Ashur appeared to read the younger man’s mind.
“I know this is difficult for you to hear, but it was a breakthrough. The vehicle psuedo-ship pairing was… unusual… but it produced something that astounded even our researchers. The pairing produced a vessel capable of making jumps across the void. It worked! We created a new type of pilot, and the partnership revealed capabilities we had not designed. The new ship could jump with a precision that not even the best pilots could achieve. Ansti, imagine this; the new vessel could make a jump from near surface to near surface. No need to rise up beyond the atmosphere before jump and negotiate with a sun. And, even more remarkably, it could manoeuvre very close to a planetary surface. Think of that. It could jump from world to world almost instantly without the vulnerable hours rising and falling from orbit, and then it could skim across a surface, hovering and hiding, stealthy and if needs be destructive. It could carry weapons, powerful weapons. Ansti, the pairing gave us the interstellar power of a ship and the planetary combat ability of a vehicle, all in one vessel and with capability on a ship’s scale; many, many times that of a vehicle. We found the ultimate defensive weapon. Armed with such a thing no one would dare attack. We found a way to protect you all Ansti.”
Ansti grimaced. He was being told that an abomination had been created; a half sentient killing machine had been raised from the gentle beauty of a ship’s body stripped of its mind. Ansti’s own heart and mind could not yet agree on how to judge these things. His heart and soul recoiled from the violation of values that guided his life, but his mind understood the logic. His mind also saw one searing flaw in his friend’s case.
“But attack came Ashur. These things you created saved no one, and great suns, you pushed the limit of ethics. I fought vat-born to get here, and now you tell me we have some kind of super vehicle that is grown using techniques that feel dangerously like the practices of our enemies. Practices we spent many years negotiating to try and end. These things you created did nothing to protect us and in fact they put us all in jeopardy.”
Ashur was forming the first words of his reply when a thought struck Ansti. It was so jolting that he flinched instinctively. Ashur noticed his friend’s moment of reaction, and kept the words silently suspended in his mind, waiting for Ansti to express what had just occurred to him. Ansti’s lip trembled as he formed the words, his body signalling both the shock of what he had imagined, and the loss he felt. He knew that the connection he just made would end his friendship with Ashur. he knew that if his own logic was true then his friend had a hand in the downfall of his people and his life. Words stuttered out of Ansti’s mouth between breaths that hurt his chest.
“That’s it, Ashur, that is why we were attacked — our enemies wanted to… no, needed to destroy that soulless ship you created. That lightless pairing was their worst nightmare come true. You did it Ashur, you put them in a position where they could do only one thing. You threatened their very existence and so they came and took ours. I was right all along. You did it! You and your conspiracy driven imaginings destroyed our worlds and people.”
Ashur was a lesson in self-control. He watched Ansti’s anger grow as he uttered the words and formed the thoughts. He watched venom fill the space between them and felt it spat at him. He heard words distorted by Ansti’s grimace of anger pushed through the fight or flight adrenaline that now coursed in his friend. He watched and knew that this was no longer a moral debate; it was very personal, and of course he knew that there was no denying what his friend had said. Ansti had reached the place Ashur knew he must. Ansti’s moral certainty was faltering, it was being slowly undermined and broken down. Ashur was creating a malleable space into which a new purpose and a new certainty would be inserted. One that would aid Ashur, one that Ansti would never have agreed to before this conversation. So far so good Ashur thought.
Ansti had stopped speaking and was drawing deep fast breaths, feeding muscles tense and ready to act, his jaw clenched tight and his eyes fixed on Ashur. He was a study in shocked aggression against Ashur’s quiet confidence. Ashur remained calm and began his story again.
“We were betrayed Ansti. Only one psuedo-ship was built and only one pairing was completed. They attacked before we were able to build a fleet, in fact before even the testing had been completed. The project was shrouded in secrecy, but they heard of it and yes they struck to prevent it. Their intelligence was faulty of course; they struck at our worlds and our pilots, and missed the project. It was as if they sensed our growing power but did not know how it was growing. They attacked what they feared not what they should have feared, assuming the threat was from our pilots. They missed the real capability we were developing. The project is still alive Ansti, the test psuedo-ship has not been destroyed, and the vehicle that paired with it remained hidden. We separated them just as we did with the pilots we could reach in time. Now they have been re-united. You are sitting in the ship now, and its partner is the vehicle you returned.
Ansti’s face was hard. On the long journey here he had imagined being rescued or re-called to a noble fight. He had been told as much in the message he received (an image of his dead friend flickered in and out of his thoughts). Now it appeared he had been used. It was not his skills as a pilot that Ashur needed, it was the vehicle. Was he simply someone they could trust to deliver it? And worse he was complicit in an act that challenged all that he held dear. The reorganising of his moral universe made him feel sick, Ansti flopped back into the comfort of the recliner, hands on his forehead and eyes fixed on the ceiling. He searched for some certainty and found none.
Ashur’s voice filled the silence.
“Ansti, your family is still alive. They were in grave danger and we hid them. We hid many pilot’s families. We anticipated an attack on our genetic heritage and planned to protect it. That plan at least worked well enough.”
