‘Maybe,’ Markarian said, with no great conviction. ‘Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud—’
‘But you don’t think it’s very likely?’
‘I’ve been listening, Irravel - scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident.’
‘It was my fault, Markarian.’
His tone was rueful. ‘Yes . . . I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.’
‘I never intended this.’
‘I think that goes without saying, don’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.’
‘Did you?’
He shook his head. ‘In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.’
‘I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.’
‘I know.’
And she believed him.
‘What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?’
‘Because of what they did to you, Irravel.’
He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.
‘They were good at surgery,’ Markarian said. ‘Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.’ The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. ‘They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.’
For a long while Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of reconnective surgery around the neck was too slight ever to have shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.
I did it to save your neck, Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.
‘You appear to be telling the truth,’ she said, when she had released the children. ‘The nature of your betrayal was . . .’ And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. ‘Different from what I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.’
‘One I’ve lived with for three hundred years of subjective time.’
‘You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.’ But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.
‘What now?’ Markarian said. ‘Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.’
‘You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?’
Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. ‘Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?’
Irravel agreed.
She willed herself into stasis, medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ’chines would only revive her when something - anything - happened, on a galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured, until woken by the same stimulus.
He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.
The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the galaxy for ten thousand light-years around Sol - a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance - at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder’s Slug had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it had swallowed humanity.
‘Why did we wake?’ Irravel said. ‘Nothing’s changed, except that it’s grown larger.’
‘Maybe not,’ Markarian said. ‘I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the galaxy; from within the wave.’
‘Yes?’
‘Looks as though someone survived after all.’
The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognised.
‘It’s Canasian,’ Markarian said.
‘Fand subdialect,’ Irravel added, marvelling.
It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly didn’t have the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.
Someone wanted to speak to them.
The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiselled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.
Irravel recognised the face.
‘It’s him,’ she said, in Markarian’s direction. ‘Remontoire. Somehow he made it across all this time.’
Markarian nodded slowly. ‘He must have remembered us, and known where to look. Even across thousands of light-years, we can still be seen. There can’t be many objects still moving relativistically.’
Remontoire told his story. His people had fled to the pulsar system twenty thousand years ago - more, now, since his message had taken thousands of years to climb out of the galaxy. They had seen the wave coming, as had thousands of other human factions, and like many they had observed that the wave shunned pulsars: burned-out stellar corpses rarely accompanied by planets. Some intelligence governing the wave must have recognised that pulsars were valueless; that even if a Dyson cloud could be created around them, there would be no sunlight to focus.
For thousands of years they had waited around the pulsar, growing ever more silent and cautious, seeing other cultures make errors that drew the wave upon them, for by now it interpreted any other intelligence as a threat to its progress, assimilating the weapons used against it.
Then - over many more thousands of years - Remontoire’s people watched the wave learn, adapting like a vast neural net, becoming curious about those few pulsars that harboured planets. Soon their place of refuge would become nothing of the sort.
‘Help us,’ Remontoire said. ‘Please.’
It took three thousand years to reach them.
For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way. During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver that fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.
Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the next two thousand years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.
‘Hope would make an excellent shield,’ Markarian mused as they approached it, ‘if one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other—’
‘Don’t think I wouldn’t.’
They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled in.
‘Then why don’t you?’ Markarian said.
/> For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. ‘Because they need us more than I need revenge.’
‘A higher cause?’
‘Redemption,’ she said.
Hope, Galactic Plane - AD Circa 40,000
They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them towards the one rock that mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving towards them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.
Conjoiners boarded the Hirondelle and invited Irravel into Hope. The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard ship since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes grey with neglect, as if the Conjoiners had given up long before.
Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rock pool filmed with grey dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.
‘You came,’ he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model Conjoiner: almost fully human.
‘You’re not him, are you?’ Irravel asked. ‘You look like him - sound like him - but the image you sent us was of someone much older.’
‘I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity; my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire . . . but that was a long time ago, and he was never known by that name to us.’
‘What his name?’
‘Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.’
She had to ask. ‘Did he make it back to a commune?’
‘Yes, of course,’ the man said, as if her question was foolish. ‘How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?’
‘And did he forgive me?’
‘I forgive you now,’ he said. ‘It amounts to the same thing.’
She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.
The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change - no matter how slight - would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it - but other than that, all they had done was wait.
They were very good at waiting.
‘How many refugees did you bring?’
‘One hundred thousand.’ Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. ‘I know - too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.’
She thought back to her own sleepers. ‘I know. Still, we might be able to take more . . . I don’t know about Markarian’s ship, but—’
He cut her off, gently. ‘I think you’d better come with me,’ said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the Hideyoshi.
‘How much of it did you explore?’
‘Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere aboard this ship,’ Remontoire said. ‘If there are two hundred cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.’
‘No sleepers?’
‘Just this one.’
They had arrived at a plinth supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary: spacesuited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.
‘Is he dead?’ Irravel asked.
