Galactic North

  Ultras didn’t care, as a rule. Ultras, by definition, already had Conjoiner drives. It was governments and rich planet-bound individuals who kept learning the hard way. The Conjoiner argument was brutal in its simplicity: there were principles embodied in their drives that “retarded” humanity just wasn’t ready to absorb. We were meant to count ourselves lucky that they let us have the engines in the first place. We weren’t meant to go poking our thick monkey fingers into their innards.

  And so long as the engines kept working, few of us had any inclination to do so.

  Weather took a step back. “It’s not good news, I’m afraid. I thought that perhaps the dial indications might be in error, suggesting that there was a fault where none existed . . . but that isn’t the case.”

  “You can feel that the engine is really damaged?”

  “Yes,” she told me. “And it’s this one, the starboard unit.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Is it anything we can fix?”

  “One question at a time, Inigo.” Weather smiled tolerantly before continuing, “There’s been extensive damage to critical engine components, too much for the engine’s own self-repair systems to address. The engine hasn’t failed completely, but certain reaction pathways have now become computationally intractable, which is why you’re seeing the drastic loss in drive efficiency. The engine is being forced to explore other pathways, those that it can still manage given its existing resources. But they don’t deliver the same output energy.”

  She was telling me everything and nothing. “I don’t really understand,” I admitted. “Are you saying there’s nothing that can be done to repair it?”

  “Not here. At a dedicated Conjoiner manufacturing facility, certainly. We’d only make things worse.”

  “We can’t run on just the port engine, either—not without rebuilding the entire ship. If we were anywhere near a moon or asteroid, that might just be an option, but not when we’re so far out.”

  “I’m sorry the news isn’t better. You’ll just have to resign yourselves to a longer trip than you were expecting.”

  “It’s worse than that. There’s another ship closing in on us, probably another raider like Voulage. It’s very close now. If we don’t start running soon, they’ll be on us.”

  “And you didn’t think to tell me this sooner?”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “To the trust between us, possibly.”

  “I’m sorry, Weather. I didn’t want to distract you. I thought things were bad enough as they were.”

  “And you thought I’d be able to work a miracle if I wasn’t distracted?”

  I nodded hopelessly. I realised that, as naive as it might seem, I’d been expecting Weather to wave a hand over the broken engine and restore it to full, glittering functionality. But knowing something of the interior workings of the drive was not the same as being able to fix it.

  “Are we really out of options?” I asked.

  “The engine is already doing all it can to provide maximum power, given the damage it has taken. There really is no scope to make things better.”

  Desperate for some source of optimism, I thought back to what Weather had said a few moments before. “When you talked about the computations, you seemed to be saying that the engine needed to do some number-crunching to make itself work.”

  Weather looked conflicted. “I’ve already said too much, Inigo.”

  “But if we’re going to die out here, it doesn’t matter what you tell me, does it? Failing that, I’ll swear a vow of silence. How does that sound?”

  “No one has ever come close to working out how our engines function,” Weather said. “We’ve played our hand in that, of course: putting out more than our share of mis-information over the years. And it’s worked, too. We’ve kept careful tabs on the collective thinking concerning our secrets. We’ve always had contingencies in place to disrupt any research that might be headed in the right direction. So far we’ve never had cause to use a single one of them. If I were to reveal key information to you, I would have more to worry about than just being an outcast. My people would come after me. They’d hunt me down, and then they’d hunt you down as well. Conjoiners will consider any necessary act, up to and including local genocide, to protect the secrets of the C-drive.” She paused for a moment, letting me think she was finished, before continuing on the same grave note, “But having said that, there are layers to our secrets. I can’t reveal the detailed physical principles upon which the drive depends, but I can tell you that the conditions in the drive, when it is at full functionality, are enormously complex and chaotic. Your ship may ride a smooth thrust beam, but the reactions going on inside the drive are anything but smooth. There is a small mouth into hell inside every engine: bubbling, frothing, subject to vicious and unpredictable state-changes. ”

  “Which the engine needs to smooth out.”

  “Yes. And to do so, the engine needs to think through some enormously complex, parallel computational problems. When all is well, when the engine is intact and running inside its normal operational envelope, the burden is manageable. But if you ask too much of the engine, or damage it in some way, that burden becomes heavier. Eventually it exceeds the means of the engine, and the reactions become uncontrolled.”

  “Nova.”

  “Quite,” Weather said, favouring my response with a tiny nod.

  “Then let me get this straight,” I said. “The engine’s damaged, but it could still work if the computations weren’t so complicated.”

  Weather answered me guardedly. “Yes, but don’t underestimate how difficult those computations have now become. I can feel the strain this engine is under, just holding things together as they are.”

  “I’m not underestimating it. I’m just wondering if we couldn’t help it do better. Couldn’t we load in some new software, or assist the engine by hooking in the Petronel’s own computers?”

  “I really wish it was that simple.”

  “I’m sorry. My questions must seem quite simple-minded. But I’m just trying to make sure we aren’t missing anything obvious.”

