“Before we do that, however,” Ida said, “I have some questions I would like to ask you about Abigail Hunter.”
For a breath, then two, Constance sat very stiff and very still, as if she were on the verge of rising. “What about her?”
The reaction was intriguing; Ida had not expected so violent a response.
“You seem upset,” Ida said. “I imagine you and Abigail have a tense relationship.”
“Something like that,” said Constance Harper.
“Why don’t you tell me what you mean,” Ida suggested.
Constance opened her mouth, then closed it. She said, “I haven’t spoken to Abigail in years, though I know Abby and Mattie have stayed in touch. I disagree with many of the decisions she has made.”
“That doesn’t explain why you were so upset by her very name,” said Ida.
Constance took another deliberate breath. At the end of it she said swiftly and abruptly, “I always suspected Ivan was sleeping with her.” She broke Ida’s gaze as quickly as possible.
Ida could not have hoped for a more perfect reaction. A jealous woman would say any number of things she would keep silent about usually.
“He has admitted as much to me,” she confided, feigning sympathy, just one woman speaking to another. “I hope it won’t be too difficult for you if I ask you a few more questions about Abigail and Ivan.”
Constance raised her eyes and sat tall and proud.
“It won’t be,” she said.
—
Milla’s warning rang in Althea’s head. It distracted her from what she ought to be doing until by the time Domitian showed up to send a quick report to the System about the circumstances of Constance Harper’s arrival, Althea was almost ready to ask him about it.
But she couldn’t find a way to phrase it. She wanted to ask if he cared about her computer, but that was a ridiculous question. Of course he did. Or he wouldn’t understand what she meant.
She found herself watching the System broadcast again. The hosts had returned to the topic of Galatea.
At her prolonged stillness, Domitian looked over at her, then at the screen. The handsome man was saying, the words scrolling in white across the bottom of the screen, “A number of other riots have arisen on Galatea since this morning. The System has suppressed the riots and placed the remaining cities on the moon under martial law to maintain order while the perpetrators are identified.”
“What happened?” Domitian asked.
“Food riot on Galatea,” said Althea. “They killed their governor. The System shattered a section of the greenhouse.” The hosts were saying nothing about Titania. It was uncomfortable to realize that that must mean that the System had not yet managed to bring that moon under control.
She wondered if the System would even announce it if it had to break all the greenhouse enclosures on Titania, destroying the entire moon to subdue it.
Domitian nodded slightly, looking over at the screen, where the woman now was talking. “Good,” he said.
“It seems kind of…violent,” Althea said, hesitant to speak but unable not to express some of her horror.
Domitian gave her an amused little smile as if he thought she was naive and sweet.
“You’d amputate a limb to save the rest of the body, Althea,” he said gently, and a thrill of unease snaked through Althea’s breast.
“Those people chose to betray the System,” Domitian said, returning his attention to the report he was writing. “The System did what it had to, Althea; that was never a question. This is how the System has always handled such things, and it has been successful for a very long time.”
Yet Titania was in rebellion and Galatea had tried to follow, and Althea did not know what else might be happening that the System was not reporting. For a moment Althea watched him type, even less sure about speaking than she had been before.
“Domitian,” she said at last, still uncertain of whether she should say anything at all, and stopped.
“Yes?” he prompted, fingers poised over the keys in midword.
Althea considered and reconsidered and discarded a dozen possible things to say.
Hopelessly, certain that it was not precisely what she wanted to ask, Althea said, as she had before, “Are you…are you worried about the computer, too?”
Domitian blinked.
“Yes,” he said, and he said it gently, but Althea was struck with the awful feeling that he did not know what she meant. “Of course I am. It will seriously impact our mission if the computer remains”—he paused—“in a state of disrepair.”
“But aren’t you worried about the computer?” Althea asked.
He frowned. “What do you mean, Althea?”
Her courage failed her. A limb was amputated, Althea knew, to stop the poison in it from spreading. And the Ananke had been poisoned in a way by Matthew Gale. “Nothing,” she said.
A brief silence, then the tapping of keys as Domitian resumed typing his message. “Don’t worry,” he said as he stood to go. “I have faith you’ll get it working again,” which was not what Althea had wanted to hear at all.
—
The rest of Ida’s interrogation of Constance had been mostly unproductive—Constance had very little to tell her indeed—but that trivial time was worth it for now, for this moment. Ida watched the tension grow in Constance Harper’s frame as she led her down the hallway, each step drawing them closer to the white room.
Constance had figured it out, of course. Ida truly would have had no respect for her if she hadn’t figured it out after the confrontation with Milla.
Doubtless Ivan had figured it out as well. Doubtless he was sitting there, pale, helpless, impotent, chained down, waiting for Ida to return and for her to bring Constance Harper in her wake. Surely now he would appreciate Ida’s power over him. Surely now he would understand how easily she could destroy the people he loved.
Ida stopped in front of the door to the white room and held it open for Constance. Constance took a steadying breath, then walked in with her head held high. The sound of Ida’s heels as she followed echoed with her presence.
Ivan said without turning around, “Is that you, Con?”
