“Recently though… in your lifetime, at least—things have become much better. There have only been two die-offs in the last ten years.” Sky would later ask himself what became of those dead; whether they were still being carried along by the ship. The adults cared deeply about the momios, like a religious sect entrusted with the care of fabulously rare and delicate icons. “But there was another kind of refinement,” his father continued.
“The engines?”
“Yes.” He said it with emphatic pride. “We don’t use the engines now, and we won’t use them again until we reach our destination—but if there was a way to make the engines work better, we could slow down faster when we reach Journey’s End. As it is, we’ll have to start our slowdown years from Swan—but with better engines we could stay in cruise mode longer. That would get us there quicker. Even a marginal improvement—shaving a few years off the mission—would be worth it, especially if we start losing sleepers again.”
“Will we?”
“We won’t know for years to come. But in fifty years we’ll be very near our destination, and the equipment which keeps the sleepers frozen will be getting very old. It’s one of the few systems we can’t keep upgrading and repairing—too intricate, too dangerous. But a saving in flight time would always be a good thing. Mark my words—in fifty years, you’ll want to shave every month possible off this voyage.”
“Did the people back home come up with a way to make the engines work better?”
“Yes, exactly that.” His father was pleased that he had guessed that much. “All the ships in the Flotilla received the transmission, of course, and we were all capable of making the modifications that it suggested. At first, we all hesitated. A great meeting of the Flotilla captains was held. Balcazar and three of the other four thought it was dangerous. They urged caution—pointing out that we could study the design for another forty or fifty years before we had to make a decision. What if Earth discovered an error in their blueprint? News of that mistake could be on its way to us—an urgent message saying “Stop”—or perhaps, a year or two down the line, they would think of something even better, but which it was not now possible to implement. Perhaps if we followed the first suggestion, we would rule out ever being able to follow another.”
Again Sky thought of the cleansing brilliance of that flash. “So what happened to the Islamabad?”
“As I said, we’ll never know for sure. The meeting broke up with the Flotilla Captains agreeing not to act until we had further information. A year passed; we kept debating the issue—Captain Khan included—and then it happened.”
“Perhaps it was an accident after all.”
“Perhaps,” his father said doubtfully. “Perhaps. Afterwards… the explosion didn’t do any serious damage. Not to us or the others, luckily. Oh, it seemed pretty bad at first. The electromagnetic pulse fried half our systems, and even some of the mission-critical ones didn’t come back online immediately. We had no power, except for the auxiliary systems serving the sleepers and our own magnetic containment bottle. But in our part of the ship—up front—we had nothing. No power. Not even enough to run the air-recyclers. That could have killed us, but there was so much air in the corridors we had a few days’ grace: enough time to hard-wire repair pathways and lash together replacement parts. Gradually we got things running again. We got hit by debris, of course—the ship wasn’t totally destroyed in its own explosion, and some of those shards went through us at half the speed of light. The flash burned our hull shielding pretty badly, too—that’s why she’s darker on one side than the other.” His father said nothing for a moment, but Sky knew that there was more coming. “That was how your mother died, Sky. Lucretia was outside the ship when it happened. She was working with a team of techs, inspecting the hull.”
He had known his mother had died that day—known even that she was outside—but he had never been told exactly how it had happened.
“Is that the reason you brought me out here?”
“Almost.”
The taxi banked, executing a wide turn which took it back towards the Santiago. Sky felt only a small stab of disappointment. He had dared to imagine that this trip might actually take him to one of the other ships, but such excursions were rare things indeed. Instead—wondering if he should try and force some tears now that the topic of his mother’s death had been raised, even though he did not actually feel like crying—he waited patiently for his home ship to enlarge, coming in out of the dark like a strip of friendly coastline on a stormy night.
“Something you should understand,” Titus said, eventually. “The fact that the Islamabad’s gone doesn’t really threaten the success of the mission. There are four ships left now—say four thousand settlers for Journey’s End—but we could still establish a colony even if only one ship arrived safely.”
“You mean we might be the only ship to get there?”
“No,” his father said. “I mean we might be one of those which never arrives. Understand that, Sky—understand that anyone of us is expendable—and you’ll be a long way to understanding what makes the Flotilla tick; what decisions might have to be taken fifty years from now, if the worst comes to the worst. Only one ship needs to arrive.”
“But if another ship blew up…”
“Agreed, we’d probably not be hurt this time. Since the Islamabad went up, we’ve moved all the ships much further apart. It’s safer, but it makes physical travel between them harder. In the long run, that might not be such a good idea. Distance can breed suspicion, and it can make enemies hardly worthy of consideration as human beings. Much easier to consider killing.” Titus’s voice had grown cold and remote, almost like that of a stranger, but then he softened his tone. “Remember that, Sky. We’re all in this together, no matter how hard things become in the future.”
“You think things will?”
