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

She had no answer .

She tried to strengthen the fields and layer the alien machinery in more armour. None of that worked. The forms broke through, began to eat her ship—making more cubes. She put more energy into her containment. What else could she do?”

Throw them overboard, you wonder?

Well, yes. She considered something like that. But that would only be passing the problem on to some other traveller. The responsibility was hers alone. She felt quite strongly about that .

Still, the machinery was definitely damaged. She was sure of that. Otherwise the transformation would have been fast and unstoppable. Instead, she had achieved a sort of stalemate .

What next?

Suicide, perhaps—dive into a star. But the data offered no guarantees that this would be enough to destroy the machinery. It might make it stronger!

Not a chance she could take .

So instead she found this world. A ship in space is an easy thing to see, even across light years. A world offers better camouflage—it has mass and heat. She thought she could screen herself—drawing no attention from passers-by .

She was wrong .

The cubes were resilient, resourceful. Constantly testing her capabilities. They demanded more power, more mass. She converted more and more of her ship into the architecture of their prison. She died! But by then her living ship had grown to know her so well that her personality lived on inside it, haunting it as a kind of ghost .

Centuries blasted by .

Her ship protected and enlarged itself. It ate into the surrounding geology, bolstering the containment and consolidating its defenses. For the most part it had no need of her, this residue of what she had been. Once in a while it raised her from the shadows, when her judgement was required. She was never lonely. She’d burned through her capacity for loneliness, discarding it like an outmoded evolutionary stage .

But she had visitors, all the same .

Like us?

No, not quite. Not to begin with. To begin with they were just like her .

“THEY CAME,” THE voice said. “My sensors tracked them with great vigilance and stealth. I watched them, wary of their intentions. I risked collapsing my containment fields, until they were out of range. I did not want to be found. I did not want my mistake to become theirs. It was always a bad time.” It paused. “But I did not miss their company. They were not like me. Their languages and customs had turned unfamiliar. I was never sorry when they turned for space and left me undisturbed.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Believe what you like. It hardly matters, anyway. They stopped coming. A silence fell, and endured. It was broken only by the tick of pulsars and the crack and whistle of quasars half way to the universe’s edge. There were no more of my kind. I had no knowledge of what had become of them.”

“But you could guess.”

“It did not mean that I could give up, and allow what I had found to escape. So I slept—or ceased to be, until my ship had need of me again—and the stars lurched to new and nameless constellations. Twenty million orbits of my old world, two hundred thousand lifetimes. And then a new visitor—a new species.”

I guessed that we were still in the distant past.

“Did you know this culture?”

“I had no data on anything like them, dead or alive. Frankly, it disturbed me. It had too many limbs, a strange way of moving, and I wondered what it looked like outside of its armour. I wanted it to go away. I quietened myself, damped my energies. But still it came. It dug into me, seeking an explanation for whatever its sensors had picked up. I thought of simply killing it—it had come alone, after all. But there was another possibility open to me. I could take it, open its mind, learn from it. Fold its memories and personality into my own. Use its knowledge to better protect myself the next time.” A kind of shame or regretfulness entered the voice. “So that is what I did. I caught the alien, made sure it was incapable of escape, and pushed feelers through the integument of its suit and into its nervous system. Its anatomy was profoundly unfamiliar to me. But at one end of its segmented, exoskeletal body was a thing like a head and inside the brittle cage of that head was a dense mass of connected cells that had something of the topological complexity of what had once been my own brain. It was hierarchically layered, with clear modular specialisation for sensory processing, motor control, abstract reasoning and memory management. It was also trying very hard to communicate with its fellows—wherever they were—and that made it easy for me to trace the circuits and pathways of expression. Before long, I was able to address the alien through the direct manipulation of internal mental states. And I explained what was to become of it. Together we would be stronger, better equipped both to deal with the thing at the heart of me, and also to make my concealment more effective. I was sorry about what had needed to be done, but I made it understand that I had no choice at all.”

“How did it take it?”

“How do you think , Nidra? But very soon the question concerned neither of us. It had become me, I had become it. Our memories were a knot of entanglements. It understood my concerns. It grasped that there had only ever been one path. It knew that we had no choice about what we had become.”

“Forgiveness?”

“Acceptance.”

“But it didn’t end, did it? There were more. Always more. Other species…dozens, hundreds of them. Until we came!”

“You are no different.”

“Perhaps we aren’t. But this alters things, doesn’t it?” I still had my thumb on the trigger, ready to unleash a matter-antimatter conflagration. “You think I won’t do this? You’ve told me what you are. I understand that you acted…that you’ve been acting…for what you think is the common good. Maybe you’re right, too. But enough is enough. You have Teterev. It’s too late for her…too late for you, if I’m still reaching a part of her. But it stops with Lenka. She’s mine. She’s coming back with me.”

“I need her. I need to add her library of fears to my own. I need to make myself stronger.”

“It won’t work. It hasn’t been working. You’re stuck in a spiral…a destructive feedback loop. The more you try to make yourself impregnable, the more evident you become to the outside world. So you have to make yourself yet more impregnable…add to your library of fears. But it can’t continue.”

“It must.

“I tried to stop myself. But always they came. New travellers, new species. Nothing I did made myself invisible to them. I could not negotiate , I could not persuade , because that would have been tantamount to confessing the hard fact of my existence. So I did what I had always done. I hid. I made myself as quiet and silent as physics allowed, and willed them to leave. I dug into our mutual psychologies, trawled the ocean of our terrors, and from that sea of fears I shaped the phantasms that I hoped would serve as deterrence, encouraging newcomers to come no nearer. But it was never totally sufficient. Some were always too brave, or curious, and by force of will they reached the heart of me. And always I had no choice but to take , to incorporate , to turn them to my cause. To feed me their fears, so that I might better my defenses. Why do you think I had to take Teterev? She was the first of your kind—a new jewel, to place in my collection. She had been very useful, has Teterev. We are all very glad of her. Her fears are like a new colour, a new smell. We never imagined such things!”