by John Love
“She’s weakening,” Cyr said.
“No She isn’t,” Smithson snapped. “Her fields are weakening, because She’s diverting their power.” He looked across the Bridge. “Into that.”
The figure had returned to the Bridge, but it was fainter than before. It faded almost to nothing, reappeared, then faded again.
“Soon She’ll be defenceless,” Cyr hissed, “and the beams will reach Her.”
All through the engagement their particle beams had been the only weapon which consistently outmatched Her. They pushed and probed through Her fields, a little closer to Her with each firing.
She had put everything into what She was trying to project, but it was not enough. Although the white light still filled the Bridge, the figure failed to re-form out of it, and the beams were still reaching for Her. Eventually She gave up, and routed power back to Her drives and flickerfields. Her stern drives stuttered and refired and She began moving through the Gulf at thirty percent—Kaang matched Her speed and course—and Her fields redeployed. Cyr continued firing, but Her fields held firm now. The white light drained from the Bridge. So did the figure which had tried to form.
Stalemate again.
The Bridge returned to its normal subdued lighting. The screen displayed the latest analyses of what She had attempted, but they added nothing new. What had entered the Bridge—Entered The Bridge, Foord read aloud, in outrage—was an electromagnetic signal which acquired physical substance. It was unreadable. Almost certainly, announced Smithson sonorously and unnecessarily, another example of Her superior use of MT physics.
“And that’s it?”
“Of course not,” Smithson snapped. “Commander, whatever She wanted to say to us, She still wants to say it. She endangered Herself to say it. She won’t give up.”
“And how will She not give up?”
“She didn’t have enough power to put that thing on the Bridge and fight our beams. So…”
“So She’ll find more power. And you know where She’ll find it, don’t you?”
Unusually, Smithson said nothing.
“You’re always right,” Foord told him, almost as an aside while motioning Thahl to divert power back to their signal-blocking, “but you’re not always right at the right time. Thahl! That figure will be back again, and this time it will…”
The crater in Her midsection started to glow, not with the cold white light but with the unnameable colour, the colour which hid inside the normal spectrum. In whatever universe it came from it might be familiar and everyday, perhaps the colour of sky or grass. In this one it was many words, all beginning with Un.
There was an explosion in the midsection crater. She rolled with it, presenting Her undamaged underside and starboard and dorsal surfaces, and then, as She completed the roll, Her port side again with the midsection crater facing them. Headups crowded the Bridge screen, telling them what they expected and could already see. The midsection crater was two percent larger but exactly the same shape, lit with the colour which burnt steadily and patiently inside it.
Perhaps it was only another millionth of what She had taken into Herself—including their five simulations, and their spiders and hull-plates, as well as pieces of Her—but She was consuming it, and turning it into power which partly fed Her flickerfields, partly Her drives, but mostly this projection of white light into the Bridge which, this time, trampled down their defences and solidified into the figure standing in front of them. Not a simulation in silver and grey but a real figure, with real flesh tones, blinking in the light of the Bridge as it looked round at each of them, its breath frosting in front of its face like theirs.
•
Aaron Foord stood in the middle of the Bridge, blinking. He was about thirteen, dark-eyed and quiet. He wore the orphanage uniform, a white shirt and dark blue trousers. He felt cold.
He looked at Foord.
“Are you what I became?”
“Are you what I grew out of?”
Aaron Foord again gazed round at the others, and stopped at Cyr. “You’re a bit old to be wearing that,” he said, “but it looks good on you. You’re really beautiful.”
He turned back to Foord, and asked “Who are these people with you?”
“Weren’t you told, before you were sent here?”
“No.”
“They’re like me,” Foord said.
“The ones who sent me, the ones in that ship over there…”
“We call it Faith. Or Her.”
“…seem to know you.”
“What do they look like?”
“They wouldn’t let me remember.… You don’t know anything about them, do you?”
“No.”
“Later you will.”
“I must admit,” Foord said, “you’re even more convincing than the figures in the crater. But you’re still made by Her.”
“What do you mean, figures in the crater? I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re not me. You’re not even yourself. She made you, you’re a simulation of me when I was younger.”
“What did you mean, figures in the crater?”
“How do you think you got here from the orphanage? Why do you think you’re here?”
“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember.”
“You’re not me. You’re not even yourself. She made you, and when you’ve spoken to me, and said whatever She told you to, She’ll unmake you. Your life exists only between being made and unmade, and it’s short and pointless.”
“And you’re not me. How much do you remember about me?”
“I remember nothing about you because you’ve only just been made and soon you’ll be unmade. About me, I remember.”
“No you don’t. Maybe that’s why I’m here, to tell you what you’ve forgotten.”
(“Ghost of Christmas Past,” Cyr whispered.)
“Ah,” Foord said. “This is it. We’ve been circling around it, but you’re right, this is why you’re here. To tell me how I went into the orphanage and turned away from people and made my life tight and tidy and made myself unreachable and became Commander of a ship full of loners and outsiders like me, and I’m the loneliest and furthest outside of all of them. Because all the other circles of Hell get hotter and hotter, but the final circle is cold and quiet and sterile, like me. Is that what She sent you here to tell me?”
