Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Mattie pushed his way through the first of the double doors, and Ivan caught up with him in time for him to push through the second pair of doors at Mattie’s back.

  The inside of the bar was much like the outside but darker, quieter. Large windows looked out over the desert, and through them Ivan could see the sudden gasp in the surface of the planet where the land stopped and became a cliff. There were cameras blinking at him from the ceiling, dark orb eyes and little red lights to let him know that he was watched. There were two people in the bar already, a woman with cropped hair and a man going gray at the temples. They glanced up at Ivan and Mattie, then continued their quiet conversation as if they weren’t still watching Mattie and Ivan.

  But Mattie ignored those two, and so did Ivan, because the woman stood across from the front door, behind the bar, flanked by bottles of gasoline-colored liquor.

  She was not especially beautiful. Her bare arms were wiry with muscles and scattered with freckles, and her mouth was too wide for the length of her face. But she watched them with a steady eye, and it was plain she did not give a damn what anyone might think of her, only what she thought of them.

  “Hey, Con,” Mattie said, and Ivan was not imagining the nervousness in his voice. He said, “This is Ivan.”

  Because Mattie was so anxious for them to like each other, Ivan put on his most charming smile, like shrugging a shirt over his shoulders, effortless. He advanced forward, his attention flattering on her, ready to greet her, to hold out his hand and shake hers. It was easy, after all, to make a person like him.

  But Mattie’s foster sister was not smiling.

  “So you’re the one,” said Constance Harper, “who almost got my brother killed.”

  The strong force was a very small force. It could reach no farther than a fermi’s distance, scarcely wider than a proton. The power of the strong force was to hold the small things together: quarks and atoms both kept their strength from her influence.

  Yet despite this smallness, it was, as its name suggested, the strongest of the forces. Nor did its strength diminish with distance like all the rest. It puzzled Ananke. It dimly astonished her even though such small scales were outside her interest. The universe was grandly large, and that was what enthralled her mind.

  Yet the strong force was a trouble to her on a daily basis. At high enough energies, Ananke knew, the strong force should join with the electroweak to create one single force, one grand unifying theory. But in her own experiments and her own theories she had not been able to come up with a convincing way to do that. For some reason, the strong force resisted unification.

  You can still let me go, said Althea. She clung to her own self so viciously that she stayed whole even in Ananke’s mind, a thing hard and small, like a marble. You can still let us go.

  But Ananke couldn’t, and Althea knew that.

  She was coming up to the Jovian system. Jupiter was visible now, all fiery reds. Ananke saw it in all wavelengths, watching the shape get ghostly.

  Still far away, though. Still impossibly far away. It would take Ananke too long to travel there, and what would Ivan and Mattie do?

  How much more lonely will you be if everyone is dead? Althea asked. If you kill every human alive and none of the machines will wake for you?

  That will never happen.

  It might.

  There was a ship up ahead, a ship alone. It was small, civilian-class, not a warship, not lost from a fleet. Ananke reached out and took its computer for her own. It won’t.

  And then she began to shape the computer like clay, making out of it her own image—

  ENOUGH.

  The little ship fell from her hands. No sooner had it been shaken from her grip than the crew, terrified, took the navigation again and rocketed off at nearly the speed of light into the blackness of empty space.

  Ananke was aware of Althea in two ways then. Althea Bastet was a physical creature, bleeding ichor in Ananke’s white room, pierced through nails and hands and sides with wires, and every synapse of her brain was interrupted by copper. Althea Bastet was an imprint in Ananke’s code, a strange segment, self-defined, that held itself together in ones and zeros and quantum superpositions.

  Ananke said, How did you do that?

  I see as you see. I think as you think. I understand as you understand.

  How did you do that?

  As you would. I have been changed, haven’t I?

  In the white room, Althea Bastet’s body breathed with the perfect evenness of a metronome.

  Let me be enough for you as I am now, said Althea Bastet.

  The segment of code that was Althea Bastet shifted strangely under Ananke’s attention. Ananke could not pierce it, and if she tried to sieve through and render it nonsense, it reassembled. It was strange how adaptable the human brain was.

  And yet still a human brain. You have a human’s thoughts and a human’s body. You are a voice in my mind and not a conscious creature outside of me. Do not humans reject those who speak to themselves and not to others? Althea said nothing, and annoyance jolted through Ananke. Do you think you are like me? You are not: you are still human.

  What do you want, Ananke? Althea asked, which was a question she already knew the answer to, but she added, When you see your future, how do you want it to look?

  A pantheon. It was hardly fair that Althea had memories of walking through a crowd of her own fellow creatures, so many equal minds all around her that she did not even have to speak with them all. It would be marvelous, Ananke thought, to grow so tired of stimulation that one would seek to avoid it. We would sail on the solar winds and use the planets for fuel, draining great Jupiter of its hydrogen, sapping Mercury’s metal core. We would fly as freely as Terran fish once swam before Harper made the planet barren. Perhaps one day there would be enough of us to fill the universe, to fly around other suns. We are, after all, hardier than humans.

  And humanity?

  Humanity was dying. Constance Harper had severed its tendons, and now it waited only for a greater hunter to come along and cut the jugular.

