Empery

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  So the intelligence that was monitoring the dispatches fromMunin was machine, not human. Until recently MOD 214 had been devoting its attention to the output of a buoy located in the Canes Venatici region of the Shield. But that particular buoy was currently being serviced by the Sentinel Daehne, and so MOD 214 had been assigned a secondary task.

  That its new task was considered by the supervising human intelligences to be of less import than its old, MOD 214 had no awareness. It reviewed the complex of digitized data with the same perseverance it had devoted to its previous duty. And when it detected a discrepant event matrix, it reacted with no less urgency.

  As clever and flexible as it was at sifting through the data, MOD 214 knew only three things to do in the event that its search was successful: to retrieve from downstream all previously passed-over data associated with the event; to route that data and any that followed to a save file; and to alert a human operator. MOD 214 did all three within a fraction of a second, then returned to its task. Curiosity about what happened next had not been included in its library of enablers.

  The comtech who received MOD 214’s alert was far from oblivious to tedium and only indifferently curious. In the first three hours of his four-hour shift, Paul Wilkins had been called on to examine nineteen discrepant event matrices detected by various DIDAC modules. None had been meaningful. In fact, during the five months he had served as a DIDAC operator, the most significant anomaly that had passed through his board was a minor buoy malfunction, which was only a Code Three event.

  So when the alarm began sounding, Wilkins casually took the time to finish what he was saying to the operator on his right before turning lazily to his board.

  “Tell me,” he said, which silenced the alarm.

  In the design of the DIDAC module, not much of its brainpower had been allocated for conversation. MOD 214’s answer was typically terse. “Threat code, sector N15.30, survey ship Munin.”

  “Inference class?” Each DIDAC module monitored its own logic stream so that it could both reconstruct and evaluate the decision-making process. This provided the operators and the analysts in the Office with a tool for weighing conclusions that they could not hope to confirm independently. Class Five inferences were barely more than guesses: Class One, only fractionally less than certainty.

  “Non-inferential. Direct observation.”

  “Show me,” Wilkins said, suddenly chilled.

  For several seconds he watched in stunned silence as the black star closed with Munin. He knew that he should act, but the sight transfixed him. They’re coming out, he thought, and the thought paralyzed him. The Mizari are coming out.

  The operator to Wilkins’s right saved him, reaching across from his station to touch the com key. “Station 31 paging the watch commander—”

  Wilkins took over in a shaky voice. “I have a Code One event in sector N15.30, survey ship Munin under attack—”

  Before the watch commander could respond, it was over. A flare of energy from the black star seemed to bum out Munin’s eyes, followed a few seconds later by a dispassionate announcement from MOD 214: “Active mode gone. Transponder gone. Munin LOS. Munin destroyed.”

  “Inference class?”

  “Class One.”

  “Aggressor ID?” asked Wilkins’s neighbor, now standing over him. Even knowing the answer, it was a jolt to hear it: “Mizari.”

  “Inference class?” Wilkins whispered.“Class One.” Before the day was over, the record of Munin’s final moments would be replayed a score of times—for the watch commander, for the head of the Defense Intelligence Office, for the station commander. For the captains of all the Sentinels and tenders on the Perimeter. For Governor Hogue at Lynx and Deputy Director Barnes at Central. And for Acting Commander of Perimeter Defense Osten Venngst, who was responsible, with Wells incommunicado in the craze, for ordering the Service’s response.

  No matter where the dispatch was played, or for whom it was played, always it ended the same: “Munin destroyed. Aggressor ID: Mizari.”

  By such simple words did they learn that the fighting had begun.

  Cocooned in the tissue of his own consciousness, Thackery allowed himself to be tossed and buffeted by the tides and currents of the spindle. He had no energy to spare for rejoicing that he was, in at least an abstract sense, still alive.

