Venturi

by S J MacDonald

  So they coped well with this, too, as Alex had known they would, and were very soon focussed on the practical issues of making provision for the Pirrellothian ambassador. It was, everyone agreed, exciting and a great honour. Opinion about how valuable her embassy to Lundane might be was rather more mixed. Not very many thought that she’d achieve very much. Rather more were afraid that her efforts to unite the dominated worlds might draw down Marfikian reprisals. It was a risk. Everyone knew it was a risk. But the skipper had agreed to it, the senior command team were entirely supportive and whatever their own opinions might be, not one of the Venturi’s crew went so far as to say ‘I think the skipper is wrong.’

  He was the expert, they agreed, reassuring one another. He knew more about this than any of them, probably more than he could say. And if he thought this was worth the risk, all they could do was trust and back him up.

  That and get started making quarters for the Chamlorn Lady Ursele Mgwamba et Savie, Grace of a Noble House, Purest of Blood, Hand of the Karlane.

  This was not a minor undertaking; nothing like as simple as merely shifting interior bulkheads about to create a VIP suite on the interdeck. Silvie, in fact, was giving up part of the aquadeck. The for’ard shaft of the pod-transit system which had been a swim tube up to her encounter zone was sealed off at the base and drained down, leaving a nine-deck high shaft of 2.6 metre width.

  At the top of this, Silvie’s encounter zone was stripped of all its plants, artworks and furniture. This had a half-quarian, half-human environment, unified by the colourful planting but effectively two spaces, one with a lounging pool and the other with tables and chairs. At need, a quarantine barrier could be activated between the two. But until then, at least, the encounter zone had been where people could hang out with Silvie without swimming down to her aquadeck quarters.

  Now, she had given it over for the Pirrellothian ambassador, not just willing but actively helping. There was a lot of work to do. The shaft was already a fully sealed quarantine environment but Shion wanted an interior skin created; floor, walls and ceiling concealing the hatches and tech with solid barriers rather than the holographic surround Silvie had used.

  This took some doing, with the need to manufacture deck plates and interior panelling on a scale which challenged even the resources of their SEP, the siliplas extrusion plant which Davie had installed on the interdeck, and the artificer’s department.

  Technical issues had also to be overcome, since Shion wanted the deck plates fitted to what was currently the aft wall of the shaft. This, with artificial gravity turned on, would transform the space into a long tunnel rather than a high narrow shaft. This required a lot of other tech being moved or adapted as well. The refit specs were so extensive, in fact, that if it had been in the hands of a spacedocks there’d have been a certain amount of scratching of heads and hmmning before a refit coordinator would put an estimate on it and that estimate would certainly not have been anything less than three weeks’ work.

  On the Venturi, they were looking to get it done in five days. And with every member of the ship’s company getting involved with it, five days was perfectly achievable.

  Alex told Trilopharus that and that they would need a few more days after that to be ready, which the Chethari agreed was fine, no rush, no problem, only to come back next day and tell them that the chamlorn wouldn’t be ready to come with them for another three weeks, anyway.

  So, they fixed a provisional day and relaxed a little, getting things ready, exploring this remarkable world and its system and, of course, getting to know more about the Chethari.

  Alex learned two important things about them in the course of the next few days. The first was that Chethari very definitely had a sense of humour.

  Alex had raised the matter of gender, explaining that they were using gender-neutral terminology until such time as they knew whether Trilopharus was male or female.

  ‘Alex,’ said Trilopharus, in response to this, ‘I do not know you nearly well enough to discuss my reproductive organs.’

  Alex was about to apologise, then realised that the Chethari was pulling his leg and laughed instead.

  ‘Come on!’ he said, with vivid memories of Trilopharus turning up in the bathroom. ‘You’ve seen mine!’

  Trilopharus laughed too and as they did so the radiance of the light around them became so much brighter Alex had to squint.

  ‘I am not going to show!’ the Chethari said merrily, ‘or tell!’ But then a moment later, ‘You can call me male. It isn’t the full truth but it’s close enough and if it matters to you, ‘he’ will be fine.’

