Under Heaven's Bridge Read online

Effortlessly, the floater pilot sidestepped her and aimed the weapon at the Kyber enthroned on thin air. He fired. Pivoting, he fired at each of the remaining five aliens, deliberately missing every one of them. Tiny plumes of smoke or steam curled out of the walls that had intercepted his laser shots.

  Andrik lunged at the man. “Goddam you, Sixkiller—!”

  Again the floater pilot casually stepped aside, holstering his weapon as he did so. “If they weren’t already dead, that is. If they just weren’t already dead.”

  Keiko gripped Sixkiller by the shoulder, surprising him, and thrust him back with all her might. “Then why is one of them not here?” she demanded. “If they’re already dead, how has one managed to leave its tomb and go wandering about on Onogoro like a living creature?”

  “Like your lover’s hoped-for saviour, you mean!”

  Andrik brushed Keiko aside, and she watched in alarm as the xenologist jockeyed the pilot back into the approach corridor and up against one of its walls.

  “Go back to the floater, Sixkiller. Go back to the floater and report your trigger-happy behaviour and my disapproval of it to Captain Hsi.” Then Andrik let go of the man and stepped back.

  Sixkiller looked neither abashed nor defiant. “If you think it’ll do any good,” he said. He unhooked his utility belt—with its laser, ration packs, and phosphor-pen, among other items—and handed it to Andrik. “You may be able to use some of these things, if you’re going to stay here without me.”

  Then, as the xenologist had commanded, Sixkiller headed into the fog of the approach corridor, ostensibly on his way back to the floater. Keiko again found herself wondering what would happen if he deserted them. …

  EIGHT

  Andrik gestured at the aliens. There they are, the gesture implied; do what you can to break their kybertrance.

  Keiko approached the nearer of the two standing figures and stared up into its lofty face. Perhaps she would do better to begin with a more accessible family representative. So, after strolling bemusedly among the frozen possibilities, she halted before the Kyber enthroned on air. It looked almost exactly like the alien she had tutored in the knowledge centre. But, then, so did all the others in the chamber, if you disregarded minor variations in the colours of their eye patches or in the shapes of their halo-crests. Otherwise, the Kybers conformed to a highly standardized pattern. Did that fact corroborate Sixkiller’s assembly-line hypothesis?

  Keiko turned to Andrik, now only a step or two behind her. “I don’t even have a name,” she said. “I don’t know how to begin.”

  “Just talk to it.”

  Sceptical and embarrassed, Keiko reached out and touched one of the creature’s rigid arms.

  “Don’t!” Andrik shouted.

  The arm reacted to her touch by swinging like a lethal boom, swiftly and soundlessly. Keiko leapt away. The arm swung back to its original position and locked.

  “Didn’t I warn you about that?” Andrik asked. “A touch is a dangerous stimulus. Just speak to it, Kei.”

  Heartened rather than dismayed (since even an automatic movement implied the possibility of life), Keiko took up a stance directly in front of the alien and leaned forward to tell it a secret.

  “Kyber,” she whispered. “Kyber, I am Keiko Takahashi, and I taught you the language of humanity.”

  A wind blew over the pit, making melancholy music. Keiko, Andrik, and the six rigid Kybers were inside this wail. Her whisper was muffled by the sound, and the alien did not move.

  “Louder,” Andrik advised her.

  In competition with the wind she said, “I am Keiko Takahashi, and I taught you the—”

  “You taught me a phonic system of communication,” said a lilting soprano voice behind her. Both she and Andrik spun about to see one of the two elevated Kybers collapsing upon its stiltlike legs somewhat nearer to human height. Still gigantic, it tottered forward as if to corral them in the chamber’s corner with the seated alien. “That is, you taught me through your tutoring of our former prime, who has spread the word in mind and person to neighbouring families.”

  Keiko and Andrik retreated, only to find that the Kyber behind them was rearing out of its seated posture in a single, continuous, gravity-defying movement. Without even shifting its feet it hoisted itself erect, then telescoped to the same towering height as that of the Kyber who had just spoken. Within a matter of seconds three other aliens had also come to life. Only the two lying back to back on the stone slab against the trapezoidal chamber’s rear wall remained in their death-coma.

