Galactic North (50 page)

“Perhaps it was once human technology, with programmed limitations to prevent it from replicating uncontrollably. But those shackles have been broken. Worse, the machines have hybridised, gaining resilience and adaptability with each encounter with something external. First the Melding Plague, infection with which may have been a deliberate ploy to bypass the replication limits.”

Irravel nodded. The Melding Plague had swept human space four hundred years earlier, terminating the Demarchist
belle époque.
Like the Black Death of the previous millennium, it evoked terror generations after it had passed.

“Later,” the Nestbuilder continued, “it may have encountered and assimilated Inhibitor technology, or worse. Now it will be very difficult to stop, even with the weapons at our disposal.”

An image of one of the machines flickered onto the Nestbuilder’s shell, like a peculiar tattoo. Irravel shivered. The Slug was right: waves of hybridisation had transformed the initial architecture into something queasily alien. But enough of the original plan remained for there to be no doubt in her mind. She was looking at an evolved greenfly—one of the self-replicating breeders she had given Captain Run Seven. How it had broken loose was anyone’s guess. She speculated that Seven’s crew had sold the technology on to a third party, decades or centuries after gaining it from her. Perhaps that third party had reclusively experimented in the Ross 128 system, until the day when the greenfly tore out of their control . . .

“I don’t know why you think I can help,” she said.

“Perhaps we were mistaken, then, to credit a five-hundred -year-old rumour that said you had been the original source of these machines.”

She had insulted it by daring to bluff. The Slugs were easily insulted. They read human beings far better than humans read Slugs.

“Like you say,” she answered, “you can’t believe everything you hear.”

The Slug made the Nestbuilder fold its armoured, spindly limbs across its mouthparts, a gesture of displeased huffiness.

“You
chordates
,” it said. “You’re all the same.”

Mirsky was dead. She had died of old age.

Irravel placed her body in an armoured coffin and ejected her into space when the
Hirondelle
’s speed was only a hair’s breadth under light.

“Do it for me, Irravel,” Mirsky had asked her, towards the end. “Keep my body aboard until we’re almost touching light, and then fire me ahead of the ship.”

“Is that really what you want?”

"It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C.” She forced a smile that must have sapped what little energy she had left. “That’s a joke, Irravel, but it only makes sense in a language neither of us has heard for a while.”

Irravel pretended that she understood. “Mirsky? There’s something I have to tell you. Do you remember the Nestbuilder? ”

“That was centuries ago, Veda.”

“I know. I just keep worrying that maybe it was right.”

“About what?”

“Those machines. About how I started it all. They say it’s spread now, to other systems. It doesn’t look as if anyone knows how to stop it.”

“And you think all that was your fault?”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

Mirsky convulsed, or shrugged—Irravel wasn’t sure which. “Even if it was your fault, Veda, you did it with the best of intentions. So you fucked up slightly. We all make mistakes.”

“Destroying whole solar systems is just a fuck-up?”

“Hey, accidents happen.”

“You always did have a sense of humour, Mirsky.”

“Yeah, guess I did.” She managed a smile. “One of us needed one, Veda.”

Thinking of that, Irravel watched the coffin fall ahead of the
Hirondelle
, dwindling until it was only a tiny mote of steel-grey, and then nothing.

The starbridge had long ago attained sentience.

Dense with machinery, it sang an endless hymn to its own immensity, throbbing like the lowest string on a guitar. Vacuum-breathing acolytes had voluntarily rewired their minds to view the bridge as an actual deity, translating the humming into their sensoria and passing decades in contemplative ecstasy.

Clasped in a cushioning field, an elevator ferried Irravel down the bridge from the orbital hub to the surface in a few minutes, accompanied by an entourage of children from the ship, many of whom bore in youth the hurting imprint of her dead friend Mirsky’s genes. The bridge rose like the stem of a goblet from a ground terminal which was itself a scalloped shell of hyper-diamond, filled with tiered perfume gardens and cascading pools, anchored to the largest island in an equatorial archipelago. The senior children walked Irravel down to a beach of silver sand on the terminal’s edge, where jewelled crabs moved like toys. She bid the children farewell, then waited, warm breezes fingering the hem of her sari.

