Faith (48 page)

The spiders were moving slowly towards the mouth of the crater; so slowly they were almost drifting.

“I think,” Thahl said, “that when they made us, they must have given us some special abilities.”

“I think,” Foord said drily, “that you have them already.”

“No, Commander. Extra abilities. Otherwise why would they…?”

“I’m not aware,” Cyr said, “of anything over here that I don’t have over there.”

“We ought to go back through this crater and find them,” Smithson said. “But we know we can’t.
That’s
something we don’t have over there.”

“Then,” Foord said, “over here we’ll die. Fighting our own weapons.”

The spiders drifted closer. Without thinking, they all stepped back from the mouth of the crater, to allow room for the first ones to enter.

“When they snip our arms and legs off,” Smithson muttered, “will we subdivide down to nothing?”

“Nothing,” Thahl said, deadpan, “is ever completely nothing.”

“Thahl, were we...” Foord began.

“...like this over there?” Thahl finished. “I don’t remember, Commander. Maybe we left more things unsaid.”

•

Foord looked around the Bridge, and focussed angrily on Cyr.

“Watch the screen! Don’t turn away. They’re
us.
We’d want that dignity. We wouldn’t want us to turn away.”

“You’re right, Commander. I’m sorry.”

Cyr had been the only one on the Bridge to turn away. Normally she would have been first to watch what her weapons were about to do. She enjoyed the use of weapons, but not against these opponents. She turned back to the screen, where her replica and the others stood blinking back at her through the cold light in the crater, and reached a conclusion. There was something she could do.

She pressed a series of panels.

•

The spiders floated closer, and the first one entered the mouth of the crater. It was missing one of its middle limbs and had gouges all over its body. It crawled forward. It did not make for Foord, but for Cyr. She moved away from the others, to isolate herself. She guessed what she had done, back on the
Charles Manson
.

“Cyr?”

“I have to be first, Commander, not you.”

“Why?”

“Because back on our ship, I’m controlling them.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

The spider approached her clumsily; almost, it seemed, by accident. The missing limb gave it an awkward rolling gait. Cyr saw it silhouetted against the silver hull of her ship, sixteen hundred feet away. On the
Charles Manson
, those on the Bridge saw it silhouetted against the silver figure of Cyr, slender and graceful.

Cyr took another step sideways. As she expected, no other spiders had yet entered the crater. She looked into its nonexistent face. It was
her
weapon. She was controlling it on the
Charles Manson
. It stepped towards her, its feet clacking on the floor of the crater; it extended a couple of forelimbs as if in greeting, and reconfigured the claws to manipulator mode. Cyr was making calculations about how long she could engage it, how long she could hold it off before those who made her were triggered into revealing whatever abilities they had given her to counter it. While she was making her calculations, it rose on its hindlimbs and pronged out her eyes. She screamed. Foord thought it was more in horror than pain, but couldn’t be certain because he’d never heard her scream before. More spiders floated into the crater and settled, and more waited behind them. Cyr continued screaming. Her screams didn’t incorporate obvious phrases like My Eyes or Help Me, but were entirely wordless. Foord motioned to the others to fan out. This can’t be, he thought. If they made us, why would they let us be massacred like this? They must have given us something. But what?

•

On the Bridge, Cyr watched the local magnification on the screen. Her palms were bleeding where her fingernails dug into them; her manicured nails, painted darker than the blood they drew. In the crater, her nails and her blood were the same shade of almost-black. She could see it clearly on the Bridge screen, because in the crater Cyr had sunk to her knees and held her hands over her eyes and was screaming, and Foord had motioned to the others to fan out and face the spiders which had entered the crater and were now climbing over each other, pushing each other aside, to get at them.

“You told that first one to go for you, not for me.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“And you told it exactly what it should do to you.”

