CHAPTER SEVEN

HEART OF BRIGHTNESS

 

 

THE VICE OF noonday pressed down on them; the ’Bug’s interior was a dry, oppressive heat even with the AC full on. When they stopped, the whining of the fans was the loudest sound in the world, and nobody much fancied getting out to have a look. Still, it was plain somebody had to, and Mao decided to make a command decision and volunteer himself. Lupé passed him their only camel pack: a bag of unfiltered water to sit between his shoulder blades and a pump to move it around enough to cool him a little. He goggled and masked and put on a peaked cap until he looked like Hotep’s second cousin. The furnace blast of the outside air washed over them all when he swung the door open, and he slipped out as quickly as possible.

Hotep might talk about being an astronaut, but it was Mao who had most experience walking on the surface of an alien world, even if it was Earth. In the midday heat, the ground crunched lifeless beneath his feet, the sky through his dark lenses was the colour of bronze, the sun the head of a white hot rivet just driven in by some celestial smith. This was Firewalker business, the work they sent the kids to do, coming out into the valley of death. Back in the Ankara it got as hot as this—hotter even—but nobody braved it. People stayed indoors, an enforced siesta in a township whose nightlife chased a fugitive breath of cool air well past midnight. Besides, the whole town was shade for someone, even the worst shacks that were twenty to a room.

Long-ways north, long-ways south, he knew there were nations that had once been merely balmy and were now tropical, while beyond those, the temperate zones of Europe, northern China and southern Russia were as Egypt and Morocco had once been. Dry heat, wet heat, lashed by the chaos of storms as the Earth shifted and writhed under its transformations. But this was the eye of that storm—this was the future, this dead land. Walking out here, sucking up water from the tube sewn into his mask, feeling his body fight shock, sweating itself dry, Mao felt almost proprietary. This was Firewalker country. And Mao could have parked up and waited ’til night, but that was more lost time, more strain on the car’s cooling system, and besides, his curiosity burned hotter even than the sun. Because his land had changed again, when he’d thought death was the final stage in its life cycle.

“‘Breeding lilacs out of the dead land,’” came a voice in his earpiece. Bastien Fontaine’s voice.

“Say what? Say again?”

“Didn’t say anything, chommie.” Lupé’s voice, infinitely preferable. “What’s up?”

“Nothing.” Covering his ass in case it was just him going crazy.

And now he was at the trees. He had a whole library of expletives at his fingertips, and any combination of them would have seemed like understatement.

Closest to him were little stalks reaching out of the parched earth, twining about each other to form braided trunks reaching straight up. They were of copper, or some alloy that looked like it. His boots kicked through them and they bent aside and then sprang vertical again. Standing on them, he felt their pressure, desperate to claw for the sun.

Further in, they were taller, ten, fifteen feet, and they branched out. He was seeing every stage of their growth, the march of their ecosystem. Now he was amongst burnished metal skeletons, not quite made like trees but following the same dendritic logic, fashioned of interwoven red-orange strands, extending fingers at the sky. Further still, they had leaves.

He understood, then. The leaves were black, flat, roughly diamond-shaped. They gleamed where the sun caught them, but only obliquely. Full on, they were midnight black as they drank down the light, harvesting it. They were sections of panel, clipped into shape and placed at the end of every branch, and as he watched they angled slightly to match the sun’s stagnant progress, all of them shifting their positioning in a shimmer like heat haze.

The forest went on as far as he could see, all the way to the horizon where the white dome of the Estate sat.

“Run!” Lupé said suddenly in his ear, and he turned and made to leg it without needing to question her. The insects were already dropping from the clear sky, the same huge locusts as before, carrying their cargo of shards. He ran through them, covering his head, feeling blundering bodies strike him like sacks of machine parts, sharp-edged legs sawing at his clothes and shards of solar panel drawing brief flashes of blood. When he burst out of their swarming industry he fell over, bending the copper saplings every which way, still swatting at an enemy that was no longer there and had never been interested in him. He rolled on his back and stared, watching the mad frenzy of activity.

