Sean Williams - Saturn Returns

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SATURN

RETURNS

Sean Williams

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either

are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any

resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,

events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any

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websites or their content.

SATURN RETURNS

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace mass-market edition / May 2007

See pages 317-319 for a complete list of copyrights for referenced lyrics.

Cover art by Stephan Martiniere. Cover design by Judith Lagerman. Interior

text design by Laura K. Corless.

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ISBN: 978-0-441-01493-4

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ACE and the "A" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321

If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book

is stolen property. It was reported as "unsold and destroyed" to the

publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment

for this "stripped book."

For Shane Dix, brother of the art.

And my dreams are strange dreams, are day dreams, are grey dreams, And my

dreams are wild dreams, and old dreams and new; They haunt me and daunt me

with fears of the morrow... I wander forever and dream as I go.

—Henry Lawson, "The Wander-Light"

Contents:

THIS WRECKAGE

THIS ELEGANT BITCH

THIS DYING MACHINE

THIS HUMAN CORROSION

THIS PRISON MOON

THAT TACITURN AND INVISIBLE GOD

Map of the Milky Way

Appendix A: Absolute Calendar

Appendix B: Glossary

Appendix C: "My Confession" All quotes attributed to Robert Charles Maturin

are taken from the first edition of Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), edited by

Victor Sage (Penguin Books, 2000). The planet Saturn takes 29.46 years to

circle the sun and, according to Astrological traditions, to return to the

House it occupied at the moment of an individual's birth. During a "Saturn

Return," the light of this cold and distant world shines on our lives,

encouraging us to examine our choices, our aspirations, and our

disappointments. It is a time of endings as well as beginnings, and will be

dreaded by those whose path through life has been ill chosen.

1 THIS WRECKAGE

The reks of art for ever decaying, —the productions of nature for ever

renewed. — Robert Charles Maturin

"I am not a decent man."

The words were spoken in response to a question Imre Bergamasc couldn't hear.

Although he knew they came from his own mouth, he knew also that the utterance

was a memory, not something occurring in his present. He wasn't talking to

anyone. He appeared, rather, to be lying on his back with his eyes closed, as

though he had just woken from a deep sleep, but fully dressed in a soft

jumpsuit made of material that whispered softly as he raised his hands to

touch his chest and explore his face.

Something was wrong, or at least very different. He had breasts.

His eyes opened wide. A grey bulkhead greeted him, less than a meter from his

face. He raised his head and looked down along his foreign, curved body. A

coffinlike space enclosed him on all sides except his left, where it opened

onto a larger chamber. The surface beneath him was padded: a bed of some

kind, yes, but one of spartan proportions. There was room for just one

person, and no space to sit up. Two narrow striplights provided the sole

illumination, cold and characterless. The chamber beyond his bunk was dark

and sounded empty.

His breathing became more rapid. He had no recollection at all of how he had

arrived in such a place, or become female into the bargain. He was profoundly

out of his depth. He was—

"Who are you?" asked a voice.

He jumped. The words came from a speaker built into the wall to his right

that didn't seem to be functioning with perfect clarity, for the voice came

with more than a hint of static.

"What's your name?" it asked him.

"Don't you know?" His own voice—real, not remembered—could have been a man's,

contralto and throaty from disuse. He cleared his throat. The timbre didn't

change. "You brought me here, didn't you?"

Instead of answering him, the voice asked, "Who do you think you are?"

"We could ask each other questions all day." He lowered his head back onto the

thin mattress, already drained by the short exchange. "Tell me who you are,

first. Then we can talk."

"We are the Jinc, fifth ganglion of the Noh exploratory arm. Perhaps you have

heard of us." The voice addressing him sounded faintly hopeful but not

expectant. "We trawl the outer edge of the galaxy for clues to the nature of

God."

He suppressed a momentary discomfort on finding that he was addressing a group

mind. He didn't know why that should bother him. "God? Why?"

"We have reasons. In the course of our explorations, we found you."

"What do you mean, you found me?"

"Your body, in a manner of speaking, drifting. We will provide full details

shortly. You need know for now only that we spared no effort in restoring you

to consciousness and, we hope, full physical fitness." He flexed his fingers.

Despite the odd alteration in gender, he did feel fine enough. "I'm well, I

suppose. What happened to me? What was I doing so far from the Continuum?"

