Memory's Blade

by Spencer Ellsworth

  I try not to make any noise as Scurv shuts off the relay.

  Scurv was just ordered to kill Jaqi and John Starfire. By John Starfire’s wife.

  Well. I either have to stop Scurv from that, or better yet, get vim to tell me everything. Which means I need to disarm vim and find some way to hold it over vir head. A thirteen-year-old girl, outsmarting the famous sheriff of all the wild worlds.

  This is a lot of delicate work, Dad would say, when he was trying to explain why I couldn’t know about what he did with his crosses. Don’t I, cut up and cowering behind a stack of boxes on the side of the most dangerous person in the galaxy, know it.

  -9-

  Jaqi

  CONVERSATION TAKES A WHILE with Whirr. I ask a question, his servos and gears spin and he sits there retrieving the answer. Reminds me of the Engineer, but at least he’s got the sense not to look like a centipede, even with them extra loader-arms and bits sticking on him.

  “Look, I’m trying to figure out a way to kill the . . .” I have to say it. I reckon I called their attention down on me plenty of times already. “What’s in your system about the . . .” Oh hell, Jaqi, it en’t like they haven’t already noticed you. “Shir.”

  “Sheer? We can access numerous sheer leggings that will compress and flatter—”

  “Shir! The devils!” I shudder saying it, and even though I en’t religious, my hands automatically cross my heart to protect against evil.

  More whirring. A long, loud whir and then Whirr says, “Shir is a common shorthand in corrupted Martian creole for pure-space beings.”

  “Aiya, that’s it. Evil corruption on them. Look like big old spiders the size of suns. They swallow suns and gas giants, use them to power their guts. They move faster than light, but it en’t the same network of nodes we use.” Hang on a second. “You said pure-space beings?”

  A long, long whirring sound as his gears turn, and he says, “We have detailed information on pure-space beings, but it is encoded.”

  “You mean I can’t see it?”

  “I must take you to the Archives tower and access central memory through a hard connection. Wireless emitters have degraded.”

  “Archives tower.” Shit, I don’t want that, I want the weapons stores, but since they’ve apparently blown up, I guess we’ll do this in the library.

  I am destined to spend all my days with book bugs.

  He’s got a working—just barely—car. En’t nothing fancy, just wheels and seats, but he drives me through the city under the lattice-light dome, old Earth that was lost following us across the horizon as we go, its light playing off the crystal towers that rise around us. I don’t ask no more questions as we go, as the stuff that’s in my wounds makes me sleepy.

  I near drift off, but every time I do, I remember John Starfire is somewhere in this city, and he’s probably got his own helper automaton by now.

  That’ll keep a girl awake.

  I see what I reckon is the Archives Tower on the horizon. Far off the horizon, outside the domed city. As we go, the dry, airless gray soil of this moon outside the sense-field grows closer. Right outside the sense-field, and nothing there but a bare rock in bare vacuum.

  It still don’t make a lick of sense. Who builds on a place like this?

  Humans should have known better than to try it, especially once they sussed out terraforming, aiya? But maybe by the time the Jorians taught them terraforming they done had all this built anyway.

  Or maybe Whirr’s right and there weren’t no Jorians. Maybe everything—crosses, Suits, even humanoid sentients—maybe that’s all one race making trouble for itself.

  Could it be? I en’t no book bug, but I know that even species that seem real weird, like Zarra, started as crosses. Fluid sentients and crickets crossed with humankind, too, back when races first started to mix it up.

  Or maybe that Jorians is a story people started because it helped give the Empire, the bluebloods, some credibility. Maybe it was easier to pass off the cross armies dying in the Dark Zone if you said they was part warriors from the ages past.

  But burning hell and the devil, what a thing to be wrong about.

  We reach what seems to be the end of the sense-field, and then we pass underground, driving through a tunnel full of flickering lights, past more automatons carefully repairing things. Funny-looking automatons this time—just little rolling boxes with spindly arms—but nothing as funny as what I seen on the Suits’ planet.

