Edges

Chapter 28

On Dragon’s high bridge, Clemantine launched a thought experiment for the philosopher cells to consider and contend over: Simulate the capture and colonization of an alien starship.

A skein of associated cells accepted the challenge. Among them, a scenario unfolded:

A distant ship of a kind never seen before. Not Chenzeme! Its alien nature is irresistible. Instinct suppresses the urge to lay waste, demanding instead that the unknown be made known. Approach slowly, alert to danger.

Close enough.

A shudder runs through the field of philosopher cells, an orgasmic release of bio-active dust, shed into the void. Most of it will drift uselessly away, but a few particles will reach the alien ship and infect it, beginning the process of colonization.

Pull away.

And wait.

Background stars slowly shift, marking the passage of time. On the hull of the infected ship, a colony of philosopher cells has begun to grow.

Clemantine sensed Urban’s interest, his intimate presence.

*Why do you want to remember that? he asked.

On the Null Boundary Expedition, they’d endured a similar encounter with a Chenzeme courser.

*It’s not us, she answered. This memory involved a different ship, in a different age, and a sentient culture that the Chenzeme warships must have eliminated from Creation long ago. *But what happened to us must have happened many times in the millions of years of Chenzeme history and the philosopher cells remember it all—don’t they?

*Yes, he confirmed.

*Some of their conquests would have resisted the dust, as we did. There may be memories of archaic lines of assault Makers that might be useful to us—forgotten patterns that we could modify and enhance, and use against the entity.

She sensed from him a rising excitement.

Riffan walked the winding path around the gee deck in the mild warmth of ship’s noon, lacy white clouds adding texture to the simulated sky. He followed the path from the pavilion, past cottages, to the dining court, then more cottages, before returning to the pavilion. He made many circuits, stopping often to talk to people, grateful to hear what they were working on, hopeful that their projects might reveal a way forward with his. Though he’d returned many times to the containment capsule, he’d never succeeded in eliciting a second response.

The capsule remained active. No doubt of that. Resources cycled through its tendrils and it emitted a constant, low-level heat. Something was busy in there—but there was no visible activity. The capsule did not grow in size.

His frustration was acute. There had to be something else useful he could offer in the effort to understand this thing… but at this stage the game belonged to the team of engineers and nanotechnologists that Vytet had put together.

He smiled and nodded as he passed Tarnya and Mikael, walking with arms entwined. Life goes on. People adapt to changing circumstances. At Deception Well, people had learned to co-exist within an ecosystem once considered lethal to human life. The Well’s microscopic governors regulated that system, maintained a balance between competing alien biologies. Urban believed the governors did the same thing here—though no one had ever worked out how. Pasha had often lamented over the elusive nature of the governors and her frustrated attempts to study them…

He halted in the center of the path, staring ahead at nothing.

“You idiot,” he said aloud.

Urban had credited the governors with stopping the expansion of the capsule. Surely there was useful knowledge to be gained by renewing a study of the ancient regulators.

“Riffan, listen to me,” Pasha said, striving to keep her voice even despite her rising impatience. “People have attempted to study the governors for centuries and no one—including me—has ever unraveled the mystery of how they work. You forget that my principal work aboard Long Watch was a study of the bio-machines of the nebula. The governors were only a small part of that.”

“But isn’t now the perfect time to renew that study?”

He looked so earnest, sitting across from her at a low table in the dining pavilion, leaning in with his eagerness to persuade her to take on this hopeless line of inquiry. A slight shake of her head to obscure the smile she could not quite suppress.

Riffan’s general humility was countered by his often incandescent enthusiasms, and now he had seized upon the idea that Pasha could master the superior nanotech of the entity by solving the riddle of the governors.

“It’s fantastical, Riffan, to think I could work out the mechanism of the governors.”

“But isn’t it worth trying, given all that’s at stake?”

Yes, it probably was worth trying, but why was Riffan pushing it? “I thought you wanted to learn to live with the entity,” she said.

“Yes, well… I am very interested in understanding it, in learning its history, and… comprehending its intentions. But that’s best done from a position of strength. Right? And you could help with that, with your study of the governors.”

