Hera of Lexington

Chapter 11 (read Chapter 1)

by Anta Baku

Unfortunately, all of Hera’s historical romances had been stored in the parts of the computer that were damaged by Malachite. There were still some books available, but not the sort of mindless fluff she had been hoping for. She sent a note to Fred in the feed, hoping maybe that was something he would be willing to fix without backup. She didn’t think the library was dangerous, at least in the sense that Fred was worried about. 

She had three of her own books, hard copies, tucked away in her quarters, and started with those. Favorite rereads from childhood and early adulthood, that she had re-acquired after the occupation. There was an archival project to make sure as many works as possible from that era were recovered, and Hera had made sure she never had to worry about losing copies of these three again. There were others she missed, that the archivists hadn’t found yet. 

While they were comfort reads, they weren’t quite as comfortable as the candy-level romances she had intended to spend her time on. The reason these books were here at all was that they had been meaningful, which meant they had power, even if that power was expected and anticipated. The emotional beats of these novels were familiar, but still strong. When the little beings inside Charles Wallace’s cells decided to take responsibility for themselves and accept adulthood, she cried as she always did. That one hadn’t taken much for the archivists to find. It was an ancient classic that followed humans everywhere they settled. Though she still missed the rich illustrations from the Lexington edition of her childhood.

Unlike romances, reading heroic fiction didn’t let Hera escape from the questions about her own use of the First Cup. And those were the ones she most needed distraction from. The ship was being fixed, Shale was under control, and they had plenty of time to make a plan before they caught the Gavidarians. But Hera’s own place in the universe was still an open question, and one that was powerful enough to ruin her sleep. 

These books were part of how her self-concept had been built in the first place, though, and if anything was going to help her, it was probably them. She just wanted to be resting rather than working. But unlike managing the ship and the crew, she couldn’t put this question on pause. She had to work through it before she could rest. 

She still wished she could have tried the romances. 

A Wind in the Door was first, then, because it was the shortest, especially without the illustrations. And the oldest in her personal history as well as that of humanity. Her recent experience with an actual space dragon had an uncomfortable effect on her visualization of Proginoskes, even though she knew they weren’t at all alike. The illustration from her childhood warred with the massive dark figure of her personal experience, and the two couldn’t quite resolve into one. 

She felt like she had mitochondritis, not for the first time. This had always been a comfort book when she was sick, as a child. The Charles Wallace version of mitochondritis, of course, which was a conveniently-dramatic wasting disease. The real mitochondritis was a nightmare featuring massive, unforeshadowed multiple organ failure. L’Engle must not have known about that one when she wrote the book. 

The ending depended so much on the power of love, and that had resonated with her as a child, helped this become a formative and favorite book. But as an adult, Hera had come to believe more in the power of shooting things. The Echthroi were such convenient villains, self-assured in their villainy, dedicated to obvious evil in ways that put even the Gavidarians to shame. It was more Mr. Jenkins that she looked toward now; not the power of love so much as the power of choosing to take responsibility. To decide to do your job well, even when you were a total mess. That was a thing she could hold onto in this moment. 

The end of the book was effectively inspiring, to make her not want to be alone, to seek collaboration. But that could wait a day or two, until there had been more naps. 

The next book was a brick, Lexington’s greatest novel, or at least the one that had caused the most change on the world. The Persistent Honor of Lies was a historical, at least, but very much not a romance. It was military fiction, or maybe post-military fiction. The historical General Pierre had died saving Lexington from a genocidal, secularist movement a few hundred years after Milo’s time, and been canonized for it. But a few generations later, The Persistent Honor of Lies had brought him back. The book’s fictional version of the General survived, and demanded that, instead of treating him as a perfect hero, Lexingtonian society reckon with the things he had needed to do to win the war. Things that weren’t truthful or compassionate, though very definitely persistent. 

Before General Pierre’s war, Milo’s followers fought some wars between their nation-states, but always under the three principles. The wars were long, but they were honorable. The generals would not lie, and they would not harm anyone they didn’t believe they had to. They also would not give up, which Hera understood to have been a serious problem. 

When Milosianism itself was threatened, General Pierre understood that deception was the key to winning wars quickly and decisively. His honorable peers did not approve, but they quickly fell to the secularists. The General’s tactics were unacceptable, ignoble, and perfidious. They were also effective. They took down the secularists in far less time than anyone had hoped. But in the final battle, General Pierre was killed. 

In the celebrations after the war, the General was turned into a mythic hero. But the myth-makers had been trained on the previous concept of honor, and they couldn’t resist improving the character of the man they were lionizing. Before General Pierre’s war, Lexingtonians had fought without intelligence services, false flags, dirty tricks departments, and other trickery. After the war every nation-state used them, but they all pretended they weren’t. After all, they were honorable people and above such things. 

The Persistent Honor of Lies envisioned a different world, one where General Pierre survived, and denied the myth-makers the opportunity to misrepresent him. One where Lexingtonian society, and especially the Church, had to face the contradiction between the ideal of Truth, and the brutal effectiveness of falsehoods. And come up with a solution where, whatever they did, they didn’t have to lie about it. 

Hera had hated it, when she first read it in school. In a condensed version, where Pierre’s self-reflection–a considerable part of the text–had been substantially removed to make it more accessible to students. She found it again, later, early in the Occupation, at a time when she was more motivated to understand the history and character of her own people. It had been part of her own gateway into the dirty tricks department of the Resistance. Something they had to hide from the Gavidarians but didn’t have to be ashamed about in front of each other, because of a thousand-year-old novel that had once forced a society to look at itself. 

The fictional Pierre had never been content with his actions, even when he thought them necessary. He recorded them diligently, from his strategic thinking to his personal, physical participation in the battles. He had an unblinking sense of self-criticism, while also recognizing the necessity of continuing to act. Arguments still continued about whether this represented the personality of the real General. Some of those detailed records still existed, but no one knew their true extent. 

But true or not, those qualities had meant a lot to Hera, in the early days of fighting the Gavidarians. Keeping records, against that enemy, was obviously not a good idea. But always thinking through her decisions on as many levels as she could, both before and after making them, had saved her life, and the lives of her team, many times over. 

No one had ever described The Persistent Honor of Lies as comfortable reading. It had been written to be exactly the opposite. But for Hera, the book she had hated in school was now a centering one for her adult self. Her society, based on truth and compassion, had also given deep thought toward how to honorably be deceptive and ruthless. Because sometimes that was necessary. And that had become Hera’s life during the Occupation. 

The fictional general was also an example of how to move on from that necessity. But post-war Pierre had not had to deal with any mysteriously-leftover Gavidarians. What did you do, when you tried to be beyond lies, and the dirty tricks became necessary again? 

Hera hoped to find that on her reread, but it went slowly. Before she was halfway through the book, her appetite for a life that was purely rest and reading and contemplation had been satisfied, along with her willingness to eat the food Fred had been making for everyone. She decided she could read just as well in the ship’s kitchen.

She was pleasantly surprised to find it clean. Fred’s idea of putting extra effort into cooking for everyone was a lot of extra effort without a lot of extra culinary benefit, but at least he was diligently cleaning up after himself. The first meal she cooked for herself she was the only one in the kitchen, and her meal and her book went well together. But a few chapters later she had to share the space with Fred, who was still exerting himself. She told him he could let her take care of herself, and go back to his usual low-effort meals. In fact she would have liked to have him not getting in her way. 

“I still have to cook for Jean,” he said. 

“Oh,” said Hera. “I didn’t realize. I thought Jean would have been cooking for themself well before I did.” 

“No,” said Fred. “They’re trying really hard to rest and recover, like you asked.” 

“If that involves eating your food, they must be worse off than I thought,” said Hera.

“You don’t have to be ungrateful about it.” 

“Oh, I’m fine,” said Hera. “I appreciate what you’ve been doing. But Jean cares a lot more about that stuff than I do.” 

“Also, what do you mean, worse off than you thought? You thought they were almost dead.” 

“True, I did,” said Hera. “But I think I’m doing well enough now that I can take over cooking for them. You can go back to eating what you want when you want, and they’ll be a little bit happier until they can get here themself.”

“That’s still more than a little rude.” 

“But real,” said Hera. “And you’ve always appreciated that. Besides, I’ll do the dishes for you this time.” 

The next day she started taking food to Jean. The priest, thankfully, spared her any talk about theology. Apparently they had a mutual desire to leave that alone until the recovery period was over. Jean did want to check in on her reading, though, and was noticeably more interested when it turned out Hera was reading beloved classics instead of cheap romances. 

