Dominion (7 page)

“That's what we call them,” Syl mumbled. “Those—”

But Fara interrupted her.

“Does this appearance disturb you?” she asked.

“A little,” said Syl.

“Why?”

“You look like someone who”—Syl tried to find the right words, but couldn't—“was—
is
—important to me.”

“Your mother.”

“Yes.”

“We—no, that should be I—
I
thought you would be pleased,” said Fara. “I thought you would be reassured. I felt your love for her.”

“She died when I was very young,” said Syl. “I have no memory of how she looked, except for pictures. When you appeared, you were so much like her, or so much like how I imagined she might have been.”

Syl seemed to be talking more to herself than to Fara, or perhaps even to the ghost of a dead mother.

“I can change,” said Fara. “I do not wish you to be distressed.”

Syl raised her eyes from the table and held Fara's gaze, although perhaps it wasn't a gaze, for the form was an organic composite. It had no need of the five senses, for it was a sense all its own.

“No,” said Syl. “I don't want you to change.”

Thula caught Paul's eye.
Not good
, his expression said.
Not good at all.

•  •  •

Back on the
Nomad
, Steven, Rizzo, and Alis were growing increasingly concerned. They had lost communication with Paul and the others from the moment that the docking bridge disengaged from their ship, and since then they had been watching what appeared to be signs of activity in the bay around them. The lights embedded in the fleshy walls of the ship had begun to form particular recurring patterns. At first, Steven thought that it might have been a trick of his imagination, caused by staring out of the cockpit window for too long, but Alis had picked up on them too, and had begun analyzing them, trying to determine what they might mean.

“I think it's a form of communication,” she said. “They're signals being sent from one part of the ship to the other.”

“By the crew?” asked Steven.

“I assume so, except . . .”

“Except?”

“There doesn't seem to
be
a crew. On a vessel this size, we'd surely have seen some sign of them by now. It's like a ghost ship.”

“But Syl felt them.”

“Syl felt something,” said Alis. “I don't doubt that. I'm just not sure it was the crew.”

“Maybe they're dead,” said Rizzo matter-of-factly.

“Then what was she hearing?” asked Steven. “Spirits?”

“When we were in basic training, Peris told me about an Illyri warship called the
Margus
. Did you ever hear of it?”

Steven shook his head, but Alis retrieved the details from her memory.

“I know of it, Rizzo. It was long before the Illyri encountered humanity—or any other advanced species, for that matter—and they had to do their own dirty work on far-flung planets. An infection was brought on board the
Margus
following an exploration mission to a new moon: a virus of some kind that the ship's medical systems failed to detect. It killed the entire crew; almost six hundred Illyri, all wiped out in a matter of hours, and the virus left no trace of its presence, beyond the bodies. When the remains were examined, they were found to be entirely clear of any lethal contaminant. It's one of the great mysteries of Illyri exploration: a ship floating through space, steered by corpses.”

“It was the early days of neural Chips,” said Rizzo. “They were always malfunctioning, according to Peris, and surgeons were forever having to perform tweaks on them. When the crew started to die, the Chips responded with some kind of spontaneous upload of data: fragments of speech, last messages to loved ones, all sent directly to the ship's systems. So when the first rescue crews entered the
Margus
, all they heard were the voices of the dead.”

“Ghosts in the machine,” said Steven.

“Even after they powered down the computers and rebooted, the voices were still there,” continued Rizzo. “No one could ever figure out where in the system they'd embedded themselves. Eventually, the
Margus
had to be entirely refitted, but even then a lot of Illyri preferred not to serve on it, apparently. It was said that the voices could still be heard, whispering in the background of open channels.”

“I thought the Illyri weren't superstitious,” said Steven. “They don't believe in an afterlife.”

“Oh, they didn't think that the ship was haunted,” said Alis. “It was just bad for morale. Eventually, the
Margus
was scrapped.”

