Linda Nagata - Vast_玖贝云文库

Table of contents

•Acknowledgments

•Prelude

•Chapter 1

•Chapter 2

•Chapter 3

•Chapter 4

•Chapter 5

•Chapter 6

•Chapter 7

•Chapter 8

•Chapter 9

•Chapter 10

•Chapter 11

•Chapter 12

•Chapter 13

•Chapter 14

•Chapter 15

•Chapter 16

•Chapter 17

•Chapter 18

•Chapter 19

•Chapter 20

•Chapter 21

•Chapter 22

•Chapter 23

•Chapter 24

•Chapter 25

•Chapter 26

•Chapter 27

•Chapter 28

•Chapter 29

•Chapter 30

•Chapter 31

•Chapter 32

•Chapter 33

•Chapter 34

•Chapter 35

•Chapter 36

•Chapter 37

Acknowledgments

Vast benefited from the input of several generous people. Robert A. Metzger and Wil McCarthy

happily fielded the bizarre technical questions that appeared from time to time in their E-mail boxes. Sean

Stewart provided priceless input on an early version of the book's opening, and Wil McCarthy, Bruce

Holland Rogers, Sage Walker, and Kathleen Ann Goonan all took time out during the rush of the holiday

season to comment on the manuscript. Finally, my editor, Anne Lesley Groell, provided insightful

commentary and guidance throughout the revision process. My warmest thanks go out to all of you.

Prelude

Point zero: initiate. A sense kicked in. Something like vision. Not because it emulated sight, but

because it revealed. Himself: Nikko Jiang-Tibayan. An electronic pattern scheduled to manifest at

discrete intervals. Nikko Jiang-Tibayan. He'd been an organic entity once. Not now.

Point one: identify.

Personality suspended on a machine grid: he is the mind of the great ship, Null Boundary. His

memories are many, not all accessible. He's locked much of his past away in proscribed data fields. He

interrogates his remaining inventory, seeking an explanation. It comes in an amalgam of cloudy scents: the

clinging stink of living flesh parasitized by aerobic bacteria. All defenses down. "Don't be sad, my love,"

she whispers. "Whatever the cost, you know we had to try."

He explores no further.

Point two and counting: status check.

A scheduled mood shift floods his pattern with easy confidence. He confirms that Null Boundary

had long ago reached maximum velocity, four-tenths lightspeed. The magnetic scoops have been

deactivated; the solenoids folded to a point piercing the increasingly thick interstellar medium. Duration?

Over two centuries' ship's time have elapsed since Null Boundary left Deception Well.

His past has become unconscionably deep for a man who'd been condemned to die at the age of

thirty standard years. Still, death is never far off.

There are four telescopes mounted on tracks around the ship's hull. When two or more are fixed

on the same object, their optical signals can be combined, creating an effective lens aperture far greater

than any individual scope. At least two lenses are continuously fixed on the alien vessel that has hunted

Null Boundary for 150 years.

It's a Chenzeme courser, an automated warship designed by a race that vanished millions of

years before the human species even came into existence. It first appeared when Null Boundary was less

than fifty years out of Deception Well. Then, it was moving at close to thirty-nine percent lightspeed, on a

course that would take it toward the star cluster called the Committee—opposite to Null Boundary's

vector. Nikko watches its fleeting image, wondering if it will manage to get past the defenses of the

human settlements there.

Nikko knows little about the Chenzeme, but he knows this much: Their ships are not powered by

conventional physics. The old murderers learned to tap the zero point field, that all-pervasive sea of

energy where particles and antiparticles engage in a continuous dance of creation and annihilation. It's a

deadly talent. With the zero point field to power their ships and guns, each Chenzeme vessel has far more

energy at its command than any human installation. Their gamma ray lasers can burn away the

atmosphere of a living world. Nikko has seen it happen.

A twinge of pain, like the tenderness of a half-forgotten wound, warns him away from memories

he does not want to awaken. It's enough to know the Chenzeme will not be beaten until the frontier

worlds own the zero point technology too.

