by Dan Simmons
Suddenly Saigyō joined her. The 10th Century monk assumed his usual virreal pose: cross-legged, floating easily just above the plane of the ecliptic a few respectful yards from Dem Lia. He was shirtless and barefoot, and his round belly added to the sense of good feeling that emanated from the round face, squinted eyes, and ruddy cheeks.
“The Ousters fly the solar winds so beautifully,” muttered Dem Lia.
Saigyō nodded. “You notice though that they’re really surfing the shock waves riding out along the magnetic-field lines. That gives them those astounding bursts of speed.”
“I’ve been told that, but not seen it,” said Dem Lia. “Could you…”
Instantly the solar system in which they stood became a maze of magnetic-field lines pouring from the G8 white star, curving at first and then becoming as straight and evenly spaced as a barrage of laser lances. The display showed this elaborate pattern of magnetic-field lines in red. Blue lines showed the uncountable paths of cosmic rays flowing into the system from all over the galaxy, aligning themselves with the magnetic-field lines and trying to corkscrew their way up the field lines like swirling salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn in the belly of the star. Dem Lia noticed that magnetic-field lines pouring from both the north and south poles of the sun were kinked and folded around themselves, thus deflecting even more cosmic waves that should otherwise have had an easy trip up smooth polar field lines. Dem Lia changed metaphors, thinking of sperm fighting their way toward a blazing egg, and being cast aside by vicious solar winds and surges of magnetic waves, blasted away by shock waves that whipped out along the field lines as if someone had forcefully shaken a wire or snapped a bullwhip.
“It’s stormy,” said Dem Lia, seeing the flight path of so many of the Ousters now rolling and sliding and surging along these shock fronts of ions, magnetic fields, and cosmic rays, holding their positions with wings of glowing forcefield energy as the solar wind propagated first forward and then backward along the magnetic-field lines, and finally surfing the shock waves forward again as speedier bursts of solar winds crashed into more sluggish waves ahead of them, creating temporary tsunami that rolled out-system and then flowed backward like a heavy surf rolling back in toward the blazing beach of the G8 sun.
The Ousters handled this confusion of geometries, red lines of magnetic field lines, yellow lines of ions, blue lines of cosmic rays, and rolling spectra of crashing shock fronts with seeming ease. Dem Lia glanced once out to where the surging heliosphere of the red giant met the seething heliosphere of this bright G8 star and the storm of light and colors there reminded her of a multihued, phosphorescent ocean crashing against the cliffs of an equally colorful and powerful continent of broiling energy. A rough place.
“Let’s return to the regular display,” said Dem Lia and instantly the stars and forest ring and fluttering Ousters and slowing Helix were back—the last two items quite out of scale to show them clearly.
“Saigyō,” said Dem Lia, “please invite all of the other AI’s here now.”
The smiling monk raised thin eyebrows. “All of them here at once?”
“Yes.”
They appeared soon, but not instantly, one figure solidifying into virtual presence a second or two before the next.
First came Lady Murasaki, shorter even than the diminutive Dem Lia, the style of her three-thousand-year-old robe and kimono taking the acting commander’s breath away. What beauty Old Earth had taken for granted, thought Dem Lia. Lady Murasaki bowed politely and slid her small hands in the sleeves of her robe. Her face was painted almost white, her lips and eyes were heavily outlined, and her long black hair was done up so elaborately that Dem Lia—who had worn short hair most of her life—could not even imagine the work of pinning, clasping, combing, braiding, shaping, and washing such a mass of hair.
Ikkyu stepped confidently across the empty space on the other side of the virtual Helix a second later. This AI had chosen the older persona of the long-dead Zen poet: Ikkyu looked to be about seventy, taller than most Japanese, quite bald, with wrinkles of concern on his forehead and lines of laughter around his bright eyes. Before the flight had begun, Dem Ria had used the ship’s history banks to read about the 15th Century monk, poet, musician, and calligrapher: it seemed that when the historical, living Ikkyu had turned seventy, he had fallen in love with a blind singer just forty years his junior and scandalized the younger monks when he moved his love into the temple to live with him. Dem Lia liked Ikkyu.
