Nomad

by William Alexander

  * * * *

  One stolen and sinuous mining craft followed the ambassadors.

  It had burrowed deep into ice and up through the surface of Ceres to leave undetected. Now it sped down gravity’s slope toward the sun and the third planet.

  The craft carried a single passenger, a single Outlast. He had sabotaged the artificial sun and remained far from the fight, still hidden, still waiting.

  Now he studied the stars until he knew their relative positions, knew where this system turned inside a small spur of a spiral arm.

  He knew where he was.

  In that same moment every Outlast warship also knew.

  19

  Nadia Antonovna Kollontai climbed aboard the waiting Khelone ship. If an honor guard stood watch to either side, she did not notice them. Barnacle’s airlock squeezed itself shut behind her.

  The inside walls were smooth and curved, like the interior of a seashell. A Khelone ship was a living thing. The very first forms of life swam through space without stars or planets, when space itself was still warm and the stars had yet to pull themselves together. Then space gradually cooled, the stars grew bright and hot, and most life learned how to cluster there. But some adapted to the cold and never bothered to settle down in solar systems. Some living things remained nomadic, swimming through space, becoming their own ships. The Khelone, both the ships and their pilots, descended directly from those first forms of life that refused to hold still.

  Nadia took in a breath that smelled leathery and familiar. She reached out and touched the smooth walls of the passageway, remembering what they looked like: opalescent, with light pulsing through them in rhythms more complex than breath or heartbeat. She remembered, but she couldn’t see it happen.

  “Hi, Barnacle,” she said.

  The wall grew briefly warm under her hand.

  “I’m going to go looking for Rem,” she said. “Help me find him. Warm means closer, and cold means farther away. Warm also means yes. Good plan?”

  She felt another flash of warmth.

  “Here we go.”

  Nadia climbed through the spiraling shape of the shell and into the central chamber. She recognized it by the way sound bounced away from the smooth dome overhead. She could also hear Rem tap against the floor with his toes and fingers, communicating with the ship. The tapping stopped.

  “Welcome back aboard,” said Rem.

  He still sounded like Yuri Gagarin. He would have looked like Yuri Gagarin if Nadia could still make visual sense of his translated appearance. But he did not sound welcoming.

  Nadia guessed why. “They brought the Outlast prisoner aboard, didn’t they?”

  “Yes,” Rem told her. “One of those creepy, aloof, genocidal, territory-gobbling things is here. Along with two guards. The aquatic one is good company, and Barnacle might even agree to flood a single cabin so she can swim around without that big, galumphing suit of hers, but the beaked one struts, preens, and glares. I do not like having them aboard. Barnacle and I never agreed to take on more passengers. We certainly never agreed to transport an Outlast. Do you know how many Khelone clusters the Outlast have killed? You don’t. You can’t. Because no one does. We’ve lost count. And we’ve had to change all of our old migration patterns to avoid Outlast territory—our ancient migration patterns. Gone now. All of the trail markings gone. We used to drop bread crumbs, little food packets to mark our routes. They’d stay fresh, preserved in the vacuum. Each ship would put special care into crafting bread crumbs. We’d code the flavors with information—velocity, intentions, destinations, maps, all sorts of important data. It’s a gift, the most important gift. A bread crumb is hospitality and hello to whoever passes that way next, which might happen soon afterward or a thousand generations later. If you explore new territory, somewhere the Khelone have never been before, then you leave the first set of crumbs behind. If you find an old one and eat it, then you always respond by leaving another in its place. That kept the routes steady and consistent. That maintained our long history. But then the Outlast figured out how to use the crumbs to track us down, or else leave deadly traps along our routes. They’re killing us, and they’re killing the oldest known historical records. We’ve stopped making new crumbs. The few I’ve found lately are coded with instructions for silence. Whoever gets this, please savor it and do not drop another.” Rem paused for breath. “And now we have an Outlast on board. This makes me so very unhappy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nadia said, and she was. “But it might help us get into the lanes, which might help us talk to Machinae, which might shut down the spreading Outlast completely.”

