by Zack Jordan
“Um,” says Sarya the Daughter. She tilts, corrects, and hiccups. “Hi.”
“Hi, she says,” Mer tells the fire. From somewhere in his huge silhouette, he lifts a pitcher. She can hear the liquid splashing past his teeth, each swallow many times what she herself has had to drink all night.
“We should soothe her,” says Roche. “Look how worried she was! This whole time, while she was dancing around eating animal and partaking of ethanol, she was actually fraught with concern. My friends, she was thinking. Last I saw, they were adrift in a zero-gravity Network-deprived hellscape! Well, now you can calm yourself, Sarya the Daughter. As you can see, we survived.”
Mer drops his arm, then tosses his pitcher into the fire. He belches. “I musta killed fifty of these little guys on the Blackstar,” he says, “Didn’t matter. I still woke up here, and they still offered me a drink.” He gazes out into the darkness, his own small eyes disappearing when he turns from the fire. “Dunno why they brought me here,” he says. “I was doin’ fine on the Blackstar.”
Sarya sways. “He,” she corrects. “Not they.” She feels that she should have come up with something else to say by now, but nothing has come to mind.
Mer belches for an answer, then begins to feel around himself for another pitcher.
“Oh, don’t worry!” says Roche. “We understand, we truly do. We are mere acquaintances. Fellow passengers aboard the good ship Riptide. We may have saved your life once or twice, it’s true, but who has the time to keep track of such things? Though who knows: perhaps the galaxy would be in better shape had we left you to bleed to death in your cabin.”
“Thought about it,” interjects Mer, speaking to the fire. “Thought about killin’ her before that, too. Damn do-gooder suit talked me out of it.”
And now Roche’s brittle courtesy hardens. “Whatever happened to old Eleven, anyway? Perhaps you don’t care. It was a low-tier intelligence, after all. Even lower than the three of us—even lower than Mer.” He stands, paying no attention to the rumble emanating from the heap of fur across the fire. “Your new friend is…somewhat higher, I understand?”
She feels a flicker of anger, under her other mess of emotions, and she seizes it. That’s solid, at least. She fans it, bathes in its glow. “I apologize,” she says tightly, matching him courtesy for courtesy. “I should have brought Him home for your approval first.”
“That’s all we ask,” says Roche, lenses gleaming in the firelight.
“And yes, Eleven did save me, for your information,” she continues. “A lot of times. And it wasn’t just a sub-legal suit. It was my…friend.” For a moment she feels those massive impacts again, watches the front of the suit rip away in sparks and the scream of torn metal. “Eleven…gave itself for me,” she says quietly. She has an absurd urge to raise her cup in a salute to the fallen suit and wonders if that’s something she’s picked up from Observer.
“I know,” says Roche quietly. “I saw the whole thing.”
Sarya stares down into the cup, at the dark liquid inside it. “But I avenged it,” she mumbles.
“You avenged it,” says Roche.
She looks up. She pins Roche’s lenses with as steady a gaze as she can muster, in a sudden fury. “That’s right,” she hisses. “Network killed Eleven, and I killed Network. Here, at least.” She waves her cup at the black sky, sloshing some over her fingers. “You see all that?” she says. “Eight hundred systems, freed.” Finally, she feels that surge of pride she was looking for. “That is what a Human can do. I did it for my species. And, and—” She swallows the unpleasantness currently curdling in the back of her throat, a sensation she’s noticed more with every drink. “And for whoever else never got a fair chance, because of Network. All those species who didn’t—who don’t—get to choose their own destinies. Their own paths.” She swallows again, trying to remember how righteously Observer had expressed it. “We have rights,” she explains. She waves up at the eight hundred stars again, with a cup now too empty to spill. “A species has the right to choose its own path. A species has the right to do what it—what She—wants to do. What She chooses to do. And Network doesn’t have the right to stop us, because—”
It’s terrifying how fast Mer can move. He must have waited for her to blink, because she literally did not see it happen. One eyeblink ago he was staring into the fire five meters away, inebriated and morose; now she is off the ground and dangling from the handful of ten-centimeter talons buried in her hair and the collar of her utility suit behind her head. Mer, observes her slowed mind, has more teeth than she realized. They are as sharp as Widow blades. They are so long that he can never quite close his mouth. And his breath is rank, made of meat and blood and worse. A predator’s breath.
“Where are your rights now?” rumbles Mer through those gleaming teeth.
His breath folds around her and chokes her. She is so shocked that she doesn’t kick, she doesn’t strike out, she doesn’t do anything but cling to the arm behind her head and try to support her weight on anything but her hair and throat. Her mind, so recently filled with righteous fire, is now kicking into survival mode. Don’t move, it tells her. “Mer,” she whispers out loud. “What the hell—”
“This is me—how did you put it?” He clicks a razor talon against his teeth as if deep in thought. “Following my own path.” His mouth is gigantic, black lips forming words around gleaming black teeth. “It’s clear you don’t know what you’ve done. It’s clear I woulda saved about a trillion lives if I’d killed you when I met you. How many will I save if I kill you now?” He makes a sound then, a booming, hissing roar that may or may not be a laugh. “Call it my destiny,” he says softly.
