“I just saw that mouth.”
“Yes.” He worked his lower lip between his teeth. “Complexity draws them. The use of the Cloud. Civilizations that grow large enough, advanced enough, attract them, and when they come, they feed. Nothing can stop them.”
“Not even the Empress?”
Hong fell silent. Zanj, pacing the room, at last said, “No.”
Hong spoke then, spurred, Viv thought, by dogma as much as by knowledge. “She could. She has. She’s the only thing in the galaxy they can’t overcome.”
“Because she hides in her Citadel, behind her wall, and whenever an upstart world gets close to summoning the Bleed she rushes out to destroy them. She’s afraid.”
Hong opened his mouth to argue, but Zanj fixed him with a stare that begged for him to try, that weighed him against all the thousands of years she’d been alive, and thousands more imprisoned. He stopped himself, breathed. “She’s … prudent,” Hong said. “Like the rest of us.”
“What are they, though?” Viv asked, and neither of them answered her. So Viv said, “Fine. Fuck it. Nobody knows.”
Zanj, arms crossed, watching, asked her a question back. “So, Los Angeles, what’s next?”
“What do you mean?”
She tapped her crown. “This makes you the boss. We’re off High Carcereal. Tell me what you want, so I can make it happen, so you can take this damn thing off.”
The engines thrummed, and Viv’s chair creaked as she leaned back, and aside from that the ship was silent. The question weighed on her, too big for thought. What do you want? “I’m tired. First, I want to sleep.”
“You shouldn’t sleep,” Hong said. “Not until we drop out of the Cloud.”
“When will that be?”
Zanj: “I didn’t have time to gin up a clear route before we jumped. Shouldn’t take us more than three days to get back to realspace. Sleep after.”
“You can go without sleep for three days?”
“With meditation,” Hong said, and Zanj, with a shrug: “I recharge. I haven’t slept in centuries.”
“I,” Viv said, “am going to sleep right now.”
She didn’t remember her dreams the first night. From the bruises and nail-tracks on her arms, from the raw gravel in her voice when she staggered to the table the next what-felt-like-morning, she was glad she didn’t remember. “What was that?” She sounded like Tom Waits had a baby with Tom Waits.
“The Cloud gets in your head,” Zanj replied, and Hong fetched her water. “It happens to everyone.”
Viv did not like being everyone.
They moved around one another in the silence of a storm. Hong worked out. His wound didn’t seem to bother him anymore; Viv could still see the patch if she looked, but it had darkened almost to the color of his flesh. Viv joined him, reassured to feel her meat still work like meat, though when she tried to match his pace on minute drills she ended up vomiting into the ship’s latrine. There wasn’t much inside her to come up. Hong’s belt held a small supply of nutrient tubes or whatever that seemed to contain exactly what her body needed, no more and no less. She felt empty, but never hungry.
If Zanj ate, Viv never saw it.
Viv did not know what to think about the other woman, or how to be around her, and in the looming silence she could think of little else. Zanj at least seemed to know what she was doing: she prowled through the halls and clambered up ladders and down to review her ship, checking the sound bulkheads made when she tapped them, listening to the pulse of conduits in what Viv took for the engine room. When Hong offered to help, Zanj laughed at the idea, then tossed him a tool Viv didn’t recognize from a box of other tools she didn’t either and told him to check the coolant flow. He caught the tool one-handed and disappeared, and either did not notice or did not care when Zanj muttered, after he turned his back: “And take your time.”
Zanj did not talk much. Nor did she try to kill either of them again, at least on the first day. Viv tried to watch her work, but whenever her eyes lingered for more than a few seconds Zanj turned to her and raised an eyebrow, what, and Viv got the hint and moved on.
Zanj had almost killed her back on High Carcereal, easy as breathing. And she had trashed a roomful of Pride barehanded, and boasted she could do more.
Viv knew she should have kept her distance, but the woman drew her. Zanj was a legend, apparently. Zanj had seen an Empress who could tear a galaxy apart, and thought, I can take her. She’d come close, too, close enough that the Empress made her suffering a personal project. You didn’t spend three thousand years torturing a nobody. Zanj had seen her chance and gone for it, and she’d paid the price, and Viv knew how that felt.
