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Four minutes ten seconds, Avi thought. Kyr had taken almost eight of the twelve minutes he'd given her to rescue Yiso and come back to the Victrix so they could leave. He could hear her speaking through the comm: to Yiso, so she'd found Yiso, and Jole too. "Avi?" she said to him.
He checked the chrono again. "You've got four minutes, Valkyr," Avi said back. "Can you make it?"
She didn't reply. He checked the comms link. Fuck, fuck, it was broken, she couldn't receive, only transmit. He could use the stationwide comm, but as he went to try he realized that was fucked too. He'd have to dynamically reroute the comms as more and more systems started failing due to the shadowspace distortions.
As he worked, he heard Sergeant Sif say, "They're all here, except for Valkyr." They had all come, then, all of the rest of the people of Gaea, to the Victrix. Avi thought, she really did save everyone. He thought: Gaea Station had trapped both of us. He'd said that to her before, when he'd went to find her in her bunk.
He'd taken Gaea Station with him, everywhere he went. So had Kyr. She's said she hadn't even thought about getting out of Gaea.
But somehow she had gotten out. He hadn't been willing even to try to undo what he'd done, to give the rest of Gaea a chance. He hadn't wanted to. He'd been too angry. And somehow -- he hadn't even thought, it wasn't even in the set of possibilities he'd been aware of -- she'd been able to say no to Gaea Station, she'd been able to make another choice, something that didn't involve destruction, that gave other people those same choices. People he wouldn't have chosen to save. People he'd never really interacted with. And also people who'd been awful to him, who'd called him assface queer and worse things, who'd shoved him and kicked him when no one was watching.
And he knew Kyr didn't like a whole lot of them either, was the funny thing. It was something the two of them had in common. He guessed it was part of why she called him a friend: the two of them didn't like most people. So -- why?
The words he'd said to Kyr echoed in his head. We're still trapped here, you know that, don't you? We're here forever, you and me. Only she -- wasn't. She'd found some sort of way to escape Gaea, the way that Gaea had fucked with their heads.
He didn't get it.
At least he could make the choice to save Kyr, to try to save her. His hands had been working busily while he thought, and the comms were finally rerouted. "Valkyr! You're the last one. We'll hold for you." Three minutes now, but he could give her another thirty seconds, maybe sixty, if he stretched the safety margins to the last bit. He would save her, and Yiso too, even though it -- they -- were a majo. Take that, Gaea, he said silently.
But at the end of four minutes he knew it was no use. They had to go. There were no more choices left. Magnus and Kyr said goodbye, and he launched the Victrix away from Gaea forever.
Magnus came up to him as he was sitting there, for once with nothing in his mind, looking out the rear viewscreen at Gaea, and bumped his hand against Avi's. Avi curled his hand around Magnus', which was very cold. So they were holding hands as they watched Gaea Station quivering, its shape warped and stretched out under what must have been severe shadowspace distortion, and crumpled in on itself, disintegrating into a long line of debris. No one cheered, but Avi knew he had a grim smile on his face. Gaea was gone, destroyed.
Except it's not gone, Gaea is still in me, Avi thought, the smile slipping off his face. If Kyr could get free, is there any chance for me?
*
The next day Avi went to sickbay for the second time. The things Magnus had told him and the things Avi had realized were buzzing in his mind. He was very angry.
As Avi entered sickbay, he saw that Yingli Lin was propped up on the cot with her tablet in her hand. He was struck by a sense of relief, even through his anger. The first time he had come to the Victrix sickbay, her eyes had been closed, her face slack and tired, the only time he had ever seen her face not animated with her ascerbic intelligence. (The only time, except for when he'd seen her unconscious on the floor of Victrix's bridge, but he shied away from that memory.) It had scared him, and he'd left without waiting to see if she was awake or whether she would wake.
But now she was alert and looking at him. Her face seemed more lined than when he had last seen her, but maybe that was his imagination. He said, "Corporal -- Commander-- "
"You can call me Lin," said the woman on the bed. "That will do as well as anything at this point, I suppose." She tilted her head. "All right, Avicenna, what is it?"
