by John Meaney
A landscape of silver and black.
They had seen it all their lives: on the face of the largest moon floating overhead. And now they were upon it, and it was vast, as big as the World.
Slowly, slowly, the ship extruded a tongue-like ramp of its own. She had not communicated with them in coherent flux, but this message was clear. Or was this whole flight a senile interpretation of everyone’s wishes back at the dig site? She was so very old.
**What do we do?**
Old Ideas told of distant worlds that were airless, but this was different, and disconcerting: they could breathe, yet flux did not tumble through the air; it was attenuated to a faint echo of normality. There might be danger, but their course of action was obvious.
**We Seek.**
In a human chain, they walked down the ramp.
**A new world!**
Then the Seekers disengaged physical contact, leaving only Seeker-once-Harij and Zirkana holding hands. The fluxsilence was eerie.
When they looked back, the ship was unmoving. It seemed a promise that she would wait for them, though of course they might be wrong. But something winked on the distant mountainside, and a few heartbeats later, it did so again.
Nine Seekers and Zirkana felt the lure of new knowledge upon them.
It was time to Seek.
The passing of time was hard to reckon, but it took longer than a normal night to reach the black mountain. There was nothing to eat and nothing to drink as they trekked across silver sand, but Seekers were used to privation, and Zirkana was determined to match them. The closer they drew to the mountain, the more certain they were that buildings of some kind awaited them.
And so they did. Huge and ancient. Tall and shining, formed of obsidian and silver, all clean lines and cold beauty. Also empty, as if they had never been lived in.
Zirkana cast her opinion:
**There were never inhabitants.**
All ten were holding hands at that point, considering what to do next.
**Never? Then who built them?**
In a polished, bare hall, they turned in circles, overwhelmed by the structure.
**A ship, or something like it. Something that went ahead.** Seeker-once-Harij stared up at a high arch, considering this.
**Why would it build them, my love?**
**For us to live in.**
**Surely that’s not—**
**I mean our ancestors. The ship was supposed to carry them here, to Magnus.**
The Seekers were unsure.
**You really think it’s the Ark?**
**You really think it isn’t?**
But as they searched amid the polished magnificence, it was the absence of food and drink that was growing in their minds: so mundane a detail, but without supplies there could be no exploration. Zirkana would not let them set off early because of her; but soon enough, the Seekers, experienced wanderers all, were in agreement. They had reached the cut-off point, beyond which returning to the ship was dangerous.
**We’ll come back with supplies. Plenty of them.**
**You think the ship will carry us back and forth from the World?**
**What else does it have to do?**
Perhaps it was true – perhaps even a ship needed a purpose in life. The thought made it easier to abandon the empty, unexplored buildings and begin the reverse trek, steadily moving across glistening sand, plodding antiparallel to their own footprints. There was always the possibility that the ship would have decided not to wait; but they had trusted her, and she remained in view as they approached.
Finally, on board, they sank down on the metallic deck, hamstrings aching, ankles sore, and waited for something to happen. But nothing did.
**Ship. Take us home.**
The opening did not seal up. There was no thrum of power to whatever mechanisms allowed the ship to fly; only her steady background hum remained, as if she were waiting for something. But whatever it was, they could not give it to her.
Desperately, the Seekers tried geometrically intricate flux patterns and every trick of rhetoric they knew, but nothing produced a response from the ancient vessel. Perhaps she really was senile; perhaps she had finally completed her original mission – as she saw it – and was resting here until she died.
No one railed at her for long. Fatigue and hunger were met-amorphosing into lethargy, and soon enough they would be unable to do anything as their bodies shut down and that was that: the end of them. But they were Seekers, and one Seeker’s wife, and they could summon composure if nothing else.
Eight Seekers sat cross-legged in a circle, hands joined as they entered flux-trance, chins on chests and drooping forwards as their strength failed, sinking fast inside themselves, preparing. Lying apart from them, Seeker-once-Harij and Zirkana clasped each other, merging their thoughts.
