Far Horizons

by Robert Silverberg

  “We’re going to go in and see if we can help…and replenish fresh provisions at the same time, if that’s possible,” said Dem Lia, her tone friendly but final. “Saigyō, at out greatest deceleration figure consistent with not stressing the internal containment fields, how long will it take us to a rendezvous point about five thousand klicks from the forest ring?”

  “Thirty-seven hours,” said the AI.

  “Which gets us there seven days and a bit before that ugly machine,” said Oam Rai.

  “Hell,” said Dr. Sam, “that machine could be something the Ousters built to ferry themselves through the heliosphere shock fields to the red-giant system. A sort of ugly trolley.”

  “I don’t think so,” said young Den Soa, missing the older man’s irony.

  “Well, the Ousters have noticed us,” said Patek Georg, who was jacksensed into his system’s nexus. “Saigyō, bring up the windows again, please. Same magnification as before.”

  Suddenly the room was filled with starlight and sunlight and the reflected light from the braided orbital forest ring that looked like nothing so much as Jack and the Giant’s beanstalk, curving out of sight around the bright, white star. Only now something else had been added to the picture.

  “This is real time?” whispered Dem Lia.

  “Yes,” said Saigyō. “The Ousters have obviously been watching our fusion tail as we’ve entered the system. Now they’re coming out to greet us.”

  Thousands—tens of thousands—of fluttering bands of light had left the forest ring and were moving like brilliant fireflies or radiant gossamers away from the braid of huge leaves, bark, and atmosphere. The thousands of motes of light were headed out-system, toward the Helix.

  “Could you please amplify that image a bit more?” said Dem Lia.

  She had been speaking to Saigyō, but it was Kem Loi, who was already wired into the ship’s optic net, who acted.

  Butterflies of light. Wings a hundred, two hundred, five hundred kilometers across catching the solar wind and riding the magnetic-field lines pouring out of the small, bright star. But not just tens of thousands of winged angels or demons of light, hundreds of thousands. At the very minimum, hundreds of thousands.

  “Let’s hope they’re friendly,” said Patek Georg.

  “Let’s hope we can still communicate with them,” whispered young Den Soa. “I mean…they could have forced their own evolution any direction in the last fifteen hundred years.”

  Dem Lia set her hand softly on the table, but hard enough to be heard. “I suggest that we quit speculating and hoping for the moment and get ready for this rendezvous in…” She paused.

  “Twenty-seven hours eight minutes if the Ousters continue sailing out-system to meet us,” said Saigyō on cue.

  “Res Sandre,” Dem Lia said softly, “why don’t you and your propulsion AI begin work now on making sure that our last bit of deceleration is mild enough that it isn’t going to fry a few tens of thousands of these Ousters coming to greet us. That would be a bad overture to diplomatic contact.”

  “If they are coming out with hostile intent,” said Patek Georg, “the fusion drive would be one of our most potent weapons against…”

  Dem Lia interrupted. Her voice was soft but brooked no argument. “No discussion of war with this Ouster civilization until their motives become clear. Patek, you can review all ship defensive systems, but let us have no further group discussion of offensive action until you and I talk about it privately.”

  Patek Georg bowed his head.

  “Are there any other questions or comments?” asked Dem Lia. There were none.

  The nine people rose from the table and went about their business.

  A largely sleepless twenty-four-plus hours later, Dem Lia stood alone and god-sized in the white star’s system, the G8 blazing away only a few yards from her shoulder. The braided worldtree was so close that she could have reached out and touched it, wrapped her god-sized hand around it, while at the level of her chest the hundreds of thousands of shimmering wings of light converged on the Helix, whose deceleration fusion tail had dwindled to nothing. Dem Lia stood on nothing, her feet planted steadily on black space, the alien forest ring roughly at her belt line, the stars a huge sphere of constellations and foggy galactic scatterings far above, around, and beyond her.

