quote:

CHAPTER 10

“THE BABY . . . SOMETHING’S NOT RIGHT.”


Jobs was one of the last to set foot on the planet’s surface. He had stayed behind to fashion a bosun’s chair that was used to ferry some of the less-agile Wakers, as they were now called. Now he was ready to go down himself.
He was reluctant. It wasn’t that the surface frightened him — it fascinated him. The poet within him found it stirring. But the poet was a subset, a mere file within the hard-core techie.

This ship was Earth. This ship was human technology. He could unscrew panels and look inside and understand what he was seeing. He could follow fiber-optic pathways and know why they went where they went. It was like a museum, of course. The shuttle and the Mayflower capsule within it were a strange mixture of cutting-edge toys and antique systems. Old and new. Somehow, it had actually worked. It had carried them for five centuries and more through space. Jobs felt intense admiration for that, for what it represented in terms of human ingenuity.

Their numbers had grown. Jobs’s little brother, Edward, had awakened, and by a stroke of luck Jobs had been able to keep him from seeing their parents. Or what was left of them. Miss Blake’s mother was awake now, as well as three other kids, a ten-year-old who called himself Roger Dodger, a fourteen-year-old girl named Tate, and a sixteen-year-old guy named Anamull.

And D-Caf had awakened.

That made seventeen people in all. Seventeen thirsty, hungry people.

Emotional breakdowns were common. Grief was a virus that spread from one to another, was suppressed only to mutate, take on some new aspect, and attack again. Jobs and Errol had worked out a pulley system to allow them to reascend to the Mayflower. That way people could serve watches aboard, waiting for others to revive.

But now it was time, at last, for Jobs to leave the ship. Jobs slid down the main cable. He would have liked to use the bosun’s chair, but he was unwilling to look like one of the lame. Not with Mo’Steel grinning up at him.

“So. What do you think, Duck?” Mo’Steel asked, indicating the landscape.

Down at ground level the weirdness of it was infinitely more pronounced. Jobs straddled the line between environments. One foot was planted in gray dust. The other crunched thick, irregular grass. To the left a vast canyon yawned, impossibly deep, impossibly steep. Silent, immeasurably huge. Perfectly detailed until you looked too closely, and then you could see quite clearly that the dust was not dust but identical round pebbles. And everything, the rocks, the few gray cacti, were all made up of those same gray-shade pebbles.

“Pixels,” Jobs said. “The original photo was predigital. This is the max resolution, I guess.”

Mo’Steel nodded sagely. “Watch this.” He picked up a small rock and threw it as far out into the canyon as he could.

“Uh-huh,” Jobs said.

“Shh. Listen. You hear that?”

Jobs heard the rock hit bottom. It had hit bottom long before it should have. Together they walked into the gray world. They stood at the edge of the canyon and looked down. Impossible not to believe it was real. You could feel the depth of the canyon in your soul. But when Jobs threw a second rock after the first it, too, fell for no more than five seconds before landing with a tiny rattling sound.

“Know what else? Look up at the sky. Look at that cloud up there.”

Jobs obeyed. He saw a puffy white, lavender-edged cloud moving serenely toward the border between environments. It reached the edge of the gray-shade environment and keptblowing. As it crossed the line it lost all color, gained clarity, and was absorbed into the sky above the canyon.

Mo’Steel seemed to expect him to say something penetrating, but all he could manage was, “Huh.”

Jobs walked back into the world of color, bent down, and stroked a single shaft of grass. Of course it was not grass. It was three inches across, a quarter-inch thick, smeared with green and blue. He pulled at it and it came free. He stared at the root structure with Mo’Steel leaning over his shoulder.

“Look at that, Mo. The root structure looks normal. The dirt looks normal. Not like the dirt over in the canyon. This is like actual dirt. The roots are like actual roots. The leaf, though, no way.”

“Tastes like grass,” Mo’Steel said.

“You tried to eat it?”

Mo’Steel shrugged. “Hey, we gotta eat, right? I thought maybe you could eat it. But it’s like eating what the lawn mower left behind.”

Jobs sighed. He looked at the lost, confused, wondering, grieving gaggle of humans, all together in the Impressionist environment. They looked shabby and dull in this vivid landscape. Hard-edged, definite, almost vulgar in their detail. His brother was staring up at a sketchy tree.

“What are we going to do?” Jobs wondered.

Mo’Steel shook his head. “I was hoping you’d know.”

“I am lost,” Jobs said. He took a deep breath. “No food. No water. Not much, anyway. Whoever put this all together, aliens or whatever, they got the air right. They got the roots of these plants right. But I doubt there’s real water in that river over there.”

“Let’s go see.”

But Jobs was too distracted to answer. “They’re playing mix and match, that’s the problem.”

“Who is?”

“Them. The aliens. They don’t have a context. They downloaded our data, but they don’t know what’s real and what isn’t, what’s actual and what’s just, you know, art or imagination. See, they found technical data on air quality so we have air. Or maybe it’s just the natural air of this planet. Maybe they have scientific descriptions of plants, so they got the roots right, but they don’t know what to do about the pictures and stuff.”

Mo’Steel said, “Hey, there must have been stuff about us, right? About humans? Like what we are, what we need to eat and drink and all?”

“I don’t know, Mo. You look in an encyclopedia under ‘humans’ you don’t exactly find a guide for the care and feeding of same. Probably says we’re omnivorous. If they access a dictionary they can figure out that means we eat anything. That may not be a good thing, depending on how these aliens interpret it.”

Jobs looked up at the shuttle. It was stupendously out of place. The white-painted shuttle was pockmarked with a thousand micrometeorite holes. The solar sails hung limp and crumpled, like carelessly hung laundry or broken arms. The Mylar sheen was gone, the microsheeting was dull.

Jobs and Mo’Steel had gone extra-vehicular to deploy those sails. Hanging there in orbit around Earth they’d seen the Rock slam into it. They’d seen the planet ripped apart, shattered into three big, mismatched, irregular chunks.
Yesterday in Jobs’s mind and memory. It had happened yesterday.

Jobs’s parents were up there in the Mayflower. Dead. Yesterday he’d seen them alive, yesterday they had walked aboard the shuttle with him and settled into those berths beside him. But that was five-hundred years ago. When had they died? Had it happened right away? Or had they survived for centuries, only to die at the last minute?

There came a sound of raised voices from the dozen Wakers. An argument. Yago’s voice was heard most clearly.
Jobs and Mo’Steel joined the group.

“What’s the beef?” Jobs asked Errol in a whisper.

He and Errol had formed a working relationship based on mutual respect. Errol was an actual rocket scientist, a fuel systems designer. An engineer. He had come aboard the Mayflower with his wife and their one child, a girl. The girl’s berth had been perforated by a micrometeorite. It had drilled a hole right through her heart. His wife was cheese.
It was something else Jobs shared with Errol: a need to keep busy in order to hold the avalanche of grief at bay.

“It’s the sergeant and her . . . her baby,” Errol said. “The baby . . . something’s not right.”

The baby was still in its mother’s arms. Not crying. But looking around with its empty eyes as though searching for something. And the more its searched, the more agitated its mother became.

“Something is going to happen,” Tamara Hoyle muttered. “Something is happening right now.”

quote:

CHAPTER 11

“YOU MAY NEED A SOLDIER.”


“It’s some kind of a freak — if it’s even human!” Yago cried. “Look at it! Look at the two of them. Am I the only one seeing this?”

2Face was already sick of Yago. He was a pampered monster, a spoiled brat with DNA-manipulated good looks and an awesome level of selfishness. But he was right about the baby. There was something wrong.

The baby turned its head to look left. Tamara Hoyle turned her head to the left. Puppet master and puppet? Or just some exaggeration of the natural sympathy between mother and child? The baby stared right at Yago and Tamara’s eyes drilled into him. Identical expressions of fixed focus.

“Look! Look at that! Don’t you people see? They’re connected!” Yago yelled.

Olga said, “The umbilical cord’s — if that’s what it was — has been cut.”

“Cut?” Yago shrilled. “And do you see a difference? You want to know the difference? The difference is the doctor is dead.” He stabbed an accusing finger at Tamara and her baby. “She’s a killer. A killer and a freak.”

“What is it you want?” 2Face calmly asked Yago.

“A little order, that’s all,” Yago said. “We need some rules here. And we need those rules right from the start. Rule number one in any society is: You don’t let murderers go free.”

“We don’t have a judge or a courtroom,” 2Face pointed out. They’d been over this. And they had other, more pressing problems. “We don’t have any way to lock her up. And we need her to care for her baby. Are you going to do it?”

“We don’t need a court. Eye for an eye,” Yago hissed. “She’s a freak. A murdering freak. She should be driven out. Exiled. You let her and that freak alien baby stay, you’ll regret it.”

“All right, no one is exiling anyone,” 2Face snapped. This was hitting close to home. If the baby was a freak, so, maybe, was 2Face. “We’re all that’s left of the human race; we’re not going to start drawing lines and saying who’s in and who’s out.”

“I see,” Yago said. “And you’ll take responsibility if this woman and her so-called baby create more trouble?”

2Face swallowed, hesitated. She’d seen Yago’s trap too late. He was putting her together with Tamara and the baby. He was making her responsible for whatever they did. “Yes,” she said at last.

“We won’t forget you said that,” Yago said. “And anyway, I suspect most people here don’t agree with you. How about you, Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake? What do you think? I know my mother always admired your judgment.”

Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake blinked, surprised and flattered, but quickly seized the tendered opportunity. “I think it’s too soon to foreclose any options. Let’s get the facts first, then we can reach a reasoned judgment.”

Yago let 2Face see his triumph, his sneering “gotcha” look. Tamara Hoyle seemed to ignore the drama entirely. “Something is coming,” she whispered.

She and her baby stared toward the distant river. The baby smiled.

2Face knew she’d been outmaneuvered. She’d known to expect it, known that Yago would make a move sooner or later. He was a bully, but not a simple one. He was, after all, the president’s son, someone raised in the political life.
She told herself it didn’t matter because now that more adults were awake her tenuous, accidental authority would have been displaced anyway. But she resented that Yago had engineered it. He had acted as the kingmaker. Or queenmaker, in this case.

It had happened in a heartbeat. Yago had neatly pulled the rug out from under her. Within ten minutes after Yago’s move Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake, the Jane’s mother, was confidently pushing people around, bringing order out of chaos, detailing a search party, setting watches for duty back aboard the ship, organizing the unpacking of the shuttle’s tools and instruments.

Fine, 2Face told herself. Truth was, the woman was better qualified to be in charge; she was the founder of a multibillion-dollar empire, of course she was in charge. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that 2Face didn’t like being outmaneuvered by Yago. And she didn’t want to be made responsible for the actions of the Marine sergeant and her eerie child.

Yago was right: There was something wrong there. But not only there. There was something wrong with Billy Weir as well. 2Face couldn’t put her finger on it, but Billy made the hair stand up on the back of her neck. He was alive, his pupils reacted to light, but he’d said nothing, moved no muscle. They’d given him water and he’d swallowed some of it, that had been his greatest accomplishment so far.

2Face was as hungry and thirsty as anyone, as disturbed by the impossible landscape of this alien world. But she’d taken comfort in the distraction of being in charge. Now she was “one of the kids” in a world where the adults were reasserting themselves, especially Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake. With less to do, there was more time to think. She didn’t want to think.

Wylson wasted no time getting rid of her. “Okay, Mr. Hwang, you take your daughter and this one” — Wylson pointed at Mo’Steel — “over to take a look at the river. Come back and let us know if it’s actual water. Carry some jugs with you, might as well not waste a trip.”

“Send me, too,” Tamara Hoyle said.

“I don’t think we’re going to be using you,” Wylson said, making no attempt to disguise her contempt.

“I’m a trained soldier,” Tamara argued. “You may need a soldier.”

“You’re a murderer with a freak baby,” Yago said. He had attached himself to Wylson.

Tamara’s baby turned away, and a moment later, so did Tamara, as though the issue no longer interested either of them.
“Okay, you’d better get going,” Wylson said to Shy Hwang.

Shy Hwang nodded to his daughter and Mo’Steel. He looked a little sheepish, but determined. 2Face saw he was ready to reassert his prerogatives as her father. That was good,actually. 2Face loved her father. He had a right to be a father. They picked up a couple of empty gallon jugs and set off through the brilliant cornhusk “grass.”

Mo’Steel forged ahead, the only one of the three who was remotely excited by the adventure. Let it go, 2Face told herself. She touched her face, quite unconsciously, as she recalled the price that could be paid by the vengeance-seeker.

"Mo’Steel posted:

“Five-hundred years, twelve days, and some spare change, Duck,”

von Metternich posted:

double freaked out by the idea of putting a tube down your throat into your stomach (lungs?)

von Metternich posted:

For some reason that line has stayed with me for twenty years

You can see some of the same archetypes emerge as in Animorphs:

Jobs/Jake is The Guy. Very important to have A Guy in your book, publishers won’t buy it without one.
Mo/Marco is funny, but smarter than he seems. (They’re funny in different ways, I think)
Violet/Cassie has specialized knowledge and an annoying personal code that made me hate them when I was twelve.

I can see an argument for some of the others, but the cast is bigger here (albeit shrinking)

As a kid i was freaked out by the asteroid scene, double freaked out by the idea of putting a tube down your throat into your stomach (lungs?), and so scared I (ironically) couldn’t sleep by that last paragraph of the first book about Billy.

I am also on team anti-murderbaby, although I only have a vague memory of what happens with that.

QuickbreathFinisher posted:

Billy is kind of the Tobias of the group

Soulhunter posted:

quote:

CHAPTER 12

“THEY’RE HEADING FOR OUR PEOPLE!”


“It was peaceful,” Shy Hwang said to his daughter.

It took her a moment to track. Was he talking about Yago’s coup? The disturbing landscape? No, of course not. He meant her mom’s death. 2Face blushed with the good half of her face.

“I know, Dad. We were all asleep. She was asleep. It was peaceful.”