He had heard about some film, some time long-back, from some place they had seasons and trees, and the trees lost their leaves when it got cold. He couldn’t imagine it, but he’d heard about it. They’d been filming when it was cold, but the scene had been meant to look like it was warm, and so they’d had to go to all the trees and glue fake leaves on to fool the audience. Now he watched as a workforce of locusts brought leaves to the metal forest, buzzing madly about the branches, weighing the trunks down to the ground with their bodies, grinding fragments of panel into shape and attaching them, or else holding them while the coppery strands reached out and took possession. Then the bugs would all leap into the air, battering at each other, veering off like drunkards, and the tree sprang erect fully clad with dark, hungry foliage.

His camel pack was giving him only heat, by then, and he felt his head begin to swim. He lurched for the car and Lupé kicked the door open and hauled him inside. He distantly realised she had been telling him to come back for some time.

They hunkered down for a couple of hours, then, listening to the pitch of the struggling fans climb and shudder but never quite fail them. Mao needed that long to get his head together and his body temperature down. He had a feeling he’d probably done quite a lot of long-term harm to himself, pushing the excursion so far. He kept deciding that maybe it was all a hallucination, then looking outside and seeing the forest right there, that much closer now the insects had been and gone.

“So what’s the plan?” Lupé asked. “I mean, I guess we’ve found the problem.” It was precisely true and entirely useless, because they couldn’t even start to guess at cause.

“Someone’s still in the Estate,” Hotep pronounced.

“Your goggles tell you that?” Mao asked her. “The Celeste tell you that?”

“What else,” she demanded archly, “is it going to be?”

“Some mad scientist?”

“Why ‘mad’?” Hotep was gazing out at the forest, and her tone spoke all of the wonder her mask hid.

“Mad because they went and pissed on the Roach Hotel,” Lupé said. “We can’t exactly uproot all these trees. So what do we do?”

“The bugs have had two chances to eat us and haven’t,” Hotep pointed out. “So maybe we go make our visit, right?”

“Give them a third go at us, you mean,” Mao muttered. He was trying to calculate odds: they go back home with what they had, what was the chance of getting paid in full? Not quite good enough to trust. Firewalkers were supposed to solve problems. One more step, then.

“Rest up, for now,” he got out. “Get the tent up.” The ’Bug was equipped with a roll of silvery foil they could peg down, to beat back the worst of the heat. “When the sun’s low, sure. Your turn to drive.”

 

 

THEY RESTED UP some, and then some more, because Lupé took the last few hours of light to tune the cooling and filtration systems, sitting cross-legged in the vehicle’s lengthening shadow with parts all over. She didn’t like the way it sounded.

Mao said he hadn’t liked the idea of being stuck without water while she took the system apart, but it was only for form. He knew well enough that if Lupé said it was a problem, then it was a problem. By the time everything was in place, the engineer was tightening the last screws with a headlamp torch to light her way, the sun’s last fire dying on the western horizon. The great expanse of artificial trees had tracked it slowly, and were now leaning slightly westwards in an attitude he could only characterise as yearning. The giant bug swarm had, thankfully, not made a reappearance.

The car’s paint was like a second armour skin in and of itself, corrosion-resistant and designed to cling on through the worst dust-storms. The artificial forest was too much for it, though. Their progress was a constant screech and scrape as metal branches and silicon leaves drew their ragged nails down the side of the car. Whole trees went under the wheels, raked the undercarriage and sprang miraculously back into place behind as though they were mounted on springs. Mao pictured how this place must look when the storms came, the entire expanse of ersatz vegetation bowing and rippling like real live reeds before the force of the wind.

Hotep, in the driving seat, was having issues with the audible chaos. She took to slapping away at the steering wheel like it had jilted her at the altar, her voice raised in an off-key rendition of a song that had been popular the year before around Achouka. On the basis that if you couldn’t beat them, join them, Mao and Lupé ended up singing along, discovering that they all remembered the lyrics differently, but that all their versions fit together to make a weird comedy. Mao and Lupé both thought it was some kind of one-sided slanging match from the abandoned artist, alternatively demanding a lover’s return and cursing her out for leaving, except Lupé knew a whole extra verse that was fantastically obscene which had somehow evaded Mao entirely. Hotep’s version was about a truck, and she made it sound like the theme tune to some surreal kid’s cartoon while changing remarkably few of the words. Their resulting infantile giggling seemed to stave off the alien landscape outside, as much as drown out the damage it was doing to their paintwork.