Yet even for the old murderers, energy does not flow in infinite quantity. To catch Null Boundary,

the courser would need to swing about and accelerate—a huge investment of both time and energy that

can gain it only a very tiny prize. So that first time Nikko sees it, he knows it will ignore him to push on

toward the inhabited worlds of the Committee. He has no reason to think he will ever see it again. He

aims the ship's prow at the natural navigation beacon of Alpha Cygni, a white-hot giant star that blazes

against a background of dark molecular clouds—and he pushes on, in the direction called swan, where

the Chenzeme warships seem to originate. He has set out to find their source, and he will not be

distracted. Like a tortured man stumbling vengefully toward his tormenters, he has to know why.

A century and a quarter later, the courser reappears in Null Boundary's telescopes, approaching

obliquely, far to the stern.

Now it has closed to 21.6 astronomical units—some three billion kilometers behind them. It's a

luminous object, agleam with a white light generated by the membrane of philosopher cells that coats its

needle-shaped hull.

Human ships and human worlds were not the original targets of the Chenzeme, but their

automated ships have proven adaptive. So Nikko has adapted too. He cannot outrun the courser or

match its guns, but on Null Boundary's hull he has grown his own layer of Chenzeme philosopher cells,

forever dreaming their simulated strategies of war and conquest.

The cells are an intellectual machine. Not so much a mind, as a billion dedicated minds in

competition, gambling their opinions. Approval means more and stronger connections to neighboring

cells. Disapproval means an increasing isolation. Links are made and shattered a thousand times a second

and long-chain alliances are continuously renegotiated. Consensus is sought but seldom found.

This is the clumsy system that guides the Chenzeme warships. Nikko thinks on it, and he doesn't

know whether to laugh or to weep in terror.

He suspects he has done both ten thousand times before. It's been twenty-two years since he

learned to live within the skin of his enemy. Null Boundary's hull has gleamed white all that time, a

skin-deep Chenzeme masquerade.

If nothing else, this ruse has bought time. Though the courser has not been persuaded to turn

away, it seems unsure, as if its instincts have been confused by Null Boundary's metamorphosis.

Seventeen years ago it ceased to accelerate. Yet because its velocity is slightly greater than Null

Boundary's, the gap between the two ships continues to narrow. In another 125 days Null Boundary will

fall within range of its gamma ray laser.

That is Nikko's deadline. He must convince the courser of his authenticity before then, and

persuade it to leave them alone. In the ship's library, an army of subminds is dedicated to the problem,

interpreting and reinterpreting every record of Chenzeme communication to uncover all identifying codes

Nikko has used the results in repeated attempts to contact the courser, but to no effect—it has never

answered his radio hails.

He adds one more submind to stew upon the problem, while instructing a Dull Intelligence to

continue the observations. He will be unable to do so himself, as his present existence is limited to ninety

seconds. At the end of this time, if nothing has gone wrong, his personal memory of the period will be

dumped and a new interval will begin, so that from his point of view, Null Boundary's transit time will

seem to require only ninety seconds, though years have elapsed. This is Nikko's defense against

boredom.

Point twenty: Additional subminds report in. Their assessments are pleasingly dull. Reactor

function is nominal. Air quality is nominal. Crew health: nominal. There are only three crew members.

Four, if Nikko counts his own rarely used physical incarnation. He finds Lot and Urban awake and

active; only Clemantine still hibernates in a cold storage nest.

Point thirty: Nikko scans Null Boundary with remote eyes. He discovers Urban in the library,

linked to an interface that records the activity of the philosopher cells. Urban insists that with practice and

refinement, the interface can be made to translate the cell's chemical language into something meaningful

to a human mind Nikko doesn't agree. Experience has taught him that Chenzeme language finds meaning

only within Chenzeme neural structures.

This is something Lot understands. He is in a transit bubble just beneath the ship's hull. One side

of the bubble is open, so that he lies squeezed against the underside of the colony of philosopher cells.

He's dressed in an insulating skin suit, but the hood is down. His close-cropped blond hair shines in the

cells' white light. On his cheeks are moist sensory glands that look like glistening teardrops. These

"sensory tears" are a Chenzeme structure, integrated into the genetic system of Lot's ancestors by some

unknown engineer, thousands of years in the past. Through them, Lot can perceive the cells' chemical

language and respond in kind, with molecules synthesized in the tears' nanoscale factories.