Her father let out a stifled sob. He wiped tears from his eyes and set his face in a parody of determination. 2Face had never thought much about her parents’ relationship. It had always been there. They argued occasionally but made up quickly. But of course they’d been together for seven years before 2Face was born. Not that 2Face wasn’t devastated by her mother’s death. But, to her shame, she had to admit that her father’s grief was deeper, more personal.

She resisted the insidious edge of contempt for her father. It was right that he grieve. She was the bad one, she was the one who was failing her mother’s memory. Her father was reacting the way a man who loved his wife should. And yet, he had to be able to see that there was a crisis before them, a mess that required action.

He’d be okay. He’d be okay in time. That was it, he needed time. Why didn’t she? How had she turned so quickly away from grief? Maybe she was more resilient. Or maybe she was just more cold-blooded, less feeling than her father.

She reached for her father to take his arm, to comfort him, but something held her back. Instead she said, “Maybe we should hurry up or Mo will get way ahead of us.”

Shy Hwang shook his head, trying again to resume the mantle of parental authority. “No. I’ll call him back. We should stick together and take our time. We’re in a strange place.”

He yelled to Mo’Steel, who pretended not to understand his words and simply waved back. So 2Face and her father accelerated their pace, passing beneath a sketchy tree whose trunk seemed to have been constructed of three or four irregular slices of bark piled together. Brush strokes. Miss Blake might be a simpering throwback, but she was right about this. It was all some weird 3-D representation of a painting. How had they done it, the aliens? Holograms and force fields? Genetic manipulation? Or was none of this real and the Wakers were still sleeping, sharing the same dream?

One thing was for sure: If any of this was real, the aliens, if aliens they were, had vast powers. It had to require enormous energies to excavate the gray-shade canyon, enormous power to grow this fabulously strange landscape.
Why? Why would an alien race want to do this? What was the motive — there had to be one. At least it wasn’t an aggressive move, that much was obvious. The aliens had gone to a lot of trouble to create an environment for their human guests. That had to be good news. In fact, very good news.

No, 2Face told herself, the real dangers were from within, from Yago and Billy Weir and Tamara and the baby.

Mo’Steel had reached the river and was waving them forward enthusiastically. They pushed on through the clinging pseudo-grass. At least it was downhill now. The river was like the trees, a jumble of agitated, moving, tumbling brush strokes. Up close you could see that it wasn’t liquid at all, not in the way it behaved, not in the way it moved. It reminded 2Face of watching clothes in the dryer, tumbling, roiling bits of blue and green and flecks of white in motion.

“It’s not water,” Shy Hwang said, disappointed.

But Mo’Steel grinned. “Watch this.” He knelt down and pushed his plastic pitcher into what seemed so solid. The brush stroke of blue came apart, sprayed around the obstacle, and to 2Face’s amazement, water, actual clear water began to fill the jug.

“Is that water?” 2Face asked.

Mo’Steel tipped the jug up to his mouth and drank. “It’s not Pepsi,” he said and passed the jug to 2Face.

It was water. Or something that sure tasted and felt like water, though unpleasantly lukewarm.

“Water,” Shy Hwang agreed.

“Hey,” Mo’Steel said. He was frowning, staring off into the distance. “Hey, scope that.”

The creatures were on the far side of the river and about a thousand feet upstream. They were moving, standing it seemed, but moving swiftly, effortlessly. Almost as if they were riding horses that were obscured by the grass.
They were the color of rust or dried blood. It was impossible to gauge their size. From a distance they appeared to be no more than man-sized, but with a multiplicity of spidery legs and very possibly more than one head.

They were surely not anything envisioned by Miss Blake’s Pierre Bonnard, the artist who had painted this meadow and this river. They veered suddenly and zoomed effortlessly across the water.

“They’re heading for our people!” 2Face said. “Come on!”

They started running. Running and yelling. There was no sign that the others had spotted the alien Riders.

“Hey! Hey!” Mo’Steel yelled. “Look! Look!”

But it was too far for voices to carry clearly. It looked as if the main group was huddled in some sort of debate. The Riders moved swiftly, faster than a running human, not so fast as a car. They were three points of a collapsing triangle: 2Face and her group, the main group of Wakers, and the Riders. The Riders would reach the Wakers first.
Then, the Wakers noticed. 2Face thought she saw Tamara pointing. There was a faint sound of yelling.

2Face was gasping, panting, as out of shape as . . . as a person who’d been asleep for five- hundred years. Mo’Steel had farther to run but he’d caught up with 2Face and Shy Hwang and was now pulling ahead. 2Face saw the Wakers drawing closer together, instinctively gathering their strength. The Riders — there seemed to be half a dozen— slowed and stopped twenty or thirty feet from Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake, who stepped out front, hands held out, palms up.

2Face saw Wylson shake her head. Then again, more violently. One of the Riders was on the move, zooming back and forth in front of her, seeming to taunt her, waving a curved stick like a dull-bladed scimitar at her. It was a challenge. A challenge to battle.

Wylson shook her head adamantly and Errol moved forward, the gallant, seeking to put himself between Wylson and the gaunt Rider. The Rider tossed the curved stick at Errol and Errol snatched it out of the air. He looked at
it, seemed to be trying to figure out what it was or how to hold it. There was a horrific shriek, an unearthly cry that was like metal gears grinding on ball bearings.

The Rider zoomed forward and stabbed a spear into Errol’s thigh. Errol fell to one knee. Mo’Steel was almost there. He was going to charge the Rider but two other Riders swooped in to block him. 2Face could see now what they rode. Not animals, but nearly flat, circular disks less than four feet in diameter. There was no obvious engine. No way for the Riders even to hold on but by careful balance. They seemed to steer with their weight, leaning this
way or that. The disks would scoot, with gathering speed, just inches above the grass tops.

The two outriders blocked Mo’Steel and he came to a confused stop. 2Face caught up with him, grabbed his arm to keep him from doing anything stupid. Up close now, 2Face’s impression was confirmed: The creatures had two distinct, but different heads. At least one of them did. The other Rider had a stump, six inches of neck and
nothing on top.

They stood on two jointed legs, each split into two short calves or elongated feet. The legs were jointed at the hip, at the split, again halfway down the calves, then at what might be ankles. The upper body was narrow and rigid, almost glossy, like a beetle’s carapace. They had two long arms, jointed much like human arms, and four-fingered hands.

The heads were the only break with symmetry. One head was little more than a mouth stuck on a neck, a hideous, razor-toothed sock-puppet of a head. The other, what had to be the main head, was dominated by two large, glittery gold compound eyes, like a fly’s but with fewer facets. Directly below, a row of four smaller eyes, black irises in gold orbs. The mouth was small, round, and seemed to be the origin of that terrible metallic voice.

The lead Rider, or surfer as he now seemed, zoomed a circle around Errol, taunting him in his harsh voice, jabbing a hand at the weapon in Errol’s hand. Errol used the weapon as a crutch, stood hobbling on one leg. Then, far too slowly, with no possible way to fool his antagonist, Errol swung the scimitar, caught nothing but air, and was
carried over by his momentum. He fell facedown on hands and knees. The alien stabbed him in his back and Errol cried out.

Again the taunting, the circling.

“Stop it! Stop it!” 2Face screamed, and realized she was not the only one. Almost everyone was yelling or crying, but no one could move as the gliding Riders formed a sort of moving circle around the two combatants. Errol was panting, sobbing, facedown in the brilliant grass. He made a feeble attempt to stand up. That movement was all the alien needed. He swept in, stabbed his spear into the back of Errol’s neck, and twisted it savagely. Errol was no more.

The aliens rode away a few paces, stopped, grouped together. 2Face had reached the others. Everyone stood, waiting, helpless. Mo’Steel started for Errol’s dropped scimitar.

“No!” Jobs yelled. “Mo! Don’t do it. Don’t touch it! It’s a challenge, let it lie, let it lie.”

Mo’Steel hesitated, fingers just inches from the hilt. The aliens watched him.

Slowly Mo’Steel took a step back. “Not this time,” he said to the killer. “Later on. We’ll see.”

The aliens took a last look, turned, and sped away out of sight.

quote:

CHAPTER 13

“YOU DON’T GO DEER HUNTING WITH A TANK.”


Night came to the meadow, a night of strange amethyst clouds and orange swirls in a troubled sky. Violet Blake found it fascinating. Was this scene an actual painting? Or were the aliens riffing on a theme? It might be Bonnard, or not. Was whoever or whatever operated the machinery on this strange world now composing its own art?

No one else seemed to care. They’d managed to make a small fire of the improbable grass and even more improbable wood. They were beside the river now, and so everyone had water to drink, and even wash in. The shuttle stood at a distance, unlit except by starlight. It seemed strangely small. Lonely. Violet’s mother was still in charge, as much as anyone could be said to be in charge of the scared, shaken, disorganized rabble. They huddled together talking endlessly, planning, abandoning plans, plotting, squabbling. Violet’s mother was trying to hold a board meeting.

Trying to transfer the skills she had honed in big business to this situation. Demanding concrete answers from people who had only speculation to offer. Yago was her toadie, seconding every motion, clinging tightly to what power there was, calling her “boss.” He was a work of art himself, Yago was, artificial, at least to some degree.
Cat DNA in his petri-dish golden eyes caused them to glow in the dark. Maybe his perfect bronze skin was a natural product of his African-American mother and Caucasian father, but Violet doubted it.

In return for the shameless toadying, Violet’s mother favored her one sure ally, complimenting Yago’s good sense. They were getting to be quite an act. Olga Gonzalez, Mo’Steel’s mother, had little to say except on matters to do with biology, her scientific speciality. She had a great deal to say about the anomalies in the plant life — the mismatch between what was taking place at the cellular level and what was observable in the developed species. But when Wylson demanded information on the aliens, Olga could only plead ignorance.

“There’s no such thing as an expert on alien biology,” Olga snapped after repeated questioning. “We’ve never encountered aliens. You know as much as I do.”

Shy Hwang sat cross-legged with head hung down, lost in memory. From time to time he would reach for his daughter, to hold her close, to hug her, and at those times Violet felt a twinge of jealousy and resentment at 2Face’s grudging response. 2Face seemed a cold little creature to her.

Another adult Waker had emerged from the shuttle, a man named Daniel Burroway, yet another scientist, an astrophysicist. He was an arrogant man, convinced of his own brilliance, and, it seemed to Violet, almost brutally indifferent to the fact that the three other members of his family had not survived. He talked a lot. If there was anyone who would challenge Wylson, it would be Burroway.

Billy Weir lay silent. Still. Jobs tended to him, paying more attention to him than to his own brother, Edward, who hummed to himself while making little collections of leaves and rocks. Some of the other younger kids sat crying, as alone as kids could be. The newly awakened sixteen-year-old named Anamull stared, slack-jawed, into the fire. A
burnout, Violet guessed. A big, hulking kid with brown hair and steroid arms, and no affect.

D-Caf sat by himself, too, ignored, excluded, shunned. According to Jobs, D-Caf had fired the shot that killed the mission’s copilot. A killer, though he seemed more pathetic than dangerous to Violet. He kept smiling at people, looking for an acceptance that no one would offer. He was jumpy, energetic, a shaggy puppy who couldn’t understand why he’d been spanked and put in the corner.

It was not a group to inspire confidence, Violet thought.

And then there was Tamara Hoyle. Along with her own mother, the type of woman Violet disliked most. A mannish woman. When she stood it was at parade rest, when she sat it was with legs precisely folded and back perfectly straight. She looked as if, all other things being equal, she could fight any of the men and win.

But all other things were not equal. Tamara Hoyle held the eyeless baby that never ate, never cried, only chuckled from time to time, as if at some secret joke. The baby was a cherub with a knowing, leering, too-wise face. The mother might almost have seemed indifferent to the child. She never looked at her baby. She never comforted it. She carried it easily, place to place, always holding it face-out as if she were allow-ing it to see the world. Of course the baby could not possibly see.

“They can’t be the ones who created all of this,” Daniel Burroway was arguing in his loud and pedantic tone. “These aliens you describe, Riders or surfers, whatever appellation you choose, were clearly warriors of some sort. It requires a subtler intelligence to imagine this environment, to meld the biologically functional with the artistic. As Dr. Gonzalez has confirmed, these are, biologically speaking, common plants. The grass is grass, despite the overt physical differences. That all argues for a larger intelligence than the sort of brutes you describe.”

Violet Blake could dispute that point — many violent societies had created great art and shown great intellectual creativity. But she didn’t have the will or the energy to be argumentative at the moment. She was desperately tired and hungry. The talk was going nowhere, accomplishing nothing.

If her opinion was asked for she would give it. But anything she said would almost surely lead to a clash with her mother and her sycophant, Yago.

Jobs evidently felt no such hesitation. “I agree with Dr. Burroway, but not for his reasons.”

Burroway frowned. “Then please, do tell,” he said with a mock bow.

“It’s that any warrior society uses its cutting-edge technology for fighting. I mean, humans, right? The military had planes before civilians, used rockets before civilians did, set up the Internet, global positioning, nuclear power plants, lasers, on and on. Now, those surfboards the Riders are using, it is cool technology, no question, but it’s not the cutting edge for whoever did all this terra forming. Or art forming, whatever you call it. I’m just saying, anyone who can split the sky right down the middle into a gray sky and a blue sky, or cause water to flow in packets. . .they can do better than antigravity skateboards, or whatever those things were. Not to mention spears and swords.”

Violet was amused to hear such a ready flow of words. Jobs was not a great talker, unless the subject was technology.

“The Riders might be the aliens’ pets, for all we know,” 2Face said. “Or maybe . . .” She paused, sending a direct question to Violet. “Maybe those Riders are part of the scene. I mean, maybe they’re images drawn from the same data the aliens took this environment. Is that possible?”

Violet heard her mother snort dismissively. “I think maybe we should stick to talking about ways to deal with the situation. This is not an art seminar.”

“Could be those Riders just didn’t think it was woolly enough using ray guns or whatever,” Mo’Steel suggested, speaking for the first time. “Maybe they weren’t looking for a gimme. Maybe they were looking to squeeze the A gland.”

Pretty much everyone stared at him, mystified.

Jobs translated. “He’s saying maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the Riders do have better technology but this isn’t them making war against us, this is just them, you know, engaging in a sport. Maybe they were looking for a challenge, a thrill. Squeeze the A gland — you know, adrenal gland.”