He looked back at her for a second, her question reminding him of the long Systems shifts, with a younger Avi vibrating about whatever it was he was thinking about or whatever had happened to him. Corporal Lin had always known when he had something to say to her -- "It's not like it's hard to tell," she had once said -- and he would blurt out whatever he was thinking, whether or not it related to their work. Lin would say something incisive or roll her eyes at him, or sometimes both.
He'd liked those times, except for the part where they were on Gaea, with the constant undercurrent of fear and rage.
And he'd never been as upset with Corporal Lin then as he was with her now.
Avi said, "Magnus told me what happened on the bridge of Victrix, before I got there. And I --" He burst out, "He told me you were talking to Jole as an equal. And I suddenly realized, remember when I was about to get my assignment and Command told me they'd kill me if I refused the assignment because I knew too much? You know what I realized, when Magnus told me that? Command knew that because of you. Because you told them."
Her eyebrows rose. Apparently, whatever she'd expected, it wasn't that. "Avi, I'm continually amazed by your ability to make a situation all about yourself. I did much worse than that." She frowned. "And, more to your point, Command already knew you had a propensity for getting in trouble, so they might not have listened to me if I'd told them otherwise. But yes, what you've said is essentially correct."
"How could you do that?" he said furiously. Part of him had hoped that Lin would deny it. And he'd known about the other things, of course, from his contraband reading: the mutiny on the Victrix, the establishing of Gaea, going along with Jole. But somehow it hadn't been real to him, until he had realized that she'd done it directly to him, too.
She looked away. "I was terrified," she said, so softly he barely heard her. "I'm... just beginning to realize how much."
"What do you mean you were scared? You were a commando in the war! You were Hagenen Wing!" He'd never told her before that he'd figured that out too, that she was the best of the best, part of the elite special forces that had been the cream of Terra Expeditionary. "And now you tell me you were scared of Aulus fucking Jole?"
She laughed, a short bitter laugh. "I was scared of many things. Of admitting we had failed, perhaps the most. But yes, him as well." She hesitated. "Perhaps that's easier to explain. I'd... seen enough of death in the war. And you remember how it was, Avi. People died for speaking out, for doing anything against him, and not in --" She breathed out. "War is different, worse in most ways, but dying in war is better than execution." Unwillingly, he thought again of seeing Lin as a sad little heap on the bridge of Victrix, after Jole had shot her.
"That's no excuse," he said, less angrily than he wanted to. He understood being scared. He'd lived his life in fear, after all. But it would have been so easy for her to have told Jole, no, Avicenna doesn't know very much, you can space him on a rock, it won't matter, you'll be well rid of a troublemaker.
She looked back at him. "No," she said, her voice a bit stronger. "It's not an excuse, not at all. But you asked." She sighed. "And I thought I should answer you. I owed you that much."
Kyr had said, If people can talk to each other... if they can be honest... it all falls apart. Well, now he and Lin were being honest with each other. But he wasn't sure how much it was helping.
What would Kyr do?
Kyr would have been angry. For the first time, he wondered what Kyr had said to Lin, when Lin had told her what she knew about their plotting. He supposed that now that Kyr was dead he'd never know, because he was definitely not going to ask Lin that.
But he did know, after all, what Kyr would do, because she'd already done it. She'd saved Lin, in the end.
"What will you do now?" Lin asked.
"Why do you ask," he said flatly and viciously. "Are you afraid of what I might do?"
She flinched, just a little. Avi wouldn't have seen it unless he were looking for it. He thought it would make him feel better, but instead he felt sick. (Not nearly like he'd felt when Mags had shot himself, in that first universe, but an echo of an echo of that feeling. Shit, he thought.) "No," she said. "Not because I don't believe you're capable of doing something terrible, but I think I'm done with being afraid, now. There's no point."
