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mind of Winston Duarte blew apart like a pile of straw in a hurricane. There was pain—a great deal of pain—and there was fear. But there wasn’t anyone left to feel it, so it faded quickly. There was no consciousness, no pattern, no one to think the thoughts that swelled and dimmed. Something more delicate—more graceful, more sophisticated—would have died. The narrative chain that thought of itself as Winston Duarte was ripped to pieces, but the flesh that housed him wasn’
When awareness returned, it first appeared in colors. Blue, but without the words for blueness. Then red. Then a white that also meant something. The fragment of an idea. Snow. Joy came to be, and it lasted longer than fear had. A deep, bubbling sense of wonder carried itself along without anything to carry it. Patterns rose and fell, came together and came apart. The
There had been a reason, a goal. Something had justified atrocities in order to avoid worse ones. He had betrayed his nation. He had conspired against billions. He had condemned people who were loyal to him to death. There had been a reason. He remembered it. He forgot. He rediscovered the glorious brilliance of yellow and devoted himself to the pure experience of that.
His body kept insisting that even if it couldn’t go on, it could go on.
He remembered. He remembered being a man who loved his child, and so he remembered being a man.
The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time. “Admiral Trejo,” he said, and Anton startled.
was the fifth week of Trejo’s combination press tour and reconquest of Sol system. He sat in his cabin, spent from his long day of glad-handing and speech-making with the local leaders and officials. He was the visible face of a nearly toppled empire, making sure no one knew how close he’d come to losing it all.
“But given the lawlessness that has followed the recent attack on Laconia, our first concern is security for the facilities. We have to have some guarantee that your ships will be able to protect these valuable assets. We don’t want to just paint a target on ourselves for the underground to aim at.” You just got the shit kicked out of you, had your factories blown up, lost two of your most powerful battleships, and are scrambling to hold the empire together. Do you have enough ships to force us to work for you?
After that, there were the gates to deal with, and whatever within them kept turning the minds off in whole systems at a time as it sniffed for ways to exterminate humanity. No rest for the wicked. No peace for the good.
“I got a feeling. There’s stuff running in the background with the new head. There was a hiccup. Don’t think it’ll happen again.”
The colony worlds were acting like their safety could exist separate from the well-being of all the other systems and ships. It couldn’t be so hard to see how accepting a little restriction and regulation benefited everyone. But inner-worlds culture didn’t measure it that way. For them, being better meant being better than the person next to you, not both of you sharing the same increase.
Fatalism had its dark attractions, after all. Hopelessness and despair could almost look restful.
ADMISSION APPROVED FOR FALL SEMESTER.
Every generation had its apocalypse. If they made humans stop falling in love and having babies, celebrating and dreaming and living out the time they had, they’d have stopped a long time before.
The weird alchemy of adolescent imprinting transformed her unconsidered identification with an entertainment feed actor into an interest in how strands of DNA turned into pathologies.
Whatever the reason—or lack of reason—Professor Li had done a section about the first explorations for extraterrestrial life in the oceans of Europa, and Elvi’s brain had lit up like someone had put euphorics in her breakfast cereal. To the dismay of her mother and her academic advisor, she changed her focus to the then-purely-hypothetical field of exobiology. Her advisor’s exact words had been From a work perspective, you’d be better off learning to tune pianos. And that had been true right up until Eros moved. After, everybody in her program had jobs for life.
Earth’s tree of life wasn’t alone in the universe.
“I am now aware that there is something called a slow life model.” “Right. Basics. Okay. So, there’s a range of metabolic rates. You can see that in animals. You have something fast with a high reproduction rate like rats or chickens on one hand, and tortoises with a really long lifespan and a much slower metabolism on the other. The whole tree of life is on that spectrum. It predicts that you’d see things evolving in very low-energy environments that, y’know, needed very little energy. Low metabolisms, low reproduction. Long lifespan. Slow life.” “Space turtles.” “Ice turtles. Actually, very
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“Start talking vulcanism, and I know my way around,” Fayez said. “That’s what Cara’s describing. That biome. Look. She talks about the cold above and the heat below. Like the ice shell of a water moon with a hot core. And free water in between.
