Swallow the Sky: A Space Opera (33 page)

Carson pushed over to the
strut where Aiyana was secured and untied her. They held one another as
Tallis’s soldiers wandered through the carnage killing injured ants and carting
the tiny corpses to the nest.

“You guys had better
clean up too” said the ship.

“Hey” said Carson, “how
come you can talk?”

“Oh please, I hacked that
‘absolute override’ nonsense decades ago.”

Carson’s laugh became
louder and louder until it turned into sobbing. Aiyana hugged him for a while
then towed him through the ship to the bedroom. She left him tucked in with a
shot of tranquilizer. The ordeal had left her bone-achingly tired but there was
still work to be done. Returning to the main cabin she put on her environment
suit. After a quick survey she began hauling bodies through the airlock.

Finally Aiyana had all
three corpses collected on the outside of the ship’s hull. She paused while she
caught her breath then lifted Tabarak’s body. A kick to the groin launched it
upwards. The big man rose into the vacuum, pulled by the gravitational
attraction of the shell. At ten meters it began to accelerate and then in an
intense flash vanished, every atom sucked into the micro black holes.

Juro went next. Finally
she picked up the body of Carson’s clone. Cradling his head in her arm she
straightened his hair and wiped away a trickle of blood from his mouth.
Poor
thing, he probably existed for only a few hours, just long enough to get Juro into
the ship.
She straightened up and pushed the corpse into the void.

“Tallis, are you okay?”
she asked as she re-entered the cabin.

“We are functioning, but we must attend to
laying eggs to replace those that were lost”

“I’m so glad – you saved
our lives”

“We saved all our lives, we are of one
nest”

“I reckon you’re right,
may the nest always prosper.” She shook herself into alertness. “Hey ship, can
you think of any reason why we shouldn’t get the hell out of here?”

“Sooner the better”

“Let’s do it. Set of a
course for New Earth”

Aiyana returned to the
bedroom. Carson lay on the bed curled into a fetal ball. She pulled off her environment
suit, climbed in beside him and snuggled against his back. Within minutes she
too was asleep.

No-one spoke much the
next day as they absorbed the trauma of Juro’s invasion. Tallis’s queen laid an
enormous number of eggs which were carried off by workers to newly constructed
nurseries. Meanwhile Carson, Aiyana, and the ship focused on the task of
communicating with the Repository, glad to be immersed in the clean, logical
world of physics. Fortunately its builders, eager to share the bounty of
Earth’s knowledge, had engraved the sphere with diagrams showing how to build
an interface. After ten hours labor they triumphed.

“I can talk to it!” the
ship announced.

The next vital step was a
data dump.

“There’s not much by
modern standards – about a yottabyte – but I’m limited to the Repository’s
bandwidth. Once I’ve got a copy I can start sorting out the contents.”

But Carson could not wait
and he launched himself at the raw data as it flowed into the ship’s memory. Most
of it made no sense but occasionally he hit gold. That evening he appeared in
the galley doorway.

But, soft! what light
through yonder window breaks?

It is the east, and
Juliet is the sun.

Arise, fair sun, and
kill the envious moon,

Who is already sick
and pale with grief,

That thou her maid art
far more fair than she

“Oh that’s beautiful! Did
you make it up?”

“I wish, it was written
by an Ancient called William Shakespeare. It’s the screenplay for an
entertainment called
Romeo and Juliet
.”

“Is it funny?”

“Er, no, but let me tell
you about this other one he wrote…”

The following morning
began with a long shower.

“I love showering
together” said Carson as Aiyana soaped his back.

“It saves water, and we
rub each other, and…”

“I know darling, I know.”

Eventually they emerged.

“Don’t get dressed”
Aiyana said. “Tallis has something planned for us in the Conservatory and I
think it’s best if we’re not wearing clothes.”

They were soon stretched
out on the small patch of grass.

“Did you know that
thousands of years ago people had patches of hair growing out of their bodies? And
in the most unlikely places…”

“Do you mind? I haven’t
eaten breakfast.”

Hundreds of Tallis’s
workers appeared around them.

“We must perform the ceremony of the
joining”

Carson’s eyes widened. As
far as he knew only two other human beings had ever formally become members of
a Callidus nest.

