Something tugged on her sleeve.
She swatted it away.
“Ow!”
Andy froze. “Thierry?” Once again, she could see his outline when she knew where to look.
“Yes, ma’am.” His voice sounded shaky.
Andy knelt and pretended to fuss with her shoes. “Do not show yourself. They are looking for people like you.”
“Who?” Now he sounded frightened.
“The city guard. Just follow me and keep quiet.” She stood, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “Can you do that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She nodded and continued past the square.
She had almost made it to Market Street when two guards stepped in front of her, blocking her path. They were easily half a meter taller than she was, a rather imposing wall.
Andy looked up at them. “Excuse me, sirs. I need to go through.”
“Pardon me, ma’am, but we’re not letting anyone through at the moment.”
“I’m sorry, sir—I was just heading to the Market to get some fresh veggies for the soup pot tonight.”
He stared at her for a moment, his eyes narrowed. “I’m afraid the Market has been closed for the day.” He took her by the arm. “We’re going to have a few more questions for you, if you wouldn’t mind waiting over there, by the sculpture?”
Something had triggered his suspicions. “I’m really tired, sir. I’d appreciate it if you’d let me get home. My grandchildren are waiting for me.” She tried to pull away from his grasp.
The other man, who could have been Santi’s grandson by the looks of him, blocked her path. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we’re under orders. No one leaves the square without being cleared.”
Andy tamped down her anger. Better not to make a scene. “Of course, my apologies. By the sculpture, you said?”
“Yes. Thank you, ma’am. Someone will be by shortly to get your testimony, and we’ll send you on your way.”
I don’t have any testimony. None that I’d give it to the likes of you. Even as weak as her abilities had become, she could reach Aine through the world wood of the Earth sculpture. She’d grown it herself. It went all the way to the world mind.
She let herself be turned around, looking for Thierry’s outline, hoping her little ghost was still with her.
DELLA PUT on the ceremonial robes of her position. They were a deep blue, flowing down to cover her feet, and trimmed with rabbit fur at the collar. The last part was her own addition.
An assistant did her makeup and another her hair.
She stared at her face in the mirror, hardly recognizing it.
When did I become this woman? Her features were still sharp, despite the age lines around her eyes and her now silver hair. She’d spent ten years after the first intifada, scraping up a living, cleaning houses and scrubbing floors on her hands and knees. Shunned by all who had been her friends.
Those hands, once the hands of a beautiful young woman, were now more like gnarled claws, twisted by arthritis. She pulled them inside the sleeves of her robe.
Age spots disappeared under foundation, and a little of her youthful beauty slowly returned under the expert work of the makeup artist.
She nodded. “Very nice.”
Her luck had changed when she’d met Galen Hart, the Captain of the Guard. She’d been younger then, just past fifty. He’d been a junior officer, rapidly rising through the ranks. She’d risen with him, eventually winning a seat on the town council.
Now that rise had brought her here, and she wasn’t finished yet.
“You’re looking almost regal.” Galen slipped his arms over her shoulders.
“Almost? I should fire these two, then.” She brushed him off. “You’ll wrinkle the robes.”
He grinned. “You worry too much.”
“You don’t worry enough.”
He grunted. “Probably true.” He’d aged well—his dark hair had flecks of silver, and his face had only gotten more ruggedly handsome with time. Ten years her junior, he still knew how to make her happy.
“Enough.” She waved off her assistants. “Go tell Arnold I’ll be ready in five minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The men scampered off like mice.
Galen sat down next to her, his brow knitted. “You’re dismissing the council?”
She nodded. “They wanted to vote down everything I asked for.”
“Don’t you think it’s too soon?”
She laughed, amused at his naïveté. “Victory goes to the bold.” She checked herself in the mirror one last time. “Besides, I have the right to do it. It’s in the charter.”
He put a hand on her knee. “Having the right to do something doesn’t always mean it’s wise. There are protests at the Council Hall.”
Della touched up a spot under her left eye with a powder brush. “Don’t you trust me?”
He shrugged. “Of course I do. I just don’t want to see you get in over your head—”
“Over my head?” She stood abruptly, her robes swirling around her. “What do you think I am? Some dunderhead fresh off the farm?”
He held his palms out in defense. “That’s not what I meant.”
“I don’t have time for this.” She stood and pushed past him, taking a deep breath to compose herself. This was an important moment. Time for her to show the city her mettle. “We can talk tonight.”
“Yes, my love.” He always backed down. It was why their relationship worked, and why she was beginning to loathe him.
Arnold waited unobtrusively by the door.
“Are we ready?” The Mayoral Residence had a wide entry hall with a polished mallowood floor and stone columns. Not a palace, but far better than the shacks she’d lived in before.
Arnold nodded. “Yes, we are. The world awaits you.”
