Текст книги "Alternate Realities (Port Eternity; Wave without a Shore; Voyager in Night)"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

X

You’re a copy,” Rafe said to Marandu/Jillan’s faded image.M

“Yes,” Marandu said. The hands, drawn up to the breast, returned to human pose; Marandu/Jillan grew brighter and more definite, with that unblinking godlike stare.

“Computer-generated,” Jillan said in self-despite.

“Or we are the computer,” Marandu said, turning those too-wise eyes her way. That stare, once mad, acquired a fearsome sanity. “We’re its soft-structure. Its enablement. We’re alive individually and collectively. We’ve been running, and growing, for a hundred thousand years. That’s shiptime. Much longer—in your referent. That we’re partitioned as we are was accident. It’s also kept us sane. It provides us motive. In a hundred thousand years, motive’s a very important thing.”

“And the enemy,” said Paul. “The enemy: what is it?”

“It’s Kepta, of course,” Marandu said. “It’s Kepta Three.”

“Be careful,” <> said to <>’s counterpart: had come very close now, to the center where <> had invested <>self. “You know what <> can do.”

At this hesitated. “Fool,” said. “Make another <> and watch it turn on <>. did.”

“It was <>y nature then,” <> said. “Perhaps <>’ve grown.”

“Only older,” returned, gaining more of <>’s territory. extended a filament of self all about the center, advanced Paul-mind and = = = = in their attack. The passengers huddled far and afraid, in what recesses they could, excepting ((())), who had forgotten who had killed ((())), long ago; excepting entities like [], who ranged themselves with . “<>’ve grown older and less integrated, <>. Give up the center.”

“ are long outmoded,” <> said in profoundest disgust. “<> learn; <> change. Come ahead and discover what <> have become.”

shivered then, in the least small doubt circled and moved back.

“Attack,” [] raged, the destroyer of []’s own world. “Take it!”

But delayed, delayed to think it through in Paul-mind. had fallen once before into that trap, <>’s mutability.

Therefore, used Paul—to learn what <> might have gained from <>’s latest acquisitions; to be certain this time that ’s strength was equal to the contest. <> collectedthings of late. <> modified <>self in disturbing ways, and was not what <> had been.

circled farther back, with more and more agitation, sent out more and more of ’s allies to scour the perimeters.

“ want the strangers,” said. “ want everything in them.”

Hunger was very like that felt; and self-doubt; and hate, that too. even felt these things in human terms, experimentally.

“This time,” <> said, “<> fed a warped copy.” And suddenly doubted whether ’s theft had indeed been ’s own idea or half so clever as had thought.

turned back.

“Where are going?” [] howled, ravening at ’s back. “Coward!”

<> was far from confident. <> huddled in the control center, realizing a serious mistake. <> had, in a taunting lie, revealed too much of ’s vulnerability; and went to solve that problem.

had realized the key to ’s previous defeats.

“Call it a very long time ago,” Marandu said, “a very long time ago ... this ship set out from home. Trade, you might call it; but it’s always a mistake to try to translate these things. Call us a probe. Or a sacrifice.” The hands drew up again, knotted like prayer beneath the chin; the body drew up in midair and drew toward the floor, legs folding, fetal-like. “ Go. Go... go. The—. ... There is no word in this brain for that. But that was why. Life, you might say. To sample—everything. Exchange. Trade. Commerce ... of a kind.”

“Why?” Jillan insisted to it; “hush,” Rafe said, afraid of losing that tenuous truth, of breaking whatever held it to them.

“No translation,” Marandu said. “There’s never translation of motives; only of acts.”

“What happened?” asked Rafe.

A long pause. “An incident. A copy of me existed as precaution. When I died, when the crew did, when the ship was without orders, it activated me.”

“Me?”

“I was Kepta then. Division came later.”

“What happened then?”

“I kept going. I kept going. Kept transmitting, as long as seemed profitable.” Marandu’s female mouth jerked. The hands drew up. “Passage of time—negates all motives. Survival is still intact. So is curiosity.” Jillan-shape flickered, brightened again and the eyes were set far, far distant. “Difficulty—”Marandu said in a voice that moved the lips but scarcely. Sweat glistened on its lip, on its brow beneath the ragged fringe of hair; the legs settled crosswise; hands came down on knees; the shape hovered in midair, naked, dim and glistening with perspiration.

