“Thanks for rescuing me,” Sora said, when he had shown her to the bridge of the ship he called Tyrant; a spherical chamber outfitted with huge black control seats, facing a window of flawless metasapphire overlooking cometary ice.
“Don’t overdo the gratitude,” the familiar said.
Merlin shrugged. “You’re welcome.”
“And sorry if I acted a little edgy.”
“Forget it. As you say, comes with the territory. Actually, I’m rather glad I found you. You wouldn’t believe how scarce human company is these days.”
“Nobody ever said it was a friendly Galaxy.”
“Less so now, believe me. Now the Cohort’s started losing whole star-systems. I’ve seen world after world shattered by the Huskers; whole strings of orbiting habitats gutted by nuclear fire. The war’s in its terminal stages, and the Cohort isn’t in anything resembling a winning position.” Merlin leaned closer to her, sudden enthusiasm burning in his eyes. “But I’ve found something that can make a difference, Sora. Or at least, I have rather a good idea where one might find it.”
She nodded slowly.
“Let’s see. That wouldn’t be Merlin’s fabulous gun, by any chance?”
“You’re still not entirely sure I’m who I say I am, are you?”
“I’ve one or two nagging doubts.”
“You’re right, of course.” He sighed theatrically and gestured around the bridge. In the areas not reserved for control readouts, the walls were adorned with treasure: trinkets, finery, and jewels of staggering artistry and beauty, glinting with the hues of the rarest alloys, inset with precious stones, shaped by the finest lapidary skill of a thousand worlds. There were chips of subtly colored ceramic, or tiny white-light holograms of great brilliance. There were daggers and brooches, ornate ceremonial lasers and bracelets, terrible swords and grotesque, carnelian-eyed carnival masques.
“I thought,” Merlin said, “that this would be enough to convince you.”
He had sloughed the outer layer of his suit, revealing himself to be what she had on some level feared: a handsome, broad-shouldered man who in every way conformed to the legend she had in mind. Merlin dressed luxuriously, encrusted in jewelry which was, nonetheless, at the dour end of the spectrum compared to what was displayed on the walls. His beard was carefully trimmed and his long auburn hair hung loose, evoking leonine strength. He radiated magnificence.
“Oh, it’s pretty impressive,” Sora said. “Even if a good fraction of it must have been looted. And maybe I am half convinced. But you have to admit, it’s quite a story.”
“Not from my perspective.” He was fiddling with an intricate ring on one forefinger. “Since I left on my quest” – he spoke the word with exquisite distaste – ‘I’ve lived rather less than eleven years of subjective time. I was as horrified as anyone when I found my little hunt had been magnified into something so . . . epic.”
“Bet you were.”
“When I left, there was an unstated expectation that the war could be won, within a handful of centuries.” Merlin snapped his fingers at a waiting proctor and had it bring a bowl of fruit. Sora took a plum, examining it suspiciously before consigning it to her mouth. “But even then,” Merlin continued, “things were on the turn. I could see it, if no one else could.”
“So you became a mercenary.”
“Freelancer, if you don’t mind. Point was, I realized that I could better serve humanity outside the Cohort. And old legends kept tickling the back of my mind.” He smiled. “You see, even legends are haunted by legends!”
He told her the rest, which, in diluted form, she already knew. Yet it was fascinating to hear it from Merlin’s lips; to hear the kernel of truth at the core of something around which falsehoods and half-truths had accreted like dust around a protostar. He had gathered many stories, from dozens of human cultures predating the Cohort, spread across thousands of light-years and dispersed through tens of thousands of years of history. The similarities were not always obvious, but Merlin had sifted common patterns, piecing together – as well as he could – an underlying framework of what might just be fact.
“There’d been another war,” Merlin said. “Smaller than ours, spread across a much smaller volume of space – but no less brutal for all that.”
“How long ago was this?”
