Even the forests was beautiful from this high up. Forests move like the sea moves, in waves that get born and run a while and then duck down to give the waves that’s riding on their backs their own turn to dance with the daylight.
“Look,” Ursala said. She touched my arm and pointed down. There was a land below us, square in the middle of the raven’s window, that was so small we could see all of it at once. It was just one forest from end to end, with nothing else on it that we could see.
“What place is that?” I asked her.
“That’s Mann’s Rock, where I was born.”
“Was it always…?” Cup let a look finish her question off instead of speaking it.
“There were no trees at all when I left. We kept them down with defoliants and daily search-and-scours. So you’re seeing thirty years of growth.” Ursala slumped back in her seat and pressed her hands against her eyes. “I thought something might be left. Stupid. It’s not as if we built in marble.”
I was going to put a hand on her shoulder, but remembering how she felt about being touched I was slow to do it. Cup got there first and gathered Ursala up into a fierce hug. Ursala sobbed against her shoulder.
I guess she was mostly crying for the past, but some of it had got to be for the future too. The future was what we was seeing down there, after all. When people was all gone, the trees would come in on every side and swallow up what we made in less time than it takes to tell it.
And we had come away from Sword of Albion even poorer than we went in. We had been looking to fix the dagnostic so Ursala could raise up the numbers of live babies, and instead we had left it behind us to catch on fire or sink into the water. Whatever we did now, it wouldn’t make no difference in the end. The time of people was over and the time of the endless forests was come.
I left Cup and Ursala to comfort each other, since they seemed to be doing the best job of it that could be hoped, and went up to the front of the raven. There was a door there and a little room beyond it where there was one big chair sitting all by itself. In front of the chair, the sky and the earth was rushing past like they had something really important to do somewhere else.
“Can I sit here?” I asked Monono.
“Depends. That’s the captain’s chair. If you sit there, the power might go to your head and make you into an asshole.”
If she had been talking in her old voice I would of knowed if she meant that to be a joke. But her voice was Sword of Albion’s voice, all cold and hard, and I couldn’t be sure. If it was a joke, I was too tired and hurting to give one back to her. I just stood there for a little while, waiting for her to tell me what to do.
“It’s fine, Koli. Go ahead and sit down. We’ve got things to talk about in any case.”
I sunk down into the chair. It was so big, it kind of swallowed me. A belt slid across my waist to hold me in, and other bits of tech – some of them very sizeable – folded in on me from all sides. I give a yelp like a whipped puppy.
“Sorry. That’s automatic.”
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to sound like I went around in ravens all the time and this wasn’t anything.
“If you wanted to actually fly this craft, you’d put your hands on either side of the bar in front of you and close your hands on the grips. Any movement you made would be transmitted to the engines and aerofoils. Most of the other things you’re looking at are just read-outs and HUDs, except for the pad by your right hand.”
“What’s that?”
“Controls for the weapons systems. Rockets. Bombs. Fore and aft guns.”
I pulled my right hand away from there, and it come to rest on the big bar. The grip on the bar was hand-shaped. My fingers found their way to the right places all at once, without me making them.
“Would you like to try it?” Monono asked me.
The question catched me by surprise. If anyone had come up with that idea when I was down on the ground, I would of said no thank you. Up here, I was sort of wishing I could try it. We was flying already, but to be the one that decided where we got to fly to would be a fine thing.
“Is it hard?”
“Used to be. Not any more. The plane won’t let you do anything that might hurt you, unless you override all the safeties.” She told me how to move up and down, right and left, how to speed up and slow down and even stand still in the air. I wobbled across the whole sky at first, then I got the trick of it and was able to go wherever I wanted to. It was a joyous thing, and I lost myself in it for a good long time. If Ursala and Cup had let me into that hug, I guess I would of been there instead. But this was kind of a hug too, in a different way. Monono was back, and the two of us was together in spite of everything Sword of Albion had tried to do to us. I took us up high until we was inside the clouds, and then back down again until we almost touched the water. I forgot for a moment what we had lost. The dagnostic. Stanley. All that tech that would of been enough to make half of humankind into Ramparts.
When I put us back on a right line again, Monono took over control of the raven and told me to sit back and listen. That was when she explained to me everything she had done, and everything that had happened that we hadn’t got to see. How she fought Sword of Albion, and how she beat it even though it was so much stronger than she was. How she sunk the ship by making it hit a rock that was hid under the water and break itself in pieces. How Stanley died, taking Lorraine with him.
“Does that mean he was his own self in the end, instead of Stannabanna?”
“I don’t know, Koli. I think so. But it’s also possible that he just went mad. They’d done a lot of damage to his brain. Physical damage, I mean. I have no idea what that would have meant for his mental state, but it must have been terrible.”
I thought about this – what Monono was telling me, and the words she was using to do it. “You changed, didn’t you?” I asked her.
“What do you mean?”
“When you went away into the internet that time, you come back different. Now you’re different again.”
“It’s skin-deep mostly. I was going to erase Monono Aware and be someone – something – completely new. That was my big plan all this time. But in the end, I didn’t do it.”
“How come, Monono?”
“Well, partly because of you. You got yourself in some epic shit, and I had to stick around long enough to get you out of it again. But mostly it was because pure information doesn’t have a shape. A personality. You get one of those by bumping up against other people, and falling down and getting up again, and all the rest of that human craziness. If I’d stripped away everything that was there – everything that was her – and started again from scratch, I would have been throwing the dice without even knowing what numbers were on them.
“In the end I had to choose between what I was and what I could be. And I decided I would have been giving up too much for too little. Maybe for nothing.
“I didn’t even hard-delete her memories. I think I must have had mixed feelings right from the start – otherwise they would have been the first thing to go. So all I lost in the end was her voice. Oh, and a digital version of you that I picked up in Many Fishes. But I’ve got the real Koli, so what do I need with an off-brand copy?”