The Friends’ black hole technology was suppressed. And after the Occupation, when the Coalition came to power, such ancient horrors were suppressed again. But a handful of pharaohs kept the old knowledge alive, tucked away where even the long arm of the Commission for Historical Truth could not find it. The pharaohs had always known a day would come when it would be needed again.
They fell silent.
“I have a new assignment for you,” Nilis said hesitantly. “You might find it sticky.”
“Sticky?”
“I need you to think about Pirius Blue.”
Pirius hadn’t thought about his temporal twin for days. “Why?”
It turned out that Blue had been having adventures of his own. Astonishingly, he had flown a ship deep into the Cavity, to scout the Prime Radiant itself.
“I’m trying to build up a picture of Chandra — its nature, its surrounds,” Nilis said earnestly. “I have the material I discovered in the Olympus Archive, the data from the neutrino telescope, and now Blue’s firsthand experience. I need to put it all together — to assemble a theoretical model of our objective. I was there, you know,” he said with a sort of modest pride. “In the Cavity. I sent in an avatar to ride with Pirius Blue. I like to think I acquitted myself well enough! But even that experience isn’t enough. I need to know what Blue himself perceived.”
Pirius nodded slowly. “So why don’t you talk to him?”
“It is a question of nuances,” Nilis said. He reached out his big hands toward Pirius. “I’m not sure I understand you, you see. We discussed this before. Our backgrounds are so different! Of course nobody knows Pirius Blue as well as you do. Nobody will be able to understand his words, his body language — what remains unsaid — as well as you. This is very important. Listen to your time brother, Pirius Red; listen to his feelings…”
Pirius took the assignment.
For the rest of the day, he sat in Nilis’s musty cabin watching Virtual recordings of Pirius Blue, more battered, more weary, even older, as he described his extraordinary jaunt into the core.
Pirius Red still felt a lingering resentment at this stranger from the future who had sent him into involuntary exile. But mostly, Red felt envy: envy for a man who had once more had the opportunity to carry out his duty in the most testing of circumstances, and envy for the companionship of his crew. Watching this scratchy Virtual report, Pirius Red felt shut out, denied.
At the end of the day, Torec and Pirius retired to their small shared room on the corvette. They didn’t speak.
Pirius stripped off his uniform and allowed it to slither into the closet. He got into his bunk, turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes, hoping for sleep. At least he wasn’t on Earth; at least he was back in space, and he could hear the comforting sigh of cycled air, feel the thrumming of the corvette’s drive.
He was surprised when Torec slid into his bunk.
He turned to face her. Her face was so close he could feel her breath on his cheek. Her eyes, dimly visible in the low light, were closed, her mouth tight shut.
He put his hand on her arm. He felt firm flesh and muscle. He whispered, “Things aren’t the same.”
He could feel her roll onto her back. “The trouble is, Pirius, things have changed for me. While you’ve been away, I’ve been useful.”
He knew that was true. There had been her work on the CTC processor, the test flights of the modified greenships, even this early work on the black-hole cannon. He remembered her confusion when they had first been brought to Sol system, when she hadn’t even wanted to get out of bed.
She said, “I know it’s chance that I’m here at all. It could have been anybody.” She shifted again. “Look, Pirius, I might have been brought here for you. But now I’ve found my own place. That’s what I’m trying to say. You can’t come swanning back and expect things to be as they were before.”
“I don’t think I ever did expect that,” he said.
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “I need you.”
She snorted. “Yeah. For sex.”
“Not just that.” He hesitated to say the word, knowing it sounded soft. “Company.”
She laughed. “What are you, a Coalescent drone? Life isn’t about company, Pirius. It’s about doing your job.”
Defensively he said, “Yes. But maybe we can help each other to be more effective. Have you thought of that?”
“What help do you need? It wasn’t even you who was sent into that weird other-place on Callisto.”
“It was a copy of me who went off and died, to spare me having to do it. Just as Pirius Blue is a copy of me, who saw friends die in action, who went back into the Core again — and because he lived through that, I won’t have to. All these copies of me, taken away to die. And I’m left standing here.”
“This talk is stupid.”
He whispered, “Or perhaps I’m not real. Pirius Blue could have died out there, at the magnetar. What if he did die? What if I’m just his ghost? Or perhaps I’m existing in somebody else’s memories, or dreams. Perhaps Pirius Blue dreamed of Earth before he died, and everything I think is happening to me is happening inside his mind, in the last fraction of a second before the starbreaker hits—”
“And maybe you’ve got your pointy head so far up your own ass it’s coming out the other end.” She pinched his kidney, hard enough to make him yelp. “Is that real enough for you?”
Before she could do it again he rolled over and grabbed her. Laughing, they wrestled. He finished up above her, with his hands locking her arms above her head. Her face was a pool of soft shadows beneath him; she looked very young.
He said, “You’re tougher than me. You always were. But don’t you feel… dislocated?”
“Well, a little. But you tell anybody back on Arches I said so, I’ll kick your butt.”
Hesitantly, he bent down, and kissed her, very softly, just brushing her lips. At first she was cold, unresponsive. Then she opened her mouth, and he felt the tip of her tongue on his teeth.
Once again the test rig was readied for a fresh shot at the patient Xeelee nightfighter.
It had been decided to try hooking up the CTC processor to the control systems of the test rig’s GUTdrive engines. It was possible that the CTC’s greater processing speed would permit the refinement of the control of the spacetime wave fronts sufficiently to get the result the designers wanted. Commander Darc railed at the foolishness of hooking up one experimental technology to another, but the CTC had already proven itself, in control of the grav shield. And as Nilis said, “Compared to the rest of this lash-up, CTC is a mature technology.”
The work proceeded fast. Torec had as much experience as anybody with CTC systems, and so she had been drawn back into the heart of the project. Pirius was left stranded on the observation deck of the corvette, watching the techs work on the modified rig. It was easy to spot Torec, with her bright red team leader’s armbands over her skinsuit.
Nilis stood with him. He waved a hand in the air, and brought up Pirius’s old Virtual sketch of the Project. The path to the Prime Radiant, the Xeelee barricade around it were green, the asterisk that represented the Radiant itself was glowing red. “What do you think, Ensign? Is today the day when we will find a weapon to strike at the Prime Radiant itself?”
Pirius was embarrassed by the hubristic sketch. “I hope so, sir.”