‘You know, Jürgen,’ Ilse had said that night. ‘Never mind Erik. You and Gavriela could be brother and sister.’
Perhaps it was the situation, the senseless official sadism visited on Alan.
He can’t be here.
She went into the Tube station, bought a ticket, and went down. But the sucking, dust-laden wind was the aftermath of a departing train, and the platform was empty.
For Jürgen read Dmitri. Or paranoid imagination.
SIXTY-FOUR
THE WORLD, 5568 AD
It was coming, the storm. Down below, where the strange, damaged craft with its soft-skinned inhabitants interrogated that other Seeker – now unconscious – they did not seem to understand the build-up of flux all around, to levels that Seeker had never experienced.
He wished he could formulate a rescue, snatch the one like him from these alien things – so like people, yet with skins so soft and squishy instead of shining silver – but he was one person and they had weapons: witness the captive’s fate. That other being, with wings and carapace of metal, had crept inside the craft, trembling and clacking as it moved. Seeker thought that the natural flux levels were affecting it; surely, then, it could sense the disturbance hurtling this way at immense velocity?
Perhaps the blackened craft was too damaged to move. Though he had never seen such a thing, Seeker had experienced the Idea of one; observing it in reality was nothing special.
Closer now, the coming chaos.
His shelter was as secure as he could manage: overhang, rock on one side, a small boulder on the other, which he had been able to push and tug to a more snug position. Soon it would be here, flux raging strong enough to tear apart minds, flinging grains of ferrous sand with force enough to strip flesh, to flense ordinary people, never mind the soft intruders below.
But they had their prisoner, that other Seeker, blackened and wounded.
Almost on them, the edge of it.
Yet something was happening, something that tore and twisted at ambient flux in ways that had nothing to do with the advancing storm; so Seeker dragged himself out of the shelter and peeked over the ridge, hoping they were too busy to spot him.
Light of sapphire blue shone from their eyes – impossible, for light entering the eyes is how people see – but it was happening. And now the glow became lines, stretching towards the captive Seeker, heading for his eyes; and then they made contact, those blue arcs converging; and then their prisoner shivered and the blueness snapped out of existence.
This was abomination.
Seeker could not sense the aliens’ thoughts, sentient though they looked; but his fellow Seeker down below was resonating with strangeness, with vortices of incompleteness whirling through his skull. It was the non-thoughts, the aspects of cognition missing from his radiating mind, that stood out for Seeker. For those partially formed thoughts needed to be complete in order to exist, as surely as flux must always loop; and if they did not complete in the captive Seeker’s mind, they must complete elsewhere: in the minds of his soft-skinned captors.
A single mind existing in a formation of bodies.
Appalled, Seeker could only hunker down, hoping that the new conglomerate could not sense him – he had not tried to mask himself from the captive’s perceptions – then realized his concern was irrelevant, because glittering sand was spraying against surrounding rock, and the edge of the storm was upon them. He hid beneath the overhang, cowering, hands over forehead and eyes squeezed shut.
**I cannot.**
Twisting flux tore the thought out of him; yet the intention remained.
Another Seeker needed him.
He had experienced only Ideas of heroism, never the actuality. Then he pushed that thought aside – a ridiculous flux-knot, torn away by the storm – and told himself to do what was necessary. Skin hurting with sand-spatter, he pulled himself up to the top of the ridge as before, already finding it hard to think, here at the storm’s edge; then he squinted his eyes open, staring into the sand-blizzard and trying to see.
They had fallen back, the soft-skinned ones: ripped red by the flensing sand.
**Good.**
While that abomination, the Seeker-that-was, struggled against the storm, pulling himself finger’s length by finger’s length towards the vessel’s hatch. It was hard to watch, and Seeker did not try. Instead he hauled himself forward, pulling against the storm’s force, crawling downwards with all the exertion of an upward climb, fingers digging into sand that thumped and rippled with inductive effects, skin burning with the wash of flying grains.
Down below, the Seeker-that-was had spotted him.
Incoherent flux tumbled this way. Torn by storm vortices or distorted from human thought because of what they had done to him, Seeker could not tell. The Seeker-that-was had been weakened by his violent capture or subsequent torture; and while he raised his arms to try controlling the storm-flux, to use it as a weapon, he was too weak and the vortices spun past, barely grazing Seeker’s skin.
And then he was close enough to act.
Storm-smash and vortex-tear.
**Spin in. Hold in!**
All his strength to fight against the rage.
**Hold in, damn you!**
Fight against the hammering flux, tidal waves of chaos strong enough to lift them up, to throw them far, but he had to hold it, control, and force the other to do so too.
**Curl it in!**
Pulling back the flux; repairing the vortices of thought; closing them off and making them whole within themselves, not running through others.
**Tighten the curl, that’s right.**
A tiny light of humanity amid the pain.
**That’s right! Fight it. Haul it in.**
The captive began to fight back, with part of his mind at least: joining his strength to Seeker’s instead of opposing it. Still the flux remanence, induced by the aliens in the captive’s mind, was strong; Seeker concentrated, howling with effort to direct the hysteresis, pushing it, restoring the mind to what it was; and then some critical point was reached and they broke apart, falling to the ground.
Whirlwind sand all around.
Cutting sharp, battering hard.
**Which way?**
**Climb there.**
Together, helping each other, neither sure of who he was, knowing only that this chaos required their joint escape, they heaved and screamed and struggled like primitive animals, climbing to shelter from the storm. And then they were out of it, the worst of it, staring at each other and laughing.
**Seeker.**
**Yes, Seeker.**
They clasped forearms, then squeezed further into the shelter, because the storm was still intensifying, with stronger flux to come.
They retained consciousness long enough to sense what happened to the alien craft. Making no attempt to rescue the humanoid crew exposed on the ground – cut by the storm, surely they were dead already – the metal-winged alien (and any others that might have been on board all along, not revealing themselves) caused the damaged craft to come to life, its powerful engines thrusting down, rising up into the vortex of the storm.
Rising …
And then the full power of flux fell upon it, flinging the craft against a ferrimagnetic cliff, smashing the alien thing to shreds. Both Seekers could sense the shards flying through the storm; then random chaos heightened to maximum strength, and holding on to their own thoughts was near impossible, all distant perceptions closed off by the storm.
Finally, finally, it was past.
**Thank you, Seeker.**
The one who had been captive passed out. Wounded but freed, Seeker thought he would recover. Perhaps they would both return to explore beneath the sands, for surely this other Seeker also had sensed what lay beneath, incarcerated for so many generations.