Gateways (13 page)

A sharp spotlight swerved suddenly downward, at the soldier’s pistol sidearm, laying on a broken chunk of wood. Abruptly, a whiplike tendril emerged from its mouth and snatched up the weapon, swallowing it before either human could move. Then, a booming voice filled the little hiding place, made only slightly murky by the watery echo chamber.

“Come, Peng Xiao Wer,”
the mechanical creature commanded, as it began to open its jaw wide.
“Now. And bring the artifact.”

Wer realized, with some horror, that the serpent-android wanted him to crawl inside, through that gaping mouth. He cringed back.

Perhaps sensing his terrified reluctance, the robot spoke again.

“It is safe to do this . . . and unsafe to refuse.”

A threat, then. Wer had plenty of experience with those. Familiarity actually calmed his nerves a little, allowing him to examine the odds.

Cornered, in a rickety sunken attic, facing some sort of ai superrobot, with my air supply about to give out . . . um do I have any choice?

Yet, he could not move. So the serpaint made things clear. From one eye, it fired a narrow, brilliant beam of light that made the water bubble and steam along its path. By the time Wer turned around, it had finished burning a single character in one of the old roof beams of the Pulupauan royal palace.

CHOOSE.

Still, he thought furiously. No doubt the machine could simply take the worldstone away from him, with one of those tendril things. So . . . it must realize . . . or its owners must . . . that the worldstone required him. Still, in order to make sure, he extended a finger and palm-wrote for the creature to see.

I am needed. It speaks to me. Only me.

The serpent-machine had no trouble parsing Wer’s hand-writing. It nodded.

“Agreed. Cooperation will be rewarded. But if I must take only the artifact, we will find a way.”

That way would be to offer the stone new candidates. As many as it took. With Wer no longer alive.

“Choose now. There is little time.”

Wer almost dug in his heels, right then. He was getting sick of people—and things—telling him that. Still, after a moment’s stubborn fury, he managed to shrug it off, quashing both irritation and fear. Lugging the heavy satchel, he shuffled a step closer, and another.

Then he glanced back at the Chinese special forces soldier, who was still staring, wide-eyed. There was something in her expression, a pleading look.

Wer stood in front of the sea monster. He put the satchel down in the muck and raised both hands, to write on his palm again.

What about her?

The robot considered for just a moment, then answered.

“She knows nothing of my mission, owners, or destination. She may live.”

Quiet thanks filled the woman’s eyes, fortifying Wer and putting a sense of firmness in his step, as he drew close. Though he could not keep from trembling, as he lifted the satchel containing the worldstone and laid it inside that gaping maw. Then, without its weight holding him down, he rotated horizontal and turned his body to start worming inside.

It was the second strangest act he ever performed.

The very strangest—and it puzzled him for the next hour—was what he did
while
crawling inside . . . when he slipped one hand into his pocket, drawing out something filmy and almost translucent, tossing it backward to flutter out of the sea serpent’s jaw, drifting below where its eyes could see . . . but where the soldier could not help but notice.

Yang Shenxiu gave it to me to protect from the attackers, and now I’m giving it to one of them? Does that even make sense?
And yet, somehow, it felt right.

The gullet of the serpaint wasn’t as gross as he expected. The walls were soft and he only had to crawl back a short distance to find a space that seemed shaped to fit a person, reclining on his back. While he twisted into the seat, Wer felt the jaw close with a solid thump and there was a sense of backward movement. Soon, by some mechanical wizardry, the small space around him began emptying of water, replaced by—

—Wer spat out the mouthpiece and took a tentative breath that turned into a shuddering gasp of pure relief. What little air had been left in the breather was stale beyond belief. The noseplug and gogglets went next, and he rubbed his itchy eyes, gratefully.

Then he realized, a patch of the machine’s wall near his head . . . it was transparent! A window, then. How considerate. Really. It made him feel ever-so slightly less like a prisoner—or a meal—and more like a passenger. He pressed his face against the little viewing patch, peering at the dimness outside.

