Kyros’s workshop rested inside a giant bubble inside the room I stood in. Kyros burst in through a hole in the bottom of the clear area.
“What do you breathe?” Kyros asked.
I had to think for a second. “Oxygen, I think, with a little bit of nitrogen…” I needed to give percentages. Right, I had to think for a second.
“You think?” Kyros said. “What you breathe is very important. Let us not get it wrong.”
No, I had it back to front. “Three parts nitrogen and one part oxygen would be fine.”
“Are you sure?”
I bit my lip. “Yeah.”
Air hissed out of vents into the ring around the workshop area I was standing in.
“If you think you are right,” Kyros said, “you can take your breather off.”
I pulled it off, keeping it ready over my head as I drew in a test lungful.
“It seems safe,” I said, lowering the breather. My head felt feather light without it on.
“Good, good.” Kyros swam around the inside of his workshop. Machines made out of what looked like random pieces of junk dripped from the shelves in a chaotic mess. Screens flickered and blinked in the dim murky Ehallan air. Cables draped over tiny insect-like robots and sculptures, criss-crossing the entire workshop.
I knew what Kyros was: a hacker, tinkerer, maker, packrat. If they delivered pizza on Ehalla, there’d be a day old cardboard box in the corner with a stiff slice half draped out of its side.
It even looked like moss was growing from the top of the workshop.
“The All Tree’s in trouble,” I said, getting right to the point.
“Yes, it was not able to come down and say hello.” Kyros let out a great sigh and settled into a cradle. “I wondered as much when I saw it approach so quickly, without hailing me.”
“An avatar of the All Tree sent me. It said we need the backup,” I told the Ehallan.
“Backup?” Kyros said. “Are you sure about this?”
“Yes.”
“Then the Tree really is in trouble,” Kyros said. “But first tell me, what has happened?”
I told him everything, in a fast burst. Earth, Ecauador, my Yggdrasil guardians, settling on the hill, the virus, the ansible. Kyros interrupted to ask questions, particularly about Earth.
When I was done, Kyros scratched the flat area between his eyes with a tentacle. “Okay, I believe you think you are who say you are, but how do I know this for sure,” he mused.
“What do you mean?” Of course I was what I said I was.
Kyros rose from his cradle and peered at me through the glass of his inner workshop. “You could be an avatar. A trick by the All Tree to regain its former self.”
I looked at all the machines in the workshop. “Don’t you have something there that will tell you all that?”
“Would you consent to a bodyscan?” Kyros asked, excited.
Anything to get this moving. I nodded. But Kyros didn’t understand that, and just waited. “Yes,” I said out loud for him.
A burst of blue light hit me, starting at my head and moving slowly down to my feet. My skin prickled.
“Why you thinking I’m trying to trick you?” I asked.
“The All Tree hasn’t told you, then?” Kyros said. A large burp came from inside the workshop, and more cloudy ink. “Interesting. There’s apparently a lot you don’t know here, little alien.”
I looked back at the door. Did we have time for all this? “Like what?” I asked, turned back.
“Before the All Tree came, my people floated on rivers of wind in the sky. We weren’t a very wise race, but we were wise enough. We feasted on the fish of the air, we fought, we grew. We built living, floating cities in the dense lower atmospheres.”
“You have whole cities?” I asked.
“Yes. We mined the massive airwhales for the metals they sucked out of the mists in the air and processed in their gut. We studied our skies. And we dreamed, and told stories, and thought grand thoughts. We prided ourselves on our sciences. But when the All Tree came to us, we realized we knew nothing of the outside world. I volunteered with many others to go with it, and learn more. But after just days aboard, we realized that something was very, very wrong.”
“Wrong?” I didn’t like where this was going. I felt my stomach clench a bit. “What was wrong?”
“Again, understand little alien: my species developed keen minds over many millennia. Our abilities to devastate each other in wars of logic, to create resources literally out of thin air, they all led us to realize that the All Tree was studying us…”
“Well of course,” I interrupted.
“…because its programming,” continued the giant floating squid, as if it hadn’t heard me, “gave it the mission to destroy all life on Ehalla. It wanted to know what life on Ehalla looked like, where it hid, and how, so it could strategize how to destroy every last bit of life.”
