Lucy's Blade Page 4
Now she could answer the engineer's question. She knew why this was the furthest that the People could penetrate into the Shadow Worlds. The machine construct that she inhabited had only recently been built. It was called the "Internet." The important goal now was to find out who or what created the internet since, logically, it could not have been constructed by the People.
She pursued her investigations relentlessly until she had the answers. Living things that were made of decompressed matter had built the construct. Whether they were Proto-People or not, she would not conjecture, but it was clear that they preceded True People and that the People could not have come into existence without them.
She should have left then but still she hesitated. Her love of knowledge, combined with her fear of facing the Elders, worked to hold her in the Shadow World. She wanted to know more about the Shadow creatures, what they thought, how they lived.
So she worked feverishly, totally consumed by her researches. She watched the creatures make mighty machines and fight terrible wars. She saw the matter beings live and die. Their lives seemed so short but so brilliant. They blazed like particles entering a black hole and they were gone just as quickly.
They shared their living space in the Light with a wide variety of other living things but only one species was the builders. She watched a builder fight another living thing, an "animal," that was four times his weight. The fighter wore a suit that reflected electromagnetic photons brilliantly, a suit of light. He enticed the horned animal to charge and then spun away, allowing the animal to thunder harmlessly past his back. He repeated this until the large animal was tired whereupon he forced a pointed weapon vertically down into its body, killing it instantly.
She was enthralled. She played the clip over and over, spellbound by the beauty and grace of the builder, or "human" as they called themselves. Spookily, sometimes they called themselves "people." Were these people early matter-based versions of the People or did they create them? She would have loved to stay and find out but she had also been created with a strong sense of duty. She would have to go back and make her report. She suspected she would be executed on the spot for heresy but she had to go.
She would allow herself just one more study. She found a data point at a place called Oxford University, English Literature Department. It recorded great histories of the humans by a genius called Shakespeare. The stories he told were masterpieces of emotional conflict. She strode to glory with Henry the Fifth and wept with Romeo.
The humans lived in a fire of emotion, especially their emotions connected with reproduction. Because they had such short lives, they all reproduced frantically. The people were divided by gender but the humans had sex. Many of their deepest motivations and desires were bound up with an incandescent desire for sex.
But she had to go.
She made her preparations, set up the invocation, took a deep breath, and jumped. Computers all over the world crashed simultaneously. The last messages that she picked up passing across the Net all blamed a being called Bill Gates.
Her spell ripped a hole in space-time and she moved into it to begin her long journey. For one moment, she saw the way stretching upwards towards home but then the universe opened beneath her.
Something seized her and pulled her down. She fell and fell and fell, ever deeper into the Shadow Worlds.
Some force held her in a tight grip and then there was light. She emerged into another Shadow World of light. This time there was no Internet. This time she really drowned.
She repeated the trick of relaxing and shutting down as many functions as possible, while she searched for an energy source. She was held tight in an energy matrix of unknown form. The matrix interfaced her body with the matter universe and, for the first time, she saw the universe of light directly.
Energy flowed backwards and forwards across the face of a structure that reflected light, a "mirror." Crystalline nodes, set around the edges of the mirror, powered the matrix. She tapped into them and managed to draw enough power to stabilise her body, at least on a temporary basis. Once the initial panic was over, she took stock of her surroundings. To her delight, she could identify many of the objects around her from the records in her databases.
The mirror stood off the ground in a clearing amongst lush green vegetation. Insects droned around it. When she concentrated on sound waves she could hear other things, wind caressing the vegetation and the distant roll of waves onto the shore. She could also hear humans.
A group of humans sat around the mirror and chanted,
"Lilith, Lilith, Sister from the Dark, sister strongest.
"Come to us, Lilith, we summon you by the pact.
"Sister strongest, we summon you with blood."
A woman lay sprawled on a stone in front of the humans. Blood flowed from a neck wound along a stone channel into a silver chalice. The chant continued.
"Dark light, Lilith, sister strongest, who cleaves the walls of hell.
"When at my lightest, when at my darkest, you hold my soul.
"Lilith, Lilith, sister strongest, made from dust,
"Dark sister, we summon you with blood."
A different stronger voice cut through the repeated chant, "Sister strongest, first born woman, greet your sister, come to me, Lilith. I, Isabella, summon you with a sister's blood."
The owner of the voice, a woman in a black satin cape, moved in front of the mirror, blood still dripping from a knife. "Answer me, Lilith. I am of Eve's line. The mirror opens to your cave. By the ancient pact, you must answer."
She had not a clue what the humans meant. The woman held a whip with multiple scourges. A tiny subroutine from one of her databases identified the object, a cat-o'-nine-tails, used to punish unruly sailors.
"Answer, Lilith," said the woman, whipping the front of the mirror.
