Spear of Light (56 page)

He saw where the slender gleaner girl was going. The word escaped his lips. “No.”

“It's all built.” Losianna's face filled with wonder. “The whole damned thing was built for us.”

He looked from Neil to Nona, waiting for one of them to contradict Losianna.

Everything he had done here was to save the natural order of things. That was what his family lived for. Everyone on the planet lived for it. Restoration. Re-wilding. Saving. Conservation.

Nona nodded, her eyes on him.

There was no place to hide. He couldn't bury his face in Cricket's fur and hope for a different answer. “How sure are you?”

“We found evidence out there,” the Colorima said. “Symbols that we believe were planted for us. Things that no one could find until we developed space travel and learned to live way out where you exiled us. They were like breadcrumbs that led us back to Lym.”

He stared at the beautiful robot, unwilling to believe she could be right. But two years ago he wouldn't have believed she existed. And now?

Now his whole world had gone sideways.

What did it mean if Lym wasn't natural?

Did it change how he felt?

The cave felt constricting, the perfect walls like a trap. “Can we go back to the surface? Please?”

Yi stood up. “I'll take you.”

Nona brushed dust from her pants. “I'll go, too.”

CHAPTER SEVENTY

CHARLIE

They had been deep in the mountain for a whole day. Charlie and Nona sat side by side on a rock near the edge of the cave, looking out over the dark folds of the mountains at night. Stars filled the sky, an arm of the galaxy visible as a brighter, deeper field.

“I always knew we colonized Lym,” he said. “Legend has it that we came in a great starship from some other place.”

Her answer was soft, as if she were speaking to a child. “That is what happened.”

The prey of a night-hunter screamed from a nearby ridge. “We were made here. The animals, too. Everything.”

“Even a colony ship might have required that. Unless it was a generation ship like the
Creative Fire
.”

A puff of night wind rustled the trees.

“The DNA—our DNA—it came from somewhere. There has to have been a beginning.”

She was right. It simply felt . . . so big. As if someone had changed the world so the sun rose in the west and set in the east. She let him be still with it all for a long time, touching him lightly from time to time but holding her silence.

A rare thing, people who could hold silences.

He spotted the lights of one or two ships where there had been a hundred before. He supposed that even a ship or two could be a good sign. Perhaps it was help coming, or simply someone who had been far enough away to be safe from the firestorm.

Nona held his hand and leaned her cheek against his shoulder.

“Will you stay with me?” he asked.

“Here?”

“Yes.”

“Of course I will.”

“I mean forever. Will you live your whole life with me? As a person, a human. Will you die with me as well? Raise my children?”

She wound her fingers through his. “Of course I will.”

Maybe nothing was really permanent. No idea, no place, no thing you believed. But he could work to make this relationship as permanent as possible.

PART FIVE

THE SPEAR OF LIGHT

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

YI

Nexity had transformed since the discovery in the caves and the destruction of the Shining Revolution. The Wall still stood, and still served as a running track, but at this moment, Yi ran across a bridge that allowed humans to move freely between Hope and what was left of Nexity. The river of metal that had run from incoming ships into the Wall had reversed, and the ships being created on the pads of the spaceport already towered over the city. Literally hundreds of ships' worth of materials had been transformed into a Wall and were now reforming into only three ships.

Arks.

He had been with the Colorima when they found DNA banks in a cave in Entare. Some might still be viable, but the Colorima who went into the caves with them had taken over the job of creating new records of all of the life that existed on Lym, which had, of course, evolved. Katherine and a few of the rangers had agreed to help. Even Kyle had volunteered, much to Yi's surprise.

Charlie had not. Nona reported that he was off looking for a rakul. She still ran the embassy, which had been rebuilt early and opened before any of the hotels. Neil Nevening worked there in his new form for two hours every day, documenting everything he could about the old Manna Springs by interviewing people and taking notes.

Yi would go when the arks left. He had never had a doubt. Chrystal would go with him, and Katherine, who had insisted that they include DNA for their own ill-fated creations, which the Next had wiped out with the High Sweet Home, the sweet and hapless jalinerines. She might even become one of the head mothers of the next place they seeded.

She had become so strong it amazed him.

Jason, however, seldom came into town at all. He spent far more time working on rebuilding the human town, which had been renamed Hope Springs and planned with a defensive wall and in a much more orderly fashion. It seemed as if learning that their home had been designed had freed the humans to use more modern building materials, even though they created a less intrusive town that blended even more with the landscape and mood of Lym than Manna Springs ever had. He had promised to meet Yi today, and as Yi ran and thought and ran and thought, he kept watch for him.

The sun was only an hour away from falling over the far edge of the sea when Jason finally showed up, matching Yi stride for stride. They walked in silence down to the water and sat far enough away from the corrosive saltwater that it wouldn't touch them and close enough to see the footprints left by the seabirds.

How's the town going?
Yi asked.

They're nearly done. It's full of more shared spaces now, and the hotel is almost ready.
Jason sounded proud of the effort.

For tourists?

We're just waiting for the debris field cleaning to be finished. Another few days.

The Next had designed and sent robots up to collect the leftover pieces of docking stations and ships from low orbit.
The new station is being built. It will be ready in about a month.

