by Simon Kewin
After a moment, Ondo continued. “We barely know each other, but I knew your father and I see some of him in you. You're still so ill and weak and you've been through a terrible ordeal. You've lost everything you knew and loved, and you've barely survived. It's natural you feel beaten down, defeated. I understand that, truly. But I wanted you also to know that after the sunset comes always the sunrise. One day you will be stronger, and you will be yourself again. Changed, yes, but you. Maybe you won't want to join me in my struggle – I'm not asking that – but I believe that, eventually, you will be glad you survived. That there will be good days.”
“You're saying you won't give me the release I asked for?”
He turned to consider her, frowns wrinkling his face. “I've done everything I can to save you, mend your body, keep you alive. But if you die on the operating table once more, I will let you go if that is truly what you want.”
Was it what she wanted? The thought of release was tempting. All her loss and physical agony would be over. And yet, and yet. That small voice inside her did want to fight Concordance, however ridiculous that notion was. Perhaps it didn't matter that you couldn't possibly win; perhaps there was sense and reason in simply trying. The swirl of the galaxy hung before her, promising countless worlds she could visit, marvels and wonders she could explore. Ondo had given her that possibility. She'd assumed she'd spend the rest of her life on Maes Far but now there was all that waiting for her.
The galaxy, and the Concordance ships that would pursue her relentlessly.
“It's hopeless,” she said. “They're so powerful and you're old and weak and powerless. What can you do?”
He looked amused rather than offended. “There are days when I despair, it is true. Days when continuing to fight seems ridiculous. But I pull myself together and tell myself the darkest hour is before the dawn, and other such platitudes, and I carry on with it, because what else is there? The physicist in me wonders whether Concordance rule is something like a chaotic system: superficially stable, but prone to violent transformations with relatively little input.”
“They don't seem very vulnerable to me.”
Ondo nodded his head in agreement. “The question is, how much is that a façade and how much the reality? I think we can agree, at least, that Omn and his church are not all-powerful, or else we wouldn't be here having this conversation. Godel's brand of madness is one thing, but I genuinely think there's a secret, a reason for everything that's happened. Or at least, something that makes sense of it. I see hope in that.”
“You sound delusional to me.”
“I like to think of it as optimistic.”
She asked her next question quietly. “And how many more operations do I have to go through? If that's what I want to do.”
“At most, four or five. Your skeletal structure, your musculature and your nervous systems are complete, as is your blood circulation. Your lymphatic system, your endocrine glands and your digestive tract are nearing a normal operational profile. Your reproductive organs are fully functional. There are some brain fleck enhancements that still need to be made and then, of course, there is your skin: once I have grown sufficient amount of dermis from your cells, I'll have to graft it across your left half. That will be raw for a time, and sore, but the worst of it is over, I promise you.”
“And what right did you have to do any of it? What right did you have to shape me as you saw fit? Maybe I wanted to stay as I was. Broken.”
He nodded, conceding it was a fair question. “I remade you in your own image, as much as I could. I strove for symmetry in the reconstruction of your body, and where that didn't help, I aimed as far as possible for some sort of body form norm. I'm aware that is a cultural construction as much as anything. You may have preferred some radically different biology. I may have got everything very wrong. I reconstructed you to be biologically female, capable of bearing new life, as that is how you were. I may have got that wrong, too; you may prefer to be reproductively male, or asexual, or some other arrangement. I had no access to your self-perceptions, of how you understand yourself. I did what I could, and in truth a lot of it could be undone or reconfigured or added to if you wish, although that would mean a much greater number of procedures. I did give you considerable artificial augmentation: you are capable of much greater feats of strength, speed, dexterity and computational prowess than you once were. Again, I may have done that mistakenly. You may prefer to be as close as possible to your former level of function.”
In his own flawed way, he had tried. Maybe that was all anyone could do. The anger that had flared through her subsided, a little. She would think about the options he'd given her. “If I did live, where would I go? What would I do?”
“You'd be able to fit in with the populations of many worlds. We can invent you an identity, go there in secret, just as your father did. I can alter your appearance within a wide set of parameters, and you can live your life. You get to choose your existence; which world will be your home. It is a possibility few are granted these days.”
She didn't take her eyes off the galaxy as she considered his words, trying to make sense of them.
“There is one more thing I would like you to see, if you have the strength,” he said. “Something smaller. There are wonders in the galaxy as well as horrors. Or there could be.”
“What wonders?”
He looked a little uncomfortable, as if he wasn't sure how she'd react. “You've heard of Coronade?”
His words threw her. Her mind was spinning; she needed to think about everything he'd said, and suddenly he was talking about fairy tales. Had he quietly lost his grip on sanity at some point over the years?
She answered warily. “Who hasn't? Every child grows up with stories of it. The golden planet where all is peace and happiness. What of it?”
“That is what I wish to show you. I've discovered Coronade isn't just a child's story. It's a planet in the galaxy. I know it is real.”
“That's nonsense. How can you know such a thing?”
