Perhaps the Stars Read online

  A flash, and all at once the image jolted, people cowered, covering their heads, and the glassy roofs around them shattered and flew like dust dispersed by breath. There was something in the sky, shrapnel and spider smoke strings raining down, while upward—upward was a column of cloud-smoke-chaos like a volcano’s eruption with no volcano, if you could imagine Vesuvius concealed by Griffincloth so all you see is the smoke and fire rising toward the clouds. Cars streaked through the black cloud-cone, smearing and striping it as a spoon stripes the frothy top of cappuccino, and as the footage tilted up I saw the top of the cone was rising, pillowy and round, and I thought the word ‘mushroom’ and felt like an idiot: a car crash. You read about the onboard reactors, how even cities don’t devour power like the engines that hurtle us a city-width in seconds, but you can’t let yourself think about it, antimatter live and close—if you think about it you could never ride a car again. The safety system directed the explosion upward, more power than all the sunshine that hits and feeds the surface of the Earth released in one spot, but upward, sparing the city with a merciful forethought that made engineers feel more like gods than ever. There was some downward shock wave, and a spot of black on the ground, burned roof and vaporized car indistinguishable, ash stirred by deadly blurs of more cars streaking the sky, too dense, too close, swarming like locusts, combing the smoke with their paths. There was a swarm of cars swirling in a shell over the city, and I understood now why we could not just flood Cielo de Pájaros with peacekeepers to protect the system all Earth needed. Had that crash been accidental? Two cars sweeping too close to each other? Or a calculated warning from whoever was controlling them? Or had a brave someone tried to force a car to land and help defend this heart which pumps the transit bloodstream of our sprawling world? The cameras turned downward again, showing fresh gunfire, advances through the wildflower trenches, closer to the vital central bash’house, and I understood why Earth needed its Anonymous. A conference call had waited blinking in the corner of my lenses, and I joined it.

  « Maître! » That word I understood, but not the rush of savage French that followed it. I had not called up video, but, even without a face to match, the grating wildness in Dominic’s voice carried a passion beyond fear. Begging?

  “Do not get in a car, Dominic! You hear me? Do not get in a car!” This shout was Martin’s, punctuated by emphatic panting.

  “Presume not to command thy prior!” Dominic’s English was more savage than their French.

  “You won’t reach ad Dominum nostrum if you die, crash, or vanish!” Latin leaked out in Martin’s frenzy. “We’ve no idea who’s controlling the disappearances. We’ve no idea when every car on Earth might crash!”

  Using French to exile Martin from the conversation is a traditional Dominic tactic. While they addressed the silent Prince, I skimmed what instahistory the news offered. The cars had rebelled, that’s how people described it, as if they were an ally that betrayed us. People had been getting into them as usual, taking off, but some never landed again. There had been no crash reports, no streaks of smoke, just certain people’s tracker signals went quiet in transit, and that was the last we heard of them. The first disappearances had been reported within two hours of the Olympic Closing Ceremony, but in the confusion after the Atlantis Strike, it took more hours for the word to spread. In those hours, thousands of Humanists had vanished mid-transit, possibly tens of thousands, and possibly not just Humanists. Vivien (whom I must get used to hearing called Humanist President Ancelet) had demanded that the Alliance forces holding the Saneer-Weeksbooth computers admit Humanist police to investigate what was happening to the transit system. Some Alliance spokesperson had refused and, worse, accused the new President of faking the disappearances as a pretext to seize the transit computers, and, worst, done so in savage, Hiveist language. Lesley Saneer had called for violence, and Cielo de Pájaros obeyed.

  « Non. » Jehovah Mason’s calm made me feel better for the moment before I remembered They sound calm even with the world on fire. « Je te l’interdis. » (Context let me guess that one: “I forbid you.”)

  « Maître! » Dominic’s voice cracked.

  “Think, Dominic!” Martin pleaded. “We have no idea what enemy may control the cars now. The Hiveguard mob’s three trenches from the house, and they’ve advanced four in the last twenty minutes!”

