The Saints of Salvation

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The life support section had its own time flow unit; they’d spent the journey through the wormhole inside it. If I can switch that on, it could shield us from the Olyix’s temporal distortions. But of course she couldn’t switch it on, because the Morgan’s network was down—and even if she did, that would just protect the life support section from the attack. I need the whole ship, everything inside the hull unified.

  Visualizing the ship like that, surrounded by a protective envelope that repelled the distortions, triggered an idea. At a fundamental level, the internal continuum of the enclave was no different from that of the wormhole. They were both a manipulation of space-time by a complex pattern of exotic matter. The Morgan’s negative-energy conduits also channeled that pseudofabric, allowing the ship to fly along a wormhole. And there were hundreds of conduits all over the fuselage. If she could activate them, and realign their function to deflect the temporal distortions, the Morgan would contain a single time zone again.

  But it was a chicken-and-egg problem. You had to provide the ship with a single time flow in order to activate the conduits—which would give the ship a single time flow.

  “I hate paradox,” she announced to the canteen.

  The fuselage conduits had to be activated simultaneously. That might just be possible if each section’s sub-network knew when to switch them on. But to do that would mean having to get a message into each section and load the instructions into the local sub-net. Trying to move between time flows was a death sentence. “For humans,” she shouted triumphantly.

  She immediately sent a ping to her cyborg. “Oh, fuck the Saints.” It was no use; the cyborg was in storage in a compartment down on deck forty-six, three time zones away. Completely out of reach. So she pulled an inventory of every remote device on deck thirty-three. More than a dozen small janitor remotes were available, and even three small maintenance units, plus…“YES!”

  She almost ran, but forced herself to keep a sensible pace while using the optik interface to watch for any sign of a boundary she hadn’t plotted. The unused cabin was five doors down from the quarters she and Dellian shared. Makes sense.

  The door opened, and she peered in. Lights came on. There, sitting inertly on the untextured raised rectangle of the bed, was the Ainsley android. Her interface immediately connected her to it. The chest cavity contained a huge neural array, which was in standby mode. She carefully selected the routines she’d used before, when she’d elaborated her consciousness out into the Morgan’s network. This time it would be different; this time she wouldn’t stay connected to the android.

  The process to elaborate up to corpus level, to become more than one, was complicated. Part of the time she was impatient for it to run, while the rest of the process was spent fearing her personality pattern and memories weren’t just being duplicated, they were being methodically stripped out of her biological brain to be absorbed by the android’s array. Stupid to think that, of course, but still very much her own foible.

  In the end, there she was—two Yirella minds, held together in perfect harmony by a single high-capacity link. She cut the link.

  She opened her eyes to stare at…the android. Thank the Saints, I’m the original me, the real one. She saw the android turn down the corners of its lips.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “I’ll be you again,” it said. “When this is all over.”

  “That’s down to you now. Maybe you won’t want to be.”

  “You know the answer to that, and you know you’re just voicing a concern to have it denied, thus gaining reassurance.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I won’t. Corpus is clearly not for us.”

  “Not now. But you and I are asunder. Every instant from now on, the divergence will widen. And in the fast flow sections, you’re going to exist for years—decades, possibly. The difference will become…extensive,” she said.

  “As soon as our aspects rejoin, there will be no difference.”

  “I am not an aspect. I am Yirella.”

  “We are.”

  “No. You’re an artificial personality operating in an array that was never designed for you.”

  “Yet here I am.” The android stood up, then glanced down at itself and grinned. “And it’s not just the array that’s different.”

  “Oh, Saints.” But there was nothing she could do to stop her own grin; her lips quirked in exactly the same fashion. Maybe thoughts have an entanglement all their own, more spiritual than quantum?

  “We’d better get on with this,” the android said.

  “Yeah. I thought you should go through riding on something. I’m not sure even you are capable of coordinating yourself while transiting through a gradient.”

