Edges

Chapter 16

Aboard the outrider Elepaio, Riffan soon discovered he did not like living as a ghost. Virtual existence did not feel real to him. He could inhabit a simulation of his body within the library—a duplicate of the library aboard Dragon—and though it was a good simulation, even an excellent one, it never felt quite right. That virtual world was too smooth, too clean, too convenient—too lacking in the rough complexity of actual existence. It left him feeling disoriented, unsure of his ability to distinguish between reality and delusion.

He did not have the option of retreating to a physical existence. The outrider did not have the room or the resources to support a living avatar. His one alternative was to forgo the illusion of human presence entirely and exist disembodied within the sensory system of the little ship. But this, he was sure, would be far worse.

So he remained dormant for most of the long voyage to the beacon, waking his ghost for only an hour or two every few days.

Urban’s ghost remained awake and alert at all times as was his custom, though he rewrote his sense of time passing so that the accumulating days did not weigh on him.

Little changed during the first year. Occasionally, the coded location in the beacon’s signal would shift and Urban would make a slight revision to his course, but he still could not resolve any object at the coordinates where the beacon must be.

It was early in the second year when he observed the appearance of another courser. Envy brushed him as he imagined his other self, that version of him aboard Dragon, plotting to seduce and dominate and destroy this intruder. He looked forward to gaining the memory of that encounter when he finally returned to Dragon. Meanwhile, Elepaio fared on, ever closer to the source of the beacon.

A time came when Elepaio’s telescope was finally able to distinguish an object directly ahead. A tiny dark smudge, nothing more. That it could be resolved at all indicated it had a high albedo, its surface reflecting the starlight that fell against it.

More time passed and the smudge resolved into multiple objects. This surprised Urban. He had expected to find a single large object, well-armed as it attempted to draw the curious into range. Instead, there were at least three and maybe four objects. He wasn’t sure yet. One was much larger than the others and round, like a tiny planetary body stripped from the gravitational hold of its parent star and cast out into the void. The others appeared to be minute, irregularly shaped moons. Still too far away to discern details. The scene lit only by a scattering of distant starlight.

Riffan’s ghost woke and exclaimed in excitement over the fuzzy image. He stayed awake as additional imagery came in. In infrared, the little moons appeared cold and lifeless. “But look at the planetary body,” Riffan said. He floated cross-legged in the library while Urban stood beside him, arms crossed, studying a large, detailed projection. “It possesses a slight thermal signature, though it’s not nearly large enough to maintain a molten interior. If it was a true rogue planetoid, it would have gone cold eons ago. So there must be something there. Recent enough to keep it slightly warm.”

“The source of the signal,” Urban said.

Riffan nodded. “A logical hypothesis.”

Urban suffered a surge of impatience. He wanted to know what was there and he wanted to know now. But time must always be paid in full measure. No rushing it.

No holding it back, either.

Each day, Elepaio drew nearer to the signal’s source. Each day, its telescope collected more and more faint reflected starlight and slowly, slowly, the scene became clear.

The primary object was a small rocky body, airless, and only about 320 kilometers in diameter. Its density—estimated from the orbital speed of its moons—was surprisingly low. It lacked the gravity to self-organize into a spherical shape. Even so, it was nearly spherical. That might have been coincidence. Or not.

Still, it did not appear to be an artificial world. Its surface was heavily cratered. There were no visible structures, no obvious weapons, no hints of design. Urban would have dismissed it as a stray asteroid of no real interest, except that there was a boneyard in orbit around it. Its three moons could now be distinguished as the wreckage of starships. Two with torn hulls he assumed to be human in origin because what else could they be? The third was a broken remnant of a Chenzeme courser, its hull cells dark.

Urban was also able to pinpoint the source of the beacon. It did not originate on the Rock as he’d supposed. Instead, it issued from the smaller of the two human ships—a finding that disappointed him because it suggested the beacon really was an archaic distress signal and not a lure in a trap.

Riffan said, “Maybe the first ship got in trouble and summoned the second.”

“And the Chenzeme?” Urban asked. “Was it here first? Or last? And why are any of them here? And what killed them?”

“Could they have killed each other?” Riffan wondered. “The Chenzeme ship blown apart by the other two, but those two mortally wounded in the battle.”

Urban shook his head. “An encounter like that would take place with the ships thousands of kilometers apart. There’s no way the minor gravity of the Rock, this rogue world, would have captured all of them.” He looked at Riffan. “Is there a way to know how old the wrecks are?”

This time Riffan shook his head. “I’ve got a search running in the library. We might be able to identify the human ships, put a date on them. Other than that, we just know they’ve been here long enough to lose all their heat, though whether that means a few years or millennia, we aren’t going to be able to tell by distant observation.”