  “They seem to have a plan,” I said, my voice cracking as it broke through a film of sleep gunk. Six months ago I couldn’t have spotted pattern in the clumps of skirmish on the video, but Achilles put us Myrmidons through enough mock battles that something in my gut now knows the difference between planned and unplanned chaos. “Obvious it was going to get hit first, I guess. If I lived near Cielo de Pájaros, I’d have made a plan.”

  “Exactly!” Martin cried. “The cars are controlled by an unknown enemy now, and a known enemy will have them in twenty minutes, and that’s if they don’t bring the whole system down. You have to face this, Dominic. Tōgenkyō’s an hour from Alexandria. Get in a car now and it may take you to the middle of the ocean, to capture, or to death, but it will not bring you ad Dominum, not in time!”

  “An hour from Alexandria,” the Prince repeated in Their light but lifeless voice. “Untrue.”

  Martin: “You’re on an island. You can take a boat.”

  “A boat? Three weeks!” Dominic pronounced it like a curse.

  The Prince again: “Three weeks. An hour. No. Distance divorces time now. They had been so long conjoined, these enemies; no more. Thou art not two hours from Me, My Dominic, nor two days, nor two weeks. Thou art half a world from Me; We know no longer what that means measured in time.”

  I doubt the sounds that broke from Dominic were language, but it might have been some broken, whimpered French.

  I fired up the Hâte Anonyme. I’m less comfortable than Vivien using this instant feed. I still think too much like an editor to feel anything but terror as billions watch my thoughts (and typos) appear character by character even as I write. But if any minutes in my tenure as Anonymous justified haste, these did:

  (By this point 11 million had cued up my feed) (81 million.) (303 million.) (Crossed the billion mark.)

  « Mon chiot Déguisé. » Even in crisis the Prince did not think to abbreviate the peculiar Title They use for me; time is so much less real for Them than words. “The inner peace you gift to your readers is only smaller than the outer war when measured by those who err by imagining that the mental sphere is bounded by the physical circumference of heart or brain.”

  It took some moments for my mind to translate that to ‘Good job.’ It shook me. That’s the trouble with the Prince in daily life: They say everything too fully. Now I couldn’t just put the feed count in the corner of my lenses and pretend it had a couple fewer digits. My message had made even Dominic’s ragged breathing ease a little, but being reminded of my own power only made it scarier as I plunged on, watching my words etch themselves into the wide world:

 

  It was done. My imagination showed me fiery deaths, faces frozen against walls of flame, a child screaming as they see smoke rise from the woods. I told myself fewer people would try it now than if I hadn’t warned them off, but some would try—a selfless doctor hoping to reach
the hospital was the image paranoia settled on—and some who tried would die, because of me.

  The Prince restored me. “What has thy species named the place where stands thy flesh, chiot?”

  Where was I? I hadn’t thought to check. I was in a place, one place in the world, and what if it was far from friends and safety? I could feel a flimsy mattress under me, rumpled sheets. I cleared my lenses enough to see a dark, cramped space, more closet than room. The walls were all shelves and jumble: boxes, folders, freezer crates, square canisters labeled in scrawl, half a coatrack, a katana, shoes and clothes in clear bags, paper notebooks, all in a sea of pack-rat detritus, some of which had rained down to join the loam of trash and laundry that filled the edges of the little room. A dented crate served as bedside table, and on it I found a stash of instant breakfasts, espresso candies, tangerines, a paper book, Cannergel handcuffs, and a cheap replica bust of a bearded man so badly sculpted it could as easily have been Darwin as Plato. A label claimed Victor Hugo. I leaned across to verify the book was Holmes. “I’m safe,” I said. “In Papadelias’s office.”

  A new voice signed in now. « Seigneur? »

  « Ma brave Heloïse, » the Prince greeted.

  Martin: “Heloïse! Good. Don’t get in a car. Whatever you do, don’t—”

  Heloïse: “I’m in a car now.”

  Martin: “What?”

  Heloïse: “I’m mid-flight. Aunt Bryar called me back to—”

  Martin: “It doesn’t matter.”

  Heloïse: “But—”

  Martin: “Land. Now. Wherever you are, just land.”