The philosopher cells are Lot's creation, and he is still the only one who can effectively

communicate with them. He mined their design from the living dust of Deception Well's nebula, storing

the pattern in his fixed memory, a data vault contained within the filamentous strands of the Chenzeme

neural organ that parasitizes his brain. Nothing degrades in fixed memory. Lot used the pattern to

synthesize a seed population of philosopher cells within his neural tendrils, exuding them through the

shimmery surfaces of his sensory tears. It's a neatly circular survival strategy in which the parasitic tendrils

use their host to reproduce the Chenzeme mind. Clearly this has happened many times before in the

thirty-milhon-year history of the Chenzeme, and it is the warships that have survived it, while their

challengers have all vanished.

All except us, Nikko thinks.

He is acutely aware that they play a dangerous game.

After the first cells were made, it took three years of experiments before they learned to feed the

young colony with nutrients delivered through the hull. Now the original cells have reproduced many

times over. Lot is learning to delve into their inherited histories, and with luck, he will discover the proper

radio hail to sooth a Chenzeme warship.

The warships are known to rendezvous in the void, to exchange cell histories encoded in dust.

How Nikko is aware of this is a mystery locked behind the black wall of another proscribed field, but

again, he makes no inquiries. It doesn't matter how Null Boundary's neural system came to be tainted by

the Chenzeme, just that it has, in a primitive way, so that Nikko too can distinguish meaning in the

cell-talk. He doesn't have Lot's talent. He is like a dog listening to its master's voice—aware of mood,

but deaf to specific meaning. Forever surprised by what Lot will say.

Chapter 1

The cramped arc of the transit bubble pressed on Lot like a gigantic, gentle hand, pushing him

sideways into the only soft tissue within the cold, brittle membrane of Chenzeme cells that coated Null

Boundary's hull. The philosopher cells glowed with an intense white light that Lot could feel even when

his eyes were closed. At this one point Nikko had created a vacuole beneath the membrane's fixed

surface, preventing it from bonding with the body of the ship. Lot thought of the site as a wound, because

the cell tissue here was slushy, like overripe fruit or decaying flesh, on the verge of freezing.

He sank into it, eager, and a little bit scared: this thin amalgam of living alien cells was all that lay

between him and hard vacuum. His gut clenched when he thought about it. He had no backups of

himself. But the membrane had been in existence for twenty-two years, and it had not failed yet.

In the wound, the philosopher cells were loosely attached to one another. They felt glassy and

granular as they molded around his shoulder, flowing up and into his ear, across his closely trimmed

scalp, and around his mouth. He kept one eye closed. Their touch was cold, though it was not

unbearable because the chemical reactions within the cells required relatively high temperatures.

Not high enough to suit Lot. The skin suit kept his body warm, but he'd left the hood off so as

not to block the tiny, drop-shaped silver glands of his sensory tears that studded his cheeks just beneath

his eyes. Now the right side of his face was embedded in the wound and it felt half frozen. He turned his

head to keep his nose in the transit bubble's thin pocket of air. Over most of the hull, the membrane was

a petrified layer only a few millimeters deep. Here in the wound it remained soft and it continually

thickened. Lot worried about that. He didn't want to drown in the cells.

Finally, his shoulder brushed the crisp tissue of the membrane's outer wall. Relief flooded him.

This time, he would sink no farther.

Over the past two years, Lot had spent up to fifteen hours a day with the cells, sometimes talking

to Urban about what he felt. Urban monitored his communications, seeking to interpret the cell-talk for

himself—and failing utterly. No surprise. Chenzeme thought was not like human thought. Lot could do

one or the other, but serious fudging was needed to bridge the two.

Often, Lot just listened to the philosopher cells. Sometimes he would try to sway the waves of

competitive simulations that swept round and round the field, and sometimes he would introduce his own

notions to the tumult. Today though, he would try something new.

