Faith

by John Love

  Her universe, like any other, was mostly empty. Its emptiness dwarfed suns, whose light guttered like cigarette-ends dropped in a derelict building. Only one time in millions would light produce life where it landed. Civilisations began and ended their lives along its timeline, in packets of millionths of a second and thousands of years. The atoms and subatomic particles of Foord and Thahl and Cyr and Smithson and Kaang—of their replicas in the crater, or their replicas from the Bridge, or the thousands of reproductions of both which had tumbled out of Her—went into Her universe and reappeared in living things. Occasionally they existed in the same galaxy; less occasionally, in solar systems close to each other; almost never, in the same solar system; less than almost never, on the same planet; and less than that, in forms that would recognise each other.

  Once, on a planet circling a dying red sun, an individual with some of Foord’s particles came within a few feet of an individual with some of Thahl’s.They glanced at each other and passed by. One was chitinous, part of a collective hive; the other was feathered, pecking at a fruit like an apple. Later they died. Five seconds and a billion years afterwards, their sun went nova. An unidentified ship watched it from a distance of atoms and light-years, and turned away towards the next solar system.

  •

  She began Her endgame. For the second time the Bridge screen went dark, and She brought them into Her universe. There was no compression: they stayed as they were, but reality around them changed, instantly, from outside to inside.

  Every part of Her universe, because it was infinite, touched every part of theirs. It welcomed them with a noiseless rushing. Foord shouted to them, above the noiselessness, We’ll come out at Sakhra, then all this will be finished. Finished abruptly. After everything which had gone before, Her endgame was simple and abrupt. Fast, and final. It was Her last throw of the dice.

  Foord knew Her better now, and knew what She had done. She was a conventional ship with a conventional opponent, and the opponent was matching Her—perhaps, with Foord’s careful penny pieces, more than matching Her. She was also something else, something which could make and encompass universes, and She had drawn on the second identity to meet the threat to the first. But that, Foord knew, would also threaten the second identity.

  They passed through Her universe like ghosts, unseeing and unseen. They were almost nothing: a movement of air, an echo, a deepening of colour. As they passed, their traces altered with the magnitude of what they passed through—a planet, a continent, a room.

  It contained random particles from them and Her, and multitudes from neither. It contained civilisations which grew and died in different galaxies at different times, without knowing each other. Some resembled the Commonwealth or the Sakhran Empire, and some were unimaginably different. Some were visited by an unidentified ship, and collapsed or declined after it left them. Some had an individual who wrote a book about what the ship was. Some sent an opponent to engage it singly.

  They saw no more of Her universe than it did of them. For seconds, and billions of years, they ghosted through it. Orders of magnitude. If it was a universe, they passed only six of its planets, in six different solar systems in six different galaxies, on the route She had set to bring them out at Sakhra. It was a short journey, less than the span of one grain of sand on a beach; and in the mere seconds and billions of years it lasted, Foord finally understood.

  I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote.

  •

  On an uninhabited planet of dark slate, their passing was an extra quiver in a column of smoke. The smoke rose from a hut standing by itself on the slopes of a mountain. Someone had come there, to live and die alone.

  On a grey-blue basalt planet their passing was a momentary darkening of one vein of mineral in a wall of cliffs.The cliffs were honeycombed with tunnels eaten into them by acid rain. They overlooked a beach.

  A tsunami was coming, nine hundred feet high and nine hundred miles an hour. It dragged the shallow water across the beach towards it. It sent a nine-hundred-mile-an-hour wind ahead of it, which tore through the tunnels in the cliffs and made them scream.

  In a room at the summit of a stone tower, their passing was a momentary deepening in the grain of a wooden floorboard. The room held the world’s last two living things, a father and daughter, opponents of an unspeakable theocracy. The theocracy had impregnated them with a cellular stasis field, which halted their ageing and even their need for sustenance; then, having made them almost immortal, it sentenced them to life imprisonment. If Foord had been able to see them, he would have remembered his own father’s old volume of King Lear: We’ll wear out, in a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.

  And they did. They lived to see, through barred windows, the extinction of their species. But they had become something else, and it no longer mattered to them.

  On a planet once visited by an unidentified ship, their passing was a small vortex of wind in a pile of dead leaves. It had been the first planet of a civilisation that spanned half a galaxy, and would have dwarfed the Commonwealth. The spires of its cities were so tall they pierced the ionosphere, and so numerous they made the planet look like a pincushion. They were still unblemished, centuries after they were built, each one standing in parkland. After the unidentified ship left, people had turned away from each other; they no longer lived in cities or visited parks, and were no longer people. Small vortexes of wind played among the dead leaves in the parks, like the ghosts of terriers.

