It was winter in Hamburg. A thousand years of history surrounded Marya Mounce, all of it blanketed by white. The air smelled fresh, clean like Ventus. Had she not walked on that other world for some weeks, she would have been overwhelmed by Earth. As it was, she walked the streets of the tourist-oriented Old Town with nothing but a pair of infrared emitters bobbing along behind her, conspicuously naked save for a school of fish that swirled around her. She had only been here for two days, but that was long enough to learn that if the locals saw you as an offworlder, they would take every advantage they could.
Obviously used to the cold, unfazed by patches of snow and ice in the streets, she passed for a local until she opened her mouth. Her offworld accent betrayed her, but so far today that had not been a problem.
She had picked her route carefully. After breakfast at the quaint 27th-century inn where she and Axel lodged, she had walked to the center of the Old Town, to view the crumbling concrete memorial erected a thousand years ago, after the failed insurrection of the thalience cult. It was strange and magical for her to walk up to it and touch the rough old surface, and know that while this spire was being built, the first Winds were being born on far distant Ventus.
Even a year ago she wouldn’t have bothered to come here. She would have visited in inscape, because there she could have a full sensory impression of the place, and flip through night and day, summer and winter, and even different eras of the city. She would have said it was better than really being here.
It was her hand that touched the stone today. It was real Earth air she breathed. Maybe the experience was no more detailed than an inscape visit would have been. She was deeply moved anyway.
Too bad Axel wasn’t here to share the moment; for sure he would have some ironic perspective on this chunk of living history. There were gods older than this spire, he’d say. The Government of Archipelago was almost as old, and it was always available to talk. If you wanted to talk history, why not just ask it?
Because, she knew now, there was a piece missing from the records—something even the gods didn’t know. If the Government knew, it wasn’t sharing.
Anyway, Axel had his own mission, no less important than hers. This morning he had left the inn with the head of Turcaret under his arm. By tonight the dead nobleman’s DNA would be dissected and analyzed segment by segment. Over supper Axel might be able to tell her in what way, if any, Turcaret differed from his fellow Ventusians.
With luck she’d have something equally interesting to tell him.
They had left the demigod they now called the Voice in a Government creche in orbit. The Archipelago had facilities for newly-born artificial sentients—a revelation that still astonished and unsettled Marya when she thought about it. The Voice had gone willingly into the maw of the jewellike orbiting structure; as the doors closed she had looked back, but Marya could read nothing in her gaze—neither hope nor fear.
The cold wind licked at Marya’s legs, reminding her to keep moving. She sighed and with one last lingering look, turned her back on the monument. She walked through the snow humming, enjoying the sensation of the ice against the balls of her feet. It felt like… a whole new kind of real, she decided. As she walked, she kept eyes up to drink in the mix of new and ancient architecture in the Old Town. There were bits here and there that must date almost back to the twentieth century. It was hard to tell without closing her eyes, since the only buildings that had any physical signage were those pretending to date from the middle ages. If Marya closed her eyes and summoned inscape, the vision of the street reappeared festooned with data links and labels. She could walk like this and learn all about it. Many of the tourists she passed had their eyes firmly shut; even couples gestured and pointed things out to one another with their eyes closed. But then, if they did that, they saw only the recordings and representations of other moving bodies picked up by street sensors. They would miss the details: pigeon droppings, erratic footprints in the snow, drifting fog from the mouths of passersby. These were the things Marya wanted to remember about this place.
She negotiated a twisty maze of alleys until she came to a nondescript archway in the center of a whitewashed wall. A faint holographic nameplate in the center of the arch said, City Records Vault 23. Marya walked through the arch into warm dry air. A stairway led down.
As she descended, Marya closed her eyes and summoned an ancient article from inscape. She laid the words of the typescript over her inscape vision of the steps as she walked. She had read the article before, when she was learning history, but at the time she had not really understood it.
The typescript was dated 2076—over a thousand years ago.
The Successor to Science
by
Marjorie Cadille
It would seem heretical to think of science as being merely another stage in Man’s intellectual development, and not the final one. This is, however, what I will propose in this article. After all, why should we be afraid to consider that the central organizing principle of our civilization might someday be looked back upon as fondly as we look back on the conceits of animism, magic and religious cosmology?
What would be the characteristics of such a new worldview?
