For the first time in centuries, a void grows inside her, a temptation to end things at last.
Are you sad? the demiurges ask. We will show you more! We are sky-painters, world-makers, singers, shapers!
She squeezes her hands into fists. Her knuckles ache. She sits up and looks down at the darkening beach. Her footprints follow the curve of the sea in an orderly row, one after another.
She stands up.
It is my turn to show you something, she says. If you help me, we can make you a friend.
We listen! We make! We shape! says the chorus of the demiurges.
She starts walking, stepping into her own sandy impressions with slow, tired strides. Cold waves lap at her feet.
In the sky, the true end of the world begins. Joséphine ignores it. She is busy making a last hope, out of memories and sand.
1
THE THIEF AND THE LAST BATTLE
We are barely past the orbit of Mars when Matjek figures out the truth about Narnia and helps me find Mieli’s trail.
‘That can’t be the end!’ he says, holding up a book. It is a big, battered purple volume, with a circular window-like cover image that shows clashing armies. He has to lift it with both of his four-year-old hands. He struggles with its weight and finally slams it down onto the table in front of me.
The Last Battle, by C.S. Lewis, I note with a sigh. That means difficult questions.
For the past few subjective days, the tiny main vir of our ship, the Wardrobe, has been a calm place. I created it based on a dream Matjek told me about. It is an incense-scented labyrinth of high bookshelves full of haphazardly stacked books of all sizes and colours. Matjek and I usually sit at a rough wooden table in the small café area in the front, brightly lit by diffuse sunlight through the display windows.
Outside – painted on the imaginary glass for us by the vir – is the turbulent flow of the Highway, thousands of lightwisps, rockships, calmships, beamriders and other craft of every kind, reflected from the Wardrobe’s solar sails in a myriad glinting fragments. And somewhere in the back, in the shadows, the blue and silver books that hold the fractally compressed minds of the people and jinni and gods of Sirr whisper to each other with papery voices.
Until now, Matjek has been reading his books quietly, leaning his chin on his fists. Which has suited me fine: I have been busy looking for Mieli in the death cries of Earth.
‘They can’t just all die! It’s not fair!’ Matjek says.
I look at him and make my sole Highway-zoku jewel – an emerald crystal disc with a tracery of milky veins inside, a gift from a friendly cetamorph – spin between my fingers.
‘Listen, Matjek,’ I say. ‘Would you like to see a trick?’
The boy answers with a disapproving stare. His eyes are earnest and intense, a piercing blue gaze that is at odds with his soft round face. It brings back uncomfortable memories from the time his older self caught me and took my brain apart, neuron by neuron.
He folds his arms across his chest imperiously. ‘No. I want to know if there is a different ending. I don’t like it.’
I roll my eyes.
‘Usually, there is only one ending, Matjek. Why don’t you find another book to read if you didn’t like that one?’
I really don’t want to have this conversation right now. My minions – a swarm of open-source cognitive agents distantly descended from rats and nematode worms – are scouring the System public spimescapes for public data on Earth’s destruction. There is a steady stream of qupts in my head, cold raindrops of information from the storm of ships beyond our ancient vessel’s walls.
And each of them is like the stroke of a clock, counting down time that Mieli has left.
A lifestream from a Ceresian vacuumhawk. A grainy feed recorded by photosensitive bacterial film on the solar sail wings of a fragile non-sentient space organism that was following a female of its species past Earth. Not nearly detailed enough. Next.
A <SPIME> from a Sagan-Zoku synthetic aperture array on Ganymede, public feed.
My heart jumps. Not bad. A hyperspectral dataset from a few days ago flashes past my eyes, like flying through aurora borealis, multicoloured sheets of light that show both Earth’s surface and the surrounding space in intricate detail. The Dragons are dark gashes in every layer, but I don’t care about them. With a thought, I zoom into the L2 Lagrange point and the cloud of technological debris where Perhonen should be. Come on.
‘But I want to know,’ says a distant, insistent voice. ‘Who was the Emperor? What was beyond the sea? Why was Aslan no longer a lion?’
The spime view is detailed enough to show the space-time trail and history of every synthbio fragment and dead nanosat in that little Sargasso Sea of space – except that Mieli’s ship Perhonen is supposed to be there, too, and it isn’t. I swear under my breath.
‘You said a bad word!’ Somewhere far away, Matjek is tugging at my sleeve.
It is frustrating. All the public data I can find is subtly corrupt, even data with supposedly unforgeable quantum watermarks from zoku sensors. It makes no sense, unless there is a major spoofing operation going on. It makes me wonder if it’s already too late.
Where the hell is she?
I rub my eyes, send the minions to scour the ad hoc networks of the Highway to see if anyone else has noticed the phenomenon. Then I let their qupts fade into distant background noise. Suddenly, I miss Perhonen’s intel gogols very badly, although not as much as I miss the ship itself.
‘Why did they have to look at his face in the end?’
In a situation like this, it would know exactly what to say.
‘Look, Matjek. I am very, very busy now. I have to work.’
‘I can help you. I am good at working.’
‘It’s grown-up stuff,’ I say carefully. ‘I think you would find it boring.’
He does not look impressed.
‘That’s what Mum always says but once I went with her to her work, and it was fun. I crashed a quantum derivatives market.’
‘My work is not nearly as exciting as your mum’s.’ I know it’s a mistake the moment I say it.
‘I don’t believe you. I want to try!’ He reaches for my zoku jewel. I hold it up, spin it in my fingers and make it disappear.
‘Matjek, it is rude to take other people’s toys without asking permission. Do you remember what I told you? What are we doing here?’
He looks at the floor.
‘We are saving Mieli,’ he mutters.
‘That’s right. The nice lady with wings who came to visit you. That’s why I came back to you. I needed your help. That’s why we are in the Wardrobe. I let you name her, didn’t I?’
He nods.
‘And who are we saving Mieli from?’
‘Everybody,’ Matjek says.
Look after her. For me. Promise, Perhonen said.
When a Sobornost Hunter attacked us, the ship tried to save Mieli by shooting her into space. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The problem is that Mieli served the Sobornost for two decades and carries a Founder gogol in her head. There are too many forces in the System that want access to that kind of information, especially now. For example, the Great Game Zoku, the zoku intelligence arm. They might be nice about it, but when they find her, they are going to peel her mind open like an orange. The pellegrinis, the vasilevs, the hsien-kus or the chens will be less polite. Let alone the mercenary company she infiltrated and betrayed on Earth.