“Stop talking like that,” she said.
The voice ignored her. [You aren’t what you seem. These memories of life on Hela are a graft, nothing more. Beneath them lies something else entirely. For nine years they’ve served you well, allowing you to move amongst these people as if born to them. The illusion was so perfect, so seamless, that you didn’t even suspect it yourself. But all along your true mission was at the back of your mind. You were waiting for something: some conjunction of events. It brought you from the badlands, down to the Permanent Way. Now, nearing the end of your quest, you are coming out of the dream. You are starting to remember who you really are, and it thrills and terrifies you in equal measure.]
“My mission?” she asked, almost laughing at the absurdity of it.
[To make contact with us,] the voice said, [the shadows. Those you were sent to negotiate with.]
“Who are you?” she asked quietly. “Please tell me.”
[Go to sleep, little girl. You’ll dream of us, and then you’ll know everything.]
Rashmika went to sleep. She dreamed of shadows, and more. She dreamed the kinds of dream she had always associated with shallow sleep and fever: geometric and abstract, highly repetitious, filled with inexplicable terrors and ecstasies. She dreamed the dream of a hunted people.
They were far away, so far away that the distance separating them from the familiar universe—in both space and time—was incomprehensibly large, beyond any sensible scheme of measurement. But they were people, of a kind. They had lived and dreamed, and they had a history that was itself a kind of dream: unimaginably far-reaching, unimaginably complex, an epic now grown too long for the telling. All that it was necessary for her to know—all that she could know, now—was that they had reached a point where their memory of interstellar colonisation on the human scale was so remote, so faded and etiolated by time, that it almost seemed to merge with their earliest prehistory, barely separable from a faint ancestral recollection of fire-making and the bringing down of game.
They had colonised a handful of stars, and then they had colonised their galaxy, and then they had colonised much more than that, leap-frogging out into ever-larger territories, dancing from one hierarchical structure to the next. Galaxies, then groups of galaxies, then sprawling superclusters of tens of thousands of galaxy-groups, until they called across the starless voids between superclusters—the largest structures in creation—like apes howling from one tree-top to the next. They had done wonderful and terrible things. They had reshaped themselves and their universe, and they had made plans for eternity.
They had failed. Across all that dizzying history, from one leap of scale to the next, there had never been a time when they were not running from something. It wasn’t the Inhibitors, or anything very like them. It was a kind of machinery, but this time more like a blight, a transforming, ravening disease that they themselves had let loose. The dream’s details were vague, but what she understood was this: in their very earliest history they had made something, a tool rather than weapon, its intended function peaceful and utilitarian, but which had slipped from their control.
The tool neither attacked the people nor showed any great evidence of recognising them. What it did—with the mindless efficiency of wildfire—was rip matter apart, turning worlds into floating clouds of rubble, shells of rock and ice surrounding entire stars. Mirrors in the swarms of machinery gathered starlight, focusing life-giving energy on to the grains of rubble; transparent membranes trapped that energy around each grain and allowed tiny bubblelike ecologies to grow. Within these warm emerald-green pockets the people were able to survive, if they chose. But that was their only choice, and even then only a certain kind of existence was possible. Their only other option was flight: they could not stop the advancement of the transforming machines, only keep running from the leading edge of the wave. They could only watch as the transforming fire swept through their vast civilisation in a mere flicker of cosmic time, as the great swarms of machine-stimulated living matter turned stars into green lanterns.
They ran, and they ran. They sought solace in satellite galaxies, and for a few million years they thought they were safe. But the machines eventually reached the satellites, and began the same grindingly slow process of stellar consumption. The people ran again, but it was never far enough, never fast enough. No weapons worked: they either did more damage than the blight, or helped spread it faster. The transforming machines evolved, becoming steadily more agile and clever. Yet one thing never changed: their central task remained the smashing of worlds, and the remaking of them into a billion bright-green shards.
They had been created to do something, and that was what they were going to do.
Now, at the tail end of their history, the people had run as far as it was possible to run. They had exhausted every niche. They could not go back, could not make an accommodation with the machines. Even the transformed galaxies were now uninhabitable, their chemistries poisoned, the ecological balance of stellar life and death upset by the swarming industry of the machines. Out-of-control weapons, designed originally to defeat the machines, were themselves now as much of a hazard as the original problem.
So the people turned elsewhere. If they were being squeezed out of their own universe, then perhaps it was time to consider moving to another.
Fortunately, this was not as impossible as it sounded.
In her dream, Rashmika learned about the theory of braneworlds. There was a hallucinatory texture to it: velvety curtains of light and darkness rippled in her mind with the languor of auroral storms. What she understood was this: everything in the visible universe, everything that she saw—from the palm of her hand to the Lady Morwenna, from Hela itself out to the furthest observable galaxy—was necessarily trapped on one brane, like a pattern woven into a sheet of fabric. Quarks and electrons, photons and neutrinos—everything that constituted the universe in which she lived and breathed, including herself, was forced to travel along the surface of this one brane alone.
But the brane itself was only one of many parallel sheets floating in the higher-dimensional space that was called the bulk. The sheets were stacked closely together; were even, perhaps, joined at their edges, like the folded musical program of some vast cosmic orchestrion. Some of the sheets had very different properties from others: although the same fundamental rules of nature applied in each, the strengths of the coupling constants—and hence the properties of the macroscopic universe—depended on where a particular brane lay within the bulk. Life within those distant branes was bizarre and strange, assuming that the parochial physics even allowed anything as complex as life. Elsewhere, some sheets were brushing against each other, the glancing impact of their collisions generating primordial events in each brane that looked very much like the Big Bangs of traditional cosmology.
If the local brane was connected to another, then the fold point—the crease—lay at a cosmological distance beyond even the Hubble length scale. But there was nothing to prevent matter and radiation making the journey around that fold, given time. If one travelled far enough along the surface of one of these connected branes—through countless megaparsecs, far enough through the conventional universe of matter and light—one would eventually end up on the next closest brane in the multidimensional void of the bulk.
Rashmika could not see the topological relationship between her brane and the brane of the shadows. Were they joined, or separate? Were the shadows deliberately withholding this information, or was it just not known to them?