Visible Light, page 13
A sound grew in his mind like the bubbling of water, and he looked to his left, where green radiance bobbed. The welcome flowed into him like the touch of warm wind.
He ignored it, cast the earth, took another spadeful.
Welcome, it sang to him. The water-sound bubbled. A flower unfolded, tinted itself slowly violet.
"I've work to do."
Sorrow. The color faded.
"I don't want it like the last time. Keep your distance. Stop that." Its straying thoughts brushed him numbing senses. He leaned on the spade, felt himself sinking, turning and drifting bodilesslywrenched his mind back to his own control so abruptly he almost fell.
Sorrow. A second time a flower, a pale shoot from among the leaves, a folded bud trying to open.
"Work," Warren said. He picked up the spadeful, cast it; and another.
Perplexity. The flower folded again, drooped unwatered.
"I have this to do. It's important. And you won't understand that. Nothing of the sort could matter to you."
The radiance grew, pulsed. Suns flickered across a mental sky, blue and black, day and night, in a streaming course.
He leaned on the spade for stability in the blur of days passed. "What's timeto you?"
Desire. The radiance took shape and settled on the grass, softly pulsing. It edged closerstopped at once when he stepped back.
"Maybe you killed Sax. You know that? Maybe he just lay there and dreamed to death."
Sorrow. An image formed in his mind, the small sickly creature, all curled up, all its inward motion suddenly stopped.
"I know. You wouldn't have meant it. But it happened." He dug another spadeful of earth. Intervening days unrolled in his mind, thoughts stolen from him, where he had been, what he had done.
It stole the thought of Anne, and it was a terrible image, a curled-up thing like a human, but hollow inside, dark inside, deadly hostile. Her tendrils were dark and icy.
"She's not like that. She's just a machine." He flung the spadeful. Earth showered over bare bone arid began to cover Sax's face. He flinched from the sight. "She can't do anything but take orders. I made her if you like."
There was horror in the air, palpable.
"She's not alive. She never was."
The radiance became very pale and retreated up into the branches of one of the youngest trees, a mere touch of color in the sunlight. Cold, cold, the terror drifted down like winter rain.
"Don't leave." The spade fell. He stepped over it, held up his hands, threatened with solitude. "Don't."
The radiance went out. Re-formed near him, drifted up to sit on the aged, fallen tree.
"It's my world. I know it's different. I never wanted to hurt you with it."
The greenness spread about him, a darkness in its heart, where two small creatures entwined, their tendrils interweaving, one living, one dead.
"Stop it."
His own mind came back at him: loneliness, longing for companionship; fear of dying alone. Like Sax.
Like that. He held deeply buried the thought that the luminance offered a means of dying, a little better than most; but it came out, and the radiance shivered. The Anne-image took shape in its heart, her icy tendrils invading the image that was himself, growing, insinuating ice into that small fluttering that was his life, winding through him and out again.
"What do you know?" He cried at it. "What do you know at all? You don't know me. You can't see me with no eyes; you don't know."
The Anne-image faded, left him alone in the radiance, embryo, tucked and fluttering inside. A greenness crept in there, the least small tendril of green, and touched that quickness.
Emotion exploded like sunrise, with a shiver of delight. A second burst. He tried to object, felt a touching of the hairs at the back of his neck. He shivered, and the light was gone. Every sense seemed stretched to the limit, heightened, but remote, and he wanted to get up and walk a little distance, knowing even while he did so that it was not his own suggestion. He moved, limping a little, and quite suddenly the presence fled, leaving a light sweat over his body.
Pain, it sent. And Peace.
"Hurt, did it?" He massaged his knee and sat down. His own eyes watered. "Serves you right."
Sorrow. The greenness unfolded again, filling all his mind but for one small corner where he stayed whole and alert.
"No," he cried in sudden panic, and when it drew back in its own: "I wouldn't mindif you were content with touching. But you aren't. You can't keep your distance when you get excited. And sometimes you hurt."
The greenness faded a little. It was dark round about.
Hours. Hours gone. A flickering, a quick feeling of sunlit warmth came to him, but he flung it off.
"Don't lie to me. What happened to the time? When did it get dark?"
A sun plummeted, and trees bowed in evening breezes.
"How long did you have control? How long was it?"
Sorrow. Peace& settled on him with a great weight. He felt a great desire of sleep, of folding in and biding until warm daylight returned, and he feared nothing any longer, not life, not death. He drifted on the wind, conscious of the forest's silent growings and stretchings and burrowings about him. Then he became himself again, warm and animal and very comfortable in the simple regularity of heartbeat and breathing.
HE AWOKE in sunlight, stretched lazily and stopped in mid-stretch as green light broke into existence up in the branches. The creature drifted slowly down to the grass beside him and rested there, exuding happiness. Sunrise burst across his vision, the fading of stars, the unfolding of flowers.
He reached for the food kit, trying to remember where he had laid it. Stopped, held in the radiance, and looked into the heart of it. It was an effort to pull his mind away. "Stop that. I have no sense of time when you're so close. Maybe you can spend an hour watching a flower unfold, but that's a considerable portion of my life."
