Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

by Henry Gee

  Chapter 20. Recapitator

   

  Tethys Ocean, Earth, c. 55,680,000 years ago

   

  Hurled headlong flaming from th’ethereal sky

  With hideous ruin and combustion down

  To bottomless perdition

  John Milton—Paradise Lost

   

  The details of the fall—that is, how he felt about it, as he fell, for each excruciating microsecond of it—would have been lost to him, had they not been replayed to him later, by his AI core. When the details were too grisly, even for such a seasoned soldier as himself, his AI continued nonetheless. It had been compelled to tell him, it said. It had no choice. And neither, it added, had he. But for now, it said, what it called an ‘executive summary’ would suffice.

  His viewpoint was from beach level, looking upwards. As he looked, he saw the tree whence he’d fallen (was pushed) and the palisade of broken, fire-sharpened trunks that surrounded it. Something appeared to be impaled on one of these stumps, about four meters from the ground. He homed in on that something, and realized with a detachment that would have shocked him, had he been in any other state, that it was the body of a man, naked, the trunk piercing it at around crotch level and passing more or less straight through, emerging through the neck. The force of the impaling must have pushed the head clean off, like thumbs flipping the lid from a beer bottle.

  What had happened to the head, then?

  Ah, me. That explains my particular point of view. He blinked, slowly, deliberately. The grisly spectacle before him darkened, then shuttered back into view.

  He took a deep breath.

  Very good. But if that is the case (and I have no reason to doubt it) then why aren’t I... dead?

  As he watched, the headless body reached for the trunk above it and, grasping with both hands, pulled itself free. To be sure, it left a slurry of internal organs in slowly dripping gobbets, snagged along the ridges of the trunk as the body hauled itself upwards. But probably not as much goo as one might have expected, in the circumstances. With a quite disconcerting agility (so he thought), the body swung, hand over hand, down and around the trunk, using the outstretched legs as counterweights. As it corkscrewed down, Ruxhana caught glimpses of its groin. What had been a hideous, gaping hole when the body started its descent had quite healed over by the time it had landed, confidently, feet first, on the sand, and had started to march towards him. It slowly grew in his visual field until all he could see was its feet. There followed a mild disorientation as he was lifted, flipped over, and with hardly more than a grind of bones and a squishing noise of almost obscene understatement, he was atop the tower of... himself.

  Calmly, he walked back to the beach camp, where Xalomé was waiting. He’d tried to query his AI core as he’d walked, but his brain must have been out of whack, for every question he framed became mangled in the asking, the mental equivalent of trying to peel bananas while wearing thick woollen mittens. His AI was, perhaps, aware of this, and even suffering from the same malaise, because it could only respond with general expressions of sympathy and a single coherent phrase.

  Ongoing transformations.

  Xalomé stood up as he approached. Her eyes were wide and full of concern, but she remained some distance away, as if she were afraid he might attack her. After all, he now knew, he could not die. He could revenge himself on her, again and again, until all the stars went cold.

  “Ruxie... it was the only way I could... the only way to explain. I had to show you. Physically. Otherwise, you’d have never have believed me. Ruxie? Are you listening?”

  “Hmm?” He felt cold, composed, remote. He felt a headache coming on and his knees go wobbly. He climbed on to the platform and collapsed on to the bed. “I could murder a drink,” he said, before he passed out.

  When he awoke it was night. His first sensation was the scent of grilled fish, followed by the spit and crackle of oil falling into the flames. He sat up slowly, and crawled to the edge of the bed. On the beach below the platform, Xalomé squatted next to the fire pit, with two freshly caught sea bass toasting on sticks. Her hair was tied back into a single ponytail, and her back was towards him, three-quarters in the flames’ silhouette. He could see enough to know that she was bared to the waist, her sarong tied as a loincloth. He was relieved to see that she had the full and normal complement of breasts. Without turning round, she spoke to him.

  “Supper’s ready.”

  He tottered down to the beach, sitting full on the ground next to her, a little way from the fire, towards the sea.

