Absolution Gap

EPILOGUE

She issues another command and the mechanical butterflies disengage their interlaced wings, shattering the temporary screen they have formed. The butterflies reassemble themselves into the lacy, fluttering fabric of her sleeve. When she looks into the sky she sees only a handful of stars: those bright enough to shine through the moonlight and the sparkling river of the ring. Of the green star that the butterflies have revealed there is no longer any sign. But she knows it is still there, just too faint to be seen. Once revealed, it is not something that can ever be forgotten.

She knows that there is nothing actually wrong with the star. Its fusion processes have not been unbalanced; its atmospheric chemistry has not been perturbed. It shines as hot as it did a century ago, and the neutrinos spilling from its core attest to normal conditions of pressure, temperature and nucleotide abundance. But something very wrong has happened to the system that once orbited the star. Its worlds have been unmade, stripped back to raw atoms, then reassembled into a cloud of glassy bubbles: air-and-water-filled habitats, countless numbers of them. Vast mirrors—forged in the same orgy of demolition and reconstruction—trap every outgoing photon of starlight and pump it into the swarm of habitats. Nothing is wasted; nothing is squandered. In the bubbles, the sunlight feeds complex, teetering webs of closed-cycle biochemistry. Plants and animals thrive in the swarm, machines tending to their every need. People are welcome: indeed, it was people for whom the swarm was made in the first place.

But people were never asked.

This green-stained sun is not the first, nor will it be the last. There are dozens more stained suns out there. The transforming machines that make the swarms of habitats can hop from system to system with the mindless efficiency of locusts. They arrive, make copies of themselves and then they start to dismantle. All attempts to contain their spread have failed. It only takes one to start the process, although they arrive by the million.

They are called greenfly.

No one knows where they came from, or who made them. The best guess is that they are a rogue terraforming technology: something developed almost a thousand years earlier, in the centuries before the Inhibitors came. But they are obviously much more than revenant machines. They are too quick and strong for that. They are something that has spent a long time learning to survive by itself, growing fierce and feral in the process. They are something opportunistic: something that has hidden in the woodwork, waiting for its moment.

And, she thinks, we gave them that moment.

While humanity was under the heel of the Inhibitors, nothing like this outbreak could ever have been allowed to happen. The Inhibitors—themselves a form of spacefaring replicating machinery—would never have tolerated a rival. But the Inhibitors were gone now; they had not been seen for more than four hundred years. Not that they had exactly been beaten: that wasn’t how it had happened. But they had been pushed back, frontiers and buffer-zones established. Much of the galaxy, presumably, still belonged to them. But the attempt to exterminate humanity—this local cull—had failed.

It had nothing to do with human cleverness.

It had everything to do with circumstance, luck, cowardice. Collectively, the Inhibitors had been failing for millions of years. Sooner or later, an emergent species was bound to break loose. Humanity would probably not have been that species, even with the assistance from the Hades matrix. But the matrix had pointed them in the right direction. It had sent them to Hela, and there they had made the correct decision: not to invoke the shadows, but to petition the assistance of the Nestbuilders. It was they who had annihilated the scuttlers, when the scuttlers had made the mistake of negotiating with shadows.

And we almost made the same one, she thinks. They came so close that even now she turns cold at the thought of it.

The white armour of her butterflies shuffles closer.

“We should leave now,” her protector says, calling from the end of the jetty.

“You gave me an hour.”

“You’ve used most of it, stargazing.”

It doesn’t seem possible. Perhaps he’s exaggerating, or perhaps she really did spend that long picking out the green star. Sometimes she slipped into a reverie of self-remembrance, and the moments oozed into hours, the hours into decades. She is so old that sometimes she even frightens herself.

“A little longer,” she says.

The Nestbuilders (she thinks back to the earlier, now-forgotten name for the symbionts: the conch-makers) had long practised a strategy of skulking. Rather than confront the Inhibitors head-on, they preferred to slip between the stars, avoiding contact wherever possible. They were experts in stealth. But after acquiring some of their weapons and data, humanity had pursued a tactic of pure confrontation. They had cleansed local space of the Inhibitors. The Nestbuilders hadn’t liked this: they had warned of the dangers in upsetting equilibria. Some things, no matter how bad, were always better than the alternative.

This wasn’t what humanity wanted to hear.

Maybe it was all worth it, she thinks. For four hundred years we had a second Golden Age. We did wonderful things, left wonderful marks on time. We had a blast. We forgot the old legends and made better ones, new fables for new times. But all the while, something else was waiting in the woodwork. When we took the Inhibitors out of the equation, we gave greenfly its chance.

