I need to find Perhonen. Mieli shakes her head. She ramps up the readiness level of her combat systems. Her senses become painfully sharp: it is a good distraction from Zinda’s words. It could be a trap. The thief taught her what it is like to be manipulated. Everything this zoku creature is saying could be designed to extract information from her. She remembers the climb with the ronin-Zinda, how easy it was to trust her with her life. Even now, it is hard not to trust her. But of course, that is exactly what they want.
She looks at Zinda. ‘I have killed your kind, you know,’ she says. ‘In the Protocol War. Hundreds, maybe more. I took out Metis with a strangelet bomb. Are you sure you want me here, living among you?’
‘Oh, we are not that easy to kill. I’ve died a few times. It’s a pain: after you respawn, you have to go back to your jewels and artefacts as a ghost. Most people keep some of them in the zoku bank, just in case. You do get to see things you don’t normally see. It’s kind of like a sub-game: the Reaper Zoku want to redesign it, but they are not getting much traction. Personally, I think you could introduce a narrative element to it, played across a space of centuries. Every time you die you advance the storyline a little bit. Would that not be cool? But the aegon and alea family zokus don’t listen to Narrativists like me—’ She shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, I’m babbling. What I meant to say is that it’s not a big deal, some people might carry a grudge but any zoku you join never will. And if you were such a big fish in the Protocol War, you probably have a fan zoku somewhere, you know!’
Zinda taps at the table. ‘Listen. We need to get you more entangled. You can’t do much here if you don’t even have a Supra City jewel, even before you think about a primary zoku. The Rainbow Table one you have won’t get you very far. Here.’ She holds out a small turquoise jewel in a golden leaflike casing. ‘You’ll find it easier to get around if you have this.’
Mieli accepts the jewel gingerly. It feels warm to the touch, like the other jewel.
Mieli, you fool, the pellegrini’s voice in her mind. What did I tell you?
And then her systems flood her with alerts and infiltration warnings. Her metacortex show her the tendrils that are pushing into her neurons from the jewel, attaching themselves into her decision-making centres, tapping into the roots of her hopes and dreams.
She lets go of the jewel, stands up and starts powering up her weapons.
‘Oh dear,’ Zinda says.
‘This was another game,’ Mieli says. ‘All this. You are from the Great Game. You don’t take care of orphans. You are here to handle an asset. To extract information.’ The q-dot gun embedded in her right hand warms up. ‘Well, here is some information for you. You should have kept me in a more secure environment. You are about to find out if they have improved the ghost game after death.’
‘No, wait! You don’t understand! Why did you have to break the Circle? I mean, all right, I am Great Game, but I’m Manaya, too. Everything I said was true! We belong to many zokus, and we can be in them at the same time, in superpositions. I just want to help you!’
There are tears in Zinda’s eyes.
‘Look, I got activated when you arrived, okay? I’m a bit out of my depth here, to be honest. Could you just sit back down and we’ll talk about it? I’d really rather not fight you, Mieli. I have volition to follow, too. I have a combat monster alter, if you insist, but I hate the way he smells.’
‘I am leaving now. You can either be an asset or a liability. It’s your choice.’ Mieli makes her voice as hard and cold as she can.
Zinda takes a deep breath. ‘Just give me a minute, okay? You have to understand that it’s not just me. We created a little zoku dedicated to analysing you. We know a lot about you. If we wanted to break you, we could!’ She sniffs. ‘I know it doesn’t sound nice, but it’s true! We could design Realms that would make you into our willing slave, give up all your secrets. But we don’t want to break you. We need you.’
‘Need me for what?’
‘Duh huh! There is a war on! The Founders are at each other’s throats! As far as we can tell, the chens are winning. And they are going to be looking at us next. They were always a threat. The Elders had a gambit after the Protocol War to … neutralise them, but—’ She bites her lip. ‘Never mind. But anything you know about what happened on Earth, what you know about the pellegrinis and the chens, all their tech, all that stuff – we can use that. Don’t worry about any booby traps or defence systems – we can deal with those, given your volition and some time.
