Edges

by Linda Nagata

  He had denied it, but could she believe him?

  Easy to find out. All she had to do was access the data cache that held the details of her other life. She’d resisted because she was sure grief waited for her there. Regret too, and maybe jealousy for a life she hadn’t lived.

  Even so, it was weakness to hide from the truth. She’d succumbed to a failure of nerve. Shame brushed her, knowing she needed to review those records regardless of what they held.

  She could confront Urban only when they stood on equal ground.

  <><><>

  An alert reached Urban on the high bridge. A DI whispered the news. Clemantine had accessed the data cache he’d set aside for her.

  Fear flushed through the architecture of his ghost, defying its limited capacity for emotion. A dangerous fear because on the high bridge his emotions and his intentions were shared across a hundred thousand connections with Dragon’s vast field of philosopher cells.

  Fear among the cells implied an enemy unexpectedly close at hand. Casual debate gave way to immediate consensus:

 

  Energy flowed to the gamma-ray gun. It began to deploy, while the Near Vicinity was re-scanned for a target. The closest object out there was the outrider, Khonsu.

  Urban set his will against the consensus to attack—

  – hold –

  – calm –

  —issuing this command simultaneously from his hundred thousand connections, a coordinated response that flooded the field, forcing a new consensus.

  At the same time, he edited his ghost, numbing its capacity to feel fear, tension, anger, boredom. Creating the personality he thought of as the Sentinel, not really a personality at all.

  A submind brought the memory of this incident to his ghost in the library. Emotions too dangerous to be experienced on the high bridge now became his. He reacted by abandoning the squabbling discussion still going on between Vytet and the Bio-mechanic. He withdrew into a different reality, a private space within the library, where he set his will against the turmoil of these emotions:

  – hold –

  – calm –

  He had wanted Clemantine to open the cache, he’d wanted her to understand what had happened, but he feared her judgment. He feared she’d hate him for what he’d done.

  I couldn’t save him!

  Things had gone too far. He’d had to end it. He’d had no choice—but a last accusation still echoed in his mind: You are the courser now.

  Bitter truth.

  He had only just joined himself to the courser, his control over it tenuous but real when he chose to use Dragon’s gun for the first time, destroying what he loved and feared.

  Stop! he told himself. Don’t go back there.

  That era was over and he would not revisit it. He pushed the memories away and waited for her judgment to fall.

  Subminds shunted between the library and the high bridge, syncing thoughts between the dual versions of himself—the one anxious and regretful, the other artificially calm. He kept watch over the stars of the Near Vicinity as hours slipped past. Enough hours to allow her to go through everything the cache contained, his own memories part of it.

  Surely she would contact him soon? Say something. He needed her to say something. Anything?

  Nothing.

  She didn’t stir from her chamber. His fear grew. He was afraid of what she would do. Afraid she would hide herself away in cold sleep, depriving him of any chance to win her forgiveness.

  He checked the ship’s log, assured himself she had not retreated into cold sleep yet.

  Without thinking too hard about whether or not it was a good idea, he messaged her:

  *Hey.

  No answer. Not for ominous seconds. Then finally, a single husky syllable: *Hey.

  Enough to give him hope. *Are we okay? he asked her.

  *Heh, she scoffed. *You were monitoring the cache?

  *Yes, he admitted. He held his breath, waiting for her to say something more. Waiting. More seconds ticking past. Too many of them. When she finally did speak, her voice was hoarse, syllables catching in her throat:

  *You want to know how I feel?

  He didn’t answer. She knew the answer.

  She said:

  *I don’t blame you for it. That’s what you want to hear, right? And it’s true. You did what you had to do. You did what I hope I would have done.

  Another long pause—his gratitude made this one easier to endure—before she added, *I didn’t think you had it in you.

  She might have meant that as an insult or a compliment, he didn’t care. He only wanted to know, *Are we okay?

  *We will be, she assured him. *Now go. I need to grieve.

  Chapter

  10

  Kona ghosted in the library, afloat within a virtual space that showed him the cosmos outside, as if the ship’s substance had all gone transparent, leaving him adrift in the void, surrounded by two hundred billion stars and the dark streamers of molecular clouds that would someday forge more suns, more worlds, more potential for life.

  They were a year out from Deception Well.

  Looking back—looking swan—the brilliant beacon of faraway Alpha Cygni was still easy to pick out, but he could no longer distinguish Kheth, the Well’s sun, from the scattered stars beyond it. He could ask a Dull Intelligence to find Kheth for him, to draw a circle around it or artificially increase its apparent magnitude, but on his own, he’d lost track of it.

  Back there somewhere lay his past. Centuries of joy and grief, terror and hope, struggle and disappointment—and quiet triumph because his people had survived. They would survive, Kona was confident of that, but the burden wasn’t his anymore and with every passing day, he felt the weight of those years slowly lifting. As the distance separating him from Deception Well accumulated, he felt himself renewed, reinvigorated, gifted with new purpose.

