Fear flushed through the architecture of his ghost, defying its limited capacity for emotion. A dangerous fear because on the high bridge his emotions and his intentions were shared across a hundred thousand connections with Dragon’s vast field of philosopher cells.
Fear among the cells implied an enemy unexpectedly close at hand. Casual debate gave way to immediate consensus:
<attack!>
Energy flowed to the gamma-ray gun. It began to deploy, while the Near Vicinity was re-scanned for a target. The closest object out there was the outrider, Khonsu.
Urban set his will against the consensus to attack—
– hold –
– calm –
—issuing this command simultaneously from his hundred thousand connections, a coordinated response that flooded the field, forcing a new consensus.
At the same time, he edited his ghost, numbing its capacity to feel fear, tension, anger, boredom. Creating the personality he thought of as the Sentinel, not really a personality at all.
A submind brought the memory of this incident to his ghost in the library. Emotions too dangerous to be experienced on the high bridge now became his. He reacted by abandoning the squabbling discussion still going on between Vytet and the Bio-mechanic. He withdrew into a different reality, a private space within the library, where he set his will against the turmoil of these emotions:
– hold –
– calm –
He had wanted Clemantine to open the cache, he’d wanted her to understand what had happened, but he feared her judgment. He feared she’d hate him for what he’d done.
I couldn’t save him!
Things had gone too far. He’d had to end it. He’d had no choice—but a last accusation still echoed in his mind: You are the courser now.
Bitter truth.
He had only just joined himself to the courser, his control over it tenuous but real when he chose to use Dragon’s gun for the first time, destroying what he loved and feared.
Stop! he told himself. Don’t go back there.
That era was over and he would not revisit it. He pushed the memories away and waited for her judgment to fall.
Subminds shunted between the library and the high bridge, syncing thoughts between the dual versions of himself—the one anxious and regretful, the other artificially calm. He kept watch over the stars of the Near Vicinity as hours slipped past. Enough hours to allow her to go through everything the cache contained, his own memories part of it.
Surely she would contact him soon? Say something. He needed her to say something. Anything?
Nothing.
She didn’t stir from her chamber. His fear grew. He was afraid of what she would do. Afraid she would hide herself away in cold sleep, depriving him of any chance to win her forgiveness.
He checked the ship’s log, assured himself she had not retreated into cold sleep yet.
Without thinking too hard about whether or not it was a good idea, he messaged her:
*Hey.
No answer. Not for ominous seconds. Then finally, a single husky syllable: *Hey.
Enough to give him hope. *Are we okay? he asked her.
*Heh, she scoffed. *You were monitoring the cache?
*Yes, he admitted. He held his breath, waiting for her to say something more. Waiting. More seconds ticking past. Too many of them. When she finally did speak, her voice was hoarse, syllables catching in her throat:
*You want to know how I feel?
He didn’t answer. She knew the answer.
She said:
*I don’t blame you for it. That’s what you want to hear, right? And it’s true. You did what you had to do. You did what I hope I would have done.
Another long pause—his gratitude made this one easier to endure—before she added, *I didn’t think you had it in you.
She might have meant that as an insult or a compliment, he didn’t care. He only wanted to know, *Are we okay?
*We will be, she assured him. *Now go. I need to grieve.
Chapter
10
Kona ghosted in the library, afloat within a virtual space that showed him the cosmos outside, as if the ship’s substance had all gone transparent, leaving him adrift in the void, surrounded by two hundred billion stars and the dark streamers of molecular clouds that would someday forge more suns, more worlds, more potential for life.
They were a year out from Deception Well.
Looking back—looking swan—the brilliant beacon of faraway Alpha Cygni was still easy to pick out, but he could no longer distinguish Kheth, the Well’s sun, from the scattered stars beyond it. He could ask a Dull Intelligence to find Kheth for him, to draw a circle around it or artificially increase its apparent magnitude, but on his own, he’d lost track of it.
Back there somewhere lay his past. Centuries of joy and grief, terror and hope, struggle and disappointment—and quiet triumph because his people had survived. They would survive, Kona was confident of that, but the burden wasn’t his anymore and with every passing day, he felt the weight of those years slowly lifting. As the distance separating him from Deception Well accumulated, he felt himself renewed, reinvigorated, gifted with new purpose.
He turned to look ahead. He was no astronomer, but he knew enough to pick out some of the closer stars of the Hallowed Vasties. There was Ryo, and Tanjiri, Quin-ken, Bengali. Somewhere farther, the Sun.
Did Earth still exist? Did it still rotate to a twenty-four hour day? Still revolve in a three hundred sixty-five day year? Did it still harbor some vestige of the life that had arisen there, miraculous result of a long chain of incredibly unlikely circumstances?
Up until a year ago, he had never even entertained the thought that he might someday find out. Now, he dared to imagine that in some future century he might voyage there, come to see it for himself. If so, he would come there in stages, with many stops along the way, passing the intervals between worlds primarily in cold sleep.
With the busy first year over, and the planning and design phase done, he wanted to hurry on.
He closed the virtual bubble. His ghost migrated back to his atrium, melding with his core persona, reaffirming his determination to leap forward in time. His skills were people skills. His real work would start when the ship’s company was resurrected.
Now, alone in his chamber, he generated a new ghost and sent it to the archive. From there it would waken at intervals to review the progress of the ship and the status of those aboard, before returning to stasis. He also instructed a Dull Intelligence to keep watch, charging it to alert his ghost if ever there was an event, anything out of the ordinary.
After his ghost was away, he summoned a cold-sleep cocoon, closing his eyes as the cocoon’s transparent mucilaginous tissue enshrouded him.
He looked forward to the future, and he’d already said his goodbyes.
Late afternoon in the forest room:
The weather algorithm had summoned gray clouds into the projected sky beyond the pergola. Clemantine appreciated the muted light as she floated in tandem with a curved screen displaying the tabular genetic data of an ornamental descendant of an ancient line of maple trees. Genetic sculpting was an art form she enjoyed, modifying not just the appearance of plants, but their life cycle as well, in this case seeking a perfect balance of autumn leaf coloration. Through her atrium, she ordered the screen to refresh, to display an accelerated simulation of the tiny tree’s seasonal life cycle.