by Tim Pratt
Callie looked down at the eye-wateringly bright electric blue of the suit. “What do you mean? I’m a winter, right?”
“Just because your heart is cold doesn’t make you a winter. You’d look good in, oh, burnt orange.”
“I’d look like a human-pumpkin hybrid, you monster.”
“My delicious pumpkin monster.” Elena squeezed her hand through Callie’s glove. “Be careful over there, and stay in touch.”
“The point is for me to be stealthy, so I doubt I’ll be doing a lot of talking, but I’ll be all right. The truth-tellers won’t be on the lookout for an invisible human.”
Elena kissed Callie before she put on her helmet, “in case you die over there.”
“Thanks for that.” The suit fit Callie well – it was custom made to fit her measurements as of a couple of years ago, and remained close enough – but it was still a full-body environment suit, a little bulky and clunky by definition, so she wouldn’t be doing yoga poses or cartwheels. She switched on the active camouflage, and the blue shimmered as the micro-projectors all over the suit and helmet came online to mimic her background. “Can you see me?” Callie said.
“A little, but only because I know to look for the shimmer, like you taught me.”
Callie thought of the possibly hallucinatory shimmers she’d glimpsed on the Golden Spider and the White Raven in recent weeks, but pushed the idea out of her mind. She had to focus on the mission now. “Liar eyesight isn’t as acute as human, unless they make an effort to upgrade, but they’re better at sensing vibrations.” She turned on the sound-dampeners, and stomped her boots and clapped her gloved hands together a foot from Elena’s face. She didn’t respond. Callie had never been clear on how the sound thing worked – something about creating sound waves that countered the ones she created, so the net result was no waves at all? During testing she’d been more interested in sneaking up on people and kicking them in the back of the knees than listening to the technical explanations.
She switched the dampeners and camouflage off, shimmering back into view. “Seems operational. Let’s go steal some secrets. And maybe the front door code into the Axiom facility, if we’re lucky.”
The Liar space station was shaped like a starfish, a common shape for their structures. This one had seven arms radiating from a central hub, and cylindrical rings intersecting the arms to take advantage of spin gravity… not that it was spinning right now, which was odd.
“That’s not the only strange thing,” Lantern said. “There are no ships here.” She gestured to the viewscreen, and Janice zoomed in on a few domed bulges on the central hub. “Just those short-range single-seat pods, the kind we use for escape, and for boarding enemy vessels. Where are the ships?”
“Let’s find out,” Callie said.
They went down to the belly of the ship and boarded the canoe, Lantern taking the controls while Callie activated her camouflage. The canoe dropped from the White Raven and made the short trip to the Liar station, docking easily at the end of one of the starfish arms. “Let’s see if they open the door,” Lantern said.
They waited, and waited, and Callie was about to call for Shall to come over in his hull repair drone to cut a hole in the airlock, when the hatch finally irised open with a hiss. Lantern scuttled through, Callie following close behind, invisible – or as close as technology could make her.
The inner airlock door opened when Lantern pressed a button, and they stepped onto the station, thumping to the floor when they hit the artificial gravity.
Lantern thumped, anyway; Callie didn’t make a sound, thanks to her suit. “That’s strange,” Lantern murmured into her comms. “We almost never turn on the artificial gravity on truth-teller stations. Even having it installed is controversial within the sect – you know we limit our use of Axiom technology, lest humans stumble upon it. Artificial gravity is supposed to be for emergencies only, to facilitate repairs if the station is damaged, or to disable intruders by flattening them against the floor with heavier gravity. Maybe the station was harmed? It’s not spinning, but I don’t see any signs of damage.”
Callie silently agreed. She’d been on a truth-teller station before, but only one that had been battered by a pirate attack. This station was pristine: all the lights glowed softly, the shining floors gleamed, and the walls and low ceilings were carved with repeating figures of Liars in various poses – probably conveying all kinds of information via body language that was opaque to Callie.
