Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Anyway, they did need a pilot.

  “We are not worthy of your service,” Viv said. “But we would accept your friendship. After we fuel the Question, we’ll see if you can fly her.” Viv didn’t trust her eyes not to betray her doubt, but she knew how to fake a confident handshake—so she put out her hand.

  Xiara caught her by the wrist and pulled her into an embrace that made Viv catch her breath—because it was tight, and for other reasons. Xiara’s dark eyes shimmered with emotion. “Then you will be my guests, for now. We shall do you honor; the Ornchief controls the great manufactory of Orn, and we can make fuel in abundance. And then we’ll fly.”

  And they set forth, boldly, into the ruined city.

  Or, they tried. On her third step Xiara winced and almost fell again. Viv slipped her arm around the other woman’s shoulder, and Xiara grabbed Viv in turn—she was strong beneath that armor, and that strength encouraged another wave of embarrassingly physical speculation on Viv’s part. She thought she caught Hong’s eyebrow drift upward, the corner of his mouth incline a hair, but she must have imagined it—when she narrowed her eyes at him he looked impassive and serene. He hid his hands in his sleeves, and walked beside them as if Xiara’s limping gait were his natural pace. “Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter,” he said, “tell us of your world.”

  As they walked, Orn took shape around them. To see the ruin from the broken landing strip was to see a painting on a wall, an image of desolation and loss reclaimed by green. To enter that space was to feel it as a landscape. People once lived here. They built this place, and it wrecked them. But, broken, the city had another beauty. Life grew and flew and crawled and climbed and slithered without care for time’s passage or what was lost. “The Ornclans hunt in the old places,” Xiara said, “for meat from animals, for parts from machines. We patrol in case other Ornclans come to raid us—for food, for goods, for attention, or because a god told them to.”

  “Do many gods come here?” Hong asked, and Viv thought at first that he must be joking—but he asked the question in full sincerity as he examined a rusted, twisted metal skeleton that had, perhaps, once been something like a car. If he was joking, he hid it well.

  “Not so many as in the old days.” Xiara guided them up a marble staircase between two rotten buildings. “They’ve picked through most of the ruins by now. All the other Ornclans traded off their great relics for blessings, save mine: we hold the manufactory, and none may take it from us.” She sounded insistent on that point, defiant, which made Viv wonder what she was defying. Before Viv could ask, Xiara slipped out from under her arm and skidded down the scree slope at the staircase’s end. She tried to stop herself at the bottom, but her leg folded under her again and she sat down hard, and laughed and waved up at them at the hill’s crest. Xiara might heal fast—everyone here seemed to, except Viv, whose ankle cut wouldn’t stay closed, and who chose her steps with care to avoid cutting her foot open on a sharp rock—but Xiara kept testing her wounds and hurting herself again. Viv admired that, in a way, even if it was dumb. She had never liked waiting either.

  “Can she really fly the Question?” she asked Hong as they crept down the slope.

  “There are strange miracles in the world,” he said. “And the pilots of Orn are legendary.”

  Useless answer. But, speaking of miracles: “Was she serious about the gods?” Zanj had used that word once or twice, but Viv thought it was a joke or a mistranslation.

  Hong chose his path with care, but he never winced when he set his bare foot on a sharp rock. Socks, Viv thought, and her pants slithered down to make her socks, but the fabric couldn’t quite get the hang of soles. The cloth didn’t tear, so her skin was more or less safe, but sticks and gravel still hurt. She hissed down after him. “There are many types of minds in the Cloud,” he said. “Some once wore flesh, or silicon, or something like either, and some did not. Many, most, build themselves pleasure palaces, or dungeons to scourge them, and shelter there. They cannot help themselves. If you do not train your mind while it is subject to physical constraint, once liberated from the flesh it seeks pleasure by reflex, and so binds itself in unbreakable chains. Trillions drown in joy-loops, unable to rise above the desire to satisfy desire. Even those who escape that fate rarely ponder the world below. Rather, they seek higher knowledge. But some minds reach down. Those so bound to this space that they seek power here become gods.” Viv had thought there was something odd about the way he pronounced that word before, but she only placed it now: he spoke as if godhood were something regrettable, a perversion, an embarrassing fetish. “They seek power over a world that has no power over them—they are the greatest victims of illusion. Orn, in the first centuries after its shattering, would have many wonders for which they might trade. What a god may value, mortals may not comprehend—and what a god may give, some mortals would die to earn.”

