Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  We never lost the stars.

  They lingered in the aftersilence, and after a while she said to the ceiling as much as to Xiara: “So, what is this?”

  Xiara answered with a hum.

  “It was great, I mean, it is great. But I’m alone here, and you’re alone, and we’re both obviously, you know, reaching for something, we barely know each other, and I don’t have any problem with that, but I don’t want to make this anything, um, you’re not ready for.” For all the times she’d had this conversation, each time it rose again she stumbled, as if she were nineteen again, younger. As if she were following Susan Cho through the dinosaurs. You didn’t grow past the old things, just enclosed them like rings in a tree, so someone feeling the bark of you could suss out your old scars. “I liked this. I’m just wondering, you know. What you think.”

  Beside her, Xiara mewed, and shifted, and began softly, undeniably, to snore.

  * * *

  IN THE CLOUD the dead tumble aimlessly, and the living travel fast.

  They made good time. Xiara skimmed them through the Cloud at will, crossed star systems in hours, slid back to normal space to take bearings, or to recover, or whenever Zanj told her they were near a good view. Black hole accretion discs and plasma fountains burned in the depths, and nebulas, though not so rich as false-color telescope pictures led Viv to believe back home, still glistened and refracted starlight, shaping ghosts in space.

  The nebulas just looked like ghosts, of course, but real ghosts lingered in the Cloud. Viv, by now, could sometimes bear to sit in the cockpit and stare out into the chaos of colors and watch immense bodies form, merge, split, birth lesser shapes that rippled and divided and birthed themselves again. When she was a kid, she loved those pictures in magazines that looked like static, but that, if you fuzzed your eyes just right, gained depth and form. This reminded her of that: sense from nonsense, the vertigo of a reality unlike your own.

  She no longer feared the dead, or the gods they became.

  Still, she did not sleep in the Cloud. Or much outside of the Cloud: Xiara, drunk on pilot’s euphoria, came to her eager—she told new tales each night, poems almost, trying to describe what she’d seen, felt, done in the Cloud or through the ship, groping with a huntress’s vocabulary to describe n-dimensional hyperspace topology. “You’re just using me for an audience,” Viv teased one night: “Nobody else will—oh—sit still long enough to listen to you.”

  “You’re not sitting still. And you’re free to ask me to stop, anytime you like.” An eyebrow raised, a turn of head, a press of the hand, and Viv had better things to do with her breath than answer.

  When their fuel supply ran low, Zanj guided them to ruins: to husks of hollowed world orbiting listless swollen stars, to webs of glass the size of moons, to docks built to serve the shattered fleets that drifted in space around them. Hong offered his own suggestions after one too many of Zanj’s leads turned out to have been picked clean eons since, and at his guidance they found a depot floating between layers of a gas giant, and stopped at a double-cupped crystal chalice several hundred miles on a side that emitted streams of high-energy particles. Twice they had to hide from a Pride fleet devouring an immense corpse which might have been machine or meat.

  They made good time, yes—but still Zanj’s brow darkened, she paced, she frowned. Finally, as the four of them, clad in suitfields, worked to free a large lumpy ferrocrystalline beast from a trap the Empress had left to guard a matter fountain near a spinning star, Viv asked Zanj what was wrong.

  “We’re not going fast enough.” The great beast was trapped in a net of light. Its herd milled several astronomical units away, grazing on asteroids and lowing plaintively in Cloudband (or so Zanj claimed, though Viv found it hard to imagine anything that large sounding plaintive). The net’s strands rewove as fast as Zanj could snap them, but she claimed she’d found the critical nodes in the network, and directed Gray and Hong to overload them all at once.

  Viv, still blissing out on the notion of a spacewalk, didn’t respond at first. Xiara’s voice came through her suitfield crystal clear: We’re going as fast as the ship can.

  “Down and to the right.” Zanj pointed.