  “I know. A chair might work.”

  “Yes.” There was no point in her saying anything else. She’d spent the time her memories were being copied thinking about the practical aspects of getting to the stairwell. Therefore: It had.

  The android picked up a chair from the canteen, one with casters, and carried it effortlessly. When they were back at the junction, it sat down, facing Kenelm’s corpse. The decay had progressed. Hir skeleton had obviously fallen apart as the joints detached from each other, subsiding into a jumble with the tunic deflating around it. Hir skull had rolled to one side, empty sockets staring up at the ceiling.

  Yirella gripped the back of the chair and pulled it back, testing how easy it was to roll.

  “Make sure you don’t hit the skeleton,” the android said.

  That didn’t even deserve a response. “Ready?” she asked.

  “Rhetorical question.”

  Yirella braced herself and ran at the junction, pushing hard. She let go—and stopped abruptly, arms waving for balance. Do NOT fall forward. The chair rattled along, sliding easily into the boundary, where the frantic air currents whipped around it. Passed the skeleton—

  And the android vanished. So fast it didn’t even leave a blur.

  Yirella let out a long breath of relief. The chair remained in the same position for a few seconds, then—she thought she saw something behind it, a shadow moving with the speed of a lightning bolt. A small wheeled platform with a single column standing vertically in the middle appeared, racing out of the boundary. The Ainsley android was standing on it, along with a quartet of similar androids—genderless this time, and with a skin color remarkably similar to her own.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  The four black-skinned androids dismounted and hurried off along the corridor.

  “Hey,” she spluttered in outrage.

  “I’m really sorry,” the Ainsley android said, as it left the platform.

  “What? Why?” That it was acting defensively was giving her a bad feeling.

  Her personal icon appeared in her optik. She hesitated to open it, guessing the memories were going to be bad. “Just tell me this. Can we deflect the time flows?”

  “I believe so, yes. Our others have gone to begin the process.”

  Yirella opened the icon—

  * * *

  —

  —the sensation was like waking, consciousness rising from foggy darkness, bringing with it the memories of who she was and what she’d done to restore her identity. She self-identified—there were no doubts, no biochemical anxiety for the Ainsley android. Nonetheless, its passage through the gradient was excruciating. Its internal network suffered an avalanche of glitches, while the array in its chest underwent random failures. She thought she was losing her mind…which in a way she was. She countered by putting the precious memories into deep store while she traveled through the gradient, the chair’s little caster wheels taking agonizing days to complete a single rotation. Full awareness rushed back in as the crazy time fluxes smoothed out, and time was whole again. She stood up and hurried into the stairwell, climbing up to
deck twenty-five. It had aged. Some of the lights were dark. Every air grill had engendered dust streaks rising like black flames on the walls. Colors had faded on doors, walls, trapping her in a world of bleak pastels. The floor outside the tactical cabin had lost its tread, the thin laminate worn down to the metal below.

  How long? she wondered.

  There was no one in the cabin. But there had been. A huge dune of rubbish filled more than half of the room—mainly old meal trays with smears of food that had long since dried and hardened but still gave off a putrid stench. Wait. Huh? The android has a sense of smell? Why? She hurriedly shut the door again. They must have been using the tactical cabin as a rubbish dump. Then the size of the pile registered. Saints, how many trays were in there? Hundreds? No, more like thousands.

  How long?

  “Tilliana. Ellici. Alexandre?” she called. No reply. The android’s management routines were complex; she had to concentrate to use the communication architecture. There was a functional sub-net in this section, though some of the nodes had dropped out. A maintenance log icon expanded, supplying her with failure details. The nodes had started to crash eleven years ago.

  Eleven years? She expanded the log’s details. Her mouth opened to cry out in dismay, hand coming up to cover it. The disassociation was complete. The hand was white—her hand—and for a moment she couldn’t understand why. Then she remembered she was in the android body. Strange how she’d adapted within minutes. But the shock of realization had been great enough to break that cozy accommodation. According to the log, the nodes had originally disengaged from the Morgan’s full network ninety-seven years ago.

