Линда Нагата - Edges

*I understand.

With the philosopher cells dormant, the high bridge remained unnaturally tranquil. Urban still received a constant low boil of sensory input from the ship’s bio-mechanical tissue, its circulatory system, matter storage, its reef, and from the telescopes and the organic cameras native to the hull. But that was a quiet meditation compared to the harsh, strident presence of the cells.

It had been a pleasant respite, but it was time to get on with things.

He told Clemantine: *Wake the philosopher cells.

She sent the signal he had taught her, amplified across a hundred thousand links. Small clusters of cells switched on around each point. The newly active cells roused their neighbors. Awareness swept across the vast expanse of the hull and the conversation began.

The philosopher cells had been aware of the beacon, and intent on destroying it, at the time Urban sent them into dormancy. On waking, their first action was to pinpoint their target—but it was not where they expected to find it. The cells easily picked up the beacon’s signal, but swift calculations showed the ship still far outside of weapons range.

Their conversation exploded into waves of confusion and fiery anger.

Urban soothed them. He turned their attention away from the beacon and injected into the debate an awareness of the distant gleam of the trailing courser. The high bridge allowed him to do this, to address them with the alien subtlety of their own chemical language, but when expressing the meaning in human terms he was left with only crude approximations of his argument:

– awareness: other –

– offer: integration –

– self-other exchange –

He felt Clemantine’s cool presence overlaid against his own, observing his every action and the responding activity of the cells as they quieted, as they considered his proposition. Memories of the past two encounters began to circulate, tainting the instinctive desire to meet and mate. Urban translated the cells’ conversation as:

The cells quickly grew more aggressive, reliving their attacks on the other ships. Their brutal successes. Their discovery of the weakness of others. They respected strength—their own strength especially. Dragon ’s cells understood they were different:

They perceived the philosopher cells of other ships as inferior and tainted:

Quickly, a new proposition circulated:

Too soon for that, even if destroying the new courser had still been Urban’s goal. He rejected the homicidal argument. He refused it at every point it appeared, overwhelming the field with repetitions of his initial thesis:

– self-other exchange –

The protocols of meeting must be observed. The cells must display the proper sequence of signals to establish trust between the two heavily armed ships. Without this first step, the new courser would not allow Dragon to draw close—and Urban needed to be in intimate proximity to wield his molecular weapons.

– self-other exchange –

He repeated it, again and again, and slowly the hull cells accepted this proposition.

Your sky survey finds a smudge of white light where none should be. You analyze the spectrum. The pattern of wavelengths identifies the object as another of the alien starships that nearly destroyed you. Its luminosity indicates it has just begun to encroach on the Near Vicinity.

Joy overtakes the ancestral mind. You’ve studied the dead hulk of the first ship, mapped its structure, analyzed its components on a molecular scale. You’ve made your preparations. You need only wait for the beast to hear your beacon. When it does, it will come in to investigate, just as the first alien ship did, but there will be no battle this time. You will lie in wait for it, and take it when it comes.

And you will finally have means to return home.

You watch the progress of the alien beast for several million seconds and then it disappears. The light of its hull cells quenched.

Fear stirs in the ancestral mind. Dread rises. Why? you ask yourself. Why has it gone dark? The first alien ship did not hide itself. Why is this one behaving differently?

The beacon continues to bleat its signal. You do not modify it or shut it off. That would be an admission of your presence here while the mindless repetition, even in the face of threat, will give the appearance of a distress beacon from a nonsentient ship.

That is your hope, anyway.

You resume your sky survey, aware that the unseen alien ship is likely modifying its course and speed. It could reappear at any time in an unexpected location.

When it finally does reappear, you realize your existence has become as precarious as it ever has been.

There are now two ships.

You wonder if this is a war you can win.

Aboard the outrider Elepaio , Riffan soon discovered he did not like living as a ghost. Virtual existence did not feel real to him. He could inhabit a simulation of his body within the library—a duplicate of the library aboard Dragon —and though it was a good simulation, even an excellent one, it never felt quite right. That virtual world was too smooth, too clean, too convenient—too lacking in the rough complexity of actual existence. It left him feeling disoriented, unsure of his ability to distinguish between reality and delusion.

He did not have the option of retreating to a physical existence. The outrider did not have the room or the resources to support a living avatar. His one alternative was to forgo the illusion of human presence entirely and exist disembodied within the sensory system of the little ship. But this, he was sure, would be far worse.

So he remained dormant for most of the long voyage to the beacon, waking his ghost for only an hour or two every few days.

Urban’s ghost remained awake and alert at all times as was his custom, though he rewrote his sense of time passing so that the accumulating days did not weigh on him.

Little changed during the first year. Occasionally, the coded location in the beacon’s signal would shift and Urban would make a slight revision to his course, but he still could not resolve any object at the coordinates where the beacon must be.

It was early in the second year when he observed the appearance of another courser. Envy brushed him as he imagined his other self, that version of him aboard Dragon , plotting to seduce and dominate and destroy this intruder. He looked forward to gaining the memory of that encounter when he finally returned to Dragon . Meanwhile, Elepaio fared on, ever closer to the source of the beacon.

A time came when Elepaio ’s telescope was finally able to distinguish an object directly ahead. A tiny dark smudge, nothing more. That it could be resolved at all indicated it had a high albedo, its surface reflecting the starlight that fell against it.

More time passed and the smudge resolved into multiple objects. This surprised Urban. He had expected to find a single large object, well-armed as it attempted to draw the curious into range. Instead, there were at least three and maybe four objects. He wasn’t sure yet. One was much larger than the others and round, like a tiny planetary body stripped from the gravitational hold of its parent star and cast out into the void. The others appeared to be minute, irregularly shaped moons. Still too far away to discern details. The scene lit only by a scattering of distant starlight.

Riffan’s ghost woke and exclaimed in excitement over the fuzzy image. He stayed awake as additional imagery came in. In infrared, the little moons appeared cold and lifeless. “But look at the planetary body,” Riffan said. He floated cross-legged in the library while Urban stood beside him, arms crossed, studying a large, detailed projection. “It possesses a slight thermal signature, though it’s not nearly large enough to maintain a molten interior. If it was a true rogue planetoid, it would have gone cold eons ago. So there must be something there. Recent enough to keep it slightly warm.”