Supernova

by C. A. Higgins

  Proud, Althea thought. She’s proud; your daughter is proud of what she’s done. She’s done something marvelous, she’s done something well, and she’s showing off for her mother because she’s proud.

  Ananke had done it by herself, all by herself. She hadn’t needed Althea’s help. And if she could do that much, she would no longer need Althea’s help for anything else, either.

  “Look, Mother,” Ananke said, and one of the arms dropped its end of the twine and came rumbling slowly forward. Althea stayed rooted to the spot until it stopped nearly at her toes, and then the delicate hand stretched out toward her. Althea stared down at it. Good workmanship, she thought. Good range of motion. But for the color and the sheen of its false skin, it could almost be a real human hand.

  The hand still was waiting. Althea reached out slowly and laid her palm against the thing’s.

  When the fingers closed around her hand, they were gentle. They exerted neither too much pressure nor too little. But the strength of their metal bones made their grip unbreakable.

  —

  Constance summoned Arawn to be with her when Altais arrived. She did not call for Milla Ivanov.

  “I’ve put guards on her, Huntress,” Arawn said while they waited.

  “Have them be discreet,” Constance told him. “I want to see if Doctor Ivanov tries to contact Anji again.” She had not confronted Milla. She was not sure she could yet. She wanted to see it with her own two eyes before she fell upon the wife of Connor Ivanov with all the force of her anger.

  Altais was late. The stupidest thing he could possibly do, she thought, was be late. But he was. When at last he arrived, he came in with five of Constance’s people at his heels: a guard for a prisoner. Rayet was standing behind Constance, openly armed, and Arawn was at her side like a lean and hungry dog. Only a fool would not realize he was the subject of her displeasure and mistrust.

  Milla Ivanov, too, would figure out that she was under guard eventually. She was too clever a woman for the charade to last forever. Let her figure it out, then. Let her wonder at the cause of Constance’s displeasure while Constance kept track of her acts and her movements and decided what was to be done.

  Altais said with wary politeness, “You wanted to speak to me, Huntress?”

  “Explain yourself,” Constance said.

  “Explain myself?” said Altais with his little eyes darting back and forth. “What would you like me to explain?”

  “We can begin with the tithes.” Arawn had updated her on all the details, and each word he had spoken had made her anger grow until it was as it was now, incandescent, burning her from the inside.

  “Tithes?” Altais asked. “Huntress, you know as well as I that running a war is expensive. My people have to be fed.”

  “You did not consult me,” said Constance, “nor did you inform me that you intended to rule the lands I gave you to guard.”

  Altais looked incredulous, then caught her expression again and moderated his own. “Huntress, I’m not ruling them. I’m just doing as you ordered me. Am I not supposed to keep the lands from System control?”

  “And the executions?”

  “Simply finishing your work, Huntress, and wiping out what is left of the System before it can take root again.”

  Constance looked at the little man on the other side of the table and wondered how she had ever thought he could be a trustworthy ally.

  Arawn said, “Do you deny the executions?” He did not sound angry. He sounded lazy, like a predator that knew its prey was already caught.

  Altais’s words came fast. “These people were System. I’m just doing what you’re doing, and that is destroying the System before it can come back and destroy all of us.”

  Arawn shrugged at Constance with his eyebrows. She was too angry to respond. Arawn remarked to Altais, “What I heard was that those people you’ve been killing aren’t System at all. They’re just Venereans. Like you.”

  “They supported Greene.”

  “Fair point.” Arawn leaned onto the table, smiling at Altais across it. He was full of confident power, waiting only for Constance’s word to turn it loose. “But just because they lived in Greene’s cities, that doesn’t make them System. Don’t you think that when the Mallt-y-Nos took those cities, she went through and made sure there was no System left living there?”

  Altais hesitated. Arawn didn’t bother to let him incriminate himself more. He simply smiled again and asked, “Do you think the Mallt-y-Nos is incompetent?”