Ansti sat up and looked slowly at Ashur. “No, Ashur, you will not do this to me. You will not ask me to accept what I know is wrong in the hope of rescuing my family. That’s where you will take this conversation isn’t it?”
Ashur pursed his lips.
“Yes, but more than that Ansti, I want to offer you the chance to free them yourself. I don’t need your approval but I do need your cooperation. Your family are safe for now but they live in constant fear of discovery and in confinement, and the enemy searches hard to find them. You are here for a reason Ansti; your skills can revive the project, you can offer the vehicle pseudo-ship pairing something that we quickly found it cannot learn for itself; motivation to act. It has the capability to do many things but it lacks the will. That comes from human feelings, and so much the better if it is enhanced by a pilots feel for ships and transit.”
Ansti regarded the older man, wondering if perhaps his thoughts were revealed or spied on in some way. He had not been given a new guide patch, and remained isolated from the collective world. Nevertheless, he was now prepared to believe almost anything was possible, even telepathy. He searched for words and found only numbness and confusion. Ashur’s barrage had done its job. Ansti could feel himself drawn to explore his role in the proposed venture; seduced by the thought of freeing his family and goaded by his need for revenge. His people had started a war. They were not the victims but the perpetrators. Yet they were still his people, bonds of love and friendship and kindred spirit fought with morality. Over all of this laid the deep desire to pilot again, to move through space and feel it brush his consciousness.
Silence filled the space between the men. Ashur did not meet Ansti’s gaze, he rested his chin on intertwined fingers and once again seemed to study a small patch of air at arms length. Ansti was agitated, he shifted around in the recliner aware of physical pain and emotional dilemma. He had feared torture by his enemies, but it was his friend who now tortured him in a different way. Loyalty versus morality, family versus profession, right versus love; how could any man choose between these? Each course of action carried a heavy price, and yet inaction was s
ure to exact an intolerable price. If, as Ashur contended, Ansti’s family were alive, the only way they could be protected and freed was to defeat the enemy. An enemy who, in Ansti’s moral universe now held the high ground.
Ansti began to rise from the recliner, slowly this time and with care for his body. He waved Ashur away when he moved to help, and despite the pain in his chest and lightness in his head Ansti began to walk. He did not know where he was going, but he did know he needed the solitude to search his feelings and decide what he wanted. He half heard Ashur call someone and felt arms support him and guide him to a room that had been prepared for him. By the time he reached the curved, softly lit quietude of the space he had been given, Ansti had already reached a conclusion. He felt his heart decide and knew that it was only a matter of time before his head rationalised the decision. He flopped onto a warm comfortable bed and drifted into sleep, experiencing the peace that humans feel when they make a decision.
Chapter 10.
The space was cramped and infused with machinery. It was smaller and less finished than Ansti was used to; more like a packed laboratory than a pilot’s sumptuous station. The environment looked part organic, part mechanical, and had an air of military functionality. Ansti had been here many times over the previous weeks, fitting himself physically and emotionally into his new niche. The pilot’s couch was nestled amongst large, curved, protuberances that descended from way above and from either side. They flowed and overlapped with each other like things once melted and now left too cool. The ship had grown this space but done so mindlessly, under the direction of humans. It had none of the symmetrical beauty and satisfying aesthetics that a sentient ship manufactured. Humans had to plan such things as aesthetics, and those planning this space had little time for thoughts of comfort. They understood that surroundings influenced thoughts, but not in the deep profound way that ships made the link and created places that cradled their pilots.
Ansti saw a slowly spinning picture of the world they rested on; an artificial model devoid of the cloud blanket and exposing the surface. To Ansti it loomed large, seemingly as tall as two people and rich in detail. He knew it was not there. He knew that the ship was stimulating his visual cortex and manipulating data to present this image, and yet it felt real enough to touch, and the urge to do so tickled him from time to time. A small marker indicated the ship’s position not far from the edge of the northern temperate zone. At this magnification the giant mesas he had navigated took on the appearance of stubble on a chin, and Ansti noticed they arranged themselves in strips across the world, punctuated by equally broad stripes of featureless tundra. It looked like some power had shaved areas clean. Ansti smiled to himself as he wondered wryly if this world was where the gods’ barbers came to practice.
He willed the image away and it disappeared, replaced by what his eyes fed his visual cortex; a view of the little vehicle nestled into a couch of its own directly opposite him. It was even more tightly surrounded by machinery. With no need for space to stretch limbs or room for air to breathe, it took less space. Its nose protruded from amongst the cloying mass, still speckled with detritus and pock marks gained in days of high speed travel and combat. Ansti regarded it for a moment and wondered if it understood its role amongst all this technology, wondered if it knew how it was about to change the lives of so many and the truths that they held dear. Not for the first time he wondered how history might cast them both; heroes or villains or even forgotten actors in events that others steered?
