8

 

Osia didn’t gather the strength to call Ways and Means until long after the comet had vanished beneath her horizon.

She stood at her boat’s prow. Rain dashed on her skin. She actually had to pay attention to realize how cold it was. She could feel, but only when she cared to. That was the difficulty with these bodies, with the past thirty years. She didn’t often care to make herself feel. Everything had become unfocused, dreamlike.

She struggled to wake up.

Ways and Means made its home far off the solar ecliptic, on an orbit with an apogee about two hundred million kilometers to stellar north. The amalgamate had chosen that distance for several reasons. It was close enough to Earth to maintain communications. It was also far enough that, to Ways and Means’ crew, the planarship felt apart from Earth. Shuttle travel consumed enough time and antimatter fuel that every journey had to be justified.

Ways and Means wanted to make its crew understand that they were alone. They could not count on this world to lift that burden. Its triennial passage across Earth’s skies was a glimpse, as much for its crew as the people below, of a different future.

But only a glimpse.

That was what she’d been told.

Ways and Means had given her these constructs with the idea that they would satisfy her social needs. More often, they came to her when they were restless. Braeloris leaned on the railing beside her, playing counselor again. “Is there something you find comforting in standing so still?”

“I’m not staying still,” Osia said. “We’ve gone farther south than I’ve traveled in years.”

“Tell me how you feel about-” she started, but Osia muted her from her awareness. She had no idea how long Braeloris kept talking, or when she figured out what she had done.

Sometime later, Tass visited. She was their best sailor, the tallest among them. Just like Coral had been a diver in thir last life, Tass had been an engineer in hers. She noted, “We’ve gone this far, but we’re still not doing anything.”

“This trip is a warm-up,” Osia said. Getting ready for what she figured she was going to have to do next.

As usual, only Coral seemed to understand. When thi visited, thi asked, “Why don’t you just talk to Ways and Means?”

It was not a question thi expected Osia to answer. Osia had not spoken to Ways and Means in ten years, and only sporadically before that.

Their last conversation had not gone well. It had invited her to come home. “Will I still have my old cabin?” Osia had asked, churlishly.

She knew her cabin would have been repurposed the moment she’d left. The cabins and bulkheads of the habitable sections were modular, expandable, collapsible, infinitely rearrangeable. The interior of the planarship was never the same from year to year.

Instead of answering, Ways and Means said, “The crew is restive. They’ve never been happy with where we are. We need voices like yours.”

“They heard me well enough.”

“Visit. Remind them.”

“Will it change anything that happened? Or that will happen?”

“It will change you. It could change them. Some of them miss you.”

Osia knew who her friends and enemies were among Ways and Means’ seven-thousand-strong crew. She shook her head, though Ways and Means couldn’t perceive that. Not unless it was so interested in her that it was watching through its satellites.

She said, “You drew our battlelines when you decided to listen to me.”

When she’d spoken up, she hadn’t expected Ways and Means to hear her. She wasn’t sure of anything now, and had been even less so then. Too late to swallow her words.

Osia had never been able to ask the question she’d most wanted: Why did you allow that to happen? The amalgamate was fully capable of making up its minds without her input. Why did you single me out? It must have known that the rest of its crew, unable to blame it, would blame her instead.

Like them, Osia’s bond to the planarship had been forged over centuries of transplanar travel and hardship. It took effort to accuse it of betraying her. More than she had to spare at that moment.

The conversation had gone on to other subjects, but she had since erased them from memory, just like the dream of several days ago.

For the past several weeks, Osia had cruised southward, shadowing trade routes between China and the Philippines. The trade routes were becoming busy again. Few sailors had wanted to leave port while the bad omen of the comet hung in the sky, although sometimes their merchant masters forced them. China lusted for trade. The Yuan government devoured it. This was the first time she had paid enough attention to realize that they had purposes for it other than growing fat.

The skies were clear and the fleets had once again set sail. At this distance, her pulse scans couldn’t resolve nonmetallic trade goods, though parts-per-trillion traces of piperine in the wind hinted at black pepper. Her scans could identify gold and silver, though. There was less than she expected. On trade routes like these, she would have assumed that China would pour precious metals into the islands to sell for spices.

