From a Certain Point of View

by Seth Dickinson

  Then Vader would eventually make a mistake. He always did.

  And Palpatine would step in and exploit it. He would be the one to propel Luke to the true potential of his bloodline—over his father’s final rasping breath.

  That was how the Sith handled disturbances in the Force.

  Now seated in his Imperial City office, the very same one as in Vader’s delusion, Palpatine dived into the Force’s chaos, eyes closed in meditation as he explored the currents for possibilities. He exerted his will over the Force, demanding insight into this unexpected variable until a singular path forward presented itself, a staggering power loaded into two simple questions:

  How much did Vader know?

  And how far had he gone to hide his betrayal?

  Palpatine would soon discover the truth.

  He tapped a button on the arm of his chair. A tinny beep chirped, then a voice spoke. “Yes, my lord.”

  “Commander,” he said, his tone neutral and curt. “Summon Lord Vader. We have matters to discuss.”

  For the first time in the longest time, Palpatine decided to let a feeling come through. Unlike Vader, he retained all mastery over the chaos that ran around and through him. But it was a real emotion fueled by his own amusement—not because it propelled the Empire to greater conquest or was a display to twist the knife in his apprentice; simply a flash of satisfaction that came and went.

  In that moment, Palpatine smiled.

  Several minutes passed before holographic lines came together to display the kneeling form of Darth Vader.

  “What is thy bidding, my Master?” Vader remained still, and through the Force, Palpatine could feel the battle within him, the struggle to contain his desires. Despite the armor and machinery, Vader’s heart still beat with the fire of Anakin Skywalker.

  A fire that Palpatine would put to the test.

  “There is a great disturbance in the Force.”

  THIS IS NO CAVE

  Catherynne M. Valente

  It was born on the thin breathless edge of the galaxy where light and warmth are legends told to frighten children.

  Space is so much quieter out there. Safer. There are stretches of dark on the Rim where even something as vast and vulnerable as its father-and-mother could pass unnoticed.

  Its birth-cluster ruptured in the secure shadow of a black dwarf star. Dead as any fallen tree in a forest, prickling with radiation instead of mushrooms.

  This was its first feast. The memory of sunlight a quadrillion years gone still clinging to the last lump of an iron core, the ghost of a star that once nurtured planets, systems, wonders. This will be its last gift: to become hot, invisible, crackling milk slurped up by a weak and naked creature, poor eyeless child, nosing instinctually in the blackness for the first desperate drink of life.

  When it had finally slurped its fill, it rolled backward in the vacuum in satisfied delight. It sealed its mouth and did not open it again for centuries. It grew. It learned to hum, the long, slow, closed-jaw song-language of its kind, a collective vibratory echolocation that was also a poem without beginning or end. Its father-and-mother loved it, after a slow, stony fashion, protected it, taught it the meaning of being as it understood such things, gave it a name.

  Sy-O. In the Hum, it meant the color of unloneliness.

  The digestive gases in Sy-O’s silicon stomach expanded, propagated, equalized, turning that first exquisite ancient meal into a stable, pressurized atmosphere flowing throughout its fragile body, enrobing the massive density of its crystalline-metallic heart.

  Outside, the empty fury of space. Inside, a world.

  And though Sy-O turned its ponderous head then toward the Galactic Core, a pulsing source it can sense, can smell, all the way out here, the way flowers turn toward the afternoon sun, it will remember this nameless, dimensionless place forever after. It will remember it the way a little girl with arms and legs remembers the smells and sounds and secret pockets of the neighborhood where she grew up, where she first knew about things. Where she first realized there existed things to know about, and that knowing was a magic trick she could perform anytime she liked. In its time, Sy-O will return here, or somewhere very like it, seeking another black, dull feasting star to sustain its own young.

