Stealing Light

Three

Shoal Homeworld, Perseus Arm

Consortium Standard Date: 01.02.2542

The creature’s name was Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals, and he fell from orbit, contained within a field-protected bubble of brackish fluid, towards an unending expanse of blue.

Far above him, only a very few stars shone down. During its long and lonely flight, the Shoal homeworld had been lost in a dense cloud of interstellar dust for almost ten millennia, and was not expected to emerge from the other side for another millennium at least.

The part of the homeworld towards which Trader descended was currently in day, the requisite heat and light providing life given not by the long-departed star under which Trader’s kind had first evolved, but instead by a myriad of field-suspended fusion globes arranged in a tight grid hanging a few thousand kilometres above the planet surface.

The homeworld moved alone through the vast expanse of the Milky Way, heading for the relatively empty spaces between its great spiral arms. There, at least, might be found safety from the war that would surely come one day.

Oh woe, thought Trader, as the watery surface of the homeworld approached at an alarming speed, that we should ever reach our fabled destination! His manipulator tentacles writhed under his body in an approximation of grim humour, snatching wriggling live-foods from his briny encasement and slipping them into his quivering jaws. Ten thousand years travelling and, with any luck, ten thousand years more, and another ten thousand years after that, and after that, and after…

The world of Trader’s birth was an ocean world. A long time ago there had been continents, too, but careful management of the natural tectonic system had lowered these continental surfaces until they could be safely drowned beneath the life-giving waters. Now all was ocean, for ever and ever, except where carefully shaped energy fields cut great holes down through the surface of the waters: gaping abyssal spaces into which the vast pressures of the ocean yearned to plunge. These fields sliced high up into the atmosphere, generating vast areas of vacuum that led all the way down to the seabed, and even further.

It was to one of these tunnels running through the world that Trader dropped, his enormous blank eyes staring out from the skull of his piscine form, but safe within his protective bubble.

The ocean rushed towards Trader and then past, as the creature dropped down one of the vacuum shafts, the blue surrounding waters rapidly turning black as he descended, leaving just a bright circle of light far above to mark his point of entry.

In the fraction of a moment it took Trader to twitch one of his palpebra, he was plunged into darkness except where the occasional fusion globe hovered in defiance of the laws of nature. These lit the way into sub-aquatic portals where a Shoal-member might pass at last from deadly vacuum and into the slippery embrace of Mother Ocean.

Down, down, down. Trader fell yet further, then twisted to one side with impossible speed in his inertia-free bubble, a fusion marker reduced to a fleeting point of incandescence as he sped by it in a flash. Then he was deep within the healing waters of Mother Ocean.

This was the place where the Deep Dreamers dwelt, in unending blackness at the very bottom of the world.

The decision to remove the Shoal homeworld from its orbit around the star that had birthed it had been made long before Trader had come into existence. But Trader himself was very, very old. He had employed a thousand names but, when he came to dealing with the humans who were his current area of interest and employment, the sobriquet Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals had seemed apposite.

It was a joke between Trader and the humans, some of whom found the honorific deeply offensive while knowing there was literally nothing they could do about it.

And neither they nor any other client race had the faintest notion of the deep rifts that ran through Shoal society. Nor would they, ever, if Trader and those of similar employ had anything to do with it.

Trader drifted further across the sandy ocean floor, where the vast watery spaces were broken into distinct regions by field projections. Massive buildings and administrative blocks grown out of ancient coral rose above the seabed like living colossi, though this was a region to which few were allowed access. Other Shoal-members darted about, following their own paths, busy in the gigantic task of administering to the Dreamers’ needs -feeding and caring for them, aeon after aeon, on and on into a future which the Dreamers had been specifically engineered to detect and analyse.

The landscape was marked by yet more fusion globes that cast a luminescence over the chillingly vast shapes scattered across the face of the abyss. The Deep Dreamers would be aware of Trader’s approach, as they were aware of so much else in their godlike capacity to see where the roots of coming events lay within the present. Trader drifted on over the edge of a precipice, and then spotted the Dreamers directly ahead, great bulbous shapes with sightless eyes, their gargantuan tentacles draped across and dwarfing the smooth hummocks of what had once been an undersea mountain range.