“You don’t go deer hunting with a tank,” Anamull agreed.

Violet hadn’t thought he was even listening.

Then, “What’s that?” D-Caf cried and leaped to his feet. “Shh! I heard something.”

Silence.

The sound of something moving through the grass. And then, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

Two people staggered into the firelight. One, a big man, was leaning for support on a smaller man. Violet could see that the larger man’s right leg was unable to bear any weight. The big man dropped to the ground and panted, unable to speak. Then he noticed Billy Weir and uttered a gasp or a sob. He crawled over to him. “Billy! Billy! It’s Dad!”

No answer. Billy Weir just stared.

The smaller man said, “Glad to see all of you. I’m very, very glad to see all of you. We saw all the empty berths, we knew others had awakened before us. But we couldn’t figure out where you were. Then we saw the fire.”

Violet noticed a distinct accent, a sort of lilt. The man was dark-skinned but with Caucasian features. Indian, Violet guessed. Olga stood up and carried a water jug to the injured man, then offered it to the other newcomer.

“My name’s Tathagata Rajagopalachari. I am afraid that my American friends call me T.R. My companion there is William Weir. He said to call him Big Bill. He is hurt, as you can see.”

“Welcome to both of you,” Wylson said. “What do you do, T.R.?”

“Do? Oh, yes. I am a psychiatrist.”

Violet almost laughed at the silent consternation that announcement caused. The other man moaned in pain and grabbed his leg hard, as though trying to squeeze the pain out of it. He paid no attention to the group but kept up his effort to get a response from his son.

“Do you have a doctor?” T.R. asked. “As I said, my friend here is not well. And I am afraid that my medical training occurred a very long time ago indeed.”

“You’re the closest thing we have to a doctor,” Olga said. “I’m a biologist but I don’t have an M.D., not even one from a long time ago.”

T.R. nodded. “Oh, that is distressing. Perhaps among the other survivors?”

Wylson shook her head. “So far we’re it, Doctor. We expect a few more Wakers like the two of you, but as you saw, the rest did not survive the trip.”

T.R. frowned. “As I saw? But I saw nothing to suggest any such thing.”

“We’re talking about the variously decomposed corpses in the berths,” Burroway said impatiently.

“But . . . But I looked carefully. I observed five more individuals in states of rest, two of them beginning to awaken, but there were no dead. The other berths were empty.”

Soonmot posted:

another consistent through line of all these books: cool weird aliens

UH OH!!!

Strategic Tea posted:

In my mind they were all camping a way away from the ship, and these two have woken up and reported that the ship is uhh not how they left it

quote:

CHAPTER 14

“AND MAYBE WE’RE ANTS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT A PICNIC.”


Jobs descended the circular stairway slowly, cautiously, on guard despite the fact that Mo’Steel was already halfway down the length of the Mayflower capsule. The berths where Jobs’s parents had been were empty. Not only empty, clean. No trace of the hideous mold. No fragments of decayed clothing.

Level after level, empty berths that had once been coffins. All of them gone but five. Three in deep slumber, two more, as T.R. had said, were waking. It was hard to accept. The horrific images were permanently copied onto Jobs’s brain. The ones who had been cratered, the cheesers, the facelifts, the wormers. All gone.

Jobs and Mo’Steel went to the two newly emerging Wakers. They were groggy, confused, scared. Jobs filled them in on the basic facts: the vertical landing, the artwork landscape, the five-hundred years, the deaths. He left out the vicious aliens, the freakish baby, the silent Billy Weir, the deaths of Doctor Huerta and Errol. Plenty of time for that later.

Of the two Wakers, one was a kid, one an adult. They were father and son. The father was Alberto DiSalvo, an engineer who had worked on the solar sails. His son, age fifteen, called himself Kubrick. Jobs motioned Mo’Steel to follow him out of hearing of the new Wakers who, in any event, seemed to be falling back to sleep in the familiar pattern.

“How many does that make?” Jobs asked Mo’Steel.

“Twenty-three Wakers. Minus the doctor and old Errol. Twenty-one up and running.”

“Three more still on ice,” Jobs said. “Where’d the others go?”

“The dead ones?”

“Uh-uh. Twenty-one awake, plus the doctor and Errol, plus three asleep, right? Twenty-six? We counted thirty-four we thought were alive. That leaves eight people gone who we thought were alive who aren’t here or back outside.”

Olga was up above them, watching from the entryway. She leaned over to call down the stairwell. “You kids okay in there?”

“Yeah, Mom,” Mo’Steel yelled. “Got two more live ones coming around.”

“Eight live ones gone,” Jobs muttered. “What’s going on here? The Deaders are all vacuumed out and so are eight live ones, but five are left behind, undisturbed. Seven left behind, actually, because it was T.R. who told us the dead were gone. So at that point we had seven people on board. The aliens — or whoever — take the dead and eight live ones. Why?”

Mo’Steel shrugged. “You got me, Duck.”

“This is unnecessarily weird,” Jobs muttered. “I’m not getting a picture. Maybe my brain is still fuzzy.”

“Maybe reality is fuzzy,” Mo’Steel said.

“Some aliens bring us neatly down for an easy landing. They invent this bizarre landscape. They or some other bunch come by and kill Errol. Then the Riders or the first aliens or some totally new bunch of aliens, or some combination of them, carry off all the bodies plus probably eight people still coming out of hibernation. And leave seven behind. What’s the game?”

“Maybe games. Plural.”

“Yeah. And maybe we’re ants trying to figure out a picnic. Wait a minute. When did they do it? When none of us was looking this way? When the Riders attacked?”

“Or else any time since we hauled butt for the river and it got dark.”

“Still, the Riders could have been a diversion.”

“Yeah. Kind of a mystery, huh?” Mo’Steel said. “Kind of thing you like to climb all over. You love to try and figure out stuff.”

Jobs smiled. His friend was not subtle. “You can stop worrying about me, Mo. I’m not going to go nuts or whatever.”

“That’s good. What are we going to do?”

“You and me, or all of us?”

Mo’Steel shrugged. “Big picture. I mean, it’s like we have problems inside and out. Aliens and all, like the ones who killed old Errol. But the serious stuff is like in us, you know? People losing it from sadness. People fighting over who’s going to rule. That baby, too.”

“Billy Weir,” Jobs said.

“Yeah, he’s strange but he’s not bothering anyone at least.”

“I think he’s —”

Mo’Steel’s mother interrupted, “Kids! Something is happening. Back at the camp.”

Jobs glanced at the two Wakers. Both dozing still. “Come on.”

The three of them were almost back at camp when they saw Big Bill Weir staggering away from the fire. Daniel Burroway, Yago, and Anamull were wielding burning brands. The bright tips drew lurid arcs in the night. Someone threw a stone or a chunk of wood and hit Bill Weir in the back.

“You’ve got my son, I have a right!” Big Bill roared.

“Stay at least a hundred yards away,” Wylson shouted. “I am deadly serious about that, Mr. Weir.”

A burning stick flew, twirling through the air toward Big Bill. Mo’Steel caught the brand and looked to Jobs for guidance.

“What’s going on?” Jobs demanded.

“Stay out of it and stay away from him!” Yago snapped. In his other hand he brandished the scimitar the alien Riders had left behind. Jobs had forgotten the weapon. Yago had not.

“They have my son,” Big Bill pleaded. He started to say more but his face contorted in pain and choked off his words.

“What is this about?” Olga Gonzalez shouted. “What is going on with you people?”

Yago stepped forward just a few feet, still armed with his torch, and stabbed an accusing finger at the man writhing in pain. “He’s got it. You want it, you deal with him.”

Daniel Burroway tried to sound reasonable, an impossible task for one red in the face and waving a glowing red branch. “He may be contagious. He’s being quarantined. If you come in contact with him you’ll be quarantined as well.”

Olga was not easily cowed. “Where’s the doctor, then?”

“He’s a shrink, not a real doctor,” Burroway said.

Big Bill moaned and Jobs knelt beside him. “What is it, Mr. Weir?”

“The leg,” he gasped.

Jobs hesitated. Maybe they were right. Maybe whatever it was, it was contagious. Or maybe they were just hysterical. Gingerly he lifted the hem of Big Bill’s pant leg and tugged at it. The rotten fabric tore easily. Mo’Steel moved close, bringing the feeble, flickering light of the torch. Bill Weir’s leg was riddled with holes. Tunnels. He looked just like Violet Blake’s father and others. A wormer. A live wormer.

Swallowing hard, dreading, not wanting to show it but unable to conceal his horror, Jobs tore the pant leg some more. The holes were everywhere through the calf muscle, up through the knee. The lower thigh was untouched. But as Jobs stared, he saw a round, red spot of blood appear just above Big Bill’s knee. A moment later the spot became a hole and the hole was filled by the pea-green head of a worm.

quote:

CHAPTER 15

“DON’T LET ME LIVE.”


Jobs didn’t know what to do. Once again his tenuous grip on certainty had been torn away. He’d been engaged in the mystery, trying to understand, and now all that he could see and feel and react to was the foul reality of the killing worm.

He wanted to run away. Should run away. There was no hope for Bill Weir. Was there? Where was Mo? Right there, steady, but grim. Olga? Of course, Mo’Steel’s mother stayed by his side.

“It’s some kind of worm,” Jobs whispered harshly, hoping Big Bill’s cries would keep him from overhearing.

“It’s nothing I’ve ever seen or heard of. Not that size, not that fast. Not as a human parasite.”

“Can you do anything?” Jobs pleaded.

“I’m not a doctor.”

“Mom, it’s a bug, right?” Mo’Steel said. “Maybe you could think about how to kill it.”

Olga Gonzalez drew her son and Jobs a few paces away. “Look, you need to understand it’s very unlikely that this parasite you saw is the only one. That leg may be riddled with them. I have nothing to work with. We have a microscope but we’d need full daylight for that even to work because we don’t have a light. No lab. No equipment.”

“It’s going to eat him alive,” Jobs said. “He’s conscious. He’s not in hibernation like Miss Blake’s dad. He’s feeling this. And it’s only in his leg — it could take a long time for him to die.”

“Maybe we cut off his leg,” Mo’Steel suggested. “We got Dr. Huerta’s scalpel and all.”

“That could kill the man,” Olga said. “Loss of blood, shock, infection . . . and any way, it might not stop the parasite. They may have advanced farther than you can see.”

“Mom, do we have any other choice?”

Olga looked hard at her son and called him by the name she had given him. “Romeo, this thing could kill all of us. I want to help this man, but you have to understand that the parasite could be capable of infesting anyone in contact. God knows what it is. It may not even be of terrestrial origin. This could be an alien life-form. There’s no telling what it might do.”

“Oh, oh, help me,” Big Bill moaned. “Oh, help me. Oh, help me!” he shrieked, then subsided in sobs.

Jobs said, “Yago has that sword thing the Riders threw to Errol. May be better than a scalpel. Quicker, anyway. In and out fast.”

Olga shook her head. “Someone would have to sew up the arteries in his leg or he’d just bleed to death. Someone would have to get in there and do that, with all the risk involved.”

“I can do that,” a voice said.

Jobs was startled to see Violet Blake. He hadn’t noticed her joining them.

“My . . . my dad died from this,” Miss Blake said, assuming that clarified her motive.

“You could end up going the same way,” Olga said harshly.

“I’ll hold him down,” Mo’Steel volunteered.

“We don’t have any thread,” Jobs pointed out. “But we might be able to use optic cable to tie off the arteries.”

“Look, this is not the time or the place for self-sacrifice,” Olga argued. “That man is probably going to die anyway, no matter what.”

“We’ll have to get the sword from Yago,” Jobs said. “Ms. Gonzalez, that would be better coming from you. Being an adult. We just need to borrow it. And some more light from the fire.”

Olga Gonzalez hesitated. “I can’t endanger all of us. I can’t endanger my son.”

“Hey, danger is my middle name,” Mo’Steel said, trying to josh her along.

Jobs could see she was hardening in her opposition. He knew what he felt and what he wanted to say, but putting it into words defeated him. He said, “Ms. Gonzalez, this is . . . We are all that’s left of the human race. We have to act like humans. Right?”

“We have to survive,” Olga said with finality.

“No, we don’t,” Violet Blake said. “We don’t have to survive, we have to be worthy of survival. I know you’re a biologist and maybe you see survival in purely evolutionary terms, but we’ve evolved beyond being just another bunch of primates, haven’t we? Isn’t human culture, human morality part of our evolution? Isn’t it part of what defines us as a species? If we give that up and start behaving like savages and survive by being savages, have we saved human life or just devolved into some lesser species?”

Jobs stared at her openmouthed. He was struck by intense jealousy, an out-of-place emotion, surely, but undeniable just the same. He’d have given anything to be able to speak that way. He noticed Mo’Steel grinning at him.

“Maybe I should be reading more,” Jobs muttered under his breath.

Mo’Steel took his mother’s hand and held it gently. “Mom, you’ve never been able to stop me from doing stupid, dangerous stuff that was just about me squeezing the A gland. Now I’m trying to do what’s right. Don’t stop me now.”

“Okay, honey,” she said quietly. “Okay. I’ll get the sword, or whatever it is.”

When she was gone Jobs said, “That was a pretty good speech, Miss Blake.”

“Thank you.” She knelt beside Big Bill and used the lacy sleeve of her dress to mop sweat from his brow. “We’re going to try to help you, Mr. Weir.”

The only response was a bellow of pain, a noise so loud that Violet jumped back. Jobs saw the worm. Or one of the worms, if there were several. It was half out of one hole and digging its way back into untouched flesh. Like a dolphin going in and out of the waves.

“It’s fine to be noble,” Jobs said to Mo’Steel, “but if that thing gets me . . . don’t let me live.”

“Don’t think about it, Duck. The Reaper can smell fear.” He laughed and patted Jobs on the back. “You have to put your brain into some other place. Stay happy and the Reaper can’t find you.”

Despite himself Jobs laughed. “You just make this stuff up to fit the occasion, don’t you?”

“Pretty much.”

“So you’re scared?”

“’Migo, I am seriously scared.”

WrightOfWay posted:

Big fan of book 2 so far. This poo poo is wild.

