Линда Нагата - Edges

That thought, combined with the spectrum of white light, triggered a memory that made Urban’s skin crawl. “By the Unknown God, is that a swan burster?”

The slightest twitch from Lezuri as if he was querying some source for a definition of the term.

A swan burster was far, far larger and more terrible than a courser. One had been caught in high orbit around Deception Well, its aggression neutralized by the governors, but still luminous when Urban lived there. He had seen it every night, a bright white ring tumbling through the sky, its interior a velvety black circle of twisted space-time. A constant reminder of Chenzeme power.

“Enlarge the image,” Urban said.

The view zoomed in. The circle—if that was what it was—was still rendered as a smooth, dimensionless line.

The swan burster at Deception Well had been eighteen hundred miles in diameter. This, Urban realized, had to be far, far larger to be so easily visible.

“Display the scale,” he instructed.

A tag appeared. The span of the ring was approximately 650,000 kilometers.

Ridiculous . Nearly half the diameter of the central star.

He wheeled on Lezuri. “What is it?” he demanded. “Is it a trick?”

“No, it is not a trick. It is very real.”

“Then is it a weapon?”

Lezuri gave the impression of weighing this question, his gaze resting on the image. “It could be used as a weapon,” he conceded. “But that is not its purpose. It is a blade of the kind once used to slice up worlds, to invert their gravity, to scatter their mass into debris fields that could then be harvested to grow the megastructures of a Swarm.” He cocked his head, smiled his condescending smile, as if daring Urban to disbelieve him.

Urban did not know what to believe. He had no way to cross-check Lezuri’s assertion. It sounded wild, fantastical. But worlds had been torn apart. The people of the Hallowed Vasties had done it over and over again. How? Wouldn’t engineering on that scale require a means to manipulate at least the direction of gravity? A means to bend the structure of space-time on a massive scale?

The reef affected the structure of space-time. A swan burster warped it, drawing immense quantities of energy from the zero-point field.

But this—he stepped closer to the screen, studying the perfect edge of the luminous white oval—this phenomenon was on a scale so much greater than anything else he’d ever seen or heard of.

Lezuri moved up to stand at his side. “At the peak of my power, I made this blade. It is an intrusion of another Universe in which matter behaves differently from our own. Such things are usually transient. Blades used to create the Swarms evaporated long ago. But this one I anchored in our reality and it has existed since.”

“Why?” Urban asked. “Why did you make it? Why such a great work in an empty system?”

“No system is ever empty. There was matter enough for my purposes. Look more closely.”

Urban did, and noticed for the first time another object, precisely placed at the center of the oval, tiny by comparison to the blade. A pinprick, a spark, but blue-green—the color of a living world.

“Enlarge again,” Urban said, now that more time had passed, time for additional detail to be pulled in by the scopes.

The perspective zoomed closer. The gleaming oval expanded until it escaped the edges of the monitor. The spark held its position at the center but grew in size, took on a form, a shape: another ring. A tag reported a diameter of fourteen thousand kilometers—far smaller than the blade, but still planetary in scale.

In contrast to the blade, this ring was clearly three-dimensional.

A torus , Urban thought. Narrow and graceful like a woman’s bracelet. It lay nearly edge-on to the star so that light struck one-half of its outer circumference—the equatorial band—wrapping the polar surfaces before dissipating in a twilight zone.

The ring’s other half—the half farthest from the star—was mostly dark. Only a small section of the inner wall enjoyed daylight, gleaming bright blue-white.

Urban raised a hand toward the screen. An atavistic gesture, the desire of instinct to explore by touch, but instead of touching, he imagined what might be there. The scattering of light so far around the curve of the ring suggested an atmosphere, but how could an object of such geometry hold onto an atmosphere?

“It has an artificial gravity,” Urban said. Not a question.

“This world is Verilotus,” the entity told him. “This is my world. It exists within a pocket of space-time held open by the blade—what my people named the Bow of Heaven. The flow of time is accelerated there. A year of game time as days go by outside. It may be that too much time has passed and nothing is left of my players.”

Urban stepped away from the screen. Wonder and excitement had chewed up the free calories in his brain, leaving him swaying on his feet—and short tempered. “Lights!” he demanded in a hoarse voice. “Leave the privacy screens closed.” The walls and ceiling swiftly brightened, leaving only rare shadows.

Lezuri had shown him this sight to tempt him, to persuade him to turn the fleet away from Tanjiri. And Urban was tempted. Oh yes. So tempted. Lezuri could manipulate time… if he was telling the truth.

But Urban didn’t trust him. And he feared Lezuri—what he was, what he’d been, but especially, what he might become again.

For all the power Urban commanded as master of Dragon , he was nothing, insignificant against a being who could open up a burning seam between two Universes and use it to pin an artificial world in place.

And it occurred to him—much later than it should have—that there must be a second entity resident there. He remembered Lezuri’s bitter voice explaining how he’d come to be marooned in the void: One whom I loved betrayed me .

“You are wondering about her,” Lezuri said. “My ‘other half.’”

Urban stared at him, startled at the accuracy of this guess. He heard himself ask a stumbling question: “Was she… a woman ?”

“A goddess.”

Urban flinched at the word, but not because notions of deity were alien to him. On the frontier, the Unknown God was an accepted, if amorphous concept—an indeterminate, inscrutable force pervading the cosmos… or perhaps existing beyond it.

But Lezuri’s “goddess” was his partner entity, surely a being like Lezuri himself, with a personal presence, a tangible existence, emergent from the competitive maelstrom of the Communion, and potentially knowable.

Lezuri continued to speak, now in a melancholy voice as he gazed at the image of Verilotus, still visible on the display screen. “I made the world. She brought life to it. But her work was flawed—too simplistic, too naturalistic, lacking the unpredictability and the spice of brutal challenge my players needed to gain in skill and strength and fortitude as they moved from one life to the next, from one level, to the next. We argued over it, she and I. Both of us, passionate beings, unwilling to compromise.” He eyed Urban again. “I think now, war was inevitable between us.”

Sooth , Urban thought, stepping back, opening the distance between them. “She won,” he said. “She proved stronger than you.”

Lezuri’s eyes narrowed. “She proved more ruthless. But I don’t know that she survived our conflict. I barely did. I only know she cast me away from our sun, shattering my mind with the force of her gesture. Billions of seconds have passed since then, in the slow time of the greater Universe. I have tried to rebuild myself, though so little remains. Still, I must return. I have a duty, an obligation, to those players I left behind.”