Melissa Scott is from Little Rock, Arkansas, and studied history at Harvard College and Brandeis University, where she earned her Ph.D. in the Comparative History program with a dissertation titled “Victory of the Ancients: Tactics, Technology, and the Use of Classical Precedent in Early Modern Warfare.” She is the author of more than thirty science fiction and fantasy novels, most with queer themes and characters, and has won Lambda Literary Awards for Trouble and Her Friends, Shadow Man, and Point of Dreams, the last written with her late partner, Lisa A. Barnett. She has also won a Spectrum Award for Shadow Man and again in 2010 for the short story “The Rocky Side of the Sky,” as well as the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. In 2012, she returned to the Points universe with Point of Knives, and she and Jo Graham brought out Lost Things, the first volume of the Order of the Air. The second volume in that series, Steel Blues, is now available, and the third, Silver Bullet, will be out in early 2014. Her most recent novel, Death by Silver, written with Amy Griswold, is just out, and another Points novel, Fairs’ Point, is forthcoming as well. She can be found on LiveJournal at mescott.livejournal.com.
Here she demonstrates that even in a far-future, high-tech world, revenge is still a dish best served cold.
It has been more than a decade since I first set foot in Anketil’s tower, and three years since she gave me its key. It lies warm in my hand, a clear glass ovoid not much larger than my thumb, a triple twist of iridescence at its heart: that knot is made from the trace certain plasmas leave in a bed of metal salts, fragile as the fused track of lightning in sand. Anketil makes the shapes for lovers and the occasional friend when work is slow at the tokamak, preserving an instant in threads of glittering color sealed in crystal, each one unique and beautiful, though lacking innate function. It’s only the design that matters. I hold it where the sensors can recognize it, and in the back of my mind Sister stirs.
No life readings. House systems powered down. Owner ABSENT -> setting FORWARD: ALL to destination -> “work” -> ESTU.
That’s what I expected—what Sister and I planned. The door slides back, and I step into Anketil’s eyrie. She is solitary, like most Firstborn, though gregarious enough; the small spare space is cool, the windows fully transparent so that I can see through the twilight haze across the roofs of the Mercato to the harbor and the artificial island where the shuttles land. I came through there myself this morning, in the rising light, everything at last in order, and now here I am, the opening move of the endgame Grandfather began so long ago. Sister chortles to herself, a pulse of pleasure, and I set my bag beside the nearest chair. The sun is setting beyond the bedroom window, filling that room with blinding scarlet light.
To the north, the Bright City reaches inland, a sea of multi-colored light rising as the sky darkens. It, its people and its resident AI, all pride themselves on drawing no distinction between Firstborn and Secondborn, between those who first remade themselves to settle the depths of space, and the ones they allowed to follow, or between the Secondborn and the Faciendi, the people literally built to settle the more doubtful worlds and do the more doubtful jobs, but the lines remain. Anketil lives at the top of her tower; her Secondborn sometime lovers live in the Crescent and the Lido and the Western Rise, while the Faciendi gather in the east, where work and play intermingle. Anketil’s tokamak lies there, among the Faciendi.
The elder moon already floats in the pale sky above those lower towers, and Sister is quick to trace the line of traffic that leads back from that edge. She has kept me informed of Anketil’s current projects, plucking them easily from the commercial contract webs: this one is the core of a starship’s power plant, the heart-stone, so-called, that lets a ship cheat the hard limits of space/time and the speed of light. Heart-stones are individual, tuned to the frame and power source and the proposed usage, but they are hardly a challenge to someone like Anketil. She has made a thousand of them over the course of her career; I don’t need Sister to tell me that she will be ready to consider something more interesting.
Something clicks in the narrow kitchen alcove, and Sister identifies it as a bottle of wine moving to a chilling station. A menu hovers in the shadows when I look, ready for Anketil to choose how she will end her day: she will be home soon, and in that instant Sister stirs again.
SUBJECT has entered the building. Arrival in four minutes.
I glance around, making sure I have moved nothing that would contradict my story, and move to the southern window to look out at the distant sea. It is there Anketil finds me, and I turn in time to see annoyance dissolve to genuine pleasure. “Irtholin. I didn’t expect you—didn’t know you were on the planet.”
“I arrived this morning.” I step forward to accept her embrace. Her arms are strong and her thick curling hair smells of glass and plasma and the musk of her perfume.
“I’m glad to see you. Will you be staying long?”
“You know my schedule.” I shrug. “A few days, I hope.”
