“Viv. Stop. I know where you’re coming from. The desperation, the anger. I can imagine how I’d feel if I were in your shoes. But we’re not as slow as you’re pretending to be right now. Why would I lie? You’re no threat. You have nothing I want. You’re a woman with skills thousands of years out of date, wielding a weapon she can barely hold, to defend a partner who doesn’t care about you. Who was just using you to get to me.”
Viv swung the Star again. The Empress’s form slipped away like mist, and the momentum spun Viv round in a circle. Her face, the Empress’s face, appeared in one of the black glass pillars; Viv smashed that pillar with the Star, but the face slipped into another.
“See,” the Empress said, “this is what I love about us. We’re so brilliantly, delightfully self-centered.”
Viv ran to that pillar, and smashed it, too. Flying glass cut her cheek. She panted. Her arms shook from the Star’s weight. The Empress appeared in a diamond slab—Viv appeared, with a gentle chess player’s smile, oh did you really mean to make that move? She knew how that smile felt from the inside.
“You know I built the Rosary over centuries, at an expense you could barely imagine. You know I spent a truly absurd amount of computational power to bring you here. But it never occurred to you to ask why your life would be the one I’d choose to interrupt. Why you would be the one person your universe’s god would visit, out of all history. Because of course the world would revolve around Vivian Liao. When you found you could undo my bindings, release Zanj, command her—it seemed natural. Why shouldn’t Vivian Liao have power?”
With a mighty swing, Viv snapped the diamond pillar in half. Off-balance, exhausted, she fell to her knees.
When the dust cleared, she didn’t see herself anywhere.
“That,” the Empress said, “is a rare gift.”
Viv lurched to her feet, and looked up. Her face stared down at her from the ceiling, still smiling.
“The habit of centering yourself, of command, of not accepting others’ answers—that was our foundation, Viv, and we built great things upon it. We built them, and they tore them from us, and we built them again. In that basement server farm, we fixed a chain to the neck of the world. The systems we built made us smarter, better, faster. We found the Cloud and made it ours. We broke banks. Governments. We beat nations. Planets. Species. We fought and fought and fought, and every time they tried to crush us, we crushed them right back.”
Viv glared up at her face, so smug, secure, so far away. She did not know how to use the Star, did not know by what power she could lift it—but when Zanj carried it, she could fly. She crouched low. A rush of power passed to her from the Star. She bared her teeth, and flew.
Or tried.
Her legs would not straighten. She looked down. Diamond flowed up from the cracked floor, over her ankle and around her knee, climbing toward her arms. She screamed, strained, but the diamond did not care, and her own voice covered her cries, like a hand over her mouth.
“But what happens,” the Empress asked, “when winning’s not enough? I conquered a galaxy, I built civilization after civilization, and still the Bleed came. Whenever a society reaches sufficient network density, whenever they place enough demands upon the Cloud, the Bleed appear. I beat them back the first time—barely. We lost trillions of souls. They cored Earth. I rebuilt civilization after civilization, empire after empire, and each time it was worse. In the end, even I would have fallen. So I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done: I played it safe. Carved off a corner of the galaxy and made it my preserve, froze the Bleed out, forbade any mind that was not mine. And each time a society grows dense enough to draw them, I fix it.”
“You eat them!” Viv was screaming now. “You burn them and break them. You’re a monster, and I am nothing like—”
A diamond gag closed her lips, a diamond band cinched her jaw shut, and she could only gaze up in impotent fury, her whole body ribbed in crystal.
“I’m sorry,” the Empress said. “I don’t quite enjoy doing this to myself, though there is a visceral thrill I’m sure you can imagine. I’ve called myself all those names and worse, millions of times, all the variations on them that your genius could muster in ten thousand years. You know you would hate to do what I have done. You know you could do it—to save yourself, to save the world, to save all worlds, all futures, from those monsters’ maws. So, forgive me for not indulging your protestations of virtue. I want to explain why you’re here, because I respect you and what you’ve accomplished by making it this far. You deserve to know your place in all this.”
