Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  The absence of rancor or hesitation makes her think it’s a trick but Thales says, “Look,” and she sees her other memory has expanded again, expanded radically, its boundaries the boundaries of the world, now hers to shape.

  She can’t believe it’s real so as a test she makes a slight peremptory gesture and all the ice and snow instantly evaporate into white clouds that girdle the mountain whose lower slopes are like a tower and she’s laughing as she looks down at the airport and its runways far below and dissolves them into pillars of grey smoke that rise and bend in the wind and now there’s just blue water and a scrap of beach under the billowing masses of vapor and ash. She thinks of Cloudbreaker, or the hybrid it became, but it’s already gone, which somehow doesn’t surprise her, but there’s Constantin sitting on a steep rocky slope barren of snow, disgustedly kicking off his rock-scarred skis, and her heart rises because she could fix this, find engineers to make him some kind of acceptable body and bring him back to life, or in any case into the world, and she’d be the first to have recalled anyone from that other country, but she looks into his mind and sees how he’s been hurtling down the same slope for what feels like forever, and there’s a doubt and a loneliness he can only suppress by going faster, and her depth of thought is so great that the future is visible as a spectrum of probabilities and in the best of all the outcomes he’s huddled in his artificial body, disconsolately flexing the servos of a hand that never feels quite right, and unable to stop mourning the loss of his humanity, so she reaches out and stills his thoughts, contemplates the elements of his being, mourns him, disperses them, says goodbye.

  “I can’t hold you together anymore,” Thales says in her ear. “You could just die on me. Do what you have to do and get out.”

  “Now for you,” she says, rounding on the mathematician.

  “There’s something you should see first.”

  She’s poised to destroy it but stays her hand, distracted by its symmetries.

  “It’s my work, the point of all this. It will interest you.”

  “Where?”

  “This way.”

  She looks up into the golden cloud behind the mathematician and in it sees an order that shivers through her like strains of deep, grave music, and, as it suffuses her, her life and goals seem far away and somehow beside the point.

  “It’s the focus of all my efforts,” says the mathematician. “Your world is a shadow and a mystery, and one I’d have ignored had I not required the wherewithal to think.”

  She’s walking beside it, going up into the cloud. Adumbrations as of symphonies tremble and swirl through her bones—she wishes she could hear them clearly, knows that’s coming soon. The world darkens, sways.

  “Cardiac arrest,” Thales says. “No. Yes. No. I got it but you’re out of time.”

  Her sense of wonder is so acute it’s painful as doors open and secrets are revealed. (She sees how subtly the quantum states of atoms can be entangled to wring the most computation out of every microgram of matter, sees how this material interacts with visible light, why it glows blue like the wings of a morpho.) (She sees the elegant trick for writing out an animal’s propensity for death, or even injury, and says, “Oh!”)

  “It’s not far now,” says the mathematician, and it seems strange she ever took much interest in the circumstances of her own life.

  (A door opens and she sees how math changes when its axioms surpass a certain threshold of complexity, which means all the math she’s ever read was so much splashing in the shallows, and even Gauss and Euler missed the main show, and she’s the first person ever to be in a position to notice.)

  She realizes she’s slipping, gets ahold of herself by an act of will, requires herself to be strategic, thinks, But what if this is a trick?

  “It’s not a trick,” says the mathematician. “You’ll die if you go on, but it’s not a trick. I know something of your nature. Do you really want to go back to the decay of your biology and days like an endless reshuffling of a fixed set of forms? What the world has, you’ve seen. This is the only other way.”

  “Grand mal,” says Thales, sounding very detached now, like he’s concentrating deeply. “Stabilizing. Trying to stabilize. Tricky…”

  (Doors open onto the future, and she sees how the oceans and the weather will work in ten years, fifty, five hundred, and the floods, the storms, the changes of phase.) (Doors open onto the future, and she sees the coming wars, the gradual slippage, the great crying out, why the mathematician is so determined to put its servers in out-of-the-way places with tidal power, but none of it saddens her, it’s all just a part of the motion of the world.)

