by Robert Reed
Twenty-one
Handing Mere a long piece of yellow paper, he said, “Here. This is for you.”
“I can’t read this,” she complained. Nobody could read it. The paper was rough and jammed full of delicate scribbles—the hard work of a persistent and empty little child, no doubt. Looking at her dead husband, she pointed out, “This isn’t Tilan, and it isn’t human, either.”
“But it’s for you,” he claimed.
So she stared at it again, harder this time.
“Help me,” she begged.
“It is a deeply embedded pattern,” a voice told her. “A persistent thought in the fragment’s surviving memory.”
“I’m very tired,” she confessed.
Silence.
“For a moment, I thought you were someone else …”
“Madam,” the AI said. “Perhaps sleep would do you a service, madam.”
Mere looked at a diamond sphere, and inside it, the suspended fragment of the polypond mind. Warmth and an array of delicate silver fingers had allowed a feeble life to emerge. The fragment was thinking. This was what it seemed to be thinking. Again, Mere stared at the display cube nestled in her hand, exhausted eyes working their way through the intricate web of three-dimensional symbols.
“This is my friend’s mind?”
“It is a very simple representation, yes.” A hint of pride surfaced as the machine remarked, “The amount of information is impressive. Despite time and the mind’s damage, it has retained this much.”
“A three-dimensional image?”
“And more, madam.”
She hesitated. “There’s a time component?”
“Yes.”
“Show me.”
Every thread of the web slowly shifted position, and after a little while, all began to contract or to melt away. The display shriveled into a smaller, denser shape that eventually became nothing but a dark smudge.
“This is the past?”
“It seems so,” the machine offered.
Mere nodded, her tiny face pale and drawn. Then an instinct tickled her, and smiling, she said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”
“Several curiosities, yes.”
The AI ran the image forward in time. The smudge enlarged and grew thinner, becoming a lacework of tiny details rendered in three dimensions. Turning the cube in her hands, she studied its final shape. “I see a resemblance,” she muttered. “Is this a map of the Inkwell?”
“Perhaps.”
“Are these strands the rivers of ice?”
“No.”
“Okay,” she said. “The curiosities. Show me.”
A tiny portion of the display was enlarged a thousandfold, revealing an equally intricate set of features. The central strand was composed of a multitude of tiny flecks and round forms and new strands as straight as taut hairs. Again, time ran backward. The various features shifted and sometimes vanished, and the round shapes passed out of view or shrank down to tiny points that moved together, swirling in unison much the same as the polypond buds swam inside their birthing space.
“Watch carefully,” the AI advised.
Time ran forward, ending with something very close to the present.
“Did you notice?”
“I doubt it.”
Like an endlessly patient teacher, the AI said, “Watch again.”
Three times, the process was repeated. And then Mere said, “Enough,” as she touched the display with the nail of one finger. “There are always differences, is that right? The positions of these features … they seem to shift a little bit …”
“Minuscule differences, but genuine. I have unfolded this thought more than twelve thousand times, and each replay is unique.”
Mere opened her mouth, then closed it again.
“This is a partial memory,” the machine offered. “Perhaps your friend is struggling to recall everything with precision.”
“No,” Mere said. Then she set the cube aside, drifting out of the tiny lab, trying to coax her weary mind into using its own deep and perishable memories.
A navigational AI whispered, “You asked to be informed, madam.”
“More buds moving?”
An image filled the nearest touch screen. Several light-months deeper inside the Satin Sack, a multitude of watery bodies were beginning to accelerate, engines flinging much of their bodies into the dusty gloom, giving them momentum while stealing away most of their lazy mass.
“I want to see the ship now, please.”
Still far behind her, the ancient vessel was visible only in the infrared, the blaze of its engines and the wild discharging of its shields producing a sloppy dot that would brighten over the next months and years. While Mere watched, a tiny flash of light swept across the leading face. The laser array had struck some burly hazard. Another few seconds told her that the blow was successful. If anything substantial had reached the hull, she would have seen the blast. In her present mood, she probably would have felt it, too.
“I assume these little ones are also aiming for the Great Ship.”
“Presumably, yes,” said the navigator AI.
“And when?”
“As with the rest—” the voice began.
She named the year. This was a slow stately chase, and everything about it seemed inevitable. Irresistible.
Mere returned to the other AI. “You mentioned more than one curiosity. What else is there?”
“I have to warn you. I’m not trained in the details and every side-shoot concept that involves these high mathematics.”
“Okay.”
“But more than four dimensions are folded into the memory. They are invisible, but they seem to have a genuine value.”
She nodded, watching the polyponds rise to meet the ship.
“When I said that this is a partial memory,” the AI continued, “and perhaps your friend is struggling to recall—”
“I said, ‘No.’”
“Would you explain why, madam?”
Every AI listened now. A glance at the main touch pad told her that she was the focus of considerable interest.
