Everybody except me, who has hidden a spare miniature body with qupt-ready EPR states inside it. And I was going to use it to steal back my ship from the Arsenal.
But I just smile and nod, and start thinking about a plan B.
5
MIELI AND THE ABYSS
Mieli is standing on a balcony. The sky above is impossibly vast, faded blue, with a white cut across it. The sunlight is bright and warm on her face, but it is diffuse, soletta-light, collected by some giant mirror in space and distilled into this gentle radiance. Strangely, it reminds her of Oort, of home.
Nothing else does.
The building she is in is high and white, made of organic rounded shapes like seashells, bristling with terraces and balconies. Tanned people sit or lie in the sun, surrounded by haloes of jewels.
Below her, there is a canal. It goes on forever, a thread that vanishes into a haze somewhere impossibly far. A golden gondola suspended from two purple balloons floats leisurely above it. On both shores of the waterway, the landscape is a quilt of mismatched buildings and vistas, separated from each other by silver lines. There is a temple of onion-shaped pagodas and spires, rising from a stark field of dark circuitry; a row of coral castles; a mist-shrouded grey city in the distance. Further away lies a white-peaked mountain range, surrounded by red-winged flying specks too large to be birds. At the very edge of her vision, there is a structure almost as big as the sky, a looming broad arc with a metallic glint, held up by thin white pillars. To right and left, the world is abruptly bound by two cloud-walls, amber-hued.
Mieli feels a touch of vertigo. She has never liked planets: they are too big for her, and the horizons and the skies here dwarf anything she has ever seen. She focuses her eyes on the blue thread of the canal. Hundreds of zoku trueforms dart along it, whirlpools and parachutes of jewels and fog, moving in flocks like birds. They suddenly remind her of the dream that brought her here.
To Supra City.
‘Would you like some tea?’
Mieli turns around. Her systems wake up, but detect no threat. It is the usagi-ronin. She is barefoot, dressed in torn blue trousers and a simple green shirt. Here, she is shorter than Mieli. Her skin is the colour of milk chocolate. Her mouth is a bit too wide to fit in the shape of her face, but her eyes are bright. She is carrying a tray with small bowls and a jade green teapot. She motions Mieli to follow her inside.
Warily, Mieli obeys. They are in a small apartment. Its white walls are covered in brightly coloured sheets showing ancient-looking two-dimensional pictures of young people, prominently featuring the words Manaya High. There is no smartmatter: the sparse furniture is made of wood and handwoven, colourful fabrics. The simplicity of it is a pleasant contrast to the madness outside. Deliberate, of course.
The usagi-ronin gracefully sets the tray down onto a small table. Then she sits down on the pillows, cross-legged. ‘Have some. It’s sencha. Unless you would like something to eat?’
Mieli sits down carefully in a kneeling position: the gravity here is heavy for her, nearly the same as on Earth. In spite of that, she feels light and strong, and her limbs no longer ache from days of climbing. She is dressed as she was on Perhonen, a black toga, and Sydän’s jewelled chain around her ankle. She notices that she is holding the zoku jewel that saved her: a blue oval, smaller than her hand, pulsating with faint light, surrounded by a very faint smell of flowers. She puts it on the table in front of her.
The usagi-ronin girl looks at the jewel and smiles. She places a cup in front of Mieli and fills it with steaming, fresh-smelling liquid.
‘Look, I’m sorry about the Realm,’ she says. ‘The mountain and all that. I can see now that it would have been disorienting for you. We usually try to bring orphans in through Realms, to let them work through their issues: they get the narrative rights to shape their surroundings in the framework we give them. You did very well, by the way. I did not see that ending coming at all. Chilling.’ She cradles her own cup in her small hands, and sips it carefully. ‘But, I didn’t realise just how many enhancements your trueform there has. One of its subsystems started fighting back, so I thought it would be best if we started again here. What do you think?’
Mieli looks at the girl sharply. Her Sobornost-made enhancements are functioning normally, and she tasks a few intel gogols to scan the environment. In an instant, they confirm what she already knew: she is on a strip of dense smartmatter, tens of thousands of kilometres long and a few hundred wide, somewhere near the equator of Saturn. However, they can’t access the local spimescape – either because she is inside a firewall, or because she lacks the right protocols.
‘What am I doing here?’ Mieli asks.
‘Whatever you want. Maybe start by drinking tea? You haven’t touched it. My name in this Circle is Zinda, by the way.’
Mieli frowns. Her experience of the zoku is limited to fighting them. During the Protocol War, she went through a few virs set on Supra City, in case of capture, but they were nothing like this. As far as her sensors can tell, the apartment is what it looks like, down to the molecular level. Zinda, however, is a zoku alter – a mixture of foglets and zoku jewels – although she is running a passable emulation of a human body, down to sketches of internal organs and a digestive system.
‘I would like to find out what happened to my ship.’
‘Hmm. We’ll get to that in a moment,’ Zinda says. ‘But to answer your first question: you are here because the Rainbow Table Zoku – which you belong to, by the way – found you. They didn’t know what to do with your volition. They mostly deal with routers, Realmgates, that sort of thing: they are really more into picotech than people, if you see what I mean. So the volition got passed to our zoku, the Manaya High. We take care of … lost lambs, you could say. Those who want to return.’ Zinda smiles gently. ‘Like you.’
‘I don’t understand what you are talking about.’ Gingerly, Mieli tries the tea. It, too, is exactly what it appears to be, slightly bitter and not completely warm anymore, but in spite of herself, she likes the taste. ‘I can’t stay. I need to get back to my ship.’
‘Oh dear.’ Zinda looks serious. ‘You are free to leave at any time, of course. But that’s not what your volition said to the jewel. You wanted to come home, and here you are.’
Mieli gets up slowly.
‘My name is Mieli, the daughter of Karhu, of Hiljainen Koto, of Oort. I have nothing to do with you.’ But deep in her gut, there is a sudden chill. A tithe child. A child of the sun-smiths, given together with a Little Sun, for the koto to protect and cherish.
‘Volition is a funny thing,’ Zinda says. ‘The jewels don’t just respond to what we want, but what we would want if we were wiser or smarter or knew more. The zoku as a whole tries to extrapolate what you really need, rather than just what you are asking for, and in line with everybody’s volition. I’ll give you an example. Tell me something you really like. A food, or something.’
Mieli hesitates. ‘This is pointless.’
‘Come on. Don’t take it so seriously!’
Mieli sighs. ‘Liquorice. I like liquorice.’
‘Great! So, let’s say I have two boxes, A and B’ – she places two empty cups on the table, upside down – ‘and A has liquorice in it. I know that you really like liquorice and are looking for some. You ask me to open box B. Which box should I open?’
Mieli blinks.
‘See?’ Zinda says.
‘But it’s not the same thing.’