Линда Нагата - Edges

*Heh , she scoffed. *You were monitoring the cache?

*Yes , he admitted. He held his breath, waiting for her to say something more. Waiting. More seconds ticking past. Too many of them. When she finally did speak, her voice was hoarse, syllables catching in her throat:

*You want to know how I feel?

He didn’t answer. She knew the answer.

She said:

*I don’t blame you for it. That’s what you want to hear, right? And it’s true. You did what you had to do. You did what I hope I would have done.

Another long pause—his gratitude made this one easier to endure—before she added, *I didn’t think you had it in you .

She might have meant that as an insult or a compliment, he didn’t care. He only wanted to know, *Are we okay?

*We will be , she assured him. *Now go. I need to grieve.

Kona ghosted in the library, afloat within a virtual space that showed him the cosmos outside, as if the ship’s substance had all gone transparent, leaving him adrift in the void, surrounded by two hundred billion stars and the dark streamers of molecular clouds that would someday forge more suns, more worlds, more potential for life.

They were a year out from Deception Well.

Looking back—looking swan —the brilliant beacon of faraway Alpha Cygni was still easy to pick out, but he could no longer distinguish Kheth, the Well’s sun, from the scattered stars beyond it. He could ask a Dull Intelligence to find Kheth for him, to draw a circle around it or artificially increase its apparent magnitude, but on his own, he’d lost track of it.

Back there somewhere lay his past. Centuries of joy and grief, terror and hope, struggle and disappointment—and quiet triumph because his people had survived. They would survive, Kona was confident of that, but the burden wasn’t his anymore and with every passing day, he felt the weight of those years slowly lifting. As the distance separating him from Deception Well accumulated, he felt himself renewed, reinvigorated, gifted with new purpose.

He turned to look ahead. He was no astronomer, but he knew enough to pick out some of the closer stars of the Hallowed Vasties. There was Ryo, and Tanjiri, Quin-ken, Bengali. Somewhere farther, the Sun.

Did Earth still exist? Did it still rotate to a twenty-four hour day? Still revolve in a three hundred sixty-five day year? Did it still harbor some vestige of the life that had arisen there, miraculous result of a long chain of incredibly unlikely circumstances?

Up until a year ago, he had never even entertained the thought that he might someday find out. Now, he dared to imagine that in some future century he might voyage there, come to see it for himself. If so, he would come there in stages, with many stops along the way, passing the intervals between worlds primarily in cold sleep.

With the busy first year over, and the planning and design phase done, he wanted to hurry on.

He closed the virtual bubble. His ghost migrated back to his atrium, melding with his core persona, reaffirming his determination to leap forward in time. His skills were people skills. His real work would start when the ship’s company was resurrected.

Now, alone in his chamber, he generated a new ghost and sent it to the archive. From there it would waken at intervals to review the progress of the ship and the status of those aboard, before returning to stasis. He also instructed a Dull Intelligence to keep watch, charging it to alert his ghost if ever there was an event, anything out of the ordinary.

After his ghost was away, he summoned a cold-sleep cocoon, closing his eyes as the cocoon’s transparent mucilaginous tissue enshrouded him.

He looked forward to the future, and he’d already said his goodbyes.

Late afternoon in the forest room:

The weather algorithm had summoned gray clouds into the projected sky beyond the pergola. Clemantine appreciated the muted light as she floated in tandem with a curved screen displaying the tabular genetic data of an ornamental descendant of an ancient line of maple trees. Genetic sculpting was an art form she enjoyed, modifying not just the appearance of plants, but their life cycle as well, in this case seeking a perfect balance of autumn leaf coloration. Through her atrium, she ordered the screen to refresh, to display an accelerated simulation of the tiny tree’s seasonal life cycle.

Green leaves had just begun to unfold when a DI brought her news of a course change.

Startled, Clemantine froze the simulation and sent a ghost into the library to investigate. Then, turning her gaze skyward, she sought a point of reference, settling on a white camellia blossom just above her nose. Slowly, as seconds ticked past, she watched herself and her free-floating screen drift away from the flower, scant centimeters toward the side of the room—motion so subtle she couldn’t be sure of the cause until a submind returned, informing her Dragon was undertaking a navigational correction, using a slow, subtle lateral force to nudge the ship’s immense mass. Why?

She waited to find out and at the end of the extended maneuver confirmed their course to be fixed a little more closely on the future position of the Tanjiri star system.

A reasonable action, then. A responsible action. And yet the incident troubled her. She should have known the adjustment was necessary. She should have known it was coming. But she wouldn’t have known about it at all if she hadn’t been monitoring the logs.

She thought about the process behind that correction, wondering if Urban had ordered it, or if it had been triggered by the Pilot, operating independently.

A chiding inner voice scolded: I should know that .

Heat rose in her cheeks, a flush of shame. More than a year had passed since her ghost had transited from cardinal to cardinal, exploring the neural bridge. She had meant to go back. She wanted to look again for the pathways leading to the spiraling trunkline and its hundred thousand filaments reaching outward to meet and link and control the vast field of philosopher cells. She wanted to confirm that she had not just missed those pathways, but that they had been hidden from her.

And yet, day after day, she’d put off the task.

At first, after opening the cache of privileged files, she had needed time to come to terms with her other existence. She felt no shame for the actions taken by her other self, but her grief ran deep. Comfort came to her through the belief that this expedition was different, that the disastrous past lay behind them, that they were embarked on a new age of discovery—or re-discovery—and that they would ultimately find evidence of vibrant, tenacious life blossoming among the ruins.

At the same time, she worried this benign outlook was fragile, that it would disintegrate if she asked too many questions. So she curbed her questions and kept busy: working with Vytet to develop a plan for the interior of the gee deck, devising a housing scheme and a landscape, and then working out the chained sequences of assembly that would bring her vision into existence.

All of that was done now. She was out of excuses.

So get on with it!

She wiped the screen she’d been using. Pulled up a schematic of the neural bridge. Reviewed its intricate, branching structure, and plotted every path that led to the trunkline. There weren’t many, just thirteen. She identified the sequence of cardinal nanosites she would have to pass through to reach each one. Then, despite her aversion to the sense of disembodiment she would face among the cardinals, she sent a ghost to investigate.