by Wil McCarthy
He could not fight down a sense of dizzy near-panic, a light tingling in his feet. He was supported here by a thing he did not understand, a thing whose true characteristics he had no way of guessing, and he realized suddenly that this had never happened to him before, never in all his life. From earliest childhood, he had been in the habit of taking things apart, of demanding explanations and demonstrations, of knowing how things were supposed to work and how they actually did—the two were rarely the same. But here, he was not given much chance to ask, to be demonstrated to, to make demands. And truthfully, he was not entirely sure he wanted to know. What if things had simply come too far, raced out ahead of his intuition, into some strange, incomprehensible realm? What if he simply couldn't understand?
High above, the rust-colored ferry hung from the ceiling by... another fog of some sort. He couldn't quite make it out. Names of Ialah, at least the ship itself was built of solid matter. He wasn't sure he could stand having nothing but fog between himself and the great vacuum.
And then the bridge was behind him and he was stepping through the ferry's hatchway. Inside, it was much darker; his eyes took a second or two to adjust.
Purple. Inside the ferry was an octohedral chamber, much like the ones back in the cavern, only smaller, less adorned, and a whole lot more purple. Even the lights, the usual trio hovering motionless in the chamber's center, were more violet than white, vaguely painful to look at despite their dimness. There was a hexagonal opening in the ceiling, webbed over with pale lavender membrane, but with no ladder leading up to it or through it. But then he noticed a ring of fog surrounding the opening; ladder on demand, perhaps. Or maybe a staircase, or maybe the fog simply extended a friendly hand and lifted you up through the hole.
Plate crowded in behind Viktor and urged him further into the chamber, which was already crowded, the enormous Drone seeming to take up by himself nearly as much space as the other nine humans put together.
“Make room,” Plate said, “here she comes.”
Viktor crowded off to the side, and turned just in time to see the lighted entryway eclipsed by a massive form. Not Wende, but the other Drone. 'Mark,' he was called, though whether it was the noun, as in marks on a holie flatscreen, or the old Earth name, as in Mark of the Gospels, Viktor didn't know.
Mark hulked in through the hatchway, his hands extended before him and then sweeping out in wide arcs, clearing a path. His arm, when it brushed against Viktor's chest, was as large and cold and solid as a high-pressure water line, and his head bobbed improbably on that great rubber neck, copper gaze seeming to flick suspiciously from one person to the next.
Viktor was reminded sharply of the Prime Minister's personal bodyguards, who had always behaved exactly this way at her various and numerous public appearances. As if the crowd were somehow dangerous, as if she must be insulated from them as much as possible, lest their touch corrupt her.
And right behind the giant Mark came the even more giant Wende herself, blocking the light from outside almost completely, her round, flabby body filling pretty much the entire doorway. Ialah, was there even room in here for such a creature? Viktor decided this would be a good time to crowd himself up against the wall and look small.
Mark made his way four meters or so to the chamber's center, and then—
And then he disappeared. More properly, he ascended through the membrane-covered opening in the ceiling, so quickly that Viktor's eyes could scarcely determine what had happened. Mark's body was not still during its rise, but had flailed its arms and legs in a peculiar way, not alarmed, not climbing, but... something. Graceful, like a high-gravity pool dive performed in reverse. The membrane opened and closed for him in its usual way, leaving no trace that he'd been standing there on the deck just an eyeblink before.
“Ialah!” somebody said, startled.
Now Wende came forward, moving slowly and rather more gracefully than Viktor would have imagined, her platter-sized sandals slapping quietly against the hard, purple floor. Her green hair and the thin white robe she wore did not bounce or flap as she walked, or rather did not do so at normal speed—they seemed imprisoned, moving jelly-like through the near-transparent layer of security fog that surrounded her, following her every move and jiggle.
Viktor felt his hair standing on end. What a ghastly figure she cut, marching along like that, her surfaces undulating with such underwater slowness! Like a ghost, a fat, flabby ghost, except that he could feel her solidity even from a meter away. She seemed to displace the air, to displace spacetime itself around her.
Her gaze also wandered, her head—so very much like a melon draped with folds of gray rubber—swinging nearly a hundred eighty degrees one way and then the other as she moved, as if nothing anchored it but skin. When her eyes met Viktor's, he saw with a chill that she was smiling; a cold, reptilian grin that did not belong on a human being's face.
Her legs were longer than they looked; she reached the chamber's center after only a couple of steps. And then she, too, was waving her arms, and raising them, and kicking hard against the deck as if leaping. Which was ridiculous, of course, but she became airborne just the same, a flicker of structural fog surrounding her like a winding glass helix. And then the membrane absorbed her and she was gone.
Right behind her was Crow, who also flashed up through the opening, and the Dog came in behind him, and then Line stepped back into the chamber's center again and vanished in the same way.
Which left Plate the only Gatean remaining. All eyes were on him.
“Thank you for your cooperation,” he said.
The hatchway irised shut with a faint whispering sound. The ferry began to hum.
