Space Opera

Lode Stars



Lavie Tidhar

The Illuminati starship Trinity was three light years away from the Orbitals and decelerating when the message reached Mikhaila Petrova that her father had died. For her it was only a month since she had last seen him, but that time was relative: back home in the Orbitals, over three years had passed.

He must have died almost as soon as she left for the Third Eye. She stared at the screen and re-ran the message, watching her aunt as she spoke. There was a new, discreet scar under her aunt's left eye and her skin bulged, just slightly, below the ear. Adapted Martian bioware. She must have got that pretty quickly, too.

"Mikhaila," Aunt Alexandra said, "your father's gone into God's eye." She stared into the camera and nodded slowly. Her lips were surprisingly fat in the thin, ascetic face. "I know this will come as a shock."

Three light-years away, Mikhaila stared at her aunt's image and the same sense of dislike filled her that always did where her father's older sister was concerned. Dislike, followed swiftly by an anger that tried to mask the pain beneath.

On screen, Alexandra shrugged, looking momentarily helpless. "He was alone in the Cyclop around the eye, meditating. In recent years, Mikki, your father had developed some strange ideas. I must confess I was relieved when you took command of the Trinity and took her to Third Eye. Your father's ideas . . . were a cause for concern. When you left he began to spend much of his time in the Cyclop, skirting close to the gravitational pull of the eye. He must have simply come too close, found out too late that he couldn't turn back." She sighed and said, "I know he went gladly when he realised, knowing he will be seen by God."

Mikhaila sat alone and watched Aunt Alexandra twist on screen. That sudden piousness at the end, too, was unlike the woman she remembered, and Mikhaila wondered numbly what else had changed back home in the last three years.

"Your father's gone into God's eye." The polite Illuminati way of saying, "He's dead." But her father had really gone into God's eye: she bit her lower lip until she felt pain, tasted a drop of blood like the taste of dull metal. Father, alone in the tiny Cyclop, suddenly too close to the gravitational field: the brief realization that there is no going back. Then the tides, tearing him and the ship into individual atoms, sucking them in until they passed the event horizon and disappeared forever from the visible universe. She didn't think it would hurt, much, being torn apart like this: but then again, she couldn't know. When an Illuminati was sent to the Eye it was a funereal occasion, and the tides tore only at already-dead flesh, while the mourners watched from the Orbitals and performed the rituals and, later, got drunk.

"Don't come back," Aunt Alexandra said on screen. "There is nothing that you can do. Mikki . . . " did the voice quaver a little? "I'm sorry."

The recording ceased and the screen faded back into being a wall. Mikhaila sat back and thought of her father again, alone as he was swallowed by the black hole. But for her father to die this way just didn't make sense. There was no way the Cyclop would be unable to determine the safety parameters around the eye. So what had really happened? Why had her father died?

Her throat felt sore, tingled with swallowed tears. She stared at the wall for a long moment more before rising, and stepped into the corridor outside, heading to the ship's control room.

The Trinity's deceleration brought it down from 99.99% of the speed of light to a more conventional ten percent. At this speed time dilation still affected the crew but the differences between ship time and that of Third Eye's Orbitals were minimal: Mikhaila felt the pressure that had built up over the past month amongst the crew begin to dissipate when the screen lit up with an image of the Orbitals that wasn't Doppler-shifted. Three years, in the space of a month. It was a difficult transition to make.

The Orbitals ringed the Third Eye like dark clams, a wide chain of habitats worn around the neck of the black hole. Lights burned from a thousand human dwellings and local net traffic was rambunctious. And yet the chain was incomplete, and many of the Orbitals appeared to be drifting away— like a miniature Diaspora, Mikhaila thought. On screen the view changed, zoomed away from the Eye onto the star field beyond, and was then replaced by the eye-and-pyramid symbol.

"Incoming message," Rochiro Yuki said from her communications Conch. "From Grandmistress Ortega of Third Eye." She paused, then added, "Time delay is currently at eight point five minutes."

"Put her on," Mikhaila said, and a moment later Grandmistress Ortega's blunt, nut-brown face appeared on the wide screen. The Grandmistress wore an organic eye-patch that seemed to crawl over her face and it startled Mikhaila, who had just seen another Grandmistress who also carried evidence of new Martian bioware augmentation. She filed it away in her mind. Nothing the Grand Lodge members did was likely to be a coincidence.

Ortega didn't waste time on small talk: she introduced herself briskly before launching into the real reason for the call. "Captain Petrova," she said, "you arrive at an inauspicious time. The Eye has been causing us some considerable concern in the past year, with increased emissions of Hawking radiation and an increase in gravitational force that have forced us to a distance from the Eye we had not had to take for a millennium. I understand—" her right, unaugmented eye stared directly into the camera so that she appeared to be looking down directly at Mikhaila—"that you are here to conduct several specialised experiments in the vicinity of the Eye. When you left, there was no need to inquire more closely as to the nature of the experiments." The eye blinked. The Martian eye-patch rippled like jelly over the left. "That is no longer the case. I expect a full operations plan to be broadcast to me immediately. You will now direct your ship to the Grand Lodge Orbital where you will be my guests until a decision has been made whether to allow you access to the Eye." She stopped, blinked. Mikhaila watched as right eye closed and left eye rippled. It made her want to punch the Martian eye-patch, the way one squashes a leech. "I may have a different assignment for you."


She disappeared, replaced on screen by the eye-and-pyramid logo.

"What the hell did that mean?" Sandor said from his Conch. His head stuck out of the immersion tank and he peered at Mikhaila with the slight bafflement that seemed to always surround the tall scientist.

"I expect some of the people living around Third Eye are becoming concerned enough to think of a little trip," Mikhaila said. She had to force herself to concentrate: a mental image of her father being torn apart with the Cyclop kept enveloping her mind. "To Homelight, most likely."

