by Peter F. Hamilton
Ione pivoted her perceptual viewpoint through a complete circle, as if she were walking around the Prince. She was intrigued by his air of stubborn dignity, the kind of face and body posture that indicated he knew he was old and outdated but still insisted on interpreting the universe the way he wanted to. He wore the dress uniform of a Royal Kulu Navy admiral, with five small medal pins on his chest. When he removed his cap to climb into the tube carriage there was little hair left, and that grey; a telling sign for a Saldana.
<> she mused.
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<> Her attention flicked back to the Royal Kulu Navy battle cruiser docked in the spaceport (the first active duty ship from the Kingdom in a hundred and seventy-nine years). A diplomatic mission of the highest urgency, its captain had said when he requested permission to approach. And Prince Noton had an entourage of five Foreign Office personnel. <>
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For a moment she felt a twist of worry. <>
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Ione had to jog down the last twenty metres of the corridor, fumbling with the seal on the side of her skirt. She had chosen a formal business suit of green tropical weave cotton and a plain blouse; smart but not imperious. Trying to impress Prince Noton with power dressing, she suspected, would be a waste of time.
The tube carriage had already arrived at the station of De Beauvoir Palace, her official residence. Two serjeants were escorting the Prince and his entourage down the long nave. Ione raced across the audience chamber in her stockinged feet, sat behind the central desk, and jammed her shoes on.
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She growled at the lack of objectivity and combed her hair back with a hand. <> She glanced around to check the arrangements. Six high-backed chairs were positioned in front of the desk. Human caterers were preparing a buffet in one of the informal reception rooms (housechimps would have been a faux pas given the Kingdom’s attitude to bitek, she felt). <>
Half of the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass darkened; the remainder altered their diffraction angle. Ten large planes of light converged on the desk, surrounding her in a warm astral glow. <>
The doors swung open. Ione rose to her feet as Prince Noton walked across the floor.
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Ione did as she was told, putting on a neutral smile: one she could turn to charm or ice. It was up to him.
When she put out her hand, there was only the slightest hesitation on Prince Noton’s part. He gave her a politely formal handshake. His eyes did linger on her signet ring, though.
“Welcome to Tranquillity, Prince Noton. I’m very flattered that Alastair should honour me with an emissary of your seniority. I only wish we were meeting in happier times.”
The staff from the Foreign Office were staring ahead rigidly. If she didn’t know better she would have said they were praying.
Prince Noton took an awkwardly long time to answer. “It is a privilege to serve my King by coming here.”
<> “Touché, cousin,” she drawled.
They locked gazes while the Foreign Office staff watched nervously.
“You had to be female, didn’t you?”
“Naturally, though it was completely random. Daddy never had any exowomb children. Our family tradition of primogeniture doesn’t apply here.”
“You hate tradition so much?”
“No, I admire a lot of tradition. I uphold a lot of tradition. What I will not tolerate is tradition for tradition’s sake.”
“Then you must be in your element. Order is falling across the Confederation.”
“That, Noton, was below the belt.”
He nodded gruffly. “Sorry. I don’t know why the King chose me for this. Never was a bloody diplomat.”
“I don’t know, I think he chose rather well, actually. Sit down, please.” She went back to her own chair. Tranquillity showed her the Foreign Office personnel exchanging relieved expressions behind her back. “So what exactly does Alastair want?”
“These fellers.” Prince Noton clicked his finger in the direction of a serjeant. “I’m supposed to ask you if we can have their DNA sequence.”
“Whatever for?”
“Ombey.”
She listened with dawning unease as Prince Noton and the Foreign Office personnel related the details of the proposed Mortonridge Liberation. <>
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When she looked at the old Prince, his immobile face, and his impassioned thoughts, she knew there was no choice, that there never had been. The Saldanas had sworn to defend their subjects. And in return their subjects believed in them to provide that defence. Over the Kingdom’s history, hundreds of thousands had died to maintain that mutual trust.
“Of course I will provide the DNA sequence for you,” Ione said. “I only wish there was more I could do.”
With an irony Ione found almost painful, two days after Prince Noton departed for Kulu with the DNA sequence, Parker Higgens and Oski Katsura told her they had located a Laymil memory of the spaceholm suicide.
