Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  When she asked Tassef for the means to build a high-powered gamma-ray transmitter to aim into the bulge, it interrogated her for an hour, then replied that the matter would require a prolonged and extensive consultation. It was, she realized, no use protesting that compared to hosting a billion guests for a couple of centuries, the cost of this was nothing. The sticking point was not the energy use, or any other equally microscopic consequence for the comfort and amenity of the Tassef locals. The issue was whether her proposed actions might be seen as unwelcome and offensive by the Aloof, and whether that affront might in turn provoke some kind of retribution.

  Countless probes and spores had been gently and patiently returned from the bulge unharmed, but they’d come blundering in at less than lightspeed. A flash of gamma rays could not be intercepted and returned before it struck its chosen target. Though it seemed to Leila that it would be a trivial matter for the network to choose to reject the data, it was not unreasonable to suppose that the Aloof’s sensibilities might differ on this point from her own.

  Jasim had left Shalouf for a city on the other side of the planet. Leila’s feelings about this were mixed; it was always painful when they separated, but the reminder that they were not irrevocably welded together also brought an undeniable sense of space and freedom. She loved him beyond measure, but that was not the final word on every question. She was not certain that she would not relent in the end, and die quietly beside him when the news came through from Massa; there were moments when it seemed utterly perverse, masochistic, and self-aggrandising to flee from that calm, dignified end for the sake of trying to cap their modest revolution with a new and spectacularly dangerous folly. Nor, though, was she certain that Jasim would not change his own mind, and take her hand while they plunged off this cliff together.

  When the months dragged on with no decision on her request, no news from Massa, and no overtures from her husband, Leila became an orator, traveling from city to city promoting her scheme to blaze a trail through the heart of the bulge. Her words and image were conveyed into virtual fora, but her physical presence was a way to draw attention to her cause, and Listening Party pilgrims and Tassefi alike packed the meeting places when she came. She mastered the locals’ language and style, but left it inflected with some suitably alien mannerisms. The fact that a rumor had arisen that she was one of the First Eavesdroppers did no harm to her attendance figures.

  When she reached the city of Jasim’s self-imposed exile, she searched the audience for him in vain. As she walked out into the night a sense of panic gripped her. She felt no fear for herself, but the thought of him dying here alone was unbearable.

  She sat in the street, weeping. How had it come to this? They had been prepared for a glorious failure, prepared to be broken by the Aloof’s unyielding silence, and instead the fruits of their labor had swept through the disk, reinvigorating a thousand cultures. How could the taste of success be so bitter?

  Leila imagined calling out to Jasim, finding him, holding him again, repairing their wounds.

  A splinter of steel remained inside her, though. She looked up into the blazing sky. The Aloof were there, waiting, daring her to stand before them. To come this far, then step back from the edge for the comfort of a familiar embrace, would diminish her. She would not retreat.

  The news arrived from Massa: forty thousand years before, the spillage from the far side of the bulge had been caught in time. Vast swathes of the data matched the observations that Tassef had been holding in anticipation of this moment, for the last fifteen thousand years.

  There was more: reports of other correlations from other observatories followed within minutes. As the message from Massa had been relayed around the inner disk, a cascade of similar matches with other stores of data had been found.

  By seeing where packets dropped out of the stream, their abstract addresses became concrete, physical locations within the bulge. As Leila stood in Shalouf’s main square in the dusk, absorbing the reports, the Aloof’s network was growing more solid, less ethereal, by the minute.

  The streets around her were erupting with signs of elation: polyglot shouts, chirps and buzzes, celebratory scents, and vivid pigmentation changes. Bursts of luminescence spread across the square. Even the relentlessly sober heptapods had abandoned their food carts to lie on their backs, spinning with delight. Leila wheeled around, drinking it in, commanding her translator to punch the meaning of every disparate gesture and sound deep into her brain, unifying the kaleidoscope into a single emotional charge.

