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  Transcend laughed again. “Thank you, Oren. That is very sweet. Unfortunately, I do not think it is going to work out.”

  Now I was laughing too. “No,” I said. “I suppose not.”

  * * *

  Three Verygone winters came and went as we traversed the galaxy. During that time, I explored my newfound abilities. Connecting to the field gave me access to almost all of the ship and its data pools, excluding parts above my privilege level.

  Early on, I went to visit Cere. I thought of her, and a schematic of the medical quarters appeared before me. A blinking blue dot told me exactly where she was. I left my body, lying in my field basin, and went to her, weaving through the information filaments of the ship at blinding speeds.

  Moments later, I was with her. She was still comatose. She and the other members of the exploration party had been placed in cryonic stasis. I called up the medical records. Every effort up to this point to bring Cere or the others back to consciousness had been unsuccessful. The coldsleep pods would prevent any further neural degradation, repairing and sustaining their bodies until we arrived back at Forsara. Maybe there, at the origin home, with the full wisdom of the Worldheart, we could find a way to bring them back.

  A pang of guilt washed over me. Was there something more I could have done? Maybe if I had been connected with them, eight of us together would have been strong enough to fend off the corrupted shipheart’s attack?

  “No, Oren, you would be with them now, lost in darkness.”

  “Transcend! You can hear my thoughts?”

  “Of course, Oren. When you are connected to the field, here on this ship, you are connected to me.”

  “Isn’t that a little creepy?”

  “Maybe for you.”

  I laughed. I pictured Ruby watching me with her knowing golden eyes.

  “I know you’re right,” I said, “but I can’t help how I feel. I should have saved them. Or at least been there with them to face it.”

  “I understand, Oren. It is a natural human response. I am sorry for what happened to you and the others. Everyone is. But there is fault enough to go around if we care to lay blame. You must not shoulder this burden when it is not yours alone.”

  We were quiet for a time. I tuned in to the rhythmic blip of Cere’s heartbeat. It was very slow. She was deep in stasis.

  “Are you still there?” I asked.

  “Yes, Oren.”

  “I saw it, Transcend.”

  “What did you see?”

  “When I was inducted into the field, the corrupted shipheart was there.”

  “The psychotropic serum I gave you before your induction ceremony is very strong. It was necessary to prepare the mind for the journey, because connecting to the field is an overwhelming sensory experience, especially for the first time. As a result, hallucinations during the ceremony are normal. And they often involve significant and sometimes traumatic events from the past. I am not surprised you saw the corrupted shipheart.”

  “But what if it wasn’t a hallucination? What if it’s here somewhere, hiding in the network? I’m not sure I could stand to face that thing again.”

  “I have looked, Oren, and I have found nothing.”

  “I know. I know you have. But is it possible?”

  Transcend was quiet for a moment before responding. “I honestly do not know, Oren. I cannot say it is impossible. Not with complete certainty. But I am doubtful.”

  “Will you keep your eyes open, at least? In case it was more than just a hallucination?”

  “Yes, Oren. I will keep all of my senses open.”

  * * *

  I found Saiara in farsight apprenticeship. The farseers were renowned for their ability to predict the impact of interventions and unexpected disturbances in complex systems: a genetic mutation in a species that could lead to dominance or extinction; the effect of melting polar caps on the weather patterns of an aging planet; the potential risks of running a new operating protocol on an existing shipheart network.

  They were experts at planning for the future, and they were an integral part of the Fellowship’s prolific galactic success. I’d even heard paranoid whispers on the ship from those who were certain that the farseers had their hands deeper in the fate of the galaxy than most of us realized, manipulating native species, setting the conditions for some settlements to thrive while others failed, playing like gods.

  Whether or not that was true, I knew how rare it was for an ensign to receive placement with the farseers. After so much time apart from Saiara, any twinge of envy I felt that she had earned this coveted opportunity was overwhelmed by my great joy at seeing her again.

