by Linda Nagata
Raising a hand, he probed at the membrane, pressing his fingers through what proved to be delicate tissue. Tore it open.
She watched him, unmoving. He didn’t doubt that she’d left instructions to disassemble them both down to their constituent atoms if something went wrong and he proved to be a Chenzeme weapon after all.
“How did you get here so soon?” he asked her. Then he held up a palm to stop her reply. “No, I already know. You were here. Do you keep an avatar aboard the second warship too? Waiting on the system’s periphery for some word from us, for someone to come back. I think you hoped it would be someone else, and not me.”
Her golden-brown cheeks warmed with a flush. “No. Urban . . .” Her eyes glistened. “I never thought to see him again. I never thought I’d see any of you. But if I’d ever considered that only one of you might make it back, I would have guessed it’d be you.” Her voice shifted, becoming low and feral: “But a Chenzeme warship, Urban. No one else—”
“That’s right,” he interrupted. “No one else dared to do it, to come all this way in a Chenzeme ship. Not even that other version of you. But here you are on a different timeline.” He reached out a hand to her. “Maybe you’ll make a different choice.”
To his surprise, she took his hand, pulled him into a tight embrace. He reciprocated, the warm scent of her an aphrodisiac exploding across his brain. He kissed her neck, her face. He remembered the pretty chains of tiny gold irises tattooed on the edges of her small ears; he found them and kissed those too. Glittering tears broke free and writhed in the cool air.
“This avatar is not really you, is it?” she asked.
“No. It is me. This is the core.” He got his hand up under her shirt, kissed the corner of her mouth. “Please,” he whispered. “Have mercy for once. It’s been a thousand years.”
Her throaty chuckle jacked him even harder than he’d been before. Unbearable.
The chamber shrank around them, squeezing out the glint of camera eyes, leaving them enclosed in a hollow just large enough to contain them. No way out. No way in.
Clemantine helped him peel off the thin layer of her clothing and then they locked together, his fingers embedded like claws in the soft wall to hold their position, her fingers hard against his back. Reminding one another of what it was to be physical beings, man and woman. To be alive.
<><><>
Later, but still too soon, he told her, “I’ve got only hours before I have to go.”
He held her close, her body against his, a physical connection unbroken since they’d begun.
She leaned back in his arms and eyed him sleepily. “You have forever,” she countered. “You’re home. This avatar, anyway. This is your home.”
“No. I won’t stay.” Her body tensed in his arms, her embrace tightened as if she would hold him there. “I made that decision long ago,” he reminded her. “I’m here now for you—and to trade information. I’ve already transferred the full history of our expedition. Now I need data from Silk’s library. Everything known about the Hallowed Vasties. Their history, and current observations. I’ve got only hours to make the exchange. You’re tracking the courser so you know this is a fly-by. I wish it could be longer, but it would have taken years to dump enough velocity to achieve orbit—and if I’d tried it, this warship or the other one would have blown me up.”
“You sent the swarm ships instead,” she mused. “We thought they were some kind of weapon, plague ships maybe.”
“Just communications relays to extend my reach, give me more hours here.”
She shook her head. Sighed deeply. “Damn you, Urban. After so many centuries, to have no time. And you don’t stay, you won’t leave even a ghost. Because no version of you wants to be trapped here?”
“Sooth,” he agreed.
Bitter now: “Some things never change.”
“You know me, Clemantine. I’m in possession of an immensely fast and powerful starship. What version of me would ever give that up?”
She sighed again. “No version I know. So you’re going there? To the Hallowed Vasties?”
He nodded, wanting her to share his excitement. “Our origin lies in the Hallowed Vasties. Our beginning, our earliest days. But it’s all changed. All of it unknown now. That makes it a new frontier, an inverted frontier, because the unexplored region lies inward from the edge of settled space. I want to see what’s there, what’s left, voyage all the way to Earth if I can.”
The outward migration from Earth had unfolded over thousands of years. Robotic probes went first, exploring and mapping tens of thousands of stellar systems, looking for those with sterile worlds orbiting within habitable zones. Those worlds were re-engineered, made viable and beautiful for the people who came to possess them.
It was as if the galaxy had been given to humankind by an unknown god, theirs to nurture and to slowly fill with new generations.
Frontier populations were never great in number, but they were enough that an innate restlessness drove some portion of them onward to still newer worlds. Always, they were the individuals who made a choice to engage in life, in the reality of physical existence.
That choice served as a filter in a selection process dividing them from those who chose to stay.
And when they looked back across space and time, they wondered what they’d left behind as megastructures enclosed the stars of the earliest inhabited systems.
On the frontier, those distant star systems came to be known as the Hallowed Vasties. Frightening rumors crossed the void, describing a behavioral virus run wild, one that spurred massive population growth and an evolutionary leap to a group mind, a Communion that was more than human.
Too far away to worry about. That was the consensus on the frontier and people pushed on—until the Chenzeme warships found them.
In those tumultuous centuries as the frontier collapsed, the Hallowed Vasties too began to fail. The stars that had been hidden within cordons of matter emerged again, and no one knew why.
