1.1 Reductio

2160.9.26 Standard Mission Time

(28 August 2163 UT)

1.1.1

Peter Alander rolled over, blinking in the dim light as he tried to make sense of his surroundings. The room was narrow with curved walls, and empty apart from himself, the bed he was lying on, and the woman standing to one side with her back facing him. Fabric slid over fabric as the woman adjusted her clothing. The sound it made, he realized, was what had awoken him.

"Lucia?"

The woman sighed and shook her head. "That's three times in a row you've got it wrong, Peter." Caryl Hatzis turned with awkward propriety to look over her shoulder at him while continuing to get dressed. "Keep this up and I might take it personally."

Alander could only stare at her in bemusement, clutching the small carbon disk around his neck as if this might in some way remove his confusion. He could smell Hatzis on the mattress next to him; there were sense impressions stirring, strange intimacies that seemed utterly incongruous. What on earth was he doing in bed with her . . .?

She faced him fully when her suit was sealed. If she was aware of his confusion, she ignored it.

"Caryl . . ."

She offered a faint, disappointed smile. "You were talking in your sleep again. You really should look at laying down some new memories, you know."

"What are you doing--?" Here, he wanted to add, but he let the question go unspoken for fear of insulting her.

"Geb called," she said. "The Spinners have arrived at Sagarsee."

His confusion persisted.

Another sigh, as though she was tired of going over the same conversation with him. "It's time, Peter. We have to act now, or lose our last chance."

Finally some of it came back to him: Earth was destroyed, and the natural order of things had been destroyed with it. What little remained of humanity was caught between the Spinners and the Starfish, unsure whether to run, hide or fight back. None of the options were particular attractive; none offered much hope for survival.

He sat up as Hatzis made to leave the room. She stopped at the arched doorway and turned to face him. There was emotion in the stare, but nothing he would have recognized as affection. He supposed he should offer her something: a kiss or a hug maybe, but he wasn't sure what was expected of him. He wasn't even sure if they had been intimate with one another. If they had, it couldn't have been about love, surely. He felt nothing of the sort for her. The closest thing, he imagined, would be ancient hormonal imperatives operating in a tight spot.

He wondered if he even had hormones any more. Or pheromones. His body consisted of an android drone into which his engram had been distilled; it had also been modified by the Praxis, the alien leader of the ^Yuhl/_Goel. He didn't know what the Praxis had done to him, only that it had left him changed: the android template didn't include hair, but now he sported several days' growth across his scalp and face; the formerly regular lines of veins visible through his olive skin were flexing, shifting by minute increments; he felt stronger somehow, seeming to have more energy; and when, in strange half-memory, he touched Hatzis's skin--marveling at her own inhumanities, the advanced biomods installed in her by the posthuman regime the Starfish had destroyed in Sol--strange impulses moved through his nervous system, fleeting emotional storms that swept through parts of his cortex he didn't know he had . . .

"You're not going to join us?" she asked, her expression reproving. She was off to decide the course of humanity's fate. She obviously felt he should be taking an interest.

"I'll come along once the bickering is over."

"Your faith in my ability to control the rabble is as strong as ever, I see."

"Don't take it personally, Caryl. It's got nothing to do with you."

"That makes me feel a whole lot better, Peter; thanks."

"I will come by later, I promise," he assured her.

"Make your grand entrance when you're ready, then. I don't care. Just make sure you use it to good effect."

She stood in the doorway for a second longer, as though about to add something, or waiting for him to do so. He said nothing. Her words stung, but he had learned enough about her in recent weeks to know that her scorn and derision hid nervousness, uncertainty. Whatever had happened between them, he didn't want to add to that. In his present state of mind, anything he said was likely to make things worse. He knew the meeting was important, in principle, but he couldn't bring himself to endure the arguments that would inevitably ensue. He could hear every one of them in advance, map out their ideological landscapes and follow point by point the routes they'd take to utter disagreement. Maybe there was a chance that the survivors would reach consensus, but he wouldn't put money on it.

Hatzis left, fleeing his puzzled silence without a word. When she'd gone, Alander lay back on the bed with his arms folded behind his head, and wondered at what he had become.

You were talking in your sleep again, Hatzis had said. That didn't surprise him. He'd been dreaming of Lucia, the lover he'd lost in the stars. Specifically, he had been dreaming of the last conversation their originals had had before the engrams left for the stars. The philosophical conundrum that had plagued opponents of the UNESSPRO missions had haunted each of the originals upon which the engrams were based at one time or another during their entrainment. How would it feel to know that hundreds of copies of yourself, echoes of the real you, were heading to places you were never likely to see? And how in turn would the echoes feel knowing that their originals would remain behind, to grow old and die at non-relativistic rates?

Are we immortal, Lucia had once asked him, or destined to die a thousand times?

