‘Come on, L’Eesh. It’s business, just as you said. You know what happened. These palettes extract their energy from the vacuum energy sea.’
‘Leaving some kind of deficit in their wake, into which I flew. Yes? And so we both die here.’ He forced a laugh. ‘Ironic, don’t you think? In the end we’ve cooperated to kill each other. Just like the inhabitants of these desolate moons.’
But I was thinking it over. ‘Not necessarily.’
‘What?’
‘Suppose I head up to the midpoint of the bridge and burn my way through the wall. Pohp ought to see me and come in for me. I’d surely be far enough out of the vacuum field for the Spline to approach safely.’
‘What about the quarantine ships?’
‘They must primarily patrol the moons’ low orbits. Perhaps I’d be far enough from the surface of either moon to leave them asleep.’
He considered. ‘It would take days to get there. But it might work. You have something of your mother’s pragmatism, little Raida. I guess you win.’
‘Maybe we both win.’
There was silence. Then he said coldly, ‘Must I beg?’
‘Make me an offer.’
He sighed. ‘There has been a sighting of a school of Spline. Wild Spline.’
I was startled.
‘Wild?
’
‘These Spline are still spacegoing. But certain of their behavioural traits have reverted to an ancestral state. They believe they swim in their primordial ocean—’
I breathed, ‘Nobody has ever hunted a Spline.’
‘It would be glorious. Like the old days. Hily would be proud.’ It was as if I could hear his smile.
I was content with the deal. It was enough that I’d beaten him; I didn’t need to destroy him.
Not yet. Not until I knew who killed my mother.
We argued percentages, all the way down towards the light.
The human victory was probably always inevitable. We were better at waging war: after all, we had spent a hundred thousand years practising on each other.
But the war transformed humanity too. After seventeen hundred years of conflict the Coalition’s grip on mankind, body and soul, was total.
We undying kept out of sight, tending our own long-term concerns. But we never went away.
The Expansion swept on across the face of the Galaxy, centralised, united, purposeful, ideological, purified by war.
It was not healthy to be in its way.
PART THREE
ASSIMILATION
LAKES OF LIGHT
AD 10,102
The Navy ferry stood by. From the ship’s position, several stellar diameters away, the cloaked star was a black disc, like a hole cut out of the sky.
Pala was to descend to the star alone in a flitter - alone save for her Virtual tutor, Commissary Dano.
The flitter, light and invisible as a bubble, swept inwards, silent save for the subtle ticking of its instruments. The star had about the mass of Earth’s sun and, though it was dark, Pala imagined she could feel that immense mass tugging at her.
Her heart hammered. This really was a star, but it was somehow cloaked, made perfectly black save for pale, pixel-small specks, flaws in the dark mask, specks that were lakes of light. She’d seen the Navy scouts’ reports, even studied the Virtuals, but until this moment she hadn’t been able to believe in the extraordinary reality.
But she had a job to do, and had no time to be overawed. The Navy scouts said there were humans down there - humans living with, or somehow on the star itself. Relics of an ancient colonising push, they now had to be reabsorbed into the greater mass of mankind, their energies engaged in the project of the Expansion. But the Galaxy was wide, and Pala, just twenty-five years old, was the only Missionary who could be spared for this adventure.
Dano was a brooding presence beside her, peering out with metallic Eyes. His chest did not rise and fall, no breath whispered from his mouth. He was projected from an implant in her own head, so that she could never be free of him, and she had become resentful of him. But Pala had grown up on Earth, under a sky so drenched with artificial light you could barely see the stars, and right now, suspended in this three-dimensional arena, she was so disoriented she was grateful for the company even of a Commissary’s avatar.
And meanwhile that hole in the sky, the cloaked star, swelled until its edges passed out of her field of view.
The flitter dipped and swivelled, and swept along the line of the star’s equator. Now she was flying low over a darkened plain, with a starry night sky above her. The star was so vast, its diameter more than a hundred times Earth’s, that she could see no hint of curvature in its laser-straight horizon.
