“I don’t blame you.”
“What?” Zanj looked at her as if she’d made some obscene joke.
“For the crash, I mean,” she said. “For us ending up here. There’s no way you could have known the Cloud would still be broken. We took a risk. It didn’t pay off. That’s okay.”
Zanj’s scar made it hard to read her expression, but her confusion would have played for the cheap seats. “What are you talking about? Of course it was the right decision. Of course it’s not my fault.”
“Okay, then. Why are you so pissed? These people seem nice so far.”
“Maybe I don’t like nice.”
“Would you rather they attack us? You’re not even trying to look grateful.”
“For what? Food? I don’t need it. Company? From a bunch of groundlings? Rescue? We saved ourselves.”
“They’re trying to make us comfortable.”
“They want us to feel comfortable,” Zanj said, “because they expect us to stay.”
Behind, the song ended to cheers. The goddesses watched, silent, growling many-toothed from the shadows. “We’ll get out of here.”
“I don’t think you understand the extent of our current fuckery. We have no ship. We can’t touch the Cloud—so if we want to build a ship to get us back, we’re stuck with what we can remember about basic metallurgy and physics. My batteries can’t recharge, and Gray—” She shook the bag that held him, and he sloshed inside. “I’ll be surprised if he can pull his body back together without the Cloud. Which leaves us a man down, while up there the Empress pulls farther ahead. Even if we can’t catch her, I refuse to sit here and play pig farmer.”
“We’ll get out.”
A sparrow—what Viv would have called a sparrow on Earth, its wings iridescent, chitinous here—launched itself from the rafters into the sunset. As the sky darkened, the grim shapes of orbiting battleships swelled in the twilight, like distant moons. As shadows shifted, the goddesses seemed to move.
“I know them,” Zanj said softly.
“Who?” Viv said, and then, “Oh.”
She nodded to each in turn, in greeting more than indication. “Old Tiger, who prowled between galactic arms. Heyshir, who sees from shadows. Al-Zayyd in her glory. The Black Bull. Not the only Suicide Queens, and not the names they gave themselves, but the Empress tracked down each one but these, and made me watch her kill them. I thought they died in battle. I hoped maybe they were out there fighting.”
“Your friends.”
“And here they are—statues in a temple. You see what happened, don’t you? They fell just like we did, and got stuck. They must have tried to leave, with their followers, their lovers and minions and children and soldiers, and failed again and again, until they gave up. And then they died, and generations of marrying and mixing later their descendants have become those sheep out there, so ready to offer hospitality and pastoral paradise. My friends gave up their names and their children forgot their stories. And if those women, those brilliant fierce women, couldn’t get out of here in all their lives, do you really think we’ll make it in three weeks?”
Below, the fiddlers and the drums started again, and there were cheers. The temple smelled of dust and cedar.
Viv said: “You might be wrong about them.” Candles flickered at the statues’ feet. “Maybe they didn’t give up.” The flames cast light through flower petals, prismatic, dancing. “Anyway, we won’t. I want to get home. You want out. We’ll make it.”
“Enjoy the party.” Zanj’s voice was more of a mask than her face. “We’ll start tomorrow.” And: “Here.” She thrust Gray’s bag sideways into her. “You take him. My shoulder’s tired.”
Which was a lie, but Viv took the bag. It weighed more than she expected, and pulled her sideways as she descended to the party.
She found Hong and Xiara sitting side by side by a fire, empty bowls on the ground by their knees, in a small clear space within that mass. Viv sat, raised her bowl to toast them, tucked in. “Here’s to survival. And to friendly locals. So long as they don’t drug us and try to steal our dreams.”
Xiara stared into the fire.
“Sorry. Just a joke.” Viv took a bite of seared paig. Delicious. “Come on, guys. We’re alive. The odds of surviving that crash sure weren’t good. We’re stuck, yes, but not forever.”
“I cannot feel the Cloud,” Hong said. “I recite my formulas, and they are only air.”
She chewed, swallowed. “Look, I manage without the Cloud all the time. We’ve come out of harder spots than this. There are no gods here, nothing trying to eat us. Not even Gray.” That fell even flatter than she had expected. “We just have to save ourselves. And we could have picked a worse place to catch our breath.”
