Edges

by Linda Nagata

  “Among us?” Urban asked, selecting this last point from among all the many curious aspects of this remarkable speech. “You’ve made an effort to mimic the form but I don’t hear a heart beating. I have to wonder, if I cut you, would you bleed?”

  The avatar smiled again, brighter and more dangerous. “If I choose to.” A gesture that took in Urban, head to toe. “You—your people—hold tight to an ancestral purity of form. A choice I admire. One I’ve encouraged in others. There are so many possible levels of existence, each worthy in their own way.”

  “What others?” Urban asked. “Where are these others now?”

  “I don’t know,” it admitted. “So much time has passed I don’t know what is left, but I will find them again. Return to them. Re-create them if I need to. I owe them life. I will restore all my players and the world I made for them. This time, as it was meant to—”

  It froze, lips parted to frame a last unspoken word. At the same time, a DI dropped an alert into Urban’s atrium that let him guess where the avatar’s attention had gone. He said, “Clemantine is coming.”

  “Yes,” the avatar agreed.

  Urban used the moment to summon a personnel map. He saw Clemantine approaching up the walk and he saw his own location marked, but there was no indication that the avatar was there with him—an omission he found profoundly disturbing. Had the thing mastered the ship’s information system?

  No. No, that wasn’t it. The fault was in the map, designed to track only the locations of the ship’s human company.

  He messaged Clemantine: *Wait. Don’t come in.

  The avatar spoke in a gentled voice. “You do not trust me and that is wise. Still, I mean you no harm and I have much to offer in return for your cooperation.” A half turn toward the door. “We will talk more later.”

  Urban moved at last, crossing the front room as the gel door retracted. Clemantine stood on the patio, head cocked, brow furrowed, looking both offended and confused.

  “Stay back from it,” Urban warned her. “Stay away.” He had no idea how physically dangerous it might be.

  The avatar looked back at him with an amused smile. Then it inclined its head at Clemantine. “Pardon me,” it said, slipping past her.

  Urban joined her. Together they watched the entity stride away, disappearing in seconds around a curve in the village path.

  Clemantine spoke in a husky voice, “What was that?”

  He hesitated, wondering how to phrase it.

  “You were alone,” she said. “I checked the map. There was no one here. So who was that? What was that?”

  “You know, don’t you?” he asked her. “It’s been there for years, lying dormant in Dragon’s tissue.” He turned to meet Clemantine’s wide-eyed stare. “It’s awake now.”

  “By the Unknown God!” she whispered. Then her voice hardened. “You’re watching it, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Link me.”

  He did, just as it stepped off the path, onto the patio fronting Riffan’s home. “Ah, shit,” he said. He could not cause a camera to bud in the private space of a cottage.

  Clemantine took off after it. He followed, a step behind. The personnel map showed Riffan at the amphitheater. Probably the cottage was empty. Through his atrium, Urban watched the entity’s avatar disappear inside.

  Seconds later, he and Clemantine reached the cottage door. She pushed through first.

  A large sofa on one side of the room. It faced a generative wall that bulged with a half-dissolved human shape wrapped in a translucent membrane. A network of capillaries, swollen into visibility, pulsed as they worked to pump the avatar’s disintegrating tissue into the transport channels of the gee deck’s circulatory system.

  “It’s erasing itself,” Clemantine breathed.

  “Sooth.”

  “How is that possible?”

  Urban pressed his palm against the pulsing capillaries. Generative walls were designed to be harmless to the human and animal inhabitants of the gee deck. The wall responded as it should, ignoring his touch. He said, “Its avatar wasn’t human.”

  He drew back his hand. Shock yielded to fury. He had to resist an urge to punch the receding bulge. “It’s playing with us, Clemantine! It’s playing with me.”

  “What did it want?” she asked, icily calm.

  He thought about it. Reviewed what had been said. Important information had been revealed but he decided that was ancillary to the entity’s primary purpose. “It wanted me to know that for all the improvements in my defenses, I still can’t touch it.”

  Only a few lumps remained in the wall.

  Urban generated a ghost, armed with his anger and frustration. He transited into the library, summoned the Bio-mechanic.

  For once, that Apparatchik appeared worried. He told Urban, “It came out of the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, entering inhabited spaces through the warren.”

  “How could you miss it? How could it grow to that size and you not be aware of it?”

  “I don’t know,” the Bio-mechanic admitted. “Not yet. But I will know soon.”

  TENTH

  Another aphorism: balanced on a knife edge.

  A situation in which disaster will follow the least mistake.

  You did not want to emerge this soon, to present yourself to your people.

  Still, more than two billion seconds of quiet coexistence has muted their fear. Allowed you to become a mythological figure in their minds. Real but not real. There, but overlooked in the day-to-day. A prospective hazard. A notional threat.

  During this interim you worked to rebuild and reorganize this remaining fragment of your mind. You’re nearly complete now, although grossly limited compared to your memory of greater things. No matter. This existence is only a stage, a transitory phase in your recovery. You’ve remembered the machinery at Verilotus. If you can get there, if you can slip in past her vindictive watch, you will level-up many times over.

