Winter Song (19 page)

    Just in case Steinar tries something; we'll tell the Norns that we've been threatened, and may need to call for assistance at any time. Let's put some pressure on them – if you can pressure machines.

    "Come on," he said to Arnbjorn. "Let's do it now."

    And then Herr Utlander, I'm coming after you.

ELEVEN

You were sure you were doomed when the Other launched the hunter-killer.

    
"Sustaining a viable ecosystem will require continual ad
justments to the climate–"

    You skulked, lying low on the basements of the meatbox-mind, and somehow you managed to evade the dark world-let that fell toward your hiding place. You had the same worm's-eye view of it that the survivors had of Asteroid Shiva thundering down on Tau Ceti IV in a ball of eye-melting fire.

    
"The Interregnum was the inevitable consequence of trying
to maintain a single society across interstellar distances with
only sub-light travel to connect the various systems–"

    Leakages from the bulky monolith give it a name: "Diagnostic Program, Artificial Intelligence, Companion Level". But to you, it had the hallmarks of a killer, all muscles tattooed with circuitry, and cold, neck-snapping efficiency.

    
"Only with the development of pseudo-FTL travel via fold
space, and the lengthening of human life toward its current four
to five centuries was the post-Terran Hegemony possible–"

    We survived this time, you thought, but next time we may not be so lucky.

    It was clear that time was no longer a luxury you had, that the Other was determined to take control of your memories, which – unless you fought like a demon for every synapse, every aspect of your personality – were all you had. With no possibility of upload to a cybernetic host on this wilderness world, this body was all that remained between you and nonexistence.

    So if we must fight, you thought, we will. Time to counter-attack.

"How do you feel?" Bera asked Karl, when he clambered, aching-limbed, from the blankets.

    "OK."

    "The way you're rubbing your back says otherwise. Another rough night?"

    "You really need to ask?"

    "No," Bera said, and exhaled. "You were restless again. Loki surfaced just before you fell asleep. That's what, four nights in succession?"

    "Yeah," Karl said. "Cerebral nanophytes aren't much use against insomnia. I guess that he surfaces when I'm on the wake-sleep cusp." He unpacked breakfast, another portion of lamb. He was so tired that his brain wouldn't function properly. "So where are we now?" It had been two – maybe three – days since they'd left Steinar's land; his last memory was of asking her a similar question the night before.

    Bera pulled out her precious scraps of paper. "I think that we're about here. That path leads to Nornadalur."

    "The valley of the Assemblers?" Karl translated, gazing at where the horses grubbed through the snow. He rubbed at the corner of his jaw that had been oddly sore this morning, counter-pointing the odd twinges at the base of his spine.

    All over the valley, a vast flock of rock-eaters rooted and snuffled through the white covering on their migration, leaving a crazy trail of tracks back across the stony moorland now facing the humans.

    "Yes," Bera said.

    "We should go there," Karl said.

    "It's slightly – only slightly, mind you – off course."

    "Still, we should go," Karl said. He added, "I'm starving."

    Bera sighed. "We're going through the food stocks far too fast. We're going to run out of food faster than I expected. I really, really thought that we had enough."

    Karl said, "I'm not criticising you. Quite the opposite, Bera." She beamed and Karl realised just how low her self-esteem was. "I couldn't have got this far without you."

    She said with sly humour, "While you and Ragnar were beating your chests, I prepared for the journey."

    "You could've warned me," he mock-grumbled.

    "It would have ruined the fun," she said, smiling. "And what good would it have done? You'd have made Ragnar suspicious if you'd stopped moaning at him. You distracted him while I prepared."

    "Charming," he said. "So why did you accompany me?" It was a question he'd wanted to ask ever since they'd left, but he needed to pick the right moment. Now, while she was laughing and joking, seemed that moment.

    "You wouldn't have lasted ten kilometres if I hadn't."

    "True," he conceded. "But why did you?"

