Authors: Jr. L. E. Modesitt
Adiamante (2 page)
T
he 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 understoodâand something I feared had not changed.
he 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 understoodâand 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.
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 creditâand 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 deathâjust 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 fadedâwhile 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 eagleâthe one with the self-concept/image of “Swift-Fall-Hunter”âflapped 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 insideâno 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 cybsâof 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 hullsâor any other kind of warship hullsâjust 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?
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 ⦠.”
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.
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 oneâthose concepts and descriptions are just humans masquerading as aliens ⦠unless you believe that intelligence, as we define it, has as its goal survivalâin 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 longago
town. Now only scrub and cedar rose from the red clay.
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 bodymods, even if they're natural calluses, and that was carrying naturality to extremesâsomething 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 aliensânot 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 sensesârather, the absence of something did.
Under another old and twisted cedar, among the lichen-covered dark gray rocks, lurked a chunk of darknessâa 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 blacknessâheavier than hardwood, lighter than iron, and stronger than anything made by man before or sinceâlay in my hands.
After a moment, I replaced it in the rocks and straightened up. Adiamanteâharder 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 Constructâand 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 mandagger 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 marcybs ⦔ 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.”
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