‘Astonishing,’ she said. ‘It’s like a geometrical exercise.’
Dano murmured, ‘And yet, to the best of our knowledge, the photosphere of a star roils not a thousand kilometres beneath us, and if not for this - sphere, whatever it is - we would be destroyed in an instant, a snowflake in the mouth of a furnace. What’s your first conclusion, Missionary?’
Pala hesitated before answering. It was so recently that she had completed her assessments in the Academies on Earth, so recently that the real Dano had, grudgingly, welcomed her to the great and ancient enterprise that was the Commission for Historical Truth, that she felt little confidence in her own abilities. And yet the Commission must have faith in her, or else they wouldn’t have committed her to this mission.
‘It is artificial,’ she said. ‘The sphere. It must be.’
‘Yes. Surely no natural process could wrap up a star so neatly. And if it is artificial, who do you imagine might be responsible?’
‘The Xeelee,’ she said immediately. Involuntarily she glanced up at the crowded stars, bright and vivid here, five thousand light years from Earth. In the hidden heart of the Galaxy mankind’s ultimate foe lurked; and surely it was only the Xeelee who could wield such power as this.
There was a change in the darkness ahead. She saw it first as a faint splash of light near the horizon, but as the flitter flew on that splash opened out into a rough disc that glowed pale blue-green. Though a speck against the face of the masked star, it was sizeable in itself - perhaps as much as a hundred kilometres across.
The flitter came to rest over the centre of the feature. It was like a shard of Earth, stranded in the night: she looked down at the deep blue of open water, the mistiness of air, the pale green of cultivated land and forest, even a greyish bubbling that must be a town. All of this was contained under a dome, shallow and flat and all but transparent. Outside the dome what looked like roads, ribbons of silver, stretched away into the dark. And at the very centre of this strange scrap of landscape was a shining sheet of light.
‘People,’ Dano said. ‘Huddling around that flaw in the sphere, that lake of light.’ He pointed. ‘I think there’s some kind of port at the edge of the dome. You’d better take the flitter down by hand.’
Pala touched the small control panel in front of her, and the flitter began its final descent.
They cycled through a kind of airlock, and emerged into fresh air, bright light.
It wasn’t quite daylight. The light was diffuse, like a misty day on Earth, and it came not from the sky but from the ground, to be reflected back by mirrors on spindly poles. The atmosphere was too shallow for the ‘sky’ to be blue, and through the dome’s distortion Pala saw smeared-out star fields. But the ‘sky’ contained pale, streaky clouds.
A dirt road led away from the airlock into the domed ecology. Looking along the road Pala glimpsed clusters of low buildings, the green of forest clumps and cultivated fields. She could even smell wood smoke.
Dano sniffed. ‘Lethe. Agriculture. Typical Second Expansion.’
This pastoral scene wasn’t a landscape Pala was familiar with. Under Coalition ideology Earth was dominated by sprawling Conurbations, and fields in which nanotechnologies efficiently delivered food for the world’s billions. Even so this was a human scene, and she felt oddly at home here.
But she wasn’t at home. The Navy scouts had determined that the stellar sphere was rotating as a solid, and that this equatorial site was moving at only a little less than orbital speed. This arrangement was why they experienced such an equable gravity; if not for the compensating effects of centrifugal force, they would have been crushed by nearly thirty times Earth standard. She could feel none of this, but nevertheless, standing here, gazing at grass and trees and clouds, she was really soaring through space, actually circling a star in less than a standard day.
‘It takes a genuine effort of will,’ she said, ‘to remember where we are.’
‘That it does. And here comes the welcoming party,’ Dano said dryly.
Two people walked steadily up the road, a man and a woman. They were both rather squat, stocky, dark. They wore simple shifts and knee-length trousers, practical clothes, clean but heavily repaired. The man might have been sixty. His hair was white, his face a moon of wrinkles. The woman was younger, perhaps not much older than Pala. She wore her black hair long and tied into a queue that nestled over her spine, quite unlike the short and severe style of the Commission. Her shift had a sunburst pattern stitched into it, a welling up of light from below.