**I love you.**
But death would soon be here.
Whether Seeking carried with it a sense of fatalism, Zirkana could not quite say, but she alone roused herself at the tiniest pinprick of distant energies, of disturbance propagated only faintly through the insulating medium of air, this strange dead air that Magnus possessed. She squeezed Seeker-once-Harij, who roused himself – it would be so easy to slip back into sleep – and forced himself to move, to shake the other Seekers into wakefulness.
And slowly, painfully, to shuffle to the exit and down the ramp.
Standing on the silver sand, they watched a huge vessel – or was it a creature? – move slowly in the night sky. Then, with twin bursts of pure white light, two more craft burst into being. All three bore some kind of resemblance to the ancient ship that brought them here; but they were different also, slowly morphing in shape, uncurling external tendrils, billowing gently.
From them, streams of bubbles began to descend.
**What are they, Harij?**
**I don’t know, my love.**
But each bubble, as it approached the ground, clearly contained a person. Or rather, a near human lacking silver skin. Seeker-once-Harij felt none of the panic that he experienced with the other soft-skinned beings – no sense of abomination, of that inhuman group mind – and Seeker-once-captive looked equally calm. That was good, because it took the last of their energy simply to stand here and wait.
For whatever was about to happen.
Each bubble, as it touched the sand, dissolved. Its former occupant walked clear. When there were some thirty folk gathered, they walked slowly forward, approaching the Seekers and Zirkana; and then they halted.
Seeker-once-Harij cast a greeting.
Two of the strangers moved their mouths in an odd fashion. One had ordinary human eyes (perhaps lacking protective membrane) despite the soft skin; the other’s eyes were pure black: polished obsidian.
**Communication.**
That was the oldest Seeker, searching his memory for Ideas, then touching each of his fellows in turn with his fingertips, sharing his thinking: words without flux, nevertheless cast upon the air. But the two newcomers looked to be thinking equally hard, blinking as if at sights only they could see – and suddenly the black-eyed stranger, surely a woman, raised her hand and a silvery mist spread outwards – from her ring, Seeker-once-Harij thought – and spanned the gap between her and the nine Seekers plus Zirkana.
This time, when her mouth moved, the mist came alive with blazing flux.
**GREETINGS!**
The Seekers staggered, and Seeker-once-Harij tripped and fell backwards, thumping into the ground. Zirkana went down on one knee beside him, but he was laughing; and after a moment, she was laughing too.
Seeker-once-captive managed to keep composure and reply.
**Greetings.**
But they were all smiling, even the soft-skinned beings, even the ones standing well back. This was a strange world and they did not know each other, but there was a sense only of warmth, of the possibility of friendship; and so long as no one did anything stupid, that was how things would proceed. Seeker-once-Harij was sure of it.
>
The World was going to be different now.
TWENTY-FIVE
NULAPEIRON, 2604-2657 AD
For fifty-three years, the system self-identified as Kenna was immobile. It existed as a network of components embedded in a wall deep inside Palace Avernon, itself located in the Primum Stratum of Demesne Avernon, some hundred metres below ground. Then, towards the end of that fifty-third year, Kenna decided that it was female once more.
Her internal computation had upgraded with the addition of neuropeptide-analogues, so that she manifested emotional cognition, the gut-think which comprises a huge portion of human neural processing; and that meant it was time to begin reconfiguring herself into a human personality. Choosing a gender was a major step, so she searched the standard human classification that reduced the choice to only thirty-five options; from among them she picked a feminine-tough trope-complex not dissimilar to the former Rhianna Chiang.
The old Duke Avernon, the first and best of them, would have approved of her choice.
‘Fear is literally felt in the stomach,’ he had told her once, ‘and heartache in the heart. Peptide flow in organs forms the third nervous system. Descartes would have got it right,’ he had added, ‘if he’d said cogito capioque, ergo sum. From capere, meaning to feel, experience, charm and suffer. A fetching semantic spectrum, don’t you think?’
