Pink Noise - Leonid Korogodski [42]
Captured?
Instinctively, Nathi overclocked their brain. The Dancer shot out of the bed, their limbs primed for a complex fighting sequence—
—to be checked, held briefly, then pushed down.
“G———? I am a friend.” The woman’s voice did not betray the effort, but her block, though gentle, matched every attempt at getting free—a fluid dance of faster-than-thought movements. “You are still too weak. Rest first—then you can beat me.”
They relaxed. The woman let go of the block.
“Do you remember me?” she said. “I am Naomi?”
Seconds after they had opened their eyes, the Dancer finally awoke—and saw a woman’s face that may have been a fair copy of the girl’s own if not for the wrinkles and the hardened eyes. Gray strands of hair were poised to soon overwhelm the flaming red.
Somehow, Nathi felt that he’d already made that observation once.
The Dancer shook their head. The woman’s smile was gone.
“We won,” the woman said. “The Dragon Nest is ours.”
It took a moment before Nathi recognized the castle’s former name. All of a sudden, he felt tired. So much pain, so many sacrifices…. He was free. They won.
But how many posthumans still remained in slavery?
“What must we do?”
“For now, nothing. You must rest,” Naomi said. “Recover strength. You’ve suffered enough.” Her eyes took in the color of the Dancer’s skin—the Martian red. “Besides, there is a matter of your many… uh, extreme modifications. Nothing, thankfully, that our healers can’t take care of.”
“No!” The girl must have surprised Naomi. Nathi, too. “I want to keep the metasilk.”
I am a daughter of the Martian soil, she added silently. They both had a sense Naomi would’ve been hurt to hear that.
“And… we have grown rather fond of our superlens sight,” Nathi said. He knew the girl would love hunting for blueberries from orbit.
“That won’t be necessary,” someone cyber-spoke. “Your new ship has superlens viewfinders.”
A wink, a nudge—and Nathi recognized his welcome personette. Rina! he sent her.
“Ship?” The girl blinked. “Our ship?”
“Your ship.” Naomi smiled. “A brand new magsail battle cruiser. An intelligent shapeshifter.”
“Guess who asked to be transferred to the new collective mind?” The personette sent them a cyber-smile.
“Happy to have you,” Nathi said. “We’ll make a ballerina of you yet.”
“So that is how you have managed to seduce my own personette!” Naomi laughed.
But Nathi was already swept by a cascade of the girl’s emotions, her memories. The dream flight in the make-believe magnetic sail ship. Then, the real flight with nothing but the metasilk skin between their body and the almost airless cold of the Martian polar night. The magic of the layered terrain, the Laceland, the “dalmatian spots.” The tickle of the plasma wind over their electromagnetic skin—
And then it struck him. The girl knew it, too. A battle cruiser.
They had won a battle. Not the war.
THE DARKNESS OF THE MARTIAN NIGHT IS CUT BY PLUMES of glow reaching for the sky. Naomi is alone in an observation bubble, watching the Dancer dance up in the air outside the walls—a metamorphosis of fluid lines, the angles shifting and diverging as the magsails follow the silent music. Theirs is a subtle, deadly grace of armored, armed surfaces. The newborn battle cruiser’s outlines keep changing, playing with space like an artist’s dream, morphing in flight.
They dance. Far down below, their eyes catch on a solitary figure in a bubble, watching them, a tear sliding down over one cheek.
Who is she? the girl asks. She knows they have met, have talked for hours about something—only she does not remember what.
I think she is a friend. A very close friend, says Nathi.
Good. They can remember friends.
The battle cruiser’s faces smile.
They dance.
NOTES
AND
REFERENCES
THE OTHER DESIGN
MY WORK ON PINK NOISE INCLUDED MUCH RESEARCH, exposing me to some very interesting science, which I will attempt to summarize here. We live during exciting times, at the beginning