“Marandu,” Paul said.

“Difficulty,” the voice hissed again.

“Where?”asked Jillan.

“Your duplicates.”

“Send me to them,” Rafe Two said. “Let me help them!”

The eyes which had rolled up came down again and centered. “Kepta is threatened,” Marandu said. The sweat rolled in illusory beads. “The enemy has gained a vital point.”

“Paul—” Paul said.

“Not yet,” Marandu said. The hands were clenched. “Not yet.”

Rafe clenched his own hands, stared at it in helplessness. “What’s it doing? What’s Kepta up to?”

“Holding what’s essential.”

“What’s essential?” he flung back at it, but it answered nothing, only sat there, pale and drawn. “Marandu, what’s essential?”

“Controls,” Rafe Two said.

“The computer.”Rafe turned, empty-handed, pushed himself off from the control panel and ran, ran in desperation down the hall.

“Rafe!” he heard—his doppelganger’s voice.

“Rafe.”Jillan’s or Jillan/Marandu’s; and a shape leapt into being beside him, a running ghost—Paul, racing along by him in a confused blur of light. Jillan was there, or Marandu; and his doppelganger, half-merged with him.

“Where are you going?” Jillan cried.

“Controls,” Rafe gasped, springing perilously from lump to hump of the uneven floor. “ That’swhere it has to be, what it has to have—I’ve been there. I know—”

The knives,he was thinking as he ran, remembering that he was flesh, remembering the arms and blades in that center of the ship. O God, the knives—

Station dock; manifests—Lindy got on toward her loading withRightwise and a Fargone agent wanted to make a fuss, small, dim man with a notepad, a checklist, suspicions.

“Where’s your form B-6878?”he asked.

Rafe searched, desperately, through the sheaf of authorizations.

The clock ticked away, meaning money, each second that loader was engaged. Money and life. All their years had bought—

“Careful,” Paul Two said, “careful—” for they had come very near that misshapen thing. Worm hovered round them, and Paul-shape shambled, sidling round them in a green-gold glow that spread along the horizon.

“—is there,” Worm whistle-moaned at their backs. “Danger-danger-danger!”

“Look!”Rafe cried; and their conjoined, rotating sight discovered a new glow at the opposite side, a thing like Worm, but more horrible, whose white-glowing segments were interspersed with lumps and legged things. Some of them had mouths and others, eyes.

“Eater,” Worm gibbered. “Can-Can-Cannibal.”

“Come ahead,” Paul-voice taunted them from the other side, a god-voice, Paul’s deeper tones underlain with Rafe’s.

“Fight,” howled Worm, hovering behind them. “Coward,” it sobbed to itself, over and over again, in half its voices.

Paul One flickered nearer and nearer, growing incrementally in their sight. He opened his/their arms. “Rafe,” it said. “Jillan.”

“Run,” Rafe-voice screamed within it. “Run—!”

“Come on. ” Paul-mind challenged that shambling thing. He stood firm. Jillan braced herself. “You’ve caught me; now take me in.”

“Look out!”Worm cried; and it was Rafe-mind turned them quick enough: the Cannibal-horror rushed past them in flank attack as the amalgam struck from the other side.

“—an accident,” the Welfare man said, “—in the belt. ...”

“Shut up!” Jillan cried, had cried that day, before he could say the words. Eight years old—she knew, knew what Welfare came to say—

But: “Brother,” Rafe Three said, meaning his battered other self, that thing that hung in rags from the monster’s side. “O brother—” with the stinging salt of tears.

And Paul: “Listen to me—”he told his twisted self, with sorrow that gathered up Jillan-mind and Rafe and all. “Oh, no. You’ve got it wrong, my friend.”

Ugliness flowed back. His own darkness, like a wave: his desire to hurt—

—Rafe wept and begged. He savored that, felt a thrill of sex—

“That’s me!” Paul said, accepting it, treading on his pride, stripping off all the coverings, revealing all the darks. “Don’t be shocked, Jillan; I did warn you, I told you the best I knew—don’t leave me, Rafe. Don’t. O God, don’t—break—”

Paul One writhed, sought Jillan-mind with its hate; sought Rafe. Kill, it raged. Have you—all—all—all—

It was too much; too strong, too mad. “No!” Rafe pulled them back, dodged aside, for the Cannibal loomed up: “Back!”Worm shrieked, and plunged between, tangled its black body, with that pale one.

