It was just a flash, just a glimpse. Like the view of an unfamiliar room if you turn the lights on for an instant. Shapes and forms, relationships between things. I saw caverns, wormed-out and linked, and things moving through those caverns, bustling along with the frantic industry of moles or termites. The things were seldom alike, even in the most superficial sense. Some moved via propulsive waves of multiple clawed limbs. Some wriggled, smooth plaques of carapace grinding against the glassy rock of the tunnels.
The things moved between caves in which lay the hulks of ships, almost all too strange to describe.
And somewhere distant, somewhere near the heart of the rock, in a matriarchal chamber all of its own, something drummed out messages to its companions and helpers, stiffly articulated, antler-like forelimbs beating against stretched tympana of finely veined skin, something that had been waiting here for eternities, something that wanted nothing more than to care for the souls of the lost.
Katerina's with Suzy when they pull me out of the surge tank.
It's bad - one of the worst revivals I've ever gone through. I feel as if every vein in my body has been filled with finely powdered glass. For a moment, a long moment, even the idea of breathing seems insurmountably difficult, too hard, too painful even to contemplate.
But it passes, as it always passes.
After a while I can not only breathe, I can move and talk.
'Where--'
'Easy, Skip,' Suzy says. She leans over the tank and starts unplugging me. I can't help but smile. Suzy's smart - there isn't a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial - but she's also beautiful. It's like being nursed by an angel.
I wonder if Katerina's jealous.
'Where are we?' I try again. 'Feels like I was in that thing for an eternity. Did something go wrong?'
'Minor routing error,' Suzy says. 'We took some damage and they decided to wake me first. But don't sweat about it. At least we're in one piece.'
Routing errors. You hear about them, but you hope they're never going to happen to you.
'What kind of delay?'
'Forty days. Sorry, Thom. Bang goes our bonus.'
In anger, I hammer the side of the surge tank. But Katerina steps towards me and places a calming hand on my shoulder.
'It's all right,' she says. 'You're home and dry. That's all that matters.'
I look at her and for a moment remember someone else, someone I haven't thought about in years. I almost remember her name, and then the moment passes.
I nod. 'Home and dry.'
Like two other stories in this collection, 'Beyond the Aquila Rift' owes its existence to that excellent and energetic editor, Peter Crowther. In 2003, Pete announced that he was putting together a book entitled Constellations, which would be a logical follow-on from his earlier anthologies Moon Shots and Mars Probes. I was pleased to be asked to contribute a story, but time was pressing on with my novel deadline, and I didn't feel that I had any story ideas that were suitable for the theme. Still, it never pays to make snap judgments, and by the time I got back from lunch in town, I thought I had enough of an idea to start work on this story. That's the way I usually work, by the way: I don't wait until I've got the fully formed architecture of a story clear in my head before starting. I need some idea of where things are going, but I generally only have a very vague notion of how a particular piece is going to end. (And if I do know the ending with any certainty, I write it first and then work backwards from that point.)
With 'Beyond the Aquila Rift', I just knew that it was going to be about being stranded, with the exact nature of that stranding not being fully revealed until the end of the story. The structure of the story only became clear as I got into its innards. As for the title, well, there really is a feature in space known as the Aquila Rift, and it always seemed to me to be crying out to be used in the title of a story. I mean, how space-operatic does that sound? In any case I had a lot of fun trying to work some real astronomy into this one, and I hope it goes some way to conveying that mingled impression of wonder and terror that I know I get when looking into the night sky, trying to imagine just how incomprehensibly far away all those little dots of light are . . . while knowing that the visible stars are barely any distance away at all compared to the nearest galaxies. Science fiction has many strategies for evoking 'sense of wonder', but the dizzying shift of scale must still count as one of the most effective. The working title for this story, incidentally - before I settled on the Aquila Rift as a point of reference - was 'Under the Milky Way Tonight'. Which may or may not mean something to readers of a certain age.
ENOLA
Lucky Kodaira worked days in the stalls and bazaars of Cockatoo's Crest. There she sold trinkets gathered during the winter months, when the Kodaira family travelled north into the great deserts of the Empty.
The trinkets were small things, relics fashioned hundreds of years earlier by the folk who had lived before the silver light of the Hour. Some trinkets spoke in shrill voices, frequently in the languages of the northern islands. Others were valuable merely for their antique charm. Some showed images of the dead, like the hologram faces she wore in a chain around her neck. There were syrinx-boxes that sang without ever repeating a single refrain. Others were mere curios: a paperweight fashioned in the shape of Broken Bridge, standing intact. Liquid metal in the flashing glass-labyrinth of a toy bagatelle board, like a chromed slug. A tiny globe, showing the world as it appeared from space, marked darkly against sepia parchment. Lucky Kodaira liked that one so much that she hid it at the back of her tray.
