Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

Oma knows Nix’s psych profile, which means the bzou knows Nix’s psyche.

Nix pushes back the jumpsuit’s quilted hood and visor again— she’d had to lower it to help protect against a minor helium leak near the shaft’s rim—and tries to concentrate and figure out precisely what has gone wrong. Oma is quiet, dark, dead. The holo is off, so she’ll have to rely on her knowledge of the manual interface, the toggles and pressure pads, horizontal and vertical sliders, spinners, dials, knife switches . . . all without access to Oma’s guidance. She’s been trained for this, yes, but AI diagnostics and repair has never been her strong suit.

The bzou is crouched near her, Shiloh’s stolen eyes tracking her every move.

“Who’s there?” it asks.

? 176 ?

? Caitlín R. Kiernan ?

“I’m not playing this game anymore,” Nix mutters, and begins tripping the instruments that ought to initiate a hard reboot. “I’m done with you. Fifteen more minutes, you’ll be wiped. For all I know, this was sabotage.”

“Who’s there, skycap?” the bzou says again.

Nix pulls down on one of the knife switches, and nothing happens.

“Push on the door,” advises the bzou. “It’s blocked by a pail of water.”

Nix pulls the next switch, a multi-boot resort—she’s being stupid, so tired and rattled that she’s skipping stages—which should rouse the unresponsive Oma when almost all else fails. The core doesn’t reply. Here are her worst fears beginning to play themselves out.

Maybe it was a full-on panic, a crash that will require triple-caste post-mortem debugging to reverse, which means dry dock, which would mean she is utterly fucking fucked. No way in hell she can hand pilot the Blackbird back onto the rails, and this far off course an eject would only mean slow suffocation or hypothermia or starvation.

Nix speaks to the bzou without looking at it. She takes a tiny turnscrew from the kit strapped to her rebreather (which she hasn’t needed to use, and it’s been nothing but dead weight she hasn’t dared abandon, just in case).

Maybe she isn’t through playing the game, after all. She takes a deep breath, winds the driver to a 2.4 mm. mortorq bit, and keeps her eyes on the panel. She doesn’t need to see the bzou to converse with it.

“All right,” she says. “Let’s assume you have a retract sequence, that you’re a benign propagation.”

“Only press the latch,” it says. “I am so weak, I can’t get out of bed.”

“Fine. Grandmother, I’ve come such a very long way to visit you.”

Nix imagines herself reading aloud to Maia, imagines Maia’s rapt attention and Shiloh in the doorway.

“Shut the door well, my little lamb. Put your basket on the table, and then take off your frock and come and lie down by me. You shall rest a little.”

? 177 ?

? The Road of Needles ?

Shut the door. Shut the door and rest a little . . .

Partial head crash, foreign-reaction safe mode. Voluntary coma.

Nix nods and opens one of the memory trays, then pulls a yellow bus card, replacing it with a spare from the console’s supply rack.

Somewhere deep inside Oma’s brain, there’s the very faintest of hums.

“It’s a code,” Nix says to herself.

And if I can get the order of questions right, if I can keep the bzou from getting suspicious and rogueing up . . .

A drop of sweat drips from her brow, stinging her right eye, but she ignores it. “Now, Grandmother, now please listen.”

“I’m all ears, child.”

“And what big ears you have.”

“All the better to hear you with.”

“Right . . . of course,” and Nix opens a second tray, slicing into Oma’s comms, yanking two fried transmit-receive bus cards. She hasn’t been able to talk to Phobos. She’s been deaf all this fucking time.

The CPU hums more loudly, and a hexagonal arrangement of startup OLEDs flash to life.

One down.

“Grandmother, what big eyes you have.”