by Linda Nagata
The reef was positioned far forward, at the bow. The polyps worked in concert to create a steepening gradient aimed away from the slight gravitational distortion of the ship’s mass. The reef accelerated along that gradient, and Dragon came with it, the ship’s velocity slowly growing.
The outriders accelerated at the same time, each powered by its own propulsion reef and piloted by a DI. From the high bridge, the lateral lines of Dragon’s gravitational sensor let Urban detect the signature of Khonsu’s reef, and more faintly, that of Artemis. The other outriders were too far ahead to be seen or sensed.
As the rate of acceleration increased, that version of Urban within the warren drifted toward the designated floor and began to walk. The ship’s company joined him—Clemantine, Kona, and Vytet. They sat together at a table, and ate and drank as if they were on a world. A convenient situation, but temporary.
Urban took the fleet to thirty-five percent light speed and then he dampened the activity of the reef, leaving Dragon to coast toward its faraway destination in the Hallowed Vasties. The reef could pull the ship to much higher velocities, but as Dragon’s speed increased so did the risk of collision. Interstellar space was not empty, and even a tiny object could severely damage or destroy the ship if it impacted the hull at a significant percentage of light speed.
Even at this compromise velocity, molecules of dust and gas constantly bombarded the hull cells. The cells renewed themselves, but Dragon slowly bled mass. That mass would eventually need to be replaced.
<><><>
“Is this what you wanted?” Clemantine asked one evening, not long after Dragon ceased to accelerate. The warren had returned to a zero-gravity configuration. Ribbons of faintly glowing wall-weed again lined the oval interior of her private chamber. She drifted in the cozy space, one arm around Urban, a leg hooked over his, skin to skin. Shared sweat, shared warmth. She gazed at his face, at the sheen of his eyes under half-closed lids. Shared tranquility, after a long session of deeply attentive love-making.
“Having you here?” he asked in a low, almost hoarse voice. “It’s exactly what I wanted.”
Clemantine wanted the truth.
She ran two fingers down the smooth skin of his chest and, with a sharp edge of accusation in her voice, she said, “I trusted you.”
This induced an unmistakable tension in his body, an acceleration in his breathing—unwelcome evidence that her emerging suspicion was not misplaced.
“Look at me,” she said.
He obeyed, turning his head until they gazed at one another. She read guilt in the worried set of his eyes, but his confused frown hinted he wasn’t certain what he was being accused of.
Multiple options, then? Interesting. She would have to investigate further, but right now, she just wanted an honest answer on the status of the gee deck.
She said, “I talked to the Bio-mechanic today. The Engineer was there too.”
“Uh-huh?” Low, puzzled syllables rising from deep in his throat. He clearly had no idea what she was getting at—and that surprised her.
She said, “The basic structure of the gee deck has been designed. A site’s been determined. A construction plan is in place.”
Still no hint of enlightenment breaking through his perplexed expression, so she expanded on her complaint. “Construction should have begun as soon as we ceased acceleration. But nothing’s been done. I asked the Apparatchiks why. Both were irked. They said they were ready to begin. They would have begun already, but you’d withheld permission—”
“No, wait.” He grasped her concern at last. “That’s not what’s going on.”
“Then you did give them permission to proceed?”
“No.”
Anger flared. She started to untangle herself from him.
“Wait,” he insisted, his arm tightening around her. “Listen to me. Vytet asked for more time, that’s all. She’s concerned. She and the Engineer can cross-check each other’s work, but no one has ever cross-checked the Bio-mechanic’s knowledge base. Vytet wants time to confirm his studies, his experiments, his conclusions. That makes sense, doesn’t it? It makes sense to take the time to confirm our knowledge base before launching a major, invasive project.”
Her hand slid back up his chest, came to rest beside his throat. “You’re saying you want to confirm six hundred years of studies and experiments?”
“It’s not me,” he protested. “Vytet asked for more time. That’s all.”
“And you gave it to her because you don’t trust the Bio-mechanic?”
“I do trust the Bio-mechanic. I wouldn’t be alive if the Bio-mechanic made mistakes.”
“Then why are you doing this?” Her fingers pressed a little too hard into his flesh.
“Vytet asked for more time,” he repeated, wriggling to escape her grip. She let him go. Even gave him a little push. “She just wants to make sure there are no mistakes,” he explained.
Clemantine said, “It feels like you’re trying to delay the project.”
A dark scowl. “And end up with your hand at my throat?”
She held up her hand, palm out. “Tell the Apparatchiks they can start the project. If it’s going to take years, we need to get started.”
“Fine,” he snapped. “It’s done. Whatever you want.”
“Thank you.”
He had drifted against the opposite wall of the little chamber, where fresh trousers had already budded. He tugged them on. A shirt appeared next. He grabbed it, put it on.
She felt a little guilty. She’d been wrong about him. He wasn’t trying to delay the project. He’d just been accommodating Vytet’s obsessive concerns. And still, she’d shaken him up with that line, I trusted you. She’d seen a flash of guilt—but whatever weighed on his conscience had nothing to do with the construction of the gee deck.
“I do trust you,” she said aloud, just to see how he would react.
