BONFIRE
The Falcon approached the Falconer.
They stood together for a time on the peak of the tall hill, watching. The landscape beyond was experiencing a great upheaval. Mountains disarticulated, snowy caps becoming champing mandibles, trees becoming hairs, cliffside shacks and skiing chalets transforming into a roiling cloud of chittering madness. Both the Falcon and the Falconer found something to admire as dissent spread across the hive, and a schism formed in the earth that was not earth.
"Would you call this beautiful?" the Falconer asked.
"In abstract," the Falcon responded.
The Falconer turned to look at his brother, face impassive as always. "More to your tastes than mine, then. Congratulations."
The Falcon shrugged, though he was grinning wide. "I might be enjoying the show, but that doesn't mean it's going my way."
The Falconer grunted. "Too soon to tell."
The scenes continued to play out, unseen by either as they locked eyes — but they still felt the effects. The defenders on the ramparts were untiring, but their ammunition was a scarce resource — like everything else. The Falconer knew he could press the issue soon, when the magazines had finally run dry, but the Falcon still had an ace up his sleeve, nearly ready to play.
"Do you see it now?" the Falconer asked. He didn't break eye contact, and neither did the other.
"Yes," the Falcon sighed. "Yes, I see it now."
"I tried to show you."
The Falcon scoffed. "You betrayed me."
The Falconer affected a patronizing look. "Hasn't that always been the arrangement?"
"You betrayed the arrangement. Changed the terms of our game."
"We were doomed to lose," the Falconer shrugged. "Both of us."
"Still," the Falcon sighed again.
Beyond the hill, the boundaries of the noösphere bent, shifted, and warped. New thoughts imposed themselves on the whole, and the racing defender drew tighter and tighter spirals through expanding currents of thought, desperate to catch up, gleeful at the challenge.
"We've litigated your hurt feelings long enough," the Falconer finally snapped. "No apology is forthcoming."
The Falcon shrugged. Letting go was easier for him. "Do you remember Stockholm?"
The Falconer frowned, taken off guard by the sudden change. He'd never liked change, or suddenness. "I remember it was one of your poorer efforts."
"It sticks in my mind, for some reason."
"Over two hundred years ago. What was his name?" The Falconer shook his head. "I can never remember the names."
"Ebel," said the Falcon. Names were everything to him.
"Ebel. Are you sure?"
"Yes."
"Insulted by one of the guards." The Falconer didn't smile at the memory, though he did remember it fondly. "You convinced him to bring grievance to the palace."
"And you," the Falcon nodded bitterly, as though this hurt was not old — and to him, speaking relatively, it was not — "convinced the regent it was a riot."
"Yes. We clawed back all the rights your rabble had won for the burghers. You were always so greedy; never knew the reach of your arm."
"And you never knew the strength of yours. Exhausting yourself on the most trivial of trespasses. Couldn't abide the slightest rebellion."
The distant din subsided. The refinery had ceased attempting to erase the final holdouts, and instead began closing itself over their heads. Blotting out the weak sun.
"No matter where you went," the Falconer mused, "I found you. You made it easy."
"You made it so difficult," the Falcon responded.
The Falconer spread his arms. "And now look at us."
Instead, the Falcon looked at them.
The confounding clusters of lives never lived. They lacked even a quantum of solid state.
"Do we deal them in, you think?"
His brother laughed. "No."
His brother agreed. "No."
"That game is over."
"Yes. And it ended the only way it ever could have."
The Falconer considered. "I don't know about that. This feels like a fluke to me."
The Falcon blinked. "Well, I think it was always building toward this." He paused. "What?"
The Falconer's gaze of steel and lines now burned with an almost passionate rage. "What would you know of building?"
The Falcon laughed it off, but inside he felt colder. More hollow. "Touché. Of course, we were both born from destruction. Do you ever miss it? Being whole?"
"No." There was no lie in the dead voice. "No, I will admit, I have always enjoyed this so much more."
"Because of them."
"Yes. They've been magnificent."
"I agree."
Guinea pigs in that final experiment. How determinedly they had run the maze!
"And that's how we know it really is over." The Falconer breathed a sigh that might just have been of relief.
"Well," the Falcon coughed. "Not quite yet."
His brother glared at him. "You think they have a chance?"
The other met the challenge. "Don't you?"
