They had reached a balcony on the sunset side of the Palace of Eternal Dusk. He leaned over the balustrade as far as he dared, seeing how the lower levels of the Palace dropped away towards the rushing sea below. The Palace of Eternal Dusk circled Plenitude's equator once a day, travelling with the line that divided day from night. Its motion caused Plenitude's sun to hang at the same point in the sky, two-thirds of its swollen disk already consumed by the sea. Somewhere deep in the keel of rock the Palace rode lay throbbing mechanisms that both sustained the structure's flight - it had been flying for longer than anyone remembered - and generated the protective bubble that held it in a pocket of still air, despite its supersonic velocity relative to the ground.
Merlin's family had held the Palace for thirteen hundred years, after a short Dark Age on Plenitude. The family had been amongst the first to rediscover powered flight, using fragile aircraft to reach the keel. Other contenders had come, but the family had retained their treasure across forty generations, through another two Dark Ages.
Finally, however, the greater war had touched them.
A damaged Cohort swallowship had been the first to arrive, years ahead of a Husker swarm. The reality of interstellar travel was dimly remembered on Plenitude, but those first newcomers were still treated with suspicion and paranoia. Only Merlin's family had given them the benefit of the doubt . . . and even then had not fully heeded the warning when it was given. Against their ruling mother's wishes, the two brothers had allowed themselves to be taken aboard the swallowship and inducted into the ways of the Cohort. Their old names were discarded in favour of new ones, in the custom of the swallowship's crew. They learned fluency in Main.
After several months, Merlin and Gallinule had been preparing to return home as envoys. Their plan was simple enough. They would persuade their mother that Plenitude was doomed. That would not be the easiest of tasks, but their mother's cooperation was vital if anything was to be saved. It would mean establishing peace amongst the planet's various factions, where none had existed for generations. There were spaces in the swallowship's frostwatch holds for sleepers, but only a few hundred thousand, which would mean that each region must select its best. It would not be easy, but there were still years in which to do it.
'None of it will make any difference,' their mother had said. 'No one will listen to us, even if we believe everything Quail says.'
'They have to.'
'Don't you understand?' she said. 'You think of me as your mother, but to fifty million of Plenitude's inhabitants I'm a tyrant.'
'They'll understand,' Merlin said, only half-believing it himself.
But then the unthinkable had happened. A smaller element of the swarm had crept up much closer than anyone had feared, detected only when it was already within Plenitude's system. The swallowship's captain made the only decision he could, which was to break orbit immediately and run for interstellar space.
Merlin and Gallinule fought - pleaded - but Quail would not allow them to leave the ship. They told him all they wanted was to return home. If that meant dying with everyone else on Plenitude, including their mother, so be it.
Quail listened, and sympathised, and still refused them. It was not just their genes that the Cohort required, he said. Everything else about them: their stories. Their hopes and fears. The tiniest piece of knowledge they carried, considered trivial by them, might prove to be shatteringly valuable. It was many decades of shiptime since they had found another pocket of humanity. Merlin and Gallinule were simply too precious to throw away.
Even if it meant denying them the right to die with valour.
Instead, on Starthroat's long-range cameras, relayed from monitoring satellites sown around Plenitude, they watched the Palace of Eternal Dusk die, wounded by weapons it had never known before, stabbing deep into the keel on which it flew, destroying the engines that held it aloft. It came down slowly, grinding into the planetary crust, gouging a terrible scar across half of one scorched continent before it came to rest, ruined and lopsided.
And now Gallinule had made this.
'If you can do all this now . . .' Merlin mused. He left the remark hanging, knowing his brother would take the bait.
'As I said, full immersion in a year or so. Then we'll need better methods to deal with the time-lag for communications around Bright Boy. We can't even broadcast signals for fear of them being intercepted by the Huskers, which limits us to line-of-sight comms between relay nodes sprinkled around the system. Sometimes the routing will add significant delays. That's why we need another kind of simulation. If we can create semblances--'
Merlin stopped him. 'Semblances?'
'Sorry. Old term I dug from the troves. Another technique we've forgotten aboard Starthroat. We need to be able to make convincing simulacra of ourselves, with realistic responses across a range of likely stimuli. Then we can be in two places at once - or as many as we want to be. Afterwards, you merge the memories gathered by your semblances.'
Merlin thought about that. Many cultures known to the Cohort had developed the kind of technology Gallinule was referring to, so the concept was not unfamiliar to him.
'These wouldn't be conscious entities, though?'
'No; that's far down the line. Semblances would just be mimetic software: clever caricatures. Of course, they'd seem real if they were working well. Later--'
'You'd think of adding consciousness?'
Gallinule looked around warily. It was a reflex, of course - there could not possibly have been eavesdroppers in this environment he had fashioned - but it was telling all the same. 'It would be useful. If we could copy ourselves entirely into simulation - not just mimesis, but neuron-by-neuron mapping - it would make hiding from the Huskers very much easier.'
'Become disembodied programmes, you mean? Sorry, but that's a definite case of the cure being worse than the disease.'
'Eventually it won't seem anywhere near as chilling as it does now. Especially when our other options for hiding look less and less viable.'
Merlin nodded sagely. 'And you'd no doubt do all in your power to make them seem that way, wouldn't you?'
Gallinule shrugged. 'If Cinder's tunnels turn out to be the best place to hide, so be it. But it's senseless not to explore other options.' Merlin watched the way his knuckles tightened on the stone balustrade, betraying the tension he tried to keep from his voice.
'If you make an issue of this,' Merlin said carefully, 'you'd better assume I'll fight you, brother or not.'
Gallinule touched Merlin's shoulder. 'It won't come to a confrontation. By the time the options are in, the correct path will be clear to us all . . . you included.'
'The correct path's already clear to me. And it doesn't involve becoming patterns inside a machine.'
'You'd prefer suicide instead?'
'Of course not. I'm talking about something infinitely better than hiding.' He looked hard into his brother's face. 'You have more influence on the Council than I do. You could persuade them to let me examine the syrinx.'
'Why not ask Sayaca the same thing?'
'You know very well why not. Things aren't the same between us these days. If you . . . oh, what's the point?' Merlin removed Gallinule's hand from his shoulder. 'Nothing that happens here will make the slightest difference to your plans.'