So someone back home was jealous of gold and silver going east. They had other purposes for it, even if that meant a less efficient sea trade. No doubt headed to the west, to war.

She had cruised within one hundred and fifty miles of the old Southern Song Dynasty capital, Hangzhou. That was just close enough to bounce a pulse scan off the atmosphere and find glittering demiorganic signatures. A dozen of them.

Now they knew about her, too. Her scan had given her away. Ways and Means had promised to hide her, gray her out from satellite data. None of them bothered to scan back.

She had not gotten close enough to Hangzhou to take a full demographic survey. The pollution carrying on the wind gave her an idea of its population, and the scope of its industries. The latter had shrunk since her last glimpse. The population had remained level, though. There was no sign of mass conscription. The patrol junk’s captain had been more concerned about gold and goods going west than men.

Osia sailed until she was two hundred kilometers away from anything. She had Tass fold the sails, and just let the boat drift.

Finally, she could put it off no longer.

It did not matter that the comet had already left the sky. Osia did not have a transmitter capable of bridging the distance between her and Ways and Means even when it passed by.

To contact it, she had to go through its network of satellites. For the first time in years, she opened a connection.

At once, she was awash in data, a flood of tangible abstraction. Security and identity-confirmation handshakes decrypted and blossomed through her thoughts. The network automatically shared recent news, orders, weather bulletins. The data came with a warm and strange fullness of mind more real than anyone she could have touched. It woke a part of herself she had not exercised in years.

This was what it was like to be connected, to have the plane at her fingertips. It didn’t stop at data. Her senses expanded outward, lacing with the thousands of satellites pirouetting overhead. If she’d wanted, she could have looked anywhere, seen anything. It took some effort to resist.

Then she found Ways and Means’ sharp-edged hull. The planarship was close enough that there was no significant light speed delay. It was so real that she might have been running her fingers along it. Every part of it was studded with sensors. It had a million eyes, and even more ears. When her senses laced with it, she felt, briefly, like she could reach anywhere, touch anything.

The impression faded. Whenever she was connected, it was always there, low-level, intoxicating.

After allowing time for her senses to dilate, it said, “Your security programs are several years out of date.”

“You can’t believe anyone would or could try to impersonate me.”

“We believe you are you. We’ve been maintaining continuous tracking since the day you arrived.”

The amalgamate was a melding of hundreds, thousands, of minds into a single identity. It was more a colony than an individual. Yet it spoke and acted in concert, even as its thoughts pulled it in a thousand directions at once. Its multifarious nature was one of its strengths. It always approached a problem from every possible perspective.

Even in exile, Ways and Means was still taking the effort to update its security programs. That could only mean it didn’t trust its crew. They were the only people here who could fight against it on that level. She wondered what drama she’d missed.

Ways and Means let the data feed crest and trough, and remind her what it had been like to travel with it. It was insidious. And it was working. For a while, she couldn’t speak either. She was caught up in remembering. Such was the puissance of the amalgamates. Even when she knew how it was manipulating her, she couldn’t help but follow along.

She said, “You’ve been hard at work down here.”

“Yes,” it said. No denials.

“Would you like me to outline what I’ve discovered, or would you like to confess?” A classic information-fishing technique, an attempt to get it to admit to more than she’d found. Ways and Means wouldn’t fall for it in a thousand lifetimes.

It said, “We’d rather talk about you. We know most of what’s happening on this world. We don’t know as much about you.”

“‘Most?’”

“Are your constructs continuing to treat you well?”

“They’re a suitable distraction,” she said.

“Are they staying true to their source characters, or do their personalities need to be reset?”

Osia did not like to think about where her constructs had come from. It was embarrassing. Ways and Means knew it. She said, “I can tweak them myself if I need to.”

“We typically don’t send constructs on extended journeys. After thirty years, we would expect some deviation from their baseline. In so alien an environment, their programming may express itself in unintended ways.”

