by Neil Clarke
By shift’s end, Imbra could see why so many of his people talked of conspiracy: The point of growing contention between the Novuni and Allegiance could have been predicted from the outset of their dealings, while the Allegiance’s split-second decisions, to wage war at the first sign of protest, suggested that someone in the greater galaxy had been waiting for the Novuni to grow restless. Only the reason for such a long-game approach lay out of Imbra’s reach when he logged off for the night: If the Allegiance simply wanted the Novun Prime system, why not take it from the outset?
On his next shift, Imbra stared for hours at the speckled panels over his desk and remembered Esrin’s Gulch—the heat of it as a child; the threat of magma churning in rivers not so far underfoot, before the dam broke and major bridges fell and the hills and the valleys realigned at great cost to human life. Historians attributed the continent’s haphazard geology to the haste of ancient terraformers, but northerners knew better, whatever side of the sun’s gospel they preferred: Hazards existed because the Novuni existed; because Mother either reviled or adored them so unbearably much.
As a child, Imbra had always been the fastest over the hot valley stones— Dash, to anyone who knew him—but not because he was the fastest on foot. In a straight sprint over a strip of flat land, he would lose to Tripp and Hurley as often as win, if not more. But give him a path that forked in odd ways, give him land that wouldn’t yield, and Imbra had al ways been quickest to work the trick out.
“You supposed to be working?” Bastrus’s voice cut through his daydreams.
“I am working.” But Imbra drew himself to a stiff-backed upright position.
“Coulda fooled me.”
Imbra nodded to her station—Bastrus rigged up to comms, her own display running simulations of a different magnitude. “Figured out how to evacuate everyone yet?”
Bastrus offered up a grim smile. “Not gonna happen.”
“Oh, you’re on the Path, too, are you?”
“I dare you to find a Loving Embracer on this ship.” She nodded toward the rest of bridge crew. “We all know the futility of the situation. The general doesn’t hide anything from us. Still, the real test is dignity at the end. Putting on the best possible show of force.”
“Sure, that’s one way, I guess.” Imbra scratched the side of his face. Bastrus’s sidelong glance vaguely resembled amusement.
“Oh, and you’ve got a better idea.”
Imbra shrugged, drumming his hands on the desk. “Just thinking, is all. You know, these AIs in the sims I’m running, they remind me of these twins I used to know. Hurley and Tripp. Loved to win. Always played to win. But if the two ever fought with each other, you knew the outcome from the outset. Tripp always had the upper hand before, so he always won in the end. Just like the AI playing the Allegiance in these sims, against the AI playing our fleets—the Allegiance starts with the upper hand, so it always wins in the end.”
“Exactly my point,” said Bastrus. “Futile exercise, but one we all endure anyway.”
“Except that Tripp never really won against me. Not really. Not when we were young, and not even after I’d been declawed. As a kid, I’d beat him in races over the gulch. As an adult, I took away his satisfaction when he tried to lay into me.”
He glanced over the workstation and noted that Bastrus was paying close attention, even if she didn’t seem the type to humor him with further questions. Not even a How.
“I didn’t play to win, see? Can’t win against someone who won’t accept the stakes.”
Bastrus shook her head. “We’re not surrendering, if that’s what you’re thinking. That’s not an option. Even if we wanted to, Treaty Day’s set for six cycles from now, and already the Allegiance’s next wave is just waiting at the edge of the heliosphere. The game they’re playing, the way they keep toying with us … we’re in this until we win or we die.”
“I’m not suggesting surrender,” said Imbra. “I’m saying—”
But he cut himself off, a deep furrow settling on his brow as more gears turned. The predictability of a clash on Treaty Day, like the predictability of the war itself, cast aspersions on even this brief reprieve from combat, and the rogue EM pulse that first allowed for it. Imbra had simply assumed that AIs registering no AI from a ship in the middle of AI-to-AI combat wouldn’t destroy the errant object anyway, but Paloma hadn’t even been piloting that well. Just enough to nudge his bubble ship right below the Allegiance’s fleet—a fleet that for some reason was advancing toward theirs at a leisurely pace. Had the winning move been, if not anticipated, at the very least permitted by Allegiance from the start?