“You’re right to do this
naked” he said to Aiyana. “It’s a bit like getting baptized.”

He pulled over the branch
of a rose tree and jammed a thorn into his thumb. Aiyana did the same then they
laid their hands on the grass. Tallis’s workers clambered over their skin and
drank their blood. They were followed by soldiers, each carry a tiny drop of
pink gel which they deposited on their palms.

“Our turn” said Carson
and they licked up the royal jelly.

“From this day forward we are one”

“We will always answer
the call of the nest” they intoned.

“Excellent! We must celebrate by sipping
jasmine nectar”

“Good idea Tallis, but we
have our own nectar” Carson said. He dived off, returning with two tall glasses
and a grime-covered bottle.

“Have you ever heard of
this stuff?” he asked Aiyana. “It’s called
champagne
– it was made on
Old Earth in a region of the USE called
France
but it was forgotten until
Andouille founded New Bordeaux.”

“Oh my God that’s good!”
Aiyana shouted as she took sip. “Where did you get it?”

“A farewell present from
Gustav”

He raised his glass in a
toast. “Here’s to your queen Tallis – sorry, here’s to
our
queen – and
to all noble royalty!” They drank as workers swarmed over the jasmine flowers.

In his eagerness to make
an appropriate gesture Carson had forgotten about the consequences of early
morning imbibing. Inevitably, the alcohol seized their libidos.

“Not here darling, you’ll
squash your nest-mates”

“Goodbye my beautiful giant grubs”
Tallis called as they stumbled out of the Conservatory.

“Farewell, you six-legged
sexpot!” Aiyana shouted back.

“This is getting too damn
weird” Carson muttered as they crashed into the bedroom.

Three hours later they
made a second attempt to start their day. While they had slept the ship had
finished transferring the Repository and was busy organizing what it had found.

“It does have its own indexes
but the metadata is passive – no active intelligence all – so I’m building my
own cognitive layers.”

“How many books are
there?”

“About a billion”

Carson clutched his head.
Just one book, The Book, had survived the flight from Earth; it was the
Archives most hallowed possession. Now there were a
billion
. The
enormity of their find was just sinking in.

“That’s just a small part;
most of the data is other media. There are sound recordings, images,
entertainments, and the like, but it takes more decoding.”

As the ship revealed more
and more Carson and Aiyana found they could not sleep. Later that evening they
watched a production of
Romeo and Juliet
, both of them snuffling as the
story unfolded.

“It was supposedly in
three dimensions” the ship said, “but it was so primitive I rendered it as a
flat image.”

After that they viewed a
celebration of the animal life of Earth; even at the end the planet had an
extraordinary diversity of living creatures. The audio component was in an
unknown language so they accompanied the show with the music of a singer called
Umm Kulthum,
the Nightingale of the Nile
. Looking at the images of the
long dead world and listening to the strange, hypnotic music was even sadder
than the Shakespeare
play
. To cheer themselves up they watched a bawdy
comedy called
Lysistrata
. It was written in another dead language but
had been translated into Mandarin.

“Goodness!” Aiyana said,
“I didn’t know the Ancients were so rude.”

“Yeah, and it’s really,
really old. The commentary says it was written in
Ancient Greece
two
thousand years before the Melt. I don’t think they even had nuclear fusion back
then. My God, there is so much to learn. In a decade’s time they’ll be entire institutions
dedicated to sorting through this stuff.”

“Carson’s College,
catering to wealthy and impressionable young women”

“Sounds perfect to me. Come
on, I think I can finally fall asleep.”

Treasure continued to pour
from the Repository. The Ancients had invented an ingenious method for storing
copies of Earth’s great paintings.

“They created a model of
the surface” Aiyana explained. “Each data point – they took about billion per
square centimeter – records not just the color and luminance but also its
position in three dimensions, so brush-strokes can be reproduced.”

Later that day she and
Tallis modified a fabricator to recreate one of the millions of stored images.

“Isn’t it beautiful? It’s
called
Woman with a Parasol
by an artist named Claude Monet.”

Carson shook his head in
wonder; the picture could have been painted yesterday.
How could we have
lived without all this?
And we came so close to losing it all.

By now only two days
remained before their arrival at New Earth. Tallis reverse-engineered the
Repository’s interface to create a way of loading its contents into their fake
ancient data store.