With a strip of cloth looped over her shoulders, she wore the wooden tray the whole time, the Kodairas lacking sufficient prestige to afford a stall. Come noon, tired from the endless haggling and arguing, Lucky would leave Cockatoo's Crest for an hour and walk into the latticed shadow of Broken Bridge. There she would sit and eat fruit and dried-meat pastries. She listened to the music coming from the Cockatoo's drummers. She dipped toes in the water and turned the holograms in her necklace against the sky. She liked gazing into the faces of the dead, rilled in rainbow colours of great subtlety. As the drums rattled, Lucky filled in the gaps with half-formed melodies, imagining that she had made the real music, from which her melodies were traceries, in another life not far from where she now sat.
With sunset, she would leave the markets, money in a purse, and walk across the bobbing pontoons of New Bridge to the south where she would meet her uncle in the auto-repair shop and then catch the bus home. That was her favourite time of day, the setting sun lighting the barrage balloons tethered from the skyscrapers, turning them into gold Christmas baubles.
Each year there were fewer balloons. Sometimes the tethers snapped, sometimes balloons came down overnight, draping across the canopies of the plane trees. In the past, when there had still been Enolas in the air, a constant effort was required just to maintain the barrages. But because no one had seen an Enola for years, the barrage balloons had been allowed to fall into quiet disrepair. Only the old worked on the balloons now, camped in the penthouses, furiously sewing, repairing the quilted mylar, criticising the youngsters for their all-night carousing.
Once, her uncle said, the balloons had formed a curtain surrounding the city. She didn't like the sound of that, for surely the sun would have been blocked out most of the time. But the old days seemed unpleasant all round, if the stories that the Pastmasters told were halfway accurate.
But as Uncle Kodaira always said: Who could honestly tell?
They lived in one room of a red building called the Monk's Hostel, shrouded by cool trees, home to nomadic families during summer. Kodaira knew most of the other traders; they had met out in the Empty, pausing to swap engine parts or oil for their overlanders. The Empty was big enough, the city itself big enough, that no one encroached upon the potential wealth of anyone else. So much had been manufactured before the Hour that you only had to scrape away a few centimetres of dirt anywhere in the Empty before you found something bright, n
ew and unfamiliar that some city-dweller would cough up plenty for.
Nightly, in the atrium of the Monk's Hostel, families converged around trestles and dined, then invariably drank and sang together. There were stories to relate, reminiscences to rekindle. Lucky, when she was allowed to stay up late, gulped in the atmosphere, wide-eyed with joy.
A woman trader passed the elder Kodaira a stein of beer, telling him that she'd seen a Maker out in the desert, still crawling along the flats, scavenging for metal and plastic. If there were Makers, someone said, in a tone of grim warning, then there might also be Enolas. But he was rebuffed; the Makers were made by people around the time of the Hour, while the Enolas had come from the sky, from the stars. The Enolas were all gone; none had been seen for ten or twenty years, and it was possible that for many decades there had only been one left, a straggler wily enough to avoid being shot down by the defences of the Makers. A roving Maker - that was interesting, no doubt about it - but no one should lose any sleep over it.
Uncle Kodaira laughed. 'There's more crazy stuff out in the Empty than any one of us imagines,' he said. 'Things I've seen . . . distant shapes on the horizon . . .' He took a swig of the beer. 'Way I reckon is, if there are still machines out there, they want to leave us alone as much as we want to leave them alone. Because it's only the smart ones that survived. And smart ones don't want trouble.'
'But Uncle, are there still Enolas?' asked Lucky.
'No way,' said the trader tenderly. 'The Enolas were bad things, once upon a time, but they're all gone now. Just like the dinosaurs I showed you in the museum, remember?'
And she did; she remembered the fallen bones, downy with dust, sprawled across shattered marble. But she didn't remember where the museum had been, what town it was.
She nodded. 'But the old people say the Enolas will return, don't they? And they don't say the dinosaurs will return.'
The trader knelt down, until he was face level with his niece. 'Darling,' he said. 'Why do you think they have to say that?'
She shrugged. 'Don't know. Maybe so they don't think they're wasting their time sewing all day.'
He laughed. 'That's half of it, for sure. The rest is so we younger people keep believing they're doing us some kind of big favour.' He stroked her chin. 'Because, darling, we keep them fed and warm. If we stopped thinking it was worth it, we'd have to run to the top of the skyscrapers and throw them all out of the windows. That'd stop them moaning, wouldn't it?'
For a moment she thought he was serious, then she caught the curve of his mouth, his mocking grin. If he could make light of them so easily, she thought, maybe they were wrong after all. Maybe they just liked sewing so much that they had to have a reason.
Kodaira wiped a rime of beer from his chin, then put down the stein and swept her from the floor.
'Know what I think, little princess?'
She looked into his eyes, fearing what he might say. 'No,' she said.
'Reckon it's way past your bedtime.'
