The Fecund's Melancholy Daughter - Brent Hayward [98]
When the siblings had made planetfall, Mummu was an infant, wanting only to rumble away from the others, who squabbled and preened and occupied themselves with vain pursuits. Single-minded, Mummu was unlike them. He had trundled across the barren landscape, toward the distant range of low mountains.
By the time the walls of Nowy Solum were completed, and the fecund was a young, lush monster, Mummu was seven times his birth size, working nearly a kilometre under the surface, eating rocks and churning out drones, which he put together in his own shop, manufactured with metals from the rocks he bored through.
When the fighting ended, with Anu half-destroyed, and his sisters hiding, he was perhaps thirty times his birth size. Big enough to generate an impressive mantle.
Today, Mummu was a further seventy times as large. He had continued to spread out, incrementally. His drones were diligent, and dutiful.
The sisters found him by first locating a pack of workers tunnelling under the crust along a stretch of coastline. Kingu and Aspu had known the general area where their brother was set up but they were astonished to see the extent of the work he had done. They approached his seeding towers, extending high above the beach in rows, penetrating the very clouds they had generated for so long.
Several attempts on many frequencies were required to get their stalwart brother to respond, to make him understand that Anu had returned, and that their mother was active. Mummu listened but was not especially interested. Only his agenda remained clear. He had little interaction with the indigenous creatures down here and even less concern for their future. With no decisions to make that required anything other than empirical logic, he had no need for exemplars. He did not care for approval, nor covet worship.
But his sisters tried to express the importance of their visit, relentless. Their lifestyles were in jeopardy. Their colony. Mummu’s fields, his dunes, all of his sculpting: these were also threatened. Anu has descended, they said. Anu is under the clouds.
Paused in his digging—as drones continued to work the vicinity—Mummu was not alarmed. He did not acknowledge the danger. He wanted only to be left alone, to continue his work. If he had to grant concessions, minor requests, to make his sisters go away, then he would do so.
Cliffs collapsed into the ocean with terrific thunder, boiling the spume and sending rolls of dust out over the waves.
The cylinder he had taken from the seraphim became suddenly warm, and Nahid withdrew it quickly from his clothes. It crackled with a light that made the hair on his head stand on end. His skin tingled. When he tried to release the device, it stayed in the air, at eye level, white tendrils a blur. Bluish light flickered, illuminating the alley.
Nahid was alone.
The cylinder lifted higher, humming.
Then someone saw him from the street, and recognized him, for a voice shouted his name, “Nahid! The ostracon is burning! The ostracon is on fire!”
Pains radiated in his limbs. Anu’s voice had still not returned. Hornblower looked at the dark roofs and darker clouds, toward a huge black structure balanced precariously atop several spindly towers, elevated much higher than all other structures around. From this lofty room, a light had begun to shine, visible through the clouds like a beacon over the city.
He heard the growing roar, approaching from behind. When he felt the shaking at his bones, he turned to see Anu appear, sliding into view, rendering every detail white and harsh. Grinding at the hard material used to roof these structures in the underworld, the blind power knocked down chunks that shattered or thudded heavily around hornblower’s feet. Winds whipped his robes about. He shielded his eyes.
Exemplar! Don’t look at me; look for a place I can land.
“I have failed you,” hornblower shouted. “Now I’m lost in this place. I will never find the exile