IN CONTRAST TO PASTORIA’S nine continents, Zenia possessed only one. The planet was old and worn. Plate tectonics had ground almost completely to a halt half a billion years earlier. Volcanism had guttered and died, and over the course of the next hundred million years, the combined actions of wind and water had eroded the world’s ancient rugged geology to vast featureless plains surrounding a shallow salty ocean filled with mushroom-like stromatolites—small mesas formed by the growth of layer upon layer of single-celled photosynthesizing microbes.
Aside from these, the only other rocks to punctuate the surface of the endless sea were the mountainous remains of a huge impact crater, five hundred miles in diameter, with peaks half a mile high, a circular freshwater lake large enough to be classed as a small sea, and a central island with a jagged central mountain.
The entire crater rim was inhabited; buildings rose up the steep slopes, linked by walkways and cable cars. Crops grew on floating barges in the crater’s lake. The landing field consisted of a cleared area at the foot of the serrated central mountain. Amahle brought the shuttle in carefully through the rain, wary of the gusts that swirled around that big peak. When the boarding ramp hinged down, there was a man waiting for her at the bottom. Amahle had never seen him before, but oh, she knew him. She ran into his arms. In this life, he was tall and wiry with tanned skin, salt and pepper hair, and deep eyes.
“At last,” he said, holding her tightly, his face buried in her hair. “At last!”
She could feel the warmth of him through his clothes. He smelled of soap and sweat and cooking spices. She hugged him back with all her might, afraid he might vanish if she let go. After all, she’d crossed vast gulfs of space and burned centuries of time in order to find him, while he had sought her out with a love and purpose that transcended corporeal death.
They stood intertwined in the shuttle’s shadow while the wind blew around them and rain fell from the clouded sky. After a while, Carloman asked, “Did you bring the strangelet?”
Amahle gave a nod, her cheek brushing the cotton of his shirt, smearing the unbidden tears that marbled her cheeks. She had been alone for so long. Thousands of years of solitude. Eons of running from the grief of his passing. And now here he was, pressed up against her again, and suddenly she felt complete in a way she couldn’t remember having felt for a very, very long time. Whatever happened next would be worth it for the sake of this single moment.
When they eventually pulled apart, she kept hold of the fabric of his sleeve, unwilling to completely detach as he led her across the packed dirt of the landing field towards a heavily fortified concrete bunker set into the foot of the mountain.
Menacing kill drones patrolled the loops of glinting razor wire that marked the perimeter of the field, lenses whirring and weapon systems twitching in response to every movement in their field of vision. Human guards stood at the doorway to the bunker. They carried plasma rifles in the crooks of their arms, and none of them wore memory collars.
“This is our main facility,” Carloman said. “From here, we’ve been scanning the whole cosmos for The Exalted’s tachyon signals from the future.”
“That’s possible?”
They passed through a set of metre-thick steel doors, into the cool of the mountain’s interior.
“Of course. The signals have to be decipherable by our AIs. So, there’s no reason we can’t pick them up, given a working detector.”
“And did it work? Did you find them?”
His smile possessed the delight of a ten-year-old child. “Yes! We found them. I know which star the signals will come from. The last part of the puzzle.”
Amahle eyed the rock walls. “This seems like a lot of security. Are you worried The Exalted will come for you in this time?”
“No. The Exalted were never a physical threat. Who knows, if we’d ever put our memories on a collar for them to live, they might even be excited by our piquant adventure to bring about their demise.”
“Then all this . . .”
“The government of this country intended to use this place as a command centre in case of another asteroid impact. Smart idea, the odds of an asteroid hitting the same place twice are so low to be effectively zero. And it’s been useful.”
Amahle couldn’t help being impressed. “So, how did you get hold of it?”
“It wasn’t easy. I had to overthrow the government.”
“By yourself?”
“Not entirely. You and I aren’t the only ones who remember our past lives.” His grin became conspiratorial. “There are others. There have always been others. And over the centuries, I’ve been able to call on them for help. The AI that came here on Zenia’s colony ship didn’t have the von Neumann level of replication technology of Pastoria’s defence station, but some of the people who reincarnated with me here knew what to do. They helped me construct a viable tachyon detector.”
A heavily shielded elevator took them down into the ancient strata of the planet. Watching the rock layers slide past its transparent diamond walls, Amahle wondered if this world had ever evolved intelligent life of its own. Maybe whole civilisations had been born and lost before humans ever reached this distant outpost, their only traces crushed beneath the petrified sediment of deep time. Perhaps by the time The Exalted became aware of what she and Carloman were planning, the human race would represent nothing more than an additional layer of fossils and an expanding emissions shell.
