The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency)

by John Scalzi

  “How do people live like that”—Seve pointed at the monitor—“for eight hundred goddamned years?”

  “They probably didn’t live like that for eight hundred years,” said Gennety Hanton. “We have evidence there were people on Dalasýsla thirty years ago. If we had time to examine the other habitats in the local space, we’d probably find some of them were inhabited or at least visited recently. Well, relatively recently.”

  “So you’re saying that people have been living like that for thirty years at least,” Seve said.

  “Looks like,” Hanton said.

  “Okay, how the hell do you live like that for thirty years?”

  “Got me.”

  “They live like that because they don’t have any other choice,” Roynold said, testily. “Obviously. Our job is to find out why. And how.”

  “So are we going over there?” Hanton asked Marce.

  Marce turned to Gitsen, the biologist. “Are we?”

  “Whoever they are, they’ve been isolated here in Dalasýsla for most of a millennium,” he said. “The number of people they’ve lived among all their life can’t number more than a few hundred at best. That’s not a lot.”

  “You’re worried that if we breathe on them, they’ll die of our diseases,” Roynold said.

  “Or the other way around,” Gitsen said. “We have no idea how the bacteria and viruses in their very limited environment have mutated and evolved. We aren’t going to just walk up to them and give them a hug. That might be mutually assured destruction.”

  “So that’s a vote for no,” Marce said.

  Gitsen shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I think we have to go over there. Whoever these people are, they represent a miracle of science. Somehow they managed to survive eight hundred years after the collapse of their civilization. We need to talk to them. But we have to be careful.”

  “Back into the suits,” Hanton said.

  “You don’t have to go,” Seve said, to Hanton. “There are no computer systems that need to be hacked.”

  “That you know of,” Hanton replied.

  Roynold looked over to Marce. “Who does need to go?” she asked.

  “Seve and Gitsen, definitely,” Marce said. “I think we might want to ask Merta Ells.” She was the ship’s doctor on the Bransid. “And I know that Captain Laure is going to want at least a few marines. And you can go too, Hat.”

  “What makes you think I want to go?” Roynold asked.

  “I went on the last mission,” Marce said.

  “That’s the one I should have been on,” Roynold said. “You know I don’t like people much.”

  “Sorry,” Marce said.

  “It’s fine,” Roynold said, then turned her attention back to the ship. “But how are you going to do it? You just going to go to the front door and knock?”

  “Hey,” Hanton said, pointing to the screen. “Do you see that?”

  “See what?” Marce asked.

  “One of the lights on the ring started blinking.”

  Marce looked at the ship and could barely make out the light in question. “Can you zoom in on that at all?”

  “On it,” Hanton said.

  “It’s not random or regular,” Seve said after a minute. “You got long blinks and short blinks going on. It’s code.”

  Hanton looked at it for a moment, then pulled out his tablet and opened up a search function. “I know what this is,” he said. “The Imperial Navy has a code system for ships in distress that it can use if their communications are otherwise down.”

  “Using ship lights?” Roynold said, incredulously. “Given the average distance between ships, that’s optimistic.”

  “I didn’t say it made sense,” Hanton said, annoyed. “I just said we had it. And anyway it’s not meant just for spaceships. You can use it for land and sea vessels.”

  “And this messaging system has been the same for eight hundred years,” Marce said.

  “Of course not,” Hanton said. He flipped the tablet around to show Marce. “But as part of the mission informational database I have the key for the code from eight hundred years ago.”

  “Well played,” Marce said.

  “It was just part of a larger download on ships generally, but I’ll go ahead and take the credit,” Hanton said. “Now give me a minute so I can pay attention to this.”

  “There are three individual messages,” he said, a couple of minutes later. “The first is ‘communications inoperable.’”

  “We knew that,” Roynold said.

  Hanton held up his hand. “The second is ‘systems critical.’”

  “What’s the third?” Marce asked.

  “‘Help.’”

  * * *

  The Dalasýslans were simultaneously short and elongated, a result, Marce imagined, of poor nutrition and low gravity. Marce could see Dr. Ells next to him clearly wishing she could get one into her medical bay for examination. He couldn’t blame her; in her position, he would probably want to do the same thing.

  For the moment, however, what Marce really wanted to do was understand them.

  Captain Laure had balked at Marce’s request to be sent over without security, and didn’t want to risk a full crew of scientists. In the end Marce, Ells, Seve and PFC Lyton put on their suits, took a shuttle and waited by an airlock while one of the Dalasýslans manually cranked it open for them. The Dalasýslan was wearing an ill-fitting suit that looked ancient and patched, because it was both of these things.

  When the four of them were in, the Dalasýslan cranked the airlock shut again and waited as air flooded back in. Then it cranked the inner door open, shed its suit and left it by the airlock. The Dalasýslan was mostly naked, of indeterminate sex, and appeared to wait for the crew from the Bransid to shuck their suits as well. When they did not, the Dalasýslan did what looked like a suit yourself shrug, kicked off in the microgravity and waved the four of them along to follow. They did, clomping along with their magnetized feet on the deck.

