'Merlin: tell me about the neutron stars, will you? I need something to keep my mind occupied.'
'The troublesome part is what happens when they stop spiralling around each other and collide. Mercifully, it's a fairly rare event even by galactic standards - it doesn't happen more than once in a million years, and when it does it's usually far enough away not to be a problem.'
'But if it isn't far away - how troublesome would it be?'
'Imagine the release of more energy in a second than a typical star emits in ten billion years: one vast, photo-leptonic fireball. An unimaginably bright pulse of gamma rays. Instant sterilisation for thousands of light-years in any direction.'
The cyclone had grown a central bulge now, a perfectly circular bruise rising above the surface of the planet. As it rose, towering thousands of kilometres above the cloud layer, it elongated like a waterspout. Soon, Sora could see it backdropped against space. And there was something rising within it.
'The Waymakers tried to stop it, didn't they?'
Merlin nodded. 'They found the neutron star binary when they extended the Waynet deeper into the galaxy. They realised that the two stars were only a few thousand years from colliding - and that there was almost nothing they could do about it.'
She could see what she thought was the weapon, now, encased in the waterspout like a seed. It was huge - larger perhaps than this moon. It looked fragile, nonetheless, like an impossibly ornate candelabrum, or a species of deep-sea medusa glowing with its own bioluminescence. Sloughing atmosphere, the thing came to a watchful halt, and the waterspout slowly retracted back towards the cyclone, which was now slowing, like a monstrous flywheel grinding down.
'Nothing?'
'Well - almost nothing.'
'They built the Brittlestar around it,' Sora said. 'A kind of shield, right? So that when the stars collided, the flash would be contained?'
'Not even Waymaker science could contain that much energy.' Merlin looked to the projection, seeming to pay attention to the weapon for the first time. If he felt any elation on seeing his gun for the first time, none of it was visible on his face. He looked, instead, ashen - as if the years had suddenly reclaimed what the Waymakers had given him. 'All they could do was keep the stars in check, keep them from spiralling any closer. So they built the Brittlestar, a vast machine with only one function: to constantly nudge the orbits of the neutron stars at its heart. For every angstrom that the stars fell towards each other, the Brittlestar pushed them an angstrom apart. And it was designed to keep doing that for a million years, until the Waymakers found a way to shift the entire binary beyond the galaxy. You want to know how they kept pushing them apart?'
Sora nodded, though she thought she half-knew the answer already.
'Tiny black holes,' Merlin said. 'Accelerated close to the speed of light, each black hole interacting gravitationally with the binary before evaporating in a puff of pair-production radiation.'
'Just the same way the gun functions. That's no coincidence, is it?'
'The gun - what we call the gun - was just a component in the Brittlestar: the source of relativistic black holes needed to keep the neutron stars from colliding.'
Sora looked around the room. 'And these people stole it?'
'Like I said, they were closer to the Waymakers than us. They knew enough about them to dismantle part of the Brittlestar, to override its defences and remove the mechanism they needed to win their war.'
'But the Brittlestar--'
'Hasn't been working properly ever since. Its capability to regenerate itself was harmed when the subsystem was stolen, and the remaining black-hole generating mechanisms can't do all the work required. The neutron stars have continued to spiral closer together - slowly but surely.'
'But you said they were only a few thousand years from collision . . .'
Merlin had not stopped working the controls in all this time. The gun had come closer, seemingly oblivious to the ordinary laws of celestial mechanics. Down below, the planetary surface had returned to normality, except for a ruddier hue to the storm.
'Maybe now,' Merlin said, 'you're beginning to understand why I want the gun so badly.'
'You want to return it, don't you? You never really wanted to find a weapon.'
'I did, once.' Merlin seemed to tap some final reserve of energy, his voice growing momentarily stronger. 'But now I'm older and wiser. In less than four thousand years the stars meet, and it suddenly won't matter who wins this war. We're like ignorant armies fighting over a patch of land beneath a rumbling volcano!'
Four thousand years, Sora thought. More time had passed since she had been born.
'If we don't have the gun,' she said, 'we die anyway - wiped out by the Huskers. Not much of a choice, is it?'
'At least something would survive. Something that might even still think of itself as human.'
'You're saying that we should capitulate? That we get our hands on the ultimate weapon, and then not use it?'
'I never said it was going to be easy, Sora.' Merlin pitched forwards, slowly enough that she was able to reach him before he slumped into the exposed circuitry of the console. His coughs were loud in her helmet. 'Actually, I think I'm more than winded,' he said, when he was able to speak at all.
'We'll get you back to the ship; the proctors can help--'
'It's too late, Sora.'
'What about the gun?'
'I'm . . . doing something rather rash, in the circumstances. Entrusting it to you. Does that sound utterly insane?'
'I'll betray you. I'll give the gun to the Cohort. You know that, don't you?'
Merlin's voice was soft. 'I don't think you will. I think you'll do the right thing and return it to the Brittlestar.'
'Don't make me betray you!'
