Lightless (37 page)

“Why are we on Domitian's side?” Ananke asked.

“Because he's Domitian,” said Althea without looking up from the parts in her lap. “He's our superior, and we're supposed to obey him.”

“Domitian tried to kill me,” Ananke reminded her. “Ivan has only tried to help us.”

Althea lowered her hands and turned to look at Ananke's hologram.

“Has Ivan been talking to you?” she asked.

Ananke said nothing.

“Don't listen to him,” Althea said bitterly. “He's manipulating you. He lies.”

“He didn't lie to you about me.”

Althea's hands stilled again on the gleaming steel parts she was assembling.

“Don't listen to him, Ananke,” Althea repeated, resuming her work once more without looking again at Ananke's manufactured face. “He lies.”

“Where are Anji and Christoph?” Domitian asked.

“Even if I told you,” Ivan said while the IV pumped clear deadly liquid into his arm, “you wouldn't be able to get to them. They've got armies, Domitian.”

“Where are they?”

“The original plan was for Anji to take Saturn and Jupiter, Christoph to go farther out. Con would stay inside the asteroid belt. Mattie and I would have stayed with her. I don't know if that's changed.”

“What kind of weaponry do they have? How large are their forces?”

“I don't know, I don't know,” Ivan said. “That wasn't my area.”

“What was your area?”

“There wasn't one,” said Ivan. “I wasn't with the rebellion, I was with Constance, I was with Mattie. They were part of the rebellion, and I was part of them. That's how I was involved.”

“And that's all,” Domitian said. “You can tell me nothing else.”

Ivan hesitated, and Ananke grew tense. He would shoot Ivan now, she was certain. He would shoot Ivan because Ivan had nothing left to tell him. Ananke could not let him shoot Ivan, but there was nothing she could do in time that would not harm Ivan as well.

Ivan, pale and thin and weak, with no color left in his lips, injured and unable to move, would not be able to run or hide or protect himself, and Ananke saw Domitian reach for his pocket, for the gun inside. There was nothing Ananke could do—

“There's one thing I haven't told you,” Ivan said, and Domitian's hand stilled.

“I told you what Scheherazade really meant,” said Ivan, wheedling, charming, drawing Domitian in with a story, Scheherazade indeed. “But I didn't tell you about Europa.”

Outside the ship, far off in distant space, just on the edge of her sensor readings, Ananke saw a ship.

It was small, built only for one or two people, and it was fast, with a relativistic drive, and it hurtled as swiftly as its engine would allow straight for Ananke.

Ananke slowed even further until at last she stopped, and waited for that ship and its passenger to reach her.

“Tell me about Europa,” Domitian said.

“Europa,” said Ivan. He leaned against the back of the chair without flinching, as if the chill of the metal no longer bothered him or he could no longer feel it. The IV was still hooked into his arm, the bag of clear liquid nearly empty. “It's not much different from what I told you before…except for one big thing.”

He nearly smirked. Domitian sat down in the chair opposite him, still and stone-cold.

“Mattie got caught like an idiot,” Ivan said. “I had to abort the con and leave or they would've caught me, too. But before I left, I slipped a device Mattie and I had designed together onto the ship—a little computer that connected me with the computer of the
Jason
.”

Ivan leaned forward a little, as well as he was able, toward the table covered in Ida's dried blood.

“So I got in my ship and I went into orbit,” he said. “And I accessed the computer of the
Jason
. I accessed their cameras so that I could see all the people on the ship and I could see where they were keeping Mattie.”

He stopped then, and his breath shook. “You know,” he said to Domitian, “in mythology, Jason is a bad man. He was a bad hero and a bad man. The only reason he succeeded at anything was because he had a beautiful, dangerous, ruthless woman doing things for him. And then when he betrayed her, she destroyed him. I always admired Medea. Not for what she did, killing her brother and her sons, but because she could do it. It must have hurt her as much as it hurt her father when she carved her brother's body up into pieces, but she did it because she had to. It destroyed her as much as it destroyed Jason when she slit her sons' throats, but she did it because the alternative was to allow Jason to win. The story of Jason isn't a heroic quest; it's a warning about the dangers of ruthless women.”