He still didn't have an answer for that question, despite contemplating it many times over. He--or his original, anyway, the most copied of all the mission scientists--had an innate flaw, somewhere, that made his engrams unstable. Of all the hundreds sent out from Earth, none had lasted more than a few weeks. All had suffered breakdowns resulting in catastrophic failure, forcing shutdown and long-term storage. He himself had survived only by virtue of being uploaded into an android body, relying on its stability, its physicality, to hold himself together. It had worked, precariously, but subsequent events had shaken his confidence. He wasn't who his engram told him he was supposed to be. He was changing, evolving. Hatzis had set him free of those internal constraints, and the Praxis had given his body a semblance of natural life. But he still had no idea what he was, exactly, or where he stood in regards to his other engrams--for which he still felt a strange sort of bond.

Out of kinship? he wondered. Or pity?

Hatzis had a fine arrangement with her own engrams. They clicked together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, or so it seemed from the outside. His own copies rejected him, spurning his offer to take their memories and integrate them into a new whole. This dismayed him more than he was prepared to admit.

"There can be no greater challenge to your identity than being cast out by your own self," Hatzis had told him after the first time it happened. "It's more painful than losing a family or a home."

He found it ironic that she should be the one guiding him through this process. The one person he'd railed against since his awakening on Adrasteia, newly embodied and keenly aware of her resentment of the resources he'd been allocated. But that Caryl Hatzis had been destroyed, along with the Frank Tipler and all its crew, in one of the very first Starfish attacks. This was a different Hatzis altogether, the last true human alive.

"If your engram chose death over absorption, then that's his problem, not yours. Don't let his failure drag you down. You're no longer him, Peter. You're better than that. Let him go. Whatever you've become, you have an obligation to yourself to keep moving on."

But where am I moving to? he wanted to ask her.

"The only thing holding us back is ourselves, and they only win if we let them."

The conversation was clear in his mind. It was the first time they'd embraced--again, not out of love or lust, but for comfort in the face of terrible circumstances.

"You need to have a clear idea of what it is you're clinging to," she'd said. "If your ship is sinking, then you want to at least make sure you're clinging to a life-raft, and not the ship itself, right?"

"And you're my raft, Caryl?"

The memory of her laugh seemed to fill the hole ship cabin. "Cling to me, Peter, and we may well both go under."

He nodded to himself. It was true: he had to find his own center of gravity, to haul himself out of his doldrums. And to make the effort worthwhile, he had to help find a way to ensure humanity's survival. He wasn't sure that arguing en masse was the solution, but he could see that Hatzis thought it might be. That was her way, her gift. The way she had organized the resistance from Sothis had proved that she was capable of great things, and that her ambition was clear. But there were times that he wondered if they might not be better off with someone more like Frank Axford. Until Axford had forced them into it, no one even considered fighting the Starfish.

With good reason, too, Alander told himself. The outcome of that skirmish had left forty percent of the ^Yuhl/_Goel scavenger fleet destroyed, along with six human colonies, Sothis and Vega included. The Starfish had lost just one of their massive "cutter" vessels--disk-shaped behemoths that made anything humans had ever built look paltry in comparison. That small victory might have meant something in terms of morale building had it not led to the appearance of an entirely new class of Starfish craft, one so large it made the cutters look as insignificant as motes of dust.

Despite the heavy losses, though, Alander couldn't help but wonder if it hadn't been worthwhile. After all, they now knew more about the Starfish than they ever had before, which was undoubtedly why Frank the Ax had done what he'd done. It took a military mind to understand that to determine an enemy's capabilities, one had to make sacrifices--one had to be prepared to enter into battles that couldn't necessarily be won. When the Starfish were unknown, they were vast and terrifying. Now, though, there was a sense that maybe this faceless enemy had limitations, after all, which was something of a comfort--even if these limitations were still incomprehensibly vast.

Alander's thoughts turned increasingly to Axford, wondering what the ex-general might be up to right now. Ever since the battle of Beid had gone so badly, there had been no sign of the man, in any of his incarnations, and his bases on Vega were in ruins--probably by Axford's own hand, to cover his tracks.

"I have a message for you, Peter," the cool voice of the hole ship interjected into his thoughts. The hole ship AIs were degrees of magnitude less sophisticated than the Gifts who maintained the legacy of the Spinners, but they were still smartly sophisticated. "The transmission is coming from the hole ship you refer to as Pearl."

Alander recognized the name immediately. "That's Thor's ship, isn't it?"

"I believe so, Peter."

"Well if it's Sol she's looking for, tell her--"

"The message is addressed specifically to you," the AI cut in.

Alander frowned. The copy of Caryl Hatzis from the colony world known as Thor had been missing for days. If she was back, she should have reported to the Caryl Hatzis the engrams called Sol, not him. Maybe she was worried how Sol would react, given that she'd gone off on her own crusade without consulting anyone shortly after her colony had been destroyed. Alander could understand how she felt. He too had experienced the emotional trauma of seeing the world of his own mission, the Frank Tipler, destroyed, along with all his crewmates. But he doubted that Sol would be as understanding given the limited resources available to humanity.

