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For millennia the Illuminates have wondered at their incessant collecting of
pulsars, their veiled experiments. We
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xt can scarcely hope to extinguish such beings if we do not know their
deepest, perhaps most dangerous abilities.*
*You have something we must possess.*
*Your Nought. *
*I sensed your small passenger while you were still in the
Hive. *
*Know that I fathom your crosscurrents and dark broodings, Quath. We have not
had a Philosoph in the Hive for a great while.
I decided to let you follow your inner compass.*
*Perhaps you kept it as a pet; podia have done such before. It is no crime.
Indeed, your secret keeping of this mite is ample evidence of the mysterious
wisdom that comes, often unbidden, to a Philosoph. Care for your pet well.*
*Yes?*
*What?*
Alarm shot through the Tukar'ramin's projected aura. *The
Illuminates themselves now need it! It was a principal on the ship that
brought them here--a vessel we must have.*
*Find it!*
With that command the Tukar'ramin's aura blew away as though a breeze had
taken it. Quath had the sense of the Tukar'ramin's hurrying to convey this
information to some distant place.
She should have felt some elation at this sudden turn. The slabs she and
Beq'qdahl had found now proved more important than any fabulous dream. Her
Nought was somehow a key because of its ship. Quath's transgression hiding the
Nought and lying by omission to the Tukar'ramin--had been lightly passed over.
Yet she felt somber and vexed as she quick-stepped toward the forest ahead. If
the Illuminates did not know how to answer
Quath's questions, what authority in all the podia could? Was it possible that
the terrible vision of an utterly empty and meaningless universe was
unquestioned, even at the highest levels?
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Gregory Benford
Restless, Quath east forward with her aura, hoping to pick up some pinprick
taste of her Nought. Finding it would not be easy if she relied on the few
quick flashes its telltale emitted in a day.
She had slipped it into the crude equipment it wore, elemental augmentations
like a crude parody of the podia's sleek lags.
She had never thought that she would need to find that particular
Nought again, only the pack it joined. What an irritant!
She caught an electro-savor of Noughts spread through the dense, leafy mass
ahead. Here in the open it was difficult to taste whether one of them was
hers. She amped the signals--and gasped.
Ugly horizontals and verticals everywhere. Unchanging, muted light. And mixed
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in with these blunt perceptions came a torrent of strong surges.
Silent colorations of fatigue and pain. Bitter red smells of fear.
Yellows of shame.
Rasping pride. Banging, loud confusion. Acrid envy, livid malice, and
incomprehensible muddy longings.
All seething, unknown, under an oily smear of senses. It was difficult to
believe that these Noughts were so unconscious!
Cryptic semisentience floated through these minds. They suffered continually
from forking senses. Their entire thought-train was constantly interrupted for
messages detailing their surroundings, their hungers, their incessant sexual
signaling (even when exhausted!)--their tumbled, vivid, small worlds.
Quath gingerly focused her aura down to a needlepoint and thrust it toward one
particular Nought who lay several hills ahead.
Was this hers?
She could not tell, awash in the scattershot jostling of quick, coarse
perceptions. In this sticky swamp she could not even separate its subminds.
Carefully she held its muscles rigid, made it stand up from where it crouched.
Did this feel familiar?
One of its upper limbs was pressing a soft thing against its face. No, into
the face. An awful salty burst told her that this was a mouth, perhaps its
principal one. Certainly it enjoyed an enormously augmented tasting system,
for the food cast piercing rivulets of lava-hot bile all over the interior of
the mouth-pouch.
Its fellows were staring at the Nought. She perceived that they would find
alarming the act of spitting the food out onto the ground, where it could
perhaps burn the foliage. These Noughts were gaunt; wasting of food would
arouse suspicion. She must not
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frighten them before she found her own Nought, or they might all flee in a
panic. Quath forced the thing to swallow the stuff, just to
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xt get the taste away.
What could this primitive form do? She had not entered her own Nought in this
way; she was getting better at it. Curiosity egged her on.
She made it stand on one foot, then another. The sensation of bipedal
instability was strangely exhilarating. She made a pod take a step, caught the
body as it began to fall, and then brought the other leg up to join the first.
This sensation of courting disaster, falling and catching oneself, carried a
delicious excitement.
She stepped again, and again. The legs carried the impacts of walking upward
and she quickly learned to absorb these with the cumbersome knees. A single
knobby columnar spine felt as though it rode on a cushioned pediment of hips
and buttocks.
Worse, it ached at the lower back. The muscles there were firmly knotted, as
though this was a constant condition. What poor design! And they were so
unimaginative that they simply tolerated such irksome pains!
She rotated the head and saw a surprising proportion of what she knew had to
lie outside the Nought--but missing the fine-grained texture Quath knew, and
overlaid vith freightings of emotion.
This Nought could scarcely see anything without immediately reacting to it.
Passing a low bush with tiny red berries brought gushing forth a hard hunger.
The shaded sky above demanded to be searched for threats. A moist breeze crept
into its primary nostrils and visions of rain sounded warnings. A nearby face
excited memories of happier times, laughter, a warm fire--
But Quath saw that this approaching face emitted sounds which disturbed this
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host-Nought. The face gave quick signals of alarm.
A wrinkling just below the top hairline. Its single mouth parted and lips
slightly reddened, bringing teeth further into view. A
narrowing of the space between the hair-hedges above the eyes.
Apparently Quath was not managing this Nought well, despite her exciting
discovery of two-podded walking. She thought she had done that quite expertly.
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