Recovering the display cube, she offered, “I don’t think this is a genuine memory, and it isn’t a map, either.” Then she shook her head, adding, “This is a lesson, I’m guessing. Search our library. Learn what you can about mathematical treatments of time … treatments that erase the concept of an authentic past … and then apply what you learn there to what we have with us here …”
A moment passed.
“This is a very complicated subject,” the AI complained.
“Then you aren’t thinking about it properly,” she chided gently. Then she pushed the cube aside, ordered the cabin lights down, and forced herself to crawl inside her sacklike bed and rise into a dreamless deep sleep.
BUT THERE WAS such a creature as the Past: a remote and simple and pure entity, and everything of consequence had leaped from its beautiful self. What every Tilan understood instinctively, and what Mere had learned in her long early life, was that the future was infinite and unknowable. Every instant of time had no choice but to explode into long lines of potential. Existence was a multitude of rivers born from an ever-increasing assortment of springs. Mere was born in one moment and one place, and now she lived on a million worlds and between the worlds and in places she could never imagine.
This Mere had a past that she knew well and cherished.
This Mere only appeared solitary, but she was part of a rich thread of interlinked moments leading directly from that slightly younger, slightly less informed woman who had told her AI, “Then you aren’t thinking about it properly.”
Eleven months had passed, and Mere was cold again. She had dismantled and dispersed the Osmium, power minimal and her own body chilled to the brink of death. Surrounding her was an ebony shell of motionless dust, smothering and dense and surprisingly warm within. When she studied the cloud earlier, in visual light and from a great distance, she saw nothing. Her best ey
es had stared at the same points for hours, absorbing only the occasional glimmer of radio noise and the wandering photons that had pierced the banks of dust and molecular hydrogen. But the infrared was richer, revealing a network of starlike dots and tidy smears arranged with precision. And more telling, her surviving neutrino detector—a minimal sensor on its finest day—was loudly proclaiming, “Something bright, I see! I see!”
Similar clouds were scattered throughout the neighborhood. Each was a neat sphere held together by electrostatic charges and youth. Each was smaller than a solar system and blackened with buckyballs and other carbon grits, natural and otherwise. But only one of the clouds lay close enough to be reached. A series of little bums could push Mere into a collision course, and against the sober advice of her resident AIs, she had accepted that grand chance.
Months later, her disassembled ship plunged into the cloud. After several hours of pushing through thickening dusts, she spotted her potential targets. They were tiny objects. Remote. Yet the gap was barely 50 million kilometers now, which was no distance at all. On her present course, Mere would pass by the first of the mysteries in less than nine minutes. The entire collection of bodies would fall behind in another half hour. They were warm objects, pieces of them fiercely hot, each wearing elaborate radiators that pumped the excess heat into cold sinks and the surrounding cloud, and they were intriguing enough that even the most cautious AIs had stopped their public worrying.
Every moment brought little impacts and endless damage.
Mere was dying in countless other existences, but not here. Here she remained healthy enough, if only for the next little moment.
And the moment after.
And for another nine excruciating, inevitable minutes.
The Osmium slid past its first target without incident. Full-spectrum images were taken, samples of dust and vacuum were absorbed, and a sudden burst of radio noise was recorded in full. Even at 5 million kilometers—Mere’s closest approach—the object’s mass pulled her ship’s pieces farther apart. Then she was past her target and free to glance at the results, at the data and the first instinctive declarations of her AIs. They had danced with some kind of machine or factory. The mass of the large asteroid had been compressed and elongated, caked with hyperfiber and powered by a trailing necklace of fusion reactors. The energy production was impressive, and it was nothing. Each of the next six factories were larger, each fed by still more reactors. The cloud’s hydrogen was the fuel. The cloud’s dust was the raw material. Both were being collected by vast electrostatic baleens and drawn inward into the first of the cylindrical factories, separated by composition and charged again, then ushered along on parallel magnetic rivers.
Suddenly Mere’s habitat absorbed a clean sharp blow.
Worry blossomed. Not about death, since that wouldn’t allow time enough for worry. No, she was afraid that she might be discovered. Every impact, tiny or major, produced a fountain of plasma. Plasmas were bright and obvious. Mere’s sturdiest hope was that if she was seen, she would be regarded as nothing special. Debris from lost polypond ships occasionally had to drift through this space, and if someone was watching, and if he could feel any emotion that resembled suspicion, hopefully his mind was elegant enough or lazy enough to grab on to this most ordinary explanation.
The next factories were more distant and considerably more massive. Despite its enormous velocity, the Osmium rippled with the tides, its pieces slowly pulled even farther apart.
Mere let them wander.
She gazed at the data, listening to the first impressions from the AIs, and with a tiny voice asked, “What next? Each of you, make predictions.”
There was no consensus, thankfully.
And none of the self-taught experts zeroed in on the truth.
“The dust?” she asked.
They could taste atomic hydrogen and molecular hydrogen, plus buckyball carbons with ordinary elements riding at their cores, from lithium to iron. The entire cloud was as regular and pure as any product spat out by a competent factory. Judging by the cloud’s fluid dynamics, it was a recent feature, built within the last century or two, and perhaps created as a whirlpool in one of the electromagnetic rivers that recently weaved their way through the Sack.
