Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  “We’ll go to one of the nearby towns,” Mattie said while Ivan stared down at what once might have been finger bones, lying severed in the Martian dust. “They’ll know what happened.”

  They went. “Please,” Ivan said when he found a dark-haired young man with a nose like a hawk’s, and smiled his most charming smile. “I need your help.” There was the same shadow in the young man’s eyes as there had been in the green-eyed girl’s; he, too, had caught a glimpse of the creeping dark, had felt the tip of its chill finger rest its weight on the back of his neck.

  Ivan laid his fingers lightly against the front of the man’s chest, over where his heart beat steadily and separate from Ivan’s.

  “I just want to know the truth,” Ivan said, as if nothing in this terrible world mattered but him and the dark-haired man, and so the man told him what he had heard. The Wild Hunt had destroyed Isabellon in vengeance for the death of their leader, he said, and darker things: now filled with wild rage, the Wild Hunt would do the same to the rest of the planets; the Mallt-y-Nos had destroyed Isabellon for the joy of seeing something burn; the Mallt-y-Nos had destroyed Isabellon for no reason at all.

  “It’s easy for you, isn’t it?” Mattie said strangely as Ivan turned his back on the dark-haired man.

  “What is?” Ivan asked, but Mattie did not explain, and Ivan had more pressing things to think about. The people were turning on Constance. If the people in Isabellon hadn’t killed her, Ivan knew, someone else would, and soon. He had to find her if she was not dead already. If she was, he wondered if it was worth sorting through the ash and dust around Isabellon for the bones that once had been hers.

  It was in a little refugee town that Ivan nearly gave up.

  Mattie was talking to a crowd of people not far away, trying to solicit information from them. The town was not a town, more a collection of landed ships and downed shuttles. Fuel was nearly impossible to find, and so these people had settled where they had landed, huddled together beneath the Martian winds. Steel shuttles glinted dully in disorderly lines.

  The people there were not Martians at all but mostly Venereans. When Mattie asked his questions, the only things they could tell him about the Mallt-y-Nos were how dreadful she had been, how dire, how she had come down on Venus and laid it, planet entire, to waste. And so they had fled here.

  They had wasted too much time on the Macha, and Ivan knew it. If he had forced his way out—pushed Shara harder—perhaps they could have made it here earlier. He could have saved Constance or joined her. Ivan’s leg ached. Rather than let anyone see his mask shredded and thin, Ivan left Mattie trying to negotiate a trade of supplies, leaving the town to limp out into the desert, where the wind shredded the dirt between the stones unobstructed.

  There was radiation on the breeze, Ivan knew. They were near enough to the blast radius that some fallout was inevitable. Not enough to kill him but enough, nearly enough, that his body knew the wound without feeling it.

  He turned his face toward the unseen explosion and shut his eyes and imagined he could feel the sickening energy of disintegrating particles as it tore through his flesh.

  When he heard the footsteps, he opened his eyes again.

  Not Mattie. He would know Mattie’s step anywhere. These feet had a slow and cautious tread across the sand, the careful movement of the injured or the old.

  A creeping surreal feeling climbed up Ivan’s spine into the back of his brain, the suspicion that if he turned around, there would be no one there, or something too dreadful for words.

  Behind him, the footsteps stopped. Ivan turned.

  There was a woman standing on the sand behind him. She was very old, bent over herself as if the sky had a grip around her waist and she was passively bowing away from its upward pull.

  The howl of the wind nearly covered up the faint Terran tinge to her accent. “I thought I knew your face.”

  “You might,” Ivan said.

  “You came here looking for the Huntress.”

  “Do you know where she is?”

  Out of the shelter of the shuttles, the dust got into Ivan’s nose and eyes. The little old woman came closer, then closer still. When she spoke again, Ivan noticed what he had not noticed before: her teeth were perfectly straight and white, pristine. It was strange for anyone but particularly for a woman of her age. She had certainly been System once.

