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 sister 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 jeweclass="underline" 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.’
6
THE THIEF AND THE ARSENAL
‘So, Colonel? What do you think? Capital idea, eh?’ Barbicane beams at me, while I swirl my port around in my glass, in rhythm with my thoughts.
I blink at a fusion flash that creates a new crater in Iapetus’s battered hulk below. Children and matches. I tug at the thread of the thought, and all of a sudden, my dilemma starts to unravel.
I smile at Barbicane.
‘Agreed! My comrades and I appreciate your candour and fairness. If you would allow me to step outside the Circle for a moment to advise them of the developments?’
The zoku Elder inclines his head, making his hat bop back and forth. ‘Naturally!’ He gestures at the silver boundary of the Circle.
I finish my drink, nod at Chekhova and step over it.
The sudden release from the Circle’s Schroeder locks gives me a head rush. The spimescape interfaces to my equipment flash into being in my field of vision. At the same time, the illusion of the drawing room shatters. I am in a featureless white smartmatter tube full of utility fog that floats in the air in powdery, inert form, pollen-like.
I immediately ramp my internal clockspeed up to the maximum that my cheap synthbio body will allow. Behind me, Chekhova and Barbicane become statues in their small green-and-gold patch of Victorian wood, brass and furniture. Another small mercy: the Gun Clubbers are too well-mannered to break the Circle just because I stepped out for a moment.
I take the computronium egg from my shoulder bag. It is heavy and cold in my hand, a beautiful, intricate brass thing, as if laid by some Fabérge bird. The art nouveau tracery on the surface makes it easy to forget the complex waste heat management machinery and the tiny pinpoint of pure atom-scale computational power inside. The egg alone swallowed a large chunk of my pyramid scheme profits, but I needed something to run the bookshop vir and to store the Sirr data in. I carefully erased all traces of them from the restored Wang bullet before handing it over to the Gun Club.
With a thought, I open a quptlink into the egg.
Matjek?
It takes a few moments before the answer comes.
Yes?
Remember when you asked if you could help Mieli, too?
A pause. It was a long time ago. But yes, I remember.
His voice sounds … older. The Aun have some strange ideas about time. How much time has passed inside the vir?
Well, maybe you still can, I say.
Tell me what to do! The qupt is so full of enthusiasm that it hurts my teeth.