“I don’t know, but they’re almost certainly not going to get easier. And by the time that any of this matters—when we get close to the end of the crossing—you’ll be my age, in a position of senior responsibility, even if not actually running the ship.”
“You think that could happen?”
Titus smiled. “I’d say it for certain—if I didn’t also know a certain talented young lady by the name of Constanza.”
While they had been speaking, the Santiago had grown much larger, but now they were approaching it from a different angle, so that the bulbous sphere of the command section loomed like a miniature grey moon, filigreed by panel lines and the boxy accretions of sensor modules. Sky thought of Constanza, now that his father had mentioned her, and wondered if—perhaps after all—this trip might have impressed her. After all, he had been outside, even if it had not been quite the surprise to her that he had originally hoped. And what he had been shown—what he had been told—had really not been so hard to take, had it?
But Titus was not done yet.
“Take a good look,” his father said as the darkened side of the sphere rotated into view. “This is where your mother’s inspection team was working. They were attached to the hull by magnetic harnesses, working very close to the surface. The ship was spinning of course—just like she is now—and if luck had been on their side, your mother’s team would have been working on the other side when the Islamabad went up. But the rotation had brought them right round into full view when she detonated. They caught the full blast, and they were wearing only lightweight suits at the time.”
He understood now why his father had brought him out here. It was not simply to be told how his mother had died, or to be initiated into the chilling knowledge that one fifth of the Flotilla no longer existed. That was part of it, but the central message was here; on the hull of the ship itself.
Everything else had just been preparation.
When the flash had hit them, their bodies had temporarily shielded the hull from the worst excesses of the radiation. They had burned quickly—there had probably been no pain, he later learned—but in that moment o
f death they had left negative shadows of themselves; lighter patches against the generally scorched hull. They were seven human shapes, frozen in postures which could not help but look tortured, but which were probably just the natural positions they had been working in when the flash had hit them. They all looked alike in every other respect; there was no way to tell which shadow had been cast by his mother.
“You know which one was her, don’t you?” he said.
“Yes,” Titus said. “Not that I found her, of course—someone else did. But yes, I do know which one belonged to your mother.”
Sky looked at the shadows again, burning their shapes into his brain, knowing that he would never have the courage to come out here again. Later he would learn that there had never been any serious attempt to remove the shadows; that they had been left as a monument not just to the seven dead workers, but to the thousand who had died in that soul-flensing flash. The ship wore them like a scar.
“Well?” Titus said, with the tiniest trace of impatience. “Do you want to know?”
“No,” Sky said. “No, I don’t want to know, ever.”
SEVEN
The next day Amelia brought my possessions to the chalet and then left me alone while I went through them. But as curious about them as I was, it was difficult to focus on the task. I was troubled by the fact that I’d dreamed about Sky Haussmann again: an unwilling observer to another incident in his life. The first dream about him that I clearly remembered must have happened to me during my revival; now I’d experienced another, and while there seemed to be a large gap in his life between them, they had clearly happened in chronological order. Like instalments.
And my palm had bled again, a hard new encrustation of dried blood over the wound. Spots of blood marred the sheet.
It didn’t take a massive leap of imagination to see that the two were connected. From somewhere I remembered that Haussmann had been crucified; that the mark in my palm signified his execution, and that I’d met another man with a similar wound in what seemed simultaneously like the recent and the infinitely remote past. I seemed to remember that the man had suffered the dreams as well, and hadn’t been an especially willing recipient of them either.
But maybe the things Amelia had brought me would explain the dreams. Trying to put Haussmann temporarily from mind, I focused on the task at hand. Everything I owned now—apart from any holdings back around Swan—lay in an unassuming briefcase which had come with me on the Orvieto.
There was some Sky’s Edge currency in large denomination Southlander bills; about half a million Australs. Amelia had told me it amounted to a reasonable fortune on Sky’s Edge—based on the information she had, anyway—though it had negligible value here in the Yellowstone system. Why had I brought it with me, then? The answer seemed obvious enough. Even allowing for inflation, the Sky’s Edge money would still be worth something thirty years after my departure, though perhaps only enough to buy a room for the night. The fact that I had carried the money with me suggested that I had planned on returning home some day.
So I wasn’t emigrating then. I’d come here on business.
To do something.
I had also brought experientials: pencil-sized data sticks crammed with recorded memories. They must have been what I was planning to sell on my revival. Unless you were an Ultra trader specialising in esoteric high-technologies, experientials were about the only way a rich individual could preserve some of their wealth while crossing interstellar space. A market always existed for them, no matter how advanced or primitive the buyer—provided, of course, that they had the basic technology to make use of the experientials. Yellowstone would be no problem in that regard. It had been the wellspring of all major technological and social advances across human space for the last two centuries.
The experientials had been sealed in clear plastic. Without playback equipment, there was no way I could tell what they contained.
What else?
Some money which felt truly unfamiliar to me: strangely textured banknotes with unfamiliar faces on them and surreal, random denominations.
