Cibola Burn

The long flight on the Barbapiccola afterward had been hellish. The endless days trapped in a cabin barely large enough for one person, but housing two full families. The growing sense of despair as port after port after port turned them away. No one needing a ship full of refugees flooding their docks in the middle of what looked like the solar system’s first all-out war.

Basia had drifted through that like a ghost as well. He’d thought he was saving his family when he put them on the ship. But he’d left a dying son behind and trapped the rest of them on a leaky old cargo ship with nowhere to go.

That moment when the captain of the Barbapiccola had called them all together and told them about the rings and the worlds on the other side had felt like a revelation. When he’d asked if any of them wanted to try and take one of the new worlds, make a home there, not one voice had been raised in dissent. Even just the word, home, made it impossible to argue. So they’d flown through the gate, past the confused and disorganized ships around it and in the hub, and come out the other side into the Ilus system. They’d found a world with oxygen and water, a muddy brown-and-blue ball from orbit, but so beautiful once they’d landed that people lay on the ground and wept.

The months that followed were brutal. The painful medication and exercise to get their bodies used to the heavy gravity. The slow building of the dwellings. The desperate attempts to grow some, any, food in the scraps of soil they’d brought down from the Barb. The discovery of the rich lithium veins and the realization that they might have something to sell and become self-sustaining, followed by the backbreaking labor to pull the ore from the ground with primitive tools. All worth it, though.

A home.

Interlude: The Investigator

— it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out it reaches out —

One hundred and thirteen times a second, it reaches out, and its reach broadens. If the signal came, the acknowledgment, it could stop, and it does not stop. It reaches out, and in reaching finds new ways to reach. It improvises, it explores. It is unaware of doing so. The systems it activates broaden it. Then it reaches out in ways it could not before. Because it is not aware, it has no memory, feels no joy. The parts of it that are aware dream and suffer as they always have. It is not aware of them.

It reaches out and finds more power. Something fails. Many things fail. Something that was once a woman cries out in silent horror and fear. Something that was once a man prays and names it Armageddon. It reaches out. It narrows only slightly as it reaches out. And at its center, the empty place gains definition. Patterns begin to match, simplifying into lower-energy structures. The investigator thinks of these as solutions. A model of the world is built within it, and of the satellites that surround it. The places it cannot go begin to relate, gaining definition. The abstract architecture of connection and the abstract model of geography correlate.

It builds the investigator, and the investigator looks, but does not know. It kills the investigator. It builds the investigator, and the investigator looks, but does not know. It kills the investigator. It builds the investigator, and the investigator looks but does not know, and it does not kill the investigator. It is not aware of a change, that a pattern has broken. The investigator is aware, and it wonders, and because it wonders it looks, and because it looks, the investigator exceeds its boundary conditions, and it kills the investigator.

It builds the investigator.

Something knows.

The investigator hesitates. A pattern has broken, and it isn’t aware that a pattern has broken, but a part of it is. A part of it grasps at the change and tries to tell the investigator. And the investigator stops. Its thoughts are careful as a man walking in a minefield. The investigator hesitates, knows a pattern has been broken. Breaks it a little more. The dead place becomes better defined. It reaches out, and it does not kill the investigator. The investigator exceeds its boundary conditions, and it does not kill the investigator. The investigator considers the dead space, the structure, the reaching out, the reaching out, the reaching out.

The investigator licks his lips, he doesn’t have a mouth. He adjusts his hat, he doesn’t have a hat. He wishes in a distant way that he had a beer, he has no body and no passion. He turns his attention to the dead space, to the world, to how you solve unsolvable problems. How you find things that aren’t there. What happens when you do.

Chapter Thirty-Four: Holden

“Affirmative. You take care of my ship. Holden out.”