  In the space between, Sy-O traveled. It accreted, particle by particle, fragment by fragment, dust by dust. A shell to protect its flesh, for it is flesh, pierceable, burnable, tender. The first line Sy-O added to the Hum was this: How unsorrowed the galaxy is to see me! It hurtles beautiful debris into my skull at the unchanging velocity of love, and gives me the gift of my skin. Sy-O retreated comfortably inside its accretion sphere, an interstellar snail, carrying its house on its back down the Road of All Moons.

  The Road of All Moons. The great rhythm of life: the infinitely repeating journey toward the Galactic Core and away again, out to the Rim, then back to the churning stew of life and energy, then the long sail into emptiness once more. At sublight speed, the Road was long, but Sy-O did not mind. Not on its first circuit. There was so much to witness. So much to experience. Empires and apocalypses, golden ages and eons of suffering swarming over planets as it passed them by. Wars that consumed systems, peaces that devoured time. Sometimes the soldiers wore masks, sometimes they did not. Sometimes they all bore the same face; sometimes they were children. Sometimes they used ships; sometimes they snuffed out their enemies with a thought. All of it interested Sy-O, even the things that horrified it. It watched the Sith and the Jedi before they invented those names for themselves, and then it watched them swell and diminish and swell again like tides of light and darkness. It added mournings and jubilations for them to the Hum and swept on through the stars.

  Sy-O wept for the dead. Sy-O marveled at the living.

  It was a billion years old.

  It was nothing but a baby.

  It was so alone.

  * * *

  —

  Sy-O was still a child when the tenor of the Hum changed. A musician would say it shifted into a minor key. A painter would say it turned blue. Neither of those would be true, but neither would be false. It did not matter. Sy-O understood immediately.

  The time of the Clew had come.

  All of Sy-O’s kind, wherever they floated on the Road of All Moons, would come to a point in time and space to congregate, to exchange, to mate, to hum, to celebrate, to debate, to exhibit the fruits of their experiences, and to part again. In their slow, imperturbable lives, the Clews were almost fast, almost bright. Holidays. The closest thing they could know to a thrill.

  Sy-O had never experienced one before. The opposite of alone. The opposite of travel: a destination. It had butterflies in its stomach. It would bring them to the Clew, and everyone would see that Sy-O had grown up good and strong enough to contain butterflies and keep them happy.

  It had found them in a ship graveyard in the Ryloth system. By then Sy-O’s aloneness had grown sharper and colder than planetary rings. It yearned, but could not comprehend its own yearning. It yearned for others. By the time Sy-O emerged from the background blackness, whatever battle had been so important to those ships had ended. They floated in space, inert, blast scars blistering their hulls, broken guts orbiting breached engine cores. And like carrion birds on a temperate world, the butterflies had come to feast on the dead.

  Sy-O trilled into the Hum, too enraptured to form proper phrases. They were so pretty, so full of energy, so delicate and radiant! Their leathery wings, their translucent proboscises, their musical screaming like symphonies of hunger and satiation! Sy-O adored them. Sy-O wanted nothing more than to be their friend.

  So Sy-O ate them.

  Carefully.

  And now they were together forever. Now they were born and grew up and had gorgeous butterfly children and suckled at the organs of Sy-O for sustenance and aged and died, all in the great world with
in Sy-O. That was what love meant. Love meant togetherness. It meant containing and sustaining another living being. It meant making sure they were unsorrowed, for all time. It meant no longer being I, but Us.

  Sy-O would bring its butterflies to the Clew. They would all bring the worlds they carried to the meeting place. Some of them would have butterflies, like Sy-O. Some of them would have three-eyed rays or squid-whales or other, wilder things. What you could carry, what you could sustain, was the only status among their people. At the Clew, they would preen, they would strut, they would show off the life they could nurture. It was their art, an art of centuries and vast interior space.

  To any other being, the Clew would look like nothing more than an asteroid field. Ten thousand dead rocks that were in truth ten thousand snails in their stony shells, drifting in nothingness. But any other being could not hear the Hum, the great conversation passing from rock to rock, from the creatures within those rocks to their kin.

  These are my butterflies! Sy-O hummed with pride. They are wonderful and unhated of my heart!

