‘Meaning what?’ she asked, testing Markarian.
‘Swarms of absorbing bodies, on orbits resembling comets, or asteroids. I think the greenfly machines must have dismantled everything smaller than a Jovian, then enveloped the rubble in transparent membranes which they filled with air, water and greenery — self-sustaining biospheres. Then they were cast adrift. Trillions of tiny worlds, around each star. No rocky planets any more.’
Irravel retrieved a name from the deep past. ‘Like Dyson spheres?’
‘Dyson clouds, perhaps.’
‘Do you think anyone survived? Are there niches in the wave where humans can live? That was the point of greenfly, after all: to create living space.’
‘Maybe,’ Markarian said, with no great conviction. ‘Perhaps some survivors found ways inside, as their own worlds were smashed and reassembled into the cloud—’
‘But you don’t think it’s very likely?’
‘I’ve been listening, Irravel — scanning the assimilated regions for any hint of an extant technological culture. If anyone did survive, they’re either keeping deliberately quiet or they don’t even know how to make a radio signal by accident.’
‘It was my fault, Markarian.’
His tone was rueful. ‘Yes… I couldn’t help but arrive at that conclusion.’
‘I never intended this.’
‘I think that goes without saying, don’t you? No one could have guessed the consequences of that one action.’
‘Did you?’
He shook his head. ‘In all likelihood, I’d have done exactly what you did.’
‘I did it out of love, Markarian. For the cargo.’
‘I know.’
And she believed him.
‘What happened back there, Markarian? Why did you give up the codes when I didn’t?’
‘Because of what they did to you, Irravel.’
He told her. How neither Markarian nor Irravel had shown any signs of revealing the codes under Mirsky’s interrogation, until something new was tried.
‘They were good at surgery,’ Markarian said. ‘Seven’s crew swapped limbs and body parts as badges of status. They knew how to sever and splice nerves.’ The image didn’t allow her to interrupt. ‘They cut your head off. Kept it alive in a state of borderline consciousness, and then showed it to me. That’s when I gave them the codes.’
For a long while Irravel said nothing. Then it occurred to her to check her old body, still frozen in the same casket where Mirsky had once revealed it to her. She ordered some children to prepare the body for a detailed examination, then looked through their eyes. The microscopic evidence of reconnective surgery around the neck was too slight ever to have shown up unless one was looking for it. But now there was no mistaking it.
I did it to save your neck, Markarian had said, when she had held him pinned to the ice of Seven’s ship.
‘You appear to be telling the truth,’ she said, when she had released the children. ‘The nature of your betrayal was…’ And then she paused, searching for the words, while Markarian watched her across the table. ‘Different from what I assumed. Possibly less of a crime. But still a betrayal, Markarian.’
‘One I’ve lived with for three hundred years of subjective time.’
‘You could have returned the sleepers alive at any time. I wouldn’t have attacked you.’ But she didn’t even sound convincing to herself.
‘What now?’ Markarian said. ‘Do we keep this distance, arguing until one of us has the nerve to strike against the other? I’ve Nestbuilder weapons as well, Irravel. I think I could rip you apart before you could launch a reprisal.’
‘You’ve had the opportunity to do so before. Perhaps you never had the nerve, though. What’s changed now?’
Markarian’s gaze flicked to the map. ‘Everything. I think we should see what happens before making any rash decisions, don’t you?’
Irravel agreed.
She willed herself into stasis, medichines arresting all biological activity in every cell in her body. The ’chines would only revive her when something — anything — happened, on a galactic timescale. Markarian would retreat into whatever mode of suspension he favoured, until woken by the same stimulus.
He was still sitting there when time resumed, as if only a moment had interrupted their conversation.
The wave had spread further now. It had eaten into the galaxy for ten thousand light-years around Sol — a third of the way to the core. There was no sign that it had encountered resistance — at least nothing that had done more than hinder it. There had never been many intelligent, starfaring cultures to begin with, the Nestbuilder’s Slug had told her. Perhaps the few that existed were even now making plans to retard the wave. Or perhaps it had swallowed them, as it had swallowed humanity.
‘Why did we wake?’ Irravel said. ‘Nothing’s changed, except that it’s grown larger.’
‘Maybe not,’ Markarian said. ‘I had to be sure, but now I don’t think there’s any doubt. I’ve just detected a radio message from within the plane of the galaxy; from within the wave.’
‘Yes?’
‘Looks as though someone survived after all.’
The radio message was faint, but nothing else was transmitting on that or any adjacent frequency, except for the senseless mush of cosmic background sources. It was also in a language they recognised.
‘It’s Canasian,’ Markarian said.
‘Fand subdialect,’ Irravel added, marvelling.
It was also beamed in their direction, from somewhere deep in the swathe of green, almost coincident with the position of a pulsar. The message was a simple one, frequency modulated around one and a half megahertz, repeated for a few minutes every day of galactic time. Whoever was sending it clearly didn’t have the resources to transmit continuously. It was also coherent: amplified and beamed.
Someone wanted to speak to them.
The man’s disembodied head appeared above the banquet table, chiselled from pixels. He was immeasurably old; a skull draped in parchment; something that should have been embalmed rather than talking.
Irravel recognised the face.
‘It’s him,’ she said, in Markarian’s direction. ‘Remontoire. Somehow he made it across all this time.’
Markarian nodded slowly. ‘He must have remembered us, and known where to look. Even across thousands of light-years, we can still be seen. There can’t be many objects still moving relativistically.’
Remontoire told his story. His people had fled to the pulsar system twenty thousand years ago — more, now, since his message had taken thousands of years to climb out of the galaxy. They had seen the wave coming, as had thousands of other human factions, and like many they had observed that the wave shunned pulsars: burned-out stellar corpses rarely accompanied by planets. Some intelligence governing the wave must have recognised that pulsars were valueless; that even if a Dyson cloud could be created around them, there would be no sunlight to focus.
For thousands of years they had waited around the pulsar, growing ever more silent and cautious, seeing other cultures make errors that drew the wave upon them, for by now it interpreted any other intelligence as a threat to its progress, assimilating the weapons used against it.
Then — over many more thousands of years — Remontoire’s people watched the wave learn, adapting like a vast neural net, becoming curious about those few pulsars that harboured planets. Soon their place of refuge would become nothing of the sort.
‘Help us,’ Remontoire said. ‘Please.’
It took three thousand years to reach them.
For most of that time, Remontoire’s people acted on faith, not knowing that help was on its way. During the first thousand years they abandoned their system, compressing their population down to a sustaining core of only a