  Suddenly Saigyō joined her. The tenth-century monk assumed his usual virreal pose: cross-legged, floating easily just above the plane of the ecliptic a few respectful yards from Dem Lia. He was shirtless and barefoot, and his round belly added to the sense of good feeling that emanated from the round face, squinted eyes, and ruddy cheeks.

  “The Ousters fly the solar winds so beautifully,” muttered Dem Lia.

  Saigyō nodded. “You notice, though, that they’re really surfing the shock waves riding out along the magnetic-field lines. That gives them those astounding bursts of speed.”

  “I’ve been told that, but not seen it,” said Dem Lia. “Could you…”

  Instantly the solar system in which they stood became a maze of magnetic-field lines pouring from the G8 white star, curving at first and then becoming as straight and evenly spaced as a barrage of laser lances. The display showed this elaborate pattern of magnetic-field lines in red. Blue lines showed the uncountable paths of cosmic rays flowing into the system from all over the galaxy, aligning themselves with the magnetic-field lines and trying to corkscrew their way up the field lines like swirling salmon fighting their way upstream to spawn in the belly of the star. Dem Lia noticed that magnetic-field lines pouring from both the north and south poles of the sun were kinked and folded around themselves, thus deflecting even more cosmic waves that should otherwise have had an easy trip up smooth polar-field lines. Dem Lia changed metaphors, thinking of sperm fighting their way toward a blazing egg, and being cast aside by vicious solar winds and surges of magnetic waves, blasted away by shock waves that whipped out along the field lines as if someone had forcefully shaken a wire or snapped a bullwhip.

  “It’s stormy,” said Dem Lia, seeing the flight path of so many of the Ousters now rolling and sliding and surging along these shock fronts of ions, magnetic fields, and cosmic rays, holding their positions with wings of glowing forcefield energy as the solar wind propagated first forward and then backward along the magnetic-field lines, and finally surfing the shock waves forward again as speedier bursts of solar winds crashed into more sluggish waves ahead of them, creating temporary tsunami that rolled out-system and then flowed backward like a heavy surf rolling back in toward the blazing beach of the G8 sun.

  The Ousters handled this confusion of geometries, red lines of magnetic-field lines, yellow lines of ions, blue lines of cosmic rays, and rolling spectra of crashing shock fronts with seeming ease. Dem Lia glanced once out to where the surging heliosphere of the red giant met the seething heliosphere of this bright G8 star and the storm of light and colors there reminded her of a multihued, phosphorescent ocean crashing against the cliffs of an equally colorful and powerful continent of broiling energy. A rough place.

  “Let’s return to the regular display,” said Dem Lia, and instantly the stars and forest ring and fluttering Ousters and slowing Helix were back—the last two items quite out of scale to show them clearly.

  “Saigyō,” said Dem Lia, “please invite all of the other AIs here now.”

  The smiling monk raised thin eyebrows. “All of them here at once?”

  “Yes.”

  They appeared soon, but not instantly, one figure solidifying into virtual presence a second or two before the next.

  First came Lady Murasaki, shorter even than the diminutive Dem Lia, the style of her three-thousand-year-old robe and kimono taking the acting commander’s breath away. What beauty Old Earth had taken for granted, thought Dem Lia. Lady Murasaki bowed politely and slid her small hands in the sleeves of her robe. Her face was painted almost white, her lips and eyes were heavily outlined, and her long, black hair was done up so elaborately that Dem Lia—who
had worn short hair most of her life—could not even imagine the work of pinning, clasping, combing, braiding, shaping and washing such a mass.

  Ikkyū stepped confidently across the empty space on the other side of the virtual Helix a second later. This AI had chosen the older persona of the long-dead Zen Poet: Ikkyū looked to be about seventy, taller than most Japanese, quite bald, with wrinkles of concern on his forehead and lines of laughter around his bright eyes. Before the flight had begun, Dem Lia had used the ship’s history banks to read about the fifteenth-century monk, poet, musician, and calligrapher: it seemed that when the historical, living Ikkyū had turned seventy, he had fallen in love with a blind singer just forty years his junior and scandalized the younger monks when he moved his love into the temple to live with him. Dem Lia liked Ikkyū.