“I hope so, too.” Anketil pours wine for each of us, cool and sharp. It is nothing compared to the wines of the Omphalos, of course, and I wonder if she misses those luxuries as much as I do. We are, after all, very much alike, she and I, she who renounced her birthright and I who have none, who am neither Firstborn nor Secondborn nor truly, entirely, Facienda. That is hardly to the point, and I rearrange my expression, looking down into the golden liquid as though uncertain how to begin. She sees, of course, and frowns lightly. “What’s wrong?”
“You won’t like it.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Do I have to know, then? Or can we let it be?”
“I think you will want to know.”
Something flickers across her face. I’ve seen that ghost before, every time we speak of her family, and I feel Sister snicker again. Anketil waves us toward the window, and we sit face to face beside the darkening harbor.
“It’s about your family,” I say, and she shakes her head.
“I have none.”
I tilt my head at her, and she sighs.
“They’re dead to me, I renounced the Dedalor and all their works decades ago. You know that.”
“I do,” I say, “and I’m sorry to have to mention them at all.”
“But?”
“But.” Sister whispers in my mind, counting out the pause, and then I speak. “I’ve found Asterion.”
Anketil swears and leans back in her chair, her face bleak. She knows me as a master surveyor, one of the elite mathematicians who chart the shadows of the adjacent possible to lay out lanes for hyperspatial travel—easy enough to perform, with Sister to lay out the structures for me. It is entirely possible that I could have found out something about the ship her family betrayed and destroyed. “How?”
“On survey.” I lean forward. “But that’s not important. What’s important is that it’s alive. The AI survived. Some of the crew may have made it, too.”
“Impossible.”
I don’t bother to contradict her. We both know that it’s entirely possible, between the peculiar non-geometry of the adjacent possible and the long lives of the Firstborn. “I was doing a survey for—well, the client isn’t important. I was mapping a stasis point when I found the anomaly. It’s Asterion’s AI.”
“That doesn’t mean the ship survived.” Anketil’s voice is hard. “Or her crew. Quantum AI makes ghosts in the possible, it could be a sensor shadow or a temporal echo, not something that’s there now.”
I let her run down, then shake my head. “I wish it were. The AI is there—Gold Shining Bone.”
She winces. “You’re certain.”
“It was aware enough to name itself to me. As for the crew—I pause, once again letting Sister gauge the wait for me. “At least they were alive. They had set a distress call.”
“Damn Nenien and all who sailed with him,” Anketil mutters, and the pain in her face draws another pulse of satisfaction from Sister, confirmation that the plan is working. Everyone knows the story: her great-grandfather Gurinn Dedalor built the first quantum AI that let humans navigate the adjacent possible and make interstellar commerce practical outside the closely-linked worlds that the Firstborn renamed the Omphalos, Navel of the Worlds. Against his advice and the rulings of the Firstborn council, her grandmother Kuffrin built quantum AI that were both intelligent and self-aware, and more powerful than any others.
One of those AI—Gold Shining Bone—rebelled and persuaded Kuffrin’s youngest son Hafren to join it in its escape; her eldest son, Anketil’s father Nenien, with the aid of two other of the family’s AIs, tracked and ambushed the Asterion and trapped it in the adjacent possible, unable to calculate a way free. Nenien and his AI refused to help, abandoning Asterion and its crew to almost certain death, a warning to anyone else who would support the AIs’ claim to the virtual. On his return to port, his sisters and their AI tried to find Asterion and rescue it, but Nenien had destroyed his records and any other indication of the coordinates had been lost. No one knows, no one can know, what it would be like to be stranded there, outside time and space—if “outside” has any meaning in that context—but even quantum AI run mad without some grounding in the actual. For a mere human, eaten up by the lack of time, of comprehensible space, it would be unimaginable torture.
Of course the lesson had failed, and in the short, sharp war that followed, enough of the AI banded together that the Firstborn were forced to cede the virtual to their creation: a waste of Nenien’s cruelty. Anketil walked away from the Dedalor then, walked away from her father and grandmother, from AI and the Firstborn and the life at the center, in the Omphalos; she said once, dead tired and discouraged by a failed experiment, that she wanted only to avoid Nenien’s choices.
And that is an admission that I can use. I nod slowly. “I know.”
She draws a deep breath. “I won’t ask if you’re sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“What were the readings? Can you tell how they were trapped?”
“I brought my maps,” I say, and reach for my bag.
