Nights Dawn (№1) - Reality Dysfunction — Emergence

In amongst the glare were fissures of darkness, fluttering around like tiny birds caught by a gale. They called out to her as they passed, mental cries, sometimes words, sometimes visions of people and places, sometimes smells—phantasm tastes, a touch, the laughter, music, heat, chill, wetness. Minds transferring into Oenone ’s neural cells. But broken, incomplete. Flawed.

Thetis!syrinx cried.

She couldn’t find him, not amid such turmoil. And the light had become a pervasive pain. She howled in anguish and hatred.

Vermuden ’s distortion field distended, strengthened, applying stress against the perpetual structure of reality. An interstice yawned wide.

Chi fired the gamma lasers. But the beams raked emptiness. The interstice was already closing.

Less than two seconds after the Dymasio exploded, a blast wave of particles arrived to assault Oenone ’s hull, supplementing the corrosive electromagnetic radiation already striking against the foam. The voidhawk looked past the immediate chaos, observing Vermuden ’s wormhole forming, a tunnel through empty dimensions. Size and determinant length defined by the blackhawk’s energy input. Oenone knew the terminus coordinate exactly, twenty-one lightyears away, the blackhawk’s utter limit.

This time!Oenone thought tempestuously. Energy blazed through its own patterning cells.

No!syrinx shouted, shocked out of her grief.

There is a way, I know how. Trust me.

She waited helplessly as the interstice engulfed them, some treacherous aspect of her subconscious granting the voidhawk permission, urging them on towards retribution. Worry faded when she saw the wormhole was only thirteen light-years long. As its terminus began to open, she felt the patterning cells activate again. Realization was instantaneous, and she laughed with vengeful fury.

Told you so,Oenone said smugly.

The desperate twenty-one light-year swallow had stretched Vermuden ’s energy loading capacity virtually to breaking point. It could sense its captain prone on his acceleration couch, muscles locked solid, back arched, the exertion twinned. The wormhole’s pseudofabric slithered round the hull, not a physical pressure, but tangible none the less. Finally, up ahead, the terminus manifested. Starlight traced strange shapes as it filtered through.

Vermuden popped out into the clean vacuum of normal space, mind radiating vivid relief.

Well done,its captain said. Vermuden felt arm and chest muscles slacken, an indrawn breath.

Powerful laserlight illuminated its hull, washing out its optical receptor cells in a pink dazzle. A lens-shaped mass a hundred and fifteen metres in diameter hung eighty metres off its central spire in the direction of Betelgeuse’s demonic red gleam.

“What the fuck . . . How?” the captain yelped.

This is just the targeting laser,Oenone said. If I sense any flux change in your patterning cells I’ll switch to the gamma lasers and slice you in half. Now extend your airlock. I have some people on board keen to meet you.

“I didn’t know voidhawks could do that,” Eileen Carouch said a couple of hours later. Vermuden ’s captain, Henry Siclari, and the blackhawk’s other two crewmen, were in Oenone ’s brig; and the navy prize crew, headed by Cacus, were familiarizing themselves with the blackhawk’s systems. Cacus reckoned they would be able to take the ship back to Oshanko in a day. “Sequential swallows?” Syrinx said. “Nothing to stop them, you just need a voidhawk with an acute spacial sense.” Like you.

I love you,Oenone replied, unabashed by the alternate praise and admonitions the Edenists had been bombarding it with since the manoeuvre.

Got an answer to everything, haven’t you?she said. But the humour wasn’t there.

Thetis. His broad, smiling face covered in boyish freckles, the uncombed sandy hair, the lanky, slightly awkward body. All the hours together spent roving around Romulus.

He was a part of her identity in the same way as Oenone . Soulsibling, so much had been shared. And now he was gone. Torn away from her, torn out of her, the voyages together, frustrations and achievements.

I mourn for him too,Oenone whispered into her mind, its thoughts drenched with regret.

Thank you. And Graeae ’s eggs have been lost as well. What a terrible, filthy thing to do. I hate Adamists.

