Neodymium Betrayal, page 32
Lem bowed back. “It’s been a long time coming,” she said.
“Indeed. Come, warm up and eat. Then you will die.”
“Mm.” Lem followed behind the long robe, tucking her hands into the pocket of Diebol’s jacket. She felt the paper he’d left in her right-hand pocket … best leave it there for now.
The pair traversed a long, metal walkway with no railing, stories above the steaming blue vat of a gravity engine. The cavernous orb’d room was pierced through with multiple walkways, all converging in the middle onto three platforms: the platform Lem awoke on with the meditation tube, a larger platform below it covered in computers, or a smaller one far, far above, just under the ceiling window out into space.
Sterba walked on the air, her boots sparking, up to the top platform. Lem followed, throwing a sparking em-push below her to rocket herself up after. Her boots impacted the platform with a soft, uncertain thunk behind Sterba’s almost soundless step. Sterba motioned with a perfect, graceful closed hand to the table in the center of the small platform. A white lace tablecloth lined with blood-red flowers and delicate blue swirls covered the table, and atop that sat two simple, cylindrical porcelain cups and small plates.
“Parrot meat with lechichi leaf, as in your childhood,” Sterba motioned to two perfectly circular sandwiches as she sat down on one of the cushions by the table. “You are welcome to take whichever you prefer, after I taste it, to assure you it is not poisoned.”
“It’s been a while since I’ve had anything that wasn’t nutrient sludge,” Lem noted as she sat cross-legged on the cushion across from Sterba. “Do you normally invite people who are trying to kill you to dinner?”
“You are the first person I’ve wanted to meet,” Sterba said. She bit a large section of one sandwich, then held it out to Lem. Lem touched the other woman’s cold, pale hand, as she took the sandwich, and watched her electric eyes—no, Sterba did not do games. She believed in direct displays of power, the Yang in which Lem lived, not the Yin of darkness and deceit where Diebol played. Or—the wound in Lem’s back reminded her—Mera either. Still, feelings and dreams aside, Lem silently turned the sandwich, and offered it to Sterba to bite a different section. She did so, and satisfied, Lem ate.
For a moment, they both chewed in silence. The tender, crispy memory of hunting with Cinta hit Lem under the foreignness of the bread—something most civilizations on steamy Luna-Guetala did not make. That came from Alpino. Oh, Jei.
She took a deep breath to clear her mind. “I’m sorry about the nightmares,” she said.
Sterba nodded. Neither girl asked how she knew she had haunted the others’ dreams. Lem could not even remember hers—she just awoke each day knowing Sterba existed to destroy everything she loved. She had rehearsed a myriad of arguments to fit Sterba’s harsh perfection into a Frelsi model, or to amend the Growen system. She swallowed now. “You have options,” she began. “The Frelsi could adapt to a disciplined hand like yours, and Growen Unification doesn’t have to mean eliminating diversity by force. For example, there’s a new trade system, that you could leverage for financial unification by educating the—”
“We are above petty Frelsi and Growen politics,” Sterba said, raising a hand. “This war is about morality.”
“I’m getting tired of everybody telling me what this war is about like I haven’t lived it the past sixteen years,” Lem remarked.
Sterba smiled. “Diebol gave you his freedom speech.”
Lem nodded. The sweet complexity of the bread reminded her of arguing with Jei. She couldn’t imagine he was okay … hush brain.
“Diebol is incorrect,” Sterba continued. “Mental freedom is not enough—mental perfection is the goal, a Universal Law for all behavior.” She pressed a closed fist against the table by her plate. “Having different moral systems across the universe causes a myriad of injustices. Right now there are tribal Alpinoans killing dragons for food—a cruel practice, for such intelligent creatures. Multiple planets like Burbura have deep economic divides between the poor and the rich; meanwhile wealthy, nomadic Insectoid species like the Vibrants evade all taxation throughout the universe with their unregulated squatting culture. Even on your own home planet women in Retrack City suffer underground businesses that really just sanitize slavery. One Universal Law will cleanse this filth.”
