Certainly other galaxies floated out there in the dark, but they were so unimaginably distant that they hadn’t even yet begun to grow larger in perspective. They didn’t cast much light at all.
We were alone in a haunting emptiness, and I felt my heart thrum in my chest. It was terrifying out here—terrifying and beautiful and strange. This was alien country, a place not even my people, spacers born and bred, routinely went. We were far from help or any contact. This was the realm of unmanned probes and science teams and the sort of explorers and theorists and prospectors who probably needed their rightminding adjusted just a little bit.
But here we were. And home was really far away.
“Singer,” I said, trying not to sound too terrified. “What just happened?”
“I wish I knew.” A short pause. “No technical fault. No power interrupt. Our white bubble just . . . failed.”
Farweather hadn’t made any moves for the door, despite my turning away from her. It was a big-enough ship that she could get lost in it as easily as I had, if she managed to slip my watch, and the idea of playing cat-and-mouse through this damned ridiculous giant vessel with her again turned my stomach. Fortunately, she didn’t seem as if she wanted to brave her own weapons—in my hands now—or maybe it was Singer’s attention that was keeping her honest.
Now, under the circumstances, there was an infelicitous turn of phrase.
Void, but there was a lot of space out there.
I held my breath, awed by the infinity of darkness. A little terrified by the idea that our alien ship, which we didn’t understand, might be busted.
At least we had a Synarche ship with us now. We were not utterly alone. We could have lost them when the bubble collapsed.
The night spread out forever, empty and silent, utterly cold. Except not really empty, if you could sense what I could sense. Laced and knotted, instead, with a network of dark gravity stretchy and heavy and hauling the bright part of the universe unwittingly in line with its predeterminations.
As the conscious mind follows the density of trauma in the psyche, I thought, so the stars follow this reminder of the primal trauma and let it be their guide across the sky. And then I laughed at myself for being too pretentious, and reading too much George Eliot when I could.
I would have given a lot for a nice fat copy of The Mill on the Floss right about then, I tell you what.
I stretched my silver-limned forehand out to touch the material of the viewport, pressing my fingers against it so hard they tingled. My skin glowed in swirls and filaments, mycorrhizal, shifting emerald-metal webs. Uninsulated, without the shelter of my fox and its regulators, I felt . . .
I felt everything.
The whole universe was out there, as if it were laid on my skin. As if I were a part of it. Raw to it. Flayed, except it wasn’t painful, just painfully near. The night was huge, and I was a part of the night, so I was huge, too. Huge, and spread gaspingly diffuse.
So this was how Farweather did it. She was stripped off. Flensed. She let the universe get under her skin.
And so the universe showed her all sorts of things that were hidden from me.
I could begin to sense some of it: the weavings and twistings of the underlying structures, and some more of those strange gaps I had noticed on other occasions. The bits of the pattern that were too even, too repetitive. In a complicated sequence, just out of my reach, like . . . ones and zeros in binary code. Like letters in an alphabet. Like amino acids in a DNA code.
Profoundly complicated, but a pattern that could be made to make sense. I could sense it better than I had before, as if I were nearer to it, less mediated, now. Touching it with a bare hand instead of a gloved one. I strained after it, thinking that if I could just get . . . close enough . . . just resolve the meaning of the thing, suddenly so much would be made clear. It was so patently artificial. So patently something that had been imposed on the structure of the universe by an intelligence, as opposed to something occurring naturally. The iterations were just too tidy. Intentionally so, as if they had been set up to be noticed.
And between that intentionality, overlaid on it, I could feel, quite suddenly, an enormous swarm of fast-converging shapes.
“We have incoming,” Farweather said.
“There’s something out here,” I told Singer. “I really need that senso online now, so I can share it with you. I don’t care about the rightminding or the regulators.”
“I care about the regulators,” he said.
I grimaced, thinking about my erratic behavior. This wasn’t really the time to bring it up, though.
But I was spared answering, and probably humiliating myself further, because all that velvet night around us was abruptly full of ghosts.
The observation deck was restfully dim to limit internal reflections. And the windows seemed to be coated, or made of something nonreflective, as well. So if I hadn’t had my hand on the transparency, I would have felt that I was standing with no barrier at all between me and the gargantuan shapes of an uncountable number of Ativahikas, drifting out of the darkness, bioluminescing softly.
They were enormous, dark, but limned at the edges against the greater dark beyond. They writhed and lashed in their tattered finery, trailing ragged swaths of elongated skin like the trains of a gown. They shone in the darkness, wiping echoes and afterimages across my dark-adapted retinas.
There were . . . dozens of them. Too many to count, and anyway they were moving, swarming and swirling around us like a flock of mining vessels mobbing an asteroid. Except every single one of them was as long, or longer, than even the enormous Koregoi ship, and mining vessels are generally smaller than the average asteroid.
Singer recovered before I did. I stood transfixed. He said. “We’ve been seeing a lot of these guys.”
His words at least shook me partway out of my reverie. “What do you suppose they want?”
“It’s been a weird trip,” Singer replied.
I realized that the swarm was describing a complex pattern, a kind of dance with our ship at the center, unless that was just perspective fooling me. Off our flank, SJV I’ll Explain It To You Slowly hung, motionless (relatively speaking). Beyond our common ambit, the Ativahikas looped and spiraled around and over and under us and one another, weaving an intricate choreography. I stared, trying to work out the math behind it. Just as it seemed as if it might resolve itself, begin to make a peculiar sense—I thought of Terran honeybees dancing about honey—the pattern changed.
As chorus line dancers part like a sea in order to deliver up the star, the Ativahikas swirled and separated, forming a whirling ring around the gap in their pattern with a swath of night behind.
Through that gap sailed a single entity. An Ativahika that even to my human eyes and experience looked old.
Its bioluminescence stuttered and crawled over its hide in waves, brighter at the crests and dimmer in the troughs than what gleamed on the fringed flanks of the surrounding individuals. Its hide had paled from the rich, sheening algal teal of the others to a watery turquoise. Even the swags of its intricate drapes seemed sparse and ablated.
Children, it said, its voice internalized and reverberating through me, and not exactly words—more an impression of meanings. Why should we not destroy you, and this terrible thing you have done?
It wasn’t entirely unlike getting a senso translation from somebody like Habren. Communication was being intermediated by the parasites, I realized; the Ativahika was speaking to me through the sparkling little mites refined from the body of its dead species-mate.
No wonder it was mad.
I glanced over my shoulder. Farweather, looking stunned, was rotating slowly toward me. She was hearing it, too, and the expression on her face was that of a child suddenly confronted with consequences for a misdemeanor she had been sure she’d gotten away with.
She took a step back, a dark silhouette against the intricate moving patterns of the Ativahikas dancing in the night beyond. “How are they going to destroy us?” she scoffed, a bravado that I knew by now was her response to fear.
Easily, I thought. Where do you think your ability to manipulate dark gravity comes from? And that was without even considering their size and probable ability to just smash the Koregoi boat.
But saying that would have been pointless, arguing with her a waste of my energy when I needed to focus on the Ativahika and on not dying. And I had no idea how to communicate with the enormous creature who hung beyond the observation deck’s bank of windows, drifting so close I could see the plasticky, impermeable texture of its hide. An eye as big as an insystem skiff loomed over me, a vast elongated face wreathed in drifting tendrils.