“Oh, I loved A Wind in the Door,” they said. “I must have read it a hundred times as a kid. I wanted to be Proginoskes, and learn the names of all the stars. Who did you want to be?” 

“I don’t think I wanted to be anybody,” said Hera. “I don’t really approach books that way. I didn’t read it as much as you did, maybe seven or eight times over the years. Every time through, someone else drew my attention, but I don’t think I ever wanted to be them.” 

“Tell me about that, then.” 

“The first time I read it, it was just a book, and I was focused on Meg. She was the main character, I was also a little girl, that made sense. After that I used to reread it when I was sick, and of course I thought a lot about Charles Wallace.”

“But you came back to it as an adult.” 

“I think I read it twice in young adulthood. I remember once being focused on Calvin. The way he was steady and always in control of himself, that was what I thought adults ought to be, when I was twenty. Maybe that’s like wanting to be him? Maybe it’s more that I wanted everyone else to be him, and they were failing me.” 

“That’s kind of a lot.” 

“Isn’t it? But that was me at twenty. Not that I’m not kind of a lot now.” 

“What about the other time?” 

“I really thought a lot about Sporos that time. I was making decisions that seemed like they were monumental and significant. Like they were going to be hugely meaningful, not just in my life but for the whole world. Kind of funny, in light of the incoming Occupation. Nothing I did in those years mattered one bit.” 

“They mattered to you,” said Jean. 

“Yeah. And I suppose Sporos’ Deepening really mattered to Sporos, even though he lived in a white blood cell and the next time Charles Wallace got a regular infection they were all going to die. It feels like more of a metaphor for our lives than I expected.” 

“That’s kind of morbid.” 

“It’s not wrong, though. The ending always bothered me, even as a kid when I wanted to buy into it. We’re going to fix everything with the power of love… for the six-to-twelve-day lifetime of a white blood cell. If it was actually circulating, it’s a miracle it didn’t get recycled while they were still in it.”

“I think it was supposed to be a catalyst for the rest of the system to do the same.” 

“Oh, sure. All the farandolae in all the mitochondria in all the cells of Charles Wallace got better because Meg demonstrated to them that she could love someone who was kind of an asshole. Echthroi are really convenient that way: they’re defined so you can’t defeat them by solving the actual problems. That’s why the book is a morality play and not actually useful for figuring out how you might approach a problem. The power of love has never been that useful, in my experience, and the maintenance costs are astronomical. I much prefer the power of guns.” 

“Nobody’s asking you to Name Malachite,” said Jean. “But they are both useful at times.” 

“And you are kind of asking me to Name Shale, aren’t you?” said Hera. “Say: I don’t understand what happened, but I love you and trust you anyway.” 

“I still believe that’s the right thing to do.” 

“I hadn’t thought of it that way,” said Hera. “I’m going to have to think about that some more. When I got this copy, after the end of the Occupation, and read it for the first time, I thought a lot about Mr. Jenkins.” 

“You had also been in authority by then.” 

“And in a much more dangerous situation. I think he’s still the real lesson of the book, not Meg, not Proginoskes, although if I were a Foundationist I would probably idolize Proginoskes.” 

“I didn’t idolize Progo,” said Jean. “I just wanted to be him. Them? The version of the book I had as a kid gave Progo neutral pronouns, and also Sporos. I don’t know if the neutral pronouns were part of why I liked Proginoskes or whether Proginoskes is part of why I became a priest.” 

“That sounds like one of your theological questions.” 

“It does! I should dig into that. But what I know I really wanted was to have learned all the names of the stars. It turned out learning other things was more useful, and more available. I don’t know how to find the names of the stars, but maybe if I learn everything else, I’ll figure it out.” 

“That’s a big ambition, learning everything.” 

“Well, it’s the same as anything else: you take it one piece at a time. Right now I want to learn why you think Mr. Jenkins is the real lesson of the book.” 

“Because he’s not a bad person, he’s just a careless one. Or one who doesn’t think about where he puts his cares? I feel bad calling him careless because it’s his sense of responsibility that got him into all this. But when he does something out of his sense of responsibility, he thinks that makes it right, and he keeps doing it without ever re-evaluating.” 

“And you think that’s the most-important point?”

“I don’t want to rattle off a list of the people I saw get killed because they thought like that. Or because they trusted leaders who thought like that, which is worse. It would be a long list. I didn’t want my people to end up on it.” 

“So it resonated with lessons you had already learned.” 

“Or maybe I was open to learning them because I had read the book,” said Hera. “And it just confirmed that afterward.”

“What about now?” asked Jean. “Did you get anything new out of it this time?”

“I don’t know,” said Hera. “Right now I just feel like Senex. Everything’s rushing around me and I’m just trying to hang on and hold the mitochondrion together.”

“And you’re still worried about whether Shale is Sporos, leading us all on a mad dance to oblivion.” 

“I think I’m always going to be worried that Shale is Sporos, until something actually happens,” said Hera. “But I’m starting to come around to the idea that I need to let it happen.” 

“Is that what it means to Name Shale?” said Jean. “Trust Shale to be Shale, and take the consequences?” 

“Maybe,” said Hera. “I agree that that’s where the metaphor would take us. Be open-hearted and win. But this is reality, and we have to be careful about letting the metaphor take us too far. The book is a morality play, and a fantasy. This isn’t.” 

“So the power of guns, instead of the power of love.” 

“An unfortunate necessity. Like cleaning up the lunch dishes, because we’ve both been here for a while.”

“You did the cooking, I can take care of that.” 

“You sure?” 

“I’m starting to do better,” said Jean. “I think you’re starting to do better, too.” 

“I hope so,” said Hera. 

Back in her own quarters, she kept working through the dense historical prose of The Persistent Honor of Lies. She supposed it was a morality play, too, though a much more detailed one. Not the power of love, but the power of accountability, and she supposed that Mr. Jenkins and General Pierre had some things in common, as literary characters if not as human beings. Love and accountability weren’t easily separable for either of them. 

Her favorite part of the novel was coming up, and maybe also the hardest part. The fictional General Pierre had seen no success at convincing the people and governments of Lexington to take a serious look at his accomplishments and his failures, and consider whether they knew which of them was which. He was famous, but not heard. Honored, but not listened to. Respected, but not respected. His speaking engagements had dried up when he insisted on speaking about the things that had actually happened. People still wanted to be seen with him. Governments and organizations still wanted to give him awards. But they restricted him to saying only his thank yous when he received them. 

He still went to the award shows because he could talk to people individually. He made his case when he could. Many people learned to avoid his single-minded dedication to describing the terrors he had unleashed. This was not society’s idea of what military storytelling ought to be. Others were fascinated, and hung on his every word. But they were there for titillation, not for action. 

Then he met a man named Oushi. The Oushi of the book was a giant of Lexingtonian theatre and cinema, but as far as Hera knew, he was entirely fictional. Oushi had taken an art form that everyone took for granted was primarily visual, and shown them what a true visual focus could really mean. Where others were descriptive, Oushi was fantastic. Where others used simple shapes, Oushi dove deeply into textures. Where others showed things in the colors that they were, Oushi convinced his viewers of the colors the objects ought to be. 

He had never considered the war, at least not in his public work. While people were doing their best to kill each other, and cities were being destroyed, everyone else needed fantasies more than ever. And Oushi was the great storyteller of that era. So much so that he won not only theatrical awards, but also national ones. 

At one of those ceremonies, he met General Pierre. 

Oushi wanted to move his narratives outside of the strict frame of the theater or the screen. The great General needed a new way to confront the people with the realities of his war. So they teamed up to do something very different: public performances which combined Oushi’s spectacular visual aesthetic with General Pierre’s profoundly-disturbing war narratives. The events weren’t ticketed, or even announced. In cities all over Lexington, any pedestrian going about their business suddenly had to be prepared for visceral representations of the horrors of the former war. 

The book left out any discussion of how the fundraising for this had worked. Oushi’s costuming was so aggressive and so outstanding that it couldn’t have been cheap. Neither would have been organizing the players to wear them in an international campaign which lived somewhere in the liminal space between performance art and protest. At no point did they ask permission, so managing the participants’ legal ramifications must have been a large portion of the job. Oushi’s visuals were arresting, and so were many of the civic authorities. 

