Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You may just have saved us all.’

  It had been ten years.

  Lecythus and its sun now lay many light-weeks to stern. The one remaining Exodus Ark had reached five per cent of the speed of light. In sixty years - faster, if the engine could be improved - it would streak into another system, one that might offer the possibility of landfall. It flew alongside the gossamer line of the Waynet, using the tube as cover from Husker long-range sensors. The Exodus Ark carried only twelve hundred exiles, few of whom would live long enough to see another world.

  The hospital was near the core of the ship, safely distant from the sleeting energies of interstellar radiation or the exotic emissions of the Waynet. Many of its patients were veterans of the Regressive War, victims of the viciously ingenious injuries wrought by the close conjunction of vacuum and heat, radiation and kinetic energy. Most of them would be dead by the time the fusion engine was silenced for cruise phase. For now they were being afforded the care appropriate to war heroes, even those who screamed bloodcurdling pleas for the painkilling mercy of euthanasia.

  In a soundproofed private annexe of that same complex, Minla also lay in the care of machines. This time the assassins had come closer than ever before, and they had very nearly achieved their objective. Yet she’d survived, and the prognosis for a complete recovery - so Merlin was informed - was deemed higher than seventy-five per cent. More than could be said of Minla’s aides, injured in the same attack, but they were at least receiving the best possible care in Tyrant’s frostwatch cabinets. The exercise was, Merlin knew, akin to knitting together human-shaped sculptures from a bloody stew of meat and splintered bone, and then hoping that those sculptures would retain some semblance of mind. Minla would have presented no challenge at all, but the Planetary Director had declined the offer of frostwatch care herself, preferring to give up her place to one of her underlings. Knowing that, Merlin allowed himself a momentary flicker of empathy.

  He walked into the room, coughing to announce himself. ‘Hello, Minla.’

  She lay on her back, her head against the pillow, though she was not asleep. Slowly she turned to face Merlin as he approached. She looked very old, very tired, but she still found the energy to form a smile.

  ‘It’s so good of you to come. I was hoping, but . . . I didn’t dare ask. I know how busy you’ve been with the engine upgrade study.’

  ‘I could hardly not pay you a visit. Even though I had a devil of a job persuading your staff to let me through.’

  ‘They’re too protective of me. I know my own strength, Merlin. I’ll get through this.’

  ‘I believe you will.’

  Minla’s gaze settled on his hand. ‘Are those for me?’

  He had a bouquet of alien flowers. They were of a peculiar dark hue, a shade that ought to have appeared black in the room’s subdued gold lighting yet which was clearly and unmistakably purple, revealed by its own soft inner illumination. They had the look of a detail that had been hand-tinted in a black and white photograph, so that it appeared to float above the rest of the image.

  ‘Of course,’ Merlin said. ‘I always bring flowers, don’t I?’

  ‘You always used to. Then you stopped.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time to start again.’

  He set them by her bedside, in the water-filled vase that was already waiting. They were not the only flowers in the room, but the purple ones seemed to suck the very colour from the others.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ Minla said. ‘It’s like I’ve never seen anything precisely that colour before. It’s as if there’s a whole circuit in my brain that’s never been activated until now.’

  ‘I chose them especially. They’re famous for their beauty.’ Minla lifted her head from the pillow, her eyes brightening with curiosity. ‘Now you’ll have to tell me where they’re from.’

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘That never stopped you before.’

  ‘A world called Lacertine. It’s ten thousand light-years from here; many days of shiptime, even in the Waynet. I don’t even know if it still exists.’

  ‘Tell me about Lacertine,’ she said, pronouncing the name of the world with her usual scrupulousness.

  ‘It’s a very beautiful planet, orbiting a hot blue star. They say the planet must have been moved into its present orbit by the Waymakers, from another system entirely. The seas and skies are a shimmering electric blue, the forests a dazzle of purple and violet and pink; colours that you’ve only ever seen when you close your eyes against the sun and see patterns behind your eyelids. White citadels rise above the treeline, towers linked by a filigree of delicate bridges.’

  ‘Then there are people on Lacertine?’

  Merlin thought of the occupants, and nodded. ‘Adapted, of course. Everything that grows on Lacertine was bioengineered to tolerate the scalding light from the sun. They say if something can grow there, it can grow almost anywhere.’

  ‘Have you been there?’

  He shook his head ruefully. ‘Never been within a thousand light-years of the place.’

  ‘I’ll never see it. Nor any of the other places you’ve told me about.’

  ‘There are places I’ll never see. Even with the Waynet, I’m still just one human man, with one human life. Even the Waymakers didn’t live long enough to glimpse more than a fraction of their empire.’

  ‘It must make you very sad.’

  ‘I take each day as it comes. I’d rather take good memories from one world than fret about the thousand I’ll never see.’

  ‘You’re a wise man,’ Minla said. ‘We were lucky to get you.’

