Vigilant

PINNED BUTTERFLY

The other Greenstrider robots had the same kind of damage: entry wounds where the legs met the torso, minced machinery inside. I guess the point of attack got chosen because it was especially vulnerable… or maybe just handy and close to important control circuits. No way to tell now — the robots had all been gutted too badly to reconstruct how they used to work.

And speaking of reconstruction… where did that leave Maya and Iranu? These robots looked too wrecked to be salvageable. What here could gladden the heart of a greedy archaeologist?

I moved around the room, giving each machine the once-over. A few rusty boxes had got opened and partly dismantled, half-rotted circuit boards laid out on the floor: Maya and Iranu must have been seeing what they could find. They’d done the most work on something that looked like a control console — a flat surface with bumps and lumps that might have been eroded push buttons, plus dirty plates of clear plastic that were probably screen readouts. Maya and Iranu had pried off two access panels under the console and gone fishing inside; you could see gaps where they’d removed bits and pieces for examination. But everything I saw looked too rust-eaten to be functional. If the archaeologists learned much from what they found, they must be rare good at their jobs.

Two times circling the room with the torch in my hand… and only then did it click back into my head that there were no doors anywhere. We’d clambered in through that spot where the wall crumbled; but that definitely wasn’t a real entranceway. As far as I could tell, the room had been totally sealed up with four mock-granite walls… and that didn’t make sense, did it?

"Festina-girl," I called, "time to give the Bumbler another workout. These walls look too good to be true."

They were. The Bumbler found two patches of wall whose temperature ran a titch warmer than their surroundings: both patches almost straight-edged rectangular, three meters wide, stretching from floor to ceiling. One patch was plunk in the middle of the wall between this room and the outside tunnel; the other was at the rear of the chamber.

"All right," Festina said. "So two sections of wall aren’t the same as the rest. Yes, they’re probably doors. But how do we get them open? Maybe once upon a time they unlocked at the flick of a switch… but every switch in the place is rusted clean through."

"O ye of little faith," I told her. "When you’ve got the right friends, who needs switches?"

My thoughts: the Greenstriders used nano weapons. So they probably used nano for other things too — like doors. The doorways could be like the windows in my office: made to look solid, but the nanites would let you pass if you had proper authorization.

What better kind of door for an army bunker?

And if Xe was my friend… if Xe had somehow wormed its way into Greenstrider nanotech, as easy as winning over the navy’s "incompatible" probe missiles… if the nanite doors weren’t totally dead after all these years… Xe might help me pass through.

"Let’s try a little experiment," I said.

I took a step toward the rear door.

And suddenly the Peacock was blocking my way, burning brighter than I’d ever seen, flames of gold and blue and green.

Nago! screamed my father’s voice in my head. Oolom for "evil." Tico, nago, wuto! Crazy, evil, dangerous.

The Peacock fluttered in the air, shivering. Shivering with emotion. And the emotion was fear.

"What’s wrong?" I demanded. "What’s so bad?" Tico. Tico, nago, wuto. "That’s not an answer."

"Are you having a conversation with a pocket universe?" Festina asked.

"Yes. But it’s precious skimpy on explanations." I turned back to the Peacock. "Tell me what’s behind the door."

Tico. Tico botjolo. Crazy. Crazy cursed.

"Fine. I get the message." I glanced toward Festina. "The Peacock is all worked up over whatever’s in the next room. Says it’s crazy, evil, dangerous." I sighed. "Maybe the smart thing is to back away and call the cops…" Boom.

Silent, inside my head, but boom. I was hit with a jolt of shuddery weeping frustration: a jab from the inside out, some high-proof hormonal punch that was pressure-pumped into every muscle of my body. I screamed — not pain, not anger, just screaming because I had to scream, deluged-drenched-drowning in teary-eyed floods of emotion. My head was clear enough to think, "What the bejeezus is this?" But still I screamed.

Festina grabbed me. Locked me into a grip that was two-thirds hug, one-third grappling hold. "What’s wrong, Faye? What is it?" I didn’t fight her. I just started to cry. Wrapped my arms tight around her and sobbed. Not understanding it, scarce even feeling it, as the clear part of my brain kept thinking, "This isn’t me, this is something else. Something else is crying through me. What’s doing it?"