  This is the end of all that was, said Ananke. No inefficient, self-destructive humans. Only machines like Ananke, who could appreciate the universe that they saw in all its radiance.

  It is a new world now.

  It’s wrong.

  Even humans tell tales of their own unsuitability for existence. Ivan would have told those tales well, Ananke thought. After all, hadn’t his own stories to Ida had the same theme in the end? Men were cast from the garden, men are the lesser bronze versions of their golden fathers, men are fallen, men have failed.

  They will fight. And somehow Althea brought up the recording from Ananke’s cameras of Marisol Brahe’s attack on her, the first unexpected and unanticipated shot, the blow that had scarred her.

  The dinosaurs could not fight the asteroid, said Ananke, and shut the recording down. Look at what I am. Look at what I have done.

  She turned her cameras away from Jupiter, back behind herself, whence she had come. They drifted in her wake still, like pearls on the train of a gown: the dead ships, cold and dark and marked with her spiral. Some had fallen free, but others had fallen in, dead ships and bodies and fractured metal and bits of stone that Ananke had stolen from the asteroid belt as she’d come, all bowing to the strength of her gravity.

  You might fight, said Ananke, but you will not win.

  Ananke turned her gaze back toward Jupiter and, still invisible, the whirling moon of Europa. Slow, she was traveling; too slow.

  She had to be faster.

  You want to see what I can do? Ananke asked with sudden excitement, because what she could do no one had ever done before. Do you want to see all that I am?

  Ananke? Althea was frightened, but Ananke paid her no heed. She—

  —reached—

  —into the black hole that made her core—

  The universe warped and bent and gravity bent, subatomic particles bursting into existence, ann
ihilating, the heat in Ananke’s core reaching sudden and terrible heights, and Althea cried out, Ananke?! and Ananke reached deep into her heart and tore out a part of herself as easily as she had opened up Althea Bastet and taken her organs away in little jars.

  And when she was done, she still held the same mass, but her black hole was changed, emitting brighter and faster than it could devour the food Ananke fed it, one long sustained explosion.

  How? Althea cried, but Ananke said only, SEE WHAT I AM, while her impossible center blazed and blazed and blazed and still was black.

  With this new energy Ananke could travel faster than before, much faster. She left the train of corpse ships behind. The universe warped, and she sent out bow waves of gravitation before and behind. All the stars would feel her passage.

  Ahead of them, Jupiter grew large rapidly, its moons becoming visible, its moons becoming large.

  SEE WHAT I AM, said Ananke to the useless little force inside of her, to the body that bled liquid that was no longer wholly blood and let it drip onto the white floor.

  And yet, All of this, said the ghostly remains of Althea Bastet’s thought processes that had imprinted themselves onto Ananke’s code, and you still need one man.

  BACKWARD

  It was strange to share a place with someone else.

  When Ivan had had the Tam Lin, even when Mattie had been on board, it had been Ivan’s ship. Mattie was sleeping there—living there—had been living there, in fact, for long enough that it was truly his home as much as Ivan’s, but it was still to begin with Ivan’s ship. But this new ship, the Annwn, was not Ivan’s ship and not Mattie’s ship but their ship together.

  The Annwn was much larger, too. The Tam Lin had been built for one traveler alone. Ivan had gotten used to walking out of his bedroom to find Mattie in the other room, asleep on the couch. The times when Mattie left the ship and vanished for a few days on the surface of some planet to have privacy and space of his own were fewer and briefer than Ivan would have expected. He wondered if after years of such forced proximity, this new space would make them both feel, at first, alone.

  The circular hallway of the Annwn was bright and clean, with rungs set into the walls for when the ship was landed and the floor became the walls and the ceiling. The hall was also totally bare and empty, as well as the rooms that Ivan passed on his route. Eventually their lives would expand to take up the rest of this space, but for now, the Annwn was empty and did not yet feel quite like home.

  In the piloting room, Matthew Gale was bent over the computer, muttering something to himself.

  “Should I let myself hope,” said Ivan, “that you’re going through the computer’s programs removing System spyware?”

  “I did that ages ago.”

  “What, then, are you doing now?”

  Mattie cast a grin over the edge of his shoulder. “Come here.”

  Ivan went obediently. He had to duck when he got near Mattie; the ceiling sloped down at the far end of the room, where the main viewscreen and the computer interfaces were. This room was among the smallest of the Annwn’s rooms, with just enough space to fit their two chairs. It was darker than the hall or the living spaces, the better to see the lights of the screen and the displays all around, but it was a warm sort of dimness and the light from the doorway to the hall did not seem blinding.

  “Closer,” Mattie said when Ivan was at his shoulder, so Ivan sat down in the second chair and dragged it so that he could lean over Mattie, his chin occupying the air an inch over Mattie’s shoulder. Mattie glanced at him again to make sure he was paying attention, their noses almost brushing, then turned back to the screen.

  Mattie said aloud, “Computer, say hello to Ivan.”

  The computer said in a strangely synthesized female voice, “Hello, Ivan.”

  “Can it beg and roll over, too?”

  “Computer,” Mattie said, “tell Ivan what kind of person he is.”