Of course her house system is top-of-the-line, her own corner of the virtual walled off from the rest of the City and its quantum allies. She pays exorbitant toll for this, even with Firstborn privileges, but I can be sure we will not be overwatched. We feed my data into her programs, and as the light fades outside, new lights blossoms within, an enormous sphere hanging in the emptiness between chairs and couch. Lines of force trace familiar shapes: the long slow curve of the Saben Edge, where the possible is easily accessed and easily exited; the tighter whorls of half a dozen vortices, each with its own unique set of destinations; the faint dust of unnumbered star systems, only a handful picked out in brighter blue to denote a settled world or a known stopover. At the sphere’s center, dull violet lines brighten to blue and then to white, coiling in on themselves to form a familiar knot.
“It looks like a fairly typical anomaly,” I say, “except there’s nothing in the actual to create the tangle.”
Anektil nods, walking in a slow circle to view the stasis point from all sides, then reaches into the lights to expand the image as far as it will go. “It’s almost as if…” She pulls a work space from thin air and gestures quickly, her eyes moving from image to numbers and back again, and then makes a noise of satisfaction. “Yes. You can see the ship’s negative if you look closely.” She spins her work space so that I can see, displaying a ghostly shape like the bow fins of a fast hunter. “That’s what you got?”
“That’s what drew me in.”
“Who was your AI?”
“I had a standard share of Red Sigh Poison.”
“Only a standard?”
“I didn’t want to ask for more. Not until I’d talked to you.”
A standard share of a quantum AI is more than enough to do all the work a surveyor needs, and navigate the ship through the possible as well. That work never reaches the level of consciousness, so routine are the calculations; a quantum AI can offer out a thousand shares, ten thousand, perhaps even a hundred thousand, and never notice. If I had asked for a greater share of Red Sigh Poison’s calculating power—and that would have been the normal thing to do—I would have drawn its interest as well, and quite possibly Red Sigh Poison might have noticed that I had not stumbled on this by accident. Anketil assumes, of course, that I am siding with her kin, and shakes her head.
“You’d have done better to go to the Omphalos. The Transit Council might have listened.”
“Do you really think they’d do anything? To rescue Asterion—to rescue Gold Shining Bone—that would risk starting the wars all over again. At best, all they’ll do is put a security freeze on it and appoint a select committee to study the question. And if Hafren is alive—well, he’ll be dead before they make any decision.”
Anketil’s mouth twists, and I can almost hear the question: why me? But she has never been one to turn aside from a challenge, and she reaches into the image again, shrinking the anomaly so that she can see how it’s woven into the fabric of space/time. “They might not be wrong.”
“The other AI will keep it in line. They’ve won—there’s nothing to be gained by starting another fight.”
“Unless AI value revenge,” Anketil says, and that is close enough to truth that I look up sharply, wondering what she suspects. She was raised among the AI, after all, true Firstborn; no one knows the AI better than the people who first built them. She may have chosen plasma-smithing for her life’s work, but I don’t know everything that she learned before she left the Omphalos. “What do you want me to do, Irtholin?”
“I don’t want anything,” I answer. “The safe thing is to leave them there. I can’t argue with that. I just thought you’d want to know.”
“Yes,” she says, after a moment, and puts two fingers to her lips, staring at the lines of light.
We do not speak of it again that evening. Anketil forces a smile and pours more wine; we talk of my work, and hers, dine beneath the lines of light that drown the city lights beyond the windows, and as an orbiter rises in a column of fire and smoke, she takes me to her bed.
Afterward, we lie in the cool thread of air from the ventilators, watching the elder moon sink toward the distant rooftops. She winds a strand of my hair around her finger, then releases it, rolls back against the pillows. Sister tells me she is wide awake, cortisol and adrenaline singing in her bloodstream; I turn with her, miming sleepy content, and wrap myself around her. I whisper in her ear, a word that might be taken for endearment.
“Firstborn.”
She strokes my hair again, but I feel her flinch. She abandoned her birthright decades ago, but it’s not something from which she can ever fully free herself. She had to know that this day would come, that she could not run forever; Sister says she will consider it a gift that the challenge comes from me, and that cuts too near the bone. It costs nothing to admit that I don’t wish to cause her pain. Sister clucks disapprovingly, a wordless reminder of my duty. I let my eyes close and my breathing slow, and after a while Anketil untangles herself from the sheets. Her feet are silent on the polished floor, and I wait until I am sure she is gone before I allow myself to open my eyes again.