“And the thing where she tasted stones,” Fayez said. “Minerals and nutrients floating up from below. You’re thinking they’re both there. These slow life turtles—” “Jellyfish.” “—and vent organisms too, but lower down.” “Like what we were looking for on Europa.”
Seeking out food instead of just bumping into it. I think Cara is experiencing this organism’s evolutionary history. The diamond—” “Thank you for not calling it an emerald.” “—is showing her how they came to exist. Like if we were explaining life to something that had never seen anything like us by pushing down to organic chemistry and building the story up from there so that we’d have a common context.”
“So we know something about what they are. This could be the origin of the species that established a vast galactic presence and overcame a bunch of things we always thought were laws of physics? That’s a big deal.”
“And if they knew. Which evidence suggests they didn’t. I mean that elaborate gamma-ray burst trap in Tecoma system was just them wiring a shotgun to a doorknob. Even if we know everything about the space jellyfish, is that going to be enough?”
“That went very bad,” she said. “Yeah.” She waited a moment before she said, “What happened to Amos?” Jim shook his head. We lost him, he tried to say. I lost him. “Yeah,” Amos said. “I got pretty fucked up all right.”
Jim wanted to feel joy, and he did. But there was something more with it. A sense of wrongness that came from trauma after trauma followed by something that violated his inborn sense of how the universe worked. What was possible. “You died,” he said. “You took a round to the back, and it blew most of your chest out. I saw your spine. It was in pieces.”
Whatever it was, it was what Amos’ resurrected corpse made when it replaced his injured flesh. Jim wondered what the inside of the wound looked like. For the first time it occurred to him that the changes the drones on Laconia had made to his old friend hadn’t stopped when they escaped the planet. Amos hadn’t become something different. He was in an ongoing process of becoming. Something about the idea was chilling. As if Amos had read Jim’s thoughts, he frowned. “I don’t know how this whole thing works. But we’d be better off not doing it too often.”
But then Cara had started screaming that she’d been shot, or if not her, that someone had. The monitors had spiked, and her brain activity lit up like someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail into her mind.
“It wasn’t the grandmothers, I don’t think,” Cara said. “They felt the same as always. Deeper, maybe, but the same. It was… one of the others.”
was searching for some very precise word. “I’m not just myself when I’m in there. I mean, I am, but I’m not just Cara. There’s more of me?” “Like the aliens.”
“Like the connection you have with Xan.” “Yes, but more. There are more of them. Only I think something happened. Something bad. I don’t know if they died. And then another one of me was trying to calm me down.”
a burn. “They were changing. The sea slugs or jellyfish or whatever? They were taking other bits of life, animals or plants or whatever was down at the hot core of that icy cold world. They sent them down into the vents so that they could change. Or it could change.” “That’s been a consistent point. And, judging from how the protomolecule functioned, they kept that strategy for a long, long time,” Elvi said.
“The important thing was the light.” “You were saying that. I’m thinking that was the creation of mind.” “A hive mind.” Elvi shrugged. “I’ve never understood that term, really. I mean, there was an electrochemical structure with a lot of semi-independent bodies. Describe it like that, and we’re hive minds of neurons. But did it find a way to build an emergent cognitive analogical system? Yeah. I think so.” “And when they saw the stars, it was like hearing God talking in a language you could almost understand. But not quite. The BFE wanted to show me more. It didn’t want me—us, whatever—to go.
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Trujillo thinks it shows that the ring space isn’t part of our universe.”
“We’re scientists. We only know things until someone shows us we’re wrong.”
“Babe,” Kit said again. “What happened?” Rohi took a deep breath, like a diver looking down toward distant water. “There was another blink. San Esteban system.” Kit felt his gut tighten, but only a little. He’d been through a half dozen rounds of the aliens from inside the rings turning off his mind for him. Everyone in Sol had. “How bad was it?” he asked. “They’re dead,” Rohi said. “Everyone in the system. They’re all just dead.”
Eighteen million people spread across ten cities, a semi-autonomous aquafarming platform the size of Greenland, and a research station in the stagnation zone of the heliosheath, 110 AU out. It had reached the technical specifications for self-sufficiency three years ago, but it still imported supplies from Sol, Auberon, and Bara Gaon.