The land for hundreds of kilometres around the Deep Dreamers was devoted to sea farms that generated the thousands of tonnes of food necessary to feed them. Hundreds of tenders constantly roamed around the Dreamers, like acolytes waiting to be consumed by vast and terrible black gods.

‘If you go among the Deep Dreamers,’ Trader’s superior had warned several days before, ‘it’s very likely an agent of the Mother Star Faction will seek to destroy you.’

They had met at an arranged rendezvous in an orbital park, a water-filled environment constructed partly from physical materials and partly from shaped energy fields. The homeworld had been visible far below, its waters wreathed in summer storms, lightning flickering across the southern hemisphere where a hurricane raged, whipping the surface waters into foam-capped waves beneath a tight curl of coriolis.

Above the atmosphere, and beyond the warming light of the fusion globes that surrounded it, the planet was ringed from longitude to latitude by glittering silver bands like a jeweller’s cage. These were manifestations of certain fundamental energies that allowed the Shoal homeworld to be guided through the depths of interstellar space, keeping as far as possible from any neighbouring star systems.

Trader and his superior-an ancient, leather-skinned individual known to him only as Desire-For-Violent-Rendering, a title reflecting his past involvement in the messier and bloodier affairs of government-had swum in parallel course through the public space, appearing to any casual observer as merely two ancient fish lost in their reminiscences of times long past.

‘It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve tried, I assure you,’ Trader had replied. His answer had been enunciated as a cascade of watery clicks generated by its secondary mouth. ‘I know how to handle myself.’

Desire-For-Violent-Rendering had clicked assent, but Trader could discern the other’s nervousness manifest from the way he twisted his manipulator tentacles.

‘Attention has been drawn to your working methods within higher levels of government,’ Desire continued. ‘Officially of course you are a free agent, long retired from active service. Nevertheless…’

Nevertheless. Trader had felt a certain wry humour listening to Desire’s carefully phrased statement. Even an old murderer like Desire got the shits in Trader’s presence. But as far as Trader was concerned, given that their ultimate purpose was to guarantee the continued survival of their species against so many enemies, real and potential, any successful approach was the right approach.

‘You think me amoral and careless?’ Trader had replied casually. ‘Yet if I had not acted in the past according to my own judgement, the outcome might well have been far more terrible than some of our cadre frankly are capable of comprehending. This agent of the pro-solar faction, would its name be Squat-Devourer-Of-Enemy-Corpses, by any chance?’

Desire-For-Violent-Rendering fell silent, and Trader enjoyed a small flush of triumph at this response.

General Squat was a Shoal-member with a reputation even more terrifying than that of Desire, who had been taking charge of many a military campaign since long before many of the Shoal’s client species had been huddling around their first self-made fires. Yet Squat seemed to have grown weaker with old age, more… liberal.

At that point, Trader had shot out a tentacle and snatched up a mollusc swimming by, ripping its shell open and stuffing the contents into his primary mouth with particular force. Even thinking about Squat provoked strong feelings of anger.

‘Squat is close to the truth,’ Desire-For-Violent-Rendering then warned Trader. ‘We know the General was approached by Mother Star representatives, after making some enquiries of his own, and has since been recruited to their cause. Do not underestimate either the power or the influence that-’

‘With respect, I am hardly to be underestimated myself.’

‘But you are becoming careless, I think,’ had been Desire’s instant reply. ‘You wouldn’t be the first agent to get swallowed up by his own hubris. This name you have chosen for yourself…’

‘Trader- In-Faecal-Matter-Of- Animals?’

‘Yes.’ Desire-For-Violent-Rendering’s distaste had become clear in the writhing of his manipulator tentacles. ‘A joke for a name, a very human joke at that. You have, I think, spent too long around those wretched creatures. Not only that, your methodology has become eccentric, for want of a better word. As if you’re testing fate by giving those you seek to manipulate the opportunity to uncover your very manipulation. One might believe you to be suffering a certain, well, existential despair, as is not unprecedented amongst agents of the Dreamers.’