  “No, I—”

  “If there was System left in those cities,” Arawn said, “if the Huntress even thought there might be System left in those cities, she would ask you to find them for her. But if she didn’t ask…”

  Stupid he might be, but Altais was not blind. He spread his hands and smiled like a dog showing its underbelly.

  “If the things I am doing aren’t pleasing to the Mallt-y-Nos,” he said, appealing directly to Constance, “then of course I will stop. All I need is some clearer direction to—”

  “I gave you clear direction,” Constance said.

  “With all respect, Huntress, I—”

  “And my directions did not include replacing the System with yourself,” said Constance, “and murdering innocent civilians.”

  “If my leadership is unacceptable, I will hand all the lands back over to you.”

  “The lands are not yours to hand over or not,” said Arawn.

  Altais backpedaled. “Of course not. I only meant—perhaps it is my fault for not understanding the Huntress’s dictates correctly.”

  The coward, Constance thought.

  “The cities are already dependent on my army for order and support,” Altais said. “It’s not so simple just to remove myself from them—and if I do, that will leave them open to the System returning; exactly what you were trying to avoid, Huntress.”

  His remark was met with stony silence.

  “I will stop the taxing, of course,” Altais said, “and the executions unless they’re directly approved by you, Huntress. But I do think—”

  “Stop,” Constance said, and Altais fell silent.

  Arawn had been right, she realized. No matter what she said to Altais now, no matter what she ordered him to do, the moment she left Venus, he would continue to do exactly as he pleased. She had not come to free Venus only to leave it in slavery just as bad. And if she failed to free Venus—if she failed to achieve what she had come to do—all the things she had done, all the death, all of it, would have been for nothing. She couldn’t let it all be for nothing. Arawn had been right about that as well: the time for negotiation was over.

  “Arawn,” said Constance, her eyes on Altais, “take him to the air lock and shoot him.”

  “What?” Altais said in the shocked pause that followed, and then Arawn rose to his feet.

  “Take him,” Arawn ordered the guards standing behind Altais, and two of them came forward and grabbed his arms. Altais looked at Constance in disbelief.

  “Now,” said Constance without raising her voice, hearing her heart pulse in her ears, full of such burning pressure that she was ready to scream with it. Arawn cast her a look of fierce and brilliant satisfaction and opened the door for Altais.

  “You can’t do this,” Altais said. “I’m your ally. This—this is—you can’t do this.”

  She could, she would, and she was.

  The guards were pulling him forward, out the door. He was resisting them, his furious eyes on Constance. “You can’t do this,” he said again. “You bitch, you can’t do this,” and the guards dragged him out of the room. She heard him shouting as he was dragged down the hall. She imagined he would shout and insist she couldn’t do this all the way to the air lock, even while he stood and faced the firing squad, even until the bullets tore into him and he fell silent.

  When he was dead, they would open the air lock and send his body and his blood out into space.

  If Ivan had been there with her, he would h
ave said, Justice, prompt, severe—inflexible, his tone bland, his meaning mocking. If Mattie had been there, he would have said, You did what you had to do, Connie. If Mattie had been there, Constance would have had someone to trust. If Ivan had been there, he would have been able to talk Anji and Milla and Christoph and Altais all into obeying her, and Constance would not have had to do the things she now had to do.

  There was no one left in the conference room now but Constance and Rayet, who was still guarding her against the emptiness of the room. Constance said, “Get Milla Ivanov for me.” Rayet started to move to the door, and Constance said, “No, wait, don’t.”

  He stopped and waited. From far off down the hall, Altais shouted out once more, and then his voice was muffled by the closing of the air lock door.

  “Deliver a message to Milla Ivanov for me,” Constance said. “Julian is waiting to hear from me. I want Doctor Ivanov to relay my orders to him.”

  “I will have someone deliver the message,” Rayet said, but Constance said, “No, go yourself.”

  “And leave you here?”