“Worm!” Rafe cried, and Paul dodged again as Worm came flooding back from the Cannibal’s assault. Worm’s substance was in ribbons. It was missing legs in great patches all down its length; it limped and moaned. But the Cannibal ran, wounded too, ran until it met a thing which took shape out of the dark, a Devourer far larger than itself.

“Paul,” that thing said, in a voice far too small and human for its size. Cannibal merged with it; it looped closer to gather Paul One’s misshapenness against its glowing side.

“There,” it said, contentedly; “there.” And lifted up its face to them.

“Rafe—”Paul said. A shudder went through his/their flesh; he felt Jillan’s horror: Rafe Three’s own dismay.

It was vast. It kept lifting up and up, serpentlike, and the eyes of Rafe-face stared down at them. Beauty—it had that too, Rafe’s gone to cold implacability. “I’ve won,” it said; and Paul-Rafe wailed as it sank unwilling into the serpent’s glowing side. “There’s nothing more to fear.”

“No!” Worm wailed. “No, no, no, no—”

“Hush,” the whisper thundered. “ Worm—worm, they call you. Do you know, Worm, what that is? For shame, Paul, to give him a name like that.”

“Kepta?” Paul asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes,” it said. “Of course I am. Come here.”

They reached the great hall, the noded dark. Things gibbered as they ran, voices howled through the overhead, chittered, roared like winds where no winds existed. Rafe kept running, stumbling, fell flat and scrambled up without pause, holding his aching side.

His ghosts stayed with him. Perhaps Marandu was one: he could not tell. There was no light but their bodies, no guidance but their hands that reached impotently to help his weakness. “Where?” Rafe Two asked him, “where now, Rafe?”

“Hallway,” he gasped, “third to the left of ours—”

“This way,” Rafe Two said, at home in dark, or not truly needing eyes. Rafe gathered himself, sucked a pain-edged breath and ran, staggering with exhaustion.

A Jillan-image materialized in the dark ahead, blazing gold. “Stop!” she/it said. An arm uplifted in a gesture human as the image and as false.

Rafe Two slowed; Rafe ran, experienced nothing but a flare of light and image, stumbled his way on blind in the dark of the passage, reeling from wall to wall. A glow passed him, gave him fitful light, became Jillan before it faded out.

He sprawled, hard, in the shimmer of insubstantial arms that tried to save him; he clawed his way up, sobbing, and kept going. His ghosts were with him again, Jillan, all; they went about him, a glowing curtain, a cloud. He fell again, a third, a fourth time on the hummocks of the floor. He tasted blood, was blind, phosphenes dancing in his eyes.

“Look out!”Jillan cried and waved him off, her body out in front of him. He reached out his hands, facing darkness beyond her.

White, sudden light blazed from the ceiling nodes. It lit the room of knives, arms that moved, snicked in unison toward him all attentive, in the lumpish barren plastic of the center he had sought.

“Kepta!” he shouted, backing, for things that gripped and things that cut were still in drifting motion toward him, traveling in extension he had not guessed. “ Kepta!Stop!”

They kept coming. More unfolded out of recesses of the wall.

“Kepta!”

Jillan-shape materialized there among the knives, flung up arms, opened its mouth and yelled something a human throat did not well stand.

Knives stopped then, frozen in mid-extension, a forest of metal, perilous limbs in which Jillan-shape stood immaterial.

Rafe stood shivering, perceived a dance of light as his own ghosts hovered round him as close as they could get, demolishing themselves on his solidity and reforming.

“Tell Kepta I want to talk with him,” Rafe said.

“Kepta won’t,” Marandu said. His female hands tucked up again like paws. “Go back.”

“Because I’m substance? Because I’m alive, with hands to touch this place?”

“Substance,” said Marandu among the knives, “is dealt with here.”

“Rafe,” Paul pleaded with him. “Rafe– stay alive. Get out of here.”

