Faith (55 page)

“I don’t…”

“Yes you do, Commander, you do understand. You were right, She made it deliberately. And it’s made of
us
and
Her.
Together. Its life will be only seconds or minutes to us, but to them it’s eternity.”

“Them?”

Smithson looked away. He seemed to be blinking.

Thahl said “Commander, he means the living things that will grow and die inside it. They must have already evolved…we may all meet again in there, Commander, and not know it.”

Foord looked away. He too seemed to be blinking.

“Commander,” Cyr said, “do we still fire on it?”

“Not this time. Whatever She’s done, it must play itself out.”

“But…”

“First, it’s not really there. Second, if it is it’s beyond our weapons. And third…I’ve destroyed ships. I might destroy cities if I had to. But a universe?”

“Made by Her.”

“The fourth reason.
We’re
part of Her. We always were.”

Again he found himself blinking back tears.

It hung before them on the screen. The ship’s voice—its instruments, all unable to reach a conclusion—sang it through its life.

•

The alarms murmured. The two ships faced each other across Her universe, which could not exist as a discrete object between them because it was infinite.

In five seconds and a billion years following its creation, it formed its time and space and physical laws. It formed nebulae; nebulae congealed locally into stars; stars were organised and spun into galaxies, measuring molecules and light-years across their spiral arms. Around some stars it formed planets.

Fifteen seconds and three billion years into its existence, it was teeming with life and death. A minority of lifeforms developed civilisations, and a minority of civilisations flourished, lasting millionths of a second and thousands of years. A smaller minority of civilisations spanned more than one solar system. There was even an unidentified ship, prowling the dark spaces between galaxies. More than one, but they rarely met or communicated.

Her universe, like any other, was mostly empty. Its emptiness dwarfed suns, whose light guttered like cigarette-ends dropped in a derelict building. Only one time in millions would light produce life where it landed. Civilisations began and ended their lives along its timeline, in packets of millionths of a second and thousands of years. The atoms and subatomic particles of Foord and Thahl and Cyr and Smithson and Kaang—of their replicas in the crater, or their replicas from the Bridge, or the thousands of reproductions of both which had tumbled out of Her—went into Her universe and reappeared in living things. Occasionally they existed in the same galaxy; less occasionally, in solar systems close to each other; almost never, in the same solar system; less than almost never, on the same planet; and less than that, in forms that would recognise each other.

Once, on a planet circling a dying red sun, an individual with some of Foord’s particles came within a few feet of an individual with some of Thahl’s.They glanced at each other and passed by. One was chitinous, part of a collective hive; the other was feathered, pecking at a fruit like an apple. Later they died. Five seconds and a billion years afterwards, their sun went nova. An unidentified ship watched it from a distance of atoms and light-years, and turned away towards the next solar system.

•

She began Her endgame. For the second time the Bridge screen went dark, and She brought them into Her universe. There was no compression: they stayed as they were, but reality around them changed, instantly, from outside to inside.

Every part of Her universe, because it was infinite, touched every part of theirs. It welcomed them with a noiseless rushing. Foord shouted to them, above the noiselessness,
We’ll come out at Sakhra, then all this will be finished
. Finished abruptly. After everything which had gone before, Her endgame was simple and abrupt. Fast, and final. It was Her last throw of the dice.

Foord knew Her better now, and knew what She had done. She was a conventional ship with a conventional opponent, and the opponent was matching Her—perhaps, with Foord’s careful penny pieces, more than matching Her. She was also something else, something which could make and encompass universes, and She had drawn on the second identity to meet the threat to the first. But that, Foord knew, would also threaten the second identity.

They passed through Her universe like ghosts, unseeing and unseen. They were almost nothing: a movement of air, an echo, a deepening of colour. As they passed, their traces altered with the magnitude of what they passed through—a planet, a continent, a room.

It contained random particles from them and Her, and multitudes from neither. It contained civilisations which grew and died in different galaxies at different times, without knowing each other. Some resembled the Commonwealth or the Sakhran Empire, and some were unimaginably different. Some were visited by an unidentified ship, and collapsed or declined after it left them. Some had an individual who wrote a book about what the ship was. Some sent an opponent to engage it singly.

They saw no more of Her universe than it did of them. For seconds, and billions of years, they ghosted through it. Orders of magnitude. If it was a universe, they passed only six of its planets, in six different solar systems in six different galaxies, on the route She had set to bring them out at Sakhra. It was a short journey, less than the span of one grain of sand on a beach; and in the mere seconds and billions of years it lasted, Foord finally understood.

I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote.

•

On an uninhabited planet of dark slate, their passing was an extra quiver in a column of smoke. The smoke rose from a hut standing by itself on the slopes of a mountain. Someone had come there, to live and die alone.

On a grey-blue basalt planet their passing was a momentary darkening of one vein of mineral in a wall of cliffs.The cliffs were honeycombed with tunnels eaten into them by acid rain. They overlooked a beach.

A tsunami was coming, nine hundred feet high and nine hundred miles an hour. It dragged the shallow water across the beach towards it. It sent a nine-hundred-mile-an-hour wind ahead of it, which tore through the tunnels in the cliffs and made them scream.

In a room at the summit of a stone tower, their passing was a momentary deepening in the grain of a wooden floorboard. The room held the world’s last two living things, a father and daughter, opponents of an unspeakable theocracy. The theocracy had impregnated them with a cellular stasis field, which halted their ageing and even their need for sustenance; then, having made them almost immortal, it sentenced them to life imprisonment. If Foord had been able to see them, he would have remembered his
own
father’s old volume of
King Lear
: We’ll wear out, in a wall’d prison, packs and sects of great ones that ebb and flow by the moon.

And they did. They lived to see, through barred windows, the extinction of their species. But they had become something else, and it no longer mattered to them.

