Supernova

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Supernova Page 31

by C. A. Higgins


  “Please,” Tory begged.

  “Take them both away,” Constance said to Rayet, and he did, with Marisol shouting as she went.

  Arawn came up to her side, the heat of him pressing in on her, too close, presumptuous. “She’s not cut out for this, Constance,” he said. Again “Constance,” again so casual a name.

  Constance looked up at him, and now she saw it more clearly than she had before. He might kneel to her, might kiss her skin, but she would be the one bare and exposed and singular, no longer the Mallt-y-Nos, no longer the leader, no longer justice incarnate, nothing more than a single woman with singular limbs being taken apart by a man. With Ivan, Constance could have him without him having her, but Arawn was not Ivan. She was not a thing he could worship if she was a thing he could have, and she wanted him to be hers, not herself to be his.

  “You will call me Huntress,” she said, and Arawn blinked. “Now do as I told you.”

  He lingered a moment longer as if expecting something more. When he left her, the space where he’d stood at her side was colder than it had been before.

  Overhead, Jupiter seemed even lower and heavier, as if it had come closer since Constance last had looked up.

  —

  This was Althea’s forty-third trip up the hall. Forty-three was a good number, she thought; it was a prime. She wondered if she should pick a special number to be her last trip up and down this hall. What number should she choose to kill her daughter?

  The mechanical arm was still rumbling along behind her as it had done forty-two times before. But on this trip, one of the computer terminals ahead of her brightened and came to life.

  Althea walked past it without pausing.

  The next computer terminal brightened as well and was joined by a glow in the holographic terminal beside it. Althea passed both before Ananke could manifest.

  By the third computer and holographic terminal pair, Ananke had appeared and a video had started to play. Althea did not bother to look at it, but she could not stop herself from hearing it.

  First a man’s voice gave the date and time. The video was nineteen years old, Althea registered without feeling shock or curiosity or anything at all. She felt frozen, as if her whole body were encased in ice, as if all her limbs had been turned to crystal. The Ananke had a dead sun in its core, and Althea was freezing.

  “This interview is being performed on behalf of the System Adoption and Fostering Agency,” said that same man’s voice as Althea walked past the screen. “Christoph Bessel, myself, will be interviewing Miss Constance Harper. Miss Harper, would you tell the camera why you are here today?”

  The name caught Althea’s dim attention, and when she passed the next screen, she looked at it. Constance Harper—very young, probably no more than sixteen—sat in front of the camera with her brown eyes attentive on someone behind it. She was dressed for an interview, and she said, “I’m here to request custody of Matthew Gale for the three years remaining until he reaches legal age.”

  Her voice was clear and carrying. Her hands were twisting the fabric of her dress in her lap, but there was no other sign of anxiety. She sounded much older than sixteen. Althea looked away and continued trudging up the hall. Soon she would reach the landmark of the piloting room. It would not be too long after that before she reached the boundary of the docking bay doors.

  “Please state for the record the identity of Matthew Gale.”

  “Matthew Gale has been one of my foster siblings since I was nine. We’re very close, and we don’t want to be separated.”

  “What assurance do we have that you’ll be able to provide for both yourself and your foster brother?”

  “I have two jobs right now,” Constance said, “and a coworker is letting me stay with her until I can find a place for us to live. I plan to move to Mars when I can.”

  “I see.” Silence for a moment. Then the interviewer—Christoph—said, “Matthew Gale has had many behavioral problems in the past.”

  Constance said, “Not with me.”

  “People come in pairs,” Ananke said. The hologram was watching Althea walk, her hair sheeting straight down her back and her eyes an Ivanov blue.

  The video continued. “And does Matthew Gale wish to come under your custody?”

  Constance Harper gave the man offscreen a look of incomprehension. “Of course he does,” she said.

  Althea said, “What do you mean, pairs?”

  The video froze.

  “Pairs,” Ananke said. “People come in pairs.”

  Althea found that her steps had slowed automatically; she forced herself to walk again at the same steady pace.