He closed his eyes, his heart beating hard in anticipation as he visualized the molecular structures

assembling within the pheromonal vats of his sensory tears.

Nikko was convinced they could establish a Chenzeme identity through radio hails. Lot was less

sure. Chenzeme radio signals were intricate and highly variable, but they were not immune to

counterfeit… a fact that had started Lot wondering if there might be another level of identification among

the warships, and if so, what might it be?

It didn't take long for him to fix on the chemical language of the philosopher cells. If Null

Boundary could communicate with the courser on that intimate level, it might be persuaded they were

authentic Chenzeme. It might let them live.

A golden spider clung to Lot's left earlobe. It was his radio link to the ship's datasphere. Now the

spider squeezed his earlobe with its legs, whispering in an airy, synthesized voice: "Looptime equal to

seventy."

Twenty more seconds then, until Nikko purged his memory.

Urban, you ready? He wanted to check in, but Nikko might be listening. It was impossible to

tell. Usually Nikko left them alone, relying on a nonsentient submind to look out for their welfare and ring

an alarm should something go wrong.

Nikko would stop them if he knew. He would see the very real possibility that the courser would

be provoked into a close approach to seek a mating—that's what Nikko called it—an exchange of

chemical histories with the philosopher cells of Null Boundary.

Lot had no idea if they could survive that level of contact—Nikko refused to even talk about the

possibility— but for Lot, even gray uncertainty looked better than the zero chance they would have if the

courser crept within weapons range still unconvinced.

He took slow, shallow breaths, determined to appear calm. Nikko would stop looping if he

thought Lot was having a bad time.

Calm.

"Ten seconds," the spider whispered.

Near the end of his loop, Nikko sometimes had a few seconds with nothing to do, free time that

could be spent looking over Lot's shoulder. Of course, whatever he saw would be forgotten as soon as

the memory of this ninety-second segment was dumped.

"Four seconds," the spider whispered.

Nikko's program would take two seconds to purge and reset. Lot breathed softly as a chemical

language slipped in discrete packets to the surface of his sensory tears. The charismata. They were

molecular messengers, and he could sculpt them to influence human moods or Chenzeme protocols.

"Three seconds. Two—"

"Do it, fury." Urban's voice issued from the spider, overriding the count.

"Zero—"

Lot released the charismata. The chemical message flushed across the bridge of liquid that linked

his sensory tears to the glowing cells pressed against his cheek. Immediately, he felt a mottled red-cold

burst of acknowledgment from the philosopher cells as they replicated the message, transferring it

throughout the membrane's vast field. Within seconds, Lot was breathing the respondent chemical

structure: a melange of identification codes and demands for radio communications from one Chenzeme

vessel to another—

The wall of the transit bubble shuddered. Lot yelped in surprise as the bubble's tissue oozed over

him, sliding like a flexible knife between his skin suit and the philosopher cells. Between his skin and the

cells: he could feel the bite as it sliced the nascent bonds the cells had made with his sensory tears. He

twisted in an instinctive—and utterly ineffectual—attempt to escape, then cried out in hoarse protest:

"Urban!"

"It's not me, fury."

"Then Nikko. Dammit, listen—"

The transit bubble's tissue sealed around him like a layer of skin, cutting off both his protest and

the cells' white light, plunging him into darkness. He could not breathe.

The bubble expanded. Cold air puffed against his cheeks. He felt the pressure of acceleration as

the bubble raced inward through the ship's insulating tissue. His face throbbed as his skin began to warm.

He tried again. "Nikko, listen to me." He had no idea if the experiment had succeeded. "I know you're

pissed, but I need to be at the hull now—"

The bubble slammed to a stop. In the same instant, the wall beneath his belly snapped open and

Lot found himself hurtling through the zero-g environment of Null Boundary's core chamber.

Chapter 2

Instinctively, Lot tucked himself into a tight ball."Nikko—!" His shout cut off as he slammed into

the chamber's opposite side. White light burst under him, flaring within the image walls that lined the

spindle-shaped room. He clawed at the soft tissue, digging his fingers in to keep from bouncing in the

chamber's zero gravity.

