Slow Bullets

by Alastair Reynolds

  It was easy to be selective, in those early days. Most people were keen to preserve some record that was of personal significance. A memory of their homeworlds, or even the region or city that they had held most dear. They could not go into any sort of detail, but this was a start, a tangible blow against the ship’s own forgetting. There were songs and poems that held some particular fondness. Someone had even begun to record lines of musical notation, a fragment of some larger tune. It might as well have been random scratchings, for all the sense it made to me.

  Later, I told Yesli that I did not think these people merited punishment.

  “They haven’t done any real damage. More than that, though. This is actually something useful. You’ve heard Prad talking about the memory loss. Unless we meet another ship, we’re not going to be able to fix that in a thousand days. Now at least we have a means of preserving something.”

  Yesli could not help but laugh.

  “Have you any idea of the amount of information Prad was talking about? It’s beyond anything you or I are ever capable of imagining, let alone carving onto a wall inside a thousand days. This is . . . a gesture. Nothing more. A pointless, time-consuming gesture. It won’t achieve anything.”

  “It’ll make them feel like they can do something. And it doesn’t have to be pointless. I know we can’t record everything. I never said we could. But if these people had some guidance, some idea of the most vital things . . .”

  “You’re talking about scratching the most important parts of human cultural knowledge onto metal walls.” Yesli allowed herself a silence. “In a thousand days.”

  “There are hundreds of us. Yes, we’ve a couple of fugitives to find right now. But they won’t get away from us for long, and then what? If the people on this ship don’t have something to do, something to keep hands and eyes occupied, there’s going to be a bloodbath.”

  “Fine.” Yesli had her arms folded. “So where would you propose we started?”

  “That’s not for me. You’re the Trinity. Assign some experts to make the choices. How about basic medicine? We all saw what that machine did to Crowl. How are we going to cope when the machine doesn’t even work? It would be good to have a few pointers—how to set a compound fracture, that sort of thing.”

  “Basic medicine, then. You think a wall will be enough?”

  “I did say basic.”

  “I’m just trying to draw your attention to the logistical difficulties, Scur.”

  “I’m not blind to them. I’m just saying: What else do we do? Maybe we can only save a thousandth part of the memory this way. But it’s the difference between saving a thousandth part and none at all. And maybe that thousandth part is the one thing that’s going to save us, when things start getting really tough.”

  “I’d say a thousandth part is optimistic, Scur.”

  “Then I’m an optimist.”

  After a moment Yesli said: “If we did this, it would have to be on a fair and equal basis.”

  “Of course.”

  “Crew, civilians . . . soldiers. Everyone. Including the Trinity. There could be no favouritism.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “The markings we’ve already seen . . . those people were doing it for their own satisfaction. No one was holding them to a schedule, forcing them to complete a passage within a certain time.”

  “It will need to be different,” I agreed.

  “Assigned work teams, just the way it is now. But each with a passage, a piece of knowledge, that must be committed to the wall. Laid down, in its entirety. We can’t tolerate mistakes, not if there’s going to be a point to this. If we want to save anything useful, enough to make it more than just a gesture . . . then it’s going to be hard work. A massive collected effort. Something close to slave labour, except we’ll all be slaves as well as masters. For a thousand days, all we’ll live and breathe will be these metal walls. Until they crawl into our dreams. Until our fingers are bloodied stumps and the effort has driven us to the brink of madness.”

  “You might be in danger of talking me out of my own idea, Yesli.”

  “I just think we need a ready appreciation of what this will cost us. But you are perfectly right, Scur, all the same. Even if we only save a millionth or a billionth part of the total memory, that is still . . .” She hesitated.

  “A light in the darkness?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we become that light,” I said. “Even if it drives us mad. Even if it kills us.”

  ______________

  We found our stowaway on the fourth day of searching. It had only ever been a matter of time, a matter of methodical procedure, but it still felt like a victory. We needed something like that, in those early days, especially as we had yet to find Orvin. It bothered me that he was still out there. It was like sharing a room with a rat. I wanted the rat under my heel, so that I could crush it and sleep peacefully.

  But at least we had found one hideaway.

  Our stowaway was no one that I had suspected; no one that had caught my eye in the days since the wakening. That was because she had been doing the only sensible thing, which was to make herself as unobtrusive as possible. She had avoided all but the shallowest of exchanges with her fellow survivors. But once we started reading out the slow bullets, it was only a matter of time before she came to our attention.

  When we knew who she was, we took her to the same control room where Prad and I had threatened to blow up the ship.

  “Tell us your name,” Yesli said.

  “Murash.”

  She was very small, and looked even smaller jammed into a chair for questioning. I realised then that we should always have been looking for someone small, due to the size of the capsule. We could have spared ourselves days of searching.

  “Do you know how we found you?” I asked.

  “There are things inside you.” She spoke in an odd but not too-odd dialect. “This is what you have been looking for.”

