Feathers seemed to have no breasts – no nipples.

  Her face was distorted, if you took the human as a norm. Soft, short feathers brushed back from a low brow. The beak-mouth seemed drastically different to the human arrangement, with a hard plate where nose and upper lip might have been—

  Suddenly Feathers’ eyes were open.

  She was staring at Salma. Large, dark eyes (did they have pupils?).

  Salma forced a smile … No, she found. It wasn’t forced.

  Feathers stared back. Those eyes were huge, unblinking.

  Zaimu said, ‘She does have a beak. She really does. But – look, with small teeth …’

  Meriel spoke out of the air. ‘I can confirm it’s female, from more evidence. It, she …’

  The disembodied voice seemed to alarm Feathers; she looked round uneasily, as if seeking the source.

  ‘The scans show it,’ Meriel said. ‘There’s an ovary, I’m sure. But – I’m drawing on loose terrestrial parallels here, parallels to the structures I see – she doesn’t have the facility to deliver live births. Salma, I think she lays eggs.’

  Feathers seemed to be growing still more alarmed. She cowered back, staring at Salma, Zaimu. She was shuddering, or shivering.

  Salma reached forward, hesitantly, stroked her head. ‘Hey. It’s OK.’

  Feathers just stared back with those huge eyes. But she seemed to calm.

  Salma pulled back her hand.

  Captain Hild’s voice boomed in the air. ‘Feathers and eggs and a beak? Watching in here. Well, we all are. You know what, Meriel? If you made a human out of a bird, that’s pretty much what it would look like, isn’t it?’

  That second voice coming out of the air seemed to be the final straw for Feathers. After a few seconds of it, she threw back her head and screamed.

  Not a human scream, Salma thought immediately. All she had seen or heard of birds had been in virtual dioramas recorded in the renewed wilderness areas of Earth. But that call had sounded like the call of a bird, a caw, a cry of alarm.

  Meriel’s voice was louder than Hild’s. ‘That’s it. I’m closing this down. You two, out; I’m leaving it to the bots.’

  Salma glanced at Zaimu.

  He shook his head, a small gesture, but firm. ‘We stay,’ he said.

  ‘Damn right,’ Salma said. ‘But we shut everybody else out. And shut up. The voices in the air are spooking her.’

  A bot descended right in front of her, hovering between Feathers and herself. She peremptorily shoved it out of the way. ‘That’s not negotiable.’

  ‘Crew Salma.’ That was the captain’s voice.

  Feathers cringed even more at the new sound, yet another new voice. She curled up on the bed.

  ‘Crew Salma. Do as Meriel orders. You and Crew Zaimu, out of there, now.’

  ‘Like hell. Zaimu—’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  Zaimu was useful in zero gravity, Salma knew. And he knew the ship’s systems intimately. Now, quickly, nimbly, he cleared away the cloud of hovering bots. When he grabbed one, it would not resist, not risk injuring him, even as he threw it aside. Salma saw how he didn’t shove hard enough to do any damage, or not significantly, though one bot did catch on the frame of the bed and went spinning out of control.

  Once the bots were cleared away Zaimu hovered by the bed, waiting to fend off any more intrusions.

  As soon as she got the chance, as soon as the bots were out of the way, Salma leaned forward – slowly, gently, but deliberately – and put her arms around Feathers. Lifted her to a sitting posture. The feathers at arms, legs and waist had been damaged by the cuffs, she saw. And immediately she could feel how Feathers was trembling – or shivering, she thought.

  At first Feathers resisted. She twisted her head in panic, as if looking for a way to escape.

  But Salma held her, not tightly, in a loose embrace. ‘It’s all right. They won’t hurt you. They’re only trying to help … Damn it, she’s still shivering. She’s cold. What if this room is too cold for her? And she’s wet – did you sluice her down as you did us?’

  ‘Crew Salma—’

  ‘She’s cold, and she’s alone, and she’s terrified. Zaimu, help me—’

  ‘On it.’ He sailed through the room, grabbed a towel from a holder on the wall en route, passed it to Salma who caught it neatly.