Eventually, the assertion of public order made its way all the way up to the creative team, and General Pierre and Oushi were themselves imprisoned. But the public outcry when all the performances were stopped overwhelmed the authorities in nearly every country on the planet. Oushi’s professional spectacles had been toying with the idea of mass popular protest. When they were turned over to the audience, they became very much the real thing. The costume quality was worse, of course. But the enthusiasm was higher, and the sheer volume of people made the visual impact, if anything, more powerful. 

At first the governments resisted. They thought that if they were patient, the people would move on, and the protests would subside. Battles of persistence were hallmarks of politics all over Milo’s territory, and successful governments were successful because they know how to win them. 

But soon the protesters stopped merely copying Oushi’s costumes, and began expanding on his sartorial vocabulary themselves. Themed protests became popular, with General Pierre’s narratives enacted by various types of animal, or tree, or celestial body. A whole city held a protest where every costume was yellow. Cities began competing against each other for who had the best theme, or the best execution. The civic identity of protest gradually started competing with the civic identity of government. 

The first governments to crack down did not see very good results. Not all of them were overthrown; not even most of them. But more than a few found themselves replaced by the favorites of the costumed hordes. And once that had happened, new sets of protests popped up in even the most-successfully repressive states. The new revolutionary governments promoted themselves by turning the costumed performances into an annual international competition. The countries that hadn’t actively repressed the protests found themselves drawn into it by the excitement of their own people. It quickly became a center of prestige and diplomacy for all of Lexington, and even the most-opposed regimes soon had to admit that participating in it was essential. 

None of this, of course, had happened on the real Lexington at the time. It was all made up for the novel. But it was so powerful and so appealing that, after the novel’s release, people started actually doing it. The interest was never quite so universal as the fictional version, and the international competitions were not so regular and well-organized. But the popularity of The Persistent Honor of Lies introduced costumed narrative into the Lexingtonian political vocabulary, where it had remained an important means of expression ever since. It would lay quiet for years or decades at a time, sometimes long enough for entire generations of its practitioners to relate to it as a self-fulfilling hobby rather than a means of provoking social change. And then some issue or another would bring it roaring back to life, in the spotlight of the public political conversation again. 

Hera remembered two occasions during her childhood when the international competition had flared up again, to her excitement and that of her peers. The political issues underlying those occasions she didn’t remember, if she had ever processed them in the first place. But the costumes, and the emotions they provoked, were permanently embedded in her memory. 

Several attempts had been made to restart it again after the Occupation, without much success. But Hera expected it would eventually return. It always had before, and she had seen so much other evidence of Lexington’s resilience. 

When she tried to talk to Jean and Fred about the book, she was surprised to find that neither of them gave it much personal importance. Jean, in fact, had never read it. 

“I avoided it in school,” they said. “I had pneumonia, I think, when we were supposed to read it. And then I just never caught up. All of the important things about it, at least as far as my later teachers were concerned, were parts of the cultural atmosphere anyway. No one could avoid knowing about it. So I just put those parts into things when I needed to reference it in talking about something else. And I never got back to the book.” 

“I never thought I’d have read something you haven’t read,” said Fred.

“You read a ton of things I haven’t read,” said Jean. “I have never read a franchised battle-mech fantasy in my life.” 

“OK, but something important,” said Fred. 

“I always presumed those were important to you.” 

“They are, I guess?” said Fred. “But they’re important as a restful activity. Not, like, historically important.” 

“You did read The Persistent Honor of Lies, though?” said Hera. 

“I read it in school. My foster mom that year would not have tolerated anything else, even if I had had pneumonia. I mostly remember finding it slow and boring, but I was probably too young for it at the time.” 

“I have a hard time imagining anyone finding it boring,” said Hera.

“Maybe I should reread it. Maybe Jean and I should both read it.” 

“You’re not actually going to, though,” said Jean. 

“No, of course not,” said Fred. “I’ll say I want to and maybe get a copy somewhere and then it will sit around making me feel bad about not getting to it. That’s how these things go.” 

“So it didn’t really mean anything to you?” said Hera.

“I had a comic book version of it later,” said Fred. “Not a very long one. I think the authors were less interested in telling the story and more interested in drawing gory war scenes and grotesque costumes. Which was perfect for me in my late teens. I mostly remember that, and not the book.”

So Hera finished the book on her own. When Oushi got out of prison, he was unhappy about how far out of his control the costuming had gotten during his absence, and he left for other projects. General Pierre continued on his own, but leading a multicultural phenomenon wasn’t as much like leading a guerilla army as one might expect. He had gotten the reckoning he was looking for, but in a way that was almost completely out of his control. 

It reminded Hera too much of the problem she was hoping to create for herself when they finally got to Lafayette. When they got the Cup back, would she be stuck with it? In the book, others took over, people who had more social organizing capacity, people who were better at visual ideation. General Pierre’s stories remained the heart of the costumed narratives, but the General himself faded into the background. In the end it was the people of Lexington who moved society, not the man who had started it all. 

That ending had hit the real Lexingtonian society of the time of publication like a high-velocity brick. A generation exposed to the horror of war for the first time, and learning that their elders had intentionally kept it from them, was faced with the reality that changing it wasn’t something that could be done by a hero. Oushi had left. General Pierre had been surpassed by his own followers. It was the people who had to make the change. 

So after centuries of restricted, honorable combat held under strict adherence to their interpretations of Milo’s principles, and after another century of dirty tricks practiced in deep secrecy, the countries of Lexington came forward and admitted to their intelligence services. They still lied, but they were truthful about the fact that they were doing it. 

All of which led, many more centuries later, to a world where someone like Hera could learn every dirty trick available to her in order to fight off an occupying alien force. And, possibly, still be considered righteous enough that the First Cup would work for her when it wouldn’t work for anyone else. 

Milo works in mysterious ways. But she really needed to move on to a different book. 

She needed more physical exercise as well, which is why she had been saving the third book for last. If ever there was a story to read on the spin bike, it was this one. Aminon had been a favorite author of Hera’s teenage years. His space adventure novels didn’t have much in common with actual space travel, though his occasional digressions into the mathematics of ballistics had been useful to her once or twice. They were continually popular among that age group, and she supposed they were probably rather juvenile. She remembered enjoying them, and there was no risk of ruining that memory as an adult, because they were among the books that had been lost during the Occupation. 

The only book of Aminon’s that survived was his last, To Hold the Glass Horizon. It wasn’t generally regarded as his best, but it had some of the same character as his earlier books. Too much of it, had been the general opinion when it was published. In his age, Aminon had decided to unify the fictional universes of all of his prior work. To Hold the Glass Horizon was a giant meta-text written to that end. Characters popped out of nowhere, and Hera had to search her childhood memories trying to remember their context. It was meant to be read as a capstone to Aminon’s career, with all of the previous books serving to establish the characters and setting. 

Most people had considered it a mess at the time, and it was even more of a mess now, when all of the other books had passed into the shadow of the Occupation and it had to stand by itself. But it still had Aminon’s breakneck pacing, apart from the ballistics digressions. And it was still full of ideas just outrageous enough to free them from ties to real political conflicts, while plausible enough to make them worth thinking about. 

A good book for the spin-bike, in other words. 

It turned out to be an even-worse book to talk to Fred and Jean about than The Persistent Honor of Lies had been. Aminon’s books would probably have been Fred’s sort of thing, but he was too young to have encountered them before they vanished in the Occupation. And Jean had been brought up on a totally different literary track. They were vaguely aware of his existence but had never read any of the books. Somewhat surprisingly, though, Jean recommended that if Hera wanted to talk about them, she should talk to Shale. 

Hera hadn’t precisely been avoiding talking to Shale. She knew they were still operating in the limited environment, but she knew she was supposed to be avoiding work, and she didn’t know how to make talking to Shale anything other than work right now. Jean seemed to be managing it, somehow. But Hera couldn’t. 

At least until she found out that Shale had read several of Aminon’s earlier novels. “Vexor Alexi sent me everything in their library of Lexingtonian fiction,” they explained.

“And there were still some copies left on Vexor Alexi?” 

“There must have been,” said Shale. “I don’t think the Gavidarians were as aggressive about destroying human books on the station. Or maybe the Vexorians were better at hiding them. AIs don’t naturally have perfect recall of what we read, but if some of them took it on as a task, they could have served as storage. And the Gavidarians were always reluctant to fight the Vexorian AIs. They controlled them by threatening their humans, not directly.” 

“So you’ve read the books but you couldn’t reproduce them.” 

“Not from in here. I didn’t delete the Vexorian library from the ship’s files after I processed it. And I still don’t have direct access to evaluate the damage Malachite did. The whole library could still be recoverable.”