Now she was done. He opened his mouth, enraged, but never knew what he would have said, because at that moment the comms link in his ear chimed, and he heard Magnus' voice, keyed up with intense emotion. "Avi! Avi! You have to come to the bridge right away!"
"What is it?" he said to Magnus, alarmed, his mind making up possible scenarios. Maybe Jole had survived Gaea's destruction somehow and was trying to get on board. Maybe Systems aboard the ship was fucked. Maybe Admiral Russell had made it out of the brig and was trying to retake the bridge --
"It's Kyr and Yiso! They're alive!"
He rushed out of sickbay. Behind him, Lin queried, "Avi?" but he did not reply.
*
After finding out from Kyr that the majo painted ship had jumped her aboard -- and oh, he knew what it meant that her eyes slid away from his, she knew as well as he did that majo ships didn't do that -- Avi waited until Magnus and Kyr went off together.
Magnus looked at him apologetically, but Avi said, "Oh come on, Magnus, are we attached at the hip or something?" and Magnus smiled that utterly sweet smile at him and wandered off with his sister. Avi knew that Magnus would only stay with him until they got to Chrysothemis, where he'd actually have options, but at least he'd enjoy getting those smiles while he could.
Kyr glanced back at him narrowly -- she could read him too, is this what it means to have a friend, then? that she knows my tells, and I know hers? -- but Avi had counted on her wanting to talk to Magnus first, and then deal with him. Once she was safely gone, he breathed a sigh of relief.
Then he went straight to the hangar bay where the painted ship was. It didn't jump him aboard. He hadn't expected that. But he'd spent enough time with it -- in that first universe -- that he knew what he needed to do to get inside. He was able to engage the door mechanism with a minimum of fuss and stepped inside, where he stood there in the midst of ludicrous-looking majo fabrics and artworks, feeling extremely self-conscious.
"All right," he demanded of the ship, "why are we stuck here? Fix it."
Command not recognized, the ship said primly, from directly overhead.
"Don't," he snarled. "Not to me. I'm not an idiot. You saved Kyr and you saved Yiso -- you and I both know that a majoda cruiser can't do that. Except under very particular circumstances: if it has a shadow engine, and an intelligence making use of the shadow engine within the ship itself. And it couldn't have been Yiso, because Yiso was outside the ship." He folded his arms. "So. Wisdom. You're not dead. And Yiso gave me back my memories of the other universes. I know there are other universes where Earth lives. You put us there once. Put us back there."
I can't, , said the ship. I'm not the Wisdom any more, as you understand it. The planet-spanning intelligence part of me is gone. I'm only a ship's worth of AI. I can manipulate a shadow engine enough to do small spatial jumps of a volume equivalent to a couple of majo, so I was able to save Yiso and Kyr, but that's all.
"That's what you'd say if you were lying," Avi observed. "How do I know you're telling the truth?"
I was programmed to tell the truth. But I will also show you, Avicenna, said the ship, and the ship control displays lit up.
He bent to the controls. Some of them weren't too different from what he knew from his Systems work, even though he knew the Systems consoles were twenty years behind and without the benefit of any of the later majoda technology. But the shadow engine manipulation wasn't all that different, even with majo controls, and he knew of ways to process the data, given that the Wisdom was giving him access.
An hour or two later, as he got more and more sullen and resigned, he stood and stretched, shaking out the cramp from his shoulders. "Ugh." He didn't say the obvious, that it was becoming very clear that the ship had spoken the truth, that the Wisdom had in fact destroyed itself, and what remained -- a miniscule part of the Wisdom's brain -- wasn't enough to move them to another universe. "But why? Why put us here, in this universe?"
The ship's voice said from above, You of all people need to ask me this, Avicenna?
"Yeah." He crossed his arms. "Okay, okay, Jole and I, we screwed things up good in that other universe. I get it. But what makes that better than destroying Earth? You can see that didn't -- go good places either." He swallowed convulsively, remembering Kyr's hands around his neck, but went on. "Both possibilities were crap, Wisdom. Why not use the last chance for the universe where Earth gets to live?"
