“We will seek for traces of abomination. He is to lower his immune system and open his sensorium.”
Just a day past, Vanessa had probed at the edges of my sensorium. It had bothered me: but that was nothing like what happened now. The Black King, which I’d been unaware of in the sensorium before now, abruptly appeared within it. It was – picture what a black hole does to the shape of space: the King did something very similar to our shared sensorium now, as it unshielded itself from us.
The Black Kings are the oldest race among the Caravans, except maybe the Tamrann. They are not individuals; they’re a shared mind, one per Caravan, and if they are not transcendent beings of the sort that ran loose during the Time Wars, it’s only because they’ve chosen not to be.
I reacted with something close to panic. My immune system and sensorium retreated to the surface of my skin, and suddenly the sense of weight on me vanished, and I lost awareness of everyone who wasn’t physically present.
The nearest Black King approached a little closer. Something trickling in through my shrunken sensorium told me it was amused by my immune system. It had no face but it turned until its antenna was oriented on Father and Mother: “He is to lower his immune system until I am satisfied. It may harm him if I am forced to lower it for him.”
“Do as it says,” Father instructed me.
I looked at Vanessa. She’d seemed subdued – now I knew why. “I did it,” she said in Tierra.
I did too. Submitting to surgery without anesthetic, back in pretech times, couldn’t have been harder. I’d turned my immune system off once, after I’d been given control of it as a small child, to show that I could manage it. My sensorium had never been unlocked since the genes that activated it had fired at puberty.
It was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. The entity that investigated me was too alien for me to understand; its touch felt at first like a cleansing light, and then without transition an oily, rancid biological invasion. Fire, then ice, clear and then cloudy – I can’t tell you what it felt like. Painful. Brutal. Ancient and incomprehensible, what humans used to call “alien.” I only hoped that some portion of that was true in the other direction: I didn’t know what they’d do, if they found a Zaradin God riding me. That presence, which had been a constant since invading me, went very still and quiet as the Black King investigated me.
It hurt and it went on forever. My clock stopped at one point.
After several eternities it withdrew. “He is free of abomination,” the Black King said.
When my time service restarted and synced itself to the Platform clock, nearly six and a quarter minutes had passed.
After that they ignored me. I walked over to Vanessa, a little shakily, and said, “Let’s go watch my brother play.”
WE SAT IN the bleachers, and watched Rose United battle Annie’s Hooligans in the second game of the 3022 season.
“There are over twenty thousand humans aboard the Rose,” I told her. “Almost fourteen thousand on Annie’s Seeker.” I imagined she knew all this already, but I couldn’t stop talking. “They’re the two human Platforms at S’Pollant. Probably every human child within a thousand light years is on that field. We’d breed faster, if we could afford another Platform. But we’re hundreds of years away from being able to take on another mortgage. So we breed very slowly.”
Vanessa nodded. She watched the game for a while, and then reached over with her left hand, and took hold of my right. “They’re going to destroy that world,” she said. “Beam it until it melts, and then blow the melted remnants down into its sun. And then we’ll drop a nova seed into the sun. It’ll have enough iron to work with.”
“And they think this is sufficient?” I asked.
She squeezed my hand. “I don’t know either.”
The game came down to a 2-2 tie. My brother Elden, who was nine, had a chance to win the game at the end, but he bounced his kick off the top of the goal and time ran out.
The kids sat down for their post-game treats, in a ritual at least as old as star travel, and Vanessa and I held hands.
I wasn’t far removed from playing on that field, myself.
I have use for you, He said, stirring now that the threat of discovery was passed.
Vanessa spoke softly next to my ear, not moving her lips, using sound waves that the greatest tech in the universe couldn’t have resolved from a meter away, “I didn’t tell anyone what happened at the altar.” Anyone watching might have thought she was kissing me. “Don’t do any research until I get in touch with you.”
We sat like that until Mother and Xander arrived. Mother gathered up me and Elden, and no one seemed to notice when I kissed Vanessa on the cheek.
“She’s a nice girl,” Mother said as we walked home, “but you should consider the possibility they won’t make it here. Not all immigrants do.”
“She’s not an immigrant, and you know it.”
Mother loves me, though in a very different way from my second mother, for all that my first mother bore me in her body. “I do,” she said. “But I wasn’t sure you did.”
Mother had dinner with us, and then spent the night, which she hadn’t done in a very long time. I never know what to expect from her; it’s hard to believe sometimes that a third of my genes came from her.
WHAT WAS DECIDED was done.
Vanessa had said we would melt the planet; S’Pollant all but vaporized it. Great engines blew the resulting mixture of vapor down toward Yppado, and when most of the planet had reached Yppado’s surface, setting off Jovian-sized flares and even larger storms across the star’s surface, we followed it with a nova seed. It took the nova seed less than a day to propagate deep enough into the star to do its work – and when the star was clearly in a pre-nova state, we jumped back out through the Gate, while it was still stable enough to take us, dropped back two systems along our path, to Temchen, and waited for word from the Face of Night.
