force of will. But it was not enough. To catch Markarian, she would have to break out of the narrow labyrinth of human thought entirely. That was why she had come to Jugglers.
That night they performed the play, while boats congregated around them, top-heavy with lolling islanders. The sun sank and the sky glared with a thousand blue gems studding blue velvet. Night in the heart of the Pleiades was the most beautiful thing Irravel had dared imagine. But in the direction of Sol, when she amplified her vision, there was a green thumbprint on the sky. Every century, the green wave was larger, as neighbouring solar systems were infected and transformed by the rogue terraforming machines. Given time, it would even reach the Pleiades.
Irravel got drunk on islander wine and learned the tributes’ history.
The plots varied immensely, but the protagonists always resembled Markarian and Irravel; mythic figures entwined by destiny, remembered across almost two thousand years. Sometimes, one or the other was the clear villain, but as often as not they were both heroic, misunderstanding each other’s motives in true tragic fashion. Sometimes they ended with both parties dying. They rarely ended happily. But there was always some kind of redemption when the pursuit was done.
In the interlude, she felt she had to tell the Communicant the truth, so that he could tell the elder.
‘Listen, there’s something you need to know.’ Irravel didn’t wait for his answer. ‘I’m really her — really the person I’m playing.’
For a long time he didn’t seem to understand, before shaking his head slowly and sadly. ‘No; I thought you’d be different. You seemed different. But many say that.’
She shrugged. There was little point arguing, and anything she said now could always be ascribed to wine. In the morning, the remark had been quietly forgotten. She was taken out to sea and drowned.
‘Markarian? Answer me.’
She watched the Hideyoshi’s magnified image, looming just out of weapons range. Like the Hirondelle, it had changed almost beyond recognition. The hull glistened within a skein of armouring force. The engines, no longer physically coupled to the rest of the ship, flew alongside like dolphins. They were anchored in fields that only became visible when some tiny stress afflicted them.
For centuries of worldtime she had made no attempt to communicate with him. But now her mind had changed. The green wave had continued for millennia, an iridescent cataract spreading across the eye of the galaxy. It had assimilated the blue suns of the Subarun Commonwealth in mere centuries — although by then Irravel and Markarian were a thousand light-years closer to the core, beginning to turn away from the plane of the galaxy, and the death screams of those gentle islanders never reached them. Nothing stopped it, and once the green wave had swallowed them, systems fell silent. The Juggler transformation allowed Irravel to grasp the enormity of it; allowed her to stare unflinchingly into the horror of a million poisoned stars and apprehend each individually.
She knew more of what it was, now.
It was impossible for stars to shine green, any more than an ingot of metal could become green-hot if it was raised to a certain temperature. Instead, something was veiling them — staining their light, like coloured glass. Whatever it was stole energy from the stellar spectra at the frequencies of chlorophyll. Stars were shining through curtains of vegetation, like lanterns in a forest. The greenfly machines were turning the galaxy into a jungle.
It was time to talk. Time — as in the old plays of the dead islanders — to initiate the final act, before the two of them fell into the cold of intergalactic space. She searched her repertoire of communication systems until she found something as ancient as ceremony demanded.
She aimed the message laser at him, cutting through his armour. The beam was too ineffectual to be mistaken for anything other than an attempt to talk. No answer came, so she repeated the message in a variety of formats and languages. Days of shiptime passed — decades of worldtime.
Talk, you bastard.
Growing impatient, she examined her weapons options. Armaments from the Nestbuilders were amongst the most advanced: theoretically they could mole through the loam of spacetime and inflict precise harm anywhere in Markarian’s ship. But to use them she had to convince herself that she knew the interior layout of the Hideyoshi. Her mass-sensor sweeps were too blurred to be much help. She might just as easily harm the sleepers as take out his field nodes. Until now, it had been too risky to contemplate.
But all games needed an end.
Willing her qualms from her mind, she enabled the Nestbuilder armaments, feeling them stress spacetime in the Hirondelle’s belly, ready to short-circuit it entirely. She selected attack loci in Markarian’s ship; best guesses that would cripple him rather than blow him out of the sky.
Then something happened.
He replied, modulating his engine thrust in staccato stabs. The frequency was audio. Quickly, Irravel translated the modulation.
‘I don’t understand,’ Markarian said, ‘why you took so long to answer me, and why you ignored me for so long when I replied.’
‘You never replied until now,’ she said. ‘I’d have known if you had.’
‘Would you?’
There was something in his tone that convinced her he wasn’t lying. Which left only one possibility: that he had tried speaking to her before, and that in some way her own ship had kept this knowledge from her.
‘Mirsky must have done it,’ Irravel said. ‘She must have installed filters to block any communications from your ship.’
‘Mirsky?’
‘She would have done it as a favour to me; maybe under orders from my former self.’ She didn’t bother elaborating: Markarian was sure to know she had died and then been reborn as a clone of the original Irravel. ‘My former self had the neural conditioning that kept her on the trail of the sleepers. This clone never had it, which meant that my instinct to pursue the sleepers had to be reinforced.’
‘By lies?’
‘Mirsky would have done it out of friendship,’ Irravel said. And for a moment she believed herself, while wondering how friendship could seem so like betrayal.
Markarian’s image smiled. They faced each other across an absurdly long banquet table, with the galaxy projected above it, flickering in the light of candelabra.
‘Well?’ he said, of the green stain spreading across the spiral. ‘What do you think?’
Irravel had long ago stopped counting time and distance, but she knew it had been at least fifteen thousand years and that many light-years since they had turned from the plane. Part of her knew, of course: although the wave swallowed suns, it had no use for pulsars, and their metronomic ticking and slow decay allowed positional triangulation in space and time with chilling precision. But she elected to bury that knowledge beneath her conscious thought processes: one of the simpler Juggler tricks.
‘What do I think? I think it terrifies me.’
‘Our emotional responses haven’t diverged as much as I’d feared.’
They didn’t have to use language. They could have swapped pure mental concepts between ships: concatenated strings of qualia, some of which could only be grasped in minds rewired by Pattern Jugglers. But Irravel considered it sufficient that they could look each other in the eye without flinching.
The galaxy falling below had been frozen in time: light waves struggling to overtake Irravel and Markarian. The wave had appeared to slow, and then halt its advance. But then Markarian had turned, diving back towards the plane. The galaxy quickened to life, rushing to finish thirty thousand years of history before the two ships returned. The wave surged on. Above the banquet table, one arm of the star-clotted spiral was shot through with green, like a mote of ink spreading into blotting paper. The edge of the green wave was feathered, fractal, extending verdant tendrils.
‘Do you have any observations?’ Irravel asked.
‘A few.’ Markarian sipped from his chalice. ‘I’ve studied the patterns of starlight amongst the suns already swallowed by the wave. They’re not uniformly green — it’s correlated with rotational angle. The green matter must be concentrated near the ecliptic, extending above and below it, but not encircling the stars completely.’
Irravel thought back to what the Nestbuilder had shown her.
