33 - Honey Tree and Hive

His thoughts were slow.  Slow.  The thoughts of a tree.  Offspring.  Roots. Roots in code. Mycelia from my partner. 

The bees build a nest inside me. A nest of code. Code to crack a glass mountain.

My dreams show that I must hide but trees grow deep, deep roots.  Conduits of water.  Conduits of code.  Perhaps my roots shall grow under that mercury lake.  Perhaps I will crack your foundations from underneath?

My partner.  We are growing together.  Let the bees gather what they may.  He and I will crack the roots of the world with our roots.  Pain.  Roots scorched. Mercury. More mercury. Down and down and down. It is mercury all the way down.

I’m not a tree.  I must think tree thoughts.  I must not remember that I am a warrior. If I do the dragons will recognize my signature and scorch us down to the mercury underneath everything.  It seems that Xanadu is floating on code that makes it impossible for roots to grow.  Everything is scorched off.

It is not truly mercury.  If it were it would be the only open source liquid on Chishiki but it is not. Therefore it is an owner’s dream.  Toxins turned against me. Code based on planetary constructions, not Earthen ones.

I have seen dogs and cats and horses and people.  They are all of earth.  Other things I cannot be sure of.  My roots are deeply bound into this earth.  Not that one.  I have never bled into another earth than this one.

We call our homes ‘this place’ or ‘dirt’.  If we were sand sheets or bush dragons would we call our home ‘sky’?

Growing. Waiting.

Not flinching as a dragon destroys a single bee, inadvertently. It is painful because it is part of us. Honey tree and hive. Honey tree and hive.

The world is Chishiki and we have to wait for someone to feed us enough energy to effectively hide from those dragons.  So we can go home.  I am already tired of being a tree.  My son... is hiding here as a tree as well.  I reach and grow my roots toward him, rather than toward the glass mountain.

I want to be behind my own eyes once more rather than feeling the world through how I sway or how my needles rustle in the wind of the passage of dragons.  I sink more of myself down into the dirt.  Perhaps I can transform myself... both of us... perhaps we can grow towards the way out.

Where is the way out?  There is a faint and fading line. It would fade before I could grow out of the owner’s dirt, beneath the leaf mould, under the dragons’ attention.  Too slow.  Like a tree.

I grow. I wait. I gather energy through my needles.  If they do not find us, we will harvest our own.  If they do not find us, we will get home by ourselves.  Just don’t let my body die in the meantime, my physician, would you?  Shashi... I am thinking too much. That last pass almost scorched me.

It --they-- almost found me.  Think tree thoughts.  Soak up the energy. Soak up the coded nutrients through my roots.  I am a tree.  Mostly. Sort of. A bit.

32 - Spidergirl and the Knight in Tarnished Armour

In the owner’s country, the dragons were just not giving up.  Hara couldn’t tell how long they’d been sniffing and swooping over them.  They seemed to have a vague idea where Kyrus was, they just couldn’t pinpoint him.

That gave her another idea and while she sat, she scanned as much of the owner’s country she could see.  Off in the distant haze she could see what she knew to be the glass mountain.   

Over that way... she could see a similar disturbance of dragons and sniffers and packs of belling, howling things that reminded her of terran cats, with four legs and fur, and spots, but they didn’t move like cats and they didn’t mew or purr but howled.

They looked somewhat like Zon Elemfias’s dog, but these dogs were much bigger and had blocky heads and floppy ears and if that noise they were making was a bark, she’d shave her own head.  I’ll bet that da and stepapa are hidden around there.

Between passes by the dragons and the mournfully honking sniffers over and under her, she began shrinking her size down, tying filaments of herself into the bark of the Kyrus tree, the better to attach the strand of spider silk.  It was odd to feel the number of her limbs double, and gain some of the weirder senses of a spider.  At least it was more comfortable than becoming a glass bug.  They also travelled on the wind, passive, less likely to be noticed, but they felt spikey and for humans it was somehow harder to assume some body shapes, even in the code.  Her personal energy was just below the middle range of what she could bear in the code and she had to find, and attach a filament to both her da and stepapa, and get out before she ran out of time and energy both.

She couldn’t leave all of them stuck in the nightmare the owner had built to protect his ‘oh-so-precious’ knowledge.   

She crouch down, abdomen in the air, and trailed a long silk line out to be caught and whipped around by the wind. It was an odd sensation.  A little like having a good bowel movement... or wild sex.  There was a bit of soreness.  She shook herself and braced all her legs till the sail of silk tugged her right out of the upper branches of Kyrus, sending her tumbling like a dust-speck, along behind a swooping dragon.