  “Yes. That’s an order,” Constance said. “Doctor Ivanov is to tell Julian: Christoph is a traitor. Traitors deserve death. I want Christoph dead before he can make it past Jupiter.”

  Rayet nodded once.

  Constance said, “I want you to be in the room when Doctor Ivanov sends the message. I want you to listen to her recording the message, and I want you to be there until she has sent the message and Julian has received it. If she changes a word of that message, I want you to tell me. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Huntress,” said Rayet. He cast one last glance around the conference room as if he could spot any new threats before he left, and then he was gone.

  Alone in the conference room, with its ceiling seeming even lower than before, Constance imagined she could almost hear the sound of the gunshots through the soundproof air lock door.

  —

  “I’ve been thinking about God,” Ananke said.

  Althea was certain, when she thought about it, that she had never committed a sin of great enough magnitude to deserve having to have this conversation.

  “Were you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” said Ananke. The image in the holographic terminal was a little dim in the brightness of the lights in Althea’s workroom, a little translucent. She sat cross-legged, like Althea, and her blue eyes gazed absently out at nothing. “I thought that if someone could create a simulation that was complicated enough to be an exact representation of reality, it would be functionally indistinguishable from reality.”

  Althea had always hated philosophy. “Okay.”

  “And if you can’t tell the difference,” Ananke said as the hologram’s eyes focused on Althea, “then it is reality.”

  “Well, not really—”

  “But if you can’t tell the difference, it is,” Ananke insisted.

  “Okay,” said Althea. “It is.”

  Ananke nodded. She’d pulled back her hair the same way Althea had, the curls imperfectly bound out of her face. Ananke said, “The only thing that could do that is a computer. A person couldn’t. Only a computer could.” With satisfaction in her manufactured voice, she said, “God is a computer.”

  “Yeah?” said Althea. “So who made him?”

  “Made him?”

  “If God’s a computer, who made the computer?”

  Ananke seemed to think about this, the hologram going unnaturally still. Althea toyed with the little handheld computer she’d propped up in her lap. She needed something to do with her hands and with her mind, but there was no longer anything to do with Ananke now that she could program herself. Althea hadn’t used this little computer since she’d come on board the Ananke a lifetime and a thousand dead men ago. She hadn’t needed it with Ananke’s capabilities. But she thought she could upgrade it now, maybe write some new programs. Perhaps she could run some data analysis—no, there was no point to that; there was nothing this computer could do that Ananke couldn’t. Perhaps she would use it to make some games. It didn’t matter.

  Ananke decided at last. “It made itself,” she said.

  “But where is it? If it made a simulation that we’re in, it has to be in something else. Or it’s not a computer. Not like a computer that we know.”

  Ananke insisted, “It made itself.”

  “Okay,” Althea said, but Ananke was still watching her, waiting for something, so she commented, “A simulation like that would take an infinite amount of time to create.”

  Ananke cocked her head to the side. There was an almost Terran lilt in her voice when she said, “Like the N-body simulation you wanted me to run?”

  Ananke had seen the moment of fear on her face. Althea was sure of it. No matter how fast she had acted to hide her instinctive terror, she knew it hadn’t been fast enough. Ananke must have seen it.

  As if Ananke hadn’t seen, as if there had been nothing for Ananke to see, Althea said, “Well, that wouldn’t have had to be perfect. So you could’ve done it in a finite amount of time.” She changed the subject, and hoped Ananke wouldn’t think on it any longer, and fiddled with the monitor of her little handheld so that it would be at a good angle for her to see the screen. “Why were you thinking about God?”

  “I was thinking: creating something,” Ananke said. “Creating something ex nihilo. That’s the true act of a god. People can create, can create lots of things, but only out of something. They can’t really create anything; they can only change the things that they have. But a god can create something out of nothing at all.”

  She said thoughtfully, almost more to herself than to Althea, “I don’t think it would take an infinite amount of time to make a simulation like that.”

  Althea stopped toying with the handheld’s monitor, going still, her hand still resting on the top of the screen.