  So that settled that. And the following day, it became apparent that they couldn’t hope for any kind of detailed historical information from the Chethari. And not because they didn’t feel it right to share it, either, but because they simply didn’t know.

  It arose when Alex asked about Camae.

  ‘The Camag have oral-history memories of beings very like yourself taking them from a diseased and burning world to Camae,’ he said. ‘Was that your people, Trilopharus?’

  ‘Not as far as I know,’ Trilopharus replied. ‘When would this have been?’

  ‘Ten thousand years?’ Alex knew that Trilopharus was happy to use League – aka Chartsey – reckoning of time. In fact, they never had to explain anything like that at all. The Chethari had learned all that, as they had their fluent and colloquial use of language, from the Gider.

  ‘Well, nobody will know, then,’ Trilopharus pointed out. ‘We live longer than you, sure, but not that long. Everyone from back then will be dead.’

  ‘Uh…’ Alex took a moment to get his head around that. ‘But there are… presumably… records?’

  ‘Data storage?’ Trilopharus sounded amazed. ‘Nobody does that. That’s a human thing, Alex, writing things down all the time and keeping unimaginably detailed records of everything you do – the Gider have told us you do that, all your billions of records about everything. Hiving, they call it, creating a hive, collective memory. But that is not sustainable, long term. Once your civilisation has been going for a million years – two, three million – how many records can you keep? And in the end, there is no need, we remember what is important to remember. The rest is ephemeral.’

  ‘And… the Salvation of Camae?’ Alex asked. ‘That would be ephemeral, to you?’

  ‘Yup,’ said Trilopharus, angel wings folding like aurora. ‘A lot of bad stuff was happening back then. If one of our ships found people on a world in collapse, they’d have moved them somewhere safe, of course, but it wouldn’t have been a big thing, so much going on that it wouldn’t have been important even at the time. We certainly didn’t write it down. And those who saw the details, those horrors, they would not have told others – why would they? Those are not things we want to remember. It is an awful tragedy, of course, but it is not healthy to dwell upon it. If you do, you end up like the Perithin, singing endless songs of grief on a world in perpetual mourning. So we grieved at the time and pity those who fell, but our lives are now, we do not live in the past.’

  They were equally unhelpful when it came to identifying the Olaret Nestings yet to be discovered.

  As Alex explained, they had a list, provided by Shion, of the colonies the Olaret had founded. It was no more than a list of names, but it hadn’t taken long to realise that the list was in order of distance from Pirrell itself. That, and in most cases similarities of name, had enabled them to identify thirty two of the thirty six. That was how they had known there was a colony somewhere in the band between the thirteenth and the fifteenth, on the Pirrellothian list as Carrea Rensis but with no corresponding world yet discovered in human space. Pretty much the only place it could be but not have been found yet was within the previously impenetrable zone of Sector Seventeen. And exploring there had, indeed, discovered the lost colony now known as Carrearranis.

  The remaining three Nestings, however, were at the end of the list – further away than Quarus, somewh
ere out on this side of the Gulf. Excorps had several expeditions out, working their way out to systems which had green-world indicators. But there were hundreds of those, even within the current range of Excorps explorations, and the area to be searched was so vast, it would be at least a century before they’d checked the whole list.

  Could the Chethari, Alex asked, tell them where the three remaining Nestings were?

  ‘Why are you even asking me that?’ Trilopharus wondered. ‘You have to know we won’t tell you and it isn’t even as if you really want to know.’

  Alex gave a guilty little grin. ‘I have to ask,’ he explained. ‘My duty as an ambassador. But as a spacer, fair cop, yes, I don’t want all that exploration and discovery to be taken away from us. Like someone stepping in and completing a puzzle you’ve been working on for ages. The point is not to get it finished, the point is the satisfaction of doing it yourself.’