"She can't commandeer the ship," Sandor said. "Just so people can run away to a world!"

Like all Orbital dwellers he held those of Homelight, the Illuminati's only planetoid, with a mixture of hidden envy and openly-displayed contempt. Mikhaila remembered her one visit to Homelight for her initiation ceremony; all that she remembered clearly was the one view of the impossibly-tall, lizard-green pyramids that rose like volcanoes from the surface of the world. Homelight had no atmosphere; it was nothing more than a wandering moon until it was found by the Illuminati and dragged back to the three Eyes, and Mikhaila spent her entire time there in a small part of the Grand Lodge Pyramid, only granted that one fleeting look at the world from above. "Grandmistress Ortega can do what she wants," Mikhaila said, a little stiffly. "If she decides to send us off to Homelight or Second Eye or even back home there's absolutely nothing we can do about it."

"Well, I can't see it coming to that," Rochiro said. "Though it isn't such a bad idea, you know. We could charter the ship and get ourselves a round trip to the world." The sound of laughter emerged from her Conch. "Everybody knows Third Eyers are rich."

"We'll see," Mikhaila said. Then that she told them about her father.

The Grand Lodge Orbital was a small moon with its own ring of smaller orbiting habitats. Mikhaila was surprised it was so close to the Eye. She was also concerned.

The Trinity decelerated gently into the Third Eye system until reaching a near-stationary position on the edge of the Grand Lodge's hangers-on: some of them have evidently been around for a very long time. A nearby orbital was a miniature stellar system composed of three hollowed-out asteroids, a Ring and two more modern—though still several centuries old—constructed orbitals, all linked together into a makeshift web. There was even a small pyramid, growing on the back of the smallest asteroid like a bright green tumour.

If Ortega was telling the truth about the recent, unexplained activity of the Eye, then why were the Grand Lodge and its followers so close to the Eye's gravitational pull? And if Ortega, for whatever reason, wasn't telling the truth, and there was no danger, then the question changed and became a big why. Why would Ortega lie about the activity of the Eye? No, Mikhaila decided, Grandmistress Ortega would not lie about that and, in fact, Sandor had already confirmed the unusual activity of the Eye as they decelerated, as did Rochiro's analysis of the local net traffic. But perhaps she wasn't telling them all of the truth, and she knew more than she was admitting or telling. Mikhaila wondered if the Grandmistress knew what the small crew of the Trinity really wanted to achieve here, three long light years away from home. It was a game she wasn't sure how well she could play. For now, she filed away the speculations and concentrated on the ride to the orbital.

She and Sandor got into their individual Cyclops; she always thought of the release from the ship as the image of a fish, blowing bubbles. She and Sandor were the bubbles: Rochiro had renounced flesh life several years before and had become a Conch, living entirely inside the immersion tank and she rarely now left the ship.

"I'll pick up some information about stuff back home," she said. "As well as the local situation. You keep your ears open too."

A hole opened in the Grand Lodge orbital, and the two Cyclops were swallowed by it and entered one of the orbital's giant hangars. A delegation of two recent Initiates welcomed them and led the way to the meeting with Ortega.

In person, the Grandmistress was surprisingly short, and her Martian bioware augmentation even more repulsive. Mikhaila's father had never trusted the biological artefacts that were created from the forced evolution of the few microbiological traces discovered on Mars, back in pre-Exodus days. The alien genetic code itself was fascinating—Mikhaila took a few basic modules of Martian Bio Programming her first year at the Magdalen Orbiter—but the results always carried with them a strange, alien sense that made her feel uncomfortable.

"Captain Petrova," Ortega said. Her hand was brown and calloused and her grip was firm as she shook Mikhaila's hand. The eye patch rippled as she spoke. "I am sorry to hear about your loss."

Surprise mingled with shock; perhaps seeing that in Mikhaila's face the Grandmistress said, "I expect I received the message from First Eye at the same time as you. Again, I am sorry. Your aunt Alexandra was very fond of your father."

Mikhaila forced herself to smile, said something about "Dear aunt Alexandra," while in her mind she saw again the unwelcome image of her father, sucked into the Eye. "I was not aware you knew each other."

"No?" Ortega said. Something in her voice suggested she did not quite believe Mikhaila. "We were initiated into the Mysteries together on Homelight. Your aunt is now a powerful figure at the First Eye Grand Lodge; you must know we keep a permanent feed between the Eyes."

"Of course," Mikhaila said. "I'm sorry. The news . . . it is something of a shock."

Grandmistress Ortega nodded. "I understand." A small smile touched the corners of her mouth and she touched Mikhaila lightly on her shoulder. "If you need to talk please come to me. The loss of your father is a loss to all Illuminati."

Mikhaila nodded, bit down on a reply. Instead, she said, "Have you had a chance to look at the research proposal I forwarded?"

Ortega's thin smile withdrew. "Yes. I'm afraid that under the current circumstances it would not be advisable."

Anger warmed Mikhaila's face. "And why not?"

An unreadable expression settled on Ortega's face. "Because right now, I don't need any more casualties like your father."

The words hang between them, riding a tense, growing silence as the two women locked eyes. "I demand access to the Eye," Mikhaila said. Her voice was soft, barely audible, but it affected the Grandmistress like a physical blow.

"You can demand nothing," Ortega said. "Don't forget your position, Captain. Do you reject the authority of the Lodge?"

"I spent three years travelling here," Mikhaila said. "I will not turn back now."

The thin smile returned to Ortega's lined face. "I'm afraid," she said, equally softly, "that you don't really have a choice at all." She turned away from Mikhaila and gestured to a wide screen where the Orbitals were displayed from a distant camera. "The Eye is growing," she said quietly. "Only by tiny increments, but it is growing as if it is being fed matter on a large scale. Something is causing that, and as we don't know what then the Grand Lodge has no choice but to see it as a potentially hostile activity."

