Cass was led into a vast hall bathed in a delicate breeze. Ghostly curtains revealed the joyful bustle of the capital. At the far end of a ridiculously long table sat Lucky, a smile on his face and a cup in hand. Cass sat at the nearby corner.
"Two days where I would've taken six. I find you sublime, Stella." "Grant me the courtesy of honoring your part of the deal, Lucky," she replied, folding her hands.
Child-servants, almost dancing, set down plates of shellfish and warm bread. The shellfish were unknown to Cass, even when she queried support AIs through her Armor: round, with flesh curled into a spiral like a worm inside.
"On the seventh day, we eat from the sea and rivers. These are marine galaxies from the Great Blue Bay, which belongs to some son-of-a-bitch baron named Matthieu. Matthieu? Seriously? What a dumbass name."
"I'd like to skip the tasting and the onomastics and get straight to the point and learn the rules of the game."
"The ono...what? Fuck's sake. Just eat! It's part of the learning."
Lucky didn't look Cass in the eyes; he slouched in his seat like a teenager. He had removed his turban, revealing a mop of messy short hair. Cass sniffed, chewed, and swallowed a spiral, then took another. First a hint of iodine, then a deep flavor of ripe fruit, tobacco, and wood.
"Trust, like many video games, doesn't just offer us new visual concepts-like rainbow turkeys or rivers that flow backwards. It offers, extraordinarily, the experience of tasting substances that exist nowhere else in the universe."
"The rules, Lucky."
"I'd like you to relax. This meal is going to be long, and you'll get more than your fair share."
Lucky's tone had turned cold and serious. His eyes, which sparkled like silver, became steel. There was, Cass thought, a brutal hardness inside him that could erupt at any moment.
"But I feel like I need to get your attention, so… Falco?"
A steward in blue bent forward.
"Bring in Lady Cassandre."
At the name, Cass stiffened, and Lucky didn't miss it. Falco slipped away, and after a silence that stretched far too long, the doors opened again to admit Lady Cassandre.
She was similar to Cass, save for a few features. The uniform was the same, which added to the confusion, but the face-especially in profile-was truly identical. Not a clone, but more like a twin sister who didn't smile quite the same way.
Lady Cassandre approached, bowed before Lucky, and asked if he needed anything. Her voice was markedly different. Cass spoke in a low, slow tone, while this Cassandre's voice was warm, like that of a barely grown teen.
"Yes, Cassandre. Tell me, how long have you been in my service?"
"It's been six years now, since you founded the fief, my lord."
He dismissed her. Lucky turned to Cass:
"So, do you want us to talk about those damn rules, Stella, or would you prefer I tell you a little story? Admittedly long, admittedly a bit self-centered, but one that will shed light on the little mystery of Lady Cassandre?"
"You have my attention, Lucky. I'm putting your little story on the agenda. But I'm not the kind to trade substance for shadows. Give me the rules. Leave nothing out."
"Stella, you're a glorious bitch. You've got Ariane's obsession and her tits. You're every inch an empress… except for the patience. I think I like you. I'd love to fight with you. All right then, let's follow the agenda."
Lucky was a smarter guy than his vocabulary and nonchalance suggested. He had started Trust about ten years ago, out of boredom, after a stay on Pax he hadn't enjoyed. Trust was designed as a negotiation game. You grow villages and have the option to build a variety of structures that grant powers to players. For instance, an Exploration Guild would reveal nearby available hamlets. A barracks could dispatch soldiers within a certain radius to reserve a hamlet until a player arrived. These buildings created balances of power that prevented negotiations from stalling. Some buildings, like the Meditation Hall-Lucky pointed at it behind him, cup in hand-had no apparent or known use.
Half of the buildings, however, existed purely for player enjoyment: weavers and mages that altered appearances, restaurants of varying prestige, cinemas, and even procedural video games, each a unique instance in its city. Many players succumbed, as Lucky himself admitted to having succumbed, to the delights of Capua: they achieved such a high level of power and quality of life that they stopped progressing in the game.
"The delights of Capua, fuck," added Lucky. "I don't know who that Capua chick was, but among players we also talk about 'Capua affairs'. Trust isn't just a grand-scope game, as I'll explain to you. There are a million fascinating, exciting, beautiful or hideous characters who drag you into their adventures, people you can court and bring into your circle. And if you like eating these unknown shellfish, just imagine the quality of the sex you can have here. Makes you go nuts."