  We emerged into a wide chamber with a forest of pillars, all of them blinking softly. Pillars march on forever into a cold, white chamber. They vanish overhead, into the darkness of the ceiling. Faint lights glimmer above me too. Thin, spindly walkways cross between the pillars, all the way up, made of that same crystal material that makes up the rest of the city.

  “Huh,” I say. “Whole place is a memory-crypt?”

  “This is the Archives Tower,” Whirr says. “I can permit you access to all public records stored here. Authorization codes will be required for private information.”

  “This whole place is full of information.” And was just waiting? “This can’t be. Folk’ve been looking for this information for a thousand years. They always said the devils ate whole planets full of libraries and things and I was told there weren’t many records left of Earth, and the Jorians . . .” The Suits would get positively slacky here. So would every book bug in the spaceways. All that information lost to the First Empire, right here!

  “Read at your leisure.”

  “Read. Ah, right,” I say. Reading again. I promise, Kalia, I’ll listen next time. “Why don’t you just read it to me?”

  “What would you like me to read?”

  “Anything that tells about them first nodes.” Whirr blinks, and does his namesake again. “You know, the ones the—the first time folk traveled faster than light.”

  “Are you speaking of the Contact?” Whirr takes a minute to do his namesake, and then says, “The Contact is the name commonly given to what occurred between genetically modified humans and a race of quantum-dimensional beings, preparing a path for faster-than-light travel and the construction of the first Intergalactic Congress.”

  “Yep, that sounds right,” I say. Genetically modified humans? There was crosses ten thousand years ago in the First Empire too? And still no Jorians, ’cept the ones he says is made up. “Start there, and go till you get to them . . . devils and how to get rid of them.”

  He only takes about a minute to start reading me a batch of jargon. “During the first days of the Earth-Mars alliance, the rigors of Mars colonization led to a greater interest in genetic modification. Heavy exploration of brain modification led to some theorization that, as was done with quantum computers, even human memories could take advantage of quantum storage. Those who attempted this modification soon reported that they were communicating with an extra-dimensional race who existed in a state of quantum flux. This seemed specious at first, but many years of experimentation proved that a node could be opened to this dimension, and by passing through points in this dimension, humans could travel via wormhole faster than light.”

  “There weren’t no Jorians in that, Whirr,” I say.

  “Jorians. A fictional species from a successful comic book franchise—”

  “What happened next?”

  Whirr does it again—gets stuck. And finally, after a real long bout of his namesake, he says what I heard before—“The Empire spread across thirteen galaxies, and further, with hundreds of thousands of nodes, well over a million planets terraformed. And then . . .” He keeps whirring. “And then . . .”

  “And then the Empire died.” I remember that bit.

  “We do not have treatment for the virus.” Whirr appears stuck. “We do not have treatment for the virus. We have done our best, but any human DNA is vulnerable. We do not have treatment . . .”

  And there he gets stuck.

  So let me get this straight. Humans—not Jorians, just humans—made contact with cre
atures in pure space.

  The First Empire was a good thirteen galaxies wide.

  And a virus came along?

  Whirr does his namesake for a good ten Imperial minutes, which is to say the longest minutes of all. And then, of a sudden, he pops out, “I have found a holo, beamed back via node from another galaxy.”

  He projects a figure again, and it looks like just a human, and this human takes a breath and speaks—and I know he’s speaking of my galaxy.

  “I am beaming this message back to the planet designated TS-101. The virus has taken hold of our crew. The other ships in the fleet have not survived after they tried to reason with the . . . with them.”

  I’ve seen this holo afore.

  No, wait—John Starfire seen it.

  The memory matches up. John Starfire, having survived battle in the Dark Zone, having found a ship, much older than any other ship in that combat zone, and a holo that told an old secret.

  He connects more wires, checks more control panels, and at last the archived message appears before him. And tells him a secret the entire Empire has forgotten.