“Bad for morale?” repeated Rizzo. “Right.” She blew air through her nose disdainfully.

“You think this might be another
Margus
?” said Steven to Alis.

“No, this is something stranger, and more advanced. Whatever is controlling this ship, it's not spirits.”

Steven was staring at her curiously.

“What?” she said.

“I don't want to offend you.”

“You won't.”

“That phrase, ‘ghosts in the machine,' I think I once heard it used about the Mechs' belief in a god. Your conviction that you had a soul was—”

“A system defect,” Alis finished for him. “A glitch. But what is a soul? Perhaps it's nothing more than a manifestation of our consciousness that survives the final destruction of our bodies. It is what continues. It is what endures. It is the ghost in the machine of the universe.”

The
Nomad
shook, and its cabin door opened. Once again, a bridge had connected it to the alien ship. As they turned to look, pinkish gel oozed into the cockpit and began to form a figure before them: first legs and a torso, then arms and a head. Rizzo leaped for the shotgun that was never far from her reach, but Steven shouted at her to stand down, his voice snapping out the command, and the highly trained fighter within Rizzo's nonchalant, tough-girl exterior had the sense to listen. Finally, a layer of pale skin formed itself over the figure, and it stood naked before them. It was female, and human, or apparently so.

“Follow me,” it said.

“I don't think so,” said Rizzo instinctively. She had never seen any reason to follow a naked stranger anywhere before, and wasn't about to start now.

Suddenly an image of Paul appeared between them and the woman, something like a hologram.

“It's okay,” Paul told them. “Just do as she asks. I think you need to see what we're seeing . . .”

T
he crew of the
Nomad
stood together at the center of a vast chamber filled with millions of sparkling lights that seemed both part of, and separate from, the alien vessel. As one light appeared, another was extinguished: a constant flickering that dazzled the eye. At first there was only silence, but gradually a low hum could be heard, and as it rose in volume they discerned the babble of an untold number of voices, all speaking in unison. This was the sound that Syl had heard.

This was the Cayth.

They were a race without physical form, a species that had long ago abandoned bodies. Bodies wasted away. They contracted diseases. Bones shattered, and organs failed.

But the mind . . .

How frustrating, how unjust, that a lively, active consciousness should cease to exist simply because the delicate frame that housed it went into decay. If the mind could be freed from the limitations of the body, then it might become virtually eternal.

And so the Cayth evolved, but they did not entirely abandon flesh, blood, and bone. They created organic computers, and biomechanical ships, and these they inhabited with their consciousness. They were both individual and collective: billions of distinct minds working together, so interwoven and interdependent that their identities had become, for all intents and purposes, one. Yet, as Fara and Kal had demonstrated, some element of their former individuality still remained, a dream of what once had been.

•  •  •

They returned to the observation deck, their eyes and ears still filled with the sight and sound of the Cayth. The hum continued, though, like a soothing white noise. Now they all looked at Kal and Fara differently, knowing that within their temporary physical forms, assumed for the benefit of their guests, they contained multitudes.

“It is interesting that you call them ‘Others,' ” said Fara, “while we refer to them as a contaminant.”

“How so?” asked Paul.

“Because to them, we are the others. We are the contamination.”

“I don't understand.”

“They are ancient,” said Kal. “They may well be the oldest living beings in the universe. To them, all other life is inferior.”

“To them,” Fara corrected him, “all other life is
prey
. They may appear simple—in their most basic form just a spore, a tiny thing—but they are impossibly complex. Within each spore is the potential for any number of evolutionary paths, depending upon the requirement of the species: food, knowledge, reproduction, infection. Destruction.”

“And they are in constant communication with one another,” added Kal. “They are not quite a collective, but individual manifestations of the life-form are capable of remaining in contact with others, even when light-years apart.”

“How?” asked Meia.

“Through what we believe is a form of quantum entanglement,” said Fara.

“Quantum entanglement remains a theory,” said Meia. “It has not been proved.”

