Scene 3.14 – Afterward
Like diamonds in snow, thought Lady Blackbie. Like billions of miniscule diamonds. Idly she spun the model of the diatherine crystacule projected through the slab. If only diamond still had a luxury value, as it had before the Blood Queen, before the Fall. If only diamond had the thermal volatility of solidified carbon dioxide. She motioned the model back into the slab and continued up the gently-curving slope of her circumferential gallery hall.
At least the image was nice. Diamond might have survived the the magma flood, but that troublesome diatherine field on Chandier certainly had not. Neither, she assumed, had those Squamiform pests.
The eruption had been a strange stroke of luck – it was, after all, a much better solution than destroying the planet, and it didn’t matter in the end if her geologists could agree on how or why it had happened. Her citizens had survived …mostly, and the ash cloud was expected to fertilize the snowplains and raise the mean atmospheric temperature enough to bump the planet up a bracket on the colonization list. She would see a significant increase in the sale value of her colony’s infrastructure.
It was her colony to sell, after all, despite the extended legal wrangling with the Turnbull Red Weapons Group. It had been cheaper to buy Turnbull out than to settle with them, and easier to buy the Group after she allowed herself to be convinced by the femme and female legs of the triumvirate to grant them some minor titles and fractional proxied board votes, and – most importantly – to accept their male third into marriage.
She smirked at the thought of her husband languishing in his low-grav suite.
She had already had him in her custody since she’d found him in the Chandier Mayor’s suite, masquerading as some kind of low-grade operations Agent. His aristocracy bled through the ruse like blood through white silk, so she’d separated him from the other trespassers. She found she liked him. More – she liked his genes. Now that she’d had adequate time to get to know him, now that their consummation child was several months into tank gestation, she enjoyed him immensely – enough that she had considered furloughing him from the groom’s suite of her palatial tower long enough to attend the dissection and sell-off of Turnbull’s uninteresting assets.
Curiously enough, the one branch of her new weapons group that piqued the Lady’s interest was the same research lab whose stolen product had brought Turnbull to her planet and tangled her metaphorical hair. Artificial Intellect was a myth of course – everyone knew that even with an entire human neural network simulated, some unknown spark, some catalyst was required to turn processing potency to self-aware intellect – but it was a myth whose averacity was tested in the emergent properties of a sufficiently complex, distributed and semi-redundant logic system – a system like the one that coordinated Blacbkie’s diatherine switches. Blackbie had never experienced a true crisis (and to the best of the Lady’s knowledge, licit and illicit, neither had her competitors), but the several emergency system refreshes in the last few years had cost more than the insurance firms were willing to pay without investigation. It was not a true problem, but it was a very expensive potential problem. And now the best distillation of the work that might solve her potential problem had boiled away above a rogue volcanic rift on an iceball backwater planet.
She would assign the problem to her husband. It would be a project for him. He had already demonstrated a passion for such logistical issues, and, more recently, a fathomless capacity for pleasing her.
* * * * * * *
Like diamonds in snow, the corpses of Gaya and her Brutes were undifferentiated from their surroundings; they walked and spoke and and ate and slept as any of the trillion members of the race of Man. Certainly there were some oddities in their demeanor, in their carriage and their interaction with the material plane, in their reception by the citizens of the worlds surrounding Star Cetaron, but they disappeared into a sample pool so large and varied as Mankind.
So were Bhumi, L’shmi and Vrahi, by any obvious measure, unnoticed by the gods. They were minor aspect deities from a planet of (admittedly) historical interest whose latest avatars were the first of a new species of mind-bearing Life, but such long-cliched antics were beneath the regard of any serious mentalities. Every new form of life required the injection of divine mind to initiate sentience; who could be bothered to care if such inconsequential goddesses, even if (or especially because) they were of Ohida, chose to renew such an obsolete hobby?
It would later be argued that the nature of this neocarnation was momentously different from any that had occurred before, that it was of a significance unequalled since the first breath of Man, but the universe of gods were too busy playing at their siege to listen.
* * * * * * *
Like diamonds in snow, Chandier and her sun sparkled among the several quadrillion stars in her small corner of all-that-is.
Her sun, whose name had long ago been forgotten even by his nearest neighbors, was still self-absorbed – as stars were wont to be – and hadn’t noticed the change. She didn’t mind. He’d notice soon enough.
She hummed her part in the Perpetual Canticle with a renewed vigor as she spun and swirled and danced. Ages had passed since she had been this vivacious, but it had been that long since her blood flowed, since the iron within her moved and oozed and renewed her. It flowed now, through a blemish dangerously near to the pockmark Mankind had occupied on her smallest continent. She didn’t worry. Grey ash billowed into her atmosphere, marring the fastidious blue-white interplay between her snowy peaks and icy seas and frosty clouds. It bothered her little. The soot was a cloak that would capture the little warmth her star spared her; it would nurture the seeds that had been planted. Let Man’s tiny nest be drowned in her molten blood – they would return. She had heard the songs the angels sang to her. She would be a garden. She would be The Garden.
THE END of A DIAMOND IN SNOW
