“We don’t have any choice,” Mattie said.
“Yes,” said Ananke, “but will you help me?”
“Let us think,” Ivan said, and turned his back on Althea’s corpse and walked back out of the white room with Mattie at his side.
As soon as he set foot in the hall outside, the holographic terminal crackled and spit to life. A haunted shape formed, a spectral image: the ghost of Ida Stays appearing in static and then swiftly falling away. Behind them, the lights to the white room flickered once more before the steel door fell shut.
BACKWARD
The woman was reading a book at her post in total disregard of all System regulations. Ivan stood out of sight and watched her, trying to read the blue cover of the novel.
“What are you waiting for?” his traveling companion asked, Mattie Gale, so Mirandan and impatient.
“A moment,” Ivan said with all the even steady calm his mother had taught him.
“She’s not paying attention. I could just slip right past.”
He couldn’t. The woman had seated herself so that any movement would flicker past her eyes and catch her attention. No, Ivan knew, she needed better distraction.
The woman turned another page and tucked a strand of brown hair behind her ear. In the movement of her hands, the flicker of her fingers turning the page, Ivan at last could read the title.
“Wait until I signal.” Ivan set off across the yard that separated the System base from the rabble who might walk by. If anyone tried to assault the place, they would have to cross open, indefensible space and be shot down by the turrets overhead. Ivan crossed it alone and unarmed, and none of the weapons fired.
The woman in the guard’s post looked up when he came near and watched him. He stopped a few feet away and spread his arms in helpless gesture, sheepishly smiling. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just—I saw your book.”
She glanced down at the book she still held, one thumb holding her place.
“Rebecca, right?” Ivan came nearer when the hostility in her gaze decreased by a fraction. “A ghost story.”
An embarrassed smile slipped past her System-trained hardness. “My mother sent it to me.”
Ivan smiled back. “It’s a good book.” He advanced the last few paces to where she sat, bulletproof glass between her and him. He took care to move so that her back was to the path Mattie would take through the gate. It had been easy enough to hack into the System cameras in the area—Mattie was impressively versed in that skill—but distracting a human guard took a different set of skills.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Ivan asked.
He startled a laugh from her. “If ghosts existed, the System would know,” she said.
“Sure, if ghosts could be caught on camera. But ghosts do exist. Not as dead people walking around but as memories.”
A flick of his wrist beneath the guard’s line of sight signaled Mattie. As Mattie darted past, Ivan held her gaze with his attention.
“That’s what a haunting is,” Ivan said. “A memory of someone who’s gone, going through the same motions they went through in life. If someone tormented you when she was alive, she’ll torment you after death. If someone comforted you—or saved you—while they were alive, they’ll comfort you or save you after death.”
Her expression said he was strange, but she was listening, her gothic novel forgotten in her hand, her thumb still holding her place so that she could pick up right where she had left off. In the back of his mind, Ivan counted out the seconds since Mattie had gone in.
“That’s how you can tell a ghost.” Ivan leaned onto the ledge that held the bulletproof glass intended to keep her safe from him. “They can’t change. Only a living thing can choose. A ghost can only go through the motions.”
“There aren’t even any ghosts in this book,” she scolded, tapping the spine of Rebecca against the glass.
Ivan smiled. “No,” he said. “Only memories.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Mattie signaling him, loot in hand and ready to slip out of the System base to freedom.
The best manner of lying was to do so while still telling the whole truth. “I’ve never seen a System guard who could get so caught up in a story that she didn’t notice I was nearby until I came walking over,” Ivan said, and because of their friendliness now she could smile at his words. “In all the solar system, I don’t think there’s anyone else like you,” and a light shone in her eyes, in her smile, and behind her Mattie Gale slipped out of the System base and to freedom.
When Ivan returned to the Tam Lin fifteen minutes later, Mattie was on the couch in the main room that had become his bed, sprawled comfortably, the data chips on the table in front of him. He gave Ivan a considering look.
“I thought you’d stay out with her for a little while,” said Mattie.
“Why? You were out.”
“It seemed to be going well. And—she was pretty.”
Ivan cast his mind back. Her slender fingers on the creamy pages of the book, the light in her eyes when she smiled at him. She had been pretty.
“I did my job right; nobody’ll know they were robbed for a couple of days. Are you going to see her again,” said Mattie, “or…?”
He trailed off in an odd fashion, but Ivan’s thoughts were elsewhere. Once he would have gone to her so that the System would see what it expected to see, so that the woman would get what she expected to get, completing the narrative he had begun, building up a plausible character and following through.
“I don’t have to,” Ivan said, and bent down to pick up one of the data flakes, studying its frosty surface and Mattie’s blurry shape beyond it.
“No one ever has to,” said Mattie, which showed how much he knew.
FORWARD
When they stepped outside into the hall, Mattie immediately turned them to the left so that they could continue to walk down the Ananke’s long and winding hall. He knew what was at the end of the hall. If Ivan did not know his aim, he would realize it soon. There was one way to destroy the Ananke’s computer from inside her halls, and it was at the very end of the hall, hidden inside the hatch that led to the black hole core: a dead man’s switch that would kill the machine and leave the ship intact.
