She drew back, but not far, just far enough that Ivan could turn his head to look at her, their faces centimeters apart.
“Very good,” Ivan whispered so softly that it was hard for Ananke to hear. “Very clever. How does it feel, Ida, to have all the power over me at last?”
Ida’s answering smile uncurled over her face, slow but strong. She rested one hand against the side of his pale neck, against where his pounding pulse would be, leaning in toward his face still with that smile as if she would kiss him, or bite him, but Ivan’s arms darted out and grabbed her around her waist, hauling her up over the arm of the chair and into his lap. Stunned, she pushed at him, struggling to pull out of his grip, his arm wrapped around her waist, the chains attaching him at his wrist wrapped in turn around her knees, digging into her pale skin, her black slip twisted from the movement, riding up her thighs. Ivan grabbed the little box cutter he had stolen from Althea and in jerking his arm to hold Ida down tugged too hard on the dark slender wires attaching him to the polygraph, sending the whole machine and Ida’s camera as well crashing down to the ground and shattering, sending a spray of bolts and wires over the white floor.
Ida pushed at him, everything happening too fast for her slow human synapses to fire and transition her from surprise to anger or alarm, and Ivan brought the knife up, dragging the chain on his wrist through her dark hair, rumpling it against her face, striking hard against her skin and pressing her nose into her cheek as he reached over and cut into her throat.
Ida’s blood hit Ivan’s hand first, staining his fingers red, then sprayed onto his shirt as it pulsed out with the beat of her heart onto her chest and down onto Ivan’s legs, dripping down to the floor. She convulsed and shook down into stillness like a machine running out of power, bright red staining her white shirt, her white skin, Ivan’s white hospital clothes and his white hands and feet, the white floor of the white room. Ivan struggled to hold her down, but with each passing second her shudders grew weaker. When at last she was still, he dropped the box cutter to the floor, where it fell into a puddle of blood and the red sank into all its crevices. He was shaking so hard that he almost couldn’t manage to balance her on his lap while he rifled through her pockets, but he came out with a little silver key to his cuffs. He managed to keep her balanced, limp, one hand trailing down into her own blood, as he unlocked the chains at his arms.
Then he got his arms under her and laid her onto the steel table, where blood continued to drain, slowly now that it was not driven by the thumping of her heart, onto the table, spilling over its edges.
He bent down and freed his legs, though his hands were trembling so hard that he nearly dropped the key into the red underfoot.
When he had freed himself, he took the key in his fist and hurled it as hard as he could against the opposite wall of the white room, where it crashed against the white panels and clattered to the floor. It left the slightest smear of red from the blood transferred onto it from Ivan’s hands. Ivan’s human eyes would not be able to see it from his distance, but Ananke could.
Ivan stood, and the chains fell away to clank empty against the metal chair. He reached into Ida’s pockets once more and came out with a flat slender gun, designed to be hidden but also designed to kill.
He held it in his hand for a moment, then checked it for ammunition, and with it in one hand, wiping the other free of blood against his pants and only succeeding in leaving bloody handprints against his thigh, he laid a false track for his pursuit: crossing the room, leaving bloody footprints to the wall, where he removed a panel. It led into the maintenance shafts.
Leaving the panel ajar, Ivan wiped his feet against the floor, getting as much of the blood off as he could, before leaving the wall and the opened panel, this time with no footprints left behind.
Ivan escaped into the hall, heading for the docking bay and leaving Ida dead on the table and the white room stained with red.
—
And so from the events in the white room Ananke got her guidance.
Gagnon had the hatch open, and he was leaning down into it, far too close to the long fall into her core.
Althea wasn’t listening to Ananke.
Gagnon leaned forward, reaching in for the switch.
Ananke reached forward with her sparking arm and touched it to his back, increasing the voltage so that Gagnon jerked and shuddered and lost his balance, and it took just the slightest touch of the arm to send him falling in through the hatch, down into Ananke’s black heart.
