“A statue?”
“No, he’s real. Just frozen. Suspended animation, null-entropy field, like Zanj did with you in the Star. I think this one’s my”—he traced the skin with his fingers—“great-great-great-grandmother Gray’s work? Maybe an extra great in there, the names repeat, it’s hard to tell. Good stuff, anyway.” He spread his arms to embrace the jungle around them, not frozen but arrested, a symphony the conductor held on a high note, forever: dragonfly wings paused midbeat, scavengers’ throats mid-swallow. “Welcome to the memory bay.”
“Come on.” Zanj pulled her to her feet. “We don’t have much time.”
Viv scrambled after her through the forest.
Gray explained on the way. “None of us really knows why She does this, but there are theories.” They passed through a burning blue door in the dinosaur swamp, and emerged onto a busy street in a city that had never been on Earth, a three-mooned city of slope-roofed skyscrapers, into frozen traffic. Viv flinched by reflex: if the city started to move, she’d be crushed in seconds. Though the cars probably would have hit Zanj first, and bounced off. “When you’re as old as She is, the grandmothers say, your memory needs a little help.” Another burning door brought them to a hive complex, millions of insects dancing in the air between subhives linked by amber cords in a nesting grove that stretched above and below as far as the eye could see. Viv and Zanj had to crouch and duck through the bugs’ flight plan; Gray fuzzed out and walked normally, his substance drifting through the swarm. “Some think She builds them out of pity for the civilizations She harvests, so a tiny piece of their present will last forever. Or as an archive, in case She finds a use for them later on.”
“Wait. Those dinosaurs were intelligent?”
“Not the dinosaurs. The trees.” They passed through another door into an ocean, so deep the surface was no more than a suggestion, a faint sheen on a distant mirror. Glowing jellyfish bulbs lit immense roiling tentacles of squid. “Some think it’s an art She practices, capturing moments perfectly balanced in beauty or justice. I don’t know. I’ve never walked here before with a body. It feels indecent. I like it.”
“It’s a trophy room,” Zanj said. “She’s wrecked so many worlds. Trillions of lives. She keeps a few of them here so she can feel better about herself.”
The next door dropped them into a basement. Viv stopped. She recognized this tile, these walls, the cement, the frigid air, the servers in their racks. Her stomach tightened, her knees unlocked, and she felt herself sweat, the mechanical reactions of a mammal about to flee. “I know this place.”
“We don’t have time.”
“This is where…” The memory of a hand around her heart stopped her from speaking. “No way. She didn’t eat Earth. When I left, we weren’t near the level of the places you’re talking about.”
“So maybe they’re not trophies,” Gray said.
Zanj scoffed. “There’s more than one kind of trophy.” And she led them through another door.
Viv stood on a beach by a gray ocean. Cotton clouds scudded across a full blue sky. Rocks rose behind her; to her left, boulders jutted from the sand. To her right, the beach curved past cedar-shingle houses to a long arm of mounded rock with a lighthouse at the end. Gulls squabbled over scraps of bread, a scallop shell. A tern glided out above the waves.
The door closed behind her.
Viv sank to her knees in the sand beside a dirty plastic six-pack collar.
Gray had been saying something, probably, but he stopped. “Viv? What’s wrong?”
“This is Cape Ann.” Not Cape Ann as it stood now—as it had stood when the Empress pulled her out of time, out of her world. They’d built a bulkier, squatter lighthouse after Hurricane Xavier, and the sea should be a meter higher at this tide; she saw no jellyfish buoys. “I went to school near here. I used to come up on long weekends, with friends. We’d have drone fights on the beach.” She sank her fingers into the sand, as if she could dig through to the deck below—but there was just more sand beneath the sand. She squeezed what she’d dredged up, and the grains slipped out between her fingers. The more you tighten your grip. She laughed, and heard the cracks in her voice. “I can’t.”
“Viv.” Zanj knelt before her, firm as iron, slightly more kind. “We have to keep moving.” Waves crashed and fell and roared. “This is a big ship, and the Empress isn’t looking for us. But if we stay in one place, make too much of a fuss, she’ll find us.” But, wait. There should be no waves. Each trophy room had been silent, arrested in time, their footsteps hammer blows on grave-still air. “And we can’t fight her here.”