Then Hotep hit the brakes and they battered to a halt when the curved wall of the Estate appeared through the trees, a pale ghost of former glories where the moon touched it. Mao’s revelation, then, was that the radio had been trying to talk to them, but they’d drowned it out with their own racket, and so whatever supervillain megalomania or poetic stuffiness it had intended had been entirely lost. All he heard before it fell silent was, “‘Who was once as tall and handsome as you,’” and by now they all got that whatever had spoken to them was fond of poems, or maybe just one poem, or maybe it was all secret code words for industrial espionage spy stuff. Mao didn’t much care.

Lupé’s revelation was, “Where’s that goddamn robot gone?”

They piled out. The inert body of Castille the butler had indeed vanished from the back of the ’Bug, the cables severed. Mao couldn’t even remember if the damned thing had been there after the last bug swarm; had it gone missing then, or had it been cut loose by the glass-edged leaves as they shouldered through the forest? The vehicle’s exterior, true to his expectations, looked as though some maniac had drawn a fantastically detailed map of an unknown country all over it.

“Balls.” Not because selling Castille, whole or for parts, would have represented a nice bonus for them, but because now his mind was full of the image of Castille, reanimated and vengeful, relentlessly tracking them down.

The Estate was surprisingly small, all told: just a white oblong dome smaller than the protein farms, smaller than the three-storey slum tenements in the older parts of Ankara Achouka, and in about the same state of repair. Of course, as Hotep said, that was because it was all underground. That was where the scientists had lived, where the work had been done, where the sonko overseers had talked about golf before being driven back to their big houses in their air-conditioned, all-terrain limousines.

The Estate’s great shell was cracked, allowing them to drive the ’Bug right inside. Mao wished they hadn’t: the soaring interior was craggy with insects. They were roosting up there like bats, clinging to the concave wall so thickly that there was no wall to be seen. A couple of dozen dead locusts were mixed in with the general detritus of the floor, which was equal parts mounded sand, broken glass and jagged rusting metal. In the centre of the dome, the floor had given way entirely, funnelling down to the promised lower levels.

Mao took some deep breaths. He had ducked back into the ’Bug as soon as he seen the bugs, and now he was having difficulty convincing himself to leave again. There was something infinitely worse about the things just hanging there above him. The actual voracious swarms he’d witnessed were somehow less upsetting, even though they posed more real threat. He felt his heart race, fighting something that couldn’t be fought, fleeing something that was hooked inside of him.

“Chommie?” Lupé asked softly. She understood. “Hotep and me, we can…”

“No,” he decided, but still he couldn’t move. In the end he closed his eyes, fumbled his way out, felt nameless things crunch beneath his boots.

“What’s the plan?” Hotep was doing her lobster claw thing again, burning nervous energy, and he wished she’d stop because it looked like bug mouthparts.

“Find the off switch.” Mao tried a weak grin. Gauging from Lupé’s expression, it didn’t come out well. “Something’s making this place go. Something’s making the bugs do their thing. Maybe we can reprogram them? Or just if we shut every damn thing off, we can shut them down too?” The thought of emerging back up here and just finding a carpet of dead insects wasn’t actually much better than his current situation, but he’d take it.

“And if we can’t?”

“Find out what we can, and hope it’s not us who gets to come back here. Maybe they can just drop a big rock on this place from orbit.”

It went wrong about as quickly as he could have imagined.

Hotep got to clamber down first, because she would never shut up about how good her night vision was with her goggles. She called up to them that everything was fine, loud enough to make the hanging garden of locusts above them rustle and shift, which nearly sent Mao back into the car for good.