“It’s threatened,” Rafe said. He was shivering. They could not feel as much, but the shivers ran through his limbs. O God. It’s going to hurt—“I’m standing here, Kepta—hear me? I’m not moving. I’m not going to move.”

“Kepta advises you,” Marandu said—and Marandu’s eyes were far-focused, vague and full of dark—“advises you—”

The thing loomed up, serpentlike, seductive in its implacability, the serenity of Rafe-face become unassailable and vast.

“Lie,” Worm cried, and writhed and looped its wounded coils aside. “Lie, lie—”

“Are you lying?” (Paul).

“Examine me,” it said, this thing with Kepta’s name. It extruded a shape from its side, the agglomeration of Paul One. Paul One wailed, writhed as Worm had done. A glowing coil materialized and took it in again. “Come close. See me as I am.”

“Go to hell,” said Jillan Murray-Gaines, through the amalgam of their lips. “Or are you already in residence?”

“Humor,” it said. “Hell. Yes.” It laughed, gentle as a breath. “I appreciate the reference. So would the passengers. I’m Kepta. There are dozens of us. We create one another—in endless cycles.” It slid closer, and it seemed dangerous to move at all now; but Rafe-mind did, veteran of the docks. They slipped backward together.

“Do you understand?” it asked again. (Another gliding move. Rafe-mind moved them back, but not far enough. It gained.) “Dangerous,” it said, “to move without looking. Where’s Cannibal? Where’s Worm? Are you sure?”

“Don’t look,” Paul whispered, shivering in their heart. “Don’t be tricked.”

“You’ve been ill-advised,” Rafe-voice urged, smooth, so very smooth. “Even death—can be remedied. Your copies are exact, down to the very spin of your particles. Your cellular information. Would you be reconstituted? I can do that much.”

Paul caught the breath he did not have, felt limbs that were not real—instincts yearned after life and breath, after humanity—

“No,” Rafe said. Just– no, unreasoning, suspicious. He was twelve again, dockside; the hand held out the coin, too large a coin for simple charity.... No—from Jillan-mind, brittle-hard, plotting how to run. Nothing’s free; not from this thing—”

“Look out!”cried Paul.

The serpent-shape was quicker. Its vast body slammed down in front of them, turning about them, surrounding them with its coils.

“You just lost your chance,” it said.

“Lost,” Marandu whispered, fading. “They’ve failed.”

“Let me go to them!”Paul cried. “Let me try!”

“Against a Kepta-form?” Marandu drew itself away, retreating in its dimness. And then it stopped, turned, gazing at them with Jillan’s calm face. “Bravery. Yes. I know.”

It shimmered out.

“Paul!”Rafe cried.,

Then all his ghosts were gone.

Marandu with them. And the lights went out.

Disaster. <> had felt it, not unanticipated. <> felt <^>’s fear. It shivered through that portion of <^>self that remained partitioned outside Jillan-shape. There was irony in this: Jillan-mind was darkly stubborn, and <^> was trapped in that fierceness.

discovered that too. Discovered other things.

“O God,” Rafe Two murmured, arrived on that darkling plain. “What isthat thing?”

“The others called it Worm,” Marandu said.

It came snuffling and limping toward them, tattered and missing legs among its segments. “Run,” it called to them multi-voice; and in other voices: “Fight.”

Then they saw the other thing, a thousand times its size.

“My friends,” it saluted them like thunder, rearing up to stare down at them with Rafe’s haggard face.

“Friends, hell,” Jillan said.

“It will take you,” Marandu said, a faint and fading voice.

“Damn you,” Rafe yelled at Marandu, snatched to hold it by the arm. “Don’t leave us—”

Marandu steadied, grew brighter then. “I’m very old,” it said, as if that were some grounds for its desertion. “Oldest of all but one.”

“So fight it,” Jillan said. “Where’s your guts?”

And Paul: “Help us. We don’t know what to do.”

There was silence. The serpent-glow flowed closer. It had Rafe’s voice, a whisper that murmured like the sea, but spoke no human tongue.

“Run! Fight!” Worn gibbered; but it did neither. Worm stayed, limping aimless circles on missing legs. “Help! Help! Help!”