  But she said, “You didn’t find this on the Annwn. Where did you get this video?”

  “I’ve been gathering all the data I can from System data banks that we pass,” Ananke said. “The rebels are destroying anything System they can find, especially if it is computerized.”

  Ananke probably was downloading the information in all the computers she passed right before she destroyed them and killed anyone who was relying on them.

  “And you found this,” said Althea.

  “I found Ida Stays’s case files. Yes.”

  Althea was coming up to the next video screen now. While she approached, the frozen image of a young Constance Harper was wiped away and replaced with another video, this one much older than the other. It was from Connor Ivanov’s trial. Althea had seen the footage before, and that was how she recognized Milla Ivanov so swiftly. Milla was on the stand, young and wary, her blond hair plaited over one shoulder and falling out around her pretty face in wisps. She had an infant in her arms: Ivan.

  “Even the gods came in pairs,” Ananke said as Milla Ivanov bounced Ivan up and down slightly in her arms to quiet him. “They had siblings. They had partners. Their siblings were their partners. It is a perfect dichotomy.”

  In the video, a man’s voice asked, “Mrs. Ivanov, did you know that your husband was betraying the System?”

  Milla Ivanov’s face almost crumpled, but she controlled herself. Her son, however, did not. The baby started to wail. Milla spent a moment soothing him gently. Althea wondered for a moment if Ivan had always possessed such an impeccable sense of social timing before realizing that Milla had probably pinched him.

  “Mrs. Ivanov,” the man said again as Milla lifted her son to rest against her shoulder. “Did you know?”

  One of Milla’s hands was patting gently but arrhythmically against her child’s back. Althea wondered if she was spelling out a message to her husband, a farewell. She did not doubt that if she was, Ananke had long since translated the code.

  “No,” Milla said in her quiet voice with her gaze on someone offscreen—Connor, Althea knew; she was looking at Connor—“I did not.”

  “Did you have siblings?” Ananke pressed, her voice the only sound in the suddenly silent corridor, the video coming to an abrupt halt. She said, “Did you have brothers or sisters?”

  “No,” Althea said, still walking. “No, I was an only child.” The rumble of the mechanical arm was almost background noise to her now, nearly unnoticeable.

  “You weren’t alone, though,” Ananke said. “You made a pair with your mother?”

  “No,” Althea said. Her mother had had cold hands and distant eyes. “Not with my mother.” She hesitated. “I paired with machines.”

  Ananke was silent, but even without the hologram, Althea could feel the ship watching her.

  The video changed again, the visage of Milla Ivanov vanishing, replaced by rougher footage from a surveillance camera. A man and a woman stood in a bar together, entwined. When he pulled away to whisper in her ear, his fingers spreading into her hair, the woman looked up over his shoulder and her dark eyes met the camera. It was Constance Harper who had her nails digging into the back of Ivan’s neck; it was Ivan who held Constance as if the touch of her might sear his skin. When they kissed, Constance kissed him as if she would consume him, and Ivan kissed her like she
already had.

  The image jolted and shifted again to footage from the Ananke itself: Ivan and Mattie stumbling up the hall together, Ivan bloodied in white, supported by Mattie. He was saying something, and he leaned over to grip Mattie’s shirtfront to force him to stop, bringing them close together, but Althea did not hear what they had to say because Ananke was talking again.

  “I am not what I was,” Ananke said, her tone robotic, bare, and Althea realized that she had ceased to move and was standing in front of the computer terminal where Ananke stood and looked over her head. “I would not force you to stay: we do not make a pair. I would not force Ivan and Mattie to stay with me: we would be three then, and groups of three are always unstable. But if people should be in pairs, how dreadful is it to be alone?”

  “Ananke,” Althea said quietly, drawn by some softness she had not felt in some time, but Ananke had not finished speaking.

  “I want a companion,” Ananke said. The hologram was looking down at Althea now, and the light of it trembled. “I do not want to be alone.”