  As the stars of the bulge came out, Tassef offered an overlay for everyone to share, with the newly mapped routes shining like golden highways. From all around her, Leila picked up the signals of those who were joining the view: people of every civilization, every species, every replicator were seeing the Aloof’s secret roads painted across the sky.

  Leila walked through the streets of Shalouf, feeling Jasim’s absence sharply, but too familiar with that pain to be overcome by it. If the joy of this moment was muted, every celebration would be blighted in the same way, now. She could not expect anything else. She would grow inured to it.

  Tassef spoke to her.

  “The citizens have reached a decision. They will grant your request.”

  “I’m grateful.”

  “There is a condition. The transmitter must be built at least twenty light-years away, either in interstellar space, or in the circumstellar region of an uninhabited system.”

  “I understand.” This way, in the event that the Aloof felt threatened to the point of provoking destructive retribution, Tassef would survive an act of violence, at least on a stellar scale, directed against the transmitter itself.

  “We advise you to prepare your final plans for the hardware, and submit them when you’re sure they will fulfill your purpose.” “Of course.”

  Leila went back to her room, and reviewed the plans she had already drafted. She had anticipated the Tassefi wanting a considerable safety margin, so she had worked out the energy budgets for detailed scenarios involving engineering spores and forty-seven different cometary clouds that fell within Tassef’s jurisdiction. It took just seconds to identify the best one that met the required conditions, and she lodged it without hesitation.

  Out on the streets, the Listening Party continued. For the billion pilgrims, this was enough: they would go home, return to their grandchildren, and die happy in the knowledge that they had finally seen something new in the world. Leila envied them; there’d been a time when that would have been enough for her, too.

  She left her room and rejoined the celebration, talking, laughing, dancing with strangers, letting herself grow giddy with the moment. When the sun came up, she made her way home, stepping lightly over the sleeping bodies that filled the street.

  The engineering spores were the latest generation: strong bullets launched at close to lightspeed that shed their momentum by diving through the heart of a star, and then rebuilding themselves at atomic density as they decayed in the stellar atmosphere. In effect, the dying femtomachines constructed nanomachines bearing the same blueprints as they’d carried within themselves at nuclear densities, and which then continued out to the cometary cloud to replicate and commence the real work of mining raw materials and building the gamma ray transmitter.

  Leila contemplated following in their wake, sending herself as a signal to be picked up by the as-yet-unbuilt transmitter. It would not have been as big a gamble as Jasim’s with Trident; the strong bullets had already been used successfully this way in hundreds of similar stars.

  In the end, she chose to wait on Tassef for a signal that the transmitter had been successfully constructed, and had tested, aligned, and calibrated itself. If she was going to march blindly into the bulge, it would be absurd to stumble and fall prematurely, before she even reached the precipice.

  When the day came, some ten thousand people gathered in the center of Shalouf to bid the traveler a safe journey. Leila would have preferred to
slip away quietly, but after all her lobbying she had surrendered her privacy, and the Tassefi seemed to feel that she owed them this last splash of color and ceremony.

  Forty-six years after the Listening Party, most of the pilgrims had returned to their homes, but of the few hundred who had lingered in Shalouf nearly all had shown up for this curious footnote to the main event. Leila wasn’t sure that anyone here believed the Aloof’s network would do more than bounce her straight back into the disk, but the affection these well-wishers expressed seemed genuine. Someone had even gone to the trouble of digging up a phrase in the oldest known surviving language of her ancestral species: safar bekheyr, may your journey be blessed. They had written it across the sky in an ancient script that she’d last seen eighty thousand years before, and it had been spread among the crowd phonetically so that everyone she met could offer her this hopeful farewell as she passed.