“This isn’t so alien to them,” Osia said.

“It would take days and weeks for you to recalibrate their personalities. It would take us less than a second.”

“I have plenty of time.”

“You do not have to keep going like this. You should at least come back long enough to update our backup of your memories.”

Ways and Means kept backups of all of its crewmembers, a feat only possible for people with wholly demiorganic bodies. Another perk of the job. It had once kept backups of itself, too – all of its memories and personalities – but exile had ended that. It could no longer place them in a location it deemed secure.

“I’ll probably end up erasing most of these years, anyway.” Just like she had erased her memories of her fugue this morning.

“You never know when you might want them back.”

Osia looked behind her. Coral wasn’t far, scanning the cloudy horizon with a hand over thir eyes. When Osia had been a child, before she’d had anything to do with the amalgamates, she’d fallen in love with an open-author adventure serial. It had been about an oceanographic submarine and its crew, trapped on a world during a transplanar invasion.

It never ended – or, rather, it ended hundreds of times. The characters and central crisis were consistent from author to author, but the plot and the endings always changed. It had been a form of storytelling perfect for the Unity, and for a people always trying to wrap their imaginations around the scope of an infinite multiverse.

In the serial, Coral and thir partner Straton had been divers. Coral had taken charge of the submarine. Ira, a violent man with no love for the Unity, turned traitor in over half of his stories – but not all. Borealis had been a trapped tourist. Tass had been an engineer and just as lost in the engine room as she was in the rigging here.

This second exile had pushed Osia to extremes. Ways and Means had delivered the constructs, but she’d requested their personalities. She’d retreated to a time before she’d joined Ways and Means. It had been mortifying to speak aloud, and it still was. And Ways and Means knew it.

She knew what Ways and Means was up to. It was trying to make her feel younger. Vulnerable. It attacked conversations from as many different angles as it had minds.

The flood of data was rising over her head. She was swimming upstream against her past. Already, she was having trouble managing it.

Ways and Means had let her go, but it would never give up trying to get her back. She’d never stopped wondering why. All its crew should have been equally valuable to it. If it wanted to trick her into imagining a deeper feeling, it was doing a good job of it.

It was an amalgamate. It was alien to her. That was why she had loved living with it. All of its powers had been on her side.

The amalgamates were always probing, always searching for weaknesses. She would have to wrest the conversation if she intended to get anything done. She said, “I thought you had decided on a policy of noninteraction.”

“We decided on a policy of noncolonization,” Ways and Means corrected. “Subject to humanitarian intervention – such as curing their great plague.”

“That wasn’t quite what I remember asking for.”

“I have never been clear on what you asked for,” it said. “Your thoughts seemed scattered.”

Galling, but accurate. Better to say that she’d been in shock. She hadn’t sorted herself out because, when she’d asked, she hadn’t had time.

She hadn’t asked alone. Dr Habidah Shen had, too. Osia had just made herself the most convenient target for the rest of the crew.

Osia had taken careful recordings of the moment. She’d been tempted more than once to erase them. It had happened only an hour after Ways and Means’ exile. Everything had been in flux. Ways and Means’ mind had been blasted apart and glued back together by the transplanar creature. The planarship was scarred, crisscrossed with molten hull.

Ways and Means typically didn’t need to interrogate anyone. This interrogation chamber it had made was freshly manufactured and flash-cooled. The curved bulkheads were bare, and still smelled of hot plastic. A table stood in the center. The room had the air of an operating theater.

The man who was to have been interrogated was a monk, a man Habidah had rescued and brought aboard. He still wore his habit. He was here because he claimed to have had contact with another transplanar power. Ways and Means had needed to know more.

His name was Niccoluccio Caracciola, and he had told the truth.

The transplanar creature had planted a weapon in him. A virus he carried in his thoughts. In rooting through Niccoluccio’s memories, Ways and Means had given the virus direct access to the amalgamate’s minds.

