The Star Mother

by J D Huffman

  “So, it exists,” William said. “Zotz wasn’t full of myths.”

  “No, he wasn’t. It’s a very real place. Perhaps not quite the kind of place the legends might make it out to be, but it is all too real.”

  “Josie died, Mother. You weren’t there. Did you even know?”

  “William, call me ‘Eleanor.’ No one’s ever called me ‘Mother.’”

  “I’ll call you what I like,” he snapped. “How dare you try to tell me how I should respond to you. You don’t have the right.”

  Eleanor sighed, taking a few steps around the desk next to them, gliding her hand over the surface. “You’re right. I can’t tell you not to be angry. I’d be just as upset in your position. But there’s much more at stake here.”

  “Like what?”

  She turned to face him again. “William, I breached the Totality Fortress with this small but formidable fleet for one purpose: to bring down the Totality. That’s my official authorization. That’s my mandate. In reality, I came here to find you. It’s not that I don’t wish to defeat the Totality, but you are, in all honesty, more important. You’re my son—my only blood. Even so, I cannot neglect my duty. We can strike at the heart of the Totality here, and we must.”

  “What about Demeter? Why is he here? Why isn’t he dead?” William already had some thoughts on that, but he wanted to hear them directly from his mother.

  “You’ve probably guessed by now that he was planted to watch you on Trepsis, and again on Actis. In fact, he wasn’t the only one. I was able to spare a few resources here and there to keep an eye on you, and ensure you were safe, but also that you drew closer to me and my activities here.”

  She must mean Zotz, and who knows who else. How many people did she have spying on me all those years? “Why didn’t you just come to me directly? Why all the subterfuge?”

  “That’s… complicated,“ she evaded, averting her eyes from his. “I had good reasons. Without getting into too many of the details, let’s just say there are people to whom I answer that have very grave concerns about you.”

  That piqued William’s interest immediately. “Concerns? Who am I to any of them? I’m nobody.”

  Eleanor smirked. “That’s precisely why they worry. You’re an unknown variable in their careful calculations. When we came across your ship, I wasn’t even sure you were aboard. I knew about the revolt, of course, and we detected a sizable Totality fleet moving through the region, and that’s where we caught your trail. Extrapolating your likely course and overtaking you was a small matter, but when we saw that the number of life signs on your ship was well above any that could have come from Actis, I had to make certain you were safe and acting of your own free will.”

  “And then one of your thugs started shooting.”

  “No, one of your people started shooting. She overreacted. I saw the video feed myself. That bloodbath would not have occurred if she hadn’t been armed.”

  “She only killed one person, and he was directly threatening us. Your troops killed dozens of innocent people who hadn’t done anything.”

  “Enough,” she with sufficient force to push the issue aside. “You have my apologies and my regrets. I can’t do anything more about that. We need to discuss the next steps.”

  “What next steps? I would be content if you just sent us on our way. We need to get Sasha back.”

  “Yes, we know Cylence took her. That was an unexpected development. You could never retrieve her yourself, though.”

  “Then what are you suggesting?”

  “Cooperation. Work with us. Help us defeat the Totality, help us with some of our other objectives, and we’ll help you get Sasha back.”

  William knew there had to be a catch. She wouldn’t be offering this if she didn’t have some way to force me. This whole effort has been about cornering me into going along with whatever she wants. “And what if I don’t find that a good bargain? What if I don’t like what you want me to do?”

  “I’m afraid the solution to that is all too simple.” She stared at him sternly, articulated her words with the utmost clarity: “We will execute everyone aboard your ship. Those Totality will all die.”

  Would she really? William had a difficult time believing it. He understood that his mother wouldn’t be completely unchanged by whatever her experiences had been, but he couldn’t fathom that she would unilaterally kill hundreds of innocent people as punishment for his lack of cooperation. “How can you even say that?” he had to ask.

  She stared at him fiercely. “William, their lives are already forfeit. My standing orders are to kill any and all Totality I encounter. Those people on your ship. How many are Totality?”

  “I don’t know, since your people killed a bunch of them,” he sharply reminded her. “Hundreds.”

  “And their prescribed fate is to perish along with the rest of their kind. I have the power to grant them clemency, but it does not come for free.”

  “What else, then? I help you beat the Totality, and then what?”

  “We’ll talk about that later,” she promised.

  “No, we’ll talk about it now. Because I’m not going to make some vague agreement here that you can then twist and turn to suit your needs later. I lived and worked in Erzan my whole life. I know how people are. They’ll try to get away with anything they can. If I don’t get specifics from you now, you’ll make up whatever you need to later.”

  “I can’t give you all the specifics because, right now, there aren’t any. I am anticipating a situation that does not yet exist.”

  “And that is..?”

  She turned away from him long enough to manipulate the control panel on her desk. A three-dimensional representation of the galaxy abruptly appeared, rotating and hovering over its surface. A massive, black sphere obscured much of it, enclosing a substantial part of the galactic disc. The hologram zoomed in on this area, then brightened a nearby collection of stars. Labels appeared below those stars, though the names meant nothing to William. “This is Hegemony territory,” Eleanor explained. “It adjoins the Totality Fortress. Ever since the Totality took root here, the Hegemony have offered an uneasy buffer between us and our enemy. Officially, we are not at war with the Hegemony. We have a long-standing truce that has been in force for many generations.”

