But first…

She caught the tram, heading away from the bare grey-red asteroid walls of Outpost’s mining and reclamation sectors, toward Temple Park and Consortium offices. Residential complexes passed overhead, beyond the lightthread.

The office structures were also grey-red, but their stone was shaped into elegant blocks, the buildings grouped into pleasingly complex arrangements. Ancient Sanskrit flowed in slow dignified processions across the tops of doorways and porticos. From the tram station, Atalya crossed to a path that led between the complexes, moving into the parkland at their center.

Temple Park was hers too. A virtual slice drawn from one version of the ancients’ heaven; Dravidian gods and goddesses, lost to one world, recaptured in another. Even now their expressions turned inward, glimpsing some incredible elsewhere, diverging from all outer places and times. Atalya felt kinship in that. Their expressions were drawn from those of her own people while quick-shifting realities. It had seemed an appropriate and subtle grafting from her shiplife onto this ancient fantasy. But it was something she had neglected to mention to the nebs.

Bawajit waited beside the reflecting pool, watching her approach. Hands together, he bowed in greeting, and she returned the gesture. He’d spread a blue silk cloth upon the virtual grass, and now invited her to sit. A carafe of sparkling juice and two stemmed glasses waited at the edge of the cloth. He poured and handed her a glass. Threadlight gleamed along the rim of the glass. Virtual sunlight played upon the pond and outlined the graceful, voluptuous bodies of the gods in their ascending and descending temple niches.

Bawajit’s gaze met hers and held it. “Endings and beginnings, all epicycles within the Great Cycle.” He spoke softly, then sighed.

She’d grown accustomed to his pronouncements, his pretensions, knowing he believed many of them himself. She also knew he fancied himself in love with her, even as he was horrified at the thought. He’d never touched her; would never touch her impure flesh, imagining what lay beneath it.

“Endings and beginnings,” she replied. They both sipped. The drink hinted at flavors both sweet and tangy. Hmm. Perhaps I’ll add it to Progeny 7’s taste library. A memento. By glancing left, she touched off an inner chemical analysis, then stored it.

Atalya gazed toward the pool. Cameras beneath the illusion captured their images, adding their reflections to the scene. Bawajit’s dark skin and long straight black hair. The crown of computronium rings implanted into her pale, hairless scalp. Brown eyes - the trait they shared.

“Do your people appreciate your artistry?” He asked. “None of them have come here, have they? To see the Temple’s re-creation.” He paused for an instant. “But I suppose they consider themselves far beyond baseline culture, the merely human.” The shape of his mouth registered distaste. Then with a motion of his hand, he waved the words away. “I apologize. I don’t wish to spoil the moment.”

There was no way to deny what he’d said. So she talked around it. “Most times, I wouldn’t have done all this on my own. My cohere and I prefer working together, as we did in the first programming phase of the mining interface. But the construction and systems-growth of our new ship has preoccupied most of us this past longcycle.” She could explain no further; there was not enough shared language, nor shared experience, with which to convey the complex intertwinings of alife and matter which made up the habship.

She edged a tone of regret into her voice. “Croasions are a sociable people, learning from each job we do, before moving on. Perhaps there will yet be time to bring others. But if you are happy here, with the re-creation, I feel content with my work.” Atalya let her gaze roam across the pool, to the upper reaches of the temple. She’d considered keeping a copy, but then decided to play fair. The Shambalista Consortium requested that their Temple be the only one of its kind. And they’d paid well, helping defray the cost of Progeny 7’s creation.

“Your cohere - your age mates?” Bawajit asked. He’d asked her few personal questions during their acquaintanceship. But she’d learned much about his childhood, his ancestral lineage, and the founding of the mining consortium.

“Some are, more or less,” she answered. Atalya doubted he wanted to hear details of genetic templates and bodymod injections, or the quick-growth that eliminated the need for early childhood. “Not all our populace cluster into coheres, and most coheres are fluid, over time. We’re just a group of people who like living and working together, playing together.”

From his expression, Atalya understood she’d given him more than he wanted.

He shook his head. “I have no way to imagine what your life is like. Nor that of any cyborg clade, of course. It’s not something I ever thought I’d want to imagine.” He paused, then laughed softly. “But when I’m with you, I feel curious. I want to know more about you. Yet when you answer my questions, I wish that you hadn’t. We have nothing in common really, except that our far ancestors were all Earth Human.”

“There’s that much then,” Atalya replied.

“Do you ever wish we were living then, instead of now?” He asked.

“No.” She said, simply, truthfully.

He sighed in an exaggerated manner, then shrugged. “I do. Or perhaps I only wish our future had not departed so radically from the past.” He gestured toward the temple. “I don’t believe in the old gods and goddesses. But I love the destiny they represented. What we could have become.”

“If not for the AI. And clades like mine.”

“Atalya, I’m saying everything I shouldn’t. But I know I won’t see you again. And we’ve said so little, really.”

“We’ve talked often,” she reminded him.

“And said so little,” he repeated.

They finished their drinks, and Bawajit put the glasses back down on the cloth’s edge.

“Your ship…” he paused, catching her glance before continuing, “Is it a god?”

“No. The Progeny fleet, my clan’s fleet, are not even fully sentient. There are ways in which my people are similar to yours.” She couldn’t suppress a moment’s laughter at his expression. “We prefer to keep our own ways. We don’t mingle with the gods. Layered smallminds and semisentients comprise the inner life of the ship. A savant monitors the drive. But only with the linkage of our own psyches into the ship does it approach true consciousness. It may seem a subtle distinction to you; but I assure you it’s of great importance to us.”

He nodded. “Even so, it is painful to imagine all those half-minds, like spectres, touching your own.”

She had no reply to that.

Then he said, “Atalya, we will have none of them in Outpost’s systems. None of those smallminds or semisentients. This was clearly stated in the contract your negotiators signed. I don’t want to seem insistent or suspicious. But I need your assurance that the mining interface is clear of deviance.”

“You have my assurance,” Atalya said. Her fingers stroked the computronium amulet in a protective gesture. “All terms of the contract have been fulfilled.”

She stood, and he hastily got to his feet, brushing the wrinkles from his tunic.

“I need to leave now,” she told him.

Bawajit nodded. His hand reached out as if to touch hers, then drew back into his accustomed prayerlike gesture as he bowed. “Farewell. May your destiny be a joyful one.”

“And may yours be joyful as well,” she replied in kind.

Atalya turned from Bawajit and the virtual temple, walked along the asteroid-stone path without looking back — not even with the sensor array of her computronium rings. Then she waited for the tram that would take her back to the docking port, her shuttle and her life. Destiny. Yes. She had one.

*****

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