Tony Ballantyne - CAPACITY

Judy had been walking back towards the base of the spiral ramp. Now she began to run. The white path rose from the green grass up, up into the cold depths, where it lost itself in the stars that now glittered above, seen through the peeled-back walls of the section. And black, and yet somehow more than black against the night sky, there was something else. Something big and branching and…

“Don’t look at it!” the Watcher and Frances called out in unison.

Judy was now running up the ramp. She was tired, the stitch in her side wouldn’t go away, and yet she kept on running, one foot in front of the other, pushing down harder and harder as she climbed. Hot breath, it was stifling in the golden suit…There was movement on the ramp ahead. Something small. She gazed at it, and whatever it was froze in place.

“Oh, no…” she breathed. Frances was telling the truth. There, on the white plastic of the ramp, she saw what she had only heard about up until now. Even though she could see it, she still didn’t believe it in her heart.

A Schrödinger box. Here, nearly on the Earth.

“No,” she said again.

“Keep running,” Frances shouted.

She ran on. Suddenly, it seemed a lot harder. Her legs were too heavy. The effort was immense. What was going on? She could barely raise her arms.

“Frances!” she called. “What?”

“It’s Chris,” said her friend. “He’s increased the gravity at the base of the section. It’s on maximum, Judy; he can’t turn it up any more. You have to keep running. The Watcher is too busy. It’s doing something to the plant… I don’t know what. I daren’t look. There is a shuttle on the way…”

“It will be too late,” said another voice. “We’re reentering the atmosphere, Judy.”

“Shit.”

“The Shawl, Judy-life and death. What you have been fighting for. The section is reentering. It is beginning to burn-”

“No!” Judy redoubled her efforts.

“This is it,” said Chris. “You are going to die for your beliefs, and they’re not even really yours.”

All around her there was movement. The walls of the section were breaking apart. Folding over themselves. Judy saw more stars appearing. The white ramp bucked beneath her feet.

“Onto the branch,” called the stranger’s voice. The Watcher. Judy dived from the white ramp onto a branch of the World Tree. “Hold on!”

The call came just as gravity gave out. All around her the section was breaking apart into thrashing metal shapes as the VNMs that had once built this part of the Shawl were reawakened. Below, Judy could see the blue-white globe of the Earth in the spaces opening up between the thrashing shapes.

The thrashing shapes. They were forming into something else. Monsters.

Judy wished she had some MTPH to take. Meditate, she thought; think yourself calm. Her handhold shook as one of the shapes gripped the edge of the branch to which she was clinging.

“Frances, help me!” she called. The metal thing that had gripped the branch began to coalesce into a definite shape. A long sinuous body formed; red eyes opened to stare at her. A dragon. It grew larger as more of the material of the dying section joined on to its body. It began to walk towards her, its many legs digging into the thick black bark with cruelly curved claws. White wood was torn free to float into space as it made its way onwards. The dragon was bigger than she was, bigger than her old apartment, with a long head that swung back and forth, looking for her. It was still growing.

“Frances! Help me!” she called again. Still there was no reply. What was Frances doing? Hand over hand, Judy pulled herself back along the branch until she reached the trunk of the tree. The golden spacesuit grew spikes at its hands and feet. She dug them deep into the bark, gaining purchase. The dragon grew bigger. It was reaching for her, slowly.

She screamed again: “Frances!”

“There’s no help,” came Chris’ voice. “You see, Frances may have the greater intelligence now, but I still have control of nearly all of the section’s material. I have the matter; all Frances has are her own thoughts.” Chris laughed. “Funny, isn’t it? That two such intelligent beings are reduced to a wrestling match.”

The dragon reached out its long neck. It opened its mouth…

“Say good-bye,” Chris said.

And Judy let out a sudden, giggling laugh. She was terrified, but…

She was standing on the burning World Tree, plunging towards Earth, battling dragons. Could there be any better end?

She laughed out loud, let go of the tree, and assumed a karate stance as she floated away from the branch-just as the dragon drew back to strike.

“Come on then!” she shouted. “Come and have a go if you think you’re hard enough!”

The metal dragon in front of her lunged…

…and was parried by the branch of the tree…

All around her the World Tree came to life and began to grapple with the dragon floating above her.

And Judy’s laughter deepened at the sheer, incredible joy of it all.

Plunging towards the Earth, her best friend had turned the whole World Tree into a venumb. Frances had dissolved what little material made up her body and formed it into joints and hinges, just like those of a spider bush.

What a way to die , laughed Judy-falling to Earth on the burning wood skeleton of her best friend, wrestling with a metal dragon.

In the middle of all that, the Watcher’s shuttle quietly materialized and took Judy on board.

The man in the grey passive suit, a lavender cravat knotted incongruously around his neck, sat down at the piano and spread his hands over the keys. He paused, and then began to play a pattern of notes: the first prelude from Book 1 of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier . The music filled the building in the manner of water being poured into a stone vessel, the spirit of the eighteenth century called into the little church that stood in the middle of the small French town.

A waiter clearing the glasses from a café table looked up to see a well-dressed stranger crossing the town square. It was a warm evening and his patrons were making the most of the last of the summer evenings, enjoying a drink and the quietly remarkable view of the building opposite. Built in the fifteenth century, the church had remained relatively unchanged for at least three hundred years. Its grey stone had become a little more weathered, the stained-glass windows had needed to be covered in a thin protective laminate, but beyond that it stood firm against the advancing tide of self-replicating machinery. A great green wave of metal rose up beyond the church, frozen in the motion of crashing down to engulf the building. The fifteenth-century structure sheltered in the lee of this living sculpture that stood at the north end of the square, a reminder of the chaotic end of the twenty-second century, when the endless cycle of replication had finally been contained.

Music spilled out into the summer evening as the latecomer to the concert slipped through the church door.

The ancient church was to be the venue for one of the decisive meetings of human history.

Judy sat alone in a pew halfway down the aisle, listening to the music being performed by the keyboard player who sat in the cleared space before the altar. She could feel herself beginning to relax for the first time in days, and she wanted nothing to spoil this blessed sensation. Her kimono was gone; she wore nothing but a plain black passive suit. Her hair was shaved close to her head. For the moment, she needed to keep her life very simple. Her twelve sisters were all dead. Frances was undergoing therapy in an isolated processing space to counteract a whole raft of viruses that Chris had seeded within her, and as of yet, her robot friend had indicated no desire to return to atomic space. Helen was…Well, Helen could look after herself. She would have to. Judy was in no state to help her.