She missed the Duke, such a contrast to the grandson ruling now. Lord Dalgen Avernon (his father had relinquished duchy status, to reduce the demesne’s tax liability) of the flighty mind and political ambition, saw himself as worldly-wise, rather than simply worldly.
Or so she thought until she watched him poring over the spacedrone experiment results, the laboratory chambers filled with holo diagrams, with billowing phase-spaces and five-dimensional lattices of linked, glowing equations. Her pseudo-face was embedded in the wall of the largest chamber, but over the years, this Avernon had grown to think of her as a decorative mounted sculpture rather than a cognitively functional, though immobile, cyborg.
She encouraged that notion by remaining silent during his devious political planning sessions.
This new experimental work, however, was based on log osophical research initiated by Avernon’s forebears and continued by current members of l’Academia Ultima, which sometimes lived up to its name. The investigation harked back to the old mystery of time’s arrow, to the time symmetry of ‘fundamental’ equations describing the natural universe, and their failure to identify the three aspects of timeflow: the moving reality of past, present and future. But the work was not just theory and laboratory experiments.
Something odd was happening in the vicinity of Nulapeiron.
The initial results had come from experiments on board drones placed in orbits of different radii around Nulapeiron, orbits chosen almost at random. Some of the results matched predictions, but others showed strange yet consistent deviations. To investigate, the researchers had commissioned more spacedrones – something most people in Nulapeiron would not dream of, given their mental blindspots regarding the uninhabitable surface, never mind what laid beyond – until there were shoals of the things, orbiting at all sorts of distances from the surface, allowing a clear mapping of the phenomenon.
Producing unambiguous readings, but not understanding.
The heart of it was a set of reactions in the spacedrones’ cores, which produced the usual spray of short-lived particles and resonances – so far, so good. But in some locations, there were too many kaons extant. Unexciting to the average person, deeply troubling to the researchers.
An imbalance occurred strongly within a kilometre-wide shell some hundred thousand kilometres from the centre of Nulapeiron; outside of that shell, subatomic reality behaved as normal. But for seven hundred years, that normality had been known to possess an inexplicable feature.
‘Take an electron moving forward in time,’ Kenna remembered one of Rhianna Chiang’s childhood teachers saying, ‘and try to distinguish it from the behaviour of a positron moving backwards in time – and you’ll find there is no difference, so how can you decide which it really is? It follows logically – and is actually true – that subatomic reactions are reversible in time.’
The teacher had shown footage of a smashed egg leaping up into someone’s hand and spontaneously reforming.
‘You know I’m showing this in reverse. But only vast collections of particles, like the number of atoms required to make up an egg, show timeflow in their larger structure. At the atomic or subatomic level, footage going forwards or backwards is equally likely.’
At an early age, Pilots were expected to understand time-flow as an emergent property. But there was a twist in the tail regarding realspace, and if an equivalent was unknown in mu-space, that might be only because Labyrinth’s researchers had not found it yet.
Because of the startling exception to the rule: neutral kaons and their opposite-spin antiparticles appear to know the difference between past and future. Seven centuries of data backed up that observation.
Now the present Lord Avernon was looking at readings that appeared to show a K° imbalance in the wrong direction, as though time itself were wobbling, as if the present were threatening to flow from the future into the past.
And if he were the one to monopolise the technology accruing from this phenomenon, not only would Demesne Avernon be a duchy once more, he would become a Lord Primus and probably—
‘Father! My Lord!’
—have better servitors, ones who would know to bar his over energetic son from his private laboratory chambers, even if he had not issued instructions to that effect.
‘What is it?’ He gestured the holos into non-existence, because the boy was bright and you never knew what he might notice. ‘Tell me there’s a good reason for this outburst.’
