Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #215

by TTA Press Authors

  "Tell her,” pressed the Melzem.

  And then an alarm began to sound.

  The planetismals were slick with organics—accreted material picked up in the course of their wanderings, most likely transferred from a fully-formed planetary system deeper within the nebula. Were these organics the fuel that had powered the growth of mesolife? Asha worked on, scanning, reading, storing. Equity untold, and freedom from her contract with the Agora. Yari, Sakaro, Elizabet and all the rest: what had become of them?

  A Far-Beyonder struck at the Hila with her short stabbing spear. The Hila easily avoided it. His legs wrapped around an epiphyte, he reached out and took hold of the Far-Beyonder's wrist as her momentum carried her towards him. Then he twisted around and dashed her brains out against one of the vines at his back.

  As he pushed her corpse away from him, a second Far-Beyonder attacked him from above. He had no time to twist clear, but he was able to exploit his greater reach and take hold of the Far-Beyonder's stabbing spear in both hands as the Far-Beyonder lunged towards him. Still anchored to the vine, he shifted the spear's trajectory away from his body and started to pull it and the Far-Beyonder towards him. The Far-Beyonder responded by releasing the spear then push-ing against its shaft to try to take him out of the Hila's reach. But the Hila was too fast; he stretched out and caught the Far-Beyonder's ankle as he moved by. Then he hauled him in and swung him round, sending him crashing into the vines behind him.

  The next moment, Called 83 finally closed the distance between them and plunged his stabbing spear into the Hila's back. The impact tore the spear from his grasp and he continued forward and collided with the Hila's shoulder. The Hila roared with rage and pain and began to turn around. Called 83 fastened his arms about the Hila's neck. He knew he had to stop the Hila from getting his hands on him, or else suffer the fate of the two Far-Beyonders that had reached the Hila before him.

  The Hila began to reach back with one arm to take hold of Called

  83. Tightening his grip on the Hila's neck, Called 83 brought his body around and beat at the Hila's approaching arm with his feet. But, in an instant, he realised his mistake. He quickly changed tac-tics, trapping the Hila's upper arm between his legs. Then he arched his back, tightening his grip on both the Hila's neck and his arm.

  Something crashed into Called 83's head. He twisted around in time to see the clenched fist of the Hila's free arm rushing towards him a second time. He began to recoil, loosening his grip in the process. But the blow never fell. Instead, the Hila pulled back his arm and started to move it back around towards the front of his body.

  Too slow: Called Redback's spear took him in the throat a mo-ment later. And he died. Called 83 released his grip. Then he hung in the air, too weak to steady his body against the nearby vines. A sob escaped his lips. He shot a look at Called Redback, his fingers burning in shame. Called Redback simply dipped his head and beckoned to him. Taking a steadying breath, he braced his body against one of the vines, pulled his stabbing spear free from the dead Hila's back, and then he followed Called Redback onwards towards the heart of the nexus.

  The Far-Beyonders greatly outnumbered the Hila, but the garden-builders had typed the Hila for war; they were taller, stronger, more agile, and possessed a greater reach. Far-Beyonder bodies filled the air, twisting and tumbling like fallen leaves on the wind, scattering blood in every direction so that even the living were wet with it. The air was so foul with blood, sweat and excrement that it made Called 83 sick to the stomach just to draw breath; and he was so weak he could hardly grip his spear, or steady his arms and legs. But he kept moving, pulling himself along the travelling vines, keeping pace with Called Redback.

  The Hila still controlled the ship. They still had the power to compel her to open fire—and it could not be long before their target would be in range.

  The current ebbed suddenly, and the temperature of the mesotypes surrounding the berg began to drop once more, shaking Asha free of her reverie. She cursed and drew in her peripheral tropes, both decreasing her surface area and freeing up resources to devote to sparking a second exotherm. She took the further precaution of closing the reader so that she could put all her energy back into the more pressing task of finishing her diffraction measurements.

  The temperature continued to fall, and soon Asha could feel her senses beginning to dull even in the heat given off by the exotherm. She had given over so much of her self to her reveries that she lost sight of the danger that she was in every moment that she was the wrong side of the brain/floe barrier.

