FERAL GODS PINNED them down inside a mindforge.
Viv had assumed the forge, a metal cocoon around a white dwarf star, was an old Imperial stronghold, because she hadn’t yet met anyone save the Empress who built to such scale, but Hong corrected her. Nobody knew whether the Kaeolith had left the galaxy, or had fallen to the Empress or the Bleed, or had ascended to some other universe, but they had been their own force, spinning diamond webs that rewove stars to strange shapes: dense twists of matte black, inscrutable and mighty beyond all reason, that roamed through the cosmos, uplifting some civilizations, breaking others. When the Kaeolith left, or were killed, or killed themselves, or shrank or grew until they could no longer be seen, the mindforges remained, efficient systems later civilizations used for juicing stars. Visiting one to refuel had been a great idea—which meant others had had the same idea centuries ago, small opportunistic gods descending from the endless simulated dreamlands of the Cloud in search of perverse satisfaction on the material plane.
In silent centuries, the gods had drunk deep of the mindforge’s fountain and, swelling, split, and split again into legions of copies, only to wage eternal war against their duplicate selves, their hatred for each other only balanced by the ravenous hunger they directed against interlopers.
The gods could disguise themselves as shadow, as color. They must have lurked behind the Question’s crew as they wandered deeper and deeper in, toward the heart of the forge, a vast chamber in which filaments finer than human hairs shielded a loop of plasma drawn from the heart of the star.
Then the gods locked the doors, and sprang.
The gods hadn’t planned for Gray, or Zanj.
Still, though each small god fell in seconds, they numbered in the thousands. Gray spun a diamond shell to cover Viv and Hong while he and Zanj switched off between fighting and harvesting the stellar fountain.
And, while they recovered, Viv asked them about the Fallen Star.
“Oh, that story!” Gray stuck his hands into the plasma loop, drew them out cupped around golden fire, and drank the star; he glowed as he swallowed its light, and then, when he could fill himself no more, collapsed and belched and rolled, sweating diamond drops that clunked against the floor when they fell. “It’s a good story, at least the way my great-great-great-aunt tells it. Zanj wouldn’t like it if I told you, though.” Ruby eyes twinkled. “So of course I will.
“The story goes that young Zanj, barely fledged, just immortal, visited her neighbors, the Serpentine of galactic north. They were ancient, scarred veterans of Bleed war. The Serpentine hold no thing private, not even their names; since they hold nothing, nothing can be stolen from them. Zanj came to ask them for a weapon to defend her people. They brought her to their treasure chambers, where hung the jewels and revelations of millions of minds over a hundred thousand years, all in common, and one by one they showed her their gravest tools: hammers to break cities, swords to cut planets, dust to eat all things. One by one she hefted them, tested them, and asked if they had something bigger.
“Serpentine hospitality demanded they satisfy her, so they drew her deeper and deeper into the caverns of their collective mind. They offered her color bombs, bows arched with superstring. Each time she said, no, not yet. Until they led her to the heart of their temple-minds: to the heart of their being, a galactic core compressed to hyperdense computational matter—the foundation of their empire and war effort, the engine that bound their society together, and kept each Serpentine itself. The only thing they would not freely give their guests. And she stole it. Can you imagine?”
Sated, he parted their diamond shell, grew forty feet tall and covered in scales, whooped a challenge, and marched into the roil of the gods.
“That,” Hong said beside her, “is not the version we tell.”
Viv turned her back to the battle: Gray was busily devouring godlings, gnashing teeth, heedless of his own exposed flank. “You’ve heard this story?”
“A piece of it. Zanj offered to help the Serpentine against the Bleed, to cut them off from the galactic core once and forever. They trusted her with the Fallen Star, but the Serpentine fell to the Empress before she could reach the battlefield. Later, she turned the Star against the Empress, and fell herself. That is the truth of the ’faith, which our archivists mill and smelt in their meditations.”
There was a flash, blinding even through their polarized shell, and Zanj arced out of the god-ruckus, struck the ground, bounced, cracked the floor, skidded, scrambled into shelter. Her eyes were their normal red again, and she panted for breath, her whole body quivering. “Don’t listen to them,” she said when she could draw breath to speak. “However I came by the Star, it was mine: no one else could use it but me. It existed before the Serpentine, before the Empress. Maybe it was left over from another universe before ours. Maybe the Bleed made it. It had no fixed form, and each attempt to wield it in battle failed gloriously as it slipped from the wielder’s control. It was not so much treasured as imprisoned. And when I took it up, no one could take it from me until the Empress tricked it from my hand.”
“Tricked?”