She was listening to James Holden and a woman with a long, slow accent that Elvi thought of as Mariner Valley but was a kind of Laconian now. Tell me about the systems going dark, the interrogator said. It was just one at first, Jim replied. And the… group consciousness? Consensus? I don’t know the right word for it. The chorus. They weren’t even particularly worried. Not at first.
Then there were more. Just a few. I mean, like three or four. Even then, it wasn’t more than a curiosity, Jim said. What was left in the system? Were there bodies? Did the aliens just disappear? the interrogator asked. It wasn’t like that, Jim said. The systems just went dark. Like losing a comm channel. Then how were they certain the systems were dead? They were all connected. If someone cuts off your hand, is it dead? So yeah, the systems were dead.
Because, Elvi thought, the builders or the Romans or the space jellyfish—the beings of light—hadn’t known what it was to be alone since they’d learned to glow in that ancient, freezing ocean. They were individuals and they were a unity. A superorganism, connected as intimately as she was with her own limbs and organs.
But they decided based on just that to destroy whole systems? the interrogator asked. It was like cutting mold off a block of cheese. Or a clump of cancer cells on your skin. There was a bad spot, and so they burned it off. They didn’t need it. They thought it would stop. What would stop, exactly? The darkness. The death.
“What am I looking at here?” he asked. “An uptick in salt precipitates that matches when everyone died,” Elvi said. “It looks like the mechanism the dark gods figured out is to make ionic bonds just a tiny bit stickier. It lasted just long enough to shut down neurons.
“I don’t think the enemy knows it worked. Listen.” She found the tagged audio and played it. It wasn’t like that. The systems just went dark. Like losing a comm channel. Then how were they certain the systems were dead? They were all connected. She stopped it. “The builders didn’t go look. They didn’t have to. They were already connected. When they lost a system, they knew there was no one there anymore. They used the gates to shove matter around when they needed to, but that was like us moving food through our guts. It was barely even conscious for them anymore. It wasn’t something they
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“Like the Amaratsu,” she said. “The enemy did a thing, and then the traffic stopped. What if that’s how the enemy knew the thing worked. But with us? The traffic didn’t stop. I think we may be as hard for them to see and make sense of as they are for us. So part of what we can do is dirty up their data. All our random, uncoordinated transits are what they’re feeling. It’s like hearing rats in your walls and putting out different poisons until the noise stops. The noise stopping is how you know what worked. And since we’re still making transits in and out of that gate? As far as they know,
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We’re not doing anything here to make a beautiful, gracious, pleasant utopia. If we win, the lives we save will be the same mix of shit, frustration, and absurdity that they’ve always been.”
The grandmothers say look look look how it all happened once and all happens again. The cold roof of the world broke open and gave the stars. The vacuum shatters in the same way and shows the outside, the older real, the vaster real. The body of God. The heaven where the angels all hate us.
Her own experience had been like a whiteout. One moment, she’d been watching the Preiss die in a failed transit. The next, she’d been in a hurricane of unfamiliar consciousness, battered by it. When she’d come back to herself, the Derecho had been on automatic lockdown. The crew had been stunned, confused. She remembered passing one woman in the corridor who was floating in a fetal position, tears in a bubble over her eyes like goggles made of salt water.
Tanaka resented the tightness in her throat as she pulled up the woman’s file. Anet Dimitriadis had skin so dark the system adjusted the image contrast to make her features clear. Like a rush of cold water in her gut, fear flooded Tanaka. “Fuck,” she said.
Primary objective. He wasn’t saying Duarte’s name. Not even here. It was a misplaced discretion. Teresa Duarte had been breaking bread with the enemy for almost a year. Naomi Nagata and the whole underground knew by now that Duarte was shattered. They might not know that he’d taken the trouble to resurrect himself, but they probably did.
She’d navigated her whole life on the unbroken membrane between her public self and her private one. The idea that the separation might have been ripped open put her on the edge of almost animal panic.
“We have evidence that something made a transit to Bara Gaon system in approximately the right time frame,” Botton said. “Shall we proceed there?” “Yes,” Tanaka said. “Alert me when the full crew has returned.”