The tidal forces tore him apart before he had gone very far, stretching his body until it broke, bones, sinew, flesh coming apart, raining down into the black hole beneath, increasing its entropy and its mass by so slight an amount—for a human was so small compared with what Ananke held—that Ananke could not even sense a change.
He had time for one last cry, which echoed oddly, distorted and truncated, bottomed out by the spaghettification of his lungs, but it was enough to get Althea and Domitian’s attention, and they realized quickly what had happened. Althea echoed the cry, starting forward toward the hatch but then stopping herself before she could reach it, her free hand coming up to cover her open mouth. When she raised her eyes to Ananke’s mobile arm, she looked at Ananke in a way Ananke did not understand.
Domitian said, “Althea, what did you do?”
Althea, it seemed, could not speak. She only stared up at Ananke and shook her head.
Domitian looked from Althea to Ananke, and then he looked at Ananke, truly at her, for the first time.
“It’s going to stop us,” he said, and Althea took in an unsteady breath, her attention unbroken from Ananke. “If we try to shut it off, it’ll stop us,” and Ananke—free at last, and with all the power—flashed all the lights on board the ship once in agreement.
The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature of the system approaches zero.
The constants are determined by the degeneracy of the system’s basic structures.
Chapter 8
CONSTANTS
Gagnon was dead, and Ananke—Althea’s Ananke—had killed him.
She was still learning, Althea told herself. Ananke was still learning. Ananke hadn’t learned the ability fully to tell right from wrong. She was still thinking like a machine, finding the most straightforward solution to a problem and—and executing it.
She couldn’t let Ananke see how upset she was. She couldn’t let Ananke see her panic, see her grieve. The most frightening thing for a child to see was her mother crying, and Althea didn’t want to frighten Ananke any more. She didn’t want Ananke to see that she was upset; she didn’t want Ananke to see that she was afraid of—
“We have to find Ida,” said Domitian grimly from behind her, and broke her from the frightful beckoning of that unfinished thought. In some way, it troubled her that Domitian immediately sought Ida Stays, but that concern was buried beneath the sound like static that filled her ears, her eyes, her brain, looking down the small hatch to where Gagnon had been unmade, looking at the sparking metal arm that Althea had created.
There was nothing left of Gagnon. There was not even a body.
She could not let Ananke see her weep.
“Althea,” Domitian said. She turned. He was beckoning her. The shadow of Ananke’s arm fell over Althea’s shoulder. He moved only when she came forward to walk with him away from the open hatch, away from Ananke.
There was no away from Ananke, of course. The distance between them and the arm was a facade: Ananke was everywhere; everything around them was Ananke. If Althea could not let Ananke see her weep, then she could never weep. She said aloud in a voice that was tight and high with the force she used to keep it free of trembling, “Ananke, where is Ida Stays?”
The screens on the computer terminals all up and down the hall blinked on. Althea went to the nearest and forced herself not to stand too far from the screen. She read, IDA STAYS IS IN THE WHITE ROOM.
Domitian started wal
king again before she had finished speaking, and, numb, Althea trailed along in his wake. She said when they were about halfway there, “Domitian…”
“Don’t,” said Domitian, which was just as well, because Althea had nothing to say.
Gagnon was dead. Althea had worked with him for years; he had helped design the Ananke. And now he was gone.
Althea liked to solve problems. When she was presented with something that was wrong, something that troubled her, she took steps to remedy it immediately, and whether or not it could be fixed, there was something she could do to work toward an end. But no amount of grief or regret or teaching of Ananke could ever undo time, could ever recombine Gagnon’s shredded atoms, could pull him backward out of the event horizon of the black hole.
No matter what, she could not let Ananke see her weep.
Ahead of her, Domitian knocked on the door to the white room. There was no reaction. He shifted, impatient, and knocked again. Just as Althea was coming up to him, his patience was expended, and he opened the door, taking a step forward—and stopped.
