Gavriela smiled. It was not just Ingrid, it was both of them: speaking in the old language brought the old habits of courtesy. The Inuit might not in truth have thirty words for snow – Schade, such a pity – but Whorf and Sapir were surely correct in pinpointing the constraints of language on intellectual concepts, witness Pirsig’s borrowing from Japanese to come up with—
‘Gabrielle?’
Natürlich. Of course.
‘I need to make a phone call.’ She steered her wheelchair out into the hallway. ‘Could you fetch the phone book, please?’
Ingrid pulled it out of the occasional-table drawer.
‘Let me find it for you. Whose number do you require?’
Gavriela looked up at the old grandfather clock. Ten to nine. Edmund Stafford, who as a young man had brought her books to read in Oxford while she was largely housebound after Carl’s birth, still went in to work every day, despite his emeritus status.
‘The Computing Laboratory at Oxford,’ Gavriela said. ‘It’s written as Comlab in the book.’
‘Also gut,’ said Ingrid, flicking through pages. Then she went to the phone, dialled the number for Gavriela, and held out the handset.
‘Danke sehr, Ingrid.’
Edmund had known Turing before the war. If anyone had a notion of how to transmit electronic runes into the future, he was the man.
She smiled, glad that life still offered interesting challenges.
FORTY-EIGHT
MU-SPACE, 2607 AD (REALSPACE-EQUIVALENT)
It might be infinitely long, but Borges Boulevard appeared to be packed with revellers. The Battle of Mandelbrot Nebula had ended the Chaos Conflict in one sudden phase transition to peace, at least for now, and that was worth celebrating.
Meanwhile, Roger and Corinne knew, the Admiralty Council members were engaged in a series of secret planning sessions, as if the current festival meant nothing. The reason was simple: direct war against the renegades was inevitable at some point, but it might not be for decades yet, even centuries. The urgent administrative question was whether to maintain a war-ready fleet, using the command structure they currently possessed, or to stand down the combat squadrons and revert to a normal mode of existence.
Of the most senior officers, only Dirk McNamara, war leader extraordinaire, was required to leave those Admiralty sessions in order to appear in public. Every population needs a figurehead as a focus of communal triumph, even among Pilots.
‘We’re still primates.’ Roger held a goblet of something fluorescent that fizzed and popped like fireworks. ‘When it boils down to it.’
‘Damn,’ said Corinne, leaning against him. ‘You mean like primitive emotions overruling logic, kind of thing.’
A thousand Pilots were jumping in time to pounding music on the stretch of boulevard before them.
‘Doomed to enjoy stuff like wild, uncontrollable sex,’ Corinne went on, sliding her hand down Roger’s abdomen, while the pandemonium of celebration continued. ‘How awful, that we just can’t help ourselves.’
‘Bloody hell, Corinne.’
‘Simply tragic.’
‘People can see—’
‘Jealousy’ – she licked his ear – ‘won’t help them.’
‘Ayee ah . . . Probably not.’
Kissing her deeply, he tumbled them both through a fast-path rotation into an isolated pocket of reality, a slowtime layer with respect to mean-geodesic, which meant they could take for ever and still be back in moments. And afterwards they were, back in the victory festival, in the midst of celebration, satisfied and exhausted.
Perhaps a few among the crowd noticed their reappearance and grinned for a moment.
Roger kissed Corinne softly. ‘You’re pretty wonderful.’
‘Likewise.’ She tapped her turing, and frowned at a her-eyes-only display. ‘Listen, we’ve been committed to non-commitment, or something like that, since Tangleknot. Do you think we could ever—?’
Scarlet flashing light overlaid Borges Boulevard and the dancing crowds, and for two or three seconds it appeared to be part of the triumphal pageant, but then the low throbbing of alarm tocsins caused the music to die away. For those who could hear, there was the voice of Labyrinth itself, more urgent than ever before.
=An invasion fleet approaches.=
How many thousands of Pilots exchanged stunned looks in that moment? How many cursed the trickery of Zajinets, those alien betrayers that should have been fought against since the first contact with Earth, before they gained a foothold in the human dominions . . .?
=They are Pilots. Renegades led by Boris Schenck.=
Corinne shut down her private display.
‘There can’t be more than two hundred of them,’ she said. ‘If Schenck thought our fleet would still be occupied with the Zajinets, he’s going to have one hell of a—’
=Half a million ships at least. And there may be many more.=
Schenck was no fool, then.
Roger took Corinne’s hands in his.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘I’m not ready.’
Had he realised this was farewell, he would have chosen different words. But he was summoning a dangerous rotation, and as he released her hands and looked into her jet-on-jet eyes for the last time, the fastpath engulfed him, spacetime swirling; and then came ejection – so very dangerous – into mid-air above that most beautiful hull, strong and black, webbed with red and gold. She was already responding to his presence.
I’m—
Falling through the chill air of the great docking bay, several thousand ships inside its concave expanse. Falling towards the dark opening melting into existence in her hull.
Caught you.
Tendrils had snapped out to slow his descent and guide him inside. Then she was sealed back up, ready to fly.
We don’t know where to engage the—
That’s not where we’re going.
They plunged into full conjunction trance, more deeply than ever before. Roger’s first thought had been that he was not ready; but together, as one, ship-and-Roger were clear on what they needed to do.
Ultra hellflight, then.
More than that. The graveyard.
Already they were turning away from the docking promenade and tumbling towards the vast cliff-like wall that led outside. It might have appeared dangerous, but Labyrinth knew everything. An opening appeared as Roger-and-ship began to soar.
I love you.
Golden space burst into being all around, the infinitesimal-point energy of the continuum itself providing power for glorious flight, magnificent and infinite. Distant black stars were inky fractal snowflakes, elegant and fine, while curlicued nebulae were strewn like fresh rivulets of blood. This was existence at its most beautiful, magnificent and heartbreaking.
They had done it once before, Roger-and-ship, making a more-than-hellflight near the insertion context of the real-space galactic core, a dangerous place from which to enter mu-space. This time the destination was less critical, granting more freedom in their choice of geodesic; but duration was everything, the effort awful and agonising, and if they survived they would be forever changed, while if they died it would be simply one more Pilot and ship lost, and in the imminent fight there would be so many deaths: that was obvious.
I would give my life for Labyrinth.
Once that had been Roger’s thought alone; now it belonged to both of them.
Half a million renegades, and maybe more.
The past four years, or perhaps ship-and-Roger’s entire existence, led up to this.
Time to prove ourselves.
Hellflight, and more.
Schenck’s timing was better than first appeared, for the fleet was depleted: exhausted from battle, some gone to recuperate on realspace worlds, most celebrating in Labyrinth, their determination low. At the same time, their ships remained massed together, one of the very few occasions when such a huge number would be located in the same place, therefore a target for a single, massive, all-out strike from nowhere.