out, and they told him it was.”
He stops, wonders how to go on.
“Who was I?” she says, finally.
“They didn’t use a real name for her,” he says. “There’s no knowing.”
(The black-market programmer was also a sucker for stories; he’d tagged her remnant “Galatea.” Mason will take that with him to the grave.)
She looks at him.
He thinks about the first look she ever gave him, wary and hard in an expression he never saw again, and the way she looked as Galatea fell in love with Paul, realizing she had lost herself but with no way of knowing how much.
He thinks about her avatar leaping over the balcony and disappearing.
He’d leave with her tonight, take his chances working on the black market, if she wanted him to. He’d cover for her as long as he could, if she wanted to go alone.
(God, he wants her to live.)
“I can erase what we did,” he says. “Leave you the way you were when Paul woke you.”
(Paul won’t notice; he loves her too much to see her at all.)
Her whole body looks betrayed; her eyes are fixed in middle space, and she curls her fingers around the edge of the chair like she’s bracing for the worst, like at any moment she’ll give in.
He’s reminded for a second of Kim Parker, who followed him to the Spanish Steps one morning during the Mori Academy study trip to Rome when he was fifteen. He sat beside her for a long time, waiting for a sign to kiss her that never came.
He’d felt stupid that whole time, and lonely, and exhilarated, and the whole time they were sitting together part of him was memorizing all the color codes he would need to build the Steps back, later, in his program.
Nadia is blinking from time to time, thinking it over.
The room is quiet—only one of them is breathing—and it’s the loneliest he’s felt in a long time, but he’ll wait as long as it takes.
He knows how to wait for a yes or a no; people like them deal in absolutes.
A Vector Alphabet of Interstellar Travel
YOON HA LEE
Among the universe’s civilizations, some conceive of the journey between stars as the sailing of bright ships, and others as tunneling through the crevices of night. Some look upon their far-voyaging as a migratory imperative, and name their vessels after birds or butterflies.
The people of a certain red star no longer speak its name in any of their hundreds of languages, although they paint alien skies with its whorled light and scorch its spectral lines into the sides of their vessels.
Their most common cult, although by no means a universal one, is that of many-cornered Mrithaya, Mother of the Conflagration. Mrithaya is commonly conceived of as the god of catastrophe and disease, impartial in the injuries she deals out. Any gifts she bestows are incidental, and usually come with sharp edges. The stardrive was invented by one of her worshipers.
Her priests believe that she is completely indifferent to worship, existing in the serenity of her own disinterest. A philosopher once said that you leave offerings of bitter ash and aleatory wine at her dank altars not because she will heed them, but because it is important to acknowledge the truth of the universe’s workings. Naturally, this does not stop some of her petitioners from trying, and it is through their largesse that the priests are able to thrive as they do.
Mrithaya is depicted as an eyeless woman of her people, small of stature, but with a shadow scarring the world. (Her people’s iconography has never been subtle.) She leans upon a crooked staff with words of poison scratched into it. In poetry, she is signified by smoke-wind and nausea, the sudden fall sideways into loss.
Mrithaya’s people, perhaps not surprisingly, think of their travels as the outbreak of a terrible disease, a conflagration that they have limited power to contain; that the civilizations they visit will learn how to build Mrithaya’s stardrive, and be infected by its workings. A not insignificant faction holds that they should hide on their candled worlds so as to prevent Mrithaya’s terrible eyeless gaze from afflicting other civilizations, that all interstellar travel should be interdicted. And yet the pilgrims—Mrithaya’s get, they are called—always find a way.
Certain poets write in terror of the day that all extant civilizations will be touched by this terrible technological conflagration, and become subject to Mrithaya’s whims.
In linear algebra, the basis of a vector space is an alphabet in which all vectors can be expressed uniquely. The thing to remember is that there are many such alphabets.
In the peregrinations of civilizations grand and subtle, each mode of transport is an alphabet expressing their understandings of the universe’s one-way knell. One assumes that the underlying universe is the same in each case.
The Iothal are a people who treasure chronicles of all kinds. From early on in their history, they bound forest chronicles by pressing leaves together and listening to their secrets of turning worm and wheeling sun; they read