“Hello?” Lantern called through her artificial voicebox. Liars often preferred to communicate in human languages even amongst themselves, especially when they were in space or communicating at a distance, since it was easier to convey nuance without body language or pheromones in those tongues. There was no reply, and no one came to meet them.
They went down the long corridor of the starfish arm until they reached another door, and then onward to the center of the base. There was a ring hallway that ran around the perimeter of the hub, with doors set at regular intervals, some of them open, and they looked inside: sleeping quarters, an armory, what looked like a media room, a few work spaces with terminals and screens designed for Liar anatomy. There were no cultists in sight, though, and the whole station had an abandoned, almost haunted-house feel. One of the doors was larger and more ornate than the rest, with an arched door of some shimmering, iridescent metal. “The elder’s quarters,” Lantern said, probably for Callie’s benefit, though she could have guessed.
Lantern pressed a button next to the door, and a moment later, it slid open.
The interior was similar to the inner sanctum Callie had seen on the station in the (feh) Jovian system: palatial and ornate. The floor was made of that same iridescent material, the ceiling was vaulted, and pillars carved with figures of Liars stood at irregular intervals, each column glowing with an inner light to illuminate the room. A large bowl-shaped water tank stood in the center of the space, and a huge Liar, easily three times as big as Lantern, splashed over to the side and hauled himself partway out of the tank, gazing at them over the rim. The last elder Callie had met had worn ceremonial garb and assorted jewelry and marks of office, but this one was naked, pseudopods dangling lazily in the water. He had well over a dozen eyes, scattered seemingly at random all over the central dome, and they all had different colored irises, blue and gold and green and red.
“Elder Trogidae,” Lantern said. “Praise to the masters. I am Elder Lantern.”
“Praise.” The voice boomed from the walls, and the ceiling – the elder’s artificial voicebox must be hooked into the station’s public address system. “Welcome, Elder Lantern. Sent by the central authority to check up on me, I assume? It was bound to happen.” He paused, spun one hundred-eighty degrees in the pool, and now looked at Lantern with a single yellow eye, as big as a saucer. “Aren’t you a bit young to be an elder?”
“I am, though not the youngest recorded. I had what you might term a battlefield promotion. Most of my cell was killed in the course of recovering a bridge generator discovered by a group of humans. The elders died around the same time, in a pirate attack – given the diminished staff on the station, they were unable to repel the invaders without taking substantial losses. Elder Mizori had been grooming me for a leadership position, and inducted me into the mysteries in her final moments.”
“Gave you the codes to her computer system, you mean, so you could educate yourself.”
“As you say, elder. The central authority ratified me soon after, at any rate.”
“I’ve heard of you. You watch over the Jovian system, don’t you? Birthplace of the human infestation. Is it a difficult post?”
“I find it amenable.”
“I heard about all that… business, with the bridge generator. I found it very surprising. There are no works by the great masters within light years of that system, and yet, humans appeared there with a sacred artifact. The humans are a pestilence, aren’t they? Always going where they shouldn’t. It’s a shame
it was deemed impractical to exterminate them.”
Callie gritted her teeth.
“As you say, elder,” Lantern said again. She was usually polite. “I offered to check on your cell, since you missed multiple scheduled check-ins?”
“You wriggled your pseudopod as if that were a question, child. But I heard no query.”
“Elder, not child,” Lantern said sharply, and Callie was impressed. Lantern was normally as mild as milk.
“Of course. My apologies. You deserve the title in recognition of rank… if not age or experience. Was there a question?”
“It was clearly implied, I thought, elder, but I will make it explicit: why did you stop reporting to the central authority?”
“There was nothing to report. There will be nothing to report, rather, and as I always found the process of compiling those coded messages tedious, I stopped sending them a bit earlier than dictated by necessity.”
“Yet you communicated with me.”
“You came all this way. If I’d ignored you, you would have cut your way onto my home. This seemed simpler.”
