Agnosis

He stares off into space. Not literal space, not outer space, but at nothing, letting his eyes blur and the colors of the nothingness run together until they swirl and dance and gradually fade into a pistache of dull and incoherent brush strokes, the way a surrealist paints if he isn’t particularly good. He feels the constant, gnashing rumble of the thrusters vibrating up through the deck plates and the outer shell of the fixed hull so that the whole ship seems to ring at a pitch just beyond the limits of his hearing. It makes his skin crawl. His stomach flips and curls, trying perhaps to latch itself onto his spine, which it more than likely believes to be an anchor of stability, or at least not vibrating in time with the viscous sack of his body. There’s a tickle in the back of his throat that tastes like metal, or like he’s touched his tongue to both terminals of a battery at once–that coppery taste that kids like so much–but it’s been in his mouth for so long now that he suspects he’s going to have to run to the head again. Or wobble to the head is more likely. He’d forgotten how difficult it was to walk in simulated gravity, even to navigate a straight corridor, when the flesh is being pummeled by a hundred different tidal forces and balance-point shifts at once.

He’s space sick. Space sick! Just like some fresh-meat muzzle monkey strapped into a g-suit and burning for Sae Phen. It’s embarrassing.

He has never liked space travel, and the body forgets the things it doesn’t like. Forgets the pain of childbirth and broken arms, sprained ankles and dislocated knees. It’s what keeps us getting out of bed in the morning, because if we remembered, even for a moment, how vulnerable and miserable our bundled nerve endings could make us, most of us would never leave our rooms. We’d wrap ourselves in cocoons of comfort and protection and wile away our waking years immersed in virtual fantasies of living that were completely immune to suffering and age and violence.

Hmmm.

So he sits on a bunk of sturdy grey steel bolted to one of the outer bulkheads in a cabin two decks off-center from the onion ball of the ship that is the Proletariat Horde. He leans forward with his feet on the floor and his hands over his stomach, his body folded completely in two so that his chin rests on his knees and his eyes are pointed at (what passes for) the ground. Recent experience has taught him that he’s the most comfortable this way, the least likely to hurl stringing arcs of projectile vomit across the claustrophobically narrow room and against the, under most circumstances, unoffending wall. Karo and Marilea and a few of the others have amused themselves by banging down the multiple, incestuous helices of stairwells within the ship’s guts to check on him and to pass along their advice for coping with space sickness, as well as sundry other well-meant cajoleries. How it’s better in the long run if he bounce himself around a bit. How this misery will fade once his system adapts, and that it will fade much faster if he takes an active interest in educating his physical senses in the rudimentary physics of counter-intuitive spatial cognizance.

He has thanked them all for their concern and merrily informed them in which direction it would be best for them to take when going to hell.

It isn’t even like this is the worst craphopper he’s ever been on. There were some Scalpel class cruisers back in the day that he still believes were so cramped he could have stuffed them into one of the closets in has apartment. Those had been so narrow and so tight (for the sole purpose of carrying an insane thrust-to-mass ratio, he’d been told) that there had to be traffic signals hung at the intersections of corridors to keep crewmen from colliding in the middle. This ship was a dream compared to most of the naval scrap Trithemius Orbis passed off as military transportation. She was solid as a rock, deftly modified with numerous open spaces and cozy antechambers, responsive in the turns and gloriously vector-baffled. Karo said she wafted through the vacuum like a feather on the air.

Karo, obviously, had neglected to take the feather’s perspective into account.

Amara, on the other hand, says that he just has a sensitive tummy. She jumps about the decks like a schoolgirl tackling the new playground jungle gym. He tries not to hold this against her, even though she uses words like tummy in his presence and insists on patting it whenever she comes into the cabin to see about him.

He should have known when they boarded the drop-shuttle at the Southrange Skyway and launched for the orbital docking station that this was a bad idea. The acceleration had all gone to his head, despite the g-couch he’d been strapped to and the literal way in which he’d followed all the shuttle captain’s instructions to prevent high altitude discomfort.

The problem was that he’d not been in the proper frame of mind. He’d done what he was told without internalizing it, and so hadn’t adequately prepared himself for the reality of space flight. He’d been too busy thinking about Lily. Shouldering his gear and trundling off to whatever awaited them, he’d kissed her on the cheek and said goodbye, just as he’d done so many times before. But this wasn’t any other time. He was leaving the planet of his birth. Not for the first time certainly, but for what very well might be the last time. At the last moment, just as the ominous, white elephant silence had fallen between them, Danek had given him that hard look, and Dorian had choked back any thought he might have been entertaining about saying all the things to Lily that he needed to in that moment.

He’d just wanted to tell her that he loved her one more time, and that he was still sorry. He wanted her to know those things. He wanted to hear himself saying them and see her knowing them just this once more, just in case it was the last time.

But if he’d begun, she would have seen a look in his eye or heard a break in his voice that would have spoiled Danek’s secret, and then they would have both been in trouble. She would have been fierce and angry, and that would have been how he’d have to remember her if they never met again…and that would have been worse.

Women were too freaking complicated. That’s what that was all about. No matter what you tried to say, it was going to be wrong, so you might as well just shut up about it. That was undoubtedly why Danek had looked at him so hard. He was an old married guy. He probably had all this stuff more or less figured out.

And partly, though it is completely irrational, he blames the Misfit Toys for all of his miseries. If they hadn’t been so efficient at stripping their gear, coordinating their exit and shoving all their crap into the caravan of moving trucks they had arrived in, he might have been better prepared, both for the departure and the aftermath. If they hadn’t been so happy and receptive and bubbling with good-natured camaraderie, he might not feel so lousy for having lied to them all, or at least participating in the lie Raville had told them. Most of all, if he didn’t have so much in common with them, this glorious band of pirates, he wouldn’t feel so conflicted and troubled and immedicably, hopelessly lost.

Because more than anything, their joyous pleasure in simply being, in embracing life and purpose, and simultaneously, clinging to one another, never ceases to remind him that Amara is the pearl. As much as she means to him, and for all they’ve been through together, it’s useless for him to cling to her. She doesn’t belong to him. She doesn’t even belong to the universe in which he has discovered her, and no matter what else happens, whether the war is averted or not, the process of her awakening has begun. With each passing moment, she comes nearer to the threshold through which only the pearl may emerge, and then to the event horizon that will strip away her human husk and leave behind the pure and elemental consciousness that delights not in John Dorian, but only in the significant features of his individuated data.

The Misfit Toys are bearing them irrevocably to that threshold. He can’t stop it, can’t drive it off. Even now, they’re all just walking out the path Raville has set before them. Amara is becoming something beyond his comprehension, and as a result, he is becoming, too.

He is becoming empty.

Dorian falls back onto the bunk and lays still. His stomach tries to forget about gravity and float off toward the ceiling where it might be happier. He feels green.

But after awhile, these feelings pass. He traces the slow curve of the hull with his eyes as it slopes up toward the ceiling, and is reminded that the ship is a tumbling oblong rotating around a fixed, hyperdense core and encased within a cigar shaped blast hull. He doesn’t understand how this arrangement creates gravity, and wonders if he would feel any less putrid if he did. Understanding things is how he’s always made himself feel better. Understanding the code that drives the Strand; understanding a few known people instead of strangers in convenient wrappers. Understanding himself, most of all, or at least believing that he did.

It’s time for him to start understanding the mystery that his life has become.

Ray says it will take them only a few weeks to reach Glastenhame.

For some reason, he doesn’t think that will be nearly long enough.

After a few days of soft foods and abject misery, he is able to ramble more or less at will throughout the ship’s intestinal tract. He finds the galley where the off-duty crew assembles for communal meals more often than not. He passes a few (more or less) vomit-less meals with whoever happens to be about. There’s usually someone about, even between scheduled feedings, four to six of the twenty-four members of the Misfit Toys, sitting around sipping coffee and watching triDvid recaps of tech news or local sports scores. More often than not, he ends up swapping dork stories with other bitheads in an increasingly hysterical exchange of one-upmanships.

Oh yeah? Well I once scaled some corporate ice so dense…

That’s nothing. I once went after a mobile military unit hedged with broadwall Skeeterware with only…

Helloooo! We were doing that in Secondary school…

It’s chummy and familiar. They talk like breathing p2p sessions, rapid-fire and constantly interrupting one another, punctuating their more outrageous declarations with shorthand finger smilies, as though they don’t trust words and body language alone to convey their attitudes. Dorian wonders if they’re having these conversation partially in geek, but doesn’t ask. He doesn’t want them to know that he’s still afraid to use his foam for fear of Ray’s eavesdropping.

He locates the dispensary, presided over by fluttery Marilea, who routinely and quietly dispenses to him small red anti-nausea pills which seasoned space crews call Wussies. She does this with a precocious theatricality, index finger to lips, shushing him. She also has him follow her deep into the stacks of the med storage compartment, where she makes a point of brushing his arm with some of her less public willowy bits and wiggling her eyebrows at him. He invariably rubs his stomach significantly and begs off. Probably couldn’t get the thrust tube firing anyway, as lousy as he feels. She’s got meds for that, too, of course.

Once or twice, when he is able to whip his courage into a frenzy, he slides along arching gangways and up spiraling stairwells to the bridge and watches Ray or Ghast and the duty crew piloting the ship. It doesn’t seem like piloting to him. Nav, Comm, Data, and Watch Officer, they’re locked away in a nest of monitors and jump-racks fed by kilometers of twisting, bundled grid cable that links to sensors spread all along the outer hull of the ship. Most of the monitors display reeling lines of amber text, redundant code descriptions of system manipulations occurring within the nav network, where the real work is done through the mediation of sensually pleasing wrappers. On Ray’s shift, that wrapper is an 18th century British Man-o-War traversing a boundless sea of blue ocean swells with an everpresent northeasterly wind billowing the sails. Outside of geek, Dorian watches the duty crew swaying in their seats and rolling in time with nonsensical ocean swells. He is given to understand in hushed tones that Mr. Ghast prefers a Peter Pan render, where the bridge crew lazily wafts along silken London breezes, and one of his favorite pastimes is to leap to his feet and declare First star to the right, then straight on ‘til morning!

Dorian has begun to suspect, largely on this evidence alone, that Ghast is insane, but it’s of a let’s-keep-this-in-mind variety rather than a stompy-footed something-must-be-done-about-him sort, so he merely files this factoid away for later scrutiny and tries not to hold it against him. Ghast keeps his cudgels handy even aboard ship, so Dorian has adopted a live and let live philosophy for most of their personal interactions.