“This is probably somewhat disconcerting,” Plate noted wisely. “I'll try to answer any questions you might have before Wende comes down to speak with you again. If she chooses to, that is.”
Viktor could not suppress a nervous chuckle. “I have a question or two, yes.”
But at that moment there was a great banging noise, and without warning the gravity vanished, leaving them all in sudden freefall. As one, the refugees gasped as their feet skidded along the floor, losing contact. The ferry had dropped! The ferry was falling through the membrane-floor of its holding chamber, falling through some deep shaft below that, falling, still falling, and Viktor found that he was too busy screaming to ask any questions after all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
214::06
CONGRESS OF ADVISORS: UNIT 312293, 8642nd SESSION (PARTIAL)
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
“What is wrong with these people, these Gateans?” Malye asked the ghost of Ken Jonson. “They look up to you, even though you're nothing like them. What did you do that they admire so much?”
The chaos of the ferry's interior was gone, vanished with the flick of a thumb trigger. A few questions, a few commands, and suddenly she and Jonson were sitting in a tiny conference room, walls covered in a heavy beige cloth of some sort, the chairs and table of steel and red plastic, the floor of some sort of tile, not ceramic. Between them sat Mediator, who apparently could not be dismissed for fear that she, the user, might be confused or misled by the opinions of a simulacrum, which of course were not facts, nor even necessarily good advice. Though how Mediator thought he could tell good advice from bad she wasn't at all sure.
Jonson, in a military uniform she did not recognize, was a small-framed but muscular man, pale-skinned, his age indeterminate except for the streaks of gray in his brown hair, particularly at the temples. He had no emotional aura, per se, no complex melange of smells and tiny involuntary movements to indicate his mind's inner workings. He was, after all, a machine, a simplification of the gist of the original persona, or so Mediator had informed her. And yet, there were nuances of the sort that a sculpture or still portrait might capture; a good portrait, not like an arrest-record holograph or the sort of hasty flatscreen scan people took of their friends and relatives. The image of Ken Jonson that the Congress projected wa
s one of confidence, of weariness, of a man who had seen too much, done too much, been repudiated and vindicated and repudiated again, many times over the course of his life. He looked, in some obscure way, like Malye's father had in the closing days before Central Investigations had come to take him away. The monster at the end of his career.
“That question exceeds in part the historical boundaries of this simulacrum's experience,” Moderator cautioned. “It is possible to feed archival data to the simulacrum in order to obtain its analysis, its 'opinion,' if you will, but the result must be considered highly suspect.”
“I just want to know what he thinks,” Malye said.
“You wish to link the simulacrum to the archive?”
“All right, yes.”
“And to the oracle?”
Oracle? “Um, no. I don't think so.”
Ken Jonson smiled at her with weary politeness. “To answer your question, Colonel, I need to step back a few paces. Are you familiar with the term 'aggressor?'“ When Malye shook her head he went on, “It comes to us from the late English, a word meaning 'enemy' or 'attacker.' But in its later meaning there is a subtext to it, a nuance of deceit, of camouflage. The aggressor is the one who poses as his own enemy, who lives and thinks and spits like his enemy.”
“The better to understand,” Malye said, echoing what Plate had told her.
Jonson nodded. “That's exactly correct. The people you call Gateans are members of what is more generally known as the Aggressor Cult, individuals who for various reasons have elected to live like Waisters.”
“And you founded this cult?”
Jonson made a face as if something bitter had dropped into his mouth. “God, no. I was drafted into it, long before it was anything like a religion. The Navy made me do it, put a Broca web in my brain and shipped me off to a secret base near Saturn. The jewel of Sol system.” He snorted without amusement. “I was very good at my job. The war ended when it did because we followed our instructions precisely. Because I did. Becoming the enemy, fighting against our own kind, surrendering to the Waisters... It worked, but it's not something I'm proud of.”
“But the Gateans are,” Malye observed.
Jonson leaned back in his chair. “You know, all my life I was accused of going too far, of taking things too far. I was a translator for twenty years, and I tried to pull across every nuance I possibly could, every concept for which there was common ground for understanding. And people said I was making it up, reading too much into it; the information couldn't possibly be that dense. I can't count the number of times people said I was crazy; it happened all the time. 'Jonson has shed his humanity, Jonson has ceased to be a reliable source of information. Jonson is a fucking whacko.' On and on. But by Aggressor standards I'm extremely conservative. I always was.”
Malye could not help smiling, if grimly. “What would they think, these people who said you were crazy? What would they think if they could see the Gate colony now?”
Jonson simply nodded—she had clearly touched the core of his identity, of his self-image. The cautious man, who knew full well the dangers that he faced. How far down that road could you travel without losing sight of your original goals? Without losing sight of who you were and what you were really trying to accomplish? How long could you keep it up without becoming a monster?
“I have the feeling,” she said, more slowly and guardedly now, “that the Gateans mean some harm to the human 'Suzerainty.' They are so far from it, so very far, I can't imagine what they have in mind... But I've dealt with rebels all my life, people who refuse to recognize any rules but their own, any needs but their own. I know the look, and I find it here.”