“Zanj?”
“So no matter what you see, I need you to keep driving in, to the center. We’re here for your home, and my freedom. Okay?”
“Zanj.” This time she pointed, and Zanj looked.
Behind her, the water rose.
It gathered into whirlwind pillars, roaring wind-whipped columns hundreds of feet tall, bridging bay and sky. Viv had seen a waterspout once on the open ocean, survived it with her sails in tatters, her mast cracked, her arms aching, her hands blistered from guiding sheets, her side an ugly purple bruise where her ribs had caught a swinging boom; that had been on her trip after the IPO, when she was still wrapping her head around the fact that she’d never have to worry about being out of pocket for a round of drinks again, but if she ever had found herself destitute in port after that she could have just told the waterspout story and drunk all she needed.
But that waterspout did not have burning eyes. Or teeth.
Zanj sighed. She stood, and cracked her neck. With a flick of her wrist, she shaped the Star into being in her hand.
The water-pillars challenged her with voices like shattering rock.
Zanj growled, “Same to you, buddy.” She gathered herself to spring.
“Wait!” Gray ran between them, hands up, eyes wide, smiling like a madman. “Zanj, stop! That’s my mom!”
40
THE GRAYMOTHER SWEPT them into the sky on whirlwind wings to a space of brooding mile-high clouds above the ocean near Cape Ann. Flames within flames, green lights, sunflower yellow, aurora orange, sculpted faces from the clouds in the instant they spoke. It took Viv an embarrassing amount of time to realize the many faces belonged to many distinct individuals, some features round or long or squashed or bubbling, and the voices, too, had a thunderous diversity. Grays moved from cloud to cloud, and new ones arose every second, their faces merged and heightened versions of other Grays she’d seen.
Only Graymom stayed in place, a towering pillar of flame. Perhaps this was a consolation to her son, who tried to look everywhere at once, eyes wide, wet, following his many aunts and uncles and cousins through the clouds. Perhaps she could not move, being already everywhere: the cloud palace pulsed with her voice.
“Our son, banished, has returned. Let him speak.”
The tongues of flame fell silent. Gray stepped forward on empty air.
The clouds opened overhead.
The sky above was not the sky of Cape Ann. The silver glass wheels of the Empress’s ship revolved against the unfamiliar stars of deep space split by the Citadel’s broken curve.
“If he fucks this up,” Zanj whispered into that silence, “get ready to run.”
“If he fucks this up, will running do any good?”
“For me? Oh, sure. For you,” Zanj admitted, “maybe not. But getting ready won’t hurt.”
She didn’t answer that. The Grays were, of course, listening.
Gray glanced back to Viv, nervous. She waved her best you’ll be fine wave. She’d encouraged enough friends through presentations, testimonies, and wedding toasts to know you didn’t show your own nerves, if you had them. Reunions with an estranged family of nanorobot genies fell way off to the severe right of that scale, but then, you used the tools you had for the task at hand.
Gray cleared his throat. It sounded wet, and mortal, and nothing like thunder.
“Mothers, aunts, uncles,
cousins of Grayframe. I’ve come back.” That much he said with confidence. The rest was harder. “Our Lady banished me to the cold. I waited there for years, gathering desires in hope of earning Her favor. I missed you all so much. Out in the dark, I imagined how you, Aunt, would laugh at a certain surprise, how you, Uncle, would have devoured a particular nuisance. I missed the way our thoughts would fuse. Your voices, and the fire of you. It’s hard to be alone.” He swallowed, took a breath, and began again. “I had a chance to come home. I took it. The Empress shaped my friend Viv to break chains, and she offered to break mine. For our paths to cross out of all the billions in the galaxy: How could it be against the Empress’s will? I am home, and I throw myself on your mercy. If you feel I have done wrong returning, unmake me now. If you want to devour me, devour me. It is enough that I have seen you one last time. I only ask that you help my friend. She was torn from her home beyond the Rosary bead. I promised I would help her find her road home, as she helped me find mine.”
