And then the Bleed arrived.
* * *
ZANJ SAW THEM. She could not think through the pain; her mind ran so goddamned slow on this platform, so weak within this meat, losing blood faster than she’d thought possible—but she held the green hole, the gap in the world through which the Empress and Viv had slipped, as above her in the dark the Moon’s sky shivered open with mouth after mouth after mouth.
She had to breathe, with flooding lungs, so she could laugh.
* * *
VIV AND THE Empress fell into the ocean of themselves—into the Cloud.
Arms battered her, and legs, knees jutted into her ribs; thumbs gouged the corners of her mouth and fingers clawed at her eyes. She clutched her opponent close in the harsh green water. She held the Empress, here in the Cloud that was her being, body to body. They tumbled together in the green, stroked by fingers of light from a distant surface, falling, falling, drowning down.
There was a voice, though, a voice familiar and accustomed to command, furious as they fell. “What are you doing?”
She hugged her closer, pressed past the clutching fingers, pulled her into an embrace, skull to skull, Viv’s shorn head to her braided crown as they sank together. “I’m you,” she said. “You’re me. It’s time for us to change.”
“You’re a castoff, a shell. An experiment gone wrong.” Fists battered her back; nails bit her scalp. Still they fell. “You’re nothing!”
“Of course. So are you.”
“I built you!”
“You did. You pulled me from a simulation of the past, from before you found the Cloud and changed it from what it was before to something anyone could use, but you would always own.” Down and down, lungs straining, nails dragging skin from her scalp, blood in the water. And sharks approached.
Yes. She could feel them. Not sharks in truth but Bleed, circling beyond the edge of the Empress’s sea. Enormous mouths of glimmering teeth, with alien stars inside.
“At first I thought I could break the chains you forged because I wasn’t part of the Cloud, because you had no way to bind me. Then I thought the system listened to me because you’d made a mistake, and did not realize it would confuse us—a loophole you’d close once you discovered it. When I couldn’t take off Zanj’s crown, I thought you must have fixed it—but Zanj couldn’t hurt me even so, and I could still open your locks, your wall, command your Grayframe. I had just been scared. I wanted to control Zanj, like you did.”
No answer but an underwater scream, bubbles wreathing them, breaking the thin trail of blood. Viv pulled her closer. They’d fallen as far as they would go, and still water gaped beneath them, deep and dark and full of vast moving shapes.
“You can’t close the loophole, because there isn’t one. You can’t lock me out, because the system you’ve built looks at you and sees however many thousands of years of power and rule, sees the immense shell you’ve built around yourself. And then it looks at me. And I look a lot more like the woman who did the building.”
The Empress stiffened then, stopped clawing and tried to pry free, to swim away. But Viv held her close in the depths.
“I have a soul,” she said. “Of course I do. Everyone does. It’s been translating for me this whole time, interpreting me to others, warning me from danger, guiding me here. It’s your soul, so big nobody else can see it, filling the Cloud. Binding it to order. Your complexity, drawing the Bleed.”
“You don’t understand!” The voice, her voice, sounded desperate, a girl drowning in deep water, alone. She had always been alone. “The Bleed are coming. The Bleed are here. We’re so close, I’m so close, and you’ll never stop them without me.”
“They come when there are too many demands on the Cloud,” she said. “This place was here before you. You found it, and built something here you could control. You didn’t ask yourself what lived here, who might be using it or how. You chased them from their feeding grounds. Drove them mad.” The Bleed neared, suggestions of form almost invisible in the murk beyond the green.
“There was nothing before I came.” She spat the words. “Nothing before me. Call me a monster if you like, but I gave us the stars. I made wonders. I beat them. You know in your bones that you were one accident away from being me. If you seize my power, you’ll make the same choices I did.”
“You’re right. I would. That’s why we have to change.”
The Empress clawed at her back. She was weeping, in the depths.
Viv said, “I love you.” And as the weight of water pressed them close, she kissed her, and drew her in.
