Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

One of the craft flew almost over them, fortunately not stopping nor slowing down, but in that brief passage all of them, not just Littlefeet, could feel and sense a power and control, some kind of dominating energy that could affect them as well as the Titans.

“Discovery at any stage right now could be disastrous,” N’Gana warned them. “That is surely the place where they breed and create the creatures like the Hunters and who knows what else, and there is no way we could escape if they decided to hunt us down on this coastal plain.”

It was a restatement of the obvious, but it showed just how nervous even the iron colonel had become.

Although their descent was fairly rapid, the old city had been huge and spread out as well. They realized that they would not make their goal before sundown. That required an immediate decision.

“That place shines,” the colonel noted. “There will be light to see by, but not enough to be comfortable in this strange and dangerous region. We can either push on and try and make it through the night, chancing that we’ll be more vulnerable than they in doing it, or we can halt and spend the night in that thick growth down there.”

“I would rather move than cower in the dark,” Littlefeet told them. “I am afraid that once darkness comes, I may be drawn to them or they to me and I might betray us anyway. There is also water here but little food, and foraging would be terribly risky. I say we push on and do what you must do.”

“I think so, too,” Spotty agreed. “I am very tired, but I can see no rest if we wait and much risk.”

Harker shrugged and looked at Kat. “I’m not going toget a wink of sleep so long as I’m near that anyway,” she told them. “I say let’s do it and get the hell out of here.”

“Agreed,” N’Gana said. “We get to the jungle there and take a rest until dark. Then we move out. I keep wondering if they let the inmates out of the asylum at closing, and I’d rather not know the answer.”

The destination had been programmed into the minds of N’Gana, Kat Socolov, and even Hamille; it was only the others who didn’t have confidence in where they were headed. Even with that mental map, though, it wasn’t easy to figure where you were and where you were going at ground level, and from the reclaiming jungle, even in daylight. In darkness, it was even harder.

They had underestimated the glow from the Titan base. Although things were distorted and shadows were menacing, there was enough light emanating from it for them to see pretty well, as much as the brightest full moon. It didn’t help, though, that the place seemed to be far more active in the night than in the day; odd sounds came from it, echoing against the hills and seeming to go right through the interlopers. These were deep bass thumps and penetrating, electroniclike sounds and pulses that would stop, start, speed up, slow down, or just throb with monotonous regularity. It was impossible to know what those sounds meant, but there was a fair amount of traffic of the egg-shaped vehicles, more than in the day, and, in the semidarkness of the glowing structures, various beams of pastel-colored light played this way and that, both into space and out to sea and across and through the grid.

“You’d almost swear the bastards were nocturnals,” Harker commented. “But who ever heard of tending flowers by night? They bloom by day, don’t they, Littlefeet?”

“I can’t say,” he responded, unnerved by the noises and the lights. “You go into those groves, you go crazy. Period.”

“They came out of the grove and attacked the Family,” Spotty put in. “They were—wild. Like mindless monsters. Their eyes were staring, their mouths foaming, and they were screeching like the damned, which they were. Their souls were taken by the flowers, and their minds with them, leaving only bodies that were maniacs.”

Harker kept trying to assemble the information into anything that might make sense. Okay, the Titans were so alien you probably could not exchange many common thoughts with them, but there were certain constants. Physics for one thing. Mathematics. There were certain constants to being in this universe. He was already hypothesizing a model that was something like an insect colony, with all of them both individuals and devoted to, perhaps even connected mentally to, one another and to central cores. The plasma manipulation was their technology, their key, and also their means of maintaining a uniform hive. They would see everything as connected, even interconnected. They would think in terms of systems. The whole would concern them; individuals would not, not even individual safety or life. They simply wouldn’t consider such things. Everything would be co-opted, modified, incorporated into the continental, then planetary, and eventually interstellar system. If, as Littlefeet suggested, the grid and the plasma gave them a kind of telepathic connection with everything else, then they might really not fear death or extinction. All that they did, were, discovered would be fed into the central database—an organic database that might not even have a center.

Kat had said that she felt that the grid was influencing even them, and certainly the Families, if only in a more indirect and general manner. That would fit his vision.

But how the hell could you ever talk with or reason with such a race? They could not even comprehend the idea of individual rights, of the kind of morality that humans put up as a standard. The Titans were the grid; that was what they did—extend it, world by world. The survivors of the worlds they took over would be the strongest, survivors in the true sense of the word. Eventually, as they were modified, studied, probed, manipulated, and whatever, they’d be co-opted into the grid, into the local system.

It wasn’t all a spurt of inspiration; these subjects had been bandied about by some of the brightest minds and most powerful computers in The Confederacy. But talking to natives and seeing things this close made it much easier to figure out which of those conjectures fit the facts.

Kat understood and thought that he was on to something, although they might never really know. N’ Gana had a more pragmatic reaction.

“It means that the only way we can stop them is to send them to hell,” he said.

After waiting out the inevitable night storm in the cover of the jungle, they moved out and headed southeast, using the alien base as the directional benchmark, figuring that, at worst, they would wind up either on the bluffs overlooking the ocean or at the remnants of the old seaport. From that point, working back to the old spaceport and then to the fabrication bunkers would be relatively easy.

The plan was good, but the sounds and the snakelike colored beams coming from the Titan base made it difficult to think, let alone hear. Then they emerged from the jungle onto old sculpted rock strengthened with poured concrete and reinforced mixtures that had withstood everything. It oriented them, but it also meant that, from this point on, they would be exposed. And every once in a while those beams would play across the open expanse.

“Drop if one comes near,” Harker told them. “Don’t let it hit you or they’ll know instantly that we’re here. I think they’d all know. They don’t seem to be able to depress to ground level—I make the minimum clearance at about a meter. So drop and wait. Understand?”

They all nodded.

From the ground, the usually silent snakelike Hamille said, “Just move like me. Not get touched.”

The entire area seemed surreal. Different parts of the base, perhaps individual “crystals,” sometimes whole areas, would pulse and change color in time to the noises. Whatever the hell they were doing in there, the base was clearly not just a base and headquarters, airport and spaceport, it was also in some way a single unified machine. Harker thought that they were making and shaping their plasma somehow in that thing, and then sending what amounted to programs along the flows.