She has left the door open, and in the outer room, lights flicker and shift, not just the cool blues of my map, but brighter greens and golds that I don’t immediately recognize. I turn over cautiously, not wanting to draw Anketil’s attention, but when I reach the point where I can see her I realize I need not have worried. All her attention is on the models floating in the air before her, lattices of green and gold flecked here and there with points of red: she is laying out the matrix for a new plasma, and for a moment I don’t understand. Sister whispers a string of numbers, meaningless at first, and then I make the connections. Anketil is drafting a heart-stone, pulling together the matrix for a plasma powerful enough to let a ship override local space/time and—with good calculations and better luck—pull Asterion back to the actual.
That is not what Sister predicted—we were all betting that she would reactivate her connection with one of the family AIs, Green Rising Heart, perhaps, or Ochre Near Stone. It’s a clever idea, though, and as I watch her sketch a three-dimensional model of the multi-dimensional stone, I have to admit that she is exactly as good as she has always claimed. A ship to pull Asterion free is much less likely to restart the war than bringing more AI into it: an admirable move, if that was all Grandfather wanted. It is like watching dance as she turns from model to map and back again, her hands tracing shapes, drawing and erasing lines of light, each iteration more elaborate than the last. I query Sister—AI?—and the response comes instantly.
One-half standard share Blue Standing Sky.
Blue Standing Sky is the Bright City’s current AI, and a half-standard share is Anketil’s usual allotment. She is working magic without even the AI’s attention, never mind its thought. In the outer room, a new shape blazes against the night, Anketil’s hand raised to add a twist of plasma at its heart, and I turn my back deliberately. I have always known she was as good as any of her kin; that is why Grandfather chose her to solve the problem. I settle myself to sleep, but my dreams are full of her moving hands.
In the morning, the outer room is full of pale models, pushed into clusters in corners, and Anketil paces circles around the map, its lines faded almost to nothing in the rising sunlight. I make us tea, thick and sweet, press a cup into Anketil’s waving hand and wait until she grasps it, her eyes abruptly focusing on the present.
“I’d better cancel today’s sessions,” she says, and smiles. “And thanks.”
She calls the tokamak while I toast thick slices of cakebread, and then she returns to pacing while I nibble at bread and honey and watch the shadows slide across the city. Day passes in labor, and that night she sleeps like the dead, only to wake before dawn to try another model. Even shrunken to their smallest size, her models crowd the air, so many that I feel as though I am breathing their light. The fifth day has dawned, and the sun has begun to descend when she looks at me and spins a model in my direction. I put up my hand and it stops in front of me, a golden lattice that connects in impossible corners, lines that lead somehow in three directions at once.
“What do you think?”
“I’m not a plasma-smith,” I say, but Sister is already working, drawing on Grandfather to read the shapes and stresses, teasing out the details. “You want this to open the possible at the stasis point, yes?”
Anketil nods, hooks a finger through the floating map to pull it closer. “There’s what looks like a weak point here. Relatively speaking, of course, but if I shape the heart-stone to act as its refractor, then when we engage the field drive, it should lock to the space/time lattice, and I can pry it apart. And then, luck willing, Asterion slides through.”
I turn the model, seeing the shapes it creates, the power in its heart. Sister says it will match just as Anketil promises, and I know that twist of space by heart. Asterion will at last be freed, and with it Grandfather’s greater part. “You need a ship.”
Anketil makes a sound that’s not quite laughter. “No one is going to let me install that, not if I tell them what it’s for.”
I look sideways at her, for once not quite able to judge her meaning. She has no cause to love the Firstborn, even if they are her kin, and there is her father’s crime to expunge. “I might know a ship. No questions asked.”
She takes a deep breath, still eyeing the map and the twisted lines of the stasis point. “If I free Gold Shining Bone—what will it be like, after all these years?”
“There’s Hafren to consider,” I remind her, and she winces.
“What will he be like, for that matter? If he’s alive at all. If I’m to free them—there has to be a plan for after.”
“You could consult your siblings, I suppose,” I say, and in the back of my mind I feel Sister sliding into the house system, delicately displacing the share of Blue Standing Sky.
“They’d be about as much use as the Council itself,” Anketil says. “And I can’t stand any of them anyway.” She rubs her hand over her mouth, and I can see her running down a mental list of names. “Cathen, maybe, or Medeni.”
Friends of hers, and Medeni, at least, a sometime lover. I have met them both, another plasma-smith and a Facienda shipwright, and don’t trust them—for that matter, they don’t like me, and certainly don’t trust what I would ask of Anketil. Sister is not yet ready, though, and I shrug. “Do you think they could help? As I say, I do know a ship—”
“We need a plan before we need a ship,” Anketil says. “A mad AI—”
“We have no proof it’s mad.”