No, That is beneath us. See, Eileen and the marines share our loss. It is not Adamists. Only individuals. Always individuals. Even Edenists have our failures, do we not?

Yes. We do,she said, because it was true enough. but there was still that fraction of her mind which remained vacant, the vanished smile.

Athene knew something was shockingly wrong as soon as Oenone emerged above Saturn. She was in the garden lounge, feeding two-month-old Clymene from a bitek mammary orb when the cold premonition closed about her. It made her clutch at her second great-great-grandchild for fear of the future and what it held. The infant wailed in protest at the loss of the nipple and the tightness of her grip. She hurriedly handed Clymene back to her great-grandson, who tried to calm the baby girl with mental coos of reassurance. Then Syrinx’s alarmingly dulled mind touched Athene, and the awful knowledge was revealed in full.

Is there nothing of him left?she asked softly.

Some,syrinx said. But so little, I’m sorry, Mother.

A single thought would be enough for me.

As Oenone neared Romulus it gave up the thought fragments it had stored to the habitat personality. A precious intangible residue of life, the sole legacy of Thetis and his crew.

Athene’s past friends, lovers, and husbands emerged from the multiplicity of Romulus’s personality to offer support and encouragement, cushioning the blow as best they could. We will do what we can,they assured her. she could feel the tremulous remnants of her son being slowly woven into a more cohesive whole, and drew a brief measure of comfort from that.

Although no stranger to death, Athene found this bereavement particularly difficult. Always at the back of her mind was the belief that the voidhawks and their captains were somehow immortal, or at least immune to such wasteful calamity. A foolish, almost childish belief, because they were the children she prized the most. Her last link with Iasius , their offspring.

Half an hour later, dressed in a plain jet-black ship-tunic, Athene stood in the spaceport reception lounge, a proud, solitary figure, the lines on her face betraying every one of her hundred and thirty-five years as they never had before. She looked out over the ledge as Oenone and its anxious escort of two voidhawks from the Saturn defence squadron crept out of the darkness. Oenone sank onto a vacant pedestal with a very human mindsigh of relief. Feed tubes in the pedestal stirred like blind stumpy tentacles, searching for the female orifices on the voidhawk’s underside; various sphincter muscles expanded and gripped, producing tight seals. Oenone gulped down the nutrient fluid which Romulus synthesized, filling its internal bladders, quenching the thirst which leached vitality from every cell. They hadn’t stayed at Oshanko any longer than it took to hand Henry Siclari and his crew over to the Fleet port authorities, and allow Edenist bonding-adjustment specialists to assume command of Vermuden . After that Syrinx had insisted on coming direct to Saturn.

Athene looked out at the big voidhawk with real concern rising.

Oenone was in a sorry state: hull foam scorched and flaking, toroid thermo-dump panels melted, electronic sensor systems reduced to rivulets of congealed slag, the sensor blisters that had faced the Dymasio roasted, their cells dead.

I’m all right,Oenone told her. It’s mostly the mechanical systems that were damaged. And the biotechnicians can graft new sensor blisters into me. I’m never going to complain about being covered in foam again,it added humbly.

When Syrinx came through the airlock her cheeks had become almost hollow, her hair was hanging limp over her skull, and she walked as though she had been condemned. Athene felt the tears come at last, and put her arms round her woebegone daughter, soothing the drained thoughts with an empathic compassion, the maternal balm.

It’s not your fault.

If I hadn’t . . .

Don’t,athene ordered sternly. You owe Thetis and Graeae this much, not to sink into pointless remorse. You’re stronger than that, much stronger.

Yes, Mother.

He did what he wanted to. He did what was right. Tell me how many millions of lives would have been lost if that antimatter had been used against a naked planetary surface?

A lot,syrinx said numbly.

And he saved them. My son. Because of him, they will live, and have children, and laugh.

But it hurts!

