Galactic Empires

by Gardner R. Dozois

  "You sound… different."

  "I am different. How long have you been on our world?"

  "You're hard. And cold. Serejen was never hard."

  "I'm not Serejen."

  A huge crash-the shutter bowed under a massive impact and the window behind it shattered.

  "Right, that's it, I don't care what happens, you're going." The tea man leaped from behind his counter and strode toward Seriantep. Fejannen was there to meet him.

  "This woman is a guest in your country and requires your protection."

  "That's not a woman. That's a pile of… insects. Things. Tiny things."

  "Well, they look like mighty scared tiny things."

  "I don't think so. Like you said, like they say on the news, they can't really die."

  "They can hurt. She can hurt."

  Eyes locked, then disengaged. The mate-man returned to his towering silos of herbal mash. The noise from the street settled into a stiff, waiting silence. Neither Fejannen nor Seriantep believed that it was true, that the mob had gone, despite the spearing cold out there. The lights flickered once, twice.

  Seriantep said suddenly, vehemently, "I could take them."

  The tea man looked up.

  "Don't," Fejannen whispered.

  "I could. I could get out under the door. It's just a reforming."

  The tea man's eyes were wide. A demon, a winter-grim in his prime location canal-side tea shop!

  "You scare them enough as you are," Fejannen said.

  "Why? We're only here to help, to learn from you."

  "They think, what have you got to learn from us? They think that you're keeping secrets from us."

  "Us?"

  "Them. Don't scare them anymore. The police will come, eventually, or the Conservatorium proctors. Or they'll just get bored and go home. These things never really last."

  "You're right." She slumped back into her seat. "This fucking world… Oh, why did I come here?" Seriantep glanced up at the inconstant lumetubes, beyond to the distant diadem of her people's colonies, gravid on decades of water. It was a question, Fejannen knew, that Serejen had asked himself many times. A postgraduate scholar researching space-time topologies and the cosmological constant. A thousand-year-old posthuman innocendy wearing the body of a twenty-year-old woman, playing the student. She could learn nothing from him. All the knowledge the Anpreen wanderers had gained in their ten-thousand-year migration was incarnate in her motes. She embodied all truth and she lied with every cell of her body. Anpreen secrets. No basis for a relationship, yet Serejen loved her, as Serejen could love. But was it any more for her than a novelty; a tourist, a local boy, a brief summer loving?

  Suddenly, vehemently, Seriantep leaned across the table to take Fejannen's face between her hands.

  "Come with me."

  "Where? Who?"

  "Who?" She shook her head in exasperation. "Ahh! Serejen. But it would be you as well, it has to be you. To my place, to the Commonweal. I've wanted to ask you for so long. I'd love you to see my worlds. Hundreds of worlds, like jewels, dazzling in the sun. And inside, under the ice, the worlds within worlds within worlds… I made the application for a travel bursary months ago; I just couldn't ask."

  "Why? What kept you from asking?" A small but significant traffic of diplomats, scientists, and journalists flowed between Tay and the Anpreen fleet around Tejaphay. The returnees enjoyed global celebrity status, their opinions and experiences sought by think tanks and talk shows and news-site columns, the details of the faces and lives sought by the press. Serejen had never understood what it was the people expected from the celebrity of others but was not so immured behind the fortress walls of the Collegium, armored against the long siege of High Winter, that he couldn't appreciate its personal benefits. The lights seemed to brighten, the sense of the special hush outside, that was not true silence but waiting, dimmed as Serejen replaced Fejannen. "Why didn't you ask?"

  "Because I thought you might refuse."

  "Refuse?" The few, the golden few. "Turn down the chance to work in the Commonweal? Why would anyone do that? What would I do that?"

  Seriantep looked long at him, her head cocked slighdy, alluringly, to one side, the kind of gesture an alien unused to a human body might devise.

  "You're Serejen again, aren't you?"

  "I am that Aspect again, yes."

  "Because I thought you might refuse because of her. That other woman. Puzhay."

  Serejen blinked three times. From Seriantep's face, he knew that she expected some admission, some confession, some emotion. He could not understand what.

