The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (137 page)

A hail from the elevator station, a simple language algorithm. Oga smiled to himself as he compared the vocabulary files to his own memory of his native tongue. Half a millennium had changed the pronunciation and many of the words of Taynish, but not its inner subtleties, the rhythmic and contextual clues as to which Aspect was speaking.

“Attention unidentified ship, this is Tejaphay Orbital Tower approach control. Please identify yourself and your flight plan.”

“This is the Oga of the Aeo Taea Interstellar Fleet.” He toyed with replying in the archaic speech. Worse than a breach of etiquette, such a conceit might give away information he did not wish known. Yet. “I am a representative with authority to negotiate. We wish to enter into communications with your government regarding fuelling rights in this system.”

“Hello, Oga, this is Tejaphay Orbital Tower. By the Aeo Taea Interstellar Fleet, I assume you refer to the these objects.” A sub-chatter on the data channel identified the cylinders, coasting in-system. Oga confirmed.

“Hello, Oga, Tejaphay Tower. Do not, repeat, do not approach the tower docking station. Attain this orbit and maintain until you have been contacted by Tower security. Please confirm your acceptance.”

It was a reasonable request, and Oga’s subtler senses picked up missile foramens unfolding in the shadows of the Orbital Station solar array. He was a runner, not a fighter; Tejaphay’s defences might be basic fusion warheads and would need sustained precision hits to split open the Aeo Taea colony cans, but they were more than a match for Oga without the fuel reserves for full scalarity drive.

“I confirm that.”

As he looped up to the higher ground, Oga studied more closely the berg cities of Tejaphay, chips of ice in the monstrous ocean. It would be a brutal life down there under two gravities, every aspect of life subject to the melting ice and the enclosing circle of the biosphere boom. Everything beyond that was as lifeless as space. The horizon would be huge and far and empty. City ships might sail for lifetimes without meeting another polis. The Taynish were tough. They were a race of the extremes. Their birthworld and its severe seasonal shifts had called forth a social response that other cultures would regard as mental disease, as socialized schizophrenia. Those multiple Aspects – a self for every need – now served them on the hostile vastnesses of Tejaphay’s world ocean. They would survive, they would thrive. Life endured. This was the great lesson of the Clade: that life was hope, the only hope of escaping the death of the universe.

“Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own,
” a teenage boy in a yellow spacesuit had said up on the hull of mighty Amoa, looking out on the space between the stars. Oga had not answered at that time. It would have scared the boy, and though he had discovered it himself on the long flight from Milius 1183, he did not properly understand to himself, and in that gap of comprehension, he too was afraid. Yes, he would have said.
And in that is our only hope
.

Long range sensors chimed. A ship had emerged around the limb of the planet. Consciousness is too slow a tool for the pitiless mathematics of space. In the split second that the ship’s course, design, and drive signature had registered on Oga’s higher cognitions, his autonomic systems had plotted course, fuel reserves, and engaged the scalarity drive. At a thousand gees, he pulled away from Tejaphay. Manipulating space-time so close to the planet would send gravity waves rippling through it like a struck gong. Enormous slow tides would circle the globe; the space elevator would flex like a crackled whip. Nothing to be done. It was instinct alone and by instinct he lived, for here came the missiles. Twenty nanotoc warheads on hypergee drives, wiping out his entire rearward vision in a white glare of lightweight MaM engines, but not before he had felt on his skin sensors the unmistakable harmonies of an Enemy deep-space scoopfield going up.

The missiles had the legs, but Oga had the stamina. He had calculated it thus. The numbers still came to him. Looking back at the blue speck into which Tejaphay had dwindled, he saw the engine-sparks of the missiles wink out one after the other. And now he could be sure that the strategy, devised in nanoseconds, would pay off. The warship was chasing him. He would lead it away from the Aeo Taea feet. But this would be no long stern chase over the light-decades. He did not have the fuel for that, nor the inclination. Without fuel, without weapons, he knew he must end it. For that, he needed space.

