by Jerry
His mother nodded. “Okay. We’ll stop it. You’ll come with us.”
Doctor San stepped forward. “I can’t let him leave. I have to report this. This is highly illegal stuff in him. I’m supposed to call deputies to detain him.”
“You heard what Tamuel said,” his mom hissed. “We can’t let the Core get involved. Not here. We’re too small. We don’t need that attention.”
Doctor San looked pained. “Okay. Go. I can delay the upload, but my scan will get reported by the software and passed along.”
“Thank you.”
And they were out into the night, running down Watts Street just like that first night when the starship had landed.
• • • •
They pulled up next to the barges, the great bulk of the starship lit up by floodlights.
Tamuel scrambled aboard, but let his mother stalk her way toward the main cabin. A pale, burly man greeted her. “I have to repeat what I told you when you called: We flew from Tamasin for this contract. Just the neural lace on this ship alone would make us all rich, if we can get in there before obsolescence.”
I think they know you’re a warship, Tamuel thought.
But he got no response. The ship was off again.
Are they close? Are they going to break through?
Still no answer.
Tamuel paced around the deck until a familiar voice made him freeze.
“Tamuel?”
It was Tosha. She frowned. “You should be back to your room by now. Did you sneak out here?”
“No!”
“You’re trying to stop all this, aren’t you?” she asked. “I came to visit Da. He says you and your parents are saying this is all going to go bad if we don’t stop it.”
“It will go bad,” Tamuel shouted at her. “The Core will come. It’s a warship.”
Tosha’s large brown eyes filled with tears, and she looked away. “Are you doing this because I was the one who called them when you tried to sail to Summerstown?”
Tamuel took a deep breath. Was that what she thought? Was that why she was always after him? “I’m not trying to do anything to you,” he said, confused.
“Well, you break out when I’m on duty. You fight with me. And I’m just trying to make sure you don’t pull another Summerstown stunt again, and get all of us prefects stuck doing extra night rounds. Or demerits on our records.”
He’d never really thought about what happened to the prefects, he realized, when he snuck out.
“I swear to you, this isn’t about that,” Tamuel said.
“This is our one chance,” Tosha said. “You don’t know how it was when we first came here from Ariston. We had nothing. Da begged in Summerstown, do you know that?”
Tamuel shook his head. Tosha stepped even closer.
“I’m so sorry,” Tamuel said.
“It’s so beautiful here, we don’t want to lose it. We don’t want to go hungry ever again.” And as she said that, she glanced from left to right and then she shoved him. It happened before Tamuel even realized what was happening. The barge flipped away from him and he struck the cold water between the starship’s pitted hull and the rusting barge.
It shifted. The waves pushed it against the starship. He was about to be ground up between the two surfaces. He could feel barnacles slicing at his skin.
Something stirred under his skin. Lace crawled out from his pores like a dark ghost and wrapped itself around him, hardening as he was battered against the starship by the barge’s hull.
“Well,” the ship said. “I would have liked to have seen another sunset in my retirement.”
Help! Tamuel screamed in his mind.
“Give me one more beautiful second on this amazing world,” the ship said sadly, “before I have to do what needs to be done.”
And for a moment, time seemed to pause for Tamuel. The barge hung at the top of a swell, and his hands remained pinned to his side, the water froze in place.
“I guess now is as good a time as any,” said the ship.
And behind Tamuel, the hull shattered into billions and billions of pieces.
• • • •
The entire bulk of the starship slumped into the East Bay like a landslide, though it pushed no waves around it. The water seemed to devour it to anyone looking.
Sonar stations registered the now semi-liquid solid mass of the warship shifting about under the bay, displacing all the water as it roiled about the barges and crept toward the beach.
Then it began to move, a solid wall pushing its way across the bay, marching toward the edges of the bay. Within five minutes, the wall had reached each of the points, leaving the bay drained of water and nestled behind a vast dam of silky black material.
