“I have to go home, too. And anyway, don’t you want me out of your hair?”
She said that mostly to offer an opening for him to joke about not having any hair to speak of. But he remained balanced for a long time, eyes distant. Then the ship lurched out of the Cloud, and he settled to a new posture. “I like you,” he said. “So does Zanj. But on this all tales agree: Zanj will sacrifice what she likes to get what she wants.”
She tried to sleep, but often failed. When she closed her eyes she saw the Empress, saw Zanj’s face in those first moments of waking, her murderous fury, and then her despair. She remembered Zanj in joyous battle and her sly, unfeigned smile when she felt strong. Viv liked her; she loved her, almost, in a way. She wanted her happy. And Zanj had promised, again and again, to kill her.
Viv walked unsteadily through the ship to the cockpit, where she found Xiara dozing in the pilot’s chair. Indicator lights swelled and faded with her breath; Xiara’s eyes opened easily as Viv watched her, and she yawned. She could yawn now, even while merged with the ship. She had learned to be almost human. “You should be asleep.”
“So should you.” Viv gave her a peck on the forehead, and leaned away. Xiara reached for her, not hungry, just stretching. Her fingers grazed her belly.
“I’m learning to sleep in the ship,” she said. “It talks to me in dreams.”
“Doesn’t that scare you? It would scare me.”
“This is a small ship,” she said. “Crude. I can’t fit all the way inside it, even dreaming. The body’s always here for me to come back to. If I tried to fly something bigger—I don’t know what would happen. That’s what scares me.” She stretched her shoulders until they popped, and looked out into the twists of deep space, smiled at something Viv could not see but the ship’s sensors could. “I was thinking about the beast you rescued, the big rock thing in the net. Maybe they were made, maybe they made themselves, but it makes me wonder, what would the pilots of Orn have been like, back before the city fell? Were we ships dreaming we were people, or the other way around?”
Viv caught her hand, laced their fingers together, and with her other hand followed the swell of Xiara’s forearm up to her shoulder, her cheek. “I know which I’d rather.”
“You wouldn’t like me as a ship? You’d be so cute and small, running around inside me. That might be fun.” She tightened her grip on Viv’s hand, using some of that strength she loved, the weight of a body trained to battle and hard work.
Usually, that strength made Viv melt—she liked that she couldn’t hurt Xiara, couldn’t break her no matter how she bucked. But the way Xiara spoke just then reminded her of the Empress, through whose ruins she’d spent the last weeks crawling, the Empress who’d torn her from her home and called her here and cast her aside as if she didn’t matter.
Viv stilled, and stared out into the stars, into space, into the carbon nanotube ribbons, miles across but hair-thin at this distance, that linked the planets in the system where they’d stopped. Some long-gone mad sculptor had shaped the star at its heart into an enormous glowing three-eyed face. She realized Xiara was looking at her, realized her hand on the back of Xiara’s neck had tensed into a fist, that her nails were digging into her own palm. Her chest and skin felt tight. “I’m sorry.”
“I can hear her out there,” Xiara said. The wheels in her eyes meshed and whirled. “The Empress. At first I couldn’t, but I’ve been studying how Zanj listens, how she looks. The Empress doesn’t move through space or through the Cloud like other people. She sings, and they move around her. I can even hear her Citadel, a great silent eddy, like the ripple a sunken rock makes on the surface of a river.”
“Can we catch her?”
“In this ship?” Her eyes and the set of her mouth said no better than her voice ever could.
“I wish I could trust her,” Viv said, meaning Zanj. “She almost killed you. She’s helped us since. I like her. But I don’t know what she’s planning. I don’t know why she came back.”
“Have you tried asking?” Xiara’s hand escaped Viv’s, and drifted around Viv’s ribs, sank to the curve of her hip. Viv wanted it to sink farther. She wanted to set concern aside, to drown in her body. She remembered Hong: What you cannot break, you do not own.
“Do you want to stay here?” Viv asked, meaning in the cockpit, but also meaning connected to the ship.
“Do you mind?”
“Are we playing the question game?”
She laughed at that, made a face. “You’re weird.”