Desire had halted close to the border of a vacuum shaft, clearly waiting for a reply.

Trader’s own manipulators had writhed in amusement. ‘Are you suggesting I retire?’

‘Perhaps not immediately,’ Desire had conceded, ‘since the Deep Dreamers appear to confirm the central nature of your role in coming events. Do you intend to visit them soon?’

‘Yes, very soon. I will… have to deal with the General, it appears.’

‘If word got out of the Great Secret, of the true reason for abandoning our home star and carrying our homeworld so far from any other solar body…’

‘I understand.’

Desire appeared satisfied with this reply. ‘It seems more than likely the General will approach you during your visit to the Dreamers, since you’re otherwise unlikely to return to the homeworld again for some time. A meeting there would be… efficacious.’

Trader had flicked his massive eyes to either side of them out of habit. A multitude of peripheral devices scattered throughout the length and breadth of the park made it clear, however, that no one was in a position to overhear anything they said to each other.

The Deep Dreamers were the result of tens of millennia of selective breeding and genetic manipulation that had resulted in creatures as near to immortal as could be imagined, even by the standards of the exceedingly long-lived Shoal. The Dreamers’ biological neural networks constituted a massive engine of quantum parallel-processing designed to navigate the chaotic foaming surf of the very near future, and thereby discern the rough shape of coming events. They could sift through near-infinite numbers of conflicting and competing quantum uncertainties, and predict where certain trends might bear fruit, or where certain historical processes might either grow in impetus or grind to a halt. They were also one of the Shoal’s best kept secrets.

Generally, the Dreamers’ predictions produced relatively few real surprises. Trader had long known that the war they all feared was an historical inevitability, something to be postponed as long as possible rather than entirely avoided. Nevertheless, the Dreamers could often produce remarkable-if occasionally unreliable -results on a far more basic and personal level.

It was for this reason Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals had chosen to make this personal trip to visit the Deep Dreamers for the first time in centuries. Extremely secret communiquйs had predicted his prominent role in certain worryingly apocalyptic visions recently generated by the Deep Dreamers.

Never one happy to accept information at second hand, Trader had naturally requested a direct audition with the Dreamers, in order more accurately to decipher his role in coming events.

This close to them, it would have been easy to mistake the vast undulating shapes of the Deep Dreamers for a particularly sinuous and disturbingly organic-appearing range of hills and valleys. Hills that, from time to time, moved.

Occasional tiny sparks of bright energy fizzed around the surface of Trader’s protective field bubble, as it adjusted to a soul-crushing pressure far higher than that in which Trader’s species had first evolved. Other bubbles of bright energy, each containing a Shoal-member, rose up towards Trader from the direction of the Dreamers. These were the priest-geneticists that spent their lives tending and guarding their mountainous oracles here in endless, solemn darkness.

Trader soon became aware of the presence of another, approaching him rapidly from another direction. Trader slowed, allowing General Squat-Devourer-Of-Enemy-Corpses to come parallel with him. They swam on together, progressing in the direction of the Dreamers.

‘There you are!’ cried the General with forced joviality. ‘Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals, eh?’ His manipulators rattled together with a series of clicking sounds, the Shoal equivalent of raucous laughter.

Trader suffered a momentary frisson of panic. Could the approaching priest-geneticists be fully trusted in their imminent dealings with the General? They were all, supposedly, insiders, loyal to Desire-For-Violent-Rendering’s decision to suppress the unpalatable truth from the likes of General Squat.

But what if Desire had in fact already betrayed Trader? What if Desire’s warning about Trader’s working methods had really been a kind of ultimatum?

What if? What if?

Trader scolded himself even for such a momentary lapse of faith. If death came this day, he would die with the knowledge he had served the Shoal Hegemony far longer than most. There was grace and nobility in that thought for, after all, the notion of dying a natural death seemed preposterous.

And if not this day, then he would die on another. So be it.

