I blink. I’m aboard a ship, an Oortian spidership by the looks of it, in a cylindrical space perhaps ten metres long, five in diameter. The walls are transparent, the dirty hue of comet ice. There are strange tribal sculptures suspended inside them, like runic characters. Spherical bonsai trees and many-angled zero-g furniture float along the central axis of the cylinder. There is starry darkness beyond the walls. And small white butterflies, everywhere.
My rescuer floats nearby. I smile at her.
‘Young lady,’ I say. ‘I believe you are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.’ My voice sounds distant, but mine. I wonder if they got my face right.
Up close, she looks awfully young, genuinely so: her clear green eyes lack that rejuvenated, seen-it-all look. She wears the same simple garment as in the Prison. She floats in a deceptively comfortable angle, smooth bare legs outstretched, relaxed but ready, like a martial artist. A chain made from multicoloured jewels snakes around her left ankle and up her leg.
‘Congratulations, thief,’ she says. Her voice is low and controlled, but betrays a hint of contempt. ‘You have escaped.’
‘I hope so. For all I know this could be some new Dilemma variation. The Archons have been pretty consistent so far, but you are not paranoid if they really have you imprisoned in a virtual hell.’
Something stirs between my legs and banishes at least some of my doubts.
‘Sorry. It’s been a while,’ I say, studying my erection with detached interest.
‘Evidently,’ she says, frowning. There is an odd expression on her face, a mixture of disgust and arousal: I realise she must be listening to this body’s biot feed, a part of her feeling what I’m feeling. Another jailer, then.
‘Trust me, you are out. It required considerable expense. Of course, there are still several million of you in the Prison, so consider yourself lucky.’
I grab one of the handles of the central axis and move behind a bonsai tree, covering my nudity like Adam. A cloud of butterflies alights from the foliage. The exertion feels strange as well: the muscles of my new body are still waking up.
‘Young lady, I have a name.’ I offer her my hand across the bonsai tree. She takes it, dubiously, and squeezes. I return the grip as hard as I can. Her expression does not change. ‘Jean le Flambeur, at your service. Although you are absolutely right.’ I hold up her ankle chain. It squirms in my cupped hand as if alive, a jewelled serpent. ‘I am a thief.’
Her eyes widen. The scar on her cheek goes black. And suddenly, I’m in hell.
I am a bodiless viewpoint in blackness, unable to form a coherent thought. My mind is trapped in a vice. Something squeezes from all sides, not allowing me to think or remember or feel. It is a thousand times worse than the Prison. It lasts for an eternity.
Then I am back, gasping, stomach heaving, vomiting bile in floating gobbets, but infinitely grateful for every sensation.
‘You will not do that again,’ she says. ‘Your body and mind are on loan, do you understand? Steal what you are told to steal, and you may be allowed to keep them.’ The jewelled chain is back around her ankle. Her cheek muscles twitch.
My Prison-honed instincts tell me to shut up and stop throwing up, but the flower man in me has to speak, and I cannot stop him.
‘It’s too late,’ I gasp.
‘What?’ There is something beautiful about the wrinkle that appears on her smooth forehead, like a brushstroke.
‘I am reformed. You got me out too late. I’m an evolved altruist now, mademoiselle, a being filled with goodwill and neighbourly love. I could not possibly dream of taking part in any sort of criminal activity, even at the behest of my lovely rescuer.’
She stares at me blankly.
‘Very well.’
‘Very well?’
‘If you’re no good for me, I’ll just have to go back for another one. Perhonen, please bubble this one up and throw it out.’
We stare at each other for a moment. I feel stupid. Too long on the train of defection and cooperation. Time to jump off. I’m the first one to look away.
‘Wait,’ I say slowly. ‘Now that you mention it, perhaps I do retain some selfish impulses after all. I can feel them coming back as we speak.’
‘I thought they might,’ she says. ‘You are supposed to be irredeemable, after all.’
‘So, what’s going to happen now?’
‘You’ll find out,’ she says. ‘My name is Mieli. This is Perhonen: she is my ship.’ She makes a sweeping gesture with one hand. ‘As long as you are here, we are your gods.’
