We cannot tell you.
‘There is no need for blackmail. I swore to Tawaddud I would—’
You don’t understand. Much of us is lost. We are shards and fragments, self-loops and voices. We are Sirr, we are the wildcode desert. That is where your answers are. Bring us and our children back and we will remember for you.
I can’t see her face, but it feels like she is smiling behind her mask. Or you can remember yourself.
Then she is gone. The corridor smells faintly of smoke.
I return to the pilot’s cabin and watch the coffee-and-cream flow of Saturn while Carabas steers the ship.
I start thinking about how to rebuild a city, how to get enough entanglement in the Notch-zoku to claim an Earth-sized plate. Slowly, in the calm of the ship’s crystalline heart, a smile returns to my face.
Barbicane was right. It is time to play a different game.
9
MIELI AND THE GREAT GAME
In the shadow of 624 Hektor, the Liquorice-zoku and the Zweihänder wait for the Sobornost civil war to come to them.
‘I wish it would start already!’ Zinda says. ‘Don’t you want to go to a Circle or a Realm, to pass the time?’
Mieli and her Great Game minder are in the central habitat module of the ship. It resembles a miniature fantasy forest wrapped into a cylinder, with gnarly bonsai-sized oaks, and tiny green-hued humanoid creatures lurking among them. Mieli is sitting in a forest clearing, inside a stone circle that barely reaches to her knees, basking under the glow of the ship’s tiny sun – which has its own convoluted orbit – and smelling the rich pine-and-dirt smell of the forest. It reminds her of her garden.
‘If there is one thing I have learned about war,’ says Mieli, ‘it’s that you spend most of it waiting. It feels … familiar. I prefer it to your Circles or Realms.’ She smiles. ‘Besides, I don’t want to forget about the physical world, especially not before going to battle. Someone … someone I knew once said that the reality is always there, like a razor blade inside an apple. The Sobornost always make that mistake. I don’t intend to.’
Zinda smiles wanly. ‘I understand. Still, I would have hoped that by now, you would have found something about the zoku lifestyle that you like. You turned down all my Realm and dinner invitations. I take that sort of thing personally, you know.’
Mieli feels the zoku girl’s eyes on her and looks up, squinting at the sunlight. Zinda is lying down on a riverbank, almost directly above her on the cylinder surface. She is wearing colourful, oversized sunglasses that clash with her samurai outfit.
Mieli gestures at the green miniature landscape around them. ‘In Supra City, I feel like this, only … opposite. Everything is too big. I grew up in an ice sphere only a little bigger than this ship. If there is too much room, too much freedom, I get lost. I need … constraints. Boundaries.’
Maybe I’m saying too much, she thinks. But the zoku girl is easy to talk to. Perhaps it is their new zoku connection, or some remnant from the Realm of the witch. Or perhaps – although she does not want to admit it – the days in the confines of Zweihänder are starting to try even her Oortian composure, and it is good to talk to someone who is three dimensional and her own size.
‘But that’s exactly what Circles and Realms are!’ Zinda says. ‘They are all about the ludic attitude, making things harder for yourself, more interesting! On Earth, they had this game called golf, for example. You were supposed to get a ball into a hole by hitting it with a metal stick – I know, really tacky, don’t ask. If the goal was the point, you’d just walk it to the hole and drop it in. But it wouldn’t be as much fun.’
Apart from the enchanted forest people, they are alone. Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere and Sir Mik made use of the Realmgate at the centre of the ship, the cryptographer to prepare her tools for Founder gogol capture, and the miniature knight to study the Great Game intel spime to determine likely locations for pellegrini, hsien-ku and vasilev skirmishes. His models predict a likely confluence of opposing forces in the local Jovian Trojan space – a Lagrange point hub of a number of minor Highway routes – within a day or two in baseline time.
‘It’s not the same,’ Mieli says. ‘It sounds like a … a song without a tune. Just making sounds that do not mean anything, that do not shape any väki, or tell a story. At least the Sobornost have a plan, a purpose.’
‘Be careful! I am from a Narrativist zoku, you know!’ Then Zinda’s expression grows serious. She sits up and removes her sunglasses.
‘I spent a lot of time studying you, Mieli, before we met. But there is so much I don’t know! Forgive me for asking, but if you miss your Oort so much, why did you ever leave? Why did you let the Sobornost change you? I can’t imagine what that was like. They do it so differently from us: we give you a way to change yourself, make a new self or an alter in a Realm, and then bring it back here. But they …’ She shakes her head. ‘Why did you feel you needed to?’
Mieli swallows. Something brushes her bare feet: a group of furred humanoids with golden eyes is chanting inside the circle, waving sticks and bones in the air. She is not sure if they are worshipping her or trying to banish her.
In spite of their diminutive size, the crew of the Zweihänder has physical specs that many Inner System mercenary companies would envy, and the positive aspects of being a giant are mostly negated by the nauseating Coriolis forces caused by the spin of the ship that creates the comfortable onboard 0.1g gravity. She has learned the hard way to take care not to step on any unwary denizens of the forest, or to swat at the dragon-riders that occasionally circle around them.
Some things are best left alone.
‘I’d rather not talk about that,’ she says, quietly.
Zinda smiles. ‘All right. We don’t have to talk. Would you like to sing to me?’
Mieli looks at Zinda. Her deep brown eyes are earnest, and their faint entanglement connection through the two zoku jewels they share betrays no malice, only warm curiosity.
‘We only sing,’ she says slowly, ‘to create, or to uncreate; in great sorrow or great joy.’ She pauses. ‘Or to a lover. But not to pass the time.’
‘Well,’ Zinda says lightly, ‘then we just have to find some other way to pass the time.’
‘Ladies!TheDarkheartedFiendApproaches!’ Sir Mik rides his winged steed into the module, fully garbed for battle. ‘TheBattleIsJoined! GloryAwaits!’
Mieli peers into the Zweihänder’s strange, runic spimescape. The passive sensors Sir Mik spent the last day seeding the Trojans with are detecting energy discharges: neutrino bursts from fusion reactors, and scattered pions from antimatter engines. Hundreds of tiny diamond shards move around the cold red masses of the asteroids like shoals of fish.
Raions.
‘I suppose that is your cue,’ Zinda says.
‘Yes.’ Mieli brings her systems up. Combat autism waits to embrace her like a vast cool sea where the world moves slowly and silently, with no room for emotions for mistakes. Yet, this time, she is reluctant to enter it.
Zinda reaches out across the treetops of the magical forest and squeezes her hand.
‘Good luck. Tell me, what comes after waiting?’
‘Terror,’ Mieli says.
‘Oh, I think we can do better than that!’
The battle does not look like a battle, at first.
Wrapped in zoku q-armour and the arms of the Dark Man, Mieli watches the raion pinpoints move in swarms and streams, dancing in the gravity well of 624 Hektor. They soak up delta-v and come at each other in battle formations like the lances of two knights, firing nanomissiles as they pass, tiny projectiles piloted by kamikaze gogols. Communication lasers flicker between them, invisible in the vacuum but sketched into the spimescape. During each microsecond pass, electronic warfare ghosts do battle in the ether, trying to break through the raions’ firewalls, flooding each other with viruses evolved by genetic algorithms. Both fleets are dumping so much bandwidth that their heat sink condensates are overloading and, in infrared, they glow like bright stars against the cool background of the Trojan rocks.