“Forty or forty five kiloyears ago – not long after the Waymakers vanished, but about twenty kays before anything we’d recognize as the Cohort.” Merlin’s eyes seemed to gaze over; an odd, stentorian tone entered his voice “In the long dark centuries of Mid-Galactic history, when a thousand cultures rose, each imagining themselves immune to time, and whose shadows barely reach us across the millennia . . .”
“Yes. Very poetic. What kind of war, anyway? Human versus human, or human versus alien, like this one?”
“Does it matter? Whoever the enemy were, they aren’t coming back. Whatever was used against them was so deadly, so powerful, so awesome, that it stopped an entire war!”
“Merlin’s gun.”
He nodded, lips tight, looking almost embarrassed. “As if I had some prior claim on it, or was even in some sense responsible for it!” He looked at Sora very intently, the glittering finery of the ship reflected in the gold of his eyes. “I haven’t seen the gun, or even been near it, and it’s only recently that I’ve had anything like a clear idea of what it might actually be.”
“But you think you know where it is?”
“I think so. It isn’t far. And it’s in the eye of a storm.”
They lifted from the shard, spending eight days in transit to the closest Way, most of the time in frostwatch. Sora had her own quarters; a spherical-walled suite deep in Tyrant’s thorax, outfitted in maroon and burgundy. The ship was small, but fascinating to explore, an object lesson in the differences between the Cohort that had manufactured this ship, and the one Sora had been raised in. In many respects, the ship was more advanced than anything from her own time, especially in the manner of its propulsion, defenses, and sensors. In other areas, the Cohort had gained expertise since Merlin’s era. Merlin’s proctors were even stupider than those Sora had been looking after when the Husker attack began. There were no familiars in Merlin’s time, either, and she saw no reason to educate him about her own neural symbiote.
“Well,” Sora said, when she was alone. “What can you tell me about the legendary Merlin?”
“Nothing very much at this point.” The familiar had been communicating with the version of itself that had infiltrated Tyrant, via Merlin’s suit. “If he’s impersonating the historical figure we know as Merlin, he’s gone to extraordinary lengths to make the illusion authentic. All the logs confirm that his ship left Cohort-controlled space around ten kiloyears ago, and that he’s been traveling ever since.”
“He’s back from somewhere. It would help if we knew where.”
“Tricky, given that we have no idea about the deep topology of the Waynet. I can search the starfields for recognizable features, but it’ll take a long time, and there’ll still be a large element of guesswork.”
“There must be something you can show me.”
“Of course.” The familiar sounded slightly affronted. “I found images. Some of the formats are obscure, but I think I can make sense of most of them.” And even before Sora had answered, the familiar had warmed a screen in one hemisphere of the suite. Visual records of different solar systems appeared, each entry displayed for a second before being replaced. Each consisted of an orbital map; planets and Waynet nodes were marked relative to each system’s sun. The worlds were annotated with enlarged images of each, overlaid with sparse astrophysical and military data, showing the roles – if any – they had played in the war. Merlin had visited other places, too. Squidlike protostellar nebulae, stained with green and red and flecked by the light of hot blue stars. Supernova remnants, the eviscera of gored stars, a hundred of which had died since the Flourishing, briefly outshining the galaxy.
“What do
you think he was looking for?” Sora said. “These points must have been on the Waynet, but they’re a long way from anything we’d call civilization.”
“I don’t know. Souvenir hunting?”
“Are you sure Merlin can’t tell you’re accessing this information?”
“Absolutely – but why should it bother him unless he’s got something to hide?”
“Debatable point.” Sora looked around to the sealed door of her quarters, half expecting Merlin to enter at any moment. It was absurd, of course – from its present vantage point, the familiar could probably tell precisely where Merlin was in the ship, and give Sora adequate warning. But she still felt uneasy, even as she asked the inevitable question. “What else?”
“Oh, plenty. Even some visual records of the man himself, caught on the internal cameras.”