Cass didn't flinch, mentally taking notes. He continued, more seriously:
"There's a micro-management dimension you could get lost in forever. The lowliest servant of this castle represents hundreds of hours of adventure-kidnapping, war, negotiations, travel, treasure maps, betrayals, love…"
"A well-lived life…"
"That's where you can tell it's a game. In real life, we get bored. And sometimes, we miss that boredom. Every man needs his share of it. That's probably also why things evolve slowly. Playing nonstop dehumanizes us."
That's how Ariane of the Black Crow was able to build her Empire fairly quickly - also because players were curious to see what an Empire would be like - but a second Empire would mean letting Ariane or her rival win, and the game had slowed down considerably since then. The Kingdoms were expanding, negotiations had grown more intense.
As starfish sushi, roasted freshwater lobsters, and even blood-sweet mussels were brought to the table, Lucky went into great detail about the precise rules of the game, and the few possible loopholes or evolutions that might occur. He explained, for instance, that when a player arrived in a new territory and discovered, say, a new animal or a stone, there was a small chance it would have some extraordinary, still-undiscovered property. That property would lead to the creation of a new item, and the player would have exclusive rights to it for negotiation.
One day, a player named Bimbi found the famous Bimbi's Negative Stones-stones lighter than air, which he had retrieved from a tree. With these stones, the city's artisan guild could create a hot-air balloon that offered a panoramic view of the surroundings. The game was always under threat of being overturned by a fundamental discovery.
Lucky, who wasn't stingy with information, concluded with a little inventory of the die-hard players who were trying to win: Ariane, of course, but also Deidre-a queen who hadn't hesitated to resort to blackmail with spies outside the game to carve out her realm (and also sold her body for connections, Lucky added with a smirk)-and finally Yarden, leader of the 2048 Initiative, a charismatic man who had convinced a bunch of poor fools that there was room for everyone on the throne of the gods.
By the end of his tale, the sun was setting, and Lucky was glancing nervously toward the balcony with the white curtains, and the red disk brushing the horizon. His eyes rested on Cass, and he looked about to add something-but held back. Cass noted his silence.
"A question," she said. "If I go to a hamlet that's part of the connection base of the Black Crow Empire, and I don't know, I burn their crops-will they starve and the hamlet disappear? And by consequence, the Empire becomes a kingdom again?"
"Not like that," said Lucky, still watching the sunset, then looking at Cass. "First, Ariane's a solid player. She secured all her hamlets. But yes, one or two must rely on animal husbandry. You could cancel the breeding by making sure to kill all the animals, even those outside the village that are the same species. But here's what would happen: Ariane, or the guy who gave her the connection to his hamlet, would arrive within the hour and rebuild the structure by selecting a different animal."
"Okay, and if I'm standing right in front of the village and block them?"
"By hand?" said Lucky, bursting out laughing.
"Have you tried fighting in this game? You can't get hurt. Throw yourself off a cliff, try to slice a player's head off-everything bounces off us like we're made of rubber. Otherwise it would be survival of the fittest. You can't even bury someone alive: they dig themselves out right away, and you get hit with a hell of a gold penalty for trying. I tried. I got screwed."
"What if I just block her at the village entrance?"
"She'll show up riding some monstrous creature, like one of those fucking giant desert crocodiles from Sugud. I mean a beast fifty meters long."
"Okay, and suppose I'm stronger than the crocodile?"
"She'll wait. She's got six days until the hamlet disappears. You'll sleep at some point, right? You'll doze off, and she'll enter the hamlet."
"Fine, let's say I'm a robot and I don't sleep."
"Stella the robot, right," Lucky laughed again. "Let me think. If I were her, here's what I'd do: there's a pretty rare artifact, costs a million gold coins, and you can build it if you have a mage guild, an artisan guild, and some so-called 'purest silk' from the Plains of Amasya. It lets you make Seven-League Boots. One-time use, but Ariane probably has five or six. They let you fly through the sky in a single leap and land right in the center of the place you indicate; for a hamlet, that's the flagpole. The second she touches the pole, she can reset the building."
"So I have to see her coming from the sky and stop her, right?"
"Yeah, it's in the bag, Stella. Just remember she'll be moving at missile speed and the flagpole's six meters tall. Complicated, isn't it?"
Cass didn't answer, absorbed in the outline of a strategy. Lucky asked for silver fig liqueur, gin, and starlight liquor to be brought. They toasted, and Cass, out of gratitude for Lucky's information, agreed to give him some time to tell his story.
