Then again, it is more than likely I am just imagining it, imposing my experiences upon a dream-like state. Pain is often made worse when you predict it will hurt, and I am nothing if not sensitive to the power of expectations.
Given the unreliability of my experience, let us simply go by the nav logs.
These state that at 0554 local Hasha-to time, the MSVMyrmidareached its jump-speed velocity, wound up its arcspace engines and sliced through the dark on its scheduled journey to Yu-mdo, guided through the great unknown by the fusion of mechanical and biological minds – my mind – strapped into the Pilot’s chair.
Twelve secondspriorto its departure, the same MSVMyrmidaappeared on the very edge of Xihana space, some two hundred and eleven light years off course, drifting uncontrollably through the dark. Xihana authorities naturally declared an emergency and sent a full quarantine crew to isolate the stricken ship. When it failed to respond to hails, a volunteer team in military-grade survival gear was sent on board to inspect the vessel. After a few days of deeply unpleasant labour, they concluded that they had found enough matching body parts to declare the nineteen crew members officially dead, and that they had been deceased at least a Normweek. They also found blood from a twentieth crew member – most likely the Pilot, based on where the majority of the blood was – insuch significant quantities that they were almost certain that said Pilot would have died of exsanguination unless immediate and urgent medical care had been given. However, without any other limbs/organs, etc. to match the blood against, they couldn’t definitively state that said crew member was dead, though it seemed incredibly unlikely that they were not.
Later DNA tests confirmed that the significant volumes of blood belonging to this last exsanguinated crew member were indeed mine, and that Mawukana na-Vdnaze had almost certainly died in the Pilot’s chair.
On the MSVMyrmida, they found me in the captain’s quarters, not a mark on me, staring out of the window at the wondrous stars.
Interlude
On Pilots
Many theories have been posited as to why an organic mind – and it is specifically organic – is required to Pilot arcspace travel. None withstand the rigours of scientific investigation.
The collective failure of the galaxy to understand a thing so fundamental to modern civilisation is distressing – frightening, even. Especially as, whatever we can say about that ruptured fold of time through which faster-than-light travel is made possible, one thing is certain: arcspace is not a void. There is something out there, defying measurement.
The more alarmist might add: and it is watching.
Personally I find the tendency of people to invent some unprovable, fancy-sounding stories to try and explain away this thing that scares them far more distressing than accepting an ignorance that has yet to be solved.
On Pilot Selection
The Xi choose their Pilots through a volunteer programme, open to anyone between fifty and eighty-three years of age. 78 per cent of candidates are eliminated at initial assessment, and the remaining 22 per cent are monitored for a duration of five years, duringwhich time they may withdraw, no questions asked. At the end of this period, final candidates are put through a barrage of psychological tests, with an average of 6 per cent judged as eligible to serve. Of that 6 per cent, priority is given to those with long-term degenerative and terminal illnesses. Once cleared for flight, they are given two months to be with family, friends and loved ones. Pilots are only allowed to fly once, and are retired upon completion of said voyage to a luxuriously appointed and highly isolated archipelago, under polite yet firm military observation.
This methodology has a number of consequences. With such a small pool of Pilots to pull from, Xi arcspace flights are rare, solemn events, and thus Xihana possesses an unusually small fleet of unusually vast city-sized ships that rival the old, lumbering slowships of pre-arcspace days, their scale compensating for the infrequency of launch. Though their Pilot scheme has one of the highest safety records of any in the Accord, in the unlikely event that a ship is consumed by the silent dark, the loss in terms of personnel and material can be catastrophic.
