Drozanoth jabbed at the iron cage; Akhmetov groaned at last, and rolled over. The rag had fallen off his face, revealing an eye not wounded but gone, and replaced with something else, a bubbling mass of smaller lenses, dark-blue and moving slightly, like a fly’s. I looked away.
“Bring her to me,” it said, turning back to me. “You, I want you to bring her. It would only be fitting. And in return... hmm? We could spare your people, perhaps. A very reasonable offer.”
“An Earth full of you things that doesn’t even look like Earth any more? You think I want my family to live in that? Your Earth? No thanks. We’ve done enough surviving in places overrun by outsiders. I’d rather we all just died together.”
“Empty bravado, I think. All things wish to live.”
“Not me.”
“You want more? I respect that. So, it is not that you will not do this thing? You wish only a greater reward? Yes, I can respect that. Now, supposing… There are Ssarati we have made promises to. Giving them... land, power. Dominion over some survivors. Like a...”
“Reservation.”
“A menagerie,” Drozanoth said. “You could have one too. You could be its king. Inside which we would not interfere nor modify to our preferences.”
“I don’t want to be a king. Or run a zoo. And she’s going to stop you. Stop this war.”
“She cannot. His Lordship the Manifestation is too powerful for that—too powerful to be stopped by any mere spell, especially one cast by a human. We gave her thoughts, we did not give her power. It is like you do not even know what the word means.”
It strode across the floor and stopped in front of me: and there it was at last, there was the fear. Buried in revulsion, but not deep enough to hide the sudden realization that no, I didn’t want to die, and I didn’t want to suffer, and I didn’t want to be infected, and only this creature’s insistence on playing its game was letting me live.
“Your world belongs to us no matter what you do,” it hissed. “No matter what she does. No matter what we do, for that matter. Because what has started cannot be stopped. You therefore may choose to deny me, and die; or accept, and live. There will still be beauty in the world... there will be sunrises and sunsets. And for a time, they will be even more beautiful than before, through the ash and smoke of your burning humans. There will still be green, which you seem to prize so much. There will still be birdsong, even if the only survivors are those who eat the dead.
“And the ocean? Why, when it is dead of all the things which arose in it, it will still be blue, and it will still shimmer in the moonlight. We will leave you your moon. Why not?”
“No.”
“Ah, you still want to play. Good.” It absentmindedly stroked its remaining wing, which shrieked in response just at the threshold of hearing. “Supposing I send you home. To your Earth. And make for you a remnant in which to live for... a little time. Some of your years. Say, a hundred. A nice round number. Then you will die a peaceful death, and your people too, and you will not even see us arrive. You cannot say no to that. And you will never get home otherwise. I can tell you that much.”
I opened my mouth this time and closed it again. They lied, They all of them lied; and the monster would say anything, anything. To play the game, to win the war, to satisfy its pride, to revenge its insult. All the same, how could we get home by ourselves?
And yet: her, her. Not just what she was, but what she could be.
Everything will be taken from you. That’s what they told me. Not told: promised. More than once. Tariq said my name was known to them. Known and hated. Just as much as hers. I thought he was trying to scare me, but he must have known something. Now They ask me: Do you want everything to be taken from you? Or just one thing? One. One. Do the math. And yet. That will take so much from everyone else. And we’ll never know. We’ll never know what we couldn’t have because I did this. How the world would have changed. The people saved.
No. Stop it. You’ve bought into her propaganda. You believe her when she says no one will be like her. That she’s saved so many lives, and fixed so many broken things, that her track record will... will continue forever. And be singular. Remember that. She thinks she will never be duplicated, because no one else will ever have that gift. It will never occur naturally.
That’s what she’s told you. All your life. All those awards, those headlines.
But she can’t tell the future. Can she.
At last I said, “I’m not saying yes. But how would I do it? She doesn’t trust me enough to follow me back to you.”