That’s because we’re human, more so than Adamists can ever be. Our empathy means we can never hide from what we feel, and that’s good. But you must always walk the balance, Syrinx; the balance is the penalty of being human: the danger of allowing yourself to feel. For this we walk a narrow path high above rocky ground. On one side we have the descent into animalism, on the other a godhead delusion. Both pulling at us, both tempting. But without these forces tugging at your psyche, stirring it into conflict, you can never love. They awaken us, you see, these warring sides, they arouse our passion. So learn from this wretched episode, learn to be proud of Thetis and what he accomplished, use it to counter the grief. It is hard, I know; for captains more than anyone. We are the ones who truly open our souls to another entity, we feel the deepest, and suffer the most. And knowing that, knowing what you would endure in life, I still chose to bring you into existence, because there is so much joy to be had from the living.

The circular house snug in arms of its gentle valley hadn’t changed, still a frantic noisy vortex of excited children, slightly weary adults, and harassed bitek housechimps. Syrinx might never have been away. With eighteen children, and, so far, forty-two grandchildren, eleven great-grandchildren, and the two newest fourth-generation additions, Athene headed a family that never gave her a moment’s rest. Ninety per cent of the adults were involved with spaceflight in one field or another, which meant long absences were the norm. But when they came back, it was the house and Athene they always visited first, staying or passing through as the fancy took them.

“Athene’s boarding-house, bordello, and playpen,” the old ex-captain had called it on more than one occasion.

The younger children were delighted to see Syrinx, whooping as they gathered round her, demanding kisses and stories of the planets she’d visited, while the adults offered subdued condolences. Being with them, knowing and feeling the heartache being shared, lifted the load. Slightly.

After the evening meal Syrinx went back to her old room, asking to be left alone for a few hours. Ruben and Athene acceded, retreating to the white iron chairs on the patio and conversing on the singular-engagement mode, sober faces betraying their worry.

She lay back on the bed, staring through the transparent roof at the lazy winding valleys beyond the dimming axial light-tube. In the seven years since Oenone reached maturity the trees had grown and bushes fattened, expanding the green-on-green patterns of her childhood.

She could feel Oenone out on the ledge, hull being cleaned of foam, mobile gantry arms in position, giving technicians full access to the battered crew toroid. Now it had completed its nutrient digestion its mindtone was returning to normal. It was enjoying being the centre of attention, busy conversing with the ledge crews over aspects of the repairs. Two biotechnicians were squatting over a ruined sensor blister with portable probes, taking samples.

Daddy?

I’m here, Sly-minx. I told you I always would be.

Thank you. I never doubted. How is he?

Happy.

A little of the dread lifted from her heart. Is he ready?

Yes. But there was so much missing from recent years. We have integrated what we can. The core of identity is viable but it lacks substance. He remains a child, perhaps the part of him you loved the most.

Can I talk to him yet?

You may.

She was standing barefoot on thick, cool grass beside a broad stream, the axial light-tube shining like a thread of captured sunlight overhead. There were tall trees around her, bowing under the weight of vines hanging between their branches, and long cascades of flowers fell to the floor, some of them trailing in the clear water. Butterflies flapped lazily through the still air, contending with bees for perches on the flowers, birds cheeped all around.

It was the clearing where she had spent so many days as a girl, just past the bottom of the lawn. Looking down she saw she was wearing a simple cotton summer dress with a tiny blue and white check. Long loose hair swirled around skinny hips. Her body was thirteen years old; and she knew why even as she heard the children shouting and laughing. Young enough to be regarded as part of childhood’s conspiracy, old enough to be revered, to hold herself aloof and not be resented for it.

They burst into the clearing, six ten-year-old boys, in shorts and T-shirts, bare chested and in swimming trunks, smiling and laughing, strong limbs flashing in the warm light.

“Syrinx!” He was in their middle, sandy hair askew, grinning up at her.

“Hello, Thetis,” she said.

“Are you coming with us?” he asked breathlessly.

A raft of rough silicon sheets, foamed aluminium I-beams, and empty plastic drink tanks—familiar enough to bring tears to her eyes—was lying on the bank, half in the water.

“I can’t, Thetis. I just came to make sure you’re all right.”

