“WE’RE GOING TO Orn,” Zanj maintained, as if any other choice were rank and suicidal nonsense.
They made their next jumps with care and calculation, rather than trusting to blind luck and the Cloud, so they could drop back to realspace when they needed. Viv slept harder on her first night back in the usual three-and-change dimensions than she had for years, slept as if wrapped in childhood blankets, and did not dream at all.
But while they made steady progress, there was some disagreement with regard to their destination. “Orn,” Hong said every time Zanj raised the subject, “is a myth.”
“You thought I was a myth until four days ago.”
“We should go to the ’fleet.” At least he was honest. Viv had been in too many meetings where ostensibly grown humans spent hours tiptoeing around their opinions. And, if half Viv’s old C-suite had been able to convey the density of meaning in Zanj’s scornful laugh, they would have saved a lot of time. Yet Hong persisted: “Viv, what you are—what you represent—we’ve wondered for centuries what’s really inside the Rosary. Why the Empress made those beads. You’re from there. You met Her. For that alone, for the privilege of an interview, the ’faith would take you anywhere, do anything you ask.”
They were orbiting a hot blue star ringed by a necklace of comets and glaciers. The ship’s skin drank sunlight and its fields drank water, and its passengers drank in the view. Purple shapes like manta rays drifted and spun through the ice, vanishing when Viv tried to focus on them, as if they could sense her gaze.
“What he means,” Zanj explained, still paging through her porn, “is that they’ll stick you in a box and pray to you, like, twenty times a day. They might let you out from time to time for good behavior, or to lay on hands, but they’ll never in a billion years help you fight their goddess. Trust me. I’ve seen what they do to people they think are holy—drugged to bliss and brainwashed after. An ice pick to the eye would be faster.”
Hong sputtered. “We don’t do that anymore.”
Viv felt unsettled to hear they’d done it once, and said so.
“The ’faith has changed in the last … How long were you stuck in that box, anyway?”
Zanj set down the pamphlet. “Three thousand years, I think. Give or take.”
“Look, Viv, the ’faith has its problems, but we know more about the Empress than anyone.”
“Because you worship her.” Zanj couldn’t sit through this conversation anymore, stood, paced; her tail curled and whipped.
“We don’t … we recognize what She has achieved. We seek to understand the cosmos so we can free its beings.” Zanj rolled her eyes and made a talking motion with her hand, but Hong pressed through. “The Empress is the world’s great mystery. She has outlived ages. Some worship Her, yes, but our true calling is to study Her works, and understand them, so we can survive as She has. So we can transcend as She did. So, in the end, we can grow beyond Her.”
“The Grand Rector,” Viv pointed out, “didn’t look like a scholar. Or like someone I’d want to meet up close.”
Hong bowed his head. “She is of the old faction.”
“She tried to blow us up.”
“She is set in her ways.” He wilted under her glare, but pressed on. “The Grand Rector is a war leader. She has led us in many great sorties against Pride and feral Grayframe and swift gods from the deep worlds. But she is no theologian. The Archivist, my master and teacher, is older and more respected by far, though she never felt the call to lead our fleet. She is our greatest student of transcendent knowledge, and she taught me the ways of the ’faith. She has studied the Imperial sky for centuries, and it was she who divined that the Empress had returned to High Carcereal and worked some great miracle there.”
“So, the Archivist sent you after me?”
At this, Hong drew silent and looked away. “Not exactly. She—the Archivist brought the matter before the council of ’faith, but she had no hope the Hierarchs would see reason. The Rector would never permit us to go, and the Hierarchs are weak before her will. She cares for our safety, but also for her own position. The discovery of a grand miracle would shift power from her warbands to scholars and students of the ’faith. She would have held us in debate until the Pride had long since absconded with the miracle. She has done as much before with less momentous finds. We—I could not let the chance slip.”
Viv had heard this kind of story before, though without so many unfamiliar names. You took your audience through the whole thing cause by cause and effect by logical effect, because if you just spat out what you did and why, your mistake would be too plain. “So you stole a ship, and a squadron, and went after the miracle yourselves.”
“You dog!” Zanj put down her porn and clapped Hong on the shoulder, hard enough to make him wince. “And this whole time you’ve been playing the priggish monk—you’re a proper pirate after all!”
He rubbed his shoulder, and looked uncomfortable with her praise. “There is no property among the ’faith. What we did is not technically theft.”
“Angry warlords,” Viv pointed out, “don’t tend to respect technicalities.”
“The Grand Rector is no warlord. We were the Archivist’s students. How could we let the greatest miracle in generations slip away? We took ships, and sought liberation. Many I have fought and studied beside passed on into the Cloud, where I pray they seek liberation still.”
Viv remembered the stained-glass sparks dying in the night, against the Pride, and robed bodies lying amid the wrecked Kentaurs. The monks’ faces had been death masks of quiet contemplation more than pain. Passed on, he said, into the Cloud.
She said, “Thank you,” and, “I’m sorry. I guess I’m not the miracle you wanted.”
He shook his head, wondering, sincere. “You are better than a weapon or a grail. You are a clue to the worlds within the Rosary, to the Empress’s divine purpose, to workings that have been a mystery to us for centuries. You could change the balance of the ’fleet. You could bring all our factions together. And with us behind you, you would stand a better chance of catching the Empress than with any other allies in the galaxy.”
