Faith (38 page)

They had no life, and would have none until She appeared. Then, their life would flare and die. It would begin and end almost simultaneously, with the performance of a very specific task.

They seemed ill-equipped for it. They were small and quite primitive. Against Her many and mysterious abilities, they were like a pair of claw-hammers. And where they floated, they were at the focus of another If:
If
they managed to stay unnoticed by Her. Because if, at any time, She did notice them…

•

“Nine hours to the high point,” Kaang reported.

A long, dead time. The engagement had congealed around Horus 4, producing a minor planetary system. Horus 4 now had a new, silver, artificial moon orbiting it, one which it might later destroy like the others, and that moon itself had two smaller moons, dark and inert; and there was another moon, even more unreadable than Horus 4, which would soon rise above the planet’s horizon. Until it did, the new planetary system was almost stable; quiet and balanced and Newtonian.

Foord was beginning to wonder, idly, if he’d rather see the missiles damage Her than destroy Her—it would open Her up, you could learn things about Her—when, like a polite tap on his shoulder, every alarm on the Bridge started murmuring discreetly, and Thahl said “Object approaching, Commander. Look at the screen, please.”

Foord wondered then whether She too had a sense of irony. For what rose over the horizon of Horus 4 was not Her, but a small silvery object. A pyramid.

On the Bridge screen, local magnification showed it tumbling end over end, but in a slower and somewhat more stately way than the pink cone She had sent them in the Belt. It was much smaller than the pyramid at CQ-504, in fact only about the size of a small lifeboat. It was featureless, and appeared to have no drive emissions, but it was headed in their direction.

“The dimensions along its base and sides have exactly the same proportions as the one in the Belt,” Thahl said.

Foord nodded, unsurprised. “Anything else?”

“Our probes get only surface readings, like the one in the Belt. If we trace back along its trajectory we get to 11-15-13, where we think it was launched. That’s also where we estimate She would be, at Her present rate of slowing.”

They paused, and studied it. Thahl’s expression was unreadable. Smithson snorted and muttered something about Cylinders, Ovoids, Pink Cones, and Now Fucking Pyramids. Cyr laughed unpleasantly, a laugh that Foord knew and didn’t like; it made her ugly.

“Ignore it again?” Smithson ventured.

“Yes,” Foord said, “ignore it. And we know what it’s going to do next, don’t we?”

It passed them by, exactly as they had done to its larger relative back in the Belt, and with exactly the same precision. It described a careful semicircle around them, so careful that at any given point it was the same distance from them. Then it plunged down into the face of Horus 4. It flared briefly, not from atmospheric friction—Horus 4 had no atmosphere; that too had been destroyed by gravity—but from the friction of being compressed down to nothing, to not even a smear. That was the last they saw and heard from Her of pyramids.

“So what was that about, Thahl?”

“Perhaps She was telling you something, Commander.”

“Kaang, how long to the high point of the orbit?”

“Seven hours, Commander.”

“Thank you…Telling me something, Thahl?”

“About how we ignored the pyramid at the Belt.”

“And what do you think She was telling
you,
Thahl?”

“Commander?”

“You’re the only one on board”—he’d been about to say The only one of Us, but caught himself just in time—“who might know what She is.”

The Bridge was already silent, otherwise it would have fallen silent then. Thahl paused a long time before replying.

“I know what Srahr said She is, Commander.”

“And what Srahr said She is, would it…”

“Affect this mission? No. And if it—”

“If it did, you’d tell me?”

“Of course I’d tell you, Commander. Why are you asking all this now?”

“You’re a Sakhran, but you’re also First Officer. Deputy Commander of my ship. Which comes first?”

“The ship does, Commander.”

“Which ship?”

“This one, Commander. You know I meant this one.” Thahl was not angry, but reproachful.

What made me suddenly ask him all that?
thought Foord. Then the alarms started murmuring, differently this time. Different alarms for different events. Monitor displays, dark since She cut Her drives, lit up again. Foord whirled round to look at the Bridge screen

“She’s here, Commander,” Kaang said softly

and saw Her.