“Course I’m all right!” He tried to do a cartwheel on the grass, but toppled over and fell into a laughing heap. “We’re going all the way down to the salt-water reservoir. It’ll be fun, we’ve not told anyone, and the personality won’t see us. We could meet anything down there, pirates or monsters. And we might find some treasure. I’ll bring it back, and I’ll be the most famous captain in all of the habitat.” He scrambled to his feet again, eyes shining. “Please come, Syrinx. Please?”

“Another time, I promise.”

There were shouts from the other boys as the raft was pushed into the fast-flowing stream. It bobbed about at alarming angles for a few seconds before gradually righting itself. The boys started to pile on.

Thetis’s head swivelled between Syrinx and the raft, desperately torn. “Promise? Really promise?”

“I do.” She reached out and held his head between her hands, and kissed him lightly on his brow.

“Syrinx!” He squirmed in agitation, colouring as the other boys launched into a flurry of catcalls.

“Here,” she said, and took off a slim silver necklace with an intricately carved pale jade stone the size of a grape. “Wear this, it’ll be like I’m there with you. And next time I visit, you can tell me all about it.”

“Right!” And he ran for the raft, splashing through the shallows as he fumbled to fasten the chain round his neck. “Don’t forget, come back. You promised.”

How far will he go?she asked sinon as a soaking Thetis was hauled over the edge of the raft by a couple of his friends.

As far as he wishes.

And how long will it last?

As long as he wants.

Daddy!

I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be flippant. Probably about ten or fifteen years. You see, even childhood will ultimately pale. Games that defy adults and friends that mean the whole world are all very well, but a major part of what a ten-year-old is, is the wish to be old; his actions are a shadow of what he sees as adult behaviour. There is an old saying, that the boy is the father of the man. So when he has had his fill of adventure and realizes he will never be that man, that he is a sterile child, his identity will fade out of the multiplicity into the overall personality. Like all of us will eventually, Sly-minx, even you.

You mean he will lose hope.

No. Death is the loss of hope, everything else is merely despair.

The children were paddling now, getting the hang of the raft. Thetis was sitting at the front shouting orders, in his element. He looked round, smiled and waved. Syrinx raised a hand.

Adamists lose hope,she said. The Dymasio ’s captain lost all hope. That’s why he did what he did.

Adamists are incomplete. We know we will continue after the body dies; in some way, some fraction of us will linger for hundreds of millennia. For myself, I cannot even contemplate abandoning the multiplicity segment of the personality, not with you and my other children and grandchildren to watch over. Perhaps in ten or fifteen generations, when I can conjure up no sense of attachment, then I may seek full unity with the habitat personality, and transfer my allegiance to all Edenists. But it will be a very long time.

Adamists have their religions. I thought their gods gave them hope.

They do, to the very devout. But consider the disadvantage under which the ordinary Adamist labours. The mythical kingdom, that is all their heaven can ever be, beyond ever knowing. In the end, such belief is very hard for poor sinful mortals to retain. Our afterlife, however, is tangible, real. For us it is not a question of faith, we have fact.

Unless you are Thetis.

Even he survives.

Some of him, a stunted existence. Floating down a river that will never end.

Loved, treasured, welcomed, eternal.

The raft disappeared round a bend, a clump of willows blocking it from sight. High-pitched voices drifted through the air. Syrinx let her hand drop. “I will visit you again, big brother,” she told the empty gurgling stream. “Again and again, every time I come back. I will make you look forward to my visits and the stories I bring, I will give you something to hope for. Promise.”

In her room she looked up at the darkened indistinct landscape far above. The axial light-tube had been reduced to a lunar presence masked by the evening’s first rain-clouds.

Syrinx closed her mind to the other Edenists, closed it to the voidhawks flying outside, closed it to the habitat personality. Only Oenone remained. Beloved who would understand, because they were one.

Emerging from the jumble of doubt and misery was the tenuous wish that the Adamists were right after all, and there was such a thing as God, and an afterlife, and souls. That way Thetis wouldn’t be lost. Not for ever.

It was such a tiny sliver of hope.

Oenone ’s thoughts rubbed against hers, soothing and sympathetic.