  “Things inside some of us,” I told her, when it was just me, the Trinity and our prize, in one of the secure control rooms. “They’re called slow bullets. Implants. You understand about implants?”

  She gave me a withering look. She had a worn out, defeated look, with dark patches under her eyes. But then so did many of us.

  “Yes, I understand.”

  “But you don’t have anything like that yourself,” Yesli said.

  “No.”

  “How long have you been on our ship, Murash?” Spry asked.

  “I do not know.”

  She was small-boned, almost childlike. Murash was very pale, almost sick-looking, and much skinnier than most of us. We might be starving soon, but Murash looked as if she had already been malnourished when she went into hibo.

  “You must have some idea,” I said. “You came here in your little spacecraft, you docked with us. When did that happen?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Sacer leaned in. “That’s the best you’ve got?”

  “There is a clock on the capsule. It has been counting since launch. If it is still working, it will say for how long I have been docked. You have seen my capsule, or you would not be looking for me. Were the systems still working?”

  Yesli looked at the rest of us before answering. “It seemed dead to us, but we’ll have to look at it in more detail. Did you come from the planet we’re orbiting?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you know the name of this planet?” I asked.

  Again that withering look. She did not have much time for my questions. But that was her problem, not mine.

  “Answer her,” Spry said. “We have limited resources and you’re not one of us. Start pissing us off, and we’ll drop you out of the airlock.”

  “You won’t,” Murash said.

  Sacer asked: “Why not?”

  “Because in the days that I have been awake I have learned that you know nothing at all. You concern yourselves with finding this man, as if that was
going to solve your difficulties. Believe me, it will not. You know nothing at all of why you are here, or what has happened everywhere else. And I know something. More than you, anyway. That is why you will not kill me.”

  “If I were you,” I said gently, “I would not be in too much of a hurry to put that theory to the test.”

  After a moment Murash said: “The world is Tot-tori. We did not fall so far that we forgot the name of our own planet. Not then, at least. Not when I left.”

  “Tell us what happened,” Yesli said. “Do you remember the war, the ceasefire?”

  “Your war? Yes. It was history they taught us in books. Old history. It happened long before I was born.”

  “Fuck,” I said, startling myself.

  Murash laughed. “This surprises you?”

  ______________

  Of course it should not have. I knew we had been displaced in time long enough for Tottori to turn into a frozen world, devoid of civilisation. But that was only an intellectual understanding. It was another thing to have it confirmed by a woman sitting across from me, as if it were the least astonishing fact in her universe.

  The worst thing was, I did not think Murash was lying.

  ______________

  “From the beginning,” Spry said. “Everything you know. What happened to us. How you came here. What happened to Tottori.”

  “Your war ended,” Murash said, pausing to clear her throat. “They had a ceasefire, then trials, and then a long reconstruction. It took a generation to start moving on. They knew the war had been a mistake, and that it had ruined hundreds of worlds. They did not want it to happen again.”

  “Did it?” Sacer asked.

  But Spry raised a hand, allowing Murash to continue uninterrupted.

  “There was never a war like that again. Difficulties, yes. Some small conflicts within solar systems. But the main peace held. Eight hundred years, it lasted.”

  I could not help myself. “Until another war?”

  “Until they came.” But now none of us dared break her flow. “No one knew what they were or where they had come from. They seemed uninterested in us—just passing through our little corner of the galaxy. They were like glass.”

  “Glass?” Yesli asked, as if we might have misheard.

  “Sheets of glass. Glass as big as worlds. It was like . . .” Murash scrunched her forehead, as if in sudden sharp physical pain. “Hard to describe. Hard to think about. Glass hinging open, too many folds . . . angles that shouldn’t be there. Crystal facets. A constant unfolding. Sheets and sheets, geometries. Colours. Very wrong colours. Wrong geometry. They had no thickness, no dimension. But they moved, they organised. They unfolded. They became.”

  “She’s cracked,” Sacer whispered. “I say we leave her out as bait for Orvin.”

  “She’s trying to describe something language isn’t made to describe,” Spry replied. “Something huge and alien. Give her a chance.”

  “We didn’t know if they were many or one,” Murash continued. “If the glass was just the one thing . . . a single intrusion, spread across space. If it was linked or discontinuous. It hurt to see it. It hurt to think about it, later. There was nothing we could do.”

  “Did it . . . attack you?” I asked.

  “We tried to examine it. We feared it. It was bigger than our planet. We didn’t know what it wanted . . . whether it wanted anything. We should not have examined it.” Murash waited, turning her head to read our expressions. She was taking a sort of cruel enjoyment in our ignorance, our collective fear. How little we truly know. “We had ships. But then the ships stopped working. Small ones, yes. They could still operate. But nothing that could skip. Nothing that could go interstellar. Suddenly there was no way to move between solar systems.”

