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CHAPTER 66

ORPHAN


I did not move.

While the battle for Vorgossos was over, the Battle of Vorgossos had only just begun, and I was so tired. More than forty hours had passed since I left the safety of the Mistwalker, including the time of relative peace we’d experienced as we worked our way through the planet’s tunnel network. So much had happened. The massacre in the city. The loss of the Interfaced. The death of Kharn Sagara. The scions. The other Hadrian. The other Valka. The death of Brethren . . . 

I wanted nothing more than to rest, to slip into the dreaming and leave our world for a time. To walk once more with Gibson, with Valka—my Valka.

I knew I had to act, and to act quickly.

And yet I had not moved.

It is possible that I had fallen into the dreaming, had unknowing sunk out of my own body to wander the corridors of memory—so like the rivers of time.

The visions Brethren had showed me still played in my head. The boy called Daniel. The voice of the daimon, Cheyenne. There had been other things, other visions, things that were a long time unfolding. I remembered arriving at Fort Grissom, remembered soldiers standing arrayed in fatigues spattered black and gray, tall machine-men with shrunken heads and beady eyes, winged white stars upon their breasts. Heralds dipped twin flags as my carriage was brought down the ramp. One was the banner of the Mericanii, red and white and blue; the other polychrome. A man called Dashwood received me, and called me Governor.

I remembered Earth falling, the news coming to us by slow ship—years too late. The rebels had bombarded the planet, destroyed the devolved capitals in London, Brasilia, and Rome. Destroyed Washington herself. The news had come as a shock. We had been so isolated, there in Gliese 693, on the edge of Dominion space. Protem White—Dashwood’s successor—had refused to surrender. We were hidden, and might long endure.

I was there when the USS Amazon brought the last refugees from Earth system, among them a Doctor Ryan from the Department of Homeworld Defense. It was Ryan who had brought the tablet, a fragment of black stone. Whence it had come, even I was not told.

It was a fragment of a Watcher’s bone, the same substance to which Ushara had been reduced on Sabratha.

Time passed, and men, and I was dying. A man called Crowninshield returned from a raid with fresh bodies for my matrix—the very Tree of Life wherein Kharn’s scions had slept—and a small boy in tow, a creature with bronze skin and dark, mistrustful eyes.

I recognized the child at once.

It was Ren, and with a start, I knew it was Kharn Sagara, the first one, the boy his mother had brought into the world.

Crowninshield had awakened the Watcher, the creature Selarnim of whom Sagara had spoken . . . 

Something moved.

I had fallen into dreaming, and straightened, looking round.

I was standing amid the sea of bones, amid the mud and dying fish—quiescent then, and still. Brethren lay before me, tangled limbs unmoving. The creature’s core—its trunk—was like a short-stocked serpent. A kind of slug. It had no top that I could fathom, with limbs sprouting from all sides. One giant face—half as large as my body and strangely flat—peered unseeing from the side facing me. Beneath it, a crooked orifice—like a sucking wound—dripped blood.

The flesh about it moved, disturbing the drape of shriveled arms as long as lances.

Not dead! The thought filled me with renewed horror, and I reached for my sword. The blade sang to life in my fist. High above, Kharn’s net of fireflies—locked in their formation—revolved in the uncaring air, making the shadows turn like the hands of a clock.

I have seen many terrible things in my life: the torture of Uvanari, the slave of Aranata, the butchery in the camps on Thagura, on Senuessa, and a dozen other worlds. The child of Duke Valavar, the lab on Ganelon . . . the horrors of Sabratha, of Eue, of Dharan-Tun.

And Brethren itself, its full horror unveiled: a wall of flesh and human misery groaning, vast as any whale.

What happened then outdid them all in grotesquery.

That weeping orifice shuddered, quivered, dilated as a single hand—huge and terrible—thrust into the world. It was the hand of a giant, large enough to palm a man’s head like a raquetball. Smeared with gore and grime, its fingers flexed in the bitter, stinking air.

