First there was a man named Winston Duarte. And then there wasn’t.
The last moment had been banal. He’d been in his private study at the heart of the State Building, sitting on his divan. His desk—Laconian rainwood, with a grain like sedimentary rock—had an inset screen showing the thousand different reports vying for his attention. The clockwork of the empire ground slowly forward, with every revolution of the wheel making the mechanism a little smoother and more precise. He’d been reviewing the security reports from Auberon, where the governor, responding to separatist violence, had begun recruiting locals into the system security forces. His own daughter, Teresa, had been on one of her illicit adventures outside the grounds. The solitary nature hikes which she believed to be outside the watchful eye of Laconian Security were developmentally important for her, and he looked on them with not only indulgence but pride.
He had only recently told her about his ambitions for her: to join him as Paolo Cortázar’s second patient, to have her awareness opened and deepened as his had been, to live perhaps not forever but at least indefinitely. A hundred years from now, they would still be guiding the human empire. A thousand. Ten thousand years.
If.
That was the terrible pressure behind it all. The overwhelming if. If he could push back against the human habit of complacence. If he could convince the vast, incoherent scrum that was humanity that they had to take action to avoid the fate of their predecessors. Either they did whatever it took to understand and defeat the darkness on the third side of the ring gate, or they died at its hand.
The experiments in Tecoma system were like all the critical steps that had come throughout human history. Ever since the first mammal decided to rise on its hind legs to see above the grass. If it worked, it would change everything again. Everything changed everything that had come before. It was the least surprising thing in life.
He had reached for his tea in those last moments, but noticed through one of the weird new senses Dr. Cortázar had given him that the pot had already gone cold. The awareness of molecular vibration was analogous to the physical sensation of heat—it measured the same material reality—but the merely human sense was like a child playing a whistle compared with Duarte’s vast, symphonic new awareness.
The last moment came.
In the instant between deciding to call his valet for a fresh pot of tea and then reaching his hand out for the comm controls, the mind of Winston Duarte blew apart like a pile of straw in a hurricane.
There was pain—a great deal of pain—and there was fear. But there wasn’t anyone left to feel it, so it faded quickly. There was no consciousness, no pattern, no one to think the thoughts that swelled and dimmed. Something more delicate—more graceful, more sophisticated—would have died. The narrative chain that thought of itself as Winston Duarte was ripped to pieces, but the flesh that housed him wasn’t. The subtle flows of energy in his body fell into a storm of invisible turbulence, whipped past coherence. And then, without anyone being aware of it, they began to slow and still.
His thirty trillion cells still took in oxygen from the complex fluid that had been his blood. Those structures that were his neurons fell into association with each other like drinking buddies bending their elbows in unconscious synchrony. Something was that hadn’t been. Not the old thing, but a pattern that took up residence in the empty space it left behind. Not the dancer, but a dance. Not the water, but a whirlpool. Not a person. Not a mind. But something.
When awareness returned, it first appeared in colors. Blue, but without the words for blueness. Then red. Then a white that also meant something. The fragment of an idea. Snow.
Joy came to be, and it lasted longer than fear had. A deep, bubbling sense of wonder carried itself along without anything to carry it. Patterns rose and fell, came together and came apart. The few that fell apart more slowly sometimes came into relationship with each other, and sometimes that made them last even longer.
Like a baby slowly mapping touch and sight and kinesthesis into something not yet called “foot,” scraps of awareness touched the universe and something like understanding began to form. Something felt its own lumbering, brute physicality as it pushed chemicals into the vast gaps between cells. It felt the raw, open vibration that surrounded the ring gates that connected the worlds, and it thought of sores and ulcerations. It felt something. It thought something. It remembered how to remember, and then it forgot.
There had been a reason, a goal. Something had justified atrocities in order to avoid worse ones. He had betrayed his nation. He had conspired against billions. He had condemned people who were loyal to him to death. There had been a reason. He remembered it. He forgot. He rediscovered the glorious brilliance of yellow and devoted himself to the pure experience of that.
He heard voices as symphonies. He heard them as quacks. He was surprised to find that a he existed and that it was him. There was something he was supposed to do. Save humanity. Something ridiculously grand like that.
He forgot.
Come back. Daddy, come back to me.
Like when she’d been a baby and he had slept at her side, he refocused on her by habit. His daughter mewled, and he roused himself so that his wife wouldn’t have to. His hand was in hers. She’d said something. He couldn’t remember the words, so he looked backward in time to where she spoke them. Dr. Cortázar? He’s going to kill me.
