Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  Crombec spoke up. ‘Captain? I would like to take command of the part of the ship that remains in flight.’

  There were a few murmurs of assent. Clearly Crombec would not be alone in preferring not to hide, even if the majority might choose to follow Quail.

  ‘Wait,’ Pauraque said. ‘As soon as we put people on a decoy, with knowledge of what has happened earlier, we run the risk of the Huskers eventually learning it all for themselves.’

  ‘We’ll take that risk,’ Quail snapped.

  ‘There won’t be one,’ said Crombec. ‘You have my word that I’ll destroy my ship rather than risk it falling into Husker possession.’

  ‘Merlin?’ the captain asked. ‘I take it you’re with us?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, snapping out of his gloomy reverie. ‘I support your proposal fully . . . as I must. Doubtless we’ll have time to completely camouflage ourselves and cover our tracks before the swarm comes past. There’s just one thing . . .’

  Quail tilted his head to one side to rest against his hand, like a man close to exhaustion. ‘Yes?’

  ‘You said the system was almost unremarkable . . . is it simply the presence of the Waynet that makes it otherwise?’

  ‘No,’ Quail said, his patience wearing fatally thin. ‘No, there was something else - a small anomaly in the star’s mass-luminosity relationship. I doubt that it’s anything very significant. Look on the bright side, Merlin. Investigating it will give you something to do while the rest of us are busying ourselves with the boring work of concealment. And you’ll have your precious syrinxes, as well - not to mention close proximity to the Waynet. There’ll be plenty of time for all the experiments you can think of. I’m sure even you will be able to make two syrinxes last long enough . . .’

  Merlin glanced down at his glove again, hoping that the news he had received earlier had in some way been an error, or his eyes had deceived him. But neither of those things proved to be the case.

  ‘Better make that one,’ he said.

  Naked, bound together, Sayaca and Merlin seemed to float in space, kindling a focus of human warmth between them. The moment when the walls of the little ship had vanished had been meant to surprise and impress Sayaca. He had planned it meticulously. But instead she began to shiver, though it was no colder than it had been an instant earlier. He traced his hand across her thigh, feeling her skin break into goosebumps.

  ‘It’s just a trick,’ he said, her face half-buried in his chest. ‘No one can see us from outside the cutter.’

  ‘Force and wisdom; it feels so cold now, Merlin. Makes me feel so small and vulnerable, like a candle on the point of flickering out.’

  ‘But you’re with me.’

  ‘It doesn’t make any difference, don’t you understand? You’re just a man, Merlin - not some divine protective force.’

  Grudgingly, but knowing that the moment had been spoiled, Merlin allowed the walls to return. The stars were still visible, but there was now quite clearly a shell of transparent metasapphire, laced with control graphics, to hold them at bay.

  ‘I thought you’d like it,’ he said. ‘Especially now, on a day like this one.’

  ‘I just wasn’t quite ready for it, that’s all.’ Her tone shifted to one of reconciliation. ‘Where is it, anyway?’

  Merlin issued another subvocal command to the ship, instructing it to distort and magnify the starfield selectively, until the object of Sayaca’s interest sprang into focus. What they saw was the swallowship splitting into two uneven parts, like an insect undergoing some final, unplanned metamorphosis. Six years had passed since the final decision had been made to implement Quail’s scheme. Sayaca and Merlin had become lovers in that time; Quail had even died.

  The separation would have been beautiful, were so much not at stake. Starthroat did not exist anymore. Its rebuilding had been a mammoth effort that had occupied all of them in one way or another. Much of its mass had been retained aboard the part that would remain cruising relativistically. She had been named Bluethroat and carried roughly one-third of the frostwatch sleepers, in addition to Crombec and the small number of seniors and subseniors who had chosen to follow him. Needless to say there had been some dispute about Crombec getting most of the weapons, chiefly from Pauraque . . . but Merlin could not begrudge him that.

  The smaller part they had named Starling. This was a ship designed to make one journey only, from here to the new system. It was equipped with a plethora of nimble, adaptable in-system craft, necessary for exploring the new system and finding the securest hiding places. Scans showed that a total of six worlds orbited the star they had now named Bright Boy. Only two were of significance: a scorched, airless planet much the same size as fabled Earth, which they named Cinder, and a gas giant they named Ghost. It seemed obvious that the best place to hide would be in one of these worlds, either Cinder or Ghost, but no decision had yet been made. Sayaca thought Cinder was the best choice, while Pauraque advocated using Ghost’s thick atmosphere for concealment. Eventually a choice would be made; they would dig in, establish a base and conceal all evidence of their activities.

  The Huskers might slow down, curious - but they would find nothing.

  ‘You were there, weren’t you?’ Sayaca said. ‘When they decided this.’

  Merlin nodded - remembering how young she had seemed then. The last few years had aged them all. ‘We all thought Quail was insane . . . then we realised even an insane plan was the best we had. Except for Crombec, of course . . .’