"Then I guess you'd better put her through," he said, climbing to his feet.

He expected a screen to form in the wall to reveal a video image; in that fashion, the hole ships normally enabled their passengers to communicate with one another. What he got, though, was something entirely different.

The walls, floor and ceiling retreated around him until he and the bed seemed to be hanging in a vast and giddying void. Through the darkness he sensed black shapes moving, strange limbs touching, complex senses interacting in an arcane, private dance. Then a woman stepped out of that darkness, her movements steady and assured, the smile on her face gentle and affectionate.

The shock of recognition that rushed through him was like a physical force. She was wearing a green UNESSPRO shipsuit. Her hair was highlighted in gold just the way he remembered. Her skin had a similar honeyish hue that shone in nonexistent light. Her brown eyes stared at him out of that impossible space, no less powerful for being virtual.

He climbed slowly to his feet, his jaw hanging hopelessly open as he struggled for words.

"Hello, Peter," said Lucia Benck. "It's been a long time."

1.1.2

Rasmussen was a beautiful world: green and temperate around the equator, with an even split between ocean and landmass. Both poles were ice-bound and surrounded by turbulent berg-filled oceans; the air was high in oxygen, supporting a diverse ecosystem that boasted insects large enough to bite an android in two and tree-trunks dozens of meters across. Its primary, BSC5070, was a G6V star slightly redder than Earth's; Rasmussen orbited close to the center of its habitable zone. Marcus Chown, the UNESSPRO mission sent to explore the system, had arrived fifteen years earlier, and established an extensive orbital complex from which detailed biological and geological examinations had been made. Under the leadership of Rob Singh, terrestrial contamination of the environment was kept to an absolute minimum. Even during the arrival of the Gifts, the pristine ecosystem had barely been disturbed. To all intents and purposes, it was a paradise--which was what made it so hard for Caryl Hatzis to deliver her pronouncement.

"In five days," she said, "this planet, and everything on it, will die."

The assembly was silent.

"Three days later," she went on, "Zemyna and Demeter will follow, then Geb and Sagarsee. And then--" She paused, allowing a faint echo to underline the significance of the silence with which she presaged her next words. "And then there will be no more colonies left. Everything UNESSPRO strove to achieve will be gone. All that will remain of humanity will be our ash and dust on the worlds we once visited."

Hatzis felt the pressure of eyes on her, virtual and real.

The meeting had been called at Rasmussen to coincide with the arrival of the Spinners at Sagarsee, colony world of the BSC5148 system, the last of five loosely clustered systems known as the Alkaid Group on the opposite side of the sphere of space humanity had explored from where the Spinners had first appeared. Unless humanity's enigmatic benefactors abruptly changed their modus operandi, Sagarsee and the rest of the Alkaid Group would be the last worlds visited by the Spinners--and the last attacked by the Starfish. If humanity was to survive, then this was where Caryl Hatzis and her ragtag band of engrams would have to make their stand.

She forced herself to speak with dignity and poise when all she wanted to do was to scream out her frustration and outrage.

"We have tried communicating with the Spinners, and they haven't responded. We've tried communicating with the Starfish, and they too have ignored us. We've tried resisting the Starfish, and that almost got us killed. So now we have to figure out what we do next.

"If we do nothing," she said, "we die. We've seen it happen to the ostrich colonies--the ones who tried hiding in systems that had already been attacked, or on worlds the Spinners hadn't visited. They thought they would be safe, that the Starfish wouldn't consider them a threat. But they were wrong, and they paid for it with their lives. To that end, should any colony represented here today choose that option, you will forfeit your gifts and your ftl communicators. This is not open to discussion; if the human race is to have any chance at all, it requires every resource it can lay its hands on."

She paused, half expecting a reaction to this, but there was none. Everyone was fully, finally aware of the harsh reality of their situation.

"One of the options open to us is to follow the lead of the Yuhl and remain in the wake of the Spinners. We can use the Gifts to fashion arks large enough to contain all our hardware, all the processors required to run the engrams and contain our memories of Earth. We can merge the hole ships, and like the Yuhl we can jump from system to system, taking what we need to keep our fleet functioning. According to the Praxis, our new friends have been doing this for two and a half thousand years, so there's no reason why we couldn't do it, too.

"This is a viable option, but for me it's not an attractive one. Many of you, I know, are still grappling with the fact that Earth was destroyed in the Spike, over a century ago. I have shown you what took its place; you've seen what the Starfish destroyed when they came to Sol." On the heels of Peter Alander, she added silently to herself, unable to completely suppress a twinge of resentment, even though deep down she knew it wasn't really his fault. "There's nothing left for us there--but it is still our birthplace. And for that reason I am loath to give up on it entirely.

"We still have some days left, and we have the resources of the Gifts at our disposal. There might still be something we haven't thought of yet--something that we might yet do to ensure our species' survival with dignity intact. We may yet, at the eleventh hour, find an alternative--a way in which our species could survive and somehow reclaim that which has been lost.

