Seeds of Earth (16 page)

'Aye, well, just as long as it's manly!'

Watching Greg ascend the slope with Catriona on his back, and hearing them both laughing, Theo smiled and wondered. Then he paused to glance back at the shadowy gap in the side of the gorge, frowning.

No, he thought.
Just my imagination, populating dark corners with spirits and kobolds, even though there's a real monster running around.

Shrugging, he followed the others up the steep path, noting that the Ezgara was gone.

17

PATH MASTER

From the sheltering veil of shadows he watched the Humans depart, feeling something akin to amusement as the eldest of them paused to look back before likewise leaving. Then he was alone with the shadows and cold, the trickling brook and the simple creatures, as alone as he had been for nearly ten thousand years. Last of the Pathmasters, last bearer of ancient knowledge, fading remnant of cherished duty.

Was it all chance and happenstance that his essence should be drawn here on the same day that a slaying took place upon Waonwir, directly above the Sleeper's vault? And that a Human female stunningly radiant with potential should then wander close enough to get his attention? Well, the Pathmasters who taught him had always reminded him that coincidences were only the most obvious manifestations of the light touch of the Eternal. After all, the female had said, 'I've been searching for you,' and he had seen in her thoughts the fruitless outcomes of her exploring in the depths of Segrana.

Such a prize she was, the avidity of her cognitive harmony burning so brightly along the transient edge of the stable dimensions that he could almost make out the ambits of possible futures. Questions had come tumbling from her in a torrent, but he had stanched it with a command - seek out a
vudron
and undertake a vigil. For in the end it came down to Segrana, to her slow but sure perceptions, and to the reckonings she made. The immemorial awareness of the great moon-enfolding forest, vast yet thinly scattered, was close to the underlying qualities of the Eternal, which could not help but influence Segrana when the human female entered a
vudron
back there.

Then her male companion had arrived, a surprise that had caused her to lose her footing by the brook, slip and fall. The Pathmaster had allowed his visible membrane of coerced particles to melt away so that when next they looked he had apparently disappeared.

All the Humans and others were receding and he knew that there was another place he had to be, a daughter-forest where another fascinating Human was taking his ease in strange company. The Uvovo-cultivated sanctuary lay several miles away, yet for such as himself that distance was no greater than that between one thought and the next, thoughts that were long and complex, thoughts that bound this self with that succession of other selves which stretched away towards the Eternal. He formed the thought of a glade in that daughter-forest, sweet and strong offspring of Segrana, and by virtue of the entwining green weave of seed and leaf his disembodiment travelled there, slipping through to unfurl his essence in green, sheltering shade.

He found the Human, a male named Horst, sitting on a low wooden bench beneath a sunny sky, leaning sideways against the armrest, reading a book balanced on a raised knee. Next to him on the bench was a small flat device, its dark surface gleaming in the sun, while on the long grass a short distance away a young human female sat crosslegged, making chains of small flowers.

But this idyllic scene was not at all what it seemed to be. The Pathmaster knew that, like her flowers, the child was an illusion, an insubstantial image cast by Horst's cunningly wrought device. Earth Ambassador Horst was a man in the grip of grief, as much a prisoner of it as if he were weeping rather than smiling, and in his grief he had surrendered part of himself to an unthinking, visionless instrument devoid of true self.

Yet that was not the worst of it. Horst also played host to one of the Dreamless, an artificial entity of a different magnitude: unlike the clever image of a dead daughter, these Dreamless possessed a kind of volition and a degree of self-critical awareness very similar to their anti-life predecessors who had brought most of the galaxy to the brink of disaster ten millennia ago.

Unlike those long-vanquished entities, however, these Dreamless had evolved in symbiosis with a dominant species, the Sendruka, thus spreading their influence far and wide throughout the Hegemonic territories and beyond. The new Dreamless had attained levels of power and existence unimaginable to those predecessors - every artificial entity consisted of two parts, a lesser part occupying a physical matrix in the vantage of the Real, either a device or an implant, and a greater part that resided in that understratum of reality known to Humans as the first tier of hyperspace. Such scraps of information the Pathmaster had gleaned from innumerable overheard fragments of offworlder conversation, the occasional stray thought, and those observations of scholars and Listeners which he had received.