“Yes, Commander.” Cyr held Foord’s gaze. Her eyes were dark and unreadable. “It was one thing I could do for them, I mean us, in the crater. They’d know I’d order the spiders to attack them. So I did it to myself first, in the most vicious way I could.”

Foord went to say How can you think of something
that
vicious, but he already knew; it was how she was made.

In the crater they had turned away from each other; they were fighting separate battles, and they were going down. Cyr was still alive while the spider which had taken her eyes continued to work on her face, making it as featureless as its own. Only then did it finish her, slashing her throat. Her blood—dark grey, almost black—should have floated around her in globules, but gravity worked in the crater.

Foord went down easily, more easily than he expected. A spider simply stabbed him in the stomach—his entrails glistened silver and grey—then slit his throat. He didn’t call to the others for help but just fell forward, shaking his head
No, this can’t be,
and the spider stepped delicately over him and over Kaang, impaled on the claw of another spider and already dead, towards Smithson and Thahl. They knew Smithson and Thahl would be more difficult, because their programming said so.

On the
Charles Manson
, Smithson watched on the Bridge screen as five of them surrounded him and took it in turn to slice him, vertically. He felt grief but concealed it beneath outrage. He swore at them, as he was swearing at them in the crater while they sliced steaks off his body; his flesh in the crater had the same moist consistency as it did on the
Charles Manson
. They had severed one of his two main forelimbs, but he extruded a secondary limb, picked up one spider and used it to dash two others to pieces, then collapsed as the spiders halved and rehalved him.

Then there was only Thahl. They surrounded him, nine against one, with more and more entering the crater. He concentrated on disabling them by breaking their limbs with blows from his hands and feet. He had already disabled five, moving among them like a Sakhran customarily moves in combat—not only using his own speed and grace, but seeming to radiate something which made his opponents slow and clumsy. Just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly, but he knew he couldn’t disable them faster than they were entering the crater. He knew that those who made him, and made the others, had put them in the crater to face the spiders, but he was puzzled.

There must be something they’ve given us to fight the spiders with.

The others hadn’t revealed it, and neither had he, but it must be there. He wondered again what it was, and when and how it would show. He kicked away a couple of disabled spiders to make room to face the newcomers who were surrounding him. Then he realised what it was, and smiled.

•

On the Bridge, Thahl carefully studied himself as he fought in the crater.

The others on the Bridge had done what Foord demanded. They had watched themselves die, even when their emotions were insupportable. Thahl did not allow himself to show any emotion, even when he saw what they did to Cyr, though there was an irony about it because that was what Cyr
over here
—words didn’t work properly—had told them to do to herself. He continued to show no emotion when Foord went down so easily, and still showed none now, when he watched himself fighting—though he studied the screen closely, looking for but not finding any modification of his abilities.

He knew there had to be more.

She
made
us and She put us in the crater to defend it. She must have given us the ability to defend it, something extra beyond ourselves, and he wondered how and when it would show. He watched himself moving among the spiders—just like a real living Sakhran, he thought wryly—and then it occurred to him that just as he made the spiders look slow and clumsy, so had
Her
spiders, each one a match for at least six of theirs until they…

Then he knew, and smiled to himself. On the Bridge screen, which had focussed on him in closeup as he was the last of them left, he smiled back at himself from the crater.

•

In the crater the spiders Thahl had disabled were strewn around him, most of them limbless or broken-limbed but still rocking backwards and forwards to get at him. Now others had entered the crater and surrounded him: nine, ten, eleven. They made cautious feints to draw him out, but did not yet attack directly. More were joining them.

That was when he had smiled to himself.

I’d like to have lived longer, he thought, which is reasonable considering how they made me. They gave me self-awareness, and all my memories and motives. He might have added, And my soul, but Sakhrans—perhaps because of how they reproduced, or how they organised themselves socially—were not particularly religious. So not Soul, he thought, but my sense of what I am. And because they made me like this, I can do what comes next more easily. It won’t be as complete as dying, because I also live over there.