  “Hand up?” Xiara asked when they made it to the bottom. She’d been piling rocks while she waited. “It’ll be dark soon, and we have a ways to go.”

  Viv helped her up, took her weight again. The declining sun lit broken towers orange and yellow and red, as crystal refracted that light to rainbows. “What happened here?”

  “The Empress.” Xiara answered matter-of-factly, with only a little pain. Of course the Empress. “Our mothers and teachers were giants. They broke the Empress’s great law. They built a republic in secret—a web of worlds—and thought they could escape her notice.” She sounded faraway sad, talking of ancient ancestors’ fallen temples, of Mongols at Kiev, of tragedies that only seemed inevitable in retrospect, and in whose shadows she now lived. “She came in glory with her Diamond Fleet, broke us, broke our ships, and cut us from the sky. It has been many hundreds of years since an Ornclan pilot took to the air.” She reached for the canteen slung over her shoulder, found it empty, scowled. Viv, wincing on her not-quite-bare feet, recognized that trick: you took a drink to remind yourself your body was here, and save yourself from the mess of your own thoughts. “Come on,” Xiara said. “There’s a stream over here. We can fill up, and still reach home by dark.”

  The stream had once been a fountain, the features of the statue worn away. A bull, perhaps, or something like a bull, the pose heroic, the eyes enormous even after acid rain decay. The stream was clear, but Xiara’s canteen filtered slowly.

  Viv drew back to Hong, and asked him: “The Empress did this?”

  “This,” he said, “is what She does. And that is why I argued with our companion when she sought to bring us here.” He had never used Zanj’s name in Xiara’s hearing, and neither had Viv. Could Zanj’s name still carry weight after three thousand years, even on this devastated and long-abandoned world? What had she been, when she fought the Empress? What had she done?

  Whatever, she was gone now.

  Xiara, humming to herself, examined a flower growing by the stream, nodded, satisfied, then settled again, and watched the setting sunlight on the water. Hong continued: “The Empress has one iron law: do not grow too large, for complexity draws the Bleed. She breaks worlds that risk the cosmos. Nothing like the Orn of legend could last for long without drawing Her eye. The ’faith survives on the thin edge of Her prohibition, and protects itself by movement.”

  The ruined fountain statue stared, proud and hungry, at the sky. Xiara had looked like that when she stared at their ship. A planet of pilots, wings broken. “This is evil,” she said. “This isn’t protection. It’s abuse.”

  “You saw the Bleed.” His voice was simple and sad: the voice of a man who did not know what else was to be done. “Where they come, none survive. What would you do?”

  “Fight them.”

  “She has fought them, time after time, at great cost to the galaxy—as have others. But they always come back.”

  “If she let civilizations grow, she would have allies in the fight.”

  “But She has seen them grow, by scores, by thousands, and always they make the same mistakes. And always the Bleed come.”
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  “You like this? Agree with it?”

  He lost all serenity at that suggestion—eyes wide, speechless, shocked. “Of course not. She is not right, nor is She good, though the Grand Rector and her followers sometimes think so. She is…” Words gone again, or else exhausted, he gestured to the ruins, to the pitted statues, to Xiara filling her canteen at this stream in this city her mothers’ hands had built. “She is massive. She is power. She strikes as She chooses. She has bent the arc of history. She built wonders and fought wars we can only describe by allegory, because we cannot work the math of them. The Archivist says we must understand Her, we must learn Her tools, so that we may stand against the darkness. I hope one day we will pass beyond Her, and find a better way. But we cannot even understand Her path now.”

  “And … our friend … fought her.”

  “Yes.”

  “How? I mean, she’s a badass, but.” Her own wave at the destroyed city felt less poetic, more futile.

