It felt like absolutely nothing — but a locus of nothingness which had somehow achieved a terrifying degree of organisation.
Was she seriously contemplating joining forces with this thing?
Maybe. If that was what it took to stop the Mademoiselle.
‘You can still back out,’ the woman said. ‘He’s busy at the moment — can’t spare his energies to invade you. But in a moment that won’t be the case.’
Now the aiming systems were at least under her control, although they operated sluggishly. She bracketed the cache-weapon, encasing the whole bulk in a potential sphere of annihilation. Now all that had to happen was for the Mademoiselle to surrender control of the weapons, if only for the microsecond necessary for them to slew, target and fire.
She felt them loosen. She — or rather, she and Sun Stealer — seemed to be winning. ‘Don’t do this, Khouri. You don’t know what’s at stake…’
‘Then clue me in, bitch. Tell me what’s so important.’
The cache-weapon was moving away from the hull, surely a sign that the Mademoiselle was worried about its safety. But the pulses of gravitational radiation were quickening, now coming almost too rapidly to separate. No guessing how long it would be before the cache-weapon fired, but Khouri suspected it could only be seconds away.
‘Listen,’ the Mademoiselle said. ‘You want the truth, Khouri?’
‘Damn right I do.’
‘Then you’d better brace yourself. You’re about to get the whole thing.’
And then — as soon as she had adjusted to being sucked into gunspace — she felt herself being sucked somewhere else entirely. The odd thing was that it seemed to be a part of herself she had until that moment completely overlooked.
They were on a battlefield, surrounded by the chameleoflaged bubbletents, the temporary enclosures of some hospital or forward command post. The sky above the compound was azure, cloud-streaked, but littered with dirty, intermingling vapour trails. It was as if some world-spanning squid were spilling its viscera into the stratosphere. Sowing the trails, and darting between them, were numerous arrow-winged jet aircraft. Lower, there were drone-dirigibles and, lower still, bulbous-bodied transport helicopters, tilt-wings and veetols, skimming the periphery of the compound, occasionally dropping to disgorge armoured personnel carriers or walking troops, ambulances or armed servitors. There was a scorched, grass-covered apron to one side of the compound, where six delta-winged, windowless aircraft were parked on skids, their upper surfaces precisely mimicking the sun-bleached hue of the ground, their VTOL irises open for inspection.
Khouri felt herself stumbling, falling towards the grass at her feet. She wore chameleoflage fatigues, currently emitting in dappled khaki. There was a lightweight projectile weapon in her hands, its alloy grip contour-moulded to match her palm. She was helmeted, a two-d readout monocle dangling down from the helmet’s rim, showing a false-colour heat-map of the battlezone, telemetered from one of the dirigibles.
‘This way, please.’
A whitehat was directing her into one of the bubbletents. Inside, an aide took her gun, ident-chipped it and racked it with eight other weapons, varying in firepower from projectile units like her own to medium-yield party-poopers and a ferocious shoulder-held ack-am weapon, something one would really not want to use on the same continent as one’s adversary. The feed from the dirigibles fuzzed and vanished, occluded by the anti-surveillance shroud around the bubbletent. She reached up with her now free hand and flicked the monocle back over the helmet rim, raking a strand of sweaty hair away from her eye with the same movement.
‘Through here, Khouri.’
They led her into a partitioned back area of the tent, through a room filled with bunkbeds, injured, and quietly humming med-servitors, craning over their patients like mechanised green swans. From outside she heard a shriek of jets, then a series of concussive explosions, but no one inside the tent seemed to even notice the sound.
Finally they let her into a tiny, square-walled room outfitted with a single desk. The walls were draped with the transnational flags of the Northern Coalition and there was a large bronze-mounted globe of Sky’s Edge on one corner of the desk. The globe was currently in geological mode, showing only the varying landmasses and terrain-types on the surface, rather than the hotly contested political boundaries. But Khouri paid it no more than cursory attention, because what snared her attention was the person sitting behind the desk, in full military dress: cross-buttoned olive-drab tunic, gold epaulettes, a conspicuous panoply of NC medals ranked across his chest, his black hair slicked back in brilliant grooves.
‘I’m sorry,’ Fazil said. ‘That it had to happen this way. But now that you’re here…’ He motioned across the room. ‘Have a seat; we need to talk. Rather urgently, as it happens.’
Khouri recalled, distantly, another place. She remembered a chamber, metallic, containing a seat, but while there was something about the memory that made her nervous — as if time were precious — it felt unreal compared to the present, which was this room. Fazil absorbed her attention totally. He looked exactly as she remembered him (remembered him from where, she wondered?), although his cheek bore evidence of a scar she did not recall, and he had grown a moustache, or at least (she could not be sure) changed something about the one he had worn last time; thickened it or allowed it to grow out from simply thick black stubble, to the point where it now had the onset of a rakish droop on either side of his upper lip.
She did as he had suggested, easing herself into a folding chair.
