Kard was glaring at Xera, hefting the mould. ‘Is this all there is? What in Lethe are we doing here, Commissary?’
‘Let’s just try on the idea before we dismiss it,’ Xera said quickly. ‘Suppose there was an ancient race, done with’ – she raised a hand at the sky, where worlds burned – ‘with all this. Colonising, building—’
Kard snapped, ‘So they came to this worn-out dump. They dismantled their starships, and dissolved into slime. Right? But it isn’t even safe, here in this cluster. Have you any idea what it would be like to live through a Galaxy plane-crossing?’ He shook his head. He threw the native life form into the hopper, along with the pea pods and runner beans.
‘Admiral—’
‘End of discussion.’
On they walked.
The stars were sombre. Most were orange or even red, floating silently in their watchful crowds. All this cluster’s stars were about the same age, and all were old. Even the planets were so old the radioactivity trapped in their interiors had dwindled away. Which explained the exhausted landscape: no tectonics, no geology, no mountain-building.
This was what you got in a globular cluster. Like a diffuse planet, this whole cluster orbited the centre of the Galaxy. Every hundred million years it plunged through the Galaxy’s disc, and in those catastrophic interludes all the dust was stripped out of the spaces between the stars. Thus there was no unburnt gas to make new stars out of, no rock dust to make new planets. That was why the fleet needed to demolish planets for their iron. Rock, metals were scarce between the worlds.
Of course Kard was right about the hazards of a main disc crossing. This planet would be bombarded with spiral-arm hydrogen and dust. A single dust grain would deliver the energy of a fission bomb. The place would be flooded with X-rays, if the atmosphere wasn’t stripped off completely.
Maybe, maybe. But – Xera learned, checking her data desk, which she’d hung around her neck – the last plane crossing was only a couple of million years ago. There were nearly a hundred megayears yet before that calamity had to be faced again. Time enough for anybody.
This wasn’t an academic debate. If she could prove the planet harboured intelligence, it might be spared demolition, its human colonists allowed to continue their way of life. If not…
Kard stopped again, breathing hard. ‘Take a break.’ He dumped the stretcher and squatted down, took a handful of pea pods from his improvised backpack, and crammed them into his mouth, pods and all.
The spare suit had extracted some water from the vegetable matter. Xera took one of its sleeves and dribbled water into the mouth of Stub. His breathing was irregular, his face pasty. She opened the cloak a little at his neck, trying to make him easier.
Kard recoiled from the stink that came out of the cloak, an earthy melange of blood and shit, the smell of a wounded human. ‘Lethe, I hate this.’ He turned away. ‘You think the base is far?’
‘I don’t know. Not far, surely.’
He nodded, wordless, not looking at her.
Tomm sat quietly and watched them, bare feet tucked under his legs. He didn’t ask for food or drink. Of the three of them he was by far the freshest.
Xera glanced again at her data desk. It had been working on the observations she’d been able to make before the landing. Now the desk showed that Home and its two siblings were locked into a figure-of-eight orbital motion. It was an exotic but stable solution to the ancient problem of how three bodies would swarm together under gravity. More common solutions resembled planets conventionally orbiting a sun, or three worlds at the corners of a rotating equilateral triangle.
She tried to discuss this with Kard. He knew a lot more about orbital dynamics than she did. But he was definitively not interested.
Xera pulled the dreaming mould out of the tied-up suit. A little dehydrated, it was cold to the touch but not unpleasant. She could tell nothing by just looking at it.
Uncertainly she handed it to Tomm.
The boy pressed his hands against the mould. He looked vaguely disappointed. ‘This one’s too dry.’
‘Tomm, what happens when you touch the mould?’
‘Like if you’re sick.’ Tomm shrugged. ‘The mould helps you.’
‘How?’
He said some things the floating translator unit couldn’t handle. Then he said, ‘Time stops.’
Kard sat up. ‘Time stops?’
‘Like that. The mould doesn’t see time—’ Tomm made chopping motions. ‘One bit after another. Step, step, step. It sees time all as a piece. All at once.’
Kard raised hairless eyebrows.
Xera felt like defying him. ‘We need to keep open minds, Admiral. We’re here to seek out the strange, the unfamiliar. That’s the whole point. We know that time is quantised. Instants are like grains of sand. We experience them linearly, like a bug hopping from one grain to another. But other perceptions of time are possible. Perhaps—’
Kard looked disgusted. ‘These dirt-diggers would call my ass sentient if it would hold back the starbreakers one more day.’ He leaned towards the boy, who looked scared. ‘Do you understand what we’re doing here? Planets like yours are rare, in a globular cluster. That’s why we need to blow up your world. So we can use what’s inside it to make more ships and weapons.’
‘So you can blow up more worlds.’
‘Exactly. Slime mould and all.’
‘Isn’t that what the Qax did to humans?’
Xera choked a laugh.
Kard glared. ‘Listen to me. You’re just a snot-nosed earthworm kid and I’m a rear admiral. And any time I want to I could—’
Stub’s med cloak abruptly turned bright blue.
Xera hurried to the dying pilot. Kard swore, stood up and walked away.
Tomm stared.
Xera felt for a pulse – it was desperately feathery – and bent her ear to Stub’s mouth, trying to detect a breath. I’m here to stand in judgement on another race, perhaps much more ancient than my own, she thought. But I can’t even save this wretched boy, lying in the dirt.
Kard stalked around. The crimson dust had stained his gleaming boots. ‘We walked all this way for nothing.’
‘It was your call,’ she snapped. ‘If we had gone to the farmers for help, maybe we could have saved him.’
Kard wasn’t about to accept that. He turned on her. ‘Listen to me, Commissary—’
Tomm was pressing bits of the dreaming mould into Stub’s mouth.
Kard grabbed Tomm’s arm. ‘What are you doing?’
‘The mould wants to help him. This is what we do.’
Xera asked quickly, ‘When you hurt, when you die, you do this?’
‘You take him out of time.’
Kard said, ‘You’ll choke him, you little grub.’ He was still holding the boy’s arm.
‘Admiral, let the kid go.’
He said dangerously, ‘This is a Navy man.’
‘But we failed him, Kard. The cloak can’t help. He’s dying. Let the boy do what he wants. If it makes him feel better…’
Kard’s face worked. But he broke away.
Bleakly, helplessly, Xera watched the boy patiently feed bits of the mould into the pilot’s mouth.
You take him out of time.
Could it be true? How would it be to loosen the grasp of time – to have a mind filled with green thoughts, like a vegetable’s perhaps – to be empty of everything but self? Kard had said the mould had no goals. But what higher goal could there be? Who needed starships and cities and wars and empires, when you could free yourself at last of the fear of death? And what greater empathy could there be than to share such a gift with others?