“Sorry. A healthy interest in where he’s been is one thing, but spying on him is something else.”
“Would it change things if I told you that Merlin hasn’t been totally honest with us?”
“You said he hadn’t lied.”
“Not about anything significant – which makes this all the odder. There.” The familiar sounded quietly pleased with itself. “You’re curious now, aren’t you?”
Sora sighed. “You’d better show me.”
Merlin’s face appeared on the screen, sobbing. He seemed slightly older to her, although it was difficult to tell, since most of his face was caged behind his hands. She could hardly make out what he was saying, between each sob.
“Thousands of hours of this sort of thing,” the familiar said. “They started out as serious attempts at keeping a journal, but soon deteriorated into a form of catharsis.”
“I’d say he did well to stay sane at all.”
“More than you realize. We know he’s been gone ten thousand years – just as he told us. Well and good. That’s objective time. But he also said that eleven years of shiptime had passed.”
“And that isn’t the case?”
“I suspect that may be, to put a diplomatic gloss on it, a slight underestimate. By a considerable number of decades. And I don’t think he spent much of that time in frostwatch.”
Sora tried to remember what she knew of the methods of longevity available to the Cohort in Merlin’s time. “He looks older than he does now – doesn’t he?”
The familiar chose not to answer.
When the transit to the Way was almost over, Merlin called her to the bridge.
“We’re near the transit node,” he said. “Take a seat, because the insertion can be a little . . . interesting.”
“Transition to Waynet in three hundred seconds,” said the ship’s cloyingly calm voice.
The crescent of the cockpit window showed a starfield transected by a blurred, twinkling filament, like a solitary wave crossing a lake at midnight. Sora could see blurred stars through the filament, wide as her outspread hand, widening by the second. A thickening in it like a bulge along a snake was the transit node; a point, coincidental with the ecliptic, where passage into the accelerated spacetime of the Way was possible. Although the Waynet stream was transparent, there remained a ghostly sense of dizzying motion.
“Are you absolutely sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Goodness, no.” Merlin was reclining back in his seat, booted feet up on the console, hands knitted behind his neck. Ancient orchestral music was piping into the room, building up to a magnificent and doubtless delicately timed climax. “Which isn’t to say that this isn’t an incredibly tricky maneuver, of course, requiring enormous skill and courage.”
“What worries me is that you might be right.”
Sora remembered the times Captain Tchagra had sent probes into the Waynet, only to watch as each was shredded, sliced apart by momentum gradients that could flense matter down to its fundamentals. The Waynet twinkled because tiny grains of cosmic dust were constantly drifting into it, each being annihilated in a pretty little flash of exotic radiation. Right now, she thought, they were crusing toward that boundary, dead set on what ought to have been guaranteed destruction.
She tried to inject calm into her voice. “So how did you come by the syrinx, Merlin?”
“Isn’t much to look at, you know. A black cone, about as long as you’re tall. Even in my era we couldn’t make them, or even safely dismantle the few we still had. Very valuable things.”
“The Cohort weren’t overly thrilled that you stole one, according to the legend.”
“As if they cared. They had so few left, they were too scared to actually use them.”
Sora buckled herself into a seat.
She knew roughly what was about to happen, although no one had understood the details for tens of thousands of years. Just before hitting the Way, the syrinx would chirp a series of quantum-gravitational fluctuations at the boundary layer, the skin, no thicker than a Planck-length, which separated normal spacetime from the rushing spacetime contained within the Way. For an instant, the momentum gradients would relax, allowing the ship to enter the accelerated medium without being sliced.
That was the theory, anyway.
The music reached its crescendo now, ship’s thrust notching higher, pushing Sora and Merlin back into their seats. The shriek of the propulsion system merged with the shriek of violins, too harmoniously to be accidental. Merlin’s look of quiet amusement did not falter. A cascade of liquid notes played over the music; the song of the syrinx translated into the audio spectrum.
