Salvation Lost

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “It is,” Yirella assured him. “But the buildings have no internal structure; there are no rooms or corridors. They’re hollow shells with a heated structure to fool thermal scanners, and the windows all have lights shining out. It appears completely real from a distance.”

  “Our insertion ship certainly believed it to be.”

  “All the world’s a stage,” Dellian said.

  Yirella smiled at him, and sent: Nice quote, to his optik.

  These days he didn’t put up any resistance when it was her turn to choose a drama for them to access together in the evening. And in return she didn’t push high culture on him every time—just as he didn’t insist on pulling only historical action adventures out of the Morgan’s archives. He’d surprised himself by the way he actually quite enjoyed Earth-set rom-coms. False nostalgia, she called it, the warm, soothing glow of an unreal past.

  “I can see vehicles moving down there,” Fintox said.

  “Yeah. They just drive around and around on long circuits. That way, any Olyix sensor satellite will see purpose. Same as the Vayans walking around down there on the ground—though we don’t think a flyby probe will have the resolution to make out individuals. But we don’t want to take the chance. After all the effort we’ve put into Vayan, it would be a killer for it to fall down because we couldn’t be arsed to make that final detail.”

  Fintox’s long neck twisted his head around so all eight eyes were focused on Yirella. “You have initiated a population of biologic Vayans, like us?”

  “No. These are androids. Biomechanical bodies, whose technology is several levels below Neána biologics. They walk around in large numbers during the day, and smaller numbers at night.”

  “How many urban citadels have you built on Vayan?” Fintox returned his gaze to the sprawl beyond the curving fuselage.

  “Twenty-three thousand. But they’re not all the same size as Igsabul. There are also vast areas under cultivation in the countryside. Then we have thousands of ships at sea, and aircraft flying about.”

  “All spewing out hydrocarbon combustion pollution like this one,” Dellian added.

  “We even discharge ‘waste’ into the seas,” Yirella said. “There are toxic blooms around the coast that sensors could pick up if they look for them.”

  “This is an effort beyond anything I have a memory of,” Fintox said. “And the data our insertion ship provided us with is considerable.”

  “That’s the whole idea. Who would ever fake an entire civilization? It has to be real. Right?”

  “It would appear to be as you say.”

  Dellian suppressed a smile. Diplomacy was clearly another trait the metavayan had been given by the insertion ship. He told the plane to change course, turning so they headed for one of the largest buildings. It was a fluted pentagonal skyscraper with flat concrete landing pads extending from the top quarter, as if it were sprouting chubby leaves. The plane produced metallic clunking sounds as it deployed its VTOL jet nozzles and their auxiliary turbines spun up loudly. You could take some details too far, he thought.

  They landed on the center of a pad, and a “crew” of Vayans came scurrying out to refuel the plane. The door swung open, and Yirella had to bend almost double to get through it. Fintox followed her out. When Dellian emerged, he was startled by how strong the wind was—a sensation not helped by the lack of any safety railing around the pad. The noise of traffic from the streets below was a constant background thrum, and the air smelled weird, like there’d been a big chemical spillage nearby.

  “There are significant amounts of combustion pollutants in the air,” Fintox said.

  “Mainly yes,” Yirella said. “But the bioforming was necessarily rushed. Our algaox pushed oxygen into the atmosphere so it would support carbon-based biology, but scrubbing out the trace chemicals is proving more difficult. We decided to just leave those elements in. In any case, we didn’t want to resemble Earth too closely.”

  Fintox was moving his head from side to side, viewing the jagged citadel skyline. “Did you design the planet’s vegetation as well as the Vayans?”

  “Not so much. The plants are all terrestrial. We tweaked them slightly, so the leaf shapes are different. But it was considered that actually growing Vayan plants with a distinctive genetic structure was finally taking things too far. Our hope is that Vayan will be convincing enough to draw the Olyix here. They won’t actually land and take plant samples before their arkship appears.”

  “I understand.”

  Dellian thought he did well not to roll his eyes.

  “What?” Yirella challenged quietly, as Fintox continued to study the chaotic sprawl of buildings around them.

  “Nothing.”

  “Don’t give me that.”

  He sighed. “Fifty years of radio broadcasts, and still no sign of the Olyix.”

  “You’re so impatient.”

  “There must be some kind of Olyix sensor station within fifty light-years.”

  She quickly glanced at Fintox, then bent down and kissed Dellian on the top of his head. “They’re on their way. Okay?”

  “They’d better be. We don’t want another false hope like the Neána.”

  “Saints, Del, I’d hardly call the Neána arrival a false hope. Is that what the squads are saying?”

  “Detecting the insertion ship got people excited. You know that.”

  Her lips compressed into disapproval.

  The three of them made their way into the skyscraper through an archway and onto a narrow walkway that Dellian could see ringing the hollow interior. The slim metal grid he stood on brought a sensation of vertigo greater than the pad outside. Fortunately, as it was designed for humans, it had a handrail, which he gripped tightly. The space inside wasn’t entirely empty; a surprisingly sparse honeycomb skeleton of bonded carbon struts supported the entire structure. It meshed with three gantry towers running up the length of the skyscraper, each with a couple of magtracks to carry cage lifts. He eyed them with distaste. Lifts were ancient history, and the only reason he even recognized them was their constant appearance in combat training simulations. The instructors assumed Olyix structures would be filled with them. Yirella had told him once it was because the Salvation of Life had used them extensively.