Almost all other research work on the Laymil project campus had stopped to allow staff from every division to assist in reviewing the decrypted sensorium memories. However, despite being the prime focus of activity, the Electronics Division was no busier than the last time she had visited. The decryption operation had been finalized, allowing all of the information within the La
ymil electronics stack to be reformatted into a human access standard.
“It’s only the review process itself which is causing a bottleneck now,” Oski Katsura said as she ushered Ione into the hall. “We have managed to copy all of the memories in the stack, so we now have permanent access.
In the end, only twelve per cent of the files were scrambled, which leaves us with eight thousand two hundred and twenty hours of recordings available. Though of course we have a team working on the lost sequences.”
The Laymil electronics stack had finally been powered down. Technicians were gathered around its transparent environment sphere, checking and disconnecting it from the conditioning units.
“What are you going to do with it?” Ione asked.
“Zero-tau,” Oski Katsura said. “Unfortunately, it is really too venerable to be put on exhibition. That is, unless you want it displayed to the public for a little while first?”
“No. This is your field, that’s why I appointed you as division chief.”
Ione saw the members of the Confederation Navy science bureau mingling with the ordinary project staff at the various research stations in the hall. It was a sign of the times that she drew no more than a few idly curious glances.
Parker Higgens, Kempster Getchell, and Lieria were standing together to watch the technicians prepare the stack for zero-tau.
“End of an era,” Kempster said as Ione joined them. He appeared oblivious to any connotations in the statement. “We can’t go on depending on stolen knowledge anymore. Much to the distress of the navy people, of course, no giant ray guns for them to play with. Looks like we’ll have to start thinking for ourselves again. Good news, eh?”
“Unless you happen to have a possessed knocking on your door,” Parker Higgens said coldly.
“My dear Parker, I do access the news studios occasionally, you know.”
“How is the search for Unimeron going?” Ione asked.
“From a technical point of view, very well,” Kempster said enthusiastically. “We’ve finished the revised design for the sensor satellite we want to use. Young Renato has taken a blackhawk down to the orbital band we intend to cover to test fly a prototype. If all goes well, the industrial stations will begin mass production next week. We can saturate the band by the end of the month. If there are any unusual energy resonances there, we ought to find them.”
It wasn’t going to be as quick as Ione had hoped for. “Excellent work,” she told the old astronomer. “Oski tells me you have found a memory of the spaceholm suicide.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said.
“Did they have a weapon to use against the possessed?”
“Not a physical one, I’m happy to say. They seemed inordinately complacent about the suicide.”
“What do the navy people think?”
“They were disappointed, but they concur the spaceholm culture made no attempt to physically defeat the possessed Laymil approaching from Unimeron.”
Ione sat at an empty research station. “Very well.” <>
She never could get used to the illusive sensorium squeeze of emerging into a Laymil body. This time, her appropriated frame was one of the two male varieties, an egg producer. He was standing amid a group of Laymil, his current family and co-habitees, on the edge of their third marriage community. His clarion heads bugled softly, a keening joined by hundreds of throats around him. The melody was a slow one, rising and falling across the gentle grassy slope. Its echo sounded in his mind, gathered by the mother entity from every community in the spaceholm. Together they sang their lament, a plainsong in unison with the life spirit of the forests and meadows, the shoalminds of the animals, the mother entity. A chant taken up by every spaceholm as the cozened dead approached their constellation.
The aether was resonant with sadness, its weight impressing every organic cell within the spaceholm. Sunspires were dipping to their early and final dusk, draining away the joyful colours he had lived with all his life. Flowers relaxed into closure, their curling petals sighing for the loss of light, while their spirits wept for the greater loss which was to follow.
He linked arms with his mates and children, ready to share death as they shared life: together. The families linked arms. Drinking strength from the greater concord. They had become a single triangle on the valley floor. Component segments of three adults. Inside them, the children, protected, cherished. The whole, a symbol of strength and defiance. As with minds, so with bodies; as with thoughts, so with deeds.
“Join into rapture,” he instructed his children.
Their necks wove around, heads bobbing with enchanting immaturity.
“Sorrow. Fear failure. Death essence triumphant.”