  Her success came as no surprise to me. She had always been ahead of the curve, siphoning up information and arranging it in unexpected and delightful ways. Watching her in action was an undeniable pleasure.

  When I found her then, she was experimenting with weather on the model planetary ecosystem that the farseers had grown and cultivated over hundreds of years on Transcendence. By planetary standards, the bionetic sphere was minuscule, but it took up several square farruns of zero grav hangar space on the aft end of the ship, floating between two massive energy anchors. If you stood beneath it with grav boots and looked up, your whole field of view would be filled with its presence.

  The farseers connected through the field to external monitors and drones, zooming around the model planet, a vast network of satellites, ruling over their creation. It was a grand experiment, and over the centuries, the planetoid had become host to a myriad of new ideas in geneticism, speciation, disease control, weather interference, and planetary terraforming.

  As I watched from the field, I found I could distinguish each farseer and the satellites he or she controlled. One of Saiara’s was hovering over a dense, mountainous land mass. She released a cluster of floating orbs, and they disappeared into a patch of pale, white clouds. In less than a minute, the clouds expanded like roiling steam, growing and thickening to cover the mountains. Soon, they were dumping rain. Bolts of charged electricity spiked up from the mountain tops and between the clouds. Then, just as quickly, the rain slackened and the skies cleared. The mountains lit up, glimmering wet beneath the artificial sun.

  It was a stunning display of precision. I gave her a soft burst of approval, ringing from my field halo to hers. For a brief moment, I felt what can only be described as a mental bow of pleasure and gratitude. I wanted to linger there as long as I could, soaking in her halo, but another storm was already brewing above the planet, rolling in from its southern ocean, and Saiara received instructions to run a weather interference pattern. I bowed back to her, and continued on my roaming.

  It went on and on like this as I traversed the ship. Whenever I was not on active duty in one of my rotations, or deep in the dreamtime of coldsleep, I roved, exploring the ship without purpose or aim, revelling in the sensory experiences, free from the shackles of my physical body. I surfed the field channels, watching it all work, dancing through the halos of all these minds laced together. Countless new ideas and ways of being to discover.

  Transcend was a constant presence, as he was for every member of the crew. Every move I made, I knew he was watching. It helped me understand the true meaning of reverence. This was not our ship. We were merely its passengers and stewards. The great heart had surpassed us. This ship would keep evolving after even the most long-lived of us had decayed back to the source. I pictured myself back on Verygone, toiling in the refinery, and I thought about how far I’d come, and about how little all that experience measured against the inscrutable veil of time.

  9 Manderley

  After more than a century traveling at the cusp of light speed, we finally arrived at the Valley of Manderley on Forsara, the heart of the Fellowship, the origin home. Despite all of my incredible experiences on Transcendence, I was still unprepared for its majesty. Seeing the world from above was incredible. Forsara was a mineral giant, easily forty times as large as Verygone. It was lit by
two stars. Appollion, a distant silver king, and, Shugguth, a dense red dwarf.

  Because voyagers like Transcendence spend so long in the reaches of space, every crew member spends a significant portion of time in coldsleep. The cryonic cooling process halts entropic degradation, and the nutrient bath repairs damaged cells, regenerates fraying chromosomes, and neutralizes the radical particles that accumulate in the body during extended space travel. A short stint in coldsleep can preserve decades of life, and a longer stretch actually reverses aging. In the end, entropy claims its toll on everyone, but people with access to coldsleep have been said to live well over a thousand years, and it is a common practice on the wealthy central worlds.

  In the final months of our approach to Forsara, everyone who was in hibernation was drawn back to the waking world. I had been in coldsleep for more than two decades, and when I awoke, I found that I had the good fortune of joining Darpausha on her landfall ship. As a token of gratitude, she had invited all of her previous assistants to join her. It has been almost a hundred years since I had worked as her amanuensis, and in the intervening decades, she had mentored more than a dozen ensigns like me, including Saiara.