  Basho appeared next. The great haiku expert chose to appear as a gangly seventeenth-century Japanese farmer, wearing the coned hat and clog shoes of his profession. His fingernails always had some soil under them.

  Ryōkan stepped gracefully into the circle. He was wearing beautiful robes of an astounding blue with gold trim. His hair was long and tied in a queue.

  “I’ve asked you all here at once because of the complicated nature of this rendezvous with the Ousters,” Dem Lia said firmly. “I understand from the log that one of you was opposed to translating down from Hawking space to respond to this distress call.”

  “I was,” said Basho, his speech in modern post-Pax English but his voice gravel-rough and as guttural as a Samurai’s grunt.

  “Why?” said Dem Lia.

  Basho made a gesture with his gangly hand. “The programming priorities to which we agreed did not cover this specific event. I felt it offered too great a potential for danger and too little benefit in our true goal of finding a colony world.”

  Dem Lia gestured toward the swarms of Ousters closing on the ship. They were only a few thousand kilometers away now. They had been broadcasting their peaceful intentions across the old radio bandwidths for more than a standard day. “Do you still feel that it’s too risky?” she asked the tall AI.

  “Yes,” said Basho.

  Dem Lia nodded, frowning slightly. It was always disturbing when the AIs disagreed on an important issue, but that was why the Aeneans had left them Autonomous after the breakup of the TechnoCore. And that was why there were five to vote.

  “The rest of you obviously saw the risk as acceptable?”

  Lady Murasaki answered in her low, demure voice, almost a whisper. “We saw it as an excellent possibility to restock new foodstuffs and water, while the cultural implications were more for you to ponder and act on than for us to decide. Of course, we had not detected the huge spacecraft in the system before we translated out of Hawking space. It might have affected our decision.”

  “This is a human-Ouster culture, almost certainly with a sizable Templar population, that may not have had contact with the outside human universe since the earliest Hegemony days, if then,” said Ikkyū with great enthusiasm. “They may well be the farthest-flung outpost of the ancient Hegira. Of all humankind. A wonderful learning opportunity.”

  Dem Lia nodded impatiently. “We close to rendezvous within a few hours. You’ve heard their radio contact—they say they wish to greet us and talk, and we’ve been polite in return. Our dialects are not so diverse that the translator beads can’t handle them in face-to-face conversations. But how can we know if they actually come in peace?”

  Ryōkan cleared his throat. “It should be remembered that for more than a thousand years, the so-called Wars with the Ousters were provoked—first by the Hegemony and then by the Pax. The original Ouster deep-space settlements were peaceful places and this most-distant colony would have experienced none of the conflict.”

  Saigyō chuckled from his comfortable perch on nothing. “It should also be remembered that during the actual Pax wars with the Ousters, to defend themselves, these peaceful, space-adapted humans learned to build and use torchships, modified Hawking drive warships, plasma weapons, and even some captured Pax Gideon drive weapons.” He waved his bare arm. “We’ve scanned every one of these advancing Ousters, and none carry a weapon—not so much as a wooden spear.”

  Dem Lia nodded. “Kem Loi has shown me astronomical evidence which suggests that their moored seedship was torn away from the ring at an early date—possibly only years or months after they arrived. This system is devoid of asteroids, and the Oort cloud has been scattered far beyond their reach. It is conceivable that they have neither metal nor an industrial capacity.”

  “Ma’am,” said Basho, his countenance concerned, “how can we know that? Ousters have modified their bodies sufficiently to generate forcefield wings that can extend for hundreds of kilometers. If they approach the ship closely enough, they could theoretically use the combined plasma effect of those wings to attempt to breach the containment fields and attack the ship.”

  “Beaten to death by angels’ wings,” Dem Lia mused softly. “An ironic way to die.”

  The AIs said nothing.

  “Who is working most directly with Patek Georg Dem Mio on defense strategies?” Dem Lia asked into the silence.