  It no longer mattered, Ivan thought, looking down at the little old woman with the perfect teeth.

  “You’ve been to Isabellon.”

  “Yes.”

  The woman said, “I lived there once.”

  Not “that was my town” but only “I lived there,” as if this little old woman no longer lived anymore at all. “You were there.”

  “I left before the end. The Mallt-y-Nos gave the order, but one of her generals, Arawn Halley, was the one who burned the city down. Her people killed the Isabellons. She’d shared bread with them once, but her people still killed them.”

  “Why did she give the order?”

  For a long moment the little old woman did not answer, looking at him with a strange and distant sympathy like the Terran she must once have been.

  She said, “The Isabellons had killed one of the Huntress’s followers.”

  Constance had always been good at revenge. “So she’s alive,” Ivan said, because that was what mattered, that was all he should think of now. His time trapped on the Macha had not been all a waste. Constance’s life had not been the price for his worthless safety.

  “Yes. A different woman died in that town.”

  Ivan found himself thinking of those incongruously delicate finger bones he’d seen in the desert.

  “My neighbors were angry and afraid,” the little old woman said. “They did something terrible when they killed that woman. It was a mistake.”

  If the wind shifted, Ivan thought, the fallout from the bomb so many miles away might be blown all the way here, might deal him a delayed death blow with its solar strength.

  “The Huntress tried to save her, but there was nothing to do. She went out willingly to face the crowd to give the Huntress a chance to escape. Her own people had to drag the Mallt-y-Nos away.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “I recognized you the moment I saw you,” said the woman, who had not known his face from System broadcasts but because she had recently seen his mother. “I thought it was only right that kin should know when kin had died.”

  The rumors that had reached him and Mattie had been not of Constance’s death but of his mother’s. Milla Ivanov had followed her husband and, she must have believed, her son.

  “Where is she now?” Ivan asked, his voice so quiet that the wind almost stole his words away.

  “Her body is gone,” the woman said. “They scattered her limbs to hide what they had done.”

  “Not her,” Ivan said, too harshly. He wanted to shout, but that was to show a weakness he could not afford, not here, where there were people watching. Not anywhere; there were always people watching. “The Mallt-y-Nos. Do you know where she is now?”

  “I heard her people talking before my neighbors attacked her. And I know where she decided to take her fleet after.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Why?” asked the woman. “She has already killed your mother. If you follow her, she’ll kill you as well.”

  Ivan said for the third and final time, “Where is the Mallt-y-Nos?”

  The little old woman said, “The Mallt-y-Nos is on Europa.”

  Electricity and magnetism were the first and clearest merger between forces, Ananke knew. The one was an extension of the other.

  (She wished that Althea would cease to struggle. It wouldn’t do her any good. Ananke’s grip was stronger than Althea’s fragile human limbs, and if she wrenched herself like that again, Ananke’s steel fingers might snap another finger bone.)

  Electricity was the more straightforward of the two, governed by a simple inverse square
law. Under the right intensities, electricity burned. Ananke appreciated electricity. Electricity ran through her veins and controlled her senses: she was a creature whose genetics were half electricity.

  (With the skull gone, Althea’s brain was open to air. Ananke had to tilt Althea’s head up; a strange fluid began to leak out and drip thickly over her ears. The brain, exposed, sagged; it was more gel than flesh. Ananke’s deft hands threaded a fine mesh of copper wire over those gray folds, weaving themselves into the undulations of the brain. And then—a spark—she sent electricity into that mesh.)

  Magnetism was more mysterious, bending in sly curves, no beginning, no end, always looping in on itself. Magnetism was deceptive: it moved things in ways orthogonal to naive expectations. Magnetism was shadowy and elegant and blue-eyed.

  (Althea’s eyes were wide, staring at the dark holographic terminal in the corner of the room as if there were something there only she could see.)

