A scratchy voice, not even an imago, said, ‘Get out of here, Campion. Get out of here now.’
‘Betony ...’ I began.
‘Just go,’ he said. ‘Follow Purslane. Bring her home. Tell her I made a terrible mistake, and that I’m sorry.’
I spun
Dalliance
around and boosted away from the two embattled ships, the console shrill with warnings of my imminent doom. I had crossed less than half the distance back to the other shatterlings when one or other of the two battling ships became a scalding point of light, swelling until it had filled the entire misshapen double-lobed impassor bubble with stained white radiance. The radiance tore against the limit of the bubble and then punched through with the fury of a miniature supernova. It was axiomatic that no ship, no part of a ship, could have survived such energies. Betony had sacrificed himself, done one last deed for the Line he loved so much. He had made errors and enemies, he had miscalculated and misjudged, but - in my eyes at least - in the last instant of his existence, he had redeemed himself utterly.
But he had not killed Galingale.
We did not see it at first; it was camouflaged to the point of invisibility and small enough to register as just another piece of fused debris spinning away from that fireball. It was Henbane who grew suspicious and turned
Shock Diamond
away to investigate - vowing to rejoin the chase when he had satisfied his curiosity.
What he found was a black egg, wrapped in a shell of impasse. It was no more than ten metres across, and appeared to lack any means of moving or steering itself.
We knew exactly what it was. Galingale had hoped to escape, to fall through space until he felt it was safe to signal his presence. A thousand years from now, ten thousand, fifty thousand - he would be hurtling through the airspace of another part of the meta-civilisation, separated by time and space from the knowledge of his crimes. He would alert the locals to rescue him, and they would gladly oblige - even if it meant pushing their science to the limits of ingenuity, even if it took them centuries or thousands of years to accomplish their task. None of that would matter to Galingale, as long as someone found him before he sailed beyond the edge of the galaxy.
Henbane signalled him. Some dull mechanism brought Galingale out of abeyance.
His imago appeared on all our ships, beaming with delight at his own survival. In Tongue he said, ‘Greetings, co-sentients of the human meta-civilisation. I am ...’ There was the briefest of pauses as he searched his mind for a new name, something other than Galingale. ‘... Campion, a shatterling of Gentian Line, a survivor of the ambush against our Line. I have been travelling for a very long time, ever since my ship was destroyed at near-light-speed. Humbly I beseech your assistance in decelerating me to planetary speeds, so that I may recontact any other survivors of this most heinous of crimes. My survival pod carries a trove rich in the science and culture of a million societies - the contents of which I would be glad to share with anyone in a position to assist me.’ He folded his hands across his lap and beamed again. ‘I await your response with interest.’
‘Hello, Galingale,’ Henbane said. ‘Sorry to spoil things, but you haven’t been asleep quite as long as you planned. A little under an hour, if you want the brutal truth.’
It must only have been then that Galingale paid proper attention to the chronometer in the cramped little space of his survival pod. He let out a sound that was almost a laugh, as if acknowledging the cosmic joke that had just been played on him.
‘Quite,’ he said.
‘I don’t think Campion’s going to be too thrilled about that little white lie you just told.’
‘I’m certain he won’t.’ Galingale scratched the border of his metal eye. ‘Sorry Campion, if you’re listening in. Had to do it. It’s not as if I could go around calling myself Galingale any more, is it?’
‘I’d have found you eventually,’ I said.
‘Given your evident determination, that wouldn’t have surprised me. But do you know what? It was all for nothing. I didn’t stop the robots, and I don’t think you’re going to stop them either.’
‘Why did you do it?’ I asked.
‘The same reason we do anything. Because it’s what I believe in. The House of Suns matters more to me than the House of Flowers. The House of Flowers is just one part of the Commonality - take it away, and the whole stack of cards wouldn’t come tumbling down. But the House of Suns underpins everything.’
I asked, ‘What is the House of Suns?’
‘What you always believed it to be. Another Line, operating in secrecy, created by the Commonality to make sure our involvement in the extinction of the First Machines stayed a secret. Nice name, by the way.’ He smiled. ‘Yes, I was listening in on Purslane’s conversation.’