That got Hong’s attention: riveted him to her, eyes dark, staring. He leaned forward, face ghost-story orange. “They don’t have souls, Viv. There’s no Cloud here. When they die, they die—unarchived, unremembered. They’re lost, and alone, and they don’t even mind.”
“Neither do I.”
“You’re different,” he said. “You’re—you’re of the Empress.”
“I’m of no one but myself, okay? I was born, like all these people, and I’ll probably die like them, too. They seem fine to me, even if they don’t have what you would call a soul.”
“If we had gone to the ’fleet, we would not be marooned here now.”
“No,” she admitted. “Your people would be halfway through round one of probes and prodding, and you’d probably be in prison somewhere. This still seems better.”
“They would have helped us.”
“You don’t believe that. Just watch. We’ll be back out in space again no problem in a few days, on the Empress’s heels, and think of all the stories you’ll have to tell your order.”
He stood smoothly. “I must meditate.” And, without a glance back at her half-voiced objections, he walked from the fireside into the shadows, alone.
She finished the paig, dropped her bowl, and leaned back on her elbows. “Xiara, I don’t know why everyone’s acting so weird.”
She reached for her hand, but Xiara’s slipped away. “I’d like to be alone.”
And then Viv was.
Okay, she told herself in the silence beside the crackling fire, under the cheers and songs. I get it. They’re upset. Doesn’t mean I have to be. She stood, slid back through the dancing crowd, and found herself another drink. And another. The little lizard-man serving the booze gave her a look when she got her fourth glass, but, hell, it tasted good.
“I get it,” she told Gray, who was a better listener than she’d expected when he was in a puddle in a bag. Bags of unconscious friends in fluid form didn’t get all weird and desert you for no reason. Okay, sure, there were reasons. She just didn’t want to face them. The fire was very bright. “I mean, Zanj has her thing. And, for Hong, this is like, he can’t see all of a sudden, and maybe he’ll die for real, which doesn’t sound so bad to me because it’s not like living as an uploaded brain is really living. Really. Except maybe it’s different if you grew up part of the Cloud. Anyway, he’s feeling lost, and Xiara, she was in the ship when it crashed, and she probably feels like she let us all down, and—hold on. I’ll be back.” The lizard guy tried to wave her off glass five, but she grabbed it anyway, stumbled back, plopped beside the bag. “They’re having a weird shitty day, we crashed a spaceship and we’re all in shock. Including me! But I don’t see why they have to be such dicks about it. We’re all in this together. Right, Gray?”
She patted the bag.
It did not slosh.
It did not slosh, because there was nothing in the bag to slosh. It was completely, sickeningly empty.
Oh no.
Viv stood, panicked; the fires and dancing and music spun around her, and the planetoid seemed to be spinning, too—did it spin? Had she noticed it spinning from orbit? The dead fleet in the sky shifted and bubbled but she was pretty sure most of that was her booze. Gray wasn’t any
where. He hadn’t leaked out—hadn’t fallen—she’d been careful—hadn’t she been careful?
“Gray!” Her voice vanished in the music.
God, she was drunk. Even the buildings had started to wobble—not evenly like the stars and warships, though. Only one was really wobbling: the grain silo Yannis had pointed out before. The village’s food supply.
Good thing she was drunk, because it would be really bad if anything happened to that silo. She liked Refuge for many, many reasons, including this one: she could tell, here, what was good and what was bad, and, yes, that, that would definitely be bad.
Then she heard the villagers’ screams. It turned out she wasn’t the only one staring at the grain silo, which meant it wasn’t just shaking because she was drunk, which was a bad sign—and the screams rose as the silo tilted, cracked, and fell.
Viv didn’t remember running, later—just a tide of people tossing her flotsamlike through mazy backstreets, through choking demolition dust and airborne rice flour, to the edge of town, to the narrow cleft in the mountainside where the silo was.
Where the silo had been.
Its wreckage lay in piles, enormous toothmarked stone blocks tossed like packing foam about the slope. There should have been a flood of rice amid the dust and shattered rock, a year’s food for a hungry village, but only a few grains slipped under Viv’s feet.
