short work of anything organic, and the slow grinding of the rubble over the millennia had milled any remnants of the inhabitants’ material culture down to dust. Rakesh didn’t dare to guess what the chances were that any of the Arks captured by the neutron star had thrived—even briefly, let alone for fifty million years—but he had written off the cousins prematurely before, and he was not about to make the same mistake again.
He turned away from the mirror and let his avatar drift, spinning slowly. He shifted his vision down the spectrum, into the infrared and microwave bands, dimming the fierce stars but revealing the eerie world of gas and dust in which they were embedded, full of structures more subtle, delicate and diffuse. Shells of plasma from thousand-year-old supernovas hung in space like the smoke from some slow-motion fireworks display. Half a dozen glowing filaments lined up perpendicular to the galactic plane shone with the synchrotron radiation of electrons spiraling along magnetic field lines. From a ring of gas a dozen light years wide that circled the galactic center, a surreal double helix stretched across the sky: the infrared glow of dust trapped by a wave in the magnetic field that was anchored to, and twisted by, the orbiting gas.
Somehow, the Aloof had mastered this beautiful, perilous place and claimed it as their own. While Rakesh’s hapless cousins had been hammered relentlessly by the forces of nature, perhaps to the point of extinction, the Aloof had overcome or circumvented the same hardships, to make this their jealously guarded home. Whether they’d matured in the disk first and only come here once they were armed with sophisticated technology, or whether their whole mode of existence had rendered them impervious to the dangers of the bulge from the start, was anybody’s guess. Rakesh did not expect answers from them, at least not directly, but he couldn’t entirely surrender the naive hope that merely being allowed inside the fence and permitted to see what the Aloof had seen, to steep his body in the same radiation and feel the same stellar winds and tides, might yet crystallize some insight about their nature that could never have formed from idle speculation back in the disk.
Parantham spoke, puncturing his reverie.
“We have company.”
This assertion was so bizarre and unexpected that Rakesh simply floated in silence for a while, refusing to abandon his sanctuary among the spiders to see if she was joking.
“What do you mean?” he finally replied.
“Someone has sent us a messenger. I’ve already asked it what it wishes to say, but it insists on speaking to us together.”
Rakesh took his senses out of the avatar, back to his body slumped in a couch in the control room of
Standing beside Parantham was a figure resembling Csi, as Rakesh had perceived him back in the node: the same bald head, the same serious demeanor, the same barely visible hint of a smile. Unlike Csi himself, it was meaningless to ask what this messenger really looked like; as an insentient courier it had no self-perception, let alone any need for a physical embodiment. Their hosts had simply loaded it into one of the habitat’s processors and let it communicate with them via Amalgam-standard protocols.
Rakesh rose to his feet and embraced the messenger. “Welcome to the bulge!” This was not his old friend, but it was designed to communicate as if it were, and perhaps to take a reply back to the sender. Some people became self-conscious in the presence of messengers, but Rakesh’s policy was to treat them as if they were the sender, and only to retreat from that stance if it led to real absurdities. To embrace this insentient hallucination was no more foolish than responding with warmth and sincerity to a written letter or a video message. “What’s been happening? Where have you come from?”
“Darya-e-ghashang. A few years after you and Parantham left the node, a traveling festival came through: the Ocean of Ten Million Worlds. I fell in with them, and I’ve been with them ever since.”
“The Ocean of Ten Million Worlds?”
“Every month, we swim, sail, or dive in the waters of a different planet.”
Rakesh smiled, recalling his sodden farewell from the node. “That sounds wonderful.” These festivals were really just large groups of friends traveling together, but they were usually dressed up with some kind of distinguishing paraphernalia: claiming to offer some new social structure or artistic milieu, or to choose their destinations in order to celebrate some particular aspect of life. Their real attraction was that they offered a satisfying mixture of stability and novelty. As long as you stayed with the group, you didn’t have to cut ties with everyone you knew just for a change of scenery.
Parantham said, “So what made you think of us, out of the blue?”
“I heard some news about Lahl,” the messenger said.
“Lahl?” Rakesh was almost as surprised by this as he had been by the messenger’s arrival. “What did she do to become famous?”
“She came out of the bulge without entering it.”
Rakesh said, “I see.” If that was true, it was worth a degree of notoriety.
“The inter-network traffic report from the node she’d claimed as her entry point finally reached the node where she’d emerged,” the messenger explained. “It took a while, because she’d told the truth when she’d said there’d been a temporary shortage of encryption keys linking the two. When that shortage was remedied and the two nodes compared data, it was clear that she’d lied about her origins.”
Parantham said, “Does that really mean she never went into the bulge? She might have entered at a different point, and the data just hadn’t been brought together for matching, the last you heard.”
“That wasn’t literally impossible when I left Darya-e-ghashang,” the messenger conceded, “but even then the remaining opportunities for that were slim. It’s widely believed now, around much of the western inner disk, that the Aloof created her: that they used their knowledge of all the unencrypted travelers they’ve been able to study over the millennia to manufacture a plausible citizen of the Amalgam, and then they sent her out to do, well. who knows what?”
“So where is she now?” Rakesh asked.
“Nobody knows. There is no record of her departing from the node where we met her.”
Rakesh laughed. He was not convinced that Lahl was anything but an ordinary traveler who preferred not to leave behind detailed records of her movements; perhaps her story about the synchronization clan had been a cover for something more complicated and nefarious. And even if she really was a messenger from the Aloof—whose lack of social skills might have led them to phrase their request for a “child of DNA” to investigate the meteor in this mildly dishonest fashion—was that anything to worry about?
“I’m glad that you decided to share this news with us,” Rakesh said, “but it’s not going to change our plans. I don’t approve of deceit, but Lahl’s basic message was genuine. Has Parantham told you about our discoveries?”
“Yes.”
“So what should we do? If the Aloof meant us harm, it’s already too late to prevent it, and the very fact that you’ve reached us to pass on these suspicions makes it seem even less likely that they do.”
“I didn’t come to warn you about the Aloof,” the messenger said. “I came to warn you about the Amalgam.”
“Oh.” Rakesh felt a real twinge of unease now.
“Unencrypted, unauthenticated travelers taking the short cut through the bulge have always done so at their own risk. It’s not just a question of what the Aloof might do with them; the receiving nodes on the other side of the bulge are actually under no obligation to embody, or re-route, unauthenticated data. Since the days of Leila and Jasim, and the first wave of excitement when they discovered the Aloof’s network, it’s been the common practice for the people of the inner disk to make exceptions for data taking the short cut. With rumors spreading that the Aloof aren’t dealing with us openly—that they’re manufacturing impostors and spitting them out into our networks, to act as spies and saboteurs—that easy-going policy is being questioned.”
Parantham said, “So when we’re finished here, and the time comes for us to leave—”
“It might not be as simple as you expected,” the messenger said. “The Amalgam might not be willing to take you back.”
14
