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Bright Star Cultures


Novakkad, the principal city of a planet fifty light-years from Nova Babylonia, had always been a strange place. More than anywhere else Lydia had visited along her family’s trade route, it had struck her as not just different but foreign. Its people were either much darker or much paler than the standard Second Sphere swarthy melange. They wore tall hats of fur in winter and shallow wide-brimmed cones of straw on their heads in summer. Their priests investigated the nature of fire with crude spectroscopes; their philosophers worshiped geometry. Their accents were thick and various, and their dialect of Trade Latin had a way of mutating unpredictably. Claiming that their city was older than Nova Babylonia, they implausibly attributed certain gigantic prehuman and prehominid ruins in its vicinity to their ancestors. Their own buildings were peculiar, tall wedges with sharply sloped roofs curving to ornate overhanging scoops of eave, like tents of brick and tile. In other ways too the city had the aspect of an encampment, clustered along the shore of a freshwater lake the size of an inland sea at the edge of an endless plain on whose grass the Novakkadians raised vast herds of horses and cattle. On the far side of the lake the glaciers of a jagged mountain range replenished its deep cold waters, within which fish shoaled by the million, some growing to lengths of ten meters and weights of three tons. Hardwoods from the lower slopes of the far mountains were harvested by the gigants and floated across the lake in such quantities that from the sky they looked like mats.

Strange and foreign, but more so this time.

Lydia walked, in native high boots and quilted clothes, through the chill streets and alleys of the autumn market. The air smelled of horse shit and fish roe, with tangs of woodsmoke and unfamiliar polymers. Crowds of several species of people and herds of beasts swirled in slow crosscurrents from one end of the market to the other, like a demonstration of the theory of price. Stalls filled the sidewalks, banners hung across them advertising their wares—new sharp stuff, glittery and colorful and strange; machines that talked and sang, clothes whose fabric and work seemed worth ten times the asking price, ceramic knives that sliced through meat like fruit and bone like gristle, calculators with little glass screens and unfeasible capacities, radios small and cheap enough to hang on key rings and that blatted forth songs whose words were hard to make out but whose tinny tunes made your feet tap and fingers snap along. Medicines were offered soberly by respectable-looking stall-holders with huge companies behind them—the same names and seals cropped up again and again—whose small print offered things that only witches dared promise anywhere else. The local fishing trade had been taken over, completely it seemed, by a new kind of gigant—tall heavy people with black sleek hair all over them and big mournful eyes. These were far from the strangest newcomers here.

Saurs for a start, saurs like none she’d ever seen, all the prickly dignity of their species dropped like an old cloak as they hustled and schemed, haggled and yelled, and accompanied by swarms of their offspring, some so young they still had their hatchling yellow feathers, others toddling along, tiny under their big and heavy heads, the older ones scooting about and screaming or whistling signals between and among their gangs.

The human traders were dark-skinned men in pajamas and turbans, or women wrapped around in long, broad single strips of silk. Their ships stood outside of town. She could see dozens of them, beyond where the streets ran out into stalls and pens, parked on long jointed legs that went with their shape, which was something like enormous flies: faceted panes of glass at the double cockpit front, stubby swept-back delta wings along the top of the tubby, segmented fuselage. The huge insectile machines sank a little in the trampled mire, their gravity fields evidently switched off. Large and many though they were, though, they couldn’t account for all the goods she’d seen in the market, let alone the stuff in the city’s downtown shops. And there were no new factories. Where did the goods come from?

Where did the traders come from?

“Chandrakhar,” one of them told her. Gold-canine grin, jerk of thumb over shoulder. “Couple light-years back.” Nod down at the stall. “Mingulayan opticals, lady? Best price in town, you see for yourself.”

“Thanks, maybe later.” She wandered off. Chandrakhar? Never heard of it. It wasn’t on the trade route, close though it might be. This was a whole new culture that had been in the Second Sphere for gods knew how long, which the kraken ships from Nova Terra had never visited. And they spoke English with the broad Mingulayan accent.

But that wasn’t the strangest thing, no, not at all.

“What are . . . they?” she asked a saur who sat behind a stall covered with shiny disks the size of sequins. You put them in machines. He wore headphones covered with yellow fur, from which the rocking music trickled irritatingly. He read her lips, followed her glance.

