Silver inverted fronti.., p.21
Silver - Inverted Frontier, Book 2, page 21
“How can there be?” Jubilee asked. “Between the explosion and the silver, surely it’s all gone. Everything. The swarm. Fortuna. The dome.”
Urban nodded. He felt empty—hollow and numb at the loss of his ghost and of Fortuna’s library. The span of his mind had been diminished, the reach of his senses truncated. “I don’t think anything could have survived the blast,” he conceded.
He wanted to be angry with himself for wiping it all out, and for making that choice unilaterally, without even a warning. But given the circumstances he had to agree that he—his ghost—had made the right decision. He’d lost Fortuna, but maybe he had won some time, and time was needed to win the war.
He continued to monitor the camera feed, alert for any sign of emergent life. He was conscious of people moving around him, quiet words exchanged.
Sunrise sent rays of light against the Cenotaph’s western wall, dissolving the veins of silver there or maybe driving them underground. A back-scatter of light chased away the silver from the Cenotaph’s floor, exposing the gritty hardpan. As soon as the way was clear, the surviving scout-bot set off, cartwheeling across the crater floor.
FOURTH
Your consciousness fled away through a thousand channels of silver, scattering across the cognitive network residing within the living crust of your world. You withdrew from the trap only just in time. Another second, and all the billions of seconds spent to engineer your return would have been for nothing. One precious second between disaster and victory—but the victory is yours after all.
You survived the shockwave with only a few snapped crosslinks in your expanding mind, a passing disorientation. You listen to the fading reverberations and recall another aphorism: No loose ends.
The victory is yours, but Urban was no fool. You know he would never have trusted his existence to the single locus of the grounded outrider. No, he would have replicated. Somewhere, an avatar. But like all else in the world it will be consumed when you re-stage the creation.
You continue the slow expansion of your consciousness through the silver’s branching veins. Here and there, you encounter her voice: Never that hell again.
Only a memory, you think, and memory is fluid. The silver is fluid memory, but it is also intention.
Lezuri, Lezuri, she cautions you. Never that hell again.
A nagging echo that you ignore. Her objection can mean nothing now. It is time, your time, time to begin again, to re-stage the creation—and you will make your beginning here, in this crater, where her cognitive bones still lie. Let her witness, as you return the world to the unordered state it held that first day when you said to her, Now, bring forth life.
She did so, though as a kind of pastoral art, a vision of peaceful, gentle life. Nothing as you intended. No mythological monsters haunted her mountains, dinosaurs did not roam the plains, the ocean harbored vast schools of fishes and pods of whales but no diabolical sea creatures. The structure of land and sea worked against the generation of planet-scrubbing storms. Mutagenic plagues did not sift out of the atmosphere, nor did phantasmic alien beings arise from the silver’s creative force. She engineered the world to be a paradise, not a crucible, and she laughed at your objections.
She said, In all of human history, Lezuri, the greatest threats our people faced have always come from one another.
Your answer: That has not changed.
And that is why you meant for this world to be an arena, a stage for ruthless competition, your people contending against a hostile world—and against one another—so that from life to life they might learn, level up, gain abilities, and grow into the formidable allies you need to defend your system and to expand your will outward, across the stars.
She is gone now. These faint echoes of her objections cannot matter anymore. You have won the right to remake the world as you intended it to be.
You begin this task by summoning the silver. It exists within and throughout the world—in veins and channels, in tiny interstices in the crust’s densest structures, in honeycombed chambers welling up under the highlands, on the near-frozen floor of the inner sea. In all such places it exists as dense, compressed potential. Released from such places, it will expand to fill the land. All that exists will be dissolved and, ultimately, re-imagined as a crucible of challenge and competition.
Having created this world for your players, you decide to witness this new beginning as one of them. You grow an avatar, one with a physiology that will allow it to function for many days. You shape it in the accustomed form, dressing it in fine clothing appropriate to a player of your advanced level: a tunic, gray-green with gold accents, wide-legged trousers, and polished boots.
When you open your eyes, you are standing on the rim of the great impact crater marking her demise. Overhead, the shimmering Blade in a star-filled night sky. At your feet, a gleaming carpet of silver, though it does not touch you. More silver runs in thin streams down the steep walls of the great crater. Far below, the crater floor is awash in it.
You look to the east, where the first faint light of dawn gleams behind the silhouettes of standing stones and desert plateaus.
Grit crunches under your boots as you walk the crater rim. The silver retreats before you, fills in again behind. How you relish this physical existence! The essential nature of the ancestral form. You made this world in part to preserve that, and you resolve that the task of re-making it should begin here, at the impact crater. Let the silver come and dissolve her last remnants, those dead and empty cognitive bones.
The avatar does not contain your mind; it is only an outpost belonging to a consciousness that sprawls through the silver. Within that greater expanse, you exercise your will and, obedient to your summons, the silver begins to rise, higher and higher, across the crater floor.
