by Gary Gibson
'We were seduced by the Deep Dreamers, Trader.' Swimmer had carefully studied the interior layout of the coreship's command centre before departing his own ship. 'They gave us our first taste of empire, but in reality we serve them, not the other way round. Your slavish devotion to their predictions is pathetic.'
'I have no delusions about the Dreamers' limitations, nor do I have the time for wishful thinking and fantasies. Don't you even want to know why I brought you here?'
Swimmer in Turbulent Currents made a show of looking around him. 'Why, to kill me, of course – far out of view of the Hegemony and our masters. Try anything, however, and my ship will destroy this building with both of us inside it.'
'I wanted you here not because I think you're a fool I can talk round, but because you can make others listen to you,' Trader continued, more quietly this time. 'That makes you dangerous. Choose to believe what you wish, Swimmer, but the Emissaries have no interest in compromise, regardless of what their servants might have told you.'
'And yet the Emissaries are winning, Trader. They just keep coming, and we keep getting pushed back.'
'Precisely! So we must use our nova weapons to-'
'To what?' Swimmer's amusement was mixed with disgust. 'To destroy not just the Emissaries with the one weapon we said we'd never use, but the entire galaxy as well?'
'Listen to me.' Trader's tone became more urgent. 'I'm offering you a chance-'
'I already know what you want: a first strike against the Emissaries, to disable them. But how could that do anything but accelerate their own research into constructing their own nova weapons? How long before they realize they'd possessed the capacity to construct them all along?'
'We'll be overrun if we don't act immediately.'
'No, Trader, we won't. We can still survive, even if we lose our Hegemony. Anything else would bring only untold trillions of deaths.'
'We will engineer the war so that the Hegemony will survive.'
'To rule what?' Swimmer scornfully demanded. 'The ashes of dead stars? I reject your offer, because to do otherwise would be to make myself as much a criminal as you are. I would rather die.'
Swimmer's yacht informed him that other field-bubbles were now approaching the command centre. Long-dead power systems throughout the building were beginning to power up, demonstrating evidence of recent repair.
'Listen to me, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents, and listen as you never have before. You betrayed us, and you were found out. It's true that I was sent here to kill you, but I now have other uses for you.'
Go feed the Dreamers, Swimmer thought, and ordered his yacht to destroy the command centre.
Nothing happened.
Swimmer tried to bolt for an exit, but found to his horror he couldn't move; his field-bubble refused to shift more than a metre or two in any direction, while Trader remained where he had been, studying him thoughtfully.
Swimmer panicked, slamming into the wall of his field-bubble as if he could push through it and into the vacuum beyond.
It took him a moment before he realized what Trader had done.
He noticed for the first time that a ring of shaped-field generators had been set into the ceiling directly above them both; more of them had been set into the floor. And the gentle shimmer of his own field-bubble had hidden from him a second, larger field enclosing them both.
'Trader, it doesn't have to be this way. The Emissaries say they are willing to share a common border, in exchange for a sharing of resources and access to our client species. I can-'
'You can atone for your sins,' said Trader grimly.
Further field-bubbles emerged from several entrances behind Trader, each one carrying a Shoal-member inside it. Some of these bubbles had the distinctive colouring that marked their occupants as priest-geneticists, the secretive fanatics who tended to the Deep Dreamers, for generation after generation.
Trader addressed him again. 'You should be aware that our superiors met to pass judgement on you. On my advice, their sentence is one of Involuntary Re-Speciation.'
Swimmer in Turbulent Currents trembled with rage. 'This is an outrage! You there!' He barked at one of the priests. 'I am a representative of the Hegemony Council! You will-'
'The Hegemony is a long way off,' the priest replied, then directed his next words at Trader. 'Sir, we've managed to salvage some surgical units from the coreship, and we've supplemented them with our own, more up-to-date equipment. I should say, however, that it's been a long time since an operation of this magnitude has been carried out-'
'You have all the equipment and materials you'll need for the Re-Speciation,' Trader replied. 'Besides, I'll be most interested to see what you come up with.'
'I must admit,' the priest replied, now totally regardless of Swimmer's presence, 'I'm fascinated by the challenge.'
Swimmer listened aghast to this exchange, his fins stiff with terror. Re-Speciation was something out of the Shoal's dim and distant past, a relic of much less civilized times. He slammed his personal field-bubble desperately against the much larger one surrounding both him and Trader, even though he knew he was trapped.
'Re-Speciation is… is a damnable barbarism, an insult to all sanity and reason,' he cried. 'For pity's sake, Trader, the practice has been outlawed for tens of millennia! I refuse to believe you would-'
'Oh, but I would, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents, I would,' Trader replied. 'Re-Speciation doesn't seem to have done the Bandati too much harm in the long run, although that was admittedly an entire species rather than a single individual. And as for legalities… well, I think we both gave up much concern over that a long time ago, didn't we? Part of the job, and all that.'
'Trader.' Swimmer tried adopting a more reasonable tone. 'There's no possible way for you to profit from something like this. There's no… no reason for it. In the name of the great Mother, kill me if you must. But to threaten something so obscene is beneath you.'
'Yet necessary,' Trader answered.
