the

chest-high and browned grasses. Swift-Fall-Hunter circled, then passed on,

looking for easier prey.

The sourness of my sweat and the panting confirmed that I'd neglected my

physical condition more than I should have. With the slowing down, something

from a pile of rocks caught my eye and senses—rather, the absence of something

did.

Under another old and twisted cedar, among the lichen-covered dark gray rocks,

lurked a chunk of darkness—a blackness that swallowed light, that turned

seeking eyes from it: a curved fragment of black adiamante. I squatted,

letting my fingers ease the adiamante up.

How long had it rested there, impervious to age, to deterioration, to anything

but the mighty lines of force that had sheared it into a smooth-sided and

round polygon whose exact dimensions still eluded the eye?

I lifted the adiamante, a relic of the great confrontation between the demis

and the cybs that had led to the Rebuilding. Neither warm nor cool to the

touch, neither seeking nor releasing heat, the smooth blackness—heavier than

hardwood, lighter than iron, and stronger than anything made by man before or

since—lay in my hands.

After a moment, I replaced it in the rocks and straightened up.

Adiamante—harder than the diamond from which its name had been derived, and

virtually useless except in a handful of applications like armor and

spacecraft hulls . . . and, I supposed, swords, except no one had ever

squandered that much energy to forge an adiamante sword. Once formed, you

couldn't mill it, work it, or change it, and only a gigawatt laser, a

sun-fired particle beam, or a nucleonic knife could cut it.

And yes, it had taken a full asteroid complex to create it. I supposed the

complex was still out there, beyond the night, fusactors cold, waiting for the

resurgence of the Rebuilt Hegemony that could never come, or some future

rebuilding of Old Earth necessitated by the workings of the Construct—and my

failure. I shivered at that thought.

Under the tree lay a fragment, a faraway meteoric fragment that had dropped

from the sundered skies of The Flight. I let it lie, wishing the cybs had been

wise enough to let the hard fragments of their past lie. But, being cybs, that

was exactly what they could not do, not when for them net-reality was equal to

whole-body reality.

After a few moments of deep breaths, I began to run again, back through the

trees, away from the adiamante. I circled slowly north and uphill, back toward

the past.

As I stopped outside the house, close enough to hold the comment, I pulsed a

link to Crucelle, who answered as though he had been waiting.

"Any further thoughts?" he asked, red-bronze man-dagger waiting for use.

"The ell stations . . . they need to be powered up. Isn't that Elanstan?"

"I'll tell her," Crucelle volunteered, and I let him, shaking my head at the

thought.

"Me, too," he answered my unspoken concern. "There's no guarantee that we

could put Earth back together again. We almost didn't last time, and the

Jykserians weren't nearly so strong."

"Letting them destroy the locials? Would that be enough?" Arielle's

storm-currents pulsed darkangel-like.

"That wouldn't give them enough revenge, I suspect," I pulsed, sensing

Crucelle's nod even before I finished. "People who feel they're right, and

who've been humiliated . . ."

"They'll want to reduce us to a bloody pulp?"

It was my turn to nod.

"So what do we do now?" he asked.

"We'll need to concede whatever it takes to get their mar-cybs ..." I stopped.

"No . . . that will just encourage them to act immediately. Give them full

access to the locials. Treat them as honored guests, but not too honored, as

if they were not quite equals."

"That's true enough."

"That's also the problem. They're sitting in orbit with enough power to make a

large mess, and they're looking for an excuse to do it without any

understanding of the repercussions."

"I think they understand," interjected Arielle. "They just don't care. If we

use force to stop them, then we fuel another millennium of cyb-based

technological development. At the end of that development, they'll have

developed devices that will nova an entire system, or worse. If we surrender,

they'll find an excuse to commit some range of atrocities or try to sterilize

the whole planet. The Construct forbids either, in any case."

"Like the way the Construct forbade what our forbearers did to Al-Moratoros?"

They both winced. That memory had not faded, though it was not ours, nor our

doing. And that wince said all there was to say about why we wouldn't break

the Construct, no matter what the cost.

"Either way," Arielle concluded, "that's our payback for using power in

forcing The Flight."

"Thanks, Arielle," I flipped back.

"You are most welcome, puissant mage Ecktor. And Coordinator," she added

ironically.

I continued to concentrate, but nothing new or original came to mind. I

finally concluded, "We're still left with the fact that Old Earth is the

planet of death where only demis and draffs can live. Proving that could be

hard, if they still fit the typical cyb profile."

The sense of a nod followed from Arielle, along with a sigh and a frown.

"That's going to be hard. I'd estimate a twenty percent mortality, maybe as

high as fifty percent for those in direct contact."

I sent back a shrug, not a disinterested one, but a resigned one. So far, I

didn't have any alternatives.

For a moment, stillness dropped across the net like a niellen shroud, and I

could understand that.

'You're breathing hard," Crucelle finally responded.

"I ran a while."

"How far? How long."

"Not quite thirteen klicks ... in half a stan . . . but I'm not in shape, and

I was scrambling through the woods." If I had been in better shape or followed

the path, I could have done close to twenty klicks in the same time.

The dialogue box in my head pointed out that while I could run from grief,

running wasn't going to solve the cyb problem. It hadn't millennia earlier,

and it wouldn't now.

<<< IV

Modesitt, L.E. - Adiamante

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