Линда Нагата - Edges

A noncommittal, “Hmm,” as her brows drew together, tiny wrinkles gathering between them.

“What?”

“I don’t think an anthropologist from the Well will be able to tell you anything about intelligent aliens, or about our own distant cousins who might have survived the collapse of the Hallowed Vasties. You’d do better to take me or Kona.”

“Someone who knows when to start shooting?”

“Yes.”

Urban nuzzled her small ear, kissed the gold iris tattoos on her ear lobe. “You hate to split your timeline, and besides, I’m going unarmed. We’re here to learn, to map what’s left, establish communications if we can. So I want someone who’s studied other cultures. Riffan Naja is my leading candidate.”

“The commander of Long Watch ?”

“I’m thinking of waking him. He’s an anthropologist, has an interest in linguistics, he’s studied the Hallowed Vasties, and he was the first to ask to be part of this expedition.”

“You’re planning to do only a fly-by, right?”

“That’s the plan,” Urban agreed, “because I need to minimize the risk to the outrider. I don’t want to lose it.” But then he admitted, “Depending on what we find, the plan could change.”

“Time,” she said, “is not on your side. Not for this venture. If you do anything more than a fly-by you’ll be away years—decades—assuming the outrider gets back at all. And if you take an unnecessary risk along the way, and lose the outrider, we’ll be down to three.”

He groaned. “I know it. You’re right, but it’s so frustrating. There’s so much to see. But choosing to stop and study a single place means forgoing other possible destinations or pushing them off far into the future—and maybe they’ll change in that time, become something other, or die before we get there.”

“You can’t see it all,” she said. “Not all at once. Take the anthropologist with you if you want to. Do the fly-by. But don’t plan on more than that. Conserve your resources. Our focus should be on the hunt, and on reaching the Hallowed Vasties. We’re still a long way from the nearest cordoned star.”

Riffan woke to a startled sense that he was falling. He gasped, his whole body jerked—and then he realized it was just the sensation of zero gee. He grimaced, thinking he must still be aboard Long Watch .

But as consciousness fully asserted itself, confusion set in. He was not in his familiar berth. Instead, he’d awakened alone within a small chamber, its curving walls covered in what he recognized as waving wall-weed. He’d seen the stuff in historical dramas, but never before seen it in use.

The wall-weed glowed gently, the only illumination within the chamber. Long ribbons of it coiled around Riffan’s body, cradling him, its touch warm and gentle… and deeply disturbing.

He thrashed, suddenly desperate to escape its grip. The ribbons released him, leaving him with his momentum untethered so that he bounced across the chamber only to be enfolded by more wall-weed. He grabbed it, frantic to control his motion. He clung to it with a desperate grip as he realized where he must be.

This was Dragon . So it had really happened. He had left Deception Well, left his home, left it far, far behind. Left it forever.

“Love and Nature and the Cosmic First Light,” he whispered. “What have I done?”

Supremely conscious of the vast distance, the unbridgeable gap, that separated him from everything he’d ever known. Deep, shaking breaths.

“Calm down,” he told himself. “You wanted this. You want it. It’ll be okay.”

And if it wasn’t? He’d left another version of himself at home. He spent a minute imagining that other Riffan, no doubt resentful that he’d been the one to stay behind. This thought brought him a slight chagrined smile. “Be grateful, you idiot,” he murmured.

His breath steadied, his heart slowed. He noticed clothing among the wall-weed, newly assembled and still budding off the wall. He reached for it: loose fitting trousers with cuffs at the ankles to keep them from drifting, and a long-sleeved pullover.

As he dressed, he puzzled over the lack of gravity. He’d expected to awaken while Dragon was accelerating to cruising speed. Perhaps they were still coasting, waiting for the swarm ships to catch up?

Perhaps they’d already reached cruising speed.

He wondered how fast that might be. He knew that in theory a reef could pull a ship to mad velocities, but the danger of collision argued against excessive speed. Run too fast, and a ship might be torn apart in the blink of an eye.

At this thought, a shudder ran through him and he muttered to himself, “Think of something else, you fool.”

So he thought about time, instead. What time was it? He suspected several days had passed since his ghost uploaded from Long Watch . After all, it would have taken time to construct this chamber and the now-vanished resurrection pod.

He checked his atrium’s connectivity. Found a network. Posted questions to it: “Where are we? When are we?”

A DI, speaking through his atrium in a soothing male voice, informed him that Dragon was 390 years out of Deception Well.

He squinted. Frowned. “What was that?” he begged. “Say that again?”

“ Dragon is presently 390 years and 114 days out of Deception Well.”

Could it be true? Riffan did not want to believe it. If it was true, it meant that he’d been gone somewhere—Cold sleep? Data storage? Did it matter? —for five times longer than he’d been alive. It meant that everyone he’d known at home was…

He could not finish the thought. He didn’t know how. They could be dead. And if not, if they were still alive and he somehow met them again, would he even know them? His own parents, his sister, his cousins—all of them now surely transformed by the passage of so much time. Become strangers. And that other version of himself that had stayed behind? That man was now surely forever sundered from him, a separate being in the mind of the Unknown God.

He squeezed the wall-weed harder as if he could arrest the flight of time with his grip, but he was too late, too late. Everything he’d once known, gone and unrecoverable.

“What have I done?” he moaned, struggling not to be sick. He knew—he’d known—he was leaving Deception Well forever but—

Three hundred ninety years!

Why so long? Why? He could only think that something must have gone horribly wrong.

He dove for the thin gel door that sealed the chamber, shot through it into a tunnel beyond. More gently glowing wall-weed. No one about. He suffered a sudden sick fear that he was alone here, utterly alone.

The chamber where he’d wakened was at the tunnel’s end. He launched himself away from it, shouting, “Hello, hello! Is anyone here? Call out if you are!”

No one answered. He shot past four other chambers, their gel doors dilated open. A swift glance into each confirmed no one inside.

He reached a U-shaped intersection. Clambered around the tight curve and found a gel door, this one sealed. He guessed another level of habitation lay beyond it. Heart racing, he grabbed a fist-full of wall-weed and shoved himself through.

To his surprise, he emerged into a beautiful, sprawling chamber made to look like a wide pavilion surrounded by an open, airy forest of giant trees, green ferns growing among them. Clusters of white camellias hung from a pergola, scenting the air. The angle and color of sunlight slanting through the lattice suggested it might be late afternoon—though he wasn’t skilled at judging such things.

He reminded himself to breathe . Filling his lungs, he looked around—and if he’d been standing he would have collapsed in relief at the sight of Kona gliding across the chamber to meet him.