Minutes later, the children’s elevator flashed heavenward.

Irravel looked out at the ocean, thinking of the Pattern Jugglers. Here, as on dozens of other oceanic worlds, there was a colony of the alien intelligences. Transforming themselves to aquatic bodyplans, the Subaruns had established close rapport with the aliens. In the morning, she would be taken out to meet the Jugglers, drowned, dissolved on the cellular level, every atom in her body swapped for one in the ocean, remade into something not quite human.

She was terrified.

Islanders came towards the shore, skimming the water on penanted trimarans, attended by oceanforms, sleek gloss-grey hybrids of porpoise and ray, whistlespeech downshifted into the human auditory spectrum. The Subaruns’ epidermal scales shimmered like imbricated armour: biological photocells drinking scorching blue Pleiadean sunlight. Sentient veils hung in the sky, rippling gently like aurorae, shading the archipelago from the fiercest wavelengths. As the actinic eye of Taygeta sank towards the horizon, the veils moved with it like living clouds. Flocks of phantasmagorical birds migrated with the veils.

The purple-skinned elder’s scales flashed green and opal as he approached Irravel along the coral jetty, a stick in one webbed hand, supported by two aides, a third shading his aged crown with a delicately watercoloured parasol. The aides were all descended from late-model Conjoiners; they had the translucent cranial crest through which blood flow had once been channelled to cool their supercharged minds. Seeing them gave Irravel a dual-edged pang of nostalgia and guilt. She had not seen Conjoiners for nearly a thousand years, ever since they had fragmented into a dozen factions and vanished from human affairs. Neither had she entirely forgotten her betrayal of Remontoire.

A Communicant completed up the party, gowned in brocade, hazed by a blur of entopic projections. Communicants were small and elfin, with a phenomenal talent for natural languages augmented by Juggler transforms. Irravel sensed that this one was old and revered, despite the fact that Communicant genes did not express for great longevity.

The elder halted before her.

The head of his walking stick was a tiny lemur skull inside an egg-sized space helmet. He uttered something clearly ceremonial, but Irravel understood none of the sounds he made. She groped for something to say, recalling the oldest language in her memory, and therefore the one most likely to be recognised in any far-flung human culture.

“Thank you for letting us stop here,” she said.

The Communicant hobbled forward, already shaping words experimentally with his wide, protruding lips. For a moment his sounds were like an infant’s first attempts at vocalisation, but then they resolved into something Irravel understood.

“Am I—um—making the slightest sense to you?”

“Yes,” Irravel said. “Yes, thank you.”

“Canasian,” the Communicant diagnosed. “Twenty-third, twenty-fourth centuries, Lacaille 9352 dialect, Fand subdialect?”

Irravel nodded.

“Your kind are very rare now,” he said, studying her as if she was some kind of exotic butterfly, “but not unwelcome. ” His features cracked into a heart-warming smile.

“What about Markarian?” Irravel said. “I know his ship passed through this system less than fifty years ago—I still have a fix on it as it moves out of the cluster.”

“Other ships do come, yes. Not many—one or two a century.”

“And what happened when the last one came through?”

“The usual tribute was given.”

“Tribute?”

“Something ceremonial.” The Communicant’s smile was wider than ever. “To the glory of Irravel. With many actors, beautiful words, love, death, laughter, tears.”

She understood, slowly, dumbfoundedly.

“You’re putting on a play?”

The elder must have understood something of that. Nodding proudly, he extended a hand across the darkening bay, ocean-forms cutting the water like scythes. A distant raft carried lanterns and the glimmerings of richly painted backdrops. Boats converged from across the bay. A dirigible loomed over the archipelago’s edge, pregnant with gondolas.

“We want you to play Irravel,” the Communicant said, beckoning her forward. “This is our greatest honour.”

