Edges

Chapter 14

Riffan woke to a startled sense that he was falling. He gasped, his whole body jerked—and then he realized it was just the sensation of zero gee. He grimaced, thinking he must still be aboard Long Watch.

But as consciousness fully asserted itself, confusion set in. He was not in his familiar berth. Instead, he’d awakened alone within a small chamber, its curving walls covered in what he recognized as waving wall-weed. He’d seen the stuff in historical dramas, but never before seen it in use.

The wall-weed glowed gently, the only illumination within the chamber. Long ribbons of it coiled around Riffan’s body, cradling him, its touch warm and gentle… and deeply disturbing.

He thrashed, suddenly desperate to escape its grip. The ribbons released him, leaving him with his momentum untethered so that he bounced across the chamber only to be enfolded by more wall-weed. He grabbed it, frantic to control his motion. He clung to it with a desperate grip as he realized where he must be.

This was Dragon. So it had really happened. He had left Deception Well, left his home, left it far, far behind. Left it forever.

“Love and Nature and the Cosmic First Light,” he whispered. “What have I done?”

Supremely conscious of the vast distance, the unbridgeable gap, that separated him from everything he’d ever known. Deep, shaking breaths.

“Calm down,” he told himself. “You wanted this. You want it. It’ll be okay.”

And if it wasn’t? He’d left another version of himself at home. He spent a minute imagining that other Riffan, no doubt resentful that he’d been the one to stay behind. This thought brought him a slight chagrined smile. “Be grateful, you idiot,” he murmured.

His breath steadied, his heart slowed. He noticed clothing among the wall-weed, newly assembled and still budding off the wall. He reached for it: loose fitting trousers with cuffs at the ankles to keep them from drifting, and a long-sleeved pullover.

As he dressed, he puzzled over the lack of gravity. He’d expected to awaken while Dragon was accelerating to cruising speed. Perhaps they were still coasting, waiting for the swarm ships to catch up?

Perhaps they’d already reached cruising speed.

He wondered how fast that might be. He knew that in theory a reef could pull a ship to mad velocities, but the danger of collision argued against excessive speed. Run too fast, and a ship might be torn apart in the blink of an eye.

At this thought, a shudder ran through him and he muttered to himself, “Think of something else, you fool.”

So he thought about time, instead. What time was it? He suspected several days had passed since his ghost uploaded from Long Watch. After all, it would have taken time to construct this chamber and the now-vanished resurrection pod.

He checked his atrium’s connectivity. Found a network. Posted questions to it: “Where are we? When are we?”

A DI, speaking through his atrium in a soothing male voice, informed him that Dragon was 390 years out of Deception Well.

He squinted. Frowned. “What was that?” he begged. “Say that again?”

“Dragon is presently 390 years and 114 days out of Deception Well.”

Could it be true? Riffan did not want to believe it. If it was true, it meant that he’d been gone somewhere—Cold sleep? Data storage? Did it matter?—for five times longer than he’d been alive. It meant that everyone he’d known at home was…

He could not finish the thought. He didn’t know how. They could be dead. And if not, if they were still alive and he somehow met them again, would he even know them? His own parents, his sister, his cousins—all of them now surely transformed by the passage of so much time. Become strangers. And that other version of himself that had stayed behind? That man was now surely forever sundered from him, a separate being in the mind of the Unknown God.

He squeezed the wall-weed harder as if he could arrest the flight of time with his grip, but he was too late, too late. Everything he’d once known, gone and unrecoverable.

“What have I done?” he moaned, struggling not to be sick. He knew—he’d known—he was leaving Deception Well forever but—

Three hundred ninety years!

Why so long? Why? He could only think that something must have gone horribly wrong.

He dove for the thin gel door that sealed the chamber, shot through it into a tunnel beyond. More gently glowing wall-weed. No one about. He suffered a sudden sick fear that he was alone here, utterly alone.

The chamber where he’d wakened was at the tunnel’s end. He launched himself away from it, shouting, “Hello, hello! Is anyone here? Call out if you are!”

No one answered. He shot past four other chambers, their gel doors dilated open. A swift glance into each confirmed no one inside.

He reached a U-shaped intersection. Clambered around the tight curve and found a gel door, this one sealed. He guessed another level of habitation lay beyond it. Heart racing, he grabbed a fist-full of wall-weed and shoved himself through.

To his surprise, he emerged into a beautiful, sprawling chamber made to look like a wide pavilion surrounded by an open, airy forest of giant trees, green ferns growing among them. Clusters of white camellias hung from a pergola, scenting the air. The angle and color of sunlight slanting through the lattice suggested it might be late afternoon—though he wasn’t skilled at judging such things.