  “We aren’t,” she said. “Take my word on it.”

  I returned Weather to her quarters and removed the collar. Where it had been squeezing her neck, the skin was marked with a raw pink band, spotted with blood. I threw the hateful thing into the corner of the room and returned with a medical kit.

  “You should have said something,” I told her as I dabbed at the abrasions with a disinfectant swab. “I didn’t realise it was cutting into you all that time. You seemed so cool, so focused. But that must have been hurting all the while.”

  “I told you I could turn off pain.”

  “Are you turning it off now?”

  “Why?”

  “Because you keep flinching.”

  Weather reached up suddenly and took my wrist, almost making me drop the swab. The movement was as swift as a snakebite, but although she held me firmly, I sensed no aggressive intentions. “Now it’s my turn not to understand,” she said. “You were hoping I might be able to do something for you. I couldn’t. That means you’re in as much trouble as you ever were. Worse, if anything, because now you’ve heard it from me. But you’re still treating me with kindness.”

  “Would you rather we didn’t?”

  “I assumed that as soon as my usefulness to you had come to an end—”

  “You assumed wrongly. We’re not that kind of crew.”

  “And your captain?”

  “He’ll keep his word. Killing you would never have been Van Ness’s style.” I finished disinfecting her neck and began to rummage through the medical kit for a strip of bandage. “We’re all just going to have to make do as best we can, you included. Van Ness reckoned we should send out a distress call and wait for rescue. I wasn’t so keen on that idea before, but now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe it isn’t so bad after all.” She said nothing. I wondered if she was thinking of exactly the same objec
tions I’d voiced to Van Ness, when he raised the idea. “We still have a ship, that’s the main thing. Just because we aren’t moving as fast as we’d like—”

  “I’d like to see Van Ness,” Weather said.

  “I’m not sure he’d agree.”

  “Tell him it’s about his wife. Tell him he can trust me, with or without that silly collar.”

  I went to fetch the captain. He took some persuading before he even agreed to look at Weather, and even then he wouldn’t come within twenty metres of her. I told her to wait at the door to her room, which faced a long service corridor.

  “I’m not going to touch you, Captain,” she called, her voice echoing from the corridor’s ribbed metal walls. “You can come as close as you like. I can barely smell you at this distance, let alone sense your neural emissions.”

  “This’ll do nicely,” Van Ness said. “Inigo told me you had something you wanted to say to me. That right, or was it just a ruse to get me near to you, so you could reach into my head and make me see and think whatever you like?”

  She appeared not to hear him. “I take it Inigo’s told you about the engine.”

  “Told me you had a good old look at it and decided there was nothing you could do. Maybe things would have been different if you hadn’t had that collar on, though, eh?”

  “You mean I might have sabotaged the engine, to destroy myself and the ship? No, Captain, I don’t think I would have. If I had any intention of killing myself, you’d already made it easy enough with that collar.” She glanced at me. “I could have reached Inigo and pressed that control box while the nervous impulse from his brain was still working its way down his forearm. All he’d have seen was a grey blur, followed by a lot of arterial blood.”

  I thought back to the speed with which she’d reached up and grabbed my forearm, and knew she wasn’t lying.

  “So why didn’t you?” Van Ness asked.

  “Because I wanted to help you if I could. Until I saw the engine—until I got close enough to feel its emissions—I couldn’t know for sure that the problem wasn’t something quite trivial.”

  “Except it wasn’t. Inigo says it isn’t fixable.”

  “Inigo’s right. The technical fault can’t be repaired, not without use of Conjoiner technology. But now that I’ve had time to think about it, mull things over, it occurs to me that there may be something I can do for you.”

  I looked at her. “Really?”

  “Let me finish what I have to say, Inigo,” she said warningly, “then we’ll go down to the engine and I’ll make everything clear. Captain Van Ness—about your wife.”

  “What would you know about my wife?” Van Ness asked her angrily.

  “More than you realise. I know because I’m a—I was— a Conjoiner.”

  “As if I didn’t know.”

  “We started on Mars, Captain Van Ness—just a handful of us. I wasn’t alive then, but from the moment Galiana brought our new state of consciousness into being, the thread of memory has never been broken. There are many branches to our great tree now, in many systems—but we all carry the memories of those who went before us, before the family was torn asunder. I don’t just mean the simple fact that we remember their names, what they looked like and what they did. I mean we carry their living experiences with us, into the future.” Weather swallowed, something catching in her throat. “Sometimes we’re barely aware of any of this. It’s as if there’s this vast sea of collective experience lapping at the shore of consciousness, but it’s only every now and then that it floods us, leaving us awash in sorrow and joy. Sorrow because those are the memories of the dead, all that’s left of them. Joy because something has endured, and while it does they can’t truly be dead, can they? I feel Remontoire sometimes, when I look at something in a certain analytic way. There’s a jolt of déjà vu and I realise it isn’t because I’ve experienced it before, but because Remontoire did. We all feel the memories of the earliest Conjoiners the most strongly.”

