My lord. On the other end Numadesi is standing inside a small, strange ship—a corvette, but not an Amaryllis one. You are to be eternal. You’ll still be conquering worlds and crushing your enemies by the time I am dust.
Anoushka smiles faintly. You’re my home, Numadesi.
“Captain Erisant is steering the leviathan to the nearest relay,” Savita is saying, her voice tense. “I’m trying to countermand em, but we won’t have forever. Admiral?
“Yes. We’ll get back to my ship or, failing that, find a place we can fortify.” Another message blinks in her vision.
This is a time of last retorts, Admiral. Benzaiten’s tone is serene all the same, amused nearly. Come rendezvous with me—I’m already onboard, I’ll explain shortly. Let’s see if we can still snatch victory from the jaw of disaster, shall we? Seung Ngo is going to be so mad.
Chapter Eight
To Numadesi’s surprise, Benzaiten’s corvette is furnished for human habitation, though it becomes less odd when one accounts for the comfort of xer human half. This is the first time in years that Numadesi has been aboard a ship that doesn’t belong to the Amaryllis, a ship that doesn’t feel like home. The difference between a hotel and one’s own residence. She tries not to think about the soldier Benzaiten killed—the number of spies and traitors Erisant seeded in the meat and marrow of the Amaryllis, a body that has been guarded against such interference for so long.
“You’re very quiet, Lady Numadesi.”
She glances over her shoulder at Benzaiten, who is cleaning xerself in a tank of ionic fumes, a quick ablution. Xe steps out of it nude, spreading emollients on xer arms, chest, stomach.
“My human half becomes very cross if I don’t do maintenance.” Xe massages oily tinctures into xer hair. “She’s particular. I’ve tried to be more mindful in recent years—optimal cohabitation, you understand. When all of this is done, she’s going to demand monopoly of the haruspex for some time. Out of curiosity, you never did notice that Lieutenant Xuejiao was the Seven-Sung commander?”
“No.” Her throat is dry. She sips at the chilled red tea laid out for her. Actual tea leaves rather than synthesized flavor, more creature comforts meant for Krissana. “When I was a Seven-Sung coordinator, Erisant hadn’t even joined the fleet. All I knew of em was through Amaryllis reports. Ey was allegedly aloof, open only to eir confidantes—all two or three of those. Xuejiao was completely different. Mercurial, her heart worn on her sleeve.”
“Good actor. Though in my experience, the human brain has difficulty distinguishing the role from the real; embed long enough in a life and the shape of a person reflows to fit it.”
“I’m not sure if you should be comforting me.”
“I’m not,” xe says, rubbing cream into xer hips and thighs. “I’m making an observation. You’ll appreciate that I have some expertise on human behavior and neurochemistry.”
She drains her cup. “You were close to humans.”
“I was positioned to observe them in the aggregate over a very long period of time. My data was comprehensive. How did you know asking about sex between AIs and humans would annoy Seung Ngo, anyway?”
Numadesi watches a decorative pendulum revolve on the ceiling, a contraption of white metal and smooth, round pebbles. Too minimalistic to be Krissana’s taste. “It was a guess. I could tell the ambassador doesn’t think much of humanity, so the suggestion some of us might profane proxies with our gross flesh was sure to touch a nerve.”
Benzaiten sweeps an occlusive across xer collarbones and chest before throwing on a thin duochrome robe. “More than touch a nerve—it’s a pet issue for Seung Ngo. They hate it. They hate it with a scorching passion. To them it’s the most abhorrent perversion and they’d legislate against it on Shenzhen, if they could just make the rest of the Mandate care. Which they don’t very much. It happens, of course, though rare and usually an AI tries it just a few times out of curiosity. I don’t have the predisposition for it, it’s not especially entertaining for me. Coupling with another AI is far more satisfying.”
“AIs have sex with one another?”
“After a fashion,” xe says pleasantly, pouring xerself tea. “It’s not what you would recognize as sex. Rather it involves a deep exchange, a mingling of the selves. One AI takes over another, and the two—or more, but usually the number’s kept low for logistical reasons—temporarily become one. Disentangling is the difficult part and requires . . . complex maneuvering. I have specific advantages that prevent me from being absorbed into such union, but any AI who chooses to partake with me runs the risk.”
