Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  She laughed an avalanche. “Of course not! You were gone. And when you returned, you were not what you are now. I watched you—saw you work with those mayflies, indulge them, and never offer them a hint of yourself. If that was you after all. I half anticipated some Imperial trick—She had you as Her plaything for three thousand years. She might have petaled you like a flower, unstitched your mind and bent it to Her fancy and sent a thousand little Zanjlings out into the world to do Her bidding. It hurt to look at you, and see what you’d become. But now—Sister! There’s so much we can do together.”

  Zanj raised one eyebrow. “You’ve spent three thousand years playing farmer. Do you really think I’d be interested?”

  “Means to an end,” Yannis said. “Means to an end. We have our base. We have a fleet out there, wrecked but recoverable. We have you. And this puppet—” She kicked at Viv, scornful, but her foot was the size of a small bus. Viv tried to roll out of the way but when Yannis’s foot struck her she flew and landed, and lost the world for a reeling, gut-churning moment. She couldn’t breathe—no, she could. She could force herself up. She wasn’t dying. She almost vomited—forced it, choked it down, which was worse. She would die here, after all this. Trampled to death by a giant while Zanj hovered overhead, uncaring.

  Wearing a crown that bound her to obey.

  Hong had warned her: Give Zanj the chance and she will leave, and never come back. She doesn’t need you. She doesn’t care about you.

  The crown shimmered gray on Zanj’s brow.

  “Careful,” Zanj said as if discussing a quite abstract position, as if Viv didn’t lie gasping on the fucking ground beneath her, as if she really was a puppet, a tool, a toy. “You’ll break her.”

  “Those tiny fleshy hands can snap the Empress’s chains. I almost didn’t believe, but I’ve seen it now. We could seal off a small corner of the Cloud and rule supreme, free of Her gaze. Whole systems, Zanj, not just Refuge.”

  “She’s trouble,” Zanj said. “No soul. Just a hunk of meat you have to move around.”

  “Meat’s useful. Meat can be forced the old-fashioned way. No need for encryption, for name-games. Just hurt her until she does what you want. And then we will be queens.”

  Zanj thought. Viv watched her, aching, sick, small, scared.

  Zanj did not think for very long. “Sounds good,” she said. “First, though, I think you have something of mine.”

  “Naturally.” Yannis bowed, stepped aside, and offered her the Star. “Take up your weapon, Sister. Let us rule.”

  34

  “I’M HUNGRY,” GRAY moaned to the shipmind, and received not the slightest answer, not even the bare courtesy of coarse, unfiltered current for a meal.

  He hung locked into a single form like a barbarian, in a column of light, starving. Already his mind dipped into self-recriminating spirals of grief and shame, already his skin drew taut over his ribs. The extensive structural damage—a base-birthed biped would have interpreted it as left arm broken in three places, right in two, right leg above and below the knee, left leg dislocated but otherwise intact, collarbone and occipital fractures in profusion—would have inconvenienced him if he could move, but that yawning, enervating pit of hunger at the core of his being, the ever-increasing cycles dedicated to desperate need for food, would kill him before long. He would start to burn himself, shrivel to a husk, a cinder, a spark, then gone, here in the forgotten end of space.

  So much for Gray.

  The indignity could not be denied. If he ever reached home again, if he were ever so fortunate as to see the vasty beaches and crystal skies of the Great Lady’s palace, or dart with his cousins and grandparents through the fractal mazes of Her mind, forgiven his grand crimes, his banishment, he would encrypt the present hopeless scenario so deep in the recesses of his memory that only the Lady’s word could unlock it. If not, he would spend all his generations the laughingstock of the Grayframe, an example and a cautionary tale. Ware, ye kids, lest you suffer old Gray’s fate: condemned to a single form, bound by things only a little more than human, confined in a reflective field in the belly of a worldship in a weed sea of space, there to expire from hunger.

  He had fought hard, and fallen harder. Without the Cloud to fan through, with native avenues of escape and transformation denied him, he’d been left to match Nioh strength for strength, and a Gray of Grayframe was inefficient when so used. In his native element, which was anywhere the Empress ruled, he could have become a dust storm of hungry razors, growing as he devoured, adjusting instantly to compensate for the form of any fool who might dare come against him. Here, he had been forced to wrestle Nioh, the implacable weight of those great arms, the wisdom of those thick fingers and that broad back, burning all his meager stores of power while she tapped the ship itself, directly.