"Is that the last thing you remember, the Continuum?"

"Why would that be unusual?"

"We will explain. Your situation is unique, and we do expect there to be some

injury to your memory. It would help us to know your name, if you do in fact

know it."

"Some injury ..." He rubbed his forehead. An alarming dizziness threatened to

consume him as he tried to recall what had brought him to such a strait. His

body, drifting on the galactic fringes; rescued by deep-space scavengers and

turned into a woman; his memory impaired. "My name is Imre Bergamasc," he

said. "That I'm sure of. The rest..." He rubbed harder. His brain was as

heavy and sluggish as lead. "I don't know. I do have memories, but—I—they

won't fall into place." He kicked out suddenly, flailing his legs in an

ill-advised attempt to swing out of his bunk and into the chamber beyond,

there to stand and seek out his questioner, the voice known only through a

speaker thus far, buzzing and removed.

Nausea overwhelmed him before he came close to succeeding. A flock of

memories, beating at his mind like a storm of crows, drove him back into the

bunk.

"I don't know," he moaned into the speaker. "I don't know who I am."

"You said your name is Imre Bergamasc. Isn't that who you are?"

"I suppose it must be. It has to be." He placed both hands over his eyes and

felt cool wetness on his cheeks. "Who is Imre Bergamasc? Do you know who he's

supposed to be? I don't know, and I don't know how to find out."

"Are you saying now that you're not Imre Bergamasc?" The speaker sounded

puzzled and cautious—perhaps, even, oddly fearful. "That's my name," he said,

"so I must be. Right?"

The speaker fell silent. Imre wept softly to himself, seeing no way out of

the terrible conundrum. He knew his name but didn't know who he was.

Something in his mind wasn't working correcdy. The uncertainty cut like acid

deep into his thoughts. He couldn't think through that terrible block, now

that he had confronted it. He was stuck, frozen, damaged.

A door in the chamber outside his bunk hissed open. Air shifted minutely as

pressures equalized. He wiped his face and blinked his sight clear of tears.

A hunched, monklike figure had entered the room.

"We, the Jinc, will explain," it said, coming to his side. Its voice was the

same as the one before: diin and dusted with static. The speaker had been

working perfectly. "Please let us."

He looked up into a face that seemed composed of nothing but gristle and grey

skin, as animated as a corpse. Its eyes were shut, but its hands moved with

all the purpose and certainty of the sighted. He reflexively recoiled when it

reached for him with long, flexing fingers, but again he reined in that

instinct. The Noh was a group mind distributed through the skulls of numerous

willing hosts. The creature before him had no more individual will than his

own foot, being the instrument through which the gestalt mind acted. It was a

mouthpiece, not the mouth.

He nodded to his strange host and let himself be eased out of the bunk.

The Noh vessel was cramped and torturous to navigate! Corridors little wider

than the bunk in which he had woken snaked between sepulchral chambers that

doubled or tripled functions in order to utilize the volumes they occupied

with maximum efficiency. The room in which he had woken was, it transpired,

normally reserved for medicinal purposes as well as bunking space for the

mouthpieces roughly equating to doctors or nurses within the Jinc. The

dispersed entity— who took its name as a parenthesis around a single parcel of

the greater culture or creature known as the Noh—needed such functionaries

just as an individual human needed an immune system. When components fell

ill, repair was easier than replacement. Voyages through deep space demanded

such careful use of resources, since the next stop might be hundreds of years

Absolute away.

Imre could not have retraced the route he followed through the Jinc's vessel.

He hoped he would not need to. Along the way he noted clues as to the

physical nature of the ship: a spinning habitat providing centripetal gravity

in a low-thrust environment; decentralized life support capable of isolating

one segment of the vessel from another in case of a major catastrophe;

numerous signs of age and wear indicating that the vessel had been in service

for a considerable time, even by the standards of deep space. His guide

negotiated the tight tunnels by application of well-practiced taps and kicks

to anchor points and solid bulkheads. The sounds and smells of humanity were

everywhere, even among the Jinc, where all notions of individuality had been

subsumed. He smelled food and spices and sweat, and a faint stink of

corruption, as though from a faulty water reclamation plant. The scents

triggered memories he couldn't pin down: faces and feelings that were, for the

moment, fragmentary and nothing less than frustrating. Somehow, he knew

everything about centripetal gravity and water reclamation plants but failed

to piece togemer anything more substantial about himself than his name. That

struck him as grossly unfair, and he hoped the Jinc would soon explain why

that might be.