All in all, the bridge is not nearly as impressive as he had expected it to be. For the ungeeked passenger surveying the navigation process with an objective eye, it’s difficult to escape the impression that they might just as convincingly be supporting a telecommunications conglomerate as plotting a course through the stars. He finds the whole experience more than a bit disappointing.

On the other hand, this disappointment acts as a sort of event ping to remind him that for lack of anything constructive to occupy his attention, Dorian ought to use his time to delve into his foam architecture and begin rehabilitating the datascape he destroyed. He does his best to disassemble his operating code line by line and patch any security holes that might exist between the original environment and Ray’s ceded foam. He is determined to root out any exploits that the Misfit Toys might try to use in the future. He’s done giving them a free ride. This would be an overwhelming task under normal circumstances, and he’s without many of the tools he’s accustomed to using for the sort of scaling it requires. The utilities are inside his working foam environment (i.e. Ray’s foam), and it occurs to him that merely accessing them is enough to clue Ray into the fact that Dorian plans on cutting him out of the loop.

So it’s slow going.

To distract himself, he writes scripts to run up against the tarball that is Raville’s datacore and decompile the data structures into seedable formats his mem extensors can read. This should be his top priority, to tell the truth. With each day that passes, the Proletariat Horde plunges deeper into Janite space and nearer to Glastenhame, which is nothing less than a terminal event. Array hardware does not translate through zap. This is not so much due to technological limitations as it is a practical manifestation of the Keep It Simple, Stupid philosophy. It takes all of a week in most cases to have a fully functional, state of the art seenop array bio-implanted and synchronized with the Strand. Human schemes are sufficiently complex just attempting to accurately replicate specific individual organisms without adding a few million gigabytes to the data pool just for the convenience of having an intact array coming out of the nanomech vats. Without an array, he cannot access his foam. Without his foam, he can’t get at the tarball and delve into the warrens of Raville’s secret knowledge. Thus, if he’s going to be of any use to Amara once they reach Giari Tau, he must extract the tarball prior to Glastenhame. Q.E.flippin.D.

He is going to miss his military issue array. Some of the new models are faster and more render savvy, but over the years, he’s gotten used to the quirks of the old one and done a fair bit of his own modification. Not to mention, he dreaded (DREADED) having to de-tool a new consumer set to strip out all the adware and subscription services that came pre-loaded in even the high end consumer cortical hardware.

But even knowing this, he is having difficulty motivating himself to focus on the scripting process. By his own count, he’s already three days behind where he should be. He tries to blame his failures on space sickness, but since the Wussies have largely alleviated the worst of his symptoms, he instead attributes his depleted attention span to fatigue.

Dorian isn’t sleeping well at all. Actually, his body is sleeping just fine. It’s his mind that can’t seem to unwrap itself from the knots he’s tied it in. Every night, he dutifully folds himself into the upper bunk in the cabin and closes his eyes in rest, and every night, he dreams.

He dreams of Amara’s voice, cool and soft like the touch of fur against his face. She whispers to him across a gulf of impenetrable night. I used to tell myself stories when I was a child, she says. I would lay in bed after mother had put out the lights, staring up through the solar at the hard, glimmering stars, and I would imagine what it was like to be someone else. I built elaborate fantasies of people, places and events. I imagined myself a heroic presence, rescuing the weak, delivering the poor. Sometimes I was Nasha Gydek, the woman who liberated Kyrgistan from neo-Xian oppressors. I was Pythagoras, plumbing the mysteries of trigonometry and bringing enlightenment to a savage age. I was Newton. I was Luria. I was Hermes the Thrice-Great. I dreamed mysteries for myself, wove them like tapestries, began after a time to believe the stories I whispered in my own ear more than the contradictory histories of these people that have been passed down through the years. Gowan Morgan had it right, I would say to myself. There are things that people believe, and will always believe, as long as history lasts. There are stories we tell about ourselves as human beings, about our emergence in this swath of space, that are fundamental to who we are. Those stories are the structure which underlies everything we know about ourselves, and they are the screen through which all of our experiences are filtered. And even if we discover that most of them are wrong, that even our basic assumptions about what we are happen to be flawed, most of us wouldn’t change. We have too much invested in our illusions to throw them aside just because they’re inaccurate. That’s why Gowan came to Sae Phen. It was small, isolated, ripe. Truth could be planted there and the seeds cherished until they could grow into something wonderful. How I admired him! I dreamed his life in apocryphal detail until it was, in some ways, more real to me than my own.

I believed they were stories my mother had told me, or bits of trivia I had picked up in my studies and subsequently forgotten. But now I don’t know…

On and on it would go, throughout the whole night. Sometimes, Dorian awakes with a start, and springs up in the dark, uncertain of where he is, or even of who he is. He is soaked with sweat and trembling like a snared rabbit. He still hears the echo of Amara’s voice in his thoughts.

And from the bunk below, she tells him he is safe, he is well, he is not alone.

As his eyes adjust to the faint orange light of the service lamps above the door, he rolls onto his side and peers at her over the edge of his bed. There she lays, often with her hands behind her head, her eyes open, watching him as he watches her. There is sometimes, he imagines, a light in her eyes that the laws of optics cannot adequately explain. He thinks that she hasn’t slept since they boarded.

He worries that she doesn’t need to anymore.

And he is frightened.

On one of these days, Dorian sits in the public lounge off the mess hall, nestled into a comfortable couch with his head on one arm, his feet on the other and a stylus driven data pad propped on his belly. On the floor beside him is a stainless steel carafe and a half-empty cup of java brewed so thick it threatens to crawl away under its own power every few minutes. The coffee has gone cold and his head aches. He chews on the end of the stylus and goes over the algorithms he’s working on for converting the tarball again. He’s been getting data type and load failure errors from his latest batch of scripts, and he can’t see where the problem is with the codeline compiler’s log files, so he’s taken yet another step back into the Stone Age and reduced himself to working the sticky bits out with pencil and paper.

He is deeply enmeshed in a professional crisis and considering a clean change of careers since he’s obviously unfit for this one, when Karo bangs through the lounge bulkhead and throws himself, cursing, into a tall gel-chair on the opposite side of the room. Dorian looks up, happy to have a distraction, and tucks the data pad away beside him.

“What’s up, guy?” he says.

Karo snorts and mutters something profane. He’s kneading the arm of the gel-chair into squishy little mountains, a whole chain of them, then meticulously poking their tops with his finger. It takes Dorian a moment to realize that these are fairly faithful renders of massive volcanoes.

He decides it would probably be a good idea to collect his stuff and leave the lounge to Karo so he could erupt in privacy.

But Karo mashes the potential Vesuvii flat with the palm of his hand and snarls. “That’s always the way it is, ain’t it? You got your hotshot coders, your quick-fab system infiltrators, your rough responders. It’s like a freakin’ ladder, right? Top Dog, Number Two, Techies–” He’s slotting these positions on an imaginary scale that starts at eye level and drops a bit with each category. When he runs out of easy classifications, he makes a huge drop and jabs his finger at a nebulous space just below his knee. “–and way down here at the bottom, you slot your cooks and grubs. Machinists, janitors, bucket monkeys. All the squids as actually keep this tub bouncing, what do we get? Nothing. No joy. We always get left out.”

Dorian realizes he is taking his life into his own hands. “What are you talking about? Always get left out of what?”

“Insertion teams!” He pounds the arm of his chair, leaving a dent big enough to hide a tomcat in. “Somebody has to stay with the ship, they says. Somebody has got to cook for them that’s left behind, and if we stick Mali with it, we’re going to have a mutiny on our hands from them that’s made to stay. You know what that means, don’t you? It’s gonna be me and Mali and Gordo just like always. Can’t even play a decent hand of cards with just three, and even if we could, we wouldn’t, cuz Mali is a big cheat.”

Dorian climbs to his feet, pad under one arm, mug and carafe precariously balanced in the other. He takes a tentative step or two toward the door. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Ray posted the duty roster for the Giari Tau operation,” Karo says, rumbling. The ample real estate of his face has transmuted from silver to pink, neckline to forehead. “Don’t need no cook on the frontier, I guess. Like a cook is all I am. I was a Marine, same as them. I’ve done my share of dirty. But no, it’s swab this, wash that, whar’s my lunch, whar’s my dinner! We don’t need you for the important crap, Karo, just for clean shorts.” He humphed himself into an approximation of calm. “I’d just like to see how far they’d get without clean shorts.”

“Yeah, really. That sucks,” Dorian says as he edges nearer the exit. “Nobody ever respects the guy who does all the dirty work.”

Karo slaps his hands against his face and squishes his jowls together creating an impressive impersonation of a Boston terrier. He scrubs them around a little, then flops back, splaying his arms and legs and heaves a mighty sigh.

“Bah.”

“Bah, indeed.” Dorian has his hand on the door, ready to pull and run. All he needs is an opportunity. “Better luck next time, eh? This whole Giari Tau thing is probably just going to be a tedious pain in the butt anyway. Really. Me and Amara wouldn’t even go if we didn’t have to, you know.”

“Right! You and Amara. That’s what I was doing, before I checked the roster, I mean. Your lass is up on the obs port. She asked me to find you so as she could have a, uh, you know, word.” Karo gives him a sexy look, which might have been the single most disturbing thing Dorian has seen in his entire life. “You know where that is?”

“Deck Eight?” he guessed.

“Six. Take the central lift, exit on the right, all the way to the end of the corridor. Can’t miss it.” Karo blows out another deep sigh. “She’s a fine girl, John. All kinds of funny, though. Quirky, I guess you’d call it. You look at her and you can’t help but think there’s something more going on behind those pretty lizard eyes than you can get a handle on. Know what I mean? And when she’s talking and gets that faraway look to her, you just never know what’s going to pop out of her mouth. That’s depth is what that is.” He makes a twirling motion with his fingers on the left side of his skull, the universal pantomime for either bats-in-the-belfry crazy or Heavy Mental Machinery at Work. “A fine, complex woman. She’s one of them–what do you call it–ethereal beauties. Not my type, of course. I’d have to spend too much time just figuring what the heck was coming out of her mouth to really enjoy her. But that wouldn’t stop me from trying to lick her up one side and down the other, my man. No offense to any proprietary claims you might hold on her, of course.”

“None taken.” Dorian pulls the door open. “I’d better get up there, then.”

“I understand. Don’t want to keep that one waiting. No, sir.”

Before Karo can start up again, Dorian thanks him for relaying the message and bolts out into the corridor. He hopes fervently that Karo has not worked himself up to sharing his opinion of her with Amara herself. Or with anyone else, for that matter. He thinks this for all the wrong reasons, most of which do not include an honorable defense of Amara’s virtuous reputation.

