Day One

"The problem with Planet is not that she didn't make mistakes, but that when you know as much as she did, it becomes easy to bury your mistakes in mystery."

Betaine's long legs flickered across the marble floor as he paced, his shoes making purposeful clicking noises that seemed to propel his sentences from his tight-lipped, reluctant face. He almost looked like a clockwork man, dark hair smooth and undeserved, a pretty face completely ignored, a body that did its vigorous best no matter how little attention he paid to it. He glowed like a youth who cared, whereas the truth of the matter was that Betaine did not give a rusty goddamn for his mortal coil but flitted from project to project, hoping to find the ephemeral soap bubble of purpose, the thing that would cement his soul to this world and ensure he always had plenty of reading material and people to lecture at.

Bala found herself interested in him, in his sharp, fractured intellect...he was so utterly consumed by whatever he was currently thinking that she, as a goddess of passions and worshipped by the Shivros, found little in him she could toy with to amuse herself. Even his anger was channeled into his mental engagements. He hated and loved his projects in equal amounts and with a savagery that would've revolutionized the tired science world if he'd been able to focus on anything for more than a year or two. Bala rarely found a mortal so completely consumed by what they did, so she did a rare thing and listened to the words being spat against the conservatory walls.

"Mystery in these times! Everything she's done that hasn't been related to her...peculiar profession..fits on the head of a pin. You'd think after ten thousand years, there'd be something more than a few love letters, restaurant receipts, ship repair invoices...and all of it only within the last few hundred or so. It's inexplicable that she kept no diaries, had no children..."

Bala twirled lazily in her cloud of red silk, picking at her teeth with a gold-capped finger.

"Perhaps, young man, you are forgetting that after a few hundred years, almost everything rots...disintegrates...goes kaput. Even the best data cubes barely last three, four millennia. People too."
She smiled her carnivorous smile, filled with lacquered black teeth, small diamonds and opals dusting the surfaces like stars. Betaine turned his head sharply towards the window that wrapped around a quarter of the room, stared out into the darkness toward fields. The silvery ring of a passenger ship left deep red streaks across the black fade of the horizon as it landed, the spindles doing a hiccupy jerk as they spun. He registered the beauty of the view without expression.

Memories stirred within him and he acknowledged them duly, the data connections came seamlessly. Rings of fire revealed as ancient messengers of God, harbingers of ill times to be avoided, wheels that spun throughout space, careening on wild courses that consumed distance and time in a burst of joy. These wheels, hundreds of miles across, were controlled at the central chamber by the most fanatical of speed junkies. He'd met one before, the Controller barely out of his teens, his movements irritable and clumsy. He'd knocked things over frequently with his gestures and eventually returned to the ship to thrash out his claustrophobia. They felt confined to even planets, needed the great voids around them to be comfortable.

"Tch tch..." Bala said, her syrupy voice wriggling into his ear and pulling his attention from the ship. "Like a child's top...no grace, no style. They must've put a rookie piloting that thing. Everyone on that ship will be vomiting."

Betaine's pale green eyes blinked once, twice. He took a breath.

"After almost two years of being strapped to a pungent, cackling Farshi archivist while he accessed every recorded session of Planet's, that's 934,867 sessions, by the way; after researching every majour and minour political, economic, religious and sociological decision altered by her visits, after witnessing her unorthodox and frankly really bizarre methods of accomplishing whatever the Council sets out for her to do, after reading every scrap of this facade of a private life, I'm even further lost as to why you hired me to find her and how this isn't just another manipulation of events by her to bring about some stupid revolution or other inane....story."

It was the first time since Bala met him that the young man had used the word. She counted it as progress.

She rotated onto her back, floating just above his height, her hair a lustrous, inky waterfall to the floor. Her eyes, black from lid to lid, glittered in the golden glow from the orb lights anchored to the pillars in the conservatory. Her believers argued that under her skin was a whole Universe where the souls of the faithful existed forever in a brawl/orgy where the passions generated birthed new worlds. When a Shivros passed on, his self was sucked through her eyes, focused and purified and given an indestructible form.

So it was said.

While imposing, she was charming enough to put anyone who caught her fancy at ease and maintained a relatively human size and appearance, insisting it was too much effort to be anything other than what she really was. Even if he had been affected by the aura of power that surrounded her, Betaine would have felt no fear in her presence.

"It's a thought I've entertained. In fact, she's disappeared for decades before and will just...turn up one day, continuing the conversation we were having before she left as if all that time was nothing. Well, I suppose to her, it *is* nothing anymore."

"She would have just left for Regulskek when you contacted the college. So why?"

"Don't interrupt, dear boy. You're much more attractive when your mouth is shut."

Rolling her eyes, she made a sinuous and complicated gesture with her gold-capped hands.

"Honestly, I couldn't tell you why, but perhaps our last meeting would shed some light for you. I don't store my memories like an Archivist, and I've usually no need to hang on to thoughts I had six millennia ago. My priests keep track of those for me."

She smiled at her joke. Betaine's mouth twitched into what might pass for a grimace.

"I can certainly gift you with a vision, however you have to accept it. I'm not getting in trouble for not following protocol." The young man sighed, nodded, his shoe tapping against the copper-veined marble floor.

