Tiamat's Wrath

Chapter Four: Teresa

We don’t know what they called themselves,” Colonel Ilich said, lying back on the grass, his hands pillowing his bald head. “We don’t know that they called themselves anything, really. They may have done without language at all.”

Teresa had known Colonel Ilich her whole life. He was a fact of the universe, like stars or water. He was a calm, thoughtful presence in a life full to spilling with calm, thoughtful people. What made him different was that he was entirely focused on her. That, and that he wasn’t afraid of her.

He shifted, stretched. “Some people call them ‘the protomolecule,’ even though that was really just a tool they made. It’d be like calling humans ‘wrenches.’ ‘Protomolecule engineers’ is closer, but it’s kind of a mouthful. ‘Initial organism’ or ‘the alien society’ or ‘the architects.’ They all get used to mean more or less the same thing.”

“What do you call them?” Teresa asked.

He chuckled. “I call them ‘the Romans.’ The great empire that rose and fell in antiquity, and left their roads behind.”

It was an interesting thought. Teresa turned it over in her mind for a few seconds like she was getting the taste of it. She liked the analogy not because it was accurate, but because it was evocative. That was what made analogies useful. Her mind wandered down that rabbit hole for a few breaths, seeing what was there, what was interesting in it, and decided to ask Timothy what he thought. He always had views that surprised her. It was why she liked him. He wasn’t afraid of her any more than Colonel Ilich was, but Ilich’s respect tasted like respect for her father, and that made it … not lesser exactly. Just different. Timothy was hers.

She felt the quiet stretching on too long. Ilich would be expecting her to say something, and Timothy wasn’t something she talked about. She found something else.

“So they built all of this?”

“Not all of it, no. The gates, the construction platforms, the repair drones. The artifacts, yes. But the living systems existed on the other worlds first. Stable replicators aren’t as rare as we used to imagine. A little water, a little carbon, a consistent stream of energy from sunlight or a thermal vent? Add a few million years, and more often than not something will happen.”

“Or if it doesn’t, then the Romans don’t have anything to work from.”

“One thousand three hundred and seventy three times that we know of,” Ilich said. “That’s a lot.” The colony worlds—Sol system included—were only on the gate network because there had been life for the Romans to hijack. A few hundred systems in a galaxy of billions. Ilich was old enough that anything more than one was miraculous to him. Teresa hadn’t grown up in a lonely universe the way the colonel had. She’d grown up in a lonely universe the way she had, and the two didn’t compare.

She closed her eyes and turned her face toward the sun. The light and heat felt good on her skin. The brightness pressed through her eyelids, turning everything red. Nuclear fusion filtered through blood.

She smiled.

Teresa Angelica Maria Blanquita Li y Duarte knew that she wasn’t a normal child the way she knew that light reflected off a level surface became polarized. A not-particularly-useful academic fact. She was the only daughter of High Consul Winston Duarte, which all by itself meant her childhood had been strange.

She’d lived her whole life in—or occasionally and clandestinely just outside—the State Building on Laconia. Since she’d been a toddler, other children had been brought in to be her friends and classmates. Usually from the most favored families of the empire, but sometimes because her father wanted her to know a variety of kinds of people. He wanted her to have as close as she could get to a normal life. To be as close as she could be to a normal fourteen-year-old. And it worked as well as it worked, but since she only had her own life to judge from, she couldn’t really say how successful it had been.

She felt more like she had friendly acquaintances than actual friends. Muriel Cowper and Shan Ellison particularly treated her best, or at least most like they treated other students in her peer group.

And then there was Connor Weigel, who had been in her classes almost as long as she’d had them. He had a special place in her heart that she found herself curiously unwilling to examine.

If she was lonely—and she assumed she was—she didn’t have anything to compare it against. If everything in the world was red, no one would know it. Being everywhere was just as good a way to be invisible as not being anywhere. It was contrast that gave things shape. Brightness made darkness. Fullness made emptiness. Loneliness defined the borders of whatever not-loneliness was called. They were comparative.

She wondered if life and death were like that too. Or life and not-life, anyway.

“What killed them?” she asked, opening her eyes. Everything looked blue. “Your Romans, I mean.”

“Well, that’s the next step, isn’t it?” Colonel Ilich said. “Figuring that out and then building a strategy around what to do about it. We know, whatever it is, it’s still out there. We’ve seen it react to things that we do.”

“The thing on the Tempest,” Teresa said. She’d seen the briefing on it. The first time Admiral Trejo used the Magnetar-class ship’s main weapon in normal space, something had happened that knocked out people’s consciousness all through Sol system for a few minutes and left a visual distortion on the ship itself, locked to its frame of reference. It was why James Holden had come to the palace, which was really the aspect of it that had the biggest impact on her.

