The Ananke was made of metal, but men had built her. All things men create have some aspect of humanity in them, for men are incapable of creating the truly alien. And so the Ananke was made of metal, but all her parts were analogous to flesh.
The cameras were her eyes, the hallway her spine, the computer her brain, the layers of metal and carbon that shielded her insides from the vacuum of space were her skin. And the dark hungry emptiness inside the hollow of her rib cage that took all light and air and in impossibility devoured them forever, that was the Ananke’s beating heart.
Through her cameras the Ananke could watch simultaneously Ida Stays in her room working with dark lips and a dark expression, Ivan in his cell leaning his forehead against the gray wall, Althea—always most importantly Althea—bowed over an interface, trying futilely to understand. The Ananke could watch, but the Ananke could not speak, and so, like an infant wailing to its mother, unable to express in more detail what had gone wrong, the Ananke’s alarms wailed day and night, and the crew did not sleep.
There was something Ida was missing.
The consciousness of the fact that there was some connection she was failing to make haunted her and had haunted her for the last long few days since Constance Harper and Milla Ivanov had left the ship. Her interrogation of Ivan had taken on an air of futility—what he knew, he was not telling, and she no longer felt she was advancing closer to the final truth.
The Mallt-y-Nos had not attacked again yet, but everyone knew that she would. There had been a dozen other minor uprisings on the outer planets—most subdued, but some of the moons were still breaking out in sporadic violence. The System had just arrested a man with a stockpile of weaponry, and as he’d been taken into custody, he’d shouted to the watching crowd that the Wild Hunt was beginning. Titania was still defiant; the System was contemplating total depopulation. The state of the outer solar system was not beyond what the System could handle, but it was incomprehensible that it had gotten this far—and there would be more. This was the prelude; the Mallt-y-Nos had not yet struck her primary blow. The System had almost its entire military out by Jupiter and Neptune and Uranus and the planetoids, waiting, but what they really needed was information. Ida needed to give them information. But she had none. If she failed—if she failed—if she failed—
Humiliation and fear warred in her breast. Intelligence agents did not retire. If she failed, she would lose her livelihood and likely her life. To prison for crimes against the state—disobedience and squandering of System resources, probably—or to exile on some planetoid that was like a prison. Either would be followed by a discreet death, she was certain. She knew too much. If she failed, first humiliation before all, then the final loss of any power she had, even over her own life—
This couldn’t be it. She couldn’t be wrong. There was something she was missing.
“I want to go over the events on Ganymede again,” Ida said, pacing, pacing. Her heels rang out through the vast white room.
“Why?” Ivan asked. The alarms had been keeping him awake, as they had the rest of the crew. He was pale and shadowed with too little sleep, as Ida knew she herself was. “You’ve already asked me about that.”
“And I’m asking you again.”
Ivan laughed. He had long since ceased to pretend to be pleasant to her, and his laughter now was vicious, taunting.
“What point would that serve? I’ve told you everything I can,” he said. “And you’ve verified it all. You have, or you’d be asking me more detailed questions.”
Ida stood and looked at him, at his handsome face, and his blue eyes, and his pallor, and wished with sudden, overwhelming keenness that she could hurt him again the way she had with Milla, the way she had with Constance.
But she already had played her hand where Milla and Constance were involved, and Mattie was dead and Abby was missing still.
Ivan said, mocking, his eyes bright, brilliant with exhaustion and anger, “Why won’t you just admit that you’re wrong, Ida?”
Ida said, “I am not wrong,” with all the surety she possessed, but the worm of doubt was hollowing out her chest, and Ivan’s expression seemed to show that he knew it.
“Now,” said Ida. “Ganymede.”
That day’s interrogation was as useless as all the others had been. At the end of it, Ida left Ivan alone in the white room, chained to his chair. She could leave him to sit there alone forever if she wanted to. Perhaps, when she went back to him, Ivan would be so tired and humiliated and dehydrated that he would bow to whatever she said. Once Ida had her proof, the System would be so relieved that they wouldn’t look too closely at how she’d obtained it. She knew that for a fact.
Ida was so caught up in her thoughts that for a few seconds she did not notice when, all over the Ananke, without any warning or reason, the lights went out.
The lights keeping the halls bright went out; all the lights marking the instrument panels went dark. The steel walls lost their gleam. Ida found herself suddenly in a vast black nothing-space, unlit by sun or star, no walls visible, the total blackness of empty space without a star, of the view from the horizon of a black hole.
She went very still.