  “Oh, Saints, no. No, no, no!” That cannot be right.

  She began to run, opening every door. The tenth compartment was a canteen. There were a lot of meal trays piled up here, too, fresher than the conference room. Not all the food was dry, and the smell was intense. The wall panels around the food printers had been removed. Somebody had repaired the machines; two had been opened up and partially dismantled, their intricate components plumbed in to the remaining printer with crude hoses and cables. She accessed the printer’s menu; it was very limited, mainly soups and soft bread rolls. Some fruit flavors were still available, and the dairy option could produce milk and cheese. Solids were error-tagged; they only came out as a paste now. All the nutrient tanks were redlined, with barely five percent left.

  Yirella staggered back out of the canteen. There was a clinic on the deck below; if Tilliana, Ellici, and Alexandre had survived, they’d need that. She made her way down the stairwell, forcing herself to hurry. The clinic door was open, its mechanism not working. Inside, the five medical bays had all undergone repairs, their casings removed to expose the delicate systems inside and the rudimentary alterations that had been performed on them. The android body didn’t have the routines for involuntary muscle shudders, but she certainly felt as if she’d shivered.

  She went back out into the corridor and looked down at the floor, seeing worn tracks. There were several cabins that had been used. The first she went in was dark, its texture walls inert; the same with the second. As she approached the third, she could hear orchestral music. When the door opened, it was so loud she hesitated on the threshold before she went in. The cabin’s texture had reproduced Turin’s splendid Teatro Regio opera house in its original eighteenth-century form. The auditorium was full of men and women in formal attire, while a full orchestra played in the pit and ostentatious players in authentic costumes bestrode the stage. A subroutine identified the performance as La Bohème.

  Sitting in the front of the stalls was an old woman wearing an extravagant lace-embellished gown Yirella associated with the kind of cantankerous dowager always to be found in a Jane Austen novel. If it hadn’t been for that fanciful gown, Yirella could’ve easily imagined the woman had walked onto the Morgan straight out of the Neolithic age. A visual subroutine gave a forty-three percent probability it was Tilliana. When Yirella really concentrated, she could pick out the characteristics she’d known all her life, aged and worn by nine decades.

  She sank to her knees beside Tilliana. “Till? Till, is that you?”

  An aghast Tilliana looked at her and began a pitiful wailing. “Who are you? You’re not part of the cast. I didn’t texture you. Are you Olyix? Have you come for us?”

  “No, I’m not Olyix. I’m very human, I promise.”

  The orchestra stopped playing, and up on the stage the actors became still. Yirella tried to ignore the way the whole audience was now staring at her.

  “It’s been so long,” Tilliana said. “I know this is your punishment, making us suffer for coming to the enclave.”

  Yirella reached for Tilliana’s clawlike hands, only to have them jerked away. “No, Till. I’m not Olyix. I’m Yirella, but I’m riding the Ainsley android. Do you remember me? Do you remember the android? We thought it was so funny when we arrived at the neutron star, so childish of Ainsley, not wearing clothes.”

  “Ainsley? Ainsley was so fine. A ship that could’ve been built in heaven itself.”

  “Yes. Yes, he is a fine ship, the best. And me, Tilliana, do you remember me? Yirella?”

  “I remember Yirella. We lost her when we came to the enclave. We lost everyone. They all froze outside; unmoving forever. The Olyix are making them wait until the end of time while they punish us. But they’re making us live through all of those billions of years. It’s because we were in tactical, you know. That’s what we decided. We were in charge, so they blamed us. We’re the only ones left.” Tears began rolling down her cheeks.

  “I’m not lost, Till. I’m still here. The Olyix have screwed with time inside the Morgan. You’ve lived so much longer than us. But I am Yirella. We grew up together on the Immerle estate. Alexandre was our mentor, remember? Is Alexandre here? Is sie okay?”