  “That’s three mights I’ve counted,” said Rem. “This represents significant levels of uncertainty. Plus I hear they’ve rearranged your brain shape. Sounds drastic. I’m relieved that you can still walk and talk.”

  “Likewise,” Nadia said, her voice dry. “So far it’s just given me a foggy headache.”

  “You inspire great confidence,” said Rem.

  “You don’t need confidence,” Nadia told him. “You are the greatest pilot in the galaxy. Confidence is for the self-deluded, or for those who avoid dangers and refuse risks. You’re better than that. No other pilot whispered of in legend or coded into millennia-old bread crumbs has ever accomplished what you’re about to do.”

  Nadia had met daredevil pilots before. She had met cosmonauts and the adolescent test pilots who wanted to become cosmonauts. She had met Yuri Gagarin and Valentina Tereshkova. Every single one of them loved flattery.

  You’re a politician, the Kaen envoy had said, and the word still stung even if it wasn’t supposed to. Nadia wanted to argue with that word, but she couldn’t.

  Rem gave a mocking and affectionate laugh, a Muscovite laugh. Her flattery was obvious. It still worked. “You’re full of noxious waste byproducts, human.”

  “Thank you,” Nadia said. “Are we ready to launch?”

  “Born ready,” he told her. Nadia heard his toes and fingers tap against the floor and wall.

  Barnacle pushed away from Calendar, away from Ceres, away from the Kaen fleet. The ship began to spin. The domed ceiling became a curved, concave floor as the spinning Barnacle made her own centrifugal gravity.

  Nadia had loved their first launch, when they left the Zvezda base. She had been able to see at the time. Drastic shifts of gravity were unsettling to experience blind. She whacked into Rem when she found the new floor, and both of them said untranslatable things. Then Nadia found somewhere to sit on the curved shell and tried to stay away from the pilot’s tapping toes.

  “We’re clear of the asteroid belt,” he said. “Time to take shortcuts.”

  “Try not to lose another forty years,” Nadia suggested.

  He didn’t answer, which meant he had no attention to spare. Nadia dropped the joke and insult from her own voice.

  “Tell me what you see,” she asked. “Tell me what Barnacle sees.”

  Right at that moment the ship would be sharing an outside view across the curved shell around them. Nadia missed that view.

  “She sees the lanes,” Rem whispered back. “She sees a web of darkly shimmering strands. And she can feel gravity leaking into our dimension from other, stranger places.”

  Nadia held her breath. She held on to the single, brightly burning hope that she allowed herself to have. This might work. It might. I left the world and lost the world to try it, and this time it might work.

  Barnacle twisted, flew, and fell into the lanes.

  * * * *

  Gravity inside Barnacle got very weird.

  Then it settled.

  Nadia and Rem lay sprawled in the domed central chamber.

  “Did it work?” Nadia asked. “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere else,” said Rem. He sounded more concerned than triumphant. “Somewhere entirely else. The space outside is . . . different. Thicker. More viscous than we’re used to. It isn’t a void, it’s a dark and soupy swirl. Weird. I was expecting a network o
f tunnels burrowing through space-time. This is more like an ocean.” Fingers and toes tapped against shell. “Barnacle is trying to get her bearings, but she can’t make much sense of her senses yet. She’s trying to tell me—”

  Rem stopped talking, suddenly, so that he could scream instead.

  “What?” Nadia demanded. “What was that? What’s wrong?”

  “I don’t know,” Rem told her. His words tumbled out fast and uncertain of each other. “I don’t know what that was. Something just moved outside. Something massive. Something that might swallow us whole and not notice. Barnacle would very much like to turn around and bolt, but she hasn’t figured out how.” His taps against the shell made a steady, frantic rhythm. “We’re caught in tides and currents, but I’m not sure if this is the direction we want to go—or if direction even means anything here.”

