Edges

by Linda Nagata

  But she was still circling around her fear of the timeline she’d never lived. “It got brutal at the end, didn’t it?”

  “Sooth. And I did what I had to do. It was the right thing to do, the only thing to do—but that last day will haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  He knew she hadn’t accessed the privileged data cache that recorded the details of those last days because he’d assigned a DI to alert him if she did. So he’d braced himself, certain she would ask what had happened, how it had ended. But she didn’t.

  Instead she had returned to the other subject he did not want to discuss. “After I left you to return to the Well, I never saw a sign of the Chenzeme. I was running dark though, and I didn’t have an array of telescopes. You’ve seen other ships, haven’t you?”

  “Sure,” he’d said cautiously. Then added, “Not often.” And that was true.

  To his surprise and relief, she had accepted this answer. It was what she wanted to hear. She had assumed he would go dark and keep his distance if ever he sighted another Chenzeme ship—and she had pressed the issue no further.

  Now, hours later, the Bio-mechanic said, “This ship is not a closed system. Eventually someone will think to ask how resources are renewed.”

  Urban shrugged.

  The Bio-mechanic translated this vague response into words: “By then it will be too late. No going back.”

  “It’s already too late,” the Pilot informed them. “By the time a ghost could relay back through the chain of outriders, the link to Long Watch will be lost.”

  “She doesn’t want to go back,” Urban insisted. “She’s made up her mind.” Guilt tweaked his conscience. “I’ll restore the modified log files. Later.”

  <><><>

  “Are we going to go through the Committee?” Kona asked when they were all back in the library again and Urban had introduced him to the Pilot.

  The Committee was a cluster of neighboring stars easily visible in Deception Well’s night sky, where there had once been several settled worlds.

  Kona added, “I’d like to know if anyone is still there.”

  “I’d like to know too,” Urban said. “And if I had more resources I’d send an outrider to investigate. But I don’t want to take the courser there. Too many Chenzeme ships have visited those worlds. I’ve relived memories of it when I’ve been immersed in the hull cells’ shared thoughts. If anyone is left, they’ll stay silent. They’ll see a courser and they won’t respond except maybe to launch an automated attack. So why frighten them?”

  “You’d frighten them less if you destroyed the hull cells and sculpted this ship into something human,” Clemantine pointed out. Nothing in her manner suggested this was a joke.

  “I don’t want to look like something human—not while I’m still in Chenzeme space.” His attention shifted as an update reached him.

  “What is it?” Clemantine asked.

  “We’ve got twelve ghosts in the archive and another coming through.”

  “That’s all right, isn’t it?”

  “I was expecting ten or twelve.”

  “Word must have spread,” Kona said. “Pasha picked up a few extra volunteers. I’m not surprised. It’s an exciting project.”

  It was more than he’d expected.

  The thirteenth ghost cycled into the archive. A fourteenth began to come in. He waved off the Pilot. Brought back the Engineer and the Bio-mechanic.

  The Apparatchiks did not have access to Urban’s thoughts and memories but they were derived from him, knew him well, and generally intuited what he was thinking. “You want to know how many individuals the new habitat can support,” the Bio-mechanic said before Urban could present the problem.

  “The warren is designed for a population of fifteen,” the Engineer reported.

  But the fifteenth ghost was now arriving. Add Urban, Clemantine, and Kona to that count, and the capacity of the warren was already exceeded.

  It was far too late to send a stop order. Light-hours separated Dragon from Khonsu, the trailing ship in the outrider fleet.

  “You could close the data gate,” the Bio-mechanic suggested.

  “No!” Clemantine snapped. “This is not just random data. We’re talking about people. They could be expecting to meet friends, family. We’re not going to erase them.”

  “Closing the gate is not an option,” Urban conceded though he felt hollow as he said it, caught up in chaos, no longer in control.

  With so many new people, everything would change.

  He opened a window above the boundless blue plain of the library. Contained within its perimeter was a chart listing names and brief bios of each newly arrived ghost.

  He watched in horrified fascination as the chart expanded to include sixteen, eighteen, twenty ghosts, the number continuing to climb.

  Privately, he messaged the Engineer: *Is there a limit on how many fully realized ghosts the library can support?

  *Yes, of course. Resolution is presently set to an efficient margin but as the number of simultaneous users grows, it will begin to drop.

  Urban wasn’t willing to endure the sensory deprivation of a low-res interface. *We need to expand capacity.

  *Yes.

  Clemantine had summoned a three-dimensional schematic of Dragon’s structure. “This is a huge ship,” she was saying. “Far larger than Null Boundary. It should be able to support large numbers—”

  Urban stopped her. “No. You have to remember, Dragon is a hybrid ship.” He reached into the projection. A thin gray filament embedded within the ship’s tissue brightened at his touch. The silvery glow rapidly expanded, illuminating the structure of a branching network, the filaments densest beneath the hull cells, though they left no part of the ship untouched.