“Yes.”
“Then you’re done. She’ll take you away from here and unmake you. Your life has been short and pointless.”
“Cold and quiet and sterile…”
“What?”
“Cold. Quiet. Sterile. If you’re what I became, it has been short and pointless.”
Foord did not reply.
The next time Aaron Foord spoke, it was to someone else.
“I want you to take me away from here, please. I want you to unmake me.”
Foord began “I shouldn’t…”
Aaron Foord’s figure stood there, but Aaron Foord was gone from inside it. Something moved across its surface: a swirl of silver, from its head down to its feet, washing away his features and colours and shape.
“I shouldn’t…” Foord tried again. “I shouldn’t have said that to him. But he...”
“He’s gone, Commander,” Thahl said. “Let it go.” He reached out to put a hand on Foord’s shoulder. They both drew back; he had not retracted his claws.
“I’m sorry,” they both said, each for several different reasons.
The figure remained in the middle of the Bridge, blank and unmoving. It changed its shape and posture, growing slimmer, and standing at an awkward angle. Features pushed out from inside it, reached its surface, and stabilised. Colours and flesh tones followed. It had a new inhabitant.
•
Susanna Cyr stood in the middle of the Bridge. She did not blink, and as for feeling cold, she always felt cold. She was over ninety. She looked round at them one by one, until she found Cyr.
“Are you what I grew out of?”
“Are you what I became?” Cyr answered.
“Yes, exactly right, this is what you became. Look at it.”
She was gaunt, where she had once been slim, and her voice bubbled through mucus. She still wore dark lipstick, but now its colour matched that of the burst veins beneath the stretched skin of her face. Her clothes—an expensive dark linen jacket and skirt—somehow did not hang properly on her.
“Why are you standing at that angle?”
“Arthritis. And incontinence pants.”
“You’re as convincing as the other one,” Cyr said. “Flesh tones, details, everything.”
“What other one?”
“You know that She made you and sent you here, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. What did you mean, Other One?”
A quiet movement to one side made them both look round. Thahl had discreetly re-routed Cyr’s Weapons functions to his own console, just in case.
They turned back, and locked eyes again.
“At least,” Cyr said, “the other one was a copy of someone who did exist, in the past. You’re sixty years in the future. You’re a copy of someone who hasn’t existed yet.”
“This is supposed to be news to me? I already told you that.”
“You didn’t,” Cyr said, “but I figured it out…Were you sent here to talk to me?”
“Oh, I see. Like the Other One. What am I, number two? Three more to go, then. Or four, if She does Joser too.”
“And what would She have told you to say? Something like, There Are Many Possible Futures?”
“I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you know, that the future isn’t fixed, that it can be altered, that I might not turn into you and get a face like a sanitary towel, but first I have to Change. Everything the Commonwealth pays me to do, everything I do best, everything involving weapons and killing, I have to stop liking it. Liking it makes me a loner and an outsider, even on this ship. I have to Change. I might seem beautiful now but inside I’m full of poison, and unless I Change, the inside will push through to the surface. Like it has with you. But I can still Change: I can still turn my life round and find another future…Is that what She told you to say?”
“Every word of that,” said Susanna Cyr, “is wrong, including And and The. Your future is fixed. You can’t change. You can’t turn your life around. You will become me. And you’re a loner and an outsider because…”
“Because I like it too much?”
“Because nobody will want you. The future is fixed. Nobody will want you: not as a lover, partner, companion, or even friend. You have only colleagues. Most of them, you frighten. The ones you don’t frighten—like these here—you sicken.”
Cyr wanted to look around her, but could not.
“Occasionally,” Susanna Cyr went on, “you think that Foord might want you, as much as you want him, and occasionally he does. He thinks you’re the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen, but also the most sickening he’s ever known. You can make him ejaculate and vomit with equal ease, and in almost equal amounts….Yes, ejaculate. Sometimes in his cabin he thinks of you and masturbates.”
Susanna Cyr paused, and laughed; the same kind of laugh Cyr occasionally did, which made her ugly.
“Always the same Foord. He can never share it, even with you. He’d rather take it with him and go off somewhere on his own. And you know, sometimes he can’t ejaculate; that’s when he thinks of what’s between your ears, rather than what’s between your legs.”
Thahl was already moving towards Cyr, but maybe he hesitated; or maybe, for once, even he was not fast enough. She emptied her sidearm into Susanna Cyr’s body. Bits of torn parchment flesh and broken struts of bone and bloodsoaked dark linen erupted from Susanna Cyr’s midriff and chest and shoulders and thighs: real substances, not silver. She doubled over, then straightened. She did not fall, despite her arthritic hip, and the bits blown from her body floated around her in midair, stopped at the moment they left her. She looked like an exploded diagram. She smiled at Cyr.
“Why didn’t you just aim for my face?”
