Evolution's Darling

"Let me pursue him. I know him now. I can find—"

"You are no longer on mission status. We have warship allies within a week's travel."

The drone's words—You are no longer on mission status—began to work some magic on her. The roar in her head seemed somehow muffled, as if a screaming child had been moved to another room.

She forced herself to hear it again.

Otherwise, this pain would go away. She remembered now the cool feeling between missions, the sure knowledge of luxury accomodations and transport arrangements made by avatars and valet drones. Wandering about the Expansion armed with large stretches of time in which there was nothing to do. Pulled this way and that by epic intelligences that worried every contingency, most of which never required her particular talents.

So different from the sharp ministrations of her Darling.

"Buy me a ship. Let me follow him. By the time your allies arrive he'll be long gone."

"He will be hunted throughout the Expansion. We suspect he will stay Outside, though."

Gone forever.

The voice continued calmly. "The rogue intelligence was destroyed, Mira. There will be no more copies." How infrequently the gods and their avatars used her name, she reflected. "All Darling has is circumstantial evidence. Source material for a new legend, nothing more. He is irrelevant."

Irrelevant. His diamond eyes, his lying assurances. The knife that was inside her belly now, turning, the sharpest of his gifts.

Mission-irrelevant.

"Is that all?" she rasped. Even through her pain, she realized that there would be no discipline for her short-lived rebellion. The gods didn't care. Vaddum was just an artist, Darling simply a romantic old fool. The danger had been destroyed with the Maker.

"One thing more," the voice said. "Never truncate your direct interface again."

She bowed her head to the little drone. "I won't."

"The Poor Sister leaves tomorrow morning. Your aircar is on its way to take you back the hotel."

"Yes."

She fought the growing empty feeling, the forgotten contentment of this, her non-mission state. Let me feel this pain, she begged the mechanisms of her mind. I don't want peace. I want this agony.

But an unstoppable calm stole over her, as if it had been ready, fully costumed, in the wings.

Waiting for the limo, she wept into her hands. In the car, she screamed and tried to scry the secrets of the leather seats, pressing her face into their darkness. Cried until her simple human biology ran out of tears, forced her to cough and empty her sinuses and take in oxygen. She breathed raggedly, pausing for strength, then pounded her fists against the windows of the luxurious machine as if she were being kidnapped. The gods suppressed the limo's mean intelligence, kept it from asking what the problem was. That was one less humiliation, she supposed.

The gods were good to her, in their cool and bloodless way, she could not help thinking.

She went to the Tower Bar, but its views were too beautiful, too seductive, and drew her down the path toward calm. She stormed back to her giant suite, swung an already injured fist at the valet drone going about the duties of unpacking. She ordered a poisonous mix of alcohols from room service, even her subvocalization in direct interface sounding desperate and betrayed.

On the glass of the floor-to-ceiling windows, she made handprints with her bloodied fist. Mira wondered how she would manage to sleep tonight, without Darling here to fuck her. The pleasure that she had taken with Darling as she'd killed the Maker had left an itch, nothing more. She needed the dark battery of his strands, that medusa's nest of whips, of barbs.

She interfaced a list of sex services: erotidrones and fuck-troupes, bent artificials and desperately pain-addicted biologi-cals, paid and paying masters, slaves, switches. The list disgusted her: the completeness, the carefully defined variables, the legal waivers, the Dewey-decimal non-randomness of it all. It was not Darling.

Mira sat with the delivered alcohol and contemplated which bottle-shapes would make the sharpest shards. She chose the agave mash, housed in a long, rapier-thin novelty bottle. And also the magnum of champagne, which reflected her face in a kalei-descope of facets. She hurled the two bottles into the titanic bathtub, bringing the heels of her travelling boots down repeatedly to refine their disintegration. In with them went the bottle of scotch, whose 200-year-old cask date had raised her ire.

Then she started the water, holding an accusatory finger into the column until it was painfully hot, and started drinking pas-sionlessly from the surviving bottles.

There were no thoughts of suicide here. The gods were watching, would intercede and ruin everything if she did too much damage. There was just the need to mimic, to recreate the physical stresses of a night with Darling. The desire to dream once more as she had in the aftermath of his pain-told stories. To find out how she had become the way she was. At some point in her fit she'd understood: her missing memory—her missing something—was the reason Darling had left her. But she could feel the rest of herself, closer than ever in this pain. Past the Pale that hid her lost childhood, beyond the Expansion territory of her gods' missions: an answer in a dream.

There must be more of her, deep inside. Hidden behind governors and religions of one. Enough of her.

She stepped into the bath. How crude this burning, flaying pain of scalding water. But as she let the watermark of agony rise— one leg, then another, a small cry when her labia broke the water's skin, a shudder as nipples submerged—Mira knew the sensory overload would do its job. The broken glass felt merely like rocks, her heat-addled nerves returning only the gritty discomfort of sand. Tendrils of blood reached up warily, thickly fibrous against the white tile of the bath, splaying pinkly on the surface.

She reached for a shard, a long finger from the agave bottle.

Where? Where first?

Mira closed her eyes, breathed the vaporous, heavy air. Memory formed her man, his tendrils and his thorns and his metal cock. She traced his imaginary attentions onto her body, writing the narrative of their sex once more. A few times, she stopped to exchange tools, to rest fingers grown too frayed. In these moments she opened her eyes, and was amazed at the color of her bath: now pink, now rosy, now like a sunset. Each time, she closed them again.

There was no interference, no mutterings or demands from the room's medical drone or her own internals. Even when she crawled dripping wet to the bed, and the pain began, the room's monitors were silent. She guessed that the gods were intervening against the hotel's safety features, allowing her injuries this one last time.

It took a long hour to reach sleep. The sheets formed attachments to the liquid of her wounds, pulling free painfully when she tossed or turned. A kind of throbbing started in her head, but she beat it back by drinking. She emptied the gin, and had to crawl for vodka left behind in the bathroom. The vodka seemed to revive her emotions; it made her cry again, and now the sobs were sharpened by her body's laceration.

But she felt something slipping away, with all that blood. Some measure of consciousness that needed sugar or oxygen was ru

Then a feathery voice came from her bedside, the god's most soothing incarnation.

"We have a story for you."

She shut her eyes.

"Do you want to hear it?" the gods said kindly. "You can say no."

She laughed harshly, a sob stuck in her throat.

"I'll hear it," she said.

She felt sleep come at last, and hoped the gods would fix her in the night.

And wake her in time to catch the Poor Sister.

The children find the drowned girl in the shadow of a mountain peak towering over the harbor's southern end.