  “And that’s about to change?” William guessed.

  “If we successfully defeat the Totality, then yes. The balance of power will have shifted, and the status quo will not survive. You see, William, I have to think about much more than what happens tomorrow, or next week. I have to consider how my actions will reverberate years, decades, or centuries into the future. When you asked why I couldn’t simply come retrieve you from Lexin, that is the best explanation I can offer you. In the short term, it would have made me happy. We could have been reunited, mother and son. A family. But I have greater responsibilities, choices that will endure long after you and I are dead. I cannot behave selfishly now, nor could I then. The only way I can even justify this detour to find you is because of your proximity to the Dominix, and because you will help me.”

  “I am going to point out again that I haven’t agreed to that.”

  “Then you would doom us all for nothing.”

  “Then convince me. You’re talking about what comes next. Tell me. Make me understand. Give me a reason to help you, other than threats.”

  “The Hegemony send their own people to the Totality as slaves, William.”

  “I know. I’ve heard about that.”

  “But I don’t believe you understand the extent. It isn’t a few outlying worlds. Their social structure is predicated on this system. It cannot survive without it. You see, the Hegemony is led by the descendants of Earth’s wealthiest and most resourceful inhabitants. After the Cataclysm befell Earth, they gathered together whatever they could to build a fleet of ships to flee the planet.
They gained the help of a multitude of others by promising to take them along. People volunteered to help design and build their ships, extract the resources for them, organize the evacuation. Millions of people, William. Many died in the process, all for the hope of escape. When these people of means finally escaped, taking their indentured laborers with them, they created a new social order. The leadership were those with wealth. They are ‘of the blood,’ as they like to say. The rest, all those volunteers? They became, in effect, owned by these masters. When the fleet made planetfall and began setting up the Hegemony proper, this distinction was never allowed to subside. In fact, it was reinforced and intensified. If you were not of the blood, your life would never be your own. You were bonded to whatever world your lord settled on. You would work the land, tailor clothing, mold cookware, build weaponry—whatever your master demanded of you. And if you refused, well, it was all too easy to deliver you to the Totality. The arrangement was informal, at first. Ships full of noncompliant lowborn would be abandoned in areas of known Totality activity. The Totality were, at first, confused by this. Soon, they realized these were deliberate offerings. Cylence eventually made overtures to the Hegemony leadership and asked for a more formal arrangement, codified by treaty, to keep the Fortress steadily supplied with slaves. This is how the two powers have functioned for centuries now. Lowborn endure their servitude in no small part because they know they could be ‘gifted’ to the Totality instead, who will treat them far, far worse. Those who are of the blood fear nothing. They protect one another, when they aren’t fighting amongst themselves, but most of the conflict merely involves political posturing and economic subterfuge. Actual warfare between them is virtually unheard of. It is an impressively peaceful system, if one is willing to overlook the cost in ancillary cruelty.”

  “And you expect that to fall apart once the Totality are defeated,” William continued.

  She nodded. “Of course. Their safety valve will be gone. The common folk will have nothing to fear, because the worst fate available to them will be erased. More than that, we will have a Fortress full of humans no longer under Totality control. There is every reason to believe they will flee the Fortress for whatever worlds look most appealing and can be reached directly—those would be the Hegemony planets.”

  “Isn’t that a good thing? It doesn’t sound like you care for the Hegemony system at all. Wouldn’t a flood of refugees overwhelm them and collapse their way of life? How is that a negative for you?”

  “It isn’t, not by itself. But what’s next? There is an ancient proverb that nature abhors a vacuum. Defeating the Totality will create one, and the freed slaves will surely rush to fill it. But if it triggers a collapse in the Hegemony—and I have good reason to believe it will—the freed people will fill that, as well. You do not know the Order as I do, William. These are strong people. But they fear change, and they fear instability. If I cannot find a way to leave this region stable in the aftermath of a Totality defeat, I may have no control over the Order’s response. I command but one fleet—the Order has many more. The President may choose to take this region by force, and people will resist. I have no doubt that they will resist, and desperately so. It will be horrific. More may die after the Totality defeat than ever died under them.”

  He had to admit her scenario was convincing, assuming she knew how to defeat the Totality in the first place. That was his next question: “How are you going to bring down Cylence, then?”

  She changed the holographic map to bring its viewpoint inside the Fortress, and to the center. A narrow, lengthy spoke ran from one end to the other, with a bulge in the middle. This bulge grew as the hologram zoomed in closer and closer, and took on the form of something more recognizable as a massive space station. It didn’t look much like the more modest stations Lexin fielded, but William could imagine its nature nonetheless. “That’s the Dominix, right?”

  “Yes. The Totality headquarters, and Cylence’s sanctum. If we can kill or capture him, we can bring the Totality low.”

  “But he’s one man. That’s surely not enough, is it?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “You’re right. It isn’t. I have an inside man.”