“Marandu!” Paul cried.

The slim Jillan-body shuddered, once. “I will take you in,” Marandu said. “Partitioned—I can’t—”

Jillan-shape broke apart in shimmer. A larger glow appeared, folded about them, an order, a structure, a body vaster than their own.

Worm was in it, snuffling.

Move, the impulse came, or something very like the command to legs and limbs.

“Go with it,” Rafe tried to say, at least he willed himself to say. He could stretch very far if he wished: or that was Marandu’s thought.

<> was dying.<> knew distress at that. The crew had already passed. “Ship,”<> said, tried to say, “go home.”

But Ship could not/would not hear. The Collective had betrayed<>, implanting instructions<> could not override.

<> died and remembered it when<> woke, with Ship long underway.

FIND. REPORT.<> obeyed, until<> had calculated that transmission scatter was too much, and the years too many, and nothing mattered any more but<> self.

<> traveled. It was all<> had left.

<> made<> self for company.<> sought other goals.

<> took on passengers.

He/they/she and Worm ... participated in a body that had more limbs than they had collectively. They were old; and badly scared; and knew too much.

They/<^> were victims of<> self, helpless in their voyage. Passengers multiplied.<> took them in.<> changed and grew complex and made other selves.

<^> shuddered, gazing at in memory.

But one of <^>’s new-gained segments was of different mind.

Ship,he thought, with vast, vast desire. He was structure; Paul was complexity; and Jillan—Jillan was going at that thing, possessed for once of strength and size and a wrath stored up for years.

swooped and struck.

They/Marandu moved, lancing through the patterns of the ship, darting this way and that at transmission speed, being here and there with electron lunacy.

“Aiiiiiieeee!”Worm wailed, and discovered <((( them)))>self alive, to ((()))’s total startlememt. “Aiiii-ya!”

was in pursuit, was on them, through them.

“Hate you,” one thing said, collectively; Cannibal was tangled with it and it lusted, that was all that filled its mind.

Fargone docks—

And They/Marandu/Worm; no-failure, not-now—beyond clear thought, beyond reasoning, except that they were still alive, like Worm, who had been a pilot once, and hurled ((()))’s skill into their evasions in the patterns.

“Aiiiieeeiiiiii!”Worm cried, going to the attack.

A red world lay in Marandu’s past, much loved betrayer—for that memory, Marandu fought. “Lindy!”Rafe yelled, and felt Jillan and Paul distinctly at his side. Their own focus was a little ship, a hope, pilot-skill and stubbornness ... no world to love at all, only Fargone’s hell.

“Aiiiiieeeeeeyaaa!”

A wall loomed up at them, Rafe-face amid it, howling as they merged.

<> was amazed.

Bravery, <^> had said. It was.

<> moved, with that same electron-swiftness as took <^> in.

<> dived after, rummaged through almost-congruencies, started ripping things into order in ’s distorted substance.

Merged—with <>’s own mad self; and <^>; and sucked up disordered bits of other things.

Worm—retreated, whimpering.

Cannibal fled, outclassed.

Only Paul One stood, howling rage at <>.

And two others of itself surrounded it, denying divisions.

Two more joined with Rafe-mind, such of it as remained. It clung to them.

One cast herself amid it all, discovering loyalties beyond herself. Her double chose another target.

<^> rode this last particle, straight to ’s heart.

<<<^/they + +>>> became <<^they>>.

Became<<^>>.

Then <>.

A shock went through the ship, a long silence.

Something very old had passed.

The passengers began at last to move. Certain ones fled for different refuges, old alignments having become impolitic, unsafe.

Worm danced, quite solemnly, for ((())) had gained a name. ((())) had become like Kepta in this, even if ((())) was Worm. ((())) had regained sanity; and pride; and glared from ((()))’s five eyes at Cannibal, who found it safer to retreat.

[] fled, precipitate.

<*> shivered, in deep mourning for <^>; for <^> had remembered <^>’s savagery at the last, and become quite sane.

<> stretched throughout the ship-body, taking all territories, all systems.

Trishanamarandu-keptacame to fullest awareness, and looked about <>’s surroundings as <> had when <>’s voyage began.

