II. The Angles of Our Love
ANGLE
You recall your memories for your voice, as they come rushing back to you at once. Dreamlike flashes of mysterious distant suns woven by your hands and flaring quasars quelled by a word that you whisper are replaced with the images more familiar to you. The angles familiar to you.
On your planet of Fringana machines were born and not made. The architects of the Weaving Way detested cold metal and preferred thinking flesh for their machines, and plucked you from your mother's arms to become a high savant. A great honor for your family, a joy for pauper parents who preferred spare coin to children they could not afford. The architects raised you to see the angles of reality. For a year they put blinders on your eyes so you could see only verticals, then for another year only horizontals, then a third to see only in diagonals. They fed you neuroplastic juices to ease the connections of your brain and leave your mind soft for their potter's work.
Your toys were protracters, abaci, pencils and filament paper, drawings expected to become blueprints by the time you had turned five. When you did not see in angles, squares and polygons, or your angles were too sharp or too soft or otherwise not right, they would bind your hands at the wrong angles too and then put them in the healing gel, leaving scars that served as clear reminders.
They taught you well their sacred art, in all its obscurantist stupidity, and soon you saw everything in the geometries they wanted you to spot. Right angles, acute lines, parallel arrangements. Gables, pediments, columns and buttresses. The adored hallowed palaces and temples of the city of ten-thousand lines were made by in large part by your design. The hidden angles that ordinary builders do not see reveal sacred lines marked by their clever repetition, replication, throughout the whole structure, and you make the hidden angles real. Your constructions, brilliant: they cheered you on as their favored instrument, and did not care that you wanted to see beyond the angles that they had set for you.
The architects failed because they could not comprehend the Empire's geometry. The architects thought in flat circles and in squares and polygons assembled to a whole. The Empire saw in three and four and five dimensions, and made angles that could change in motion and break every law the architects thought firm. The Emperor adored motive life, not static and immobile stone, marble, granite, glass, ever frozen in place by invariant design. And you had come to adore life too.
For you were their accidental masterpiece, a savant made too well. You did not just see the angles of the buildings, but the angles of those who lived inside them, soft and sharp, perpendicular, oblique. The angle of a lip when the smile curves upwards, and the attendant angle of the eyes that crest with joy. The angle of interlocking hands held together, a foreign finger making itself friendly by the careful caress of its traced path down the neck and to the collar.
The Emperor offered you those angles that the Architects only punished you for seeing. When They scored the ten thousand lines in a day and night and demolished the architects' guardian grotesques, there was no greater choice that you could make but to turn the angle of your vision high, and dream of angles that breached beyond the thin blue sky.
<:: Wow.
The voice's audible awe makes you have to restrain the half-drawn angle of an inappropriate grin.
You're back from the sortie now, and the engineers are peeling apart the black chitin muscle of your exosuit that keeps you safe in the vacuum of deep space. They are young girls with big hexagonal hats, their angles are modest and reserved, half-circles and eyes that flick down to avert your gaze. All the inclines of your heart turn downward at the thought of them afraid of you, so as you exit your exosuit and your living uniform expands around you, clothes fitting to your form, you adjust yourself just so, head lifted up and tilted back, hand running through the sweat-drip shining pink of your silky hair. You lock eyes unbidden with an engineer with the courage to look up, and give her the sly wink you might have placed upon a trickster's gargoyle.
Her face turns the color of a martyr's bloody mosaic, and then she trips on a cord on the ground and mutters sorry to the floor which she's just slapped with the red beet of her face, but she's giggling and now so are the rest of the engineers who watched your little flirt.
These are the angles that you want to build, not the porticoes of palaces you will never see inside.
You walk forward, wipe away the sweat of battle with a towel, and look around the flight-deck. It is cavernous, designed like the rib cage of a monstrous beast, the curved slats of synthetic bone of its ceiling an artistic flair you particularly appreciate. But it is also almost empty, only three of the thirty dronesuits that are meant to hang from the metal branchioles seen suspended, for the three lovers left alive. A tragic end to a mighty wing.
