“How did it take it?”
“How do you think, Nidra? But very soon the question concerned neither of us. It had become me, I had become it. Our memories were a knot of entanglements. It understood my concerns. It grasped that there had only ever been one path. It knew that we had no choice about what we had become.”
“Forgiveness?”
“Acceptance.”
“But it didn’t end, did it? There were more. Always more. Other species…dozens, hundreds of them. Until we came!”
“You are no different.”
“Perhaps we aren’t. But this alters things, doesn’t it?” I still had my thumb on the trigger, ready to unleash a matter-antimatter conflagration. “You think I won’t do this? You’ve told me what you are. I understand that you acted…that you’ve been acting…for what you think is the common good. Maybe you’re right, too. But enough is enough. You have Teterev. It’s too late for her…too late for you, if I’m still reaching a part of her. But it stops with Lenka. She’s mine. She’s coming back with me.”
“I need her. I need to add her library of fears to my own. I need to make myself stronger.”
“It won’t work. It hasn’t been working. You’re stuck in a spiral…a destructive feedback loop. The more you try to make yourself impregnable, the more evident you become to the outside world. So you have to make yourself yet more impregnable…add to your library of fears. But it can’t continue.”
“It must.
“I tried to stop myself. But always they came. New travellers, new species. Nothing I did made myself invisible to them. I could not negotiate, I could not persuade, because that would have been tantamount to confessing the hard fact of my existence. So I did what I had always done. I hid. I made myself as quiet and silent as physics allowed, and willed them to leave. I dug into our mutual psychologies, trawled the ocean of our terrors, and from that sea of fears I shaped the phantasms that I hoped would serve as deterrence, encouraging newcomers to come no nearer. But it was never totally sufficient. Some were always too brave, or curious, and by force of will they reached the heart of me. And always I had no choice but to take, to incorporate, to turn them to my cause. To feed me their fears, so that I might better my defenses. Why do you think I had to take Teterev? She was the first of your kind—a new jewel, to place in my collection. She had been very useful, has Teterev. We are all very glad of her. Her fears are like a new colour, a new smell. We never imagined such things!”
“Good. I’m truly sorry for Teterev. But you don’t need Lenka. Give her back control of her suit, and we’ll leave you alone.”
“You could make that promise to me. But you did not come here alone.”
“The Captain…we’ll take care of him.”
SEE? THINKING OF you even then.
Always in our hearts and minds.
“I LISTENED TO your babble. The theories of your Captain. He craves his fortune. He will think he can turn the fact of me to profit. He will try to sell the knowledge of my location.”
“He doesn’t even know what you are!”
“But he will find out. He will ask what became of you, what became of Lenka. Your silence will count for nothing. He will return. He will send machines into me. And soon more will come, in other ships, and I am bound to fail. When the machines touch your civilisation, they will scorch you into history. They have done it a thousand times, with a thousand cultures. They will leave dust and ruins and silence, and you will not be the last.”
“Lev,” I said quietly.
There was a silence. I wondered if the thing before me would speak again. Perhaps I had shut the door of communication between us with that one invocation.
But the voice asked: “What do you know of Lev?”
“Your son,” I answered. “The son of part of you, the son of Teterev. You had to leave him on the orbiting ship. You didn’t mean to, but it must have been the only way. You loved him. You wanted very badly to get a message to him, to have him help you. That’s why you came as far as you did. But you failed.”
“And Lev is gone.”
I nodded. “But not in the way you think. Someone got to that ship before us—cleaned it out. Stripped it of engines, weps, crew. The frozen.
But they’d have been valuable to someone. If Lev was on that ship, he’d have made it back to one of the settled worlds by now. And we can find him. The Mendicants trade in the frozen, and we have traded with the Mendicants, in many systems. There are channels, lines of enquiry. The name of your ship…”
“What would it be to you?
“Give us that name. Let us find Lev. I’ll return. I promise you that much.”
“No one ever promises to return, Nidra. They promise to stay away.”
“The name of the ship,” I said again.
She told me.
SO MANY NAMES, so many ships. Numberless. Names too strange to put into language, at least no language that would fit into our heads. Names like clouds. Names like forests. Names like ever-unfolding mathematical structures—names that begat themselves, in dreams of recursion. Names that split the world in two. Names that would drive a nail through your sanity.
But she told me some of them, as best as she could.
Lovely names. Names of such beauty and terror they made me weep. The hopes and fears of the brave and the lost. The best and the worst of all of us. All wayfarers, all travellers.
I asked her to try and remember the last of them.
She did.
Tell you?
Not a chance, Captain. You don’t get to know everything.
I STEPPED BACK from his suited-but-immobile form, admiring my handiwork. He really did look sculptural, frozen into that oddly dignified posture, with his arms coming together across his chest, one hand touching the cuff of the other.
“I suppose you could say that we came to an understanding, Teterev and I,” I said. “Or what Teterev had become. Partly it was fear, I think, that I’d use the hot-dust. Did I come close? Yes, definitely. Not much to lose at that point. I might have been able to work the ship without you, but certainly not without Lenka. If she didn’t survive, there wasn’t much point in me surviving either. But Lenka was allowed to leave, and so was I. It was hard work, getting Lenka back here. But she’s begun to regain some suit function now, and I don’t think either of us will have any trouble returning to the lander.”