Drozanoth patted its wing again, as if calming it. Its whole posture exuded something of triumph, smugness.
“I didn’t say yes, you know.”
It said, “When we left the method up to you last time, it was too difficult, wasn’t it? Mm. Allow me.” It gestured, and a creature approached us, cringing, encircled in some kind of clinging vine that squeezed its limbs so that the grayish flesh bulged between them, handing something up to Drozanoth’s waiting pincers. “This would render her unconscious. Placed upon her skin.”
I held out my palm for the object: a shell, or something carved to look like a shell, containing a small amount of clear paste. It spun for a moment on the fading bruise of the watcher in my palm, quiescent for a long while now, perhaps happy that it was home.
“Consider how you might apply it,” Drozanoth went on, gleefully. “Perhaps on... the insects you two use? Her present?”
“I’ll think about it.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
THE MONSTER’S THRALLS had no idea where to leave me; and I didn’t know what to tell them either. Words weren’t coming; I wanted to talk in bellows, howls, grunts, postures. Somehow I managed to get back to the broken black church, which at least sheltered me from the fine, grayish rain that had begun to fall.
I sat on one of the pews and wondered who had built it; who had been compelled to do so, or whether the entire building had been stolen wholesale somehow, like the library, torn intact from a different civilization or built by forced labour. The cage that had contained Namru’s corpse was empty again. I wondered if they would put Johnny in it, display her here, if they caught her. If I turned her in. Part of the game. War, too, is a game.
But the cathedral was something else—not a joke exactly, but a mockery of something. I had thought They had no culture, no art; looking at the shambles of Their city, the apparent laziness and impatience with which everything was built, the casual cannibalism even, it would have been easy to conclude that. But They did, and that was another place we had underestimated Them. To steal what others valued specifically so They could desecrate it, to set out to blaspheme and vandalize as well as steal, and to do so systematically, and display it and copy it here, or places like here: that was Their culture. Not contrarianism for the sake of it, but a kind of sadistically gleeful chaos. A game whose only rule was that the rules must be found and broken.
Evidently thinking along the same lines as me, Sofia and Rutger found me later, when I had curled up on one of the pews to try to sleep; I wasn’t sleepy exactly, but my body was exhausted, and I couldn’t think. I was even tempted to put on some of Drozanoth’s knockout drops, thinking of how Carla used to steal and apply Mom’s perfume, the way she’d seen it in a cartoon. Dab dab: behind the ears.
If They lie, if They betray you, maybe you will go back home only to see her die. Her and Mom and the twins.
Better to not go at all? It doesn’t change the outcome. Only what you will see.
Coward, fucking coward.
Sofia sat down on the wood next to me; I woke to its creak. “My God. We thought They had killed you… Are you all right? Are you hurt? How did you get away?”
“Where’s Johnny?”
“She’s working on her plan. Said to keep our distance for a little while, in case of an accident.”
“Yeah, wouldn’t want the auditors to see that,” I mumbled. I wanted to sit up, but couldn’t, and for a while I looked
at Sofia’s primly clasped knees in their filth-encrusted jeans, and Rutger’s thick legs where he stood in the aisle of the church.
Sofia was weeping, though her voice remained steady. “She said you... sacrificed yourself so she could get away.”
I almost laughed. “...No. That’s not what happened.” It did, though, sound like something she’d say.
“We thought we’d never see you again. What really happened?”
I sat up at last, my head ringing like a struck bell. Rutger and Sofia looked terrible, not just muddy and rumpled from a night or two in the woods, but actively roughed up. “They came to get Akhmetov, didn’t they. He didn’t escape.”
Rutger nodded. “We would have given him up. But they fought us anyway.”
I took a deep breath. “Okay. Okay. What really happened, you asked? I still don’t know. But...”
And I told them.
