Линда Нагата - Edges

“I am so glad to see you!” Riffan cried out as he took Kona’s proffered hand. “I didn’t know what to think when I woke up alone… but where is everybody?”

Beyond Kona he saw Urban and Clemantine, and a third person he didn’t recognize, someone with decorative blue skin and short, thick, creamy white hair. They were all together in a nook, looking at him expectantly. But no one else.

Many more people could have fit comfortably within that expansive chamber. Riffan wondered where they were, wondered how many had come on the expedition. He didn’t know, but Pasha should be there.

His grip on Kona’s hand tightened as a fresh wave of anxiety swept through him. “Where is Pasha?” he pleaded. “And why has it been so long?”

“We’ve had some trouble,” Kona said. “But don’t worry, we haven’t lost anyone. Not yet.”

After they explained things to him—especially that preposterous part about being on the hunt for another courser—Riffan thought he ought to be angry, but he couldn’t muster the emotion. He was too overwhelmed. So much to take in! And the beacon. The beacon! Something was out there. The idea of it made his heart race in curiosity, in excitement. In fear.

All manner of speculation made swift passage through his brain until he had to remind himself that the simplest explanation was, as always, the most likely.

“Perhaps it’s an ancient colony ship,” he suggested. “Damaged in some accident and coasting without propulsion for thousands of years. If it set out before we knew of the Chenzeme, the ship’s company would not have been afraid of signaling their location.”

“If it was that old,” Urban countered, “the Chenzeme would have found it and vaporized it long ago.”

Riffan felt his cheeks heat. “Yes. Yes, of course,” he conceded, unable to deny this grim logic. He thought on it for a few seconds, then asked, “Is this the first signal you’ve heard? There’s been nothing else, nothing at all from the Hallowed Vasties?”

“Nothing,” Vytet confirmed in a voice low and rich, yet feminine. Deep blue eyes in a pale-blue face gave her a faraway look. “Though the nearest stars are still so distant we can’t reasonably expect to detect a radio signal.”

“And what of the visible spectrum?” Riffan asked. “Surely we can see more now than from Deception Well?”

“We’re closer,” Urban said, “but not close enough for the detail we need to see. Tanjiri is the nearest star and for some years we’ve seen evidence of objects in orbit. Odd shapes. Not spherical. Gravitational clusters of debris, maybe. Or remnant megastructures that survived the collapse.”

At a gesture from Vytet, a black rectangle opened within the wall of the alcove, over-writing a portion of the forest scene. Two astronomical images appeared within it. On the left, a cordoned star—an ancient image, at least fourteen hundred years old, captured by a telescope somewhere on the frontier. Distance had flattened the cordon’s spherical geometry into a disk aglow in the infrared range of the spectrum.

“This was Tanjiri when it was still cordoned,” Vytet said. She gestured to the image on the right. “This is how it appeared the last time we surveyed it—a simple star with no visible structures. But a variation in luminosity suggests that objects continue to pass across the face of the star, dimming its light. Possibly a planetary body, but more likely, large remnant structures.”

Riffan flushed with excitement at this prospect. What would such structures look like? And might they still contain life?

“Is Tanjiri our destination?” he asked Urban.

“For now, unless the hunt pulls us away.”

A sigh from Kona and a slow shake of his head as he studied the image of the cordon. “I cannot imagine what it must have looked like from the inside. The scale of it! Swarms of orbiting bodies, so many the star’s light could not get through.”

“There had to be a decentralized intelligence overseeing it,” Riffan said. “Coordinating a flocking algorithm to prevent the components from crashing into one another.”

“Agreed,” Vytet said. “But there would have been layers and layers of orbital lanes, tilted at different angles. So many it might not have looked crowded from inside.”

“And still,” Kona rumbled, “it seems impossible.”

“But it was possible.” Riffan turned again to the image. “The cordons were real, but they didn’t last. None of them lasted—and that’s as strange as that they existed at all. Why did they fail? Was it because the design is inherently unstable? Vulnerable to chained disasters? Or did the people who built them destroy themselves?”

“Maybe they reached an apotheosis and moved on,” Clemantine said, startling Riffan with the bitterness in her voice.

An uneasy silence. Averted gazes. “You’re referring to the Communion virus, aren’t you?” Riffan asked.

Her shoulders rose and fell in a quiet sigh. “It’s just so silent out there. There’s only the beacon. What if it’s a repository of the virus? Bleating into the void to attract a new host.”

“We’re not vulnerable to the Communion virus anymore,” Urban said. “And despite the silence, we are going to find life somewhere. Survivors. We have to.”

“Spoken with such certainty,” Vytet teased, “as if you can bend the future to your will.”

Urban’s chin rose. That pirate smile. “Who says I can’t?”

Kona said, “It’ll be safer for us if it’s all ruins—but tragic, too.”

“Even if it is only ruins, I want to know,” Riffan said. “I want to begin to understand what happened.”

Somewhere in the course of that long, convoluted introduction to his new life, Riffan agreed to accompany Urban on an outrider—but not as himself, not as this physical version of him. Urban only asked him to send a ghost, and that was easy enough, wasn’t it?

He eventually retreated to his assigned chamber, needing time alone to process it all. He huddled there, curled within the grip of the wall-weed—he’d begun to consider its touch comforting—while he tried to decide how he felt, how he should feel.

He wondered: Am I happy?

He thought he might be. He was definitely still in shock. It would take time to adjust emotionally to the facts of this new life. So much to learn— and already eighty percent of the way to the Hallowed Vasties!

The thought sent a fresh burst of excitement shooting through him. But then his emotional pendulum reversed. His chest tightened in grief as his thoughts turned again to his parents, his sister, lost to him, far gone in both time and space. Shades of past lovers arose in his memory too. Never a permanent partner for him or it would not have been so easy to leap away into the void.

He wondered if that would be a common trait among the others who were still archived. Loneliness stirred in him. He had always meant to find someone. He’d hoped to. But he’d always been distracted by his work. It wasn’t fair, really, to even call it work. His studies, then. His studies had always come first and his interests were wide, rooted in a sense of wonder at the astonishing existence of all things, of the Creation.

“You lucky fool,” he said aloud. “Think of where you are and where you’re bound.”

Beyond the walls of this miraculous hybrid ship innumerable stars swirled in a great gyre, some of them accompanied by worlds, and some of those worlds had given rise to lifeforms and to living machines in such great variety that their span reached from the molecular scale to the great sun-cloaking cordon of a Dyson swarm of the Hallowed Vasties.