She closed her eyes, giving him no answer. He nuzzled her neck. “What are you thinking?”
“The past and the future,” she whispered. “Both are so very far away. That last time I saw you—you and him—a thousand years ago. And another thousand years to Earth, even in that great beast you’ve stolen.”
“It is a great beast,” he agreed. “And I’ve named it after a great beast. I call it Dragon. And time doesn’t matter to us. So what if it takes a thousand years to reach the Hallowed Vasties? If the time drags, we sleep.”
“How peacefully can we sleep aboard a Chenzeme courser?” she asked him.
He told her, “Don’t think of it that way. It’s a hybrid ship. Its neural structure is heavily modified. It’s under my control. And I want you with me again. You. After all those years we spent together, you are part of me… and I am so hungry for human company. Don’t abandon me again.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I think that other version of me made a smart choice to stay behind.”
“No. I think she regrets her choice. Because you’re her. You’re the same. You haven’t changed. You don’t have another life, do you? No new lover, no children. All you’ve done is wait. You’ve skipped over these years, passed them in cold sleep, waiting for us to come back.”
“I needed to know,” she said defensively. “But you—you seem the same too. That’s on purpose, isn’t it? You want me to believe you’re still that same smart-ass pirate, but Urban, you can’t be. Not if you’ve grafted yourself on to that alien killing machine.”
A tremor of guilt. A shrug. A confession: “This is me. My human core. I keep this persona because I want to remember who I am and what matters. But I’m not alone. I remade myself multiple times. My Apparatchiks are highly edited, each with a different technical skill. They’re based on me, but they’re not me anymore. Some of them are insufferable and sometimes we argue among ourselves, but no mutiny so far.”
“All ghosts?”
“Yes.”
“And what is it like to be the master of an alien killing machine?”
He tapped his chest and told her the blunt truth: “For me, this version of me, it’s fucking miserable. Soul-annihilating loneliness. Out there, coasting in the void between stars, awake and aware and so far from anywhere or anything, any human thing, knowing with utter certainty that I’m alone and not even the mind of the Unknown God could find me. It’s terrifying.”
“That’s not a very persuasive argument if you’re trying to convince me to come with you.”
“I need you.”
“I don’t want to live as a ghost.”
“We don’t have to. It’s a big ship. There’s room. There are resources. We can be physical when we want it—and god, I want it. I want you. And when time becomes unbearable we can retreat into cold sleep to speed the transit, like we did before. Think about it. Please.”
“I am thinking about it,” she admitted. She stroked his arm, his cheek, considering what he’d offered. “An inverted frontier?”
“Yes. That’s how I think of it.”
“I like that.”
Curiosity was awake within her—an almost forgotten feeling. And he was right that she had no attachments, no obligations of honor. She’d spent three-quarters of a millennium asleep, waiting for some word.
She told him, “It was unbearable not knowing what had happened out there. I would have turned around and gone back after you, but I was afraid that no matter how long I looked, I would never find a sign of you. That seemed the likeliest outcome.”
“This time we’ll be together. No doubt about what happens. We’ll know.”
She nodded her tentative agreement. “I want to send a ghost to your ship, now, to verify what you’re telling me.”
“Due diligence,” he agreed. “You’ve got the address.”
She shifted her focus inward, using her atrium to create the ghost, and then she sent it on its way. If this turned out to be a trap, the ghost could dissolve itself. If it didn’t return, she would know.
“It’s a long round trip,” he warned her.
“I can wait.”
“I want you to go over the library files too,” he said. “Make sure they’re legitimate, consistent, human.”
“I’ve got a DI working on it,” she assured him.
He nodded shortly, then confessed, “I’ve sequestered some of the data. Nothing critical. Just some of the raw details. Things too personal to share in full—mostly at the end. That cache is open to you, but no one else.”
“All right.” Her voice, suddenly hoarse. She feared what she might find when she accessed that privileged data. It might be enough for her—it might be best—to know in only a general way what had happened.
She allowed herself one question: “We lost him in the end, didn’t we?”
“Yes.”
A soft sigh. She had always known it.
“Nineteen hours,” Urban warned, “before we lose data coherence.”
“Okay.”
Time enough. If he was lying, if this was subterfuge, if his apparent sincerity was a false front for a Chenzeme weapon, the history he carried would surely reveal it.
He must have guessed her thoughts, because he looked at her with that pirate half-smile of his, so familiar, taunting her away from melancholy, and he asked, “You still don’t trust me, do you?”
She replied very seriously, “In the madness of these hours I don’t trust myself.”
FIRST
You are confused, sure that you once were far more. Your mind feels as if it’s been rolled and crushed in a landslide. You wander through wreckage: torn metal arteries, broken white ceramic housings, heavy glass plates marked with impact scars, and everywhere thin crystalline sheets, shattered and jumbled, oozing fluids, your thoughts and memories spilled out across the floor. So much unrecoverable.
You stoop to pick up a crystal fragment. With this action, you realize you have somehow contrived to reconstruct a physical avatar. You are here. You have hands. You drop the crystal and hold up your hands for your eyes to see. Large, masculine hands. You curl your hands into fists. A familiar gesture.
You look about, smell the air. There is air. Good. System integrity not entirely demolished. Lingering stink of burnt toxins. White light from a surviving ceiling panel. Most have fallen.
So quiet here.
Now that you are still, you can hear the fluids move in your body. You can’t hear a heartbeat—but then you remember: You’re not human anymore. This avatar you wear looks human, but you redesigned it, gave it thousands of little hearts to keep the fluids circulating. No longer that one heart muscle vulnerable to execution.
She tried to execute you.
The memory of that affront ambushes you.
She tried to execute me.
The details are hazy. Why she did it, how, that is lost to you in this moment. Perhaps you’ll find the memory somewhere in the shattered strata of your mind but this much you know: She tried to execute you and—fear bubbles up from the dark depths of this avatar’s ancestral instinct as you realize the truth—she has in some sense succeeded. You are broken. You will never again be what you were.
What was I?
Something other than this. The answer—you know though you don’t know how you know—was once contained within the weeping crystalline fragments. Can it be recovered? It has to be.
You sniff the air again. The scent of your avatar lingers in the stillness. No one else about. There has never been anyone else here. You would not allow such a security vulnerability. Another fact that you know without knowing how you know.