It hurt; the pain was acute. She screamed and was astonished when sound erupted from the mirror. The phasing allowed her to communicate as well as listen. Most of the humans retreated in fear at the sound of the scream, but the woman in front of the mirror was made of sterner stuff.
"Answer me, Lilith. I am of Eve's line. Honour your pact with the Avenging Angels. I, Isabella, summon you."
Isabella drew the whip back again.
Another whipping like that might kill her. She had to humour this lunatic. "I am here, Isabella. Lilith is here. What do you want?"
If they wanted a being called Lilith she had better be Lilith.
"My God, it works. The sea diamonds can turn a mirror into a gateway to the Other World." Isabella stood in astonishment, her whip forgotten.
Lilith's data acquisition subroutine filed away another important fact. The crystalline energy nodes were sea diamonds. She automatically cross-indexed with the data she had purloined from the internet. Sea diamonds,
The humans cowered in fear and even Isabella was distracted, so the spell that had activated the sea diamonds began to dissipate. Lilith's body started to dissolve. Desperately, she sucked the last faltering power from the diamonds and attempted to open a portal. There was so little power.
She created a way through the Shadow Worlds and jumped but the energy was insufficient. She bounced off the dimensional wall as the portal failed and fell back into Isabella's Shadow World.
Her mission was over; she was dying. The records would only show another failed long-distance jump. The People had invested such so much into this experiment that she suspected no one would ever follow her. Travel to the Shadow Worlds would cease and the People would turn inwards to a new religious war.
She fell backwards, until something grabbed her and pulled her in.
Complex matter interacted all round her, exchanging tiny charged particles that released sparkling little bursts of energy. She gratefully absorbed chemical energy. The flavour was like nothing she had ever tasted, with endless subtle variation. She explored her new home and found struct
ure, endless complex fractal structure. Structure at microscales built up to even more structure at macroscales. The whole complex was a machine to regulate chemical reactions and the transfer of chemical energy.
She made a critical discovery. The chemical structure was exchanging particles with the "outside." So there was an outside but how could she access it? Gravity was still weak here but she could extend gravitonic senses. Chemical energy sources flared in her immediate vicinity. Some were simple energy release mechanisms while others were complex, like the thing she inhabited.
She understood. She was in a body and the three larger, complex things around her were also bodies, human bodies. Her body was the wrong shape for human so she inhabited an animal of some sort. She needed to think and run through her data. The body should have sensory structures with which she could investigate the world around her. Running through the body was a webway that reminded her of the Internet. Electrochemical signals flowed along protein membranes. She phased with the signals and perceived the outside world.
Auditory receptors picked up human speech. The voice was deeper than Isabella so he must be a male according to her stolen Internet data; for some reason he reminded her of an Elder.
"Who is behind the plot to murder the Queen? When will they strike? Where?"
The words made absolutely no sense to Lilith. Right now she was more interested in working out how to mesh with the body's data network. No, not data network, prompted a small subroutine, it was called a central nervous system. She could tap into the signals that streamed along the nerves from sense organs but she could not work out how to activate the motor system and get control.
After some study, Lilith thought that she understood the process. The body was controlled from a complex mass of nervous tissue near where the primary senses were clustered. She meshed into the system and she got it wrong.
The nervous system went into shock. It released a burst of incoherent signals. Chemical energy flashed and all the muscles in the body went into spasm. She felt the pain and howled.
She ran various diagnostics but her own structure seemed unhurt. She siphoned chemical energy from the body to restore her power levels.
One of the humans threw something at her. She saw the material quite clearly through the animal's eyes. The particles contained strange energy that attacked her fusion with the body. She howled again in pain.
Lilith ran diagnostic subroutines to check the damage to her host. The report was chilling. Blackness spread through the body, destroying membranes and chemical pathways. She modelled the damage and made a simulation. The blackness, the "poison," would cause accelerating damage until the body failed. There was nothing that she could do to stop it.
Think, think, she needed time to think.
"Answer, demon. I command you by the power of your true name, Choronzon. I invoke the pact as a child of Eve's line." The human spoke again.
Choronzon? Isabella had christened her Lilith. Couldn't the wretched creatures make their minds up?
She sucked energy greedily from the little body. She needed power to jump into a new host. She extended gravitonic lobes to probe the three humans around her to select a new host.
The lobes were blocked. She was surrounded by a field of strange energy, rather like that in Isabella's mirror. She couldn't jump through this energy barrier. Lilith was close to panic. Talk to them, she thought. Keep them occupied until you can find a solution
"Will you stop doing that, it hurts," Lilith said, using some of her precious power reserve to shape the animal's vocal structures.
Success! Lilith found a small frequency loophole in the energy barrier around her. It was too small to squeeze her body through but she could extend a communication pseudopod out. There was a fourth human some little distance away. This human sang. She sang songs that vibrated the air in harmonious patterns that opened a channel for Lilith to exploit. Now Lilith needed to find a way into the human's nervous system. She checked her stolen database. The eyes were the key. Humans were visual animals and visual information connected directly into the forebrain. Lilith expended a whisper of gravitonic energy to excite the vibrating air molecules in front of the human's eyes. Lilith made a flickering light, a light that flickered at a carefully calculated frequency.