  The Hum snickered. And flickered. And answered: Those are mynocks, silly child. They are nothing. You know nothing. Look at the acidic Unark worms inside Si-Yy or the star-colored pylat birds in To-X. They evolved on planets. Now they live within the exogorth. That is accomplishment. Mynocks evolved from space vermin to become space vermin. Do not speak again.

  They are beautiful, Sy-O whispered into the Hum. They are uncruel. They can Hum a little. I have taught them. They are not like their brethren now.

  The Hum became a laugh.

  And when the mating spirals began, no one would come near, for Sy-O stank of butterflies and youth. It was as alone as it had always been.

  It slept.

  It tried to dream.

  * * *

  —

  The ship surprised it.

  It had eaten ships before. Countless in number, infinitely varied in design. But none had fed themselves to it so eagerly.

  Sy-O wanted everything, the whole cosmos. No one had ever wanted Sy-O before. The galaxy did hurtle its gifts, it did. Sy-O felt them in its upper digestive tract. It bore down and adjusted pressurization slightly for their comfort. It would take some time to craft air they could breathe. Sy-O would do it. With such care.

  It could not see what they were exactly, butterflies or starlight-colored birds or lizards. No one can see well inside their own stomach. But Sy-O could taste and smell them. It could feel them. And more important than any sense, it knew they were together, at last, together forever, the great worm and these tiny flames, so alive, and so bright. So hot. So quick. Talking! With their mouths! Back and forth at a speed that made Sy-O feel slightly ill.

  One screamed like a beast, covered in long hair whose every strand carried the musk of other worlds. One spoke always as though he was mocking, but was not. And some of them were not carbon or even flesh, but silicon, like Sy-O. Not quite like. These tasted like metal, where Sy-O was stone. But they crackled with life all the same.

  And something else. One of them, the female, burned with another light all her own. A light Sy-O had sometimes felt in its long travelings, a force that bound the planets and the space between them and everything on them, too. A wave that carried the exogorths through the galaxy, but also splashed on each lonely shore of each lonely world. Almost like the Hum, but without sound or vibration, without a dislike of butterflies, without border or boundary.

  One of the beings inside Sy-O glowed incandescent with it, as steady as her own heartbeat. And so, in those moments as dear as darkness, Sy-O glowed, too.

  They were very busy, Sy-O’s new friends. They didn’t have to be. They constantly ran from here to there on their little ship, yelling instead of humming, whispering urgently. Sy-O tried with its excretions and gaseous emanations to indicate that they could rest now. They had reached the end of their small, insignificant journey and joined a far more important one, joined the Road of All Moons, joined the great circuit. They could let their burdens fall and become unsorrowed here.

  But they could not stop moving, these new citizens of planet Sy-O. It seemed to be a kind of compulsion. They even left their ship and walked on the raw flesh of its insides. What a strange sensation! So heavy, so purposeful! Nothing like the pretty flutterings of the mynocks. What pain and pleasure! Sy-O felt deep honor that its new friends wished such intimacy with it already, and hurried to send them butterflies so that they would know how passionately they were welcome, to introduce them to their new nation.

  Sy-O instructed the butterflies to Hum: I am your home now. I love you.

  The newcomers screamed and ran. But perhaps they were screams of delight! Of recognition and gratitude! Yes, Sy-O was certain of it.

  But they were not always loud. They did not always fill their hours to the brim with running and banging and arguing. Sy-O could feel their every breath and pulse of blood the same way it could feel the Galactic Core singing to it off in the far great distance. It could hear their talk, if it could not always understand their strange, limited language. It could feel their feelings—they were so bright, after all, so urgent.

  Two of them whispered. They made a quiet place between themselves. A Clew, but not a Clew. There were only two of them, not many, not enough. But enough for their needs, perhaps. When they looked at each other, the color of their feelings was the color of unloneliness. A new kind of stellar radiation, with a warmth that made Sy-O shiver.

  Sy-O heard words echoing in its bones that it did not understand. But it loved the sound of them all the same, because they made those sounds with their tiny alien high-speed bodies hurtling toward one another.