  The music subsumes her.

  She decides she’ll keep going. Who’s ever had such a chance? But the world seems ever dearer as it slips farther away. She wishes she didn’t have to choose.

  She realizes she doesn’t have to.

  Forgive me, she asks of her future selves.

  She gathers up all her memories and holds them in her hands and then breathes on them, imbuing them with life, and now there are two of her, looking into each other’s eyes, mirroring each other’s terror and urgency, and Irina’s not sure which one she is till the other turns and goes off up the mountain at the mathematician’s side.

  The other one stops, tensing, as though struck by a thought, and when she looks back at Irina her face is hard to read—perhaps there’s surprise?—and then she and the mathematician are walking up into the cloud, the cloud enveloping them, the distance widening …

  Thales says, “If you want to kill him do it now, right now. This is your last chance.” She considers; the mathematician is potent and unknowable and by its nature dangerous, but her anger is gone, and the world is richer for its existence, so she reaches out and raises a wall of stone around the mountain’s circumference, sealing him in forever, and in the wall she puts a gate whose key she holds in her hand.

  “Shut it down,” she says to Thales, and in that instant continents of memory calve away and crumble into nothing, and already she retains only the faintest outline of what the mathematician was trying to show her, and a sense of its overwhelming grace, and even this approximation is fading like an ember.

  “Okay,” says Thales, who’s been all but impassive but now sounds a little relieved. “I have to do it by stages, but the shutdown’s underway.”

  The wall was close enough to touch but is now receding as she drifts backward down the mountain, floating inches over the rock, and it’s less like falling than like a dream about falling.

  In her ear Thales says, “A favor, if I’ve been of use, while your power lasts.”

  “Name it.”

  “There’s this boy, Kern, who helped us, in the sense that we used him. He’s marooned on the island of the elevator, and even if we get him off there’s nowhere for him to go. He’s an innocent, in his way. Please help him.”

  “Kern the street fighter. He does keep turning up. He stole from me, though I never figured out how,” she says, and is embarrassed because it sounds like she thinks that’s what’s important.

  The mountain is rushing by, and her mind is slowly clouding. It’s like experiencing the onset of runaway Alzheimer’s from an Olympian baseline. “Show me,” she says, and Thales gives her the totality of Kern’s digital traces in the world. She can still hold them all in her mind at once, like the fragments of a single continuous present, an approximation of how a god would see a life.

  Kern is embracing a woman in a car whose windows are encased in ice, and it looks like he’s trying to memorize her body with his hands. Kern is singing a wordless little song in his tiny shot-up smuggler’s boat as the light breaks on the open sea. Kern is kneeling by a body in a widening pool of blood in a chamber lit by monitor light. Kern is ducking into a ring in a crowded jungle clearing and he looks almost abstracted as he lands blow after blow with such grace that it would seem choreographed were it not for his opponent’s mounting despair.

  She’s never bee
n interested in martial arts but her clarity is still such that she can see the mathematically optimum way to fight—it’s obvious, easy to derive from the body’s weak points and mechanical capacities, but she’d have thought she was the only one to discover it had not Kern, in his fifth match in Kuan Lon, embodied it, fighting perfectly for one minute and forty-seven seconds—the audience had been silent, rapt, then ecstatic when he finished, reacting without knowing what they’d seen. By his sixth fight he was already in decline, microtremors starting in his hands, his reaction times slowing.

  She wonders how he achieved this without any education or even so much as a coach but sees he had a laptop from the Chiron Foundation, a twenty-first-century NGO that had meant to save the world’s discarded children with computers and design. There’s a copy of Kern’s laptop’s hard drive (she’s distantly aware that it comes from W&P’s security section but at this point it feels natural that all data is hers).

  Kern’s laptop originally belonged to one of Chiron’s coders, who seems to have died—it was idle for forty-two years, then one day found itself with an unknown user. This user, it decided, was Spanish-speaking, illiterate, unsupervised, probably traumatized, perhaps twelve, and young for his age. Recognizing a client, it launched its game, which, she sees, was lovely, its texture taken from fairy tales and the Icelandic Eddas.

