Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

silent banyan forest drifting verdant in interstellar space, its branches still, its field-blurred tree houses uninhabited save by dust that had once been flesh,

face the coyote question. Well, folks, I caught her. Now what do you expect me to do with her?

The echoes died, leaving breeze over broken bone.

We could learn more if we ate him, but Zanj says no.]

I owe her a loss for everyone I failed, for everyone I could not save. If I can get you home, that’ll be something I’ve done right.”

Imagine a gray gnat darting over a shining black field: the sky, you might think at first, perhaps, until the horse blinks, and its eyelash flicks the gnat away. Imagine a herd of horses, dying, dead. Imagine rotting elephants. Imagine the oceans of their blood.

I am so impressed by Max’s approach to SF — it’s not fantasy, but fantastical. Otherworldly, Alice in Wonderland-y, absurd even, and poetic, lyrical.

Great shapes blocked out stars, and behind every broken ship another turned, unfurled.

CRASHING TURNED OUT to be easy. Staying alive was the hard part.

It couldn’t happen to her—until it happened, and once it happened, she wouldn’t be around to worry about it happening again.

an ant, dropped down a mine shaft, walks away. A man breaks. A horse splashes.)

“I’m not asking what you have to fix. I’m asking, can you fix it?”

Trolley problem time. Do you break one woman’s will, and your own word, to save five lives?

Do you use power when it’s easy, and there, and you need it? No matter what it makes you?

They fell. They fell. They fell. And then. Silence. More like the opposite of that—no, the converse. Think of silence, then think of everything it’s not. Hot. Loud. Bright. Furious. Endless. Painful. Thick. Bursting. Alive.

Bags of unconscious friends in fluid form didn’t get all weird and desert you for no reason.

“Your plan stinks of if,”

Back home, she expected all kinds of fuckery from rivals. But to build anything real, you had to trust your people, even if they might let you down.

as she sat, still, quiet, she considered the merits of having a sensitive conversation at the edge of a cliff, while someone stood behind you with a knife.

Above, the dead fleet turned and turned in the night.

But what was the goal of a friendship? What did it get you? How did it run up the score?

But again and again when there wasn’t a crisis she turned from them into uncharted waters, to run up her various scores alone.

God, Viv loved being right. Even—hell, especially—when being right meant learning you were in a great deal of trouble.

she could bear them, or not, and if not, she wouldn’t be around to worry.

Was this what they called growing up? She’d thought that meant maturity, weathering, endurance. But instead you gathered one terror after another to yourself, until you were a skin-clad skeleton cradling a self made up of wounds.

“Dear. I’ve known her since the Empress first burned stars against the Bleed. We fought together, loved together. We stole wonders to slake our greed and lust, and reveled in our triumph to break the vaults of heaven.

her skin threaded with fire: immutable, unbendingly vicious, a violence that once stalked prey through some prehistoric alien swamp, still, still, each heartbeat closer to a pounce.

She was unarmed only in the vulgar sense. When you stand unarmed, the world must be your weapon,

“You robbed their freedom.” “Oh, sure, their freedom to fight and die in a broken wasteland. Some freedom.”

Fly the ship, do not be flown.

This woman could shatter gods, if she would just wake up.

Claws stroked her hair. She looked up into a pair of red-gold eyes, and a vicious smile on a scarred face.

She roared curses in radio bands—and Groundswell trembled. But that tremor had nothing to do with her. Viv was still laughing when the ship’s skin burst open and Zanj flared out into the hollow night, trailed by the fires of her wrath.

We joke about what we cannot allow ourselves to be.

Ware, ye kids, lest you suffer old Gray’s fate: condemned to a single form, bound by things only a little more than human, confined in a reflective field in the belly of a worldship in a weed sea of space, there to expire from hunger.

He had fought hard, and fallen harder.

The gleaming silver weapon of her, the dancing murderer, the pirate queen, gained depth and shadow and the weight of long absence.

blink of idle surprise a swatted gnat was not yet dead.

Fractal facets smoothed. The Star whirled inward, its light-devouring blackness gaining depth as the weapon concentrated itself into a staff of no color save at either end, where its facet edges broke light to rainbows.

Or we will burn your world, and kill your friends, and sift your corpse and its ashes for the sacred truths we seek.”

She had left Orn to sail the stars—but she had left Orn, too, to see this strange wanderer home.

“I won’t use one ship,” she said. “I’ll use them all.” She whispered with a voice that was not of her body—and across space, throughout the stretching wreckage of the Suicide Queens’ fleet, other chattering whispers came in answer.

“Go conquer your world. Thank you for bringing me to mine.”

The ship’s skin parted their lips, and they were gone. The Star flew. And Xiara Ornchiefsdaughter dove into the ocean of her fleet.

she felt as if she’d been dismembered. Perhaps she had, for ease of transit.

We’re working this into your nerves, adjusting your neural homunculus without manipulating the flesh. It’s all wet and squishy in there—gruesome.”

“And when they’re ripe, she harvests them. That’s what we’re for—one of the things we’re for. We eat and archive worlds.

Ahead, the universe was an empty gray curve, vast beyond measure and webbed with cracks, not entirely unlike the surface of Viv’s burnt marshmallow if it had been hundreds of light-years on a side.

“No.” She tested muscles, bones, most of them in the right place.

“If he fucks this up,” Zanj whispered into that silence, “get ready to run.” “If he fucks this up, will running do any good?” “For me? Oh, sure. For you,” Zanj admitted, “maybe not. But getting ready won’t hurt.”

Reunions with an estranged family of nanorobot genies