by J. Boyett
Madaku stared at her. He was still trying to get his breathing under control, but it was getting harder and harder.
She continued: “My first memories that I feel sure more or less happened, cloudy though they are, are of being brought by servants into a fertile river valley cutting through a desert land. Already then I was very old—but I can remember for certain none of the things that had passed before then, although to this very day sometimes as I sleep a word will pop unbidden into my conscious mind, an inconsequential word, from one of those ancient tongues that predate the wheel, a word that has remained pure and uncorrupted in the cryostorage of my mind, that still retains its original form because I have not thought of it in so long, have not mingled it with other words and memories. Of course, as soon as I remember it, that long-delayed corrupting process begins. It comes and joins this world. Within seconds of its exposure to air it begins to fade, it loses much of that vividness it had upon its first appearance.
“As for when I came upon Ironheart, ask me not. Often it seems as though I have always lived upon her, even in those distant days when I rode horses upon the home planet. I know that isn’t true, but I do think Ironheart is very old. It seems to me that I acquired her original hull, the one underneath the centuries of encrustations and additions, around the time humans were contacted by their first starfaring species. Perhaps Ironheart even originally belonged to those voyagers, whatever it was they were called.”
Madaku looked over at Burran for some sign that he was rejecting this ridiculous story, but there was none. Madaku was no big history buff, and wasn’t certain which space-faring species had been the first to make contact with humans nor how many millennia ago that had been. Long ago, anyway; long, long before the Registry, long before the Hygienes.
Anya said, “In that way-back time of my first sure memories, they brought me into that rich valley. In the land where I had been living, powerful men built temples from mud bricks, and the valley-dwellers wanted me to guide them how to build such temples. In this new place there was much large stone. But the sacred way was to build the temple with bricks, so I made them break the big stones into brick-sized pieces and build with those. Later, after I moved on, innovators chose to forego that step and build the temples directly out of massive stone. Everything changes.” She came out of her reverie enough to look with distant hope at her captives. “That land was called Egypt. Have either of you heard of Egypt?”
They stared back at her blankly. The name meant nothing to either of them.
Disappointed but unsurprised, she returned her gaze to that obscure point. “For a very long time people talked about Egypt, and so I was able to remember it. It almost began to seem that it would always be remembered. But now it is long gone. And as the eons go by, and no one mentions it to me ever again, I gradually will come to forget it too.
“They worshipped me there, as I had been worshipped elsewhere before, as I have been worshipped since. They had a god-king—later they called this king a ‘pharaoh,’ but in the very beginning the god-king was merely called the ‘husband,’ because he was only the man whom I chose to marry. But I don’t think I married many generations of them, before moving on. And I don’t think I made any of them my companions, as I wish to do for Willa. Probably none of them pleased me, though I was more easily pleased in those days. Perhaps I had not yet learned how to make a companion. I cannot remember how I learned, or if it is a thing I always knew how to do.”
“What kind of ‘companionship’ is it you want Willa for?” growled Burran. “You want to chain her up, like you’ve done us?”
“But no. You are not my companions. You are my prisoners. I shall not treat her as I do you.”
“She’s not going to just hang out with you, when you’ve got us chained up down here.”
“I shall not allow her access to this dungeon—I shall tell her you have both died, so that she may stop thinking of you. If need be I will kill you both and flush you out the airlock before she comes upon you.”
“You’re crazy,” said Madaku. “We’re her friends! Her crewmates! Burran is her lover. You think she’s going to want to be your companion after you harm us? She’s going to hate you!”
“Ah, your error is that you see with mortal eyes. Right you are, that the hatred she will feel for me shall be more than enough for a whole human lifetime: enough for two, three, four. But I can wait. And as centuries pass, centuries which none but I shall have shared with her, she will find it harder and harder to remember why she ever found anything in the paltry span of her life till now worthy of such passion.
“And as the centuries pile and stretch, she shall seep into my being, as well. A day will come when I shall look upon her and it shall seem she has always been there, by my side. At my age, one longs for sensations such as that.”