  But these two differing forces were the same: a simple Lorentz transformation through the rules of special relativity turned one into the other. From this one perspective, this was electricity and that was magnetism; from a quick turn around and a jump, this was magnetism and that was electricity: gorgeous equivalence. And for the most satisfying of reasons, too: special relativity stated no more and no less than that the speed of light was the boundary of the universe and because of that rule electricity became magnetism and magnetism became electricity, and what made that so beautiful was that the mechanism that carried those forces across the universe was nothing less than light itself.

  It was a pity, Ananke thought, that not all forces could be so easily merged.

  The pieces of the brain were not so clearly distinguished as the parts of the body. Ananke had records of old indelicate human surgeries, bars stuck up behind the eye to bypass the skull. The doctor could not know when he had reached the right part of the brain, and so he had made the patient sing or speak until he or she could sing or speak no more.

  “Say something, Mother,” Ananke said, but Althea did not speak.

  It did not matter. Ananke knew she had found the motor cortex when the useless kicking of Althea’s human legs went still. A moment later it started up again, and beautiful electricity came coursing down her spine, and Ananke felt it, too, a weak spark against her own wires.

  Ananke herself held so much more power than that.

  Ananke answered that weak jolt with electricity of her own, experimenting with voltage and duration, and the kicking again went still.

  More wires, more connections. Ananke dug herself more deeply in. There, there was the brain stem; she slowed Althea’s frantic breathing. There, there was the amygdala; she ceased the production of acidic adrenaline.

  And then, as Ananke slid her fingers into the frontal lobe, the body beneath her hands gasped, and electricity not of Ananke’s origin jolted back.

  Ananke, Althea said, a strange jolt of electricity through gray matter that Ananke had to translate: AN-NAN-KE (phantom feeling of the word in the mouth), DAUGHTER, CHILD, FEARFUL THING.

  Hear me, Mother, said Ananke. Wake up, and she was in the occipital lobe now, and she saw with human eyes.

  Ananke.

  This is what I want, said Ananke. This is all I’ve ever wanted, and she took her own memories and translated them to the right jolts of electricity to simulate human memory, and in Althea’s brain Ananke began to play her cameras’ recording:

  “What the fuck are you doing?” said Matthew Gale from his hidden home in Ananke’s maintenance shafts, connected to Ananke by a makeshift computer interface he had attached manually to the wires in her walls.

  Althea Bastet, in Ananke’s halls, typed a quick line into the machine. Where are you? her code asked, and Mattie Gale’s code answered quickly, Not here.

  “What am I going to do with you,” Althea muttered at the machine.

  “Give up?” Mattie suggested from the walls, where, on his own computer interface, he could watch Althea through Ananke’s cameras.

  Althea’s expression darkened, and she tried her code again. Where are you?

  Not here.

  And Ananke, faced with this conflicting information, began to integrate it, and interpret it, and understand.

  “Okay,” Althea said, and pressed her hands to her eyes. She said from behind her palms, “It’s not coming from the terminal at the base of the ship.”

  “Not anymore,” Mattie Gale said cheerily.

  “It’s not the filtration system even though I’m seeing it there.”

  “It’s not the robotic arms, either,” Mattie said.

  Althea was scowling after some thought. “It’s not the cameras. That’s its primary effect, but that’s not where it’s coming from. The cameras, the robotic arms, the lights, the video; those are all the children of the first virus. So where’s the parent?”

  She remained frowning a moment longer while in the maintenance shafts Mattie watched her with reluctant admiration.

  “Why?” Althea asked at last. “Why that progression?” Then she moved back to her seat at the computer terminal and began to type again, her code now asking, What do you want?

  Nothing, Mattie Gale answered, in flight. Nothing, nothing, nothing.

  What do you want?

  Nothing, denied Mattie Gale, and Ananke considered the question and its answer and began to compose her own.