“Oh, they’re Multis,” he said. “Short for Multipliers. It’s what they call themselves.” He leaned across the stall, disengaged a blaring phone from his ear, and spoke behind his hand in a low voice. “They’re aliens, you know.”

He rocked back, small shoulders shaking, lips stretched, the big ellipses of his eyes narrowed to slits. He found something funny, but Lydia didn’t see it. She knew they were aliens, and they certainly did multiply. The strange thing was that nobody here seemed to mind, or notice. The eight-limbed furry folk scampered and swung, overhead and underfoot everywhere, common as monkeys in a ruined jungle temple, and as unregarded. Except when they ran stalls themselves.

She stopped in front of one, and the Multi perched on two hands at the far side of the table made little model spaceships in bottles from wood and chips of stone. It held one model in front of it, like a template, and with its other five hands it made more, like magic: one moment there would be a fistful of wood and gravel, then something at the ends of the arms would blur and hum, and a minute later the hands would open on a beautiful little object, like an insect in its perfection as much as its shape. And on it would go to the next.

The thing was, it was making them inside the bottles.

Other miracles went on elsewhere. At the busiest stalls of the Multis, people were being cured—or more precisely, mended. People shuffled up and strode off; were carried up, and walked away. Lydia distinctly saw a man walk up with one healthy eye and leave with two. It was like the miracle stories of the gospels of the Jesus of the Christians, and it was happening in plain sight and without fuss. The patients were delighted and grateful, but not surprised, not wondering and glorifying the gods.

Lydia stepped around a corner and into an open space where cattle awaiting slaughter inside a fenced corral regarded her suspiciously. She powered up her ship-to-shore radio and raised Voronar. The ship was thousands of kilometers away, over the ocean where the kraken refreshed themselves and did their own deals, but the skiffs were parked along the lakeside quays and warehouses with the cargo for hominid and saur customers.

“Where are you?” the saur asked.

“Behind the market,” she said. “I’m seeing things you wouldn’t believe.”

“I do not doubt it,” came the dry reply. “The question your father wishes me to ask, however, is—are you safe?”

“Yes, I’m fine. Why doesn’t he ask me himself?”

“He is in a meeting and can only communicate by buzz codes,” said Voronar. “I shall reassure him. The city Elders are plying him with something he refers to as horse piss, but he retains his sobriety admirably.”

“Good,” said Lydia. “I’ll endeavor to do the same with my sanity.” She smiled at an anxious crackle. “That was a joke, Voronar.”

She signed off and walked on through the ragged fringe of the market, toward the alien—no, that wasn’t what was strange—toward the human ships.


“You’re not fucking local,” the boy told her, after a few minutes of ostensibly idle chat. “You’re a goddam Nova Babylonian babe, you are.”

His teeth were as perfect as his language was foul: Mingulayan English with Croatan swear words, blasphemous and obscene. He lounged on the lower steps of the ship’s ladder, torn between pride in the responsibility of guarding the ship—a revolver that looked too big for his hands was stuck in his belt—and boredom at having to stay there. Blue-black straight hair flopped over his eyes.

“ ‘A goddam Nova Babylonian babe,’ ” Lydia repeated, grinning. “You certainly give good lines. You should keep notes of them, to use after your balls drop.”

The crudity put him at his ease. He leaned back against the treads in a way that would have been uncomfortable but for his bulky fur jacket.

“What are you snooping around after, anyway?” The question came out curious, not suspicious.

Lydia shrugged. “Just checking things out,” she said. “We only came in today, and we’re not sure how things are. Bit of a change since two hundred years ago.”

The boy laughed. “Changed a fucking hell of a lot in four, I can tell you that.”

“Oh?”

“We were one of the first ships in here,” he said. “Four years ago.” He wiped a hand over his eyes, as though tired. “Fucking last week, it feels like. Nah, maybe a month. Me Da and Ma, they made a real fast turnaround back on Chandrakhar, loading up new gear. And even then, shit . . . ”

He paused. “I didn’t ought to be telling you this.”

“We’re not your competition,” said Lydia. “But let me guess. By the time you got here, you were just ahead of the game. All the stuff that was new when you loaded it on Chandrakhar was already being made locally here.”

