Линда Нагата - Edges

Heads turned, looking for a response from Urban in the back row.

Anger moved in him, though it felt apart from him, like an argument offered by the philosopher cells. A protective anger. Even if Pasha was not proposing to destroy the ship, she was proposing something close to it.

He stood, burdened by the weight of Clemantine’s gaze. Like Pasha, she wanted no compromise with the entity, while Naresh, Vytet, Riffan, and many others wanted to believe that when the entity finally emerged, an accord could be reached. Urban didn’t believe either option was possible, not now. His strategy was to extend the game indefinitely, allow the situation to evolve until he found a way to win.

He spoke slowly, carefully considering his words. “I don’t want to take the entity to Tanjiri. I don’t intend to. Maybe Vytet is right and it’s from there. But there must be a reason it was left marooned in the void. A reason those other people chose to scuttle their ships rather than give it a way out.”

Naresh rose to his feet, his youthful face flushed with anger. “Then you agree with her? Destroy this ship to destroy the entity?”

“No,” Urban said. Just the thought of Dragon ’s demise made him recoil. The ship was his avatar. An irreplaceable avatar. It was him . A millennium on the high bridge had forged that bond and he did not intend to break it. “I’m not giving up my ship. It will have to be taken from me.”

“The entity has made no move to do that,” Naresh said in satisfaction.

“Not yet,” Urban agreed. “And the longer it holds off, the better for us. Look what’s ahead of us!” He gestured at the projection screen. “Beings greater than we are. I won’t take this ship to Tanjiri System, but I will approach it. Signal our presence, establish communication if we find something there we can talk to… something willing to talk to us. If nothing else, we can send in an outrider. Let it drop scout-bots to prospect among the ruins. There might be old libraries still intact. Designs for weaponry better than what we’ve got now. And we’re not the only ones at risk. I am sure the entity is aware of its situation. It knows Griffin is following behind us.”

“So the stalemate continues,” Tarnya said, looking up at him from the first row. “For how much longer, I wonder?”

He had no answer for that.

Several days later, after a raucous game of flying fox, Urban returned alone to the cottage. The last images from the annual survey of the Hallowed Vasties had come in that morning. Most of the ship’s company planned to return to cold sleep the next day, so tonight there would be a banquet and concert. Clemantine had gone to the dining terrace with Kona and Tarnya to finalize the plans.

Urban dried off, dressed in soft shorts, and then sat cross-legged on a mat just inside the open backdoor, sipping cold tea and watching a flock of tiny green birds play hide-and-seek among the shrubbery. He planned to return to cold sleep too. Melancholy descended on him as he considered that soon, the birds and the butterflies would be the only inhabitants of the gee deck.

Impossibly, a soft knock sounded at the front door.

He dropped his tea, spilling it across the mat as a burst of adrenaline put him on his feet, heart hammering, fight or flight triggered because his extended senses had failed him. He should have received an alert that someone was approaching the cottage, but no alert had come.

Now he needed to know why.

He crossed the bedroom. Looked into the front room, furnished now with just the sofa and the low side table with the porcelain dish holding Clemantine’s irises, lifeless and dormant. He stopped cold when he saw the opaque gel of the front door retract. In came an impossible apparition—a man Urban had seen only once before.

His visitor was of moderate height, shorter than Urban, with a lean, chiseled build and a youthful look, his apparent age around twenty. His skin, a polished soft brown. Thick black hair cut short. Dark-blue eyes with only a shade of color saving them from being black. He greeted Urban with a short, knowing nod as if to acknowledge the shock of his unexpected arrival. A half-smile followed, one that looked friendly, but felt dangerous.

Given the circumstance, it could hardly feel any other way.

The gel sealed shut behind him.

Urban noted that he was dressed in a way typical among the ship’s company, in a long-sleeved pullover—he’d chosen one patterned in a tiled geometric print—and soft shorts that reached to the knee.

It was an imitation of normalcy—admirable in its way—though there was nothing normal about this being. The illusion of its humanity was too well done. Hyper-real. The thing’s skin, utterly smooth and unmarked by wrinkles or errant veins. Eyes too bright, outlined in thick lashes arrayed in perfect ranks. Its clothing too neat, too crisp, weirdly unresponsive to the tug of the ship’s pseudo-gravity or to air currents. It was like a projection in three dimensions, as unsullied by living detail as a ghost instantiated in the library.

Urban amped up his hearing, listening hard, and decided it had no pulse, no bellows of breath.

His own breath, a sharp gasp drawn past clenched teeth.

He sent a submind to alert his ghost on the high bridge and all the Apparatchiks. Wake up. Wake up! Even as he wondered how it was possible that the entity had slipped out of its containment capsule with no ghost or Apparatchik or Dull Intelligence taking notice.

Of course it had not. This was not the entity. It was only a representation of it. A rendition designed to be personable, appealing. A front for something too complex to be contained in any human-shaped vessel.

No, the entity remained safe in its fortress. Like the vacuum-adapted man he’d seen at the Rock, this was surely only the simple product of an instruction set that had escaped into Dragon ’s tissue, leaking from somewhere, anywhere along the tendrils that tied the entity’s domain to the ship’s critical structure. That instruction set would have supervised the assembly of this avatar within a cocoon hidden, somehow, from easy detection.

The thing had entered uninvited, but it had the decency to pause just inside the front room. That dangerous smile. And then it spoke, its voice as polished as its body. It said, “We will help each other.”

Urban sensed an automated biochemical routine kick in, taking the edge off his fear. He lowered his chin, saying, “I’ve had nothing but trouble from you so far.”

“Trouble you have earned. You full well understand that concepts of property and cultural propriety must be put aside when survival is at stake. You did not intend to offer help to me. I helped you to make a better decision.”

“My decision was made when you attacked my scout-bots.”

“Those devices you first sent to investigate my location?”

“Yes.”

“That was not you. It was a tool, one that puzzled me greatly. I thought this scout must have come from one of these starships.” He gestured to take in the idea of Dragon . “An alien thing, serving the ancient regime. Where else could it have come from? So I took it to analyze its constitution and decrypt its knowledge base.”

The avatar cocked its head, eyes momentarily unfocused as if reviewing some pleasant memory. It said, “I was worried, I will admit. My last confrontation with the ancient ones nearly made an end of me. But this device, your scout, it turned out to be a human thing. From it, I learned this was the language you use, one that is not much different from a common language of the old worlds, at least when spoken in formal cadence. This is a common effect of ageless populations. When lifespans were shorter human languages changed quickly. Now, the elders among us act as an anchor against change, and our libraries enforce this effect.”