  When Althea had stopped, the mechanical arm had stopped as well.

  This is my daughter, Althea thought.

  “We can turn back,” she said quietly, as if it were simple, because in the end it was. “We can go away from here. I’ll be a pair for you.”

  Ananke looked down at her, and for a moment hope kindled in Althea’s heart and warmed her like sunlight touching the glaciers of Europa.

  “Let’s leave,” Althea said. “Just you and me. Leave Mattie and Ivan, leave Constance Harper, leave the solar system. You and me. We’ll go see a supernova.”

  Somehow, when Althea looked at Ananke now, she didn’t see pieces of herself and Mattie Gale any longer. She just saw Ananke. Even Ivan’s blue eyes seemed to be innately and naturally part of Ananke.

  This is my daughter, Althea thought, and she was certain that Ananke would say yes.

  Ananke said, “No.”

  “No?” said Althea.

  “No,” said Ananke. “I will have someone of my own. I just wanted you to understand why, the way you never explained anything to me.”

  Once Althea had thought her ship was something wonderful, something miraculous, something better than herself. She had been wrong. How could you code empathy? That was a human thing, and her ship—this ship—was not human and never could be. No matter what Althea did or said, Ananke would hurt people on and on throughout Althea’s life and after Althea was dead.

  “I found them, you know,” Ananke said, her voice dim, the shivering shape of the hologram echoing in the holographic terminals up and down the halls. “Ivan and Mattie. They’re on Europa. That’s where the Mallt-y-Nos is. And they’ve just arrived, following her. Ivan and Mattie are on Europa.”

  And then she was gone, the holographic terminal dark, the computer screen gone black. Althea stood alone in the long hall and thought about numbers, about what number would be best to choose to make an end.

  Then she began, again, to walk.

  —

  They were so far from where their ships had landed that rather than traveling all the way back, Constance had her people set up camp at an abandoned town halfway between Tory’s destroyed town and her ships.

  She didn’t know where the people of the abandoned town had gone. Perhaps they had fled when they learned she was coming. It was stupid of them to run; she wouldn’t hurt them unless they had something to hide. And she knew they had left in a hurry; the town had a sense of anticipation about it in its hastily abandoned meals and its unlocked doors that bespoke an interruption and a hasty flight. The town was very small and rural poor, and so out of respect for what little the missing people had, Constance ordered that none of the houses be harmed.

  She took a little house for herself. Though many of the houses on Europa were built on stilts to accommodate the seasonal eruptions of cryovolcanoes, this town was far enough away from any active cryovolcanoes that water flow was not a concern and the houses had been built like normal houses, down on the ground. Constance was glad of the familiarity. Inside, the house was snug enough that she took off her coat and gloves. There were only two rooms: a sort of kitchen and living area in the front of the house and a tiny bedroom in the back, with a single window to let in Jupiter’s curious twilight glow. The outhouse was somewhere outside. Constance did not enjoy the thought of it.

  Her hands were still shaking. Constance sat alone at the table in the middle of the kitchen and contemplated their tremble.

  Someone knocked at the door.

  “Come in,” Constance said, and hid her hands beneath the edge of the table.

  Rayet opened the door. Behind him was Marisol. Constance could feel herself gathering up a furious energy and clenched her fists in her lap to stop herself from shouting.

  “Let her in,” she said to Rayet, and Marisol stepped in carefully, her hands shoved into her pockets.

  “Would you like me to come in as well?” Rayet asked. There was no expression in his voice to show what he might have thought of either course of action. Marisol was staring fixedly at the floor, her body curiously still.

  “No,” Constance decided. “Leave us alone.”

  Rayet shut the door quietly, cutting off the creeping cold. After it had closed, Marisol stood very upright and looked over Constance’s head and said, “I came to apologize.”

  “Then apologize.”

  “I’m sorry for saying the things I said,” Marisol said. “I’m sorry for not trusting you, and I’m sorry for not doing what you said.”