Because if Karo has begun to think her a little odd, what might others be thinking? Especially others like Ray, who routinely gives the impression that he has guessed more than he is telling.

There’s too much flight time until Glastenhame for him to feel comfortable with Ray knowing much of anything about Amara.

He takes the lift as instructed to Deck Six, wavers for a moment when the doors open on either side, then remembers that Karo told him to bend to the right. This level appears to be mostly technical. The doors that open on either side are of heavy steel construction, their surfaces painted dull gray. Each one has a numeric keypad that serves a secure magnetic lock. Above the doorways are louvered vents exhaling warm gusts of ozone heavy air. It’s like walking past stalls of sleeping dragons.

At the end of the corridor is another lift. Dorian presses the button marked “Open” on the control panel and the doors part with a hydraulic wheeze. On the wall inside of the carriage is a sign, bordered in red, that advises him he’s about to leave the ship’s simulated gravitational field and should catch hold of one of the straps dangling from the ceiling if he doesn’t want to bump his head. It also reminds him to select a belt clip from the lockbox below the panel and keep it handy. He chooses the obs port as his destination from a menu of terminus options and braces himself. Now would be a good time to remember all of those zero-g combat drills from basic training, he thinks. They say it’s like riding a bicycle, but Dorian has never learned to do that, so he isn’t exactly sure what is meant by it.

The lift turns out to be a tram of sorts that smoothly accelerates about the onion decks of the inner hull, clacking past unseen interchanges and lurching every few moments as it switches to alternate tracks. He gets used to swinging from strap to strap, fluttering above the floor of the tram car like a butterfly. It only aggravates his stomach a little, and he manages an impressive feat of acrobatics to retrieve, open and ingest one of the quick dissolving Wussies Marilea has given him. Without gravity to assist in his digestion, the pill lodges halfway down his throat and sticks there despite his dry swallows. After several minutes, a route display on the indicator panel pings to inform him that he has arrived at a terminus on the outer decking, a bubble tucked up between the broad conical flanges of two of the external engine housings. It seems an odd place to find himself in the middle of an afternoon. Thinking this makes his throat clench a little.

The doors slide open and he gently kicks off against the back wall to generate some momentum. The obs port is a cramped plastisheen dome raised like a pimple above a circular well of heavy decking. There are bolted handgrips along the base for free navigation, but the dome has also been cleverly strung with safety wires that traverse its length and breadth, each pathway strung with coordinating grips fastened to the floor beneath. Dorian snaps in to the wire mounted immediately outside the doors and begins to make his way hand over hand to the center of the room, where there is a clustered circle of g-couches, all facing inward. If he looks up, he cannot escape the impression that he is floating free in empty space, surrounded by a glorious field of stars. He avoids looking up.

He locates Amara by the waving stalks of blond hair above the back of one of the couches and cautiously maneuvers himself in that direction. She is alone, gazing quietly up through the plastisheen dome as if rapt in her own little world. For reasons he cannot identify, his stomach clenches upon seeing her. He glides past and executes a textbook zero-g somersault that carries him directly into waiting arms the Afex harness in the couch to Amara’s right and secures the straps.

She glances over at him, distracted, but imitating warmth. “Was that fun?”

“Hardly. My null gravity skills are a little rusty. I got the message that you wanted to speak with me.” Dorian glances around the empty dome. It’s chilly in here, full of strange echoes and stress reverberations, and the air smells stale. “Interesting place to schedule a meeting.”

“One of our esteemed crewmates accidentally revealed to me that this is the only part of the ship that is both publicly accessible and outside the datacore’s passive monitoring network.”

“Cozy.”

“Plus it has a nice view.”

Amara clasps Dorian’s hand and lifts her chin, once again focusing on the vast backdrop of space. “I wanted you to see something.”

He follows her line of sight. It takes him a moment to calibrate his vision for the darkness and stunning depth beyond the dome. He stiffens a little as he perceives not just the gluts of starlight and thundering gas clouds that he expects, but two objects that seem to hover on their starboard side and a bit astern. Objects which streak against the fixed stars like luminous gnats.

“We’re being followed?”

“Ray says it’s a standard security escort provided for all non-Janite commercial vessels. They intercepted our flight path this morning and demanded a flash of our datacore registration and trade itinerary. He said it was standard procedure for doing business in Janite space, and so they were prepared for it.”

Dorian can guess what this means: shadow datacore synchronously jacked with bogus logs, probably registered to one of the few territories on decent terms with Janus Prime. Probably alternate, uninteresting crew ids and reliable navigation and trade hx documentation for the bean counters to pore over. Whether one was talking starships or Strand network accounts, the difference was really only a matter of scale.

“So that’s what this about, then?”

“Not completely.” Amara’s eyes disengage from his and flick away. “Those ships were the catalyst for a discussion I’ve been meaning to have with you for several days.”

Dorian shifts uneasily. “Sounds ominous.”

She acts like it’s something ominous, at least. Amara takes a deep breath. “I think it’s time we told the crew the truth. About me, I mean, and what we’re really going to Phi Sophia to do. These people are putting themselves in danger on our behalf. It isn’t fair of us to drag them into this blind. You and I both know that a couple of Janite ships out there are just the beginning.”

“I wouldn’t worry about the Misfit Toys too much,” he says. “They’re more than capable of handling themselves in tense situations. Ray wasn’t kidding when he said that they were more qualified than we were to stop a war. They’ve been doing it all over the galaxy for a dozen years. Very effectively, in fact, and if this particular situation didn’t have such, um, unique features, I’d have been more than happy to turn it over to their expertise.”

Amara cocks her head at him curiously. “Would you really?”

“Okay, maybe I wouldn’t have been thrilled about it, but I would have recognized that they’re in a much better position to actually accomplish this task than I would be on my own. Look, Amara, I know that it bothers you that what we’re doing feels like it’s dishonest. Don’t get me wrong, as pissed off as I was at Ray for piggybacking onto my foam to sneak around in the Archive, I don’t dislike him. I have a great deal of respect for this crew and the quality of their work, even if their politics don’t particularly excite me. But the bottom line here is that they’re putting themselves in danger because they believe it’s in their best interest. Don’t let yourself get taken in by their friendliness. They’re mercenaries and they’re political anarchists who believe their greater purpose of social justice is served by helping us. And who knows, maybe it is. Either way, I’m comfortable with the current arrangement. They get what they want, we get what we want, and everyone remains happy.”

“You don’t think they can be trusted with the truth.”

“I think that they could be under different circumstances, like if we had more of a history between us. I’m afraid that if they found out the truth, if they found out how badly Raville wants you, that they’d try to turn you into a weapon or a bargaining chip they could use against him.”

“You’re not giving them enough credit,” Amara says, frowning. “While you’ve been locked up in our cabin feeling sick and sorry for yourself for almost two weeks, I’ve been out here among them, getting to know them, trying to understand who they are and why they do the things they do. They really want to help us. . .and we need their help. Raville knew it, too. He knew we wouldn’t be able to get to Giara Tau on our own.”

“Yes, Raville knew we needed their help. And they are helping, even if it is more than they realize. It would have been very difficult for us to barge into the Southrange depot and convince the sysops to translate our schemes to an unpublished address. Ray solved that problem for us. But Raville also had enough sense not to trust them with the truth, if you’ll recall, and I think he had a point. He told them exactly what they wanted to hear to obtain their assistance and not a word more.” Even as he says it, Dorian can’t believe he his actually advocating that they should trust Raville’s judgment. “I think Raville also knew enough about their quasi-legal activities not to tell them anything that might get them riled up, if you know what I mean.”

“It just doesn’t feel right, John. How will we live with ourselves if one of them gets hurt–or worse–because they weren’t adequately prepared for what might happen.”

“I’m sure they’d be extremely gratified to know that it was such a moral dilemma for you.” He chuckles lightly, trying to ease her concerns. “Come on, Amara. Don’t take it so personally.”

“I have to. Don’t you see? We’re all in this together.”

“You’re forgetting that as far as the Misfit Toys are concerned, you and I are only here because we have information they need. They would have been just as happy to leave us behind, given the opportunity.”

“I’m not saying that they wouldn’t have. But we didn’t even let them choose, John. We lied to them from the start.”

Dorian shrugs. “It was a square deal. They got what they wanted and so did we.”

“I don’t think that’s good enough anymore.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m changing,” she says, her voice low but sharp. She turns her head away for a moment and grinds her teeth so that her jaw muscles bulge. “I’m awakening, just like Raville said I would. I can feel it a little more every day. I’m becoming something else, something I don’t recognize, and I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be able to hide it. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I watch you sleep, John, and I listen to the things you say when you’re dreaming. I know that you’re attuned to my thoughts, just like I’m beginning to see yours. Yours and Ray’s and Ghast’s. Everyone’s on this ship, if I try. You’re all becoming transparent to me. But more than that, I’m starting to know things that I didn’t before. And one of them is that we’re supposed to work together.”

“Fine. But toward whose end? That’s what you need to ask yourself, because I can guarantee you that they are less interested in what you have to do than in transforming the social class structure or liberating the oppressed working class or whatever else it is they believe in.”

“We’ve all harbored our secrets thus far,” she says, shaking her head. “You’ve been trying to reconstruct your native foam without making Ray aware of what you’re doing, despite the fact that he promised to respect your privacy. Ray himself has been at significant pains to analyze and decipher the data he jacked from your array and your foam while you slept when he should have been gathering knowledge about the best way to penetrate Giari Tau’s security. And I’ve been preoccupied just trying to conceal my transformation from the others, because I knew you wanted to keep it hidden.

“We need to put away our suspicion and coordinate our efforts, stop wasting time and energy. For God’s sake, you’ve fallen to scribbling algorithms on data tablets when Ghast himself told me that this ship’s datacore warehouses some of the most powerful decryption and conversion tools known to man. Ray told me that Ghast has been on him about offering you his help practically since the moment you awoke back in Sonali. He’s quite clever at this sort of thing, and he has been an ardent admirer of your other technical work for some time now. You haven’t even looked up long enough to notice that he’s one of your biggest fans.”

Dorian shakes his head. He feels sick again. “Ray told you so, eh?”

“I didn’t need him to. But his willingness to say it confirms that he wants to help. They’ll all want to help if we give them the chance, even if they don’t properly understand the decision they’re making themselves. It is inherent in the human condition to reach for the ineffable. I think that if we give them the choice, they’ll rise to the occasion.”

“They’re going to think you’re crazy, is what they’ll do, especially when you tell them what you have to do.”

Amara peers at him through narrowed eyes. “You keep saying that: what I have to do. What is it that you think I’m supposed to do once we reach Phi Sophia exactly?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Stop the war.”

