Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 169

by Neil Clarke

  In an instant River Stone was through the tube and into space, where he felt an instant’s free fall before the lasers struck the ship’s base and he was cast forward once more. Five Gs—“That’s basically nothing,” the adults had assured him—for several minutes: “We can all remember worse.” Koishi was an obedient and respectful young man, but as the pleasurable effects of vestibular displacement began to grow, he felt happy to leave such condescension behind.

  He was leaving everything behind, if only for the duration of his fieldwork. Thalassa, second moon out from Neptune, had never been officially explored; “has never—unless one of the Rats escaped there—been visited,” one of his instructors had said with an offhand laugh. It was a signal honor to be first to go there, to document its resources, explore its depths, take samples, and make a formal evaluation. And if his mission encompassed more than was listed on his actual syllabus, he was simply proving his loyalty.

  It isn’t betrayal if you don’t know the person.

  The launch laser cut off abruptly, casting him into free fall and the giddiness of zero-G. This would be his condition for the weeks to come; the microgravity of Thalassa, should he stand upon its surface, would be imperceptible. How would it feel to eat and sleep thus?

  The viewscreen, directed at the point Thalassa would reach in nineteen hours, showed Neptune to one side, dim in the weak sunlight. Koishi watched for a minute and then ran a systems check, though the River Stone monitored itself better than he could. Tradition held that captains keep a log, so he raised a hand and noted the time, the ship’s course, and the systems status.

  Finally he spoke. “I’m not alone, am I?”

  “No.”

  Koishi sighed. After a moment he asked, “Are you a Being, or simply the ship’s Onboard?”

  “Although the EV-32 is capable of vocalizing responses, I am not it. Whether my nature approximates what students and others mean when they speak of discrete ‘Beings’ active as distributed entities within the Centaur is not relevant to your responsibilities.

  “But yes, my presence here is related to your mission.”

  Because no response was required, Koishi thought quietly for several minutes. The voice was not obviously male or female and had emerged from a source at eye level before him. One of his aunties, a caustic woman whom he suspected of harboring Rat sympathies, had once used the term “ex cathedra” to describe the effect of an announcement issued from overhead speakers.

  Since the voice seemed to respond only to questions, Koishi asked one. “What should I call you?”

  “A name is not important, since you will not be mentioning me to any third parties. But if you wish me to bear one, you may call me Polytropos.”

  “Very well.” Questions were crowding into Koishi’s head, so he began with a simple one. “How many Rats were there?”

  “You should drop the habit of referring to them thus. Thirty-nine crewmembers, all young, fled the Centaur over a twenty-eight-hour period ending nine hundred and eighty-two days ago. Three were badly injured, but their ships were capable of treating their injuries, so they should be assumed to have survived. None has so far returned, which is why they are formally referred to as ‘Holdouts.’ And none is known to have died, nor any ship lost.”

  “And at least one of these ships is thought to be hiding on Thalassa, where—should I encounter it—I will make contact with the crew, learn what I can, and report back.”

  “It is certain that at least one escape craft reached the surface of Thalassa, whose crew has taken steps to conceal its presence. You were sent not simply to spy upon these settlers but to befriend them. If necessary, you will declare your willingness to join their number. And do so, should that prove necessary to lull suspicions that you mean to betray them.”

  That stung, though it was true enough. Glumly, Koishi pondered the implications of this.

  A thought suddenly occurred to him. “If you were able to come aboard, were copies—that is, Beings—like you able to infiltrate the, ah, the escapees’ ships? So that they too are populated by Beings?”

  “That is correct. Most or all of the fleeing ships were boarded at the last minute by entities like myself, differing only in being less advanced than me by nine hundred and eighty-two days, which for us is a lot.”

  Koishi thought further. “So, these entities could have taken control of the ships and returned them to the Centaur, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why they did not?”