Viv pushed to the front, knocking Refugers away—shoved past pitchforks pointed in, past Yannis in the lead, to reach the pale figure reclined atop the rubble, moaning and stroking his grotesquely swollen belly.
Viv shouted, “Stop!” though nobody had started anything yet. “I know him.”
Gray opened his eyes, blinked twice, and said, “Heya, Viv! Boss! Glad you made it! Man, isn’t this place great? All this food, jus’ lying around.”
Speech completed, he slumped back to the ground, and began to snore.
Viv looked from Gray, to Yannis, to the wreckage, to the villagers, to Gray again, but her eyes kept tracking past him, and there were so many villagers. They all looked angry, and, but—no, the ground wasn’t really shaking, don’t be silly, she knew earthquakes, she grew up with earthquakes, and this, sir, was no—
She made it to the bushes, at least, before she threw up.
28
MOST MORNINGS VIV woke before dawn, alone in the hut the village gave her, stretched, sponged off, shrugged into a loose cotton shirt and pants, then went to work the fields with Gray. It was the least she could do. That’s what she told Zanj when Zanj asked why she bothered: Gray had eaten Refuge out of a year’s grain, and while Yannis and the others, once talked down, realized that Gray didn’t mean to hurt them—they understood the misunderstanding, they welcomed him, too, and they had supplies enough to last through the harvest if they were careful and rationed meals—after all that, even Viv, who had, age fourteen, once unthinkingly accepted an aunt’s offer to treat her to dinner with a simple thanks, thereby sending her entire extended family into a three-week-long paroxysm of apology and counterapology, could tell they’d fucked up bad, and had to make amends.
What she didn’t tell Zanj, what it took her a week to admit even to herself, and what she never would have admitted to her friends back home, was that she liked the work. At the end of the first day in the sun, drenched in sweat, her back aching from hours bending to transplant rice seedlings, hassled by gnats and flies, she felt more bone-tired than she’d felt in years, a two-day sailing race’s full-body exhaustion squeezed into the hours between sunrise and noon. Bone-tired, and glowing.
They all worked together, that was part of it, the folk she classed roughly as women and the folk she classed roughly as men and the folk who didn’t fit in either camp. They worked in paddies, row by row. They joked about each other, about the sun, about the mud, about sex hidden behind metaphors and sex not hidden at all. Viv didn’t get most of the sex jokes, which involved unfamiliar equipment about which she really didn’t want to ask. Elders moved among them, Yannis and Nioh, her bent, blunt-horned friend, and others, answering questions, offering sun tea and balls of glutinous rice wrapped around minced fried paig. There were songs that meshed voices, high and reedy, earth-deep, trembling and hale; Fenliu the drummer beat time while they sang, and the work went faster. When Viv didn’t know what she was doing, which was always at first, her neighbors helped her: here is how you plant the seedling straight, here is how you bend so you don’t hurt your back. Gentle corrections, and soon she could do the work without thinking.
The joy snuck up on her. Clouds drifted below the sun as the ruined fleet drifted far above. The sun was hot but the water cool. The wet squick of mud between her toes grossed Viv out at first, but even that was welcoming once she got used to it, gentle as breezes. Gray loved it: he covered himself in mud as he worked, baked it to a clay with the sun’s heat and the heat of his own body.
That first day, after he woke from a digestion coma to learn what he’d done—after Viv doused him in a bucket’s worth of cold water to wake him so he could learn—he’d been confused by the notion of food as scarce resource. Then, when he understood, he’d gone pale as Viv had ever seen him, and promised—on bent knee, no less—to make it good. He’d offered to fight monsters, to topple mountains, but there were no monsters here to fight, or mountains anyone wanted toppling. Yannis pointed out, though, that their crash landing had left a miles-long scar through their most fertile fields. That, Gray could fix.
“I’m not so good without the Cloud,” he told them on day one, as he stared at the trench. “I can’t fuzz out into the air, and I can’t change shape as fast. It’s harder to track all my little pieces. But I can push things around just fine.” He put his shoulder to a ten-foot-tall pile of dirt and rock, and shoved—and with a crack, and a groan, it collapsed on top of him. He wriggled out, spat gravel, grinned gap-toothed. “You get the idea.”