Viv could still breathe through her nose, at least, and she could curse in her mind.
“I’ve spent eons trying to defeat the Bleed. But I have only my own genius to work with—any culture that grows to the point where it could contribute, I must harvest before the Bleed come for them. At first I gained their knowledge, new physics, new math, but at this point each new civilization only adds a few marginal discoveries, and a bunch of poetry. I have to face facts: I’m the universe’s only hope. It is indeed a lonely thing.” A smile; Viv caught the reference, and hated it. “Centuries passed. I worked, and worked, and I found no solution. And then I started to worry.
“We both know the dangers of lock-in effects, of local maxima and minima. We are climbing a mountain, looking for a high valley where we can live safe from floods. We settle in a cleft in the mountainside, poorly sheltered, barren, harsh, and we think, this must be the highest place where human beings can live. That cliff goes up forever. Until one day someone scales the cliff, through unimaginable suffering, and finds at its summit a green and temperate paradise. I’ve spent my life clawing handhold by handhold up that cliff, and slipping down. But perhaps another path up the mountain would never have found the barren cleft where I took shelter. Perhaps a journey I did not take, some seeming dead end I rejected eons past, leads straight to paradise.”
Viv glared up at her with all the hate she could force into her gaze.
The face disappeared. Footsteps approached: soft, padded steps over the broken floor. She felt the heat of green. Her own face entered her field of view, condescending, curious.
“That’s where you come in. I simulated other paths we might have taken, seeking answers to the Bleed threat, a place where my grip on power would be absolute. I used computational matter so dense I had to close it behind an event horizon to hide its inner workings from my Cloud and from the Bleed. And then I left my Rosary to bake.”
Viv wanted to shake her head, wanted to deny it. The Empress turned to her in a whisper of green silk, her expression mocking Viv’s disbelief. Hong had suggested the rosary beads might contain simulations, back during that first jump in the Question, and she’d rejected the idea. Time travel was a better explanation, or parallel universes. Why did she toss away his theory? Because she was real. Her world was real. Magda was real, and the sea. In that pure black mirror she seemed so small. That black hole below her was not just a passage home—it was home, and the Empress’s knife lay at its neck. Everyone she had ever known. Everyone she had ever loved.
Well. Not everyone.
The Empress was not lying. Viv did not lie to herself. Not when the truth was cruel.
“I made you. I set millions of parallel Vivs along their paths, seeking answers in millennia. And for so, so long, I heard nothing—until your world went ding. Problem solved. Intrigued, I extracted you so I could search your mind for answers: What could I have done differently? What wrong turn did I make? Only to find that your principal contribution to your world’s success, your sole embellishment, was a sentimental mistake.” She shook her head. “It’s not all a loss. Your world remains, and all its promised answers. Once I’ve returned to the Citadel I will unravel the simulation and incorporate its innovations at my leisure. In the meantime, given how far you’ve come, it’s remotely possible your mentality holds some useful feature I overlooked on my first scan. Grayframe!”
A whirl of fire and smoke and
clouds erupted from the air and condensed into a featureless silver blob, almost the shape of a man. “Yes, my Lady?”
The Empress looked into Viv’s rage-filled eyes, reached down, and stroked her cheek. A red line carved across Viv’s face; Viv smelled the burning flesh. She screamed and tried to pull away, but the diamond held her fast and smothered her words. The Empress straightened, licked her fingertip, and, after a faraway wine taster’s moment, nodded in satisfaction.
“Take this girl apart and feed her to me.”
44
VIV DIDN’T HAVE a “give up” setting. This was one of many reasons she’d made her first fortune, and her second; it was also why she had a hard time finding a consistent board game play group. She had zero chill. She fought when there was hope; she fought when hope was gone. What did surrender ever get anyone? A life spared by another’s sufferance wasn’t worth the work of breathing through. The world was out to get her anyway—far more than it was out to get most of her friends and colleagues. If you didn’t fight, you let it win. If you fought, you might lose, but better to go down aflame and cackling on a ship you’d sailed yourself.
