Phase Space (31 page)

Others rejected it.

Sun-Cloud gathered around her central corpus the cubical pattern of Cold-Current, and Orange-Dawn’s sad remnants, integrating them crudely. She grew huge, bloated, powerful.

And now, as she broke the thick Surface of the Ocean, she made ready.

She wondered briefly if she had gone mad. Perhaps Orange-Dawn had infected her.

But if it were so, let it be. She must know the answer to Orange-Dawn’s questions for herself, before she submitted to – as she saw it now, as if through her sister’s perception – the sinister embrace of the Song.

She enfolded Cold-Current’s compact data pattern, and let its new wisdom flow through her …

Of course. It is simple.

She began to forge forward, across the Ocean.

A bow wave built up before her, thick and resisting. But she assembled her impellers and drove through it. At last the wave became a shock, sharp-edged, travelling through the water as a crest.

And now, quickly, she began to sense the resistance of lightspeed’s soft membrane. The water turned softly blue before her, and when she looked back, the world was stained red.

At length she passed into daylight.

The day seemed short. She continued to gather her pace.

Determined, she abandoned that which she did not need: lantern-corpuscles, manipulators, even some mentation components: any excess mass which her impellers need not drag with her.

A bow, of speed-scattered light, began to coalesce around her.

The day-night cycle was passing so quickly now it was flickering. And she could sense the Cycles themselves, the grand, slow heaving of the Ocean as her world tracked around its sun.

The light ahead of her passed beyond blue and into a milky invisibility, while behind her a dark spot gathered in the redness and reached out to embrace half the world.

Time-dilated, she forged across the surface of her Ocean and into the future; and ninety-five Cycles wore away around her.

Light’s crawl was embedded, a subtle scaling law, in every force governing the structure of Sun-Cloud’s world.

The sun was much larger than Sol – ten thousand times more so – for the fusion fires at its heart were much less vigorous than Sol’s. And Sun-Cloud’s world was a thousand times smaller than Earth, for the electrostatic and degeneracy pressures which resisted gravitational collapse were greatly weaker.

Lightspeed dominated Sun-Cloud’s structure, too. If she had been a single entity, complete and entire, it would have taken too long for light – or any other signal – to crawl through her structure. So she was a composite creature; her mind was broken down into modules of thought, speculation and awareness. She was a creature of parallel processing, scattered over a thousand fragile corpuscles.

And Sun-Cloud’s body was constrained to be small enough that her gravitational potential could not fracture the flimsy molecular bonds which held her corpus together.

Sun-Cloud, forging across the Surface of her Ocean, was just two millimetres across.

At last, a new light erupted in the bow that embraced her world.

With an effort, she slowed. The light-bow expanded rapidly, as if the world were unfolding back into its proper morphology. She allowed some of her impeller corpuscles to run free, and she saw their tiny wakes running across the Surface, determined, red-shifted.

Now that her monumental effort was done she was exhausted, depleted, her impellers dead, lost or dying; unless new impellers joined her, she would scarcely be able to move again.

Ninety-five Cycles.

Everybody she had known – Cold-Current and the rest – all of them must be gone, now, absorbed into the Song’s unending pulse.

It remained only for her to learn what mystery awaited, here in the remoteness of the future, and then she could Dissolve into the Song herself.

… From the darkling sky, the new light washed over her.

Her optic corpuscles swivelled upwards.

She cried out.

Sun-Cloud felt her world shrink beneath her from infinity to a frail mote; the Song decayed from the thoughts of a god to the crooning of a damaged sub-corpus.

Above her, utterly silently – and for the first time in all history – the stars were coming out.

To human eyes, the skies of this cosmos would have seemed strange indeed:

The stars spawned from gas clouds, huge and cold. Hundreds of them formed in a cluster, companions to Sun-Cloud’s sun. Light and heat crept from each embryonic star, dispersing the remnant wisps of the birthing cloud.

It took five billion human years for the light to cross the gulf between the stars.

And at last – and as one speculative thinker among Sun-Cloud’s people had predicted, long ago – the scattered light of those remote suns washed over an unremarkable world, which orbited a little above the photosphere of their companion …

The stars were immense globes, glowing red and white, jostling in a complex sky; and sheets and lanes of gas writhed between them.

Orange-Dawn had been right. This
was
wonderful, beyond her imagining – but crushing, terrifying.

Pain tore at her. Jagged molecules flooded her system; her corpuscles broke apart, and began at last their ancestral war.

She struggled to retain her core of rationality, just a little longer. Exhausted, she hastily assembled sub-corpora, and loaded packets of information into them, pale images of the astonishing sky. She sent them hailing down into the Ocean, into the Deep, into the belly of the Song itself.

Soon a new voice would join the Song: a merger of her own, and Orange-Dawn’s. And it would sing of suns, countless, beyond imagining.

Everything would be different, now.

She fell, gladly, into the warm emptiness of Dissolution.

The first time Kate had come here, to his son’s home, Malenfant had shown her an image of a planet: blue, streaked with white cloud.

