Galactic North (51 page)

But all games needed an end.

Willing her qualms from her mind, she enabled the Nestbuilder armaments, feeling them stress spacetime in the
Hirondelle
’s belly, ready to short-circuit it entirely. She selected attack loci in Markarian’s ship; best guesses that would cripple him rather than blow him out of the sky.

Then something happened.

He replied, modulating his engine thrust in staccato stabs. The frequency was audio. Quickly Irravel translated the modulation.

“I don’t understand,” Markarian said, “why you took so long to answer me, and why you ignored me for so long when I replied.”

“You never replied until now,” she said. “I’d have known if you had.”

“Would you?”

There was something in his tone that convinced her he wasn’t lying. Which left only one possibility: that he had tried speaking to her before, and that in some way her own ship had kept this knowledge from her.

“Mirsky must have done it,” Irravel said. “She must have installed filters to block any communications from your ship.”

“Mirsky?”

“She would have done it as a favour to me; maybe under orders from my former self.” She didn’t bother elaborating: Markarian was sure to know she had died and then been reborn as a clone of the original Irravel. “My former self had the neural conditioning that kept her on the trail of the sleepers. This clone never had it, which meant that my instinct to pursue the sleepers had to be reinforced.”

“By lies?”

“Mirsky would have done it out of friendship,” Irravel said. And for a moment she believed herself, while wondering how friendship could seem so like betrayal.

Markarian’s image smiled. They faced each other across an absurdly long banquet table, with the galaxy projected above it, flickering in the light of candelabra.

“Well?” he said, of the green stain spreading across the spiral. “What do you think?”

Irravel had long ago stopped counting time and distance, but she knew it had been at least fifteen thousand years and that many light-years since they had turned from the plane. Part of her knew, of course: although the wave swallowed suns, it had no use for pulsars, and their metronomic ticking and slow decay allowed positional triangulation in space and time with chilling precision. But she elected to bury that knowledge beneath her conscious thought processes: one of the simpler Juggler tricks.

“What do I think? I think it terrifies me.”

“Our emotional responses haven’t diverged as much as I’d feared.”

They didn’t have to use language. They could have swapped pure mental concepts between ships: concatenated strings of qualia, some of which could only be grasped in minds rewired by Pattern Jugglers. But Irravel considered it sufficient that they could look each other in the eye without flinching.

The galaxy falling below had been frozen in time: light waves struggling to overtake Irravel and Markarian. The wave had appeared to slow, and then halt its advance. But then Markarian had turned, diving back towards the plane. The galaxy quickened to life, rushing to finish thirty thousand years of history before the two ships returned. The wave surged on. Above the banquet table, one arm of the star-clotted spiral was shot through with green, like a mote of ink spreading into blotting paper. The edge of the green wave was feathered, fractal, extending verdant tendrils.

“Do you have any observations?” Irravel asked.

“A few.” Markarian sipped from his chalice. “I’ve studied the patterns of starlight amongst the suns already swallowed by the wave. They’re not uniformly green—it’s correlated with rotational angle. The green matter must be concentrated near the ecliptic, extending above and below it, but not encircling the stars completely.”

Irravel thought back to what the Nestbuilder had shown her.

“Meaning what?” she asked, testing Markarian.

“Swarms of absorbing bodies, on orbits resembling comets, or asteroids. I think the greenfly machines must have dismantled everything smaller than a Jovian, then enveloped the rubble in transparent membranes which they filled with air, water and greenery—self-sustaining biospheres. Then they were cast adrift. Trillions of tiny worlds, around each star. No rocky planets any more.”

Irravel retrieved a name from the deep past. “Like Dyson spheres?”

“Dyson clouds, perhaps.”

“Do you think anyone survived? Are there niches in the wave where humans can live? That was the point of green- fly, after all: to create living space.”

“Maybe,” Markarian said, with no great conviction. “Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud—”

“But you don’t think it’s very likely?”

“I’ve been listening, Irravel—scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident. ”

“It was my fault, Markarian.”

His tone was rueful. “Yes . . . I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.”

“I never intended this.”

“I think that goes without saying, don’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head. “In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.”

“I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.”

“I know.”

And she believed him.

“What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?”

“Because of what they did to you, Irravel.”

He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.

“They were good at surgery,” Markarian said. “Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.” The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. “They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.”

For a long while Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of re-connective surgery around the neck was too slight ever to have shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.

I did it to save your neck,
Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.

“You appear to be telling the truth,” she said, when she had released the children. “The nature of your betrayal was . . .” And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. “Different from what I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.”

“One I’ve lived with for three hundred years of subjective time.”

“You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.” But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.

“What now?” Markarian said. “Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.”

“You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?”

Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. “Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?”

Irravel agreed.

She willed herself into stasis, medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ’chines would only revive her when something—anything— happened, on a galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured, until woken by the same stimulus.

He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.

The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the galaxy for ten thousand light-years around Sol—a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance—at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder’s Slug had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it had swallowed humanity.

“Why did we wake?” Irravel said. “Nothing’s changed, except that it’s grown larger.”

“Maybe not,” Markarian said. “I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the galaxy; from within the wave.”

“Yes?”

“Looks as though someone survived after all.”

The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognised.

“It’s Canasian,” Markarian said.

“Fand subdialect,” Irravel added, marvelling.

It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly didn’t have the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.

Someone wanted to speak to them.

The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiselled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.

Irravel recognised the face.

“It’s him,” she said, in Markarian’s direction. “Remontoire. Somehow he made it across all this time.”

Markarian nodded slowly. “He must have remembered us, and known where to look. Even across thousands of light-years, we can still be seen. There can’t be many objects still moving relativistically.”

Remontoire told his story. His people had fled to the pulsar system twenty thousand years ago—more, now, since his message had taken thousands of years to climb out of the galaxy. They had seen the wave coming, as had thousands of other human factions, and like many they had observed that the wave shunned pulsars: burned-out stellar corpses rarely accompanied by planets. Some intelligence governing the wave must have recognised that pulsars were valueless; that even if a Dyson cloud could be created around them, there would be no sunlight to focus.

For thousands of years they had waited around the pulsar, growing ever more silent and cautious, seeing other cultures make errors that drew the wave upon them, for by now it interpreted any other intelligence as a threat to its progress, assimilating the weapons used against it.

Then—over many more thousands of years— Remontoire’s people watched the wave learn, adapting like a vast neural net, becoming curious about those few pulsars that harboured planets. Soon their place of refuge would become nothing of the sort.

“Help us,” Remontoire said. “Please.”

It took three thousand years to reach them.

For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way. During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver that fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.

Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the next two thousand years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.

“Hope would make an excellent shield,” Markarian mused as they approached it, “if one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other—”

“Don’t think I wouldn’t.”

They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled in.

“Then why don’t you?” Markarian said.

For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. “Because they need us more than I need revenge.”

“A higher cause?”

“Redemption,” she said.

They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them towards the one rock that mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving towards them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.

Conjoiners boarded the
Hirondelle
and invited Irravel into Hope. The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard ship since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes grey with neglect, as if the Conjoiners had given up long before.

Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rock pool filmed with grey dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.

“You came,” he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model Conjoiner: almost fully human.

“You’re not him, are you?” Irravel asked. “You look like him—sound like him—but the image you sent us was of someone much older.”

“I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity; my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire . . . but that was a long time ago, and he was never known by that name to us.”