“I slept out here away from the others,” said Daeman, speaking in a more normal tone as they got farther away from the main lean-to. His voice was still soft but each syllable roared in Ada’s aching head. Far overhead, the e—and p-rings whirled as they always whirled, turning and crossing in front of the stars and a fingernail moon. Ada saw something move up there and for a minute her heart pounded before she realized it was the sonie, orbiting silently in the night.
“Who’s flying the sonie?” she asked dully.
“Oko.”
“I didn’t know she knew how to fly it.”
“Greogi taught her yesterday,”said Daeman. They were approaching the smaller campfire and Ada saw the silhouette of another man standing there.
“Good morning, Ada Uhr,” said Tom.
Ada had to smile at the formal honorific. It had not been used much in recent months. “Good morning, Tom,” she whispered. “Where is this thing?”
Daeman pulled a long piece of wood out of the fire and extended it into the darkness like a torch.
Ada stepped back.
Daeman and Tom had obviously piled up palisade logs on three sides to cage the… thing… in the triangular space. But it was scurrying to and fro in that space, obviously ready and soon capable of climbing the two-foot-high flimsy wooden barricades.
Ada took the torch from Tom and crouched lower to study the Setebos thing in the flickering light.
Its multiple yellow eyes blinked and closed at the glare. The little Setebos—if that is what it was—was about a foot long, already larger in mass and length than a regular human brain, Ada thought, but still with the disgustingly pink wrinkles and folds and appearance of a living, disembodied brain. She could see the gray strip between the two hemispheres, a mucousy membrane covering it, and a slight pulsing, as if the whole thing was breathing. But this pink brain also had pulsating mouths—or orifices of some kind—and a myriad of tiny, pink baby hands beneath it and protruding from orifices. It scrabbled back and forth on those pudgy little pink fingers that looked like a mass of wriggling worms to Ada.
The yellow eyes opened, stayed open, and locked on Ada’s face. One of the orifices opened and screeching, scratching sounds came out.
“Is it trying to talk?” Ada whispered to both men.
“I have no idea,” said Daeman. “But it’s only a few minutes old. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s talking to us by the time it’s an hour old.”
“We shouldn’t let it get an hour old,” Tom said softly but firmly. “We should kill the thing now. Blow it apart with flechettes and then burn its corpse and scatter the ashes.”
Ada looked at Tom in surprise. The self-trained medic had always been the least violent and most life-affirming person she’d known at Ardis.
“At the very least,” said Daeman, watching the thing successfully trying to climb the low wooden barrier, “it needs a leash.”
Wearing heavy canvas-and-wool gloves they’d designed at Ardis early in the winter for work with livestock, Daeman leaned forward and plunged a sharp, thin spike that he’d curved to form a hook into the solid band of fibers—corpus callosum, Ada remembered it was called—connecting the two hemispheres of the little Setebos’s brain. Then, moving quickly, Daeman tugged to make sure the hook was secure, snapped a carabiner to it, and rigged twenty feet of nylon rope to the carabiner.
The little creature screamed and howled so loudly that Ada looked over her shoulder at the main camp, sure that everyone would come boiling out of the lean-to. No one stirred except one sentry near the fire who looked over her way sleepily and then went back to contemplating the flames.
The little Setebos writhed and rolled, running against the wooden barriers and finally clambering over them like a crab. Daeman tugged it up short on six feet of leash.
More tiny hands emerged from their folded state in the pink brain’s orifices and pulled themselves along on elastic stalks a yard or more long. The hands leaped at the nylon rope and tugged at it wildly, other hands exploring the hook and carabiner, trying to pull them free. The hook held. Daeman was pulled forward for a second but then jerked the scrabbling creature back onto the frozen grass of its cage.
“Strong little bastard,” he whispered.
“Let it wander,” said Ada. “Let’s see where it goes. What it does.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. Not far, but let’s see what it wants.”
Tom kicked the low post-wall down and the Setebos baby scurried out, the baby fingers under it working in unison, blurring like some obscene centipede’s legs.
Daeman allowed himself to be tugged along behind it, keeping the leash short. Ada and Tom walked beside Daeman, ready to move quickly if the creature turned toward them. It moved too quickly and too purposefully for any of the humans not to sense the danger from it.
Tom’s flechette rifle was being held at the ready and Daeman had another rifle strapped over his shoulder.
The thing didn’t head for the campfire or the lean-to. It tugged them twenty yards into the darkness of the west lawn. Then it scurried down into one of the former defensive trenches—a flame trench Ada had helped to dig—and seemed to squat on its spraddled hands.
Two new orifices opened at either ends of the little creature and stalks without hands, pulsing proboscises, emerged, wavered, and suddenly attached themselves to the ground. There came a sound that was a mixture of a pig rooting and a baby suckling.
“What the hell?” said Tom. He had the rifle aimed, the plastic-metal stock set firmly against his shoulder. The first shot, Ada knew, would slam several thousand crystal-barbed flechettes into the pulsing pink monstrosity at a velocity greater than the speed of sound.
Ada started shivering. Her constant, pulsing headache turned to a wave of nausea.
“I know this spot,” she whispered, her voice shaking. “It’s where Reman and Emme died during the voynix attack… they burned to death here.”
The Setebos spawn continued loudly rooting and suckling.
“Then it’s …” began Daeman and stopped.
“Eating,” finished Ada.
Tom put his finger on the trigger. “Let me kill it, Ada Uhr. Please.”
“Yes,” said Ada. “But not yet. I have no doubt that the voynix will return as soon as this thing dies. And it’s still dark. And we’re nowhere near ready. Let’s go back to your camp.”
They walked back to the campfire together, Daeman tugging the reluctant and finger-dragging Setebos thing along behind them.
60
Harman drowned.
His last thoughts before the water filled his lungs were—That bitch Moira lied to me—and then he gagged and choked and drowned in the swirling golden liquid.
The crystal dodecahedron had filled only to within a foot of its multifaceted top while Harman had been watching the golden liquid flow into it. Savi-Moira-Miranda had called the rich golden fluid the “medium” by which he would sigl—although that had not been her term—the Taj’s gigantic collection of books. Harman had stripped down to his thermskin layer.
“That has to come off, too,” said Moira. Ariel had stepped back into the shadows and now only the young woman stood in the bright light from the cupola windows with him. The guitar was on a nearby tabletop.
“Why?” said Harman.
“Your skin has to be in contact with the medium,” said Moira. “The transfer can’t work through a bonded molecular layer like a thermskin.”
“What transfer?” Harman had asked, licking his lips. He was very nervous. His heart was pounding.
Moira gestured toward the seemingly infinite rows of shelved books lining the hundred curved stories of inner dome-wall widening out below them.
“How do I know that there’s anything in those old books that will help me get back to Ada?” said Harman.
“You don’t.”
“You and Prospero could send me home right now if you wanted,” said Harman, turning away from the filling crystal tank. “Why don’t you do that so we can skip all this nonsense?”