From Ruins

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  "How long until we leave Well?" she asked.

  "Two days," Crispin answered.

  "Captain's quarters," she instructed the lift, which resumed movement.

  "What's this?" Crispin asked. "Lost your will, Mistress? Not ready to intimidate another pirate into following you? Should I tell Nolan it's all clear for a coup? He'd love that."

  "I don't care what you do," Sediryl said. "You're going to do it anyway." The lift opened and she strode through it, Qora following.

  "I thought you had a backbone," Crispin complained. "Where's your vicious streak now, Mistress? You were doing so well with the plasma and the fire and the burning people alive. I'd like to see more of that and less of this."

  "Your life must be a constant series of disappointments," Sediryl said.

  "Oh no." Crispin stopped at the door to her quarters. "I expect people to live down to their worst natures. They never disappoint me."

  "Then knowing me will be salutary for you." She let the door close on him, savored that small act of rudeness while knowing that was all it was when there was no way for her to bar him from entry. Stopping just inside the door she inhaled slowly, the bones of the corset pressing against her ribs.

  "Arii?" Vasiht'h asked from his seat alongside the Queen.

  What could she say that wouldn't worry them unnecessarily? "It's nothing," she said. "Two more days and this fleet will land in Chatcaavan space. We'll have done what we had to."

  Neither of them asked her ‘and then what', for which she was grateful.

  Setting an alarm would have been cruel when his siblings had all had different schedules, so Vasiht'h had taught himself how to wake up without one. He popped awake in the middle of the night and glanced at the chronolog he'd left floating alongside the desk: perfect. Rising, he shook his hind leg out until the pins and needles left it, then went to the genie and requested some cups, hot water, and tea bags. It felt luxurious, using power so profligately, but they were on a Fleet warship and it had the power to spare: more importantly, the room lacked a kitchen, and it wasn't safe for him to leave.

  Setting out the cups, Vasiht'h started making tea. Considering his set-up, he returned to the genie for a selection of delicate cookies.

  It took longer than he expected, but as he'd guessed, his actions proved too bizarre not to inspire interest. Behind him, Crispin said, "What are you doing?"

  Vasiht'h pressed a finger to his mouth. "Quieter," he whispered. "Qora's asleep."

  Irritably, Crispin waved an arm. "There. Privacy film. He can't hear us. Happy?"

  "Much," Vasiht'h said, sitting beside the desk. "Now I don't have to worry about disturbing him. Won't you join me?"

  "Are you trying to tell me you made tea for me?" the D-per asked, incredulous.

  "Who else?"

  "You woke up in the middle of the night to make a drink for me that I don't need."

  "You like to visit at night," Vasiht'h said. "I wanted to be a good host."

  Another of those pauses. In Crispin, the hesitation was so complete it looked like his solidigraph had frozen. Perhaps it had. "I don't understand."

  "Won't you sit?" Vasiht'h said. "Have tea. I don't know what these cookies are, I just asked for something appropriate with a floral tisane. They look perfect." He canted his head. "Can you eat? I know you can manipulate matter so I'm guessing you can make things disappear. But do you taste them?"

  "I'm not a flesh and blood person," Crispin said. "I don't have a tongue to taste with. I'm a simulacrum. I can't eat."

  Vasiht'h nodded. "I've attended more than one meal where I've pushed food around a plate to be polite, but I haven't had the appetite to eat." He thought about it. "Not many, admittedly. I won't be offended if you ignore the food."

  Crispin stared at him. "I don't understand you."

  "What don't you understand?"

  "I'm holding you prisoner," Crispin said. "Without me, you'd die. Tortured to death, or pushed out an airlock. Your girlfriend would be raped. The furry thing..." He glanced at Qora. "Sold for money. Faulfenza are exotics. I'm holding your life in my hands and you know I don't care what happens to you. And you're pretending like you'd like to get to know me?"

  Vasiht'h considered. "To be honest, if these are going to be some of the last days I live, I want to live them doing the sorts of things I always do. And that includes making food for people and trying to help them. Or just talking with them. I like getting to know new people."

  "I'm not a person," Crispin said.