When they reached the raft, the Communicant taught Irravel her lines and the actions she would be required to make. It was all simple enough—even the fact that she had to deliver her parts in Subarun. By the end of evening she was fluent in their language. There was nothing she couldn’t learn in an instant these days, by sheer force of will. But it was not enough. To catch Markarian, she would have to break out of the narrow labyrinth of human thought entirely. That was why she had come to Jugglers.

That night they performed the play, while boats congregated around them, top-heavy with lolling islanders. The sun sank and the sky glared with a thousand blue gems studding blue velvet. Night in the heart of the Pleiades was the most beautiful thing Irravel had dared imagine. But in the direction of Sol, when she amplified her vision, there was a green thumbprint on the sky. Every century, the green wave was larger, as neighbouring solar systems were infected and transformed by the rogue terraforming machines. Given time, it would even reach the Pleiades.

Irravel got drunk on islander wine and learned the tributes ’ history.

The plots varied immensely, but the protagonists always resembled Markarian and Irravel; mythic figures entwined by destiny, remembered across almost two thousand years. Sometimes one or the other was the clear villain, but as often as not they were both heroic, misunderstanding each other’s motives in true tragic fashion. Sometimes they ended with both parties dying. They rarely ended happily. But there was always some kind of redemption when the pursuit was done.

In the interlude, she felt she had to tell the Communicant the truth, so that he could tell the elder.

“Listen, there’s something you need to know.” Irravel didn’t wait for his answer. “I’m really her—really the person I’m playing.”

For a long time he didn’t seem to understand, before shaking his head slowly and sadly. “No; I thought you’d be different. You seemed different. But many say that.”

She shrugged. There was little point arguing, and anything she said now could always be ascribed to wine. In the morning, the remark had been quietly forgotten. She was taken out to sea and drowned.

“Markarian? Answer me.”

She watched the
Hideyoshi
’s magnified image, looming just out of weapons range. Like the
Hirondelle
, it had changed almost beyond recognition. The hull glistened within a skein of armouring force. The engines, no longer physically coupled to the rest of the ship, flew alongside like dolphins. They were anchored in fields that only became visible when some tiny stress afflicted them.

For centuries of worldtime she had made no attempt to communicate with him. But now her mind had changed. The green wave had continued for millennia, an iridescent cataract spreading across the eye of the galaxy. It had assimilated the blue suns of the Subarun Commonwealth in mere centuries—although by then Irravel and Markarian were a thousand light-years closer to the core, beginning to turn away from the plane of the galaxy, and the death screams of those gentle islanders never reached them. Nothing stopped it, and once the green wave had swallowed them, systems fell silent. The Juggler transformation allowed Irravel to grasp the enormity of it; allowed her to stare unflinchingly into the horror of a million poisoned stars and apprehend each individually.

She knew more of what it was, now.

It was impossible for stars to shine green, any more than an ingot of metal could become green-hot if it was raised to a certain temperature. Instead, something was veiling them—staining their light, like coloured glass. Whatever it was stole energy from the stellar spectra at the frequencies of chlorophyll. Stars were shining through curtains of vegetation, like lanterns in a forest. The greenfly machines were turning the galaxy into a jungle.

It was time to talk. Time—as in the old plays of the dead islanders—to initiate the final act, before the two of them fell into the cold of intergalactic space. She searched her repertoire of communication systems until she found something as ancient as ceremony demanded.

She aimed the message laser at him, cutting through his armour. The beam was too ineffectual to be mistaken for anything other than an attempt to talk. No answer came, so she repeated the message in a variety of formats and languages. Days of shiptime passed—decades of worldtime.

Growing impatient, she examined her weapons options. Armaments from the Nestbuilders were amongst the most advanced: theoretically they could mole through the loam of spacetime and inflict precise harm anywhere in Markarian ’s ship. But to use them she had to convince herself that she knew the interior layout of the
Hideyoshi.
Her mass-sensor sweeps were too blurred to be much help. She might just as easily harm the sleepers as take out his field nodes. Until now, it had been too risky to contemplate.