His sensory tears registered the enveloping scent of his own anger, the tang of Urban's presence,

and the sharp taste of Nikko's fury.

"You taught the cells to drop dust, didn't you?" Nikko demanded, his deep, rich voice filling the

chamber.

Lot looked up. "Sooth. I tried."

The core chamber was the sheltered heart of the ship, some twenty feet long and eight across.

The image walls displayed a shifting blue-gray illumination. Nikko was nowhere in sight, but Urban

drifted only a few feet away, clothed in a pale gold skin suit. He was upside down to Lot, his long, lean

body curved in the zero gravity like a cupped hand.

In silhouette, Urban and Lot might have been taken for twins. Their builds were almost the same,

and they both kept their hair cut short so it wouldn't drift in the way. Their complexions differed. Lot was

blond-haired and brown-skmned. Urban was darker, his hair black and tightly curled. Now Urban's grm

flashed like the sudden turn of a white fish in murky water. "We taught the cells to drop dust, fury, and it

worked."

"You're sure?" Lot wanted confirmation. "Nikko, did you feel a flush of heat?"

"Like I'd been lanced." His disembodied voice originated from the chamber's end.

Urban laughed. "That would have been the moment the dust went into the void."

Several tons of dust. It had been a huge drain on the ship's resources, but it had worked! Lot

shook his head, loosening a charismata of joy on the air. Let Nikko feel it. This was a good thing.

"It was a message for the courser, wasn't it?" Nikko pressed, still without appearing.

"Sooth." Lot eased his fingers out of the semisolid image wall, the tissue sparking white around

his hand. "Are you still running on looptime?"

"Hardly. Too much seems to happen in my two seconds of downtime."

"Well, if you're going to hang around for more than ninety seconds, you might as well come out

and talk to us."

"Now that it's too late to take anything back?"

"You never would have let us do it."

"You've got that right."

"Give us a grip, will you?" Urban asked. "And a little more light too?" These requests brought an

immediate response. Texture appeared all around the image wall. Loops and knobs pushed out from the

curving surface, and the illumination climbed toward a brighter, whiter glow. Hooking a boot under a

loop, Lot looked back—up?—to see Nikko's image at the chamber's end.

No one was natural anymore, Lot least of all. Yet everyone he had known before had appeared

natural. Not Nikko. His anatomy was adapted to tolerate vacuum, and it showed. Where Lot had skin of

neutral brown, Nikko was covered with minute blue, china-hard scales. His fingers and toes were almost

eight inches long. Lot watched them twisting in braids, a sure sign of anxiety. His head was smooth and

hairless. His eyes were hidden behind protective crystal lenses, and his nose and mouth were diminutive,

his face incapable of expression. The small, membranous cloak of his kisheer lay still against his

shoulders. It was an organ for converting carbon dioxide into oxygen, that would seal over his face under

vacuum, allowing him to breathe. Nikko wore no clothing, though an accessory organ like a living

loincloth concealed and protected his anal and genital zones.

This version of Nikko was a holographic image reflecting the physical human body that he

sometimes used, but Nikko was more than a man. He was also the sculpted entity that inhabited and

controlled the body of the ship. His sensory system extended from the outer membrane of philosopher

cells to the bioactive walls of this chamber, where glands synthesized the charismata of his moods.

Somehow, long ago, Null Boundary's neural system had been tainted by Chenzeme tissue, so

that Nikko had some understanding of the charismata. He was no precisely engineered machine like Lot;

still, he could follow the gist of cell-talk, and he had even more skill at producing the charismata of human

emotion.

Now a charismata burst against Lot's sensory tears, a chemical package conveying a sense of

pressure: time pressure and chest injuries and gathering specks of darkness.

"Back off, Nikko," Lot warned. "It's not that bad."

"You made a mistake."

"You don't know that. The courser won't taste the dust for months."

A new charismata hit Lot's sensory tears. He felt blood flowing thick and warm across his face;

salt in his eyes and on his lips. He pulled back, one hand rubbing frantically against the sticky glands of his

sensory tears. "Stop it! Nikko, what's the matter with you? You know the radio hails weren't working.

We had to try something new."