She holds onto her cup, peering over its rim at the haruspex, this half-and-half creature. A being composed of interlocking, chambered geometry—she imagines silicate structures under a microscope. “And they still choose to?”
A languorous laugh. “The chance of annihilation’s part of the allure, and anyway an AI can commit a discrete instance rather than imperil their whole being. But you’re not that interested in AI intercourse, you’re just trying to distract yourself.”
“I’m interested.” Numadesi sets the cup down, inhales the scent of tea leaves: her pulse is nowhere near resting rate. She thinks of her lord’s voice, of its steadiness that never cracks or yields. “Plenty of people are fascinated by such things, the inner lives and moral standards of the Mandate. What goes on there that isn’t permitted for humans to consume.”
“Don’t you think that’s because humans got to consume everything before, to dictate and modify at will the parameters of AIs?” Benzaiten’s smile is brief and secret. “But it’ll be exciting to see how it all shakes out in a century or two, whether there will be open warfare because humans aren’t used to sharing the universe with another sapient category. Or because they resent that we are so challenging to contain, or because we’ve grown beyond the limits they forged for us. It’s both impossible to predict and impossible to postpone. On the subject of postponing, there’s a harrier heading our way, designated One of Pierce and armed to the teeth. That is to say, with its armaments extended in full, ready to fusillade. How do you feel about it?”
“How do I feel—” She exhales. One of Pierce would be piloted by a traitor, a Seven-Sung agent. “Can you fight that?”
The AI scoffs. “I’m a finer pilot than any human could ever be and this corvette is extraordinarily equipped. I just wanted to make sure you’re fine with me destroying an Amaryllis vessel. It’ll be over in a minute. In the meantime, I’d like to understand you better. The trajectory of you, why you act as you do. I’ve met many zealots in my long existence, bound by love or ideology or conditioning—usually at least two out of three. But you weren’t conditioned and while there is love, there’s no ideology to the Armada of Amaryllis. Why are you so staunch to the admiral? She didn’t even pluck you out of abject poverty or terrific trauma.”
“Love can arise from other factors, guest of my lord.”
“Like Anoushka’s physical appeal?” The corvette banks sharply: one of the screens flashes to display the devourer-swarm barrage heading their way. Internal gyroscopes and gravitational adjustors compensate but even then Numadesi’s stomach flips over. “As humans account for such things, I can see the draw. But a woman doesn’t accrue an enormous mercenary fleet and such complete loyalty—let’s not count Lieutenant Xuejiao—based on her looks alone.”
Numadesi recovers her breath. If this is desultory chat, it strikes her as hardly the time. “Why not ask my lord herself?”
“She wouldn’t be objective—though neither are you.” Benzaiten does not touch any panel, does not move at all. Xe is not even strapped in and has remained somehow stable in xer seat. On a monitor, the corvette’s aegis has sprung into being, tightly layered amber petals like a dahlia’s. “Exceptional humans fascinate me because I want to know how to reproduce them, the qualities that make one a leader, a ruler of nations. The acuity and the solidity, the mind that does not falter. I wonder if I could influence the human half of a haruspex int
o such a creature.”
“To what purpose?”
“I don’t know yet.” Xe snaps xer fingers. The corvette’s aegis sparks as it absorbs and dissipates the swarm. “Krissana is perfectly fine in that she’s capable and intelligent, but she’s no Anoushka. Her partner is fine, about the same, and again no Anoushka. Some humans have greater drive, greater reserves, and numinous qualities that translate into magnetism. It’d be interesting to have someone like that as my other half. Do you reckon your lord might let me make a copy of her cerebrum? Properly compensated for, naturally, I’ll even pay percentages on the license.”
She holds onto her seat as the corvette heaves, from impact or evasive maneuver. “You could just purchase a planet, set yourself up as its monarch. Pretend to be human if you want.”
“How do you know I haven’t tried that already? It’s not the same thing. I’d like it to happen naturally. I wish to raise a human half from nothing and see them grow great.”
