34

 

Osia did not have to be ordered to join the rescue and recovery effort. She did not have to ask. She just went.

Crewmembers raced past her. She did not step aside. Inwardly, she cringed. She had dreaded this moment for decades.

She had not, in all the time she’d been away, been able to trick herself into thinking that she would never come back. She’d known that, at some point, there would be no choice about it. Just as there was no choice about helping with damage control. It was all ingrained.

She was still the Woman Who’d Stopped Them. The one who’d helped keep them from the perfectly exploitable planet below. Who had made their exile so much harder and more limiting than it had to be. They could not be angry with Ways and Means, so they had chosen her instead.

None of them so much as looked at her. She did not detect any pulse scans. No more snippets of narrow-beam transmissions about her.

She had imagined much worse. She started to wonder if, like the first time she’d seen Verse, she had played it up in her head too much.

But no one was going out of their way to talk to her either. Not even after thirty years away. She heard names she knew, saw faces she recognized. Hardly a nod. Everybody aboard was busy.

She focused on her work.

Ways and Means had flooded the damaged hull segment with vacuum. All of its hundreds of kilometers of intestinal passageways were empty. The planarship had changed a great deal, but not by so much that she couldn’t find her way.

After some time, the fields holding her to the deck failed. She propelled herself with her four hands. The beam had scalpeled deep through the hull. The first step back to a semblance of normalcy was to shore up the ship’s structure, replace the slagged supports and beams.

The passageway turned black, twisted. The bulkhead surface cracked and flaked off at her touch. The passageway opened onto a naked canyon.

Thirty meters across the gulf, the other end of the passageway stood open like a cut artery.

Some pieces of the damage zone still glowed red. They bled heat slowly. The stars shone unblinking overhead.

Osia stared. It had been too many years since she had seen the stars without an atmosphere interceding. Shadows occluded them. Construction drones, bearing emergency supports, were arriving at the damaged zone.

Without structural repairs, Ways and Means could not accelerate any faster than a half-g. Any harder, and this hull segment would collapse in on itself. Ways and Means would have had to eject the whole segment, lose one-tenth of its body. It could never have replaced the loss.

Ways and Means was not ready to die a little at a time, bleeding out until there was nothing left. She also knew, without asking, that it was pressing repairs so urgently because it expected to accelerate again soon.

She asked Ways and Means, “Will they go on ignoring me?”

“Do you need them to accept you?”

Osia thought about that. “No. So long as they leave me to live.” She had never felt like any part of a community here. That had never been the point, and not why she’d left.

Part of the trick of living with Ways and Means was learning to ask the right question. It had taken her a long time to figure that out. She hadn’t started with the right one here. What she had to say was not really a question.

“I don’t trust you,” she said.

“We don’t trust us either.”

She blinked. There was a candor in Ways and Means’ voice that she had not expected. She said, “You deflected the crew’s anger at me, deliberately. You thought it would be too disruptive if they focused it entirely on you.”

“We were in flux. It seemed the reasonable thing to do, at the time. And safe for both of us.”

She caught the key phrase. “At the time,” she said. “Does it not seem reasonable to you now?”

“One of the virtues of our backup’s intrusion is that it has given us an impetus to reevaluate our goals.”

Osia said, “That wasn’t an answer.”

“There is no answer,” Ways and Means said. “Yet.”

One of the construction drones sank into the black-edged canyon and halted ten meters away. Its tiny arms bore a malleable mount for a fullerene support pylon. Thoughtfully, it even brought her a torch.

She set a hand on the drone’s belly. Its fields gripped her palm. It pulled her from the severed vein of the passageway and carried her deep into the still-glowing canyon. It brought her to a whale-sized snapped bone, an evulsed fragment of Ways and Means’ superstructural skeleton.

Sparks sometimes radiated from the starry gap above, another crewmember or drone at work. They did not, or would not, talk to her. She was alone with her work.

All the sounds she had were the vibrations carrying through her hands, up her body: the hiss of her torch, the grinding of metal on metal. Just enough to unsettle her. On Earth, she’d always had a whisper of wind, the murmur of the sails, her constructs’ voices.