  Seriantep said, "I know about her. We know things at the Anpreen Mission. We check whom we work with. We have to. We know not everyone welcomes us, and that more are suspicious of us. I know who she is and where she lives and what you do with her three times a week when you go to her. I know where you were intending to go tonight, if all this hadn't happened."

  Three times again, Serejen blinked. Now he was hot, too hot in his winter quilt in this steamy, fragrant tea-shop.

  "But that's a ridiculous question, I don't love Puzhay. Nejben does."

  "Yes, but you are Nejben."

  "How many times do I have to tell you?" Serejen bit back the anger. There were Aspects hovering on the edge of his consciousness like the hurricane-front angels of the Bazjendi Psalmody—selves inappropriate to Seriantep. Aspects that in their rage and storm might lose him this thing, so finely balanced now in this tea shop. "It's our way," he said weakly. "It's how we are."

  "Yes, but"-Seriantep fought for words-"it's you, there, that body. You say it's different, you say it's someone else and not you, not Serejen, but how do I know that? How can I know that?"

  You say that, with your body that you said could take many forms, any form, Serejen thought. Then Fejannen, shadowed but never more than a thought away in this besieged, surreal environment, heard a shift in the silence outside. The tea man glanced up. He had heard it, too. The difference between waiting and anticipating.

  "Excuse me, I must change Aspects."

  A knock on the shutter, glove-muffled. A voice spoke Fejannen's full name. A voice that Fejannen knew from his pervasive fear of the risk his academic Aspect was taking with Seriantep and that Serejen knew from those news reports and articles that broke through his vast visualizations of the topology of the universe and that Nejben knew from a tower-top cell and a video screen full of stars.

  "Can I come in?"

  Fejannen nodded to the tea man. He ran the shutter up high enough for the bulky figure in the long quilted coat and boots to duck under. Dreadful cold blew around Fejannen.

  Cjatay bowed, removed his gloves, banging rime from the knuckles, and made the proper formalities to ascertain which Aspect he was speaking to.

  "I have to apologize; I only recently learned that it was you who were caught here."

  The voice, the intonations and inflections, the overpreci-sions and refinements—no time might have passed since Cjatay walked out of Manifold House. In a sense, no time had passed; Cjatay was caught, inviolable, unchangeable by anything other than time and experience. Lonely.

  "The police will be here soon," Seriantep said.

  "Yes, they will," Cjatay said mildly. He looked Seriantep up and down, as if studying a zoological specimen. "They have us well surrounded now. These things are almost never planned; what we gain in spontaneity of expression we lose in strategy. But when I realized it was you, Fejannen-Nejben, I saw a way that we could all emerge from this intact."

  "Safe passage," Fejannen said.

  "I will personally escort you out."

  "And no harm at all to you, politically."

  "I need to distance myself from what has happened tonight."

  "But your fundamental fear of the visitors remains unchanged?"

  "I don't change. You know that. I see it as a virtue. Some things are solid, some things endure. Not everything changes with the seasons. But fear, you said. That's clever. Do you remembe
r, that last time I saw you, back in the Manifold House. Do you remember what I said?"

  "Nejben remembers you asking, Where are they migrating to? And what are they migrating from?"

  "In all your seminars and tutorials and conferences, in all those questions about the shape of the universe—oh, we have our intelligences, too, less broad than the Anpreen's, but sub-der, we think—did you ever think to ask that question: Why have you come here?" Cjatay's chubby, still childish face was an accusation. "You are fucking her, I presume?"

  In a breath, Fejannen had slipped from his seat into the Third Honorable Offense Stance. A hand on his shoulder; the tea-shop owner. No honor in it, not against a Lonely. Fejannen returned to his seat, sick with shuddering rage.

  "Tell him," Cjatay said.

  "It's very simple," Seriantep said. "We are refugees. The Anpreen Commonweal is the surviving remnant of the effective annihilation of our subspecies of Panhumanity. Our eight hundred habitats are such a minuscule percentage of our original race that, to all statistical purposes, we are extinct. Our habitats once englobed an entire sun. We're all that's left."

  "How? Who?"

  "Not so much who, as when," Cjatay said gently. He flexed cold-blued fingers and pulled on his gloves.

  "They're coming?"

  "We fear so," Seriantep said. "We don't know. We were careful to leave no traces, to cover our tracks, so to speak, and we believe we have centuries of a head start on them. We are only here to refuel our habitats. Then we'll go hide ourselves in some great globular cluster."

