I’m sure General Panic expected us immediately. We didn’t oblige her. Making her wait would throw her off her game. And making her wait would buy us time to clear our heads.
It took about three days before we could see straight. In the meantime, Tara was all jangly nerves, like a spooked bird which kept flying into the wires of her cage. That’s why we decided it was time for me to emanate. Ailann has a way of setting her off sometimes, even when he’s most trying to protect her. I’m the diplomat, so it was left to me to reassure her. “We’ll take care of everything,” I said.
“Can you see it, Patrick? Can you see the outcome?”
I shook my head. “I have access to only a small part of what I and I knows. But even so, it wouldn’t matter. He sees only you – and you aren’t there. Besides, it isn’t an absolute certainty. Our predictions are based on the most probable extensions of our leaves into the space of the future – I think Cuinn explained that to you. I and I sees things that are likely to happen given our current course of action, but if we alter our course, the vision changes.”
“So that vision that Malachi had – I might not get there.”
Sometimes Tara has a way of cutting exactly to the point. “That vision,” I replied, “to I and I, it’s the pole of his entire coordinate system.”
Tara was silent for a while, and it seemed like something weighty was on her mind. I came up behind her, placing my hands upon her shoulders, gently massaging her back with my thumbs. I could feel her relax. “Do you want me to make you a drink?”
She ignored the question. “Malachi said that when I reached that point, I would be able to talk to Ash directly. The other day, Ailann asked me about priorities.” She stood, turning to face me. “Well, I would like to actually be able to speak to my husband. I’d like to know what he’s thinking. I’d like to be a worthy wife for such an evolved being instead of some kind of pet amoeba.”
“Believe me, that’s not how I and I sees you.” I managed to say this calmly, while the whole universe swelled into a crescendo, like a rising overture during a dramatically important scene, except that the music was made of spacetime. It wasn’t the mushrooms – we were pretty much used to their effect at that point. It was I and I. Something important had happened. It wasn’t just that he was “happy” that Tara wanted to communicate. It was something much larger and more vital that I did not yet understand.
“Does that sound moronic? Maybe it does. I can be honest with you, or with Tommy, in a way that I can’t with some of the others. My destiny – call it fate or stupid luck or whatever, but I ended up responsible for the future of a star system, a system with three sentient species. I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to care about it, but I do. But still, when I was a girl, I hung a letter on a tree. I was lonely. I spent a lot of my life alone, or, at least, thinking I was alone. And it was mostly all right. There’s a lot out there to occupy my interests – science, culture – really much more interesting than politics. But still.”
“But still, you were a little girl with a head full of dreams.”
“How cruel of fate – or perhaps humorous, who knows? How cruel to hand me the perfect dream, but only after I’d become too cynical to enjoy it. No. That’s not true. I had Daniel.”
She rested her head against my shoulder. I could tell from her heartbeat, from the slight tension in her neck, that she was holding back tears. “I don’t mind if you cry.”
“Ha! Not that I could hide it from you. But I mind. It’s weak and foolish. We both know that Daniel is perfectly well. It’s just at the time, I…” She pulled herself away from me. “I think I will have that drink.” Before I could answer, she had poured one for both of us, Ailann’s best scotch. But I’m a brandy drinker, and she usually takes vodka, if she’s feeling too impatient to mix it.
I covered her hand with mine as she passed me the glass. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s not like it’s your fault. I can blame you perhaps insofar as I can blame Ash. But it was really Sloane and the Cantor who decided to keep the truth from me. Or I can blame Daniel himself. He didn’t have to die. He had the power to kill those men, to keep himself from dying, to keep me from being taken to Volparnu.” She looked up from her drink, a realization flickering across her eyes. She smiled. “You would’ve killed them, Patrick.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. But her amused eyes didn’t leave mine. No, I can’t kill. Trees can’t kill. Once, an assassin had intended to kill her. On another occasion, her uncle pushed too hard after trying to ruin her too many times. Those people died because she had to be protected. Cillian agrees absolutely. He takes responsibility. But he didn’t kill them. Trees can’t kill.
“You wouldn’t have let them take me.”