He heard an alert followed by a voice inside his head. Tannen, the chief drop-smith was asking his readiness. Ansti briefly opened his emotions to scrutiny and let Tannen sense he was prepared. They had rehearsed what he was about to do time after time, simulating the focus and feelings required to make it work. Ansti had struggled at first. He reflexively searched for the ship’s mind, and finding none he recoiled from the task. He had also struggled to make others understand his difficulty. None of the team working with him were pilots of course, and they simply did not understand how wrong it felt to try and bond with a mindless ship. In one moment of frustration he had described it as like making love to a corpse. The others had laughed, but soon the pace of the project slowed a little and the demands on him relaxed a little too. Tannen reminded Ansti that this was no longer a rehearsal. Systems would be live and the vehicle would not be constrained. After the weeks of practice they were about to make an unassisted jump.
Another oddity; Tannen intervened to link Ansti and the vehicle via the ship. Ansti was not used to someone else’s involvement in such a process and it had been another obstacle to progress early on. Now he had learnt to live with it, but it did not feel right. Even so he gave the permissions and opened himself and the ship-vehicle combination filled his consciousness. As a boy Ansti had had dreams in which his hands swelled to enormous size and became very sensitive. The experience of joining with the ship-vehicle gave him the same sense of dislocated scale and sensitivity. He felt his own body, the vehicle’s body and the ship’s mass all as if they were his own physical reality. His pilot’s training stopped his mind from recoiling at the impossibility of inhabiting three bodies simultaneously, but again the links did not forge themselves with the ease of bonding with a ship’s mind. For the first time in his life, Ansti realised the lengths ships went to in order to accommodate their pilots, and he felt a wave of love for ships wash over him.
He also felt the little vehicle’s limbs extending into new dimensions. It too was an alien sensation and dwelt on too long it challenged his sanity. His mind was exposed to things it had never meant to sense, and only his pilot’s skill and training enabled him to separate that which he could understand from that which he could only accept. He could see why Ashur need a pilot so badly. No untrained human could stand this dimension warping proposition for long and remain sane, let alone use their will to move and fight. Ansti relaxed and adjusted, accepting totally this new reality and calming the part of him that squirmed to escape from it. He could feel the vehicle’s mind, ready to act but with no trace of any emotion. The sun-blessed it seemed did not struggle with the trans-dimensional juxtapositions required to do this thing.
Tannen messaged them clear. Ansti could now make the move. It would be a very short hop; a fifty-five degree rotation of the planet’s longitude. It was a minuscule twitch compared to the interstellar distances usually made in jump, but it did not matter. The test was simply a validation of the concept and technology, and in any case Ansti knew from experience that there was no relationship between distance and difficulty when jumping. It was all a matter of perception.
Ansti tightened all his muscles and then relaxed them. He settled his breathing and opened his mind to the vehicle. It felt his offer of partnership and in return it opened to Ansti. As it did perception flooded in. The sensation mimicked the nauseating vertigo that had accompanied the vehicle’s first negotiation with this world, but now it was predictable and less threatening, if no less physically challenging.
The unpleasant adjustment passed in moments, to be replaced with the familiar sense of presence that the psuedo-ship/vehicle gifted its partner. Ansti felt the ship’s place in the world as surely as he had felt his body supported by the couch just moments ago. He knew their exact location, and could let his senses drift over the landscape. If he chose to he could spin billions of tons of mass in his hands and trace the revolving landscape with his fingertips. He could taste the atmosphere and feel precipitation and wind on his skin. He could identify a place with certainty because every atom of the world now existed inside Ansti, collected by the sun-blessed magic of the vehicle and amplified by the power of the ship.
Tannen pulsed another stream of messages; the ship was functioning, powered and ready to move. Ansti confirmed that he could feel it too, and he was now in control. He felt Tannen’s emotions adjust a little to include a tingle of excitement and then a waft of deference and fear. Ashur was there with Tannen — not participating directly — bu
t there, and Tannen’s emotions signalled his presence. So, watched by the mentor and manipulator, this was it. They could move. Ansti had to admit that as much as he still resented why this was happening, what they were about to do was exciting.
Ansti focussed on the vehicle and asked it to probe around them. It did so, once again seeking spies and enemies, and finding nothing. This time it did not use its own senses alone. It routed its multidimensional perception through the ship and magnified it. Nothing could hide from them, nothing at all. He flashed that message to Tannen who confirmed their lesser mechanical watchers had also seen nothing. They were redundant. Ansti knew there was nothing there, with the certainty of a man checking for a lump of coal in a glass of water. In fact he knew exactly what was there, down to the last drop of moisture on the last tiny plant, and it was all native to this world.
They had calculated the duration of the jump, and figured it would last a few seconds. They also figured they would feel the slow-time of jump for those few seconds. No one really knew if this phenomenon was the product of human perception or a sun’s intervention or something else entirely, but whatever the reality, no crew member would be sleeping. Ansti suddenly wondered what suns would think of this. Would they be jealous, amazed, apathetic, unaware? Not knowing made Ansti anxious. If some people feared the political awakening of pilots, then pilots had some similar fear of suns. The difference of course was that there was not one thing the combined power of all the sentient races could do to either understand or protect against a single sun’s wrath. The reassurance came from the absence of anything akin to anger in a sun’s psyche. Perhaps it was only races that had something to fear that had a use for anger. Perhaps its absence in suns was the ultimate sign of self-confidence. Perhaps.
The Man Who Talked to Suns Page 14