The thought could not be unthought. Imbra felt a faint chill—the merest echo of a proper fear response—and stood suddenly, gripping his desk at the ensuing wave of nausea.
“Breathe, recruit,” said Bastrus. “I’m not catching you if you pass out.”
“They could’ve torn through us in minutes,” said Imbra. “But they didn’t. They took their time. They waited.”
“They sure did.” Bastrus’s voice was too upbeat. Imbra gave her a hard stare.
“Where’s General Asarus?”
“Still in talks, I’d imagine. But you might try the bay.”
Bastrus wasn’t far off; Imbra found the general in a portside corridor, watching the dull brown glimmer of the sun after flight-crew inspections. Not praying, she’d told him after one shift. Just contemplating how to exist in a universe that operates at such unfathomable magnitudes.
“I have a plan, sir,” he said. “But you’re not going to like it.”
General Asarus turned slowly, her dark eyes hard enough that his own watered.
“Recruit,” she said, “I haven’t liked a bit of this from the start.”
But she waited for him to go on.
General Asarus chose her own team for Imbra’s special assignment, but at Imbra’s request she also granted Paloma passage to the flagship to be part of the final send-off. While preparations continued for Treaty Day, and for the evacuation and defense fleet that would be required shortly after, some two dozen willing crewmates were briefed on their impending missions and given the time they needed to grieve. A believer in Her Loving Embrace would have found solace in the idea that life went on, but a crew predominantly set upon the Path of the Vengeful Sun needed to adjust to their new fate: to live longer, much longer, than any of their doomed colleagues left be hind.
“Time is not on our side,” said General Asarus to her team. “For decades, if not centuries, we’ve been playing the long game on the Allegiance’s terms, and in a few days, it will surely lead to our ruin. We’ve all seen the size of their ships, the indifference of their agents to genuine calls for peace. What else remains for us, then, but to play the long game, too, the only way the Novuni know how?” She went on to wish her team peace, and prayed with them, and sent them to make final arrangements. Only Imbra she told to hang back.
“Have you been in stasis since the surgery?” When Imbra shook his head, Asarus hummed. “I wonder,” she said, “if it will be easier for you. Without all that fear when the body struggles with the stasis fluid, unable to believe what the mind already knows.”
“Only one way to find out,” said Imbra.
The general watched him closely, as if for signs of visible apprehension. Seeing none, she nodded. “Your friend has arrived, by the way. You can go under any time.”
Imbra smiled. “I doubt he’d see himself as a friend.”
“Associate, then. But you’re sure you wouldn’t rather a proper stasis crew?”
“He’ll pick it up quickly. He’s young, but he’s already seen action—and he knows what stasis is like, too.”
“That’s a benefit, is it?”
“In this case, absolutely.”
General Asarus didn’t press, so after finalizing other details, Imbra went to confer with his fellow northerner in the docking bay. Paloma looked older, somehow, after weeks of being lauded as a system-wide hero
for a set of actions prescribed for him by his mother’s killer. He certainly made no attempt to hide his displeasure at seeing Imbra again.
“I could murder you, you know,” said the kid. “I could put you under in a way that guarantees you never wake up again.”
“I know,” said Imbra. “And I’ll take that risk. I’ve owed you that much all along. But if you don’t, you’re the only one I can count on, to do what I need someone to do.”
Paloma’s expression remained hostile as Imbra went on, but at least the kid listened, which was all Imbra could hope for. On their way to the lifepods, Imbra was tempted to ask something else—how Ren was; whether Paloma had been back to Nov and visited his mother’s grave—but every note of affected camaraderie felt flat and wrong in the back of his throat. Before prepping for immersion, Imbra held out a keypass instead.
“I don’t know if you’ll ever get back,” he said. “But if you do, take this to Biggs. It’s a copy, with a holo-note from me. The garage, Bullet, every-thing—It’s yours.”