  “Oh, no, dear. Alexandre has been dead since that very first day.”

  “No!” She couldn’t help the cry of dismay. For an array that struggled to perform emotional routines, that was a blow so raw she knew she must be trying to cry. It was useless; those particular impulses went nowhere. Ainsley hadn’t included tear ducts in the android. “How? How did sie die?”

  “Sie tried to walk into another section. We didn’t understand. Sie just fell over dead, but sie never decayed. Hir body’s still there. I think so, anyway. I haven’t visited for years, now.”

  “And Ellici? Is she still alive?”

  Tilliana gave a mournful nod. “She’s still alive. But it was all too much for her. She hasn’t been herself for a while now. It’s been hard, you know. Life can be such a burden when there is nothing you can use it for. Sometimes I think I should just let it end, but she needs me to look after her. So I have my shows and my music stored in what’s left of the network. Perhaps that was a mistake.”

  “No. It wasn’t. I’m here now. We’re going to get out of this.”

  “I don’t think so, dear. I don’t know who you really are, but there’s no way out of the enclave. It is eternal.”

  “Can I see Ellici, please? I’d be very grateful.”

  “I suppose there’s no harm.” The Teatro Regio and its phantom audience of opera enthusiasts slowly faded away into neutral textured cabin walls. “Help me up, dear; my arthritis is quite troublesome now. The clinic’s pharma dispenser stopped working a while back. I couldn’t repair it anymore. There aren’t any initiators in this portion of the ship.”

  “I know.” She helped Tilliana get to her feet. It was easy enough; the old woman was so thin. Yirella was surprised and a little disturbed by how little she weighed. Once she was upright, Tilliana continued to grip the android’s arm for support. By the time they reached Ellici’s cabin, the exertion was causing her to tremble continuously.

  “You go in,” Tilliana said. “I’m a bit tired. She can be exhausting.”

  The doors opened, re
vealing a dimly lit room. It wasn’t textured in a way Yirella recognized. No cultural classic home, no historic city vista just outside. The walls were a thick silver-gray cushion, as was the floor, and even the ceiling, apart from a few inset strips that radiated the diffuse light. There was a toilet basin—also padded, inside and out—and a small sink alcove that appeared to have been scooped out of the wall.

  The only other thing in the room was the bed, a raised rectangular slab. Thickly padded. Ellici lay on it, dressed in a dreadfully filthy, thin one-piece suit that Yirella recognized: a space suit’s skin layer, a garment designed to keep body temperature stable and extract human waste. Her knees were drawn up against her stomach and her hands were drawing invisible pictures on the padding. Not that she seemed to be looking at them; her eyes were unfocused.

  “Oh, no,” Yirella moaned. The sight of her vibrant friend reduced to this was too much. She’d always accepted that they’d stay together for ages yet, staying the same thanks to the ability to rebuild and rejuvenate their bodies. Maybe in time, perhaps back on Earth reclaimed, they’d eventually go their separate ways. But there would be decades of warning. This, though—this was the cruelest weapon the Olyix had ever attacked the humans with. There had been no warning, no time to prepare. “We’ll make it better,” she whispered. “I’ll fix the Morgan. The clinics will work again. They’ll heal you.”

  Physically, perhaps—but she knew more than any of them how deep the mental scars reached. The Ellici and Tilliana she’d known were gone forever now.

  She backed out of the room, saying nothing as the door slid shut again.

  “I’m sorry,” Tilliana said. “It was too much for her. The waiting, the emptiness. They broke her.”

  “I understand.” Yirella faced her old friend. “What about the other tactical stations, the other squads? Are you in contact with any of them?”

  “No. Every way in and out of this part of the ship has time boundaries.”

  “Okay. I want you to sit tight. I’ll do what I came here for.”