The Emperor of Everything

Nisa seemed as graceful as the bronze creature who stood poised in the center of the pool, a six-legged predator, obviously of some coursing species. Its beautiful terrible head glared blindly; it snarled, exposing long fangs green with the patina of ages. The dark water that ran down its flanks and dripped into the pool steamed, as though the day were cold and the water hot. There was something fascinating about the patterns the water made as it flowed over the bronze, an involving complexity, as the streams diverged and recombined, endlessly. It was almost hypnotic.

After what seemed a very long time, the bronze predator began to seem not quite so graceful. Its limbs were thicker and less cleanly defined, its head a knot of lowering menace. Ruiz tore his gaze away from the ugly thing and looked at Nisa again.

He made a choked sound of horror. While he had been distracted, Nisa had continued her vigorous scrubbing, to hideous effect. Her skin, her wonderful perfect skin was gone, scoured away, exposing the bloody meat beneath. She still smiled at him, but her lips were gone, so that her smile was very wide, long white teeth smeared with red. He saw now that the black sand was really made up of splinters of dark cobalt-blue glass, with which Nisa continued to abrade her flesh.

He could not rise from the coping of the fountain, he could form no words; it was as if his body had turned to stone. He wanted to stop her from continuing her destruction; surely it wasn’t yet too late. She still lived and moved; he had brought her back from death once. Why not again? But he couldn’t act, he could only watch, as she began to change even more terribly.

She was rotting as she stood, and instead of glass, she bathed in handfuls of maggots, which wriggled into her body and made her flesh pulse with hidden movement. She was dead, long dead, now, and yet she still moved.

Her flesh darkened, liquefied, dripped from her into the pool, which now seemed a sump full of dreadful substances, boiling with virulence.

He expected to see, finally, the clean whiteness of bone, but what he saw instead seemed infinitely worse. As the last of her flesh fell away, he discovered that beneath all had been hidden the bright alloy of a killmech. The thing — he could no longer call it Nisa — moved with quick insectile precision to the center of the fountain and laid its claws on the shoulder of the bronze beast.

With a groan that made Ruiz think of long-locked doors opening, deep under the ground, the beast shifted and then stepped down from its plinth.

Both of them, in a movement that seemed to take hours, shifted their gaze until they looked at Ruiz. Their glowing red eyes projected an unmechlike hunger.

In a horribly synchronized motion, they took a step toward him, and the killmech raised its arms in a parody of embrace.

He woke screaming, unable to remember what had frightened him so badly.

Chapter 20

Ruiz came to himself, covered with greasy sweat, feeling not a great deal better than he had before his rest. He wiped his hands over his face, rubbing at his eyes, waiting for the remaining traces of the dream to fade. He had forgotten the content of the dream already, but he knew it had involved Nisa in some context, and he felt a touch of wistful loss at the thought of her. Sometimes he wished he could remember his dreams, even if they proved unpleasant, as this one evidently had.

Albany had started to move toward Ruiz, but had evidently thought better of it, and now stood still, one hand extended in a gesture of comfort or restraint. “Damn, Ruiz,” he said. “You’re giving me the crawls. Are you all right?”

“Sure. I’m fine.” Ruiz climbed out of the pilot chair and saw that he’d slept almost the full two hours he’d allotted himself. He flexed his injured shoulder and decided that it was healing well, responding to the tissue stimulants the armor’s medical limpet had injected.

Albany shook his head. “What a freak show,” he said, shaking his head. His face was pale inside the opening of his helmet, and he wasn’t smiling.

“Sorry,” Ruiz said. “Why don’t you take a nap next? I’ve got a wafer to scan, and some scheming to do.” He started to climb into his armor again, wrinkling his nose at the sour stinks that rose from the monomol segments.

For a moment Albany didn’t react, then he seemed to relax from some tautness that Ruiz hadn’t noticed until he had moved. “Yeah, yeah. I guess I’ll do that.” He began to strip off his own armor, and Ruiz saw that Albany’s hands were trembling.

“What’s been happening?” Ruiz asked.

Albany shrugged, and settled into the pilot’s chair. “Not much. We’re in a west-running current, drifting at a half knot. There was something going on right after you went to sleep, some fuss on the surface, with a lot of active sonar and detector drogues being dropped — someone looking for something. Probably wasn’t us, hey?”

“Maybe not,” said Ruiz. “Anything else?”