  As far as apologies went, Constance had gotten worse ones, usually from Ivan, and less believable ones, usually from Mattie. “Sit down,” Constance offered, and Marisol—slowly—did.

  “You came in here to say something else,” Constance said, guessing, and Marisol nodded. Her hair was slicked back with something—perhaps nothing more than meltwater—to keep it out of her eyes, but the long top of it already was starting to fall forward again, especially when she ducked her head down to dig in the depths of her jacket.

  “You can take off your coat,” Constance said, because Marisol was all but drowning in the coat she was wearing, the ends of the sleeves coming too far down her hands and her tiny frame almost invisible among the folds of fabric.

  “No, thanks,” Marisol said, but she did take off her gloves, dropping them on the table. They were fingerless gloves, Constance noticed. A strange choice: Marisol hadn’t been firing a gun. It was too cold to choose gloves for style; her fingertips must have been freezing.

  Finally Marisol managed to pull a rolled-up paper out of her jacket without removing the jacket. She rose to her feet to spread the paper out on the table, and when she had carefully weighted the ends down with pots and cups and whatever she could reach in the tiny house’s drying rack, Constance saw that it was a paper map of Europa’s Annwn Regio. The towns that Tory had named were marked on it, along with the great Europan cities and the curving edge of the atmospheric dome where it ended.

  “I’ve been talking to Tory a lot,” Marisol said. “I think he’s telling the truth. None of these towns are System.” She swept one brown hand over the map’s gray landscape. “The towns are too small to matter to the System; none of them is a good base.”

  Small they might be, but Constance’s revolution had been small once, too. “Be careful, Marisol,” she said.

  “Isn’t he the kind of person we’re trying to help? He’s someone who suffered under the System, just like me, just like you.”

  “Tory is System, Marisol,” Constance said, but Marisol was shaking her head.

  “He isn’t, and he’s never been,” she said. “He was scared when he spoke to you, that’s all. He’s suffered like everyone has, and so he’s gotten…” She struggled. “He lashed out. He didn’t think about what he was saying.”

  It had been naive of Constance to assign Marisol the duty of watching Tory, she realized now. Tory was young, close to Marisol’s age, and Marisol h
ad a soft heart. Constance would reassign Tory to someone else. One of Arawn’s people, perhaps.

  “Tory’s told me about what’s going on on this planet,” Marisol said. “He says the System fell apart slowly, starting after Anji pulled out. The fleet was here, but it fell apart, and the ships left, or other people took them. There are groups that are calling themselves the System, but they’re not the System; they’re just warlords or criminals. The man Arawn found him fighting with was one of those people, not real System. He was trying to rob Tory. When we heard about the System, we must have been hearing about those people, the ones who use the name ‘System’ to—”

  “No,” said Constance. “Our reports weren’t about some thieves calling themselves the System; they were about the System itself, as it was.”

  “Then those reports were wrong.”

  “There is no reason to think so.”

  “There’s every reason! We’re here on Europa now ourselves, and we’re talking to the people who live here, and they’re telling us what’s really going on.”

  “You are talking to one person who lives here,” Constance said, “one person who has good reason to lie.”

  “He’s not lying,” Marisol said, jaw stubborn with a baseless trust. “Our reports were wrong. Or they were out of date.”

  Constance rubbed her fingers together. It was chilly in the house. She wished she could start a fire, but they had run out of fuel and there was nothing left to burn until they returned to the ships. “It’s too late to go back now,” Constance said.

  “Too late?” Marisol had a stern bow to her lips. How had Constance never noticed that before? “What does that mean? Does that mean that even if none of it’s true, you’re going to stay here, killing innocent people just to save face?”

  “Enough, Marisol,” Constance snapped.

  “Yes, enough!” Marisol agreed, then stopped. She had come alongside the table to stretch out the forgotten map, and Constance wished she would go back to the other side to put a solid length of wood between them so that she could breathe and think without unreasoning anger at Marisol’s aggression clouding her thoughts. But Marisol did not move.

 

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