There is no “in charge,” the Pllix had said. A shiver went down Thor’s spine.
“Are they at least going to help us get out of here?” asked Inari. “Or are they just going to leave us here to die?”
“That’s up to us.”
“How?” asked Thor.
“They only attack the governor’s servants, the Pllix, because they resist the demolition. If we do not resist, we are free to leave.”
“Just like that?” said Thor. “No questions asked?”
“They assure me that they won’t try to stop us.”
“But they won’t guide us, either, I take it,” said Axford.
“No,” said Alander. “That’s not their function.”
Thor thought of the wild, chaotic landscape of the cutter. She doubted, somehow, that it would be any safer while it was being torn apart by the A|kak|a/riil. In fact, if anything, it might even be more dangerous. And what if more than one species filled the demolition crew niche? The next one they encountered might not be so accommodating.
“Can they at least tell us which way they’ve come?” she asked. “If we knew the best way to avoid the governors, that would be something.”
Alander nodded, closing his eyes again to concentrate.
“They’ll give us that information,” he said. “They don’t see us as any real threat.”
Something akin to relief rushed through Thor, then. She only hoped it wasn’t premature.
“Tell them that we are grateful, and that—”
“They have supplied the relevant information,” Alander cut in, opening his eyes, facing everyone. “They’ve gone.”
On the screens the A|kak|a/riil were concentrating on the destruction of the last of the black Pllix ships. The chunky, squat construct fought valiantly, but to no avail. As it crumbled under the combined onslaught of the A|kak|a/riil, five of the blade ships swooped in to gather up the detritus, enfolding it in webs of silver energy that seemed to eat into it, compacting it down into a form that could more easily be transported.
Scavengers, she thought. Just like the Yuhl...
Was this, she wondered, to be the fate of humanity?
“The way is clear,” said Samson. “Thor? What are your instructions?”
Without taking her eyes from the blade ships, Thor muttered, “Just get us the hell out of here, Cleo. I don’t think I can look at this any longer.”
2.2.0
UEH/ELLIL
The entrance to Ueh’s private niche opened with a liquid sigh, and the human called Caryl/Hatzis stepped through it.
“I’m sorry to bother you, Conjugator,” she said, standing awkwardly before him. The niche contained little more than an alcove for him to crouch in and tubes through which he performed ablutions. There was no room for her to sit. “If it’s not convenient, I can always—”
“It is not inconvenient,” he said, synchronizing both of his throats to speak in English. “I was not sleeping.”
Which was true. He’d simply been huddling in his alcove, rocking back and forth on his long-toed feet, clutching his stomach and chest to himself. A narrow circle of fluorescent lights on the ceiling banished shadows from every corner.
The expression on the human android’s soft, fleshy face sagged in such a way as to suggest that she was satisfied with his response. Bulging, moist, and endlessly mobile, human features fascinated and repulsed him in equal parts: nonverbal signals varied from face to face, asymmetry was the norm, not the exception, and the placement of so many vital sensory organs on the outside of the brain’s skeletal case left them vulnerable to attack.
He waited quietly for the human to continue, distracted by the thing he could feel moving inside of him.
“I wanted to talk to you about the Spinner front,” said Caryl/Hatzis. “We’ve been here three days now, and no one will tell us what you’ve found. We know what you’ve found, Ueh; we’re not stupid. Why won’t the Fit talk to us about it? I think we have a right to know what’s going on.”
Ueh stared at her, puzzled. Three human days approximated two cycles. He’d been in his room the entire time, completely cut off from the normal activities of the Yuhl/Goel. He couldn’t help but be curious as to what he’d missed out on in that time.
His curiosity was matched, though, by a need to keep what he had done secret.
“Tell me what you know,” he instructed her, hiding a full-body shudder by tightening his arms around his shins. His wing sheaths stirred weakly against his back.
If she noticed his discomfort, she didn’t comment on it. “I know what we should have found. We’ve searched the Library data for intelligent life-forms in the Spinner path. There aren’t any listed, so we’ve had to search in person. That’s a lot of systems, but we’ve been as methodical as we can. We haven’t picked up any ftl signals from the Gifts, and we haven’t detected any—” She hesitated. “What do you call them?”
“E’athra/kilar” he supplied, working both his throats together.
She nodded. “That’s it. One of your clastic-slash-scientists told us before we left that the Spinners leave beacons where they can’t find intelligent life, hoping to lead civilizations across the gulfs toward each other. But they haven’t done it this time. There’s nothing. You know it, and we know it. Why the silence?”
He didn’t know, but he could guess. “To my knowledge, this has never happened before. Therefore the Fit will be cautious before saying anything premature.”
“Anything at all would be good. We’re supposed to be partners,” she protested. “They don’t have to be cautious around us. Not about sharing data, anyway. We’re humanity-slash-Goel now, aren’t we? What are they afraid of?”
Change, he thought. That’s what they’re afraid of! Bad enough that they had new allies who had already proven to be unreliable. Bad enough, too, that the Yuhl/Goel had split in two. Attacking the Ambivalence had shocked many. Now that the forward, beneficiary front had failed to materialize, that would be taken as a sign that they had fallen out of favor with their dual gods.
