Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 166

by Neil Clarke

  Once upon a time, he believed the stars decided everything. Now, Yu folk had changed the stars with their own hands.

  And what sort of future would this mean for the Kingdom?

  The Book of Revelation was silent in his hand.

  3: Mirror

  A tiny grain of dust fell into his eye. Thirty-five hundred years later, the great serpent blinked.

  His eyes were immense, exotic spaces formed of sixty million stellar black holes. Light advanced through the four-dimensional space-time of the cosmos, finally sliding along its curvature into the black hole cluster, and it was perceived by the giant snake.

  Every feeble little ray, whether it originated in a dying star or a dim, rarefied nebula—even if attenuated to a few quanta by a difficult journey of ten million years—would, in the end, be captured by the serpent’s eyes.

  This grain of dust was no different.

  In a flash, it disintegrated in the black hole. In the twinkling of an eye, the sealed biosphere of the arc was ripped open by black hole tidal forces. The power source in the hollow sphere died at once. The intelligent lifeforms transported by the sphere couldn’t change their interstellar trajectory, whether or not they had predicted this fate.

  When the giant snake had blinked, the elastic space in the black holes gave rise to an oscillation. This released gravitational waves that rippled outward. After ten billion years, this fluid gravitational glance would propagate throughout the universe.

  The great snake looked upon his body.

  It was an immense body of stars and matter ten billion lightyears long. Its density was not uniform, as it consisted of dozens of galactic clusters, each cluster containing tens of millions of nebulae, every nebula containing hundreds of billions of star systems. As for the dust and other matter orbiting these stars, it was not quantifiable. And there was hot and cold interstellar gas, mingled with radiating energy, that with all the rest formed the great serpent.

  His body was so colossal that when he gazed upon the tip of his tail, he saw it as it was ten billion years before. He was completely ignorant of his tail’s current state. Ideas of “current” or “now” were fuzzy concepts to him at best.

  Just after noticing the wound-like breach in his body, he thought it must have resulted from the exertion of blinking. But he soon realized that couldn’t be: the gravitational waves of that blink couldn’t have reached so far yet.

  A spasm moved the section of the serpent’s body near the breach. The movement was faint, but directly caused two thousand galaxies to collide with one another. A magnificent radiance arose, two hundred million lightyears in extent.

  Five million years later, the awesome spectacle began to pour into the great snake’s eyes, but the breach was unchanged. It was like another fathomless eye, calmly regarding him. And yet, it was not a black hole. The celestial bodies near it were not affected by that sort of irresistible gravitation.

  Thus, the serpent knew the breach was not in his body.

  It was a breach in space itself.

  The space he existed in was finite, yet limitless, warped so much by his gravity that it formed a hypersphere with no beginning and no end. Extend himself in any direction and he could eventually bite his own tail. He didn’t want to become an accidental self-devouring serpent, so he simply left well enough alone.

  The great snake grew captivated with the breach five million lightyears from his eyes. He watched it, rapt, gathering any information that escaped from it:

  The luster of stars reminiscent of primordial times, just barely discernible. Immense, brilliant air masses birthing countless galaxies. Whenever space shifted, the hot spots scattered throughout ejected matter that formed long, thin nebulae. When huge quantities of information passed through this merely three thousand lightyear diameter breach, wondrous images were diffracted out, and these followed curved space gracefully into the great serpent’s eyes. He began to perceive a being much like him, an immense lizard.

  After a brief eight thousand years of reflection, the snake began to adjust the distribution of galaxies within himself. He ignited three hundred supernovae. Their positions were all decided in advance, and their shockwaves interfered with one another just so, forming meaningful patterns.

  He was sure that on the other side of the breach, the lizard would see his great efforts. Through some kind of intuition, he also knew the lizard would understand his meaning.

  He waited twenty million years for the lizard’s reply—and that was just counting from his side. It might have been longer for the lizard over there, if the lizard spoke before seeing his message.

  “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  Twenty million years had passed. Trillions of tons of matter had been converted into energy, becoming forever-useless heat in space. All for two simple greetings.

  With unprecedented enthusiasm, the serpent went into action. He altered galaxy cluster motion, mustered a dense cloud of primeval particles spread across three lightdays, and began to accelerate star manufacture. He hadn’t been this busy since just after the birth of the cosmos.

  Stars were born unceasingly, and they matured and exploded, and eight hundred million years later, a sentence took shape:

  “Where do you come from?”

  The great serpent waited patiently and watched. Another 1.2 billion years passed, and the lizard’s reply came through the breach:

  “From a universe egg adjacent to you.”

  They proceeded to communicate through a kind of self-elaborated language. Every word in this language included its meaning and its position in the whole semantic network. When the great snake saw “universe egg,” he immediately understood what the lizard meant.

  There was no distance between adjacent universes. Space itself did not exist outside a universe.

  He was in a universe. Although massive, he wasn’t really unbounded. The quantity of elementary particles in this universe was finite, after all, and each particle could only be in a finite number of states. The universe, therefor, could only be in a finite number of states. Precisely speaking, this number was equal to the number of possible states of elementary particles, raised to the power of the number elementary particles in the universe.

