So instead she found this world. A ship in space is an easy thing to see, even across light years. A world offers better camouflage—it has mass and heat. She thought she could screen herself—drawing no attention from passers-by.
She was wrong.
The cubes were resilient, resourceful. Constantly testing her capabilities. They demanded more power, more mass. She converted more and more of her ship into the architecture of their prison. She died! But by then her living ship had grown to know her so well that her personality lived on inside it, haunting it as a kind of ghost.
Centuries blasted by.
Her ship protected and enlarged itself. It ate into the surrounding geology, bolstering the containment and consolidating its defenses. For the most part it had no need of her, this residue of what she had been. Once in a while it raised her from the shadows, when her judgement was required. She was never lonely. She’d burned through her capacity for loneliness, discarding it like an outmoded evolutionary stage.
But she had visitors, all the same.
Like us?
No, not quite. Not to begin with. To begin with they were just like her.
“THEY CAME,” THE voice said. “My sensors tracked them with great vigilance and stealth. I watched them, wary of their intentions. I risked collapsing my containment fields, until they were out of range. I did not want to be found. I did not want my mistake to become theirs. It was always a bad time.” It paused. “But I did not miss their company. They were not like me. Their languages and customs had turned unfamiliar. I was never sorry when they turned for space and left me undisturbed.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe what you like. It hardly matters, anyway. They stopped coming. A silence fell, and endured. It was broken only by the tick of pulsars and the crack and whistle of quasars half way to the universe’s edge. There were no more of my kind. I had no knowledge of what had become of them.”
“But you could guess.”
“It did not mean that I could give up, and allow what I had found to escape. So I slept—or ceased to be, until my ship had need of me again—and the stars lurched to new and nameless constellations. Twenty million orbits of my old world, two hundred thousand lifetimes. And then a new visitor—a new species.”
I guessed that we were still in the distant past.
“Did you know this culture?”
“I had no data on anything like them, dead or alive. Frankly, it disturbed me. It had too many limbs, a strange way of moving, and I wondered what it looked like outside of its armour. I wanted it to go away. I quietened myself, damped my energies. But still it came. It dug into me, seeking an explanation for whatever its sensors had picked up. I thought of simply killing it—it had come alone, after all. But there was another possibility open to me. I could take it, open its mind, learn from it. Fold its memories and personality into my own. Use its knowledge to better protect myself the next time.” A kind of shame or regretfulness entered the voice. “So that is what I did. I caught the alien, made sure it was incapable of escape, and pushed feelers through the integument of its suit and into its nervous system. Its anatomy was profoundly unfamiliar to me. But at one end of its segmented, exoskeletal body was a thing like a head and inside the brittle cage of that head was a dense mass of connected cells that had something of the topological complexity of what had once been my own brain. It was hierarchically layered, with clear modular specialisation for sensory processing, motor control, abstract reasoning and memory management. It was also trying very hard to communicate with its fellows—wherever they were—and that made it easy for me to trace the circuits and pathways of expression. Before long, I was able to address the alien through the direct manipulation of internal mental states. And I explained what was to become of it. Together we would be stronger, better equipped both to deal with the thing at the heart of me, and also to make my concealment more effective. I was sorry about what had needed to be done, but I made it understand that I had no choice at all.”
“How did it take it?”
“How do you think, Nidra? But very soon the question concerned neither of us. It had become me, I had become it. Our memories were a knot of entanglements. It understood my concerns. It grasped that there had only ever been one path. It knew that we had no choice about what we had become.”
“Forgiveness?”
“Acceptance.”
“But it didn’t end, did it? There were more. Always more. Other species…dozens, hundreds of them. Until we came!”
“You are no different.”
“Perhaps we aren’t. But this alters things, doesn’t it?” I still had my thumb on the trigger, ready to unleash a matter-antimatter conflagration. “You think I won’t do this? You’ve told me what you are. I understand that you acted…that you’ve been acting…for what you think is the common good. Maybe you’re right, too. But enough is enough. You have Teterev. It’s too late for her…too late for you, if I’m still reaching a part of her. But it stops with Lenka. She’s mine. She’s coming back with me.”
“I need her. I need to add her library of fears to my own. I need to make myself stronger.”
“It won’t work. It hasn’t been working. You’re stuck in a spiral…a destructive feedback loop. The more you try to make yourself impregnable, the more evident you become to the outside world. So you have to make yourself yet more impregnable…add to your library of fears. But it can’t continue.”
“It must.
“I tried to stop myself. But always they came. New travellers, new species. Nothing I did made myself invisible to them. I could not negotiate, I could not persuade, because that would have been tantamount to confessing the hard fact of my existence. So I did what I had always done. I hid. I made myself as quiet and silent as physics allowed, and willed them to leave. I dug into our mutual psychologies, trawled the ocean of our terrors, and from that sea of fears I shaped the phantasms that I hoped would serve as deterrence, encouraging newcomers to come no nearer. But it was never totally sufficient. Some were always too brave, or curious, and by force of will they reached the heart of me. And always I had no choice but to take, to incorporate, to turn them to my cause. To feed me their fears, so that I might better my defenses. Why do you think I had to take Teterev? She was the first of your kind—a new jewel, to place in my collection. She had been very useful, has Teterev. We are all very glad of her. Her fears are like a new colour, a new smell. We never imagined such things!”
