Space Soldiers

by Jack Dann

  Then something happened.

  He replied, modulating his engine thrust in staccato stabs. The frequency was audio. Quickly Irravel translated the modulation.

  “I don’t understand,” Markarian said. “Why you took so long to answer me, and why you ignored me so long when I replied?”

  “You never replied until now,” she said. “I’d have known if you had.”

  “Would you?”

  There was something in his tone which convinced her that he wasn’t lying. Which left only one possibility: that he had tried speaking to her before, and that in some way her own ship had kept this knowledge from her.

  “Mirsky must have done it,” Irravel said. “She must have installed filters to block any communications from your ship.”

  “Mirsky?”

  “She would have done it as a favour to me; maybe as an order from my former self.” She didn’t bother elaborating: Markarian was sure to know she had died and then been reborn as a clone of the original Irravel. “My former self had the neural conditioning which kept her on the trail of the sleepers. The clone never had it, which meant that my instinct to pursue the sleepers had to be reinforced.

  “By lies?”

  “Mirsky would have done it out of friendship,” Irravel said. And for a moment she believed herself, while wondering how friendship could seem so like betrayal.

  ###

  Markarian’s image smiled. They faced each other across an absurdly long banquet table, with the Galaxy projected above it, flickering in the light of candelabra.

  “Well?” he said, of the green stain spreading across the spiral. “What do you think?”

  Irravel had long ago stopped counting time and distance, but she knew it had been at least 15,000 years and that many light-years since they had turned from the plane. Part of her knew, of course; although the wave swallowed suns, it had no use for pulsars, and their metronomic ticking and slow decay allowed positional triangulation in space and time with chilling precision. But she elected to bury that knowledge beneath her conscious thought processes: one of the simpler Juggler tricks.

  “What do I think? I think it terrifies me.”

  “Our emotional responses haven’t diverged as much as I’d feared.”

  They didn’t have to use language. They could have swapped pure mental concepts between ships: concatenated strings of qualia, some of which could only be grasped in minds rewired by Pattern Jugglers. But Irravel considered it sufficient that they could look each other in the eye without flinching.

  The Galaxy falling below had been frozen in time: light waves struggling to overtake Irravel and Markarian. The wave had seemed to slow, and then halt its advance. But then Markarian had turned, diving back toward the plane. The Galaxy quickened to life, rushing to finish 30,000 years of history before the two ships returned. The wave surged on. Above the banquet table, one arm of the star-clotted spiral was shot through with green, like a mote of ink spreading into blotting paper. The edge of the green wave was feathered, fractal, extending verdant tendrils.

  “Do you have any observations?” Irravel asked.

  “A few.” Markarian sipped from his chalice. “I’ve studied the patterns of starlight among the suns already swallowed by the wave. They’re not uniformly green—it’s correlated with rotational angle. The green matter must be concentrated near the ecliptic, extending above and below it, but not encircling the stars completely.”

  Irravel thought back to what the Nestbuilder had shown her.

  “Meaning what?” she asked, testing Markarian.

  “Swarms of absorbing bodies, on orbits resembling comets, or asteroids. I think the greenfly machines must have dismantled everything smaller than a Jovian, then enveloped the rubble in transparent membranes which they filled with air, water and greenery—self-sustaining biospheres. Then they were cast adrift. Trillions of tiny worlds, around each star. No rocky planets anymore.”

  Irravel retrieved a name from the deep past. “Like Dyson spheres?”

  “Dyson clouds, perhaps.”

  “Do you think anyone survived? Are there niches in the wave where humans can live? That was the point of greenfly, after all: to create living space.”

  “Maybe,” Markarian said, with no great conviction. “Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud . . .”

  “But you don’t think it’s very likely?”

  “I’ve been listening, Irravel—scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident.”

  “It was my fault, Markarian.”

  His tone was rueful. “Yes . . . I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.”

  “I never intended this.”

  “I think that goes without saying, wouldn’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.”

  “Would you?”

  He shook his head. “In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.”

  “I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.”

  “I know.”

  She believed him.

  “What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?”

  “Because of what they did to you, Irravel.”

  He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.

  “They were good at surgery,” Markarian said. “Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.” The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. “They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.”

  For a long while, Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of reconnective surgery around the neck was too slight to have ever shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.

  I did it to save your neck, Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.

  “You seem to be telling the truth,” she said, when she had released the children. “The nature of your betrayal was . . .” And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. “Different than I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.”

  “One I’ve lived with for 300 years of subjective time.”

  “You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.” But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.

  “What now?” Markarian said. “Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.”

  “You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?”

  Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. “Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?”

  Irravel agreed.

  She willed herself into stasis; medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ’chines would only revive her when something—anything—happened, on a Galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured, until woken by the same stimulus.

  He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.

  The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the Galaxy for 10,000 light-years around Sol—a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance
—at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it swallowed humanity.