This time he was ready, his signature half-smile, taunting her. “It’s not like you have a choice.”
She hissed. His grin widened—a dangerous delay before he darted for the gel door. She dove, intercepting him before he could make his escape, slamming him against the waving wall-weed. “Ah, son,” she crooned, biting at his earlobe as they bounced back across the chamber, “don’t ever underestimate me.”
He laughed and protested, “I was joking. Ow!”
“Of course you were joking.”
“I was.”
Even so, it was true she had no choice but to trust him—which put the obligation on her to verify that trust.
<><><>
Clemantine sent a ghost to the library to confirm that the process of construction had truly started. The Engineer and the Bio-mechanic surprised her by appearing within their frames a moment after she arrived. Always before, they’d come only when summoned.
She cocked her head, looked from one to the other, wondering if Urban had ordered them to be there. “You’ve begun?” she asked.
The Engineer gestured. A huge, translucent, three-dimensional model of the ship appeared, with the planned gee deck ghosted in. Dashed ribbons, brightly colored and branching like tributaries, linked the construction site to the stored matter at the ship’s core. “We’ve begun,” the Engineer confirmed.
The Bio-mechanic explained, “I’ve initiated the growth of matter channels to transport required material to the construction site, and carry undifferentiated tissue away.”
She nodded, eyeing the ribbons. “This is the easy part.”
“Easy for me,” the Bio-mechanic agreed acidly. “Easy now, after the centuries I’ve spent studying this system.”
Clemantine gritted her teeth. “I meant that this phase uses only Chenzeme biotechnology, so you don’t need to be so careful. The dangerous part comes when you begin defining human spaces.”
“Ah,” the Bio-mechanic said. “I will keep that in mind. Do you have other advice? I do so value the advice of those wholly lacking in expertise.”
Clemanti
ne rolled her eyes. “You’re a sensitive flower, aren’t you?” she asked.
The Bio-mechanic’s eyes narrowed. His image changed, fading into the complex background of his frame—removing himself from the conversation in a fit of pique?
She shrugged, offering no apology, making no plea for him to stay. A flicker of surprise on his part and in moments he restored himself. In a crisp voice he informed her, “I know what I’m doing.”
“I’m confident of that,” Clemantine answered. “And I won’t insult you with amateur advice, but I do have an instruction.”
“Any change in the basic structure will slow the process,” the Engineer warned.
“Exactly,” she said. “That’s my instruction—or call it a request if the idea of an instruction exceeds whatever authority I might have. Allow no changes in the basic design. Nothing that will delay completion of the project. If someone attempts to introduce such a change, let me know.”
“All actions and relevant discussions are recorded in a log file,” the Engineer informed her. “Including this one.”
“Good,” she said. “I’ll set a DI to monitor that log—and all the others.”
She should have done it before, but she’d been lax, overwhelmed during the early days of the voyage by newness, and by the immediate demands of creating a home within the hostile body of this alien starship.
No more surprises, she resolved. She needed to comprehend her environment, understand the operation of the ship, know when tasks shifted, and when orders changed.
And she needed to discover whatever sordid detail it was that Urban didn’t want her to know, even though she suspected she’d be happier not knowing.
She left the library, leaving the Apparatchiks to their work, but she did not return to her atrium. Instead, she entered the complex of Dragon’s neural bridge, intent on continuing her mission of verification.
The bridge was a cross-linked web of neural filaments extending throughout the ship, studded with cardinal nanosites—tiny processing nodes that tracked and monitored the surrounding tissue. The cardinals supported a limited virtual environment that allowed Clemantine to access the data they’d collected, in numeric and text form and also visually, so that she could see the structure of the tissue surrounding each node.
But the cardinals offered no representation of Clemantine’s physical presence. She existed only as a mote of awareness, a disembodied will. It was a state she heartily loathed. Although the cardinals were easy to instruct and she had no trouble moving between them, the absence of even an illusion of physical existence left her plagued by an underlying panic, in quiet terror of being trapped in that disembodied state.
She thought of Urban. She could not sense the presence of his ghost but she knew he was somewhere on the bridge. He was always on the bridge. It dismayed her to think he endured this state all the time. She wondered if he’d edited his psyche to do it, or if his brash confidence was enough to fend off the doubt that haunted her.
Despite her doubt, her fear, her aversion to that mode of existence, she continued her inspection, moving from cardinal to cardinal, assessing the function and status of the ship’s diverse array of bio-mechanical tissues, sensing its metabolic heat, aware of the incessant probing of Chenzeme nanomachines, and the firm push-back of the defensive Makers that guarded the bridge. She let herself feel it all, and she began to fit it all within a mental map, verifying what she’d been told about the structure of the ship.
It would be so easy to retreat, to leave it all in Urban’s hands, to trust him in his role as master of Dragon—but she kept going. She had to.
It’s not like you have a choice.
A teasing, taunting challenge. A dare. Asking her to look more closely.
If Urban had a guilty secret, it surely involved either their shared past or the functioning of this ship. Clemantine was still wary of immersing herself in that other life, so instead of accessing the data cache he’d set aside for her, she’d come here. Resolved to inspect the ship first, face the truth of her past later.