She sighed, surprised to find herself warming to him. “I’ve missed your optimism,” she said.

His bronze cheeks deepened in color. “Oh, I don’t think I’m—”

“Accept a compliment, Riffan.”

“Oh. All right.” His brow wrinkled. He looked down. Looked up. Looked at her with a pensive gaze. “You believe it’s evil?”

The question startled her, but she didn’t need to consider her answer. “Yes.”

She’d watched the brief video of its avatar as it had appeared at the Rock, listened to its words and the inflection of its voice, considered the disappearance of Urban’s and Riffan’s avatars, accounted the violence it had used when it stormed Dragon, and also its failure to offer any accord or communication. And she’d concluded it was evil.

Not alien, though. She recognized it as a human thing, but atavistic despite its knowledge and its skills. Brutal. Arrogant. Possessive. Controlling. Fascist. Traits the people of the frontier had tried to leave behind, had needed to leave behind to survive the long voyages and to work successfully together at the arduous task of adapting worlds to human needs.

“I mistrust the idea of compromise,” she told Riffan. “Although so far, compromise is only wishful thinking.”

“You can change that,” he said, returning to a cheerful confidence. “We all can, together, by strengthening our position. Say you’ll do it?”

“I’ll look into it,” she conceded, quite certain she would regret the promise. “Don’t expect anything to come of it.”

“But if it did—”

He broke off, looking up as Bituin, a poet and dramatist, approached their table carrying two large covered platters. Bituin was a skilled cook who’d volunteered to host a luncheon that day.

“My apologies for the wait,” she chirped, skillfully balancing her burden as she knelt.

The grace of her movements, the happy anticipation behind her smile, this luncheon she’d planned—in a moment of insight, Pasha saw in these details a return to normalcy, to the regular rhythms of daily life aboard Dragon, despite the entity’s presence. It was human nature to get on with things.

“This is wonderful,” Riffan said, reaching out to help Bituin. “And you mustn’t apologize.”

“Do be careful,” Bituin scolded him. “The platters are hot. Let me.”

People could remain afraid for only so long. Throughout history, societies had learned to live with the inevitability of earthquakes, volcanic eruption, climatic oscillations, outbreaks of pestilence, and war—whether that meant attack by nomadic warriors armed with spears and arrows or by the ruthless ships of the Chenzeme. A threat not immediately apparent was easy to put out of mind.

Pasha leaned back to give Bituin room to maneuver. She set down the platters and removed their covers with a theatrical flourish, releasing a warm cloud of sweet and sour aromas.

“Oh, it smells wonderful!” Pasha exclaimed.

“Enjoy!”

Pasha resolved that she would enjoy moments such as this, but she was also determined never to forget the threat posed by the entity.

She picked up her chopsticks, reciprocated Riffan’s smile, and split her timeline, transiting to the library before the first bite was in her mouth.

Once there, she summoned the Bio-mechanic and explained her intention.

“Oh yes,” he responded with truly polished sarcasm. “Yes, I do agree. If I knew how to master the governors, I don’t doubt I could master the entity too. But nine hundred years of study and experimentation has not allowed me to emulate their function or reverse engineer their structure. Given that history, I foresee failure for your efforts too.”

His assessment stung, even though it matched her own—but she wasn’t going to let him see that. A disdainful shrug, and then she told him, “It doesn’t take any great insight to foresee defeat. But given the stakes, I think we should try. Why not? It’s one more option to explore—and how sweet it would be for you to win this contest, to prove yourself more adept than the entity—and to actually have a chance to survive.”

He crossed his arms, narrowed his eyes, looked at her with a judgmental expression. “Meaning you want my help in this project.”

“I want to utilize your unmatched expertise. That’s your purpose, isn’t it? The reason for your existence?”

“It’s my pleasure and my joy,” he agreed flatly. “How shall we begin?”

Steady, incremental improvements strengthened the expedition’s arsenal of defensive Makers. Clemantine’s deep dive into the memory of the philosopher cells yielded insights on combative nanotech, Vytet’s team of molecular engineers contributed further improvements in logic, deduction, and adaptability, and the probes and detectors Pasha developed in her otherwise futile work with the governors led to enhanced reaction times.