  “Then you’re not my student?” asked Keiko to the first resurrectee, mindful of her and Andrik’s puniness and isolation.

  “We are all your student,” said the Kyber whose arm had nearly struck her. “Your voice is therefore familiar to us. Upon your addressing us forthrightly, Lady Keiko, we arise and sing.”

  The three late risers crowded up behind the first resurrectee. Piped one, “Though I have never sat down with you in the knowledge centre and drilled for hours in the rudiments of Translic, I am still your student.”

  “As am I,” echoed the second newcomer.

  “As am I,” sang the third.

  They hovered above and about the two human beings like impossibly large mechanized statues, distorted figures from a nightmare or a drug fugue. Despite the profound depth of the kybertrance from which they had just awakened, they seemed lively and curious. Further, in the last ten seconds, they had volunteered more information about themselves than had Keiko’s absent dropout in nearly fifty Onogorovan days.

  “You are all her student?” asked Andrik of the clustering aliens, one hand on Keiko’s arm.

  “Indeed,” crooned the first resurrectee. “All of us, in the most encompassing sense.” To suggest every inhabited crater on the plain, its arm swept theatrically around the horizon of the sheltering ruins. A learned gesture, Keiko realized, a visual aid akin to Olivant’s clumsy ellipses or even the absentminded choreography of her own small hands. …

  “Every Kyber on Onogoro now has the capacity to speak Translic?” exclaimed Andrik. “Don’t tell me you’re telepathic!”

  “Request granted,” said the family’s designated mouthpiece.

  “No,” cried Andrik, chopping with his hand. “Tell me! While in kybertrance you’re all in subconscious—or is it para-conscious—contact with one another: isn’t that it? Resonating minds? Conjoined consciousness?”

  The four resurrected Kybers gaped, not without a certain deliberate irony, it seemed to Keiko. She noticed, too, that the lateral pupils of the creatures—now nearly twice their normal size—were glowing brightly. Occasionally, in fact, an alien would turn its great head in order to view them with a peripheral eye-bulb, as if attempting to shine into their very souls a psychic ophthalmoscope.

  “Why couldn’t you speak to Andrik or Betti or Farrell?” she asked. “What made you wait for me?”

  “We are your student,” said the first to awaken.

  “But I might never have come. This is the only time I’ve ever actually threaded my way into one of your dwellings. My principal work is on the Platform.”

  “We were waiting for the lessons you bring.”

  “The only lesson she brings,” said Andrik, looking at the parodically saintly faces of the aliens, “is one that any of us might have carried. Your bloody sun is going to explode!”

  “Dextro—pejoratively bloody—in actual fact radiates principally between ångström units—” The alien stopped, canted its head. “But let us not speak technically, Lady Keiko. The lesson you bring is lost neither in its transport nor upon us at its arrival. We have anticipated it and learned it by heart. The recitation of our knowledge is what we have held in reserve for your coming.”

  Andrik, at a loss, turned to Keiko. “They say they know.”

  “Evidently.”

  The xenologist pointed skyward. “You realize that Onogoro is going to decouple from Dextro because of the heavy inner planet? That Laevo may or may
not recapture your world? That Dextro itself will inevitably flare up and eject shells of annihilating gas at huge velocity? You genuinely understand the seriousness of the situation?”

  “In all its gravity,” replied the family speaker.

  “But you joke, you pun,” cried Andrik, a titbird strutting before Titans. “The truth of the matter is that your world is doomed and your people with it!”

  “In such circumstances,” crooned the Kyber, “it would seem essential to appeal to a higher power.”

  Andrik’s expression was incredulous. “How? By prayer?”

  “Orare est laborare. Our prayer is our labour. Oratory in the laboratory of our souls.”

  “You’re going to pray that some higher power shunts Onogoro into a viable orbit around Laevo? And your prayer is going to bring about the very orbit your people desire?”

  “We pray to ourselves, Lady Keiko,” said the alien, ignoring Andrik. “Each of us is a god in turn. We all worship the septa-prime, whom each will become turn by turn in the cycle of our apotheosis.”