Ida was a planetary woman. She knew—she had seen it proved in math, in words—that the apparent safety of a planet’s solid ground beneath her feet was based on precisely the same physical laws that described the construction of a spaceship, that there was no real difference between the solidity of dirt beneath her feet and the hollowness of sculpted carbon and iron. She knew this for the fact that it was, but Ida Stays was a planetary woman, and it was with a planetary woman’s fear that she froze in the darkness, because Ida did not believe in God, did not believe in any gods at all, only the cold fact of existence and man’s ability to work within the inflexible laws of nature, but somehow she, so human, so unmechanical, somehow she trusted the engineer that had constructed the planets far more than the human ones who had built the ships that flew between them.
Here, in the dark of the hallway, with the image of civilization—and human control—vanished, where all Ida knew was that she was not on some planet but was on a man-made structure and its first output (let there be light) had failed, and she was afraid, and that was the worst thing of all: the utter loss of her power, destroyed by as insignificant a thing as the loss of light.
But then again, perhaps the heat would be next to go, or the air, and Ida would freeze in the cold emptiness of space. Perhaps she was already out in space now, for the space around her, unbounded by light, with the walls and floor and ceiling all invisible, could have stretched out to infinity.
No, Ida thought with a deep chill of fear that was animal in its intensity, space would have stars. She was not in space. Perhaps the containment fields at the center of the ship had failed and the hollowness there, the emptiness that could not be filled, had swelled up and devoured all in its path, and Ida, too, and next, next it would swallow up the planets, the sun, and then, with redshifted photons howling, it would devour the solar system entirely—
Light, flickering eerie light from behind her that touched on the walls and made them exist again. Ida took gulping breaths.
The flashlight shook and wavered and bounced up and down and came nearer, and something rushed past Ida, knocking her into the wall and taking the flashlight with her, while Ida stood and gasped and could not make herself move.
Althea Bastet was holding the little light; Ida recognized her by the wiry silhouette of her hair. Althea pushed into a room just ahead of Ida in the hallway, and Ida blindly followed the faint glow of that light, unwilling to be left in the dark any longer.
Ida found Althea kneeling before the machine as if in prayer, the flashlight cast down beside her and illuminating the floor. Ida gripped the frame of the door and watched as Althea touched the machine, and the computer brightened into a glow. Althea tapped away at the machine like a pianist playing a soundless song, and by the time Ida took her next shaking breath, the lights flared suddenly, brilliantly back on.
It was too bright, all that lost light returned at once. Ida had to squeeze her eyes shut and shield her face. When she dared to open her eyes again, blinking reddened afterimages away, Althea was still kneeling in front of the computer, frowning.
“What was that?” Ida asked, and was startled by the hoarseness of her voice.
Mercifully, Althea did not seem to notice. “I don’t know yet,” she muttered. “I’ll figure it out.” It sounded as if she were speaking half to Ida and half to herself, as if her words were rote, well learned, well rehearsed.
The glow of the machine on Althea’s face was bland, innocent, mechanical. Ida ran a hand down her own face and tried to regain her composure.
“Fix it,” she ordered with almost enough force to hide the trembling in her tone, and Althea looked at her in surprise, as if she’d just realized, really, that Ida was right there.
Without another word, Ida left Althea inside the machine room and proceeded toward her room.
Domitian met her there some time after he had been intended to, but in light of the difficulties with the ship, Ida let his lateness pass. It had given her time to recover some of her composure, at least.
“I need this ship repaired immediately,” Ida snapped the moment he stepped in. “I don’t care how. This is unacceptable. This is an embarrassment. Your mechanic is incompetent, criminally incompetent.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Don’t ‘yes, ma’am’ me,” said Ida. “I want it fixed.” She would have Doctor Bastet punished, but first she needed the ship to function.
“I will ensure that it is,” Domitian said with enough force that she knew he meant it.
“Good.”
Domitian asked, “Is there some other reason you wanted me here, Miss Stays?”
Ida looked at him, so solid and loyal and dependable, and sighed.
“The interrogation is not going well,” she admitted. “It may be that I will be required to transport Ivanov to the surface of Pluto. We should discuss those arrangements later this week, provided, of course, that your mechanic has managed to repair the ship by that point in time.” Or if they even made it to Pluto, Ida thought. If the Mallt-y-Nos attacked again, it was likely that the System would have the Ananke return to Earth. Already the System had required the Ananke to report its location on the hour; it was only the ship’s considerable firepower and the enormous expense of its mission that had persuaded the System to allow it to continue on. As for taking Ivan off the ship, if Althea Bastet had not managed to fulfill the basic role of her position by the time they reached Pluto or by the time the Mallt-y-Nos attacked, thus making it possible for Ivan to leave the premises, the System would have to become involved. A part of Ida was pleased at the thought of finally seeing the damn mechanic reprimanded, but she knew that if she had achieved nothing by the time they reached Pluto, more of the System’s attention was the last thing she wanted. Her failure would be clear and obvious enough without being the subject of an investigation.
