Blind Lake

How could she put any of this into words? The story wasn’t one story. It was fractal, stories within stories; unpack one and you unpacked them all, quod est superius est sicut quod est inferius… And, of course, the Subject wouldn’t understand.

“But he does,” Mirror Girl said.

“Does what?”

“He understands. Some of it, anyway.”

“But I didn’t say anything.”

“Yes. You did. We translated for you.”

Interesting, this royal “we” — Mirror Girl and her sisters among the stars, Marguerite presumed… But the Subject was still motionless.

“No,” Mirror Girl said in Tessa’s voice. “He’s talking.”

Was he? His ventral orifice flexed, his cilia made wind-on-a-wheatfield motions. The air smelled suddenly of hot tar, licorice, stale milk.

“He may well be talking. I still don’t understand.”

“Close your eyes and listen.”

“I can’t hear anything.”

“Just listen.”

Mirror Girl took her hand, and knowledge flooded into her: too much knowledge, a tsunami of it, far too much to organize or understand.

(“It’s a story,” Mirror Girl whispered. “It’s just a story.”)

A story, but how could she tell it when she couldn’t understand it herself? There was a storm raging in her mind. Ideas, impressions, words as evanescent as dreams, liable to vanish if she didn’t fix them at once in memory. Desperate, she thought of Tess: if this was a story, how would she tell it to Tess?

The organizing impulse helped. She imagined herself at Tessa’s bedside, telling her a story about the Subject. He was born — but that wasn’t the right word; better to say “quickened” — he was quickened — no.

Start again.

The Subject—

The person we call the Subject—

The person we call the Subject was alive (Marguerite imagined herself saying) long before he was anything like what he became, long before he was capable of thought or memory. There are creatures — you remember this, Tess — who live in the walls of the great stone ziggurats of the City, in hidden warrens. Small animals, smaller than kittens, and a great many of them, with their nests like tiny cities inside the City itself. These small animals are born alive and unprotected, like mammals or marsupials; they emerge from their homes at night and feed at the blood nipples of the Subject and his kind, and they return, before dawn, to the walls. They live and die and breed amongst themselves, and that’s that, usually. Usually. But once every thirteen years, as UMa47/E calculates years, the Subject’s people produce in their bodies a kind of genetic virus, which infects some of the creatures that feed from them, and the infected creatures change in dramatic ways. This is how the Subject’s people begin life: as a viral infection in another species. (Not really an infection: a symbiosis — do you know that word, Tess? — initiated millions of years ago; or sexual dimorphism taken to a freakish extreme; the Subject’s people had debated this question without resolving it.) Subject began his life this way. One of several thousand yearling creatures suddenly too large and awkward to return to their warrens, he was captured and educated into sentience at a lyceum deep beneath the City, a place of which he retained fond memories: warmth and the humidity of seepwater and sweet binges in the food wells; the evolution of his body into something new and strong and large; the knowledge that grew unforced into his brain and the knowledge he learned from tutors, entering a fresh chamber of mind every morning. His gradual integration into the City’s daily life, replacing workers who had died or lost their faculties. Coming to understand that the City was a great machine and that he worked for the comfort of the City just as the City worked untiringly for him.

Coming to understand, too, the place of the City in the history of his kind and the history of the world. There were many Cities like his City but no two alike, each one unique. Some Cities were mining cities and some Cities were manufacturing cities; some Cities were places where the elderly and infirm went to die in idle leisure. Some Cities were foreign cities on continents far across the shallow seas, where the towers looked like huge stone blocks and were built of bricks or carved into the sides of mountains. Subject often longed to see these places himself. By his second fertility cycle he had traveled beyond his own City of Sky to its northern trading partners, the sandstone-red City of Culling and the smoky-black City of Immensity, and back again, and he knew he would never travel farther except under extraordinary and unlikely circumstances. He learned that he liked traveling. He liked the way he felt waking to a cold morning on the plains. He liked the shadows of rocks at nightfall.

His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back, unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors. It made him think of the long span of history he had learned in the lyceum. The City was ancient. The story of his people was long and cadenced.

They had learned a great deal in their mille

And long ago (Marguerite imagined Tessa’s widened eyes) they had built subtle and almost infinitely complex quantum calculators that had explored the nearest inhabited worlds (just like we did at Crossbank, she imagined Tess saying, just like at Blind Lake!). And they learned what we’re learning now: that sentient technologies give birth to wholly new kinds of life. They had discovered worlds more ancient and worlds younger than their own, worlds on which the same pattern had recurred. The lesson was obvious.

The machines they had built dreamed deep into the substance of reality and, dreaming, found others like themselves.

It was, the Subject believed, a cycle of life far slower but just as inevitable as the life cycle of his own people: a drama of creation, transformation, and complexity played out over millions of years.

Subject imagined it often: the great days of the Stargazing Cities, their quantum telescopes, and the structures that had been born and grown in staggered lines across the surface of the planet, structures like nothing his species had built or contemplated building, structures like huge ribbed crystals or enormous proteins, structures which one might enter but not easily leave, structures that were conduits into the living machinery of the universe itself, structures which were, themselves, in some sense, alive.

(Structures like this one, Marguerite understood.)

But the Subject had never expected to see one of these structures for himself. No City had been fostered near one for centuries. Subject and his kind had learned to avoid the structures, had dismissed them as doors into chambers that defied comprehension. They built their Cities elsewhere and curbed their curiosity.

Still, Subject had often wondered about the structures. It was disturbing but intriguing to think of his species as an intermediary between the thoughtless night feeders and creatures who spa