But like Peter, she didn’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions. The system was empty, though. There wasn’t any wreckage that didn’t come from ruined planets and shattered asteroids.
They waited for the fovea to reappear, but nothing disturbed the violent beauty of the expanding clouds of gas that had once been the system’s primary. They waited for Thor, but she didn’t come, either.
“Maybe they kept going,” Alander said. “Maybe the fovea pushed us out of the way while they danced on, system by system.” A slight pause before: “And maybe we’ve just been wasting our time here all along.”
Lucia’s stomach sank at that notion. Time was so precious right now, and the idea of having wasted any was depressing. “So where do you want to go, then?”
He didn’t even hesitate.
“To Sol,” he said. “I want to go home, to see if there’s anything left.”
3.0.0
UEH/ELLIL
Ueh/Ellil stepped out of the hole ship and onto the surface of the unnamed planet. Dense air whipped around him, catching his body off balance. He slipped to one knee and put a hand into the dirt to steady himself.
Yu-qiang was beside him in an instant, helping him up.
“This is so not a good idea, Ueh.” Weak sunlight painted her skin a deeper green than normal. She looked decidedly unwell. It matched the unease she had expressed throughout the short journey down to the planet.
“I shall be fine,” he assured her.
“Well—just so you know—if you die I’m not carrying you back.”
He shifted his faceplates in acknowledgement of what she’d said but realized immediately that she wouldn’t have understood the facial gesture. He was too preoccupied with the sense of joy that was thrilling through his body to say anything. Something wonderful was about to happen.
The soil was rough and stony beneath his feet—but it was soil. He rubbed his fingers together, enjoying the graininess of it. He was standing on a real planet for the first time in many, many long cycles. The higher gravity dragged him down; the weather was completely unnerving; the light lacked the controlled qualities of Mantissa A’s artificial sources. And yet here he felt complete—or nearly so, anyway.
Atonement stirred within him. He could feel its tendrils writhing under his skin, yearning for something he could no longer give. It had outgrown him and longed for its next phase of growth.
It would be a difficult birth, he knew. But he didn’t mind. Strangely, he held no fear whatsoever.
“Well?” said Yu-qiang. “Now what?”
“Now I think I understand,” he said. The yearning of Atonement filled him like light, granting him insight into things he never thought to question. “I understand what Goel means.”
“Don’t go all mystical on me, Ueh. This isn’t the time for epiphanies.”
He laughed. For the first time in cycles, he felt truly alive. “My name is no longer Ueh,” he said. “I am changing again. I am escaping.”
“You’re making me nervous is what you’re doing,” she said.
He could sense her fear and concern as clearly as he could feel the thing inside him straining for release.
“The Ambivalence is gone,” he said.
Yu-qiang stared at him for the longest time, mystified and intrigued simultaneously. He could see the flicker of hope behind her expression. “You can’t possibly know that.”
“The Praxis knows it. He knows things we cannot. He sensed its passing from this universe.”
“So we’re saved?” She hesitated again, clearly wanting to embrace this news with delight but reluctant to do so until she understood everything. A brief scan of the turbulent sky seemed to galvanize the doubts she still held. “We won’t have to keep running?”
“You can go home now, Caryl/Hatzis. Just as you wished.”
“As can you.”
“That is something the Yuhl/Goel cannot do.”
“I know it’s a long way, but you have navigation records. I’m sure you could find it again.”
“You misunderstand,” he said. “We never had a home.”
She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“Goel means made,” he said. The simple truth, the realization, warmed his insides, lit up areas of his mind that had until then been dark.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Yu-qiang said.
“The Praxis made us,” he explained. “We served him, attended him, kept him company. We gave him a reason to keep running. Perhaps we were modeled on a species he encountered in the past—maybe even more than one. Whatever the origins of our forms, we were given false memories, myths that gave us a sense of who we are but did not hold us back or undermine our true purpose. We were the perfect companions.” His understanding grew the more he thought about it, but it came only with feelings of compassion, not anger. “The Praxis lied to us for all these years.”
“You don’t seem too upset about it,” she said. “He used you—and he would have used us, too!”
“How long would you engrams have lasted without his help? He may have used you, but it would have been for your own benefit. Only by being remade by the Praxis, as were we, would you have been able to survive in a universe containing the Ambivalence.”
Yu-qiang didn’t look convinced. “That still doesn’t give him the right to—”
But he wasn’t interested in her objections. Something more important was about to happen—something that would justify the Praxis’s lies.
“I understand now,” he interrupted her. “I know what has to be done.”
He opened his arms to embrace the wind and ordered his I-suit to open.
Ueh gasped as bitter cold struck his chest and shoulders. Primordial winds tore at his skin, making every nerve scream. The widening seams of the suit slid slowly down to his waist and around his back, then spread along his limbs and up his back.
“What the hell are you doing!”