•

Slowly, and apparently with caution, She rose over the horizon of Horus 4

Her position, said the Bridge screen, was 8-7-12; close to where they expected, far enough from Horus 4 to avoid its gravity, and not yet close enough to be seen by the missiles. The Bridge screen, unasked, shuffled filters and switched to local magnification. She was a slender silver delta like the
Charles Manson
, but the proportions differed; Her length was about eight percent less than theirs, and Her maximum width, at the stern, about eleven percent less. Her surface had interlocking hull-plates, like theirs but smaller; the size of scales on Sakhran skin. The contours of Her hull were covered in small ports and slitted windows and apertures, but there was no light or movement behind any of them.

They had seen images of Her before, on recordings. They knew Her dimensions, knew what She would look like from every angle, and knew Her shape would be like theirs. But all that was before they had actually
seen
Her. None of it mattered, now.

They watched Her in a silence which grew around and between them, neither joining nor separating them. This time, they knew
they shared the same thought. She’s brought more than just Herself to face us here, She’s brought a universe.

Foord went away somewhere on his own. They all did. And a few miles and a universe away, She noticed; and waited for them.

•

The
Charles Manson
, Thahl told himself, had simple lines which were visibly curved or straight; Hers were neither. The
Charles Manson
had a simple, recognisable geometry with an inside and outside, ending at the outside; Her geometry was different. She
began
at the outside.

Thahl tracked the line from the needlepoint tip of the nose to the broad stern end of the delta. He imagined that line extending forward millions of miles, perhaps to Sakhra, and knew it would deviate by less than a millimetre; but he could
see
it, a fifteen-hundred-foot straightness which was part of a cosmic curvature. He imagined each line of Her shape extended in a cat’s-cradle millions of miles in all directions, beyond Horus system and out into the galaxy, until they all began to curve. Faith was just the visible part, hanging at their centre. That was what She had brought with Her.

Is
this,
he thought,
what Srahr saw three hundred years ago?
I’m the first of us (no, the second) to see Her since him. And what happened to us will happen to the Commonwealth, unless we destroy Her. My father believes Foord might be able to do that. So do I, now.

Smithson recalled Copeland, seeing Her at Anubis and whispering Face of God; the recordings captured it, the last thing he ever said. And Ansah at her trial (Smithson had read the transcripts) describing the moment when She unshrouded: a shape not unlike an Outsider, but on Her it’s different, as if She’s only the visible part of something larger. She moves like a living thing and looks like a part of empty space, a small part made solid and visible. And the rest looming around Her, unseen. He understood now what Ansah meant by The Rest: everything else She had brought with Her out of the shroud.

I’m not ready for this
, he thought.
You don’t see it on the recordings.
It’ll affect
us
more than ordinary crews, because we’re more imaginative, and more self-indulgent. More dangerous, and more vulnerable. How had Ansah stayed functional when she saw
this
? Because, he thought sourly, she was trying to lose those ridiculous Isis ships, and she had no time for what
we’re
indulging in now (he had looked round the Bridge and seen it on their faces, as surely as they would see it on his).

Smithson had read all the transcripts and knew Ansah’s trial was an injustice; but none of that mattered, now.

“She cruised the cities, random and motiveless, beautiful and brilliant.” Cyr recalled the the phrase from her trial; unlike Isis, trials on Old Earth were adversarial, not inquisitorial, and tended to produce such rhetoric. The prosecuting counsel was a small stout man whose sonorous diction was oddly out of keeping with his appearance; a man given to flights of verbosity, but also incisive and clever.

His phrase had always troubled her, and now she knew why. Cyr remembered the faces of her family as he said it; the trial had turned them into people who no longer recognised her, but now Cyr recognised herself. If you took The Cities out of that phrase, his description of
me
is a description of
Her.

Maybe
Foord really meant it when he said Instrument of Ourselves.
Maybe She’s what we would be, if we didn’t have the Department looming behind us.

