Edges

Chapter 35

The Bio-mechanic warned, *Our nemesis returns.

Urban looked up from the novel he’d been reading, disturbed by the bitter cynicism in the Bio-mechanic’s voice. More disturbed, when he did a quick lookup of ‘nemesis,’ a word he’d never heard before.

*The agent of our downfall? he asked.

*Desperate times, desperate measures, the Bio-mechanic replied. *You need to recognize that.

*You’ve changed. You’re not the same.

*We all change—to meet our circumstances or be defeated by them.

*You believe we’ll be defeated.

*No. I won’t let that happen.

Urban did not miss the harsh promise behind those words.

He sat up on the sofa, looked around the pleasant little room: Leaf-filtered sunlight patterning the white carpet, a painting depicting mountains in the path of a planetary storm, the dish of irises in full bloom on the side table.

Clemantine was gone somewhere with Pasha. He messaged her: *I’m worried the Bio-mechanic is unstable.

Several seconds passed before she sent a cryptic reply: *I trust him.

He frowned down at the tablet he’d been reading. On its screen, text from a novel purportedly written by one of the Founders at Tanjiri and recently translated by Dalisay, a linguist in the ship’s company. Glimpse of a lost past.

Reluctantly, he instructed the tablet to display the personnel map instead. It showed Lezuri still in the warren.

Urban traded subminds with his ghost on the high bridge and then reviewed his memories of the ship’s status. Nothing out of the ordinary, given that alien infestation had become ordinary.

He watched as Lezuri progressed to the transit gate. The personnel map showed Naresh, waiting to meet him, just like yesterday. The two points drew together, but after a few seconds they separated again. Naresh stayed, while Lezuri crossed the pavilion alone, taking a fast, determined pace to the pathway that was the shortest route to Urban’s cottage.

Hard not to think some momentous decision had been made.

Did Lezuri regret the game he’d played with the needle? He’d held out the lure of knowledge to win Urban over, but the impenetrability, the uselessness of that thing, had only hardened Urban’s resolve to reach Tanjiri. He would rather creep among the shadowed ruins of the megastructures, hunting for the remnants of libraries, then to rely on Lezuri to teach him what the people of the Hallowed Vasties had once known.

The map showed Lezuri on the patio. Urban set the tablet aside and stood up. The gel door retracted and Lezuri came in.

Subminds shunted through the network, keeping him synced with his ghost on the high bridge.

“I know the trick to the needle,” he told Lezuri. “It requires me to reach back in time to before it was sealed, and then set the mechanism that will open it from the inside.”

Lezuri looked at him, considering this for a long moment. Then he said, “I have something else to show you. I have ascertained the position of a star system that will interest you. Grant me the use of the array of telescopes and it will please me to show it to you.”

At these words, Urban felt he’d won a kind of victory. Lezuri had talked about his past, but never in any specific way. Now he seemed ready to reveal his origin. The offer triggered acute curiosity, but also suspicion. Everything Lezuri did made him suspicious. But what was the downside? Lezuri meant to persuade him to take Dragon somewhere other than Tanjiri. Urban was sure of that.

He wanted to know: Can I be persuaded?

He sent a DI to check the observational schedule. Nothing critical was underway, but that’s not what he told Lezuri. “The scopes are busy with a survey of the Near Vicinity. It’d be a risk to interrupt that. It might lead us to overlook some imminent hazard.”

The risk was minuscule. Urban mentioned it only because he wanted to see Lezuri’s reaction to a delay.

“We’re scheduled for an interim update on Tanjiri in another hundred sixty days or so,” he continued as if this news could serve as consolation. “But if it’s another star you want to see, you’ll have to wait for the annual imaging.”

Judging by the cynical amusement in his gaze, Lezuri recognized the act. In the condescending tone that came so naturally to him, he said, “Your annual survey is useful but limited. It only looks at those stars that once hosted a Swarm, ignoring other interesting systems within this region you call the Hallowed Vasties.”

“Are you saying there are inhabited star systems here that escaped the Communion?”

“There are places that were never touched by it,” Lezuri assured him.

This was a new concept. Historical observations affirmed that all inhabited star systems in the Hallowed Vasties had evolved into Dyson swarms. But maybe other systems had been settled later, after those records were made?

Urban wanted to know. Curiosity was his engine. And what harm could come from turning the telescopes in a new direction? He was more than willing to trade a delay in the ongoing survey to gain insight into Lezuri’s goals.

“Give me the coordinates. We’ll take a look.”

Urban sent the coordinates Lezuri provided to the Astronomer. *Check the catalog. Tell me what’s at this position.

*These coordinates map to the vicinity of an unnamed star. Roughly forty-two light years from our present position.

*Closer than Tanjiri?

*Yes. The star’s catalog designation is MSC-G-349809. A stable G-type, very similar to Earth’s Sun, though with only a single planet in the inner system—a small rocky world too close to the central star to be habitable.

*So it was never settled?

*Correct.

*What else?