“After they poke and prod you, and assuming they let you go at all—by which point,” Zanj observed several jumps later, while she guided them through a nebula’s murk, “the Empress will have retreated beyond the borders of her Citadel. If they can keep out the Bleed, they’re damn sure going to keep out Hong’s cultists. While a pilot from Orn, crystal city of starships, could catch the Empress without tangling you in a religious war.”
“This Citadel of hers,” Viv said. “It’s, what, a planet?” She was getting tired of all these new words and concepts, but then, a learning curve was to be expected after one woke up in the year a million and a half.
“The Citadel is a sector of space near the galactic edge where the Empress reclines in contemplation of the cosmos.” Hong sounded close to rapture again. “A stellar fortress into which none may pass, its Cloud locked, its borders patrolled by the Diamond Fleet.” At this point, logic caught up with his rapture. “Wait. Zanj.” His voice still hooked when he said her name, like Viv imagined hers would if she met someone named Napoleon—or Satan. “How do you know She isn’t there already?”
“I couldn’t track her if she were traveling alone,” Zanj said. “But your Lady’s moving in style, dragging a singularity and a palace ship and a whole pile of Grayframe. She leaves a wake.” Zanj flicked a switch, and a new image painted the cockpit glass: a single long line with their ship on the far left, a cartoonish castle on the far right, and a green crown moving between them—still near the left of the line, but ticking forward twice for each tick their ship advanced. “She’s faster than we are, and gaining speed. Still think you have enough time to stage a revolution, gather a strike group, and catch her, kid?” Before either of them could answer, she swiveled her chair around and kicked her feet up onto an unused console. “Or we could go to Orn, which is, as I said, the crystal city of starships, and find a racer to take you straight to the lady. Once that’s done, you let me go, and I promise I’ll not harm you—I’ll dart around bringing ruckus to distract her, while you sneak into her ship, get home, and—” She slapped her palms together as if banishing dust. “—that’s all. Easy.”
“That does sound simpler,” Viv admitted.
“Except,” Hong said, much later, in the cargo hold, far from any windows, as the ship performed vertigo-inducing rolls Zanj claimed involved eating a tungsten asteroid for its raw materials; she’d banished Hong and Viv from the cockpit for fear of nausea, “Orn is a myth.”
“It’s not,” Zanj called back from the controls.
“Everyone tells stories about it, but no one knows where it is.”
“Because they hide. The Empress has a habit, in case you hadn’t noticed, of killing civilizations that get too big. If you were running an interstellar commerce hub, would you tell her fan club where you lived?”
“Maybe things have changed,” Hong said. “You were in that star for a long time.”
Zanj stalked back down the hall from the cockpit. The ship continued to fly itself without her guiding hand, and the turns grew vicious. Zanj’s face looked like the face of a thunder god, and while Viv forced herself to match her glare for glare, she felt faint as she did, and grateful when Zanj turned her gaze on Hong. “I know.” She heard the rawness in those words, the edge of cutting humor not quite on the good side of despair. “Orn had a good system—stealth, expertise, generations of augmented Cloud-spliced pilots. They dream spaceways. They dance in formation. They sing babies preflight checkup songs while they nurse. If anyone anywhere in the galaxy can catch the Empress, it’s a pilot of Orn.”
Hong looked to Viv the way friends had looked to her after too long spent arguing on the Internet. Help. I’m drowning.
Hong was right—his knowledge would be more up to date than Zanj’s. But she thought about life inside a crystal box, studied and prodded and poked and praised. If she’d wanted that, she would never have left her family in LA.
“We go to Orn,” she said. Once she’d made the decision, her misgivings vanished, as always. Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.
Zanj nodded, self-satisfied, as if she’d never doubted Viv would make the right choice. “Good.” The ship lurched and settled. Gravity changed—softened, grew more complex in a way that reminded Viv of the difference between listening to a Beethoven quartet on good headphones, and playing it yourself. This was real gravity. “I’m glad you made the right decision. Because we just landed. And we’re out of fuel.”
“Wait. What?”
Zanj marched past her toward the ramp. She did not spare so much as a glance for Hong, frozen in apoplexy behind. “I figured this was what you’d choose, and I didn’t want to waste time.”
“And if you were wrong?”
“That’s why I dumped our fuel before we landed. Don’t worry, Orn has a manufactory, we’ll get more. Or we’ll mothball this rust bucket and take a faster ship. They have thousands here. Don’t let it bother you, Viv. You made the right choice.”
“Is this your idea of a choice?”
“Let’s leave questions like that to the philosophers.” Zanj thumbed a button. The ramp hissed and began to lower. Blue sunlight flowed in from outside. “Come on.”
“We had a deal.” Hong had recovered enough to use his words. “We’d each make our case and let her choose freely.”
“I got bored.” Zanj turned her back on the lowering ramp so she could direct the full force of her salesmanship against them. “Besides, kid, you’ll love Orn. It’s an oasis of civilization—like we used to have in the old days, before the Bleed and your Empress got so damn good at wrecking everything. Orn, crystal city of starships, Orn of the towers, Orn of the spaceways, best seafood this side of anywhere, gladiator matches alternate Saturdays, pleasure pits and simulated depravities to choke a zekk, hell, they even have a temple network if you’d like to talk to a few gods up close and personal. I’ve spent more years than you can count missing this place, and if you’ve never been here before, you should damn well thank me for bringing you.”
Hong didn’t answer. He was too busy staring out of the ship.
“Ah, Zanj,” Viv said.
“What?”
She pointed.
Zanj was right, after a fashion. Orn had been a great city once.
It was a ruin now.