"Hostile?" Disgust almost made her choke. "What could possibly threaten the Illuminati?"

On Ortega's face the Martian eye patch shivered and began to migrate across her face, revealing a grotesque hole where her left eye should have been. "I don't know," she said. She had pitched her voice low still, but the anger in it was unmistakable. "And until I do, no one—and that means no one, Captain—is allowed access to the Eye. Do I make myself understood?"


The eye patch now nestled in the space between Ortega's left shoulder and her neck. It looked like a sleepy, obese beetle.

"Yes," Mikhaila said. Cold settled in the bottom of her stomach and spread, enveloping her until she felt as if she were made entirely of ice. "Quite, quite clear."

"Is the woman mad?" Rochiro said loudly in Mikhaila's ear. Mikhaila was in her allocated rooms at the Grand Lodge: she didn't plan to stay there long. "She is going directly against the Mysteries!"

"I don't think she is mad," Mikhaila sub-vocalized. "But I do wonder what she's playing at. I did notice all the local feeds aimed at the Eye don't appear to be operating. What's net traffic like?"

"The same," Rochiro admitted. "Everything is being re-routed on direct links cutting out the Godfeeds, narrow beam, minimal loss—it's strange. Much more efficient, obviously, but how will God see us?"

"I don't think it's God that's being blinded," Mikhaila said. She massaged her face, feeling a growing pain in the bridge of her nose. "I think . . . I think my father was successful." She didn't complete her thought aloud, conscious that the conversation was most likely monitored. I think the Eye is talking back.

"How's Sandor?" Rochiro said, changing the subject.

Mikhaila laughed. "Grumpy. He demanded permission to run his experiments from Grandmistress Ortega. Demanded. It didn't go very well from there."

"What are we going to do, Captain?"

"I have an idea," Mikhaila said. The pain spread up to her eyes now. "But we'll talk about it back on the ship. Meantime, how are the backpackers?"

"Most of them are gone already," Rochiro said. "I mentioned a possible Homelight flight and a few are sticking around for it. Willing to pay, too."

"Is that Ran one of them?"

"Raz. Yeah."

Mikhaila wondered briefly about Rochiro's complicated sex life then shook the thought from her head. Who—or how—her comms. officer spent her off time was none of her business. And it was always good to have a few backpackers around, if only for morale.

"Ortega didn't mention anything to me," Mikhaila said. "Yet. I have a meeting with her in a few hours. I'm going to try and get some sleep first. Hopefully she'll let us go after that."

"Sleep well, then," Rochiro said, and the connection ended.

Mikhaila lay back on the bed and thought about her father; and about what it was that she thought he had done.

She felt only a little better after her sleep, and worse after her meeting with Ortega. But now, as she was gliding through space in her Cyclop—a round, compact craft whose shell could be made to allow through harmless light and turn the entire vehicle transparent—and saw the Trinity she felt better. Smaller craft hovered all over the Trinity's shell, attaching themselves like flies to flesh. Ships came and went in a complicated dance: there were never that many starships and whenever one went cross-system (or cross-Eyed, which as a joke dated back nearly two millennia) it had plenty to carry. The two Cyclops wove themselves into the elaborate dance and soon Mikhaila and Sandor were standing back in the command room of the Trinity with Rochiro.

"Ortega wants us to go to Homelight," Sandor said the moment he saw her. He blinked at the command room as if searching for a place to vent anger. "I'd say it was just her way of getting rid of us, but there were a hell of a lot of people came up to me asking about a place."

"Three," Mikhaila said, and Sandor grimaced. "It's indicative of a wider trend."

Mikhaila smiled.

"So what's the plan, Captain?" Rochiro said. "Seeing as we can't dump anything into the Eye for the foreseeable future . . . "

"No," Mikhaila said. "We can't. But we can monitor the Hawking radiation that's being emitted."

"You think . . . ?" Rochiro said, and Mikhaila said, "Can you do it?"

"Sure. Don't know if it would be political to send out a few probes but I can probably get all the data directly off of Third Eye Mirror."

"Just make sure you confirm its authenticity," Sandor said darkly. "Something doesn't feel right about any of this."

"Yes, sir," Rochiro said. "Captain, is there anything else?"

"Yes," Mikhaila said. "I want you to delay the Trinity for as long as you can. Come up with some technical problems to keep us stationary. And find me someone on the, um, unofficial channels who knows about Martian biotech."

"Might take a few days to make a contact," Rochiro said. Mikhaila thought about the Grandmistress' eye patch, of her aunt's own new augmentation hidden beneath her skin. "That's fine," she said. "Just make sure it's not traceable."

"I'll see what I can do." The silence that followed from the communications Conch carried a strong sense of irritation. Mikhaila almost smiled: Rochiro was convinced that as a Conch she was a true Illuminati, one of the few truly Enlightened who always knew what was really going on. She'd be eating up bandwidth following anything she could sniff out. "I'm sorry," she said, feeling suddenly tired again, "you know what you're doing."

The three of them fell into a silence. It was the comfortable silence of people who knew each other well, and Mikhaila felt that she was setting something raw and unpredictable into that unit, her unit, when she broke it and said, "Sandor, I want you to wake up Leibniz."

The Martian expert lived in Ghostown.

It took seven ship-days (by now aligned with Third Eye's own calendartime arrangement) to locate him. When Rochiro at last told Mikhaila she had sounded sheepish.

"A hobbyist?" Mikhaila had said. "I said unofficial channels and you got me some guy who plays with a backyard evolution kit?"

"Mr. Alvarez," Roshiro had said, each word enunciated clearly, "is an expert on Martian bio-coding. An expert, moreover, who is not affiliated with any official Lodge corporations."

Mikhaila nodded. Under the circumstances she couldn't really complain. "Fine. When can I see him?"

The hidden Rochiro, the part of her that was flesh and blood might have smiled. "Any time you like." Then she told her where Mr. Alvarez lived.