  Before then, you cannot risk an encounter with a god—and there is a surviving godlike being in Tanjiri System. You cannot doubt it. Only such a being could have restored Tanjiri-2 to life and assembled the living moon.

  Your people—so bold and brave and curious—do not understand the risk they would take on by going there.

  So you walk the knife’s edge. You have revealed yourself to them as an enigma, a puzzle. You will stoke their curiosity, offer them gifts of knowledge, soothe their fears, and persuade them that there is a more worthy target for their explorations.

  You must gauge your approach with great care. You cannot command obedience, not yet, not with the second ship trailing within weapons range. In time, as you come into your power, your people will reach acceptance. Until then, you must be wary of igniting a war you cannot win. You must make no mistakes.

  Indeed, you decide that “mistake” shall be an undefined concept. You will work to ensure that there is more than one possible path forward. If an action does not produce the desired result, you will change the parameters of the situation to make it right.

  Chapter

  30

  “Thank you for coming,” Pasha said, ushering Clemantine into her cottage. “Please, have a seat.”

  Clemantine eyed her warily but said nothing as she took one of the two white cushy chairs arranged alongside a garden window.

  Pasha signaled privacy screens to close across the door and the windows, cutting off the view of the garden and all outside light.

  Clemantine’s finely sculpted eyebrows rose to put a question mark over a steely gaze. “You’re working on a contingency plan?” she asked as Pasha sat down. “Some harsh means to rid us of the entity?”

  The accuracy of this guess caught Pasha by surprise. She folded her hands in her lap to hide their sudden trembling. Her invitation had given nothing away. She’d merely said, I request your discretion, and a private meeting.

  “Was I so transparent?” she asked in a subdued voice.

  “I think we kn
ow each other’s views.”

  Only in part. Clemantine had despised the entity from the beginning, but that did not mean she would agree to act outside the consensus of the ship’s company. Pasha had meant to feel her out on the topic, but now it was out in the open and she needed Clemantine, needed at least this one ally, so she confessed, “Yes, you’ve guessed correctly. I have a plan ready.”

  Two days had passed since the entity’s brief appearance, with no sign of it since and no hint of activity at the containment capsule. The incident had generated heated discussions. Naresh and his allies imagined the entity cautiously testing the ship’s company—weighing their hostility, their rationality, their adaptability—evaluating whether they would make worthy allies.

  Pasha’s grim opinion was different. She saw its behavior as seduction: It’s teasing, stoking our curiosity, hinting at rewards—‘we will help each other’—tactics to establish an emotional connection . . . and reduce the threat Griffin presents to its existence.

  She looked for some hint of sympathetic interest in Clemantine’s eyes, but saw only stern reserve. She pushed on anyway, her heart tripping in shallow rhythm. “Griffin can deny this ship to the entity, but that is not the outcome we want. Instead—”

  Clemantine cut in. “Instead, what we want is to extricate the entity from Dragon and eliminate it. You don’t need to convince me of that. I want that thing off this ship if we have to burn half our mass to do it.”

  Pasha squeezed her hands together. Fear of what she was proposing reduced her voice to a soft monotone. “It would take only twenty-three percent of the ship’s mass . . . at most. That number comes from my own calculations. I’ve done a lot of work over the years.”

  This won a slight nod from Clemantine. Go on.

  Pasha said, “I’d like you to ask Griffin’s Engineer to check my work. Look for flaws, refine the design with an eye toward limiting the scale of damage. After that, it’s a matter of implementation.”

  “Are you planning a unilateral shock attack?” Clemantine asked coldly.

  “No. I have no plans to initiate an attack. I intend this as insurance. Something to have in reserve, ready to use, when this long truce finally breaks.”

  “You think it’s inevitable?”

  “Yes. But if I’m wrong, no harm done.”

  “Assuming your preparations remain secret. If the entity suspects what you’re doing, it could kick off conflict.”

  “Yes. Stealth is essential. That’s why I can’t seek consensus. It’s why I’m asking only you.” She added bitterly, “Naresh and his allies would never agree anyway.”

  Clemantine said, “Urban would not agree.”

  Pasha froze, her heart hammering, trying to read intent behind Clemantine’s stony expression—and failing. She sensed an imminent defeat.

  But then Clemantine’s gaze softened. Worry creased her brow. She said, “Urban’s strategy all along has been to play for time, learn what we can, improve our position. But I think time is short. The entity will show itself again, and it will be welcomed by many. There may even be a consensus for alliance. But I can’t forget what it said to Urban.”

  She quoted the entity’s words as recorded on video: “‘I will restore all my players and the world I made for them.’”

  Her thin expressive eyebrows knit. “It has plans of its own that don’t involve us, except as a means to an end.”

  Pasha drew a deep melancholy breath. “I think it’s worse than that. I think we are players, already caught up in a game devised by this thing.”