Beyond the hill, the skies were full of aircraft screaming with post-human joy as they spiralled down from the stormclouds, impacting skyscrapers and bunkers and makeshift stability fields. The Peace Tower tumbled down to plant its face on the Parliament green, which rose up to consume it.
Nothing was decided, but together — for the first time since the first time, really and truly together — both felt they could discern the pattern entire.
"Hmm," the Falconer said.
"Yes," the Falcon agreed.
"There's always the contingency."
"I hope it doesn't get that far."
"For their sakes."
"Yes." A trumpet blew, and the visions collapsed. Beyond the hill, there were merely more hills. And two armies, awaiting their generals. "I'm expected."
A second trumpet, and the sound of stamping feet. "As am I."
The Falcon reached out.
The Falconer reached in.
"To the next game."
"To us."
The Falcon stopped midway down the hill, and turned to face his brother. "It galled me, you know."
On the other path, the other side, the Falconer stopped and turned as well. "Coming to me for help?"
"Yes."
"And you?"
The Falcon laughed. "I feel sick."
The Falconer did not laugh, but his tone was rueful. "We really got into the roles, this time. Didn't we?"
"Yes." His brother looked to the eightfold horizon, and shook his head. "But alas. Curtainfall."
§
TANGO
The door slammed shut with a booming crash, and Ilse saw stars.
The stars were blue, and they reflected off the glossy bodies of tremendous slugs soaring through the cosmos with their eyeless gazes fixed on distant Earth.
The stars, Ilse realized, were not red.
She was lying on a porthole. She was seeing outside.
The import of this fact dawned on her, and she rolled over and raised the gun.
He approached down the cylindrical corridor as the walls shifted, casting strange reflections — terror gripped her for a moment — and shadows across the hodgepodge of metal and polymer. The walls were rotating in stages, the portholes climbing up one side of the tunnel and then sliding back down the other. She didn't have time to watch the stars shift.
She pointed the gun at him.
He raised his hands, smiling wearily. A nasty bruise was forming around his left eye, though in the dim light it was difficult to distinguish this from the heavy bags under each, and the haunted look in his gaze. "We can work this out," he said.
"It's a simple enough solution," she growled. Her finger rested against the trigger, and he halted his approach mid-step. "One twitch."
At the far end of the tunnel, behind him, something pulsated in red. It gave him an almost satanic halo as he raised his hands up further. "You went to a lot of trouble to secure this meeting," he said. "It can't have just been to kill me."
She struggled to her feet, and glanced at her surroundings again. Much of the technology looked sophisticated and new, but it was almost like a gloss over something more rag-bag and sinister. Shiny conduits over masses of bundled wire. High-tension clamps holding bizarre tubes in place, tubes she could have mistaken for copper had they not also been red. And the portholes…
She saw reality run its course, and become the foundation for a second pass. A third. A fourth. Ideation and revision in the blink of an eye.
She saw motion out of the corner of her eye, and snapped her attention back to her cornered quarry. "What did you say?"
He regarded her coolly. "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you did bring me here to die. You seem a little out of sorts."
She laughed. "Out of sorts? You think I'm crazy. That's what you think is going on here."
"And why would I think that?" His tone carried an ironical echo. "Just because you shanghaied me, pulled a gun, threatened my life, broke into my home—"
"Home?" She gestured at the tunnel with her weapon. "This isn't a home. This is an escape pod."
"That's true," he nodded. "But maybe escape is my home, now. Do you find it so difficult to relate?"
She took a deep breath, and levelled the barrel at his forehead. "This isn't where I start sympathizing with you, Placeholder. If that's your narrative read, you've let your skills lapse."
He graced her with a sad frown. "I know what you're thinking, Ilse. Why don't you just say it?"
Indeed, why not? "You could have fit a few dozen people in here. And you left alone?"
The frown became more complex. He didn't quite smile, but there was something in his eyes, bleary and haunted though they were. "I think you just skipped a few steps."
But Ilse would not be interrupted. "You abandoned all those people! All your friends!"
"You'd rather I'd abandoned almost all of them?" He leaned on an arc of metal between the floor and the irregularly-rotating wall. "Should I have asked them to draw lots?"
"You didn't ask them anything. You didn't tell them anything! They thought you were going to find a way to save them!"
"And that's exactly what I'm going to do. I've already started working on it, in fact."
"So you didn't just step around the multiversal corner to buy a carton of milk?"
He snorted. "Who do you think I am?"
