At fifty hours from the outer boundary, I transmitted an approach request and identified myself as Gentian. There was no response. I slowed down to system speed and made a further series of approach requests. I was doing everything by the book, following the wise counsel of the trove. The distance narrowed to a handful of hours. I slowed again, to the point where it would take me a year of flight to cross the remaining distance. Save for brief catnaps, I stayed awake and alert for the entire time, not even allowing myself a dose of Synchromesh. Slowly that black sphere enlarged until it was swallowing half my sky, its horizon so flat it felt as if I had reached the wall at the end of the universe. At three light-seconds, the Vigilance deigned to notice me.
It was, technically speaking, an attack. The scalding energies that twinkled against
Dalliance
were enough to ablate metres of her hull before the impasse rose to full effectiveness. I had not run with the impasse raised because that would be construed as an approach with hostile intentions. As far as the Vigilance was concerned, this was no more than a polite challenge. They were simply testing my seriousness, determining whether or not I was someone it was worth doing business with.
It should have been enough that I had survived the challenge, but the Vigilance saw fit to up its entry criteria several times before I reached the swarm’s surface. Escalating energies rained against my shields, stressing them to their limit. Those concentrated defence systems could have destroyed me many times over were I judged a real threat. I had been toyed with, teased, no more than that.
Presently a door opened. The orbits of thousands of the outer bodies had been adjusted so that a dark tunnel formed in the swarm, arrowing deep into its heart. My nervousness peaked. As the door sealed behind me, I was vulnerable to attack from all angles. As I fell deeper, the bodies of the swarm blocked off any view of open space.
Dalliance
reported that the space around us was crackling with information flow. The main beams were being routed around us, but occasionally a photon or two would ricochet off a stray grain of dust into
Dalliance’s
sensors.
The spheres were artificial worlds, the largest of them tens of kilometres across and the smallest not much larger than
Dalliance.
Each was dark and smooth, their surfaces uninterrupted save for the circular apertures of signalling antennas. According to the trove, the spheres held concentric levels of processing machinery, wrapped around a fist-sized kernel of quark matter. Levators toiled to keep each node from crumpling in on itself. Data was organised in the layers according to reliability and access-frequency. Data of high provenance, or which seldom needed amending, was concentrated in the safe, stable depths of the quark kernels. It was troublesome to read in and out, but immune from accidental change or deletion, and safe against even a local supernova. Suspect or volatile data was kept in the intermediate and outer shells, occasionally shuffling higher or lower as it was reclassified. New data was fed in from the outside under the painstaking supervision of the Vigilance’s curators. Very few living souls had ever seen one of those strange, slow creatures. It was presumed that there were at least as many curators as there were bodies in the swarm, but since the curators hardly ever needed to travel either within the swarm or beyond it, their true number could not be ascertained.
I had consulted the troves, but all they had told me was that there were many theories about the curators, and that few of the accounts could be reconciled with each other. The Vigilance thrived on collating information, but by the same token it seemed mischievously keen to spread misinformation about itself.
I was thinking about that, wondering what chip of dubious value I would add to the mosaic, when fields snared
Dalliance
and brought her to a halt relative to one of the larger bodies in the swarm. We had fallen about halfway into the shell: the light of the star was beginning to bleed through the‘floor’ of swarm bodies below me, its yellow-white brilliance diminished to a deep, brooding scarlet.
A voice, more ancient than old-growth civilisations, deeper than time, slower than glaciers, boomed across the bridge in Trans. ‘State the purpose of your visit, shatterling.’
I had rehearsed my answer countless times. ‘I have nothing to offer that is worthy of the Vigilance. I am here only to open my troves for your inspection, worthless though they are, and to pass on the goodwill and blessings of Gentian Line, the House of Flowers.’
‘Do you wish to access our archives?’
‘Yes,’ I said, for one never lied to the Vigilance. ‘But I do not expect that access to be provided. As I said, I am here on a goodwill basis.’
‘Please wait,’ the voice rumbled, sounding like a distant landslide. ‘Your case is under referral.’
I waited.
I waited a week. Then a month. Then half a year. Then six and a half years. All the while,
Dalliance
was pinned in place, going nowhere.
I was asleep when the voice boomed again, but I had taken precautions to have myself roused to full consciousness the instant anything happened.
‘You will be admitted into the node. No further action is required on your part at present.’
One of the circular apertures in the swarm body revealed itself to be an irising door, wide enough for
Dalliance
to fit through. The fields cajoled my ship inside, prodded her down a narrowing shaft, then left her floating at the centre of a spherical holding bay. According to
Dalliance’s
inertial measurements - far from foolproof - we were still some distance from the centre of the swarm body. The walls around us were dimpled with smooth, perfectly round craters, the rims of which glowed arterial red. The fields had released their hold, but with the door closed behind me, there was nothing to do but wait.
So I waited. Eleven and a half years this time.
It may sound as if, to a shatterling, accustomed to crossing the galaxy in circuits lasting hundreds of thousands of years, eleven years is nothing. But our minds are not wired that way. Those eleven and a half years consumed lifetimes.
But at the end of it all, I was joined by another presence. One of the craters irised open and a vehicle began to intrude into the holding bay. It was bulbous, with a dome-shaped prow connected to an ovoid hull, and various smaller ovoids branching off the hull. It was about six times smaller than
Dalliance
- seven or eight hundred metres from end to end. The technology was more primitive-looking than I had been expecting. The brassy brown hull had a corroded look to it in places, mottled and scarred in others, and there were crude mechanical connections running between the ovoid sections suggestive of the docking collars on primitive spacecraft. As it cleared the door, the ship began to tilt, turning its long axis through ninety degrees. It did this with great ponderousness, as if it moved to a different, slower physics than
Dalliance.
