‘Mirsky?’
‘She would have done it as a favour to me; maybe under orders from my former self.’ She didn’t bother elaborating: Markarian was sure to know she had died and then been reborn as a clone of the original Irravel. ‘My former self had the neural conditioning that kept her on the trail of the sleepers. This clone never had it, which meant that my instinct to pursue the sleepers had to be reinforced.’
‘By lies?’
‘Mirsky would have done it out of friendship,’ Irravel said. And for a moment she believed herself, while wondering how friendship could seem so like betrayal.
Markarian’s image smiled. They faced each other across an absurdly long banquet table, with the galaxy projected above it, flickering in the light of candelabra.
‘Well?’ he said, of the green stain spreading across the spiral. ‘What do you think?’
Irravel had long ago stopped counting time and distance, but she knew it had been at least fifteen thousand years and that many light-years since they had turned from the plane. Part of her knew, of course: although the wave swallowed suns, it had no use for pulsars, and their metronomic ticking and slow decay allowed positional triangulation in space and time with chilling precision. But she elected to bury that knowledge beneath her conscious thought processes: one of the simpler Juggler tricks.
‘What do I think? I think it terrifies me.’
‘Our emotional responses haven’t diverged as much as I’d feared.’
They didn’t have to use language. They could have swapped pure mental concepts between ships: concatenated strings of qualia, some of which could only be grasped in minds rewired by Pattern Jugglers. But Irravel considered it sufficient that they could look each other in the eye without flinching.
The galaxy falling below had been frozen in time: light waves struggling to overtake Irravel and Markarian. The wave had appeared to slow, and then halt its advance. But then Markarian had turned, diving back towards the plane. The galaxy quickened to life, rushing to finish thirty thousand years of history before the two ships returned. The wave surged on. Above the banquet table, one arm of the star-clotted spiral was shot through with green, like a mote of ink spreading into blotting paper. The edge of the green wave was feathered, fractal, extending verdant tendrils.
‘Do you have any observations?’ Irravel asked.
‘A few.’ Markarian sipped from his chalice. ‘I’ve studied the patterns of starlight amongst the suns already swallowed by the wave. They’re not uniformly green — it’s correlated with rotational angle. The green matter must be concentrated near the ecliptic, extending above and below it, but not encircling the stars completely.’
Irravel thought back to what the Nestbuilder had shown her.
‘Meaning what?’ she asked, testing Markarian.
‘Swarms of absorbing bodies, on orbits resembling comets, or asteroids. I think the greenfly machines must have dismantled everything smaller than a Jovian, then enveloped the rubble in transparent membranes which they filled with air, water and greenery — self-sustaining biospheres. Then they were cast adrift. Trillions of tiny worlds, around each star. No rocky planets any more.’
Irravel retrieved a name from the deep past. ‘Like Dyson spheres?’
‘Dyson clouds, perhaps.’
‘Do you think anyone survived? Are there niches in the wave where humans can live? That was the point of greenfly, after alclass="underline" to create living space.’
‘Maybe,’ Markarian said, with no great conviction. ‘Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud—’
‘But you don’t think it’s very likely?’
‘I’ve been listening, Irravel — scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident.’
‘It was my fault, Markarian.’
His tone was rueful. ‘Yes… I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.’
‘I never intended this.’
‘I think that goes without saying, don’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.’
‘Did you?’
He shook his head. ‘In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.’
‘I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.’
‘I know.’
And she believed him.
‘What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?’
‘Because of what they did to you, Irravel.’
He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.
‘They were good at surgery,’ Markarian said. ‘Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.’ The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. ‘They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.’
For a long while Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of reconnective surgery around the neck was too slight ever to have shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.
I did it to save your neck, Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.
‘You appear to be telling the truth,’ she said, when she had released the children. ‘The nature of your betrayal was…’ And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. ‘Different from what I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.’
‘One I’ve lived with for three hundred years of subjective time.’
‘You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.’ But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.
‘What now?’ Markarian said. ‘Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.’
‘You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?’
Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. ‘Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?’
Irravel agreed.
She willed herself into stasis, medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ’chines would only revive her when something — anything — happened, on a galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured, until woken by the same stimulus.
He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.
The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the galaxy for ten thousand light-years around Sol — a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance — at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder’s Slug had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it had swallowed humanity.
‘Why did we wake?’ Irravel said. ‘Nothing’s changed, except that it’s grown larger.’