‘The marauders.’
—Yes, the eaters of all children, whose crimes are so much worse than those of my unborn sisters. After we destroy Novaya Rosya, and slaughter those of our sisters who will fight against the genocide, we will give up hope. We will have been committing suicide long before you arrive and become final instrument of our death. That is why we will do nothing when humans begin to travel between the stars, not because we will be without a weapon. We can always fashion weapons, if we need to. But here, at this moment, the world is as we willed it to be, while we were still falling through the spiral arm towards this star. It is paradise, and I am part of it, Dorthy. I still want my brothers and sisters to live. I wish to preserve my bloodlines.
‘Is that why you wanted me to come to the hypervelocity star? Is that why you want me to go down to the patchwork moon? What’s down there? Where do the wormholes lead?’
—There is much we do not know. When my ancestors and all the other families began to settle the core, we blundered into a secret history of the Galaxy—perhaps of the Universe—that had passed over our little world in the gas clouds.
‘Yes, yes, I know the marauders appropriated technology abandoned around the core’s black hole. But the moon, the hypervelocity star. Are they the work of the marauders? Where do the wormholes lead?’
The Alea’s hood of skin flared out around her face. The blunt claws tipping her three-toed feet rasped against stone as she drew up her legs.
—Half a million years after the death of this incarnation, the star will be launched to intersect the galactic orbit of the star of your home world. You will have no civilization when the star is launched, no faster-than-light physics to betray your existence. I do not think it will be the work of the marauders. But I cannot know.
‘Then what are you trying to tell me?’
—We think that we were infected, when we came to live on the worlds of the stars of the core. We took genetic templates of plants and animals from worlds of stars close to the star of P’thrsn, to restock its biosphere after the civil war. On three of those worlds, intelligent species arose soon after. My unborn sisters will destroy the species of Novaya Rosya when they begin to explore the near stars; another species, the aborigines of Elysium will fail in themselves; and finally humans will almost destroy us. It is likely that we were the unwitting agents of a paradigm that kindles intelligence. For otherwise, given the proximity in time and space of all three species, the Galaxy, the Universe, should be swarming with space-faring civilizations.
‘How could you carry an idea? Like a virus, you mean? There were things like that in the last years of the American and Russian Empires. Loyalty plagues.’
—No virus could infect species of different biological clades. We do not understand it ourselves, except it is the most likely solution. An idea may not need a physical location. Is an idea truer when written on stone, or when it resides in the twisted RNA of your deep memory? When you do not think of the idea, does it still exist? If the stone is destroyed, if the brain dies, does the idea die? We are a stupid species, Dorthy. We care for knowledge only if it aids survival of our bloodlines. We will only know of this possibility when it will be raised by the computers my unborn sisters will build to watch the species they will murder. Perhaps humans have an answer. It is one reason why I was given to you.
‘Perhaps. But it sounds to me that it is touching upon gnosticism. Secret knowledge written into the fabric of the Universe, waiting to be expressed when suitable complexity of mind is achieved…Laws and conditions exist, it’s true, but they exist whether or not we know about them. They don’t reveal themselves. Or at least, I don’t think they do. I was trained as a scientist. As an observer, not a philosopher. Others may know the answer.’
—You must ask them, Dorthy. It is important, so very important.
‘Yes. I will ask them. But you haven’t answered my question about the wormholes. I must know where they lead, before I can persuade—’
The Alea reared up as swiftly as a striking snake, a shadow twice as tall as Dorthy silhouetted against sudden red light. Was that the dawn? Surely, Dorthy thought, the sun had set in that direction. But the light was growing brighter by the second. The Alea seemed to be fading into it. Dorthy could scarcely make out her muzzled face, deep in the shadow of her flared hood. Her larger pair of arms was flung wide as if in entreaty; the small secondary pair was tearing at the bristly pelt of her chest.
—And ask them too if I am only an idea. I cannot remember all that I once knew, it seems, and yet I do not know what I have forgotten. Ask them, Dorthy! Ask them!