  Merlin smiled. He was silent for many moments, letting Minla enjoy the last calmness of mind she would ever know. ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ he said eventually.

  She must have heard something in his tone of voice. ‘What, Merlin?’

  ‘There’s a good chance you’re all going to die.’

  Her tone became sharp. ‘We don’t need you to remind us of the risks.’ ‘I’m talking about something that’s going to happen sooner rather than later. The ruse of shadowing the Waynet didn’t work. It was the best thing to do, but there was always a chance . . .’ Merlin spread his hands in exaggerated apology, as if there had ever been something he could have done about it. ‘Tyrant’s detected a Husker attack swarm, six elements lying a light-month ahead of you. You don’t have time to steer or slow down. They’d shadow every move you made, even if you tried to shake them off.’

  ‘You promised us—’

  ‘I promised you nothing. I just gave you the best advice I could. If you hadn’t shadowed the Waynet, they’d have found you even sooner.’

  ‘We aren’t using the ramscoop design. You said we’d be safe if we stuck to fusion motors. The electromagnetic signature—’

  ‘I said you’d be safer. There were never any cast-iron guarantees.’

  ‘You lied to us.’ Minla turned suddenly spiteful. ‘I never trusted you.’

  ‘I did all in my power to save you.’

  ‘Then why are you standing there looking so calm, when you know we’re going to die?’ But before Merlin had time to answer, Minla had seen the answer for herself. ‘Because you can leave,’ she said, nodding at her own percipience. ‘You have your ship, and a syrinx. You can slip into the Waynet and outrun the enemy.’

  ‘I’m leaving,’ Merlin said. ‘But I’m not running.’

  ‘Aren’t they one and the same?’

  ‘Not this time. I’m going back to Plenitude, I mean Lecythus, to do what I can for the people we left behind. The people you condemned to death.’

  ‘Me, Merlin?’

  ‘I examined the records of the Regressive War: not just the official documents, but Tyrant’s own data logs. And I saw what I should have seen at the time, but didn’t. It was a ruse. It was too damned easy, the way they took control of that rocket factory. You let them, Minla.’

  ‘I did nothing of the kind.’r />
  ‘You knew the whole evacuation project was never going to be ready on time. The Space Dormitories were behind schedule, there were problems with the Exodus Arks—’

  ‘Because you told us falsehoods about the helium in the moon’s soil.’

  Merlin raised a warning hand. ‘We’ll get to that. The point is, your plans were in tatters. But you could still have completed more Dormitories and ships, if you’d been willing to leave the system a little later. You could still have saved more people than you did, albeit at a slightly increased risk to your own survival. But that wasn’t acceptable. You wanted to leave there and then. So you engineered the whole Regressive attack, set it up as a pretext for an early departure.’

  ‘The Regressives were real!’ Minla hissed.

  ‘But you gave them the keys to that rocket silo, and the know-how to target and guide those missiles. Funny how their attack just missed the one station that you were occupying, you and all your political cronies, and that you managed to move the one Exodus Ark to safety just in time. Damned convenient, Minla.’

  ‘I’ll have you shot for this, Merlin.’

  ‘Good luck. Try laying a hand on me, and see how far it gets you. My ship’s listening in on this conversation. It can put proctors into this room in a matter of seconds.’

  ‘And the moon, Merlin? Do you have an excuse for the error that cost us so dearly?’

  ‘I don’t know. Possibly. That’s why I’m going back to Lecythus. There are still people on the surface - Regressives, allies, I don’t care. And people you abandoned in orbit, as well.’

  ‘They’ll all die. You said it yourself.’

  He raised a finger. ‘If they don’t leave. But maybe there’s a way. Again, I should have seen it sooner. But that’s me all the way. I take a long time to put the pieces together, but I get there in the end. Just like Dowitcher, the man who gave your father the whetstone.’

  ‘It was just a stone.’

  ‘So you said. In fact, it was a vital clue to the nature of your world. It took spring tides and neap tides to lay down those patterns. But you said it yourself: Lecythus doesn’t have spring tides and neap tides. Not any more, at least.’

  ‘I’m sure this means something to you.’

  ‘Something happened to your moon, Minla. When that whetstone formed, your moon was raising tides on Lecythus. When the moon and Calliope were tugging on your seas in the same direction, you got a spring tide. When they were balancing each other, you got a neap tide. Hence the patterning on the whetstone. But now the tides are the same from day to day. Calliope’s still there, so that only leaves the moon. It isn’t exerting the same gravitational pull it used to. Like you told me, the surface gravity is much lower than you’d expect. Oh, it weighs something - but nowhere near as much as it should, based on its size and appearance. If you could skip forward a few hundred million years and examine a piece of whetstone laid down now, you’d probably find very faint variations in sediment thickness. But whatever the effect is now, it must be insignificant compared to the time when your whetstone was formed. Yet the moon’s still there, in what appears to be the same orbit. So what’s happened?’