  Clemantine considered this. After a few seconds, she said, “Send me your plan. I’ll ask Griffin’s Engineer to evaluate it. If this is a game, we need to be ready to change the rules.”

  <><><>

  After several hours, they met again with the privacy screens sealed.

  Clemantine looked grim as she took a seat. Pasha braced herself, expecting to hear of some fatal flaw in her carefully developed assault plan. Instead, Clemantine said, “Griffin’s Engineer agrees the strategy you’ve developed could work as intended.”

  “Oh good! That is good . . . right?”

  An uncertain shrug. “If Dragon survives. If we’re not left marooned and helpless, our reef destroyed and our rare elements all consumed.”

  “Oh.” The assault would be ugly and traumatic. Pasha knew that. She’d run her own simulation. “We wouldn’t launch the process unless we had to. It’s insurance. A step short of calling on Griffin . . . and we’ll be able to seed a new reef from Griffin or one of the outriders.”

  Clemantine said, “The news isn’t all positive. The Engineer did not believe the plan could be implemented in secret—and I think he’s right. The amount of materiel that will need to be synthesized and precisely placed . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t have the skill to direct an operation like that. I don’t think you do either.”

  “No, you’re right,” Pasha said. “We’ll need help with that.”

  “Urban won’t agree—”

  Pasha waved this off. “I don’t think he could do it anyway. It’s the Bio-mechanic we need. I worked with him when I was studying the governors. He despises the entity and he’s half-mad with frustration that he’s never been able to match its defenses. Plus, he’s as ruthless as the Chenzeme. I think he’ll help us.”

  Clemantine looked skeptical. “You think he’d take on a task this significant, this dangerous, and not tell Urban?”

  “If he wants to beat the entity,” Pasha said. “And he does.”

  “All right, then. Ask him.”

  With Clemantine’s permission secured, Pasha went to the library where she summoned the Bio-mechanic to a private chamber.

  He manifested with crossed arms, a curled lip, and a scornful glare.

  Despite an extensive search through the vast complexes of the ship’s tissue, the Bio-mechanic had failed to discover where the entity’s avatar had been grown—a defeat that had left him in a caustic temper.

  “Have you brought me another clever plan to work against our mutual enemy?” he asked in a voice toxic with sarcasm.

  Pasha answered sweetly, “Yes, I have! And I think this one is within your reach.”

  Chapter

  31

  Riffan returned to the containment capsule, nested for sixty-three years now in Dragon’s tissue. He’d visited it daily since the entity’s brief appearance. “Come speak to us,” he invited. “All of us. We don’t need to be enemies.”

  When he’d learned the entity had entered his cottage, dissolved its avatar in his generative wall, he’d been badly rattled. Logic suggested it was a coincidence and no reflection of his early efforts at communication—and yet illogically he felt called out, compelled to establish a bridge between the entity and the ship’s company.

  So far his efforts to persuade the entity to come forth again had gone unrewarded, but he kept at it, and with increasing urgency, because each passing day left him more fearful—not of the entity, but of the growing division among the ship’s company.

  Many, maybe even most, desired compromise. Riffan counted himself among this faction. They had all joined the expedition to learn, to explore, to discover what lifeforms had survived among the Hallowed Vasties and here was one such lifeform now living among them.

  When he’d first encountered it at the Rock, Riffan had been terrified, and when it had infested the ship he’d hoped desperately that Urban would be able to eliminate it, erase it utterly, because he’d believed their survival was at stake.

  Survival excused many behaviors that would otherwise be criminal.

  Riffan said, “We understand you did not attack this ship as a hostile act.” He hesitated, then amended this statement. “Well, most of the ship’s company understands that. The question of your own survival left you no choice. And you’ve done nothing to threaten our survival. Better for all of us to be allies than enemies. And more among the ship’s company might be persuaded of that if you were to come forth a
gain, talk to us, answer our many questions, allow us to know you.”

  A sense of peaceful amiability came over him. He recognized the effect of the harmless behavioral virus he’d experienced once before. His excitement ramped up. This was the first response he’d gotten in sixty-three years! He breathed deeply, taking in the virus, wanting to extend its effect, knowing his defensive Makers would swiftly break it down. Such a small thing—and yet he felt victorious knowing the entity was aware of him, that it was listening to and considering his words.

  So speak again, you idiot!

  “You may already know,” he said hastily. “But there is another assembly scheduled to begin in forty-five minutes. I want to encourage you to come take part in it. Speak to us. I know your presence will change everything.”

  <><><>

  As Riffan returned to the gee deck, he debated with himself. Should he announce that his visit to the containment capsule had finally won a response? He wanted to believe the behavioral virus was a meaningful communication, a promise that events were moving forward, that all would be well. But at the same time, he didn’t want to read too much into it. He was wary of setting up expectations only to have them go unfulfilled—and the assembly was about to start anyway.

  Let’s just see what happens, he concluded.

  He composed himself, employing his acting skills to hide his excitement. Then he reached the amphitheater, saw the sparse turnout, and nearly changed his mind.