Radiate

by C. A. Higgins

  Mattie closed his fist around the data chip and leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “Had to be hard,” Mattie said, “for you and your mother.”

  Mattie’s accent had a way of cutting the ends off of words, as if his tongue were too lazy to make it all the way to the end. It still struck Ivan strangely sometimes, that accent of his, but less often than it had at first.

  “Harder for her, I think,” Ivan said, and it was just as strange to hear those words coming from his own mouth, when these thoughts were forbidden to speak. “She remembered a time before the surveillance was that bad.”

  “When?”

  Ivan wondered sometimes who knew the things that he knew. Was there anyone alive in the solar system who knew the whole truth of recent history? The System had the footage of everything that had ever happened at their disposal, yet no one knew what had happened in the past—or even what was happening now—except by rumor and biased report. All that information and none of it known, his mother’s truths suppressed into silence.

  “Things were bad before Connor Ivanov’s revolution,” he said. “They were worse after.”

  Mattie sat, hands clasped, and listened. He didn’t look like a man who was using Ivan or like a man waiting to turn the conversation to his advantage. He just looked like he was listening.

  “My father revolted when he was a student,” Ivan said. “My mother was a student, too, and all his followers. They thought—they thought.” Ivan laughed. “They thought. They thought the System would listen to reason. They were willing to die, but they didn’t think they would. They wanted Saturnian independence because it would be better, not because Saturn was unlivable. They didn’t know that there was nothing the System was more afraid of. They didn’t realize that they were pushing the System into a corner and that the System would never come out of that corner again.”

  Mattie frowned, but Ivan couldn’t tell if it was concentration or disagreement. Ivan said, “In the System’s mind, it’s been at war ever since then—at war with its own people, the way the Saturnians once were. So yes. Over the past twenty-odd years, it’s gotten worse.”

  Mattie seemed lost in thought, brow furrowed, as if he were trying to work this information into the world he already understood.

  Ivan hadn’t said those thoughts out loud to anyone before. He looked at Mattie with his honest smile and his quick and clever hands and his mess all over Ivan’s System-decorated luxury ship.

  “Before the last couple of months I’d never worked with a partner,” Ivan said.

  Mattie grinned unexpectedly. Ivan found himself paying especially close attention to that smile, to learn what had caused it.

  “Sure you did,” Mattie said. “You and your mother made a good team.”

  “Not quite the same.” Ivan leaned back in his chair. “There’re a lot more options for a con when you have more than one person working.”

  “Yeah,” Mattie agreed. “I’ve worked with a couple other people before but never for so long. Or at least not so—” He waved a hand.

  “Continuously?”

  “Continuously.” Mattie studied the data chip in his hand again. “It’s nice to work with someone long enough that you can kind of predict what they’re gonna do.”

  “It is,” Ivan agreed.

  FORWARD

  The communications terminal had started to chime again, patient, unrelenting.

  Ivan sat on the floor of the Ankou, his back to the wall, and watched Mattie’s frantic motion. There was nothing they could do now. They were less than a day from Titan, and their course was straight, and they could go no faster. Saturn had come into visibility, the rainbow curve of its rings, the moving lights of its orbiting moons.

  “How is she doing it?” Mattie demanded, stalking away from the engines in frustration.

  To think about the way the Ananke worked brought a strange shudder to Ivan’s skin, as if, should he look closely enough, he would be drawn into the whirling darkness that filled her core.

  He forced himself through. “Her engine is based on the black hole’s radiation, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe she’s found a way to control how much energy the black hole outputs.”

  Mattie paused in his restless pacing. “You think she can change the thermodynamics of the black hole?”

  “Even if she thinks she’s a god, she can’t change the laws of thermodynamics. Somehow she found a way to make the black hole radiate faster. Maybe she made the inside of the ship colder than the cosmic background radiation.”

  “Would that do it?”