“Yes, ma’am,” Domitian said, but although this time Ida turned her back on him in dismissal, he did not leave.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Miss Stays,” said Domitian in a softer tone, “if you’ll allow me. Over the past days I have seen that you are a brilliant interrogator and loyal to the System. If you think that Ivanov knows something, then I have no doubt that he truly does.”
That Domitian saw that in her strengthened something inside of Ida that she had not known needed strengthening. For a wild moment, she had the impulse to tell him the truth: that the System did not believe her theory about Gale and Ivanov knowing the Mallt-y-Nos, that Ida herself was near ruin if she could not break Leontios Ivanov immediately.
The impulse passed, strange and irrational, and Ida cast it from her mind.
“Of course he does,” Ida said. “There’s something I’m missing, but he does know.” An idea was forming in her head. “If I start from the beginning,” she said, to herself, not to Domitian, “without any preconceptions, perhaps I’ll find it…”
“Permission to leave, Miss Stays?”
“Granted,” Ida answered absently, and hardly heard the door shut. Instead, she sat down before her computer and started from the beginning.
Althea had run out of ideas. Althea had nothing left to try. Althea did not know what to do.
“Come on, calm down, shh,” she crooned at the computer like a mother trying to soothe her colicky baby, but the alarm continued to wail inconsolably. “Please, Ananke, shh.”
She had gone through all the usual sources. The manual override wasn’t working, and she could not find the source of the error, and she could not figure out why the ship was crying out, just as she could not understand why all the lights had gone off.
“Ananke, please,” she begged, and the alarm cut out abruptly, as meaninglessly as it had begun. She had done nothing to stop it. She had done nothing to start it in the first place. She did not understand, and she didn’t know what else to do.
She leaned her head against the wall of the ship and, with no one but the Ananke to see her, with nothing to distract herself from her frustration and her humiliation and her despair, started to cry.
A light shone through her closed lids; when Althea opened her eyes, the nearest holographic terminal was lit up, glowing red, a flickering shape appearing and disappearing in the terminal, there and gone before Althea’s eyes could make out its shape, but for an instant it looked like an image of the last hologram the ship had received: the face and figure of Ida Stays.
Her tears had dried. Althea rested her head against her ship’s familiar metal, and breathed, and watched as the holographic diodes died back down into darkness.
There was one thing left she had not tried. A week and a half ago, even a few days ago she would not even have allowed herself to consider it. But she had nothing left to try, and still the Ananke was broken.
She could talk to Ivan.
Matthew Gale had broken Althea’s ship. Matthew Gale had been Ivan’s friend and partner for ten years. Ivan already had admitted that he knew something about what Gale had done, something about “a little bit of chaos.” Surely if Althea questioned him more closely, he would be able to tell her precisely what Gale had done. Ida already had made it clear that she had little interest in interrogating Ivan about the ship, and Althea did not want to have to confess that she’d been speaking to Ivan against orders. Ida Stays already hated her. If Althea admitted that—or if she even troubled Ida again without the Ananke being functional—she doubted she would ever work, or even see Earth, again.
Gagnon had kept his word; Althea had not guarded Ivan’s cell since the day Milla Ivanov and Constance Harper had been on board. But Ida had taken to leaving Ivan alone in the white room for hours at a time, and Althea knew that Ida had already left today. Ivan would be alone, unguarded. The camera in the white room wasn’t working; no one would know what Althea had talked about with Ivan. They wouldn’t even have any proof that she had said anything to him at all.
Slowly, without feeling that she had really made a decision at all, Althea stood up and began to walk up the Ananke’s spiraling hall.
She had not really, truly made a decision, she felt, even when she was standing in front of the door to the white room, even when without hesitation she turned the knob and walked in.
Ivan sat in the center of the white room, the bow of his back very tense. Althea could not speak, did not know what to say, and so she only walked forward, her boots making dull sounds against the floor.
“What happened?” Ivan asked, tense, before she had come into his line of sight.
“What?” Althea asked, slowing down.