I had asked Amelia what they were.
“That’s local money, Tanner. From Chasm City.” She pointed to a man on one side of each bill. “That’s Lorean Sylveste, I think. Or it could be Marco Ferris. It’s ancient history, anyway.”
“The money must have travelled from Yellowstone to Sky’s Edge and then back again—it’s at least thirty years old. Is it worth anything at all now?”
“Oh, a little. I’m no expert in these matters, of course, but I think this would be enough to get you to Chasm City. Not much more than that, though.”
“And how would I get to Chasm City?”
“It’s not difficult, even now. There’s a slowboat shuttle which makes the run down to New Vancouver, in orbit around Yellowstone. From there you’d need to buy a place on a behemoth, to get down to the surface. I think what you have should be enough, if you were prepared to abstain from some luxuries.”
“Such as?”
“Well, any guarantee of arriving safely, for a start.”
I smiled. “I’d better hope my luck’s in, then.”
“But you’re not planning on leaving us yet, are you Tanner?”
“No,” I answered. “Not just yet.”
There were two other things in the briefcase: a dark, flat envelope and another, fatter one. Amelia had left me alone by the time I tipped the flatter of the two onto the chalet’s bed. The contents spilled out; less in it than I had expected and nothing that seemed like a revelatory message from my past. If anything, the contents were designed to confuse me even more: a dozen passports and laminated ID cards for myself, all valid at the time I had boarded the ship, and all applicable to some part of Sky’s Edge and its surrounding space. Some were simply printed; others had computer systems embedded into them.
I suspected that most people could have managed with only one or two such documents, accepting that there were areas they could not legally enter—but from what I gathered from the documents’ small print, I would have been able to travel more or less freely, in and out of war zones and militia-controlled states, into the neutral zones and into the low-orbital space around the planet. They were the documents of someone who needed to get around without interference. There were some anomalies, though: what appeared to be trifling inconsistencies in the personal data in each document, places of birth and places I had visited. In some of the documents I was listed as having been a soldier in the Southland Militia, whereas in others I was affiliated to the Northern Coalition as a tactical specialist. Other documents failed to mention any soldiering history at all—listing me only as a personal security consultant or an agent for an import/export firm.
Suddenly the documents stopped being a confusing jumble and cohered into a clear indication of the kind of man I had been. I was someone who needed to be able to slip across borders like a ghost; a man of many guises and pasts—most of them probably fictitious. I sensed that I had been a man who lived dangerously; someone who probably made enemies the way most people made acquaintances. I guessed that it had seldom bothered me much. I was a man who could think about killing a pervert monk without breaking sweat, and then refrain from the act because the monk was not worth the tiny expenditure of energy it would have taken.
But there were three other things in the envelope, tucked at the back so that they had not fallen out at first. I pulled them out carefully, my fingers feeling the gloss surfaces of photographs.
The first picture showed a woman of striking, dark beauty, a nervous smile on her face, backdropped by what looked like the edge of a jungle clearing. The picture had been taken at night. Angling the picture to look past her, I could just see the back of another man examining a gun. It could almost have been me—but then who had taken the picture, and why did I have it with me?
“Gitta,” I said; without any effort I had remembered her name. “You’re Gitta, aren’t you?”
The second pic
ture showed a man standing in what might once have been a road, but which was little more than a pot-holed trail, curtained on either side by jungle. The man was walking towards the person taking the picture, a huge black weapon slung over his shoulder. He wore a shirt and a bandolier, and though his build and age were more or less the same as mine, his face was not quite the same. Behind the man, there was what seemed to be a fallen tree blocking the road, except that the tree ended in a bloodied stump, and much of the road was covered in a thick impasto of gore.
“Dieterling,” I said, the name springing from somewhere. “Miguel Dieterling.”
And knew that he had been a good friend of mine who was dead now.
Then I looked at the third picture. There was no trace of the intimacy of the first about this image, or even the dubious triumph of the second, since the man did not seem to be aware that his picture had been taken. It was a flat-image, taken with a long lens. The man was moving quickly through a mall, the neon lights of stores blurred into hyphens by the panned exposure. The man was slightly blurred too, but sharp enough for recognition. Sharp enough for acquisition, I thought.
I remembered his name, too.
I picked up the heavier of the two envelopes and allowed it to empty itself on the bed. The sharp-edged, intricately shaped pieces that fell out of it seemed to invite me to fit them together. I could feel the thing squeezed into my palm, ready to be used. It would be difficult to see; pearly in colour, like opaque glass.
Or diamond.
“This is a blocking move,” I said to Amelia. “You’ve immobilised me now. I may be taller and stronger than you, but there’s nothing I can do at this point which won’t cause me a lot of pain.”
She looked at me expectantly. “What now?”
“Now you take the weapon from me.” I nodded down towards the little trowel we were using as an ersatz weapon. She removed it from my grip softly with her free hand, then flung it away as if it were poisoned.
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