If there is a God, and if somewhere my brother’s soul is intact, please look after him. He will be so alone.

Chapter 07

Over a thousand tributaries contributed towards the Juliffe’s rapacious flow, a wrinkled network of rivers and streams gathering in the rainfall over an area of one and a half million square kilometres. They emptied themselves into the main course at full volume throughout the whole two hundred and ninety-five days of Lalonde’s year, bringing with them immense amounts of silt, rotting vegetation, and broken trees. The turbulence and power of the huge flow was such that the water along the last five hundred kilometres turned the same colour and thickness as milky coffee. By the time it reached the coast the river’s width had swollen to over seventeen kilometres; and the sheer weight of water backed up for two thousand kilometres behind it was awesome. At the mouth it looked as though one sea was bleeding into another.

For the final hundred-kilometre stretch, the banks on the northern side were non-existent; marshland extended up to a hundred and fifty kilometres into the countryside. Named the Hultain Marsh after the first reckless ecological assessment team member to venture a few brief kilometres inside its fringes, it proved an inhospitable zone of reeds and algae and sharp-toothed lizard-analogue animals of varying sizes. No human explorer ever managed to traverse it; the ecological evaluators contented themselves with Hultain’s sketchy report and the satellite survey pictures. When the wind blew from the north, it carried a powerful smell of corruption over the river into Durringham. To the city’s residents the Hultain Marsh had virtually assumed the quality of myth, a repository of bad luck and ghoulish creatures.

The land on the Juliffe’s southern side, however, rose up to twelve metres above the surging brown waters. Sprawling aloof along the bank, Durringham was relatively safe from the most potent of the Juliffe’s spring floods. Poised between spaceport and water, the city was the key to colonizing the entire river basin.

The Juliffe provided the Lalonde Development Company with the greatest conceivable natural roadway into Amarisk’s interior. With its tributaries extending into every valley in the centre of the landmass, there was no need to hack out and maintain expensive tracks in the jungle. Abundant wood provided the raw material for boat hulls, the simplest and cheapest form of travel possible. So shipbuilding swiftly became the capital’s principal industry, with nearly a quarter of its population dependent on the success of the shipyards.

Captains under contract to the LDC would take newly arrived colonist groups upriver, and bring down the surplus produce from the established farms to be sold in the city. There were several hundred boats docking and sailing every day. The port with its jetties and warehouses and fishmarkets and shipyards grew until it stretched the entire length of the city. It was also the logical place to site the transients’ dormitories.

Jay Hilton thought the dormitory was tremendously exciting. It was so different from anything in her life to date. A simple angled roof of ezystak panels eighty metres long, supported by a framework of metal girders. There were no walls, the LDC officer said they would have made it too hot inside. There was a concrete floor, and row after row of hard wooden cots. She had slept in a sleeping-bag the first night, right at the centre of the dormitory with the rest of Group Seven’s kids. It had taken her an age to fall asleep, people kept talking, and the river made great swooshing noises as it flowed past the embankment. And she didn’t think she would ever get used to the humidity, her clothes hadn’t been completely dry since she got off the spaceplane.

During the day the dormitory thronged with people, and the alleyways between the cots were great for chases and other games. Life underneath its rattling roof was very easygoing; nothing was organized for the kids, so they were free to please themselves how they chose. She had spent the second day getting to know the other kids in Group Seven. In the morning they ran riot among the adults, then after lunch they had all made their way down to the riverside to watch the boats. Jay had loved it. The whole port area looked like something out of a historical AV programme, a slice of the Earth’s Middle Ages preserved on a far planet. Everything was made of wood, and the boats were so beautiful, with their big paddles on each side, and tall iron stacks that sent out long plumes of grey-white smoke.

Twice during the day the sky had clouded over, and rain had fallen like a solid sheet. The kids had all retreated under the dormitory roof, watching spellbound as the grey veil obscured the Juliffe, and huge lightning bolts crashed overhead.

She had never imagined the wild was so wild. But her mother wasn’t worried, so she wasn’t. Sitting down and just watching had never been such fun before. She couldn’t think how wonderful it was going to be actually travelling on a river-boat. From a starship one day to a paddle-steamer the next! Life was glorious.

