“YOU’RE LYING.” VIV said the words, but did not believe them. She wanted the Empress to be playing a cruel joke on her—she’d played jokes as cruel on the rest of the galaxy. She wanted her ice-cold creeping shock of recognition to be wrong. She wanted to look at Zanj, slack in bonds of light, and find support, anger, anything but careful neutrality. “It’s not true.” But saying the same thing with different words did not make it so.
The Empress slid her hands into the pockets of her dress and walked toward Viv, head cocked slightly, mouth’s corner slanted up: Really? Viv knew that face. She’d used it for the cover of Time.
“You’re not me. I’m not you.”
“I watched my first living thing die—outside of bugs, I mean—when I was seven. We were sailing. I woke up early and found this beautiful green-blue bird twitching on the deck. I think the cat got to it. There was nothing I could do. I could see all the way inside it. Organs looked so clear in Mom’s books: hearts, lungs, guts. But on the deck they were a mess. I knew it would upset them if they saw it—they’d be so worried about how it might have affected me that we’d spend the rest of the trip talking about that bird. So I knelt and watched it die, and when it was dead, I gathered it and tossed it overboard and cleaned the deck, and never told anyone. Until now.”
Something was stuck in Viv’s throat. She could not breathe. The Fallen Star weighed heavy in her hands. Her voice sounded thin—a shadow of the Empress. “Maybe I wrote the story down. You could have spied on me. Found records.” But the story’s truth had not chilled her so much as the patter. Cadence, choice of words, the wry shrug, amused and puzzled by the child’s disgust, never self-deprecating: Viv had never told this story to anyone, but if she did, that was how she would tell it. “I can think of a thousand ways you might know.”
“Viv. Stop. I know where you’re coming from. The desperation, the anger. I can imagine how I’d feel if I were in your shoes. But we’re not as slow as you’re pretending to be right now. Why would I lie? You’re no threat. You have nothing I want. You’re a woman with skills thousands of years out of date, wielding a weapon she can barely hold, to defend a partner who doesn’t care about you. Who was just using you to get to me.”
Viv swung the Star again. The Empress’s form slipped away like mist, and the momentum spun Viv round in a circle. Her face, the Empress’s face, appeared in one of the black glass pillars; Viv smashed that pillar with the Star, but the face slipped into another.
“See,” the Empress said, “this is what I love about us. We’re so brilliantly, delightfully self-centered.”
Viv ran to that pillar, and smashed it, too. Flying glass cut her cheek. She panted. Her arms shook from the Star’s weight. The Empress appeared in a diamond slab—Viv appeared, with a gentle chess player’s smile, oh did you really mean to make that move? She knew how that smile felt from the inside.
“You know I built the Rosary over centuries, at an expense you could barely imagine. You know I spent a truly absurd amount of computational power to bring you here. But it never occurred to you to ask why your life would be the one I’d choose to interrupt. Why you would be the one person your universe’s god would visit, out of all history. Because of course the world would revolve around Vivian Liao. When you found you could undo my bindings, release Zanj, command her—it seemed natural. Why shouldn’t Vivian Liao have power?”
With a mighty swing, Viv snapped the diamond pillar in half. Off-balance, exhausted, she fell to her knees.
When the dust cleared, she didn’t see herself anywhere.
“That,” the Empress said, “is a rare gift.”
Viv lurched to her feet, and looked up. Her face stared down at her from the ceiling, still smiling.
“The habit of centering yourself, of command, of not accepting others’ answers—that was our foundation, Viv, and we built great things upon it. We built them, and they tore them from us, and we built them again. In that basement server farm, we fixed a chain to the neck of the world. The systems we built made us smarter, better, faster. We found the Cloud and made it ours. We broke banks. Governments. We beat nations. Planets. Species. We fought and fought and fought, and every time they tried to crush us, we crushed them right back.”
Viv glared up at her face, so smug, secure, so far away. She did not know how to use the Star, did not know by what power she could lift it—but when Zanj carried it, she could fly. She crouched low. A rush of power passed to her from the Star. She bared her teeth, and flew.
Or tried.
Her legs would not straighten. She looked down. Diamond flowed up from the cracked floor, over her ankle and around her knee, climbing toward her arms. She screamed, strained, but the diamond did not care, and her own voice covered her cries, like a hand over her mouth.