Kate’s heart had thumped. ‘Earth
?’

He shook his head. ‘And not Pluto either. This is a live image of Neptune. Almost as far out as Pluto. A strange blue world, blue as Earth, on the edge of interstellar space …
’

Saranne said uneasily, ‘What’s wrong with it
?’

‘
Not Neptune itself. Triton, its moon. Look.’ He pointed to a blurred patch of light, close to Neptune’s ghostly limb. When he tapped the wall, the patch moved, quite suddenly. Another tap, another move. Kate couldn’t see any pattern to the moves, as if the moon was no longer following a regular orbit.

‘
I don’t understand,’ she said.

‘
Triton has started to … flicker. It hops around its orbit – or adopts another orbit entirely – or sometimes it vanishes, or is replaced by a ring system.’ He scratched his bald pate. ‘According to Cornelius, Triton was an oddity – circling Neptune backwards – probably created in some ancient collision event.
’

‘
Even odder now,’ Mike said dryly.

‘
Cornelius says that all these images – the multiple moons, the rings – are all possibilities, alternate outcomes of how that ancient collision might have come about. As if other realities are folding down into our own. Other realities, from out there in phase space.’ He searched their faces, seeking understanding.

Kate took a breath. Neptune: a long way away, out in the dark, where the planets are cloudy spheres, and the sun’s light is weak and rectilinear. But out there, she thought, something strange is stirring: something with awesome powers indeed, beyond human comprehension.

‘
I wonder,’ Malenfant said, ‘if we are out there somewhere. Versions of us and those we love, with different destinies. Lost in phase space.
’

Sheena didn’t mean it to happen.

Of course not; she knew the requirements of the mission as well as anyone, as well as Dan himself. She had her duty to NASA. She understood that.

But it felt so
right.

It came after the kill.

The night was over. The sun, a fat ball of light, was already glimmering above the water surface.

The squid emerged from the grasses and corals where they had been feeding. Shoals formed in small groups and clusters, eventually combining into a community a hundred strong.

Court me. Court me.

See my weapons!

I am strong and fierce.

Stay away! Stay away! She is mine! …

It was the ancient cephalopod language, a language of complex skin patterns, body posture, texture, words of sex and danger and food; and Sheena shoaled and sang with joy.

… But there was a shadow on the water.

The sentinels immediately adopted concealment or bluff postures, blaring lies at the approaching predator.

Sheena knew that there would be no true predators here. The shadow could only be a watching NASA machine.

The dark shape lingered close, just as a true barracuda would, before diving into the shoal, seeking to break it up.

A strong male broke free. He spread his eight arms, raised his two long tentacles, and his green binocular eyes fixed on the fake barracuda. Confusing patterns of light and shade pulsed across his hide.
Look at me. I am large and fierce. I can kill you.
Slowly, cautiously, the male drifted towards the barracuda, coming to within a mantle length.

At the last moment the barracuda turned, sluggishly.

But it was too late.

The male’s two long tentacles whipped out, and their club-like pads of suckers pounded against the barracuda hide, sticking there. Then the male wrapped his eight strong arms around the barracuda’s body, his pattern changing to an exultant uniform darkening. And he stabbed at the barracuda’s skin with his beak, seeking meat.

And meat there was, what looked like fish fragments to Sheena, booty planted there by Dan.

The squid descended, lashing their tentacles around the stricken prey. Sheena joined in, cool water surging through her mantle, relishing the primordial power of this kill despite its artifice.

… That was when it happened.

As she clambered stiffly down through the airlock into the habitat, the smell of air freshener overwhelmed Maura Della.

‘Ms Della, welcome to Oceanlab,’ Dan Ystebo said. Ystebo, marine biologist, was fat, breathy, intense, thirtyish, with Coke-bottle glasses and a mop of unlikely red hair, a typical geek scientist type.

Maura found a seat before a bank of controls. The seat was just a canvas frame, much repaired with duct tape. The working area of this hab was a small, cramped sphere, its walls encrusted with equipment. A sonar beacon pinged softly, like a pulse.

The sense of confinement, the
feel
of the weight of water above her head, was overwhelming.

She leaned forward, peering into small windows. Sunlight shafted through empty grey water. She saw a school of squid, jetting through the water in complex patterns.

‘Which one is Sheena 5?’

Dan pointed to a softscreen pasted over a scuffed hull section.

The streamlined, torpedo-shaped body was a rich burnt-orange, mottled black. Wing-like fins rippled elegantly alongside the body.

The Space Squid, Maura thought. The only mollusc on NASA’s payroll.

‘
Sepioteuthis sepioidea,
’ Dan said. ‘The Caribbean reef squid. About as long as your arm. Squid, all cephalopods in fact, belong to the phylum
Mollusca.
But in the squid the mollusc foot has evolved into the funnel,
here,
leading into the mantle, and the arms and tentacles
here.
The mantle cavity contains the viscera and gills. Sheena can use the water passing through her mantle cavity for jet propulsion –’