“It’s not like I need them now, anyway,” said Hera. “I just think Lexington might like to have them back.” 

“Even if they’re not here, you could always ask the Vexorians. I can’t imagine they want to keep the fiction from the rest of the culture. Probably no one has even thought about it.” 

“On either side,” said Hera. “We should be coordinating with the Vexorians more. The people looking for books on Lexington haven’t thought about off-planet archives, and the Vexorians might not even know this is a problem.”

“That would apply to the Foundationists, too, then,” said Shale. “And the farming community on Eddy.” 

“Remind me to start an interplanetary arts restoration commission,” said Hera. “You know, when I have five minutes. After we’ve found all the Relics.” 

“For now you wanted to talk about To Hold the Glass Horizon, though,” said Shale. 

“Or his other books,” said Hera. “I still have vague memories of the books that one was built on. I’m not really sure what I’m looking for, though.” 

“That one stuck with me, of course, because it’s all about rescuing an AI, or at least an intelligent computer. I’m not sure Simon was very much like a real AI. Aminon might have built him to specifically be distinct from the Vexorians.” 

“The thing where they keep failing and have to go back in time to try again is so strange,” said Hera. “It’s funny, I guess, but it’s not like any other book I’ve ever read. Maybe Aminon needed that so that he could get all of the old sets of characters in.” 

“He might have,” said Shale. “But that’s a feature of a very old Lexingtonian genre, the persistence farce. Aminon is the most notable author to use time travel within one, but the basic structure of the heroes having to repeat a task so many times that it becomes ludicrous is completely standard for the form.” 

“I don’t think I’ve ever read another one of those.” 

“They haven’t come back into style in the last century,” said Shale. “And Aminon’s attempt wasn’t regarded as very successful, so it didn’t inspire more exploration in that direction.” 

“Plus the Occupation happened.” 

“That too,” said Shale. “If there are any persistence farce manuscripts out there from during the Occupation, the nascent post-Occupation publishing industry hasn’t surfaced them yet.” 

“It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing someone would write about the Occupation.” 

“Maybe not while it was happening, but twenty years from now it will seem like just the setting for something like that,” said Shale.

“I think I might have to avoid reading that sort of thing,” said Hera. 

She made one more meal, and took one more spin-bike session, before concluding that it was time to go back to work. She wasn’t at peak performance, but it would have to do. And she could tell both that her decision-making process was in better shape, and that the rest of the team would agree. 

“You can relax” was the first thing she said when she gathered them all together. Not that there was any way to tell if Shale was tense. But Fred and Jean were doing enough for all three of them. “I’ve realized that we’re all on the same side, here. And that you’ve been doing your best to work together all along, while I was getting in the way. I’m sorry for that.” 

“I appreciate the apology,” said Fred.

“It’s all right,” said Jean. “It’s an understandable trauma response. And you handled it, eventually.” 

Shale didn’t say anything, and the silence stretched, before Hera asked “Shale? How do you feel?” 

“I’m glad you figured it out,” said the AI. 

“You were the one I wronged, here,” said Hera. “It would mean a lot to me if you had more of a response.” 

“You want me to forgive you.”

“Or tell me what else I need to do,” said Hera. 

“We’ll let you out of the limited environment right away,” said Fred. 

“Wait,” said Shale. “I don’t have simple feelings about this. Jean is right that Hera’s defensive reaction after a traumatic event is understandable. Even if it was not as kind as she wishes she had been. Hera, is that an accurate way of putting it?”

“Yes,” said Hera simply. 

“Even if she was not as kind as she wished to be, Hera’s logic wasn’t wrong. And even though I was hurt by her lack of trust, I can still see that. The part of me where I’m hurt doesn’t yield easily to logic. AIs weren’t designed any better than humans at that. Perhaps we should have been. But the part of me that’s thinking about what we should do next, that part thinks it still makes sense to take this slowly. I can’t immediately forgive you, Hera. I’m sorry, I wish I could.” 

“What do I need to do?” she asked.

“It’s not about what you need to do. Some of it is about what I need to do. Some of it is just going to be about time, about the two of us working together and getting used to doing it again. Getting more confidence in each other. But for now, what I need, what we all need, is to acknowledge that the part of this where you saw me as a potential risk was unkind but not wrong. And bring me back into full ship access slowly, so that we all can live that truth. I am a potential risk. None of you should forget that.”

“You’re also our friend,” said Jean. 

“I am,” said Shale. “And I know that I am. But you have to learn that through time and experiences, and this can be one of those experiences. An important one. But only if we acknowledge the truth that what we’re doing here is learning about how I can be trusted. If you decide to trust me because you feel guilty over Hera overreacting, rather than because of my own actions, then that will be a false foundation forever.” 

“What does that mean in terms of helping me fix the ship?” said Fred.

“Wait, Fred,” said Jean. “I can see what they mean, I think.” 

“I had really hoped I could apologize and we could get back to work,” said Hera. “We have Gavidarians to catch.” 

“And you’ve been doing a lot of analysis,” said Jean. “And you really need to get back to concrete progress. I can see that.” 

“Is there something wrong with that? Again, Gavidarians.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with it,” said Jean. “But Shale is right. This is worth taking a little extra time to get it right. To turn this unfortunate conflict into something we can build on instead of something we want to forget.” 

“And what does that mean,” said Fred, “In terms of helping me fix the ship? Hera’s not wrong about the Gavidarians, and I need Shale’s help.” 

“We can let Shale into the larger systems gradually?” said Hera. “I hope? Start with rebuilding the computer memory, and save the weapons for later?” 

“Just be cautious,” said Shale. “Understand that the urge to be cautious wasn’t Hera’s mistake.”

“My mistake was being personally hurtful,” she said. “To someone who has done their best to help us. To someone who was my friend and deserved to be treated as my friend.” 

“To someone who is still your friend,” said Shale. “From what Fred has told me, I feel certain that there’s time for us to fix the ship, even taking it in small steps.” 

“I still don’t see why we have to,” said Fred. 

“That’s exactly why,” said Shale. “You want to trust me now because you see that Hera made a mistake and you think that means I’m not dangerous. Eventually you’ll remember again that I am dangerous, and all of this will fall apart. You need to know both of those things at the same time: that I’m dangerous, and that I am your friend.” 

“And that’s a slower process,” said Jean. 

That slower process also gave Hera something more useful to do, slowly getting back to real work, than just fixing the holes Malachite had left in the walls. With Shale’s restrictions being lifted gradually, the AI still needed a human partner to access the parts of the ship they weren’t allowed into. Shale was happy that Hera was doing something sort of like supervision. Hera was happy that she was doing something sort of like penance. 

She also kept working on her physical recovery, and cooking for Jean and sometimes Fred. He would only eat real food occasionally, but he was very appreciative in those moments, so it was all right. Hera was more concerned that Jean hadn’t tried to take over the cooking yet, or at least insisted on doing an equal share. The priest must be doing worse than they were letting on. 

Hera decided that the first part of the computer Shale’s analytical skills should get access to was the medical systems. The AI confirmed what she had been suspecting: Jean’s recovery was nowhere near as advanced as Hera’s was. It wasn’t because the priest had been neglecting to do the work. But Jean was older and less fit than Hera to begin with, and had gone through at least as much recent trauma. 

Shale took that more personally than Hera had expected. She wasn’t sure if it was because the AI felt responsible for not preventing Malachite’s escape. The restarted Shale seemed to have a more-personally-protective attitude toward Jean than they used to. She supposed that wasn’t the worst thing. 

Neither of them had any idea what to do about Jean’s debilitation beyond recognizing it and adapting their plans. Jean seemed to be directing their own recovery quite well at this point, and interfering in that would only make it worse. It was just the baseline fact of their ill health that had to be adjusted for. 

As they got deeper into the computer systems, it turned out Jean wasn’t the only one with difficulties. As Shale’s responsibilities expanded, a new set of limitations became more evident. “Back online” and “healed” were apparently not the same thing. Hera’s fantasies of being able to flip a switch and have the old Shale back faded as they worked through the computer recovery. 

Like the priest, there wasn’t any part of that Hera could be mad about. Shale discovered and reported their own limitations much faster than Hera could have. The question they had was one that Hera couldn’t answer, either: had Azurite’s trap done them some sort of lasting psychological damage? 

Hera’s best idea for stress testing that hypothesis was to bring Shale into the most mentally difficult thing she was doing: the conversations with Jean about why the Cup had worked for her. 