  ‘That’s it,’ Trilopharus agreed. ‘And we’re enjoying watching you do it, too. It was only last week, in our terms, that you were living in huts and worshipping lightning. And now here you are braving out into space in your fragile little ships, so tiny and so slow it takes you weeks to creep even between worlds so close they’re virtually touching. But there you are, doing it and evolving so fast, it’s impressive.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Alex said, taking this in the friendly spirit it was evidently intended. ‘We know we have a long way to…’

  ‘Oh, you’ll get there,’ Trilopharus said. ‘And we’ll be cheering you on.’ He did a strange little dance, hopping on one foot, waving the opposite arm, ‘Go humans!’

  Alex cracked up, the combination of Gider dancing and the cheerleading just too absurd from the radiant angelic figure. Trilopharus chuckled, too.

  ‘There is just one thing,’ he said. ‘We won’t interfere, absolutely not. But we are a little concerned, Alex. The Gider tell us that you have ships out looking for Point Zero – the world that you call Defrica – and you didn’t take any notice when they told you that’s a really bad idea. So we’re not telling, Alex, we’re asking, but we’re really asking – please don’t go there. Please, don’t. It is a terrible place and there is nothing for you to find there but death.’

  Alex sobered rapidly. ‘I understand,’ he said. ‘I know, it was sealed off for all time.’

  Shion, in fact, had told them that the only approach to Defrica was said to have been sealed off by the moving of a star to block it, along with a Veil system protecting it and broadcasting the warning plague, plague, plague.

  It was the world where the Red Death had started. Not, Alex had gathered, an inhabited world. Pirrellothian records were sketchy but it appeared to have been a system tucked away deep in nebula, which was used by many species as a place of shared endeavour, whatever that might mean. Shion thought they might have been conducting terraforming experiments there, as that seemed the most likely origin of the viral pathogen which would, over the next six centuries, devastate this entire region.

  The entire region, that was, which was such a massive space to humans that it would take centuries for them to explore all the space within the Firewall. But the Firewall itself was no more than a tiny blob at the edge of the galaxy.

  Beyond that, they knew now, the galaxy was full of life – civilisations so vast, so ancient and so strange that even people like the Gider didn’t understand them and so many billions of species, too, it was impossible to know them all. But it was, for now, enough that they were starting to get to know their nearest neighbours.

  ‘If you could identify Point Zero for us on charts,’ Alex said, ‘I can assure you that we would put a very big and absolute no-go zone around it. We recognise the dangers and we respect, too, the fact that it is a tomb and not to be…’

  ‘If I could do that for you, Alex, I would,’ Trilopharus said. ‘But all I can say is, get a pen, draw a big sphere right around the space you call the Altarb Ranges and stay right out of it, okay?’

  ‘I understand,’ said Alex. ‘But there is a problem, Trilopharus. One of our explorers, Oscar Van Damek, found an inhabited world in that region. He called it Defrica – we know it can’t be Defrica, of course, Defrica is dead and sealed. But he thought he’d found Defrica. He described what he’d found as a Dark Age world, but for reasons which seemed valid to him, he concealed its location. So we have good reason to believe that there is a world in that region with a human population, a forgotten colony, perhaps, but a human world which we have to find, we cannot just abandon them.’

  ‘Well,’ Trilopharus said, ‘if you unleash a pathogen that starts taking your worlds out one after another, don’t say you weren’t warned.’

  ‘I will,’ Alex promised, ‘pass that on to our government. They may pull back on exploration for a while. But unless you can be more specific…’

  ‘The Perithin are right, humans are alarmingly impulsive,’ Trilopharus observed, but without rancour. ‘Well, we can only advise so far… see you tomorrow, Alex!’

  It was apparent that the Chethari had said all that they were going to on the subject of Defrica.

  It was also apparent that they weren’t going to solve the mystery of Camae, a world which had always seemed, somehow, out of place. Davie, though, had come up with a theory.