Trader ceased his worrying. He cast a sideways glance at Squat, noting what an ugly brute the General was, his scaly hide scarred and weather-beaten. One eye-albeit easily repairable-was milky-white and blind, with a visible rent in its surface. A formidable opponent indeed, but Trader had faced worse.

General Squat rammed his field bubble into Trader’s, and the water around them boiled as their energies clashed. Trader rapidly skipped his protective field away from the General, taking a moment to realize Squat was not in fact attempting to kill him.

‘General-’

‘Caught you there, eh?’ The General came rushing back up, ancillary mouth snapping and tentacles writhing. ‘Need to stay sharp! Never know when you might get a knife between the fins.’

‘And you, General’-Trader was regaining some of his composure-‘what brings you to the Deep Dreamers?’

‘Well, you see, the future’s been rather on my mind of late too,’ Squat replied.

At this comment, Trader kept his tentacles noncommittally bundled.

Something very like a human shrug rippled across the General’s scarred exterior. ‘There are rumours… very dark rumours, my friend.’

‘I had no idea,’ Trader replied.

‘I hate to listen to unfounded gossip, but you’d be amazed the things that are presently being muttered in some very high-ranking circles.’

‘Such as?’

Trader looked askance at his companion. They were close enough now to the Dreamers to see the sheer scale of the beasts; each tentacle-sucker could easily consume a hundred Shoal-members all at once. They were deep within the Dreamer’s influence now, caught in the eddying tide of the very near future, even as it prepared to crash into the present.

‘Well, I wouldn’t care to elaborate,’ Squat replied in a conspiratorial tone. ‘And if I did, I might subsequently be forced to kill you.’ The General’s tentacles swirled around with humourless mirth.

‘I have heard rumours myself,’ Trader replied, ‘that the Dreamers all predict a war is coming.’

‘Yes!’ The General seized upon this. ‘Now don’t get me wrong, war is a wonderful thing-in the right context, with the right enemy, and as long as you win. But these rumours, they concern an unwinnable war, as preposterous as that notion seems. Unwinnable?’

‘Perhaps some of our associates have been talking too freely, General. It really wouldn’t do to frighten the ordinary population.’

‘Indeed,’ the General replied.

Trader glanced ahead and noticed the priest-geneticists were almost upon them.

‘Have you heard about old Rigor-Mortis?’ asked Squat. ‘Dead, I’m afraid.’

‘Is that so?’

Trader failed to conceal his surprise. Rigor-Mortis had long been a prime mover among those who, like Trader, were privy to the Great Secret.

‘Yes. Rigor gave himself to the Dreamers not so long ago, apparently unable to bear the burden of some preposterous secret he had carried all his life. Or so the old fool told me, before he became voluntary squid food.’

‘I see. And what might this secret be?’

‘Preposterous nonsense, obviously. But I wanted to ask you about it, considering you were close pals with old Rigor for, oh, so many centuries. He claimed he knew the real reason we’ve been fleeing our own sun for so long. What he said was… remarkable. Of course, if you were to lend credence to such stories, it would raise rather a whole slew of other questions, wouldn’t it?’

Trader steeled himself. ‘I wouldn’t know, General. What secret? Which questions?’

‘Officially, the decision to remove our world from the original home system was due to inherent instabilities within our own star, which were likely to result in particularly destructive solar flares. Correct?’

‘This is old news, General.’

‘For this reason,’ Squat blithely continued, ‘we have since been travelling through the eternal darkness of space at a sublight crawl for millennia. Yet there are plenty of viable and stable star systems we could have guided our world toward before now. But we haven’t done so. Why?’

‘General-’

The General ignored Trader and continued. ‘Yet we continue eternally on this quixotic quest, believing misguidedly that it wouldn’t possibly occur to any of the tens of billions of Shoal-members living today that this story doesn’t hold up nearly as well as a bucket of fish guts on the sunniest day of the year. Otherwise, why would the Mother Star Faction have gathered so much support for the idea of simply finding a viable star and going there! And then, of course, there remains the question of why we don’t simply construct the biggest transluminal drive in the galaxy, and just fly this bloody great mudball to some other perfectly compatible star in an instant. Oh, so many questions, my dear Trader. And yet old Rigor seemed remarkably certain he had all the real answers.’