“You spoke to me without our sect’s… customary discretion, though.”
“Secrecy only matters when there is a future to keep those secrets in.”
Lantern waved her pseudopods in frustration. “You seem to enjoy being mysterious.”
“This surprises you? Did you think I joined a secret cult within another secret cult because I’m such a great believer in transparency and forthrightness?”
“I require direct answers. Our superiors demand them. Where is the rest of your cell? What happened here?”
Elder Trogidae gave another lazy, contented spin in the pool of liquid. “Ah, the others. I was the only initiate of the inner mysteries here, did you know that? Until recently this was an uneventful post, and hardly needed much in the way of oversight. True, there is a great work of the masters nearby – have you seen it? It’s beautiful – but there were only a handful of humans in the vicinity, close to the nearest star, working tirelessly to transform the planet into a more comfortable habitation. They were focused entirely inward, rather than outward, and never ventured farther than the asteroid belt around their system – they seldom went as far as that. Alas, it’s become so much more crowded now that they finished their terraforming. So many more humans to worry about.”
“You could have sent for more assistance,” Lantern said.
“No, no. I liked the devotees I had. They knew just how I liked my meals, exactly what temperature to make the water in my meditation tank, the tone and timbre of the ritual chants that least displeased my highly developed aesthetic sense, the proper way to massage my limbs. They were good children. That’s why I sent them to such a glorious reward.”
“What reward?”
“They fuel the dream.”
Chapter 22
The elder clambered out of the tank, slopping water everywhere, and languidly dragged himself toward an alcove on the far wall. Callie moved a few steps to the left so she could keep an eye on him, just in case he went for a weapon. He didn’t: he stood in an alcove, forced air blowing across his body to dry him, and then pulled on a sort of robe made of silky black fabric before scuttling back out, moving closer to Lantern.
“Whose dream?” Lantern said.
“The Dream,” Trogidae said. Callie caught the proper-name emphasis this time. “The Dream is the great work of the masters here. The secret only I know. That vast station of the masters, floating between here and the system the humans have occupied? It is the engine of the Dream. Of all the long, slow projects of the masters, the Dream is the most noble, and the most glorious. The slumbering masters there are creating the future, Elder Lantern.”
Callie scowled and clenched her fists. The kind of future the Axiom wanted to create wasn’t a future anyone else would want to live in – or be allowed to live in.
Trogidae continued to rhapsodize. “How can you create the future if you can’t imagine it?” Hadn’t Sebastien said something similar to her, when she was in the Hypnos with him? “The Dream is a place for the great masters to test their various schemes and stratagems – a virtual world where they can control every variable. Everything within the Dream is theirs to control, and in that place, they perform great experiments, and plan for the future. The world within the Dream seems absolutely real to them, and this faction of the masters has lived there for tens of thousands of years, refining and perfecting their visions.”
The Dream sounds like the Hypnos, Callie thought. A fancy alien version of the same virtual reality humans use for schooling and gaming and porn.
“I imagine that the masters might someday be able to overwrite this reality with the reality of the Dream.” A happy-sounding sigh rustled from the speakers in the ceiling and walls. “Wouldn’t that be glorious? For the visions of the masters to become real in the physical world?”
“Praise the masters,” Lantern said in a perfunctory way. “What are they… dreaming about?”
“Things more amazing than the pitiful, limited mind of a servant like myself could possibly imagine, I’m sure.”
“But if it’s a virtual world, then what is the swarm doing? Why is it devouring all the matter in the system?”
“The swarm? Ah. You refer to the gatherers. They are servants of the masters, too – they reach out from within the Dream to touch this world directly. I only wish I had their clarity of mission.”
“Yes, fine, the gatherers, but why are they gathering?”
“Even infinite dreamworlds can become cramped, elder,” Trogidae said. “We have seen this happen before, though not for many centuries – the gatherers go out, and bring back matter, and convert that matter into dreaming crystals.”
