Galactic North (52 page)

“What his name?”

“Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.”

She had to ask. “Did he make it back to a commune?”

“Yes, of course,” the man said, as if her question was foolish. “How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?”

“And did he forgive me?”

“I forgive you now,” he said. “It amounts to the same thing.”

She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.

The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change—no matter how slight— would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it—but other than that, all they had done was wait.

They were very good at waiting.

“How many refugees did you bring?”

“One hundred thousand.” Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. “I know—too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.”

She thought back to her own sleepers. “I know. Still, we might be able to take more . . . I don’t know about Markarian ’s ship, but—”

He cut her off, gently. “I think you’d better come with me,” said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the
Hideyoshi.

“How much of it did you explore?”

“Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere aboard this ship,” Remontoire said. “If there are two hundred cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.”

“No sleepers?”

“Just this one.”

They had arrived at a plinth supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary: spacesuited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.

“Is he dead?” Irravel asked.

“Depends what you mean by dead.” The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. “His organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the
Hideyoshi
would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.”

“Why didn’t he tell me what had become of him?”

“No guarantee he knew. Once he was in this state, with his personality running entirely on machine substrates, he could have edited his own memories and perceptual inputs—deceiving himself that he was still corporeal.”

Irravel looked away from the casket, forcing troubling questions from her mind. “Is his personality still running the ship?”

“We detected only caretaker programs, capable of imitating him when the need arose, but lacking sentience.”

“Is that all there was?”

“No.” Remontoire reached through one of the casket’s larger fractures, prizing something from Markarian’s fingers. It was a sliver of computer memory. “We examined this already, though not in great detail. It’s partitioned into one hundred and ninety areas, each large enough to hold complete neural and genetic maps for one human being, encoded into superposed electron states on Rydberg atoms.”

She took the sliver from him. It didn’t feel like much. “He burned the sleepers onto this?”

“Three hundred years is much longer than any of them expected to sleep. By scanning them he lost nothing.”

“Can you retrieve them?”

“It would not be trivial,” the Conjoiner said, “but given time, we could do it. Assuming any of them would welcome being born again, so far from home.”

She thought of the infected galaxy hanging below them, humming with the chill sentience of machines. “Maybe the kindest thing would be to simulate the past,” she said. “Recreate Yellowstone and revive them on it, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.”

“Is that what you’re advocating?”

“No,” she said, after toying with the idea in all seriousness. “We need all the genetic diversity we can get if we’re going to establish a new branch of humanity outside the galaxy.”

She thought about it some more. Soon they would witness Hope’s destruction, as the wave of machines tore through it with the mindlessness of stampeding animals. Some of them might try to follow the
Hirondelle
, but so far the machines moved too slowly to catch the ship, even if they forced it back towards Galactic North.

Where else could they go?

There were globular clusters high above the galaxy— tightly packed shoals of old stars the wave hadn’t reached, but where fragments of humanity might already have sought refuge. If the clusters proved unwelcoming, there were high-latitude stars, flung from the galaxy a billion years ago, and some might have dragged their planetary systems with them. If those failed—and it would be tens of thousands of years before the possibilities were exhausted—the
Hirondelle
could always loop around towards Galactic South and search there, striking out for the Clouds of Magellan. Ultimately, of course—if any fragment of Irravel’s children still clung to humanity, and remembered where they’d come from, and what had become of it, they would want to return to the galaxy, even if that meant confronting the wave.

“That’s the plan then?” Remontoire said.

Irravel shrugged, turning away from the plinth where Markarian lay. “Unless you’ve got a better one.”

Here are eight stories—more than one hundred thousand words—set against a common background. I’ve written two other novellas and four novels set in the same imagined universe: not far shy of a million words. I’ve plans for more stories and books.

You can probably tell that I like future histories.

The first one I encountered was Larry Niven’s “Known Space” sequence. I was in my middle teens, which is probably exactly the right target age. As I started reading the stories and novels embedded within this consistent timeline, beginning with
Ringworld
, and later the collection
Tales from Known Space
, I found myself plunged into a dizzying series of venues and eras. In some of the stories— a few of which were actually set
earlier
than the date at which I was reading them—humanity was still confined to the solar system and had little or no knowledge of alien cultures around other stars. Some stories were set a few centuries downstream, with colonies beginning to be established around other systems. Still more stories were set in an era when humankind had access to faster-than-light drives, teleportation technology, planet-gouging weapons and near-indestructible materials, and was in contact with many variegated alien races.

At first glance, not all of Niven’s stories appeared to belong in the same universe. But the connections were there, if one looked closely: finding them was half the fun. It was like pulling back from a close-up in which the individual stories were coloured chips in a mosaic. Suddenly you began to see the bigger picture; the larger composition upon which the author had been labouring. It hardly mattered that not all the details were absolutely consistent between the stories, or that some of the tales had been retrofitted into the scheme after initial publication. One still had a sense of the future as teeming, chaotic, prone to unexpected swerves and lurching accelerations.

