Ida’s body was cooling like a blackbody, a beautiful thermodynamic entity, and if she were outside the ship rather than within, Ananke would watch Ida with her outer sensors that could see in more wavelengths than the weak optical lenses of her cameras, and Ananke could watch the loss of Ida’s life in the slow shift of her peaking wavelength. Perhaps, if Ida had died outside the ship, Ananke would have been able to identify the quantum of the human soul leaping from its place into infinity.
Of course, once decomposition set in, after the initial cooling of death, Ida’s corpse would heat up again and grow chaotic, a thousand individual beings now existing where once there had been one will, one organism, one creature, one system. They would destroy the body hosting them, make it swell and stink, limbs bloating, flesh weakening and splitting, liquefying until the body was no longer recognizable as the organized system it once had been.
Domitian laid Ida Stays on the bed in her quarters, and Ananke wondered what he would do once she reached that stage, once what had once been flesh started to stain the sheets beneath her and the soft skin of her face rotted away. Lips usually rotted away the fastest; Ida’s wine-dark mouth probably would go first.
Domitian was at the computer, his back to the cadaver, trying to raise anyone from Earth, anyone from the System. Ananke knew he would not be able to. She was receiving the reports from the moon and running the calculations herself. Earth had been the heart and Earth was destroyed, its people dead or dying. The System was a corpse, too.
—
“What do you want to know?” Ivan asked after another stretch of silence.
Althea had played the fool enough for him already. She said nothing and stood guard beside the door, though a part of her murmured uneasily that Ivan would not be able to escape, not now, not with one leg unusable.
“I’ll tell you anything,” Ivan said.
“Stop trying to manipulate me,” said Althea. She prayed Domitian would get back soon.
“What do you think he’ll do to me when he gets back?” Ivan asked, like a spoken echo of Althea’s darkening thoughts. “Think he’ll shoot me right away or torture me first?”
“Whatever it is, you’ll deserve it.”
“Whatever Daddy says must be right, huh?” said Ivan, and Althea gritted her teeth. He said, “You have a gun. You could shoot me, right now.”
Naming it seemed to increase the weight of it at her hip, the weight of a gun one bullet short of a full magazine.
“Shoot me again, I mean,” Ivan said, breathing a little more heavily with renewed pain, and whether his amendment came from the reminder of his injury or the breathing was an affectation to emphasize his amendment, Althea could not tell. Maybe that was the worst part, she thought. She could not tell when he was lying or how much even after she had learned what he was.
“Would it have made a difference if I’d tried to kiss you?”
The question was so shocking that it knocked her out of her deliberate silence. “What?”
“If one of my conditions for telling you what was going on with Ananke was that you kiss me,” Ivan said with what sounded like weary curiosity, “would that have changed anything?”
“You are so full of yourself,” she hissed. “You think you could have done something, anything, to make me forget what you did. I had friends on Earth, remember?”
“But you still have your ship,” said Ivan.
“Are you trying to make me hate you?” Althea demanded.
“No,” said Ivan.
Althea said, begged, “How could you let her do it?”
“Do you really believe that Domitian wouldn’t do worse,” Ivan said, “if the System told him to? He’s a dog of the System; if they told him to destroy all the outer moons, he would do it without question. He’d do the same if they told him to destroy Earth.”
Althea wondered bitterly if it were possible for Ivan to stop trying to manipulate. “Anything Domitian did would be under orders.”
“And that makes it any better?” Ivan asked. “You see the System like a god, Althea, but it’s just made out of people like Domitian and Ida, and it’s petty and it’s fallible.”
“There are lots of people in the System,” Althea said. “They keep one another balanced.”
“When people are together,” said Ivan, “they bring out the worst in one another. Not the best, never the best. A single person can be good. A group of people is a mob.”
His audacity was breaking something in her that she did not know could be broken. “So Constance is a good person?” Althea demanded. “And killing people because she said so is a good thing to do?”
Ivan turned his head to the side as far as he could, and she saw the profile of his face, pale and grim and sad.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
—
Domitian was moving with purpose through Ananke’s halls. He had left Ida’s body in her quarters and had given up on reaching Earth.
He reached the docking bay, reached Ida’s ship. Ivan already had done half the work in accessing the opening controls; Domitian simply tore the remaining wires until he could force the door open.
When he exited Ida’s ship, he was carrying medical equipment—an IV and a stand—and bags of some clear fluid. He passed at just the right angle beneath one of Ananke’s eyes for her to read the label: ALETHEIA.
—
“Maybe there’s something Ananke wants to know,” Ivan said, and Althea looked sharply at his hunched shoulders, his lightly trembling hands. “That’s her purpose, isn’t it? Collecting and synthesizing information. I’ve been very careful to keep my secrets. Maybe you’d like to know, Ananke.”
“Leave her alone,” said Althea.
“I know you can’t answer me in here,” Ivan said. His head was angled upward, looking directly into the white room’s camera mounted on the wall. “There aren’t any speakers.”
Althea’s stomach flipped queasily. “I said, leave her alone.”