And the implications provoked in him a deep unease. Were the implant Dreamless merely a manifestation of the greater, hyperspace ones, or did they possess autonomy? What was the hierarchy of the hyperspace Dreamless and how did they communicate with their implant counterparts? That last unknown was the most immediately worrying - did that method of communication bear any similarity to the frail bonds that linked his essence to those former echoes of himself which were on the path to mergence with the Eternal? His unease deepened still further when he thought of the Sentinel asleep in its vault, and how it communicated with deep, hidden allies.

He regarded the Human Horst once more, noticing how the man's attention was focused on a point in the air just beyond the other end of the bench. His lips were scarcely moving but he was speaking, softly in his throat. From a tall, broad tree nearby the Pathmaster tentatively reached out with rarefied senses, trying to see into Horst's thoughts, with a touch of the mind so light as to be scarcely extant.

Yet he felt the resonant disturbance of linkage, and he saw ... so strange, another man, tall and well-proportioned with a relaxed, even amused demeanour, yet he was an image lacking any colour. Blacks, whites and shades of grey.

They were talking, something about the sister ships of the
Hyperion,
the ones that had gone missing, a tale that the Pathmaster was acquainted with.
I've had an enquiry from another group of ship-hunters,
Horst was saying,
calling themselves the First Flight Association.

And what's their pet notion}
said the Dreamless's monochrome image.
That the
Forrestal
and the
Tenebrosa
were flung far back in time and their crews became the original ancestors of the Sendruka?

No, that's the HTF Society's theory. First Flight have somehow deduced that all three ships ended up in the Huvuun Deepzone and they've asked me to persuade the Hegemony's Grand Archivist to release any Huvuun survey data into the public domain.

But Robert, don't these people realise that the
Hyperion
colonists were incredibly lucky to find an uninhabited world like this, lucky not to have encountered any interstellar marauders or resource raiders, and lucky not to have succumbed to some native microorganism? The other two crews would need similar amounts of good fortune to survive the potential hazards.

Which are many,
said Horst. No - /
fear that the
Hyperion's
luck was a fluke and that the other vessels were overcome by tragedy or violence. Perhaps in a hundred years, or even tomorrow, a traveller will find a dead hulk of a ship drifting around an uncharted star, or the ruins of a settlement on some inhospitable world, and the mystery will be solved.

The Pathmaster listened, amused at the finality of Horst's declamation yet puzzled to see a knowing smile pass across the grey-pale Dreamless's features. And as the Pathmaster paused to ponder, he felt an echo of wrongness resonate back from that sombre verdict, as if there was something out among the stars to contradict it.

Then the Dreamless turned a thoughtful gaze over at the seated figure of Horst's daughter. For a moment all were still in that tableau, the two apparitions hingeing on Horst's state of mind.

The Pathmaster withdrew his perceptions, returning to the simpler imperatives of plantlife, to build, to grow, to put forth leaf, flower and seed, taking in the sun while drinking from the soil. The cycles and rhythms of nations and species, however, were vastly more complex than those of plantlife and the Pathmaster had come to know for certain that several ruthless ventures and ambitions had been drawn together by the discovery of Umara. Very soon these intersecting forces would bring great pressure to bear on the colony's leaders, and also on Horst, whose position might prove to be pivotal. Also, a lot would come to depend on the resilience and character of Cheluvahar, the new Artificer Uvovo. The husking of Cheluvahar would soon take place, shortly thereafter to be followed by the dispersal of Artificer teams to their appointed destinations and tasks, many secret, some formidable, all vital. Assuming that Segrana was able to carry out the husking as planned.

Now a man approached, one of the ambassador's staff, attired in a blue, high-necked uniform and perspiring visibly as he came hurrying round the forest path and into view. He would be carrying news of the shooting, the event that would set the first cogs in motion, their turning bringing certain forces into play, allowing larger cogs the freedom to turn, while other things moved and stalked between the stars ...