The man spoke. ‘My name is Sool. This is Bicansa. We have been delegated to welcome you.’ Sool’s words, in his own archaic tongue, were seamlessly translated in Pala’s ears. But underneath the tinny murmuring in her ear she could hear Sool’s own gravelly voice. ‘I represent this community, which we call Home …’
‘Inevitably,’ Dano said.
‘Bicansa comes from a community to the north of here.’ Pala supposed he meant another inhabited light lake. She wondered how far away that was; she had seen nothing from the flitter.
The woman Bicansa simply watched the newcomers. Her expression seemed closed, almost sullen. She could not have been called beautiful, Pala thought; her face was too round, her chin too weak. But there was a strength in her dark eyes that intrigued Pala.
Pala made her own formal introductions. ‘Thank you for inviting us to your community.’ Not that these locals had had any choice. ‘We are emissaries of the Commission for Historical Truth, acting on behalf of the Interim Coalition of Governance, which in turn directs and secures the Third Expansion of mankind …’
The man Sool listened to this with a pale smile, oddly weary. Bicansa glared.
Dano murmured, ‘Shake their hands. Just as well it isn’t an assessment exercise, Missionary!’
Pala cursed herself for forgetting such an elementary part of contact protocol. She stepped forward, smiling, her right hand outstretched.
Sool actually recoiled. The custom of shaking hands was rare throughout the worlds of the Second Expansion; evidently it hadn’t been prevalent on Earth when that great wave of colonisation had begun. But Sool quickly recovered. His grip was firm, his hands so huge they enclosed hers. Sool grinned. ‘A farmer’s hands,’ he said. ‘You’ll get used to it.’
Bicansa offered her own hand readily enough. But Pala’s hand passed through the woman’s, making it break up into a cloud of blocky pixels.
It was this simple test that mandated the handshake protocol. Even so, Pala was startled. ‘You’re a Virtual.’
‘As is your own companion,’ said Bicansa levelly. ‘I’m close by actually - just outside the dome. But don’t worry. I’m a projection, not an avatar. You have my full attention.’
Pala felt unaccountably disappointed that Bicansa wasn’t really here.
Sool indicated a small car, waiting some distance away, and he offered them the hospitality of his home. They walked to the car.
Dano murmured to Pala, ‘I wonder why this Bicansa hasn’t shown up in person. I think we need to watch that one.’ He turned to her, his cold Eyes glinting. ‘Ah, but you already are - aren’t you, Missionary?’
Pala felt herself blush.
Sool’s village was small, just a couple of dozen buildings huddled around a scrap of grass-covered common land. There were shops and manufactories, including a carpentry and pottery works, and an inn. At the centre of the common was a lake, its edges regular - a reservoir, Pala thought. The people’s water must be recycled, filtered by hidden machinery, like their air. By the shore of the lake, children played and lovers walked.
All the raw material of this human settlement had come from cometary impacts, packets of dirty ice from this star’s outer system that had splashed onto the sphere since its formation. It was remarkable that this peaceful scene could have originated in such violence.
This was a farming community. In the fields beyond the village, crops grew towards the reflected glare of spindly mirror towers, waving in breezes wafted by immense pumps mounted at the dome’s periphery. And animals grazed, descendants of cattle and sheep brought by the first colonists. Pala, who had never seen an animal larger than a rat, stared, astonished.
The buildings were all made of wood, neat but low, conical. Sool told the visitors the buildings were modelled after the tents the first colonists here had used for shelter. ‘A kind of memorial to the First,’ he said. But Sool’s home, with big windows cut into the sloping roof, was surprisingly roomy and well lit. There were traces of art. On one wall hung a kind of schematic portrait, a few lines to depict a human face, lit from below by a warm yellow light.