But as the dawn brightens, the flood’s gleaming surface jostles with frantic motion, developing into a chaotic boil. A mist is thrown off—fragile, transient, swiftly dissolving into nothing wherever the light touches it.
Through the eyes of your avatar you confirm the same process is underway on the crater rim: all that thin flood of silver that blanketed the desert is evaporating in the rising light. In moments, it’s gone altogether.
You summon more silver, but it breaks down before reaching the surface of the soil. Across the crater, you can still see silver glinting in a few deep shadows beneath the eastern rim, but within seconds, even those vanish.
So the touch of sunlight, even scattered light, has become a key? One that triggers the silver to denature itself?
Did you design this?
No! You did not engineer this vulnerability into the silver. This is foolishness. It is not your doing.
She did this.
You stand in the rising light of this first day and you know this to be true. She anticipated your return and the strategy you would undertake, and although she is dead, she remains determined to hinder you.
Chapter
27
Urban was still sitting at the kitchen table when an alert came in. It was a report from one of the satellites, relayed through the communications gear on his bike. He scanned the readout and whispered a soft, “Shit.”
Clearing his visual field, he found Jolly, Jubilee, and Yaphet all standing around the table, eyeing him in trepidation.
“There’s another ship already in orbit,” he told them. “It’s another outrider. Not Dragon, but dangerous enough on its own.”
He stood up, anxious to be on his way. “I need to get going, get down into the core of the planet while I still can.”
Jolly caught his eye. *I’m going with you.
*You don’t have to.
*I want to.
A twinge of guilt, but Urban nodded anyway. Jolly had more experience of the silver than he did.
He turned to Yaphet. “You need to make that deletion kobold.”
“I don’t want to make it until we know for sure Lezuri is here. It’s a dangerous thing to have around.”
“It’s dangerous not to have it.”
“Maybe. But what do we really know right now? We’ve made a lot of assumptions and trusted your word. I don’t doubt the god has come, but how do we know for sure that he’s our enemy, and not just yours?”
“‘Brutal challenges’,” Jolly reminded, quiet menace in his voice. “Inevitable war.” He turned to Urban. “Use your tablet. Show them.”
Urban shook his head. “That video was in the library. It’s gone now.” He turned to Yaphet. “If you want more proof, you’ll have to wait for Lezuri to provide it. I’m going now.”
“Not alone,” Jubilee said, blocking his way. “It’s too dangerous.”
“He’s not going alone,” Jolly announced.
But Jubilee spoke simultaneously, saying “I’ll go with you.” She turned an apologetic gaze on Yaphet, not registering what Jolly had said.
“No, you can’t go,” Yaphet countered. “You’re the only one who can read that book you found. If it has anything to say about configuration codes, what the settings are, what happens if we change them, we need to know.”
“Hold on,” Urban said. “You have a book about configuration codes?”
Jubilee looked torn and unsure. “Maybe. I haven’t read it yet. It’s written in an old language. It will take time to interpret.”
“How much time?” he asked, wondering if it was worth a delay.
“A few hours?”
But she immediately revised this estimate. “If it’s useful at all, it’ll probably take a few days to fully translate.”
Urban sighed in frustration. “That’s way too long. Dragon could be in range within hours. There’s just no way to know. But Yaphet’s right. You need to stay here, work on it. Anything you learn could eventually be helpful.”
“What you’ve already learned could be helpful to us,” Yaphet said. “What mechanism are you using to adjust your configuration codes?”
“I use a Maker to do it. Makers are molecular tools, part of my biome, but not of yours.”
Yaphet turned to Jolly. “Part of your biome too?”
Jolly bit his lip and nodded. “But I don’t know how to use the Makers to change my codes.”
Urban said, “I could teach you that, but it’s dangerous to just flip switches.” He turned back to Jubilee. “That’s why it’s important to know what that book says. If it contains any hint of what the settings do, that would be incredibly helpful.”
He wanted to be on his way. He tried to step around her, but Jubilee backed up and blocked the kitchen doorway. She said, “I need to know what you mean to do.”
Urban answered honestly. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I can do. I won’t know until I get there. Maybe Yaphet is right and there won’t be anything I can do.”
“Maybe that would be best,” she said. “I am afraid of what you might be able to do, of what you might decide to do. You destroyed your ship and that other version of yourself. Would you do the same to our world?”
He drew back, revolted by this idea. “No! No, I would not do that.” But then he wondered, Is that true? Would it be true under all circumstances? The scale of his concern was different from Jubilee’s. He had sworn to keep a broken god from recovering its power. He had promised himself not to let Lezuri loose among the ruins of the Hallowed Vasties. Just how far was he willing to go to keep that promise?
“I don’t want to do that,” he said softly, speaking as much to himself as to her. He found himself thinking of Clemantine and her long grief for the loss of her birth world. “I am not Chenzeme,” he whispered.
Jubilee moved closer, gazing up at him as her fingers brushed the sleeve of his coat. “What does that mean, Urban? Tell me what that means.”