‘Depends what you mean by dead.’ The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. ‘His organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the Hideyoshi would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me what had become of him?’
‘No guarantee he knew. Once he was in this state, with his personality running entirely on machine substrates, he could have edited his own memories and perceptual inputs - deceiving himself that he was still corporeal.’
Irravel looked away from the casket, forcing troubling questions from her mind. ‘Is his personality still running the ship?’
‘We detected only caretaker programs, capable of imitating him when the need arose, but lacking sentience.’
‘Is that all there was?’
‘No.’ Remontoire reached through one of the casket’s larger fractures, prizing something from Markarian’s fingers. It was a sliver of computer memory. ‘We examined this already, though not in great detail. It’s partitioned into one hundred and ninety areas, each large enough to hold complete neural and genetic maps for one human being, encoded into superposed electron states on Rydberg atoms.’
She took the sliver from him. It didn’t feel like much. ‘He burned the sleepers onto this?’
‘Three hundred years is much longer than any of them expected to sleep. By scanning them he lost nothing.’
‘Can you retrieve them?’
‘It would not be trivial,’ the Conjoiner said, ‘but given time, we could do it. Assuming any of them would welcome being born again, so far from home.’
She thought of the infected galaxy hanging below them, humming with the chill sentience of machines. ‘Maybe the kindest thing would be to simulate the past,’ she said. ‘Recreate Yellowstone and revive them on it, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.’
‘Is that what you’re advocating?’
‘No,’ she said, after toying with the idea in all seriousness. ‘We need all the genetic diversity we can get if we’re going to establish a new branch of humanity outside the galaxy.’
She thought about it some more. Soon they would witness Hope’s destruction, as the wave of machines tore through it with the mindlessness of stampeding animals. Some of them might try to follow the Hirondelle, but so far the machines moved too slowly to catch the ship, even if they forced it back towards Galactic North.
Where else could they go?
There were globular clusters high above the galaxy - tightly packed shoals of old stars the wave hadn’t reached, but where fragments of humanity might already have sought refuge. If the clusters proved unwelcoming, there were high-latitude stars, flung from the galaxy a billion years ago, and some might have dragged their planetary systems with them. If those failed - and it would be tens of thousands of years before the possibilities were exhausted - the Hirondelle could always loop around towards Galactic South and search there, striking out for the Clouds of Magellan. Ultimately, of course - if any fragment of Irravel’s children still clung to humanity, and remembered where they’d come from, and what had become of it, they would want to return to the galaxy, even if that meant confronting the wave.
But they would return.
‘That’s the plan then?’ Remontoire said.
Irravel shrugged, turning away from the plinth where Markarian lay. ‘Unless you’ve got a better one.’
AFTERWORD
Here are eight stories - more than one hundred thousand words - set against a common background. I’ve written two other novellas and four novels set in the same imagined universe: not far shy of a million words. I’ve plans for more stories and books.
You can probably tell that I like future histories.
The first one I encountered was Larry Niven’s ‘Known Space’ sequence. I was in my middle teens, which is probably exactly the right target age. As I started reading the stories and novels embedded within this consistent timeline, beginning with Ring-world, and later the collection Tales from Known Space, I found myself plunged into a dizzying series of venues and eras. In some of the stories - a few of which were actually set earlier than the date at which I was reading them - humanity was still confined to the solar system and had little or no knowledge of ali
en cultures around other stars. Some stories were set a few centuries downstream, with colonies beginning to be established around other systems. Still more stories were set in an era when humankind had access to faster-than-light drives, teleportation technology, planet-gouging weapons and near-indestructible materials, and was in contact with many variegated alien races.
At first glance, not all of Niven’s stories appeared to belong in the same universe. But the connections were there, if one looked closely: finding them was half the fun. It was like pulling back from a close-up in which the individual stories were coloured chips in a mosaic. Suddenly you began to see the bigger picture; the larger composition upon which the author had been labouring. It hardly mattered that not all the details were absolutely consistent between the stories, or that some of the tales had been retrofitted into the scheme after initial publication. One still had a sense of the future as teeming, chaotic, prone to unexpected swerves and lurching accelerations.
That sense of a future history as a single fictional entity - a whole larger than the sum of its parts - has never left me, and it’s largely why I find the form so appealing. Future histories are often dismissed as exercises in laziness: why invent a new background when you can reuse one from another story. I don’t quite agree. For my money, it’s generally more difficult to write a second story in a pre-existing universe than to make a new one up from scratch. You have to work within ground rules already laid down, which places severe limits on narrative freedom. If you’ve introduced a world-changing invention in the first story, it has to be incorporated into the background texture of the second, unless the second is set earlier in the first. And if that’s the case, the second story must not introduce inconsistencies in the first. By the time you’re on the eighth or ninth story in a sequence, the narrative airspace can be getting awfully crowded. Future histories usually reach a point of limiting complexity, when trying to slot new stories into the stack becomes so fiendishly difficult that most writers move on to new pastures. I suppose the difficult part is knowing when you’ve reached that point.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 372