  ‘You tell me, Merlin.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s a moon any more. I think the original moon got ripped to pieces to make your armoured sky. I don’t know how much of the original mass was used for that, but I’m guessing it was quite a significant fraction. The question is, what happened to the remains?’

  ‘I’m sure you have a theory.’

  ‘I think they made a fake moon out of the leftovers. It sits there in your sky, it orbits Lecythus, but it doesn’t pull on your seas the way the old one used to. It has gravity, but it’s not enough to affect the oceans to the same degree. And you’re right: it’s much less dense than I expected. I really should have paid more attention. Maybe if I did I could have spared Lecythus all this bloodshed.’

  ‘And now you understand everything?’

  ‘I understand that the moon’s new. It’s not been sitting there long enough to soak up billions of years of particles from the solar wind. That’s why you didn’t find the helium you were expecting.’

  ‘So what is it?’

  ‘That’s what I’m keen to find out. The thing is, I know what Dowitcher was thinking now. He knew that wasn’t a real moon. Which begs the question: what’s inside it? And could it make a difference to the survivors you left behind?’

  ‘Hiding inside a shell won’t help them,’ Minla said. ‘You already told us we’d achieve nothing by digging tunnels into Lecythus.’

  ‘I’m not thinking about hiding. I’m thinking about moving. What if the moon’s an escape vehicle? An Exodus Ark big enough to take the entire population?’

  ‘You have no evidence.’

  ‘I have this.’ With that, Merlin produced one of Minla’s old picture books. Seventy years had aged its pages to a brittle yellow, dimming the vibrancy of the old inks. But the linework in the illustrations was still clear enough. Merlin held the book open at a particular page, letting Minla look at it. ‘Your people had a memory of arriving on Lecythus in a moon-sized ship,’ he said. ‘Maybe that was true. Equally, maybe it was a case of muddling one thing with another. I’m wondering if the thing you were meant to remember was not that you came by moon, but that you could leave by one.’

  Minla stared at the picture. For a moment, like a breeze on a summer’s day, Merlin felt a wave of almost unbearable sadness pass through the room. It was as if the picture had transported her back to her childhood, before she had set her life on the trajectory that, seventy years later, would bring it to this bed, this soundproofed room, the shameful survival of this one ship. The last time she had looked at the picture, everything had been possible, all life’s opportunities open to her. She’d been the daughter of a powerful and respected man, with influence and wisdom at her fingertips. And yet from all the choices presented to her, she had selected this one dark path, and followed it to its conclusion.

  ‘Even if it is a ship,’ she said softly, ‘you’ll never get them all aboard.’

  ‘I’ll die trying.’

  ‘And us? We get abandoned to our fates?’

  Merlin smiled: he’d been expecting the question. ‘There are twelve hundred people on this ship, some of them children. They weren’t all party to your schemes, so they don’t all deserve to die when you meet the Huskers. That’s why I’m leaving behind weapons and a detachment of proctors to show you how to install and use them.’

  For the first time since his arrival in the room, Minla spoke like a leader again. ‘Will they make a difference?’

  ‘They’ll give your ship a fighting chance. That’s the best I can offer.’

  ‘Then we’ll take what we’re given.’

  ‘I’m sorry it came to this. I played a part in what you became, of that I’ve no doubt. But I didn’t make you a monster.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll at least take credit for myself, and for the fact that I saved twelve hundred of my people. If it took a monster to do that, doesn’t that mean we sometimes need monsters?’

  ‘Maybe we do. But that doesn’t mean we should forgive them for what they are, even for an instant.’ Gently, as if bestowing a gift, Merlin placed the picture book on Minla’s recumbent form. ‘I’m afraid I have to go now. There won’t be much time when I get back to Lecythus.’

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Not like this. Not this way.’

  ‘This is how it ends,’ he said, before turning from her bed and walking to the exit. ‘Goodbye, Minla.’

  Twenty minutes later he was in the Waynet, racing back to Lecythus.

  There’s a lot to tell, and one day I’ll get around to writing it up properly. For now it’s enough to say that I was right to trust my instincts about the moon. I just wish I’d put the clues together sooner than I did. Perhaps then Minla would never have had to commit her crimes.

  I didn’t save as many as I’d have wished, but I did save some of the peopl
e Minla left behind to die. I suppose that has to count for something. It was close, but if there’s one thing to be said for Waymaker-level technology, it’s that it’s almost childishly easy to use. They were like babies with the toys of the gods. They left that moon there for a good reason, and while it was necessary for them to camouflage it - it had to be capable of fooling the Huskers, or whoever they built that sky to hide from - the moon itself was obligingly easy to break into, once our purpose became clear. And once it started moving, once its great engines came online after tens of thousands of years of quiet dormancy, no force in the universe could have held it back. I shadowed the fleeing moon long enough to establish that it was headed into a sector that appeared to be free of Husker activity, at least for now. It’ll be touch and go for a few centuries, but with force and wisdom on their side, I think they’ll make it.