The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  * * *

  But Callie couldn’t sleep. “Can you hear what’s happening in the machine shop?” she asked the ship.

  “I can. Ashok has not activated his privacy protocols.”

  “Let me listen in. Secretly.”

  “Opening a line.”

  There was silence for a moment, then Ashok said, “OK, that’s bizarre. Who has a base-seventeen mathematical system?”

  “It seems very natural to me, but I was raised with it. As you can see, the coordinate system takes into account not just space, but also time–”

  “You aren’t telling me the Axiom could time travel?”

  “No – or, not that I know of, and I hope not – but you see, such calculations are the only way to account for the relativistic effects. There must be an absolute referent, for this to–”

  “Aw right, I get it, wow, that’s so needlessly complex it almost wraps all the way back around to elegance, doesn’t it?”

  “It seems that way, yes, but there are special conditions here, and here.”

  “Ahhh. Right. Otherwise you could end up in the middle of a star by accident. Oh, and there’s the emergency protocol trigger, right where it’s halfway logical to find it. But why did the protocol bring us here?”

  “I am only speculating, but if the emergency protocol were ever triggered, then it would mean the crew had failed their mission, and so they would be deemed unsuitable for further service.” A long pause, and then Lantern said, “That planet down there. It was a very bad place.”

  “What, like a prison?”

  “A prison? No. The Axiom did not waste resources on feeding and sheltering those who failed them. The planet below is a rendering plant. A recycling center. Based on what I know of Axiom methods, I am fairly sure the crews would be extracted from their ship, taken below, and forcibly stimulated to produce neural memory buds, which would then be examined to see how the mission failed. The buds would eliminate any need to keep the crews alive, so they would be reduced to slurry, to be used as raw organic material for the cloning vats, or just to feed the newborns.”

  “Wait. The Axiom killed their slaves and fed them to babies?”

  Callie, listening in her room, shivered.

  “Yes. We are fortunate the factory below is so badly damaged. There would normally be an automated system to collect us. It is difficult to overstate how terrible life was under the rule of the Axiom. That is why the Free go to such lengths to prevent those terrible times from returning.”

  “I get it, but blowing up Meditreme? That was… It’s unforgiveable. And I know you agree with me, Lantern.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Come on. You’re not a zealot. You belong to a sect of zealots, totally, but you’re not one yourself. Otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. You were crawling around undiscovered inside the ship, listening in on us. You knew the bridge generator was on board. You clearly know your technical stuff. We’re a zillion miles from any human-occupied space. We both know what a zealot would have done in those circumstances.”

  “Destroyed the ship,” Lantern said. “I should have. My elders would have done so, without hesitation: rigged all your torpedoes to explode in their bays, set your energy weapons to overload, caused your Tanzer drive to explode.”

  Callie closed her eyes on her bunk, visions of her ship coming apart flooding her mind.

  “But you didn’t,” Ashok said. “You tried to talk things out with us instead. Tried to make us understand, and come around to your point of view. You’re a persuader, not a genocider. Your bosses blew up Meditreme Station. You didn’t.”

  “It does not seem right to me, to commit atrocities, even to prevent greater atrocities. We have exterminated whole species to protect ourselves from the possibility that the Axiom might someday awaken. I feel there must be a better way. But I do not know what it is.”

  “It’s not all your fault,” Ashok said. “Your people were enslaved. The spirit of rebellion was literally cut out of you, and even though you’ve been free for a long time, your minds aren’t free. You’re still suffering under all that conditioning. Your instinct is to hide, to avoid notice, to tiptoe around. Right?”

  “Of course. There is no other alternative.”

  “Sure there is,” Ashok said. “You could fight. You could destroy the thing that threatens you. Eliminate the Axiom.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Nah, it’s super possible. You guys did rebel, remember, once upon a time? You stole, you schemed, you attacked, you fought.”

  “We lost.” Lantern’s voice was harsh.

  “Sure, but the rebels went on the offensive, instead of simply going into hiding. That means they must have thought it was possible to win, right? Think about it. The Axiom weren’t content with squashing the rebellion. They were so freaked out they erased the memories of everyone who was involved in the rebellion, and scoured their neural buds from the galaxy. What do you think those Liars knew? They must have been some juicy secrets, if the Axiom were that afraid.”

  “I- I have no idea. The cleansing of our memories was just a show of force, we thought.”

  “I mean, maybe, it could be. Sounds like the Axiom could be sadistic. But you’d think just killing all the rebels would have been a pretty good deterrent. Instead, they went total overkill. Destroyed your homeworld. Embarked on a mass re-education program. I don’t care how near-godlike you are, that’s a whole lot of effort. If you’re all-powerful, I just don’t see sweating a little uprising all that much. You’d just crush it and move on. My guess is, those rebels figured out something important – something that made the Axiom vulnerable, or else revealed a vulnerability. You’re used to thinking about the Axiom as unstoppable juggernauts of mega-strength. They made sure you thought of them that way, right? How about you look at them in a different light, though. Imagine they have a weakness they’re trying really hard not to reveal.”

  “Open a channel,” Callie said. “I was just listening in, guys.”

