by Linda Nagata
“For the day the Chenzeme returned?” Clemantine asked him, startled at the bitterness she heard in her own voice. “Yes.”
“Then you knew they’d come again.” This was spoken by the engineer, Zira Lin. Each syllable sharp with anger, her words an accusation.
“Of course,” Clemantine answered. “Did you let yourself believe otherwise?”
A warm flush rose in Zira’s cheeks. She looked away, rolling a shoulder as if to deny such a naive thought. But truth was in her words. “We hoped,” she said. “Some of us dared to hope, anyway. It’s been more than seven centuries since the last sighting.”
Clemantine had no patience for such a limited perspective. “What are seven centuries,” she asked, “when the Chenzeme have waged their autonomous war for thirty million years? A war of that duration won’t end in your lifetime or in mine, however many centuries we might survive.”
“At least we have survived,” Zira answered, though she sounded chastened. “Here in the Well. Some say we’re the last to survive. That between the Chenzeme and the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties, the human age has come to an end.”
She paused as if to give Clemantine an opening to argue, but Clemantine did not. Riffan spoke up instead, “I don’t believe that.”
“Do you believe that?” Zira pressed as if Clemantine owed her an answer.
Clemantine consented, giving all the answer there was: “No way to know.”
The truth was, hunkered down as they were in the shelter of the nebula, not daring to venture beyond it, not since the Null Boundary Expedition anyway, they were abysmally ignorant of the status of other star systems. Still, Clemantine did not hold much hope.
Deception Well survived because of the nebula’s ancient inhuman technology. No other reason. And no one knew how far the robotic Chenzeme ships had ventured in their war of extermination. They might have pushed past the frontier, in among the star systems of the Hallowed Vasties. If so, had they found anything left there to destroy?
“It doesn’t matter if we’re the last or not,” Clemantine concluded. “Our duty is the same—to survive.”
For Zira, this was answer enough. Tears shone briefly in her eyes, crystalline, trembling in the zero gravity until she wiped them away.
<><><>
Forty-nine minutes later Riffan had an update on the courser’s relative velocity and a solid estimate of its trajectory. Together, those figures assured him that it would bypass the Well. At closest approach, TH-6 would still be light-hours beyond the measurable edge of the nebula with a velocity too high to be captured by the system’s gravity or to survive passage through the nebula’s debris field.
It might still try to dump that velocity. Turn about and return. But such a maneuver would require months, maybe years. Someone else would be designated as commander of Long Watch by then. So Riffan put the courser out of his mind, focusing instead on the suspected weapons swarm.
He watched and he waited, enduring the slow unfolding of time as radar waves propagated outward, moving at the speed of light but still requiring most of an hour to reach the nearest target, and an equivalent time for the reflected waves to return to Long Watch.
At last the first faint signals arrived. A DI compiled them into a blurry image, revealing the shape and size of the leading object in the swarm. They all studied it—Riffan and Pasha, Enzo and Zira, and Clemantine.
Zira spoke first: “It looks too small to be well armed.”
The object was like a dart, thin and elongated, only seventy meters from bow to stern and just a few meters in breadth.
Zira said, “It’s large enough to house a zero-point propulsion reef and enough bio-mechanical tissue to insulate a thin core of computational strata—but not much more than that.”
“Maybe it’s a plague ship,” Enzo suggested grimly.
Pasha proposed another possibility. “Maybe the swarm is meant to scout the system, chart our defenses and our weaknesses.”
Both suggestions sounded plausible to Riffan. He turned to Clemantine, wanting her interpretation, knowing that she’d endured a more harrowing experience of the Chenzeme than anyone else alive. He was taken aback by the shock he saw on her face. “Do you know what it is?” he asked her.
She bit her lip. He heard a hoarse tremor in her words as she said, “I’ve seen the form before.”
Pasha, eyes half closed in mad linkage with the library, said, “It’s the same dimensions as the ship that brought you home!”