  “And my wife?” Van Ness asked, like a man frightened of what he might hear.

  “Your wife was just one of many candidates who entered Transenlightenment during the troubles. You lost her then, and saw her once more when the Coalition took her prisoner. It was distressing for you because she did not respond to you on a human level.”

  “Because you’d ripped everything human out of her,” Van Ness said.

  Weather shook her head calmly, refusing to be goaded. “No. We’d taken almost nothing. The difficulty was that we’d added too much, too quickly. That was why it was so hard for her, and so upsetting for you. But it didn’t have to be that way. The last thing we wanted was to frighten possible future candidates. It would have worked much better for us if your wife had shown love and affection to you, and then begged you to follow her into the wonderful new world she’d been shown.”

  Something of Weather’s manner seemed to blunt Van Ness’s indignation. “That doesn’t help me much. It doesn’t help my wife at all.”

  “I haven’t finished. The last time you saw your wife was in that Coalition compound. You assumed—as you continue to assume—that she ended her days there, an emotionless zombie haunting the shell of the woman you once knew. But that isn’t what happened. She came back to us, you see.”

  “I thought Conjoiners never returned to the fold,” I said.

  “Things were different then. It was war. Any and all candidates were welcome, even those who might have suffered destabilising isolation away from Transenlightenment. And Van Ness’s wife wasn’t like me. She hadn’t been born into it. Her depth of immersion into Transenlightenment was inevitably less profound than that of a Conjoiner who’d been swimming in data since they were a foetus.”

  “You’re lying,” Van Ness said. “My wife died in Coalition custody three years after I saw her.”

  “No,” Weather said patiently. “She did not. Conjoiners took Tychoplex and returned all the prisoners to Transenlightenment. The Coalition was suffering badly at the time and could not afford the propaganda blow of losing such a valuable arm of its research programme. So it lied and covered up the loss of Tychoplex. But in fact your wife was alive and well.” Weather looked at him levelly. “She is dead now, Captain Van Ness. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but I hope it will not come as too shocking a blow, given what you have always believed.”

  “When did she die?”

  “Thirty-one years later, in another system, during the malfunction of one of our early drives. It was very fast and utterly painless.”

  “Why are you telling me this? What difference does it make to me, here and now? She’s still gone. She still became one of you.”

  “I am telling you,” Weather answered, “because her memories are part of me. I won’t pretend that they’re as strong as Remontoire’s, because by the time your wife was recruited, more than five thousand had already joined our ranks. Hers was one new voice amongst many. But none of those voices were silent: they were all heard, and something of them has reached down through all these years.”

  “Again: why are you telling me this?”

  “Because I have a message from your wife. She committed it to the collective memory long before her death, knowing that it would always be part of Conjoiner knowledge, even as our numbers grew and we became increasingly fragmented. She knew that every future Conjoiner would carry her message—even an outcast like me. It might become diluted, but it would never be lost entirely. And she believed that you were still alive, and that one day your path might cross that of another Conjoiner.”

  After a silence Van Ness said, “Tell me the message.”

  “This is what your wife wished you to hear.” Almost imperceptibly, the tone of Weather’s voice shifted. “I am sorry for what happened between us, Rafe—more sorry than you can ever know. When they recaptured me, when they took me to Tychoplex, I was not the person I am now. It was still early in my time amongst the Conjoiners, and— perhaps just as importantly—it was still early for the
Conjoiners as well. There was much that we all needed to learn. We were ambitious then, fiercely so, but by the same token we were arrogantly blind to our inadequacies and failings. That changed, later, after I returned to the fold. Galiana made refinements to all of us, reinstating a higher degree of personal identity. I think she had learned something wise from Nevil Clavain. After that, I began to see things in the proper perspective again. I thought of you, and the pain of what I had done to you was like a sharp stone pushing against my throat. Every waking moment of my consciousness, with every breath, you were there. But by then it was much too late to make amends. I tried to contact you, but without success. I couldn’t even be sure if you were in the system any more. By then, even the Demarchists had their own prototype starships, using the technology we’d licensed them. You could have been anywhere.” Weather’s tone hardened, taking on a kind of saintlike asperity. “But I always knew you were a survivor, Rafe. I never doubted that you were still alive, somewhere. Perhaps we’ll meet again: stranger things have happened. If so, I hope I’ll treat you with something of the kindness you always deserved, and that you always showed me. But should that never happen, I can at least hope that you will hear this message. There will always be Conjoiners, and nothing that is committed to the collective memory will ever be lost. No matter how much time passes, those of us who walk in the world will be carrying this message, alert for your name. If there was more I could do, I would. But contrary to what some might think, even Conjoiners can’t work miracles. I wish that it were otherwise. Then I would clap my hands and summon you to me, and I would spend the rest of my life letting you know what you meant to me, what you still mean to me. I loved you, Rafe Van Ness. I always did, and I always will.”