Now illuminated only by slanting moonlight, the palace ruins were a slanted jumble. It took him several moments, while the huge robot continued backing up, to spot the little attic opening where he had taken shelter.

Then, briefly, just before the machine began accelerating forward, Wer thought he glimpsed a shadow—a human silhouette—framed by a canted, twisted dormer window.

At least, he thought he did. Enough to hope.

The sea serpent took a circuitous route along the ocean floor, carrying Wer on a lengthy tour of murky canyons and muddy flats that seemed to stretch on endlessly.

Although the little cavity where he lay had clearly been intended for a passenger’s comfort, there was almost no room in the padded space, between curved walls that kept twisting and throbbing as the machine beast propelled itself along. Nor was the robot vehicle as garrulous or friendly as Dr. Nguyen’s penguin surrogate had been, giving only terse answers when he tried to start conversation and refusing his request for a webscreen or immersion specs or any other form of ailectronic diversion. For the most part, the apparatus kept silent.

As silent as a motorized python could be, while undulating secretively across a vast and mostly empty sea. Clearly, it was avoiding contact with humanity—not easily done in this day and age, even far away from shipping lanes and shorelines. Several times, Wer felt thrown to one side as the snake-submarine veered abruptly and dived to take shelter behind some mound, within a crevice, or even burying itself under a meter or so of mucky sediment, then falling eerily quiet, as if hiding from predators. On two of those occasions, Wer thought he heard the faint drone of some engine gradually rise and fall, in both pitch and volume, before fading away at last. Then, as the serpent shook itself free of mud, their journey resumed.

Of course there were still signs of mankind, everywhere. The ocean floor was an immense junkyard, even in the desert zones where no fish or
plants or any kind of organism could be seen. Shipwrecks offered occasional sightseeing milestones, but far more often Wer saw mundane types of trash, like torn commercial fishing nets, resembling vast, diffuse, deadly clouds that drifted with the current, clogged with fish skeletons and empty turtle shells. Or swarms of plastic bags that drifted alongside jellyfish hordes—a creepy mimicry. Once, he spotted a dozen huge cargo containers that must have toppled from a mighty freighter, long ago, spilling what appeared to be bulky, old-fashioned computers and television screens across at least forty hectares.

I’m used to living amid garbage. But I always figured that the open sea was better off . . . more pure . . . than the Huangpu.

Losing track of time, he dozed at last, while the slithering robot hurried across a vast and empty plain, seeming almost as lifeless as the surface of the moon . . .

. . . then jerked awake, to look out through the tiny window and find himself being carried along a jagged underwater mountain range, an apparently endless series of stark ridges that speared upward from unfathomable depths, reaching almost to the glistening border between liquid and sky. It was as alien a landscape as he had ever seen, and even more transfixing because the rippling promontories vanished into bottomless gloom below.

If the mechanical creature that had swallowed him meant to shake off any pursuers, or avoid detection, weaving its way through this labyrinth would seem a pretty good approach.

Feeling somewhat recovered from exhaustion, Wer peeled open some ration bars that he found in a small compartment by his left arm. A little tap offered trickles of fresh water. There also was a washcloth, which he used to dab and clean his cuts, as well as possible in the cramped space. A simple suction tube—for waste—was self-explanatory, if a bit awkward to use. After which, the voyage became a battle against both tedium and claustrophobia—the frustration of limited movement and worry over what his future held.

No clues came from the sea serpent, which only spoke sparingly and answered no questions, not even when Wer asked about some roiling funnels of black water that he spotted, rising from fissures in a nearby ridge-line, like columns of smoke from a fierce fire.

It occurred to Wer that—perhaps—he shouldn’t be so glad that the owners of this sophisticated device had included a window, after all.
In stories and teledramas, kidnappers always insist on a blindfold, if they plan to let you go.

The time to worry is when they don’t seem to care. If they let you watch the route to their lair, it often means they know you’ll never talk.

On the other hand, who could possibly tell, from memory, one hazy sea ridge from another?