The priest who had addressed Trader earlier now moved closer, clutching a weapon resembling a spear-gun in his manipulators.
'I need to set an example for anyone who might entertain similarly idiotic ideas in future,' Trader explained. 'I want them to be filled with terror when they hear your name spoken. I want them to know exactly what would become of them.'
The larger fields surrounding both Trader and Swimmer snapped off suddenly. The priest moved forward quickly, intersecting his own field-bubble with Swimmer's and shooting him with a dart from his weapon before Swimmer could react.
A freezing numbness began to envelop Swimmer's thoughts.
'After all, it's true there are worse things than death,' Trader continued, twisting his manipulators together with sick glee. Swimmer barely heard his following words before consciousness finally abandoned him: 'Being human, for instance.' Hugh Moss stepped out from the tug and onto an airless plain on the surface of Blackflower. This plain was ringed by jagged mountains that delineated the outline of an ancient impact crater.
He was protected from the harsh vacuum of space by a shaped field-bubble that had a minute but perceptible effect on the local gravitational field. Tiny energy spikes at different points in the sphere could impel it in a particular direction; so he now caused it to float towards the low foothills fringing the nearest peak, quickly picking up speed. They operated on Swimmer in Turbulent Currents for several weeks continuously. First, they placed him in an artificially induced coma, then suspended his piscine form within a nutrient-rich soup of highly engineered bacteria that ate away first at his outer epithelial layers before attacking specific types of differentiated tissue.
Arrays of closely packed femtosecond-pulse lasers cut away at his fins, manipulators, and then much of the fleshy bulk of his body, before narrowing their focus to the cellular level, carefully removing minute fragments and pieces of flesh and muscle from around Swimmer's skeletal structure and nerve cells.
Before long, his body had been reduced to little more than a
naked bundle of ganglia and neuroglia, his nerves and cerebral tissue meanwhile suspended within a dense bundle of supportive meshes. The nutrient soup was then flushed, and replaced with a liquid suspension of nanocytes that had been specially tailored to his genetic material. These entered every cell, re-engineering him at the smallest possible level, while teams of Shoal surgeons relearned the techniques necessary to reshape his body into something entirely different.
By necessity, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents slept through much of this in a dreamless coma.
They rebuilt his skeleton into a humanoid scaffold of tissue, plastic and metal, meanwhile operating on his cerebrum until it could be squeezed into a tiny braincase without compromising the thoughts and memories it retained. New flesh was grown in layers over the top of the skeleton, while the framework supporting the naked nervous tissues shifted into a new alignment, micro-surgical instruments still cutting and pruning and reshaping what was then left into something that would fit inside re-engineered muscles and skin.
Artificial organs were grown in situ – lungs, heart, kidneys and more, tweaked to at least superficially resemble those of a human being. The rebuilt nervous system was gradually hidden under a tide of growing flesh.
And somewhere inside all of this, the Shoal-member known as Swimmer in Turbulent Currents died a very real death indeed. He awoke, insane and naked, light slanting through tall windows that touched a bare concrete floor. He gagged on dry air, his mind telling him he was drowning even while his newly constructed lungs drew air down into them in great heaving gasps. He twisted and screamed, unable to coordinate unfamiliar limbs, the chafing of dry dust against his skin almost more than he could take.
He lay panting as sunlight crawled across the floor towards him, and tried desperately to comprehend the new sensations and feelings coming to him through unfamiliar sense organs.
That he had died was a conclusion he would come to only in retrospect. There was so little left of Swimmer in Turbulent Currents in the travesty Trader had now made of him; and yet his memories of who and what he had been remained intact.
Later – much, much later – he recalled the paradox of the ship that was repaired, piece by tiny piece, so many times that nothing of the original remained. It was the kind of endless circular argument best left to the young as to whether it was in fact still the same ship once every part of it had been replaced.
And therein lay the greatest cruelty of all, that this dazzling expertise had been deployed to make sure that he would always remember what he had been – and the reason for his punishment.
Somehow, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents staggered upright on two strange-feeling feet, only to collapse a moment later, writhing and screeching out his madness at the bare metal walls that echoed his own cries back at him.
He was alone, utterly alone, bar the cameras he knew must be watching him, recording every appalling moment, documenting the tragic outcome for anyone suicidal enough to betray Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals.
The creature that had once been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents managed to crawl towards a half-open door, stumbling through it and into the burning light of a midday sun. It didn't take much guesswork to realize he was now a long, long way away from the Te'So system.
Far overhead, contrails cut a bluish-red sky in half, while a large orange sun burned its way down slowly towards a distant horizon. A nearby road cut across a desert expanse in the direction of low hills beyond, while in the other direction a distant glimmer suggested the shores of an ocean or lake.
He crouched in the dirt, and saw that he had emerged from what appeared to be a warehouse – one of human design.
He looked upwards and saw a vast planet overhead, entirely visible even in the daytime and far larger than the sun. He could actually see it moving, as if barely skirting the world on which he stood, and he wondered if he was about to be witness to some cataclysmic collision.
And, in that moment, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents knew where he was: Corkscrew.