“Recall essencemaster teaching,” he instructed. “Laymil species must end. Knowledge brings birthright fulfillment. Eternal exaltation awaits strong. Recall knowledge. Believe knowledge.”
“Concur.”
Beyond the rim of the spaceholm constellation, the ships from Unimeron slid out of the darkness. Stars gleaming red with the terrible power of the death essence, riding bright prongs of fusion flame.
“Know truth,” the massed choir of spaceholms sang at them. “Accept knowledge gift. Embrace freedom.”
They would not. The pernicious light grew as the ships advanced, silent and deadly.
The Laymil in the spaceholms raised their heads to the vertical and bellowed a single last triumphant note. Air rippled at the sound. The sunspires went out, allowing total darkness to seize the interior.
“Recall strength,” he pleaded with his children. “Strength achievement final amity.”
“Confirm essencemaster victory.”
The spaceholm mother entity cried into the void. A pulse of love which penetrated to the core of every mind. Deep within its shell, cells ruptured and spasmed, propagating fractures clean through the polyp.
Sensation ended, but the darkness remained for a long time. Then Ione opened her eyes.
“Oh, my God. That was their only escape. They were so content about it. Every Laymil rushed into death. They never tried to outrun them; they never tried to fight them. They willfully condemned themselves to the beyond to avoid being possessed.”
“Not quite, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said. “There are some very interesting implications in those last moments. The Laymil didn’t consider they had lost. Far from it. They showed enormous resolution. We know full well how much they worship life; they would never sacrifice themselves and their children simply to inconvenience the possessed Laymil, for that is all suicide is. There are any number of options they could have explored before resorting to such an extreme measure. Yet the one whose sensorium we accessed made constant references to knowledge and truth derived from the essencemasters. That knowledge was the key to their ‘eternal exaltation.’ I suspect the essencemasters solved the nature of the beyond. Am I right, Lieria?”
“An astute deduction, Director Higgens,” the Kiint said through her processor block. “And one which confirms the statement Ambassador Roulor made to your Assembly. For each race, the solution is unique. Surely you do not anticipate suicide as the answer for the problems facing humankind?”
Parker Higgens faced the big xenoc, his anger visible. “It was more than suicide. It was a victory. They won. Whatever the knowledge was they carried with them, it meant they were no longer afraid of the beyond.”
“Yes.”
“And you know what it was.”
“You have our sympathy, and whatever support we can provide.”
“Damn it! How dare you study us like this. We are not laboratory creatures. We are sentient entities, we have feelings, we have fears. Have you no ethics?”
Ione stood behind the trembling director and laid a cautionary hand on his shoulder.
“I am well aware of what you are, Director Higgens,” Lieria said. “And I am empathic to your distress. But I must repeat, the answer to your problem lies within you, not us.”
&nbs
p; “Thank you, Parker,” Ione said. “I think we’re all quite clear now on where we stand.”
The director gave a furious wave of his hand and walked away.
<> Ione told the Kiint. <>
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***
Erick was woken by his neural nanonics. He had routinely set up programs to monitor his immediate environment, physical and electronic, alert for anything which fell outside nominal parameters.
As he sat up in the darkened office, his neural nanonics reported an outbreak of abnormal fluctuations in Ethenthia’s power supply systems.
When he datavised a query at the supervisor programs, it turned out that no one in the asteroid’s civil engineering service was even examining the problem. A further review showed that fifteen per cent of the habitation section’s lifts appeared to be inoperative. The number of datavises into the net was also reducing.
“Oh, dear God. Not here, too!” He swung his legs off the settee. A wave of nausea twisted along his spine. Medical programs sent out several caution warnings; the team Emonn Verona promised hadn’t been to see him yet.
When he datavised the lieutenant commander’s eddress to the office’s net processor there was no response. “Bloody hell.” Erick pulled on his ship-suit, easing it over his medical packages. There were two ratings standing guard outside the office; both armed with TIP carbines. They came to attention as soon as the door opened.
“Where’s the lieutenant commander?” Erick asked.
“Sir, he said he was going to the hospital, sir.”
“Bugger. Right, you two come with me. We’re getting off this asteroid, right away.”