  In a half-lit apartment, their passing was an unnoticed flicker in a lamp swinging from the ceiling. A couple had taken to meeting there, despite the sectarian and political forces ranged against them. Later they died, but their children founded a new society. It too died, but gradually and gracefully, and while it lived—hundredths of a second, and tens of thousands of years—it was glorious. Its systems of thought were so powerful that they lived on as ghosts, heard and seen in the dreams of the historians and chroniclers and archaeologists who sifted its ruins.

  Their passing was a moment’s dilation of an eye pupil in something which walked vast plains. It was a solitary carnivore with the same shape as the members of the herd it walked with. It had evolved the shape and smell and voice of herd members, so it could live among them. It would even help defend them against packs of other predators. It lived with them and outside them, and fed with them and on them.

  •

  I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote. Her universe died. In four minutes, not five as the Bridge screen had said, but four, it went from singularity to universe to singularity. It collapsed, and they came out of it at Sakhra.

  They cried out as the screen relit. It seemed months or years since they had last seen Sakhra. It pulsed before them as if lit by a naked swinging bulb, the main continent covering an entire hemisphere, the Great Bowl filling most of its interior. It looked like a giant eye.

  She was waiting. For the first and last time, She spoke directly.

  I almost love you, said Her words on the screen, in a cursive script like the one they thought they had seen spreading over Her earlier, but this time they could read it. I almost love you too, Foord thought, and almost love can almost never die.

  She moved to exactly one thousand six hundred and twelve feet from them and they resumed fighting, if that was what it was.

  •

  The two ships passed by Sakhra, well outside its orbit. Horus Fleet, in its careful defensive cordon, watched them pass. Faith carried a huge gash which had opened up two-thirds of Her port side, and the Charles Manson was covered in shit and striations and an apparent infection of boils where its dorsal hull surfaces had been attacked. They were throwing closeup weapons at each other when they emerged at Sakhra, and continued as they passed by and left its orbit and headed for the two inner planets, and neither of them gave Horus Fleet more than a glance. Horus Fleet made no move towards them and no attempt to contact them. They were gone.

  The
y approached the orbit of Horus 2, and it finished. There were nearly fifty impacts from missiles She had made, replicas of Foord’s two, which had been floating inert all around them. They hit every part of the Charles Manson, even the Bridge. It wasn’t Her private universe which had destroyed them, it was Her copy of Foord’s idea. Now, thought Foord, looking for his closest friend, I really do understand Sakhran irony. And he’s always been my closest friend.

  The damage they did to Her was enough; she consumed herself. She was not able to turn back and attack Sakhra. She limped off, and passed out of Horus system, and would never come back.

  Foord’s ship died like Jeeves would have died: carefully, ordering its affairs, collapsing tidily and progressively, informing survivors of the disposition of lifeboats. It had always been in Foord’s nature to wonder how Jeeves would have died.

  The Bridge was wrecked. Kaang and Smithson were unhurt, but Thahl had died instantly and Cyr lay on the floor amid wreckage and rubbish. Foord went to her, and held her in his arms. He’d never touched her before, except once, more than seven years ago, to shake hands when she joined his ship. Now they kissed, tongues and everything.

  Cyr looked up at him. “Almost,” she said, and died.

  PART NINE

  From the Second Book of Srahr, by Aaron Foord

  •

  “Almost,” she said. She could have meant the life we ought to have had together, or the engagement with Faith. The word works equally well for either.

  If she meant the life we ought to have had, then I won’t write about it here. It doesn’t belong here. If she meant the engagement with Faith, I think she was right; we almost defeated Her.

  •

  We never did see what they look like, but with hindsight it doesn’t matter. When you know what they do, what they look like becomes irrelevant. They do the work of gods, but they aren’t gods themselves.

  Maybe I should write about Her in the past tense. After all, the engagement is in the past: She went away from Sakhra because we damaged Her, and She won’t come back. But Her effect on us, like Her effect on the Sakhrans when She first visited them three hundred years ago, belongs in the present and will belong in the future. It won’t go away just because She went away. And there isn’t just one of Her. There will always be more Faiths: the universe has several of them. Every universe does.

  It was just before the end of the engagement, when everything ended for me, that I finally came to know what She is. And when I knew, I saw something else: a structure, made up of orders of magnitude. To describe what She is I must first describe the structure, because She’s part of it.

  Orders of magnitude. How many grains of sand on one beach? How many beaches on one planet? Planets in one galaxy? Galaxies in one universe? So, how many grains of sand in one universe? And how many universes? All those questions, except the last, have a finite answer. Only in the last question is the answer infinity. Or zero, which is the same thing turned inwards. In Sakhran mathematics they have the same symbol for infinity and zero: the srahr, so named when She first came here three hundred years ago.

