Thorn haunted Talon; the Derloens haunted the Thing. As the ship juddered with its initial leap into hyperspace, Atlanta went to visit her own ghosts.
They had been installed in her head at the tender age of eight, and by now, consulting them had become second nature. She invoked them by closing her eyes and standing inside a space that existed only within her own brain. It was a simple chamber, and where the emblem of Pax, the empire to which she once had been an heir—or believed that she had, as she had to tell herself on a daily basis—had hung on the wall overlooking the imaginary chamber, there was now a window.
As tall as she was, she could look out the square window on stars, but not any known system. She’d told the computer to create what it liked. It was hooked into her brain, so she knew that if she ever looked at the pattern, she’d understand some of it, or at least see some of her own idiosyncrasies reflected in it. But it was enough to be able to look out and know at a basic level that it was hers, that landscape. Those stars were hers and hers alone.
Three figures stood within this space. She studied them. They had not changed, but she had, and with that change, her perspective had shifted as well.
The first was a version of herself as a child, the same age at which the software had originally been installed, dressed simply in play clothes, hair caught back with a piece of cording.
The second was a mirror reflection of herself as she was as an adult—or rather it was the version of her that had appeared at court. Dressed in ornate clothes that made her itch now to look at them. Nowadays she was a new Atlanta, a different Atlanta. Looking at this one made her feel as though she were looking at an old shell of herself, something that had been outgrown and discarded.
The third was a familiar friend from childhood, a children’s viddie that had always made her feel happy. The Happy Bakka stood there with its enormous ears and wide, exaggerated black eyes. It rarely spoke, but when it did, its voice was furry and warm and made you think of lullabies.
In the past they had been her advisers. She had brought them complicated issues of court interactions, figuring out status and who to pay attention to and who not to be seen in the company of. The Court of the Paxian Empress was a complicated place, a game that was played by arcane rules that had never really been recorded. The advisers had served her well there.
Nowadays they were useless, she thought, looking at them. They might have overheard the thought; she had never been clear on exactly how tied into her brain they were. But they were not actual intelligences, just algorithms and databanks of possible responses, and so they didn’t flinch or look worried. That was good, she thought, given what she intended to do.
She sat in a chair that formed itself under her at the motion. That was a convenience of virtual life—think it and it appeared. And just as easily disappeared. She could have erased all of these with a single thought.
“Do any of you know things about cooking?” she asked.
She expected them to come up with their usual useful knowledge, but instead they all looked blankly at her.
“That is not a duty you should be expected to do,” her youngest self finally said, a little haughtily. “That is something servants do.”
“I’m not an Imperial heir anymore,” she said. They looked at her blankly again. “Do you understand that?”
They kept staring at her while she waited for their response. They were of no help to her anymore, only serving to remind her of a life that had been lost.
“All right,” she said. “You’re no help. I don’t care.” She stood and was about to wave them away, but the Happy Bakka said, its furry voice thinned by urgency, “We are not an equipment manual. We are of use in situations dealing with other people. We can help with that. Questions of protocol or Paxian custom.”
“Then what good will you do me?” she demanded. “When will I need to know some nuance of Paxian custom ever again?”
“We will always be here,” it said, and the others nodded. “You can always talk to us. Sometimes it is good to have someone to talk to. Someone who is always on your side.”
Without acknowledging what it had said, she switched out of the space to find herself sitting on her bunk, hands clasped tightly in her lap.
Impatient anger tensed her shoulders and clenched her jaw. They were worthless. They were imaginary, created things, not part of the real world, the world in which she had to exist now. Another piece of her past that had prepared her for nothing.
She forced herself to calm, taking a long, slow breath and thinking about it, feeling the moist air with You Sexy Thing’s ineffable smell of rose and cardamom soften her mood.
“Thing,” she said, “is Sergeant Dabry in the kitchen right now?”
“He is,” the ship confirmed.
She nodded to herself and stood. She paused, looking at herself in the reflective screen. She was small, dark-skinned, not particularly well-fleshed. Her eyes were black and she would have liked to think they were kind. But who was she, really? What was she?
“Do you wish for me to give the sergeant a message?” the ship asked.
“No,” she said, then changed her mind. “Tell him I’m on my way.”