He reminded himself to breathe. Filling his lungs, he looked around—and if he’d been standing he would have collapsed in relief at the sight of Kona gliding across the chamber to meet him.

“I am so glad to see you!” Riffan cried out as he took Kona’s proffered hand. “I didn’t know what to think when I woke up alone… but where is everybody?”

Beyond Kona he saw Urban and Clemantine, and a third person he didn’t recognize, someone with decorative blue skin and short, thick, creamy white hair. They were all together in a nook, looking at him expectantly. But no one else.

Many more people could have fit comfortably within that expansive chamber. Riffan wondered where they were, wondered how many had come on the expedition. He didn’t know, but Pasha should be there.

His grip on Kona’s hand tightened as a fresh wave of anxiety swept through him. “Where is Pasha?” he pleaded. “And why has it been so long?”

“We’ve had some trouble,” Kona said. “But don’t worry, we haven’t lost anyone. Not yet.”

After they explained things to him—especially that preposterous part about being on the hunt for another courser—Riffan thought he ought to be angry, but he couldn’t muster the emotion. He was too overwhelmed. So much to take in! And the beacon. The beacon! Something was out there. The idea of it made his heart race in curiosity, in excitement. In fear.

All manner of speculation made swift passage through his brain until he had to remind himself that the simplest explanation was, as always, the most likely.

“Perhaps it’s an ancient colony ship,” he suggested. “Damaged in some accident and coasting without propulsion for thousands of years. If it set out before we knew of the Chenzeme, the ship’s company would not have been afraid of signaling their location.”

“If it was that old,” Urban countered, “the Chenzeme would have found it and vaporized it long ago.”

Riffan felt his cheeks heat. “Yes. Yes, of course,” he conceded, unable to deny this grim logic. He thought on it for a few seconds, then asked, “Is this the first signal you’ve heard? There’s been nothing else, nothing at all from the Hallowed Vasties?”

“Nothing,” Vytet confirmed in a voice low and rich, yet feminine. Deep blue eyes in a pale-blue face gave her a faraway look. “Though the nearest stars are still so distant we can’t reasonably expect to detect a radio signal.”

“And what of the visible spectrum?” Riffan asked. “Surely we can see more now than from Deception Well?”

“We’re closer,” Urban said, “but not close enough for the detail we need to see. Tanjiri is the nearest star and for some years we’ve seen evidence of objects in orbit. Odd shapes. Not spherical. Gravitational clusters of debris, maybe. Or remnant megastructures that survived the collapse.”

At a gesture from Vytet, a black rectangle opened within the wall of the alcove, over-writing a portion of the forest scene. Two astronomical images appeared within it. On the left, a cordoned star—an ancient image, at least fourteen hundred years old, captured by a telescope somewhere on the frontier. Distance had flattened the cordon’s spherical geometry into a disk aglow in the infrared range of the spectrum.

“This was Tanjiri when it was still cordoned,” Vytet said. She gestured to the image on the right. “This is how it appeared the last time we surveyed it—a simple star with no visible structures. But a variation in luminosity suggests that objects continue to pass across the face of the star, dimming its light. Possibly a planetary body, but more likely, large remnant structures.”

Riffan flushed with excitement at this prospect. What would such structures look like? And might they still contain life?

“Is Tanjiri our destination?” he asked Urban.

“For now, unless the hunt pulls us away.”

A sigh from Kona and a slow shake of his head as he studied the image of the cordon. “I cannot imagine what it must have looked like from the inside. The scale of it! Swarms of orbiting bodies, so many the star’s light could not get through.”

“There had to be a decentralized intelligence overseeing it,” Riffan said. “Coordinating a flocking algorithm to prevent the components from crashing into one another.”

“Agreed,” Vytet said. “But there would have been layers and layers of orbital lanes, tilted at different angles. So many it might not have looked crowded from inside.”

“And still,” Kona rumbled, “it seems impossible.”

“But it was possible.” Riffan turned again to the image. “The cordons were real, but they didn’t last. None of them lasted—and that’s as strange as that they existed at all. Why did they fail? Was it because the design is inherently unstable? Vulnerable to chained disasters? Or did the people who built them destroy themselves?”

“Maybe they reached an apotheosis and moved on,” Clemantine said, startling Riffan with the bitterness in her voice.

An uneasy silence. Averted gazes. “You’re referring to the Communion virus, aren’t you?” Riffan asked.

