Edges

Chapter 29

“Look at that,” Urban whispered, leaning forward in the darkness of the amphitheater as murmured wonder filled the air, punctuated by cries of astonishment. He sat between Clemantine and Riffan, in the highest tier of seats, gazing at the newest image of Tanjiri System. “Not the planet or its moon. I mean the other object. Is it new? Or are we just seeing it at a new angle?”

“We might have seen it before,” Clemantine answered in taut excitement. “But not like this.”

“Sooth,” Urban breathed, grinning in the dark.

Over the years, he’d come to enjoy the festival surrounding the annual astronomical survey, and the shared suspense as the Astronomer posted the newest images to the projection screen.

A tag popped up, labeling the object as Tanjiri Artifact 121. More than three hundred artifacts had been cataloged, so TA-121 had certainly been seen before—but never so clearly, completely unobscured. It appeared as two tiny, conical, blue-green crystalline chips pointing at one another across a gulf of space. Presumably, there was a tether—too fine to be resolved—linking them together, allowing them to rotate around a central point.

“It’s a celestial city,” Clemantine said. “I’ve seen them in the histories.”

The Astronomer confirmed it, speaking within the atriums of everyone in the amphitheater: *TA-121 is a tethered structure. The appearance of the dual units suggests an architectural design similar to the city of Silk, with intact transparent canopies to contain atmosphere.

“A living city,” Urban concluded. “Alongside a living planet and a living moon.”

Glittering and bright, the celestial city glided in serene orbit closer to the planet than to the dark debris ring with its looming megastructures.

“It must be huge,” Riffan breathed. “I wonder who lives there? Or maybe the structure itself is alive?”

“Maybe,” Urban said, throat suddenly tight as a sense of wonder welled up in him, and awe for the tenacity of life, and pride because he had chosen to come here, and fear, knowing he wasn’t equal to the beings inhabiting Tanjiri System.

His mood darkened. Was the entity from Tanjiri? Vytet thought so, though it had given them no hint of its identity or its intention, remaining utterly quiescent through the years, while they busied themselves with the Naresh Sequence.

The Apparatchiks on Griffin were convinced the sequence had been planted by the entity to keep everyone busy, to lull them with a sense of progress. Dragon’s Bio-mechanic insisted that was impossible, but Urban no longer felt confident that any of them could recognize the boundaries of possible things.

The Naresh Sequence had not brought them a solution, but the effort put into it had been worthwhile. They’d greatly expanded the envelope of their knowledge—and still there was so much they did not understand.

The lights came up, the walls opened. The next image wasn’t due for another ninety minutes. He started to rise, thinking to find something to eat, but Pasha was already up from her front-row seat, stepping onto the dais, her petite figure turning to confront the gathering.

“A moment!” she pleaded.

Urban felt the pressure of Clemantine’s hand on his arm. He settled back down, a sense of tension in his chest, guessing that Pasha’s thoughts this day had paralleled his own.

She said, “I don’t want to cast a shadow on the wonder of this day, but an affirmative decision needs to be made. The entity is still with us and we are decades closer to Tanjiri. Are we going to serve as the vector that allows it to escape its isolation? Or are we going to do everything, everything, in our power to stop it?”

This drew a smattering of angry responses, Naresh the most coherent among them: “Are we back to that, Pasha? What would you have us do? Destroy the ship?”

She crossed her arms. “I don’t want that. I don’t believe we would have to go that far, but now that the Naresh Sequence has failed, we must discuss other options.”

Heads turned, looking for a response from Urban in the back row.

Anger moved in him, though it felt apart from him, like an argument offered by the philosopher cells. A protective anger. Even if Pasha was not proposing to destroy the ship, she was proposing something close to it.

He stood, burdened by the weight of Clemantine’s gaze. Like Pasha, she wanted no compromise with the entity, while Naresh, Vytet, Riffan, and many others wanted to believe that when the entity finally emerged, an accord could be reached. Urban didn’t believe either option was possible, not now. His strategy was to extend the game indefinitely, allow the situation to evolve until he found a way to win.

He spoke slowly, carefully considering his words. “I don’t want to take the entity to Tanjiri. I don’t intend to. Maybe Vytet is right and it’s from there. But there must be a reason it was left marooned in the void. A reason those other people chose to scuttle their ships rather than give it a way out.”

Naresh rose to his feet, his youthful face flushed with anger. “Then you agree with her? Destroy this ship to destroy the entity?”

“No,” Urban said. Just the thought of Dragon’s demise made him recoil. The ship was his avatar. An irreplaceable avatar. It was him. A millennium on the high bridge had forged that bond and he did not intend to break it. “I’m not giving up my ship. It will have to be taken from me.”

“The entity has made no move to do that,” Naresh said in satisfaction.