Clemantine felt strangely near—and unutterably far away, separated from him by unbridgeable years. He sighed a melancholy sigh, and answered Jubilee. “It means that no matter what I learn down there, I won’t sacrifice your world—even if that’s the only way to beat Lezuri.” He cocked his head. “Okay?”
She did not look at all okay with the situation. Jolly saw it too, and stepped forward to reassure her.
“We have to try this,” he said. “We have to do it now.”
“You’re not going!”
“I am,” Jolly answered, quiet but determined. “You’re the one who said Urban shouldn’t go alone.”
“I didn’t mean you should go! You have no idea what will happen to you if you try to go down there.”
“None of us knows,” Jolly said. “We don’t know what’s going to prove critical in the end. And we don’t have a lot of options. So we have to try them all. You and Yaphet can read the book and make the kobold, and I’ll keep an eye on Urban and make sure he doesn’t kill us all.”
Urban couldn’t help it, he cracked a smile, but Jubilee did not appreciate her brother’s humor.
<><><>
They collected kibble and water for the journey. Jolly repacked his sleeping bag.
Yaphet was concerned that Urban’s quad-bike would not fit through the grotto’s narrow entrance, so they agreed Urban would ride Jubilee’s bike.
“But I need a way to take the fabricator with me,” Urban said.
Yaphet nodded. “Give me a minute.” He disappeared into the workshop, returning a few minutes later with clamps that he used to secure the fabricator to the bike’s cargo rack.
While they waited, Urban showed Jubilee how to operate his bike, and how to use the tablet to direct the surviving scout-bots. “You can see where they are on this map,” he said, showing it to her.
There was the one on the temple wall, one in the City of Glass, and two more at observation points ninety kilometers to the east and west. “You can move any of these if you need to, but leave the one in the Cenotaph. It’s on its way to the blast site, and I want to know what’s there.”
He also left her his signal booster. “I’ll be out of contact once I’m underground, so you might as well use it. When the satellites are in position to get a signal through, they’ll automatically update the feeds from the remote bots.”
“I need to show you where the grotto is,” she said when they were finally ready.
“I know where it is,” Jolly said.
Urban nodded. “So do I. Another scout-bot followed you to it yesterday.” His ghost aboard Fortuna had instructed the bot; the memory became his when he awoke. “I sent it down the tunnel to explore.”
She looked outraged, but only for a moment. Then she held up her palm. “Touch my hand.”
He did so, and felt her presence written into his awareness just as he’d felt Jolly’s last night. He repeated the gesture with Yaphet, while she hugged Jolly and warned him in dire tones to take care.
<><><>
Moki whined, but I held him back as Jolly left through the gate with Urban. I helped Yaphet close the gate and then we trotted up the stairs to the top of the wall. Moki dashed ahead of us, barking. He did not like the idea of Jolly leaving without him. I felt the same.
When we were still children, my brother had been taken by the silver. We did not know then that Jolly was not like other players. We’d believed him gone forever. But I found him again, and the goddess had recognized him. She’d called him “the new one.”
All the rest of us have lived many lives since the world’s beginning, but Jolly has lived just this one life, and maybe this is the only life he will ever have; we don’t know.
I believe our wounded goddess summoned him into existence almost as her last creative act, his purpose to waken the ha in other players so we might learn to master the silver and no longer live in fear of it.
But that came later. When Jolly was taken, he was lost within the silver, and time moved strangely for him. When he finally escaped he was hardly older than the night he’d disappeared, though seven years had gone by.
As I watched him ride away across the meadow with Urban, I felt I was losing him again. I feared he would vanish into the underworld and if he ever emerged, it would be in some uncertain time and place, far from me. As I lost sight of him among the trees, I felt half my heart stolen away.
And I had not forgotten the promise I made to my mother. I shivered as I imagined explaining to her that instead of bringing Jolly safely home again, I had stood aside and let him leave us.
Yaphet put his arms around me.
“I’m afraid,” I confessed.
“I am too.”
He spoke no platitudes, no reassurances. That was not his way. He and I had lived many lives, both together and apart, and though I’d recovered only a few memories of those past lives I knew there had been struggle and grief, over and over again as we sought a means to counter the floods of silver that were the fallout of that ancient war between the deities who made our world. We had both lived too many lives scarred by failure, to believe we were immune to failure now.
“Come,” Yaphet said gently. “Let’s work on the book you found.”
“Maybe we should finish the flying machine first, while the weather’s good,” I offered. “Have it ready to use, if we need it.”
He agreed, and we went inside to collect a folded section of wing cloth from where he’d stored it in the kitchen. We had just begun attaching it to the frame when the tablet buzzed in my pocket. I reached for it, my heart racing, guessing it had received a message from Urban. As I pulled it out, it ceased buzzing and its glass face lit up with the image of a young man, someone I’d never seen before. Judging by his startled expression, he had not expected to see me.
FIFTH
Your consciousness exists within the silver, and the silver links you to the physical world. Through the silver, you are aware of movement—minuscule vibrations generated as a fragment of cinder rolls and bounces down the steep inner wall of the blast pit.