That sense of a future history as a single fictional entity—a whole larger than the sum of its parts—has never left me, and it’s largely why I find the form so appealing. Future histories are often dismissed as exercises in laziness: why invent a new background when you can reuse one from another story. I don’t quite agree. For my money, it’s generally more difficult to write a second story in a pre-existing universe than to make a new one up from scratch. You have to work within ground rules already laid down, which places severe limits on narrative freedom. If you’ve introduced a world-changing invention in the first story, it has to be incorporated into the background texture of the second, unless the second is set earlier than the first. And if that’s the case, the second story must not introduce inconsistencies in the first. By the time you’re on the eighth or ninth story in a sequence, the narrative airspace can be getting awfully crowded. Future histories usually reach a point of limiting complexity, when trying to slot new stories into the stack becomes so fiendishly difficult that most writers move on to new pastures. I suppose the difficult part is knowing when you’ve reached that point.

Future histories obey differing degrees of consistency. At the soft extreme you have something like the
Star Trek
universe, in which the writers have been perfectly willing to go back and re-imagine certain details, even if that means contradicting data in earlier episodes. At the harder extreme, which I’d guess is almost exclusively the purview of written fiction, you have writers who maintain a furious lock-hold on consistency. Their published stories are only the iceberg’s tip of a vast private archive of background data, and no new story can be written without the monkish consultation of that hidden bible. I admire anyone with that degree of dedication to the art, but it’s not my approach. My stories fit together like a badly made jigsaw. Some of the pieces don’t even seem to come from quite the same puzzle. You probably need to file down a few corners and press hard to make them fit. My bible consists of one small Word file containing a sketchy chronology, and the written works themselves. If I’m writing a story and a detail comes up that may refer to something I think I might possibly have written in
Chasm City
, I’ll try to find the relevant page in
CC.
But I won’t kill myself if I don’t find it. In this approach I’m in the good company of John Varley, who refused to go back and read any of his “Eight Worlds” stories before writing
Steel Beach.

I’ve arranged the stories, as near as I can, in chronological order: “Great Wall of Mars’ is set barely two hundred years from now, while the last story, "Galactic North,’” encompasses most of the future history and slingshots into the deep, distant future. But chronological order has little to do with the order in which the pieces were written. The earliest published story in this collection, “Dilation Sleep,” is a case in point. It was sold in 1989 and published in 1990, a full ten years before my first novel. It has roots that go back another ten years: in my teens I wrote two novels (
A Union World
and
Dominant Species
, since you asked) and a slew of stories set against an unashamedly Nivenesque background, in which a United Nations-dominated humanity makes contact with a zoo-load of alien races and obtains the secret of faster-than-light travel. Although I never tried to publish any of that stuff (which isn’t to say I didn’t inflict it on my long-suffering friends) it was a valuable learning experience. Because I’d written two moderately long novels by the time I was eighteen, I wasn’t intimidated by the idea of doing it again, and to this day I’ve maintained a good track record of finishing projects once I start them: good practice, I think, for any budding writer.

But by the time I finished the second novel, I was already growing dissatisfied with all the unquestioned assumptions that had gone into the melting pot. I vowed that the next novel I wrote would take a more rigorous approach, eschewing such easy cop-outs as humanoid aliens, conveniently Earth-like planets and magic faster-than-light travel. It would owe less to ideas gleaned from media SF and more to what I was reading, including scientific non- fiction by the likes of Paul Davies, John Gribbin and Carl Sagan. But those early books and stories weren’t completely wasted. Some of the locations, terminology and characters in them have cropped up again in the “Revelation Space” universe, sometimes transformed, sometimes not. Yellowstone and Chasm City, which feature as background detail in “Dilation Sleep,” go right back to that first unpublished novel.

“Dilation Sleep” itself is an example of the kind of story that—if I were to take a scrupulous approach—really ought not to be in this collection. It’s that wrong jigsaw piece: a story written before I had all the large-scale details of the history nailed down. That’s more or less exactly why I wanted to include it, though. I think it’s of interest for the details it
does
share with the other stories, not the points of deviation. It’s got the notion of colony worlds linked by slower-than-light spacecraft; it’s got Yellowstone and the Melding Plague; it even has a reference to the Sylveste family (and yes, I did already know that they had an influential and ambitious scion named Dan, who’d go on to cause a bit of trouble). I could have tinkered with the story to remedy some of the more egregious points of inconsistency (change “spacers” to “Ultras,” that kind of thing) but in the end I decided, not without misgivings, to let it stand unaltered.

The curious reader might wonder why I failed to return to the RS universe for another seven years after the publication of “Dilation Sleep.” It wasn’t for want of trying. I did write other stories, but they were never good enough to get published, even when I was selling other material. The strongest ideas from these dead stories were eventually salvaged and incorporated into later pieces, not all of them within the RS universe. In any case, “Dilation Sleep” was part of a batch of stories I wrote before moving to the Netherlands and getting my first paid job. Settling into a new country inevitably placed constraints on my writing activities, and when I did manage to free up some time, I decided I’d be better off investing my energies in a novel.

By the time I came to write “A Spy in Europa” and “Galactic North,” both of which were written in parallel with work on both
Revelation Space
and
Chasm City
, I was beginning to get a feel for the large-scale architecture of the future history. Here’s a shocking confession: I stole a lot of good ideas from other writers. I’ve already mentioned Niven and Varley, but I owe an equally obvious debt to Bruce Sterling, whose “Shaper/Mechanist” sequence blew my mind on several levels. Sterling’s future history, even though it consists of only a single novel and a handful of stories, still feels utterly plausible to me twenty years after I first encountered it. Part of me wishes Sterling would write more “Shaper/Mechanist” stories; another part of me admires him precisely for not doing so. Read
Schismatrix
if you haven’t already done so: it will melt your face.