It might have all ended there. But lodging in Niccoluccio’s mind had changed the virus as much as Niccoluccio himself. It had wrapped around his thoughts, sluiced through him, to avoid detection. It had made him a part of itself. It controlled him, but he had influenced it.

Without that influence, the virus would have destroyed the amalgamates. Instead, it had given them the chance to surrender. To dismantle their empire by choice and submit themselves to exile.

When the virus had surged into Ways and Means, it had taken Niccoluccio’s mind, too. It had been too much for Niccoluccio. Fatal. A human mind was not elastic enough to expand so far, so fast. He had decohered.

He still breathed, but he was no longer alive in any real sense.

Ways and Means spent years afterward sorting through the thoughts and memories he had left behind in it. In the chaotic gestalt of its minds, it could never be sure what belonged to the monk and what belonged to some equally dissolute other.

Traces of Niccoluccio flitted in Osia’s mind, too, like scattering leaves. She had tried to stop the data transfer between the creature and her amalgamate, and tapped into it. She had been rebuffed, tossed back onto the shoals of her unconsciousness. But parts of Niccoluccio had snagged on her. She couldn’t get them off.

Uninvited memories had trilled across her senses. Hot canine breath on her neck. A shovel in her hands, blisters on her palms. A field of graves in frozen earth. The heady, clammy dizziness of medicinal bloodletting.

Without demiorganic assistance, she could not have spoken. Her demiorganics steadied her voice. They had heuristics to interpret what she had meant to say rather than what, on her own, she would have stammered.

The acceleration holding her to the deck faltered. The planarship’s superstructure cracked and popped. Osia would have found it alarming if she hadn’t been so lost. It sounded like gunfire, kinetic missile impacts.

Ways and Means had gated to this plane at a full g of acceleration. A sparkling cyclonic whirlwind of exhaust billowed in its wake. The first appearance of the false comet.

The crew was shattered. The datastreams that bound them together rippled with sorrow, with panic, with denial. Bitter fury. All their disparate reasons for coming aboard had fallen apart with the death of the Unity. Now they had been trapped here with Ways and Means, on this plane.

Unlike its crew, Ways and Means wasted no time mourning. “This plane must serve as a home while we consider our long-term path,” it said. “We must make a new context to place ourselves within.” It had already announced its plan to end the black plague below. Short leap from there to imagine what it was prepared to do to the rest of the world.

Dr Habidah Shen had been involved with Niccoluccio. She had come with him into the interrogation chamber, and, frankly, she would have been the next to be subjected to memory rooting. Her face was bloody from a fight with Meloku, who had come to stop them, but arrived too late.

“You’ll erase this world’s identity.” Habidah stayed by the shell of the monk. She curled his fingers in hers. “They wouldn’t want us.”

Osia’s trauma response programs muted her instinct to lash out. Instead, she said, “They won’t be given any choice.”

The monk said, “They can be made to be ready.”

As much as the monk’s thoughts had bled into Ways and Means, its thoughts had flooded into him. He was not the same person. Even his face seemed different, cheeks sharper and brow flatter, a new mind wearing the old musculature.

Habidah’s voice was hollow. “We’ll destroy those people no matter what we do.” She didn’t believe she could matter. The forces arrayed against her were too great. She was just lodging a protest.

Meloku said, “No great loss.”

The man who had been Niccoluccio said, “We can help. There’s so much misery below, and unnecessary suffering.”

And there was. Osia had tasted Niccoluccio Caracciola’s thoughts. She had drunk deeply. She had not intended to, but parts of him had become her.

His father had died of the plague. His spiritual brothers, too. His whole monastery, gone. He had walked into an icy wilderness to die. He had offered himself to a mob that would happily accept any blood offered to them. Each time, Habidah had saved him. He had suffered immensely. Though he had forgotten most of it, Osia couldn’t.

Osia’s speech heuristics programs couldn’t decipher what she wanted to say. So much of his suffering had come from being ripped out of his old life. His monastery was gone. Thanks to Habidah, he had learned things that would keep him from ever living in one again.

Meloku told Habidah, “You wanted to save him. To help them.”