He gave her a look of grudging respect. “Damn near right,” he said. “We’re ahead on a few lines, but some things you can’t even give away. The only thing that’ll pull this jaunt into the black is passengers.” He sounded as though in his eleven or so years he’d learned all the weight of a merchant’s risks. “Fucking Multis,” he added, with startling venom; then, more reflectively: “Clever little monkeys, though.”

“What have the Multis got to do with it?”

He looked at her as if she had asked where babies came from. “They multiply,” he said, “things. They make stuff. They make. Fucking. Everything.”


Esias felt the tickle of the radio’s buzz against his ankle and counted. Three dashes. Lydia was safe. That was some reassurance but, as he sat naked on a wooden bench in a hot-room with three men, a woman, and an eight-armed, eight-eyed green ball of fur that persistently felt him up, he could have done with more. The radio was in a puddle of towel at his feet and he suspected the heat or humidity would soon short it out. He took a squig of the glutinous local drink from the vacuum flask his hosts had provided. Its chill and its high alcohol content were all that it had to recommend it. The Novakkadians called it khiss. Their listing of its ingredients had started with fermented mare’s milk and stopped, at Esias’s urgent request, when it reached dinosaur-egg yolk. You could live on it indefinitely, they’d told him. There were worse things than death, he’d not told them.

The Elders were the biggest local business people, as well as hereditary chiefs of the herding clans. Esias recognized their names from their ancestors, with many generations of whom he had dealt: Viln, Vladimiro, Sargonsson, Elanom. They were all old but in good shape, and had matted hair to their waists. There was something troubling about their hair, but Esias couldn’t see what it was. The lights were dim and when the room wasn’t full of herb-scented steam his eyes stung with salty sweat.

It was customary for the Elders to meet the Traders here in the Traders’ Lodge, the lakeside house set aside for starship merchants and their crews. It was likewise normal for them to do their preliminary deals in the hot-room over a melting ice slab spread with fish roe and other delicacies and accompanied by flasks of khiss. For them to get through the preliminaries so quickly, and to have virtually agreed to his opening price, was not normal at all. Usually the haggling and the drinking continued to the point where the following day’s hangover would be compounded by his regret at not having been more sober for the handshake.

The presence of the Multiplier was disturbing, but in an oddly abstract way. It should have bothered him more than it did. This was one of the octopod alien invaders that Volkov had warned about, and it was in here and thousands of its like were out there, and somehow he was not alarmed by it. It skittered about the room, its multiple manipulators touching faces and heads and skin. Esias found its feathery, tickling touch all the more uncomfortable for its being physically pleasant, warming and relaxing the muscles like a brief massage. The Elders ignored it, apart from moving slightly and with visible enjoyment—again as though being massaged—when it touched them. It had said nothing, though it was, he understood, both articulate and intelligent. The Elders had not introduced it, explaining that the aliens did not have names in the form of sounds. Their names were written in molecules, and if he were more familiar with it he would recognize the distinctive odor that spelled out its chemical signature.

The woman, Sargonsson, stood up and stepped over to the ice block. She picked up a sliver of roe on a shell and sat down beside Esias, who moved a little to make room for her. Despite her weathered and lined face, and the slightly bandy legs that a life in the saddle had left her, she was a fine figure of a woman, shapely and lithe, gleaming with steam and sweat. She smiled politely and scooped up roe on the back of a fingernail and licked it with the tip of her tongue.

“We are almost done,” she said. “Your cargo will fetch a good price.”

“If it is as we agreed,” said Esias. The phrase was formal, just short of a handshake.

“We have another deal we can make with you,” said Sargonsson, settling back into the corner. “The goods we have exchanged so far are the same as you and our fathers’ fathers’ fathers have traded. The hardwoods and the fresh roe, the strong herbs and the fine brasswork. Likewise with you.”

Sargonsson glanced around, to nods from the others and a small flailing of hands from the alien. As she did so Esias noticed what had troubled him about her hair. The length of it between her ear and her butt was a salt-and-pepper grey; the first few centimeters of more recent growth out from her scalp were a pure glossy brown. Her head was crawling with lice.

Esias scratched his own scalp. Turning back, the woman saw his reflex and smiled. He lowered his hand, embarrassed.

“They don’t itch,” she said.

