‘Failed.’
‘But if one system was accidentally transformed, it doesn’t mean…’ Irravel trailed off. ‘You’re worried about them crossing interstellar space, to other systems. Even if that happened — couldn’t you resist the spread? This can only be human technology — nothing that would pose any threat to yourselves.’
‘Perhaps it was once human technology, with programmed limitations to prevent it from replicating uncontrollably. But those shackles have been broken. Worse, the machines have hybridised, gaining resilience and adaptability with each encounter with something external. First the Melding Plague, infection with which may have been a deliberate ploy to bypass the replication limits.’
Irravel nodded. The Melding Plague had swept human space four hundred years earlier, terminating the Demarchist belle époque. Like the Black Death of the previous millennium, it evoked terror generations after it had passed.
‘Later,’ the Nestbuilder continued, ‘it may have encountered and assimilated Inhibitor technology, or worse. Now it will be very difficult to stop, even with the weapons at our disposal.’
An image of one of the machines flickered onto the Nestbuilder’s shell, like a peculiar tattoo. Irravel shivered. The Slug was right: waves of hybridisation had transformed the initial architecture into something queasily alien. But enough of the original plan remained for there to be no doubt in her mind. She was looking at an evolved greenfly — one of the self-replicating breeders she had given Captain Run Seven. How it had broken loose was anyone’s guess. She speculated that Seven’s crew had sold the technology on to a third party, decades or centuries after gaining it from her. Perhaps that third party had reclusively experimented in the Ross 128 system, until the day when the greenfly tore out of their control…
‘I don’t know why you think I can help,’ she said.
‘Perhaps we were mistaken, then, to credit a five-hundred-year-old rumour that said you had been the original source of these machines.’
She had insulted it by daring to bluff. The Slugs were easily insulted. They read human beings far better than humans read Slugs.
‘Like you say,’ she answered, ‘you can’t believe everything you hear.’
The Slug made the Nestbuilder fold its armoured, spindly limbs across its mouthparts, a gesture of displeased huffiness.
‘You chordates,’ it said. ‘You’re all the same.’
Mirsky was dead. She had died of old age.
Irravel placed her body in an armoured coffin and ejected her into space when the Hirondelle’s speed was only a hair’s breadth under light.
‘Do it for me, Irravel,’ Mirsky had asked her, towards the end. ‘Keep my body aboard until we’re almost touching light, and then fire me ahead of the ship.’
‘Is that really what you want?’
‘It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C.’ She forced a smile that must have sapped what little energy she had left. ‘That’s a joke, Irravel, but it only makes sense in a language neither of us have heard for a while.’
Irravel pretended that she understood. ‘Mirsky? There’s something I have to tell you. Do you remember the Nestbuilder?’
‘That was centuries ago, Veda.’
‘I know. I just keep worrying that maybe it was right.’
‘About what?’
‘Those machines. About how I started it all. They say it’s spread now, to other systems. It doesn’t look as if anyone knows how to stop it.’
‘And you think all that was your fault?’
‘It’s crossed my mind.’
Mirsky convulsed, or shrugged — Irravel wasn’t sure which. ‘Even if it was your fault, Veda, you did it with the best of intentions. So you fucked up slightly. We all make mistakes.’
‘Destroying whole solar systems is just a fuck-up?’
‘Hey, accidents happen.’
‘You always did have a sense of humour, Mirsky.’
‘Yeah, guess I did.’ She managed a smile. ‘One of us needed one, Veda.’
Thinking of that, Irravel watched the coffin fall ahead of the Hirondelle, dwindling until it was only a tiny mote of steel-grey, and then nothing.
The starbridge had long ago attained sentience.
Dense with machinery, it sang an endless hymn to its own immensity, throbbing like the lowest string on a guitar. Vacuum-breathing acolytes had voluntarily rewired their minds to view the bridge as an actual deity, translating the humming into their sensoria and passing decades in contemplative ecstasy.
Clasped in a cushioning field, an elevator ferried Irravel down the bridge from the orbital hub to the surface in a few minutes, accompanied by an entourage of children from the ship, many of whom bore in youth the hurting imprint of her dead friend Mirsky’s genes. The bridge rose like the stem of a goblet from a ground terminal which was itself a scalloped shell of hyperdiamond, filled with tiered perfume gardens and cascading pools, anchored to the largest island in an equatorial archipelago. The senior children walked Irravel down to a beach of silver sand on the terminal’s edge, where jewelled crabs moved like toys. She bid the children farewell, then waited, warm breezes fingering the hem of her sari.
Minutes later, the children’s elevator flashed heavenward.
Irravel looked out at the ocean, thinking of the Pattern Jugglers. Here, as on dozens of other oceanic worlds, there was a colony of the alien intelligences. Transforming themselves to aquatic body-plans, the Subaruns had established close rapport with the aliens. In the morning, she would be taken out to meet the Jugglers, drowned, dissolved on the cellular level, every atom in her body swapped for one in the ocean, remade into something not quite human.
She was terrified.
Islanders came towards the shore, skimming the water on penanted trimarans, attended by oceanforms, sleek gloss-grey hybrids of porpoise and ray, whistlespeech downshifted into the human auditory spectrum. The Subaruns’ epidermal scales shimmered like imbricated armour: biological photocells drinking scorching blue Pleiadean sunlight. Sentient veils hung in the sky, rippling gently like aurorae, shading the archipelago from the fiercest wavelengths. As the actinic eye of Taygeta sank towards the horizon, the veils moved with it like living clouds. Flocks of phantasmagorical birds migrated with the veils.
The purple-skinned elder’s scales flashed green and opal as he approached Irravel along the coral jetty, a stick in one webbed hand, supported by two aides, a third shading his aged crown with a delicately watercoloured parasol. The aides were all descended from late-model Conjoiners; they had the translucent cranial crest through which bloodflow had once been channelled to cool their supercharged minds. Seeing them gave Irravel a dual-edged pang of nostalgia and guilt. She had not seen Conjoiners for nearly a thousand years, ever since they had fragmented into a dozen factions and vanished from human affairs. Neither had she entirely forgotten her betrayal of Remontoire.
But that had been so long ago…
A Communicant completed up the party, gowned in brocade, hazed by a blur of entopic projections. Communicants were small and elfin, with a phenomenal talent for natural languages augmented by Juggler transforms. Irravel sensed that this one was old and revered, despite the fact that Communicant genes did not express for great longevity.
The elder halted before her.
The head of his walking stick was a tiny lemur skull inside an egg-sized space helmet. He uttered something clearly ceremonial, but Irravel understood none of the sounds he made. She groped for something to say, recalling the oldest language in her memory, and therefore the one most likely to be recognised in any far-flung human culture.