It was the same ship. The drive field harmonics, the spectrum of the fusion flame, the timbre of the radar images that he so gently, kiss-soft, bounced off the pursuer’s hull, even the configuration he had glimpsed as the ship rounded the planet and launched missiles. This was the same ship that had hunted him down all the years. Deep mysteries here. Time dilation would compress his planned course to subjective minutes and Oga needed time to find an answer.

The ship had known where he would go even as they bucked the stormy cape of the wandering neutron star. It had never even attempted to follow him; instead, it had always known that it must lay in a course that would whip it round to Tay. That meant that even as he escaped the holocaust at Milius 1183, it had known who he was, where he came from, had seen through the frozen layers of smart-ice to the Torben below. The ship had come from around the planet. It was an enemy ship, but not the Enemy. They would have boiled Tejaphay down to its iron heart. Long Oga contemplated these things as he looped out into the wilderness of the Oort cloud. Out there among the lonely ice, he reached a conclusion. He turned the ship over and burned the last of his reaction in a hypergee deceleration burn. The enemy ship responded immediately, but its ramjet drive was less powerful. It would be months, years even, before it could turn around to match orbits with him. He would be ready then. The edge of the field brushed Oga as he decelerated at fifteen hundred gravities and he used his external sensors to modulate a message on the huge web, a million kilometres across:
I surrender
.

Gigayears ago, before the star was born, the two comets had met and entered into their far, cold marriage. Beyond the dramas and attractions of the dust cloud that coalesced into Tay and Tejaphay and Bephis, all the twelve planets of the solar system, they maintained their fixed-grin gazes on each other, locked in orbit around a mutual centre of gravity where a permanent free-floating haze of ice crystals hovered, a fraction of a Kelvin above absolute zero. Hidden amongst them, and as cold and seemingly as dead, was the splinter ship. Oga shivered. The cold was more than physical – on the limits of even his malleable form. Within their thermal casing, his motes moved as slowly as Aeo Taea Parents. He felt old as this ice and as weary. He looked up into the gap between ice worlds. The husband-comet floated above his head like a halo. He could have leaped to it in a thought.

Lights against the starlight twinkle of the floating ice storm. A sudden occlusion. The Enemy was here. Oga waited, feeling every targeting sensor trained on him.

No, you won’t, will you? Because you have to know
.

A shadow detached itself from the black ship, darkest on dark, and looped around the comet. It would be a parliament of self-assembling motes like himself. Oga had worked out decades before that Enemy and Anpreen were one and the same, sprung from the same nanotechnological seed when they attained Class Two status. Theirs was a civil war.
In the Clade, all war was civil war
, Oga thought. Panhumanity was all there was. More like a family feud. Yes, those were the bloodiest fights of all. No quarter and no forgiveness.

The man came walking around the small curve of the comet, kicking up shards of ice crystals from his grip soles. Oga recognized him. He was meant to. He had designed himself so that he would be instantly recognizable, too. He bowed, in the distances of the Oort cloud.

“Torben Reris Orhum Fejannen Kekjay Prus Rejmer Serejen Nejben, sir.”

The briefest nod of a head, a gesture of hours in the slow-motion hypercold.

“Torben. I’m not familiar with that name.”

“Perhaps we should use the name most familiar to you. That would be Serejen, or perhaps Fejannen, I was in that Aspect when we last met. I would have hoped you still remembered the old etiquette.”

“I find I remember too much these days. Forgetting is a choice since I was improved. And a chore. What do they call you now?”

“Oga.”

“Oga it shall be, then.”

“And what do they call
you
now?”

The man looked up into the icy gap between worldlets.
He has remembered himself well
, Oga thought.
The slight portliness, the child-chubby features, like a boy who never grew up. As he says, forgetting is a chore.

“The same thing they always have: Cjatay.”

“Tell me your story then, Cjatay. This was never your fight, or my fight.”

“You left her.”

“She left
me
, I recall, and, like you, I forget very little these days. I can see the note still; I could recreate it for you, but it would be a scandalous waste of energy and resources. She went to you.”

“It was never me. It was the cause.”

