Needle, page 1
Inverted Frontier
book 3
Needle
Linda Nagata
Published by Mythic Island Press LLC
Kula, Hawaii
Mythic Island Press LLC
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Remembrance
“Do you recognize it?” Lezuri asked.
Pinched between thumb and forefinger, he held up a slender needle for Urban to see. Ultra-thin and a full twelve centimeters long, the needle’s silvery surface sliced light into sprays of rainbow glints.
“No,” Urban answered, tense, wary, wondering where this was going.
“But you can guess.”
“Is it like that needle you used to penetrate the hull of my ship?”
“Yes, except this one won’t activate. It won’t grow spontaneously. It doesn’t have that capability, but everything else is there. Everything I know. All of it folded into a quantum-scale matrix.”
Lezuri offered the needle to Urban. “Take it. It won’t harm you. It’s a gift, from me to you. All my knowledge yours—if you can work out how to access it. If you can do that, then I am wrong, and you are ready to go to Tanjiri.”
Chapter
1
Lezuri’s needle had remained a mystery for well over a century—a mystery that more than ever, Urban was anxious to solve.
He sat cross-legged at the low table in the front room of the cottage he shared with Clemantine. Holding the needle gently between thumb and forefinger, he turned it back and forth, admiring the way it refracted light.
The needle felt cold, yet when he passed it through a column of steam rising from the brewing teapot, no condensation appeared on it. Other than the slight friction coefficient of its surface—a structural convenience that allowed him to hold on to it—Lezuri’s needle had never demonstrated any willingness to interact with the world.
Soft footsteps on the garden path outside the cottage served as an auditory alert—not that Urban needed one. With his expanded senses he had watched Vytet approach.
He reminded himself to look up as Vytet came in. It was important to make eye contact. A smile and a nod of welcome would assure his guest that he was present within this avatar and paying attention—which of course, in some way, he always was.
Vytet paused in the doorway, tall and willowy as ever, her gender lately indistinct. A delicate, feminine face, almost childish—but with the slim, hard, youthful body of a teenage boy. She wore only a long, patterned skirt, leaving her smooth hairless chest bare.
Vytet eyed the needle.
“That thing,” she said, coming inside. “Do you still need it?”
His gaze returned to the needle’s refracted rainbow glints. “Not so much the knowledge it contains. Still, it’s a puzzle I’d like to solve.”
“A puzzle Lezuri left for you . . . how to get it to open.” She sat down across from him. “So strange that we never found the solution, somewhere in the memory of the silver.”
“Sooth.”
“Though of course Lezuri’s ancient consciousness resided within the Rock, separate from the silver of Verilotus, and perhaps not within its memory.”
Urban held the needle out to her. She took it cautiously. Stroked it. Turned it over and squinted at it while Urban poured the tea.
“I want you to work out how to open it,” he told her.
A soft, skeptical chuckle as Vytet laid the needle in a padded case, lying open on the table.
“I have looked into it. You know that. And I’ve concluded this physics, like the physics of the Blade, is beyond us, that our minds are not designed to comprehend such things.”
Urban sipped his tea, savoring an awareness of the silver within him. His connection to the silver of Verilotus and the vast living memory it contained had faded to nothing as Dragon departed that system—sixty-four years ago now. Yet some portion of silver remained tangled in his mind, tempting him, always, to immerse himself within its trove of memory—a personal memory of all he’d done and discovered since the silver had augmented his senses.
“Our minds are adaptable, Vytet.”
“Yours more than mine.”
She said this because she’d rejected a permanent entanglement with the silver. She’d lived with it during the years they’d spent at Verilotus, but in the end she’d discarded her planetary avatar, explaining, I’m losing myself in obsession, endlessly chasing the chains of memory the silver contains.
Vytet had not been alone in that decision. Among those who had continued the voyage, all but Urban had made that same choice.
Still, for all her life, Vytet had trained her mind to see the world in new ways, and in her mind—her brilliant, adaptive mind—she walked paths that Urban had never been able to follow, either as himself or as one of his highly specialized Apparatchiks.
He needed Vytet to reconsider the puzzle of the needle.
Setting his cup down with a soft tap, he said, “There must be another way to approach the problem, one we haven’t considered yet. Lezuri created that needle here, aboard Dragon. If he can do it, we can do it. And if you crack this puzzle, my guess is we’ll be one step closer to cracking the physics of the Blade.”
This last argument did not win her interest as he’d hoped. Instead, she drew back, lips pursed in wariness, eyes narrowed, and her youthful brow drawn down in a worried scowl.
“Why would you want to bring that knowledge back into the world, Urban? A knowledge like that . . . it would let you tear apart worlds.”
He did not allow his gaze to waver. Nothing of fear could be heard in his tone as he asked her in a gentle voice, “We need to know, don’t we? We’re bound for Tanjiri. An entity exists there—Lezuri believed it anyway—and the evidence suggests he’s right.”