She put a finger to her temple and one of the creatures crawled onto her fingernail, which she held out for inspection. Perched there was not a louse but a spider—no, a tiny version of the alien. It scuttled up her arm and disappeared again into her hair.

“Ah,” said Esias with false heartiness, “so that’s why they’re called Multipliers!”

“It is not,” said Sargonsson. Again she glanced around; again they nodded. The alien climbed onto the bench opposite and crouched there. The mouth on the side that faced Esias had no teeth. Vladimiro threw another ladle of water over the coals. The alien’s breathing was loud.

“They are called Multipliers because they can make copies of things. Of almost anything, given the right materials. They can certainly make copies of your Nova Babylonian manufactures. Your way of trading is obsolete. We in the Bright Star Cultures do not need to have merchant clans who live on the ships. We can make short journeys of a few years, because we set our own courses. That is how the Bright Star Cultures have spread from Mingulay to Novakkad, without anyone’s having to travel more than a small part of the distance, or knowing how to navigate the jump.”

“Yes, yes,” said Esias. “I expected that, and I’ve made plans for—”

“Because of that,” the woman continued relentlessly, “we need the long life, the very long life like the saurs. The Multipliers gave the saurs long life long ago, and they have given the same to us.” She smiled. “Or so they say. We have no way of knowing, yet. But I will say I feel better than I did four years ago.”

She wiggled her shoulders. Esias stared at her, for the first time shaken out of his detached acceptance. “This is astounding news!”

Sargonsson turned her shoulder rotations into a shrug. “They offer us more than that,” she said. “They have given us immortality.”

Esias took a gulp of cold slime that burned in his throat on the way down and glowed in his belly.

“That is impossible,” he said. “Not even the gods are immortal.”

Sargonsson held out a hand to the alien. “Tell him,” she said.

“In your body,” it wheezed, “there are patterns of information that have instructed the building and instruct the working of your body. Some of them are older than the gods, older than the light from the visible stars. Some of my memories are older still. I remember seeing with four of my eyes the galaxy you call the Foamy Wake, and with my other four eyes the one that you call Andromeda. Yet never have I traveled between them. I remember scuttling through the grass by the lake outside, also. I am four years old.”

It hopped down from the bench. “We can make you live long, by changing the instructions of your body. To do that, we must read them. By reading them we read your memories, and they can be shared among us, and will be among some of us until our line dies, as are those of the Novakkadians. In that sense we can offer you immortality.”

Esias jumped as the radio on the floor buzzed against his skin, once, long. It signaled an urgent call back to the skiffs. He could hear a commotion and running feet in the rest of the house. It did not seem to matter.

“How can you read us?” he asked.

“That is simple,” sighed the Multiplier. It raised two of its hands. Fuzz formed around the fingertips.

“The smallest of the smallest of us are too small for you to see. They are small enough for you to breathe in like smoke. They can travel through your body and read you.”

“Travel—through—my—body?”

“You hardly notice it,” said Sargonsson. “It’s like a slight fever for a day or two, nothing more. And then any that have grown larger crawl out of your ears and nostrils and . . . ”

Esias was shaking as hard as the insistently buzzing radio. The Multiplier flicked its hands. Esias stared as a cloud of green motes, some like dandelion seeds, some like pollen, wafted through the steamy air toward him.

He jumped up and ran to the door, bashed it open and rushed along the rickety wooden jetty and dived into the lake. The shock cleared his head instantly. What had passed in the hot-room seemed like a dream. He swam down through the clear cold water until it filled his sinuses, his mouth, his ears. He shot to the surface gasping and spitting and swam at a racing crawl, plunging and surfacing again and again, until a skiff appeared above him. The ladder came down, and he snatched it and hauled himself up and inside. The hatch closed behind him. He floundered for a moment, then stood up, dripping. His wife Claudia, two of his daughters, several nephews, and a saur pilot stared at him.

“What happened to you?” Claudia asked.

Esias shook his head. “Later,” he said. His gaze swept the wraparound viewscreen. The skiff was rising fast, Novakkad tilted and dwindling below, an echelon of skiffs behind them. He padded across the corky floor and around the engine fairing to stand behind the saur. “What’s going on?”

“The ship is leaving,” said the saur. “We will rendevous in the atmosphere above the ocean.”

“Why?”