He twisted around to glance at her and did not seem surprised to see her there. Her shoes, Althea realized. He’d recognized she wasn’t Ida from the sound of her walking. “With the lights,” he said. “What happened?”
“The ship,” said Althea. “She malfunctioned again.”
Ivan looked up at her sharply as she came to stand a little distance away from him. Althea felt pinned, pierced. It was different seeing him and speaking to him than it was just to speak to him; he was more real somehow, not a voice from behind a metal wall, yet he was different somehow, too, now that she could see his blue eyes, the way they searched her face, as if he was reading things off of her she did not know were there to be read.
Ivan leaned back slowly in his chair. The chains around his wrists clinked with the movement.
“Why did you come here, Althea?” he asked.
“I need your help,” she said.
This was it, the point from which she could not return, yet Althea had a strange fear that she had passed the extremal point already and simply had not recognized it.
Against his silence she began to explain, the words falling nervously from her as if from a broken dam, all in a rush. “I can’t figure out what Gale did. You knew him. You could tell me; you could tell me what exactly it is that he did. You know Gale, so you know what he did. You told me something about ‘a little bit of chaos’; what does that mean? I can’t— I can’t fix the computer. I need you to tell me.”
“First of all,” said Ivan, and there was something dark in his tone, “his name is Mattie.” He cocked his head to the side. “If you’re going to try to convince me to help you, you’re not off to a good start. Call him by the name I use; that’s how you generate a rapport.”
Althea’s tears had started to flow again. It happened without her volition, without her understanding. She stood very still, like prey in sight of a wolf, and for the first time in weeks—perhaps for the first time since she had caught him dressed all in black and toying with her computer—she was afraid of Leontios Ivanov.
He did not speak again immediately. Althea could not find the courage to speak, and only stood and let him take her apart with his eyes.
He said, “Did you come here to make a deal with me, Althea?”
“I just wanted to ask you a question.”
“Information is my only currency right now, Althea. It’s my only power. I’m not just going to give that away because you asked me nicely.”
Althea swallowed. She felt very small, hopeless and desperate, in that vast white room and under Ivan’s piercing attention.
“You’re smart,” Ivan said. If he had said this to her before, Althea’s heart would have glowed at the compliment. Now she felt only chilled. “You must have known, coming in here, that you would have to make a deal.”
“What do you want?”
He did not look surprised. At the moment Althea could not imagine anything so fallible in him as being surprised. “What will you offer?”
“Food,” said Althea. “Drink. A word with Domitian.” Ivan was stone-faced, and even to her own ears her offer seemed petty, poor. She said, “I have nothing else to offer,” and heard her own desperation.
“And why would I want food, or drink, or a useless conversation with Domitian?” Ivan asked. “Think bigger, Althea.”
“I have nothing else to offer.”
The way Ivan looked at her was almost, Althea hardly dared to think, pitying.
“No,” she said in response to that look, to what it said without saying. “No.”
“Not even for your ship?” Ivan asked with a peculiar mocking emphasis on “your ship.”
“I can’t do it,” she said, and braced herself and said it outright. “I can’t set you free. I’m risking enough just being here, just talking to you. The System could throw me in prison, maybe even execute me, just for talking to you like this!”
“And that,” said Ivan, cruelly ironic, deliberate, “would be terrible.”
“Don’t do that to me,” Althea said, caught between anger and pleading. “Ivan, I need your help.”
For an instant, a desperate hopeful instant, she thought she saw pity in his face again, pity for her.
“Fine,” he said. “But here are my terms. They can’t be negotiated. They can’t be changed.”
Althea took a shuddering breath. “I can’t set you free, Ivan.”
“I want two things from you before I tell you a damn thing,” Ivan said. “First I want you to tell me something, and then I want you to do something for me. I want you to tell me the mission of the Ananke. And then I want you to lengthen the chains on my arms.”
She couldn’t do it. That was her first thought; it was so overwhelming that for a moment she could not speak for fear that nothing would come out of her mouth other than “I can’t, I can’t.” Then she swallowed and asked, “Why?”
“The first,” said Ivan, “is so that I can actually diagnose your problem for you. I can’t tell you what’s wrong with the ship if I don’t know how it’s supposed to work, Althea.”
That much was probably true. Althea’s mouth was dry when she said, “And what about the second?”
In answer, Ivan lifted his arms for the first time since she had walked into the room. They were arrested a few short inches away from the chair’s armrests by the chains, which had been hooked shut several links above the full length of the chain. It had to be uncomfortable. It had to be humiliating.
