The Star Mother

by J D Huffman

  “You are each responsible for one another,” the overseer explained. “This was not a matter of one person’s carelessness, but a group effort. The crime was collective and so the punishment must be, as well.”

  Sasha knew it was a lie. The Totality put them in an impossible position. The only solution they would’ve found acceptable was every last one of them throwing their bodies onto the flames and hoping that would put them out. And if the entire unit perished, the Totality would consider that an acceptable sacrifice and replace them with a new batch of slaves in short order. She also knew that the best course was to keep quiet so as not to provoke the masters. Anything we say only makes things worse. Let’s just take the punishment and get it over with.

  Demeter lacked Sasha’s wisdom. “This is shit,” he spat. “You left us all to die down here. Water was the only thing we had to fight the fire with. If we didn’t use that, what could we have done instead? It would’ve burned a lot more crystals. We saved your product. It’s just one short tunnel instead of the whole mine. That’s what you would have lost without our quick thinking and action.”

  For Demeter’s insolence, he got a rifle butt across the face, then the same treatment as Tau. To his credit, he remained silent as he lay curled up on the floor. Demeter, you idiot. You asked for that.

  The overseer lifted his chin. “Does anyone else wish to make a statement?”

  To Sasha’s relief, no one was so foolish. That did not mean they would not suffer, though. The overseer nodded to his men, and Sasha watched as Tau and Demeter were dragged back to their feet. Tau could barely keep standing, but somehow remained upright. They were all ordered to turn around. Sasha did so, her eyes level with the alcove above hers, where Angel slept. She heard the faint beeps of each soldier adjusting his rifle to the proper setting, then their feet as they took a step back. The rustling and light clanging of their weapons being leveled made her heart race. She clenched her fists, closed her eyes, did everything she could to brace for what was next. All at once, soft pops emanated from each weapon, and she immediately felt as if her body was on fire.

  Only gritting her teeth and tightening every muscle in her body kept her from screaming. The first few seconds, she thought she could endure. If this is the worst of it, I’ll be okay. But that was not the worst of it. The burning that began in the small of her back started to spread, coursing through her body with every heartbeat, rolling along every nerve from head to toe, bringing the fire and turning up the heat. She soon felt as if someone had exploded a bomb in her belly, and she could hold it in no more. She screamed, collapsed forward, tried to grab onto the lip of the alcove above, but found she couldn’t control her fingers well enough to hold on. Every muscle in her body betrayed her and she was soon on the floor, trembling and spasming and writhing uncontrollably while she felt as if searing hot coals were burning through her from the inside out. She couldn’t see or hear anything in that state, she could only feel the exquisite agony of Totality punishment. She briefly wondered if she would lose consciousness, but that didn’t happen. Later, she would realize that was by design: the punishment short-circuited the body’s natural defense mechanism of inducing a protective unconsciousness. The bolt instead kept her awake to experience every moment, as the flames inside died down and came to be replaced with whirling knives, the sensation of something slicing through her flesh exciting every last nerve ending. The orchestra of cuts made her long for the burning—at least that was a steady, predictable feeling. The blade-pain, the lingering effect of the weapon’s non-lethal setting, came in fits and starts, slashing open her wrist one moment and tearing open her belly the next, before flaying the skin from her thighs and making her pray to a god, any god, if gods were even a thing anyone believed in anymore, to take her and end this horrific existence, if that’s what would be required to stop the pain.

  And then it was over. The pain faded as abruptly as it began, and though her face was covered with tears and her cheeks were red from screaming and wailing, her body felt just fine. Her thoughts went immediately to revenge. Someday, I’ll turn those rifles on them, line them up, and hit them over and over and over. Every time they think it’s ending, I’ll hit them again. I’ll do it for days. Months. Maybe I will do it for as long as I’ve been a slave—an even trade.

