by Neil Clarke
“That’s very good, Adel.” He was surprised when she reached across the table and patted his hand. “You understand me better than I did myself. About a year ago, when Speedy told me that I had been aboard longer than anyone else, I was devastated. But she consoled me. She said that she had heard my prayers over the years and had longed to answer them. I asked her if she were a god, that she could hear prayer?”
Sister fell silent, her eyes shining with the memory.
“So?” Adel was impressed. “What did she say?”
“Speedy is very old, Adel. Very wise. She has revealed mysteries to me that even the Main does not know.”
—she believes—plus buzzed.
“So you worship her then? Speedy is your god?”
Her smile was thin, almost imperceptible, but it cracked her doleful mask. “Now you understand why I don’t want to go home.”
“But what about finding true love?”
“I have found it, Adel.” Sister pushed her bowl away; she had eaten hardly anything. “No man, no human could bring me to where she has brought me.”
—could we maybe try?—
—she’s not talking about that—
“So you’re never leaving then?” Adel carelessly speared the last spiralini on his plate. “She’s going to keep you here for the rest of your life?”
“No.” Her voice quavered. “No.”
“Sister, are you all right?”
She was weeping. That was the only word for it. This was not mere crying; her chest heaved and tears ran down her cheeks. In the short time he had known her, Adel had often thought that she was on the brink of tears, but he hadn’t imagined that her sadness would be so wracking.
“She says something’s going to happen . . . soon, too soon and I-I have to leave but I . . .” A strangled moan escaped her lips.
Adel had no experience comforting a woman in pain but he nevertheless came around the table and tried to catch her in his arms.
She twisted free, scattering thrush needles across the table. “Get away.” She shot off her bench and flung herself at the wall of the breakfasting room. “I don’t want him. Do you hear?” She pounded at the wall with her fists until the sconce shook. “He’s nothing to me.”
The Godspeed’s head filled the wall, her face glowing with sympathy. “Adel,” she said. “You’d better leave us.”
“I want you,” Sister cried. “It’s you I want!”
DAY FIFTEEN
Adel sprawled on the camel-back sofa and clutched a brocade toss pillow to his chest. He rested his head in the warmth of Meri’s lap but, for the first time since they had met, he wasn’t thinking of having sex with her. He was trying very hard to think of nothing at all as he gazed up at the clouds flitting across the ceiling of the Blue Salon.
Robman spun his coin at the tikra table. It sang through stacks of parti-colored blocks that represented the map of the competing biomes, bouncing off trees, whirling over snakes, clattering to a stop by the Verge.
“Take five, put two,” said Robman. “I want birds.”
“I’ll give you flies,” said Jonman.
“Digbees and bats?”
“Done.”
Jonman spun his coin. “It’s not just you, Adel,” he said. “Speedy picked Robman and me and Jarek too. Sister didn’t want us either.”
“Why would she want you two?” said Adel. “You’re yoked.”
“Not always,” said Meri. “Jonman was here a month before Robman.”
“But I saw him coming,” said Jonman. “Put ought, skip the take.”
“She didn’t disappear because of you,” said Adel.
—or you either—buzzed minus.
“Or you either.” Meri had been stroking his hair, now she gave it a short tug. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“I made her cry.”
“No, Speedy did that.” Meri spat the name, as if she were daring the Godspeed to display. She had not shown herself to them in almost three days.
Robman spun again.
“Speedy wouldn’t let her go out of the airlock,” said Meri. “Would she?”
“Without a suit?” Robman sipped Z-breeze from a tumbler as he watched his coin dance. “Never.”
“Who knows what Speedy will do?” said Adel.
“They’re wasting their time,” said Jonman. “Sister isn’t out there.”
“Do you see that,” Meri said “or is it just an opinion?”
“Take one, put one,” said Robman.
“Which gets you exactly nothing,” said Jonman. “I call a storm.”