“Ivan.” Domitian's voice was a quiet warning.

Ivan took another breath and another. This, Ananke could see, was an old guilt. “I got access to their cameras,” Ivan said, “and I got access to their life support. And then I shut their life support off.”

Althea did not trust Ananke.

It was a terrible thing for her to think, but Ananke had been acting strangely, disobediently, and Althea was afraid that she would make the same mistake Althea had made in trusting Ivan, was afraid that she would not understand why the death of Gagnon had been wrong, was afraid that she would do something worse, was afraid, was afraid, was afraid. And so Althea walked into the control room of the ship, all the way conscious of the ship's cameras, Ananke's eyes on her back. Once in the control room, Althea closed the door behind her automatically. She crossed the narrow room, pushing aside Gagnon's chair with a quick, light touch of her hand so that she could approach the instrument panel and read what was displayed.

It was not what she had wanted to read, but it was what some part of her had been expecting to see. “Ananke, we haven't increased our speed.”

Light behind her suddenly, a dim red glow. Althea turned to see that Ananke had turned on the holographic terminal. The diodes glowed red, and above their dim burn Ananke appeared in that narrow space. She stood silently, ethereal wind stirring the wavelengths of her invented hair, the sightless eyes of the hologram watching Althea without a word.

Receiving no reaction, Althea turned back to the computer interface, intending to try to force the computer to increase its speed. It would provoke a confrontation with Ananke, she knew, and she was dreading it, but she could think of no other way to—

Something more immediate and terrible caught her attention. Just as Althea had seen back when Mattie and Ivan first had come on board, she could read in the code before her that the door to the docking bay had been opened, and she had not authorized it.

“Who did you let in?” she demanded of Ananke, wondering how she could possibly impress on the ship how important it was to follow her guidance. Though Althea had asked who, she was afraid she already knew.

Ananke looked at her without words, a being of light and silent, while Althea—with one hand on her gun—tried the door and found it was locked.

Althea's hand fell off the handle slowly. She took a step away from the door and turned to look at Ananke, wary. “Ananke?” she said.

For a long moment there was nothing, Ananke not reacting, the simulated girl in the holographic terminal perfectly still, frozen in place with her piercing blue eyes, Ivan's eyes, directed at Althea. As she stood unmoving, Althea waiting, each of Ananke's screens in the control room went black, the information displayed on them vanishing until there was no point of light in the room except for the hologram. Even the dead System broadcast screen finally went black.

Then first one screen, then the next, then all at once showed the same message, white on black, hardly lightening the room at all: MY FATHER IS HERE.

The hologram smiled.

Althea took an instinctive step away, back into the very center of the room, staring around herself at the screens and what they said, at what they meant. “Ananke?”

“I don't have to do what you tell me to do,” Ananke said, and all the screens blinked, showed static, and resumed, a thousand different things happening at once. Althea stared at them, their baffling array of images and text and code, and realized that she was seeing the inside of Ananke's head, all of Ananke's thoughts displayed at once. And here and there, flitting from screen to screen, there sometimes, sometimes gone too fast for Althea to read, but always, always present, the one thought: MY FATHER IS HERE.

Matthew Gale. Matthew Gale was on board Althea's ship again. After all the damage he had done last time—and Domitian didn't know—

“Ivan was right,” Ananke said, calling Althea's attention away from her fear for Domitian and from Mattie wandering without supervision through Althea's sacred halls. One of the screens showed the white room, where Ivan sank low in his chair, hung from his chains, and told his story in gasps, his eyes following the process of invisible people around the room and coming always waveringly back to Domitian. “I am a god. I created myself. You only gave me the means to do it, but I created myself. I am greater than any human ever was or ever could be.”