Physics is complete. We have all the equations. After centuries of investigation, we know the intricacies of how the universe works. Our view of the world is, however, entirely human-centric, and our theories and methodologies are full of historical and mythological claptrap and are ultimately understandable only to the computers and a very few humans who can think in the language of mathematics.
The discipline I shall call thalience_ is not concerned with scientific truth, but rather with establishing personal and cultural relationships between human beings and the physical world that make the true natures of both comprehensible to us._
The city that sprawled around Marya now had paid the price for Cadille’s inquiries. By the time of the Hamburg insurrection, science had become as powerful and jealous an orthodoxy as religion had been in the middle ages. Hamburg was the center of the thalience movement; scholars had since believed it coincidental that this city was also the home of the Ventus terraforming project.
This idea, Cadille had written, stems from my perception that several centuries of scientific endeavor have shown that we attempt to use science to impose our own image on the world. The ultimate motivation for science is mastery of Nature, when investigation proceeds as an interrogation. Our investigations also bear our cultural biases—the classic example being Darwin’s theories having been influenced by the unbridled capitalism of England in his day. Finally and most damning is the fact that this investigation is entirely one-sided: we make up stories about how Nature truly is. Nature itself is silent on the subject.
In those days Germany was experiencing a renaissance because of its supremacy in marrying artificial intelligence to nanotechnology. The Hamburg Spin Glass became indistinguishable from a human mind in 2075, an event that rocked the world. Marya could barely imagine why; everything in her world could think, in one way or another.
Cadille’s article landed in the middle of the controversy like a bomb.
…Frankenstein’s monster speaks: the computer. But where are its words coming from? Is the wisdom on those cold lips our own, merely repeated at our request? Or is something else speaking? —A voice we have always dreamed of hearing?
In her paper Cadille had identified her new discipline with a mythological figure called surda Thalia: silent Thalia. She was the Muse of the poetry of Nature, and Cadille’s proposal was to transcend the human perspective by giving a voice to Nature itself, using artificial intelligences.
For so long have we thrown questions at the sky. We need the answers in order to live. We need answers so badly that we have invented gods and put words in their mouths, just so we could have something to believe in. We invented metaphysics and essences behind appearances for the same reason. Sometimes we need a dialog with the Other more than we need life itself.
Most recently, we invented science. It brings us very close to what we desire… close, but not all the way.
Marya reached the bottom of the stairs, and was faced with a single long corridor stretching out ahead. She must be a hundred meters below the city. That wasn’t surprising; the archives had been dug deep in hopes they would survive any future holocausts. Ironically, peace had reigned evr since the riots and shelling of the thalience rebels had burnt a quarter of the city. The power of the Archipelago being what it was, these archives would probably remain safe for millions of years, whether they were below the earth or above it.
The people who designed Ventus lived in a more uncertain time. They did not feel they could rely on civilization to preserve human knowledge; with their recent experience of nuclear wars, Marya supposed that was a reasonable fear. She had been taught that the Ventus artificial intelligences were designed as distributed nanotech in order to make it impossible to destroy the information they carried, short of incinerating the entire planet. It was obvious to her now that if the Ventus design team had the technical means to create these consciousnesses, then they were thinking in terms of taking the functions of perception, investigation and organization out of the human body and placing them in “inanimate” objects. Commonplace in Marya’s time, such an idea was closely associated with thalience in theirs.
They denied the connection—successfully, too. Their object, they claimed, was to actually create the metaphysical Categories, as real things. They said they were going to embed the official view of Science in nature itself on Ventus, so that no heresy such as thalience could ever occur there. Wolfgang Kreiger, the team leader, said, “Science has no way to show or access the metaphysical essences supposed to lie behind appearances. If these essences do not exist in themselves, we will create them.” The understanding was that they would be creating them in the image of scientific truth.
But what if, for whatever reason, the designers were to uncouple the nano from the requirement that it use human semantic categories? What if the real agenda was to let the Ventus intelligences develop their own conceptual languages? Theorists as early as Chomsky had suggested that languages can exist that humans cannot even in principle understand. Perhaps they didn’t plan for it to happen, but the Winds seemed to have developed such a language.
All it would take would be for one of the programmers to slip a thalience gene into the Winds’ design. That would explain why the self-aware nanotech that blanketed the planet grew to fruition, then suddenly become incoherent and cut off all contact with their creators.