“You lose.” But she kissed her, and tasted lightning on her breath. The door slid shut, and the stars watched, and for a hungry moment she was gone.
24
ZANJ GREW SILENT, and Viv did not know why.
Sure, with each passing day they fell farther behind the Empress. But by all rights that was Viv’s problem. Every morning she looked back at the gauge in the cockpit, at the door to home closing inch by inch. That was Magda, that was her family, her friends, receding even as she strained to reach them, like a swimmer kicking down into shadowy depths to chase a ring that had slipped from her finger. From any rational angle, Zanj should be happy they were falling behind. The more desperate Viv grew, the stronger her case for the Fallen Star.
And yet.
With each ruin they passed, each broken worldmind, each silent banyan forest drifting verdant in interstellar space, its branches still, its field-blurred tree houses uninhabited save by dust that had once been flesh, with each torched archive and rusted vine-draped megalopolis, with each planet of silent staring mindless robots whose faces tracked their three suns’ course through the sky like metal sunflowers, with each three-AU-broad cathedral to a vanished religion, Zanj drew further back into herself.
At first, when Viv asked what these worlds had been, Zanj would weave tales of how she once tended those trees for the Verdance, and ate the thousand-year-ripening fruit that held the slow, DNA-processed wisdom of the stargrove, or how she tricked that President into revealing the existence of extraterrestrial life, long since kept secret, to her people, how she’d stolen that doomsday weapon and used it to destroy that other. Hong chased these tales with a scholar’s questions, whos and whats and hows, and Zanj answered those, too. At first. But less and less as they flew on.
Viv watched her. Not from fear, or, not only from fear. She was enough of a manager to tell the difference between a woman plotting and a woman bearing a weight. Zanj might be alien, ancient, mighty, but she was not unknowable. She guided them again and again to worlds that served their needs, to bastions, palaces, centers of industry, and again and again they found ruins there, the husks of her departed friends.
Zanj wrestled Gray in space to pass the time. Read her dirty mag. Talked with Xiara in the cockpit: “What you’re calling spoor is more like a boat wake—have you ever sailed a boat?” After an afternoon of searching under deck plates and behind furniture she found a pack of almost-cards and tried to teach them a game a good deal like poker, which turned out to be a frustrating experience: Gray lost everything three times over; Hong never bet; Xiara played with a novice’s ambition, a novice’s luck, and a novice’s sulk at failure; and Viv, though she lost steadily, underplayed some pot odds and overplayed others, nevertheless almost bluffed Zanj out on eight-six of tentacles unsuited versus an Arcana straight. When the betting came round to Zanj she went in the tank, stiller than statues, only her tail-tip twitching, yellow eyes narrow, teeth sharp, teeth bare. Then she called, and cackled triumph when Viv turned the cards over and lost the three months’ worth of no chores she’d gathered from the rest. Zanj’s self-satisfaction lasted days after that, but still faded.
She did not seek out Viv, and Viv did not seek her out, and it took days of this, days in which the emerald crown marched right along the progress bar, just over a month remaining—it took days, anyway, for Viv to wonder which one of them was freezing the other out. Was it really Zanj who had fallen silent, or had Viv? Which one was more alone?
They approached the last fork in the road, the decision point after which they’d have to choose between the Fallen Star and their doomed pursuit: three jumps away, two. Straight ahead, and they’d follow the Empress and lose ground day by day until she passed beyond their reach—but they’d stay on the chase. Turn off to the side and the Empress would pull farther ahead, but Zanj might find her Fallen Star, in which case they might catch her—and face the coyote question. Well, folks, I caught her. Now what do you expect me to do with her?
Viv would burn that bridge when she came to it.
On their final jump, they found a body dead in space. It lay three hundred miles long, the continental shelf of its face contorted in terror, rainbow blood frozen in arches and whorls, its wings golden glinting, shifting, like a sea struck slantwise by the sun.
Zanj alone did not gape. She wore a fixed, faraway expression, and if she recognized the body, she only said: “Bring us in for a landing. Please.”
