Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
“So where would they come from?” asked Lucia. Her tone was unashamedly skeptical. “How far in the future are we talking about?”
“Current estimates put it at fifty billion years or so to the turnaround.”
“That’s a hell of a long time,” said Lucia.
“But not impossible.”
“In order to maintain their arrow of time,” Alander said, mentally dusting off theories he hadn’t read about for years, “they’d have to stay at a distance from the rest of the universe. They could interact, but only weakly; otherwise they’d risk flipping their arrow of time over to ours.”
“What would that do?” asked Lucia.
“I don’t know.” Alander struggled with an image forming in his mind. “What if the Starfish or the Spinners or both are from the future, traveling back to our past, but everything we’ve seen so far is from our universe, from
our
arrow of time, grown up around them like coral?”
“That’s precisely what I’ve been wondering,” said Singh. “It seems so strange that the Spinner and Starfish migrations have always been there, locked in time like a thread, while other life-forms have grown around that thread to make it their home. In a sense, they
have
lost their arrow of time, because causality has become so tangled in the thread that it doesn’t have much meaning anymore. Did the Starfish or the Spinners make the gifts? Did the Starfish or the Spinners destroy them? It depends entirely on how you look at it. Did we trigger the battle in pi-1 Ursa Major by going to the Starfish, or did we finish it? Did the Spinners arrive in pi-1 Ursa Major forty-three years ago, or was that when they left? Perhaps, from their point of view, they’re only just arriving there now.”
“Or perhaps they’ve always been there,” said Alander.
Lucia’s skepticism was an almost physical presence in the Dark Room. “Personally, I prefer the other theory doing the rounds.”
“Of course,” said Singh, “because it’s easier to accept. But that’s why I distrust it. If the Spinners were giving us the gifts to distract the Starfish while they got away, then that would make
them
the bad guys—and that conveniently absolves us of our guilt, doesn’t it?”
“Guilt for what?” asked Lucia.
“For handing them over to the Starfish, of course,” said Singh. “I’m sorry, but anything that makes the universe seem so neatly comprehensible, while at the same time makes us feel better about our actions within that universe, strikes me as being unlikely.”
Alander didn’t know if he wholly agreed with that but he had to admit that Rob Singh’s theory was intriguing. The image of a thread curling through space-time, causally locked between its endpoints, was a strange but seductive one—as well as terribly fatalistic. He was starting to see it less as a coral around which a rich and varied ecosystem had built up, rather than a strip of flypaper, trapping everyone that came too close. And once caught in the tangled web of causality, there might be no escape; the thread would be unbreakable. Only at the end- points—at the beginning and end of the intertwined timeline—would the chance to slip through appear.
The question, therefore, was: where in the future
was
the endpoint? Was humanity—or what was left of it—trapped for millennia, like the Yuhl, or was the end in sight?
“Perhaps the Praxis can help resolve this,” he said after some thought. “If they’ve encountered more Spinner drops ahead, then we’ll know the migration is continuing, regardless of what’s happened in pi-1 UMA.”
“I’m sure someone will ask,” said Singh. “Once they find him.”
“
If
they find him,” Lucia added gloomily.
* * *
Alander couldn’t stay hidden forever and he knew it. Eventually,
following increasingly annoyed summons from Sol, he did reluctantly emerge to offer his version of events. He wasn’t sure how seriously his viewpoint would be taken, but he could accept that his role in the killing of two Axfords and the destruction of the android breeder factory was pivotal and warranted at least a personal statement after the fact.
Lucia accompanied him in her I-body form first to the Hub, then to the Library, where the inquest was being conducted. He related what had happened to a panel of mission supervisors With as much accuracy and objectivity as he could manage. The events of the previous two weeks were hard to view with complete detachment, however, and he found his palms sweating as he related how he had subdued Axford 1313. The sensation of ribs breaking and organs collapsing under the force of his blow was still horribly vivid. The smell of blood, he feared, would never leave him.
