‘Get the hell out of here!’ he growls, finally.
In the spimescape, I see the great gateway of the Arsenal irising open.
You can stop now, I tell Matjek.
Do I have to?
Yes. We are going to talk about this later, young man.
The Leblanc rises beneath us. I can feel its cool non-mind touch my own through my quptlink with Matjek. It is a sleek, midnight blue thing, not large, barely ten metres long, a cross between a Rolls Royce Silver Phantom and a spaceship. The glare of its Hawking drive pierces the chaos of the Arsenal.
‘You are making a mistake, Jean,’ Barbicane says. ‘The Oortian joined us. She is a member of the Great Game now, in the embrace of our volition cone. She told us everything.’
Shit.
‘We know you are not what you used to be. A challenge for a small zoku, nothing more. We will catch you!’
‘You are welcome to try,’ I say. ‘As for the Oortian, you can keep her.’ I stare at him. ‘Next time we meet, I will take more than just toys.’
Then I jump through the q-dot bubble and drift slowly downwards, towards the ship.
We’ll be ready, Barbicane mouths silently.
Another gun cascade goes off around us as a fiery goodbye, and then the blue cold skin of the Leblanc swallows me.
Interlude
THE GODDESS AND THE FLOWER
Joséphine Pellegrini takes a step, then another. Her legs ache. The sand is wet and clings to her feet.
The beach is dark. The spiderweb of the System map in the sky has faded into a ghostly glow. Even the sea is silent. The demiurges are busy, listening to her, making the partial. The gogol construct is taking shape next to her as she walks, a hollow ghost, a sand-woman, made of fine grains swirling in the air. It matches its steps to hers, waiting to be filled with thought and purpose.
Joséphine gives it memories. They do not belong to her: they are the Prime’s, perfect like diamonds, preserved across centuries. They were given to her by her copymother, to make her into what she is. She holds each one tight as they pass through her and into the partial’s eager brain.
The time of her branching, in her labyrinth temple in the shadow of Kunapipi Mons, when her Jean came to her, for the last time.
She remembers being the Prime, but only in fragments. Walking through the gardens of the Engineer-of-Souls, helping him shepherd thought-swarms. Fighting a war against herself in the Deep Time, against a branch who wanted to take the entire guberniya into deep Dyson sleep, to leave behind these troubles and wake up to see Andromeda Galaxy fill the sky. Like her labyrinth, the thoughts are mere shadows of something greater and high-dimensional that she cannot understand with a mind confined to the dream-vir.
On the other hand, she remembers very well how she felt when the thief made his entrance.
One moment he is not there, and then he is, warming his hands in the blaze of her singularity, in the cylindrical room at the heart of the labyrinth. A cheap trick, as one of her gogols quickly determines: a carefully placed series of space-time cloaks, hiding his approach through the labyrinth even from her eyes.
He wears flesh and heavy blue armour of the zoku, not quite matter, not quite light, and a halo of quantum jewels to go with it. She hopes that they are not for her. He has given her jewels aplenty already, all of them equally disappointing.
He is so much smaller than she is. She is in the rock and the atmosphere and in the computronium beneath the crust of the planet and in the thread-modes of the event horizon of the black hole. He is a mess of carbon atoms and entanglements and q-dots and water, barely larger than the least of her gogols.
And yet—
She creates an image of herself out of modulated Hawking radiation and steps out of the glow of the black hole to meet him. Her gogols show her his point of view: a towering figure of blue fire, wearing a necklace of stars. He flinches, and she smiles. She keeps the intensity of her form just below what his q-stone suit can handle, but not by much.
‘Back already?’ she asks, in a voice made of gamma rays. Her words incinerate his armour’s surface layer. ‘It has only been a century or two. Did you grow tired of Mars so quickly?’
He shields his face with a raised hand. ‘Mars was … educational,’ he says. ‘Could you stop glowing, please? It hurts my eyes.’
‘As you wish.’
It only takes a thought to vaporise him and to pour him into a mindshell in her vir. Her gogols do not know what to do with the zoku jewels, so she just leaves them scattered on the floor of the singularity chamber like discarded toys.
They stand together in her heart-vir, next to a murmuring fountain, beneath a starry sky. She, too, is embodied now, in her favourite dress, in the most regal mindshell from her Library she can find. He is simply a translation of the flesh he came in, a little older than she remembers, in form-fitting dark blue. He massages the bridge of his nose.
‘That’s better,’ he says.
‘Is it? Were you not happy with that particular self? Your Raymonde seemed to like it. Poor girl. She must miss you so.’ She adjusts her ring. ‘Perhaps I should bring her here, too, along with the rest of Mars.’
‘Joséphine—’
‘Do you think you can play with the little people, and then crawl back to me, with no consequences? Other yous have done the same. What do you think I did to them?’
‘Something involving poetic justice, I expect.’ He spreads his hands. ‘I was told that this is where you come to pray to the goddess. So I did.’
‘What do you want?’
‘As unlikely as it may seem to you, I am here on business.’
‘I see. And why should I not have my gogols consume you, here and now, and finally find out if there is anything of use in that mind of yours?’
‘Don’t offend me by thinking I haven’t taken precautions,’ he says, tapping one temple. ‘Touch me, and whatever I have to trade will all burn. Touch me wrong, that is.’ He grins.
‘Do not test my patience, Jean.’
‘I don’t have to test it.’
‘Then you know you should make it quick.’
‘Here, where we have all the time in the world? Where each minute takes less than a baseline picosecond? When we haven’t seen each other – well, I haven’t seen you – for nearly two hundred years? You have gotten even more impatient in your old age.’
She sighs and sits down on the fountain stairs.
‘Perhaps I have,’ she says. ‘It tends to happen when you walk a tightrope between Founder sisters and brothers who want to stab you in the back and a fanatic who wants to conquer death, all the while making sure that they don’t tear the System apart in another ridiculous war. It’s not like designing buildings and having affairs on Mars, Jean.’
He sits down next to her, carefully choosing a step below her. He crosses his hands over one knee and leans back. ‘I know. That’s why I’m here. Things are about to get worse.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Matjek Chen has the Kaminari jewel.’
She takes a deep breath.
‘And why are you telling me that?’
‘Why do you think? Because I’m going to steal it.’
She laughs. ‘I would like to see that,’ she says. ‘And I suppose you are asking for my help?’
‘Not exactly.’ He takes her left hand in his own. His grip is tight and warm. ‘Joséphine, if I fail, you know where I’ll end up.’ He gestures with his free hand. There is a flower between his thumb and forefinger, suddenly, with colourful, tapering petals.