  Grayteeth said, “Sure thing, boss,” sprouted several extra legs, scuttled over the beast’s skin, leaping over the shifting strands of net.

  Zanj continued: “I know we’re going fast. But we’re losing time. The Empress moves with all her power, and we’re stuck with this antique.”

  “Which is why,” Hong said, strain evident in his voice as he gripped the struggling node he’d caught, “we should go to the ’faith. We have newer ships, reclaimed Imperial technology. We can catch Her.”

  Zanj’s laugh was short and heavy with scorn. “We don’t need to lose even more time to get ships that won’t keep pace either. Only one ship can catch the Empress when she doesn’t want herself caught—and that one’s mine.”

  “Isn’t the Question your ship?” Beneath Viv, the beast bucked, twisted, a convulsing landscape; her suit rendered its static roar as a bass pulse in her chest too low for human hearing. Plasma played about its mouth. As it thrashed, the net tightened, cracking plates of rocky armor to vent Cherenkov blue into space. Viv jetted in and laid a hand on its shell. “Hey. Come on. We’re almost there.”

  Maybe it heard her. Maybe it was just tired. Either way, it stilled; Zanj shouted, “Now!” and struck, and so did Gray and Hong, and the net stopped shifting. Viv slid her hand beneath the net’s strands and pulled, and they unraveled all at once. The beast trumpeted joy; in the asteroid field, its fellows turned, grunted, and neared, blueshifting toward them with joyful speed; Gray could only half fill the ship before the beasts demolished the matter siphon in their enthusiasm.

  “This was one of my ships,” Zanj said as they watched the cataclysmic celebration from a safe distance, through telescopic lenses. “My first. The one I rode away from Pasquarai. I’m talking about the ship I used to fight her. We need to find the Fallen Star.”

  23

  FERAL GODS PINNED them down inside a mindforge.

  Viv had assumed the forge, a metal cocoon around a white dwarf star, was an old Imperial stronghold, because she hadn’t yet met anyone save the Empress who built to such scale, but Hong corrected her. Nobody knew whether the Kaeolith had left the galaxy, or had fallen to the Empress or the Bleed, or had ascended to some other universe, but they had been their own force, spinning diamond webs that rewove stars to strange shapes: dense twists of matte black, inscrutable and mighty beyond all reason, that roamed through the cosmos, uplifting some civilizations, breaking others. When the Kaeolith left, or were killed, or killed themselves, or shrank or grew until they could no longer be seen, the mindforges remained, efficient systems later civilizations used for juicing stars. Visiting one to refuel had been a great idea—which meant others had had the same idea centuries ago, small opportunistic gods descending from the endless simulated dreamlands of the Cloud in search of perverse satisfaction on the material plane.

  In silent centuries, the gods had drunk deep of the mindforge’s fountain and, swelling, split, and split again into legions of copies, only to wage eternal war against their duplicate selves, their hatred for each other only balanced by the ravenous hunger they directed against interlopers.

  The gods could disguise themselves as shadow, as color. They must have lurked behind the Question’s crew as they wandered deeper and deeper in, toward the heart of the forge, a vast chamber in which filaments finer than human hairs shielded a loop of plasma drawn from the heart of the star.

  Then the gods locked the doors, and sprang.

  The gods hadn’t planned for Gray, or Zanj.

  Still, though each small god fell in seconds, they numbered in the thousands. Gray spun a diamond shell to cover Viv and Hong while he and Zanj switched off between fighting and harvesting the stellar fountain.

  And, while they recovered, Viv asked them about the Fallen Star.

  “Oh, t
hat story!” Gray stuck his hands into the plasma loop, drew them out cupped around golden fire, and drank the star; he glowed as he swallowed its light, and then, when he could fill himself no more, collapsed and belched and rolled, sweating diamond drops that clunked against the floor when they fell. “It’s a good story, at least the way my great-great-great-aunt tells it. Zanj wouldn’t like it if I told you, though.” Ruby eyes twinkled. “So of course I will.

