‘You chordates,’ it said. ‘You’re all the same.’
Mirsky was dead. She had died of old age.
Irravel placed her body in an armoured coffin and ejected her into space when the Hirondelle’s speed was only a hair’s breadth under light.
‘Do it for me, Irravel,’ Mirsky had asked her, towards the end. ‘Keep my body aboard until we’re almost touching light, and then fire me ahead of the ship.’
‘Is that really what you want?’
‘It’s an old pirate tradition. Burial at C.’ She forced a smile that must have sapped what little energy she had left. ‘That’s a joke, Irravel, but it only makes sense in a language neither of us have heard for a while.’
Irravel pretended that she understood. ‘Mirsky? There’s something I have to tell you. Do you remember the Nestbuilder?’
‘That was centuries ago, Veda.’
‘I know. I just keep worrying that maybe it was right.’
‘About what?’
‘Those machines. About how I started it all. They say it’s spread now, to other systems. It doesn’t look as if anyone knows how to stop it.’
‘And you think all that was your fault?’
‘It’s crossed my mind.’
Mirsky convulsed, or shrugged — Irravel wasn’t sure which. ‘Even if it was your fault, Veda, you did it with the best of intentions. So you fucked up slightly. We all make mistakes.’
‘Destroying whole solar systems is just a fuck-up?’
‘Hey, accidents happen.’
‘You always did have a sense of humour, Mirsky.’
‘Yeah, guess I did.’ She managed a smile. ‘One of us needed one, Veda.’
Thinking of that, Irravel watched the coffin fall ahead of the Hirondelle, dwindling until it was only a tiny mote of steel-grey, and then nothing.
The starbridge had long ago attained sentience.
Dense with machinery, it sang an endless hymn to its own immensity, throbbing like the lowest string on a guitar. Vacuum-breathing acolytes had voluntarily rewired their minds to view the bridge as an actual deity, translating the humming into their sensoria and passing decades in contemplative ecstasy.
Clasped in a cushioning field, an elevator ferried Irravel down the bridge from the orbital hub to the surface in a few minutes, accompanied by an entourage of children from the ship, many of whom bore in youth the hurting imprint of her dead friend Mirsky’s genes. The bridge rose like the stem of a goblet from a ground terminal which was itself a scalloped shell of hyperdiamond, filled with tiered perfume gardens and cascading pools, anchored to the largest island in an equatorial archipelago. The senior children walked Irravel down to a beach of silver sand on the terminal’s edge, where jewelled crabs moved like toys. She bid the children farewell, then waited, warm breezes fingering the hem of her sari.
Minutes later, the children’s elevator flashed heavenward.
Irravel looked out at the ocean, thinking of the Pattern Jugglers. Here, as on dozens of other oceanic worlds, there was a colony of the alien intelligences. Transforming themselves to aquatic body-plans, the Subaruns had established close rapport with the aliens. In the morning, she would be taken out to meet the Jugglers, drowned, dissolved on the cellular level, every atom in her body swapped for one in the ocean, remade into something not quite human.
She was terrified.
Islanders came towards the shore, skimming the water on penanted trimarans, attended by oceanforms, sleek gloss-grey hybrids of porpoise and ray, whistlespeech downshifted into the human auditory spectrum. The Subaruns’ epidermal scales shimmered like imbricated armour: biological photocells drinking scorching blue Pleiadean sunlight. Sentient veils hung in the sky, rippling gently like aurorae, shading the archipelago from the fiercest wavelengths. As the actinic eye of Taygeta sank towards the horizon, the veils moved with it like living clouds. Flocks of phantasmagorical birds migrated with the veils.
The purple-skinned elder’s scales flashed green and opal as he approached Irravel along the coral jetty, a stick in one webbed hand, supported by two aides, a third shading his aged crown with a delicately watercoloured parasol. The aides were all descended from late-model Conjoiners; they had the translucent cranial crest through which bloodflow had once been channelled to cool their supercharged minds. Seeing them gave Irravel a dual-edged pang of nostalgia and guilt. She had not seen Conjoiners for nearly a thousand years, ever since they had fragmented into a dozen factions and vanished from human affairs. Neither had she entirely forgotten her betrayal of Remontoire.
But that had been so long ago…
A Communicant completed up the party, gowned in brocade, hazed by a blur of entopic projections. Communicants were small and elfin, with a phenomenal talent for natural languages augmented by Juggler transforms. Irravel sensed that this one was old and revered, despite the fact that Communicant genes did not express for great longevity.
The elder halted before her.
The head of his walking stick was a tiny lemur skull inside an egg-sized space helmet. He uttered something clearly ceremonial, but Irravel understood none of the sounds he made. She groped for something to say, recalling the oldest language in her memory, and therefore the one most likely to be recognised in any far-flung human culture.
‘Thank you for letting us stop here,’ she said.
The Communicant hobbled forward, already shaping words experimentally with his wide, protruding lips. For a moment his sounds were like an infant’s first attempts at vocalisation, but then they resolved into something Irravel understood.
‘Am I — um — making the slightest sense to you?’
‘Yes,’ Irravel said. ‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Canasian,’ the Communicant diagnosed. ‘Twenty-third, twenty-fourth centuries, Lacaille 9352 dialect, Fand subdialect?’
Irravel nodded.
‘Your kind are very rare now,’ he said, studying her as if she was some kind of exotic butterfly, ‘but not unwelcome.’ His features cracked into a heart-warming smile.
‘What about Markarian?’ Irravel said. ‘I know his ship passed through this system less than fifty years ago — I still have a fix on it as it moves out of the cluster.’
‘Other ships do come, yes. Not many — one or two a century.’
‘And what happened when the last one came through?’
‘The usual tribute was given.’
‘Tribute?’
‘Something ceremonial.’ The Communicant’s smile was wider than ever. ‘To the glory of Irravel. With many actors, beautiful words, love, death, laughter, tears.’
She understood, slowly, dumbfoundedly.
‘You’re putting on a play?’
The elder must have understood something of that. Nodding proudly, he extended a hand across the darkening bay, oceanforms cutting the water like scythes. A distant raft carried lanterns and the glimmerings of richly painted backdrops. Boats converged from across the bay. A dirigible loomed over the archipelago’s edge, pregnant with gondolas.
‘We want you to play Irravel,’ the Communicant said, beckoning her forward. ‘This is our greatest honour.’
When they reached the raft, the Communicant taught Irravel her lines and the actions she would be required to make. It was all simple enough — even the fact that she had to deliver her parts in Subarun. By the end of evening she was fluent in their language. There was nothing she couldn’t learn in an instant these days, by sheer