  “Not enough.” Ivan ran through the rough calculation in his head and instantly dismissed the possibility, like the quick flick of his mother’s wrist as she graded a paper. “The smaller a black hole is, the faster it radiates. The smallest ones radiate so fast that they explode. Ananke must have decreased the size of her core somehow.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know.” Ivan tried to imagine what that had been like: the ship carving out a piece of its own innards and casting it aside, deliberate dismemberment in pursuit of them.

  As for how—perhaps in the end Ananke had fulfilled her purpose, after all.

  “She’s been killing ships and destroying computers,” Mattie said suddenly. “You can’t leave your planet without a ship; you can’t get supplies from anywhere else. Without computers you can’t even open the sky lock in a greenhouse enclosure. You couldn’t even use a radio to talk to anyone else!”

  As if summoned, the communications chimed once more. Mattie shut it down and then flicked on the radio with an agitated turn of his wrist. Static spit out, drowning out the renewed chime of Ananke’s calling. Ivan tightened his arms around his knees as he watched Mattie turn the dial sharply until a voice could be heard.

  “—Venus.” It was a shockingly young voice, and for a terrible moment Ivan thought Mattie had found Ananke on the radio waves, speaking young and sweet. But the voice was harder than Ananke’s, differently accented.

  “The time has come to rebuild,” it said. “There must be peace in the solar system. It will begin here, on Venus. I am Marisol Brahe, and I lead the Huntress’s true followers. Rebuild on your own planets or join us on Venus. The time has come to rebuild—”

  Mattie flicked the radio off. He moved to the navigation, scanning its output agitatedly, but the Ankou was moving as fast as it could go, and Ivan knew that there was nothing they could do now but wait.

  Just as Saturn was visible now on the viewscreen, so was the Ananke. Ivan could see the full whorl of her, the seashell-shape.

  Ivan said, and the words, however familiar, came to his tongue reluctant from long disuse, “Would you like me to tell you a story?”

  Mattie’s agitated motion stilled.

  “Why not?” he said after a long and excruciating silence. “There’s nothing else we can do.”

  Ivan took in a deep breath and began to speak.

  BACKWARD

  Ivan was going to kill Mattie Gale before they ever made it to Jupiter.

  “Would you sit still?” he demanded as Mattie made another round of the Tam Lin’s narrow cabin.

  “Nope,” Mattie said.

  “We’re only a few hours from Jupiter,” Ivan began, and then saw from Mattie’s expression that reminding him of the length of time left to wait was unwise. “There’s a huge library on the ship’s computer; you could find a book there.”

  “I didn’t ask for homework.”

  “Then by all means,” Ivan said acidly, “go field strip your weapon again. You seem to enjoy that.”

  Mattie smirked. “Are you saying I should—”

  “I was talking about your gun.”

  Mattie opened his mouth as if he would continue to try to assault Ivan with innuendo, then stopped himself. Perhaps, like Ivan, he recognized that his own irritability would only lead them to a fight. What had Ivan been thinking, letting Mattie come on board the Tam Lin in the first place? />
  “Do you really enjoy reading a book?” Mattie asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I like a well-told story,” Ivan said guardedly.

  “You would,” Mattie said, and dropped down onto the couch that had become his bed, letting his head dangle over the seat back.

  Ivan turned back to his book.

  “What are you reading?” Mattie’s voice cut into his concentration.

  “A book of myths.”

  “What, like about gods?”

  Ivan hid a sigh. “Something like that.”

  Mattie watched him from the couch, his leg jittering up and down restlessly. Ivan offered, “My mother had a copy of this book in the house, growing up. It had been my father’s.” Ivan was not certain he had ever seen his mother touch the book, much less open it, but the book had been there all the same.

  “What’s it about?”

  “Right now, I’m reading the story of Blodeuwedd.”

  “Say that word again.”

  “Blodeuwedd.”

  “Bless you.”

  “You should see it spelled.”