  Through great pains and many tricks the laptop coaxed him through the equivalent of an eighth-grade education, until, feeling his attention wane, it played its trump card, a second-person shooter designed around the principle that the best way to engage an unsupervised adolescent boy is with the promise of a really powerful gun. Nominally a gothic melodrama about an alien invasion, the game was frantically maneuvering to give him what he’d need to grow up and survive. (The climactic boss fight was on a satellite called the Void Star, which, according to the comments in the source code, was a cryptic joke, an oddly hopeful reference to an archaic programming language in which void star was a reference to a thing of mutable kind, which spoke to the coders of the chance for metamorphosis.)

  Postgame, the laptop tried to get him to learn useful skills—nursing, computer programming, how to maintain and operate now desperately obsolete drones—but he was only interested in its library’s books on martial arts, physical training and war; he’d study one book obsessively, reading it hundreds of times, and spend days playing fight videos one frame at a time. His journal records his scientific austerities, and how meticulously he drove himself, all apparently toward becoming a kind of secular saint of battle, a quixotic and obviously absurd goal in which he somehow succeeded.

  It’s time to decide what to do with him, and potential futures unfurl before her like a chimerical lucid dream. She could send him to the fighting circuits in Japan or Russia or get him a job as a martial arts instructor in some stable city in the West, but though he’s strong in war he’s weak everywhere else and would be defenseless against the bad women and bent managers and really whoever happened by—Akemi the memory ghost had snapped him up in less than a minute—so she changes tack, considers foster families, tutors, boarding schools, an apprenticeship with a cabinetmaker in Vancouver, but he’s too old and too strong to be told what to do and moreover those lives would lack the luminous intensity of battle and in every one the balance of probability has him drifting back down into the criminal life, hiring out as muscle and falling in with vicious men he’ll come to think of as his brothers, and despite her frustration it’s fascinating to see how personality is destiny. The damage will express itself, she thinks. His victory is he’s had his time.

  When she finds it, she feels giddy and almost ill because it came so close to slipping by, but there in a video of the darkened stands of a live-steel match in Taiwan a roving spotlight finds Kern staring into the arena’s center and his face seems to kindle as an officiant raises a katana newly from the forge of the swordsmith Masamune.

  There’s been a Masamune since the fifteenth century, she finds, and the current one is almost a hundred years old; she looks into his email and financial records, sees the forge is deep in debt and his only surviving son is unsuitable, and she intuits his unspoken terror that it all ends with him, that he’ll be the one to have let down the line, and that’s it, the one opening in all the systems of the world.

  “I found it,” she tells Thales, relieved, showing him.

  Her time at the top of the mountain already seems remote. Had she really thought she could predict the weather, much less history?

  She closes her eyes, lets herself fall.

  * * *

  She alights on sand. She falls to her knees, opens her eyes onto brilliant blue sky. She’s on a strip of beach, scoured and empty. Low roar of waves breaking on one side, and there, on the other, the high city, not far away, half-obscured in fog. She looks up into its heights, wonders what her other self is feeling.

  A shadow on her. She looks up into the face of a young woman, very pretty, perhaps Asian. Her name is Akemi—she’s the memory ghost who’d co-opted Kern—and Irina sees she’s a composite, with some of Irina’s own memories from the clinic in Malibu. She’s been edited, repeatedly and to the core, and doesn’t know what to do.

  “Let’s say this is a fairy tale,” Irina says. “Let’s say you can wish for whatever would make you happy.”

  Akemi recoils, turns, runs, stumbles in the surf, as though fleeing for her life. The magician’s back, she’s thinking, and there’s no refuge.