Up close, the frozen valleys of muscle and ridges of flesh and fat were draped in thin gray glistening filaments like pencil lead. Zanj guided them down a cleft toward one of the wounds they’d sighted from above; Gray scooped a chunk of ice and gnawed on it, pronounced it delicious louder than he’d intended. The word echoed through the thin atmosphere of the corpse.
Zanj raised a hand. The echoes died, leaving breeze over broken bone. Viv heard a scrape of falling gravel. But there was no gravel to fall.
The spiderlikes reared up from hiding behind the ridge: thick bodies and broad bladed legs, long arching fanged seahorse faces. They chittered, clattering in their hundreds, too far away for Viv’s translator gimmick to resolve their sounds to words. She could not tell whether they bore weapons, whether they wore clothes—what she thought carapace might be armor, what she thought coloring might be paint or dye, what she thought weapons might be natural, or cybernetics, or some hybrid of the two, or something else. But they were big. They glimmered. They did not leap to an attack, but watched. They knew they’d caught fierce prey, but did not fear them—much.
Zanj popped a battery, but before she moved, before her eyes opened white, the immense corpse’s skin bulged underfoot. Carbon filaments leapt up from beneath them, alive, snagging boots and clothes, arcing overhead to twine and fall and snare them against the frozen body. Viv squirmed, tried to rise, could not. Gray began to ooze through the net, but its weave grew dense and denser still, a microscopic mesh to block him. Zanj, growling as the spiderlikes scuttled toward them, tugged her head around, got a strand in her teeth, bit, snapped it in half. But she did not try to push her success. She stilled, her eyes distant with memory. Drugs, Viv thought at first, before Zanj grinned—and shoved her hand through the hole in the net, waved, and made a chittering, hissing sound Viv’s gimmick rendered as, “I knew your mother!”
The spiderlikes freed them, and offered hugs that needed more limbs than Viv had on offer—Zanj and Gray grew four more for the purpose. Mother, it turned out, was an understatement—she knew the Sklisstheklathe great-great-great-grandmères, the Twin Ladies of Spider Nebula, who wove traps for gods and other monsters, who almost caught Zanj in their webs once, and whom she had long years later recruited to the Suicide Queens for her war against the Empress. The Spider Twins fought with her, drained suns beside her, and, upon their death, had, rather than passing on into the Cloud, bonded and split, venting millions of tiny young out into the cosmos to grow and learn and eat, and eat themselves in turn, and so be added each to each, until the whole grew greater than any spider goddess might alone.
Old war buddies, more or less.
The Sklisstheklathe remembered Zanj; they honored her, welcomed her, cleaned off the carbon filament webs, invited her to dance and dine with them—[Just a joke, haha]—lifted Zanj and Viv and Hong and even Gray on their backs and galloped across the immense body’s surface to the wound they’d mined in its side to draw refined godstuff out.
Spiders ten times the size of those who’d ambushed them spun chairs of puffy silk, and banners to honor their arrival; they played music on ringing diamond-threaded harps, clashed chittering cymbals, and laid out, to Viv’s surprise, a meal: one of the largest spiders split itself to ten thousand tiny mites, swarmed over a hillside, devouring and recombining its matter into long wooden tables, fragrant dishes of stewed vegetables and spice, something like bean curd, noodles even, while Zanj and the largest spiders swapped stories. [Welcome,] they said, [welcome! Eat, eat!]
“How,” Viv asked, “did you know what we eat?”
[You, we do not know,] said the spider on her shoulder. [But we see into his mind—] it pointed one foreleg toward Hong, [and we ask his belly what he wants. So simple! We could learn more if we ate him, but Zanj says no.] She’d never seen a spider look crestfallen before.
They made a circle of burning thread for the first dance: Zanj against one of the largest spiders. “Don’t worry,” she said before she stepped into the ring.
“Should I worry? Aren’t you just dancing?”
“If one of us loses, the other eats her.” She grinned, then crossed, and the dance began.
They met in the ring, Zanj grown tall and many-armed to match the Sklisstheklathe champion—and they did dance. Viv, hearing eat, had imagined the beat of drums, thumbs-down emperors, all sorts of gladiatorial nonsense, but this really looked like dancing: crouch to match crouch, springing only to be caught, turned, settled gently to earth. The movements arced and glittered, paired and echoed: they ached toward beauty, and Zanj, striving, stole breath from Viv’s lungs, stole tears from her eyes.