‘And then – you could be one of us. Do you have any idea how hard it is to join the Great Game? You have to find them. I looked for them for years. I entangled notches and ithaqui and a whole bunch of others so I could analyse hints they had hidden in our narratives! And I’m just a sleeper. But you – you could be a field agent, fight existential threats, the big stuff. You could save the world. Like a James Bond with wings.’
Mieli blinks. ‘Who?’
‘What do you say? Come on. It will be fun.’
Mieli lets a q-dot form at her fingertip. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You have ten seconds to tell me where my ship is, and how I get off this planet.’
‘Ah, about that—’
‘Nine.’
‘Are you sure you want to—’
‘Eight.’
‘I can call for help, you know.’
‘Seven.’
‘All right, all right! Calm down.’ Zinda sighs. ‘I didn’t want to tell you. Not until you had had a chance to settle in. We traced your trajectory to its origin, of course. This is what we saw.’ She gestures, and a small q-dot screen appears above the table. It shows Earth, and a shape that she instantly recognises as Perhonen. It is caught in a storm of Hunters, daggerlike Sobornost weapons. Her mouth goes dry. You stupid, stupid girl. You didn’t have to.
The ship is a spiderweb of threads and modules in the centre of a pair of solar sail wings. It unravels as the Hunters come, swift like beams of light, each impact and scan beam flash taking a piece away.
And then the ship slowly swings around and dives towards the blue and white globe. In a moment, it is a burning scar, drawn across the face of the Earth. It vanishes beyond the horizon, and is gone.
‘We couldn’t find any traces of it afterwards,’ Zinda says. ‘That was just before the Dragons came. I’m sorry.’
Mieli closes her eyes but the world does not go away. Her enhancements paint a cold ghost landscape around her. The walls of the apartment are like her skull, squeezing her brain.
She lets out a wordless cry, runs to the balcony, opens her wings and takes to the air.
*
Mieli flies without destination, pushing the microfans in her wings until the air is thin and the strip below is like a road, disappearing into the horizon, crisscrossed by other strip habitats. There are hundreds of them, passing beneath each other, binding the giant planet tight. Playful zoku trueforms try to join her in flight, but she pushes herself harder until the fusion reactor in her thigh complains, outdistances them, flies on until the blue of the sky starts to fade into black and she feels the faint, familiar touch of the Dark Man of the void. She yearns for it, for the hard vacuum and radiation and pressure drop, for the stinging black slap after the heat of an Oortian sauna. But Saturn won’t let go of her that easily
Perhonen is gone. I always loved you better than she did, the ship said, before it shot her out with the zoku jewel, when the Hunters came.
She lets the planet’s gravity pull her into a long, rushing glide, follows it until she reaches the edge of the world.
It is a wall that looks like a mass of sunset-tinted clouds, reaching from the ground to the top of the sky, twenty kilometres high. Up close, it is a mass of cells filled with a gas, held up by thin smartmatter threads, erected on the rim of the habitat strip to keep the atmosphere in.
Then she is above it, wings whining in the almost absent air, and sees the abyss beyond. The mass streams that support the strip are spiderweb pill
ars that vanish into the yellow-ochre haze of Saturn, far, far below. A storm boils down there, winter blue cream swirling in a giant cup.
Perhaps it will be better to fall like she did.
What happened was her fault. But it was the right thing to do. On Earth, she died a thousand times to find the courage to face down the pellegrini. She drew a line that she would not cross, refused to allow a child’s self to be stolen. She did not expect to live, afterwards.
She should let Saturn take her, dive into the ammonium crystal clouds and water vapour and deeper down, until the crushing metallic hydrogen in the planet’s depths give her the end that belongs to her. So easy: her momentum will carry her over the edge, down towards the storm and its eyewall, a chain of maelstroms the size of Oortian comets, threaded together like beads on a string, like jewels.
And then something stronger than gravity stops her, a memory rising from the depths. Sydän.