  The crossing had been difficult, and he was acutely aware of the savaging the finer elements of his new structure had suffered. Shielding himself from the turbulence with the strongest surviving elements of his personality, Thackery endeavored to restore what he could.

  Where an echo, fast fading, or a shimmering fragment, fast dissipating, remained to remind him of the elegant shape and complex synergy of the element it represented, there was hope. But that which had been torn free and swept away, without even a pale, harmonic ripple to show something had been there, these things he could not reconstruct. He could not even catalog what had been lost.

  The wounds had been grievous, and for the most part, his repairs were crude. He felt as though he were struggling to assemble with maul and mallet the delicate parts of a fine and complex watch. With every well-intentioned movement he sent the tiny gears and catches scattering, losing three for every one he captured.

  But still he persisted, tracing down each thread of his consciousness, weaving loose ends back into the pattern, forging connections where it seemed proper to do so. And presently there came a point at which he had recouped enough of his faculties to spare some small portion for other concerns, among them wondering how he had survived.

  Thackery was unable to summon concrete remembrances of the moments in which he had passed from Munin’s drive core to the spindle. He sensed that, rather than projecting himself by a simple act of will, he had been drawn across the barrier when the drive was destroyed and the aperture closed. His achievement had been to maintain the integrity of his consciousness long enough for that moment arrive.

  Because I remembered. Because I have been here before. The thoughts formed clearly and easily, and their resonances were true.

  Time passed and his understanding grew. He saw that the bulwark surrounding him was nothing less than his will to live, bolstered by the clean, simple structure of his reason. Within that shell he found, drifting free, pale threads of his curiosity and a mote that was a memory of a word. He restored both to their station and felt himself grow.

  I am D’shanna now, he thought, and unfolded.

  He had remembered the spindle as a place of great beauty—a place where currents of energy—like long, gentle swells, each with its own hue and timbre and taste—collided miscibly and immiscibly in a rhythm that seemed random and chaotic until the mind’s far eye abstracted the pattern.

  But this time Thackery opened his senses to a landscape full of fury. He had not realized the strength of his shield, nor the violence of the assault against it, and for long moments he wavered on the brink of retreating. But the need to see, to know, was complete in him, while fear was a shrunken fragment. He steeled himself against the battering and looked outward into infinity.

  The resonance that was Thackery was drifting like a mote in a great Brownian sea near the interface between the matter-matrix he knew as the Universe and the energy-matrix of the spindle. The interface, propagating like a slow-moving ripple from the cataclysm of origin in which the two matrices had been separated to the cataclysm of terminus in which they would be reunited, marked what those he had left behind called the present. Downtime, there were only echoes; uptime, only anticipations.

  There had been turbulence here before, he remembered. Every ship’s drive was a whirling sinkhole, every Kleine message a hard-edged resonance slicing through the fibers of the spindle. There were more ships and more messages now, and so a greater disturbance.

  But there was also a powerful tide from uptime, an incursion of discordant energies whose shadowy dark colors blocked the far view. Thackery could name neither its source nor its substance, but it proc
laimed its own power to his eyes. It was the shadow tide that drove the storm holding the spindle in its grip.

  Thackery was abruptly aware of his isolation. As far as his senses could reach, even deep into the quiet downtime, he perceived no other resonances like his own. If the D’shanna could be said to have a birthplace, it was here, cradled between future and past. This was the one point at which the constructs of both matrices could be said to be real, real enough to manipulate, and yet not so real as to be unchangeable.

  When last he had come there, the exodus uptime had already begun, tens of thousands of D’shanna migrating away from the intruding human presence. But even so, Thackery had known the presence of many of Gabriel’s kind, and now he felt their absence.

  Gabriel. Each thought Thackery formed seemed to contain reflected in its fine resonances a dozen more, and so the healing continued. This was a good thought, a strong thought, rich in implication and memory.

