“What’s he talking about?” Mirsky said.
“Their neural patterns can be retrieved.” It was Remontoire speaking now. “We Conjoiners have had the ability to copy minds onto machine substrates for some time now, though we haven’t advertised it. But that doesn’t matter— there have been experiments on Yellowstone that approach our early successes. And these heads aren’t even thinking: only topologies need to be mapped, not electrochemical processes.”
The pig took one of the heads from his belt and held it at eye level, for inspection. “The Conjoiner’s right. They’re not really dead. And they can be yours if you wish to do business.”
“What do you want for them?” Irravel asked.
“Markarian, for a start. All that Demarchy expertise makes for a very efficient second-in-command.”
Irravel glanced down at her prisoner. “You can’t buy loyalty with a box and a few neural connections.”
“No? In what way do our loyalty shunts differ from the psychosurgery your world inflicted on you, Irravel, yoking your motherhood instinct to twenty thousand sleepers you don’t even know by name?”
“We have a deal or not?”
“Only if you throw in the Conjoiner as well.”
Irravel looked at Remontoire, some snake part of her mind weighing options with reptilian detachment.
“No!” he said. “You promised!”
“Shut up,” Seven said. “Or when you do get to rejoin your friends, it’ll be in instalments.”
“I’m sorry,” Irravel said. “I can’t lose even ten of the cargo.”
Seven tossed the first head down to her. “Now let Markarian go and we’ll see about the rest.”
Irravel looked down at him. “It’s not over between you and me.”
Then she released him, and he scrambled back up the ice towards Seven.
“Excellent. Here’s another head. Now the Conjoiner.”
Irravel issued a subvocal command; watched Remontoire stiffen. “His suit’s paralysed. Take him.”
Two pirates worked down to him, checked him over and nodded towards Seven. Between them they hauled him back up the ice, vanishing into a crevasse and back into the Hideyoshi.
“The other eight heads,” Irravel said.
“I’m going to throw them away from the ship. You’ll be able to locate them easily enough. While I’m doing that, I’m going to retreat, and you’re going to leave.”
“We could end this now,” Mirsky said.
“I need those heads.”
“They really fucked with your psychology big-time, didn’t they?” Mirsky raised her weapon and began shooting at Seven and the other pirates. Irravel watched her carve up the remaining heads; splintering frozen bone into the vacuum.
“No!”
“Sorry,” Mirsky said. “Had to do it, Veda.”
Seven clutched at his chest, fingers mashing the pulp of the heads still tethered to his belt. She’d punctured his suit. As he tried to stem the dam-burst, his face was carved with the intolerable knowledge that his reign had just ended.
But something had hit Irravel, too.
Sylveste Institute, Yellowstone Orbit, Epsilon Eridani— AD 2415
“Where am I?” Irravel asked. “How am I thinking this?”
The woman’s voice was the colour of mahogany. “Somewhere safe. You died on the ice, but we got you back in time.”
“For what?”
Mirsky sighed, as if this was something she would rather not have had to explain this soon. “To scan you, just like we did with the two frozen heads. Copy you into the ship.”
Maybe she should have felt horror, or indignation, or even relief that some part of her had been spared.
Instead, she just felt impatience.
“What now?”
“We’re working on it,” Mirsky said.
Trans-Aldebaran Space—AD 2673
“We saved her body after she died,” Mirsky said, wheezing slightly. She found it difficult to move around under what to Irravel was the ship’s normal two and a half gees of thrust. “After the battle we brought her back aboard.”
Irravel thought of her mother dying on the other ship, the one they were chasing. For years they had deliberately not narrowed the distance, holding back but never allowing the Hideyoshi to slip from view.
Until now, it hadn’t even occurred to Irravel to ask why.
She looked through the casket’s window, trying to match her own features against what she saw in the woman’s face, trying to project her own fifteen years into Mother Irravel’s adulthood.
“Why did you keep her so cold?”
“We had to extract what we could from her brain,” Mirsky said, “memories and neural patterns. We trawled them and stored them in the ship.”