“Then I call a flood.” Robman pushed three of his blocks toward Jonman’s side of the board. The tether connecting them quivered and Adel thought he could hear it gurgling faintly.
Jonman distributed the blocks around his biome. “What I see is that she’s hiding someplace,” he said. “I just don’t see where.”
Meri slid out from under Adel’s head and stood. “And Speedy?” Adel put the pillow on the armrest of the sofa and his head on the pillow.
“She’s here,” said Jonman. “She’s toying with us. That’s what she does best.”
“At least we don’t have to practice her damn play,” said Robman.
Adel wanted to wrap the pillow around his ears to blot out this conversation. One of their number had vanished, they were some fifty light-years from the nearest MASTA, and there was something very wrong with the cognizor in command of their threshold. Why weren’t the others panicking like he was? “Rehearse,” he said.
“What?”
“You don’t practice a play. You rehearse it.”
Meri told the wall to display the airlock but it was empty. “They must be back already.”
“Have some more Z-breeze, Rob,” said Jonman. “I can’t feel anything yet.”
“Here.” He thrust the tumbler at Jonman. “Drink it yourself.”
Jonman waved it off. “It’s your day to eat, not mine.”
“You just want to get me drunk so you can win.”
“Nothing,” said Kamilah, as she entered the salon with Jarek. “She’s not out there.”
“Thank the Kindly One,” said Jarek.
Robman gave Jonman an approving nod. “You saw that.”
“Is Speedy back yet?” said Kamilah.
“She hasn’t shown herself.” Meri had settled into a swivel chair and was turning back and forth nervously.
“Kamilah and I were talking on the way up here,” said Jarek. He strode behind Meri’s chair and put hands on her shoulders to steady her. “What if she jumped?”
“What if? “ Meri leaned her head back to look up at him.
“Adel says she was hysterical,” said Kamilah. “Let’s say Speedy couldn’t settle her down. She’s a danger to herself, maybe to us. So Speedy has to send her home.”
“Lose your mind and you go free?” Robman spun his coin. “Jon, what are we waiting for?”
“Speedy,” said Kamilah. “Is that it? Talk to us, please.”
They all looked. The wall showed only the empty airlock.
Adel hurled the pillow at it in a fury. “I can’t take this anymore.” He scrambled off the couch. “We’re in trouble, people.”
—be calm—
—tell it—
They were all staring at him but that was fine. The concern on their faces made him want to laugh. “Sister said something was going to happen. This is it.” He began to pace around the salon, no longer able to contain the frenzied energy skittering along his nerves. “We have to do something.”
“I don’t see it,” said Jonman.
“No, you wouldn’t.” Adel turned on him. “You always want to wait. Maybe that was a good idea when all this started, but things have changed.”
“Adel,” said Meri, “what do you think you’re doing?”
“Look at yourselves,” he said. “You’re afraid that if you try to save yourselves, you’ll be fucked. But you know what, people? We’re already fucked.
It makes no sense anymore to wait for someone to come rescue us.”
Adel felt a hand clamp onto his shoulder and another under his buttock. Kamilah lifted him effortlessly. “Sit down.” She threw him at the couch. “And shut up.” He crashed into the back cushion headfirst, bounced and tumbled onto the carpet.
Adel bit his tongue when he hit the couch; now he tasted blood. He rolled over, got to hands and knees and then he did laugh. “Even you, Kamilah.” He gazed up at her. She was breathing as if she had just set a record in the two hundred meter freestyle. “Even you are perfectly scared.” Her medallion spun wildly on its silver chain.
“Gods, Adel.” She took a step toward him. “Don’t.”
Adel muted his opposites then; he knew exactly what he needed to do. “Speedy!” he called out. “We know that you’re decelerating.”
Meri shrieked in horror. Jonman came out of his chair so quickly that his tether knocked several of the blocks off the tikra board. Kamilah staggered and slumped against a ruby sideboard.
“Why, Adel?” said Jarek. “Why?”
