by Rich Horton
Present
They thrust hard. The princess flew close. Hot violet radiation bathed them as the hunger of the Maw’s gravity sped them faster. They fell from heaven, like the Hero himself. The whole world shifted into the blue. The sounds of static came tight and high-pitched. Tense. Near the Maw, space itself feared, releasing ghostly sounds and strange discharges.
The searing cloud abraded Diviya. The keening of his soul heightened in pitch. Radiation and particle strikes corroded the little soul. It was not made to fly this close to the Maw. It was composed of so many different radioisotopes that no matter what struck it, some part of it changed to something inert or something inappropriately active. The soul was going mad.
They neared perigee. Their speed was terrifying. Stars multiplied, filling the sky. Their haunting chorus blended with the relentless screams of the souls.
“Pray!” Diviya yelled to the souls. “Pray!” They did. In warbling tones of panic, the souls recited the metronomic cadences of the liturgy. Diviya listened to the prayers as he never had before.
Diviya’s carapace creaked. He was so close to the edge of the Maw that the difference in gravity from his ventral side to his dorsal threatened to crack him. And still the Maw accelerated him.
No sounds of the living world remained, except for the chanting of his soul, a simple prayer to a hero who had no authority here. A new, eerie ocean of slow echoes filled his senses. His stars, radiant microwave stars, were all gone. New stars appeared. They were dead, their glows constant and unblinking as the sleet of passing clouds flayed and scorched him. He counted time by the cadences of the souls’ prayers.
The intensity of the radioactive hail burned his soul, making Diviya’s exhaust so hot that it felt like riding a star. And the clay wafers that he carried, his gametic contribution to the future, hardened in the heat and pressure, forming the crystalline structures that could be laid over the wafers carried by the princess. The possibility of new life quickened in this crushing furnace. Diviya counted the prayers and then, at a precise moment, he redoubled his thrust.
Diviya could not hear the princess. He stayed fixed on the strange stars. If he looked back for her, they would both be lost. Among these ghost stars, he could only trust. If she had not been able to follow, everything they had suffered at home was for naught.
The Maw grasped at him, to crush, stretch, and snap him. The heat of Diviya’s thrust burned his own carapace. The clouds of hot gas brightened. He became so fast that even the ghost stars became too blue to see. The acidic particles shooting at the Maw crowded out the darkness, filling Diviya’s world.
Then the Maw flung Diviya away.
The clouds thinned, but did not cool. Each grain floating in his path zipped into his carapace at nearly the speed of light. The world was eerie. He had left the Maw, but not the land of the dead. Strange purple colors and warped, fluid sounds drifted past him. He was a ghost and the living world had closed itself to him.
Yet amidst this dislocation, far away, faint, a point pulsed, frenetically like a young pulsar. Its microwaves were blue-shifted to a pitch that was visible instead of audible. The world was covered in a cloak of strangeness, yet he had to have faith that this was the Hero, summoning him back from death.
He was far from home, and had only whispers of breath left. He had used everything in the slingshot passage around the Maw and he did not even know if he had succeeded in leading the princess.
He exhaled the tiniest gasp of breath. Achingly slow, he pivoted. And his heart grew, in a primal way. A few body lengths from him was the princess. He had led her into the land of death and past the Maw. They could see the world of life, even if they were still fast-moving ghosts. It would take weeks to slow down. Her sleek carapace was striped and pitted with fine burns. Her soul was bright, but quiet and reverent.
Beyond her, the great bulk of the Maw had begun to shroud itself again under layers of bright, doomed clouds. The gases in palliative spirals spit hard radiation, but now that they had passed the Maw, their spite was thin and reddened and sepulchral.
The king of the underworld receded majestically. In the last moments of that hypnotic view, Diviya saw a tiny, distant silhouette, carrying a point of hard, hot radioisotopes.
No.
No. No. No.
The Maw had scarred them as they passed, and had not let them truly escape. The Maw let through one of its own, an engine of death, a famished monster that had nothing to eat but Diviya and the princess.