“Exactly,” Ilich said. He rolled onto his belly and propped himself up on his elbows to look at her. Eye contact was how he signaled that something he said was important. “It’s the most serious threat to our security. Either the Romans died because they ran up against some natural force that they weren’t prepared for, or because an enemy killed them. That’s what we’re finding out first.”

“How?” she asked.

“We don’t know how they killed the Romans. We’re still just at the edge of understanding what they were compared to us.”

“No. I mean how are we finding out if it was an enemy or a natural force?”

Colonel Ilich nodded to say it was a good question. He pulled out his handheld, tapped on it a few times, and brought up a grid.

“Prisoner’s dilemma,” Teresa said.

“You remember how it works?”

“We both decide without talking whether to cooperate or defect. If we both cooperate, we both get three points. If only one of us cooperates, they don’t get any points and the defector gets four. If we both defect, we both get two. The problem is that no matter what you choose to do, I’m better off defecting. I get four instead of three if you cooperate or else two instead of nothing if you defect. So I should always defect. But since the same logic applies to you, you should always defect too. And then we wind up both making fewer points than if we’d cooperated.”

“So how do you fix that?”

“You don’t. It’s like saying ‘This statement is false.’ It’s just a hole in logic,” Teresa said. “I mean … isn’t it?”

“Not if you play it more than once,” Colonel Ilich said. “You play it over and over and over for a really long time. Every time the other player defects, you defect the next time. And then you go back to cooperating. It’s called tit for tat. There’s a pure game theory analysis of it I can give you if you want, but you don’t need it for this.”

Teresa nodded, but slowly. Her head was thick, the way it got when she was thinking about something without quite being conscious of what it was. Usually something interesting came up shortly afterward. She liked the feeling.

“Think of it like you were training Muskrat back when she was a puppy,” Ilich said. “The puppy wets the rug, and you scold it. You don’t go on scolding it forever. Just once, when it happens, and then you go back to playing with it and petting it and treating it like a puppy. It defects, then you defect, then you go back to cooperating.”

“Until it figures out that there’s a better strategy,” Teresa said.

“And it changes its behavior. It’s the most basic, simplest way we can negotiate with something we can’t talk to. But what if you do the same thing with the tide? Punish the waves for getting the rug wet?”

Teresa scowled.

“Exactly,” Colonel Ilich said as if she’d spoken aloud. “If you scold the tide, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t care. It doesn’t learn. And most of all, it doesn’t change. Your father is going to play tit for tat with the force that killed the Romans. And we’re going to see if it changes its behavior. If it doesn’t, we’ll take the hypothesis that they ran up against a law of nature like gravity making tides or the speed of light. Then we can study it, and find ways around it. But if it changes …”

“Then we’ll know it’s alive.”

“That’s the difference between exploration and negotiating,” Colonel Ilich said, pointing at her. She felt the bloom of pleasure that she always got when she’d answered a knotty problem well, but something nagged at her.

“But it killed the Romans.”

“War’s a kind of negotiation too,” he said.

Teresa’s rooms were in the north wing of the State Building, as were her father’s. It was the only home she’d ever had. A bedroom built to military specifications, a private bathroom, and the room that had been her playroom and was now her office, the difference being mostly cosmetic. When she’d been ready to strip away the decorations of cartoon dinosaurs and puppies, she’d said so, and the next day a designer had come to help her choose a new color scheme and layout. Her corner of the State Building wasn’t large or ostentatious, but it was hers to customize and re-create. Her little bubble of autonomy.

She’d chosen to make the office look like a science station. Her desk was tall enough to stand at, but also had long-legged stools along the side if she chose to sit. The east wall was a single screen set to run animations of simple mathematical and geometrical proofs when she wasn’t watching a news or entertainment feed. It wasn’t that she understood all the math, but she thought it was pretty. There was an elegance to the proofs, and having them there made her more aware of her intelligence. She liked being aware of her intelligence.

But she also had a couch long enough that she could lie down on it and still have room for Muskrat, her Labrador, to curl up at her feet. And a real glass window that looked out over a ceremonial garden. There were whole days when, if she wasn’t with Colonel Ilich or in class, she’d curl up on the couch with Muskrat and read books or watch films for hours at a time. She had access to everything the censors approved—her father was very liberal about giving her access to literature and film—and she gravitated to stories about girls who lived alone in castles or palaces or temples. For such a specific genre, it turned out there were quite a few.

Her present favorite was a ten-hour feed made on Mars back before the gates opened called The Fifth Tunnel. In it, the hero—who, at twelve, was now younger than Teresa, but had been older when she first watched it—discovered a secret tunnel under a city called Innis Deep and followed it to a whole buried community with elves and fairies who needed help getting back to their dimension.