Burran said, “So pick one of us instead, if you need a buddy so bad.” Madaku had actually begun to wonder if the immortality Anya claimed to offer would really be so bad—it might be nice to live forever. But from the tone of Burran’s voice as he offered himself, Madaku could tell he didn’t think it would be so hot.
Not that he need have worried on his own account, to judge by the distaste on Anya’s curled lips as she pulled her head back in physical disgust. “You shall not be my companion.”
“Why not? If all you want is someone to get used to. What’s so special about Willa?”
“Everything is special about Willa. Know thou how many times I have made a mortal my immortal companion?”
“No. How many?”
“Less than thirty. In all these eons. It is one of the only things I have not yet already done a thousand times. I’ll not do it simply for anyone—I am not that bored, yet.”
“Well, you’re right—Willa is special,” said Burran. “And you can’t just have her.”
“There is little thou can do about it, weak mortal. There is little Willa can do about it, either, short of hyperjumping away, never to return. But the charming creature has chosen not to abandon you, her comrades. Who knows, given more time to mature, say only a hundred years, she might be able to find a way to avoid capture by me, and rescue you both. She is, after all, very formidable, more so than you know. But youthful and inexperienced as she is, I think I need not worry on that account....”
With those last words, Anya rose smoothly to her feet and loomed over them. Madaku had already started to wonder, in a panic, what she was going to do to them; so when the ship shook with a sudden crashing boom and the lights flickered, he thought it was something Anya was doing. Even when she was knocked hard onto her hands and knees on the floor, along with the tumbling crates and shattering souvenirs, Madaku desperately yanked his legs out of reach, terrified by her proximity.
Twelve
Seconds later Willa tore into the chamber, screaming and shooting; she was unrecognizable in her pressure gear, but she was the right height and as far as they knew there was no one else in the system, so they assumed it was her. The prisoners couldn’t see her enter from their vantage, but when the door opened and blaster fire darted across the room, it seemed they could hear flames crackling in the corridor.
Anya had not yet risen to her feet when Willa was upon her, screaming and blasting her till she seared. Then she turned her laser on the chains binding Burran and Madaku.
“Willa, look out!” Burran was shouting. “Don’t take your eyes off her—she doesn’t die!” But Willa gave no sign of comprehending. She just collapsed in between them once the chains were severed, and Burran and then Madaku grabbed the extra guns hooked onto her pressure suit. Watching her body quiver, Burran realized with a shock that she seemed to have just come out of a jump.
Anya may not have died, but being laserblasted multiple times in the face had stunned her, at least. Burran leaped to his feet and kicked her over onto her belly while the charred and half-obliterated meat of her head regenerated, then put a knee in her back and yanked something out of his belt pouch. Upon being removed
from the pouch, his magno-cuffs expanded till they were big enough to slap onto Anya’s wrists. They swelled into bubbles of metal that swallowed her hands.
For the first few moments Madaku could only watch, marveling not only at Burran’s violence but also at his stamina. He himself wasn’t sure he could even wobble to his feet.
Burran cuffed Anya’s ankles as well, then marched back to where they’d found the brain. Soon he was out of view. But then Madaku could see the red flashes of laser fire, and realized that Burran was destroying Fehd’s brain.
Or trying to, anyway. He came stalking back. “That fucking case it’s in is indestructible,” he reported grimly to Madaku and the still-hysterical Willa, as if destroying Fehd was a task they’d given him. He toed Anya in the ribs. “How do I break through that case?” he demanded. “How do I put that brain out of its misery?”
She twisted her quickly-healing face around to look up at them over her shoulder. Already her lips, tongue and teeth were sufficiently restored for her to say, “Art thou so intent on leaving me bereft of all hyperdrive?”
“I don’t give a fuck about your hyperdrive. I’m not leaving my employer and shipmate like that.”