  Thus, the number of possible universes was also finite. This meant if you went far enough, after browsing enough universes, you could in the end find a universe identical to yours.

  Seemingly endless time passed. The snake conversed with the lizard, constantly consuming stars. Time was meaningless for them.

  “How did the breach between our universes come to be?”

  “I do not know. Perhaps because I blinked.”

  “Just before the breach, I blinked as well.”

  “Does time pass at the same rate for both of us?”

  “As long as our times are flowing in the same direction, it is not an issue.”

  “So, causality is the same for both of us . . . ”

  Ten billion years, long enough for galaxies to be born and die, was just long enough for them to exchange a few phrases. The giant snake gazed at the breach, at the small segment of the lizard that was visible. Entranced, he began to feel they’d been conversing since the birth of the universe, or that their dialogue was so ancient as to be measureless.

  The lizard was the only other being he knew of in existence. He wondered why they could understand each other. Among nearly limitless universes, communication had occurred between the two of them alone. It was like a fantasy, a dream. Perhaps it was likely that information passing through the breach underwent mysterious transformation. If the topology of the semantic network remained unchanged, he would be unable to confirm the meaning of the lizard’s words.

  So, he asked:

  “What if it is like this . . . when I asked, ‘Where do you come from?’ . . . you thought I asked, ‘How many eyes do you have?’ And you replied, ‘Three.’ And I thought you said, ‘From a universe egg adjacent to you.’ Well?”

  This comple
x question took three billion years to organize. The lizard’s answer was succinct:

  “What difference would it make?”

  After a brief two thousand years of contemplation, the great serpent felt relieved.

  But another question disturbed his peace. What if the breach was just a tangled region of local space-time in his universe? Such a tangle might change certain light rays’ routes in the past and future, reflecting them back to his eyes. In other words, there might be no adjacent universe, no lizard, no breach, just a gravitational reflector, a mirror reflecting the serpent’s past or future.

  If he defined the universe as all of time and space he could contact, and defined himself as everything in the universe, then this mirror hypothesis would be absolutely fitting.

  He carefully watched the lizard, hoping to recognize himself in it, hoping to see his reflection. But he soon gave up, because he didn’t really know what his development had looked like, let alone how his future self might appear. In this universe, the most difficult thing to know and recognize was oneself.

  The lizard put a question to him:

  “What do you look like over there?”

  The great serpent gazed calmly at the stars in his mirror, and replied:

  “Come over and see.”

  Then he began to wait.

  A billion years later, in the wake of the breach’s slow expansion, something began to emerge, extending gradually, something formed of a hundred familiar and unfamiliar nebulae. It was a toe. And the giant snake knew the lizard had accepted his invitation.

  He watched stars on the far side of the breach slowly moving, forming a resplendent smile.

  Originally published in Chinese in Science Fiction World, May 2006.

  Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

  About the Author

  ShakeSpace is a Shanghainese author of science fiction and fantasy. He loves to build worlds with imagination and language. His stories have been published in Science Fiction World, and his longer works include the science fiction novel The Scythe Holder and the fantasy series Jiuzhou. When he’s not hard at work sitting in front of a computer, he is probably playing with his son or training at the gym.

  Power to Yield

  Bogi Takács

  In memory of A

  0.

  Oyārun closed her eyes to concentrate on the video she was viewing through her neural interface. She wanted to finish her civics homework assignment fast. Just a few more hours, and then she would be done with everything that wasn’t on the preengineering track. She could get back to what actually interested her, lose herself in that . . . Not now, she wrenched her thoughts back to her assignment. The attention shift was almost painful.

  Pick a high-importance political event in recent history. List three major stakeholders and present their viewpoints, with special attention to conflicts. It sounded hard. She was a math person, not even sure where to begin. She picked this event because it had happened shortly after Independence.

  The recording was three-dimensional, but relatively low resolution. Oyārun watched, trying to recall some context that she could use for her assignment. At the time the recording had been made, beat-up space transports carrying refugees from the Empire were still streaming into the small planetoid of Eren, and a vote had just been passed to increase ambient gravity in living areas. People were still hammering out the political details of the new state; the High Council was yet unformed, existing only as an informal social conglomerate of like-minded leaders.

  These leaders were standing on a podium, surrounded by a vast crowd. Oyārun only recognized some of them from her previous studies, and the person now moving to the front to speak was unfamiliar to her.

  She pulled up the annotations for the video, cross-referenced them with the Eren-wide social network. Aramīn, also known as Armyn, formerly of the Imperial House of Gubhas on the High Plains of Emek. Male, living alone, not interested in—she shooed away the panel. It was helpful to know he was still alive—he wasn’t in his elder years yet, but people had died in all sorts of accidents in the early days. She wasn’t interested in his personal circumstances beyond that. She suddenly remembered something. Wasn’t he one of the very few Imperial nobles who’d supported independence?

