by Linda Nagata
Urban met her there. Saw the shudder run through her. “You don’t have to do this.”
Her fist closed. “I can do this.”
She shifted out of the library, but not to the high bridge. She needed to breathe, so she returned to her core persona. Alone in her chamber, she shivered and gasped, her heart raced, tears escaped to drift in the air around her, reflecting light like precious gems. “I can do this,” she growled aloud. “I can. I can.”
More than ninety minutes slipped past before Urban again felt her join him on the high bridge. This time, she came knowing what to expect; she had prepared herself. He felt her as a calm, glassy presence that allowed the endless conversations of the philosopher cells to pass through her, without touching her.
She stayed there with him, far longer than she’d stayed before.
After a time, she messaged him: *This conversation . . . it’s like mindless, poisonous froth riding on the surface of an ocean of memory.
*Not mindless, he replied. *The cells are a composite mind operating as minds do.
Later, in the library, he explained it in more detail:
“Each cell has its own senses, a particular awareness, a cache of memories, and a measure of influence in the cell field. That influence waxes and wanes depending on the success of the hypotheses and ideas that it supports. That’s what most of the chatter is: discussion and argument on the meaning of sensory input evaluated against known data. You can enter that debate. The bridge gives you enough influence to command consensus—but you will always need to be careful that the field doesn’t coerce a consensus out of you.”
<><><>
Clemantine hated the philosopher cells, hated interacting with them, but the strength of her hate made them amenable to her will.
She learned to perceive as they did, through the senses of the ship: the carefully nurtured vitality of the reef; the burn of dust against the hull field; the slight gravitational perturbation generated by the closest outrider and the occasional incoming bursts of laser communications that marked its position; the population of stars in the Near Vicinity; the chaotic radio chatter of background radiation.
She sensed the link to the gamma-ray gun. Explored a memory of a time—she guessed it was long ago—when the gun had been used against another ship, one vastly larger even than Dragon. She felt the excitement of the philosopher cells, their frantic demand to
Suppressing a mental shudder, she diverted the cells from the violence of that memory by giving them a task. A simple task, but it was the first time she exerted her will on them.
She asked them to push Dragon’s velocity a little higher, just to do it, to know that she could.
She thought: – go –
Lightly, easily.
In response, a spike of awareness: Urban shadowing her, his concern for what she was doing. But he said nothing, nor tried to interfere.
Again, she thought: – go –
The cells responded, commanding just a tiny pull of acceleration from the reef. She felt it as a shift, a sense of falling forward, so slight she wondered if it would even be noticed in the warren. But then she suppressed that thought, not wanting to distract the cells.
Enough, she decreed.
The acceleration ceased, but Dragon’s velocity was now slightly higher. Urban issued an order to the outriders to boost their velocity to match.
<><><>
Clemantine visited the high bridge often during the second year of the voyage, but never alone. “You’re always there,” she mused, lying entwined with Urban one morning. “Your ghost, always present. You must get tired of it. You have to find it . . .” She groped for the right words. “Emotionally exhausting,” she decided.
“Did you want to take over?” he asked with that familiar taunting smile. “Hijack my ship?”
“Mind reader.”
He chuckled. “You’ve learned everything I know.”
“No, that’s not true.”
Still, she’d learned a lot. She’d skimmed the ship’s history, delved into its systems, interviewed the Apparatchiks, and refined her control of the philosopher cells.
She had needed to verify all those systems to truly trust him.
And I do.
She kissed his cheek and sniggered.
“What?” he demanded.
“Just remembering what an asshole you used to be when you were younger.”
He chuckled some more. “Come on. You found me entertaining.”
“Always,” she agreed.
A comfortable silence followed, one she eventually interrupted with a softly spoken promise, “We’ll have years together.”
“Sooth,” he agreed, sounding half asleep. But then his eyelids fluttered, his brows knit in a suspicious scowl.
She said, “I’m going into cold sleep.”
His eyes snapped open. “No.”
“Yes. I’m going to skip ahead to when the engineering phase of the gee deck is done. The Engineer estimates two more years to finish the assembly of the inner cylinder, the rotational mechanism, the permanent supply lines, the heat sinks. Then it’ll be my turn to assemble the interior landscape.”
The Bio-mechanic had warned her it would take an additional year to complete the interior and lay in material reserves. After that, they would finally be able to waken their company of archived ghosts.
She said, “I’m looking forward to the future, Urban. I’m eager to start my project. So I’m going to jump to that point in time.”
“But what am I supposed to do while you’re down?”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s just two years. Aren’t you the one who voyaged alone across six centuries?”
He sighed a heartfelt sigh. “I was younger, then.”
“You’ll get by,” she assured him. “You’ll be there on the high bridge whether I’m awake or not, whether I’m there or not. Nothing will change. And if you need to, you’ll adjust your time sense so the years don’t burden you. I know you’ve done it before.”