“It’s me,” said Constance, and did not stop alongside Ivan as Milla had but went to the other side of the table, where Ida usually sat, and there she stood. For a long time the two simply looked at each other. A curious thing was happening to Ivan’s expression; he was starting to appear the slightest bit afraid. But Constance only looked as if she would cry.
“Have you been well?” Ivan asked, as if it was not precisely what he’d wanted to say. “I haven’t seen you in…it feels like forever.”
“I’ve been well,” Constance said. She glanced aside and visibly mastered her expression. Ivan’s frightened attention never left her face.
“But I have been told,” Constance said, as solid and unrelenting as the beating of a war drum, “that you’ve been seeing Abby while you haven’t been seeing me.”
Jealousy, Ida thought, was a beautiful thing.
“Nothing to say?” Constance asked when Ivan did not speak. “I’m certain that Abigail appreciates your loyalty.”
“Oh, good,” Ivan said, unexpectedly bitter. “As long as she appreciates it.”
Constance’s lip curled as if she would start shouting at him, as a thousand other arguments between the two had begun, but she controlled herself. It could not have been because there were strangers watching—there were strangers watching her every moment of every day—so perhaps, Ida thought, it was because she knew that this was the end.
“You know,” said Ivan, with a change of subject and a change of affect, charming now, winsome, “you and I are still technically together, I guess. We never formally left each other.”
“I guess we haven’t,” said Constance.
“Con,” said Ivan, serious again, “are you going to leave me?”
For a moment Constance pressed one hand over her mouth.
/> “I have to, Ivan,” she said.
That fear was back on Ivan’s face, fear that he had never showed so clearly to Ida. Ida wondered what she would have to do to provoke that expression on his face in reaction to herself.
“Sometimes you think there are things you have to do,” he said to Constance. “But you know, you don’t have to. You can change your mind. Even if you’ve already begun—” He stopped, looked down at the table, gathered himself. He said, “Even if you’ve already started to leave me, you don’t have to finish it. It’s not too late.” He almost smiled at her but could not. “You don’t need to leave me just because you feel like you have to.”
“That’s easy for you to say,” Constance said angrily with tears in her eyes. “You’ve never had a purpose before. Or responsibilities. You and Mattie—all you ever do is run.”
“Constance—”
“I have to leave, Ivan.”
“I love you.”
Ida knew it was manipulation but thought that perhaps he also might genuinely mean it.
Constance must have believed it to some extent, because she did start to cry.
“You should have stayed with me,” she said. “You and Mattie. You should have followed me. Not run off to steal things and get caught by the System. You should have stayed with me.”
“Connie,” said Ivan, so gently that to Ida it seemed he was briefly someone else, “I think I would have always ended up here one way or another.”
Constance closed her eyes.
“That may be true,” she said in a voice that was stronger, less choked with sorrow than before. “Good-bye, Ivan.”
“Con—” said Ivan, and stopped, as if he had nothing with which to follow the hopeless exclamation of her name. Constance closed her eyes again and shook her head. There was a great finality to it.
Without another word spoken and without a bow in the proud straightness of her spine, Constance Harper walked around the table, past Ivan, and straight for the door to the white room. “Well?” she said when she had reached it and Ida and Domitian had not followed. Ida took her time about it to remind Constance of her lack of power here. Ivan was staring at the table before him with peculiar inward attention, as if Constance already had left.
Ida walked toward Constance and opened the door for her. Constance, whose tears had been wiped away but whose eyes still were red, stepped into the hallway. Gagnon was waiting; he slipped into the room as Domitian came out to escort Ida and Constance back to the docking bay.
Constance was silent on the long walk back. Ida was still riding on the pleasure of the interactions she had provoked, and so she let Constance stew in silence. Besides, Constance had served her purpose: she had unsettled Ivan, had frightened him, had shown him the extent of Ida’s control. Ida had no more use for the woman.
When Ida opened the doors to the docking bay, they were greeted by a strange muffled sound. Constance did not seem troubled by it, but it put Ida on edge. Perhaps the computer was malfunctioning again. The doors to space were just overhead; if they should open, Ida would suffocate—
The nearer they walked to Constance’s ship, however, the louder the sound became, and Ida realized she was hearing the muffled barking of a dog, a frantic sound, as if the dog was terrified of something that Ida could not see. Constance opened the door to her ship, and the barking became suddenly loud, ringing out throughout the docking bay, echoing sharply off of the ceiling, the walls, the disemboweled Annwn sitting sullenly in the corner.
“Quiet,” Constance said, but the dog did not stop barking. “Quiet!” she ordered again, and the dog whined.
“Good-bye, Miss Stays,” Constance said, and Ida nodded her permission for her to leave. Constance swung the door to her ship shut.
Muffled by the metal, the dog resumed its frantic barking.
Constance Harper left the ship with little difficulty until the minute the Janus had passed through the Ananke’s open maw, and then, for the third time that day, the Ananke’s alarms began to wail.
The latent fury over the persisting malfunctions of the ship rose up again in Ida and filled her from top to toe. She said coldly and calmly to Domitian, “If your ship persists in this state, I will have your damned mechanic shot.”