‘She didn’t say anything about us being involved in any extinction. She just said they died out.’
‘Yes, and she was keeping something from you. She’d have had her reasons. But the sad, sordid truth of it is that we stabbed the First Machines in the back. Gave them the poisoned chalice, made them die in agony just like the Ghost Soldiers in Palatial. We didn’t really
mean
for them all to drop dead, but that’s no excuse, is it? We were looking for the means to kill them, and all of a sudden - oh dear - we
did
kill them.’
I absorbed this truth provisionally, slotting it into a mental file but not yet making any emotional connection with it.
‘How did the House of Suns operate?’
‘Where’s Betony?’ he asked suddenly.
‘Betony’s dead. That’s why I’m asking the questions.’
‘Poor old Betony. He did his bit, you know. Just didn’t have quite what it took.’
‘I’m still waiting for an answer to my question.’
He exhaled a massive, world-weary sigh. ‘The House of Suns was designed to enforce and police the Lines’ self-administered amnesia. It wasn’t enough just to forget about the crime we committed against the First Machines. Gentian Line, and the other complicit Lines, had to be actively prevented from rediscovering the evidence of that crime. So that’s what we did. For five million years, ever since the Lines decided to wipe the story of the First Machines from their collective histories, we’ve been in the shadows - waiting and watching. We’ve always known the truth -
someone
had to be trusted with it. It’s been our duty to monitor the activities of the Lines - and any other high-level civilisations - and make sure no one ever puts the pieces of that puzzle back together. And for four of those five million years it really wouldn’t have mattered that much if anyone had. We’re human - we’d have got over ourselves.’
‘But then the Machine People emerged,’ I said. ‘That changed everything.’
‘What would you rather have had, Campion, peace or war? That’s how simple it was. We couldn’t stop the Vigilance collecting data, but most of what they discovered never found its way outside their archives. Then you came along, worked your way into their graces and discovered something damaging. We knew then that we had no choice. At the next reunion, Gentian Line had to be wiped out. It was brutal, but what else could we do?’
‘The problem was, the Machine People already knew.’
‘They only had
suspicions.
We weren’t to know that, but it wouldn’t have changed anything if we had.’
‘You never suspected that Cadence and Cascade were agents, though.’
‘Did anyone?’
‘You’ve got a point. Did you know about the stardam?’
‘About their plans to crack it open? Not at all. But I knew of the stardam. That was something else we were supposed to be monitoring. What I didn’t know was that the opener was in Purslane’s possession.’ His good eye flared at my incomprehension. ‘It’s been five million years, Campion. Things are forgotten, even when you’re trying very hard to remember them. We were sowing so much misinformation that some of it came back and bit us. We thought the opener had been destroyed circuits ago, or lost. We had no idea it was still in the Line’s possession - even less that it had survived the ambush. But the robots knew where to look. You know what that means?’ Before I could answer, he leaned forward in his seat, his face glistening with a film of sweat. ‘They’ve had spies inside the Line, so deeply embedded that even the House of Suns didn’t know about them. Learning our secrets, finding out things about us even we didn’t know. Such as the fact that Purslane is the custodian of the opener. You can kill me now - I won’t blame you. But understand this: no matter what you think of me,
Silver Wings of Morning
cannot be allowed to reach that stardam.’
‘We’ll do what we can to prevent that.’
‘You don’t understand. I’m not even sure Purslane does, despite what she obviously knows. What she told you, about the First Machines being trapped inside that thing—’
‘Yes?’
‘That’s not the whole story.’
‘Our reserves of patience are rapidly diminishing,’ Charlock said.
‘It’s a stardam - that part is true. But it wasn’t put there just to contain the robots. Don’t you think we’d have found a way to wipe them out if we’d been able to shepherd them into such a small volume of space? We’d have used H-guns on them and turned them into a ball of molten slag.’
‘The thought had occurred,’ I said.
