Mayer Alan Brenner - Spell of Apocalypse

Whether there was any chance of counteracting the situation - or more precisely the thousand different situations that were probably evolving out there even as I sat thinking - was highly questionable. Even if I had the superuser equipment to start tinkering with the overrides and common carrier controls and the general guts of the system, or triggering the waiting oncogenes or retroviruses or other biologicals, I might be able to do nothing but make the general predicament worse.

The system I’d set up all those years ago wasn’t the only possible modality that could influence affairs, either. To meddle directly by rolling up sleeves and plunging arms into the guts would be cruder and rawer and less effective than working through the transformers and facilitator channels, but the world out there wouldn’t wait. Anything that had survived the assault on the infrastructure would already be exploiting any alternatives.

For the first time since the beginning I had begun to think seriously about the autokill self-destruct option. But I’d still need to get to an operational workstation, one that had been off-line during Arznaak’s pulse and that hadn’t had its cutouts tampered with. “Anybody know the fastest way to get to the Archives from here?” I asked.

Tildamire Mont hadn’t been certain Karlini was actually going to wake up, and when he did start to move it was with his eyes rolled back and his arms and legs jerking spasmodically, and when the seizure had stopped and she and the Lion had gotten him turned over so he could finish vomiting without asphyxiation and he opened his eyes for real, blood still running out of his ear, and his face and eyes as red as if he’d been run head-first into a freshly painted wall, well, by then the reason she’d wanted to so urgently get him sensible had advanced far beyond a curiosity into a clearly significant hazard.

She didn’t know if she’d ever been so aware of the movement of air. There was a slight breeze, and it was blowing away from them, which meant that the material that had come foaming up from the ground under the wreckage of the laboratory and was now having its top layers wafted away by the wind in streamers of bubbles was heading in the other direction rather than settling over their own heads. In the glow of the streetlights and the illumination from the Knitting celebration fireworks that were still occasionally going off overhead the stuff had an oily sheen and was a particularly dingy shade of gray as well; it looked overall like the sludge left in the laundry barrel after the clothes were clean. Its scummy appearance was not especially cheerful, but it wasn’t notably ominous either. The menacing character came from what the stuff was doing: it wasn’t merely coating the surfaces of the obstacles it encountered in its path, it seemed to be sinking into them, penetrating, being absorbed. It was unclear what happened to the obstacles next. It was thoroughly clear to Tildamire, however, that she didn’t want that stuff infiltrating her.

“That looks bad,” said the Lion.

“Have you ever seen anything like it, Dad?” Tildamire asked.

“No,” the Lion told her. “But I learned a long time ago never to trust anything escaped from a vat. Gray goos are bad business.”

Karlini made a gurgly sort of sound. Had there been a word in there, perhaps with the inflection of a question? He was up now on his hands and knees, his head hanging down toward the ground, but he was shaking his head as though trying to clear it, and if his eye, when he rolled his face far enough to the side to peer up at Tildamire, was not completely focussed or any less bleary, it was still no longer the empty vacant blank that had been the case a few moments before. He gargled again, and this time his utterance sounded more like “Goo?”

The Lion grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, hoisted him to his feet, and pointed him at the mounting foam. Karlini stared for a moment, at the mound of ooze in the wreckage, already easily twice their height, at the sheen covering the buildings behind it, and at the waving sheets of foam sailing off down the alley and over the tops of the structures and out of sight. “Damn,” Karlini said.

“Can you stop it?” said Tildamire. “Or kill it? Or whatever?”

Karlini raised a limp hand, looked at it, then forced his fingers into some sort of spell-sign. A sickly green wisp puffed out of his fingertips and faded out, and at the same Karlini uttered an involuntary grunt of pain, as though someone had punched him in the stomach. “Lemme sit down,” he mumbled at the Lion.

“No,” the Lion said. “Go ahead and kill the slime first.”

“I can’t,” Karlini said, sagging even more.

“What the hell kind of talk is that?” snarled the Lion, with the look of someone who is just about to wallop his conversational partner over the head.

“Burnout,” mouthed Karlini. “Power pulse hit hard. Can’t probe - remote sensing channels are out. Can’t call for help - carriers are down. Magic’s useless till things settle down, maybe longer than that.”

“Arr!” the Lion growled, and shook Karlini hard enough to make his teeth actually rattle. So that really could happen - Tildamire had always thought it just a colorful turn of phrase.

“Dad,” she said, “that’s not going to help anything. Karlini, is that bubbly stuff what I think it is? The material from Roni’s vats alive and growing again?”

“Hoped it was all dead,” Karlini mumbled. “Couldn’t detect anything. Must have been almost dead, must have been only a few drops of it dripped down into a crack in the ground, saved it getting sterilized by the fire. Would have finished dying if that power pulse hadn’t come through, give it a major transfusion. Burnout for me, energy to grow for it. Should have died out of the vats anyway, lacked essential nutrients - told Roni not to let them mutate.”

Magic-generating organisms, Tildamire thought. Magic-using organisms. Each one of them might be too small to see, but put enough of them together... “But Roni was developing them as tools, right? To respond to your commands, something you could tell to do spells on its own instead of having to do it all yourself, right? So why not command them, tell them to kill themselves off?”

“They’re not listening. Must have mutated, must have gotten rid of the self-destruct -”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” said the Lion. “They’re magic. Magic’s your job. I can’t cut it with a sword, it’s goo. So start doing your job. Shaa thought you could handle it or he wouldn’t have sent you. You said fire kills it? Then let’s start lighting off buildings. Somebody’s got to stop it. That stuff’s got to be dangerous.”

Before Karlini was able to respond, a bat came toward them into the nearest light, the paper-dry rustle of its wings erratic and its flight path lurching, until abruptly it careened head-first into the light standard with an audible thwack and fell limply to the ground. The bat’s skin had blotches of an iridescent sheen, and through its skin, the bones seemed to glow a pale yellow. “Why does that thing still look like it’s moving?” said Tildamire.

It wasn’t moving, not exactly, but areas of its skin did appear to be... foaming. “Let’s get out of here,” said Karlini. “Now.”

“Something’s happening out there,” said Max, as they jogged and weaved down the alley, “something that’s not good. I can feel it.”

“How?” said Leen. “How can you feel it?”

“Intuition,” Max told her. “That pulse of Arznaak’s was bad medicine, the kind of thing that sets off chain reactions nobody can see the end of.”