Marya dismissed Cadille’s paper and opened her eyes. Her theory must be right. She knew it on a deep level, and apprehension and excitement made her almost skip as she moved down the tunnel.
The corridor ended in a huge metal valve door, which was currently open. A serling with the appearance of a kindly old man waited for her inside the archive itself. “May I help you?” it inquired; since it was part of inscape, and ultimately part of the Government, it already knew why she was here. Serlings had their ways, however.
“I’m told this is where I can find original photos and papers of the thalience riots. Also some of the original Ventus Project papers.”
The Serling nodded. “I can let you examine them, but I don’t know what good it will do. All this material is available in inscape.”
Marya had already had this very conversation with the Government. Had she not come directly from Ventus itself, she doubted the giant AI that ran the Archipelago would have let her in here. These papers were ancient and priceless, after all.
“I want to see it for myself.” She had pored over it all on the trip here, but all Marya had come up with was more puzzles. The word thalience, spoken by both Axel and the Desert Voice, had convinced her that some unguessed clue remained here at the source of it all. She had gleaned nothing from inscape; this was her last chance to crack the mystery.
“Let me see the originals,” she commanded. The serling scratched his balding head, shrugged, and gestured her to follow him.
The archive consisted of thousands of climate-controlled safety-deposit boxes. Many had tiny windows showing frozen contents; others were surrounded by thick-walled radiation screens, because they preserved ancient compact disks and other fragile data storage media. Supposedly, all the information here had been scanned into inscape long ago. Marya was skeptical; she knew from her own experience scanning Ventusian artifacts just how sloppy technicians could be.
The serling brought her into a room whose far wall was made of glass. Low lights came up revealing several deep chairs, and glove boxes built into the glass wall. “The papers are delicate, so we store them in an atmosphere of argon gas,” said the serling. “The gloves in the glovebox have force-feedback built in; if you try to crush or tear anything they’ll stop you.”
It sounded paranoid—but then, the serlings were charged with preserving this information indefinitely. Even an accumulation of small accidents over millennia could destroy these delicate objects.
Another serling moved in the dimness behind the glass. Marya settled herself in one of the chairs, and after a few minutes the second serling emerged from the gloom carrying a metal hamper. Marya savored the moment. She had never before had a valid reason to be here, looking at such original documents. These would not be inscape copies, but primary documents.
She put her hands in the glove box. She couldn’t feel the material of the gloves; it transmitted perfectly the textures of whatever it touched. She rubbed her fingers together as the serling set the box down on a table on the other side of the glass.
Marya closed her eyes and reached out. Her fingers touched… paper, yes it was definitely paper. She picked up the top document, let out her breath in a whoosh, and opened her eyes.
For the next half hour she happily sifted through the few records of the Thalience Academy that had survived the assault. With increasing disappointment, she discovered that indeed everything in here had been scanned perfectly into inscape, other than data records that were encrypted using keys that were now lost. There were no clues here. And some of the ancient photos were disturbing—particularly some color 2D pictures taken at a riot just weeks before the rebels took over the city center. One showed police clubbing protestors on a street. The blurred outline of a vehicle obscured the foreground; in the background was a row of shops. A sign saying PHOTO glowed above one of them; another was probably a restaurant.
Disappointed, Marya put the papers back. A second box held records of the Ventus project. It was obvious now she was on a fool’s errand; there really was more to be learned in inscape. At least, though, she would be able to tell people back home that she had held these documents in her own hands (almost) and seen them with her own eyes (really).
Here were photos of some of the team; she remembered their names intimately. Kreiger, the mastermind of the terraforming effort; he had come up with the idea of the nanotech-driven ecosphere. There was Larry Page, the geneticist. There were dozens of others at the height of the project, all driven by a shared vision of interstellar settlement on worlds terraformed before any human set foot on them. New Edens, by the thousands, of which Ventus would be the first.
They did not command the wealth of nations, these researchers. Although their grants amounted to millions of Euros, they could never have funded a deep-space mission on their own, nor could they have built the giant machineries they conceived of. In order to achieve their dream, they built their prototypes only in computer simulation, and paid to have a commercial power satellite boost the Wind seeds to a fraction of light speed. The Wind seeds massed only twenty kilos, but it cost nearly all their remaining money to pay for the satellite’s microwave power. They were famous—in the way that romantic dreamers and crackpots often are—but no one expected the Winds to bloom and grow the way they ultimately did.