  "What is it?” demanded the Melzem.

  A new target marker had appeared in the imaging tank, above and behind the wanderer. At the same time, a second subsidiary volume began to coalesce in the bottom of the tank. Wright didn't need to wait to see what this new close-up view would reveal. He had already realised what the approaching object must be.

  He turned to the Melzem. “It's another farship.” The urge to smile overcame him once more. “Don't you see? Elena Andalian didn't kill your people—the people chasing her did.” He laughed. “She wasn't punishing your people because they hadn't helped her. The people chasing her were punishing them because they had."

  Elena Andalian had approached the Melzemi outposts looking for information about the human race, and the people in the out-posts had provided it. That was what had led Elena Andalian to the nebula, and the wanderer. Wright's heart was beating so fast that he had to struggle to draw breath.

  The Melzem ordered the ship to re-align the catapult. And Wright finally awoke to what was about to happen. Gripping the vine, he spun back around and sought out the close-up view of the approaching farship in the imaging tank. Flashing, shifting glyphs clustered around the image of the farship. The next moment, the glyphs pulsed, the image flared; and a new alarm began to sound.

  The second farship had opened fire.

  Every second that the current didn't flow, carrying heat from the core into the ice floes, the closer the ice in the floes came to forming a solid barrier. Asha fashioned a chemical marker and sprayed it across the surface of the berg; and then she peeled away and started for home.

  Yari, Sakaro, Elizabet and all the rest ... she had abandoned her fellow XVIIers, because she saw nothing but death in staying with them, and she hadn't wanted to die. She still didn't. She jettisoned the diffraction measurements, streamlining her self, and tumbled through the tropes and floes towards the brain/floe barrier. The neo-nous could keep its secrets, and the Agora could keep its equity. Asha just wanted to hold on to life.

  "Elena Called Andalian ... Elena Called Andalian ... If you are able, answer, please. We are ... we are Beyonders—Far-Beyonders. I am he that you renamed ‘Called 83 In Honour Of Another Of That Name'. After you left us, Elena Called Andalian, the Hila reappeared. They took this ship that you gave us and forced us to join them in their hunt for you. Elena Called Andalian ... if you are able, answer, please ... We are Far-Beyonders..."

  The last of the Hila had died hard. And they had been able to fire the ship's missile-thrower at least once before the Far-Beyonders had finally been able to kill the last of them. So many dead Far-Beyonders floated about the fibre nexus that their corpses shut out much of the light streaming in from the chamber walls, and so much blood tumbled through the air that it fell everywhere like rain.

  Called 83 drew in a breath through gritted teeth then dipped his head towards the sound ing box once more. “Elena Called Andalian...

  Elena Called And—"

  "I am here, Far-Beyonders, I am here."

  Called 83hooted in relief. He felt a hand grip his shoulder and turned to find Called Red—back smiling down at him. Over Called Red—back's shoulder, he could see more survivors of the hunt, slick with blood—as were they all—but smiling. He dipped his head to them then turned back to the sounding box.

  "Elena Called Andalian, are you badly hurt? We have taken back our ship, but we were too late to prevent the Hila firing at—"


  "It was not me that your missile struck, Far-Beyonders. It was the Melzemi farship."

  "The Melzemi...?"

  "You must go to it, Far-Beyonders. It is dying, and you must go to it. There is a being on board—not Melzem, not Hila; a human being. You must find him and bring him to me. I am sorry for the further hurt that I have brought upon your people, but I ask this of you. Do you understand, Far-Beyonders? Will you do this for me?"

  The ice floes were starting to freeze into a single mass, squeezing out the intermixed mesotypes in the process. Asha shuffled through a thinning vein of compressed mesotypes, tumbling back towards the brain/floe barrier. For the moment, the heat from the exotherm was keeping her mind active, her tropes mobile and mobilising the mesotypes through which she was shuffling, but she knew that it couldn't last.

