Authors: Sean Williams,Shane Dix
“What do you mean by symmetry?” she asked again in lambda Auriga.
“Every thread has two ends,” Thor said, then was gone once more.
In Theta Perseus, Lucia tried again. “Are you talking about Rob’s causally locked thread?”
“Your lexicon is insufficient.”
Peter chuckled bitterly to himself on the way back to 10 Taurus, the next system on the roll call of the dead.
“She always was an arrogant bitch,” he said. “But if she thinks the Starfish are going to follow her back the way they came—”
“I don’t think that’s what she’s trying to do,” Lucia cut in. She had difficulty even considering the possibility that had occurred to her. Thor was only half-right. It wasn’t just the English lexicon that was lacking; Lucia’s mind simply didn’t have the capacity to contain such thoughts.
Presumably, Thor’s did. Under the reddish light of Luyten’s Star, Lucia watched as Thor jumped closer to the fovea, braving its intense radiation. The fovea flared brightly, threateningly, and then Thor was on her way again to the next system. Lucia followed, with the fovea close behind her.
At Groombridge 1830, Thor tried again and was similarly rebuffed; in iota Boötis, she seemed to get a little closer before being forced away; at chi Hercules, the fovea came out almost on top of Thor, forcing her to retreat before making the attempt. And so it continued. It was like watching a strange kind of game, Lucia thought, a game of hopscotch conducted across solar systems with the threat of the cutters never far behind.
“What
is
she up to?” Alander asked on the way to the next system. “Trying to
merge
with it, for Christ’s sake?”
“That would be taking hybridization a little too far, perhaps,” said Lucia. “But I don’t think that’s what she’s doing. The fovea probably isn’t even the kind of thing you
could
merge with.”
“What do you mean?”
“Everything has its own signature when it jumps through unspace. Everything except the fovea. The fovea doesn’t leave a wake of any kind. There’s no sensation of it traveling at all; it just
appears
.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I don’t believe it’s a ship.”
Alander frowned. “Then what is it?”
“I think it’s the mouth of a wormhole.”
In beta Cane Venatici they watched as the fovea blossomed over another dead world. Now that the idea had occurred to her, it seemed obvious: why send ships to investigate systems when peeking through space-time would be enough? Given the other wonders of the Spinners and the Starfish, wormhole technology wasn’t too much of a stretch for the imagination. If the Starfish didn’t want to get too close, for whatever reason, all they had to do was open a hole in the system they wanted to examine, see what awaited them there, then send in the cutters if necessary. The radiation was simply a by-product of the hole, like blood from a wound.
The question was: what was on the other side of that mouth? Where did it lead? And what did the intelligences watching through it make of Thor’s strange dance?
They passed Vega and Sothis, two sacrifices of the Battle of Beid. Axford and Sol had both lost their headquarters in the fallout of that skirmish—a minor one in what, to the Starfish, was a much larger war. Or so Lucia imagined it. But the fovea showed no sign of recognition as it passed by the ruins, and the dance continued, with Thor edging closer and closer to the mouth of the wormhole as though daring it to swallow her.
“Wormhole or not, I don’t see the point of all this,” said Alander. “Once the fovea reaches Sol and the others, the cutters will come, and that’ll be the end of it.”
Lucia agreed, and she suspected Thor did, too. As they swept through systems and Sol came ever closer, the dance took on an urgent note. Constantly testing the perimeter around the wormhole mouth, Thor no longer paid Lucia and Alander any attention at all. She ignored Lucia’s questions and simply assumed that she would be followed. Lucia felt like a spectator, a witness to something she could never hope to understand.
They arrived at HD92719, a system that at first seemed no different than the others: alien worlds turned under an alien sun, and ash darkened the face of the one planet most like Earth.
Then, unexpectedly, Thor spoke.
“I am home,” she said in the few seconds before the fovea appeared. “Here is where it begins.”
Lucia didn’t understand what Thor meant by “home” until she checked the UNESSPRO records. HD92719 had contained the colony after which Thor was named.
“What do you mean, Caryl?” asked Alander. “This is where what begins?”
Thor had no time to reply, if she had ever intended to. The fovea opened up above them, blazing like a supernova. It loomed over them, taking up a quarter of the sky. It seemed larger than it had before, and at first Lucia thought that this was just an optical illusion. But then she realized that it actually
was
expanding.