Corkscrew was a Consortium world close to the outer limits of the sphere of influence permitted to humanity by the Shoal. The planet apparently bearing down on him was therefore Corkscrew's co-orbital companion, Fullstop.
Stable co-orbital worlds were extremely rare, and the only other example Swimmer had ever heard of was a pair of moons in humanity's home system. Fullstop and Corkscrew effectively shared the exact same orbit around their parent star; and Fullstop, a smaller world with a faster orbit, caught up with Corkscrew every 287 days.
As it now rushed towards the larger world, the combination of mutual gravitational attraction and momentum sent Fullstop swinging past the larger world, appearing from the point of view of any observer on Corkscrew's surface to first approach dangerously close, before quickly receding as Fullstop then moved into a wider orbit before continuing on its way.
The human culture on Corkscrew called this phenomenon 'playing chicken'. They had a regular festival at the time of every close approach, making jokey fake sacrifices and generally acting the fool in the way only humans really could, like frightened monkeys hoping their screeching and dancing could mask the very real fear induced by the awesome sight of an entire planet bearing down on you at enormous speed.
Swimmer could even make out certain man-made details on Fullstop's surface, both worlds being habitable, and he could see clearly the glistening silvery blue of rivers, lakes and oceans, as the planet proceeded across the sky.
He knelt in the sand and watched its passing until night fell and Fullstop finally began to recede into the distance. Then he crawled back inside the warehouse to sleep, collapsing in a heap on the bare dusty floor to spend his first night as a human – or at least as an approximation of one.
His features twisted into a combination that he did not yet know was called a 'smile'.
Corkscrew! Of all the damnable luck.
Somewhere on this very world, in a disused bunker left over from one of the intermittent feuds between the two worlds, was a faster-than-light yacht very much like the one he'd used to travel to the Te'So system. There were several such craft carefully hidden on worlds leased to client species, placed there with the help of those who had first helped him elicit his audience with the Emissaries.
And any one of those hidden ships could take him anywhere in Shoal-controlled space he wanted to go, and further.
But first, he had to reach that bunker – and somehow stay alive in the meantime.
The smile stayed on his face even as he slept.
The next day he found food and water that had obviously been left for him. Then he crawled and flopped around the warehouse as he slowly relearned the most basic skills of physical coordination. Somehow, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents – or rather, the creature that had been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents – relearned the art of living.
Meanwhile, a growing desire for vengeance gave purpose to every faltering step and laboured breath.
He soon discovered there were microscopic lenses everywhere, feeding continuous video into a central stack he found in a dusty, unlit basement. It was linked into a tach-net transceiver, the signal run through so many encrypted proxies that his chances of ever working out where the video feed was ultimately destined were nil. He destroyed the stack with a crowbar, screaming his fury all the while at the tiny glinting eyes that watched him from every corner and from every angle.
Then, one day, he stumbled across video records of his re-speciation, hidden elsewhere in the warehouse and certainly intended to be found by him.
He watched, trembling, as his previous form was reduced to a tangle of nerves and then rebuilt into something else entirely. He was at a loss to find any empathy with the creature on the screens before him, as its flesh was torn apart and raped. It was happening to somebody – no, something else. He was He had to find himself a name. He was not, any longer, Swimmer in Turbulent Currents.
That one was dead.
He needed a human name – not that he was
human, or Shoal either, for that matter. He was something different: a sentient being freed of the constrictions of the flesh into which it had been born. He was, he thought, a harbinger of some distant time when a species was merely something you were born into. For then there would only be intelligence moving between different forms at will.
If Trader had sought to punish him by the half-forgotten art of Re-Speciation, then he – as yet nameless – might choose to develop it yet further, even to attain the level of an art form. If he could retrieve the FTL yacht secreted elsewhere on Corkscrew, he might yet be able to access the same historical records Trader's surgeons had relied on to rebuild Swimmer – and then learn them for himself.
His mind burgeoned with possibilities.
But the creature that had been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents could get only so far without establishing an identity.
He found a fat-wheeled multi-terrain vehicle stored in a basement garage, with enough power in its batteries to safely carry him all the way to Celeste, the largest settlement on Corkscrew. This vehicle also boasted a full tach-net link that supplied him with the name of the human who owned the warehouse and the surrounding land: a Celestial businessman by the name of Hugh Moss.
Trader had almost certainly bribed this man Moss into leasing him the warehouse, no questions asked.
Hugh Moss. It was as good a name as any. He would find the human, kill him, and take his identity.
The creature that had been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents rolled the syllables around on his new tongue. He was slowly learning to speak, grunting and shouting sounds and learning to shape them with his mouth, throughout each day, as he prepared for his departure.
And then, on his last day at the warehouse, he climbed into the vehicle's cabin and studied himself in a mirror, the wide, round shape of his face.
That could be changed. So much could be changed, through the simple expedient of surgery. He was like an unfinished canvas, a work of art that had not yet found its final form.
But beyond that lay a far higher purpose.
When he – Hugh Moss That Had Been Swimmer in Turbulent Currents – finally found the means to wipe the Shoal out of existence, he wanted Trader in Faecal Matter of Animals to know exactly who had been responsible.