“Oh, hey!” Enzo shouted in excitement, one hand tapping and stroking his control panel. “Riffan, I’ve got a radio transmission.”
“Radio?” Riffan echoed in confusion. Communications out of Deception Well came by laser relay—and it was far too soon for that.
Enzo said, “It’s a repeating segment. Voice. Human voice. Not encoded. Here, listen.” He touched a finger to the screen of his workstation and a man’s voice emanated from hidden speakers: Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. A repeated phrase spoken in the language of Deception Well, but with an accent like Clemantine’s, only heard among the older generations:
Don’t shoot. I mean no harm. My name is Urban, formerly of the starship Null Boundary. Like Clemantine before me, I’ve come home. Then he laughed and added, Are you listening to this, Clemantine? I know you made it home, that you brought them the zero-point reef because I’ve detected its signature here. We won, Clemantine. We learned how to beat the Chenzeme. This courser you see? It’s mine. I took it. I hijacked it and made it my own. So don’t shoot. I’ve sent small outrider ships in-system as a communications relay. They’re harmless, but through them I can send you the history of the Null Boundary Expedition. You’ll want that. Respond to this. Open a data gate. And set up a resurrection pod. I’m sending my pattern through. Do it quickly. I won’t be in range for long.
A tonal signal followed, indicating a break, and then the message started to repeat: Don’t shoot. Don’t shoot. . . .
Riffan’s heart hammered in shock, in suspicion, in a desperate hope that it was all true.
He had not been born when Clemantine returned from the Null Boundary Expedition. In those days the Well had possessed only paltry defenses, but even so, Clemantine had approached cautiously in the tiny ship Messenger.
Excitement cut across this line of thought. The object picked up by radar had the same dimensions as Messenger—corroborating evidence that the radio transmission was true. Only someone familiar with the Null Boundary Expedition could have known what those dimensions were.
Clemantine had made her presence known months before she came into range of Deception Well’s orbital guns. Her ghost—an electronic version of her persona—had preceded the ship itself and a physical avatar had been grown for her. She’d testified to the history of the expedition up to the point she’d left it, she’d delivered a library of data, and she’d brought the propulsion reef that powered both Long Watch and Silent Vigil.
She’d been accepted for who she was, but Clemantine had not come back in the company of a Chenzeme courser.
Riffan turned to her as the voice continued to speak its repeated message. “Is it a trick?” he demanded.
Her eyes were closed, her lashes trembling against the pressure of a flood of emotion. “It is probably a trick,” she said in a husky murmur just audible over the recorded laugh. Her head tilted back as she drew a gasping breath like a swimmer surfacing after some long time underwater. “But it is his voice, his inflections, his attitude.” Her eyes opened. She listened—they all listened—until the message finished again.
As the tonal interlude began, she turned to Riffan. In words now sharp and sure she said, “Reply to him. Quickly. As quickly as you can. He can’t be allowed into Silk, not yet. Not until we’re sure. But we can bring him here. Give him the access code to a data gate, accept his pattern. We can examine it while his avatar is assembled. If there’s anything suspicious in it . . .”
A slight hesitation, that Pasha filled. “Then we end the p
rocess,” she said. “And wipe the avatar before he’s live.”
Clemantine’s gaze fixed on Pasha, as if really seeing her for the first time. Riffan thought she must be angry, but after a few seconds she acknowledged Pasha’s words with a slow nod. “Yes. Exactly.” Stern approval in her voice.
Then she turned again to Riffan. “In the meantime I suggest you adjust this ship’s course, take it closer to the swarm, and find the best angle for the guns.” She kicked off the wall and glided toward the still-open doorway.
Before she passed through it, Pasha spoke again. “This is why you’re really here, isn’t it? This is why you’ve spent centuries in cold sleep at this remote post. You were waiting for him, or them . . .”