“Holy shit,” Alander muttered, noticing it, too.
Thor vanished with a flash of white light as the edge of the fovea swept nearer. Lucia was ready to follow to the next system, but according to Thor’s wake, that wasn’t where she was headed. The ripples in unspace denoting her passage were aimed directly into the heart of the wormhole.
Radiation boiled through vacuum as the fovea swept outward, its roiling surface tearing and bursting. Lucia’s Spinner-enhanced senses caught glimpses of arcane geometries and tortured space-time. The interior of the wormhole seemed almost alive, rippling with symmetries she wasn’t equipped to comprehend.
Then, abruptly, something lashed out at them—a tongue of pure white energy. She felt motion, acceleration, penetration, reorientation—
Time passed in an unmarked blur. It seemed to Lucia as though her internal clock had slowed right down to zero, freezing her in place while the universe moved around her.
Then all was quiet, and the fovea was gone. Lucia looked about her, confused as to what had just happened to them.
“Are we—?” Alander stopped, his question unasked. The view outside the spindle rendered all inquiries meaningless.
They weren’t in HD92719 anymore; they’d moved again. Thor’s home system was gone, and in place of its central star hung a maelstrom of unleashed energy. The system they were in had changed dramatically in the previous two days, but Lucia recognized it immediately.
“Pi-1 Ursa Major,” she said.
“How the hell did we get here?”
“Maybe this was where the wormhole led.”
“So where are the Starfish? What happened to the battle?”
Lucia examined the system in every frequency, but it was completely empty.
“They’ve gone,” she said.
“I can see that, Lucia. The question is
where
?”
“How the hell should I know, Peter?” she snapped. Her confusion was making her less tolerant than she normally might have been.
Peter ran a hand through his hair, sighing. He looked haggard, much older than his rejuvenated body had before. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”
He stopped.
“It’s just what, Peter?”
“It’s just that it seems so empty,” he said after a moment. “So quiet. And I don’t want to hope that—” He stopped again and shook his head. “I just don’t want to hope, that’s all.”
She did know what he meant. As they searched the system, looking for any sign of alien activity, the same thought occurred to her, too. Just because they found nothing—no Source, no Tridents, no cutters—did that mean that the aliens had really gone? Was it too much to hope that Thor’s strange dance had somehow saved them?
But like Peter, she didn’t want to jump to any hasty conclusions. The system
was
empty, though. There wasn’t any wreckage that didn’t come from ruined planets and shattered asteroids.
They waited for the fovea to reappear, but nothing disturbed the violent beauty of the expanding clouds of gas that had once been the system’s primary. They waited for Thor, but she didn’t come, either.
“Maybe they kept going,” Alander said. “Maybe the fovea pushed us out of the way while they danced on, system by system.” A slight pause before: “And maybe we’ve just been wasting our time here all along.”
Lucia’s stomach sank at that notion. Time was so precious right now, and the idea of having wasted any was depressing. “So where do you want to go, then?”
He didn’t even hesitate.
“To Sol,” he said. “I want to go home, to see if there’s anything left.”
3.0.0
UEH/ELLIL
Ueh/Ellil
stepped out of the hole ship and onto the surface of
the unnamed planet. Dense air whipped around him, catching his body off balance. He slipped to one knee and put a hand into the dirt to steady himself.
Yu-qiang was beside him in an instant, helping him up.
“This is so
not
a good idea, Ueh.” Weak sunlight painted her skin a deeper green than normal. She looked decidedly unwell. It matched the unease she had expressed throughout the short journey down to the planet.
“I shall be fine,” he assured her.
“Well—just so you know—if you die I’m not carrying you back.”
He shifted his faceplates in acknowledgement of what she’d said but realized immediately that she wouldn’t have understood the facial gesture. He was too preoccupied with the sense of joy that was thrilling through his body to say anything. Something wonderful was about to happen.
The soil was rough and stony beneath his feet—but it
was
soil. He rubbed his fingers together, enjoying the graininess of it. He was standing on a real planet for the first time in many, many long cycles. The higher gravity dragged him down; the weather was completely unnerving; the light lacked the controlled qualities of
Mantissa A’s
artificial sources. And yet here he felt complete—or nearly so, anyway.
Atonement stirred within him. He could feel its tendrils writhing under his skin, yearning for something he could no longer give. It had outgrown him and longed for its next phase of growth.