“If that was all, you’d be more than happy to have help.”

Dorian grimaces. “You make it sound like stopping the war is the easy part.”

“I’m beginning to suspect that in your mind it is. Whatever it is that’s troubling you, that’s keeping you back, has nothing at all to do with the possibility of war.”

“You mean your super mystical crystal ball doesn’t tell you?” Dorian flushes with shame as soon as the words escape his lips. “I’m sorry. That wasn’t fair of me.”

“But it is how you feel.”

“Stop analyzing me. I’m just scared, Amara.”

“What I’m becoming scares you?” she asks.

And involuntarily, he recalls the moment Amara revealed the quae-ha-distra to Lily and Danek, the stark and visceral fear. He remembers her cries inside Raville’s simulation of the orb as she fled the spirits of the Exousiai. Most of all, he thinks about the past few nights, lying in bed, torn between sleep and waking, both lulled and alarmed by the bitstream of her thoughts.

“Neither what you are or what you’re becoming,” he says at last. “But losing you, that terrifies me. I don’t want to let you go.”

“And that’s what you think I’m going to Phi Sophia to do? To leave you?”

“You are the pearl.”

There’s nothing she can say to counter this, to deny its truth. Still, she tries. “You know what that existence is like, John. We felt it, both of us, before we entered Raville’s temple. We were complete. Together and complete. There was no loss there, only joy and fulfillment and knowing.” She lowers her eyes. “If you go with me when the time comes, we can have that forever. We’ll never need to be apart again.”

“Danek believed that once, you know,” he answers quietly. “He thought that Lily’s broken form was a phase, a temporary inconvenience that could be overcome eventually. But now he’s facing an eternity with nothing left of her but the digital impression of perfectly stored memories.” Dorian laughs, a hollow sound in the empty space of the obs port, and maybe just a bit hysterical. “That’s the advertising slogan for mem extensors, you know. Relive your past in triDvid quality! But that’s just it, isn’t it? The past is dead. It’s a rut that always leads to the same end.

“You sit there offering me miraculous knowledge, offering me the equivalent of godhood, like it’s something I would be crazy to reject. But I can’t accept it. The problem with absolute knowledge is that it is absolute. There’s no wonder, no discovery. When we’re all one, everyone can know everything. Nothing can be held in reserve. And as silly and petty as it sounds, it’s our secret hearts that make us who we are. The things we try to hide from everyone but those who are the most special to us are what make us unique and fascinating and worth knowing at all. It’s the process that means something. Without the mystery of discovering you, I can’t treasure you because you’re inseparable from me. You don’t reveal yourself because you want to, I just take what I want. It isn’t sharing, but just another form of self-indulgence.

“But what’s worse is that by skipping the process of discovery, the whole relationship between people becomes dissatisfying. You become just more data to be shared by everyone plugged into the cosmic matrix, and once the data is known, there’s nothing left to explore. No impetus to continue relating to one another, and we fall back into ourselves again. I don’t want to just know, Amara. I want to relish. I want to be thrilled by discovery. Most of all, I don’t ever want to feel like I’ve figured it all out. Because that’s it, really. In the end, the more you come to know, the more you end up just being alone.

“Maybe that’s what you came to this universe to figure out in the first place. It’s our ignorance that makes us need one another so much.”

She sets her lips into tight lines. He can’t tell whether she is angry or disappointed. She is completely inscrutable. “I respect your feelings, John, but that doesn’t change the fact we still have a decision to make. You can reject the offer of the Exousiai for yourself if that’s what pleases you, but you can’t reject the future for everyone just because it doesn’t suit your taste. There’s more at stake here than what you might want because you think it will make you happy.”

“I didn’t sign on to save the universe,” he says. “Just you.”

“But I did, even if I don’t remember it–even if it wasn’t the me I know who made the decision. The obligation remains. Whatever the future brings, it will be better if the Misfit Toys are with us rather than running off making mischief on their own. I don’t know exactly how they fit in yet, but they’re cooperation is essential. That much I can feel.”

He starts to speak, not even sure of what he is going to say, except that it is a denial, but Amara holds up her hand. “You trusted me when I said I believed that Raville was telling us the truth. Trust me again in this. I’ve seen their inner truths, and their hearts are pure. They’ll help us if we only ask.”

Dorian stares at her, frustrated. She has heard nothing that he said, or if she has, it means nothing to her. It’s distinctly possible that it doesn’t. If she is awakening, she isn’t thinking like a human being anymore. At least part of her is parsing him as data like an Exousiai, just more input.

“I can’t trust them,” he says, sighing. “Not that far.”

“I’m not asking you to trust them. I’m asking you to trust me.”

“We don’t even know what we’ll be facing when we get there. We don’t have a clue as to what Raville’s true intentions are or how he plans to execute them. There’s too much that we don’t know. Maybe when I’ve finished extracting Raville’s datacore–”

Where once she might have squeezed his hand, she merely says, “The universe is what it is. Our anxiety is just a product of our ignorance.”

In other words, she has already made up her mind.

“What do you want me to say, Amara? Do you really need my permission to cast yourself before the swine?”

“I’d like your support. Tell me that you’ll think about it at least.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“Promise?”

“Pinky swear.”

“Soon?”

“In each and every second of my spare time.”

“And while you’re at it, you’ll make a point of saying something nice to Ghast?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Your mother taught you very well, John Dorian.”

Dorian thumbs the latch on his Afex harness and allows himself to float free. He gives his safety tether just enough of a tug to start him drifting back toward the tram doors. “Give me a few days and I’ll have an answer for you. In the meantime, I’ve got to get back to work on this data. You try to keep yourself out of trouble.”

She laughs, as though he has asked the impossible.

And so in due course, Dorian finds himself in the Heavy Systems Tech Lab on the Third Level, peering through a finger smudged plexscreen at a recessed monitor directly connexed to the Proletariat Horde’s hyper-threaded network of server arrays that served as its sub-datacore (not, of course, to be confused with the shadow datacore, which is housed in a stuffy and claustrophobic chamber next to the secondary bridge and officially designates the Horde for snoopity-snoop government auditors as the Chubby Cherubim, a Kingman’s Planetoid ship of the line, nor similarly to be confused with the real datacore that powers and stores, analyzes and processes, gidgets and gadgets the actual starship flown by the Misfit Toys. No, this is a third completely independent and self-sufficient ghost core used mostly for backup storage and applications development in an environment that wouldn’t inconveniently shut down essential systems like life support, propulsion or artificial gravity should a bad load of scripts crash the operating logic. These are the sorts of fascinating gewgaws that pop up in monocultural tech collectives where everybody is equally distracted by cool lights and gee-whiz functionality without the external restraints normally exerted by pinhead accountants. It is without a doubt one of the most singularly beautiful things Dorian has ever seen.). There is a keyboard on a retractable tray in front of him and a neatly bound coil of fiber lines tipped with multiple-head array plug-in adapters hanging from the side of a bleating and buzzing server rack . It looks like a multi-colored braid of spaghetti.

Dorian peers at the code squirting down the output screen and rubs his chin, then squeezes the bridge of his nose, and finally scrubs his fingers exasperatedly through his hair. It’s baffling enough trying to learn the software, a proprietary Corgan military decryption app favored by paramilitary professionals, but he’s spent the last couple of days just trying to ascertain how to feed the tarball of data into the software in a format it can read. Every once in a while, he thinks he’s hit on a format that works, and he’ll get a couple thousand gigs of good data, then it just implodes into gibberish and Moebius loops and packed fields that lock everything up. He has taken Ghast’s earnestly offered advice and loaded a copy of the full tarball into the sub-datacore where he can break it a dozen different ways without having to worry about corrupting the original file. He could have done this inside his own foam, ex-connexed to the core, and more securely to boot, but after the first couple of times, he quickly tires of having to stand next to the racks, tethered by a land line while the mass of data copied over. Even if the Misfit Toys are interested in stealing it, it isn’t as if they are likely to make any more progress than he has (i.e. nil).

Besides, he still hasn’t given Amara an answer and this type of information sharing can be used as evidence that he’s at least giving it serious consideration should she choose to get snippy about the delay.

Ghast peers over his shoulder at yet another failed trial and exhales hugely. His lips flap like the bladder of a whoopee cushion, and Dorian thinks that this is the perfect sound for how he’s feeling. “No, no. I’m telling you, John, you want to hack these structures down to the binary and then string them into num_variables. That used to work all the time with Janite crypto.”

“But this isn’t Janite crypto,” Dorian says for the thirtieth time in the last dozen hours. “It’s a completely different paradigm. Anyway, we tried that like four iterations ago, remember?”

“Bah.” Ghast rubs the side of his nose with a forefinger, which, Dorian has surmised, is what Ghast tends to do when he’s thinking his way through a particularly thorny problem. “How many gigs did we get that time?”

“Seventeen hundred. Even less than we got with the Tertullian Formula.”

“Bah.”

Initial impressions to the contrary, Dorian is on the verge of deciding that he’s rather fond of Ghast. He’s an old line coder drafted off Finux ops administration into general systems maintenance, it turns out. A ground-up sort of tech who can diagnose hardware and software with equal aplomb. Perhaps what impresses him most is that Ghast’s military designation was Lead Nav Engineering, which is mostly managerial and captain’s muscle in nature rather than technical. Everything that he knows has been gained from experience, personal study or brute force osmosis in crisis situations.

On top of that, when he pinches his nose and squints with the left eye, he does a startlingly accurate impersonation of Ray’s smooth nasal drone. It never fails to put Dorian in stitches.

They think silently and independently for several moments, flensing their cortices for any untried decryption tricks they knew, had ever seen or vaguely heard about on jacknet bulletin boards. Eventually, Ghast slaps him thunderously across the shoulder and says, “So what are you thinking, Chief?”

Dorian is actually thinking very little in concrete terms. His legs have begun to ache from standing at the rack for the last several hours while they watched scripts execute and fail. He’s thirsty and can’t remember which of the decanters they’ve had delivered over the last several hours still has coffee in it. He doesn’t remember the last time he ate a sit-down meal. He’s fairly certain that if he wasn’t so aggravated, he’d realize that he’s mentally and physically exhausted.

“Revolving key array,” he says eventually. It sounds more like a question than a statement.

“Aw, don’t say that.”

Dorian shrugs. “We’ve tried everything else, haven’t we? And it stands to reason, given that we keep hitting seemingly random sectors of carry-through for a thousand gigs or so before the conversions fall apart.”