  The John Starfire in memory, and the Jaqi of now, both of us listen.

  “They can’t be reasoned with. They don’t remember what they were.” He’s talking about the devil. Only one thing in the universe folk talk about that way. “Their transition into this dimension has taught them only hunger. The lost suns are proof of this.” The man’s face is haggard, and marked with blotches. Disease has rooted in the man’s body, it is clear. “Once they opened all of space to us. Once they were the music of the stars. It appears we can still use the nodes, but there will be no new nodes. The sensitives among us go mad . . . when they come near.”

  I’m confused and curious, and in memory, John Starfire is too.

  Is he saying that the devil—the Shir used to be the Starfire itself? They was really pure-space beings?

  How’d they change?

  The memory answers me. “It seems that, when the human sensitives bonded to—to them died, they breached the dimensional wall, to try and reach their symbiotes in our universe. They weren’t made for it.

  “This is a message to the crew on TS-101. Keep the experiment going. The unique fold in pure space around that planet means that you may yet be able to bring one to maturity without losing it. The children are the key. The children are the key.”

  The holo crackles and becomes inaudible.

  I stand there staring like an idiot.

  And John Starfire’s memory matches me. He can only sit and stare. This is the origin of the Dark Zone, revealed.

  TS-101 is a First Imperial designation for a planet. It sounds like the place they were trying to breed more of the pure-space beings. He could find it, if he could find a star-map of the Dark Zone before the Shir came.

  The truth is overwhelming. For this all his friends and family died? For this great secret: the Shir were not always what they are.

  The Empire must fall. For this secret, it must.

  He stands before a mirror and cuts his face, wedges synthskin into it, cuts it again. To make a new face, to overthrow an Empire with.

  I huddle down as well, just as bowled over as John Starfire in the memory. “Oh hell.” The entire galaxy, open to folk, and then the Starfire people, the people made up of pure space, they got turned into the devils.

  “One moment, please,” Whirr says, and cocks his little automatic head to the side. “One moment.”

  “What you talking about?”

  “Another patron to the Archives has requested your presence, Miss Jaqi.”

  My blood goes cold. Another patron? He found me? Already?

  “Little spaceways girl. Went as far as you could, I’ll give you that.” John Starfire walks toward me through the pillars.

  -10-

  Z

  THE TRACE SYSTEM IS still bucolic from a distance, the planet gleaming, its moon a speck in the sky, welcoming the traveler. Last time I was here, I died slowly, my body rotting away inside from the NecroWasp’s poison. I thought only of meeting my ancestors with honor.

  Now I am unkillable, and thus cut off from honor.

  I did not appreciate how good it could be, dying of poison.

  “Well, look who it is!”

  Swez, of the Matakas, appears on my viewscreen, unchanged. “I had money down that at least one of you would survive Shadow Sun Seven. And here you are. Without tattoos! You survived, but got those tattoos removed? Wouldn’t’ve put money on that part, myself.”

  “Swez.” It takes a minute to even address someone so dishonorable. And I do not like to be reminded, to see my skin without the names of my fathers and grandfathers. A reminder of the things done to my honor. My skin is pale white, unmarred, like a babe’s, and truly a confusing thing to look upon. I feel as though I have been in another womb, and need to earn my honor afresh. “You have committed one of the most dishonorable acts I have ever heard tell of,” I say to him.

  “I know.” He rattles his annoying wings again. “At least by your perception. Would love to have you discuss it with my ethics class. I’ll have you in as a guest speaker.”

  “You.” This takes a moment to absorb, even for one as familiar with dishonor as me. “You are teaching ethics? To Kurguls?”

  “Comparative ethics. To everyone! Lots of money to be made with the new, John-Starfire-approved curriculum. We’re going to try and seed the curriculum, then copy-protect it so anyone who uses it will have to pay.”

  Even in a newly reformed galaxy, that cannot be legal. Then again, legality rarely reflects honor. “I must land on Trace,” I say. “And speak with the Engineer.”