Riffan hissed at her, appalled at the impertinence of such a question. Too late. Clemantine caught the edge of the doorway and turned back. Riffan braced for an outburst, a reprimand.
But Clemantine sounded only downcast, not angry. “Not knowing what became of them has been hard,” she confessed to Pasha. “If it is him, I will be grateful to hear his story. But to come here after so long, after all he must have seen, and in such circumstance—” She gestured at the projection. “Who is he now? Not the man I knew.”
With that she went out, and the sides of the door swept in, sealing shut behind her.
The message continued to repeat as Riffan turned to Enzo. “Do as she said,” he instructed. “Reply to him, and send him the key to a data gate.”
“On it.”
“We’ll need to isolate all data that comes in,” Riffan added. “Create a new library for it, separate from ship’s systems.”
Zira said, “I’ll set that up.”
“Thank you, Zira,” Riffan told her. “I’ll work on our trajectory.”
He was grateful they had time to prepare. Given the light-speed delay, it would be nearly two hours before the pattern that defined Urban’s physical incarnation came through—if it was him at all, and not some Chenzeme trick.
This thought cast a shadow on his mind. Even so, he recalled a subset of the words Urban had spoken: We learned how to beat them.
By the Pure First Light, Riffan hoped it was true.
Chapter
3
For nearly six hundred years Urban had existed as a pattern of data, an electronic ghost, a virtual entity, a complex ever-changing simulacrum of his biological self that ran on a web of computational tissue grown within the Chenzeme courser. An army of highly evolved defensive Makers guarded the perimeter of his holdings, preventing all attempts at incursion by aggressive Chenzeme nanomachines.
This ghost could imagine itself as the inhabitant of a physical body, or as pure mind, or it could adopt the senses of the courser.
Urban had secured his control over the warship by replicating his ghost over and over again and then editing and pruning each electronic avatar to create a new, machinelike personality incapable of distraction or boredom. These artificial ghosts became his staff, his crew, each designed to embrace a specific task—navigation, calculation, astronomy, library research, Chenzeme bio-mechanics, and engineering, including the propulsion and weapon systems.
He named these assistant personalities the Apparatchiks, an ancient term whose connotation of blind devotion to assigned duty he found amusing.
Urban had synthesized an army of Dull Intelligences too, to assist the Apparatchiks and to handle all the simple, repetitive tasks each day required—not that he experienced night and day, but he held tight to the tradition of measuring time according to the days and years of Earth though millennia had passed since any news had come from there and maybe, most likely, humanity’s birth world was gone to dust.
He’d like to know if that was true.
Urban had also created small outrider ships, based on the design of Messenger, the little ship that had taken Clemantine’s ghost back to Deception Well. He’d named his outriders after ancient gods and guiding spirits: Khonsu, Artemis, Lam Lha, Pytheas, Elepaio, and Fortuna. None were armed, but they extended the reach of his senses and his communications.
He’d grown the fleet of six from raw materials carried by the massive warship, matter originally intended for the ship’s own bio-mechanical reproduction.
For most of their existence, the outriders had run ahead of the courser in a long, staggered line, spaced ninety light-minutes apart. All were equipped with small telescopes enabling them to observe across the spectrum. Combining the data they collected gave Urban a detailed view of distant objects. And each outrider held backup copies of his library, and archived copies of his ghost.
Replication was a form of insurance. Even in the void of deep space there was a potential for collision with some bit of rubble. The courser, with all its mass, might be able to survive the huge energies of a high-speed impact, but the tiny outriders could not. Over the centuries, two of them—Khonsu and Artemis—had been destroyed.
Urban had grown new ships to replace them, giving them the same names.
He did what was needed to survive and he endured, but he did not let himself forget who and what he was. He took care to guard his core persona, that most-human version of himself. To endure the years, he modified his time sense, ensuring that neither the events of his past nor his hopes for the future ever seemed too far off as the ship coasted in a centuries-long passage through the vastness between stars.