For a ship to make an unscheduled departure was unprecedented. The pilot shook his head, not turning from the screen and the incomprehensible display below it. “The kraken decided, minutes ago. There has been no time.”

“Have we got everyone?” Esias asked.

“Safely lifted,” said Claudia. “Everyone in the lodge has checked in.”

“And Lydia?”

“Lydia?”

“She was out in the town on a mission—”

Claudia paled instantly. “What were you thinking—” She shook her head. “We must turn back!”

“Yes, yes, turn back!” urged Esias.

“If we do, we shall not make the rendevous,” said the pilot.

Esias clenched his fists at his sides. “We can catch another.” He knew the other merchants’ schedules to the hour. “The Delibes will be here in seventeen days.”

The pilot glanced from the clear sky in front to the crowded display on the control board. He read something in its complex glyphs.

“Ah,” he said. He turned to Esias. “Do you wish to join the Bright Star Cultures?”

Claudia looked bemused and distraught.

It would not be so bad, Esias thought frantically. People were not subsumed. They had free will. The Multipliers were friendly. Lydia was his number seven daughter. The spiders crawled on the scalp and their tiny offspring swam through the blood and the brain, and crawled out. His shudder was involuntary even as he opened his mouth to speak.

“You may,” said the pilot. “I do not.”

Esias stood still, shivering and unseeing. The skiff flew on.


Three comets lit the sky. Out here in the fields, the lights from the market and the town made the silhouettes of the parked ships stark and monstrous. It was dark enough to see the jagged outline of the mountains against the stars, and the comets’ converging tails, a chevron pointed at the sunken sun. Novakkad had no moon, and only solar tides stirred its ocean. In the Second Sphere, this made it a backwater.

Dim reddish lights moved here and there in the broad meadow, barely raising a whinny from the resting horses. The lights came on only for a moment, illuminating complex wheel-mounted arrangements of brass and wood, with long tubes poking up like antiaircraft guns. Around these astrolabes the ships’ navigators fussed and muttered, plotting the positions of nearby stars. Now and again a green glow from the screen of a handheld calculator would light up an intent face from below.

Lydia wandered quietly among them, unregarded. Once or twice she heard a low cry of “Hey, Multi! Give us a hand!” and saw a Multi scurry over and poke a limb into a piece of machinery. Other than that they took no part in the observations or calculations. They could make and adjust things, but they did not seem to know everything already, the way the saurs and the krakens knew, or gave the impression that they knew.

Lydia had given a lot of thought to the aliens in the hours since she had been stranded. If nothing else it served to distract her from her plight while she wandered around, looking and thinking. She had heard the evacuation call but no response to her frantic queries had cut through the babble on the radio, so she had no idea why the clan had fled. The only message she had picked up was a crackly, apologetic, anguished good-bye from her father, who told her that the krakens were taking the ship back to Nova Terra and could brook no delay. No explanation was given, and she had no time to ask. It must be something urgent and fearful for them to leave her behind, but she could see nothing so fearful in the city. It was amazing how quickly one got used to the aliens. There was something soothing about their scent, and their variously colored fur and constant activity and curiosity had a charm that evaporated any associations with spiders. What humans toiled for in factories and saurs spun in the manufacturing plant, the Multipliers made for fun, if they could be so persuaded. Which, she had gathered, was not always easy. Their jittery attention span made humans seem like saurs.

She made her way back to the market and bought with the last few local coins in her pocket a fast meal of beef in a spicy sauce parceled in some kind of thin bread and munched it as she walked back to the lodge. It was a big stone building with a sharp-pointed wooden roof. She flicked on all the lights she could find and wandered through the rooms, disconsolate. Everywhere were the strewn signs of hasty evacuation. The skiffs’ landing-feet had left deep prints in the soggy lawn. The hot-room, its door swinging open, was cold and stank of warm seafood and spilt khiss. Her father’s clothes lay folded outside. She did not touch them, and started clearing the decayed repast and sluicing the room with a wall-mounted hose.

