Galactic North

  The purple-skinned elder’s scales flashed green and opal as he approached Irravel along the coral jetty, a stick in one webbed hand, supported by two aides, a third shading his aged crown with a delicately watercoloured parasol. The aides were all descended from late-model Conjoiners; they had the translucent cranial crest through which blood flow had once been channelled to cool their supercharged minds. Seeing them gave Irravel a dual-edged pang of nostalgia and guilt. She had not seen Conjoiners for nearly a thousand years, ever since they had fragmented into a dozen factions and vanished from human affairs. Neither had she entirely forgotten her betrayal of Remontoire.

  But that had been so long ago . . .

  A Communicant completed up the party, gowned in brocade, hazed by a blur of entopic projections. Communicants were small and elfin, with a phenomenal talent for natural languages augmented by Juggler transforms. Irravel sensed that this one was old and revered, despite the fact that Communicant genes did not express for great longevity.

  The elder halted before her.

  The head of his walking stick was a tiny lemur skull inside an egg-sized space helmet. He uttered something clearly ceremonial, but Irravel understood none of the sounds he made. She groped for something to say, recalling the oldest language in her memory, and therefore the one most likely to be recognised in any far-flung human culture.

  “Thank you for letting us stop here,” she said.

  The Communicant hobbled forward, already shaping words experimentally with his wide, protruding lips. For a moment his sounds were like an infant’s first attempts at vocalisation, but then they resolved into something Irravel understood.

  “Am I—um—making the slightest sense to you?”

  “Yes,” Irravel said. “Yes, thank you.”

  “Canasian,” the Communicant diagnosed. “Twenty-third, twenty-fourth centuries, Lacaille 9352 dialect, Fand subdialect?”

  Irravel nodded.

  “Your kind are very rare now,” he said, studying her as if she was some kind of exotic butterfly, “but not unwelcome. ” His features cracked into a heart-warming smile.

  “What about Markarian?” Irravel said. “I know his ship passed through this system less than fifty years ago—I still have a fix on it as it moves out of the cluster.”

  “Other ships do come, yes. Not many—one or two a century.”

  “And what happened when the last one came through?”

  “The usual tribute was given.”

  “Tribute?”

  “Something ceremonial.” The Communicant’s smile was wider than ever. “To the glory of Irravel. With many actors, beautiful words, love, death, laughter, tears.”

  She understood, slowly, dumbfoundedly.

  “You’re putting on a play?”

  The elder must have understood something of that. Nodding proudly, he extended a hand across the darkening bay, ocean-forms cutting the water like scythes. A distant raft carried lanterns and the glimmerings of richly painted backdrops. Boats converged from across the bay. A dirigible loomed over the archipelago’s edge, pregnant with gondolas.

  “We want you to play Irravel,” the Communicant said, beckoning her forward. “This is our greatest honour.”

  When they reached the raft, the Communicant taught Irravel her lines and the actions she would be required to make. It was all simple enough—even the fact that she had to deliver her parts in Subarun. By the end of evening she was fluent in their language. There was nothing she couldn’t learn in an instant these days, by sheer force of will. But it was not enough. To catch Markarian, she would have to break out of the narrow labyrinth of human thought entirely. That was why she had come to Jugglers.

  That night they performed the play, while boats congregated around them, top-heavy with lolling islanders. The sun sank and the sky glared with a thousand blue gems studding blue velvet. Night in the heart of the Pleiades was the most beautiful thing Irravel had dared imagine. But in the direction of Sol, when she amplified her vision, there was a green thumbprint on the sky. Every century, the green wave was larger, as neighbouring solar systems were infected and transformed by the rogue terraforming machines. Given time, it would even reach the Pleiades.

  Irravel got drunk on islander wine and learned the tributes ’ history.

  The plots varied immensely, but the protagonists always resembled Markarian and Irravel; mythic figures entwined by destiny, remembered across almost two thousand years. Sometimes one or the other was the clear villain, but as often as not they were both heroic, misunderstanding each other’s motives in true tragic fashion. Sometimes they ended with both parties dying. They rarely ended happily. But there was always some kind of redemption when the pursuit was done.

  In the interlude, she felt she had to tell the Communicant the truth, so that he could tell the elder.