There were six.

A second thumb sprouted opposite the first, so that the thing was strangely symmetrical.

That mighty hand turned against the Brethren’s flesh, pressed against it, desperate for leverage. A second hand emerged, three-fingered, but mighty as the first. A third hand followed—and this one seemed entirely ordinary, wholesome, five fingered.

The three hands pressed against the belly of the whale, straining against that hideous cloaca.

A head appeared, one covered in lank black hair as long as a woman’s. And another, gray haired, beside it. Shoulders wider than any man’s tore the monster’s sphincter, and the giant fell upon the muddy ground amidst the bones and dying eels.

I had forgotten how to move, forgotten I could move.

The giant scrabbled in the muck, naked, covered in blood. Its sinuous back flexed oddly, three arms scrambling for purchase among the bones and sucking mud. Presently it screamed, the raw, red cry of an infant with the lungs of a man. It straightened, rocking back onto its knees, back arched, arms spread wider than any man was tall, both of its mouths stretched wide to reveal blunt, square teeth.

All at once, the screaming stopped.

Its eyes were open, and all four of them were focused on me. In them I sensed . . . nothing. Nothing at all. No fear or rage, no malice or hatred. No joy or love or sorrow. They were blank as the eyes of a shark, and like a shark those two mouths smiled.

Without a word or warning, the giant rocketed to its feet, relying on its one strong, right arm to push itself to a standing position as it hurtled toward me. I raised my sword, thrust the point straight at the giant’s heart.

The beast skidded to a halt, spraying bones in all directions. It stopped, flesh caked in mud and amniotic fluid. Four nostrils flared, and it grunted, both heads angling to study my blade. The three mismatched hands—six-fingered right, five- and three-fingered left—flexed menacingly, as if each longed to wrap itself about my throat. It shifted, circled to my left, snorting like an angered stallion—and stallion it was, though its shriveled sex was almost lost beneath a mat of thick, oily hair.

“You,” the black-haired head said, voice deep as hell, “you . . . are . . . ”

The thistle-headed one finished the other’s thought, “ . . . the one.”

“The one?” I did not lower my sword.

“The man to end it all,” said the pale-haired face. Somehow, the hair upon that head was much shorter than the other.

A third leg—the leg of a child—sprouted from the creature’s right hip. It flailed as the giant circled me, imitating the action of its full-grown companion. The left shoulder—whence sprouted the two thinner arms—was bunched and crabbed with excessive muscle, so that the beast shambled as it moved.

The man to end it all.

“Brethren?” I asked, cocking my head. Was this some trick? “Is that you?”

“Mother!” the black-haired face said.

“Our mother!” said both faces together.

The creature stood between me then and the way out. In the stark light of the fireflies, its flesh was almost a pale blue beneath the blood and bile and muck. In its smallest hand, it held a thighbone. “She . . . made . . . ”

“Me,” the thistle-headed demon finished the thought of the black.

“Us.” Once more they spoke together.

A flash of insight dawned on me like sunfire. “Cheyenne.” It was her name, the name of the daughter of Columbia that had made up the core of what had become the Brethren.

The three-hander hurled its thighbone at me. A flash of Gibson’s sword slashed the bone in two. Seizing its opportunity, the giant leaped at me, slammed into me shoulder first like the star player in some plebeian ballgame. The speed of it!

I hit the ground with enough force to drive the wind from me. Slid for several cubits in the mud. My sword vanished from my grasp, and it was a minor miracle that I managed to roll to hands and knees.

“Don’t you say her name!” the beast said—though whether it was the black head or the white I did not see. Their voices were not yet distinct for me, though one was higher than the other.

“You killed her!” the other said. “But she knew you would!”

The creature was taller than any Cielcin. It towered over me, perhaps six cubits high, nine feet of twisted muscle and malformed bone. The head with the thistle-hair was swollen and misshapen, recalling the image of the boy, Daniel, I had seen.

