by J. D. Moyer
Maro smiled at the ease with which Livia lied. She was truly a viper, cold and cunning.
“Could I bring my mother along? She’s sick.”
“Of course. Whatever her ailment, I’m sure we could ease her pain and prolong her life. Perhaps even cure her.”
Maro reached out and gently touched the girl’s arm. “What’s your name?”
“Filumena.”
“Will you accept these?” He offered her five gold aurei.
She didn’t even look at the coins. “No. Not yet. I need to speak with my mother. And with my friends.”
Friends. He’d seen Filumena speaking with Jana. “Is Jana your friend?” he asked. “Where is she today?”
“I haven’t yet seen her.”
“Please tell her to come speak with me, when you do. My name is Maro.”
“I know.” She nodded, brow furrowed, and left them.
“Do you want Jana for the project?” Livia asked him quietly.
“No, not for that. I want to know what Sperancia was, and what will become of the girl.”
Livia had a look of regret in her eye, and Maro guessed that she was questioning her choice to kill the old woman. But it hadn’t been a choice, not really. Livia had instinctively saved his life. He squeezed her hand, trying to convey his reassurance, wishing he could speak his thoughts openly. But the townsfolk were all around, talking and eating the last of the desserts.
After the feast they strolled through the cobblestone streets and alleys of the old town, conversing with whoever wanted to speak with them, asking and answering questions. Maro explained that Felix was preparing the balloon for their return voyage home; soon they would return with their shuttle to pick up the volunteers. In terms of the exchange, they would wait for a formal offer from the council before sending guests to live in Bosa. The townsfolk seemed satisfied with his answers, and openly speculated as to what life might be like on the Michelangelo. Maro was thoroughly enjoying himself. But he noticed that Livia, though putting on a brave face, was suffering.
“We’ll get our revenge,” he whispered. “I haven’t forgotten Felix.”
“That won’t bring him back.”
He almost said something about talking to Felix’s engram, but stopped himself. That would bring Livia no comfort. She’d lost a lover, someone she’d cared about deeply. Not that he understood why, but he accepted it. Love wasn’t logical or fair. If it was, Maro would be first in Livia’s heart.
Eventually they returned to the town square. Micheli invited them to his bar for drinks. It was still some hours before dusk, but day drinking seemed in the spirit of things. Aside from the hiccup with Felix, everything was falling into place. And honestly Felix’s absence was a relief; he’d been secretly considering how to get rid of his romantic competitor. Now he could put that thought to rest. Once Livia recovered emotionally, all would be right in the world. There were a few loose ends to tie up: dealing with Jana, navigating safely back to Tunis, the logistics of picking up the volunteers in the shuttle. But no major problems. It was okay to let his guard down a little. So when he saw a young boy whispering something to Gregoriu, and the look of concern on the mayor’s face, he dismissed it.
Micheli put out olives, cured ham, a pungent, fermented cheese, red wine, sweet mead, and thick crackers made from a nutty wheat varietal. Maro joked and laughed with the barkeep and his friends, listening to stories from their childhood. Livia appeared to be in better spirits as well, drinking copious amounts of wine and flirting with the old men, who gazed at her lasciviously. Even the suspicious old man – Iginu – who Maro had gathered was the boy Cristo’s father, warmed to Livia, laughing uproariously at her quips and occasionally touching her shoulder, which she allowed. It was good to win Iginu over; his son Cristo would be a valuable recruit, brave and adventurous.
People came in and out of the bar, not just the men but their wives, and young people as well. As dusk fell, Maro felt an echo of the ecstatic fugue he’d experienced during their first days on Earth. This was wonderful, just spending time with new people, people he hadn’t known his entire life. He knew nothing of their history, their families, their affiliations and alliances. He could be himself, unguarded, uncalculating. He wondered how many small communities like this had survived. Dozens, perhaps. Ancestral Realism could be expanded….
“We should go,” Livia whispered in his ear, “before it’s completely dark.”
“Of course,” said Maro. He was reluctant to pull himself away, but she was right. It wasn’t safe to spend another night in the field, not with Jana unaccounted for. He stood, stumbling slightly from the wine, and cleared his throat, ready to give a final appeal. He knew he had Cristo, and the girl Filumena. One or two more was all they needed.
He felt a tap on his shoulder. Gregoriu, the mayor. “Excuse me, Maro,” the little man said, “there’s something I’d like to show you. Will you and Livia please follow me?”
Maro put his arm around the mayor’s bony shoulder. “Of course. Show us the way.”
The mayor led them outside. The clarity of the moonlit square, deep shadows and powerful contrasts, made Maro feel as if he were walking into a Caravaggio painting. It took his breath away. “This way, please,” Gregoriu said, leading them down a stone staircase. The mayor opened an unlocked basement door. “After you.”
Even with his augmented vision, Maro’s eyes took a moment to adjust. They were in some sort of storage room, the walls lined with shelves and stacked barrels. Two long, rectangular tables took up the center area, pushed up against each other to form a large, squarish workspace.