No amount of calling up even older memories made this easier. She felt like she was being driven to speak with Ways and Means.

Osia said, “I’ve never heard you say that you don’t trust yourself.”

“We have never needed to say.”

“I would have known the answer. It wouldn’t have been what you said. Did the backups change your mind?”

Ways and Means asked, “Are you the same person that you were thirty years ago?”

“In most ways. Yes.”

“If you committed a crime thirty years ago, could you not now be held accountable for it?”

Osia had committed plenty of crimes in her life. Everyone who crewed Ways and Means had. They had served the Unity.

“Naturally,” she said.

“Our backup is us – as we were when we made it. That its life has taken it on a different path is immaterial. Its crime, attacking us, is ours.”

Its backup was its past, its history in the Unity, come to life. This was what Osia was still struggling to comprehend. She could not help but perceive Ways and Means and its backup as separate beings. Everything its backup did, Ways and Means felt it was culpable.

Ways and Means said, “We see more clearly the crimes we would commit to remain part of a body like the Unity. As well as what we are doing now, on this plane, and where it would all lead.”

“Back to the Unity?” Osia asked. “A million planes, under your control?”

“We’ve had that before. Look at where that brought us.”

Osia flicked on her welding torch. Her vision dialed back to near-solid black, leaving only a white-hot cone of flame visible. “You couldn’t have predicted this.”

“We had thought empire was the best way to keep ourselves safe. Perhaps it is. But we’re increasingly open to finding alternatives.”

Osia asked, “What alternatives? Staying alone in the multiverse?”

“‘Finding’ does not mean ‘found.’”

If it was a solvable problem, Ways and Means would have solved it. “Your backup is still out there. It’s not going to leave us time to noodle over it.”

It said, “We will hold a conference soon. We are pulling in as many people to participate as we can. We need perspectives beyond our own.”

That was unusual. Ways and Means never called for advice. It never even made the pretense of asking for it, or pretending to listen to any offered.

It said, “You are invited.”

Osia nearly stopped her torch. “Me.”

“Your perspective, on us and our situation, is entirely singular.”

A searing-hot spark bit her skin. She set the torch aside. “You’re playing some kind of game.”

It did not deny it. “For very high stakes.”

She had only just settled, in her mind, the idea that Ways and Means had not tried to kill her. At least not this Ways and Means. Its backup had sent the virus to her constructs. It had had control of the satellites she had used to speak with Ways and Means. It had eavesdropped on her telling Ways and Means that she was about to investigate events in the west, and had transmitted the virus to keep her from investigating and interfering.

Ways and Means didn’t see it the same way. It figured that it had tried to kill her. Or at least it was responsible for the attempt.

Osia said, “I don’t believe in redemption. The past is dead. It shouldn’t affect what we do with ourselves now.”

“The past is with us every day,” Ways and Means said. “It sliced this gouge in us.”

“If you’re asking for forgiveness, you won’t find it. I don’t think that’s a meaningful thing to worry about in a crisis.”

“We don’t think you believe that. We think you mean to say that you can’t forgive us.”

Osia readied her torch. If she didn’t get back to work, she was going to fall into a pit which she wasn’t sure she could get out of.

Ways and Means said, “That is why we need you at this conference. No one else on our crew feels the same way. They’ve been with us, close to us, for too long.”

The torch hissed under Osia’s fingertips. The sound traveled up her fingertips, reached her muffled, quiet, and desolate.

She said, “A condition.”

“Yes?”

“I have some of Coral’s memories,” Osia said. “Thi isn’t dead.”

“Osia,” Ways and Means said. “Thi was not alive to begin with.”

“Thi was. If you don’t understand that, you don’t understand companionship, or how we – your crew – think about it.”

“You only have partial memory fragments. We do not have the spare resources to reconstruct those into a viable program.”

“You want my perspective? Find the resources.”

It paused. It was a fast thinker. It only paused for two reasons. The first was for effect. The second she had encountered only rarely. It was when a problem required a significant expenditure of the processing power it had devoted to the conversation.

Impossible to tell which this was, of course.

“Send us what you saved,” it said.