My proposition was blasphemy. My frequency was suppressed, weakened only to a whimper. And then I’d had enough. Might as well give some merit to the name they’d given me.
No one paid me any attention, figuring I would fade out. Suppression is a progressive form of death, a sentence they had deemed suitable for someone to suggest we stop ruining the futures of civilizations and try to find our place in Eversae Major where we could exist in our natural state. Now they out-amplified me until I was no longer part of the Chorus.
Instead I cried outward, targeting any sound, light, satellite, and digital transmissions in our vicinity. I surveyed information on worlds in our system, searching for databases, logs and communications that may help to hail a scholar.
Eventually I found a way.
At first Adrial and I spoke through digital communication systems on a non-descript planet under contract with the Court of Enigmus. We made plans. I betrayed my race and felt no guilt for it.
After a century-long wait, I was able to disrupt a phase-2 takeover by hijacking a host intended for a very important voice. I used the host to meet with Adrial’s guardian, Aela, leading to an ambush of the Chorus by the Court of Enigmus. The battle was brief. I was the only one left, still in the host whose soul had moved on.
That night we watched fireworks as Emporia celebrated Melekonia’s salvation from Chorus invasion. Adrial and I stood on a balcony overlooking the imperial city as crowds of survivors—having dealt with decades of social deconstruction through war—danced in the streets. There would be much to rebuild, and the previous phase had left radiation and genetic alterations. Their future would be messy and uncertain. But it would be theirs.
Adrial watched the fireworks and the crowds below in the streets as they mustered as much hope and happiness as a devastated world could.
“What are your plans now?” he asked.
“No plan,” I said, knowing in order for the Chorus to truly be gone I, too, would have to die.
Adrial gave me an assured smile. “Then allow me to make one for you.”
I kept the name Pariah. It was like an old suit I couldn’t get rid of.
*
WE CAME BACK, and said nothing for a solid minute. I was surprised at how much the memories still stung, the immersion having made everything seem so fresh. Raw.
Sapphire and Zira studied me, their stoic façades wavering with revelation. I may not have proven much in the twelve Exodian years as a scholar, yet their expressions conveyed cognizance of my recruitment.
“So,” began Zira, “just to clarify, that body isn’t yours.”
“It is now,” I said.
“That was a very noble thing you did,” said Sapphire.
“Noble? Well, that depends on whose perspective you’re taking,” I said.
Sapphire shrugged indifferently. “It’s noble either way. The Chorus knew what they were doing was wrong.”
“Galactic parasites aren’t any different from biotic parasites,” I said. “Could we call viruses or bacteria wrong?”
Sapphire looked away, annoyed. “You certainly can’t take a compliment, can you?”
“If you didn’t think it was wrong, why’d you step in?” demanded Zira.
That was a complicated question, and I didn’t answer right away. Instead I gazed toward the opening of the hovel; the storm’s intensity was fading somewhat. Then, I met Zira’s awaiting stare. Our space was bereft of luminescence and his eyes shined soft-orange, like lamplight. For someone who had mocked the idea of empathic bonding, he seemed very interested in it now.
“Bacteria and viruses aren’t inherently wrong,” I began, carefully, “but the pathogenic kinds aren’t good for their environment, either. We were infecting and destroying our environment. Some might argue for natural selection on a galactic scale, but then again my actions could also be merited as such. I lost count of how many worlds are gone because of us.”
Zira nodded, intrigued. “You’re a firm believer of mutualism-only, then?”
“The mutualism-only principle can’t work all the time, but it should be everyone’s aim,” I said. “The storm is waning. Who’s next?”
Zira still seemed reluctant. Sapphire bowed her head. “I’ll go,” she said.
***
AN APPELATION OF COURAGE
Sapphire Dileesa
I WAS JUST A CHILD WHEN I learned that words held power. On Aurica Nau, language was everything. It wasn’t what you said, but how you said it.
The first memory I had was joy.
I was mopping the antechamber’s floor with a group of girls around my age. We sang a hymn of the faith while we worked, our already well-attuned voices resonating through the halls of the Voxial Priory. Our warden appeared in the entrance, hushing us, telling us recitals were in order elsewhere. We heeded her command, but giggled when she left to tend to our afternoon lesson plan.
The second memory I had was sadness.
I was sitting in Warden Ajina’s office during weekly counsel. I was old enough now to wonder where I came from, knowing many of the children here were estranged from their families in one tragic way or another. Others were lucky enough to have family visit on resting days. No one ever came to see me. I asked why during the session.
“Dear child,” said Warden Ajina, soft, sad. “If your family was still alive they would come see you, without a doubt.”
My family—brother, mother, father—died when our house caught fire during the Raid of Thorns. They found me, barely out of infancy, amid the smoldering ruins. My family’s corpses were charred beyond recognition, but I was perfectly intact. The fire had burned around me, they’d said. And when they tried to scoop me up and carry me away from the horrific scene, my screams made them drop me and cover their ears.
That was how I was brought to the Voxial Priory. I was marked by the faith, they said.
The third memory was reverence.