“You do know that slavery increased on Luna-Guetala when the Growen moved in and your soldiers started funding the meat-markets,” Lem said. “Retrack’s been Growen territory for years.”
“When I have further control this will end.” Sterba pursed her lips for finality, as if her promise fixed it. “I will kill those soldiers. In fact, I will enforce moral natural selection everywhere, literally eliminating morally problematic people and their genes. Imagine the happy community after the imperfect are dead: no more rapists, no more thieves, no more greedy corporatists or unjust leaders—just genetically good people.”
“So, in your version of ‘happy community,’ slavery’s bad, but genocide isn’t?” Lem broke a piece off her sandwich, really for no reason than to see it tear. “I had friends in Fort Jehu.” Wow, she could allow herself to feel the pain now …
Sterba flinched, but cool indifference returned to her face quickly. “The Contamination must be eliminated at all costs. I also cleanse evil by removing those who would defend the ‘right’ to resist Universal Law in favor of their own beliefs.”
“I’m sure you’re aware many of those you killed weren’t Contaminated,” Lem said.
“Nonaction—failure to fight evil—makes you just as complicit,” Sterba said. “Under Universal Law, those who fail to report even their own families will suffer the same penalties as the law-breakers themselves. I apply this same rule to all beings: Njandejara fails to use its power to end evil, and therefore, as complicit, must be eliminated.”
Lem took a sip of the warm liquid beside her, cupping it in both hands as she inhaled the herbal steam. “So say we need Universal Law. Shyte, I’ll agree the universe sucks as-is. But who gets to decide that Law?”
“The intelligent and just, selected by an algorithm I create.”
“Ah. And if, say, a being outside of time who can see, well, basically everything—a being who would know the best Universal Law—doesn’t force all people groups into uniformity to obey it … why do you think you know better?” Lem asked.
“I can synthesize the optimal outcomes from all legal systems, based on my advanced computing. My mind, once removed from attachments, became—well, perfect,” Sterba paused. “Boasting is ineffectual.”
Lem took another sip—it was grassy, and bitter but rich. “You’re electrogenic like me, right?” she asked. “But you’ve got some kind of processing boost that makes you a super-hacker?”
“When I glance at a computer, I own it. One touch, and I can see and manipulate every electron within its wires, like the blood sorcerers of old with their fingers in human veins.”
“That’s cool. There’s gotta be some kind of insane mutation in the structure of your brain.”
Sterba allowed herself a slight smile. “Perhaps, through my superior mental control, I have simply broken the barriers imposed on all sentients.”
“You think you meditated yourself superpowers?” Lem laughed. “I guess we don’t have time to get out the test tubes to analyze you.”
“I suppose not,” Sterba said. She tilted her head and placed her sandwich back on her plate. “What is the war about for you?”
Lem wanted to say a bunch of things about morality, maybe find some common ground here … perhaps something about changing culture through free allied discourse instead of force, about the inability to know for sure one way was right, about working together to learn the best morality, perhaps amending Sterba’s Universal Law idea to consider how it might apply differently in different ecosystems and work more effectively if spread through organic means—
“I will know if you try to invent compromises,” Sterba said. “I am interested in your reason. You have spent months hiding under other peoples’ truths; aren’t you tired of them?”
“Only the pure of heart get in here, huh,” Lem sighed. “Well, you got me. To me, the war’s about Njandejara. I love him, and wanna hang out with him without you stopping me.”
Sterba finished her sandwich and folded her hands. “Lem Benzaran, have you ever seen Njandejara?”
Lem’s instinct was to say yes—yes, all over the place, in abstracts and concretes from the rustle of dewy leaves to the lessons the old hermits muttered under their breath, but as she began to talk Sterba laid a hand on her wrist.
“Pardon me. ‘See’ has many meanings. I don’t mean perceive. I mean, could you draw him? Can you define his form?”
