Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone

by Ian McDonald

  A shadow detached itself from the black ship, darkest on dark, and looped around the comet. It would be a parliament of self-assembling motes like himself. Oga had worked out decades before that Enemy and Anpreen were one and the same, sprung from the same nanotechnological seed when they attained Class Two status. Theirs was a civil war. In the Clade, all war was civil war, Oga thought. Panhumanity was all there was. More like a family feud. Yes, those were the bloodiest fights of all. No quarter and no forgiveness.

  The man came walking around the small curve of the comet, kicking up shards of ice crystals from his grip soles. Oga recognized him. He was meant to. He had designed himself so that he would be instantly recognizable, too. He bowed, in the distances of the Oort cloud.

  “Torben Reris Orhum Fejannan Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben, sir.”

  The briefest nod of a head, a gesture of hours in the slow-motion hypercold.

  “Torben. I’m not familiar with that name.”

  “Perhaps we should use the name most familiar to you. That would be Serejen, or perhaps Fejannen, I was in that Aspect when we last met. I would have hoped you still remembered the old etiquette.”

  “I find I remember too much these days. Forgetting is a choice since I was improved. And a chore. What do they call you now?”

  “Oga.”

  “Oga it shall be, then.”

  “And what do they call you now?”

  The man looked up into the icy gap between worldlets. He has remembered himself well, Oga thought. The slight portliness, the child-chubby features, like a boy who never grew up. As he says, forgetting is a chore.

  “The same thing they always have: Cjatay.”

  “Tell me your story then, Cjatay. This was never your fight, or my fight.”

  “You left her.”

  “She left me, I recall, and, like you, I forget very little these days. I can see the note still; I could recreate it for you, but it would be a scandalous waste of energy and resources. She went to you.”

  “It was never me. It was the cause.”

  “Do you truly believe that?”

  Cjatay gave a glacial shrug.

  “We made independent contact with them when they came. The Council of governments was divided, all over the place, no coherent approach or strategy. ‘Leave us alone. We’re not part of this.’ But there’s no neutrality in these things. We had let them use our system’s water. We had the space elevator they built for us, there was the price, there was the blood money. We knew it would never work—our hope was that we could convince them that some of us had always stood against the Anpreen. They torched Tay anyway, but they gave us a deal. They’d let us survive as a species if some of us joined them on their crusade.”

  “They are the Anpreen.”

  “Were the Anpreen. I know. They took me to pieces. They made us into something else. Better, I think. All of us, there were twenty-four of us. Twenty-four, that was all the good people of Tay, in their eyes. Everyone who was worth saving.”

  “And Puzhay?”

  “She died. She was caught in the Arphan conflagration. She went there from Jann to be with her parents. It always was an oil town. They melted it to slag.”

  “But you blame me.”

  “You are all that’s left.”

  “I don’t believe that. I think it was always personal. I think it was always revenge.”

  “You still exist.”

  “That’s because you don’t have all the answers yet.”

  “We know the kind of creatures we’ve become; what answers can I not know?”

  Oga dipped his head, then looked up to the halo moon, so close he could almost touch it.

  ‘Do you want me to show you what they fear so much?’

  There was no need for the lift of the hand, the conjuror’s gesture; the pieces of his ship-self Oga had seeded so painstakingly through the wife-comet’s structure were part of his extended body. But I do make magic here, he thought. He dropped his hand. The star-speckled sky turned white, hard painful white, as if the light of every star were arriving at once. An Olbers sky, Oga remembered from his days in the turrets and cloisters of Jann. And as the light grew intolerable, it ended. Blackness, embedding, huge and comforting. The dark of death. Then Oga’s eyes grew familiar with the dark, and, though it was the plan and always had been the plan, he felt a plaint of awe as he saw ten thousand galaxies resolve out of the Olbers dazzle. And he knew that Cjatay saw the same.

  “Where are we? What have you done?”

  “We are somewhere in the region of two hundred thirty million light-years outside our local group of galaxies, more precisely, on the periphery of the cosmological galactic supercluster known s the Great Attractor. I made some refinements to the scalarity drive unit to operate in a one dimensional array.”

  “Faster-than-light travel,” Cjatay said, his upturned face silvered with the light of the ten thousand galaxies of the Great Attractor.

  “No, you still don’t see it,” Oga said, and again turned the universe white. Now when he flicked out of hyperscalarity, the sky was dark and starless but for three vast streams of milky light that met in a triskelion hundreds of millions of light-years across.

  “We are within the Bootes Supervoid,” Oga said. “It is so vast that if our own galaxy were in the center of it, we would think ourselves alone and that our galaxy was the entire universe. Before us are the Lyman alpha-blobs, three conjoined galaxy filaments. These are the largest structures in the universe. On scales larger than this, structure becomes random and grainy. We become grey. These are the last grand vistas, this is the end of greatness.”

  “Of course, the expansion of space is not limited by lightspeed,” Cjatay said.

  “Still you don’t understand.” A third time, Oga generated the dark energy from the ice beneath his feet and focused it into a narrow beam between the wife-comet and its unimaginably distant husband. Two particles in contact will remain in quantum entanglement no matter how far they are removed, Oga thought. And is that true also for lives? He dismissed the scalarity generator and brought them out in blackness. Complete, impenetrable, all-enfolding blackness, without a photon of light.

  “Do you understand where I have brought you?”

  “You’ve taken us beyond the visible horizon,” Cjatay said. “You’ve pushed space so far that the light from the rest of the universe has not had time to reach us. We are isolated from every other part of reality. In a philosophical sense, we are a universe in ourselves.”