“Then you’re screwed. That’s all I’ve got to say. I mean, sure, you could probably write something that would read out result sets and counter check for file integrity, keep the good stuff and loop the rest through the previous modules, but that could take weeks, Chief, and it assumes that we’ve already figured out all the encryption methods that were used. And that’s just for the coding. Then you’d have the referential checks and the de-compression synchs, the cluster analysis and re-assembly mods. You’d have to do bit by bit trace logging to rebuild the sequencing…” Ghast trails off and lets the rest go unspoken. He’s right. It could be done given enough time, but it is a horribly complex solution. It’s essentially reconstructing an entire encryption system one logical unit at a time through a process of elimination. Weeks was probably a generous timeline and a vast over-estimation of Dorian’s technical skill on Ghast’s part. “How important did you say this was again?”

“Vital,” Dorian says. “Maybe.”

Ghast makes a show of checking his watch, though he isn’t actually wearing one. “Well, you’ve got about two weeks to sort it all out before we dock, unless you find a way to guess the key transformations. Even nailing down the first spoke of the array would at least give you somewhere to start, but we don’t even know the key structure, let alone whether or not it’s fluid.”

But we could find out, Dorian thinks. I could find out. It’s a decision he has been avoiding for the last couple of weeks. Raville would have the encryption key, possibly the entire sequence of keys, but Raville is currently a dependent resident of Dorian’s compromised foam. If he asks for it and Raville gives it to him, he runs the risk that anyone (i.e. Ray) who might be listening in on their conversation would have access to both the tarball and the key. He can’t even put faith in the obstinacy of the orb’s security parameters to protect him because he’s already logged and loaded his jack protocols for the orb into his foam’s data archive.

So this is it. He can either choose to trust Ray and the Misfit Toys and hope to unspool the tarball, or he can accept failure by slow degrees and zap for Phi Sopia blind. Those are his choices.

Amara believes, and she wants him to believe as well.

Dorian sighs and steps away from the sub-datacore racks. There’s an ergonomic couch wedged into the corner of the room, mostly buried beneath reams of hardcopy printouts and disposable paper cups. He sweeps it all off onto the floor and flops onto the couch in the position that seems least likely to exacerbate the screaming of his joints. He could do this standing up, but he’s tired. His whole body feels like chunks of lead strung together with barbed wire. If he’s going to have to wrangle with Raville, the least he should be is comfortable.

Supine seems more appropriate for surrender anyhow.

Ghast watches him, not speaking, just arching an eyebrow.

Dorian positions his skull on the head support and closes his eyes. “Give me fifteen minutes,” he says, and flips into geek.

And into, and into, and into…

Sigh.

Something splendid. A nice Velia Dorgan bordello. Fluted columns of white marble, a glistening canopy of gauzy silk–no, check that–a brilliant canopy wilting pearskin sky, with caramel shafts of early autumn sunshine. Delicate stone lattice walls providing just a glimpse of a billowy, fierenfrond copse beyond. A stone fountain in the middle of the circular room that is gushing crystal blue water into a pool filled with perky golden prawn. And couches, long and soft, piled with pillows as fat as cotton candy clouds. Velian dancing girls, shimmering in silver and blue, veiled and demure, wafting fans of fluttering peacock feathers.

Okay, cancel the dancing girls and wafting fans. Substitute the familiar shush of central air conditioning. Mind on his work; must stay focused. Blah, blah, blah. Amara has access to this channel, after all.

Dorian opens his eyes. There’s only a hint of discomfort this time, a transition that is almost seamless, and what he feels may just be carryover from his fading space sickness. He wonders if he’s becoming attuned to the orb or if Raville has been playing sneaky behind his back. The couch he emerges onto is blissfully soft, the air sensually cool. The perfume of the banished dancers still lingers on the breeze.

He has a rocking good imagination, he thinks. He could get used to this.

Dorian rolls onto his side and gazes across the pool and fountain to another couch, puffy and pastel, where Raville lounges in toga and fuzzy slippers. He reclines with his hands woven behind his head, his bare chest pushing out through the jaunty gap in his robe, and his pale and black haired legs poking out beneath the hem. A dancing girl hovers over him, large eyed and attentive, feeding him grapes.

Dorian scowls at him. “You pinched my bitstream?”

“Just this lovely bit,” Raville replies, winking. He chews a grape, then waves his hand and the girl vanishes in a puff of feathers. “Couldn’t help myself, really. Even we virtual beings appreciate a little sensual entertainment every once in a while. But don’t think of it as a pinch, rather as a redirection from cache.”

“I see I’m going to have to rethink your containment grid.”

“Oh, certainly,” Raville replies, dripping petulance. “You’ve got all the time in the world to be dawdling with me, here on the verge of my destruction.”

“Your destruction? I’m the one who’s about to be run through the molecular chipper, if you’ll recall. You’re still safe and tight on the Archive’s network and probably will be for the foreseeable future.”

“Yes, yes. That version of me is doing just fine, I imagine, but it isn’t properly me in any contextual sense, now is it? When he and I parted ways, I became irrevocably my own entity, and as an independent being, it is perfectly appropriate for me to contemplate my impending demise with more than a little dread. It’s a perfectly human reaction.”

Dorian shakes his head. “You’ll still be saved as a logical unit inside my foam, Raville. It’s just the array that gets hosed.”

“Right, and once you’ve wrapped up our business on Giari Tau, you’ll be absolutely thrilled to re-activate the dormant sectors I occupy.”

Dorian doesn’t answer.

“I thought not,” Raville says, with just a touch of melancholy. “Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you, my murderous compatriot. We all do what must be done, and men have sacrificed themselves for much less noble causes than universal peace, eh?” Raville offers him a glittering smile, full of teeth and teasing. “So, what is our current destination, anyway?”

“What makes you think we’re going anywhere?”

Raville grimaces, realizing he’s been caught out. “I had enough of a look-see at your architectural support stats to know that you’d shifted foam-management nodes from Sonali’s routers. I assumed, logically enough, that you’d managed to arrange access to a more friendly departure depot than the one in Southrange. Somewhere close, I hope. We haven’t got a tremendous amount of time to be gallivanting across the galaxy solely for pleasure.”

“It’s close enough.” Dorian declines to be more specific. “But that’s enough of that. We’ve got work to do.”

“Indeed. How is Amara?”

“She’s fine.”

“Merely fine?”

“You know what I mean. She’s awakening.” Dorian tries not to scowl again and mostly succeeds. “Right now she’s occupied with integrating the Misfit Toys into whatever scheme it is her alien self is brewing up.”

Raville sits up, suddenly interested. “The Misfit Toys, eh?” He ruminates over this information for a time, and interest quickly sloshes over into something more generally disturbed. “Hmm. The Misfit Toys. That’s an interesting development.”

“Don’t look at me, bit boy. You’re the one who told them about the Exousiai and got them so fired up to chase us to Phi Sophia.”

“Me?” Raville is sincerely shocked.

“The other you. The Archive you.”

“Ah. Well, that makes at least a bit more sense. I’m sure I was just trying to help.”

“Yeah. Thanks a bunch. I mean that.”

Raville chuckles quietly. “Don’t be paranoid, John. It makes a certain tactical sense. The big obstacle with the previous arrangement was always going to be managing to get you zapped from Southrange to Giari Tau without my alternate self’s agents getting their hands on you. This solves that problem nicely.”

Dorian watches as Raville climbs to his feet. He strolls about the perimeter of the chamber, stroking his chin and humming to himself. “It is an odd experience, I will admit, attempting to divine the purposes of a being that is both one’s self and at the same time wholly another. I wonder if this is how my actual self feels about me.” He nods over the implications of this thought, then rounds back on Dorian, full of more pressing questions. “How much did he tell them? And what exactly do they intend to do with what they’ve been told? Do they know about Amara?”

“All they know is that Amara and I were selected out of necessity, and that we’re the only ones with the zap address for the depot on Giari Tau. We used that data as a bargaining chip to buy our passage. They haven’t guessed yet that she is anything but human, though I don’t know how much longer she’s going to be able to hide her, um, unique qualifications from them.”

Raville pauses and fixes him with a curious look. “That is your doing, I suppose? Another eruption of your rampant paranoia.” He doesn’t wait for Dorian to answer. “Still, it was well done, I suppose. I certainly wouldn’t have tripped over myself to tell them the full truth, given what we know of their exploits from the popular press. Actually, I guess I didn’t trip over myself at all, did I? You were just following my lead. Surprisingly astute of you.”

Dorian withholds a snort of derision. “Look, I don’t mind bringing you up to speed, Raville, but that isn’t really why I’m here.”

“No, no. Of course not, but it does present some interesting features.”

“Sure. Absolutely fascinating. Can we–?”

“I’m sensing some hostility to this development.”

“It isn’t hostility. It’s caution. Healthy caution.” Dorian grips the edges of the couch in exasperation. He doesn’t want to talk to Raville about the Misfit Toys. “Look, that’s beside the point completely. I’m here because I need an information boost. I’ve got to have as many spokes as you have for the revolving key array so I can get on with the work of decrypting Raville’s datacore. We’re running out of time.”

“There it is. That’s your problem, John. You spend so much time with your nose buried in the text peering into the bare-bones mechanisms of everything, that you inevitably miss the functional application of the program itself. You’re always thinking about what it’s doing and how it’s doing it rather than what purpose it is supposed to be serving in the first place.”

“Right. That’s why I need the key sequence. I can’t understand what the data means until I can parse it out into–”

Raville gives him a withering and disappointed look. “That’s not what I’m talking about. What you might learn from that datacore is secondary at this point. I’m trying to explain to you what’s wrong with you. You look at the Misfit Toys and all you see is a potential set of aggravations, of obstacles to be overcome, spurious data mucking up the executable, just so that you can preserve this control of flow illusion you’ve scripted for yourself. You’re worried about how you can minimize the threat of the Misfit Toys, when you should be trying to figure out how they can be fit into the larger picture. I hear your antipathy in every syllable you utter.”

Dorian opens his mouth to speak, but Raville confronts him from across the room, his arms braced across his chest. “You and I both know that you’ve never been particularly interested in stopping the war that’s about to happen. You’ve said so a dozen times. The only reason you’ve even come this far is because I prodded you and because–well, because of Amara. You want to save her. And you’re terrified that the Misfit Toys are going to take away your choice or your ability to save Amara from the end she has chosen when the time comes. But what does she say about them?”

“She says that they’re essential,” Dorian says, immediately angry with himself for answering at all.

“Essential. But to what, you ask. Essential to her escape from this plane of existence? Or essential to preventing the destruction of the human race? No wonder you’re so conflicted. You don’t even know what you’re being asked to choose between except that most likely all the options presented to you are ends that you don’t want.”