  “Listen, there’s something you need to know.” Irravel didn’t wait for his answer. “I’m really her—really the person I’m playing.”

  For a long time he didn’t seem to understand, before shaking his head slowly and sadly. “No; I thought you’d be different. You seemed different. But many say that.”

  She shrugged. There was little point arguing, and anything she said now could always be ascribed to wine. In the morning, the remark had been quietly forgotten. She was taken out to sea and drowned.

  Galactic North—AD 9730

  “Markarian? Answer me.”

  She watched the Hideyoshi’s magnified image, looming just out of weapons range. Like the Hirondelle, it had changed almost beyond recognition. The hull glistened within a skein of armouring force. The engines, no longer physically coupled to the rest of the ship, flew alongside like dolphins. They were anchored in fields that only became visible when some tiny stress afflicted them.

  For centuries of worldtime she had made no attempt to communicate with him. But now her mind had changed. The green wave had continued for millennia, an iridescent cataract spreading across the eye of the galaxy. It had assimilated the blue suns of the Subarun Commonwealth in mere centuries—although by then Irravel and Markarian were a thousand light-years closer to the core, beginning to turn away from the plane of the galaxy, and the death screams of those gentle islanders never reached them. Nothing stopped it, and once the green wave had swallowed them, systems fell silent. The Juggler transformation allowed Irravel to grasp the enormity of it; allowed her to stare unflinchingly into the horror of a million poisoned stars and apprehend each individually.

  She knew more of what it was, now.

  It was impossible for stars to shine green, any more than an ingot of metal could become green-hot if it was raised to a certain temperature. Instead, something was veiling them—staining their light, like coloured glass. Whatever it was stole energy from the stellar spectra at the frequencies of chlorophyll. Stars were shining through curtains of vegetation, like lanterns in a forest. The greenfly machines were turning the galaxy into a jungle.

  It was time to talk. Time—as in the old plays of the dead islanders—to initiate the final act, before the two of them fell into the cold of intergalactic space. She searched her repertoire of communication systems until she found something as ancient as ceremony demanded.

  She aimed the message laser at him, cutting through his armour. The beam was too ineffectual to be mistaken for anything other than an attempt to talk. No answer came, so she repeated the message in a variety of formats and languages. Days of shiptime passed—decades of worldtime.

  Talk, you bastard.

  Growing impatient, she examined her weapons options. Armaments from the Nestbuilders were amongst the most advanced: theoretically they could mole through the loam of spacetime and inflict precise harm anywhere in Markarian ’s ship. But to use them she had to convince herself that she knew the interior layout of the Hideyoshi. Her mass-sensor sweeps were too blurred to be much help. She might just as easily harm the sleepers as take out his field nodes. Until now, it had been too risky to contemplate.

 
But all games needed an end.

  Willing her qualms from her mind, she enabled the Nestbuilder armaments, feeling them stress spacetime in the Hirondelle’s belly, ready to short-circuit it entirely. She selected attack loci in Markarian’s ship; best guesses that would cripple him rather than blow him out of the sky.

  Then something happened.

  He replied, modulating his engine thrust in staccato stabs. The frequency was audio. Quickly Irravel translated the modulation.

  “I don’t understand,” Markarian said, “why you took so long to answer me, and why you ignored me for so long when I replied.”

  “You never replied until now,” she said. “I’d have known if you had.”

  “Would you?”

  There was something in his tone that convinced her he wasn’t lying. Which left only one possibility: that he had tried speaking to her before, and that in some way her own ship had kept this knowledge from her.

  “Mirsky must have done it,” Irravel said. “She must have installed filters to block any communications from your ship.”

  “Mirsky?”

  “She would have done it as a favour to me; maybe under orders from my former self.” She didn’t bother elaborating: Markarian was sure to know she had died and then been reborn as a clone of the original Irravel. “My former self had the neural conditioning that kept her on the trail of the sleepers. This clone never had it, which meant that my instinct to pursue the sleepers had to be reinforced.”

  “By lies?”

  “Mirsky would have done it out of friendship,” Irravel said. And for a moment she believed herself, while wondering how friendship could seem so like betrayal.