  Elena Andalian, bane of the Melzemi, errant child of an abandoned garden. She wasn't what Wright had expected her to be. The children that had rescued him from the dying Melzemi farship had trans-ported him in a shiftboat to the farship floating above the surface of the wanderer—that much he had been expecting. But once on board the farship, they had taken him not to its fibre nexus, but to one of its subsidiary chambers, a tubular space perhaps fifty metres in length and twenty metres across. It was a hangar. Lights furred its surfaces, but it contained no travelling vines. Instead, a ship all but filled its interior, a tear-shaped mass of bone and sinew, bristling with drive spines and sense organs. Viewed from some angles, the ship's surfaces seemed blue in colour; viewed from others, they appeared gold. She was breathtaking.

  When she spoke, the sound seemed to rise up from every square centimetre of her surface. “Your ‘wanderer’ is a vessel of sorts,” she said, “a container for an example of liquid-crystal intelligences that my informants called ‘mesominds'. The mesominds are ancient, and they carry within them stored memories from a time when the galaxy was young.

  "The stored memories of the mesominds are objects of such fasci-nation for my informants that they send what they call ‘miners’ into the mesominds to copy as many of these stored memories as they can. But foreign bodies are poison to the mesominds. The only way that my informants have found to mine their memories is to mim-ic the make-up of the mesominds, stripping living beings of their physical bodies and transforming their naked consciousnesses in-to short-range order in the twists and turns of packets of liquid crystals."

  "And the miner in this vessel?"

  "Is, according to my informants, human."

  Asha spun her self out into a thread and pressed forward, one mesotype at a time. Her exotherm was exhausted. The pressure ex-erted by the freezing ice floes was so great that it was affecting the mesogenic properties of the substance of the nous. She flashed in and out of being—it felt as though she were living from one second to the second after next—and there was something beating at her, running through her, a pulse the meaning of which she couldn't grasp.

  Yari, Sakaro, Elizabet and all the rest ... Asha had jettisoned the data that she had gathered in the neo-nous’ back-up memory store, but she had not journeyed in vain. Even if this was the final end, she had not journeyed in vain. She hadn't thought about Yari, Sakaro, Elizabet and all the rest for she didn't know how long. She had been right to choose life over staying with them, but she had been wrong to forget them. They were part of her self. She had carried the memory of them with her into the nous. She had been wrong not to acknowledge how much she needed to remember them.

  She strained to keep moving. That pulse kept beating at her, rippling through her. It was the call of her VLF receiver, she realised in one of her increasingly brief moments of being. Someone was trying to contact her. But her receiver was the other side of the brain/floe barrier, and the barrier was still a long way away.

  The VLF call rippled through her once more.

  "Who are you, Elena Andalian? What is the human race to you?"

  Called 83 studied the Melzemi human. There was something of the Hila about it, in the way that it moved and talked, for all that it was physically a much smaller being. Called 83 didn't know how to react to it. It was clearly important to Elena Called Andalian, but, like the Hila, it was a creature of the Melzemi. What poison had they written into its being?

  "You say that the Melzemi re-grew you?” said Elena Called Anda-lian.

  "Yes,” answered the Melzemi human.

  "My parents were just like you."

  "I can see that you are a chil—"

  "No, you don't understand: my parents were garden-grown hu-mans, just like you. Their names were ‘Grigor Pietrovitch Rahmatov’ and ‘Nina Petrovna Seremnova'. The Stro grew them from patterns recovered from the ashes of the human homeworld."

  The Melzemi human's mouth opened and closed but no sounds came out. Then, finally, the Melzemi human managed to say, “How ... How many patterns did the Stro recover?"

  "Enough to grow enough replacement humans to fill a ship five times the size of the ship that brought you here—a ship that the replacement humans named the Acheron. But the Acheron was no farship, it was a hollow rock powered by the most basic of drive sys-tems. There is a limit to the Stro's generosity, even in circumstances such as these."

  "But it was their fault,” the Melzemi human said. “The Melzemi were targeting the Stro fleet grazing in the atmosphere of Jupiter when they detonated a bomb inside Sol."