His guide brought him to an observation port at the very edge of the spinning

habitat, where gravity approached half Earth Standard. Unfamiliar details

made themselves felt as he stepped into the center of the port: the weight of

his breasts; the width of his hips; the narrowness of his feet. He had no

hair at all and no obvious markings on his skin.

i He had, as yet, not seen his own face, so couldn't tell how much it

resembled the one glimpsed in his memory. That his new body possessed a suite

of implants and cognitive modifications came as no surprise; such were

standard in the Continuum. Only the most recalcitrant of people, Primes,

rejected such technology and lived more or less as humans had hundreds of

thousands of years ago.

A name drifted across his thoughts—Emlee Copas— and with it an image of a

wiry, blond-haired woman with jade green eyes. Before he could pursue the

recollection, the reflective black bulkheads of the port faded to

transparency, and the full glory of the galaxy at close range confronted him.

He gasped. One hundred billion stars filled the view to his right, shining

across all frequencies of the spectrum. To his left was mottled darkness, lit

only by globular clusters and more distant aggregations of galaxies. The Noh

vessel was still too close to discern the true shape of the Milky Way—-the

barred spiral that humanity had long ago spanned from end to end—but the

central bulge was clearly visible, as was the thick, curving arc of one arm.

"Behold," said the Jinc's mouthpiece, rather unnecessarily Bergamasc thought,

until he realized that the wizened creature pointed not at the galaxy but at

an object much closer to hand. "This is your origin," it said, indicating a

long, grey cylinder with the rough proportions of an old-fashioned flashlight,

hanging immobile with respect to the Jinc's vessel. Its size was impossible

to determine without points of reference. "Do you recognize it?"

Imre could only shake his head. "What's it made of?" he asked, taking stock

of starlight gleaming dully from underrated metal. "It looks like iron."

The creature bowed its cowled head. "The most stable element in the universe.

This artifact was built to endure the ages."

"How long has it been drifting out here?" "Many centuries Absolute, at least.

Its rest was disturbed, making a more precise date difficult to ascertain."

"Disturbed how?"

"The Drum, as we call it, was discovered in pieces. Two crude but effective

nuclear explosions had reduced it to little more than dust, which we gathered,

mote by mote, from within the blast radius. Our painstaking reconstruction of

the original artifact took longer than we anticipated, for much has been lost

forever—including, we thought at first, its contents, for the Drum proved to

be hollow."

"What makes you sure there were contents at all? It could have been empty when

destroyed."

"That was our second thought. Someone built this artifact and set it adrift

on the outer limits of human space in a stable orbit that would have seen it

neither escape the Milky Way nor return to habitable regions. Then someone

else, for unknown reasons, came along to steal its contents and eliminate the

evidence."

"A long way to come for a heist."

"Indeed, and just as far for murder."

Imre studied the expressionless face of the Jinc mouthpiece even though he

knew it would reveal nothing. "What do you mean, murder?"

"We have ascertained that the Drum was always empty of matter, but not

information. Its interior wall was inscribed with a single groove, looping

around and around like copper wire in a crude electric motor. The groove

contained notches spaced at irregular intervals. When we examined those

notches—played them, if you like, as one would once have played a record with

a diamond needle—we quickly ascertained that they contained information. The

Drum was a data storage device, strange and magnificent in its own way, and

intended to last forever. That it might have done but for its deliberate

destruction."

"You managed to recover and decode the data," he said, guessing ahead. The

feeling of dizziness returned, and it had nothing to do with the vertiginous

view. "This must be where I come in."

"Yes. The Drum preserved the life of a single person in hard-storage. We

have reconstructed a large proportion of that person from what remained of the

Drum. Who that person was, exactly, we couldn't tell. Now you are awake, we

know."

"How much do you know, really? The record preserved my name, but it got my

gender wrong."

"Gender is a matter of choice not biology, as it should be. It is one data

point among trillions. We only had your genes to rely on for your

physiognomy. They allow the possibility of a masculine form, but also several

species of late-onset cancer as well. Would you have had us retain those

tendencies too?"

"Of course not."

"Then we can only apologize for assuming incorrectly regarding your gender.