Tanjiri had been a cordoned star of the Hallowed Vasties, cloaked in a swarm of orbiting objects so abundant they’d hidden the star’s light. But the cordons had disintegrated all across the Hallowed Vasties. At Tanjiri, as everywhere, starlight shone through.
Nearly two millennia had passed since then—and much of Tanjiri’s cordon was simply gone. The Apparatchik known as the Astronomer had mapped a wide, chaotic belt of scattered debris shepherded by rare, broken megastructures. Those remnant ruins constituted only a small fraction of the former cordon. Urban interpreted the missing mass as evidence of brutal warfare. And yet somehow a living world had survived through it all—through the creation of the cordon and its cataclysmic collapse.
Designated Tanjiri-2 in the Master Star Catalog, the planet continued to orbit as it always had, within the star’s habitable zone. But in the millennia since the star catalog had been compiled, Tanjiri-2 had acquired a large moon, Tanjiri-2b, miraculously blue-green and alive like its partner, and rotating independently. If it had been a natural moon, formed in the planet’s distant past, it would have long since become tidally locked, with one face always turned toward its primary. But Tanjiri-2b enjoyed its own complex cycle of day, night, and a twilight bathed in the varying blue-green glow of the planet.
Something had created that moon.
Thinking about it, a shiver prickled Urban’s skin.
Did Vytet see it? Maybe so. Her scowled deepened. She eyed him with a mistrustful gaze.
“Are you saying you’ve changed your mind?” she asked. “That you won’t go to Tanjiri unless you possess this knowledge?”
“That’s not what I’m saying.”
Even so, Lezuri’s remembered warning haunted him: You are not ready to encounter what exists there.
Did that remain true? Despite all he’d learned at Verilotus?
He did not speak of such doubts aloud. Instead, he assured Vytet, “We are going, but I want your help with this, because I want to be as ready as we can be.”
Chapter
2
A Dull Intelligence, obeying a scheduled command, roused Clemantine from cold sleep. Her rekindled consciousness checked first on the status of the ship, confirming the only significant change to be Dragon’s position as the courser continued to slowly decelerate, drawing ever closer to Tanjiri.
She dressed in a sleeveless lavender tunic and knee-length olive tights, then left the warren, transiting to the gee deck. There, she strolled the empty path that wound among the little parks and the cottages, listening to birdsong while longing for the sound of human voices.
The personnel map reported only Pasha, Vytet, and Urban present, though they were nowhere about.
Nearly all of the ship’s company had chosen to spend the last decades of the passage to Tanjiri in cold sleep. Yet despite their prolonged absence, the gee deck showed no sign of neglect. Every cottage and every garden appeared pristine, kept that way by automated maintenance systems.
Bees hummed, leaves rustled faintly at the touch of a gentle breeze, a hummingbird’s wings buzzed unseen somewhere near by—and Clemantine found herself wondering if it wouldn’t have been wiser to eschew perfection and allow the gardens to overgrow and the cottages to become stained with moss and time . . . to acknowledge the absence of those who ought to live there. As it was, despite the passage of years, the perfection of the deck suggested a recent abandonment, as if everyone had only just been spirited away—and wasn’t that an unsettling thought, one that cast doubt on the reliability of memory.
Still, time had passed since the ship’s company had last been together. And the deck had changed, subtly, slowly. Trees had thickened or been replaced. The composition of species had been rebalanced, tiny primates introduced, along with darting damselflies, and the colorful, shimmering hummingbirds that were her own design.
The gee deck’s web of life had grown ever more complex, while the potential hazards of Tanjiri drew ever closer.
She reached the side path to her own cottage. Strolled to the open doorway.
Inside, Urban sat cross-legged at the low table, shirtless, eyes closed, deep in meditation . . . or not there at all. An abandoned avatar, a lean living statue with sparks of ha glinting in the palms of his upturned hands as they rested in his lap. He used to leave his avatar in the bedroom, feigning sleep, but more and more often in recent years he neglected to put himself away.
On the table, a pot of tea gone cold.
She said, “I’m back.”
He already knew that, of course. A DI set to monitor activity within the cold sleep chambers would have noted her waking and alerted his ghost on the high bridge or his ghost in the library—multiple instantiations of the same mind, continuously trading memories. And through his expanded senses, he would have perceived her presence as she approached the cottage.
Yet he had not risen to meet her, instead waiting for her to speak, allowing her words to be the key that wakened him. Awareness arrived on his face in the form of a sly smile. His eyes opened, to look up at her with that warm teasing gaze she knew so well.
“I’ve been waiting for you,” he said, soft and low. “I’ve missed you and I want you to stay with me this time. We’re almost there—and soon now, things will start to change.”
Over the years since Verilotus, Clemantine had established a pattern: one hundred days in cold sleep with her ghost dormant in the archive, and then a hundred days of existence on the gee deck while her ghost served a shift on the high bridge.
That would change now.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she assured him as she sat across the table from him on a pale-green pillow. “Even with our deceleration”—she felt it as a slight, unpleasant pressure—“in a hundred days we’ll be among the outer band of megastructures.”