“He looks like …” The Crajk beast, saving Jei from the tentacle’d hydromorph last year? But no, because if she said he looked like a Crajk beast, then he would have to be that, and he was too much like a tree, or a star, or wind, or virtue, or a word. “No, when you put it like that, I’ve never seen him. I think … I think there’s something in the archaeological texts we uncovered, too …” Lem felt almost a trance cover her with the spell of the ancient things. “‘Be faithful to remember: you saw no temunah, no form, on the day I spoke to you out of the fire. Lest you corrupt yourself, and make an image … you heard only a voice.’ Seems to me he’s pretty proud of being unseeable. Like he thinks if I could see him, I wouldn’t be able to get it—my brain could connect him with something easy and familiar, and I’d trust that thing, and let it rule me, instead of knowing him.”
“As if it’s about you,” Sterba said. “Don’t gloat—his decision to be unseen comes entirely from megalomania. He knows, as well as you do, that the first rule of trust is knowledge. You trust what you know. But here he comes, insisting on being unknown, and yet demanding your trust. And you find it difficult to trust the galaxy’s decisions to someone like me, who you can see, who has proven their superior intellect?”
Lem withheld a laugh with such force tea sputtered on the tablecloth.
“Excuse me?” Sterba asked.
“Sorry, it’s just—I don’t mean to be rude, but it took you four months to find me. With your superior intellect.”
“To your credit, not my loss,” Sterba said, neither perturbed nor laughing. “I don’t think you know what you are, and I feel for you, trapped under the reign of a Being inferior to yourself.”
The lightning eyes did not blink. “Shyte,” Lem muttered. She’d never had anyone look at her with that intense admiration, and even—“I almost want to ask you what you saw in your dreams.”
“The same you saw in yours. A future that could be.”
Lem sighed and looked away, cheek on her fist as she stared at the swirling dregs of her cup. “Eh. I might actually be destined to bring about the end of all things, so.”
“According to Njandejara,” Sterba pointed out. “But that’s the narrative from the losing side.”
Dark green slurry under a film of lighter liquid … Lem tilted back her head to finish the drink, ignoring that last statement. “Sterba, the dreams alone should tell you we can know what we can’t see and understand what we’ve never met.”
“And that some things are better left unknown.” Sterba leaned forward. “I can’t pretend to know the mind of something that’s existed for eons, but don’t you find it a bit convenient that the year after Njande reveals you’re supposed to destroy his future, here he sends you to me to die?”
Lem’s eyes lifted from the cup. “You don’t know that, though.”
Sterba pressed a long finger to the table. “Just look at everything that has happened to you, because he sent you to me. You would never have lost your friend. Everyone dies—you would still have died one day. But you’d have died happy, arm in arm with those you love. Now if Njande cared about you, why do you think it was so important for you to die early? I mean, look at you, then look at me—what do you think is going to happen?”
“I’m gonna live, that’s what’s gonna happen.” Lem smirked.
But Sterba’s intense, blue stare left no room for false confidence. Lem sighed and placed her cup down on the table. “You’re right. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. But we can find out.”
“And we should.” Sterba rose, sliding her left foot behind her into a ready stance as she lifted her hands. Lightning sparked between her fingertips.
Lem sighed and leaned back in her chair, rocking it on the back two feet. “I know something’s wrong with me. I know I’m supposed to have this passion for justice to kill you. Maybe it’s the months of brainwashing myself. But after coming all this way—shyte, girl, I don’t want to kill you.”
Sterba did not relax her stance. “I feel it as well. That is why it is our duty to fight. If we go on talking, one of us will change her mind.”
“That’s kinda the point,” Lem said. She winced at the tightening in her belly. “Come on, can’t you just, like, believe Njande doesn’t exist or something?”
Sterba’s insulted glare forced another sigh from the tired Paradox Warrior, who put her chair right on all four legs and laid both palms on the table, elbows bent. Yup, now I gotta stand up. Ugh. She gazed up at the other woman: “You sure you don’t want to keep talking?”
“You would rather die in a glorious blaze of fire than fizzle out and betray what you stand for. We are alike in this. We know each other’s souls, and will not change the glory we see in each other.”
“So because we’re such good pals, and we respect each other’s beliefs, we gotta kill each other,” Lem quipped.
“Sarcasm has no place here,” Sterba answered.