“Good. I’m truly sorry for Teterev. But you don’t need Lenka. Give her back control of her suit, and we’ll leave you alone.”
“You could make that promise to me. But you did not come here alone.”
“The Captain…we’ll take care of him.”
SEE? THINKING OF you even then.
Always in our hearts and minds.
“I LISTENED TO your babble. The theories of your Captain. He craves his fortune. He will think he can turn the fact of me to profit. He will try to sell the knowledge of my location.”
“He doesn’t even know what you are!”
“But he will find out. He will ask what became of you, what became of Lenka. Your silence will count for nothing. He will return. He will send machines into me. And soon more will come, in other ships, and I am bound to fail. When the machines touch your civilisation, they will scorch you into history. They have done it a thousand times, with a thousand cultures. They will leave dust and ruins and silence, and you will not be the last.”
“Lev,” I said quietly.
There was a silence. I wondered if the thing before me would speak again. Perhaps I had shut the door of communication between us with that one invocation.
But the voice asked: “What do you know of Lev?”
“Your son,” I answered. “The son of part of you, the son of Teterev. You had to leave him on the orbiting ship. You didn’t mean to, but it must have been the only way. You loved him. You wanted very badly to get a message to him, to have hi
m help you. That’s why you came as far as you did. But you failed.”
“And Lev is gone.”
I nodded. “But not in the way you think. Someone got to that ship before us—cleaned it out. Stripped it of engines, weps, crew. The frozen.
But they’d have been valuable to someone. If Lev was on that ship, he’d have made it back to one of the settled worlds by now. And we can find him. The Mendicants trade in the frozen, and we have traded with the Mendicants, in many systems. There are channels, lines of enquiry. The name of your ship…”
“What would it be to you?
“Give us that name. Let us find Lev. I’ll return. I promise you that much.”
“No one ever promises to return, Nidra. They promise to stay away.”
“The name of the ship,” I said again.
She told me.
SO MANY NAMES, so many ships. Numberless. Names too strange to put into language, at least no language that would fit into our heads. Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever-unfolding mathematical structures—names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity.
But she told me some of them, as best as she could.
Lovely names. Names of such beauty and terror they made me weep. The hopes and fears of the brave and the lost. The best and the worst of all of us. All wayfarers, all travellers.
I asked her to try and remember the last of them.
She did.
Tell you?
Not a chance, Captain. You don’t get to know everything.
I STEPPED BACK from his suited-but-immobile form, admiring my handiwork. He really did look sculptural, frozen into that oddly dignified posture, with his arms coming together across his chest, one hand touching the cuff of the other.
“I suppose you could say that we came to an understanding, Teterev and I,” I said. “Or what Teterev had become. Partly it was fear, I think, that I’d use the hot-dust. Did I come close? Yes, definitely. Not much to lose at that point. I might have been able to work the ship without you, but certainly not without Lenka. If she didn’t survive, there wasn’t much point in me surviving either. But Lenka was allowed to leave, and so was I. It was hard work, getting Lenka back here. But she’s begun to regain some suit function now, and I don’t think either of us will have any trouble returning to the lander.”
The Captain tried to speak. It was hard, with the noose tight around his throat. He could breathe, but anything more was an effort.
He rasped out three words that might have been “fuck you, Nidra”. But I could not be sure.
“I made a commitment to Teterev,” I carried on. “Firstly, that we’d make sure you were not a problem. Secondly, that I’d do what I could to find Lev. If that’s decades, longer, so be it. It’s something to live for, anyway. A purpose. We all need a purpose, don’t we?”
He attempted another set of syllables.
“Here’s yours,” I said. “Your purpose is to die here. It will happen. How fast it happens, is in your hands. Quite literally. Those pieces of debris I set around you are curved mirrors. Now, it’s not an exact science. But when the sun climbs, some of them will concentrate the sun’s light on the snow and ice on which you are standing. It will begin to melt. The tension on your noose will increase.” I paused, allowing that part to sink in, if he had not already deduced matters for himself. “In any case, the ice will melt eventually, with the change of seasons. It’s only permafrost deeper in the cave mouth. But you’ll be dead by then. It’ll be a nasty, slow death, though. Hypothermia, frostbite, slow choking—take your pick. But you can speed it up, if you like. Turn up your suit’s heat, and you can stay as warm as you like. The downside is that the heat will spill away from your suit and melt the ice even quicker. You’ll be hanging by your neck within hours, with the entire weight of your suit trying to rip your skull from your spine. At that point, overwhelmed by terror and pain, you might try and turn down the thermal regulation again. But by then you might not be able to move your fingers. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. There are many paths to the one goal. All the scenarios end with your corpse hanging from the mouth of the cave. Swinging there until the ice returns. You’ll make an effective deterrent, wouldn’t you say? A tolerable invitation to keep away?”