Jim the Nickel posted:

I'd say we're on about a 3-4 out of 10 on the weirdness scale for these books

Jim the Nickel posted:

I'd say we're on about a 3-4 out of 10 on the weirdness scale for these books

Jim the Nickel posted:

I'd say we're on about a 3-4 out of 10 on the weirdness scale for these books

quote:

CHAPTER 16

“I’LL COUNT TO TEN SO YOU’LL KNOW WHEN IT’S HAPPENING.”


Jobs heard heated words coming from the main camp. Burroway’s loud, grating tone. Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake sounding imperious, but less sure of herself than before. Olga demanding. In a moment, though, Olga returned carrying the sword. For the first time Jobs looked closely at it. It was curved, almost a scythe. It was perhaps three feet long, very broad, the inside edge was ornate, decorated with cutouts and filigree. There was what might be writing all over the blade. The hilt was never meant for a human hand; it had a clumsy angle in the middle and was too short overall.

“Here’s our scalpel,” Olga said dryly. “The edge seems quite sharp. I suggest the cut be made about eight inches above the knee. That won’t leave him much of a leg, but we have to remove all the affected portion of the limb. There’s no point doing this unless we do it right.”

She took a deep breath. “I don’t know that I have the strength to handle this thing, or the eye- hand coordination.”

“I can do it,” Jobs said.

Olga nodded. “Okay. Romeo? Take Mr. Weir’s shoulders, hold him down, don’t let him jerk free. I’ll try to hold his other leg, I’ll sit on it, I guess. Miss Blake, you stand ready with the ‘thread.’ Jobs, you know what to do.”

When Mo’Steel and his mother were in place, Violet Blake spoke to Big Bill. “Mr. Weir, we’re going to amputate your leg and try to save you. I’ll count to ten so you’ll know when it’s happening.” She turned away and mouthed the words On three to Jobs.

He understood. Big Bill would think he had another seven seconds before he needed to panic or try to break free.

“One . . .” Violet said.

Jobs felt an urgent need to throw up. Later, he told himself. Throw up later.

“Two . . .”

Jobs raised the sword.

“Three . . .”

Jobs took careful aim and brought the sword down with all his might.

Jobs breathed.

Mo’Steel stood up and kicked the detached limb away.

Violet Blake moved in to begin suturing the wound. Then she began to scream. She leaped to her feet. She held her right hand out before her, screaming at it. Jobs saw the worm as it drilled its way down into her index finger. Mo’Steel bounded across the prostrate man and grabbed Violet’s wrist. He closed his strong hand around her
fingers, leaving only the index finger extended.

“Jobs!” he yelled.

Jobs swung the sword on pure reflex. The blade stopped less than an inch from Mo’Steel’s face. Mo’Steel hauled Violet back and threw her violently into the grass. Jobs yanked Olga to her feet and dragged her away.

Big Bill cried piteously, quietly, “Oh, god, oh, god, it’s still here. I can feel it. I can feel it,” just before he lost consciousness.

Olga snatched a branch from the fire and blew out the flame leaving only an ember at the tip. She told her son, “Hold her hand. Hold it still,” and quickly pressed the coal-hot tip to the stump of Violet Blake’s finger.

Violet screamed and fainted, and Jobs missed catching her. She slumped to the ground. “Back away, back away,” Jobs yelled.

They dragged Violet with them, dragged her through the grass and stopped only when they were twenty yards from the hysterical, now-awake Bill Weir. And then, from the main camp came a new sound, like nothing Jobs had ever heard, a collective moan, a cry of fear and disbelief. Outlined against the fire a dark form seemed to float through the air. Human? No human moved like that.

And yet with growing dread Jobs realized that he recognized the form, knew what face he would see when at last the shape was close enough. Billy Weir floated, moved without benefit of muscles, simply floated through the air. He
still stared, blank, as though blind, still showed no expression on his vacant face. He floated with his limbs all limp, with his head upraised, till he was above Big Bill.

Big Bill was shrieking now, shrieking like a lunatic thing, his voice no longer human. And it seemed to Jobs as though a shadow extended down from Billy Weir to his adoptive father. The shadow enveloped them both. For a heartbeat Big Bill was silent. And then Billy Weir screamed.

Jobs thought at first it was Big Bill again, but no, this voice was different, raw, hoarse, but at least an octave higher, a young voice screaming in pain.

Then silence.

Billy Weir sagged, fell to the ground.

Jobs ran back to him, ran and grabbed his nerveless arms and pulled him away, dragging him back from Big Bill.
He stopped, panting, shaking. Big Bill was silent. And Jobs knew the man was dead.

quote:

CHAPTER 17

“TEN’S ONLY A MAGIC NUMBER IF YOU GOT TEN FINGERS.”

“We have to get out of here, right now,” Olga said. “Those things could be capable of moving across the ground. Once they’re done with Mr. Weir . . .”

Violet Blake heard the words but as if from far away. The pain in her hand was unlike anything she had ever experienced. She would not have believed that a single finger could possibly cause so much agony. She held her wounded hand with her free hand, using tattered, decaying bits of her dress as a bandage. The blood wouldn’t stop. But there was no way to tie a tourniquet, the finger had been lopped off right at the base.

She would have liked to try and sew up whatever vein was producing the endless flow of blood, but she knew she didn’t have the nerve for that. The cauterization had been only partly successful.

There was no one to help her. They had dragged the once more prostrate Billy Weir back toward the fire, but they’d been stopped by a solid front presented by Yago, D-Caf, Anamull, Burroway, and the psychiatrist, T.R.

“Wylson says you’re quarantined,” Yago said. “The worms could be in you.”

Violet wanted to scream at him. But the truth was, her mother and the others had been right, the fearful ones, the safe ones, they’d been right and she and her idealistic compatriots had been dangerously wrong. And now even her own mother believed she was contagious.

“The point is we all have to get out of this area,” Olga said through gritted teeth.

“Suddenly you discover prudence,” Burroway drawled. “A little late, I should say.”

Olga erupted. “We’re not asking to mingle with you people, we’re saying, move. Move! Move now! You want to play gotcha? Do it later.”

That seemed to get through. It got through to Violet. She could swear she felt the worms crawling up her legs. She had seen the one in her finger. She had seen it and felt it and known the terror and the pain of it. Burroway, having gotten off his snide remark, seemed unsure how to proceed. It was Violet’s mother who made the call. “Okay, we move out. We follow the river.”

“We should go back to the ship,” Jobs said. “There are more Wakers there.”

“And maybe more worms,” Burroway argued.

“We can’t just go off and disappear and leave those people,” Jobs argued. “Not to mention the ship. There’s a lot of useful things there still. We need tools. We need to make weapons. We need to figure out what happened to all those people who just disappeared. And we have to be there to help the Wakers.”

Violet sensed a desperation in Jobs’s voice. Of course: He was a techie, leaving the only technology in sight to head out into the wild.

“Forget them,” Yago snapped. “Or else you go back, Jobs. You want to be Joe Responsible, you go. But leave the sword with us.”

Olga put her hand on Jobs’s shoulder. “They’re right: We have to get out of this area. We know nothing about these worms. We don’t know how they move, how they reproduce. They could be on the ship. They could be all around us soon. We don’t know if these are even true parasites: They could be predators. They could hunt us.”

Violet let loose a small sob that went unnoticed. There was a battle in her mind between pain and fear, and in that battle fellow-feeling, compassion, concern were all just minor players. She wanted to run away. And more, she wanted to be somewhere else. Back in the world, back on Earth, back in a place where there were doctors and the smell of disinfectant and bright, clean stainless steel gleaming under fluorescent lights.

Suddenly she felt weak. Her knees buckled. She caught herself, terrified of letting any part of her touch the dark ground that in her imagination teemed with the killer worms. Mo’Steel was at her side in a flash. He caught her around the waist, very chastely, and held her up.

“Strap it up, Miss B., I know it hurts. With pain and all you have to kind of ride right into it. Don’t fight it, don’t try and look away. You go right straight into the pain. Eat it up, make it yours.”

Violet blinked, not understanding the words, but appreciating the tone and the sense that someone was helping her. Mo’Steel stood close, put his face right into her field of vision. “Don’t run from pain. You have to be like,‘Bring it on. Show me what you got.’ ”

Violet nodded. Defiance, is that what he meant? She felt a little stronger and Mo’Steel, evidently sensing this, let her go. Jobs yelled across the distance to his little brother, telling him to be good and careful and listen to 2Face and do whatever she said.

It was an interesting note, Violet thought. Jobs trusted 2Face to watch over his brother. Not one of the adults.

The group, two groups, actually, were moving now. The bulk of Wakers carrying whatever branches they could rescue from the fire. A shifting mass of fireflies in the darkness. Violet’s group followed at a distance. She noticed that Jobs had retained the alien weapon. And they had their own burning brands that cast almost no meaningful light and indeed seemed only to deepen the impenetrable blackness.

They marched through the knee-high grass, fugitives again, running again. Leaving behind the shuttle, their only physical connection with the world, with their world. Jobs and Mo’Steel were carrying Billy Weir by his hands and legs, like a sack of grain. Violet wondered whether it had been a dream, an illusion. The sight of the boy floating in
the air, rising above his doomed father, a black energy flowing from the boy to the man. Big Bill’s sudden silence. Billy Weir’s anguished cry.

“The nights could be twenty hours long,” Jobs was saying. “We don’t know when the sun will come up. Or if it will come up. Or if there is a sun.”

The main group was pulling ahead. They were unencumbered by the need to carry anyone. They had more light.

“What are we doing?” Violet wondered. She was surprised to hear her own voice. She hadn’t meant to speak.

“We’re running away,” Mo’Steel said cheerfully. “We are hightailing it. We are preboarding. Click on the X.”

“No. I mean, what are we doing?” Violet repeated. “What are we going to do? In this place, this planet? Those Riders, the worms, someone taking the bodies, someone taking the eight people who might have been alive. All we do is react.”

“Your mother seems to have a plan,” Olga muttered.

Violet doubted that but didn’t say anything. She doubted anyone had a real idea of what they were doing. And her entire hand hurt. And she was in no mood to just run and be terrified and be shoved this way and that.

“We need to figure it out,” Jobs said.

It took Violet a while to realize he was reacting, belatedly, to what she had said. “Figure what out?”

“We’re getting jerked around,” Jobs said. “We fly for five-hundred years, end up here, and all that’s happening is we’re getting jerked around.”

“You assume there’s some consciousness behind all of this?” Olga said. “That may be a mistake. People look at nature and assume there is intentionality. They used to think the sun was carried through the sky by a god in a flying chariot. Order does not necessarily imply conscious design.”

“Isn’t that what you used to tell your students?” Mo’Steel teased his mother.

She laughed, a melancholy sound, but welcome in the darkness. “Straight out of my intro to biology class at Cal State Monterey.” Then, in a more somber voice, “All a trillion miles away.”

“You may be right, Ms. Gonzalez,” Jobs said.

“But you don’t think so?” When Jobs didn’t answer, she said, “Me, neither.”

“The eight disappeared,” Jobs said without explanation. “Ten percent of the Eighty.”

“A message?” Olga wondered.

“I need to rest,” Jobs said. He and Mo’Steel knelt to gently deposit Billy Weir on the ground. Jobs shook his arms, trying to get the cramps out.

“It’s a base-ten message,” Mo’Steel said. “I mean, ten percent, right? If someone’s picked ten percent as some magic number, why is that? Ten’s only a magic number if you got ten fingers. Otherwise, why not six or two or twenty-nine?”

“I’m in base nine now,” Violet snapped. Then, the absurdity of it struck her and she laughed.

“Maybe it’s intentional. Maybe it’s partly intentional, partly accidental, coincidence,” Olga mused.

Violet said, “If you’re all right, then someone wants us away from the shuttle. They took the bodies away because they figured out that we were tied to them. They took the eight, the ten percent, that was to say, ‘Follow us.’ Follow us away from the shuttle.”

“And leave the other five Wakers behind?” Mo’Steel wondered.

Violet shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t expect us to leave so soon. Maybe they didn’t know we’d panic and run.”

Jobs grunted and knelt down to pick up Billy Weir’s feet again. “I guess we sent a lousy message, then: Push us and we run away.”

Violet could see that the main group, marked only by the ever-smaller points of light from their torches, was pulling steadily away. By daybreak, if day ever did break, they might be miles away.

Her finger hurt. Well, what was left of it.

quote:

CHAPTER 18

“WHO ARE YOU? WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH US?”


Billy Weir knew he was being carried. He felt as if he was flying. Skimming low like a jet coming in under the radar. Fast. Moving so fast, no time to even look, no time to really see. Just a blur of darkened colors.

He felt hands wrapped around his ankles, hands around his wrists, he felt the strain of his weight. From time to time he heard the buzz of talk, and when he tried very hard he could pick out a word here or there, no context, just words. And he couldn’t even be sure of those. The sky was different. He could see the sky. They were carrying him faceup and he could see the sky. Not a sky. No, not a real sky, that was obvious. He could see what were supposed
to be stars, what was supposed to be a moon, but of course they were no such thing. And beyond the illusion? Could he force his mind through the illusion, see what was real?

He tried, but gave up quickly. He was tired. Weary. Draining the consciousness from his father had taken enormous energy. Big Bill was a forceful man, he had a great will, and that had made it harder. Billy doubted he could have done it if Big Bill had not been so weakened. And of course he never would have but for his father’s agony.
The pain had been a blinding glow, a green light enveloping Big Bill. As the pain surged, the light shaded toward deep purple, shattered into a rainbow of lurid green and luxuriant purple and night black. It was a strobe in Billy’s brain, insistent, the rhythm irregular, but stronger and stronger, firing his own nerve endings.

Big Bill had taken him from the orphanage and given him a decent life. He and his wife had given Billy love. Billy owed his father an easy death. He knew how to do it, though it meant spending the energy he had been hoarding.
Do you want to die? he had asked his father silently. But Big Bill never heard or understood the question. He, like everyone but Billy, was a spark, electric, so fast, too fast to hear his son’s slow voice in his head. So Billy reached into his brain and found the answer himself. It wasn’t hard. He had long ago learned to fire the neurons of another brain. He had long ago come to understand the architecture of the creased gray matter, the billion billion switches within, the ghosts of memory and ideas.