The food they had been served was strange, the aboriginal fruit was all odd shapes with a mildly spicy flavouring, but at least there wasn’t any vat meat like they had at the arcology. After the high tea the staff served for the kids in the big canteen at one end of the dormitory, she went back to the riverside to see if she could spot any aboriginal animals. She remembered the vennal, something like a cross between a lizard and a monkey. It featured prominently in the didactic memory which the LDC immigration advisory team at the orbital-tower base-station had imprinted before she left Earth. In the mirage floating round inside her skull it looked kind of cute. She was secretly hoping she’d be able to have one as a pet once they reached their allotted land upriver.

The embankment was a solid wall of bitek polyp, a dull apricot in colour, preventing any more of the rich black soil from being chewed away by the frighteningly large river. It was thrilling to see so much bitek being used; Jay had never met an Edenist, although back at the arcology Father Varhoos had warned the congregation about them and their soulless technology of perverted life. But using the polyp here was a good idea, the kernels were cheap, and the coral didn’t need constant repairs the way concrete would. She couldn’t see the harm. The whole universe was being turned upside-down this week.

She slid right down the sloping wall to the water itself, and started walking, hoping to see a xenoc fish. The water here was almost clear. Wavelets lapping on the polyp sent up sprays that showered her bare legs; she was still wearing the shorts and blouse that her mother had made her carry in the zero-tau pod. A lot of the other colonists in Group Seven had spent the morning chasing after their gear in one of the warehouses, trying to find more practical clothes.

Everyone had been envious and admiring of her and mother yesterday. That felt good. So much better than the way people back in the arcology regarded them. She pushed that thought away hurriedly.

Her boots splashed through the shallows, the water droplets slithering off the shiny coating. There were a lot of big pipe outlets venting into the river, along with the drainage gullies which were like medium-sized streams, so she had to be careful as she dodged under the pipes not to get splattered by the discharges. Up ahead was one of the circular harbours, six hundred metres in diameter, also made out of polyp; a refuge where the larger boats could dock in calmer waters. The harbours were spaced every kilometre or so along the embankment, with clusters of warehouses and timber mills springing up on the ground behind them. In between the harbours were rows of wooden jetties sticking out into the river, which the smaller traders and fishing boats used.

The sky was growing darker again. But it wasn’t rain, the sun was low in the west. And she was getting very tired, the day here was awfully long.

She ducked under a jetty, hand stroking the black timber pillars. Mayope wood, her eidetic memory said, one of the hardest woods found in the Confederation. The tree had big scarlet flowers. She rapped her knuckles against it experimentally. It really was hard, like a metal, or stone.

Out on the river one of the big paddle-boats was sailing past, churning up a big wake of frothy water as its bows drove against the current. Colonists were lined up along the rails, and they all seemed to be looking at her. She grinned and waved at them.

Group Seven was sailing tomorrow. The real adventure. She stared wistfully after the boat as it slipped away upriver.

That was when she saw the thing caught around a support pillar of the next jetty. A dirty yellow-pink lump, about a metre long. There was more of it underwater, she could tell from the way it bobbed about. With a whoop, she raced forwards, feet kicking up fans of water. It was a xenoc fish, or amphibian, or something. Trapped and waiting for her to inspect it. Names and shapes whirled through her mind, the didactic memory on full recall, trying to match up with what she was seeing.

Maybe it’s something new, she thought. Maybe they’ll name it after me. I’ll be famous!

She was five metres away, and still running as hard as she could, when she saw the head. It was someone in the water, someone without any clothes on. Face down! The shock threw her rhythm, and her feet skidded from under her. She yelled as her knee hit the rough, unyielding polyp. She felt a hot pain as she grazed the side of her leg. She finished up flat against the embankment, legs half in the water, feeling numb all over and sick inside. Blood started to well up in the graze. She bit her lip, eyes watering as she watched it, fighting not to cry.

A wave lifted the corpse in the river, knocking it against the support pillar again.