by B C Woodruff
“Ship.” Aux-Ceras stretched out, satisfied that they wouldn’t find anything out of the ordinary there. “I would like you to recognize Code Hot Steam and behave appropriately when you are being interrogated. Nothing about the Realms, the Council, or my orders are to be divulged to Umberite authorities without explicit indication that they are already aware of them. Confirm.”
= CONFIRMED, Ceras. =
“Good. Now, give me some Uplift so I can be at my best.” It didn’t respond; instead, a soft mist followed from the ports on the sides of the hallway. The moment they touched his biomimetic skin he felt invigorated, mind and body, and it was good timing.
“Arbiter Ceras.” The voice seemed to come from the transmission centre of his neuro-implant. Even though the ship’s matter synth hadn’t been activated in centuries, this frame’s resemblance to his actual body was truly uncanny. “We are here to guide you to the Capital. My name is Ulgrick, and my co-pilot is Temme. We are pleased to serve as your security detail, and hope that you find your stay with us a comfortable one. I have been assured you are prepared to power down when indicated. Shall we go?”
He returned the message with a mere thought. “Yes. Thank you, Ulgrick and Temme. Let’s get going.”
The escort craft, nearly as big as the Crusade ship, darted towards the gravity well of the rogue planet. It was barren, for the most part, but that information had been available in the preliminary report. There were small spots of civilization here and there, encased under enormous domes – albeit small relative to the planet itself.
One dome could easily have been the size of Australia back on Old Earth, another, the size of Europe, but they were relatively small, and that’s how the Realms measured things.
In terms of land mass, population, and military might, they were a pebble in the sky when compared to the Realms, and even to the Autarchy that Umber was scheduled to meet. Like Earth would appear next to the red supergiant Betelgeuse.
They drew closer to the amplified magnetosphere and, as he was instructed, Arbiter Ceras shut off the power to the ship. His vacsuit generator came to life, forming a soft shell around his flesh, encasing him in a preservative field that could sustain him in environments that would vaporize even the near-immortal inhabitants of the Realms. It was a standard feature for Arbiters and those living outside Green Zones.
The technology was old, but effective.
= DON’T FORGET YOUR ORDERS, Ceras. =
The Ship sent a final, slurred reminder before falling into hibernation.
Meanwhile, and as the vacsuit finished forming, the ship found itself effortlessly attached to the guide belt from the lead escort. Ceras was quick to switch his perceptual feed to explore the view and data from the ship’s perspective; even with the core deactivated, the passive sensors could continue to supply telemetry for hours.
It was all wrong, of course, but he didn’t know it then. He sighed a little, feeling refreshed by what the data said. It should have bothered him. It was a hint, wasn’t it?
Everything looked normal.
***
“Welcome to our world!” Host and Master Derridan Max- well reached out and shook his hands, one after the other. “I am so pleased to see that we have such a high ranking agent of the
Council joining us for this,” he leaned in, “frankly absurd impediment on our rights as an independent state.”
“I’m sure we’ll be able to resolve all of this quickly enough.” “Yes, yes! Good saying, my friend!” The Host and Master was gregarious and warm, as opposed to the antagonistic prick that he had been made out to be by the Realms media.
“Where shall we start?” Ceras asked with a smile, knowing that Derridan had already felt enough direct pressure from the Council. “I think we should start with a taste of the culture here. I’ll be handing you off to Temme, who will take you to our garden, and then to the Capital near the edge of our agricultural plots. He will want to record your conversations for review later, of course.”
“Of course.” “Then, let’s say around the midday feast, we’ll meet with the elected officials here in preparation for the Autarchy’s delegation.” The Host and Master went to leave when Ceras added: “When do you expect Umber to enter orbit?”
He stopped. “Days, perhaps a week at most. Our gravitists have had some difficulty bending the warp of our shell to match the unique quality of the system’s background energies.”
“Yes, about that, the Realms are very interested in how–” “All to be explored and perhaps even explained at a different time, Arbiter Ceras. Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have much to prepare for.”
He left quickly, leaving Ceras with Temme, a small man with big, round, and eerily black eyes and a bald, shaved scalp. His teeth were golden and his skin tone, something like a light, transparent chrome set atop a pinkish base.
Ceras made a sharp contrast, matching a rich, dark tone with bright, chilling blue eyes, and stood at least a foot taller than his new companion.
“Fine to meet you, Arbiter.” “And you.” Temme clapped his hands together, “Well, let’s get going, shall we? Lots to see, lots to do, and people to meet! My, oh my, many people to meet.”
“Reliable information on Umber is tough to come by in the news feeds or the Continuous Archives. How much, I wonder, are you allowed to discuss with me?”
“As long as it doesn’t violate our sovereign right to privacy, I can pretty much tell you about anything. Father really wants you to be comfortable and for the people of the Continuous Realms to understand that while we’re open to negotiation, we aren’t going to be bullied.”
“Father? The Host and Master is your father?” “Apologies, I thought you were aware of that. Yes, all leading officials are directly related to the Maxwell genegroup. It ensures that we can properly serve the people without internal struggles or protests.”
