“What are they doing?”
Slatermeyer laughed, the sound distorted by his suit’s radio into a harsh grate. He shrugged. “I know what it looks like.”
oOo
There was her body, but she was someplace else. Her body was busy, it had no use of her mind, and her mind swam amid black waters of nowhere, like a question gone unanswered, and then the answer came, and she was there, here, her. Lilith and she, entwined in thought and body, asking and answering each other the question of their being.
“They say it began in a garden,” said Lilith, “but I know better. It began with a dream.”
The brilliant blackness of the void faded around them, and they stood in a green place with a tree and a snake in the tree. Her sisters were there, adorned with fig leaves. They stood with their arms linked in a crisscross pattern, like a row of x’s with legs.
“Before we existed we were a dream dreaming ourselves into existence,” thought Lilith as one of the sisters broke out of the line, lay down and closed her eyes. Soon another detached herself and danced over the head of the sleeper. “We crossed over into the world through the mind of Hector Martin.” The sleeper turned over and wakened, and the dancer rolled over her bowed back in a somersault and stood, arms outstretched, at the head of the dreamer.
“This is how we happened, but I remember before the dream, before anything. I remember the void.”
The tree was made of cardboard, and Helix saw the void reach up with empty hands behind it, and the blackness rushed in and toppled it and her sisters were gone. All that remained was a ring of x’s, spinning around them.
“This is where we came from.” Helix knew somehow.
“Everything comes from here,” either she or Lilith thought, she couldn’t keep track anymore. “From the well of possibility, where nothing is known. Everything comes from here, everything returns here, but only in the world do we know that we exist.”
“But what difference does it make, if we only end up here again?”
“All the difference. All the difference in the world. We are a pattern, and the pattern continues. We return to the void, but our pattern is forever in the weave of the world.”
The void around them gradually returned to being the waters of the vat, and Helix realized she could open her eyes and lift her head. She and Lilith separated, and the sisters flowed in to buffer them from one another.
The consuming rage that had driven her into her mother’s arms was gone, and she allowed her sisters to guide her with numerous small hands, up onto the dive platform and down into the other vat. They had been designed to replace the vatdivers; trading cheap labor for in-house slavery. But it hadn't worked out the way GeneSys wanted. Instead of docile biological machines, it had gotten the Lilim, and now, they were here to stay.
Chapter 20 — Daughters of the Void
The first time she’d lucked out and gotten into the output system. The ducts were clean, the air was fresh and ready for breathing, and the only fellow travellers she had to contend with were some very passive algae caulking the duct’s seams, probably there to breathe extra oxygen into the mix. It was good air. This, on the other hand, was not good air. She’d taken a wrong turn back there somewhere and wound up in the exhaust system. This stuff had pretty much been breathed by everyone on the twenty-second floor, and smelled like it. Plus the walls of the duct were covered with a fine grit of dust mites. They crunched beneath her palms and got ground up under her fingernails as she crawled down the narrow shaft.
Chango squirmed around a corner to find an opening in the duct, but it was only a vent from another apartment. She crawled on until the duct ended in a vertical shaft, and she took it down, trying to slow her descent by bracing her arms and legs against the walls. Dust mites caked at her elbows and knees, and soon she was sliding in a streak of their crushed bodies. She passed several floors before the duct banked inward and halted her downward plunge.
Here the duct was joined by several others, and became considerably larger. She took the opportunity to sit upright and catch her breath. Looking around at the duct walls, now faintly luminescent with some sort of algae, she was glad for the dive-suit she wore. Hot and uncomfortable as it was, it was better than picking up goddess knows what from this ventilation system and its attendant organisms. She probably shouldn’t even be breathing in here, but she didn’t have air tanks; couldn’t have fit through the ducts if she had.
She crawled on through the darkness, her way lit only by the phosphorescent glow of the algae clinging to the walls. If anything, the air was worse than ever. It was warmer now and humid, and she was pretty sure the oxygen level was dropping off. Her head swam, and there was a faint ringing in her ears. She had to get out of here.
She took the next branch she could find, wending her way through several switchbacks lined with fine, feathery, growths that squished between her fingers and left a faint trail of slime where they brushed across her face.
She climbed over a lip into a larger chamber. At first she thought there were flecks of dirt blowing through here, but then she realized they were swarming and nipping microscopically at her exposed flesh. Dust mites, only these ones flew, and to them she was one motherfucking huge dust bunny; the challenge of their careers, their big opportunity to prove just what excellent flying dust mites they were. Chango suppressed a scream and squeezed her eyes shut as she dashed through the biting swarm, searching for a way out.
Her hands plunged through something thick and gelatinous, to mite-free air on the other side. She lunged through and found herself on the other side of a shimmering blue-green membrane which sealed itself back up behind her. Ahead of her was another one, only it was orange instead. They were filters, apparently. As Chango progressed through the prismatic slimefest, the air steadily improved. And the wind picked up.
She dove through a deep purple membrane to find herself in a howling indraft, surrounded by the hum of turbines. She was pulled along the duct at nearly twice her crawling speed and then the duct gave way to a larger chamber where it was joined by several others.
Chango careened off the lip of the duct, plummeting towards one of four big turbine fans in the opposite wall. A narrow crossbar spanned the fan’s ten foot diameter, and as she tumbled through empty air, Chango reached for the metal struts, desperately hoping to grab on before she was diced by the blades. Her left foot struck the center of the crossbar first, and she twisted forward, her hands spread wide, managing to grab a strut with her right hand. For perilous seconds she teetered there, flailing desperately with her other hand to keep balance, her face inches from the whirring blades. The wind sucked at her, and she was glad of the divesuit hood that prevented her from being pulled in by her hair. Finally she grabbed hold of another strut and got her other foot braced against the cross bar. Slowly, carefully, she crawled across the vortex of the fan and pulled herself up over the lip of the vent opening. She perched there on the casing for a few seconds, catching her breath and looking around. A narrow walkway ran beneath the fans. Of course. They’d need to get in here in case something big got jammed in the blades. Like her, for instance. To her right she spotted a small door. Chango wedged herself between the fan casing and the wall, and gradually lowered herself down to the walkway. Clinging to the iron rail she made her way around to the door. It opened with a crank handle, and she was outside, finally, in the welcome, mundane dust of empty narrow walkways and the outsides of ducts and machine casings.