  “Are these things safe?” he muttered as the cage door rattled open. His databud was unfurling statistics graphics across his optik, all reassuring figures and graphs of the lift’s safety margins. But it still didn’t feel safe.

  Yirella gave him a puzzled glance as she politely gestured for Fintox to enter. The lift descended quickly, and they went out onto the streets of Igsabul.

  Instinct stirred Dellian’s blood as the otherness of this place crowded in on him. Nonhuman creatures ambling along, their four legs rocking the rounded body, while eight arms mostly dangled like thick ropes. The skyscraper architecture was chunky—primal-level wrong. His eyes were irritated by a glow on the edge of ultraviolet emitted by the rails cutting down the center of the road. Crude ground vehicles belched out thick streamers of diesel fumes as they sped past.

  “Damn, it’s good,” he said. It was utterly convincing. And alien was what he lived to fight.

  Fintox focused on him. “Have you not seen this before?”

  “I’ve seen recordings of the citadels, sure. But I’ve never been here in the flesh. We try and keep human activity on Vayan to an absolute minimum.” Now he thought about it, he hadn’t set foot on a planet since they’d left Juloss. His gaze shifted to the open sky above. It made him feel vulnerable—anything could fall out of it.

  “In my opinion, taking authenticity to this degree is an unwelcome aspect of our paranoia,” Yirella said. “Frankly, if some stealthed Olyix spy satellite can see me and Dellian walking around down here, then we’ve lost anyway. But that level of mistrust is what being chased across the galaxy wil
l do to a species.”

  “It does appear to me that this citadel is a forgery,” Fintox said. “Do you mind if we walk for a while?”

  “Not at all,” Dellian said. “This trip is all about proving our purpose to you. Take as long as you like. Go where you want.” His databud was running a fringe display in his optiks, showing the other metavayans being escorted around different citadels. The six of them had been impressively calm since they arrived, but certainly wouldn’t commit themselves to helping the Morgan and its mission without verifying the lure. He could hardly blame them for that. Just looking around at Igsabul in all its enormous solidity made it difficult to accept it was all fake, the galaxy’s greatest drama show. And he knew it was phony; he’d seen the project’s early design concepts back on Juloss, listened for hours to Yirella happily explaining away some quirky aspect of Vayan culture she’d dreamed up. But to actually go ahead and manufacture a whole fake civilization…Since the Neána had turned up, he’d started to wonder if perhaps humans weren’t coming across as just as fanatical as the Olyix. What else could we build if we were free?

  They came to a junction of seven roads and waited for Fintox to choose one. The metavayan set off down the third street, pausing for the traffic to stop at a crossing point. Dellian grinned privately at that; the autodrives would have braked the vehicles even if they’d run out right in front of one. So maybe Fintox was subconsciously adapting to the charade. Do metavayans have a subconscious?

  Yirella was in full tour-guide mode, chattering away about aspects of the citadel, its social composition and architecture. “Each building has its own radio station,” she was saying. “We skewed their clan society to demonstrate a partisan pride. That way, each clan broadcasts their own news and information constantly, because only they speak the real truth.”

  “She’s being modest,” Dellian said. “Every clan having its own radio station was her idea.”

  “I was being practical. It supplies a valid cultural reason for so many radio stations, which make Vayan easier to detect across interstellar distance. This world shines in the electromagnetic spectrum.”

  “Indeed it does,” Fintox said. “I listened to many clan broadcasts while I was being created.”

  “If you don’t mind me asking, did you like Vayan music?”

  “Some of it, yes. Why do you ask this question? Is it important?”

  “Not important. But interesting—especially to me, from an anthropological point of view.”

  “How so?”

  “Because it’s not real. The ‘music’—along with all Vayan art—is an artificial construct, a fiction. It was extrapolated by gentens once we fed the original parameters in. Then after the basics were established—the guidelines for what our Vayans would like and dislike—the gentens kept composing new tunes. But you see, the only people who would enjoy such a thing are Vayans, yet they don’t exist. Rather, they didn’t until you were created. Your mind was formatted by the insertion ship to appreciate the music, because that’s what the ship truly believed a Vayan mind would enjoy. While, in actual fact, it has no realistic basis, because there is no Vayan culture—nor are there any real Vayans.” She gestured at the android bodies walking past.

  “There are now,” Fintox said. “We six are real Vayan.”

  “Just as the metahuman Neána were real humans,” Dellian said.

  “But you won’t reproduce,” Yirella said. “I mean, will you?”

  “No.”

  “So you’re the first and last of your species. I don’t know if that makes me sad or not.”

  “If you wish there to be Vayans, you can create them yourself, for real. Molecular initiators can create biologically perfect Vayan bodies. We are proof they function. Humans are good concept designers.”

