‘Thank you for letting us stop here,’ she said.
The Communicant hobbled forward, already shaping words experimentally with his wide, protruding lips. For a moment his sounds were like an infant’s first attempts at vocalisation, but then they resolved into something Irravel understood.
‘Am I — um — making the slightest sense to you?’
‘Yes,’ Irravel said. ‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Canasian,’ the Communicant diagnosed. ‘Twenty-third, twenty-fourth centuries, Lacaille 9352 dialect, Fand subdialect?’
Irravel nodded.
‘Your kind are very rare now,’ he said, studying her as if she was some kind of exotic butterfly, ‘but not unwelcome.’ His features cracked into a heart-warming smile.
‘What about Markarian?’ Irravel said. ‘I know his ship passed through this system less than fifty years ago — I still have a fix on it as it moves out of the cluster.’
‘Other ships do come, yes. Not many — one or two a century.’
‘And what happened when the last one came through?’
‘The usual tribute was given.’
‘Tribute?’
‘Something ceremonial.’ The Communicant’s smile was wider than ever. ‘To the glory of Irravel. With many actors, beautiful words, love, death, laughter, tears.’
She understood, slowly, dumbfoundedly.
‘You’re putting on a play?’
The elder must have understood something of that. Nodding proudly, he extended a hand across the darkening bay, oceanforms cutting the water like scythes. A distant raft carried lanterns and the glimmerings of richly painted backdrops. Boats converged from across the bay. A dirigible loomed over the archipelago’s edge, pregnant with gondolas.
‘We want you to play Irravel,’ the Communicant said, beckoning her forward. ‘This is our greatest honour.’
When they reached the raft, the Communicant taught Irravel her lines and the actions she would be required to make. It was all simple enough — even the fact that she had to deliver her parts in Subarun. By the end of evening she was fluent in their language. There was nothing she couldn’t learn in an instant these days, by sheer force of will. But it was not enough. To catch Markarian, she would have to break out of the narrow labyrinth of human thought entirely. That was why she had come to Jugglers.
That night they performed the play, while boats congregated around them, top-heavy with lolling islanders. The sun sank and the sky glared with a thousand blue gems studding blue velvet. Night in the heart of the Pleiades was the most beautiful thing Irravel had dared imagine. But in the direction of Sol, when she amplified her vision, there was a green thumbprint on the sky. Every century, the green wave was larger, as neighbouring solar systems were infected and transformed by the rogue terraforming machines. Given time, it would even reach the Pleiades.
Irravel got drunk on islander wine and learned the tributes’ history.
The plots varied immensely, but the protagonists always resembled Markarian and Irravel; mythic figures entwined by destiny, remembered across almost two thousand years. Sometimes, one or the other was the clear villain, but as often as not they were both heroic, misunderstanding each other’s motives in true tragic fashion. Sometimes they ended with both parties dying. They rarely ended happily. But there was always some kind of redemption when the pursuit was done.
In the interlude, she felt she had to tell the Communicant the truth, so that he could tell the elder.
‘Listen, there’s something you need to know.’ Irravel didn’t wait for his answer. ‘I’m really her — really the person I’m playing.’
For a long time he didn’t seem to understand, before shaking his head slowly and sadly. ‘No; I thought you’d be different. You seemed different. But many say that.’
She shrugged. There was little point arguing, and anything she said now could always be ascribed to wine. In the morning, the remark had been quietly forgotten. She was taken out to sea and drowned.
‘Markarian? Answer me.’
She watched the Hideyoshi’s magnified image, looming just out of weapons range. Like the Hirondelle, it had changed almost beyond recognition. The hull glistened within a skein of armouring force. The engines, no longer physically coupled to the rest of the ship, flew alongside like dolphins. They were anchored in fields that only became visible when some tiny stress afflicted them.
For centuries of worldtime she had made no attempt to communicate with him. But now her mind had changed. The green wave had continued for millennia, an iridescent cataract spreading across the eye of the galaxy. It had assimilated the blue suns of the Subarun Commonwealth in mere centuries — although by then Irravel and Markarian were a thousand light-years closer to the core, beginning to turn away from the plane of the galaxy, and the death screams of those gentle islanders never reached them. Nothing stopped it, and once the green wave had swallowed them, systems fell silent. The Juggler transformation allowed Irravel to grasp the enormity of it; allowed her to stare unflinchingly into the horror of a million poisoned stars and apprehend each individually.
She knew more of what it was, now.
It was impossible for stars to shine green, any more than an ingot of metal could become green-hot if it was raised to a certain temperature. Instead, something was veiling them — staining their light, like coloured glass. Whatever it was stole energy from the stellar spectra at the frequencies of chlorophyll. Stars were shining through curtains of vegetation, like lanterns in a forest. The greenfly machines were turning the galaxy into a jungle.
It was time to talk. Time — as in the old plays of the dead islanders — to initiate the final act, before the two of them fell into the cold of intergalactic space. She searched her repertoire of communication systems until she found something as ancient as ceremony demanded.
She aimed the message laser at him, cutting through his armour. The beam was too ineffectual to be mistaken for anything other than an attempt to talk. No answer came, so she repeated the message in a variety of formats and languages. Days of shiptime passed — decades of worldtime.
Talk, you bastard.
Growing impatient, she examined her weapons options. Armaments from the Nestbuilders were amongst the most advanced: theoretically they could mole through the loam of spacetime and inflict precise harm anywhere in Markarian’s ship. But to use them she had to convince herself that she knew the interior layout of the Hideyoshi. Her mass-sensor sweeps were too blurred to be much help. She might just as easily harm the sleepers as take out his field nodes. Until now, it had been too risky to contemplate.
But all games needed an end.
Willing her qualms from her mind, she enabled the Nestbuilder armaments, feeling them stress spacetime in the Hirondelle’s belly, ready to short-circuit it entirely. She selected attack loci in Markarian’s ship; best guesses that would cripple him rather than blow him out of the sky.
Then something happened.
He replied, modulating his engine thrust in staccato stabs. The frequency was audio. Quickly, Irravel translated the modulation.
‘I don’t understand,’ Markarian said, ‘why you took so long to answer me, and why you ignored me for so long when I replied.’
‘You never replied until now,’ she said. ‘I’d have known if you had.’
‘Would you?’
There was something in his tone that convinced her he wasn’t lying. Which left only one possibility: that he had tried speaking to her before, and that in some way her own ship had kept this knowledge from her.
‘Mirsky must have done it,’ Irravel said. ‘She must have installed filters to block any communications from your ship.’