Cocooned in the Cyclop, Mikhaila now watched as the distant lights of Ghostown lit up a complex—yet essentially random—pattern against the darkness of Eyeless space. They twinkled in and out of existence, inscribing messages for God that had no meaning to anyone but, perhaps, the ghosts.

The Cyclop floated closer and Ghostown came into naked-eye view; Mikhaila drew in breath as the giant, elongated structure filled up her field of vision. It was like a rock the size of a moon that had been stretched across space into a wide baguette shape, pan-fried and old: even from a distance she could see that the outer shell was crawling with insects. A black-metal beetle emitting ionised particles from its rear approached the Cyclop and for a moment the view blanked. The beetle was the size of her fist. In that brief glimpse it looked fat and well-fed.

When the screen cleared a hole was opening in the side of the rock, expelling out both air and mechanoid insects; she heard their angry buzzing as they flooded the local channels. The Cyclop slid into the opening.

Ghostown's rotation created only a very low gravity. Mikhaila found herself inside a tomb-like space, almost floating in the thin air. It smelled dry, with only a distant taste of something human, like smoke or the lingering traces of frying onion. Here there were no bugs: all around her and as far away as she could see stood a vast and open forest of columns that rose from the rocky ground, gleaming in hues of matt black and cold metallic blue and disappeared into the impossibly-high ceiling.


She took another breath; the ghosts began whispering to her.

Their whispers had an almost physical touch, and as she walked away from the Cyclop they grew it tone and volume until some of the trapped souls screeched and others begged her: to touch the columns, to let them ride her body, to help them. Some of the columns shifted and changed their look, revealing a hidden, virtual world beneath, and some of the ghosts manifested on the makeshift screens, some men and some women and some no longer recognisable as human.

She had never before seen a ghost, and she found the experience distressing. Ghostown was the end result of an ancient belief: back in the pre-Exodus solar system of which Earth was a part many people—some of them Illuminati—talked about the possibility of an event they called a Singularity, and of something else called Upload culture. The idea was that human minds could be transported to digital systems, neuron-networks copied, neuron by painstaking neuron, until an exact, digital copy of the mind resided in a virtual environment where it could live like a god, at least a demi-god.

The idea was not impossible, and so, some centuries after the Illuminati fleet discovered the three Eyes and settled around three real singularities, a splinter group around Third Eye built the complex that eventually became known as Ghostown. It was an honourable experiment: the men and women who worked on it had wanted to transcend as a way of coming closer to God, that unexplained, unknown force that resided in the ur-universe from which all other universes grew, and watched this particular universe—so the Illuminati reasoned—through the only eyes it had: the singularities that hid at the heart of every black hole.

"Mikhaila Petrova?"

The voice startled her. It was deep and strangely homely, and the man who stepped out of what appeared to her for a moment as just another screen was small and deeply tanned, with sparse white hair and deep, brown eyes. "Mr. Alvarez?"

He nodded. "Shmuel," he said. He gestured, his arm encompassing the "What do you think of it?"

"It's . . . " Mikhaila said, and then wasn't sure what answer he expected, "disconcerting."

Shmuel Alvarez nodded. He stepped forward and, now that she could see him more clearly, Mikhaila discerned the patches of Martian bioware on his nearly-naked body. His body itself was muscled and seemed younger than his face, and he wore only a small loincloth that—she realised with a start—was not cloth but another Martian bio-construct. As she watched the loincloth opened a lazy, inhuman eye and winked at her.

"It takes you that way," Alvarez said quietly. "Sometimes I think it would be merciful if we just pointed it at the Eye and sent the ghosts directly to God. But I am afraid that is not a course of action the Grand Lodge would ever tolerate. Come with me."

He led Mikhaila through the cavern of columns, and all the time the ghosts whispered to her and cried for her to save them. She saw faces whose features were distinct and different from each other, who spoke in old dialects and laughed and cried and shouted her name, which they had picked up from Alvarez's speech.

She tried not to show how she felt. Disgust, which she hadn't expected to feel, and pity, which she had. The ghosts surprised her, and she couldn't tell why. They made her think of her father, and she wondered again about what she thought he tried to achieve, and if he, too, was a ghost in some form. The Illuminati who were involved in the Upload project did not consider that the human brain would have a problem existing in isolation, that it was evolved to function in a human body, and that sensory input—of a specific kind—was needed. In other words, a human brain needed a human body—and what happened when a mind was trapped in a virtual environment was apparent all around her.

"They killed themselves," Alvarez said. "The Upload process used a copy and-erase approach, to make sure no one would be left behind. That ghost—" he pointed at a column they were just passing. The fractured face of a oncebeautiful woman stared at them from a thousand replicated shards. "—is now the only thing left of the woman she had once been."

"Why live here, Mr. Alvarez?"

They had reached a clearing in the forest of columns. It was a wide space that was fenced by light, flexible walls that were stretched from column to column and formed . . . a zoo. Mikhaila watched as strange compact bio-constructs walked and hopped and crawled across the rocky floor; some climbed the columns while others formed groups that more often than not merged gradually into one blob of mass before splitting again into different shapes. A creature the size of a small child ambled towards her and from its mouth came the shriek of a ghost encased in new-found flesh.

"Because it's private, Captain Petrova," Shmuel Alvarez said, and his hands moved as if to encompass the entire mini-habitat he had created. "And because I find there are inherent potentialities in the possible creation of a ghost-Martian interface."

"Feel you . . . touch you . . . taste you . . . smell you . . . " The possessed Martian construction moved towards Mikhaila and fell to all fours, developing an elongated snout in the process. "Make love . . . " Its voice sounded suddenly forlorn and lost.

"Enough," Alvarez said, and the ghost-ridden creature stiffened, and turned away without sound.

"You're not joking," Mikhaila said. She looked at Alvarez's creation and held down a shudder. She'd prefer to deal with the Grandmistresses themselves.