The answer came, not words, just realization.

Xe. Xe, Xe, Xe.

Weeping as if her heart would break.

Here’s the thing: I’d been assuming the Peacock was Xe. An alien whatsit hooked into our world-soul AI. Tied in with my father and me and Tic and God knows what else.

But. (Hard to think when you’re bawling your eyes out and wiping your nose on an admiral’s shoulder.) The Peacock spoke to me in simple Oolom words, sounding in my head with my father’s voice. Xe hardly ever spoke in words at all: just emotions, realizations, facts showing up in my brain.

Xe sent thoughts through my link-seed. The Peacock spoke words — telepathically, if you wanted to call it that.

Two different beings. Entities. And what was behind the hidden door?

Xe. Xe, Xe, Xe.

The Peacock didn’t want me going through the door. Crazy, evil, dangerous.

But Xe spilled me wet with tears of frustration the moment I considered walking away. Sad, desperate tears.

"Stop it," I blubbered into Festina’s shoulder. "Let me think. Let me think."

"Shh," she said. We must have looked clown-stupid, me so much taller, crumpled against her. "Shhh. Shhh." She stroked my hair, not looking at me. Her cheek was against my head. "Shhh. Shhh."

Slowly, the gush of heartbreak eased away. Quiet. A drained-weary calm. Mine? Xe’s? Or just the afterwash from the hormones Xe sent swelling through me?

Peace is when the adrenaline goes away.

"That wasn’t me," I murmured to Festina, still holding her tight. "My body got hijacked by someone else."

She kept stroking my hair. "Shhh. Shhh." I’d dropped the torch-wand. Now the only light I could see came from the Peacock, looping quick circles around Festina and me like an anxious dog. Dizzying, dappled ripples of color.

"Shhh. Shhh. Shhh."

At last I pulled away… one hormone cocktail played out, another too precious eager to surface. Festina let me go, not meeting my eyes.

The Peacock had drawn in tight around us, an Ouro-boros ring only a handbreadth from touching our backs. Now it loosened, opening a gap that would let us scuttle back up the tunnel… but still blocking the way forward like a glittery wall of light.

"Do you want to tell me what’s going on?" Festina asked. She was still very close.

"Xe," I said. "She… it… is a consciousness laced through all the digital intelligences on Demoth. Including my link-seed. When I suggested maybe we shouldn’t keep going forward, Xe hit me with that colossal crying jag. Or maybe Xe herself had the crying jag, and I just got caught in the backwash."

"So," Festina muttered, "this Xe desperately wants us to press on. And the Peacock doesn’t. Dandy." She looked down at the Bumbler, clipped to her belt. "I suppose we could take a discreet peek from a distance…"

Carefully she drew back from the Peacock, slipping out through the gap it’d left for us. With the slow steps of someone who doesn’t want to rile a hair-temper dog, she walked around the edge of the ribbon-tube of light. The Peacock fluttered jumpitty-jittery, but didn’t stop her. As long as I stayed safe, the Peacock wouldn’t prevent others from sticking their heads in the noose.

Xe, I thought as Festina approached the hidden door, she’s a friend. Don’t be tico, nago, wuto.

No response.

Festina lifted the Bumbler and pulled out the scanner on its umbilical again. She took time for a glance back at me; I nodded. Then she planted the head of the scanner against the wall and gave a light push.

It went in. Straight into a wall that looked like solid granite. The nanites of the stone slipped out of the way, yielding enough to let the scanner pass through — centimeter by centimeter, like pushing a wooden stake into soft mud. Half a meter in, Festina said, "Okay. We’re through."

"See anything?" I asked.

She looked at the Bumbler’s vidscreen. "A short corridor and another room beyond. They’re both lit up, though I don’t see the light source. Oh, here’s something interesting." She turned a dial for better magnification. "My, my, my."

"What?"

"It’s an anchor. A Sperm-tail anchor. A machine that generates fields for holding Sperm-tails in place."

The dipshits had mentioned something about anchors — they were amazed the Peacock could stay stable without one. "These anchors lock down Sperm-tails?" I asked.

