‘Father – don’t you know?’
‘I told you. It’s kind of unreliable, or so my father told me. We ought to end up just a little above the Galactic plane, however. OK, it’s ready.’
‘As quickly as that?’
‘Well, that supernova shock wave is going to take a while to get here – years, as we’re light years off from the Boss. But we can’t expect rescue for years either, even if the Coalition is willing to try; the gravity waves from the detonation are going to churn up hyperspace for a long time. Best to get out of here now if we can – and if this doesn’t work, we might have time to figure out something else. I’ve sent an alarm out through the Reef.’
‘Shouldn’t we ask Mother first?’
‘She’d only say no. Hang onto that rail. Good luck, son!’ He stabbed a finger at his data slate.
The Association stars turned to streaks and disappeared.
So, just as his father had tried to explain, Donn was leapfrogged through Susy-space. What he hadn’t been told was what it would feel like.
Susy-space was another universe, laid over Donn’s own. It had its own laws. He was transformed into a supersymmetric copy of himself – an s-ghost in Susy-space. And it was . . . different. Things were blurred. Susy-space cut through the distinction between Donn, here, and the stars, out there. Donn could feel the scale of the journey, as if the arch of the universe were part of his own being. Distance crushed him.
But at last it was done.
The Reef of ships popped out of Susy-space, sparkling with selectrons and neutralinos.
Samm and Donn stared at each other. ‘Let’s not do that again,’ said Donn.
‘Agreed.’ Samm tapped his data slate to get an external view.
No stars. Just darkness, broken only by the faintest smudges of grey light.
‘Are they galaxies?’ asked Donn.
‘Oops,’ said Samm.
Humans spread across the stars, their capability increasingly rapidly, their zone of influence expanding at many times light-speed.
A period known as the Assimilation followed, in which the wisdom and power of other species were absorbed, on an industrial scale. Those they conquered became mere resources: even the last traces of those pushed into extinction, like the Silver Ghosts, were exploited.
Soon, only the Xeelee stood between humans and dominance of the Galaxy, and beyond.
And all the time, as humans belatedly learned, the Xeelee were waging war on another front, against a cosmos-wide force that was wrecking the stars themselves.
The Xeelee war had its own terrible logic. Eventually the tide turned against humanity.
The conflict had lasted a million years. There were many casualties.
Gravity Dreams
AD 978,225
1
‘Massive sensor dysfunction!’
This time his own shout dragged Coton out of his dreams. He lay on his pallet, gasping, sweat coating his face.
‘It’s all right.’ Here was his grandmother, Vala, in her night robe, her round, calm face shadowed in the glow cast by a single hovering light globe. Above him loomed the frame of Vala’s house, a tetrahedron of metal bars and panels hung with musty tapestries, cosy and cluttered and mundane. ‘You woke yourself up.’
‘And you. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be.’ She sat on his pallet and passed her hand over his brow. Her fingertip traced the tattoo there, an inverted black tetrahedron, like her own. ‘It’s why you came here, in a way. So I can help you cope with the nightmares.’
‘But it wasn’t like my other dreams.’ He’d had plenty of nightmares of flight. It was only a month since the ships of the Second Coalition had appeared in the skies of Centre, and the officials and the troops had landed to impose their curfews and tithes and evacuations – and the population, enraged, had turned in on itself, and Weaponised families like Coton’s had become targets of hate and frustration. Only a month since he’d had to abandon his parents, and his world, at the age of seventeen.
‘But this was different.’ He clenched his fists and huddled them into his chest. ‘I couldn’t move. As if my arms and legs had been cut off. I could see and hear, but there was something wrong with my head. I was floating in this big sky, a red sky that was full of glowing shapes, like light globes – or stars. But I hated it, for it was wrong.’
‘Wrong?’
‘I shouldn’t have been there. It was my duty to get everyone out – to get them home. But I couldn’t move.’ He twisted, as if wrapped up.
She took his hands. ‘There could be another cause. Your parents would have explained all this, one day . . . You know we’re Adepts, Coton, don’t you? And young Adepts sometimes have dreams – we call them gravity dreams. It might be nothing to do with the pogroms back on Centre . . . But dreams of immobility are common even among normals, I think. These things are subtle, indirect. Your dream could be a sign that you’re healing, in some way. The waking mind trying to reconnect with the body.’
‘What did I say?’
‘When you woke up? Not words I recognised. Mas-eef . . . Can you replay?’
Coton’s own voice came echoing out of the air, the sound shaped by the smart systems that pervaded Vala’s environment. ‘Ma-seef senss-or dees-funx-eon.’
‘Doesn’t mean anything,’ Coton said.
‘Perhaps not. The words sound archaic. It might be interesting to check.’
That was just like his grandmother, whose scholarship, according to his own mother, had made her a cold parent, and caused them to fall out. Her own world, this world, after all, had no name but a numbered label – Delta Seven – and Vala referred to it, not as home, but as ‘the college’. Now he was stuck here with her, and she was studying his dream as if it was an academic puzzle.
He felt a surge of resentment. He needed to move, to blow away the last dark shreds of his nightmare. He pushed aside the sheets and rolled off his pallet, his bare feet on the cool floor.
‘Are you all right?’
‘I need some water.’
He shoved his way out through the thick woven flap that was the door of the house, and emerged into cavernous gloom. ‘Lights.’ A sprinkling of globes lit up and revealed the expanse of this Map Room, the shining floor, the complicated walls with their reefs of shelving, and the alcoves folding off into the dark like suppressed memories.
He made for a bathroom block, a neat cube a hundred paces away. Here there were spigots and low sinks. He bent, and the water, flowing without a command, poured into his mouth, cool and clean.
When he was quenched he stood back, and found himself staring at the spigot.
Vala walked to his side, wrapped in a black cloak, evidently uncertain of his mood. She saw what he was staring at. ‘You know, that spigot was put here for the scholars who once worked in this chamber. Now the students are long gone. But the spigot itself, the tip of a vast self-maintaining system, doesn’t care whose thirst it quenches; it just does its job, millennium after millennium. I’m sure there’s a lesson for us all in that . . .’
He glanced back at her shack, sitting squat on the shining floor of this immense building. ‘Long gone?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s obvious my house is much more recent than the Map Room itself. When I first moved in I could even see traces of a hearth. Somebody had been building fires, here on the floor of the Room. That’s how badly things fell apart, when the last unified government collapsed. And this is what the worlds of mankind are like, all across the Galaxy – or at least the part of it we still inhabit. We are a lesser generation, squatting in the ruins of a greater past. Lighting fires on the marble floors of libraries.’