In the sky, silver halcyons rose, reflecting the moonlight.
"It's an open secret," Lucky said, "but the Brotherhood of Two Worlds is based on Booz. You know what I mean?"
"The pirates," Cass said.
"Hahaha, pirates! Sounds like some pre-stellar age epic. What do you know about them?" "The Stellar Fleet calls them a handful of drugged-up outcasts."
Lucky smiled with confidence. Cass suddenly guessed, with dread, that the "pirates" weren't a handful of drugged-up outcasts at all.
"Outcasts, that's not wrong. Drugged-up, sometimes. A handful... a handful… yeah right. Mafia, pirates, cartel - that's the HS opinion. There's a bit of all that, and much more. They think they're a mafia, act like pirates, and embrace cruelty like cartels. They've got a taste for independence and they all jerk off to this damn Emprise, you know, the Grip. But behind that shiny distraction, Stella, there's a surprisingly structured project... I won't say more, even in the After."
"I was born about a hundred and fifty years ago to a member of the Brotherhood and a slave who claimed she came from a bourgeois family on mythical Earth, captured in a raid. When I was three, she escaped from their hideout and went to live with three other escapees in the marshes. A harsh life, always afraid of being caught again. Plenty of nightmares and sleepless nights. We were surrounded by the Booz Owls, native Xenos... you've heard of them?"
"I've heard they communicate with parallel universes."
"You're well-informed. Surprisingly well-informed. Let's move on. The Owls were very cautious. During an HS project - which turned into Project Lodovico, you know, the trial, with the Transient and the exile... never mind. Basically, the HS was hunting them, taking their brain fluid to make God-knows-what. But these Xenos watched us, and we helped each other. I'd tip them off about SH raids. And one day, they gave me a vision. I'll talk about the vision soon, but let me continue the story first."
"I returned to civilization. Goodbye, mommies, back to HQ. I climbed the Brotherhood hierarchy - literally, if you catch my drift. The Brothers aren't exactly a fun bunch, but I'd dealt with swamp Xenos since I was a kid, and I knew what those bastards had done to my mother. And I'd had the vision. I rose to high ranks-almost the top. I flew in an Ozymandias that looked like a shark, all golden inside. I was thirty-three when my lieutenant, a little slut named Malia, denounced me for betraying Brotherhood secrets-bullshit, but an easy way to get me condemned to death and take my place."
"I fled to Lennox and robbed some rich bastard just back from Escalus to buy myself a fast one-way ticket into the After. I racked up orgies on my Sanctuary island and wandered through Big City, never finding any of the old Brothers. I tried Pax once. It sucked."
"Everyone ends up on Pax, they say."
Lucky's smile faded, his eyes melancholic.
"You know what happens on Pax?"
"You live someone else's life."
"Yeah. You forget everything, and you're a baby again, then a boy... or a girl... you live another person's life in real time. Without knowing you're someone else. But it's still you. And then one day, you're about to die, you're terrified, and then boom-you wake up here. For a second, you think it's paradise, and the After re-downloads your old personality. Imagine the rage. It's not nothing. It changes you."
"So in a way, you're no longer the real Lucky?"
"I was a guy born in India, an old Earth state, around 2150. A lonely guy who struggled his whole life for nothing. Who suffered a lot. Who loved only one woman - and it didn't work. He had a few friends, but died alone. He built nothing. Back then, there was still the free market, currencies, and no social protection. Kinda like me in the marshes... had to grind every day just to see tomorrow. I died a fool, as a fool. A shitty life with another layer of shit added on top."
"So it changed you?"
"Yeah. There's a before and after. You know what the Psis say? That they didn't know loneliness until they had their power. It's the same. You think you have empathy for others, but really, you're projecting into them, and you're empathizing with yourself. But there, by literally living someone else's life... yeah, you become empathetic. That's why I took refuge here afterward... I'd become too different. And yeah. I can put myself in other people's shoes more easily."
"Sounds like you hate it."
"Either I hate it, or I hate who I was before."
"A sociopath? Charity begins at home. Forgive yourself."
"You know what the Transients say about the After?"
"That after the After, we become Transients."
"We become empathetic, at any rate. Soft. Incapable of waging war."
"I don't know if you're wary of the Transients, Stella," Lucky said, "but I don't find them empathetic, at all. Maybe the promise of transcendence is just a way for those sons of bitches to control us."