  “The story goes that young Zanj, barely fledged, just immortal, visited her neighbors, the Serpentine of galactic north. They were ancient, scarred veterans of Bleed war. The Serpentine hold no thing private, not even their names; since they hold nothing, nothing can be stolen from them. Zanj came to ask them for a weapon to defend her people. They brought her to their treasure chambers, where hung the jewels and revelations of millions of minds over a hundred thousand years, all in common, and one by one they showed her their gravest tools: hammers to break cities, swords to cut planets, dust to eat all things. One by one she hefted them, tested them, and asked if they had something bigger.

  “Serpentine hospitality demanded they satisfy her, so they drew her deeper and deeper into the caverns of their collective mind. They offered her color bombs, bows arched with superstring. Each time she said, no, not yet. Until they led her to the heart of their temple-minds: to the heart of their being, a galactic core compressed to hyperdense computational matter—the foundation of their empire and war effort, the engine that bound their society together, and kept each Serpentine itself. The only thing they would not freely give their guests. And she stole it. Can you imagine?”

  Sated, he parted their diamond shell, grew forty feet tall and covered in scales, whooped a challenge, and marched into the roil of the gods.

  “That,” Hong said beside her, “is not the version we tell.”

  Viv turned her back to the battle: Gray was busily devouring godlings, gnashing teeth, heedless of his own exposed flank. “You’ve heard this story?”

  “A piece of it. Zanj offered to help the Serpentine against the Bleed, to cut them off from the galactic core once and forever. They trusted her with the Fallen Star, but the Serpentine fell to the Empress before she could reach the battlefield. Later, she turned the Star against the Empress, and fell herself. That is the truth of the ’faith, which our archivists mill and smelt in their meditations.”

  There was a flash, blinding even through their polarized shell, and Zanj arced out of the god-ruckus, struck the ground, bounced, cracked the floor, skidded, scrambled into shelter. Her eyes were their normal red again, and she panted for breath, her whole body quivering. “Don’t listen to them,” she said when she could draw breath to speak. “However I came by the Star, it was mine: no one else could use it but me. It existed before the Serpentine, before the Empress. Maybe it was left over from another universe before ours. Maybe the Bleed made it. It had no fixed form, and each attempt to wield it in battle failed gloriously as it slipped from the wielder’s control. It was not so much treasured as imprisoned. And when I took it up, no one could take it from me until the Empress tricked it from my hand.”

  “Tricked?”

  “The Suicide Queens lured her into battle, but we didn’t realize until too late that she’d set a trap of her own: she cut us off from the Cloud so we could not flee, and drew the Bleed. They ate us; they slid into the minds of our ships and poisoned us from within. Our greatest weapon against the Empress was the Groundswell, a ship the size of worlds, built around the strange matter of a Bleed corpse, and the Bleed invaded and animated it against us. I killed it with the Fallen Star, but the Empress had planned for that, too. She wrapped the Star in a chain with her own seal, so it could not return to me.

  “I fled that battle, but the Empress caught me. Without the Star, I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t outthink her; I couldn’t fight for longer than a few minutes at a time. Speaking of which. I’m charged again.” She turned on Viv a radiant fierce grin that made her story seem impossible. How could Zanj have ever been imprisoned? How ever outfought?

  There came that fierce pop inside her skull, and Zanj’s eyes burned white. She kipped to her feet, unsheathed her claws. “We’re only a few skips from where I lost the Star. Get it, and we’ll catch the Empress. But first, I have to beat up some godlings. I’ll be right back.”

  In the end, it was Viv who noticed that the godlings drew their strength from the mindforge itself, their shattered dust bodies drifting back across the floor to the plasma fountain, where they took strength and gained shape to launch themselves once more into the fray. And it was Hong who guided her through the battle, over gods’ bodies, to a control panel. Viv tried to use it, to no avail; Hong offered to try, touched the panel, and his hands sank into it up to his crystal bracelets; he glowed static snow, face set in meditation, features calm save for the sweat that rolled down his forehead, and the trembling tension of his arms. The star-siphon’s filaments realigned; the plasma column lost cohesion, and would have boiled them away had not a fail-safe cut in to shut the siphon down.

