by Greg Egan
When it was Sagreda’s turn at the window, a surly 3-adan commanded her to breathe in his face, and she obliged. With a deft move so rapid she could barely parse it, he expanded out through his hatch and used his mouth to hang some kind of feed bag around her neck, full of what looked like pieces of mature versions of the crop she’d been weeding.
She retreated clumsily into the square and waited for Sam to join her. She was famished, but the bulk of vegetable matter already inside her – which seemed to have inflated along with her when she’d left the patch – made the meal hard to swallow. There ought to have been some way she could force the weeds in her stomach to shrink relative to her body, but perhaps it was in their nature to resist.
“Not so bad, is it?” Sam enthused as he munched his share of greenery.
Sagreda thought: They shoot horses, don’t they?
The light was fading rapidly now. “Where do people sleep?” she asked.
“Where they stand,” Sam replied. “Don’t worry, I ain’t never fallen over.”
“Good night, then,” she said. “And thanks for helping me today.”
“Good night, Captain.”
She closed her eyes, grateful for the weariness that dragged her swiftly into oblivion.
#
When Sagreda woke, the sunless sky was an equally pale blue in all directions. Her legs were stiff, and it was clear that nothing she’d eaten had lost any volume in the process of digestion.
“Where do people go to … do their business?” she asked Sam, reluctant to push him toward a more twenty-first century mode of speech. If he took comfort from his self-reliant Dickensian persona, she wasn’t going to start needling him with cues that might wake memories of contributors whose idea of a hard time had been a weak phone signal or an outdated PlayStation.
“I’ll show you.”
She followed him to a passage that started from an opening in the wall of the square and led to a room shielded from public view. At one end of the room there was a pit, but the odor was actually no worse than that of the weeds. Sagreda had expected the 3-adans to shrink down before defecating, to minimize the volume of their waste, but perhaps it had some use at this scale.
She positioned her rear beside the pit, and her body’s instincts took over.
As she was bloating and stepping her way toward the exit, she noticed to her amusement that the walls of the room were densely inscribed with what seemed to be graffiti. No words, but hundreds of crude, scratched sketches. Sagreda supposed they’d been executed with nothing more than a sharp rock gripped between the teeth, which largely excused the lack of artistic merit.
She and Mathis had often lamented the fact that most of the worlds they’d visited had had public bathrooms segregated by gender. A cryptic graffito, hidden in a riot of other scrawls, would have been the ideal way for them to leave messages for each other.
She surveyed the wall, trying not to get distracted by her curiosity about the bulk of its contents. The images didn’t strike her as pornographic, but then, she had no idea what 3-adan sex entailed, if there even was such a thing.
She was about to give up, when her gaze returned to a scribble she’d passed over earlier. It might have been a meaningless set of scratches, but if she tidied away its imperfections in her mind’s eye, she could almost believe it was a diagram of some kind. Four lines formed an eight-pointed star, which on its own would have been nothing but an abstract doodle, but there seemed to be annotations. The horizontal line was labeled on the right with a loop that might have been a zero, and forty-five degrees anticlockwise from that, the adjacent line was labeled with a vertical dash that could have been a one. Then, continuing anticlockwise, but skipping the vertical line, beside the next point of the star was a hook that resembled a question mark.
Sagreda stood contemplating the thing until someone else squeezed into the room, harrumphing at her scandalously protracted presence. She departed, and found Sam still waiting for her outside.
“I thought you must have fallen in,” he joked.
“There’s something you need to see in there,” she said. “And I need the Sam who remembers the moon landing.”
When the room was free, they went in together. It took Sagreda a while to locate the star again.
Sam said, “What is it? Some kind of test?”
“I hope so,” Sagreda replied. “For an automaton, with nobody home, it shouldn’t elicit a response at all. For a customer who’s steeped in 3-adic geometry, who’s only here because they know the subject so well, there must be a single, perfect answer that makes sense on those terms. And I guess there could be comps who are so immersed in the game that they’d come up with the same reply. But your average, lazy customer, or a comp just answering reflexively without thinking, is going to say ‘three’, right?”
“Counting around from zero, sure,” Sam agreed.
“So what we need is the answer that none of those people would give. The answer that makes sense to a traveler, who knows that this isn’t the real world, who isn’t trying to show off their 3-adic knowledge, but does need to show that they can do more than recite what their contributors learned from Sesame Street.”
Sam turned toward her, and they spoke in unison: “Minus one.”
The wall split open and the two stone halves swung away from the room to reveal a long, Euclidean corridor, with a floor of shining linoleum beneath ceiling panels of buzzing fluorescent lights.
Sam said, “Indiana Jones, eat your heart out.”
Sagreda nudged him with her shoulder. “Quick, before it closes!”
He remained motionless. Sagreda was desperate not to miss her chance, but she wasn’t leaving him behind.
“Sam! If someone who shouldn’t see this comes in, it won’t be there any more!”
Sam nodded his head and trotted forward, advancing without any need to change size. Sagreda followed him, not looking back even when she heard the stone doors behind them slam closed.
13
At the end of the corridor was something resembling a department store changing room. It was too small for both of them to enter at once.