The light was brilliant now, too bright to be P’thrsn’s dim red dwarf star. Dorthy twisted her head from its pulsing brightness and awoke on the narrow bunk of her cabin.
Valdez slept on beside her, one arm around her hips, his face so close that his slow breath mingled with hers. The light was merely the one light that couldn’t be switched off in the cabin, an emergency glotube that flickered with age. Dorthy slid out of Valdez’s embrace and quickly dressed, still half-asleep. But she knew where she was going, even if she didn’t know why.
The docks ran the length of the Vingança’s keel, a kilometre of launch cradles and graving pits strung out beneath a maze of catenaries and cat-walks and railed platforms and lifting gear, even single-story metal-walled offices. It seemed to run on for ever, a narrow, linear, metallic universe dwindling away in a crosshatching of glotube glare and slabs of granite shadow. There were only a few craft in the launch cradles, mostly single-ships and suborbital tugs; Dorthy glimpsed the bulbous nose-assembly of Barlstilkin’s ship as she went down a helical stair, lost sight of it as she followed a cross-walk towards the sound of metal ringing against metal. She stepped around a bundle of cables, each as thick through as her thigh, that ran over the edge of an empty graving pit. On the far side, a couple of figures moved behind a great fan of golden sparks that guttered down into darkness, where a robot welder was sealing up a seam in the black hull of a combat singleship.
As Dorthy walked towards them, the welder stuttered to a halt. One of the figures called, ‘The fuck you think you’re going? Oh, Seyoura Yoshida, it’s you. I didn’t see. We are honoured, eh, Ramon?’
They were a couple of the mechanics she’d spoken to a few times in the crew commons; sitting off to one side of the permanent floating poker pool, they would give her a run down of the latest gossip while she sipped scalding oily java that one of them (‘No, Seyoura Yoshida, please, you sit down. It is no trouble at all.’) had, with elaborate courtesy, fetched from the treacher.
These two went through a parody of that routine now. Ramon vanished around the blunt, bristling prow of the singleship and came back with a plastic cup of thin coffee (a black thumbprint on one side of the rim), while the younger man, João, found Dorthy a place to sit. ‘You look sad, Seyoura,’ he said. ‘A woman as young and as pretty as you should not look so sad.’
‘A woman so young and so pretty should never have a reason to be sad,’ fat, florid Ramon said. He was jacking his augmented arm into the welding robot: the torch stuttered into life and sparks arced out again, hissing as they fell through black air. ‘Nor,’ he added, ‘should she be wandering down here, strictly speaking. A dangerous place if you don’t know it. Many of the pits are in vacuum. The pressure curtain wouldn’t stop you if you fell in.’
‘Thanks for the warning. It seems so empty down here. Like so much of the ship, I guess.’
Ramon said, ‘In the old days—’ and João said, ‘We all know about the old days, more than those who were there, I imagine. But Seyoura, surely you didn’t come down here to visit us? If so, we are greatly honoured.’
Ramon said, ‘You spend too much time with the scientists. Up there, they worry over what they must do, endless worry.’
‘And down here you don’t worry? This is a dangerous place for everyone, not just the scientists.’
Ramon said, ‘If the Enemy was here, we would know it. I
served on this ship when it was fighting the Campaigns at BD Twenty. I know all about the Enemy, Seyoura. That light show, nothing but automatic defences.’ On the ball of his shoulder, the tattoo of a naked woman stretched bonelessly as his augmented arm swung up and back. High above his head, the welder’s slave arm aped his motion. ‘The way I see it, we don’t worry because if they hit us it will be all over before we know anything. I don’t mean to alarm you, Seyoura, of course.’
‘I’m not alarmed. Actually, I came down here to find out more. There was a pilot who gave me a trip around Colcha. Does he hang out down here?’
João exchanged a glance with Ramon, and Dorthy knew that her transparent piece of misdirection had been seen through. There was something going on she couldn’t quite place. João gestured with his augmented arm and said, ‘If you want to know anything about Colcha, you talk with Ang Poh Mokhtar, Seyoura. She did the maintenance runs, before the Event.’