The barges, just minutes ago floating on water, now sat on the bottom of the bay, everyone aboard gaping at the dam wall that had sprung out of nowhere.
And Tamuel, vomiting bile that was inhumanely black, stared up at it and the silence in his own mind.
When they pulled him back aboard, shivering and feverish, he shook his head. “I fell in,” he insisted. He’d been knocked in when the ship shifted, he said.
Doctor San found no trace of military lace in him and the Core never came to Yelekene.
• • • •
Tosha found him three days later, when he sat on a rock on what had once been East Bay beach, looking out over the surveyors examining the new plain of land Weatherly had been gifted. The ship had heard his parents talking about the need for land. Had given them a gift that he could barely even begin to appreciate, but they certainly understood.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone?” Tosha asked.
Tamuel half jumped, as he’d been deep in thought.
“The ship showed me something,” he said.
“What?”
“Showed me what your world was like,” Tamuel said.
“Oh.” She looked down. “No one else here knows.”
“It showed me the war.” He looked away from her. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry. I—”
“It showed me a lot of things,” he interrupted. “Took me on a tour of everywhere it had been. I’ve seen a lifetime’s travel in a single millisecond. It’s going to take me a while to stop dreaming about it. I can’t sleep.”
Tosha nodded, but she didn’t really understand, he could see.
But that was okay.
“I’m not going to cause you any trouble,” he said. “At least, not for a long while.”
Then he turned back to look at the East Bay Wall. As he waited, the sun dipped behind it.
“Just one more sunset,” he whispered.
CLOUDSONG
Nick Wolven
THE LEGATE SUITE on Warren had all the newest amenities: ambient engineering, mood-adaptive algorithms, even morphifoam furniture that took any shape you chose—so long as it was curvy, soft, and indistinguishable from a finely sculpted blob. Of course, the specs were ancient and the style absurdly retro, but out in the wilds of the Darkling zone, what could an interworld legate expect?
Anander Flyte’s only complaint was that he had nothing good to smash. No door to slam, no plants to topple. Not even a desk to pound a filebook on. He could throw a waterbulb at the wall, but it only bounced.
Anander threw it anyway. “I can’t believe they would do this. It is absolutely intolerable.”
From the exit valve, Maximilian watched in his palace-guard pose, chest out, eyes ahead, hands tucked with defiant dignity behind his back.
“They know we’re on a schedule. Do they think this is some kind of company junket?” Anander pounded the chair until it assumed a new shape, spindly and elaborate, a cat’s cradle of morphifoam tensegrity. He gave it a wallop.
The structure crumpled. Sprang back.
Most unsatisfying.
“Do they think I came here to poke my nose in a hole, sniff the local flavors of dirt? To tour some shadowy, half-lit hollow? This isn’t a sigh
tseeing trip.”
“Nevertheless.” Maximilian managed to accentuate his ramrod posture—a slight sucking in of the stomach, an incremental clench of the buttocks—conveying not only impatience, but disapproval. “According to the terms of the agreement—”
“Oh, spare me the terms.” Anander quit abusing the furnishings and scooped up the fallen waterbulb. He popped the straw and sipped. The suite opted for calming imagery, waterscapes, a rhythmic roar. “It wasn’t I who set the terms, Max. Why should I be the one to sort this out?”
Despair stifled him as he thought, for the eightieth time that hour, of the tremendous blow to his fortunes. Failure! At this stage in his career. And not only a failure, but the most critical, epical, apocalyptic, humiliating insult a legate could receive . . .
It was unthinkable. Anander snapped a finger at the wall, demanding an ambience suited to his mood. The room obliged with a view of Jovian storms.
“What exactly is their objection, anyway?”
Maximilian brought his arms from behind his back, revealing twenty-four long, thin fingers, each with far too many joints. Amazing, Anander thought, what the man can communicate with only a subtle flick of those digits. But this was the gift of the secretarial orders. They were neurally wired for uptightness.