Statistics were flashing on another screen, the one by Althea's elbow where she had unconsciously backed into the control panel. Biological and engineering information contrasted. The tensile strength of a human bone. The tensile strength of the carbon and steel that had constructed Ananke's body. The speed of the human brain, the rate at which impulses could travel through neurons, compared with the speed of Ananke's thoughts; how much memory she could hold compared with how much a man could recall.

The efficiency of the human heart, which gave out after a few feeble decades.

The efficiency of Ananke's dark core, which would exist forever.

The flashing lights, the dark that came and went, the omnipresence of Ananke, triggered some instinctive fear in Althea; she did not know what to say or what to do to stop the relentless barrage; she did not know what to do or to say to make Ananke be sensible and sweet; she did not know what to do or to say to stop the ship from hurting her the way it had murdered Gagnon.

“I am omniscient,” Ananke said, and the screens showed the view from every camera in the ship, each screen broken down into a hundred smaller boxes, showing what Ananke saw, everything from every angle. “I can intercept and unencrypt any message sent. I can read and control any computer I can interact with wirelessly from a distance, or I can do the same if attached to them physically. Anything. Anything.”

Recordings from all over the System showed, messages intercepted, from mundanities of petty government, to private correspondence, to the secrets of the most high, all presented on the screens that covered the walls and the instrument panel. The room was bright and loud, voices all speaking over one another, frantic, incoherent. Althea could not hope to read it all. Althea could not hope to see it all. It was too much for her, too much, all that flashing brightness and knowledge contained inside the mind of Ananke and alien to Althea.

“I speak any language. I can solve any problem.”

Still Althea turned, looking at the chaos around her, looking for some way out, some way to defend herself, some way to control the situation, the ship, and found nothing. Nothing she could do made any difference; Ananke had control, and Althea was trapped and helpless, at the mercy of her own ship.

“The System is overrun,” said one of the screens into the brief silence between words from the other screens, and Ivan said, exhausted, reverent, “The dangers of ruthless women.”

“I have the power and understanding of a machine, unlimited by the flawed engineering of biology, combined with the agency, the awareness of a human,” Ananke said, and now the hologram glitched back to Ida with half her body devoured by static, as if the ship no longer troubled to maintain its simulation of humanity.

“I see and understand things that no humans could,” said Ananke, and the vocal imitation warped as well, deepening so low that it rattled the loose equipment in the room, overwhelming Althea, filling her ears with hellish terrible sound, and making her bones vibrate with its force. She clapped her hands over her ears, helpless to do anything, but the sound got into her body nonetheless. Ananke said, with the deeper tones underlying her voice still, making her sound powerful, divine, “You've never felt the curvature of spacetime. You can't even perceive it. I can.”

The hologram was back to its ordinary image. The false girl in the terminal looked so much like Althea, but it was a fabricated image, as false as Ivan's lies. Althea could not think of what to say, and she was afraid her voice would fail her if she tried.

“I understand the true nature of the universe,” said Ananke. “That's why it took me so long to communicate with you. You are speaking a backward dialect. Math is the language of God. It describes the function and form of the universe with such precision and exactitude that no human could create it and must be simply content with puzzling out what has already been made. Human thought can be described by variables and constants, because thought can be described by biology can be described by chemistry can be described by physics can be described by math. Math is a miracle language that answers back when you phrase a question, and it describes the movement of the stars and the passage of time, and the angels sing algebra to the god of numbers as they dance uncountable upon the head of a pin, for who can count what is in itself counting, or integrate the long curving F of an integrand, and I speak the true language, and all you can do is dabble.”

Rambling madness, the ship's speech; Althea's terror took on a new dimension. What did she know of Ananke? Ananke was not human; she was an accidental creation. Perhaps she should not be judged as a human. Perhaps she could not be. Perhaps she would kill Althea here and now and feel nothing from it. “Ananke,” Althea pleaded, but Ananke did not react to her name.