The Triple Stars Trilogy

Chapter 9-1

The recorded image of a spinning planet filled the transparent globe. White clouds swirled over a red-brown surface, peppered with azure oceans.

“What planet is that?” asked Lilith, wonder clear in her voice.

Selene shook her head. “I have no idea. If these images are millions of years old it will obviously be very different now. It might not exist anymore.”

There had to be a way of getting more data from the bead. If the aliens had devoted themselves to capturing galactic information, they wouldn"t have travelled to each system simply to take pictures. There would be sensor readings, maps, galactic positioning data, profiles of any lifeforms.

Without thinking, Selene sent instructions from her fleck to display an index of all the available data, just as she would have done on the Dragon.

Inevitably, nothing happened. Perhaps there was a direct-brain interface, but she clearly lacked the relevant hardware. At the Depository, she"d had to resort to making physical gestures. It was strangely primitive, but it was all she had.

She experimented with holding up her hands and then moving them together. The pictures responded by zooming rapidly in, until a mountain lake completely filled the orb. Blue-green algae coated the scattered rocks, but there were no more advanced lifeforms apparent. By moving her hands apart, she zoomed out again. The whole planet became visible, then the whole solar system. She began to get used to the subtle movements required to navigate the display.

Symbols appeared on the images, overlaying the orange sun and the eleven or twelve planets strung out in space round it. Runes from the unknown alphabet they had encountered previously. Each symbol changed as she looked at it, looping through a series of shapes as if each were a whole word in itself. Their intricate curves were beautiful, but she could make no sense of any of them. By experimenting, she found she could point towards one of the planets and zoom in on it. Twisting her hand made more symbols appear around the edge of the display, presumably displaying more of the captured data.

“A whole system on one sphere,” said Lilith. “Do you think each bead in here catalogues a different one?”

“Could be, yeah.”

“That"s a lot of data.”

It was. But without being able to access a central index or interpret the writing, they weren"t going to get very far.

Selene thought about the Recorder constructions described in the Magellanic Cloud"s archives, the ancient library found in orbit around the mysterious planet. Somewhere, there had to be a bead that described that system, too.

She zoomed back out to the whole-system view. She needed a way to see a wider perspective. She experimented with various gestures and hand movements but succeeded only in making the images flick backwards and forwards. Then she stopped flapping her hands around and simply held her arms wide, as if attempting to embrace the orb.

Immediately, the view in the sphere shifted, zooming outwards until the whole galaxy was visible: the spiralling arms and the countless stars in its heart blazing brightly. Except, they weren"t countless, were they? This alien race had seemingly gone to the trouble of doing just that: counting and cataloguing them all.

Part-way along one of the arms was a single flashing star, a label in the alien language overlaying it. By pointing at it, Selene found she was back in the overview of the system on the bead she"d picked. Okay. She zoomed back out to the galaxy view, picked a different star at random and pointed at it. Nothing happened except that a label appeared next to the new star, flashing some message at her.

“It"s telling us which bead we need,” said Lilith.

Five hundred metres above them – if above was the right word – the bud on one of the pathway stalks was flashing.

Selene tried pointing at different stars. Each time, a different bead lit up. Perhaps there was some system to the arrangement, but she couldn"t see it. Two stars near each other in space illuminated beads a long way apart inside the Heliolith. Presumably it had all made sense to the Tok.

“There"s a star on the map that remains illuminated wherever you point,” said Lilith. “Right there in the middle.”

A blazing light made up the heart of the galaxy, a solid agglomeration of stellar masses. At its very core was a sphere of darkness: the supermassive black hole that helped hold the galactic mass together. Zooming in, Selene could see that Lilith was correct: relatively nearby, within the blazing halo of stars, a single light blinked green.

It could only be one thing. Selene pointed at it with her left hand. A moment later, a bud a few hundred metres away began to flash. There was the faintest tinge of lime to the light.

Lilith went to fetch the bead. It was a deep, almost blue green when she held it out.

“This one is different to the others.”

“It"s the green waybead. It"s the thing we"ve been looking for.”

“Oh. We can use this?”

“Yes. Probably.” They"d been studying Eb"s body and the structures he"d used to hook into the Dragon"s core. They weren"t there yet, but they were beginning to understand how to interpret the navigational data held on the waybeads. Given time, they"d be able to follow the required metaspace pathways themselves.

Selene returned to studying the images displayed by the orb. This system had three suns, relatively rare in the galaxy. A larger red star, a smaller yellow one, and a yellow-orange sun midway between the two in volume. Their movements would be complicated, all three dancing around a central point that shifted constantly as the stellar masses spun nearer and farther away. There was also a single planet: an aquamarine ocean world.