  Viv caught Hong as he fell, his hands dripping crystal, his eyes twitching. When Zanj and Gray finished with the gods, Hong had recovered enough to walk, which was good, since the mindforge relied on the siphon to hold its ancient architecture together, and its monomolecule skin was unraveling. Gray gathered a fistful of god-dust to munch on the run. They had to dive out a porthole into hard vacuum for a few seconds before Xiara caught them; Viv’s robe flowed to cover her completely, then released her when she tumbled once more into the ship. The hatch snapped shut, and Xiara burned hard for the Cloud. “Come on!” Zanj pulled Viv to her feet, dragged her to a porthole. “You have to see this.”

  Behind them, the mindforge collapsed, and took the star with it.

  * * *

  UNCERTAIN, VIV SOUGHT advice.

  She found Hong dancing through the engine room. Eyes half shut, half open, each step and turn precise, he trailed his fingers over pipes, down couplings. He did not squeeze his body into the tight spaces through which he passed. He held himself so he did not need to squeeze. She waited for him to stop, but he spoke to her first, without breaking stride. She was so surprised she jumped. “Please, speak. It is good practice for me to speak without attachment as I move.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Learning the ship.”

  When he said that, she understood: his movements followed the course of fluid through the pipes, his fingers pointed toward status indicators as their colors switched. “You’re making that happen?”

  “No,” he said. “Xiara is. We study machines, and train our mind to mirror them. This ship holds many systems: Cloud engines interlace with crude chemical and subspace drives. We learn systems so we may learn our selves. A mind is as complex as a mindforge—but subtler; so subtle most beings cannot comprehend even their simplest thought in its entirety. We study so that when we are thrust against the limits of our own minds, we can break ourselves.”

  “Why would we—sorry, why would you want that?”

  “Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.”

  She recognized that line, handed down however many millennia. She’d never thought of it like that before: the mind as a computer, sure, she’d lost track of the number of times some reporter made that analogy, but the self as a proprietary system, what would that imply? Your desires, your thoughts no more your own than a system’s preprogrammed behavior belonged to it? But if your thoughts weren’t you, what was? Or was that even the right question? Her head hurt; she retreated to her own exhaustion, to the bruise on her hip, to the chill ozone-tinted air and the calm motion of his body. “So, you study machines. Is that how you knew how to break the mindforge?”

  “I have only traced small relics of the Kaeolith before. I have never touched something so immense. I damaged it, and killed a star. I have taken something glorious from the world.”

  “It was trying to kill us.”

 
He did not interrupt his dance to shrug, but she got the gist.

  “Zanj wants to go after the Fallen Star. I don’t even know if it’s a ship, or a mind, or a weapon, or a computer, or what.”

  “All these terms,” he said, “are, at sufficient stages of mastery, indistinguishable from one another, as a strike from a block from a counter.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we should go to the ’faith.”

  “They tried to kill us.”

  He spun in place, slowly, balanced on one foot. “We still don’t know why Zanj came back to Orn. Why she stopped trying to kill us. We don’t know whose side she is on. She scares me. I know she would only smile if she heard me say this. The ’faith may hinder us; the Grand Rector may oppose us. But if they do, their actions will be obvious. Zanj is subtle.”

  “And you’re sure this isn’t just you wanting to go home.”

  He spread his arms and extended one leg in a slow, slow kick, level with his eyes.

  “You are pushing us far, and fast,” he said. “We have seen marvel after marvel. But we do not share what we have seen. I do want to go home: to commune with my sisters and brothers, to seek answers, to meditate. To change things. You want to leave us altogether.”