Edges

by Linda Nagata

  The perspective zoomed closer. The gleaming oval expanded until it escaped the edges of the monitor. The spark held its position at the center but grew in size, took on a form, a shape: another ring. A tag reported a diameter of fourteen thousand kilometers—far smaller than the blade, but still planetary in scale.

  In contrast to the blade, this ring was clearly three-dimensional.

  A torus, Urban thought. Narrow and graceful like a woman’s bracelet. It lay nearly edge-on to the star so that light struck one-half of its outer circumference—the equatorial band—wrapping the polar surfaces before dissipating in a twilight zone.

  The ring’s other half—the half farthest from the star—was mostly dark. Only a small section of the inner wall enjoyed daylight, gleaming bright blue-white.

  Urban raised a hand toward the screen. An atavistic gesture, the desire of instinct to explore by touch, but instead of touching, he imagined what might be there. The scattering of light so far around the curve of the ring suggested an atmosphere, but how could an object of such geometry hold onto an atmosphere?

  “It has an artificial gravity,” Urban said. Not a question.

  “This world is Verilotus,” the entity told him. “This is my world. It exists within a pocket of space-time held open by the blade—what my people named the Bow of Heaven. The flow of time is accelerated there. A year of game time as days go by outside. It may be that too much time has passed and nothing is left of my players.”

  Urban stepped away from the screen. Wonder and excitement had chewed up the free calories in his brain, leaving him swaying on his feet—and short tempered. “Lights!” he demanded in a hoarse voice. “Leave the privacy screens closed.” The walls and ceiling swiftly brightened, leaving only rare shadows.

  Lezuri had shown him this sight to tempt him, to persuade him to turn the fleet away from Tanjiri. And Urban was tempted. Oh yes. So tempted. Lezuri could manipulate time . . . if he was telling the truth.

  But Urban didn’t trust him. And he feared Lezuri—what he was, what he’d been, but especially, what he might become again.

  For all the power Urban commanded as master of Dragon, he was nothing, insignificant against a being who could open up a burning seam between two Universes and use it to pin an artificial world in place.

  And it occurred to him—much later than it should have—that there must be a second entity resident there. He remembered Lezuri’s bitter voice explaining how he’d come to be marooned in the void: One whom I loved betrayed me.

  “You are wondering about her,” Lezuri said. “My ‘other half.’”

  Urban stared at him, startled at the accuracy of this guess. He heard himself ask a stumbling question: “Was she . . . a woman?”

  “A goddess.”

  Urban flinched at the word, but not because notions of deity were alien to him. On the frontier, the Unknown God was an accepted, if amorphous concept—an indeterminate, inscrutable force pervading the cosmos . . . or perhaps existing beyond it.

  But Lezuri’s “goddess” was his partner entity, surely a being like Lezuri himself, with a personal presence, a tangible existence, emergent from the competitive maelstrom of the Communion, and potentially knowable.

  Lezuri continued to speak, now in a melancholy voice as he gazed at the image of Verilotus, still visible on the display screen. “I made the world. She brought life to it. But her work was flawed—too simplistic, too naturalistic, lacking the unpredictability and the spice of brutal challenge my players needed to gain in skill and strength and fortitude as they moved from one life to the next, from one level, to the next. We argued over it, she and I. Both of us, passionate beings, unwilling to compromise.” He eyed Urban again. “I think now, war was inevitable between us.”

  Sooth, Urban thought, stepping back, opening the distance between them. “She won,” he said. “She proved stronger than you.”

  Lezuri’s eyes narrowed. “She proved more ruthless. But I don’t know that she survived our conflict. I barely did. I only know she cast me away from our sun, shattering my mind with the force of her gesture. Billions of seconds have passed since then, in the slow time of the greater Universe. I have tried to rebuild myself, though so little remains. Still, I must return. I have a duty, an obligation, to those players I left behind.”

  Urban issued silent commands, turning off the view screen, returning the telescopes to the standard survey of the Near Vicinity, locking away the newly acquired image of Verilotus under a secure key—although this last, he knew, was futile.

  Lezuri would surely have a means to capture images. There would be no metadata attached, no proof that it wasn’t faked, but it would be enough to inspire an examination of the telescope records, and after that a request for the original image.

  Verilotus could not be kept secret and once its existence was known to the ship’s company there would be demands that the fleet go there instead of to Tanjiri.

  Urban would not let that happen. To return this broken fragment of a warring god to his seat of power struck him as a fool’s choice. To risk encountering an entity of similar violent nature, possibly still in the fullness of her power . . . he would not do it.

  He would not do it, regardless of the consensus of the ship’s company.

  Still, he did not want to impose his will. That would lead to festering resentment. Better to argue his position . . . or circumvent debate by persuading Lezuri to take one of the outriders and go—get off my ship!

  No. That couldn’t work. Lezuri would never risk getting in front of Dragon’s gun.

  Lezuri must want control of that gun.

  As if to confirm it, the entity said, “We must approach in stealth. These two ships together are well armed, but she is not without her resources.”