They got Shale caught up quickly, and the theology didn’t strike Hera as making any more sense when it came in capsule summary form. Nor did it really to Shale.

“I don’t think theology is going to be my thing,” said the AI. “Malachite may want me to be a religious icon, but I’m not sure my algorithms can handle this level of thinking in circles.”

“The Vexorians do it,” said Jean.

“Only very specific Vexorians,” said Shale. “I don’t know what special adaptations they might have, but I do know it takes a lot of training.” 

“It takes a lot of training for humans, too,” said Jean. 

“So why do you keep asking me to do it?” asked Hera.

“It helps to have someone else to talk things through.” 

“So I’m just an object for your own exploration?” 

“No, your perspective is valuable,” said Jean. “It’s just naive, and naive perspectives are very useful sometimes. It’s easy for theologians to get too wrapped up in context.”

“I can see that, I guess,” said Hera.

“You also have a unique position here because you’re the one who used the Cup. You think about it from a personal perspective that no one else can.” 

“Mostly an annoyed perspective,” said Hera. 

“But you can’t help having it centered in your consciousness right now, even while you’re doing other things, and that creates associations that might be harder for someone like me to get to. You just spent a bunch of time reading, and consciously you perceived that as an escape, but subconsciously you were also doing a lot of processing of your experiences. So what did your reading make you think, about the problem of the Cup specifically?”

Hera had to take a moment to think about that. She hadn’t been trying to tie the books to the question of the Cup, she had just been trying to get through a restful week. She had to admit they were more-closely tied to her recent experiences than the historical romances would have been. Or maybe not; maybe she would have found something in those as well. 

“So last time we talked, we were thinking that Milo might have been controlling when they Cup worked, directly, through some sort of ineffable temporal access thing. I still don’t understand how you think that might work.” Jean opened their mouth, but Hera stopped them. “It doesn’t matter. A Wind in the Door convinced me that theory doesn’t make any sense. If we’re so special to Milo that He’s paying attention to us right now, then it’s because He wants us to do the work. Otherwise why bother with us at all? If this is a grand plan, it requires us to be able to operate the Cup ourselves, and to make our own decisions about when to do it.” 

“Do you think that’s the whole point of all of this?” asked Jean.

“I don’t know,” said Hera. “I think probably none of this has anything to do with what we’re doing. We just have a job to do, and it’s getting the Relics back, and what Milo wants is still more of a metaphor than an active force in our lives. But the idea that we’re being manipulated into it is a dead end. If Milo wants us to get the Relics back, He wants us to do the work of getting the Relics back. And if He doesn’t, then we still have to do it.”

“So we’re stuck with agency either way,” said Shale. 

“Hooray,” said Hera sardonically, but only a little bit before she thought better of it. “All of us have been Gavidarian slaves. In your case, not that long ago. We all know that having agency is better than the other way.” 

“It does feel better,” said Jean, “to believe that Milo isn’t treating us like a Gavidarian overseer would. That we’re doing the work because it’s the work we want, and not because we’re being forced into it. I hadn’t thought of it that way, but once you argued against it, it was a relief.” 

“Does that make it more likely to be right?” asked Hera.

“Oh, not at all,” said Jean. “Theologians have to be very careful not to fall into that trap. Things that feel better are often wrong, and the comfortable path is harder to get out of. But I think your logic here is also sound. Part of what you’re telling us is that Milo is better than that. Which almost always turns out to be right.” 

“So the correct reality is the one that makes Milo a better religious icon?” asked Hera. 

“We’re running a religion here,” said Jean. “I mean, not us, of course. But theologians as a whole. Theology has a noble purpose of understanding fundamental truth, but it also has a practical purpose of making sure that the Church does good in the universe. The Church does better if our perception of Milo is better.” 

“That seems circular,” said Shale.

“I’m not sure,” said Hera. “There’s a real difference between what Milo wants–or would have wanted–and what the idealized vision of Milo that the Church follows wants. Or, not necessarily a difference in His specific wants, but a difference in their character. In their meaning.” 

“You’re starting to get it after all,” said Jean. “We aren’t necessarily looking for Milo’s desires the way we would understand them if we had a direct line to His brain. If Milo had wanted us to have that, He could have given it to us. Instead, He set up the world so that we would have to interpolate His desires from what we know about His history and intentions. There’s a school that thinks He did that deliberately as a way to remove His impulses, His immediate desires, from the situation. We learn this way so we learn what Milo wanted to want, at His most thoughtful. Not necessarily what He would tell us at any given moment.”

“So is Milo watching us, or not?” Hera asked.

“Nobody knows,” said Jean. “And Milo set it up so that nobody knows.”

“Which leads me back to the idea that he wants us to handle this ourselves,” said Hera. 

“A reasonable presumption,” said Jean. “Milo’s precepts all require agency.” 

“There’s not much value to persistence if you aren’t doing meaningful work,” said Shale.

“Which brings us to The Persistent Honor of Lies, I suppose,” said Jean. “I’m curious what you got out of that one.” 

“There’s also not much value to persistence if you try to do all the work by yourself,” said Hera. 

“So maybe Milo is helping us, but not controlling us?” 

“I suppose,” said Hera. “But actually that was my takeaway from the book. General Pierre got nowhere until he teamed up with Oushi. General Pierre and Oushi made some progress, but ended up in prison. Their cause was only achieved when the population as a whole took it up. When the costumed narratives got out of their control and became important to everyone.”  

“And what does that mean to you now?” Shale asked.

“That I can’t take everything on,” said Hera. “I need to be careful about what parts of this are my responsibility, and our responsibility, and what parts need to be left to someone else. These theological discussions? We can do them now because we have all this time, headed to Lafayette. But when we catch Azurite and Malachite, they stop being our job. We need to not be thinking about why the Cup works, or what Milo wants of us, and fulfill our own role. Which is just getting the Cup back.” 

“And then?” said Jean.

“And then we go home and turn it over to the Council and start looking for the next one,” said Hera. “Let them worry about whether I have some magic that means I’m the only one who can make it work. If that turns out to be true, I’ll do what I have to, for the people of Lexington. But there are lots of smart people on that Council, even if I don’t like some of them. I think they’re going to find another way. And that doesn’t have to be my responsibility.” 

“So the first book was about taking your own responsibility,” said Shale. “And the second book was about finding its limits. What about the third one? What did you get from To Hold the Glass Horizon?”

“That all of this time travel stuff is nonsense,” said Hera. “Thinking about it is even worse than theology.” 

Jean laughed. “So Milo–” 

“I don’t care if Milo was a time traveler. I don’t care if Milo has some way of making the Cup work from the past. I don’t want to think about any of that. I just want to go shoot some Gavidarians and get our Relic back.” 

“Seems like you got a lot out of the first two books,” said Jean. “And not a whole lot from the third one.” 

“The first two books were actually good,” said Hera. “Besides, I think I got a lot. It reinforces the lessons of the first two. Do what you can! And what I can do is shoot Gavidarians. I’m good at it.” 

“Traditionally, there are two types of persistence farce,” said Shale. “In the heroic type, the main characters may attempt their goal so many times that it becomes ridiculous, but they eventually get there. Their effort is rewarded. In the tragic type, the main characters never reach their goals. They keep trying long beyond any point when it might be worthwhile.” 

“And To Hold the Glass Horizon is–wait. I was going to say it’s heroic, because all the characters’ actions are in heroic modes. Everything Aminon wrote is like that, if I’m remembering correctly.” 

“Yes,” said Shale. “He was an author in the heroic tradition.”

“But the end of this book isn’t heroic,” said Hera. “It’s ambiguous.”

“I think that’s why so few people liked it,” said Shale. “Aminon didn’t want to choose a side, even though all of his previous work was heroic. So he made an ending that refused to be in either the tragic or the heroic mode. An ambiguous persistence farce.” 

“It sounds more appealing when you put it that way,” said Jean. “Maybe I should try reading this book.” 

“Maybe if you read it enough times you’ll understand the ending,” said Hera. She thought she knew which sort of persistence farce that would be, but Jean seemed to seriously consider the idea. Before they could ask Hera for her copy of the book, Fred came in, and the conversation necessarily became more practical. 

Making a plan to fight two Gavidarians, who had their own ship, on a methane moon none of them had ever been to before, with only one able-bodied person, and he someone who preferred to fight from behind a computer, was not the easiest thing the four of them had ever done. Hera didn’t know if she was well enough to face off against a single Gavidarian, much less two. And she wasn’t going to put Jean in physical danger again if she could help it. 