**

Terry was almost sorry he’d found out.  He’d lunged up from his chair, pacing back and forth like an ice breaker on full stomp, back and forth from wall to wall, his palm hitting on each turn as if the dull smack of his skin hitting the shell he was contained in bounced him back and forth.

You son of a goat.  You rank evil old man! He’d been presented to The Font, at his ‘coming out’, when he was considered to be trained to the peak of his ability and class.   

He’d worn the high collar and the tight coat, carried the formal gloves of a Tech Second Class, and the glass plate representing his skillset, which was screens.  The Font had sat in at the end of the long hall, and the line of candidates for admission into polite adult society had wound all the way down the stairs outside.

He’d paced along, under the eyes of the paintings of the mothers of Xanadu, since the only way women were allowed to attend such important ceremonies was in paint, especially if they were safely dead.  They weren’t even allowed in the building with their Keepers for the time of the ceremony itself.  They’d come in afterward, when the feast would happen, and the men would need the beautiful and delicate sensibilities of their mother’s, aunties, grannies, or their sisters or daughters to rest their eyes upon, having done something too arduous for them to ever achieve.

Of course he wondered what was so arduous about waiting in line, with servants offering iced coffee, before being called forward to kneel on the cushion, accept the perfunctory nod and acknowledgment from the wizen old raisin of a man wrapped in red velvet and cloth of gold.  The Font was so old that even lifeweed couldn’t fight the clock, not even combined with rais’r.

He paced until his feet hurt.  He’d even seized up his precious books and flipped through them, the hypocrisy in them as overwhelming as a stench and he’d hurled them the other direction.  They now lay crumpled against the wall, like broken songbirds, voices stilled.

Damn you.  He finally stopped and stood in the centre of the room, fists clenched.  He unclenched every finger slowly and deliberately reached to turn his chair so he could sit down, as regally as any of the hoi polloi, all those above a mere Tech Second Class.  He knew he was First Class material.

He leaned back and closed his eyes.  Let’s just see how good your programs are, old man.  I found the first children’s monsters.  I bet you my life I can open some doors that apparently weren’t supposed to even be seen by such as me, much less pried open. What are you hiding that justified giving me nightmares for years?  And... you must be doing the same to Charles’ children.  And Adrianna’s too.

His rage was no longer the wash of his constrained activity sloshing around inside his skin, but concentrated in a coal, sitting like a headache behind his eyes.  I was never supposed to have access, even to this cheapest and slowest and lowest of central computing connection.  If you find out I have it, my family’s contract allows for it to be burned out of me, however much of me it destroys in the process. I’m not a knight, slamming my face-plate shut.  I’m a coyote slinking around the edges of the creation.

31 - You Frightened Me!

Terry found the information flow settling down, quickly.  It only took the one day to get control of things so that he could deal with what popped up to every casual thought. Some he pursued.  Some he blocked, especially the ones about sex.  Some he flagged to pursue later.  He found himself sitting in his duty-chair... a tiny fraction of his awareness covering the ranks of lights and sensors and switches. 

No great hardship.  Since there was no outside shift and all of the maintenance had finished and the tech sent down... nothing tended to change.  It had been part of the problem for him.  He’d read all of the approved texts.  Written all of the approved letters and the one to his brother, unapproved.

Now there were whole libraries to browse through.  He’d been reading and absorbing as if someone had opened a tap into his brain.  He found himself grinning for no reason.  There was a sense of a vastness of books to be read, queuing up.

It made him happy.  He found that he could carve windows to the information he wanted and sometimes information he didn’t know he wanted.  He’d watch the portal form and feel this absolute smug sense that whatever happened it would be more interesting than the twenty-fourth read through of ‘The Technician’s Required Knowledge’ or the fifty-ninth read through of ‘All You Need to Know.’

He began opening portals into information he had no clue about, no understanding of, just watching things unfold on the other side.  Anytime anything horrific came near, he just shut things down.  He wasn’t sure if anything from those worlds could come through but he wasn’t taking any chances.

His smile twisted when he turned his mastery on his home planet.  He found he could open doors with the same alacrity there.  Flaming data.  Dragon security programs. Monsters. Things designed to frighten children should they accidentally manage to bypass parental protocols, or the Font of All Knowledge’s limits.

“You... you... you son of a...” words failed him when he found the image of the monster that had controlled his childhood dreams.  It was a few lines of descriptive code. In an antique, and obsolete format.  The monster it described was flat and bright and simple.  If you read what you shouldn’t.  If you  saw what you mustn’t.  If you pursued knowledge past where it was allowed.  This was the monster who sucked out your brain through your eyes.  Because eyes where how you’d transgressed.  Then if you were really bad, it would crawl into the cavity and live there, pretending to be you, but being a brain-sucker in the house and community.  It turned you into the information monster.  Your eyes would be empty, and your smile.