She knew that Domitian was looking at her sharply, but she could not trouble herself to see what his expression might be.
The alarm shut off again. Over the intercom Althea Bastet said, “Sorry. It was the two extra life-signs again.”
Ida controlled her rage, turned on her heel, and went back down the hallway.
It was time for her to speak to Ivan.
As she walked, all her excitement and all her fury seemed to merge, until by the time she opened the door to the white room, her hands were shaking with it.
Ivan, too, was shaking. She could see, as she crossed that vast space, that his hands were trembling in their chains. “Go,” Ida said to Gagnon, who was lingering uncertainly. “I don’t need you anymore.” She hardly noticed him leave, she was so focused on Ivan’s bent back.
Just as Ida reached the table and the door swung shut on Gagnon, Ivan said, “Are you happy?”
“Happy?” Ida asked, and came into view of his face.
He was furious. It sent a thrill through her that she had in some way broken into his head, into his heart.
“I’m frightened,” he said. “You’ve scared me. Are you happy?”
“I don’t want your fear. What I want is the truth.”
“What you want is my submission,” Ivan snarled. “Are you happy? You’ve made me admit I’m afraid.”
That was not what she wanted.
That was not at all what she wanted.
“It didn’t do you any good, though, did it?” Ivan asked, leaning toward her, his eyes seeming to glow with his anger, his fingers flexing uselessly against the arms of his chair. “You haven’t gotten any information. You achieved nothing. Did you expect to walk in here and find me ready to confess?”
She had achieved his fear. She had gathered a good deal of information—information that she doubted would result in a lead—but still, she had risked her career and her reputation to achieve his fear, to make him confess, and he would confess. He would. He had to. She had no other recourse; she had come too far to go back. He had to confess or she would have nothing.
But there he was, glaring at her, confessing nothing.
“You have nothing,” he said. “You know nothing. I know nothing, and I will tell you nothing. And the Mallt-y-Nos will burn you all.” There was despair mixed with the hate in his voice, and that was what lingered in the echoes in the white room as the silence between them stretched out long and taut.
There were so many things she wanted to say to him. He would break, she was certain, if only she could say them.
With one finger Ida reached over and flicked off her System-mandated surveillance camera, leaving her and Ivan unobserved, since of course the camera in the white room was not working.
“Think about the things that I can do,” she said to him, into the unwatched, unobserved silence, and the total freedom to speak almost choked her with all the things she would have liked to say. “Think about the people I can hurt if you will not tell me what I want to know.”
“Go to hell.”
“I will send your mother to rot in prison,” Ida said. “I will send Constance back to Miranda without money, without friends, without a chance at a better life, all the things she hates. I will have Abigail shot. And when I find Matthew Gale’s corpse, I will bring it here and lay it on this table before you so that you can watch him rot.”
“And what good will any of that do you,” Ivan asked, “if I have nothing to say?”
He was angry now, but the fear would set in soon, the fear that would make him bow to her, that would make him bend. She knew it would. It would have to.
“Think on it,” she said, and strode out with her hands shaking with a rage she could not fully understand or control,
leaving him alone in the white room to think and to fear, helpless and chained.
—
The camera in the white room was working. The crew of the ship and the System itself could not see what the camera saw, but the camera was recording, and the ship saw.
In the white room, Ivan sagged over the brushed steel table and breathed. He was alone, by the ship’s records, for the first time in eight days.
After a long time, Leontios Ivanov raised his head. The Ananke watched him sit upright, the wires tugging at his skin in reaction to the sudden shift in position.
Ivan was very still and silent, as if listening for something.
Whatever it was, he did not hear it.
Cautious, too quiet, Ivan said, “Mattie?”
There was no response. Ivan hesitated, then tried again, louder, “Mattie?”
The vast white room was silent still.
“Mattie?” Ivan called. “Mattie?” But the white room remained empty, and he received no response.
The entropy (or chaos, or disorder) of an isolated system may never decrease.
Because of this, the laws of nature are irreversible, and an increase in disorder unavoidable.
Chapter 6
AN ISOLATED SYSTEM
(OR: MAXWELL’S DEMON)
The Ananke was made of metal, but men had built her. All things men create have some aspect of humanity in them, for men are incapable of creating the truly alien. And so the Ananke was made of metal, but all her parts were analogous to flesh.
The cameras were her eyes, the hallway her spine, the computer her brain, the layers of metal and carbon that shielded her insides from the vacuum of space were her skin. And the dark hungry emptiness inside the hollow of her rib cage that took all light and air and in impossibility devoured them forever, that was the Ananke’s beating heart.
Through her cameras the Ananke could watch simultaneously Ida Stays in her room working with dark lips and a dark expression, Ivan in his cell leaning his forehead against the gray wall, Althea—always most importantly Althea—bowed over an interface, trying futilely to understand. The Ananke could watch, but the Ananke could not speak, and so, like an infant wailing to its mother, unable to express in more detail what had gone wrong, the Ananke’s alarms wailed day and night, and the crew did not sleep.
Lightless Page 22