“Total mass of the facility?”
Equal to a substantial moon, so far.
“Energy production?”
An assortment of voices hesitated.
“What?”
The navigator AI answered, whispering into her mind, “There’s a new mass. A body. Ahead of us now.”
“Show me.”
In the blackness was a deeper blackness. In the bitter cold lay a superchilled realm rimmed by an army of elaborate machines, and until this moment, no one had suspected its existence.
The mystery lay 20 million kilometers from Mere.
At her closest, she would pass within 8 million kilometers.
“Mass?”
A small moon.
“Looks larger,” she noted. Then, “Composition?”
Hyperfiber, at least on its surface.
“Grade?”
High.
At the frigid center of the cloud was a perfect gray-white sphere. The surrounding machines resembled any of a hundred familiar pieces of equipment, and they resembled none of them. They were alien devices built to serve some clear engineering purpose, each wrapped around an alien aesthetics. Mere found herself staring at the array, trying to twist her mind until she could see beauty in it. Beauty and elegance were reliable routes into the unknown mind. But after several minutes of hard concentration, nothing changed. She was examining a minimal arrangement of pragmatic tools, and nothing mattered but their capacity to do their exceptionally narrow work.
“Question,” she said.
The AIs had been talking among themselves. Now they fell silent, and the navigator whispered, “Yes, madam.”
“Is there any trace of organic organisms?”
Silence.
“Look for habitats warm as tropical water,” she advised.
“We have been, madam.”
“And leakage from closed biosystems.” Because there were no large polyponds here, and small biosystems often leaked a thin rain of water and carbon dioxide and other rich clues about metabolisms and catabolisms.
“Nothing here, madam.”
Except the machines, she realized. Nothing but machines.
As the Osmium charged forward, the little impacts of iron and lighter dusts began to lessen. Apparently the local space had been mined out, or it had been made safer for delicate instruments. Either way, she was relieved. For the next fifteen minutes, Mere found herself daydreaming about passing out of the cloud safely, then reconfiguring her ship again. Once it was pulled back together, she had important things to show to the captains. To show Washen. She got as far as imagining that tall woman sitting beside her, their faces temporarily eye to eye, and with an appreciative wink, the First Chair would tell her, “Thank you.”
The frigid sphere vanished behind her.
Another necklace of factories stretched into the distance, bending off to the right and ending with a great glowing baleen.
Mere called up her best eyes, but she used none of them.
When the bolide struck, she was daydreaming again. She was sitting with half a dozen old husbands at a table in some wide avenue on board the Great Ship, and she was listening while the six of them, each from a different species, happily exchanged stories about their little one-time wife.
THE BOLIDE WAS iron and nickel flavored with an assortment of sulfur and rare earths. Watching the impact, a sensor positioned on one of the distant portions of the Osmium took careful note of the plasma signature, and with a calmness born from simplicity, it checked the data against a carefully compiled library of known signatures. Sometime in the not-too-distant past, that particular bolide had lain inside the solid core of a Mars-class world—presumably one of the worlds that drifted inside the Inkwell and which th
e polyponds had dismantled.
After the impact, the ship immediately began reassembling itself. Following long-established protocols and measured doses of inspiration, the pieces moved along electrostatic threads and with tiny breaths of nanorockets. Five full months were required to gather around the battered habitat and reattach what remained of the main engine.
Long ago, the Osmium had left the factory cloud.
Using the shards and existing systems, a new craft was assembled. It was inelegant and unlovely and barely able to operate in any meaningful fashion, but a new habitat was constructed, nearly five cubic meters of space partly filled with the vacuum-baked and deeply dead body of its pilot.
An atmosphere was fabricated.
The main engine was repaired to a point, recalibrated as well as possible, and left untouched.
The mummified body was slowly fed liquids and salt and sugars, plus amino acids, both old-fashioned and modern. But the damage was severe, the wounds achingly slow to heal. Consciousness came in slow steps with long plateaus and occasional backfalls. To save energy, Mere was kept in complete blackness. To minimize demands on the fragile life-support system, her metabolism remained at the lowest possible level. Even when she was conscious, she couldn’t move or see, communicating with her surviving AIs through new implants delivered by machines not originally designed to serve as autodocs.
Her first word was, “Shit.”
A week later, she muttered, “This is it … how it is …”
“What is?” an AI asked.
Silence.
“What can I do for you, madam?”
“Who are you?”
“Your navigator.”
“Who else is there now?”
The AI listed the survivors, including itself, and the dead, which included the machine that had untangled the alien memory.
“What about the fragment?” Mere moaned.
Still tucked inside its diamond envelope, it was kicked free by the explosion, drifting nearly a thousand kilometers from the habitat before an industrious fragment tracked it down and wrestled it back again. Twice now in the fragment’s life, it had survived a high-velocity impact.