Still, no one suggested their defensive Makers were ready to turn loose against the entity’s stronghold—but there was no hurry. For over three years, the containment capsule had remained quiescent.

Mockingly quiet, Clemantine thought as she occupied Griffin’s high bridge. She gazed ahead, twenty thousand kilometers, to the faint spark of Dragon’s luminous hull, barely discernible against the background stars. The entity seemed unconcerned with their efforts, content to let them puzzle out the challenge it had laid for them.

A scheduled data transfer arrived. It brought a startling memory: She had witnessed a simulated battle in which a new line of Makers rapidly overwhelmed the best competitors submitted by Griffin’s team of Apparatchiks.

This is a leap forward! Urban had said with a triumphant smile.

Enough to unravel the entity’s defenses? Clemantine had asked him.

He shook his head. Too soon to try. Better to push this line of research as far as we can. If we get this right, we can take it apart with no damage to the ship.

Clemantine immediately shifted her point of view to Griffin’s library, summoning the Mathematician and the Bio-mechanic.

“Your thoughts on this latest competition?” she asked them.

The Bio-mechanic crossed his arms. “It demonstrates a… most remarkable advance,” he said, surprising Clemantine with the sour disapproval in his voice.

“The design path is unaccountable,” the Mathematician added. “It can’t have been derived from our libraries of Makers by any evolutionary process. It’s distinct. The equivalent of another phylum.”

“Maybe it’s an artifact out of Chenzeme memory?”

“Unlikely,” the Bio-mechanic said. “It’s not indicated in the report, and we received no data that could form the basis of such a breakthrough.”

“Then it’s a product of one of the nanotechnologists,” she concluded. “An inspired leap in design.”

The Mathematician looked at her as if she were an idiot.

She raised her eyebrows. “You don’t think that’s likely?”

He spoke crisply: “Not without a long succession of intermediary steps, and if those steps were taken, why weren’t they shared with us?”

She looked from one to the other, realizing their sour attitude was not jealousy or resentment. Trepidation touched her. “What are you suggesting?”

The Mathematician shrugged. The Bio-mechanic turned to regard him. Were words exchanged beyond her perception? The Bio-mechanic returned his attention to her, saying in a faux-sweet tone, “Ask them how they achieved this design. It’s such remarkable progress. Their method would be so useful for us to know.”

The explanation arrived with the next scheduled data transfer. The design originated with a newly discovered document in the library. Buried amid a long, thoughtful history of a particular celestial city that existed in Earth system before the cordon, Dragon’s Scholar had found a discussion of a complex set of evolutionary algorithms. He shared the discovery with Dragon’s Mathematician, who quickly perceived the revolutionary nature of the concepts.

Griffin’s Scholar angrily rejected this explanation, “There is no such document in the library.”

“The library is immense,” Clemantine objected. “You can’t know everything that’s there.”

“I don’t need to. The document’s identity key was included in the transmission. I’ve run a search on it. No results.”

Clemantine considered this, aware of an automatic routine working to moderate her rising anxiety. “There is an explanation,” she insisted.

But when the explanation came, it did not satisfy the Scholar. “An ancient document from a private collection,” he scoffed, glaring at Clemantine as if, being the only representative of flawed humanity present, he meant to hold her responsible for this offensively implausible circumstance. “One handed down over generations, forgotten until now in the data cache of one of the ship’s company.”

“Rediscovered at a remarkably convenient time,” the Mathematician observed, trading a dark look with the Bio-mechanic.

The document had come from Naresh. As an adolescent, he’d been gifted the family library to carry within his atrium—history and records from places his ancestors had lived. But his interests had lain in physics and in the future, and he’d never done more than skim the cache. It had only recently occurred to him to share it to Dragon’s library.

“Serendipity,” the Scholar observed acidly.

Clemantine struggled to understand why any of this was a problem. “So we got lucky,” she said. “Is that so bad?”

“It’s a cause for wonder,” the Scholar replied, his acid tone unchanged.

The Mathematician explained, “The odds against such a fortuitous coincidence are extreme.”