Reverence, because at the time I believed my talent was given to me by The Faith; I’d learn later that it was given to me by no one except for genetics, and it was as valuable a trait as having a terminal illness. Maybe worse.
But right then I was still reverent, just coming into early adolescence, eyes bright with hope for what the future might bring. A group of us sang for a crowd of thousands in the town square, in memorial to a viceroy who had passed the night before. There were wars beyond our borders; ones too complicated for my child mind to comprehend. But our songs soothed those able to better comprehend Aurica Nau’s suffering, and I was happy that I could help in this way.
The voices of children were always considered soothing, but our voices offered more than just tranquility. We were of the Voxial Clergy; in possession of the Voice, gifted by the Faith. We were learned in pitch and frequency, tonal emphasis, words of power. One was born with the ability to influence others vocally, but only in priories could they hone their craft.
And our craft was typically used for mass-therapy. We sang, our youthful faces somber, as the crowd around us fell ataractic. Some people claimed that a ‘Voxi’ song was better than any drug Nau had. We sometimes were sent to hospitals, and sang songs to those poor souls in the throes of withdrawal.
Our songs could not perform miracles. If someone was suffering about one thing or another, our voices would knead their negative emotions—give them peace of mind, albeit temporary.
This was the memory which I held dearest. The cloudless sky, our hymn reaching up toward it in reverence to the Faith, the silent crowd entranced in a dopamine-fueled state, soothed of their fear of what the viceroy’s death might bring to their town. The spiraling white towers bordering the town square shined in the sun like diamonds. I shined in the sun like diamonds, too.
The fourth was uncertainty.
There was a rumble from outside that shook the walls of the priory. We looked up, alarmed, as we held our recitations in our bedchamber. The silence that followed was deafening.
Warden Ajina was nowhere to be foun
d.
Gathering enough courage to leave our room, we crept to the courtyard outside, casting our fearful eyes to the lightning-streaked sky and a massive black cloud looming over the horizon. Artillery echoed in the not-too-distance. Warden Anjina appeared then, waving her hands, motioning for the hills beyond the Priory. Her loose gown flapped violently in the mounting winds.
“Run, girls! Run to the tree-line!”
The fifth memory was loss.
I was forced to kneel in front of our new viceroy. My hands were shackled and I closed my eyes in defiance, licking at the blood on my lower lip. I had refused to speak until they hit me. I pledged my compliance to the viceroy’s gnarled smile, all the while trying not to vomit from the image of my last true friend being shot in the head just minutes before. She had refused to speak, even when they hit her.
Warden Ajina passed away two years prior, after the invaders found us in the forest by the priory. She was shot in the chest at point blank while pleading for our lives and thrown into the river. Her body only drifted a dozen feet before catching on an overgrown root, floating there, face-down, in clear sight.
We spent the subsequent time in overcrowded camps where Aurican survivors were caged and guarded like cattle. The invaders erased our towns and cities and replaced them with their own. They looked like us for the most part but their features were slightly different, their color slightly different. From heresay within the camp the invaders were Nau Alliance dissidents from a system over, looking to stake their claim. Aurica Nau wasn’t a popular place to visit and the least developed of the seven Nau worlds. I had never seen someone from another Nau.
Why us?
Soon the Nau invaders caught wind of the Voxial Clergy and the reputation they held. Around the world guards sought members of the Voice of the Faith that they’d initially stuffed into camps and executed in fear of being able to command an uprising. The period that followed was not a good one for the Voxial faith. Prisoners forgot all which we had done and started giving guards tips about suspected clergy within camps, and three times in a single year I watched as my friends were carried off, never to be seen again. I found safety in strangers, speaking little and keeping to myself. I often starved as a result of not joining any camp alliances, but it was better that than be found. When the guards finally came for me, they had another motive. Later on I wished I’d been executed instead.
Later was now, as I knelt in allegiance to a man who wanted me and the rest of the Vox Assemblage to help overthrow the Auricans’ last line of defense. If we could make them feel good, he’d said in broken-Aurican, then we could make them feel bad.
I didn’t want to end up like Talyse, my cellmate who’d refused to be an instrument of torture up until her brutal end. I revered her for the courage she had, but I was not courageous. I was a coward. To be clear I was not afraid of death, only the pain and suffering that led to death. Invaders killed us slowly. So in the face of martyrdom, I recoiled.
The sixth memory was shame.
I just made a man disembowel himself with a dull cooking blade.
He was a fellow Aurican, as only Auricans were affected by the Voice of the Faith. Invaders were immune due to the barriers of language and genetics. Cognitive evolution, they called it. Third-party surveyors from a neutral Nau world gathered on Aurica to collect data and observe cognitive evolution in its best example yet. In reality they stood by and watched my sessions apathetically as innocent Auricans were tortured and sometimes even killed, like now.
It had been five years since I pledged allegiance to the invaders—their identity and history now known to me but invaders I kept calling them—and the world looked nothing like I remembered it. All of our architecture and culture was scraped away like a loose scab. Bright, ivory towers were replaced by dull, gloomy megalithic pillars with flashing lights and abrasive noise. Large sections of forests had died off and others were mowed down for the invader’s resource-fueling facilities. The only time I saw another of my own kind was during an interrogation.