There was a peak of thrust, then the impulse ended abruptly, along with the music.
Sora looked to the exterior view.
For a moment, it seemed as if the stars, and the nearer planets and sun of this system, hadn’t actually changed at all. But after a few seconds, she saw that they burned appreciably brighter – and, it seemed, bluer – in one hemisphere of the sky, redder and dimmer in the other. And they were growing bluer and redder by the moment, and now bunching, swimming like shoals of luminous fish, obeying relativistic currents. A planet slammed past from out of nowhere, distorted as if squeezed in a fist. The system seemed frozen behind them, shot through with red like an iron orrery snatched from the forge.
“Transition to Waynet achieved,” said the ship.
Later, Merlin took her down to the forward observation blister, a pressurized sphere of metasapphire that could be pushed beyond the hull like a protruding eye. The walls were opaque when they arrived, and when Merlin sealed the entry hatch, it turned the same shade of grey, merging seamlessly.
“Not to alarm you or anything,” the familiar said. “But I can’t communicate with the copy of myself from in here. That means I can’t help you if . . .”
Sora kissed Merlin, silencing the voice in her head. “I’m sorry,” she said, almost instantly. “It seemed . . .”
“Like the right thing to do?” Merlin’s smile was difficult to judge, but he did not seem displeased.
“No, not really. Probably the wrong thing, actually.”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t find you attractive, Sora. And like I said – it has been rather a long time since I had human company.” He drew himself to her, their free-floating bodies hooking together in the center of the blister, slowly turning until all sense of orientation was gone. “Of course, my reasons for rescuing you were entirely selfless. . . .”
“. . . of course. . . .”
“But I won’t deny that there was a small glimmer of hope at the back of my mind; the tiniest spark of fantasy. . . .”
They shed their clothes, untidy bundles which orbited around their coupled bodies. They began to make love, slowly at first, and then with increasing energy, as if it was only now that Sora was fully waking from the long centuries of frostwatch.
She thought of Verdin, and then hated herself for the crass biochemical predictability of her mind, the unfailing way it dredged up the wrong memories at the worst of times. What had happened back then, what had happened between them, was three thousand years
in the past, unrecorded by anything or anyone except herself. She had not even mourned him yet, not even allowed the familiar to give her that particular indulgence. She studied Merlin, looking for hints of his true age . . . and failed, utterly, to detach the part of her mind capable of the job.
“Do you want to see something glorious?” Merlin asked, later, after they had hung together wordlessly for many minutes.
“If you think you can impress me . . .”
He whispered to the ship, causing the walls to lose their opacity.
Sora looked around. By some trick of holographics, the ship itself was not visible at all from within the blister. It was just her and Merlin, floating free.
And what she saw beyond them was indeed glorious – even if some detached part of her mind knew that the view could not be completely natural, and that in some way the hues and intensities of light had been shifted to aid comprehension. The walls of the Waynet slammed past at eye wrenching speed, illuminated by the intense, doppler-shifted annihilation of dust particles, so that it seemed as if they were flying in the utmost darkness, down a tube of twinkling violet that reached toward infinity. The spacetime in which the ship drifted like a seed moved so quickly that the difference between its speed and light amounted to only one part in a hundred billion. Once a second in subjective time, the ship threaded itself through shining hoops as wide as the Waynet itself; constraining rings spaced eight light-hours apart, part of the inscrutable exotic-matter machinery that had serviced this Galaxy-spanning transit system. Ahead, all the stars in the universe crowded into an opalescent jeweled mass, hanging ahead like a congregation of bright angels. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
“It’s the only way to travel,” Merlin said.
The journey would take four days of shiptime: nineteen centuries of worldtime.
The subjective time spent in Waynet flight amounted only to twenty-three hours. But the ship had to make many transitions between Ways, and they were never closer than tens of light-minutes apart, presumably because of the nightmarish consequences that would ensue if two opposing streams of accelerated spacetime ever touched.