‘Kuutar and Ilmatar?’ I ask, naming the Oortian deities.
‘Perhaps. Or the Dark Man, if you prefer.’ She smiles. The thought of the place she put me in before does make her look a little like the Oortian dark god of the void. ‘Perhonen will show you your quarters.’
When the thief is gone, Mieli lies down in the pilot’s crèche. She feels exhausted, even though the biot feed of her body – that has been waiting for her with Perhonen, for months – tells her she is perfectly rested. But the cognitive dissonance is worse.
Was it me who was in the Prison? Or another?
She remembers the long weeks of preparation, days of subjective slowtime in a q-suit, getting ready to commit a crime just so she could be caught by the Archons and enter the Prison: the eternity in her cell, mind wrapped in an old memory. The violent escape, hurled through the sky by the pellegrini, waking up in a new body, shaking and raw.
All because of the thief.
And now there is the quantum umbilical that connects her to the body the pellegrini made for him, a constant dull awareness of his thoughts. It feels like lying next to a stranger, feeling them moving, shifting in their sleep. Trust the Sobornost goddess to make her do something guaranteed to drive her crazy.
He touched Sydän’s jewel. The anger helps, a little. And no, it’s not just because of him, it’s for her as well.
‘I’ve put the thief away,’ says Perhonen. Its warm voice in her head is something that belongs to her at least, not something that was tainted by the Prison. She takes one of its tiny white avatars and cups it in her palm: it flutters, tickling, like a pulse.
‘Feeling amorous?’ asks the ship, jokingly.
‘No,’ says Mieli. ‘I just missed you.’
‘I missed you too,’ says the ship. The butterfly takes flight from her hand, fluttering around her head. ‘It was terrible, waiting for you, all alone.’
‘I know,’ says Mieli. ‘I’m sorry.’ Suddenly, there is a throbbing sensation inside her skull. There is an edge in her mind, like something has been cut and pasted in place. Did I come back the same? She could speak to her Sobornost metacortex, she knows: ask it to find the feeling and wrap it up and put it away. But that’s not what an Oortian warrior would do.
‘You are not well. I should not have let you go,’ Perhonen says. ‘It was not good for you to go there. She should not have made you to do that.’
‘Ssh,’ says Mieli. ‘She’s going to hear.’ But it is too late.
Little ship, says the pellegrini. You should know that I take care of my children, always.
The pellegrini is there, standing above Mieli.
Naughty girl, she says. Not using my gifts properly. Let me see. She sits down next to Mieli gracefully, as if in Earthlike gravity, crossing her legs. Then she touches Mieli’s cheek, her deep brown eyes seeking hers. Her fingers feel warm, apart from the cold line of one of her rings, exactly where Mieli’s scar is. She breathes in her perfume. Something rotates, clockwork gears turning, until they click into place. And suddenly her mind is smooth as silk.
There, is that not better? One day you will understand that our way works. Not worrying about who is who, and realising that they are all you.
The dissonance being gone is like cold water on a burn. The sudden relief is so raw that she almost bursts into tears. But that would not do in front of her. So she merely opens her eyes and waits, ready to obey.
No tha
nk you? says the pellegrini. Very well. She opens her purse and takes out a small white cylinder, putting it in her mouth: one end of it lights up, emitting a foul smell. So tell me: what do you make of my thief?
‘It is not my place to say,’ says Mieli quietly. ‘I live to serve.’
Good answer, if a little boring. Is he not handsome? Come now, be honest. Can you really pine after your little lost amour with somebody like him around?
‘Do we need him? I can do this. Let me serve you, like I’ve served you before—’
The pellegrini smiles, her rouge lips perfect like cherries. Not this time. You are, if not the most powerful of my servants, the most faithful. Do as I tell you, and faith will be rewarded.
Then she is gone, and Mieli is alone in the pilot’s crèche, butterflies dancing around her head.