  They ate in pregnant silence, neither daring to catch the eye of the other. But as he stripped the last of the succulent flesh from the bones, and the fire behind them died to crimson embers, he felt a compliment was due.

  “Thank you, Xalomé. That was delicious.”

  “Don’t mention it. Least I could do, really, after... well, after this morning.” She seemed subdued, dignified, but not guilty—an entirely different person from the hoyden of twelve hours earlier. As if she’d aged half a century. She reached over to gather his palm-frond plate. Her mind might have moved on, but her body was just the same, just as youthful. She must have sensed him staring, then, because she said, with some sharpness—“look up.”

  And he did.

  What he saw was nothing like the skies of Earth. Most of heaven’s vault was quite dark, punctuated only by the most meager scatter of stars. But ahead of them, deep in the west, and yet filling a third of the sky, was the Galaxy, in all its spiraled, dust-laned, electric blue, pearly pink, fiery orange, snowy-white majesty.

  He stood up, then, and walked into the greater darkness along the beach, so he could see it with yet more clarity, as if he just couldn’t get enough of it. He sat down abruptly on the sand, and then lay down at full length, looking up. Now, as at no other time in his life, not even when he was a small kit yet newly acquainted with vision, had he such a potent sensation when lying on the ground that he was stuck to a small ball, careening through space.

  “Does the Tesseractrix really have twenty-seven legs?” he asked.

  “Yes. What you see in this continuum is merely one part of an M-dimensional...”

  “... ‘relativistic manifold?’”

  “That’s right. Just like me.” And there she was, lying next to him, turned towards him. He could see her curves picked out in the starshine, but brightest of all were her eyes, their moistened gleam reflected in the curves of her cheeks, full and smiling.

  “This is an Xspace, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, resting her left hand lightly on his chest. “It is. But that doesn’t make it any less real... any less real than it seems to be.” She lay closer, next to him, her head resting beneath the crook of his chin, her hair, now loosened, spreading over them both like a blanket.

  “It’s time, now, isn’t it, Xalomé? Time to go?”

  “Yes. Almost. We have just one more night together. And I have so many things I have to tell you. That’s always been the trouble, Ruxie, even... even back then, when you were younger, at Xandarga Station. I just never knew how to put things, so either they came out all wrong, or I didn’t even try, and in the end I felt I was just using you. I’m so sorry.”

  A picture of his last night at the barracks flashed before him, no more than a memory of a sour saffron stench of betrayal, superimposed on this magnificent siege of stars.

  “That’s far away now, Xalomé. It feels like another life, like it happened to someone else. Like everything happened to someone else. I’ve changed, I think. Who am I, Xalomé?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, hugging him. “Whatever happens, you’ll always be Ruxie. Deep inside.”

  “But that’s just it. What is happening? To me?”

  She sat up, then, a silhouette against the Galaxy.

  “I guess I should start at the beginning,” she said. She told him then of her own beginnings, and of the Drove, and of how the task had
been given to her of finding a species, raising that species to transcendence, in order to commit a kind of sin, a heresy, a genocide—of destroying the Drove, the work of her species, the heart of her own existence, so that the Universe itself might be saved from premature extinction.

  Some of this she’d told him before, and a little of the rest he’d guessed. But he heard it all now, and, for the first time, he understood.

  “At first I thought I’d found that species—yours, Ruxie—and that would have been a marvelous irony, as well as being highly convenient.” She laughed, drily, in her throat. She grasped his hand again, as if she, this almost godlike being, to him—required his human reassurance. “But something told me that your kind wasn’t quite right. Almost, but not quite.”

  “But why... then.... why all this?”

  “Oh, Ruxie, my existence seems to be a catalog of near-misses, doesn’t it? But you’re aware, I’m sure, of the history of your species. You’re mammalian, and primates: your lemuroid ancestors emerged from the jungles of the Northern Tethys less than fifteen million years ago.”