  “I am,” said Ryōkan.

  Dem Lia had known that, but she still thought, Thank God it’s not Basho. Patek Georg was paranoid enough for the AI-human interface team on this specialty.

  “What are Patek’s recommendations going to be when we humans meet in a few minutes?” Dem Lia bluntly demanded from Ryōkan.

  The AI hesitated only the slightest of perceptible instants. AIs understood both discretion and loyalty to the human working with them in their specialty, but they also understood the imperatives of the elected commander’s role on the ship.

  “Patek Georg is going to recommend a hundred-kilometer extension of the class-twenty external containment field,” said Ryōkan softly. “With all energy weapons on standby and pre-targeted on the three hundred nine thousand, two hundred and five approaching Ousters.”

  Dem Lia’s eyebrows rose a trifle. “And how long would it take our systems to lance more than three hundred thousand such targets?” she asked softly.

  “Two-point-six seconds,” said Ryōkan.

  Dem Lia shook her head. “Ryōkan, please tell Patek Georg that you and I have spoken and that I want the containment field not at a hundred-klick distance, but maintained at a steady one kilometer from the ship. It may remain a class-twenty field—the Ousters can actually see the strength of it, and that’s good. But the ship’s weapons systems will not target the Ousters at this time. Presumably, they can see our targeting scans as well. Ryōkan, you and Patek Georg can run as many simulations of the combat encounter as you need to feel secure, but divert no power to the energy weapons and allow no targeting until I give the command.”

  Ryōkan bowed. Basho shuffled his virtual clogs but said nothing.

  Lady Murasaki fluttered a fan half in front of her face. “You trust,” she said softly.

  Dem Lia did not smile. “Not totally. Never totally. Ryōkan, I want you and Patek Georg to work out the containment-field system so that if even one Ouster attempts to breach the containment field with focused plasma from his or her solar wings, the containment field should go to emergency class thirty-five and instantly expand to five hundred klicks.”

  Ryōkan nodded. Ikkyū smiled slightly and said, “That will be one very quick ride for a great mass of Ousters, Ma’am. Their personal energy systems might not be up to containing their own life support under that much of a shock, and it’s certain that they wouldn’t decelerate for half an AU or more.”

  Dem Lia nodded. “That’s their problem. I don’t think it will come to that. Thank you all for talking to me.”

  All six human figures winked out of existence.

  Rendezvous was peaceful and efficient.

  The first question the Ousters had radioed the Helix twenty hours earlier was, “Are you Pax?”

  This had startled Dem Lia and the others at firs
t. Their assumption was that these people had been out of touch with human space since long before the rise of the Pax. Then the ebony, Jon Mikail Dem Alem, said, “The Shared Moment. It has to have been the Shared Moment.”

  The nine looked at each other in silence at this. Everyone understood that Aenea’s “Shared Moment” during her torture and murder by the Pax and TechnoCore had been shared by every human being in human space—a gestalt resonance along the Void Which Binds that had transmitted the dying young woman’s thoughts and memories and knowledge along those threads in the quantum fabric of the universe which existed to resonate empathy, briefly uniting everyone originating from Old Earth human stock. But out here? So many thousands of light-years away?

  Dem Lia suddenly realized how silly that thought was. Aenea’s Shared Moment of almost five centuries ago must have propagated everywhere in the universe along the quantum fabric of the Void Which Binds, touching alien races and cultures so distant as to be unreachable by any technology of human travel or communication while adding the first self-aware human voice to the empathic conversation that had been going on between sentient and sensitive species for almost twelve billion years. Most of those species had long since become extinct or evolved beyond their original form, the Aeneans had told Dem Lia, but their empathic memories still resonated in the Void Which Binds.

  Of course the Ousters had experienced the Shared Moment five hundred years ago.

  “No, we are not Pax,” the Helix had radioed back to the three-hundred-some thousand approaching Ousters. “The Pax was essentially destroyed four hundred standard years ago.”