Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

Like a giant computer, he thought. They were components, programmers, and everything else all in one. They and their machines were one. And the surviving humans, culled to leave only the very strongest, with the Hunters taking out the weak and maintaining the line—what were they intended to be? Some new cog in the great unity, almost certainly. Perhaps several.

But why the hell did they grow flowers that drove people nuts?

Unless…

What if the Titans were the flowers? Or the flowers were Titan young? Or Titan young hatched or whatever inside the flowers? That was possible, and would explain a lot, including why you might be driven nuts if you stumbled among them.

Or the groves might be repositories. Temporary memory? Sorters? If they grew their bases from crystals, might they have organic parts of their great system, their great machine, other than themselves?

At least his suppositions reinforced Kat’s and Littlefeet’s conviction, independently arrived at, that if you could shatter just one part of this system, the rest would collapse in on itself. Divert the plasma, or the source of it, and the means of transference, and they could quite possibly die or, more unsettlingly, go mad at suddenly becoming disconnected individuals.

The terrible weapon created from Priam’s Lens just had to work. It just had to.

“Down!” N’Gana shouted, and they all hit the hard rock and hugged it as tendrils of energy snaked all about them. This was about the tenth time that the tendrils had come this close, but their purpose remained unclear. Certainly whoever or whatever was running that huge base/machine over there could identify them and pick them off anytime they wanted. N’Gana was certain they weren’t being hunted or toyed with; that would make the motivations and logic of the Titans almost understandable. They had probably been detected and ignored since they were not coming near the base and posed no apparent threat, but there was no doubt that whoever those energy streams touched would instantly be within the Titan mental network.

Littlefeet understood this better than most, and he was already somewhat connected. Terrible and unintelligible visions flooded his mind, and it was only by force of will that he managed to push them back enough to keep going. The others felt them, too, but never as strongly as when those tendrils came close.

It was, Kat thought, almost like someone practicing on a piano, only the keys were the receptors of the brain and they were being rapidly triggered and canceled when that energy approached. It was a bizarre sensation, or series of sensations; in a few seconds you could go from feeling pain to orgasmic delight to fear to absolute confidence to love, hate, just about the whole range. If it lasted for longer than that, it would have been impossible to take, but the tendrils always moved on, and the sensations and urges lessened, although they never totally went away.

“What the hell are they doing and why?” she almost wailed after it happened yet again.

Harker patted her arm gently. “They’re broadcasting,” he said simply. “And maybe they’re receiving as well. Bear with it. We can’t be too far from our goal now.”

It had taken most of the night, some of it spent crawling over raw stone or broken concrete on their bellies and elbows, but this was true. Hamille, who seemed less affected by the broadcasts, had kept the physical markers—mountains, sea, bluffs, and the pattern of roads and ruins on the ground—in closest focus. They had swung way out, skirting the old spaceport ruins, then come back in along the main spaceport highway.

Once this had been an industrial park for high-tech products most of which were related to spaceport maintenance and spaceship repairs. The only exception was the special project of the Karas and Melcouri families. This was a large complex now almost completely obliterated above ground, but that went down, down into the very bedrock. Now, as the sun grew closer to the terminator, the light of false dawn was spreading, and the Titan base activities lessened. They reached the same spot that had been reached a few years earlier by another offworlder, one who could neither get to its still hidden treasures nor escape from the planet, but who had had the guts to get the message out.

Now they made their way down into a drainage ditch half-filled with debris, going along toward a small open pipelike tunnel ahead.

The emotional roller coaster caused by the Titan signals had subsided almost to a memory. Though they were extremely tired and bloodied on the elbows and knees from the night’s crawls, they saw the end of the quest ahead.

It was dark and silent in there, but they weren’t afraid, not after what they had had to walk and crawl through just to get there.

Some air circulated, probably from other old half-exposed vents and exhausts, but it was suddenly quite cool.

“Let’s rest here and consider how we proceed from this point,” the colonel suggested, sinking to the damp rubble that served as a floor inside the tunnel. The others did the same.

“I’d say that we have to find some way to get some light in here or we’re going to have to go totally blind,” Harker noted. “Hamille, can you see much in here?”

“Better than you,” the Quadulan responded. “Not good enough.”

“It’s odd, but even in this muck in the darkness I feel better than I have since we landed and lost our stuff,” Kat Socolov commented. “It’s like—well, like there was some kind of constant background noise that’s suddenly been cut off. Don’t you all feel it?”

“I think I know what you mean,” a weary Harker responded. “For some reason, we’re no longer connected to the grid. They’ve been broadcasting constantly to us, to all of us, and now we can’t receive the signals. Odd that it wouldn’t penetrate this far. We can still see the opening.”

“I can’t hear them,” Littlefeet said, amazed. “For the first time since I climbed the mountain, I can’t hear them. And we are almost on top of them!”

“It couldn’t be so simple, or there would be organized underground societies on the Occupied Worlds,” Harker noted.

“It’s not,” N’Gana told him. “I suspect that this place, like several of the high-industry areas dealing in very dangerous radiation and other forms of energy manipulation, required shielding. What shielded and protected the population of Ephesus does the same now for us. The odds are that it began with the topmost floors of the buildings above that no longer exist. Dissolved, they’ve lined this conduit. Now the buildup of debris channels the water away, so we’ve got this protected area. Ironic, isn’t it?”

“Well, it’ll serve as an explanation until something better comes along,” Harker agreed. “But it’s pretty damned temporary. With no food, no uncontaminated water except this little bit in Spotty’s gourd, and no light, we can’t stay here long. One way or the other, we have to move.”

“Light is our first, last, and only priority right now,” Socolov agreed. “With it we can deal with the rest. Without it, we don’t have a chance. Damn! I wonder what the Dutchman’s man did for light? He couldn’t possibly have been in any better shape than we are!”

“Actually,” said an eerie voice just beyond in the blackness, “I turned on the lights when his presence awakened me. Shall I do the same for you?”

All tiredness vanished. Every one of the group felt their hearts jump almost out of their chests. In an instant they were on their feet and eyeing the distant oval, which was now showing some sunlight filtering in.

Littlefeet was in a combat stance, and N’Gana and Harker had reflexively pulled the gun barrel truncheons they still carried.