Vigilant

GERM FACTORY

Information exploded in… century after century, what Xe experienced. Imprisonment. Boredom. Suffering. Madness. Evil. Guilt. Contrition.

Everything all at once, pummeling into my consciousness. A damburst set off by the right question, at the right place, right time.

Drowning in the weight of data. Choked by it — the way I often choked on scalpelish thoughts when I brooded how much I’d made a mess of things. Black depression is all you see, all you touch, all you feel, frothing-foaming-muddling in your brain. Motion churns without moving forward, bleak images circling the same futilities, everything all at once, too much to swallow, too much to breathe…

Then, in the jumble of mental meltdown, blood-boiling death a millisecond away… the sweet strong image of a peacock’s tail. Green and gold and purple and blue, a million eyes open. Just as I’d seen during mushor. not long ago, but I’d been so naive back then, I thought it was a trick of my mind. Now I knew better. This was the touch of the Peacock, my Peacock: shielding me, stopping up the data flood, holding back the tide till I caught my breath.

And the sound of it, same as before — feathers rattling, like a true peacock.

Look at me. Look at me. A demanding peace.

Then the world was back… and only a blink had flicked by. Festina was just starting to move toward me, her hands coming up, grabbing me as I slumped. I let her take my weight — I didn’t have the strength to stand because my head was so heavy, so full…

Not that I knew everything. My Peacock had thrown himself in the way of the data flood before I drowned. I’ll never know how much of the download got pinched off short.

But I knew enough. More than enough. "Are you all right?" Festina asked.

"Yes," I said. "And no. Ouch."

I didn’t move — just leaned against her and let her do the work because my brain couldn’t exactly remember how to control my legs. When Festina saw I was nigh-on deadweight, she lowered me gently to the floor. "What happened? Faye. Faye. Come on, focus. What happened?"

"I got the explanation," I replied, still reeling. "No one else ever asked. Even Tic… so Zenned-out, he never questioned. Just accepted everything Xe sent his way. When I asked, Xe was so excited and relieved… she tried to control the memory dump, I think she did, but she was too blessed giddy."

"What did she say?"

"Give me a second to sort it out." I looked around. "Where’s the Peacock?"

"It was moving so fast I could barely follow it, but, umm… I think it went up your nose."

"Oh," I said. "They do that. It’s their nature. And since he stopped my brain from exploding out my ears, I can’t complain, can I?"

"Are you sure you’re all right?" Festina asked, placing a hand on my forehead.

"I don’t have a fever," I told her. "Not yet. And I’m not delusional, I’m enlightened. Enlightened, lightheaded, delighted. Do you want to hear a story?"

"If you want to tell me one." She had the cautious tone of someone humoring a woman who might be tico. But I told her the story anyway.

Start with the peacocks. A species that surfaced into sentience long long long before Homo saps. They launched their first rocket while Earth was still watching protomammals dodge out from under the feet of T. REX. Then came the peacocks’ space-exploration phase, their bioengineering phase, their evolution into immortal energy-beings phase…

Yeah, sure, trite cliche. Simplistic at best, and God knows, maybe plain wrong. All I can share is the data scar left in my mind after the tumor: a mix of real information from Xe and approximations made by my overloaded brain as it tried to make sense of everything. If the input got trivialized and contaminated by junk already lying in my subconscious — well, that’s the way the meat brain works. Alien experiences get reinterpreted into things more familiar… even if that means drawing on fusty neural pathways laid down while watching Captain Action and the Technocracy Team.

So. The peacocks. Sentient Sperm-tails. Don’t ask me what part was the actual peacock: maybe the Sperm-tail’s pocket universe, maybe the particle-thin field that contained the pocket universe inside our own. Xe didn’t give me details. Maybe she didn’t know the truth herself.

Oh, another human prejudice there — seeing Xe as female. She wasn’t… any more than my own Peacock was male. But three thousand years ago, the two were a couple, a pair bond, friends, lovers, allies, interpenetrating energies… pick whatever facile description gives you the gooey. And the two wandered the galaxy together, looking for enlightenment/light-headedness/delight. Riding lesser beings.