  “Yeah? Give me a reason why I shouldn’t shoot you down.”

  “You wish to gain Jaqi’s favor, and the favor of the Reckoning back, do you not?” I wait to see if this registers. The truth is, I am not good at bluffing. It seems like good bargaining material, but it is only stating the obvious.

  I never figure such things out until after I have said them.

  “She survived too?”

  “She is . . .” There is little dishonor in lying to someone who will not do honorable things with your own words. “She is a confirmed Saint. Her miracles abound. If she wished to, she could throw your planet in the sun.”

  “You’re a terrible liar!” He laughs so hard that the rattle of his vestigial wings drowns out his laughter. “You’re such a bad liar that I think I’ll let you land. The Engineer’s been asking after you folk.”

  “So we did not need to have this conversation.” I am glad that my newfound abilities are only restricted to my own body, and I have not the powers Jaqi does, to manipulate nodes.

  If I could, I would create a node between my fist and Swez’s face.

  And I would use it to punch him.

  (In case that was not clear.)

  After an easy flight, I step from the shuttle onto the Suits’ world. My second time here.

  As before, the air is noxious with the fumes of several billion machines. They crawl around me, bulbous shapes with insectile legs, flesh half revealed in miles of circuitry. Their vat-towers reach to the sky, bearing sentient bodies for harvest. The Suits’ mainframe is as hideous as it was before, as much a product of dishonorable practices, pushing away truth, ancestors, natural resource, and replacing the world with machines.

  I step into the central chamber. Such an easy return, to a place we earned with such pain. When we came before, I was poisoned, we were hungry and running from the Vanguard and the Dark Zone. Now I should come as one who has conquered death, who has been through many great battles, not as one betrayed. Yet here I am. Betrayed, dishonored, yet unafraid.

  I can already tell it is not here.

  My honor is not one of the smears on the walls, or one of the machine-men emerging from that wall, or the smears of yellow in the atmosphere that denote the nano-Suit swarms. It could not be here. The Suits have insulated themselves against honor.

  My honor
is still on Shadow Sun Seven, and still in Araskar’s hands.

  And on Zarra-kr-Zar, with my people.

  “You have returned.”

  The Engineer seems older, as much as I cannot say why, and thus would not speak such a thought aloud. “You return.” His many segments rattle and click along his body, and he twists in place. His voice is as flat and devoid of passion as ever, showing how far he has gone from any notion of true sentience, which is linked to true honor. “You return to give us your data?”

  “Don’t mock my honor.” I point a finger—a finger that mocks all of us, as it is white and unmarred, where it previously bore a part of my great-great-great-grandfather’s name. “You have changed me!”

  “I . . .” The Engineer takes a moment to reply, and I await his answer. It would be a shame to kill something so ancient, but I will if I must. “I have done nothing save what we bargained.”

  “What had your bargain to do with me?”

  “Nothing,” he says. “I bargained with the girl. Her alone. You we have not touched. And yet . . .” More words, more memories, flash before his eyes. “Yet you contain within you multitudes of ours.”

  “I did not seek this!”

  “Neither did we.”

  That is a peculiar answer.

  “A shipment of our smallest selves, bearers of microscopic data, vanished from our very air, shortly after we saw you.” He pauses. “They are inside you now. They are part of you. I cannot say how.”

  “You know how! You wanted my memories, my most sacred things, but—” Wait. I stop myself.

  Jaqi’s first miracle I could not explain, except to attribute it to the ancestors, until I learned the truth of how the Suits did it. But her second was of a kind with her skills—moving a node. Is it possible? Did Jaqi, not knowing what she did, open a node inside me and bring nano-Suits to heal me?

  Did Jaqi do this to me?

  If so, I have an even more complicated situation here. If your mate unknowingly compromises your honor, the issue must go before the elders. It can take years to determine a course of action. Never mind the fact that Jaqi will never again consider herself my mate.