‘She goes down to the surface?’
‘Before the Event, sure. Someone has to look after all the stuff the scientists left behind.’ Ramon turned away to watch the welder’s arm slowly track across the singleship’s hull. He added, ‘It kept her out of the way, at any rate.’
‘She is a strange woman, Seyoura,’ João said. ‘You be careful, now.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Dorthy said. ‘Where exactly is she?’
Ang Poh Mokhtar lived on her ship. It was a surface-to-orbit tug, a cluster of spheres studded with thruster pods, bristling with antennae. Perched in its cradle, its three articulated legs swung up above it, it looked like a huge insect struggling to free itself of its cocoon. Its pilot was a slim woman with a lined, hawkish face and thick iron-grey hair pulled back from her forehead. A glittering spiral brooch pinned the high collar of her tunic. She said, ‘You want to go down to the surface? If you’re brave enough for it, we shall go right away. You’re as small as me, so there is no problem with pressure suits. Come on, now! Or are you really not so brave?’
‘I’ll come,’ Dorthy said, surprised by the woman’s directness. ‘Of course I’ll come. Are you sure that it won’t get you into trouble?’
Ang spat red juice into the black pit below the cat-walk on which they both stood. She was barefoot, the wrinkled skin on top of her feet crawling with blue veins. ‘The time is right. We want to help you in any way we can, Dorthy. Don’t you worry, my dear. I live in a comfortable little niche down here, and no one fusses much over what I get up to. And we Witnesses have been waiting for you to make this move.’
‘Really? Then I suppose I should count myself lucky that you didn’t just kidnap me.’
Ang said, ‘We want to help you. If you had talked with Dr Baptista, all would have been clearer. Which reminds me that I have to give you this.’
She held out her hand. A round white tablet lay on her palm’s scribed lines. ‘It’s the drug you want,’ Ang said, after a moment.
Chills snarled at the base of Dorthy’s spine. ‘Counter-agent? Where did you get it?’
‘The medical technician is one of us, Dorthy. Dr Baptista says it’s a token of our good will.’
Dorthy’s hand snatched the tablet up, crammed it into her mouth. Light dazzled her as she tipped her head back to swallow, and she was suddenly herself again, felt the tablet’s hardness as it went down her dry gullet into the darkness of her metabolism.
Ang spat another stream of red juice over into the pit, wiped her chin, turned and started up the curved side of one of the tug’s blisters, gripping inset rungs with hands and feet. Dorthy followed, finding that it was easier than it looked. Gravity here was only about half of what it was in the main part of the ship. As they swung, one after the other, into the tiny cabin, she asked the pilot, ‘What is it you’re chewing?’
Ang said, ‘Betel. My only bad habit, but at my age I guess I’m allowed one. That and chasing the boys, which is a lot easier here. I’ll say this for letting the Greater Brazilians more or less run the Navy: at least it means the sex ratio is in my favour. Only competition is from those fluffy little aides some of the ranking scientists have brought along, and you can bet they don’t share their favours around. Oh, I’m sorry, I’m embarrassing you. I forgot you Chinese don’t like to talk about that kind of thing.’
‘I’m Japanese, well, half-Japanese actually.’
‘Really? The other half Australian by that accent. Well, I’m sorry. I’m just an ignorant old Nepalese woman who should by rights still be walking a plough behind her cow in her stony fields half way up the Himalayas. Here, now put this on and stay out of my way while I get us into vacuum.’
‘This’ was a one-piece pressure suit. Dorthy stripped off her tunic and loose trousers, wriggled into a liner and clambered into the pressure suit’s stiff embrace, while Ang talked to someone (‘One of ours, dear, don’t worry.’) about clearance, using a patch microphone she’d fixed to her scrawny throat. Meanwhile, the hatch shut and various servos and fans whined into life, and a fine continuous trembling thrilled in the little craft’s entire structure as it was woken up. Dorthy squatted down to test the seals and indicators of the life support pack, difficult in the cabin’s dim red light. When she straightened, the gas giant’s turbulent green light filled the triangular cut-out ports.
