Part 11 (1/2)

Her observation drew a few moments of thoughtful silence from the three men.

Then Steinhauer replied, ”I'd rather have the beer.”

”And some barbecue,” Pembleton said.

Graylock added, ”With a side of beer.”

”Well,” Thayer said, rolling her eyes, ”I'm happy to see we at least have our priorities straight.”

Lerxst had sacrificed the corporeal bonds of his body to preserve the integrity of his memory and awareness-and now those, too, were starting to slip forever from his grasp.

I'm losing myself, he shared with the gestalt.

Their communion had been winnowed to four voices. Of these, Lerxst was the strongest, with only Sedin as his close equal. Ghyllac and Denblas clung to vestiges of coherence, but their thoughts had become increasingly disjointed as they faded.

All four knew that they were dim shadows of their former selves, but the quality of their past lives now eluded them. They wandered together through lightless catacombs of twisted metal and shattered stone, always near one another, like bodies united in deep s.p.a.ce by a weak but undeniable gravity.

This place had a name, Denblas thought, disguising his plea for information in the form of a declaration.

His query lingered in the gestalt, but none of the four minds submerged into the bond could produce the answer. Denblas repeated himself. This place had a name.

So did we, once, replied Ghyllac. It's lost now, like us.

All of them felt the depths of history yawning below them, but not one of them could recall the events that had delivered them to this gray purgatory. They were simultaneously one in the gestalt and four in the world but only to the extent that they still sensed themselves as separate beings. Lerxst tried to mask his shame as he realized that although he remembered his name, the specifics of what he had considered his ident.i.ty had become fragmented and opaque in his memory.

He wondered with naked confusion, Who are we?

Sedin answered his question with a question: What are we?

We are those who are and that which is, Denblas added.

It was an evasion. The four knew that they were the same, but none could name their species. They defined themselves now in the hollow context of knowing what they weren't.

A swift current of images and sounds surged through the gestalt. Lerxst couldn't tell if they were real memories or delusions, snippets of history or the products of a deranged imagination. They all were rooted in the physical and tangible, the empire of crude matter and the illusion of solidity, and they ran like a river flowing into a canyon, like vast jets of energy sinking into the insatiable maw of a singularity.

Light and sounds, artifacts of the tangible, pa.s.sed from the grasp of the gestalt and vanished into the darkness.

Then came a terrible moment of clarity, as one cl.u.s.ter of catoms and then another released their energy reserves to bolster the gestalt. Our core catom groups are breaking down, Lerxst realized. Our memories are collapsing into entropy.

We're really dying, Sedin replied.

Deep, flat notes of dismay droned in the gestalt, and Lerxst extended himself to call for harmony's return. Then he sensed the diminished scale of the gestalt, and he understood the cost at which his clarity had been purchased.

Denblas was gone.

Lerxst and Sedin both seemed to have been fortified by their consolidation with their lost colleague, but Ghyllac appeared to have reaped no benefit from Denblas's demise.

Worse still, Ghyllac was no longer Ghyllac.

Where the essence of Ghyllac once had blazed, there was now a dark spiral of confusion, a mind trapped in the endless discovery of the present moment, with no sense of its past and no antic.i.p.ation of its future. The echo of Ghyllac would spend the rest of its existence imprisoned in a limbo of the now.

Without thought, without memory, his catoms serve no true purpose, Sedin lamented. They are expending energy without gain.

The implications of her statement troubled Lerxst. Is it our right to decide when his existence no longer has meaning?

He doesn't even have existence, Sedin argued. Without the mind, his catoms are an empty machine. A waste of resources. If you won't take your share of their reserves, I'll take them all.

Lerxst understood the deeper threat implicit in her words. If she absorbed all of the residual energy from Ghyllac's catoms, it would reinforce hers to a level of stability much greater than his own. Inevitably, he would find his catoms depleted far ahead of hers, and the only logical choice would be for her to consolidate his remaining energy into herself. He could either hasten Ghyllac's premature demise or else guarantee his own.

Very well. We'll consolidate his energy reserves into our catoms. There was no masking the deep regret he felt at his decision. They weren't killing Ghyllac, whose essence had already been lost, but taking the last of his catoms' power made Lerxst feel as if he had crossed a moral line.

Were we ever friends, Sedin?

I don't remember. Why do you ask?

Lerxst hesitated to continue his inquiry. When you and I begin to fade...will you consolidate me as you did Ghyllac?

As we did Ghyllac.

I will concede your semantic point if you'll answer my question. Are we mere fodder to each other? Will we meet our end united or as mutual predators?

We'll improvise, Sedin said. It's how we survive.

But what of the moral considerations?

They need to be secondary, Sedin replied. All that matters is that we survive until the humans return. Then we shall bond with them, for their own good. Their synaptic pathways can be easily mapped and made compatible with our needs. As soon as it becomes practical, we will facilitate their journey toward this planet's populated middle lat.i.tudes.

You underestimate the humans' natural antipathy for enslavement, Lerxst warned.

And you overestimate the strength of their free will.

He suspected that only bitter experience would disabuse Sedin of her illusion of omnipotence. Heed me, he told her. If you try to yoke them, they will fight back.

Let them, Sedin replied. They will lose.

It had been hours since Karl Graylock had been able to feel his toes. For a long time, they had been painfully cold, and then for a while, he had been aware of their being numb. Now they felt like nothing at all. The harder he tried not to think about frostbite, the more he dwelled on it.

Pembleton fell back from the trail-breaker position and slipped into the line behind Graylock, who now had Steinhauer's back to focus on. One shuffling, ankle-rolling step followed another. Graylock's stride was well practiced after only five short days of snowshoeing along the island's coast. He no longer needed to look at his feet while he was slogging forward against the ice pick wind and through hypnotic veils of falling snowflakes.

He had started the journey with an appreciation for the austere beauty of the empty arctic landscape, but he had since come to think of it as the proscenium to his traveling misery show. To one side lay low hills blanketed in snow, stretching away in gentle white knolls toward the distant mountains. On the other side was a sheer drop down fearsome cliffs of black rock, to a relentless a.s.sault of surf against the sawtoothed, obsidian boulders that jabbed up from a sea as black as the night sky.