‘The stardam doesn’t contain the First Machines. They’re somewhere else. It doesn’t hold a dying star, either. What it contains is a door, a mouth, an aperture.’ Galingale’s pale tongue licked his bloodless, snake-pale lips. ‘The Priors made it, while we were still spineless slugs swimming around in the oceans of the Cambrian period. They cracked the causality problem - found a way to open a wormhole large enough for macroscopic transits that doesn’t suffer from the information censorship bottleneck of our own little efforts.’
‘You can’t “crack” the causality problem,’ I said. ‘It’s built into the deep structure of reality.’
‘They found a way, Campion - trust me on this. Interstellar transits weren’t the problem - they were happy with relativistic flight, the way we are. Two hundred thousand years to complete a circuit around the galaxy? It’s
really not
that long, once you get into the swing of things. But to travel to Andromeda, or one of the galaxies in the Local Group? Different story. Then you’re looking at millions of years. Fuck, we’ve only been doing
language
for six and a half.’
‘Time to get to Andromeda and back.’
‘Just. Still not enough time to make a second trip, even if we had a mind to do it. That wasn’t acceptable to the Priors, so they built a wormhole connection between the two galaxies. It’s been there since they vanished - dormant, but functionally intact. At the time of the First Machines it wasn’t even recognised for what it was. It was only when they vanished that the nature of the door was established.’
‘Did the First Machines use it to escape to Andromeda?’
He smiled at my question. ‘Close, but not quite. They got there under their own power, at sub-light-speed. We’re only talking about a small number of survivors, you understand. For a long time the fact that they’d escaped, that the Lines couldn’t track them down and finish them off - because the survivors
had
to be finished off, even if most of the deaths had been accidental - simply wasn’t an issue. They were heading to Andromeda. Nothing could catch up with them, but at least they weren’t our problem any more. Let them get to where they were going. We had our galaxy. They could have theirs. No one expected them to survive and thrive and start
doing
things.’
‘The Absence,’ I said.
Galingale nodded gravely. ‘Until then, the robots were a distant concern. They’d made no efforts to signal their existence, and as far as the rest of the galaxy was concerned, Andromeda was still uninhabited. But when the Absence happened, we knew things were taking a new turn.’
‘So what is the Absence?’
‘The signal that the wormhole had been reactivated. From that moment on, the House of Suns was faced with a crisis on two fronts. We had to prevent knowledge of the earlier atrocity from ever reaching the present Machine People. And we had to deal with the possibility that the remnants of the First Machines were preparing to return home. We couldn’t deactivate the wormhole - it was far beyond our understanding. But at least we had the stardam in place - our last and only line of defence. Fortunately, it was enough. We could be confident that nothing would ever be able to break through that containment. If a stardam can hold back the fury of a supernova, no weapon known to Line science could ever penetrate it. It was holding, too - in all the years since the Absence, nothing has ever broken through.’
‘And now?’
‘Work it out, Campion. Cadence and Cascade want the opener so that they can release the First Machines back into our galaxy. That’s why it’s so vital to stop them. You’re not just dealing with a few pissed-off robots that have been stuck inside a box for five million years - there’s an entire galaxy’s worth of them waiting to pour on through. Oh, and I think we can take it as a given that they’re not going to be in a reconciliatory mood.’
‘We’ll do what we can,’ I said.
‘But you won’t do anything that might hurt Purslane.’
‘You were prepared to kill her. It didn’t make much difference to the outcome.’
‘I only had one ship, Campion - you have four. But what do I care? It’s your problem now, not mine. I’ve told you everything I know - not because I give a damn what you think of me, but because I want you to understand how important it is to stop
Silver Wings.
But I’m done now - I’ ve said my piece. You can go ahead and kill me.’
‘You seem very resigned to it,’ Charlock said.
‘What choice have I got? Even with its impasse raised, this pod wouldn’t survive a concentrated attack from your ships for very long.’
Charlock shrugged. ‘No, it probably wouldn’t.’
‘I think I’d sooner it was quick. I shall put myself in abeyance, then I won’t know a thing. Do what you will with me.’