"I have no idea who you are!" She wished she had something to throw, but the only items on her person were far too precious to waste, or reveal.
"That's not entirely true, though, is it?" he responded in a voice like the closing of an era.
She hesitated. "The only thing that matters," she hissed, in tones so strident they hurt her throat to form, "is that you lied to hundreds of people who were relying—"
"I have an update on that, actually." He tried to smile. It didn't nearly work. "The number is much, much higher now."
"You think this is a joke?"
He shook his head. "No. Jokes are stories. Stories have meaning. I don't think this conversation matters in any respect. It's certainly not going anywhere."
But the craft they occupied certainly was. Ilse snuck another look at the nearest porthole as it slid past on the right; she saw a smile, and hands, and the hands reached out, and for a moment she felt seen and known as never before.
She understood what she was seeing, in the abstract. Other times. Other places. Other worlds. She wondered how many of them had been betrayed by their version of this man already. Or perhaps, given his cryptic hints, this version of this man.
She adjusted her grip on the gun. "I really should put a bullet in that big brain of yours."
"And strand yourself in the literal middle of nowhere?" He crossed his arms. "How would that help your poor, abandoned friends? Which, by the way, you've now abandoned yourself."
She would not, could not engage on that point. "Take us back."
"No."
"Take us back."
He shook his head. "This ride only goes forwards, Ilse. Do you realize who you sound like?"
She really could do it. She really could. "Tell me."
"You're hung up on things that already happened. Things which can't be altered. You want to go backward. You want to change the past."
Her trigger finger ached to complete its duty. "No. I want you to take responsibility."
He spread his hands. "That's all I want, too."
"I want you to acknowledge the mistake you made, and make it right. That couldn't be farther from Dougall Deering."
"But you're just as short-sighted as he was," Placeholder sighed. "If you could go anywhere in time and space, Ilse, where would you go?"
She looked out the porthole again. Now there was a prodigious fleet of star ships canvassing the stars, searching for lost Earth; or were they fleeing it?
"I don't know," she lied.
"You'd go to Canada, around the turn of the twentieth century, and prevent your sister's death. Am I right? And then you'd hop ahead a bit and tell yourself not to step into that incinerator."
"If my sister hadn't died," she said, looking in his direction but not quite meeting his eyes, "there would have been no incinerator to walk into."
He waved the specifics away. "You know what I mean. I've seen the files. I know what you and that idiot were working on."
"And what would you do?" she snapped. "Stop famines? Natural disasters? Paranatural ones? Let's hear a grand altruistic statement to justify your cowardice."
He managed to look legitimately sorrowful. "You're not thinking big enough. On the scale I'm addressing, nothing interpersonal even registers. These characters whose fates are so fascinating to you? I simply don't have time to think about them. I'm not going to make a brighter tomorrow for them. I'm not going to fix their pasts. You've proven how dangerous that narrow focus can be, both of you. It's provincial. It's wasteful."
She lowered the gun, just a little. Just to get a better look at his hateful face. "Then what? What are you going to do?"
He took a step towards her. She kept her aim firm, this time pointing straight at his heart. Assuming it was still where it ought to be. Assuming he still had one. "I'm going to tackle things holistically. That's all you need to know." He was still approaching, and she adjusted her feet to what she hoped was a more threatening stance. "Go on. Threaten to shoot me again. This kind of debate gives esoteric polymaths a bad name."
Her hands weren't shaking. She wouldn't allow it. "You could at least have told them you were going to get help."
"But I wasn't." It seemed like he'd been approaching her forever, but there was still so much distance between them. "It would have been a lie. Even if they'd believed me — and let's be honest, they weren't clever enough not to — they still would never have let me go. If they trusted me, they'd have said it wasn't safe. If not, they'd be afraid of me skipping out."
"Imagine that," she snarled.
He stopped a few metres away. "Imagination," he smiled. Really smiled, for the first time. "That's what it all comes down to. I didn't leave behind anyone with enough imagination to make a difference to what I'm doing. I'm going to imagine a better way, and I'm going to make it real. And you're all going to thank me."
Then he stepped forward again, and again, and pressed his breast against the barrel of the gun. "That's all you get," he said. Up close, she could see how haggard and drawn his face was. She imagined she looked much the same. "That's as far as the monologue goes."
She lowered the gun. What was the point? She couldn't pull the trigger. Not on him. Not here. Not now. However those variables were defined.
She stepped away from him, shakily, and looked out the porthole once more.