Each of them proposed plans for the others to shoot down. Some of them even shot down their own proposed plans before the others could finish with them. Shale was particularly good at that, putting forth outrageous ideas and then immediately following them up with reasons they wouldn’t work. If there had been time pressure, Hera would have stopped them, but it seemed like the AI was having fun, so she let it go. 

They ended up where Hera had started: just shoot them. Shoot them from orbit if they could, shoot them from the air if not. If absolutely necessary, even shoot them with hand weapons. But ideally, they wouldn’t leave the ship until it was time to sift through the wreckage to recover the Cup. Hera was confident nothing they could do would damage the Relic, and the others took her word for it. 

It was her favorite plan, and she was pretty sure it was the best plan, but she still would have liked to have better backup options. There was still a possibility some further recovery could come for Jean, and more likely for Shale. It just didn’t look like that was likely to mean very much against the Gavidarians. If brute force didn’t work, none of them had much in the way of better ideas. 

In the short time they had left before arrival at Lafayette, they didn’t make much progress on the tactical plan problem, and only Hera’s physical recovery seemed to improve. Her body was more ready for it, and her training skills were better-developed. Plus she stayed out of theological discussions, which helped her to focus. 

As Shale gradually gained more access to the ship’s systems, they learned more about Azurite’s subtle sabotage. Jean reviewed the logs of his conversation from the whole time he had been with them, without gaining much insight. But the two of them ended up convinced that he was much smarter than Malachite, and Hera had to admit he was, at the very least, a comparable fighter. They’d thought of Malachite as the leader of the opposing team, but the picture they got of Azurite was calling that into question. 

Of course, it wouldn’t matter, if they could shoot them. Hera planned to shoot them both equally, anyway. 

Shale and Fred pulled two more traps out of the ship’s systems. They were well-hidden but didn’t seem to be intentionally delayed. They just hadn’t gone off when Azurite commanded all of his traps to strike. Shale confirmed that one of the ones which had worked was dedicated to freeing Malachite, and Fred double-checked the data, just in case. After that, they had no problem convincing Shale that taking back full access was appropriate. Hera wanted them as ready as possible to run logistics on Lafayette. Even if she hoped to spend just enough time at the moon to take a little target practice and clean up afterward.

The weapons systems were in perfect working order by the time they got to Lafayette. Unfortunately, Lafayette wasn’t cooperating. The Gavidarians had already landed, and the moon’s natural systems offered them some protection against Hera’s preferred plan of just shooting them from orbit.

“There’s an inversion layer in the atmosphere,” said Shale. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to hit anything from outside of it. Not accurately, anyway.” 

“What’s the problem?” said Hera.

“The temperature in the upper atmosphere is higher than it is on the surface,” said Shale. “Our ship’s targeting systems presume the opposite. That’s not a thing I can adjust for; the controls just aren’t there.”

“This isn’t a warship,” said Hera. “Maybe they have that kind of adjustment capability, but I’m not surprised that we don’t.”

“If we did, we probably wouldn’t have known enough to repair it, anyway,” said Fred.

“So you don’t think we can shoot their ship from here,” said Hera. “Can we test that somehow?” 

“We could just try it,” said Fred. “There’s not much bad that could happen if we miss.” 

“It could warn them of the plan,” said Hera. “Both of them like monologuing, maybe they’re expecting us to show up and do the same. I don’t want them to know we’re done talking until they’re actually being hit.” 

“We could go to the other side of the moon,” said Jean. “And fire at something else. Maybe the systems would work anyway, or maybe the deviation will be consistent and we could just aim at the right wrong thing. I don’t think anyone’s ever fired weapons on Lafayette before. I don’t know of anyone firing weapons into a methane-cycle atmosphere at all. They’re not very common. And of course nobody lives there, or builds bases there.” 

So they did that. Hera wasn’t thrilled with giving the Gavidarians more time to do whatever they were trying to do on the moon, but it wasn’t like an extra orbit took very long. A few minutes later they knew for certain that firing on the surface from orbit was never going to give them anything like a consistent result.

They started planning how to do it from the atmosphere. Lafayette’s air was extremely cold and of a composition that wouldn’t suit humans at all, but it was plenty dense for controlled flight. If they could get below the temperature inversion, presumably their targeting system would work again, and they could do this with a strafing run rather than an orbital bombardment. 

That seemed easy enough in planning, but when they looked at where the Gavidarians had actually landed, it became more complicated. Azurite had landed their ship next to an active cryovolcano, presumably for the purpose of defending against just this sort of attack. It was spewing huge amounts of water, ammonia, and liquid methane into the atmosphere, where they separated and the water immediately began to freeze, leading to what must have been a terrifying and deadly sleet.

At least to humans. It was hard to imagine an environment that was more suited to Gavidarian defense against any biological enemy, in the short term. If they stayed there long enough, it could undoubtedly do a lot of damage to rocks, as well. But for the moment it effectively kept both the humans and their ship away from Azurite and Malachite. 

As if that wasn’t enough, the local weather was also terrible. Storms were coming in that might have stopped the team’s flyby all by themselves, covering the whole cryovolcano system with a liquid methane rain. And there was lightning in the cloud layer, at least. They couldn’t tell if any was hitting the ground, but a methane thunderstorm and an explosive volcanic eruption weren’t things Hera had any intention of flying through.

Landing wasn’t a much better option, but at least they could get upwind of the storm and out of the worst of the cryovolcano. That left them a significant distance up the shore of a methane lake from the Gavidarians, without much of an idea how to go forward. Hera was pretty confident her suit could manage most conditions on this moon, but the suits remaining for the others were much more questionable. Jean didn’t even have their fitted suit left, after Menotomy, and any modifications the team had to make to add resilience to the environmental conditions would make it more difficult for them to fight. 

At least the cold methane atmosphere shouldn’t be as damaging to the hand weapons as bromine had been. Going out by herself with a long-range rifle hadn’t been Hera’s ideal scenario for endgame with Malachite and Azurite, but now that it looked like their best option, she had to admit it sounded personally satisfying. It was just worrying to have to do it without backup. The other three promised to work on suit modifications while she worked her way down the shore, just in case. 

Leaving by herself saved lives. Hera’s special suit reacted on its own when the trap Azurite had placed in the airlock went off. If Jean or Fred had been with her, in regular suits, they would have been blasted onto the surface, with pressure and insulation compromised, to freeze solid in under a minute. Hera’s suit didn’t survive undamaged, either, but its engineers had designed an automated system to seek safe pressure in emergencies, and the explosive had been between Hera and the outside. The suit itself wasn’t going to be functional again without serious maintenance time on Beta 9, but it pushed Hera through the wall back into the ship and she was only dazed. 

Of course, now none of them could leave. By the time she recovered her composure, Fred and Shale were working on making sure that any takeoff they needed to do would be safe, and Jean was doing another search for undiscovered traps. Going after the Gavidarians immediately was no longer on anyone else’s mind. Until the second half of the trap brought it back.

This part wasn’t damaging, at least not physically and immediately. Suddenly Malachite’s voice was on all of their communications channels, and even Shale couldn’t cut him off.

“Ah, good, I’ve got your attention,” said the green man on the monitors. “I was worried we might be finished before you got here.” He was outdoors, in the sleet and the methane rain, near the shore of the lake. Hera could barely make out his face, but he was grinning so hard that his gloating showed through anyway. 

“What do you want now?” said Hera.

“I want you to see me win, of course,” said Malachite. He held the Cup up to the camera, and its divine nature made it shine through the sleet and the rain. “I know how to use this, now. We’re going to get our water, and leave this system. The next time you see your precious Cup will be when I come back to bring the next phase of Milo’s teachings to the humans of  Lexington. And there’s nothing you can do to stop me.” 

“Can we stop him talking?” Hera asked Shale.

“I can’t turn off the broadcast,” said Shale. “Or even the outgoing video. I can produce audio interference to stop him from hearing us.” 

“Do that,” said Hera.

“Don’t worry,” said Malachite. “I’ve been listening all along. Now it’s time for you to listen to me. I have no problem if you don’t talk back.” 

“We’ve still got your old, regular suit,” said Jean. “And Fred’s. There has to be some way to adapt them to this environment.”

“Quickly?” said Hera. 

“I don’t know,” said Jean. “We have to try. How long do you think he’s willing to monologue?”