Her shoulders rose and fell in a quiet sigh. “It’s just so silent out there. There’s only the beacon. What if it’s a repository of the virus? Bleating into the void to attract a new host.”

“We’re not vulnerable to the Communion virus anymore,” Urban said. “And despite the silence, we are going to find life somewhere. Survivors. We have to.”

“Spoken with such certainty,” Vytet teased, “as if you can bend the future to your will.”

Urban’s chin rose. That pirate smile. “Who says I can’t?”

Kona said, “It’ll be safer for us if it’s all ruins—but tragic, too.”

“Even if it is only ruins, I want to know,” Riffan said. “I want to begin to understand what happened.”

Somewhere in the course of that long, convoluted introduction to his new life, Riffan agreed to accompany Urban on an outrider—but not as himself, not as this physical version of him. Urban only asked him to send a ghost, and that was easy enough, wasn’t it?

He eventually retreated to his assigned chamber, needing time alone to process it all. He huddled there, curled within the grip of the wall-weed—he’d begun to consider its touch comforting—while he tried to decide how he felt, how he should feel.

He wondered: Am I happy?

He thought he might be. He was definitely still in shock. It would take time to adjust emotionally to the facts of this new life. So much to learn—and already eighty percent of the way to the Hallowed Vasties!

The thought sent a fresh burst of excitement shooting through him. But then his emotional pendulum reversed. His chest tightened in grief as his thoughts turned again to his parents, his sister, lost to him, far gone in both time and space. Shades of past lovers arose in his memory too. Never a permanent partner for him or it would not have been so easy to leap away into the void.

He wondered if that would be a common trait among the others who were still archived. Loneliness stirred in him. He had always meant to find someone. He’d hoped to. But he’d always been distracted by his work. It wasn’t fair, really, to even call it work. His studies, then. His studies had always come first and his interests were wide, rooted in a sense of wonder at the astonishing existence of all things, of the Creation.

“You lucky fool,” he said aloud. “Think of where you are and where you’re bound.”

Beyond the walls of this miraculous hybrid ship innumerable stars swirled in a great gyre, some of them accompanied by worlds, and some of those worlds had given rise to lifeforms and to living machines in such great variety that their span reached from the molecular scale to the great sun-cloaking cordon of a Dyson swarm of the Hallowed Vasties.

To learn what he could of it, that was the task Riffan had been given, whether by his own heritage or by the inscrutable will of the Unknown God. However long and hard and monotonous and lonely his studies might be, inevitably they revealed yet one more detail behind the machinery of existence, and that was reason enough to have made the leap to Dragon, despite what he’d left behind.

He drew a deep breath. “You’ll do just fine,” he assured himself. And then a cynical chuckle, “Or die trying.”

Urban replicated his ghost, once again splitting his timeline.

There was a lottery in each replication. At that moment, he became himself and someone else. Their points of view divergent. Their futures different.

As himself, he would stay behind aboard Dragon, while that other version uploaded to Elepaio, the outrider he’d chosen for this mission. That ghost would command the little ship, taking it as close as good judgment allowed to the site of the beacon.

He swore softly, indulging in disappointment, because he was the version who would stay behind. But if his ghost returned, the memories of both timelines would belong to him and he would have both gone and stayed.

Many hours later, a message came in from Elepaio, relayed through Lam Lha and Artemis. It confirmed his ghost and Riffan’s had reached the outrider, and included the precise time Elepaio had departed, breaking away from the communications network that linked the fleet.

Urban knew the outrider’s planned course. He could calculate its position. But its dark hull and minimal heat signature meant he could not see it, and it was too far away for the lateral lines of Dragon’s gravitational sensor to detect its propulsion reef. With Elepaio out of the communications network, he had no way to confirm its actual position. The little ship had become invisible to Dragon’s senses. His senses.

It was a stark reminder of how easily dark, quiet, cool objects could disappear in the great empty. An unneeded reminder. Urban kept a constant watch, ever alert to the possibility of a hostile vessel coasting unseen to well within weapons range.

Radar could map the space around him, but it would slide off the hull of a fully stealthed attacker. And using radar would expose Dragon’s position when he wanted to stay hidden.

So he used passive detection. A nearby object would eclipse background stars. He watched for that. And he was alert for gravitational anomalies—but he detected none.

Time passed. Three hundred twenty-one days.

Then a DI brought him a report gleaned from the newest astronomical records. A faint point of white light had been observed behind Dragon, where no light had been seen before. Its spectral signature confirmed its identity as a Chenzeme warship.

At last, Urban had found his long-sought prey.