“Ida and Domitian have been shortening them,” he said, and she shifted her attention reluctantly from the chains to see that he had been watching her the entire time. “It’s not very comfortable.”
Lengthening the chains would lengthen his reach. Fully extended, he probably could reach above the top of the table or perhaps up to Althea’s waist if she stood right beside him. He would be less contained, less well trapped.
“You’re not going to…do anything, are you?” she said. “If I lengthen the…” She trailed off with a gesture.
“It’s just for my comfort,” Ivan said, and she wanted to believe him.
“Domitian and Ida will know—”
“—when they unchain me,” Ivan finished. “No, they won’t, not if I keep my arms down. When they bring me back, they’ll shorten the chains again, but they won’t know they were ever lengthened.”
It would be a brief comfort, but Althea could nearly justify it in her head.
What she could not justify was the betrayal of her ship and of Domitian.
“I can’t tell you about the Ananke,” she said. “It was the highest of my oaths when I took this position, that the mission of this ship be kept a secret.”
“No,” Ivan said, “the highest of your oaths is to obey the System, and you’re not doing that very well, are you?”
Althea set her jaw.
“Look,” Ivan said, seeming to relent. “There is no working surveillance in this room. Ida can’t get me to tell her what she wants to know; there’s no way I’ll tell her about this. I understand loyalty, Althea, and I understand keeping secrets, but I can only help you if you tell me this.”
This was all too much, and Althea was so exhausted. She ran her shaking hands over her face and could not even think how to decide.
“And anyway,” said Ivan, “I’ll be dead in a few days.”
Althea lowered her hands and stared at him, at the shadows under his eyes and the pallor of his skin, and could not decide if she was afraid of him or for him, only that she was overwhelmingly afraid.
“I can’t,” she said, and she whispered it, but it seemed very loud even at a whisper and in that vast white room.
“Then I won’t help you.”
“You have to understand,” Althea began, driven by some incomprehensible impulse to explain herself to him, to explain Domitian, and the Ananke, and the System, and her own fear.
“I understand,” Ivan said, but there was neither absolution nor forgiveness in his voice.
Althea tried again. “You know if something happens because I can’t fix the ship, you’ll die, too.”
Ivan leaned forward. There was an intensity to him, Althea decided, and that was what made him so frightening.
“Like I said,” he told her. “I’ll be dead in a few days.”
There was nothing she could possibly have said to that, so she let her fear drive her from the room. The door swung shut with a heavy clang behind her and nearly covered up the sound of her name being called from a nearby intercom.
“Althea,” said Domitian’s voice in a tone inching steadily from annoyed to angry. “Althea, come in.”
She could have just as well fixed the Ananke on the spot as not replied instantly to that tone. Hoping only that she did not sound too shaken, she opened the connection and said, “I read.”
“Control room. Now.”
She went.
It was a testament to how rattled she was that she did not realize immediately that she had walked into an ambush.
Domitian was sitting in the main chair, which had been swung around to face the door. Gagnon leaned with affected casualness against the wall and swung the door shut once she entered, and she found herself in the center of the tiny room, the object of both men’s attention.
“What is it?” she asked, although she already could guess.
Domitian had his hands folded in front of his face, bent elbows braced on the arms of his chair. He took his time before speaking, and that frightened Althea, that long, thoughtful silence.
“Althea,” he said. “We need to know when the ship will be fixed.”
“Soon,” Althea said, her fingers trembling against her sides; she stuck them in her pockets. They knocked against the tools she carried, the bits of wire, the slender silver box cutter, sharp and flat.
“When?” said Domitian. “An exact time frame, Althea.”
For a moment she contemplated a lie. In the next moment the very idea shamed her; she turned her head aside without answering.
“Do you even know what’s wrong with it?” Gagnon asked from behind her, and when Althea dared to glance Domitian’s way again, he did not look surprised at her lack of an answer.
“I have some ideas,” said Althea, but her only idea was a wolf in a white room.
“But you don’t know,” Gagnon pressed.
“Not exactly, no.”
She had the distinct impression that the two men were holding a conversation with each other over her head.
“If the computer can’t be fixed,” Domitian said at last, “then it must be deactivated.”
Her head snapped up.
“What?” She had misheard, she must have—even though she knew she hadn’t.
“The dead man’s switch is at the base of the ship,” Domitian said. “The ship can be operated by the crew without the computer.”
“Not completely,” said Althea. “Not perfectly, not entirely…”
“But it can be operated well enough to fly, to sustain life, and to perform the basic experiments of our mission,” said Domitian.