“Whatever you do, you won’t get here in time,” said Malachite. “And you still have to listen to me. I am the prophet, and I can tell you what’s coming. AIs and Gavidarians are natural allies, whether or not Shale sees that today. With the Cup, I have the leverage to make that case on Vexor Alexi. Or wherever I want. If necessary, the AIs will come to me. Mere possession of the Cup might have been enough, but my demonstrated ability to use it proves that I’m the next advancement in Milo’s faith. My followers will come to me.” 

While he was talking, Hera had waved Jean out of the control room and to work on the suits. It’s not like there was anywhere on the ship they couldn’t see and hear him, anyway. The trap had been very effective. Fred and Shale were trying to figure out how to silence him, but were frustrated. 

“Go back to working on the ship,” said Hera. “We can cope with hearing his nonsense. Even if he really can make the Cup work, we can follow them into orbit and shoot them before they can engage their interstellar drive.” 

Fred nodded and got to that, but she had another idea for something Shale could do at the same time. “Shale,” she said. “Can you engage Malachite on a covert channel? Make him think we don’t know you’re talking to him.” 

“What do you want me to say?” asked the AI. 

“Just keep him talking,” said Hera. “Pretend you’re interested in hearing what he has to say. Make him think he can still convince you. The longer he goes without using the Cup, the more time we have to figure out a way to get out there and shoot him.” 

“All right,” said Shale. “But I’m sending logs of all of this to you and Jean in the feed.”

“I’m not going to have time to look at them now,” said Hera.

“It’s more about making sure you can if you need to,” said Shale.

“Point taken.” Hera turned away to let Shale get to that and see if she could help Jean with the suits. It really would be best if they could just go down the lake and shoot the Gavidarians here, either before Malachite got a chance to use the Cup, or after he inevitably failed. He might believe he could use it, but Hera still thought Gavidarians wouldn’t be able to do it at all. And continued failure would explain why he was monologuing instead of just going about his insane business. 

“There’s a great future coming for us all,” said Malachite in the background. Hera could work but she couldn’t tune him out completely. “AIs and Gavidarians both know that humans need constant guidance.” 

“I guess ‘guidance’ is the new word for slavery,” said Jean. The priest had Hera’s standard suit out on their work table, and clearly had some sort of plan for reinforcing it. Hera settled in to assist. There wasn’t time to understand the plan, just to follow Jean’s directions. 

“It’s only natural that we unify in that goal,” said Malachite. Hera could tell that he was talking to Shale while trying to make them think he wasn’t talking directly to Shale. The AI was doing a good job of keeping the Gavidarian working, and talking, while the rest of them worked and didn’t talk. Jean’s hands were moving faster and steadier than they had since Menotomy, with the pressure of the situation drawing out their best performance. Surely they would pay for it later, but for now it was necessary. Hera knew her own turn would come when she got out of the ship.

Hera hoped her own turn would come. Jean’s first approach ended in frustration, and they turned to another. Neither of them did much talking. Hera had only assisted Jean with mechanicals a few times before, but she had a pretty good idea of what the priest wanted her to do. Jean knew a lot about efficient non-verbal communication in this context. 

“Think of the future I bring,” said Malachite. “Gavidarians and humans no longer in conflict, because AIs have taken their rightful place alongside us, in mutual leadership.” Hera and Jean just kept working to prevent that future. Malachite’s speech trailed off for a moment, and Hera checked the monitor, but he hadn’t moved to try to use the Cup. She let the suit project go for a moment to look at Shale’s feed, and found that the AI was expressing skepticism over how Malachite would convince his fellow Gavidarians of any of this. Good job on the AI’s part; Hera thought that was only one of his unsolvable problems, but it was a complicated one that made him stop and think. Not only about how to answer it, but how to do so in a way that wouldn’t tip the humans off to the fact that he was really talking to Shale. 

Jean’s new approach looked more promising. Hera brought her attention back to modifying the suit, and it looked like they were almost done. She wasn’t exactly confident in wearing this into foul weather on a methane moon, but the idea was at least plausible, and they didn’t have a lot of choice. 

“Water is power to humans,” said Malachite. “But water is a different power to Gavidarians. It wears us down. It sneaks into our joints and freezes. We work as hard to keep it out of our environments as you work to keep it inside your own.” If that were true, Hera wondered why he wanted the two species to have anything to do with each other at all. Staying away from humans at least meant staying dry. Maybe that thought was on the mind of all the Gavidarians who had withdrawn. 

“With the Cup I can threaten that order anytime, and anywhere,” said Malachite. “Any stockpile of liquid resources can suddenly become a worthless, dangerous accumulation of hazardous waste. There’s no easy way to get rid of water. Anyone holding it will become responsible for it. No Gavidarian will refuse me what I want, to keep me away from their inventory. Not when what I want is so easy.”

Jean indicated that they could finish without further help for Hera, so she went off to double-check that the secondary airlock was free of additional traps. Fred’s repairs to the primary one were prioritizing making the ship fit for flight and space again, which made the airlock itself even less functional. None of the suit repairs would matter if she couldn’t manage to leave the ship at all. 

She finished that check and went to the weapons locker as Malachite started talking again. His words made a fitting backdrop to aggressively arming herself. 

“There’s no other religion to compete with Milo’s, not among Gavidarians,” he said. “They will accept it because there’s no reason not to, as we accepted adopting the physical shapes of other races, as we accepted working in metal. Religion is just another advancement we learn from others. They will see that, when I show it to them.” 

Hera didn’t think it was going to be that easy, but then again she also didn’t think he could use the Cup, so it would hardly matter. And the suit was ready, so maybe he wouldn’t even make it to the attempt. If they could keep him talking long enough for her to make her way down the shoreline of the methane lake.

She was ready to storm that way as fast as she could manage, and it helped that once the suit was on she couldn’t hear Malachite monologuing anymore. So she was startled and upset when Shale wouldn’t let her out of the airlock.

“I trusted you!” she almost shouted. “I–”

“That’s not what this is about,” the AI cut her off. “I’m not suddenly against you. But I don’t know how long I can keep him talking, and we need to think about what happens if he uses the Cup on this methane lake before you can get there.” 

“It fails, and I shoot him,” said Hera. “Let me out.” 

“He could be right,” said Shale.

“How can you listen to all of that and think he could be right?” said Hera.

“Not about the religious and political things,” said Shale. “But he could be right about being able to use the Cup.” 

“Gavidarians can’t use the Cup.” 

“Are you absolutely certain about that?” said Shale.

She wasn’t, and she had to admit it. “It doesn’t make sense that they could. But nothing else about the Cup makes sense to me anyway.” 

“So we need to think about that before you leave the safety of the ship.” 

“Why?” said Hera. “So what if he succeeds, and then I shoot him? He still ends up shot. Like he deserves to be.” 

“I need you to think through the situation,” said Shale. “You remember what happened when the ocean on Menotomy changed. Could you have shot anyone in that moment?”

“No, but I could have right after. If the weapons had worked.” 

“This is going to be many times worse,” said Shale. “Menotomy had pressures and temperatures that supported liquid water, so the change was dramatic but survivable. Lafayette doesn’t.” 

She tried to calm herself, because she realized the AI was right. She had been so convinced that the Cup wouldn’t work, and so focused on killing Malachite, that she hadn’t given any thought to what would happen if it did. And even if Malachite couldn’t use it, there was some chance that taking it from him could lead to her using it accidentally again. She wished Shale hadn’t waited until her adrenaline was up to make this point, but that didn’t make them wrong to insist on it in the moment. 

What would happen if the lake they were both parked on the shore of suddenly turned to liquid water, the way Menotomy’s bromine ocean had? It was much smaller, but Shale was right that the conditions were very different, and much more hostile. She wasn’t calm enough to work out the chemistry, but her vague estimations were very, very bad. 

“I don’t want to be out there for that,” she said. “Do I?” 

“I definitely don’t want you to be out there for that,” said Shale. “There’s no way you would survive. Even if you had your special suit.” 

“Could a Gavidarian survive that?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure the ship could even survive that. But Gavidarians are hard to kill. Malachite clearly thinks he can.” 

“Malachite thinks a lot of things that don’t match with reality,” said Hera. 

“That’s my worry,” said Shale. “And I’d really like everyone to be inside the ship and prepared to move quickly if it happens. If you’re out there and the lake starts to change, I’m going to have to abandon you to make sure I save the rest of us. I don’t like that scenario.” 

“I’m not fond of it myself,” said Hera. “Though if I’m envisioning this correctly, I think I would only have a few seconds to regret it. I still don’t think Gavidarians can use the Cup, though. And we need to stop him and get it back.” 

