‘Maybe not,’ Markarian said. ‘I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the galaxy; from within the wave.’
‘Yes?’
‘Looks as though someone survived after all.’
The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognised.
‘It’s Canasian,’ Markarian said.
‘Fand subdialect,’ Irravel added, marvelling.
It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly didn’t have the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.
Someone wanted to speak to them.
The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiselled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.
Irravel recognised the face.
‘It’s him,’ she said, in Markarian’s direction. ‘Remontoire. Somehow he made it across all this time.’
Markarian nodded slowly. ‘He must have remembered us, and known where to look. Even across thousands of light-years, we can still be seen. There can’t be many objects still moving relativistically.’
Remontoire told his story. His people had fled to the pulsar system twenty thousand years ago — more, now, since his message had taken thousands of years to climb out of the galaxy. They had seen the wave coming, as had thousands of other human factions, and like many they had observed that the wave shunned pulsars: burned-out stellar corpses rarely accompanied by planets. Some intelligence governing the wave must have recognised that pulsars were valueless; that even if a Dyson cloud could be created around them, there would be no sunlight to focus.
For thousands of years they had waited around the pulsar, growing ever more silent and cautious, seeing other cultures make errors that drew the wave upon them, for by now it interpreted any other intelligence as a threat to its progress, assimilating the weapons used against it.
Then — over many more thousands of years — Remontoire’s people watched the wave learn, adapting like a vast neural net, becoming curious about those few pulsars that harboured planets. Soon their place of refuge would become nothing of the sort.
‘Help us,’ Remontoire said. ‘Please.’
It took three thousand years to reach them.
For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way. During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver that fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.
Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the next two thousand years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.
‘Hope would make an excellent shield,’ Markarian mused as they approached it, ‘if one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other—’
‘Don’t think I wouldn’t.’
They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled in.
‘Then why don’t you?’ Markarian said.
For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. ‘Because they need us more than I need revenge.’
‘A higher cause?’
‘Redemption,’ she said.
They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them towards the one rock that mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving towards them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.
Conjoiners boarded the Hirondelle and invited Irravel into Hope. The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard ship since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes grey with neglect, as if the Conjoiners had given up long before.
Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rock pool filmed with grey dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.
‘You came,’ he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model Conjoiner: almost fully human.
‘You’re not him, are you?’ Irravel asked. ‘You look like him — sound like him — but the image you sent us was of someone much older.’
‘I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity; my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire… but that was a long time ago, and he was never known by that name to us.’
‘What his name?’
‘Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.’
She had to ask. ‘Did he make it back to a commune?’
‘Yes, of course,’ the man said, as if her question was foolish. ‘How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?’
‘And did he forgive me?’
‘I forgive you now,’ he said. ‘It amounts to the same thing.’
She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.
The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change — no matter how slight — would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it — but other than that, all they had done was wait.
They were very good at waiting.
‘How many refugees did you bring?’
‘One hundred thousand.’ Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. ‘I know — too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.’
She thought back to her own sleepers. ‘I know. Still, we might be able to take more… I don’t know about Markarian’s ship, but—’
He cut her off, gently. ‘I think you’d better come with me,’ said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the Hideyoshi.
‘How much of it did you explore?’
‘Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere aboard this ship,’ Remontoire said. ‘If there are two hundred cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.’
‘No sleepers?’
‘Just this one.’
They had arrived at a plinth supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary: spacesuited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.
‘Is he dead?’ Irravel asked.
‘Depends what you mean by dead.’ The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. ‘His organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the Hideyoshi would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.’