"We are here to decide whether to take the chance or not. We are the sole survivors of the human race; it is upon our shoulders that the future of our species rests. You must think long and hard about what you wish to do now. We must reach consensus, or we must divide.

"I ask you to consider this: to live as the Yuhl do now would mean that our future descendants, whatever they may be, will inherit nothing from us but our fear and obeisance. We will have run from our greatest challenge, and that will be our only legacy. But if today, together, we can find an alternative, then perhaps our descendants will inherit something more. If we can live through these next few days, then we could reclaim Sol System and rebuild our species, and our descendants may be heirs to a new Earth."

With that, as the echoes of her words filled the virtual meeting-hall, she stepped back from the spotlight, glad to remove herself from the decision-making process. The sentiments she'd expressed were genuine, but in truth she didn't know for certain what was the best thing for humanity right now. Abandoning Surveyed Space for a life roaming the galaxy, caught between one alien race and another, sounded a lot like a prison sentence to her--one with no chance of parole. But was it worse than the death sentence humanity may face if they attempted to fight back?

Sol understood Alander's point all too well; she, too, was tired of endless spats, constant claims and counterclaims, petty ascendancies and power struggles. She wished her higher self, the one destroyed with the Vincula in Sol System, could magically reappear and take over. She would know what to do. With the resources of a post-Spike, Twenty-Second Century humanity behind them, maybe the engrams would have had something of a chance, at least.

Then again, she reminded herself, it hadn't really helped the Vincula. The Spinners had cut through its defenses like a hot knife through butter. The memory of the destruction of her home was indelibly burned into her mind, and like a recently formed scar, it itched terribly . . .

"We can't leave here," someone was insisting. "This is our home!"

"Then we must find a way to contact them--to reason with them," said another.

"The Starfish don't care about that," came the instant reply. "If we stay here, they'll destroy us as easily as they destroyed Sol."

"But who says Sol was actually destroyed?" said a third voice, entering the debate. "All we have is her word for that. It could be a fake designed to make us leave, to empty the colonies to allow her to take over!"

And there it was in a nutshell: all three possible responses to the situation. The engrams could refuse to accept the harsh reality and die; they could bite the bullet and leave; or they could doubt that it was even happening. The last was particularly symptomatic of newer colonies, especially those who'd been skipped by the Spinners and had yet to see any evidence of alien activity beyond the hole ships. And she could understand that. Conspiracy was so much easier to accept than the harsh reality of humanity's genocide.

Fortunately, though, survivors of Starfish attacks significantly outnumbered the newbies. Of the thousand-odd remaining engrams attending the meeting, approximately eight hundred had lost homes and missions to the aliens. While they may not have seen the destruction first-hand, since few had and managed to do so and survive, they were left in no doubt as to the desperate nature of humanity's plight.

Run or die, she thought to herself. It's not a choice; it's an ultimatum.

"I have to say, I've never been one for ultimatums."

The voice intruding upon her thoughts, reading her thoughts, startled her. She knew immediately to whom the voice belonged, and it was this more than anything that surprised her. She quickly sent her senses through the assembly, trying to find the source of the voice, seeking out the owner. Try as she might, though, she couldn't find him.

"That's because I'm not there, Caryl," Frank the Ax said with amusement. "The others can't hear me; I'm speaking only to you, because right now, yours is the only opinion that matters."

"And I'm supposed to be flattered by that, Frank?"

She heard a low chuckle. "Is that animosity I detect, Caryl?"

"I don't know. Why should I harbor any ill feelings toward you?" She couldn't restrain her sarcasm. "That stunt you pulled back at Beid didn't hurt us at all."

While she spoke, she ramped up her internal processing speed to its fastest setting, determined to out-think the man who'd brought so much death and destruction to humanity and its allies. But he was telling the truth: he wasn't at the meeting. There was no sign of him in the assembly, nor in any of the networks attached to it. The array of hole ships docked in the upper orbits of Rasmussen was empty of his spoor, as were the gifts themselves. The only other possible place in orbit around the planet was the Marcus Chown, looking boxy and antiquated against the superior technology of the Spinners. It hung innocent and isolated at a lower altitude, glinting brightly in the sunlight . . .

"Got you," she said. His transmission was coming from the gutted survey ship, the relic of Earth that had been abandoned as soon as the Gifts arrived.

"You think I'm that stupid, Caryl?" Axford replied. "It's just a relay. I could be anywhere in the system."

"You can't be far away; your transmission lag is low."

"And what would you do if you found me, Caryl? Take me out? I'm only one of many, remember? You'd still be left with hundreds more Frank Axfords to contend with."

"That sounds like a threat, Frank."

"Listen, Caryl: either you're going to hear what I've got to say, or I'm going to leave." His voice was cool behind the amusement.

