Zima Blue and Other Stories

by Alastair Reynolds

  It seemed to bother all of them except Sayaca.

  ‘Krasnikov,’ she mouthed, shaping the unfamiliar word like an oath.

  She was the youngest and brightest of the four disciples who had agreed to accompany Merlin on this field trip. At first the others had welcomed her into Merlin’s little entourage, keen to hear her insights on matters relating to the Way and the enigmatic Waymakers. But in the cutter’s cramped surroundings Sayaca’s charms had worn off with impressive speed.

  ‘Krasnikov?’ Merlin said. ‘Sorry, doesn’t mean anything to me either.’ He watched as the others pulled faces. ‘You’re going to have to enlighten us, Sayaca.’

  ‘Krasnikov was . . .’ she paused. ‘Well, a human, I suppose - tens of kiloyears ago, long before the Waymakers, even before the Flourishing. He had an idea for moving faster than light, one that didn’t involve wormholes or tachyons.’

  ‘It can’t work, Sayaca,’ said a gangly, greasy-scalped adolescent called Weaver. ‘You can’t move faster than light without manipulating matter with negative energy density.’

  ‘So what, Weaver? Do you think that would have bothered the Waymakers? ’

  Merlin smiled, thinking that the trouble with Sayaca was that when she made a point it was almost always a valid one.

  ‘But the Way doesn’t actually allow faster-than-light travel,’ said one of the others. ‘That much we do know.’

  ‘Of course. All I’m saying is that the Waynet might have been an attempt to make a network of Krasnikov tubes, which didn’t quite work out the way the builders intended.’

  ‘Mm,’ Merlin said. ‘And what exactly is a Krasnikov tube?’

  ‘A tube-shaped volume of altered space-time, light-years from end to end. Just like one branch of the Waynet. The point was to allow roundtrip journeys to other star systems in arbitrarily short objective time.’

  ‘Like a wormhole?’ Weaver asked.

  ‘No; the mathematical formulation’s utterly different.’ She sighed, looking to Merlin for moral support. He nodded for her to continue, knowing that she had already alienated the others beyond any reasonable point of return. ‘But there must have been a catch. It’s clear that two neighbouring Krasnikov tubes running in opposite directions violate causality. Perhaps when that happened—’

  ‘They got something like the Waynet?’

  Sayaca nodded to Merlin. ‘Not a static tube of restructured space-time, but a rushing column of it, moving at a fraction below light-speed. It was still useful, of course. Ships could slip into the Way, cross interstellar space at massive tau factors and then decelerate instantaneously at the other end simply by leaving the stream.’

  ‘All very impressive,’ Weaver said. ‘But if you’re such an expert, why can’t you tell us how to make the syrinx work properly?’

  ‘You wouldn’t understand if I did,’ Sayaca said.

  Merlin was about to intervene - tension was one thing, but he could not tolerate an argument aboard the cutter - when his glove rescued him. It had begun tickling the back of his hand, announcing a private call from the mother ship. Relieved, he unhitched from a restraint harness and kicked himself away from the four adolescents. ‘I’ll be back shortly,’ he said. ‘Try not to strangle each other, will you?’

  The cutter was a slender craft only forty metres long, so it was normal enough that tempers had become frayed in the four days that they had been away from the Starthroat. The air smelled edgy too: thick with youthful pheromones he did not remember from the last trip. The youngsters were all getting older, no longer his unquestioning devotees.

  He pushed past the syrinx. It sat within a metal harness, its long axis aligned with the ship’s. The conic device was tens of thousands of years old, but its matt-black surface was completely unmarred. It was still purring too, like a well-fed cat. The closer they got to the Way, the more it would respond. It wanted to be set free, and shortly - Merlin hoped - it would get its wish.

  The seniors would not be pleased, of course.

  Beyond the syrinx was a narrow, transparent-walled duct that led back to Merlin’s private quarters. He kicked himself along the passage, comfortable in free-fall after four days of adaptation. The view was undeniably impressive; as always he found himself slowing to take it in.

  The stars were clumped ahead, shifted from their real positions and altered in hue and brightness by the aberration caused by the cutter’s motion. They were moving at nine-tenths of the speed of light. Set against this distorted starfield, far to one side, was the huge swallowship - the Starthroat - that Merlin’s people called home. The swallowship was far too distant to see as anything other than a prick of hot blue light pointing aft, like a star that had been carelessly smudged. Yet apart from the four people with him here, every other human he knew was inside Starthroat.

  And then there was the Way.

  It lay in the opposite hemisphere of the sky, stretching into the infinite distance fore and aft. It was like a ghostly pipeline alongside which they were flying - a pipeline ten thousand kilometres thick and thousands of light-years long. It shimmered faintly - twinkling as tiny particles of cosmic debris annihilated themselves against its skin. Most of those impacts were due to dust specks that had rest velocities of only a few kilometres a second against the local stellar rest frame - so the transient glints seemed to slam past at eye-wrenching velocities. Not just a pipeline, then - but a glass pipeline running thick with twinkling fluid that flowed at frightening speed.