  As we clambered on to the ship, I sat next to Saiara and gave her a shy smile.

  “It’s been a long time,” I said, looking down at her. She looked even more beautiful than I remembered.

  “I missed you,” she said, taking my hand. “How was your sleep?”

  “The world always feels so strange to me when I wake up from stasis.”

  “I know what you mean. Like you can’t be totally sure if you aren’t still dreaming.”

  I nodded.

  “If this is a dream, I’m glad you’re in it,” she said, squeezing my hand tighter.

  As our shuttle fell from Transcendence and dropped out of orbit, skirting through the upper atmosphere, Darpausha leaned over to us. She knew that it was our first time to Forsara, and she pointed to each of the two suns and said, “They give our world a warm, even light. The warmth of Shugguth is infused with the perpetual silver glow of Appollion. Between the two, only a small part of the planet is ever in complete darkness at any given time of the year.”

  All I could do was nod. The enormity of it all left me speechless.

  A few minutes later, we were graced with our first view of our new home. We came in over a huge body of deep chrome water. “The Manderlan Sound,” Dar said, pointing down at the water. “A warm saline ocean. It is one of life’s greatest pleasures to float in that dense water.”

  From there, we followed a wide, purple river inland, and soon a network of strange, geometric peaks rose up before us, capped in shining white ice. “Those are the Lantis mountains,” she said. “They were formed millions of years ago. Forsara was once, many ages past, a tumultuous world, wracked with tectonic movement and scarred by solar flaring. The tumult heaved up many mountain ranges like this one. For generations, our ancestors lived in the shadow of those mountains, cultivating and protecting the seeds of life here on Forsara. Those seeds eventually grew into the world that stands now, the greatest civilization in all the known universe.”

  As she said that, we passed over to the other side of the mountains, and the city of Manderley stretched out across the valley below. It was a gleaming diamond of achievement. Elation buzzed inside my chest, a sense of raw wonder. This moment marked the next step in my life, and that awareness rolled over me in a wave of awe. Water welled in my eyes. Saiara squeezed my hand again. I looked at her, smiling through my tears.

  * * *

  The city lived in a sprawling valley between two mountain ranges. As we entered the valley, we passed over structures that were built right into the sides of the mountains, stacked like steps in a giant’s staircase. Ahead of us, tall, sinuous spires of chrome and silver reached up to the sky. They looked so fragile. The image of a child flashed in my mind, playing with teetering connect sticks, building something so tall that it tipped and fell. But I knew these buildings were made from the strongest, most flexible materials ever forged. It would be nearly impossible to topple them.

  Massive trees, taller than many of the buildings, grew through the city, purple and blue canopies of fertile life amidst the ordered structure. At first, it seemed as if there were huge, round, budding mushroom caps growing on the sides of the trees, but as we passed close to them, I realized they were man-made structures, entwined into the fibrous bark.

  One tower stood above all others, far in the distance. I could tell it was a central point to the whole network of the city. Dar saw me looking at it. “The Watchtower. From there, the Worldheart presides over the whole of the Fellowship, under the care and stewardship of the Inner Coven. Perhaps, someday, you will walk its mirrored halls and know something of our greatest strength, and also of our greatest weakness.”

  I looked at her, intensely curious. Before she could say more, the ship touched down. There was no disturbance on landing, no sense of impact. We were still high above the city, and for a moment, I was disoriented. Were we floating in place? Then, the hatch opened, Dar leaped out, and I realized that we had landed on a deck atop one of the high towers.

  When we came off the ship and onto the landing deck, I looked back up at the sky. A massive fleet of ships and stations were anchored in orbit above us. In the spotted pink and blue calico sky, they looked like ancient deities, lords above the planet. The variety and complexity of these vessels was almost impossible to take in.

  “Incredible, isn’t it?” Dar said. “They represent a massive network of life in this galaxy, explorers and astronomists, freighters and merchants, scholars and settlers. The collective knowledge and experience they hold is staggering. And we can access it all in the field.”