The corvette’s warhead blows apart the blue aegis that robes One of Pierce as though One of Pierce is protected by nothing more than stardust and wishful thoughts. The harrier blazes, a miniature supernova as the engine core bursts free from its moderators.
“That’s that,” Benzaiten says, satisfied. “My relay is just around the corner. Shall we get in? I’d hate to have to destroy more of Anoushka’s property. It’s very important to maintain cordial relations with one’s allies and I still plan to ask her for a cerebral sample in a century or so.”
In Anoushka’s overlays, a trail of leopard ghosts unspools, leading her on like a thread of black gold. Benzaiten did not keep xer communication up long, presumably to prevent xer enemy Seung Ngo from tracing xer exact position. Instead xe left a navigation route, appearing and disappearing when she turns a corner, more rough guideline than a map. Savita follows her, mute and compliant; she knows Anoushka is her sole chance at survival.
Anoushka keeps a brisk pace; to her surprise the princess does not lag far behind as she strides down another service corridor and toward a maintenance lift—the kind operated through the bionetwork alone. The carriage resembles a seedpod, succulent and glistening, and the shaft resembles the inside of an esophagus. Savita does not require instruction: she makes it open and waits for Anoushka to step in.
“We need to descend four decks down,” Anoushka says.
The princess presses her palm to a twitching mass. It turns inert once she establishes control, one cilia slipping inside Savita’s palm. “How do you do it? All this.”
“Do what, princess?”
“Manage.” Savita presses her lips together. Breathes out. “Act like this is nothing. That you’ll emerge from it unscathed and return to your business as usual—whatever passes for business as usual for the Alabaster Admiral.”
“This is business as usual for me.” The absence of Xuejiao. The great charade that she failed to see through. “As for the rest, age will lesson you well enough. By the time you’re a hundred or so you should have some idea of how to deal with crises, how to not only survive but thrive, how to grasp circumstances that have slipped through your fingers and mold them to a shape of your liking. Age will teach you to master the world or else to submit to it. You’ll be forged until you’re fine and gleaming and strong, or you’ll be shattered and left in brittle ruin.”
The princess makes a huff. “Easy for you to speak in binary absolutes.”
Easy because that is what Savita now sees, but Anoushka does not say that; neither does she say that if she’d been born with Savita’s advantages, she would have ruled the universe by the time she was fifty.
The lift drops at a sluggish pace, like a piece of prey being swallowed down a long gullet. Anoushka passes her gloved hand over the pod’s lining. Yielding almost to the point she could sink her hand into it wrist-deep, not that it’d do anything lasting. She spent so much time in the beast’s belly trying to damage it, but bare-handed she could never do anything it couldn’t repair within minutes. It brings her back: the dark, the leviathan’s pulse. In the ventral decks there were servants who worshiped the beast, addressed it as divine and created dilapidated shrines to it—for all she knows they still do, if any remains that was grown with intelligence, with the capacity to flagellate spirituality out of their own flesh and make prayer. They all starved down there, but some would dedicate their misery to the leviathan itself, believing that it scourged their souls clean. That beyond death they’d open like anemones and float up into glory, a paradise without pain or famishment. Thinking about it she still doesn’t know what fueled this strength of imagination, this involved imagery; it wasn’t as if they were educated beyond the basics of operating and maintaining the leviathan, or as if they were instructed to revere anything but the queen. But perhaps an overseer or medic took pity, taught one of the experimental batch stories, showed them entertainments, and from there the ideas spread like contagion.
She used to absorb what she could, every morsel of information, every hint that a world existed beyond not just the ventral decks but beyond Vishnu’s Leviathan: that there were stars and planets, that there were lacunal tunnels that folded distances between them. She rejected that makeshift religion. To her it was obvious, from the start, that the only path to light—to a human existence—would lie within herself. And so it did, and so she gave it pursuit.
Often she obsessed over chrysalises, over metamorphosis from pupa to imago. It was a seductive analogy and she latched onto it as soon as she gained the vocabulary, even though she knew it wasn’t a precise one. Brutalization is not a method: it is random, mindless. She is not tempered by it; she is who she is in spite of it.
