Gudsriki (32 page)

He hesitated
. “I barely saw her these last couple years before the war. Only briefly, so fleetingly, so meaninglessly. She didn't even know I was there. The last time I saw her before that we—when I left her, I thought she'd break down in tears. I thought she'd die without me.

“How wrong I was…. She turned out tougher than I ever imagined she could be. Turned out…. Turns out I never knew her at all. I spent seventeen years raising her, and I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about who she'd grown up to be. And once I left her life, I was gone for good and she didn't miss me. Knowing she's dead…. It shouldn't be that different. My life will barely change. Certainly not with my duties as a Geki.

“But I know she's gone and everything is different. Nothing is worth doing. This war, this fight we're fighting, we could kill every religionist, and there would be no point because I'm not making the world safe for her.”

Varg watched him. The elder didn't cry. He just looked at his cards.

“I'm sorry for how I told you about your teammate. I shouldn't have told you at all.”

“I'm glad you did.”

“Why? What pleases you about knowing Violet's dead?”

“Nothing pleases. It's not pleasing. But it's right that I know.”

“Bullshit.”

The elder played his cards. Varg looked over his own.

“We'll jump to Valhalla tomorrow morning.”

Varg nodded.

 

 

I
N
THE
morning Vibeke woke to find Nel's skin black with frostbite. She was awake… if she had ever slept. Vibs didn't think to ask. She took freeze treatment plaster out of her Thaco pocket and applied it over her wounds. It was human skin and had to be healed in the human fashion.

“You don't feel pain at all, do you? When I burnt you?” she said.

“I'm certain what I felt was pain,” it replied.

“Does the frostbite hurt?”

“Yes, it's extremely painful.”

“Then why didn't you brush me away and put your suit back on?”

“You seemed happy. I'd never seen you happy before.”

Vibeke had nothing to say. Somehow she was scared by it. She hurried to pack up and get moving.

They found more houses as they moved southward and began to see people from time to time—calm people like those on Orkney, in Kirkwall where the war hadn't touched them.

But then, only a short way south, they found corpses, burnt and half-eaten. Posed in cruel ways in death. At night they heard laughter in the woods. Vibeke didn't touch Nel again for days after that night. She slept next to her, afraid to touch her. Afraid she would let her, or touch her back. She couldn't rationalize it. She told herself she could do with Nel as she pleased but didn't feel it.

Finally they hit the shore of Pohjanlahti, which they could follow to the portal near Umeå. They spent their last night of the journey under a thicket of dead trees.

Vibeke sat up and watched Nel sleep, or simulate sleeping. She didn't ask which, it looked real enough. And didn't look like Violet. Violet always slept with her mouth open, drooling as often as not, snoring from time to time. Nel slept like she'd been stowed in a drawer.

Vibeke tried to force herself to find Nel attractive. She thought it wouldn't be hard, she looked like her lost love, but she forced herself to look at Nel. Not thinking about Violet's heart or memories, but whatever individual being Nel constituted. She looked over her body thinking of Nel's chest, Nel's hips, Nel's face. She owed it to the thing to see her as a unique person.

Then another side kicked in and told her to see it as an object. A simulation running on spare parts, one she'd commissioned. For company, for sex, the robot was exactly that: a slave. The thought sickened her, though. She felt the inanimate sympathy, guilt. She realized she had to see Nel as a person or it would crush her.

“Nel.”

“Yes?”

“You don't sleep, do you?”

“I can, I do. But not often.”

“But you feel boredom.”

“Yes, night is very dull.”

“If you could do anything to pass the time, what would you do?”

“Violet would w—”

“No, you. What would
you
do?”

“Whatever would make you happy.”

Vibeke thought for a moment. She didn't know what would make her happy. Her only happy memories of late were falling asleep on Nel's chest and watching her butt wiggle in the snow.

She took her microwave and fired at the birch leaves, setting them on fire. She brushed the dirt around them to confine the flames then took off her suit. She reached over and undid Nel's. Nel didn't move. Vibeke gently pushed her over and lay on top of her and kissed her neck, buried her face against it.

“Hold me,” she told Nel.

Nel gently put her arms around Vibeke and flattened her hands across her back and sides. Vibeke grabbed Nel's butt cheek. It didn't feel like she'd hoped. It was too firm, only a thin layer of skin and decorative fat over metal. But it was warm, very warm.

She felt happy—alone with a robot, responsible for destroying the planet, but happy enough. As happy as she could be. Nel kept her arms across her motionlessly through the night, the perfect stillness of hydraulics and shape-memory alloy. Vibeke forced herself to think,
This is Nel that I'm touching. Hard under her skin. Motionless. This is Nel and nobody else
.

But the heartbeat betrayed her. It was Nel she was holding. But Nel was also someone else, someone she still loved.

Nel could sense it in her as she listened to Violet's heart. She was still deeply in love with her. If Veikko told the truth, if he had really hacked her into loving Violet, then he was a master of the art like nobody who had ever lived before him.

“I am.”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“I'm just saying. I am that good. You should see what I just hacked in Ulver's new mainframe.”

“I don't care, Veikko.”

“You know, maybe I was too hard on you. We are brothers in arms after all. We're both Niide's cyborgs. The only two there are.”

“If we're brothers, we're Cain and Abel.”

“Violet had no clue who Cain and Abel were. Hell, I didn't until Mishka went on about 'em.”

“She picked up some mythology online when she was twelve.”

“Good for her. Are you two really gonna get the fish to come for me?”

“That's the plan.”

“Bad plan. I know the fish. They won't help you.”

“Worth a shot.”

