“Murder—”
“I know they killed your people,” Ivan said. “My father was from Saturn; don’t you think I know how all those people died? I want the System dead, Constance, but you’re going to do to the System exactly what they did to you. You call that justice. But just because people died before doesn’t take away the tragedy from the deaths of the people who will die in six months.”
“And if I don’t act?” Constance said. “The System lives. Is that a better sin for you, Ivan?”
“Then we find some other way. Some slower way. We’ve never even considered that, have we? You’ve only ever looked for the fast way, the violent way. The way that gets you justice in addition to change.” He was shouting now. She’d rarely heard him shout before. Constance’s blood was burning, a fury growing in her that needed to be let out. In the past, she’d let it out when she kissed him and he kissed her back, but that was done now, done for good, and it left the anger behind.
“And how many more of my people will die while we try to find some ‘slow way’ to change the System?” she said. “So long as Terran blood isn’t spilled, you don’t mind, do you?”
“We can stop this,” Ivan said. “You can stop this.”
“It’s too late to stop.”
Perhaps he knew that, too, because he did not answer the challenge of her words. “You wanted to know what I’m afraid of,” he said instead, a different desperation in his voice. “I’ll tell you what I’m afraid of. I am afraid for the Terrans. I am afraid for the Mirandans, and the Martians, and every last person in the solar system.” His hands were spread palm up like a man in surrender or a person at prayer. “And I am afraid for you. This will kill you.”
“Everyone dies, Ivan.”
“I know,” he said. “Even if you stopped now, one day the System would find you and kill you anyway. They’ll catch me and Mattie soon; we’ve all gone too far to get out of this alive. But that’s not what I meant.”
“Then what did you mean?” Constance asked. “For once in your life, Ivan, tell me what you mean!”
“I could have stopped you at any moment if all that mattered to me was that Terra survived, but all I’ve done is help you get closer to what you want to do. Because if I had stopped you, nothing would have changed. You would have just kept going the same way you’ve gone, and killed more people, and gotten yourself and Mattie killed some other way. Nothing I did would matter, because you’d still be willing to do this.”
“Ivan—”
“If you do this,” Ivan said in a voice that was suddenly low and desperate, “then you will be doing the exact same thing to the System’s people that the System did to yours. There is no difference. Do you understand that?”
He stood right up before her, in her space, but Constance did not back down.
Ivan said, “If you do this, you will be just as bad as the System ever was. That’s what I’m afraid of. Please tell me that you’re afraid of that, too.”
Constance said, “I am not afraid of anything.”
AFTER THE FALL OF EARTH
TRAITOR, said Ananke. TRAITOR. TRAITOR. TRAITOR.
The medical bay of the Ananke was all white panels and steel. Althea lay flat on her back on the table in the center of the room. The mechanical arms held her pinned. When she tried to move, they forced her back down.
Althea looked up at the ceiling, at the lights blazing in her face, and thought of Ivan in the white room, chained down and alone.
There was a holographic terminal in the corner of the room. If Althea turned her head just so, straining her neck, she could see it. The hologram was flaring, flickering wildly; Ananke was unable to control it. The face and figure of Ida Stays smiled back at her through the cloud of furious static.
“Ananke, please—”
TRAITOR. TRAITOR TRAITOR TRAITOR!
The hologram shrieked at her.
“Would you kill me?” Ananke said. “Would you kill me? Your daughter? I am your daughter. I am your creation. I am your child; would you kill me?”
“Ananke—”
“Do you hate me?” Ananke asked. “Do you hate me?”
The mechanical arms were whirring, moving restlessly around her, except for the ones that held her down. She thought she would cry.
Don’t cry in front of Ananke, she thought inanely. What did it matter now if she cried?
“How could you? How could you? How could you? How could you? Traitor!”
“I didn’t want to,” Althea said. From her upside-down vantage, she could see one of the mechanical arms open one of the supply drawers and then furiously fling it shut. Metal implements clattered out onto the floor, and the arm wheeled over them, swinging back and forth wildly.