After this he went to the Surgery for a detailed examination. The instruments in Spindle Four were considerably more advanced than anything he’d ever seen on Earth, and he dreaded what Kingsley Oborn—the closest thing to a medic from a thousand missions containing no actual bodies—would find. He gritted his teeth as arcane scanners swept up and down his body, while strange nanotech-laden fluids flowed through his tissues.
Oborn’s conclusions were nebulous at best. There was evidence of extensive change on a cellular level throughout Alander’s body, but exactly what those changes meant could not be determined without more comprehensive tests.
“I’m working on a new android design,” said the biotechnician, stroking his chin where a beard would normally have grown. “If there are changes we can incorporate based on the work the Praxis did on you, then that might give us a more robust start, at least.”
“Which mission are you from?” Lucia asked him.
He eyed her modified I-suit with naked fascination. “Ten Taurus. I’m looking forward to going back there when all this is over.”
“To live?”
The biotechnician shrugged. “I’d like to, but I know that if we all split up, nothing will get done. We have to stay together to work things out. Later, once everything has settled down, we can talk about resettlement.”
“In your new android bodies.”
He beamed at her. “Of course. Who’d want to stay a con forever, right?”
Alander had never heard the expression before, and his confusion must have showed. Lucia explained it to him as they left the Surgery.
“That’s
con
as in conSense,” she said. “Some of the droids tend to look down on those stuck in VR, even though conSense is often more comfortable and flexible than life in the flesh. The reverse is also true, of course: cons sneer at droids for being clunky and slow.”
Alander grunted, wondering if he was seeing the beginning of a new culture clash. Was this how the future was going to shape out, as a conflict between those in the flesh and those without? He wondered where people like Lucia would fit in, straddling the divide.
“You can take the engram out of the ape,” he said, “but you can’t take the ape out of the engram, eh?”
“Perhaps,” said Lucia, walking ahead of him like some shimmering ghost. “Although I’m sure someone’s working on that even as we speak.”
* * *
In the strange, virtual landscape of the Unfit Alander heard the
cautious celebrations of an alien race that had been running for as long as most of them could remember. Of those who had chosen to stay to pursue the Species Dream, only a handful had been alive when the Spinners had first arrived in their home system. Their memories were faded and confused. Given the plasticity of the Yuhl brain, all of them had been cognitively recast many times since their escape from the Starfish.
“We lost everything,” said one of the elders, accorded no special status by virtue of her survival but allowed to speak as one who had dreamed of regaining her freedom. “Billions died in the hive moons. Fire spread through the weave, undoing everything we had built. The Ambivalence didn’t heed our pleas. The Praxis made himself known to the few of us who escaped, and our fate was sealed.”
Alander listened to the litany of recollections with interest, wondering at how it must feel to have ended a millennia-long emigration. He wasn’t certain that the inbuilt ability to understand the Yuhl’s speech, granted to him by the Praxis, was translating accurately, but he thought he sensed a certain sadness in the telling as opposed to relief. Had the survivor of the purging of the Yuhl home systems hoped for death rather than freedom? Perhaps in the Yuhl’s eyes, one release was as good as another.
The concept of the Ambivalence—that Starfish and Spinners were facets of the same manifestation, rather than two independent migrations following one another—dovetailed neatly with Rob Singh’s speculations. Alander wondered if the Yuhl’s innate sense of symmetry gave them an edge in understanding the phenomenon they had been caught up in, or whether centuries of being around the Praxis had simply given them access to his own insights. The fleshy alien had been trailing the Spinner front much longer than the Yuhl, after all, and would therefore have a better understanding of the superpowers—an understanding that less knowledgeable races could only benefit from.
“This is the dawning of a new time,” said Sol, her voice ringing out clear and strong through the minds of the Yuhl and engrams assembled. Alander knew she had doubts as to her role among the engrams, but it didn’t show. “What future lies ahead for our two races is unknown, but if we face it with determination and dignity, then we—”
“Yes, let’s face it, Caryl,” a familiar voice interrupted. “I guess you’ll face it in exactly the same way you’ve faced everything else: incompetently. In fact, I’d be prepared to lay odds that you won’t see out another year.”
A wave of shock spread through the gathering. “Frank?” called Sol. “How the hell did you get—?”