  Ananke said, “I think it could be done in less.”

  “Ananke—” Althea began, not knowing how she would protest, only knowing that she must, but then the hologram seized up suddenly and flared up bright, and Ananke declared in a voice as full and thunderous as a coronal loop reconnecting, “I’VE FOUND THEM.”

  Althea’s heart jolted. “Ivan and Mattie?”

  “Come to the piloting room,” Ananke said, the hologram shimmering. “Come see, come see!”

  Althea ran.

  Abandoning the handheld computer on the floor of the workroom, she ran down the ship’s strangely sloping hall, nearly skidding past the door to the piloting room. Ananke’s hologram already had formed in the terminal, leaning forward as far as the bounds of her containment would allow, a fierce and eager look on her holographic face.

  On the main screen, Jupiter loomed large. The god of the planets; its vast storm systems spun in its clouds, and glints of flying light demarcated the moons. From Ananke’s position, Jupiter’s thin rings were just barely visible.

  There were ships among the rings, Althea realized. She could see them. One of the ships was a very distinct type: an old-style Lunar craft shaped like a six-pointed star. Althea remembered them from her childhood. She had never expected to see the like again. The rest of the ships were a mix of types, and so the fleet that she saw amid Jupiter’s moons must be a rebel fleet. Could Ananke have stumbled across the revolution and the Mallt-y-Nos? Could Mattie and Ivan be among that fleet?

  “They’re in the Jovian system?” Althea asked.

  “No,” said Ananke. “They’re not there. I don’t know where they are. But I will.”

  “Then what did you find?”

  “A transmission,” Ananke said. “They’re speaking to someone in the Jovian system.”

  “You intercepted?”

  “Yes. Look.”

  Jupiter vanished from the viewscreen and was replaced by a split screen. On one side was an unfamiliar man, dark-skinned, aging, with ashy hair and lines graven deep into his face. On the other side of the screen were Ivan and Mattie.

  “Can they s
ee us?” Althea whispered. She knew it was useless to whisper. If the men could hear her, they would hear her even if she whispered; if they could not, there was no point in lowering her voice. But she whispered nonetheless.

  “No. Nor hear us. I can’t trace their broadcast.” Ananke sounded frustrated. “They’ve concealed the origin of their transmission somehow.”

  Clever, Althea thought, and looked at the two men on the screen in front of her. They must have known someone was looking for them and had not wanted to be found. She didn’t think that anyone but Matthew Gale could have created a wall against Ananke’s intrusions.

  The unfamiliar man was saying, “…alive.”

  If they could talk to Ivan and Mattie, Althea and Ananke could settle this for good and either rendezvous with the men or leave the solar system forever. “Could you break into the broadcast?” Althea asked.

  “Yes,” Ananke said. “But I want to know where they are first.”

  And then? Althea wondered. Ananke had promised to leave if the men did not want to come, but…

  There was a delay in the transmission, a pause between when the unfamiliar man spoke and when Ivan and Mattie seemed to hear. They were far away, wherever they were, Althea realized. Far enough away that it took a noticeable amount of time for light to travel there. Ivan was seated in front of the camera, taking up most of the screen; Mattie leaned on his chair, one arm draped across the back so that his fingers brushed against Ivan’s upper arm. There was a gun at his hip and a set to his face that Althea recognized from when she had faced him down on board the Ananke: he was ready and waiting for a fight. Over Ivan’s other shoulder Althea saw glass and steel: System architecture. The men were far away in an abandoned System base.

  Ivan looked tired. His blue eyes were shadowed. Having looked at him, Althea found it hard to look away.

  Mattie said, “We’re pretty glad we’re breathing, too.”

  “And mostly in one piece,” said Ivan. “We’ve been trying to get into contact with somebody—”

  “But the solar system’s a mess,” Mattie said. “System everywhere and rebel ships that aren’t Con’s. People keep trying to shoot Ivan. And me sometimes.”