It would be a difficult birth, he knew. But he didn’t mind. Strangely, he held no fear whatsoever.
“Well?” said Yu-qiang. “Now what?”
“Now I think I understand,” he said. The yearning of Atonement filled him like light, granting him insight into things he never thought to question. “I understand what
Goel
means.”
“Don’t go all mystical on me, Ueh. This isn’t the time for epiphanies.”
He laughed. For the first time in cycles, he felt truly alive. “My name is no longer Ueh,” he said. “I am changing again. I am
escaping
.”
“You’re making me nervous is what you’re doing,” she said.
He could sense her fear and concern as clearly as he could feel the thing inside him straining for release.
“The Ambivalence is gone,” he said.
Yu-qiang stared at him for the longest time, mystified and intrigued simultaneously. He could see the flicker of hope behind her expression. “You can’t possibly know that.”
“The Praxis knows it. He knows things we cannot. He sensed its passing from this universe.”
“So we’re
saved
?” She hesitated again, clearly wanting to embrace this news with delight but reluctant to do so until she understood everything. A brief scan of the turbulent sky seemed to galvanize the doubts she still held. “We won’t have to keep running?”
“You can go home now,
Caryl/Hatzis.
Just as you wished.”
“As can you.”
“That is something the
Yuhl/Goel
cannot do.”
“I know it’s a long way, but you have navigation records. I’m sure you could find it again.”
“You misunderstand,” he said. “We never
had
a home.”
She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“
Goel
means
made
,” he said. The simple truth, the realization, warmed his insides, lit up areas of his mind that had until then been dark.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” Yu-qiang said.
“The Praxis made us,” he explained. “We served him, attended him, kept him company. We gave him a reason to keep running. Perhaps we were modeled on a species he encountered in the past—maybe even more than one. Whatever the origins of our forms, we were given false memories, myths that gave us a sense of who we are but did not hold us back or undermine our true purpose. We were the perfect companions.” His understanding grew the more he thought about it, but it came only with feelings of compassion, not anger. “The Praxis lied to us for all these years.”
“You don’t seem too upset about it,” she said. “He
used
you—and he would have used us, too!”
“How long would you engrams have lasted without his help? He may have used you, but it would have been for your own benefit. Only by being remade by the Praxis, as were we, would you have been able to survive in a universe containing the Ambivalence.”
Yu-qiang didn’t look convinced. “That still doesn’t give him the right to—”
But he wasn’t interested in her objections. Something more important was about to happen—something that would justify the Praxis’s lies.
“I understand now,” he interrupted her. “I know what has to be done.”
He opened his arms to embrace the wind and ordered his I-suit to open.
Ueh gasped as bitter cold struck his chest and shoulders. Primordial winds tore at his skin, making every nerve scream. The widening seams of the suit slid slowly down to his waist and around his back, then spread along his limbs and up his back.
“What the hell are you doing!”
He ignored her protests. The exposure to alien air sent a completely new sensation thrilling through him. He felt as though every cell in his body had woken. He halted the I-suit’s progress at his neck, wanting to savor every last sensation he was experiencing. He opened his wings’ sheaths to their full extent, as though he was gliding in the wind.
Yu-qiang tried to grab him, presumably to drag him back into the hole ship cockpit, but she stopped short when a flurry of mist rose up between them, accompanied by a strange and alien hissing sound. It took him a moment to realize that it was coming from himself. His skin was decrepitating; every exposed cell was popping open, releasing genetic material to the wind.
“I am Atonement!” he shouted over the rising noise.
“Don’t do this, Ueh!” she shouted back. “You’re going to die!”
But the thought didn’t bother him. He embraced it, knowing that his death would bring life to a barren world—life based on
his
life, on his genetic material. Atonement had made him a catalyst, the seed crystal for an entirely new biosphere. A
home.
What was death in the face of such transformation? Who wouldn’t give up their life to give his people what they had lacked, without knowing it, all their existence?
With a feeling of the most profound accomplishment, he ordered his I-suit completely open and gave himself up to his fate.
“Ueh!” was the last thing he heard as Yu-qiang made one last, desperate plea to him.
But the word was meaningless to him now. The name no longer belonged to him. And as the winds carried his substance across the face of the planet, part of him wondered if it ever had.