Adiamante Read Free

centuries or longer.
    The breeze carried the scent of cedar and juniper and piñon, the air barely damp from the quick evening rain of the night before. A light dusting of snow had covered the higher mountains to the east, and to the north the Esklant Peaks glittered white, as would the hills around me before much longer.
    I finished stretching, straightened the loose sweat clothes, checked the razored blade in the sheath, and walked along the path toward the western end of the ridge. A brilliant blue piñon jay squawked, then a second, and both flapped upward, followed by the rest of the small flock, as they swirled downhill to light on another broad-branched piñon, high enough that they would not be easy prey for a vorpal.
    After a quick glance back at the thick brown walls that merged with the hillside and the one partly open window, I began to run, letting my mind free-associate on the thought of the cybs—of the coming meeting in Parwon.
    As always, the lines of dialogue spooled through my nets, almost independent of moving legs and breathing.
    Dialogue line one: The cybs seek an undefined goal, probably revenge cloaked in something, and are human enough to make it nasty, if given a chance. Old Earth has no ships with adiamante hulls—or any other kind of warship hulls—just twenty to thirty million talented demis. What do the cybs want in their revenge? Symbolic atonement? Destruction of Earth’s remaining demis? Acknowledgment
of their superiority and that they were treated wrongly?
    What would Morgen have said? Enter soulsong one:

    â€œMy songs for you alone will flow;
at my death none but you will know
cold coals on black stove’s grate, ash-white,
faintest glimmers for winter’s night … .”

    Dulce, dulce, with the smoothed gold of a perfect pear, the gold hair of mountain dunes at twilight, and a funeral bell across the hills of Deseret.
    Fighting the images, the ghost sense of silky skin I could no longer touch, I ran harder. I used all my other senses, full-extended, because my eyes blurred and burned, and I skittered thoughts toward the cyb-ships, the twelve adiamante hulls, hard and black in the void-wrapped nielle, that darkness deeper than black.
    Downhill to the right, a jackrabbit thumped and jumped sideways behind a cedar, another ancient twisted trunk that felt as though it dated to the Rebuilding. Above, Swift-Fall-Hunter circled, his eyes on the jackrabbit.
    Dialogue line two: Are the cybs people or aliens? Does it matter? No matter how deeply we feel, nor how much we try to develop a picture of an alien, or a concept of one—those concepts and descriptions are just humans masquerading as aliens … unless you believe that intelligence, as we define it, has as its goal survival—in which case there are no aliens, only humans with different shapes.
    The jackrabbit darted to a halt under a piñon beside a washed-out scrub brush, and Swift-Fall-Hunter circled to the east on wings that spanned more than four meters. The golden eagle sought other prey, gliding silently over the valley that had once held, among other things, a longago
town. Now only scrub and cedar rose from the red clay.
    I kept running, westward, away from the vanished town and away from history.
    Dialogue line one: Morgen, morning, morning in my twilight, what would she have said? Certainly something to the effect that revenge is human, all too human, and therefore a fitting vice to be overcome, except she would have said it, thought it, more gently … something like, “The cybs have human vices, too, Ecktor … .”
    Not like that, either, I realized, as I started down between the hills, concentrating on putting my boots evenly between the rocks and depressions. Not even with the net and her songs could I construct what she might have said to the unexpected, like the return of the cybs.
    Some demis run naked and barefoot, but that takes bodymods, even if they’re