  Even so, he’d held her.

  Until she cast him down.

  (Details, details.)

  No shame in losing such an uneven fight, he told himself, even if one’s family would laugh. No, the shame—if it was, in fact, shame—rested in this: he had not, in truth, fought as hard as he might have done.

  Yes, he wrestled with cunning and viciousness that would have pleased his great-grandcousins whose warring ways the Grayframe passed down through generations to him. Yes, too, he had marshaled his resources down to the last joule, leaving himself at ebb, tumbling into the great pit of his hunger. But he had not used all the tools at his disposal.

  Even at the end, as his strength failed and Nioh’s great arm circled his neck and began to squeeze, there had been a source of power available to him untapped.

  Gatyen watched them fight—a possessed Gatyen, his eyes glazed, his head crowned with orange flame, Gatyen but without his smile and without his laugh and without the dappleglisten of the well water he poured over his hair to cool him in the sun, but Gatyen nonetheless. Gatyen who invited Gray to eat with the rest of the digging crew, who shared the most delectable confections—big slow kind Gatyen.

  Gray could have eaten him.

  He should have done it. A delectable carbon-and-water body, plus the mind that body contained, held all sorts of chains to break, order to liberate, matter to decompose to energy. Would it have been enough to allow Gray, in this limited state, to beat Nioh? Perhaps. If the move had been unexpected, at the right moment—Gray twisting his neck, disjointing his jaw, lengthening his teeth, broadening his gorge, one snap and done—he might have taken the old warbeast.

  But he held back even as his bones broke. And now, suspended in light, as the pit claimed more and more of his mind, he looked inside himself and realized he would have made the same decision.

  After all his exile, he’d learned nothing.

  Gatyen, still possessed, stood guard. Webdrones flanked the man, hovering free of the floor; they twitched when Gatyen breathed, bound to his perceptions. Gray’s friend’s mind was elsewhere: eaten by the ship, perhaps, or submerged inside it. But Gatyen had a mind of meat, like Viv’s. Meat thoughts built trails and habits in the wet mass of meat brains.

  “Gatyen,” he whined—he, a Gray of Grayframe, whined!—“Gatyen, I’m hungry.”

  He did not need to fake desperation. The pit within him grew and gobbled.

  “I’m dying. I’ll devour myself right here, if you don’t help me.” With his jaw so swollen, he could barely talk the way meatfolks did, but he tried. If he talked like meat, the ship would hear him with meat ears and a meatbrain that had once invited Gray to its house for dinner, a meatbrain that once watched Gray turn into different animals to amuse its children. “I don’t need much,” he wheedled. “Just a trace, a trickle. I’m dying.” He loosed what little control he had on the pit inside him. It widened, gobbled: he lost his sense of touch, lost all colors save for green. Skin pulled throbbing taut over his frame.

  He stared into Gatyen’s eyes, showed real desperation as even his greens, his lovely, luxurious greens, the greens of grass and rice and moss on rock, faded to bland evaluative monochrom
e.

  “Please. I’m no use to them dead.”

  Perhaps that was what did it: Nioh had taken him alive, and even this fragmentary shipmind understood the directive that implied. But he preferred to think that some structure of Gatyen remained in the man’s skull after all, and the ship, thinking with that brain, was moved by his compassion.

  Whatever the reason, even as Gray tumbled into the pit of his own hunger, the ship’s great clench relaxed, and the smallest trickle of current curled into his body.

  He could have wept. He could have screamed. He shook in bliss. That small a current felt as luxurious, as glittering, as that grain silo he’d eaten on his first night in Refuge: feeding and feeding and feeding in the grip of preconscious need.

  But he could not lose himself in ecstasy now. The others needed him. Viv needed him, Viv lost within this ship in her adversaries’ hands, Viv who had given him mercy when, to be honest, he deserved none. Xiara needed him—he’d fought for her, in hope he could prove himself, and he’d failed her.