Did the Praxis know this, he wondered, when he chose me for his mission?
“Why did you come to see me?” he said, turning from his reflection. “Why me? What is it you expect me to do?”
She seemed surprised that he should ask this. “Because you were envoy/catechist—”
“I no longer fulfill that function,” he interrupted immediately.
“Yes, but you understand us better than the others. The Praxis changed you like he changed Alander. You’ve been designed to stand between our people and help us work together.”
I once was, he thought. He wasn’t entirely sure what his purpose was now. “If I understand you better,” he said voicing the troubling notion that simmered beneath his thoughts, “does that mean I understand my people less?”
She shook her head. “You’re still conjugator.”
“Yes and I have duties to perform that bear no direct relation to the Ambivalence. What I am not required to know, Caryl/Hatzis, I am not told.”
“But surely you could ask and...” She trailed off in the face of his hopeless expression. He could see it reflected in her eyes. The stark black and white lines were a sharp contrast to her swollen, rounded curves.
If I took off my mask, is that the sort of face I’d see?
“You still haven’t told me why you came to me,” he said.
She frowned at this. “I thought I just did—”
“No,” he cut in. “Why you specifically, and not one of the others.”
She blinked wide, watery eyes. “I’m Yu-qiang, the only Hatzis in the mission. I’m not in charge, but I’d like to make sure everything runs smoothly.”
“Your original told you to do this?”
“She didn’t need to.”
He nodded. The thing inside him wobbled on its axis, causing him to clutch himself even tighter.
“I wouldn’t have bothered you,” she said, looking at him with some concern, “e
xcept no one else will talk to us. Even the Praxis has gone quiet. If there’s something wrong, I think we have a right to know.”
“Very well,” he said, wanting simply to be rid of her. “I will try, but I may not be successful. I am... distracted at the moment.”
“Are you sick?”
“No.”
“Are you—?” She hesitated, then forged on. “Are you pregnant?”
He barked a dissonant laugh, both throats ululating across slightly different pitches. The bitterness and scorn it carried was probably lost on human ears. “No, I am not pregnant. It is not the time.”
“I’m sorry; that must have seemed a stupid question.” Curiosity replaced the uncertainty in her eyes. “This is something we know very little about in regards to your race. We know you have the term bearer-slash-favored, but we don’t really know what it means. Alander thought you might be bisexual and mate in triplets, but...” Her sentence ended in silence and a shrug.
She was clearly hoping he would enlighten her. “I’m sorry, Yu-qiang. I must ask you to leave, now.”
“Of course,” she said, backing reluctantly away. The door sighed open behind her. “Thank you, Ueh. We’d be grateful for anything you can find out.”
He nodded again as she left. When she was gone, he was able to address the intense physical discomfort he felt as a result of the thing squirming in his belly. The muscles of his major abdominal chamber were spasming, flinching inside him. He opened his mouth as wide as it would go, but instead of a moan, three jets of black blood burst from within and splattered across the floor.
He cleaned himself up best he could and shuffled painfully to a private data access point. People stared at him but said nothing. He felt like a prophet/pariah: honored and rejected at the same time; feared and respected in equal measures. He felt his expression shifting and swirling in strange, chaotic patterns.
He literally collapsed when he reached the access point. Slithering, holding his guts in with one hand, he barely managed to haul himself into the chair. Exhausted, he let himself slump into its embrace, barely able to sit upright.
“I am Conjugator Ueh/Ellil,” he told the access point.
“I know,” said the smooth voice of the Praxis.
Ueh suppressed a shudder. He had expected an AI: safe, distant, uncomplicated. “You are here to answer my questions?”
“That depends on what you want to know, Ueh.”
“I want to know where we are.” That wasn’t the first thing that came to mind, but it was what he’d gone there for.
“Mantissa A is in parking orbit around the star the humans call Alkaid. We have been here for a full cycle.”
“What of the Spinners? Have we located the front?”
“Spinners?” The Praxis chuckled throatily. “You speak like a human, Ueh.”
“You remade me that way, remember?” The discomfort gave his tone a disrespectful edge, but he didn’t care.
“The Spinner front has not yet been located.”
“What of e’athra/kilar?”
“None has been found as yet.”
“What does this mean?”
“I do not know, Ueh.” The Praxis spoke like an indulgent guardian, playing a game he saw through easily and wasn’t terribly interested in. His amusement lay in observing the one he was playing against. “There is much speculation among the Yuhl/Goel, though. Some of the Fit believe that the Ambivalence has changed course, and we simply have yet to notice.”
“But that would mean an enormous deviation, unlike anything we have ever seen before.”
“Exactly. But it’s still a possibility. Others naturally feel that they have incurred the wrath of the Ambivalence by taking part in the Battle of Beid. The fact that the gifts continued to arrive in human space after then makes no difference to them. Theirs is the voice of irrational fear.”
“And what do the rational voices say?”
“Some say that we should wait to see what happens. The search continues apace. There are many systems to comb through, and many to revisit. The front may yet appear.”