“But what happens,” the Empress asked, “when winning’s not enough? I conquered a galaxy, I built civilization after civilization, and still the Bleed came. Whenever a society reaches sufficient network density, whenever they place enough demands upon the Cloud, the Bleed appear. I beat them back the first time—barely. We lost trillions of souls. They cored Earth. I rebuilt civilization after civilization, empire after empire, and each time it was worse. In the end, even I would have fallen. So I did the hardest thing I’ve ever done: I played it safe. Carved off a corner of the galaxy and made it my preserve, froze the Bleed out, forbade any mind that was not mine. And each time a society grows dense enough to draw them, I fix it.”
“You eat them!” Viv was screaming now. “You burn them and break them. You’re a monster, and I am nothing like—”
A diamond gag closed her lips, a diamond band cinched her jaw shut, and she could only gaze up in impotent fury, her whole body ribbed in crystal.
“I’m sorry,” the Empress said. “I don’t quite enjoy doing this to myself, though there is a visceral thrill I’m sure you can imagine. I’ve called myself all those names and worse, millions of times, all the variations on them that your genius could muster in ten thousand years. You know you would hate to do what I have done. You know you could do it—to save yourself, to save the world, to save all worlds, all futures, from those monsters’ maws. So, forgive me for not indulging your protestations of virtue. I want to explain why you’re here, because I respect you and what you’ve accomplished by making it this far. You deserve to know your place in all this.”
Viv could still breathe through her nose, at least, and she could curse in her mind.
“I’ve spent eons trying to defeat the Bleed. But I have only my own genius to work with—any culture that grows to the point where it could contribute, I must harvest before the Bleed come for them. At first I gained their knowledge, new physics, new math, but at this point each new civilization only adds a few marginal discoveries, and a bunch of poetry. I have to face facts: I’m the universe’s only hope. It is indeed a lonely thing.” A smile; Viv caught the reference, and hated it. “Centuries passed. I worked, and worked, and I found no solution. And then I started to worry.
“We both know the dangers of lock-in effects, of local maxima and minima. We are climbing a mountain, looking for a high valley where we can live safe from floods. We settle in a cleft in the mountainside, poorly sheltered, barren, harsh, and we think, this must be the highest place where human beings can live. That cliff goes up forever. Until one day someone scales the cliff, through unimaginable suffering, and finds at its summit a green and temperate paradise. I’ve spent my life clawing handhold by handhold up that cliff, and slipping down. But perhaps another path up the mountain would never have found the barren cleft where I took shelter. Perhaps a journey I did not take, some seeming dead end I rejected eons past, leads straight to paradise.”
Viv glared up at her with all the hate she could force into her gaze.
The face disappeared. Footsteps approached: soft, padded steps over the broken floor. She felt the heat of green. Her own face entered her field of view, condescending, curious.
“That’s where you come in. I simulated other paths we might have taken, seeking answers to the Bleed threat, a place where my grip on power would be absolute. I used computational matter so dense I had to close it behind an event horizon to hide its inner workings from my Cloud and from the Bleed. And then I left my Rosary to bake.”
Viv wanted to shake her head, wanted to deny it. The Empress turned to her in a whisper of green silk, her expression mocking Viv’s disbelief. Hong had suggested the rosary beads might contain simulations, back during that first jump in the Question, and she’d rejected the idea. Time travel was a better explanation, or parallel universes. Why did she toss away his theory? Because she was real. Her world was real. Magda was real, and the sea. In that pure black mirror she seemed so small. That black hole below her was not just a passage home—it was home, and the Empress’s knife lay at its neck. Everyone she had ever known. Everyone she had ever loved.
Well. Not everyone.
The Empress was not lying. Viv did not lie to herself. Not when the truth was cruel.
“I made you. I set millions of parallel Vivs along their paths, seeking answers in millennia. And for so, so long, I heard nothing—until your world went ding. Problem solved. Intrigued, I extracted you so I could search your mind for answers: What could I have done differently? What wrong turn did I make? Only to find that your principal contribution to your world’s success, your sole embellishment, was a sentimental mistake.” She shook her head. “It’s not all a loss. Your world remains, and all its promised answers. Once I’ve returned to the Citadel I will unravel the simulation and incorporate its innovations at my leisure. In the meantime, given how far you’ve come, it’s remotely possible your mentality holds some useful feature I overlooked on my first scan. Grayframe!”
A whirl of fire and smoke and clouds erupted from the air and condensed into a featureless silver blob, almost the shape of a man. “Yes, my Lady?”
The Empress looked into Viv’s rage-filled eyes, reached down, and stroked her cheek. A red line carved across Viv’s face; Viv smelled the burning flesh. She screamed and tried to pull away, but the diamond held her fast and smothered her words. The Empress straightened, licked her fingertip, and, after a faraway wine taster’s moment, nodded in satisfaction.
“Take this girl apart and feed her to me.”