She fights the momentum and brakes, folds her wings and dives straight down, at the top of the wall. The wing microfans overheat and moan. She comes down near the edge, hard, rolls like a broken bird. The cloud-wall is soft and slippery and absorbs the impact like water. Her landing sends slow ripples through the gas sacks: the surface is soap-bubble thin, but it stabilises to support her weight. She lies on top of it for a moment, hurting and breathing hard. The air is like watered milk, thin and tasteless.
After a while, she gets up and walks to the edge, slowly, with comical, bouncy steps, treading against the movement of the gas sack beneath her feet. When she sits down and hugs her knees, looking at the endless pale yellow expanse of Saturn below, it keeps rocking her gently up and down, like a mother on her knee.
With a voice that is almost inaudible in the sparse air, she prays to Kuutar and Ilmatar for guidance, and hopes they have power in this dark place where everything changes and nothing is real.
*
As Mieli quiets her mind, she becomes aware of a murmur in her head: the Rainbow Table jewel is whispering to her. Somehow, it has ended up in the folds of her robe. She frowns: she does not remember picking it up. She takes it out and looks at it. The jewel tells her that there are routers and Realmgates nearby, pinpoints them amongst the network of mass streams and q-tubes below, gives her a compulsion to go and make adjustments to a stream buffer controller.
She kills the thought with a quick command to her metacortex. She feels the jewel’s disapproval, an unravelling of the entanglement it contains. She ignores it and throws the bauble over the edge. She watches it fall for a long, long time, until it finally disappears from sight.
‘It amazes me,’ says a warm voice, ‘that you have the tenacity to keep praying to your gods, when I’m the only one who ever answers.’
The pellegrini rises slowly from the abyss, a tall auburn-haired figure in a white dress, hands open at her sides, as if ready to embrace Mieli.
Mieli stares at the Sobornost goddess. ‘Go away. I told you: I don’t work for you anymore.’ She feels cold and empty. Even her rage at the woman who has lived in her head for so long is a fading ember.
The pellegrini rolls her eyes. ‘And I can’t believe it took you so long to get rid of that ridiculous jewel. I could not risk being detected. I tried to speak to you, in the Realm. Clearly, you did not listen.’ She opens her purse and takes out one of her foul white stick-things, lights it with an elaborately carved lighter, and takes a drag. Then she holds it delicately to one side, sprinkling hot ash onto the eye of Saturn below.
‘As for our current relationship – fine. But I can’t leave that easily, Mieli. I am in your mind. You let me in, remember?’ She takes another drag from the stick. ‘Now that I have calmed down a bit, I must admit that I was impressed by the backbone you showed on Earth. Too bad you had to choose such a misguided moment to do so.
‘Well. Here we are. I should have self-destructed when you were captured. But I was made a gogol when I was quite old, and I have always found such extreme measures … difficult.’ She smiles. ‘So do you, it seems, in spite of all you have lost. We are stuck with each other, like it or not.’
‘I could tell them about you,’ Mieli says.
‘Of course you could. But it would not be wise. You may find them friendly and polite now, Mieli, but if they knew you had a Sobornost Founder gogol inside you? They would have me at any cost, and I am hiding so deep that they would have to tear you apart to get me.’
‘Perhaps I’m not afraid of that.’
‘No: you do not fear death, you have shown that many times. But this would not be death. You know what I’m talking about: you have interrogated gogols yourself. And they don’t believe in copies. They would transfer you into one of their Realms, turn the process of cutting me out into a game. You would be changed, utterly. Trust me, you don’t want that.’
Mieli shivers. The pellegrini will say anything to get what she wants. But she has a feeling that the goddess is not lying, this time.
The pellegrini gestures with the glowing end of her white stick.
‘At the same time, I need you. I always did. I never lied to you. Like my Jean, I keep my promises. I would have given you your little Sydän, in the end.’
Mieli bites her teeth together, hard. ‘Perhonen always tried to tell me. Sydän never wanted me in the first place. She was just trying to escape Oort. I am better off without her.’