Light from the explosion wouldn’t appear at Temchen for six years: but the Face of Night had the tachyon starship Almundsen at Yppado. They’d been there for forty-one days before our arrival, I learned later. They didn’t need the Gate and gravitational instability didn’t bother them. They watched the star go nova, watched the wavefront of the nova race across the system, consuming everything within its path, and then went superluminal to meet with S’Pollant. Less than sixty hours after the Black King decided to destroy Yppado, it was done.
I’D NEVER SEEN a tachyon starship before. They are rare tech – the rarest of rare; not something old, not an adapted or even slightly improved version of something some forerunner species left behind in the eight billion or so years following the Zaradin destruction of the Spacethings: but something new in the history of the universe. As far as any archive could tell us, the only way ever known to exceed the speed of light was the spacelace tunnels. Species and civilizations rose and fell, and warred with information and anti-matter and novas, slowly across real space or more quickly but with lower volume through the choke points of the spacelace tunnels.
The tachyon starship changed that. With help from K’Aillae, humans had used it to break the power of the sleem empire. Even now, eight hundred and seventy-six years later, only the Face of Night and the House of November controlled the secret of making the tachyon wands that drove such ships to superluminal speeds.
It was genuinely new tech and scared the hell out of everyone.
TWO DAYS AFTER the nova at Yppado, the Almundsen left the system behind and headed toward a rendezvous with S’Pollant.
ONE DAY AFTER the nova at Yppado, my parents scheduled downtime. After Elden and the adults had gone to bed, I pinged Vanessa. She answered briefly: I’ll come over.
When she arrived she sat at the foot of
my bed, me at the head, and with a near field signal, unreadable beyond a meter or so, gave me a key for an encryption protocol I was unfamiliar with: I took it and she streamed archive updates at me – details about the Zaradin Church and the Time Wars I suspected no human aboard the Rose had ever been exposed to before. I integrated them and spent half an hour absorbing their implications. I could tell my slowness frustrated her, but she waited patiently enough. “OK,” I said finally. “I know what you know.”
“Not really, but you know more than you did.” She smiled at me, and I liked it. “Sensorium and experience aren’t the same thing, Erin.”
“Awfully close,” I told her.
“Oh?” She considered that for a moment. “Well. That’s an opinion, anyway. So. What do we know about the artifact, the abomination?”
I could count the data points on the fingers of one hand. “It fired twice upon Vince when he approached the Zaradin temple. And then didn’t fire again. And the Face of Night suspected or knew it was there.”
“Suspected. From some of the oldest archives, translated and translated again. We had more search time in system than you know – Almundsen dropped Xander and me off to travel aboard Rose from Earth, and then went on ahead. They didn’t find anything. They asked me to take a look on the planet’s surface. The odds of finding anything there struck everyone as low, though.”
“My parents are unhappy with the Black King.”
“That seems ... counterproductive,” she said carefully.
“Pretty much. Not even my first mother would have sent us out into a mess like that if they’d known. But they weren’t told this was anything but exploration of a system with a new Gate. They sent a complaint to the Black Platform.”
“The Black Kings aren’t particularly sympathetic to the idea of children,” Vanessa said.
“I’ve never heard that suggested before.” It wasn’t in the archive updates I’d just been given, either.
“It was in my training. Quite a lot about the major non-human species, in my training. You only find Black Kings on Platformer Caravans, and Caravans are carefully managed ecosystems. They’ve seen what short-lived species do, when presented with new ecosystems to expand into.” I knew what she, and the rest of the Continuing Time, meant by short-lived; humans don’t often die of old age any longer, but we still have the attitudes of an ephemeral species, by comparison with beings who’ve been alive tens or hundreds of thousands of years – perhaps longer. “It’s speculated the main reason Rose from Earth was taken into S’Pollant was that humans had tachyon starships, and the Black Kings wanted to study us. Most Caravans since have turned down human applicants, but S’Pollant swung past Sol twice in less than a thousand years, the second time taking aboard Annie’s Seeker.”
This was interesting, but it was history. “Have you snapped since you got back?”
She shook her head. “Living in logs.”
“How secure are they?”
“Xander has access to them. I’d know if she’d scanned them, and she hasn’t.”
I looked at her. “I’m even not in logs.” I was afraid someone would read them. “I’m only in my head.”
The Black King hadn’t examined any of the other kids on flyabout – just me and Vanessa. It wasn’t worried we’d had contact with the abomination: it was worried we’d had contact with the Factual altar.
“What if the abomination has eaten the Black King?”
“Try this,” said Vanessa. “What if it didn’t need to?”
I’d been afraid she was going to say that.
“We need to go see the Tamrann,” I said.
She nodded and leaned forward slightly. “Right. Now you lean forward.”
I didn’t move. “What?”
“Lean forward.” I did and to my surprise, she kissed me. Soft, at first, and then more urgently. It startled me, but I kissed her back, and was starting to enjoy it when she abruptly disengaged and hopped up off the bed. She stood looking at me, still and oddly composed.
My breathing had quickened. That was odd – I didn’t think that had ever happened before except during exercise.
“Have you ever been kissed?” she asked.
“In a virtual segment. Not in real life.”