“It’s a discovery that will keep us quite busy,” the Bio-mechanic added. “It will be some years before we have explored all the avenues this new line of research will reveal.”

Years?

And how long would the entity lie dormant? Long enough for their teams to work out a means to evict it?

“Do you think this discovery will lead us to match the entity’s defenses?” she asked the Apparatchiks.

The Bio-mechanic’s eyes narrowed. “Only time will tell.”

“Is it waking?” Kona asked, the moment he manifested in the library.

A Dull Intelligence had summoned his dormant ghost from the archive, reporting a change in the status of the containment capsule: the intake and outflow of matter through the tendrils had ceased.

Urban and Vytet had arrived ahead of him; their ghosts were never dormant. The Bio-mechanic and the Engineer were on deck too in their frameless windows. Before anyone could answer his question, Shoran popped into existence beside him. They exchanged a surprised glance. Kona had instructed his DI to wake him on any change; Shoran must have done the same. This was the first time in eighteen years his DI had found cause.

“News?” she asked him.

“Not yet.”

Clemantine appeared. Then Riffan, Naresh, Pasha, and several more, all within a two-second span.

Urban eyed the sudden crowd, his lip curled in irritation. “All of you have alerts set up?”

“Absolutely!” Riffan assured him, breathless with excitement, though as a ghost in the library he did not breathe. “Any change at all will get my ghost out of the archive. I imagine it’s the same all around.”

Kona asked again, “Is the entity waking?”

“It’s always been awake,” Urban answered tersely.

“That’s not what I mean. From our external perspective, the thing has been steady-state for eighteen years. There’s every reason to think this shift in resource consumption presages a significant change.”

“Agreed,” Naresh said. “If this is a prelude to an attempt at communication, we must be ready to respond both calmly and rationally.”

Kona stifled a groan. Was he deliberately needling Clemantine?

She must have thought so, because her response was sharp and quick: “Communication is trivial for a being with such abilities. If it wanted to communicate, it would have done so. It’s more likely the shift indicates hostile intent. It’s had time to study Dragon. It could be preparing to extend its control.”

Factionalism had been a problem from the day of the entity’s arrival, when Naresh and Clemantine had staked out opposite positions. Ever since, she considered the physicist dangerously optimistic, while Naresh regarded her as neither calm nor rational where the entity was concerned.

Naresh turned in exasperation to Vytet, where he often found support. “There’s no evidence of that, is there? No reason at all to assume the entity is hostile.”

Pasha answered him instead. “Those scuttled ships are a reason.”

Kona cut in, determined to keep the peace. “We can disagree on our interpretations, but all of us need to remain open to possibility, be prepared for either outcome.”

“Or for a return to baseline,” Urban said in a detached monotone, his gaze downcast, his focus elsewhere. “This may not be a significant event.”

“Is that what you’re expecting?” Kona asked him.

“It’s what I want. We’re not ready for a confrontation.”

“Sooth.” That was unarguable truth.

Urban had demonstrated an unsuspected reservoir of patience in dealing with the entity. He’d consistently rejected any suggestion of trying again to forcefully expel the capsule, or even of preparing a kinetic response that could be held in reserve. He did not want to incite the entity, push the conflict to a premature conclusion—not when he believed he could get his ship back, whole and intact, by beating the invader’s molecular defenses.

“What is the temperature of the capsule?” Riffan asked. “Has it changed?”

The Bio-mechanic put on a show of narrowing his eyes, cocking his head, as if seeking the data—an affectation that annoyed Kona. DIs were so much less complicated.

“Infrared measurements show a slight increase in temperature,” the Bio-mechanic informed them. “Less than a tenth of a degree.”

“It’s a good gauge of activity,” the Engineer said in his ever-reasonable voice. “If processes are continuing within the capsule, we can expect the temperature to rise further. If those processes have ceased, it will gradually cool to ambient.”

“It won’t cool,” Pasha said. “That would indicate it was entering a hibernation state—and that would leave it vulnerable.”

“I agree,” Vytet said. “My suspicion is that the entity is reordering the capsule’s interior anatomy, possibly consolidating computational strata. As soon as that’s done, we’ll see a return to normal circulation—or possibly a new normal.”