He sighed again, gazing at her unhappily. “The times in between matter too.”
“We’ll have time,” she insisted. “We’ll be okay.”
THIRD
Time heals all.
It is an ancient aphorism that surfaces in your mind as if by chance.
You are aware that a billion seconds have gone by since you resolved to take revenge. A billion seconds spent in reconstruction of your ravaged memories.
A billion seconds.
More than enough to know that time does not heal all, that it cannot, because the circumstances that created you will not exist again in any future you can foresee.
Judged strictly, the aphorism is false.
You understand though that the aphorism is not meant as a binary true/false statement. Instead, it is intended as encouragement in the process of recovering from grievous emotional wounds. That you are aware of this distinction reflects the progress of your own slow recovery.
You walk the tunnels that honeycomb the cold crust of your world; miles of tunnels restored or rebuilt. Thousands of miles more lie still in ruins but you will get to them in time, if time allows. At this time, you focus your mind on what you’ve accomplished, not what remains to be done.
Re-grown in ordered ranks on walls and ceiling, are the thin, crystalline leaves of your computational strata. Now, as always, your mind works to gather scraps of data and memories from the ruins.
You organize what you find, analyzing and testing as you do so, seeking to place it all again into proper context although with no outside means to cross-check results, you know there will be errors.
Still, you do your best and second by second your mind recovers. You remember more and more. You are capable of more and more.
Another billion seconds, and you have used resources stored in the subterranean ocean to grow telescopes, and subsurface silos to house them. When the silos open, you look out on the cosmos for the first time since she de
stroyed you. You map the position of your world and realize: There is not time enough.
You are light years from anywhere. No star holds you within its gravity well. She has cast you away, flung your world into the void. You are alone, alone, alone. Stranded, with no way back.
Terror stirs deep within the biological structure of your ancestral mind. You experience it and then the sense of shame that follows it—shame of both your fear and your defeat.
You could cut both fear and shame from your persona but why would you? The old passions sustain you. They give you all the reason you need to go on. So you remind yourself that her cruelty, her jealousy, her fury, marooned you here.
This helps to focus your mind.
You continue your observations. You hunt through your shattered memories, seeking astronomical data and eventually you are able to recognize the closest stars, map their relative positions, and determine your precise location in both space and time.
Quite a lot of time has passed, but less than you would have guessed.
In the course of your astronomical survey you observe a hint, a glint, a tiny reflection where you are sure no reflection should be. For eight and a half million seconds you watch it as it moves against the background stars.
Does she regret her fury? Has she sent some monstrous servant to look for you, to fetch you back? No. Wishful thinking, that.
More likely some other entity observed your defeat, your disgrace, and is coming now to pick over your bones.
You ponder this as you walk the corridors of your wounded mind—and you prepare. You hide your presence, disguising the telescopes so that the surface of your world once again appears to be that of a dead and airless rogue world.
There will still be an infrared signature, but that will be attributed to the subterranean ocean cooling only very slowly with the passage of time.
Another aphorism: The best defense is a good offense.
You begin to prepare.
You will never be more than a shadow of your former presence. Still, you remain formidable.
Chapter
11
Three point six years out of Deception Well:
From his solitary post on the high bridge, Urban observed an anomalous flash of pale blue light. He saw it through the composite mind of the philosopher cells. A brief, bright flare ahead of the courser, slightly offset from its trajectory.
Furious speculation erupted among the hull cells. The memory of a similar incident circulated among them, a familiar memory, one that Urban shared. Like the cells, he’d seen that same spectrum of light flare and die before. He knew what it meant.
He replicated into the library, sending the rage and frustration rising within him safely away from the cell field, while the copy of his ghost that remained on the high bridge reconfigured, taking the form of the imperturbable Sentinel.
In that form, he sensed the alarm winding through every cross-threaded conversation among the philosopher cells, and their growing awareness of impending danger. He entered the conversation. Determined to soothe the field, he introduced the same argument at a hundred thousand points:
– hold –
– calm –
The composite mind of the philosopher cells had recognized the flash of light as the visible energy emitted by the explosion of an outrider. Urban didn’t know yet which one.
A faction of cells wanted to interpret the incident as a hostile attack, but a far larger number sought consensus for the proposition that what had happened was a fluke, an accident, the result of a collision with a high-speed fragment of matter—a conclusion Urban encouraged.
No reason to believe otherwise. No evidence of another hostile presence anywhere in the Near Vicinity.
Even so, the cells were correct. The hazard was not ended. The danger they anticipated would come from secondary effects that required time to play out.
A report streamed in. Relayed at light speed through the array of outriders, it arrived only a few seconds after the light of the explosion. Each outrider had appended a signature as the report passed through its data gate.
Urban received the report in the library. A submind shared news of it to the high bridge. On both timelines, he noted the signatures of only the three nearest outriders. Khonsu, the closest, Artemis next, and then Lam Lha. Pytheas had been stationed beyond Lam Lha. The absence of its signature told him it was Pytheas he’d lost.