“Interesting... Rather like Old Earth prior to the abolition of the royal systems.”
The man’s black eyes widened, and Ceras thought he saw a translucent membrane slide across both.
“Old Earth?” He clapped again, this time with noticeable excitement. “Do you really have experience with people from the home- world?”
“I was born there.” His grin swallowed itself into a grimace. “Certainly not! That would make you...” He counted, stopped, stared off into the distance, and came back with: “Old. Very, very old. Impossibly old. Unpleasantly old, perhaps.”
“I’ll be happy to provide you with details. I guarantee you that I am what I say I am.”
Temme’s head shook. “Let’s forget that, for now at least. Come, come, we must get onto the Vein and travel to the Capital! You’ll get a chance to see some of the cleverness of the Umberite people. We have done some wonderful things with superconducting lattices, to say nothing of the exotic materials we retrieved from the Sp–” He paused. “When we were experimenting with the technology that keeps Umber safely insulated from the interstellar medium.”
The two walked through into a carrier car on a track and sat down. Since Ceras arrived, aside from the Host and Temme, there had been no sign that any other humans lived on the planet at all – even here, at a transit station, they were alone.
“Temme, tell me, why are you here?” His expression twitched. “Indeed, that’s a good question. Why are we here? What is our purpose? Can we be sure there is such a thing?”
“I mea–”
“Yes, yes, I know what you meant. I’ll have to defer to my father to give you a better explanation than I can. We have been traveling a long time, Arbiter. A very, very long time. We have seen such things that would haunt your mind, waking or asleep, until the day you chose to end it all. We have found ourselves face to face with phenomena and possibilities that would make the True Justice himself take leave of his senses and abandon millions of years of evolution in favour of the mindlessness of beasts. Yet, out there, in the great divide where so few are prepared to travel, we have come to the conclusi
on that, perhaps, together is better than alone.”
Temme went to barely a whisper, “Without ears, it listens. Without a heart, it feels.”
“What does?”
“The universe. Reality. Whatever you choose to call it.” The car accelerated silently. Out they went, from the window-less station onto the surface of Umber. The cold, colourless terrain was almost smooth except for some rolling valleys and hills in the distance. Far off, beyond the shimmer of the gravity field, the Autarchy’s brilliant blue star – as rogue as the planets that orbited it – was faintly visible.
Soon their representatives would arrive, and the Umberites’ presentation would begin.
For now, there was something unattainably beautiful about the blue light twinkling just out of reach. Yet, its size grew with each passing moment.
“Loneliness doesn’t seem much like the appropriate emotion to incite a war with the Continuous Realms, my young friend.”
“We don’t war, Arbiter. But, and I mean this by no way as a threat – rather, as a cautious statement that requires your attention, if I may usurp your polite language for the sake of brevity – If there were to be a war as a result of our overtures towards the Autarchy, and if convincing you is our battlefield, you should know that we will win it.”
They rode on for a time accompanied by much more vague conversation regarding far less interesting things until, finally, the car rose up a hill and slowed as it settled into a large, artificial crater with a dome that shook as it was pierced and sealed behind them.
“Gods be good,” Ceras gasped, nearly pressing his face to the window. “What beauty is this?” ***
Spurred on by the fading intelligence at its core, the Crusade ship’s reserve energy flowed into the matter synth chamber. It wasn’t enough that most security systems would take notice – or that was the hope, at least. From within the polyform gel, something like a human formed.
Umber had just passed into the Span, the energy field created long before its idealistic founders set a course into the abyss. This had, in turn, triggered the next phase in the Council’s plan.
In moments, the Nemesis would be complete, and it would start about its task.
***
“I’m still absolutely dumbfounded by what you have done here, Temme.” Ceras was gushing, and it was genuine. He kept looking out the window as the car made the circuit around the Capital. The crater was green and bright and beautiful.
“We extrapolated the information from our own genetic code.” Ceras nodded, obviously confused. “We reverse engineered our genome as far back as we could, interpolating data where we had to, watching it branch out, trimming things here and there, and using new data to move even further back. Again and again for thousands of years. At first, we only tampered with samples from our archives, but eventually, we had a breakthrough and took leaps into prehistory. To a time when the Tree of Life was much more extensive, to a time when so many wonderful and impossible things emerged from the crucible of ancient Earth. This is the fruit of that labour of love, Arbiter Ceras – our secret, and our gift.”
Out there, just beyond the morning fog, was a forest unlike any the universe had known for a quarter million years. It was lush, vibrant, idyllic, and any other word that could be used to describe something impossible to imagine in an era where, for the most part, humans weren’t even human in form or function anymore.
Ceras, the real Ceras, certainly wasn’t. To him, this seemed improbable and yet to others, he knew, it would seem wasteful.
What need did the universe or the Realms have for these things? One by one, the greatest minds in the galaxy had pushed humanity far beyond the petty limitations of organic existence.
“I think”– Ceras hesitated for an agonizing moment – “I think you may have a case.”
“We know we have a case, Arbiter Ceras, and we expect our petition to join the Autarchy – even as it technically lies within your territory – will proceed without incident. But by virtue that you also see it this way, perhaps there will be peace in our time after all. We do not want wish to revisit the Long War, do we?”