“Because she knows we know.” Adel picked himself up off the Berber carpet. “She can scan planets twenty light-years away and you don’t think she can see us dropping rocks on her own surface?” He straightened his cape. “You’ve trapped yourselves in this lie better than she ever could.”
“You do look, my son, as if something is bothering you.” The Godspeed’s fetch stepped from behind the statue of Levia Calla. She was in costume as Prospero.
“What did . . . ?”
“Speedy, we don’t . . .”
“You have to . . .”
“Where is . . . ?”
The Godspeed made a grand flourish that ended with her arm raised high above her head. She ignored their frantic questions, holding this pose until they fell silent. Then she nodded and smiled gaily at her audience.
“Cheer up,” she said, her voice swelling with bombast. “The party’s almost over. Our actors were all spirits and have melted into air, into thin air. There was never anything here, no soaring towers or gorgeous palaces or solemn temples. This make-believe world is about to blow away like a cloud, leaving not even a wisp behind. We are the stuff that dreams are made of, and our little lives begin and end in sleep. You must excuse me, I’m feeling rather odd just now. My old brain is troubled. But don’t worry. Tell you what, why don’t you just wait here a few more minutes? I’m going to take a turn outside to settle myself.”
The Godspeed paused expectantly as if waiting for applause. But the pilgrims were too astonished to do or say anything, and so she bowed and, without saying another word, dissolved the fetch.
“What was that?” said Robman.
“The end of Act IV, scene 1,” said Adel grimly.
“But what does it mean?” said Meri.
Jarek put his hand to her cheek but then let it fall again. “I think Adel is right. I think we’re . . .”
At that moment, the prazz sentry ship struck the Godspeed a mortal blow, crashing into its surface just forty meters from the backside thruster and compromising the magnetic storage rings that contained the antimatter generated by collider. The sonic blast was deafening as the entire asteroid lurched. Then came the explosion. The pilgrims flew across the Blue Salon like leaves in a storm amidst broken furniture and shattered glass. Alarms screamed and Adel heard the distant hurricane roar of escaping air. Then the lights went out and for long and hideous moment Adel Ranger Santos lay in darkness, certain that he was about to die. But the lights came up again and he found himself scratched and bruised but not seriously hurt. He heard a moan that he thought might be Kamilah. A man was crying behind an overturned desk. “Is everyone all right?” called Jarek. “Talk to me.”
The fetch reappeared in the midst of this chaos, still in costume. Adel had never seen her flicker before. “I’m afraid,” said the Godspeed to no one in particular, “that I’ve made a terrible mistake.”
The Alien is worshipped on almost all the worlds of the Continuum. While various religions offer divergent views of the Alien, they share two common themes. One is that the Alien gods are—or were once—organic intelligences whose motives are more or less comprehensible. The other is that the gods are absent. The Mission of Tsef promises adherents that they can achieve psychic unity with benign alien nuns who are meditating on their behalf somewhere in the M5 globular cluster. The Cosmic Ancestors are the most popular of the many panspermian religions; they teach that our alien parents seeded earth with life in the form of bacterial stromatolites some 3.7 billion years ago. There are many who hold that humanity’s greatest prophets, like Jesus and Ellen and Smike, were aliens come to share the gospel of a loving universe while the Uplift believes that an entire galactic civilization translated itself to a higher reality but left behind astronomical clues for us to decipher so that we can join them someday. It is true that the Glogites conceive of Glog as unknowable and indifferent to humankind, but there is very little discernable difference between them and people who worship black holes.
We find it impossible to imagine a religion that would worship the prazz, but then we know so little about them—or it. Not only is the prazz not organic, but it seems to have a deep-seated antipathy toward all life. Why this should be we can’t say: we find the prazz incomprehensible. Even the Godspeed, the only intelligence to have any extended contact with the prazz, misjudged it—them—entirely.
Here are a few of most important questions for which we have no answer:
What exactly are the prazz?
Are they one or many?
Where did they come from?