  Markarian’s image smiled. They faced each other across an absurdly long banquet table, with the galaxy projected above it, flickering in the light of candelabra.

  “Well?” he said, of the green stain spreading across the spiral. “What do you think?”

  Irravel had long ago stopped counting time and distance, but she knew it had been at least fifteen thousand years and that many light-years since they had turned from the plane. Part of her knew, of course: although the wave swallowed suns, it had no use for pulsars, and their metronomic ticking and slow decay allowed positional triangulation in space and time with chilling precision. But she elected to bury that knowledge beneath her conscious thought processes: one of the simpler Juggler tricks.

  “What do I think? I think it terrifies me.”

  “Our emotional responses haven’t diverged as much as I’d feared.”

  They didn’t have to use language. They could have swapped pure mental concepts between ships: concatenated strings of qualia, some of which could only be grasped in minds rewired by Pattern Jugglers. But Irravel considered it sufficient that they could look each other in the eye without flinching.

  The galaxy falling below had been frozen in time: light waves struggling to overtake Irravel and Markarian. The wave had appeared to slow, and then halt its advance. But then Markarian had turned, diving back towards the plane. The galaxy quickened to life, rushing to finish thirty thousand years of history before the two ships returned. The wave surged on. Above the banquet table, one arm of the star-clotted spiral was shot through with green, like a mote of ink spreading into blotting paper. The edge of the green wave was feathered, fractal, extending verdant tendrils.

  “Do you have any observations?” Irravel asked.

  “A few.” Markarian sipped from his chalice. “I’ve studied the patterns of starlight amongst the suns already swallowed by the wave. They’re not uniformly green—it’s correlated with rotational angle. The green matter must be concentrated near the ecliptic, extending above and below it, but not encircling the stars completely.”

  Irravel thought back to what the Nestbuilder had shown her.

  “Meaning what?” she asked, testing Markarian.

  “Swarms of absorbing bodies, on orbits resembling comets, or asteroids. I think the greenfly machines must have dismantled everything smaller than a Jovian, then enveloped the rubble in transparent membranes which they filled with air, water and greenery—self-sustaining biospheres. Then they were cast adrift. Trillions of tiny worlds, around each star. No rocky planets any more.”

  Irravel retrieved a name from the deep past. “Like Dyson spheres?”

  “Dyson clouds, perhaps.”

  “Do you think anyone survived? Are there niches in the wave where humans can live? That was the point of green- fly, after all: to create living space.”

  “Maybe,” Markarian said, with no great conviction. “Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud—”

  “But you don’t think it’s very likely?”

  “I’ve been listening, Irravel—scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident. ”

  “It was my fault, Markarian.”

  His tone was rueful. “Yes . . . I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.”

  “I never intended this.”

  “I think that goes without saying, don’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.”

  “Did you?”

  He shook his head. “In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.”

  “I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.”

  “I know.”

  And she believed him.

  “What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?”

  “Because of what they did to you, Irravel.”

  He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.

  “They were good at surgery,” Markarian said. “Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.” The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. “They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.”

  For a long while Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of re-connective surgery around the neck was too slight ever to have shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.

  I did it to save your neck, Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.

  “You appear to be telling the truth,” she said, when she had released the children. “The nature of your betrayal was . . .” And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. “Different from what I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.”

  “One I’ve lived with for three hundred years of subjective time.”

  “You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.” But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.

  “What now?” Markarian said. “Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.”

  “You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?”

  Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. “Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?”

  Irravel agreed.

  She willed herself into stasis, medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ’chines would only revive her when something—anything— happened, on a galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured
, until woken by the same stimulus.

  He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.

  The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the galaxy for ten thousand light-years around Sol—a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance—at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder’s Slug had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it had swallowed humanity.

  “Why did we wake?” Irravel said. “Nothing’s changed, except that it’s grown larger.”

  “Maybe not,” Markarian said. “I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the galaxy; from within the wave.”

  “Yes?”

  “Looks as though someone survived after all.”

  The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognised.

  “It’s Canasian,” Markarian said.

  “Fand subdialect,” Irravel added, marvelling.

  It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly didn’t have the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.

  Someone wanted to speak to them.

  The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiselled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.

  Irravel recognised the face.