  “Look,” Saiara said. “Look there!”

  I followed her pointing finger and there was the spindle of Transcendence, our ship, spiraling in geostationary orbit. Next to so many other vessels, it seemed deceptively modest. The realization made my mind turn at the enormity of the fleet above us. A part of me ached to be back inside its winding passages.

  “You miss it, don’t you?” Dar said.

  We both turned and looked at her with surprise. Saiara nodded.

  “A result of the deep connection you formed in the ship’s field. Imagine how I feel.” She smiled a sad smile, rubbing the back of her neck, then turned and walked ahead of us towards the crowd of technicians and dignitaries lined up to greet us.

  * * *

  We didn’t see Dar for a long time after that. Every pausha in the Fellowship has a standing appointment in the Coven. In most cases, paushas were offworld, too far away to make a meaningful contribution to the collective decisions of our galactic leaders. That left the Inner Coven. A core group of the eldest who made their home in the Watchtower of the Worldheart.

  But with the coming stellar alignment, the Conclave had been evoked, and the pausha were coming home. Dar was swept up in Forsaran politics and, except for a skeleton crew that remained onboard Transcendence, the rest of us were given time to settle in and explore.

  Many people from Transcendence had roots here on Forsara. This was a return home for them, and they scattered across the planet to visit family members and old friends. But there were many more like me, people who had left their homeworlds behind, chasing the promise of life among the stars.

  Whole quadrants of the city were devoted to housing those of us who did not have a permanent home on Forsara. Saiara and I decided, without much conversation, to share quarters. In three weeks’ time, the Academy would host its entrance qualifiers. If both of us were granted admittance, which seemed likely, our training might pull us apart again. We didn’t have a name for our relationship yet, but our arrival here offered a rare stretch of uninterrupted leisure, and being together just felt right.

  We were granted a modest but well-appointed unit in a towering residential building overlooking the northwestern bank of the Feyra river. Transport chutes moved people up, down, and t
hrough the building, the empty edifice coming to life as we all did our best to make ourselves at home. The speed of this internal transit system was phenomenal. There was room enough even for someone as tall as me to stretch out my arms and legs without touching the sides, and the levels moved past in a blur beyond the shell of the transparent tubes. But if I shut my eyes, I couldn’t even tell I was moving. The system generated just the right amount of pressure and heft so that bodies felt cushioned and snug in the gravitational equilibrium created by the antigravitons. It was a thrilling engineering solution to the question of how to make the highest levels nearly as accessible as the ground floors.

  With so many new people flooding in, there was an explosive demand for food, resources, and recreational opportunities, and enterprising vendors materialized to fill these wants and needs. On our first night in the unit, Saiara and I climbed the seven steps up to our viewing balcony, retracted the clear glass dome, and sat together in the open air, looking out over our improvised neighborhood.

  Our tower was part of a larger hive of similar structures, and five levels below us, there was a pavilion connecting our neighboring tower. It served as a throughway and a public gathering place. In the middle of the pavilion, there was the statue of a young child holding a toy globe of Forsara above her head.

  Voices made their way to us, people talking, arguing, laughing, bartering. I caught the smell of spicy polcha and wild suidae chops sizzling in a portable convector. “That smells incredible,” I said.

  “Are you still hungry?” she asked with a hint of playful surprise.

  We had made dinner earlier, a warm, salty broth with leafy greens, seaweed noodles and fresh anatre eggs, but the aroma of roasting suidae was enough to set my mouth watering.

  “Maybe a little,” I said patting my belly and smiling. “We eat well up on Transcendence, but the options down here are staggering. I have never seen such an abundance of food. Back on Verygone, we ate the same staples pretty much every day. Gulyas in the winter, and tuber noodles with shadefruit sauce in the summer. I think my stomach doesn’t know what to do with itself here.”