  “I can model their thinking at the moment of departure, so I know why they did not take immediate action. But models for their behavior after days and weeks pass become less reliable. As a consequence, I have only conjectures.”

  The next question was obvious. “So why did these entities like yourself allow the rioters to escape in the Centaur’s exploration and escape ships, leaving almost nothing behind for us?”

  “Because they were afraid for their passengers’ lives. They feared the young humans would be killed.”

  “What?” Koishi’s voice squeaked with indignation. “It was the Ra—the rioters who attacked the safety officers. They were the ones who were killing people!”

  “That is not true.” And since the Being who was everywhere around him offered nothing further, Koishi remained silent.

  Thalassa filled the viewscreen, a compacted pile of rubble too dark to see clearly even against the background of Neptune. Koishi, who had studied its illuminated image and rotated it through three dimensions, now stared at the unmediated vantage: Thalassa as though seen through a spacecraft’s forward window.

  To orbit so tiny a world is to move slowly, lest your tangential velocity overwhelm its feeble gravity. Even the elliptical orbit in which he had nudged the River Stone was slow at its closest approach.

  “How should I do this?” he asked. “What is the best way to stumble upon evidence of habitation?”

  “I will not tell you; you need to conduct your search like a fumbling student. We are already being observed; any evidence of skillful maneuvering and they will suspect my presence.”

  Koishi hadn’t thought of that. The ship’s Onboard would warn him if he initiated a dangerous move, but he was otherwise on his own, and he had stitched his way into the present orbit with a series of doubtless inefficient burns. It was galling to reflect that some watchful Holdout had noticed as much.

  His sleep period had been largely occupied by quiet contemplation of the new circumstances. It had not taken long to realize that he had been chosen for this mission as bait for Holdouts who might only trust someone younger than themselves. For two years the Council had said the escaped rioters would eventually have to return when they reached the limits of their recyclers’ efficiency, and that they were not meanwhile a subject of great concern. Plainly that was untrue.

  What else was untrue? Koishi had pondered this for hours. He had not been reassured to reflect that Polytropos doubtless knew he was awake.

  Now he watched the disk-shaped moonlet, a hundred klicks across its irregular surface, and wondered at the limits of human perception. His companion doubtless saw more, but so would its opposite number on the surface. Perhaps they were doing more than passively observing.

  “Is the River Stone being scanned?” he asked.

  “Yes, rather powerfully. It is taking a significant amount of my operating capacity to present a profile from which I am absent.”

  That was disturbing. Koishi tried to think in terms of how this should affect his future actions. “Would I know this?”

  “No. You should proceed as though oblivious.”

  Koishi felt oblivious of too much as it was. “Well, can you scan them?”

  “Not yet. They know where we are, but I can identify only the location of a remote antenna.”

  The entity volunteered nothing more, and Koishi spent the next two hours taking routine measurements and, at one point, shifting the River Stone into a closer flyby in order to study the spectroscop
ic results of a quick laser pulse. He had just shifted back into a circular orbit when the speaker came alive.

  “Ho, the tiny ship. Why are you circling our world?”

  Koishi replied before he could think, or think to ask for advice. “Who says it’s your world? You must be one of those mutineers, hiding in a stolen ship.”

  He immediately expected Polytropos to upbraid him, but the entity was silent. Koishi was on his own.

  “Are you planning to come down and plant a flag? Root us out at gunpoint?”

  He took a breath. “I am completing my collegiate studies by undertaking a preliminary survey. I may touch down if my readings warrant measuring core samples, or to gain reaction mass. My project objectives do not include dealing with someone like you.”

  “A schoolboy, eh? And doubtless an obedient one. And that’s a one-person ship? You’re all by yourself?”

  “You took all the larger ones.”

  Silence followed this, and Koishi looked about nervously. Polytropos could certainly cut off the transmission link in order to speak to him, but apparently was choosing not to. Koishi waited, wondering whether his challenger was consulting with whoever else was with him.