  Gently she drew Feathers towards her again, wrapped the towel around to enclose her but not so tightly that Feathers might feel trapped, and started to rub her back through the towel. Still Feathers shivered, and twisted, as if restless, though her moans were dying down.

  ‘Smooth downward,’ Zaimu said. ‘The way the feathers lie. That will be easier for her – more comfortable.’

  ‘Yeah. Good thinking.’

  Stroking Feathers’ back softly, smoothly, Salma felt her relax – although she could sense what felt like a heartbeat, oddly rapid. Now Salma was able to look into the creature’s face once more. Her eyes were pools of darkness that showed her own reflection.

  Gradually the shivering slowed.

  ‘Shit,’ said Meriel, quietly, as if whispering. ‘If I really were a doctor I’d probably say you were doing exactly the right thing, Salma. Do you want my job?’

  ‘She was scared, and alone, and wet,’ Salma said. ‘All she needed was a hug.’

  ‘OK. But listen, try to do a little science while you’re there. We need to understand her to be able to help her. Don’t put any stress on her. But do you get any sense of – of weight, robustness?’

  ‘I … maybe. I’m holding her, not lifting her. I get the sense she’d be lighter than a human, though.’

  ‘That’s what I’d expect from the scans we’ve already done. Her bones look built for strength with lightness – not as solid as human bones, but with hollow cavities, struts for strength. And a big breastbone, an anchor for powerful muscles—’

  Zaimu said, ‘Like a bird. A bird has such features, a skeleton built for flight. The big breastbone to ground the flight muscles.’

  ‘Correct …’

  Feathers still seemed relaxed, but a little more restless; she turned her face this way and that, her beak-mouth opening and closing.

  There really were teeth in that beak. Did any birds have teeth? Salma knew that some dinosaurs, relatives of the birds, once had teeth …

  ‘I think she’s thirsty,’ Zaimu said now. ‘Look. The way she’s opening her mouth. Not surprising. We’ve given her nothing since we picked her up on the surface. Can she have water?’ Anticipating the answer, he went to a spigot, filled a covered cup.

  ‘I’m pretty sure she can,’ Meriel said. ‘We’ve already analysed some body-fluid samples, including the spittle you collected and what the bots have managed to retrieve. As non-invasively as possible, from scrapes and scraps, before you launch into me … We have blood, tissue. Her biochemistry is like ours, but not identical. Proteins in water, as I thought. What looks like a genetic system based on amino acids – but not our DNA. More like our RNA, in fact. So – water, yes.’

  Zaimu came over. Salma gently rested Feathers’ head back a little, pushing back the towel, so that the creature could see Zaimu’s offer. The lidded container seemed to baffle her. So Salma took a sip herself, to show how it was done, and then let Feathers take the cup herself.

  Feathers reached, a wing-arm unfolding with a rustle of feathers, and fragile, bony fingers extended from the wingtip.

  Meriel said softly, ‘Look at that limb. It’s more like a wing with a claw, than an arm. But if it’s meant for flight it’s evidently devolved. Her ancestors may have taken to the skies, but this bird never flew …’

  It took a couple of tries, but soon Feathers was holding the cup for herself and sucking water into her beak-mouth with ease.

  Salma, feeling protective, took back the cup after a few mouthfuls. ‘Maybe we ought to take it easy for now … Meriel, what about food?’

  ‘Well, I have her genetics. And we know she’s a meat-eater, or I think so—’

  ‘The teeth in the beak.’

  ‘Yeah. I’m thinking of synthesising some kind of meat-substitute based on her own flesh’s composition. It feels a little queasy to feed her back her own kind’s flesh, but it will keep her alive until we can do better.’

  ‘Or until she can tell us what she wants,’ Hild said. ‘That sounds like good work, Meriel. And you, Salma.’

  For once, no smart come-back from anybody. All Salma cared about now was Feathers.

  But Hild said, ‘So we made a start on what she is. Now we also need to know why she’s here. What the hell this is all about.’

