Линда Нагата - Edges

*No. I won’t let that happen.

Urban did not miss the harsh promise behind those words.

He sat up on the sofa, looked around the pleasant little room: Leaf-filtered sunlight patterning the white carpet, a painting depicting mountains in the path of a planetary storm, the dish of irises in full bloom on the side table.

Clemantine was gone somewhere with Pasha. He messaged her: *I’m worried the Bio-mechanic is unstable.

Several seconds passed before she sent a cryptic reply: *I trust him.

He frowned down at the tablet he’d been reading. On its screen, text from a novel purportedly written by one of the Founders at Tanjiri and recently translated by Dalisay, a linguist in the ship’s company. Glimpse of a lost past.

Reluctantly, he instructed the tablet to display the personnel map instead. It showed Lezuri still in the warren.

Urban traded subminds with his ghost on the high bridge and then reviewed his memories of the ship’s status. Nothing out of the ordinary, given that alien infestation had become ordinary.

He watched as Lezuri progressed to the transit gate. The personnel map showed Naresh, waiting to meet him, just like yesterday. The two points drew together, but after a few seconds they separated again. Naresh stayed, while Lezuri crossed the pavilion alone, taking a fast, determined pace to the pathway that was the shortest route to Urban’s cottage.

Hard not to think some momentous decision had been made.

Did Lezuri regret the game he’d played with the needle? He’d held out the lure of knowledge to win Urban over, but the impenetrability, the uselessness of that thing, had only hardened Urban’s resolve to reach Tanjiri. He would rather creep among the shadowed ruins of the megastructures, hunting for the remnants of libraries, then to rely on Lezuri to teach him what the people of the Hallowed Vasties had once known.

The map showed Lezuri on the patio. Urban set the tablet aside and stood up. The gel door retracted and Lezuri came in.

Subminds shunted through the network, keeping him synced with his ghost on the high bridge.

“I know the trick to the needle,” he told Lezuri. “It requires me to reach back in time to before it was sealed, and then set the mechanism that will open it from the inside.”

Lezuri looked at him, considering this for a long moment. Then he said, “I have something else to show you. I have ascertained the position of a star system that will interest you. Grant me the use of the array of telescopes and it will please me to show it to you.”

At these words, Urban felt he’d won a kind of victory. Lezuri had talked about his past, but never in any specific way. Now he seemed ready to reveal his origin. The offer triggered acute curiosity, but also suspicion. Everything Lezuri did made him suspicious. But what was the downside? Lezuri meant to persuade him to take Dragon somewhere other than Tanjiri. Urban was sure of that.

He wanted to know: Can I be persuaded?

He sent a DI to check the observational schedule. Nothing critical was underway, but that’s not what he told Lezuri. “The scopes are busy with a survey of the Near Vicinity. It’d be a risk to interrupt that. It might lead us to overlook some imminent hazard.”

The risk was minuscule. Urban mentioned it only because he wanted to see Lezuri’s reaction to a delay.

“We’re scheduled for an interim update on Tanjiri in another hundred sixty days or so,” he continued as if this news could serve as consolation. “But if it’s another star you want to see, you’ll have to wait for the annual imaging.”

Judging by the cynical amusement in his gaze, Lezuri recognized the act. In the condescending tone that came so naturally to him, he said, “Your annual survey is useful but limited. It only looks at those stars that once hosted a Swarm, ignoring other interesting systems within this region you call the Hallowed Vasties.”

“Are you saying there are inhabited star systems here that escaped the Communion?”

“There are places that were never touched by it,” Lezuri assured him.

This was a new concept. Historical observations affirmed that all inhabited star systems in the Hallowed Vasties had evolved into Dyson swarms. But maybe other systems had been settled later, after those records were made?

Urban wanted to know. Curiosity was his engine. And what harm could come from turning the telescopes in a new direction? He was more than willing to trade a delay in the ongoing survey to gain insight into Lezuri’s goals.

“Give me the coordinates. We’ll take a look.”

Urban sent the coordinates Lezuri provided to the Astronomer. *Check the catalog. Tell me what’s at this position.

*These coordinates map to the vicinity of an unnamed star. Roughly forty-two light years from our present position.

*Closer than Tanjiri?

*Yes. The star’s catalog designation is MSC-G-349809. A stable G-type, very similar to Earth’s Sun, though with only a single planet in the inner system—a small rocky world too close to the central star to be habitable.

*So it was never settled?

*Correct.

*What else?

*That is the extent of information the library has to offer.

Urban shifted his focus to Lezuri, who had taken over the sofa, sitting with an arm stretched across the back.

“I checked the catalog. There’s nothing of interest there.”

“Perhaps your records are out of date.”

He conceded this with a nod. All the histories of this region that he possessed were thousands of years old. That was the reason for this voyage, to discover what had changed.

Next, the slow turning of the telescopes.

He instructed the Astronomer to use only Dragon ’s twin scopes and the one on nearby Artemis . The coordinates Lezuri had provided were offset from the star so that the telescopes looked at a point in the inner system, though well outside the orbit of the known world. There should not be a planet there, but maybe there was a celestial city?

He asked Lezuri, “What will I see?”

Lezuri’s lips pressed together. For a moment, a single vertical worry line appeared between his eyebrows. “I don’t know. I told you before, I don’t know what is left. Look, and we shall see.”

Urban summoned a chair. It rose from the floor, close to the side table where the irises bloomed. They would have to wait through the long exposure, so he retrieved his tablet, then sat, playing at reading the novel.

Lezuri waited in silence, his perfect face empty of expression.

Urban shifted from the text to the personnel map. Clemantine was at the dining terrace with Kona. He was on the verge of messaging her when the Astronomer said: *The initial image is ready.

*Send me the file.

He put the tablet on the side table. Lezuri looked up as privacy screens slid shut, darkening the room. The painting of the planetary storm became a display screen. Urban routed the file to it. He stood. Lezuri joined him as an image winked into view.

“ Damn ,” Urban whispered. “It’s flawed.”

There must have been undetected damage to the glass of one of the telescopes because there was an aberration at the center of the image—a micro-thin oval of white light among the background stars.

That was his initial impression.

But how could random damage to a lens produce an oval so thin and perfect, so sharply rendered. Was it an oval? If it was an actual object, it might be a circle viewed at a low angle.