Rasht tried to say something. But Lenka, who had hobbled closer, placed a finger on his lips.
“Enough,” she whispered. “Save your breath.”
“Where is the monkey?” I asked.
“Tethered where we left it, over by the wreck. Shall we leave it here?”
“No. We’ll bring it with us, and we’ll take good care of it. I promised him that much. I try not to break my promises. Any of them.”
“Then we’re done here,” Lenka said.
“I think we are.”
We turned our backs on our former Captain and commenced the slow walk back to the lander. We would stop at the wreck on our way, collect the monkey, and what we could of Teterev’s belongings. Then we would be off Holda, out of this system, and that was a good thought.
Even if I knew I had to return.
“When we we get back to the ship, I want to give it a new name.”
I thought about that for a moment. “That’s a good idea. A clean break. I have some suggestions.”
“I’d be glad to hear them,” Lenka said.
THE WATER THIEF
THE BOY wants my eye again. He’s seen me using it, setting it down on the mattress where I squat. I am not sure why he covets it so badly.
“Sorry,” I say. “I need this. Without it I can’t work, and if I can’t work, my daughter and I go hungry.”
He is too small to understand my words, but the message gets through anyway. I smile as he sprints away, pausing only to glance over his shoulder. Nothing would prevent the boy creeping into the shipping container and taking the eye while I am working. But he has not done that yet. Something in his face makes me think he can be trusted.
You can’t understate the value of that, here in the refugee camp. Not that they call it that. This is a “Resource and Relocation Assistance Facility”. I have been here six years now. My daughter is twelve; she barely remembers the outside world. Eunice is a good and studious girl, but that will only get you so far. Both of us need something more. Prakash tells me that if I can accrue enough proficiency credits, we might be relocated.
I believe Prakash. Why wouldn’t I?
I SQUAT DOWN on my mattress. The shipping container has had its doors removed and holes cut in the sides. Windchimes hang from one corner of the roof, cut from buckled aluminium tent-poles. On this airless afternoon they are as silent as stalagtites.
My virching rig isn’t much. I have the eye, my lenses, my earphones and my t-shirt. All cheap, second-hand. I position the eye, balancing it on a shoebox until its purple pupil blinks readiness. I slip in the earphones. The t-shirt is ultramarine, with a Chinese slogan and some happy splashing dolphins. Too tight for a grown woman but the accelerometers and postural sensors still function.
I initiate the virching link. The lenses rinse me out of reality, into global workspace.
“Good afternoon, Prakash,” I say.
His voice is near and far at the same time. “You’re late, Soya. Had some nice jobs lined up for you.”
I bite back my excuse. I have no interest in justifying myself to this man. This morning I had to walk twice as far to get clean water, because someone from a neighboring compound broke into our area. They damaged our pump as they tried to steal from it.
“I’m sure you still have something in the queue,” I tell him.
“Yes…” Prakash says absently. “Let me see.”
If God was a fly, this would be the inside of his head. Wrapping around me are a thousand constantly changing facets. Each represents a possible task assignment. The facets swell and contract as Prakash offers me options. There’s a description of the job, the remuneration, the requir
ed skillset and earnable proficiency credits. The numbers swoop and tumble, like roosting birds.
“Road repair,” Prakash declares grandly, as if this is meant to stir the soul. “Central Lagos. You’ve done that kind of thing before.”
“No thanks. Pay is shit and a monkey could do it.”
“Window cleaning. Private art museum, Cairo. They have some gala opening coming up, but their usual ’bot has broken.”
“It’s years since I cleaned windows.”
“Always a tricky customer, Soya. People should be less choosy in life.” He emits a long nasal exhalation like the air being let out of a tyre. “Well, what else have we. Bioremediation, Black Sea. Maintenance of algae bloom control and containment systems.”
Cleaning slime from pumps, in other words. I scoff at the paltry remuneration. “Next.”
“Underwater inspection, Gibraltar bridge. Estimated duration eight hours, reasonable pay, at the upper end of your skills envelope.”
“And I must fetch my daughter from school in three hours. Find me something shorter.”
Prakash’s sigh is long suffering. “Seawall repair, Adriatic coastline. Overnight storm breach. Four hours, high remuneration. They need this done quickly.”
Typical of Prakash, always the job he knows I will not refuse until last.
“I’ll need to make a call,” I say, hoping that someone can collect Eunice from the school.
“Don’t dilly-dally.”
Prakash puts a hold on the assignment, and I get back to him just in time to claim it for myself. Not that I’m the only one on the task: the Adriatic breach is a local emergency. Hundreds of robots, civilian and military, are already working to rebuild shattered defenses. Mostly it is work a child could do, if a child had the strength of a hundred men—moving stone blocks, spraying rapid-setting concrete.
Later I learn that fifteen people drowned in that wall failure. Of course I am sad for these people—who wouldn’t be? But if they had not died, I would not have had the assignment.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 79