"No," Alvarez agreed. He led her to a small house erected in the centre of the clearing. When they got there she discovered the house was no more than a small room made of the same light material as the outer walls, and that it was empty. Alvarez closed the door. His loincloth shook and stretched itself around him, flesh-coloured and thin.

He tilted his head as if listening. Then, "No," he said again. "A ghostMartian interface is a possibility that has significant implications for the deeper Mysteries. Your father understood that well, Mikhaila."

She drew back. "How do you know my father?"

There was a mesh of fine wrinkles at the corners of Shmuel Alvarez's eyes and they made his smile seem sad. "How do I know what he believed? Because I believe the same as him, Mikhaila. Because I, too, believe that there is life beyond the Eyes' event horizon."

She woke up into darkness, and the sweet faint smell of her lover's body pressed into her between the sheets. Ernesto's arm was lying on her chest, and when she pushed him off he muttered something intelligible and turned over.

Mikhaila rose and put on the loose informal trousers and shirt that were the sign of ship life: it made her smile, the thought of this super-advanced starship being piloted by people dressed in pyjamas.

The Trinity was on her way to Homelight, cargo hold converted to peoplecarrying. Beside the backpackers—Ernesto joined the ship at Third Eye while Rochiro's Raz remained with them, happy to follow Rochiro after his brief exploration of the Third Eye Orbitals—the ship thronged with Third Eye families who had decided to take the one and a half light years journey to the world. Mikhaila walked softly out of Ernesto's cabin and made her way through a service corridor (Crew Only) back to the control room, where Sandor waited.

"Leibniz's awake," he said, and nodded to a corner of the room where the Other's avatar sat calmly in an old-fashioned armchair.

Starships did not, as a rule, need overwhelmingly powerful computers. The very first space probes sent from Earth seemed to manage, just about, with two 8-bit processors and the Illuminati designers appreciated that fact. Nevertheless, the Trinity did carry with it one piece of complex machinery, a quantum computer with a DNA-coded interface and its own fortified cadaver of hulk-metal: more than any human, Leibniz was conscious of the possibility of permanent death and was determined to have nothing to do with it.


Leibniz's avatar stood up as she came into the room. It was over six feet tall, a silver-skinned, bald mannequin whose sexless body was undraped by clothes. If humans feared being Uploaded, the Others feared the opposite: being trapped in a human body, being Downloaded seemed to them perverse and frightening, and would drive the being so confined into a dangerous process of fragmentation and insanity.

"Petrova," Leibniz said. The voice came directly from the avatar's mouth, which did not move. As usual, it went straight to the point. Like most Others Leibniz could communicate with people, running a sort of low-level expert system that mimicked a human personality, but as he had said to Petrova the one time, what was the point? Others did not evolve from biological bodies but in the vast and disembodied breeding grounds of digital code, and subsequently did not have the drives and emotions, flesh-bound, that formed a human character. "If there is a code hidden in the Hawking radiation then I can't find it." The mannequin hesitated, then said, "Unless it is there and I can't see and understand it."

Mikhaila thought about what Alvarez had told her, back on Ghostown. She expected Leibniz's next words.

"Petrova," Leibniz said, and the voice coming from the mannequin changed, sounding like metal flashing in a dark room. "Why is there a ghost on the ship?"

"Ah."

The ghost was Alvarez's parting gift, as was the fat, amorphous Martian aug that she left in Rochiro's capable, if proverbial, hands as soon as she could. She didn't imagine the Other had missed the fact, or its implications. But it was giving her the chance to argue: it was all that she could hope for.

"I do not wish to interface with biological matter."

"It's only a different platform," Mikhaila said. She felt wide-awake; she slept deep for the first time in months. "It's code."

"Running a crazed human ghost riding shotgun? Mikhaila, selfpreservation alone would forbid me from trying."

"Tell me," Mikhaila said. She stared at the avatar and it stared back, without expression. "How long have you been an Illuminati?"

The voice lost its inflection, became flat. "I came out of the breeding grounds about seven hundred years ago. I was initiated into the Mysteries shortly after."

"Do you believe that singularities, as the only places where the laws of the universe do not apply, are windows into the ur-universe, and that something we can only think of as God, a maker of universes, must exist there in some form?"

"It's a possibility," Leibniz said. "An intriguing one."

"Humbling?"

"I can emulate pride, but I can't be arsed to feel it," the Other said, and made Mikhaila suddenly laugh.

There was a short, comfortable silence.

"Think about it," Mikhaila said. "There's time. After Homelight . . . "

"After Homelight," Leibniz agreed. The Mannequin made a curious gesture with its left hand. "Then we'll see."

She woke up in the narrow bed feeling disoriented. The room was small and dark, and there were no windows. Mikhaila whispered an order and a soft light came on. She had been dreaming of black holes, and her head felt raw and strange, as if it belonged to someone else.

She sub-vocalized. "Sandor?"

The reply returned filled with static. "I'm at the Great Library. I'm glad you finally decided to get up."

"Did you find anything?"

A pause. Then, "Meet me at the apex in half an hour?"

She agreed. Got up, prepared genuine coffee from the reproduction antique coffeemaker provided in her room. Screens around the room woke up to her movements and began showing images of the dark sky as seen from Homelight.

"Pretty," Leibniz said.

Mikhaila ignored him. She ordered one of the screens and it turned into a mirror. She stood and watched herself, and worried. Her image in the mirror seemed alien to her. Different. An ur-Mikhaila, a stranger wearing her face. The thumb on her left hand was flesh-coloured, only subtly different to the rest of her fingers. She had grafted Leibniz on just before the Trinity reached Homelight. Neither of them enjoyed it.

There were dark rings around her eyes. Her breasts felt raw to her, her nipples hurting, and on her ribs, less discreet than the Other, was a patch of red flesh that seemed to crawl on her flat stomach. The Martian bio-construct, its ghost made to sleep.