ANDY DID as she’d been told, edging closer to the sculpture she’d called up from the ground all those many years ago.
If she could just reach Aine….
She sat down on the steps that led to it, and her ghost sat beside her.
“What’s happening?” His voice was a whisper. Poor kid, caught up in things he didn’t understand.
Andy sighed. “The same thing that always happens, eventually. Someone using lies to take power.” She had hoped Forever would be different. Had thought that it was—that their great democratic experiment, launched by her father and Colin McAvery, would stand the test of time.
It was difficult to accept that it wasn’t so. That fundamentally nothing had changed about humankind—that they had brought all the baggage of Old Earth along with them.
“A man came for me.” Thierry’s voice was shaky.
“What?” Andy checked herself. She didn’t want to look like a crazy person or attract unwanted attention for talking to thin air.
“Mr. Leak. Roland was going to sell me to him.” She could hear the shudder in his voice.
“What did you do?” She covered her mouth with her hand and pretended to cough.
“I ran. I came here. Looking for you.”
For me? What can I do? She couldn’t even get back to her hotel room, and it would go worse for her if they discovered who and what she was.
Who was trying to buy the boy? Impossible to say, but the why was clear. Someone else knew what he could do.
City workers in black outfits were busy building a platform in the square, on the other side of the sculpture.
Andy shivered. The last time someone had built platforms in the square, they’d been meant for hanging. She hung her head and spoke softly. “Listen to me carefully.”
“Okay.” His breath warmed her ear.
“If anything should happen to me, you have to find a couple named Ally and Sander.”
“Ally and Sander. Where do they live?”
“Somewhere across the river. Maybe in the Grid. My daughter and her partner are there.”
“Okay.”
“Belynn and Destiny. They’re Liminals. Like
us.” She looked up. One of the guards was staring at her strangely. “Don’t trust anyone else.”
“What about you?”
She covered her mouth and coughed again. “I’ll be all right. Tell them to take you far away from here.” He would be safe, away from Darlith. For now.
“I… I can’t just leave you.”
Andy coughed again, harder this time, and the guard turned away. “I’m old. My time is coming. You have a whole wonderful life ahead of you. Promise me you will.”
He was silent for a long moment.
“Thierry?”
“Okay. I promise.”
“No fingers crossed behind your back?”
Laughter. “I promise.”
Andy used her walking stick to lever herself up and ambled over to the sculpture.
Beside her, Thierry’s face flickered into view for just an instant, then disappeared.
“You’re losing control.” She stared at the polished wood.
“I’m tired. I usually don’t hold it so long.”
“Then go!”
“But….”
“I’ll be okay. Don’t trust anyone but Belynn and Destiny. Go!”
The outline stood there for a moment longer, hesitating. Then it ran off.
Andy sighed with relief. He would be safe. She had to cling to that.
She reached out and grabbed hold of the sculpture.
Aine!
Chapter Four: Burn
AINE THREADED her way through her vast consciousness, a million little pieces of her doing a million little things.
As Forever slipped through space toward its ultimate destination, still ages of time away, the world stretched and grew, consuming the last asteroid it had captured years before.
Waste was dissolved into its guts and redistributed. Factories made heating coils and building blocks and myriad other finished products and raw materials.
Subnetworks distributed communications, both hers and those of the Liminals.
Her old selves had called this mode autopilot. She didn’t think. She just was and did. She reserved her thinking for when it was most needed. Or when she needed her time away, stolen in milliseconds from her other tasks.
She was no longer human, or anything close to it. But she felt the same ennui—to use a word from Old Earth—that she understood older humans often felt. It would be nice, after all this time, to give up the burden to someone else.
Aine!
Andy’s call seared across her consciousness. She coalesced her consciousness, letting go of some of her tertiary tasks. Andy hadn’t called her in a long time.
I’m here.
They’re rounding up Liminals here in Darlith. Andy’s voice was weak, and she felt nervous.
Who is?
The new government. Della.
Della. Of course it was Della. She’d been at the root of most of their problems for the last two decades. Are you okay? You sound tired.
Andy’s laughter came through the connection. I’m fine. Just old.
You and me both. She reached out to Liminals in Darlith, sending them a brief message: Run. You are being hunted by the City Guard.
There were so many of them now. Some whose abilities were latent and some who blazed like a sun in Aine’s mind.
Can you warn them?
Already done. As she spoke with Andy, other pieces of her split off to reply to the confused queries that were coming in.
Who is this?
Aine, what’s happened?
Is David all right? He was going to the Market.
She handled them all with ease.
A small part of her was thrilled at being connected with people again and exercising mental muscles long unused.
Relief flowed through the connection with Andy. Thank you. There’s a boy here named Thierry. A thief. He can do things I’ve never seen before. Find him and—
Then she was gone.
Andy?
Concerned, Aine reached for her.