  Nadia wanted to see. She desperately wanted to see, more than she had while walking through the streets of Night, more than she had in the House of Painted Books or the Hall of Murals, and almost as much as she had while confined in the darkness of a kitchen cupboard.

  Calm down, she told herself. You don’t spend most of your time upset that you can’t fly or breathe underwater. You also can’t see. Doesn’t mean you’re broken. Everyone just works with what they’ve got.

  Barnacle shivered and shook. Then she held extremely still.

  “Now we’re stuck,” Rem reported. “The viscous liquid stuff pulled back to make a bubble around us. Then it solidified. We’re stuck at the edge of the bubble as though half-frozen in ice.”

  “What should we do?” Nadia asked. “The Outlast can travel through this dimension somehow, so there must be a way.”

  “We did bring one with us,” Rem pointed out. “Maybe we should ask how they manage.”

  A voice echoed through the ship. Nadia felt it as much as she heard it.

  GREETINGS.

  “Rem, did you hear that?” Nadia whispered.

  “Hear what?” he asked.

  GREETINGS, the voice repeated.

  “Greetings to you,” Nadia answered. “This is Ambassador Emeritus Nadia Antonovna Kollontai of Terra. Whom do I address?”

  GREETINGS, said the voice, as though Nadia hadn’t spoken at all.

  “I still don’t hear anything except you,” said Rem.

  “Maybe because you haven’t had your brain rearranged the way I have,” Nadia said. “I can hear someone out there, but they don’t seem to be able to hear me.”

  GREETINGS.

  “Okay,” Nadia said. “Time to suit up. I need to go outside.”

  “I’ll go with you,” said Rem. “I should investigate our stuckedness and try to get us unstuck. But be careful. We don’t know what the rules are here.”

  “I’m an ambassador,” Nadia pointed out. “I’m very good at figuring out rules of conduct.”

  “I don’t mean polite rules of conduct,” said Rem. “I mean rules of physics. The Outlast skip over hundreds of thousands of light-years for freebies by moving through this place. So anything could happen. We might disappear, or explode, or turn into an ever-expanding and sentient nebulae stuck in one endless moment of pain. You might age a few million human lifetimes in one moment. Your feet might get older while your head gets younger. Who knows?”

  “Who knows,” Nadia agreed. “Maybe we’ll transform into dozens of butterflies and bunny rabbits. Sure. We don’t know what will happen. That’s always true. We never, ever know what’s going to happen next. So let’s go find out.”

  GREETINGS.

  * * * *

  Nadia stepped cautiously across the inside surface of the bubble in a borrowed Kaen suit, one that had never belonged to Valentina Tereshkova.

  Her molecules hadn’t torn apart in an ever-expanding nebulae of endless pain, or turned into bunnies, or experienced any other sudden consequence of unfamiliar physics.

  “Talk to me,” she said to Rem. “Tell me what you see.”

  Please, please, please, let the translation matrix still work out here, she thought.

  It did. Rem spoke, and she understood him. “The stuff we’re walking on looks like dark stone, semitransparent. Veins of some shimmering stuff run through it. Pale light pulses through those veins.”

  Nadia continued to walk across the stone-like surface. She felt gravity, or something similar. She felt as though she should be able to just push off and float, but she couldn’t. Instead she took small and careful hop-steps, just as she had in her very first moonwalk before learning how to run there. She remembered moving across a frozen pond as a very small child, holding hands with Aunt Martina on one side and Uncle Konstantine on the other. She remembered staring down through clear, dark, solid pond water in wintertime, wondering where all the fish had gone, imagining all of them frozen in midswim. She remembered seeing bubbles trapped in the ice, and how they looked like tiny stars. It gave a sense of vast depth to small, frozen ponds.

  Rem made a low, slow noise.

  “What is it?” Nadia asked.

  “Something is pushing its way up through the ground,” he told her. “It looks like . . . it looks like a suit, a bulbous stone suit. It’s moving toward us now, roughly you-sized and you-shaped, but . . .”

  “But?” Nadia pressed.