My cabin that is not much bigger than a cleaning cupboard. I try to ingest a protein milkshake from the fabber in the wall, but my new body is not taking to food too well. I have to spend some time on the space-bog: a tiny autonomously moving sack that comes out of the wall and attaches itself onto your ass. Apparently Oortian ships are not big on comfort.
One of the curving walls has a mirrored surface, and I look at my face in it while going through the undignified if necessary bodily functions. It looks wrong. In theory, everything is exactly right: the lips, the Peter Lorre eyes (as a lover said, centuries ago), the dimpled temples, the short hair, slightly grey and thinning, the way I like to wear it: the skinny, unremarkable body, in reasonable shape, with its tuft of chest hair. But I can’t help looking at it and blinking, as if it was out of focus slightly.
What’s worse, I have a similar feeling inside my head. Trying to remember feels like poking at a loose tooth with my tongue.
It feels like something has been stolen. Ha.
I distract myself by looking at the view. My wall has enough magnification to show the Dilemma Prison in the distance. It’s a diamonoid torus almost a thousand kilometers in diameter, but from this angle it looks like a glistening slit-pupilled eye among the stars, staring straight at me. I swallow and blink it away.
‘Glad to be out?’ asks the voice of the ship. It’s a feminine voice, a little like Mieli’s, but younger, sounding like somebody I’d quite like to meet under happier circumstances.
‘You can’t possibly imagine. It’s not a happy place.’ I sigh. ‘Your captain has my gratitude, even if she appears to be somewhat on the edge at the moment.’
‘Listen,’ says Perhonen. ‘You don’t know what she went through to get you out. I’m keeping an eye on you.’
It’s an interesting point, which I file away for future investigation. How did she get me out? And who is she working for? But it’s too early for that, so I simply smile.
‘Well, whatever job she wants me to do has to be better than shooting myself in the head every hour or so. Are you sure your boss would be all right with you talking to me? I mean, I am a manipulative master criminal and all that.’
‘I think I can handle you. Besides, it’s not like she is my boss, exactly.’
‘Oh,’ I say. I’m old-fashioned, but the whole human-gogol sexuality thing always bothered me in my youth, and old habits die hard.
‘It’s not like that,’ the ship says. ‘Just friends! Besides, she made me. Well, not me, but the ship. I’m older than I look, you know.’ I wonder if that accent in its voice is real. ‘I heard about you, you know. Back then. Before the Collapse.’
‘I would have said that you don’t look a day over three hundred. Were you a fan?’
‘I liked the sunlifter theft. That was classy.’
‘Class,’ I say, ‘is what I’ve always aimed for. By the way, you don’t look a day over three hundred.’
‘Do you really think so?’
‘Mm-hm. Based on the evidence so far.’
‘Would you like me to show you around? Mieli won’t mind, she’s busy.’
‘I’d love that.’ Definitely female – maybe some of my charm survived the Prison. I suddenly feel the need to get dressed: talking to a female entity of any kind without even a fig leaf makes me feel vulnerable. ‘Sounds like we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other better. Maybe after you get me some clothes?’
First, Perhonen fabs me a suit. The fabric is too smooth – I don’t like wearing smartmatter – but looking at myself in a white shirt, black trousers and a deep purple jacket helps with the sense of unself a little.
Then she shows me the spimescape. Suddenly, the world has a new direction. I step into it, out of my body, moving my viewpoint into space so that I can look at the ship.
I was right: Perhonen is an Oortian spidership. It consists of separate modules, tethered together by nanofibres, living quarters spinning around a central axis like an amusement park ride to create a semblance of gravity. The tethers form a network in which the modules can move, like spiders in a web. The q-dot sails – concentric soap-bubble-thin rings made from artificial atoms that spread out several kilometres around the ship and can catch sunlight, Highway mesoparticles and lightmill beams equally well – look spectacular.
I steal a glance at my own body as well, and that’s when I’m really impressed. The spimescape view is seething with detail. A network of q-dots under the skin, proteomic computers in every cell, dense computronium in the bones. Something like that could only have been made in the guberniya worlds close to the sun. It seems my rescuers are working for the Sobornost. Interesting.