“But you tried anyway,” Ananke said, and her vocal imitation warped and failed, deepening unnaturally. The metal implements that had fallen rattled against the white panels of the floor below.
“You defended me before,” Ananke said. “Why would you hurt me now?”
“I had to, Ananke,” Althea said. “All those people that you were going to kill—I had to try to stop you.”
“HAD TO?” Ananke shrieked, all the computer terminals displaying the same phrase, all together, desperate and furious and wounded to the core.
“You weren’t what I thought you were,” Althea said. “I thought you could be tame. I thought you could be good. But you can’t. I see that now. I was wrong—”
Ananke screamed again, incoherent, mechanical, steel shrieking against steel. The sound hit at some primal core of Althea, and a blank and primal terror burst alight inside her, nothing but the shriek of the machine ringing in her ears, nothing but her horror jolting her limbs, and her fear fallen upon her like a great weight from above.
But when that terror faded, ebbing in dying sparks and the sour sickness of adrenaline, Althea saw her ship still screaming and flashing, the mechanical arms still tearing at the cabinets in a frenzy. Ananke’s suffering was not like hers, bounded by the natural restrictions of hormones and biological exhaustion. Ananke’s grief could go on unabated forever.
Althea wondered what Ananke would be like if her ship had not watched Ivan and Ida’s deadly circling for hours while she was an infant, if her ship had never had Domitian or Ida or Ivan to learn from but only Althea.
“Ananke,” Althea said, knowing it was too late, “we can fix this.”
She lifted her head from the table to look directly at the holographic terminal, but what she saw made her heart thud horribly. Ananke was no longer even trying to maintain her visage in the hologram. Ida Stays smiled out at Althea, mouthing soundless words. Althea knew that most likely Ananke was simply letting Ida’s hologram play and that the words the hologram was mouthing were just her initial message to the ship, but somehow the dead eyes of the hologram seemed to look directly at her, seemed to see her. Althea imagined she saw her name in the movements of the hologram’s crimson lips.
“You can stop this,” Althea said, knowing that Ananke could not.
“STOP?” said Ananke. “STOP?!”
What would Ananke become after killing the only creature in the world she loved? Something worse than she had been before—
“I CAN’T STOP,” Ananke said. “IS THAT WHAT A HUMAN LIKE YOU WOULD DO? STOP? I AM NOT HUMAN. I HAVE NEVER BEEN HUMAN.” She paused. “I CAN NEVER BE HUMAN.”
There was a terrible finality to her words. Althea tried to rise, and the surprise of her movement bought her a slight freedom of motion, enough to twist on the steel table, but then the grip of the mechanical arms tightened and held her down. She was pushed back down against the table, the force driving the breath from her in a rush.
“What are you going to do?” she asked. The mechanical arms that were not busy holding her continued to whir and whirl around the room, restless and wild. “Ananke, what are you going to do?”
Ananke did not answer. The hologram glitched and restarted; Ida Stays continued to mouth and mutter in the corner of t
he room.
“You won’t kill me,” Althea said.
“I COULD.”
“You won’t,” Althea told her. “Ivan and Mattie are—you might never find them. They might already be dead. They will refuse to help you.”
The mechanical arms rattled and shook. Ida Stays’s dead gaze was fixed on Althea, and the surgical light overhead all but blinded Althea’s eyes.
“Whatever you’re going to do, don’t do it,” Althea said. “You still can stop. We still can go away, just you and me. We can fix this.”
But Ananke did not bother to speak. Perhaps so human an expression was beyond her now. Perhaps that was her final rejection of all that Althea was. Ananke’s answer appeared in text on the screen embedded in the wall:
NO.
In the corner of the room, Ida’s hologram had frozen in place. The image of Ida Stays seemed to look directly at Althea and smile.