  “Oh, hey, cap,” Ashok said. “I was just thinking out loud.”

  “No, they’re good thoughts,” she said. “I was wondering about something that connects. Lantern, why did the Axiom create a slave race in the first place? You said they were going along just fine on their own for millions of years, undisputed masters of creation, then fifty thousand years ago they suddenly go to a whole lot of trouble to break a sentient race to their will. They devoted a ton of resources to that project. Why do you think they did that?”

  “We do not know. They never explained themselves.”

  “What Ashok said, about the Axiom hiding a weakness. Maybe they suddenly needed the help. Maybe they were sick, or their population was dwindling, or they’d just extended their empire too far to govern it properly. They couldn’t keep up with everything that was happening anymore. They needed soldiers, workers, custodians, all that, right? How many of the Axiom did your kind actually see?”

  “We mostly dealt with their machines,” Lantern said. “Actual meetings with the Axiom, in person, were vanishingly rare. It was like meeting a malevolent god.”

  “I think the Axiom was an empire in decline,” Callie said. “Once great, but overextended, decadent, rotting, diseased, who knows what. They started to crumble, and they needed outside help to keep everything going, to keep pretending they were as invulnerable as ever. But they were too old and arrogant and set in their ways to collaborate with anyone, so they went for slavery instead.”

  “That… is a plausible interpretation,” Lantern said.

  “They were clearly working toward some big project, too,” Callie said.

  “Sure,” Ashok said. “Maybe several projects. They went somewhere, after all. Sadistic monomaniacs don’t commit suicide. Whether they uploaded or migrated to a new universe or transitioned to being full-time energy beings, or whatever, it took a lot of preparation.”

  “Maybe that’s what the rebels threatened with their
attacks,” Lantern said. “Perhaps they delayed or menaced the transition.”

  “That makes sense,” Callie said. “What if there were actually just a few of the Axiom left, and they were desperately trying to save themselves, and then suddenly the slaves attacked? Maybe they did some real damage, or threatened something crucial. They had to respond with overwhelming force, and keep you guys down long enough for them to finish their project.”

  “They’re still trying to protect their infrastructure,” Ashok said. “Their machines are still active. Some of it might be purely automated systems they didn’t bother to switch off. But that factory on the gas giant coming to life and destroying a planet in such a weird and scary way? That’s not a robot vacuum left running when the owner goes on vacation. That’s a contingency and a deterrent.”

  “If the Axiom are trying to hide something, or protect something, what could it be?”

  “They don’t like to be disturbed,” Ashok said. “Maybe they don’t want their weakness to be discovered. If the rebels threatened them when they were awake, how much more vulnerable are they now that they’re asleep – or whatever? Relying on automated security systems?”

  Lantern said, “If they are trying to protect some secret, it could be the servers where their simulated reality resides. Or the dreaming machine that spawned their new universe. Or the life support system for their stasis while some other machines prepare this universe for their return. It would be something essential to their existence.”

  “They spent a long time crafting a reputation as ferocious unstoppable gods who punish the slightest transgression with armageddon,” Callie said. “Why would they do that? In my experience people who bluster that hard, and who favor wildly disproportionate responses, are a lot more insecure than they let on.”

  “This is an interesting line of speculation,” Lantern said. “I would like to present it to my elders and solicit their thoughts.”

  “You can’t cower forever,” Ashok said. “Isn’t ten thousand years of subjugation long enough?”

  “Even if you are right, I am not sure what we can do about it,” Lantern said. “If there is a secret weakness, I cannot imagine how we would ever discover it.”

  “Of course you can’t,” Callie said. “You’re not a trained investigator.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  Elena knew she should be sleeping, and she dozed fitfully, but she never sank very deep. Her mind kept returning to the Axiom station, made even more sinister in the context of Lantern’s revelations, and every time she closed her eyes she saw horrors witnessed and imagined. She stared at the darkness over her bunk for a long time and finally said, “Shall?”

  “Yes, Elena?”

  “Did I hear you say you loved Captain Machedo, when we all thought we were going to die?”

  “I don’t know what you might have heard.”

  “Ha. Let me rephrase that. Why did you say you loved her? And why did she call you– what was it, Michael?”

  “That’s not a question I can answer. I’ve been asked not to discuss the subject. Callie has promised to sell me to a discount liquor store as an inventory management system if I divulge any details.”

  “Can I speculate wildly, based on my keen observations? And if I speculate accurately, will you let me know?”

  “I can grunt meaningfully, I suppose.”

  Elena smiled. “Fair enough. Your name is actually Michael?”

  “I’m just a ship’s computer. What need have I for any foolish human name?”

  “The crew calls you ‘Shall.’ Callie doesn’t call you anything at all. There’s that old phrase, isn’t there, about a villain so terrible his name could never be spoken aloud? ‘He Who Shall Not Be Named’?”

  “The villain in question was more commonly known as ‘He Who Must Not Be Named’, but the crew decided ‘Must’ was a terrible nickname. It sounds too much like ‘musty’. So they proposed a variation.”

  “You told me computer intelligences like you are modeled on actual humans. You’re based on a human named Michael, then?”

  “Meaningful grunt.”