Basho appeared next. The great haiku expert chose to appear as a gangly 17th Century Japanese farmer, wearing the coned hat and clog shoes of his profession. His fingernails always had some soil under them.
Ryokan stepped gracefully into the circle. He was wearing beautiful robes of an astounding blue with gold trim. His hair was long and tied in a queue.
“I’ve asked you all here at once because of the complicated nature of this rendezvous with the Ousters,” Dem Lia said firmly. “I understand from the log that one of you was opposed to translating down from Hawking space to respond to this distress call.”
“I was,” said Basho, his speech in modern post-Pax English but his voice gravel-rough and as guttural as a Samurai’s grunt.
“Why?” said Dem Lia.
Basho made a gesture with his gangly hand. “The programming priorities to which we agreed did not cover this specific event. I felt it offered too great a potential for danger and too little benefit in our true goal of finding a colony world.”
Dem Lia gestured toward the swarms of Ousters closing on the ship. They were only a few thousand kilometers away now. They had been broadcasting their peaceful intentions across the old radio bandwidths for more than a standard day. “Do you still feel that it’s too risky?” she asked the tall AI.
“Yes,” said Basho.
Dem Lia nodded, frowning slightly. It was always disturbing when the AI’s disagreed on an important issue, but that it is why the Aeneans had left them Autonomous after the breakup of the TechnoCore. And that is why there were five to vote.
“The rest of you obviously saw the risk as acceptable?”
Lady Murasaki answered in her low, demure voice, almost a whisper. “We saw it as an excellent possiblity to restock new foodstuffs and water, while the cultural implications were more for you to ponder and act on than for us to decide. Of course, we had not detected the huge spacecraft in the system before we translated out of Hawking space. It might have affected our decision.”
“This is a human-Ouster culture, almost certainly with a sizable Templar population, that may not have had contact with the outside human universe since the earliest Hegemony days, if then,” said Ikkyu with great enthusiasm. “They may well be the farthest flung outpost of the ancient Hegira. Of all humankind. A wonderful learning opportunity.”
Dem Lia nodded impatiently. “We close to rendezvous within a few hours. You’ve heard their radio contact—they say they wish to greet us and talk and we’ve been polite in return. Our dialects are not so diverse that the translator beads can’t handle them in face-to-face conversations. But how can we know if they actually come in peace?”
Ryokan cleared his throat. “It should be remembered that for more than a thousand years, the so-called Wars with the Ousters were provoked—first by the Hegemony and then by the Pax. The original Ouster deep-space settlements were peaceful places and this most-distant colony would have experienced none of the conflict.”
Saigyō chucked from his comfortable perch on nothing. “It should also be remembered that during the actual Pax wars with the Ousters, to defend themselves, these peaceful, space-adapted humans learned to build and use torchships, modified Hawking drive warships, plasma weapons, and even some captured Pax Gideon drive weapons.” He waved his bare arm. “We’ve scanned every one of these advancing Ousters, and none carry a weapon—not so much as a wooden spear.”
Dem Lia nodded. “Kem Loi has shown me astronomical evidence which suggests that their moored seedship was to
rn away from the ring at an early date—possibly only years or months after they arrived. This system is devoid of asteroids and the Oort cloud has been scattered far beyond their reach. It is conceivable that they have neither metal nor an industrial capacity.”
“Ma’am,” said Basho, his countenance concerned, “how can we know that? Ousters have modified their bodies sufficiently to generate forcefield wings that can extend for hundreds of kilometers. If they approach the ship closely enough, they could theoretically use the combined plasma effect of those wings to attempt to breach the containment fields and attack the ship.”
“Beaten to death by angels’ wings” Dem Lia mused softly. “An ironic way to die.”
The AI’s said nothing.
“Who is working most directly with Patek Georg Dem Mio on defense strategies?” Dem Lia asked into the silence.
“I am,” said Ryokan.
Dem Lia had known that, but she still thought, Thank God it’s not Basho. Patek Georg was paranoid enough for the AI-human interface team on this specialty.