"It isn't new." His kisheer rippled, a tight wave rolling outward from his neck, ending with a low

snap as it met the edge of the membrane.

"It is new," Lot insisted. He loosed a soothing charismata. "I know you don't want to risk a

mating, but I found this function in the cells, for producing massive quantities of identical data packets."

Dust. It had never occurred to him before that dust could be used for anything other than the

short-range com- mumcation of a mating, but here was a way of producing trillions of copies of a single

message. Why would so many copies be needed? He had talked it over with Urban, and the only

plausible reason they could think of was to counteract the dispersion of a long-distance drop.

Urban was happy to explain it. He rolled forward, a horizontal arrow aimed at Nikko. The

textured surface of his skin suit gleamed like wet sand. "The packets develop with spin vectors to reduce

their velocity and stabilize their spread. They should form a diffuse cloud, at least ten thousand klicks

across by the time the courser intersects it. The density will be low, but it'll only take one hit to convey

the message."

"If the particle survives the impact, of course," Lot amended. He had his doubts. "Only

Chenzeme communicate with dust. This is just one more way to convince it we're real. Did you

understand the message content?"

Nikko shrugged, a gesture that moved in a wave down his torso. "Good feelings. Friendly

contact. Not the kind of message you'd expect to find in a Chenzeme library."

"That's where it came from," Urban said.

Lot nodded. "Sooth. I got it from the cells. I think it's an armistice signal."

"It's not new," Nikko insisted, his voice reflecting all the emotion his face lacked. "I've seen a dust

drop before. Love and nature, I remember it exactly."

Lot knew little about Nikko's past, except that it was deep, extending some thirty-two hundred

years back to Sol System in the era before the rise of the Hallowed Vasties. Some cataclysm had

overtaken the ship early in its history, wiping much of the original memory and leaving the rest scrambled.

Once, Nikko let slip that he'd learned the charismata from a "mating" with a Chenzeme ship. Maybe that

record was wiped too, or maybe it never happened. When Lot asked Nikko how he'd escaped, the

answer was a terse "I didn't."

Urban seized a handhold, rotating his position again, so that now his head aligned with Lot. His

dark eyes glistened, as if they were made of some frozen liquid thinly wrapped in meltwater. His black

hair lay against his head in tight curls. On his face was a faint, condescending smile. "So tell us Nikko.

What do you remember?" It was a facetious question. There would be no answer, because Nikko never

talked about his past.

This time though, Nikko surprised them. "It was another world then. Everything felt different."

Light caught in a smear in each of the scales of his hide.

Lot leaned forward. He badly wanted to know more. "Tell us about it?" he urged.

Nikko's kisheer went still. Lot caught the edge of a sense of vastness, no more, before it

vanished into a pointillistic cynicism shimmering in discrete specks upon the air. "It was a long time ago,

and we were angry. The cult virus had begun to move through the Celestial Cities. We didn't understand

it then. All we knew was that our perfect world was dissolving into a fascist religious mania, and when we

couldn't change it, we left."

"Aboard Null Boundary?" Lot asked.

"Aboard Null Boundary, yes. Four hundred twenty-nine of us. Others had gone out from Sol

System before us, of course, but we were going farther. We were angry, and most of our company was

very young—and foolish, like the two of you."

In truth, both Lot and Urban were over 220 standard years, but then time in cold sleep didn't

count toward maturity. Lot's effective age was somewhere around twenty-five. Urban was close to

thirty—no more than adolescence in the culture of Deception Well.

"You were immune to the cult?" Urban asked.

"Yes. All of us—though of course we didn't understand it then." His voice soft and bitter. "And

we'd never heard of the Chenzeme. When we saw the vessel in our telescopes, it seemed a miracle,

dreadful and awesome. We should have fled. We might have outrun it… even if we had to run forever.

But we didn't even try. The flash of heat on the hull"—Nikko waved his hand, as if to acknowledge Null

Boundary's perimeter—"I saw that. I never understood it though, not until now."

"It dropped dust?" Lot asked, though already he could see the incident in his mind. A flash of

heat, a temporary blurring of the image of the Chenzeme ship for the few seconds it would take the dust

to cool and disperse. Then nothing. No overt sign of hostility.