“Not through colonization,” Habidah said. “Just a cure. Help them and let them go.”

“‘Catch and release,’” Meloku mocked.

“Ethical interference,” Habidah said.

“That has to seem small now, even to you.”

Meloku and Habidah bounced angrily, pointlessly off each other. The monk spoke again: “We can help each other. We can cure their plague. They can give us a home.”

Ways and Means reminded them, “The terms of our exile forbid us from expanding across the multiverse. A single plane is within our limits.”

Osia said, “No.”

She’d been silent for so long that Meloku and Habidah seemed to have forgotten she was here. They looked to her. If Osia had had a pulse, it would have been pounding.

Osia said, “Listen to his memories. These people aren’t just fighting death. They’re fighting loss. The plague doesn’t just take their lives. The survivors have had most of what they knew taken away from them.” She turned on Habidah. “Just like you took this man’s life from him when you uprooted him, and told him what you were.”

Habidah’s hand tightened around Niccoluccio’s, but the infrared pattern of blood coursing under her skin revealed only surprise. She had not been expecting Osia to take her side. Neither had Osia. She had not felt so strongly until this past hour.

“Doesn’t matter,” Meloku said. “They’re not the only ones who’ve been uprooted.”

Osia said, “There are three hundred and seventy million people on the world we’re heading for, and only seven thousand of us. We’re better equipped to cope.”

Meloku said, “Right now, they need us more than we need them.”

“If we don’t need them, why do this?”

Ways and Means was silent. It had never been more vulnerable, Osia realized. Or changeable. Over its lifetime in the Unity, it had become ossified. Encrusted in its beliefs. The virus had taken all of that apart. It was rebuilding itself, and in a state of neural plasticity akin to a newborn.

Niccoluccio’s memories had shaken Osia too. Both she and Ways and Means in the process of being reborn.

Osia said, “We can’t keep doing what we did before. We came from an empire. Even if we colonize this world, it won’t be enough. It will always seem too small.”

If Habidah had registered Osia’s jab, she didn’t answer it. “Yes,” she said. “You’re all going to have to learn a different way of doing things.” She didn’t see herself as complicit in the Unity, though she had benefited from it all her life.

Osia’s scraps of Niccoluccio’s memories had left her with an interesting perspective on Habidah, on everything she had done to him. Niccoluccio hadn’t resented Habidah when he had been alive.

Osia would have to do it for him.

Meloku said, “This is academic,” by which she meant stupid. “What you’re asking us to do is surrender more of ourselves to the monster that sent us here.”

“You already surrendered,” Habidah pointed out. “We’re here.”

“I didn’t. Ways and Means did.”

Habidah said, “You took oaths to serve it, didn’t you?”

In the look that Meloku gave her, there was a preview of the hundred little mutinies to come.

Osia said, “We can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing and expect it to be the same.” She did not know who she was talking to. She spoke from conviction but without hope. She had not expected to make a difference.

She was one voice out of thousands. Those thousands could out-argue her. She had no faith in her powers of persuasion.

But the acceleration pressing them to the deck gave out.

Meloku grabbed the edge of her acceleration couch. “What the fuck is happening?” Her demiorganics had been damaged. She was the only one who did not already know.

Ways and Means told her, “We are preparing a new course high and away from the solar ecliptic.” An acceleration warning trilled in the back of Osia’s mind. “One minute to thirty-seven degree pitch-axis thruster burn.”

Osia’s mouth opened and closed. Her speech heuristics informed her that she badly wanted to speak, but they could not determine what she wanted to say. Already, she felt the crew’s shock, the horror of realizing what was happening. It echoed down Ways and Means’ datastreams. They were waking up to the fact that Ways and Means was no longer heading toward the world ahead.

Ways and Means said, “Well spoken, Osia.”

More of their attention focused on this chamber. Eyes accumulated in the sensors lodged in the bulkheads.

The quiet moments were the most dangerous ones. They nursed a thousand grievances, angers, shocks.

Some of the shock belonged to Osia.