  “Why did we wake?” Irravel said. “Nothing’s changed, except that it’s become larger.”

  “Maybe not,” Markarian said. “I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the Galaxy; from within the wave.”

  “Yes?”

  “Looks like someone survived after all.”

  ###

  The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognized.

  “It’s Canasian,” Markarian said.

  “Fand subdialect,” Irravel added, marvellingly.

  It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of Galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly lacked the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.

  Someone wanted to speak to them.

  The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiseled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.

  Irravel recognized the face.

  “It’s him,” she said, in Markarian’s direction. “Remontoire. Somehow he made it across all this time.”

  Markarian nodded slowly. “He must have remembered us, and known where to look. Even across thousands of light-years, we can still be seen. There can’t be many objects still moving relativistically.”

  Remontoire told his story. His people had fled to the pulsar system 20,000 years ago—more so now, since his message had taken thousands of years to climb out of the Galaxy. They had seen the wave coming, as had thousands of other human factions, and like many they had observed that the wave-shunned pulsars; burnt-out stellar corpses rarely accompanied by planets. Some intelligence governing the wave must have recognized that pulsars were valueless; that even if a Dyson cloud could be created around them, there would be no sunlight to focus.

  For thousands of years, they had waited around the pulsar, growing ever more silent and cautious, seeing other cultures make errors which drew the wave upon them, for by now it interpreted any other intelligence as a threat to its progress, assimilating the weapons used against it.

  Then—over many more thousands of years—Remontoire’s people saw the wave learn, adapting like a vast neural net, becoming curious about those few pulsars which harboured planets. Soon their place of refuge would become nothing of the sort.

  “Help us,” Remontoire said. “Please.”

  ###

  It took 3,000 years to reach them.

  For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way. During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver which fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.

  Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the 2,000 years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.

  “Hope would make an excellent shield,” Markarian mused, as they approached it. “If one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other.”

  “Don’t think I wouldn’t.”

  They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled it in.

  “Then why don’t you?” Markarian said.

  For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. “Because they need us more than I need revenge.”

  “A higher cause?”

  “Redemption,” she said.

  ###

  HOPE; GALACTIC PLANE—AD CIRCA 40,000

  They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them toward the one rock which mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving toward them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.

  Conjoiners boarded the Hirondelle and invited Irravel into the Hope. The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes gray with neglect, as if the Conjoiners had given up long ago.

  Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rockpool filmed in gray dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.

  “You came,” he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model Conjoiner almost fully human.

  “You’re not him, are you. You look like him—sound like him—but the image you sent us was of someone much older.”

  “I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire . . . but that was a long time ago and he was never known by that name to us.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.”

  She had to ask. “Did he make it back to a commune?”

  “Yes, of course,” the man said, as if her question was foolish. “How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?”

  “And did he forgive me?”

  “I forgive you now,” he said. “It amounts to the same thing.”

  She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.

  The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change—no matter how slight—would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it—but other than that, all they had done was wait.

  They were very good at waiting.

  “How many refugees did you bring?”

  “One hundred thousand.” Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. “I know; too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.”

  She thought back to her own sleepers. “I know. Still, we might be able to take more . . . I don’t know about Markarian’s ship, but—”

  He cut her off, gently. “I think you’d better come with me,” said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the Hideyoshi.

  ###

  “How much of it did you explore?”

  “Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere in this ship,” Remontoire said. “If there are 200 cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.”

  “No sleepers?”

  “Just this one.”

  What they’d arrived at was a plinth, supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary; space-suited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.

  “Is he dead?” Irravel asked.

  “Depends what you mean by dead.” The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. “Hi
s organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the Hideyoshi would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.”

  “Why didn’t he tell me what had become of him?”

  “No guarantee he knew. Once he was in this state, with his personality running entirely on machine substrates, he could have edited his own memories and perceptual inputs—deceiving himself that he was still corporeal.”

  Irravel looked away from the casket, forcing troubling questions from her mind. “Is his personality still running the ship?”

  “We detected only caretaker programs; capable of imitating him when the need arose, but lacking sentience.”

  “Is that all there was?”

  “No.” Remontoire reached through one of the casket’s larger fractures, prying something from Markarian’s fingers. It was a sliver of computer memory. “We examined this already, though not in great detail. It’s partitioned into 190 areas, each large enough to hold complete neural and genetic maps for one human being, encoded into superposed electron states on Rydberg atoms.”

  She took the sliver from him. It didn’t feel like much. “He burned the sleepers onto this?”

  “Three hundred years is much longer than any of them expected to sleep. By scanning them he lost nothing.”

  “Can you retrieve them?”

  “It would not be trivial,” the Conjoiner said. “But given time, we could do it. Assuming any of them would welcome being born again, so far from home.”

  She thought of the infected Galaxy hanging below them, humming with the chill sentience of machines. “Maybe the kindest thing would be to simulate the past,” she said. “Recreate Yellowstone, and revive them on it, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”