That didn’t seem right. He didn’t know why. The storm in the other place was loud and soft and loud. That was connected. He was supposed to save them from the things in the storm, that were the storm. Or from their own too-human nature. But his daughter was there, and she was interesting. He could see the distress flowing through her brain, through her body. The pain in her blood scented the air around her, and he wanted. He wanted to soothe her, to comfort her. He wanted to make right everything that was wrong for her. But more interesting, for the first time, he wanted.
The strange sensation of feeling these things plucked at his attention, and his focus drifted. He held her hand and wandered. When he came back, he was still holding her hand, but she was someone else. We just need to scan you, sir. It won’t hurt.
He remembered Dr. Cortázar. He’s going to kill me. He waved Cortázar away, pushing at the empty spaces between the tiny motes that made him a physical thing until the man swirled like dust. There. That was fixed. But the effort tired him and made his body ache. He gave himself permission to drift, but even so, he noticed that the drift was less. His nervous system was shattered, but it kept growing together. His body kept insisting that even if it couldn’t go on, it could go on. He admired this stubborn refusal to die as if it were something outside of himself. The sheer mindless and physical impulse to move forward, each cell’s determination to churn along, the obdurate need to continue existing that didn’t even require a will. All of it meant something. It was important. He just had to remember how. It had to do with his daughter. It had to do with keeping her safe and well.
He remembered. He remembered being a man who loved his child, and so he remembered being a man. And that was a stronger rope than the ambition that had built an empire. He remembered that he had made himself something different than a human. Something more. And he understood how this alien strength had also weakened him. How the brutish and unapologetic clay of his body had kept him from annihilation. The sword that slew a billion angels had only inconvenienced the primates in their bubbles of metal and air. And a man named Winston Duarte, halfway between angel and ape, had been broken but not killed. The shards had found their own way.
There was someone else too. A man with dry riverbeds in his mind. Another man who had been changed. James Holden, the enemy who had shared his enemy, back before Winston Duarte had broken, and in breaking, become.
With infinite effort and care, he pulled the unbearable vastness and complexity of his awareness in and in and in, compressing himself into what he had been. The blue faded into the color he had known as a man. The sense of the storm raging just on the other side, of the violence and threat, faded. He felt the warm, iron-smelling meat of his hand, holding nothing. He opened his eyes, turned to the comm controls, and opened a connection.
“Kelly,” he said. “Could you bring me a fresh pot of tea?”
The pause was less than might have been expected, under the circumstances. “Yes, sir,” Kelly said.
“Thank you.” Duarte dropped the connection.
A medical bed had been put in his study with an aerated foam mattress to prevent bedsores, but he was seated at his desk as if he had never left it. He took stock of his body, noticing its weakness. The thinness of its muscles. He stood, clasped his hands behind him, and walked to the window to see whether he could. He could.
Outside, a light, tapping rain was falling. There were puddles on the walkways and the grass was bright and clean. He reached out for Teresa, and he found her. She wasn’t nearby, but she wasn’t in distress. It was like watching her traipse through the wilds again, only without the artificial lens of the cameras. His love and indulgence for her was vast. Oceanic. But it wasn’t pressing. The truest expression of his love was his work, and so he turned to it as if this were any other day.
Duarte pulled up an executive summary the way he had at the start of every morning. Normally it was a page long. This one was a full volume. He sorted by category, pulling out the thread that addressed the status of traffic through the ring space.
Things had, putting it mildly, gone poorly in his absence. Scientific reports of the loss of Medina Station and the Typhoon. Military analyses of the siege of Laconia, the loss of the construction platforms. Intelligence summaries of the growing opposition in the widely scattered systems of humanity, and of Admiral Trejo’s attempts to hold the dream of the empire together without him.
There had been a time not long after her mother passed when Teresa had decided to make him breakfast. She had been so young, so incapable, that she had failed. He remembered the crust of bread heaping with jam and a pat of unmelted butter perched on top of it. The combination of ambition and affection and pathos had been beautiful in its way. It was the kind of memory that survived because the love and the embarrassment fit together so perfectly. This felt the same.
His awareness of the ring space was clear now. He could hear the echoes of it in the fabric of reality like he was pressing his ear to a ship’s deck to know the status of its drive. The rage of the enemy was as apparent to him now as if he could hear its voices. The shrieks that tore something that wasn’t air in something that wasn’t time.
“Admiral Trejo,” he said, and Anton startled.
