Part Three — The Spreading Silence · The Threnody
Chapter Twenty-One
New Beltane — Present Day
The skimmer took them south across the wheat, low and fast, with the sun going down behind them.
Vash watched the fields go by under the canopy. Gold, endless, combed flat by the skimmer's wake, the long heads of ripe grain bowing and rising again like the surface of a slow sea. The light was low and red. Every stalk stood out sharply, each one rimmed in fire, each one throwing a long shadow across the next. It was the most beautiful harvest she had ever seen.
She thought about the two hundred hectares she had seen cut down that morning, the harvesters abandoned where they stopped, engines still ticking, in a world that had not finished its work.
Geordi had pushed the harnesses on them at the skimmer's door, flat gray things like climbing rigs, with a cell the size of a fist humming at each hip. Tuned to the Cirrus Key, he'd said. Wear it. Don't take it off, don't get it wet, and don't count on it for more than an hour and a half. There were sixty in the whole fleet. The evacuation crews working nearest the front had the rest.
"Thirty-five kilometers," Tobin said, from the pilot's seat. "Six minutes at this speed."
"We have more than six minutes," Data said. "We do not have much more. The front is moving at four meters per second. It was three point two when we left Harrow's Reach."
"How long until it reaches the town?"
"At the present rate, two and a half hours. The rate is not constant."
Dara sat beside Vash in the rear seat, her notebook closed on her knees. She had said nothing since the school. She watched the fields go by with the fixed, inward, terribly calm expression of someone listening to music in another room.
"You were humming last night," Vash said.
Dara's head turned. "Was I?"
"Outside my cabin. About three o'clock. The phrase from the Vault."
A very small pause. "I couldn't sleep," Dara said. "I hum when I can't. It's a habit. I'm sorry if I woke you."
"You didn't."
"Good."
"I was already awake." Vash met her eyes. "I had a dream."
She watched Dara's face. It didn't change. That was the thing she would remember afterward, going over it and over it in the dark. It didn't change at all. A woman who had spent four years being read by the best reader in the field had learned, somewhere along the way, exactly how little to show.
"I had one, too," Dara said quietly. "A few days ago. I've been meaning to tell you."
"Tell me now."
"I will. After." She looked back at the window. "When there's time. I promise."
Vash opened her mouth to press. Then the skimmer slid through something like a curtain of heat, and every hair on her arms stood up.
"The front," Data said. "We have crossed the drift boundary."
The cell at Vash's hip gave a thin electronic chirp, and its display dropped from a hundred to ninety-four.
"The dampers are reducing the local effect by approximately eighty percent," Data said. "I estimate ninety minutes of protection before the cells are exhausted. I recommend we do not exceed it."
"And after ninety minutes?" Tobin said.
"After ninety minutes, we would begin to resemble the vegetation ahead."
The light was wrong. She couldn't have said how. The sun was the same, the wheat was the same, but the shadows lay a fraction too sharp, the edges of things a hair too bright, as though the world had been drawn again by a hand with a slightly finer pen. Her chronometer skipped a second and caught up. The tone, which had been a murmur, swelled to something she could feel in her sternum.
Then the skimmer crested a low ridge, and the world changed again, and she forgot what she had been going to say.
The Kettle was a bowl in the land.
It lay a kilometer ahead, a wide shallow depression a kilometer and a half across, ringed with low hills. The wheat stopped at its rim. She saw the edge of it at once, a clean curved line where the gold ended and something else began. Below the line, the ground in the bowl's slope was pale, nearly white, and as the skimmer slowed, she saw that it wasn't bare earth.
It was wheat. Every stalk was still standing, row on row, each one exactly as it had been. But each had turned a dead pearl white, glassy and fine, and the heads had opened like hands, and in every palm, exactly where a grain should have been, hung a single small ring. Thin. Translucent. Seven rings to a stalk, nested, tilted, each a hair's width from the next.
The wind passed over them. They rang.
It was a sound like a thousand tiny bells. Not loud. Not musical. Perfectly, terribly in tune.
"Oh," Tobin breathed. "Oh, hell."
"Do not touch them," Data said. He had the tricorder up already. "Their structure is crystalline, but the lattice matches the geometry of the Keys. The same nested form. It is self-similar at every scale I can measure. I believe each stalk is a Key in miniature."
"It's growing Keys." Vash's mouth had gone dry. "The wheat. It's converting."
"The plant matter is being reorganized, atom for atom, into a pattern that resembles the local mechanism. It is not destroyed. It is replaced." Data lowered the tricorder. "If the same process were applied to an animal, the result would be similar."
Nobody spoke.
Behind them, Dara made a low sound. Vash turned. Dara had risen in her seat, both hands pressed flat against the canopy, looking down into the bowl. Her eyes were very wide, and her face had lost all its color, and in the pale light from the white field, Vash saw a tear run down her cheek and drip from her jaw.
"It's beautiful," Dara whispered.
"Dara."
"It's so beautiful. I didn't think it would be." She swallowed. "I thought it would be terrible."
They left the skimmer on the rim and walked down.
The white wheat rang around their knees. Every step raised a soft chime. Tobin kept his hands pressed to his sides and his eyes straight ahead. Data walked with a measured, deliberate gait, tricorder held out before him like a man carrying a lamp in a dark house. The air smelled of hot metal and cold rain. Above them, through a haze of shimmering light, the sun was a dull red smear.