  “We have seen her fight without weapons. When she fought in Heaven, she was fearsome.”

  “Well!” Xiara spoke the word like a bell peal—yes, indeed, the world was well! She stood with her canteens, or tried to, forgetting her injury again. Viv rushed to her side; she thanked her with a grin and an offer of water, river cool.

  The waters of Orn tasted silky rich and clean. Viv wondered what the filter filtered out.

  Xiara pointed with her chin. This way.

  Buildings thinned as night closed in. They passed fewer toppled towers, fewer piles of broken glass, as they entered what Viv would have called the outskirts of the city if the skyline had not continued unbroken to every horizon—perhaps a park or warehouse district?

  There were new structures here, too, mostly empty, made of wood and bamboo and rope: lean-tos and traveler’s hutches, and there, just visible past an overgrown hill that used to be a house, a lookout tower. The dirt road was narrow but well trodden. Xiara hobbled surer, faster, eager for home; the doubled suns set and released the sky.

  More stars shone, and more after those, a thick full vault of golden fire webbed with hair-thin glittering arcs. Rings maybe, or stations still orbiting after all these years. Orn, city of starships, had its crown.

  The day’s heat faded. Viv smelled a night-flower musk she could not name. She wondered if Xiara or Hong had ever smelled a rose. If there still were roses.

  “Beautiful,” she said into the silence. Hong walked in contemplation, hands sleeved, head down, but Viv didn’t like where contemplation led her: home, her unfinished conquest, Magda, the hand in her chest, and Zanj.

  “If you like the stars,” Xiara said, “just wait. There is a balcony behind our hall, and by the Chief’s command all lights are covered to hide us from the sky. I’ll show you stars like you have never seen—and you will know what drew Orn’s daughters to the sky.”

  “I’d like that,” Viv said, but Xiara said nothing, and Viv found herself, as if she were still goddamn fourteen, wishing she’d said something cooler, or more grand.

  Then she noticed the bandits ahead.

  Armored figures emerged from the shadows, rifles and spears ready. Hong had seen them first, and strode forth, clubs glittering to his hands, voice calm. “We are simple travelers,” he said. “Pilgrims who have left the family. We seek only peace and knowledge. Name yourselves.”

  Viv wondered if he’d noticed the flanking team on the rooftop to their right. Probably. So he was just pretending not to see them. Maybe it was an honor thing. “We don’t want trouble,” she said. Obviously, her role here was to be the one who didn’t lunge for weapons at the first hint of danger. Not that she had any weapons. Old gamer instincts suggested she should find some. Practical experience, on the other hand, suggested that weapons in the hands of jumpy, untrained folk rarely made anyone safer.

  Back on Earth Viv had relied on a sort of coolant system to protect her: subtle, and less subtle, mechanisms for drawing violence away from the places she spent her time, and dumping it in places where people couldn’t defend themselves. That wasn’t so much nonviolence as a willingness to let bad things happen to other people. Here, if she didn’t want to fight—and the fact that every second person they met seemed to be some sort of highly advanced cyborg suggested fighting was a bad idea—she’d have to find a more genuine path.

  That would be a challenge.

  “We’re not from around here,” she said. “This woman’s hurt. We’re just trying to get her home.”

  “Lies!” shouted a voice from the firing line. A bearish figure wielding a rifle in one hand and an enormous spear in the other marched from the shadows.

  “I’m not lying,” Viv said before he could speak again. She was starting to get a sense for the rhythms of speech on Orn, which were slower than her own. She could use that to slip through them. “There was a misunderstanding, and she’s been hurt, but it’s all sorted out now, we’re just—” What was the phrase Hong used, ah. “—pilgrims who have left the family, seeking…” What were they seeking again, not the Empress, something else …

  “You have attacked Ornclan guards!” Armor-bear shouted again. Even after everything, Viv almost wanted Zanj back. It would have been nice to watch someone deck this bozo. “You have taken a princess of Ornclan hostage!”

  Princess?

  “I’m not—” Xiara started to say, but Hong was already talking.

