They crashed, orbited, crashed again, lines of light in the sky, and as they fought, and cast one another down, and flew up to fight again, forms swelling and changing and dividing, Viv, who had not quite bought the golden Zanj’s story, felt her doubts ebb.
They fought the same. Not “with the same moves,” or “with the same style,” or even “with the same ferocity.” Their movements echoed each other. Zanj struck the sun-bright staff aside and jabbed to her opposite number’s neck, met not with a parry but with a backbend that became a kick, and ten beats later in the dance her golden double tried precisely the same move, and Zanj responded in the same way. They raked with claws, and strangled with tails, and kicked and bit for jugulars and snatched at one another’s staffs with their feet; they landed on the Zanjspire, scuttled across their enormous statue’s face, shattered her nose and burst together through the broad palm of her hand.
A fight is a jungle. Two people dive into it together, and each seeks her own path through, running down known trails, avoiding pits and perils she knows, falling victim to those she fails to guess. Training matters, and raw physical ability: a stronger, harder, fleeter body can bear more, run faster. We can climb that tree, we can swing along that vine over this quicksand here. Tools make a difference, too: a machete to cut through undergrowth, a bomb to blast the tangled mess to rubble. Learning how to fight is learning how to navigate jungles in the abstract: to recognize common shapes, which paths tend to lead through and why, what traps are, what water’s pure and what only seems pure at a glance. But each jungle grows anew between the two combatants. They are the territory, and its navigators.
Zanj and Zanj halted in the sky, staff crossed with staff, red eyes into red eyes.
“Sister,” the Queen said, “one might think I’d spent three thousand years killing our friends, rather than saving them.”
“You didn’t have the decency to kill them,” Zanj replied. “You bent them so they can’t look up. And what did you do with those who wouldn’t bend?”
“Most do, sooner or later. Sometimes it takes years, sometimes centuries. But the number who resist is always smaller than you think. I care for all my children.”
Zanj hissed. “Maybe the Empress broke you. Maybe you did it to yourself. But either way, this is where you end.”
The Queen in her battle glory somehow still looked sad. “I hoped we wouldn’t have to do this.”
And then she poured past Zanj’s guard, into her.
Zanj landed in a heap in the throne room, curled around her stomach, cursing, screaming. Her silver battle-skin bubbled and burst, and the pus that flowed from those boils ran gold. Her teeth gnashed and ground. The gold spread slowly, viciously, rippling down her arms, trickling together to form a net over her silver skin that spread, curling over her lips, down her ears, into her eyes. Viv ran for Zanj, unsure what she could do, knowing only that she had to help—but glass-eyed Pasquaran soldiers grabbed her and threw her to the floor.
Hong and Xiara made it farther, Hong barreling through power-armored guards until Avoun locked her sword against his clubs. Xiara slipped past them both, her arm outstretched, the pilot marks awake beside her eyes, and as she neared, the gold shuddered and began to fade from Zanj’s field, to run back into the wounds from which it poured. But one of Zanj’s hands was already covered in gold, and it reached up, shuddering, unsure, fighting its own movement from the inside. The hand clenched into a fist.
Xiara dropped so fast that fist might have closed around her brain.
Gray was there next, tossing guards left and center, a whirl of fire battering the golden shell that enclosed Zanj. One Zanj, he could almost fight. Two, with all Pasquarai Station behind them—that, he could not face.
Viv surged against the soldiers, wriggled free, kicked, felt something in her ankle give. But the gold closed over Zanj’s eyes, and the light faded.
Zanj levered herself to her feet, leaning against the Fallen Star, breathing heavy, shuddering all through, kitten weak. She still wore the crown, and Viv felt a stab of hope. But when Zanj looked up, her eyes were the Queen’s closed-door eyes, and her face was free of scars.
And that smile, that toothy slantwise smile, that was not the smile of a bad puppeteer, the smile she had forced on Avoun’s face. This smile was wholly itself, and wholly in control, with a mother’s sadness and a mother’s cruelty.
