He felt, in fact, that he had done what he was born to do.
‘Antoinette,’ he said, knowing that Felka would not have recognised the woman without his help, ‘how are things on dry land?’
‘There’s shit brewing already, Clavain.’
He kept his eyes on the ground, for fear of tripping. ‘Do tell.’
‘A lot of people aren’t happy with the idea of staying here. They bought into Thorn’s exodus because they wanted to go home, back to Yellowstone. Being stuck on an uninhabited piss-ball for twenty years wasn’t quite what they had in mind.’
Clavain nodded patiently. He steadied himself against Felka, using her as a walking stick. ‘And did you impress on these people the fact that they’d be dead if they hadn’t come with us?’
‘Yes, but you know what it’s like. No pleasing some people, is there?’ She shrugged. ‘Well, just thought I’d cheer you up with that, in case you thought it was all going to be plain sailing from now on.’
‘For some reason, that thought never crossed my mind. Now, can someone show us around the island?’
Felka helped him pick his way on to smoother ground. ‘Antoinette, we’re cold and wet. Is there somewhere we can get warm and dry?’
‘Just follow me. We’ve even got tea on the go.’
‘Tea?’ Felka asked suspiciously.
‘Seaweed tea. Local. But don’t worry. No one’s died of it yet, and you do eventually get used to the taste.’
‘I suppose we’d better make a start,’ Clavain said.
They followed Antoinette into the huddle of tents. People were at work outside, putting up new tents and plumbing-in snakelike power cables from turtle-shaped generators. She led them into one enclosure, sealing the flap behind them. It was warmer inside, and drier, but this served only to make Clavain feel more damp and cold than he had a moment before.
Twenty years in a place like this, he thought. They’d be busy staying alive, yes, but what kind of a life was one of pure struggle for existence? The Jugglers might prove endlessly fascinating, awash with eternally old mysteries of cosmic provenance, or they might not wish to communicate with the humans at all. Although lines of rapport had been established between humans and Pattern Jugglers on the other Juggler worlds, it had sometimes taken decades of study before the key was found to unlock the aliens. Until then, they were little more than sluggish vegetative masses, evidencing the work of intelligence without in any way revealing it themselves. What if this turned out to be the first group of Jugglers that did not wish to drink human neural patterns? It would be a lonely and bleak place to stay, shunned by the very things one had imagined might make it tolerable. Staying with Remontoire, Khouri and Thorn, plunging into the intricate structure of the living neutron star, might begin to seem like the more attractive option.
Well, in twenty years they’d find out whether that had been the case.
Antoinette pushed a mug of green-coloured tea in front of him. ‘Drink up, Clavain.’
He sipped at it, wrinkling his nose against the miasma of pungent, briny fumes that hovered above the drink. ‘What if I’m drinking a Pattern Juggler?’
‘Felka says you won’t be. She should know, I think — I gather she’s been itching to meet these bastards for quite a while, so she knows a thing or two about them.’
Clavain gave the tea another go. ‘Yes, that’s true, isn’t…’
But Felka had gone. She had been in the tent a moment ago, but now she wasn’t.
‘Why does she want to meet them so badly?’ Antoinette asked.
‘Because of what she hopes they’ll give her,’ Clavain said. ‘Once, when she lived on Mars, she was at the core of something very complex — a vast, living machine she had to keep alive with her own willpower and intellect. It was what gave her a reason to live. Then people — my people, as a matter of fact — took the machine away from her. She nearly died then, if she had ever truly been alive. And yet she didn’t. She made it back to something like normal life. But everything that has followed, everything that she has done since, has been a way to find something else that she can use and that will use her in the same way; something so intricate that she can’t understand all its secrets in a single intuitive flash, and something that, in its own way, might be able to exploit her as well.’
‘The Jugglers.’
Still clasping the tea — and it wasn’t so bad, really, he noted — he said, ‘Yes, the Jugglers. Well, I hope she finds what she’s looking for, that’s all.’
Antoinette reached beneath the table and hefted something up from the floor. She placed it between them: a corroded metal cylinder covered in a lacy froth of calcified micro-organisms.
‘This is the beacon. They found it yesterday, a mile down. There must have been a tsunami which washed it into the sea.’
He leaned over and examined the hunk of metal. It was squashed and dented, like an old rations tin that had been stepped on. ‘It could be Conjoiner,’ he said. ‘But I’m not sure. There aren’t any markings which have survived.’
‘I thought the code was Conjoiner?’
‘It was: it’s a simple in-system transponder beacon. It’s not meant to be detected over much more than a few hundred million kilometres. But that doesn’t mean it was put here by Conjoiners. Ultras could have stolen it from one of our ships, perhaps. We’ll know a little more when we dismantle it, but that has to be done carefully.’ He rapped the rough metal husk with his knuckles. ‘There is antimatter in here, or it wouldn’t be transmitting. Not much, maybe, but enough to make a dent in this island if we don’t open it properly.’
‘Rather you than me.’