“Not yet,” Urban agreed. “And the longer it holds off, the better for us. Look what’s ahead of us!” He gestured at the projection screen. “Beings greater than we are. I won’t take this ship to Tanjiri System, but I will approach it. Signal our presence, establish communication if we find something there we can talk to… something willing to talk to us. If nothing else, we can send in an outrider. Let it drop scout-bots to prospect among the ruins. There might be old libraries still intact. Designs for weaponry better than what we’ve got now. And we’re not the only ones at risk. I am sure the entity is aware of its situation. It knows Griffin is following behind us.”

“So the stalemate continues,” Tarnya said, looking up at him from the first row. “For how much longer, I wonder?”

He had no answer for that.

Several days later, after a raucous game of flying fox, Urban returned alone to the cottage. The last images from the annual survey of the Hallowed Vasties had come in that morning. Most of the ship’s company planned to return to cold sleep the next day, so tonight there would be a banquet and concert. Clemantine had gone to the dining terrace with Kona and Tarnya to finalize the plans.

Urban dried off, dressed in soft shorts, and then sat cross-legged on a mat just inside the open backdoor, sipping cold tea and watching a flock of tiny green birds play hide-and-seek among the shrubbery. He planned to return to cold sleep too. Melancholy descended on him as he considered that soon, the birds and the butterflies would be the only inhabitants of the gee deck.

Impossibly, a soft knock sounded at the front door.

He dropped his tea, spilling it across the mat as a burst of adrenaline put him on his feet, heart hammering, fight or flight triggered because his extended senses had failed him. He should have received an alert that someone was approaching the cottage, but no alert had come.

Now he needed to know why.

He crossed the bedroom. Looked into the front room, furnished now with just the sofa and the low side table with the porcelain dish holding Clemantine’s irises, lifeless and dormant. He stopped cold when he saw the opaque gel of the front door retract. In came an impossible apparition—a man Urban had seen only once before.

His visitor was of moderate height, shorter than Urban, with a lean, chiseled build and a youthful look, his apparent age around twenty. His skin, a polished soft brown. Thick black hair cut short. Dark-blue eyes with only a shade of color saving them from being black. He greeted Urban with a short, knowing nod as if to acknowledge the shock of his unexpected arrival. A half-smile followed, one that looked friendly, but felt dangerous.

Given the circumstance, it could hardly feel any other way.

The gel sealed shut behind him.

Urban noted that he was dressed in a way typical among the ship’s company, in a long-sleeved pullover—he’d chosen one patterned in a tiled geometric print—and soft shorts that reached to the knee.

It was an imitation of normalcy—admirable in its way—though there was nothing normal about this being. The illusion of its humanity was too well done. Hyper-real. The thing’s skin, utterly smooth and unmarked by wrinkles or errant veins. Eyes too bright, outlined in thick lashes arrayed in perfect ranks. Its clothing too neat, too crisp, weirdly unresponsive to the tug of the ship’s pseudo-gravity or to air currents. It was like a projection in three dimensions, as unsullied by living detail as a ghost instantiated in the library.

Urban amped up his hearing, listening hard, and decided it had no pulse, no bellows of breath.

His own breath, a sharp gasp drawn past clenched teeth.

He sent a submind to alert his ghost on the high bridge and all the Apparatchiks. Wake up. Wake up! Even as he wondered how it was possible that the entity had slipped out of its containment capsule with no ghost or Apparatchik or Dull Intelligence taking notice.

Of course it had not. This was not the entity. It was only a representation of it. A rendition designed to be personable, appealing. A front for something too complex to be contained in any human-shaped vessel.

No, the entity remained safe in its fortress. Like the vacuum-adapted man he’d seen at the Rock, this was surely only the simple product of an instruction set that had escaped into Dragon’s tissue, leaking from somewhere, anywhere along the tendrils that tied the entity’s domain to the ship’s critical structure. That instruction set would have supervised the assembly of this avatar within a cocoon hidden, somehow, from easy detection.

The thing had entered uninvited, but it had the decency to pause just inside the front room. That dangerous smile. And then it spoke, its voice as polished as its body. It said, “We will help each other.”

Urban sensed an automated biochemical routine kick in, taking the edge off his fear. He lowered his chin, saying, “I’ve had nothing but trouble from you so far.”

“Trouble you have earned. You full well understand that concepts of property and cultural propriety must be put aside when survival is at stake. You did not intend to offer help to me. I helped you to make a better decision.”

“My decision was made when you attacked my scout-bots.”

“Those devices you first sent to investigate my location?”

“Yes.”

“That was not you. It was a tool, one that puzzled me greatly. I thought this scout must have come from one of these starships.” He gestured to take in the idea of Dragon. “An alien thing, serving the ancient regime. Where else could it have come from? So I took it to analyze its constitution and decrypt its knowledge base.”