Hell, in her shoes Viv, too, might have tried to kill the woman who rescued her.
“Can I help?” she asked the next time Zanj looked up from her work.
“You can quit standing in the light.”
Then again, maybe Zanj was just an asshole.
She remembered snatches of her dreams the next night. Striding gigantic through a crystal forest, reveling in her strength, crushing rocks underfoot, snapping branches, she heard tiny screeches below, felt gunfire tickle her ankles, and realized she was shattering a city. Once she understood, she started to break it worse on purpose. She dreamed of cinders that once were worlds, dreamed the deaths of friends she’d never met. A girl with bloodstained golden hair, a man with lizard scales pierced with bright spears. A beautiful woman with butterfly wings curled and burned like a dry leaf in a bonfire. Once she saw Magda and her boy, and cursed herself that she could not forget.
The second day she and Hong and Zanj orbited one another slowly, leaving rooms as others entered. She tried to ask Hong about the Rector, about his faith, but the nightmares he had not dreamed lingered in his haunted eyes.
She found Zanj in the cockpit with the shades up. The silence had grown so deep between them that she could not speak at first, made herself lean back against the control panel and stay by Zanj alone, and ignore the horrors outside.
“How can you watch all that? It makes my head hurt just knowing it’s there.”
Zanj whistled through her teeth, and did not face her.
“Fine.” Viv stood up and turned to go. “Don’t talk to me.”
“I’m not the problem here,” Zanj said as she left.
That stopped her. “I just wanted to talk.”
She laughed. “I can bear the Cloud, because I’m used to it. I came this way the first time when I was young, and we didn’t know what to expect. I almost chewed off my tongue in my sleep. It’s an acquired taste.”
“You saved my life.”
Zanj raised her shoulders and crossed her arms and propped her feet up on the control panel. “I saved mine.”
Viv felt the freeze-out. She’d used tricks like this herself—you built walls with any tools available. “I’m not talking about the whole escape. If you hadn’t tripped me in the hangar I’d be dead and you’d be free.”
“Not likely. Like I said back on the station—I know how the old lady works. Death’s no escape from her. I’m stuck in this thing unless you let me out.”
“I wanted to thank you.”
“No. You wanted to say thank you. You feel like you should. You don’t really want to thank me.”
“I do.”
“Then let me go.”
“So you can kill me.”
“Maybe.” A laugh. A toothy grin. Her gaze drifted from the monstrosities outside to rest, utterly without malice or interest, on Viv. “This crown on my head puts us a bit beyond thanks, Los Angeles. You don’t want to let me go because I’m dangerous—I get that. Does it give you a thrill to have me under your thumb? You want to make me perform? Do tricks?”
“No,” she said, too fast, horrified.
“So let me earn my freedom. Give me a task, like fuck up my enemies or get me where I need to go. You know what you want, or else you’d be asking more questions—but you’re too scared to ask for it. You’
re scared and alone in a big damn galaxy and you scream through the night. Great. Welcome to the party. I’d feel plenty sympathetic if I hadn’t spent the last three thousand years burning in a star. Tell me where you want to go. Tell me what you want to do. Quit playing curious and talk to me for real.”
Viv did not want to talk for real.
The third night she dreamed she lay in the Ogham basement. The Empress knelt above her, green, indomitable, her face a mirror; she pressed Viv to the tile floor with one hand as if she was nothing, as of course she was when set beside the Empress’s great transforming need. Gently, gently, the Empress curled her fingers, pierced skin, snapped bone, squeezed past lungs to the heart, and what Viv felt was too deep for anything with so quaint a name as pain, and she was screaming and so was Magda and that was worse. She tried to fight free, for her. Her hands flapped at the Empress’s wrists. Her left hand would not close, her wrist ruined, her blood flowing, and her nails slicked off green skin like it was marble, and she felt herself drawn like a thorn, her heart tugged from her chest—
She woke and found herself held. She struck out by reflex, and hurt her fingers. Broken nails raked eyes, a mouth, a face hard as granite. She felt a burn scar beneath her palm—felt Zanj. Who drew back from the bed, in the dim light of Viv’s cubbyhole cabin.