  “That was what they feared? You feared?”

  “That the scalarity drive had the potential to be turned into a weapon of unimaginable power? Oh yes. The ability to remove any enemy from reach, to banish them beyond the edge of the universe. To exile them from the universe itself, instantly and irrevocably.”

  “Yes, I can understand that, and that you did what you did altruistically. They were moral genocides. But our intention was never to use it as a weapon—if it had been, wouldn’t we have used it on you?”

  Silence in the darkness beyond dark.

  “Explain, then.”

  “I have one more demonstration.”

  The mathematics were critical now. The scalarity generator devoured cometary mass voraciously. If there were not enough left to allow him to return them home… Trust number, Oga. You always have. Beyond the edge of the universe, all you have is number. There was no sensation, no way of perceiving when he activated and deactivated the scalarity field, except by number. For an instant, Oga feared number had failed him, a first and fatal betrayal. Then light blazed down on to the dark ice. A single blinding star shone in the absolute blackness.

  “What is that?”

  “I pushed a single proton beyond the horizon of this horizon. I pushed it so far that space and time tore.”

  “So I’m looking at…”

  “The light of creation. That is an entire universe, new born. A new big bang. A young man once said to me, ‘Every particle will be so far f
rom everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own.’ An extended object like this comet, or bodies, is too gross, but in a single photon, quantum fluctuations will turn it into an entire universe in waiting.”

  The two men looked up a long time into the nascent light, the surface of the fireball seething with physical laws and forces boiling out. Now you understand, Oga thought. It’s not a weapon. It’s the way out. The way past the death of the universe. Out there beyond the horizon, we can bud off new universes, and universes from those universes, forever. Intelligence has the last word. We won’t die alone in the cold and the dark. He felt the light of the infant universe on his face, then said, “I think we probably should be getting back. If my calculations are correct—and there is a significant margin of error—this fireball will shortly undergo a phase transition as dark energy separates out and will undergo catastrophic expansion. I don’t think that the environs of an early universe would be a very good place for us to be.”

  He saw portly Cjatay smile.

  “Take me home, then. I’m cold and I’m tired of being a god.”

  “Are we gods?”

  Cjatay nodded at the microverse.

  “I think so. No, I know I would want to be a man again.”

  Oga thought of his own selves and lives, his bodies and natures. Flesh indwelled by many personalities, then one personality—one aggregate of experience and memory—in bodies liquid, starship, nanotechnological. And he was tired, so terribly tired beyond the universe, centuries away from all that he had known and loved. All except this one, his enemy.

  “Tejaphay is no place for children.”

  “Agreed. We could rebuild Tay.”

  “It would be a work of centuries.”

  “We could use the Aeo Taea Parents. They have plenty of time.”

  Now Cjatay laughed.

  “I have to trust you now, don’t I? I could have vaporized you back there, blown this place to atoms with my missiles. And now you create an entire universe…”

  “And the Enemy? They’ll come again.”

  “You’ll be ready for them, like you were ready for me. After all, I am still the enemy.”

  The surface of the bubble of universe seemed to be in more frenetic motion now. The light was dimming fast.

  “Let’s go then,” Cjatay said.

  “Yes,” Oga said. “Let’s go home.”

  Oga, returning

  Thanks and Acknowledgments

  FIRST AND ALWAYS, TO MY WIFE TRISH, WHOSE CONtribution to all my work is far greater than she can ever imagine, and especially to the H.N.D. Design Communication Class of ’92 at the University of Ulster Faculty of Art and Design in Belfast, whose lives, times, and works form the warp and weave of this story. Those who deserve thanks know who they are; I consider myself honored to have been worthy of the Award of the Silver Tinsel, signifying Honorary Membership of this rare body.

  Two books are the spiritual parents of this work. Oliver Statler’s Japanese Pilgrimage (Picador; London, 1984) first brought the Shikoku pilgrimage to my attention; if I’ve sampled it mercilessly, I hope I’ve done so in the spirit of a tribute to an underappreciated masterpiece. Likewise, acknowledgment is also due Jan Wozencroft’s The Graphic Language of Neville Brody (Thames and Hudson; London, 1988), required reading not only on the undervalued art of typography from which the idea of Authoritative Typefaces was extrapolated, but also as one of the clearest apologias of the ’70s—’80s punk ethos.

  Thanks: to Gary Gibson and Mike Cobley, who don’t know it, but introduced me to the wonderful world of Japanese anime; to Charles Stross, for an idle comment about computer animation systems; to Betsy Mitchell for faith in things unseen, etc., and the Religious Views of Life; to Robert M. Pirsig for longstanding inspiration: all fellow pilgrims together.

  Namu Daishi Henjo Kongo!

  About the Author

  Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He used to live in a house built in the back garden of C. S. Lewis’s childhood home but has since moved to central Belfast, where he now lives, exploring interests like cats, contemplative religion, bonsai, bicycles, and comic-book collecting. He debuted in 1982 with the short story “The Island of the Dead” in the short-lived British magazine Extro. His first novel, Desolation Road, was published in 1988. Other works include King of Morning, Queen of Day (winner of the Philip K. Dick Award), River of Gods, The Dervish House (both of which won British Science Fiction Association Awards), the graphic novel Kling Klang Klatch, and many more. His most recent publications are Planesrunner and Be My Enemy, books one and two of the Everness series for younger readers (though older readers will find them a ball of fun, as well). Ian worked in television development for sixteen years, but is glad to be back to writing fulltime.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1994 by Ian McDonald

  Cover design by Gabriel Guma

  978-1-4804-3214-7

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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