  By the time her vision cleared, she saw that no one else had fared any better. The Totality dragged each of her unit mates back to a standing position so the overseer could make his parting speech. “There will be no rations for the next two days. Water will be available in small quantities. I suggest you all learn to share it carefully, lest you run dry. Engineers will be sent to repair the damage in short order. I expect all of you to return to the mines and retrieve any tools you left behind. There is still mining to be done today, and it will continue while repairs are underway. Do not trouble the engineers. Distractions will earn you more punishment. Our quota will be met despite today’s setbacks. I don’t believe I need to explain what will happen should these expectations not be met.” He turned and left, hands still clasped behind his back like before, and the rest of the Totality filed out behind him.

  Despite herself, Sasha waited until the last one was out and jogged over to the doorway, watching as they all left through the heavy security door at the end of the hall. It was the only way to escape into the rest of the facility, she knew. The carts passed only through narrow passages large enough for the carts themselves, and Fred had warned her in the past that they went straight to a processing facility, “the atmosphere of which would be instantly toxic to your kind.” It drove her mad to have that security door in sight, to see it open and people passing through it, to be so close yet unable to run toward it, through it, and away from this place. There’s always the surface, she thought. I’d freeze to death, but at least I’d die free. She couldn’t bring herself to do that. Coward, she scolded. I don’t want to escape the Totality. I want to beat them. I want to humiliate them. Destroy them. I want to make them regret ever enslaving a single person. I want to drive them off of every planet and into the nearest burning sun. That’s when I’ll be ready to die.

  She took calming breaths as she descended back into the main mineshaft and headed for the place she’d worked with Fred a short while earlier. It was hard to accept that that had been less than an hour ago. The fire, the fighting for their lives, the punishment, none of it had taken long, but her body and mind were so exhausted it might as well have been a week. A residual effect of the punishment began to manifest as she retrieved her tools: a considerable soreness in every muscle required for moving about, though she wondered if some of it was her own fault for clenching so tightly when they punished her. But why should that be my fault? They’re the ones tormenting us. They’re the ones at fault. Never forget that. Never forget that, and someday I’ll make them pay.

  With a tool in each hand, she passed Fred who was heading in the opposite direction. Both avoided eye contact. She simply moved to another area to work and went to it. The rote, tedious process of mining somehow calmed her mind, a fact which she hated much more now. The repetition, the simplicity, they allowed her mind to reach far away places, anywhere she could imagine. She thought of home, of her father, and how far away that was from all this. And so she thought of the chronicle, and nearly hit her head on an outcropping because she turned and moved so quickly. “Shit!” she muttered, moving with haste toward the latrine area, destined for the cracks where she’d jammed the chronicle earlier that morning.

  Slipping her hands into the crevice, she brought up pieces of the leather binding and smears of wet ash. She put her face down to the cracks, peering with a single eye open, and saw only a mess that barely resembled what had once been a thick book. No. That can’t be all that’s left. She shoved one hand inside, ignoring the scraping of stone and bits of crystal against her skin, desperately working to pull out any remnants she could. The best she got were singed scraps with water-spoiled writin
g. The fire had burned too hot and the water had done its job too well. The opposing forces had obliterated the chronicle, and the sinking realization made her angrier than the torture.

  Chapter 7

  Seeds

  Sasha continued her work for the rest of the day in a surreal haze. Her mind felt detached from her body. She saw a woman of her description cutting slices from a large crystal, and thought she might have been somehow controlling this puppet, but it wasn’t her—it was an empty shell she manipulated. The real Sasha was somewhere else, perhaps on another planet far away, reaching across the void to move the arms and hands of this facsimile. The sweat belonged to this inhuman creature, this mere imitation of sentience. In time, she drew farther and farther away even from this false flesh, until she found her not-body lying in a sleep alcove with no recollection of how she arrived. She saw faces, lips moving in the shapes of words, but heard nothing. These beings were ghosts, as well, pretenders miming existence the way children played at adult pursuits, oblivious and bereft of understanding. They could make the motions associated with intelligence, with thought, with compassion and care, but they didn’t exist, not really. The universe was only Sasha, Sasha and an endless abyss of false-faces, and even Sasha herself had become something less than real, the pages that made her life legitimate having burned in the fires of indifference. The universe cared not for her. It cared not for anyone. It was only empty or burning—it could only be one or the other. As the burning had ceased, now it remained empty.