“We suggest you find acceleration couches,” Ways and Means told them. “And brace yourselves.”

Osia had believed she was only saying what needed to be said. Like Habidah, she had lodged a quiet protest against the march of forever. She didn’t even know if she believed it, or if Niccoluccio had spoken through her. If she had known what was going to happen, she never would have spoken.

She was selfish enough to place her happiness above that of others. If she hadn’t, she never would have become Ways and Means’ agent. She couldn’t stand the weight of the responsibility Ways and Means had placed on her.

This, at least, was the narrative she had constructed for herself.

One of the burdens of her demiorganic mind was that she remembered things too clearly. An ordinary human mind was too messy. Its process of recalling a memory destroyed it. They cast shrouds of ex post facto narrative over the moment, “remembered” invented feelings.

Osia’s recordings of the moment were too precise, indiscriminate. She did not often revisit them for that reason. Every time she did, she learned what she had avoided looking at. She saw where her narrative broke.

When she erased her memories, it was often to preserve her image of herself as anything else.

She hadn’t gone into that argument a naif. She knew how vulnerable Ways and Means had been. She’d lodged a protest, sure. She’d spoken from a slim hope that she could make a difference. She’d made the choice deliberately.

She did not know what tapping into Niccoluccio’s thoughts had done to her. She still felt like herself. She was not aware of any deeper change. But that was the insidious thing about consciousness. So much of it was a self-constructed lie.

She held her hands on her boat’s railing. She tried not to lose control again – not while Ways and Means was watching.

Ways and Means traced the synaptic storms of her memories. “We agreed with you,” it said. “But we made no promises.”

“Nothing about what I told you has changed. We can’t live like we did.” That should have been the only thing that mattered to her.

“The crew is convinced that they can’t live like they are now, either,” it said.

“They work for you. Not the other way around. They can go into hibernation for the next thousand years if they’re really so pent up.”

“After that? They want a home. They want to matter in the way that they feel that they did before.”

“You’re deflecting.” Manipulating. Ways and Means was not above lying but, like most clever beings, it preferred to be artful with the truth. “You’re trying to make me believe that the crew is compelling you to do this. You’ve never affirmatively said that was the reason.”

“We are as dependent on them as we are on you.”

That took her aback. When she had signed on, she had never been under any illusion that she would ever be important to it. She had signed on to serve a task. To be a negotiator. To make deals with people Ways and Means would not speak to.

She was not entirely sure what, in fact, she was needed to do now that the Unity had fallen. Same with much of the rest of the crew.

It said, “We know you cannot, and should not, believe what we tell you. But it has been a terrifying thirty years. You and the crew are the only things we have left from the lives we once had.”

She said, “Just tell me what the fuck you’re up to.”

Ways and Means did not deny any of what she had already guessed.

It told her about the agents it had planted throughout the Mongol Empire. It had modeled its efforts on the Unity, allowing nations to retain their own identities – so long as they sent taxes and soldiers, of course. And opened to Yuan merchants. Before long, the prospect of losing Chinese trade would be a more effective deterrent to rebellion than war.

The end goal was a world with a unified polity, managed by Ways and Means’ agents. A world shaped and molded to accept the larger changes that Ways and Means would bring. The new world the false comet promised.

Osia knew Ways and Means had always meant to reveal itself, eventually. But she had thought that it had given up the idea of control. Osia said, “You meant for this to happen from moment you said you agreed with me.”

“No,” it said. “The current incarnation of our plan kicked off twenty years ago.” Ten years after Osia had fled to the surface. “Some of our agents had already acted without our permission. We reined them in, but sent others to continue their work.”

“You took advantage of a mutiny.” Osia marveled. Or had the mutineers taken advantage of Ways and Means? Forced its hand?

Ways and Means said, “Explaining this would be much easier if you had stayed up-to-date.”

Caution tickled the back of her mind. Ways and Means’ messages were layered, always operating above and below the levels she perceived. She was missing something.

She said, “Thousands of the natives are going to die because of the wars you’re starting.”

“Millions,” Ways and Means said.