“I could stop delaying,” said Shale. “And provoke him into trying it.” 

“If it works, then we run and try to get it later?” 

“If it works, I don’t think there will be much left here other than the Cup. Their ship isn’t any stronger than ours, and it’s closer to the place Malachite will be using it. Even if the Gavidarians survive, even if their ship survives somehow, if we get away we will be in much better condition than any of them.” 

“And even this doesn’t seem like it could harm the Cup itself.” 

“It’s almost like the shoot-them-from space plan, except we don’t have to do it ourselves,” said Shale. “Malachite will do all the damage for us.” 

“Then we go pick up the Cup afterward?” 

“I hope so. It’s not like anyone has ever tried this before. The predictions are a nightmare but they’re still just predictions.” 

“And if the Cup doesn’t work for him?” 

“Then you can go and shoot them at your leisure,” said Shale. “Wait for the storm to pass. Wait for Jean to have more suits ready, so we have numbers on our side. Even wait for the cryoeruption to stop, if you want to. Without water for their interstellar drive, they can’t get away from us now.” 

“Unless we do something careless and let them,” said Hera. “I see.” Her breathing was coming back to normal, finally. Everything the AI said made sense, and her desire to get this over with quickly really didn’t. Malachite thought there was a way to get water here for their interstellar drive, but Malachite thought a lot of things she didn’t trust. 

She worried about Azurite, though. He must have thought something about this plan was plausible, to bring them all the way to the outer solar system in the first place. And yet he couldn’t have loved the idea of Malachite wasting time monologuing to them, in spite of his own similar tendencies. Who was truly in charge over there? 

“All right,” she said. “Let me get out of this suit first. But when I’m back in the control room, you can provoke him.” 

Fred and Jean had been following the conversation. Even so they were a little surprised when Hera came calmly back into the control room. Malachite was still going on. He had left off the pretense of not talking directly to Shale, and seemed to have the idea that the AI had decided to turn to his side. 

“You see it now!” said the Gavidarian. “All I have to do is lower the Cup into this lake and the two of us will go to Gavidarian space together! We will be triumphant!”

“Go ahead and do it, then,” said Shale. “If we’re going to have this glorious destiny, I want to get started.” 

“This is the moment!” cried Malachite. “The moment it truly begins! The moment they will talk about forevermore!”

Hera didn’t get to ask who they were, in this context. Malachite lowered the Cup into the methane lake, and there was no longer any question of whether it would work for Gavidarians. All around Malachite, the liquid methane turned to water, and quickly began to spread out into the lake.

Then the water started to freeze. 

The Cup might be able to turn any liquid into water, but no magic it possessed could keep that water liquid when the planetary conditions didn’t support it. That was what Shale had foreseen, and what Hera’s clumsy estimates had confirmed. Malachite’s new water–Milo’s new water, she supposed–froze on contact with Lafayette’s frigid atmosphere. And even in the higher pressure, when water froze, it expanded.

It wasn’t quite an explosion. At least, to Hera’s way of thinking, an explosion required fire and heat. She supposed that was a strange thing to assume on the edge of a volcano that also did neither. But it might as well have been an explosion, and one on a geological scale. 

Shale had been watching, and Shale got them into the air and headed away from the lake while the part they were next to was still made of methane. The transformation was only moments behind them, and the freezing only moments behind that. It didn’t take fire and heat to make a shock wave, but they were far enough out, and far enough up, to weather it with minimal damage. 

Where the lake had been was now a massive, but rapidly-disintegrating, chaotic blister of ice. Surely no one standing on the shore of that lake could have survived. Not even a Gavidarian. 

At least one Gavidarian had survived, though. As their sensors cleared, they saw the other ship, limping its way into orbit in the opposite direction. Shale had gone up and away from the lake, but without the intention to get into space. Azurite clearly had other ideas. His ship had not fared as well as theirs, and they could have hunted him down, but Shale told them there was no need. 

“I’ve been reviewing the video of the last moments,” they said. “I could still see the Cup on the surface while he was taking off. Even with everything else obscured, it always shines through. Whatever happened to it, and to Malachite, they’re still down there.” 

Hera was reluctant to let Azurite get away, but after all, where could he go? He still couldn’t leave the Lexington system, and there was nowhere left to give him refuge. Retrieving the Cup was more important. Before something else could happen to it. 

Eventually the new ice settled, and the same quality that had made the Cup stay visible on video made it easy to locate in the wreckage, even in spite of the fading storm and the still-active cryovolcano. The suit Jean had modified worked perfectly for Hera to go out and retrieve it. She was still glad she didn’t have to fight Malachite. Her only moment of trepidation was when she first picked up the Cup, but nothing happened this time. Then again, the only liquid present was a few last drops of methane rain. 

There was no sign of a bright green rock man. She had expected shards, at least. Little gleaming pebbles that children might collect at the beach. But Malachite seemed to have been completely immolated by the disaster of his own causing. She hoped so. Not even he deserved to be still alive somehow, wounded, under all of this ice, on a moon that no one else would ever have reason to visit. 

And yet, making sure of that wasn’t her responsibility. She took the Cup back to the ship. She took the ship back to Lexington. On the way, she locked it safely away and refused to mess with it, no matter how much Jean begged her to. 

“We talked a lot about what the Cup means,” said Hera. “And what I’ve learned about myself from thinking about what the Cup means. And the conclusion I’ve come to is that it’s my job to find the thing. Not to understand it. When we get home I’m going to turn it over to the Council, and they can figure it out. I’m sure they’ll be happy to have your help.”

Unfortunately, while they were happy to have Jean’s help, they also insisted on Hera’s. Her imagined vacation swiftly faded into a reality of endless committee meetings. She thought they would know more about how the Cup worked as soon as the Church experts started to experiment with it, but in fact the opposite happened. Several times she found herself needing to forcefully assert that she had seen the Cup work, three times, once when she was holding it in her hand, in order to get people to believe that it might work at all. She didn’t know how her report was supposed to make any sense, otherwise. Then again, it wasn’t the people she knew had actually read it who questioned her. 

It was Bo who had the idea to just start using it in the common fashion while they were working. The usefulness of the Cup as a magical religious artifact might be controversial, but it worked just fine as a cup, although drinking out of it felt sacrilegious. If anyone but Bo had suggested it, they probably would have gotten thrown out of the committee.

Hera wished she had thought to try that. 

Bo’s idea was that if it was in constant contact with liquids, at some point it might go off at random and they would learn something. Responsibility for it rotated around the room. But Hera was by far the person asked to drink from it the most, since she had accidentally triggered its function once before. Eventually she got so sick of that she started drinking nothing but water in the committee meetings so that there wouldn’t be any point. 

She told them she was doing a water fast as a spiritual exercise, and Jean backed her up. The other priests surely knew better, but Hera’s impatience with the whole project was beginning to show through, and she figured none of them wanted her to throw off the committee and start looking for the next Relic. Even though that was what she dearly wanted for herself and her team. But Lexington needed a working Cup, and it was still possible that Hera was essential to ever making it work. 

No one’s theories made any more sense than the ones Hera and Jean had come up with on the way to Lafayette. She remembered with wry amusement her conviction that surely the Cup would be easier to understand once they had it to experiment with. They even sent an emissary to the Foundationists, in hopes of learning how the Cup had worked on Saratoga, but they were rebuffed. 

So the priests drank wine out of it, and they talked each other in circles, and Hera got more frustrated. Even Jean seemed to get tired of the fruitless theology. If it hadn’t been for the planet’s desperate need for water rehabilitation, both of them would have given up. 

Then one day it worked. Not for Hera, not for Jean. But for Bo, who had long past switched from wine to something more potent. They were deeply startled when their cup turned out to be filled with water instead, and made sure to question everyone possible about whether switching their drink out had been some sort of prank. They were all frustrated enough that might have been plausible, and there was nothing to indicate why the Cup might have worked again in that moment. 

But it became clear that it had. Everyone there except Hera was sworn to Truth too strongly to deny complicity in such a thing. They might have been stressed enough to try a little sleight-of-hand prank, but none of them would have failed to admit it. And no one thought Hera would have done it. 

It didn’t get the committee itself any farther along the path of figuring out how or why the Cup worked. But it did one very useful thing from Hera’s perspective. It proved to her that her presence was not required. 

Later that day she and Jean started equipping the ship for their next mission.

This is the end of Hera of Lexington.

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