I figure out how to pop it open. Clean air rushes in. I breathe deeply. Jayd opens her eyes.
Casamir offers me her hand. I raise my eyebrows at her. “So,” I say, “you believe me now?”
“Never doubted,” Casamir says.
“Where’s Das Muni?” I say.
“In the medical lounge,” Arankadash says. “Your witches can do wonders here. We’d like some of these tricks back home.”
“You’ll get them,” I say, “but first we need to get somewhere safe. The Bhavajas are still running around.”
“The infirmary,” Casamir says. “We’ve barricaded it up.”
“Let’s go, then,” I say, “Jayd needs help, but . . .” I hesitate. I think of all that has been sacrificed for me. “Can you go out one more time? Can you look for a woman? Sabita. It would please Jayd.”
* * *
Jayd spends time in the infirmary, or what I take to be one. There are few people left on the first level of the ship. We discover a half a dozen Bhavajas and a whole section of Katazyrnas who have held off incursion for all this time. But I recognize none of them. Jayd is their lord now. What that makes me, I’m uncertain. But they are loyal to her; they recognize her and are willing to help secure the first level.
While Jayd is being tended by the witches, I sit down next to Das Muni. Her breathing is shallow. Her wounds are coming back together, all slathered in greenish-amber salve. Her eyelids flutter open. She squints at me. Frowns.
“Are we all dead?” she says. “Have we been freed?”
“Not dead,” I say, “but free, in our own way. You’ll get to go back to the Mokshi.”
“I was never happy there,” she says. “I didn’t fit there, either.”
“You will now,” I say. I take her hand.
“I have always loved you, Lord,” she says.
“Just Zan,” I say. “I’m Zan, always.”
She closes her eyes. I let her rest.
Casamir did indeed find Sabita hiding in the salvage that orbited Katazyrna. She lay snoozing now on the slab opposite Jayd. I go to Sabita’s side, but she does not wake. What did I confess to her before I lost my memory? Maybe I could ask her when she wakes. Or perhaps it’s best to just let it be.
Arankadash and Casamir are sitting up on a slab near Jayd now, eating prickly mushrooms. Arankadash is drawing a map of the first level on the wall, cutting into it with her knife.
“We should consider what happens when the other Bhavajas get here,” I say. “The reinforcements from their world.”
“No,” Jayd says, and I turn to see that though her eyes are closed, she is awake. “Nashatra will want peace. There was . . . a civil war. It’s a very long story. But I think she can hold them there if we can stabilize Katazyrna.”
“That’s our goal, then,” I say. “We need to secure the first level at least. If we can hold that while the Mokshi is reborn, then we can decide who wants to go over and who wants to stay.”
It’s Casamir who finds the temple room on one of her excursions with a handful of Katazyrnas as they patrol the first level. When she returns, her eyes are big, and she’s talking about the eyes of the War God. She takes me and Arankadash down to the room, which is one level below. I don’t admonish her for taking her group a level below when our goal was to secure only the first level, because I don’t think she’s listening to anything I’m saying at this point. She’s so excited about her find, I think her head may burst.
“The lights were simple enough to figure out,” Casamir says. “They’re a language, writing. They give you instructions on how to work things once you know the code.”
Casamir tangles with the lights in the walls, and suddenly the whole room becomes translucent. From here I can see all the worlds around us, as if we are sitting at the very center of Katazyrna and staring out at the dark spaces that surround us. I have a perfect view of the whole of the Outer Rim.
The Mokshi is out there, a strange planet folding in on itself, wrapped in great brazen tentacles, pulsing with a bold new heart. A world that was not supposed to exist. Yet here it is, remaking itself to leave the Legion.
Arankadash says, “What will you do with that world? Will you abandon us?”
“I’ll take you with me,” I say, “if you’d be willing.”
“I don’t know,” Arankadash says. “We are of the world. Leaving it . . .”
“I’m not dying with the world,” Casamir says. “That’s defeatist. After all you’ve seen, you still think we should stay?”
Arankadash gazes out at the Mokshi. I don’t know what she’s thinking about, but I suspect it’s to do with the child she lost and all the offspring she bore for the world itself. I wonder then what Jayd did with the womb I gave her when she took Rasida’s. Where is that child? Who cares for it? Because I know who should.
“I will consider it,” Arankadash says. “I will put the question to my people. But they must have a choice. To stay with the world and the Legion or to risk the unknown in that new world.”
“I’m not going to make anyone do what they don’t want to do,” I say. “I should bring Jayd here, though. This is what all the madness was for. To watch this.”
When I go back to the infirmary, Jayd is sitting up and speaking to Das Muni. I stay in the doorway for a time before they notice I’m there. I enjoy that because it also gives me time to observe Sabita. Though Sabita’s eyes are closed, I doubt she sleeps. I don’t know how she and Jayd will ever reconcile. I don’t want to know what there is between them, but I can feel it the same way I can feel what is between Jayd and Das Muni.
Das Muni is frowning, fists knotted in the sheets. She is not yet well enough to even sit up. Jayd is apologizing, though what she’s done is something that no apology will fix. I appreciate the gesture, though.
“Can you walk?” I ask Jayd. “I’d like to show you something.”
When she looks at me, I see a great sadness. I have two competing emotions—I want to hold her, and I want to push her away. I extend my hand instead. When you start over, you must start again with the small things. Jayd takes my hand and then my arm.