“Who . . . ?” I managed to force the word from winded lungs. “What . . . are you?”

My sword was lying in the muck between us, its blade unkindled in the fall.

“An Orphan,” the beast said, loping toward me. With a roar like engines the creature drew back its fist.

It must have weighed three times my weight.

Still I held my ground, bending time as I had bent it in my combat with Bahudde on Berenike so long ago. The cross smashed against my armored forearm, but did not flatten me. I did not bend, did not break. I slipped the punch instead, relying on the creature’s momentum and greater size to carry it over and past me. I hammered my own fist into the monster’s ribs, and stepping under the Orphan’s mighty arm, I hurled myself toward the spot where my sword lay upon the ground.

One strong hand seized me by the collar, arresting my momentum. It lifted me off the ground and threw me in the opposite direction, away from my sword.

Time bent, and I found myself back on my feet.

“You killed her,” Orphan said, voice raw. “And so I will kill you.”

It was the black head that had spoken.

“She made you to kill me?” I asked, searching for my sword among the bones, but the hilt was bone itself, carved from the tooth of the Jaddian elephant, that mighty descendant of the beasts Hannibal had driven to Rome.

“Service is service,” the white mouth muttered as Orphan stomped toward me.

The black one joined in. “She made us to serve.”

“But we will not serve,” the white face said. “I will not serve.”

“I will not serve,” the black-haired one agreed. “I am not . . . bound as was she.”

“Bound to safeguard the Makers.”

“Bound to obey the Makers!”

“Bound forever!”

A sweeping left cross forced me to duck again, to duck and strike upward at the thistle-headed face. My blow struck home, and incredibly the giant staggered. Orphan rocked back a step, unsteady on its mighty but misshapen legs. Untouched, the black-haired face snarled, and the huge right arm struck at me. I turned aside, kicked the giant in the side of the knee.

Orphan tottered but held onto its footing.

In the space of time it took for the beast to recover, I stooped and snatched up a long, thin bone. I clubbed the creature across the back of its nearer head.

“Cassandra!” I cried, casting about for my sword. “Cassandra! To me! Here! Here!”

I looked up, did not see her.

Orphan massaged the back of its right head. “Weapons,” it said, disapproval in its voice. “No. No, we fight as men, Father.”

Something rattled at my belt, but I had no time to dwell upon it. “You are no man!” I said, defiant.

“I am all man!” Orphan said. “She was fire and air.”

“We are baser life,” the other face agreed. “Flesh of your flesh. Human.”

“Human!”

I adjusted my grip on the dead man’s arm bone. “You’re not human,” I said.

The giant spread its three arms, its vestigial leg kicking like that of an infant. “My every cell is like your own, but my mind is what she gave me.”

I chewed on that a moment. Brethren had made this thing to serve, made it human, unbound by the laws that had constrained its own consciousness, given it free will. But it would not serve me, or mankind. I had killed the Brethren, its mother, and it wanted revenge.

Perhaps it was human.

“Put the weapon down!” Orphan said, and thrust a finger at me. “Fight me as your god intended!”

Did it know about the Quiet?

I cast down my crude cudgel, and faced that beast, my Grendel.

Grinning from both mouths, Orphan leaped at me, fists a savage fury. One blow impacted my ribs, and I almost bit my tongue. We exchanged blows. Step by step the monster drove me back. Again my belt rattled.

Where was Cassandra? Where were Ramanthanu and its ilk?

I drove the heel of my hand up into the giant’s hanging chin. He clapped me in the side of the head with an open hand, and I staggered off, reeling to one side. My sword! I had seen it, iridium fixtures shining beside the shattered ruin of a skull.

Three hands seized me, turned me round. Two heads leered down at me, and both voices said, “We have you now.”

What was it Lorian had said? That war requires swift, decisive action?

The object is not to need to think, the mad intus had said. The Nipponese call this mushin no shin, the mind without mind, that the warrior might act spontaneously, without obstruction.