‘Clavain…’
He looked around; Felka had returned. She looked even wetter than when they had arrived. Her hair was glued to her face in lank ribbons, and the black fabric of her dress was tight against one side of her body. She should have been pale and shivering, by Clavain’s estimation. But she was flushed red, and she looked excited.
‘Clavain,’ she repeated.
He put down the tea. ‘What is it?’
‘You have to come outside and see this.’
He stepped out of the tent. He had warmed up just enough to feel a sudden spike of cold as he did so, but something in Felka’s manner made him ignore it, just as he had long ago learned to selectively suppress pain or discomfort in the heat of battle. It did not matter for now; it could, like most things in life, be dealt with later, or not at all.
Felka was looking out to sea.
‘What is it?’ he asked again.
‘Look. Do you see?’ She stood by him and directed his gaze. ‘Look. Look hard, where the mist thins out.’
‘I’m not sure if—’
‘Now.’
And he did see it, if only fleetingly. The local wind direction must have changed since they had arrived in the tent, enough to push the fog around into a different configuration and allow brief openings that reached far out to sea. He saw the mosaic of sharp-edged rockpools, and beyond that the boat they had come in on, and beyond that a horizontal stroke of slate-grey water which turned fainter as his eye skidded toward the horizon, becoming the pale milky grey of the sky itself. And there, for an instant, was the upright spire of Nostalgia for Infinity, a tapering finger of slightly darker grey rising from just below the horizon line itself.
‘It’s the ship,’ Clavain said mildly, determined not to disappoint Felka.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s the ship. But you don’t understand. It’s more than that. It’s much, much more.’
Now he was beginning to feel slightly worried. ‘It is?’
‘Yes. Because I’ve seen it before.’
‘Before?’
‘Long before we ever came here, I saw it.’ She turned to him, peeling hair from her eyes, squinting against the sting of the spray. ‘It was the Wolf, Clavain. It showed me this view when Skade coupled us together. At the time I didn’t know what to make of it. But now I understand. It wasn’t really the W
olf at all. It was Galiana, getting through to me even though the Wolf thought it was in control.’
Clavain knew what had happened aboard Skade’s ship while Felka was her hostage. He had been told about the experiments, and the times when Felka had glimpsed the Wolf’s mind. But she had never mentioned this before.
‘It must be a coincidence,’ he said. ‘Even if you did get a message from Galiana, how could she have known what was going to happen here?’
‘I don’t know, but there must have been a way. Information has already reached the past, or none of this would have happened. All we know now is that somehow, our memories of this place — whether they’re yours or mine — will reach the past. More than that, they will reach Galiana.’ Felka leaned down and touched the rock beneath her. ‘Somehow this is the crux, Clavain. We haven’t just stumbled on this place. We’ve been led here by Galiana because she knows that it matters that we find it.’
Clavain thought back to the beacon he had just been shown. ‘If she had been here…’
Felka completed the thought. ‘If she came here, she would have attempted communion with the Pattern Jugglers. She would have tried swimming with them. Now, she may not have succeeded… but just supposing she did, what would have happened?’
The mist had closed in completely now; there was no sign of the looming sea-tower.
‘Her neural patterns would have been remembered,’ Clavain said, as if speaking in a dream. ‘The ocean would have recorded her essence, her personality, her memories. Everything that she was. She’d have left it physically, but also left behind a holographic copy of herself, in the sea, ready to be imprinted on another sentience, another mind.’
Felka nodded emphatically. ‘Because that’s what they do, Clavain. Pattern Jugglers store all who swim in their oceans.’
Clavain looked out, hoping to glimpse the ship again. ‘Then she’d still be here.’
‘And we can reach her ourselves if we swim as well. That’s what she knew, Clavain. That’s the message she slipped past the Wolf.’
His eyes were stinging as well. ‘She’s a clever one, that Galiana. What if we’re wrong?’
‘We’ll know. Not necessarily the first time, but we’ll know. All we have to do is swim and open our minds. If she’s in the sea, in their collective memory, the Jugglers will bring her to us.’
‘I don’t think I could stand for this to be wrong, Felka.’
She took his hand and squeezed it tighter. ‘We won’t be wrong, Clavain. We won’t be wrong.’
He hoped against hope that she was right. She tugged his hand harder, and the two of them took the first tentative steps towards the sea.
ABSOLUTION GAP
For my Grandparents
‘The Universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.’
Sir James Jeans
PROLOGUE
She stands alone at the jetty’s end, watching the sky. In the moonlight, the planked boarding of the jetty is a shimmering silver-blue ribbon reaching back to shore. The sea is ink-black, lapping calmly against the jetty’s supports. Across the bay, out towards the western horizon, there are patches of luminosity: smudges of twinkling pastel-green, as if a fleet of galleons has gone down with all lights ablaze.