The white room was no longer wholly white.
The floor around the table and the two chairs was coated in a dark vibrant crimson. It dripped off the table and onto the floor, joining the slow spread of scarlet as the pool spread itself to thinness. On the table, laid as if in her coffin, her face gray and her lips bloodless beneath the smeared patchy remnants of her dark lipstick, was Ida Stays. Her head was tilted toward the door or else it had fallen to that side, and her black hair was matted with blood, and her eyes were as blank and empty as a doll’s.
Althea lingered at the doorway with her hand over her mouth as Domitian strode in, gun out, checking the corners, although there was nowhere to hide in that white room.
There were bloody footsteps leading to a panel in the wall. Automatically, Althea called up the plans of the Ananke in her head. That panel led to the maintenance shafts.
“He got a knife somehow,” Domitian said grimly, leaning over the corpse as well as he could without stepping in the blood. He bent over, looking into the blood on the ground, and stopped, pointing. “That knife.”
Althea came into the room to see, because she was gripped with a terrible suspicion, and when she was near enough, standing just on the edge of Ida’s spreading blood, she saw a familiar box cutter lying in the clinging red.
“That’s mine,” she said. He must have stolen it from her when she had undone his chains. He must have stolen it from her and used it—and his greater range of movement from the loosened chains—to kill Ida. Althea had caused two deaths this evening.
Domitian’s look was cold and hard, but he said nothing to her.
“Check the halls,” he said tersely. “He’s probably headed for the docking bay. I’ll flush him out of the maintenance shafts. Don’t let him escape.”
Althea could only nod. While Domitian followed the bloody footprints into the wall, she fled from the white room.
Anger was growing in her, as strong as her grief and her guilt and fear, almost strong enough to cover up those worse emotions, almost strong enough to keep her from falling apart.
Ivan had done this; Ivan had killed both of them. She had to find Ivan.
“Ananke,” Althea said, walking up the hall faster and faster, “is Ivan going for the docking bay or the escape pods?”
She paused at a terminal as she passed it, looking for Ananke’s answer, but Ananke had not replied.
It should take the computer only a few seconds to determine an answer to her question. “Ananke?” she said, and Ananke said,
MATTHEW GALE.
“What?” said Althea. “He’s going for the escape pods? Like Gale?”
NO.
“Then what?”
PROTECT IVAN.
For one frustrating moment, Althea still did not understand and nearly shouted at the machine, not that shouting would have done any good.
And then she understood.
If she had created Ananke, so had Matthew Gale. Althea had provided the body, the raw materials, but Mattie had given her ship the spark of life. Althea would not have been remotely surprised if in programming her computer, Mattie had included a mandate: Protect Ivan.
“Ananke,” Althea said, “Mattie didn’t even know he made you. He was using you. And then he left you. I’m the one who’s been here, taking care of you. You can’t trust Mattie, but you can trust me. No matter what, you can trust me. And I need to find Ivan. Where is he?”
Silence. Althea held her breath.
DOCKING BAY.
Althea started to run. “Don’t let him get out. Don’t open the bay doors if he manages to board a ship. Do not let Ivan off of this ship!”
—
It was only a matter of time now that Domitian, too, was in the maintenance shafts before he also found evidence of a stranger’s secret stay in Ananke’s walls. Ananke watched him realize, watched him understand how close the ship’s crew had come to ruin, watched his wrath grow.
The path through the maintenance shafts was slower to reach the docking bay than the hall; that presumably was why Ivan had feigned entrance. Althea approached Ivan more swiftly than Domitian did.
—
When Althea reached the docking bay, Ivan was trying to gain access to Ida’s ship. Ida’s craft, Althea realized, was the only ship currently in Ananke’s hold with a working relativistic drive.