  Mattie’s leg was still bouncing. “What’s the story of Blodeuwedd?”

  I thought you didn’t like a well-told story, Ivan almost said. At least Mattie had stopped pacing. “Once upon a time, two magicians made a woman out of flowers.”

  “Flowers?”

  “You use what you’ve got,” Ivan said. “There was a prince who was cursed to never have a human wife. The magicians wanted to help him, so they made a woman out of flowers and named her Blodeuwedd. Since she was not a human woman, the prince could marry her, and he did.”

  “That’s not much of a story,” Mattie said.

  “When the prince was off to war, Blodeuwedd started sleeping with one of his lords.”

  “Oh.”

  “The lord and Blodeuwedd decided they would kill the prince so that they could be together,” Ivan said. “But the prince, because he was cursed, could only be killed under very special circumstances. Um—he couldn’t be killed inside or outside, he had to be killed by a special spear, he couldn’t be killed on horseback or on foot—”

  “So how could he be killed?”

  Ivan had to consult the book. “Only while he was about to go into the bath in a house with holes in the roof while he stood with one foot on a deer and the other on the edge of the bathtub.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “I am not. Blodeuwedd got him into this position—”

  “How?”

  “Clever lies,” Ivan said. “Once he was in that position, the lord came and stabbed him with the special spear. But the prince survived with help from the magicians. And then the prince went and found the lord and killed him with a spear of his own while one of the magicians went to confront Blodeuwedd.”

  “What did the magician do?”

  “He found her in the mountains where she had fled from him,” said Ivan. “She knew that he could destroy her. She had taken all of her own people with her when they ran, but one by one they had died until it was just her alone. And when the magician found her, he told her that he would do something worse to her than simply killing her: He would unmake her.”

  “He turned her back into flowers?” Ivan could see in his own mind what Mattie was envisioning: a beautiful woman, hand outstretched in outrage or appeal, falling apart into the petals that had made her. Her eyes turned to daisies, her cheeks peeled away in velvety roses, her goldenrod hair dropped to the grass, and her dress fell down beside it, full of chrysanthemums.

  Ivan said, “He turned her into an owl.”

  There was a beat of baffled silence. “Are all the myths in the book as weird as that?” Mattie asked.

  “Some of them.”

  Mattie hummed low in his throat. His leg had stopped its restless jumping. “The magicians didn’t do a real good job making a wife.”

  “They did their job too well. A flower can’t be cruel, and a construct can’t betray its sole purpose. But a living, sentient thing can.”

  “Then I feel bad for her husband,” Mattie said. “Loving someone who didn’t care about him at all.”

  Mattie stared up at the Tam Lin’s ceiling, squinting at the lights overhead. The restless energy that had filled him earlier and so annoyed Ivan seemed to have drained from him, leaving him like this, peaceful and open and thoughtful, his presence a warmth against Ivan’s nerves, not a restless scrape.

  Ivan said, “Let me tell you about the Battle of the Trees.”

  FORWARD

  Mattie stared out at Titan, the swirling orange storms, and knew that somewhere down there was Constance Harper.

  They would not make it to Titan, he knew. They would come just short when Ananke caught them. The pull of her mass was slowing the Ankou down even now. Mattie could run from her to his last breath, spending his last moments in useless search for Constance, or he could stop their ship and face what would come.

  He said, “Do we stop?”

  “Your choice,” said Ivan quietly.

  His creation was coming, sunlight gleaming off her spiral shape. There was no point in running.

  Mattie stopped the Ankou and waited to face his daughter.

  BACKWARD

  “Why’d you leave?” Mattie asked one day when it was late enough and the Tam Lin was peaceful enough that the question no longer seemed unwise.

  Ivan cocked a brow. “Leave Earth?”

  “Yeah.”

  Ivan was sitting on the floor, back to the wall. There was plenty of space on the couch next to Mattie, but he wasn’t using it. It interested Mattie, this peculiar and deliberate distance of his.