“Yes,” Big Bill’s brain wanted to say. “Yes, let me die.”

It was like sucking a milk shake through a straw. Big Bill fought for life though he longed for death. Life and mind were separate, and life fought to persist, no matter how much logic argued for surrender. In the end, though, Big Bill was too weakened by pain, by loss, and by fear. Billy had been able to give him peace.

Billy could feel the fear around him. Some of it was fear of him. When he let himself go, when he released, he could open himself to the minds that hovered like bright fireflies, like candlelit jack-o’-lanterns floating in the night. The words in their heads were too quick, but Billy could read the deeper meanings, he could sense the emotions, the basic truths. So much grief, so much fear, so much guilt. So much they didn’t understand.

But then, there was still so much Billy didn’t understand, either.

Who are you? What do you want with us? Billy asked, and he reached out, searching for the answer, feeling in the dark for synapses, trying to illuminate the architecture of a mind unlike any he had yet encountered. The mind was out there, but beyond Billy’s reach.

And not that mind alone. There were others.

quote:

CHAPTER 19

“YOU DON’T LIKE THE WAY THINGS ARE, YOU CAN GO, TOO.”


They kept moving through the night. 2Face kept Edward close to her. He was a decent-enough kid, and she felt Jobs had placed the burden for his well-being on her. In any case, it compensated somewhat for her fall from authority.

She fretted as she saw the faint lights of Jobs’s group falling farther and farther behind. Jobs at least was a potential friend, her only potential friend aside, of course, from her father. Now here she was under the thumb of Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake and Yago.

Daniel Burroway was more a pouter than a fighter, 2Face thought. He would make sniping remarks, but after one particularly vehement dispute, Wylson had dismissed him curtly with the remark that he was “an academic, a book-jockey. This is the real world, not a seminar.” Since then Burroway had done little but stew silently as they walked along through the darkened landscape.

Wylson had absorbed the shrink, T.R., into her coterie and Yago had begun to draw D-Caf to him: a toady for the toady-in-chief. 2Face imagined that D-Caf, shunned by everyone else, was glad for any acceptance. Wylson had dictated the gathering of wood for new torches, the assembling of any sharp stick or edged rock for weapons. She had directed that the line of march stay beside the river. They were wise policies, 2Face couldn’t argue with that. But she did object to leaving Jobs’s group behind. At a rest stop, as everyone drank deeply, she approached Wylson.

“Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake? It’s been hours now. If Jobs and Ms. Gonzalez or any of them had been infected by the worms, surely they’d show signs by now. We’d be hearing yelling or screams or something.”

“That’s not necessarily true,” Wylson answered. “Parasites can lie dormant.” She turned away.

“Your own daughter is with them,” 2Face pressed.

T.R. intervened. “What you’re feeling is healthy. You want to unite everyone, and that’s very understandable. Besides, those are your friends, no?”

2Face suppressed a desire to tell the psychiatrist to take a jump. She’d had to talk to shrinks after she was burned. She had no respect for the profession. But this wasn’t the time for antagonizing anyone. She said, “I don’t think we have the right to just kick people out of the group.”

“Is it about rights?” T.R. asked. He wore a pitying smile. “Perhaps it’s more about an unresolved feeling of guilt? We call it survivor guilt. The feeling that one has sinned merely by the act of surviving when others have died.”

“I’m talking to Ms. Lefkowitz-Blake,” 2Face grated.

“No you’re not,” Yago said flatly. “You’re talking to air.”

D-Caf giggled, then stifled the sound with his hand, looked at Yago for approval, giggled again.

Yago pushed past D-Caf and came right up to 2Face. “And, by the way, I wouldn’t push your luck, wax girl. You and the freak-show Madonna and Baby Yikes would maybe fit in better with Jobs and the Monkey boy’s crew, you know what I’m saying? They already have that . . . that whatever he is, that Billy the Weird. You don’t like the way things are, you can go, too. You can hook up with Jobs’s freak show.”

2Face fought to keep from showing the fear she suddenly felt. The threat was clear. Unmistakable. There were two classes of people: the normal and the not. And she was in the latter group. She faded back from the torches, back from the clique around Wylson. She looked for her father. He was slogging along, head down. He wouldn’t understand. Would he?

2Face stopped and turned to search the darkness for Jobs’s group: If she was going to be exiled, maybe it was better to go voluntarily. She didn’t want to be driven out like a leper. She saw faint light, maybe the torches of the other group. Maybe not. A mile of darkness separated them. A mile of worms, maybe, and the alien Riders. Besides, Jobs had asked her to take care of Edward. Where was he, anyway? She had to do that. Had to live up to her responsibilities. She couldn’t run away. Why should she?

She touched her face. The burn had been horribly painful. The recovery had taken forever. But she’d understood it as an atonement for her sin. And after a while she’d come to see the disfigurement as a useful device for confronting, shocking, disturbing people.

She had abandoned her birth name, Essence, and taken the name 2Face. She had chosen not to hide her face. She thought of herself as an anthropologist studying the strange, inconsistent, hypocritical reactions of the people she met. Here is ugliness, look at it. Let me see your reaction.

But that was back in the world. That was back in a world where physical ugliness was all-but-erased by cosmetic surgery and DNA manipulation. Her split face, ugly and beautiful, had been a statement. And, she had always known, it was temporary — once the healing was complete the surgeries would begin. Twenty-eight square inches of 2Face’s own skin had already been grown in culture at the hospital, ready for transplantation. That world was gone. This was a simpler world. A more primitive world. “Unique” was no longer a virtue. Here people were powerless, and being powerless, were afraid.

No. She was not going to be pushed out. She was Essence Hwang. She had a scar. But she was not a freak. Not like Tamara and the baby. They were freaks. If anyone was going to be exiled it would be them, not her. 2Face threaded her way through the tired, footsore, hungry survivors in search of her father. He at least would stand by her. That was one. And Edward. Two. Who else?

quote:

CHAPTER 20

“THIS IS AN AWFUL LOT OF TROUBLE FOR OUR ALIENS TO GO TO.”

The sun rose, small, distant, and weak. A winter sun. No longer a Bonnard sun. Jobs called a halt and laid Billy Weir down. He was getting mightily sick of carrying the boy. They had taken shifts, but there were only the three of them, Mo’Steel, his mother, and Jobs. Violet, with her hand still leaking blood, was in no condition to carry anything.

They stood on a rise, not a hill so much as a low plateau overlooking a long, shallow valley. The river had slowed and now meandered toward a green, unhealthy-looking bay dotted with wooden ships that might almost have been the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria.

There was a village directly ahead. Strange, ungainly buildings, some little more than rough lean-tos, others patched plaster houses with steep, dormered roofs. Jobs saw a brick bridge, arched, with a square tower. The perspective seemed odd; the relative sizes of buildings were wrong.

Within the village, people, all in costume, or what seemed costume to a modern eye. Men wore tunics and feathered caps, some wore crimson tights and brocaded jackets. The women wore white linen head wraps and voluminous peasant dresses and aprons.

There were pigs running in the dirt street, gaunt dogs, and chickens. The people were busily engaged in a series of odd activities. One man in a close-fitting felt cap was facedown on a wooden table, stretching his arms to the left and right. Another man wearing only one shoe appeared to be trying to crawl through a sort of transparent globe. A
man was shearing a sheep while beside him a man tried to shear a pig. A man armed with a curved knife was slamming his head against a brick wall.

It was ritualized, unnatural, not for a moment to be confused with anything real. The people were identifiably human, but behaving more like automatons. A man waded into the river waving a large fan and with his mouth open as if he was shouting. But no sound came forth. Another was perched on a steep roof and shot a crossbow at what looked like a tumbling stack of pies.

This unsettling, strange tableau extended into the distance, melding into a less-detailed vision of a crowded city. But dominating it all, overwhelming all with its sheer size was a massive building. It was round, built like a wedding cake but one that might have been carved out of a single mountain of yellowed rock. It was seven layers of arches, each set back from the lower one, so that the whole thing might in time have risen to a point.

But the structure was imperfect, asymmetrical. The top few layers of this stone cake had been slashed and within the gash, a sort of tower-within-a-tower, more arches, more layers. Jobs turned to Violet. She held her disfigured hand up at shoulder level, trying to help the blood to clot. She was an incongrous sight in her tattered feminine finery, stained with blood. Her hair, once piled high, hung down unevenly, a fallen soufflé. She was dirty, like all of
them, in pain, hungry, scared. And yet, Jobs thought, she had a determined dignity that he admired. And the truth was, her knowledge of art was proving at least as useful as his own technological facility.

Violet stared at the scene, awed, rapt, eyes shining. “I know this,” she said. “I’ve seen this!”

Mo’Steel was salivating. “I see piggies down there. Where there are piggies there is bacon. And chickens. That means eggs. I am seeing bacon and eggs. I am seeing about a dozen eggs and maybe a pound of bacon, all hot, all hot from the pan.”

Jobs was hungry, too. But to him the tableau was just creepy, impossible, absurd. Unnatural. “Talk to us, Miss Blake,” Jobs said.

“I’m trying to remember,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “I forget what it’s called. The style, I mean.”

“I don’t care,” Mo’Steel said. “Question is: Are we going to get us some bacon and eggs?”

“It’s like a video loop,” Jobs said. “Each of those people keeps doing the same thing over again.”

Miss Blake nodded. “It’s an allegory, or a series of allegories. It’s the kind of thing that would have meant more to a person of that era. Each of those people is demonstrating a fable or a saying of some sort. I don’t recall the specifics. And of course there’s the Tower of Babel, that’s obvious.”

Jobs blinked. He was exceedingly tired and maybe stupid. “The what?”

“The Tower of Babel. You know, Old Testament? Man builds a tower to reach up to heaven?”

“Jobs is a heathen,” Mo’Steel explained. “If it isn’t from either a technical manual or a poetry book, my boy here don’t know it.”

Olga Gonzalez said, “They’re cooking fish. See? Not in the tower, down in the village.”

“The Tower of Babel?” Jobs repeated.

“There has to be food, that’s the point,” Mo’Steel said.

“Brueghel!” Violet Blake exclaimed suddenly.

“A bagel?”

“It’s a Brueghel. Fifteen hundred something. Sixteenth century, anyway,” Violet said. “Look at the detail.”

“Can we eat the pigs and the fish?” Mo’Steel wondered.

“Where are the others? Where is the main group?” Olga wondered. “I wonder if . . . oh, look. There they are.”

Jobs followed the direction of her gaze. Perhaps half a mile away, a small, vulnerable-looking knot of people in shabby modern dress stood gaping down at the same scene from a different angle. They were closer to the river, just at the edge of the village.

“This is an awful lot of trouble for our aliens to go to,” Jobs said. “I mean, did they do this with the whole planet? This all extends out to the horizon.” He glanced at Billy Weir. He had formed the suspicion, the hope maybe, that Billy Weir had some profound knowledge he simply couldn’t share with them. Certainly he possessed some sort of incredible power. Unless that had all been a dream. Jobs could no longer be sure. He was exhausted.

“You slept for five-hundred years and you’re tired?” he muttered under his breath.

“I guess we had better see if we can find food down there,” Olga said.

Jobs had opened his mouth to agree when it happened. A beam of brilliant green light, no more than two inches in diameter, blazed from the village. It drew a line at an angle to the ground. It seemed to originate from the small,
crenelated tower at the end of the bridge.

“Laser,” Jobs said. He frowned.

The tower blew apart.

Bricks flew everywhere. The half-dozen peasants closest to the tower were thrown through the air, tumbling, landing in the river, on the roof of a house, smashing into walls.

“What was that?” Violet cried.

With a shocking concussion, far larger than the first, the village exploded upward. It was like a bomb going off. Buildings were flattened. Livestock was tossed carelessly, twirling. The concussion was a hot wind in their faces, an oven blast.

“Look out!” Olga cried.

Twenty feet behind where they stood, a second beam of green light shone straight up out of the ground. The first laser had been followed by two explosions.

“Run!” Jobs yelled.

They bolted, racing away from the beam, racing the only direction open: downhill toward the village. The first, smaller explosion caught them, ruffled their hair, and rang bells in their ears. The second explosion hit Jobs like a mule’s kick in the back. He flew forward, landed on his face, rolled in the sparse grass, rolled down the slope. Violet Blake landed almost on top of him.

Jobs wiped dirt from his eyes and blinked. He was deaf to everything but a roaring sound in his ears. His head throbbed. He felt a sharp pain in his back. All at once a hurricane was blowing. Olga Gonzalez was just standing up and the wind picked her up like she was an empty paper cup. The wind rolled her across the ground, faster and faster toward the ruined village.

Jobs snatched at grass, at rocks, roots, anything, but the wind had him, too. He was sliding backward, clawing, unable to hold on. The wind got beneath him, lifted him up. He somersaulted backward and for a moment was
airborne, flying.

He bellowed and flailed and slammed hard into a ruined brick wall down in the village. Couldn’t breathe, air sucked out of his lungs, grabbing at the bricks but they were coming free, each one he grabbed, falling, slipping. Then, a solid purchase. He hugged the half wall and dug his fingernails into the mortar. He could see right into the
village from here, right into all that was left of it.

He stared in horror as the wind picked up pigs and sheep, wood and stone, men and women, and sucked them all down into a ragged hole in the ground. It was a whirlwind. A tornado. Irresistible. Where was Mo? Where were Violet and Olga and Billy?

He had caught a hallucinatory flash of Mo’Steel running at mad speed, running with the hurricane at his back, propelling him. Then, nothing. Jobs felt his lungs gasping, drawing futilely on thin air. He could not fill his lungs. No air. No air!

He crept up the wall, climbed on battered knees and bloody hands, gasping for breath, up till he could look down in the crater left by the explosion. Already he suspected, already his brain was putting it together. The crater was a hole, fifty feet across, a ragged, gaping gash.

And in the hole, down through the hole in the ground, Jobs saw stars. Black space and the bright pinpoints of stars.