On a planet once visited by an unidentified ship, their passing was a small vortex of wind in a pile of dead leaves. It had been the first planet of a civilisation that spanned half a galaxy, and would have dwarfed the Commonwealth. The spires of its cities were so tall they pierced the ionosphere, and so numerous they made the planet look like a pincushion. They were still unblemished, centuries after they were built, each one standing in parkland. After the unidentified ship left, people had turned away from each other; they no longer lived in cities or visited parks, and were no longer people. Small vortexes of wind played among the dead leaves in the parks, like the ghosts of terriers.

In a half-lit apartment, their passing was an unnoticed flicker in a lamp swinging from the ceiling. A couple had taken to meeting there, despite the sectarian and political forces ranged against them. Later they died, but their children founded a new society. It too died, but gradually and gracefully, and while it lived—hundredths of a second, and tens of thousands of years—it was glorious. Its systems of thought were so powerful that they lived on as ghosts, heard and seen in the dreams of the historians and chroniclers and archaeologists who sifted its ruins.

Their passing was a moment’s dilation of an eye pupil in something which walked vast plains. It was a solitary carnivore with the same shape as the members of the herd it walked with. It had evolved the shape and smell and voice of herd members, so it could live among them. It would even help defend them against packs of other predators. It lived with them and outside them, and fed with them and on them.

•

I know what She is. I know what Srahr wrote.
Her universe died. In four minutes, not five as the Bridge screen had said, but four, it went from singularity to universe to singularity. It collapsed, and they came out of it at Sakhra.

They cried out as the screen relit. It seemed months or years since they had last seen Sakhra. It pulsed before them as if lit by a naked swinging bulb, the main continent covering an entire hemisphere, the Great Bowl filling most of its interior. It looked like a giant eye.

She was waiting. For the first and last time, She spoke directly.

I almost love you
, said Her words on the screen, in a cursive script like the one they thought they had seen spreading over Her earlier, but this time they could read it. I almost love you too, Foord thought, and almost love can almost never die.

She moved to exactly one thousand six hundred and twelve feet from them and they resumed fighting, if that was what it was.

•

The two ships passed by Sakhra, well outside its orbit. Horus Fleet, in its careful defensive cordon, watched them pass. Faith carried a huge gash which had opened up two-thirds of Her port side, and the
Charles Manson
was covered in shit and striations and an apparent infection of boils where its dorsal hull surfaces had been attacked. They were throwing closeup weapons at each other when they emerged at Sakhra, and continued as they passed by and left its orbit and headed for the two inner planets, and neither of them gave Horus Fleet more than a glance. Horus Fleet made no move towards them and no attempt to contact them. They were gone.

They approached the orbit of Horus 2, and it finished. There were nearly fifty impacts from missiles She had made, replicas of Foord’s two, which had been floating inert all around them. They hit every part of the
Charles Manson
, even the Bridge. It wasn’t Her private universe which had destroyed them, it was Her copy of Foord’s idea. Now, thought Foord, looking for his closest friend, I really do understand Sakhran irony. And he’s always been my closest friend.

The damage they did to Her was enough; she consumed herself. She was not able to turn back and attack Sakhra. She limped off, and passed out of Horus system, and would never come back.

Foord’s ship died like Jeeves would have died: carefully, ordering its affairs, collapsing tidily and progressively, informing survivors of the disposition of lifeboats. It had always been in Foord’s nature to wonder how Jeeves would have died.

The Bridge was wrecked. Kaang and Smithson were unhurt, but Thahl had died instantly and Cyr lay on the floor amid wreckage and rubbish. Foord went to her, and held her in his arms. He’d never touched her before, except once, more than seven years ago, to shake hands when she joined his ship. Now they kissed, tongues and everything.

Cyr looked up at him. “Almost,” she said, and died.

PART NINE

From the
Second Book of Srahr
, by Aaron Foord

•

“A
lmost,” she said. She could have meant the life we ought to have had together, or the engagement with Faith. The word works equally well for either.

If she meant the life we ought to have had, then I won’t write about it here. It doesn’t belong here. If she meant the engagement with Faith, I think she was right; we almost defeated Her.

•

We never did see what they look like, but with hindsight it doesn’t matter. When you know what they do, what they look like becomes irrelevant. They do the work of gods, but they aren’t gods themselves.

Maybe I should write about Her in the past tense. After all, the engagement is in the past: She went away from Sakhra because we damaged Her, and She won’t come back. But Her effect on us, like Her effect on the Sakhrans when She first visited them three hundred years ago, belongs in the present and will belong in the future. It won’t go away just because She went away. And there isn’t just one of Her. There will always be more Faiths: the universe has several of them. Every universe does.

It was just before the end of the engagement, when everything ended for me, that I finally came to know what She is. And when I knew, I saw something else: a structure, made up of orders of magnitude. To describe what She is I must first describe the structure, because She’s part of it.

Orders of magnitude. How many grains of sand on one beach? How many beaches on one planet? Planets in one galaxy? Galaxies in one universe? So, how many grains of sand in one universe? And how many universes? All those questions, except the last, have a finite answer. Only in the last question is the answer infinity. Or zero, which is the same thing turned inwards. In Sakhran mathematics they have the same symbol for infinity and zero: the srahr, so named when She first came here three hundred years ago.

When Srahr wrote his Book and told them what She is, they saw it was true and accepted it. They still carry it within them like the code of an ancient disease. It told them they were almost nothing, that they had nowhere to turn except away from each other and nowhere to go except into regression and decline. Sometimes I think they were right, sometimes not. What Srahr wrote, and what I will write, has more than just darkness about it; there’s also a suggestion of infinity. The more you know, the more room there is for the unknown. Like something continually halving itself where the halves get
bigger.