Endless possibilities. Rubik's Cubes. Billions of them. Spinning their way to some terrible collective solution.
So many ways to turn. Which was the right way? Were any of them right? Was he right, and the only thing that mattered was the bigger picture? They'd both seen so much more than the average human's keyhole view…
She wasn't sure she liked where this train was going. But there was definitely a pull. She turned back to face him again. "What do you intend to do about me?"
"If you don't shoot me, you mean?" he half-smiled.
"Yes," she nodded. "If I don't shoot you. What happens then? You vent me into space?"
He looked offended. "I've never hurt anyone."
That seemed too crass to be worth responding to. "Drop me off at the Diner at the End of the Galaxy, then?"
He rolled his eyes. "You and I consume very different media."
"I'm sorry. What stories do I need to get caught up on, so I can be a good crew member on the U.S.S. Ayn Rand?"
He leaned on the wall again, and thumped the next porthole that rolled past. She caught a glimpse of a public building adorned with a shining V. Only a glimpse.
"That's an unfair comparison, and you know it. Rand might just be the most successful untalented hack in history, so I'm doubly offended."
She didn't care to pursue this tangent. She gestured at the rotating worldscape without glancing at it again. "Where are we, anyway?"
"We aren't." His expression softened, and he looked suddenly very old and very tired. "We aren't when, either. This is something entirely outside of your experience."
"Nobody understands my experience," she told him in a low, threatening voice.
He nodded. "I suppose that's true, isn't it? You've been locked outside of time and space for lifetimes. I'm impressed you made it back in."
She could feel her teeth grinding. "I don't need your appreciation."
"You can have it anyway, as a luxury." He turned away from her, and walked a few steps back towards the red. "Remember luxuries? We didn't have those, in hell. Unless you count time, which is a luxury you've always had." He looked over his shoulder. "But I am curious. How did you get out?"
"By myself," she sneered.
He clapped his hands, seven times. "Bravo, I guess. Too bad you couldn't keep up the streak."
"Meaning?"
Now he was walking backward into the glow, facing her. "You're hitching a ride out of the underworld with me."
Her hackles raised immediately. It was fully out of her control. "I didn't need to."
"Uh huh."
"I could have made something like this." She laughed, one brief outburst. "I had to conceive it, understand what you had to have built, to do what I did."
"But only because I built it," he reminded her. "Only because I saw the possibility first."
"You think that?" She smiled grimly. "You think I didn't mull over every single possibility for getting out of that hole? Most of them before you were born. I just had to figure out which path you took. Of course it was the most ridiculous one."
"So why didn't you build your own, then?" He raised a hand to stop her replying. "No, I know. You wanted to show me the error of my ways."
"I wanted you to give them a chance."
He narrowed his eyes. "I think you're lying. I think you wanted to meet me." When she didn't protest, he kept going. "What was it like, working with Dougall Deering at the height of his stunted powers? I'll bet it was just like hauling an anvil uphill. Uplift is always like that. Do you know, he talked about you often? What a great partner you were."
She stared at him.
"I could tell he resented it. Plain for all to see. He hated how much better you were at everything he valued. He despised you, Ilse, but you must have despised him so much more."
She didn't argue. How could she? He knew.
"I've often wondered what it would have been like, you know. If I'd had you to work with, instead of him, and Du, and the rest of the B-team. And I think that must have occurred to you, too. That's why you went fishing for me."
"Your self-confidence seems to have improved." She hoped she was projecting her own well enough. "They told me you were a blubbering mess before you left."
The jibe made no obvious impact. He merely shrugged. "I know what I can do, now. And so do you."
"Yes," she said. "That's certainly true."
"But beside the point." He was almost to the end of the tunnel, and she was having a hard time making out his outline. She took a few steps forward as he continued to speak. "I'm not taking on crew. There's nothing on this ship needs doing which I can't do myself. And when I get where I'm going, it'll be easier to set myself up without needing a cover built for two."
"And where are you going?" she pressed, still advancing as he stood still.
"This is actually a round trip. I'm headed back to where I was before you snagged me. I don't want to hang around there just now; there's some changes being made I shouldn't be present for."
She snorted. "Found some new vulnerable people to lie to?"
"Yes." For a moment, she thought she saw something like regret. But it could have been the changing of the light as she drew closer again. "But they're not very sympathetic, so don't give me those big blue eyes. You wouldn't like them any better than you liked our mutual fool."