  "Sure you are." Vasiht'h poured tea for himself, and then for the D-per. "Just not made the same way I am."

  "You believe that," Crispin scoffed.

  "I think so, yes," Vasiht'h said. "My Goddess thought the worlds into being. What are you, if not a thought in a network? Why is your existence any less valid than mine?"

  Crispin froze again. Vasiht'h ignored the D-per's break and picked a cookie for himself, tasted it. For something that had come out of a genie, it was amazing. Buttery, but so crisp it was light. It did in fact complement the tea perfectly.

  "You make no sense," Crispin said finally. "Why are you treating me this way? Don't you know I've been helping a sociopathic dictator set herself up? By selling Alliance citizens to people even worse than her?"

  "Before you made these choices," Vasiht'h said, "you made other choices."

  "I'm not going to magically become a nice person because you made me tea."

  "I know," Vasiht'h said.

  Crispin slammed his hands on the desk. The tea cups rattled on their saucers, sloshed. "Stop it!"

  Obediently, Vasiht'h put the cookie back on his plate.

  "Why aren't you scared of me? Why don't you hate me! Don't you know I destroy everything I touch?"

  Vasiht'h looked at him steadily.

  "Answer me!"

  "You haven't destroyed me," Vasiht'h said.

  "Yet!"

  "Yet," Vasiht'h allowed. "But that's a start."

  "A start!" The shadows in Crispin's uniform began to writhe. "It's going to end the same way. It always ends the same way. Everyone ends the same way. They die!"

  "Eventually," Vasiht'h agreed. "Is that why you're grieving?"

  "What??"

  "Do you still miss him?" Vasiht'h asked gently.

  Crispin's eyes widened, his mouth stretching into a snarl. A flesh and blood person would have been breathing hard, sweating, trembling. The D-per wasn't moving. Just staring at him with that rictus of anger and misery. And then, abruptly, he was gone.

  Vasiht'h sipped the tea as if nothing had happened. And as before, he waited to make it clear he was willing to continue the conversation, if Crispin wanted to return. It didn't surprise him that the D-per didn't. He left the tea out anyway.

  CHAPTER NINE

  "The Tyrant is killing people," Tsonet said.

  The young male was pacing in the Surgeon's office, fingering some sort of pale medallion with a nearly invisible strand. Ostensibly he was waiting for the Surgeon to complete his review of the reports Tsonet had written on the alien's health. Had he been doing so, he would have been seated on a stool, and silent, but Tsonet was rarely still. A male given to action-the Surgeon wondered what he would have been like, had he been allowed to develop normally. From the reports, he made an excellent surgeon's assistant, though the Surgeon didn't think the male would welcome that news: such rarified positions were denied castrates.

  At least, they had been. Perhaps that situation would not obtain for much longer. "More people?"

  "When the court males object too much to their reassignments, they disappear. Which means they show up in the servants' quarters, where we are expected to dispose of them."

  The Surgeon looked up, eyes narrowed. "He is hiding his kills?"

  "Yes?" Tsonet paused, frowned. "That is strange, isn't it."

  "He hasn't troubled to do so before." The Surgeon tapped a talon on the back of the tablet. "He is concerned he might be overwhelmed."

  "That ma
kes no sense!" Tsonet said. "He was more outnumbered previously, when it was just him and Second, and he strutted in with guns to claim the throne."

  "But they feared him then," the Surgeon murmured. "Now he is the one who fears them, so it doesn't matter how much strength he has. He has lost confidence."

  "That is good for us."

  "That is dangerous for us," the Surgeon said. "Frightened people behave erratically." He set the tablet down. "The alien is getting worse."

  "I stopped the bleeding, more or less," Tsonet said. "But he's still not getting enough nutrition. And those cuts on his face don't look good."

  The Surgeon grimaced. What he knew about treating infection in aliens could be measured in micrograms. "I will send a request to examine him. The Emperor might grant it."

  "Or he might kill you?" Tsonet said. "He threatened you before. Isn't it wiser not to come under his eye?"

  The Surgeon said, "A needful risk. We require this alien alive."

  "Do we?" Tsonet asked.