He became still. He folded his arms across his chest, and collapsed into himself.

The process began at the top of his head and worked down through his body to his feet, like an ice-sculpture melting. He turned, from his head downwards, into liquid silver. Because it started at his head, his consciousness dissolved away while the rest of him was still collapsing. His last thought was They didn’t make us telepathic. I wish I could tell them over there that our opponent is not just a Her or an It, there are
people
living here. Perhaps they’ll find out. Even see them.

The liquid silver which had been his head cascaded down his body, which in turn cascaded down his legs to pool at his feet, which in turn became part of the pool. When Thahl was gone, the same thing happened to the bodies of the others. Cyr, Foord, Kaang and Smithson collapsed into themselves, leaving silver pools; five pools, including the one which had been Thahl. Suggestions of rainbow colours swirled across their surfaces, but otherwise the pools were inert. The spiders peered and poked at them, indifferently, because they did not signify opposition.

Simultaneously the five pools burst into thousands of separate silver beads, each the size of a fingernail. For a moment they stood apart from each other, quivering; then flicked across the floor of the crater, between and around the clacking feet of the spiders, combining and recombining until they became a single thing: a floorcovering of rippling silver, only molecules deep. Its shape was like a map, defined by the spiders around which it flowed and formed. It moved back into the depths of the crater, through the out-of-focus dark curtain, to where the silver-grey coils of the Rope festooned the walls. It rose and touched the Rope’s coils, welcoming it down from the walls and into itself; the coils entered it, and continued and continued to enter. Then it flowed back towards the mouth of the crater.

Its volume had increased. Now it covered the entire floor, to a depth of inches.

•

On the Bridge, Foord cried out as he watched Thahl die in the crater. He had stayed outwardly impassive when the others went down, even himself, but now he could not look across the Bridge at Thahl; they were both embarrassed.

He watched the pools become beads, and the beads combine and recombine.

“Get us out of here, Kaang.”

“Commander, our spiders—”

“Forget them, Cyr, they’re already finished. Get us out of here, Kaang. Now.”

The
Charles Manson
’s manoeuvre jets fountained, a gesture of parting. It turned away, engaged its ion drive at seventy percent, and ran.
We keep moving backwards and forwards
, thought Foord,
like masturbation
.

•

The carpet of liquid silver stretched continuously from the mouth of the crater to its recesses, where the darkness hung. Points on its surface rose into small conical shapes or sank into small conical depressions, within a vertical range of no more than plus or minus an inch; they formed and disappeared randomly, as though caused by the first isolated drops of a rainstorm. Colours—cobalt, violet, burgundy, dark bluish grey—swirled across its surface like cloud shadows.

About thirty spiders were in the crater; the others still floated outside. They walked through the silver liquid—it no longer flowed around them—picking their steps with human delicacy, swivelling to find recognisable shapes of opposition but seeing none. They saw the
Charles Manson
turn away from them and run, but it meant nothing to them; its location was not in their mission parameters, not until they had done what they came to do and were ready to leave Her.

Near the mouth of the crater a small conical point rose to about an inch above the surface, but did not subside. It continued to rise, drawing more liquid up after it. It was still silver but grew duller as it solidified and cohered and became the shape Foord had expected: man-sized, a triangular body with three jointed limbs pushing up and out from each corner, and no face.

If there was a moment when it could be said to have started its existence, it was when it stepped clear of the silver liquid, leaving a hole behind it which closed
Plop,
and pivoted to survey the
Charles Manson
’s spiders around it. They looked back impassively. Rising on first one corner of its body and then another, moving in spasms of right-angles and diagonals like a new chessboard figure, it plunged amongst the dark spiders and shredded three of them before they could react. A fourth, remembering the earlier encounters on the
Charles Manson
, snipped a joint off one of its legs, but this time the silver spider did not subdivide down to nothing. It stopped and looked, facelessly, into the recesses of the crater, where others like itself were forming.