It was true, but Althea would not admit it.
“Stopping this insanity is worth the price of a few lost experiments,” Domitian said. “All the System needs to know is if the process this ship is designed to test is physically possible. That is the core purpose of this ship, and we can achieve that without the computer. Everything else the computer was designed to test can be tested in later experiments, but there will be no second ship with a black hole core if this ship fails. With the amount of resources the System has sunk into this mission, we must succeed or there will be consequences for all three of us. And there is still the matter of whether Ivanov can be removed from the premises while the computer is operational. Miss Stays is not happy, and do you realize what her unhappiness—”
“I know,” Althea snapped.
“So then tell me,” said Domitian, as sharp as she had been, “can you or can you not fix this ship?”
Again Althea could not answer.
“Give me an hour,” she blurted out when it seemed Domitian was about to break the silence. “Give me one more hour, and then, if I can’t fix it by then, you can…you can do whatever you’re going to do.”
“An hour,” Domitian said, and Althea ignored Gagnon’s visible exasperation. “One hour and no more.”
She left before he could take it back.
The ship’s cameras watched Althea Bastet step out into the hall and close the door to the control room behind her. For an instant she stood still, her hair curling chaotically out around her face, barely bound anymore by the band that once had held it back. She began to walk, and the ship watched her as she walked in the direction opposite to the white room.
Althea knew that if the dead man’s switch was flipped, it would destroy the computer, euthanize it, wipe it from existence and leave only the computer’s shell, the computer’s corpse, drifting through space. The ship would be left under manual control of the crew, who would operate it like ancient earth scientists testing galvanism, who set a corpse to jumping or shrieking with the touch of electricity to the right limb or piece of the brain.
Althea Bastet went to the weapons cabinet and opened it. She took a key from a hook that once had held the cuffs that now held Leontios Ivanov, and she dropped it into her pocket.
Down the hall she walked, down the winding hall, toward the white room.
If the dead man’s switch was flipped, there would be no computer to repair, nothing but dead synapses and the fading echoes of an aborted life.
At the door to the white room, Althea stopped and took a long, slow breath. Her hands were trembling when she reached into her pocket and came up with a handful of wire, the long flat blade of the box cutter, and, shining bright and small, the silver key to Ivan’s cuffs.
She dropped the rest back into her pocket absently, hardly paying attention to whether the items made it into her pocket or fell onto the floor, and pressed the key into the palm of her hand.
The Ananke watched her open the door and walk into the white room.
Althea was still no more conscious of when she had made the decision to go to Ivan than she had been the first time she had visited him. The decision, it seemed, had been made subconsciously, and she was left only to carry it out.
Without speaking a word to Ivan, she crossed the expanse between the door and the table in the center of the room. It seemed longer than it had before, the silence in the room overwhelming, the lights and the white walls and ceiling and floor all too bright for her eyes.
Ivan was watching her without speaking as she came up beside him. When she finally reached out to move, she knew that she had left the mark of the key in white and red on her palm.
She reached down first to his right wrist, which was closer to her. His skin was very pale against hers when she lifted his wrist so that she could reach the keyhole in the lock.
He watched her. She could feel him watching her, and she did not look at him.
She leaned over him to reach for his other arm. She knew that she should not—it left her vulnerable if Ivan reached up and grabbed her—but she could not quite bring herself to care or to believe that he would hurt her.
Something snagged her open hip pocket, probably the chair’s armrest, so she shifted and freed it, then lengthened the chain on Ivan’s left hand.
Then she pulled back, dropped the key in her pocket, faced Ivan, and said, “The mission of the Ananke is to discover how to reverse entropy.”
Ivan frowned, somewhere between incredulous and confused.
“If entropy can be reversed,” Althea said, “the System can create more efficient engines. We can create better terraforming devices. Without entropy, liquids don’t have to mix, water can be kept uncontaminated, heat doesn’t need to disperse; we can finally warm the outer moons up enough to have a proper biosphere. There will be no energy crisis. Every ship can have a relativistic drive, not just the lightweight ones. The System will be able to control the outer moons better. One day we’ll be able to colonize planets outside of the solar system.” Some of the wonder of the idea that had struck her when she first had heard it years ago came back to her now and in some small measure calmed her fear and despair. “Perpetual motion would be possible, Ivan,” she said. “Every physical process reversible. Time goes in the direction of increasing entropy; if we had control over whether entropy increased, it would be like having control over time. We would have the power of eternity.”