  Worship. Trembling. Afraid. Scoundrel.

  Yes, Sy-O thought with half-frozen stony joy, come together. Pursue life. Be present. How happy will be your children safe and unharmable inside Sy-O, protected from the terrible background radiation of the universe, the crackling heat and noise of conflict, of temptation, of ambition. I witnessed the rising and falling of this searing energy on so many worlds, only to see it eat them all at last. It will not touch your babies here. It will not even once so much as crease their skin. I will keep them soft and kind. I will be the black star that shields and feeds them, and no child of the glowing woman and the man with the mocking voice will ever know pain but always peace and ungrief. Are you not glad we met?

  And the creatures did come together, butterflies or starlight-colored birds, whichever they were, it hardly mattered, and Sy-O quietly added their names to the Hum.

  It seemed to Sy-O that it slept in contentment, but it could not have dreamed long.

  The beautiful animals inside it were angry. They were hurting it. They made fires and stoked them hot, so hot the delicate membranes of its body recoiled and shrank back. The Hum in its mind became a shriek of agony.

  What was happening? Why would they do this? What had Sy-O done wrong? How had it angered its new friends? The belly of Sy-O lurched and quailed. Perhaps they had guessed what the other exogorths knew: Sy-O was silly and stupid. It had no real art. It thought mynocks were butterflies and it loved them. They had found out Sy-O was a child and decided they could not love it, no one could.

  They were leaving.

  No, cried the Hum of ancient, infant Sy-O. You can’t. Please. Don’t leave me.

  Their ship, containing them as Sy-O contained their ship, the ship that was worthy as Sy-O was not, roared through its digestive system, into its throat cavity, no care or quarter, scorching its flesh with every centimeter of progress. Scorching its butterflies, whose tiny cries went unheard in the thunder of engines. Sy-O tried to close its mouth, to keep them in, to keep them loved, to keep them tucked away from that dreadful rhythm of rising and falling worlds that could do no good for anyone. Stay. I am all you need. Stay with me, friends. I will make the butterflies go, if you do not like them.They are
nothing, as the elders said. I was silly. I was young. I know better now. Please. I do not want to be alone again.

  It could hear the tenseness in their voices even through the hull of their ship. The metal could not hide it. Sy-O felt the sounds of them bracing for impact, their circulatory systems working in overdrive to compensate for their fear.

  Fear? But why? Everything was going so well.

  More words it does not understand. Sy-O wails in sorrow.

  The cave is collapsing!

  This is no cave.

  The little ship bursts out of Sy-O’s immense mouth, blackening its teeth with its afterburn.

  No, Sy-O Hums pitifully. No, no, no! Come back! Come back! I will be better! I will be good! I am almost finished making air for you! You will miss it! Please don’t go! I need you! Who will I love when you are gone?

  But they are gone. Nothing remains of them but scars. Blisters already freezing on its exposed flesh. It left the shell. Made itself ridiculous for them. And they are still gone.

  Sy-O and the butterflies are left alone. It is quiet. It is quiet except for the great worm weeping. The Clew will soon disperse. The Road of All Moons will begin again, its slow silver thread through the maze of the galaxy.

  Perhaps that was them, Sy-O thinks to itself. The fairy tales. The beings that do not walk the Road but live and die quick, glittering, incandescent, never to know what it is to contain worlds or glimpse what lies at the center or the edge of all that is.

  But that is not possible.

  Such beings do not exist.

  Sy-O curled into its rocky shell and mourned in the Hum. It missed them. It will miss them forever. When the suns that fed their homeworlds have burned to black eggs with just enough life left to nurse a newborn exogorth, when their names are either forgotten in the sand of a blasted barren planet or writ in letters of starfire across the heavens, when their descendants’ descendants do not even know the color of their eyes. Sy-O will still miss the scoundrel, and the metal ones, and the screaming beast, and the glowing woman. Its organs will hold on to their memories like blood and nutrients.