They were just around the final bend from the end of the ship when Mattie heard it: a hydraulic hiss and a dry sound like bones clattering.
The end of the ship’s hall was not empty as the rest of the ship had been. Three mechanical monsters hulked and whined like the separated heads of a computerized Cerberus. They were the ship’s mechanical arms standing guard over the dead man’s switch, but they had been altered in a way no normal ship’s engineer would have outfitted its robotics. The arms had hands, delicate things covered in pale sensor patches like corpse skin. They looked like smaller versions of the arms that Mattie had seen sticking out of Althea Bastet’s broken back.
One of them was different from the others. Its metal bones had been replaced by something ivory. The ivory pieces swooped in delicate curves, more like a sculpture than a practical machine element.
Mattie realized that the swooping bones were Althea Bastet’s removed ribs.
In the midst of her monsters, Ananke’s holographic terminal lit, and the insubstantial form of the fragile little girl glowed.
“I am not such a fool,” said Ananke.
“We had to see, at least,” Ivan said. He had found his charm again, somehow maintaining a gentle, teasing tone in the face of the beasts ahead of them. “Would you trust us if we didn’t try?”
Ananke considered the question thoughtfully. “No,” she said.
“We need someplace to rest,” said Ivan. “Someplace to sit and think.”
“Any room is yours,” said Ananke. “Would you like—”
“One as far down as it can be, please,” Ivan said, and added, as if embarrassed to admit it, “The other crew—their rooms were at the top.”
“There are no bodies left on this ship,” Anank
e assured him.
“The human mind is irrational.”
“Then follow.” Ananke flickered out.
Ivan and Mattie followed her back up the hall, the hologram appearing and disappearing ahead of them like a mirage. Mattie’s mind whirled, trying to determine what Ivan had planned.
“There,” Ananke said with a gesture to a door ahead of them.
It must have been a storage room for laundry once, when there had been three people living on board. Sheets were folded and stacked on carts. The room was small and cramped, but the carts could be pushed against the walls to allow for a living space.
“You would have to set up a bed yourself,” Ananke said from the hall. “None of my rooms, aside from the ones that have…already been used…are suitable for habitation.”
“This is fine, Ananke,” said Ivan with strange, serene calm. “Mattie and I will go get our things from the Ankou.”
“One of you will go,” Ananke said. “The other will stay.”
Understanding struck Mattie like electricity. “I’ll go.” He said to Ivan, “Do you want me to set this room up like you asked me to set up the Copenhagen? Back when you were sick?”
Mattie wasn’t sure how much Ivan remembered from his delirious hours after Mattie had rescued him from the Ananke. He couldn’t be certain that Ivan would remember his plea to Mattie and that Mattie had refused to comply: to set up the Copenhagen with a manual self-destruct that Ananke could neither detect nor prevent.
“That was my hope,” Ivan said. “I know how much you hate my sense of style.”
“I always hoped you’d learn to have better taste.”
“One does what one can with the materials on hand,” Ivan said quietly.
“I’ll be right back,” said Mattie, and left.
The walk up the hall seemed to take longer now than it had before. He passed the shut door to the white room where Althea’s body was hanging. He walked through the glassy doors to the docking bay and into the Ankou.
Their new quarters were situated close to the base of the Ananke. That had been deliberate. Mattie understood now Ivan’s earlier interest in what Ananke had done to her black hole core. If Ananke was maintaining the core by steadily feeding it mass and the steady feed of that mass was cut off, there would be nothing to stop the rapid evaporation of the diminished black hole.
An explosion powerful enough at the base of the Ananke would not only annihilate the ship’s computer and destroy the integrity of the ship but also disrupt the careful control of the black hole core. What the explosion—such as one set off by, say, a handful of Eridian Class 50 bombs—did not destroy of the Ananke, the explosive force of the black hole’s sudden evaporation would. Their destruction would probably be bright enough to be seen from Titan.
Inside the Ankou, out of sight of Ananke’s constant gaze, Mattie could let some of his control go. He scrubbed his hands through his hair, thinking. There was no way they could get the Ankou out of Ananke’s docking bay. Even if they could get past the mechanical arms, once in the Ankou, they wouldn’t be able to reach space with Ananke’s hull doors closed. Any attempt at escape would end up with them bleeding blood and oil like Althea Bastet.
Alone in the piloting room, unseen by System, or Ananke, or Ivan, Mattie let himself sit down against the wall, his arms wrapped around his knees, and hide his face in them. He sat that way for a time.
Then he stood back up and went and collected everything he would need.
Ivan was waiting for him in their room. He had pushed the carts aside and made a makeshift bed out of the abandoned linens. The process of doing so had muddied the sight lines from Ananke’s various cameras. Mattie made careful note of those blind spots and began to plot where he would put the explosives he had taken from the Ankou’s weapons room and concealed in the bags he’d brought down with him.
“I’ll do it,” he said when Ivan moved to stand and started to position the bombs around the room. The last thing Mattie wanted was to see Ivan planting the bombs that would kill him. He had had quite enough of that from Ivan to last one lifetime.