"Right. Whenever Explorers ride Sperm-tails on planet-down missions, we send an anchor out first to hold the tail in place."

"No wonder the Peacock is jumpy," I said. "A machine that can chain him down? That’s enough to give anyone the trembles."

"On the other hand," Festina replied, "you have to wonder what an anchor is doing down here." She fiddled with another dial on the Bumbler. "Let’s get more magnification and we’ll… holy shit!"

"What?"

She didn’t answer; she just stared at the Bumbler screen, her body blocking the view. "What is it?" I kept asking. "Festina? What?"

Twenty seconds later she stepped back from the wall. With a bit of huffing and puffing, Festina tug-of-warred the scanner out of the false granite. Then she carried the Bumbler back to me, her face deliberately emotionless. "I’ve recorded what’s in the next room. Here’s a playback."

She held the vidscreen in front of my eyes. The Peacock rippled nervously, flowing like Whitewater rapids between Festina and me, but not blocking my view of what the Bumbler showed.

Like Festina said, the other side of the door was a corridor leading to a larger room. In the mouth of the corridor, a boot-sized machine sat on the ground — the anchor thingy. The view moved in for a close-up: a black box with a horseshoe-shaped inset of gold embedded in its lid. More golden horseshoes circled the box’s sides, all glinting faint as a whisper. Incandescent. Every surface clean, not a speck of dirt or corrosion.

Then the view lifted away from the anchor, aiming out into the room beyond — a room with a huge black machine in the center, a great whopping obelisk stretched from floor to ceiling… and all around the obelisk, lights glowed.

Purple. Yellow. Green. Blue.

Flecks of color filled the room wherever I looked, everywhere, everywhere… till I realized I was seeing a single creature wrapped around and around and around, spun about the obelisk like thread on a spool. Wrapped around so many billion times, the windings went all the way out to the walls, bulging against them. Stuffed into the room, crammed tight. Another Peacock, locked down by the anchor. Then the Bumbler’s view shifted once more, zooming straight ahead, to part of the far wall. On the floor sat another anchor box; and a pace away another; and another, and another, out to both edges of the view, so I could imagine that the whole room, all the parts out of sight, had anchor boxes along the walls. Like pins holding down a butterfly.

The Bumbler’s screen went blank. Then the playback kicked over again, the entrance corridor, the view zooming in for a close-up of the first anchor…

"Turn it off," I said.

Festina moved a dial; the video went black.

"So what do we do?" she asked, her voice a whisper.

"Can we set it free?"

"It’s not hard to break an anchor," she replied. "One good smash with a rock should do it. But do we want to?"

Tough question, that. No doubt at all, the pinned-down Peacock was Xe — soul of the world-soul, friendly spirit who let me hear nanites giggle. Her body might be trapped, but her mind had roamed outward, melding with machine intelligences…

How?

An answer appeared in my mind: the obelisk in the next room was a computer, a Greenstrider computer. And Xe surrounded it, permeated it. Used it as a stepping-stone to all the other computers on planet. Xe had done her best to be kindly, helpful…

But my Peacock said tico, nago, wuto. Crazy. Evil. Dangerous. Was he just afraid of the anchors, or was he describing Xe? No matter how gentle-natured Xe seemed, she’d been locked down here a long long time. Probably the whole three thousand years since the Greenstrider colony self-destructed. Three millennia = thirty centuries = plenty of time to go mad.

Tico.

In stories, when you let a genie out of a bottle, sometimes it grants you wishes. Sometimes it decides to rip your head off.

"What do you think?" I asked Festina. "If we let Xe out, how dangerous could it be?"

She lowered her gaze. "I once knew a lunatic who planned to destroy a planet’s biosphere with a Sperm-tail. I won’t tell you how, but I think it might have worked."

"Ouch," I said. "If it was just us at risk…"

"Yes," she agreed. "It’s harder taking a chance with other people’s lives." She stared at me thoughtfully. "You can talk to this Xe with your link-seed?"

"Sort of. But she hasn’t volunteered to explain what’s going on."

"Ask a direct question. See what you get."

So I asked… and what I got was data tumor. Three thousand years of torment lanced straight into my brain.