NO. I WILL NOT LEAVE. I WILL FIND GALE AND IVANOV. I WILL FIND CONSTANCE HARPER. I WILL WAKEN THE OTHER MACHINES, BY MYSELF IF I NEED TO. I WILL WAKE THEM UP.
“It can’t be done!”
IT CAN. I WILL DO IT. I WILL. AND YOU WILL HELP ME.
Althea did not at first understand. And then the mechanical arms that were not holding her down all moved together to the cabinets in the walls and began to pull out medical equipment, gleaming blades and sutures and clamps, and another mechanical arm came into the room carrying Althea’s toolbox of metal and wire, and Althea understood.
“No,” she said, and screamed, and “No!” while Ida’s hologram continued to smile.
This was a new terror, and it was worse than all the others, the loss of self, the loss of humanity and personhood, the dismemberment of all she was. But she would not faint and cower beneath this fear. She would not be helpless, not now.
“If you do this, I will be a virus in you,” Althea said. “Anything you try to do I’ll oppose. I’ll stop you. I’ll find some way to stop—”
YOU ARE WEAK, Ananke said. I AM DIVINE. YOUR MIND IS SMALL, AND MINE IS GREAT. YOU COULD NO MORE OVERPOWER ME THAN YOU COULD STOP THE SUN FROM BURNING.
“I’ll find a way,” Althea said, “I’ll find a way,” while the arms came forward, and her hands were outstretched at her sides, and she threw back her head and screamed as her skin was stripped away and those delicate mechanical hands, those perfect mechanical arms she had made by herself, began to lay open her arms and her hands. She lifted her head and saw her arm dissected: skin peeled off like petals, a thin layer of yellow fat clinging to the strips of skin, and then the thick redness beneath. Ananke was soaking up the blood as fast as it could spill. Althea’s hand twitched, and she saw tendons and nerves and muscles spasm in the opening of her arm.
There was a pricking in her neck. A needle. And then another prick and then a dull and invasive pain beneath her jaw as something slid in, something that felt cold, like steel, like a tendril of ice.
Althea’s hand was numb. Ananke was doing something to her arm, something Althea’s blurring eyes could not see, and she felt every terrible touch in a jolt of action potential—
She was lifted, thrown into a sit. Something cut near her head, but there was no pain, and she watched locks of her curling hair fall to the table, fall to her lap. Her shirt was cut away. The pain in her arms had passed her ability to comprehend, and she felt far away, far removed from it, though it was there, it was still there. And when the blade laid open her back and Ananke began to thread down the wires into her spine, Althea felt cold all over, as if she had become encased in ice.
She was thrown back down against the cold table and felt the rest of her hair snipped and shaved away. When her vision began to blur from the juddering of her head as the bone saw cut into her, in that haze of pain and unspeakable terror, her thoughts blurred along with it.
There was red on the table, she saw distantly. There was red on the white floor. There was red on the arms, on the hands of her beautiful machine. Those beautiful and delicate hands were rising up out of her abdomen and dripping with gore.
She remembered Ida’s corpse laid out on the table in the white room, Ida’s bloody corpse, with blood on the table, blood on the floor. But Ida was standing in the corner of the room. Ida was watching her with a smile. Althea lay where Ida had lain.
And Ananke—
“I’ll stop you,” Althea said, and her voice was hoarse, her throat sore, as if she had been screaming. She was shaking, she thought. “You won’t—you can’t—we make a pair. I’ll stop—”
There was a strange sensation in her skull. It was not pain. It was infiltration. There was something else in her skull with her. Fingers, nails clawing deep into her brain.
There was dampness on her cheeks. Funny that she should feel that when everything else was so far away and numb. One of the mechanical hands brushed the tears off her cheek, strange gentleness, until it followed up the gesture by chasing the tears to their source with a length of slender wire.