  "Yes," the Surgeon replied, unperturbed by the question. "Because the previous Emperor was fond of aliens, and if we let this one die I would prefer not to answer to him, or his allies."

  "His allies?" Tsonet's wings fluttered. "You mean to tell me these puling creatures are important to us?"

  The Surgeon resumed reading the reports. "We are about to discover how much."

  The sheath Uuvek wrote Maia came in two parts: the first injected her into the closed Chatcaavan network, which they called the skein, and the second allowed her to navigate it without being identified and attacked. "This will work?" she asked him, because the code looked slapdash and her overwhelming impression of it when she slid into it was of a rickety wooden roller coaster. Something that had been left out to rot for several generations.

  "It is not elegant," Uuvek said, which for him was an apology. "I will continue work on it. But yes, it is functional. Remember its limitations."

  How couldn't she. A glittering stream followed her activities in any Alliance network, continuously updating all the nodes she used to store what she learned, did, became. Once she passed the gate into the Chatcaavan skein, that stream would be truncated. No back-ups. No ability to reach into the Alliance network except in the most limited ways. She was forking her personality into a nodule that might not return to report its experiences.

  The idea was terrifying, but not enough to deter her from her decision. She was, after all, Fleet.

  "I will," she said.

  "Then anytime you're ready," Uuvek said. "Make use of it. Keep me apprised. I have access to Chatcaavan systems now through the fleet, you can use my public call-marker. All your communications will be encrypted."

  "All right. Thank you."

  He didn't answer: no surprise. He wasn't a garrulous man. A fascinating one, though, that she couldn't help being curious about. Maybe when all this was over...

  ...but it had to be over first. Maia ducked into her new sheath and engaged it.

  The injection didn't hurt, because she lost consciousness. That dark lasted barely a fragment of a second, and it was the most terrifying thing she'd ever experienced, because she'd never, ever lost consciousness since activation. Was this what happened to flesh and blood people when they slept? How did they close their eyes for the horror of it?

  But, she saw, the sheath had worked, and her coating was functioning too. Hanging in the Chatcaavan skein, she tasted the information flow, ran her fingers through it, inhaled it as best she could past the layer that both translated its foreign protocols and protected her from its security measures. It felt... different... being here. In a way she couldn't describe. She hated the delays introduced into her actions; clumsiness was a novelty she would have gladly foregone. The way the Chatcaava encoded information and shared it was foreign and the alienation she felt surrounded in it, and the isolation knowing she was completely cut off from her back-ups... those were new too, and she didn't enjoy them either.

  But she was here, and she could act. Maia sank into the skein, orienting herself until she pieced together the path from Apex-East to the Twelveworld border, where the pirates would be arriving. And then, laboriously, she began to make her way there.

  I'm coming, Sediryl.

  Crispin didn't come to Vasih't's second midnight tea, or his third. On the fourth morning, Qora set a hand on his shoulder casually and asked, /Why are you up in the middle of the night?/

  /I am trying to.../ Vasiht'h paused. What was he trying to do? /I'm trying to help the D-per./

  /The crazy one?/

  Vasiht'h grimaced. /I would prefer to call him... deeply troubled?/

  Qora snorted. "And?" he asked aloud, while folding the blanket he'd been using to sleep.

  "I need a lot more cookies," Vasiht'h said. "Do you know how the other Faulfenza are doing? Should I go talk to them?"

  "No need," Qora said. "I have been. They are prepared."

  He couldn't resist asking, "For what?"

  "Anything," Qora replied.

  Vasiht'h was thinking about that later, setting out the tea again while the Faulfenzair slept and Sediryl slept and the Chatcaavan Queen burned. Had he been prepared for this? Absolutely not. And yet, maybe his whole life had been a preparation to hold fast in this fateful hour. He'd lived a life of gentleness and peace and assumed that had made him unfit to weather strife and pain, because that's what the common wisdom proclaimed: ease made you soft, and soft things died when the wolves came. But maybe that was too simple, like so many things were. Maybe sometimes living a hard life riddled you with cracks and flaws until you were prone to shattering, and sometimes living an easy one made you too whole to break when trouble came calling?

  "You keep doing this," Crispin hissed from behind him.

