Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

  Zanj held out her hand. The Fallen Star burned black and rainbow, preparing to run. Outside, the ’faith fleet warmed its guns, and fighters streaked through the black.

  Viv kissed her once more, and accepted.

  The Star turned on an axis that, not long ago, Xiara would have thought confusing. Zanj folded inside it, and Gray—but Viv could not fold, so it flowed over her instead, long threads of black claiming her body, sliding under Xiara’s fingers, parting them by microns and forever. She knew it hurt, she smelled the pain, but she saw it nowhere in Viv’s eyes.

  The ship’s skin parted their lips, and they were gone.

  The Star flew.

  And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter dove into the ocean of her fleet.

  38

  VIV DROWNED THROUGH space.

  The Fallen Star refused to let her die. It moved against her, through her, infinitesimal gears feathering her skin like caterpillar hairs. It fed oxygen to her blood, it part-filled her lungs, it swallowed her and held her whole and cushioned her organs against their acceleration. But it did not make her feel like she was breathing. It did not preserve the illusion that her blood was still driven by her, rather than by itself. The Star pulled her through the Cloud, a woman become a vector, undying, undead, unable even to cry, tasting the last pressure of Xiara’s kiss.

  She lost senses she did not know she had until she gained them back. Time. Proprioceptive unity, the sense of her body as an integrated whole—she felt as if she’d been dismembered. Perhaps she had, for ease of transit. She lost the left part of the world, then the right. The well-ordering of memory: ringing the bell on the Stock Exchange, her first time in a Jesus camp bed, stone sober, observing herself as Susan sank between her thighs, a fistfight age eight, drowning here, walking out of her house age sixteen with nowhere in mind to go and no plan for coming home, in jumbled order, in no order at all. In the dark.

  After who could say how long, she became aware of light.

  She did not see it, not really. Her eyes were not open. But still she saw … an image triggered in her optic nerve, a grayish flickering shape on a mottled surface not quite like stone. Her shadow.

  She tried to turn, and the image whirled, though her body remained frozen within the Star. Her inner ear suggested that she moved, pebbles seemed to crunch beneath her feet, but she was still.

  She stood, and did not stand, in a chamber made of almost-stone, and in its center burned a gritty, blocky fire, its flames rising grayscale, and across the fire sat a suggestion of a form that was not precisely Gray.

  He looked up, his eyes shining with poorly rendered reflections. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I tried to make this place more comfortable, but Zanj needs all the processing power she can get. She’s driving us so fast—I’ve never moved like this before. I didn’t know anyone could. We’ll catch the Empress, and I’d thought that was impossible. But I don’t want you going mad on the way.” He poked the fire with a stick, and sent up voxelated sparks.

  She wanted to weep, she wanted to clutch Xiara, who wasn’t there anymore, whom she could still taste. She wanted to curse Hong, to scream her frustration to whatever Cloud spirits and small gods had gathered to hear them. But what was the point? It was done. They were gone. She had always been leaving. The knowledge turned in her stomach. She made herself sick. “Thank you,” she said instead of all the other, worse things she felt. At least, she thought she’d spoken the words aloud, and heard them, though her lungs insisted she had no breath to voice them, and her mouth would not open to set them free. A rock sat across the fire from Gray, glistening not at all the way real rocks glistened when struck by real flame. She did not sit down. She paced, stretched. The motion made her dizzy, and did not relieve the tension her real muscles felt, in a place that was not this place. “What is this? A game? Virtual reality?”

  “More or less. It’s so inconvenient that you don’t have a soul—we can’t address it directly. We’re working this into your nerves, adjusting your neural homunculus without manipulating the flesh. It’s all wet and squishy in there—gruesome.” The simulation was too low-res for him to shudder, so he seemed to have a kind of seizure instead. “I don’t understand how you operate.”

  “Comfortably.” She sat to wait for the dizziness to pass. The fire spat sparks. She reached toward it, fanned her fingers, and felt real warmth. “So, we’ll make it.”