  Heloïse: “I’m over the Sahara Desert!”

  That knocked the breath from all of us. “What?”

  Heloïse: “I was in Kano. Wonderful meeting with the U.N., they’re preparing to accept our refugees.”

  I: “The United Nations…” I whispered it, awed by this dreamlike reminder that, even locked within their Reservation boxes, these vestigial ‘nation-states’ still have their embassies, and hospitals, and borders.

  Heloïse: “The African Union is—”

  Martin: “Later. You have to land, now.”

  Heloïse: “It’s fine. I saw the Anonymous’s message. I’m less than twenty minutes from Casablanca.”

  Not Heloïse too; my words killing imaginary doctors was already too much.

  Martin: “It’s not fine. Someone’s hijacking cars. What’s the nearest city? Head there. Check your maps.”

  Heloïse: “Ubari? Someplace called Ubari’s—”

  I: “No good. 70 percent Hiveguard at least, you’d be a hostage in no time.”

  Martin: “How do you know?”

  I: “You think Su-Hyeon and I haven’t counted every rooftop flag on Earth? Even with people off at work, it’s risky.” I brought up the map. “Let’s see, Illizi is Mitsubishi majority … most of these oasis towns are dangerously small, if supply chains fail … no…”

  Martin: “Can they reroute to the coast? What’s closest? Tripoli?”

  Heloïse: “Tripoli’s only barely closer than Casablanca. If—”

  I: “I don’t like the mix of flags in Tripoli. There’s nothing majority Remaker between Ubari and—”

  « Alexandrie, » Dominic finished for me. « Va à l’Alexandrie, Heloïse. Immédiatement. »

  Heloïse: “Alexandria’s as far as Casablanca.”

  « Notre Maître est à l’Alexandrie! » Dominic barked back. « Seul! »

  « Seul. » The Prince repeated the word, slowly, softly. It made me think of a kid at an aquarium, watching a strange new creature undulate behind the glass and mouthing its fresh-learned name.

  « Seul! » Heloïse shrieked in horror. “Alone! Martin, is Nôtre Seigneur really in Alexandria alone?”

  “Don’t worry,” Martin answered. “The palace is better staffed and defended than anywhere on Earth. We need to concentrate on you now. If you can get to the coast you can reach Alexandria by boat.”

  Evasion from Martin set off all my warning bells. “Where are you, Martin?” I asked.

  “On the ground, safe.”

  More evasion. “That’s not what I asked. I’m in Romanova, Dominic’s in Tōgenkyō, where are you?”

  For three seconds we all listened to Martin’s too-rapid breathing. Fear breaths? Running? “Heloïse first,” they answered.

  One Questioner Martin must always answer: “What has humankind named that place where stands thy flesh, My Martin?”

  Almost no hesitation: “Klamath Marsh Secure Hospital.”

  The doom couched in the answer seemed to grow as logic unpacked it. Of course poor Martin was hard at work, off chasing O.S. and Perry-Kraye, combing through the hospital carpet for hairs, or counting footprints. But now the distant hospital-prison where we had raced for Cato Weeksbooth promised a different kind of crisis. Klamath Marsh had no roads, no neighbors, not out in deepest Oregon, a wilderness preserve, Greenpeace’s once, now Mitsubishi, verdant and teeming with the dangers of raw nature. And if Martin survived the mountains, nothing waited beyond them but the infinite Pacific, or, to the East, the deserts and Great Plains, and there no help or shelter but a peppering of isolated wilderness bash’houses, almost all Greenpeace Mitsubishi, or, beyond them, the proud cities on whose towers fluttered Sniper’s flag. The vastness of it felt spiteful, this huge, fat planet, as if Earth had planned this, knowing that no wall or battlefront could be so dispiriting a barrier as the cruel width of America.

  I scanned my Sahara map again, since Heloïse we might still save. “There’s nowhere I’d call safe closer to Heloïse than Alexandria. Nowhere I’m confident will turn majority Remaker or neutral. But Alexandria’s close-ish, in reach, in theory.” I checked the video of Cielo de Pájaros again, but the smoke and crouching figures had advanced only one trench. We still had minutes.