Two bodies lay faceup atop the tables, feet facing Maro and Livia. Both were cold and lifeless, skin tinged blue, wounds brownish-black where the blood had dried. Whoever had arranged the corpses had completely removed them from the vacuum bags. Felix was on the left, Sperancia to the right.
“I can explain,” Maro said immediately. “She attacked us!”
But the townsfolk were already on them, hurling damp, pungent fishing nets. The coarse rope scratched his skin away as he struggled, stumbled, and fell. They kicked him in his legs and stomach. Livia fared a little better, punching and knocking men down, but the old fishermen were used to pulling in huge fish from the sea. They worked together to subdue Livia, catching her limbs with weighted nets and beating her with oaken cudgels.
“Enough!” someone bellowed hoarsely. A low, female voice.
It was Jana, standing over them, just as he had stood over Sperancia’s fallen body the night before. Her skin was pale and her eyes were bloodshot, but there was the same determination and stubbornness in her expression that he’d noticed earlier.
“Sperancia murdered Felix,” said Maro loudly, with as much dignity as he could muster from his prone position, wrapped in wet netting. “Tell them the truth, Jana. You were with her, and you came for us without provocation.”
“They can’t be trusted,” Jana said. “Livia murdered Sperancia.”
“See?” Maro said. “She doesn’t deny it.”
“You killed one of us – a council member – and acted as if nothing had happened,” Gregoriu said accusingly. “This was my call, not Jana’s. Ralf and Bina saw what happened last night, and gathered the courage to tell me.”
The children hiding in the woods – he’d forgotten about them after the attack. He should have scared them away when the security drones had first detected them.
“If Sperancia attacked you, why didn’t you tell us?” Gregoriu asked.
“Because he’s hiding their past,” Jana said. “They’re thieves – they are here to steal from us.”
Maro raised his hands as best he could. “What would we steal from you? Cheese? Fish? We created our own world, with its own sun, that moves freely among the planets. You are delusional if you think you have something of value that we cannot create ourselves.”
“You say they are thieves, Jana. What did they steal?”
“All the art from the greatest museums in the world. They’re hoarding it all on their worldship.”
“We’re hoarding nothing,” Maro protested. He tried, unsuccessfully, to remove a fish scale from his lip. “We have invited you to visit us, to experience the great art that we have protected for centuries. And the invitation is still open. This is all a misunderstanding. Sperancia and Jana perceived a threat where none existed. That’s natural and to be understood.”
Even as he negotiated for his life, Maro felt an excitement bubbling up inside of him. This was the purpose of Ancestral Realism. He’d been completely blindsided by their actions. Consciousness had so diverged between Earth dwellers and worldship citizens that he’d been unable to predict their behavior. This, despite his intelligence, training, natural cunning, and years of experience surviving the traitorous sharks of the Senate. For all his savvy, here he was on the floor, entrapped in a fishing net, confronting the very real possibility that he would be beaten to death with cudgels. But Ancestral Realism would break that wall between the primitive minds of the past and the sophisticated minds that had kept higher civilization alive and flourishing, while the planet below recovered from its devastations. Soon, if he was not smashed to a bloody pulp, he would be able to time travel within the landscape of historical subjective human consciousness.
Gregoriu appeared as if he had made some sort of decision. “If you truly killed Sperancia in self-defense, we will take that into consideration. But you have murdered a council member, a town elder, a person of great esteem—” Jana touched Gregoriu’s arm, silencing him, and he gave a brief nod before continuing. “We will deliberate among ourselves, but Sperancia’s death will not go unpunished.”
Maro smiled – humbly, he hoped – and nodded. The worst danger had passed, he suspected. Gregoriu’s cool head would prevail.
But he briefly locked eyes with Jana and felt a shiver of fear. In a way the girl was right – they were here to take what they wanted – and he was sure Jana would do everything in her power to protect her people.
Chapter Nine
Traveling in the hovershuttle was terrifying. Katja regretted tricking her nephew, but Tem was too thick-headed to realize the urgency of the situation.
No, that wasn’t it. He was an intelligent, empathetic young man, not thick-headed at all. But he had not experienced the horror of having his body stolen by a gast. He had no way of knowing what was truly at stake.
Stealing the flying machine had been trivial. Katja had found it right where Tem said he’d left it, by the Three Stones. Her nephew had not even bothered to conceal the craft with branches and debris. The boy was bright like his father but was more like his uncle in that he was far too trusting. Tem preferred to believe the best about people, despite the traumas of his childhood.
“Return!” she had ordered the craft, in English, once boarded. “Previous location!” she’d said, when that produced nothing. She’d noticed the way Tem spoke with machines, using precise language and specific terms. A map had appeared on the screen, displaying an island with a red dot on the north-west coast. She’d opened the ancient atlas she’d brought with her, a book salvaged from the ruins of a Builder city. Its pages were brittle and yellowed but somehow the book had avoided water damage; the text was faded but legible. Sardinia was an island in the Mediterranean Sea, and the shapes matched.
“Go!” she had shouted. “Onward! Start! Engage! Return to destination!”
