The visitor was simply there, standing by her bed.
She was a woman, dressed in white. Bella saw only her face and hands. The rest of the woman’s head was concealed under a kind of flat-topped wimple of the same electric-white fabric as the rest of her gown. Her hands emerged from subtle folds, joined as if in prayer. Her skin was dark, her racial background otherwise indeterminate: Nordic bone structure, perhaps, or even Inuit? She was beautiful and severe, but there was a kindness and a wisdom in her face that touched Bella on some basal level of total trust.
“Hello, Bella,” the woman said. “You can see me now, can’t you?”
Bella found the energy to call out, “Ryan. Please.”
She had not even been sure that Axford was still there, but he came, bustling over with a concern that cut through any fatigue he must have been feeling.
“What is it?”
“I’m hallucinating,” Bella said calmly. “I’m hallucinating a woman dressed in white, standing immediately to your right.”
Axford looked guardedly to his side. “I’m not seeing anything, Bella.”
“She’s there. Solid as daylight. Looking at me.”
“Bella,” the woman said, with a searing empathy, “there’s no cause for alarm.”
Axford adjusted the imaging coronet. He snapped glasses from his pocket and placed them on his nose. They were ridiculously oversized for a child. “There’s a lot of activity in your occipitoparietal area, and in the auditory cortex,” he said, tapping a finger into midair to enlarge some detail of the scan.
“I think the machines must be there. I think they’re making me hallucinate.”
“Describe the woman,” Axford said.
“She’s tall. Black. Dressed all in white. Like a nun —” Bella scowled at her own imprecision. “But she’s not a nun. This isn’t some stock religious imagery my mind’s conjuring up during a moment of crisis.”
The woman looked on sympathetically, head tilted to one side, waiting for Bella to finish.
“Do you recognise her?”
“I can’t see much of her, just her face. I’m not experiencing any heavy jolts of déjà vu.”
“Bella, listen to me,” the woman said, with infinite patience, infinite serenity. “You don’t know me. You’ve never met me. It would have been difficult: I lived and died a long time after you left us.”
“She’s talking to me, Ryan.”
Axford pulled the ungainly glasses from his nub of a nose. “Perhaps you’d best listen, in that case.”
“Bella, the short form of my name is Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird, but you can call me Chromis — the whole thing is a bit of a mouthful.”
“Hello, Chromis,” Bella said, feeling awkward as Axford looked on, yet compelled to acknowledge the woman’s presence. “You can understand me… right?”
“Completely,” Chromis said, with a smile.
“Do you mind if I ask who you are, and what you’re doing in my head?”
“Not at all — it would be rude of me not to explain myself, after all. Well, to begin with… let’s just say that I’m a politician of quite some seniority — what you might call a senator, or a member of parliament. The political body I serve is — or was at the last census, at least — a grouping of worlds encompassing fifteen thousand settled solar systems, spread across a volume of space more than four thousand light-years in diameter.”
Chromis extended a hand, showing Bella a ring she wore on her right index finger. It was embossed with an interlocking geometric design that squirmed and shifted somehow before Bella’s eyes, teasing her with hints of dizzying complexity. “This is the seal of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. That’s the name of the political administration I serve.”
“You’re a message from after the Cutoff,” Bella said.
“I’m not sure what you mean by ‘the Cutoff’, but I can tell you this much. You left Earth’s system in 2057, by your calendar. The exact date at which I’m recording this image is unimportant, suffice it to say that it’s more than eighteen thousand years since your departure.”
Bella shook her head. “No. We’ve only come two hundred and sixty light-years. A lot of time has passed, but… it’s only hundreds, not thousands of years.”
Chromis looked at her with that searing clemency. “There’s no mistake, Bella. We know what happened to you at Spica. We know what happened during your passage through the Spica Structure.”
“We didn’t pass through anything,” Bella said, all the while knowing that it was pointless and infantile to argue with the woman’s godlike wisdom. “We reached the Structure and now we’re in it.”
“You are somewhere,” Chromis said, “but it is definitely not within the Spica Structure.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because we destroyed it.” The woman looked rueful: it was the first glimpse of human fallibility Bella had seen in that gravely imperious face. “It was not intentional. We were studying it, trying to understand the principles underlying its function.”
“When?” Bella asked. “When did you destroy it?”
“Seventeen thousand years ago, by my calendar — around the early thirty-third century, by yours. And when I say ‘we’ destroyed it, I don’t mean any extant powers affiliated to the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. I’m simply referring to envoys of the human species — people from much nearer your own time.”
Bella’s mind reeled, but she didn’t have the slightest doubt that Chromis was speaking the truth. “This is a lot to take in.”
“I know, and I’m sorry.”
“When you say we passed through —”
“For two hundred and sixty years, you were under way to the Spica binary at ninety-nine point nine per cent of the speed of light. You experienced a time dilation factor of twenty-two, which compressed that two hundred and sixty years of flight into twelve years of subjective time, as measured by your clocks.”