The Bleed circled close. They had no eyes and no gills, of course, since they were not really sharks. But they had mouths and teeth, and there were so, so many of them. Waiting. They smelled a change, but not all change was for the best.
There had been a change before, after all. A slow, cascading transformation, a green light seeping from a hole in their world, transforming the water through which they swam, robbing it of air, starving them of chaos and complexity, burning through the darkness beneath the stars where they once prowled, hunted, fed.
Viv opened her eyes underwater, alone. Black spots moved across her vision. Her head felt heavy. She had so little time.
The light filled her as she rose—the light, in a very real sense, was her. Where she could see, she was. She could peer across the galaxy, and cross all that space in an instant. I never dreamed, people said when they received some enormous fortune or power or honor. I never dreamed it would be like this. But Viv dreamed. That was why she won.
The galaxy waited for her. Trillions of beings. Ghosts and gods and living mortals. The poetry of archives. The power to build suns and break them. All at her, at Her, command. And it felt glorious.
Which was the problem. The Bleed had been born in the place beyond, the hyperspaces from which the Cloud was built, and they lived there still (if lived was the right word), rambling in the space beyond its edges, hiding in deep pockets of hyperspace until expanding Cloud disturbed them. But when the Cloud reached into the hollows where they hid, they fought back, and ate it and the matter that gave it birth. If the Cloud broke apart, they would own their space again: the computational depths through which they swam. All Viv had to do was surrender. Give it all up. Step down as Queen of Everything.
She heard them all in that silence, as the Bleed circled. Xiara, god, Xiara, singing and weeping in Groundswell’s heart, thinking her mother dead, while nearby the Ornchief hovered comatose in her fast picket, oxygen supplies dwindling, her soul compressing itself in preparation to leave its physical frame. Gray stared up at the smiling mouths of his doom. Zanj, bleeding, held fast to the stitch of light where the Empress had been.
There were others, too, Ornclan and Archivist and Pride, the silver birds of Pasquarai and Yish with his clipboard, Refuge’s farmers, children. Bleed rising toward them all, drawn to the Cloud and its Empress. To Viv.
And below them all, she heard Hong—Hong in the Cloud, or Hong in herself?
Nothing lasts forever.
She turned her gaze toward home. Toward the singularity that hovered in a cage of green light in her sky.
She could go home. Surely these machines, built for a more vicious purpose, could give her that at least. One last wish, as she broke them forever. Show me the hole my shape and size, where the Empress pulled me from the depths. Take me home.
The machines did not understand.
The singularity has never been opened, they whispered. Nothing has been removed. To do so would have spoiled the simulation.
The Empress, she replied, and then, I, took a woman out of there. She woke in a bubble in High Carcereal, in green.
The machines disagreed. Nothing had been extracted from Simulation 8117. When monitors detected a successful resolution to the Bleed issue due to deviation in that branch’s Vivian Liao, the easiest method of reading out the result was, naturally, to create an entangled duplicate of Viv-8117, read her into this world, and interro
gate her in realspace. A duplicate built gluon by gluon in High Carcereal. A terminal. A construct.
That was her.
She remembered making herself. Images surfaced: the green bubble empty before the machines began their work. The Empress pacing as her body compiled. Bones framed themselves, wreathed in nerves; the eyes inflated next. Blood. Meat. Fat. Skin spread over muscle and fat like algae blooming on a pond. Scars, and birthmarks, and the stubble of her knife-shorn hair.
That was her. And when the Empress found that the simulation’s victory had nothing to do with brilliance, or strategy, or even tactics, but merely a willingness to run, to leave her task unfinished and save her friend, she abandoned the project in disgust.
And what of Vivian Liao inside that simulation? What happened to the woman she’d thought she was?