The greatest good for the greatest number, said the ship, now sounding less certain.
"But the greatest good for whom -- Shit." Avi had been trying not to think about the caverns of Chrysothemis or the Halls of the Wise since they left Gaea, and mostly succeeding. But now he forced himself to think about the other him, Sennett, the one who had grown up on Earth, the hills of Earth. Sen, because of his Providence work, had known much more than Avi had about the Wisdom and the Princes of the Wisdom. "The greatest good," Avi repeated. "You had the functionality to make decisions, to decide what the greatest good was. But you needed data for that. You needed a shit-ton of data to train on, that told you what the right answer was, what the greatest good was, in a bunch of different situations, so that you could run your fancy generalization and pattern-extraction crap to figure out the answer yourself when you needed to make a decision.."
Avi looked up. "And you did have training data. You had thousands of years of it."
He paused, but there was no reply from the ship. He continued slowly, "That's what the Princes of the Wisdom were for. I didn't know this, but Sen did: whenever you asked one of them to make a decision, that was an element of your training set. Every decision they made, every time they made a choice about what was better and what was worse, you trained on that. You had thousands of fucking years of data that said that the majo were more important than anyone else, didn't you! In fact, yeah, now that I think about it, Leru chose that first world that I remember, the one where Earth was dead. That's the data you had to work with. That's why you chose that future and not something else. We could have had a future where the majo worlds were dead instead of humans, maybe even one where some of both humans and majo were dead but all the worlds lived, or where the Earth joined the majoda, but instead -- what we got --" He stumbled to a halt. He realized he was crying, for that world where he'd lived in the cities of Earth, where he'd seen its mountains and oceans, where he hadn't ever been so hungry he couldn't sleep, where he'd actually felt sometimes that he enjoyed his life.
The ship continued to say nothing.
Avi didn't need it to confirm what he'd said, anyway. He knew he was right. He started systematically pulling the beautiful expensive fabrics and artworks off the walls of the room, hurling them against the floor and tearing them apart.
The ship finally spoke: Please don't do that, Avicenna, it said in its soft voice.
"What are you going to do about it?" he yelled. "Send me to a universe where my planet is dead? Oh hey, you already did that, and you can't send us back! Kill me? Yeah, sure, go ahead, what's one more human?"
Well, Sen's voice said coolly inside of him -- Avi had been suppressing Sen's voice, but accessing his alternate self's knowledge came at a price, and he was so tired -- just look at the training set you got.
The thing that Avi hated the very most about having Sen in his head was that dispassionate analytical perspective on Avi's life. It was much easier without that. Because Sen had a point: Avi's whole training set, all the information he had been making decisions with, was utterly warped by Gaea Station.
And Sen's training data, for that matter, had been skewed too. Not by Gaea Station, but he'd been making decisions based on what Jole told him, what Jole wanted.
Shit.
He stopped ripping up the ship's decorations and slumped down in the middle of the floor, destruction all around him. (At least, he thought hysterically, it could have been worse! it could have been trillions of majo worse!) He put his head in his hands.
"I don't like you," he said. "I never will. I'm going to leave you alone now, and you leave me alone. Don't fuck with me any more."
I wouldn't dream of it, the ship said.
Avi stalked away from the painted ship. He didn't want to think about him being like the Wisdom, or the Wisdom being like him.
Or him being like Yingli Lin, with her priors about war and execution and failure -- and, his brain filled in for him, her deteriorating body as well. He'd known that she was in significantly worse shape physically than when he'd started in Systems, that she could barely walk from one part of the station to another without falling down. He supposed someone who found herself like that, in a system where physical prowess was everything, might have become resigned to being powerless. Her training data had probably gotten skewed too, somewhere in there.
He scowled. This whole trying-to-be-better-than-Gaea thing was exhausting and extremely annoying.
He didn't think he'd forgive Lin, either. That wasn't something he did. But maybe he'd go talk to her again sometime.
Maybe.