“Not a planet,” Jobs whispered. “A ship!”

quote:

CHAPTER 21

“THAT WAS ENOUGH OF A RUSH.”


Mo’Steel saw his mother lifted by the wind and hurled with shocking force toward the hole. He jumped up to grab her but the wind hit him like a train. He did a Road Runner, milling his legs as fast as he could, but it was the wind that was in charge. His feet barely touched the ground, sufficed only to keep him more or less upright. It was, a corner of his mind thought, a very woolly ride.

He flew-ran down the hill, into the village, unstoppable, unable to offer any resistance. He flashed on Jobs, saw a blur that might have been Violet Blake, blew past, wind rushing in his ears. If he hit anything at this speed he’d crush the last of his natural bones.

All at once the hole was there, right in front of him, right below him, down he went, down into a field of black, dotted with stars. It was a whirlpool, a sink drain, a vacuum hose, sucking him out into space.

Space?

Down and through and all at once Mo’Steel was sucking on nothingness. His skin was freezing cold. He knew he’d be dead in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. He tumbled, weightless, twisted, saw forty, fifty strange, hovering creatures, liquid blue-steel, floating in space below the hole. He turned, unable to control anything, nothing to touch, twirled, and into his field of vision rose an object so massive, so vast it seemed as big as a planet. It was a maze of protrusions, towers, bubbles, clefts, doughnuts, cubes, and pyramids. It extended far beyond his field of vision in every direction. And it was beautiful.

Some surfaces were blazing bright as though filled with the light of a sun shining through green or red or yellow glass. Other parts were mirrored, showing nothing but distorted, twisted reflections of the stars. There were transparencies, opacities, glowing milky translucences. There were long streams of living light that bounced and curved and danced. There were shadows so deep they seemed to swallow light.

It was impossible to take in. He was an ant clinging to the undercarriage of a car, too tiny and insignificant even to be able to imagine the size and shape and purpose of the vast object above him.

Mo’Steel wondered if he was already dead. Wondered if his mind was already gone. Then pain reminded him that he still lived. His frostbitten flesh slammed into something hard and unyielding. He grabbed, reflex taking over. He grabbed and his hands slipped, numb, insensate fingers clawed at a surface that allowed no purchase. But he could wrap his arms around it. He wrapped his arms and held on, with his head swimming, lungs starving, draining the last molecules of oxygen into his heart.

He held on to the creature, the smooth, glossy, liquid-metal creature, as it fired engines within its hind legs and zoomed up toward the ragged hole in the bottom of the ship. Mo’Steel saw the others, a cluster, rising all together with what seemed grim determination, up through the hole into the village, up through the hole in the hill. Farther down the ship, a quarter mile away, a second band of the creatures. More beyond that. At least four, five separate assaults, all taking place at once.

Mo’Steel held on with the last of his strength. Up and up, up through the hole. Up toward a pale-blue, Brueghel sky.
Then they were through and Mo’Steel could feel the warmth, not warm but warmer than empty space. But still no air. Still his lungs seized and his diaphragm convulsed. As if it had belatedly discovered his presence, the creature shook him off. Mo’Steel was ten, fifteen feet above “ground level” when he lost his grip. He fell. He had weight again. He fell back toward space. Back to the hole. Back down/up into the stars.

He reached feebly, woozy, half-blind, trying to grab the lip of the hole. But there was no way, too far, emptiness beneath him. And all at once a square of steel appeared.

Mo’Steel landed hard. His knees crumpled. He fell facedown, slid, jerked the wrong way, confused, and now his legs were dangling out into empty space. Squares. Appearing all around. Ten-by-ten-foot squares, running around the hole, racing in a circle, filling in the gap, appearing out of nowhere, simply appearing. Like dominoes, they
rippled. Coming toward him! He yanked his legs up and a second later rested them on a solid surface.

Steel? Hard, anyway. The hole was closing, healing itself. He was thinking. Yes. Breathing! Air, thin, but there. Thin better than nothing, a lot better. He had to expand his lungs to the max with every intake, gasping like a fish on land, but awareness was returning, oxygen was in his blood once more.

With an audible snap the hole was closed. And now a wall of dirt was appearing, materializing. Mo’Steel was lying in a hole, facedown on steel, and the soil beneath the village was being replaced. It was like a wave rushing toward him, a ten-foot tsunami of dirt.

He got to his feet, ran straight toward the advancing wall, scrambled up, riding the wave of dirt like a surfer. He rose on the swell, windmilling his arms, kicking frantically with his feet. And then, it was over. He was on his knees behind a rough-hewn stable. Two peasant women were doing something with a large copper pot.

He was gasping, sick, stomach convulsing, retching dry heaves, and still so cold his body was shaking like he had malaria. There was blood draining from his ears, blood seeping from his nose and eyes.

“Okay,” Mo’Steel said, “that was enough of a rush. Even for me.”

quote:

CHAPTER 22

“WELL, SOMEWHERE THERE’S A BRIDGE.”

Jobs watched as the blue-black creatures rose up through the hole in the village. Up through the hole in the hill above. Machines or creatures or something in between, it was impossible to tell. They were quadrupeds, four sturdy legs supporting a high-arched body. They reminded him of Halloween cats, backs high. A head was carried forward, like any grazing animal might, but from the sides of the head grew two tentacles. They waved like snakes, like guardians of the face.

They were armored, metallic, blued steel that moved like plastic. Or perhaps the seeming armor was actually the creature. The rear legs fired short bursts, like maneuvering rockets. They flew but not fast, not like missiles or even like jets. They lumbered. Like helicopters perhaps. Clumsy.

Up through the two holes they came, dozens of them. And Jobs thought he saw more in the far distance, behind the Tower of Babel. They rose above the landscape, a blurry nightmare to Jobs’s oxygen-deprived brain. Then, air. A little at first, more. His lungs drew greedily. His head began to clear.

The hole was being filled. Squares of steel were appearing, plate against plate, rimming the hole, healing the scar, shutting out space. The steel plates simply materialized, entire, one after another. Like something out of a cartoon.
Now dirt appeared, eight or ten feet of it, covering the plates. Upon the dirt, right behind its advance edge, the buildings of the Brueghel village were once again taking shape.

The hole was healing. But the quadruped aliens had made it through. They assembled in the air. Jobs counted. Hard to be sure, but he thought there were thirty-six. Thirty or forty, any way. They reminded Jobs of his own people, of the Wakers. They seemed hesitant, hovering, unsure.

“Mo! Miss Blake!” Jobs yelled. The risk seemed acceptable: The aliens were ignoring the peasants that reappeared to populate the village.

“Olga? I mean, Ms. Gonzalez?” Jobs called. No answer. Oh, god, had they all been pulled out into space? What about the others, the main group? What about Edward? He yelled again. No answer. He got to his feet and scanned in every direction.

Then he spotted Mo’Steel rounding a stable and felt a flood of relief. His friend was walking though the reconstituted village, carrying half a dozen pies.

“Mo! Over here!”

Mo’Steel came at a run, pausing only to glance up repeatedly at the hovering armada of armored aliens.

“Is my mom with you?” Mo’Steel demanded.

“I don’t know where she is, Mo. Or Miss Blake, either,” Jobs said.

“This ain’t a planet, Duck,” Mo’Steel said.

“Yeah, I noticed.”

“This is a ship. We’re inside some whompin’ big ship.”

“Yeah. And those guys up there just boarded it forcibly.” He looked closely at his friend.

He and Mo’Steel watched the aliens.

“I was outside, ’migo. Caught a ride back inside with one of those Blue Meanies. You should see this ship, Jobs. God, I hope my mom’s okay.”

The more Jobs watched, the more he became convinced that the Blue Meanies were space suits of a sort, small, individualized spacecraft almost. It was in the way they moved: not with the ease of a biological creature or with the speed and assurance of a sophisticated robot. They were clumsy, uncertain. Creatures within machines.

The hole was completely repaired. The village was back. The wall Jobs was on rebuilt itself, like a video on rewind. Bricks appeared, piled one atop another. He jumped to the ground and winced at the pain in his back.

Mo’Steel yelled, “Mom! Mom! Can you hear me?”

There came an answer. “Over here. In the barn.”

They found her with Violet Blake and Billy, all in the darkness of what might have been a barn but for the absence of animals, or even animal smells.

“Everyone okay?” Jobs asked.

“What about those creatures out there?” Olga asked, ignoring Jobs’s query and hugging her son.

“I don’t know,” Jobs said. “They don’t seem to care about us.”

“This is not a planet,” Violet Blake said. “I was looking at space out there. Stars. We’re in space.”

“Seems like,” Jobs said. He was distracted. Of course it was a ship, not a planet. Why hadn’t he figured it out before? That’s why the shuttle showed no reentry scarring. That’s why the solar sails hadn’t burned away. They hadn’t landed, they’d been picked up by a ship that could simply match velocity. It was the scale that had thrown him off. It was impossible to conceive of a ship vast enough to contain a tenth of what they’d already seen.

“Hey, you can eat these,” Mo’Steel announced. He held out a pie for Jobs.

“What’s it taste like?”

“Like you care? You live on jerky and chips. Tastes like . . . I don’t know, maybe some kind of meat.”

Jobs hesitated, but there was no point resisting. He had to eat. He took a tentative bite.

“Tastes like . . . I don’t know. Like chicken?”

“That’s original,” Violet said. She took a pie for herself. “It does taste like chicken. Maybe it is.”

Jobs edged back to the door and peeked outside. He expected to see the aliens still hovering. They were, but now they had formed up into a V. Like geese heading south.

“They look like they’re getting ready to leave,” Mo’Steel observed.

“Hard to tell. They aren’t exactly human.”

The “V” formation hovered and rotated slowly counterclockwise. Then, with sudden,shockingly smooth speed, they jerked back clockwise. They fired their jets and the entire formation shot ahead. The lead alien ran smack into a steel plate that appeared in the air before him. Jobs could hear the ringing of metal on metal. The alien crumpled and fell.

They were all moving now and as each advanced, a steel square appeared to block him. But now the clumsy moves were abandoned. The aliens shot forward and up and around, dodging, zooming, accelerating, and decelerating. Some dropped down to just above ground level and blew between buildings, smacking carelessly into peasants.

“It was a ruse!” Jobs said. “They were playing dead! Hiding their speed. They were hiding their capabilities, playing lame.”

It was a dogfight, a melee. The plates materialized, floating steel walls. The Blue Meanies evaded them. The plates caught many. Many crumpled and fell to the ground. But others escaped.

As Jobs and the others watched, a dozen or more of the blue-steel space suits burned jets and disappeared beyond the Tower of Babel.

“I wonder where they’re going?” Olga mused.

“To the bridge,” Jobs said.

“The what? What bridge?”

Jobs watched them disappear from sight. Their flight was no longer obstructed. The defenses of the ship had either been exhausted, or the ship had simply decided to let the Blue Meanies pass.

“This is a ship,” Jobs said. “We didn’t land, we were picked up. We were picked up, we were attacked, eight of us were kidnapped. We’re separated from the others. Now this. Well, somewhere there’s a bridge, or the equivalent.” He nodded as if to himself, accepting his own analysis. “Someone or something flies this ship. Someone or something’s got an agenda. Someone or something is in charge. That’s where those Blue Meanies are going. And I’ll tell you what else: It’s where we better be going, too.”

It was a long speech for Jobs and he felt a little embarrassed. He was going to ask if anyone else had a different opinion, but Mo’Steel slapped him on the back and grinned.

“Sounds good, Duck. To the bridge, so my boy here can figure it all out. Let’s travel.”

Coca Koala posted:

I’m so so confused.

Everworld had a bunch of mysteries and questions, but all within a framework that was relatively understandable. I didn’t grow up in Chicago in the early 2000s or whenever, but I can understand approximately what it was like and the forces at play. Everworld doesn’t exist, but I was familiar with the building blocks it was constructed with and could imagine, you know, what happens if the Vikings run into the Aztecs? Hell, i’m pretty sure there’s a show on TLC or the History channel about exactly that question, you know?

I have very little framework to understand what’s happening in Remnants, or to try and figure out what it means and where it’s going. I have no context to try and understand what’s going on with Billy, except that 500 years with no external stimulation is gonna drive somebody batty. I have no idea how to reason about the baby, or the worms, or the paintings brought to life. It’s more challenging to read these chapters just because it can be harder for me to tie events together into a narrative with causes and effects, so my brain ends up skimming over things.

That’s not to say it’s bad - I’m just struggling with it a bit and i might go back and reread these books again when we’re further in and I can put them in a larger context.

quote:

THEM

REMNANTS #3


CHAPTER 1

“HOW DOES BUGS BUNNY DO HALF THE STUFF HE DOES?”

They named the pony Eeyore.

He was a skanky-looking beast, shaggy and slumped over and hangdog. He was harnessed to a wagon that might fall apart at any moment. The big solid wheels creaked and wobbled. Neither pony nor cart would ever break three miles an hour. But they had managed to load the comatose Billy Weir into the back of the wagon.

They had food in the form of pies. Not fruit pies or cream pies, but meat pies, and the exact nature of the meat was anyone’s guess. But it was food and they were hungry. They also had water. The water was in crockery jars that were no doubt supposed to contain mead or ale, but what did the ship know about any of that?

Jobs, Mo’Steel, Olga Gonzalez, who was Mo’Steel’s mother, Violet Blake, who liked to be called Miss Blake, and Billy Weir, who managed to be entirely catatonic and then, at unpredictable times, frighteningly powerful, were the most normal creatures in view. There were other humans all around, but not humans as they were in reality, humans as they had been imagined by a long-long-dead painter named Brueghel.

Pieter Brueghel the Elder had painted at about the same time that Nostradamus had written his prophecies, in the mid-1550s and early 1560s. That was, give or take, four-hundred-fifty years earlier than Jobs had been born, and not quite a thousand years earlier than the present moment. Jobs was fourteen years old. Or five hundred and fourteen years old, depending on your perspective.

The Dutch painter could not have foreseen that his work would be inscribed on data disks that would find their way aboard a space shuttle called the Mayflower and from there end up being downloaded into an alien spaceship so vast it had at first seemed to be a planet. Jobs and his companions were walking through a live-action version of an old painting. A live-action, 3-D, solid-to-the-touch, undeniably real version created by who or whatever was in charge of the alien ship.