The avatar cocked its head, eyes momentarily unfocused as if reviewing some pleasant memory. It said, “I was worried, I will admit. My last confrontation with the ancient ones nearly made an end of me. But this device, your scout, it turned out to be a human thing. From it, I learned this was the language you use, one that is not much different from a common language of the old worlds, at least when spoken in formal cadence. This is a common effect of ageless populations. When lifespans were shorter human languages changed quickly. Now, the elders among us act as an anchor against change, and our libraries enforce this effect.”

“Among us?” Urban asked, selecting this last point from among all the many curious aspects of this remarkable speech. “You’ve made an effort to mimic the form but I don’t hear a heart beating. I have to wonder, if I cut you, would you bleed?”

The avatar smiled again, brighter and more dangerous. “If I choose to.” A gesture that took in Urban, head to toe. “You—your people—hold tight to an ancestral purity of form. A choice I admire. One I’ve encouraged in others. There are so many possible levels of existence, each worthy in their own way.”

“What others?” Urban asked. “Where are these others now?”

“I don’t know,” it admitted. “So much time has passed I don’t know what is left, but I will find them again. Return to them. Re-create them if I need to. I owe them life. I will restore all my players and the world I made for them. This time, as it was meant to—”

It froze, lips parted to frame a last unspoken word. At the same time, a DI dropped an alert into Urban’s atrium that let him guess where the avatar’s attention had gone. He said, “Clemantine is coming.”

“Yes,” the avatar agreed.

Urban used the moment to summon a personnel map. He saw Clemantine approaching up the walk and he saw his own location marked, but there was no indication that the avatar was there with him—an omission he found profoundly disturbing. Had the thing mastered the ship’s information system?

No. No, that wasn’t it. The fault was in the map, designed to track only the locations of the ship’s human company.

He messaged Clemantine: *Wait. Don’t come in.

The avatar spoke in a gentled voice. “You do not trust me and that is wise. Still, I mean you no harm and I have much to offer in return for your cooperation.” A half turn toward the door. “We will talk more later.”

Urban moved at last, crossing the front room as the gel door retracted. Clemantine stood on the patio, head cocked, brow furrowed, looking both offended and confused.

“Stay back from it,” Urban warned her. “Stay away.” He had no idea how physically dangerous it might be.

The avatar looked back at him with an amused smile. Then it inclined its head at Clemantine. “Pardon me,” it said, slipping past her.

Urban joined her. Together they watched the entity stride away, disappearing in seconds around a curve in the village path.

Clemantine spoke in a husky voice, “What was that?”

He hesitated, wondering how to phrase it.

“You were alone,” she said. “I checked the map. There was no one here. So who was that? What was that?”

“You know, don’t you?” he asked her. “It’s been there for years, lying dormant in Dragon’s tissue.” He turned to meet Clemantine’s wide-eyed stare. “It’s awake now.”

“By the Unknown God!” she whispered. Then her voice hardened. “You’re watching it, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Link me.”

He did, just as it stepped off the path, onto the patio fronting Riffan’s home. “Ah, shit,” he said. He could not cause a camera to bud in the private space of a cottage.

Clemantine took off after it. He followed, a step behind. The personnel map showed Riffan at the amphitheater. Probably the cottage was empty. Through his atrium, Urban watched the entity’s avatar disappear inside.

Seconds later, he and Clemantine reached the cottage door. She pushed through first.

A large sofa on one side of the room. It faced a generative wall that bulged with a half-dissolved human shape wrapped in a translucent membrane. A network of capillaries, swollen into visibility, pulsed as they worked to pump the avatar’s disintegrating tissue into the transport channels of the gee deck’s circulatory system.

“It’s erasing itself,” Clemantine breathed.

“Sooth.”

“How is that possible?”

Urban pressed his palm against the pulsing capillaries. Generative walls were designed to be harmless to the human and animal inhabitants of the gee deck. The wall responded as it should, ignoring his touch. He said, “Its avatar wasn’t human.”

He drew back his hand. Shock yielded to fury. He had to resist an urge to punch the receding bulge. “It’s playing with us, Clemantine! It’s playing with me.”

“What did it want?” she asked, icily calm.

He thought about it. Reviewed what had been said. Important information had been revealed but he decided that was ancillary to the entity’s primary purpose. “It wanted me to know that for all the improvements in my defenses, I still can’t touch it.”

Only a few lumps remained in the wall.

Urban generated a ghost, armed with his anger and frustration. He transited into the library, summoned the Bio-mechanic.

For once, that Apparatchik appeared worried. He told Urban, “It came out of the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, entering inhabited spaces through the warren.”

“How could you miss it? How could it grow to that size and you not be aware of it?”

“I don’t know,” the Bio-mechanic admitted. “Not yet. But I will know soon.”