Линда Нагата - Edges

*Sooth , she agreed. *I thought I never wanted to see another Chenzeme courser. Now I hope we find one soon.

You are formidable.

Three shipwrecks now orbit your world. As you had guessed, the first ship came to ensure your demise and pick over your bones. You surprised that one, breached its defenses, attempted to take control of it—but its autonomous synthetic mind destroyed its propulsion mechanism and then destroyed itself. You remained marooned.

The second ship carried a human crew of ancestral form. Their forebears had escaped the Communion. They, like you, had seen the synthetic’s ship. They’d watched it from afar, seen it decelerate in the middle of nowhere—and then never saw it again. This piqued their curiosity and because they were a people both wealthy and adventurous, they sent a ship to investigate, with no idea what they might find.

You admired these people. You admired their bravery, their fortitude, even their decision to disable their starship rather than let you take it.

After that, nothing, as billions of seconds passed. You used the time to recover more and more of yourself and to grow ever more formidable. In time, you decided you were strong enough to risk making your presence known. You called out to the void and your call was answered by an alien starship.

That was not an event you anticipated. Nowhere in your shattered memory was there mention of such a thing. Such a beast . You survived only because it delayed its attack as it sought to ascertain just what you were before it killed you. Even so, it was a hard-fought encounter that left you nearly undone again.

More repairs.

But when you recovered sufficiently, you sent an avatar to investigate the ruined hulk of the alien ship and you learned much from it. You learned enough to be ready should such a chance come again.

Clemantine’s ghost awoke from dormancy. A submind slipped into its pattern, integrating, so she knew things she had not known before: Dragon was over three hundred ninety years out of Deception Well—almost 80% of the way to the edge of the Hallowed Vasties; ahead of them an anomalous radio signal had been detected.

Clemantine experienced a surge of excitement, of anticipation—and fear too. Fear was necessary, caution essential, because it was impossible to know what they might find. Anything could be out there, from the unthinking residues of moldy life to godlike beings among the ruins—and maybe it would not be so easy to tell the difference?

But they would look. That was why they’d come: to discover what was here, what might remain—while doing all they could to survive first contact.

The radio signal was weak, too attenuated by distance for Dragon to detect it directly. Remote Fortuna had found it—the lead ship in the vanguard—and passed the record back through the fleet.

Clemantine transited to the library, manifesting there in a simulation of physical existence. Kona arrived alongside her.

Urban and Vytet were already present, studying a three-dimensional map showing Dragon ’s position amid the nearest stars. The map’s colors were inverted: white background, black stars. Far ahead of the fleet and offset to the left of their trajectory, a small, curving swath of space glowed faintly blue. Sequences of monotone beeps played in soft rhythm, each set of beeps separated by a silence that lasted an equivalent time:

beep-beep-beep-beep

beep-beep-beep-beep-beep

beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep

An absurdly simple sequence, but Clemantine listened with an attentiveness she might have given to a complex symphony while the count continued to climb until it reached ten. Then with the next round the number of beeps commenced to drop, declining steadily toward one.

Urban indicated the blue glow. “We think the signal is originating from somewhere in this area,” he said, his voice taut with excitement. He turned to Clemantine, his expression bright with the flush of discovery, no trace of his usual cynicism in the tight curve of his smile. “It’s not Chenzeme,” he said. “At least, not like any Chenzeme signal we’ve ever heard before.”

“Human?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What is human?” Kona wondered. “The closer we get to the Hallowed Vasties, the more likely we’ll face that question.”

“This could be human,” someone said. An unfamiliar, childlike voice.

Clemantine’s head snapped around in surprise—though it had to be Vytet’s voice, spoken by a new aspect, updated since the last time they had been together. Doubtless Vytet had changed many times in the intervening years, but Clemantine’s daily inspections of the ship did not extend to an inspection of Dragon ’s inhabitants.

In this version, Vytet had adopted pale blue skin, deep blue eyes, and a creamy white color for the pelt that covered her scalp. Finely sculpted facial features suggested a feminine nature, but the lack of both masculine weight or feminine curves on a body as thin as Clemantine had ever seen it, left gender open to question. Time would tell. Until then, Clemantine defaulted to the universal she .

Vytet continued to think out loud. “A simple signal,” she murmured, her voice possessing the sweet, high tone of a pre-adolescent child. “Certainly artificial—but not a language. The complexity of language isn’t there. It could be a new Chenzeme tactic. We don’t know—”

She broke off as the pulsing beeps dropped in number to one. They all listened to a single drawn-out tone that lasted several seconds. Then abruptly the signal changed to a complex series of swift beeps, suggesting some kind of code.

“It got our attention,” Clemantine said. “Now it’s telling us what it wants us to know.”

Kona looked up from the map, looked around. Impatiently: “Where are the Scholar and the Mathematician? We need them on deck to do the decoding.”

Both instantiated immediately, appearing within their frameless windows on opposite sides of the black-on-white starfield. The Scholar, with his mature countenance, wore formal blue. The Mathematician, Urban’s double, was dressed exactly like him, in a casual charcoal-gray pullover and snug black trousers.

Both Apparatchiks looked annoyed.

“They’re already working on it,” Urban explained. “My guess is that if we’re meant to understand the code, the solution will be easy.”

“ We ,” Clemantine mused. “Do you think it’s aware of us?”

Urban answered her question with one of his own: “How close is it? Close enough to resolve the light of our hull cells? Probably not.”

“It’s got to be a trap,” Kona said with a fierce scowl. “A lure to draw in the curious.”

Urban nodded reluctantly. “I agree it’s some kind of lure. It wants to be found. But that says nothing about its purpose.”

A trap .

Given the hostile nature of the Universe as Clemantine knew it, that made grim sense. Her perspective shifted, her first flush of enthusiasm cooled. She made herself listen, really listen, to the continuing sequence of arrhythmic beeps, striving to extract some meaning from them, though they remained meaningless to her ear.

She knew from the library that Urban had never encountered anything like this before. “If it is a lure,” she pointed out, “whoever or whatever is behind it doesn’t fear attention or discovery by the Chenzeme.”

“Then it must be Chenzeme,” Kona growled.

“Or a Chenzeme ally?” Vytet mused. “Is there such a thing?”