  “Home sweet home.” He nodded. “I didn’t dare dream of this. And you made it possible. I could throw you a parade, cook you a feast, but…” He spread his arms to indicate their surroundings: a cave just large enough for the two of them to sit, walls marked with crude animal paintings, an indifferently rendered starscape visible through a narrow opening meant as a chimney for simulated smoke she couldn’t smell. Not that she could smell anything else here. “I do the best with what I have.”

  “It’s wonderful. Thank you.” Outside, something some sound designer somewhere thought sounded like a wolf howled. Helpless, locked, she remembered Hong, chained, Hong, who sought freedom, liberation, knowledge—who had saved her life time and again, and then betrayed her, and himself. She remembered Xiara, the wheels within wheels within her eyes, how she’d screamed the first time she touched the fleet, and the resignation in her voice when she told Viv to go.

  Viv was going home. And so was Gray. “What’s it like? Her ship, I mean.”

  “You’ll see. I—I’m not sure I can describe it in ways you’d understand. Not that I think you’re not smart enough. Just, I didn’t have a body most of the time I was there, or eyes like yours. I remember data, high-amplitude telemetry streams, information. For me, the palace was a flower blooming on all axes at once through time, writing and rewriting itself, bubbles of memory and purpose forming to split and splitting to form. I wished, and it was. It was…” He dropped his hands, and stared into the fire. “Perfect.”

  “Better than Refuge?”

  His eyes darted up: gray as the rest of him in here, and reflecting gray flame. “Different. I’ve never been a man before—even something like one. It was … odd to live with those limits. One shape, and only so much strength and time in a single day. Friends to help, or to disappoint, or devour. It was scary. Not bad scary. Just, scary.”

  “I know what you mean.” She tasted the ghost of Xiara’s kiss. “Gray, why did she kick you out?”

  He glanced up from the fire, scared, and his form derezzed. She imagined being left here alone, waiting for the fire to burn out—worse, imagined returning to that drowning dark.

  “No! I’m sorry, I don’t—you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  His outline grew steady once more. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just wasn’t expecting that. What did I tell you? I forget. I’ve lied a lot since I left home. I told the Ornclans I was a god.”

  “You said you’d spoiled her meal.”

  “That’s … right. More or less. You’ve seen what she does to the worlds she breaks?”

  “Like Orn?”

  “Worse,” he said. “Orn was a rush job. Mostly, she waits for them to ripen. That’s what she calls it: the century or so before they draw Bleed, when their network’s as tangled and creative as it can get before they hit the boundary condition—tiny republics surging through the galaxy’s empty corners as if they were the first. There’s always a chance they’ve come up with something she can use: some weapon, some new principle to perfect her powers, some shield the Bleed can’t overcome.

  “And when they’re ripe, she harvests them. That’s what we’re for—one of the things we’re for. We eat and archive worlds. We take them apart to learn how they work, how they think.

  “She sent me to a little culture, twenty worlds, asteroid colonies, a few orbitals. A simple mission, my first solo: to harvest what was useful, so She could shatter the rest. But I … I liked them. Their music. The games they played. The little stupid sculptures they made for mating partners. Their children sang at school to help them memorize the cha
racters they used to write. They made amazing food, spicier than you could conceive, skin-melting curries, they had this carnivorous migratory lizard that tasted kind of like duck but better and if you crisped the skin right, just—ah.” He kissed his fingertips. “So I seeded myself through their network, and when the time came, I ruined it. The collapse started with a little thing, a knot of code. It spread through the Cloud, undid their communications systems, scattered their fledgling minds to madness. The lines that bound their worlds across the void snapped. I ate memory banks and factories. The civilization fell back centuries. They’ll piece it all together again someday—or maybe not, since they’ve mined out most of their surface metals. But they’ll live. So here I am.”

  “You…” She wasn’t certain how to finish that sentence.

