Zima Blue and Other Stories (43 page)
'Are you absolutely sure you know what you're doing?'
'Goodness, no.' Merlin was reclining back in his seat, booted feet up on the console, hands knitted behind his neck. Ancient orchestral music was piping into the room, building up to a magnificent and doubtless delicately timed climax. 'Which isn't to say that this isn't an incredibly tricky manoeuvre, of course, requiring enormous skill and courage.'
'What worries me is you might be right.'
Sora remembered the times Captain Tchagra had sent probes into the Waynet, only to watch as each was shredded, sliced apart by momentum gradients that could flense matter down to its fundamentals. The Waynet twinkled because tiny grains of cosmic dust were constantly drifting into it, each being annihilated in a pretty little flash of exotic radiation. Right now, she thought, they were cruising towards that boundary, dead set on what ought to have been guaranteed destruction.
She tried to inject calm into her voice. 'So how did you come by the syrinx, Merlin?'
'Isn't much to look at, you know. A black cone, about as long as you're tall. Even in my era we couldn't make them, or even safely dismantle the few we still had. Very valuable things.'
'The Cohort wasn't overly thrilled that you stole one, according to the legend.'
'As if they cared. They had so few left, they were too scared to actually
use
them.'
use
them.'
Sora buckled herself into a seat.
She knew roughly what was about to happen, although no one had understood the details for tens of thousands of years. Just before hitting the Way, the syrinx would chirp a series of quantum-gravitational fluctuations at the boundary layer - the skin, no thicker than a Plancklength, which separated normal space-time from the rushing space-time contained within the Way. For an instant, the momentum gradients would relax, allowing the ship to enter the accelerated medium without being sliced.
That was the theory, anyway.
The music reached its crescendo now, ship's thrust notching higher, pushing Sora and Merlin back into their seats. The shriek of the propulsion system merged with the shriek of violins, too harmoniously to be accidental. Merlin's look of quiet amusement did not falter. A cascade of liquid notes played over the music: the song of the syrinx translated into the audio spectrum.
There was a peak of thrust, then the impulse ended abruptly, along with the music.
Sora looked to the exterior view.
For a moment it seemed as if the stars, and the nearer planets and sun of this system, hadn't actually changed at all. But after a few seconds she saw that they burned appreciably brighter - and, it seemed, bluer - in one hemisphere of the sky, redder and dimmer in the other. And they were growing bluer and redder by the moment, and now bunching, swimming like shoals of luminous fish, obeying relativistic currents. A planet slammed past from out of nowhere, distorted as if squeezed in a fist. The system seemed frozen behind them, shot through with red like an iron orrery snatched from the forge.
'Transition to Waynet achieved,' said the ship.
Later, Merlin took her down to the forward observation blister: a pressurised sphere of metasapphire that could be pushed beyond the hull like a protruding eye. The walls were opaque when they arrived, and when Merlin sealed the entry hatch, it turned the same shade of grey, merging seamlessly.
'Not to alarm you or anything,' the familiar said, 'but I can't communicate with the copy of myself from in here. That means I can't help you if--'
Sora kissed Merlin, silencing the voice in her head. 'I'm sorry,' she said, almost instantly. 'It seemed--'
'Like the right thing to do?' Merlin's smile was difficult to judge, but he did not seem displeased.
'No, not really. Probably the wrong thing, actually.'
'I'd be lying if I said I didn't find you attractive, Sora. And like I said - it has been rather a long time since I had human company.' He drew himself to her, their free-floating bodies hooking together in the centre of the blister, slowly turning until all sense of orientation was gone. 'Of course, my reasons for rescuing you were entirely selfless . . .'
'Of course . . .'
'But I won't deny that there was a small glimmer of hope at the back of my mind, the tiniest spark of fantasy . . .'
They shed their clothes, untidy bundles that orbited around their coupled bodies. They began to make love, slowly at first, and then with increasing energy, as if it was only now that Sora was fully waking from the long centuries of frostwatch.