  Gabriel… He sent the namepattern out into the chaos with little hope of answer. If Gabriel still endured, he was with the other D’shanna in the far uptime near terminus, beyond the chaos of nearer tomorrows. Thackery was alone in the interface zone, alone and uncertain of what next to do…

  … for one of the threads that had eluded him in the course of his self-resurrection was purpose. He had found the place where it belonged, the anchor points that cried out for its presence, but the wounds there were nearly healed, as though purpose had been lost not in the transition but sometime long before.

  He remembered how time had weighed on him, on Earth, in Munin. Now he had nothing but time. There was death on the spindle, or at least nonexistence. All he need do is let go, open himself to the dark currents and let them scatter his energies. It would be an easy death, without pain, without rancor. But he could not let go. That which had protected him through transition and rebirth also protected him against the impulse to die.

  So time remained, perhaps time without ending. In the absence of purpose Thackery could at least indulge his curiosity, for he had conceived a question, and a question demanded an answer.

  All the Universe was spread below him, all the past stretched out behind him. The art of seeing was still within him, and he opened himself to let the echoes of reality pour into him. Patiently—for he had time in abundance—he sifted through the echoes for familiar images, for places and moments congruent with the resonance of memory. He reached with his senses across the barrier and surrounded himself with the Universe, seeking the creatures that had driven him here, searching for the face of the enemy.

  Hard by the thin nebulosity that had been Munin, two stars whirled in an oscillating ballet. The dancers were ill-matched, the larger a brilliant white, the smaller a pale yellow. They were joined in their dance by a small, rocky world tracing what seemed a perilous course between them. The planet’s echoes said nothing of life, and yet there was something.

  Thackery focused his sight and scanned the face of the whirling mote. It was a desolate place, hard-edged, dry, airless. Nowhere on its surface could he find the signature of life. Nowhere was there a sign that this was the world that had launched the black star. And yet there was something—Something more—

  A sound heard at the periphery of sensation—

  Not sound but muted song. Not voice but discordant chorus. He listened with ears newly opened to a clacking, whining sound that made him think of swarming nests of ants and flights of angry bees. But where was the source? Nothing moved on the dead planet’s surface.

  The sound seemed to emanate from the planet’s entire surface, out not uniformly so. He let his senses follow the voice of one of the loudest singers and found there, set in the cold stone surface of the planet, a shallow crystalline dome. He probed past its smooth, unmarked surface and sensed a confusion of electrical currents within the solid mass of silica-quartz, of energies received and transmuted, then emitted again.

  Was this life? Could this be life? But he sensed no pattern in the currents, no sense to the song. If there was Mind here, he could not touch it. Life, perhaps, but not intelligence—merely the pointless stirring of matter in obedience to the impulse from within. These sun-eaters could not be the builders of the black star.

  Thackery widened the focus of his viewing both across and below the planet’s surface. There were many of the crystal creatures, and he sensed the synergy among them. Even life without purpose obeys the imperative of interdependency. A whole ecology of meaninglessness—

  But as he stretched himself in an effort to absorb the ecology of this strange world in its entirety, a new and shocking perception forced itself on him without warning. For a brief instant he brushed up against the energies of a powerful Mind, powerful enough that he flinched from the contact defensively.

  Even so, that moment was enough to show him what he had seen without seeing—a Mind that harnessed energy directly in the substance of its body, without the need for mechanical contrivance. A Mind that embraced an entire world and looked out from it with one sight that embraced an entire Universe.

  Such were the Mizari. Such were the enemies of humanity. Thackery did not need to probe the Mind of this Mizari nest to discover its self-name, for he knew that it would carry the same thread of meaning as all self-names: We are that which is worthy—we are life.

  , How came you here? he asked of the Mind. How long ago did you make your claim?

  He did not expect nor receive answers and so began to search for them on his own.

  Leaving the turmoil of the interface behind, Thackery began to push his way downtime, against the steady past-to-future current of the spindle. His senses, still focused on the Mizari world, now embraced echoes that were true but not real.