When she was little, Dabry and his daughter often played pat-a-pat. Clapping his four palms against her smaller four in rhythms complicated for her child’s coordination, easy to him, who had been taught them himself back when he was her age.
Sometimes, when he was working in the kitchen on something particularly rhythmic, like kneading bread, he remembered the feel of her soft little hands against his and heard her voice chiming out the rhyme in his head, and wanted to weep.
Today was a day he always remembered his daughter, even when he tried not to. He’d had such a moment and was still coming back from it when Atlanta entered, and it made him steel his heart against her. He could hear his own voice, gruffer than he had intended it to be, as he snapped, “What is it?”
She looked at him with startled eyes, which was even worse, as though he had struck a kitten.
“You and the captain were talking about how I needed to be of use.” She faltered. “Remember? I thought we had decided that I would learn cooking. Unless you think it would be wrong for me?”
In all his time training soldiers, he had learned one thing. There were soldiers who had to be told what to do and there were the ones capable of directing themselves. The latter were the ones who became officers. He was irritated to learn that Atlanta was not one of them but instead was standing there checking his reactions, waiting for his approval. He’d thought better of the girl. He forced down that irritation and said, “Why cooking?”
“I-I thought,” she stammered. Her eyes darted past him to take in the kitchen, the neatly filled rack behind him, and the mass of bread that lay in front of him, being manipulated with all four hands. “I mean, it seemed the most logical if we were going to set up a restaurant somewhere else sometime, that I learn how to cook.”
He looked down his nose at her, feeling himself a bully, but again unable to help himself. It made him feel an edge of shame—hadn’t he recently criticized Niko for not being able to help herself? And that shame in turn made things worse, so he snapped, “You think it’s something that just anyone can pick up in a short time? Maybe you should just go watch some tutorials on it, if it’s that easy.”
Her eyes filled with tears, but she squared her shoulders. “I’ve offended you,” she said.
Gio tapped him on the shoulder. “I will teach her how to clean things,” the chimpanzee signed. “That is always a useful skill, and you do not need to trouble yourself with it.”
It felt to Dabry as though that last phrase might be tinged with sarcasm, but he was unwilling to look hard enough at Gio to figure out whether that was truly the case. He folded both sets of arms and turned back to Atlanta. “Gio will teach you how to clean things, then. A useful skill, as he says.”
He moved to the doorway. “I have things to do,” he said to no one in particular, then exited.
Atlanta stared after him. Gio tapped her on the shoulder and handed her an apron. “Wear this.” He himself was pleased. There were a lot of mushrooms to clean, and now he could palm all that off on her.
She put it on. It was crisp and new-smelling and covered with the Thing’s logo. “Did I say something wrong?” she asked. “I’m not sure what I did.”
“It is not you that offends, but the day,” Gio signed. “He is always out of sorts on this day. Do not speak to him of it. It is an anniversary.”
She picked up the mushroom and held the soft-bristled brush as Gio showed her. “Anniversary of what?” she asked.
Gio’s long-fingered hands moved among the mushrooms, laying them out for her. She thought he was not going to answer her for a moment. But then: “His daughter’s death,” he signed, but would answer no other questions.
By the time they were done, she had learned how to brush growing medium off mushrooms without breaking the feathery gills underneath and did so much more swiftly than when she had started. But she also thought to herself that perhaps this skill, useful as it might be, was not really the sort of thing she wanted to hone.
Her name had been Keirera.
Dabry stood looking out the viewspace at the stars, still thinking about his daughter.
She had been tall like him, and her eyes had been like her mother’s. It was as though all their best features had been mingled together and made into a single person that was everything. Was it ego that had made him so proud she was his heir, that she would carry on after him?
She was the one he really wanted to teach how to cook.
He closed his eyes and leaned his forehead against the glassy surface of the viewer. The chill bit at the skin, not painfully, or at least only painfully enough to relieve some of the buzzing pressure of his thoughts.
He missed his wife, but he missed his daughter as though he had mislaid the best part of himself.
Or not mislaid. She had been stolen by war, killed like his wife in a skirmish that had been the result of mistakes in communications, the sort of dirty little affair that gets covered up and whoever instigated it passed up the chain of command in order that they be incompetent somewhere else.