The Eyrie has a strict fifteen-year Pilot selection programme. Individuals are put through rigorous physical and psychological training, earning a reputation as the toughest of the tough, the bravest of the brave. Afterwards, graduates will fly a maximum of eight Pilot sorties, before being retired to a life of socially distanced celebrity. There is no evidence that this programme produces increased safety benefits in-flight; however, the Eyrie’s Pilot programme remains highly subscribed owing to a long-running series of dramatic presentations ranging from young adult dramas set in training academies through to schlocky soaps depicting the often glamorous and sexually exaggerated lifestyles of this elite and their squabbling families. The occasional complete mental collapse and psychosis Pilots can experience at the end of their service is a dramatic plot point, not a theme. Consequently the Eyrie runs more arcspace flights than many Accord members,even if their risk mitigation remains for all practical purposes entirely minimal.
The Shine is one of the few polities to use prisoners for Pilot work. To minimise the inherent risk in forcefully interfacing an unvetted organic mind with the arcspace systems of an FTL ship, it is standard practice to irradiate parts of a Pilot’s brain, reducing them to a mere organic husk through which navigational protocols may pass. This, the Shine claim, can enable reuse of a Pilot up to twenty times before they are declared brain-dead. From a safety perspective, the method is a disaster, with the attrition rate of ships lost to the dark speculated to be as high as 1:8,000 (and likely far higher). However, the ease of finding the aforementioned forced labour means that the Shine has developed an extensive infrastructure of small-vessel courier and pleasure ships, flitting passengers around the galaxy as if arcspace travel were just a merry little paddle across a pond.
Quanmech minds have not yet found a way to integrate their consciousnesses successfully with arcspace navigation systems, and either rely on slowships or hired organic Pilots.
It is not known how the Slow travels across the infinite dark.
PART 2
Beneath the Lover’s Light
Chapter 8
One hundred years after the Slow came to Tu-mdo; ninety-nine years after the MSVMyrmidaentered Xihana magnetic space with its cargo of dismembered crew, the binary star system called Lhonoja exploded.
There was at first very little data on the supernova blast. The nature of the Edge – the wall of radiation ripping through the galaxy at light speed from the collapsing heart of the supernova – made observation of anything within fifty light years of the solar collapse practically impossible. Sensors were burned to a crisp at the moment of impact, and it wouldn’t be until many years later that anyone was able to peer through the chaos of the blast back in time to the moment of destruction. To everyone else, it seemed that Lhonoja still twinkled in the sky, the old light travelling on even though the source itself was an obliterated mass of rapidly expanding plasma. From my little garden, far away from the core, it would be another one hundred and sixty-three years before the light of those binary stars would flare for a few dazzling weeks of daylight brightness, and then go out.
Consequently, I only found out about the supernova when Rencki, my companion, directed my attention towards a minor piece on the news informing me of the same.
“Right on schedule,” qe quipped. “Just as the Slow said.”
Rencki’s mainframe was not, as far as I was aware, one of the quanmechs who worshipped – or as near to worship as the quans came – the Slow. As qe put it, qis mainframe was interested in its own development as an evolving operating system within the galactic Accord, and didn’t approve of leaving its fate in the hands of an unknowable god.
Qe did use the word “god”, though, when qe talked about the Slow. Qe made it sound like a job description.
Let me tell you about my garden.
I live on an island, about twenty minutes’ sedate rowing – or five minutes by motor – from the town of Poulinio, the administrative capital of the Mun peninsula. You can walk around the island in thirty-five ticks, which is more than enough to keep me occupied every month of every season with the constant flourishing of nature. In the east, where the land rises up to black basalt cliffs, are groves of giant courl and drooping bluebrush trees, whose sapphire blossoms stink to high heaven when they open in the wettest part of summer, but which wither to black nuts in winter that are a roasted treat, if only I can get to them before the longlaps pick the branches clean. Away from the cool shade of the woodland, wild grasses grow, which in summer are pricked out with an explosion of yellow and white as the slumbering blossoms burst up from the gentle soil below. In the north, a shingle beach faces the sea, and the prevailing winds bend back the branches of spiny thorn-break and thick-bellied succulents that seem impervious to salt, while inland I tend a long lawn where I sometimes welcome what few visitors I have in the summer months with feasts of fruit grown from the southern orchard and fish caught with hook and line – actual hook and actual line! – from the side of my little boat.