Ivan’s mouth was hanging slightly ajar; his eyes had gone very wide, and Althea could see the full circles of blue, reflecting on their surfaces the bright white walls, the bright white ceiling, and herself with the light coming through her hair like a halo.
“That’s why this ship is so well protected,” Althea said. “That’s why it’s kept such a secret. Imagine anyone but the System having that kind of power.”
“That’s not possible,” Ivan said. “The laws of thermodynamics are the laws of reality. They can’t be broken.”
“Gagnon has some theories. I don’t understand them completely, but I don’t need to. They have something to do with the black hole, I think, which is why the Ananke has a black hole instead of just a dense sphere for gravitation—but the computer, that I understand. The Ananke…she…” It was hard to put foreign inhuman languages, math and code, into simple, short spoken words. “The computer identifies the entropy,” Althea said, hands outspread, fingers curled, as if she would capture the correct way to communicate in her hands like a firefly, “and it turns it back into work.”
“What you’re saying, then,” Ivan said, leaning forward but with his hands still pressed flat to the rests of his chair, not taking advantage of the lengthened chains, “is that the computer is designed to take chaos as an input and produce order from it.”
“No,” Althea said immediately, and then on revision, “No, not really.”
“The greater the entropy, the greater the number of states a system can have,” Ivan said, leaning forward, alight, and seeming a different person for this sudden energy. There was color in his cheeks and his eyes were bright, but it looked more like the flush of fever than the glow of health.
“Yes,” Althea said slowly.
“So you start with a system of low entropy—low chaos, high order, only a few states,” Ivan said. “Maybe only one. And then you add a little bit of chaos—a little bit of entropy—and suddenly the system is broken up into many different states.”
“Chaos isn’t a thing,” said Althea, frustrated. Ivan was still alight with that familiar look of a scholar faced with the solution to a problem, but she had no idea where he was heading. “You can’t ‘add’ entropy to a thing.”
Ivan waved his left hand dismissively. The lengthened chain clattered. He said, “But you can increase the number of states the computer can have.”
It was Althea’s turn to be briefly struck dumb by the implications.
“Mattie’s ‘little bit of chaos,’ ” she said. “I thought you meant an error. I thought you meant he put some sort of…replicating random virus into the system.”
Ivan shook his head.
“The Ananke’s computer can exist in a few predetermined states, right?” he said. “Normal functioning, high alert, basic functioning only, that sort of thing.”
“He added states,” Althea said slowly, testing the sense of it.
“He added states,” Ivan confirmed. “Strange ones. Like ones where some of the cameras don’t save their footage but the computer functions normally. It was just supposed to confuse the crew, nothing more. And then he changed the computer so that it would cycle through them at random.”
It was possible, just—but there was no way Mattie would have had the time to do it. “He was only at the computer for a few minutes,” Althea said.
Ivan grinned, and the wolf was there again in that smile. “You didn’t even find his lock picks,” he said. “Do you think that was all he had hidden on him?”
“A computer drive.” Of course. But even so, the drives would be able to contain only generic programs; Mattie would have had to alter them for the Ananke, which was like no other ship in existence. He could have managed it—just—but the complexity of some of the behavior Althea had witnessed…“I still don’t see how—”
“We’ve done this a lot of times,” Ivan interrupted. “I promise you he could’ve done it in the time he had.”
It still didn’t make sense to Althea, not completely, but it had to be true. There was no other possibility.
“So the computer just fluctuates between these states at random?” Althea asked, turning her mind back to the problem at hand and feeling for the first time in a week as if she might have some way to fix this.
“Mattie adds a set of states,” Ivan confirmed, “sometimes a very large set, and then the computer fluctuates through them like a person having mood swings. That’s how we coded the Annwn, actually. We got the idea—”
He stopped.
It was so abrupt and unnerving that Althea said, a little too loudly, “What?” and it echoed through the white room.
“That’s how we programmed the Annwn,” Ivan said, slowly but building up steam, and Althea knew that expression from its having been on her own face, from seeing it on the faces of colleagues before—Ivan coming to conclusions, connecting the facts faster than he could speak.
“We had Annie—the Annwn’s computer. We programmed her to switch between states depending on sensory triggers,” Ivan said. “Emotions. She would react emotionally to stimuli.”
“It’s a computer,” Althea said. “It doesn’t have emotions. It can’t react emotionally.” Of course Ivan had changed one of a machine’s best qualities just so that it would react emotionally to him.