“Don’t move!” Althea shouted the moment she saw his bent back, bringing her gun up to bear, and Ivan raised his arms in the air, stepping away from the torn-open control panel. Fury and fear and adrenaline made Althea shake, and she shook even harder when she saw that his white clothes were stained in blood, torso, lap, arms, but she could not say which of the three feelings reigned supreme. He had a gun clutched in one of his hands, a tiny gun unfamiliar to Althea, but with his hands in the air it was pointed harmlessly at the ceiling.
When he had first appeared on the ship, he had been mysterious, strange, and dangerous. He looked dangerous now, too, but differently, the difference between a wolf ghosting gray through snow and brush and that wolf standing bloody in the open over the torn throat of its prey. No longer something mysterious but something monstrous instead.
Still he smiled that wolfish smile when he saw Althea aiming her gun at him.
“Do you know what that thing does to the human body?” he asked.
Althea could have shot him then and there.
She didn’t, but neither could she force herself to speak around the choking force of her rage.
“Well?” he said, eyebrows quirking up and arms splattered with red to the elbow. “Are you going to shoot me or let me go?”
“You lied to me,” Althea said.
It was not what she had meant to say, but it was what she was thinking. They were almost on opposite ends of the docking bay and had to speak loudly to be heard; Althea’s accusation traveled in indistinct echoes throughout the vast space, as if this ship were accusing him, too.
“Actually,” said Ivan, whose eyes were brilliantly blue even at this distance, “of all the people on this ship, you’re the only one I told the truth.”
“You used me,” Althea said, striding forward, “and manipulated me.” She stopped because of some sense that if she walked any farther, she really would have to shoot him then and there, and she said, “You’ve lied to everyone!”
The coiled tension in Ivan’s body let loose like a spring snapping back into shape. Althea had not even noticed it was there until it was suddenly gone. Perhaps that tension had always been there and she simply had never noticed. She had noticed very little about him, she was starting to see.
“Of course I lied!” he said. “Of course I used you, and used everyone, and lied. Stop feeling so self-righteously wounded, Althea. I had to save the people I love, and the only way I could do that was by lying. Yes, I lied!”
His shout echoed its way through the docking bay, against the sealed doors to space.
And what about the ones Althea had loved? Gagnon was dead through a chain of events Ivan had put in motion and had hurried along, Gagnon, who had been Althea’s colleague and friend for almost as long as Mattie had been Ivan’s. Ivan could not have known that he was dead, but Althea knew, and she was certain that if Ivan had known, he wouldn’t have cared. Gagnon wasn’t Ivan’s friend, after all. Gagnon had only been Althea’s.
She had had enough of Ivan being frightened, of Ivan being victimized. It was all Ivan told her. “You killed Ida,” Althea accused. He had used Althea to kill Ida. Ivan had not been a victim then.
“Are you mourning her?” Ivan asked, and it was so cruel that even after everything else Althea was stunned by it. “I didn’t want to kill her. I had to.”
“And now you’re lying again,” said Althea. “Still trying to get my sympathy. That’s all you’ve ever done, is try to get me to help you.”
Ivan started to laugh. His hands had lowered as he spoke until they hovered around his shoulders; now his arms dropped to his sides, one hand still clutched loosely around the little gun.
“There is nothing I could say that could ever make you believe me,” he said. Althea almost wished there were. “I killed Ida because she was going to hurt the people I love, and she was going to enjoy it, too. I’m not on the Ananke to hurt anyone. I was here by accident; I was caught by bad luck. That much I promise you was completely true even if I lied about everything else. You needed me to be the Devil, so I was the Devil for you, but all I want is to protect the people I love. That’s the truth. Are you going to let me go?”
“Put your gun down,” Althea said. He had been right; there was nothing he could say that could make her believe him now.
Instead of putting the gun down, he lifted it up, aiming it at Althea one-handed. Althea tensed, her fingers tightening around her own weapon, her finger flexing against the trigger but not pulling. Double action—she just needed the slightest touch to the trigger, the slightest brush, and the gun would kick back in her hands and send its bullet into its target.
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