She dangles from his talons, absolutely sure that Observer is about to rescue her. So Mer could shred fifty of him without breaking a sweat—Observer has trillions. They could pile on top of Mer’s massive shape. They could exhaust him until he could not lift a talon. They could wrest her from his grip. But they’re not, and suddenly she realizes why. Observer may be a god, but there are certain things that even a god cannot stop. Her death at Mer’s talons and teeth is a future that Observer cannot prevent. It’s too late to prevent it. It would take Mer a quarter second to rip her body in half, and all he needs is a trigger. He could literally eat her, right here in the middle of Observer’s brain, and there would be nothing Observer the godlike mind could do about it.
“Wait,” says Roche.
Sarya releases a breath. Roche, thank the goddess. Roche, you are underappreciated. Roche, if you can talk this monster into releasing his hold, you can name your reward, you have the word of Sarya the Daughter that—
“Hand,” says Roche.
She hears a series of clicks and pneumatic hisses, and suddenly her hand loses its grip on Mer’s fur. It feels much lighter and colder, and far more useless. Something crawls down her body, then scampers through the firelight toward Roche.
“I missed you,” says Roche when the hand crawls into his lap. “Yes, I did. You don’t have to touch that nasty skin anymore, no you don’t.”
And then Sarya is hauled out of the firelight like garbage.
“Mer—” she gasps through a collar that is choking off more vital oxygen and blood with every jolt. “Observer—”
She doesn’t know who she’s talking to. Is she begging for her life? Trying to explain herself? To reassure herself? Is she calling for help to a mind who cannot save her? There must be a thousand pairs of eyes on her right now, and yet Observer does nothing as this massive predator lumbers through the darkness with his prey. Here at the edge of the clearing, where the matted grass gives way to trees, it is cold. Out here, it is dark. It’s not Human-ship dark, but it’s close. A few fires behind her and a few hundred false stars in the sky do absolutely nothing to light the forest; whatever few photons they can spare don’t survive more than a meter into it. She stares between barely lit
trees, realizing: this is where she ends, in the cold darkness.
Mer holds her up, dangling from her hair and collar, facing the dark forest. “What do you see?” he rumbles.
Sarya struggles, one hand on the collar of her utility suit and the other flopping uselessly, her boots still kicking half a meter off the ground. “Mer, please—” she chokes.
“What do you see?” Mer roars.
Sarya pulls herself up, desperate. “I—I don’t—”
“You’re damn right you don’t,” says Mer. “You don’t see anything. You don’t know what the hell is out there.” He turns now, Sarya’s feet whipping outward with the centrifugal force. “Now what do you see?” he says.
“Fires,” gasps Sarya, instantly, searching for what Mer wants to hear. “People.” Goddess, Mer, what is it? Dancing? Observer? Roche and Sandy, food, what?
“This is our galaxy, Human,” says Mer. “A few fires in a universe so huge, so cold, so dark that nobody knows what’s in it. So much darkness it would rip your mind in half to think about it, and nobody knows anything about it. So what do we do? We band together, a million species with our backs to our fires and our talons to the darkness. We keep our weapons for the night—not each other. And every single one of us understood that—except your Gor-damned species. What the hell kind of morals do you people have? You had a fire. Your people got to grow up in a nice little safe place, with food and light and heat and everything you needed—just like the rest of us. And then when the rest of us said hi, what did the Humans think?” She feels herself drawn inward, away from the fires and toward Mer’s glistening teeth. His hot breath blows the matted hair off her forehead. “You thought, maybe we can take their fires too.”
Sarya chokes on the collar around her neck, on the bile in her throat, on the fumes curling through Mer’s teeth. This is not the time or place to debate, says her mind. This is the time to survive, to think about drawing the next breath, to consider strategies that allow a breath after that and the possibility of more breaths in the future. “Mer—” she squeaks. “You’re…killing me.”
“Yes, but it’s what I choose to do,” rumbles Mer. He draws her closer, until her entire front is actually pressed against his hot fur. She feels his teeth open and close against her utility suit when he speaks. “Is there a reason I shouldn’t?”
Because she has rights, screams her mind. Because she is a living thing and life is sacred. Because Mer is her friend—whatever that’s worth. These and a dozen other reasons flash through her mind, but each one seems like it could instantly trigger a homicidal beast many times her mass and strength. All she has to do is say the wrong thing and she’s dead—for good, this time.
And then she is thrown to the ground, hard enough to rattle her teeth. Her arms and legs are stretched out and pinned to the wet grass by four of Mer’s limbs; she can feel their talons sinking into the soil around her wrists and ankles. “There was a reason,” says Mer from above her, and when he speaks she can feel his hot saliva sprinkle her face. “There was a big reason, called the Network. It said every Citizen had rights. It enforced those rights. But guess what?” And now Sarya hears a horrible wetness, the intensely biological sound of a gigantic mouth opening wider. Something wet and hot caresses the side of her face, then pulls back into the darkness. She shivers, the night air cold on the side of her licked face. “Network’s not here,” whispers Mer.