He couldn't keep the delight from his features. “Because three years ago, I found the proof. I recovered images of the mythical planet of Coronade.”
3. Coronade
“You brought me up here to talk about fairy stories?” His words poured doubt through her. He was crazy. Being pursued so relentlessly by the forces of Concordance had made him paranoid.
“Please,” he said, “tell me which version of the story you know.”
She thought about claiming exhaustion – the short ride in the chair had drained her – but she wanted to know more about him, where his lonely thoughts had taken him. She'd play his game a little longer. “Coronade is a myth, a planet where everything is beautiful and peaceful. All cultures and religions have ideas like it: an idealised place where life makes sense, and everyone is happy.”
“And what do you say to my claim that it is real?”
“I don't believe you.”
“Why?”
Her voice was hoarse from so much talking, her throat rough, but she kept on. “Because … because reality isn't like that. There is no paradise you can simply visit. Things aren't so simple. Life is cruel. Do I have to spell that out? Look at me.”
He moved his head from side-to-side, in a way that suggested she was only half-wrong, that it was more complex than that. “The truth may have been embellished with myths and wishful thinking, but the images I've seen prove Coronade is real.”
“Is real? Even if a planet of that name once existed, Concordance would have destroyed it.”
“Perhaps. You're right, I can only prove that it did exist, not that it still does. Concordance go to great lengths to root out any hints of their Golden Age Heresy. In their version of history, all interplanetary contact was characterised by genocide and bloodshed until they arose to impose the order of Omn. But there is much that doesn't make sense about that, and we can't be completely sure what Concordance would do to Coronade. They may not even know where it
is.”
“They know everything.”
“Do they? They don't appear to know where we are. But Coronade definitely did exist, and it's clear it was some sort of beacon or celebration of hope for the galaxy.”
“How do you know this? How can you have these images?” It was like claiming he had photographs of heaven.
“It's what I've devoted my life to doing: piecing together scattered scraps of information in an attempt to put the truth back together. Something bad happened to the galaxy three hundred years ago, and I don't just mean the devastation of the Omnian War. Galactic civilisation was shattered, and since then Concordance have gone to great efforts to wipe out all evidence of our real histories. They are very thorough, but the war left ruins and hulks scattered across the galaxy, and even Concordance hasn't been able to track all of them down in the three centuries since. Every now and then I find one, and if I'm lucky I unearth some fragment of the truth from the mangled ruins. That's what I do, and that's what your father was doing on Maes Far. And, possibly, he was getting too near some truth that Concordance did not wish to be revealed. Often it is a race: we to reveal, they to destroy.”
She was having trouble absorbing all the information he was throwing at her, as if her brain no longer had the capacity for so many ideas. “My father didn't travel the galaxy being pursued by Void Walkers. He didn't have all the forces of Concordance attempting to find him and kill him.”
“He chose a different path. We both devoted our lives to uncovering the truth, but he wanted a normal life, too. I … turned my back on that. I've roamed the galaxy, gone where I needed to go.”
“You think he made a bad choice.”
The suggestion appeared to trouble Ondo for some reason. “Truly, no. I've often thought it was I that made the bad choice, although I had my reasons. Your father didn't want to lead the life I have. We knew space around Maes Far saw several major skirmishes in the war, and we knew there was a crash site on the planet. Your father decided to adopt the life of a local to give him the time and freedom to carry out the necessary archaeological research. We invented his identity between us, the Ada family name, all of it, and smuggled him onto the planet as a young man. It might seem a safe and provincial life to lead, but it was dangerous enough in its own way. He was brave, working out there in plain sight with no means of fleeing if they came for him. He had to be very careful not to learn too much; Concordance were always watching from orbit.”
She would never have believed such a wild claim, if not for the fact that Ondo had come to rescue her when Maes Far was destroyed. “What was his real name?”
“For what it's worth, I think his Maes Far name became the real him, but when I first knew him, he was Seben Jen Akter.”
The name meant nothing to her. Her father had done a good job of keeping his former life a secret.
Deep, heavy pains tore at her insides then, and for a moment they consumed her. She gasped, putting her hand to her breast as if to hold everything in place. The agony mounted, sharp, then dissipated. It happened, sometimes so badly she had to sedate herself back into oblivion.
“The pains again?”
She didn't need his overbearing concern. “It's nothing. Show me these images you claim are of Coronade.”
“If you're sure you're up to it.”
“Show me.”
The galaxy disappeared and, in its place, came moving pictures of a purple-oceaned planet strewn with honey-yellow and gold-orange continents. Many ships and satellites hung in orbit around the planet. The sight of them sent a jolt of alarm through her, but they were not Concordance ships. They were not any sort of ship she recognized. There were countless different shapes and configurations and sizes, functions she could only guess at. The planet's high atmosphere buzzed with activity as the vessels came and went, but everything was ordered, controlled. Somehow it was all managed without any ship colliding with any other.