She shook her head. 'I'll have the bad dream again, I know it.' But all along knowing that her words would have no effect, and who could blame her uncle anyway? She never could remember what the dream was about in the light of day.
Her eyes were closed to the walls of the Monk's Hostel, closed to the nicotine-darkened images of the Crucifixion. What she saw instead were the contrail-smeared skies of the battlefield, smoke rising into the stratosphere from wrecked machines on the ground.
She searched the horizon and noted the same silence she had heard for almost two hundred megaseconds. She was the last in the air; all the rest had gone to ground, burrowed or been destroyed by the hemispheric grid.
Stirring fitfully, she found a cooler place on her pillow, remembering faintly the globe she had hawked around Cockatoo's Crest. Saw it webbed over with a tracery of red lines, radiating out from two land masses she couldn't name, but knowing that she owed allegiance to one of those territories; saw flecks of golden light spangling the continents, filaments of the red tracery darkening permanently.
Then she slipped into the dream fully, drowning in memory rather than treading its sleepless shallows.
Into a dream of war.
The war, inasmuch as it meant anything to those who had initiated it, was now over. The grid was gone, neither side able to communicate with its scatterlings. Most population centres had suffered some attack, with many cities simply cratered out of existence. War zones were chaotic: troops deserting and reaggregating into mutinous brigades, hunting food, water and medical aid. Machines that had survived the first fifty minutes were loitering, awaiting instructions.
Machines like herself, prowling near enemy installations when she targeted the Factory module, rumbling across a sea of dunes.
She had dreamed of the encounter with the Factory many times, enough now to see it as the beginning of her transmigration. She had hardly been conscious when she engaged it, yet it had begun an evolution that had brought her . . . this far, across this much time and distance. Although it was just a damaged machine, long since wrecked, she felt strange affection for it. It was the affection she might have felt for an old, moth-eaten toy. She had planned to destroy it with a salvo of diskettes, deigning it too small a target for her warhead. Like a bee, she only had one sting, and she would not be around too long after using it.
She had cusped her wings and swooped in low, skimming the ground in a hypersonic approach profile.
She was a second from kill when the target lasered her.
The laser burst was not an attempt to shoot her down, but a message coded for the smartware of her electronic brain. It looked safe on first pass. All the same she spent several microseconds filtering the transmission for viruses before allowing it into her mind.
She cogitated on it for a few mikes more.
She grasped that it was a form of defence. It was unloading thousands of simulations into her brain. They showed her attack profile, releasing the diskettes, spreading into a nimbus of spinning flecks, then each being parried by counter-weapons from the Factory, before they had a chance to wreck it.
She understood the point of the argument after several more mikes: Go away; you're wasting your time with me - save your weapons for a target you'll have a chance of destroying for good. You're only looking at collateral damage here - a little degradation of my armour, a few minor systems failures . . .
And she thought, Yes, but what about the attack profiles you haven't considered? She saw other approach angles and release points. Working from the simulations she had been sent, she ran her own to investigate whether the Factory could parry those as well.
The results pleased her. According to her own predictions, the Factory would not be able to survive those particular attack strategies.
But what if she were wrong?
Rather than attacking, she decided to return one of her sims instead. She wanted to see how the Factory would respond to that. She still had time; she wouldn't have to commit to a particular profile for another point-two seconds.
All the time in the world.
She waited for the response, idly running self-diagnostics and weapons checks. After an age the Factory responded, blipping out another laser burst. She unpacked it, examined it from every angle.
It was too comprehensive, she realised. The Factory had run these sims already. It was playing games with her, calling her bluff. What it was telling her now was that, yes, she could take it out. But the catch was that it would destroy her as well.
Try that trick, I'm taking you with me, it seemed to say.
It wouldn't even bother trying to limit its own damage.
So think about it . . .
Yes, she needed time to think. More than point-two seconds. The situation was outside her smartware parameters. This was not a contingency anticipated by her designers, clever though they had made her.
She pulled out of the attack, sheathed her wings and went to ground, burrowing deep into the sand. When safe she deployed a remo
te to talk to the Factory, sending out a little, clawed decoy that popped out of the sand a kilometre from her actual position.
Straining hard against the inbuilt limitations of her programming, she considered the nature of the Factory.
It was a construction unit, scavenging for waste and wreckage, and manufacturing anything in its memory. It made equipment and weapons. It made, for instance, the enemy counterparts of herself.
She thought about that, letting the idea tick over for several more mikes.
Her brain lit up like a bagatelle board. She had an idea.
She hit the Factory with a detailed blueprint of herself, showing component failures, fatigue points, battle damage. Much of it true, some of it deftly exaggerated. She was careful to stress the functionality of her warhead, while making the rest of herself seem in bad shape. She hoped the point of the schematic was clear enough: Think again. I'm not going to be around much longer anyway. I might as well blow and take you out from where I'm sitting now . . .