Guardian of Night (26 page)

“I thought you would be leaving us at that point, Lieutenant Commander Talid. Off with your Mutualists.”

“I have not made that decision, Captain.”

Ricimer settled his feet back into the basin for a final pull on the nutrient bath. “What happens then depends very much on the humans,” Ricimer said. “You are the Mutualist, Hadria.” Ricimer’s nostrils tightened into a thin smile. “It will be time to practice what you preach. For all of us. We will all become good symbiots then.”

FIFTEEN

10 January 2076

Vicinity of 82 Eridani

USX
Joshua Humphreys

Griff Leher tugged his beard and surveyed V-CRYPT, the vessel xenology station. His work cubicle, decked out in puce and vomit-green fiber-coated separators, was not much smaller than his desk back in the New Pentagon. But there the similarity to CRYPT HQ ended. Instead of nearly fifty people working for him, and they in turn bossing dozens of other expers and civilians among them, he had exactly two fresh-from-IAS ensigns under him, one seemingly experienced warrant officer, Branton, as his station manager, and three exper specialists.

To call it a step down in prestige would be a massive understatement. He was now managing a xenology McDonalds.

There were also geists—many more aboard the craft than ever appeared on Earth, even in the relatively geist-friendly New Pentagon. One, DON, in charge of the local network and liaison with the vessel’s other internal-operations programs, got a kick out of appearing as a grizzled older man with a naval tattoo on one forearm. Leher was sure there was a story there but hadn’t checked into it yet.
 

The other, VIKI, was a low-level persona that did most of the janitorial work and added an extra level of security to chroma operations. The only words she and Leher ever exchanged was when she asked for his password when he came on duty, salted up, and wiied into the chroma.

The salt basin was a small ceramic sink protruding from the wall near the entrance portal. It held a scoop full of the granular material that carried the military acronym Nanotechnologically Interactive Reciprocal Communication and Environmental Interaction Substrate but was called “salt” by everybody, civ and military alike.

You shook a handful of it over your head as if you were sprinkling yourself with baby powder. You blew it into your ears with a bulb on the end of a whiffer. You dissolved it in saline (conveniently supplied nearby in a small bottle complete with dropper next to the salt basin) and dripped it in your eyes.

Ludicrously low-tech, Leher had always thought.

After that, you were wiied into virtual reality: the chroma.

The chroma was based on the same method as those old special effects in movies and television weather reports. The salt on top of your corneas filtered out a small segment of frequencies of incoming light. You hardly felt the lack in your color perception. And the salt that had migrated to the
inside
of your cornea projected the virtual environment in precisely those deleted colors.

The chroma fit over the real like a finely crafted mask. You knew there was a physical substrate under there, but what you interacted with was the mask. At this point, any room, corridor, or even empty space might come alive with keyboards, joysticks, floating files and folder icons, pull-down toolbars—there was scarcely any limit to possible designs. But the most important things you were able to see and interact with were geists.

Like all things in the chroma, geists appeared partially see-through, semiopaque. To make matters more confusing for the uninitiated, there were also geist representations of regular humans in other parts of the vessel who occasionally showed up in the chroma. When a vessel com message call came through, the geist of the caller would appear, and you could, if you wished, have a face-to-face conversation. Or not, if you just wanted intercom. In visual com, the human geists that appeared in the chroma were as transparent and ghostly as the a.i. personas.

Leher’s crew, geists and humans alike, were crammed into a square workspace that looked to be about twenty-five feet on each side. The bulkheads, ceiling, and deck were animated with crunch-crawl—traveling, semiautonomous swarms of nanotech bots. The ceiling came equipped with roving lights that followed you around and attempted, as best the crawl programming could manage, to provide more light for whatever you happened to be working on at the moment. If you were doing nothing, as was Leher at the moment, they hovered above you indecisively in groups of three or four like nervous fireflies.

The V-CRYPT walls were scarily transparent. Each wall had only a glint of semiopacity here and there worked precisely into its structure so that humans wouldn’t constantly walk into them. The floors—
decks
, everyone in the Extry called them, even on Earth—were semitransparent, as well. For all intents and purposes, he worked in a glass box floating in space.