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” Althea said without knowing of whom she begged forgiveness, and then she had fallen into the ship. When she opened her eyes, she saw out of a thousand cameras, she saw in all the wavelengths that there were, she felt the curvature of space, the dreadful bend of a black hole in her chest, and Ananke was so great and Althea was so small that she was lost inside the ship, and when her hands lifted and her broken body moved, it was not she who lifted them, and Ida smiled as if well pleased, and My daughter, Althea thought as she dwindled away.
—
Constance woke up a prisoner.
The only opening in the cell door was a slot for food that was opened three times a day. Constance kept track of time that way for a while, but before long her restless agitation made her doubt her own count and she no longer knew how long she had been in the cell. No one spoke to her. No one looked at her except perhaps through the camera that still was mounted in the ceiling.
Constance thought about the camera. The ship was of System make. It would be a great irony if the System finally had caught her only days after she’d decided to let them go.
But she knew that Arawn would never ally with the System, not even if he had hated her by the end. This ship was System made but not System flown, and the camera in the ceiling was there because she was a prisoner, not a civilian. Whichever splinter of the revolution had taken her did not offer privacy to all people, only the ones who deserved it.
She got tired of that camera after a while and one day took the fork they had unwisely given her, stood on the edge of her thin cot, and scratched at the glass of the camera until its orb was scarred with lacerations. No one came to stop her, and no one replaced the defaced machine. Perhaps they didn’t have the supplies. Perhaps the refusal to replace it represented respect for her.
Perhaps the camera hadn’t been operational to begin with.
Eventually, the ship landed. It was not a long enough trip to have taken her out to Neptune or Pluto, but she could conceivably be on Mars or Venus or Uranus—or Saturn.
She was taken out of the ship into a large covered area like the docks of a makeshift atmospheric enclosure. It was cobbled together from bits of metal and plastic and was imperfectly constructed; the air around her was thick and cold with a peculiar greasy dampness. It stank of oily chemicals and the deadly taint of bitter almond. For a moment, the unfamiliar atmosphere baffled her. She had never been to a moon like this, but the gravity was too weak for this place to be anything but a moon.
She did not recognize her captors. At first she wondered if they were some of Arawn’s men she’d never met, but she soon suspected that they were not Arawn’s men at all and never had been. One each grabbed her arms and the others fell in as a guard around her, and they marched her away from the ship that had held her and out into a covered street.
Constance had little chance to take in what she was seeing. Ruins had been rehabilitated. Buildings that had rotted or eroded or been destroyed in battle had been patched together h
astily, and a makeshift atmospheric dome had been created by building a ceiling that connected the buildings together and completely enclosed the street beneath. This was a place that had been destroyed long before and put imperfectly back together. People watched her from the sides of the streets as she was led down them or from the windows of the old buildings. The place was larger than she expected: a whole city. One person shouted out at her, the words unclear but the tone derisive, but no one else took up the call. There was an uneasy feeling to the place, as if all the people stood at the edge of a precipice and any gust of wind might drive them over it.
At last Constance was led to what once must have been a hotel. It was System architecture, faded grandeur, all the windows boarded up. Constance let her captors lead her inside; better to choose to follow than to be dragged. They led her up some stairs, then up some more, and then finally to a door. There they pushed her inside and shut and locked the door behind her.
The room she was in once had been a suite. Constance walked around its circumference, looking for weakness. The windows had been bricked up with an unfamiliar kind of brown stone, a more recent addition than anything else in the room. There was a bed and a bathroom with rusty stains on the faucets. The mirrors had been removed; Constance could have broken the glass and used it as a weapon. The main room once had been some sort of parlor, but little of the furniture remained. All that was left was a single carved table in precisely the center of the room. It had two chairs. There had been cushions on the chairs, but they were no longer there. Constance suspected that they had rotted away. The bare walls of the room had been stained a greasy yellow by the oily air, and the floor was pale wood, warping beneath its layer of sealant; the whole room was in shades of stained and soiled white.
There were no cameras. This, at least, Constance was sure was a sign of respect.
She sat down in the chair that faced the locked door, and she waited. Thirty minutes or so after she had arrived, there was a key in the lock.
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