"And why should I--or anyone, for that matter--care if you stay or go? You've done nothing but hurt us in the past: stolen from the colonies; used the Starfish to cover up your thefts; sent the Yuhl almost to their deaths--"

"And saved your collective ass," he interjected. "You just don't know it yet."

Hatzis laughed at this. "I must have missed that part. I guess I was too busy fighting off the Starfish you set upon us."

"You seemed to do all right."

"Christ, Frank, do you even know how many people we lost because of you?"

"Of course I do. I was watching. The data I gleaned were exceedingly valuable."

"I'm glad the massacre gave you some amusement."

"Oh, come on, Caryl! Put your hostilities to rest and just listen to what I have to say. We're all in the same boat here. If we go down, we go down together."

"So your threat to leave was empty?"

"I need you nowhere near as much as you need me," he returned. "In a few days, we're all going to be on the run from the enemy, and from that point on there'll be no turning back. Trust me, I'm your only shot at deflecting the Starfish."

No turning back, she echoed in her mind, tasting the notion and finding its bitterness appalling. The Yuhl had run, and were survivors as a result--but they were also scavengers, slowly devolving to the status of superstitious pirates. They practically worshipped the Spinner/Starfish migration, which they referred to in combination as the "Ambivalence." Did a familiar fate now await humanity?

"Okay, Frank. I'll listen."

"But are you open to suggestions?"

She sighed to herself. "If you're going to suggest that we attack the Starfish again--?"

"Fighting back is our only chance of survival, Caryl."

"You saw what happened when you forced us into doing that before."

"Look, I'm not stupid, Caryl. I know you won't stand any chance at all if you try going head to head with the big guns. I mean, that new ship of theirs--the Trident--that thing's so big you could use it to skewer the Moon! There's no way we'd be able to take one of those things out with anything we've got. A solar flare might do it, but there's nothing in the Gifts to show how we might generate one--or how to get the Starfish to bring one of their Tridents close enough for us to even be able to use it."

"Whatever you're trying to talk me into, Frank, you're doing a shit-poor job of it. And you're not telling me anything I don't already know, either."

"If you already know it, then why bother with the big meeting? Why waste time debating over options as if you really have any choice in the matter?"

The scorn in his voice stung, like salt in an open wound.

"Because the decision can't be mine alone to make."

"But it can't be left to them. Christ, they're idiots, Caryl! Half of them seriously believe that, regardless of what happens, the human spirit will prevail and overcome any adversity. But you and I both know that the Starfish will storm through this galaxy and completely remove all trace of humanity as it goes--and they won't even stop to check their heels to see what it is they've stepped in, either."

A great weariness fell over her. The fatalistic certainty of her insignificance was something that confronted her on an almost hourly basis.

"So what do you suggest we do, Frank? What's your great plan to save humanity?"

"We make them notice us, of course."

"We've tried that, remember? It didn't work."

"Then you didn't try hard enough."

"Easy to say, but do you actually have something more than just hot wind and criticism to offer here?"

"I do have an idea, but I don't think you're going to like it."

"Try me anyway."

"Very well," he said. "You've already tried broadcasting messages to the Starfish. You've left satellites in vulnerable systems, radiating in all frequencies, using all known codes and media. You've sacrificed hole ships to transmit via ftl. And despite attempting to get their attention, you've never once received a reply.

"I think the reason for this is that you've been hailing the wrong people. The cutters are nothing more than drones; they're just doing a job. They're deaf to anything but their orders--and those orders are to take out any sign of intelligence in the systems they've been allocated. Maybe I'm anthropomorphosising, but that's what I see when I study their behavior. They're simply front-line soldiers, grunts, cannon-fodder--they're nothing, Caryl.

"We need to speak to the people giving the orders, and I don't think we've even come remotely close to seeing them yet."

"What about the Trident?"

"It's possible, but at this stage there's no way of knowing one way or the other. All I do know is this: they probably have no idea that we even exist, and no reason to suspect it. They're as blind to us as we are to the insects in the soil over which we used to walk. They're not looking for us, so they don't see us."

"So what's your plan, then?" She wished he would hurry up and get to the point.

"To be honest, it's not my plan," he said. "I was contacted by someone with an intriguing idea."

She wanted to ask who this person was, but she didn't have time--the engram assembly was quickly breaking down into a morass of arguments and personal insults and she needed to get back to it--so instead she asked: "And that is?"

"It's quite simple, actually," he said. "If the Starfish won't come to us, then we'll just have to go to them."

1.1.3

In the virtual spaces of the hole ship walls, the image of Lucia Benck faced Peter Alander for the first time in one hundred and ten Adjusted Planck years. She looked exactly the same as she had during entrainment, but he had changed both overtly and subtly: from the hair to the color of his skin; from his apparent age--much younger than it had been on Earth, even taking anti-senescence treatments into account--to the way he moved. There was something about him, Lucia decided, that was very different to the Peter Alander she'd known.