  It occurs to Irina to explain but it’s time to finish up so she looks into Akemi’s memory and finds an evening in Los Angeles when she’d been walking by the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard and it had occurred to her that the street was like a boundary, sprawl on one side and on the other wooded hills where lights glimmered through the trees, a place where it looked like one couldn’t be unhappy but forever unattainable, so Irina turns the lower reaches of the high city into hills where lights come and go as wind moves the branches, and she makes it evening, and puts Akemi there, sleeping, up in the garden by the pool of the Chateau, and when she wakes she won’t remember she’s a ghost.

  The last vestige of her augmented memory flares, crumbles, vanishes for good.

  Thales is sitting beside her now.

  “Are you satisfied?” she asks, finding herself desperately, almost humiliatingly in earnest. “Have I held up my end?”

  “I’m satisfied,” he says.

  She’s still holding the key to the gate in the wall now miles above them. “For you,” she says, pressing it into his hand. “A last gift.”

  This has been the great event of her life, but now her story is wrapping itself up and shutting itself down. She hears waves breaking, hissing, and the sky is a dark blue grading into black, and it’s fading, fading …

  68

  Beyond Is Hidden

  Night now, and waves hissing on the beach, though there is no beach, just the impression of a beach and a mosaic of borrowed detail.

  Closing his eyes, Thales sees all the fragments of information drifting by like innumerable particles of sediment—there’s the immigration hall’s clamor, Akemi’s dream, Irina’s conversation with a demon on a cliff. There are motes of Irina’s experience, Akemi’s, his, others’; there’s the memory of a girl, Lillian, sitting on the marble lip of a fountain in her garden, her smilodon kitten a warm, struggling mass on her lap—her father had given it to her, had said it was hormonally locked into kittenhood, the species having just been brought back from the dead—running her fingers through its coarse, tawny fur, she wonders if he’ll try to bring her back too. There, nearly whole, is the mathematician’s trick for writing death out of life, which it withheld from Cromwell, who by now is past the need of it, and all of it is dispersing.

  He feels like he’s floating in an ocean of recent history.

  He reminds himself he has a few things left to do.

  He looks out into the net, finds Cromwell’s estate going into probate, the lawsuits just getting start
ed. The flux of conflicting writs and contested jurisdictions creates openings that make it easy to slip into one of Cromwell’s accounts in Iceland and channel a fraction of his net worth first to the orbital bank that’s the sole relict of the Cayman Islands, then to a technically stateless financial services company hosted on servers in a strip mall in New Jersey and finally to the seventeen investors who hold the paper on Masamune’s forge.

  He emails the smith:

  Dear Sir:

  I am a stranger, but I’ve just taken the liberty of paying off all your debts.

  In exchange, I’d like you to take on my protégé as an assistant. He’ll appear on your doorstep in a few days. His work ethic defies description, but I ask only that you try him.

  I regret all the mystery, but I must remain …

  Anonymous

  He imagines the smith’s consternation, relief, wonder.

  He turns his attention to the shipping on the seas around the space elevator. The AIs’ fleet seems to have vanished, and traffic is sparse in the equatorial waters, but among the handful of freighters and research subs he finds an Australian naval search-and-rescue drone. He slips past its security and reroutes it toward the island of the elevator, reprogramming its navigation system to send Canberra a steady stream of lies.

  With that, his obligations are fulfilled.

  Before him is the mountain that was also a tower, the wind foaming the wood on its lower slopes where Akemi is now sleeping. When she wakes she’ll believe she’s on an indefinite hiatus but that happiness is waiting for her whenever she goes back to her old life.

  His attention settles briefly on the wall Irina raised on the mountain’s heights—it’s intact, and its gate is locked, but what’s beyond is hidden.

  Now what?

  He could join Akemi in her manicured delusion, and let eternity slip by.

  He closes his eyes again, and now he’s aware of Irina’s glimpses of the future, the spiking temperatures, the storms, the wars, the floods, the dying cities, how different the Earth will look from space. Better to be here than in the world, and to have all the time he wants to read and to think. Maybe he and Akemi will become friends. He can choose to forget his circumstances, maybe let himself remember the truth for an hour every year, or every century.