We had a one in two chance of getting it right. The mistake can be rectified,

in time."

"I'll think about it." If reclaiming his past self and finding out who he had

been was to become his priority—as seemed logical, given the lack of an

alternative proposition—then adopting his prior physical form could be an

important first step. In none of the memories clamoring for his attention was

he female or any other gender but male. "In the meantime, what should I do?"

"You may remain our guest, if you wish."

Imre took a deep bream. So many thoughts ran through his brain at a time that

it was hard to concentrate on just one. From the collision between them, he

picked out several key notions. The Jinc was a long way from anywhere, so

leaving might be difficult, perhaps even impossible, given that he had no

vessel of his own or any belongings that he knew of. He had to assume that

the Jinc was genuinely willing to keep him around, since it had gone to so

much trouble to re-create him from the splinters of his outlandish personality

backup. Only when that willingness ran out, perhaps in conjunction with its

curiosity about his identity and past, would he have to make other plans.

Until then, it seemed simplest to take the Jinc at its word and accept its

hospitality.

Part of him, though, hated the thought. He had only the Jinc's word that any

of this was true. There were other ways to edit memory, and only some of them

were benign.

"You said that you were able to reconstruct 'a large proportion' of the person

I had once been," he said. "What about the rest? Where did that come from?"

"Extrapolation accounts for much of the missing genetic code," said the Jinc,

not flinching from the question at all. "The rest came from a standard human

template. Several neurological modules required direct intervention—

functions of the brain, in other words, that simply did not work until we

intervened—but we did everything we could to ensure that such alterations were

kept to a minimum. Memory could not be repaired. Only you can put those

pieces back together."

"There's no single answer, then," he said. "I'm me plus some bits you made

up. I'm not me mixed with someone else, though. You're definitely saying

that."

"Yes. It was not our intention to create a new persona. You are as close to

the record of the Drum as we could make you."

That was something, Imre supposed, even though intention was a guarantee of

nothing.

"I'll stay until I can sort myself out," he said. "You've wasted enough

resources on me already."

"We do not think so."

Imre studied the expressionless face of his guide, sensing a meaning hidden

but unable to tease it free. He resolved then to spend as much time studying

the Jinc as himself. If he could discover why it had gone to so much trouble

to resurrect him from the dust of intergalactic space, that would go some way

to revealing who it thought he might be.

I And then, possessed with that knowledge, he could begin to wonder who had

tried to kill him.

He had no plan of attack. Who had ever been in such a situation before? Not

he, if the incomplete reminiscences at his disposal were anything to go by.

There were uncountable such fractions, each needing to be lifted out of

obscurity, examined, then rewritten in both the neurological and narrative

senses back into his mind. He chose to let instinct be his sole guide, taking

him where it willed throughout the Noh vessel, and beyond, to the Drum itself,

where someone—his former self, presumably—had gone to painstaking effort to

preserve him for posterity, only to see it blown to smithereens.

Moving around the Drum was easier than expected. The Jinc gave him a cowl and

robe identical to the ones worn by its mouthpieces. A translucent microfilm

provided him with air and maintained a comfortable temperature. It also

adjusted the magnetic properties of the soles of his feet, enabling them to

stick to the iron of the Drum's curving wall. It was easily thirty meters

across and well over one hundred long. He walked for hours along the thin

spiral decorating its wide interior. Less than a millimeter wide, they formed

the single helix that had preserved the data comprising him and his body. The

magnitude of the venture startled and shocked him. This was information

engineering on a massive, hubristic scale. The Drum had been built to

withstand everything the void threw at it. Only intelligence, deliberate and

malicious, had ultimately done it in.

He could see places where the Jinc had failed to reassemble the Drum from its

multitudinous bits. Tiny black dots marred its metallic grey surface where a

resinous material filled in for the missing parts, offending a deep-seated

need in him for neatness and order. He felt as though he were walking across

a starscape in negative, one that arced up and around him in a powerful

representation of the curvature of space. The real stars shone down either

end of the Drum, where the Jinc had left open the construct's massive caps.

Naked vacuum bathed the cylinder and its contents. The sound of his magnetic

footsteps propagated through the metal in silent waves.