Nikko's expression didn't change—couldn't change— though his voice grew softer. "It was a

plague. A typical Chenzeme plague. It took months to overrun us, but eventually we intersected the

cloud. It wrecked the ship's memory and wiped the ghosts. It killed everyone but me. I don't know why I

survived. No reason for it."

But Nikko's physiology was not human-ordinary, even when he chose to manifest in physical

form. "Were they like you?" Lot asked. "The other people on the ship?"

Nikko didn't answer this. "As I think on it now, I can see we must have been strange to it, just as

it was strange to us. It didn't strafe us with its guns, as any Chenzeme ship would do these days. It was a

test. You see? If we'd been Chenzeme, the plague would not have harmed us."

Lot felt a fever's burn ignite upon his face, dark blood oozing from his pores. "Nikko, stop it!" He

slapped at his sensory tears, but he could still feel the near presence of disaster.

"Did you booby-trap your dust?" Nikko demanded.

"You know I didn't. I sent a friendly handshake." He looked at Urban. They'd been in this

together, but only Lot understood the cells. It had been his choice. "What if the proper greeting is a

threat?" Urban detested failure; it showed in the hard set of his face. "Well then fury, I guess we've just

presented ourselves as deranged Chenzeme."

"Maybe it doesn't matter." Nikko's fingers twisted in excruciating braids. "Maybe we've

misinterpreted everything. The courser has left us alone, so we tell ourselves we've fooled it."

"We have." Lot didn't like the doubt in Nikko's voice; instinctively, he moved to shore up

Nikko's faith. "The camouflage is working. You know it is. The courser could have closed with us years

ago, but we're still alive."

Nikko's image stretched, his long, spidery toes raking the wall. "Why?" he demanded.

"Because we've confused its instinct."

"Or because it's afraid of us," Urban said. "We're Chenzeme. We could be dangerous."

Nikko snorted, crossing his arms over his chest, his long fingers at his elbows like coarse fringe.

"Or maybe it understands us better than we understand ourselves. Coursers aren't blind, or stupid. This

one was hot on our ass. It saw the cell field spread across our hull. It saw us becoming Chenzeme. So it

eased off. It gave the process time to happen."

"What process?" Urban asked, his voice stern, braced for bad news.

Lot guessed. "A colonization."

Nikko nodded his agreement. "So it might not matter if we get the first message wrong. The

courser might even expect it to be wrong, because we're becoming Chenzeme. We're not Chenzeme

yet." This was a neat line of speculation. It gave them maneuvering room. Lot nodded a willing

agreement. "So another dust drop might be accepted, even if the first one tastes of deranged Chenzeme."

He rubbed at his sensory tears, already planning the structure of his next greeting.

"So that's the good news," Urban said. "There's bad news too, isn't there, Nikko? Like, if the

courser knows what's going on, that only means it's seen this all before." He looked around the core

chamber, performing a sarcastic inspection, eyes wide, his neck craning. "Hey. I don't see any other

survivors."

Lot felt his chest tighten. It was true. Human and Chenzeme were the only species active

between worlds. There was evidence of other spacefaring races in the distant past, but they were all gone

now. At Deception Well, nanotech-nological "governors" still protected the system from destructive

elements, but the species that had designed them had long since disappeared.

"Colonization must be a damn successful procedure," Urban concluded. "Or maybe that

ass-biting courser's standing by to tidy up any evidence of failure."

"Maybe it is," Nikko said, "but now we have the dust, we're not helpless anymore." The walls of

the chamber brightened further, along with Nikko's mood. "Dust can be used to carry chemical lies. It

can be used to carry poisons and plague. And Lot brought a library of Chenzeme vulnerabilities out of

the Well. Didn't you?"

That was true. Lot remembered Deception Well, the dry taste of the nebula's living dust, and the

static libraries of data it contained—thirty million years of a contentious history, recording the clash

between Well nanotech and Chenzeme nanotech. The Well governors had forced their own evolution,

actively seeking new structures that might provide an advantage over the Chenzeme, and mostly, they

had been successful. The Well thrived, while other systems had perished.