Jonson was nodding again, sitting up straighter in his seat. “Yes. You have to understand, they view themselves as quite distinct from humanity, and rightly so. Their bodies are filled with machinery from the molecular level right up to the macroscopic. Fantastically efficient. And genetically, they've adopted a number of nonhuman attributes—the hypermobility collagens and collagenated bones, for just one example, and the chlorophyll to reduce their nutritional requirements...”
“Yes? So? I never thought they were human.”
“They would certainly agree with you about that, and because of their perceived novelty they have a desire to confront. They expect to be confronted. And the Suzerainty of the Human Spaces has changed and evolved in their absence, in the centuries they spent traveling to Gate system, so that is a new thing, also.”
Even the Human Spaces had changed? Well, of course they had, but Malye couldn't help wondering just how different things could be, just how lost her own worlds and cultures were in the fog and distance of time. There hadn't even been an interstellar community when she was alive, not really.
“How different is it?” she asked.
Jonson seemed to understand the meaning behind her question. His voice was gentle. “I'm not really qualified to answer that. I've been dead a long time. But it seems to me that human history is a cyclic phenomenon; we build and build and build, striving and struggling toward these fantastic goals that seem just out of reach, everything moving better and faster and smarter, but then we fall back. The Clementine Monarchy, the collapse of the Second Colonial Age. The Fall of Rome, the Fall of America.”
“The Fall of Sirius?” she asked, not quite sure what he was getting at.
But he nodded. “I think so, yes. The collapse never seems to come from within; it's always some external force that triggers it. But it always comes, doesn't it? Something catches us off guard. We notch up a little higher on every cycle, but we never reach that breakthrough point when all the curves go vertical, when everything becomes easy for us, and the universe is our playground. Maybe we never can.”
Malye doubted that, and shook her head to show it. “The Waisters. Ialah, they were so powerful, melting whole planets... There was nothing we could do against them. They've crossed that line. It can be done.”
“I doubt it,” Ken Jonson said, and now he was smiling again, once more the tired man who had seen too much. “I could write everything we know about Waister history on my thumbnail and still have room to chew the white part off, but in dealing with them I always sensed a certain... stagnation, I guess. They seem very old, very set in their ways. Their civilization has been around a long time, several million years at least, and if I had to guess, I'd say their history isn't cyclic at all. I'd say they're approaching their breakthrough point asymptotically, or possibly even retreating from it. It would disturb them, the idea that they might become something new, something incomprehensible to their present selves. There's no way to confront a thing like that, not without experiencing it. But how could they experience it without confronting it first? They'd be very uncomfortable with the paradox.”
Malye thought about that, and decided the information was nothing she could make use of. What was it she wanted to know? What questions, specifically, had she come in here to ask? Suddenly she wasn't sure. Everything was so new and so frightening, and no amount of Congressional advice seemed to make her feel any better about her position here. Where were they going? What was Holders Fastness, that it held such sway over the minds and hearts of Wende's six? These were not questions Ken Jonson's ghost could answer, nor anyone else in the Congress. The answers lay, rather, in the real world from which she was presently hiding.
“Thank you very much for your time,” she said to Jonson, with a respectfulness that felt right, however unnecessary it might be. And then she released the thumb trigger on top of the Congress, and returned at once to the hold of the Gatean ferry.
She'd only been gone a moment, it seemed—she tumbled weightlessly through the chamber, Plate floating calmly in the corner across from her, serene amid chaos.
Everyone else was still screaming and thrashing in the air, their eyes bulging, white flickers of terror dancing around them. Weightlessness was one thing, but they were falling, still high inside the world of Pinega and dropping outward toward Ialah
knew what. If they hit anything...well, assuming the ferry itself survived, they would all be smashed together in one happy splatter, and there wasn't a damn thing Malye could do to prevent it.
The thought struck her as obscurely, obscenely funny, and for the first time in almost two standard years, she threw her head back and joined her father's voice in laughter.
~~~
“So how long will this trip take?” Malye asked Plate.
Once the engines had fired, everything had settled back to the deck once more, and fortunately, nobody had vomited in the interim. They had fallen, Plate said, through an eighty-kilometer shaft that followed a Coriolis curve all the way out to Pinega's surface, before reorienting in open space and beginning their burn. And the engines on this ferry (or 'transport,' as Plate preferred to call it), unlike the ones she was used to, fired continuously at low thrust, so that there was no crushing acceleration, no invisible sack of potatoes pressing down, and also no weightlessness during the course of the trip. Which seemed like a good thing, because they'd all had their share of it already, and there were no cribs here, no safety straps, no handrails, nothing to hold onto at all except maybe the shitter.
And really, the light acceleration was very comfortable. Generally, people had always stayed away from low gravity in Pinega, it being considered a kind of effete addiction, akin to overeating. Low-grav sports had never been very popular there, nor high-grav ones for that matter, since the very worst Pinega had to offer was 0.9 gee. But yes, the reason it was considered effete was because it was so pleasant—you could easily lounge and play in an environment like this for months or years, until your bones went soft and required medical attention.