“What good was that?”
“We knew they’d come in useful again.”
She’d been cloned from Mother Irravel. They were not identical—no Mixmaster expertise could duplicate the precise biochemical environment of Mother Irravel’s womb, or the shaping experiences of her early infancy, and their personalities had been sculpted centuries apart, in totally different worlds. But they were still close copies. They even shared memories: scripted into Irravel’s mind by medichines, so that she barely noticed each addition to her own experiences.
“Why did you do this?” she asked.
“Because Irravel began something,” Mirsky said. “Something I promised I’d help her finish.”
Stormwatch Station, Aethra, Hyades Trade Envelope— AD 2931
“Why are you interested in our weapons?” the Nestbuilder asked. “We are not aware of any wars within the chordate phylum at this epoch.”
“It’s a personal matter,” Irravel said.
The Nestbuilder hovered a metre above the trade floor, suspended in a column of microgravity. They were oxygen-breathing arthropods that had once ascended to spacefaring capability. No longer intelligent, yet supported by their self-renewing machinery, they migrated from system to system, constructing elaborate, space-filling structures from solid diamond. Other Nestbuilder swarms would arrive and occasionally occupy the new nests. There seemed no purpose to this activity, but for tens of thousands of years they had been host to a smaller, cleverer species known as the Slugs. Small communities of Slugs—anything up to a dozen— lived in warm, damp niches in a Nestbuilder’s intricately folded shell. They had long since learned how to control the host’s behaviour and exploit its subservient technology.
Irravel studied a Slug now, crawling out from under a lip of shell material.
The thing was a multicellular invertebrate not much larger than her fist; a bag of soft blue protoplasm, sprouting appendages only when they were needed. A slightly bipolar shadow near one end might have been its central nervous system, but there hardly seemed enough of it to trap sentience. There were no obvious sense or communicational organs, but a pulsing filament of blue slime reached back into the Nestbuilder’s fold. When the Slug spoke, it did so through the Nestbuilder: a rattle of chitin from the host’s mouthparts which approximated human language. A hovering jewel connected to the station’s lexical database did the rest, rendering the voice calmly feminine.
“A personal matter? A vendetta? Then it’s true.” The mouth-parts clicked together in what humans presumed was the symbiotic creature’s laughter response. “You are who we suspected.”
“She did tell you her name was Irravel, guy,” Mirsky said, sipping black coffee with delicate movements of the exoskeletal frame she always wore in high gravity.
“Amongst you chordates, the name is not so unusual now,” the Slug reminded them. “But you do fit the description, Irravel.”
They were near one of the station’s vast picture windows, overlooking Aethra’s mighty, roiling cloud decks, fifty kilometres below. It was getting dark now and the stormplayers were preparing to start a show. Irravel saw two of their seeders descending into the clouds, robot craft tethered by a nearly invisible filament. The seeders would position the fil
ament so that it bridged cloud layers with different static potentials; they’d then detach and return to Stormwatch, while the filament held itself in position by rippling along its length. For hundreds of kilometres around, other filaments would have been placed in carefully selected positions. They were electrically isolating now, but at the stormplayer’s discretion, each filament would flick over into a conductive state: a massive, choreographed lightning flash.
“I never set out to become a legend,” Irravel said. “Or a myth, for that matter.”
“Yes. There are so many stories about you, Veda, that it might be simpler to assume you never existed.”
“What makes you think otherwise?”
“The fact that a chordate who could have been Markarian also passed this way, only a year or so ago.” The Nestbuilder ’s shell pigmentation flickered, briefly revealing a picture of Markarian’s ship.
“So you sold weapons to him?”
“That would be telling, wouldn’t it?” The mouthparts clattered again. “You would have to answer a question of ours first.”
Outside, the opening flashes of the night’s performance gilded the horizon, like the first stirrings of a symphony. Aethra’s rings echoed the flashes, pale ghosts momentarily cleaving the sky.
“What do you want to know?”