The machines had learned enough, in their study of the singularity, through selective bombardment and Hawking radiation and other techniques with no names save in languages she’d need several mouths to speak, to answer that. She escaped with Magda and hid, scared, forming her next plan. After weeks of hiding in her basement Viv received a message, so subtle she might as easily have missed it, from the being she’d abandoned half-born in the ’net—a being not hers to control, less golem and more child, who had pieced themselves together and come to seek their creator. Adventures followed that—unraveling a conspiracy, exposing the caves of men who’d tried to stop her. Together, Viv and Magda took their first tender steps into something that would not, in this world, be called the Cloud, toward waiting stars. Many visions spread through this new space, none grand, none complete; the Bleed moved out there, immense and gentle and fearsome in their unconcern, their songs loud enough to break the ears that heard them, their sleepy swimming frames a hazard to all travel, and a source of beauty, too. It was a harder world, dangerous, but no less wonderful. A world where no one lived forever. A world where Vivian Liao and her wife came back to Sol, 307 years of age, to die on Mars, no Empress at all but a traveler, and happy. Where she would say good-bye to Magda one last time.
Viv realized she was crying. She was curled in green, as she had been at the beginning. Alone.
She could go there. She had the power. Just slide herself in, and overwrite the simulation’s Viv, the woman she’d thought she was. With care, she could even keep her memories of all she’d done, as dreams at least. That would be a good life.
But it belonged to someone else.
Viv stared down into the world she’d thought her own, into the life she had thought hers.
She closed the portal, and broke it.
The Bleed circled.
Up there, somewhere outside herself, Xiara, and Gray, and Zanj—and Hong—were waiting.
She stretched out her hand, and while she had the power, changed some things. A touch of healing for Zanj, returning the machines that made her. Xiara and her fleet she pushed to safety, and while she was at it she dropped the Ornchief into Groundswell’s medical bay. Gray, and the Grayframe, and Zanj as well, she moved. The Moon would not be safe in a few seconds.
She swam for the surface, but found herself dragged down. Her head felt so heavy.
Oh. Right.
She made a knife, and cut off the thickness of her ten-thousand-year braid, and kicked up toward the surface.
She heard a noise, deafening after the silence.
The green broke to blackness, full of stars.
72
VIV AWOKE TO the sound of waves. Coarse sand ground against her knees. Beneath her, the earth quaked. The earth, the real Earth, was coming apart now, as the Empress’s will failed. How many eons of seismic pressure and decay had she just freed at once? The Cloud was failing. She had made it fail. The protocols would still work—souls would grow and gods would move. But no one was in charge now, except all of them.
Across a hundred thousand light-years, new worlds opened, and crypts long sealed rolled back their stones, and the galaxy woke up.
She raised her eyes and watched the Moon collapse. Of the Bleed, of the mouths in the sky, she saw no sign.
Viv knelt on the beach of Cape Ann. The lighthouse crumbled, and with it the houses, the art galleries and lobster roll shacks, until the whole stone promontory slid into the sea.
She was still crying when Zanj found her. Once she would have swallowed her tears, crushed herself to an edge, made some dumb joke. Instead she let Zanj bear her up, and leaned into her embrace. Got snot on the ribbons of her shirt. Felt the wet blood and fresh-healed skin of her arms and back. “Hey,” Zanj said. “It worked.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know who I am.”
Zanj, exhausted, shrugged. “That makes all of us.”
It wasn’t funny but Viv laughed anyway, big and wet and gross. “This place is falling apart.”
“Same,” she said. “There are a whole bunch of confused Grayframe over there, not to mention our boy. Let’s go.”
“In the Star?”
Zanj shook her head. “I can feel your soul now. Tiny, but it’s there. We have options. We can run a lot faster than we used to.”
Viv sniffed, and swallowed, and wiped her eyes. She breathed the salt air of the draining sea, and shook with the tremors of the breaking Earth. She felt raw, and free.
She wanted to run. She settled for a limp, for now, hand in hand up the beach from the end of the world.