9
* * *
In much the same way that Dorthy Yoshida had become the centre of the cabal of non-Witness scientists, and despite the beady regard of Ivanov, the interservices liaison officer (as fancy a term for a security cop as he had ever come across), Talbeck Barlstilkin had managed to gather a number of disaffected Navy officers around himself. Greater Brazilians to a man, they were mostly younger sons of impoverished aristocratic families whose estates had dwindled to a shabby townhouse in the capital and a fazenda with a few thousand viable hectares in the provinces, no career open to them but the Navy, except the diplomatic corps if they were particularly intelligent, or the church if they were pious.
In many respects, they were like Talbeck’s younger self in the bitter years after the Federation had put down his father’s stubborn isolated rebellion. They were proud and resentful, kicking ineffectually against the unfairness of the Universe in general and their posting to the hypervelocity star in particular. It was demotion in all but name, usually the result of some transgression of the complex rules of Naval etiquette and deference: it was consignment to certain boredom and the ever present risk that the meddling of the scientists would awaken the Alea that (all the officers were convinced on this point) were slumbering inside the patchwork moon. Chafing under the slack leadership of the ship’s captain, a blandly affable bureaucrat seldom seen in the officers’ mess, they hankered after action and glory, a chance to reforge their slighted honour in the fire of combat. That was the way they talked, and Talbeck played up to them, although to begin with he hadn’t even the ghost of an idea what to do with them, except lend them his bonded servant to slake some of their physical frustration.
No matter. Something would turn up. The confidence that Dorthy suspected was a façade in fact had deep roots. After all, Talbeck had led a charmed life. Because of his father’s murder, he was by far the youngest director of the Fountain of Youth Combine. The rest were revenants from the time before Earth had returned to Elysium, preserved by agatherin and elevated by the wealth it brought, but still basically motivated by reflexes learnt when each had been Duke of a minuscule kingdom, tiny islands of civilization in a sea of barbarism, spearleaf only a weed in the saltwater rice fields and the disease it nurtured in the nucleus of each of its cells, the basis for agatherin and the longevity treatments, quite unknown. Talbeck had made his mark in the Combine by sheer force of will, and because he was virtually the only director willing to travel to the other worlds of the Federation…but he had tired of the Combine when he had realized that it would never be anything other than a figurehead, a puppet for Federation interests.
The realization had sharpened Talbeck’s sense of superiority—he saw throug
h the charade of self-governance, while the other directors, those crudely cunning self-serving revenants of a lost age, were content to follow the directives and recommendations of the Combine’s officers so long as it guaranteed continued accumulation of fabulous wealth—and it had deepened his thirst for revenge. Like his scarred face, his hatred of the Federation set him apart from the Golden with whom he’d spent much of the rest of his life, the perpetually frustrated heirs of undying Lords and Ladies, of immortal self-made tycoons. Self-mockingly, he had taken to dressing in black, to affecting an air of remote disdain for the elaborate pranks and bons gestes of the others of his set as he flitted with them from world to world, looking not for entertainment but a lever long enough to overthrow the governments of the Earth.
Talbeck did not delude himself that it would be an easy task. He soon ran through fantasies of uncovering or setting up a scandal that would overthrow the Security Council of the ReUnited Nations, or of financing a rebellion that would split apart the contrary loyalties of the ten worlds (it was not that scandals were rare—it was that they were too commonplace; and while there were plenty of rebel groups, most were fighting lost causes, and most of the rest too unstable to be worth the risk). He had run arms, very discreetly of course, to the revolutionary People’s Islamic Nation Party of Novaya Zyemla when it had attempted to secede from its treaties with the Federation, but the Alea Campaigns had put an end to that, and after the razing of BD Twenty the Navy had soon overturned the rebel government and set up a more cooperative faction in its place.
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