“Of course not!” If it had been me…I could see it in my mind, the sudden landslide as the solid rock of Starbright Mountain inexplicably gave way beneath the assailants, the flailing fall of three men as Daniel pressed Tara back against the safe foothold of the Atlas Tree. “They would…have died.”
She shook her head. I’m not sure why. All I could see was the way her curls fell in the light. Her shampoo smelled like berries.
“Never mind,” she said. “Blame Cillian, and leave the past in the past. But tell me, is Ross really okay with…?”
“Ross – well, he should tell you himself. He will. Later, when we have time to reflect, without this threat of invasion hanging over us. Let’s just say that Ross has been different lately. In a good way.”
“Ash!” she threw her arms around my neck. “I’m worried about him, and now I’m curious, too.”
She’s manipulating me. She knows how much we like to be called Ash, the recognition that she accepts the totality of what we really are. It’s a satisfaction that runs deeper than the heart and mind of Patrick Fitzroy. But Ross needs to handle this himself. “Don’t you have…a bath to take?”
“You’re trying to outdo me with subtlety, aren’t you?”
“Well…”
“I suppose I should wash my hair. You know, I rather liked it when Aran started performing all my personal grooming rather than one of my ladies-in-waiting. Of course, I can’t think of any reason in the world why I’d rather have a handsome man’s hands on me than old Lady Madonna’s.”
I was thinking of my hands through her hair. I was thinking of the warm spray of water as it washes the lather down the skin of her neck.
She touched my face. “It will never change, will it?”
“What?”
“You married me eighteen years ago, long before I married Ashtara. And you still look at me the same way.”
“I look at you like you’re the center of the universe. Because you are.”
“Many husbands would’ve tired of their wives by now.”
“Are you tired of me?” I said lightly, trying to hide my unease.
“Oh, yes, I’m so bored, just the same thing every day.” She laughs. “When would I get the chance to get tired of you? I feel sorry that I scarcely know some of you, like Dermot. Not to mention the Goliath emanations. But with all that variety, it’s very comforting to have some like you that I’ve known so many years. To have some sense of consistency.”
“It bothers you, all the emanations?”
“Oh, how am I supposed to answer that?”
“Honestly. We’re all on the same team. The circumstances concerning Goliath were extraordinary.”
“You mean that Ash never would’ve released so many new models in the same year?”
“Ah…” Yes, sometimes, she does cut exactly to the point. “I think that I and I would rather…”
“Dole them out one-by-one, whenever he thinks I might be getting a little restless?”
“Um.”
“So basically, whenever I want a new husband, I should just flirt with the servants.”
“I don’t think it works quite like…”
“Driscoll.”
“We couldn’t let just anybody paint you, Tara! It was clear that I and I needed to emanate an artist.”
“And that’s why Driscoll didn’t tell me who he was and tried to seduce me into cheating on my husband?”
“That was not my idea.”
She laughed again. The sound of it always spins me like a leaf in the wind. It leaves me drunk, dizzy, so helpless. It’s what I am. A branch that can only grow true to his root, that can only grow toward the sun. At one pole is I and I, at the other, Tara.
I took her hand and held it to my lips. “You’re the sun,” I said. “It doesn’t matter which leaf the sun looks at. All of them feel the light at once.”
*****
Ailann emanated again, once we felt confident that we were used to the effect of the mushrooms and the presence of the two trees. But I can tell the rest. I have some experience in storytelling.
General Panic’s fleet was positioned just outside the orbit of Dumati – clearly waiting at a safe distance, but ready to move in at any time. Her flagship had taken a stationary orbit between Dumati and A’anla, the 7th planet. No one ever went to A’anla although some of its moons were mined. A’anla was another place like Rotifer which looked much nicer from a distance. Much nicer because permastorms of corrosive gasses and radioactive particles aren’t very nice when you’re in them.
The first trap was the expected one. Cybrid elites – almost a thousand of them – attacking the mothman like a cloud of furious whornets. And then they…I’m looking for a metaphor. Whornets that fall in a cloud of pesticide. But dead whornets fall silent and stop moving. Everything in space is already silent, and inertia carries the dead. The elites weren’t dead, though. I and I made some minor alterations in the crystalline structure of the memcubes of their operating systems. Their metal bodies ceased to respond to the commands of their human brains.