*That is the extent of information the library has to offer.

Urban shifted his focus to Lezuri, who had taken over the sofa, sitting with an arm stretched across the back.

“I checked the catalog. There’s nothing of interest there.”

“Perhaps your records are out of date.”

He conceded this with a nod. All the histories of this region that he possessed were thousands of years old. That was the reason for this voyage, to discover what had changed.

Next, the slow turning of the telescopes.

He instructed the Astronomer to use only Dragon’s twin scopes and the one on nearby Artemis. The coordinates Lezuri had provided were offset from the star so that the telescopes looked at a point in the inner system, though well outside the orbit of the known world. There should not be a planet there, but maybe there was a celestial city?

He asked Lezuri, “What will I see?”

Lezuri’s lips pressed together. For a moment, a single vertical worry line appeared between his eyebrows. “I don’t know. I told you before, I don’t know what is left. Look, and we shall see.”

Urban summoned a chair. It rose from the floor, close to the side table where the irises bloomed. They would have to wait through the long exposure, so he retrieved his tablet, then sat, playing at reading the novel.

Lezuri waited in silence, his perfect face empty of expression.

Urban shifted from the text to the personnel map. Clemantine was at the dining terrace with Kona. He was on the verge of messaging her when the Astronomer said: *The initial image is ready.

*Send me the file.

He put the tablet on the side table. Lezuri looked up as privacy screens slid shut, darkening the room. The painting of the planetary storm became a display screen. Urban routed the file to it. He stood. Lezuri joined him as an image winked into view.

“Damn,” Urban whispered. “It’s flawed.”

There must have been undetected damage to the glass of one of the telescopes because there was an aberration at the center of the image—a micro-thin oval of white light among the background stars.

That was his initial impression.

But how could random damage to a lens produce an oval so thin and perfect, so sharply rendered. Was it an oval? If it was an actual object, it might be a circle viewed at a low angle.

That thought, combined with the spectrum of white light, triggered a memory that made Urban’s skin crawl. “By the Unknown God, is that a swan burster?”

The slightest twitch from Lezuri as if he was querying some source for a definition of the term.

A swan burster was far, far larger and more terrible than a courser. One had been caught in high orbit around Deception Well, its aggression neutralized by the governors, but still luminous when Urban lived there. He had seen it every night, a bright white ring tumbling through the sky, its interior a velvety black circle of twisted space-time. A constant reminder of Chenzeme power.

“Enlarge the image,” Urban said.

The view zoomed in. The circle—if that was what it was—was still rendered as a smooth, dimensionless line.

The swan burster at Deception Well had been eighteen hundred miles in diameter. This, Urban realized, had to be far, far larger to be so easily visible.

“Display the scale,” he instructed.

A tag appeared. The span of the ring was approximately 650,000 kilometers.

Ridiculous. Nearly half the diameter of the central star.

He wheeled on Lezuri. “What is it?” he demanded. “Is it a trick?”

“No, it is not a trick. It is very real.”

“Then is it a weapon?”

Lezuri gave the impression of weighing this question, his gaze resting on the image. “It could be used as a weapon,” he conceded. “But that is not its purpose. It is a blade of the kind once used to slice up worlds, to invert their gravity, to scatter their mass into debris fields that could then be harvested to grow the megastructures of a Swarm.” He cocked his head, smiled his condescending smile, as if daring Urban to disbelieve him.

Urban did not know what to believe. He had no way to cross-check Lezuri’s assertion. It sounded wild, fantastical. But worlds had been torn apart. The people of the Hallowed Vasties had done it over and over again. How? Wouldn’t engineering on that scale require a means to manipulate at least the direction of gravity? A means to bend the structure of space-time on a massive scale?

The reef affected the structure of space-time. A swan burster warped it, drawing immense quantities of energy from the zero-point field.

But this—he stepped closer to the screen, studying the perfect edge of the luminous white oval—this phenomenon was on a scale so much greater than anything else he’d ever seen or heard of.

Lezuri moved up to stand at his side. “At the peak of my power, I made this blade. It is an intrusion of another Universe in which matter behaves differently from our own. Such things are usually transient. Blades used to create the Swarms evaporated long ago. But this one I anchored in our reality and it has existed since.”

“Why?” Urban asked. “Why did you make it? Why such a great work in an empty system?”

“No system is ever empty. There was matter enough for my purposes. Look more closely.”

Urban did, and noticed for the first time another object, precisely placed at the center of the oval, tiny by comparison to the blade. A pinprick, a spark, but blue-green—the color of a living world.

“Enlarge again,” Urban said, now that more time had passed, time for additional detail to be pulled in by the scopes.

The perspective zoomed closer. The gleaming oval expanded until it escaped the edges of the monitor. The spark held its position at the center but grew in size, took on a form, a shape: another ring. A tag reported a diameter of fourteen thousand kilometers—far smaller than the blade, but still planetary in scale.

In contrast to the blade, this ring was clearly three-dimensional.