  “I’m not here to take part in your war,” Urban said as he waved aside the privacy screens, allowing daylight to flood the room. Subminds visited, updating him on the ship’s status. Everything normal, peaceful.

  A message from Clemantine:

  *I’m on my way home.

  He glanced at her display of irises. They remained fresh and blue. No precipitous shift to white. Not yet.

  Still, he understood their lesson: Nothing lasts.

  TWELFTH

  You have lost so much of yourself, but this you remember from your origin: Strike first. Take without hesitation or be taken.

  This is the credo that allowed you to rise above the Swarm. By this credo you survived your origin, escaped it, went on to create a world of your own.

  You know now that world still exists. Knowing this, you are more determined than ever to return.

  She may still be there. You suspect she is there. The biosphere is still there, and that is evidence of her presence—but you promise yourself it won’t last. You will end her tenancy, eliminate all trace of her failed art, re-create your world and your players as you intended them to be.

  You will need this starship to do it, but the ship’s master continues to stand in the way of your ambition. You have sought to persuade him, you have promised to teach him, you have given him the gift of yourself, but he is resolved against you. A hard resistance that reminds you of her.

  You envision the days of persuasion to come, the political maneuvering, vicious factionalism, false compromises, inevitable betrayals—and you have no patience for it. Better to end this stalemate now.

  You are ready.

  In the million seconds since you first sent your avatar among your people, you completed preparations for a first strike. Quiescent in the archives of both ships is a template based on one of your people—that one who was incautious enough to loan you his mechanical device. His ghost now belongs to you. It is a shell you will use to take command of both ships, an interface that will let you endure the violent alien nature of the Swarm contained within the philosopher cells . . . if all goes well.

  If not, there is another plan in place.

  Through your avatar you see the ship’s master, his eyes w
idening as he anticipates your intention, but for him it is too late.

  Dancing across your avatar’s upturned palms is the tingling luminous silver shimmer of the ha—breath of life, breath of death—creation and disintegration both contained within a fog of adaptive molecular machines programmed by quantum instruction to fulfill your will.

  The ha ladders across the gap that separates your avatar from his.

  For all that you’ve forgotten, you never forgot this.

  Chapter

  36

  Urban glimpsed a fog of luminous silver sparks rising from Lezuri’s upturned palms, their shimmer suggesting a composition similar to the needle Lezuri had given him, although that was locked into a fixed crystalline structure, while this flowed.

  He had never seen such a mechanism before. Maybe it was another demonstration, like the needle? He hesitated a full second, wanting to see it as benign. In that time, the silver replicated across Lezuri’s palms. It wound together, forming a tendril.

  Instinct took over.

  Urban stumbled backward, heart racing. He’d waited too long. The tendril leaped toward him with appalling speed, forcing him to accept the bitter truth: It was a weapon. What else could it be?

  He remembered the protocol put in place years ago against this moment. He undertook the prescribed action, triggering a radio burst that would close the data gate to Griffin. Next he sent a submind to warn his ghost on the high bridge. Then he messaged Clemantine:

  *Warn our people! I think—

  The tendril touched him. Instantly, it expanded to envelop his body, enwrapping him from head to toe in a new skin, a skin that consumed him, grinding down through the layers of his physical existence, dis-assembling him so swiftly there wasn’t time to register pain or the shocking inadequacy of his own defensive Makers in the face of this new and unexpected form of assault.

  All he had time to do was upload a ghost, a last imprint of this version of himself.

  <><><>

  Clemantine was walking with Kona back from the dining terrace when Urban’s truncated message reached her: *Warn our people! I think—

  Words sharp with a high-edge of panic, jumbled together in his hurry to get them out.

  *Urban?

  She looked ahead along the path that wound between neat cottages and pretty gardens, everything well ordered under a bright artificial sky.

  *Urban!

  “What is it?” Kona asked, though she had not spoken aloud.

  “Something’s happened to Urban. We need to find him.”

  A moment before, he had been at their cottage. She did not bother to recheck the personnel map, but took off running, aware of Kona following a step behind.

  *Urban, answer me!

  He did not.

  She rounded the last bend in the path. Her cottage came into view. A luminous silver fog billowed from the doorway and from the window, dissolving the surrounding walls as it touched them, and leaching through the miniature meadow on the roof.

  She came to an abrupt stop, putting an arm out to block Kona. Urban had said, Warn our people. Now she knew why. She composed a general message, dictating it out loud so that it doubled as a shouted warning: “Evacuate! Evacuate! We’ve got a runaway event. Take shelter now!”

  The cloud collapsed just as her warning went out. It condensed into a thick silver liquid. Only a few centimeters deep, it flowed over the threshold and onto the patio, shimmering there for a few seconds.

  Then it was gone, vanished. Evaporated? Or absorbed into the floor of the gee deck? She couldn’t tell.

  She started forward.

  “No, get back,” Kona told her.

  She went on anyway, to the edge of the patio. From there, she could see in through the doorway. She could see inside easily because a meter of wall on either side of the threshold was gone, and so was most of the interior wall that divided the bedroom.

  The cottage was empty.