When he was done, he walked to where the short-range shuttle scoop waited to

take him back to the Noh vessel. The Jinc's home looked like a giant neuron,

all curves and distended spines with a semitransparent outer hull that gleamed

liquidly in the light of the Milky Way. Imre could discern no front or rear.

Similarly with me shuttle scoop, which was a large, seed-shaped vessel

pockmarked with thirteen mouths that could, at will, distend vast magnetic

vanes. The purpose of the vanes was simple: to suck up the dust and debris

the Jinc encountered in its long, destina-tionless voyage. The remains of the

Drum had been gathered in just such a fashion, the mouthpiece of the Jinc had

told him. What the Jinc did with its normal harvest, Imre hadn't yet

ascertained.

The mouthpiece awaited him in the scoop, as lifeless as ever. Perhaps it was

the same one who had greeted him on his awakening, perhaps not. The

distinction was meaningless. He told himself to stop thinking about it as an

individual and treat it, in both his mind and every aspect of his behavior, as

the Jinc itself.

"Did that trigger any memories?" the Jinc asked him, as he reached the edge of

the Drum and prepared to cross.

"I'm afraid not. I've never seen anything like it before." He stepped

carefully into the belly of the scoop, disengaging his magnetic feet with

relief. Fleeting g forces gripped him as the scoop accelerated away. "I

suppose it was worth a try."

"You sound disappointed."

He was, but saw no point in dwelling on the fact. Although the data had been

encoded in the Drum with a fair degree of redundancy, nuclear blasts and wide

dispersal were huge hurdles to overcome. The Jinc had done an amazing job to

recover anything. "The way I see it, I'm lucky to be here at all. Wherever

we are, exactly." The hunched figure beside him made no move to offer any

information on that score, so he took it upon himself to ask.

"Show me where you've come from."

A series of three-dimensional maps appeared around him. He waved them away.

"No. Pointing will be fine, while we're out here."

The mouthpiece looked up at him. A long, wrinkled finger pointed through the

transparent hull of the scoop at me splendid starscape ahead of them, tracing

a line around the extremities of the galaxy. There was no clear purpose to

the Jinc's past movements just as there was no obvious "captain" aboard the

ship. It was driven by collective will in directions unknown.

Imre's gaze slid from the outstretched finger outward to the galaxy, truly

grasping its immensity for the first time. It filled one-half of his view, a

tilted, glowing waterfall looming over the shuttle scoop and its passengers.

Every speck was a star—one of a hundred thousand million, large and small,

dead and alive, and none of them overlooked by humanity. The Continuum

connected them all, whether by arcane quantum loops, stately webs of

electromagnetic radiation, or sluggish bullets of matter. The minds

inhabiting the Milky Way ranged from as small as his, via gestalts as complex

as the Jinc, to intelligences as large as the galaxy itself. Layer upon layer

of sentience and civilization stretched upward from the individual to heights

he could barely imagine, and all of it had originated in one remarkable

system, on one tiny world.

He staggered, not under the influence of acceleration or the immensity of the

view, but from a flashback that burst in his skull like a Roman candle.

"What about the individual?" said Alphin Freer, an angular, high-cheeked man

with iron grey eyes and neat black hair. "Are we supposed to forget

everything you told us— that we fought for?" "The Forts are the big players in

the galaxy now." His own voice again, ringing in his ears. The disorientation

was profound. He was undoubtedly in the scoop, but at the same time he was on

the bridge of a burning ship. "They may have had the Aces all along."

"No shit," said a big, scar-pitted soldier looming like a small mountain to

one side, combat suit open to the waist. The green-eyed blonde beside him

looked ready to cry.

"If you do this," said Freer, "you're as much a traitor to the human race as

they are."

"Listen to me." Imre's reminiscence was full of anger, resentment, and

frustration, but his voice conveyed nothing but entreaty. "Whatever it takes

to get us out of this—isn't that worth pursuing?"

"You really think we're getting out of this?"

The new voice came from behind him, silky and subtle like a stiletto blade.

Imre turned—or remembered turning— and the recollection suddenly dissolved,

leaving him with fleeting impressions of snakeskins and stab wounds.

He shook his head. The stars were making him feel light-headed.

"Are you unwell?" asked the Jinc. One cool, skeletal hand fell on his

shoulder.

"I don't know," Imre said. "I think I'd like to lie down."

"That can easily be arranged. You have been assigned a private berth. We

will show you there now."