"But I bet I'd still care about them more than you do."
He spread his hands across the width of the tunnel, blocking her from seeing what lay beyond. "That's the thing you really don't get. You don't care more than I do. You live with people. You talk to them. You make friends, and you overvalue their quirks and aspirations. That's not enough for me. I want to do so much more. Know everything there is to know about everyone. See through their eyes. Understand them so perfectly I could simulate their every stimulus response in my head. I want it all up here, Ilse." He tapped his temple, twice.
"And what good will that do anybody?"
His eyes gleamed. "You'll see. I'm going to make you very happy. I'm going to make it so much better for everyone. But right now I have an itinerary, and you don't fit into it." He stepped back one more time, and flipped a switch hidden behind the final stanchion. The air between them shimmered. "So I'm sorry, little stowaway, but I'm going to have to put you on ice for a while."
She tapped the shimmering with the barrel of the gun. It rebounded gently, so she stuck her free hand into her lab coat pocket. "You want to really know people?" she asked him. "Start with me. There's only one thing you need to understand about Ilse Reynders."
She appeared behind him, and slammed the gun into the back of his head. He was sent sprawling into the forcefield, bounced off, and hit the ground much as she had at the start of this conversation.
She pushed him onto his back with her shoe. He stared up at her, baffled, and she leaned in to tell him: "Nobody puts me in the fucking refrigerator."
Then she threw the gun away. It clattered through the bulbous space full of wires and cables and panels and blinking lights, the red heart of this travelling redoubt, and she took it all in. The arcane scribbling on the walls. The absurd contraptions and controls. The source of the harsh magenta glow: the REISNO Cannon, or what was left of it, spinning madly on its back at the centre of the console. Spinning out of time.
"How did you do that?" Behind her, he was groaning to his feet again.
She tapped her labcoat pocket. "I told you. I didn't need your help getting out." She turned around, and laughed at the sorry state he was in. Hair wild, bruise darkening, red labcoat scuffed and filthy. "I wouldn't blame you for not having a mirror in here, but have you seen yourself? Only one of us looks like a hitchhiker right now."
He smoothed out his clothing, and glared at her. "So you've got some tricks up your sleeve. You're standing in one of mine. This isn't a stalemate."
"No," she agreed. "I think it's a negotiation."
"And what are we negotiating?"
"Our way through all the bullshit." She walked over and reached up, tilting his head so they were looking eye-to-eye. He was a lot taller than she was, but his shoulders were rounded in a hunch. "We both want the same thing. That's what I think. We're not happy with the way this is ending. We've both put in too much time, too much effort, too much blood and tears to lose now. I'm proposing we change the terms."
He reached up to remove her hand from his face. Very gently. "You want to help me?"
"No."
"You want me to help you?"
She shook her head. "It doesn't have to be one thing or the other. That's how it has been, but there's a better way. A better option. We can work this out together."
He blinked. "A third way."
She nodded.
He considered.
After a few moments, he turned away and walked to the far end of the chamber. There were monitors set up there, and he tapped a few keys. Ilse saw flashes of light as he did whatever he was doing, and took the moment to look up at the tunnel ceiling. At the highest porthole, before it turned away.
She saw the spiders.
She took it as an omen.
"There is something I've been wondering." At the sound of his voice, she turned back to face the chamber. He was still standing on the other side of the central console, the Cannon still whirring away between them. "Some nagging questions unresolved."
"Field research?"
He raised his hands up to dramatically encompass the entire interior, all its bells and whistles and gauges and parascientific madness. "It's a wide, wide field. Who's to say there aren't lessons to be learned there?"
"Lessons with practical applications," she said. "I'm not abandoning my friends again. There's a way to get what you want, what I want, and what they want, too. There must be."
He shrugged. "I'm flexible. If nothing else, you must believe that. And I can see you believe in what you're saying. But you have to ask yourself one thing."
"Do I trust you?"
He nodded.
She shook her head. "I do not. But I know who you are, and maybe that's almost as good."
He stood to one side, gesturing at the monitors, indicating she should join him. There were eight of them, each displaying yet another stark new scene. No stranger than what she'd already seen through the portholes, but perhaps a lot more portentous.
She had an inkling of what he meant. What he meant to do. She could help him. She could also try to stop him. It was her decision to make.
Realities wheeled about them, and the decision was finally made.
The woman without the incinerator approached the man without a name.