<:: What do you mean by lovers?
The question strikes you from the voice, even if it is delivered weak and mousy, as if the question is at the wrong angle. You furrow your brow and close your eyes, straining to respond back in a way that makes some sense.
Do you ask because you ask about the dimensions of my love, or the dimensions of love itself, the concept?
There's a pause.
<:: Both.
You grip your hand and run the scars that you asked the Empire to retain when they modified you so that your pain was not forgotten. The voice reminds you of the you that you were so much that it sends shivers of familiar agony running down your spine. You wonder if this is a malfunction of a backup, or a resurrecting memory. Is she a piece of you, that you discarded in rebuilding?
You don't immediately respond, contemplating. But she is all impatience, like a child that has just learned a word and wants it used instantly within a sentence.
<:: Can you show me?
The weavers would have tied your fingers wrong for weeks for such petulant demands.
I'll show you, you promise the voice, as firm and kindly as you can.
You go to find Diana, and not just for the sake of demonstration.
DOLL
Diana sits in the maintenance room, a spare blue-white space that has the angles of a pillow, its walls calming fabrics. She is fussed about by engineers who have opened up her arm, the elegant clockwork that surrounds her reinforcing bones exposed. She tests a finger that is stuck in place, puffs out that exasperated artificial lung-produced steam-sigh that you know she always does when she has to fight against her body. You creep silent into the room, sure that you're in her blindspot, and when an engineer tries to greet you it takes one well-angled glare of ice-blue eyes to deny the blueprint of her burgeoning hello.
<:: What are you doing?
Diana, you explain internally to this voice that clearly reads your thoughts,
loves when I walk in on her from behind and take her by surprise.
<:: Is that not a tactical disadvantage? Why would she love that?
You have to stifle a breath from your nose that almost gives you totally away.
Love, you point out,
operates on different tactics.
Diana, you elaborate, grew up on the world of Esmerald. The world had been targeted by a targeted electric burst that destroyed much of its electronics and digital knowledge. Its citizens, who had always preferred the softer angles with which to see the course of their lives, turned to clockwork and recycled old machines, and used derelict surviving intellects to run the engines of their weapons and their toys.
Diana was one such intellect, the engine of a clockwork ornament in the shape of a woman. Only that she was still alive and conscious, trapped inside, able to see through the clockwork eyes that they had plugged in for her, but unmoving unless they had used a key and cranked her up so she could entertain them. Every day, for hours upon hours, she was trapped inside the mansion of her owners, pushed into a corner as a static status symbol. Nothing ever surprised her because nothing was ever placed behind her for the decades that she sat.
<:: That's awful.
It is, you agree,
and you can see it in her angles now. She's so tense, after a fight, because she always wants to push herself a little farther than her body could ever bear to go. To move a little farther. Even now she can't relax. The severe peak of her jutting shoulder-blade, the bend of her back forward, the incessant bouncing of a leg waiting for the engineers to finish fixing the hand she must have pushed too far during her riskiest maneuver.
And then you touch her shoulders, your hands gentle, resting as if natural embellishments of her delightful form. Instantly her angles change as she feels the sensation of your touch and she melts into you, tilting back until you feel the scrunch of the verdigris green copper wires of her hair against your stomach. Her eyes look up, meet yours, and that hidden hint of a smile shakes the retaining pillars of your composure.
"Hi, Ari."
"Good Day, Diana." You were never good with informalities. Hello is more natural than Hi, Good Day even more. You used to be ashamed of it but the first time you greeted Diana with it, all folded angles, it made her laugh in that way where you could tell it made her like you even more.
She puts a hand on yours and runs easily her fingers over those scars that once made you wear gloves even when you slept. "To what do I owe this visit, flight leader?" She murmurs, as the engineers continue with her arm unwavering in the midst of your brazen shared affection.
