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AR glasses were more portable than a screen, but nothing beat a keyboard for input. She still felt pissed at Bill Gibson for promising her transcranial electrodes and failing to deliver.
So, as she had many times before, in negotiations and breakups and staff meetings and when she quickened her step to catch Susan Cho between the dinosaurs, she took the part of herself that wanted to scream, gave it a big hug like her therapist recommended, drew it a nice hot metaphorical bath, and drowned it in the bathwater. From the outside, this looked like taking a deep, slow breath.
“You have no shadow in the Cloud. When your meat goes, that’s it. No resurrection, no heavens or afterlives. You’re gone. So that’s good news for me, at least. Maybe I can’t kill you. But all I have to do is wait.”
And when you were weak, strength was a powerful drug.
There was an undeniable appeal to throwing yourself into a monster’s gears, in hope you could jam them with your corpse.
Stupid physical body. If she could touch the Cloud, she’d leave the flesh behind in a heartbeat. She’d miss sex and cinnamon rolls, but she had to imagine there were compensations.
“I did it!” She couldn’t stop laughing, doubled over, dragging in huge heaves of breath. “The first Ornclan in centuries offworld. I didn’t expect it to feel so good. We didn’t lose the stars at all. They’ve been up here waiting for us this whole time.”
“Ancient sages have written: what you cannot break, you do not own.”
“They came from across the galaxy and from the depths between stars, to free themselves, to fight, to kill, to feed, to tell the tale. Old Ones who survived the wreck of long-gone fallen worlds, fleets of rebel machines, pirates and soldiers and fanatics. The Suicide Queens brought them: al-Zayyd in her glory, Heyshir who sees from shadows, Old Tiger who prowled between the galactic arms, the Black Bull framed first in iron, assassins and heroes and poets and thieves, sisters, and among them, cleverest, most fierce: Zanj.”
She’d been broken up with far more than she’d done the breaking, which she seldom mentioned to her friends, partly because it wasn’t any of their business, partly because she had no use for the kind of soppy sympathy which inevitably followed sharing that particular piece of information. She did not need any assurances she’d find someone someday, because she either would or wouldn’t, and either way, in the meantime, she wasn’t hurting for sex or companionship. She ate her ice cream and took her seven days plus or minus three of crying jags like a champ; with extensive interval training one
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Zanj had her tricks and transformations, but Viv would never accuse her of subtlety. If she needed to hide in shadows, she’d just snuff out the sun.
If this didn’t work, at least her life would be over quickly. Hell, for all she knew, atomic disassembly might not hurt. She’d never been disassembled before, and atoms were smaller than nerves. That did not seem likely, though.
ZANJ WAS HAVING a better time than anyone else on the battlefield. Not unusual, but then, what’s a pirate queen to do? A long time ago, out of some misguided urge to understand why other people seemed to have so much trouble enjoying themselves, she’d tried to compile a list of problems normal folks had that she didn’t. She’d started the list with honor, and, ten pages later, gave up after mortality and loans.
Her voice was even as a knife’s edge—smooth when seen from far away, but a magnifying glass revealed serrations.
“The imposter,” Zanj shouted over her shoulder, over the wind, over the sound of blaster fire, “threw my friends in jail because they stood up to her! Does that sound like something I’d do?” “Yes,” Viv admitted. “Definitely,” Gray said. Hong nodded. “If you were in a bad mood,” Xiara said. “Or a good one. Or just a mood, generally.” “I hate you all.”
It felt new, and weird, and un-American, for the friend stuff to take priority over galactic conquest. But then, doing things the other way had led to galactic conquest in the first place, which was the whole problem. So. “We’re right here with you,” she told Zanj, wishing, as she’d spent a lot of time wishing in recent weeks, that she’d sunk more skill points into this sort of thing.
“We’re right here with you,” she told Zanj, wishing, as she’d spent a lot of time wishing in recent weeks, that she’d sunk more skill points into this sort of thing.
this moment should have no more meaning than any other, that the world was always changing and any claim of significance for changes in which one participated was just a failure of perspective.
Nevers and onlys and forevers grew as you did. The sky went on forever, but if you had no context save the height of the nearest trees, you could fool yourself into thinking the blue hung just beyond your reach, when in fact it was never there at all, and what was, was deeper than you could dream.