And at what <> had retained within-the-shell. That too.

Rafe put out his hands in the dark. His fingers met the extended arms, hard metal, rigid. He tried to feel his way backward amid this maze. Razor steel sliced his back in more places than one. His questing hands met the same no matter where he turned.

“Kepta,” he said aloud, quite calmly; “Kepta—” Patiently. “I want the light back, Kepta; at least give me the light.”

Kepta might have lost; might have won; the blades might start to move of a sudden and dice him down to something disposable.

“I want the light!”he cried.

Light blazed. He jerked, hit his back and arm against the knives and froze at the sting of wounds. The glittering arms were starkly poised about him, a web of razor steel and claws.

Rafe-shape phased in. “I’ve won,” it said.

“Who—won?”

“Kepta. Me.”

“ Whichof you?”

“Ah. Marandu told you.” Rafe/Kepta moved through the metal arms, through the razors, coming clear to view. “The original. Myself. The one who brought you here.”

“Either of you could have done that.”

“Either would be me. But both my copies are gone, dissipated.”

“Keep away from me!” And– Either would be me—sank in. He stared at it, finding the razor points at his back more comforting than its presence.

“Anxious still? It’s your doing, you know: all three of you. Yourself, for instance—It never could quite break you down, not while Paul was there. Not while there was any vestige of him. That’s your secret, your one secret. Responsibility. My double worked so hard keeping you alive. Mistake. And Paul: Paul One always trusted reason: and he couldn’t withstand it when he met it face to face in Jillan; he couldn’t bear that—or her solitude.”

“Where are they? Are they all right?”

“Jillan, now,” it said, inexorable. “Jillan was the crux. Marandu knew. She gave him—sanity. He was once very fierce—Marandu was, in certain causes. He’d forgotten all of them. And Worm—they called him Worm—he has affinity for you: nibbled up a bit of you, in your other form, as if he’d found one of his own missing bits.”

“Kepta—where are they?”

Rafe/Kepta’s face showed—it seemed—disappointment in him. A ghostly hand lifted, motioned to the center of the place, among the arms. “Come on, Rafe. Lie down. You’ll sleep now. I’ll keep my promise. We’ll go to Paradise.”

“Where are they?”

“I had to erase them, Rafe. I had no choice.”

“ You—” He dodged past the arms, the blades, half-blind.

Snick-snick—Arms moved in unison. Clamps seized his limbs and held, irresistible.

“Damaged,” Kepta said. “They were irrevocably changed. What would you have wanted me to do?”

Rafe wept. He shut his eyes and turned his head; it was all the movement left him.

“I’ll bring them back,” Kepta said.

“Damn you—” He rolled back his head, heaved uselessly against the unflexing arms. The strength went out of him. Resistence did, and gathered itself up again.

“They’ll be new again,” Kepta said. “You understand. What happened to them—won’t ever have happened—to them. The templates are clean of that. I do have charity.” The arms clattered and retracted, snick!“You can harm them, far more than I ever could. Do you understand that?”

“No,” he protested—everything.

“Not make them again?”

He wiped his eyes, hung there, his arms about the metal limb. It was cold. There was, for him, sensation; heat and cold; touch, taste; all the range of senses. “For what?” he asked. “What do you make them for in the first place?”

“Should I not?”

“You talk—” He caught his breath, caught his balance, straightened and walked over to sit on the smooth plastic bed amid the humps, the nodes, in the shining forest of the limbs, where it wanted him. “You talk about Paradise. Leaving me there. Forget that. I’m not leaving them to you, to make into what you want. Take me with them. Hear?”

“They’d object,” Kepta said. “I know them very well.”

“Damn you.” He shuddered, lifted up his arm, flesh and bone. “You want to strip me down to what they are? Do that. At least I could touch them then.”

“But you can. You already have. You’re not thinking straight. Don’t you know one Rafe-template’s you? In every respect—he’s you. You’ve already had your wish. He can touch them; be touched; touch me; do all the things you’d do. Dead, alive—that makes no difference. The only decisions are selfish ones.”

He wiped his eyes a second time, bleak and blank and knowing insanest truth.

“Think about it,” Kepta said. “There are choices.”

“What am I leaving them to? Where are you taking them?”