“It was thirteen years,” Bella said.
“No. If thirteen years did indeed pass before your arrival here, it was because it took you twelve years to reach Spica, plus another year to reach somewhere else.”
“I still don’t —”
Chromis interrupted her gently. “The Spica Structure was a booster, Bella. Its purpose was to accelerate you even closer to the speed of light. A time-dilation factor of twenty-two, while high, was still insufficient for the long journey you eventually had to make.” Chromis’s serene face showed strain, as if imparting this information caused her genuine discomfort. “To adapt an analogy from your own era, Bella, the first two hundred and sixty light-years of your flight — that first twelve years of subjective time — was simply the process of taxiing to the runway. The Spica Structure was the runway. Your journey had not really begun until then.”
Bella wanted to deny it, but the woman’s conviction left no room for doubt. Chromis was telling the truth. “So where did we go?” she asked.
Chromis looked abashed. “We can’t be sure, even now. By the time you passed through the Structure, the nearest follow-on probes were still a hundred light-years behind you. Their observations were made from a great distance. They detected faint signals from your free-flier probes: enough to measure the change in your velocity as you completed your transit through the Structure. But by the time you emerged, those signals had been lost.”
“You couldn’t see us any more.”
“No. The envelope was too dark, too absorbent.”
Bella supposed that she meant the Iron Sky. “But you must have had some idea where we were headed.”
“We had a rough idea. We extrapolated and located a counterpart to the Spica Structure two thousand light-years beyond Spica. Another booster, we presumed, or a course-adjustment element. We knew you’d probably reach it in two thousand years, but beyond that we had no means of tracking you, or estimating your subsequent time-dilation factor. You were too dark, too fast. We lost you.”
“But you found us again,??
? Bella said.
“We never forgot about you,” Chromis said. “The Janus anomaly changed history. The existence theorem says that it is always much easier to find a solution when you can be confident that one exists. Within a hundred years of your departure, there had been cataclysmic breakthroughs in fundamental physics. Janus taught us to look for loopholes in theories that had looked watertight for decades. Eventually, we had our own frameshift drive. It wasn’t as efficient as the Janus motor, and probably didn’t employ anything like the same principles, but it sufficed. Eighteen thousand years of expansion, Bella, at velocities very close to light speed. Frameshift made us a glorious human empire. The Congress of the Lindblad Ring is just one of the larger political entities in the great dominion of human space. I represent a small cluster of likeminded systems — about a hundred and thirty worlds — bound together by long-established trade routes and a common democratic framework — what you might call a state, or constituency, within the Congress. There are hundreds of such constituencies, some of them very alien in their modes of society. Anyway, as I said — you were never really forgotten. We found your self-sacrifice inspirational.”
“Our self-sacrifice?”
“Even when it became clear that you could not escape Janus, you kept sending data back home. But then you always promised as much.”
“I did?”
“The interview, Bella.” Chromis said it with a peculiar reverence. “You must remember.”
“I’m not sure I do.”
Chromis’s voice shifted, mimicking Bella’s own. “I’m Bella Lind, and you’re watching CNN.”
Bella blinked. “CNN. You just said CNN.”
“The interview was repeated many times during the years after you left, Bella. It became a touchstone for a kind of bravery, the noblest kind of selflessness. Children were taught to learn it, like a prayer or declaration of patriotic intent.”
“I’m having trouble dealing with this.”
“The Janus data changed history. It accelerated a hundred different scientific disciplines, revealed connections no one had ever suspected before. Our knowledge of mass-energy, mass and inertia became logically complete. It gave us the stars, and for that we’re enormously grateful. But at the same time it was always taken for granted that your ultimate destination — your ultimate destiny — must remain unknown. The boosters were shuttling you into the future, out of our reach.” Chromis smiled primly. “Then we had a modest idea. It was approaching the ten thousandth year since the first settlement of the first world in the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. There were many competing ideas for the best way to commemorate this anniversary. My people sent me to table a proposal to the delegates on New Far Florence, and after a degree of persuasion it was accepted. We would commemorate the founding by sending a message to the Benefactor.”
“The Benefactor being me, I suppose?”
“Now perhaps you begin to see the importance you assumed to us. It would be a message of thanks, of course, but also a message that might be useful to the Benefactor and her people, wherever they might find themselves. I am, self-evidently, that message. As the instigator of the project, my personality was encoded into the memorial cube you must have found.”
“How did it reach us?” Bella asked. “How far did it travel to get here?”
“I can’t tell. We made vast numbers of cubes. Short of being dropped into a star, there isn’t much that can harm them. We were thinking long term, extreme deep time.” Chromis anticipated Bella’s next question. “We scattered them to the four winds. Dispersed them throughout the galaxy via automated probes. Dropped them into orbit around a hundred million dead worlds. Cast them into intergalactic space, on trajectories that would eventually bring them into the gravitational influence of every major galaxy, satellite galaxy or globular cluster in the local group. We launched some of them far beyond the local group, towards the great galactic superclusters, halfway to the edge of the visible universe. They’ll take a while to get there, of course. We even fired some of them into naked black holes, in the hope that their information would be encoded and released in the immeasurably distant future, when the black holes surrender their parcels of entropy back to the universe. We continued making them for four thousand years. Of course, we never really expected success — it was just a gesture, the decent thing to do.”