“You mean… computronium? Programmable matter? Those huge rings, they’re… just vast computers, running the masters’ virtual reality program?”
“The way you explain it lacks poetry, Elder Lantern. You have been living too close to humans for too long.”
“So when the Dream reaches its computational limit and needs more processing power, they send out the gatherers to pillage local systems for material,” Lantern said.
“So it has been, and so it will always be – until the masters waken from their slumber and bring their Dream to life. This new expansion is the largest yet – each is larger than the last, by orders of magnitude, as their needs seem to grow exponentially. To complete the latest ring of dreaming crystals, the gatherers will need to consume the planet the humans spent so much time changing, along with a fair portion of the asteroid belt, at a minimum.”
“Oh, no,” Lantern said. Callie, standing invisibly nearby, clenched her teeth and both fists. “When you said you sent the rest of your cell to fuel the dream – you sent them into the swarm?”
“I sent them to be gathered, Elder Lantern, so their feeble bodies might serve to glorify our masters. It is a great honor. The very particles of their bodies were transformed into dreaming crystals: they will hold the visions of the masters in their own cells.”
“Did they go… willingly?”
“I told you,” Trogidae snapped. “They weren’t initiates into the inner mysteries. They believed their only purpose was to keep the Axiom from being disturbed – to protect the humans from the masters, instead of the reverse. When the Dream began to expand again, the gatherers moved in the direction of the planet the humans occupied. I had long predicted such a possibility – they’d already gathered most of the available mass in the vicinity, after all. The junior members of the cell wanted to send a delegation to the Dream engine! They wanted to try to switch off the gatherers, before they reached the humans. To save them, and prevent the discovery of the engine. The children knew I’d studied the engine for years, and believed I had knowledge that would allow them to approach safely, without triggering the engine’s defenses.”
“Do you?”
“Of course I do. But I didn’t give it to them. I told them to transmi
t a certain sequence of digits on a certain frequency, and they would be protected, but I just gave them random data. I sent them all, every child from my cell – I told them it was too important, too vital a mission, to leave anyone behind – and of course, they never returned. They were transformed. They were blessed.”
“You’ve lost your senses,” Lantern said. “The whole purpose of our sect is to keep the Axiom a secret – to keep anyone from disturbing their work! What do you think will happen when an entire human colony planet is devoured?”
“I think the other humans will be afraid.” Trogidae moved closer quickly, looming over Lantern, an act of physical intimidation that made Callie want to plant a boot in the elder’s side. “When the Taliesen system goes silent, and humans eventually come to see what happened to them, and the planet is simply gone, vanished without a trace? This will become a haunted system. A cautionary tale. An object lesson, teaching those vermin: do not explore. Do not push into the dark, or you will die. You will die and vanish utterly. You say I’ve lost my senses!” The elder lashed out with a pseudopod and struck Lantern, sending her tumbling. Callie raised her arm to fire a tranquilizer dart, at the very least, at the elder, but then Lantern struggled upright, and Callie held off.
“I am brilliant!” Trogidae bellowed. “The humans will huddle in their other systems, terrified, wondering if the fate that befell Taliesen might befall them. This will become a forbidden system, the bridgehead sealed off, just like Vanir – which I hope has also become deadly thanks to the glorious work of the masters. It is a shame we lost contact with the cell there so long ago – it would be nice to have confirmation. At any rate, I am not violating the purpose of our sect – I am epitomizing that purpose. By allowing Owain to be devoured, I am protecting the Dream definitively. I’ll make sure no human ever dares venture here again.”
You don’t know much about humans, Callie thought.
“You fail to understand humans,” Lantern said. “Your assumptions are wrong. I have observed them, closely, for all my years, in the system where they are most numerous. Humans, on the whole, do not run from danger. They do not hide from mysteries. Oh, there are individual exceptions, but as a rule, cautionary tales mean nothing to them. If Owain disappears, they will want to know why, and they will come, and they will investigate, and they will find the Dream. They might even destroy it.”