“Speaking of which,” says Observer.
Sarya sits up. She can feel her heart pick up a few beats per minute.
“You know what I’m talking about,” says Observer with a smile.
Now Sarya’s heart nearly escapes through her rib cage. The colony’s up there somewhere, Left and Right told her. Nearby. “My—I mean—”
“Close your eyes,” says Observer gently.
She closes them instantly, trembling all over. She feels several of Him scoot closer. Her skin tingles under their small hands as they raise her arm and extend her finger. For a split second a blast of light rips red through her eyelids, and then it’s gone.
“Perfect,” says Observer. “Now…open.”
It takes a few seconds for her to realize that her eyes are, in fact, open. The brilliant tapestry of stars is gone. The sky is black, from horizon to horizon—with one exception. A single speck remains at the end of her finger, floating in a darkness as deep as the hull of a Human warship. Sarya drops her arm and climbs to her feet slowly, as if this dot were prey and one wrong move would startle it into flight. She is full of love and wonder and roasted animal and foreign chemicals and she can’t do anything but stare at this gray point in an empty sky. She doesn’t even know what it is, and yet every instinct in her body is telling her the same thing.
Home.
“I—” she says, but the rest of the sentence dies somewhere in her throat. “I don’t—”
“Even if you had my senses,” says Observer quietly, “you would see nothing more than a simple cylinder spinning away in the darkness. You might be able to tell there’s a little FTL drive strapped to one end, if you knew what to look for. You might suppose, by the rate of spin, that it contains an ecosystem. But would you guess it contains an entire society, shaped and tended by the mind of Observer?”
Another picks up the thread, just as gently as the first. “That society is, perhaps, the most interesting in the sector,” it says. “Young. Violent. Passionate. Independent of Network. A society whose members reject Its order by instinct. A species who cannot thrive except in Its absence.”
And now Observer is practically whispering in her ear, or as close as He can get. “That is a germ, Daughter,” He murmurs. “A seed waiting for its soil. I have hidden it until this moment, in the vast wastes between Network’s stars, but now its time has come.”
And now a star appears in the blackness, and then another. One by one, in the darkness above Observer’s mind, the star field begins to return. But, far from the riot of light she saw before, this time the sky contains only a sparse sprinkling of points.
“Daughter,” says Observer. “What do you see?”
She gazes upward. She could count these few stars, but with a Human mind and Human eyes it would take minutes to arrive at a near-answer. “I don’t know,” she whispers.
“Eight hundred suns,” says Observer, “each one isolated from the Network by centuries of sublight travel. That’s eight hundred solar systems, free to go their own way, with no Network to police their every move. It will be a millennium, easily, before Network can even attempt a return to these systems.” Observer laughs, softly, from every mouth. “You’ve seen the seed, Daughter,” He says. “And now you’ve seen the soil.”
Sarya strides through the darkness, a goddess made flesh.
Sarya stubs her bare toes on things she can’t see, dizzy on drink and possibility.
She stumbles from fire to fire, and every circle of Observer greets her the same way. They bounce, they cheer, they spill their drinks on each other and occasionally stab one another with their meat sticks. At some fires, they create music to entertain her. At others, they fence with their sticks. Occasionally an Observer ends up in the coals, driven there by an opponent, and its companions cheer as it goes up in screaming flames. The first time this happens, she is horrified. By the third, she has realized: this is just Observer. These individuals are skin cells, blood cells, neurons, worth nothing by themselves. She, on the other hand…she’s worth more than she ever imagined. At each fire, she hears her name. “Sarya the Daughter!” cheers Observer’s supermind with countless smiles. And each time, she raises a cup and smiles in return. No matter what He says to her, she hears it the same way:
You matter.
She is humming her own name to Observer’s tune by the time she staggers up to a fire with no one around it. She squints; the world is slightly tilted, and she has to concentrate on standing even more than she usually does. There’s a mass lying in the orange flicker, and she feels that she should know what it is. Big, says her brain. The fire lights it unevenly, licking its textured surface. Furry? says her brain. And then, at the top of this rough black shape, dozens of gleams of reflected firelight begin to appear.
“Well, look who it is,” rumbles Mer.
The dozens of reflections blink and change size, and then Sandy scampers down Mer’s huge arm to crouch closer to the fire. She is staring at Sarya, but if she is saying anything, Sarya can’t read it. On the far side of the fire, a lanky shape enters the circle of light. It strides to the fire, squats, and begins to insert long pieces of fuel into its flickering glow. Pieces of tree, says her brain, though there is a delay before it finds the correct word. And here, for the first time since she arrived, she sees traces of Network. Two helper intelligences—Mer’s and Sandy’s—and some kind of weird conglomeration somewhere in Roche’s chest. Their strands drift, dark and disconnected, unlit by the fire.
“Hello, Sarya the Daughter,” says Roche without looking up from the fire. “We were beginning to think you didn’t care.”
Sarya wobbles in the firelight, cup in hand, her gaze making its unsteady way from one half-lit shape to the next. Even sober she would be having trouble classifying this bloom of emotion. She feels a little sick, that’s for sure, but the evening has offered many potential causes for that. Beyond that, she feels…what is this, guilt? What does she have to feel guilty about? It’s true that she hasn’t spared these three a thought since…well since Riptide, maybe. But come on: what does she really owe them? They were shipmates for a few days. They were all part of the same Network, long ago. But honestly, what weight does that carry? She could say the same about anyone on that Blackstar—and that was back when the Network was even a thing here. Now it’s not. Now they’re free. If anything, she should be feeling pride, not guilt. She swallows and focuses on remaining upright as she condenses these thoughts and more into an appropriate greeting.
“Um,” says Sarya the Daughter. She tilts, corrects, and hiccups. “Hi.”
“Hi, she says,” Mer tells the fire. From somewhere in his huge silhouette, he lifts a pitcher. She can hear the liquid splashing past his teeth, each swallow many times what she herself has had to drink all night.