Gradually this displacement activity calmed her. She felt let down rather than abandoned. The next ship was due in just over a fortnight. There was always money in the lodge if you knew where to look. She worked her way through the house, tidying things away. The servants would not be in until just before the Delibes arrived, just as they had been in the previous day, before the de Tenebres. Her ramble ended in the room where her own luggage lay on a freshly made-up bed. At the top of the case lay the Nova Babylonian robe she had neatly folded, in her own hopeful yesterday. She would wash, put it on, go downstairs and put out some of the lights, make herself a drink and go to bed. Why not?

She was sitting at an empty table in the big dining hall, sipping a long voka, when she found herself feeling more cheerful than even the bath and the drink could account for. At the same time she had a feeling she was being watched. She turned to the corridor. A green-furred Multiplier came clicking along the flagstones, into the room. It hopped onto the end of the table, hands spread, and padded along the tabletop, then clambered onto the seat opposite her.

“Do not be alarmed,” it said.

She wasn’t.


Lydia stood alone at the end of the long pier at Novakkad docks, the one reserved for the star merchants. Her suitcase rested beside her, she had her traveling clothes on, and she had a watch in one hand and a radio in the other. High nimbus made the sky silvery and hard to look at. When she glanced back at the watch, it was hard to read, but she kept looking, from the watch to the sky, from the sky to the watch. At last, and right on time, she saw the dark speck, high above, far away up the lake.

She stuck the watch in her pocket and picked up the suitcase and walked to the top of the ladder. The man in the dory looked up at her.

“Now,” she said, handing the case down.

The passenger was meant to sit facing the steersman, but she crouched the other way. The electric engine whined and the boat pulled out from the pier. The Delibes’ starship was now a solid black, now a wavery worm in the heat haze. She waited until she was sure it was within range and switched on the radio, preset to the hailing sequence.

“Lydia de Tenebre to the Delibes ship, come in please.”

There was a long pause, filled with static. The ship was low now, about a kilometer away. The place where Lydia expected it to set down was a few hundred meters ahead of her.

“Ship to de Tenebre, receiving you. What do you want?” The voice sounded irritated and puzzled. A radio operator was always on standby on an approach, and almost never had anything to do.

“De Tenebre to ship. I would like to come on board as soon as possible.”

“Huh? Sorry, I mean, yes, that’s not a problem, but why? Are you in some—”

More static.

“Ship to de Tenebre. Sorry, I’ve just had a message. There’s an emergency, I don’t know what it is. The kraken want to pull out!” The voice rose in an indignant, alarmed, disbelieving squawk.

Now the ship stood just two hundred meters in front of her, a stationary, impossible object, half a mile of streamlined cylinder glowing with Novakkadian symbols and words, the water bending beneath its shimmering fields.

“I know that,” said Lydia, with a calm she didn’t feel. She had half-expected something like this. “You’re safe enough though, you can wait a few minutes to take me on board.”

“Hold on a minute.”

At the same moment as the radio at the other end clicked off, the boat’s engine died. Lydia whirled.

“What’s the problem?”

The doryman smiled placatingly and waved ahead. “I can’t go on—look.”

Lydia looked forward again and saw what she had missed in her attention to the ship. Between the boat and the ship the pointed front end of an enormous mat of logs floated on some fast current, filling the space like an entering wedge. The tugboat that had been riding herd on it had evidently cast loose on sight of the incoming starship and was now speeding away on a diagonal course at, as the phrase had it, a rate of knots.

“Can’t we get around it?”

It was a stupid question. “No,” said the doryman.

The angled leading edge of the mat was coming closer; the doryman was loyally holding their relative position with small bursts of power to the motor. The side of the mat would pass just in front of the bow.

The radio crackled. “Ship to de Tenebre. The saurs say the kraken agree to hold our position for ten minutes or so. Come on board as soon as you can.”

“Can you send out a skiff?”

She overheard some background consultation, indistinct but loud.

“No, sorry.” The voice sounded genuinely apologetic. “The saurs are . . . well, they’re a bit paranoid, between you and me. I’ve never seen them . . . like this.”

“Okay, thanks, I’ll do what I can,” said Lydia. “Hold the door.”

She put the radio away and looked over her shoulder at the doryman. “How long will this thing take to pass?”

He shaded his eyes and looked up the lake. “Half an hour, maybe more.”

“Burning hell.”