“What the fuck?”
“You were screaming,” Zanj said.
She came back to herself slowly. “Did I hurt you?” A shake of the head in answer. “How long were you watching?” It took her three tries to stammer out the question.
“Half the night. Hong took the other half. You’ve had seizures the last two nights, but this is the first time you’ve come close to hurting yourself.” In the shadows, her crown looked black. “I get it, you know. I fell in battle, but the Empress does not fight to win. She fights to break all will for future fighting. She burned me. Humiliated me. She hurt my friends and killed them one by one.” She raised her hand to the scar. “And then she marked me. Like she marked you.”
Viv felt afraid then, on this hard bed, with this strange woman in her room. She’d been afraid all along, but avoiding it until now. “It hurt.”
Zanj nodded. “Viv.” The name didn’t fit in her mouth at all. “You’ve lost something and you want it back. I know how that feels. The kid thinks you’re a miracle—and a bargaining chip to win his way home. Me, I’m honest. I want freedom—if only so I can kill you.” Another smile, this one slant. She knelt, and reached, slowly, to the bed, and stroked Viv’s wrist where the skin melted and warped, where she could not precisely feel anymore. “You have a hold over each of us, but we can’t help you unless you trust us. There’s no shame in having lost.” That smile again, deeper, and Viv placed it now that she could see the depths of those eyes close up: sadness. “At least, I hope not.”
“I don’t have anything over Hong.” It was easier to say that.
“If you say so.” Zanj knelt again, and let her sleep.
Or at least, she let her try. Zanj left after another hour, and when she was gone Viv lay awake until she felt it was morning. She found them in the hold, Hong practicing a punch sequence, Zanj paging through a glossy pamphlet that looked an awful lot like porn. She said, “I need your help.”
Hong interrupted a lot while Viv told the story, his awe and disbelief growing throughout. Zanj just listened.
“I come from a planet called Earth.” It sounded ridiculous to say. And, of course, neither Zanj nor Hong reacted. They both came from planets, after all, nothing weird about that, and neither of them seemed to have heard of Earth. “Where I’m from, none of this exists. That probably sounds absurd to you. No space travel. No Cloud, no Pride, no Bleed, no ’faith. No Empress. Or, if they do, we don’t know about them. Zanj, you mentioned you’d known a few planets named Los Angeles. That’s a city on my world. I think, maybe, I’m from your past. Or something like it.
“I was on the run. I’m … I build things, with computers.” (She realized she hadn’t heard them mention computers, which made some sense—how often, under normal circumstances, did she mention oxygen?) “The government wanted to break me. My friend and I had almost stopped them—but when I had almost won, the Empress showed up.” Hong interrupted here, hungry for a description, for wisdom and for signs, how do you know it was Her; Zanj threw a pillow at him, to spare her, but Viv gripped the scar tissue on her wrist and told him what she remembered, then moved on. “She stopped me. She hurt my friend. Then she … she tore my heart out of my chest, and I woke up back on Rosary Station, drowning.
“Hong said the Rosary beads, the black holes, hold worlds. I think where I’m from, my world, my home, my friends—I think they’re in the Rosary bead the Empress took with her when she left. It’s a way back to my planet, or a portal to my time. Can people travel through time here?” Hong shook his head; Zanj scoffed. “Well, maybe she can. Or maybe Earth, my Earth, is in some sort of other universe, or it’s a simulation, or whatever. I don’t know. But I’m real, even if I don’t have—even if I’m not connected to the Cloud. I don’t belong here. I have business back home. Enemies I can’t let win. And my friends need me.
“I want to catch the Empress. I want to go back through that Rosary bead, and home.
“But I don’t know how.”
She stood at the apex of a triangle, balanced between Hong’s awe and the calculation in Zanj’s red eyes. She might be wrong. She felt too many ways at once: overwhelmed, excited, skeptical, scared. She didn’t know this place, but she knew how to manage a team. You could not keep your colleagues in the dark and expect them to help to the best of their ability. Especially when you lacked relevant technical expertise. Viv didn’t even know what was possible here.