She is clothed, if that is the word, in a white cloud of mechanical butterflies. She urges them to draw closer, their wings meshing tight. They form themselves into a kind of armour. It is not that she is cold — the evening breeze is warm and freighted with the faint, exotic tang of distant islands — but that she feels vulnerable, sensing the scrutiny of something vaster and older than she. Had she arrived a month earlier, when there were still tens of thousands of people on this planet, she doubted that the sea would have paid her this much attention. But the islands are all abandoned now, save for a handful of stubborn laggards, or newly arrived latecomers like herself. She is something new here — or, rather, something that has been away for a great while — and her chemical signal is awakening the sea. The smudges of light across the bay have appeared since her descent. It is not coincidence.
After all this time, the sea still remembers her.
‘We should go now,’ her protector calls, his voice reaching her from the black wedge of land where he waits, leaning impatiently on his stick. ‘It isn’t safe, now that they’ve stopped shepherding the ring.’
The ring, yes: she sees it now, bisecting the sky like an exaggerated, heavy-handed rendition of the Milky Way. It spangles and glimmers: countless flinty chips of rubble catching the light from the closer sun. When she arrived, the planetary authorities were still maintaining it: every few minutes or so, she would see the pink glint of a steering rocket as one of the drones boosted the orbit of a piece of debris, keeping it from grazing the planet’s atmosphere and falling into the sea. She understood that the locals made wishes on the glints. They were no more superstitious than any of the other planet dwellers she had met, but they understood the utter fragility of their world — that without the glints there was no future. It would have cost the authorities nothing to continue shepherding the ring: the self-repairing drones had been performing the same mindless task for four hundred years, ever since the resettlement. Turning them off had been a purely symbolic gesture, designed to encourage the evacuation.
Through the veil of the ring, she sees the other, more distant moon: the one that wasn’t shattered. Almost no one here had any idea what happened. She did. She had seen it with her own eyes, albeit from a distance.
‘If we stay…’ her protector says.
She turns back, towards the land. ‘I just need a little time. Then we can go.’
‘I’m worried about someone stealing the ship. I’m worried about the Nestbuilders.’
She nods, understanding his fears, but still determined to do the thing that has brought her here.
‘The ship will be fine. And the Nestbuilders aren’t anything to worry about.’
‘They seem to be taking a particular interest in us.’
She brushes an errant mechanical butterfly from her brow. ‘They always have. They’re just nosy, that’s all.’
‘One hour,’ he says. ‘Then I’m leaving you here.’
‘You wouldn’t.’
‘Only one way to find out, isn’t there?’
She smiles, knowing he won’t desert her. But he’s right to be nervous: all the way in they had been pushing against the grain of evacuation. It was like swimming upstream, buffeted by the outward flow of countless ships. By the time they reached orbit, the transit stalks had already been blockaded: the authorities weren’t allowing anyone to ride them down to the surface. It had taken bribery and guile to secure passage on a descending car. They’d had the compartment to themselves, but the whole thing — so her companion had said — had smelt of fear and panic; human chemical signals etched into the very fabric of the furniture. She was glad she didn’t have his acuity with smells. She is frightened enough as it is: more than she wants him to know. She had been even more frightened when the Nestbuilders followed her into the system. Their elaborate spiral-hulled ship — fluted and chambered, vaguely translucent — is one of the last vessels in orbit. Do they want something of her, or have they just come to spectate?
She looks out to sea again. It might be her imagination, but the glowing smudges appear to have increased in number and size; less like a fleet of galleons below the water now than an entire sunken metropolis. And the smudges seem to be creeping towards the seaward end of the jetty. The ocean can taste her: tiny organisms scurry between the air and the sea. They seep through skin, into blood, into brain.
She wonders how much the sea knows. It must have sensed the evacuation: felt the departure of so many human minds. It must have missed the coming and going of swimmers, and the neural information they carried. It might even have sensed the end of the shepherding operation: two or three small chunks of former moon have already splashed down, although nowhere near these islands. But how much does it really
know about what is going to happen? she wonders.
She issues a command to the butterflies. A regiment detaches from her sleeve, assembling before her face. They interlace wings, forming a ragged-edged screen the size of a handkerchief, with only the wings on the edge continuing to flutter. Now the sheet changes colour, becoming perfectly transparent save for a violet border. She cranes her head, looking high into the evening sky, through the debris ring. With a trick of computation the butterflies erase the ring and the moon. The sky darkens by degrees, the blackness becoming blacker, the stars brighter. She directs her attention to one particular star, picking it out after a moment’s concentration.
There is nothing remarkable about this star. It is simply the nearest one to this binary system, a handful of light-years away. But this star has now become a marker, the leading wave of something that cannot be stopped. She was there when they evacuated that system, thirty years ago.
The butterflies perform another trick of computation. The view zooms in, concentrating on that one star. The star becomes brighter, until it begins to show colour. Not white now, not even blue-white, but the unmistakable tint of green.
It isn’t right.
ONE
Ararat, p Eridani A System, 2675
Scorpio kept an eye on Vasko as the young man swam to shore. All the way in he had thought about drowning, what it would feel like to slide down through unlit fathoms. They said that if you had to die, if you had no choice in the matter, then drowning was not the worst way to go. He wondered how anyone could be sure of this, and whether it applied to pigs.
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