Whatever has been done to her leg is not something the witches have fixed. I wonder if they even can. Because of this, our walk to the temple room is long and slow. We have time to talk in the mostly empty corridors, but we don’t. The silence is oddly soothing. Maybe we’ve said all we can say now.
We step inside the temple room, and Jayd gapes. Outside, the Mokshi is a heaving ball of red and orange light. There is a new band of tissue spreading out from its core, splitting the broken world in two, like a great new skin.
“It’s working,” she says.
“Yes,” I say.
We watch the Mokshi in silence for some time.
Then she says, “I’m afraid we can’t be together after what we’ve done to each other.”
“We can’t,” I say.
She wipes at her face. I’m surprised she has any tears left. I don’t.
“You’re the Lord of Katazyrna,” I say. “Your people will look to you now to figure out what to do next. I can take them on the Mokshi. We can all leave the Legion together, go out into the unknown. But that’s up to you and them. You’re Lord of Katazyrna now, and I’m Lord of the Mokshi. That’s all we are. That’s all we can be after this.”
Jayd nods. “You said the Mokshi could go anywhere once it was repaired. But I’m afraid, seeing all this darkness . . . What if there’s nowhere else to go? What if there’s only the Legion?”
“The stars are legion,” I say. “Look at them. All those other suns. There could be many other worlds like ours circling them. Maybe worlds very different from ours. We can learn from them.”
“Better worlds?” Jayd says.
“Different ones,” I say. “I don’t know if where we’ll go will be better, but we’ll be free, finally. Free of what the Legion made of us.”
“When we first met—”
“No,” I say. “No more abo
ut the past. We’re building the future now.”
“I’m afraid,” she says.
“I know,” I say, “but it’s the fear that’s wounded us. We must stop being afraid.”
“I don’t know how,” she says.
“We’ll learn together,” I say.
We raise our faces again to the pulsing light of the Mokshi. We are two women standing at the edge of the Legion, our armies dead, our people broken, with a history between us that I no longer want filled in any further. Instead, in my mind I construct a future. In my future, we break loose from the Legion, and Casamir helms the Mokshi, and Arankadash is at my right hand, and Jayd is at my left, and Das Muni spends her time on the shores of some sea inside the Mokshi, collecting bits of detritus and teaching herself to sing. Arankadash holds a child, and Jayd finds love with some bottom-world mechanic, and Sabita takes charge of the infirmary, and perhaps we become something more, Sabita and I, and I stand in a room like this on the Mokshi, looking forward, ever forward, into endless possibilities. It’s a potential future for us, as real as the potential of the child I sacrificed to get here, as real as the dreams of the people who helped me get this far.
“I need to go back,” Jayd says, tugging at my arm.
I know what she means—she wants to go lie down in the infirmary—but I still think: we can never go back, only forward. Ever forward.
I put my hand on hers. We step away from the dazzling room and the rebirth of the world, and enter the heart of Katazyrna. We walk arm in arm, two lords without a Legion, into our uncertain future.
THANK YOU FOR READING THE STARS ARE LEGION
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Acknowledgments
When I first came up with the idea for this novel in 2012, I knew it was going to be a hard sell. What, you want to write an all-women space opera? Like, science fiction without men in it? Not even a mention of men? WHAT IS THIS, 1968?!
Props to Joe Monti at Saga Press for not only hunting us down for this book proposal, but for being even more excited to buy it when he realized the unspoken world-building bit. Thank you to everyone at Saga Press who helped shuttle the book through the publishing process. Thanks also to one of my favorite copy editors, Richard Shealy, who is not afraid to reach out to me for clarification on my wild worlds. Special thanks to Stephen Youll for the fabulous cover, and to Joe for humoring me when I said, “Dammit, Joe, it has to have a SPACESHIP ON THE COVER!” and then coming through for me.
As ever, thanks to my agent, Hannah Bowman, who helps keep me sane and on task.
Thanks also to Jayson Utz, who continues to be the bright, shining star in my own wacky universe.
Thanks to the loyal friends and fans who keep buying all these books. As a colleague said when he saw the cover for The Stars Are Legion: “Your name is getting bigger! That’s a good sign!” Let’s hope so.
My writing career continues to feel a lot like fighting through armies of mutant rats with a flashlight in one hand and a sword in the other while navigating a labyrinth designed to break my will to carry on. But so far, I have been able to tell exactly the stories I want to, in exactly the way I want to, and that gives me great pleasure. At the end of the day—however many days I get—that’s the best any creator can hope for.
Thanks for coming along for the ride.
The Big Red House
Autumn, 2016
KAMERON HURLEY is the author of the Worldbreaker Saga and the Bel Dame Apocrypha (God’s War Trilogy). Hurley has won the Hugo Award, the Golden Tentacle Award, and the Sydney J. Bounds Newcomer Award. She has also been a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Nebula Award, Locus Award, British Fantasy Society Award for Best Newcomer, the Morningstar Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award for Best Novel. Her short fiction has appeared in POPULAR SCIENCE magazine, LIGHTSPEED magazine, THE YEAR’S BEST SCIENCE FICTION, THE LOWEST HEAVEN, and MEETING INFINITY. Her nonfiction has been featured in the ATLANTIC, LOCUS magazine, and the collection THE GEEK FEMINIST REVOLUTION. You can visit her at kameronhurley.com.
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2017 by Kameron Hurley
Jacket illustration copyright © 2017 by Stephen Youll
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Interior design by Brad Mead
The text for this book was set in Utopia Std.
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4814-4793-5
ISBN 978-1-4814-4795-9 (eBook)
The Stars Are Legion Page 32