‘So, why didn’t you go over the edge? Why do you still wear that trinket?’ She points at the jewelled chain around Mieli’s ankle, modelled after the Great Work Mieli and Sydän made together, a dancing formation of comets bound into a chain with q-dot fibres. It feels cold against Mieli’s skin, suddenly.
‘Let me tell you something, Mieli. When you become immortal and get the things you want, you start wondering why you wanted them in the first place. Sydän regrets letting you go. She misses you.’
She is lying. Mieli squeezes her eyes shut, wraps her wings around her. She will not serve the pellegrini again. What would Perhonen tell her? To be herself. The ship wanted her to abandon the endless quest for Sydän, to find a new life.
What does that even mean anymore? How could I go back to Oort now? The thief was right. I don’t belong there either, after what the goddess made me into.
Mieli opens the chain around her ankle. She wonders how the thief did it so easily: the Oortian gems need a little song to release the thread that binds them. She is close to the edge. If she lets go of the chain, it will fall, into the waiting mouth of Saturn, always hungry for children. She runs her fingers along the chain. Each jewel is a different colour. Choices, moments, in a string, one after another. She remembers their first kiss, in the ice cave, when Sydän’s suit opened, warm and wet with life support liquids. The day when they left Oort in Perhonen. Venus, where the singularity took her. The last thing she saw was her face, a sad pixie smile, erased by the Amtor black hole’s information wind, fading like cream poured into coffee, still looking at her.
Looking back.
Sydän looked back.
Mieli squeezes the chain in her hand. Then, slowly and carefully, she replaces it around her ankle, humming the brief song that makes the smartcoral bind the loop into an unbroken whole.
‘What do you need me to do?’ she asks the pellegrini.
The pellegrini smiles a half-smile, the rouge line of her mouth twisting. ‘That is an interesting question. We are trapped here, hiding, with no means of contacting my sisters. They have begun the endgame, no doubt. The contingency plan we had in case you and Jean failed to steal the Kaminari jewel from Chen.’
‘And what is that?’
The pellegrini sighs. ‘How do you unite Founders? You give them a common enemy. It wasn’t just my Jean you let loose from the Dilemma Prison, Mieli. There is a creature called the All-Defector: Sasha’s Archons stumbled upon it. A game-theoretic anomaly of sorts. I don’t really understand it, but my gogols tell me it is the most dangerous thing since Dragons. The chaos in the Inner System indicates that my sist
er inside Jean has deployed him, and that means the guberniyas are going to burn.’ She frowns. ‘I only wish I knew why my sister could not get to the jewel first. If she had, we would know. The entire Universe would know.’
Mieli breathes deeply, lets her metacortex pour cool water on her emotions, makes herself hard and professional. There will be time for proper grief later, and for crafting songs.
‘Zinda mentioned something,’ she says. ‘The Great Game zoku saw Chen as a threat. They were running an operation to get rid of him, but something went wrong. The thief found out how Chen got hold of the Kaminari jewel: from a zoku fleet near the remnants of Jupiter.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘What if Chen was meant to find it?’
The pellegrini starts laughing, a pearly tinkling sound. She sits down next to Mieli and covers her eyes with one hand, overcome with mirth.
‘Of course,’ the goddess says, wiping tears from her eyes. ‘Oh, my Jean, how you tricked me.’
Mieli finds herself thinking about the thief. Whatever she feels about his demise is lost in the well of grief she has for Perhonen; but in spite of their differences, they worked together well, and there were times when she understood him. Almost. The thought that he might have perished with Perhonen or be tortured by Chen stings a little.
‘What do you mean?’ she asks.
‘Never mind now, my dear. What is important is that you are absolutely right. Somehow, the Great Game played poor, overconfident Matjek. They made him think he had the Kaminari jewel. And that means they must have it.’
The pellegrini touches Mieli’s cheek. Her ring is cold against Mieli’s scar. ‘My dear, beautiful Mieli, we can still both get everything what we want, and more. But first, you have to embrace your heritage. You must join the Great Game Zoku.’