The Phebus had dimmed its lights. After an unknown number of hours of sleep, during which Ada dreamed of immense inhabited planets that lit up and went dark like Conway's game, she got up to relieve her bladder and make a circuit of the ship like a cat on patrol.
Alpha was neither in Ada's room (as usual), nor playing with Kukth in front of the viewport, nor standing in contemplation of the stars.
Ada saw Salman lying on his back, his body a little twisted because he must have dropped off suddenly and had kept his oxygen device on. The natural beauty of the human face in sleep was here marred by a furrowed brow: he was having nightmares. For an instant Ada felt desire for him and thought to move closer to make love to him. He began to snore like an animal and the urge vanished.
She resumed her round. The Abandoned was humming in his bathtub.
"Are you awake?"
"I never really sleep, you know, Ada."
"In front of Salman, you should call me Gorylkin. Tell me, where is Alpha?"
"He's gone."
Ada went pale, like on her first days on the Shareplace. She trembled.
"What?"
"He'll come back. He has something to do."
"But how did he leave?"
"I think he can travel from one world to another without a ship. Ah, if mine had that faculty… we wouldn't have had to unite like… the inverted Babel of your nightmares."
"What has he gone to do?"
"I don't think I can tell you. It's his business. He'll come back, that's certain. Ada, Alpha can't really love you the way you love sentient beings… even if, to my taste, you have a somewhat rare kind of love for a species with such empathic potential. Feelings have another texture in Alpha's kind. But in contact with you, he has developed human cultural elements. He's attached to you and he's afraid for you. However, if he came into the HS network, it's because he had a mission to accomplish, in a certain place, at a certain time. And that moment will arrive imminently. I reminded him of it yesterday."
"Why - are you his boss?"
"No, but I read his inner conflict and I helped him make a decision."
Ada felt anger rising in her. She grabbed whatever was at hand: anthologies and bottles, and threw them while screaming. Salman woke up, stunned, seized his breaker. But he quickly understood the, let's say, domestic problem, and said nothing, his gaze fixed on the dawn-planet.
When Ada calmed down, the Abandoned continued:
"Lots of violence."
"Don't complain, you didn't get hit."
"You are immature."
"I'm sick of you and your shitty opinion."
"You should not say that. You are the saint of the Xenos."
"Then respect me!"
"I respect everyone, saint or not. I am too well read about the customs of intelligent races, and humans in particular, to understand what it is to be a 'saint' of the Xenos. It's a title that will draw attention to you. But it will be as useful to you as a carafe of water to a fire if you let yourself give in to childish violence."
She shot him a furious look and decided to ignore him. She sat down forcefully on a couch facing Salman's. He had the vague eyes of a man who was still dreaming.
"Tell me about your nightmares."
Salman did not answer so she added:
"One day, when I was ten or twelve, my adoptive father chased me with a shovel to kill me. After that I lived through lots of dangerous situations, battles, sieges. I even killed people for real. So that story about a killer shovel is a bit lame, right? And yet I dream it every night. And when I don't remember my dreams, I know I dreamed anyway."
"A shovel? I thought you came from a station."
"I come from a Shareplace around Caliban. But the shovel was on Clelia. A LE asked me to undergo therapy, but LEs are manipulative whores."
"Caliban, the war planet…," murmured Salman.
"And you?"
"Nothing truly nightmarish, really. I was born on Jiaozi, a spherical space station around Dante… you know what Dante is?"
"The HS says it's a prison planet, Sashko says not really."
"It's a prison planet. A place of exile. They put people there whom they no longer want, and sometimes they come to fetch them. It's cold there, people starve, violence is everywhere. Sometimes a tough leader - often a political exile - shows up and there is a year of social structuring, but it collapses quickly. The planet was chosen because there is an anomaly at its core. Basically you can't get any lift nearby. So the only way to take off is with reactors, and there is no fuel on site. The ideal prison. But anyway I was on Jiaozi. It's one of those many Antioch stations that produce and export food in bulk. In the center of the station, where there is no gravity at all, there was a huge meat globe several tens of meters in diameter that was constantly growing, fed by… well, our waste."
"You mean…," Ada suggested.