Past
Diviya had ceased to sympathize with his soul. In the beginning, he understood it as a gift from the Hero and the queen, as a guide for the migration. The soul was, in some ways, an alien presence, but partly comprehensible within its role as the voice of eternity. But it was pitiless. Petty. Commitment became inflexibility. Resolve turned to stubbornness. Morality deafened reason. Diviya’s soul argued, becoming more shrill. It was difficult to ignore the voice in his head.
In part to draw the soul away from its recriminations, Diviya spoke to his soul about the migration. Skates were taught nothing of the migration. This was safer ground to till. His soul calmed while considering the migration. Perhaps it thought that Diviya was opening himself to redemption.
At first petulantly, then with increasing enthusiasm, the soul spoke to Diviya of what was to come. Even when Diviya probed at the mystery of time dilation itself, the speeds and accelerations needed to achieve the magical dilation of seventeen, his soul answered him. Some of the pieces were symbols, or worse yet, allegories Diviya had to suffer through to keep his soul talking. More useful were the liturgies containing mathematical proportions, and angles and curves. Diviya read meaning into the liturgies that perhaps his soul did not mean for him to understand.
On the third day, Diviya descended from the mound. He left the slums and hopped into the worker districts where tailing hills were evenly rowed and the workers were healthier, younger. The neighborhood seemed lonely. This was a rest period, so most workers should have been back. In the distance, he saw the shine of another soul and turned away, so as not to give himself away. Between dusty piles he recognized a worker.
“Tejas!” he said.
Tejas approached. He had new scratches on the tops of his fins. Chips were missing along his leading edges. “Diviya,” he whispered. “I thought you’d been arrested.”
“Abhisri got me out a back alley. What happened?”
Tejas had difficulty speaking. The sparks he made were mistimed and sometimes sputtering. “We were all beaten. Most were arrested. I thought they were going to crack me.”
Diviya’s strength left him. “What charges?”
“I don’t know,” Tejas whispered. “They’re all being sent to work farm number seven.”
Dwani’s broken face stared out of memory. Tejas sputtered and shorted over his words. “Abhisri got it bad, Diviya. They took out his soul right there. They weren’t careful. I don’t think he made it.”
Diviya sank into the packed regolith. Adding or removing a soul was dangerous. Diviya had done it many times, but had not always been successful. The radioactive souls heated the ceramics and metals of the carapace and the neural wiring, while the skates cooled the souls. Sometimes the stresses on the skate and on the soul were too much. Tejas neared.
“They told me he didn’t say nothing to the interrogators, but his soul did. They’re looking for you, Diviya. You’ve got to hide.”
“I told you!” Diviya’s soul said. “Turn yourself in! Name names!”
But Diviya’s soul had no hold on him anymore. The crushing pressure of the hive and his soul had crystallized a sense of mission in him. They had hardened his wavering resolve into the seed of something much more permanent. He was deathly frightened of being cracked open like Dwani, of having his soul torn away, but he heard the sagas through Dwani’s eyes now.
“I’ll hide in the slums, Tejas,” Diviya said, “where the broken workers lie. Send me the leaders, yourself included.”
“I’m no leader. I wasn’t even a committee member.”
“We’re all committee members now,” Diviya said. “The revolution must begin. Not the one Dwani and Abhisri wanted, but a larger one.”
Present
Diviya and the princess had little with which to escape the shaghāl. Diviya had intended to unfurl his sail to brake beyond the black hole, but that would do nothing more than bring the fast-moving shaghāl to them faster. They flew so quickly that the gulf between the Maw and the Hero, that had taken the migration many months to cross before, now took only days. Yet if they did not slow soon, they would overshoot their home.
They unfurled their sails together. Blue-shifted radio waves punched their sails and the shock of slowing dizzied. As the tremendous deceleration intensified and the Hero fed them, they became less ghostly. The world abandoned its frenetic blue-shift. Strange stars faded, their haunted voices quieting. Stars he knew began to shine as if just reborn and the Hero’s Voice aged centuries every minute, slowing finally to two flashes per second. Diviya and the princess were reborn.
