The screen went dark.

  “Creating an AI is really not cheap,” Shall said. “I was an anniversary present from your rich ex-husband, even he could only afford it because his company owns one of the only labs that makes artificial intelligences. There are other complications, legal and practical – as far as I know, no one has ever made an AI based on someone who wasn’t alive, for obvious reasons. It won’t be easy.”

  “That’s true,” Callie said. “Fortunately, Michael still owes me lots of favors. I’ll cash in every one of them to get this done.” She knew a copy of Ashok’s consciousness in a computer wasn’t the same as getting her friend back. A new Ashok would diverge from the old, changed by not having a physical body, and by the vastness and speed of a mind that lived in machinery instead of bioelectric meat. Michael had formed the basis of Shall, but now, years later, they were entirely different, as distinct as identical twins leading different lives. The same would be true of artificial Ashok.

  But like the general said: half a loaf was better than none.

  “I’ve never been to a harvest festival before,” Callie said. “It appears to involve getting drunk and setting things on fire, though, so I approve.”

  Everyone was here for the harvest festival on Owain – they’d even picked up Uzoma, Robin, and Ibn from Ganymede and their colony world, respectively; Stephen and his partner Q met them at that ridiculous spaceport with the mushroom-shaped restaurant and drove them in a land vehicle to their house, a big geodesic dome on sprawling pastoral property surrounded by trees. Their yard was full of dried fruit and vegetables hanging on strings, bales of grass piled up to form mazes and structures, and gracefully carved wooden furniture. Weirdly enough, given his history in cities and in space, Stephen seemed totally at ease in the country. He looked wonderful, lean and smiling instead of round and doleful. “I credit my new health and outlook to gardening, walking, and eating all these fresh vegetables.”

  “Getting laid regularly probably doesn’t hurt, either,” Callie said.

  “Propriety forbids comment.”

  “Whatever. I know it’s good for me.” She brushed an insect off her arm. “This place is horrible and I’m happy for you.”

  They had a wake for Ashok – Imperative scientists were still turning his files into a mind – and swapped stories about him, fond and exasperated, while drinking the local booze. Sebastien came to the wake near the end. He approached Callie and said, “I am so sorry. Ashok was one of a kind. I mourn your loss.” Then he walked away. That was it. He didn’t say anything sarcastic or cruel, and didn’t try to make the situation about himself at all. He seemed entirely sincere. Maybe his time on Owain really had changed him for the better.

  As the sky grew purple with dusk, the wake segued into a harvest party proper, with various guests from the local settlements gathering around bonfires and sharing good cheer. After making the rounds for a while, Callie sat alone on a straw bale – whatever that was for – and gazed up at the stars. There were lots of them, and she knew there were still monsters lurking in the darkness between them. But now they had a map to those monsters, and the means to destroy them. There was lots of work yet to be done, but Callie and her crew no longer had to do it all alone.

  Elena caught up with her old crewmates from the Anjou for a while, but then she came over to Callie and placed a crown made of little yellow flowers on her head. “Perfect.” She sat on the bale beside Callie. “How does it feel to be a queen, anyway?”

  “Heavy lies the head that wears the crown.” Callie wasn’t royalty, but she had accidentally become a politician. She’d decided that, if they were making as much money as a small country, they might as well start acting like one. She was a celebrity on the Tangle in every system for her part in liberating Vanir, which helped negotiations with the Inner Planets Governing Council and the Imperative go smoothly. Michael and his company’s lawyers had helped too.

  As a result, The Trans-Neptunian Authority would rise again. Callie’s home, destroyed by the servants of the Axiom, was being rebuilt. Construction on Meditreme Station II was already starting, out near the orbit of Neptune, and Callie had secured exclusive resource exploitation rights from there to the Oort cloud, and the right to offer citizenship, levy taxes, control trade, and make laws for the region.

