“She—the Mademoiselle—worried that it might come to this,” Fazil said, his lips barely moving, or seeming to move, beneath the moustache. “So she took certain measures. While you were still on Yellowstone, she implanted a series of closed-access memories. They were tagged to activate—to become accessible to your conscious mind—only when she deemed them useful.” He reached across the desk and spun the globe, allowing it to whir before stopping it abruptly. “As a matter of fact, the process of unlocking those memories began some while ago. Do you remember a slight migraine attack in the elevator?”
Khouri grasped for some anchor-point; some objective reality she could place her trust in.
“What is this?”
“A convenience,” Fazil said. “Woven partially out of existing memory patterns the Mademoiselle appropriated and found useful. This meeting, for instance—isn’t it a little like how we first met, darling? That time in the ops unit on Hill Seventy-Eight, in the central provinces campaign, before the second red-peninsula offensive? You’d been sent to me because I needed someone for an infiltration mission; someone with knowledge of the unshielded SC-controlled sectors. We made a great team, didn’t we? In more ways than one.” He fondled his moustache and tapped the globe again. “Of course, I didn’t—or rather she didn’t—bring you here just to reminisce. No; the mere fact that this memory has been accessed means that certain truths have to be revealed to you. The question is, are you ready for them?”
“Of course I’m…” Khouri trailed off. What Fazil was saying made no sense, but she was being troubled by that memory of the other place; of the brutal chair in the metallic room. She had the feeling something was unresolved there—even, possibly, in the process of being resolved. She felt that, wherever that room was, she was meant to be there, adding her weight to the struggle. Whatever that struggle concerned, she had the sense that there was not much time left, and certainly not enough for this diversion.
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Fazil said, appearing to read her mind. “None of this is really taking place in realtime; not even the accelerated realtime of the gunnery. Haven’t you ever had it happen to you that someone wakes you abruptly from a dream, and yet somehow their actions were incorporated into the dream’s narrative, long before they actually woke you? You know what I mean: your dog licks your face to wake you, and in your dream you fall overboard from a ship into the sea. Yet you’d been on that ship for the entirety of the dream.” He paused. “Memory, Khouri. Memory being laid down instantaneously. The dream felt real, but it was created in an instant when the dog began licking your face. Back-constructed. You never actually lived through it. It’s the same with these memories.”
Fazil’s mention of the gunnery had crystallised the concept of the room. More than ever she felt as if she had to be back there, engaging in a struggle. The details of it still escaped her, it seemed very important that she rejoin it.
“The Mademoiselle,” Fazil continued, “could have selected any venue from your past, or manufactured one from scratch. But she felt that—in some way—it would assist matters if you were put in a frame of mind where the discussion of military matters seemed natural.”
“Military matters?”
“Specifically, a war.” He smiled then, causing the tips of his moustache to angle momentarily upwards, like a demonstration of the engineering principles of a cantilever bridge. “But not one you’re likely to have ever read about. No; I’m afraid it happened rather too long ago for that.” He stood without warning, pausing to straighten his tunic, tugging down the belt. “It might help if we adjourned to the briefing room, actually.”
TWELVE
The briefing room into which Fazil escorted Khouri was unlike any she had ever visited. It was clearly far too large for the bubbletent to have ever held it. And while Khouri had experienced many projection devices, none of them would have been capable of displaying the thing that was now being presented to her. It covered the entire floor, across a space about twenty metres wide, and was circumnavigated by a metal-railinged walkway.
It was a map of the entire galaxy.
And what made it impossible that the map could ever have been projected by the devices with which she was familiar was one simple fact. Looking at it, she apprehended—saw, and, somehow noted—every single star in the galaxy, from the coolest, barely fusing brown dwarf up to the brightest, transient white-hot supergiant. And it was not just that every star in the galaxy was there to be noticed, if her gaze chanced upon it. It went beyond that. It was, simply, that the galaxy was knowable in one glance. She was assimilating it in its entirety.
She counted the stars.
There were four hundred and sixty-six billion, three hundred and eleven million, nine hundred and twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and eleven of them. As she watched, one of the white supergiants expired in a supernova, so she revised her count down by one.
“It’s a trick,” Fazil said. “A codification. There are more stars in the galaxy than there are cells in the human brain, so for you to know them all would tie up an undesirable fraction of your total connective memory. Which doesn’t mean that the sensation of omniscience can’t be simulated, of course.”
The galaxy was in fact too perfectly detailed to really be described as a map. Not only had every star been accorded due prominence—colours, sizes, luminosities, binary associations, positions and space velocities all represented with absolute fidelity—but there were also star-forming regions, wispish, gently glowing veils of condensing gas, in which were embedded the hottening embers of embryo suns. There were newly formed stars surrounded by disks of protoplanetary material, and—where she cared to apprehend them—planetary systems themselves, ticking round their central suns like microscopic orreries, at a vastly accelerated rate. There were also aged stars which had ejected shells of their own photospheres into space, enriching the tenuous interstellar medium: the basic protoplasmic reservoir from which future generations of stars, worlds and cultures would eventually be created. There were regular or irregular supernova remnants, cooling as they expanded and shed their energy to the interstellar medium. Sometimes, at the heart of one of these stellar death-events, she observed a newly forged pulsar, emitting radio bursts with ever-slowing but stately precision, like the clocks in some forgotten imperial palace which had been wound one final time and would now tick until they died, the time between each tick lengthening towards some chill eternity. There were also black holes in the hearts of some of these remnants, and one massive (though now dormant) one at the heart of the galaxy, surrounded by an attendant shoal of doomed stars which would one day spiral into its event-horizon and fuel an apocalyptic burst of X-rays as they were ripped asunder.
But there was more to this galaxy than astrophysics. As if a new layer of memories had been quietly overlaid over her previous ones, Khouri found herself knowing something more. That the galaxy was teeming with life; a million cultures dispersed pseudo-randomly across its great slowly rotating disk.
But this was the past—the deep, deep past.
“Actually,” Fazil said, “somewhere in the region of a billion years ago. Given that the Universe is only about fifteen times older than that, that’s quite a hefty chunk of time, especially on the galactic timescale.” He was leaning over the railinged walkway next to her, as if they were a couple pausing to stare at their reflections in a dark, bread-strewn duckpond. “To give you some perspective, humanity didn’t exist a billion years ago. In fact, neither did the dinosaurs. They didn’t get around to evolving until less than two hundred million years ago; a fifth of the time we’re dealing with here. No; we’re deep into the Precambrian here. There was life on Earth, but nothing multicellular—a few sponges if you were lucky.” Fazil looked at the galaxy representation again. “But that wasn’t the case everywhere.”