And
stood. That white mist had been thick when I entered the cache. It was absurdly
heavy now. I barely saw the hand before my face. Around me total silence fell. Something
clicked, and I understood. Some of the so-called fog came out of my own
nostrils. All through the poet’s journal there’d been prophecies about some new
machine, something white and cloudy. Now I’d found it in this White Swarm.
Or
it had found me. White dust had covered the poet and politician in their
coffin. In the Well where the provisions were, I had thought it odd to see my
breath in a room that was not cold. But it was just the first time in this city
that I hadn’t had an energetic barrier. I had been breathing those machines. For
a moment, standing there in the center of Ariel, I wondered what they did.
Then
it hit me: no nightwind. There was no nightwind anywhere I saw. I reflected on
what Jerem Cozak had said. Damned neat, these new machines.
The
Temple of the History of the Profusion was just across the square. Spires and
towers, a ruined mess. There’d been a fire during the riots or perhaps the
city’s fall. No one had rebuilt. I thought that odd. On my world, the nightwind
built the Augers whole cities of barracks and warehouses. Maybe on Thaeron they
were tired of all the striving. This wasn’t a warring world, not anymore. I
walked over.
There
was someone already there. A young dark-haired man, large and slumped over on
the front steps, his skin more than a little off-key. I recalled that
nanotechnical invasion is rarely kind to the physiologies of anyone.
He
blinked when he looked up. “There’s no one to take care of me,” he said.
‘I
know,” I said. I sat down beside him. “Me neither.”
I
reflected. On Earth I’d gotten out just ahead of this problem. How are you
managing it, Elmy? How do you enclose ten million souls who once were Augers, but were supposedly no
more? It changes your brain. That’s the purpose of the nightwind. But when you
take the machines out, does the mind remain the same?
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