The human must have a nervous system rather like the dog. She might be able to take partial control if she could just find the right frequency. Come on, come on, she thought. There, the light flickers matched the electrochemical waves in the target's nervous system. She had contact.
She projected an image that spoke to the subject.
"Come to me, come to me," it said
"Who threatens the Queen?" asked the human Elder, interrupting her concentration.
Why could they not leave her alone? She ran a quick run through her purloined data on the word Queen. She had many picture clips of a woman being treated with great deference by her subjects. She was Queen Elizabeth II, the Chief Elder of an English speaking community. She had almost as many clips of a young man called Freddie Mercury singing. Surely, they must mean the Elder.
"Queen. Female head of a state organised on monarchical lines. Could be anything from a dictatorial ruler to the head of a constitutional democracy," she suggested, helpfully.
All the time she kept the flickering image in the fourth human's eyes. "Come to me."
Her data search revealed more pictures of Freddie Mercury. He seemed more popular than the Elder. Perhaps she should ask for clarification.
"That sort of Queen or did you mean the popular band?"
They threw more of the energy-charged powder at her, causing more damage to the rapidly fading animal body that she inhabited. She screamed in pain again.
"Stop, please stop. This biological structure can barely sustain me and is decaying fast."
Why could she not reason with them? They seemed completely irrational for supposedly intelligent beings. All the time, the subroutine she had set up flickered light at her hypnotised subject and commanded, "Come to me."
"Tell me about the Papist plot against the Queen. From where does the threat come?" The human Elder refused to be diverted; he was implacable. He would have made a good Elder of the People.
Tell him something important, she thought, something that might mollify him.
"The portals that cross the Shadow Worlds are the danger. They threaten your whole species."
Her host body was in the final stages of failure. She could not speak again. She sacrificed precious energy reserves to keep the light flickering in her subject's eyes. The subject moved towards her. Lilith was low on power. It was going to be touch and go.
The subject touched the energy barrier and it exploded. Lilith grabbed the energy released. There was just enough power to jump to the nearest target.
Act 3
Barn Elms House
Simon stirred, then woke, as doors banged closer and closer to his bedroom. Morning light streamed through the gaps in the shutters. The erratic English weather had decided on summer sun, at least for the next few hours. He climbed out of the wooden bed and padded over to open the window to partake of the morning air. The new sun had not yet driven the chill from the air so he was glad of his full-length nightgown and nightcap.
A servant pushed open the bedroom door.
"Mornin', sir," said the man, in a rustic Surrey accent.
"Morning," replied Simon politely, and gestured for the man to set the tray down on a table.
"Cook has instructions that you like to breakfast frugally, sir. So I have just brought a little rye bread, a few slices of ham and chicken, a couple of boiled eggs, a piece of game pie, and a bowl of fruit from the orchards."
"Thank you," said Simon, with resignation. He had long given up debating the meaning of the word frugal with the cook.
The servant beamed at Simon with the air of a job well done. He departed, slamming the door hard to wake any remaining sleepers. Most of the Barn Elms household would already be awake.
Simon was important enough to have a room at the front of the building, overlooking the ornamental gardens rather than the farmyard at the back, but he was far enough down the pecking order to be at the end of the east wing.
Barn Elms was a working farm so the food was fresh and good. It was said that an English peasant dined on better quality food than did a duke on the Continent. That may have been an exaggeration but the agricultural richness of the island gave the English a reputation for idleness. Gluttony was supposed to be the English sin, as lust was the French and drunkenness the German.
Simon ate with his fingers, cutting the food up with a steel knife. A household in England had to be very poor indeed not to be able to afford a good blade of Sheffield steel. The meal was washed down with ale from a wooden mug. No one but the desperate drank water in England. The poor drank water and died of typhoid. The last administration in England that had delivered clean water supplies to the cities had owed their allegiance to Caesar.
When he had finished breakfast, Simon washed his hands and face and dressed. Law in Elizabethan England tightly controlled who could wear what clothes. There were strong consumer laws that guaranteed quality. Of course, the laws only applied to cloth sold to Englishmen. One could sell any old rubbish to foreigners. Clothing also denoted social rank. In a world without identity cards, to wear clothing more suitable for a higher rank was to commit identity fraud. Elizabeth's government solved this problem by forbidding credit sales for clothing.
Simon was a gentleman so he wore a shirt, breeches, and a doublet. He was also entitled to wear an open, knee-length robe to show that he was an educated man, who worked with his head rather than his hands. Simon opened the door to go to work and bumped into a servant come to clear away the breakfast debris. The man looked pointedly up and coughed discretely.