The lightning flashes of the battle above make their long, sharp shadows flicker as Matjek leads them to a sheer face of the colossal cylindrical mountain range. He touches the rock, and a disc-shaped area of it dissolves, revealing the eerie blue of the Arsenal’s pseudomatter wall. The boy qupts a large quantum state at the impossibly smooth surface and it, too, opens, revealing shifting folds that part before them.
Zinda creates a q-dot bubble to carry them through, and then they are in the giant blue-green tunnel of the Arsenal.
It does not take them long to find the ekpyrotic cannon. Mieli stares at it: it reminds her of some monster of the void of Oortian tales, a thing with a four-lobed eye made of black holes.
‘Algorithm termination: undecidable,’ Anti-de-Sitter-times-a-Sphere says.
‘Do you really have to do this, Mieli? How can you go inside that thing, and ask us to fire it into Saturn?’ Zinda’s eyes plead until Mieli has to look away.
Mieli smiles. ‘I’m afraid that the waiting will be your job, this time,’ she says. She turns to Matjek: the boy is already busy feeding the tanglematter sphere’s contents to the monstrous weapon. ‘Matjek, can you—’
A lightning bolt strikes at her through her Great Game jewel, like the All-Defector’s blow on Hektor, only inside her mind. Around her, she sees the other Liquorice-zoku members shimmer into their trueforms, frozen in place like huge snowflakes.
‘This is not how the Great Game is played,’ Barbicane says, shaking his head.
The Great Game Elder is alone, wearing his brass cyborg form. His Game jewel shimmers in his hand: the others orbit his stovepipe hat in a dimly glowing halo.
‘We don’t take the easy way out! We don’t use cheat codes! Would you risk all of reality for one insignificant war?’ Barbicane gestures at Zinda with her gun hand, exasperated. ‘And you, little girl! I made you to keep her sane! What were you thinking?’
Barbicane winks. ‘My apologies. I am being facetious! You are all doing exactly what I wanted you to do. Sobornost infiltrators who broke into our most secure fortress during a time of crisis, and destroyed the Kaminari jewel! That’s the official version! Why do you think I let you know where it was, pretended to overlook Zinda’s twinking?
‘I always wanted to do it myself, but the volition of the Great Game would not let me. It was too tempting for too many. I kept a balance of indecision for a long time, managed at least to hide it on another brane.
‘But now, our mutual friend Jean has set us all free! It has been forever since I did not feel the volition of the zoku in my head. It is like playing a new game! I am finally free to do what the zoku needs, not what it wants!’
He gestures at an iridescent cube floating behind him. ‘A strangelet device. It will go with you all into the cannon. It should cause a Big Crunch on the Planck brane. Ah! A grand truedeath for all of you! I almost wish I could share it!’
Mieli, comes a quiet qupt from Mieli’s Liquorice jewel. It’s Matjek. I can move. And I still have access to the gunscape. I don’t think he knows I’m not Great Game. Can you keep him talking?
‘There won’t be anyone to remember our deaths,’ Mieli says. ‘The Sobornost is about to wipe out Supra City if we don’t use the jewel.’
‘Oh, there will be survivors, my dear! Like I said, it is time to start a new game, and I look forward to the challenge! We had grown too powerful. But being the underdog again, a rebel, one of the few ragged survivors of a great empire, fighting a vastly superior force. What a jolly Great Game that will be!’
I’m almost ready, Mieli, Matjek says. He pauses. Are you?
Mieli casts a quick glance at Barbicane, hovering in front of the ekpyrotic cannon.
You can’t be serious, she qupts.
The entire Arsenal is a linear accelerator. I will fire you at Saturn. The rest of us will be fine. Just promise that you will come back.
‘We could end that game, here and now, if you just let me,’ Mieli shouts.
Ten seconds.
‘And are you so arrogant that you think the jewel will accept you, Oortian?’ Barbicane growls. ‘You are nothing special, no matter what le Flambeur thinks. I had to dangle you in front of him to goad him into desperation, into breaking the volition system. I even filled his ship with tools! I suppose I should thank him. After all, it was his Collapse that created the Great Game Zoku in the first place, to make sure it would never happen again!’
His face darkens. ‘Then again, there are parts of me that remember what I lost on the day it rained fire. So I must admit it gives me some pleasure to think that his attempt to rescue you was in vain.
‘Perhaps I will allow myself the indulgence of taking care of you personally. It will not make a difference in the end, after all, and may teach a lesson to incompetent little Zinda here. Discipline amongst the newbies is far too lax these days, that’s what I always say!’
He presses the cold mouth of his gun arm against Mieli’s head.
Do it! Mieli qupts at Matjek. She casts one more look at Zinda. The zoku girl’s eyes flash with understanding. The metal against Mieli’s flesh grows hot.
Done. Mieli is qupted into the gunscape, her mind encoded into the quantum states of the tanglematter sphere. She is inside a tiny Realm, bodiless, only dimly aware of the Arsenal around her, of the minuscule shape of Barbicane right in front of the ekpyrotic weapon.
Matjek fires. The Arsenal walls come alive with energy. An EM field pushes the ekpyrotic shell to an enormous velocity in seconds. It flashes through chamber after chamber, spinning faster and faster, erasing every gun in the Gun Club’s collection in its path.
Even inside her cocooned Realm, Mieli feels the impact on Saturn’s south pole, of the shell pushing deep into the metallic hydrogen core. Then the four black holes of the ekpyrotic shell come together.
The entire giant planet pulses like a heart, pumps gravitational waves across the space between universes. They carry Mieli with them, a message in a bottle, washing onto an alien shore.
Everything is soft. Everything is liquid.
Mieli does not see or feel as much as perceives, does not move as much as flows. There is only a bubble-thin boundary between her and Other, inside and outside. It is like a dream where you dive and start breathing underwater.
She has a vague sense of up and down, and of infinite depths below her. Something huge passes beneath, moving with slow strokes, and her fragile bubble-self wavers in its wake. For a moment, she stays very still, fear spilling out of her in ripples.
How did the zoku build this place? Solitonic states, governed by alien physics, just about complex enough to compute, to provide a platform for thought, here on the Planck brane. Did they build it or find it?
Slowly, carefully, she lets herself expand, reaches out with her awareness, feeling for things that are not her. After a while, she starts to sense a knotted flow, something warm in the liquid other, something shaped like hands, folded together, or a sleeping butterfly.
The Kaminari jewel.
Here, touching is a metaphor, and when Mieli reaches for it, its flow lines pull her essence in, make her a part of it, create a knot in what she thinks of as her chest.
Then the jewel opens.
At first, there is only a cool presence, filling her, spreading to her every cell. Then the jewel is her, and she is it, and they are all possible Mielis at once.
An old winged woman dying of a smartcoral growth in Oort, telling a story to her great-grandchildren.
A Sobornost goddess whose wings spread over the Solar System.
A zoku trueform with a halo of jewels, like a tarot card.