That reassured him for a while . . . till he remembered the visual helper unit that Dr. Nguyen installed in his right eye. Wer had come to take for granted the way the tiny aissistant augmented whatever he looked at, enhancing the dim scene beyond the window. Now he realized; without it, he wouldn’t be seeing much at all.

Are they assuming that a poor man, like me, is unaugmented?

He wondered about the implant. Might it even be recording whatever he saw? In which case, was he like the kidnap victim who kept daring fate, by peeking under his blindfold?

Or am I headed for someplace that is so perfectly escape-proof that they don’t care how much I know?

Or someplace that I’d never
want
to escape from?

Or am I to be altered, in ways that will make me placid?

Or do they figure that I’ll only be needed for a little while—till a replacement can be arranged to speak with the worldstone? Must I try as hard to win over my next masters, as I did Anna and Patri and Dr. Nguyen?

Each scenario came accompanied by vivid fantasies. And Wer tried not to subvocalize any of them—there were modern devices that could track the impulses in a human throat and parse words that one never even spoke aloud. On the other hand, why would anyone bother doing that, with a mere shoresteader trashman, like him?

Ultimately, each fantasy ended in one thought. That he might never see his family again.

But the soldier . . . the woman in that drowned attic room . . . she will get the sheet recording that Yang Shenxiu made. She will know that I cooperated. The government will protect and reward Ling and Xie Xie. Surely?

It was all too worrisome and perplexing. In order to help divert his thoughts, Wer put the worldstone on his lap and tried talking to
Courier of Warnings.
True, without immersion in sunlight, the entity had to preserve energy, subduing its vivid animations—the images were dim and limited to a small surface area. Still, if he could learn some new things, that might prove his worth, a little, when they arrived.

It wasn’t easy, at first. Without any sound-induction devices, he was limited to tracing characters on the ovoid’s surface.
Courier
at first
tried responding with ancient ideograms. But Wer knew few of those, so they resumed the process of updating its knowledge of written Chinese. The entity within offered pictures or pantomimed actions. Wer sketched the associated modern words—often helped by the ai-patch. Never having to repeat, it went remarkably quickly. Within half a day, they were communicating.

At last, Wer felt ready to ask a question that had been foremost in his mind. Why did
Courier
hate the aliens inside the Havana Artifact?

Why did he call them “liars”?

In a stream of characters, accompanied by low-resolution images, the entity explained.

Our world is farther from its sun than yours. Larger but less dense. Our gravity slighter. Our atmosphere thicker and rich with snow. It is a planet much easier to land upon than your Earth. Hence, if a solar sail is built especially sturdy in the middle, it can be used as a parachute, to cushion the fall.

And so, when they came to our world, many of the stones did not shy away, lurking at a safe distance. No, instead they sometimes chose a direct approach, raining down upon—

There appeared a new symbol, not at all like anything in Chinese, but made up of elegant, curling and looping lines that suggested waves churning a beach. The emblem reminded Wer of
turbulence
and so that became his word for the planet.

—from many sources.

My species rose up to sapience already knowing these things, finding them occasionally in mud or stone or ice. Foraging packs of our presapient ancestors cherished them. Early tribes fought over them, worshipped them, looked to them as oracles, seeking advice about the next hunt, about agriculture, about diplomacy . . . and marriage.

The alien made a gesture that Wer could not interpret—a writhing of both hands. And yet, he felt somehow sure that it expressed irony.

Thus, our evolution was guided. Accelerated. Certainly our cultures.

Painting characters with a finger, Wer wrote enviously that humanity never had such help. That is, unless you counted a few, vague strictures from Heaven. And, perhaps, some nudges from the rare messenger fragments that made it to Earth.

Do not envy too readily,
Courier chided.
It might have gone smoothly, if there were only one kind of stone, with one inhabitant each! But there were scores, perhaps even hundreds of crystal seers, scattered across several continents! Only much later did we learn—they had come across
space from several directions. At least six different alien points of origin. Turbulence planet sits at a meeting of galactic currents.