Graymother spoke ponderously into the silence. “Our son Gray. What have you brought us from your travels? What gifts, to earn our welcome?”
Silence once again. Gray stood alone in the circle. Though they were not touching, Viv felt Zanj tense beside her, and traced the line of the pirate queen’s thought as she totaled the worldly goods Gray might offer: some archived dreams of Orn—and Zanj, and Viv. An ancient enemy of the Lady they served, and a woman out of time, whom Yannis had thought enough of a prize to justify war with heavens.
Those might be enticement enough for the Grayframe.
She set her hand on Zanj’s arm, felt the battle tension there, and whispered, “Wait.”
Gray straightened, drew his shoulders back, and breathed in, out, in again. Then he began to sing.
His voice warbled at first, but when it steadied on a pitch, Viv recognized the song from the fields of Refuge, from the digging crew’s voices, the rhythm of planting and the movement of limbs.
Big rat, big rat
Don’t eat my millet
Big rat, big rat
Don’t eat my rice
Viv’s translation gimmick fed her the words, but like any song, the meaning had as much to do with rhythm and melody as lyrics: the pound, the march, the drive. This song had hundreds of verses; you worked through each grain and every other crop, a chorus after each set of four, then started again from millet with the next pest. Just a workers’ song.
Midway through the third verse a drone like swarming bees reverberated through the sky, and other lower notes, on the hairy line between sound and pressure. The Grayframe joined the chorus.
Gray began to clap; thunder echoed him, and clouds roiled and spun into dancing, rumbling helices of flame, burning faces grinning and spinning and singing blues. They spread fiery arms, lifting him up; he blurred out into them, interwoven with his family’s smoke, laughing and singing with the sky.
Viv realized Zanj was glowering, wondered why, and realized she was tapping her feet in time with the music.
* * *
ANOTHER PARTING. VIV wondered if she would ever grow used to those.
The Grayframe’s joy seared on around them, spinning, transforming, warping and returning to form. She could barely trace Gray within, swept from cloud to cloud, joining the cascade of thunder, tossed high into the air and caught, spun round by relatives.
“I don’t believe it,” Zanj said with a shake of her head. “They’re all like that.”
Graymother, beaming, shaped herself from the revel: first smoke, then smoke in the vague dimensions of a body, then, in a whirl of construction, step by step as she advanced, nerves, bones, flesh, eyes, skin, until she stood glorious, ten feet tall and full-figured and smoke-wreathed before them.
Zanj seemed nonplussed; Viv felt grateful for the smoke that still surrounded Graymother, because otherwise she might have embarrassed herself. Or—as her eyes tracked over that body built to more-than-human scale, as she blushed and riveted them on that perfect face, and ordered her mouth to close—embarrassed herself more.
“I am sorry,” Graymother said. “You have so small a shadow on the Cloud that I cannot see you without eyes. I hope this form does not disturb you.” Which seemed dense for a being of fire and whim and billions of statically suspended nanomachines—except for the tiny corner-of-the-mouth smirk that tipped her cards.
“I think I’ll live,” Viv said. “It won’t be a problem for you to take him in?”
“The Lady is not merciful, but She is often distracted. Gray’s entire natural life could pass before She notices his return. He had the misfortune to be exceptionally efficient in his infancy, so She raised him up and cultivated him as her herald. We will be fine.” Her hand was larger than Viv’s head, but still she cupped her cheek. Her touch was warm and gentle and tingled on Viv’s skin like peppermint. “You have brought our son home. What can we do for you?”
Viv swallowed many answers, and offered the one that mattered. “I want to go home. I think the Empress pulled me out of the Rosary bead she stole. I need a way to get back in.”
Graymother smiled. “Such an easy thing! Surely you could ask a greater boon.”
“Wait,” Viv said. “Easy?”
“Of course! We’ve been building, and testing, a machine for the purpose of engaging with the bead, ever since we pulled it from the Rosary. The Empress has directed all Her mind to the task, all our strength. Even in its current form, it’s more than enough to send a body through. And you?” She drew her hand from Viv’s cheek—Viv had to restrain herself from pulling it back—and turned to Zanj. Her face darkened. “I believe I should know you.”