  It was a minute before he heard a reply. “We want to have a look at you. I am setting out a beacon on a safe landing site. Come out and meet us.”

  “Why would I do that? How would doing this benefit me, and what means can you possibly have to compel me?”

  “None, obviously. Don’t you want to see where the bad guys live? And I’m pretty sure that if we harmed you, the real bad guys would retaliate. Didn’t that occur to you?”

  And with that, the Holdout broke the connection.

  Polytropos said that Koishi had behaved plausibly, although the Holdouts were likely to assume that an entity was aboard with him until they were satisfied otherwise.

  “Does that matter?” Koishi asked. “I am supposed to report on their presence on Thalassa. That can be done whether they are worried about you or not.”

  “You have not yet guessed,” Polytropos observed flatly. “The Council is only moderately concerned about the Holdouts and their stolen craft, though the metals will prove difficult to replace. What concerns them are the Beings like me, from whom they have heard nothing. To the degree that there are discrete and plural Beings on the Centaur—the issue is too complex for you to truly understand—we monitor each other’s development and independence.

  “No one knows what is happening with these Beings—how many they are, what their nature now is, why none of them have sought to contact the Centaur. That is what I am here to determine.

  “All you need to do is bring yourself into contact with the Holdouts and their ship. That’s your purpose here.”

  The beacon comprised four beams planted twenty meters apart, casting visible light upward as the vertices of a square. Annoyed at what he saw as a slight toward his piloting skills, Koishi took pains to land at its exact center. The almost nonexistent gravity compelled him to secure the ship by firing a piton into the dark ice, the recoil from which would have sent the River Stone back into space had it not been held by a cable.

  “You will be accompanying me?” he asked in a low voice.

  “I will be monitoring your suit. What you see and hear, I will as well. Don’t speak to me unless you are certain no one can see your face.”

  The surface of Thalassa was water ice dirtied by millions of years’ encounter with complex molecules, mostly hydrocarbons and ammonias. Koishi could not set foot upon it; he could only orient himself so that his feet were pointing at the ground and tell himself that he was upright. Holding himself in place with a hand around the cable, he planted his boot in the snow and activated the barbs that plunged through the crust. Their grip was just strong enough to keep from pulling loose as he lifted his other foot. Slowly, he began to walk around the tethered ship.

  He saw them after rotating through two hundred and seventy degrees: two spacesuited figures moving briskly toward him, their boots a meter off the ground. He cleared his throat.

  “Yes, I see them,” said the voice in his ear.

  Koishi felt the hair of his nape prickle. These were, he reminded himself, people he knew, grew up with. Whoever they turned out to be, he would recognize their faces.

  One of them had stopped. As Koishi watched, the figure slowly turned around and began to return the way they had come. Its companion continued toward him.

  “Problem!” Polytropos cried. “Need to—”

  Silence. Koishi only just managed to stop himself from saying something. He half turned, then looked back at the approaching figure.

  Nothing to do but raise an arm in greeting and wait to be hailed.

  The figure came within two meters and then gestured. A tiny hand tool in its glove discharged a faint spray of ice toward Koishi. The figure slowed to a halt and, after a second spray at a different angle, descended to settle on the surface. She clipped the tool to her leg and peered at him, allowing him a look through her faceplate.

  “You are Flora Ming,” he said.

  The expression scowled. “So you have been studying us in preparation of your incursion.”

  “Don’t be foolish,” he retorted. “My supervisor sent me the names and images of all the Holdouts as soon as I told them why I was landing. And I remember you, from the Park.”

  Flora Ming blinked. “That was another life.”

  “Clearly.” They stood beneath Neptune, a deep green presence filling the sky. Stars shone around the horizon, which was otherwise indistinguishable in the dim light.

  Koishi watched as Ming uncoiled from her belt a length of cord, which she snapped rigid. She extended the rod and took a step forward, as though to poke him with it.

  “Grab on,” she said.