Nowhere among the cardinals did she encounter anything to suggest forged data in the library files, or a critical truth, hidden.
She kept at it until she could find no path she had not already explored. Then she fled, retreating directly to her atrium where her ghost memories merged with the memories of her physical avatar—alone within her chamber, just waking up, tension and fatigue tangled up together as if she’d only just escaped the grip of a bad dream.
She sighed and stretched, grateful her inspection of the cardinals was over. She did not want to go back there again.
Only as she relaxed, as her tension eased, did it occur to her she’d found no pathway leading to the philosopher cells.
Chapter
9
From his post within the restricted span of the high bridge, Urban monitored Clemantine’s tour of the lower cardinals. He logged the time she stayed at each node and the data she perused.
I trusted you. Past tense. She’d said it to shake him up and it had worked. She’d seen his concern and now she was looking for a discrepancy. A difference between what was and what ought to be. She wouldn’t find an answer out among the cardinals, but eventually she would work it out, or Vytet would. One of them would think to run the equations on Dragon’s immense mass.
In all likelihood, Clemantine would never forgive him.
Vytet spoke to him in the library—another version of him, but he heard that conversation:
“You can’t assume this pre-construction phase is safe just because it uses all Chenzeme elements,” she argued, her brows knitting in frustration. “It is not a Chenzeme process. It will not be using elements in a way known to Chenzeme instinct.”
The Bio-mechanic answered her, though from within his frame he aimed his impatient glare at the Engineer, not at Vytet. “It is using elements in a known way,” he insisted.
The Engineer amended this claim, “To a point.”
Most of the courser’s mass was bio-mechanical tissue and stored material, but it was organized around a structural frame—the bones of the ship. The plan was to synthesize sheets of this framing material, shaping them into a huge cylinder surrounding a short segment of the core. The cylinder would be stationary, anchored to the ship’s frame. A second cylinder within the first would rotate on magnetic tracks, just fast enough to provide a small pseudo-gravity.
Urban—that version of him in the library—said, “All we’ve done is to adapt the processes that we used when we grew the outriders. It’ll be fine.” At the same time, the version of him on the high bridge continued to track the passage of Clemantine’s ghost as she transited the last of the cardinals.
In the library, Vytet remained uneasy. “I’m confident the design of the gee deck will serve our purpose, if it’s presence doesn’t trigger a defensive reaction in the surrounding tissue—but it’s such a large structure, it’s hard to see how it could fail to be recognized as an artificial and invasive growth.”
“Barrier issues are my responsibility,” the Bio-mechanic said brusquely. “And I have already taken these concerns into account. The outer cylinder will have a reactive surface using Chenzeme molecular signaling to mimic the hull of an ancillary ship under construction.”
“Is that a permanent solution?” Vytet asked.
“Of course,” the Bio-mechanic said. “So long as the correct molecular signals are produced, the cylinder will not trigger a defensive response.”
“That’s not the only factor,” Urban said. “It matters how fast we consume resources. The first outrider we tried to grow was lost because we went too fast. Looked like uncontrolled growth, a runaway event. The entire mass of the half-formed ship was ejected.”
On the high bridge, a mental twinge. He had not meant to bring up the topic of Dragon’s mass.
For a moment, Vytet looked distracted, her brow wrinkled as if chasing an elusive thought, but the Bio-mechanic reclaimed her attention with an acerbic di
smissal of Urban’s cautionary story. “Not a relevant issue,” he said, waving away any concern with a sweep of his hand. “Acceptable growth rates are now well understood.” He fixed his cold gaze on Vytet. “Focus your concern on your own responsibility. Leave me to mine.”
From the high bridge, Urban watched Clemantine’s ghost depart from the last cardinal, returning to her atrium, where it vanished from his perception.
<><><>
Alone in her chamber, Clemantine studied a schematic of Dragon’s structure, made visible through the augmented reality generated by her atrium. Glowing silver threads mapped the filaments of the neural bridge. Wherever the threads intersected, a tiny bead indicated the presence of a cardinal node.
The schematic showed tens of thousands of filaments linking to the ship’s outer skin of philosopher cells, which together comprised the ship’s composite mind. Those filaments were separate from the rest of the bridge. They led back to a spiraling trunkline of bridge tissue that linked to the lower threads at only a handful of points.
Clemantine was sure she must have passed those points during her inspection, but she had not perceived them. They’d been hidden from her. Her access had been limited to the lower threads only.
The message was clear. The philosopher cells were off-limits to her. Urban didn’t want her interacting with them. He didn’t want her tempted to interact.
Why?
She pondered this question, understood there could be many reasons. None boded well.
No doubt he was jealous of his command. Dragon was his pride as well as an avatar of his existence. He guarded its structure just as he guarded the structure of his own body, protecting the ship’s Chenzeme elements, resisting any suggestion of re-making the courser into a human ship.
But what if the reason was some fault of hers?
I do trust you, she’d said.
He had not responded with any similar assurance, an omission that now made her suspicious of her unknown past. Had she, in that other timeline, given him reason not to trust her? Made a fatal mistake or failed at some critical juncture?