As he finally drew near to Deception Well, he copied his core persona: one version to stay aboard the courser, another to replicate through the chain of outriders, establish communication, and eventually pass through a data gate aboard the warship stationed at the periphery of the nebula.
If all went well, these two ghosts would ultimately recombine into one. Until then, they operated independently, separated by light-hours from one another.
<><><>
For the first time since he had hijacked the courser and made it his own, Urban rose to consciousness inside a physical body. His eyes snapped open. He heard the beat of his heart. Felt the touch of cool air against newly made skin and a faint electrostatic charge lofting the sparse black hair on his forearms.
He stretched the arms, legs, neck, back, even the feet of this avatar, newly grown aboard the warship, Long Watch. A fully rendered version of himself. Sleek and lean and comfortingly familiar. He curled long-fingered hands into fists, unfolded them again. Relishing the details of mass and resistance, of existence itself. So many years spent in simulated reality he’d forgotten how different it felt to be alive. How glorious. A pleasure just to breathe again, to feel the rumble of his stomach.
Hungry. Not just for food. Instinct stirred, sending blood towards his groin in an ancient tide. Desire as a homecoming rite, an affirmation of place. He’d been alone so long.
Was he still alone?
He shifted his focus outward. Found himself adrift in a zero-gravity environment, nude, confined within a transparent membrane just large enough to contain him. Strokes of light curved across the membrane’s shifting surface and across his dark-skinned body.
What was the membrane for? It might be just a gel cocoon left over from his resurrection, although in his experience those were designed to dissolve and drizzle away.
It might be meant to confine him.
Beyond the membrane, a dark undefined space.
His atrium sought a network connection. Found none. Not a surprise. Still, his isolation made him uneasy.
He peered past the cocoon. Was someone there?
Certainly there would be cameras on him, watching, evaluating. And his body would have been studied in detail as it was grown and assembled, confirming he was truly human. He expected no less.
The people of Deception Well—whoever they were in this era—were taking a chance by communicating with him at all. It was a risk on his side too. So much time had passed since he’d left the Well he could not claim to know his people anymore. His heart beat faster as he wondered: Have I made a mistake?
Aloud, he asked, “Why the darkn
ess, the silence?”
No answer, but beyond the gel membrane darkness yielded to a barely perceptible blue light emanating from the walls of a small spherical chamber. As the light brightened, it picked out the edges and curves of a woman’s drifting figure. A familiar silhouette.
“Clemantine,” he growled in a low, victorious voice. The light became whiter, revealing the woman he’d come to find.
She had not changed, not physically. They’d been lovers once and he remembered every curve of that long, strong, well-muscled body, the feel of full breasts in his hands, the spicy scent of her skin. Her face was the same too: a broad, beautiful, balanced face with a flat nose and full lips. Serious in its expression, even now.
His heart hammered as he gazed at her; his hands shook. The joy of meeting her again almost overwhelming. He longed to reach for her, ached for her physical reality, skin to skin. He held back only because he did not see any similar joy on her face.
Instead, she looked distraught and defensive. “Who are you?” she asked. A demand phrased as a question. The chill in her words froze him.
“You know me,” he answered.
“I did once. But who are you now? Did they turn you?”
“They?” he asked. “There is no they. The Chenzeme—whatever they were—they’re gone. We found remnants. Artifacts. That’s all. But we learned. Like I told you in the radio message, we won. We learned how to beat their ships.”
“If you won, where are the others? You said ‘I’ve come home.’ Not we. What happened to them?”
The fear and suspicion in her eyes was more than he’d expected. “They stayed behind,” he told her. He made no effort to hide the bitterness these words brought him, but she was unmoved by it.
“Why?” she insisted.
He shook his head. “I’m not going to tell you that story, Clemantine. It’s in the library files that I’ve transferred over. I haven’t hidden any part of it. Not from you. Relive it there if you want to. I don’t want to. I want to talk about you. I came here to find you.”