"Truth is, I am wary of the Transients."
"Good. After Pax, I came back here. I roamed around and built this palace, guided partly by an unconscious intuition, and you know what? I reconnected with the vision from my youth-the one the Booz Owls had given me. The Owls speak the Stellar Tongue, but on Booz, everyone babbles it-it's a finger-language. And they get in your head like Psis. They gave me… a vision of glory."
"What does glory mean to a Lord who already has everything?"
"All this, Trust, the After-it's shit, virtual, fake. I saw myself as a General, leading all of humanity into a massive stellar battle, becoming the savior of my species. And I also saw, at the height of my glory… well, I saw this palace, that sunset earlier, those curtains and those birds, even the little crack in the stone slab. I was dressed like a prince. Exactly like I am now. And with me, in her officer's uniform, was a woman named Cassandre, who took my hand and led me onto the balcony, and she kissed me. So I had almost everything-except Cassandre."
"And the stellar battle."
"It'll come. Failing to find Cassandre, I tried to recreate her here with the Guild of Illusions-but now you've shown up. You're nearly perfect. Just your name. It doesn't fit. I felt the hour of my reign approaching. Don't you want to change your name?"
"I don't particularly want to kiss you, Lucky," Cass said, "even if you seem desperate to find your Cassandre. But here's one explanation: the Owls don't read the future-they read parallel worlds. If that's possible."
"It's the same thing."
"I remember the Episode of Captain Wau's Crew - you may not know it - but basically, in fiction, in parallel universes, for example, you're in a relationship with someone you hate in this one."
"No, Stella. You don't know anything about the Owls. Big creatures like frogs with skinny bodies and huge eyes. But they twitch like owls."
"Where did you learn Stellar Tongue?" Cass asked, changing the subject.
"Told you, on Booz everyone speaks it. Booz is a human planet with a Xeno majority, and the HS leaves us alone. Their officials tend to disappear. Back to parallel worlds-your certainty annoys me. The Owls see into parallel universes. But what's a parallel universe? At the tiniest scale, when an atomic, quantum phenomenon occurs-say, some little shit of an electron takes a particular state - it could also have another one, or a third, etc. Each of those states gives rise to a universe where the particle takes that configuration. And those universes exist. And they're touching ours. For every electron and every particle in the universe-and there are a shitload-for every possible state, there's a universe."
"Lucky, pirate lord and quantum physics professor."
"Don't mock me. I read and reread the LE entry on it, obviously. Imagine these universes are bubbles, touching each other. The ones that touch ours are almost identical-like, they differ by just one particle. The Owls see into these neighboring worlds. And one changed particle won't turn a Cassandre into a Stella. My vision is accurate."
"Why do they see into the future of those universes and not their present?"
"It's just the time it takes for the vision to reach them. I think time loops. I don't know. What matters is, it works. They're never wrong."
"So you say."
"Before every Brotherhood raid, we took a slave and gave him an Owl injection. Before he croaked, he'd tell us how it would go. That's why the Fleet thinks we're just a handful-because they see nothing."
"You killed a lot of people that way?"
"Yeah. And I'd like to say I regret nothing-but, well, Pax opened my heart, turned me into a softie, and that pisses me off. As for you, you're not Cassandre. Unless you're a hacker who can alter LEs, but that'd be a first."
That gave Cass plenty to chew on. The Owls. The existence of a slave trade within HS. The cartel with a "structured project"... her mission list just kept growing.
She broke Lucky's silence and bitter meditation. Outside, the night had deepened, sliced now and then by flashes of bright light.
"Lucky, I'm going to need your help to win the game."
"Funny. And what are you offering me?"
Mentioning his empathy made him aggressive. He must've thought he could never lead a war again if he couldn't kill.
"I know Cassandre. I could introduce you-when the time is right."
"Funny and cute. But even if you look like her, those are just words."
Cass reached up and unpinned her Psi brooch, then reattached it to her collar-on the left side.
"A Cassandre would wear it like this."
Lucky was speechless, stunned. A major yet obvious detail from his vision, still etched in his memory. With coldness and poise, Cass stood up.
"I know where the Cassandre from your vision is. Be patient. I'm going to use your Meditation Hall properly to draft a conquest plan. Let's take the throne. And I'll bring her here, the woman from your vision. You've got, I think, trillions of people to lead into battle… or whatever your friends from Booz say."