She was there, like the dimmest candle flame, but Aine couldn’t connect with her. Something had happened.
Thierry.
She found him, a young boy running away from the square as fast as his little legs would carry him. Thierry!
He stopped. She could feel his confusion.
Thierry, I need your help.
Who are you?
This is Aine. The world mind. She was bemused that she had to formally introduce herself. Such was her penalty for being so long absent.
She felt his negation.
Andy said not to trust anyone but Destiny and Belynn. Then he vanished.
If Aine had still had a corporeal form, she would have sat back in shock. How had he done that?
Where did you go, my little thief?
SOMEONE PULLED Andy away from the sculpture, dropping her to the ground so hard that she lost her breath.
Gasping, she looked up at her attacker. The same guard who had been staring at her earlier.
“Hey, what are you doing?” A young dark-haired man interposed himself between her and the guard. “She’s an old woman.”
The guard reached for his knife. “She was acting suspiciously.”
“What was she going to do? Pull the Earth down with her bare hands?”
Andy took a ragged breath, thankful to be able to breathe again. “It’s okay….”
“No, it’s not.” Several other people had gathered around the man. A blond woman in a white tunic and pants, maybe twenty-five, knelt next to her, putting a hand on Andy’s shoulder. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
The guard took a step back, looking at the gathering crowd uncertainly. “Just doing my job, folks.”
The crowd grumbled and continued to swell, more people putting themselves between Andy and the guard, and he grunted and turned away.
“You okay?” The woman helped her up.
Andy felt her legs and her hips. “Nothing broken, I think.” She held out her hand. “I’m Andy.”
“Sera. It’s a shame what’s happening to Darlith.” She glared at the guard’s back. He had apparently decided he had more urgent matters to deal with elsewhere.
“It scares me.” Andy shivered. “I thought we left that kind of thing behind on Earth.” She remembered her history well. The Third Reich in Germany in 1938. The Alt Right in Europe and the Americas in the early twenty-first century. The Sorpopulist movement of the 2070s.
“Earth? You believe in that?” They sat together on the steps below the sculpture.
Andy nodded. “I do. I saw it. I was born on Transfer Station, but I still remember Earth.”
Sera smiled. “My grandpa told stories about it too. I never believed him. He was a bit senile, at the end.”
“It was real.” She’d never gotten to visit the surface, but her father had regaled her with tales about it when she was a little girl. “Billions of people spread across seven continents, and oceans that make our little lakes and seas seem like mere puddles. And the sky….”
A sky filled with a thousand million stars. Giant fluffy clouds and rainbows.
She missed her father every day. He’d been gone twenty-five years now. When did I become the matriarch?
“It sounds amazing, and terrifying. What was it like, really? On the surface?” Sera sounded eager for more details.
“I never actually got to go—”
Horns blared, announcing the arrival of something or someone important.
Andy laughed. That was very medieval of them.
She stood to get a better look. Her hip was sore, but the pain was manageable.
A column of city guards cleared the way through the crowd and made a path for the newly arrived personage to reach the stage.
Andy shouldn’t have been surprised when she saw who it was.
Della.
The woman looked like a queen, all dressed up in finery, her hair styled in silver ringlets that fell around her powdered face.
Della caught Andy’s ga
ze, and her eyes narrowed. She leaned toward her advisor and whispered something.
Andy backed away, not taking her eyes off the woman. She’d been recognized.
Hands reached around her as a guard came up behind her on either side. “The mayor has requested the kindness of an audience.”
“Requested, my ass.” Andy looked around, but her earlier saviors had melted away into the crowd.
“What was that?” One of the guards squeezed her arm more tightly.
“I said I would be delighted to sit down with the mayor.” She watched as Della climbed the stairs to the newly constructed platform.
Della’s advisor supplied a wooden box, and she climbed onto it, staring out at the gathering crowd below.
Now Andy understood why they’d been packing the square.
“People of Darlith.” Della’s voice was clear and carried across the crowd.
Everyone went silent.
“For too long, we have lived under a set of stifling rules. Where you can live. What you can do. How you are supposed to think.”
There was a broad murmuring amongst the crowd.
“The world mind has held sway over our lives for decades. We have been spoonfed this mantra of ‘limited resources.’” She gestured at the world all around them. “As if we don’t have more than we could ever need! Look above you—see all that open land? We have been fed a steady diet of lies—a diet of conservation, preparation, stagnation!”
There were whispers of assent now.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to live in a city where you are free to do what you want? Where you are not constrained by petty bureaucratic rules? Where you don’t have to ask permission to wipe your own… assets?”
There was laughter among the gathered mob.
Andy looked around nervously. People were eating it up.
“And where did it all begin? Where did all these limits and rules and stifling ways of thinking come from?” She pointed up at the sculpture. “Old Earth!”
Della’s assistant climbed up onstage with a blazing torch.
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