Vertigo city for Leher.

The sceeve printer from his apartment was shoved into one corner. It was useless for now, but he was in the process of wiiing it to the
Humphreys
’s network and teaching DON how to communicate with it.

“So the point of the enzyme lacrimates is to provide a kind of patina to the esters,” Leher explained to DON, whose geist hovered nearby with an intent look painted on his blue-green ghostly face. “It’s a final coat of paint, if you want to look at it that way.”

“I get it,” DON replied. “But what is the chemical patina’s function in speech?”

“It creates conditionality. Something like a subjunctive. ‘If I were,’ ‘if he were.’ That sort of thing. It normally makes the whole thought-block subjunctive, but sometimes it’s only applied to one or two esters or an ester phrase. That’s when the meaning gets tricky.”

“Out of curiosity,” DON said, “how do we know any of this is true about the sceeve language? I mean, it is entirely smell-based.”

“That’s not exactly true,” Leher said. “You should think of them more as chemical sensors. As near as we can tell from the autopsies, a sceeve nasal ganglion is able to perform analysis on chemical markers it encounters. It contains a structure that’s a little p-chem spectrometer of amazing complexity, among other things. Lots of Earth animals have an analogous structure, although it is far less advanced in Earth fauna. It’s called a vomeronasal organ. Ever noticed how dogs will sometimes lift their lips up in that smiley-grimace when they meet a new animal or person?”

“I’m afraid I’ve never had a dog, sir,” DON replied without the least trace of irony. “But I know what you mean.”

“Yes, well, there’s a little organ on the top part of their gum that takes in pheromones, specialized nonvolatile chemical messengers, that kind of thing. They say the VNO is what gives some mammals their sixth sense and ability to smell fear and such.
Homo sapiens
is underdeveloped as a species when it comes to smell. So are most old-world apes and monkeys. We do have our moments, of course.” Leher glanced at DON, who blinked, nodded that he understood.

Am I that dry, that I bored a computer program?
Leher tugged his beard. No trim yet. Maybe a couple of days until he’d need one.

“Anyway, snakes have VNOs, too. That’s why they’re always flicking out their tongues. It gathers scents and delivers them to the VNO in the snake’s mouth when the tongue is retracted.”

“Interesting, Lieutenant Commander,” DON replied. DON flickered for a moment, as if he were losing the ability to remain in existence—

“Sorry to go off on this stuff,” Leher said apologetically. “I realize it fascinates me a lot more than most—”

DON’s geist disappeared entirely. It was replaced by DAFNE, the vessel-wide servant and the craft XO.

“Pardon me for interrupting, Lieutenant Commander Leher, but the captain has requested your immediate presence on the bridge,” she said.

Leher huffed. “Can you tell him I’m busy setting up the most important piece of equipment on his vessel and I would very much like not to be disturbed?” he said.

DAFNE was silent for a moment, with the implication that she was conveying his request to Coalbridge—although Leher very much doubted she actually was. As far as he could tell, DAFNE was not outranked by anyone aboard
except
for Coalbridge. Definitely not by himself, the lowly “craft creep.”

“I’m afraid Captain Coalbridge insists,” DAFNE answered after a moment. “He says we’re nearing our destination and, besides, he thought you might enjoy familiarizing yourself with other parts of the vessel since you’ve hardly left V-CRYPT for the past ten days.”

Leher reflected that he had no desire to familiarize himself with anything. He knew the way from his workspace to his cabin and back, and that was terrifying enough. Even though the cabins in the craft were opaque for privacy, the connecting passageways and accessways were
not
. The decks had the transparency of frosted glass, and the bulkheads and ceiling were invisible. They were Q-built, fields of force with no material being.

Leher pictured the vessel’s Central Operations Area, the CORE, as a giant carbuncular diamond, shot through with empty cracks for passageways. The cracks could be reconfigured, however, and were shifted around like moving erector parts to best facilitate crew movement.