  “Out of the shadow of the great lizards,” he added. “Their shapes haunt the walls of our dreams, our earliest legends. The reason for their disappearance is the stuff of myth. Some of our more ancient traditions—long before the Empire—say that they were punished by the Great Old Ones for some transgression. All superstition. These days we think it was some kind of cosmic accident. But what an accident! Without it we might never have evolved.”

  She was silent for a spell, as if he’d unwittingly touched a nerve, a subject she’d have loved to have discussed, but concerning which she felt that the right moment had not yet arrived.

  “But how far you’ve come, in such a short time,” she said. “From the jungles of a small planet to rulers of the Galaxy in the blink of an eye, really! But where was I? Oh yes. Even despite all that achievement—that potential—you’re not the savior species I’ve been looking for. But you can help me make it, Ruxie. Evolve it. For the species will emerge from this planet, I know it: and from, I think, the primate order. Really, Ruxie, we two look very like them already, and with time, we—you—your species shall converge on that form.”

  “We... shall?” He had a fleeting, nightmarish vision of her as he’d seen her a few nights previously; almost hairless, with those strange, round eyes, and not enough breasts.

  “Yes, but we are not that form. The form that we... the one we need. Our task—your task—is to find them, to evolve them. To shape their destiny. To transcend. To destroy.” She paused, sent out a long sigh into the evening air, and sank down again, next to him. He detected a scent then, of peace, and satisfaction.

  Of closure.

  The Galaxy stood above them both, expectant.

  “There now—I’ve said it. Not very hard, really, when it came down to it.”

  “My task? So that’s it? Evolution? It’s... well, more than one can do in a lifetime, or a dozen, or a million lifetimes. Isn’t it?”

  “You will have all those lifetimes, Ruxie. As many lifetimes as you’ll need. And you’ll have help, too...”

  “My AI core?”

  “Oh, that! The poor lamb! I had to upgrade it to sentience. It didn’t much like it. It complained even more than you did when I did all those things to you. I think it went a bit barmy, frankly, for a while. Started jabbering on about the difficulty of making decisions without sufficient information, and sentience having too many free parameters, and NP-completeness, and shoes, and ships, and sealing-wax, and bands playing different tunes, and eclipses, and whether you could breathe on the dark side of the Moon, and, for all I know, whether pigs have wings. And then it got really unhinged. I confess I had to give it a rather stiff talking-to.” She giggled.

  He laughed, then, a full, roaring belly-laugh, a laugh like he could hardly remember having laughed, of relief and resolution and joy, and she joined in, and she rolled on top of him and silenced him with her lips on his, and pulled away, her whole face a silhouette above him. “The silly old thing couldn’t really cope. So I had to merge it with you. You haven’t had much trouble from it lately, I hope?”

  “No, I haven’t. Funny, it hadn’t occurred to me...” and, in truth, his AI had spoken to him ever more rarely, of late, and in tones that were more delphic than truly helpful. At the same time, he felt more confident, more sure of himself in everything he did. He remembered his calmness, even when confronted by his own decapitation.

  Ongoing transformations.

  He and his AI core had become one. The person he now was—the body he now inhabited—was greater than the sum of its parts.

  “Good. That’s good to know,” she said. She rolled off him, on to her side, her back towards him. He rolled into her, so that they were like two spoons in a drawer. His left arm was beneath her, trapped. With his free hand he stroked her hair. It shimmered in the light of a four hundred billion stars.

  “May I ask you something, Xalomé?”

  “Of course, Ruxie. Of course.” Her left hand grasped his, resting on her curve of her right shoulder, cooling in the night air. He thought he heard it, in her voice, something like a catch, a sob, hastily stifled.

  “Why me? Why not have chosen... oh, I don’t know, any other Admiral, or any one of my sisters, or my mother, or even, while we’re about it, my old barrack-mate, Ko Handor Raelle? How do you know?”

  It was a long time before she spoke. Before she did, she turned in his arms until she faced him. Her eyes were wide, as wide as if they were confronting all the chasms of the void or her own ultimate extinction. Wide with terror.

  “Oh, Xalomé—I didn’t mean....” She sank down next to him, once more, so that he could no longer see his face.