She recognized all of them: this was the system depicted in the final image in the Gatekeeper"s tower on Ansider. Malleus had described its perfection to her with wonder: that single green eye regarding the galaxy. Omn. It was the planet of the Tok, the Recorders, and it was the planet rediscovered millions of years later by Vulpis and the Magellanic Cloud.

She had found Concordance.

She zoomed into the planet, hoping to discern some detail of its secrets. There was nothing save the endless ocean. There was no sign of any structure, nothing that would indicate complex organisms or any sort of technology. She recorded everything she could find onto her own flecks for later analysis.

She zoomed back out and pointed at some of the lettering arranged around the edge of the pictures. Some appeared to do nothing at all, but when she clicked the one with the longest title, the stars and clusters and nebulae of the galaxy disappeared and, instead, the green circle was depicted at the heart of a complex network of branching lines, fanning out into space to fill an area roughly the same shape and extent as the galaxy.

Selene walked around the sphere, gazing at the lines, intrigued. If anything, the display resembled the pathways in an organic entity"s nervous system. There were many millions of the lines. Billions of them, seemingly reaching to every solar system in the galaxy. She thought about the nanotube mesh and the communication structures the Magellanic Cloud had discovered on the gamma moon, the arrays pointing into space at all angles. That had to be what this was. They were seeing a map of the lines that the Tok used to transmit information back to the central point. Their galaxy-spanning communications network.

“It"s beautiful,” said Lilith. Her head was bulbously distorted through the sphere. She appeared to have come to the same conclusion that Selene had. “They really did visit the whole galaxy, recording everything.”

“So it seems. And placing a copy of their knowledge in this Heliolith, too.”

“For all we know there are lots of these sites scattered about the galaxy.”

“The point is, this is how Concordance communicates. They use this network to talk instantly to any star, any planet, any ship. They use it to monitor us, predict our behaviour, keep us under control. Just think what we could achieve if this was ours, if news and information and ideas could flow instantly and freely across the galaxy. I don"t know, research and art and music; cries for help and negotiations and discussions. It would change everything. It would be like the Nexus that Hessia described, the network of planetary Minds centred on Coronade. The galaxy would be a single thing again, not this fractured, broken collection of island planets. Destroying Concordance isn"t just about justice, or revenge. It isn"t about Omn or even the damned shrouds. It"s about this.” Surprising herself, she found she was shaking with suppressed fury at what had been done to the galaxy.

“What"s this line here?” said Lilith. “It disappears out of view, see.” A faint line, deep red in hue, led from the central point directly out of the 3D map. “It goes somewhere outside the galaxy.”

Selene tried to zoom out further, holding her arms out wide repeatedly as if trying to fly or swim. The map shrank so that the area of the galaxy filled about a third of the scene. The faint line still led out of view. She repeated the movement several more times, until the galaxy was nothing more than a glowing dot in the centre of the sphere. Still the single line led off. Three strange markers, symbols she didn"t recognise, lay spaced along its length, but always the line continued, far into the void. Finally, they found its other end, hugely remote from the galactic mass. There was another dot there, red like the line.

A solar system in the depths of intergalactic space? There were stars in the voids between the galaxies, sure, but who would bother to go there? The distances were enormous, far greater than the span of the galactic wheel. It was the only extra-galactic point that the Tok had a communication line to.

Selene pointed at the star on the display. This time, the corresponding bud was distant, at the far end of one of the walkways. The light from it was faintly scarlet, but when Lilith came back holding it, the waybead she held in her hand wasn"t red, but purest black – as Selene had known it would be.

She now had them both: the green and the black waybeads.

Selene replaced the green with the black in the viewing orb.

“What the hell is that?” said Lilith.

Once again, they were looking at a view of an entire solar system. Five planets orbited the red star at its heart. One of the planets, the middle of the five, appeared to be on fire, tongues of flame l*****g off it. Was it flame? It was hard to be sure; it almost looked like something alive was constantly reaching out from the surface, clutching at space with grasping hands. A great deal of Tok writing covered the scene, some of it flashing.

Selene peered closely. It looked like the planet was on fire. “That has to be vulcanism on a huge scale; the plumes look like they extend far out of the atmosphere.” She focused closer. There was something else odd, too, some minute detail even her eyes couldn"t quite resolve. All through the titanic licks of flame were black specks, tossed repeatedly into space before falling back down to the surface.

But even the volcanoes weren"t the most striking aspect of the scene. Around the entire system was something else Selene recognized: a mesh sphere. The scale of it matched the one she"d investigated at the Depository, surrounding the sun and the orbits of the five planets. As before, it was hard to escape the conclusion that it was a cage. A cage built around an entire solar system.