Kaang thought,
What’s Her pilot like, has She got a pilot like me?
I don’t think so, I’d have felt it when She unshrouded, ships have a body language. That’s a shame, I’d like to find someone like me one day.

Then, unaware of the thoughts of the others on the Bridge, she shrugged and turned back to her instruments.

It’s like seeing a new primary colour,
Foord told himself,
or finding a new prime number.
Her shape didn’t belong here, it belonged outside ordinary perception and geometry. Outside, inside; straightness, curvature. Orders of magnitude. She looks like us, but She’s a universe of things we aren’t.

He watched Her on the screen and thought, Do you know why you’re doing this? Or are you like Cyr, are you following a compulsion which you tell yourself is free choice? Are you doing this because it’s how you were made? If you are, who made you?

Later, when they returned from wherever they had separately gone, She was waiting. She knew the effect Her unshrouding had on opponents. Normally She would not have waited for them to recover, but this opponent was different.

5

Foord was breathing heavily. There was a ringing in his ears. He had an erection, and tasted brine in his mouth and along the sides of his tongue. He gestured at the screen.

“Her position…” Thahl began. He paused, partly because he needed to and partly to help Foord compose himself. “Her position is 8-7-12, Commander. She’s matching our speed and maintaining an exact distance.”

“Within range?” Cyr asked, before Foord could speak.

“No. She’s outside closeup range.”

“She’ll come closer.” Cyr moistened her lips. “We’re going to hurt Her.”

The two ships were directly facing. They watched each other. There was a particular quality to their watching, like the first meeting of two people who would share the rest of their lives together.

“Has She seen the missiles?” Smithson asked, minutes or hours later.

“I don’t think so,” Thahl said, “and I know they haven’t seen Her.”

“Of course they haven’t!” Smithson snapped. “She’s not close enough.”

“She has to come closer,” Foord said.

“She will,” Cyr said.

“She might,” Thahl said. “If it doesn’t look like we want Her to.”

There were a couple of curious glances at Thahl, but only a couple. Most of them couldn’t take their eyes off the Bridge screen.

Foord’s erection wouldn’t go. He studied the others’ faces, trying to see if they were similarly affected. Normally you could tell; there was a certain fixedness of expression which characterised people nursing an unwanted arousal. But two of them were nonhuman, and one of those was asexual, and the light on the Bridge was too subdued to be certain of the others, so he gave up. He preferred looking at Her anyway.

She hung there, like light turned solid.
I had no idea
, Foord thought,
that She’d be like this. I’ll remember this for the rest of my life. How long is the rest of my life?

“How long since we saw Her, Thahl?”

“Nearly three hours, Commander.”

“
What?
Are you sure?”

Thahl ignored that.

What was happening to time? It had seemed to slow down at other points in the engagement, but now it was doing something stranger:
sharing
itself. It drained out of Faith, and out of the
Charles Manson
, and into the space between them. Almost as if it was doing an act of courtesy to them, so they could hold this moment together, the moment of their first meeting. Time filled the space between them, setting itself out for them like a gaming table on to which, later, they would lay their cards.

“How long,” Foord asked, “till we reach…”

“The first high point? Three hours, Commander,” Thahl said.

“So we’re about midway, where She’ll probably attack.”

“If,” Smithson said, “She believes we’re really trapped here, and if She hasn’t seen the missiles.”

Foord said “She does believe. And She hasn’t seen them.”

“And She’s coming,” Thahl hissed, suddenly, as alarms murmured. “She’s coming closer. Look at the screen.”

•

The two missiles waited to perform their task. When the time came they would sacrifice themselves to perform it, but they would not make the sacrifice knowingly or freely. They would do it because that was how they’d been made.

They floated in unpowered orbits, behind the
Charles Manson
and further out from Horus 4, on trajectories which still bore some of the
Charles Manson
’s imparted motion. The shortsighted lenses in their nosecones tracked back and forth in search of the only shape they’d recognise; but She was still too far away.