No big mystery what I mean by Riding: hitchhiking in another creature’s brain. Secretly experiencing its thoughts and emotions. Telepathic tourism. Peacocks could set up as squatters in the minds of lesser organisms, decoding neural transmissions as easily as we decode the snarl of light waves that hit our retinas. Xe and her paramour picked up the thoughts of everyone around them, clear as a summer’s day.

Idle wandering took them to the Greenstrider home-world; hitchhiking brought them to Demoth. They Rode their unknowing hosts, sometimes for just a few hours but often from cradle to grave. That was their favorite way to Ride; traveling from birth to death gave them the full story, beginning, middle, end. The peacocks found each part fascinating… especially when the Greenstrider colony started breaking into factions.

You can picture them, those peacocks, like some rich-as-sin tourists watching the locals disembowel each other. Civil war breaking out, while the peacocks sat amused, sipping a telepathic cocktail of hate and violence, with just a splash of genocide.

The schisms that ripped apart Greenstrider society were so meaningless to Xe she didn’t try to understand. Too much bother. The striders may have been fighting rich against poor, heathens against believers, green legs against blue; but Xe couldn’t tell me because she hadn’t paid attention. All she could say was the Greenstriders fought: north vs. south, east vs. west, coast vs. interior, tribe vs. tribe vs. tribe.

For a long time, it stayed a cold war. The League of Peoples was just as inescapable back then as it is today; if the striders had battled full out, nukes blazing, poison gas spreading like fog, Demoth would have been declared non-sentient: no one allowed out or in, total blockade and embargo. That threat was enough to keep hostilities mostly "polite"… like those nanotech weapons that gutted machines without hurting people. But let’s not pretend blood was never shed. Sabotage can kill. Suspected sympathizers got lynched. Raids turned vicious. As machines went defunct one by one, neighbors invaded each other, looking for food synthesizers that could still pump out protein.

Ugly stuff… but not to Xe. She just found it interesting: like watching ants squabble, colony against colony; vicious but not important. For all her years of soaking up Greenstrider emotions, she still didn’t identify with them. They were animals — so far beneath her, they didn’t count. Even if the League considered the Greenstrider species sentient, they didn’t act that way on Demoth; murdering each other with barely an excuse, believing their petty squabbles mattered. If the strider she was Riding grieved for a fallen comrade or raged as his clan sank into low-tech barbarism… well, wasn’t it just so cute how they took themselves seriously?

Her sweetheart didn’t see it like that. Humorless dud that he was, he actually tried to stop the fun; and in a gag-down disgusting way. Here’s the thing: peacocks could do more than Ride in a passive way. They could actually fuse with their hosts, mind to mind, heart to heart. A conscious union, two brains in one, lasting for the lifetime of the host. Once twinned in, the Peacock couldn’t withdraw without killing its Greenstrider partner.

To Xe, whole fusion was like doing the dance with a monkey. Obscene. Uncleanly. But the other peacock, my Peacock, didn’t balk at grossness when it was necessary — he picked the leader of the strongest faction and zoomed in for a merge. The result was secret symbiosis: full Greenstrider on the outside, but inside half Peacock. Two minds becoming one… and the Peacock half was set on ending the civil war.

It made Xe sick. It made Xe furious. It made Xe blind-screaming jealous.

Her lover — her soul mate — getting heart-mind intimate with a lower animal. Disgusting. Sordid. Insulting.

Like many jealous lovers before her, Xe blazed back tit for tat: her own fling at bestiality. But she wasn’t looking for a productive working union; she wanted someone she could rape and use. Xe chose the leader of another faction, and shredded the Greenstrider’s brain as she made it her own. Blew the poor bugger straight off the edge of insanity. Then she set about using his body and his clan to rack up revenge.

It goes without saying Xe had ungodly intelligence compared with paltry minds like the Greenstriders. Intricate technical projects were child’s play… like creating the most lethal biological agent she could imagine. Not a germ, but a germ factory — a cloud of nanites (microscopic, invisible) that could analyze an organism, then build a microbe ideally suited to giving that organism a slow inescapable death.

Got it? Germ factory = Pteromic Central. The Mother of all Plagues.

My Peacock’s Greenstrider host operated from a bunker in Great St. Caspian. Xe sent the germ factory there — a microscopic troop of nanites, bent on making disease. The factory found a Greenstrider… analyzed the sad bastard’s biochemistry… came up with a killer bug. As Yunupur had observed, the germ was designed to spread far and wide: a long latency period when carriers were contagious but showed no symptoms. It infected everyone in the Peacock’s bunker, and the Peacock never noticed.