  "And that moved the Stro Commons to do as much as it did. But, they are a mercantile people, and there was no profit in it. It was not a venture that they were willing to sustain. Instead, they sold the Acheron humans a list of gardens—abandoned gardens—offering them the chance to find a means of making their own way in the galaxy."

  "The farships,” put in the Melzemi human. “The Acheron might not be capable of faster-than-light travel, but the farships are. But, if Acheron humans grew these two farships from seeds that they found in an abandoned garden, why are there no Acheron humans here? I don't understand."

  "The farships are the children of an abandoned garden—as are the Far-Beyonders. The garden was on the list that the Stro sold to the Acheron humans, but it was also very close to Melzem Space—too close to risk sending an expedition to it; but the leaders of the Acheron humans sent one anyway, an expedition led by my parents. And that decision got my parents killed.

  "The Melzemi knew about the Acheron humans and the list that the Stro had sold them. They seeded all the abandoned gardens closest to the Acheron's known course with Hila—Hila hardwired with instructions to hunt down and kill anything that entered the gardens.

  "My parents grew me from a copy of the boneship expression carried by the expedition in case it had need of a lifeboat. They gave me life and cared for me while I was a neonate. They loved me. The Hila took them from me, but it was the leaders of the Acheron humans that delivered them into the Hila's hands."

  "Was that why you didn't take the farships back to the Acheron

  —because you blamed the leaders of the Acheron humans for what happened to your parents?"

  "The leaders of the Acheron humans put the chance to profit from finding the FTL expression above any danger that my parents and the other members of their expedition might face. I wasn't going to reward them for that. Instead ... across the long years that it took the expedition to reach the target world, my parents had told me all sorts of stories, including the story of what had happened to their people. But they had also told me that they didn't believe that the Acheron humans were all that was left of the human race. They had told me that, once they had the FTL expression, they wanted more than anything to search for other remnants of the human race.

  "So, I chose to follow the course that my parents would have followed, had they lived. I collected the single farship seed that we had found and triggered it. Then I watched it grow into, not one, but two farships—twin farships. That was unexpected, but it gave me the chance to repay a debt that I owed the Beyonders on my parents’ behalf. My parents had co-opted a Beyonders group into taking
them into the garden, and, because of that, those Beyonders had died along with them. So, I took one of the nascent farships for myself, and left the other for the Beyonders, to give them the means to go somewhere where no one could co-opt them ever again.

  "I see now that it was stupid of me not to realise that the Hila would intervene again—that they would go to any length to pursue their command set."

  Hearing that, Called 83 whistled in protest, but before he could tell Elena Called Andalian that the blame was not hers, an alarm sounded in the chamber.

  They had received a reply from the vessel below them at last.

  "This ... this is Asha Kafabusa, mesophrast agent of the Agora. This mesogenic lifeform is protected by treaty. If ... if you choose to app-roach, do so in peace. I repeat: this is Asha—"

  The air had turned luminous, and there was a line of fire running along the horizon. A new day was beginning.

  "For a long time I thought that I was the finish of the human race. But I was wrong. The definition of what it meant to be ‘human’ was shifting—expanding—and had been ever since the Melzemi blew up Earth's sun. Finding Elena taught me that. And finding Asha put us both on the road to new horizons. It had been nearly 300 base-years since Asha had separated from the few other remaining XVIIers, but she was still alive. I was re-grown. You—the Acheron humans—were abroad in the galaxy. So, who was to say that her former friends weren't also still alive somewhere, in some form?"

  While Wright had been speaking, Antonov had been running a search. “There's nothing in the Stro records about there being survivors from the Melzemi viral attack on the Pridac XVII colony. Nor is there anything that matches your descriptions of the ‘schools’ or the ‘Agora'."

  Wright rippled his fingers. “The Stro don't know everything. Else, why would you be here, interrogating me?"

  Antonov had no answer to that. He tried a different tack. “Were you with Elena Andalian when she crossed into Stro Space?"

  Wright dipped his head. “We all were—Asha, the Far-Beyonder Called 83 and me. We were still with her when the Stro recalled the Acheron humans, and had you try to get her to hand over the farship."