  “But I think the inside of that stone-suit is much larger than it looks from here. The rough helmet seems like it isn’t any bigger than yours, but I can see something moving inside it. Something . . . far away. Now it’s moving closer. Much closer. Now it’s pressing itself up against the inside of that crystal helmet and opening one eye. That eye is bigger than the helmet itself.”

  “Am I facing toward it?” Nadia asked.

  “Yes,” Rem told her.

  Nadia raised one hand. “Greetings? Hello?”

  She heard no answer. She wondered what surrounded them. Air? Vacuum? Some other sort of gas-like stuff? Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to carry sound.

  “It’s coming closer,” said Rem, clearly alarmed, clearly trying not to be. “The eye is staring at you without blinking. Now it stopped. Now it’s leaning forward. You should seriously consider backing away.”

  Nadia didn’t move. “I think I know what it’s doing. This is how cosmonauts talk without radio. If you touch visors then sound moves directly from one suit into the other.”

  She felt a small thunk against her helmet visor. Then she felt a voice pass through all the small bones of her face.

  GREETINGS.

  She blinked, and then grinned, and almost gave a gleeful shout.

  “Greetings,” she said. “I am Nadia of Terra. Are you of the Machinae?”

  The voice changed and expanded.

  What are your origins?

  By what expansionist imperative have you spread so far beyond your habitat of origin?

  How did you come to be here?

  Do you travel here by accident or by deliberate intention?

  What are your deliberate intentions?

  How well do you treat the machines that you make?

  What wavelengths of light are you able to perceive?

  Do you strive to increase the number of possible outcomes radiating outward from any given nexus point?

  Do you strive to decrease the number of possible outcomes radiating outward from any given nexus point?

  What stories do you tell?

  What games do you play?

  Are you intelligent?

  Are you alive?

  The sound and the sense it carried overwhelmed her. Nadia felt like she was drowning in that voice, like she couldn’t breathe while surrounded by it. Separate threads of meaning pulled her consciousness in every direction at once, and then she lost consciousness entirely.

  20

  Gabe found pesos in his emergency backpack. He also found Canadian currency, stashed there just in case the family needed to move even farther north, and he found a small, sealed envelope marked DO NOT OPEN UNLESS SURROUNDED BY GHOST PIRATES. Dad liked ghost stories a
nd obsessed over emergency plans. Gabe searched for more envelopes that might prove useful in the event of genocidal alien invasion, but he didn’t find any.

  He dug out his set of spare clothes and gave them to Kaen. They set aside space suits and clothing woven out of space-grown corn silk, and they pulled on grubby and uncomfortable jean shorts and T-shirts instead.

  “Have you visited any actual planets before?” he asked Kaen with his back turned, only slightly nervous about changing clothes in her company.

  “Yes,” she said behind him.

  “What was that like?” he asked.

  “Strange,” she said. “Too big and too small at the same time. I kept looking up and feeling alone without a twin city overhead. But we didn’t stay long.”

  “Why not?”

  “Outlast.”

  She didn’t elaborate. She didn’t need to.

  Gabe tried not to remember the clenching pressure of pale Outlast tentacles. He decided to bring the cane sword with him. It didn’t look so very fancy while sheathed—just a walking stick with a metal tip.

  Gabe stuck the pesos and the address book in his pocket. “Do you have a translator portable enough to bring with us?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Kaen, and tapped her bracelet.

  “Good,” said Gabe. “Wait. Hang on. Why didn’t you use that when we first met at Zvezda? Why did you force us to rely on our own patched-together translator?”

  “I did use it,” Kaen admitted. “I set it to receive, and not to transmit. It only worked for me. I wanted to test the measure of your welcome.”

  “Ah,” Gabe said. “Smart.”

  “I thought so too.”

  They studied street views and bus routes projected onto the floor until Gabe felt like he had a solid sense of where they were and where they were going. Then Kaen spent some time reassuring the shuttle that they would be fine, and that they didn’t need a massive and mechanical jaguar prowling through the city streets along with them.