The gifting was unimpressive. Bala relied on the depths and complexities of her memories to astound the lucky host rather than the dog-and-pony flash many of her fellow godlings used. Her hands glowed faintly red and she laid a needle-tipped finger against his forehead. A surge of white blankness overwhelmed him and Betaine crashed like a sack of dice to the floor.

"This was the last conversation I had with Planet, three months ago..."

The bar was a graceful thing, composed of carefully blended curves of a hundred different woods, treated to release their scents in a thick, sweet cloud that evoked memories of forests across the Universe, quiet dreams of green and deep loam. Drinks were kept simple and the bartender extended lines of credit that reached seven or eight digits for some of the more prodigious drinkers who frequented the place. It was a favourite spot of Planet's when something upset her and she had made Bala swear on her ten thousand sons that she, Bala, yes you, would absolutely under no circumstances whatsoever, don't you dare ignore me on this, will not invoke in any way, shape or form, even if you think it's an emergency, your godly presence and start a goddamn bar-fight, I don't care about your reputation, I'm sick of being thrown out of places to have a quiet drink in.

Bala had acquiesced after much pouting and rarely showed up except when Planet needed a drink and to give someone an earful. Tonight, however, she had ported over as quickly as possible and found Planet slouched in a booth alongside the bar's 40,000 cubic foot miniature forest, staring through the glass at two diminuitive black bears clinging to the evergreen treetops, snapping fish-birds from their nests with comical gnashing. The bears were the size of a quarter and looked like mobile burrs, their prey, tiny squeaky slivers of blue almost too small to see.

Normally the sheer ridiculousness of Mother Nature done on such a small scale never failed to amuse Planet, but her lips were pursed and her fingers drummed erratically on the Tavnasian rosewood. Bala lowered herself until the tips of her perfect, lotus-shaped feet were an inch above the pale ironwood floor. She slid into the seat and stared at her friend, prepared to wait until Planet spoke.

The first thing one noticed about Planet was how hard it was to separate her from the scenery. She seemed a statue until she moved and had an unnerving habit of forgetting to blink. Her wardrobe consisted of gathered white tunics above ugly brown workman's pants that had a hard time staying up on her boyish hips and a pair of beaten old leather slippers. Her skin was smooth and pale, a smattering of freckles across her upper shoulders. Planet's face was well-composed, balanced between a small jaw, straight nose and a fluffy mess of silver hair which was currently being tugged and frazzled with a long-fingered hand.

"When was the last time you were bored, Bala?"

Behind Planet, a blue-skinned woman stood and began shouting at her companion, ugly, hateful things, and everyone but Bala and Planet turned to stare.

"Bala."

"I swear on the moon of my soul that I have nothing to do with that, but you are making this very difficult. Could you, perhaps, explain what the hell you mean?"

Planet shrugged.

"Last month it was Snav. I almost fell asleep in front of the Lord of Lions because he's so much like his twelfth-great-grandfather that I might have just sent a recording of myself from back then. In a few years, he'll have to make a choice to allow core-drilling and decide against it, which will save his country. I couldn't bring myself to care. This month it's Regulskek. More black market problems. Another budding religious war. It's nothing new."

The goddess tapped her gilded nails against the forest glass, startling a flock of crows no larger than pinheads. They looped in strange, lazy patterns, crying warnings across the trees, pretending raucous laughter at the intrusive noise even as they scattered.

"You told me the only way you can do your job is because sentient nature rarely varies."

"I'm wishing it would."

"Oh seriously. You've dealt with dry spells and tedium, your whole *purpose* is tedium and words, and you're getting upset over a few throwback systems who make hobbies of planetary destruction and economic ruin? You're even pouting."

"I am not."

The woman behind them had raised her volume, was screaming flecks of spittle, her words indistinct as she moved from Standard to her own guttural language. Planet ordered another drink and raised an eyebrow at Bala.

"Still not me, but I could translate if you'd like...ahem...that whatever was in your creche/home...unholy, a great void of roaring...I will not hold to me, hmm...embrace it? You listen for it only and will listen no longer for my footsteps outside your creche/home. Aah, a break up is a beautiful thing."

"Okay, I am pouting. What do you suggest?"

"Hmm. I'd tell you to come stay with me, but I've got my hands full with another Miracle."

"The conversion of Theruman's heir that I've been hearing about? The sun god?"

"Tch...it took a miraculous amount of effort to seduce him. Theruman is livid his son is one of my castellan priests...old bastard tried to force a heat plague on one of my landing fields," said Bala, a bitter smirk on her painted lips.
"He didn't get anywhere, but..." she trailed off, noting Planet's glassy expression.

The goddess sighed.

"Look, take a lover, take a vacation, take something. I know I tease but I've never seen you like this. You! You sat in a Gekkin sensory dep jail for forty years and came out asking if your ship had been ticketed."

Planet smiled thinly. The screaming woman lunged at her companion, who barely dodged and shouted for the bartender.

"Maybe I'll get a dog."

"And maybe I'll have to console you in twenty years when it dies again. Do something different."

Her fingers paused, wrapped in thick glittering strands of white hair, Planet looked up at Bala, the creases on her forehead smoother but not quite gone. Worry was in her eyes and only her consummate skill kept it out of her voice.

"*Can* we do something different?"