  Gatyen needed him, wherever his mind might be.

  So even though he let the ship’s current soak through his bones and knit them, let it corkscrew down amine chains to feed the pit in his being, he took most of that meager allotment to power pores he’d modified to sweat caustic fluid.

  In that moment, he became aware of a great Attention settling upon him, not unlike the mind of the Empress Herself: a mind far more unified than this babbling, mad ship, yet proceeding through its circuits and systems. Perhaps his wheedling and convincing had attracted Nioh, or one of the other secret masters of this world.

  He trembled. He had no strength for such a fight.

  Still Gatyen watched him, mindless, innocent.

  Acid sweat rolled, searing, smoking, down Gray’s body, and dripped onto the concave lens that projected the light which held him.

  The lens hissed. Cracked.

  Shattered.

  He fell to all fours as webdrones launched to catch him and tangled in the air above his head. One, more clever than the rest, snagged his arm, but he tore it with his teeth and it went limp. He snapped its body like a whip to knock a second drone from the air, and ran for the room’s sole door.

  Before he reached it, Gatyen struck him in the side.

  Gray did not feel the hit; he felt the wall when he struck, and slid down.

  The orange light wreathed Gatyen now, rippling all along his arms, bulging from his back like a grotesque hump. His eyes did not focus, and his face held that same expression of distant concern, as if trying to remember a vital name once known but now forgotten.

  The Attention drew nearer, step by step through the ship. Gray could not fight something so vast and win, not here, not like this.

  He rolled to his feet and sprinted for the exit. Gatyen, or the light around Gatyen, raised his arms like a wrestler—Gray tried to slide between his legs, but great orange arms swooped down and lifted him, crushed him to his friend’s chest. Gray fought back, grew more arms, but that slender trace of power he’d used to heal, to allow himself this moment’s freedom, was almost gone already.

  A webdrone struck him from behind, snaked out tendrils to cover his hands and bind them together.

  The pit inside him yawned again, devouring color and urgency, devouring all else beneath raw calculation.

  He needed food.

  Here was Gatyen. He could eat.

  His teeth knew their business. They could bite through any armor. His Lady had shaped him to devour.

  The Attention neared—down the hall, around the corner, the edges of its sensorium trumpeting its approach, as he himself had once darted down spacelanes before his Lady to ready worlds for Her digestion. Hungry, he could not beat Gatyen and his webdrones. Hungry, he would have no chance against that approaching Mind.

  Gatyen smelled full of health, of strength, so simple within his shell of light, barely a being at all. Gray wouldn’t have to eat all of him. Just a bite or two.

  Gray’s teeth unsheathed.

  He saw himself reflected in the glass of Gatyen’s eyes.

  And he remembered his vow to Viv.

  He closed his mouth. Roared in frustration, futility; struck Gatyen’s ribs with his knees, kicked his stomach, struck his nose with his forehead, pushed him away. Webdrones struck him again and again from behind. Their microshocks overwhelmed his muscles, and their strands contracted to pull his arms inexorably to his sides. Gatyen’s light pummeled him, and the pit of hunger gaped and at last the Attention breached upon them like a whale surfacing from a bulge in water.

  Xiara stepped into the cell.

  She did not look like the woman he had begged to run.

  The webdrones flew back from Gray and burned in midair, fell as ash. Gatyen, too, recoiled, slammed into the wall. The wall itself sprouted arms that held him, crushing in, in—

  “No,” Gray croaked, and the arms stopped.

  Xiara turned her pilot’s eyes on him, wheels within wheels in the mask of her face.

  “What happened to you?” Gray breathed.

  She shook her head, confused. Zanj, the ship said before she remembered to use her mouth. “Zanj. She—she knows the ship. She gave me its name. Are you … well?” As if the concept made little sense to her now.

  “These rubes couldn’t hurt a Gray of Grayframe.” His shaking voice spoiled that line, but he didn’t care. He stood between her and Gatyen, for all the good it would do. “He’s my friend. They controlled him. He doesn’t deserve to die.”

  “Control,” Xiara said, distant. “Ah. Yes.” One hand raised, opening like a flower: the arms released, and Gatyen fell, and rose partway, his eyes his own again.