“We will find a way to survive,” the princess said.
No. Not princess. She was the queen now. But no. Not that either. No queens after the revolution. No princes. No grand princes. Just skates, sharing what they had.
“Yes, we will.”
His words felt false. If they overshot their home, deep, deep space was a different kind of death than being crushed by the Maw.
“I will try to shadow the shaghāl,” Diviya said.
“That will bring it to us faster!”
“Yes,” Diviya said. Diviya adjusted his path, spotting the shaghāl’s soul, as it shone in faintly blue-shifted hunger, far distant. “It will be ravenous now, and desperate.”
Far behind, but still close enough to chill Diviya’s marrow, a great radio sail unfurled. Diviya would make a poor shadow. The shaghāl was close and closing, decelerating at a furious rate.
Diviya slipped into the path of the pulsar’s beam, cutting a shadow in the center of the shaghāl’s sail. The shadow grew as the shaghāl neared. The shaghāl seemed to realize what was happening and angled its sail to escape the shadowing. Diviya followed.
The shaghāl jerked its sail the other way. It had no experience in avoiding a shadow. It hurtled closer, unable to do more than edge slowly sideways. The shaghāl tilted its sail wildly, trying to get around Diviya.
Diviya jerked his sail opposite to the shaghāl’s tilt. The Hero’s Voice veered Diviya aside, but not fast enough. The shaghāl’s wing tip struck Diviya. The knock was tremendous, accompanied by a snap.
Diviya spun. Pain. Sharp pain. And fear and screaming. The second soul nearly flew from Diviya’s mouth. Diviya righted his sail, catching the Hero’s Voice, slowing his spin. Finally, he controlled his spin.
The shaghāl plunged far ahead, toward the asteroid field. It was slowing, but Diviya had robbed it of time. Now it would need every bit of effort to avoid overshooting the asteroid field.
The ragged princess neared. Diviya felt strange. His sail still pulled oddly, producing an ache under him.
“Your soul is glowing through a long crack beneath you,” she said. The rhythms of her sparking speech were quick, fearful. He feared, too.
Cracked. He was cracked. Dwani’s broken face haunted his thoughts. Dust would get into his carapace and would scour his wiring and joints. Soon, he would only be good for resting on mounds.
“You will survive,” she said. “We will survive. You will make a magnificent grand prince.”
His soul, and the stolen one, made sounds of relief. The princess had accepted him as her mate. Despite his crimes and the hardships of the migration, the souls sounded guardedly elated. A new hive. His hive. Grand prince. Diviya would be the father of a new generation, one that, due to the separation of time dilation, would never see any skates from another colony. And his colony would have no landlords, no tax collectors, and no beatings.
Past
Furtively, workers came to Diviya in the slums, atop his mound. Most had never been unionists. Diviya recognized his old fear in them. They came to speak to Diviya about the massacre. Few had been there, but they knew the workers who had been killed, and the workers who had been exiled to the work farms. They came as cowards might, shamefully, weighed by the guilt that they were happy not to have been there.
The idea of sacrifice in them was strong, as it was in Diviya. The Hero had built them to sacrifice for each other, for kin. They were pressed of the same clay. The success of a brother worker or a prince felt like a success for all of them. Demanding something for themselves was difficult. The newly ensouled like Diviya had to be taught selfishness, acquisitiveness by the souls. Yet these skates, who had not been brave enough to attend a union rally to help all of them, now slinked to the last committee leader, a skate who shared their guilt. They formed new committees.
“Tell them what to do,” his soul said. “You are better than this rabble. Leverage your influence here for patronage. Deliver the malcontents to the hive. Give bribes.”
Diviya had bribes. The workers smuggled innumerable tiny nuggets of frozen volatiles to him. This struggle with his soul could not go on.
And then, he saw it again.