He ignored her protests. The exposure to alien air sent a completely new sensation thrilling through him. He felt as though every cell in his body had woken. He halted the I-suit’s progress at his neck, wanting to savor every last sensation he was experiencing. He opened his wings’ sheaths to their full extent, as though he was gliding in the wind.
Yu-qiang tried to grab him, presumably to drag him back into the hole ship cockpit, but she stopped short when a flurry of mist rose up between them, accompanied by a strange and alien hissing sound. It took him a moment to realize that it was coming from himself. His skin was decrepitating; every exposed cell was popping open, releasing genetic material to the wind.
“I am Atonement!” he shouted over the rising noise.
“Don’t do this, Ueh!” she shouted back. “You’re going to die!”
But the thought didn’t bother him. He embraced it, knowing that his death would bring life to a barren world—life based on his life, on his genetic material. Atonement had made him a catalyst, the seed crystal for an entirely new biosphere. A home.
What was death in the face of such transformation? Who wouldn’t give up their life to give his people what they had lacked, without knowing it, all their existence?
With a feeling of the most profound accomplishment, he ordered his I-suit completely open and gave himself up to his fate.
“Ueh!” was the last thing he heard as Yu-qiang made one last, desperate plea to him.
But the word was meaningless to him now. The name no longer belonged to him. And as the winds carried his substance across the face of the planet, part of him wondered if it ever had.
3.0
EPILOGUE
2160.10.7 Standard Mission Time
(12 September 2163 UT)
It had been three whole days since the Starfish had last been seen by anyone—three days of almost unnatural calm and unspoken apprehensions. Sol understood those apprehensions well, and as she faced her third sunset on the ancient regolith of Luna, she couldn’t help but wonder if
humanity would ever stop holding its breath in anticipation of death striking once again from the skies.
“You okay, Sol?”
She glanced over to where the barely visible shimmer that was Lucia Benck’s new body stood. If she looked above the north horizon she would have seen the golden gleam of the orphaned spindle from which Lucia was conducting her part of the conversation.
Sol nodded, smiling. “I was thinking of that carbon disk Peter found in 53 Aquarius,” she half-lied. “The one that you—that one of your engrams—left behind. Do you know what it said?”
“I had a list of quotes,” said the former scout pilot. “Was it Noël Coward? ‘Why, oh why do the wrong people travel, when the right ones stay at home?’ “
Sol laughed at this, and realized as it lasted just how good it felt. “Actually, I think it was Wordsworth.”
“Ah, yes,” said Lucia, taking another step forward, glancing in the direction of the sun. “ ‘Bliss was it, in that dawn to be alive.’ “
“That’s the one.”
“Why were you thinking of that?”
Sol shrugged, sobering. “I guess because this doesn’t feel much like bliss to me.”
“But we are alive, Sol, and that’s what matters. As long as we stay that way, there’s a chance things could get better; then we can find the bliss.”
“He still wears the disk around his neck, you know.”
Lucia didn’t respond immediately, and when she did, her tone was defensive. “We’ll figure out how to change. We have to.”
“Not all people want to change.”
“Then maybe we should just figure out how to be people again.”
“You make it sound like that’s a good thing.”
Her bitterness surprised even herself. After all, she was still alive, like Lucia said. Surely she should be grateful for that? She should be grateful for every day she got to see a new dawn.
Sol shook her head, smiling wryly to herself. That was crap, and well she knew it. She tilted her head to look up at the sky, where the stars would have been had not the glare of the sun swamped them—and where Earth might have been had it not been destroyed ninety-eight years ago. Human nature being what it was, survival alone wasn’t enough. There were precious few people left with which to rebuild, and none of them were more than passably human; Lucia, Alander, and herself were extreme examples.
Since the destruction of Sagarsee and the last of the gifts three days earlier, she had remained on Luna, here in Sol System, waiting for humanity’s end—waiting for the Starfish to come and trample the remaining survivors underfoot. But they had never come, and this had left her feeling profoundly exhausted. She was tired of the apparently endless ebb and flow of change. She wanted to settle down and grow old as humans were supposed to, to quietly die on some porch while sitting in a rocking chair and watching her grandchildren playing around her feet.
She almost laughed again. The image was a ludicrous one.
She’d never been interested in children, let alone grandchildren! And with Peter, the closest thing to a lover she had had for over a century? The thought was absurd. The circumstances that had brought them together were passing; both the whim and the need were gone. And the sports they might produce didn’t bear contemplation.
No, her engrams had been the closest she’d come to offspring, and they had been imperfect and resentful, just like her.
The truth was, she didn’t know what she wanted. But she knew what she didn’t want, and what she didn’t want was to be sitting around waiting for death to come and take her.
“I called you here to ask you a favor, Lucia,” she said.
Lucia’s I-body moved closer, kicking up moondust that slid unimpeded off her invisible legs and fell with unnatural rapidity back to the regolith.
“I’ve already agreed to act as a shuttle for people between Ellil and here, if that’s what you want,” said Lucia. “The Unfit asked me to do that yesterday.”