Moving cracks, Leher thought. He had a recurring mental image of himself making a misstep while traversing one of those crack-corridors and walking right out into the void. Dropping immediately into N-space. Choking, his lungs exploding. Eyeballs inflating from interior pressure, popping out like cueballs.

He knew this was hardly possible. The servants were well in control of the internal environment. Nobody had ever been accidentally spaced in the whole history of the Extry. Still, who was to say that Griff Leher might not be the first?

His hand moved to his jacket pocket, his fingertips touching the edge of a protruding postcard.

If I have to, I’ll stop right here and write,
Leher thought.
Mail went out yesterday in the drone, but I should still be able to get it in today’s MDR.

No. Continuance approved. Go on.

The way to the bridge proved to be particularly heinous. DAFNE guided him with a pale pink line that lit along the left side of the passageway at eye level and then faded back to nothingness as he passed. Even though the occasional crew member bustled past him, reminding Leher that he was in a working vessel, still he felt as if he were following a will-o’-the-wisp into the Fairy Dark.

Soon the passageway began to curve upward sharply—or at least in what gave every visual cue of being an upward direction—but the pseudogravity remained constant and mildly sticky, so that he felt no exertion in “climbing” up the corridor.

The view of the craft, he supposed, would be spectacular to most others.

What you saw were the cabins, cargo bays, rec rooms, messes, meeting spaces. These appeared to be floating together, clustered in blackest space like a clump of glistening frog’s eggs suspended in invisible froth.

The stars beyond the froth were not mere twinkling pricks of light as they were on Earth. Because of the architecture of the quantum SQUID enclosures—the Q-bottles—that made up the vessel’s hull, some portions of the
Humphreys
were in a different relationship to space-time itself. Leher didn’t begin to grasp the math or even the concepts behind the math, but the effect was visible in the sky surrounding the vessel.

Most of the distant stars were distended lines, constantly in motion overhead, writing and rewriting themselves on the heavens above as the vessel hove in and out of Newtonian, or N-space, as the expers called ordinary space-time. But due to the weird Q-bottle topographically determined geometry, some of the stars, some of the galaxies in the Milky Way’s local cluster, in fact, were closer—at least closer in appearance—their electromagnetic representation twisted through the juxtaposition of superluminal flight and strong-force quantum interaction to a seeming extreme nearness. These heavenly bodies did not form as blurry lines as did the other stars but were perfectly represented as they might appear up close in N-space. They shone in the sky over Leher’s head with the brightness of lamps and lanterns. You could see the actual make up of some local cluster galaxies. The Magellanic cloud. The Andromeda Galaxy tilted on her edge, her stars a mass of pinpricks visible within her spirals.

Leher had to do everything he could to fight his compounding vertigo, his body’s insistence that at any moment he might fall
up
into those reaches. He closed his eyes against his internal spin, trudged forward.

“Christ, this is taking forever,” he mumbled.

“Actually, I have rerouted several other personnel for your convenience, Lieutenant Commander Leher,” said DAFNE. “With the optimal corridor restructuring I have created for your passage, the time from your office to the bridge is approximately one minute and thirty-five seconds shorter than it would be on average.” DAFNE flashed what he guessed was supposed to be a helpful clock readout on the corridor side.

“I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.

“Keep giving my personas and servant crew interesting assignments,” DAFNE replied immediately. “They like working with you.”

“That I can practically guarantee,” he answered.

The corridor finally ended, and Leher arrived at a hatchway. The hatch de-opaqued, and Leher stumbled into the bridge.

If he’d felt exposed before, that was nothing in comparison to the present assault on his equilibrium. The bridge was essentially an oval-shaped balcony suspended in space. There were no reassuring walls. No guardrails. Even the deck was only faintly visible, a pane of glassine emptiness under his feet.

It was inhabited by humans and blue-green geists, all bustling about on various tasks, moving with the harmony of watchworks.

Place looks haunted,
Leher thought,
by busy, busy ghosts.

Coalbridge was pacing around near the forward edge. Standing close—dangerously close!—to the edge of nothing.

“Griff! Good to see you,” Coalbridge said.