But it was Peter nonetheless, and that was all that mattered. She saw him through the hole ship's advanced senses, gazing at him from a thousand different angles simultaneously and in all frequencies. He was a glowing, cubist, abstract of a person, dissected and reassembled every nanosecond as her new senses swept through him. His biological functions were laid bare before her, even those specific to his android body--and others that had no analogue in human anatomy. What they were, she didn't know.

His Adam's apple worked. Complex glandular responses indicated anxiety that her image subconsciously imitated. He stared at her for a few seconds longer in troubled silence, finally shaking his head slowly and saying, "How did you . . .?"

"Thor found me. She rescued me from Chung-5 and uploaded me into her hole ship. I've been there ever since."

"You were in the . . .?" He was having trouble finishing his questions. "I don't think anyone's tried that before."

She smiled. "I'm the first, actually."

He nodded in understanding. "You always were the explorer."

She didn't need to examine the tightness around his eyes to know that something other than amusement lay behind the comment. "I'm sorry I had to go, Peter. It's just that--" She struggled to recapture her rationalizations, the feelings attendant to her decision. They felt incredibly remote, and not just because they'd occurred many years earlier, even in subjective time. "Somewhere--back home, our originals--we were together, so what did it matter what I did? I was just one of dozens, hundreds, you know?"

"You all made the same decision," he said.

She nodded solemnly. "Thor told me. I'm sorry."

"I know you didn't do this to hurt me. You had to do what was right for you." He fell silence once more, shrugging awkwardly before moving the conversation onto a different subject. "You wouldn't have known what happened back on Earth, either--with the Spike and everything."

Another nod. "Only Caryl Hatzis survived. Which is kind of--" She tried to find the right word. "--scary."

He laughed at this. "I'm sure Caryl would love to hear it put that way. And I sympathize, but she's the only true human remaining. She's all we have left. She may be biomodified up to the eyeballs, and she may be a hundred and fifty years old, but she's the reason a lot of the engrams keep waking up in the morning. If humanity consisted of nothing but a bunch of dodgy programs already pushing their expiry dates, there wouldn't be any point. She's real; it makes a difference."

Peter shifted from foot to foot as he spoke, as though restless or nervous. His body was all smooth angles and planes, elegantly muscular yet not quite right. There was something about him that wasn't entirely human. Her image--generated by her engram but not entirely under her conscious control--folded her arms across her chest and stepped minutely away.

"You look pretty real to me," Lucia said.

Peter looked down at himself, realizing for the first time he was naked. He snatched a sheet from the bed and wrapped it around himself. She smiled at his uncharacteristic self-consciousness, but didn't say anything.

"I'm a freak," he said with galling matter-of-factness. "No one would fight for me. I'm the engram with the highest failure rate in the entire program. I'm a copy of that arrogant bastard who thought the galaxy revolved around him, but now can't even keep his head on right. I've been taken apart and put back together so many times I don't know who I am anymore."

"That's my point, Peter. You're someone." Every instinct in her virtual body told her that. "If you're not the past, then maybe you're the future instead."

He exhaled explosively--something caught between a laugh and a bleat of incredulity. "No wonder the Spinners picked me to talk through, then! They obviously have a sense of humor."

For a long moment, she didn't know what to say. His readings were incomprehensible. His internal organs displayed a strange symmetry that she'd never seen before, and his brain seemed to have grown entirely new sections. There was a mysterious membrane covering his entire body. It appeared to be a film of water, shifting constantly but never evaporating.

"What's happened to you, Peter? You used to be so strong, so certain of yourself. Where did it all go?"

"In there, actually," he said, pointing at a clunky-looking solid-state data storage unit of UNESSPRO manufacture tucked into one corner of the cabin.

She frowned quizzically at him. "What do you mean?"

"You asked where the old me went," he said. "And that's where Caryl puts the copies of me that don't work. She's been collecting them ever since Sothis was destroyed. She calls it the Graveyard."

Lucia grimaced in distaste; Peter smiled.

"That's what I thought, too," he said.

"But why is she doing it?"

"I have no idea. But I'm not sure that I mind it. It acts as a reminder of what I've lost--of who I'm not anymore."

"Shouldn't that be 'whom'?" Out loud it sounded ridiculously irrelevant, but strangely it was all she could think to say. The conversation wasn't going at all as she'd imagined it.

He laughed at that. "I've never really known, to tell you the truth. And neither have you, if my memory serves me correctly--and I'm sure it does. It's programmed into us, after all."

"Thor mentioned something about the programming. I'm lucky to be here, apparently. If all of the other versions of me are in as bad a shape as I was, there might not be too many operable copies of Lucia Benck out there."

"How long had you been traveling?"

"A long time," she said, injecting as much solemnity into her tone as was necessary to convey her regrets. "I went through pi-1 Ursa Major, the Linde's target system, over forty years ago. My clock-rate has been slow since then, but the years kept mounting." Those memories, too, seemed faint, as though they'd happened to another person. "And to think, I actually had hopes of seeing another galaxy! I thought that if I kept going, there would be no stopping me. How naïve I was." A glimmer of her old self found metaphorical oxygen and caught flame. "But now . . ."