Will the arks be ready by then?

Yi shrugged.
Close. I'm not working on that. I'm helping to design the common spaces for the new ones like us, making a learning environment.

Jason splashed a stone into the sea.
You must like that.

I do. I want us to be ready.

What will you do after you build the next planet?

Build another.
This was the point Jason might not yet understand.
We're building crèches. Not for humans. We make places for the humans to live, and then we leave. If the humans succeed, then they create more beings like us, or a little like us, or at least with mechanical bodies so they can live far from the surface of a planet. That's the way new species are born.

Jason fell silent.

Yi watched the waves roll in, and again in, splashing and pulling away. It was easy to imagine that each wave had been here thousands of times and yet was also brand new, each one part of a simple and beautiful repeating pattern. In all his time here, he still hadn't seen the truly big waves he'd heard about.

After a time, Jason spoke.
Are all new species born from humans?

“I don't know.”

A small line of tiny round seabirds with sharp yellow beaks raced between them and the low waves. Yi admired the mathematical precision of their movements, visible in spite of the fact that they also looked like a wave of life undulating in multiple S-curves across the beach.
I'm going to miss the beach most of all. I'll miss everything about Lym, but the ocean is my very favorite part. I love the smell of salt and seaweed, the calling of the birds and the way their feet make patterns in the fine grains of sand. I love the mathematics of nature, the fractal symmetry.

You sound like a poet.

Yi laughed.
I've always liked poetry. I suppose I will need a way to spend time on the ship.

I'm not going.

Yi felt his fears tighten inside his head.
Either of you?

Either of us. We've talked about it. We think we would die if we went away in a tin can with only robots. We couldn't live like that.

Everyone you love will get old and die.

Yes. But more will be born regularly.

What about Losianna? She will get old and die.

She has asked to be turned and to go with you.

That shocked Yi. There was no reason for the shock. Humans came every day and begged to go through the process of shedding their bodies to become something more.
I thought she loved you.

She does. And we love you.

There wasn't much to say to that. It was all true. He sat beside Jason and listened to the waves and thought about how they sounded like the heartbeat of Lym. He reached for Jason's hand and held it, a soft melancholy filling him, the subdued feelings of a soulbot still very different than he remembered from his human days.

Perhaps this was a good day not to be human.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-TWO

CHARLIE

The town had been open for a week. The new docking station had been installed in the sky the day before, and the last parts of the Wall had ceased to exist as wall and become the shining fins of new ships. Charlie and Nona sat on a small hill that had been built for Manny's new garden, smelling the freshly tilled earth.

Everything reeked of spring.

The two Jasons made their way up the hill and sat down on either side of the ranger and the ambassador.

Jean Paul was the next one to join them, then Manny and his family, Pi as big as ever and the children bigger than Charlie remembered them. Of course. They stuck to Manny like glue, no longer hiding behind their mothers the way he remembered them.

Nona scooted closer and leaned into him, the jewel in her cheek sparkling in the sun.

All four watched as three shining arks nearly the size of mountains climbed slowly up out of the gravity well, flashed with light the shape of a spear as they hit the atmosphere, and flew onward and out, bound for destinations far beyond the Ring of Distance.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Novels are born in the quiet of a writer's head, but they are burnished in the conversations with others. I want to send out specific thanks to my first readers. For this novel, they were Linda Merkens and Gisele Peterson, Darragh Metzger and John Pitts. I also want to thank my assistant, Joy Adiletta, who helped me with a last read, and who is helping with much more as well.

Novels see the light of day because agents sell them to editors who make them real. Well, these days, there are a lot of paths to availability. This novel took the traditional path, and I want to thank Eleanor Wood for her constant support and editor Rene Sears, publicist (and poet!) Cheryl Quimba and also Jake Bonar, and all of the other fine staff at Pyr.

I am grateful for the support of my family, who put up with me disappearing for a week at a time to hide and work on novels or get really public and promote novels. I suspect writers are hard to live with, and writers with day jobs are even harder. I'm often not home, or, if I am home, part of me is often in another universe entirely.

And for this book, like its predecessor, I want to say thanks to all of the people exploring transhumanism. I'll list a few, but I'll miss a lot. I have not met all of them. Regardless, here goes: Ray Kurzweil, Ramez Naam, Madeline Ashby, Natasha Vita-More, Max More, Charlie Stross, Gray Scott, Nancy Kress, Greg Bear, Vernor Vinge, David Brin, Bruce Sterling, John Smart . . . and there are many, many more.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Brenda Cooper is the author of
Edge of Dark
, which is book one in this duology. She also wrote
The Creative Fire
and
The Diamond Deep
, books one and two of Ruby's Song, as well as the Silver Ship series. Though not intended as a young adult novel, book one,
The Silver Ship and the Sea
, was selected by
Library Journal
as one of the year's 100 Best Books for YA and by Booklist as one of the top-ten 2007 adult books for youth to read. The other books in the series are
Reading the Wind
and
Wings of Creation
. She is also the author of
Mayan December
and has collaborated with Larry Niven (
Building Harlequin's Moon
). Brenda is a working futurist, a poet, and a technology professional with a passionate interest in the environment.