  “Alexandria, then,” Martin concluded.

  “What about Casablanca?” Heloïse challenged. “They’re equidistant at this point.”

  « Il est seul! »

  “I know,” Heloïse more yelped than spoke, “but there might be a coup!”

  “What?”

  “In Casablanca. That’s why I was going up. Cookie’s assembled the Cousins’ Board, and all the Nurturist leaders are there, and Aunt Bryar says the balance is very fragile! I’m making all the calls I can, but I could do so much more in person.”

  At this point I realized, to my shame, that we’d all been talking over Heloïse the whole time, though it wasn’t until I was editing this transcript just now that I realized quite how much. Their comportment invites it, that toxic artificial helplessness that coded feminine in olden days, and makes us all fall over ourselves wanting to do things for Heloïse, so much so that we stifle when they try to do things for themself. I like to hope Martin and I wouldn’t have fallen so easily into the pattern without Dominic there leading us on.

  « Seul, » again the Prince repeated.

  “I know, Seigneur. I want to come to You. But You’ve asked me to be Your voice in the Cousins, and in this circumstance I can’t do both.”

  “You make Me choose,” Their lifeless voice pronounced.

  “I don’t want to, Seigneur!”

  “Not thee, ma chère Heloïse. My Host. He Who Created Distance chooses now to make Me taste these many kinds of pain: separation, impotence, ignorance, and, through thee, the pain of choosing between two pains. I must lose one eighth-part of all humanity, or thee. He makes Me choose.”

  Seeing them as a transcript like this, the Prince’s words feel like interruption, wasted time, but it wasn’t like that in the moment. Their calm felt liberating, zoomed things out, as if I was a tiny creature living in a snow globe, and the vast Being outside that held my little world was trying to communicate with me, get me to glimpse it for a moment, to help me realize all this blinding blizzard was just microcosm, that the real causes I was seeking lay beyond. That let the bigger problems dawn on me: “Wait, is Bryar in danger? Is this the kind of coup with
posturing or the kind of coup with death?”

  “Aunt Bryar is in Delhi,” Heloïse replied, “meeting with the Greenpeace Leadership. She can’t reach Casablanca, that’s why she needed me to rush back. Everyone Aunt Bryar trusts is off handling emergencies. The Nurturists are practically in charge of Casablanca. There’s no one else to stop them except me.”

  Delhi? Something slipped inside me, the snow-crumb that starts the avalanche. It was all wrong. The chess match was supposed to start with all the pieces in their rows. Bryar was Cousin Chair, they were definitionally in Casablanca, that’s how the world worked, just as MASON was in Alexandria, Joyce Faust in Paris, and Heloïse with the Prince. If Bryar was in Delhi, where was Vivien? Where was anybody? Su-Hyeon? Achilles? Mycroft? I checked my messages and found half a dozen from Vivien in Buenos Aires, frantic, asking where I was, one from Bryar telling me they were safe in Delhi, one from MASON demanding that I come to them in Alexandria, others from Servicers, Huxley Mojave, Patroclus, Joyce Faust, but none from Mycroft. None from Mycroft. And then something in the mustiness of Papa’s little bedroom smelled like olive oil and I remembered. Mycroft. Sobs came fast. I couldn’t fight them, couldn’t even think to, my mind and flesh both thrown full-body into it, until there was no difference between sobs and screams. The animal part of me knew I needed this, and the physicality of it, intense as sprinting, erased all other thoughts. There were no duties now, no decorum, no messages, no maps before my eyes, no waiting Prince, just I alone in grief and no more Mycroft. I sobbed until my throat burned, and the muscles in my sides cramped, and my sobs weren’t even sobs, just sorry hiccups as I twitched against the wet shoulder beneath me. There were arms around me, awkward but warm, and I clung to them a long time before it occurred to me that arms and a shoulder meant someone was with me. Holding me. I smelled shampoo and chocolate, and pulled back enough to look up, but a door was open to some bright and noisy outside space, and the glare made me light-headed.