Still entranced, Ceras could only nod in agreement.
The car slowed as it turned into a spiral that ran into a grass-layered tunnel near one side of the forest. It was disappointing that the view was gone but there would, he hoped, be time to explore the wonders the Umberites had created.
“Now that we’ll be heading into the Capital, this is going to come as a bit of a shock, so I’m going to have to ask you to refrain from asking the obvious questions about our technology. Is that acceptable?”
“I suppose. There will be an opportunity to see more of that wonderful place, won’t there?” Ceras shifted back and forth in anticipation. “I never thought I’d see another tree, not a real one like that, anyway.”
“There might be time, but that is only a small portion of what we have done. Arbiter, come, stand here.” Temme urged him to the other side of the car and, moments later, they exited from the tunnel.
“Gods be good, indeed...”
***
The Nemesis had doubled itself in the last ten minutes, which brought its number to sixteen – each one going about in perfect unison, removing panels from the walls, floors, ceilings, and everywhere else they could and refitting them into something else.
***
Umber, Ceras now understood, was not so difficult to move after all. The core of the planet had been hollowed out, leaving the crust as a shell for what stood within. And what a marvel it was. Umber’s entire inner surface was green with patches of blues and other natural colours. Sitting at its core, a half-bright, half-dark sphere was rotating on an enormous axle that ran from the top to the bottom. In the shadowy areas at the poles, domed cities crawled up towards the pivoting beam. It was no wonder that the Umberites insisted he deactivate his core, considering the incredible gravitational engineering required to support single-gee settlements on both sides of the crust.
Even from here, Ceras could see the colossal walls that separate areas of different colours and consistencies from one another. Great jungles, towering dunes, frozen tundras – words that had long since lost all but the vaguest literary significance were here, given life and form in a world that the True Justice’s star-spanning intellect could never have imagined. Ceras wept for a home that could only dream of secrets that killed.
“Paradise...” Ceras sighed, enveloped in the unreal warmth of an impossible star, confronted by such beauty that he felt himself fall his knees.
“We have been at this for a very long time, Arbiter, but we feel it is time that we brought this back to our people. First the exiles, the travellers in dark places, those who refused the urge to control. And someday, once the wandering worlds of the Autarchy bring the borderlands into bloom, perhaps even the Realms themselves. We will not keep secrets from you, but neither will we hasten to show the Council the way. Yet our doors will always be open to the peaceful.
These creatures are natural, pure, untampered – save for the boundaries separating each ecosystem – and they reach back so far that they have revealed more about what and who we are than anyone had ever suspected. We have come here for you, our brethren, but even this is not the greatest gift that we offer. But my father will tell of that.”
“H-How... W–...This is... I can’t...” “We will arrive at the Capital soon, there, you will learn more. For now, enjoy the journey as we have marveled in its creation and its many rewards.”
***
The doubling had stopped at one hundred and ninety-six. The many-bodied Nemesis was a singular mind that knew precisely what needed to be done and worked tirelessly towards that end. Some humanoid forms had sacrificed their polyform flesh to become components of the Great Work, diminishing in number but increasing in speed.
They would be finished soon.
***
“Father, I have taken our guest on a tour of our home.” Temme bowed and stepped back, ushering Ce
ras to a seat next to the Host and Master. He sat down, still shaken by what he had witnessed but holding himself together.
“And what does the Arbiter have to say for himself?” Host and Master Maxwell gave Ceras a warm hug, making him feel like he’d returned home. “Quite the sight, isn’t it?”
“I am humbled by your home, Host and Master.”
“Now that you have seen what we have to offer, please refer to me as Derridan.” He smiled, golden teeth shining like all the others sitting at the rounded table.
“Derridan,” Ceras said, letting his voice carry through the assembly chamber, “it is my finding that the suspicions against you and your world are groundless. I am prepared to take word back to the Continuous Realms and the True Justice to see that any further action is suspended and that your rights as an independent state are upheld.”
Applause and cheers carried through the chamber. “That is great to hear! We are glad that –” Derridan’s head cocked to the right. His eyes darted back and forth. His jovial expression vanished and his black eyes turned white.
“WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS?” he shouted. The Master grabbed Ceras by his collar and threw him to the tabletop, knocking off empty plates and pans. “WHAT IS THE MEANING OF YOUR LYING WORDS?”
Ceras, stunned, said nothing. “I am told that there are creatures building something out of that Crusade ship of yours. What are they doing? Tell me now and we may yet resolve this peacefully.”
The Nemesis? But that had always been a weapon of last resort... Ceras thought.
“I... I... You need to stop them from completing the structure! You have to destroy it! You can’t let it be completed – if you don’t, then –”
***
The DeepString snapped and in flurry of pain and confusion, memories of the betrayed Parallel swung across the vast expanse of broken space, far and away... far and away.
***
But the dying gasps of Umber left an indelible mark on the Span’s geometry. Days folded into decades which turned themselves to millennia and then, at last, Aux-Ceras returned to its point of origin.
