Resolution (96 page)

(Both factions agreed on the likely effect of change, on the extent to which language influenced thought. What they disagreed on was whether new thinking was
desirable.)

Among the Admiralty Council - for by this time a single Admiral was no longer sufficient to rule all Pilots, inasmuch as leadership was required at all - Dirk had both supporters and enemies. Admiral Schenck was foremost among those who considered Dirk a dangerous anachronism.

In a long and bloody duel that began on Poincare Promenade among a startled crowd, ranged through Hilbert Hall and ended on Borges Boulevard, Dirk finally gained victory. They fought on many levels, through revolving layers of reality, and when Dirk struck the telling blow Admiral Schenck screamed as the air fractured into shimmering blood-red shards of geometry. Those shards swirled into a vortex, pulling Admiral Schenck inside.

Schenck died - dies still, and will forever die - crushed inside a fractal maelstrom whirling to eternity.

It was after this event that Ro, saddened and mournful, retired to the endlessly branching Aleph Annexe, where it was said that even her ship - whose whereabouts no-one knew - might be tucked away in some fractal pocket of Labyrinthine reality.

Sightings of Ro became increasingly rare, until such apparitions became the stuff of archaic legend and no-one remembered that she had once been an ordinary, feeling person who had loved in vain - Luis Starhome was long dead - and raised sons who had not turned out the way she expected.

But Aleph Annexe held wonders to beguile an enquiring mind, and miracles to soothe any hurt, in mazes that could never end.

Myths and rumours.

There were tales of a disfigured man with a scarred face and claw hand who appeared on the worlds of humankind, quietly recruiting people to his cause. He was never seen in Labyrinth; but those among the Pilots who might have been his followers became a powerful voice for moderation.

Perhaps such a body of opinion was one of the root causes of the Stochastic Schism. But it was also, centuries later, an inherent part of the Tri-Fold Way which healed the rift and unified Pilots once more.

Sigurd’s World was an isolated human colony with its own way of doing things. The Admiralty Council, through its network of observers and agents-in-place, became concerned at hints of offworld trade, of goods arriving from mu-space ... goods which had not been brought by Pilots.

Zajinets had been off the scene for some time, and the Admiralty’s suspicions turned in a different direction: that those worlds were creating pseudo-Pilots of their own. The processes which had resulted in Ro’s abilities were part design, part chance; anyone who thought about it expected that humankind somewhere, somewhen, would try to create Pilots again.

Pilots they could control.

The Admiralty sent a Pilot called Jared deVries to investigate undercover, in the realm of King Rasmus. But Rasmus’s Palace Guard had had a great deal of practice in counterespionage, and they laid ambush to deVries, imprisoned him and put out his eyes.

Dirk led the rescue raid.

Five ships burst into the sky above the Fastness Magnusson. The raiders descended in drop-bubbles against which graser fire spattered harmlessly; and then they were inside. When the rescuers departed with Pilot deVries, they left behind King Rasmus and his Palace Guard reduced to a collection of strewn corpses from whose eye sockets steam still rose.

It turned out that King Rasmus’s subjects had been trading with Zajinets, after all.

Dirk also commanded the much larger fleet which routed the Zajinets - one fleet of Zajinets at least - at the Battle of Mandelbrot Nebula. That was a long and deadly engagement inside mu-space featuring thousands of vessels on either side. Besides the violence, the battle was remembered for one other notable occurrence.

When the Zajinet position became untenable, they sent a message to the Pilots’ fleet. It was the only time they had ever delivered a syntactically straightforward statement, yet its meaning remained obscure.

<<... we leave you to your darkness ...>>

And then the entire surviving Zajinet fleet moved together to execute a manoeuvre whose audacity left the Pilots wondering about their own limitations. Golden mu-space rippled as the fleet turned and exited the fractal universe en masse.

But they did not return to realspace.

Instead, as the returning Pilots would analyse over and over, the Zajinets had treated mu-space like the ur-continuum it was, and used it as a launching point into an entirely different universe. Their destination might have been a parallel reality to the realspace they knew; or it might have been an unimaginable place where different physical laws applied.

The victory celebrations in Labyrinth were ... thoughtful.

Throughout the First Chaos Conflict and after its uncertain resolution, the worlds of humankind multiplied and diverged from each other. On the paradise of Fulgor, a new entity arose through the mediation of mu-space processors that were everyday devices to the Pilots who used them.

Pilots did not move openly during the Skein Wars (though their agents made a difference to many beleaguered humans), but they arranged the evacuation which saved some of that world’s inhabitants before the Anomaly engulfed it.

Different factions of the Stochastic Schism had divergent ideas about how closely to observe or even control the settled human worlds. Those who followed the Reconciled Path (which might or might not have been founded by Kian McNamara) watched closely yet did little to influence affairs.

The one thing no Pilot of any faction revealed to humanity was

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57

NULAPEIRON AD 3426

Tom hurled the lifeless crystal against the wall.

Bastard thing.

It bounced to the floor, lay still. The crystal had wiped its own contents, was empty now.

Then Tom looked around the small half-lit chamber and laughed. There was no-one to hear it besides himself. Phase space displays billowed around him.

It’s too late for stories.

A chime sounded.

Too late for any distraction.

The door shimmered open.

‘Planning teams are ready, Warlord.’ The soldier was young: far too young.

‘Good. Thank you.’

Eemur?

I’m ready, sweetheart.