Lydia half-stood, gazing at the logs that drifted by a couple of meters in front of her. The mat was held together by cables around the outermost logs; within that kilometers-long loop the logs were (another phrase literalizing before her eyes) log-jammed, wallowing and bumping like a school of whales in a bay. The trunks were huge, up to fifty meters long and two or three meters on the bole. As she stood there, her balance sharpened by her long familiarity with small boats, Lydia suddenly saw the logs as the backs of a galloping herd of wild horses, and an image of leaping from back to back (the neighing, the dust, the roar of a thousand hooves) was real behind her eyes.

She motioned the boat forward and the steersman, perhaps not understanding, complied. The nearest log was a meter and a half away. Lydia picked up her case and put one foot on the prow.

“No!” yelled the doryman.

Lydia jumped—it was hardly more than a step, but the boat moved backward behind her—onto the wet rough bark. Then she sprang to the next, and the next, dancing across the rolling logs (the bucking backs), from one to the next before each had time to roll further (to notice), with her case (her frantically-held pack of food) a burden but at the same time a help in keeping her balance.

Halfway to the ship, she slipped. She crashed forward, the arm with the case thrown over the top of the log. Her side thumped hard against the bark, her legs in very cold water to the knee. There was no pain but the breath was knocked out of her. She saw the crushing logs converge (the pounding hooves trample) and her whole body convulsed in one complex movement she could never have intended, and she was astraddle the log and then standing, running along its back to regain her balance, and then she leaped sideways.

A minute later her last leap took her through the open deck door of the ship, where her heel skidded on slopped water and she fell hard and slid four meters on her arse and banged up against a bulkhead. Everything hurt. She sat and stared at her grazed palms and cried.

The deck door shut behind her like a snapping clam.


Saurs glared at her, then turned away. The human clan members looked at her with compassion and amazement. A kid helped her to her feet.

“How did you do that?”

She looked at her hands. The grazes were already fading. Bits of dirt and bark, expelled from under her skin, flaked away. She dusted her palms and smiled.

“Just luck.”

The Delibes were kind; they took her to the senior family’s skiff and helped her into dry clothing and gave her hot drinks, even though they were themselves in upheaval over their landing’s being aborted. The krakens had set a course back to Nova Terra. The Delibes’ route only intersected the de Tenebres’ at some points, of which Novakkad was one; they had left Nova Terra a few weeks before the de Tenebres had arrived, so they knew nothing of Volkov and his dire warnings and wild projects, and little of the historically recent arrivals on Mingulay. Lydia spent the hour before the lightspeed jump filling them in. But they were more interested in the Multipliers, and the Bright Star Cultures.

“This is bad for us,” said Anthony Delibes, the clan patriarch. “It is a new sphere, intersecting the Second Sphere and supplanting all our routes. The saurs and the kraken are terrified. They seem too shocked even to talk. But—”

He hesitated, stroking his beard. “In itself it does not seem bad. It is not the invasion and war that your Volkov feared.”

Lydia nodded eagerly. “I feared much worse myself. But what I’ve seen on Novakkad is very different from what I expected. The species we know already are mingling much more than before, and the two new species are just”—she spread her hands—“accepted.”

She did not tell them all she knew. She could remember touching a carbon atom, and how its springy, slippery feel matched the sight of its wavelength in the spectrum of a supernova; the dissolution of death, and the wild joy of jaws closing on a deer’s throat; flying with wings, and swimming with fins. These and myriad other fragmentary memories, random thoughts, equations solved and principles understood, floated in her mind as disparate bright shards, which someday and with untold effort she might assemble to a mirror, and see in it a new self.

Until she saw that new self, she could talk about none of this. She felt restless, and excused herself to take a walk around the ship. She was at the navigator’s pool at the moment of the light-speed jump.


The navigator had recoiled to the side of the pool. Gouts of sepia blackened the water. This was not the normal response to a jump. Within a couple of seconds, alarms sounded. The saurs and humans of the ship’s complement rushed to evidently prearranged posts. Lydia scrambled to the nearest skiff. Only the pilot was in it.

“What’s happening?”

“I do not know,” the pilot said. “We are definitely at our destination, but Nova Terra bears . . . an unfamiliar aspect. And we have been hailed, perhaps even challenged. The kraken are disturbed.”

“Indeed they are,” Lydia said. “Which suggest that we should be terrified.”

The saur himself was trembling slightly. “I am awaiting instructions,” he said. “I am ready to die.”

