Alastair Reynolds - Beyond the Aquila Rift - The Best of Alastair Reynolds

“Against the outside world?” I had my hands on her suit now, and I tried to rip the silver strands away from it, while at the same time applying as much force as I could to drag Lenka back to safety.

The voice said: “Nothing like that. I am a barrier against the thing that would damage the outside world, were it to be released.”

“Then I don’t understand.” I caught my breath, already drained by the effort of trying to free her. “Is Lenka going to become part of you? Is that the idea?”

“Would you sooner offer yourself? Is that what you would like?”

“I’d like you to let Lenka go.” Realising I was getting nowhere—the strands reattached themselves as quickly I peeled them away—I could only step back and take stock. “She came back here to find the monkey, not to hurt you. None of us came to harm you. We just wanted to know what had happened to Teterev.”

“So Teterev was the beginning and end of your concerns? You had no other interest in this place?”

“We wondered what was in the cave,” I answered, seeing no value in lying, even if I thought I might have got away with it. “We thought there might be Amerikano relics, maybe a Conjoiner cache. We picked up the geomagnetic anomaly. Are you making that happen? If so, you can’t blame us for noticing it. If you don’t want visitors, try making yourself less visible!”

“I would, if it were within my means. Shall I tell you something of me, Nidra? Then we will speak of Lenka.”

SHALL I TELL you what I learned from her, Captain? Will that take your mind off the cold, for a little while?

You may as well hear it. It will put things into perspective. Make you understand your place in things—the value in your being here. The good and selfless service you are about to commence .

She was traveller, too .

Not Teterev, but the original one—the first being, the first entity, to find this planet. A spacefarer. Admittedly this was all quite a long time ago. She tried to get me to understand, but I’m not sure I have the imagination. Whole galactic turns ago, she said. When some of the stars we see now were not even born, and the old ones were younger. When the universe itself was smaller than it is now. Young galaxies crowding each other’s heavens .

I don’t know if it was her, an effect of the magnetic field, or just my fears affecting my sense of self. But as she spoke of abyssal time, I felt a lurch of cosmic vertigo, a sense that I stood on the crumbling brink of time’s plungeing depths .

I didn’t want to fall, didn’t want to topple .

Sensible advice for both of us, wouldn’t you say?

The universe always feels old, though. That’s a universal truth, a universal fact of life. It felt old for her, already cobwebbed by history. Hard for us to grasp, I know. Human civilisation, it’s just the last scratch on the last scratch on the last scratch, on the last layer of everything. We’re noise. Dirt. We haven’t begun to leave a trace .

But for her, so much had already happened! There had still been time enough for the rise and fall of numberless species and civilisations, time for great deeds and greater atrocities. Time for monsters and the rumours of worse .

She had been journeying for lifetimes, by the long measure of her species. Travelling close to light, visiting world after world .

If we had a name for what she was, we’d call her an archaeologist, a scholar drawn to relics and scraps .

Still following me?

One day—one unrecorded century—she stumbles upon something. It was a thing she’d half hoped to find, half hoped to avoid. Glory and annihilation, balanced on a knife edge .

We know all about that, don’t we?

Your finger is moving. Are you trying to adjust that temperature setting? Go ahead. Turn up your suit. I won’t stop you .

There. Better already. Can you feel the warmth flowing up from your neck ring, taking the sting out of the cold? It feels better, doesn’t it? There’s plenty of power in the suit. You needn’t worry about draining it. Make yourself as warm as you wish .

Look, I didn’t say there wasn’t a catch .

Turn it down, then. Let the cold return. Can you feel those skin cells dying, the frostbite eating its way into your face? Can you feel your eyeballs starting to freeze?

Back to our traveller .

We have rumours of plague. She had rumours of something far worse. A presence, an entity, waiting between the stars. Older than the history of any culture known to her kind. A kind of mechanism, waiting to detect the emergence of bright and busy civilisations such as hers. Or ours, for that matter .

Something with a mind and a purpose .

And she found it .

“I’VE NO REASON to think you haven’t already killed Lenka,” I said, a kind of desperate calm overcoming me, when I realised how narrow my options really were.

“Oh, she is perfectly well,” the voice answered. “Her suit is frozen, and I have pushed channels of myself into her head, to better learn her usefulness. But she is otherwise intact. She has travelled well, this Lenka. I can learn a great deal from her.”

I waited a beat.

“Are you strong?”

“That is an odd question.”

“Not really.” I reached beneath my chest pack, fumbling with my equipment belt until I found the hard casing of a demolition charge. I unclipped the grenade-sized device, presenting it before me like an offering. “Hot dust. Have you dug deep enough into Lenka to know what that means?”

“No, but Teterev knew.”

“That’s good. And what did Teterev know?”

“That you have a matter-antimatter device.”

“That’s right.”

“And the yield would be…?”

“A couple of kilotonnes. Very small, really. Barely enough to chip an asteroid in two. Of course, I have no idea of the damage it would do to you.”

I used two hands to twist the charge open along its midline, exposing its triggering system. The trigger was a gleaming red disk. I settled my thumb over the disk, thinking of the tiny, pollen-sized speck of antimatter held in a flawless vacuum at the heart of the demolition charge.

“Suicide, Nidra? Surely there’s a time-delay option.”

“There is, but I’m not sure I’d be able to get to my ship in time. Besides, I don’t know what you’d do with me gone. If you can paralyse Lenka’s suit, you can probably work your way into the charge and disarm it.”

“You would kill Lenka at the same time.”

“Not if you let her go. And if you don’t let her go, this has to be a kinder way out than being sucked into you.” I allowed my thumb to rub back and forth over the trigger, only a twitch away from activating it. There was an unsettling temptation to just do it . The light would be quick and painless, negating the past and future in a single cleansing flash.

In that moment I wanted it.

WHAT WOULD YOU have done, Captain?

Her mistake?

That’s easy. The thing she found, in the wreck of another ship, seemed dead to her. Dead and exhausted. Just a cluster of black cubes, lodged in the ship’s structure like the remnant of an infection. But it had not spread; it had not destroyed the wreck or achieved total transformation into a larger mass. She thought it was dead. She had no reason to think otherwise .

Can we blame her for that?

Not me .

Not you .

But the machinery was only dormant. When her ship was underway, while she slept, the black cubes began to show signs of life. They swelled, testing the limits of her containment measures. Her ship woke her up, asking what it should do. Her ship was almost a living thing in its own right. It was worried for her, worried for itself .