  “Apotheosis?”

  “I speak now not of kybertrance, but of the ordinary social world we share with you at present.”

  Confused, Keiko nodded at the aliens lying back to back on their slate-grey bier. “Are they also gods—intermittently?”

  “Even they, who maintain us in underlinkage and psalm in death-sleep a versicle of our people’s common prayer.”

  “You can’t move worlds by psalms or magic,” Andrik protested. “The Heavenbridge isn’t terribly large, but—”

  “Should we fear its want of largeness, Lady Keiko, or the wiles of human largesse?”

  “Damn it!” Andrik overrode both the Kyber and her. “If you’ll switch yourselves off—go into kybertrance, or hibernation, or whatever it is—we can take a hundred or more of you to safety with us.”

  “Perhaps,” cautioned Keiko.

  “To our own world, thirty-seven lights from here, a place of safety.” Andrik pointed heavenward, grimaced. “It’s one of the tragedies of the universe that over aeons a sapient species arises only to be obliterated by a—by a cockeyed cosmic accident,” he concluded bitterly.

  A Kyber behind the family speaker looked into the mists concealing Dextro and intoned. “Nothing is accidental, everything meshes, deaths are significant, life has a cause.”

  “But the conjunction of life with an event that crassly annihilates it,” Andrik declared, “is an accident!”

  “Part of the plan of a star,” said the family speaker. “As for the plan of our planet, we shall walk in the sheen and the shadow of Laevo, sun-shadow our shield.”

  “As Craig said was possible,” Keiko reminded Andrik, “the new sun blocking the blast of the old.”

  “But what’s to guarantee such an alignment?” Andrik protested. “You have no guarantee.”

  “Throughout the community of families, we read the signatures of suns and decipher their messages.”

  Keiko wondered if this were possible. Humanity had long had experimental syntheses of the organic and the mechanical: the brain and the computer interfacing, disabled limbs co-operating with sophisticated prosthetics, mechanical systems exploiting the advantages of sensory plug-ins. But would a human being ever be able to see the solar wind, or X-rays, or the fabric of meta-space? The Kybers had apparently grown into these capabilities, evolved into them, maybe even restructured themselves along biomechanical lines to achieve this condition of heightened awareness. What hope was there for humanity to do likewise?

  “Are you born or made?” Keiko asked impulsively, thinking of Sixkiller and his implacable hostility toward the aliens.

  “Born,” sang the family speaker. “Born, born, born; born in Bethlehem. Each crater a cradle, each maze a manger. Like you and your gods, the Kybers are born.”

  “But you’re all adults,” Keiko said. “Where are the children? Don’t you have to grow into adulthood?”

  “Of course we must grow.” The Kyber suddenly elevated itself another half metre, then slid smoothly back to its previous height. “The child is father to the clan. There have been no children among us since a hundred revolutions after Onogoro’s last decoupling from Laevo. But, Lady Keiko, after our departure from this unstable orbit there will be children again.”

  “Your birth cycles—your gestation periods—correspond to the times of transit between the two suns?” Andrik looked at Keiko, then back at the complacent alien. “That means you have children no more often than every—what?—every couple of thousand years.”

  “Blessed events,” said the Kyber laconically.

  “And damn rare ones,” Andrik replied. “With such a birth rate how do you manage to replace those among you who die? Or don’t your people die?”

  “Frequently,” the Kyber responded. “We all die frequently.”

  “Are you immortal, then? Are these ‘little deaths’ a means of defeating Death itself?”

  “They are a means of knowing,” the alien said.

  Keiko watched Andrik pace among the four resurrected Kybers, scrutinizing their faces and trying in vain to control his excitement. Each time he looked back at her, his eyes glinted with Dextro light and the set of his lips bespoke either triumph or a long-deferred vindication. He seemed alternately smug and chastened—but it was also clear that he felt genuine gratitude for what she had helped him accomplish, whatever that was. Lady Keiko, his eyes told her, you have proved yourself as alien and admirable as the Onogorovans. And yet, in truth, she had little understanding of what she had done. …

  “Of knowing what?” Andrik asked. “The secrets of your sun’s life cycle? The answer to the riddle of ultimate meaning? If you can’t tell us what you know, tell us how to know what you know.”