A subtle shift in his gaze together with a slight lowering of his chin alerted her. “You’re worried,” she said, surprised.
“Of course I’m worried. We still have no answer to the question of why no other people, no other entity, ever visited Verilotus.”
“That again?” Hadn’t they talked this subject dry?
“The Blade is a beacon,” he insisted. “If there still are other entities on the scale of Lezuri, they should have investigated. It would have been an easy venture. It’s taken us just sixty-four years to make the crossing to Tanjiri. Yet we never found any sign or record in the silver that anyone or anything had visited that system, not until we arrived.”
Sooth. It was an important question, but they did not have data to answer it. Urban knew that and still he could not leave it alone. Discussion of the topic had the feeling of ritual as Clemantine commenced to reiterate possibilities. She started with the simplest. “Maybe no one else exists.”
Lezuri and his partner goddess had tried to kill each other off. A similar enmity, more successful in its execution, could explain the silence.
Urban dismissed the suggestion with a shake of his head. “No. The answer has to be more complex. Besides, we know there’s some kind of presence at Tanjiri. That celestial city is alive.”
“But is it inhabited? Or is it like Silk?”
Clemantine’s memory reached back millennia. The city they’d inhabited at Deception Well, the city where Urban had been born, had existed long before their people came to take it over. Clemantine remembered the day they’d arrived, remembered watching the feeds from the hundreds of camera bees that had been sent in ahead of human scouts. The city had been very much alive, overgrown with forest and home to birds and insects, a well-balanced ecosystem. But all those people who had built the city and who had lived there . . . every one of them had been dead and gone.
Not a memory she cared to explore any further. So without waiting for a response, she pushed on to the next phase of the discussion. “But if there still is an entity at Tanjiri—”
“Lezuri believed there was.”
“Yes. Maybe it’s just not interested in anything outside its own system.”
“But the Blade,” he countered, making no effort to hide the longing in his voice.
She cocked her head. “Don’t assume your desires are shared by others. You are obsessed with the Blade. But this entity, if it exists, surely already understands the physics behind the Blade. It created a world, Urban. A huge, living moon. It had to have used something analogous to the Blade to do that.”
His brow furrowed and a distracted look came over his face, a sure sign that his intellect had turned elsewhere. “Or maybe,” he mused, “it knows about Verilotus’s sentient missiles.”
Clemantine’s heart rate spiked at mention of the missiles. They were Lezuri’s creation. A trio of them had pursued the outrider, Artemis, consuming it in a blossom of white light, obliterating what she had feared, at the time, to be Urban’s last ghost. A psychic scar that still had not healed.
“Sooth,” she whispered. The sentient missiles were a fearsome deterrent, operating through their own bizarre and incomprehensible physics. “It could be that all such entities avoid each other for fear of mutual destruction.” Then she smiled. “And yet here we are, come to disturb such a being.”
He smiled too and spoke jokingly though it was true. “It’s just we have a lot of questions to ask.”
“So we do.” But with Lezuri still haunting her thoughts, she added, “Let’s pray it doesn’t prove to be a mad god too.”
Chapter
3
Throughout the years the fleet had lingered at Verilotus, Pasha had divided herself to make twice the use of her time.
In her physical avatar she’d explored the world, most often venturing on her own, but at times seeking out her closest friends among the ship’s company: Tarnya, Alkimbra, Clemantine. She had even spent long stretches in Riffan’s chatty company. The man could make friends with anyone! By taking advantage of his social skills, she’d met and talked with a fascinating array of people from all around the great circle of Verilotus. But none had known anything of the physics that permitted the existence of their ring-shaped world and the vastly larger ring-shaped Blade that surrounded it.
So Pasha had dedicated a ghost-self to that mystery, puzzling over it in the company of Vytet and Naresh, along with three of the Apparatchiks: the Engineer, the Mathematician, and the Astronomer. It had been a heroic effort, yet they’d gotten nowhere. And when the fleet finally departed Verilotus, they had put the question aside.
“To be revisited later,” Pasha murmured to herself. She stood alone in the front room of her cottage, eyeing the generative wall, presently modulated as a display screen. Onscreen, and running by default, was a short video loop.
The sequence began with the Blade, imaged by a probe as it approached the anomaly’s crisp white non-surface—a featureless boundary, with no visible detail or texture, though at this point the probe had been only a hundred kilometers away.
That distance shrank rapidly. As the probe closed in, the Blade filled the screen, still with no hint of detail within its white glow.
Then, for a fraction of a second, the display went dark, marking the moment when the signal from the descending probe had ceased.
The video shifted. It pulled back in time, back to the viewpoint of a second probe, sent to monitor the first. As before, a smooth white glow filled the display, but now the descending probe could be seen against that glow, appearing as a simple dark spot, visible for several seconds . . . then gone. In the moment of its disappearance, the Blade brightened instantaneously as if the probe’s mass had been converted into harmless white light.