  And perhaps soon they would relearn the art of riding it.

  He pushed into his quarters, confronting his brother’s image on the comms console. Although they were not twins - Gallinule was a year younger - they still looked remarkably alike. It was almost like looking in a mirror.

  ‘Well?’ Merlin said.

  ‘Trouble, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Let me guess. It has something to do with Quail.’

  ‘Well, the captain’s not happy, let’s put it like that. First you take the syrinx without authorisation, then the cutter - and then you have the balls not to come back when the old bastard tells you to.’ The face on the screen was trying not to smile, but Merlin could tell he was quietly impressed. ‘But that’s not actually the problem. When I say trouble I mean for all of us. Quail wants all the seniors in his meeting room in eight hours.’

  Just time, Merlin thought, for him to drop the syrinx and make it back to Starthroat. Not as good as having time to run comprehensive tests, but still damnably tempting. It was almost suspiciously convenient.

  ‘I hadn’t heard of any crisis on the horizon.’

  ‘Me neither, and that’s what worries me. It’s something we haven’t thought of.’

  ‘The Huskers stealing a lead on us? Fine. I expect to be comfortably senile by the time they get within weapons range.’

  ‘Just be there, will you? Or there’ll be two of us in trouble.’

  Merlin smiled. ‘What else are brothers for?’

  The long oval meeting room was hundreds of metres inside Starthroat’s armoured hull. Covered in a richly detailed fresco, the walls enclosed a hallowed mahogany table of ancient provenance. Just as the table’s extremities now sagged with age, time had turned the fresco dark and sepia. In one corner a proctor was slowly renovating the historic artwork, moving with machine diligence from one scene of conflict to another, brightening hues, sharpening brushstrokes that had become indistinct with age.

  Merlin squeezed past the squat machine.

  ‘You’re late,’ Quail said, already seated. ‘I take it your trip was a fruitful one?’ Merlin started to compose an answer, but Quail was already speaking again. ‘Good. Then sit down. You may take it as a very bad omen that I am not especially minded to reprimand you.’

  Wordlessly Merlin moved to his own chair and lowered himself into it.

  What could be that serious?

  In addition to the gaunt, grey-skinned captain, there were fifteen ship seniors gathered in the chamber. Apart from Merlin they were al
l in full ceremonial dress, medals and sigils of rank to the fore. This was the Council: the highest decision-making body in the ship save for Quail himself. One senior for every dozen subseniors, and one subsenior for every hundred or so crewmembers. These fifteen people represented somewhat less than fifteen thousand others working, relaxing or sleeping elsewhere in the swallowship’s vast confines. And much of the work that they did was concerned with tending the two hundred thousand people in frostwatch: frozen refugees from dozens of systems. The burdens of responsibility were acute; especially so given that the swallowship had encountered no other human vessel in centuries. No one became a senior by default, and all those present - Merlin included - had earned the right to sit with Quail. Even, Merlin thought, his enemies on the Council. Like Pauraque, for instance. She was a coldly attractive woman who wore a stiff-necked black tunic, cuffs and collar edged with complicated black filigrees. She tapped her fingers against the table’s ancient wood, black rings clicking together.

  ‘Merlin,’ she said.

  ‘Pauraque. How are you?’

  She eyed him poisonously. ‘Reports are that you took one of the final two syrinxes without the express authorisation of the Council Subdivision for Waynet Studies.’ Merlin opened his mouth, but Pauraque shook her head crisply. ‘No; don’t even think of weaselling out of it. I’ll see that this never happens again. At least you brought the thing back unharmed this time . . . didn’t you?’

  He smiled. ‘I didn’t bring it back at all. It’s still out there, approaching the Way.’ He showed Pauraque the display summary on the back of his glove. ‘I placed it aboard an automated drone.’

  ‘If you destroy it . . .’ Pauraque looked for encouragement in the doleful faces around her. ‘We’ll have you court-martialled, Merlin . . . or worse. It’s common knowledge that your only reason for studying the syrinxes is so that you can embark on some ludicrous quest—’

  Quail coughed. ‘We can discuss Merlin’s activities later, Pauraque. They may seem somewhat less pressing when you’ve heard what I have to say.’ Now that he had their attention, the old man softened his tone of voice until it was barely a murmur. ‘I’m afraid I have remarkably bad news.’

  It would have to be, Merlin thought.

  ‘For as long as some of us remember,’ Quail said, ‘one central fact has shaped our lives. Every time we look to stern, along the way we’ve come, we know that they are out there, somewhere behind us. About thirty light-years by the last estimate, but coming steadily closer by about a light-year for every five years of shiptime. In a century and a half we will come within range of their weapons.’ Quail nodded towards the fresco, one particularly violent tableau that showed ships exchanging fire above a planet garlanded in flames. ‘It won’t be pretty. At best, we might take out one or two elements of the swarm before they finish us. Yet we live with this situation, some days hardly giving it more than a moment’s thought, for the simple reason that it lies so far in our future. The youngest of us may live to see it, but I’ll certainly not be amongst them. And, of course, we cling to the hope that tomorrow will offer us an escape route we can’t foresee today. Better weapons, perhaps - or some new physics that enables us to squeeze a little more performance from our engines, so that we can outrun the enemy.’