Maximilian gestured at the walls, dimming the room to a semblance of sylvan shade.
“The Darklings,” said Maximilian, now dappled with leafy shadow, “have re-evaluated their earlier position. They say Project Snowfall cannot be allowed to go ahead as planned.”
“But they signed an agreement!” Seeing Maximilian’s expression, Anander hurried on, “And when did they come to this great epiphany?”
His secretaid sighed. “They held a council, it seems, while your shuttle was en route. The assembly voted to annul the agreement.”
“Did they give a thought, perchance, to how this would be received by the InterOrbital administration? The inner worlds? My superiors? To the effect it would have on my—”
Anander stifled his rage. A wind had gathered in the virtual underbrush, sweeping the scenery of simulated trunks, disturbing the bower of morphifoam branches, even fretting the slicked-down locks of Maximilian’s impeccable hair. The room had picked up his suppressed emotions.
“What are they claiming, Max?”
The secretaid cleared his throat. “The Darklings say, Anander, that Project Snowfall cannot proceed because . . .” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Because they believe the affected area to be inhabited.”
Winds, real and virtual, shrieked around the room. The mock-forest dissolved in a whirl of leaves. Maximilian’s hair became a brown flurry.
And Anander Flyte, to his delighted surprise, discovered it was actually possible, with enough frenzied passion, to beat even the most resilient morphifoam chair to a quivering pile of pulp.
“Now, that,” he roared, spiking the waterbulb, “that is completely crazy.”
THE INNER WORLDS of the solar system had many salient advantages. Bright, dense, mineral-rich, they were humankind’s natural habitat.
But they had hazards. Foremost: radiation. The billion-year brush of invisible death that swept away air and water with it, flensing the friable stuff of life from naked rock.
Mars needed water. Ganymede needed water. The Floating Cities of the interplanetary void, they definitely needed water.
Even Earth could have used a new icy moonlet to feed the sweet clear stuff of life to its growing cloud of orbital junk.
Once upon a time, long ago, superheated cities on an overwarmed Earth had towed icebergs from polar seas, anchoring them offshore, freshening inhabitants with the cool wet winds of weather-hacked microclimates. Epic ice transport: it was a venerable profession.
The asteroid belt had ice, but it was locked up in a patchwork of minipols, city states, and feudal regimes. A confederacy of dunces: those reckless colonizers had polluted their turf with experimental bacteria, unlicensed replicators, poisonous spores of ersatz life. You couldn’t kick a rock out there without running a thousand environmental checks.
Sensing a crisis, the government at InterOrbital had crunched the numbers. Factoring current rates of resource discovery, planned terraforming schemes, projected trends of population increase—plus those great underestimated hydrosinks, thermal regulation, and radiation shielding—they had prophesied total systemic collapse within two thousand years.
But there remained a vast and accessible reservoir . . .unclaimed, unexplored, effectively infinite.
The plan was superhumanly farsighted. Munchers—minute, fast-traveling, densely programmed replicators—would invade the many icy pebbles of the Kuiper Belt. Multiplying from a selected point of origin, the tiny machines would convert the vast snowfield to a swarm of guided projectiles. All preprogrammed with two directives: to propagate through the rocks of the solar hinterlands, and to later outgas in explosive fashion, altering the subtle dance of orbits, sending a supply of comets wheeling toward the inner worlds.
In one thousand years, the first would arrive.
Within two thousand, more. And still more. And ever more—in a cascade that harnessed the power of exponential increase to combat the solar system’s enormous emptiness.
The munchers had been programmed. The launchers were set to deploy. A project ninety years in the planning had reached its final stage.
Yet.
There remained one tiny, almost trivial hassle.
The Kuiper Belt was unclaimed. But to reach it . . .to send out the munchers, reel in the comets . . .to make the sky rain watery manna for futurity’s generations . . .