Lydia regretted her flippant tone. “Shall we look outside?”

The pilot palmed the controls. Lydia scanned the familiar landmasses of Nova Terra.

“Look at Nova Babylonia!” she said. “The air’s filthy!”

“Yes,” said the saur, as though something more important had been missed.

Lydia felt an odd sensation on the back of her neck. She turned and saw a huge shape glide—as it seemed—above them, then come to a halt in front of them.

“It is we who are moving,” explained the saur. “The other craft is in Trojan orbit.”

“How far away is it?” Lydia asked.

“About a kilometer.”

The scale of the thing snapped into focus. Toroidal, rotating about a stationary hub, bristling with antennae and what Lydia guessed were armaments, and accompanied by a dozen or so small vessels with long jointed legs.

“Gods above,” she said. “It’s bigger than we are.”

“Orbital fort,” said the pilot. “Keeping station on the jump destination.”

Lydia had not known that jump destinations were at Trojan points.

One of the small craft burned off a brief boost and scooted toward the starship, closing the gap in seconds. Its retro-flare almost overloaded the screen’s brightness controls. As Lydia blinked away afterimages she saw its rockets make a few smaller nudges. It vanished below her line of sight, apparently docking. The saur fingered a control and the view cut instantly to the side of the starship, on which the craft resembled a small spider clinging to a large pipe. The docking bays, Lydia noticed with interest, were compatible.

“We have been boarded,” said the saur. His tone carried a faint note of melancholy.

“Can you switch to an internal view?”

He shook his head. “I have no access to the ship’s internal sensors.”

“No,” Lydia said patiently. Saurian thought ran more deeply than the human, and therefore in deeper ruts. “But you do have access to the skiff’s external—”

“Ah.”

In a moment a band of the skiff’s hull had become as glass. On the wall across from the skiff, beside the equivalent rack of skiffs, a stairway zigzagged to the interior deck near the navigator’s pool. Three space-suited figures trooped down it, heavy-duty plasma rifles at the ready. As they turned on a landing, their open helmets revealed human faces.

The pilot stared at them and turned to Lydia, and she could see by his expression that he had never seen and barely imagined their like. Their clumsy suits were of obvious human manufacture, their rocket maneuvers were perfect; their fort resembled one of the space stations Volkov had told her about, the kind the Germans had imagined and the Americans never built, perhaps because by the 1950s the Americans already understood that deep space would never be theirs. They’d abandoned it, too hastily, to the Russians, not realizing that it didn’t belong to the skiffs’ little grey pilots either. Knowing nothing of this, the Russians were the first to meet the galaxy’s real masters. The Nova Terrans in the past century had founded a human space presence more formidable than anything even the Russians had attempted, and they had done so in a full knowledge of its possible consequences. Lydia had to admire them for that. She was afraid of them, but she admired them, and she took a certain malicious joy in the saur’s discomfiture at this unexpected display of human capability.

“What are they?” the saur asked.

“Cosmonauts,” Lydia said.


It turned out they called themselves astronauts.

Lydia returned to the deck and found the senior Delibes had gathered there ahead of her. Anthony, his pugnacious jaw thrust forward, was making an effort to be polite.

“Naturally,” Lydia heard him say, “I share your concern for the security of the Republic. I assure you that nothing and nobody on this ship could compromise it. You have my word. I am a Member of the Electorate!”

“So’m I,” said the cosmonaut who stood in the apex of the group. He gestured at the other two, a pace behind his shoulders. “So’re we all.”

“Ah!” The merchant smiled and relaxed. He held out his hand. “Welcome aboard, fellow citizens. Anthony Delibes, at your service, officers.”

“Thank you, citizen.” The cosmonaut returned the handshake, then jerked a thumb at his chest. “Astronaut Sarn’t Claudius Abenke; Astronauts Alexander Obikwe and Titus Adams. Space Defense Force of the Democratic Republic of New Babylon.”

“Oh, shit,” said Lydia, unable to stop herself.

The astronauts glowered at her; the Delibes turned, startled.

“You have a problem with that, citizen?” said Abenke.

“Volkov,” said Lydia.

The astronauts all looked uncomfortable. Abenke composed his features to a steadfast frown.

“Volkov is dead.”




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