“Nevertheless, we can find no other explanation for how the Contamination”—she paused and then corrected herself, deferring to the visitors—“no, for how the
Others
behave.”

“Excuse me a moment,” said Thula, “but could someone explain what you're talking about? What the hell is this quantum entanglement business?”

“How long do you have?” asked Meia.

“Explain it to me like I'm five,” said Thula, folding his arms across his chest in a challenge.

“And me too,” chipped in Rizzo, “but preferably in Italian.”

“It is a theory concerning very small particles—electrons, for example—that have interacted in the past, and then moved apart. Anything that affects one of those particles, such as an adjustment to its position or velocity, should instantaneously affect the other particle, no matter how distant they are.”

Now they all stared at Meia in bafflement.

“And that's the bambino version? Is it even worth telling you that nobody understood a word of what you just said?” said Rizzo.

“Don't feel bad—it's not you,” Thula told Meia. “Someone could be explaining to Rizzo how to open a door, and she wouldn't get it. Unless she can blow it up or shoot at it, it's all just Greek to her. Or Zulu.
Ngicela ukhulume kancane
, hey, Rizzo?”

“Screw you, Thula,” said Rizzo. “And what the hell does that mean, anyway?”

“It means, ‘Speak more slowly,' ” said Thula, and he winked at her.

Rizzo said something presumably obscene in Italian, though no one felt the need to ask for a translation, before returning her attention to Meia.

“What he just said,” Rizzo told her.

“That probably goes for all of us,” Paul added.

Meia sighed, and even rolled her eyes. Sometimes Paul had to remind himself that she was an artificial being. She grew more human—or more Illyri—with every passing day.

“Imagine you had a twin sister,” Meia explained, focusing on Rizzo, “and she was on Earth, and you were here. Well, quantum entanglement is the equivalent of someone tickling you here, and your twin sister back on Earth laughing.”

Rizzo considered what she had been told.

“That,” she said, after a few moments, “is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.”

“Albert Einstein agreed,” said Syl, dredging up a memory from her lessons on Earth. “He called it ‘spooky actions at a distance,' so he wasn't a big fan of quantum theory either.”

“Anyway,” said Fara, who had watched and listened with a combination of bemusement and irritation to these exchanges, “we believe that only some form of entanglement can account for the exchange of information between the Others.”

“What else can you tell us about them?” asked Paul.

Both Kal and Fara looked almost embarrassed.

“Very little,” said Fara. “They are hostile, without mercy, and concerned only with the propagation of their own species. They resist examination. If necessary, an individual spore will destroy itself rather than submit to testing of any kind, but that's purely a last resort. They prefer to attack. Infection is their best defense: a single spore lodges in a host organism, then uses the energy of the host to breed fragmentarily through asexual reproduction, with each new fragment capable of growing into a mature individual. Basically, one spore can turn its host into a kind of spore bomb.”

“We've watched it happen,” said Syl.

“My crew saw an entire planet being used as a breeding facility,” added Paul.

“And what did you do?” asked Fara.

Paul hesitated.

“We destroyed it,” he said.

“An entire world?”

“Yes. We irradiated it. On my orders.” Paul spoke defiantly, but he was annoyed to feel a blush of shame coming to his cheeks.

Fara smiled at him, but it was not triumphant, or gloating, merely sad.

“It's okay,” she said. “Nothing on it could have been saved from them.”

“You seem very certain of that,” said Meia.

Meia had not been present when Paul was forced to act so ruthlessly to halt the breeding program. She had heard something of it from Alis, but had kept her opinions to herself. Privately, though, she was appalled at the probable eradication of all life on the planet, and alarmed at the capacities of the young human lieutenant. But she also recognized a kind of muted admiration for him. No one so young should have been forced to make that decision—nobody of any age, if it came to that—yet he had acted as he thought best, and was now living with the consequences. Still, Meia did not want him to get a taste for such actions.