He shook his head. 'I've just issued a command that reassigns control of my ship to you. The proctors are now under your command; they'll show you everything you need.'
'Merlin, I'm begging you . . .'
His voice was weak now, hard to distinguish from the scratchy irregularity of his breathing. She leaned down to him and touched helmets, hoping the old trick would make him easier to hear. 'No good, Sora. Much too late. I've signed it all over.'
'No!' She shook him, almost in anger. Then she began to cry, loud enough so that she was in no doubt that he would hear it. 'I don't even know what you want me to do with it!'
'Take the ring, then the rest will be abundantly clear.'
'What?' She could hardly understand herself now.
'Put the ring on. Do it now, Sora. Before I die. So that I at least know it's done.'
'When I take your glove off, I'll kill you, Merlin. You know that, don't you? And I won't be able to put the ring on until I'm back in the ship.'
'I . . . just want to see you take it. That's enough, Sora. And you'd better be quick--'
'I love you, you bastard!'
'Then do this.'
She placed her hands around the cuff seal of his gauntlet, feeling the alloy locking mechanism, knowing that it would only take a careful depression of the sealing latches, and then a quick twisting movement, and the glove would slide free, releasing the air in his suit. She wondered how long he would last before consciousness left him - no more than tens of seconds, she thought, unless he drew breath first. And by the state of his breathing, that would not be easy for him.
She removed the gauntlet, and took his ring.
Tyrant lifted from the moon.
'Husker forces grouping in attack configuration,' the familiar said, tapping directly into the ship's avionics. 'Hull sensors read sweeps by targeting lidar . . . an attack is imminent, Sora.'
Tyrant's light armour would not save them, Sora knew. The attack would be blinding and brief, and she would probably never know it had happened. But that didn't mean she was going to let it happen.
She felt the gun move to her will.
It would not always be like this, she knew: the gun was only hers until she returned it t
o the Waymakers. But for now it felt like an inseparable part of her, like a twin she had never known, but whose every move was familiar to her a fraction in advance of it being made. She felt the gun energise itself, reaching deep into the bedrock of space-time, plundering mass-energy from quantum foam, forging singularities in its heart.
She felt readiness.
'First element of swarm has deployed charm-torps,' the familiar reported, an odd slurred quality entering her voice. 'Activating Tyrant's countermeasures . . .'
The hull rang like a bell.
'Countermeasures engaging charm-torps . . . neutralised . . . second wave deployed by the swarm . . . closing . . .'
'How long can we last?'
'Countermeasures exhausted . . . we can't parry a third wave, not at this range.'
Sora closed her eyes and made the weapon spit death.
She had targeted two of the three elements of the Husker swarm, leaving the third - the furthest ship from her - unharmed.
She watched the relativistic black holes fold space around the two targeted ships, crushing each instantly, as if in a vice.
'Third ship dropping to max . . . maximum attack range . . . retracting charm-torp launchers--'
'This is Sora for the Cohort,' she said in Main, addressing the survivor on the general ship-to-ship channel. 'Or what remains of the Cohort. Perhaps you can understand what I have to say. I could kill you, now, instantly, if I chose.' She felt the weapon speak to her through her blood, reporting its status, its eagerness to do her bidding. 'Instead, I'm about to give you a demonstration. Are you ready?'
'Sora . . .' said the familiar. 'Something's wrong . . .'
'What?'
'I'm not . . . well.' The familiar's voice did not sound at all right, now, drained of any semblance to Sora's own. 'The ring must be constructing something in your brain . . . part of the interface between you and the gun . . . something stronger than me . . . It's weeding me out, to make room for itself . . .'
She remembered what Merlin had said about the structures the ring would make.
'You saved a part of yourself in the ship.'
'Only a part,' the familiar said. 'Not all of me . . . not all of me at all. I'm sorry, Sora. I think I'm dying.'
She dismantled the star system.
Sora did it with artistry and flair, saving the best for last. She began with moons, pulverising them so that they began to flow into nascent rings around their parent worlds. Then she smashed the worlds themselves to pieces, turning them into cauls of hot ash and plasma. Finally - when it was the only thing left to destroy - she turned the gun on the system's star, impaling its heart with a salvo of relativistic black holes, throwing a killing spanner into the nuclear processes that turned mass into sunlight. In doing so, she interfered - catastrophically - with the delicate hydrostatic balance between pressure and gravity that held the star in shape. She watched it unpeel, shedding layers of outer atmosphere in a premature display of the death that awaited suns like it, four billion years in the future. And then she watched the last Husker ship, which had witnessed what she had wrought, turn and head out of the system.
She could have killed them all.
But she had let them live. Instead, she had shown the power that was - albeit temporarily - hers to command.
She wondered if there was enough humanity left in them to appreciate the clemency she had shown.
Later, she took Tyrant into the Waynet again, the vast, luminous bulk of the gun following her like an obedient dragon. Sora's heart almost stopped at the fearful moment of entry, convinced that the syrinx would choose not to sing for its new master.
But it did sing, just as it had sung for Merlin.