Peter frowned. "But now what?"

"Thor told me all about the other aliens--the Yuhl. They travel endlessly, she said, jumping from system to system in the Starfish wake. Apparently they invited us to join them, too."

From his expression she could tell that he didn't share her excitement at the prospect.

"Well, don't you see, Peter? It means that I get to see the galaxy as I've always wanted, and I get to be with you at the same time! What more could I ask for?"

Thoroughly reinforced pathways in her mind glowed with the energy she poured into that thought. Her original's long-standing dilemma--to explore the stars or to opt for a life with Peter, perpetuated across all her copies--had found a solution, finally, and every fiber of her being resonated to it. She might only be an engram, and a time-weary one at that, but she had succeeded where her original had failed. She could have her cake and eat it.

"It's not that simple, Lucia," he said cautiously.

She refused to have her mood dampened. "Why not? Think of the things we could learn from the Yuhl. The things we can see!"

He sat down on the edge of the bed, looking weary. He seemed to be having trouble working out what to say. "There may be alternatives."

"Such as?"

"That's what Caryl's trying to work out now. Everyone's gathered here to discuss--"

"I know, Peter. Thor and I just missed you at iota Boötis. They said to come here, where the decision was being made. But what other decision can we make? It's not as if any of the alternatives are terribly attractive." Impatience was beginning to make inroads into her optimism.

He hesitated again, keeping his gaze deliberately away from her.

"What's going on, Peter? What is it you're not telling me?"

He sighed, raising his stare to meet hers. "There's a lot we need to discuss, Lucia. You've only been here a few minutes and--"

"I'm looking forward to traveling with you, Peter," she said, cutting across his cautious rambling with a knife-edge certainty.

He looked far from reassured, though. In fact, if anything he was looking more worried than ever.

"Tell me, Lucia: how did you get in here?" he said slowly.

"I told you. Thor found me--"

"No, I mean here, in this hole ship. Has Pearl linked up with it, or have you uploaded yourself with the message Thor transmitted?"

"I uploaded myself," she said, thinking: Why is he asking this? How is it relevant? "I can move freely among all the hole ships except where security restrictions have been put in place. The ships let me wander; it's only the people who get in the way."

"Does Thor know you're here?"

"Does she need to know? I'm a free agent; I can do whatever I want."

"Klotho, shut down all internal communication with Rasmussen," he said. "Accept only incoming transmissions as legitimate, and do not reply to anything without my express permission."

It didn't register that he was talking to the hole ship until Lucia sensed the boundaries of her world contract around her. She felt as though her head was being gripped by a vice--except she didn't have a head, and the only thing enclosing her was the hole ship's semantic space.

"What are you doing, Peter?"

"Thor has been irresponsible letting you wander freely like this," he said. "You're fixating; it's a symptom of senescence."

"So?"

"So you're not thinking properly." He sighed. "Listen, Lucia, I'm not the same Peter Alander you remember from the Linde. Nor am I the same as the one on Earth, either. I'm--" He hesitated uncertainly, then said: "I'm someone else altogether."

Why was he speaking to her like she was an idiot? "I know that, Peter!"

He shook his head. "No, you don't, Lucia. I've seen your manner before, in other engrams. You're seeing me as your memory sees me, not as I am."

She was about to protest the accusation, but he must have seen it coming and jumped in before she could say anything.

"You're probably not aware that you're doing it--no more than you could be aware what your programming is doing to you. And I know what it's like, Lucia. Believe me, I've been there. It's like being caught in a loop, but all you're seeing is a straight line. You can only see the discontinuities from the outside."

"So what are you saying? That you don't trust me?"

He tightened the sheet around him. "It just strikes me as dangerous for you to be free to go anywhere you choose when you're not yourself, that's all. It's nothing personal."

"What do you think I am, Peter?"

"I don't know--and that's the problem. I mean, suppose you don't like something I have to tell you; how do I know that you're not going to shut off my air? Or steal another hole ship and hurt someone else? I don't even know if you can control the ships like that, but I'm reluctant to take the chance. I don't even know who I am, half the time." He stared, warily, at her image in the walls--which she only noticed then was flickering and distorting as though under great electromagnetic pressure. "Lucia, before we continue with this conversation, I really think you should be examined."

"I'm fine," she insisted, ignoring the stretching and strobing of her image. "Trust me."

He completely ignored her reassurances. "Klotho, can you confirm that I am in command of your systems?"

"That is correct, Peter," said the hole ship.

"And what status have you given the personality of Lucia Benck?"

"While you are both passengers in this vessel, she will have the same status as yourself."

"Can you lock her out of the command loop?" he asked. "I don't want her interfering with my orders or issuing any without my knowledge."

"Peter . . ." She could manage nothing else in the face of his mistrust.

