‘So, why are you not out there, in the air, flying? That should make it easier.’
Mieli takes a bite of the peach. It is sweet and yielding, with a trace of bitterness, like Venerian air.
‘And you? Why are you not flying?’ she asks.
‘Well,’ says the boy. ‘You’re here, for one thing. Prettiest girl I’ve ever seen, all alone in the city of the gods.’ He bites his lip. ‘Or maybe I just don’t like flying.’
Mieli sits on the bench next to the boy and finishes eating the peach in silence. She keeps the peach stone in her mouth. Its surface is rough, and she imagines that that is what the venera firma below would feel like if she could reach out and touch it with her tongue. Uneven basalt, sticky almost-liquid air and bitter acid.
‘My . . . woman is out there,’ she says. Talking to someone who is not Sydän or Perhonen feels good. ‘We came here yesterday. It is very strange here. She likes it. I do not.’
‘I didn’t even think Oortians came this far to the Inner System. Not that I’m complaining, of course.’
For a moment, she wants to tell the story to someone. We met building big things and fell in love. We fought in a war, tribes against tribes. Everyone thought we were dead. So Sydän decided we might as well be. But the look in the boy’s eyes is too intense.
‘It’s a long story,’ she says aloud. ‘How did you know I wasn’t one of them?’ She gestures at the white winged figures in the clouds, now almost invisible in the distance.
‘The peach,’ says the boy. ‘They don’t eat. Not like you did, anyway.’ He grins. ‘It’s also symbolic. Paris gave it to the prettiest goddess.’
He flatters well, says Perhonen. Better than Sydän, almost.
‘You agreed that I am not a goddess,’ Mieli says.
‘You’ll do. Until I find the real one.’
‘That doesn’t sound like a compliment.’
‘Sorry,’ the boy says. ‘I meant that literally. I’m here for the quake. When the city falls. When the Sobornost gods come out.’
What is he talking about? Mieli whispers to Perhonen.
I have no idea, the ship says.
The boy sees her confusion. ‘Do you know what a Bekenstein quake is?’ he asks.
‘No. But perhaps I should.’
‘That’s what happens to all the Wind Cities. That’s why everybody comes here. Pilgrims and posthumans and monsters and godlings, from the Belt and the Oubliette and even zoku, from Jupiter and Saturn. They come here to be taken by the Sobornost, to give themselves to the Great Common Task.
‘The city falls. The Sobornost machines take it. They collapse it to Planck scale. There is a singularity. The information density goes beyond the Bekenstein bound. You get a little black hole: so small it’s not stable. So it blows up, beneath the crust. It’s a fantastic lightshow. And it’ll happen here soon.’ There is a wistful look in the boy’s eyes.
‘The goddess will come after the quake, to gather her children, to soak up the Hawking radiation. I’m here to meet her. And to give her a peach of immortality.’
Mieli stands up. Her body still feels so heavy it might be encased in lead, but she does not care.
‘She didn’t tell me,’ she says quietly. She didn’t tell me! she screams at Perhonen. You didn’t tell me!
I didn’t want to interfere, the ship protests. I thought she was going to tell you.
‘Thank you,’ she tells the boy quietly. ‘I hope you find your goddess.’
‘Oh, I will,’ he says, but Mieli is already running, towards the edge of the city and the clouds and the fifty-kilometre fall. She spreads her arms, opens her wings and leaps.
Sydän turns it into a chase, just like they used to do in the Chain in Oort. It always ends the same way, and by the time Sydän lets Mieli catch her, she is no longer angry.
They make love on Venus for the first time in a q-dot bubble above the Cleopatra Crater, on the slopes of Maxwell Montes, leaving them exhausted and bathing in the honey-coloured light of the clouds, wrapped around each other. Mieli traces the silvery lines of scars where Sydän’s wings used to be. The other woman shivers with pleasure, and then shifts in her embrace.
‘Look, you can see a guberniya from here,’ Sydän says, pointing up. And there it is, a bright evening star. A diamond eye in the sky, one of the homes of the deep Sobornost gods: an artificial sphere the size of old Earth, made from sunlifted carbon, thinking thoughts bigger than the sum of humanity. ‘Doesn’t it make you feel funny? How far we have come?’
Mieli feels cold. She touches Sydän’s cheek.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I’m afraid of this place,’ Mieli says. ‘We did not have to come here. The sunsmiths told us about Jovian polises, and the red planet where they drink wine and listen to old Earth music. Why are we here?’
Sydän turns away, hugging her knees. She takes her jewelled chain – fashioned after their first Great Work – and starts wrapping it around her left forearm.
‘You know why,’ she says.
‘Why do you want to be a goddess?’
Sydän looks at her, her lips a stern line in the dark, but says nothing.
‘You want to fall with the city,’ says Mieli. ‘A pilgrim told me. Be a thought in its mind when it dies.’
‘It’s a dream, all right? My dream,’ says Sydän. ‘Kirkkaat Kutojat think they are so good. Let’s all build ice bridges to the stars, let’s be free. Fine. Great. But we die. We die and become ghosts. The ancestors are not us, not really: just shades and memories and bones of ice. I don’t want that. Not ever.’ She touches Mieli just above the heart with her chained hand. ‘We could do it together.’
Mieli shakes her head slowly.
‘You were right. All my life they told me that I’m special,’ she says. ‘The tithe child, Grandmother’s pet. But none of that is as special as the me that is with you. I want to be that, just that, for a while. It’s the fear of losing it that makes it special. If it was for ever, it would not matter as much.’
Sydän says looks at Amtor City, a distant amber bubble in the sky, like a snowglobe.
‘I’ll stay with you. I promise,’ she says, after a while. ‘Damn. I still suck at this.’ She wipes her eyes. ‘So. Sightseeing instead. How about watching a transhuman mind have a Hawking orgasm? From afar.’
Mieli smiles. A warm rush of relief washes over her.
‘I bet you say that to all the girls,’ she says.
I still think the best place to watch this thing would be in orbit, mutters Perhonen. Preferably around Mars.
‘Ssh. It’s about to start’, says Mieli, tingling with excitement. Snowflakes of data drift across her field of vision, superimposed on the forbidding landscape of Lakshmi Planum. There is movement everywhere on the basalt surface: the von Neumann beasts are fleeing in all directions, scuttling up the steep cliffs at the base of Maxwell Montes. They look like black ants in the blood-coloured haze of a Venerian morning, moving in panicky shifting swarms.
Have a look at this. The ship passes Mieli a feed from orbit: Amtor City is the eye of a maelstorm, a blue-white perfect golden-ratio spiral. Mieli, there are thinking mountains down there. Even up here, the data stream is a bit of a headfuck. If I go mad or spontaneously transcend in the next five minutes, I’m going to blame you.