In the distance, the brief, hot shine of a soul, looking this way. The sleet of radioactive particles stilled his soul. Diviya shut his eye, shuttering the emissions of his own soul.
“Open your eye!” his soul said.
“You can guess as well as I what that was,” Diviya whispered.
Diviya’s soul laughed. “More unionists have been picked up by hive drones,” the soul guessed. “The rascals must have spoken of an ensouled committee member dispensing fratricidal treason from a mound in the slums.”
“It is rich that you would call me fratricidal, when I have never hurt another skate, while the hive beats, imprisons, and kills my brothers,” Diviya said.
“Your disloyalty endangers every skate and princess in the hive. Open your eye.”
Diviya descended the mound with his eye closed. Tejas was with him, as were Barini and Ugra. They did not have souls and were accustomed to Diviya’s silences while he communed with his own. With his eye closed, the world was dark, but loud, filled with the Hero’s Voice and the scraping vibration of his own movement. But in this way, he was invisible to the other ensouled skate in the slums.
“What are you doing, Diviya?” Tejas asked.
“An ensouled skate has been moving at the edge of the slums,” Diviya said to Tejas.
“I have seen him several times today. He is looking for something.”
“Or someone,” Tejas said.
“I saw only one skate. Perhaps an ambitious tax farmer seeks favor by catching a union leader.”
“Hide!” Tejas said. “We must get you away.”
“Me?” Diviya said.
“You’re the key to the revolution,” Tejas said. His voice was charged, tense. He believed what he was saying. And Diviya felt as he had when he’d first spoken at the rally. Exposed. Undeserving.
“Tejas, Barini, and Ugra,” Diviya said, “lead me closer, so that we can see, but not be seen. You will need to be my eye.”
“What are you doing?” his soul demanded.
Tejas walked Diviya on a winding, blind way around the tailing mounds.
The Hero was high in the sky, so none of the mounds cast shadows. Diviya heard the Hero’s Voice change tone when they turned. Catching the subtleties in the polarization of the radio waves was a different way of experiencing the Hero, one perhaps more primal, and it calmed Diviya, as much as his new resolve.
Diviya was built for peace, but the princes, and those who spoke in their name, had taken matters too far for Diviya to stay still.
They were kin, pressed from the same clays, made to launch princesses and some males into the migration. Their success was his success, in the flat equations of biology, but skates had grown. They were no longer the primit
ives of the sagas. They reasoned. They were more than their instincts. They had grown past the need for souls to tell them how to treat each other. Souls created and perpetuated divisions in the hive. Princes. Landlords. Workers. But the skates carried their own blame for taking what was given to them, as blindly as Diviya was being led through the slums. The souls had their own interests. Not least Diviya’s soul.
Brother and enemy. Family and opponent.
Diviya’s steel fingers sunk into the thick regolith. Pebbles and larger fragments of iron-nickel and hard, volatile-dry silicates were so numerous and uneven as to be stumbled over, especially blind. The four of them walked and hopped. From a distance, they would just be four soulless workers.
“He is to our left now,” Tejas whispered.
“Take me onto a mound,” Diviya said.
Tejas led Diviya scrabbling to the top of the hillock.
“What are you doing? Open your eye!” his soul said.
“Is he facing us?” Diviya asked.
“No,” Tejas said. “We are facing north. He is facing west.”
The revolution needed to happen. Working with the souls as they had was no longer possible. Diviya lifted a large chunk of iron-nickel in his fingers. He snapped his eye open and thrust, hurling himself toward the ensouled skate.
“You are wasting breath!” his soul shrieked. “Stop! Stop!”
Diviya released the iron-nickel chunk as he flew past, as a hive drone would have. It crashed into the other skate with such force that ceramic chips rattled against Diviya’s underside.
“Murderer,” his soul whispered.
Diviya puffed breath sideways to spin, and then thrust to a stop and landed. He hopped to the ensouled skate. His three fellows were already there.
Diviya’s attack had struck the skate’s left leading edge, near the eye. A gaping hole exposed the hot soul beneath.