Viv did not have time to scream.
66
HONG CHASED HIS own reflection through a maze of warped mirrors.
He had forgotten something, a piece of himself slipped out while he was not looking, his old name perhaps, the name he’d had before he became Brother Hong of the ’faith, or even just a memory of the gold of leaves in autumn drifting down, and if he caught the image that ran always three steps and a turn ahead of him, scrambling as he scrambled, slipping as he slipped, he could reclaim what he had lost, own it, eat it, become wholly himself. But as he ran he lost more, unraveled as if he were made patchwork like a doll sewn from a single thread and that thread had been tied to a post so the doll unmade itself as it pulled away.
Facts slipped from him with every step: the specific heat of water, the speed of light in a vacuum, the fractal manifold equation of the Cloud, sliding out one by one and leaving only voids behind.
The mirrors twisted his reflection as he ran, showed him unraveling, the holes growing in his skin. He chased the seeming. The hallway glittered with crystal but it stank of blood and skin, and slick glass slipped beneath his bare feet, and as he ran his fear swelled and he heard the great Presence that chased him on steady plodding feet and slurped the thread of him like a long thin noodle, eating everything he knew and everyone he loved, swallowing them down into the deep beyond deep, into un-sense, into the chaos belly where form lost form and all words failed.
The truth lay ahead. He could run and save himself. He could run and break the unraveling thread. He could make it somehow. They needed him. Gray, and Viv, and Zanj, and—
What was her name?
* * *
XIARA WAS PART of something grand.
Even Groundswell was not so vast as this. She was the heart of a ship the size of a universe, sinewed by neutronium, smelting data in the stellar forges of its mind, one unified sprawling being humming mad music to itself, working calculations in the death of worlds. Here she was, perfected, one with the machine.
This was what she wanted. This was what she wanted. This was what she wanted.
She was a piece of it as gears were a piece. When it thought, it thought with her mind, grand cold inhuman thoughts that left aches and blood behind, waves of intense cognition and concentration, obsession, her whole being tangled around a problem of hyperspace geometry, forgetting breath, forgetting how it felt to dance, her gut twisted to the point of throwing up, her mind washed with vertigo and regret. And then the conclusion racked through her, staggering ecstasy at performing a task whose ends she did not, could not understand, and after she was an aching pit, vacant, useless until called upon to strain and scream again.
This was what she wanted. This was what she wanted.
The sky, yes, she wanted the sky. She wanted to leave the Chief her mother behind, she wanted to leave the Ornclan’s demands, she wanted to mount a ship and ride it past all limits to the end of the world, and she had made it, here she was, mighty, or at least a piece of mightiness, and whole. The world was full of uses for her. Her mind was a fine mesh, with its delightful chaotic cognition layers, a perfect addition to the computational subsystem, especially when trained, when educated to service. Those muscles, those tissues, those mucous membranes, that skin: uses for all of them, toxin filters and gas exchange, not to mention the sophisticated DNA computation in her blood, not without its errors, but even those could be fixed, yes, incorporated. Employed.
She was a pilot. She was free. She wanted this. She gave herself.
Small machines peeled her skin away and stretched it.
This was what she w
anted—
* * *
GRAY ATE THE world.
He ate and ate and ate and was not full. He ate bodies, crunching bones, rending molecules for raw materials to build more teeth to eat still more. He ate and grew and ate and grew, choked down planets, vomited asteroids and ate them again. Larger, he ate suns, belched gas which he breathed back in for redigestion. Grown larger still, he ate galaxies.
The world was not small but it seemed small when he filled it, when the bulbous slick cloud of him pressed against its own boundaries. There was nothing left to eat, but still he hungered.
So he grew new teeth, facing inward, and began to eat himself.
* * *
VIV WOKE TO find herself bound upon the throne.