Cyr could not reply, even to shake her head. Thahl’s micromanipulator claws were around her neck, almost but not quite piercing her skin. She dropped the sidearm. Thahl’s claws retracted, and his hands left her.
“Well, it doesn’t matter,” said Susanna Cyr. “I’m done here anyway. I’ll see you in sixty years. The future is fixed. Your life will be long and pointless. I know, I’ve lived it.”
Cyr sank to her knees. Thahl still stood behind her. He reached out to touch her shoulder, but she shrank away, even though his claws were sheathed.
Susanna Cyr’s figure had emptied. As the exploded pieces returned to it, it washed itself clear of her features and identity and posture, and became blank.
“Ghost of Christmas Future,” Cyr hissed. She locked eyes with Foord. Strangely, neither of them was embarrassed.
“Do you really do that? On your own?”
“Yes,” said Foord.
“Why?”
“Habit.”
Thahl looked from one to the other. He had only a partial understanding of human sexual dynamics, but a very good understanding of the nuances of human speech, and of things left unsaid.
“Kaang,” Foord said, “get us away from here. Hard to port, eighty percent. Maybe that signal will weaken with distance.”
She did so, though she didn’t believe him. Neither did any of the others.
•
They fled through the Gulf. She made no attempt to follow them, but Her white light still filled the Bridge, and they still felt cold.
For the first time since Joser’s death there were six and not five on the Bridge, but the sixth was blank and unmoving and empty. For those reasons Cyr—who knew it was essential to appear unaffected—hit on the rather spiteful device of calling the empty figure Joser. When she got unsteadily to her feet after Susanna Cyr left and Foord gave the order to run, she pointed to the figure. Forcing lightness into her voice, she asked Thahl
“Which of us will fill Joser next? You?”
When Thahl did not answer, she lowered her voice and said “Remember I was too quick for you. And please put the Weapons functions back to my console.”
Thahl glanced at Foord, who nodded.
Cyr, without taking her eyes off Thahl, said “He didn’t order you to reroute my Weapons functions. You don’t need him to order you to put them back.”
“The functions are back.”
“Thank you.”
“I would never have killed you, Cyr.”
“I know. But you tried to stop me doing what I wanted.”
And later, while they continued to run from Her in a silence broken only by operational remarks, Cyr turned to Foord and said “Is Joser still solid? Or does he seem to be turning back to vapour?”
The headups on the Bridge screen showed She was hundreds of miles away; soon it would be thousands. Her image had dwindled to almost nothing. In the absence of instructions, the screen had not seen fit to magnify it.
“I meant it, Commander. Look at him. Around his edges. Don’t you see it?”
Foord tore himself away from her gaze and looked again at the empty figure. It took him a few seconds to see what Cyr had already seen: the figure was less distinct. It started to sway. The motion was most pronounced at its head while its feet stayed unmoving, and as it swayed it left flakes of itself, like scurf, floating alongside it until they dissolved in the light. It was bleeding away into the light, in a reversal of the process by which it had first appeared.
“It is weakening with distance!” Foord shouted.
The screen headups showed She was now several thousand miles away. The figure on the Bridge was keeping its shape but losing its substance, turning back to an open basketweave of vapour. For the first time since Susanna Cyr had inhabited it it made a deliberate movement, putting what had once been its hands up to what had once been its throat. If it had bee
n more distinct, it might have looked like it was trying to breathe.
She was now tens of thousands of miles behind them, less than a smear on the Bridge screen. The screen chose that moment to return to the original magnification, patching in Her image as if She was sixteen hundred feet away, and She chose that moment to consume another millionth of what was in the midsection crater. Again there was an explosion in its recesses and again the unnameable colour burned there; but this time, as She rolled with the force of the explosion, something was different. She rolled along Her entire length but also pivoted around Her midsection, backwards and forwards and side to side, turning the roll into a clumsy figure-of-eight movement which She fought to bring under control. Nothing She does is clumsy, thought Foord. She’s in trouble.
They caught fragmented glimpses of Her underside and starboard and dorsal surfaces as She rolled. Her manoeuvre drives fountained to correct the movement and the roll ended before the port side came back into view; then began again in the opposite direction, dorsal to starboard to underside. Her manoeuvre drives fountained again to correct the movement, and again to correct the correction, and overcompensated. She rolled a third time, underside to starboard to dorsal to port, and came unsteadily to rest. They stared, across tens of thousands of miles and sixteen hundred feet, at Her port side. Maybe, they thought, these projections were damaging Her internally.
Cyr pounded her console in pleasure, then swore viciously as she thought how she’d look if she hit something important—not what damage she’d do, just how she’d look. Foord and Thahl were still watching the screen.
“Cyr…” Foord began.
“Yes, Commander, we’re still in beam range.”
Foord nodded, and looked at the midsection crater; it glowed exactly as before, steadily and patiently. It might have been another screen, patching in a picture from another universe. Alarms murmured.
The empty figure on the Bridge, Foord noticed, was no longer empty.