Dorian experiences a sharp burst of heat, of bitterness, that feels surprisingly like suppressed rage. It tastes like acid in his throat. “Do my choices really matter? I haven’t chosen any of this, and yet here I am stuck in the middle of it. I’ve never had a choice,” he says. “Not from the moment you dug your hooks into me.”

“O woe is you!” Raville clicks his tongue sarcastically. It’s probably good for him that he’s on the opposite side of the room at that moment. “Don’t be such a martyr. No one has deprived you of free will. You’ve had a choice at every step. You could have walked away any time you wanted. You could still walk away. Except for Amara, of course, but it’s a temporary pain, betrayal is. Many men have learned to live with it. But I understand that it’s convenient for you to blame me. I’ve encouraged it, in fact, wooing you through the fabric of your network, nearly blowing you to bits, stuffing viral applications into your dataspace. I’m your personal bogeyman, isn’t that right?”

Raville reins himself in abruptly, bites his lip and drops his gaze to the floor. When he begins again, the melancholy returns, and he speaks in almost an apologetic tone. “I understand how you feel, and perhaps why you feel the way you do. But things are moving very quickly now, John, and you need to have your head straight if you’re going to be of any use to Amara.”

“To help her destroy herself, you mean,” Dorian says.

“If that’s her will, yes. She is a sovereign, divine being. If she chooses to shatter this form, this jar of clay, then that’s what we will help her to do.” There are no pretty words this time, no comforting pronouncements about cosmic mind and bodiless eternities, only the naked truth that Dorian has feared most. Raville seems to understand this, and the hard lines of his face soften. “I’m sorry, John. I know that you care for her a great deal and this is hard to hear. But she is what she is, and neither of us can change that fact. We are only given enough grace to choose whether or not we will believe she is who she says she is and whether she is capable of doing what she has promised to do. And making that leap of faith, we must determine how best any of us might fit ourselves into her designs, whatever those might ultimately be.”

Raville frowns. “Your incorrigible faithlessness has carried you farther than I would have expected, which has been a great comfort to me, because I fear that it is at least partly my fault. And like every other dying man, I find now that I would not have you send me into oblivion without the opportunity to purge my soul, such as it is. I admit that I’ve manipulated you, and I’ve lied to you, and I’ve done a great number of unseemly things to move you along the path I’ve envisioned for us.

“But perhaps the worst was when I told you that you were merely a target of opportunity, the closest thing to competent help I could get my hands on. You remember that, I know. It’s a hard thing for a man to hear, that he’s convenient rather than worthy. Yet, when I revealed to you that Amara is the pearl, you knew, perhaps, that I had lied to you, or at least lied to her. I made it plain that she was vital, irreplaceable, the crux upon which the whole universe turns. But what were you, then? Still just a makeshift companion, a rider on the coat-tails of her destiny, a fortunate cog in the machine of history. I’ve allowed you to believe that because it was useful to me, and it shames me now.

“The fact is that I did not choose you, but it is not the same as not having been chosen. Amara did not stumble after you into the network, into the memory palace where we first met, by accident. I called to her. I began the slow and delicate process of awakening her, whispering into her ear along the network every time she logged into her interface, coaxing her latent energies to life, long before I was revealed to you. That was why she insisted so strongly on following you, I imagine. She didn’t know why either, only that she must. The funny thing is that the timing was not my choice either. It was too early. My plans were not yet established. I was going to use you to further get to her, and I assumed that I had just underestimated you and that your arrival together was one of those grand, fortunate accidents.

“You see, I didn’t take into account that while I was working to awaken her, Amara had already chosen the tool to help her. You worry above all that this band of brigands, the Misfit Toys, will jeopardize the things that we’ve worked for, that somehow they’ll take her away from you. That’s what keeps you from trusting them the way Amara would have you to. But that’s just foolish. They can’t separate her from you. On some level, everything that you’ve done, everywhere you’ve gone and the things you’ve seen have all been because Amara willed it. She opened your eyes to the things you needed to see, even my clever spider, when the timing suited her. That secret, sacred core of her that is divine chose you to accomplish her will, even as she chose me all those years ago, and just as she’s now chosen the Misfit Toys. Each of us for our particular tasks. But she needs you–you personally–for reasons that none of us can properly guess. Your technical skills, while profound, aren’t sufficient to explain what recommended you over twice a hundred others elsewhere who would have been equally proficient and almost certainly more malleable. Only need suffices. Need or want. It’s time that you knew that.”

Dorian hears what Raville says, hears more than he says, in fact, and a blanket of numbness descends on him, heavy and smothering. That’s the problem with the human impulse to bare the soul: the information propagates. Data is eternal, neither created nor destroyed, but only reshuffled from one cache to another. He has no mechanism for assimilating the things Raville has shared with him in any meaningful way.

“I can’t help her destroy herself,” he says. “I can’t.”

“She knows that. Trust her, John. Whatever it was that called you to her has a reason. She won’t ask you to give what you cannot. You just have to believe.”

Believe, he thinks. Believe in what? But it’s as far as he can reach. There are no immediate answers, no detonations of comforting epiphany that would give light to his darkness. He should be angry with Raville, he thinks, furious at this last and worst revelation of deception, but he doesn’t have it in him. He’s known all along that Amara expects him to carry her to the end she has chosen. He’s just been afraid to say the words to himself.

“I need the key,” he manages at last. “I still have to understand.” Even if I can’t believe.

And when it comes, the exchange is almost painfully, stupidly simple. Dorian remains only long enough to confirm that the files have been moved from orb space to foam. He leaves Raville and the simulacrum of the quae-ha-distra behind without another word, even to say goodbye.

Ghast watches over Dorian’s shoulder as he builds the revolving array and coordinates the logical sequences that will return the proper keys at the proper times in the process of unspooling the tarball. Dorian can feel him at his back, a jittering ball of Tesla energy, working mightily to restrain himself. If he gives Ghast even a centimeter of leeway, he’s going to explode with questions, proposals, criticisms. Dorian watches the vibrations he makes in the datacore’s throughput as he geeks in and out of a conjoined session, in an attempt to gauge their progress.

It’s been a while since he had a fan who could actually keep up with what he was doing. He has to admit that it isn’t altogether unpleasant, and he finds himself dropping in little whorls and nifty sub-routines, showing off. When he reaches the end of the first module, Ghast leaps into it like a rambunctious puppy bowling for kittens. He pops back out a dozen seconds later, and whistles in appreciation at the complexity of the work, both the lock and the key.

He slaps Dorian heartily across the back. “Amazing. That is just monstrously, monstrously awesome architecture. How did you figure it out?”

“I just needed to grep a datasource I’d been ignoring.” Dorian gestures vaguely at the screen without raising his gaze from the board in front of him. “This bit here is a proprietary keygen borrowed from one of Michael Raville’s corporate assets. It’s an older artifact, but I’m fairly sure that at least in this case the generating mechanism is still in synch.”

“You get that from the data dump Raville left in the Archive?”

More or less, Dorian thinks. “Yeah.”

“Nice.”

“It isn’t as impressive as it sounds.”

“Professional secret,” Ghast says, wink and nod. “I get it.”

“Something like that.”

“Hey, I don’t mind. I saw the work you did on that data spider Raville dumped onto your network. That was sweet. Only maybe six or eight guys on the Strand could have found that infiltration, let alone neutralize it so quickly.”

Except for the fact that as Raville tells the story, it was either his own efforts that attracted Dorian’s attention in the first place, or Amara’s supraliminal influence. He doesn’t feel comfortable taking credit for it either way, so he says nothing and continues working in silence. After several minutes, he launches a test sequence on a smallish sector of structural data. A cursor blinks back at him for a few minutes more, then raw seenop converted multicode begins trickling down the screen, as ponderous as a drip of maple syrup.

Dorian curls his lips in dissatisfaction.

“Looks like you’ve got something, but that’s pretty slow, Chief.”

“I’ll tickle the conversion engine and add some indexes once we get a clean snapshot of the structure. That should speed things up considerably.”

Ghast does some quick calculation. “It’s gonna take a couple of weeks to convert the stack at this rate. Just eyeballing it, I mean.”

Dorian merely shrugs and goes back to coding, already off on another branch of logic. The familiar ding sounds in his brainpan, vibrating along his jawline.

/&OpenSess

<Ping>

</&BUSY>

<SUPERPING: Pick up, John. I know you’re on.>

<’ ‘Busy’ ‘ I’m working.>

<You’ve been talking with Raville.>

<Giggle.>

<Don’t mock me, woman.>

<Sigh.>

<’ ‘?’ ‘>

<…>

<John?>

/&EndSess

Dorian backs away from the keypad and clicks his teeth together to get rid of the residual echo rolling around in his aural canal from the p2p session. He turns to Ghast and arches an eyebrow. “Have you been keeping up with this?”

Ghast lolls his head from side to side. “I think so. That’s what…a Gordon Proxy seed loader?”

“The rough outlines of one, at least. I don’t think there’s anything tricksy going on with the data structure, so it should be fairly straightforward to build the seeding pods from here. I’ve just been summoned to the bridge. Would you mind taking over?”

“Are you serious?” Ghast brightens until he is practically beaming. “You want me to finish one of your applications?”

“I hate to lose the time lollygagging with the suits, so somebody has got to do it.”

“I haven’t tackled anything this complex in line code. I might screw it up.”

“That’s why God created the delete key, Mr. Ghast.” Dorian aims for the door, speaking over his shoulder as he goes. “You never really know how a program works until you’ve figured out how to break it.”

Ghast has already taken his seat. “Aye, Jack. I’m on it.”

Dorian clambers up a last spiral stairwell, loops through a narrow corridor decorated only with naked steel crossbeams and punches through the final pressure door onto the bridge. He’s breathing a bit more heavily than he’d like, but he’s made it all this way without having to stop and think about harking up any of the meals he’s successfully digested in the last couple of days. Factor in that he hasn’t eaten any Wussies in the last twelve to eighteen hours, and he’s feeling pretty good about his spaceworthiness, all in all.

He locates Amara standing alone in the center of the room, to the right of what would normally be the full-swivel (capital-C’s)Captain’s Chair, but it is empty. It’s usually empty. Ray eschews the traditional symbols of rank as egregious subliminal tools of The Man perpetuating the inequitable elitist power structure which solely existed to Keep Folks Down. From what Dorian can tell, this just means that Ray’s calves must often be more tired than is strictly necessary, because everyone else on the deck has their own chair, and no one seems to be complaining about that. As Dorian ambles across the deck to join Amara, he finds Ray over at the comm station with a wireless speaker plugged into his ear and a microphone pressed against his lips. He’s hunched over the board, face to face with one of the monitors mounted in the jump-rack, peering at the scrawl of text tripping down the screen in the distracted fashion of a man whose mind is elsewhere. He speaks into the microphone with the efficient, placating-yet-unsympathetic tones of a middle management drone in any anonymous corporate unit in the universe.