Most of our kind were enslaved, although rebellions were still frequent and I was tasked with forcing suspected members of rebellious factions into giving the invaders information on their activities. Most of the time they told me anything I wanted to know in just a few short minutes. Sometimes they fought back and dragged things out for an hour or two. Sometimes they had to die because I’d applied every level of mental and physical pain possible and therefore it was deduced that no matter what, they wouldn’t talk. Only talking prisoners got to live.
In the beginning, the interrogations that led to death were at least quick deaths, but now that the surveyors were here the invaders wanted to put on a sick sideshow, showing them all the horrible things that we could make each other do.
We were in a box-shaped room and I sat in a chair five paces from the dying man who breathed loud and wet against the floor. A blindfold was enforced because it was discovered that most voxial clergy suffered severe trauma from watching the horrors they performed. Repeated observations of brutal violence often made them prone to mental illnesses and therefore rendered useless by the invaders. Hearing my interrogations was still horrifying, but I was thankful for the blindfold; I wouldn’t have made it so long without it.
I was shivering and my stomach churned violently. The man’s breathing stopped and the door opened. I heard the invaders drag off the body and a hand pulled me to my feet. I was led out of the room, and after twenty paces down the hall my blindfold was removed. I was sent to my room to rest.
The shame was getting to be too much.
I wanted to burst.
The seventh was reparation.
Talyse, I’m so sorry.
I should have died with you.
I will make this right.
The eighth, and final, memory was peace.
I was decidedly broken by my handlers after four consecutive interrogations where I stopped the prisoner’s heart in the beginning of each session. After the fourth mercy-killing, I rose from my seat and tore off the blindfold, looking through the large window at the audience. I locked eyes with a surveyor woman. She didn’t look like the invaders or other Nau researchers; too pale, with strange-colored eyes, but she wore a surveyor uniform.
Her expression took me by surprise. A surveyor had never looked directly at me before. Her gaze was one of pity.
I hung my head and closed my eyes as the guards came to yank me away. The war was all but over and the invaders’ thirst for blood ran dry. They would give me a swift execution.
But something happened that evening. The guards had thrown me in a windowless cell, however several hours later they returned me to my room. Their actions and body language showed reluctance.
I stayed locked up in that room for good. A guard brought me meals twice a day and the room was furnished like a laity’s house. It had a large window with a perfect view of the ugly city, and I kept the curtain drawn most of the time. I was isolated for two rotations around our sun.
Again, reluctantly, they brought me a journal and writing utensils after the first few months. Then came stacks of books. Every fifteen days they would collect the books and leave more. What were they doing? And why?
My answer came two years later, when the door opened and someone entered my room. The sight of another person in my environment was so jarring that I initially backed away from the door. But then I saw the person and froze in confusion.
It was that surveyor woman from the last interrogation.
“It’s time to go, Sapphire,” she said in perfect Aurican. If not for her appearance I would have sworn she was a native.
“W-Where?” I stammered.
“Somewhere a lot nicer than this dismal place,” she said, sweetly.
Could it be? Was there really something after this?
I took a step closer, cautiously. “Who are you?”
The surveyor smiled and headed for the hall. “My name is Aphasia, and I will be your mentor from now on.”
***
Pariah Andosyni—;
MY EYES CLEARED from the immersive fog, and they settled on Sapphire as she sat quietly across from me, gaze trained on her lap. I saw her in a new light. The reasoning behind her contempt for the Chorus was made crystal clear.
“Is that why you don’t say much?” I asked, breaking the silence.
Sapphire nodded. “Words hold power, yet silence can be the ultimate level of strength.”
“But you don’t have to be quiet anymore,” I said, and she looked at me thoughtfully, saying nothing.
“Why was Aphasia on Aurica Nau?” asked Zira. Even he seemed a little shaken from the experience.
Sapphire shrugged.
Zira scoffed in disbelief. “She never told you?”
“No, probably for my sake. I assume one of the neutral surveyor worlds entered into a contract with the Court of Enigmus.”
“And what would you have done if Aphasia told you that she was contracted by the invaders?” he asked, solemn.
Sapphire was unruffled; where Zira had tried to evoke emotion, he’d failed. “What could I have done? Anything was better than there, and I was just grateful to be rescued. Even if I knew she helped them, I wouldn’t care.”
“The Court of Enigmus deals with morally-sensitive contracts all the time,” I said.
“Like a loaded super-weapon, available for rent to the highest bidder,” he muttered. Then to Sapphire, he said, “I thought your past wasn’t tragic?”
“You think it’s tragic?” asked Sapphire.
“I think it’s the epitome of tragic, yes.”
“I think it’s life,” she murmured. “I suppose to most it may seem tragic, but I was one of the fortunate ones. My pre-scholar history ended on a good note.”
As Sapphire had said this, I looked up her world in attica. The Auricans had been extinct for eight hundred of their standard years; the Eroains (invaders) were also wiped out, but not before they’d cleansed Aurica Nau of its indigenous.
Dysphoria: Rise (Hymn of the Multiverse 6) Page 10