  She slept, as much as an imposter like her could do anything human-like. She sobbed over her father’s body, men in uniforms that evoked cruelty laughing at her pain, the way the universe mocked the suffering of all. There were the unfeeling faces on the slave transport, the stone visages that would betray no weakness nor compassion, who left her swallowing crumbs of bread and droplets of putrid water, surviving by will alone only so she could become a hollow shell and dissolve into the background radiation that signaled the birth of the cosmos. She was one with it, one with all the planets and moons and stars and galaxies, supernovae exploding behind her eyes, every nebula a gust of breath from her lips, and she saw herself—always outside herself, always—arms outstretched, reaching from one end of reality to the other, her belly full with possibilities because it was never full with food. What she could not birth of matter, she would create out of potential instead. Every broken dream, every shattered life, every single cruelty inflicted by the Totality would be returned a billionfold, and a new everything could be constructed from the remains, a place of love and life and hope and creation, no misery, no destruction, no death.

  The fantasy shifted, moving Sasha to the front of a mass of human beings, people starving and naked and wailing for her help. “Star Mother,” they cried, “Star Mother, save us!” Their arms reached but they could not grasp. She stood over them, larger than the rest. She did not want to be their mother—mothers were for children, not adults with the capacity to fight for themselves. She told them so, bellowed out the edict.

  “I am not your mother!” she declared. “We have no mothers and we have no fathers. The Totality took them from us. We are the only family we have left. We, the human chattel ripped from our lives—from our homes, from our parents, from our friends and family—shoved into the tunnels and processing plants, the factories and refineries, the farms and barracks. The Totality left us with nothing, and we will leave them with the same!”

  In her life, she had never made such a bold promise. Only in dreams. Only in dreams.

  “Only in dreams,” she heard in Fred’s voice, her body reconstituting within the alcove, his hand on her arm reminding her that she possessed a body after all, and was as human as anyone else. She yawned, her eyes shying away from the brightness, realizing she must have overslept. “You’re going to be late,” he warned.

  “I don’t care,” she mumbled, attempting to turn away from him.

  His grip on her arm tightened, leaving her unable to move. “Sasha. They will punish you again.”

  She sighed and gave up the struggle. “Fine.” He backed off, letting her come out and plant her feet on the floor so she could join the rest. She went through the morning routine, minus the food they were presently deprived: the light adjustment, the shower, the distribution of the tools. She made her way to another distant part of the mine, away from everyone else.

  Fred still followed her. “Are you well?” he asked, concerned, taking up a position not far away.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” she said, keeping her eyes on her work.

  “I think you do,” he goaded. “I saw what happened to your chronicle.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s understandable that you would be upset.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Surely you have more to say about it than that?”

  She lowered her plasma-blade, raised her goggles from her eyes, and glared at him. “I want them dead. I want them all dead. Every last Totality. If I could made them burst into flames with my eyes, I’d never stop staring at them. I’d watch them burn for eternity. That’s how I feel about it.”

  “Anger is good, but action is better,” he suggested.

  “Pearson. He set up the fake signal, didn’t he? You helped him?”

  Fred nodded.

  She turned to face him fully, eyes full of fire. “I’m tired of waiting. There will be a cargo train here soon. When it comes, we will strike. They’ll be distracted by all the cargo they have to deal with. We’ll break out of here and take over the facility. The other mining units should be quick to join us once they realize we have control. We’ll own this facility, and we’ll spread to the next. The whole planet, Fred. We’ll take it all.”

  “How will we break out?” Fred wondered.

  She broke off a piece of crystal from the shards jutting out in front of her, and held it up so the lights running overhead could illuminate it. “Start a fire. Put crystal dust around the security door. A lot of it. Maybe jam some shards of crystal in there. Light it up with a cutter. We can burn right through it.”