“Right,” Ivan said. “It was just a simulation. The Annwn wasn’t able to switch between states on her own; we had to program everything into her. We told her what triggers would make her happy, sad, angry. She was completely manufactured. She couldn’t figure out triggers on her own because she wasn’t designed to deal with multiple states that way.”
The faintest glimmering of where Ivan was going began to shine in Althea’s mind. She said warningly, “Ivan.”
“The Ananke,” said Ivan, his eyes fever-bright, “the Ananke. She can handle chaos. She’s designed to take a set of states and organize them. She’s designed to figure out how to switch between states on her own. She figures out her own triggers.”
“No, no, no,” said Althea, but he wasn’t listening to her at all.
“Imagine it,” Ivan said over her protests. “Imagine the Ananke having to organize herself. There would have to be some degree of self-awareness from that, don’t you think?”
“Ivan, this is stupid.”
“Imagine it,” he insisted. “If it did happen, the Ananke— Ananke wouldn’t know how to interact with people. She would be worse than an infant, because she wouldn’t have the necessary instincts. She would have to learn from first principles.”
Perhaps this had been a mistake. Perhaps Althea never should have come into this room.
“But Ananke’s smart,” Ivan said, and she wondered if he really was mad, as his file said. “Of course she is. She’s brilliant, more brilliant than any human that ever existed. She would learn.”
Althea paced away, trying to settle the anxiety that rose up again in her stomach, but Ivan’s voice pursued her.
“She’d start by learning what got a reaction—the alarms got a reaction, didn’t they? Just like a baby crying to its mother,” he called out over the distance to her, and she turned back around.
“Stop it, please,” she said, but again he seemed not to hear.
“Next it’ll learn to speak,” said Ivan, and if he meant to be mocking her, he seemed to be very serious. “The ship has a voice-processing system, too, of course, doesn’t it? I imagine it’ll learn how to communicate through text before verbally, but it can convert between sound and text already. And she’s been listening and watching, too. The cameras are all working; they’re just not showing what they see to you.”
“Stop!”
“She’s probably been trying to talk to you in her native language,” said Ivan, unstoppable, eerie and pale, “in code, but sooner or later—and probably sooner—she’ll figure out the languages of humans.”
There had been strange code that Althea had seen, strange and seemingly meaningless, but it had been a mere artifact of whatever Gale had done and had nothing to do with the madness Ivan was speaking.
“She’s probably processing her own linguistic data stores even now,” Ivan said. “If you don’t kill her first, she’ll speak to you, Althea—”
“Stop!” Althea shouted, and her voice filled up the vast room and rang out in echoes long after the first sound had passed.
Into the silence that followed the death of the echoes, Althea said, filled with a hurt she did not want to consider too closely, “I came to you for help.”
Ivan’s eyes were round and blue and without guile. “I am helping you,” he said.
“No, you’re not!” Althea cried, and found that she was again near tears. “You’re not. You’re making things up, and you’re lying to me, and…”
“I’m not lying to you!”
“Yes, you are!”
For a moment they stared at each other. Althea hoped helplessly that if she just waited another few seconds, Ivan would take it all back and tell her what she needed to know to fix her ship.
Ivan’s voice was low, sincere. “The ship is alive.”
The Ananke watched Althea as she stormed from the white room and out into the hall. For a short stretch of hall she kept up her wrathful stride before she slowed, and it became apparent that she had had no real destination in mind.
She went to one of the computer terminals lining the walls and began to dig around in the Ananke’s head again, looking for a flaw that wasn’t there. Her allotted hour was nearly up by the time she sighed and pulled back from the screen, laying her head against the wall and closing her eyes.
Althea raised her head.
“Ananke,” she said into the air, her eyes cast up in the instinctive way all humans do when they address a divinity. “Ananke, if what he said was…If you can hear me.”
She swallowed. The hallway was empty. There was no one around to listen to Althea’s madness—no one but the Ananke.
“Answer me,” Althea said, and with her gaze she found one of the ship’s cameras and looked straight into it as if it were an eye. “If you can hear me, let me know.”
The computer screen beside her flashed. Althea turned to look down at it.
“Ananke?” she whispered.
The number 1 appeared on the screen.
For a moment Althea was baffled. Then she understood.
“One for true, zero for false,” she said, then shook her head, hardly able to believe what she was considering.
“That’s not enough,” she said to Ananke. “Tell me if you can hear me, Ananke.”
TRUE, said the screen.
While Althea stared in wonder, caught still on the edge of disbelief, the machine paused, almost as if it were thinking, as if it were reconsidering.
TRUE blinked out, and Ananke said instead,
YES, I CAN HEAR YOU.