"May I ask you something?" Data said. He had fallen into step beside Vash on the slope, the tricorder under one arm. "Ms. Liang has now seen what this does to a field of wheat. Her conviction has survived it. I do not understand how."
"It isn't that kind of belief," Vash said, not slowing. "It's not the kind you hold. It's the kind that holds you."
"That is not an explanation."
"No. It's the best I've got." She glanced at the cell on her hip. Seventy-one. "I've known people like that. You don't argue them out of it. It isn't in the part of them that argues."
"I find that I wish to understand her, and cannot." Data's head tilted. "I believe humans call the result distress. I do not like it."
"Welcome to the club. Dues are steep."
"Then I will not join. I do not think I am qualified."
"You'd be surprised," Vash said, and put her hand briefly on his arm. They went on down into the singing bowl.
At the bottom of the bowl stood the stones.
There were seven circles of them, concentric, each a little smaller than the one before. The outermost was forty meters across. The innermost, at the center, was perhaps four. The stones were black, rough-hewn, taller than a man, each carved along its inner face with the single continuous looping line. They stood in perfect silence. The wheat grew right up to their bases and stopped.
In the exact center, in the innermost circle, a flight of stone steps led down into the ground.
"The Standing Stones," Tobin said. "That's what the colonists call them."
"They are the crown of the structure." Data knelt and laid a gloved hand on the topmost step. "It descends thirty meters. The temperature within is thirty-eight degrees. The drift radius at the lowest point exceeds four kilometers." He looked up. "I have never recorded a figure like it."
"It's the source?"
"It is one of the sources. The orb is the broadcast. This is a receiver. It answers."
Vash looked down the stairs. The dark went a long way. From it, very faint, rising, came the sound of a chord, eight or nine voices close together, slightly flat, each one leaning toward the next.
"I'm going down," she said.
"We will all go," Data said. "Ms. Liang, you will go first. I will follow. Mr. Hale will remain at the top with the comm."
"I'd rather go last," Dara said.
"I would prefer otherwise."
There was a moment's silence. Dara looked at him, and at the stair, and Vash saw the small smile come and go on her mouth.
"Of course," she said. "You're quite right."
She went down.
The chamber at the bottom was a round cave of polished stone, thirty meters across, empty except for one thing.
It stood at the center. It was a Key, unmistakably. The same nested rings, the same tilt, the same pale and delicate geometry. But it wasn't the size of a man's torso. It rose from the floor to the vault of the roof, twelve meters high, a cathedral of rings, each one a different shade of white, turning imperceptibly against the next in the warm light of its own glow. Its base wasn't a plinth. It went down into the bedrock, in a tangle of pale roots, spreading across the floor and into the walls and out through the stone in every direction, like the roots of a tree.
The chord rolled through the chamber like breath through a pipe. Every surface sang.
"It's not a Key," Vash said. She could hardly hear herself. "It's the tree the Key is a seed of."
"I believe it is the original," Data said. "The others are copies. Perhaps even offspring." He had his tricorder out, and his voice was quite level, but his eyes were moving very fast. "The root network extends across the continent. I read it in every direction, to the limit of my instrument. It is not placed on the land. It is part of the land."
"Can we move it?"
"No."
"Can we cut it?"
"I do not believe so." He looked up at her. "Ms. Vash, this is not an artifact. It is a structure of geological scale. To remove it would be to remove the continent."
She looked at the tower of rings. She thought, absurdly, of the little gloved hands she had seen on the drawings in the school, of forty children humming at their desks. It was the most terrible and most beautiful thing she had ever stood in front of.
"Then we don't take it," she said slowly. "We stop it."
"How?"
"We've got a damper. The Cirrus Key. We've got the test data. It cut the orb's growth by six percent." Vash turned. "Dara. Could you calculate a counter-frequency? Something that would shut this down? Not cut it. Put it to sleep."
Dara had stopped on the last step. She stood with one hand on the wall, her face tilted up toward the great tower, her lips parted. She didn't seem to hear.
"Dara."
"Yes." She blinked. "Sorry. Yes. I think so. Six hours, if I work straight through. I'll need the Cirrus Key and Data's readings." She swallowed. "I can give you a sequence. If it's broadcast at the right frequency and held for long enough, the receiver should fall silent."
"Then you start now," Vash said. "You can work on the flight back."
"Will it work?"
"I think it would." Her voice was steady. She wasn't looking at Vash. "I'll start as soon as we're out of here."
"I shall verify the calculation independently," Data said.
"Of course," Dara said. "I'd want you to."
Vash nodded. She felt something cold and watchful move, quietly, at the back of her mind. She let it.
Data's comm chirped.
"Commander Data." The voice was tinny, tight. Tobin, from the surface. "Sir. The skimmer's sensors. You need to come up."
"Report."
"The front." A pause. A crackle of static. "It's not at four meters per second anymore. It's at twelve."
Data's head came up. Vash saw him calculate, and saw what his face did when the number arrived.
"At twelve meters per second," he said, "the front will reach Harrow's Reach in forty-seven minutes."
"Renata," Vash said.
She was already on the stairs.