On the surface, glinting in the bright sun, cities lined the coastlines, as well as ringing inland lakes and large expanses of greenery. There were habitations or some other forms of construction within the oceans, too: round islands to which, just visible, the lines of bridges threaded from the land masses.
“What makes you say it's Coronade?”
“Listen. There's audio, too.”
Voices filled the little room: a communication between the ship whose point of view they were seeing and some sort of planetary control system. The voices were clear, although heavily accented. It took Selene a few moments to make sense of the slanted vowels and pick out the words of the conversation.
“…you welcome to Coronade, Ambassador Vol Velle. The delegations from Arianas and Gogon are already on the planet and awaiting your presence. Dock at Equatorial City Seven and you will be escorted to your quarters. We assume you want to commence negotiations at your earliest convenience?”
“Thank you, Coronade Central, we will land at Equatorial City Seven within the hour. Tell me, what mood are the Gogoni in?”
(sound garbled)
“…unhappy, but in truth they seemed … no more resentful than usual. Let us hope for a mutually satisfactory outcome to your negotiations.”
“If anything can calm their warlike tendencies, it's a few weeks on Coronade. I'm in no hurry at all to conclude our negotiations. Perhaps…”
The audio cut out in a fuzz of distortion. A moment later, the images also flickered and stopped, the final, frozen frame of some bulbous, whale-like ship manoeuvring into orbit en route from an unknown star.
Selene considered what she'd seen for a moment. “It doesn't really prove anything. Just because they called it Coronade doesn't mean it was the Coronade. Lots of planets are named after mythological lands and figures, right?”
“Right,” conceded Ondo. “But the evidence is strong. This Coronade was clearly some sort of neutral ground, a place where cultures and races could meet in peace to settle their differences. I believe it was a centre of scientific and technological cooperation and research, too. You saw how many different sorts of ships there were. I've studied the images carefully and counted over two thousand distinct architectural styles to the vessels in orbit. I think this was a planet that civilisations across the galaxy came to when they needed to resolve their differences.”
She couldn't help being a little intrigued. “Were you able to identify its location?”
“There were translatable coordinates embedded in the communications stream, but I had no frame of reference to baseline them from. As you saw, there were no background stars visible to fix off.”
“Can you date the images?”
“There was chronological information embedded as well, but, again, I couldn't match it to any known calendar.”
“How did you even acquire the images?”
“I found fragments of a spaceship floating in a system's asteroid belt. The hulk was hard to spot among all the rocks and dust, but I'd learned there'd been a battle there in the Omnian War. Ships, as you may know, sometimes seek refuge in asteroid belts when they're being pursued or when they're heavily outgunned – even though, in truth, such regions of space are generally sparsely populated once you're in them. I struck lucky. There wasn't a lot left of the vessel, but I did manage to retrieve some of its data flecks. They were damaged – the entire craft had been blown to pieces – but I was able to extract those few fragments.”
“Could you tell which side the ship fought on?”
“It was Magellanic Alliance, not Concordance. I've found the remains of very, very few Concordance ships, I think because so few were destroyed. The ships on the other side, drawn from all the star-faring cultures of the galaxy, were apparently no match for them. It's something that makes no sense to me, even now. How did this little-known sect suddenly acquire the knowledge to build these devastating warships? And to have so many of them? It is a great puzzle.”
She was still trying to make sense of everything he'd said. Her brain was made of fog. “This ship
you found had been to Coronade and it was a ship that fought in the Omnian War. That means the images must be around three hundred years old.”
“We can't say that for sure. The war was a war for the truth as well as military domination. The ships on the Magellanic side were trying to disseminate the facts of what the Magellanic Cloud encountered, and I believe that included excerpts of much older information, from hundreds of years earlier or possibly even from some prior civilisation. This is, you understand, largely guesswork based on mere fragments of data.”
“Then the images don't really tell us very much.”
“Perhaps, but they're intriguing, aren't they? I think there's another important clue in them, too, something you may not have noticed. I applied no translation routines to the audio. What you heard was the original speech of the ship's navigator and the Coronade control station. The accents and cadences were odd to our ears, but comprehensible.”
“Those people, whoever they were, spoke the same language as us.”
“Yes – which is, in truth, not that remarkable. I've travelled all across the galaxy, to many systems in the central mass and out to the edges of each spiral arm, and the language we are using now – or some variant of it – is spoken almost universally. It's hard to escape the obvious conclusion: in the past there weren't simply a few thousand isolated starfaring civilisations, but a genuinely galaxy-spanning culture. Coronade, quite possibly, was at its heart.”
“If that was true, we'd have proof of it, histories of it.”
“Concordance are clever. They isolate us, control the message, suppress the truth and give us stories that suit their own needs. Each planet knows its local history well enough, but Concordance paints the greater picture. The terrible bloodshed, the genocide, the mass destruction in the historical record: it's always somewhere else. Even everywhere else. The scraps of truth that they haven't destroyed get subverted as fairy story: Coronade and its civilisation as nothing more than childish myth. People relish their own cynicism, and the truth gets lost.”