“Why?” That was the question. And also “how?”

The improbable set of circumstances had begun with the destruction of Earth by an asteroid. Jobs and Mo’Steel had seen the impact from space. Earth was a watermelon dropped from the third floor. When last seen, Earth had been smacked into three big, irregular chunks flying apart in stately slo-mo.

But before that cosmic annihilation, humans had tried a desperate, last-minute, utterly doomed effort to save some tiny remnant of Homo sapiens. They had hauled a nearly antique shuttle out of storage, fitted it out with experimental solar sails and even more experimental hibernation equipment, and loaded up the so-called Mayflower Project with eighty humans chosen, according to time-honored ritual, from among those who had ties to, or influence over, NASA.

The Mayflower had no possibility of succeeding and indeed no one had expected it to. It had no destination, no goal. It had merely been fired into space, fired away from Earth. And despite this it had been found far, far beyond the orbit of Neptune, out in cold empty space where good old Sol, Earth’s sun, was just another twinkly star.

Found, recovered, picked up by the ship, by whoever or whatever ran the ship. Those of the Eighty who had survived the moldy death called “cheesing,” and death by mutated carnivorous worm, and death by micrometeorite, and death by mummification, had revived to find themselves in an environment created out of humanity’s own creative patrimony. The ship had downloaded the Mayflower’s data and created an environment based on human art.

It must have seemed like a good idea to the ship. But at the moment, Jobs and his friends were walking beside a rickety pony-drawn cart through a gloomy landscape dominated by what was, according to Miss Blake, the Tower of Babel. Brueghel’s vision of the Tower of Babel, at least.

It looked a bit like a wedding cake. A wedding cake constructed of crumbling sports arenas piled one atop the other. A wedding cake done in the colors of old parchment and iced tea stains. It was circular and there were layers, each one smaller in diameter than the one below. If construction had continued indefinitely it might have, in time, reached a sharp point. But construction had stopped at seven layers. It was a gigantic spiral ramp, and if construction had
been sensibly completed it would have been possible to walk around and around the building and ascend to the top. But the Tower of Babel was a mess, with massive, tumbled-stone spurs defacing one side and blocking the rampway on at least three levels.

And toward the top of the tower it seemed the builders had changed their minds, cut away the outer layers, and begun construction on a tower-atop-a-tower, a sort of miniaturized, modest version of the tower rising from the tumbled wreckage of the original building. This mini-tower had the look of a castle’s keep, or perhaps a sort of grandiose penthouse.

Each layer was penetrated by high-arched doors and windows, and the mini-tower likewise. The doors on lower levels were tall enough to allow a giraffe to walk through without ducking. Doors higher up were of more human dimensions. The Tower of Babel fronted a harbor on one side. It had a low stone quay. The remaining three hundred degrees of arc was on land and loomed huge above a squalid, medieval city.

It was this city that Jobs was walking through, leading the pony. From this distance the tower was so tall, so vast in extent, so massively heavy that it seemed impossible that the ground could support it.

“Big,” Mo’Steel remarked.

“I wonder how tall? If we had a stick, we could cut it to the length of my arm and figure it out,” Jobs said. “All you have to do is hold the stick vertically and move back or closer till it appears to equal the height of the building. Then you just pace off —”

“Or we could just agree that it’s really big,” Violet Blake said.

Jobs knew her finger was bothering her. Her missing finger. The empty space where her tenth finger would have been. She unwound the bandage and Jobs looked away, squeamish. The wound was still bleeding; it might go on bleeding forever. It was down to a slow seep now, a red ooze from beneath the cauterized crust and around the scab. It wasn’t gushing at least. He winced just thinking about it.

“Strange how it doesn’t just hurt at the knuckle where it was lopped off,” Violet said through gritted teeth. “It hurts at the tip. I mean, the former tip. The no-longer-there tip.”

“Phantom pain,” Olga Gonzalez said sympathetically.

“You should change that bandage,” Mo’Steel said. He left the road and walked up to a peasant woman who was carrying a heavy bucket. “Excuse me, ma’am, I need your scarf.”

Mo’Steel unwound the white cloth from the woman’s head. The woman said nothing. In fact, she never slowed or stopped or responded. Beneath the scarf was blank space, no hair, no head, just emptiness. A second later a new scarf appeared, wrapped just like the one Mo’Steel had taken.

Mo’Steel handed the scarf to Violet. “Would you like me to help you with that?”

“No. No, thank you,” she answered.

Mo’Steel caught up with Jobs. “I’d feel bad about taking stuff from these people, but they don’t seem to mind.”

“I don’t think they mind anything,” Jobs said. “I don’t think they have minds. They’re not real in the usual ways. They may not even be anatomically human, let alone have functioning wills.”

Mo’Steel shrugged. “Maybe not.”

“It never hurts to be polite,” Olga, Mo’Steel’s mother, opined.

“I was raised right,” Mo’Steel said with a wink for Jobs and a sincere smile for his mother.

“The system conserves energy,” Jobs said thoughtfully. “That’s why when you take the scarf away there’s nothing underneath. The system doesn’t need to create matter to fill in beneath the scarf; it saves energy, it just does what it has to do. I’d bet some of these people don’t weigh more than twenty pounds or so. You could pick them up and carry them. The system probably doesn’t fill them in.”

“They’re three-dimensional illustrations,” Miss Blake said.

Olga looked skeptical. “So how is it Eeyore can pull Billy? He shouldn’t be strong enough if he’s hollow.”

“The strength doesn’t come from muscles. It comes from the matter-manipulation system directly,” Jobs said. He liked this sort of puzzle. It gave him a sense of satisfaction being able to construct a theory and defend it.

“They’re like cartoons,” Mo’Steel said. “Because they’re drawings they can do stuff that doesn’t make sense. I mean, how does Bugs Bunny do half the stuff he does?”

Jobs gave his friend a dirty look, which Mo’Steel reflected back as a gapped grin. Jobs knew when he was being teased.

“Why exactly are we heading for the tower?” Miss Blake demanded.

“It’s tall. We climb it, maybe we’ll be able to get the lay of the land,” Jobs said. “Besides, the others will head for it. Maybe we can hook up with them.”

“Are you sure you want to?” Violet muttered.

Violet’s mother, Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake, had taken charge of the Remnants. She was a dynamic, impressive woman. It had not escaped Jobs’s notice that mother and daughter didn’t get along at all.

“My brother’s with them,” Jobs pointed out. “Besides, strength in numbers and all that.”

“Who do you think lives in the tower?” Olga wondered.

“More Cartoons,” Jobs said with a shrug.

“Maybe they have a cartoon bath,” Violet said wistfully. “A hot bath. With soap. And shampoo.”

They turned a corner and suddenly there was no more town between them and the base of the tower. Jobs hauled back on Eeyore’s bridle. They stood for a moment staring up at the structure, imposing and impossible and threatening.

“What was the story of the Tower of Babel? Does anyone know? It’s a Bible thing, right?” Jobs asked.

Mo’Steel shook his head pityingly. “You are such a heathen, Duck. The people made a tower to reach all the way up to heaven. God didn’t like their attitude, getting above themselves and all. So he turned them against one another by making them speak all different languages. That way they couldn’t cooperate and make any more towers to heaven.”

Jobs made a face. He was on the verge of saying that it was a stupid story. But Mo’Steel would be offended.

“An allegory of human pride,” Miss Violet Blake said. “A pretty good allegory if you wish to instruct people in humility.”

“But not as good as an asteroid,” Jobs said dryly.

quote:

CHAPTER 2

“YOU’RE REALLY JUMPY, YOU KNOW THAT?”

Yago liked the tower. No one else seemed to, but he did. One thing was for sure: If you wanted to be king you needed a castle. And this tower was the mother of all castles. It totally dominated the landscape, the biggest thing around by a factor of ten thousand percent or so.

The upper floors had possibilities, definitely. He could see setting up a throne room there. He would have the whole mini-tower to himself. All the lower floors would be for various servants, functionaries, soldiers, and so on. Okay, it was a daydream, but what empire ever started without some crazy dream?

“I think we should see if we can make it a center of operations,” Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake said, hands on hips. “Depending on whether it’s already inhabited. I mean, it’s pretty impressive, isn’t it?”

Tamara Hoyle was standing stolidly with her creepy baby cantilevered out on one hip. Such a chubby baby, such a hard, bony, bodybuilder mother. They fascinated Yago. Why didn’t the baby ever eat? How could it seem to see with those empty craters where its eyes had been? And surely it was too big to be natural. He was no expert on babies, but that was one freak of a baby. He edged away from Tamara and the baby, eased around to the other side of Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake. For the moment Wylson seemed to be running things. Which was fine with Yago: He would play the loyal number two for now.

“I think it would be perfect,” Yago said. “I mean, look, the only way up is by following the spiral pathway, right? So couldn’t you defend it with just a few people?”

The baby made a giggling sound and Tamara Hoyle snorted. “If we had five hundred troops, yes, you could hold it. But altitude and interior lines only go so far. How do you even know if someone is climbing the far side of the thing? It would take a hundred men just to monitor the perimeter.”

“We need to be someplace,” Wylson countered. “We need a corporate headquarters. A base of operations. I’d far rather be up there than down here. If we can find a way to get some kind of radio system going, well, that’s the highest point.”

Yago looked away to hide his laugh. Radio? Corporate headquarters? Where did Wylson think she was? “Good thinking, boss.”

The baby looked away, bored, and Tamara shrugged, indifferent.

Yago suppressed a shudder. He was right: In the end it would be the freaks against the normals. Tamara and the baby were the definition of freak. Them and Billy Weir, wherever he was, and of course, 2Face. He searched for and found her over by her father, Shy Hwang. Shy Hwang had a permanent mope glued onto his face, as though the death of his wife was a unique tragedy beside which the death of the entire human race paled to irrelevance. 2Face
didn’t seem as depressed, although who could tell with that half-melted face of hers? Hard to read her, though Yago had the definite impression that 2Face was a tough chick. Probably hot, too, back before her face was blowtorched. Half a nice face.

And she’d blown him off, that’s what stuck. He’d tried to recruit her, back in the world, back in the before, he’d offered her the chance to be his first fan. He, Yago, universally hailed by every teen fanzine as the best-looking guy in America. He’d been Teen People’s Hunk of the Year two years in a row, unprecedented! Half the kids in the country had copied his spring-green hair and golden, cat’s-DNA eyes.

And Candle Face had chilled him.

Yago bit his lip and tried to move past it. It was five hundred years ago, after all, and it wasn’t like it mattered. On the other hand, no one ever slammed Yago. He had dated Leonessa. He had dated Pet Proffer. Celebrities. Models.
Chilled by a freak? Yago?

He sensed D-Caf sidling up beside him. D-Caf was a natural toady, a born bootlicker. Plus he had not an ally in the place. He was a killer, he was, the little twitch. That didn’t bother Yago. Much. A leader used the human material he was given.

“Are we going up there?” D-Caf asked.

“What do you care?” Yago asked.

D-Caf shrugged. “I was just wondering. It’s kind of creepy, isn’t it? I mean, I don’t know, it’s just creepy. Isn’t there somewhere else we can go?”

“You’re really jumpy, you know that?” Yago said. D-Caf grinned and ducked his head. “I guess I am.”

“Here’s what you do: Don’t worry about where we go. Just do what I tell you.”

D-Caf frowned and looked uncertain.

Yago drew him closer, leaning in for a false confidentiality. “Your job is to watch 2Face. See, I think maybe she’s a problem. So you keep an eye on her, and you tell me if she does anything.”

“Like what?”

“Just keep an eye on her, okay, Twitch?”

D-Caf nodded. Yago slapped him on the back. “Good deal. Now get lost.”

Wylson said, “Yago, tell everyone we’re going.”

“Everyone” consisted of Wylson and Yago as leaders; 2Face and her father, Shy Hwang, and her temporary ward, Edward, as likely enemies; Tamara and the baby, just out-and-out freaks; D-Caf, who was already halfway coopted; and then some unknowns: a kid named Roger Dodger who couldn’t be much over ten, a kind of tough-looking chick named Tate, and a sixteen-year-old beast of a guy named Anamull, who looked like he might be of some use as an enforcer; finally, the two other adults, Daniel Burroway, who was some kind of scientist, and T.R., who was a shrink. Of the two, Burroway might be trouble someday, but T.R. was a worm.

Yago made a mental note: Work on Anamull. Muscle was always helpful. As Anamull was demonstrating. He had cornered one of the automaton people, one of the fake creatures who inhabited this weird artscape, and was busy stealing the man’s dagger.

Not a bad idea, Yago thought. They should acquire whatever weapons they could, while they could. Who knew what was up in that tower?

“Anamull,” Yago yelled. “As soon as you get that knife, let’s go. Tate? Shy? Let’s go, boys and girls.”

“Where are we going?” Tate demanded.

Yago jerked a thumb. “Up there. Saddle up or be left behind. Where’s that kid, Roger?”

Just then he spotted Roger Dodger. The kid was a block away, down the disjointed street. He was running and yelling. Yago assumed he’d gotten into some trouble with one of the automatons. Which was strange, because the “locals” never objected to anything you did. They weren’t really humans. Yago strained to hear what Roger was shouting.

“Riders!” Tate translated. “He says Riders are coming!”

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CHAPTER 3

“I’M THE PRESIDENT’S SON, YOU KNOW.”


Yago froze. What? Here?

“Wylson!” he cried. “Riders! Riders!”

That got everyone moving. They formed into a mass and the mass started stampeding. Through the narrow, pig-dropping-dotted streets, tripping over uneven cobblestones, careening off indifferent locals. They ran, with Wylson, like any good leader, out in front. Yago had to admire the fact that her muscles, acquired during daily workouts with a personal trainer, had survived five centuries of hibernation. She was strong. Yago glanced back over his shoulder but he couldn’t see anything. At least nothing but Roger Dodger, steadily gaining.