  Tassef, the insentient delegate of all the planet’s citizens, addressed the crowd with some somber ceremonial blather. Leila’s mind wandered, settling on the observation that she was probably partaking in a public execution. No matter. She had said good-bye to her friends and family long ago. When she stepped through the ceremonial gate, which had been smeared with a tarry mess that the Tassefi considered the height of beauty, she would close her eyes and recall her last night on Najib, letting the intervening millennia collapse into a dream. Everyone chose death in the end, and no one’s exit was perfect. Better to rely on your own flawed judgments, better to make your own ungainly mess of it, than live in the days when nature would simply take you at random.

  As Tassef fell silent, a familiar voice rose up from the crowd.

  “Are you still resolved to do this foolish thing?”

  Leila glared down at her husband. “Yes, I am.”

  “You won’t reconsider?”

  “No.”

  “Then I’m coming with you.”

  Jasim pushed his way through the startled audience, and climbed onto the stage.

  Leila spoke to him privately. “You’re embarrassing us both.”

  He replied the same way. “Don’t be petty. I know I’ve hurt you, but the blame lies with both of us.”

  “Why are you doing this? You’ve made your own wishes very plain.”

  “Do you think I can watch you walk into danger, and not walk beside you?”

  “You were ready to die if Trident failed. You were ready to leave me behind then.”

  “Once I spoke my mind on that you gave me no choice. You insisted.” He took her hand. “You know I only stayed away from you all this time because I hoped it would dissuade you. I failed. So now I’m here.”

  Leila’s heart softened. “You’re serious? You’ll come with me?”

  Jasim said, “Whatever they do to you, let them do it to us both.”

  Leila had no argument to make against this, no residue of anger, no false solicitousness. She had always wanted him beside her at the end, and she would not refuse him now.

  She spoke to Tassef. “One more passenger. Is that acceptable?” The energy budget allowed for a thousand years of test transmissions to follow in her wake; Jasim would just be a minor blip of extra data.

  “It’s acceptable.” Tassef proceeded to explain the change to the assembled crowd, and to the onlookers scattered across the planet.

  Jasim said, “We’ll interweave the data from both of us into a single packet. I don’t want to end up at Massa and find they’ve sent you to Jahnom by mistake.”

  “All right.” Leila arranged the necessary changes. None of the Eavesdroppers yet knew that they were coming, and no message sent the long way could warn them in time, but the data they sent into the bulge would be prefaced by instructions that anyone in the Amalgam would find clear and unambiguous, asking that their descriptions only be embodied if they were picked up at Massa. If they were found in other spillage along the way, they didn’t want to be embodied multiple times. And if they did not emerge at Massa at all, so be it.

  Tassef’s second speech came to an end. Leila looked down at the crowd one last time, and let her irritation with the whole bombastic ceremony dissipate into amusement. If she had been among the sane, she might easily have turned up herself to watch a couple of ancient fools try to step onto the imaginary road in the sky, and wish them safar bekheyr.

  She squeezed Jasim’s hand, and they walked toward the gate.

  IX

  Leila’s fingers came together, her hand empty. She felt as if she was falling, but nothing in sight appeared to be moving. Then again, all she could see was a distant backdrop, its scale and proximity impossible to judge: thousands of fierce blue stars against the blackness of space.

  She looked around for Jasim, but she was utterly alone. She could see no vehicle or other machine that might have disgorged her into this emptiness. There was not even a planet below her, or a single brightest star to which she might be bound. Absurdly, she was breathing. Every other cue told her that she was drifting through vacuum, probably through interstellar space. Her lungs kept filling and emptying, though. The air, and her skin, felt neither hot nor cold.

  Someone or something had embodied her, or was running her as software. She was not on Massa, she was sure of that; she had never visited that world, but nowhere in the Amalgam would a guest be treated like this. Not even one who arrived unannounced in data spilling out from the bulge.

  Leila said, “Are you listening to me? Do you understand me?” She could hear her own voice, flat and without resonance. The acoustics made perfect sense in a vast, empty, windless place, if not an airless one.