  ‘I think I know what happened,’ he said, at that day’s debriefing, where they brought together all the things that they’d been working on throughout the day. ‘Camae…’ he put up a star chart showing the system’s location. It was just outside the area defined as the Central Worlds by the League, but was culturally so different it might almost not have been part of the League at all. Uniquely amongst League worlds, they retained their ancient language in a bilingual culture, just as they retained their hereditary monarchy in a modernised guise as diplomats and politicians.

  Genetically and geographically, they were human. Culturally, they were unique. Linguistically, their language was so close to quarian that anyone who could speak the one could effectively speak the other, too. They had all the characteristics, in fact, of an Olaret Nesting. But there was no Olaret colony matching their name and location on what they believed to be a full and accurate list.

  ‘I believe,’ Davie said, ‘that the Camag were once one of the Olaret Nestings – one of three colonies the Olaret founded out here.’ He drew a wide area this side of the Gulf. ‘I think things went bad – some natural disaster, maybe. And I think perhaps it happened after the Olaret themselves were no longer in the picture.’

  He indicated Carrearranis, now thought to be the Olaret’s last colony. It was incomplete, with nothing like the depth of biodiversity they’d developed for their other colonies and no other world had been left with a Guardian. On the contrary, the Olaret principle had been to engineer genomes adapted for that environment, provide everything they needed to thrive and to step away entirely, leaving them to evolve without interference. The Guardian, it was thought, had been only there as a temporary comms system while the colony was being established. Only the Olaret had died before they could complete their work and remove the Guardian.

  And before, too, perhaps, they could respond to a disastrous failure of one of their other colonies.

  ‘I think,’ Davie said, ‘that the Chethari, or someone very like them, picked up survivors and moved them over to Camae. And that may even have been done in one trip – Olaret colonies were very small initially, just a few thousand settlers. Purely speculative, of course, but the Camag recall it as one dramatic event with them all on one ship and that is certainly something which would be remembered. Why Camae was chosen and who was responsible for the Chambers and terraforming six hundred thousand years ago, those will have to remain mysteries until we meet someone who does remember about it. But I do believe that we are now only looking for two more Olaret Nestings, that the third one has been with us, as it were, the whole time.’

  ‘That seems,’ Alex agreed, ‘the most plausible explanation.’

  It was the best they w
ere going to get, anyway. And they had so much else grabbing their attention. They had fifty drones out now, for a start, all of them exploring different habitats and feeding back their data to the ship. Some of the fungal growths discovered in the lower levels of the swamp were truly spectacular. There was one responsible for yellow patches in the apparently unending green, which turned out to be the planet’s apex predator. It had evolved a long way from its symbiotic origins, the parent mycorrhiza which transferred nutrients and water from the soil to the plant, receiving sugars in return. This fungi had found it more profitable to suck the life out of plants without giving them anything back – a vampire growth which covered plant stems in sinister yellow lumps.

  The most jaw-dropping, though, was one of the fungi which fed on and broke down dead plant material. It was the size of a five storey building and instantly dubbed ‘Fungus Humungous’ by the biodiversity team. Sampling had found it to be edible, too, as indeed were many of the brassicas. Whether anything that big would be enjoyable or not was another matter. Sampling also indicated that you would need a laser-saw to slice it and its texture would be that of semi-dried leather.

  Recipes were generated by the galley staff, though, with the more appetising cabbage and fungi being recreated in the ship’s biovat. No samples were being brought aboard ship and they would be leaving, frustratingly, just three days before the month of quarantine was up.

  Alex would not be budged on that, either.

  ‘I am not going to ditch Excorps rules,’ he said. ‘Yes, I know the ship is a contaminant in itself, but the outer hull is sterile and we have kept rigidly to Pristine Environment protocols. And while we may think that we now know as much as we need to to leave the ship safely, we don’t know that and can’t know that until the full survey is completed and that includes a month of total quarantine. And I am not going to ask Trilopharus to ask the Pirrellothians if they’d mind delaying for a week or two while we climb about amongst the cabbages and mushrooms. Let’s keep our priorities straight, yes?’