  He turned to look ahead. He was no astronomer, but he knew enough to pick out some of the closer stars of the Hallowed Vasties. There was Ryo, and Tanjiri, Quin-ken, Bengali. Somewhere farther, the Sun.

  Did Earth still exist? Did it still rotate to a twenty-four hour day? Still revolve in a three hundred sixty-five day year? Did it still harbor some vestige of the life that had arisen there, miraculous result of a long chain of incredibly unlikely circumstances?

  Up until a year ago, he had never even entertained the thought that he might someday find out. Now, he dared to imagine that in some future century he might voyage there, come to see it for himself. If so, he would come there in stages, with many stops along the way, passing the intervals between worlds primarily in cold sleep.

  With the busy first year over, and the planning and design phase done, he wanted to hurry on.

  He closed the virtual bubble. His ghost migrated back to his atrium, melding with his core persona, reaffirming his determination to leap forward in time. His skills were people skills. His real work would start when the ship’s company was resurrected.

  Now, alone in his chamber, he generated a new ghost and sent it to the archive. From there it would waken at intervals to review the progress of the ship and the status of those aboard, before returning to stasis. He also instructed a Dull Intelligence to keep watch, charging it to alert his ghost if ever there was an event, anything out of the ordinary.

  After his ghost was away, he summoned a cold-sleep cocoon, closing his eyes as the cocoon’s transparent mucilaginous tissue enshrouded him.

  He looked forward to the future, and he’d already said his goodbyes.

  <><><>

  Late afternoon in the forest room:

  The weather algorithm had summoned gray clouds into the projected sky beyond the pergola. Clemantine appreciated the muted light as she floated in tandem with a curved screen displaying the tabular genetic data of an ornamental descendant of an ancient line of maple trees. Genetic sculpting was an art form she enjoyed, modifying not just the appearance of plants, but their life cycle as well, in this cas
e seeking a perfect balance of autumn leaf coloration. Through her atrium, she ordered the screen to refresh, to display an accelerated simulation of the tiny tree’s seasonal life cycle.

  Green leaves had just begun to unfold when a DI brought her news of a course change.

  Startled, Clemantine froze the simulation and sent a ghost into the library to investigate. Then, turning her gaze skyward, she sought a point of reference, settling on a white camellia blossom just above her nose. Slowly, as seconds ticked past, she watched herself and her free-floating screen drift away from the flower, scant centimeters toward the side of the room—motion so subtle she couldn’t be sure of the cause until a submind returned, informing her Dragon was undertaking a navigational correction, using a slow, subtle lateral force to nudge the ship’s immense mass. Why?

  She waited to find out and at the end of the extended maneuver confirmed their course to be fixed a little more closely on the future position of the Tanjiri star system.

  A reasonable action, then. A responsible action. And yet the incident troubled her. She should have known the adjustment was necessary. She should have known it was coming. But she wouldn’t have known about it at all if she hadn’t been monitoring the logs.

  She thought about the process behind that correction, wondering if Urban had ordered it, or if it had been triggered by the Pilot, operating independently.

  A chiding inner voice scolded: I should know that.

  Heat rose in her cheeks, a flush of shame. More than a year had passed since her ghost had transited from cardinal to cardinal, exploring the neural bridge. She had meant to go back. She wanted to look again for the pathways leading to the spiraling trunkline and its hundred thousand filaments reaching outward to meet and link and control the vast field of philosopher cells. She wanted to confirm that she had not just missed those pathways, but that they had been hidden from her.

  And yet, day after day, she’d put off the task.

  At first, after opening the cache of privileged files, she had needed time to come to terms with her other existence. She felt no shame for the actions taken by her other self, but her grief ran deep. Comfort came to her through the belief that this expedition was different, that the disastrous past lay behind them, that they were embarked on a new age of discovery—or re-discovery—and that they would ultimately find evidence of vibrant, tenacious life blossoming among the ruins.

  At the same time, she worried this benign outlook was fragile, that it would disintegrate if she asked too many questions. So she curbed her questions and kept busy: working with Vytet to develop a plan for the interior of the gee deck, devising a housing scheme and a landscape, and then working out the chained sequences of assembly that would bring her vision into existence.

  All of that was done now. She was out of excuses.

  So get on with it!

  She wiped the screen she’d been using. Pulled up a schematic of the neural bridge. Reviewed its intricate, branching structure, and plotted every path that led to the trunkline. There weren’t many, just thirteen. She identified the sequence of cardinal nanosites she would have to pass through to reach each one. Then, despite her aversion to the sense of disembodiment she would face among the cardinals, she sent a ghost to investigate.

  Very soon, the ghost returned. It affirmed what she’d inferred over a year ago: The paths to the trunkline were not visible to her. She had no access to them.

  A deep breath to gather her courage. The philosopher cells were on the other side of those hidden paths. Once she crossed over, she would be in contact with them, plunged into unfiltered communication with the ship’s murderous composite mind.