  William cocked an eyebrow. “Oh?”

  “You know him. It’s Zotz,” she grinned in a mischievous way that instantly brought to mind the times she pranked him when he was a child.

  “You’re not serious.”

  “Oh, I am deadly serious. It’s the old Sage. I told you I had other people watching you, didn’t I? Where do you think he got Transcendence of Light?”

  “Well, I guess that makes sense,” William sighed. “You still went to a lot of trouble to hide the truth from me.”

  “I wasn’t hiding it so much as avoiding a confusing explanation. Would you have listened to Zotz if he’d told you he—a stranger—was tasked with bringing you to your long-lost mother, who commanded a fleet from Earth? You’d think him insane.”

  William couldn’t help laughing. “You’re right about that. I was pretty sure he was crazy in the first place. That wouldn’t have helped convince me otherwise.”

  As his mother continued to explain more about her plans for taking down the Totality, another thought crept into his mind, unbidden: What about Trepsis? He didn’t want to jump to conclusions right away, but in thinking about what she’d told him so far, he had to know, and take the risk that she might lie to his face and he wouldn’t know. Having been separated for so many years, he couldn’t predict if he would be able to tell her lies from truth—he still had to make the attempt. “What about Trepsis, Mother?”

  She paused mid-sentence, losing the course of her thoughts. “Excuse me?”

  “Trepsis. That’s what started all this, for me. Zotz took me, and Linda, and Andrew aboard Transcendence, away from Trepsis. We came back and it was destroyed. Everyone was gone. You gave him that ship. You, I assume, told him to take me on that ‘joyride.’ Did you have something to do with Trepsis, too?” His fists balled up in anger, awaiting the provocation of her response. He wasn’t sure he would actually hit her, but depending on what she told him, he might really, really want to.

  The way her expression changed, she didn’t have to say anything for him to know the answer. His worries that she might try to lie her way around it evaporated. She couldn’t keep that kind of truth from him, not when asked directly. “I did. I gave the order. I carried out the evacuation. I had it made to look like a Totality operation. Other Totality ships were active in nearby star systems, which gave Zotz enough evidence to put you on that trail instead. That’s what you wanted to know, isn’t it?”

  William needed several moments to collect himself, to process what she’d told him. He thought he was ready to hear it, that his entire reason for heading for the Totality Fortress in the first place was a ruse, a fabrication. But to hear it, to have the words come from his mother’s own mouth, not blunted, undiminished, direct and forthright, his mental state veered into something far beyond anger, far beyond rage, somewhere on the other side of the universe even from despair. It was as if, immediately after discovering most of his life had been a lie, that this whole other world had existed alongside it the whole time, unbeknownst to him, right at the moment in which he became aware of this and began to construct a new reality, he had the entirety bombed into oblivion, to leave him with nothing, not a sense of up and down, right and wrong, or even life and death. He was sure of one and only one thing: being reunited with his mother had firmly rooted its place as the worst moment of his life.

  Chapter 37

  Echoes and Reverberations

  Sasha and Cylence struggled for dominance in their own curious ways as the days passed. It did not unfold as Sasha expected, nor did she imagine Cylence found the sequence of events altogether predictable. He would make an attempt to intimidate or degrade her, and she would respond with some form of hostility or defiance. She did not doubt that those g
eneral contours were a foregone conclusion based on their respective roles. The surprise was in the specifics.

  One day, Cylence reminded her that everything she’d ever accomplished was because he’d allowed it. He once again pulled out the Chronicle—the weathered, apparently completed version, the authenticity of which she still doubted—and elaborated upon her uprising on Actis, how he waited patiently for it to occur, and how he monitored the movements of her ship and her people until the time was opportune to capture her. He seemed particularly proud of the fact that he took her prisoner, since it was not something her alleged account recorded.

  She refused to entertain him by discussing the matter. While he gloated about his own cleverness and ingenuity, she simply stared at him, stone-faced. Finally, he asked, “What do you have to say for yourself? What do you think of your so-called accomplishments now? How does it feel to know everything you have done is because I permitted it?”

  At that, she finally spoke. “Are you permitting me to do this, too?” She then proceeded to grip the bars on the front of her cage, pull herself up into a squatting position, and urinated on the floor of her prison. The yellow liquid pooled in the center and surrounded her feet, and she tried not to be bothered by either the sensation or the knowledge of what it was. She reminded herself she’d been much filthier in the past on Actis, when lengthy punishment periods would deny the slaves access to showers and clean clothing. This is no different, except this time I’m the one controlling it.

  She could tell by the fury in his brown and yellow eyes that he wanted to strike her. His skin did not pulsate in such a way as to indicate she’d raised his blood pressure—it was possible the Totality did not experience that sort of physical reaction to stress—but she knew he was angry. She wanted him to hit her, to prove that he couldn’t control her except in the crudest manner possible. She did not know much of creature, but she knew his ego rested in no small part on the illusion of civility. In a way, his culture was built on that: physical labor was for the slaves, after all, and the Totality did all the managing and supervising. The violence they inflicted was precise and dispassionate, meant to correct, not to punish, or so she was sure they believed.