As the Pathmaster watched, Horst nodded to the official then turned to the ghost-image of his daughter, speaking gently to her as if she were really there.

Reality,
the Pathmaster thought.
When it comes, will it break him or will he learn how to survive?

PART TWO

18

KAO CHIH

Outside his armoured cabin the winds of the gas giant V'Harant raged and roared as the gravity-tug
Biaolong
maintained its spiral ascent, carrying its pendant burden of six ore containers. Relaxing in the huge, ancient pilot couch, retrofitted for the human form by Roug technicians decades ago, Chih kept a practised eye on the exterior monitor and the generator gauges while deftly swapping the music tab in the couch's headrest. Like the couch and most of the instrumentation, the exterior monitor was a conversion hack, a dusty panel cased in grey plastic and fixed to the original console with webby struts. It showed a montage of views of the
Biaolong's
hull, looking for all the world like an inverted stepped pyramid, its flanks studded with tapered blocks, while a perpetual blast of corrosive atmosphere whirled and scoured and howled.

Watching it, Chih smiled, remembering Great-Aunt Mei's assertion that the murky skies of V'Harant were really
Di-Yu,
the underworld, the abode of demons and punishment. Then he listened to the sound of that neverending storm, muted to a low whisper by the thick alloy hull and the chemo-suppressor field, imagining it to be the fangs of a demon host grinding uselessly away, just beyond the armoured shutters. He laughed and was about to start the music, a selection of Yunan school electroniki, when the voice of his copilot, Ta Jiang, came from the headrest instead.

'Chih - number seven is sliding out of resonance.'

'Not again,' he said, leaning forward. The generator gauges were flat displays set on brassy, octagonal plinths that jutted from the main console. Slipping on the spectrum goggles, he studied gauge 7, switching between colour lens pairs to take in all the 3D data. The Roug's willingness to modify the instrumentation had not extended to the antigrav generator displays, stemming from the conviction that all operators had to adapt their sensory perceptions to the equipment in order to preserve the conceptual integrity of the primal schemata. Fabulously intricate assemblages of motors, gyros, gears, levers, mirrors and crystals constituted the control systems of the gravity-tugs, the mines down on V'Harant's core, the orbiting refineries, and the cities of the Roug, floating somewhere in the gas giant's turbid atmosphere. Three generations of human engineers had been unable to persuade them to introduce even the most basic digital upgrades, and with never a reason given beyond a veneration of the original designers.

'Right, Jiang,' Kao Chih said, lifting his goggles to catch a glimpse of the main console's powerflow display, then it was back to the rainbow data-forms of gauge 7. 'It's radial pair nine in the crystal array - you'll need to rebalance it by three increments ...'

'Okay ... is that it?'

'Just a moment - yes, Jiang, perfect.' He grinned. 'I'll buy the
ch'a
when we get back to the Mountain.'

'That is very noble of you,' said Jiang. 'And who knows - I might have time to finish it before we go out again!'

Chih laughed as he tugged off the goggles. After docking, the copilot always had a longer journey to the airlock as his monitor station was near the core of the tug, which left him with a significantly shorter break than the chief pilot.

The remaining hour and a half of the
Biaolong's
ascent was uneventful. Once the tug was clear of the upper atmosphere, Chih opened the cabin viewport's shutters and gazed out at the sullen, roiling face of V'Harant while the headrest played old, poignant synthesiser motifs softly in the background. From this altitude the turbulent globe did suggest a place of torment like
Di-Yu;
Great-Aunt Mei once had scandalised Kao Chih's mother and father by saying that V'Harant might even be a Chamber of Hell reserved for those who betrayed friends and family, abandoning them to ruthless enemies. The elder Kao's rebuke had been calm and measured, reminding her of how their forebears had been forced to flee destruction twice, firstly aboard the
Tenebrosa
when she and her sister ships fled the Swarm, and secondly when Hegemony mercenaries attacked their settlement on Pyre. He also pointed out that the ignoble character of her comments was a disservice towards the sept's collective sorrow.