They reached the bottom of the shaft and Carloman led her into a lush, tropical climate. The cavern seemed to stretch away forever in all directions. Whitewashed accommodation blocks with terracotta roofs could be glimpsed among the trees. Even after so much time and distance, she thought, we still live in the forest.
Carloman took her to his living quarters and she watched him change into a brightly patterned shirt and white linen suit. She’d half-expected him to pack a case or gather some belongings, but what would have been the point? If their desperate scheme succeeded, this version of reality would cease to exist and everything would be reset.
* * *
The command centre was a large room filled with workstations and immense display screens. The detector it monitored consisted of five petal-like structures a thousand kilometres across floating sedately in geosynchronous orbit around the planet. Spun from monofilament by molecule-sized spiders, each petal sieved the incoming cosmic radiation for tachyons, focusing any identified signals to receptors on the planet below, where they could be translated and interpreted by the compliant AI Carloman had installed in the depths of this mountain. The detector’s construction had been a huge achievement that had required the resources of an entire world. And that was one of the reasons Carloman had decided to hide the control centre down there in this old bomb shelter. The populace resented the derailing of their fragile economy, but the instruments were safe down there. These catacombs had been designed to survive the fall of civilisation: they would be enough to keep the tachyon detector and his followers safe from civil unrest.
Carloman gave a final speech to his assembled team. They numbered a couple of hundred devotees, and Amahle couldn’t help trying to guess which were aware of their reincarnations and which had simply been convinced of the justness of this cause. Carloman stood on the lip of a fountain in a communal garden. Orange fish drowsed in the water behind him as he spoke. “Compadres,” he said. “We have come a long way. When we first excavated these caverns, we were posing as contractors constructing a refuge for the planet’s political leaders. Then we became the political leaders. We put the entire economy on a war footing and told the populace the truth about the conflict in which we’re embroiled.”
He reached for Amahle’s hand. She reluctantly let him, recalling when he’d been Jacob Raymond DeVinesse, the poet on Farshire, who held his audience of estate workers enthralled with his energy and with the urgency of how their lives could be so much more.
“And now,” Carloman said. “The Light Chaser has arrived, bringing us the weapon to end this conflict and erase it from history.”
The crowd cheered. Amahle felt mildly embarrassed. This had been their private war for so long, she didn’t quite know how to cope with her new public status. But . . . this too will pass.
“And not only the weapon,” Carloman continued, “but also the delivery system. Her great, ancient ship, the tool of the oppressor, will be turned against them.”
His fingers were intertwined with hers, just as their souls were bound together. She had come so far to find him again. They were quite literally going to be spending the rest of their lives together.
A band played. People partied like it was the end of the world. Fireworks crackled over the forest canopy. And then they bade their farewells. They went back to the landing field and took her shuttle back up to the Mnemosyne. Stepping aboard felt strange with no AI or cat to greet her.
“Are you sure about this?” she said.
Carloman put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ve come this far. We’ve sailed across this universe for thousands of years. And during all that time, the only thing I’ve always been certain about . . .” His fingers rose to touch her cheek. “ . . . has been you.”
His dark eyes burned into her. Somewhere in their depths, Amahle sensed the man she had forgotten—the love of her artificially extended single life. Her husband, who had ignored the until death do you part clause in their marriage contract and instead pursued her through lifetimes of hardship and deprivation.
She took the proffered hand and kissed his knuckles.
“Then, let’s do this.”
“Yes.”
* * *
The Mnemosyne turned its back on cloud-shrouded Zenia and powered up its negative mass drive. At close to lightspeed, the voyage to its target star would take fifteen years. When it arrived, it would destroy itself in order to deliver the strangelet it carried to the heart of that sun, killing The Exalted before they had chance to evolve, before even their homeworld had a chance to form from an accretion disk. An act of destruction which would liberate the human race from its artificially imposed stasis.
Walking through the familiar corridors of her home, Amahle smiled to herself. Fifteen years was a long time. They might be facing certain death—and chronological erasure—but she and Carloman had time. Time to get to know each other again. More time together than they’d ever had before.
Time to say hello.
Time to say goodbye.
When she reached the bridge, stars beyond count blazed on the display. But one star was swathed by angry scarlet icons: their target star, into which the Mnemosyne would hurl itself like a lance thrown into a dragon’s face.
Amahle let out a breath. That moment would be the end of this long, tragic life. But there would be others to be had amid a new timeline where The Domain wouldn’t even be a memory for most. Liberated humans would arise from the ashes of this reality and build a society which could advance towards its full potential. For the next fifteen years, she’d be able to watch her death approaching, the seconds of her existence ticking inexorably down to zero, but for some reason, the thought didn’t bother her.
She had a purpose now.
She had Carloman.
Always.