She kept seeing things from impossible angles. Slivers of light that formed fragmented pictures in her head, familiar images made startling and new.

Alien. She was turning into a fragment herself, something more, or perhaps less, than human. Something different. She turned away from the mirror, suddenly uncomfortable with her own naked figure, and dressed quickly before taking hold of the coffee.

Just drinking it was a problem. While the human part of her was tasting the coffee the Other was breaking it down into components, running pointless diagnostics on everything that entered her body. And through the Martian construct the coffee tasted different, a synesthesia of smells and colours that made her giddy, not helped by the insane dreams of the sleeping ghost riding the interface of flesh.

She didn't finish the coffee. Instead, she opened the door and stepped outside into the corridor. Here was the same level of silence, the same absence of noise: it ran all through the living quarters of the Grand Lodge Pyramid and extended to all its levels, a hush that permeated the air, whispering of mysteries.

Mikhaila thought about the Mysteries as she walked down empty corridors to the service elevators that would take her up, to the apex deck with its panorama of desolate views. The conviction that behind the creation of the universe lay God—lay an intelligence, a consciousness, a something that made the Big Bang happen, that gave the universe the constants it needed to support life, to create suns and planets and people—was what drove the early Illuminati in the Exodus. It took them on a wild ride through interstellar space, looking for a theoretical hole in the universe, for the tear in space and time where the laws and the constants no longer applied, and where God's eye was open, beyond the universe, and watched it in the slow speed of light . . .

The elevator took her, still within her own bubble of silence, to the apex. She recognized some of the people moving here—new immigrants from Third Eye brought on board the Trinity—but the majority were Illuminati scholars, members of the Grand Lodge or the Great Library, identified in the distinguished black robes of the scholars of Mystery.

Sandor was waiting for her beside one of the walls, his gaze lost in the panoramic vista of space and world, and she joined him and watched with him in silence. The green pyramids rose from the surface of Homelight like impossible temples, reaching for the dark night above, and the stars that met her eyes were strangers, the galaxy an unfamiliar ribbon fluttering in the great emptiness.

"We can talk now," Leibniz said.

Mikhaila turned away from the view and Sandor followed her.

"What did you find?"

Sandor looked tired, and there was a smell about him that took Mikhaila a moment to recognise: dusty paper and mock-leather, the smell of ancient books.

"What I didn't find," Sandor said. "There is nothing in the databases about the possibility of life beyond the Eyes. Not even speculation. Not a suggestion, not a theory, nothing."

"But we knew this," Mikhaila said. "My father . . . "

"Your father . . . " Sandor said. He wore his unpleasant smile, the one that said he was deeply irritated. " . . . does not seem to exist. Two papers, both from over thirty years ago, both about nothing in particular."


Mikhaila stood still, her fingers curling to balls. Then, "I expected that," she said.

"Did you?" He looked angry.

"Yes," Mikhaila said, feeling the same anger taking root. "He always warned me of the possibility. He suspected a conspiracy of the Lodges."

Sandor laughed, a frustrated bark. "An Illuminati suspecting a conspiracy. Conspiracies are what we do, Mikhaila. Take ten for the price of one. Take your pick. Choose a card, any card."

"Sandor, calm down," Leibniz said. He spoke through Mikhaila's mouth, and she felt her body freezing in protest as the Other utilised her vocal cords. The sense of alienation rose in her, threatening to suffocate her. "We did not expect to find anything in the archives. I've been running duplicate agents on the digital side since we landed. Now what did you find?"

Sandor looked away, drawn back to the view of Homelight beyond the window. "I found a book."

"What book?" Leibniz again, silencing Mikhaila's own question.

Sandor laughed again. "A children's book. From eight hundred years ago. A collection of legends. Everything else is off-limits, or just been borrowed, or doesn't exist, or digitised and destroyed. Guess no one thought there'd be any harm in letting me browse the children's archives."

Mikhaila felt Leibniz throbbing on her hand, and in the hidden patch below her own robe the Martian bio-construct stirred, the ghost inside it trying to wake up. She felt both of the influences like sharp, medical pains, and a phantom smell of spirits tickled her nose. "What book?"

"The Legend of Aldus Trismegistus."

Mikhaila stilled. The name, dimly familiar, evoked in her a certain dread that she could feel pumping up from her abdomen. And the ghost was nearly roused now, the name of the book acting as a drug on its fragile consciousness. She felt Leibniz's reaction even before he spoke. "Who was Aldus Trismegistus and what was the manner of his death?" and then she remembered.

It was an old riddle, a children's nursery rhyme, learnt on the playground, separated from her now by both space and time. "Who was Aldus Trismegistus and what was the manner of his death?"

"He was a man," Sandor said, "who entered a joining with an Other. He slept . . . "

"For a thousand years," Mikhaila said, remembering. "As the ships left Earth system and went searching for God. And he was woken up only when the First Eye was found, and then . . . "

"He killed himself. Themselves. Three-times Aldus, who joined with an Other, and merged with a Martian aug. He threw himself into First Eye, three thousand years ago. That's what the book tells."

"And?" Mikhaila said. A headache was blossoming inside her, and the ghost was whispering to her, dribbling of sex and the flesh and something else, too: an old memory of childhood and of singing an even older rhyme.

"And that's it," Sandor said. "In the nursery rhyme."

"But not in the book."

"No." The word was flat and heavy, like an old, forgotten tombstone. "You see, the book doesn't end with Aldus' death. In the story, Aldus never died at all."

"He still lives," Leibniz said, "is that it?" But Mikhaila already knew he was right, and she took control over her vocal cords and said, "he went into the Eye, but he didn't die—" and the old rhyme returned to her, like a persistent shard of music, and she saw in Sandor's eye the same wild thought as he completed the words: "—Aldus Trismegistus was one and three times alive."