Sarya turns away, her cheek on the wet mess of grass and goddess knows what else. She holds her eyes closed, waiting. She’s faced death before; she’s been dead before, more or less. But this—this is different, and far worse. This is an ignoble end in the darkness, a last wet scream and gurgle—
And then she becomes aware that the air flowing over her has turned cold. It doesn’t smell like predator breath; it smells like fire and trees and maybe a whiff of the biological necessities of a million partying Observers. She moves an arm, then the other, then opens her eyes and sits up slowly. Fifty meters away, in the direction from which she was just dragged, kicking, a furry mass sits staring into a fire.
And right in front of her, next to the depression where her head lay a second ago, sits Sandy.
“You were watching that?” Sarya demands.
Sandy blinks something, then turns away and scampers toward her fire.
“She was preventing that,” says a voice behind her. It hiccups. “You should be more grateful.”
Sarya turns to see a lone Observer weaving in the near-darkness at the edge of the forest. “What about You?” she demands of it, massaging her limp hand with her other. “He was going to kill me, and You didn’t do a thing.”
“Not true!” says the Observer. It hiccups and raises its cup. “I observed.”
Under a sky of false stars, on the gigantic face of a cube the size of a world, Sarya fumes.
She sits by one of the fires, in one of the islands of light scattered through the cold unknown, on one of the few remaining patches of grass that have not been trampled into moist awfulness. The air is thick with the odor of a million biological bodies doing what biological bodies do—only worse. Observer has been eating and drinking for hours now, and He is apparently the kind of intelligence who doesn’t mind sleeping in His own filth.
She clenches her jaw and strokes the bare skin of her half-dead hand. She can open it with the tendons she left herself, but she can’t clench it without help. She is at the farthest fire from Roche, who took back his hand when she needed it most. Farthest from Mer, the predator who almost killed her. From Sandy, who—well, maybe Sandy gets a pass. Actually, no: there’s no telling what a tier three is doing. Probably playing some long game that Sarya will never understand. The point is, Sarya would have called them her friends, once. She would have even admitted that she was wrong to abandon them. But that was before they stripped her body for parts and almost killed her. That kind of thing tends to change relationships.
“Drink?” asks an Observer, careening up with a pitcher.
Speaking of long games. “No,” she murmurs, looking away.
“I see you found your boots,” it says in a transparent attempt at small talk.
Sarya massages her half-dead hand and says nothing. The memory of being observed during a near murder is fresh enough to make conversation challenging.
“I thought you would be happy,” says the Observer. “I brought your friends. I made you a party. I let you play together and have an adventure…”
Still, Sarya doesn’t answer. She can feel the Observer staring at her, its gaze unsteady. “Well,” it says, then pauses for a noisy sip. “Maybe the entertainment will cheer you up.” It turns its back on Sarya and the fire, places its pitcher on the ground, and sits beside it. She glares at the back of its small head for a long moment before admitting to herself that she is not actually accomplishing anything. Her eyes wander over heaps of unconscious Observers between dozens of other fires. The ones that are still moving are doing the same as her Observer: seating themselves and facing the same direction. And in the direction of His collective gaze—
She squints, trying to make out details in the darkness. A train of almost identical figures has threaded its way through fires and puddles and piles of snoring Observer. They walk in threes: two holding a third by its arms. The two weave, but they walk with their heads up; every third plods with its hands behind its back and its eyes on the ground. The two are identical, dressed in Observer’s featureless tunics; every third is dressed in sloppy handmade clothing and appears miserable in a small but unique way. In the center of the line, not twenty meters away, she glimpses a burst of hair and the gleam of a bald head. Right gazes out through the crowd of Observer, its head reflecting the light of the nearest fire. Left doesn’t look away from the ground in front of it.
“Attention!” shouts a lone Observer. “Attention, if you please!”
Observer no longer see
ms capable of instant reactions, not even to Himself. Silence falls in a wave, and even when it has spread to the farthest reaches of the clearing, it’s only a relative quiet. There is the ever-present crackling of fires, but now it is interspersed with intermittent retches, wails, music, fistfights, and the occasional thud of a small body hitting soil. Out in the dark forest, where Mer nearly killed her, she hears a scream. She swallows; maybe Mer found other prey.
“It’s that time!” cries the lone Observer. “Before I black out completely—” The figure pauses and raises its cup for a ragged cheer from the crowd of Himself. “Time for…the entertainment!”
“Entertainment!” shout several Observers, raising their own cups to the black sky. Sarya sees one nearby fall to its hands and knees and vomit, mid-word.
“First!” shouts the Observer. “I will honor tonight’s graduating class!”
With a hundred individual gestures, the whole line of pre-Observers shivers. Their various escorts, with identical motions, pull them upright.
“Then!” shouts another. “I will honor Sarya the Daughter, the source of—and inspiration for—My merriment!”
Even in the darkness, Sarya can feel a thousand gazes turn to her. She shivers and pulls her utility suit closer to her skin.