  “You see this? This is my neural system. I inhabit it continuously. I’m there now. This is the bridge that translates between my mind and the Chenzeme mind. A neural bridge. It’s how I monitor the ship, and guide the thoughts and temper of the philosopher cells. But from the Chenzeme perspective, this bridge is still all alien tissue. Not integrated. Something to be purged from the ship’s body, if possible.

  “That first day, those first minutes when I breached the courser’s defenses, there was a hot war on the molecular scale. My Makers evolved to meet the threat. I won, but it was close.” His gaze shifted to acknowledge the Bio-mechanic. “There have been a few more skirmishes since then.”

  “You’re still here,” Kona said warily. “So you won those skirmishes. You’re in control.”

  “That’s what you said,” Clemantine reminded him.

  “I am in control.”

  “Thanks to my constant vigilance,” the Bio-mechanic amended.

  Twenty-five ghosts.

  “I’m in control,” Urban repeated, “but I never let myself forget there’s a quiet war ongoing at molecular scale across every square micron of the boundary between my neural bridge and the Chenzeme zones. Right now, the situation around the warren is stable. But if we push deeper, radically expand the surface area of our safe zones, the existing balance could be overthrown.”

  The Engineer expanded on this, saying, “Our challenge isn’t just about the volume we inhabit. It’s also the resources we require, the heat we produce.”

  Thirty.

  “So we take it slowly,” Clemantine said. “Expand carefully.”

  “Always,” the Engineer agreed.

  “Most of our people will choose cold sleep anyway,” Kona said. “They understand it. When we first came to Deception Well, all but a handful of us were in cold sleep.”

  “And when we reach the Hallowed Vasties?” Urban asked.

  “Even then,” Kona said, “centuries between star systems.”

  “Centuries between now and then to make this an entirely human ship,” Clemantine added.

  Urban’s gaze shot to the Bio-mechanic. The Apparatchik loomed dark, menacing, within the confining boundary of his window. Before he could speak, before he could ob
ject to this call to wipe out centuries of his work, Urban silenced him with a look. Not now.

  *Not ever, the Bio-mechanic said, speaking through Urban’s atrium.

  *Agreed.

  Clemantine wanted to believe it was possible to remake the ship, and on a theoretical level it might be, but Urban would never consent to it. The hull cells were in some sense sentient and together they contained tangled memories accumulated over millions of years—an overwhelming sweep of time that he’d hardly begun to understand.

  But this wasn’t the moment to explain that to her.

  “We’ll take it slowly,” he agreed.

  Thirty-five.

  “And find me that engineer.”

  SECOND

  You wake, cradled in a cocoon of warm gel with only your face exposed to cold night. Your chest rises as you breathe deeply, gratefully, of sweet, clean air. Still alive.

  Glimmers of light play on the periphery of your vision. You recognize them as little bio-machines, existing to serve your purposes.

  Your senses extend beyond this physical body you inhabit. You mentally map yourself in your surroundings: afloat in a subterranean ocean.

  There is a layer above the ocean—still subterranean—where computational strata are distributed throughout a vast complex of fluid-cooled tunnels and chambers. This is the network of your existence, though your mind is not what it used to be. You have a tentative recollection of terrible, crushing acceleration, shattered strata, the components of your mind snapping loose, collapsing into dust.

  Panic shoots through you. You flail upright, your head above the cloying gel, your feet thrashing, reaching a deeper, colder layer. A slant of pale light flicks on, reveals a ladder close at hand. You reach for it. The solid feel of it is soothing and calms your fear.

  You climb through the half-light to a hatch that opens at your touch, admitting a brighter light and a puff of warmer air. You pause as your eyes adjust, pondering why you re-created yourself within this avatar with its limited abilities, its inefficient memory. But you trust yourself. There is a valid reason.

  The hatch swings back to lie flat against a floor and you emerge into a clean corridor with rectangular leaves of crystal neatly arrayed in banks along the walls and ceiling.

  Your skin prickles as you remember an earlier existence when you and everything around you was in ruins. You reach out with your mind, tentatively, to assess the memories gathered in the strata around you—recoiling at once from disconnected visions, ambitions, emotions, and swirling facts cut loose from all basis, all structure. Chaos!

  The strata you see have been rebuilt but the memories within are useless. Broken in their disorder.

  A thousand tiny hearts beat hard, flooding your mind with rage and frustration. You know now why you have been reduced to this pathetic avatar. It is a simple pattern, a first step to recovery. A surviving kernel, a seed crystal.

  You wonder: Is it enough?

  Can all that was, coalesce around you again?

  Unlikely. You arose from the Communion, with the resources of quadrillions contributing to your ascension. No way to recover all that. Not here—you pause to sniff the air, scan your mental map—here, where you are utterly alone.

  You think of her, of what she did to you.

  She destroyed you.

  Your fists clench. You destroyed me!

  Even so, there is something of you left.

  And you’d like your revenge.

  Chapter

  7

  The final count of ghosts reached sixty-three. Urban looked at the list of names and bios in consternation, in dread. These were good people, serious people. Educated, experienced. Scientists, engineers, historians, journalists, storytellers, and even two planetary scouts. It wasn’t the presence of any one of them that worried him; it was all of them, together.