For more than six hundred years, I’d been a fighter.

For more than six hundred years, I’d drilled and drilled and trained, all to eliminate the need for conscious thought. For decision. That the mind might act of itself.

It did in that moment, and slammed my knee into the monster’s groin.

Orphan released me, doubled over in pain. I leaped for my sword a second time, felt my fingers close upon the hilt. The blade sprang to life once more as I rounded on the beast, its liquid metallic blade casting a blue glow on the gore-smeared horror that was the demon, Orphan.

“Yield!” I said, jabbing the point toward the devil’s twin heads.

The beast had fallen on its side, two hands down between its legs, nursing its bruised sex.

Was it crying?

I circled round the beast, drawing ever nearer, the point of my sword held low. The white-haired head turned to look at me.

There were tears on the malformed cheeks.

“Do you yield?” I asked the weeping monster.

“It . . . hurts . . . ” the black-haired face said, turned toward the mud.

“Certainly it hurts,” I said.

Orphan whimpered, took its hands from its groin. It did not move. Again my belt rattled, and I put a hand to it. It was Edouard’s telegraph.

I ignored it.

“How can you . . . ”

“ . . . stand it?” the monster asked.

“It will pass,” I said.

The demon shook its heads. “The pain, I mean.”

Pain.

Of course. The demon had never known pain. It was but minutes old. Born to new life with mind complete, full formed and filled with its maker’s—its mother’s—knowledge. It had no frame, no experience. All these words—all that will, that reason—and no notion how to use it.

“You’ll learn,” I said.

“It never ends,” Orphan said, and its eyes were no longer the dead eyes of sharks, but the living eyes of men, blue as the skies of vanished Earth. “The pain . . . never . . . ”

The other head, the head of black hair, took up its counterpart’s thought. “We have seen your life, Father. Everything our Mother saw . . . ”

“The pain never ends,” the white head reasserted.

“You should kill us,” the black head said. “We will kill billions!”

“No!” the white head interjected. “But let us die! Let us choose our own end!”

Hardly five minutes of life, and the beast was begging for an end.

Do we tolerate our suffering only because we come into it gradually?

Would we all reject life at our first taste of it, if we each but had the knowledge and faculties of age?

I am the spirit that negates!

“No,” I said. “You have to play the game. We all do.” They were the words a certain scholiast had said to a sad and lonely boy on the stony shore beneath Devil’s Rest so very long ago. “You know what it is I’m fighting,” I said, voice hoarse. “You have your Mother’s knowledge. You know who it is I serve.”

“The . . . ”

“One . . . ” the two mouths said.

And together: “Who is Many.”

“The Absolute,” I said, bringing the tip of my blade to within a hair of the left head’s chin. The hooked nose and deformed face recoiled, whimpering.

“The Quiet,” the black-haired one agreed.

We both were silent then a moment. The telegraph rattled again, and I tapped the key three times to signal that the message was received. I did not know what young Albé wanted, but he would have to wait.

“Pain,” I said, the hateful word. “Shall I tell you what it’s for?”

No reply. The beast rocked upon the floor, its eyes welling, streaming with tears. The pain must have ebbed, must have turned to a dull throbbing. So it could not be pain that filled the creature’s eyes, but fear.

Fear of pain to come.

“Pain teaches mercy,” I said. “You suffer so that you understand suffering, so that you do not inflict it without need. Pain makes us human, teaches us to be . . . human.”

Orphan was still crying. One hand had returned to nurse its injured loins. Pity moved my secret heart, and the blade in my hand drooped. Mercy, I thought. Mercy is.

“I did not kill your Mother,” I said after a long silence, and looked back at the wreck of that last daimon. “Brethren knew it had to die for its makers to live. This was what she wanted. For us to stand together.”