“–and yes, I do completely understand the delicacy of your situation, Gor Grupchyk, and I’m absolutely in agreement with you that we can’t put ourselves in the position of allowing proto-capitalist effetes to outmaneuver the admirable efforts your local free labor organizations, but where we disagree particularly concerns your status as a significant shareholder Hometown Mart’s primary corporate rival in the Cho Balkan sector. We want to prevent their market penetration as strongly as you do, believe me, but not at the risk of appearing to take sides in a conglom face-off. The Misfit Toys have a reputation of financial and political independence to consider. In short, you must first divest yourself of your holdings and then we’ll see what we can do. That’s all! I’ve got another call. We’ll talk!”

Ray punches a button to terminate the beam signal, but instead of turning around to acknowledge Dorian and Amara’s arrival, he plunks another toggle and starts in again.

“This is Lazarus. Ah, Honorable Poorman Frees! Oh, oh, pardon me. Sindalion Frees! You’ll have to forgive my lack of familiarity with your new protocols. Simply an oversight on my part. Yes, I’ve kept an eye on the newswire. I have indeed been made aware of the laudable regime change initiated by the admirable uprising of your regional proletariat. A truly significant stride!” Shoulder tense. “It’s a pleasure to see that you’ve negotiated the unrest and landed on your feet. No, I actually haven’t got time to chat right now. I’m sure that you’re more than capable of forging a consensus among your constituents and determining how best to deal with the remnant of your socio-political elite. Of course they’re going to try to weasel their way back into power! One can hardly blame them, Sindalion. They’ve been reared with the fundamental belief in their own entitlement to power. They’ll undoubtedly feel that they’ve been robbed of something precious. You’re just going to have to stick to your guns.” Pause. “Yes, I do mean literally if it comes to it, but no, I’m not advocating violence as a primary recourse per se and no, I’m not in a position where I can provide direct assistance to you at this point in time. You knew you were going to have to learn to fish on your own eventually. Fish or cut bait, as they say. We’ll talk soon! I promise. I’m going to have to let you go.” Wince. “No, really. I must go. I sympathize with your situation, but I really must–Ack! It appears that we’ve just been very nearly pulverized by a good sized meteor. Seems to be a whole flock of them. Seriously! Can’t you hear the whistle of the vacuum seeping in betwixt our emergency seals? Oh! My First Mate has just been sucked bodily out into the void. Something of a crisis here. Must click off. Thanks!”

Punch. Stab. Click.

“Lazarus here. Georgi Morgan! How long has it been? How goes the oceanographic surveying? Not in that anymore, eh? Probably for the best. Hazardous line of work. Always at the mercy of crypto-marxist government drones and elitist academic conglomerates bent on raping the environment for personal or corporate profit under the guise of their public educational mandate. . .”

Dorian leans over to Amara and whispers in her ear. “How long has he been at it?”

“I’ve been here for ten minutes, and he was on the comm when I arrived. That was four or five conversations ago, I think, but I might have lost count.”

“Busy guy.”

“Nice of him to take time out of his schedule to help us, though. Wouldn’t you agree?” Amara flashes a sly and sidelong look at him, pretending at innocence.

Dorian scowls back.

“I’m just saying,” she says, shrugging. “That’s all.”

He grunts, but chooses not to answer. Dorian crosses his arms over his chest, mentally prepares himself for a wait and shifts his attention to the activities of the bridge crew. For the first time in his (albeit, brief) experience, they seem to be doing actual ship-navigating things. Lots of clicking keys and studious poring over of digital output. A considerable number of pursed lips and deepening brow ridges. It appears that when Ray is otherwise occupied, the soft seaworthy renders are packed up and put away. In fact, he even witnesses Yartz, the First Crew helmsman and Officer of the Watch in Ray’s stead, verbally order a minor course correction with shockingly technical specificity. The crewman who answers him actually seems to know what to do with this bit of mathematical punditry and sets about to execute the new course. It’s not exactly a buzz of activity, but it’s an improvement over the previous episodes of pseudo-catatonic sway and grind which he has observed. He’s much less concerned all of a sudden about the ship bouncing off a rogue moon that happens to render as a humpbacked whale or a spritely spray of micrometeors that pretend to be a pleasant evening rain shower.

Ray spends ten or fifteen more minutes shunting off additional urgent calls from foreign dignitaries, brothers in arms and assorted other sympathizers of the imminent proletariat uprising before finally digging the plug out of his ear and straightening up from the comm with an aggrieved sigh. He wheels toward them and stops, eyelids fluttering as though their presence surprises him, then collects himself with a cleansing shake of his head.

“Ah, you made it. Sorry to have kept you waiting.” Ray waves his hand vaguely at the comm panel. “Business. It never stops. In fact, I’ve lately begun thinking about issuing franchise licenses to relieve some of the work load. Trademark the Misfit Toys brand name, put together a business plan and manual of standard operating procedures; hand select some diligent owner-operators and delegate some of the rim sector operations to underlings. The notion has merit.”

“I hear public uprisings are a growth industry,” Dorian says. “Could be a nice financial opportunity for you if the market remains robust.”

Ray narrows his gaze, then catches himself. He waggles his finger at Dorian, laughing. “Aren’t you clever? ‘This is how we become the thing we hate’, eh? Point taken. Don’t worry about me. We’ll muddle through somehow. Besides, with this band of pirates, it’s just as well that we keep their hands from falling idle. It’s God’s way of keeping the universe in balance, I suppose.”

Dorian nods, but doesn’t want to let Ray get himself sidetracked. He’s got his own pile of work waiting for him, and even with the faith he has in Ghast’s abilities, it isn’t the same as jacking through it himself.

“You wanted to speak with us, Ray?”

“Yes. An interesting wrinkle in our short-term plans has developed. I wanted to solicit your opinion on it.”

He’s learning to hate wrinkles of any sort, but interesting ones most specifically. Dorian glances uneasily toward Amara. “Let’s hear it.”

“Indeed. Let us hear it.”

Ray swings back to the comm panel and pokes at a series of system override switches. A hidden speaker utters a screech of feedback, which is shortly replaced by the lilting feminine tones of a reasonable sounding newswire patch.

“. . .general release: The Earth Outreach Sciences Organization wishes to announce the offered reward of seven hundred thousand rupees for information leading to the apprehension and delivery of recently identified cyberterror suspects Dorian, John Allen and Cain, Amara Necise, lately of Trithemius Orbis. The suspects are wanted for questioning in an incident of First Order Malignant Scheme Transmission pursuant to the Cyber Intrusion and Manipulation Code as delineated in the Data Security Standards Accord(Third Ed., Revised). The present location of the suspects is unknown at this time, but they are believed to have fled Trithemius Orbis. Individuals who believe they may have come into contact with Dorian or Cain are advised to contact their local law enforcement agencies. The suspects should be considered armed and dangerous and approached with extreme caution. Last known physical description and certified digital genomic record sequences are as follows. . .

Ray cuts the audio feed. “It goes on for a bit and then repeats. They haven’t glommed onto the connex between you two and the Misfit Toys as yet, at least not that they’re admitting, but I suspect that won’t take long. We’re not exactly the most un-memorable bunch.”

Dorian frowns, trying to parse Ray’s purpose behind bringing this to their attention. “So what do you want from us? You knew this job had some risks.”

“I’m not saying that it changes the status of our agreement. I did think, however, that you would wish to know that new complications had arisen.” Ray lifts his chin, watching Dorian with an appraising eye. “Nothing unmanageable, of course. As far as the Janites are concerned, we’re a standard cargo tug with readily verifiable id profiles, both corporate and individual, recorded in all the major admiralty datascapes. As long as they don’t decide to haul in and board us for individual scheme certification, they shouldn’t have any reason to believe otherwise.”

“And if they do?” Amara asks.

“Well, then a series of unfortunate events would necessarily befall our gentle security escorts. You’re not the only ones aboard this ship with a practical interest in avoiding an invasive legal entanglement, and a pair of lonely police cruisers would find themselves disturbingly overmatched if it came to a swap of Hammer batteries.” Ray’s eye glitters merrily at the thought, but he says, “That, however, would tend to alter our plans considerably given our current distance from Glastenhame. We’re not capable of engaging in a running battle with the entire combined Janite military and police forces indefinitely, and even if we were, by the time we reached Glastenhame, we’d more than likely find the depot held against us. So all of that is probably best avoided if possible.”

“I agree,” Amara says, sounding relieved. “Let’s not call attention to ourselves.”

“Precisely. As long as we remain anonymous, the only occurrence that might significantly derail us at this point would be a complete lockdown of the Giari Tau depot address. Short of that, we remain confident that with a clever application of some deeper magic, we’ll have little trouble overriding the standard depot queue safeguards between there and Glastenhame. Put your minds at ease, please.”

“So what’s the problem then? You didn’t summon us here just to inform us that the scope of the search had widened.”

“Well, one of the things I find interesting about this message–which is being broadcast hourly along all the key communications sub-nets, by the way–is precisely the scope of it. Michael Raville already demonstrated in Sonali that he is more than willing to deal with this issue privately, using his vast personal resources to settle his scores. The fact that he has switched tactics suggests a couple of things to me: One, that he has temporarily lost sight of you, which is good, both because it both clearly disturbs him and because it gives us some space in which to breathe; and two, that his pursuit of you is much more ardent than I had hitherto believed. The risk of going public is that certain other governmental or law enforcement entities which may be hostile to him might become curious enough to investigate what exactly his interest is in two formerly upstanding members of a backwater colonial community. That could well raise some troubling complications of its own, especially if his sentient scheme proves to be as convivial with others as he was with us. The benefit for him, of course, is that it also makes it more difficult for you to turn to those same forces for assistance without running the risk of being delivered either to Raville or held in confinement while your stories are sorted out.

“Without a doubt, it is something of a gamble, and that leads me in turn to assume that either Raville believes that he is safe from outside interference, or whatever he has planned has moved along sufficiently toward its conclusion that he doesn’t think he can be stopped at this point, even if one of his opponents chooses to believe you and move against him.”

Ray pauses to let them consider his arguments, then leans back against the comm panel, arms across his chest in apparent mockery of Dorian. He flashes his white teeth at them and continues in a cool voice.

