Faith (51 page)

“Ghost of Christmas Future,” Cyr hissed. She locked eyes with Foord. Strangely, neither of them was embarrassed.

“Do you really do that? On your own?”

“Yes,” said Foord.

“Why?”

“Habit.”

Thahl looked from one to the other. He had only a partial understanding of human sexual dynamics, but a very good understanding of the nuances of human speech, and of things left unsaid.

“Kaang,” Foord said, “get us away from here. Hard to port, eighty percent. Maybe that signal will weaken with distance.”

She did so, though she didn’t believe him. Neither did any of the others.

•

They fled through the Gulf. She made no attempt to follow them, but Her white light still filled the Bridge, and they still felt cold.

For the first time since Joser’s death there were six and not five on the Bridge, but the sixth was blank and unmoving and empty. For those reasons Cyr—who knew it was essential to appear unaffected—hit on the rather spiteful device of calling the empty figure Joser. When she got unsteadily to her feet after Susanna Cyr left and Foord gave the order to run, she pointed to the figure. Forcing lightness into her voice, she asked Thahl

“Which of us will fill Joser next? You?”

When Thahl did not answer, she lowered her voice and said “Remember I was too quick for you. And please put the Weapons functions back to my console.”

Thahl glanced at Foord, who nodded.

Cyr, without taking her eyes off Thahl, said “He didn’t order you to reroute my Weapons functions. You don’t need him to order you to put them back.”

“The functions are back.”

“Thank you.”

“I would never have killed you, Cyr.”

“I know. But you tried to stop me doing what I wanted.”

And later, while they continued to run from Her in a silence broken only by operational remarks, Cyr turned to Foord and said “Is Joser still solid? Or does he seem to be turning back to vapour?”

The headups on the Bridge screen showed She was hundreds of miles away; soon it would be thousands. Her image had dwindled to almost nothing. In the absence of instructions, the screen had not seen fit to magnify it.

“I meant it, Commander. Look at him. Around his edges. Don’t you see it?”

Foord tore himself away from her gaze and looked again at the empty figure. It took him a few seconds to see what Cyr had already seen: the figure was less distinct. It started to sway. The motion was most pronounced at its head while its feet stayed unmoving, and as it swayed it left flakes of itself, like scurf, floating alongside it until they dissolved in the light. It was bleeding away into the light, in a reversal of the process by which it had first appeared.

“It
is
weakening with distance!” Foord shouted.

The screen headups showed She was now several thousand miles away. The figure on the Bridge was keeping its shape but losing its substance, turning back to an open basketweave of vapour. For the first time since Susanna Cyr had inhabited it it made a deliberate movement, putting what had once been its hands up to what had once been its throat. If it had been more distinct, it might have looked like it was trying to breathe.

She was now tens of thousands of miles behind them, less than a smear on the Bridge screen. The screen chose that moment to return to the original magnification, patching in Her image as if She was sixteen hundred feet away, and She chose that moment to consume another millionth of what was in the midsection crater. Again there was an explosion in its recesses and again the unnameable colour burned there; but this time, as She rolled with the force of the explosion, something was different. She rolled along Her entire length but also pivoted around Her midsection, backwards and forwards and side to side, turning the roll into a clumsy figure-of-eight movement which She fought to bring under control. Nothing She does is clumsy, thought Foord. She’s in trouble.

They caught fragmented glimpses of Her underside and starboard and dorsal surfaces as She rolled. Her manoeuvre drives fountained to correct the movement and the roll ended before the port side came back into view; then began again in the opposite direction, dorsal to starboard to underside. Her manoeuvre drives fountained again to correct the movement, and again to correct the correction, and overcompensated. She rolled a third time, underside to starboard to dorsal to port, and came unsteadily to rest. They stared, across tens of thousands of miles and sixteen hundred feet, at Her port side. Maybe, they thought, these projections were damaging Her internally.

Cyr pounded her console in pleasure, then swore viciously as she thought how she’d look if she hit something important—not what damage she’d do, just how she’d look. Foord and Thahl were still watching the screen.