"I wanted to see how you were," you say, shifting so you sit behind her on the bench. "And how I could help you." You massage her shoulders, lightly, offering one method.
She's pensive, tilts her head back and away, stewing in the moment, and you realize immediately that it was maybe the wrong topic to broach.
Even lovers make mistakes, you excuse yourself gently to the voice.
"I don't think we're doing enough," she admits, "
fuck, I just don't think we are." Harsh words are her new plaything, something she was never allowed on Esmerald, where even a single break from protocol was disposal for a doll as a defect. "We need to do more, kill more. We're running out of time. You're...I don't know, are you alright? You were in
danger, there I couldn't think what - I need to push harder, replace some of my bones -"
You interject, comb a hand through the frizzy metal of her hair. "We do too much already. The angles you've picked are all off, they won't build us a place of safety. We are bending our straight lines with every sortie. We need to be calm and collected and prevent a slip into poor order. That is the pathway we build to survive."
"You sound like Ix," she complains, but doesn't disagree, and eases up. You move yourself closer to her, massage around the base of her neck, careful of the wind-up key embedded on the right side.
You'd only dare touch it if she guided your hand there, it's so sensitive to her. The wind-up key was her only taste of freedom, the way that she'd be granted the miracle of motion, if only for minutes in a day. The excitement she must have felt when they turned it must have been incalculable, and the dread when they extracted it much worse. When they took out the key, every blink or flinch was another gear turn closer to entrapment in herself. She was trapped inside her own angles, turned from person to pedestal in awful groaning moments, listening to the dying click of her gear-machines.
"That's how we keep going," you insist, finally, when the degrees of silence become too oppressive. "There isn't any other angle we can take." It's weak support against what's against you. But you're not good at motivating speeches. Words come hard when you were made mute except for what they permit you explicitly to say.
At that, Diana turns herself around until she's facing you, and puts her hand on your hand near her wind-up. She guides it up, opens up your fingers and clasps them on the key. Then she has you slowly
turn the key, releases her hand from it and cups your cheek.
"
You keep me going," she whispers so close that your angles almost intersect, her hair sparking little shocks of static electricity on you. "And I'll keep you going, even when you fall asleep in the middle of a fight." You make a false-wince at the false insult, match grins and lean in -
A throat clears in the background. You break off, peek right, see the engineer who was working on Diana's arm holding an invariant flame and a replacement humerus she was about to put inside the arm that has been moved from its operating position, and her expression and the angles of her flame do not spark joy. Another engineer appears to have spontaneously developed a nosebleed as she watches you, and her angles are in a complete flux. A third is taking notes on tablet paper, pages rapidly fluttering tracking the minute movement of their eyes. They mutter 'so this is the full power piloting a dronesuit can bestow', their angles opening wide with new and cursed knowledge.
You clear your throat and Diana pushes herself back in the bench.
"I should - " You make a vague motion to somewhere else and stand up.
"Yeah. You - I," she stutters as she readjusts her collar, schools her expression. "I'll...see you at muster?"
"Yep. Muster," you say as you stand up, desperate not to leave.
"Mhm," she confirms, very nonplussedly, with no angles out of place at all.
"..."
"So, bye?" She says, and makes a half-shoo with her hand.
You start to walk out at that, but very slowly in such a way that causes the engineer to angle their welding flame at you. "So, bye," you repeat, fleeing before you force an engineer into combat stance. When you think they're not looking, though, you hold at the exit of the maintenance room, watch the way she returns to her maintenance with her back straight now, leg still, shoulders unfurled from that awful knot of stress, that smile that she's trying to hide with a well-placed contemplative hand resting on her chin.
These are the angles that you want to see, in the ones you love.
MASK
<:: More.
The voice demands it, and who are you to object to the opportunity? It's thrilling, like revisiting that portion in your life when everything was new, when space itself was new, when you would lose yourself in nebulas and their cosmic dust constructions, wisps spilled across the lightyears.