Why was a sentry posted between our Local Arm and the Sagittarius-Carina Arm of the Milky Way?
Are there more sentries?
And most important of all: what are the intentions of the prazz now that they know about us?
What we can say is this: in the one thousand and eighty-sixth year of her mission, the Godspeed detected a communication burst from a source less than a light-year away. Why the prazz sentry chose this precise moment to signal is unknown; the Godspeed had been sweeping that sector of space for years and had seen no activity. Acting in accordance with the protocols for first contact, she attempted a stealth scan, which revealed the source as a small robotic ship powered by a matter-antimatter engine. Unfortunately, the prazz sentry sensed that it was being scanned and was able to get a fix on the Godspeed. What she should have done at that point was to alert the Continuum of her discovery and continue to track the sentry without making contact. That she did otherwise reflects the unmistakable drift of her persona from threshold norms. Maybe she decided that following procedures lacked dramatic flair. Or perhaps the discovery of the prazz stirred some inexpressible longing for companionship in the Godspeed, who was herself an inorganic intelligence. In any event, she attempted to communicate with the prazz sentry and compartmentalized the resources she devoted to the effort so that she could continue to send nominal reports to the Continuum. This was a technique that she had used just once before, but to great effect; compartmentalization was how the Godspeed was able to keep her secrets. We understand now that the contact between the two ships was deeply flawed, and their misunderstandings profound. Nevertheless, they agreed to a rendezvous and the Godspeed began to decelerate to match course and velocity with the prazz sentry.
The highboy that killed Robman had crushed his chest and cut the tether that joined him to Jonman. Their blood was all over the floor. Adel had done his best for Jonman, clearing enough debris to lay him out flat, covering him with a carpet. He had tied the remaining length of tether off with wire stripped from the back of a ruined painting, but it still oozed. Adel was no medic but he was pretty sure that Jonman was dying; his face was as gray as his jacket. Kamilah didn’t look too bad but she was unconscious and breathing shallowly. Adel worried that she might have internal injuries. Meri’s arm was probably broken; when they tried to move her she moaned in agony. Jarek was kicking the slats out
of a Yamucha chair back to make her a splint.
“An alien, Speedy?” Adel felt too lightheaded to be scared. “And you didn’t tell anyone?” It was as if the gravity generator had failed and at any moment he would float away from this grim reality.
“So where is this fucking prazz now?” Jarek ripped a damask tablecloth into strips.
“The sentry ship itself crashed into the backside engine room. But it has deployed a remote.” The Godspeed seemed twitchy and preoccupied. “It’s in the conservatory, smashing cacti.”
“What?” said Adel.
“It has already destroyed my rain forest and torn up my alpine garden.”
plus buzzed—they’re fighting with plants?—
“Show me,” said Jarek.
The wall turned a deep featureless blue. “I can’t see them; my cameras there are gone.” The Godspeed paused, her expression uneasy.
—more bad news coming—buzzed minus.
“You should know,” she said, “that just before it attacked, the prazz warned me that I was infested with vermin and needed to sterilize myself. When I told it that I didn’t consider you vermin . . .”
“You’re saying they’ll come for us?” said Jarek.
“I’m afraid that’s very likely.”
“Then stop it.”
She waved her magic staff disconsolately. “I’m at a loss to know how.”
“Fuck that, Speedy.” Jarek pointed one of the slats at her fetch. “You think of something. Right now.” He knelt by Meri. “I’m going to splint you now, love. It’s probably going to hurt.”
Meri screamed as he tenderly straightened her arm.
“I know, love,” said Jarek. “I know.”
—we have to get out of here—buzzed minus.
“How badly are you damaged, Speedy?” said Adel. “Can we use the MASTA?”
“My MASTA is operational on a limited basis only. My backside engine complex is a complete loss. I thought I was able to vent all the antimatter in time, but there must have been a some left that exploded when the containment failed.”
Something slammed onto the level below them so hard that the walls shook.
—those things are tearing her apart—