Sorrow. The radiance murmured and bubbled with images he could not make sense of, of far-traveling the unrolling of land, of other consciousnesses, of a vast and all-driving hunger for others, so strong it left him shaking.
"Stop it. I don't understand what you're trying to tell me."
The light grew in his vision and pulsed bright and dark, little gold sparks swirling in the heart of it, an explosion of pure excitement reaching out to him.
"What's wrong with you?" He cried. He trembled.
Quite suddenly the light winked out altogether, and when it reappeared a moment later it was not half so bright or so large, bubbling softly with the sound of waters.
"What's wrong?"
Need. Sorrow. Again the impression of other consciousnesses, other luminances, a thought quickly snatched away, all of them flowing and flooding into one.
"You mean others of your kind."
The image came back to him; and flowers, stamens shedding pollen, golden clouds, golden dust adhering to the pistil of a great, green-veined lily.
"Like mating? Like that?"
The backspill became unsettling, for the first time sexual.
"You produce others of your kind." He felt the excitement flooding through his own veins, a contagion.
"Othersare coming here?"
Come. He got the impression strongly, a tugging at all his senses, a flowing over the hills and away. A merging, with things old and wise, and full of experiences, lives upon lives. Welcome. Come.
"I'm human."
Welcome. Need pulled at him. Distances rolled away, long distances, days and nights.
"What would happen to me?"
Life bursting from the soil. The luminance brightened and enlarged. The man-image came into his vision: The embryo stretched itself and grew new tendrils, into the radiance, and it into the fluttering heart; more and more luminances added themselves, and the tendrils twined, human and otherwise, until they became another greenness, another life, to float on the winds.
Come, it urged.
His heart swelled with tears. He wept and then ceased to be human at all, full of years, deep-rooted and strong. He felt the sun and the rain and the passage of time beyond measure, knew the birth and death of forests and the weaving undulations of rivers across the land. There were mountains and snows and tropics where winter never came, and deep caverns and cascading streams and things that verged on consciousness deep in the darkness. The very stars in the heavens changed their patterns and the world was young. There were many lives, many, and one by one he knew their selves, strength and youth and age beyond reckoning, the joy of new birth, the beginning of new consciousness. Time melted. It was all one experience, and there was vast peace, unity, even in the storms, the cataclysms, the destruction of forests in lightning-bred fires, the endless push of life toward the sun and the raincycle on cycle, year on year, eons passing. At last his strength faded and he slept, enfolded in a green and gentle warmth; he thought that he died like the old tree and did not care, because it was a gradual and comfortable thing, a return to elements, ultimate joining. The living creature that crept in among his upturned roots for shelter was nothing less and nothing more than the moss, the dying flowers, the fallen leaves.
He lay on the grass, too weary to move, beyond care. Tears leaked from his eyes. His hands were weak.
He had no terror of merging now, none, and the things he had shared with this creature would remain with them, with all its kind, immortal.
It pulled at him, and the pull that worked through his mind was as strong as the tides of the sea, as immutable and unarguable. Peace, it urged on him; and in his mind the sun flicked again through the heavens.
He opened his eyes. A day gone. A second day. Then the weakness in his limbs had its reason. He tried to sit up, panicked even through the urging of peace it laid on him.
Anne. The recollection flashed through his memory with a touch of cold. The luminance recoiled resisting.
"No. I have to reach her. I have to." He fought hard for consciousness, gained, and knew by the release that the danger got through. Fear flooded over him like cold water.
The Anne-image appeared, a hollow shell in darkness, tendrils coiling out. Withered. Urgency pulled at him, and the luminance pulsed with agitation.
"Timehow much time is there?"
Several sunsets flashed through his mind.
"I have to get to her. I have to get her to take an instruction. She's dangerous."
The radiance was very wan. Urgency. Urgency. The hills rolled away in the mind's eye, the others called.
Urgency.
And it faded, leaving behind an overwhelming flood of distress.
Warren lay still a moment, on his back, on the grass, shivering in the cold daylight. His head throbbed.
His limbs ached and had no strength. He reached for the com, got it on, got it to his lips, his eyes closed shutting out the punishing sun.
"Anne."
"Warren. Please confirm status."
"FineI'm fine." He tried to keep his voice steady. His throat was raw. It could not sound natural. "I'm coming home, Anne."
A pause on the other side. "Yes, Warren. Assistance?"
"Negative, negative, Anne. Please wait. I'll be there soon." He gathered himself up to his arm, to his knees, to his feet, with difficulty. There were pains in all his joints. He felt his face, unshaven and rough.
His hands and feet were numb with the cold and the damp. His clothes sagged on him, belt gone loose.
"Warren?"
"I'm all right, Anne. I'm starting back now."
"Accepted," Anne said after a little delay. "Emergency procedures canceled."
"Whatemergency procedures?"
"What's your status, Warren?"
"No emergency, do you hear me? No emergency. I'm on my way." He shut it down, found his canteen the food packet, drank, forced a bite down his swollen throat and stuffed the rest into his sodden jacket.
Walked. His leg hurt, and his eyes blurred, the lids swollen and raw. He found a branch and tore it off and used that as he went, pushed himself, knowing the danger there was in Anne.