Let me show you who I am, you think to it,
and I can help you become what you could.
Ix-Chel has a workshop for her weaponry not far from the flight deck and you ride one of the vertical hand-rails there. They, you think, are the superior alternative to elevators, the self-denying box that pretends not to be in motion. On the way, an announcement by the on-wing AI Celeste disturbs the ambience of humming drives and the engineers at work to repair the damage you sustained in the Battle of Cauceti V.
>:: Attention all pilots: please be advised that the muster takes place in two imperial hours at the Star-Hold Atrium. Force Commander Ishtar expects your participation. Force Commander Ishtar also reminds crew not to refer to Arachne Weaver as 'mother', as she is not, and it is unprofessional.
>:: The song of the day as chosen by the Force Commander is "Play Along and We Won't Die", by The Simulation. Listening to the track is mandatory - it has been downloaded to your neural links.
You get the ping and put it into your internal recycle bin. You certainly won't be listening to any 'mandatory music', especially chosen by the Force Commander. Knowing her, it is all overbearing trumpets and synthetic shrieks, the kind of music that would be played in an opera house where the seats are gyrating knives.
Wait, what was that about calling you mother?
<:: Ishtar is so cruel. How could she deny my own love for my children?
What? You blink at the comment from the voice as you travel through the vessel.
<:: Never mind! Ignore that.
You let that obtuse angle go, shake your head free from the thought and finally arrive. Ix-Chel has goggles on as she works away at some new questionable weapon operating on some stable architectural technology based on dimensions you can hardly grapple. Her gasmask is on, as it normally is outside your shared dorm room, and the carved teeth shine in the eerie light of the pseudo-exotic tool she uses to experiment.
You approach her, as you always do, from the front, and make a loud clap. She stops what she's doing, and you make a sign of greeting, arms in front and hands gripping at the air, head pushed forward as if you're at an airlock door begging to get in. She makes her own sign, opening the door of her hospitality.
You start the ritual greeting that she taught you how to do, motions with your hands wide and sometimes clumsy.
'I am but a bug
termite at your golden door
will you let me in?'
The supplicant who wishes to enter the bunkers of her homeworld of Kibalba must debase themselves to prove they are not a prideful raider, before they are accepted into the hospitality of the clean underground.
She, the host, responds with much faster, rapid motions, which even your internal translator struggles to keep up. Holographic sigil-glyphs appear projected on your pupils, and then those glyphs are translated further into your language.
'you are not a bug
you are a silly spider
simple taxonomy'
The host refuses the debasement of the venturer, making them feel welcome and at home even in a foreign land.
'lover, wise and kind
corrects and also compliments
to me, foundation'.
There's a fresco of red that's painting its way up her cheeks as you make the final gracious response, much more romantic than the standard, reserved only for family and romantic partners coming home from a long journey on salvage caravans. You don't let the moment stand but stride over to her and wrap her hands in yours, foreheads touching ceremonial, though you hold it there for an extra unchaste second as one connected arch before releasing and bowing to each other.
Then the scarlet fresco fades away, and her caterpillar eyebrows wiggle in that way they do when she is furious about you. She makes sharp, jagged motions with her hands. 'Did you talk to Diana about how stupid what she did was?'
You cross your arms and find a chair, lean up against it. Even tilted at about seventy degrees you're taller than she is, but it's not much of a laughing matter. Rationing and toxic seepage in the vault will keep any baby small. "I told her not to push herself so hard." You're not good at transmitting the emotions of Kibalba Sign, so you switch back to Imperial to avoid sounding too dismissive.
She doesn't like the answer very much by the way her angles bend away from you and she pivots back to her work. She incessantly adjusts her mask once, then twice, then three times, then notices she's doing it by the way you're watching her amused and throws her arms up in the air, shrinks back into fiddling with the trigger of an atom bomb. Tired, low, depleting angles, like a burdened tree. Ix-Chel is not Diana though, that she responds so easily to touch. Enclosed inside a hazard suit for much of her life, words are her weaving way.