  “Don’t worry, Ruxie. Not your fault. This is it though, isn’t it? The question I knew you’d ask, and which I’ve been trying to dodge, always knowing that I’d have to confront it, one day.” He encircled her in his arms. He could feel her breath and her heart beating inside her. She swallowed.

  “Well, one reason is that you owe me—us.”

  “How so?”

  “It’s a funny thing, fate. Destiny. For us, I mean, the Drovers, who see space and time rather differently from... well, from the way you do. But I was given this task about sixteen million years ago, or thereabouts, when the Drove invaded the Oort cloud of a double-star system, consuming the smaller of the two stars and pitching a rain of cometary debris inwards, towards the primary. We didn’t mean it to happen. We tried to stop them, but we were overwhelmed.

  “I didn’t discover it until later—actually, it was one of our Drove Elders who told me—that the impacts plunged one of the planets into a biotic crisis, rewriting the course of its evolution. Extinguishing one set of organisms—the great lizards—so that the potential of another could be realized. And, irony of ironies, that planet...”

  “... was the Earth. It was the Earth, wasn’t it, Xalomé?”

  She hugged him closer. “If it wasn’t for our... well, our mistake, Ruxie, our incapacity, your species would still be up trees, dodging dinosaurs. There’d be no Galactic Empire. And there’d be no you.”

  “Xalomé...”

  “But before you ask me... as I know you will...” her voice seemed choked with tears. “Why you, Ruxie, in particular...”

  “Really, Xalomé, there’s no need. I don’t think so. Not really.”

  “No... need?”

  “No. I think I can work it out now, for myself. Because all you’ll be able to say is that I’ll just have to trust your judgment on this; that you just know, without having sufficient information. A hunch. Instinct. And I do. Trust your judgment, that is. Completely. So you’ll have to trust mine. I know what I have to do, now. And how to do it.”

  “Ruxie... you... why?

  Ruxie could hardly have articulated his conviction more completely. That no matter how much information you have at your disposal, you will always want more; no matter how thickly the dat
a stream in, it will never be enough. It’s an urge—a human urge—for safety, for a certainty that can never be achieved.

  His mind was cast back to his cadet days, a hot classroom in a yellow-brown tropical afternoon, an instructor waffling on about elementary statistics. Amid the drone, the instructor said one thing that had stuck in his mind: no matter how fancy your statistical technique, no matter how many pretty graphs and charts you generate, it all, always comes down, in the end, to a judgment based on probability. In the end, always in the end, you have to act on inner conviction.

  A hunch.

  Instinct.

  It was something he wished he’d remembered in his last engagement as an Admiral, when he chose to wait and see why seventy-eight thousand cruisers and destroyers had simultaneously switched their positions, rather than doing what his instinct demanded—to get the hell out and save his fleet from destruction. He would do this task for two reasons, then, and two reasons only. The first was out of duty. The second was out of love.

  “Look up at me, Xalomé,” he said. She did, and her wide eyes were full of supplication, and gratitude, and relief, and a whole host of other less definable emotions, all mixed up together. Her lips were full and slightly parted, and Ruxie kissed her, and did not stop for a long while. They made love, then, on the beach, in the dark beneath the wheeling nebula; lovemaking of a kind remembered and cherished ever after in its totality, even long after the particular details have faded.

  The next day dawned, overcast and gray. Ruxhana stood in the skiff, his few belongings around his feet, as it was about to pull away from the shore, towards Shelly’s Shagpad—and after that, who could tell? All Ruxhana knew was that he’d know it when he saw it.

  Xalomé stood on the sand not two meters away, though it might as well have been two million light years, her toes lapped by the fringes of the waves, hair and sarong billowing in the chill wind, hugging herself for warmth. She wore an expression of such desolation that he just wanted to step out of the skiff, right then, and hold her in his arms again.

  “Xalomé...”

  “No, Ruxie, not now. It’s time to go. Good luck!” She tried her best to smile.

  “I love you, Xalomé.”

  “Oh, go on with you, you silly man.”

