“They should be at school,” Marc said.
Kara wondered how you teach a plant. Slowly.
“Just abandoned. That’s sad.” He thought a moment. “Unless it’s normal.”
“Perhaps the empire is in retreat,” she said. “If we only knew where. Or from where. Or they even understand how to retreat.”
“Or the bad guys think they’ve won. This place isn’t important any more.”
“We’re doing it again. Assuming they think human.”
He asked the question she’d been dreading. “Any sense of Tatia?”
“Nope. Maybe this isn’t the best place.” And maybe it’s all BS about empathy.
“Don’t force it, Kara. It’ll come. Not just saying it, either.”
They walked back to the ship, sat outside drinking beer, neither for the moment wanting to make any decisions. The sight of abandoned Gliese eaten alive had introduced pointlessness to the situation.
“What’s that?” he asked, as Kara took something metal and square from a pocket.
Kara passed him the small metal box Greenaway had given her. “I was told good luck. Problem is, I can’t open it.”
< Maybe you got to think it open.
> Where were you?
< Checking out the ship. Salome left copies of itself in all the spare AIs. And somehow the food stasis locker. At least, there’s a link that vanished in a higher dimension. Suggest you destroy the AIs. The stasis locker’s okay now but all the milk went off. So only espresso.
“No spare AIs,” she said to Marc. Then, “What the hell!”
The box lay open on Marc’s hand.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The lid just vanished.” He passed it back.
The interior gleamed like mother of pearl. Inside, a small ring of what looked like plaited dark hair. Kara took it out and gasped, suddenly aware of someone she knew well, unseen, so much more than an idea or a memory.
“What!”
She couldn’t speak for a moment. “I just got the strongest sense of Tatia.”
“Did Greenaway give you that box?”
Kara nodded. “Said it was an alien trade, years ago. He could never open it.” She reached inside, touched the plaited hair and recoiled. “Again!”
“My guess, it’s Tatia’s hair. Maybe from her as a toddler.”
“Greenaway would have said.”
“If he knew. Even then, maybe not. Sometimes we can’t be told or it changes things, right?”
She wondered about her reaction on being given a lock of Tatia’s baby hair. And would Greenaway have lied to her? “Maybe.”
“Isn’t it all a little convenient?”
“Could be that we’re not the only players.”
Marc looked shocked.
“Think about it.” The more she did, the more it made sense. “We keep on saying that perhaps the pre-cog empire is crumbling. Assume you’re right – and it has been for centuries, even thousands of years. Could be that another race that wanted to be free saw a way of getting us to do it for them...”
“Stop!”
She looked at him with concern. “What’s wrong?”
“Hear yourself, Kara! You’re saying that just as Tse and Greenaway and the other, good pre-cogs manipulated us, they were also being manipulated but never knew it? Maybe the bad pre-cogs are also being manipulated? Where does it all fucking end?”
“You can only play the hand you’re dealt.”
“What?”
“Old saying.” Personal AIs had killed off poker, bridge and any other gambling game that needed skill. “It means you worry about the things you can change.”
“Or simply follow orders. Do you trust Greenaway?”
Kara laughed. “Always – to do what he thinks is right.”
“No matter who gets hurt?”
Was Marc a little jealous? She didn’t think so. Protective, as a friend. Desperate to get back to netherspace alive. “He sees it as a war. Anson’s like any general. He has the job because he’s willing to send others to their deaths. Not every leader can do that. Or if they can, they just see soldiers as expendable.” She took the loop of hair from the box. “How to make this work? How does it work?”
“Some sort of quantum entanglement?” Marc guessed.
“You have to stop reading books. They only give you strange ideas.”
Marc shrugged. “So I don’t know. Let’s call it magic.”
“But she’s close. I can feel it.”
“That could just be...”
“No.” Positive. “I mean physically close... at least it’s like a trail...” She stopped as she saw Marc’s sudden start.
“You know she’s here. Her trail is here.” He shook his head. “You don’t get it?”
Kara stood up. “Five seconds before I break something. Like your arm.”
“Netherspace! You sense where she is – was – in netherspace!”
Kara stared at him. Logic said he was mad. Intuition said to listen. “Go on.”
“It’s all energy, right?” His gesture took in the planet, galaxy, universe. “Netherspace. And when we go into it, we have an effect. You said that. It’s what those things are: the result of living matter affecting an energy field. And you said the foam, the Wild SUT ship hulls are there to stop contamination. But maybe they don’t, never completely. Maybe, sometimes, a human leaves a trail. You have to think on a quantum level... or something like that...” he tailed off, struggling to explain something he didn’t really understand to someone equally confused.
“Okay.”
Marc looked surprised. “You agree?”
“Wait a minute.”
> Well?
< Anything’s possible. But yes. Should have seen it myself.
Which was all that Ishmael would say. It/he seemed to have become more fixed in a single personality, Kara thought. More fun when she’d be surprised by a Humphrey Bogart character, or an AI’s patrician take on England’s last king, never replaced after moving to open a yoga retreat on Majorca.
“We need a new name for this ship,” Marc announced as they left the planet’s surface. “Merry Christmas doesn’t cut it.”
< Traditionally the AI names the ship. But since Salome is gone...
“Ishmael has a suggestion,” Kara said. “Oh. Are you sure?”
And so the newly named Iron Thrown – retro-lover