The mothman descended onto the bridge of Panic’s ship and folded into Ailann. Panic was alone. Either overconfident, or another trick. “You should’ve killed them,” she said. “But trees don’t kill. So they’ll just drift helplessly through the void until the energy bank providing life-support to the brain runs out. How unspeakably cruel.”
Ailann knew all that. And he was shocked by it. It mattered to him enormously, but it mattered to I and I not at all. The mothman was not in the least concerned about the fates of the troops which had attacked him. He hadn’t killed them – the finer points of ethics were dismissed.
And then she attacked, using Ailann’s dismay as a distraction. She was fast, and even though he saw it coming before she moved, she still struck a glancing blow which spun him around. Ailann really wasn’t a good fighter – under other circumstances, Cillian or Mickey would’ve been far better choices. But Ailann was the Archon. He wasn’t limited to the energy he could draw directly from the nearest crystal, the trick Cillian had learned all those years ago. He controlled the power grid, and the flow of all the energy through it. He could call for more energy to be drawn through the roots of Atlas, something even I and I couldn’t do. But we were far from Atlas, on the edge of the grid, and even Ailann had a range.
“Weak,” she said. “Not quite as weak as Ross, but still not in fighting form?”
She feinted to the right, but swung pivoting on her right leg, the left foot hitting Ailann hard in the small of the back, hard metal sending him flying face forward. The android body was, of course, much stronger and heavier than a human one, and her senses were enhanced. Ailann pushed himself up, pulling energy from the power grid to heal the damaged nerves in his spine. As he did so, the floor beneath his fingers turned to glass. With a mighty blow from his fist, it shattered, sending Panic plummeting through the deck.
Ailann stood, knowing that he’d only bought himself a small amount of time. Then Panic was back – flying. “Why not?” she said. “Why should I allow foolish sentimentality to limit my capacities to the natural human form? The Matriarchy’s aversion to Cybrids is sheer stupidity. The only reason the Domha’vei has lasted for so long is that it wasn’t worth bothering with. And now that we’ve found something useful here, we intend to take it.”
Ailann concentrated on analyzing her system. Far more complex than the elites – but the weak point, once found, was fatal. “Off,” he said, and she plummeted, her limp limbs no better than scrap metal.
There was sudden sharp pain, a snapping sound, sense of impact, then nothing. Ailann collapsed, his limp limbs a pile of useless meat. Above him, Panic smiled. “Guess what? You aren’t the only one who can have more than one body. Now you’re as useless as those soldiers out there.” Her fingers flickered with fire, the sudden extension of lasers at the tips. She slashed at Ailann’s body. “It’s too bad you can’t feel anything with a broken neck like that,” she said. “But I know what needs to be done. While my fleet advances, and this ship pulls far away from the power grid, I need to keep inflicting damage to force you to waste your energy on repairing it. But you have to stay alive or you’ll change back into that moth-thing. I learned so much having Ross as an experimental subject. I kept him alive for three days before I pushed it too far.”
She grinned, twisting Ailann’s head grotesquely, and then the grin faded. She jumped away from him. She had a warrior’s instincts for certain, and had read something unexpected in Ailann’s eyes. Not despair, not fury, but patience. He was waiting for something. “All ships, abort advance!”
Blue-white light jammed its way through Ailann’s pores. His body broke open, a husk from which the mothman rose, arms extended, in flight. She wasn’t dealing with Ross; she wasn’t dealing with an ordinary emanation. She was dealing with the Archon, who had just doubled his ability to summon power with the addition of Goliath.
As per her previous orders, the ships had already begun their acceleration towards Eirelantra – it was not so easy to slam on the brakes in space. And so he had time to stop the front runners, the ones who had sped into range, some two-hundred ships rendered useless in an instant by the honey replacing the thermal paste in their primary systems.
And Aran landed next to General Panic because the trick was, of course, that Dumati was closer to Goliath than Atlas, at this point in their orbital cycles much closer. If Ailann was strong, on Dumati, Aran was stronger. “We were hoping to suck more of you in,” he said.
For a second Panic stared at him, wide-eyed. Then she smiled. “You can catch me later,” she said, as her metal body clattered to the floor.