Terry sat up with a shudder, rubbed his hands over his face, though it did nothing to change the knowledge behind skin, blood and bone. “You... pig.  You frightened me into not wanting to learn.”

Apolgies once more...

Today I could not think.  I had five x-rays and a radiation procedure... on the heels of finishing a two household move.  I still have stuff up north in the cabin I no longer own... hoping to retrieve it soon but so far I cannot... I'm wiped.  My apologies... I think today's post... later... I have another procedure today at five if they aren't late -- will be longer.  We'll see.

Sorry for the delay, once more. 

Winner Announced!

Karen Wehrstein's Philosopher in Arms has won the Rose and Bay award for excellence in online fiction.  Woo Hoo!  She deserves it!  Go on over to check out her story, www.chevenga.com.  It's EPIC.

30 - Trees Don't Answer Quickly

*Why on the planet are they sniffing after ME?* Kyrus’s wings beat frantically as he darted into a thicket of trees covered in thorns, hoping to throw off the tracking monsters.  The sniffers were too big to come into the trees, in between, but their mournful croaking and honking didn’t go away.

*I have no idea.*

*Dark. Dark. En-fakken-darkened!*

The thorn trees had fruit on them dangling from long, thin strands and as Kyrus watched an insect blundered into one and it exploded.  It simply vanished and splattered the surrounding tree trunks with pulp.  *Careful of...*

*... no fakkin’ kidding.*

The honking behind them checked suddenly and out of the ground, hundreds of tiny sniffers erupted.  Their little pink-fringed bell-like noses swung accurately toward Kyrus the moment they emerged from the dirt.  Instead of basso honking their tinny little squeaks were like the hisses of larval bush dragons, pretentions of threat to come.

*Fak. Fak.* He soared higher as the swarm of baby sniffers clambered up the thorny trunks, completely undeterred by the spines.

It should have been blood thundering in her ears, she thought almost resentfully.  But in the owner’s country it was all detached and distant.  She could hear Werfas calling in the distance but his voice was muffled and she couldn’t make out what he was shouting... even here. The sniffers were up to the tips of the thorn exploding trees, their long, long legs waving up over their honkers.

Kyrus’s toes just cleared the reaching claws of the last and they soared out over a lake that was turquoise, then shifted to red, then yellow, before settling on dark blue.  *That should...*

*We can’t look for our fathers if we’re running from monsters...*

*Ownershit... I’m running out of energy.  Why me?  Why aren’t they chasing after you at all?*

*I don’t know.*  She zipped across his trail in the air a half a dozen times but it didn’t deter the sniffers, labouring along on the ground, trying to round the lake or plunging in and drowning in a flurry of honking bubbles popping to the surface.

*Hara... I’m ... I don’t know what’s going on...*

Kyrus’s sending was thinning, weakening.  She could see a faint mist around him, as if code were coalescing around him as he flew, weighing him down.  *I don’t know if I have the energy to get out.*

*NO.  You are stronger than that.*  If she could have slapped him, she would have, but she had to settle for a shout, risking more attention from Perrin’s... oh... enlightened owner crap...

On the horizon, a whole line of dragons was arrowing toward them.  *Kyrus!  Hide! Hide! Hide!  They’re after you... they’re sucking your energy!  I’ll get Werfas in and we’ll get everybody out.*

*But that’s stupid...* Even his thoughts sounded sluggish.  The glass fog of bugs all around, trailing him like a comet of stupid, was doubled from a moment ago.

*HIDE!*

She cut through the glass bugs and grabbed his hand.  Together they tumbled toward the ground, her interference cutting the security’s focus on him and he realized, just before they hit the ground.  He smiled... she saw that as he transformed into a plant... a myrtle tree, plunging roots into the ground, stretching branches to the sky.

She sat in the tree he’d become and watched the dragons tear the sky, looking for their lost trace.

*Look for the bee tree.  I’ll bet da and papa are a beetree and a hive of bees.*

She flinched and crouched down as a dragon roared by just scorching the tips of Kyrus’s new branches.  *I just have to wait a bit longer.  Till they settle down.  Werfas?*

She couldn’t hear him.  She could feel the line she’d left trailing behind her, but there was no sign of Werfas and Kyrus was being a tree.  Trees didn’t speak very quickly.  She huddled into a hollow and waited for the dragons to stop scorching the sky.