  "But why, why would anyone do this? We're all the same species. That's what you told us. The Clade, Panhumanity."

  "Brothers disagree," Cjatay said. "Families fall out, families feud within themselves. No animosity like it."

  "Is this true? How can this be true? Who knows about this?" Serejen strove with Fejannen for control and understanding. One of the first lessons the agisters of the Manifold House had taught was the etiquette of transition between conflicting Aspects. A war in the head, a conflict of selves. He could understand sibling strife on a cosmic scale. But a whole species?

  "The governments," Cjatay said. To the tea man, "Open the shutter again. You'll be all right with us. I promise." To Serejen, "Politicians, some senior academics, and policy makers. And us. Not you. But we all agree, we don't want to scare anyone. So we question the Anpreen Prebendaries on our world, and question their presence in our system, and maybe sometimes it bubbles into xenophobic violence, but that's fine, that's the price, that's nothing compared to what would happen if we realized that our guests might be drawing the enemies that destroyed them to our homes. Come on. We'll go now."

  The tea man lifted the shutter. Outside, the protestors stood politely aside as Cjatay led the refugees out onto the street. There was not a murmur as Seriantep, in her ridiculous, life-threatening house clothes, stepped across the cobbles. The great Winter Clock on the tower of Alajnedeng stood at twenty past five. The morning shift would soon be starting, the hot-shops firing their ovens and fry-pots.

  A murmur in the crowd as Serejen took Seriantep's hand.

  "Is it true?" he whispered.

  "Yes," she said. "It is."

  He looked up at the sky that would hold stars for another three endless months. The aurora coiled and spasmed over huddling Jann. Those stars were like crystal spearpoints. The universe was vast and cold and inimical to humanity, the greatest of Great Winters. He had never deluded himself that it would be otherwise. Power had been restored, yellow streedights glinted from the helmets of riot control officers and the carapaces of counterinsurgency drones. Serejen squeezed Seriantep's hand.

  "What you asked."

  "When?"

  "Then. Yes. I will. Yes."

  TORBEN, MELTING

  The Anpreen shatter-ship blazed star-bright as it turned its face to the sun. A splinter of smart-ice, it was as intricate as a snowflake, stronger than any construct of Taynish engineering. Torben hung in free fall in the observation dome at the center of the cross of solar vanes. The Anpreen, being undifferentiated from the motes seeded through the hull, had no need for such architectural fancies. Their senses were open to space; the fractal shell of the ship was one great retina. They had grown the blister—pure and perfectly transparent construction-ice-for the comfort and delight of their human guests.

  The sole occupant of the dome, Torben was also the sole passenger on this whole alien, paradoxical ship. Another would have been good. Another could have shared the daily, almost hourly shocks of strange and new and wonder. His other Aspects had felt with Torben the breath-catch of awe, and even greater privilege, when he had looked from the orbital car of the space elevator-the Anpreen's gift to the peoples of Tay-and seen the shatter-ship turn out of occultation in a blaze of silver light as it came in to dock. They had felt his glow of intellectual vindication as he first swam clumsily into the star-dome and discovered, with a shock, that the orbital transfer station was no more than a cluster of navigation lights almost lost in the star fields beyond. No sense of motion. His body had experienced no hint of acceleration. He had been correct. The Anpreen could adjust the topology of space-time. But there was no one but his several selves to tell it to. The Anpreen crew-Torben was not sure whether it was one or many, or if that distinction had any meaning—was remote and alien. On occasion, as he swam down the live-wood paneled corridors, monoflipper and web-mittens pushing thick, humid air, he had glimpsed a swirl of silver motes twisting and knotting like a captive waterspout. Always they had dispersed in his presence. But the ice beyond those wooden walls, pressing in around him, felt alive, crawling, aware.

  Seriantep had gone ahead months before him.

  "There's work I have to do."

  There had been a party; there was always a party at the Anpreen Mission among the ever-green slopes of generous, volcanic Sulanj. Fellow academics, press and PR from Ctarisphay, politicians, family members, and the Anpreen Prebendaries, eerie in their uniform loveliness.