  Bluethroat was separating now, its torch still burning clean and steady, arcing back into the night along the great axis of the Way. Far behind - but far closer than they had once been - lay the swarm, still pursuing Merlin’s people.

  ‘You think Crombec’s people will die, don’t you?’ Sayaca said.

  ‘If I thought he had the better chance, that’s where I’d be. With his faction, rather than under Pauraque.’

  ‘I thought about following him too,’ Sayaca said. ‘His arguments sounded convincing. He thinks we’ll all die around Bright Boy.’

  ‘Maybe we will. I still think the odds are slightly more in our favour.’

  ‘Slightly?’

  ‘There’s something I don’t like about our destination, Sayaca. Bright Boy doesn’t fit into our normal stellar models. It’s too bright for its size, and it’s putting out far too many neutrinos. If you’re going to hide somewhere, you don’t do it around a star that stands out from the crowd.’

  ‘Would it make any difference if Quail had put you in charge rather than Pauraque? Or if the Council had not forbidden you to test the final syrinx?’

  Conceivably, he thought, it might well have made a difference. He had been very lucky to retain any kind of seniority after what had happened back then. But the loss of the next to last syrinx had not been the utter disaster his enemies had tried to portray. The machine had still rammed against the Way in a catastrophic manner, but for the first time in living memory, a syrinx had appeared to do something else in the instants before that collision . . . chirping a series of quantum-gravitational variations towards the boundary. And the Way had begun to respond: a strange local alteration in its topology ahead of the syrinx. Puckering, until a dimple formed on the boundary, like the nub of a severed branch on a tree trunk. The dimple was still forming when the syrinx hit.

  What, Merlin wondered, would have happened if that impact had been delayed for a few more instants? Might the dimple have finished forming, providing an entry point into the Way?

  ‘I don’t think it made any difference to me.’

  ‘They say you hated Quail.’

  ‘I had reasons not to like him, Sayaca. My brother and I both did.’

  ‘But they say Quail rescued you from Plenitude, that he saved your lives while everyone else died.’

  ‘That’s true enough.’

  ‘And for that you hated him?’

  ‘He should have left us behind, Sayaca. No; don’t look at me like that. You were
n’t there. You can’t understand what it was like.’

  ‘Maybe if I spoke to Gallinule, he’d have more to say about it.’ Subtly, she pulled away from him. A few minutes earlier it would have signified nothing, but now that tiny change in their spatial relationship spoke volumes. ‘They say you’re alike, you and Gallinule. You both look alike too. But there isn’t as much similarity as people think.’

  PART TWO

  ‘There are definitely tunnels here,’ Sayaca said, years later.

  Their cutter was parked on an airless plain near Cinder’s equator, squatting down on skids like a beached black fish. Bright Boy was almost overhead; a disc of fierce radiance casting razor-edged shadows like pools of ink. Merlin moved over to Sayaca’s side of the cabin to see the data she was projecting before her, sketched in ruddy contours. Smelling her, he wanted to bury his face in her hair and turn her face to his before kissing her, but the moment was not right for that. It had not been right for some time.

  ‘Caves, you mean?’ Merlin said.

  ‘No, tunnels.’ She almost managed to hide her irritation. ‘Like I always said they were. Deliberately excavated. Now do you believe me?’

  There had been hints of them before, from orbit, during the first months after their arrival around the star. Starling had sent expeditionary teams out to a dozen promising niches in the system, tasking them to assess the benefits of each before a final decision was made. Most of the effort was focused around Cinder and Ghost - they had even put space stations into orbit around the gas giant - but there were teams exploring smaller bodies, even comets and asteroids. Nothing would be dismissed without at least a preliminary study. There were even teams working on fringe ideas like hiding inside the sun’s chromosphere.

  And for all that, Merlin thought, they still won’t allow me near the other syrinx.

  But at least Cinder was a kind of distraction. Mapping satellites had been dropped into orbits around all the major bodies in the system, measuring the gravitational fields of each body. The data, unravelled into a density-map, hinted at a puzzling structure within Cinder - a deep network of tunnels riddling the lithosphere. Now they had even better maps, constructed from seismic data. One or two small asteroids hit Cinder every month. With no atmosphere to slow them down, they slammed into the surface at many kilometres per second. The sound waves from those impacts would radiate through the underlying rock, bent into complex wave fronts as they traversed density zones. They would eventually reach the surface again, thousands of kilometres away, but the precise pattern of arrival times - picked up across a network of listening devices studding the surface - would depend on the route that the sound waves had taken.

  Now Merlin could see that the tunnels were definitely artificial.

  ‘Who do you think dug them?’

  ‘From here, there’s no way we’ll ever know.’ Sayaca frowned, puzzling over something in her data, and then seemed to drop the annoyance, at least for now, rather than have it spoil her moment of triumph. ‘Whoever it was, they tidied up after themselves. We’ll have to go down - get into them.’

  ‘Perhaps we’ll find somewhere to hide.’

  ‘Or find someone else already hiding.’ Sayaca looked into his face, her expression one of complete seriousness.

  ‘Maybe they’ll let us hide with them.’