“What are Patek’s recommendations going to be when we humans meet in a few minutes?” Dem Lia bluntly demanded from Ryokan.
The AI hesitated only the slightest of perceptible instants. AI’s understood both discretion and loyalty to the human working with them in their specialty, but they also understood the imperatives of the elected commander’s role on the ship.
“Patek Georg is going to recommend a hundred kilometer extension of the Class Twenty external containment field,” said Ryokan softly. “With all energy weapons on standby and pretargeted on the three hundred nine thousand, two hundred and five approaching Ousters.”
Dem Lia’s eyebrows rose a trifle. “And how long would it take our systems to lance more than three hundred thousand such targets?” she asked softly.
“Two point-six seconds,” said Ryokan.
Dem Lia shook her head. “Ryokan, please tell Patek Georg that you and I have spoken and that I want the containment field not at a hundred klick distance, but maintained at a steady one kilometer from the ship. It may remain a Class Twenty field—the Ousters can actually see the strength of it, and that’s good. But the ship’s weapons’ systems will not target the Ousters at this time. Presumably, they can see our targeting scans as well. Ryokan, you and Patek Georg can run as many simulations of the combat encounter as you need to feel secure, but divert no power to the energy weapons and allow no targeting until I give the command.”
Ryokan bowed. Basho shuffled his virtual clogs but said nothing.
Lady Murasaki fluttered a fan half in front of her face. “You trust,” she said softly.
Dem Lia did not smile. “Not totally. Never totally. Ryokan, I want you and Patek Georg to work out the containment field system so that if even one Ouster attempts to breach the containment field with focused plasma from his or her solar wings, the containment field should go to Emergency Class Thirty-five and instantly expand to five hundred klicks.”
Ryokan nodded. Ikkyu smiled slightly and said, “That will be one very quick ride for a great mass of Ousters, ma’am. Their personal energy systems might not be up to containing their own life support under that much of a shock, and it’s certain that they wouldn’t decelerate for half an AU or more.”
Dem Lia nodded. “That’s their problem. I don’t think it will come to that. Thank you all for talking to me.”
All six human figures winked out of existence.
RENDEZVOUS was peaceful and efficient.
The first question the Ousters had radioed the Helix twenty hours earlier was “Are you Pax?”
This had startled Dem Lia and the others at first. Their assumption was that these people had been out of touch with human space since long before the rise of the Pax. Then the ebony, Jon Mikail Dem Alem, said, “The Shared Moment. It has to have been the Shared Moment.”
The nine looked at each other in silence at this. Everyone understood that Aenea’s “Shared Moment” during her torture and murder by the Pax and TechnoCore had been shared by every human being in human space—a gestalt resonance along the Void Which Binds that had transmitted the dying young woman’s thoughts and memories and knowledge along those threads in the quantum fabric of the universe which existed to resonate empathy, briefly uniting everyone originating from Old Earth human stock. But out here? So many thousands of light-years away?
Dem Lia suddenly realized how silly that thought was. Aenea’s Shared Moment of almost five centuries ago must have propogated everywhere in the universe along the quantum fabric of the Void Which Binds, touching alien races and cultures so distant as to be unreachable by any technology of human travel or communication while adding the first self-aware human voice to the empathic conversation that had been going on between sentient and sensitive species for almost twelve billion years. Most of those species had long since become extinct or evolved beyond their original form, the Aeneans had told Dem Lia, but their empathic memories still resonated in the Void Which Binds.
Of course the Ousters had experienced the Shared Moment five hundred years ago.
“No, we are not Pax,” the Helix had radioed back to the three hundred some thousand approaching Ousters. “The Pax was essentially destroyed four hundred standard years ago.”
“Do you have followers of Aenea aboard?” came the next Ouster message.
Dem Lia and the others had sighed. Perhaps these Ousters had been desperately waiting for an Aenean messenger, a prophet, someone to bring the sacrament of Aenea’s DNA to them so that they could also become Aeneans.
“No,” the Helix had radioed back. “No followers of Aenea.” They then tried to explain the Amoiete Spectrum Helix and how the Aeneans had helped them build and adapt this ship for their long voyage.