“And I’ll put you onto that as soon as Yu-qiang arrives. Once I see through her eyes what happened there, we’ll know better what to do.”
Sol still didn’t quite believe the testimony of those that had followed the Praxis in the wake of the Starfish. A new world flowering from the nanotech dust of Ueh’s body; the Praxis gone, vanishing with a significant chunk of Mantissa A to destinations unknown; no sign of the Starfish anywhere, for hundreds of light-years ahead or to either side...? It seemed almost incomprehensible.
“But that wasn’t what I was going to ask,” said Sol. “This is more of a personal favor.”
Lucia’s ghostly image inclined her head slightly, as if curious. “What kind of favor?”
“It’s going to take a while to work out exactly who’s going to live where, and how. I’m intending to stay right here, but that doesn’t mean everyone else has to.” Sol imagined a similar transformation of the lunar surface as was occurring on Ellil, the new Yuhl home world. Set free from Earth and nudged by the Ais of the Spike, Earth’s old moon rotated once every ten hours and followed a stable, life-supporting orbit around Sol. Enough raw material—in the form of shattered molecule chains and radioactive ions—had fallen from the destruction of the Shell to make nanofacturing a habitable biosphere a relatively easy task. It wouldn’t be Earth when she finished, but it would be somewhere to call home. With the exception of Venus, another victim of the Spike, the starscape was reassuringly familiar. Her ancient genes responded to its call.
Sol told Lucia, “I want you and Peter to find the others.”
“What others?”
“The missions that didn’t arrive at their target systems. The ones who drifted off course, whose acceleration or deceleration phases were mistimed, or who ran into any one of a dozen different types of trouble. Some will have been destroyed, and some won’t be what they’re supposed to be—if Axford is to be believed—but not all of them will be out of commission. Some might be waiting for rescue. They’re needles in a very large haystack, I know, but I’m sure the spindle will make it easier for you to search that haystack. And it’s worth it. We need everyone we can get, Lucia.”
Lucia didn’t respond immediately, but Sol could tell that she was taken by the idea.
“You can get started as soon as things settle down,” Sol said into the silence.
“There are more of me out there,” Lucia said finally. “As well as more Peters.”
Sol nodded. “And you’ll get to explore, too.”
“What if I come across Axford?”
“Ignore him,” she said. “Don’t listen to anything he has to say and get the hell away from him as quickly as possible.”
“Okay. Why not? It might be fun. And who knows: we might even find Thor in the process.”
Sol didn’t feel the same enthusiasm with which Lucia clearly viewed the possibility. She’d heard all about her hybridized engram’s dance with the fovea and its climax in HD92719. Thor hadn’t been seen since, and neither had the Starfish or any of their attendant species. She hoped her attempted, futile, final stand in Sol System hadn’t driven Thor to do something equally self-destructive. As if diving into the Source of All hadn’t been enough.
If it was true that Thor had tried to sacrifice herself again, the fact that it appeared to have worked made Sol’s vague feelings of guilt even worse. Had the memories she’d given the engram contributed to her demise? Was she in some way responsible?
“If you do find her,” said Sol, “then tell her she’s welcome back here any time. Tell her—” She paused for a moment, thinking of the last time she had seen Thor back in the cutter. “Tell her I’m tired of being in charge.”
“Do you really mean that?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling faintly at her own routines, and the traps from which even she couldn’t quite escape. “Sometimes I do.”
“Bliss was it...”
Even as she smiled, the quote haunted her. Lucia’s disks, like the Yuhl death markers, were totems that were never truly i
ntended to be seen. They were gestures flung defiantly out to the stars, as if daring the universe to ignore them. That they would be ignored was indisputable. The universe as a whole didn’t care if the disks or totems—or engrams or humans—faded to dust and were forgotten forever.
Still, she was determined to fight the natural progression. She would write her will large across the stars by any means possible. And if she failed in the attempt, then so be it. But having come so close to pointless immolation, she vowed to do her best to avoid it happening again. Whatever life brought her, it had to be better than the alternative.
* * *
“So we still don’t know, then?” Alander looked away from Rob Singh’s virtual representation. His ability to participate in conSense events was improving, but it still unnerved him. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
Singh cleared his throat. A slim, tall man with dark hair graying at the temples, he looked more like a high school teacher than an astronaut pilot.
“That’s it in a nutshell,” he said. “At least I can tell you the difference between what we don’t know for certain, and what we only think we don’t know.”
“I can do that for myself.” Alander raised a hand and began ticking off points on his fingers. “We don’t know where the Starfish and the Spinners came from.”
“No,” said Singh. “But—”
“We don’t know where they went.”
“Again, no; however—”
“We don’t know if they’ll come back.”
“If you’ll just let me—”
“And we don’t even know why they came here in the first place, right?”
“Ah, now that I think we do know.” The enthusiasm in Singh’s tone was short-lived, however. “Well, actually, we don’t think they had a reason at all. I think we just happened to be in their path.”
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