A hundred crewmen worked to bolt together a huge, cubical lattice. Eventually, Rodi realized, it would fill the common room. Medical devices and supplies were strapped to struts. Rough hands pushed a man-sized bundle of blankets into the lattice. Then another, and a third…
Crew members in sterile masks unwrapped the bundles.
Suddenly Rodi saw it.
This was a hospital. It was being built in the soft heart of the Ark — the most protected place in case of attack. And towards the hull they were taking heavy-duty lasers — to use as weapons?
Holism Ark was preparing for war.
Rodi’s head pounded and there was a metallic taste at the back of his throat.
Thet came sweeping across the bustling space, towing a small package of clothes.
Rodi pushed away from the wall and grabbed her arm.
“The philosopher returns,” Thet said, grinning. Her eyes sparkled and her face was flushed.
There was a growth at the top of her spine.
“Thet… what’s happening?”
“I’m going to Unity Ark. As a Battle Captain. Isn’t it fantastic?”
“Battle? Against who?”
“The Xeelee. Who else? Why do you think we came all this way?”
Rodi tightened his grip on her upper arm. “We came for the Integrality. Remember? We came to remove war, not to wage it.”
She laughed in his face, her mouth wide. “That’s yesterday, Rodi. It’s all gone. And you know who we have to thank? You. Isn’t that ironic?” With fingers like steel she prised open his hand and kicked away.
“Where’s Gren?”
“In the sanatorium,” she called back. “And, Rodi… that’s your fault too.”
Rodi hung there for long minutes. Then he turned to the makeshift hospital.
Gren lay in a honeycomb of suffering people. Bandaging swathed his neck.
Rodi touched the shrunken face. Gren’s eyes flickered open. His face creased as he recognized Rodi. He whispered: “…our grand Foe, / Who now triumphs, and in the excess of joy / Sole reigning holds the tyranny of heaven!” He grimaced. “You have to admire the planning. Over thousands of centuries, even as humans died before the Xeelee, they hid those words among thousands of fragments of verse, and built an epic deception…”
“Please,” Rodi said miserably, “I don’t understand any of this.”
Gren stirred. “I’m sorry, Rodi. The truth is that the Integrality is a fraud, an epic deception spanning millennia. Our mission was a lie which has allowed this huge armada to penetrate Xeelee space, its true purpose unknown even to generations of crew.
“The reassembled poetry was the key, you see. Hearing those words ignited something in each of us — something locked in the genetic code that defines us. We began to suffer explosive growths—”
Rodi fingered his own smooth neck.
“You’re a lucky one,” Gren whispered. “It doesn’t always work. A tenth of us are unaffected. Perhaps two-thirds have been — programed. Like Thet. And the rest of us are dying.”
Rodi turned away.
Gren said, “No, Rodi. Hear the rest. The growths are nervous tissue. They contain information… it’s like a false memory. And an obsession. I walked to a wall and touched tiles in a certain way; control panels unfolded — and I knew how to work weapons mounted in the hull… The Exaltation is a deception, the message of the Integrality a way to enable a war fleet to approach the Ring.
“Your poetry is being spread from Holism by closed inseparability net. Not all the Exaltation has yet been infected. But… but finally…” His rheumy eyes fluttered closed.
Rodi shook frail shoulders. “Gren… tell me what to do. We’ve got to stop this—”
Gren’s mouth gaped, spittle looping between his lips.
Holism Ark had become an alien place. Rodi watched weapons pods erupting from walls still coated with uplifting Integrality slogans.
He thought of trying to find his parents. He envisaged their grisly welcome, overlaid with spinal knots and blank, driven faces.
He shuddered and swam towards the flitter hangars. There was no way he could influence events here. Perhaps if he made his way to the battle site…
Then what?
He readied the flitter for launch, trying to lose himself in activity.
He skimmed the surface of the Ark; the blisters which had puzzled him earlier had now opened up to reveal the snouts of weapons and guidance sensors.
He pulled away. Much of the Exaltation, he saw, was still unaffected and held its formation. He flew to the tip of the flying wedge.
For the first time in three thousand years, the great Arks were leaving hyperspace.
His heart heavy, he swept ahead of the fleet and dropped into three-space.
He was in a mist of blue-stained stars. A torus glowed: Bolder’s Ring, still hundreds of light years away but already spanning the sky.
He pushed towards the Ring.
The flitter passed through the last veil of crushed matter and entered the clear space at the bottom of the Ring’s gravity well… and for a few seconds, despite everything, Rodi’s breath grew short with wonder.
The Ring, a tangle of cosmic string, glittered as it rotated. There was a milky place at its very center, a hole ripped in the fabric of space by that monstrous, whirling mass.
Xeelee were everywhere.
Ships miles wide swept over the artifact’s sparkling planes, endlessly constructing and shaping. Rodi watched a horde of craft using cherry-red beams to herd a star, an orange giant, into a soft, slow collision with the Ring. The star’s structure was breaking up as cosmic string ripped into its flank—
A dozen flesh-pale spheres hurtled over Rodi’s head, spitting fire.
They were Spline: the warships of the Integrality. They tore towards the star drovers and battle was joined.
At first the humans had the advantage of surprise. The ponderous Xeelee construction ships scattered in confusion. One of them was caught in the cross-fire of two Arks; Rodi could see its structure melt and smolder. More human ships dropped out of hyperspace and the battle spread.
But now a Spline ship splashed open. Rodi watched people wriggle in vacuum, soaked by spurts of Spline blood.
A Xeelee nightfighter covered the wreck with wings a hundred miles wide.
There were nightfighters all around the battle site. Fire bit into the sides of the laboring Spline.
It was a massacre.
Rodi could not bear to watch. Each Ark was a world, millennia old, carrying families… He increased the scale of his monitors, turned the battle into a game of toys.
But now the Xeelee fighters pulled away. They folded their wings and hovered outside the mist of debris, almost aloof.
The human ships tore into the defenseless construction vessels. Out of control, the orange star splashed against the Ring surface.
The Arks withdrew to hyperspace. One of them whirled as if in jubilation, spitting fire in all directions. Wrecks sailed into clumsy orbits around the Ring.
The Xeelee fighters departed, wings shimmering.
Rodi closed his eyes.
This had been no triumph for the humans. The Xeelee had given them a meaningless victory; they had simply not wished to slaughter.
Couldn’t the human crews see that? Would this happen again and again until every Ark was disabled, every human life lost?
No. He couldn’t let it occur. And, he began to realize, there was a way he could prevent it.
He opened his eyes, rubbed his face, and lifted the flitter to hyperspace.
The neutron star scraped the surface of its companion, just as it had in that dream time before the metamorphosis. “Integrality for the Comms Officer—”
“Greetings, Rodi from the Integrality.”