A cart pulled out of a side alley. Piled high with hay, a moving haystack. Yago jerked left and jumped the yoke. He caught his foot and went sprawling. Elbows on cobblestones and a sharp jolt of pain. Then he was up, scrambling, Roger Dodger even with him now. He was falling behind! He was in the rear! They were going to leave him for the Riders. No way, no way he couldn’t outrun Shy Hwang, who was a wheezy chub.

Then it occurred to Yago: He’d taken a wrong turn. He’d lost them! He couldn’t see anyone but Roger Dodger.

“Hey, kid! Hey, kid!” he yelled. No answer, no look. The kid was a rabbit.

Had to head for the tower, no other way, no other way, but where was the tower? Ahead? Left? To the right? How had he gotten so turned around? Yago bolted down an alley, even filthier than the street, even more narrow, with the
buildings leaning drunkenly out till their upper stories almost touched. A sudden, looming horror, straight ahead.
Rider!

Coming straight down the street. He was atop his surfboard, shifting his weight minutely to keep the antigravity board from striking the walls on either side. Yago took in the bifurcated legs, the cockroach-shell upper body, and most of all the two heads, fraternal not identical twins, one little more than a mouth on a stump, and the other
dominated by six spider eyes. He squeezed his legs together to keep from wetting himself, spun, and ran.

The Rider couldn’t move at top speed in the alley, but he could still outrun Yago. Yago was screaming as he ran and the Rider let loose with his horrifying, metal-on-metal shriek. Yago almost collapsed right then, but the memory of Errol’s disconnected head kept him running.

Where were the others? Where was that kid? Let the Rider take the kid! Why didn’t the alien eat the automatons? How did he know that Yago was food and the locals weren’t? Glance. Ten feet!

Slam. Into one of the locals, tumble, fall, roll, and look up as the Rider skimmed overhead, unable to stop in time. The Rider braked, spun his board, eyeballed Yago with his larger faceted eyes, grinned with his vicious mouth.
Yago whimpered, rolled, kicked himself up, stumbled and fell, up again, crying, no no no no.

A side alley. Even more narrow. Narrow enough?

Yago lurched, tripped. The Rider turned, stopped, couldn’t go any closer. Yago was on his butt, kicking, sliding backward away from the Rider. The alley was too narrow! Too narrow for the Rider’s board.

“Yeah!” Yago yelled triumphantly.

Then the Rider jumped down off his board.

The Rider bounded toward Yago, a weird stride, two feet on either side, or else two legs on either side, hard to define which. The Rider bounded and stopped, gathered strength, bounded again.

Yago was already running but he was encouraged that at least the Riders weren’t all that fast on foot. The Rider hesitated with each jump. A ten-foot leap, a five-second pause, a ten-foot leap, five-second pause. The distance between Yago and the Rider kept going from fifteen feet to five feet and back. Yago wasn’t gaining but he wasn’t losing ground, either.

He staggered into a woman carrying a large clay pot on her head. The pot went flying, smashed to bits. Yago kept running, out into an open space. Not quite a square, but at least a place where a maze of streets joined from all angles. Which way? The tower! He could see it.

The Rider had stopped. Maybe he was worn out. Then Yago spotted the hoverboard. It was flying just above the rooftops and now swooped down to rejoin its master.

“No fair!” Yago yelled.

He ran for a doorway, open for a man who was exiting. He shoved past the automaton and stopped dead. There was nothing inside the building. Just open space. The building was a shell.

Yago blinked.

Suddenly the building had an inside. It had an inside filled with soft, golden candlelight, ornate, plush furniture, and a woman reclining on a brocaded couch. A painting in 3-D. It even looked familiar.

“What?” Yago wondered.

The ship was improvising. The ship had seen him go into the building, and, having no obvious interior scene to construct, it had grabbed one from some other file.

“Excuse me,” Yago said to the indifferent, unreal woman. He ran up the stairs. Up another floor. Another interior, gloomy this time, but with a huge window at one end of the room. The window was open. Yago crept to the window, trembling, jittery, wanting to throw up but too scared of the noise it would make.

He peered out at the street below. Left. Right. No Rider.

Then, coming down the street, Wylson Lefkowitz-Blake and the rest of the bunch.

“Hey!” Yago yelled. “Hey, I’m up here!”

Wylson frowned. “What are you doing up there?”

“I was chased here by a Rider.”

“We assumed he’d gotten you,” Wylson said without revealing any particular concern.

“No, I’m still alive,” Yago snapped.

“Then you’d better come down. The Riders must still be around. We need to get to the tower.”

“Yeah, and it sure is good to know you survived, Yago,” Yago said, but under his breath. “Thank god you made it, Yago.”

The Wylson woman just didn’t get it: He was important. Yago was not one of the herd. He was important. He glanced at the reclining woman on the couch as he passed by.

“I’m the president’s son, you know.” He pointed at himself. “Yago. That’s me.”

quote:

CHAPTER 4

“I HATE THIS PLACE.”


Jobs had seen no Riders. At one point he’d been sure he heard someone yell, “No fair!” which seemed like an unlikely thing to come from the mouth of one of the automatons — or Cartoons as Mo’Steel called them. He no longer entirely trusted his senses. They had reached the base of the tower and found steep walls and no easy way up. But there was the strange stone abutment that ran the height of three levels. It looked as if the tower had been carved from living rock and this jagged outcropping was all that was left of what had to have been a mountain.

It was steep, a hard climb, especially now that they’d had to say good-bye to Eeyore and transfer Billy back to his stretcher. The climb would have been impossible but for the fact that Mo’Steel was quite strong and hauled Billy up almost single-handedly over the roughest parts.

It was perhaps a two-hundred- or two-hundred-and-fifty-foot climb and in places was like crawling up a cliff. At the top Mo’Steel sweated and grinned and gave Jobs a last yank up and over.

“That was good,” Mo’Steel said, wiping his brow. “Drain the pores, strain some muscle, pop some veins. Burning the C’s.”

Jobs looked at Billy. His gaunt, pale face showed nothing new. The shadowed eyes continued to stare. Olga flopped down, tired. Violet Blake took a moment to find a tumbled rock to sit on. Her skirt was frayed at the hem. Her frilled sleeves were stained with blood and sweat.

All in all, Jobs thought, the whole ultrafeminine “Jane” look really didn’t work for rock climbing. Besides, she was a very pretty girl, especially now that she’d given up on keeping her long, sandy hair tied up. It looked better down over her shoulders.

Violet Blake saw his smug look. She carefully folded her hands in her lap and favored him with a defiant smile. Jobs looked down, not wanting his admiring grin to be misinterpreted as condescension. Then he scanned the horizon. He was looking back over the direction from which they’d come. At the far range of his vision he saw the sight that stabbed at his heart: the shuttle, a white stiletto, far away now. He looked long, storing up the image for later. It was worth a poem. Someday, somewhere, maybe.

“Should have stayed with the shuttle,” he muttered. “It was home.”

Mo’Steel overheard and slapped him on the back. “Don’t sweat it, Duck. We’ll make a new home.”

Jobs didn’t want to be jollied out of his mood. He was tired and he wanted for the moment just to savor the melancholy. There was nothing wrong with sadness. Sadness was a good emotion. It was a tribute to all that had been lost: to family, to friends, to the billions of people, long dead now, who were only family in the sense that they shared human DNA.

A planet destroyed, a million species obliterated, the human race reduced to these Remnants, lost, that was worth some sadness.

“It’s been five hundred years,” Jobs whispered.

“Not to us,” Miss Blake said. “To us it was only days ago.”

“Hey, look,” Olga said. She stood up and pointed. “It’s the others.”

They could be clearly seen, a gaggle of people in colors too bright and with too many blond heads to be Brueghel Cartoons. They were at the edge of the town below, and they were running toward the tower.

“Riders!” Mo’Steel yelled and jumped to his feet.

Three of the rust-red aliens were pursuing. Two more were coming in from an angle, racing to cut them off.

“We have to help them,” Miss Blake said.

“It took us an hour to climb up here,” Olga said. “It would take almost as long to get back down, and then we’d have to traverse over to them.”

The four of them stood at the edge of the drop, staring, eyes bulging, straining as if straining would slow the Riders down or lend speed to the rest of the group. One of the fugitives was smaller, slight, and moved with the slight ungainliness of a child. The wispy, almost translucent blond hair could be clearly seen.

“I see Edward,” Jobs said grimly.

The running, panic-stricken crowd was hidden from view by the tower itself. Four sighs, four worried looks.

“Maybe they can find a place to hide,” Violet said.

Jobs nodded, silent. He was sick with worry. His parents were gone. He was all Edward had in the world. His little brother was his responsibility now, and Jobs wasn’t down there but up here. He should have tried harder to find the others and get back together. Should have done something. He squeezed his eyes shut tight trying to keep out the image of Edward being taken, killed by the Riders.

“I hate this place,” Violet said with sudden passion. “Why is it this way? Why go to all the trouble of creating these environments and then let those alien murderers run rampant? Is this stupid place trying to save us or kill us?”

Jobs shook his head. “Maybe neither.” He rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Maybe the ship isn’t all that in control. Look at how the Blue Meanies got in. How can whoever or whatever is running this ship have all this power and then be unable to stop the Blue Meanies?”

“You always say whoever or whatever, Jobs,” Olga said. “You know something we don’t?”

“No.” He was about to add that he had a feeling, an instinct. But he had nothing to go on. And in any case, it was too easy to talk about abstractions. His brother was down there somewhere, without a mother or a father or a soul in the world to help him, down there facing the ruthless, murdering savages called Riders. That’s what he should be thinking about.

He glared at Billy. “Can’t you do something? I know you can hear me. We know you’re not dead, Billy. We saw you floating around in the air and trying to help your dad when you had to, when he was screaming — why can’t you do that now?”

No response, not even a flicker.

“I hate this place,” Violet repeated savagely.

Jobs wanted to agree. This place was probably killing his brother, right now, right this second. But he didn’t hate it. He couldn’t. Not till he knew for sure what it was.

quote:

CHAPTER 5

“EVERYTHING DIES, HUMAN.”


“Get in! Get in! Get in!” Wylson yelled.

They got in. They ran like a herd of gazelles with a lion hot on the trail. Into the dark-on-dark archway, into the tower.
No door, Wylson thought. No way to block the Riders. Was everyone in? Had everyone made it? 2Face, Shy, Burroway, T.R., Roger Dodger. Who else? No time to worry.

A glance around. Where were they? A vaulted chamber, nothing around but space, an echoing space like a gothic cathedral, high-arched space. Keep them running, that was all.

“Keep moving, keep moving,” she shouted. Her voice was shrill, she hated that, it was the fear. They kept running, but where? A Rider appeared, a shadow in the archway.

“Stairs!” someone yelled.

“Go!” Wylson cried.

The Rider was moving cautiously, unsure of himself in this interior environment. The hoverboard inched forward. What Wylson thought of as the creature’s “spider head” craned, back and forth, upward. The alien almost seemed to cringe. Doesn’t like it, Wylson thought. Doesn’t like being enclosed. Or maybe it’s the dark. A second Rider joined the first.

The people were on the stairs now, narrow, hacked from stone, a sheer drop if you strayed, no handrail. Someone tripped and those behind plowed into and over him. It was the kid, Edward. People were always bumping into him, clumsy brat.

2Face snatched at the kid’s collar and yanked him after her. Up and up and Wylson glanced back to see that three Riders had entered the chamber, huddling together, uncertain. Then, one of them hefted a spear and threw it with shocking speed. It missed T.R.’s head by a whisker and jammed hard into the stone wall.

Wylson reached the spot and tried to yank the spear out. She didn’t have the strength. Tamara Hoyle grabbed the shaft and pulled. It came free. The baby chuckled and Tamara handed the spear to Wylson with a mocking little bow.

Wylson nodded and took the steps two at a time, holding the spear high like a prize. When she glanced back she saw the three Riders apparently still undecided. Then she noticed Tamara. The Marine sergeant was standing, facing the Riders, the baby on one hip, a fist propped on the other.

“Tamara! Don’t be stupid!” Wylson yelled.

Tamara showed no sign of having heard her. The three aliens were now focused entirely on the woman and child. One hefted a spear, hesitated. Tamara made a little gesture with her free hand. Bring it on. The alien snarled and threw. Tamara moved with liquid grace, dodged, and snatched the spear out of the air.

The Riders gave her a cold look. A mean look, with one head staring and the other gnashing its razor teeth. One of the Riders urged his hoverboard forward. It flowed easily up the first dozen stairs, but then it slowed and seemed to be straining to keep climbing.

Tamara Hoyle waited, confident. She sat the baby down on a stair. It was the first time Wylson had ever seen them separated.

“What are you doing? They’ll kill you!” Wylson shouted.

But Tamara was indifferent. She kept going toward the Rider, taking the steps with feline grace, with a feline’s air of power-within-grace. The Rider let loose its glass-shattering shriek. Tamara replied with a feral laugh. Sitting on
the edge of its stone step the baby clapped its hands.

Tamara was now almost face-to-face with the alien. The hoverboard quivered, unable to climb farther. In a rush, the alien leaped onto the stairs. It swung a bladed weapon like a scimitar. Tamara caught the blow with her spear, twisted the spear, threw the Rider off-balance, and stabbed the spear into one if its heads.

The alien shrieked again but in a very different tone.

Tamara pulled back, spun her entire body, and slapped the alien’s other head with the butt of the spear. With blinding speed she jabbed the butt into one of the larger fly eyes. The Rider swung his scimitar again, but Tamara easily ducked the blow and buried the point of her spear in the Rider’s chest, in a narrow gap between halves of its beetle armor.

The Rider staggered, fell back onto its hoverboard. The hoverboard clattered down the stairs, as lifeless as the Rider. Tamara ignored her kill and stared instead at the two remaining Riders. To Wylson’s amazement, the two aliens executed what could only be a salute, a sort of half-genuflection in the direction of the Marine sergeant.

No, not to Tamara. They were bowing to the baby.

One of the Riders turned and flew away. The other stayed behind, waiting, not trying to ascend the stairs. But not giving way, either. Tamara retrieved the baby and came up the stairs, spear shouldered, unconcerned by the
purple blood oozing down its length.

“You killed it,” Wylson said stupidly.

“Did you think they were immortal?” Tamara said. “Everything dies, human.”