Something she’d said had worked, and soon she’d been high in the air, speeding over the trees, clutching the arms of the pilot’s seat in white-knuckled terror. The hovershuttle flew faster than any bird, or so it seemed. It was not her first ride in such a vehicle, but it had been years, and this model was sleeker and faster.
She’d brought Biter, her soulsword. The long blade lay on the bench seat behind her, a deadly passenger. Her mission was simple: behead the new gast and chop her to bits. She would open her up, find the black egg, and destroy it for good. She’d heard stories of the ancient volcanoes that had destroyed the Builder civilization, mountains filled with molten rock. Maybe she could find one and throw the Crucible in.
It wouldn’t be easy. She’d be killing multiple people in doing so. But she’d also be freeing them. And she knew she was up to the task; she’d done it before.
Raekae, the gast of Happdal, had stolen her body thirty years ago. The Crucible had kept him alive for generations, allowing him to parasitically occupy new bodies and replicate each host’s brain. Raekae’s first life had been in the Builder era. He’d been some sort of scientist or inventor. But the Crucible had turned him into a monster.
The original intention of the Crucible program had been to create communities of minds, multiple virtualized people living in shared simulated worlds with access to a real body in the physical world. Katja had experienced two such world simulations herself. One had been dominated by Raekae, who had manipulated the emotions of his slave minds, quashing rebellion with artificially induced fear. The other had been created by Zoë, a previous host who had escaped Raekae’s control to create her own world-within-a-world. Zoë’s simulation had been highly detailed and realistic, with vivid sights and smells, animals and insects, entire living ecosystems.
In the end, Zoë had destroyed Raekae, as well as all his slave minds and previous hosts, including Zoë herself, by running a new algorithm on the Crucible’s quantum core. Zoë had told her that the algorithm would create a new simulation, not a programmed world but a real evolving universe. Zoë hadn’t wanted to die, but she’d been willing to make the sacrifice in order to potentially save Katja.
And Katja had made the choice.
The algorithm had destroyed everything, completely erasing the minds of the previous hosts, some who had befriended her. Including Stian, the first smith of Happdal.
The dying of those worlds had nearly killed Katja as the Crucible’s physical host. But she had survived. And recovered, mostly, though the experience had irrevocably scarred her.
She harbored no bitterness. Everyone had wounds, seen and unseen. Life scarred you. The longer you lived, the more scars you accumulated. And those wounds never completely healed; each was capable of generating its own unique pain or discomfort until you died. So she accepted her pain and refused to live in fear.
But that didn’t mean that all suffering should be accepted. You could make the choice to heal, never the same but sometimes stronger. You could avoid getting injured in the first place. And you could fight against evildoers to protect the weak and innocent. That’s what Biter was for.
Katja studied the controls but thought better of touching any. “Close hatch,” she commanded. The vehicle responded, raising two connecting hemispheres to form a clear dome. She studied the navigation display, comparing it to various pages in the atlas. The hovershuttle took her south, out of the Harz mountains and through a long, wide valley. She passed over what had once been Switzerland, recognizing a vast lake. A huge, snow-capped mountain range rose to her left – the Alps.
The air inside the dome became quite warm, and the novelty of traveling so high and fast wore off. She crawled into the back seat and slept for a while, cradling the sword for comfort. When she woke, she was over water – more water than she had ever seen in her life. She was worried the craft would run out of fuel but she had no idea how to check.
“Where are we?”
“Over the Mediterranean Sea,” the shuttle answered in a soothing voice. “Approximately at latitude forty-three, longitude seven. Would you like more precise co-ordinates?”
“No. No, thank you.” She found it awk
ward to speak with machines, though it didn’t seem to bother Tem or Car-En, and her brother Esper had adapted easily enough. She felt stupid for only giving the vehicle commands and not asking questions earlier. She asked about the fuel levels. The hovershuttle reassured her that it had adequate resources for another half-day’s travel, but would need additional biomass at that point. They would reach their destination in approximately forty minutes.
Her stomach was grumbling. She’d brought food – dried venison, smoked fish, and three apples. She was two bites into her second apple when the hovershuttle spoke again. Except this time it sounded different, slightly broken up. And angry.
“Tem, why are you returning to Bosa without us? The plan was to meet in Ilium.”
Katja froze. It wasn’t the ship speaking, but rather a person from the ringship settlement. People from the Stanford, including Car-En’s friend Lydia, had created their own town of sorts – Ilium.
“Who is speaking?” Katja asked tentatively.
“This is Maggie. Who is this?”
She wasn’t sure what to say. What would happen if she confessed to stealing the hovershuttle? Could they turn off the engine, plunging her into the cold sea below?
“What the hell is going on? Where is Tem?”
Maggie. Tem’s lover in Ilium. He’d spoken fondly of the girl, though that hadn’t stopped him from rutting with Saga in Trond’s smithy last night. She’d overheard more than she’d wanted to.
Still, there was genuine fear in Maggie’s voice – she cared about Tem. And Tem was her own flesh and blood.
“He’s fine,” Katja said. “Though he may need a ride. He’s still in Happdal.”
“Who is this?”
“It doesn’t matter. I stole the hovershuttle. There’s something I need to do in Bosa. Please don’t turn it off – I’m over the water.”