  Aramīn looked mixed, Imperial and Plainsfolk, possibly also Northerner. She couldn’t make out the details of his face beyond his pale skin and his long black hair, carefully braided with thinner braids joining into three larger ones, hanging well past his shoulders on both sides, and—she’d seen when he turned around—also along his back. A symbol of nobility. The video did not allow her to zoom in further, and she resisted requesting an interpolation; she could pull up his profile again later.

  She missed the first few sentences.

  “ . . . denounce oppression. Denounce subjugation. And take a firm stand.” The crowd seemed restless, murmuring. Pulling at their scarves, scratching their heads under their caps. Aramīn went on, speaking firmly and loudly, his voice carrying even past the amplification. “Imperial Seers were subjugated and forced to labor for the Court, the very same Court that declared a major cognotype to be Undesirable, its bearers to be eradicated from the gene pool. The same attitude undergirds both: a greed to prescribe value. A greed to be the only source of truth and justice. A greed.”

  The crowd was quieting down. Paying attention? Oyārun leaned forward, even though that wouldn’t help her see better. She was intrigued.

  “We are all here together now. Undesirables and Seers, from all peoples of the Empire of the Three Stars, the Empire of Emek: Imperials, Worowans, Northerners, Plainsfolk, and more. And the people who have stood with Undesirables and Seers in solidarity.”

  Aramīn paused. Took a deep breath.

  “You all know that I am neither a Seer nor an Undesirable. Yet I chose to stand by the cause of independence. I am Armyn, formerly the head of a noble house, and head of the High Plains Research Institute. A surgeon, a medical scientist. I come from a high position. And more—I supplied young Seers for the noble houses, I trained them and let them be eaten alive by the insatiable hunger of the Court, always desperate for more magic. Until those young Seers said no more. Until I said no more. Until we said no more. They rose up and I rose up. They spoke and I listened.”

  A chill ran along Oyārun’s spine. Aramīn spoke in an even tone, but he was brutally direct. People wouldn’t speak about the war in such a straightforward way anymore. He went on, not backing down:

  “I cannot claim to know what it is like to be a Seer. I never had to wear Seer’s robes. I never had my head shaved, treated with a poison so that my hair would never grow out again, so that I would stand out in a crowd, so that I would not be able to escape, would not be able to hide.

  “But now we stand all together. On this land, this planetoid deemed uninhabitable by the Empire, we are equal.”

  Oyārun watched, entirely breathless, not even daring to fidget for fear that the magic of the moment would pass. Aramīn went on.

  “Yet whenever you look at me, you see me—and you see a symbol of Imperial might. You see my hair past my shoulders. You see a man who was never tortured. And you remember your pain.” His voice lifted and lifted higher, working itself into a crescendo:

  “I say we are equal, and my actions shall mirror my words. We shall all be equal, and I am willing to take the first step. We are not just Seer and not just Undesirable and not just anyone else—we are all this and more, we are a people, a people arising from murder and bloodshed, a people arising from genocide, a people who have fought hard for our freedom.” He dropped his voice abruptly, and spoke in a quiet, calm tone: “And I shall be just like anyone else.”

  Aramīn raised a hand, a blade glinting into the camera for a moment. He cut off his thick braids, one by one, with motions that seemed impossibly practiced. With an economy of gesture. He turned to one of his fellow councilpeople, someone Oyārun recognized: Esokaruwe, a former Imperial Seer and
a leader of resistance fighters. A fearsome warrior.

  “Esteemed Esokaruwe, if you please.” He handed the blade to her. Esokaruwe seemed stunned, then began to cut his hair, confused, hands moving slowly, jaggedly. Oyārun thought she must not have been privy to Aramīn’s plan.

  It took a while. Esokaruwe steeled herself, tensed her muscles as she worked, hacking away at the remaining hair, shaving Aramīn’s scalp. Then Aramīn turned to her and said something in an undertone, too quiet for the camera to pick up. She gestured for him to turn around and passed her hands slowly over his scalp. Oyārun could not sense it through the recording, but she knew that Esokaruwe was using the māwal to scour Aramīn’s head. He would not grow hair again. Oyārun ran a hand along her own hairless scalp, in an attempt to ground herself in physical reality. But she wouldn’t pause the recording. She had to see it all for herself.

  The other councilpeople who hadn’t been Seers were already lining up, dazed and shocked, milling in place. Limbs twitching as they waited for their turn. Aramīn had not run this by them, Oyārun thought. But she knew this had been the moment when Ereni became Ereni; from the disparate groups of Seers and Undesirables and whoever else had escaped to the planetoid with them, one united people began forming at this very instant. Blades flashed here and there among the crowd, and slowly, people removed their head coverings. Some were bald former Seers, stunned by the sudden turn of events wrenched out of their course that even their precognition had not foreseen. Others were Undesirables of various ethnicities, uncomfortable, but willing to join the Seers. Cutting their hair in silence, with only the low murmurs of people asking each other for help. Making a point of solidarity. With all the weapons in the crowd, there was not a moment of violence. Oyārun watched, breathless, until the video finished playing.