But.

The Peacock was working to restore peace on Demoth. That meant sending out envoys. Diplomats. People carrying offers of truce.

People also carrying the plague. Infecting clan after clan after clan.

The Greenstrider version of plague affected their skeletal structure; that’s what the germ factory decided was most vulnerable. Slowly, ever so slowly, bones began to shrink. Subtle, subtle. Bone cells just stopped reproducing, never replacing themselves. Ostrich legs grew thinner till they snapped like matchsticks. Just flexing a thumb might be enough to rip one of their spindly insect arms to flinders: thumb stressing the wrist, stressing the forearm, stressing the elbow joint, and so on up to the shoulder, everything going in one sickening crack.

Greenstrider lungs and diaphragm were seated on bones, using them for leverage during inhalation. Once those bones turned to tinder… breathless.

So Greenstriders began to die, all around the world. Leaving saggy corpses that soon decayed to humus and powder. Precious little in the way of skeletons for future archaeologists to study.

Long after it was too late, the Peacock realized what had happened — who was to blame for the epidemic unstoppably scouring Demoth free of Greenstriders. He never managed to develop a cure; but he did have time to settle the score with his former love.

Taking revenge? Or just locking up a mad dog? Neither Xe nor I knew whether the Peacock acted in anger or sorrow. But he did act. He built dozens of those Sperm-tail anchors. He tracked Xe down to Mummichog, to this bunker, where she still lived in fusion with her Greenstrider host. He ambushed her and imprisoned her and walked away without looking back.

Her prison was more than just the ring of anchors nailing her in place. The obelisk in the middle was also a key component: a computer, designed to run off Xe’s own energies. The computer controlled a team of nanites to serve as jailers — keeping the anchor boxes in good repair, collecting solar energy from the world outside, and bringing it down for Xe to feed. (That was the source of light in Xe’s chamber: nanites releasing their sucked-up mouthfuls of sun.)

But the computer did more than maintain the prison. My Peacock had taken mercy on his lover and given her something to Ride. Something safe. She could inhabit the computer, could use it to reach out to digital intelligences all over the planet… but it was programmed to resist her control. Xe could never override the functions that kept her trapped; she could only respond to outside requests, not initiate anything herself. Even after the Ooloms arrived, with link-seeds implanted into proctor brains, Xe couldn’t ask anyone to free her. The obelisk computer simply wouldn’t transmit such instructions.

It had stopped her from telling anyone about her situation, till I asked a direct question. But it hadn’t stopped her from mourning her imprisonment. And it hadn’t stopped her from repentance. Even an immortal can change over the course of three thousand years. Especially three thousand years of inhabiting the machines that served "lesser beings": first the Greenstriders, then later Ooloms, and finally Homo saps.

Xe had learned true sympathy. Or so she told me.

She bitterly regretted the death she had caused. Or so she said.

She was no danger to anyone, and only wanted to help. Or so her story went.

And she wanted out, out, out, out, out. Please, please, please, set her free, set her free.

That part, at least, I had no trouble believing.

"You know Xe can’t leave Demoth," Festina said when I finished the story. "Even if we free her, she’s a mass murderer. The League will swat her like a gnat the moment she heads for space."

"The League is strong enough to do that? To an advanced lifeform like Xe?"

"Faye, you have no idea how powerful the highest species in the League are. Compared to them, humans are as backward as bacteria. Xe might approach the level of a flatworm, but she’s still far too primitive to defy the League."

"And the League won’t accept she’s had a change of heart?"

"No one ever knows what the League will accept," Festina replied. "But they take a very preemptive attitude toward dangerous non-sentient creatures."

"Maybe Xe’s sentient now. Maybe she cares."

"And maybe she doesn’t." Festina sighed. "I had a partner once who studied Norse mythology. He liked all that atmosphere of gloomy ice and snow." She made a face. "Anyway, he told me a legend about a rude-boy god named Loki. Loki pissed off the Father of the Gods once too often and was encased inside a tree till some passerby shed a tear for his plight. No one did. Eventually Loki gained enough control over the tree that he forced it to drop a leaf into someone’s eye. Instant tear. Loki got free and proceeded to precipitate the end of the world."