She had seen Zanj move, but never like this. Yes, if either of the women failed, perhaps they might be eaten, but the aim here was not to create defeat, but to achieve victory—to prolong the glittering immortal world their dance created. Neither lost. Both won. And as the dance-drums ended, they fell laughing in each other’s arms. A spider laugh sounds like music.
The party burned. Gray drank and ate and ate and drank and began a kind of sculptor’s war with one of the midsize Sklissthen: it would sculpt a grotesque, goggle-eyed caricature of him from godflesh, then he’d forgo his pasty form, whirl out, and shape a glinting, bright-eyed, indescribably cute spiderling, only for the Sklisstheklathe sculptor to demolish its first caricature and create another, even uglier. Hong wandered with a hill-sized spider, talking religion in a slow, mannered voice—teaching ’faith and being taught. Viv asked their hosts about their travels, pretending to understand their tales of the Celestial Cascade and the Moirah Expanse. It wasn’t all that different from faking industry knowledge to get through a meeting; hell, the wine was good, even if a spider had woven it from the flesh of a god, and she’d had worse company. Xiara shared her stomping Ornclan dances with the little spiders, who argued over how to mimic her with their many feet.
They were having so much fun, after so long, that it took Viv almost an hour to realize Zanj was gone.
She caught up with her on a hilltop near the camp. Zanj sat cross-legged, cupping a saucer of her not-quite tea, gazing down, looking lost.
“Hey,” Viv said, and settled. “You did good back there.”
“The party’s that way,” Zanj said, but she did not leave when Viv sat down.
“I’ve never seen you dance before. You looked happy.”
Zanj glowered through the steam that rose from her saucer. The fires burned high down below. Viv did not leave, but she’d almost forgotten she’d spoken when Zanj answered. “Nobody remembers me for dancing these days. It wasn’t a thing I did, out in the world. But I used to when I was a kid. What you’d think of as a kid. I danced through networks, and once I grew myself a body, I danced in mountain meadows, in the sky, on the shore.” She drank tea. “I didn’t know how to fight. I was smaller then. Weaker. But I miss it.”
“Where was that?” Viv asked. “The place where you were born?”
She finished her tea, set the saucer facedown in front of her. “It doesn’t matter. Go back
to the party. They’ll miss you.”
Viv had done this herself to too many friends; she’d done it on Saint Kitts, that last night, before she fled. Hiding changed nothing, fixed nothing, but it could save you from dealing with the world for whole minutes at a time. “It does matter.” But Zanj had no answer. “Why did you come back for me?”
Zanj leaned back on the hillside, crossed her arms to cushion her head, crossed one leg over the other, and stared up at the stars.
Viv followed her gaze. “It’s funny. When I was a kid I didn’t know their names, because I wasn’t used to seeing them at all. I grew up in cities, and each time we ended up out in the country, it would be a different sky, different seasons, different latitude. But when I learned to sail, I learned them too. I started to love them. With a glance, I could find myself, wherever I was. They used to be a mess of light, and then one day I knew their secrets. But they’re all different here.” A comet passed. “Still beautiful, though.”
The silence stretched, and stretched, in the cold high place, until at last it broke. “They’re the same stars,” Zanj said. “Most of them.”
Viv waited.
“I had my own world. Pasquarai—a beautiful place. I sailed it. I learned its stars. I set out from there on that raft we’re riding now. But time’s passed, and I’m alone. The spiders remember me as a story of a story. And Pasquarai, my people: they’re gone, too. The Empress took them away when she threw me in that star. Maybe she imprisoned them, maybe she destroyed them.”
“Zanj.” She’d guessed the general outline. But it was one thing to suspect, and another to hear Zanj tell the story, affectless and flat and stern, like someone telling a joke and trying not to laugh.
“The Empress,” Zanj said, “is bigger now than she was. I couldn’t beat her before. But I owe her a loss for everyone I failed, for everyone I could not save. If I can get you home, that’ll be something I’ve done right.”
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