As he knelt beneath one of the carts, Ivan’s hand on his arm stopped him. Mattie turned, expecting to hear him say something, but Ivan only pulled him into an embrace.
Into his ear Ivan said quietly, “Can you put the bombs on a delay timer?”
“Of course I can,” said Mattie, who had been putting bombs on delay timers every couple of months since he had been seven. “Why?”
“The Ananke,” Ivan said, brushing his hand over Mattie’s head to hide his mouth from the ship’s cameras, “has an escape pod left.”
Back when they first had come onto the Ananke, Mattie had feigned his escape by shooting off one of the ship’s escape pods. The crew had believed he’d left in it and had stopped looking for him in the walls of the ship.
But—
“But,” Mattie said into Ivan’s neck, “it has no navigation or supplies.” The crew had believed he’d died in the escape pod for that very reason.
“We’re within sight of Saturn,” said Ivan. “Anji can’t let an unidentified craft fly into her space. When she realizes it’s us, she’ll help us.”
“And then what?”
“We do what we like. Go to Venus, find Marisol Brahe, fix things—they’ll need people who understand computers. Or we can go away, just the two of us, until everything’s settled down again. Whatever we choose.”
“The timing won’t work. I can delay the explosion, but Ananke will sense the escape pods. She won’t let us launch, and then we’re stuck.”
“Althea is still alive.”
Mattie thought of that mutilated body, the wires piercing it, strung up, skinned. The heart had been beating, yes, but…
“She has some control left,” Ivan insisted. “She stopped some of the ships on Europa from being destroyed. I think when Ananke took her brain, there was some transference.” His fingers pressed against Mattie’s scalp, curved over the top of his ear. “Maybe I’m wrong; maybe she won’t help us, and we’ll blow up in that ship, or we’ll get out and we’ll die in the escape pod between moons, shot down or starved or whatever. But this way, at least we have a chance.”
Mattie pulled away from him then so that he could look at Ivan directly. There was nothing but honesty in his expression, so close to Mattie’s, and suddenly Mattie could find no more reasons to ignore the impulse that he had spent years running from. He took Ivan’s face in his hands and kissed him.
Mattie expected him to pull away, but Ivan didn’t. He leaned into the kiss as if it had been his own impulse as well, and when Mattie pulled back, he found that Ivan’s hand had somehow made it to the front of Mattie’s shirt, where it had tangled itself inescapably in the material.
“All you have to do,” Ivan said, near enough that Mattie felt his breath on his mouth, “is distract Ananke.”
“Okay.”
“Set up the timer,” said Ivan, and let him go.
Once they were separated from each other, Ananke could hear them and read the motion of their lips. As he assembled the bomb, his hands hidden from Ananke’s camera, Mattie said, “What time do you want to eat? An hour?”
“Better give me two.”
“Okay.” Mattie set the bomb’s timer for two hours. “I want to take a look at our course anyway. Let’s meet upstairs.”
“I don’t know where the mess hall is,” Ivan said.
Mattie grimaced, as if he had just remembered that Ivan had spent all his time on this ship in prison or in interrogation. “What places do you know?”
“The white room,” Ivan said. “The docking bay. The escape pod bay.”
“Meet me by the escape pods,” Mattie said. “It’s closest to the mess hall.” He set the timer.
Mattie rose to his feet. He dusted off his hands even though there was not a trace of dirt on them. Some phantom warmth of Ivan’s cheeks still tingled against his palms.
He took a breath and looked toward the
nearest camera.
“Ananke,” he said, “we’ll help you.”
There was no sign of acknowledgment. The camera stared at him blandly. But Mattie knew that Ananke had heard.
Mattie joined Ivan just outside. For a moment he looked at Ivan and saw that he was doing the same thing: looking at Mattie as if he might be able to memorize the lines and shape of him.
If they failed, Mattie knew, they would never see each other again.
There could be no farewells here, not with Ananke watching.
“See you soon,” Mattie said, and stuck his hands in his pockets so that he would not do something like try to kiss him again, and walked up the long, silent hall alone.
Gravity ruled the universe. None of the other forces were anything like it. Its strength reached out to infinity, and at the largest scale of the cosmos, it was gravity that defined its shape. Gravity was the experience of the very fabric of the universe being felt, like running a hand across silk. There should be a theory of everything in which gravity was unified with the remaining forces, Ananke knew, but unlike the other unifications, this one seemed undoable.
The impossibility was fundamental. The other forces were defined by the small, by quantum mechanics, but gravity was not. Gravity, as Ananke understood, was something entirely different. Whereas the other forces acted in a world of time and space, gravity itself was time and space. And how could Ananke define something in respect to itself?
It could happen, she knew; it could happen, and it would.
Mattie and Ivan were on board. Triumph danced in Ananke like photons on the arc of a magnetic field. She had found them. She had caught them. She was ascendant. She had won. Mattie and Ivan and Althea and soon Constance Harper, too; all the forces, arranged as one.
I can’t understand it, Althea was saying, an irritating distraction from Ananke’s joy. I can’t see what caused it, but it can’t have been inevitable.
What?
That you are the way you are, said Althea.
I am a god come to life, Ananke told her mother’s ghost. My begetting is beyond your conception.
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