  Yirella gave the alien a troubled look. “We can’t. Not with the threat of the Olyix hanging over the galaxy.”

  “We’re not gods,” Dellian chided. “Even without the Olyix, we wouldn’t do things like that.”

  “Wouldn’t we?” she asked.

  He held her gaze. Sometimes their conversations were little more than good-natured arguments. It was one of the great things about being with Yirella, that she had different views on so many things. There were times when he thought it was like looking into his own future; so much of what she said he eventually came around to agreeing with—even her fury at being born for war, at having no choice. He still wanted the fight, but these days he could certainly appreciate the immorality that arose from that lack of choice. It just didn’t bother him as much as it did her. He supposed that was because he believed in the coming war, and that afterward they’d either be dead or free to live however they wanted. She called that fatalism—when she was being kind.

  * * *

  —

  The supersonic jet took them back to Timsal, a small citadel in the mountains on the edge of Igstabul’s domain, which in reality was the continent’s operations center for the lure, its gentens coordinating the activities of every citadel and farm.

  It was raining as they landed on the flattened apex of a hemispherical building: a heavy downpour that produced wide, grubby rivulets sliding over the structure’s curving sides, enriching the algae slicks. The pad retracted down to the hangar level where they disembarked.

  “Would you like to see more citadels?” Yirella asked. “Or some farm estates? We’d have to take ground transport to them, I’m afraid. In terms of Vayan economics, they don’t really qualify for visits from passenger jets.”

  Dellian silently shook his head at that. Before today he hadn’t really appreciated the exhaustive level of detail involved in maintaining the fiction of Vayan civilization.

  “I do not believe that will be required,” Fintox replied. “Igsabul was compelling. Are my colleagues returning?”

  “They will all finish their first assessment visits within the next ninety minutes,” Yirella said. “We are scheduled to regroup in Bennu.”

  “I am interested to see your advanced facilities.”

  They walked over to the building’s hub. It had three circular portals, two meters wide, their edges a complex braid of silver cords, with indigo sparks visible slithering along inside. The aperture was a blank pseudosurface; it was impossible to tell if it was solid or not. Dellian sent it his code, and the entanglement expanded.

  “We keep the interplanetary portals closed unless we need to use them,” Yirella said as she walked through, “so the quantum signature is even fainter to detect.”

  “I am again impressed by your adherence to security procedures,” Fintox said.

  Dellian followed them out into Bennu’s hub.

  * * *

  —

  Bennu’s habitat was a torus ten kilometers in diameter, and two wide, rotating slowly to provide Juloss-standard gravity around the rim—apparently equivalent to 1.1 Earth gravity. The oval cross-section interior housed a single swath of subtropical parkland, with a roof composed of crystal that had a slim sunstrip running along the apex. Dellian never quite understood the point of having a transparent roof here. It wasn’t like there was anything interesting outside. If you squinted against the glare, all you could ever see were attitude thrusters and navigation strobes winking away on the extremities of machinery.

  “Welcome to lurker central,” he said to Fintox.

  But the alien wasn’t listening. He’d curved his neck back, allowing all eight eyes to stare upward. His voice was so high it was virtually inaudible, a bat squeak. The translator wand took what seemed an age to turn it into human speech. “Those are not stars. Where is this place?”

  “We’re inside a small cryoplanet,” Yirella said. “Eleven AUs out from Vayan’s star. It had a rock core enveloped by eighty kilometers of ice. We hollowed out its center to make Bennu; this cavity is a hundred and fifty kilometers wide. So it’s secure; our thermal e
missions won’t leak through to the surface for a thousand years.”

  Dellian pointed. “That group of lights: That’s the Morgan. Those over there, that’s one of three shipyards; they’re assembling more assault cruisers for our attack fleet. The components are all made in initiator blocks—the big truncated icosahedrons you can see floating around near the cavity wall.”

  “You have accomplished so much,” Fintox said. “How long have you been here?”

  “The seedship arrived fifty-seven years ago,” Yirella said. “It started broadcasting Vayan clan radio signals, and its von Neumann systems began bioforming the planet. We arrived five years ago.”

  “Relativity time arrears,” Dellian explained. “We started out at the same time, but the Morgan traveled slightly slower than the seedship.”

  “You built this redoubt in only five years?” Fintox asked.

  “Our von Neumann systems go exponential themselves first, then when there’s enough of them, we crash-build what we need,” Yirella said.

  “You are a very advanced species. I do not understand what we can do to aid you.”

  “Part of our technology, like the initiators, is derived from Neána scientific advances, given to us by your emissaries to Sol. They were on a mission the same as you. We are hoping you may have fresh or different knowledge that may help us. The truth is, we know nothing of the Olyix outside of their assault on Earth.”

  “What were you going to do for the Vayans?” Dellian asked. “The Neána who came to Earth gave us the knowledge to fight the Olyix and weapons that would help.”

  “That is also our mission,” Fintox said. “That is always what the Neána do. But I am not sure we can add anything to your resources. They appear to surpass what we have.” There was a long pause as he continued to watch the sprinkling of lights drifting through the vast cavern. “May I ask why you did not follow the suggestions of our emissaries?”