She did not hurry back to the world. Memory returned first, stained by the dreamless mud of uneasy and unwilling sleep. She felt sharp wire around her wrists and ankles and throat, pressing against her thighs through her clothes. When she shifted against the wire to test its strength, it bit her like a blade. She went slack, took a deep breath, felt the wire press against her ribs and cut.
“I know you’re awake,” Zanj said. “I can hear your brain. You might as well open your eyes.”
They were alone in the chamber of Zanj’s eye. Viv sat on the throne, held in place by her wire cage, and Zanj—Queen Zanj, unscarred, crowned, and edged in gold—paced the empty floor, her head down, hands clasped behind her back, deep in frustrated thought. The angle of her head, the weight of her stride, the twitch of her tail, all screamed Zanj, so much so that when her gaze shifted to Viv, Viv could not help but flinch away from the fierce calculation of this woman who was not, was not, her friend.
When she flinched, the wire laid open a thin line of her neck, and blood trickled down.
“You,” Zanj said, “are a puzzle.”
Her crown glittered in the fake sun’s light.
* * *
GRAY ATE HIMSELF skin first.
Starting was hardest, as with any distasteful task, but some things just had to be done. He had eaten everything else; consumed family and friends, probably, along the way, suns and stars. When you’d eaten everything, what could you eat next? He had no choice. This was who he was. This was what he wanted.
You made your teeth razor fine. You gnawed, sampling, at a stretch of limb, testing your jaws’ strength, tasting the pain as your tongue explored the open wound. There’s a special sick joy in discovering that you taste good. You don’t suspect you will, but then, you’re full of everything your body needs to survive. That first taste confirms the suspicion, and a hunger yawns within you like a pit.
He ate, and each bite fed the hunger as a fire feeds fuel.
* * *
THIS WAS WHAT she wanted.
Writhing in the heart of the machine, each piece of her recycled and repurposed, her lungs bellows and her liver a filter, her mind chained as a subsystem to an elegant machine—this was what she was built for, after all. The Ornmothers had made of themselves a bridge between world and ship, and she had stepped onto that bridge, and built it further than they ever dreamed. This was unity. Stars drifted like wind through the wires of her hair.
The machine asked of her, and she gave and gave.
Wasn’t that what she wanted after all, under everything? Wanted more than the stars, more than the Cloud and the sky, more than reclaiming the honor her ancestors lost when the Empress’s jade boot crushed them down? What she wanted beneath her dreams of cloud?
She wanted to be used.
She was Ornchiefsdaughter, raised to lead, to stand, to order warriors and offer justice where the world gave none. She was proud and fierce. She was expected to rule and order and command. That was her place. She was so rarely asked to give. To serve.
But you gave yourself to the stars. You gave yourself to the machine. You gave yourself to Viv, who sought, who asked, who needed. You pledged in your heart to serve and follow, and at every chance you offered yourself: take me as a pilot, as a lover, as a body, take my mind to order your fleet, my sacrifice to safeguard your escape, take my people to fight your wars. Take me to pieces, and use those pieces. Give me purpose with your need. Ask and I offer, and as I learn your heart, I will offer even before you ask.
Only a single still voice whispered against the offering tide. That’s not all of it, she thought. So hard to think. So hard to frame the words. It’s not just about you. It’s not just shuddering loneliness, it’s not just pouring yourself into a pit. You’re not alone.
But a pressure closed around her temples, a fierce aching weight, and there was nothing but her and the machine after all.
The machine pressed her, ground her, pulled her. It said: Give me that single still voice in your heart. Give me your everything. Give me your body so I can core it and use it for a boat. Give me your name.
She offered. She wanted to offer. She knew her name. (Didn’t she?) She could remember it, give it away, and lose even this shred of self that bound her sensations together and ordered them to a single story. She would not be so selfish. She would belong to the machine, once she remembered her name. She wanted to give herself away. She would. Any second now.
* * *
HONG FLED AND lost himself.