  “Why did I leave paradise,” Ivan said with a wry turn to his voice that was almost unpleasant. “Why do you steal things? What do you get out of it?”

  “Aside from free shit?”

  “Aside from that.”

  “It’s fun.” More fun than Constance’s grim missions against System control, at least. “It’s not like I can live any other way.”

  “If you had your choice, what would you do instead?”

  The image was immediate and vivid: a ship of his own and a beautiful computer, enough freedom and travel and food to satisfy a man. Constance Harper happy and at peace for once in her life. Someone who loved him and a child maybe, maybe from the foster system as he’d been. And all those things so securely his that no one could take them away once they had been found. Freedom: from guilt, from longing, from fear.

  Mattie said, “King of the System?”

  “You want the System to make an entirely new position just for you?”

  “I don’t want any System jobs that actually exist,” Mattie said. “But being king’s always sounded nice.”

  “Sounds like a high-pressure job.”

  “How about consort to the king of the System?”

  Ivan showed his teeth again, but Mattie thought this time he might be genuinely amused. Yet from the way he watched him, Mattie wondered if somehow he had divined part of Mattie’s true answer beneath the flippancy.

  To parry that glance, Mattie said, “You never answered my question.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “I answered you. You owe me one.”

  Ivan’s brow arched up again. He was not, Mattie saw, going to answer the question.

  “What would you do if you could do anything you wanted to?” Mattie asked.

  Ivan did not reply immediately. His fingers tapped against one another in mysterious patternless patterns.

  No, Mattie realized suddenly, looking at that restless tapping: there was a pattern to it. This habit of his new roommate’s was not anxiety. It was communication.

  “Controlling a person is a game of knowing what they want,” Ivan said. He, too, was watching his fingers move. “So the only defense against it is to make sure that the other person doesn’t know what you want. Sometimes the best way to do that is to bury it down so deeply that not even
you know it’s there.”

  Mattie leaned on his elbows, bringing him almost eye level to where Ivan sat on the floor on the other side of the little room.

  “So what would I be doing now if I had freedom?” said Ivan. “I don’t know.”

  FORWARD

  This close to Saturn, Anji’s patrols must have seen them, but no one came to confront them. Mattie wondered if something had happened to Anji or if they had Ananke to thank for that.

  When the Ananke was very near, the holographic terminal in the corner of the room chimed with an incoming message. Mattie started to move toward it, but Ivan grabbed his arm.

  Instead, Ivan went to the communications equipment. “No holograms,” he said. “Talk with us this way. Or let us see Althea.”

  Ananke’s voice came pristinely through the machine, untouched by static, commanding and incongruously young. “Let me speak to you in person.”

  No,” Ivan said. “Let us see Althea.”

  “Please, Ivan,” Ananke said. “Father, please.”

  The title jolted Mattie. Ivan spoke for them both: “Let us see Althea.”

  “If you wish to see Althea, you must come to me.”

  Ivan hesitated, looking to Mattie. Mattie said into the radio, “You want us to board you?”

  “As you did once, yes. This time with my permission.”

  On the viewscreen, the spiral shape of Ananke gleamed, the faint reddened light of nearby Saturn gilding her. The last time Mattie had seen her, he had been rushing to save Ivan from certain death, his rage at his own sister driving him on, his fear for Ivan driving him in to face something unnatural and terrible.

  Ananke said, “No matter how fast you travel or where you go, I will follow. You may guard your computer against me, but I will find you.”

  Mattie muted the connection. “If we board her, maybe we can find a way to stop her. There’s a dead man’s switch on her, isn’t there?”

  “Yes,” Ivan said, “right next to the black hole.”

  Mattie waited for more from him, wanting to hear Ivan’s alternative plan. Ivan was good at this, after all. If anyone could find a way to outwit Ananke, it would be Ivan.