‘More an inburst, surely,’ said young Alvin. ‘But we’ve a visitor and you’ll never guess what he is.’
‘You’re right, I won’t guess. Just tell me.’
Alvin looked disappointed for a moment; then he gushed: ‘His name is Caleb de Vries and Mother’s talking to him in the Great Hall and he’s a Pilot, Father. A Pilot!’
If people, deep in their underground strata, rarely thought about the planet’s surface, then they had almost forgotten about mu-space and the Pilots who had brought their fore-bears here. Nor was this a culture that had come about by accident; deliberate design ran through customs, politics and language. But of course the Lords and Ladies still, on occasion, dealt with Pilots as required.
So long as the others, the servitors and commonfolk, forgot about the rest of inhabited space, that was good enough. Isolationism was a tool for social engineering, not an end in itself.
Today was nevertheless doubly unusual. Kenna, observing, felt an unexpected excitement.
It had been so very long since she had seen a Pilot.
Pilot deVries stood in formal jumpsuit, black edged with gold, with a knee-length black cape that was more than a simple garment: it could if necessary become shield or weapon. For an offworlder, he made a decent job of the nuances in bowing to the correct angle, with leg turned correctly, as Lord Avernon entered the Great Hall. The Lady, from her ornate chair, smiled approval.
‘My Lord,’ said deVries. ‘Lady Suzanne was just pointing out your grandfather’s work.’ He gestured at the holoscape showing in an alcove. ‘A deliberate unbalancing of the golden ratio to produce a visual momentum, combined with a fractal dimension of 1.66 throughout.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ answered Avernon. ‘My Lady is privy to more than art appreciation.’
It was an indirect way of indicating he could discuss business.
‘Pardon my intrusion,’ said deVries. ‘I gather that you lodged interest in commissioning a voyage, before the Lords Major at the Regional Convocation.’
The high point of that Convocation, some fifty days past, had been the upraise of a servitrix to noble status, by virtue of her enormous self-discipline in using every educationa
l opportunity available, and her superlative work. Now she ruled her own demesne in Penrhyl Provincia: a shining example for every commoner, except that upraise occurred maybe twice a century, no more.
But most of the actual work done during Convocation had been the usual – trade negotiations, strengthening or reshaping political alliances – during which Avernon had indeed lodged a discreet request.
‘Not exactly a mercantile voyage.’ Avernon’s tone lightened. ‘More along the lines of logosophical investigation.’
‘My Lord?’
‘I’m looking for a sequence of short flights in ever-wider orbits of Nulapeiron. Additional data to build on spacedrone investigations we’ve already carried out.’
(In Kenna’s judgement, the we in that sentence was unjustified.)
‘The details are in here,’ added Avernon, holding out an infocrystal. ‘Will you be able to carry out the work?’
Pilot deVries took the crystal and scanned it with his tu-ring. ‘Absolutely, my Lord.’
‘Then we’re done here.’
‘My Lord.’
As deVries bowed out, his obsidian eyes turned to an ordinary looking patch of wall that formed one of Kenna’s thousands of covert optical sensors, and then he winked. Inside herself, Kenna laughed: Pilots were as sharp as ever.
In contrast, Avernon had forgotten or never bothered to realise that Kenna’s distributed presence reached this far.
‘Pilots.’ Lady Suzanne continued to stare at the grand door-way after deVries had exited. ‘Are we still so dependent on them?’
‘Not so much,’ said Avernon. ‘But what would it be like, my Lady, if you could perceive events that were to come? How much power would accrue from such an ability?’
‘None at all, my Lord, if what you saw was your own ruin.’
Avernon blinked several times.
(And again, Kenna was amused.)
‘I’d be interested,’ Lady Suzanne added, ‘in how one might engineer such a thing.’
‘It’s, um, early stages yet.’
‘And when do you foresee those ideas maturing?’ Then she laughed and placed her palm on Avernon’s arm. ‘Forgive me, love. I’m only teasing.’