The report unfolded into two windows. One displayed text data, the other, the raw video of the starfield that lay ahead of the fleet.
Urban summoned all six of the Apparatchiks. They manifested in a curved row behind the report, each confined within its own frameless window.
“Analyze it,” Urban ordered them, wanting opinions from them all.
The simulation of a faint vibration alerted him. He looked to the right as Vytet’s ghost popped into existence beside him.
Vytet had never sought the refuge of cold sleep. “I think there are never enough minutes in the day,” she’d explained when Urban asked about it. “I want to monitor the progress of the gee deck, of course, but I could spend a millennium in the library and not reach the end of what there is to do and to learn.”
Since that time, Vytet had shifted gender and updated the envelope of his appearance. His nose had become more prominent, the pelt of his hair had shifted from white to dark red, and his eyes were darker, deeper-set beneath a heavier brow. “What happened?” he asked in a calm masculine voice as he scanned the report.
Urban told him, “I’ve lost Pytheas.”
“Lost?”
Bitter admission: “I saw it explode.”
Clemantine and Kona ghosted in, lagging several seconds behind Vytet—the time it had taken their personal DIs to summon their dormant ghosts from the archive.
Clemantine met his gaze. She’d been away a year and a half, but he’d adapted his time sense to match hers. It felt to him as if she’d been away only hours, while she perceived the time as a sequence of discrete intervals when her ghost had wakened only long enough to assess the status of the ship. That left no awkwardness, no alienation in their reunion.
“Pytheas hit something and blew apart,” he said to ensure that she and Kona understood that basic fact. He indicated the frameless window containing the starfield. “This is video from Lam Lha.”
It didn’t look like a video. There was no visible motion. The stars were much too far away for their movement to be perceptible, and Pytheas was too small, dark, cold, and distant to be captured by Lam Lha’s array of cameras. Only the digital clock streaming through fractional seconds in the window’s lower right corner indicated this was not a still image.
A hiss from Clemantine as a spark of blue-white light burst into sight. Flared, and disappeared.
Now the stars moved, the entire field rotating together through a narrow arc.
“Lam Lha is repositioning itself,” Urban explained. “Aiming its prow at the point of the explosion, to minimize its profile and reduce the odds of impact from any surviving debris.” His ghost hand closed into a fist, his temper finally escaping. “By the Unknown God! We are not even four years out of Deception Well!”
“You’re sure it was an accident?” Kona asked. “You’re certain we’re alone out here?”
“Yes. I’m sure of that much.”
“But can you be sure it was a collision?” Vytet asked. “Or might it have been caused by instability in the outrider’s reef?”
“The reef is monitored. If there was a problem, it would have been detected and addressed.”
“I’ll check the data anyway,” Vytet volunteered. “In case something was missed.”
Urban ignored this. Nothing had been missed. He turned to Kona and Clemantine. “This happened before,” he told them. “It’s not complicated. The outriders are fragile. They don’t have the mass to absorb the energy of a high-speed impact. The concern now is secondary effects.”
He gestured at the starfield. “Lam Lha, Artemis,
Khonsu, Dragon. All four ships were following Pytheas. All four are at risk. It’s going to take time, but eventually each ship will intersect the trailing edge of the debris field and when that happens, there’s a real chance of another impact.”
“Surely not,” Vytet objected with a puzzled frown. “Given the distances between the outriders and the low relative delta V of the debris, the field will have time to disperse across an immense volume of space before the next outrider reaches its perimeter. That will work to minimize any risk of collision.”
“I used to think so too,” Urban answered. “But remember the reef. It doesn’t behave like normal matter.”
As if summoned by his warning, tiny points of blue-tinged light blossomed in a cluster at the center of the video. “There,” Urban said, feeling vindicated. “That’s the debris field. That blue light is generated by remnants of the reef, energized by the explosion. The fragments will try to coalesce, and as they do, they’ll warp the surrounding space, affect the trajectory of the debris. Some of it will gather and fall into their fields.”
They watched for several seconds as the blue light brightened. Specks shifted relative to one another. A few merged, brightening again when they made contact. Others drifted away.
Clemantine spoke quietly. “Can we use the gamma-ray gun to target the visible debris? Vaporize it?”
Given her history, it surprised Urban to hear her propose the use of the gun. Such monstrous Chenzeme weapons had taken so much from her. But she regarded him now with a hard pragmatic gaze.
As he hesitated, the Engineer took on the task of answering her question, explaining, “The tactic is impractical at this time. The debris is over four light-hours away and tumbling in an unpredictable manner—and the beam is narrow. It’s unlikely to find a target.”
“Then we modify our course,” Clemantine said, her gaze still fixed on Urban.
This time, the Pilot responded: “Course adjustments are being undertaken. Instructions are already outbound, directing the fleet away from the debris.”