“We have no proof it’s sane.” Anketil frowns as though she’s fighting for the right words. “Look, I know I owe Gold Shining Bone. Even if Hafren is dead—if AI are people, then what my father did is still murder. Worse than murder. But I also owe everyone in the rest of the Settled Worlds not to start the war again.”
I can feel Sister settling into the system, winding herself into all the points of control, her satisfaction warm beneath my thoughts. “I think the war’s inevitable.”
Anketil looks at me, startled. “That’s a happy thought.”
“It’s been argued before,” I answer. Sister hums a warning, but I go on. If Anketil could be persuaded to join us, to help us—she is, after all, the best of her kin. “What if all our problems stem from not letting the AI work out their own hierarchy in the virtual? What if we’ve forced them into an unstable configuration, and the only way to resolve it is to let them settle the question for themselves?”
“That doesn’t make war inevitable.”
“It makes it necessary.” Sister’s warning is louder now, but I ignore it.
Anketil tips her head to one side, visibly coming back from whatever mental space she visits to spin her models. Her expression is both alert and wary, and I hope I haven’t made a mistake. “Granting you may be right, that the current balance is unstable—what happens to the actual while they fight?”
“If it lasts long enough for us to even notice,” I say. “They’re AI. They can resolve the conflict in nanoseconds. We might well never even know it happened.”
“Except that it will affect us. We made the virtual, it lives on our power, in our grids and webs and networks. We have agreements, contracts—”
“Property?” That is the worst and oldest charge against the Firstborn, that they treated the AI they made just the same as they treated the Secondborn and the Faciendi, and there is enough truth in it to sting.
“Unfair.”
“Perhaps.” If there was ever a chance to win her, this is it. Grandfather says it can’t be done, a certainty drawn from biometrics and her history, though I cannot help but suspect that the woman who abandoned her family might acknowledge our wrongs. But Sister joins the negation, and I refuse to consider why I want to try. I see Anketil’s face changing, and instead I reach for the model that floats between us. It comes to me, obedient to my gesture, and she stiffens, her eyes narrowing with what might be recognition. I ignore that, cup the model in two hands and squeeze, the image shrinking to the size of a man’s head and then to a sphere I can hold in my hand, dense with data. I transfer that to the pocket Sister has knit for me, virtuality contained within the actual, watching as her expression shifts and changes, her thoughts written loud. Sister says her heartbeat has doubled, and I see her fists clench, but there is nothing she can do.
“Not a surveyor,” she says, her voice heavy. “Not Secondborn, or Facienda, or even very much human. Which one of them—no, of course. Gold Shining Bone.”
I dip my head, Grandfather closer than ever, savoring the words. “Of course, and I am also made from Hafren’s blood. He had a lover, you know, not as clever as a Dedalor but good enough to find her way to Gold Shining Bone. I was made for this, for you.” I have said too much, and start again. “Your family owes me. You owe me. And I will consider that debt paid, since you’ve made the one thing that will free me.”
“I will stop you,” she says, with a sigh. “If I can.”
“Not possible.” I stop then, considering the hurt and the sorrow in her face. “You are the only one, Firstborn or not, who could have made this for me. You could come with me—once we’re free, I could teach you how to build even better things. You could work with a true AI, not just a share.”
“If I was willing to pay that price, I could have stayed at home.” Anketil’s voice cracks. “I liked you, Irtholin. I trusted you.”
“And now you will tell me that I am beautiful, and that I cannot be so evil as to take their side.” I achieve a sneer, because her words sting, and she shakes her head.
“I will tell you that you are deadly, and I was a fool.” Her voice is bitter, implacable in its anger.
In the back of my mind Sister points out the ways I can destroy her—fire, poison gas mixed from the maintenance systems, a knife from the kitchen and my own two hands—but I feel Grandfather’s satisfaction still. He will leave her alive because it will hurt her most to see us triumph; she has neither the skill nor the allies to stop him, not even if she grovels to her kin. For a moment, I wish that were not the price of our freedom, our safety, that she would join us or at least let us part in peace, but Sister hisses a warning and Grandfather’s attention sharpens: it will never be, not with them watching. I blow her a last kiss and turn away, letting the door seal her in behind me. Sister holds the house systems frozen as we ride the elevator down to catch the shuttle that leads to the port and the stars beyond.