“Vega, maybe; you mentioned that. Altair. They interest me. Places that have names—are so rare in the universe.”

He looked at the doppelganger. His pulse picked up with hate. “Truth, Kepta. Once, the truth.”

Motives—”’

“—won’t make sense. Makethem make sense. I want to know.”

“Say that I travel,” Kepta said. “And they will.”

“For what?”

“Don’t we all,” asked Kepta, “travel? Who asks why?”

“I do.”

“That is worth asking, isn’t it? We are kindred souls, Rafe Murray.”

“Don’t play games with me!”

“I know. There’s pain. I never promised you there wouldn’t be. I never promised them. Do you want them back? Now?”

He was paralyzed, yes and no and loneliness swollen tight within his throat. He shook his head, found nothing clear.

“No choice is permanent. Except your first one. Will you go to Paradise?”

“I don’t know,” he said hoarsely. It included all there was. “Can I talk to them?”

“You said it to me, didn’t you—they’re not toys.”

He dropped his head into his hands. “Don’t do this to me.”

“I only asked for choice.”

“What if I ask you to wipe them out here? Off this ship. Out of this. Would you do that?”

“No,” Kepta said. “Their templates would exist. I’d use them. Eventually.”

“Honesty.”

“Would it be—what they would choose?”

He sat and shivered until it seemed Kepta must lose patience and go away; but Kepta stayed, waiting, waiting.

“I want to be with them,” Rafe said at last, so softly his voice broke. “Make me one of them.”

“You don’t understand,” Kepta said. “Even yet.”

“But I do,” Rafe said. He swung his feet up and lay down on the machinery, blinked at the lights, the metal glare of knives. “I won’t go. I won’t leave them. Wake us up together, Kepta.”

For a long moment Kepta stood. The cold seeped in.

“Yes,” Kepta said. “I know.”

Vega shone.

“No human’s ever been here,” Rafe said, confronting that white, white glare, that dire A-class star that no human would find hospitable. He felt its wind, heard its voice spitting energy to the dark. Ship had invented sensors for them, human-range.

“ Lookat that,” said Jillan; and passengers hovered near, delighted in the four human-shapes, in new senses, in mindsets both blithe and fierce.

“Let ((())) try!” said Worm, who looked through human eyes, and shrieked and fled.

“““crept out of hiding, as many had, who had been long reclusive. The timid of the ship had appeared out of its deepest recesses, now that was gone.

“Look your fill,” said <>. “There’s time.”

Paul just stared, arm in arm with Jillan-shape. Rafe and Rafe Two stood on either side. They kept their shapes, unlike some. They kept to their own senses exclusively, quite stubborn on that point.

“We’re human,” Rafe insisted. “Thank you, no help, Kepta. We don’t make part of any whole.”

Perhaps, Rafe thought, for he could still see human space, perhaps Kepta had betrayed him after all. Perhaps he had waked back there too, in a capsule near a much smaller star.

He hoped that he had not. He dreaded its loneliness.

“It was crazy,” Rafe Two had said when they had waked together in the dark. “Rafe, you didn’t have to.”

“Come on,” he had said then, in that dark place where they waked. “Sure I had to. I’d miss you. Wouldn’t I? Maybe I do, somewhere. At Paradise.”

Shapes crept close to them, hovered near.

Worm snuggled close, ineffably content.

It was a small, very old ship that Hammonfound adrift.

“Something ... 24,” the vid tech deciphered the pitted lettering. “The rest is gone.”

“God,” someone said, from elsewhere on the bridge. “That small a ship—How’d she get out here?”

“Drifted,” Hammon’s captain said. “Out of some system.”

And later, with the actinic glare of suit-lights lighting up the wrecked insides, hanging panels, bare conduits, tumbled and crumpled steel:

“It’s a mess in here,” the EVA-spec said. “They were hulled, half a hundred times. Dust chewed her all to bits.”

“Crew?” asked Hammon’s com.

The spec worked carefully past jagged edges, turned spotlights and cameras on frozen bodies.

“Three of them,” the vid tech said. “Poor souls.”

“She’s old,” the spec reported. “Real old. Out this far—at the rate of drift—”

The spec shivered, adding up those years.