"A load of laughs, those Vikings," I said.

"The lesson is still valid," Festina replied. "Xe may weep with contrition, but she’s done monstrous things. Freeing her is a real gamble. You realize that her germ factory must have created the plague twenty-seven years ago? Millions of Ooloms died because of her."

"I know. Xe told me herself. After Yasbad Iranu got caught for illegal archaeology digs, an old Oolom proctor decided to snoop around in the so-called mines to see what Iranu was looking for. The proctor never realized he was exploring Greenstrider bunkers; and he never knew he’d encountered Xe’s germ factory. That was Patient Zero for Pteromic Paralysis — a member of the Vigil doing his job."

Thank God he never knew.

"I want to set Xe loose," I said.

"Do you?" Festina asked. "Do you! Or is this a compunction she planted in your brain?"

"I’m saying what I want. I don’t know why I want it."

Festina grimaced. "Tricky things, those link-seeds."

"You’re telling me."

"So let me guess," she said. "You want me to make the final decision about Xe, because you can’t trust your own motives."

"Afraid so," I told her. "Someone’s got to make the call, and it’d be crazy to leave it up to me."

Festina sighed. "I suppose you’ve got a reason why we don’t pass the buck to your government?"

"Because they’ll drag their heels. They won’t dare upset the status quo till they’ve brought in experts, advisors and boffins galore. Which means knocking on the Admiralty’s door, doesn’t it, since the navy has the most experience with Sperm-tails."

"Whereupon," Festina said, "dipshits will expropriate Xe and hold her as a lab rat forever."

I nodded. And waited. Trying not to feel coward-guilty for dumping the hard choice on someone else. It’s what proctors are supposed to do, I told myself. Present the facts, name the risks, then get out of the way.

Festina stared at the floor as she thought over the situation; it only took a few seconds. "Okay," she said. "If we don’t free Xe now, you’re right; your government will search this place, find her, and eventually call in the Admiralty. At which point, people we really don’t trust will have a captive superintelligent pocket universe that can design germ factories." She shuddered. "I’d rather take our chances with Xe."

A sizzle of fiery hope flashed over me from the next room.

Festina and I walked toward the concealed door. The Peacock, last seen going up my nose, didn’t come swooping out to stop us. No Tico, nago, wuto! and blocking our way. I took that as a good sign. If my Peacock could read mental processes, he’d overheard Xe’s confession to me… and he must have believed it, or he’d be screaming warnings in my face.

No excitement. No fuss. When we got to the door, Festina gave me a look, making sure I wanted to keep going. I nodded, then pushed my hand against the wall.

My fingers sank in. The pseudogranite was more viscous than the windows back in my office — thick as concrete slurry. I forced myself forward, using the strength of my legs: pressing hard, both arms burying into the surface. Festina stood back, watching; if need be, she could push or pull to keep me from getting stuck in the middle. Just before my head went in, I took a breath and closed my eyes. Then onward, through the thick muddy soup, reminding myself I wasn’t at all claustrophobic like daft old Ooloms.

My arms came free on the other side. Then my face. For some reason, I expected to have muck coating me, smearied over my eyes, crusting up my hair; but I was clean, maybe cleaner than when I went in — my cheeks felt scrubbed, like having a pumice rinse. I kept driving forward, pushing, till my feet pulled away from the wall with a soft sucking sound.

Ssss-pop.

The sound echoed in the dimly lit corridor. Xe coiled in front of me, all green and gold and blue. Her lights shone flame-bright; I didn’t need a link-seed to feel her rapturous anticipation.

Festina’s shoulder came through the wall, followed straight on by her head — she hadn’t reached out with her hands first, she’d slammed straight in as if she were body-checking the stone. I hurried to help her… nearly yanking her off her feet in my eagerness to drag her free.

Maybe not my eagerness. Maybe Xe’s. The same way her frustration had spilled over to give me the weepies, I could feel myself swimming with creamy anticipation — nothing to do with my own hormones. "The wet tingles," we called it when I was fifteen… and Xe had them so whipping-fierce they were leaking into me.

So to speak.

I moved forward. There was a good-sized rock in my hand — I’d picked it up from the rubble in the other room. The anchor machine sat straight in front of me, wisps of Xe’s body sticking to the horseshoe insets like hairs plastered onto a balloon by static electricity.