Urban wanted to know why. It was the goal he had set for himself: to learn what had happened to the Hallowed Vasties and what was left. If there were only remnants and ruins, he wanted to see them. If something had grown up from the ruins, he wanted to see that too. He wanted to see it all with his own eyes.
“I’ve watched the Vasties for centuries,” he told Clemantine. “Every star ever known to have been mantled by a Dyson swarm is visible again. We thought that meant failure. Civilizational collapse on a massive scale. Death. But there are signs of life. Transmission spectra confirm the presence of oxygen, water, organic molecules. I want to know what was there, what happened, and what’s come after. And I don’t want to go alone. I want you to come with me.”
She closed her eyes, giving him no answer. He nuzzled her neck. “What are you thinking?”
“The past and the future,” she whispered. “Both are so very far away. That last time I saw you—you and him—a thousand years ago. And another thousand years to Earth, even in that great beast you’ve stolen.”
“It is a great beast,” he agreed. “And I’ve named it after a great beast. I call it Dragon. And time doesn’t matter to us. So what if it takes a thousand years to reach the Hallowed Vasties? If the time drags, we sleep.”
“How peacefully can we sleep aboard a Chenzeme courser?” she asked him.
He told her, “Don’t think of it that way. It’s a hybrid ship. Its neural structure is heavily modified. It’s under my control. And I want you with me again. You. After all those years we spent together, you are part of me . . . and I am so hungry for human company. Don’t abandon me again.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I think that other version of me made a smart choice to stay behind.”
“No. I think she regrets her choice. Because you’re her. You’re the same. You haven’t changed. You don’t have another life, do you? No new lover, no children. All you’ve done is wait. You’ve skipped over these years, passed them in cold sleep, waiting for us to co
me back.”
“I needed to know,” she said defensively. “But you—you seem the same too. That’s on purpose, isn’t it? You want me to believe you’re still that same smart-ass pirate, but Urban, you can’t be. Not if you’ve grafted yourself on to that alien killing machine.”
A tremor of guilt. A shrug. A confession: “This is me. My human core. I keep this persona because I want to remember who I am and what matters. But I’m not alone. I remade myself multiple times. My Apparatchiks are highly edited, each with a different technical skill. They’re based on me, but they’re not me anymore. Some of them are insufferable and sometimes we argue among ourselves, but no mutiny so far.”
“All ghosts?”
“Yes.”
“And what is it like to be the master of an alien killing machine?”
He tapped his chest and told her the blunt truth: “For me, this version of me, it’s fucking miserable. Soul-annihilating loneliness. Out there, coasting in the void between stars, awake and aware and so far from anywhere or anything, any human thing, knowing with utter certainty that I’m alone and not even the mind of the Unknown God could find me. It’s terrifying.”
“That’s not a very persuasive argument if you’re trying to convince me to come with you.”
“I need you.”
“I don’t want to live as a ghost.”
“We don’t have to. It’s a big ship. There’s room. There are resources. We can be physical when we want it—and god, I want it. I want you. And when time becomes unbearable we can retreat into cold sleep to speed the transit, like we did before. Think about it. Please.”
“I am thinking about it,” she admitted. She stroked his arm, his cheek, considering what he’d offered. “An inverted frontier?”
“Yes. That’s how I think of it.”
“I like that.”
Curiosity was awake within her—an almost forgotten feeling. And he was right that she had no attachments, no obligations of honor. She’d spent three-quarters of a millennium asleep, waiting for some word.
She told him, “It was unbearable not knowing what had happened out there. I would have turned around and gone back after you, but I was afraid that no matter how long I looked, I would never find a sign of you. That seemed the likeliest outcome.”
“This time we’ll be together. No doubt about what happens. We’ll know.”
She nodded her tentative agreement. “I want to send a ghost to your ship, now, to verify what you’re telling me.”
“Due diligence,” he agreed. “You’ve got the address.”
She shifted her focus inward, using her atrium to create the ghost, and then she sent it on its way. If this turned out to be a trap, the ghost could dissolve itself. If it didn’t return, she would know.
“It’s a long round trip,” he warned her.
“I can wait.”
“I want you to go over the library files too,” he said. “Make sure they’re legitimate, consistent, human.”
“I’ve got a DI working on it,” she assured him.
He nodded shortly, then confessed, “I’ve sequestered some of the data. Nothing critical. Just some of the raw details. Things too personal to share in full—mostly at the end. That cache is open to you, but no one else.”
“All right.” Her voice, suddenly hoarse. She feared what she might find when she accessed that privileged data. It might be enough for her—it might be best—to know in only a general way what had happened.
She allowed herself one question: “We lost him in the end, didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
A soft sigh. She had always known it.
“Nineteen hours,” Urban warned, “before we lose data coherence.”
“Okay.”
Time enough. If he was lying, if this was subterfuge, if his apparent sincerity was a false front for a Chenzeme weapon, the history he carried would surely reveal it.
He must have guessed her thoughts, because he looked at her with that pirate half-smile of his, so familiar, taunting her away from melancholy, and he asked, “You still don’t trust me, do you?”