  Bare moments after he began his sojourn he was a spectator to his own death, the only witness as the black star appeared, closed on Munin and destroyed her, and then vanished. But even from his privileged position he could not see whence the black star came or to where it went. He shrugged his puzzlement aside and continued on.

  The years unrolled before his eyes, the worlds spinning backward in their courses, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred thousand years, and still the Mizari owned the barren planet. A million years, ten million, and still the Mizari persisted, their song declaring their presence. It seemed as though as long as there had been a planet, the Mizari had been there. They were more than visitors. They were part of its substance.

  An ancient species they are—old already when humankind was being born. If they had wanted it, the galaxy could have been theirs. They had time, and the, black stars to carry them—

  Still farther back Thackery flew, until the stars in that region of space began to converge and the nebula out of which they had formed to reappear. As they came together he heard across the unimaginable distances another Mizari voice, and a third, and a fourth, each singing the same song, yet each singing a song all its own.

  Like great whales cruising the black depths of the sea, each alone save for the distant voice of its kin—

  Thackery realized with sudden certainty where he was, what he was witnessing. He knew the names of these newly young stars and the shape they would one day make in Earth’s night skies: Alioth. Merak. Megrez. Phad. Alcor. Mizar. But there were a hundred more, spawn of the same mother but not the same litter, returning from haunts more widely scattered in space: Menkalinan. Sirius. Aldhafera. Ras Alhague.

  As the stars and their planets dissolved into whirling disks of gas and dust, and as the disks merged into a great coalescing cloud, the Mizari song was finally stilled, and Thackery understood at last. This glorious unnamed nebula, alive with turbulence, had given birth not only to the Ursa Major Cluster but to the Mizari as well.

  The evolutionary pressure that had shaped their nature and their powers was the same that had shaped the planets that were their homes. The same process had bound them inextricably to those worlds. No new Mizari nests had been founded since the cluster had dispersed. Those that existed in Thackery’s
time had existed since the beginning. These were not creatures oriented to dominion and conquest. By their very essence they were creatures shaped by the single imperative of survival.

  Thackery tried to form the namepattern for an intelligence that had known fifty million years without death, whose body massed ten million times that of the largest life-forms Earth had ever known, whose perspective embraced the spectacle of the Universe from every direction and across immense spans of time. He failed. It was a conception too great for Thackery as he was. He would have to grow before he could accept it into himself.

  There was one riddle, left unanswered—the black star. But with what he now knew, Thackery understood what it must be. A species existing on a planetary scale could only be endangered by a catastrophe on the same scale. The black star was the reason the airless Mizari world he had studied was oddly unscarred by craters. It was the means by which a handful of Mizari nests had survived the violence of planet-making. Guardian, shield, it stood between the Mizari and a deadly fall of stones.

  Drifting uptime along a different fiber of the spindle, Thackery acquired the proof he did not require. He watched the two Mizari worlds of Alcor turn aside a thousand wayward planetoids, vaporize a hundred wandering comets—even, in time, shatter whole planets and drive their fragments into the sun—until the system was swept clean of all that might endanger them.

  The black star appeared when needed, disappeared when its task was done. For it was neither star nor ship, nor could it even be said to be real. It was a weapon without substance, which could not be destroyed because it did not exist at the point where it appeared to the senses. It was an instrumentality for their collective will, a receiver for their energies. And the channel for those energies led through the spindle.

  Panthers had their claws, piranha their teeth. The Mizari had the Mind’s Shout—an ancient reflex still slumbering within them, a terrible savage power still at their command.

  Sixty thousand years ago the Mizari had swept away theWeichsel, not in retribution but in response to an imperative as deeply ingrained in them as the will to live. Now Thackery had unwittingly repeated the transgression of the Weichsel iceship so long ago. Withdrawing his senses from beyond the spindle, he hastened to rejoin the present, wondering as he flew across the years how high the price would be this time.