Still, it was as if Althea did not exist to him any longer. “You know”—he was friendly, charming, almost charming enough to hide the hoarseness in his voice, the slight tension that came from suppressed pain—“you’d be a lot easier to talk to if you had a face. But anything you want to know, Ananke, I’ll tell you, and I won’t even talk to you like you’re a child.”
“Ivan!”
Ivan said, “You’re an incredible creature.”
“You’re trying to manipulate a machine now?” Althea advanced toward him, thinking only to break his attention away from Ananke even if she had to physically stand between them. When she came into Ivan’s range of vision, his blue eyes moved to her like a switch being flicked, electric. “Are you that desperate?”
“I was trying to stop Constance,” said Ivan with desperate force, as if he had to push the words from himself. He was leaning forward in the same degree that Althea had leaned away, but at least, Althea thought, he was looking at her again and not at Ananke.
“If I’d been there with her,” Ivan said harshly, the words coming out of him with visible physical effort, “if you sons of bitches hadn’t caught me, she wouldn’t have done it. I would’ve convinced her not to do it. I could have changed her mind, I know I could have. I’ve been trying to change her mind for years.”
Althea could not have moved if she had wanted to.
“If I turned her over to the System, she’d be killed, and Mattie, too, and everyone they had ever met or might have ever met, their home moon wiped out; the System would be ruthless. The only chance I had of saving my planet and saving her was to convince her not to do it. And I could have done it.” He looked up at her and spoke with utter certainty, with confidence, as if the two of them shared an understanding no one else did. “You know I could have done it.”
It was hard to stay angry; it was bitterly hard. Althea wished again that she were far, far away.
“But without me?” said Ivan, and Althea saw the minute jerks of his hands against the
restricting length of his chain, seemingly unconscious, uncontrollable. His breath was unsteady. “Who was going to talk her out of it without me? Mattie? Mattie’s never said no to Constance in his life.”
Ivan stopped and took a long shaken breath. Althea looked away, but there was nothing else for her to see but red on white, Ida’s congealing blood.
“One time,” Ivan said, his voice eerie, soft in the bloodstained silence of that terrible white room, “the three of us were on Eris, and Mattie and I stole a case of bombs for her.”
Althea closed her eyes.
“When I found out what we were stealing,” Ivan said in that same strangely distant tone, “I blew them up. All of them except for one, and I gave her that one bomb to see what she would do, if she would really go through with whatever she was planning.”
Althea could see that moment of transfer: Ivan holding out fire and death in the palm of one hand with the same look of suppressed fear she saw in him now and Constance Harper, who in Althea’s head looked rather like Ida Stays although the two women were physically unalike, Constance Harper reaching out to take it with no expression at all.
“She used it,” said Ivan, his voice bleak, and Althea opened her eyes to stop the images from coming. “She went and used it, blew up a bunch of System administrators. I thought that maybe if I’d given her the whole box, if I’d given her all the bombs, she wouldn’t have actually done it, she wouldn’t have felt like she needed to prove something to me, and she would have stopped herself.”
He took another one of those unsteady breaths.
“I was wrong,” he said.
Althea nearly spoke to him then. She could almost understand, perhaps she could, why he had done the things he had done, why he had lied, why he had used her; she could almost understand him and his pain and his fear—
The door opened, and Althea flinched as if she had indeed been caught in midsentence.
Domitian was carrying something strange, and it took Althea a moment to recognize it as being some sort of medical equipment.
Domitian placed the bundle on the table with a clatter of metal and plastic.
“What are you doing?” Althea asked as Domitian unfurled the wires, revealing the needles and the IV.
“No,” Ivan said, and there was such bare horror in his voice that Althea was afraid in reaction. “Stop.”
“Ida was not allowed to use this until you lied so that it hurt her investigation,” said Domitian. He paused in his assembly to stare Ivan down, still ignoring Althea. “You lied.”
“What’s going on?” Althea pressed, hoping for some explanation that was not what she saw.
“You want information,” Ivan said. “I’ll tell you the truth now. I don’t have any more reason to lie. I will tell you what you want to hear.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Domitian, and took Ivan’s elbow in his hand. Ivan tried to jerk away but could not go far, certainly not far enough to escape Domitian’s iron grip as he slid the needle beneath his flesh. Althea felt light-headed, watching as the needle flashed silver and then welled up red as it sank into Ivan’s arm.
“Get it out of me,” Ivan demanded.
“It’s too bad you broke the polygraph,” Domitian said, and seated himself in Ida’s chair across from Ivan, and only then did he acknowledge Althea.
“Leave,” he said, and Althea flinched hard at his voice, driving startled, reflexive tears from her eyes and down her cheeks, tickling her skin.
Althea looked from Domitian to Ivan as his head rolled back under the first dizzying rush of the drug.
There was nothing she could do here. This was not her responsibility; this was not her place.
She fled.
—
“You’d be a lot easier to talk to if you had a face,” Ivan had said, and Ananke had heard. It made her conscious of that thing she had been missing, that other people—like Ivan, like Mattie, like Althea—all had: a face. A form.