“Cyr…” Foord began.

“Yes, Commander, we’re still in beam range.”

Foord nodded, and looked at the midsection crater; it glowed exactly as before, steadily and patiently. It might have been another screen, patching in a picture from another universe. Alarms murmured.

The empty figure on the Bridge, Foord noticed, was no longer empty.

•

Elizabeth Kaang stood blinking in the cold light, her breath frosting in front of her face. She looked round the Bridge at them, one by one, and found Kaang. Their eyes locked.

“What’s missing?” Kaang asked.

“Nothing, I think,” said Elizabeth Kaang. “I’m just the same as you.”

To the others on the Bridge, she was: blonde, plumpish, a pale complexion verging on pastiness, and pleasant but unremarkable features.

“I’m sorry,” Kaang said, “but something’s missing.”

“Oh,
that.
Over there,” Elizabeth Kaang pointed at the Bridge screen, where Faith hung in silent counterpoint to their mundane conversation, “they said you’d spot it immediately. To me it doesn’t feel any different. It was never in me to begin with.”

“Over there. Who are they?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember.”

“What do they look like?”

“I don’t know. They wouldn’t let me remember. Look, I’m nothing, really. What they told me to say will only take a few moments, less time than the others, and then I’ll go. …This ship has only two things which can outperform them. The first is its particle beams, which are stronger than theirs, but that’s only tactical.”

“And the second,” Kaang said, “must be me.”

“Yes. Over there they have nothing, living or otherwise, to match you. You know that yourself. You’re nothing really—I can say that, you see, because I’m the same as you—except for what you do as pilot. Even genius doesn’t describe it. Genius comes once in a lifetime, but what you have may never be repeated. You’ve always had it, and you’ve never had to work at it, and you don’t know what it is. Neither does the Commonwealth.”

Kaang glanced down at her console to check; Thahl had rerouted her Pilot’s functions through to himself. “Nobody,” she said, “has any idea what it is.”

“
They
do, over there,” said Elizabeth Kaang.

“No! I don’t believe you!” Kaang’s voice shook. “I don’t believe you, you’re lying.”

“I’m sorry,” said Elizabeth Kaang, “but they told me exactly what it is and how it works. Of course I didn’t understand, and anyway they wouldn’t let me remember.”

“No! You’re lying!”

“They made me without it, to show that if it ever leaves you, the rest of you will be unchanged.”

“You can’t prove any of that!”

“The first thing you said to me is ‘What’s Missing?’”

“You still can’t prove it. You’re lying!”

“Look, I said I won’t take as long as the others, and I’m almost finished. You have a gift that you don’t understand and didn’t ask for. You’re on an Outsider ship with a crew of outsiders, and it even sets you apart from
them.
They need you because of what you can do, but you’re not anything like them, not in any way. You’re a different kind of outsider. You’ve never done bad things. You wouldn’t know how to
decide
to do bad things.” She smiled, almost apologetically, and her features started to sink into the substance of the figure.

The last thing she said, sounding further and further away, was “I asked them over there, if they understood your gift, could they copy it and make others like you? They answered me, but they wouldn’t.”

“Let.”

“Me remember.”

“I’m alright, Commander,” Kaang told Foord, for the second time. “There was nothing there I didn’t already know…Thahl, can you route my Pilot’s functions back to me? Thank you.”

“Kaang, She didn’t intend any of us to come through this unaffected. She took damage, just to put that thing into the Bridge. So please, go and rest.”

“Because I’m nothing really? Because except for what I do as your pilot, I’m the weakest one here?”

Foord paused. “Yes.”

“I’m glad you answered plainly, Commander. If you’d said anything except Yes, even Yes But, you’d have been lying.”

Foord did not reply.

“But I can’t rest, Commander. If She really does understand what I have, I need to be here. If She really can make others like me, She’ll come after us.”

“She doesn’t, and She can’t,” said the figure on the Bridge. “She was lying.”