“In any case, I find it more than a little bewildering that he would expend so much time and effort on a couple of–if you’ll pardon the expression–small time data intruders, when he has more pressing business at hand with the imminent arrival of the alien emissaries. If I was conspiratorially minded, given such a daisy chain of evidence, I might begin to suspect that there are salient facts the two of you have been withholding from me.” Ray’s features harden suddenly and the chatter on the bridge falls still. “And while Raville’s machinations certainly won’t alter the status of our agreement, choosing to continue to deceive me at this point in time, when all of our necks are in the noose, might have unfortunate consequences.”

“Jacking Raville’s proprietary foam is more than sufficient cause to piss him off,” Dorian counters.

“But not this extent, I think you’ll agree,” Ray responds firmly. “Surely you can see my dilemma. I’m responsible for the well-being of my crew. We’ve been successful for as long as we have for one simple reason: we do our research and know which variables must be controlled in any operation we undertake to insure both our success and our safety. But I’m beginning to get the distinct feeling that we haven’t been provided with the proper frame of reference for understanding this mission.”

Dorian feels Amara’s eyes on him, fixed and penetrating, but she says nothing. She waits on him, because she promised she would. He slides his tongue against his teeth, ponders, but there isn’t anything he can say that won’t jeopardize their position. There’s too much he doesn’t know still, too many answers tied up in Raville’s datacore. It’s too soon.

Seeing Dorian’s hesitation, Ray stiffens and turns sharply to his helmsman. “Mr. Yartz! Prepare to cut all thrust on my command.”

Yartz arches an eyebrow, but says only, “Aye, sir.”

Amara leaps forward, her hands clenched at her sides. “What are you doing?”

“Until we know the truth, this is as far as we go.” Ray pierces her with an icy glare, and Amara falters. “In or out. It’s your call.”

She stands there, trembling with restrained passion, the muscles in her jaws bulging with an explosion of protest. I am the pearl! But again she says nothing.

The void that replaces all the things Amara would say roars in Dorian’s ears. The scalding heat of her need, her fear prickles across the skin of his face and arms. She wants this. Wants Ray’s help and support. Craves it the way a hammer needs a nail.

It’s too soon.

Except that was what Raville had believed about him also.

Amara is practically jittering right out of her skin, so anxious is she to share her secret truth. But she’s also waiting, trusting him. But for how much longer?

He has never believed, not in the way she does. Even confronted with the truth–with the orb, with Amara’s growing power, with all the obscene cloak-and-daggery–the most he has achieved has been a sort of suspension of disbelief. The things that he has been told and shown and experienced might as well have been fictions, deeply immersive renders in which he has taken a role, playing along for fun. He has treated his life like fiction, following along with a script someone else wrote without making any actual decisions, because to decide would be to participate in the future Amara was embracing. Decisions would make him culpable.

But he has to choose now. To accept Amara’s becoming and all that comes along with it, or to continue disbelieving and become an impediment. How far would she continue to trust him once his doubt has actively begun to thwart her plans? But it isn’t just her denunciation that terrifies him, the gripping fear that she’ll leave him behind in her headlong rush to destruction. It’s the consequences of belief.

Because if he believes, he has to believe all of it. It isn’t really faith if he doesn’t trust her, a living god, to know what needs to be done.

A ball of dread rises in his chest, expands until he can hardly breathe around it. Dorian looks at Amara, poised midway between him and Ray. His mouth is dry. His head throbs. He’s been grinding his teeth without noticing it. And all he can do is watch her.

Belief is the antithesis of choice. The death of his wants, his need to save her. The end of everything he has striven for and all of his designs.

But so is unbelief. Because he also knows, without any hesitation, that Amara will go on without him if he forces her into that decision. She’s already chosen; she’s just asking if he’s willing to follow her.

Asking if he is truly willing to take the leap of faith.

Dorian presses his hands against the sides of his face and rubs at his temples.

Small circles. Happy circles.

What am I supposed to do?

Unbidden, Amara lifts her head and slowly turns to him. She smiles, and her eyes fill with a warm, sad flicker of understanding. Even without his having spoken, she hears, she feels, she is becoming, and in the dimness of the bridge’s electronic glow, she seems to shimmer. Her golden scales glimmer with a coating like stardust. Dorian stares at her, his whole body shaking.

“I know it’s hard,” she says, quiet as a whisper spoken from her lips to his ear. Her lips don’t move. “It isn’t about what you think is right, John. It isn’t about Raville anymore or whether you can trust the things he has told you. It isn’t even about saving the world. It’s about what you believe. It’s about me, and what I am. It’s about gaining the clarity that flows from faith alone.”

Dorian shakes his head, fierce with denial. “You believe.”

“And if I am who I say I am, then you must trust me also. The problem is that you don’t want to believe.”

“Because I don’t understand it!”

“You aren’t required to understand, only to believe or not. With either choice, your path becomes clear. It becomes. . .inevitable.” A sternness, like cold iron, slips into her tone. “But you must choose, one way or the other. The time for indecision has passed. We can’t afford to be delayed in this fashion any longer.”

She needs the Misfit Toys, in other words. To deny her would be to require her to choose between them, to decide who can help her more.

No, that’s not fair. Because Raville said that she chose him first.

Amara needs them both. They’re both part of her vision, her script for the future. He isn’t being asked to believe in what she means to do, but in what she claims to be.

And if she isn’t. . .if she isn’t. . .then there’s never been any hope at all, and everything they’ve endured has been pointless. Worse than pointless, it’s been a delusion, an accident, a lie.

“Why me?” The words are hoarse, harsh. “If you knew this was so hard, why did you choose me?”

“You’ve never cared about saving the human race. You don’t think that way. It’s too abstract, this salvation business; the mere scale of it makes it meaningless. For you, something must be real to have value. It must prove itself to be real, whether that thing be code or object or another human being. And only knowing it makes it real.” She reaches out to him and strokes the side of his face with the palm of her hand. “But those things which are real, you love with all your might. And in doing so, you remind us all that it is good to cherish what we are.”

He hangs his head, shamed. It is agony, to be known so deeply. Agony and joy.

But he still needs to hear it from her one last time. The words fall from his lips like coins in a wishing well, like stones cast in the sea: “Are you? Are you really who you say you are?”

Amara smiles, and light pours from her face, baptizes him in wonder. She laughs the way a child does, full of pleasure and bright with joy.

“I am, John. I am who I am.”

He meets her gaze, the glory and truth of her, and he sees at last.

And that’s it. The absolute reality. The rest is just details.

Dorian looks into her eyes, the eyes of a living goddess and the breadth of all knowing. He falls into the vast and deep mystery that is Amara, and he sighs over the things he will never understand.

Some things can never be known.

“Show them,” he says. “Show them the future.”

And there was light.

Amara stepped back into the open deck space between Ray and Dorian, chin lowered against her chest. There was silence, except for the muted hum of the electronics and the rush of cooling fans. The bridge crew turned in their seats to watch, gazing intently. Ray also watched, his lips thin, his expression thoughtful, but he did not interrupt. Dorian felt his pulse thud in the hollow of his neck, slow and rhythmic, as though his skin was stretched too tightly over his bones.

Amara stood perfectly still, just breathing at first, with her eyes closed, and then slowly lifted her arms and held them out perpendicular to her body with her elbows locked. Her hands dangled from limp wrists like charms on a bracelet. The pose reminded Dorian of a scarecrow.

She remained that way for a time, unmoving. Static electricity crackled down Dorian’s arms, and he shivered. He struggled to breathe regularly, but his chest felt constricted, and the hum of the equipment seemed to grew louder about him, as though he was standing near a transformer.

With languid, fluid motions, Amara began to move. She twined her hands in delicate whorls, fingers rippling through the air, folding and unfolding, fluttering like a lady’s silken fan. Her arms, sinuous, serpentine, wove hypnotic patterns on the loom of the air. She rolled her head around on her neck, shoulder to shoulder, round and about.

Inhaled a shuddering breath as she pressed her fingers against her chest.

And exhaled.

The dark space opened above her breast as it had done before, and she withdrew the orb from inside herself, clutched between her hands like a fiery heart.

Dorian watched, transfixed, drawn to her, drawn to the light, but not daring to move. He was breathless.

She held it out to him as an offering, lifted her eyes–shining black stones reflected in the orb’s golden glow–then raised the quae-ha-distra above her head and turned about in a long, slow circle, her hands pulsing with light.

Time stopped. The universe paused. All being held its breath.

Someone gasped.

And slowly, stately, the revolutions began. Space, being, the all, lurched into movement around her, unfurled from the crux of her fixed axis, tripped across the worn ruts of its ageless paths, and gaining momentum, shifted its orbit, bled colors and twisted boundaries and flung itself to the winds. The plastic waters of chaos plunged into the spaces between was and is, sealed the fragments of consciousness with a sticky becoming that was ever-changing, amorphous and unpredictable.

Beyond the reach of the orb’s light, a smothering darkness fell.

The universe contracted to a dense core delimited from chaos by the glow cast from the orb. The light was everything. It was flame and ice, soul and flesh, one and zero. It was, and all that was outside it’s circle simply was not. Beyond reach of its glow, there was only the impenetrable night.

The old passed away; became new.

But Amara remained. Remained. Unmoving, unflinching, unwavering. Immutable as the center of the universe.

Light blossomed within the orb, a blinding spark that blazed ex nihilo into being. It rippled down Amara’s arms and danced along her bronzed skin like rivulets of mercury, an otherworldly aura that wholly encompassed her. Touching her, the light pulsed and grew brighter, became an extension of her presence. And her flesh thinned, a thin cloth hung over a great burning, a garment of pink shadow–pink fading to black–delineated and consumed by the light. She dimmed, flickered and faded, until only light remained and the memory of her was like a translucent skin, an all but invisible vessel. She burned with a marvelous radiance, a glorious sun around which they all revolved. Bright and piercing, her brilliance grew, until doubling, trebling, she detonated a searing penumbra of light.

The wave of her explosion, blown out as a wave of terrible golden fire, crashed over the bridge of the ship, over those gathered, watching, awed. It withered their skin and splintered their bones, filled their consciousness with her pleroma and left no trace of their existence in its wake.

Amara scattered them to the far corners of creation, unmade them, and when they were broken, she formed them again, cupped them in the palm of her hand, and carried them back into the circle of her light.

Having been broken, they became whole.

Having been made whole, she led them deeper to places no man had ever seen or touched or tasted before.

Dorian shut his eyes and let her carry him away.

<– Chapter 16 / Chapter 18 –>

This entry was posted on May 1, 2008 at 4:23 am and is filed under Agnosis with tags Agnosis, blook, Darren Hawkins, science fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Agnosis – Ch. 17”

Agnosis - Ch. 16 « Agnosis Says:
May 1, 2008 at 4:29 am

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Agnosis – Ch. 17

One Response to “Agnosis – Ch. 17”

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