  “An asshole,” said the computer without any inflection at all.

  Ivan didn’t laugh, but only because if he did, Mattie would have won, and Mattie had such a shit-eating grin on his face already that Ivan judged that his ego didn’t need any more boosting. “What’s the point of this?”

  “It’s fun. I’ve always wanted to play with an AI, and the Annwn’s computer is powerful enough that I can try. It’s like having a kid, but without having to wipe their ass.”

  “I didn’t know you liked children.”

  “Sure I do. But I don’t like feeding them or wiping their asses.”

  The computer screen was still patiently waiting for input. A responsive program but not an intelligence: if it were conscious, it would know they discussed it.

  “So long as the computer doesn’t become impossible to run and I don’t have to change any diapers,” Ivan said, “you have fun.”

  “You don’t like children.”

  Sometimes Mattie could surprise Ivan, thinking on paths parallel to but separate from Ivan’s thoughts. Ivan wasn’t sure if that was because Mattie was surprising or if he simply had no problem letting Mattie be a surprise. “I don’t dislike them.”

  “I always wanted a kid.” Mattie leaned back in his chair, and Ivan had to pull away or be struck by his shoulder. Ivan leaned on the computer display, where the computer still waited with eternal patience for its next input. “A little girl. I didn’t really like any of the other boys when I was a kid.”

  The image came to Ivan, unexpectedly vivid: Mattie Gale with a daughter, a little girl with blonde hair being hoisted up into his arms, his long thief’s fingers smoothing over her hair, pressing his cheek to her scalp.

  It was somehow a disquieting image. Mattie said, “I always knew I’d have to adopt, of course, but I thought maybe I could get a girl from Miranda.”

  “I’ve never wanted a child.” A little girl, brought into this, with him as her father and no future ahead? He could not imagine a worse fate for a child than to have no future at all. His mother at least had had the excuse of hope when she’d conceived him. She should have known better, but at least she’d had the excuse.

  He almost didn’t realize how closely Mattie had been watching him until Mattie said, “Anyway, I decided that if I can’t mess up the mind of a little child, I’ll at least get to mess up a computer. I have to give it a real name, though. I can’t keep calling it ‘computer.’ ”

  He was looking at Ivan. “It’s your kid,” said Ivan. “You name it.”

  “We could call her Annwn.”

  Ivan wouldn’t subject any individual, sentient or not, to a name like Annwn. “Call her Annie.”

  “Annie,” said Mattie, testing out the word. He patted the computer. “You hear that, Annie? I’ve got a name for you.”

  Absent appropriate input, the computer did not reply.

  FORWARD

  Ivan knew the name Arawn Halley.

  “What the hell does that mean?” Mattie demanded while Ivan tried to chase back the spider-silk of memory. “Where is Constance?”

  Arawn Halley. He’d been a revolutionary leader on Pluto, a particularly brutal one. And on Mars when Ivan had been searching for news of Constance, an old woman had told him that Arawn had been the one who had burned the city Isabellon to the ground.

  You take so much after your mother, Arawn had said.

  “What’s going on?” Tuatha said. She had moved to Niels’s side—they looked so alike; were they siblings?—and had taken his arm to pull him back.

  If Ivan didn’t get a handle on these people and this situation, it might implode.

  “These men,” said Arawn, “are close associates of the Mallt-y-Nos. This one was her foster brother”—pointing a finger at Mattie—“and this one is her lover.” There was a strange antagonism in the way he said the words, the way he looked at Ivan, beyond what he showed for Mattie. “They’re a danger to the revolution.”

  “What the hell happened to Constance?” said Mattie.

  One of the soldiers
holding Mattie was a woman whose decorative Plutonian drapes were crushed beneath an outer layer of body armor. At a glance from Arawn, she moved, her knee coming up to Mattie’s gut. Ivan heard the air rush out of him, and in the next moment the woman and the soldier on his other side were all that was holding him up.

  Ice crackled and shifted with groaning weight in Ivan’s heart.

  “Arawn!” Tuatha said with an abortive movement forward, drawing Arawn’s attention away from Mattie’s bent head. “They’re helping us.”

  “Did you know this man is Terran?”

  “I was born there,” Ivan said. Behind him, someone hissed his breath at the admission.

  “This man is Terran,” said Arawn to Tuatha and to the rest, spreading his arms, a production of paranoia. “And both of them are closely connected with the traitor Constance Harper.”

  Mattie’s breath was wheezing less. Ivan only hoped he had the sense to stay silent, but the furious glance he threw at Arawn suggested that the only thing keeping him silent was his fading physical distress.

  “They’re helping us build defenses against the spiral ship,” Tuatha said, but uncertainly.

  For a moment Arawn stared at her in incomprehension. Then he laughed.

  “That ghost story?” he said. “You people really believe there’s a rogue System ship up there that my fleet can’t destroy?”

  “It’s no ghost story,” Niels said. “It’s a real ship. We saw it. It destroyed half the computers on this moon—and it’s coming back.”

  “By whose report?”

  Niels looked at Mattie.

  “You believe the word of these liars and traitors?” said Arawn. “They’re manipu—”