"Thank you." The Jinc's statement took a moment to sink in. "A private berth,

really?"

"We made it especially for you."

It was, he supposed, somewhat less involved than plucking his pieces out of

the void and putting them together again, but the thought still made him

uncomfortable. "I'd be happy enough in the sickbay."

The Jinc didn't reply. As the scoop rolled into a new course, Imre held on

and kept his eyes averted from the view. * * *

Incoherent memories trickled down the crater wall of his mind, threatening an

avalanche of incapacitating proportions.

The burning ship was called Pelorus, and it had been the flagship of an armada

vast enough to cast a shadow across a solar system. Like many ships of the

day, it had endured the ravages of interstellar space by sloughing away layers

of hull in much the same fashion that humans shed dead skin cells. Across a

voyage of several hundred light-years, every external surface might be

completely replaced many times over while everything within remained pristine.

"In the same way," a voice from his memory said, "the Forts replace frags.

But are they skin cells? I don't think so. A skin cell doesn't feel pain or

loss. It doesn't feel anything at all. The comparison, and the practice, is

odious."

Humans had evolved vastly and without check across the galaxy. People came in

all shapes and sizes and communicated by every imaginable means. No reliable

method had been found to cross the light-speed barrier, but that was no

deterrent. Where space would not break, time would happily bend. If a

journey was to take a thousand years by the "natural" tick of the clock, why

not make the subjective ticks longer so the journey seemed to last only a

decade, or a year, or a day, or even a minute? Indefinite life extension had

been in common practice since before humanity left Earth. To grow old and the

while visiting a neighbor—for anything less than a thousand light-years away

was practically on one's doorstep—would be considered wasteful, even obscene.

People shook hands across the constellations. They made conversations, and

love, and war.

"This machine runs down." That was the big, scarred man again. His accent was

untraceable, wooden only in the sense that a forest was made of wood. "So few

of us are left."

"That's a bleak outlook." Imre's face hurt as though he had recently been

laughing uproariously. Or screaming. "Only gods walk on water."

"Only idiots or fools would try. "We're neither, right?"

"Amen. We're the new religion."

An acrid wave of ozone swept that memory from the stage. A name took its

place: the Corps. Just as humans in ancient times had formed friendships,

allegiances, and armies, so too did affiliations spring up across the

inter-galactic gulfs. Some were necessarily loose; others were as tight as

they had ever been. Some were between numerous discrete, different

individuals; some consisted of multiple copies of one individual, propagated

across the starscape like seeds, meeting up every millennium or so to exchange

memories. Such singletons were themselves an ambiguous blend of individual

and multiplicity. Novel pronouns and neologisms abounded as language

struggled to keep up with numerous new ways to be. All were human, since they

had sprung from the same ancient home as all known intelligent life, but not

all were the same.

The Corps was just one of many affiliations caught in the middle. Imre

Bergamasc—the man who had amassed the memories preserved in the Drum—had seen

through many sets of eyes and lived in many bodies. He had none of the

smeared awareness of the Jinc, however; each body had a keen sense of

himself—and that, gradually, was how the revived Imre was coming to think of

his former incarnation: Himself, the being that had preceded him in life's

great adventure. There were bound to be more of him out there somewhere,

unless whoever had destroyed the Drum had finished them off too. There were

also, most likely, other members of the Corps.

Alphin Freer was definitely one of them: cool, remote, and knife-sharp. The

big man whose name and origins wouldn't quite come, another; also the reticent

blonde, Em-lee Copas, with eyes of green stone. The fourth of his former

companions was the woman whose voice had crawled down him like oil on a ship's

hull. The five of them had been a team, he gradually surmised; soldiers of

both kinds, war- and peacemakers, as circumstances demanded. Had they been

friends? That he couldn't quite unpack. Certainly, they had been close;

perhaps even codependent. At least one of them had been his lover, if the

complex knot of emotional associations was anything to go by. Flesh and blood

and pain and fucking, all wound up in one vicious tangle. If he pulled at it

too hard, he feared he might strangle himself.

His own voice formed the backdrop to many of the memories—demanding, cajoling,

commanding, ranting— but the words weren't always comprehensible. So many

speeches: when had he ever found so much to say? Now, all he wanted was to

close his ears and think. If he opened his mouth to answer the Jinc's

questions, he feared the dusty, disconnected pieces of his mind might fall

out.