Urban said, “I think the Chenzeme warship was the last one to come here, probably in response to the signal. It might have been curious, wanting to identify the target before it struck, but it waited too long. The next warship to pick up the signal won’t come in close. As soon as it detects the wreck, it’ll fire its gun—but that hasn’t happened yet. That tells me the beacon is probably recent, no more than a few centuries old.”

“So there is something at the Rock,” Riffan said. “Something that can tear apart the hull of a courser as large as Dragon.” He laughed softly, self-deprecatingly. “My voice sounds impressively calm, doesn’t it? This ghost must be poorly rendered, because it isn’t communicating just how disturbed I feel. Do you still want to do the fly-by?”

“Yes. It’s our only option.”

They were on course to do a close fly-by, echoing Urban’s passage of Deception Well. Elepaio had far too much relative momentum to be troubled by the Rock’s slight gravity, and anyway, the little ship was too valuable to risk taking it in on a close approach. Once Elepaio had passed out of observational range, they would accelerate and eventually rejoin Dragon.

“But this means the Rock is a trap,” Riffan said. “Just as you first suggested. We have no idea of its reach. If we get too close…”

He did not finish the thought. He didn’t need to.

Still, Urban thought he worried too much. “If it had a long reach, why would it lure its prey in so close?” he asked.

“Because it’s easier to harvest their resources that way, isn’t it? Imagine it luring in ships, disabling them, feeding on their rare elements. You know, I really think we should pass by as quickly as we can.”

“No,” Urban said. “I want to know what’s there. We’re going to dump velocity, prolong our observational time. This is our one chance. We won’t be coming back.”

His plan was to send a disposable probe into the little system to take a closer look. The probe would carry a tiny reef that he would burn out in a brutal maneuver to reduce its relative velocity. As it neared the Rock, he would refine its course, sending it skating close to the hulks of the starships. The data the probe collected would stream back to Elepaio.

Scout-bots would ride aboard the probe but Urban wondered: Was that enough? His curiosity was building and, as Riffan had pointed out, this could be a dangerous venture. A scout-bot was not the most versatile option.

“I think we need to visit the system ourselves,” he decided. “In first person. Physical incarnation.”

Riffan regarded him with a look of shock and horror, seeming to reevaluate him as a mad man. “What? You want to dump that much velocity? Enter orbit? Risk Elepaio?”

Urban rolled his eyes. “No. We’ll go aboard the probe. We’re carrying all the matter and the Makers necessary to synthesize avatars. I’ll transfer that to the probe, launch it, and by the time it reaches the Rock, our avatars will be ready.”

“But how will we get back?”

“We won’t,” Urban said. Wasn’t that obvious? “There’s no way back. Not for an avatar. But we can get the ghosts back. We’ll have their memories.”

“You mean you want to abandon those other versions of ourselves? Leave them to die there in that alien place?”

“Shut them down, yes,” Urban said, irritated. “Dissolve them so they can’t be copied. You must have intended the same thing for that avatar you inhabited on Long Watch. What were you going to do with it, when you were ready to return to the Well? Leave it behind, right? You weren’t going to take a shuttle in-system?”

“Of course not. It would take years to physically transit. I would have returned as a ghost, while the avatar stayed aboard Long Watch in cold sleep.”

“Where it would eventually be recycled.”

“No. It would stay there, in case I needed it again.”

Urban responded to this declaration with a scowl of fierce disapproval. “That’s wasteful.”

“It’s respectful. This concept of throw-away bodies—”

“Hey,” Urban interrupted, feeling a need to defend himself. “It’s not something I do all the time.”

“It’s what you did at the Well. You wiped that version of yourself.”

“There wasn’t a choice. I didn’t want to stay behind.”

“But you did stay behind. Only a ghost escaped. There was no way out for that version of you that comprised the consciousness of the avatar.”

Urban grimaced. This was not a conversation he wanted to have. “That’s just how it works,” he said. “And that’s why I shut the avatar down.”

“You ended its life.”

“So? It was just an avatar. A means to access a different timeline, to allow for a split existence. Nothing wrong with that. What would be wrong, ethically wrong, would be to willy-nilly create copies of yourself and maintain all of them because every copy is afraid of termination.”

Riffan’s lip stuck out, his brow wrinkled. “That’s not what I meant. What’s wrong is to create an avatar that you intend to send on a suicide mission. You can bring yourself to do it because you imagine you’ll be the ghost that escapes. But what if you’re not? What if you’re the consciousness of the avatar and you’re stuck down there and you’ve got no way out? Sure, your ghost has escaped, but you’re still there! How do you think you’ll feel?”

Urban glowered. “I won’t feel anything because I’ll shut the avatar down. Now, are you going or not?”