  “Destroyed a people. And saved them. When I was done they weren’t developed enough to be worth eating—they wouldn’t be ripe for centuries, if ever. She cast me out into the void for it. That’s why I gathered dreams and nightmares on Orn. I thought if I showed Her another way, if I made up for the meal I’d spoiled, She might forgive me. I don’t think that anymore. When, if, She finds that I’ve come back, She’ll kill me. But I’ll see my family again, and they can try to hide me, and beg mercy in my name.”

  “You still want to go home.”

  “Of course,” he said. His eyes were flat and shiny in the low-res firelight, and Viv wished she could see them in the real world, wished she could read them. “I’m a Gray of Grayframe. I serve my Lady. I live on Her ship. Without that, what am I?”

  “Xiara’s monster,” she replied. “Gatyen’s friend. My friend. You danced with spiders on a corpse the size of an island. You fed our ship. You learned to sing. You’re more than someone’s tool. You could go anywhere.”

  “Well, what about you? Where are you going?”

  He didn’t ask it viciously. If he had, she would have closed down.

  She stared into the fire, and remembered the drunk she’d felt when she looked at Xiara, and the vine that had grown from that drunkenness to wrap around her body, and sink its roots into her heart—and the desperate confusion she’d felt when Xiara told her to leave. No. We’re not done yet. There has to be more than this.

  But of course there wasn’t.

  She thought, too, of Hong helping her climb, Hong saving her from the Pride, Hong her ally and friend, Hong bleeding out in that eggshell room on High Carcereal. The fear in his eyes, the shame, in chains, of his betrayal. She’d helped him escape Pride drones and his own people, and cross the galaxy, and he’d turned against her because he knew, of course, she would not stay.

  Where are you going?

  She sat by the fire, drowning, and tried to remember. Her enemies. Her plans. Her family. Magda.

  But in the end, all she said was “Home.”

  39

  THEY REACHED THE Empress’s ship as it neared the Citadel.

  Viv, seated by the simulated fire, toasting a simulated marshmallow, first noticed they’d arrived by the improved resolution in her sim: color crept into the stone walls, the night air chilled. Her marshmallow crisped gold, then, because she was holding it too close, caught fire. As she cursed and blew out the flame, Zanj appeared, Zanj in her full dimensionality, shoulders sagged, fur dull with exhaustion, tail drooping. “Kids,” she said. “We made it.”

  Gray jumped up, sniffed the air. “You did it! I can smell home. I can hear the song. Zanj!” He hugged her in a rush of limbs. She looked down as if confused by the gesture. “Thank you.”

  Whatever response Zanj had been about to offer, she thought better of it. “Hold on. The next part might feel a little strange.”

  The cave dissolved, replaced with space—more or less. Behind them, stars pricked gaping velvet black. Ahead, the universe was an empty gray curve, vast beyond measure and webbed with cracks, not entirely unlike the surface of Viv’s burnt marshmallow if it had been hundreds of light-years on a side. Though the curve was dark, its mass dazzled, like a snowfield.

  “The Citadel walls,” Zanj said. “Don’t everybody thank me all at once.”

  “She built that?”

  “Build is the wrong word,” Gray said, rapt. “The whole Grayframe together couldn’t build that in a thousand years, if you gave us a hundred stellar masses to chew and build it with. But the Empress commands the Cloud, and the Cloud describes the Citadel into being: a surface more mathematical than physical, a boundary condition on the outside universe.”

  “That doesn’t sound less intimidating than build.”

  “It’s not,” Zanj said.

  “There!” If Gray had a body, he would have been pointing excitedly, but he didn’t, so it took Viv a moment to see what he meant. “There it is!”

  Viv knew on an intellectual level that scale was hard to judge in space. Humans measured size with a bunch of instinctive tricks like binocular parallax that worked fine for stuff roughly human-scale: dogs, houses, aircraft carriers. These tricks failed for things meaningfully larger than people or farther away than people tended to be, like mountains, or moons. While there was no convenient moon nearby against which to judge, Viv would have laid most of her fortune that the ship beneath them was considerably larger than Earth’s. Or than Earth itself, for that matter.

