It was starting to sink in.
Lian Wei was past the point of needing friends.
I crutched Kaden back to the exit, hir good arm around my shoulder, our respective good legs taking the weight of our respective bad ones. Kaden’s wounds went deeper than mine; se hissed, clenched hir teeth with each step as we hobbled away from the light. Eri’s singularity, close below, added weight to every step.
“She’s changed,” I said.
“Had to,” se gritted. “Put this whole thing together while you were sleeping with the enemy.”
I let hir take more of hir weight on the next step—
“Shhhhit…”
—and took it back, point made. “We’re all sleeping with the enemy, Kaden. Anyone who wasn’t would’ve been dead a thousand builds ago.”
“If you say so.”
“It’s inspiring to see you show such generosity to someone who just came within a few centimeters of slicing open your femoral artery.”
“Like she said. Gotta sell this.” Kaden’s face turned toward me; in the dark, it might as well have been a radar dish. “She better be right about you.”
“Right?”
“That you don’t come around easy. But when you’re in you’re in.”
“You think she’s wrong?”
“Think she’s dead right. Stick by your friends, no question. Maybe even when they turn out to be mass murderers.” Se grunted. “Always were Chimp’s pet. I wasn’t the only one who found it creepy.”
Chimp’s pet. I turned the words over in my head as we paused to catch our breath. When did they hang that cute little term of endearment around my neck?
“So why you going along with this?”
“You went four builds, never breathed a word. You were gonna sell us out, would’ve done it already.”
We started forward again. The hatch beckoned in the distance, piecemeal brightness filtering through mutant undergrowth.
I remembered two ’spores, and a third between. “Dao’s not exactly on board, is he?”
“He’ll come around.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
Kaden stopped again. Turned.
“Lian trusts you,” se said. “Don’t know why, but I guess she’s got her reasons. And I trust her, so here we are. Plus it would obviously help if we could harness that sick Chimp-Sunday dynamic of yours. Things’d go a lot easier if we had someone with a bit of pull.”
“But.”
“But the fact that you didn’t run to the Chimp doesn’t make you an ally. Maybe figured we’d stop you. Maybe just too chickenshit to take a side.” Se turned, and kept going, and I almost didn’t notice that se hadn’t answered my question.
“I guess we’ll find out,” I said. One last vine, thick as my leg, squirmed off the path at our approach. “Act wounded. We’re on.”
“Chimp! Gurney!” But one was already gliding into view down the slope, its clamshell lid gaping in anticipation of fresh meat.
“It’s good to see you, Kaden,” Chimp remarked as I helped hir onto the pallet. “How are you feeling?”
“Great.” Kaden winced, lay back, let the gurney close over hir. Probing snakes, thin as fiberop, swarmed hir wounds.
“What happened?” the Chimp said.
“What does it look like? The forest attacked hir. It attacked me. Gone completely fucking feral.”
Kaden had nothing to add. Spinal blocks can be distracting at the best of times.
Chimp: “How?”
“A couple of mutations left to simmer for fifty thousand years, that’s how.” We started back up the corridor. “Don’t ask me to go back in after Dao.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s not enough left of him to make it worth the risk. Send a bot if you want him so bad.” A calculated risk, but Chimp wasn’t the impetuous sort. At the very least it would wait to hear my report.
“Sunday.” IF vocal stress harmonics > X THEN invoke name. DO UNTIL calm.
“What.” Into the tube. There was an infirmary a couple of levels up. Probably unnecessary—the gurney could handle a simple flesh wound—but the system was programmed to play it safe under incomplete-information scenarios.
“You’re injured too.”
“I’m okay. I’ll glue myself together upstairs.”
Satisfied, it moved on. “Can you explain how low-lumen photosynthesis could generate enough energy to support such rapid movem—”
“Look up turgor, for fucks’ sake. Those vines had gigasecs to build up hydrostatic pressure. Released it all in a split-second. Lucky it didn’t take hir whole leg off.”
The hesitation was so slight I barely noticed it; the Chimp could have run a thousand scenarios in that time. “That would account for initial damage along any given route. But there wouldn’t be enough time to re-establish turgor pressure between multiple incursions along the same path.”
Out of the tube and a few kilos lighter. Kaden’s gurney slid on ahead. I lingered a moment, distracted by a new scrawl of swirls and jiggles and dots (new—now there’s a relative word) the Painters must have left sometime over the past few millennia. I wondered distantly what they meant. That word popped into my mind again: feral.
“Sunday.”
“I know.” I picked up the pace, lowered my voice enough to release the Chimp from DO UNTIL. “Obviously they’re not being powered by the usual redox reactions.”
“Do you know what they could be using instead?”
I did. But it wouldn’t do to make it look too easy. Lian had cut me a tissue sample while we’d been catching up; I pulled it from my belt. “Let me run this. Then we’ll talk.”
The infirmary was less compartment than cul-desac, an invagination of corridor containing a hardlined sarcophagus and two gurney sockets. A lab bench nestled in their midst, a horseshoe of screens and sample ports curved around a pseudopod. The sequencer was primarily intended for human tissue, but everything’s the same tinkertoy that far down. It only took a few minutes to extract the genome; maybe another twenty to extrapolate the resulting phenotypes. By the time I was finished Kaden had decided to sleep through the mandatory sixteen-hour convalescence window and availed hirself of the general anesthesia option. Chimp and I were alone again.
Not exactly a Sunset Moment.
“It’s a gradient pump,” I said.
“I see.”
Maybe it did, or maybe it was flowchart filler. “Any gradient would work, in principle. Ionic, thermal, gravitic. Any time you’ve got energy flowing from A to B, you can siphon some off in between.”
“Gravitic,” the Chimp guessed. Maybe not filler after all.
“Yeah. Glade’s right above the Higgs Conduit, right? There’s a gravity gradient—in some spots it’s so strong the tree trunks actually spread out to handle simultaneous vectors from different directions. And these sequences”—I gestured at the workbench display—“seem to code for a metabolic chain that exploits that gradient.”
“I have no records of any such processes ever evolving on Earth.”
“Why would they? Back on Earth you could have a single organism stretching from sea level to the edge of space and the raw gradient would barely be competitive even if you could figure out some way to make Krebs cycle work across a few hundred kliks.” Just say the lines. “But everything’s squashed here, right? You’re going from one gee to a thousand in the space of fourteen kilometers, and that’s before you split your center of mass in two.” Don’t pause. Don’t hesitate. Don’t leave any opening for buts or what-ifs. “Whole different set of rules. More energy. Everything from tissue growth to waste-O2 production amps up.”