  The family’s speaker tottered away from its human questioners, stared ritually skyward, then dropped its wall-eyed gaze back upon both Andrik and Keiko. Its lateral pupils had swollen to the size and colour of overripe grapes; the tatters of sailcloth flesh draping its polelike arms popped in the wind like firecrackers.

  “Impossible,” it told them. “To tell you is probably impossible. But to show you, yes, that remains an option.”

  NINE

  Keiko and Andrik stayed in the Kyber palace for nearly three more hours, explaining, arguing, gawking. One of the items on Sixkiller’s utility belt was a miniature recording unit, and Andrik used it to preserve the arcane pronouncements of the family speaker. For the most part, the alien’s one- or two-line speeches had either the puzzling succinctness of koans, Zen riddles propounded by a living machine, or the dour flavour of bad puns indifferently peddled and garnished. The longer they stayed among the Kybers, in fact, the more amazed Keiko grew at the dearth of real information conveyed by these pronouncements—if, indeed, she and Andrik were not simply too obtuse to extract from them their intricately encoded meanings. Maybe the cold had something to do with the seeming unintelligibility of the Kyber aphorisms. In any case, after the first hour of interrogation and badinage, two of the aliens suddenly dropped back into kybertrance, freezing where they stood, and a third stalked out of the atrium into the encircling labyrinth. Twilight wove its way through the fog, and the wind picked up.

  “Let us take you off this planet before your sun flares up,” Andrik pleaded for the tenth or twelfth lime. “Some of you, at least.”

  “Your offer to turn the Heavenbridge into Noah’s Ark is undoubtedly well intentioned,” warbled the family speaker. “But the ‘safety’ toward which you would steer us would be—perhaps—inimical to our essence. Moreover, you do not truly understand steersmanship, by which we mean the controlled direction of a process.”

  “What process?”

  “Thought and metathought, world and metaworld, cosmos and metacosmos. Your eyes still do not permit you to peer over the threshold of This-Reality, Dr Norn. You are as yet unconjoined with your machines.”

  “Tell me how—”

  “Laevo rises soon, and you must return to
your Platform. Visit us at the Rite of Conjoining, when we adjure again the influence of Dextro and remake ourselves according to the precepts of a different light.”

  The Kyber swivelled its head, elevated itself eighteen or twenty centimetres, then abruptly shut down all visible organic operation. Keiko and Andrik were alone again with the unmoving husks of several alien intelligences. The Kyber that had earlier departed, walking out as if in a fit of impatience or pique, still had not come back. Andrik turned off the portable recording unit and signalled that he was finally ready to leave; there was little more they were likely to learn today, and Sixkiller had probably just about given up on them.

  Guided by the markings of the pilot’s phosphor-pen, they retraced their path through the Kyber labyrinth. Keiko was silent. It was too cold either to think or to talk.

  Once out of the maze, they clambered up the steep, shadow-etched bank of the crater. Atop the ridge, forty or fifty metres distant, perched their floater, resembling a great, silver wasp. Dextro was setting, and Laevo had positioned itself low on the horizon, a hard little circle pouring bone-white radiance through the mists. More startling to Keiko was the apparition of two Kybers hovering in silhouette beside their floater, like medieval saints on stilts. She and Andrik exchanged a surprised glance, and together they hurried across the ridge to see what was happening.

  “Kei ko,” sang a melodious feminine voice as they approached. “My mentor, my madonna, whose hardness is also mine.”

  Sixkiller stood between the two aliens, his back pressed against the floater; he appeared to be trying to protect expeditionary property from a threat still not wholly clear to him. His eyes—Keiko saw when they were nearer—were wide with apprehension and resolve. He brightened visibly upon catching sight of them. With choppy gestures he urged them to hurry.

  “You’ve found my student,” Keiko told Sixkiller.

  “This other one found me,” said the floater pilot, looking back and forth between the two Kybers. “And then your—your student showed up.”

  The fingers of the former septa-prime stroked the nose of the aircraft. “This is the one in which I rode, yes?”