  The skiff pulled away, and as her form diminished in the distance, he saw her turn, and walk up the beach towards the belt of trees. As he watched, he saw her climb onto his palm-log platform, turn once again, and wave. As far as he could make out, she kept on waving until the island was no more than a thin line on the horizon, almost lost in a cloud bank.

  She managed to hold herself in until Shelly’s Shagpad was lost from view, carrying Ruxhana Fengen Kraa on his eternal and uncertain voyage, and with him, all her—their—hopes.

  No sooner had he gone, however, than she crumpled onto the palm-log deck, crying uncontrollably. Her tears kept on flowing, on and on, making runnels and braids and deltas down her brown cheeks, until she began to wonder whether they would ever stop. They did, eventually. Of course they did, replaced at first by immense, wracking sobs, in which her lungs and guts heaved. She managed to pitch herself back onto the sand before she threw up, and after that, she felt much better. Washed out, but with some sort of equilibrium restored, however fragile.

  Baryonic matter.

  He had said that it would be hard, and so had she expected it to be. Very hard indeed. But he had said nothing of its emotional intensity; nothing of all the guilt, the backwash from playing with the hearts and minds of these creatures. He had said nothing about the dangers of getting involved. Perhaps he’d had no idea himself.

  Or perhaps he had, but feared that had she known of this—the awful, gnawing pain of it—then she would have refused the task, or, worse, have agreed to it only half-heartedly, forever looking for a let-out clause, an excuse to stop, with the increased risk of failure that this would have entailed. And if one thing was certain, this was a task that must not be allowed to fail.

  The Continuum depended on it. On her.

  As she calmed herself, she was only dimly aware that her body was changing into the form in which she felt most comfortable; into which she often reposed when deeply relaxed. Much of the fur on her body melted away; all but two of her breasts were resorbed; and her eyes changed their shape.

  The transformation was helped along as she thought of him again, at their first meeting in the ski lodge, and in many other Xspaces afterwards, in which he had trained her. And more than trained—forged, quenched, broken, tamed. How she had bucked and rebelled at first, after the initial shock of her selection. But it was—could only ever have been—as the rage of a storm against a massif of billion-year-old granite. Solomon had always been calm, kindly, guiding: as well as irresistible, commanding, resolute. She had fallen for him as surely as as Ruxhana had fallen out of that tree, over there.

  And he had loved her, in return.

  She recalled, now, the time when, almost out of her mind with terror, with uncertainty, at the magnitude of the task she faced, alone, he had stood before her, in the bright north light of the grand salon of the ski lodge, bent down, kissed her eyelids, and told her that everything would be all right.

  They had been in this form too, then. Of course they had.

  She smiled as she remembered it—remembered it all. Her tears dried on her face. She walked down the beach again, to the shore, sloughed her sarong onto the sand and wallowed in the healing surf. The irony was that even were Solomon to have been manipulating her, using her love to secure her devotion to the task, she realized that she did not care. And how did she know that he loved her?

  Because he had told her, of course.

  Her body, bathed in the waves, went suddenly cold. How could she? How could she have betrayed Solomon, and used Ruxie, all at the same time?

  No, not betrayed, he would have said. Do anything, he’d have said, anything to get the job done. Such is a sign of commitment.

  Solomon had often told her that he loved her for her passion, for the fact that it fueled her intellect, and her seemingly unerring judgment, the rightness of her instincts.

  It was all one, he had said.

  But there, surely, he had been wrong.

  And, anyway, the job was far too important for anyone, and especially her, to get hung up on notions such as betrayal, when it was in fact nothing of the kind.

  “No!” she bellowed into the unfeeling breeze.

  “No!” she bawled into the uncomprehending sky.

  “No” she screamed, rising from the water, the foam running off her body in white, streaming gouts into the pitiless sea.

  She was part of the equation, too: if she could not do this thing and maintain what she felt to be his trust, then it would not be a job worth doing. Solomon had made her, and she would be worthy of his trust. Would be. Must be. And more than that, worthy of his love.

  By her own lights.

  Whatever it took.