So she fought her chains in the Empress’s throne room, the Star useless in her hand, as the quicksilver blob approached. She seethed with rage. Diamond bonds cut her skin. Her jaw ached. If she could not free herself, if she could not curse, she would die trying.
The Gray flowed toward her and settled, its feet not quite where the floor should be. She glared into the flat, eyeless face, and wondered who this was—a cousin, niece or nephew, a grandmother, Graymother herself, one of the singers in that great chorus above Cape Ann? Did it stand featureless before her now to protect itself from the Empress’s notice, or because the Empress would rather not think about these servant weapons she deployed, so long as they solved her problems?
The Gray stepped closer. She opened her lips and tried to spit. Most of it ran down her chin. Some made it, and crackled and sparked against the silver. The Gray raised a pseudopod arm to its face, and extruded a straightened finger. Was it flicking her off? No—the finger settled where it might have had lips. As if quieting her down.
The Gray reached for her. She cursed it in mumble, pulled away as far as her bonds allowed. But as it reached for her, it refined, bubbled with context. A face surfaced from that mirror pool. Wide, eager red eyes, pale skin. A face she had first seen as a child’s, now planed, nearly a man’s.
Not the Gray. Her Gray.
His hand settled on the diamond bands around her face, and left a silver stain that zipped down facets, across joints, prickling her body like hot needles as it broke her bonds molecule by molecule. Her jaw slacked—which meant her jaw had room to slack. She breathed out awe, relief, fear, saying nothing, watching him.
He did not open his mouth, but a drop of his body, too small to feel, must have trickled into her ear. She heard his voice. “I’ll keep Her busy. Get Zanj. And run.”
She might have spoken then, tried to tell him no, ruined everything. But he was already rising from his crouch, grown large in limb and long in claw and red in tooth, his body a tornado of knives and fire, a roar of hunger and rage that shivered the throne room as it crested and crashed onto the Empress.
Viv didn’t wait to watch what happened next. She lunged across the cracking crystal floor toward Zanj.
The battle did not care whether she was watching, though. She heard, distinct through the chaos, her own voice, a contemptuous “What?” Her green fire, tattered and reflected by whirling Gray, burst through the room, searing the air in Viv’s lungs.
Gray was saving them. Saving her. Or at least, giving them a chance. At the cost of everything. Like before. She hadn’t asked him to this time. She wouldn’t have dared to ask.
He hadn’t told her to wait for him, to join him, to save him. Just to free Zanj, and run. That bastard. Her stomach turned. He didn’t mean to get away.
Half-blind from the battle’s heat, she struck a wall wrapped in cloth: Zanj. Zanj didn’t seem to feel the impact. She hung limp in her restraints, eyes rolled back, breathing hard and shallow and fast. Blood ran down her face. The crown burned black as the singularity beneath them. “Zanj!” She twitched. Could she hear? Or was that pain? Didn’t matter. Viv clawed at the green light that fixed her in place, and it parted like wet paper. Of course. It recognized her. Like all the chains and all the walls and all the ships had recognized her.
Zanj sagged onto Viv, and Viv sank beneath her hot weight. Her spittle flicked Viv’s face. Cradling Zanj’s skull, Viv lowered her to the floor. The crown pulsed black; Zanj curled in agony, struck Viv in the side. Viv heard a crack, and her breath left her. She tried to get her hands around the crown, but Zanj pulled her head out of reach. Zanj flailing in pain could be as deadly as Zanj armed and free. “Stop hurting her!” She’d never tried to order the crown itself before—but god, if her commands had any value, let them be good for something now. “Stop.” All her anger and fear broke into a plea.
The crown paled. Zanj gasped; her eyes spasmed, settled.
An enormous hammer struck the floor, which cracked, deep white fissures spreading in spiderweb beneath them. Two whirlwinds of light, one silver, one green, consumed the center of the throne room—the green, enormous and growing by the instant, had thrown the silver down, and pummeled it now, tearing shreds of mass away. Gray roared, tried to fight back, but his desperate clawing strikes skittered off Imperial jade.