“We Slugs are amongst the few intelligent starfaring cultures in this part of the galaxy. During the war against intelligence, we avoided the Inhibitors by hiding ourselves amongst the mindless Nestbuilders.”
Irravel nodded. Slugs were one of the few alien species known to humanity that would even acknowledge the existence of the feared Inhibitors. Like humanity, they’d fought and beaten the revenants—at least for now.
“The weaponry you seek enabled us to triumph—but even then only at colossal cost to our phylum. Now we are watchful for new threats.”
“I don’t see where this is leading.”
“We have heard rumours. Since you have come from the direction of those rumours—the local stellar neighbourhood around your phylum’s birth star—we imagined you might have information of value.”
Irravel exchanged a sideways glance with Mirsky. The old woman’s wizened, age-spotted skull looked as fragile as paper, but she remained an unrivalled tactician. They knew each other so well now that Mirsky could impart advice with the subtlest of movements, expression barely troubling the lined mask of her face.
“What kind of information are you seeking?”
“Information about something that frightens us.” The Nestbuilder’s pigmentation flickered again, forming an image of . . . something. It was a splinter of grey-brown against speckled blackness—perhaps the Nestbuilder’s attempt at visualising a planetoid. And then something erupted across the surface of the world, racing from end to end like a film of verdigris. Where it had passed, fissures opened up, deepening until they were black fractures, as if the world were a calving iceberg. And then it blew apart, shattering into a thousand green-tinged fragments.
“What was that?” Irravel said.
“We were rather hoping you could tell us.” The Nestbuilder ’s pigmentation refreshed again, and this time what they were seeing was clearly a star, veiled in a toroidal belt of golden dust. “Machines have dismantled every rocky object in the system where these images were captured— Ross 128, which lies within eleven light-years of your birth star. They have engendered a swarm of trillions of rocks on independent orbits. Each rock is sheathed in a pressurised bubble membrane, within which an artificial plant-based ecosystem has been created. The same machines have fashioned other sources of raw material into mirrors, larger than worlds themselves, which trap sunlight above and below the ecliptic and focus it onto the swarm.”
“And why does this frighten you?”
The Nestbuilder leaned closer in its column of microgravity. “Because we saw it being resisted. As if these machines had never been intended to wreak such transformations. As if your phylum had created something it could not control.”
“And—these attempts at resistance?”
“Failed.”
“But if one system was accidentally transformed, it doesn’t mean . . .” Irravel trailed off. “You’re worried about them crossing interstellar space, to other systems. Even if that happened—couldn’t you resist the spread? This can only be human technology—nothing that would pose any threat to yourselves.”
“Perhaps it was once human technology, with programmed limitations to prevent it from replicating uncontrollably. But those shackles have been broken. Worse, the machines have hybridised, gaining resilience and adaptability with each encounter with something external. First the Melding Plague, infection with which may have been a deliberate ploy to bypass the replication limits.”
Irravel nodded. The Melding Plague had swept human space four hundred years earlier, terminating the Demarchist belle époque. Like the Black Death of the previous millennium, it evoked terror generations after it had passed.
“Later,” the Nestbuilder continued, “it may have encountered and assimilated Inhibitor technology, or worse. Now it will be very difficult to stop, even with the weapons at our disposal.”
An image of one of the machines flickered onto the Nestbuilder’s shell, like a peculiar tattoo. Irravel shivered. The Slug was right: waves of hybridisation had transformed the initial architecture into something queasily alien. But enough of the original plan remained for there to be no doubt in her mind. She was looking at an evolved greenfly—one of the self-replicating breeders she had given Captain Run Seven. How it had broken loose was anyone’s guess. She speculated that Seven’s crew had sold the technology on to a third party, decades or centuries after gaining it from her. Perhaps that third party had reclusively experimented in the Ross 128 system, until the day when the greenfly tore out of their control . . .
“I don’t know why you think I can help,” she said.
“Perhaps we were mistaken, then, to credit a five-hundred -year-old rumour that said you had been the original source of these machines.”