‘General, Rigor believed in a lot of things, but his mind became increasingly addled since he was forced to retire. You’ll recall he was captured in some middle-of-nowhere conflict and came very close to being made into a stew’

‘Be that as it may, everything the General told me made perfect sense. And don’t keep trying to play the innocent, Trader. Your own name turned up often enough during his confessions.’

Trader sighed inwardly, and mentally prepared himself to murder General Squat at the nearest convenient moment. Now, however, he would have to listen to his idiotic heresies for a few minutes more, until the priest-geneticists were close enough for Trader to flash them the prearranged signal.

Squat continued in his blustering way. ‘Remarkable, Rigor’s revelations, particularly his suggestion that our faster-than-light technology was in fact stolen from another species.’

‘General, would you really see the Shoal Hegemony collapse after half a million years? Is that what you’re seeking? Would you still be proud of giving away the secrets of some dried-out old idiot too tired of life to stick around to see what damage he could do before he died?’

‘Of course not. The days of our earliest interstellar travels are now long ago and half-forgotten. And, as we know, the few records that still exist are sketchy at best. Yet he didn’t stop there. According to Rigor, the transluminal technology has other uses so remarkable that merely possessing the knowledge of it would entirely explain our long flight from the home star…’

The dozen priest-geneticists, in their bright, colour-coded pressurized bubbles, were almost upon them, feigning as if to pass on by in the opposite direction. Trader watched the General glance towards them, and struggled not to do the same.

‘All right, General, tell me what your price is. Please don’t tell me it’s anything as banal as power and influence. I’d be disappointed.’

‘Half a million years of unbroken rule would hardly become unbalanced by a more candid attitude towards our fellow citizens,’ came Squat’s immediate reply. ‘If the Mother Star Faction’s demands can’t be met, then at least give them a reasonable explanation of why they can’t.’

‘That won’t happen, General. Those to whom I answer will have none of it.’

‘Then you’re facing the risk of revolution, Trader-In-Faecal-Matter-Of-Animals,’ came General Squat’s immediate reply. ‘Now that I think of it, perhaps your chosen ambassadorial name sounds more appropriate than I realized. Most Shoal-members live far from the homeworld, but they would all rather see it orbiting securely around a stable star than lost for ever in a frozen dust cloud. Otherwise…’

Otherwise, what? was Trader’s unvoiced reply. It was clear the General was not going to listen to reason.

‘Otherwise,’ General Squat concluded after a pause, ‘others like me will be sure to disseminate the truth -particularly if anything drastic were to happen to me.’

Trader gave the signal. Suddenly the dozen priest-geneticists came rushing forward. Their energy bubbles flashed as they collided with the General’s, while Trader himself retreated to a safe distance.

Thirteen balls of coloured light suddenly merged into one, with General Squat caught in the middle. The priest-geneticists now fell on the old warrior-fish, their tentacles ready-tipped with diamond-edged blades. The General fought valiantly, but he was old, and had been taken by surprise.

Your agents, dear General, are compromised, Trader thought to himself. Squat’s plans stank of rank amateurism.

It was over so quickly. After a few moments the priest-geneticists fell away from the General’s ripped-up corpse, which began spiralling down towards the seabed, preceded by a field disrupter weapon the old fool had kept concealed about his person.

‘Feed the General’s remains to the Dreamers,’ Trader instructed one of the priests, a near-albino known as Keeper-Of-Intimate-Secrets-Of-The-Unwittingly-Compromised. ‘They can enjoy his memories.’

Keeper blinked his massive eyes at this request. ‘If we submit the General’s remains to the Deep Dreamers, his once-conscious matrix will merge with and further inform the Dreamers. The memory of what has happened here would survive and, so long as it remains within the matrix of the Dreamers, what he knew at the time of his death might be rediscovered by others.’