  Kona’s early questions returned to haunt him: What will their status be? Will they have a choice of where you go? What you risk?

  Urban did not want to submit his will to the choices of others, but that would happen now. He did not want to be responsible for so many lives, but now there was no choice in it.

  <><><>

  Kona looked over the bios of all the newly archived ghosts, smiling as he encountered a scattering of familiar names. Over the years, he’d made the mistake of letting too many friendships fall away . . . but at least he hadn’t left everyone behind.

  “You know some of them?” Urban asked, approaching out of an unexpected and undefined distance.

  Kona looked up, looked around in confusion. Though the library appeared much the same, his immediate surroundings had undergone a quiet transformation. Clemantine had receded. He was aware of her, not far off and yet only half sensed as she continued to work with the Engineer.

  “Have I been shoved off into my own workspace?” he asked.

  “Something like that,” Urban agreed. “The library allows for privacy and strives to respond to a user’s shifting focus.”

  “Huh.”

  “About the engineers,” Urban said. “There are nine in the archive. You’re a better judge of people than I am, so I want you to pick one.”

  Kona didn’t have to think about it. “The one we need is Vytet Vahn-Renzani.”

  Urban puzzled over this. “Do I know that name?”

  “Yes, you do. When you were a child, you knew Vytet.”

  “She—” He broke off with a frown. “He . . . ?”

  A distracted moment as they both checked the bio. “She,” Kona confirmed. “For now, anyway. Vytet’s a shifter.”

  Vytet had never kept a fixed gender. She chose sometimes to be a man, other times a woman, or other, rarer variations. Always experimenting. She would change surface features too: the shade of her skin, the color of her eyes, the structure of her face. Retaining only the basic dimensions of her body.

  Urban nodded. “I remember.”

  “We’re incredibly lucky to have her here. She’s an exceptionally skilled engineer. Careful, determined, but daring, too.”

  Long, long ago, Vytet had led the effort to bring the city of Silk back to life in the desperate early days after their arrival, and she’d made it a better place in the years that followed. The extraordinary passage of time since that age had not diluted Kona’s opinion of her. If Vytet had joined the expedition looking for new challenges, he could surely accommodate her.

  “All right,” Urban said. “Wake her. Give her the tour. Help her to feel at home.”

  <><><>

  Kona could not remember the last time he had talked to Vytet, or even heard her name mentioned. If pressed, he would have guessed her gone forever into cold sleep, as so many from that age were. Ruefully, he acknowledged to himself that Vytet might have assumed the same fate for him.

  He sent a DI to fetch her ghost from the archive. An anxious moment later she instantiated beside him on the library’s surreal blue plain.

  Kona smiled in recognition.

  Regardless of how Vytet might change the envelope of her appearance, he was sure he would know her by her gaunt height and by the ceaseless curiosity of her gaze. She turned her head, assessing her surroundings with dark eyes set in a sharp-featured face—not a face he remembered. The hair that covered her scalp was short, thick as a pelt, and startlingly white. She stood several centimeters taller than he did but carried far less weight—always too preoccupied to devote sufficient time for the drudgery of consuming each day’s required calories. She’d dressed her ghost in a loose blue coverall and flexible foot gloves. Nothing in her face or figure strongly signaled a female identity but her bio made it clear that was how she chose to be seen—until she changed again.

  “Hey, old friend,” Kona said gently. “I was surprised to see your name in the inventory.”

  As Vytet’s wandering gaze settled on him, her eyes widened in surprise. “Kona.” A disbelieving smile. “You’re here.”

  “I am.”

  She started to reach out, using both h
ands. Hesitated as if unsure. Then she gripped his shoulders. He felt the pressure of her fingers, registered the confusion on her face. “Ah, this is so strange,” she said. “You look the same as always—”

  “And you, forever different.”

  “I feel different.” She released him. Held her hands up, studying them, as if looking for a flaw. “We’re ghosts, aren’t we?”

  “We are,” Kona confirmed.

  “Ghosts in an artificial matrix,” she murmured, puzzling through the situation. She looked at him again and confessed, “I have not experienced this state before. I’ve rarely ghosted, and when I have, I always instantiated within someone’s atrium, riding on their senses. This is different. Very different. By the Unknown God, it feels so incomplete. ”

  “Our natural senses are limited here,” Kona affirmed. “But this state is temporary. We’ll resume a physical existence once living space is assembled.”

  Something drew her attention. Her eyes narrowed as if to bring a distant object into focus. “I have a new sense,” she realized. “I feel myself standing on the surface of a vast library.” She turned in a circle, scanning the featureless blue plain. “I feel the presence of well-ordered data.”

  She reached out, and to Kona’s surprise, a curving side path appeared in response to her beckoning gesture. Files sprang up on the path, each one a thin, vertical pane large enough to step into. The first file in the stack showed a branching map of the library with all its major sections neatly labeled.

  “How did you do that?” Kona asked. He could sense the presence of data too, but Clemantine had taught him to use a DI to do his research.

  Vytet was too absorbed in discovery to hear his question. “Wondrous,” she whispered reverently as she stepped onto the side path. Then she stepped into a file, and disappeared.