Sloughing hulls and singletons in rows demanded that he keep it together as

best he could. Whether he was divine or merely decent, or not even that, he

owed it to himself to piece Himself together. Then he could stand back and

decide who or what he had been. Soldier? Victim? Leader? Man?

He was in a bar. Three glasses of a pinkish liquid rested on the table before

him. The big man glanced over his shoulder as though at a sudden sound.

"Something is wrong."

Imre reached into the pocket of his uniform jacket for the Henschke Sloan

sidearm he kept there, fully loaded. Before he could draw, a single shot

discharged into the ceiling behind them, and a voice barked that they should

stay seated.

He remembered nothing after that point.

But her name, the name of his lover, did eventually come to him: covert ops

specialist Helwise MacPhedron, she of the liquid voice and thin, soft ribs

that went down her waist like those of a snake.

Just thinking of her sent a shudder along his spine, but once again he didn't

know why. * * *

The quarters assigned to him were as cramped as the sickbay, containing a

coffinlike bunk identical to the one in which he had awoken and barely large

enough to crouch in. At least the door locked behind him. From the other

side of the bulkhead came the sound of machinery and people moving about.

Never voices. The Jinc ship was empty of language, unless he was part of the

conversation.

Sleep was a long time coming. Getting undressed and slipping into the elastic

coverlet didn't help. His body felt both pleasantly and unpleasantly

unfamiliar. It was in perfect condition, but the differences between it and

the one he remembered irked him, making him irritable and suspicious of his

hosts when on the face of it he had no good reason to be either. His skin was

healthy, pliable and soft, even where body hair was making its presence newly

felt. There were no visible scars. Nerve endings responded as he ran his

slender fingers down both arms and across his stomach. His eyelids blinked

smoothly in the eternal gloom of the Noh vessel.

He wondered if he was being watched—and, then, whether he should pursue a

faint and not entirely erotic impulse to masturbate. That would help him

sleep, if nothing else. It always had in his old body.

His nipples hardened at the thought, but fear of failing stayed his hand. He

told himself mat he was unwilling to embrace mis body that he had not chosen.

It would be like screwing a stranger. There was a time and a place.

Earlier, the Jinc had asked him, "What is the last date you remember?"

He had considered the question a long time before answering. Little linear

sense came with the memories assembling in his mind. The feeling that some

were more recent than others was therefore hard to justify.

"What date is it now?" he had asked in return. "We are nearing the end of the

nine hundredth millennium."

"Absolute?"

"Yes."

That had told him nothing. "Is the war over?"

"Which war?"

"People were calling it the Mad Times even before it had finished."

"Yes, that war finished 150,000 years ago. Is that the last thing you

remember?"

That figure still bothered him hours later, as he lay on his bunk and

contemplated the arousal states of his new body. So many years—yet they had

passed in the blink of a cosmic eye, as they might have for one of his enemies

in the Mad Times. Humanity had gone from savagery to the stars in such a

time.

His right moved down to cup his pubic mound. The lack of penis and testes

gave him no comfort at all.

"I don't know," he had said. "Why the interrogation? I'll tell you when I

remember something important."

The Jinc mouthpiece had bowed in apology. "Perhaps you would like to know who

won."

"I can guess. It was a stupid war fought over meaningless ideals. Sol

Invictus was never going to come out the other side. The only question was

how many of the Forts we took down with us." The intensity with which he spoke

surprised him. Clearly, this had once mattered deeply to him. "Am I right?"

"You are," the Jinc had told him. "Sol Invictus did fall in the end."

"Could that have been when my record was destroyed? The Drum, I mean."

"No. Over such a long time, your remains would have dispersed too far for us

to gamer. You would have become one with the Holy Background."

He had immediately thought of the cosmic microwave background radiation, on

which were imprinted the ripples of creation. Was that what the Jinc

worshipped? The fiery Original State from which the universe had emerged?

"Well, that'd be some funeral pyre."

"You misunderstand us. We pursue the ExoGenesis, the ultimate source of life

in the galaxy—perhaps the universe. Life on one world can seed life on

another, but science cannot tell us where life started in the first place. We

seek that place on the galactic outskirts, where expeditions only infrequently

come and where your remains might have been lost forever."

"Mixed up with anything else you found," he said, remembering the Jinc telling

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