Metallic trash scattered in the backwash from the mother Dragon's engines.
Feroza stared up at her. She wanted to run to the beast, wave her arms, shout to her not to leave her children behind. But, of course, her real children were still back in the hangar.
"All right," Victor said, "I can hack her behavioral processors — "
"No." Feroza exhaled. "Let her go. It's the right thing to do."
"Is it?" Victor stared at her.
"What do we need her for? To take us back to the hangar? To guard us? To keep us company? Let her go back to her family, Victor, what's left of it."
"Well...pucha." Victor's legs gave out. He didn't so much fall as sink, drifting downward until his bottom rested against the Leviathan.
Feroza knelt to swap out his spare oxygen canister. "Come, we'll think on just how to survive for the next few hours. Do you have the materials you need to make another still?"
"I'll have to start again from nothing."
"But you can keep us alive?"
Victor took a deep breath of fresh air. "Feroza, we can never go home again."
Feroza looked at him, remembering the large and manifold family he'd told stories about in the hangar. How long would it be before Feroza's own parents and sister found out what had happened to her? What version of events would they hear? Would mummy and dad still be proud of her, stranded a billion kilometers from home?
"Maybe," she said, "we can make a new home."
"What? Here?" Victor looked around. "On the back of a giant flying lobster?"
"Well, we could live anywhere, with your skills. We could go back to the hangar — "
Victor bumped his helmet against hers. "What do you want, Feroza?" he said. "To live here permanently? In God's name, why?"
"What choice do we have?" she said. "I know you don't like Petrolea — "
"Es verdad."
" — but maybe you will come to like it."
"Like the Beautiful Girl and the Beast? This place has killed so many people."
"We don't know that," said Feroza. "The people in Xanadu Base might have escaped. Leviathans aren't fast. They could be up there now waiting for a signal from us."
"And how are we going to send a signal, even if you're right? We lost the comms station at Xanadu," Victor hung his head. "And even if I could get a communication satellite into orbit, even if there is someone alive up there to listen to me, who would want to? After what I did?"
"I'm sorry I blamed you for what happened in the jungle. You weren't responsible for that, and you're not responsible for the destruction of Xanadu Base, either," said Feroza. "They violated the rules, and Petrolea turned on them."
"It? What it? Are we talking about some kind of planet-sized brain? Because that's more ridiculous even than alien overlords or eco-terrorists with handshake gauntlets."
"I agree." Feroza lifted an eyebrow. "Petrolea doesn't have a brain any more than this Leviathan. And yet the Leviathan flies."
"The Leviathan flies." He repeated slowly, thinking. "What do you mean the Leviathan doesn't have a brain?"
"It doesn't have a central behavior processor. It's not really one animal. It's an ecosystem. A community. Like a whopping great, flying Berg."
"Well," said Victor, "there were some programs I was preparing to use to hack a Berg."
"Is that even possible? Hacking a Berg would be like hacking...." She wiggled her fingers. "Like hacking a whole city. No, even less, because in a city, you could bribe the mayor, and a Leviathan doesn't have any executive control of the kind. It makes decisions with a distributed net of agents connected by radio."
"And what do the agents look like?"
Feroza spread her arms as if to embrace the demonic legions around them.
"The parasites?"
"Among other morphotypes, yes. The parasites are networked to each other and to whatever mechanoids are at work under the Leviathan's skin. Information flows through all of them."
"In other words everything is jury-rigged at the last minute with no planning. Only constant tinkering keeps everything working. Everyone talks to everyone else." Victor was becoming more animated. "It's a slum." He shook the last of his slave factors from his gauntlet.
"I'm afraid I don't see the significance of that," said Feroza. But she imagined little Victor and the stories he'd told her of his life in the pueblos jóvenes, where animals were food or competitors for food, plants were what grew between piles of garbage, and the only clean, orderly place was the world beyond the screen of his phone.
"Alright," she said. "So you might hack a Dragon if you just find the right place in the mental hierarchy and insert your command. The Leviathan, however, has no brain, no authority on the basis of which to issue commands."
"How about starting rumors?" Victor said. "Rumors such as, 'there are no humans here?'"
Feroza began to understand. "Or, 'this would be a good place to build a pleasure dome?'"
"Why not?" Victor's fingers twiddled. "Oh, this is an inefficient way to get anything done. At least it's familiar."
Feroza imagined the children moving randomly around the network, shouting and texting at each other about everything interesting they see. What's interesting to them? A pot of stew, a dead cat, a stranger with shiny shoes, a gun. Summarize that as 'food' and 'danger.'
The response was nearly immediate. The parasite population, which had been thinning out, again grew denser. Except now, rather than rushing the human intruders in a rabid frenzy, the creatures organized themselves. With their concentric circles of builders and rayed supply lines, the parasites now behaved less like an immune reaction and more like the imaginal cells of a metamorphosing insect. Or the stem cells of a fetus, differentiating into bone and muscle, gut and brain.
"What next?" mumbled Victor. "A slum will have grandmas, coordinating the information-stream coming from the children with what they hear from their daughters, cleaning toilets or picking trash in the city. One such daughter might call with news of a job opportunity, or a particularly good haul of metal and almost-intact furniture."
The aircraft-carrier bulk shifted under them. Hot-air cowls bulged up on either side of its vast carapace like hills on the horizon.
"Finally," said Victor, "there are the official sources of news: the radio, the political enforcers, and the churches. Come down too heavy there, and the little old ladies, oh, they'll pull in the opposite direction. But if the Leviathan's distributed brain is as contrary as my grandma, I might as well give up now."
Feroza watched a group of tentacle creatures twine their limbs together and fuse into a new still, much larger than their old one in the hangar. "Just how much of this are you controlling directly?" she asked.
"Almost none," said Victor as crab-sized mechanoids locked their bodies together to become building blocks. "They're doing this by themselves." From the cracked shell of the Leviathan, a new pleasure dome began to rise. "It's what they were made for."
Victor braced himself as his colossal mount writhed into the sky.