  She turned back to her work. ‘Or maybe they’d rather we left them alone.’

  Several months later, Merlin buckled on an immersion suit, feeling the slight prickling sensation around the nape of his neck as the suit hijacked his spinal nerves. Vision and balance flickered - there was a perceptual jolt he never quite got used to - and then suddenly he was back in the simulated realm of the Palace. He had to admit it was good; much better than the last time he had sampled Gallinule’s toy environment.

  ‘You’ve been busy,’ he said.

  Gallinule’s image smiled. ‘It’ll do for now. Just wait till you’ve seen the sunset wing.’

  Gallinule led him through the maze of high-ceilinged, baroquely walled corridors that led from the oubliette to the other side of the Palace. They ascended and descended spiral staircases and crossed vertiginous inner chambers spanned by elegantly arched stonework bridges, delicate subtleties of masonry highlighted in sunset fire. The real Palace of Eternal Dusk had been ruined along with every other sign of civilisation when the Huskers had torched Plenitude. This simulation was running in the main encampment inside Cinder, but Gallinule had spread copies of it around the system, wherever he might need a convenient venue for discussion.

  ‘See anything that looks out of place?’ Gallinule said.

  Merlin looked around, but there was nothing that did not accord with his own memories. Hardly surprising. Of the two of them, Gallinule had always been the one with the eye for detail.

  ‘It’s pretty damned good. But why? And how?’

  ‘As a test-bed. Aboard Starthroat, we never needed good simulation techniques. But our lives depend upon making the right choices around Bright Boy. That means we have to be able to simulate any hypothetical situation and experience it as if it were totally real.’

  Merlin agreed. The discovery that the tunnels in Cinder were artificial had enormously complicated the hideaway project. They had been excavated by a hypothetical human splinter group, which Sayaca had dubbed the Diggers. No one knew much about them. Certainly they had been more advanced than any part of the Cohort, but while their machines - lining the tunnels like a thick arterial plaque - seemed unfathomably strange, they were not quite strange enough to suggest that they had been installed by the Waymakers. And they were quite clearly human: markings were in a language that the linguists said had ancient links to Main. The Diggers were simply one of the thousands of cultures that had ascended to heights of technical prowess without making any recognisable dent on human history.

  ‘. . . Anyway, who knows what nasty traps the Diggers left us?’ Gallinule was saying. ‘With simulations, we’ll at least be able to prepare for the more obvious surprises.’ His youthful image shrugged. ‘So I initiated a crash programme to resurrect the old techniques. At the moment we have to wear suits to achieve this level of immersion, but in a year or so we’ll be able to step into simulated environments as easily as walking from one room to another.’

  They had reached a balcony on the sunset side of the Palace of Eternal Dusk. He leaned over the balustrade as far as he dared, seeing how the lower levels of the Palace dropped away towards the rushing sea below. The Palace of Eternal Dusk circled Plenitude’s equator once a day, travelling with the line that divided day from night. Its motion caused Plenitude’s sun to hang at the same point in the sky, two-thirds of its swollen disk already consumed by the sea. Somewhere deep in the keel of rock the Palace rode lay throbbing mechanisms that both sustained the structure’s flight - it had been flying for longer than anyone remembered - and generated the protective bubble that held it in a pocket of still air, despite its supersonic velocity relative to the ground.

  Merlin’s family had held the Palace for thirteen hundred years, after a short Dark Age on Plenitude. The family had been amongst the first to rediscover powered flight, using fragile aircraft to reach the keel. Other contenders had come, but the family had retained their treasure across forty generations, through another two Dark Ages.

  Finally, however, the greater war had touched them.

  A damaged Cohort swallowship had been the first to arrive, years ahead of a Husker swarm. The reality of interstellar travel was dimly remembered on Plenitude, but those first newcomers were still treated with suspicion and paranoia. Only Merlin’s family had given them the benefit of the doubt . . . and even then had not fully heeded the warning when it was given. Against their ruling mother’s wishes, the two brothers had allowed themselves to be taken aboard the swallowship and inducted into the ways of the Cohort. Their old names were discarded in favour of new ones, in the custom of the swallowship’s crew. They learned fluency in Main.

  After several
months, Merlin and Gallinule had been preparing to return home as envoys. Their plan was simple enough. They would persuade their mother that Plenitude was doomed. That would not be the easiest of tasks, but their mother’s cooperation was vital if anything was to be saved. It would mean establishing peace amongst the planet’s various factions, where none had existed for generations. There were spaces in the swallowship’s frostwatch holds for sleepers, but only a few hundred thousand, which would mean that each region must select its best. It would not be easy, but there were still years in which to do it.

  ‘None of it will make any difference,’ their mother had said. ‘No one will listen to us, even if we believe everything Quail says.’

  ‘They have to.’

  ‘Don’t you understand?’ she said. ‘You think of me as your mother, but to fifty million of Plenitude’s inhabitants I’m a tyrant.’

  ‘They’ll understand,’ Merlin said, only half-believing it himself.