“Zanj!” Zanj’s claw twitched, but her eyes did not open. Viv set the Star on her palm, closed her fingers around it. Still she did not move.
Another blow rocked the throne room. An arch collapsed, raining diamond. Cracks in the floor widened, spread. Viv felt a draft: wind drawn down, down and out. Gray’s roar broke to a modem wail. She glanced over her shoulder—the whirlwinds had condensed to forms, and the Empress stood ten feet tall in midair, crushing Gray’s lean, starved body in her massive arms. He clawed for her eyes, and she squeezed tighter.
“Wake the fuck up, Zanj. We have to get out of here.” The command burned her crown black. Zanj’s eyes flew open, and focused, and her teeth bared, and in a blur she held Viv by the throat.
Her face was sweat and blood and rage and scar. The crown seared black against her brow. Her eyes were wide and crazed and Viv suddenly wondered if Zanj was not seeing her, Viv, but the Empress she had twice tried and failed to kill. Viv tried to speak, to explain, but she could not breathe.
The modem scream rose, twisted—and, with a sickening crack, stopped.
Zanj’s grip loosened.
The Empress let Gray fall. He hit the ground heavy, his eyes staring red. His skin trickled. Lightning darted along his limbs, trying to heal, to re-form. She set her immense claws on his chest, and he began to burn.
He shriveled from the edges out, the millions of mites that made him up squealing, popping, and sizzling as they failed to vent waste heat. The Empress watched him die, locked him in place.
“Zanj.” She could barely speak. “Please.”
And, with a snarl, Zanj threw Viv aside. She stood as much as her ruined body would allow, raised the Star, and slammed it into the throne room floor.
Which shattered.
Viv tumbled in shards and thinning air. Cold stung her eyes; she should cover them, protect herself, but what would that accomplish, really? The Empress burned green in the void where her throne room had been, far above already and receding; they fell toward blackness beneath, toward the bent light around the hole that was Viv’s world, singularity now and forever, herself eating herself, and out there in the storm of cutting mirrors, Zanj tumbled, flew, caught a handful of silver from the heart of a shape of flame-licked char, then somersaulted back, nearer, ever nearer, eyes burning white, breaking the mirrors all about them, real and furious, and her face was the last thing Viv saw before the black.
45
THE BLACK SPAT her out on the brow of a rocky frozen planetoid carved in the shape of Viv’s own face. She c
ollapsed, sagged, curled around something she did not have, and sobbed into the stone until she thought she would be sick. Her breath drew steam from the rock—it must have been a long time since this version of her face had felt any warmth.
She could not cry, could not breathe, without pain from her lungs, without an ache in her side where she’d fallen, where Zanj struck her, where the diamond shard had pierced. Her cheek was a burned mess, and there were other pains, too, less physical but no less real. Failure, futility. She remembered the Empress’s triumphant grin when she broke Gray. She knew that same expression from gym mirrors and candid photos. Winning. She gulped the memories down one by one like coals, and lay there forever beneath the burning stars.
When forever ended she pushed herself up. Each movement stabbed new needles into her flesh. Once she managed to sit, she found it hurt no more to kneel, to stand. No less, either.
Zanj sat cross-legged, back to Viv, on the brow of Viv’s face, watching a screen so matte black Viv could only tell it was a screen by its discontinuity against the background stars. Zanj could hear birds perch miles away; she could feel the shifting electromagnetic fields of a nervous system approaching. Certainly she felt Viv’s footsteps. But she said nothing, kept still, as Viv limped closer.
The screen showed the Empress’s ship, in all its immensity still just a diamond bauble against the green-broken black curve of the Citadel wall. As the ship drifted forward, with Viv’s home, with her whole world, at its heart, the wall rippled, bubbled, bulged, and swallowed it whole. The process mirrored itself: a bulge, a bubble, a ripple, then stillness.
Zanj swiped the screen away; it rolled up and became the Star again, then shrank to pencil size. She stuck it behind her ear.
Empress of Forever Page 36