  Prad whispered slowly: “I do not quite see how this is possible.”

  Murash had heard him. “And you think it matters? They were above us. Beyond anything we had. They just made our ships not work. And that was that. The start of the collapse of our entire civilisation.”

  “No more commerce between systems,” Yesli said. “I can see that would have been a terrible blow. But the systems always had a lot of autonomy. How could it have been the end?”

  “Things had changed since your time,” Murash said. “It was different. The worlds depended on each other. It was a way of keeping peace, of making sure we never had such a war again. But they did more than just take our ships from us. Our planet began to grow colder. We did not realise, to begin with, quite what they had done. It was something to do with our stars. They had made them shine less brightly.”

  Prad began to speak again. I laid my hand on his arm, none too gently, and whispered: “Later.”

  “They could change physics,” Murash continued. “That was the best explanation anyone had. They could alter physics so our ships no longer worked, and alter physics so our suns did not burn as brightly. Reach into their cores, and make the stars ill. That is why we gave them the name we did.”

  “Which is?” Spry asked.

  “The Sickening.”

  “But they left,” I said. “They’re not here now, are they?”

  “They left,” Murash confirmed. “In ten years, they had come and gone. That is all the time it took. And we struggled on, not quite knowing what had happened. After they had gone, our skipships still did not work, and our suns were still dim. But we could still signal between solar systems, even if we had to do it at the speed of light. Gradually, we learned that no one, no system or world, had gone unaffected. The Sickening had touched us all. Left us all wounded and dying.”

  ______________

  If you were born on Caprice, then there has never been a time when you have not known of the Sickening. You heard speak of them in your nurseries, you came to know them from the stories told to you in your cots, to keep you from the path of wrongdoing.

  There have always been tales of monsters and dragons. The difference is that you did not stop believing in the Sickening as you turned from childhood. You only learned to think of them with a deeper, cooler, more adult fear. On any given day, you knew that they would probably not return. But always you knew that they were still out there.

  Yet that was the first day for us. Until then we had no knowledge of them at all. Not even the faintest suspicion that they were out there, or that they had undone all that was good about the peace that soldiers like me had won, with our bodies and our blood. We had burned our lives for a peace that had held, until the Sickening took it away.

  Murash broke our innocence.

  ______________

  “We must have surprised you,” Spry said. “A ghost from the past.”

  Murash looked unimpressed. “We knew more about skip physics than you did. By the time the Sickening came, it was known that sometimes skips go wrong. Clever people said they understood why.” She gave a shrug. “It does not matter now. Your skip took you deeper into the future than most, nearly a thousand years, but we understood that such a thing was possible. You were lucky, though.”

  Prad laughed. “Lucky?”

  “You survived the skip. Usually that is not what happens. The ships come out as wrecks. The crew are corpses. We found many wrecks like that, before the Sickening came. But you were different. You had come a long way, and your ship was still functioning.”

  “Just barely,” Spry said. “We made it into orbit around Tottori, which was always our destination. But the ship was still virtually dead—powered down to the basics, the crew and passengers all in hibo. Many of us didn’t make it.”

  “I know,” Murash answered. “I am just saying, you can still count yourselves lucky.”

  “You detected our arrival,” I said.

  “We were still listening for signals, still watching space for the Sickening. We saw you move into orbit and we recognised you for what you were. A very large ship from the distant past.” Murash looked down at her hands. “You were useful to us. We had lost a great deal, in the years since th
e Sickening. There were many medicines and technologies that were lost to us.” She gave a defiant look. “It was not that we were ignorant, just that we had lost the means to make and repair complex things. But we thought you might have some of those things on your ship.”

  “You say the Sickening made your suns turn cold,” Prad said.

  “That is true.”

  “We know about your ice age. But Tottori’s sun is only a little cooler than the records say it should be. Whatever the Sickening did, it must be wearing off—your sun returning to its normal temperature, your planet coming out of its ice age. That means there’s a chance for all of us.”

  “Is there?” Murash asked.

  “Your planet can recover, rebuild its civilisation—emerge from the cold. And if the Sickening isn’t affecting the stars any more, then perhaps we can still use our skipdrive. It got us here, didn’t it?”

  “Let’s not run before we can walk,” Spry said.

  “Maybe your ship will work,” Murash said. “But there is nothing out there. Only more death. Only more cold.”

  “If things are that hopeless,” Sacer said, “why did you bother trying to reach us?”

  “What else could we do?” But Murash added: “It was hard—much harder than we ever thought it would be. Space travel had ended before I was born. No one went into space, no one came back. But we still had the knowledge to construct a craft with the capability of reaching your vessel. A chemical rocket, very simple. Even then, there were many who did not think it was worth the trouble. Times were hard enough as it was—not enough food, not enough power. Why squander what we had on a thousand to one chance? But we did it anyway.”