  She hadn’t wanted the job, really, but being the head of a nation-state instead of captain of an independent crew gave her a lot more leverage in her partnership with the Jovian Imperative… even if currently the citizens of said nation-state were limited to members of her crew. The Imperative’s ministers would have a harder time secretly using Axiom tech behind her back when their partner ran her own country.

  “We should get you a real crown,” Elena said. “Or at least a tiara.”

  Callie snorted. “My job is a lot more like being CEO than a queen. Anyway, I’m not really suited for it. We’ve established that I’m a terrible diplomat. I’m going to talk Shall into taking over the top job pretty soon.”

  “An artificial intelligence as head of a polity? That’s going to shake things up.”

  “As the head of the newly reconstituted Trans-Neptunian Alliance, I’m drafting a constitutional amendment granting full rights to human-derived artificial intelligences. I’m pretty sure the other senior ministers will ratify, since that’s you and Stephen and Drake and Janice and Lantern. The other polities can complain about negotiating with an AI, but they’ll suck it up or lose out on trade with us, and once we roll out some benign uses for Axiom tech, like the gravity generators, they’ll get over their objections.” She took a sip of the sweet, cool wine in her glass. “You know what else that amendment means? It means Ashok, or Ashok the AI, can own and autonomously operate his own ship, flying under TNA colors. I’m giving him the Golden Spider as a rebirthday gift.”

  “That’s… well… I want to say it’s nice, but… the Golden Spider is a heap of epoxy and spare parts. It was the one ship so ugly the pirates didn’t even bother taking it with them on their last raid before we stole Glauketas out from under them. With the money we’re getting from our stake in the Vanaheim system, we could buy him a new ship.

  “That would be cruel, Elena. If we gave him a perfect ship, how would Ashok amuse himself? With the Golden Spider, he’ll have the endless joy of upgrading, augmenting, and improving himself.”

  Elena snuggled closer. “Good point. There’s a reason you’re the captain and I’m just the executive officer.”

  “There’s no one I’d rather have as my XO,” Callie said. “There’s no one in the world I trust more, and not many I trust as much.”

  Elena murmured in her ear. “Remember how I told you back on Earth, in the 22nd century, we used to sign our letters ‘XOXO’ sometimes? Do you remember what that stands for?”

  “Why don’t you remind me?” Callie said.

  So Elena did

  AKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thanks to my wonderful son River and my lovely wife Heather for creating a supportive environment that allows me to vanish for hours at a time to write about punching space fascists and kissing the people you love, and for providing such a pleasant reality for me to come home to. Thanks to Ais, Amanda, Emily, Katrina, and Sarah for their kindness and support, and for listening to me go on (and on, and on) about reversals and betrayals and body horror and whether we’re allowed to have happy endings, and my rambling doubts about whether I could wrap up this trilogy in a satisfying way. (I think I did. I’m satisfied, anyway.) Special thanks to Ysabeau Wilce and James Thomas for letting me spend several days in seclusion up at Rancho Zopilotes, where I wrote more than half this book, including many of the best parts.

  On the professional side, thanks to my longtime agent Ginger Clark for making the business things run so smoothly and for supporting all my weird novelistic whims. Thanks to the team at Angry Robot, especially Marc Gascoigne for believing in this series, Phil Jourdan for editing the first two volumes so deftly, and Penny Reeve for being a great publicist (and taking care of me last fall when I visited London). They’re all gone from the company now, and I miss them a lot, and I wouldn’t be here without them. New publicity and editorial coordinator Gemma Creffield has stayed in touch and kept on top of things during this transitional period, Simon Spanton brought his considerable editorial insight and experience to bear on this final volume, and copyeditor Rob Triggs saved me from myself in several places. My thanks to Paul Scott Canavan, who continues to bring the White Raven to life in his glorious cover art.

  And thanks to you, the readers who joined me on the journeys of the White Raven. I’ll see you in the stars.

 

 

  Tim Pratt, The Forbidden Stars

 

 

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