  When Srahr wrote his Book and told them what She is, they saw it was true and accepted it. They still carry it within them like the code of an ancient disease. It told them they were almost nothing, that they had nowhere to turn except away from each other and nowhere to go except into regression and decline. Sometimes I think they were right, sometimes not. What Srahr wrote, and what I will write, has more than just darkness about it; there’s also a suggestion of infinity. The more you know, the more room there is for the unknown. Like something continually halving itself where the halves get bigger.

  The first part of what I write can be easily proved, because the orders of magnitude demonstrate it. They’re well known. Our galaxy’s magnitude relative to the universe is quite negligible, perhaps no more than the magnitude of an atom, and we’re only minor parts of the minor parts of that atom. We really are, in physical terms, almost nothing. And we can’t see the whole universe because it’s too big. Our encounter with Faith was only a momentary ripple in the lesser regions of one of its lesser galaxies.

  The next part can’t be objectively proved, but it’s what I finally saw as the engagement ended, and it fits all the observed data. When it comes to observed data, nobody since Srahr has observed Her more than me.

  •

  We fought Her through a solar system, and piece by piece I got to know Her, one new thing after another, though I never put all the pieces together until the very end. Her abilities are the key. Her abilities explain not only how, but why; they’re everything She is.

  Her abilities meant that She knew all Her opponents, past and present and future. That She knew them before they existed, and after She defeated them. That they were always part of Her and always would be.

  Her abilities meant that no system She attacked would ever defeat Her, and that every system She attacked would, after She left, sink into chaos or decline.

  Her abilities meant that She knew everything we were, all our motives and memories. She could put it all into silver replicas of us that were better than the originals, and then make us kill them. We recovered from that, but only just.

  Her abilities meant that She could send a second generation of replicas into the Bridge, my Bridge; replicas of what we were or might become, all misleading and all true. We never entirely recovered from that, though we did go on fighting Her somehow.

  Her abilities meant that She could influence us by creating events to which She knew, exactly, how we’d react. She did it so accurately that mere telepathy, or possession, wasn’t necessary. At times She seemed to know our thoughts before we did, but what She really knew was us.

  Her abilities meant that She could confuse and block our scanners and probes, letting them detect only what She wanted them to detect, and leaving them otherwise useless.

  Her abilities meant that She could change the building-blocks of matter, could create and re-create Her spiders and our replicas from silver liquid and white light; that She could take parts of Herself, and parts of us She’d collected, and convert them to energy to go on fighting even after the damage we’d done should have destroyed Her.

  Her abilities meant that She could control the basic laws of conversion of matter to energy, slow them down thousands of times to a steady state, and diffuse them through Herself. Rewrite the laws in Her own language.

  Her abilities meant that She could make a universe, apparently just for tactical reasons, and use its few minutes of life to move us and Herself through the Gulf to Sakhra.

  Her abilities enabled Her to outfight, outmanoeuvre, outthink and outperform every opponent She ever met or would ever meet: the next opponent and the next and the next, into eternity or for as long as the universe lasts.

  Her abilities were exactly what She would need if She was the universe’s own, official, designated antibody. I notice I’ve lapsed into the past tense. She is the universe’s own, official, designated antibody, and will be for eternity or for as long as the universe lasts.

  •

  I realized what She was just before the end of the engagement, when everything ended for me…. No, I shouldn’t say that, it’s what Smithson used to call self-indulgent. What ended was important to me personally, but it doesn’t belong here. I’ll start again.

  I realised what She was just before the end of the engagement. The only way Srahr could explain his conclusion, and the only way I can explain mine after fighting Her across a solar system, is that the orders of magnitude were not made for inanimate objects; they were made for living cells in a living body, for galaxies in a universe.

  The universe is a living thing, perhaps the final or even the only living thing. The only question is whether it’s also sentient; a question to which I’ll return presently.

  I don’t have the tone for this. The proper tone should be apocalyptic, or at least revelatory, but I’m incapable of either. I’ve learnt to see things differently n
ow, and all I see are multiple levels of irony; the result of being around Sakhrans for too long. So our galaxy is only a cell in a living body too large to see, and the body organises and defends and preserves itself, either consciously or blindly, against disease. Disease is an imbalance in one part of a body, something spreading too fast. Civilisations which spread across solar systems become diseases; they threaten an imbalance, so She visits them and leaves them in regression or chaos. Our engagement with Her, into which we poured everything we had, was only a momentary spasm in some minor organ, not even noticed unless the body is sentient; a question to which I’ll return presently.

  •

  So She’s the universe’s perfect, invincible instrument, yet we damaged Her so badly that She couldn’t go on to Sakhra. Does that mean we proved Her inadequate? Does that mean there will be another generation of antibodies to replace Her, even more beautiful and brilliant than She is?

  The universe made Her, but did it make Her consciously, or blindly? Could something like Her really be made blindly? Just reflexively secreted? Perhaps: antibodies and enzymes and secretions are made blindly, but if you see them as pieces of functional design, they’re as beautiful and brilliant as She is.