Paloma clicked his teeth, setting the keypass beside the controls. “You can’t bribe me that easily.” But he paused before adding. “Are you scared yet? Not gonna beg, are you?”
Imbra, lying in the dark womb of the lifepod, shook his head as Paloma started the process, and then the seal came up all around him, and Paloma’s last words couldn’t be heard through the tiny front window. But Imbra’s body, in the end, could not be so easily tricked into calmness. Even with the declaw, he shivered violently as the stasis fluid rose, and his lungs resisted breathing to the bitter end even when fully submerged, and so Imbra went to sleep screaming—and stayed screaming—for what felt like a hundred years.
Ninety-seven years, give or take. His skin felt like twisted bark when the freight crew pulled him from the battered lifepod. At first Imbra could not register his arms and legs, let alone speak, but after days in the infirmary, realizing from the steady beep of machines that his tinnitus had passed, he started to notice larger details outside of himself. The Allegiance insignia, for instance, on the medical officer who so painstakingly coaxed him to health.
“Quite the journey you’ve been on,” said the slender, faintly luminescent being who called itself Yarun. “I guess there’s no one we can call?”
Imbra shook his head—a painful, sluggish maneuver. “Where … ?”
“On the Ambara. We’re a small operation, running supplies to various outposts the cruise ships use for debarks along the way.”
Imbra still struggled for basic control over his facial expressions, but his confusion came naturally enough. Yarun hummed understanding, even sympathy.
“Cruise ships,” Yarun explained, “for tourists from the Allegiance’s central worlds. Those are some wildly rich families, I tell you. Kept in luxury stasis—nothing like your little nightmare, sorry to say—while their ships wander the galaxy, visiting all sorts of attractions. There’s one system, I hear, with the most fantastic athletes. Something to do with the density of the world, and its land features, but really—they’re a sight to behold. And another world’s one big library, an archive of all the galaxy’s knowledge. Beautiful promenades.”
Imbra swallowed heavily before attempting to speak again. “And—Nov— Novun Prime?”
Creases at the corners of Yarun’s eyes suggested incomprehension, but the medical officer pulled up a system file and cried out in triumph. “Ah! Yes, the mausoleum. A solemn little system, that—museums and graveyards almost everywhere, paying tribute to the heroism of those lost in the last Great Allegiance War. Gets a pretty good run of cruise ships passing through. Lots of Allegiance members like to go and wring their hands over that sort of thing. Can’t remember what started the whole war—some monstrous affair involving despotic trade agents, I believe. But all so very sad. Never again, you know?” Yarun nodded while scrolling through the file. “Whole fleets wiped out in brutal double-crosses, as well as some of the lunar bases, civilians and all, over ninety years ago. Say, that’s not where you’re—?”
But when Yarun looked up, Imbra was already touching with amazement the sudden flood of dampness on his cheeks. Yarun offered a gentle smile with its lipless mouth.
“When we scanned you, we saw that you had some sort of neural block. Fascinating monstrosity, stopping the signal for some fairly important hormonal reactions. I know some of the worlds still use these things, but not many. Barbaric, really. So—I know we didn’t ask, but we took it out while repairing the rest of the stasis damage. If, if you want it back … ?”
“No,” said Imbra, choking on the outpouring of his grief. He’d had his suspicions, which was why he had asked Paloma to plot the course for his lifepod differently—to aim it farther than those for the rest of the team, who’d been given flight paths on limited thrusters that would have found their occupants waking maybe ten years later, still in the system and ready to infiltrate any dominant Allegiance force in operation around Novun Prime. A long-term assassination plot, granted, but the Novuni’s only real hope of living to fight again.
But the truth of the matter, the cause for the war in the first place, proved even worse than General Asarus had suggested it might be. What sun was theirs, that neither loved nor hated her people, but rather operated with cool indifference towards the Novuni, having raised them up for a slaughter that served the whims of other systems’ worlds?
Yarun waited for Imbra to regain some measure of composure.