She held each photo and paper in turn, then put it reverently down. Finally, at the bottom of the box, Marya found an image she remembered well: the single existing group shot of the project team. She picked it up.
It felt different from the other pictures. Heavier. Curious, she turned it over. While all the other photos had been digital images printed on ordinary paper, this one was done on some kind of stiff material, glossy on the image side and smooth and waxy on the other. The glossy surface was cracked in a couple of places.
She turned it over. A kind of watermark or stamp ran across the back of the photo: Walther Photos.
“Serling, why is this picture different from the others?”
“Ah, an interesting question,” said the serling. They always said that when they didn’t know something; it was a way of buying time while their AI widened its search for the answer. After a barely perceptible pause, the serling said, “This image was created using a photochemical camera. Photochemical cameras predate digital technology. During this era they were often used along with a holographic stamping technology to record events in ways that could not be digitally forged. The person who took his photograph must have wanted a provably authentic record of the event.”
Marya turned the picture over again. Sixty smiling academics stood on a set of stone steps. Nothing exciting about that, unless you knew the faces. But her heart was pounding again.
She put down the photo and reached for the other box. “Where is it…” There. Marya picked up one of the riot pictures.
PHOTOS.
“Serling, how many shops were there in Hamburg at the time that could make these chemical pictures?”
“Oh, let’s see… six. Quite a few, given the times.”
She held the riot picture up, squinting at it. It was too dim in here; she closed her eyes to view the inscape version in better light.
Above the word PHOTOS were the bottom serifs of some other letters. She couldn’t prove it, but the missing word could very well be WALTHER.
“Serling, who took this group photo?”
“Lawrence Pakin. He was the man in charge of the Winds’ psycholinguistics.”
“What records do we have about him?”
“There is very little about him personally. He left behind a very large library of writings. Some of it is encrypted, but I have the rest if you’d like to—”
“Wait! Some is encrypted? How?”
“Using primitive but effective trapdoor functions. The public-key method he used makes it prohibitive to crack the code using brute force. Since we never discovered the key—”
“Did any of the thalience people use similar codes?”
“Most groups at that time did, Ms Mounce.”
“Has anybody ever tried using one of the thalience keys to open Pakin’s records?”
“I have no record of that. They assumed…” The serling’s voice changed. “We assumed it was Pakin’s personal code. There is nothing linking him to the thalience movement.”
The serling’s new voice was that of the Archipelagic Government. It must have been listening in. Marya was now talking to the oldest, most powerful human-based god in the galaxy. Unfazed, she asked, “Have you got any of the keys of the Hamburg thalience conspirators?”
“Yes. I assume you want to apply them to Pakin’s files and see what we get?”
“Well, yeah.”
“I’m not sure where you’re getting the idea that Pakin was connected with the thalience movement, but here goes,” said the Government. “If the key works, you’ll see the file contents in inscape.”
Marya closed her eyes—
—And opened them on a vista of text, diagrams and charts— hundreds of pages flooding out of ancient time and into her hands.
Eyes closed, fists punching over her head, Marya danced about the room and sang a wordless song of triumph.
*
Axel hoped she was in the hotel. He took the steps three at a time, unable to wipe the grin off his face despite the way it alarmed the other tourists. He was going to savor this moment, he knew; this was the sort of discovery that made him feel like more than just a big dumb mercenary. He was more than hired muscle—ha!—and this would prove it to Marya.
So when the door slid aside, and he caught sight of her in mid-pace in the center of the room, he opened his mouth quickly and—
“I’ve got it!” they said simultaneously.
He stopped. She stopped.
“What?” he said.
“Huh?” she said.
“No really, I—” “I was right all along, you see, about the—”
Both stopped again.
This time, they watched each other warily for a moment, before Axel finally stepped inside, letting the door close, and said, “I know the secret of the Flaw!”
Marya crossed her arms. “Me too. It’s thalience.”
“No, it’s DNA.”
Another wary look.
“Ahem.” Axel chose to be gracious. He found a deep couch and plunked himself on it. So she thought she’d found the secret, huh? Well, he’d hear her out then floor her with his revelation.
“Shoot,” he said, with a magnanimous wave of his hand.
Marya retreated behind the suite’s bar. She began to rummage in the cupboards there. “Well, this calls for champagne,” she said. “The secret was staring us in the face all along. But nobody knew where to look!”