She thought of Verdin, and then hated herself for the crass, biochemical predictability of her mind, the unfailing way it dredged up the wrong memories at the worst of times. What had happened back then, what had happened between them, was three thousand years in the past, unrecorded by anything or anyone except herself. She had not even mourned him yet, had not even allowed the familiar to permit her that particular indulgence. She studied Merlin, looking for hints of his true age . . . and failed, utterly, to detach the part of her mind capable of the job.
'Do you want to see something glorious?' Merlin asked later, after they had hung together wordlessly for many minutes.
'If you think you can impress me . . .'
He whispered to the ship, causing the walls to lose their opacity.
Sora looked around. By some trick of holographics, the ship itself was not visible at all from within the blister. It was just her and Merlin, floating free.
And what she saw beyond them was indeed glorious - even if some detached part of her mind knew that the view could not be completely natural, and that in some way the hues and intensities of light had been shifted to aid comprehension. The walls of the Waynet slammed past at eye-wrenching speed, illuminated by the intense, Doppler-shifted annihilation of dust particles, so that it seemed as if they were flying in the utmost darkness, down a tube of twinkling violet that reached towards infinity. The space-time in which the ship drifted like a seed moved so quickly that the difference between its speed and light amounted to only one part in a hundred billion. Once a second in subjective time, the ship threaded itself through shining hoops as wide as the Waynet itself: constraining rings spaced eight light-hours apart, all part of the inscrutable exotic-matter machinery that had serviced this galaxy-spanning transit system. Ahead, all the stars in the universe crowded into an opalescent jewelled mass, like a congregation of bright angels. It was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
'It's the only way to travel,' Merlin said.
The journey would take four days of shiptime, nineteen centuries of worldtime.
The subjective time spent in Waynet flight amounted only to twenty-three hours. But the ship had to make many transitions between Ways, and they were never closer than tens of light-minutes apart, presumably because of the nightmarish consequences that would ensue if two opposing streams of accelerated space-time ever touched.
'Aren't you worried we'll wander into Huskers, Merlin?'
'Worth it for the big reward, wouldn't you say?'
'Tell me more about this mystical gun, and I might believe you.'
Merlin settled back in his seat, drawing a deep breath. 'Almost everything I know could be wrong.'
'I'll take that risk.'
'Whatever it was, it was fully capable of destroying whole worlds. Even stars, if the more outlandish stories are to be believed.' He looked down at his hand, as if suddenly noticing his impeccably manicured fingernails.
'Ask him how he thinks it works,' the familiar said. 'Then at least we'll have an idea how thorough he's been.'
She put the question to Merlin, as casually as she could.
'Gravity,' he said. 'Isn't that obvious? It may be a weak force, but there isn't anything in the universe that doesn't feel it.'
'Like a bigger version of the syrinx?'
Merlin shrugged. Sora realised that it was not his fingernails to which he was paying attention, but the ornate ring she had noticed before, inset with a ruby stone in which two sparks seemed to orbit like fireflies. 'It's almost certainly the product of Waymaker science. A post-human culture that was able to engineer - to mechanise - space-time. But I don't think it worked like the syrinx. I think it made singularities; it plucked globules of mass-energy from vacuum and squashed them until they were within their own event horizons.'
'Black holes,' the familiar said, and Sora echoed the words aloud.
Merlin looked pleased. 'Very small ones, atomic-scale. It doped them with charge, then accelerated them up to something only marginally less than the speed of light. They didn't have time to decay. For that, of course, it needed more energy, and more still just to prevent itself from being ripped apart by the stresses.'
'A gun that fires black holes? We'd win, wouldn't we? With something like that? Even if there was only one of them?'
Merlin fingered the ruby-centred ring.
'That's the general idea.'
Sora took Merlin's hand, stroking the fingers until her own alighted on the ring. It was more intricate than she had realised. The twin sparks were whirling around each other, glints of light locked in a waltz, as if driven by some microscopic clockwork buried in the ruby itself.