For this, it would be necessary to transit the outer orbits. The distant wilds, far past the frontiers of the moon dwellers, far, far past the reach of IO jurisdiction, out in the blackness and the cold of the remote territories, where the constellations of the great strange beyond overwhelmed the bright pinprick of Sol, and the deeps of the inhospitable universe yawned to swallow the frail human ego.
In the grand chronology of the solar clock, time was running out. And Anander Flyte had come with pomp and haste to wrangle a final territorial concession, here at the limit of human survival, the boundary of law, the edge of imagination—
Where the Darklings lived.
“ARE YOU READY, Legate?”
Anander could become, with help from certain technological tweaks, master of his emotions. He felt for his pressure point, jamming a thumb under his jaw. The room settled as his frustration abated.
“What can I look forward to?”
“I’m not entirely sure.” With fingers like crab legs, Maximilian straightened his hair. “I believe the Darklings have planned a demonstration.”
“Have they offered terms? Prepared a statement? Given us any sense of their position?”
“As I understand, Legate, they mean to take you on a tour.”
Somewhere in the depths of his cortex, Anander’s anger stirred. “A tour?”
“They don’t wish to risk an interorbital incident. They believe that persuasive measures, properly applied, will win you over to their point of view.”
“And convince me to pass a death sentence on the solar system?”
Maximilian shrugged. Anander shut his eyes. He was here for a reason. He was the best diplomat InterOrbital had on staff.
The Darklings themselves had requested him.
Before setting out on his mission, Anander had prepared himself in body and mind for feats of superhuman diplomacy.
He had spliced a connectome for heightened social intelligence.
A round of surgery, a weekly injection, daily doses of sensory reinforcement . . .
The rewiring of a brain’s neural net was one of InterOrbital’s subtlest arts. Anander’s new, delicate weave of synapses and associations gave him uncanny powers of concentration, a talent for improvisation, and a certain clarity of mind.
The treatment also made him subject to mental spasms—patterns of association that collaps
ed into recurring cycles, entered catastrophic feedback loops, gravitated to strange attractors of neural phasespace. In layman’s terms, Anander was obsessive. Recurring thoughts afflicted him.
He clenched his fists.
Two Martian years out, two back. My genius wasted on a Hail Mary mission. The peak period of my diplomatic career, burned up in an embodied crawl to nowhere. And for what? To be rebuffed by a mob of savages?
“The Darklings are waiting, Legate.”
Anander controlled himself. “Send them in.”
Anander, as a courtesy, dimmed the lights. The exit valve opened. And the Darklings came through.
Even without his neural modifications, Anander could appreciate InterOrbital’s dilemma. By any reasonable measure—population, wealth, power—the inner worlds outclassed the solar system’s far-flung colonies. Distance was their adversary. They couldn’t project their power. The Darklings—remote settlers—were undisputed masters of the outer orbits.
Diplomacy was essential. But diplomacy was hard. Communications latency marred every virtual assembly. Someone had to travel out here—someone embodied, corporeal, human—to make an in-person appeal.
So, yes, Anander appreciated the importance of his task.
That didn’t make it any easier.
The Darklings entered in a tangled clump, scurrying across the morphifoam floor. To inworlders, they were a semimythical people, bizarrely modified bogeymen inhabiting a wild frontier. Anander had been tutored in their culture.
He knelt to address the furry mass.
“Reverend Elders of Warren! I, Anander Flyte, bring greetings to you from the members of the InterOrbital Assembly.”
The Darklings murmured in welcome. Even these remote people spoke the common tongue. Words, however, were of secondary importance. Among Darklings, touch was the chief form of communication. And not the brusque handshakes of Earth. Contact, for Darklings, was an intimate dance of plucks, brushes, pinches, and caresses. It could be . . . unsettling.
And there were so many of them.
“As the Assembly’s chosen legate to the outer worlds,” Anander continued, “I humbly beseech you to remember the treaty that was filed thirty Martian years ago. And I beg you to consider the welfare of your distant neighbors in the inner orbits—”