“If it doesn’t?”
“A handful speculate that the Unfit have succeeded. If the Ambivalence has been persuaded to attack itself, then the migration may have ceased. There will be no more gifts.”
The ramifications of that statement were profound, and Ueh could well understand why the Fit were so reticent to discuss the matter with the humans. Salvation from destruction also meant the withdrawal of beneficence.
“What do transmissions from Surveyed Space reveal?” Ueh asked. “We are still in range, aren’t we?”
“For the time being, yes. But the transmissions tell us nothing. There has been no news from the system called pi-1 Ursa Major. If nothing is heard soon, then Mantissa A will jump to 24 Canes Venatici.”
Appropriate, Ueh thought, translating the human name of the constellation the A-type giant belonged to: the hunting dogs...
He changed the topic abruptly, as the thing inside him moved again. “What have you done to me?”
“I told you,” said the Praxis. “I’ve given you something for the future.”
“But what is it?” he persisted. “A seed? A spore? What?”
“Does it pain you?”
“Very much so.”
“I am sorry, Ueh. I wish it could be otherwise.” The Praxis did sound contrite. “The organ that made it is a part of me that I have not used for many thousands of years. It has grown distant, following its own imperatives. While it is true that this organ was once designed for reproduction, its issue no longer fulfills that function. I no longer reproduce. It has another purpose.”
“And that purpose is?”
“To atone,” said the Praxis. “You carry my Atonement within you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You will, soon enough—especially if events continue to unfold as they appear to be unfolding. Everything is proceeding as I both hoped it would—and feared it might.”
Ueh’s face took on jagged star shapes, the Yuhl equivalent of a wince, then dissolved into asymmetrical chaos.
“You will tell me no more?”
“I cannot, Ueh.”
“Will you talk to the humans about the missing front?”
“It is not my function to dole out reassurances.”
“That’s not what they want to hear. They are humanity/Goel now. Surely they deserve to be taken into our confidence.”
“They are not humanity/Goel, Ueh,” the Praxis countered. “Nor can they ever be.”
That surprised Ueh. “But they have joined the migration, they’ve earned the title.”
“Goel is no mere honorific, Ueh. It once had meaning.”
“I was taught that that meaning was companion,” he said.
“It has come to be regarded as such down the long cycles, but that is not its true meaning.”
“Then what did it originally mean?”
But only silence followed, long and uncomfortable, made more so by the pain of Atonement in his belly. Eventually, when it became clear that the Praxis would speak no more, Ueh was forced to abandon his questioning and crawl back to his niche. Once there, he curled crouched in a tight ball, rocking back and forth in the vain hope of finding peace within himself.
2.2
THE JUDAS ALTERNATIVE
2160.9.30 Standard Mission Time
(3 September 2163 UT)
2.2.1
Lucia Benck woke bathed in the light of a new sun.
Her mind took some time to disentangle itself from the assumption that she should be dead. The last things she remembered were the Starfish coming to Rasmussen, the destruction of the Marcus Chown and the spindles, the deaths of Rob Singh and the others, and her desperate flight to the Dark Room. It was burned into her memory like some grim, ghastly snapshot of mortality.
But here she was, still very much alive, and most definitely somewhere other than Rasmussen. Rasmussen’s sun, BSC5070 was a bright G-type s
tar with eleven planets, whereas the system she was in now had seven worlds ranging from dense, rocky balls to vast, turbulent gas giants with impossibly fragile- looking ring systems. How she actually “saw” them, though, she didn’t really understand. The knowledge was present in her mind like something she’d always known, like a memory of something familiar. And the more she thought about it, the more she came to realize that it was familiar—as familiar to her as her body had once been.
It was Sol System.
Something was different, though. Jupiter and Saturn and all the outer planets were instantly recognizable, as were Mars and Mercury. Most of the Kuiper bodies were exactly where they should have been. The sun itself glowed a familiar blotchy yellow, exhibiting all the sunspot activity Lucia would have expected of neither a solar maximum nor a solar minimum.
There was, however, a huge gap between Mercury and Mars, occupied by just one small world. It wasn’t even a planet, really. It was dead and lifeless, its surface littered with scorch marks and newly formed craters. It took Lucia a long moment to identify it, and she did so only by locating the site of the old Chinese Yi Base on what had once been known as the small world’s dark side. Now all sides were dark, except for the one facing the sun. Earthlight no longer shone on Luna, for the Earth itself was gone.
Lucia had heard the stories from Thor and the others, but the reality had never truly sunk in. Seeing it now with her own eyes—or whatever it was she was seeing with—brought home the terrible truth.
Home?
Home was gone, and would never be again. All the things she recalled about it—her childhood in Dalarna, following the Strzelecki Track, her selection to UNESSPRO and entrain- ment—it was all gone. As were her family and friends; as was her original. Everything, everyone—really, truly gone.
All that remained were great clouds of dust from the massive post-Spike construction the original Caryl Hatzis had referred to as the Frame. The Starfish had reduced the lot back to atoms. Not one self-replicating molecule remained to allow even a token attempt at reconstructing her home.
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