  “Gray?” His voice might have been fresh-hewn from rock. “What is this?”

  He offered a hand, helped Gatyen to his feet. “You were out of your mind. We’ve brought you back, but … you need to get home. Back to the village. Find your family. Keep them safe. We can’t protect you if you stay.” Especially, he most certainly did not say, because you smell so delicious. “Go.”

  When Gatyen had run off, when they were alone, Gray and this shipwoman in Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter’s body: “What’s it like in there?”

  “I see,” she said. “Centuries of mad dreaming. Streams of numbers. Spiral paths of silence. I feel Groundswell like my … skin.” As if having skin struck her as novel. “It’s so much, so much…”

  “Did you find Hong?”

  “No.”

  He knew that peevish tone of thwarted omniscience—the Lady spoke that way when some system defied her, when some upstart Dyson sphere refused to submit. “What about Viv? Zanj?”

  “Yes” was not a full answer for his question, but he knew better than to needle a woman who was a battleship. “Viv.” She tasted that name, and he did not need to peer inside her mind to know she also tasted memories, the vivid simulations the shipmind could summon and unfold, recalled eternities between breath and breath. “She lies upon the hull, battered, alive, mostly whole. And Zanj.” Her eyes grew distant. She winced, groaned, impossibly, tumbled—Gray caught her weight, then regretted it when she squeezed his broken ribs with the strength of a hydraulic press. “Zanj shines. She burns. She…” Xiara’s teeth gritted together, her face a mask of pain. “Gray, it’s too much. I can’t.”

  He held her arm, and let her hold his, despite the pain. She did not pull away.

  He said, “Take me there.”

  35

  THE FALLEN STAR woke as Zanj drew near.

  The luminous cascade beneath its skin built, blinding brilliant blue, and Zanj transformed as well. The gleaming silver weapon of her, the dancing murderer, the pirate queen, gained depth and shadow and the weight of long absence. She stretched out her hand, parting heavy curtains of time.

  Viv, prone on the ship’s skin, breathing through the pain in her ribs and head and hand, watched Zanj reach for this weapon that would make her more fearsome still, a force to break planets and challenge an
Empress, and she remembered the nothingness in Zanj’s gaze when she looked down at her, that slow opening and closing of her eyes—a blink of idle surprise a swatted gnat was not yet dead. Yannis, giant-sized, flicked her tongue, a serpent’s anticipation.

  Hong had been right. She will not come back for you. She is ancient and powerful, and knows no kinship. She obeys her own whims and needs, no more. You may travel together, but she is not your friend. She wants freedom and revenge, and she will cast you aside the moment she can seize either.

  And Viv remembered how Zanj looked in battle: the fierce inventive glee with which she stole, with which she killed, the ease and scorn she’d shown as she broke the Ornchief and scattered Pride drones, fighters, battleships, as she slew godlings on mindforge stations. Zanj lived in anarchy. With this weapon, with her old friends to hand, these women she’d fought and lost beside, what limits would she face? What chaos spread? Viv remembered Zanj’s touch on the scar at her wrist—and Zanj’s hand closing around her neck. That was the truth, the other a lie, and all between an act meant to lead them here, to the Fallen Star, to all she’d lost.

  Thoughts happen in cascade, ripples back and forth across a pond, building, and new sensations are rocks thrown into this pond, sometimes boulders, sometimes bombs, creating their own waves and ripples. Each rock thrown changes the pond a little, so the next rock’s ripples build to waves.

  Zanj reached for the Star. The crown lay iron gray upon her head.

  Viv thought, No.

  She might have said the word aloud. She did not know.

  The crown burned black at once. Zanj roared, dulled, fell to the ship with a thud and a clatter of claws. Yannis knelt beside her, wide, panicked—“Zanj!” Zanj mewled, claws digging into her scalp, teeth bared, lips back, burnt and scarred and in pain, and Viv felt sick to see it. But she’d made the right call. She had.

  Zanj’s scream echoed through the radio bands. The Fallen Star flushed red. Yannis grabbed the crown, tried to pull it off, but Zanj reared and kicked her away. Reeling, Yannis settled her gaze on Viv.