There were words expressing sorrow at her loss, quiet warnings about the futility of hope, words of advice about grieving, and about letting go of the dead. The room, high up on the Southern corner of the Grand Lodge Pyramid, twinkled with light; a fine mist fell from the high ceiling onto lush, transparent vegetation of a kind she had never seen before. Designer plants, sucking up the mist and turning all the colours of the rainbow.

"Your father was a good man," Grand Master Rune said to her, his hand enveloping a rolled crystal leaf containing an amber drink. "He would be proud of you. You did good to come here and bring us the new immigrants. You're a true Illuminati, Mikhaila. Remember we must all serve."

Grand Master Rune was short and hairless, his head a shaven dome. His eyes were deep-set and ordinary brown. His fingers were bitten, the skin around the nails raw and red. Earlier he said, "We were initiated together, me and your father. I was sorry to hear of the accident."

The words of the old riddle still echoed in her head. "Who was Aldus Trismegistus and how did he die?" and she felt it reverberating through her new components. The Martian aug crawled across her stomach and wrapped itself around a breast, shivering. She was going insane; or perhaps, she thought, not sure which part of her the thought came from, she was becoming Aldus.

"You don't look well," Rune said and he released his drink into the air, the leaf unfurling and sailing away on an invisible breeze. His gaze took her in, all of her: she saw him note the Other on her hand and his eyes lingered for longer than necessary on her breasts, as if knowing there was something alien there that did not belong.

Or maybe, she thought, he's just looking at your tits.

"Sit down," he said. He guided her away from the throngs of people to a quiet corner. Two giant leaves unfolded from a stem and they sat down, the leaves moulding themselves around their bodies. "Mikhaila," he said, and his voice abandoned its mere-human tones and took on the aspect of a Grand Master, stern and impersonal and powerful. "Whatever you are doing to yourself, don't. Do not meddle with things you do not understand."

Mikhaila tried to smile. "I'm an Illuminati," she said. "It's what we do."

The Grand Master shook his head in an old gesture of negation. "You are not high up enough in the study of the Mysteries. Don't go seeking conspiracies where none exist. Look at you." He gestured to Leibniz, but the gesture seemed to take in more than that, hinting at the Martian biomass and its ghostly rider. "You're killing yourself."

"Like Aldus Trismegistus?" Mikhaila said, feeling a sense of relief as the words were out, a challenge. Time to put down your cards, she thought.

Rune blinked. She noticed his own discreet Martian aug, a faint red line running down his neck, behind his ear. And he too, she saw, had an Other, though this one was in his left earlobe and was so discreet she had to know it was there to see it. "If you like."

"What would you have me do?" Mikhaila asked. "Tell me the truth. Tell me why Third Eye is becoming inhospitable. Tell me why I was not allowed to study the Eye. Tell me . . . " the thought remained unformed in speech.

Tell me why my father died.

"Go home," Rune said instead. "Say goodbye to your father. Mikhaila—" he paused, then said, "The Grand Lodge has been concerned for some time—for several hundred years, in fact—with the possibility that life this close to the Eyes might become even more dangerous." He turned to her and his eyes took hers in, forcing her to pay him attention. "We have decided to organise . . . an expedition. For the first time in two millennia, we would like to expand— and to re-establish contact with other parts of humanity, if any exist in the direction we once came from."

Mikhaila drew in breath, imagining the oxygen rushing through her blood-stream, cleansing her. She felt her pulse race up despite the air she was inhaling. Leibniz warned her, sotto voce, to be careful.


"As one of our finest starship captains," the Grand Master said, and for the first time since she met him Rune smiled, "we would like you and the Trinity to be a part of the expedition."

Mikhaila found she was unable to speak. She felt a fever rise in her and inside her the voices of her body's co-habitants threatened to drown her own thoughts, which were of journeys, and strangeness, and adventure.

"Think about it," Rune said. He rose and the leaf he was sitting on furled back on itself. "But go home first. Your aunt misses you."

He walked away, but Mikhaila remained sitting, and all the while Leibniz was whispering to her about bribes, and about carrots and sticks.

The fever burned her. Her body had become a battle-ground, a clash of entities too alien to co-exist. The Martian thing was tight around her waist and seemed to be spreading, growing over her stomach and breasts. And the ghost that haunted it was fully awake now, and insane. Its jabbering hurt her like thousands of internal cuts.

Leibniz kept quiet. The Other throbbed where her thumb had been, as if barricading himself against the mayhem in her body though with little success. Her mind became a screen where sequences of different and alien codes clashed and competed, a miniature breeding ground of Human and Martian and Other.

When she gained partial consciousness she felt she was on fire, the bedsheets heavy with sweat, and she caught snatches of conversation as if from far away. She heard Sandor talking about carrots and sticks, and understood from what he said that at some point before leaving Homelight the Trinity's systems had been carefully wiped of the Hawking Radiation data they had collected at Third Eye. Rochiro seemed completely upset about this invasion of her domain, more than she seemed at Mikhaila's condition. Sandor spoke in short angry bursts and Rochiro was a sequence of longer notes against him.

When she dreamed she saw evolutions. She went through condensed minutes of Martian evolution as it may have been, the alien genetic code producing an ecology of stunning complexity; and she dreamed the ghost's dreams, in which she walked through an ancient temple and schemed to become Uploaded and saw shadows wherever she turned.

She felt herself changing. Somewhere inside her codes began to match, to mutate into each other. To communicate.

The fever burned her. She felt as if she was no longer human. And when the voices in her head merged at last into one she knew what she had to do.

She no longer needed the erased data. As they approached First Eye, the heaviest and largest of the three black holes the Illuminati had discovered at the end of their immensely long journey, her new eyes began to see the quantum radiation leaking and her new mind was on the verge of deciphering it.