It isn’t the end of everything. Worlds are being evacuated as the greenfly machines sweep through their systems. But after the catastrophic mismanagement of the first few evacuations, things move more smoothly now. The authorities are ahead of the wave. They know all the tricks of crowd-control.

She looks out into darkness again. The greenfly machines move slowly: there are still colonies out there that won’t fall victim to them for hundreds, even thousands of years. There is still time to live and love. Rejuvenation, even for an old demi-Conjoiner, has its allure. They say there are settled worlds in the Pleiades now. From there, the wave of green-stained suns must seem pretty remote, pretty unthreatening.

But by the time she gets to the Pleiades, she will be another four hundred years downstream from her birth.

She thinks, as she often does, about the messages from the shadows. They had also spoken of being harried by machines that turned stars green. She wonders, not for the first time, if that could really be a coincidence. Under the ruling paradigm of brane theory, the message must have come from the present, rather than the distant future or the distant past. But what if the theory was wrong? What if all of it—the shadow branes, the bulk, the gravitational signalling—was just a convenient fiction to dress up an even stranger truth?

She doesn’t know. She doesn’t think she ever will know.

She isn’t sure she wants to.

She turns from the sky, directing her attention to the ocean. It was here that they died, back when this place was called Ararat. No one calls it that now: no one even remembers that Ararat was ever its name. But she remembers.

She remembers seeing that moon being shattered as the Inhibitors deflected the energy of the cache-weapon while the Nostalgia for Infinity made its escape.

Inhibitors. Cache-weapon. Nostalgia for Infinity: they are like the incantations of a childhood game, forgotten for years. They sound faintly ridiculous, yet also freighted with a terrible significance.

She hadn’t really seen the moon being shattered, if truth be told. It was her mother who had seen it. But her memories made no great distinction between the one and the other. She had been a witness, even if she had seen things through another’s eyes.

She thinks of Antoinette, Xavier, Blood and the others: all the people who by choice or compulsion—had remained on Ararat while the starship made its escape. None of them could have survived the phase of bombardment when the pieces of the ruined moon began to hit the ocean. They would have drowned, as tsunamis washed away their fragile little surface communities.

Unless, she thinks, they chose to drown before then. What if the sea welcomed them? The Pattern Jugglers had already co-operated in the departure of the ship. Was it such a leap of imagination to think of them saving the remaining islanders?

People had been living here for four hundred years, swimmers amongst them. Sometimes, the records said, they spoke of encountering ghost impressions: other, older minds. Were the islanders amongst them, preserved in the living memory of the sea after all these years?

The glowing smudges in the water now surround the jetty. She had made a decision even before she descended the transit stalk: she will swim, and she will open her mind to the ocean. And she will tell the ocean everything that she knows: everything that is going to happen to this place when the terraformers arrive. No one knows what will happen when the greenfly machines touch the alien organism of a Juggler sea, which one will assimilate the other. It is an experiment that has not yet been performed. Perhaps the ocean will absorb the machines harmlessly, as it has absorbed so much else. Perhaps there will be a kind of stalemate. Or perhaps this world, like dozens before it, will be ripped apart and remade, in a fury of reorganisation.

She does not know what that will mean for the minds now in the ocean. On some level, she is certain, they already know what is about to happen. They cannot have failed to pick up the nuances of panic as the human population made its escape plans. But she thinks it unlikely that anyone has swum with the specific purpose of telling the world what is to come. It might not make any difference. On the other hand, quite literally, it might make all the difference in the world.

It is, she supposes, a matter of courtesy. Everything that happens here, everything that will happen, is her responsibility.

She issues another command to the butterflies. The white armour dissipates, the mechanical insects fluttering in a cloud above her head. They linger, not straying too far, but leaving her naked on the jetty.

She risks a glance back towards her protector. She can just see his silhouette against the milky background of the sky, his childlike form leaning against a walking stick. He is looking away, his head bobbing impatiently. He wants to leave very much, but she doesn’t blame him for that.

She sits on the edge of the jetty. The water roils around her in anticipation. Things move within it: shapes and phantasms. She will swim for a little while, and open her mind. She does not know how long it will take, but she will not leave until she is ready. If her protector has already departed—she does not think this is very likely, but it must still be considered—then she will have to make other plans.

She slips into the sea, into the glowing green memory of Ararat.