  She dreaded it. The Chenzeme had murdered her family, her people, her world. She wanted no intimacy with the minds behind those deeds. And still, she held it to be her duty, her responsibility, to learn all aspects of the ship. At the very least, she needed to know why Urban had closed the paths to the high bridge.

  So she messaged him: *Hey. We need to talk.

  <><><>

  He woke his avatar and, still stretching and yawning, came to her in the forest room. She observed the moment he caught up on her recent activity, a wary look taking over his face.

  She said, “You know I’ve visited the neural bridge.”

  He shrugged, as if to dismiss the topic as anything that might cause him concern. “You’ve been there before.”

  “I have. And just like before, I found that part of the bridge is not open to me. The spiral trunkline and all those filaments that link to the philosopher cells—”

  “That’s the high bridge,” he interrupted.

  “The paths to it aren’t just closed,” she said. “You’ve hidden them. Why?”

  “Because I don’t want you there. It would be dangerous.”

  She raised her eyebrows, though she gave him credit for the blunt honesty of this answer. “Dangerous for who?” she asked.

  “For you, and for all of us.”

  “You go there.”

  “I’m used to it. I understand it.”

  “I want to understand it.”

  “No, you don’t. You don’t want to be immersed in Chenzeme thoughts, Chenzeme conversation, millennia of memories, the murder of worlds.”

  “You’ve seen that?” she asked, her gut clenching.

  “Yes. And you don’t want to experience it. You don’t want it to touch you.”

  Clemantine let out a slow breath. “You don’t need to protect me.”

  “I’m not sure that’s true.”

  “Trust me when I tell you that it is. You’re right that I don’t want to interface with a Chenzeme mind. But I do want to learn this ship, to understand how it operates, how you integrate with it. I want to learn from you what it takes to pilot Dragon—and if the cost of that is intimacy with the philosopher cells, so be it. I’ll take it on.”

  His jaw clenched in frustration; he shook his head. “Why? Why do you feel you need to do this?”

  “Because it’s dangerous for me, for you, for everyone, if you’re the only one capable of handling this ship. If something happens to you—”

  “Nothing is going to happen to me.”

  “I believe you, and still, you shouldn’t be the only one to know.”

  <><><>

  Intimacy, she’d called it, and Urban found that it was a strange intimacy to feel her ghostly presence overlaid against his own in the branching fibers of the high bridge.

  He didn’t want her there. He knew her history, and understood the horror she must feel at interacting so directly with the philosopher cells. He also worried her presence would change the temper of the cells, feeding their suspicions, making it harder to bring them to consensus. Mostly, he resented her implication that he was vulnerable, that he might someday be separated from his ship, that someone else might need to take over.

  But none of these objections were sufficient grounds to refuse her request. Clemantine believed she could handle the experience. It would be petty and paternalistic to deny her—and besides, she would never forgive him.

  So he’d opened the high bridge to her.

  Before her first visit, they’d met in the library. He’d warned her, “If you feel overwhelmed, if you can’t suppress an emotional reaction, I need you to retreat. If you stay, you’ll destabilize the cell field.”

  “All right. I understand.”

  Clemantine kept her voice level, but even a ghost existence could not mute her escalating anxiety. She closed her eyes, took a few seconds to gather herself. Then she departed for the neural bridge, leaving behind all illusion of physical existence.

  A mapped path brought her to the trunkline. From there, a brief, terrifying moment as her awareness flowed to fill the great network of branching fibers. Then she was plunged into the swirling, combative conversation of the philosopher cells. The bridge translated their intent, their emotion, the bite of their hateful aggression.

  She recoiled.

  *Careful, Urban messaged
her, much too late.

  Her revulsion and fear spilled across a hundred thousand connections, flooding the cell field. The cells re-echoed her emotions, amplified them, sought the cause behind them as they debated in a complex language she comprehended but could not effectively translate so that she “heard” it only in primitive phrases:

 

 

 

 

 

 

  *By the Unknown God, she whispered to Urban—and then she withdrew.

  Just like the cells, he had been hit by the force of her fear and revulsion. It left him shaken, but he suppressed that and worked to soothe the philosopher cells.

  Simultaneously, he awaited her in the library.

  She appeared before him, wild-eyed, lips parted. “You’re there all the time,” she whispered in horror. “Some version of you.”

  “Some of the time I use an edited version,” he admitted. “I call it the Sentinel. Low empathy. Emotionally numb.” He tapped his chest. “But it’s still my core persona that makes all the decisions. You could do that too.”

  Eyes half-closed, she nodded, visibly recovering her composure. “Right now I need to be able to handle it as me. I’m going back in.”

  She shifted from the library to the high bridge. Again, she became a disembodied presence that dispersed to fill the network of fibers, Urban there with her, everywhere. No breath to hold or she would have held her breath against the vicious, tumultuous conversation that engulfed her. Sadistic longings. Frustrated hates. The philosopher cells still restless, still seeking a target that would let them satisfy an instinct to burn/kill/sterilize.

  Revolted again, she slipped away, back into the library.