Knowing how little time there was. It would go, it would go then, and leave him. And there would be nothing after that. Ever.
II
Anne was waiting for him, at the riversideamid the stumps of trees, mud, cleared earth. Trees dammed the river, water spilling over them, between them, flooding up over the banks and changing the land into a shallow, sandy lake.
He stopped there, leaned against the last standing tree on that margin and shivered, slow tremors which robbed him of strength and sense. She stood placidly in the ruin; he called her on the com, heard her voice, saw her face, then her body, orient toward him. He began to cross the bridge of tumbled trees clinging to branches, walking tilted trunks.
"Damn you," he shouted at her. Tears ran down his face. "Damn you!"
She met him at the other side, silver slimed with mud and soot from the burning she had done. Her sensors blinked. "Assistance?"
He found his self-control, shifted his attack. "You've damaged yourself."
"I'm functioning normally. Assistance?"
He started to push past her, slipped on the unstable log. She reached to save him, her arm rock-solid stable. He clung to it, his only point of balance. Her facelights blinked at him. Her other hand came up to rest on his shoulder. Contact. She offered contact. He had meant to shove at her. He touched her gently patted her plastic-sheathed shoulder, fought back the tears. "You've killed, Annie. Don't you understand?"
"Vegetation."
He shoved past her, limped up the devastated shore, among the stumps of trees. His head throbbed. His stomach felt hollow.
The crawler still waited on the bank. Anne overtook him as he reached it; she offered him her hand as he climbed in. He slid into the seat, slipped the brake, started the motor and threw it full throttle, leaving her behind.
"Warren." Her voice pursued him.
He kept driving, wildly, swerving this way and that over the jolts, past the brush.
"Anne," he said, standing at the airlock. "Open the lock."
Silence.
"Anne. Open the lock, please."
It hissed wide. He walked in, unsteady as he was, onto the cargo platform. "Engage lift, Anne."
Gears crashed. It started up, huge and ponderous that it was. "Warren," the disembodied voice said, from the speakers, everywhere, echoing. "What's your status, Warren?"
"Good, thank you."
"Your voice indicates stress."
"Hoarseness. Minor dysfunction in my speaking apparatus. It's self-repairing."
A silence. "Recorded." The lift stopped on nether-deck. He walked out, calmly, to the lower weapons locker, put his card in.
Dead. "I've got a lock malfunction here, Anne. Number 13/546. Would you clear it up?"
"Emergency locks are still engaged."
"Disengage."
Silence.
"There is no emergency." He fought the anger from his voice. "Disengage emergency locks and cancel all emergency procedures."
"This vocal dysfunction is not repaired."
He leaned against the wall, stared down the corridor.
"Warren, please confirm your status."
"Normal, I tell you." He went to the lift. It worked. It brought him up to the level of the laboratories. He walked down to Bio, walked in, tried the cabinets.
"Anne, I need medicines. Disengage the locks. I need medicines for repair."
The lock clicked. It opened.
He took out the things he needed, washed his torn hands, prepared a stimulant. He was filthy. He saw himself like a specter in a reflecting glass, gaunt, stubbled; looked down and saw his clothes unrecognizable in color. He washed an area of his arm and fired the injection, rummaged through the cabinet for medicines to cure the hoarseness. He found some lozenges, ripped one from the foil and sucked on it, then headed off for the showers, undressing as he went.
A quick wash. He had forgotten clean clothes; he belted on the bathrobe he had left in the showers, on a body gone gaunt. His hands shook. The stim hummed in his veins. He could not afford the shakes. He had visions of the pseudosome walking back toward the ship; she would be here soon. He had to make normal moves. Had to do everything in accustomed order. He went to the galley next, opened the box and downed fruit juice from its container; it hit his stomach in a wave of cold.
He hauled out other things. Dried food. Stacked it there. He took out one frozen dinner and put it in the microwave.
It turned on without his touching it.
"Time, please."
"Fifteen minutes," he told it. He walked out. He took the dried food with him to the lift.
He punched buttons. It took him up. He walked out into the corridor; lights came on for him. Lights came on in the living quarters, in his own quarters, as he entered. He dumped the dried stores on the bed opened the locker and pulled out all his clothing dressed, short of breath, having to stop and rest in the act of putting his boots on.
The lock crashed and boomed in the bowels of the ship.
She was back. He pulled the second boot on. He could hear the lift working. He folded his remaining clothes. He heard the next lift work. He arranged everything on his bed. He heard footsteps approach.
He looked round. Anne stood there, muddy, streaked with soot.
"Assistance? Please confirm your status, Warren."
He thought a moment. "Fine. You're dirty, Anne. Decontaminate."
Sensors flickered, one and then the others. "You're packing. This program is preparatory to going to the river. Please reconsider this program."
"I'm just cleaning up. Why don't you get me dinner?"
"You fixed dinner, Warren."
"I didn't like it. You fix it. I'll have dinner up here at the table. Fifteen minutes. I need it, Anne. I'm hungry."
"Yes, Warren."
"And clean up."
"Yes, Warren."