‘She — the Mademoiselle — worried that it might come to this,’ Fazil said, his lips barely moving, or seeming to move, beneath the moustache. ‘So she took certain measures. While you were still on Yellowstone, she implanted a series of closed-access memories. They were tagged to activate — to become accessible to your conscious mind — only when she deemed them useful.’ He reached across the desk and spun the globe, allowing it to whir before stopping it abruptly. ‘As a matter of fact, the process of unlocking those memories began some while ago. Do you remember a slight migraine attack in the elevator?’
Khouri grasped for some anchor-point; some objective reality she could place her trust in. ‘What is this?’
‘A convenience,’ Fazil said. ‘Woven partially out of existing memory patterns the Mademoiselle appropriated and found useful. This meeting, for instance — isn’t it a little like how we first met, darling? That time in the ops unit on Hill Seventy-Eight, in the central provinces campaign, before the second red-peninsula offensive? You’d been sent to me because I needed someone for an infiltration mission; someone with knowledge of the unshielded SC-controlled sectors. We made a great team, didn’t we? In more ways than one.’ He fondled his moustache and tapped the globe again. ‘Of course, I didn’t — or rather she didn’t — bring you here just to reminisce. No; the mere fact that this memory has been accessed means that certain truths have to be revealed to you. The question is, are you ready for them?’
‘Of course I’m…’ Khouri trailed off. What Fazil was saying made no sense, but she was being troubled by that memory of the other place; of the brutal chair in the metallic room. She had the feeling something was unresolved there — even, possibly, in the process of being resolved. She felt that, wherever that room was, she was meant to be there, adding her weight to the struggle. Whatever that struggle concerned, she had the sense that there was not much time left, and certainly not enough for this diversion.
‘Oh, don’t worry about that,’ Fazil said, appearing to read her mind. ‘None of this is really taking place in realtime; not even the accelerated realtime of the gunnery. Haven’t you ever had it happen to you that someone wakes you abruptly from a dream, and yet somehow their actions were incorporated into the dream’s narrative, long before they actually woke you? You know what I mean: your dog licks your face to wake you, and in your dream you fall overboard from a ship into the sea. Yet you’d been on that ship for the entirety of the dre
am.’ He paused. ‘Memory, Khouri. Memory being laid down instantaneously. The dream felt real, but it was created in an instant when the dog began licking your face. Back-constructed. You never actually lived through it. It’s the same with these memories.’
Fazil’s mention of the gunnery had crystallised the concept of the room. More than ever she felt as if she had to be back there, engaging in a struggle. The details of it still escaped her, it seemed very important that she rejoin it.
‘The Mademoiselle,’ Fazil continued, ‘could have selected any venue from your past, or manufactured one from scratch. But she felt that — in some way — it would assist matters if you were put in a frame of mind where the discussion of military matters seemed natural.’
‘Military matters?’
‘Specifically, a war.’ He smiled then, causing the tips of his moustache to angle momentarily upwards, like a demonstration of the engineering principles of a cantilever bridge. ‘But not one you’re likely to have ever read about. No; I’m afraid it happened rather too long ago for that.’ He stood without warning, pausing to straighten his tunic, tugging down the belt. ‘It might help if we adjourned to the briefing room, actually.’
TWELVE
Sky’s Edge, 61 Cygni-A, 2483 (simulated)
The briefing room into which Fazil escorted Khouri was unlike any she had ever visited. It was clearly far too large for the bubbletent to have ever held it. And while Khouri had experienced many projection devices, none of them would have been capable of displaying the thing that was now being presented to her. It covered the entire floor, across a space about twenty metres wide, and was circumnavigated by a metal-railinged walkway.
It was a map of the entire galaxy.
And what made it impossible that the map could ever have been projected by the devices with which she was familiar was one simple fact. Looking at it, she apprehended — saw, and, somehow noted — every single star in the galaxy, from the coolest, barely fusing brown dwarf up to the brightest, transient white-hot supergiant. And it was not just that every star in the galaxy was there to be noticed, if her gaze chanced upon it. It went beyond that. It was, simply, that the galaxy was knowable in one glance. She was assimilating it in its entirety.
She counted the stars.
There were four hundred and sixty-six billion, three hundred and eleven million, nine hundred and twenty-two thousand, eight hundred and eleven of them. As she watched, one of the white supergiants expired in a supernova, so she revised her count down by one.
‘It’s a trick,’ Fazil said. ‘A codification. There are more stars in the galaxy than there are cells in the human brain, so for you to know them all would tie up an undesirable fraction of your total connective memory. Which doesn’t mean that the sensation of omniscience can’t be simulated, of course.’
The galaxy was in fact too perfectly detailed to really be described as a map. Not only had every star been accorded due prominence — colours, sizes, luminosities, binary associations, positions and space velocities all represented with absolute fidelity — but there were also star-forming regions, wispish, gently glowing veils of condensing gas, in which were embedded the hottening embers of embryo suns. There were newly formed stars surrounded by disks of protoplanetary material, and — where she cared to apprehend them — planetary systems themselves, ticking round their central suns like microscopic orreries, at a vastly accelerated rate. There were also aged stars which had ejected shells of their own photospheres into space, enriching the tenuous interstellar medium: the basic protoplasmic reservoir from which future generations of stars, worlds and cultures would eventually be created. There were regular or irregular supernova remnants, cooling as they expanded and shed their energy to the interstellar medium. Sometimes, at the heart of one of these stellar death-events, she observed a newly forged pulsar, emitting radio bursts with ever-slowing but stately precision, like the clocks in some forgotten imperial palace which had been wound one final time and would now tick until they died, the time between each tick lengthening towards some chill eternity. There were also black holes in the hearts of some of these remnants, and one massive (though now dormant) one at the heart of the galaxy, surrounded by an attendant shoal of doomed stars which would one day spiral into its event-horizon and fuel an apocalyptic burst of X-rays as they were ripped asunder.