  "I keep enjoying it?" Vasiht'h answered. "Would you like lemon in your tea? You can smell that, at least. You must be able to smell, or you wouldn't be able to... analyze gases or whatever?"

  The Tam-illee walked in front of him, and the nightmare scroll of his uniform was less agitated tonight: more a slow-motion pastiche of horror than the frenzied gyrations that revealed the D-per's turmoil. "I don't want lemon. I don't want anything."

  "That's not true," Vasiht'h said. "You told Sediryl you wanted to see things destroyed? That's something."

  Crispin stared at him. "How can you repeat that without looking horrified?"

  Vasiht'h thought of the few times he'd been volcanically angry. Most of them recent. "Sometimes I want to see things destroyed too. It's all right to have awful thoughts. It's what you do about them that matters."

  "But I've done atrocious things to manifest those thoughts." Crispin crossed his arms. "I am an awful person."

  Vasiht'h considered that, then shook his head. "No, I can't agree with that."

  "Why? Because you're naïve?" Crispin said with a sneer. "Because you believe anyone can be saved?"

  "No," Vasiht'h said. "Well, yes, I believe anyone can be saved. But that's not why I disagree with you about being an awful person."

  "Oh really. Then by all means, enlighten me."

  "It's an excuse," Vasiht'h said firmly. He took up his teacup. "The moment you say ‘I'm terrible and there's no redemption for me', you have reneged on your responsibility to fix things."

  Crispin gave another of those frozen pauses.

  "I bet you could do enormous amounts of good, if you decided to," Vasiht'h continued. "As a D-per. I can't imagine what it's like to exist almost... almost like a thought of the Goddess. But trying, I can't help but think it's amazing."

  Crispin's uniform darkened, grew howling mouths and scrabbling claws. His eyes went glassy. "You... you want it too. Just like him. You're all the same...."

  Vasiht'h laughed, pressing a hand to his abdomen. "Me! Want to be a D-per? Goddess, no! I love my body. And the taste of bread and kerinne. And the hugs of my nephews." He patted his stomach. "I love flesh too much to give it up, and even if I didn't I would never disparage the Divine by r
ejecting Her gift to me, which was to be born this way. Having a body has its problems, sure, but those problems give me opportunities to learn something."

  Staring at him in disbelief, Crispin asked, "Like what?"

  "Oh, self-discipline, mostly," Vasiht'h answered, rueful. "Gluttony is its own punishment. But how to overcome things, and work with them, and work around them. You can't do any of that without obstacles. I trust that the obstacles of my life are the ones She decided were best for me. So here I am." He smiled. "That doesn't mean I can't appreciate what your life must be like. And it must have its own obstacles." Crispin was still staring, so Vasiht'h said, "Why don't you sit down?"

  "I don't need to sit."

  "See, that right there sounds like an obstacle to me," Vasiht'h said. "Do you know how much pleasure sitting is when you've been on your feet all day?"

  "Maybe as much pleasure as reducing your footprint after you've stretched yourself across the network," Crispin muttered.

  "You do understand, then."

  "But you're still wrong," Crispin said. "Other people agree that I'm awful. I'm so bad, in fact, that Fleet put the D-per project on hold for over a decade after my trial, and even now they don't let D-pers accompany ships on tour. All of us are assigned to static emplacements where there's no temptation for anyone to develop an obsessive relationship."

  Vasiht'h snorted. "If they think that keeping you in the middle of a bunch of people will prevent that, they should have hired some psychologists before making their decisions."

  "What... what are you?" Crispin exclaimed. "You... I don't... why don't you react to me the way you're supposed to?"

  "Because real people are like that. They never do exactly what you want or expect them to do. They're... random." Vasiht'h smiled faintly. "I'm sure no one expected you to go rogue, either, so you're doing the same thing. Reacting the way no one expected."

  "How else can you react to having killed someone you were supposed to be protecting?" Crispin asked.

  Vasiht'h felt himself grow still-on the inside, he hoped, where it wasn't noticeable-and replied, "It depends on the person. Everyone responds to guilt, shame, grief, anger differently. There are enough patterns in how people react that people like me can be trained to be helpful, but that doesn't make people predictable. As you've just noticed with me."