Gridlinked

'Alive and a machine,' said Cormac. 'There were AG readings from it, and the readings of metals, and some pretty strange radiations. It's speculated that its bones were some form of bubble metal, or that it supported itself with AG. No one got close enough to find out.'

'Tell me more,' said Chaline, her fatigue forgotten.

Cormac snorted and shook his head. 'It starts with the scream, doesn't it?' he said, then he looked up at the screen. 'Hubris, you might as well record this. I don't want to have to tell it again.' He turned his attention back to Chaline. 'They say you scream for a fraction of a second when you're transmitted by runcible. I didn't arrive on Aster Colora screaming. I arrived reciting a nonsense poem. I should think you know it. Don't we all?'

And Cormac remembered, and he told her.

(Solstan 2407)

A scream, silent in underspace: a flicker of existence between the shadows of stars. It is known, the scream, but quince never remember. For Cormac there was merely a flash of black and red, a Dante glimpse, and he was completing his diought far from where he began it.—on mince and slices of quince, which they ate with a runcible spoon. Is that right?

Times change: terms change, and it was an ancient nonsense rhyme. He was well aware of that as he fought to overcome the disorientation of mitter-lag.

And the runcible spoon flicks them across the galaxy… Hah! Myths rewritten. I'm a knight in shining armour only my hardware's on the inside.

Caught in the flaw of a jewel Cormac considered dragons. Ten seconds and 400 light-years later his mind caught up with his body. The scream was lost in a twilight place. Echoes. He stepped from the shimmer of the cusp. Down the steps from the pedestal, across the black-glass floor, then out of the containment sphere.

'Ian Cormac?'

'Yes.'

The sky was metallic red, the land pink rock with black striations. The horizon was more tightly curved than that viewed from the balcony of his 200th-floor apartment in New York. You noticed things like that, just as you noticed other immediacies. He sneezed, then breathed deeply. The air tasted of salt, and silica dust coated his tongue. After a moment of deliberation he turned his attention to the speaker.

'I am Maria,' said the girl, whose hair was red with no white light to show him different. Cormac held out his hand to silence her as his breath billowed in the chill air like lung-blood. He continued to survey the wasteland.

He gestured back at the runcible.

'Only one. Quince and light cargo. Few people come here,' he observed.

'Yes, Dragon set a limit of twenty thousand visitors a year.'

'Solstan year?'

'No… Colora,' she said, annoyed.

Cormac stared at her. 'I require assistance, not impatience,' he said, and waited.

'Yes, Ambassador,' she said grudgingly, rubbing her hand on a leather-sheathed hip. Cormac accessed his link and immediately had a report up in his visual cortex. Rather than download it into his memory, he speed-read it while he studied his surroundings.

Maria Convala. Born on Aster Colora 2376 solstan, exobiologist attached to the Earth Central study team, ambitious, has connections with the Separatist movement, is rumoured to have been involved in the third Jovian putsch…

He smiled bleakly to himself and thought about his other operation in this sector. Earth Central had only chosen him to come here because he knew the systems, the people, those most likely to cause trouble. Even now the agents he was running were uncovering Separatist cell after cell in that razor-walk of undercover work. As soon as the first cover was blown, the whole investigation would collapse, but a huge proportion of the Separatist network would fall with it. Of course, what was going on here was different - wasn't it? Files blinked out and dropped away as he dismissed them as irrelevant. He allowed the smile to fade from his face and slid his attention to the iron slug of an AGC that had been left on hover nearby. He noted the rust streaks, and the plates welded to its underside. It was old. Such was always the way this far from Earth; things broke down, wore out, were infrequently replaced. He should consider himself lucky they had AGCs here at all. Was that why this sector was a hotbed of Separatism? Not enough luxuries?

'Shall we go?' he said, after a pause.

As they slid above the desolation, Cormac accessed information more relevant to his task. There was no life here but for the human colony, the sentient Dragon and the insentient Monitor (the latter two leviathans), nor had there been. There were no fossils, chalk deposits, or life-based hydrocarbons - nothing. Billions had been expended in deep-coring projects, sifting machines and lengthy geochemical studies. The questions remained: where was the ecology from which Dragon and Monitor had evolved? Was it on Aster Colora?

Dragon had immediately communicated with those first to arrive through the seed-ship runcible, and had been in continuous communication with the colony ever since, yet little had been learnt about it. Dragon relished oracular pronouncements and Delphic replies.

'Has Dragon given reasons for its request?'

'It was more of a demand than a request.'

'Clarify that.'

With her hand resting on the guide-ball of the AGC, Maria glanced at him. 'We have always been here on sufferance. It said, "Send me an ambassador"; there was no request.'

Cormac noted the bitterness. As a Separatist, he realized, this put her in an intolerable position. How could she campaign for political independence while Aster Colora could not rise above colony status? He wondered just how deeply in she was and how far she was prepared to go. He didn't want to have to kill her.

The red land flowed under the rock of the AGC until at length Cartis, like a spreading fungus, came into view. Like any tourist, Cormac booked into the metrotel. In his room he slumped on his bed and accessed Dragon/ human dialogue. Human politics were irrelevant in this case which, for Cormac, was a novelty.

'You continue to evade our questions concerning yourself,' asked a man only just holding on to his temper.

'Yes, this is true,' came the indifferent reply.

'Yet for years you have had access to our information systems. You know our history, the level of our technology… You perhaps know more about the human race than any single member of it. Why will you not tell us about yourself? Surely, this is little to ask?'

'You are correct: I know more about you people than any single member of your kind.'

'You have not answered my question.'

'Yes, I have.'

'I do not understand.'

'A very human trait.'

'Please explain.'

'The runcible has been developed to the stage where it is near perfect in function. Humankind can now step from star system to star system with ease. On Earth, contra-terrene power is about to be introduced. In the system of Cassius the first Dyson sphere is under construction. The matter for this project came from a planet of Jovian size, demolished by a contra-terrene missile.'

'Do you fear us?'

'Should I?'

'Many assume that this is the reason for your reticence.'

'How old are you, Darson?'

'One hundred and seventy, solstan.'

'It is likely that you will live to be over eight hundred years old and then only to the of ennui.'

'Perhaps. How old are you?'

'Do you represent your race, Darson?'

'In the sense—'

'No, you do not represent your race. I cannot sit in judgment on you. Send me an ambassador.'

After the dialogue had ceased, Cormac opened his eyes and scratched at his head. He was tired; he had, after all, travelled a long way. He got off the bed and shed the clothes he had been wearing only a few hours earlier, personal time, in New York, and wondered, as always with cold humour, what the morning might bring. Of course he did not know whether it was day or night here, but such things he had for quite some time dismissed as irrelevant. He lived by personal time. It was the only way to stay sane.