As she told him about her discovery of Pakin’s secret encryption key, Axel’s confidence began to waver. He had been so sure… No, he was right. He had the facts in his inscape files.
“…Pakin knew that the whole Ventus project was an attempt to actualize the semantic categories of the world as physical things. A tree knows it’s a tree, a cloud that it’s a cloud. This ran totally at odds to the way the Archipelagic Government was designed, of course; there, data is internalized in an inscape we all have mental access to. Ventus was an attempt to fulfill the Platonic-Pythagorean dream of essences behind appearances, right? But what Pakin realized was that doing this could limit the flexibility of the Winds. The terraforming might not succeed if the Winds limited themselves to a human-centric worldview. Since he was a convert to thalience already, it was a small step for him to introduce a new language-game to their programming—you see, that’s why they became “advocates” for the physical objects they inhabit. The Ventus project was supposed to physically manifest a human-centric metaphysics, but what Pakin did was cause the Winds to create their own, inhuman metaphysic. In trying to terraform Ventus, they invented new ways of thought that worked better than the ones we’d given them. They stopped thinking like us. Which is why they won’t talk to us!”
She beamed in triumph as she slammed a glass of champagne down in front of him.
“Well.” He picked up the glass and regarded it. “They talked to Turcaret, though.”
“So he claimed.”
“Well.” He rallied. “But they could talk to him; I found out how.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do tell?”
Ooh, there she went again—the smug academic amused at the antics of the soldier of fortune. Axel smiled brittley at her and took a swig of champagne without tasting it. He put the glass down, and said, “Turcaret’s DNA is significantly different from the Ventus standard.”
“Really?” she indulged.
“Well, first off, he has some sort of extra neural wiring in his auditory/visual lobes in pretty much the same places as Armiger put his into Jordan. It’s a kind of biological radio. Secondly, in all other respects he’s an archaic—his DNA matches the Human Genome Project norm established in 2013.”
“Meaning?”
“You and I don’t match that norm. Nobody does nowadays—not even Jordan. We all have DNA that matches the 2219 norm or later—with all the dangerous recessive traits removed. Ancient diseases like…” he groped for an example. “Well, I don’t know what they were, but they were awful, and they were still there in the archaic norm. The point is, Turcaret matches that norm, while according to your institute’s random studies of modern Ventusians, everybody else matches the 2219 norm—but none of the later iterations.”
Marya said nothing, but curled up in a chair opposite and sipped at her champagne. She tilted the glass to indicate he should continue.
“Turcaret represents the DNA norm at the time that the first colony ship was sent to Ventus,” said Axel. “It was sent out in 2095; that’s just before the Hamburg insurrection, when most of the Ventus records were destroyed. But they knew the terraforming was working then, and a few of the original members of the project participated in the colony effort. I checked and there’s records of “genetic surgery” being done on all the colonists before they went out. Everybody always assumed that was to remove genetic diseases and deficiencies; but Turcaret’s DNA shows no alterations from the archaic except for this one neural enhancement. See what I’m saying?”
She put down the glass. “The first colonists were genetically modified to be able to speak to the Winds.”
He nodded vigorously. “Whereas the next—and it was the last—wave of colonists didn’t set out until a hundred years later, after most of the original Ventus project records had been lost and all its originators were dead. Those colonists had DNA that matched the 2219 norm, like Jordan and the majority of the population on Ventus now.”
“I’ve never heard of the biological radio thing,” she said. “People have looked for such a thing, but they never found it…”
“Not in the samples they took,” said Axel. “Because it’s a rare trait, limited to isolated populations—or inbred ones, like Turcaret’s family.
“Turcaret could talk to the Winds. So can Jordan. It’s this biological radio that’s the key. That’s the Flaw.” He sat back, toasting her ironically with his glass.
“No…” She hunched forward, scowling at the floor. “That’s not the Flaw.”
Axel threw up his hands.
“But neither is mine!” Marya hopped to her feet—her toes, actually—and began pacing.
“By your account Turcaret couldn’t get any useful information out of the Winds. My guess is all he had was limited contact with the mecha—which by your descriptions is exactly what Jordan has too.