  Zaimu murmured, ‘All in good time. And it’s going to take a good long time, I think. A lot of patience.’

  Hild said quietly, ‘Patience we’ve got, it seems. And – empathy.’

  Feathers, resting now, wrapped in the towel and Salma’s arms, looked up at Salma with those big, watchful, unblinking eyes.

  ‘Well,’ Salma said, ‘I don’t know where you came from, or how you got here, or why you are here. But I guess we’re stuck with each other.’ She pointed to herself. ‘Salma. Salma.’ And at Feathers. ‘Feathers. Feathers.’

  The creature reached up one wing, feathers rustling. One of those fingers at the end of the wing touched the black amulet at Salma’s neck. Those big eyes fixed on Salma, and the beak-mouth opened and closed.

  ‘Shh – aa – maa …’

  And, her eyes closing, Feathers slid into sleep.

  12

  And elsewhere, elsewhen—

  The contact was going well, he saw. Far away across the quantum-froth multiverse – ‘far’ by a definition that would have meant little to most humans – it was as if the softest, hesitant knock on a door had been made.

  That was all he needed.

  Later, humans would call him Terminus.

  Him. They would assign a gender.

  And a god’s name.

  But even that ‘him’ was nothing but a human label associated with the human name they had applied. It had nothing, intrinsically, to do with him.

  His own awareness of himself was quite different, of course.

  To him, the universe that humans inhabited – so large to them! – was just one transient bubble in a high-energy foam, a foam barely even describable within the limits of human physical theories. To Terminus, this foam of realities, all of it, was home. Indeed, he had once learned about his own origin, had looked back and watched his own creation.

  That is, as if he had watched such foam until, purely by chance, those swirling bubbles self-assembled to form a pattern. An image.

  His own image. His mind, his self.

  This was how he had been ‘born’, he came to understand. Not conceived as a procreation of other life forms, not as a member of any species, not a product of any chain of life – not even an automaton, created as the result of a decision of other minds.

  He had been ‘born’ in a place – a universe among an infinitude of others – that was so vast and so long-lived that there was time for minds like his own to come about through the random collisions of stray matter particles, the pushing of stray wisps of energy. Not through the slow working of any kind of natural selection or evolution – but by sheer chance, all a mind’s complexity could be created. Given enough time that scenario could play out, over and over.

  Even before their first encounter, humans had guessed at the existence of such creatures as Terminus. In theory, purely through logic. It was all a matter of time, and chance. Given enough time, the wildest, most improbable act of creation could appear literally out of nowhere. The shards of the broken vase would leap up to the shelf, reassemble, all spontaneously. All you had to do was wait.

  But, however born, once born Terminus had been given a purpose.

  Scattered across every universe, in every bubble in the reality foam, there were lesions, or doors, or portals – each a breach of a boundary. The portals came in a variety of forms and designs, lodged in the hearts of giant stars, or on the surfaces of rocky planets, or drifting in the thinnest of intergalactic dust clouds. Humans might have labelled them black holes – but most were far more sophisticated than those crude ruptures in spacetime … But, in a sense, they all worked the same way.

  Terminus did not know how the portals had been created, distributed. That belonged to an unimaginable before. But he knew they all had a single purpose.

  His role, as he understood it, was to spread complexity – life and mind of a wide definition – spread it out from the intricacy of his own origin, his own unimaginably ancient cosmos, across reality, across a wider multiverse. And, since not all universes could endure as long as his own, he would reach out to other universes and rebuild them – or at least start that process – share with them the gift of infinity. Of eternity. Eternity and infinity.

  What else was there to do, in a multiverse of eternities and infinities, but to share? As to what came after that – what became of the universes he touched – Terminus had no interest.

  But for now the game was unfolding, once more, as it had so often before.

  It was simple. Wait for somebody, on the other side, in a target universe, to find one of his portals.

  To reach out to that portal.

  To touch it – whatever that meant in terms of their own embodiment. Sometimes, a mere wisp of deflected relic radiation was enough. A mere glance.

