The Killing of Worlds (29 page)

“You certainly hold on to the old ways.”

Zai nodded. “Ever seen one before?”

“A sled? Laurent, I’d never seen snow before coming to Home. There isn’t any on Vasthold. Well, perhaps at the poles, but we haven’t gotten that crowded yet.”

The house read surprise on the captain’s face. “You’d never seen snow? And you bought a house in the antarctic? That was … adventurous.”

“Adventure had nothing to do with it. Home is more crowded than Vasthold. This is the only place on the planet I can withdraw completely from apathy. But it’s true, I always did want to see snow. On Vasthold we have children’s tales about it.”

“About sisters lost in a blizzard?” Zai asked. “Freezing to death?”

“Godspite, Laurent, no. I grew up thinking snow was magical stuff, rain turned white and powdery. Pillow feathers from the sky.”

Zai smiled. “You’re about to find out just how right you were.”

He hoisted the two and a half meters of skin and pseudobone onto his shoulder.

The mistress narrowed her eyes at the sled, rising a little hesitantly.

“It looks sound enough,” she said.

“Shall we find out?”

The house’s mind shot down the sled trail again, searching once more for a poorly banked turn, a hidden crevasse, a dangerous ice patch.

All seemed in order.

As the mistress and her guest changed into warmer clothes, the house connected with the planetary infostructure, accessing several collections of oral and written folklore. In seconds, it had discovered hundreds of children’s stories from Vasthold, and many more from the older world of Vada. Then its search spilled across the many planets where the two worlds’ founder populations had originated, and hits came in the tens of thousands. The house found tales of animated snowmen and wish-granting white leopards, magical arctic storms and strandings on ice floes, stories of how the aurora was made and why the compass sometimes lied. It even found the tale Zai had mentioned, entitled “Three Vadan Sisters Lost in a Blizzard.”

The two headed for the east door, the leather of the handmade sled creaking softly as the captain carried it downstairs. For the next minute or so, they couldn’t hurt themselves.

The house settled in for a pleasant hundred seconds of reading.

“Of course, when I mentioned sledding I didn’t mean downhill. Nothing quite so childish.”

“Well, Laurent, we couldn’t very well fly in a team of dogs.”

“True. But what’s a country house without dogs, Nara?”

“Dogs aren’t fashionable on Home, I’m afraid.”

He sighed. “So I’d noticed.”

Zai turned down the heating in his uniform. His metabolism was enough to keep him warm inside Navy wool. The snow crunched under his boots with the bright sound of a recent fall. Perfect powder for sledding.

If only he had a long, flat stretch of it and a team of huskies.

Nara’s blue eyes were flashing with a smile. “I’m relieved to see that you Vadans don’t slavishly follow the Emperor’s taste in these matters.”

Laurent cleared his throat. “There’s nothing wrong with cats … strictly speaking.”

The trail began only a few meters from the door. It was shiny and slick, as if incised into the snow with lasers. On the mountain side of the trail the snow had been melted into an overhang, forming a half-cylinder of ice that wound downward around the peak. On the other side loomed a vertiginous drop.

Zai felt a bit dizzy, possibly from exhaustion. With only an hour of darkness every night, they hadn’t slept much in the last three days.

He took a deep breath. “\ hope your house knows what it’s doing.”

“Sometimes I think my house knows altogether too much,” Nara said. “It has an excess of time on its hands.”

Zai looked up at the building, which seemed quite modest from the outside. Most of its bulk was hidden within the stone of the mountain, its true extent revealed only by the glimmer of a hundred polarized windows. Not all looked out from Nara’s living quarters, of course. He had toured the gardens this morning, or at least some of them. The warrens that had produced three days of sumptuous meals seemed endless.

That sort of decadence always resulted when machines were given too much autonomy. Zai adjusted his tunic waist, which was growing tighter by the day.

“I get the feeling it can still hear us,” he said.

“Probably.” She shrugged in her coat.

Laurent pulled the glove from his real hand and ran his fingers through the short, yellow-gray fur.

“Paracoyote,” Nara said.

His eyes widened. “You’re wearing a canine? That’s a crime on Vada.”

She laughed. “They’re a pest on Vasthold, to say the least.”