It was the fifth week of Trejo’s combination press tour and reconquest of Sol system. He sat in his cabin, spent from his long day of glad-handing and speech-making with the local leaders and officials. He was the visible face of a nearly toppled empire, making sure no one knew how close he’d come to losing it all. After the hard weeks-long burn out from Laconia, it was exhausting. He wanted nothing more than a stiff drink and eight hours in his bed. Or twenty. Instead, he was on a video call with Secretary-General Duchet and his Martian counterpart, both of them on Luna and near enough that light delay didn’t interfere. The politicians were lying through their smiles. Trejo was threatening through his.
“Of course we understand the necessity of getting the orbital shipyards up and running as quickly as possible. Rebuilding our shared defenses is critical,” Duchet said. “But given the lawlessness that has followed the recent attack on Laconia, our first concern is security for the facilities. We have to have some guarantee that your ships will be able to protect these valuable assets. We don’t want to just paint a target on ourselves for the underground to aim at.”
You just got the shit kicked out of you, had your factories blown up, lost two of your most powerful battleships, and are scrambling to hold the empire together. Do you have enough ships to force us to work for you?
“We’ve suffered setbacks, that’s true,” Trejo drawled, the way he sometimes did when he was angry. “But there’s no need for concern. We have more than enough of the Pulsar-class destroyers to provide total security for Sol system.”
I just reconquered you with two dozen of those ships, and I have a shit-ton more of them I can call in if I need to, so fucking do what I tell you to do.
“Excellent to hear that,” the Martian prime minister said. “Please let the high consul know we will spare no effort to meet his production schedule.”
Please don’t carpet-bomb our cities.
“I will let him know,” Trejo replied. “The high consul treasures your support and loyalty.”
Duarte is a drooling moron, but if you give me the ships to hold the empire together, I won’t have to glass your damn planets, and maybe we all win.
Trejo killed the connection and leaned back in his chair. The bottle of whiskey in his cabinet called to him gently. The freshly made bed was much louder. He had time for neither. The underground was still running riot in thirteen hundred systems and more. And that was just his human problem. After that, there were the gates to deal with, and whatever within them kept turning the minds off in whole systems at a time as it sniffed for ways to exterminate humanity.
No rest for the wicked. No peace for the good.
“Connect me to the Association of Worlds rep, Sol system. I don’t remember her name,” he said. No one heard him but the ship.
CONNECTING NOW flashed on his screen. Time for more smiling lies. More veiled threats. More—and he used the word as an epithet—diplomacy.
“Admiral Trejo,” said a voice from behind him. It was familiar but so unexpected that his mind scrambled to place it. He had a brief, irrational idea that his attaché had been hiding in his room this whole time and had only just now chosen to reveal himself.
“Anton,” the voice said, lower and as intimate as a friend. Trejo turned around in his chair to face the room. Winston Duarte stood near the foot of his bed, hands behind his back. He wore a loose casual shirt and black trousers. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. His hair was mussed, as if he’d only recently woken up. He looked like he was actually there.
“Security alert,” Trejo said. “This room. Full sweep.”
Duarte looked pained. “Anton,” he said again.
In milliseconds, the ship had swept every inch of his cabin looking for anyone or anything that wasn’t supposed to be there. His screen reported to him that the room was free of listening devices, dangerous chemicals, unauthorized technology. He was also the only person in it. The ship asked if he wanted armed security personnel to respond.
“Am I having a stroke?” he asked the apparition.
“No,” Duarte said. “Though you should probably be getting more sleep.” The ghost in his room shrugged its shoulders, almost apologetically. “Look. Anton. You’ve done everything that could have been asked of you to hold the empire together. I’ve seen the reports. I know how difficult this job has been.”
“You’re not here,” Trejo said, asserting the only possible reality against the lies his senses were telling him.
“What here means has become strangely flexible for me,” Duarte agreed. “As much as I appreciate your work, you can stand down now.”
“No. It’s not over. I’m still fighting to hold the empire together.”
“And I appreciate that. I do. But we’ve been running down the wrong road. I need a little quiet to think this through, but I see things better now. It’s going to be all right.”
The need to hear those words—to believe them—rushed through Trejo like a flood. The first time a lover had kissed him, it had been less overwhelming than this.
Duarte shook an amused and melancholy smile. “We built an empire that spanned the galaxy, you and I. Who’d have imagined we were thinking too small?”
The image, illusion, projection, whatever it was, vanished so suddenly it was like a skipped frame in a film.
“Fuck me,” Trejo said to no one. The security alert was still flashing on the screen over his desk. He slapped the comm link with one hand.
“Sir,” the duty officer said. “We’ve got an active alert from your quarters. Do you want—”
“You have five minutes to prep for a max burn to the ring.”
“Sir?”
“Sound the alarm,” Trejo said. “And get everyone in their couches. We have to get back to Laconia. Now.”
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