And then, alone this time - more alone than she had ever been in her life - she climbed into the observation blister and turned the metasapphire walls transparent, making the ship itself disappear, until there was only herself and the rushing, twinkling brilliance of the Way. It was time to finish what Merlin had begun.
This trio of far-future stories all feature Merlin, a favourite character of mine and one I intend to return to. The Merlin stuff is very baroque, very widescreen: as close as I come to writing pure-quill space opera. My 'Revelation Space' stories may be replete with ancient civilisations, exploding space dreadnoughts and fire-wreathed planets, but in the Merlin stories I like to turn the amplifier up to eleven and get seriously 'one louder'.
The first and third stories both appeared in 2000, but I wrote them out of sequence, with 'Hideaway', the prequel, being written three years later than 'Merlin's Gun'. I wrote 'Minla's Flowers' five years later, when a commission demanded something big and space-operatic: perfect Merlin territory. In these stories I try to navigate a path between hard SF and something close to Lucasesque space fantasy. The Merlin stories are full of archaic imagery, but (I hope) it's there in service of a rigorous science fictional spine. In 'Hideaway' I played around with some genuine concepts related to faster-than-light travel and the effects of dark matter on stellar physics, while in 'Merlin's Gun' I deal with one possible explanation for gamma-ray bursts, one of the central mysteries of contemporary astronomy. The inspiration for 'Minla's Flowers' was an article about the growth cycles of chambered nautiluses. By the time I'd finished the story there were no nautiluses anywhere in it, although the idea of lunar growth cycles survived in very different form. The inspiration for the character Minla, incidentally, was a certain grocer's daughter with ambitions to high office.
Here's an anecdote. Around the time that 'Merlin's Gun' was due to appear in print, I was busy putting together a series of web pages for the research group of which I was a member. I needed an artist's impression of a type of interacting binary star known as a 'cataclysmic variable', because that was what we'd been looking at with our new optical camera. Trawling the Internet, I found what I was looking for on the website of astronomical artist Mark Garlick. All I knew of Mark was that he used to work with a colleague of mine, and had left full-time research to develop a career in space art. I was just composing an e-mail to Mark, asking his permission to reuse the image, when I noticed something else on his pages. There was a cover for a forthcoming edition of Asimov's magazine Mark had just done . . . which turned out to be the cover image for 'Merlin's Gun'.
Being a good rationalist, I don't attach too much significance to coincidences. But I still think that's a bit weird.
ANGELS OF ASHES
Sergio flew under a Martian sky the colour of bloodied snow. Nerves had kept him awake the previous night, and now sleep was reclaiming its debt, even as he spoke the Kiwidinok liturgies that his catechist had selected from the day's breviary. Earlier, he had overflown a caravan of clanfolk - unusual, that they should travel so far west from Vikingville - and the sight of their crawling, pennanted machines had brought Indrani to mind, her face more alluring than any stained-glass effigy in the seminary. She was asking his name, each syllable anointing him, and then, instead of Indrani, it was God roaring in his head, so deep it seemed as if the landscape was issuing a proclamation.
'UNIDENTIFIED AIRCRAFT,' said the voice. 'YOU ARE ABOUT TO TRANSGRESS CONSECRATED AIRSPACE.'
He slammed awake, conscious of the bulge in his lap. He could still smell Indrani, as if he'd imported her fragrance from sleep. The Latinate script of the breviary had stopped scrolling across his retina, his destination cresting the horizon, much nearer than he'd realised. Cased in a pressure dome, it was a hundred-metre obelisk of alabaster, attended by smaller spires. Flying buttresses and aerial walkways infested the air between the spires, but there was no evidence of human habitation.
'TRANSMIT RECOGNITION CRYPTOGRAMS IF YOU DO NOT WISH TO BE INTERDICTED BY TEMPLE DEFENCE SYSTEMS,' the voice continued, although less impressively, since Sergio knew now that it was the catechist, the one that had been implanted on the day of his ordination. The voice added: 'YOU HAVE TEN SECONDS TO COMPLY OR ALTER YOUR VECTOR . . .'
'I understand,' he said. 'Just a moment . . .'
&
nbsp; Sergio instructed the ornithopter to emit the warble that would satisfy the Temple of his benevolence, then watched as the defensive gargoyles retracted lolling tongues and closed fanged jaws, beam-weapon nozzles vanishing into nostrils, laser-targeting eyes dimming from ruby brilliance.
'WELCOME, BROTHER MENENDEZ,' the voice said. 'PROCEED WITH THE GRACE OF GOD. YOU WILL BE MET BY A MEMBER OF THE ORDER.'
The Machinehood, he thought.
The ornithopter punched through the resealing polymer bubble that encased the Temple, executing one circuit of the building before settling on the terrazzo at its base, furling wings with a bustle of synthetic chitin. Sergio emerged, nervously drying his hands against the ash-coloured fabric of his trousers. His jacket was similarly dour, offset by the white of his collar and the Asymmetrist star embroidered above his heart. The bluish stubble on his scalp revealed the weal-like stigma of ordination.