It all seemed wildly exotic, and the idea of a girl who lived her whole life underground captured her imagination so much that she’d put a blanket over her windows and pretended that the darkness was made of Martian dirt. When her father told her that part was true—that there was an Innis Deep and that Martian children did live in tunnels and buried cities—and that only the elves and fairies were inventions, it had astounded her.

She was watching it again when her father came by. She’d just gotten to the part where the girl—whose name was never mentioned—was running through a dark hallway with the evil fairy called Pinsleep chasing her, when the knock came. She was just getting up to answer it when the door opened. Only her father opened the door. Everyone else made her get it.

The treatments had changed him over the last few years, but just growing up had changed her. It didn’t seem weird. His eyes had developed more of their oil-on-water shimmer in the whites and his fingernails had gone darker at the cuticles, but that was all just looks. In every way that mattered, he was the same.

“Am I interrupting?” he asked, the way he always did. It was half a joke, because she didn’t have anything to interrupt, but only half. If she’d ever said yes, he would have let her be.

The nameless girl shrieked as Pinsleep lunged for her. Teresa paused the feed, and prey and predator both froze. Muskrat huffed, tail thumping against the couch as her father scratched the dog’s wide ears.

“I have a briefing in two hours,” he said. “I’d like you to attend.”

Teresa felt a little prick of annoyance. She’d meant to go out and visit Timothy as soon as the feed was done. If they’d found out she was leaving the grounds without permission …

“Did I do something wrong?”

Her father blinked, then laughed. Muskrat pushed her head up into his hand, demanding more attention. He went back to rubbing her ears. “No, not at all. It’s Admiral Waithe’s report on the expansion plan for Bara Gaon Complex. You aren’t expected to contribute, but I’d like you to listen. Then afterward, we can talk about it.”

Teresa nodded. If it was what he wanted, of course she could, but it sounded dull. And strange. Her father’s eyes went unfocused for a moment, the way they did sometimes, and then he shook his head like he was trying to clear it. He leaned against the arm of the couch, not quite sitting but not standing either. He tapped Muskrat’s side firmly twice in a way that meant petting time was over. The dog sighed and flopped her head down on the cushion.

“Something’s bothering you,” he said.

“You’ve been asking me to do this more often,” she said. “Am I doing it wrong?”

His laughter was warm, and it made her relax a little.

“When I was your age, I was pushing for early entrance to upper university. You’re like me. You learn fast, and I want to keep up with you. I’m bringing you in more because you’re old enough to understand things now that you weren’t able to when you were a child. And Colonel Ilich says that your studies are on track. Even advanced.”

She felt a little glimmer of pride in that, but also confusion. Her father sighed.

“It’s hard work, keeping people safe,” he said. “Part of that is that we’ve come up against very dangerous, unknown things. I can wish that weren’t the case, but I can’t take it back. And the other part is that we’re working with people.”

“And people are terrible, terrible monkeys,” Teresa said.

“Yes, we are,” her father said. “We have a very close horizon almost all the time. Including me. But I’m trying to get better.”

The way he said it, he sounded tired. She leaned forward, and Muskrat took it as a sign that she was looking for someone to pet. She shifted, breathing hot on Teresa’s face until she gently pushed the dog back.

“Is the Bara Gaon Complex expansion really important, then?” Teresa asked.

“Everything’s important. All of it,” her father said. “And so every part of it needs to be able to fail without destroying the whole project. Including me. Which is why I’ve been asking you to come to the briefings more often.”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I’m fine,” her father said. “Everything’s fine. There isn’t a problem. It’s only that … if there were to be, sometime later. Decades from now. Someone would need to understand the shape of the whole plan, and be able to step in. And people trust what they already know. Having a new high consul would be difficult under any circumstances, but it would be less difficult if there were a story with it. A succession. I want to train you to be that, if—God forbid—something happened to me.”

“But why should I be good at it just because you were?” Teresa said. “There’s no reason to think that. That’s dumb.”

“It is,” her father said. “But it’s a mistake people have made all through history. And since we know that, the two of us can use the tool we’ve been given. Come sit in the briefings and the meetings. Listen. Watch. Talk to me afterward. This is the next phase of your education. So that if you need to step in, you’ll actually be the leader they need you to be.” It took a few seconds to really understand what he was saying. The huge moments in life seemed like they should have more ceremony and effects. The important words—the life-changing ones—should echo a little. But they didn’t. They sounded just like everything else.

“You want to train me up to be the next high consul?”

“In case something happens to me,” Duarte said.

“But just in case,” she said. “Only just in case.”

“Just in case, princess,” he said.