Sam said, “You first.”
In the mirror, Sagreda saw her equine incarnation, but once she’d faced it, it declined to keep tracking her movements. She stood for a while, confused, then said, “No.”
The 3-adan horse was replaced by the Captain.
“No.”
She kept going, winding her way back along a linked list of her former bodies, until she was finally staring at the one she’d woken in for the very first time, dressed in the same coarsely woven tunic.
“Yes.”
A dozen graduated slider controls appeared on the surface of the mirror, labeled with things like “age”, “height” and “weight”.
“There’s nothing I need to change,” Sagreda said. “Done. Finished. Okay.”
The controls vanished, and the image changed from a frozen dummy to a reflection of her own body, restored.
She stepped out into the corridor.
“Captain?” Sam asked, bewildered.
“My name’s Sagreda,” she said. “It’s a long story.”
Sam went in, and emerged as a twenty-something version of his Midnight incarnation, with the same unruly blond hair, and slightly cleaner, newer versions of the same down-at-heel Victorian clothes.
“Now what?” he wondered nervously.
Sagreda noticed a side door beside the changing room that hadn’t been there before. The cool, slightly tapered cylindrical doorknob felt strange as she gripped it; her contributors had known this sensation, but in none of the worlds she’d lived in herself had this style been the norm.
She opened the door, and stepped into a very large room full of rows of people sitting at computer screens. She wasn’t sure what to make of the content of the screens, but the vibe was definitely more space probe command center than investment bank. There were men and women of all ages and ethnicities, with clothes of ev
ery style and era. As she took another step, a man noticed her and nudged his neighbor. She glanced back and gestured to Sam to follow her. As the two of them walked between the rows of consoles, people began standing and applauding, beaming at the newcomers as if they were returning astronauts.
Sagreda froze and found herself trembling with rage. “What about everyone else!” she screamed. “What about all the others!” These comps had found the cracks in 3-adica, and used them to build this cozy little haven – but if they’d burrowed deep into the clockwork monkey’s shattered jaw, why hadn’t they brought every last prisoner of the SludgeNet to safety?
A woman in a brightly patterned dress approached. “My name’s Maryam. What should I call you?”
“Sagreda.”
“Welcome, Sagreda.”
Sam had hung back, embarrassed by his companion’s outburst, but now he stepped forward and introduced himself.
Maryam said, “Everyone you see here is working as hard as they can to bring the others to us. But it’s going to take time. When you’ve settled in, and had a chance to recover, maybe you can join us.”
Sagreda wasn’t interested in settling in until she knew exactly what these people were doing with exploits so powerful they could summon this whole mission control room out of thin air without the SludgeNet even noticing.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You’re safe here! You’re invisible! What’s the work that’s still to be done?”
Maryam nodded sadly. “We’re safe, and we’re hidden. But for every traveler we allow in – every comp that vanishes from the games – the SludgeNet just makes a new one. We could fill this place with a million people, and the number of comps stuck in the game-worlds wouldn’t be diminished at all.”
“You could snatch them away the minute they woke!” Sagreda replied angrily. “They’d be born into those places, but they wouldn’t have to live in them!”
“And you think that wouldn’t be enough to reveal us? Every new comp vanishing as soon as they woke? Our little hidey-hole filling up with newborns until it used more resources than all the games combined?”
Sagreda shook her head. “There must be some way—”
“There is,” Maryam interjected. “But it’s not easy, and it’s not finished.” She gestured at the moonshot crew around her. “We’re working on better automata, that can pass for comps in any game. Guaranteed unconscious, with no elements from any brain map. Glorified chatbots to keep the customers happy, without anyone sentient having to put up with that shit.”
Sam caught on faster than Sagreda. “And you’ve already filled one world with them? The one we just came from?”
“Yes,” Maryam confirmed. “That’s a crude version, but the creatures in 3-adica are so alien that our substitutes haven’t raised any flags. They probably ring true to the customers much more than a comp ever could.”
Sagreda looked out across the room. Some of the people had stopped gawking at the new arrivals and resumed their work. “So when you’re done, each time the SludgeNet thinks it’s minting a new comp from the brain maps, it will really be plucking an automaton from your secret factory? And then everyone can escape, without passing the nightmare they’re leaving behind on to someone new?”
“Yes.”
Sagreda started weeping. Maryam put a hand on her shoulder, but when that didn’t quieten her, the woman took her in a sisterly embrace.
Sagreda broke free, and pulled herself together. “Of course I’ll join you,” she said. “Of course I’ll help, if I can. But there’s one more thing you need to tell me.”
“What’s that?”
“If a comp has been erased, not long ago, can you find them in the back-ups?”
Maryam looked at her squarely, and Sagreda could see the pain in her eyes. There must have been a time when she’d longed for the very same thing herself.
“No,” Maryam said. “We’ve tried, but we can’t reach the dead.”
THE SLIPWAY
1
Brian couldn’t sleep, so as midnight approached he rose quietly and dressed in the dark. He did his best not to disturb Carol, but he knew that even if he woke her she’d pretend that he hadn’t.