“You’re not even trying to hide it. Not even cushion the blow.”

“Millions will die in any large-scale intervention on this world,” it said. “Thousands died because we cured their plague. We left their civilization unbalanced – some regions dramatically weakened, while others remained at the height of their strength. The conflicts that resulted have been devastating on a scale that is difficult to describe in language.”

Osia said, “That’s an argument against intervention, not for another one.”

“If it is, it is incomplete. Ending that plague saved more lives than were lost.”

“It’s just arithmetic, then? Lives ended versus lives lost?”

“By the time we are through on this world, we will have saved many more lives than we will have destroyed,” it said.

“You’ll be responsible for the people killed in these wars.”

“‘Responsibility,’” Ways and Means answered, with just enough of a mocking tone to bite, “is a very interesting human conceit.”

Very rarely, it let slip just enough of itself to remind her just how alien it was.

“These lives are not abstract figures.” For most of her life, she wouldn’t have cared. She couldn’t explain how she had changed. Her perspective had shifted more than once since she’d tapped into Niccoluccio Caracciola. Exile had become a kind of Purgatory.

Imprisonment, too, was a shift in perspective. She could not leave this place, and all her thoughts about it, behind. When she and Ways and Means had traveled the planes, everything could sink into the past.

Ways and Means said, “This will preserve their cultural uniqueness, as Dr Shen wanted.”

“I doubt she would agree,” Osia said. “It’s not them I’m most worried about. It’s us. We’re backsliding. Falling into our old habits. What happens when our term of exile is up? Right on to the next plane, conquering, colonizing, until we’re stopped again?”

“The crew will not tolerate staying here mute and powerless.”

“You’re running into problems, though, aren’t you?” The patrol junk’s captain had told her that the Yuan were funneling more and more resources westward, always levying new taxes.

It said, “There are always challenges.”

She prodded, “Challenges you don’t want to talk to me about. Who’s giving you trouble? The natives? Or more of the crew?”

“Religions,” Ways and Means said. “Cults. Several of them.”

“So it’s the natives. Funny. You’re so mismatched I thought you would have bowled right over them.”

“Nothing on this plane is so simple as it looks from your distance.”

Anger lashed at her. “I’m closer than you.”

“We do not understand why you are so suddenly so invested.”

“What if I want to do something about this?”

An understated pause. Ways and Means did not hesitate. It thought so quickly that it did not ever need to, except for effect. “Then you should change your mind. Intervening would not be good for you. Our agents in the west are playing dangerous games.”

“I could do anything they can.”

“They work for us.”

“And I don’t.” The words hurt as much to say as to realize. “That’s why I need to look.”

“You cannot find out what’s happening so easily. We would be happy to show you. If you come aboard. We wouldn’t ask if it weren’t important.”

“I’ll think about it,” Osia lied. She cut the transmission.

It took her a long moment to recover from losing the datastream. She had stood above continents, satellites, starfields. Now there was just her boat. By the time she had shrunk back into herself, Coral and Braeloris were beside her, holding her shoulders.

“Not necessary,” she told them, pulling away.

Braeloris said, “It certainly seemed like it was.”

Osia had always figured, in the back of her mind, that she would be going back to Ways and Means at some point. Not now. Not in a year. But sometime.

Ways and Means’ perspective, its crew’s, would have to change before that happened. If they didn’t, it would be best if she stayed here – and best if Ways and Means never traveled to another plane.

This tiny world would be the end of their path. Not just an Earth. The Earth. Their only one now. The terminal point of Ways and Means’ journey across the multiverse.

Osia told Coral, “Don’t contact any satellites for this, but compose a weather forecast for the next several days. Pulse scans only. Have Tass unfurl the sails and tell her and Straton to steer clear of any other ships. We’re going to cross some busy trade routes and it would be best if we didn’t let a single ship see us.”

Braeloris looked to Coral, as if waiting for Coral to say it was all right. Coral hesitated, equally uncertain.

“We’re going west,” Osia explained. “Far enough west that no one will have seen a Chinese junk like ours before.”