Redemption Ark

Clavain walked back to the tree stumps. He lowered himself on to his with a crick of leg joints. ‘If there’s a decision to be taken, there must be some choices on the table. Is that the case?’

‘Yes.’

He waited patiently, listening to the soothing white-noise hiss of the waterfall. ‘Well?’

Felka spoke with a reverent hush. ‘We’re a long way out, Clavain. The Resurgam system is nine light-years behind us and there isn’t another settled colony for fifteen light-years in any direction. But there’s a solar system dead ahead of us. Two cool stars. It’s a wide binary, but one of the stars has formed planets in stable orbits. They’re mature, at least three billion years old. There’s one world in the habitable zone that has a couple of small moons. Indications are that it has an oxygen atmosphere and a lot of water. There are even chlorophyll bands in the atmosphere.’

Clavain asked, ‘Human terraforming?’

‘No. There’s no sign of human presence ever having established itself around these stars. Which leaves only one possibility, I think.’

‘The Pattern Jugglers.’

She was evidently pleased that it did not need to be spelled out. ‘We always knew we’d stumble on more Juggler worlds as we moved further out into the galaxy. We shouldn’t be surprised to find one now.’

‘Dead ahead, just like that?’

‘It isn’t dead ahead, but it’s close enough. We can slow down and reach it. If it’s anything like the other Juggler worlds there may even be dry land; enough to take a few settlers.’

‘How many is a few?’

Felka smiled. ‘We won’t know until we get there, will we?’

Clavain made his decision — it was, in truth, little more than a blessing on the obvious choice — and then returned to sleep. There were few medics amongst his crew, and almost none of them had received formal training beyond a few hasty memory uploads. But he trusted them when they said that he could not expect to survive more than one or two further cycles of freezing and thawing.

‘But I’m an old man,’ he told them. ‘If I stay warm, I probably won’t survive that way either.’

‘It’ll have to be your choice,’ they told him, unhelpfully.

He was getting old, that was all. His genes were very antiquated, and though he had been through several rejuvenation programmes since leaving Mars, they had only reset a clock which then proceeded to start ticking again. Back on the Mother Nest they could have given him another half-century of virtual youth, had he wished… but he had never taken that final rejuvenation. The will had never been there after Galiana’s strange return and her even stranger half-death.

He did not even know if he regretted it now. If they had been able to limp to a fully equipped colony world, somewhere that hadn’t yet been ravaged by the Melding Plague, there might have been hope for him. But what difference would it have made? Galiana was still gone. He was still old inside his skull, still seeing the world through eyes that were yellow and weary with four hundred years of war. He had done what he could, and the emotional burden had cost him terribly, and he did not think he had the energy to do it one more time. It was enough that he had not totally failed this time.

And so he submitted to the reefersleep casket for the final time.

Just before he went under, he authorised a tight-beam laser transmission back to the dying Resurgam system. The message was one-time-pad coded for Zodiacal Light If the other ship hadn’t been totally destroyed, there was a chance it would intercept and decode the signal. It would never be seen by the other Conjoiner ships, and even if Skade’s forces had somehow managed to sow receivers through Resurgam space, they would not be able to crack the encryption.

The message was very simple. It told Remontoire, Khouri, Thorn and the others that had gone with them that they were to slow and stop in the Pattern Juggler system; they would wait there for twenty years. That was enough time to allow Zodiacal Light to rendezvous with them; it was also enough time to establish a self-sustaining colony of a few tens of thousands of people, a hedge against any future catastrophe that might befall the ship.

Knowing this, feeling that in some small but significant way he had put his affairs in order, Clavain slept.

He woke to find that Nostalgia for Infinity had changed itself without consulting anyone.

No one knew why.