  After that, for that somebody, everything would change.

  And now one such portal loomed in his awareness.

  One glance. One small touch.

  Terminus would eventually learn all things about humanity. Humans would eventually call him ‘Terminus’ after a Roman liminal deity. A god of boundaries. Indeed, the very name meant ‘boundary stone’. In their early days the Romans had made sacrifices to such stones, in the belief that the god Terminus, if pleased, preserved such boundaries, and so ensured a little piece of civilisation stayed peaceful and intact a little longer.

  Of course that didn’t quite fit his own role.

  But a later generation of Romans, under the Emperor Diocletian, had invoked their god of the boundaries to push back, actively, at the cult of Christianity, which at that time was rapidly infecting and destabilising the pagan core of their ancient culture.

  A terminus could be an active, expansive entity, then. A weapon. Even in human culture.

  Perhaps the name was apt …

  To smile was a human reflex. Yet now, it could be said, Terminus smiled.

  13

  Elizabeth Vasta, Special Scientific Adviser to the President of Earth, still hated being in space.

  ‘I hate this,’ she said, as the ferry from the space elevator hub slowly made its way around this synchronous-orbit altitude to the Conservers’ embassy, yet another satellite in a twenty-four-hour orbit about the Earth.

  ‘Patience, my friend,’ said Jeorg North. ‘We are nearly there …’

  She tried to take some consolation from that. North had been sent essentially to hold Vasta’s hand on this hours-long orbital hop, in a ship perfectly capable of piloting itself. A top pilot she already knew – that had been the recruitment pitch. He wasn’t a lot of comfort, frankly, but at least he shamed her into keeping up an illusion of calm.

  And now, at last, through the window of this passenger lounge, she saw the grey sphere that was the Conservers’ embassy to Earth and Moon. She leaned forward in her harnessed chair. There wasn’t much to see: a dull globe adorned with sheets of solar-energy panels, and heat-dump radiators. A glimpse of sunlit green through what looked like an extensive picture window. Wispy sails spreading wide behind the main structures.

  ‘Conservers prefer to maintain their position in space using solar sails,’ North said, pointing. ‘No consumables, you see. But the planetary government does insist on their having rocket packs fitted for emergencies, if they’re going to hang around in such a crowded orbit.’

  ‘Everybody has to make compromises,’ she said. ‘Even the Conservers.’

  ‘That’s about the size of it.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope they’re in the mood for compromise over Planet Nine, today …’

  It was already some six months after the first landing on Planet Nine, and the discovery of the creature the crew had called Feathers – and months too since the eruption of the anomaly at the heart of the Galaxy. And there had been no significant advance in understanding any of it.

  Which was why the President’s science adviser was coming to talk to the Conservers’ embassy to Earth.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll charm them,’ Jeorg North had said dryly.

  The Conserver habitat loomed closer now. Vasta leaned back – and her black pearl pendant floated up at her face. She tucked it into the neck of her shirt, slow-motion fiddly. I hate zero gravity.

  Closer yet. Looking out now Vasta caught more glimpses of green, through windows in the structure. She thought she made out a door, or a hatch: just a frame etched into the dull grey wall.

  ‘You sound cynical,’ she said to North.

  He grinned back. ‘Cynical like a politician?’

  ‘I’m no politician. I’m a scientist, just an adviser to politicians – but I’ve learned how to figure people out. And these Conserver characters, for all their fine principles, are still people, their ambassadors still politicians working in a political human world. All this ostentatious austerity is as much a display of nation and culture as a World Flag Day parade in Beijing or Bangkok, Berlin or Boston. Paradoxical as it may seem.’

  ‘Paradoxical, yes,’ murmured a voice in their ears.

  Jeorg glanced at Elizabeth. ‘Oops.’

  ‘Ariel Uwins speaking, Adviser Vasta. Manager of this facility. And, political, yes, as you say. No matter what our goals – how divergent from your own – we are humans in a human society, and we have to operate as such. Especially as we now all seem to be facing an inhuman situation. Or superhuman, possibly.’