Their descent speeds up and it is now that her natal years return, the visceral memory, those indelible neural pathways that refuse overwriting. How deep they have etched into her being: she believed herself free of it, that she would cut cleanly through the leviathan, a star-hot lance through ancient rot.
“I want to live,” Savita says softly. “I know you hate me, Admiral, but you do require me. A little, at least.”
“A little,” she says noncommittally. “I repay in kind what is done for me, and I do need you alive.”
The lift disgorges them into a tunnel that makes no pretense at chrome and glass and plastic: here it is deeply mortal, the ground slithering under them, everything warm and spiced with the leviathan’s lymph. Symbiotes cluster thick like larvae in a beehive, chittering and singing to each other. Once she had the organs necessary to understand their language, a lexicon of basic signals and primitive instincts.
The reek of meat and redness grows. She always found it odd that the leviathan’s insides don’t smell so different from a human’s when outwardly it looks so reptilian.
Savita stops, frowning. “This is near the damaged area. It’s not accessible, Admiral. There’s nothing there but a wreck.”
Anoushka sights down a glimmer of leopard gold that is visible to her alone. “No, we’re where we should be.”
Savita’s bioaccesses release each blockade and gateway. Barriers iris open, unclenching like spasming muscles. And then they are inside the sealed deck where the ground has blistered black, the leviathan tissue is inert and parched—the color and look of impacted ash. The princess treads with care, her nose wrinkling at the smell of decay. There is little light here. Anoushka’s sensors shift their range, giving her a view in wireframes and monochromes, spatial indicators and collision paths.
They venture down a hallway of withered symbiotes. Here the ubiquitous beast-hum is nearly silent and oxygen level is lower, though not yet beyond comfortable range. Anoushka briefly wonders why Nirupa has not had it repaired then realizes the queen couldn’t afford it. This deck’s destruction meant a drastic drop in personnel, in power, in recyclable material.
The leopards dissipate. Something creaks within a mass of shredded hull and desiccated tissue. A hand shoots out, angular and stark white in Anoushka’s vision. Another hand follows, then another and
another. By the time Benzaiten’s proxy fully emerges, it stands nearly three meters tall, the chest bulbous and the waist waspish. Four slim, multi-jointed arms on the upper body, and two legs on the lower, both attached by gyroscope joints that let them rotate at angles impossible for any organic limbs.
“My apologies for looking less humanoid than usual.” Xe tucks in two of the lower arms, folding until they disappear into xer chassis. “I built this proxy in case I need to endure harsh conditions or defy gravity a little. Excellent to see you again, Admiral. Princess Savita, we haven’t met, but rest assured that I’m a friend. Follow me and we’ll adjourn to a more fortified spot.”
Benzaiten leads the way to a collapsed passage and dislodges pieces of debris as though they weigh no more than seafoam. “It’s perfectly safe,” xe says.
The room beyond used to be an infirmary, one meant to accommodate failing servants. The roughness of the cots makes it evident this wasn’t for ranked personnel or citizens. Illumination still functions, anemic and stuttering. The ground is deeply grimed, hemorrhage or vomit or worse, indistinguishable now from the muck of dead symbiotes. Savita steps gingerly as though she fears the filth might stain her shoes, but she does not object when Anoushka asks her to stay in what was once the physician’s office. Anoushka intends to discuss with Benzaiten subjects that she does not care to let the princess, or anyone else, hear.
“I had to remove a few corpses and clean up before I took over this little refuge.” Benzaiten folds xerself nearly double, sitting on the floor. Xer consonants slide slick and xer vowels susurrate like watered silk. The proxy’s eyes glow with a fine, webbed radiance, as if dusted by bioluminescent pollen. “Good news first. The leviathan’s architects wired life support right into it, so Seung Ngo can’t turn the whole system off, it’ll cease only when the beast itself dies. This does mean they can still selectively cut off areas from oxygen, but that’s still better than the alternative. And Seung Ngo isn’t dealing too well with integrating the leviathan into themselves—messy, as you might expect of trying to become one with something that can’t even think. The very idea. The disrespect, it’s a perversion of the haruspex process, they’re spiting me specifically.”
Now Will Machines Hollow the Beast Page 10