Shoran spread her hands in frustration. “And then? Another twenty years of argument among ourselves about what it all means?” She snorted. “Give us another twenty years to devote to baseless speculation, and we’ll be at war with each other.”

Kona gave her a slight nod, a silent thank you, grateful for her blunt manner. “It’s a frustrating situation,” he said. “And when facts are short, it’s human nature to put our own interpretation on things.” He fixed Naresh with his gaze. “Still, we need to remain wary of the entity, and not of each other.”

Naresh’s shoulders slumped. He turned half away. “I just… I worry some among us might take precipitous action, seeing malice where there is none.”

Kona’s fleeting hope of a truce vanished as Clemantine drew back, crossed her arms in a confrontational posture. “If only there was some action we could take,” she said. “The so-called Naresh Sequence was supposed to give us a fighting chance, but we’re not there yet. If you know another means to contain the entity, please do share.”

Naresh turned back. His chin rose. “I only worry what others might have in mind, given the bias of opinions. What will we gain if we destroy it?”

Clemantine snorted. “Just our autonomy. Our sovereignty.”

“Only to be lost again at our next encounter. Don’t you see? The entity must have originated in the Hallowed Vasties. Nothing else makes sense. And given that its abilities are so far beyond ours, that tells us we are not prepared to meet other beings that may exist there. We need the entity. We need it on our side. We need its skills and knowledge to have any hope of holding on to our autonomy, our sovereignty, of simply surviving our encounters with the old worlds. We need to make it our ally—and that is a realistic possibility. Remember its words. We can help each other.”

“You are hanging a great deal of hope on one small phrase,” Clemantine said.

This drew murmurs of agreement from both Shoran and Pasha. And while Kona sympathized with Naresh’s hopes, he felt them premature. “Naresh, you want it to turn out well,” he said. “So do I. So do we all. But so far we have evidence of restraint, not of good will. Let the entity prove its good will to us.”

“But not yet,” Urban insisted. “We’re not ready to meet it yet.”

Forty-seven minutes later, the slow flow of matter into and out of the capsule resumed. No other changes were detected—not in the capsule, along the tendrils, or anywhere within the ship’s tissues.

By this time, Kona’s physical incarnation had emerged from cold sleep, and in that form, he met Shoran at the dining terrace. Naresh and Vytet soon joined them, Vytet with amber eyes and onyx skin, her hair an ashen gray. They all remarked on how empty the gee deck felt, abandoned to songbirds, all the rest of the ship’s company still in cold sleep.

Naresh tried to continue his argument, but Shoran wasn’t in the mood. “It’s the entity who will decide the direction this encounter takes,” she told him, and turned the conversation to other things.

She and Kona were never far apart over the ensuing days as they waited to see if the brief anomaly would lead to something more. After a time, the quiet of the gee deck led Kona to uneasy dreams of an empty city, overgrown by lush foliage, the white bones of former inhabitants glinting in the humus. One night, he cried out in his sleep, and woke Shoran.

“That’s a memory of Silk, when you first came to it,” she said.

“Sooth. A long, long time ago.”

They lay together in the bedroom of his cottage, melancholy in the early morning.

“I miss Deception Well,” she confessed. “To be able to take off at a whim and wander through the wilds. I need that. I need for us to arrive somewhere, to get out of this ship and into wider territory.”

“Tanjiri is only a few decades away.”

“Or,” she murmured, turning toward him, her lips beginning to wander across his bare shoulder, “if things go right, just a handful of days, perceptually.”

“Are you ready for the next great leap forward?”

She drew back, her gaze serious. “Not too great a leap, I hope. Every time I wake from cold sleep, my first thought is, Have we lost? I expect to find myself aboard Griffin in some faraway future where we’ve missed all our destinations, and only Clemantine and the Unknown God aware of our history, and what exists outside the ship.” She dropped down into the curve of his arm with a sigh. “Each time I wake, it’s a relief to know Dragon is not lost to us… yet.”

Pasha emerged from cold sleep. Checked the date and time, confirming it was a scheduled waking. Another year had passed.