When I had finished, we sat for a long time, listening to the rain. A thin trickle of water as opaque as paint ran down the aisle towards the altar. Somewhere outside, the Earth twisting, rotting, crumbling. And that was tempting, to just sit here, wait it out till it was all out of my hands, till the decision was taken from me.
No. Asshole. No. Seven billion people. Enough dead already. Her fault, yes, but yours too: for leaving her at the last minute, when she needed you to complete the spell.
No. I am more than my use as a feedstock for her internal processes.
No. You’re not. You’re one person, and one person isn’t important. Many people are important: many people have importance. But you? You’re nothing.
All the same. They gave me this: to hold all those people in one hand, and her in the other. No contest. Even if I’m not important, it’s my hands. Mine.
“Basically I am not saying that we need to put this to a vote,” I said. “Or that it would be a... what do you call it?”
“Binding vote,” Sofia said.
“But I thought: I’d better say something. So I can explain. So Rutger doesn’t pull my head off my shoulders. But maybe I’m assuming too much. Maybe he would help. Because he’s a smart man. And he’s good at math. He knows when one number is bigger than another number.”
Rutger was staring at me, the most shocked I’d seen him in my entire life. I wasn’t surprised at his surprise. He hadn’t been marinating in this his whole life, like Johnny and Sofia. Only for the last eighteen months, like me. We were still so new to this, to the awful new math of magic and gods, the psychotic calculations of what could be, what might be, what was paid for, what was still due.
“You…” he said, but genuinely managed to surprise me in turn with what he said next: “But you are her... but you have always been... her closest friend. You would never turn her in.”
Yes I would. No, no I wouldn’t, no, of course not. No, Rutger, I too am stunned that any of this needs to be said; and I am stunned that you said, out loud, that I used to love her, and she used to love me, or that she fooled us both into thinking so. Either way: “So your vote is no.”
“My vote is no.”
Sofia said, “You’re thinking They’ll renege. But supposing They keep Their word. Does that change it?”
“No.”
“Look,” I said. “We need to consider it. We do. We need to think about it.”
“You are a child,” said Rutger quietly. “So is she. So are you,” he added, tilting his chin at Sofia. “You are about to say: But the law says. Yes, the law says you can do many things now. Drink alcohol, and vote, and serve in an army. But your brains are not developed enough to see what the world is and what it could become. And you have not seen her work. You have only played. I have seen her at work, and I know she can both get us free from this place, and end the invasion before it begins.”
I watched him, the broad face not lit with energy or enthusiasm or even faith but something else, a grim knowingness, the awareness that he had no secrets from us. “You can’t predict the future,” I said. “You’re guessing the same way we’re all guessing.”
“I have more information with which to guess,” he said stiffly. “You have seen her mind in... in low gear. I have seen it in high.”
And that gave me pause, something about gears: remembering Johnny on the night she had created the first reactor, the shield between us dropped for a moment, seeing the frankly terrifying, and awesome—in the original, maybe medieval sense—power of her mind: like watching God move across the face of the waters, and wanting to fling an arm up to cover my face from it. He must have seen her do that more times than I could count over the years.
“Well, you have not seen the Ssarati at work,” Sofia said. “Listen. My father will dig out, uproot, those people in the group that are… that are collaborators. And the survivors will return to the original mission. He just needs time. The side of good needs time. And we can buy them that. They can turn all their resources to preventing the invasion. Humanity would not exist if this was not something they could do. It would have been wiped out long ago.” She looked up at Rutger, and set her jaw. “Thousands of minds are more powerful than one. No matter how remarkable the one. And you know where that power comes from now. It’s evil. No matter that she’s tried to use it for good, Mr. Giehl, I’m sorry, but... it’s like... using a nuclear weapon to dig a coal mine. It is intrinsically evil and so is she.”
A thump on the roof startled us, bits of broken stone raining down and splashing into the deepening water; in the heart-pounding silence came the sound of scrabbling claws. Like a Canada goose landing on the skylight, I thought, and almost laughed, but the thing, whatever it was, passed over the hole admitting most of the light, and it became dark and grim inside the church.