She replied very seriously, “In the madness of these hours I don’t trust myself.”
FIRST
You are confused, sure that you once were far more. Your mind feels as if it’s been rolled and crushed in a landslide. You wander through wreckage: torn metal arteries, broken white ceramic housings, heavy glass plates marked with impact scars, and everywhere thin crystalline sheets, shattered and jumbled, oozing fluids, your thoughts and memories spilled out across the floor. So much unrecoverable.
You stoop to pick up a crystal fragment. With this action, you realize you have somehow contrived to reconstruct a physical avatar. You are here. You have hands. You drop the crystal and hold up your hands for your eyes to see. Large, masculine hands. You curl your hands into fists. A familiar gesture.
You look about, smell the air. There is air. Good. System integrity not entirely demolished. Lingering stink of burnt toxins. White light from a surviving ceiling panel. Most have fallen.
So quiet here.
Now that you are still, you can hear the fluids move in your body. You can’t hear a heartbeat—but then you remember: You’re not human anymore. This avatar you wear looks human, but you redesigned it, gave it thousands of little hearts to keep the fluids circulating. No longer that one heart muscle vulnerable to execution.
She tried to execute you.
The memory of that affront ambushes you.
She tried to execute me.
The details are hazy. Why she did it, how, that is lost to you in this moment. Perhaps you’ll find the memory somewhere in the shattered strata of your mind but this much you know: She tried to execute you and—fear bubbles up from the dark depths of this avatar’s ancestral instinct as you realize the truth—she has in some sense succeeded. You are broken. You will never again be what you were.
What was I?
Something other than this. The answer—you know though you don’t know how you know—was once contained within the weeping crystalline fragments. Can it be recovered? It has to be.
You sniff the air again. The scent of your avatar lingers in the stillness. No one else about. There has never been anyone else here. You would not allow such a security vulnerability. Another fact that you know without knowing how you know.
You follow the fading scent trail through a corridor, retracing your steps though you don’t remember coming this way. Sleepwalking? More likely the biological mind contained in this avatar was then still incomplete and unable to retain permanent memories.
You walk carefully, stepping over fallen strata, taking care not to stumble or to cut your feet. You are nude. Lean, wiry, male. Dark-brown skin. Hairless, which seems strange.
Every ten steps or so you pass a meter-wide circular plate in the otherwise featureless white floor. Each plate fitted so neatly that there is only a faint gray seam to indicate its perimeter. A handle lies flat, its shape a half-circle, but you don’t try to lift the plates, not given the heavy debris that lies on top of them.
You notice a drizzle of clear gel, a few millimeters wide but over twenty centimeters long, moving past your feet in a shimmer of motion, disappearing beneath the crystalline wreckage. Another strand slithers around the sharp edge of a fallen block. A few steps farther on and you see many more, sliding as if in rapid inspection across the tumbled debris. One gel strand disappears into a thin gap between plates of crystal.
Do they come to feed on your broken mind, or to fuse the broken pieces of it back together?
You think, I was no fool. I would have taken precautions, created backup systems, repair networks.
This thought comforts you as you continue to backtrack, your scent almost impossible to follow now, but that’s all right because now you can follow wet marks where you tracked gel across a section of floor.
One of the circular plates has been lifted on a hinge, exposing an opening in the floor. This is where
your footprints originate. You crouch at the edge and peer in.
Cold, cold air. And darkness. A silver ladder descends. You count the rungs you can see: fifteen. Despite the ladder, you’re sure this is not a shaft. Sparks and trails of light interrupt the otherwise velvet darkness below, suggesting a vast space. This, you know: It is an underground sea, but not filled with water. Another unsourced fact.
You descend the ladder. On the tenth rung your feet encounter a freezing gel. Drizzles of gel dart up your calves, circle your thighs, weave about your groin. You continue to descend, your skin puckering in the cold as the gel strands flow over your shoulders and veil your head. You give yourself up to it, releasing your grip on the ladder to subside into a gel ocean.
Tiny bright lights distract your mind as a slow current rolls your body. Consciousness fades . . . though as it goes you wonder if this dull state of mind you’ve been enduring even deserves the word.
Chapter
4
A message from Clemantine forestalled panic when the walls of the isolation chamber contracted, cutting off the cameras and eliminating all sight and sound of what was happening in that space.
Her message said:
*Take no action. Give me time. Understood?
Too well understood. From his post on the bridge, Riffan glared at his workstation’s screen, cursing the banality, the triviality of sexual desire. Against the wonder of Urban’s return, his capture of a Chenzeme courser, the question of what he intended to do with that ship, of where he intended to take it . . . this tryst struck Riffan as both dull and dangerous. Clemantine had left him with an order to dissolve the chamber with herself in it if anything went wrong. But how was he to know?
Still, Riffan had done as she requested. He’d taken no action, using the time instead to send an army of DIs combing through the river of data that constituted the library Urban was transferring to Long Watch. Years would be needed to thoroughly analyze everything that library held. It was a task that would consume the working hours of hundreds of researchers and Riffan was certainly keen to learn of all that had been discovered among the star systems that lay swan of Deception Well.