•

The empty figure had become a seven-foot column, approximately humanoid. It was grey and glistening, and its eyes were startlingly large and intelligent; warm, and golden.

“She was lying,” it repeated.

“And what business,” Smithson said, “have you here?”

The rest of their conversation was conducted in Smithson’s own language, a series of scratches and chirps made by the rubbing together of chitinous surfaces in the neck, amplified through the throat and modulated by the mouth: a language of almost electronic speed and intensity, evolved by Smithson’s ancestors when they were herds of plains planteaters who needed to develop a more sophisticated social organisation than the packs of impressively-organised carnivores and omnivores who hunted them. That, and their physical strength, and their development of the most efficient digestive system in the galaxy for extracting energy from plant matter—it worked subatomically, and meant they didn’t have to spend all their time grazing, but could develop intellectually—let them turn evolution upside down and become the dominant lifeform.

Foord could not understand, afterwards, why the conversation was conducted in Smithson’s language. Initially he suspected it contained things She didn’t want them to hear. But in fact, as they found out later when the Bridge screen played back the recordings with translations added, it covered matters of which they were already well aware.

The simulation began by reciting Smithson’s original name, the one he’d had in his youth. This was a polysyllabic word the length of several paragraphs, enumerating his youthful achievements, both physical and intellectual. The word of his name was a mechanism which grew as he grew, some parts taken away and larger parts added, to show what he was and point to what he would become—how he might grow into his expanding future. And then, abruptly, it ended.

The simulation paused—it had only taken a few seconds, but the translation would last several minutes—and then recited Smithson’s present name, the one which would never grow any further, because now he had no future. It followed the polysyllabic structure of his earlier name, and ended with two syllables which the Commonwealth had humanised to their nearest pronounceable equivalent: Smithson.

Smithson was where his present name ended. After it, no further additions would ever be made. It was an Ember slang expression, most closely translated as Septic Knob.

Children and accomplishments were of overriding importance to Smithson’s people. They needed both, in massive amounts, for the strength and intelligence to beat off several predator species, any one of which would normally have become Emberra’s dominant lifeform. Males and females alike piled up their accomplishments, used by the outstanding ones as bargaining-chips in their drive to create, at the expense of lower achievers, more descendants to strengthen an already rapidly-strengthening gene pool. This compulsion, to achieve to procreate to achieve, was fundamental to the social organisation the Embers had developed on the plains. It pervaded all their institutions. They were an impossibility: dynamic, aspirational herbivores.

And Smithson, even among the other high achievers, was pre-eminent. His position on Emberra was almost that of Srahr on Sakhra. But it had all ended when he was diagnosed as a carrier of the incurable disease known colloquially—Ember humour was always cruel—as Septic Knob. As a carrier he would not suffer its horrific degenerative effects, which spread out from the sexual organs to engulf the body and mind; but his children would. So he killed them, and then—because, he said bitterly, they would have become vegetables anyway, and he was a vegetarian—he ate their remains, hoping he would become infected; but carriers were immune. So he turned away from his people and his accomplishments—irrelevant now, because no more females would ever mate with him—and was recruited by the Department.

“And is
that,
” Smithson said, reverting to Commonwealth, “all you came here to say? Everyone here knows it already.”

The simulation laughed. “It bought some time. For Her to make more like Kaang.”

“Only about one minute of
their
time,” said Smithson. “And She can’t make more like Kaang, that was a lie.”

“Of course it was. That’s why I’m here. To tell you a lie about it being a lie.”

“Oh, go fuck yourself.”

“You tried that, too. Remember? You still couldn’t get infected.”

•

Later, Foord remembered to check the figure on the Bridge. It was empty and unmoving. Smithson’s dimensions and features had drained out of it; what remained was smaller, roughly humanoid, but blank.

“Getting ready for me, Commander,” Thahl said.

“Why did She leave you to last?”

“We’re in beam range, Commander,” Kaang said.

“Thank you. Hold this position. Cyr, start firing, please.”