“We still have to decide what to do with you,” it said softly.
“All … dead?”
“Your system?” Yarun checked the file. “Well, mostly. But there’s a continent on one of the planets, Nov, that was already pretty volatile. Says here that Allegiance didn’t bother destroying its settlements, because ‘their existence seemed squalid enough’—sorry. Just reading the file. Tough people, though, I imagine, to survive at all out there.”
Imbra was silent. At first he humored thoughts of his garage still standing, and Palo ma and Ren having started a family that stretched out over the lost century, and Biggs and Tripp and Hurley having made some sort of decent postwar life for themselves before the valley did them in. But no— the landscape was too fickle, too restless for the sort of feel good story that those who believed in Her Loving Embrace might desire. So he imagined a supervolcano instead, washing the whole mess of the continent’s peoples away. But that was too easy, too. A conceit of the Path, restless to be done with an unforgiving world.
Imbra’s emotions, left to their own devices, lurched from one extreme to the other for the first time in months—and a century. Still, he knew his own path lay somewhere in the middle of the gospels, or maybe an eternity re moved from both. He remembered the recovery ward in the courts, and how, as the urgent need for more crystal bled from his system, a sudden calmness rose instead: a drug unto itself. The joke had always been on the courts after that day, for the declaw only gave him more of what he wanted—only made it harder, despite his all-too-human inclinations, to remain addicted to anger, fear, and grief.
“You play dead in the valley to survive,” said the ancient Novuni man at last. “Dead in your heart, dead in your veins, and eventually, when they catch you doing what everyone does, dead in your brains. But there’s another kind of stillness in the Universe, isn’t there?”
“Well—yes,” said Yarun. “All kinds, I’d imagine.”
“Good. Then that’s where I’ll start.”
While Yarun attempted a hesitant reply, involving the possibility of placement on a science vessel soon to be passing by, Imbra turned with great effort to the nearest porthole, which revealed a series of stars unknown to him— each with its own peoples, and their own notions of inner peace. He knew then that he couldn’t defeat the Allegiance, an empire that went to such lengths to complete itself through domination sport: the complete distortion of other worlds and cultures to suit its idlest wants and needs. Nevertheless, Imbra knew he could at least try to find and name them—all the
forms of detachment through which a man might yet go unconquered, though every fiber in his being longed to cry out and give in.
The center of my sky no longer boasts a native sun.
Imbra turned the words over and over in his restless mind, a new sort of Novuni proverb in the making, and set his sights on a day when he might almost believe them, too.
Greg Egan has published more than sixty short stories and thirteen novels. He has won a Hugo Award for his novella “Oceanic” and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for his novel Permutation City. His most recent novel is Dichronauts, set in a universe with two time-like dimensions.
UNCANNY VALLEY
Greg Egan
1.
I n a pause in the flow of images, it came to him that he’d been dreaming for a fathomless time and that he wished to stop. But when he tried to picture the scene that would greet him upon waking, his mind grabbed the question and ran with it, not so much changing the subject as summoning out of the darkness answers that he was sure had long ago ceased to be correct. He remembered the bunk beds he and his brother had slept in until he was nine, with pieces of broken springs hanging down above him like tiny gray stalactites. The shade of his bedside reading lamp had been ringed with small, diamond-shaped holes; he would place his fingers over them and stare at the red light emerging through his flesh, until the heat from the globe became too much to bear.
Later, in a room of his own, his bed had come with hollow metal posts whose plastic caps were easily removed, allowing him to toss in chewed pencil stubs, pins that had held newly bought school shirts elaborately folded around cardboard packaging, tacks that he’d bent out of shape with misaligned hammer blows while trying to form pictures in zinc on lumps of firewood, pieces of gravel that had made their way into his shoes, dried snot scraped from his handkerchief, and tiny, balled-up scraps of paper, each bearing a four- or five-word account of whatever seemed important at the time, building up a record of his life like a core sample slicing through geological strata, a find for future archaeologists far more exciting than any diary.
