“It won’t be so bad,” she said. “As I said, I won’t have much room left for consciousness. I won’t be bored, that’s for sure. It’ll be more like one very long dream. Someone else’s dream, certainly, but I don’t doubt that there’ll be a certain rapturous quality to it. I remember how good it felt to find an elegant solution, when the parameters looked so unpromising. Like making the most beautiful music imaginable. I don’t think anyone can really know how that feels unless they’ve also held some of that fire in their minds. It’s ecstasy, Inigo, when it goes right.”
“And when it goes wrong?”
“When it goes wrong, you don’t get much time to explore how it feels.” Weather shut her eyes again, like a person lapsing into micro-sleep. “I’m lowering blockades, allowing the boy to co-opt my own resources. He’s wary. Not because he doesn’t trust me, but because he can barely manage his own processing tasks, without adding the temporary complexity of farming some of them out to me. The transition will be difficult…ah, here it comes. He’s using me, Inigo. He’s accepting my help.” Despite being almost totally enclosed in the shell of red matter, Weather’s whole body convulsed. Her voice, when she spoke again, sounded strained. “It’s difficult. So much more difficult than I thought it would be. This poor mind…he’s had so much to do on his own. A lesser spirit would already have buckled. He’s shown heroic dedication…I wish the nest could know how well he has done.” She clamped her teeth together and convulsed again, harder this time. “He’s taking more of me. Eagerly now. Knows I’ve come to help. The sense of relief…the strain being lifted…I can’t comprehend how he lasted until now. I’m sorry, Inigo. Soon there isn’t going to be much of me left to talk to you.”
“Is it working?”
“Yes. I think so. Perhaps between the two of us—” Her jaws cracked together, teeth cutting her tongue. “Not going to be easy, but…losing more of me now. Language going. Don’t need now.”
“Weather, don’t go.”
“Can’t stay. Got to go. Only way. Inigo, make promise. Make promise fast.”
“Say it. Whatever it is.”
“When we get…when we—” Her face was contorted with the strain of trying to make herself understood.
“When we arrive,” I said.
She nodded so hard I thought her neck was going to break. “Yes. Arrive. You get help. Find others.”
“Other Conjoiners?”
“Yes. Bring them. Bring them in ship. Tell them. Tell them and make them help.”
“I will. I swear on it.”
“Going now. Inigo. One last thing.”
“Yes. Whatever it is.”
“Hold hand.”
I reached out and took her hand, in my good one.
“No,” Weather said. “Other. Other hand.”
I let go, then took her hand in my metal one, closing my fingers as tightly as I dared without risking hers. Then I leaned down, bringing my face close to hers.
“Weather, I think I love you. I’ll wait for you. I’ll find those Conjoiners. That’s a promise.”
“Love a Spider?” she asked.
“Yes. If this is what it takes.”
“Silly…human…boy.”
She pulled my hand, with more strength than I thought she had left in her. She tugged it down into the surface of the couch until it lapped around my wrist, warm as blood. I felt something happening to my hand, a crawling itch like pins and needles. I kissed Weather. Her lips were fever-warm. She nodded and then allowed me to withdraw my hand.
“Go now,” she said.
The red material of the couch flowed over Weather completely, covering her hands and face until all that remained was a vague, mummylike form.
I knew then that I would not see her again for a very long time. For a moment I stood still, paralysed by what had happened. Even then I could feel my weight increasing. Whatever Weather and the boy were doing between them, it was having some effect on the engine output. My weight climbed smoothly, until I was certain we were exceeding half a gee and still accelerating.
Perhaps we were going to make it home after all.
Some of us.
I turned from Weather’s casket and looked for the way out. Held tight against my chest to stop it itching, my hand was lost under a glove of twinkling machinery. I wondered what gift I would find when the glove completed its work.
BEYOND THE AQUILA RIFT
GRETA’S WITH me when I pull Suzy out of the surge tank.
“Why her?” Greta asks.
“Because I want her out first,” I say, wondering if Greta’s jealous. I don’t blame her: Suzy’s beautiful, but she’s also smart. There isn’t a better syntax runner in Ashanti Industrial.
“What happened?” Suzy asks, when she’s over the grogginess. “Did we make it back?”
I ask her to tell me the last thing she remembers.
“Customs,” Suzy says. “Those pricks on Arkangel.”
“And after that? Anything else? The runes? Do you remember casting them?”
“No,” she says, then picks up something in my voice. The fact that I might not be telling the truth, or telling her all she needs to know. “Thom. I’ll ask you again. Did we make it back?”
“Yeah,” I say. “We made it back.”
Suzy looks back at the starscape, airbrushed across her surge tank in luminous violet and yellow paint. She’d had it customized on Carillon. It was against regs: something about the paint clogging intake filters. Suzy didn’t care. She told me it had cost her a week’s pay, but it had been worth it to impose her own personality on the grey company architecture of the ship.
“Funny how I feel like I’ve been in that thing for months.”
I shrug. “That’s the way it feels sometimes.”
“Then nothing went wrong?”
“Nothing at all.”
Suzy looks at Greta. “Then who are you?” she asks.
Greta says nothing. She just looks at me expectantly. I start shaking, and realize I can’t go through with this. Not yet.
“End it,” I tell Greta.
Greta steps toward Suzy. Suzy reacts, but she isn’t quick enough. Greta pulls something from her pocket and touches Suzy on the forearm. Suzy drops like a puppet, out cold. We put her back into the surge tank, plumb her back in and close the lid.
“She won’t remember anything,” Greta says. “The conversation never left her short-term memory.”
“I don’t know if I can go through with this,” I say.
Greta touches me with her other hand. “No one ever said this was going to be easy.”
“I was just trying to ease her into it gently. I didn’t want to tell her the truth right out.”
“I know,” Greta says. “You’re a kind man, Thom.” Then she kisses me.
I REMEMBERED ARKANGEL as well. That was about where it all started to go wrong. We just didn’t know it then.
We missed our first take-off slot when customs found a discrepancy in our cargo waybill. It wasn’t serious, but it took them a while to realize their mistake. By the time they did, we knew we were going to be sitting on the ground for another eight hours, while inbound control processed a fleet of bulk carriers.
I told Suzy and Ray the news. Suzy took it pretty well, or about as well as Suzy ever took that kind of thing. I suggested she use the time to scour the docks for any hot syntax patches. Anything that might shave a day or two off our return trip.