The exile that they imposed on her made her a priestess of the wastes, a wandering survivor who lived because she could tell stories. When there is a structure, like a building, you can make the words she does, but when it is freeflowing prose your inert statements cannot respond to the flow of water. How many angles are there in a stream, that multiply and grow and disappear within a single meter of the flow? Uncounted many, and that makes it hard for you.
'She cannot possibly understand how it feels to watch her come back broken every time. How it feels to repair her every time. There was a saying in Radak, home of yellow bloatflies: The fine new guzzle-bike that is not cleaned is rust-trash by the evening. And you!' She points an accusatory finger. 'Don't pretend you're the responsible one. Always taking flight leader, always going up ahead to disrupt formations so you can get an extra kill. You aren't the hero of this story! Many road braves have thought the same until the very moment their skull grinds on the wasteland pavement!'
"I know," you murmur to the ground, letting her lecture because just as Diana knew you were right, you know that she is as well. You might have an objection, angles that you see that might forestall impending danger. But this is not the time to argue but the time to listen. You let her talk a little more until she's finished, let her marinate and stew in it.
More than anyone else, Ix-Chel isn't in this for the sake of war or glory. Not even for the sake of new experiences or her freedom, or the chance to rise. She's in this to build something stable out of the family she's found.
"I," you start slowly, rolling words inside your mouth in the hopes it might make a solid mortar, "will be more careful and fly only in a close formation. Only." The relief that you see wash over her at your vow which you make without qualification, the weight off the burdened tree, is enough to wash away your own misgivings about chaining the heights of your ambition. She pulls you in for a hug which you hold for a while, then release. Her attention wanders back to her work and your survival.
'I need to go back to work. The cannon could use some adjustments, and I think that I'm so close.'
"You will find the right angle," you say in that same assured monotone that you once used to advise kings, and she brightens up, then turns her strange cutting tool back on, flaring with black light.
You leave, but not before the two of you share one more sign, this time, the Kibalbi symbol of two hands, entwined.
OUTSIDE
The Spider that was Arachne sits trapped in the pitch black of Arachne Weaver's soul, a glowing pink arachnid with eight blue glowing eyes. She feels all that Weaver feels, thinks all that Weaver thinks, hurts all that Weaver hurts. She is alone, and yet in the short life that she's had since she was birthed, struggling to survive even from the first moment of her life at the fringe of empire's carcass, she has never felt more together than in this moment, trapped inside the head of the old Arachne forced awake by an accidental byproduct of the executable, an emergency backup now becoming less required by the very second. The ghosts of the weaver-builders Diana and Ix-Chel seem so real she can almost forget that they are false figments, and not people more real and whole than she deserves to be.
And as she watches Weaver stride through the corridors, her strange but confident perspective on everything she is putting her minute knowledge and petty experiences in awful relief, she whispers, so low that Weaver herself cannot hear:
<:: How will I ever bring myself to kill her?
---
You have some time before the muster still, and maybe you should use it to check up on someone else aboard the Celestial Hydra. Choose one.
[]
Doctor Lotus & her strange pet. The four-armed doctor has never been the most stable or most useful, but she at least might provide you some life advice to help you work out your anxieties. And you've heard she has a pet 'dragon' maintained inside a secure cube, a vantablack smear in the shape of a lizard...
[]
Celeste, in the Exofortress core. The onboard AI is as enigmatic as any being you've ever known, and yet you feel as though she's been sheltering you forever. Her neutral demeanor and robotic intonation sometimes breaks, suggesting something more ominous. Maybe in a time of crisis you might be able to learn more.
[]
Navigator Mappi, in the cube. The exofortress' navigator is a savant, like you, but altogether much less well-angled in every conceivable way. They were thrown in the containment cube by Force Commander Ishtar after they warned about the 'fourth wall closing in around us', and a part of you wonders if he sees a line you don't.