He peeled his forehead away from the glass.
“What are you doing?” the ship asked.
“I have been thinking,” he said.
“What were you thinking about?”
“That is an intrusive question,” he said, more mildly than he might have to anyone else except perhaps Niko or his daughter.
He would have said more, but Niko swung in through the door and he broke off.
“Well, we’re underway now and committed to a course,” she said. “We’ll get to the closest Gate in about a week. Then through there and en route to Montmurray. Think anyone will bail on us along the way?”
He shook his head. “I don’t think we’ll lose anyone,” he said. “Milly, maybe. Atlanta will cling hard; we’re the only point of reference she has. Lassite’s yoked his destiny to yours. And the rest, well, they feel a certain affection for you.”
Her lips twitched. “Certain affection, huh?”
He nodded, his face still somber.
Niko changed the subject. “Odd rumors coming out of the last newsblip,” she said.
“Odd rumors?”
“Someone claims there’s something out there breaking Gates.”
No one knew how or when or why the Gates had been created or even how the technology worked. No one knew where the Forerunners that had made them had gone, leaving behind only certain traces of their civilization and technology: a few scattered ruins, usually strewn with what might or might not have been intended as booby traps but certainly had lethal effects when triggered; the great corpses of what some called “space moths,” which had apparently served as vessels to that race; and the Gates themselves, whose limits marked the edges of the Known Universe.
The Gates employed what was called Q-space, which the clever said was named for Question-space, but the truth was that it had been named after the first species to discover and make use of the Gates, centuries after their originators had gone.
Outside that realm there were some civilizations, but generally the farther a planet or system was from the Known Universe, the less known and more backwater it was. Nowadays, everyone used the Gates by mutual accord, and it was understood that they were free to whatever species wanted to use them, and also that in times of war, they would be shut down so no side could use them.
These rules were rarely violated, and when they were, usually the rest of the Known Universe’s many inhabitants were willing to band together in order to make sure the action was punished as publicly and painfully as it could be. And if that involved dividing up the territory and wealth once possessed by the transgressor, well, that was all the better.
In short: No one fucked with the Gates.
The notion that one might be failing was horrifying. Some systems were only reachable through the Gates; others were so far away that they might as well have been separated from reality.
Dabry said, “Rumors?”
Niko shook her head. Information was guarded and kept scarce as though in reaction to the Gates. Travel was free; news was not. You could subscribe to one of the services, but veracity and verified sources cost more money than most people had, and the majority paid little attention to events on a galactic scale, rightly figuring that effects that filtered down to their level would be mostly unnoticeable.
The thing that kept anyone from ever taking over the Known Universe, despite the best efforts of entities such as the Holy Hive Mind, was the sheer size of it. That vast scope made bureaucracy, even the oldest and most established bureaucracies, unworkable with the mass of data and necessary coordination. You could create an empire, but it seemed as though there was an arbitrary limit to how large it could become, much to the frustration of people like the Holy Hive Mind or even Tubal Last.
“I guess we’ll see when we get there,” she said.
He nodded.
“I’m sorry about earlier,” she said. “You’re right to call me on things. I forgot that sometimes I need to think about how everyone else is affected.”
He shook his head. “It’s the day,” he said.
She had known that and hadn’t wanted to bring it up. She didn’t say anything now. She’d been with him when the news had come; she’d held on to him as he wept. Offered him a lifeline that had kept him from going out and killing himself.
They had been friends before that night, but after that, the bond between them went deeper. Not that of lovers, but more like siblings, able to know each other’s thoughts because they had been through so many things together.
Rather than speak, she touched his upper arm lightly. He covered her hand with his own for a moment and they stood together. Then he released her and they stepped apart and went about their business as they always had, in perfect syncopation, as though they were two halves of the same machine, made to work together.
Dabry went to his news sources, combing through the onslaught of opinions and half-facts in search of some sort of truth. It was difficult to decipher these things, and governmental computers—not to mention all the other AIs out there—were unceasing in their manipulation of the streams. He could not decipher all that was happening in the Known Universe. There was simply too much, and if there were patterns related to Petalia or Tubal Last, he could not find them; no matter how hard he tried to chase them down, they vanished just as he thought he was on the edge of seeing them.