    "I can be who I want to be out here," Bera said. "Not who they decide I am." She hefted the rifle. "If I'd suggested to Ragnar that I go shoot rock-eaters, his brain would have imploded. But let's hunt!" It was clearly all the explanation he was going to get, so he might as well accept it. She would tell him more when she was ready.

    She took careful aim, and dropped a rock-eater on the edge of the vast flock with one shot, a blue rose staining its chest. The others around it scattered. "Their brain's in their torso, which makes them easy to hunt. It's a lot harder to hit that little head." She walked over, pulled out a knife and, crouching, hacked at the torso.

    "I thought that you said their meat's toxic?" Karl watched her, his stomach churning. He'd managed to come to terms with eating meat, but only by keeping where it came from out of his head. Watching Bera butcher the rock-eater was a little too vivid a reminder of where that food came from.

    "It is, if you eat a lot for a long time," Bera said without looking up. "But a little, eaten, say, once a week, would probably only give you a stomach ache."

    "Actually," Karl said, "my nanophytes may render it harmless." If I can stomach it.

    She looked up. "Really?"

    "Maybe."

    Gamasol emerged from behind the clouds into a rare clear patch of sky. Karl took his shirt off to absorb the radiation, ignoring the bitter chill. He caught Bera looking, and she saw him notice, and flushing, looked away. To ease the sudden tension, he said, "This will save us far more food."

    "But the further south we go, the weaker the sunlight, and the longer we're travelling, the deeper into winter we go – so the benefit diminishes doubly."

    She was right, as usual. Too often she'd found the flaw in his ideas. These people aren't stupid because they're primitive. "But it'll help." He glimpsed the blubbery steaks she was carving. "That's more fat than meat."

    "You need fat on Isheimur, Mister Spaceman."

    "If you say so." He stood soaking up the sun, trying to stay alert so that he felt less than useless. "They have small ears."

    "Minimises heat loss." She was clearly concentrating on not cutting herself so he shut up and watched the vast herd of rock-eaters roiling north in a slow-motion Brownian movement.

    Minutes passed, and Bera wiped the blade clean on the rock-eater's fur.

    Clouds obscured Gamasol and the temperature dropped sharply. Buttoning up his shirt, Karl leaned across and felt the rock-eater's fur. It was thick, but coarse and wiry. He couldn't imagine people wearing it.

    Bera must have read his expression. "Most people are allergic to the fur, so we use it for outer-coats, blankets, anything where it's not next to the skin. A few progressives tried to farm them, but with allergenic fur and the meat's toxicity, it was a non-starter, even if we could have got them to stay on the grasslands – and they're migratory." She wrapped the steak in some sawn-off rock-eater skin and placed it in a saddlebag, repeating the action until the bag was full.

    "You'd better give me a couple of pieces of that," Karl said. "To eat as we ride."

    Rejoining the horses, they resumed their journey.

    The morning was uneventful, even pleasant, except for the few minutes when a hungry Karl made himself chew raw rock-eater, to Bera's amusement. The rockeater was slimy and tasted bitter, and when he retched for a second time she stifled a laugh. "I'm sorry," she said, giggling, when he glared at her.

    But that was the exception; the landscape was as still as any Karl had known since landing on this palsied planet. The gradients up and down hills were shallow, the terrain easy-going, and mostly the sun shone. Karl kept his shirt off despite the bitter wind across the desolate moorland. The combination of sunshine and food made him feel full.

    He'd never known hunger before Isheimur. Since landing, he'd known little else.

    They made good time, and by early afternoon crested a rise. Karl gaped at the valley that opened out in front of them.

    Two or three kilometres wide, Karl guessed, the valley floor and sides were scarred and pitted, huge gouges cut into the grey clay soil that was exposed to the sky. A few pits were filled with water. Even by Isheimuri standards, Karl thought it almost unbearably desolate.

    This is all that's left of the great Former plan? Karl thought. A few hulks rusting in a valley?

    He counted four machines, each next to a pond.

    No two machines were alike. Each was an untidy collection of metal, angles, spars and extrusions. None looked even stable, let alone moveable, although the wheels at each machine's base indicated that they must be.