They had weapons: pistols and nine rounds each, hammers, machetes. Lupé had improvised a sort of Taser-on-a-stick arrangement with the avowed intent of ramming it up Castille’s nether regions if the butler tried to do for them.

Below the cracked floor they found a mounded heap of broken concrete, chitin and dust. Lupé swore and pointed at the shattered body of a beetle-thing twice the size of the locusts, translucent and brittle. Mao dearly hoped it was a failed prototype, long discontinued.

They went further down into what must have been a grand hall once. Holes in the floor showed where escalators had long since stilled and fallen into ruin below. The room rang with their every tread, every scuff and shuffle susurrating like distant waves. Mao glanced up nervously, finding that his fears were entirely justified: there were clots of insects roosting down here, too, though not quite the abundance of the dome above them. They seemed closer to waking, though, ripples of agitation passing through them, veined wings shifting lazily, unfurling in his torchlight and slowly refolding.

Lupé jerked back suddenly, the beam from her own torch swinging wildly.

“I just saw the robot,” she said.

“There’s nothing,” Hotep insisted.

“It was there.”

“My goggles—” the girl started, with that lecturing air Mao thoroughly hated, and then she stopped, which he found was not the relief he’d have thought.

“They turned off, didn’t they?” Lupé accused.

Hotep made a little whimpering sound, frantically fiddling with the eyepieces.

“Like something was listening and you had to go remind it,” Lupé went on, moving her light back and forth, hunting.

“This isn’t fair,” Hotep whispered.

Then the lights came up.

They grew slowly, from a dozen places about the ceiling, an irregular pattern that was surely not conceived by any human architect. They were a ghostly blue-white and bled the colour from everything they touched, so that Lupé’s face seemed dark teal and Hotep’s bandages the colour of drowned things. The light came filtering through a hanging shroud of insects, too, so that the Firewalkers were surrounded by a forest of spiky many-legged shadows and the shimmer of gauze.

“Fucker,” said Lupé, and there, at the far end of the hall, was the robot, Castille, gleaming new.

“Welcome, children. M’bolani, brave Firewalkers.” The robot’s arm extended, gesturing about the subterranean vestibule as though it was lord of all it surveyed. The voice was not its previous servile tone, but something more androgynous, shifting towards the feminine even as it spoke.

“Dzam!” Hotep shoved her goggles up, eyes brimming with tears. “Shoot the fucking thing.”

“No!” Mao and Lupé both started, but the girl had her pistol out, levelled at the butler. It was their doubled shout, not any shot, that brought the insects down from the ceiling.

Mao had thought he’d go to pieces, if that happened. Instead he came together; the worst had already occurred. Shouting for the others to follow, he ran for Castille, aiming past the robot for several doorways at the end of the room, each small enough to hold or barricade until the bugs exhausted themselves. The air around him was already wild with wheeling bodies, whirring blindly past him, ricocheting off each other, miraculously failing to just bludgeon him to the floor with sheer clumsy exuberance. He clawed for Lupé’s sleeve, failed to snag it, but she was still alongside him, and hopefully Hotep was on their heels. He had his machete out for Castille, but somehow the robot had vanished already, and he doubled his speed and ran for the middle doorway.

It was occupied. He tried to stop running, but his boots skidded, sand drifts on the metal floor giving no traction. He ended up on his back, staring upwards at the thing forcing itself through the opening a limb at a time. It was a mantis; or that was the closest reference he had for it. A mantis that, now it was out in the open, towered over him, ten feet if it was an inch. Its hooked forelimbs were the size of a man, one held close to its body, the other trailing its sickle-claw on the ground. Its carapace was patterned with bright colours; he realized he was staring at some corporate logo repeated into meaningless infinity, killer-insect-business-casual.

It raised its foreclaws in threat and he shrieked and bolted for another door, scrabbling on hands and knees, losing his torch, losing his machete, desperate only to get away. Three steps in he discovered a stairwell the hard way, pitching forwards into space before he could stop himself. Even in his mad panic, he clutched at the rail, arresting his momentum at the price of wrenching his shoulder. Then the railing itself gave way, corroded metal snapping beneath his weight and sending him over the edge.