  “—will meet you in single combat for the right of passage through your lands, as the Star Tablets decree—”

  Armor-bear didn’t wait for the formula to finish, just held out his rifle until one of his flunkies took it, and strode forth with the spear. “Very well! As is meet, I who have been challenged choose the weapons of our—”

  “Shut up!” Xiara’s voice echoed off the walls, and while stunned silence reigned she slipped out from under Viv’s arm, limped forward, and fixed their ambushers with a glare of withering command. “Both of you just be quiet! I am no hostage, Djenn Ornswarden. These are my guests. They have come from beyond the sky, seeking aid and fuel, and I am their pilot. Now, take us to the Chief, and let’s get all this sorted out.”

  13

  WHAT WITH THE spears and matronymics and slightly Viking rhetoric, Viv had pictured the Ornclan hall as a Heorot of ring-giving postapocalypse kings, Grendel-haunted maybe. She imagined wood and gables and gilding, a dais and a throne, a woman in a horned helmet.

  But when Djenn and his warriors marched them through the palisade, when the spear-bearing guards on watch there, their skin crackling blue with what Viv assumed was some sort of energy shield, drew back to let them pass, as rifle-bots set down their weapons and the drumbeats swelled, Viv found at the core of all those defenses not a palace, not a building even, but a grove.

  Pale-barked trees spread skyward, straight and ghostly as birch but redwood thick and tall, so close their branches and flat leaves closed out the sky. Xiara’s people had hung stained glass and dyed paper in the woven branches’ gaps, glimmering in the gloam. Into the grove they drew, stepping with care between and over high, gnarled roots, following the drums and the smell of thick spiced smoke, until they emerged into a frat party.

  Okay, fair, Viv was being cultural-essentialist, hegemonic, whatever. There were obvious differences between this and Viv’s last frat party. The frat party’s drums had been electronic, for one thing, while the Ornclan’s were made from skin and wood. The frat party’s floor was sticky, while the Ornclan reveled on soft green grass. The frat party had fewer women, fewer dead posthuman artifacts repurposed as jewelry, and considerably more polo shirts, and the wrestling had been more the mud-and-salacity type than for-the-honor-of-my-fathers. But the Ornclan hall was a good deal like a frat party. Maybe Viv’s beer pong expertise wouldn’t go to waste after all.

  As they entered, the revels stilled—but not because of their arrival. The drums beat low, then stopped. All eyes in the room, including Djenn’s and Xiara’s, fixed on two figures standing in a bare dirt ring be
fore the throne.

  The wrestlers wore breechcloths and gray vests, armbands of woven cord, and no other ornament. Their arms were thick, their shoulders broad, their hair gathered in braids and knots while most of the other Ornclan wore it loose. They circled one another, steps measured. The wrestler who started the circle facing Viv glared at his opponent as if there were nothing else in all the world, his jaw clenched and his cheeks red. The wrestler who ended facing Viv looked every bit as intent, every bit as fierce and ready—but she was smiling.

  They rushed together, clutching, shifting grip, bodies slick, limbs trembling with effort, lips pulled back to bare teeth in expressions half grin, half growl. Their stamping feet replaced the beat of drums. Onlookers clutched wooden goblets and massive drinking horns, but did not lift them to their lips. They leaned closer to the ring. This was it. Whatever “this” was.

  Both fighters’ flesh bore finger tracks amid their scars, and bruises, and the dirt of prior falls. They looked well matched in mass and skill. Viv and Hong had been marched—or, as Xiara insisted, escorted as honored guests, not prisoners—into the final act of the wrestlers’ drama.

  Just my luck, Viv thought. She always had the worst timing.

  Djenn, who had been so eager to show off his captives, fell silent beside the circle, barely daring to breathe. Xiara had been just as ready to present her guests, but she too kept silent, and watched. The large jewel-decked man on the wooden throne on the dais near the ring clearly noticed the new arrivals, and looked from them, to the match, to them, and back—more unsure than Viv expected in a post-Viking, though to be fair she didn’t have a lot of firsthand experience with the type—but he did not stop the match.