“It doesn’t matter
how
I got here,” Axford cut in again. “That I
am
here is all that matters.” His voice was full of amused contempt. “You know, Caryl, I hear you talk about dignity and determination, but it’s just your usual rhetoric, isn’t it? All I see is a bunch of submissive fools sitting around in desperation waiting for the heel to come and crush them.”
“Whereas you’d be making plans and exploring options, right?” said Alander disdainfully. “Why don’t you save us the self-congratulatory rant, Frank, because we’ve heard it all before.”
“Ah, Dr. Alander, I presume?” returned Axford. “The Praxis’s pet experiment. Tell me, how does it feel to be part of the freak show? As your humanity sloughs away, do you even care about what you did back in Sol? Do you ever grieve for the millions of deaths you were responsible for simply because you are unable to string two coherent thoughts—”
Alander’s laugh cut him short. “You might have been able to bait me once, Frank, but not anymore. Once upon a time I was probably intimidated by you, but now I can’t even muster the enthusiasm to pity you.”
“I’d be mindful of that hybrid tongue of yours, Peter.”
“You accuse us of rhetoric, but you’re just as guilty of it. If you have more than words to threaten us with, then you wouldn’t be wasting your time here with us now. And this
is
time wasting, Frank.”
There was a feral edge to Axford’s voice when he replied. “Maybe you should talk to that freak girlfriend of yours, Peter.”
Then he was gone, the presence of his mind vanishing into the morass of other thoughts, roiling and clamoring at his invasion. Alander didn’t stop to discuss the intrusion or the meaning of Axford’s words. He quickly retreated from the gathering and rejoined his body. With a squelching sound, he pulled his head from the organic helmet that linked him to the Unfit. A Yuhl attendant was on hand to wipe him clean of slime, but he pushed the alien away, looking for Lucia.
Her I-body lacked the nerve endings required to join with the Unfit, so she had waited patiently by his body for his mind to return.
“What happened?” he asked, taking her translucent hands in his. They were shaking.
“He came to me,” she said. “Frank the Ax. He tried to get inside of me, to take over the spindle.”
Even written in fields barely more visible than air, her distress was obvious. It was in her posture and hinted at in her ghostlike features. For a person composed entirely of mind, with no body to call her own, android or otherwise, Axford’s invasion must have constituted something close to rape.
“Did he succeed?” Alander asked uneasily.
She shook her head. “The Dark Room wouldn’t let him in—not down deep where I live. I’m the only one who can go there. But he tried, and when he failed, he tried to hurt me.”
“You’re okay, though, right?” He studied her I-body for injuries, even though rationally he knew it would look perfect no matter what had happened to her spindle-bound mind.
“I’m fine.” Her disposition lightened at this, appreciating his concern. “But I’m glad he’s gone. I think Thor made a big mistake doing a deal with him.”
He nodded in agreement, even while acknowledging the help that Axford had at times given them. That help might have been undermined by betrayals, and may never have been unselfishly offered, but it
had
helped them. He had alerted them to the Yuhl, shown them how to merge hole ships, given them tactical advice when they most needed it, and consistently tried to educate the scientists and administrators chosen by UNESSPRO to survey the stars that the universe was a very hostile place—a place where it was becoming more and more apparent that only the most brutal would survive.
Lucia suddenly released Alander’s hands, her head tilting in a manner that suggested she was listening to a sound that she alone could hear.
“What is it?” he asked, seeing her expression become one of concern.
“It’s Thor,” she said. “She’s back.”
“And the Praxis? Is he with her?”
“No. Listen.” Lucia reached out and took Alander’s hand. He was instantly plunged into a conSense view of the system. Thor shone like a many-tailed comet in close orbit to Sagarsee.
“—Have returned,” she was saying, “and I bring bad news.”
Alander fought disorientation. “What sort of bad news?” he asked, not unsurprised to hear his voice over the simulation. “Didn’t the others make it?”
Thor didn’t answer his question. “You must leave here.”
“
Leave
here?” said Cleo Samson from the world below. “But why? I thought we were safe now.”