  True enough. This was the state of things that they had known for years. It was the reality that had underpinned every waking thought for just as long. No one knew much about the Huskers except that they were ruthless alien cyborgs from somewhere near the galaxy’s centre. Their only motive seemed to be the utter extermination of humanity from all the niches it had occupied since the Flourishing. This they prosecuted with glacial patience, in a war that had already lasted many kiloyears.

  Quail took a sip of water before continuing. ‘Now I must disclose an alarming new discovery.’

  Stars winked into existence above the table: hundreds and then thousands of them, strewn in lacy patterns like strands of seaweed. They were looking at a map of the local stellar neighbourhood - a few hundred light-years in either direction - with the line of the Way cutting through it like a blue laser. The swallowship’s position next to the Way was marked, as was the swarm of enemy ships trailing it.

  And then a smudge of radiance appeared far ahead, again near the Way.

  ‘That’s the troubling discovery,’ Quail said.

  ‘Neutrino sources?’ Merlin said, doing his best to convince the room that his attention was not being torn between two foci.

  ‘A whole clump of them in our path, about one hundred light-years ahead of us. Spectroscopy says they’re more or less stationary with respect to the local stellar neighbourhood. That means it isn’t a swarm coming to intercept us from the front - but I’m afraid that’s as good as the news gets.’

  ‘Husker?’ said Gallinule.

  ‘Undoubtedly. Best guess is we’re headed straight towards a major operational concentration - hundreds of ships - the equivalent of one of our motherbases or halo manufactories. Almost certainly armed to the teeth and in no mood to let us slip past unchallenged. In short, we’re running from one swarm towards another, which happens to be even larger.’

  Silence while the seniors - including Merlin - digested this news.

  ‘Well, that’s it, then,’ said another senior, white-bearded, bald Crombec, who ran the warcrèches. ‘We’ve got no choice but to turn away from our current path.’

  ‘Tactically risky,’ Gallinule said.

  Crombec rubbed his eyes, red with fatigue. Evidently he had been awake for some time - perhaps privy to this knowledge longer than the others, grappling with the options. ‘Yes. But what else can we do?’

  ‘There is something,’ Merlin said. As he spoke he saw the status readout on his glove change: the sensors racked around the syrinx finally recording some activity. Considering what he was about to advocate, it was ironic indeed. ‘A crash-programme to achieve Way-capability. Even if there’s an ambush ahead, the Huskers won’t be able to touch a ship moving in the Way.’

  Pauraque scoffed. ‘And the fact that the Cohort’s best minds have struggled with this problem for kiloyears in no way dents your optimism?’

  ‘I’m only saying we’d have a better than zero chance.’

  ‘And I suppose we could try and find this superweapon of yours while we’re at it?’

  ‘Actually,’ said Quail, raising his voice again, ‘there happens to be a third possibility, one that I haven’t drawn your attention to yet. Look at the map, will you?’

  Now Quail added a new star - one that had not been displayed before. It lay directly ahead of them, only a few tens of light-years from their current position. As they moved their heads to establish parallax, they all saw that the star was almost exactly aligned with the Way.

  ‘We have a chance,’ he said. ‘A small one, but very much better than nothing. This system has a little family of worlds: a few rocky planets and a gas giant with moons. There’s no sign of any human presence. In nearly every respect there’s nothing remarkable about this place. Yet the Way passes directly through the system. It might have been accidental . . . or the Waymakers may have wanted this system in their network.’

  Merlin nodded. Extensive as the Waynet was, it still only connected around ten million of the galaxy’s stars. Ten million sounded like a huge number, but what it meant was that for every single star on the network there were another forty thousand that could only be reached by conventional means.

  ‘How far away?’ he said.

  Quail answered: ‘Without altering our trajectory, we’ll reach it in a few decades of worldtime whatever we do now. Here’s my suggestion. We decelerate, stop in the system and dig ourselves in. We’ll still have thirty years before the Huskers arrive. That should give us time to find the best hiding places and to camouflage ourselves well enough to escape their detection.’

  ‘They’ll be looking for us,’ Crombec said.

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Quail made a gesture with his hands, clasping them
and then drawing them slowly apart. ‘We can split Starthroat into two parts. One will continue moving at our current speed, with its exhaust directed back towards the Huskers. The other, smaller part will decelerate hard - but it’ll be directing its radiation away from the aliens. We can fine-tune the beam direction so that the swarm ahead of us doesn’t see it either.’

  ‘That’s . . . ambitious,’ Merlin said. He had his gloved hand under the table now, not wanting anyone else to see the bad news that was spilling across it. ‘If hiding’s your style.’

  ‘It’s no one’s style - just our only rational hope.’ Quail looked around the room, seeming older and frailer than any captain ought to be, rectangles of shadow etched beneath his cheekbones.