"I've seen too many engrams go bad, Lucia--my own included. Until Caryl has had a chance to examine you, I can't take any chances. I'm sorry."

A wave of ugliness swept through her. She hated it, but at the same time she couldn't fight it. There was no way she would allow him to make her a prisoner in her own home. The semantic spaces of the hole ship AIs were identical from ship to ship. In the days since her awakening, they had come to seem more real to her than the solid matter they oversaw.

She felt the command pathways of Klotho's AI stretching out around her. She was a dust mote wandering the transistors of a giant, antique computer, incapable as yet of seeing the whole picture, but knowing how information flowed and ebbed through the greater machine. Already she could feel where to intrude if she wanted Klotho to take orders from her instead of Peter.

It was true what he said, too: she could have the ship cut off his air, if she wanted to. But hopefully it wouldn't come to that . . .

Ignore his command, Klotho, she instructed. You will listen to me instead.

You are both passengers, the hole ship replied. I am obliged to obey you both where possible, and to follow my own judgment when orders conflict.

Don't lock me in here! she pleaded, exerting all her will on the pressure points she sensed. All the years of confinement in Chung-5 were fresh in her mind. She'd thought she was free, that she could travel the stars as she had always dreamed. It was a cruel joke to have that snatched away from her now--and by Peter of all people. She'd thought he understood.

"Lucia?" Peter was looking nervously around him. The fact that her image had disappeared completely, leaving the walls of his cubicle depthless and empty, had obviously unnerved him. "Lucia, are you still listening to me?"

She withdrew from Klotho's complex circuitry, returning her attention to Peter. "Why should I?"

"Because I want you to understand. When I was on Adrasteia,"I was desperate for you to return. In fact, at times it was only the thought of you that kept me going. You were the anchor on which I hung my sanity. But you never showed up; you never called."

"I would have if I could!" she broke in. "It was my intention to transfer data as I flew by the target system, so I could justify carrying on. I didn't want to cost the program anything, or hurt anyone."

He looked up at the ceiling as if seeking her out. "You did hurt someone, Lucia. You hurt me. As time passed, the expectation that you would appear softened into a hope, and then it became just a dream--a dream that I never really expected to be fully realized. But it's never gone away. I've tried many times to get over you, Lucia, because I need to be free of you to find myself. But I don't know how to. It's not something I can switch off."

Something akin to relief washed over her at the sound of these words, but then he blinked and looked down to the floor, and in that tiny gesture she could see what was coming and a scream began to rise inside her.

"Years ago if you had suggested we could have traveled the galaxy together, tourist and truth seeker alike, you know I would have leapt at the chance."

"But now?" she prompted, her voice barely level.

"It was only when you appeared here just then, Lucia, that I realize that I've already let go. It was just the taste of the dream that I was savoring; the memory of the time when we were together back on Earth. It's gone, Lucia. I can see that now; I can feel it. It switched itself off. I've moved on; I've changed. And I can't just drop everything to go gallivanting across the galaxy. I have responsibilities now. I have--"

The sentence went unfinished. No words were required for her to understand what he had been about to say--it was in his expression. I have no need for you anymore . . .

The high-pitched wail that erupted from her was quite unlike anything her original mouth could have ever produced. She felt it thrill through her like a standing wave, making her entire being vibrate. The hole ship rang with it, and Peter put his hands over his ears. Wordless, agonized, the sound seemed to go forever.

Lucia felt herself being torn apart by it--by the incomprehensible dichotomy between what was and what should have been. If it didn't stop, her mind would fly into pieces, each fragment an unfulfilled expectation--a lie propagated by the engram overseer that had kept her her for so long. She was a victim of programming, a continuity error--a goddamn glitch, for Christ's sake!

I can't take this, she realized, understanding and accepting it without despair, but with desperation. She didn't want to die. Klotho, you have to let me go!

What are your instructions? asked the hole ship, its voice in her mind as cool and calming as a mountain stream.

Just let me out of here! she demanded. Let me out! Let me out!

Whether it was her subtle nudging of the hole ship's inner workings or the force of her plea, she couldn't tell. But she felt the constrictions around her suddenly ease.

"Lucia!" Peter was trying to make himself heard over the ongoing scream. "Try to understand!"

"I don't want to understand!" she shouted back, and with that she felt the resistance of the hole ship crumble and the walls come down. Before it could change its mind or Peter could countermand it, she forced herself out of her prison and back out into the universe. A dizzying array of possibilities awaited her. Swept along by the power of her grief and the pain of her incomprehension, she sought somewhere quiet to hide, to lick her wounds and try to work out what was to be done. Everywhere was bright and dazzling: hole ships in complex networks dozens of nodes across, vibrating with the force of humanity's assembly; Gifts shimmering with alien intentions she could only partly read; and amid it all, nestled at the center like a tiny, insignificant flaw, was a tiny speck of darkness.

She headed for it, trailing her grief and confusion like a comet's tail, and dived inside . . .