“But you succeeded,” Bella said. “One of them found me.”
“Yes, it did, but there’s no telling where or when. All I know is that this cube — the copy that this personality was dropped into — was one of the last to be launched. By then, the memorial project had already been under way for nearly four thousand years, and in all that time, no contact had ever been claimed.” Chromis meshed her fingers nervously. “We can presume that you travelled a great distance, or we would have heard from you before the last cube was launched.”
“But you can’t tell me how far I’ve come.”
“The cube only knows its subjective history. It has no record of how much objective time passed before you touched it. It may have been picked up and discarded a hundred times, like a lucky coin. Even so, it was a long journey.”
“Tell me everything up to that point,” Bella said.
“In time,” Chromis answered. “All in good time.”
THIRY-TWO
Chromis disappeared, but Bella knew she had not seen the last of her. Afterwards, feeling a restfulness that she had not experienced since touching the memorial cube, she told Axford all that she remembered of the conversation — Axford interrupting here and there to probe for more details, which Bella was sometimes able to supply and sometimes not.
“I believed her,” Bella said. “Absolutely, implicitly. I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”
“She might have been manipulating you to achieve that effect.”
“What does it matter? She’s gone and I still believe it now. It has the ring of truth, Ryan. It explains a lot. The Iron Sky, for instance: it must have been a shield to protect us against the effects of super-relativistic velocity. Janus put it up as we were approaching the booster.”
“I don’t like it. It’s one thing to accept that you’ve fallen a few hundred years down the rabbit hole. How are people going to adjust to the fact that we’ve actually come eighteen thousand years?”
“More than that,” Bella reminded him. “That’s only the length of time that had passed when Chromis made her recording. There’s no telling how many more years passed before we picked up the cube.”
“You might want to consider sugaring the medicine here, Bella.”
“I thought you didn’t approve of that.”
“I don’t, as a rule.”
“But this would be one of the exceptions.”
“Perhaps. While we’re at it, incidentally, for every answer Chromis gave you, she threw up at least as many questions. If we’re not in the Spica Structure, where are we? We’ve already established that we’re inside something that matches the size of one of the spars.“
“I didn’t get an answer on that,” Bella said, with a creeping feeling of inadequacy.
“Here’s another thing: Chromis told you about a human civilisation spanning hundreds and thousands of worlds, spread across thousands of light-years — right?”
“Yes,” Bella said.
“And she dropped hints that they’d looked deep in the galaxy, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Axford said, “remind me: when exactly did she mention the Fountainheads?”
* * *
The ordinary business of the High Hab rolled on with its own oblivious momentum.
Parry returned to Crabtree and surrendered himself to Bella and the Judicial Apparatus. He was detained in a secure room close to the court, with an excellent view over Crabtree. The room was clean and comfortable, but still had the air of a place of detention or psychiatric internment. The soft-surfaced walls had the profoundly dead look that told Bella they were not flickeri
ng with subliminal data patterns. There was a bed and a bedside table and a tray containing a half-eaten meal. Parry sat on the bed, seemingly unfazed by whatever might happen to him.
“Hello,” he said, standing up to meet her.
She motioned him to remain seated. “Are you all right?”
“They’re treating me very well.”
Bella didn’t doubt it. Parry had friends everywhere, and hardly any enemies. “I’ve some news for you,” she said. “The preliminary hearing’s set for tomorrow. You’ll be required to be there, but other than that you won’t have to do or say much.”
“Mm.” He scratched under his cap. “Other than state my guilt.”
“Yes,” Bella said. “If you still want to do that, of course. There’s nothing to stop you pleading not guilty.”
“Except I’ve never claimed that I didn’t do it. It’s the extenuating circumstances I’m interested in.”
“As I said, I’m sure a solid case can be made for that.”
“But not a watertight one.”
Bella remembered something she had been meaning to ask. “Parry, you’re a bright man. You have a lot of contacts, a lot of friends with good skills. When you knew I was closing in on whoever tampered with the log files, didn’t it ever occur to you to hide your trail? I’m sure you could have concealed the concealment, especially now, after all these years. I doubt it would have taxed you.”
“You’re probably right,” he said, “and maybe it did occur to me — for about five minutes.”
“So why didn’t you do it?”
“A couple of reasons, Bella. Firstly, it would have involved dragging more people into this shit, and I didn’t want to do that. This is my mess, no one else’s. Secondly, when I did what I did, I always knew it might come back and bite me one day. And I always promised myself that I’d stand up and take the punishment when that happened.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said. “And I’m glad I was right about it. I want you to know that whatever happens here, whatever the tribunal decides, I’ve never doubted your intentions, not for a second. And I never will.”