Zai wondered if Nara knew how extraordinary it was to come from a planet where “pest” could mean something bigger than an insect. On Vada, hunting was only allowed on stocked private lands, a sport for the unthinkably rich. “Vasthold is fortunate that terraforming has taken so well. Did you kill it yourself?”

“No, I haven’t hunted since I was a kid.” She smiled, fingering the fur. “And then only with a slingshot. This was a political gift from a conservationist group. But taken in the wild, with a bow, I think.”

Zai shook his head. “We have no wild mammals on Vada.”

He placed the sled on the snow.

“I wish I could take you on a proper sled ride, Nara. With a team of huskies, across a floe of new sea ice.”

“
Sea ice?
You mean without land underneath?”

“It’s very smooth when it’s new.”

“No, thank you.”

“Well, after a few days of strong wind, pressure ridges break up he landscape.”

She laughed. “It’s not the monotony, Laurent. It’s the thought of nothing but ice between me and an ocean!”

“There is safety equipment. When you fall through—”

“When?”

He cleared his throat again. “Perhaps we should get started.”

“Yes. I’m beginning to think you’re delaying us intentionally. Afraid of heights, Laurent?”

He looked down the trail. The surface looked somewhat glassy, a 3it fast. Too slick for dogs’ feet, certainly. He wondered if the runners would find any purchase to keep them on the track. The trail was banked to keep them from flying off the mountain, but they had no way to control their speed.

“Not heights.”

“What then?”

“Putting my life in the hands of an Al.”

She smiled, and sat down on the front of the sled. “Come on, Laurent. It’s a very clever house.”

It was marvelous.

The sled accelerated quickly, like a dropship spiraling down a gravity well. Laurent clung to it fiercely, his fingers wound into the leather straps that held it together. The runners found the ruts pre-cut deep into the ice and stayed in them, banking comfortably with the turns.

The trail seemed never to pass into the shadow of the mountain; the clever house reflected sunlight from the surrounding peaks, the snow in their path glowing with the warm red of the rising sun. But his eyes still reduced to slits against the wind, the crisp air turned freezing by their velocity.

Nara leaned back into Laurent’s chest, laughing hysterically, her arms wrapped around his legs. She was warm, and her chaotic hair brushed his cheeks. He squeezed his knees together tightly to hold her in the plummeting sled, and to keep her warmth against him.

After four turns around the mountain, the trail slanted upward, slowing them as it straightened. The rise hid the terrain before them.

“I’d do that again,” Laurent shouted as the sled came almost to a halt.

“I don’t think it’s done,” Nara said, shaking her head. “Are you familiar with the term ‘roller-coaster’?”

“I don’t think— Godspite!”

The sled had crested the rise, revealing a gut-loosening decline dotted with giant boulders. The trail ahead was lined with high snow banks, but the ruts guiding the runners suddenly disappeared, leaving the sled free for the straight decline. The slope was forty-five degrees at least.

“It’s trying to kill us!” Zai shouted.

“We’ll see!”

Laurent and Nara clutched each other, screaming, as the sled dropped into the canyon of ice.

After the acceleration of the first mad drop, the trail leveled, descending gradually between icy walls. The exposed interior of the glacier was deep blue, the color of a clear Vadan sky on the Day of Apogee. In the rift’s protection, the air was still except for the wind of their passage, but Laurent held his lover closer. He touched his lips to her left ear, which was bright red and as cold as the metal buttons of her coat.

“Remember when I said we had no technology for slowing down time?” he whispered.

“Yes?”

“I was wrong. This lasts forever.”

She reached back and put a gloved finger to his lips softly, and Laurent felt foolish. It wasn’t right to speak of these things. This was a fragile endlessness, soon followed by an onrushing of events that would part them for decades.

Tomorrow, they would take the suborbital back to the capital. The commissioning of the
Lynx
was set for the day after. On Home, any such event would be a tremendous affair, lasting an entire night and filling the great square before the Diamond Palace with supplicants, zealots, and status-seekers. After that, Captain Zai had only a matter of weeks to train his crew in orbit before leaving for Legis.