Trader sighed, emitting a long stream of bubbles. ‘And it is your duty to sift through, interpret and censor such information as it comes to light, is it not? Rigor-Mortis gave himself to the Deep Dreamers precisely because he believed the truth would emerge just as you describe, and it’s your duty to ensure this never happens. Is that understood?’

‘Understood, yes,’ the priest-geneticist replied, with a rapid string of clicks.

‘Very good. Now take me to the Deep Dreamers.’

For some reason, some of the priests-including Keeper-Of-Secrets-appeared to regard Trader as almost as much of an oracle as the Deep Dreamers themselves.

‘And you truly believe the war to end all wars is upon us?’ Keeper-Of-Secrets asked yet again, as General Squat’s body was delivered to the vast spirochetes of the nearest of the Dreamers.

Trader’s reply was dismissive. ‘What the Dreamers tell us is… well, it’s rarely conclusive, is it? Sometimes, sad to say, it’s even useless.’

Keeper was clearly scandalized by this suggestion, but Trader blithely continued: ‘Instead the Dreamers give us clues vague enough to appear to mean one thing, then turn out to have a wildly different interpretation once it’s too late to influence the course of events. Keeper, I think we rely on them too much. They’re just a convenience the Hegemony can point to so they can abdicate all responsibility for their own actions. Look, they just say the Deep Dreamers predicted this, and the outcome was inevitable, whatever they might have done.’

Trader flicked his tentacles in a shrug. ‘So ultimately that means an unfortunate few like myself are forced to take on responsibility for what must be done, and divert the flow of history.’

‘Perhaps, but it must be…’ Keeper hesitated.

‘Continue.’

‘I’m afraid of speaking out of turn.’

‘You have my permission.’

‘It strikes me as a lonely and thankless occupation,’ Keeper-Of-Secrets continued. ‘So few are permitted to know that such as yourself must manipulate events throughout the galaxy for the general benefit of our species. Yet, since such manipulations are based on the Dreamer’s own predictions, and you appear not to think highly of the Dreamers…’

‘I couldn’t live with myself, if I thought any inaction on my part led to our destruction,’ Trader replied. ‘So, you see, to act is morally unavoidable, whatever the source of the intelligence.’

They had by now almost reached the first of the Dreaming Temples-a hovering robot submarine that granted the privileged few the means to interface directly with the Dreamers.

Trader made his farewells to his new partners in murder before finally slipping into the wet embrace of the Temple. The machine’s innards opened up automatically at his approach, mechanical mandibles reaching out and securing his field bubble, which merged on contact with the Temple’s own energy fields.

Trader found himself in absolute darkness, greater even than that prevailing beyond the Temple’s hull. This hiatus lasted only seconds, however, before the Temple made contact with the Dreamer’s collective consciousness.

Trader felt as if his mind had expanded to encompass the entire galaxy within a matter of seconds. Powerful images and sensations assailed his mind, far stronger than those faint intimations he had sensed on his journey here. He witnessed a hundred stars blossoming in deadly fire across the greater night of the Milky Way, a wave of bright destruction unparalleled in all of Shoal history, outside of the Great Expulsion.

Trader felt sickening despair. This was the worst possible outcome: a seething wave of carnage sweeping the Shoal Hegemony into dusty history. To become a had-been and never-would-be-again civilization, forgotten in the annals of the greater history of the cosmos.

Yet hope could still be detected even in the face of apparently unavoidable doom. Over the next few hours, working within the Temple, Trader was able to identify potential key factors: individuals, places and dates that might well influence the initiation of the conflict.

And even if war could not be prevented, it might still be reduced in the scale of its destructive impact. With gentle manipulation, it might even be contained, rendered harmless: turned into a historical footnote rather than a final chapter.

Sometimes, Trader had found, fate really did lie in the hands of a few sentients such as himself.

He began to make plans to ensure he would always be present in the right places to witness-and influence-these pivotal events. And perhaps even divert them away from an astonishingly destructive war that otherwise threatened to erase life from the galaxy.