It was . . . strange. As if a mathematics that felt somehow wrong had become a series of deferred signifiers, operating within an exotic Saussurean langue. She couldn't comprehend it; but gradually, she began to discern places where the alien nature of the code abated, became almost human. She began listening for those moments, for their rhythm as they trickled out of the Eye like tears.

When Mikhaila woke up the Trinity was already decelerating towards First Eye and her aunt was demanding that she speak to her. It had been seven years since she had been home; though to her it was only a year. She made a good impression of the old Mikhaila and told her aunt that she needed time alone.

Then she took her Cyclop and stole away from the Trinity.

She floated alone and invisible, the black hole a piece of darkness in a universe of stars, and she listened to it talk.

She thought she could hear her father's voice, sometimes, in between the too-alien code. She thought he said her name, but she couldn't be sure.

She could hear other voices, too. She thought she heard her mother, who was sent into the Eye when Mikhaila was only a girl. She remembered the day of the funeral, the way her father almost didn't cry.

She thought about the idea they had come up with, this small group of Illuminati within Illuminati: that life may have evolved beyond the Eye's event horizon, in that relative band of stable space-time. A kind of life that sat inside God's eye, caught between a universe they could only see and a place where the world ended. All matter is information, her father said, all matter is data. We always thought we went straight to God, but maybe there's a stop on the way.

There was only one way to know. The Cyclop rode the pull of the Eye, heading lazily towards the massive gravity well. Mikhaila hardly paid attention, she was listening so hard. It was like reading signals in the sand, wiped away too quickly by the rushing water.

She thought she felt the tides as they began to pull her body apart, but when she looked outside she saw it was a sleek dark ship and that it was forcing her to it and she could have cried.

She almost understood the message. She felt her eyes growing heavy as she approached the ship, and then she blacked out.

She knew something was being done to her, both to her body and to her mind. A breaking up, a separation. She felt the moment the Otherness was gone, felt Leibniz as he was re-formed beside her, a lone and separate entity. After a while she could no longer feel the ghost, and when she woke up and looked down at herself all that remained of the blind Martian construct were pale bands of skin, like bars across her chest and stomach. She woke up grieving. It was a failure. She had hoped for transcendence, and she failed.

Gradually she began to recognise the images that were coming through her eyes, though her seeing felt limited, singular and uneasy. The first thing she saw was Aunt Alexandra's face. The Grand Mistress was looking down on her with a frown. Mikhaila began to form a word but couldn't and her aunt's face changed: an expression of concern that touched Mikhaila unexpectedly.

She slept, and didn't dream.

When she woke up her aunt was there again.

"You were being driven mad," Aunt Alexandra said to her. Mikhaila was trying to sit up and finding it difficult. "How could you think of jumping into a black hole before it's your time?"

"What have you got to hide?" Mikhaila said, the words coming slow and unfamiliar. "That something lives inside? That we could talk to it?"

"Yes," her aunt said, "something lives inside," and this sudden admission, most of all, lifted away an old weight in Mikhaila's mind, and made her lightheaded. "But can we talk to it? To them? You tried, and you were ready to kill yourself."

"I would have . . . lived inside," Mikhaila whispered. Her eyes wouldn't focus. "All matter is information. They would have re-built me, like they did my father."

"Mikhaila . . . " Aunt Alexandra looked into her eyes and sighed. "You think there are ghosts beyond the event horizon? The Illuminati dead risen in heaven? You tried to understand them—they, it, whatever we can try and call whatever is inside there—and even augmented as you were in the strands of three evolutions you failed. The simple truth is we don't understand what's behind the event horizon but we treat it with respect— and with caution."

"It's a conspiracy," Mikhaila said, but discovered that she couldn't feel much about it. She remembered the children's book Sandor had discovered and it nearly made her smile. "Is that why Aldus Trismegistus died? Is that the answer to the riddle?"

"No," another voice said. "That was a story." The face of a man appeared beside her aunt. No, not a man. An avatar. "I managed to control my three components. I was two centuries older than you back then. And a time came when the human and Martian parts of me remained only in their pure code, and I migrated almost entirely into my Other body." He paused. "But I never died."


"Three-times Aldus, who joined with an Other, and merged with a Martian aug," Mikhaila half sang, and found that, though she didn't know why, she believed him.

"The song got it wrong," the avatar said, a little stiffly. "Aldus was the Other. The name of the human was Scott."

Aunt Alexandra coughed. "You can consider yourself initiated into the Greater Mysteries, as of now," she said. "You know almost as much as we do. I tried to tell my brother to wait and that he wasn't ready, but he didn't listen. He did the same thing as you, and it drove him insane. Is he there? Sometimes I think he is. I listen to the Eye and I can almost hear him talking to me. But if he is, then he is too alien now. Since Aldus's time we did a lot of research on three-way interfaces. I'm . . . changed. Perhaps too much. But it isn't working. It isn't enough."

She thought of the way she was driven towards the Eye. Was that what happened to her father? She tried to remember back, looking for signs: he must have already been augmented before she left. And she thought, he must have dealt with Alvarez.

She felt chilled, now, having experienced that same painful imperfect joining. Did he have marks on his skin? Was he wearing long clothes? She thought he did but could no longer be sure.

"We need something more, Mikhaila," Aldus said. "We need another element. Another way of seeing. Another form of life. That's why we're sending out the starships. Not to go back, but to go further." The avatar's eyes were almond-shaped, a too-detailed reproduction of a human eye. "To find new life, and join with them."

"That's enough," Aunt Alexandra said. "She needs to rest."

Aldus looked at her and inclined his head. "Sleep well," he said, "Grandmistress."

Mikhaila, head suddenly full of starships and stars, let herself close her eyes at the words; and sleep claimed her immediately. Her dreams felt lighter, and belonged to her alone; for she knew now that, whatever happened, she was once more herself, and the memories receded and she only dreamed, a dream that would in the coming years recur to her, that she was floating: a being of peace, a child of pure light, shining into the watching God's eyes.