“The Suicide Queens lured her into battle, but we didn’t realize until too late that she’d set a trap of her own: she cut us off from the Cloud so we could not flee, and drew the Bleed. They ate us; they slid into the minds of our ships and poisoned us from within. Our greatest weapon against the Empress was the Groundswell, a ship the size of worlds, built around the strange matter of a Bleed corpse, and the Bleed invaded and animated it against us. I killed it with the Fallen Star, but the Empress had planned for that, too. She wrapped the Star in a chain with her own seal, so it could not return to me.
“I fled that battle, but the Empress caught me. Without the Star, I didn’t stand a chance. I couldn’t outthink her; I couldn’t fight for longer than a few minutes at a time. Speaking of which. I’m charged again.” She turned on Viv a radiant fierce grin that made her story seem impossible. How could Zanj have ever been imprisoned? How ever outfought?
There came that fierce pop inside her skull, and Zanj’s eyes burned white. She kipped to her feet, unsheathed her claws. “We’re only a few skips from where I lost the Star. Get it, and we’ll catch the Empress. But first, I have to beat up some godlings. I’ll be right back.”
In the end, it was Viv who noticed that the godlings drew their strength from the mindforge itself, their shattered dust bodies drifting back across the floor to the plasma fountain, where they took strength and gained shape to launch themselves once more into the fray. And it was Hong who guided her through the battle, over gods’ bodies, to a control panel. Viv tried to use it, to no avail; Hong offered to try, touched the panel, and his hands sank into it up to his crystal bracelets; he glowed static snow, face set in meditation, features calm save for the sweat that rolled down his forehead, and the trembling tension of his arms. The star-siphon’s filaments realigned; the plasma column lost cohesion, and would have boiled them away had not a fail-safe cut in to shut the siphon down.
Viv caught Hong as he fell, his hands dripping crystal, his eyes twitching. When Zanj and Gray finished with the gods, Hong had recovered enough to walk, which was good, since the mindforge relied on the siphon to hold its ancient architecture together, and its monomolecule skin was unraveling. Gray gathered a fistful of god-dust to munch on the run. They had to dive out a porthole into hard vacuum for a few seconds before Xiara caught them; Viv’s robe flowed to cover her completely, then released her when she tumbled once more into the ship. The hatch snapped shut, and Xiara burned hard for the Cloud. “Come on!” Zanj pulled Viv to her feet, dragged her to a porthole. “You have to see this.”
Behind them, the mindforge collapsed, and took the star with it.
UNCERTAIN, VIV SOUGHT advice.
She found Hong dancing through the engine room. Eyes half shut, half open, each step and turn precise, he trailed his fingers over pipes, down couplings. He did not squeeze his body into the tight spaces through which he passed. He held himself so he did not need to squeeze. She waited for him to stop, but he spoke to her first, without breaking stride. She was so surprised she jumped. “Please, speak. It is good practice for me to speak without attachment as I move.”
“What are you doing?”
“Learning the ship.”
When he said that, she understood: his movements followed the course of fluid through the pipes, his fingers pointed toward status indicators as their colors switched. “You’re making that happen?”
“No,” he said. “Xiara is. We study machines, and train our mind to mirror them. This ship holds many systems: Cloud engines interlace with crude chemical and subspace drives. We learn systems so we may learn our selves. A mind is as complex as a mindforge—but subtler; so subtle most beings cannot comprehend even their simplest thought in its entirety. We study so that when we are thrust against the limits of our own minds, we can break ourselves.”
“Why would we—sorry, why would you want that?”
“Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.”
She recognized that line, handed down however many millennia. She’d never thought of it like that before: the mind as a computer, sure, she’d lost track of the number of times some reporter made that analogy, but the self as a proprietary system, what would that imply? Your desires, your thoughts no more your own than a system’s preprogrammed behavior belonged to it? But if your thoughts weren’t you, what was? Or was that even the right question? Her head hurt; she retreated to her own exhaustion, to the bruise on her hip, to the chill ozone-tinted air and the calm motion of his body. “So, you study machines. Is that how you knew how to break the mindforge?”
“I have only traced small relics of the Kaeolith before. I have never touched something so immense. I damaged it, and killed a star. I have taken something glorious from the world.”
“It was trying to kill us.”
He did not interrupt his dance to shrug, but she got the gist.
“Zanj wants to go after the Fallen Star. I don’t even know if it’s a ship, or a mind, or a weapon, or a computer, or what.”
“All these terms,” he said, “are, at sufficient stages of mastery, indistinguishable from one another, as a strike from a block from a counter.”
“What do you think?”
“I think we should go to the ’faith.”
“They tried to kill us.”