"Yes, exactly what you think. And they cut into it, make slices, send the slices away. You may have eaten one of our slices. Obviously when you know where it comes from, it's disgusting, but everyone says it's delicious. And no animal is killed in the process. Jiaozi was also an intermediary place between Dante and the League. If you had behaved badly but not too badly, they put you there so you could keep an eye on your future prison. If on the other hand you were a convict but your sentence was limited in time, you boarded one of those big old rockets that left every month and they put you in a meat station - that's what we called it - for a few years before returning you to the League. I think my parents met there… and they were killed in one of the many mutinies the system produced. I survived and I have more or less always been on the prisoners' side. They scared me at first, but they were people, men and women, who had lived a hell built by other men. Some were born cruel, and if it were up to me, we should have shot them. But others had endured great misfortunes and that was all."
"No one deserves death," declared the Abandoned.
"Possible. I don't know. I didn't choose a job where I decide who must die. I mean, I'm a soldier, but a soldier doesn't kill. He obeys orders. When I was fourteen… there was a very big riot. When prisoners killed each other, the authorities called it a 'settling of accounts' and didn't even file a report, but then a few soldiers were killed. They brought in a Psi from Antioch. The League's Psis are people very feared. They wear a red uniform and form a body separate from the administration - they don't even have the right to approach the presidential palace. There's a proverb about them: 'A Psi never leaves without a life.' Fortunately we see them seldom. But that day he came. She came. Saturnina. She came down alone from her Alexandrite. Tall, red dress, long white hair, white eyes."
"I know her," said Ada. "Sashko's psi. She has an evil air."
"That's an understatement. That day she didn't say a word. She went to the quarter where the mutineers were holed up, went in, then came out. They were all dead."
"I disapprove of those methods," said the Abandoned.
"The League has many advantages. It aims for great equality, excellent education, the end of property… but it still carries defects from its past. Like the Psi corps. Afterwards she went into the office of the person in charge to write a report. And she asked that I come. She was writing on paper with a tool, old-fashioned. She didn't look up but spoke to me as if she wanted to eat me. She asked if I wanted to join the Psi corps, and I didn't dare answer. Then she looked up at me, and she said: 'Do you know he suffers?' She showed me the big globe of meat that we cut every day. 'It's intelligent, of course. There must be a cerebral mass at the heart of the meat that directs its growth. And it suffers. You cut it into little pieces every day. It would like to tell you, but it cannot. So I do it for it. You are free to dispose of it.' I don't know if she drilled my brain at that moment, but I didn't say another word. I left Jiaozi, then the League, and the HS promised me a citizenship card as soon as I had served twenty years. I was at sixteen. My nightmares are those ten minutes with Saturnina."
"Many humans do evil in the hope of surviving their own shell," commented the Abandoned.
"And it works. She is there every night."
Ada moved closer to him:
"Do you want us to go kill her?"
"No one deserves death," said the Abandoned."
I'm of the same opinion as the octopus," Salman admitted.
She let herself fall back onto the couch. The Abandoned moved his bathtub to come closer to Ada.
"So, you were born in orbit of Caliban, saint of the Xenos?"
His tone was exalted and hurried, very unusual for Mister-Octopus who knows everything and uses complicated words.
"Yeah, the planet of the stellar tongue. Maybe that's why I was chosen. But… how do you know Caliban?"
"I know the planet you call Caliban. All the Xenos know it. I compulsively read your maps and was curious to know what you called it… it seems you don't pay it much attention."
"It's bad memories for me. There was the war, there."
"Tell me, why did you come to see me the first time on my planet, Ada?"
"Mmm… so many things happened. I'm looking for the Empyrean Gates. Do you know them?"
"Yes… I know them. Everyone knows them."
"Not humans in any case. Do you know where they are?"
"Yes."
"Uh… where are they?"
"Where you were born."
"On Caliban? But… how do you know that?"
"It's the planet at the end of the path of planets."
"That's not possible. I spent years around Caliban. I was born there. In orbit. There is nothing on it."
"You saw a surface with no construction?"
"There are… clouds… wait… no Xeno ship has ever landed on Caliban. At least, I have never seen one."
"That is correct."
"Why?"
"There are two reasons. When civilizations considered travel and addressed the Transients, they replied that it was better to leave Caliban alone - in Stellar Tongue, in those places, it is called PLANET END PATH, which has the double meaning of 'end of the stellar road' and 'where your road ends' - and the Xenos do not have the human tendency to question everything. But there are proud or exalted races that sent scouts. And they never returned."
"Never?"
"Not a single ship. Caliban swallowed them like a monster. I would like you to fulfill your destiny and go there to open the Empyrean Gates, but that planet is already the tomb of many prophets and scientists. Those gates, wherever they lead, are certainly worth less than your life."