“Nothing's worth dealing with those things. Why don't you come back? We'll patch things up between us. Maybe you can show me how we're supposed to fit together, maybe take turns holding up the ravine. My legs are getting tired.”

“We don't get tired.”

“Metaphorically tired, they detest lugubrious work.”

“Leave me alone, Veikko.”

“As long as our brains are linked, we're not gonna be leaving each other alone.”

“Try.”

 

 

“J
UST
HERE
for Willie, sir.”

Risto nodded. Pytten headed to the aquarium and pushed the unfortunate creatures into their distribution matrix. It sorted them out and gently placed them around the aquarium as Willie waddled from under Risto's desk to hop into the water.

Pytten was about to leave when Risto spoke.

“What are your ambitions, Pytten?”

“I want to be a captain, someday. Sir.”

“Not an admiral?”

“Respectfully, not after this, sir.”

Risto laughed. “Few would, few would.”

Risto continued to observe an Ulver fleet. It was motionless, but their flagship had just docked with a known intel scout. If they were to act, it would be soon.

“Any siblings, Pytten?”

“None, sir. And you?” Pytten regretted asking the moment the words came out. It was surely inappropriate to have spoken so casually. But Risto answered.

“One brother, regrettably. Loki…. A murderer, now on land. Did you know I was demoted once, Pytten?”

“No, sir.” Pytten was very surprised.

“I'd just become a vice admiral. My armada was on a mission to observe the undersea movements of a land gang, the Orange Gang. Thugs, nothing more. But among them I saw Loki. He'd become one of their lackeys, beneath even a gang member. Thus I justified to myself that he was not among those we were to observe, and thus he was not subject to the rules of engagement. I sent a detachment to kill him.”

Pytten was shocked. The admiral had just admitted the unthinkable.

“That surprises you, I see. Well, it surprised Fleet Admiral Edeltäjä too. I was a rear admiral again before I could say ‘Vellamo.' Now in the past two years, a lot has changed. Enough to make me fleet admiral myself. How that happened is another story,” he reflected, “but in any case. My brother lived. Never knew assassins had him in their sights before those assassins requested confirmation from my superior.”

Pytten considered the tale.

“My brother is still alive, I assume. I've not checked. I never will. He's a weakness to me now. One I will not consider nor seek nor tolerate to be mentioned to me in any military context. And you will not speak of him.”

“No, sir!”

“But you are more than my assistant. You've surely guessed that by now. You're my observer. And if you haven't already, you'll be asked to review my acts by the civilian assembly soon enough.”

“I have, sir. I've marked you—”

“Not my business. But you are a check and balance. You are insurance that I not act out of petty personal motives again. I assure you I won't, but I'd rather you hear it from me than the assembly.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You want to be a captain.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don't have what it takes.”

Pytten felt stabbed in the gas bladder.

“But you will. You will because I'll give it to you here.”

Pytten felt less stabbed.

“Nobody lasts more than a year at your job. They go to the grave or to command. You've been in command for thirty minutes, and you've saved the lives of an entire crew. I sought you because you put Bax in the brig. Yes. But your heroic acts are not forgotten or overlooked. You want to be a captain.” Risto nodded. “I miss being one. What I do here I do because I know I'm needed. But there's not a day I don't wish I were back on board the
Proteus
, my first command. That was when I was your age. You've surely noticed I'm the youngest admiral, let alone the youngest Admiral of the Fleet.”

“They speak of you as an incomparable prodigy, sir.”

“I am. Any modesty would be false, conceit. Edeltäjä named me successor for a reason, despite my mistakes. Audacity, Pytten. Obedience is the beginning of discipline, not the apex. You are obedient, and proper in the extreme. You
are
here for sending Bax to the brig. But you crawled back through a collapsing sub to save his life moments after. That's why I have no doubt you'll be a great captain when you leave.”

“Thank you, sir!”

“You're welcome. Don't let it go to your head.”

 

 

N
EL
AND
Vibeke entered the town and emerged from the high snowbanks. There were no people on the streets. There was no sound but the frozen wind.

As they walked through they came upon one of the town's universities. In the center of its campus was a small frozen pond. In the pond was a stack of thousands of deceased students piled up higher than the university buildings. Warm enough to rot amid the shattered ice, their smell was tremendous.

“The war never hit here, no bombs, no radiation. It has no tactical merit. This makes no sense.”

“I estimate thousands if this stack is comprised only of students.”

“But why?”

“Violet's memory has no answers. The only mention of UmeÃ¥ she would remember was in Balder's list of suspected underground Muslim communities.”

They stepped up to the great pile. Vibeke examined the bodies. They wore heavy jackets and thick pants; most had hats. No, not hats. Most girls had headscarves. Some boys had skullcaps. The dead students were mostly if not all Muslim.

“They must have come out of hiding once the war began. Then they were slaughtered.”

“Who would kill thousands of Muslim students?”

“Christians.”

“Why?”

“People have asked that for sixteen centuries.”

“You really think this was a religious massacre?”

“A crusade.”

“Violet's memories suggest there had been no crusades for a millennium.”

“Well, I think there's one now. We're lucky we missed it. This appears to have happened months ago.”

“There's nothing we can do about this. We should head to the Cetacean gate.”

Vibeke continued to look at the bodies.

“Vibeke, we should go.” Nel's voice wavered.

“What's wrong?” Vibeke asked.

“This is a great deal of murdered people.”

“So?”

Nel said nothing. Vibeke understood.

“You're sad.”

“No.”

“Yeah, you are. You actually feel sad.”

“So what if I do?”

“You feel fear, and you feel sad seeing people dead.”

Nel watched her for a moment. “Yeah. I do. What does that mean?”

“I'd say it means you're only human, but….”