So we block our ears with wax—or the scientifical equivalent. We furl antennas, shut receivers down. We run silent and dark as a prehistoric submarine. Ears closed, we can’t hear the Witch’s spells, or her wet cackle, or the screams of her other victims, our fellow ships she’s caught and burned. Back there our friends are dying, back there Our Lady Herself breathes Her last, Her miles-long hull shattered and leaking coolant, Her beautiful great guns silent. We’re safe while we flee—a silver dart on the crest of a bloodthirsty tidal wave. We run through silent space. Witches don’t tire, but neither do we. Thank Newton and his laws.
If we could hear the screams outside our hall, the Witch would have us already.
But we can hear one another—and I ought to hear Callie’s wails right now. I don’t.
That may be a problem.
You see, Caliban had a chance to kill the old man tonight, during our slingshot around the black hole. (We needed speed—we always do. The Witch does not slow.) Motives, Callie has them: she’s a prisoner, she’s suffered the old man’s torture. Method, she has that too: claws and teeth. Opportunity: his back was turned. But she didn’t, which worries me, and now she’s gone, which worries worse.
Outcome matrix: each time Callie tries to kill the old man and fails, he locks her in the cave again. The old man won’t kill her and end it, because Miri won’t let him. She begs each time, on bended knees if needed, till he relents. Callie wants to escape into the black, but he, all mission and purity and fear, won’t let her; if Callie doesn’t kill him, she’ll writhe and hiss beneath his thumb forever. She’s not killed him yet, but failing doesn’t bother her, though she screams when the pain starts.
But the whole world’s quiet tonight—as quiet inside our hull as without. Callie did not die. Neither did the old man. She had the opening, and she didn’t take it. Why?
Our outcome matrix can’t explain Callie’s behavior, so we shift methods, use narrative rationality to model the principal actors and the evolving scenario. A narrative tab isn’t as clean as an outcome matrix, but war’s never clean, and this is how they taught us to think for that.
So: the old man watches from the cliffs as we swing into a black hole’s gravity well. It’s a tight maneuver—your humble correspondent’s idea, naturally. Who else would be so bold?
Blessed Newton says, objects in motion stay that way ’less acted on by outside force. And it’s outside forces that worry me, specifically outside forces with event horizons and plasma jets several AU long. The idea, O my Self, as I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, was to slingshot around the black hole and exploit the spin-stressed local fourspace to pull ahead of the Witch. Tidal strain will tear us apart if I don’t stay on my toes. Run faster! Dark forces on our tail! Work to do!
It’s a fine and fortunate thing to like one’s work when there is so much of it. Hull breach! (Stitch it shut.) Tensor strain! (Robots with diamond spinnerets scuttle forth from hidden ports to reinforce.) Core collapse imminent! (Yipe, that’s no good—spin and dance and overclock the notional engines to give that extra juice a place to go.) I’m everywhere and I do mean everywhere at once while Goodwife Gravity crushes us twixt her thighs.
Too late I remember that the old man’s alone on the cliff’s edge—and I remember what that means.
I can’t afford to divide my attention further but I do, wasting a few cycles to glance back at our island, and I see: Caliban lurks in high branches above the old man, her jaws open to their second hinge. Her long teeth drip saliva ropes.
I know what happens next. We’ve played the scene a million times if once: she jumps, and the old man’s magic catches her in midair. His eyes flash wroth but he smiles this small, soft smile and we’re back to the beginning, to a beast in a cave rattling her chains, screaming, until Miri tends her wounds and soothes her brow, and it all gets good for a while before it gets bad again.
In my moment’s inattention we skirt the edge of a plasma jet and our NO-engine filaments snap. If I don’t fix this right now, we’ll be a particle mist scattered over light-years—
I save the day, of course. I’m awesome, O Self. Permit me a flourish of bows stage left, stage right, raise hands and the whole cast raises ’em in time and we all bow together. It’s a fast, risky fix, though the details would bore you. Skip down a paragraph unless you’re a glutton for this sort of thing: I deploy hull-patch maintenance walkers, wind them in ablative shells of their own thread, which will endure the engines’ heat long enough to weave new filaments, and my mind dances skipstepfast from walker to walker, micro-ing their repair tech. We lose a few; there’s a moment of tension when the right primary surges, but we survive.
I love repair stories. Everything’s so clear. Our machines are broken! So we fix our machines. Fix didn’t work! Try another. All problems have one right answer. We tinker to retreat.
When we’re safe, I return to the island.
I find the old man alive, and Callie gone.
I search for her. She’s not in the hall or in her grotto, or in that shadowy place she doesn’t think I know, where she bashes small critters against rocks until they bleed, then eats them. I dart swift as fire through the island. All our hiding spots, I trace them. But she’s gone. I see everything, but I don’t see her.
Worried? Of course I am, O Self. Glancing over my shoulder.
The old man turns from the cliff and walks to his study. “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,” he says, and you’d hope he was joking. But, or and, he adds, “Find her.” He takes his throne, braces his staff across his lap, levitates a book, and reads, combing his fingers through his beard. After a while, he sleeps.
I hope his dreams are better than mine.
*
Miri keeps us together.
When the old man rages and his curses shrink our island to a nutshell, when Callie passes months sulking or in chains, when I grow peevish with boredom—I sense your disbelief, O Self, but even so polished and decorous a specimen as I grows testy at times—when we might fling ourselves apart, in short, we don’t, because of her. Her tether keeps us in whirling orbit. She’s our gravity.
I find her at the cliff, bird-watching with binoculars in a red velvet dress, legs folded, feet dimpled by rock, long dark hair wind-blown. I’m the wind in that hair, I’m the light that glints off foam-capped waves into her eyes, but it’s rude, if lyrical, to be these things, so I take form. My light casts her shadow onto the water.
She and Callie talk. They share confidences to which I am not admitted. If anyone can answer my questions, it’s Miri.
I ask: “Do you know where Callie’s gone?”
“Never any ducks.” Miri puts down the binoculars. “Or geese. Not so much as an albatross. I’d like to see something else, someday. Someone else. From somewhere other than here.”
“You know that’s impossible.”
“There’s a whole universe out there. It can’t all be dangerous.”
“You’d be surprised.” She doesn’t remember the war. She was too young. I drop next to her and dangle my legs over the cliff edge. Her shadow clocks back round to land. “I need to find her, Miri.”