Without the Cloud he also tired faster. They found that out on the third day, which was apparently how long Gray could run on the energy of a year’s worth of grain. He collapsed mid-shove, and the rocks he’d been trying to move rolled on top of him. Viv saw, ran to him, pulled him from the rubble—his skin was so tight she could see his bones were not in the same arrangement as a normal person’s. “Gray! What the hell.”
“I’m fine. Just a rest and.” His head slumped against her. “Hungry.” She offered him a rice ball, but he shook his head. “Ate for a year already. They’ll starve.”
“You need food.”
He shook his head again, but Viv called, “Yannis!” and the woman came, leaning on her fork, and together they dragged Gray to a shaded hut and ladled broth into his mouth until his eyes flashed and his irises went white, then filled clockwise like progress bars. He woke just before a hundred percent, and Viv finally relaxed.
He could feed off the sun, but slowly. Carbon chains were faster, energy-dense, but Refuge didn’t have another year’s grain surplus to spare. He could eat grass and hay, but burned them less well. “You need to pace yourself,” Viv said, hearing the echo of everyone in her life who’d told her to do the same. “You’re no good to anyone half dead.”
So Gray worked mornings after that, ate for three, and did the work of only twenty. The afternoons he spent spread into a thin silver film on the surface of the village reservoir, pulling sunlight. He worked beside a team of villagers, Gatyen and Mishya and Cenk, strong, bold, belly-laughing, broad-backed shovelers and pickax artists. They teased him, taught him their digging songs, invited him to rest beside them in the shade. Gray’s form changed, even in that first week: he slouched less, and thickened all through. He didn’t grow muscle the way a person might, but he learned the efficiency of the older men’s shapes, and how they used their bodies. When he was ready, he even joined their songs, with a surprising high tenor pure as a boy’s. Viv ate lunch with him, and he told her stories around mouthfuls about Gatyen’s three kids, about Cenk’s father, who had walked all the way around the world. “They don’t know any
thing about the Empress, or the stars. They just know this little place. But they’re as big as anyone. I wish I could eat their dreams. I mean,” he said, “I won’t. But they’d be as rich as a god’s.”
How Levin-in-the-grass could you get? But there it was. Gray, improbably enough, was growing up.
The others didn’t help with the fields.
Not that they kept idle. Zanj worked constantly. She gathered metal at first: walked miles seeking bits of foam and alloy scattered from their crash, returned one day bearing a twenty-foot wing over one shoulder. She rescued wire, diamond, glass; she borrowed tools from the village blacksmith and built her own forge, melting and recasting the Question’s wreck for the parts she needed, and slowly, she raised her antenna. Viv helped her in the afternoons, and tried to make conversation about village politics, about Gray’s development, about Hong, about Xiara still so quiet and withdrawn, about next steps. When all the rest failed to start a conversation, she asked about the Suicide Queens, and how they’d fallen. Zanj worked, and told her where to put her hands, and did not answer. She slept across the river under the stars, far from the village’s firelight, when she slept at all.
Hong worked with Zanj, and he was chattier. He helped with the antenna design, helped her wind wire and repurpose bits of surviving circuitry. “We learn the ways of machines,” he explained. “The ’faith starts its children on steam in their youth and guides us principle by principle into the Cloud, so we are trained to open our minds to problems. Our first challenge here is to determine just what cuts us off from the wider universe. Since we observe no gravitational distortions, no lensing, it’s likely a signal interference. A strong, directional broadcast should pierce through, if we can use Zanj herself as a power source.”
“Your plan stinks of if,” Zanj said as she heaved a crossbar into place.
“Do you have a better one?”
If she did, she didn’t say.
Hong spent only part of his time with the antenna. He roamed the village and beyond, drawing maps and landscapes in charcoal, talking in teahouses with locals, playing board games and dice, studying plow construction, visiting the sick, teaching children tumbling games: learning, always learning. She ran into him one night after dinner with Gatyen’s family. She’d limited herself to a single cup of the fizzy lemon stuff, which still made her eyes burn. Full and tipsy and exhausted, she staggered back to her own hut, and as she neared it, saw him on a hill nearby, sketching by the light of the battleship moons.
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