The voice did not immediately reply.
One of the screens in the Command Centre showed a live address from the President of Sakhra, appealing for calm. The irony was not lost on Swann. Apart from the disturbing but still largely isolated incidents shown on various other screens, calm was what Sakhra still had. Things were falling apart, but calmly. Since the Charles Manson’s departure from Sakhra—if She ever came here, would She cause as much chaos?—the disturbances had increased, but they were still apparently unconnected, and hard to read. The humans on Sakhra seemed to share the Sakhrans’ sense of separation, of having turned away from each other. Election turnouts were small. When Swann gave interviews, which he had done frequently in the last few days, he got ten times the President’s coverage.
Or maybe these events were the tip of a larger pattern, as were the events in the Gulf with Foord and Her. Maybe—Swann immediately regretted this thought, because its afterecho wouldn’t go away—maybe they weren’t just hard to read, but too big to read.
“No, not two opponents,” said the voice, eventually.
“What do you mean?”
“Not two opponents, Director. Foord is still attacking Her.”
“Attacking?”
“She’s been damaged: nobody has ever done that before. She’s fighting back, so the Charles Manson is still attacking Her. We don’t fully understand what She’s doing, but She’s fighting back.”
“You don’t know, do you?”
“I told you, Foord has killed communications with us.”
“But you have your devices. Do you or don’t you know what’s happening in the Gulf?”
“We don’t know. He seems almost like Her.”
“I met him here, remember. And dealt with him over Copeland. He was always like Her.”
“But we know he’s damaged Her, Director, and we know he’s trying to finish Her. We can’t read Her responses. But we don’t interpret it as any joining of forces.”
“You’ve contradicted yourself at least three times, but let that pass. We can agree that he’s damaged Her, and that nobody else has done that.” Despite what he felt for Foord, he remembered the genuine sense of wonder he’d had on hearing that. “So why isn’t anyone helping him? Does all of Horus Fleet have to remain around Sakhra?”
“Director Swann, believe me. If Foord fails, you’ll need the entire Fleet.”
“Not even the Charles Manson could take on the entire Fleet. Are you saying She can?”
“If Foord fails, She’ll come for Sakhra. It may be over-provision, but it’s better that Sakhra’s defended with the whole Fleet.”
One advantage of the microphone was the amount of sceptical expressions Swann could safely direct at it. Not even the voice seemed to believe that last answer.
Swann let the silence grow long enough to become uncomfortable. “If,” he said, “they’re so closely matched that one Outsider can damage Her, how many would it take to be sure of defeating Her?”
“What do you mean by that, Director Swann? Specifically?”
“One Outsider’s damaged Her. Two or three more could finish Her. Send us two or three more. Is that specific enough?”
“No. Outsiders don’t fight in teams, they fight alone. And if She defeats Foord and comes to Sakhra, the Commonwealth will need all of them for what happens next.”
7
Foord stood in the mouth of the midsection crater and looked across the gap, blinking, at his ship.
He felt cold. He held his hand in front of his face and flexed his fingers. There were veins and tendons and nails—immaculate nails—but the flesh tones were gradations of grey and silver. He felt cold, then it occurred to him that he was standing open to space and didn’t have a suit. He was standing—gravity worked here—and breathing; he took in what felt like air through his open mouth, and his chest rose and fell. I’m a construct, he told himself, a construct of liquid silver made by whatever lives in this ship, but I’m also me, with all my memories and motives. I’ve just woken to life, but I remember all my life leading up to this. Why didn’t they just make something that looked like me? Why did they make me like this, full of everything I am? It seems like overengineering.
He looked down from his raised hand, along his arm, to the rest of his body. Large, heavily muscled; toned and tidy; everything I’ve woken up to, every day, over there on the Charles Manson. How did they know it all? And why have they put me here? He felt cold.
Outside the mouth of the crater, between him and his ship, floated nearly three hundred dark gunmetal spiders. They’d been about to pour into this crater, this open wound we made in Her side. They’d been about to enter Her and attack Her, like She had sent Hers to attack us, but when this cold light filled the crater I told Cyr to hold them back. (Did he remember that, or just assume it? He didn’t know.) And behind him, in the crater’s deepest recesses—behind the swirling darkness which hid those recesses from the Charles Manson—were the giant coils and festoons of The Rope, the thing She’d made by joining pieces of them and Her, and had then taken into Herself.
He felt cold. Not because he was standing open to space—that was a cold he’d never have had time to feel, he’d have died from it instantly, if he’d been alive. The cold was inside him. He knew he couldn’t possibly be alive, but he avoided the temptation of trying to define Alive. I have motives and memories and sensory inputs and outputs and a sense of myself, just like me in my ship over there. Maybe more so. I’m almost more than me. I must be looking across from the Bridge and seeing me here, but I can’t look back and see myself over there because I’m hidden in the Bridge and I don’t have a screen that gives me magnifications of things moments before I ask for them. The grammar doesn’t work, it’s too clumsy. Words don’t work. I’m here in the crater and I’m over there sixteen hundred feet away in my ship. I can’t call the Foord over there Him, it’s Me.
Self-referential, like a book reading a book. Same software, different hardware. The software is all my memories and motives, everything I am, but I’m made of liquid silver which remains solid while it keeps my shape. I’m not organic—no, don’t go there either, don’t try defining that. I’ve been made.
I grew out of a pool of silver on a floor somewhere behind me on this ship. I’ve been made by the people who live in this ship. (Yes, People. Who Live.) I know them as Them and People, not Her or It, because there’s more than one and they interact socially, but I don’t know what they look like or why they made me or why their ship has done these things. I know less about them than a hammer knows about the owner of the hand holding it—less than an atom in the handle of the hammer—but they made me like this, and put me here, for a reason.
And that’s what it is, he thought, looking out at the spiders floating between him and his ship. They were motionless, dark against the silver of the Charles Manson. They floated in a narrow compressed formation so that he only saw the front five or six bodies but saw hundreds of limbs, some broken, sprouting from those behind, like figures of Kali. He knew he would try to stop them when they entered the crater. He neither wanted to nor was aware of being compelled to; it was just how he was made. It was inevitable, like breathing, though he stood open to space and wasn’t alive.