‘I—’
Zinda touches her face, cups her chin, turns her head gently. ‘Ssh. I want you to watch.’
She presses her hands against her chest. Something glows between them with warm light, emerging from beneath her smooth skin. Zinda cups it between her hands: a zoku jewel, like a pearly tear in a delicate golden frame. She places it on the ground gently, next to the eggs. ‘Great Game,’ she says. Another jewel follows, a round red eye in a silver disc, and then another, and another. ‘Manaya High. Supra. Huizinga. Strip. Liquorice. That’s my whole q-self.’
She smiles. ‘Remember, we always have the freedom to leave. You can always stop playing the game.’ She points at the jewels on the ground. ‘They are just pretty rocks to me now. What you see is all you get.’
She pulls her dress down and steps out of it with a rustle. Her body is slim and small, her breasts tiny buds, her bare sex a pink comma in the brackets of her hips. She steps forward lightly and stretches her arms like a dancer, wraps them around Mieli’s neck.
‘So, who is a big bad Great Game Zoku member now, hmm? Who is out to exploit a poor, innocent girl?’
Mieli answers with her hands and lips and tongue, and pulls Zinda down to the bed of grass, treasure eggs, and scattered quantum jewels.
Mieli sings to her, afterwards, a soft, quiet song that lovers sing. In Oort, it makes tinkling väki flowers grow in a koto’s walls. But here, it fits with the rhythm of Zinda’s breathing in her arms, with the warm breeze that the forest makes to dry the cooling sweat on their skin.
She feels free and light, unmoored, for the first time on a world bigger than a koto. Zinda is a small and precious and true thing against her.
I can’t do this. I can’t lie to her with my body. I have to tell her the truth.
The pellegrini may have sacrificed herself for her, but no doubt it was for selfish reasons. After years of service, Mieli owes her nothing.
And Sydän? She looked back. But she got what she wanted. An eternity. A life without end. Would she begrudge an end for Mieli, or a new beginning?
Promises and vows, chains made of words and false hope. I am done with them. Perhonen was right. She would want this. She would want me to be happy.
I always loved you more than she did, the ship said.
Perhaps this is the best song I can give her.
‘Why did you stop?’ Zinda asks.
‘There is something I have to tell you.’ Mieli takes a deep breath. ‘I’m not one of you. I’m not sure I ever will be. I only joined because I was looking for the Kaminari jewel. And you were right. There was someone. And there was a witch, too. My friend Perhonen once told me the same thing you did. I have been a fool.’
‘Mieli, you don’t have to say anything.’
‘Yes, I do.’ Haltingly, she tells Zinda about Sydän, about Venus and the pellegrini; her long journey with the thief and Perhonen. And the All-Defector. It gets easier as she speaks, and it takes a long time. When she finally runs out of words, there is faint rosy soletta-light glinting in the infinitely distant horizon of the Strip.
‘I understand if you have to share all that with the Great Game,’ Mieli says, after a while.
Zinda hugs her bare knees and looks at Mieli. ‘I won’t, if you don’t want me to. I’ll leave the zoku, if I have to.’
‘I can’t ask you to do that.’
‘Of course you can.’
Zinda stares at the river water, weighing her pearly Great Game jewel in her hand. Then she squeezes her eyes shut. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she whispers.
‘What is it?’ Mieli touches her shoulder. ‘Tell me.’
‘I’m not sure you would understand.’
‘After you listened? Of course I will.’
Zinda smiles a sad smile. ‘I know you pretty well, Mieli. I knew you even before we met. And I know you won’t like it. But after everything you said, I can’t keep you in the dark. You don’t like lies, Mieli, you really don’t. And like you said, you will never be one of us.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I was made for you, Mieli.’
‘What?’
‘I told you about zoku children. We are never born without a purpose. You are mine.’ She bites her lip. ‘It’s not artificial. It’s not a mask. It’s not a jewel putting thoughts into my head. I want to make you happy and to love you. It’s who I am.’ Mieli looks at the jewels lying on the ground. They sparkle in the morning light, in many colours. It was a trap, all a trap. She stands up.
‘I’m sorry, Mieli. But you have to understand, it doesn’t make it any different.’
‘I thought the Sobornost were cruel,’ Mieli says in a cold voice. ‘But they have nothing to learn from you. They deserve to have this place, and everything in it.’
She turns her back to the zoku girl and starts walking into the woods.
Mieli walks for a long time. She is naked, except for Sydän’s chain, and her zoku jewels, which follow her like a flock of birds. She ignores them, ignores the qupts from Zinda, and keeps walking. Rage and guilt and confusion swirl inside her like the eyestorms of Saturn, until finally she can’t bear it and uses her metacortex to filter the emotions out. But that is even worse: there is no room for anything else in her mind, and she is left a blank sheet of paper, a mindless point in motion.
The landscape is changing around her. The party is over, the Circle erased. The building blocks of the world are showing through: the surfaces of rocks and trees are melting back into smooth notchcubes, and after a while, she is the only living thing in a roughly sketched, blocky forest of gunmetal.
What finally stops her is an insistent impulse from her Great Game jewel. Stay where you are. She regrets not throwing it into the river, but cannot summon the energy to do it.
Impassively, she stops and waits. A Realmgate pops into being, and Barbicane floats through it, a rotund splash of colour against the grey cubetrees.
‘I suppose you want your hat back,’ Mieli says, folding her arms.
Barbicane raises his eyebrows, and smiles a little awkwardly. ‘My dear, young ladies at parties do what young ladies at parties do! My headgear is hardly the issue here. I do apologise for intruding upon your privacy at a difficult time, but the zoku has an urgent need for your services, and your handler, the lovely Zinda, failed to contact you. I thought my presence would carry more … weight!’ He clangs on his brass belly with his heavy gun arm.
Mieli turns away. ‘Whatever it is, I’m not interested.’ She reaches for her Great Game jewel, ready to throw it away.
‘Oh, but I think you will be! I believe you are familiar with a rascal by the name of Jean le Flambeur?’
Mieli stops and looks at Barbicane, eyes wide.
‘He is here?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ Barbicane licks his lips. ‘We received a communication from him. He claims that in precisely fifty-seven minutes, he is going to steal a ring of Saturn.’
14
THE THIEF AND THE CLUTTERED SELF
The boy is lying in the hot sand with the sun beating down on his back, thinking about stealing.
The robot moves along the edge of the solar panel fields. It looks like a plastic toy, a camouflage-coloured crab. But there is a bioprocessor inside the cheap shell, and One-Eyed Ijja will pay well for it.
His mouth is dry. The sun is hot enough to peel even his parched neck, and bright lights are starting to flash in his eyes.