  Jupiter might be closer to the mark, though misleading, since the planet wasn’t hollow and the Empress’s ship was. Judging from what Viv had seen so far, the Imperial aesthetic, which Viv decided she shared, could be summed up as “Monster Lace.” Crystal arches the size of continents, filigree webs, vast refractive snowflake spans arced by green fire: a wire globe with spikes growing inward toward a burning hole, a ring of bent light around factual, essential, eternal black.

  That was the stolen Rosary bead. Through there was home.

  Everyone she ever loved or hated, every triumph, every disaster, every night she’d slept or spent sleepless, every ship she’d ever sailed, every run she’d ever taken and every problem she’d solved before High Carcereal, that sphere held them all. Somewhere in there, her friends thought she was dead. Somewhere in there, a world waited for her return.

  If you looked at it that way, it made sense how much she’d lost to get here. How much she’d give up to go back.

  She would not let herself cry in front of Zanj, or Gray.

  “Viv,” Gray said. “Are you okay?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Zanj answered for her.

  The Star slid down, dizzyingly fast, toward the ship. As they drew alongside, Viv’s stupid mammal tricks started working again. The stellar object became landscape, the landscape became a structure, and if Viv could have breathed, her breath would have stopped in her throat as she comprehended its scale. “Where should we go?” Zanj asked. And Gray suggested, “The memory bay. I’ll paint it for you.”

  They swept over what Viv had taken at a distance for filigree: conduits broad as oceans, coursing with green light. “Did you build this one?”

  “Yes.” Gray’s voice rang with pride. “This, we built. Took a day and we ate a star to do it: good star, too, one of the crunchy ones.”

  “Crunchy?”

  “Don’t ask,” Zanj said. “You don’t want to get them started on stars.”

  “Sixth or seventh generation. Lots of heavy elements, a dirty burn. You know it’s horrible for you, but you can’t help yourself. Like when you wrap bacon around, you know. Things. Like more bacon. Go left. Now down a bit—good.”

  They settled beside an arc of crystal hull. “Okay, Viv. Do your thing.” And for the first time in she did not know how long, she could move. The Star bulged around her arm, bubbled out, touched the palace hull, made a seal. Viv could not breathe, but she could raise her arm. Stretch out her hand.

  The crystal hull felt glassy smooth at first, but as she trailed her fingers across it, it caught her skin as if tiny gears within the surface were spinning off her touch. When she pressed the hull, it gave way.

  And she fell.


  She hit the deck hard, in a confusion of reversed gravity. She should have been silent, she should have been careful. She had meant to be. But she could breathe, and breathing, she could scream. Her heart could beat again, and her blood move, and that blood was full of unprocessed endorphins, of the chemical pain of broken bones, not to mention heartbreak, anger, guilt, betrayal, adrenal fear. She’d thought she’d worked through all that in those long campfire hours, and in her mind she had, but they still marked her body: the dislocated thumb, the broken ribs, that final kiss.

  She came aware of time again, gut-heaving, eyes red, breathing so deep she felt queasy, would have thrown up if there had been anything in her stomach to throw. The world’s red blush burnt off. Someone spoke. Gray. “Viv? Are you okay?”

  “No.” She tried to push herself up, before she remembered her dislocated thumb, her broken ribs—but she did not collapse. Her hand hurt, her hand remembered hurting, but the thumb, when she looked down, was in exactly the right place relative to the rest of her fingers, splayed on a surface that looked more like rock than crystal. Blinking away tears, she felt her side. Her ribs were whole, though sore. “What?”

  “I fixed it,” Gray said. “On the way. The ship was all through you already, so it wasn’t hard. Was I wrong?”

  “No.” She tested muscles, bones, most of them in the right place. “Thank you.” Then her focus shifted to the looming shape behind him, and she screamed.

  “This guy?” Gray laughed, and tapped the ankle of the … it wasn’t quite a tyrannosaur, but something of that ilk, bipedal and enormous and toothy, with great bulging eyes and an elegant prow of skull. “Don’t worry, he’s not going anywhere.” He rapped the leg with his knuckles, producing a sound that didn’t quite remind Viv of stone or wood.