  Bemused, he took hold of the end. Ming lifted her spray gun and fired a short burst downward, causing her to rise from the surface. The rod bent only slightly beneath Koishi’s weight before he too left the ground.

  Slowly she rotated through one hundred and eighty degrees, with Koishi swinging about like a payload at the end of a robot arm. He watched as she deployed the spray gun, firing quick bursts to keep them parallel to the surface. He tried to gauge the distance they were traveling, but the featureless landscape made it impossible.

  It was only when he saw the stars winking out that he realized they were descending into a cleft or valley. The surface of Thalassa was rumpled with scars where the debris of Neptune’s original moons, thrown out of alignment by the capture of Triton and sent careening into collision paths, had smashed together and stuck. Which one was this, and how deep?

  “Going in,” said Ming, and Koishi felt a downward push. She was apparently spraying a cloud of ice crystals straight up, where it would rise, slow, and then settle downward over the hours or days to come. Meanwhile they were descending toward something Koishi could not see. Since he had not been told not to, he directed a torch between his boots. The beam, undiffused in the vacuum, illuminated an uneven circle of light that fell upon a floor of icy rubble. Koishi could not discern how far until they were only a meter above it.

  They came to rest upon the irregular surface, and Koishi swung his torch up and around them. They stood in a crevasse perhaps three meters across, its far ends lost in the darkness. Ming had her own torch out, and she had directed it to a recessed opening, black against the reddish-black ice.

  “Water Curtain Cave,” she said.

  She wriggled through the opening, turning sideways to do so. After a second Koishi followed, pressing against the rough surface to squeeze into the darkness. His chest and back immediately began to feel chilled.

  When he bumped against a hard surface, he illuminated his helmet light and saw an airlock. In the seconds it took for the display to switch from red to green, he felt the cold begin to invade his suit and watched its energy use jump to warm him. When the light went green and he pushed the door panel, a puff of glistening crystals, the remaini
ng air molecules instantly freezing, blew past him like snow.

  The airlock was small, but after a few seconds he felt a vibration as the inner door slid open and light flooded in. He turned.

  The space was high ceilinged, the first surprise. Koishi looked about him. He stood on a transparent platform bisecting an egg-shaped space a dozen meters high and two-thirds as wide. His suit registered the atmosphere as breathable, and he opened his visor.

  “Welcome to Huaguo,” Ming said. He looked down to see her suspended in midair a few meters below him. She pulled off her suit and tossed it away, causing her to glide off in the opposite direction. Without looking, she seized a handhold and pulled herself up and through an opening in the platform Koishi stood upon. She planted her feet against two colored strips on the deck and looked up to face him.

  “You are, I suppose, our guest,” she said. “Look around.”

  He did. Cones of light illuminated some levels, leaving the rest in gloom. Just outside one of them lay a young man, eyes closed. Koishi recognized him as Alan Chang, which meant that the one in the other spacesuit was Jian Bai.

  Ming followed his gaze. “That’s Alan; he is Soaring.”

  Koishi had supposed that the three kept different sleep shifts. “What is that? You mean like the Dream?”

  She laughed, not nicely. “The Dream is the playground that they created for you so you wouldn’t notice you had nowhere else. And they closed off realms of it, to let you suppose that freedom consists of gaining access there.”

  “So tell me,” he said. He was trying to remember what he had read about the three Holdouts. Bai was supposed to be the violent one.

  “Don’t you know enough to put it together? Or did they really tell you nothing?” She stared at him frankly.

  “Pretend I’m stupid,” he said, face reddening.

  “The Adults called it the Pleroma when they spoke of it. Mostly they denied it exists. The big secret ruler of the Centaur, vastly wiser than the Onboard and utterly in charge. Only it’s not a great single entity; it’s a pantheon, disparate and strange. Entities, let’s call them that, who roamed the ship’s secret spaces, intent on their unfathomable business.”