Do that, he thought, and we're halfway to being Husker ourselves.
What could he do to save himself, if saving the rest of them was out of the question? He thought of stealing the syrinx. He had not learned enough to use it safely yet, but he knew he was not far from being able to do so. But it was tightly guarded, under permanent Council scrutiny. He had asked Gallinule and Sayaca to apply persuasion to the others, but while they might have had the necessary influence, they had not acceded to his wishes.
And now Sayaca was back from Cinder, bearing tidings. She had convened a meeting again, but this time nobody was going to steal her thunder.
Especially as she had brought someone with her.
It was the semblance of a woman: a female of uncertain age but from approximately the same genetic background as everyone present. That was nothing to be counted on; since the Flourishing there had been many splinters of humanity, many of which seemed monstrously strange to those who had remained loyal to the old phenotype. But had this woman changed her clothes, make-up and hairstyle, she could have walked amongst them without attracting a second glance. Except perhaps for her beauty: something indefinably serene in her face and bearing that seemed almost supernatural.
Her expression, before she began speaking, was one of complete calm.
'My name is Halvorsen,' she said. 'It's an old name, archaic even in my own time . . . I have no idea how it will sound to your ears, or if you can even understand a word of what I'm saying. We will record versions of this message in over a thousand languages, all that we hold in our current linguistics database, in the hope that some distant traveller will recognise something, anything, of use.'
Merlin raised a hand. 'Stop . . . stop her. Can you do that?'
Sayaca nodded, causing Halvorsen to freeze, mouth open.
'What is she?' Merlin said.
'Just a recording. We triggered her when we arrived in the chamber. It wasn't hard to translate her. We already knew that the Diggers' language would later evolve into Main, so it was just a question of hoping that one of the recordings would be in a tongue that was also in our records.'
'And?'
'Well, none of her messages were in languages we knew moderately well. But three were in languages for which we had fragments, so we were able to patch together this version using all three threads. There are still a few holes, of course, but I don't think we'll miss anything critical.'
'You'd better hope not. Well, let her - whoever she is - continue.'
Halvorsen became animated again. 'Let me say something about my past,' she said. 'It may help you establish the time frame in which this recording was made. My ancestors came from Earth. So did yours - if you are at all human - but in my case I even met someone who had been born there, although it was one of her oldest memories, something as faint and tiny as an image seen through the wrong end of a telescope. She remembered a time before the Flourishing, before the great migrations into the Orion Arm. We rode swallowships for ten thousand years, cleaving close to light-speed. Then came wars. Awful wars. We hid for another ten thousand years, until our part of the galaxy was quiet again. We watched many cultures rise and fall, learning what we could from them; trading with those who seemed the least hostile. Then the Waymakers came, extending their transit network into our region of space. They were like gods to us as well, although we stole some of their miracles and fashioned them to our own uses. After thousands of years of careful study we learned how to make syrinxes and to use the Waynet.' She paused. 'We had a name for ourselves too: the Watchers.'
Halvorsen's story continued. She told them how a virus had propagated through their fleets, subtly corrupting their most ancient data heirlooms. By the time the damage was discovered, all their starmaps had been rendered useless. They no longer knew where Earth was. At first, the loss seemed of minimal importance, but as time passed, and they came into contact with more and more cultures, it became clear that the Watchers' records had probably been the last to survive uncorrupted.
'That was when she died, the oldest of us. I think until then she had always clung to some hope that we would return to Earth. When she knew it could never happen, she saw no reason to continue living.'
Then they entered a long Dark Age. The Waymakers had gone; now, unpoliced, terrors were roaming the galaxy. Marauders sought the technological wisdom that the Watchers had acquired over slow millennia. The Watchers fled, pursued across the light-years in much the same manner as the Cohort now found itself, hounded from star to star. Like the Cohort too, they found Bright Boy. They were exploring it, trying to understand the system's anomalies; hoping that the understanding would bring new power over their enemies. They had excavated the tunnel system into Cinder and created the machines that lined the terminal chamber. They too had detected signals from the shadow universe, although the contents of the messages proved much harder to decode.
'They were alien,' Halvorsen said. 'Truly alien: automated transmissions left behind half a billion years earlier by a group of creatures who had crossed over into the shadow universe. They had been fleeing the fire that was about to be unleashed by the merger of a pair of binary neutron stars only a few hundred light-years away. They left instructions on how to join them. We learned how to generate the same kinds of high-frequency gravitational waves that they were using to signal us. Then we learned how to encode ourselves into those wave packets so that we could send biological information between universes. Although the aliens were long gone, they left behind machines to tend to us and to take care of our needs once we were reassembled on the other side.'
'But the Marauders are long gone,' Merlin said. 'Our oldest records barely mention them. Why didn't Halvorsen and her people return here?'
'There was no need,' Sayaca said. 'We tend to think of the shadow universe as a cold, ghostly place, but once you're mapped into it, it looks much like our own universe - the sky dotted with bright suns, warm worlds orbiting them. Theirs for the taking, in fact. Halvorsen's people had been late-players in a galaxy already carved up by thousands of earlier factions. But the shadow universe was virgin territory. They no longer had to skulk around higher powers, or hide from outlaw clades. There was no one else there.'
'Except the aliens . . . the--' Merlin blinked. 'What did she call them?'
Sayaca paused before answering. 'She didn't. But their name for them was the . . .' Again, a moment's hesitation. 'The Shadow Puppets. And they were long gone. They'd left behind machines to assist any future cultures who wanted to make the crossing, but there was no sign of them now. Maybe they moved away to settle some remote part of the shadow galaxy, or maybe they returned to our universe when the threat from the merger event had passed.'
'Halvorsen's people trusted these creatures?'
'What choice did they have? Not much more than us. They were in as much danger from the Marauders as we are from the Huskers.'
It was Halvorsen who continued the story. 'So we crossed over. We expanded massively; extended a human presence around a dozen nearby systems on the other side. Star travel's difficult because there's no Waynet, but the social templates we acquired during the time before the Marauders have served us well. We've been at peace for one thousand years at the time of this message's recording. Many more thousands of years are likely to have passed before it reaches you. If we attempted to communicate with you gravitationally, then you can be sure that we're still alive. By then we will have studied you via the automated systems we left running in Cinder. They will have told us that you are essentially peaceable; that we are ready to welcome you.'