'What does it mean?' she asked, sensing that this was both the wrong and the right question.
'It means . . .' Merlin smiled, but it was a moment before he completed the sentence. 'It means, I suppose, that I should remember death.'
They fell out of the Way for the last time, entering a system that did not seem markedly different from a dozen others they had skipped through. The star was a yellow main-sequence sun, accompanied by the usual assortment of rocky worlds and gas giants. The second and third planets out from the sun were steaming hot cauldrons, enveloped by acidic atmosphere at crushing temperature, the victims of runaway heat-trapping processes, the third more recently than the second. The fourth planet was smaller and seemed to have been the subject of a terraforming operation that had taken place sometime after the Flourishing: its atmosphere, though thin, was too dense to be natural. Thirteen separate Ways punched through the system's ecliptic at different angles, safely distant from planetary and asteroidal orbits.
'It's a nexus,' Merlin said. 'A primary Waynet interchange. You find systems like this every thousand or so light-years through the plane of the galaxy, and a good way out of it as well. Back when everyone used the Waynet, this system would have been a meeting point, a place where traders swapped goods and tales from halfway to the Core.'
'Bit of a dump
now
, though, isn't it.'
now
, though, isn't it.'
'Perfect for hiding something very big and very nasty, provided you remember where you hid it.'
'You mentioned something about a storm--'
'You'll see.'
The Way had dropped them in the inner part of the system, but Merlin said that what he wanted was further out, beyond the system's major asteroid belt. It would take a few days to reach.
'And what are we going to do when we get there?' Sora asked. 'Just pick this thing up and take it with us?'
'Not exactly,' Merlin said. 'I suspect it will be harder than that. Not so hard that we haven't got a chance, but hard enough . . .' He seemed to falter, perhaps for the first time since she had met him, that aura of supreme confidence cracking minutely.
'What part do you want me to play?'
'You're a soldier,' he said. 'Figure that out for yourself.'
'I don't know quite what it is I've found,' the familiar said, when Sora was again alone. 'I've been waiting to show you, but he's had you in those war simulations for hours. Either that or you two have been occupying yourselves in other ways. Any idea what he's planning?'
Merlin had a simulator, a smaller version of the combat-training modules Sora knew from warcreche.
'A lot of the simulations had a common theme: an attack against a white pyramid.'
'Implying some foreknowledge, wouldn't you say? As if Merlin knows something of what he will find?'
'I've had that feeling ever since we met him.' She was thinking of the smell of him, the shockingly natural way their bodies meshed, despite their being displaced by thousands of years. She tried to flush those thoughts from her mind. What they were now discussing was a kind of betrayal, on a more profound level than anything committed so far, because it lacked any innocence. 'What is it, then?'
'I've been scanning the later log files, and I've found something that seems significant, something that seemed to mark a turning point in his hunt for the weapon. I have no idea what it was. But it took me until now to realise just how strange it was.'
'Another system?'
'A very large structure, nowhere near any star, but nonetheless accessible by Waynet.'
'A Waymaker artefact, then.'
'Almost certainly.'
The structure was visible on the screen. It looked like a child's toy star, or a metallic starfish, textured in something that resembled beaten gold or the lustre of insect wings, filigreed in a lacework of exotic-matter scaffolds. It filled most of the view, shimmering with its own soft illumination.
Other books
Caged by Stephie Walls
Grooks by Piet Hein
Birthday Girl: Paolo's Playhouse, Book 3 by Natasha Moore
Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set by Scott Nicholson
Sergeant Nelson of the Guards by Gerald Kersh
Death in the Dolomites by David P Wagner
Sentinels of Fire by P. T. Deutermann
The Bastards of Pizzofalcone by Maurizio de Giovanni, Antony Shugaar
Confronted (Beauty And The Billionaire Geek Book 1) by Griffin, E.E.