But he had these moments here with Nara. Against the weight of years and the depredations of the Time Thief, he had only the sharp and brittle thing that was now.

Laurent wondered if it were possible that any alliance formed across days could really last decades. Or would what they’d shared in this icy waste prove illusory, born of torturous memories, lack of sleep, and the romance of its own improbability?

Of course, Laurent realized, what was real or unreal would be determined in the years to follow. Falling in love was never genuine in itself; what had happened in these four days would be given meaning over their decades apart. Like some figment of the quantum, love was made true only when measured against the rest of the world.

The sled was slowing, and Laurent Zai sighed softly to himself. Thinking of the future, he had missed the present.

Nara kissed him and stood. They were at the blind end of the rift.

“What now? Climb out?” He looked back up the trail at the kilometers-distant house, just visible on its mountain peak. It would take hours.

Nara shook her head and pointed to a patch of icicles, which shattered as something metal rumbled behind it. A door opened, and warm air rushed out carrying the scent of jasmine.

“Just through the tea gardens, I think,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind riding in a drone elevator.”

Laurent smiled. “So we can go again?”

“Of course. As many times as you like.”

Something broke inside him, but the fissure didn’t open onto the familiar well of sadness. Laurent found himself laughing hard, almost hysterically as he lifted the sled. Nara smiled quizzically, waiting as he gathered himself.

When Laurent found his breath, the echo of his laughter still played at the edge of hearing. It was a wonder he hadn’t brought an avalanche down upon them.

He felt a small tear already freezing in the corner of one eye.

“Laurent?”

“I was just thinking, Nara: You have a very clever house.”

When a single nation’s armies are ordered against each other, all is lost.

—
ANONYMOUS
167

The Other came to her talking of darkness.

There were no words, just gray shapes issuing from a maw, inside a cave whose blackness invoked faerie lights upon her optic nerve. So dark that whispers rode the ears. Her blindness made things calm and rich.

Rich, but so many things were missing now. The keen edges of desire, the pleasures of flesh, all the appetites of drama, expectation and dread, hope and disappointment—all the anguished terrain of uncertainty had been flattened into an arid plane. And soon, the Other explained, she would entirely forget the phantom shapes of those extinct emotions.

It led her toward a bloodred horizon.

She didn’t know where they were headed, but she felt no worry. The Other explained that worry was one of those missing things.

The dead woman took a deep, calm breath. No more fear, ever again.

The red horizon opened up—like the slit of opening one’s eyes.

“Rana Harter,” a voice said.

The woman at the end of her bed was short and had the gray skin of the dead. She wore an Imperial uniform, the dully glinting, gun-metal robe of the Political Apparatus.

“Yes. I know who I am.”

She nodded. “My name is Adept Harper Trevim.”

“Honored Mother,” she said. The Other had prompted her with the proper form of address. (The Other lived inside her like an organ, like a software guide, like a subtle form of second sight.)

“You will live forever.”

Rana nodded. Then a moment of disorientation troubled her, as she wondered if she should be joyful. Immortality was the highest reward her society could bestow on any citizen, an honor that had seemed utterly out of her humble grasp. But joy was such a gross emotion. Instead, Rana Harter closed her eyes again and regarded the subtle beauty of eternity, which had the pleasures of a geometrical simple, the ray of her lifetime extending indefinitely.

But the question lingered: Why was she—a militia worker, a lower-school dropout, and a recent traitor—one of the honored dead?

“How am I risen, Mother?”

“By the action of the symbiant.”

A trivial answer, using the outsiders’ word for the Other.

“I was never elevated, Mother.”

“But you died at the hands of the enemy, Rana.”

“I died in the arms of my lover,” she answered. The self-damning words surprised her in a dull way, but it seemed that it was not within the dead to lie.

The honored mother blinked.

“You were taken hostage, Rana Harter. A terrible experience. The minds of the living are fragile, and under stress they are bent with strange emotions. You suffered from a weakness called Stockholm Syndrome. Your ‘love’ for your captor was a perversion caused by the fear of death, a need to hang on to something, anything. But now you have faced death and crossed it, and your mind is clear. Those feelings will pass.” The adept brought her hands together. “Perhaps they have passed already, and you spoke out of habit.”