“I’m just passing through,” Zanj said. “I’m only here to get Viv home.”
Behind, the party whirled, and Gray led another verse:
Gray goo, gray goo
Don’t take my millet
Gray goo, gray goo
Don’t take my rice
At last, Graymother nodded. “I will fly you to the throne room. Our Lady sleeps there, Her mind submerged in contemplation of the Cloud. We will direct Her attention down, and down—and we will wake the machine for you.”
Zanj looked to Viv; Viv said, “Thank you.”
Graymother called out with a voice much larger than the one she’d used with Viv, in the Graytongue of surf and fire, and the flame revel tossed Gray from one pair of whirlwind arms to another until he sprawled in the sky before them, re-forming into the body they knew: taller, broader, stronger than he’d been on Orn, shaped by sun and work, sweaty and sore from laughter, but Gray nonetheless, their Gray, himself.
When he saw them, he understood. He hugged Zanj, who made as if she’d been too shocked by his embrace to dodge in time, though of course she could have. She patted him on the back, awkwardly.
“I’m so glad I got the chance to know you,” he said. “And that I didn’t kill you when we first met! And you didn’t kill me!”
“It’s a mystery why,” Zanj said. But even she couldn’t sell that line without a waver. “It’s been fun.”
He let her go, and before Viv could think of what she was supposed to say, dropped to his knees before her, eyes raised to her face, with eagerness and respect, and beneath all that, a sorrow she was half surprised to feel her own heart echo. “Thank you. I owe you everything.”
She knelt, and hugged him. He felt more solid than before. He hugged her back, and for once he got the smell right. He drew a breath of her and held it, and as he exhaled with a sigh Viv’s arms slipped through him. His body quickened to lightning and smoke, and that face, that open child’s face, joined the whirlwind of his family.
Leaving Zanj, and Viv, alone.
41
VIV AND ZANJ crept into the Empress’s throne room.
Graymother had flown them down the vessel’s winding halls at speeds Viv did not care to guess, through apertures that opened to admit them only to snap closed instantly behind, and left them at the throne room door. She whispered her
instructions, then departed with a kiss that lingered on Viv’s cheek and a scent too rich for roses.
The words were easier to remember than the kiss.
Touch nothing, leave nothing. Do not speak. Dare not look upon our Lady Herself, for She can sense regard. Follow the lights. Through them we guide you from afar. When the gate opens, step through, and do not look back.
She’d told herself she was ready, but she was not ready for this room.
In childhood Viv had designed throne rooms and secret lairs the way other kids designed dream bedrooms. In high school she’d tried to remodel her own bedroom to match her visions, but her parents wouldn’t let her paint, so she’d been stuck with pink walls, and her mother kept hanging white frill curtains though each time Viv replaced them with black. Her college dorm had been, in retrospect, a stupid eighteen-year-old’s attempt at the same project, piled with electronics and books, monitor after monitor, bad prints of good art. Her various houses had various versions of the dream, but none ever felt quite right. She just couldn’t lay hands on enough marble, stained glass, and porphyry for what she had in mind.
If Viv had infinite resources, a whole Grayframe at her beck and call, and forever to build in, she might have made a room like this. Diamond arches climbed and curved, meshed, braided, and melded to plummet once more, toward the throne in the center where sat, dreaming—
No. She was not supposed to look.
A galaxy of multicolored lights turned overhead, its stars mostly Imperial green, here and there a luxurious calm sapphire, broken with cracks of black and saffron-orange and red, a map of a galaxy controlled by the woman, the entity, upon that—
Do not look at the Empress. Do not look at the throne.
She walked on.
Walking on hurt. The emerald radiance of the Woman Viv could not see flooded the hall, pulsed through veins in diamond. Black crystal pillars displayed graphs of local gravity, tensor webs of magnetic fields, diagrams of the palace ship itself, and they reflected Her light: the Empress Whose brilliance overflowed Her flesh. If She even had flesh anymore.
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