‘Shut up. We’re having fun.’ Mieli squeezes Sydän’s hand: the responsive smartmatter of her suit melts away, and she grips her warm fingers hard.
They’re both wearing heavy quickstone suits, and a laser beam from orbit is feeding power to their q-dot bubble shield that is currently pretending to be a hyperdense element at the far, far end of the periodic table. Sobornost hospitality extends even to those who do not give their minds away just yet.
If anybody asks, I’ll be digging my head in the sand and praying that I still have a human captain four minutes from now, whispers Perhonen and disappears. Its absence is a small sharp shock to Mieli, but there is little time to worry about that when the world explodes.
A vast hand grabs a moon-sized fistful of rock and basalt from the centre of the Lakshmi plateau and squeezes. There is a flash of light, barely filtered by the q-bubble, and then there is a swirling crater, a growing whirlpool of rock and dust, pulled in by an incandescent pinpoint that is the newborn singularity.
Amtor City dives right into it, a falling star.
A funnel of dust rises into the sky, eclipsing what blood-hued sunlight there is. The Maxwell Mountains shake like dying animals. Mieli feels the vibrations in her bones, lets out a small gasp and Sydän squeezes her hand harder. The grey-haired boy was right. This is giant-land.
The whirlpool grows and starts to glow as rock and dust become white-hot plasma. From their vantage point it looks like a glowing drill is being pushed through Venus’s skin, revealing the shifting, intricate layers of computronium beneath the crust. The q-bubble struggles to keep up with the barrage it is taking across the electromagnetic spectrum and switches to neutrino tomography. Basalt and lava become transparent like glass, leaving the spiraling madness visible around the Bekenstein epicentre where god-thoughts have pierced the fabric of spacetime.
Mieli is dimly aware of the fact that this is more of a cartoon than a faithful representation of what is really going on, but she doesn’t care, watching elaborate shapes form around the infant black hole, wishing for a second that she had the accelerated senses of the Sobornost gogols.
There is a shell that surrounds the little godhead completely now, multifaceted and intricate. The earth beneath their feet no longer so much shakes as hums, and Mieli’s teeth rattle even in spite of the q-bubble’s attempt to dampen the resonances.
‘Any second now’, whispers Sydän. Mieli kisses her hard, briefly joining their smartmatter suits into one.
‘Thanks’, she says.
‘Thanks for what?’
‘For showing me this.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Sydän says. ‘And I’m sorry. I need it to be for ever.’
She squeezes Mieli’s hand so hard it almost hurts. Then she lets go and takes a step forward, outside the q-dot bubble, and starts running. Mieli tries to grab her arm. She comes away with the jewelled chain in her fingers.
For a moment, Sydän turns to look back. She wavers in the information wind, face swirling into whiteness like cream poured into coffee.
Mieli screams, but it is too small a sound against the all-engulfing voice of the dying city.
The quake comes. The black hole has been teetering on the brink of instability for minutes, balanced precariously on the edge by the Higgs-churning machines around it, the superthread modes trapped in its event horizon computing furiously for an artificial eternity. It explodes, screaming out all the thoughts it has thought in its own private hell, the mass of a mountain converted into Hawking radiation in an instant.
The q-bubble groans, goes opaque and dissipates, but Mieli’s quicksuit holds under the impact of the blast wave. Basalt shatters under her feet. The white fire grinds Mieli between the hammer of pressure and the anvil of rock.
The last thing she sees before blackness is Perhonen’s feed from orbit, a fiery crack opening up in the face of Lakshmi like a mocking smile.
That was, by far, the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do, says Perhonen.
Mieli floats in a sea of gentle euphoria, soothing blue shapes dancing in front of her eyes. But underneath the coolness hot pain is hiding, pulsing ever so slightly in her bones.
Don’t try to move. You are a mess. Compound fractures, a punctured lung, internal bleeding. I dumped the suit’s nanomeds, they’ve been mutated. Probably shaping some rock into a liver at the moment.
‘Where’s Sydän?’ she says.
Not far.
‘Show me.’
You really shouldn’t—
‘Show me!’
She is dragged back to the cold hard rock of reality. There is pain, and she feels groggy, but at least she can see. She lies on her back sprawled on a craggy basalt edifice. It is almost completely dark: dust swirls in the sky, blocking the cloud cover glow. The dark shapes of Von Neumann beasts creep across the landscape slowly, carefully. Lakshmi Planitia is no more – in its place is an impossibly smooth crater of some godstuff she cannot name.
She sits up slowly and sees the grey-haired boy, watching her.
He does not wear a quicksuit, or any other form of protection that Mieli can see, sitting on hot basalt, leaning back.
‘Did you find your goddess?’ she asks, almost laughing at the absurdity of the sight.
‘I did,’ the boy says. ‘But it seems that you lost yours.’
Mieli closes her eyes. ‘What is it to you?’
‘I was not entirely honest with you. I’m not a pilgrim. You could say that I’m . . . management. And I take an interest in whoever passes through here, whether they decide to join us or not.’
‘She let go of my hand,’ Mieli says. ‘She did not want me to come. I can’t follow her.’
‘I didn’t think you would. In spite of our reputation, we respect that. Or some of us do, in any case.’ He walks to Mieli and offers her a hand, helping her up. With the suit’s support, she manages to stand.
‘Look at you. That won’t do. See, this is what you get when you wear flesh and come here.’ Suddenly, the suit is flooded with a cool sensation, fresh nanomeds, Sobornost ones. The pain turns into a full-body tickle.
‘To be fair, your friend was not entirely honest with you either,’ the boy says. ‘She had been speaking to one of my sisters for a while now, about coming here.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Don’t give up,’ the boy says. ‘I learned that a long time ago. If reality is not what you want it to be, change it. You should not accept anything blindly, not death, not immortality. If you don’t want to join her, you can go to my sister and ask for her back. But let me warn you, there will be a price.’
Mieli takes a deep breath. Something rattles in her lungs. She finds that she is holding Sydän’s chain in her hand, like a little piece of Oort, made of jewels and songs.
‘I’ll do it,’ she says. ‘Just tell me where to go. But why are you doing this?’
‘For love,’ he says.
‘Love for whom?’
‘No one,’ he says. ‘I just want to know what it feels like.’
After three days, Mieli finds the temple on the metallic plain, in the shield volcano’s shadow.
Her limbs burn with fatigue. Her muscles and bones have almost completely healed now, and the q-stone armour helps, but hunger and thirst gnaw her insides, and she has to fight to take every step.
The temple is a labyrinth of stone, a seeming jumble of black rectangles and shards like building blocks discarded by a giant child. When she enters, it explodes into an intricate gallery where stone bridges and pathways lead in all directions. Perhonen whispers that the whole place is a projection of a larger, higher-dimensional object, a shadow solidified in stone. There, in the black rock, she sees silver flower markings, like the grey-haired boy said, and follows them.