  Anywhere in the Amalgam, you knew whether you were embodied or not; it was the nature of all bodies, real or virtual, that declarative knowledge of every detail was there for the asking. Here, when Leila tried to summon the same information, her mind remained blank. It was like the strange absence she’d felt on Trident, when she’d been cut off from the repositories of civilization, but here the amputation had reached all the way inside her.

  She inhaled deeply, but there was no noticeable scent at all, not even the whiff of her own body odor that she would have expected, whether she was wearing her ancestral phenotype or any of the forms of ersatz flesh that she adopted when the environment demanded it. She pinched the skin of her forearm; it felt more like her original skin than any of the substitutes she’d ever worn. They might have fashioned this body out of something both remarkably lifelike and chemically inert, and placed her in a vast, transparent container of air, but she was beginning to pick up a strong stench of ersatz physics. Air and skin alike, she suspected, were made of bits, not atoms.

  So where was Jasim? Were they running him too, in a separate scape? She called out his name, trying not to make the exploratory cry sound plaintive. She understood all too well now why he’d tried so hard to keep her from this place, and why he’d been unable to face staying behind: the thought that the Aloof might be doing something unspeakable to his defenseless consciousness, in some place she couldn’t hope to reach or see, was like a white hot blade pressed to her heart. All she could do was try to shut off the panic and talk down the possibility. All right, he’s alone here, but so am I, and it’s not that bad. She would put her faith in symmetry; if they had not abused her, why would they have harmed Jasim?

  She forced herself to be calm. The Aloof had taken the trouble to grant her consciousness, but she couldn’t expect the level of amenity she was accustomed to. For a start, it would be perfectly reasonable if her hosts were unable or unwilling to plug her into any data source equivalent to the Amalgam’s libraries, and perhaps the absence of somatic knowledge was not much different. Rather than deliberately fooling her about her body, maybe they had looked at the relevant data channels and decided that anything they fed into them would be misleading. Understanding her transmitted description well enough to bring her to consciousness was one thing, but it didn’t guarantee that they knew how to translate the technical details of their instantiation of her
into her own language.

  And if this ignorance-plus-honesty excuse was too sanguine to swallow, it wasn’t hard to think of the Aloof as being pathologically secretive without actually being malicious. If they wanted to keep quiet about the way they’d brought her to life lest it reveal something about themselves, that too was understandable. They need not be doing it for the sake of tormenting her.

  Leila surveyed the sky around her, and felt a jolt of recognition. She’d memorized the positions of the nearest stars to the target node where her transmission would first be sent, and now a matching pattern stood out against the background in a collection of distinctive constellations. She was being shown the sky from that node. This didn’t prove anything about her actual location, but the simplest explanation was that the Aloof had instantiated her here, rather than sending her on through the network. The stars were in the positions she’d predicted for her time of arrival, so if this was the reality, there had been little delay in choosing how to deal with the intruder. No thousand-year-long deliberations, no passing of the news to a distant decision-maker. Either the Aloof themselves were present here, or the machinery of the node was so sophisticated that they might as well have been. She could not have been woken by accident; it had to have been a deliberate act. It made her wonder if the Aloof had been expecting something like this for millennia.

  “What now?” she asked. Her hosts remained silent. “Toss me back to Tassef?” The probes with their reversed trajectories bore no record of their experience; perhaps the Aloof wouldn’t incorporate these new memories into her description before returning her. She spread her arms imploringly. “If you’re going to erase this memory, why not speak to me first? I’m in your hands completely, you can send me to the grave with your secrets. Why wake me at all, if you don’t want to talk?”

  In the silence that followed, Leila had no trouble imagining one answer: to study her. It was a mathematical certainty that some questions about her behavior could never be answered simply by examining her static description; the only reliable way to predict what she’d do in any given scenario was to wake her and confront her with it. They might, of course, have chosen to wake her any number of times before, without granting her memories of the previous instantiations. She experienced a moment of sheer existential vertigo: this could be the thousandth, the billionth, in a vast series of experiments, as her captors permuted dozens of variables to catalog her responses.