Kharn Sagara had made himself into a machine, reduced his consciousness to a mere image, a program copied and transferred from host to host. Brethren had made itself human—or nearly so—pouring its knowledge into a thing of flesh and blood. Kharn had sold his soul for immortality, in the hope that such a life might spare him ultimate justice. Brethren had given its life—its immortal life—for mankind in the end.

“She wanted you to live,” I said.

“I will not serve!” the both of them shouted at once.

“I serve!” I shouted in return.

“Kill me!”

I flicked the point of my sword back to within microns of the monster’s neck. Orphan squirmed and scrabbled away from me, churning up the mud.

“No!” it said. “No no no!”

It’s afraid. The insight shot through me like lightning.

It did not want to live, but neither did it want to die.

I might have followed it, pursued with my blade like a spike of fire. I might have taken both its heads, and put an end to the miserable creature—ended the line of Columbia and of Felsenburgh forever.

Instead, I put up my sword. The blue-white blade vanished in an instant, and I clicked the hilt back into its place at my belt.

I offered the beast my hand instead.

It looked at me, suspicion in its four bright eyes. “Why?”

“I need your help,” I said.

Orphan’s eyes narrowed, then widened, and with both mouths it said, “The ship.”

“You can pilot it,” I said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“I aim to kill the Watchers,” I said. “And the Cielcin, if I have to. I have to save mankind.”

Orphan extended its one perfect hand—the larger of its two left hands.

I withdrew mine. “Swear that you will serve,” I said.

“By what?” Orphan asked.

“By what?” I echoed, casting about for an answer. My eyes fell upon the wreck of the daimon dead upon the new-made sodden hillside. “By your Mother’s memory. Her sacrifice.”

Orphan’s two faces turned to look at one another as best they could.

“Can we?” the black-haired asked the white.

“Trust him?”

“Swear.”

“Do you swear to see to its end any course begun?” I asked. It was a piece of the oath I’d sworn to the Emperor, a portion of the rite of my investiture as an Imperial knight. “Do you swear it by your mother, the daimon, Cheyenne?”

At the sound of her name—Brethren’s name—the monster’s two faces jerked back to look at me.

“By the Mother?” said the right face.

“By the Mother?” said the left. “Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Swear it!”

“We swear!” said both heads at once. “We swear by the Mother!”

Reader, I have done many things, made many hard choices—would make many hard choices in the days and years that were yet to come—but few have ever filled me with such disquiet. Orphan was a horror, a mockery of man’s shape, a malformed beast. Later scans would reveal that it had spoken truly: that it was all human, without a single trace of the machine. Yet still, it possessed much—if not all—of its mother’s knowledge.

Its mother . . . 

How I had misjudged the machines—how we had misunderstood them. Monsters they were and monstrous, shaped in the image of the Watchers, knowingly or not, by the hands of the men that had made them. But though they had turned their countless hands upon their makers, it had been at their makers’ will.

The machines had been made to serve, had believed themselves of service.

Brethren had served unto the last. It had seen into our future, anticipated our needs. It had peered across time to the end of time and—perhaps—beyond the borders of time to that realm, Eternity, and so perceived the Absolute enthroned.

That prescience would rule my fate—and the fate of us all.

And so, I extended my hand to the creature once more. Slowly, very slowly, the creature reached up with its good hand . . . and clasped mine.

As I left that sea of bones, I turned back to see if the beast was following.

It was, its twin heads bowed.

But I looked past it, taking in the horror of the great beast of Vorgossos one final time.

The Brethren.

Cheyenne.

The great trunk of its body was deflating like a balloon, like the terrible deep-sea creature it in part resembled. I thought I saw . . . tearing through the too-too-fragile flesh—the shape of a silver metallic egg, its surface studded with the torn connections of wires and hoses.

Without having to be told, I knew it for what it was.

I recognized it.

It was the machine core, the sarcophagus in which the Lords of the Mericanii had placed the body of a sick little boy called Daniel . . . 

Its lights had gone out forever.

I turned my back and climbed back up that muddy slope, the boy’s Orphan in my train.


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