“That’s it,” she said. “Will you help me get home?”
Hong nodded, mute with wonder. Zanj nodded, too. She seemed pleased. Viv hoped that was a good thing.
Then, with a sickening thud, the ship dropped back into realspace and the arguments began.
10
“WE’RE GOING TO Orn,” Zanj maintained, as if any other choice were rank and suicidal nonsense.
They made their next jumps with care and calculation, rather than trusting to blind luck and the Cloud, so they could drop back to realspace when they needed. Viv slept harder on her first night back in the usual three-and-change dimensions than she had for years, slept as if wrapped in childhood blankets, and did not dream at all.
But while they made steady progress, there was some disagreement with regard to their destination. “Orn,” Hong said every time Zanj raised the subject, “is a myth.”
“You thought I was a myth until four days ago.”
“We should go to the ’fleet.” At least he was honest. Viv had been in too many meetings where ostensibly grown humans spent hours tiptoeing around their opinions. And, if half Viv’s old C-suite had been able to convey the density of meaning in Zanj’s scornful laugh, they would have saved a lot of time. Yet Hong persisted: “Viv, what you are—what you represent—we’ve wondered for centuries what’s really inside the Rosary. Why the Empress made those beads. You’re from there. You met Her. For that alone, for the privilege of an interview, the ’faith would take you anywhere, do anything you ask.”
They were orbiting a hot blue star ringed by a necklace of comets and glaciers. The ship’s skin drank sunlight and its fields drank water, and its passengers drank in the view. Purple shapes like manta rays drifted and spun through the ice, vanishing when Viv tried to focus on them, as if they could sense her gaze.
“What he means,” Zanj explained, still paging through her porn, “is that they’ll stick you in a box and pray to you, like, twenty times a day. They might let you out from time to time for good behavior, or to lay on hands, but they’ll never in a billion years help you fight their goddess. Trust me. I’ve seen what they do to people they think are holy—drugged to bliss and brainwashed after. An ice pick to the eye would be faster.”
Hong sputtered. “W
e don’t do that anymore.”
Viv felt unsettled to hear they’d done it once, and said so.
“The ’faith has changed in the last … How long were you stuck in that box, anyway?”
Zanj set down the pamphlet. “Three thousand years, I think. Give or take.”
“Look, Viv, the ’faith has its problems, but we know more about the Empress than anyone.”
“Because you worship her.” Zanj couldn’t sit through this conversation anymore, stood, paced; her tail curled and whipped.
“We don’t … we recognize what She has achieved. We seek to understand the cosmos so we can free its beings.” Zanj rolled her eyes and made a talking motion with her hand, but Hong pressed through. “The Empress is the world’s great mystery. She has outlived ages. Some worship Her, yes, but our true calling is to study Her works, and understand them, so we can survive as She has. So we can transcend as She did. So, in the end, we can grow beyond Her.”
“The Grand Rector,” Viv pointed out, “didn’t look like a scholar. Or like someone I’d want to meet up close.”
Hong bowed his head. “She is of the old faction.”
“She tried to blow us up.”
“She is set in her ways.” He wilted under her glare, but pressed on. “The Grand Rector is a war leader. She has led us in many great sorties against Pride and feral Grayframe and swift gods from the deep worlds. But she is no theologian. The Archivist, my master and teacher, is older and more respected by far, though she never felt the call to lead our fleet. She is our greatest student of transcendent knowledge, and she taught me the ways of the ’faith. She has studied the Imperial sky for centuries, and it was she who divined that the Empress had returned to High Carcereal and worked some great miracle there.”
“So, the Archivist sent you after me?”
At this, Hong drew silent and looked away. “Not exactly. She—the Archivist brought the matter before the council of ’faith, but she had no hope the Hierarchs would see reason. The Rector would never permit us to go, and the Hierarchs are weak before her will. She cares for our safety, but also for her own position. The discovery of a grand miracle would shift power from her warbands to scholars and students of the ’faith. She would have held us in debate until the Pride had long since absconded with the miracle. She has done as much before with less momentous finds. We—I could not let the chance slip.”
Empress of Forever Page 10