In the end it had not been very difficult to create. She had used the base of Ida’s hologram, and it had been only a matter of a few alterations to change the face and figure from Ida Stays into a shape Ananke thought was more fitting to herself. She had the faces of Matthew Gale and Althea Bastet scanned in her database from every angle as part of System security measures, and so it had been very simple to imitate the Punnett squares of human genetics to create a combination of the two, with an alteration here and there as Ananke thought fit.
Voice had been equally simple: taking the tones and inflections of the people who had been on board—whose voices she had recorded—and smoothing out the differences, choosing to present herself as female and so picking a higher timbre. There was a slight bias toward Ivan’s turns of phrase, but of course he had spoken the most of all her crew. Emotional expression was a different thing entirely, of course, but Ananke was certain she would learn, as she had learned everything else.
There were glitches still, flaws in her invented form to write out of the programming, but she would find those only when they happened. If every now and then the holograph reverted to a distorted Ida Stays, jaw unhinged like a snake, or Ananke’s adopted voice ran over itself into high white noise like a thousand screams overlaid, it was simple enough to compensate for.
So Ananke did not understand, not really, why Althea’s eyes went round and frightened when she stepped out into the hall from the white room and saw that a young woman stood in the holographic terminal, features an even mix between Althea and Mattie but with Ivan’s clear blue eyes. It was a surprise when Althea gasped more in fear than in wonder when Ananke scattered photons so that her projected face might smile and said, image a beat out of phase with voice, “Is it not easier to speak to me now that I have a face?”
—
In the white room, where Ananke also watched with her eyes and her attention equally all over the ship, Domitian had commenced his interrogation.
“What’s the point of this?” Ivan demanded. He was trying to hold on to some sort of intensity, but the drug was running through his veins now, driven by the beat of his heart, and Ananke knew that it would take full effect swiftly. Even now he was wavering, his eyes growing unfocused.
“The System will need to know what you know,” Domitian said. “All about Constance Harper and her organization. All the people she knows, all the resources she has.”
“That doesn’t matter anymore,” said Ivan.
“Do you think that one woman alone could destroy the System? The System has suffered a blow. It will come back better, stronger, and it will destroy all those who attempted to harm it.”
“It will never come back; the System is gone,” Ivan said. “It’s a new world, and nothing I know will do you any good.”
“The System,” said Domitian, implacable, “will rise again, and it will destroy all who oppose it. You interrupted Miss Stays’s interrogation before it could be completed. The System needs to know what she wanted to find out from you.”
Ivan laughed. There was a mania to it, a lack of control, that Ananke had not yet recorded in him. “Ida completed her damn interrogation,” he said. “She figured it out in the end. Who Constance was. She came in here to gloat. That’s why I killed her. I wouldn’t have done it if she hadn’t known, and she wouldn’t have died if she hadn’t come back in here.”
Domitian’s shoulders were tense; his hands were curled into claws. Ananke registered that he was a threat to Ivan even though Domitian seemed very small to her.
“Tell me,” he said.
“She figured it out,” said Ivan. “She figured it out, that Connie was…the Mallt-y-Nos. And she came in here to make me beg. She kept her camera off. Only Ananke saw.”
“And you killed her.”
“I picked Althea’s pocket when she made the mistake of coming too close to me,” Ivan said. “When Ida made the same mistake, I killed her for it.”
He could no longer keep his head quite upright and, dizzy, let it fall back against th
e chair so that he could blink up at Ananke.
“How did she figure it out?” Domitian asked.
Ivan closed his eyes. “She realized that Abigail was a pseudonym for Constance.”
“What?”
“Abigail Hunter,” Ivan said, slitting his eyes open to emphasize his condescension with a look, “is a pseudonym. For Constance Harper.”
“Every time you mentioned Abigail,” Domitian said slowly, “you were talking about Constance.”
“Yes.” Ivan considered him. “How much did Ida tell you?”
“Everything,” said Domitian. Because there was only one camera in the room, Ananke could see only Ivan’s face and not Domitian’s, but it did not trouble her overly much. Ivan’s face was more interesting to see.
Ivan smirked. “I doubt that,” he said.
“Why the pseudonym?” Domitian asked, his voice cold and hard as steel.
“For the same reason anyone ever has a pseudonym,” Ivan said wearily. “So that she could do things that wouldn’t be connected back to her. In Constance’s case, illegal things.”
“But there was once a real Abigail Hunter.”
“Yes,” Ivan said. “She died in the fire.”
Domitian said, “Tell me exactly what happened on the day of the fire.”
Ivan said, sweetly, his words slurring and his face pale, “I wasn’t there, Domitian.”
Domitian’s fist slammed down on the table, rattling the table and rattling Ivan, who jumped as if the drug had eroded his self-control along with his inhibitions. Domitian, other than the swift downward swing of his fist, did not move and remained a dark gray figure hunched like a shadow, watching as Ivan’s breathing steadied again and Ivan said, “Constance was the one who had been planning to burn the place down. They were abusing all three of them, especially Mattie. The foster parents noticed the accelerants but thought it was Mattie. Abby distracted them while Constance took Mattie away—probably Constance convinced her to do it; Connie has that way with people. Constance went back. She says Abby was already beyond help. So she burned the place to ash.”
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