She had insulted it by daring to bluff. The Slugs were easily insulted. They read human beings far better than humans read Slugs.
“Like you say,” she answered, “you can’t believe everything you hear.”
The Slug made the Nestbuilder fold its armoured, spindly limbs across its mouthparts, a gesture of displeased huffiness.
“You chordates,” it said. “You’re all the same.”
Interstellar Space—AD 3354
Mirsky was dead. She had died of old age.
Irravel placed her body in an armoured coffin and ejected her into space when the Hirondelle’s speed was only a hair’s breadth under light.
“Do it for me, Irravel,” Mirsky had asked her, towards the end. “Keep my body aboard until we’re almost touching light, and then fire me ahead of the ship.”
“Is that really what you want?”
"It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C.” She forced a smile that must have sapped what little energy she had left. “That’s a joke, Irravel, but it only makes sense in a language neither of us has heard for a while.”
Irravel pretended that she understood. “Mirsky? There’s something I have to tell you. Do you remember the Nestbuilder? ”
“That was centuries ago, Veda.”
“I know. I just keep worrying that maybe it was right.”
“About what?”
“Those machines. About how I started it all. They say it’s spread now, to other systems. It doesn’t look as if anyone knows how to stop it.”
“And you think all that was your fault?”
“It’s crossed my mind.”
Mirsky convulsed, or shrugged—Irravel wasn’t sure which. “Even if it was your fault, Veda, you did it with the best of intentions. So you fucked up slightly. We all make mistakes.”
“Destroying whole solar systems is just a fuck-up?”
“Hey, accidents happen.”
“You always did h
ave a sense of humour, Mirsky.”
“Yeah, guess I did.” She managed a smile. “One of us needed one, Veda.”
Thinking of that, Irravel watched the coffin fall ahead of the Hirondelle, dwindling until it was only a tiny mote of steel-grey, and then nothing.
Subaru Commonwealth, Pleiades Cluster—AD 4161
The starbridge had long ago attained sentience.
Dense with machinery, it sang an endless hymn to its own immensity, throbbing like the lowest string on a guitar. Vacuum-breathing acolytes had voluntarily rewired their minds to view the bridge as an actual deity, translating the humming into their sensoria and passing decades in contemplative ecstasy.
Clasped in a cushioning field, an elevator ferried Irravel down the bridge from the orbital hub to the surface in a few minutes, accompanied by an entourage of children from the ship, many of whom bore in youth the hurting imprint of her dead friend Mirsky’s genes. The bridge rose like the stem of a goblet from a ground terminal which was itself a scalloped shell of hyper-diamond, filled with tiered perfume gardens and cascading pools, anchored to the largest island in an equatorial archipelago. The senior children walked Irravel down to a beach of silver sand on the terminal’s edge, where jewelled crabs moved like toys. She bid the children farewell, then waited, warm breezes fingering the hem of her sari.
Minutes later, the children’s elevator flashed heavenward.
Irravel looked out at the ocean, thinking of the Pattern Jugglers. Here, as on dozens of other oceanic worlds, there was a colony of the alien intelligences. Transforming themselves to aquatic bodyplans, the Subaruns had established close rapport with the aliens. In the morning, she would be taken out to meet the Jugglers, drowned, dissolved on the cellular level, every atom in her body swapped for one in the ocean, remade into something not quite human.
She was terrified.
Islanders came towards the shore, skimming the water on penanted trimarans, attended by oceanforms, sleek gloss-grey hybrids of porpoise and ray, whistlespeech downshifted into the human auditory spectrum. The Subaruns’ epidermal scales shimmered like imbricated armour: biological photocells drinking scorching blue Pleiadean sunlight. Sentient veils hung in the sky, rippling gently like aurorae, shading the archipelago from the fiercest wavelengths. As the actinic eye of Taygeta sank towards the horizon, the veils moved with it like living clouds. Flocks of phantasmagorical birds migrated with the veils.
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