  Fred looked skeptical. “How long do you imagine that will take?”

  “Not long, I hope,” she sighed. “I don’t know. It’s not like we can test it.”

  “On the contrary,” Fred said, wagging a finger. He stepped toward her and snatched the little piece of crystal from her hand, then knelt down to place it on the ground before him. Clasping his plasma-blade in both hands, he set it alight and watched it burn. It flickered brightly for several seconds, then it was gone. In its wake was left a scorched impression in the rock. Fred dipped his finger inside it. Sasha winced, imagining how hot it must be. “The rock cools quickly,” he assured her. “And given the depth your little piece of crystal achieved, we could probably collect enough dust from our tunics alone over the next several days. The question is, where to store it.”

  Sasha had a suggestion. “There’s a cart with a broken wheel that nobody uses and the Totality haven’t bothered to remove. They’d notice if we put shards of crystal in there. They wouldn’t notice dust. We can all take turns shaking off the dust into the cart. I’ll cup it all in my own shirt when it’s time to start the fire. But we’ll need a cutter for that.”

  Fred grinned. “It is likely that William can help us. He may have a weapon or two that we could use.”

  “Every bit helps,” Sasha agreed. “Get what you can from him. We’ll need him to create a distraction for us, too. But tell him he can’t hurt the cargo ships. We need those intact. We’ll never get off this planet without them.”

  Fred bobbed his head. “Of course. What about the others? They need to know what to do.”

  “Pass it along. I’ll tell Angel. She’ll tell Serim. You can tell Demeter. Demeter will tell Tau. Tau can tell Janus. Janus is useless, anyway. He can be the last to know.”

  Fred frowned, folding his
arms. “I’ll be sure to omit that part.”

  Sasha shrugged. “What? All he does is complain. Oh, and run away. I didn’t forget about that. He left us all to burn.”

  “The Totality left us to burn,” he corrected her. “Janus’ cowardice is not malice.”

  “Call it what you want, it’s all the same to me. You’re sure there’s another cargo train coming soon?”

  Fred seemed not to have any doubts. “I’ve come to know the schedule very well. The next train is due in six days, give or take one or two depending on engine power and such.”

  “So, four days at the minimum. We need to be ready by then.”

  “Indeed.”

  Sasha put her goggles back over her eyes and returned to work. “This is it, Fred,” she called to him. “We’re going to get out of here. The Totality will pay for everything they’ve done, one by one.”

  “Take care not to lose sight of why you are doing this,” he warned her. “It is for all the people they have enslaved, is it not?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said defensively. “That doesn’t mean I’m going to treat the Totality with any kindness or compassion when I’ve got their heads against a wall. I’ll make them beg, Fred. You’ll see. They’ll beg the way I begged when they cut down my father. The slave will become the master, and the master will become the slave. But I’ll show them a mercy they never showed me—I’ll put them out of their misery.”

  Fred looked at her as if he didn’t know whether to admire her or fear her. Some of both would be justified, Sasha thought.

  She held onto that dream, those seeds of revolution. She wondered what it all meant. She couldn’t imagine being a mother to all of these people—the thousands or millions she’d never met. This mine contains nearly all the people I’ve ever known. The rest are dead or so far away there’s no chance of seeing them again. I don’t want to lead them to anything. I just want to beat these hideous creatures, beat them so hard they’ll never raise a hand to another living thing. They won’t be able to. I’ll hunt them to the edge of existence and laugh when they beg me not to kill them. They took away my life. They took away my history. I will sweep theirs aside and build a new one. Free humans, surviving and thriving outside the control of these monsters. My father used to tell me monsters aren’t real, but they are. They came to my planet and made the monsters real for all of us. If there’s even a small chance I can spare someone else that experience, I have to take it. And if I can purge the whole universe of these things, then the stories parents tell their children will be true once again. There are no monsters under your bed, nor monsters in the skies, just people… and trolls and faeries and things, I suppose. But no Totality.