He had been here before, lost in this maze of mirrors, chasing himself. He had followed the Pridemother here. Before that, imprisoned by the Ornclan’s machines in the dungeon underneath their grove, he had chased Viv, the riddle of her. And again, after that, he was caught in the sticky clutches of Gray’s pleasure garden: another mirrorscape, another sculpture of dry leaves that crumbled and blew away as he reached for them.
When he had dreamed this dream before it was a trap, a hallucination tailored to his desire, driven by an ever-optimizing attention loop. A brother of the ’faith cleaned the mirror of his mind to reflect the world and pierce through its illusions. He should have been able to think his way out.
But that was not how illusions worked. They pinned you where you lived. Do you seek clarity and understanding? Clarity and understanding make fine prison walls. It’s freedom you want? Freedom is the collar at your neck. Truth? There are blindfolds made of truth.
This was a trap. They had been caught, somehow. He had been caught. He thought he heard their cries, their screams. Thought he could sense them thrashing in the night beyond this maze. But the more he fought, the faster he ran, the more it bound him, and the more he felt himself drawn away, drawn down into the gullet of the shadow that pursued.
He was bound. He was bound. He was bound.
But maybe that was the key.
* * *
VIV ASKED, “WHAT did you do with my friends?”
She was afraid. The wire at her wrists and neck scared her, and so did the prospect of the jokester mind that would have tied her to a throne. Her own imagination churned to work, inventing tortures, starting with the most pedestrian horrors, the broken fingers and pried-out teeth, the thousand and one uses of fingernails, a range of grisly fates for the fragile salty jelly of the eye. It got baroque and gross from there. The woman across from her moved, spoke, turned, smiled like Zanj, and Zanj was terrifying even when you were on her side. There were blades at Viv’s wrists—that was the strategic mind surfacing again, cold and sharp and honest—but she didn’t for a second think she could kill herself to spare herself pain. Zanj was too fast. Viv could hurt herself, no doubt, that was the point of the wire, but she wouldn’t be allowed to make her own exit.
She was afraid, but she didn’t see any percentage in showing it. So she did what she always did when she lost control: she seized it back, as well as she could. Right now, that meant asking questions.
The Queen answered, “What was necessary. Don’t worry, they’re safe. I have to learn them from the inside out, swallow them whole. That’s the only way to make sure I’m caring for them properly. But you? You’re…”
“A puzzle. You said.”
“Interesting,” Zanj finished with a grin. “You’re
no part of the Cloud. I try to address your soul, but my overtures go unanswered. I try to crown you, and the crown slips off. I try to bind you, but the manacles keep snapping open. So I’ve done this the old-fashioned way.” With a broad grin Viv recognized from the Zanj she knew, though it looked so alien without the scar. “I can see you’re feeling cocky, but really, don’t. A physical body’s a crude interface, but eminently programmable.” She lingered over that last word, and Viv felt, and quashed, another wave of fear. She’d have plenty of time for fear later. “I thought we might start with a conversation.”
“Where’s Zanj?”
She indicated her body with a wave of both hands, like a designer presenting a dress.
“I mean, my Zanj.”
“Weren’t you paying attention? I am her. She’s me—and like me, too stubborn for her own good. I can feel her inside me even now, trying to fight. She doesn’t yet understand what I’ve had to do here, the price I’ve paid in my own self-respect to keep these people safe. Does she think I liked doing this, being this? If only we could all be so selfish as to be heroes, freeing the cosmos by making messes for others to clean up. I can’t believe I ever was that young. But she’ll learn. Like you will.” She moved toward the throne, languid and slow, pondering where to start.
The fear surged up again, but something else surged, too. A conclusion bubbled out of the depths of Viv’s mind. If she’d been wise, rather than just smart, she would have said nothing, kept silent rather than annoying her captor—but the conclusion was so beautiful, and it would piss the Queen off so much, she could not resist.
First, it came out as a laugh.
The Queen stopped, and cocked an eyebrow.
“Zanj was right,” Viv said when she recovered her breath. She laughed, taking care not to carve her face open on the wire cage. “When do you think the Empress broke you?”
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