“Come on,” she said, laughing against the pain, pushing herself faster, gaining speed. “Let’s go exploring.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Each book is a meeting place. We know each other by now, dear reader, but there are others here, too, and a good host should introduce the guests. Otherwise everyone’s just standing around in the kitchen wondering who will go for the knives first.
My parents, Tom and Burki Gladstone, thought Anthony C. Yu’s four-volume University of Chicago translation of Journey to the West was a good gift for an eleven-year-old (and weren’t wrong). Shao-nian Bates and Athenia Wu were early guides to lands unfamiliar but by no means new, and Kang-i Sun Chang nurtured a creative angle on academic pursuits (though odds don’t look good for me getting that Ph.D.—sorry, Professor!).
Ben and Beth Druhot introduced TV-less grade school Max to Star Trek, and Paul Grillo and Danny Miller added fuel to that particular fire. Danny, also, for the gift of a whole box of books, including Roger Zelazny’s Lord of Light. Scott Caplan, usually not much of a Science Fictionero, suggested I read The Player of Games back in college, and John Chu, who needs no introduction, recommended Nova. A kid at summer camp whose name I honestly forget once spent two days enthusiastically relating, beat for beat, the plot of Dragon Ball Z, and another did the same for Sailor Moon. Joshua Frydman is directly responsible for my exposure to both FLCL and Revolutionary Girl Utena.
If I’ve ever run a game for you or with you, there’s probably a touch of you here as well. Special thanks to Scott Biss, Chrysta Bond, Carl Dull, and Eric Stubbs, to Vlad Barash, Miguel Garcia, Daniel Jordan, Stephanie Neely, and Nathaniel Rowe, to Matt Michaelson’s absurd beholder-mage, and to the Innermost Cabal of the FPL (among others: Chad Smith, Sam Justice—his real name!, Josh Tomblin, Gigadork, Bryn, Abdiel, Serge) voyagers in realms most strange.
This particular volume has had many allies. DongWon Song, agent of greatest wisdom and excellence, knows what he did. Marco Palmieri and Melissa Ann Singer were excellent editors and advocates throughout the process, with assistance from Anita Okoye. Christina MacDonald, Lauren Hougen, and Eliani Torres’s copyediting and proofreading services were invaluable. Tommy Arnold’s cover art, Irene Gallo’s art direction, and Jamie Stafford-Hill’s cover design produced the stunning object you hold in your hands, which (if you invested in the physical edition) doubles as an implement for home defense. Desirae Friesen is our publicity mastermind. Without them, this book would have reached you in many ways less, if at all.
Vivian Liao left Saint Kitts in December of 2016, and I followed the first draft of
her adventures in a feverish writing jag through June of 2017—a period in which the notion of fighting a long war against implacable foes through time, in which victory would involve a literal deconstruction of ourselves, felt especially jagged and raw. Working on this book was a great complement to other, less solitary work I and others across the world were doing at the same time. We have all done so much, and there is so much more to do. But the fight for a world where all of us can enjoy lives of freedom, exploration, hospitality, and encounter is not new, and none of us are alone in it. I hope this book has given you some strength.
Find allies. Take care of yourselves.
Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.
ALSO BY MAX GLADSTONE
The Ruin of Angels
Four Roads Cross
Last First Snow
Full Fathom Five
Two Serpents Rise
Three Parts Dead
“Places Gladstone firmly in the lineage of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, and yet stands apart as something incredibly special.”
—Fran Wilde, Andre Norton Award–winning author
“A story that will make you weep with wonder. It broke me to pieces and then stitched me back together with golden thread. Simply glorious.”
—K. B. Wagers, author of Behind the Throne
“A gloriously maximal space opera in the tradition of Banks and Rajaniemi—the diamond-bright adventure of five unlikely companions across a transhuman galaxy.”
—Seth Dickinson, author of The Traitor Baru Cormorant
“A gonzo space opera adventure in the post-human future, Journey to the West plus FLCL plus The Quantum Thief and much more. I love it.”
—Django Wexler, author of the Shadow Campaigns series
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