There was a not-so-distant boom, and the ship rocked again. Madaku was about to point out that Burran’s concerns might soon be moot, and he was embarrassed when Willa, weak though she was, managed to beat him to it. “I don’t know how stable Ironheart’s superstructure is,” she managed. “I kissed the hull when I brought the Canary out of hyperspace.”
Madaku stared at her. At first he thought she meant she’d accidentally let the hulls kiss, and they were just lucky the slip hadn’t been big enough to kill them all. But then he realized she was saying she’d done it intentionally. Any other attack on Ironheart might have been impossible for one person alone, ill-versed in the Canary’s weapons systems—Ironheart would have seen the Canary pop into realspace and its more belligerent AI might have attacked preemptively. Having the ships come into explosive contact in the first instant of the Canary’s existence avoided that problem. But it called for a truly unheard-of level of precision, so much so that Madaku wasn’t sure he could believe her.
“If that’s true,” he said, “how did you manage to avoid destroying the Canary?”
“I brought it into realspace so that the far side of its cargo hold was touching Ironheart. Less than a square millimeter. I was hoping the hold would be enough to buffer the blast. And I brought it into realspace near coordinates on Ironheart that were removed from Fehd’s position, according to the doctor—I just had to hope you were with him. And they were coordinates that were at one of the add-on compartments, since I was afraid the original hull might turn out to be really indestructible.”
Burran wasted only a moment on an incredulous, wonderstruck headshake. As the ship buckled again, he grabbed Anya roughly by her upper arm and said, “Come on, we’ve gotta get out of here in case the ship blows.”
“Ironheart shall not be vanquished!” she cried, pelting them with scorn. “Know thee how long this ship has bosomed me?!”
“Yeah, well, looks like it’ll be scrap soon enough,” said Burran as he dragged her along. There was a grim pleasure in his voice as he taunted her.
For the first time they saw Anya lose control of herself. She thrashed and spat in her restraints as Burran dragged her though the shuddering ship back to the umbilicus Willa had punched through the hull to connect it to the Canary. She cursed them in Old Galactic, and then, as her fury swelled, she lapsed into what sounded to Madaku like older, more savage languages. He flinched as she bucked and strained, giving Burran plenty of trouble as he pulled her along. Madaku more than half-expected her to suddenly burst the magno-cuffs in a feat of superhuman strength. It seemed, though, that invulnerability and immortality were the only god-like qualities she possessed.
Once they reached the umbilicus, Ironheart had calmed and so had Anya. The three surviving members of the Canary’s crew breathed heavily, gasping to regain their breath as they slumped onto the gravity cushion, letting the attractor at the Canary end gently pull them along the tube’s length. Through the translucent, semi-frosted plastic of the thin tube walls they could vaguely make out Ironheart’s shape, falling behind them. Unclipping his tablet from his belt and checking its readings, Madaku said, “Looks like Ironheart’s self-maintenance programs have come online and managed to handle the damage. It’s stable again.”
Madaku was going over the damage reports on his tablet; Willa, still not completely recovered from her jump, had her face in her hands; only Burran was watching Anya, and it was he she locked eyes with as she smirked knowingly. “I told thee,” she said. “Ironheart can stand up to anything.”
Burran slammed his foot into her face. “You’re not following Willa’s Modern Galactic lessons,” he said.
“Burran,” said Willa, face out of her hands, glaring at her lover. “Don’t kick people in the face when they’re tied up. Not even her.”
Burran shifted his weight and did look a little ashamed. He wasn’t ready to apologize to Anya, though. Besides, she was simply smirking at him as before, the new blood trickling unnoticed from her lip to mix with the drying crust left over from when laser blasts had passed through her face and head.
He said, “If the Canary is in good enough shape, the first thing I’m gonna do when I get back aboard is smelt your ship.”
Now that smirk was gone, at least. In its place she fixed on Burran a hard, murderous glare. It should have been enough to make even him nervous, though if it did he did a pretty good job of covering it up.
He said, “Gonna fucking smelt you, too.”