He spun in place, slowly, balanced on one foot. “We still don’t know why Zanj came back to Orn. Why she stopped trying to kill us. We don’t know whose side she is on. She scares me. I know she would only smile if she heard me say this. The ’faith may hinder us; the Grand Rector may oppose us. But if they do, their actions will be obvious. Zanj is subtle.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t just you wanting to go home.”
He spread his arms and extended one leg in a slow, slow kick, level with his eyes.
“You are pushing us far, and fast,” he said. “We have seen marvel after marvel. But we do not share what we have seen. I do want to go home: to commune with my sisters and brothers, to seek answers, to meditate. To change things. You want to leave us altogether.”
“I have to go home, too. And anyway, don’t you want me out of your hair?”
She said that mostly to offer an opening for him to joke about not having any hair to speak of. But he remained balanced for a long time, eyes distant. Then the ship lurched out of the Cloud, and he settled to a new posture. “I like you,” he said. “So does Zanj. But on this all tales agree: Zanj will sacrifice what she likes to get what she wants.”
She tried to sleep, but often failed. When she closed her eyes she saw the Empress, saw Zanj’s face in those first moments of waking, her murderous fury, and then her despair. She remembered Zanj in joyous battle and her sly, unfeigned smile when she felt strong. Viv liked her; she loved her, almost, in a way. She wanted her happy. And Zanj had promised, again and again, to kill her.
Viv walked unsteadily through the ship to the cockpit, where she found Xiara dozing in the pilot’s chair. Indicator lights swelled and faded with her breath; Xiara’s eyes opened easily as Viv watched her, and she yawned. She could yawn now, even while merged with the ship. She had learned to be almost human. “You should be asleep.”
“So should you.” Viv gave her a peck on the forehead, and leaned away. Xiara reached for her, not hungry, just stretching. Her fingers grazed her belly.
“I’m learning to sleep in the ship,” she said. “It talks to me in dreams.”
“Doesn’t that scare you? It would scare me.”
“This is a small ship,” she said. “Crude. I can’t fit all the way inside it, even dreaming. The body’s always here for me to come back to. If I tried to fly something bigger—I don’t know what would happen. That’s what scares me.” She stretched her shoulders until they popped, and looked out into the twists of deep space, smiled at something Viv could not see but the ship’s sensors could. “I was thinking about the beast you rescued, the big rock thing in the net. Maybe they were made, maybe they made themselves, but it makes me wonder, what would the pilots of Orn have been like, back before the city fell? Were we ships dreaming we were people, or the other way around?”
Viv caught her hand, laced their fingers together, and with her other hand followed the swell of Xiara’s forearm up to her shoulder, her cheek. “I know which I’d rather.”
“You wouldn’t like me as a ship? You’d be so cute and small, running around inside me. That might be fun.” She tightened her grip on Viv’s hand, using some of that strength she loved, the weight of a body trained to battle and hard work.
Usually, that strength made Viv melt—she liked that she couldn’t hurt Xiara, couldn’t break her no matter how she bucked. But the way Xiara spoke just then reminded her of the Empress, through whose ruins she’d spent the last weeks crawling, the Empress who’d torn her from her home and called her here and cast her aside as if she didn’t matter.
Viv stilled, and stared out into the stars, into space, into the carbon nanotube ribbons, miles across but hair-thin at this distance, that linked the planets in the system where they’d stopped. Some long-gone mad sculptor had shaped the star at its heart into an enormous glowing three-eyed face. She realized Xiara was looking at her, realized her hand on the back of Xiara’s neck had tensed into a fist, that her nails were digging into her own palm. Her chest and skin felt tight. “I’m sorry.”
“I can hear her out there,” Xiara said. The wheels in her eyes meshed and whirled. “The Empress. At first I couldn’t, but I’ve been studying how Zanj listens, how she looks. The Empress doesn’t move through space or through the Cloud like other people. She sings, and they move around her. I can even hear her Citadel, a great silent eddy, like the ripple a sunken rock makes on the surface of a river.”
“Can we catch her?”
“In this ship?” Her eyes and the set of her mouth said no better than her voice ever could.
“I wish I could trust her,” Viv said, meaning Zanj. “She almost killed you. She’s helped us since. I like her. But I don’t know what she’s planning. I don’t know why she came back.”
“Have you tried asking?” Xiara’s hand escaped Viv’s, and drifted around Viv’s ribs, sank to the curve of her hip. Viv wanted it to sink farther. She wanted to set concern aside, to drown in her body. She remembered Hong: What you cannot break, you do not own.
“Do you want to stay here?” Viv asked, meaning in the cockpit, but also meaning connected to the ship.
“Do you mind?”
“Are we playing the question game?”
She laughed at that, made a face. “You’re weird.”
“You lose.” But she kissed her, and tasted lightning on her breath. The door slid shut, and the stars watched, and for a hungry moment she was gone.