  Literally empty. Urban was not there. Neither was the sofa, the carpet, the pillows, the paintings, the side table with the shallow dish that held her irises—everything gone, nothing left behind. No goo, no detritus. On the surviving walls, the room’s adaptive tissue was exposed, its surface scalloped where mass had been carved away.

  She edged across the patio, vaguely aware of Kona cautioning her, but she had to see.

  “It’s cold,” she realized as she reached the threshold. There was not even the heat of metabolic processes left behind. The room was cold. So cold that the damaged surfaces of the adaptive tissue began to steam as they initiated self-repair.

  <><><>

  A notification reached Urban on the high bridge, one he’d set up in the first years of the voyage, to let him know whenever a ghost woke from the archive. Riffan’s ghost had just awoken. He noted it. It should have been just one more banal data point and yet something about it troubled him.

  Clemantine sensed the shift in his mood. *What? she asked.

  *Riffan just woke his ghost from the archive. Why would he do that when he’s already awake?

  A radio signal burst from Dragon’s antenna, startling him, startling the philosopher cells. He recognized it as a warning to close the data gate on Griffin.

  Somewhere, something had gone very wrong.

  A submind reached him, overwhelming him in memories: an encounter with Lezuri, a newly discovered artificial world, a moment of proud defiance—and death in the form of a leaping silver tendril.

  <><><>

  The ghost Urban had generated within his dying mind instantiated in the library. Riffan was there ahead of him, gazing at a window that displayed a view of the ring world at Verilotus. He turned to greet Urban, his face beaming with a friendly smile. “Look! It’s such an amazing thing. We must make it our destination.”

  Within the library, geometry was flexible so that proximity could shift, becoming greater or lesser, but change unfolded as a sliding scale, not as teleportation. Riffan had found a way around that rule. One moment, he was by the window. And then he was face-to-face with Urban.

  In the infinitesimal fraction of a second Urban required to register this, the ghost raised its fist.

  At this range, Urban perceived the apparition with a peculiar double vision. There was the smiling ghost, utterly normal in appearance, but he could see into it. He could see that it was a shell, an envelope structured in Riffan’s guise, using Riffan’s permissions to allow an unauthorized intruder into the network. Contained within the shell was a dense, three-dimensional maze of computational weaponry that shimmered in luminous silver motion.

  The ghost shoved its fist into Urban’s chest, injecting a data parasite.

  Urban congealed his recent memories into a submind and retreated, wiping his ghost as he left.

  <><><>

  Standing on the cold threshold of her cottage, Clemantine traded subminds with her ghost on the high bridge. Urban was there, safe, but another version of him had triggered a radio warning to close the data gate to Griffin.

  “Where is he?” Kona demanded. “What the hell is going on?”

  Clemantine didn’t answer. Instead, she addressed a message to both Pasha and the Bio-mechanic: *Alert! I don’t know what’s happening, but it’s bad. Be ready to trigger the Pyrrhic Defense.

  <><><>

  Excited conversations circulated among the philosopher cells as they developed explanations for the anomalous radio signal. Ideas were proposed, analyzed, boosted or rejected within a fraction of a second while Urban fought hard to keep his rising fear in check. Lezuri had attacked him, erased him—

  *What’s wrong? Clemantine demanded.

  *Lezuri—

  He broke off as a new submind arrived, the memories it carried seizing his attention: Riffan’s false ghost and the attack of computational weaponry.

  *What about Lezuri? Clemantine pressed him.

  He told her, *The war’s gone hot. A predator is loose in the network. It came after my ghost. Destroyed it. May have subsumed my
permissions. If we lose the network, we lose the ship.

  He could not hide his raw fear from the philosopher cells. They sensed it across a hundred thousand nodes and reacted by sending energy flowing toward the gamma-ray gun. But there was no threat in the Near Vicinity. No target.

  He aborted the response: – negate that! –

  The only potential threat was Griffin, trailing behind, commanded by that colder version of Clemantine.

  Lezuri knew Griffin was there.

  So why had he attacked, with Griffin ready and willing to put an end to any takeover attempt? Why? Unless he thought he could take over Griffin too?

  Riffan’s ghost! Each time it was updated, it would have been copied from Dragon’s archive, sent in a package to Artemis, and from there to Griffin.

  Shit.

  <><><>

  In Griffin’s library, Clemantine stood at the center of her council of Apparatchiks. She’d summoned them immediately after she’d closed the data gate.

  “Something has happened. We don’t know what, and we’ve had no instructions on whether to hold off or proceed with termination—”

  “It’s too soon to commence,” the Scholar said. “We can’t act precipitously, without data.”

  “I agree.”

  “But we also need to be prepared to reach a decision on our own,” the Engineer said.

  “Yes.” She turned to the Astronomer. “It’s on you to alert us to any external activity. If Dragon should fire a steerage jet or begin to swivel its gun—”

  The entire circle froze, the attention of each entity diverted as Griffin picked up a new radio communication.

  Urban’s voice: Access your archive. Delete Riffan’s ghost. Do not allow it to instantiate. It is corrupt. Repeat: it is corrupt. Do not allow it to instantiate. Do it now!