After some silence, the Ousters had radioed, “Is there anyone aboard who has met Aenea or her beloved, Raul Endymion?”
Again the nine had looked blankly at each other. Saigyō, who had been sitting cross-legged on the floor some distance from the conference table, spoke up. “No one onboard met Aenea,” he said softly. “Of the Spectrum family who hid and helped Raul Endymion when he was ill on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B, two of the marriage partners were killed in the war with the Pax there—one of the mothers, Dem Ria, and the biological father, Alem Mikail Dem Alem. Their son by that triune—a boy named Bin Ria Dem Loa Alem—was also killed in the Pax bombing. Alem Mikail’s daughter by a previous triune marriage was missing and presumed dead. The surviving female of the triune, Dem Loa, took the sacrament and became an Aenean not many weeks after the Shared Moment. She farcast away from Vitus-Gray-Balianus B and never returned.”
Dem Lia and the others waited, knowing that the AI wouldn’t have gone on at such length if there were not more to the story.
Saigyō nodded. “It turns out that the teenaged daughter, Ces Ambre, presumed killed in the Pax Base Bombasino massacre of Spectrum Helix civilians, had actually been shipped offworld with more than a thousand other children and young adults. They were to be raised on the final Pax stronghold world of St. Theresa as born-again Pax Christians. Ces Ambre received the cruciform and was overseen by a cadre of religious guards there for nine years before that world was liberated by the Aeneans and Dem Loa learned that her daughter was still alive.”
“Did they reunite?” asked young Den Soa, the attractive diplomat. There were tears in her eyes. “Did Ces Ambre free herself of the cruciform?”
“There was a reunion,” said Saigyō. “Dem Loa freecast there as soon as she learned that her daughter was alive. Ces Ambre chose to have the Aeneans remove the cruciform, but she reported that she did not accept Aenea’s DNA sacrament from her triune stepmother to become Aenean herself. Her dossier says that she wanted to return to Vitus-Gray-Balianus B to see the remnants culture from which she had been kidnapped. She continued living and working there as a teacher for almost sixty standard years. She adopted her former family’s band of blue.”
“She suffered the cruciform
but chose not to become Aenean,” muttered Kem Loi, the astronomer, as if it were impossible to believe.
Dem Lia said, “She’s aboard in deep sleep.”
“Yes,” said Saigyō.
“How old was she when we embarked?” asked Patek Georg.
“Ninety-five standard years,” said the AI. He smiled. “But as with all of us, she had the benefit of Aenean medicine in the years before departure. Her physical appearance and mental capabilities are of a woman in her early sixties.”
Dem Lia rubbed her cheek. “Saigyō, please awaken Citizen Ces Ambre. Den Soa, could you be there when she awakens and explain the situation to her before the Ousters join us? They seem more interested in someone who knew Aenea’s husband than in learning about the Spectrum Helix.”
“Future husband at that point in time,” corrected the ebony, Jon Mikail, who was a bit of a pedant. “Raul Endymion was not yet married to Aenea at the time of his short stay on Vitus-Gray-Balianus B.”
“I’d feel privileged to stay with Ces Ambre until we meet the Ousters,” said Den Soa with a bright smile.
WHILE the great mass of Ousters kept their distance—five hundred klicks—the three ambassadors were brought aboard. It had been worked out by radio that the three could take 1/10 normal gravity without discomfort, so the lovely solarium bubble just aft and above the command deck had its containment field set at that level and the proper chairs and lighting adapted. All of the Helix people thought it would be easier conversing with at least some sense of up and down. Den Soa added that the Ousters might feel at home among all the greenery there. The ship easily morphed an airlock onto the top of the great solarium bubble, and those waiting watched the slow approach of two winged Ouster and one smaller form being towed in a transparent spacesuit. The Ousters who breathed air on the ring, breathed 100% oxygen so the ship had taken care to accommodate them in the solarium. Dem Lia realized that she felt slightly euphoric as the Ouster guests entered and were shown to their specially tailored chairs, and she wondered if it was the pure O2 or just the novelty of the circumstances.