“So how about this scenario,” she said, swirling her champagne. “The first colonists arrive, and they almost die out. They can speak to the Winds, but the Winds don’t understand them. So they struggle for a hundred years, until the survivors have been knocked back to a hunter-gatherer existence. The second wave arrives and thrives, but only because the first has done all the rebuilding by the time they get there. The new arrivals can’t talk to the Winds at all.
“We know the first wave almost dies out, because the genes that have come down to us are almost exclusively from the second population. And yet, it was only the first wave that had the bioradio you found. Ergo…”
“Ergo, the bioradio didn’t work for some reason. Or it wasn’t enough. And the second wave didn’t have it at all.” Now Axel was on his feet too. She was grinning, and he knew he was too.
He took the opportunity to top up their champagne.
“And that means…” She paused dramatically.
“Say it! Say it!”
“There are two Flaws!”
“Yes!” He grabbed her arms and danced her in a circle. Since he was still holding his champagne, he spilled some; it vanished somewhere within the precincts of her holographic gown.
“And that,” he finished, “is why nobody’s found the Flaw. In fact they may have found one or the other at various times, but never both.”
“Ventus has been studied by dozens of groups,” she said. “They all gave up, and they didn’t all share their data.
“Oh.” She sat down. “Axel. This is wonderful. This is what we’ve been searching for. It’s way more than I hoped to see in my lifetime. Far more than I ever hoped I’d accomplish…”
He sat down opposite her, and dragged his chair close enough for their knees to touch. He raised his glass. “I guess there’s an article or two in this, eh?”
Before she could reply, a voice burst into his mind from inscape.
“This is an urgent bulletin. I thought you should know.”
It was the voice of the Government. Marya had obviously heard it too; she jerked back, spilled her drink, and cursed.
“Oh, what is it!” he snapped at the ceiling.
“The god Choronzon has won over enough votes to send six destroyers of the Archipelagic fleet to Ventus,” said the Government. “He has made a convincing case for Armiger being a resurrection seed of 3340. Since you and Calandria failed to stop him on the surface, the fleet has orders to locate him from orbit and nuke him.”
“That’s crazy!” said Axel. “You can’t find Armiger from orbit, we tried that. Why do you think we had to go down to the surface?”
“If they are unable to locate him, the destroyers have authorization to sterilize as much of the surface of the planet as they need to in order to ensure his destruction. Choronzon believes that the infrastructure of the Winds makes a resurrection seed particularly dangerous here. A resurrected 3340 could command the full resources of the planet almost instantly.”
“Sterilize…?” Marya looked to Axel.
“Choronzon has convinced enough reps and metareps that the loss of life from cauterizing part of one continent will be minuscule, compared to the immediate loss of all human life on the planet that can be anticipated if 3340 revives.”
“Sterilize,” Axel told Marya, “means holocaust. Destroy Iapysia completely, and probably Memnonis too for good measure. Everyone… everyone we met there, every place we went, everything we saw.
“Wait!” he said to the Government. “We’ve got important new information to add to the debate.”
“The destroyers are on their way,” said the Government. “I will convey your information; but you need more than that. You need to present an alternative plan, or the sterilization goes forward.”
Axel and Marya stared at one another in horror. Finally, Axel cleared his throat.
“Time to call in some favors,” he said.
*
There is a ceiling to the sky.
For a while Calandria knew this, but couldn’t make sense of why or what it meant. Gradually it came to her that she was lying on her back, gazing up at a sky blue save for a single drifting cloud—but the sky was patterned with a fine net of triangles. Puzzling.
She let her eyes track along the triangles. There were thousands; they formed little hexagons and squares, a very orderly array. The cloud was underneath them, so they must be very big, or very high up.
She knew this kind of pattern. Tesselations. Geodesics.
Geodesic structure. She was inside an aerostat.
With that realization she was suddenly wide awake, and her heart pounding. She remembered the siege, and the terrible things she had done in trying to reach Armiger. She remembered being shot, subdued in chains, and dragged before a general who promptly traded her to the Winds.
Calandria groaned. After that first incident with the Heaven hooks, she’d had a presentiment that things would end this way. She couldn’t explain it to Axel—or even to herself. She had simply known they would come for her. And now they had her.
She curled up in a ball, willing it all to go away. Even with her eyes and ears stopped, though, she could feel the slow swaying motion of the aerostat. And breathing this warm dry air was hard; they must be very high up. She unrolled again and sat up.