  The interior of the ship was falling apart, or it looked great for an at least eight-hundred-year-old ship, take your pick. Marce noted how every part of it was cobbled together and jury-rigged. It was a Frankenstein monster of a ship, clearly refurbished with bits and pieces of other ships and habitats. The citizens of the ship were scavengers, as well they would have to be to survive as long as they had.

  The crew from the Bransid were taken to what appeared to be a mess hall, or would have been a mess hall if the ship had been anything approaching a normal ship. Inside were several dozen other Dalasýslans, each looking not dissimilar from the one that had led them in.

  They were human, but of a sort of human that Marce had never seen before. They were creatures of space and of spaceships in a way that no other member of the Interdependency was. Billions of Interdependency citizens lived in space, of course. But they lived in habitats with full gravity and full atmosphere and all the essentials and most of the luxuries. They lived in space. They weren’t of space, like these Dalasýslans now were.

  This is what our future is, Marce thought, and hoped the involuntary shudder that went across his body was not visible outside of his suit.

  The Dalasýslan who had escorted them into the room maneuvered over to a group of its compatriots, and another unfurled, oriented itself to Marce’s team, and began to speak. Marce couldn’t understand a single thing it was saying.

  “Jill?” Marce said, to his linguist, after the Dalasýslan had stopped speaking.

  “It’s Interdependency Standard,” Seve said. “Or was. There’s some sort of vowel shift going on.”

  “Can you understand it?”

  “Sort of.” Seve stepped forward to the standing Dalasýslan, and pointed to herself. “Human.” She pointed to Marce. “Human.” She did the same with Ells and Seve.

  The Dalasýslan caught on easily enough and said a word that might have been “human” if someone had recorded the word, run it backward through a recording device, said that r
esulting word, reversed that, said that and then repeated the process a couple dozen times. Seve did the word game several more times with different objects in the room, getting the Dalasýslan version of it. Then she said something to the Dalasýslan in something that sounded, to Marce’s ears, like nothing resembling language.

  The Dalasýslan nodded and waited.

  “Wait, what did you just say?” Marce asked.

  “I think I said, ‘Speak slow, your words are hard for us,’” Seve said. “I guess we’ll find out.”

  The Dalasýslan started again, much more slowly, and this time Marce could almost make out things that sounded like they might have been words he might have known.

  “This is Chuch and he—I think ‘he’ is right—is their captain, and this is what remains of Dalasýsla,” Seve said, then nodded at Chuch to continue. “He says that this ship has been the home of what remains of Dalasýsla for the last hundred years.” More talking. “There used to be more, but other ships and habitats failed over time. He says that they have survived by moving the ship from habitat to habitat and from ship to ship and scavenging what they need.” Another burst. “But now they are no longer able to do that.”

  “Why not?”

  More listening. “I think their propulsion systems are screwed,” Seve said. “They have enough power to propel the ship, but they don’t have the ability to maneuver it.” Another pause. “They have power to run some ship systems, but they can’t get to any of the habitats they scavenge to repair the ship anymore. It’s falling apart around them, and eventually, it’ll fail entirely.”

  “How long?”

  Seve asked, and Chuch looked at another Dalasýslan, who answered. “It’s been eighteen months since the propulsion system failed,” Seve said. “This person is the chief engineer, and he estimates another year to two before too many critical systems fail.”

  “They have a chief engineer?” Lyton said.

  “They’ve kept this ship running this long,” Marce said. “Of course they have a chief engineer. Don’t assume these people are stupid, Lyton.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  Chuch asked Seve something, and Seve responded. “He just asked me what was said.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Yes.” Chuch said something and Seve listened. “He agrees they are not stupid, just desperate. He asks for our help.”

  “What kind of help?” Marce asked.

  “Help with the propulsion systems, for a start. Other technical assistance. Food—sorry, not food, food stock. Things they can grow. Medical supplies. Information. New technology.”

  Chuch looked at Marce and said a word. Marce looked over to Seve. “Did he just say ‘everything’?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Well, I can’t blame him for that,” Marce said. He was quiet for a moment.

  “What is it?” Seve asked.

  “They don’t seem surprised to see us,” Marce said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Marce motioned around the room, to the Dalasýslans assembled there. “They’ve lived on this ship for a hundred years at least. Before that they were eking out an existence on one of the habitats. The Flow stream to here collapsed eight hundred years ago. How would you react if after hundreds of years of isolation you were suddenly discovered?”

  “I really don’t know,” Seve said.

  “I’d probably shit myself,” Lyton said. Seve looked at her oddly.

  “You think they should be treating us like gods or something?” asked Dr. Ells.

  “No,” Marce said. “But I don’t think this is the way I’d be reacting, either.” He turned to Seve. “Ask him.”

  “Ask him what?”

  “Ask him why he doesn’t seem surprised to see us.”

  Seve asked, and blinked at the answer.

  “What did he say?” Marce asked.

  “He said he wasn’t surprised to see us because the last ship to come always said that more would come back.”

  “What?” Marce said.