    "The Norns?" Karl said.

    "I think so. I've… no one comes here." Bera's face was pale.

    "Why?"

    "We can't communicate with them, except through an Oracle. Do you see any here?" At his head-shake, she continued, "Not that it's exactly communicating. We tell the Oracle what we need. It relays the request. Perhaps once a year a package arrives, with what we've asked for – medicines, a vital machine part – but mostly, even if it is what we needed, it's too late. And sometimes something else arrives, as if they haven't understood the request."

    "I'm guessing that they're low-level factories," Karl said.

    "Perhaps," Bera said. "To us they're enigmas. The Oracle's sketchy about them, whether deliberately I don't know. They do just enough sometimes to stop our 'civilisation' from total collapse. But they never acknowledge our existence."

    "They aren't intelligent enough," Karl called, riding down toward the nearest machine, ignoring Bera's protests. As he neared the machine, he looked over his shoulder to where she was reluctantly following. "You don't have to come down," he said. "I'll be back up."

    She halted while Karl rode round the machine. Fortunately the horse seemed unfazed by it.

    The Norn hummed, and two lights pulsing rhythmically indicated that it was doing something.

    "I'm not very good on this sort of machinery," Karl said, loudly, so Bera could hear even several metres away. "Ship used to do it all for me." He studied the diagrams on the side of what looked like a tunnel connecting two separate parts. "I think it's a mechanochemist. I saw something like it once in a museum on Avalon."

    "A what?" Bera called.

    As if on cue, the mechano-chemist emitted a highpitched whine, and shook as if something were caught inside.

    "It breaks chemical bonds, changing the molecules. It needs vast amounts of power, most of which goes on sustaining it," Karl said. "It's probably recharging. If it's what I think it is," he said, pointing at a shovel at one end, "it quarries raw materials like monazite or bastnasite which are common in this system, and breaks the cerium and samarium from the ores down at sub-molecular level into nitrogen and oxygen, which it emits into the atmosphere. We probably shouldn't stay too close. If it throws out carbon dioxide, which it may…" He backed the horse away.

    They rode slowly through the valley toward a second machine, as ungainly-looking as the first, but taller, with lots of spherical protuberances connected together. Again, flickering lights and a low-level hum were the only sounds of activity. It struck Karl how quiet – even by empty, isolated Isheimuri standards – the valley was. There was no hum of insects, no bird song, no animal cries, only silence. "Assembler factory, I guess," Karl said.

    "On Isheimur?" Bera kept several metres further away.

    "This makes your packages. See the ballista at the back?"

    "Oh yes." Bera leaned toward it, peering.

    "It uses old-fashioned convergent assembly," Karl said. "Each fabricator or assembler makes something small, and the central core puts them all together, maybe in several stages, to make something bigger."

    He rode in closer.

    "Be careful," Bera called.

    "I'm going to try communicating," Karl said. "All these machines will have an emergency interface. Like here!" He pulled a jack from the panel he'd prised open and pushed it into the base of his neck.

    He sensed cold thought, but no more intellect than to be found in a Terran dog, or an Avalonian glider.

    After a few seconds, Karl jacked out and rode back.

    "That was quick," Bera said.

    His smile was a wan effort. "Not in cyberspace. That was an epic interview, if you can call talking to an idiot an interview. The Norns are there to self-maintain primarily, second to pump atmosphere out, and if they have surplus resource, to nanofacture local requests. No more, no less. No signalling devices to send a Mayday, no idea of the world except the Oracle." He grinned, adding, "Which I tried to access, to complain that I'd been held captive by Ragnar." At her shocked look he said, "I failed."

    "What now?" Bera said.

    "We ride on," Karl said. "I didn't expect there to be anything here that would help, but I had to check it out. Can you imagine how stupid I'd have felt if I learned later that there was something here I could have used?"

    They rode on, climbing the slope until they left the valley. Karl felt his spirits lift slightly. Life was simple again. The faint flicker of hope was dead; now there was no option but the W
inter Song.