  "You can do the research work on Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, that's the idea," Seriantep had said. Beyond the paper lanterns hung in the trees and the glow of the carbon-sink lagoon, the lights of space-elevator cars rose up until they merged with the stars. She would ride that narrow way to orbit within days. Serejen wondered how he would next recognize her.

  "You have to go." Puzhay stood in the balcony of the Tea Lane Ladyhearth, recentiy opened to allow spring warmth into rooms that had sweated and stifled and stunk all winter long. She looked out at the shooting, uncoiling fresh green of the trees along Uskuben Avenue. Nothing there you have not seen before, Nejben thought. Unless it is something that is the absence of me.

  "It's not forever," Nejben said. "I'll be back in a year, maybe two years." But not here, he thought. He would not say it, but Puzhay knew it. As a returnee, the world's conservatoriums would be his. Bright cities, sun-warmed campuses far from the terrible cold on this polar continent, the winter that had driven them together.

  All the good-byes, eightfold good-byes for each of his Aspects. And then he took sail for the ancient hospice of Bleyn, for sail was the only right way to come to those reefs of ceramic chapels that had clung to the Yesger atoll for three thousand hurricane seasons.

  "I need… another," he whispered in the salt-breezy, chiming cloisters to Shaper Rejmen. "The curiosity of Serejen is too naive, the suspicion of Fejannen is too jagged, and the social niceties of Kekjay are too too eager to be liked."

  "We can work this for you," the Shaper said. The next morning, he went down into the sweet, salt waters of the Othering Pots and let the programmed palps swarm over him, as he did for twenty mornings after. In the thunder-heavy gloaming of a late spring night storm, he awoke to find he was Torben. Clever, inquisitive, wary, socially adept, and conversationally witty Torben. Extreme need and exceptional circumstances permitted the creation of Nineths, but only, always, temporarily. Tradition as strong as an incest taboo demanded that the number of Aspects reflect
the eight phases of Tay's manic seasons.

  The Anpreen shatter-ship spun on its vertical axis and Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben looked on in wonder. Down, up, forward: his orientation shifted with every breath of air in the observation dome. An eye, a monstrous eye. Superstition chilled him, childhood stories of the Dej-ved whose sole eye was the eye of the storm and whose body was the storm entire. Then he unfolded the metaphor. An anti-eye. Tejaphay was a shield of heartbreaking blue, streaked and whorled with perpetual storms. The Anpreen space habitat Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, hard-docked these two years past to the anchor end of the space elevator, was a blind white pupil, an anti-pupil, an unseeing opacity. The shatter-ship was approaching from Tejaphay's axial plane; the mechanisms of the orbital pumping station were visible beyond the habitat's close horizon. The space elevator was a cobweb next to the habitat's three-hundred-kilometer bulk, less even than a thread compared to enormous Tejaphay, but as the whole assemblage turned into daylight, it woke sparkling, glittering as sun reflected from its billions of construction-ice scales. A fresh metaphor came to Torben: the sperm of the divine. You're swimming the wrong way! he laughed to himself, delighted at this infant Aspect's unsuspected tendency to express in metaphor what Serejen would have spoken in math, Kekjay in flattery, and Fejannen not at all. No, it's our whole system it's fertilizing, he thought.

  The Anpreen ship drew closer, manipulating space-time on the centimeter scale. Surface details resolved from the ice glare. The hull of Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode was a chaotic mosaic of sensors, docks, manufacturing hubs, and still less comprehensible technology, all constructed from smart-ice. A white city. A flight of shatter-ships detached from docking arms like a flurry of early snow. Were some of those icy mesas defensive systems; did some of those ice canyons, as precisely cut as a skater's figures, conceal inconceivable weapons? Had the Anpreen ever paused to consider that to all cultures of Tay, white was the color of distrust, the white of snow in the long season of dark?

  Days in free-gee had desensitized Torben sufficiendy so that he was aware of the subtle pull of nanogravity in his belly. Against the sudden excitement and the accompanying vague fear of the unknown, he tried to calculate the gravity of Thirty-Third Tranquil Abode, changing every hour as it siphoned up water from Tejaphay. While he was still computing the figures, the shatter-ship performed another orientation flip and came in to dock at one of the radial elevator heads, soft as a kiss to a loved face.