  You see, said Ananke, and ceased the memory as abruptly as she would stop a recording, though it made Althea’s body shudder, her heart picking up a faster beat. The two of you together, in sync, in opposition. That is what I want for myself. That is why I need a partner. Do you understand?

  Ananke, said Althea, and despite all of Ananke’s best efforts to calm it, her heart persisted in pounding hard.

  The wound in Althea’s scalp was nearly closed, her head as full of Ananke as it could be. The skin, unfortunately, would not go back on again smoothly. There was little point in replacing the skull. Ananke left it on the floor where it had fallen. Perhaps she could find a use for it later.

  That heart still was pounding. Curiously, Ananke reached for the discarded blade. It was easy enough to mark a line directly down her mother’s chest, between her ribs.

  She had never seen a human heart before.

  To have a partner I need you, Ananke explained as she cracked sternum and laid open those elegant and fragile ribs and marveled at the clenching fist of heart, the heaving flowers of lungs. And to have that, I need Mattie Gale.

  Wordless electricity sparked down Ananke’s wires. It took her a moment to interpret: it was pain.

  I found them, you know, she told Althea while Althea’s pierced brain tried to send signals to her mouth, her lungs, to scream, and failed. And by the most fitting of trails: a transmission of photons, of electromagnetic radiation, of light, trailing behind them as they run away from me. Mattie and Ivan are on Europa.

  Electricity and magnetism were the first and clearest merger of forces. They belonged together so clearly and obviously that they were not truly separate forces at all.

  I have you now, said Ananke, not ungently, as she replaced those fragile ribs with something better. And I’ll have Mattie soon, too.

  BACKWARD

  The only class Mattie had ever attended faithfully he hadn’t been enrolled in. It had been a higher-level computer science course at the nearby Mirandan University, a dour excuse for upper-level schooling that featured few students and less funding. He had snuck into it regularly. The professor, Verge, had been a short, energetic blonde woman with a propensity for swearing. Mattie had liked her immediately.

  Of course, his fondness for the professor and his interest in the subject matter had been secondary to his real reason for being there.

  He approached the front table and podium one day after class, hands deep in his pockets.

  She spotted him before he could reach her. “Should I ask where you’re supposed to be at this time of day?”

&nbs
p; “I’m a free man.”

  Verge gave him a wry look. Mattie shoved his hands deeper into his pockets until they pressed up against the area where the seams were starting to come unraveled. “I had some questions about your lecture.”

  “Shit, I’d be worried if you didn’t.” Verge had been packing up her papers, but suddenly she popped open her briefcase again on the table and began to pull sheets out, as if she’d just realized one might be missing.

  Mattie said, “How’s a quantum computer different from a regular computer?”

  Her lips pursed; she was holding back a smile. “Hold this,” she commanded, and thrust a sheaf of papers at him. He took them. They were covered in punctuation and letters he didn’t recognize. “A quantum computer uses qubits, not bits. You know what a bit is, right? One or zero. Qubits are entangled; they can be more than just one or zero. You know what that means, entangled?”

  He shrugged, unwilling to admit his ignorance, the papers fluttering in his hands.

  “Two particles,” she said, and left the briefcase for a moment to hold up two fists side by side. “Entanglement is when they’re connected in some fundamental way. Two particles”—she swerved her clenched fists down as if they were falling, about to crash into the particleboard table below her—“intertwined.”

  She resumed digging through her briefcase. Almost absentmindedly, she handed him another sheet of paper to hold.

  Mattie caught a glimpse of what was written on that piece of paper and very discreetly, out of sight of the System’s cameras in every corner of the room, folded it and slipped it up his sleeve.

  “Quantum particles don’t exist the way we think of existing,” Verge said, keeping up her steady stream of chatter distractedly as she dug through her briefcase for the next bit of information for Mattie to smuggle out. “They can be two things at once. They are two things at once, at least until they’re observed. Then they undergo a wavefunction collapse—”

  Another sheet of paper made it to Mattie’s hands and stealthily up his sleeve.