  Chuch spoke again. “He says the last ship arrived three hundred years ago, and its crew stayed here. He says that every one of his crew, including him, has some of their blood. And he says that their captain always said more would come, eventually. So they weren’t surprised when we came. We were expected. They were waiting for us. And we chose a good time to arrive, so thanks for that.”

  Chapter

  15

  Archbishop Gunda Korbijn was thinking about art again.

  Specifically, she was thinking of the statue Rachela at the Assembly, by Admirable Pritof (“Admirable” was not Pritof’s actual first name, but sometime after his death a particularly canny art dealer with an overabundance of his sculpture did a very good job of PR). The sculpture was itself based off a painting of the same name by Hippolyta Moulton, which hung in the Imperial Art Institute, not too far from Xi’an Cathedral.

  In the painting Rachela is expounding to an assembly of political and corporate luminaries who will be so moved by her words that they will immediately put aside all their petty differences and form the Interdependency. Moulton imagined the moment with Rachela pretty, her face serene and her expressions iconically blank; apparently the politicians and the businessmen were so amazed at her words that they didn’t mind they were coming from a mannequin.

  Pritof’s sculpture had another take on the moment. The sculptor had kept Rachela’s pose exactly the same as in Moulton’s painting, but the expression on her face was wildly different. Instead of serenity and blankness was canniness, and awareness, and, some would argue—exhaustively, in art and academic journals for centuries—sardonicism. Moulton’s Rachela was a religious icon; Pritof’s Rachela was a woman with an agenda.

  Of the two Moulton’s was the more famous representation, which was why it was in the IAI whilst Pritof’s sculpture existed in relative exile at the Interdependent Church’s cathedral in Šumadija, Pritof’s home habitat. But Korbijn didn’t care for it. Archbishop and effective head of the church though she was, blank-faced iconography gave Korbijn the willies. It depersonalized Rachela and made her less human, and more inevitable. And while it suited the Interdependent Church to give itself an air of inevitability—it suited nearly all churches to do that—Korbijn, who by profession and inclination was a student of its history, knew that there was nothing inevitable about it at all.

  The famous assembly both works of art memorialized, for example: The politicians and captains of industry had not stared, stunned into amazement, at Rachela. They had laughed and jeered at her foolishness. Certainly they had not walked out of the room and lined up to create the Interdependency. It took years and countless backroom deals for that, with details a great deal more profane than exalted. Moulton’s painting was after-the-fact propaganda, commissioned by one of Korbijn’s long-dead predecessors as archbishop of Xi’an. The real story of the assembly was not stricken from the historical record, of course, but people liked Moulton’s version better. To the extent that anyone thought of Rachela at the Assembly at all, the vast majority of them pictured it like Moulton had.

  And this is why Korbijn liked the sculpture better. She suspected Rachela’s actual expression during the assembly was far closer to what Pritof had depicted than what Moulton had. Not for the first time, Korbijn wished that Rachela had actually been something more divine than human, because at least then she could summon her and ask her what the hell she was actually thinking when she chose to speak to those politicians and businesspeople—what her “prophecies” really were and to what extent they should have ever guided the church that Korbijn had now given close to forty years of her life to.

  Barring that she wished that she could be the emperox for a day. It was an open secret that the emperoxs were all embedded with a technology denied to every other subject of the Interdependency, one that recorded their every thought and then on death reconstituted them to advise their successor. There was a room in the imperial palace dedicate
d to it. Korbijn didn’t know if this recording scheme went all the way back to Rachela, but if it did, Korbijn would have some pointed questions for her digital ghost.

  If Rachela’s memory is in there, then surely Grayland has asked her the same questions I would, Korbijn thought.

  And that was why Korbijn was thinking of Pritof’s sculpture in the first place. Because like Rachela, Grayland II was going to address an assembly.

  Nominally she was going to be addressing the Parliament of the Interdependency, a body that she as emperox was officially a member of as the simple and sole representative of the Xi’an habitat, although by tradition the emperox neither attended nor voted.

  But the audience would not be merely the parliament. The gallery of the parliament had become the hottest ticket in Xi’an, with members of the great houses of the Interdependency fighting each other for seats. Korbijn would not have to fight for a seat—she had been invited to offer a formal benediction prior to the emperox speaking, and she had accepted—but other bishops and officers of the church were in the same seating scrum as the great houses. At the end of the day all the major powers of the Interdependency—political, commercial and ecclesiastical—would be there.

  Whenever it would be, Korbijn amended in her head. It was common knowledge that the emperox would make an address, but she hadn’t quite set a date; all that came from her press minister was “imminently.” Grayland was waiting for something, although what that something could be was a matter of intense speculation.

  Unlike Rachela, when Grayland II addressed her assembly, she would already be emperox, and nominally at least the most powerful person in the known universe. Korbijn was not entirely sure this was the advantage it might seem to be. Rachela might have been seen as a charismatic crank when she addressed her skeptics. Grayland was seen as a danger. Korbijn was well aware of the rumors that Grayland intended to use the address as an announcement of martial law, under the rationale that the closing of the Flow streams would require a higher level of order. Then under writ of martial law, Grayland would go about dispatching her enemies, just as she had done with Nadashe Nohamapetan.