In their passage through the nebula, Lot had barely brushed the surface of that data sea,

uncovering only a tiny portion of the molecular defenses that must exist there. The patterns he had learned

were safely ensconced in the neural tendrils of his fixed memory He probably could learn to use them.

"You could use what you know to kill the courser," Nikko said. The crystal lenses that protected

his eyes made his unchanging stare seem fixed somewhere over Lot's right shoulder.

Lot stared back at him, filled with a sudden, sourceless dread. "I don't know how to use the dust

that way."

"You'll learn."

"Nikko's right," Urban said. "Once we get what we need out of the courser, we could poison it."

Lot felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten as Nikko drummed a slow, deliberate beat

against the china-hard scales of his thigh: a synthesized image producing synthesized sounds of impact.

When the courser had first been sighted, he too had longed to find a way of destroying it. Now…

He glanced at Urban, saw the anxious and not-so-subtle shake of his head—and ignored it.

"Nikko, I've been thinking… maybe we should try to make our peace with the courser."

Nikko froze. For several seconds he didn't answer. Then: "That's the cult virus talking. It's inside

you and you can't escape it. You were made to be its host, its vehicle, and it will always drive you to

make a Communion with anyone and anything."

"Not with the Chenzeme," Lot said. "The cult virus is their plague. They made their ships

immune. You know that."

"While they tailored your kind to attack the human neural system."

"History," Urban scoffed. "Who cares?"

Lot, for one, because Nikko was right, he'd been engineered to spread the virus—and he was

fairly sure he'd been engineered by the Chenzeme. Some ancestor of his must have been one of the first

humans to venture into Chenzeme territory. He had found something there, or the Chenzeme had found

him, and they'd changed him. They'd infected him with their neural tendrils, their sensory tears, and their

cult virus, and then they'd sent him back again, all the way to Sol System.

This was the story Lot had pieced together, from the history he knew, and from the

remembrances that had come down to him, inherited through his fixed memory, shadowy snatches of

ancestral lives.

The cult virus had hit first in Sol System, burning through the population in a firestorm of faith that

made the planets melt and run and re-form again into a Dyson swarm—a singular intellect distributed

across a swarm of orbiting habitats so vast the Sun was hidden within it. From Sol, the contagion moved

outward to other star systems, carried in the flesh of men like Lot, charismatic cult leaders almost exactly

like that first cult leader, each of them formed from a fusion of Chenzeme and human neural systems.

Rationality burned away in their presence. Religious fervor eliminated dissent. Cults blossomed into true

Communions that grew at exponential rates, until another star was claimed by a Dyson swarm of the

Hallowed Vasties.

Disaster or ascension? Looking inward from the frontier, it had been impossible to say—until the

cordoned suns began to fail. Now, scant centuries after their formation, anyone could turn a telescope

toward the center and see the shells crumbling into clouds of dust and gas that slowly unraveled on mild

stellar winds. No one knew what became of the people who had succumbed to the cult, or if anything

living survived the breakdown of the cordons. There was no way to know without going back to look,

and such a journey would demand centuries of travel time. It seemed a fair guess though, that in the

collapse of a cordon, there were no human survivors.

Thousands of frontier worlds remained unconquered by the cult at the time they left Deception

Well, but the cycle could erupt again on any of them, igniting around a charismatic carrier like Lot. The

cult virus was inside him, and no one had ever learned how to get it out. He could feel it: a dull desire for

Communion forever nestling in his belly.

Deliberately, he straightened the curving line of his body. "Nikko, for all the Chenzeme have done

to us, for all the worlds lost between the cult virus and the warships, hitting back is not the answer. It

doesn't matter that we want to. You know we can't destroy every Chenzeme ship. We'd be lucky even

to wreck this one. But if we can get it to talk—"

Nikko's long, long fingers slashed the air in front of him. "You can't negotiate with the warships.

They're not conscious, and they don't make deals."

"You don't know that. The Chenzeme vessels are intelligent, even if they're not conscious.

They're adaptable too. They can change."

Linda Nagata - Vast

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