She sat in the center of a black plain that gradually curved upward to become walls, becoming translucent as it did so. The aerostat must be two kilometers across at its widest. Various structures that might be buildings but probably weren’t, stuck up out of the black surface. Like a half-built city, abandoned by its makers.
Once, before she came to Ventus, Calandria had been a hero. She had tricked the rebel god 3340 into “deifing” her. Although she knew what had happened after that, the memories weren’t clear. Her human mind had been buried, after all, while the god-mind betrayed 3340. With Choronzon at her side she had hunted down the rebel, and Choronzon had destroyed 3340 while she looked on.
And then she had willed herself to become human again. Axel didn’t understand why she’d done that, and she wasn’t too clear on it herself. She had been a god—immortal and free. Yet she had chosen to become human again.
In quiet moments, Calandria knew why. It came down to the phrase “unfinished business”. She was a successful assassin, a powerful agent in Choronzon’s service. Formidable and respected. But in her heart of hearts she felt that however much she had succeeded at those things, she had failed at being human. Something was lacking; she could never completely connect to people. It was this feeling of being an outsider that had attracted her to the gods and their wars to begin with.
In quiet moments, she knew she had chosen to become human in order to give herself a second chance to get it right.
Now she sat wishing she had been kinder to Jordan, wishing she had told Axel how much he meant to her. She should never have come to Ventus. She’d blown her second chance, and there wouldn’t be another.
Movement to her right made her turn her head. Some beings were walking down the inside curve of the Heaven hook toward her. Another judge, perhaps, and new executioners. She would not even die at the hands of humans.
Calandria stood up. They had removed her bonds; of course, there was nowhere to run. The surface she stood on was black, unlike the upper reaches of the aerostat—the “sky”. Below her must hang the gantries and claws and cargo bays of the Hooks.
She stretched gingerly, feeling her injuries wake to protest. It was pointless to run; at least she might be able to put up a fight before they took her down.
Five creatures approached her. Four of them were squat, misshapen figures, like parodies of men sprouting extra limbs and multiple slobbering mouths: morphs. The fifth, towering above them, was a slim female shape made of glowing crystal. A Diadem swan, much like the ones who had dragged her into the night, and plucked her into the sky while she screamed…
Calandria hung her head.
“We sought pathology,” said the swan. Its voice was clear and bell-like. “We found you.”
Calandria cleared her throat. “I am not the one you seek.” Her voice seemed small to her, and uncertain. She couldn’t seem to regain that fine control that let her mesmerize her listeners so easily.
“You are not the one we seek,” agreed the swan. Surprised, Calandria looked up.
“You do not match the signal we have been pursuing,” said the swan. “You are nonetheless a pathology.”
“I came to Ventus to destroy the one you seek. That one is here to overthrow the Winds. I have been sent to stop him. The… modifications to my body, that you detected, were made to help me find him.”
“What are these Winds of which you speak?” asked the swan.
“Ah. Y-You, you are. That’s the name we have for you. Anyway there is a creature walking on Ventus, who’s come to destroy you. He’s the one you are after. He is extremely dangerous. I—”
“You are a hunter?”
“I— Yes. Yes, I am.”
“You hunt the pathology.”
“Yes.” She was afraid to say more. Afraid to move, now.
“Have you been successful?”
“Partly. I, I encountered him during the siege. We fought. I could have destroyed him, if—”
“We may use you.”
Calandria felt dizzy. Must be the air, she thought abstractly. Her knees felt weak, but she willed herself to stay standing. What had the swan just said to her? Use her?
“How?” she tried to say. It came out as a gasp.
“First, you must cease to be pathological,” said the swan. It gestured with one fiery hand. The morphs stepped forward.
“Oh no.” The morphs’ eyes glittered like water-polished stones. They surrounded her, muttering to one another, slapping their greasy hands on their thighs.
A hand closed on her neck and instantly, a wave of numbness spread down her arms. Calandria tried to fight, but all she saw was the black floor of the aerostat coming up to meet her, with the crowding shadows of the morphs overlaying one another.
“Kill me!” she hissed. Then her mouth would no longer work. She felt herself being pulled and tugged around; her cheek dragged along the floor. Wet tearing sounds accompanied the tugs. After a moment she was dragged across a patch of dark liquid that stank like iron.
She closed her eyes, and wept for all the missed opportunities of her life.