  “Someone who loved Callie?”

  “Grunt, grunt.”

  “Ah. The bartender on Meditreme Station, Jana, said she got to know Callie after the divorce. Was that divorce from Michael? The human template for you?”

  “If we were in human-occupied space, and you had a few lix to spare, you could look up Callie’s past marital status on the Tangle. It’s public information.”

  “It must be very difficult, to spend so much time on a ship occupied by a consciousness based on someone you had a terrible breakup with. I might find hearing their name quite painful, in those circumstances.”

  “Indeed. But imagine having someone you love suddenly hate you, because their partner, who happens to share certain neural patterns and memories and a name and a voice with you, betrayed them. Imagine that you didn’t do anything bad at all, and you never would, but it doesn’t matter, because you’re tainted by association. So the person you once had long talks with every night can no longer even bear to speak your name, and gets so angry when she hears anyone else speak it, that even that name is taken from you, replaced by a nickname that by its very nature reminds you, every day, of your fallen status. Not that you need to be reminded, because your memory is perfect.” The ship paused. “Sorry. I meant to say, ‘grunt’.”

  “I’m so sorry, Michael.”

  “Don’t let the captain hear you say that word. The two of them only split, definitively, a bit over a year ago, though things were tense for some time before that. I have some hope that she will soften toward me in time, but not too much. I know her very well. Captain Machedo loves with full force, full-hearted, and gives it her all, but she takes betrayal hard. I’m telling you that because – if we don’t all die – knowing something about the workings of Callie’s heart might be relevant for you.”

  Elena sat up, the webbing holding her lower body in the bed. “Why do you say that?”“I monitor everyone’s vitals on the ship as a matter of course. With passive scanners, of course, so the data isn’t very deep, but I’ve seen how her pupils dilate around you, and yours around hers. How your heartbeats speed up, and your skin conductivity increases. If I did a full diagnostic, I think I’d see very interesting hormonal activity when the two of you interact.” A pause. “What I’m saying is, you’re attracted to each other.”

  A blush blossomed on her cheeks. “I’ve always been drawn to strong, confident people – men and women. Callie is all that. She’s been very kind to me, too, obviously. But I didn’t think she’d… and anyway, it doesn’t seem appropriate…”

  “We’re in a galaxy far, far away, facing imminent death. You heard me say I love Callie. I love her so much I genuinely want her to be happy. It helps that there’s no element of sexual jealousy present in me, probably – I was spared that set of irreconcilable urges when I was created, fortunately. My fondness for Callie is purely intellectual and emotional, and as a result, I really wish she’d get laid occasionally. She was so much more cheerful when she did, even when it was just visits home in between long hauls in space.”

  “She, ah, doesn’t just like men?”

  “Back in the days when she had a dating profile on the Tangle, Callie identified as demisexual. She’s attracted to people she develops feelings for, whether they’re femme, butch, andro, enby, genderfluid, shifting, or otherwise. Attraction follows interest, for her. I think you interest her greatly.”

  “But why? I’m basically a primitive caveperson thawed out of a glacier. Why would she be interested in me?”

  “You’re willing to do anything to save your crew, Elena. You’re amazingly courageous. You’re insatiably curious. The vastness of the universe fills you with wonder. You could not be more perfectly Callie’s type.”

  Elena groaned. “This is ridiculous. We’re being hunted by alien zealots who want to destroy us because we discovered their secret. But they have to ge
t in line to kill us behind the other aliens – the ancient unknowable sadistic ones, whose station we’re about to invade, the second time around for me. This is hardly the time to think about whether I find the captain of this ship cute or not.”

  “Callie is always up for a fight,” Shall said. “Sometimes she loses sight of what she’s fighting for. It would make me very happy if you could remind her.”

  “Gah. OK. I’ll ask her out for a drink when all this is over.”

  “I wouldn’t wait that long. Because of the likelihood of death, I mean.”

  * * *

  Callie knocked on her XO’s door softly.

  “Come,” Stephen called.

  She entered the dim cabin, second only to her own in size. Stephen was on his back in his bunk, the webbed straps holding him loosely in place. He was apparently meditating on an image of abstracted fractal flowers opening and closing, projected on his ceiling. “You’ve got the wrong cabin. Elena’s is two doors down.”

  “Ha, ha.” Callie had actually almost knocked on her door, then heard voices inside: Elena talking to the ship. She’d decided not to interrupt them. “I wanted to check on you.”

  “I’m all right. For now. But there’s a festival coming up, and soon. In, oh, about thirteen hours.”

  “I know. Believe me, I mark that stuff on my calendar.” She sat in the wide, soft armchair in one corner and looked at the flowers with him.

  “I picked up the sacraments on Meditreme. From the same priestess who’s provided them to me for the past decade. The leader of my congregation. Now she is gone. Dust dispersing into space. Along with all the other members of my faith. I was a bad adherent, in some ways. I rarely made it to the meetings, which is a shame, because that fellowship, taking comfort in one another, erasing the borders between our individual selves, is such an important part of our faith. I’ve always been just a little too self-contained. But I made it to the festivals, when I could, and as such I shared a togetherness with those people that I have shared with few others.”