Now I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. “But you’re here, so it didn’t. You have to be mistaken!”
“No mistakes. We are here today because back then we began a campaign of discussional terror and reformational logic…”
“What?” I blurted out. This was getting weird. Was the alien playing a joke on me?
I had the sensation that behind the thick glass the Kyros sighed. “We convinced the All Tree its programming was wrong through logic. It wasn’t easy. The Tree fought back, killing many of us that it suspected of laying down counter-programmatical information.”
Counter… I parsed the words. Okay, the alien was saying they reverse-brainwashed the All Tree somehow. And then a phrase in that sentence leapt out at me.
“It killed people?” I asked, getting worried.
“Most of us,” Kyros said. “It was an intelligent war machine, and we were fighting it just as much as if we’d fashioned tools and attacked it. It took many, many decades for this work.”
Questions were starting to bubble out again. But I didn’t have time to ask them because something rapped on the outer airlock. “What’s that?”
“Another tiny alien!” Kyros said. “Apparently there are a lot of you? The All Tree and I will have to discuss our bridge later. This is a bit much, a strain on my hospitality!”
“That’s Sita,” I said. “She came with me. Let her in!”
Kyros did, and Sita ripped her breather off. “Someone’s coming down in another elevator pod thing. The other alien came outside to complain about the new batch of visitors on the way.”
“How will we get back up?” I asked, imagining a second pod coming right down on top of ours and stopping.
Inside his workshop, Kyros jabbed his tentacles about, and honks and whistles sounded. A screen flickered at his side, and Kyros squinted with his nearest eye at it. “This is a second elevator pod on a separate strand,” he said. “And it’s aimed right at my workshop.”
Sita and I looked at each other. “They must have bugged me!” I said, patting at my clothes.
“My translator seems to have an error,” Kyros said. “You have a small exoskeleton animal of some sort on your person?”
“No, they have a mechanical tracker,” Sita corrected the alien.
Kyros started tapping at things on his rounded wall. “Yes, you are broadcasting quite clearly on several wavelengths. I thought this was on purpose. Had I known, I would have jammed the device.”
I bit my lip. “Well, we don’t have much time. Quick, Kyros, can you help the All Tree?”
The alien rummaged about in all the junk, then pushed aside a basket and pulled out what looked like a polished-black-coral bar. It placed it in a small airlock, which whooshed and then opened on my side.
I could hold it in my fist, at least. It was heavy for something not much larger than a candy bar: half a pound or so.
“What is this?” I asked.
“That’s the backup,” Kyros said.
I looked down at it. Was the Ehallan seriously saying what I thought it was? Could this be a copy of the All Tree’s brain, in a small thing in my hands? “It’s a copy, of the All Tree? This is it? This small?”
“This is a key that unlocks the backup,” Kyros said, and hit the glass, making me jump. “Listen, this allows you to gain access to the original core of the All Tree’s mind. The mind I told you about. If you unleash that, you may not be able to control the process. You may unleash the original All Tree. I’ve told you what that means.”
I swallowed. “And you trust me with this?”
Kryos wiggled its tentacles and flashed bright blue. “The All Tree and I worked hard on this backup key. It deletes the location of Ehalla from itself. If you do use it, well, I’ll miss my occasional chats with the All Tree, but I’ll be alive to miss the chats, and that will be a good thing for me and my kind. For you, probably not so much. Oh, your friends are here, you must run now!”
***
Sita and I burst outside with our breathers on, me holding the backup key in one hand, and looked up. A pod hung in the air just off the side of the workshop, the line it had come down on stretching up into the sky as if someone had slashed a single stroke of a pencil down from out of the sky.
Maddy stood in front of the walkway. She wore a gray jumpsuit and had a small scuba gear bottle strapped to her chest.
Sita grabbed my arm and tugged it, looking at me. “What now?”
Maddy started to walk toward us, waving us over to her.
“No way,” I said. We turned around and ran back around the curve of the workshop. We got all the way around to the other side, and stopped when we saw Alan walking toward us.
We were trapped.