But there was more to this galaxy than astrophysics. As if a new layer of memories had been quietly overlaid over her previous ones, Khouri found herself knowing something more. That the galaxy was teeming with life; a million cultures dispersed pseudo-randomly across its great slowly rotating disk.
But this was the past — the deep, deep past.
‘Actually,’ Fazil said, ‘somewhere in the region of a billion years ago. Given that the Universe is only about fifteen times older than that, that’s quite a hefty chunk of time, especially on the galactic timescale.’ He was leaning over the railinged walkway next to her, as if they were a couple pausing to stare at their reflections in a dark, bread-strewn duckpond. ‘To give you some perspective, humanity didn’t exist a billion years ago. In fact, neither did the dinosaurs. They didn’t get around to evolving until less than two hundred million years ago; a fifth of the time we’re dealing with here. No; we’re deep into the Precambrian here. There was life on Earth, but nothing multicellular — a few sponges if you were lucky.’ Fazil looked at the galaxy representation again. ‘But that wasn’t the case everywhere.’
The million or so cultures (although she could be infinitely precise about the number, it suddenly struck her as childishly pedantic to do so, like specifying one’s age to the nearest month) had not all arisen at the same time, nor they did all hang around for the same length of time. According to Fazil (though she understood it on some basic level) it had taken until four billion years ago for the galaxy to reach the required state at which intelligent cultures could begin to arise. But once that point of minimal galactic maturity had been reached, the cultures had not all suddenly appeared in unison. It had been a progressive emergence of intelligence, some cultures having arisen on worlds where, for one reason or another, the pace of evolutionary change was slower than the norm, or life’s ascendancy was subject to more than the usual quota of catastrophic setbacks.
But eventually — two or three billion years after life had first arisen on their homeworlds — some of these cultures had become spacefaring. When that point was reached, most cultures expanded rapidly into the galaxy, although there were always a few stay-at-homes who preferred to colonise only their own solar systems, or sometimes even just their own circum-planetary environments. But generally the pace of expansion was rapid, with a mean drift rate between one tenth and one hundredth of the speed of light. That sounded slow, but was in fact blindingly fast, given that the galaxy was billions of years old and only a hundred thousand light-years wide. Unrestricted, any of these spacefarers could have dominated the entire galaxy in the totally inconsequential time of a few tens of millions of years. And maybe if it had happened like that — a neatly imperialist domination by one power — things would have been very different.
But instead, the first culture had been at the slower end of the expansionist speed-range, and had impacted on the expansion wave of a second, younger upstart. And while younger, the second civilisation was not technologically inferior to the first, nor less capable of mustering aggression when it was required. There was what — for want of a better word — one might describe as a galactic war; a sudden sparking friction where these two swelling empires brushed against one another, grinding like vast flywheels. Soon, other ascendant cultures were embroiled in the conflict. Eventually — to one degree or another — several thousand spacefaring civilisations fell into the fray. They had many names for it, in the thousand primary languages of the combatants. Some of these names could not easily be translated into any meaningful human referent. But more than one culture called it something which might — with due allowance for the crudities of interspecies commun
ication — be termed the Dawn War.
It was a war encompassing the entire galaxy (and the two smaller satellite galaxies which orbited the Milky Way) — one which consumed not just planets, but whole solar systems, whole star systems, whole clusters of stars, and whole spiral arms. She understood that evidence of this war was visible even now, if one knew where to look. There were anomalous concentrations of dead stars in some regions of the galaxy, and still-burning stars in odd alignments; husked components of weapons-systems light-years wide. There were voids where there ought to have been stars, and stars which — according to the accepted dynamics of solar-system formation — ought to have had worlds, but which lacked them: only rubble, cold now. The Dawn War had lasted a long, long time — longer even than the evolutionary timescale of the hottest stars. But on the timescale of the galaxy, it had indeed been mercifully brief; a transforming spasm.
It was possible that no culture emerged intact; that none of the players who entered the Dawn War actually emerged, victorious or otherwise. The lengthscale of the war, while short by galactic time, was nonetheless hideously long by species-time. It was long enough for species to self-evolve, to fragment, to coalesce with other species or assimilate them, to remake themselves beyond recognition, or even to jump from organic to machine-life substrates. Some had even made the return trip, becoming machine, then returning to the organic when it suited their purposes. Some had sublimed, vanishing from the theatre of the war entirely. Some had converted their essences to data and found immortal storage in carefully concealed computer matrices. Others had self-immolated.