“I know. I’m sorry.” With another long sigh, Lem pushed herself to her feet and rolled her head around on her neck, pausing to look up at the round ceiling far above her, and the stars visible through it … Goodbye. She drew the bamboo staff from her belt, jerking it out to the side as she rubbed the groove that lit it up red.
“Do not be afraid,” Sterba said, drawing her own mace: a blinding white. “It will be over soon.”
Chapter Forty-Seven
Jei
I found myself in Mera’s lap when I awoke, and this time, I groaned.
“Not how every girl wants to be greeted,” she said.
I held up a finger. The red earth walls around us spun, and swill churned in my esophagus. I rolled over, palms in the cool earth, and crawled to the corner to vomit.
She crouched after me, a soft hand on my shoulder blade, and offered me a nausea gum tablet. I shook my head. “We give these to little kids when they go into space for the first time,” I told her, flopping back against the wall. “We don’t take them after regulation fighting age.”
“You’re tougher than the Growen then,” she said sitting beside me against the wall. “These are essential; people don’t leave port without them. But they’ll get the taste out of your mouth.”
“Fine.” I plucked the baby-gum out of her open palm and popped it between my teeth. The burst of menthol tingled the roof of my mouth as I chewed and pulled up my sleeves to check for injection sites. I found two. “What’d they give me?” I asked.
“Something to … lower your inhibitions.” She looked away from me, eyes on the ground. I let my head loll to the side, and glanced across her exposed shoulders and arms—no injection sites, but deep purple bruises marred her neck and wrists.
I reached over to feel her tiny wrist between my fingers, checking for the cracking or crackling of broken bone. She winced, but she could clench, unclench, and rotate her fist without issue; her limpid, grateful eyes stroked my face. She was fine, but didn’t say so, and her hands lingered in mine, begging the check not to end. “How long have you been trying to get out of the Growen?” I asked.
She leaned her head against my shoulder. “It’s not that simple,” she said. “They saved me from some really terrible things, Jei.”
“Does that make this okay?” I asked.
“No, but survival isn’t about okay,” she said. “I owe them and I hate them, but my feelings don’t matter. It’s not like they’d let an electromagnetic like me leave. They’d just kill me.” She said it with a cold matter-of-factness I hadn’t heard from her before. The trembling softness returned: “I—I’ve only been happy since I’ve been around you.”
Something tickled at the back of my head … “Why can’t I be mad at you?” I asked, thinking of Lem, and searching for the embers of rage and grief that had ruled my life for the past weeks, to find only cold sleep inside me. “Is that a side effect of your powers?”
“I—I hope it’s a bit more than that,” she said. “I hope you know there’s something real here. I’ve really tried to help you get to your goal.”
“Well, almost. You were sent to kill her. Whatever she was trying to do, you were sent to be her opposite.” I stared at the ceiling, my enemy’s head on my shoulder, everything too light and floating as my thoughts blurred out with the scent of strawberries, cream, and lilac. The turning spit in my chest had stopped, and I wanted it back. I wanted to feel grief and confusion and loss and question what they’d done with Lem, what I’d done, finish piecing Mera into it all, and I could feel nothing but acceptance.
“But we were working together for the same thing most of the time,” she was pleading.
“And what did you think would happen after?” My fist pressed against my forehead, as if exasperated with grief, and I was wet around the eyes, but it all seemed distant—locked in here, I didn’t feel the emotions my body seemed to remember without me.
“I live in the moment, Jei, I didn’t think of after. I’ve never had that luxury—not until the moment you showed me,” she said. She lay her cool palm against the side of my face, turning my chin to face her. “Look at me. I know you believe I care about you. It’s not just because I’m a great actress, is it?”
I laughed, holding her hand. This, I did feel. “Yeah no, you’re not a great actress. It’s easy to believe you care about me because you’re the worst Growen agent ever. You let me destroy five or six vehicles before you stopped me, and you were actively recruiting me to kill your boss. Who you tried to kill with a grenade.” I closed my eyes, leaning back against the wall again. “I only realized it here at the end, when you pretended to ‘hot-wire’ something without wires, and stopped me from destroying everything.”