A torus, Urban thought. Narrow and graceful like a woman’s bracelet. It lay nearly edge-on to the star so that light struck one-half of its outer circumference—the equatorial band—wrapping the polar surfaces before dissipating in a twilight zone.

The ring’s other half—the half farthest from the star—was mostly dark. Only a small section of the inner wall enjoyed daylight, gleaming bright blue-white.

Urban raised a hand toward the screen. An atavistic gesture, the desire of instinct to explore by touch, but instead of touching, he imagined what might be there. The scattering of light so far around the curve of the ring suggested an atmosphere, but how could an object of such geometry hold onto an atmosphere?

“It has an artificial gravity,” Urban said. Not a question.

“This world is Verilotus,” the entity told him. “This is my world. It exists within a pocket of space-time held open by the blade—what my people named the Bow of Heaven. The flow of time is accelerated there. A year of game time as days go by outside. It may be that too much time has passed and nothing is left of my players.”

Urban stepped away from the screen. Wonder and excitement had chewed up the free calories in his brain, leaving him swaying on his feet—and short tempered. “Lights!” he demanded in a hoarse voice. “Leave the privacy screens closed.” The walls and ceiling swiftly brightened, leaving only rare shadows.

Lezuri had shown him this sight to tempt him, to persuade him to turn the fleet away from Tanjiri. And Urban was tempted. Oh yes. So tempted. Lezuri could manipulate time… if he was telling the truth.

But Urban didn’t trust him. And he feared Lezuri—what he was, what he’d been, but especially, what he might become again.

For all the power Urban commanded as master of Dragon, he was nothing, insignificant against a being who could open up a burning seam between two Universes and use it to pin an artificial world in place.

And it occurred to him—much later than it should have—that there must be a second entity resident there. He remembered Lezuri’s bitter voice explaining how he’d come to be marooned in the void: One whom I loved betrayed me.

“You are wondering about her,” Lezuri said. “My ‘other half.’”

Urban stared at him, startled at the accuracy of this guess. He heard himself ask a stumbling question: “Was she… a woman?”

“A goddess.”

Urban flinched at the word, but not because notions of deity were alien to him. On the frontier, the Unknown God was an accepted, if amorphous concept—an indeterminate, inscrutable force pervading the cosmos… or perhaps existing beyond it.

But Lezuri’s “goddess” was his partner entity, surely a being like Lezuri himself, with a personal presence, a tangible existence, emergent from the competitive maelstrom of the Communion, and potentially knowable.

Lezuri continued to speak, now in a melancholy voice as he gazed at the image of Verilotus, still visible on the display screen. “I made the world. She brought life to it. But her work was flawed—too simplistic, too naturalistic, lacking the unpredictability and the spice of brutal challenge my players needed to gain in skill and strength and fortitude as they moved from one life to the next, from one level, to the next. We argued over it, she and I. Both of us, passionate beings, unwilling to compromise.” He eyed Urban again. “I think now, war was inevitable between us.”

Sooth, Urban thought, stepping back, opening the distance between them. “She won,” he said. “She proved stronger than you.”

Lezuri’s eyes narrowed. “She proved more ruthless. But I don’t know that she survived our conflict. I barely did. I only know she cast me away from our sun, shattering my mind with the force of her gesture. Billions of seconds have passed since then, in the slow time of the greater Universe. I have tried to rebuild myself, though so little remains. Still, I must return. I have a duty, an obligation, to those players I left behind.”

Urban issued silent commands, turning off the view screen, returning the telescopes to the standard survey of the Near Vicinity, locking away the newly acquired image of Verilotus under a secure key—although this last, he knew, was futile.

Lezuri would surely have a means to capture images. There would be no metadata attached, no proof that it wasn’t faked, but it would be enough to inspire an examination of the telescope records, and after that a request for the original image.

Verilotus could not be kept secret and once its existence was known to the ship’s company there would be demands that the fleet go there instead of to Tanjiri.

Urban would not let that happen. To return this broken fragment of a warring god to his seat of power struck him as a fool’s choice. To risk encountering an entity of similar violent nature, possibly still in the fullness of her power… he would not do it.

He would not do it, regardless of the consensus of the ship’s company.

Still, he did not want to impose his will. That would lead to festering resentment. Better to argue his position… or circumvent debate by persuading Lezuri to take one of the outriders and go—get off my ship!

No. That couldn’t work. Lezuri would never risk getting in front of Dragon’s gun.

Lezuri must want control of that gun.

As if to confirm it, the entity said, “We must approach in stealth. These two ships together are well armed, but she is not without her resources.”

“I’m not here to take part in your war,” Urban said as he waved aside the privacy screens, allowing daylight to flood the room. Subminds visited, updating him on the ship’s status. Everything normal, peaceful.

A message from Clemantine:

*I’m on my way home.

He glanced at her display of irises. They remained fresh and blue. No precipitous shift to white. Not yet.

Still, he understood their lesson: Nothing lasts.