In silence, we moved towards the wall of the church, slipping through one of the cracks and fleeing quietly upslope, sliding in the muddy grass, while the thing clawed and tore at the stone tiles and harried the main spire. Some kind of dragon, but more legs—like a winged centipede, complete with fangs that jutted horizontally from its mouth, which hung open, unable to close.
“We can’t stay here,” Sofia panted as we ran. “We can’t live here... we can’t even survive here, we’ve been doing so by luck for the last day. Our luck will run out. We have to get home.”
“Joanna will get us home,” Rutger said serenely. We reached the top of the hill and paused, looking down again; the dragon/insect had curled firmly around the spire, shimmering with the dirty rain.
“What if she can’t? What are the odds that she can’t? You’ve seen her work in... in Earth conditions. We’re not there any more, this isn’t her lab, this isn’t... Even the laws of physics and math don’t work here. You’re a scientist too, you know all this.”
Rutger nodded. “I have done a risk assessment. Since this one told us the bargain supposedly offered. And I do not need to continue to defend my vote. And my vote is no.”
We skidded down the far side of the hill, getting out of the creature’s direct line of sight. Sofia, I thought, was wrong to say we couldn’t live here. You could live anywhere. People did. Not with monsters, necessarily, but people could survive anywhere. Anywhere. That was the only good and noble thing about us any more: that we chose life wherever we could. Cast away in strange lands. In space. In war, in plague. We’d be unhappy here, but we’d be alive.
“I didn’t mean to say that she was evil,” Sofia finally said, as we headed for the outcropping of trees and monoliths in the distance. She sounded exhausted. “Not truly, in her heart of hearts. It’s just that... there’s something in her that looks like evil, and it’s her inability to admit that she is wrong.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I said. “She admits she’s wrong all the time.”
“Nicholas, her research, yes. Because she thinks that after she discovers she’s wrong, she will hunt down information to make her right. But you can’t do that for everything. Not everything is like... research, math, telescopes. There are things you can’t look at, can’t measure. That’s w
hat that papal bull was about, that’s what the Holy Father meant. She doesn’t understand that. No one will... no one can, I mean, and no one will, teach her the humility that you need to admit that you’re wrong and say you’re sorry and mean it. No one. Ever. In her entire life.”
“But one day,” Rutger said. “When she’s older. You cannot assume people never change.”
“No, even then,” Sofia snapped, the weepy edge leaving her voice. “No. She cannot and she will not. She hates so much to be wrong, and for someone else to be right, that that, that alone, might be evil. It looks enough like evil to make no difference.”
And we’re not going to get much older than this anyway, I thought. We’ll never know. “If we turn her in, that makes us evil too, you know. Killing an innocent person.”
“To save lives. And she’s not innocent.”
“She didn’t know any of this would happen,” I said, and Rutger nodded.
“She could have stopped it when she saw what was happening. She had choices. She has one now. She could turn herself in. And then we wouldn’t have to do this. We wouldn’t even have to discuss it.”
“So your vote is yes.”
“Stop it. Stop saying that. It’s you They want to bring her in. You said so. It’s not a vote.”
The ground trembled: not thunder, not the rain. Like a landslide, far away. I thought of the video the twins had watched for class (stop thinking about them), Mount St. Helens, in America, the whole side of the mountain coming off like that. Johnny not born yet, or else she’d have stopped it, like the one in Indonesia last year, the one in Iceland a few years ago. No one knew those were going to happen, or that lives would be risked, or that lives would be saved, no one knew, only her, and just in time. Even They didn’t know the future.
“She’s done the most terrible things,” I said slowly. “It probably looked like she confessed them all. But she didn’t. Things to me, to my family. Some she meant. Some she didn’t. But... I would still trust her to get us home. Over Them. And I would still trust her to end the war. Over Them.”
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