She held my eyes with her own. “Different, isn’t it?”
WE HAD SIXTEEN hours before the Almundsen was due to arrive at S’Pollant.
“You can speak safely here,” Picky Jim said.
Vanessa and I had flown our Razors six bands down from the Rose, about 140 degrees around the chain, to the blue-domed Platform at 11-82. There was not much about bandchain 11-82 even in archive – for an oxygen atmosphere Platform only six bands away from the Rose, that was unusual. I’d never been to it; I’d only ever been aboard sixty-one of the two thousand and twelve Platforms at S’Pollant, and there were well over a thousand about which the archives told little – sometimes no more than a bandchain position. We were in our suits but it turned out not to be necessary; the consensus atmosphere was only a little different from that on the Rose, though thick with unfamiliar scents. (I’ve been in “oxygen” atmospheres where a suit was a necessity.)
As on the Rose, the top level of 11-82 was parkland – though they simulated a sun, and the Rose doesn’t. 11-82 seemed to be mostly filled with K’Aillae – K’Ailla foliage, too, to the degree I recognized it – though there was a healthy smattering of other oxygen-breathing species aboard, slissi and Tangletrees and such. No one seemed to notice our host, the Tamranni from the meeting, who was calling himself Picky Jim. At one point a pack of K’Ailla cubs, tearing through the park, swarmed over him as though he were a statue – he became one, while they were on him, and then resumed walking. The cubs touched neither Vanessa nor me, and then they were past us.
If you read the reports of the first humans to meet Tamrann, they came across as cheaply made robots. They’re surfaced in a gold metallic substance, around two meters in height – which struck those early humans as tall, though it’s shorter than the average human today – built along vaguely human lines, down to the articulation of arms and legs. They even have five fingers, though they lack anything recognizable as a face; the space humans use for a face, Tamrann reserve for instruments. After introducing itself, Picky Jim led us through the parkland until we came to a doorway stuck between two trees; this was a K’Ailla designed Platform, all right. The Tamranni issued us through it, into an unremarkable room, and told us we could talk.
Vanessa wasted no time. “Has the Black King been eaten by the abomination? Or is it in league?”
The Tamranni spoke reference Tierra, and sounded like a simple Machine Intelligence as a result. Cautious; it wasn’t sharing sensorium with us. “The former, almost surely not. The latter, possibly. They switched sides to suit themselves during the Time Wars. One could never trust them.”
“What about the Almundsen?”
Picky Jim was silent long enough I thought it wouldn’t answer.
“Sol’s MI is bright,” the Tamrann said finally. “The Source. I’ve spoken with it, in centuries past. But it’s young for a transcendent being, not quite a thousand years old. What you call the Abomination is the same order of entity – with perhaps as much as five billion years of algorithmic sharpening behind it.” It looked back and forth between me and Vanessa. “Your ship was at Yppado forty-one days before S’Pollant arrived. I fear for your people.”
WE SNAPSHOTTED AND flew out to meet Almundsen.
I had to turn my fear off; it didn’t like what Vanessa and I had prepared. Fear is a useful feedback system, but it’s not supposed to run you, and mine was trying to. It was making me think I was short of breath, and I knew I wasn’t, even if I was short a lung.
S’Pollant was parked n
ear Temchen’s Second Gate, the Gate that linked to Horiadaa’a, which linked to Yppado. Almundsen was coming through real space, sort of; on its approaching vector, it would cross most of Temchen system on its way to the Second Gate and S’Pollant.
We spent six hours burning at the highest acceleration we could handle – Razors are much too small to have artificial gravity. Then we spent most of two hours decelerating to match velocities with Almundsen. An interesting looking ship. For generations the Face of Night had built ships along the brutal lines of sleem warships, which they understood very well, having had many half-destroyed samples to hand after the war. But the Almundsen had clearly not been designed by sleem. It was a collection of fractal soap bubbles, half melted together, with a tachyon wand on its foremost bubble.
We got close enough for sensorium, and Captain Scolo appeared to us. “Your parents are not pleased,” they said.
We’d been ignoring their transmissions the entire flight.
Scolo was human, ungendered in an attractive sort of way, with bright blue eyes and dark blue skin scattered with stars. Not that much of their skin was visible, wearing the uniform of a ship Captain of United Earth Interstellar.
We’d agreed to let Vanessa talk. “It’s a pleasure to see you again, Captain Scolo. I fear that S’Pollant Caravan has been compromised by the Abomination.”
They smiled. “Alas. They say the same about you, young person.”
Vanessa indicated surprise. “Do they? We had no direct contact with the Abomination, as you probably know.”
They nodded. “I’ve seen your recordings from the planet’s surface, Sel Vanessa. You had direct contact only with the Factual Temple.” They indicated me. “I’ve not seen your recordings, Ser Rose. Something happened to your shiplog?”
I indicated confusion. “My shiplog is fine. You’re welcome to read it.”
Captain Scolo looked at us for a beat. I watched them read through sensorium, into my Razor’s systems. “I see the shiplog. Your Razor reports that it is inaccessible.”
Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories Page 12