‘I thought you wanted to get to know me,’ Perhonen says, offended.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘Just, you know, making sure I’m presentable. You don’t spend much time in the company of ladies in the Prison.’
‘Why were you there, anyway?’
Suddenly, it feels amazing that I haven’t thought about it for so long. I have been too preoccupied with guns, defection and cooperation.
Why was I in the Prison?
‘A nice girl like you should not worry about such things.’
Perhonen sighs. ‘Maybe you’re right. Maybe I should not be talking to you. Mieli would not like it if she knew. But it’s been so long since we had anyone interesting onboard.’
‘This certainly does not seem like a lively neighbourhood.’ I indicate the starry field around us. ‘Where are we?’
‘The Neptunian Trojan belt. Arse-end of nowhere. I waited here for a long time, when she went to get you.’
‘You have a lot to learn about being a criminal. It’s all about the waiting. Boredom punctuated by flashes of sheer terror. Sort of like war.’
‘Oh, war was much better,’ she says, excitedly. ‘We were in the Protocol War. I loved it. You get to think so fast. Some of the things we did – we stole a moon, you know. It was amazing. Metis, just before the Spike: Mieli put a strangelet bomb in to push it out of orbit, like fireworks, you would not believe—’
Suddenly, the ship is silent. I wonder if it realised it has said too much. But no: its attention is focused elsewhere.
In the distance, amidst the spiderweb of Perhonen’s sails and the spimescape vectors and labels of habitats far away, there is a jewel of bright dots, a six-pointed star. I zoom in in the scape view. Dark ships, jagged and fang-like, a cluster of seven faces sculpted in their prows, the same faces that adorn every Sobornost structure, the Founders: god-kings with a trillion subjects. I used to go drinking with them.
The Archons are coming.
‘Whatever it was that you did,’ Perhonen says, ‘looks like they want you back.’
2
THE THIEF AND THE ARCHONS
What did I do?
Mieli’s heart pounds as the pilot’s crèche embraces her. Something went wrong in the Prison. But it was just like the sims. Why are they after us? She summons the combat autism the pellegrini built into her. It enfolds her like a cool blanket, turns the world into vectors and gravity wells. Her mind enmeshes with Perhonen’s, thinking fast thoughts.
Objects: Perhonen.
r /> Scattered Trojan asteroids, clustered around 2006RJ103, a two-hundred k nugget of rock, inhabited by slow-brained synthlife.
The Prison, a diamond doughnut thirty lightseconds behind them, the origin of Perhonen’s current vector, dense, dark and cold.
The Archon bladeships, coming in fast at a .5g, much more delta-v than the gentle tug of Perhonen’s lightsail. The torches of their antimatter engines are fiery pillars of backscattered mesons and gamma rays in the spimescape.
The Highway, twenty lightseconds away, their next way-point. A constant torrent of ships, one of the few rare ideal invariant surfaces in the N-body Newton’s nightmare of the Solar System, a gravitational artery that lets you travel fast and easy with the gentlest of pushes. A safe haven, too far away.
All right, breathes Mieli. Combat mode.
The hidden Sobornost tech beneath the Oortian sapphire coral wakes up. The spidership reconfigures itself. The scattered modules pull themselves together along their tethers and fuse together into a tight, hard cone. The q-dot winglets transform from a perfectly reflective material into a diamond-hard firewall.
Just in time, before the Archons’ nanomissiles hit.
The first volley is just a series of thistledown impacts that fail to penetrate. But the next batch will adapt and optimise, and so will the ones after that, over and over and over until either the software or the hardware of the firewall collapses. And after that—
We need to get to the Highway.
The engines in her mind prune the game-theoretic branches like diamond-bladed chainsaws. There are many paths through this, like meanings in an Oortian song, and she only needs to find one—
Another barrage, innumerable needles of light in the spimescape. And this time, something gets through. One of the storage modules blossoms into a misshapen sapphire growth. Calmly, she ejects it, watches it drift away, still mutating and shifting in slow motion like a malignant tumour, forming strange organs that fire molecule-sized spores at Perhonen’s firewall until she burns it with the anti-meteorite lasers.