Festina waved toward the box. "You want to do the honors?"

I knelt. Up with the rock, down with the rock — hard enough that the outside of the box ruptured and something cracked inside.

Wisps of peacock light danced away from the box. Free. A wave of joy surged through me so burning hot, I almost wet myself. Cool down, Xe, I thought desperately. I know you’re happy, but you’re going to embarrass me.

Acknowledgment with apologies. Not that the excitement abated much.

Festina and I went around the room in opposite directions, smashing anchors. Pulling the pins that held the butterfly. Xe made sure we never came in contact with her body, leaning herself away as we broke each fetter. I don’t know what would have happened if we actually touched her; maybe we’d get sucked inside and spin through her innards in a never-ending swirl. Something to avoid.

Smash. Smash. Smash. Till we came to the final anchor, holding the last threads of Xe’s being. She was mostly up on the ceiling now, like a streamer ribbon taped in this one spot to the floor but blown by a fan so it fluttered up and flapped. I lifted my rock for one more smash… but Festina wrapped her fingers around my hand.

"Before you do that," she said, "get Xe to stop the germ factory. Deactivate it, dismantle it. If she’s in touch with all nano on the planet, she should have no problem doing whatever it takes."

I didn’t even have time to phrase a command before Xe acknowledged the deed was done. The germ factory, far to the north, was shut down forever, nanites dispersed.

Just like that. All Xe ever needed was for someone to make the request.

"It’s done," I said. And brought the rock down hard.

Xe’s bliss was so strong I nearly fainted — a bursting-blazing headrush that drenched me with sweat. Colored lights filled the room like a blizzard of blue and green as Xe danced, pranced, soared, everywhere all at once… till my foggy brain realized the dance was not one peacock but two. My Peacock had slithered out to join her, to celebrate — so many emotions shooting off sparkles I was too giddy to appreciate a thousandth of them.

Two peacocks. Old lovers. Old enemies. Dancing.

Then suddenly, it stopped. The blur of lights snapped into focus, straight in front of Festina and me: two Sperm-tubes open side by side, flowing out of the room, down the corridor, and off God knows where.

"This would be our ride out of the tunnel," Festina said. "To where?"

"Don’t know," I answered. "But we’d better go — there’s still work to be done."

"You mean tracking down Maya?"

I nodded. Feeling breathless. Realizing Xe had planted more facts in my mind than just her own history.

"What’s wrong?" Festina asked. "Something to do with Maya? Something that… oh shit."

She bit her lip. She knew.

"Maya and Iranu," Festina whispered. "They’ve both been exploring Greenstrider bunkers." She took a deep breath. "They both met the germ factory, right?"

I nodded again. "Iranu met it six months ago. The factory analyzed him, then created the Freep disease. The disease killed Iranu and nearly did the same to Oh-God."

Festina steeled herself. "When did Maya meet the factory?"

"Four months ago," I said.

"And the factory created a disease that’s absolutely lethal to humans?"

"Yes. Xe says this version of the plague affects the brain."

"Shit." Festina’s face had grown pale. "So Maya’s been spreading the infection for ages. In Sallysweet River. And in Bonaventure."

"You’re forgetting Mummichog."

"Damn," Festina said. "Maya stayed with Voostor and your mother for days. Your mother must have caught the disease. The whole house has to be filled with it."

"All over the place," I agreed. "Xe says we’re both infected. And the olive oil cure won’t work this time. It’s a brand-new disease. Old medicines mean bugger-all."

There. There it was.

After twenty-seven years, the other shoe had dropped: a disease to kill humans without touching Ooloms. Scary having that inside me… and yet.

And yet.

I had a queer sense of completion. Botjolo Faye — waiting all this time for a death of her own. Finally belonging.

Relief. Sick dread, and scalpelly relief.

In front of us the peacocks still twinkled, ready to carry us somewhere they thought we should go. I reached out, took Festina’s hand, squeezed it. Our palms were both damp with fear sweat. "Sorry," I said, "this wasn’t meant for you. But it’ll still be all right. There’s time."

Whatever I meant by that.

I tugged her hand gently, pulling her toward the open peacock tubes. She squeezed back, a strong brave grip; then she let me go and we dived forward, side by side.