few hundred thousand. Together with the cultural data they’d preserved during the long centuries of their struggle against the wave, they packed their survivors into a single hollowed-out rock and flung themselves out of the ecliptic using a mass-driver that fuelled itself from the rock’s own bulk. They called it Hope. A million decoys had to be launched, just to ensure that Hope got through the surrounding hordes of assimilating machines.
Inside, most of the Conjoiners slept out the next two thousand years of solitude before Irravel and Markarian reached them.
‘Hope would make an excellent shield,’ Markarian mused as they approached it, ‘if one of us considered a pre-emptive strike against the other—’
‘Don’t think I wouldn’t.’
They moved their ships to either side of the dark shard of rock, extended field grapples, then hauled in.
‘Then why don’t you?’ Markarian said.
For a moment Irravel didn’t have a good answer. When she found one, she wondered why it hadn’t been more obvious before. ‘Because they need us more than I need revenge.’
‘A higher cause?’
‘Redemption,’ she said.
They didn’t have long. Their approach, diving down from Galactic North, had drawn the attention of the wave’s machines, directing them towards the one rock that mattered. A wall of annihilation was moving towards them at half the speed of light. When it reached Hope, it would turn it into the darkest of nebulae.
Conjoiners boarded the Hirondelle and invited Irravel into Hope. The hollowed-out chambers of the rock were Edenic to her children, after all the decades of subjective time they’d spent aboard ship since last planetfall. But it was a doomed paradise, the biomes grey with neglect, as if the Conjoiners had given up long before.
Remontoire welcomed Irravel next to a rock pool filmed with grey dust. Half the sun-panels set into the distant honeycombed ceiling were black.
‘You came,’ he said. He wore a simple smock and trousers. His anatomy was early-model Conjoiner: almost fully human.
‘You’re not him, are you?’ Irravel asked. ‘You look like him — sound like him — but the image you sent us was of someone much older.’
‘I’m sorry. His name was chosen for its familiarity; my likeness shaped to his. We searched our collective memories and found the experiences of the one you knew as Remontoire… but that was a long time ago, and he was never known by that name to us.’
‘What his name?’
‘Even your Juggler cortex could not accommodate it, Irravel.’
She had to ask. ‘Did he make it back to a commune?’
‘Yes, of course,’ the man said, as if her question was foolish. ‘How else could we have absorbed his experiences back into the Transenlightenment?’
‘And did he forgive me?’
‘I forgive you now,’ he said. ‘It amounts to the same thing.’
She willed herself to think of him as Remontoire.
The Conjoiners hadn’t allowed themselves to progress in all the thousands of years they waited around the pulsar, fearing that any social change — no matter how slight — would eventually bring the wave upon them. They had studied it, contemplated weapons they might use against it — but other than that, all they had done was wait.
They were very good at waiting.
‘How many refugees did you bring?’
‘One hundred thousand.’ Before Irravel could answer, Remontoire shook his head. ‘I know — too many. Perhaps half that number can be carried away on your ships. But half is better than nothing.’
She thought back to her own sleepers. ‘I know. Still, we might be able to take more… I don’t know about Markarian’s ship, but—’
He cut her off, gently. ‘I think you’d better come with me,’ said Remontoire, and then led her aboard the Hideyoshi.
‘How much of it did you explore?’
‘Enough to know there’s no one alive anywhere aboard this ship,’ Remontoire said. ‘If there are two hundred cryogenically frozen sleepers, we didn’t find them.’
‘No sleepers?’
‘Just this one.’
They had arrived at a plinth supporting a reefersleep casket, encrusted with gold statuary: spacesuited figures with hands folded across their chests like resting saints. The glass lid of the casket was veined with fractures; the withered figure inside older than time. Markarian’s skeletal frame was swaddled in layers of machines, all of archaic provenance. His skull had split open, a fused mass spilling out like lava.
‘Is he dead?’ Irravel asked.
‘Depends what you mean by dead.’ The Conjoiner’s hand sketched across the neural mass. ‘His organic mind must have been completely swamped by machines centuries ago. His linkage to the Hideyoshi would have been total. There would have been very little point discriminating between the two.’
‘Why didn’t he tell me what had become of him?’
‘No guarantee he knew. Once he was in this state, with his personality running entirely on machine substrates, he could have edited his own memories and perceptual inputs — deceiving himself that he was still corporeal.’
Irravel looked away from the casket, forcing troubling questions from her mind. ‘Is his personality still running the ship?’
‘We detected only caretaker programs, capable of imitating him when the need arose, but lacking sentience.’
‘Is that all there was?’
‘No.’ Remontoire reached through one of the casket’s larger fractures, prizing something from Markarian’s fingers. It was a sliver of computer memory. ‘We examined this already, though not in great detail. It’s partitioned into one hundred and ninety areas, each large enough to hold complete neural and genetic maps for one human being, encoded into superposed electron states on Rydberg atoms.’
She took the sliver from him. It didn’t feel like much. ‘He burned the sleepers onto this?’
‘Three hundred years is much longer than any of them expected to sleep. By scanning them he lost nothing.’
‘Can you retrieve them?’
‘It would not be trivial,’ the Conjoiner said, ‘but given time, we could do it. Assuming any of them would welcome being born again, so far from home.’
She thought of the infected galaxy hanging below them, humming with the chill sentience of machines. ‘Maybe the kindest thing would be to simulate the past,’ she said. ‘Recreate Yellowstone and revive them on it, as if nothing had ever gone wrong.’
‘Is that what you’re advocating?’
‘No,’ she said, after toying with the idea in all seriousness. ‘We need all the genetic diversity we can get if we’re going to establish a new branch of humanity outside the galaxy.’
She thought about it some more. Soon they would witness Hope’s destruction, as the wave of machines tore through it with the mindlessness of stampeding animals. Some of them might try to follow the Hirondelle, but so far the machines moved too slowly to catch the ship, even if they forced it back towards Galactic North.
Where else could they go?
There were globular clusters high above the galaxy — tightly packed shoals of old stars the wave hadn’t reached, but where fragments of humanity might already have sought refuge. If the clusters proved unwelcoming, there were high-latitude stars, flung from the galaxy a billion years ago, and some might have dragged their planetary systems with them. If those failed — and it would be tens of thousands of years before the possibilities were exhausted — the Hirondelle could always loop around towards Galactic South and search there, striking out for
