“Right,” I said. “Here it comes.”
There was a pause, though not a long one. Then Singer said, “Haimey, you need to look at this.”
I looked. And then we called Connla over, and went to where Cheeirilaq was nesting, and we all looked.
When Cheeirilaq had come over just a few hours before on the launch, under painstakingly gentle acceleration, Connla had been off doing important Connla things—probably flirting (or more than flirting) with one or all three of the cute human constables. Cheeirilaq had made itself at home, however, commandeering one corner of the observation deck in order to spin a web in.
I hadn’t even been aware that its species spun webs. Seriously, is there anything in the galaxy as terrifying as an adult Rashaqin?
We had spent the intervening time, me and the giant bug, hanging out and gossiping. Catching up. I was grateful once again to have regained access to senso; running conversations with systers through a translator would be a pain in various dorsal portions of the torso.
It was Cheeirilaq who broke the silence, stridulating, Friend Haimey, what do you think this means?
“Well,” I said dubiously. “It’s a lot of words.”
It was, indeed, a lot of words. I’m not sure what I had expected to get out of a book code, other than a lot of words. But I supposed I had expected them to make sense.
I was hoping that the archaic book code that Singer had worked out for me would, translated, tell me how to gain access to…
Well, whatever would be there when we got there.
What I had was, to all intents and purposes, a series of nouns. Nouns, verbs, and a few other parts of speech. Words that might have been useful, if I had any idea whatsoever of the context to which they applied.
They were:
Eschaton Artifact Water Help Teacher Thinker Learn Eat Go Take Find Destroy Use Song Mind Star Travel Need Plinth Categorical Library Memory Sing Talk Consciousness Polyhedron Beyond Before Computers Expanding Dimensions Alive Consumed Abyss Death.
It was, I had to admit, a disappointing list. And an unsettling one. But apparently one that was worth quite a bit to the Freeporters. So I assumed it would have meant something to them. Maybe there was another layer of code underneath, and each of the words was the key to another piece of information. Maybe we had the wrong book, or the wrong numbers, or there had never been a code at all and the whole thing had been a miscommunication—or disinformation that got out of hand.
Maybe I just didn’t have the context to make sense of the thing, and it would have meant something to Farweather. Something important.
If so, I was glad she didn’t have it. The Eschaton Artifact, if that was what the book code was discussing—well, that didn’t sound dangerous at all.
Or maybe it was a set of instructions that I just didn’t have the context to parse. I admit, Consumed Abyss Death was not reassuring.
The best and most ironic part was that Farweather had put so much effort into getting her hands on me, or on the book, and between the potentially dubious scholarship of my clademothers—if Farweather could be believed, which of course she couldn’t—or whomever had translated the original source, and the limitations of a book code, and the questions I had about whether we even had the right key, I wasn’t sure it had been worth it. The map was the most important bit, and she seemed to have known where to go all along.
Of course, if she actually did mean what she’d said about wanting to use the unfiltered contents of my memories as blackmail fodder, well. That did give her another reason to want me. And another reason for me to be glad she didn’t have me.
Singer had also worked out a projected flight plan for the Prize, and he wasn’t happy with it. He projected it for the three of us meat-types, noting that it led off into intergalactic space. Not that we were particularly surprised by that. We were discussing the possibilities when Singer broke in to say, “I am unwilling to commit to these projections.”
So I said, “What do you mean?”
“We have no record of any Freeport activity in this region. Standard models would suggest that there is very little likelihood of a colony here, and small reason for an outpost.”
I stared up at the ceiling, since we had one for a change and all. I wondered if it would annoy me less when he made pronouncements like this if he were wrong occasionally. “You’re kidding me. Anyway, what if she was bringing us to the”—I winced, but there it was in the book code—“the Eschaton Artifact?”
Eschaton is an old religious word meaning, more or less, “the final event that God has lined up for the universe.” It was used to describe the crisis in pre-white-space history that sent the first slower-than-light ships scrabbling on a one-way trip to the stars, because there were a lot of religious cultists in those diar. Of course, I didn’t think whatever this was could have had anything to do with Terra’s historic Eschaton, being most of the way across a rather large galaxy. And since a book code is limited to words actually in the book in question, Eschaton might just have been the closest thing Niyara could find to whatever the original, presumably alien, text had indicated.
But anything advertising itself as an artifact relating to the final event in a Grand Plan made me justifiably nervous. You wouldn’t just walk up and pinch the Ragnarok Thingummy.
Well, Farweather probably would. And she was the one who had known how to find it, unless the Prize was just taking us there automatically. What she hadn’t had, though, was the description of the object at the other end. That was what Niyara had given me, or at least given me the key to.
That ridiculous antique printed book.
There just aren’t any planets out here, Cheeirilaq said.
“In that case why did Farweather drag me halfway to Andromeda? Anyway, who says it has to be a planet?”
“It seems likely to me that there’s a well-hidden outpost out here somewhere. If I were a pirate and I were going to mass forces, I’d want to do it off the beaten track. The resources to get here are a problem, but once you’re here you’re pretty safe.” Connla, taking the strategic view.
“That’s a good idea,” I told Connla. “But I think that’s not where we’re going.”
The giant insect stridulated, I was wondering if you had an idea about what the destination might be.
It cocked its head at me, segmented antennae questing forward. For a moment, it reminded me of Halbnovalk and their eyestalks, but the antennae were part of a whole different sort of sensory system, and I realized I couldn’t even probably visualize what the information they provided felt like. The Goodlaw, conversely, would probably have the same problems with my simple, noncompound eyes… and my ability to sense the contours of space-time, come to think of it.
I grinned. The Goodlaw probably would not know what grinning meant, and generally savvy humans were significantly habituated not to show our teeth around systers, as so many of them were likely to interpret it as a threat display. But I just couldn’t help it—the joy, the response, was so intense that my cheek muscles contracted utterly involuntarily.
I couldn’t resist. “We’re following a pirate map to a treasure!” I said.
Cheeirilaq didn’t seem in the least nonplussed by my gratuitous display of natural weaponry (not, admittedly, that my blunt little nippers were likely to register as anything but innocuous by the standards of a Rashaqin whose forelimbs were two meters long and murderously barbed). It simply paused, and then quite sensibly asked, What sort of a treasure?