She used her toes to clutch a ribbon of glowing wall-weed as she floated in the zero-gravity of the warren, wiping away the remnant gel of her cocoon. The chamber where she’d wakened was crowded with the bodies of her shipmates, wrapped up in cocoons of their own and tethered by wall-weed.

She dressed herself in newly budded clothing while listening to a DI’s summary report:

*The containment capsule remains quiescent…

“As it has been for decades,” she murmured. This was not news. If there had been any sign of activity, this DI would have wakened her early.

*… with no indication of an imminent threat from the entity…

She rolled her eyes. As if there would be some warning before it finally burst forth.

The DI went on to summarize the Bio-mechanic’s ongoing work on the Naresh Sequence. This news was not good.

In the decades since Naresh had posted his family history to the library, the data uncovered in that one fortuitous document had led to radical improvement in the adaptability and response speed of the fleet’s arsenal of defensive Makers—but still not enough to convince the Bio-mechanic he could overwhelm the entity and safely eliminate its presence from the ship.

Now the Bio-mechanic reported that useful new forms no longer appeared in the evolving digital simulations inspired by the Naresh Sequence. That line of research had reached its end.

Pasha heaved a sigh. The Sequence had once looked so promising that it stifled discussion of cruder strategies involving explosive weapons. If the entity should finally emerge, a hard strike from Griffin’s bow gun remained their only means of containing it.

With this grim thought in mind, she made her way to the gee deck. A glance at the personnel map showed Vytet and Naresh together at the dining terrace. No one else.

No voices disturbed the quiet. No music, no annoying buzz of the flying fox. Birdsong and the rustle of an occasional breeze through the low canopies of aging trees served as themes in a composition of silence.

A temporary state.

In forty-eight hours, the newest images from the annual astronomical survey were due. Everyone would wake in time to see them come in. It had become a regular custom, a festival, the time of year when the ship’s company came together.

Pasha went to her cottage. Heated water for tea.

To this version of herself, it felt as if she’d been gone from the cottage for just a few minutes. For the ghost she’d left at work in the library, it had been a year.

She sat in a cushy chair, a steaming teacup on a side table, and allowed the ghost into her atrium—but she did not allow it to merge. Not yet.

It manifested before her, a perfect image of herself overlaid on the reality of the room.

That first day after the entity infested the ship, Kona had tasked everyone in the ship’s company with exploring every possible option that might allow them to continue the expedition without abandoning Dragon. At first, Pasha had focused on understanding the mechanism of the governors, but later she’d turned her mind to more archaic technologies. Through the passing years, she’d studied the structure of the ship, and mastered concepts in bio-mechanics and explosive technology.

For the past year, this ghost had worked in isolation within a private chamber in the library, studying the feasibility of a brute force effort to evict the entity from the ship.

“Can it work?” she asked her ghost. She did not want the burden of the ghost’s experience—the isolation and frustration of the past year—unless it had found a way forward.

“I believe it can,” the ghost said.

Pasha’s heart rate kicked up. This was the answer she’d both hoped for and feared. She leaned forward as the ghost continued to speak.

“I’ve created an initial plan,” it said. “It’s dependent on stealth at every stage—”

“Understood.”

“—but we should be able to remove every structure associated with the entity and lose no more than twenty-three percent of the mass of the ship.”

Pasha’s gut clenched. “Almost a quarter of the ship?”

The ghost shrugged. “This was the most efficient approach. The alternative, if we leave it to Griffin—”

“I know. If we leave it to Griffin, we lose the ship, one hundred percent. Can we preserve essential systems?”

“What we can’t preserve, we can rebuild.”

Pasha stared into her ghost’s pale green eyes, struck by doubt. She had planned to erase the ghost if it determined there was no feasible means to burn out the entity. Now it came to it, she wondered: If that ghost was me, would I lie to preserve myself?

The ghost returned her gaze with a taut smile. “I can show you my strategy paper.”

Pasha leaned back in her chair, settling her shoulders, relaxing her hands. “No,” she said. “I trust your judgment.”

“Our judgment?”

“Mine,” she concluded—and she allowed the ghost to integrate, its memory of the past year becoming hers.