Some change occurred to the domed part of the hull, the opaque plating becoming milky and then translucent, as if smoke was clearing from behind a window. Behind the translucence loomed a complicated structure, some kind of leathery, biologically derived machinery ...
The machinery was a face, looking out at me through the glass of a helmet. It was not human, but I could tell that it had been human, a long time ago. It was as if a face had been carved in a cliff and then subjected to aeons of weather, until the features were no more than residual traces. The eyes alone were ten metres across; the face ten times as wide. The mouth was a dark and immobile crevasse in the granite texture of the creature’s grey-tinged flesh. The nose, the ears, were no more than worn-away mounds on the side of a hill. The head swelled at the neck and vanished into a huge body concealed by the connecting ring around the base of the domed helmet.
The eyes blinked. It was less a blink than the playing out of an astronomical event, like the eclipse of a short-period binary. It took minutes for the lids to close; minutes again for them to ooze open. The eyes were looking at me, but there was no focus in them, no hint of animation.
The figure drifted closer. From one side of the hull, a string of jointed ovoids became a grasping arm with fingers at the end. The fingers were as large as trees. They closed around
Dalliance,
and I felt their tips clang against the hull. The ship, sensing my mood, was wise enough not to take retaliatory action.
It turned out that the curator was only interested in touch. Over the course of several hours, he ran his hand along
Dalliance,
cupping and stroking her, as if he needed reassurance that she was not a phantasm. Then he slowly pulled back.
The voice, which I had not heard for more than eleven years, boomed again. It was as if no time at all had passed for the curator. ‘There is just the one of you, shatterling. You have come alone.’
‘It’s the way we travel, except when we have guests. Thank you for letting me come this far.’
The giant being’s face registered no change when I was being spoken to, but I had no doubt that I was being addressed by the curator. Whatever functions that mouthed served, the creation of language was not one of them.
The creature floated where it was, perfectly still save for the occasional blink of those monstrous, pond-like eyes. It blinked about once an hour.
‘You have been very patient, shatterling.’
‘It was told that patience would be necessary, curator.’ Aware of how easily the Vigilance could be angered, I felt as if each word I uttered was a grenade about to be thrown back in my face. ‘Is that the right term of address?’ I asked.
‘For you,’ the curator answered. ‘Do you have a name, other than Gentian shatterling?’
‘I am Campion,’ I told it.
‘Tell me about yourself, Campion.’
I gave it my potted life story. ‘I was born six million years ago, one of a thousand male and female clones of Abigail Gentian. My earliest memories are of being a little girl in a huge, frightening house. It was the thirty-first century, in the Golden Hour.’
‘You have come a long way. You have outlived almost all the sentient beings who have ever existed, including the Priors.’
‘I’ve been very, very lucky. Lucky to have been born into Gentian Line, lucky to have been able to live through so much time without experiencing more than a fraction of it.’
‘To live through deep time would be considered unfortunate?’
‘I didn’t mean that, rather that I’m carrying a brain not so very different from the ones humans had when we were still hunter-gatherers. There are some modifications that help me process memories and the strands of my fellow shatterlings, but Abigail never touched the deep architecture. Our minds just aren’t engineered to experience that much time in the raw.’
‘You would go mad.’
‘I’d need help.’
‘You must wonder how we have coped. It is known that curators are very old, very long-lived. Unlike you, unlike the late Rimrunners, we do not have the luxury of time-dilation to make the centuries fly past.’
‘You appear to be managing well enough.’
‘You would presume to know?’
‘The mere continued existence of the Vigilance is evidence that you have overcome the difficulties of extreme longevity. No other stellar-based culture has endured as long.’
‘There would be no point in the Vigilance if it was ephemeral. Our watch is a long and lonely one. We always knew it would require great patience; a willingness to take the long view.’
‘Are you as old as the Vigilance?’
‘That would make me more than five million years old, shatterling.’
‘I’m nearly six.’
‘Except you aren’t, really. You were born that long ago, but I doubt you have experienced more than a few tens of thousands of years of subjective time. You are a bookworm who has tunnelled through the pages of history. Is that not so?’
‘That’s an apt analogy, curator.’
‘For me to be as old as the Vigilance, I would need to have endured all those years. That would make me one of the most ancient organisms in the galaxy.’
‘For all I know, you may be.’
‘I am not the oldest curator, but I am still growing. All of us are. In the dawn of our kind we found a pathway to biological immortality that depends on continued growth. There are other pathways, but this is the one we settled upon.’
‘Are there curators larger than you?’
‘Absolutely. You will not see them, though. They inhabit the largest nodes, with the most important kernels. Most of them are too large to leave now. Their heads would fill this chamber. They are beings of awesome wisdom, but they are also very slow. Nothing can be done about that, though: when synaptic signals have to cross distances of hundreds of metres, even the simplest thought may take several minutes to formulate. We find dealing with them ... taxing. But I’m sure you understand. From your perspective ... well, we’ll say no more about that, shall we?’
I was not really surprised to be dealing with a giant, though it had taken me a moment or two to appreciate the true nature of my host. Many of the accounts in the trove spoke of the enormous size of the curators, although the details varied too widely to be of much use. When I left the Vigilance, I would add my contribution to that confusing picture. The next visitor might encounter something completely, bewilderingly different.
‘Do you always live in that suit?’ I asked.
‘Not always. We breathe fluid, not air, although you could not be expected to know that. There are spaces where we may discard our suits and still survive, but it would be much too difficult to equip all the nodes with pressure-filled chambers. Eventually, we outgrow our suits. Then we must move to one that has recently been discarded by an even older curator. I have been in this suit for more than a hundred thousand years, and I still have some room for growth. Before me this suit held many other occupants. It must look old to you, but it is constructed very robustly. Many more will wear it after I have moved on.’