“Do you truly believe that?”

Cjatay gave a glacial shrug.

“We made independent contact with them when they came. The Council of governments was divided, all over the place, no coherent approach or strategy. “Leave us alone. We’re not part of this.” But there’s no neutrality in these things. We had let them use our system’s water. We had the space elevator they built for us, there was the price, there was the blood money. We knew it would never work – our hope was that we could convince them that some of us had always stood against the Anpreen. They torched Tay anyway, but they gave us a deal. They’d let us survive as a species if some of us joined them on their crusade.”

“They
are
the Anpreen.”

“
Were
the Anpreen. I know. They took me to pieces. They made us into something else. Better, I think. All of us, there were twenty-four of us. Twenty-four, that was all the good people of Tay, in their eyes. Everyone who was worth saving.”

“And Puzhay?”

“She died. She was caught in the Arphan conflagration. She went there from Jann to be with her parents. It always was an oil town. They melted it to slag.”

“But you blame me.”

“You are all that’s left.”

“I don’t believe that. I think it was always personal. I think it was always revenge.”

“You still exist.”

“That’s because you don’t have all the answers yet.”

“We know the kind of creatures we’ve become; what answers can I not know?”

Oga dipped his head, then looked up to the halo moon, so close he could almost touch it.

“Do you want me to show you what they fear so much?”

There was no need for the lift of the hand, the conjuror’s gesture; the pieces of his ship-self Oga had seeded so painstakingly through the wife-comet’s structure were part of his extended body.
But I do make magic here
, he thought. He dropped his hand. The star-speckled sky turned white, hard painful white, as if the light of every star were arriving at once.
An Olbers sky
, Oga remembered from his days in the turrets and cloisters of Jann. And as the light grew intolerable, it ended. Blackness, embedding, huge and comforting. The dark of death. Then Oga’s eyes grew familiar with the dark, and, though it was the plan and always had been the plan, he felt a plaint of awe as he saw ten thousand galaxies resolve out of the Olbers dazzle. And he knew that Cjatay saw the same.

“Where are we? What have you done?”

“We are somewhere in the region of 230 million light-years outside our local group of galaxies, more precisely, on the periphery of the cosmological galactic supercluster known as the Great Attractor. I made some refinements to the scalarity drive unit to operate in a one dimensional array.”

“Faster-than-light travel,” Cjatay said, his upturned face silvered with the light of the 10,000 galaxies of the Great Attractor.

“No, you still don’t see it,” Oga said, and again turned the universe white. Now when he flicked out of hyperscalarity, the sky was dark and starless but for three vast streams of milky light that met in a triskelion hundreds of millions of light-years across.

“We are within the Bootes Supervoid,” Oga said. “It is so vast that if our own galaxy were in the centre of it, we would have thought ourselves alone and that our galaxy was the entire universe. Before us are the Lyman alpha-blobs, three conjoined galaxy filaments. These are the largest structures in the universe. On scales larger than this, structure becomes random and grainy. We become grey. These are the last grand vistas, this is the end of greatness.”

“Of course, the expansion of space is not limited by light-speed,” Cjatay said.

“Still you don’t understand.” A third time, Oga generated the dark energy from the ice beneath his feet and focused it into a narrow beam between the wife-comet and its unimaginably distant husband.
Two particles in contact will remain in quantum entanglement no matter how far they are removed,
Oga thought.
And is that true also for lives
? He dismissed the scalarity generator and brought them out in blackness. Complete, impenetrable, all-enfolding blackness, without a photon of light.

“Do you understand where I have brought you?”

“You’ve taken us beyond the visible horizon,” Cjatay said. “You’ve pushed space so far that the light from the rest of the universe has not had time to reach us. We are isolated from every other part of reality. In a philosophical sense, we are a universe in ourselves.”

“That was what they feared? You feared?”

“That the scalarity drive had the potential to be turned into a weapon of unimaginable power? Oh yes. The ability to remove any enemy from reach, to banish them beyond the edge of the universe. To exile them from the universe itself, instantly and irrevocably.”