She stood in the midst of the racks of clothes, outfits of every conceivable colour, a huge variety of cuts and materials, and an odd thing occurred to her.
“Ondo, why are these costumes all the same?”
Ondo replied from his laboratory. “The same?”
“I mean, they all follow the same basic pattern. Two arms, two legs, somewhere between one and two metres high. Even the cuts, the tailoring for busts and waists and hips. Why is it all so uniform? There have to be clothes here for thousands of planets across the galaxy.”
“Of course, the sample of costumes you see is self-selecting. I haven't bothered to collect disguises for body-forms that aren't near my own, and there are many, many variations. Sentient species with more than four limbs are common. But you've hit upon a very good question, one that's puzzled me in the past, because there is a very high incidence of this basic form among intelligent civilisations across the galaxy. At a rate that appears to be far above what might be likely by chance.”
“What answer have you come up with?”
“I see two possible explanations: either this basic form is an optimal one given a wide variety of evolutionary niches, or else there is a prime cause. A deliberate plan.”
“You mean, like a creator god?”
“That wasn't the explanation I had in mind. What we see might be evidence of large-scale genetic manipulation of emerging species across the galaxy. The problem is that there's no way I've found of proving that, no obvious repeating patterns in species' genes or gene analogues.”
This wasn't like the shared language, a relatively recent phenomenon. Such widespread manipulation of genotypes would have to have been carried out millions of years ago. “Do you have any hard evidence at all that such a galactic-scale intervention took place?”
“None. Most likely it never happened, and what we see is a perfectly natural parallel evolution across broadly similar planetary environments. The theory that an advanced and ancient progenitor species shaped life across the galaxy would also require them to have undertaken widespread terraforming interventions on countless thousands, perhaps millions, of worlds. It's hard to believe that's possible.”
“So, it is all the work of Omn, and Concordance have been right all along,” she said.
He got the joke but still replied with all seriousness. “The forces of evolution and long passages of time seem like a simpler explanation to me. There's a bell-curve distribution of basic body forms across galactic space, with common patterns and outliers as you see in just about every biological phenomenon. You need hands or some close analogue for complex tool manipulation, and you need something like a head, an armoured bone container, to hold a growing brain. If you don't have structures along those lines, you don't get intelligence.”
“Right. So not Omn.”
When she was ready, they hugged only slightly awkwardly, and she resumed her position in charge of the Radiant Dragon while Ondo returned to his analysis of the Depository images. She let the ship control its own exit from the hangar deck, then took over executive control. It was already beginning to feel like it was hers, following her instructions perfectly as they flew. In those moments, she stopped knowing where she ended and the ship's structure started: its voidhull her skin, its drives her limbs, its engines her organs. The fun of it, the thrill of skimming around stray lumps of space rock and accelerating hard towards the stars, was undeniable.
The rushing fall into metaspace was the greatest ecstasy, making her stomach flip within her, although her internal body senses calmly informed her that no such thing was actually taking place. Still, with no one else around to hear, she screamed from the exhilaration of it as the Dragon translated out of normal space.
“Do you feel it?” she cried out to the ship. “Doesn't it fill you with joy?”
The ship took a moment to reply, its voice as calm as ever. “I feel it, Selene Ada. I have always felt it.”
5. Migdala
She emerged from metaspace into the outer reaches of the Migdala system, five hundred million kilometres from the single yellow sun and at an angle of seventy degrees to the ecliptic plane.
She began to suck in telemetry. Ondo had been right: instead of a single Cathedral ship in orbit, there were three of the vessels, moving in close formation around the planet on an equatorial orbit. At this distance, she was seeing images of events that had taken place twenty minutes previously. She waited twice that long, drifting under reaction drive, metaspace projectors spun-up in case attack ships showed up at her coordinates.
“We need to plot a course down to the surface,” she said to the ship. “A vector that takes us through the defence network but that gets me close to Senefore.” She didn't want to spent days or weeks trudging across the planet to reach the carnival city. From what she'd learned, celebrations were already ramping up.
The ship took a few moments to reply. “I see a possible route, but it is not without risk.”
“Show me.”
The vector plotted by the Dragon looped round to the far side of her current orbit, then approached with the sun always between her and the planet. She would be visible if Concordance were monitoring local space properly, but they often did not. Being small and weak had its advantages: Concordance knew the chances were remote – approaching zero – that she or Ondo or some other renegade would turn up at any given time.
From the star, they would make a series of reaction-drive hops between the inferior planets, again keeping Migdala out of direct line-of-sight. The final approach to the planet, and the subsequent atmospheric insertion, would be the moment of greatest risk. She would be visible to Concordance sensors, and she'd be too near the star to make an immediate escape into metaspace.
Fortunately, from Ondo's analysis of