When Anya answered, her voice seemed devoid of boastfulness. Instead, she sounded almost regretful: “Many, many are those who have tried to kill me. Sometimes I think I can dimly remember a time when a few of them caused me fear. But that is long since, and I have learned not to fear such as you.”
“So maybe it’s true that I could kick you forever without killing you. Which, by the way, is not an unpleasant prospect. But I bet dropping you right smack into this system’s star would do the trick.”
“Yes, it might, at that.” Anya sounded almost cheerful at the possibility. “No one has ever done it to me. Two wakings ago the ship’s crew which found me did try to do that very thing, but I foiled their plan and killed them. But my last companion killed herself that way. At least, I hope she did—I hope her suicide attempt worked—as she was piloting her stolen shuttle into the sun, I cried out to her over the comm to consider how ghastly it would be if her gamble proved wrong—if she spent the next millions of years boiling in the heat of a sun, never healing but never quite dying either. How horrible! But I think it would be enough, to dive into a star. But I shall never try. I shall live, and live, and live.”
“Why did your companion want to kill herself?” asked Willa.
“She was weak, friend Willa. Not like you. You, I feel, could be the one, at long last. It takes strength to swallow the boredom. To build sinews of it. None have ever had that strength but I. How can that be, I’ve so often asked! Yet I suppose that making a companion is one of the few things I’ve not done so many times, since usually they last at least a thousand years, and in between each one I sometimes wait millennia. Waiting to stop grieving the last one, and then waiting to find someone interesting enough to change, and to invite in. That’s how rare you are, Willa.”
“It doesn’t sound very pleasant, though.”
“Perhaps not the ends. And, often, not the beginnings. But there are sometimes vast stretches of interest and pleasure in between those points. Vast by your reckoning, I mean to say. Come with me, Willa. Shake off these mortals. I offer you eternal life, if you wish it.”
“She doesn’t,” said Burran, and kicked Anya in the face again. This time Willa seemed too lost in thought to protest. Burran studied her worriedly, as if it had occurred to him that it would not be so strange if she decided she did want it, after all
.
But Willa, whatever she was thinking about, only regarded Anya a little sadly.
Madaku couldn’t contain his curiosity. “How do you make someone immortal?” he asked.
“I put my mouth on theirs, and will it to be so,” said Anya. “I no more know why it works, than I have ever understood why my hand should rise when my mind demands it.”
“How did you discover you could do that?”
“I cannot remember exactly,” said Anya. “It was long ago, that first time. Back in the early days of the human race. I remember her—the companions are sparse enough that they are among the only things I can remember well—but I do not ever remember all the events the companions and I passed through together. But I imagine I simply put my mouth on that first one, and wished she might be like me. And probably I was as surprised by the result as anyone.”
The Canary was coming up. They all hovered a while in silence.
Anya surprised them by volunteering her next words: “That is half the point of a companion, you know. It is very hard to find someone who can be familiar, and yet also sometimes surprise one. Especially at my age.... Perhaps I myself became immortal because someone treated me thus—my own origins are murky in the distant mists. I know only that in my memory I have encountered no other immortal aside from those I have made. And none of those have been able to bear the millennia—they buckle so quickly, so quickly.”
The umbilicus finished sliding them back onto the Canary. They dragged Anya inside and sealed the airlock behind them; they could hear mechanisms whirring softly inside the bulkhead as the umbilicus folded itself back up and retracted its two kilometers or so back into the Canary. This was the section of the ship which held the escape pods and auxiliary skiff’s dock.
Madaku looked around. Alarm lights were still flashing, but the klaxons were off and the place looked okay. “What you did is really amazing, Willa. Anyone else would have blown both ships to smithereens.”
“Yeah, well, I did rip open the cargo hold. It’s pretty ugly over there—the ship’s commercially useless now, it would cost less to replace than repair.” She added, “Fehd would be so mad if he knew,” and started to cry a little bit, but quickly got herself back under control.