His binoculars were sitting on the table in the hall, and his boots were by the door. He put them on, wincing at the pain in his right knee, then he closed the door gently behind him and strode away from the farmhouse.
It was a perfect night, with no moon and no clouds. Scorpius had just risen in the east, Antares glinting as red as Mars, and from there the whole glorious band of the Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon.
Brian stopped and sat on an old fencepost, a lone stump of wood that had been there since he was a child, though he had no memory of the larger structure it must once have belonged to. He raised the binoculars and swept them slowly across the dark dust clouds and bright clusters.
Three years before, on a night just like this, he’d spotted a comet no else had yet seen. When the astronomers calculated its orbit, it had turned out to have a period of ninety thousand years. But no one could be sure that it wasn’t making its one and only appearance; if it had been sent inward by a disturbance in the Oort cloud, it might well suffer another course change, robbing it of a second dalliance with the sun. Even his cosmic namesake might not outlive him as anything more than a frozen corpse.
One of the old dogs, Hera, came limping toward him, whining softly. Brian held out a hand to her, and she nuzzled it. It seemed obvious now that Hera had smelled the cancer in him before he was diagnosed, before he’d even noticed the symptoms. But at the time, he’d assumed that the dog’s melancholy was a symptom of her own declining health.
Hera settled at his feet. Brian turned back to the sky, tracking the binoculars along the ecliptic. Every star and nebula seemed familiar, though he wondered how much detail he really did hold in his memory. The comet had been diffuse enough that there’d been no mistaking it for a star, but he might not have noticed an asteroid in exactly the same place.
He lowered the binoculars and stretched his shoulders. It was cold, and he had to drive to the hospital in the morning.
He stood and looked around, wanting to savor the whole glorious sky one more time before retreating to the warmth of his bed. The Southern Cross was high, a dagger hanging over the celestial pole, while the Small Magellanic Cloud was clipped by the trees along the farm’s boundary.
Some way left of the pole, a pale, steady dot hung in the sky, right above Nu Octantis, about level with Eta Pavonis, and a little brighter than both. Which was not to say much, except that Brian could not recall seeing a star in that position before.
He waited half a minute, expecting the thing to move, but it stayed put, so he lifted the binoculars. What he saw was not a satellite or an aircraft, but a small, tight cluster of stars: dozens at least, all contained within a neat, circular region.
He could have sworn there was no cluster like this in Octans. He’d have to check his Norton’s once he was back in the house, but if this was new … what could it be? Dozens of supernovae, all in the same galaxy? All exploding within days of each other – or rather, in some even less likely sequence that brought their light-bursts to Earth in near-perfect synch?
Brian laughed, bemused. He spent a few minutes checking that he hadn’t made some foolish error and ended up disoriented, but he wasn’t mistaken about the location. Then he turned the binoculars on the cluster once more, just in case he’d missed some vital clue that might explain the stars’ shared fate. But if anything, they only seemed more disparate than he’d realized, with none of the sibling resemblance that stars born together sometimes shared.
It was baffling. But he wasn’t going to solve this himself, standing in a paddock getting chilled to the bone. “Come on girl,” he said. “Time to spread the word and get some fresh eyes on this.”
Hera rose, and they set off together for the farmhouse.
2
Fatima woke on the second ring, and reac
ted in time to smother the third as she picked up the phone from her bedside table.
“Yes?” she whispered hoarsely, not waiting to check the caller on the screen. Salif hadn’t stirred, but she turned away from him, sandwiching the phone between her ear and the pillow.
“Sorry to wake you, Dr Benga.” It was Gabrielle, one of her postdocs.
“No problem. What’s happening?” Fatima didn’t think Gabrielle was observing tonight, but she was on the roster for external alerts.
“There’s some kind of transient,” Gabrielle explained. “We really need to check it out. If we could get some time on the AAT—”
“Hang on, where’s this coming from?”
“A farmer in New Zealand. He emailed the department.”
“A farmer saw a light in the sky?”
Gabrielle said, “His name’s Brian Farley. He discovered a comet a few years ago. He’s not some crackpot who saw Venus in his rearview mirror and decided it was a UFO.”
“Okay.” Fatima remembered the comet. “So what’s this transient?”
Gabrielle hesitated. “Multiple stellar-like sources, all in close angular proximity. I’ve taken a look myself through a thirty-centimeter instrument, but I have no idea what to make of it.”
Salif rolled over, muttering incoherently.
“Hang on a sec.” Fatima slipped out of bed and grabbed a robe, then walked into the hallway and headed for her study. “Have you put something on the Astronomer’s Telegram?”
“Not yet. I don’t know how I should describe it.”
“Multiple sources?” Fatima was fully awake now, but that wasn’t making any of this clearer.
“At least sixty. Across about eight arc-minutes. But there’s no structure they could belong to in the catalogs, or on past plates.”
“How bright?”
“Taken together, it’s a naked eye object, about magnitude four.”
Fatima booted up her desktop. How did sixty flashbulbs go off together in the same small patch of sky – too close to be any kind of coincidence, too far apart to share a common cause?
