Minla's Flowers

MINLA'S FLOWERS Alastair Reynolds

Mission interrupted.

Even now, I still don't know quite what happened. The ship and I were in routine Waynet transit, all systems ticking over smoothly. I was deep in thought, a little drunk, rubbing clues together like a caveman trying to make fire with rocks, hoping for the spark that would point me towards The Gun, the one no one ever thinks I'm going to find, the one I know with every fibre of my existence is out there somewhere. I was imagining the reception I'd get when I returned to the Cohort with that prize, the slate of all my sins wiped clean when they saw that I'd actually found it, that it was real after all, and that finally we had something to use against the Huskers. In the pleasant mental haze brought on by the wine, it seemed likely that they'd forgive me anything.

Then it happened: a violent lurch that sent wine and glass flying across the cabin, a shriek from the ship's alarms as it went into panic-mode. I knew right away that this was no ordinary Way turbulence. The ship was tumbling badly, but I fought my way to the command deck and did what I could to bring her back under control. Seat-of-the-pants flying, the way Gallinule and I used to do it on Plenitude, when Plenitude still existed.

That was when I knew we were outside the Waynet, dumped back into the crushing slowness of normal space. The stars outside were stationary, their colours showing no suggestion of relativistic distortion.

'Damage?' I asked.

'How long have you got?' the ship snapped back.

I told it to ease off on the wisecracks and start giving me the bad news. And it most certainly was bad news. The precious syrinx was still functional - I touched it and felt the familiar tremble that indicated it was still sensing the nearby Waynet - but that was about the only flight-critical system that hadn't been buckled or blown or simply wiped out of existence by the unscheduled egress.

We were going to have to land and make repairs. For a few weeks or months - however long it took the ship to scavenge and process the raw materials it needed to fix itself - the search for my Gun would be on hold.

That didn't mean I was counting on a long stopover.

The ship still had a slow tumble. Merlin squinted against hard white glare as the burning eye of a bright sun hove into view through the windows. It was white, but not killingly so. Probably a mid-sequence star, maybe a late F- or early G-type. He thought there was a hint of yellow. Had to be pretty close too.

'Tell me where we are.'

'It's called Calliope,' Tyrant told him. 'G-type. According to the last Cohort census the system contained fifteen planet-class bodies. There were five terrestrials, four of which were uninhabitable. The fifth - the furthest from Calliope - was supposedly colonised by humans in the early Flourishing.'

Merlin glanced at the census data as it scrolled down the cabin wall. The planet in question was called Lecythus. It was a typical watery terrestrial, like a thousand others in his experience. It even had the almost-obligatory large single moon.

'Been a while, ship. What are the chances of anyone still being down there?'

'Difficult to say. A later Cohort flyby failed to make contact with the settlement, but that doesn't mean no one was alive. After the emergence of the Huskers, many planetary colonies went to great lengths to camouflage themselves against the aliens.'

'So there could still be a welcoming committee.'

'We'll see. With your permission, I'll use our remaining fuel to reach Lecythus. This will take some time. Would you like to sleep?'

Merlin looked back at the coffin-like slab of the frostwatch cabinet. He could skip over the days or weeks it would take to reach the planet, but that would mean subjecting himself to the intense unpleasantness of frostwatch revival. Merlin had never taken kindly to being woken from normal sleep, let alone the deep hibernation of frostwatch.

'Pass on that, I think. I've still got plenty of reading to catch up on.'

Later - much later - Tyrant announced that they had reached orbit around Lecythus. 'Would you like to see the view?' the ship asked, with a playful note in its voice.

Merlin scratched fatigue from his eyes. 'You sound like you know something I don't.'

Merlin was at first reassured by what he saw. There was blue ocean down there, swatches of green and brown land mass, large islands rather than any major continental masses, cyclonic swirls of water-vapour clouds. It didn't necessarily mean there were still people, but it was a lot more encouraging than finding a cratered, radioactive corpse of a world.

Then he looked again. Many of those green and brown swatches of land mass were surrounded by water, as his first glimpse had indicated. But some of them appeared to be floating above the ocean completely, casting shadows beneath them. His glance flicked to the horizon, where the atmosphere was compressed into a thin bow of pure indigo. He could see the foreshortened shapes of hovering land masses, turned nearly edge-on. The land masses appeared to be one or two kilometres thick, and they all appeared to be gently curved. Perhaps half were concave in shape, so their edges were slightly upturned. The edges were frosted white, like the peaks of mountain ranges. Some of the concave masses even had little lakes near their centres. The convex masses were all a scorched tawny grey in colour, devoid of water or vegetation, save for a cap of ice at their highest point. The largest shapes, convex or concave, must have been hundreds of kilometres wide. Merlin judged that there must have been at least ten kilometres of clear airspace under each piece. A third of the planet's surface was obscured by the floating shapes.

'Any idea what we're looking at here?' Merlin asked. 'This doesn't look like anything in the census.'

'I think they built an armoured sky around their world,' the ship said. 'And then something - very probably Husker-level ordnance - shattered that sky.'

'No one could have survived that,' Merlin said, feeling a rising tide of sadness. Tyrant was clever enough, but there were times - long times - when Merlin became acutely aware of the heartless machine lurking behind the personality. And then he felt very, very alone. Those were the hours when he would have done anything for companionship, including returning to the Cohort and the tribunal that undoubtedly awaited him.

'Someone does appear to have survived, Merlin.'

He perked up. 'Really?'

'It's unlikely to be a very advanced culture: no neutrino or gravimagnetic signatures, beyond those originating from the mechanisms that must still be active inside the sky pieces. But I did detect some very brief radio emissions.'

'What language were they using? Main? Tradespeak? Anything else in the Cohort database?'

'They were using long beeps and short beeps. I'm afraid I didn't get the chance to determine the source of the transmission.'

'Keep listening. I want to meet them.'

'Don't raise your hopes. If there are people down there, they've been out of contact with the rest of humanity for a considerable number of millennia.'

'I only want to stop for repairs. They can't begrudge me that, can they?'

'I suppose not.'

Then something occurred to Merlin, something he realised he should have asked much earlier. 'About the accident, ship. I take it you know why we were dumped out of the Waynet?'

'I've run a fault-check on the syrinx. There doesn't appear to be anything wrong with it.'

'That's not an answer.'

'I know.' Tyrant sounded sullen. 'I still don't have an explanation for what went wrong. And I don't like that any more than you do.'