Kole took her hand in his again. The tattoos seemed to flow off of his flesh and onto hers in one continuous band. “That’s what I’m trying to explain to you. To the shock of every Armenite privy to the news, you’re ascending.”
Chapter Nine
This Is All Too Big
Jewel’s mind went blank for a moment as she tried and failed to process what Kole had told her. Ascension was the term Armenites used for the process that created Empyreals—the leaders of Armenite civilization. She asked the only question she could think of under these circumstances. “How is this even possible?”
Even through the turmoil boiling inside her, Jewel was intensely aware of Kole’s hands as he cupped and gently caressed her fingers. His touch calmed the edges of the storm within her mind. No, that wasn’t quite true. The touch of his tattooed flesh against her blemishes—her tattoos-to-be—calmed the hysteria edging up inside of her. His unadorned flesh felt warm against her skin, but it didn’t calm her the way the painted portions did.
“We are not precisely certain,” Kole admitted, “other than that it is by definition the clear will of the Unity. To put this in perspective, the medical staff of The Righteous Lightning did not immediately realize what was happening inside you when your sleep capsule was first brought aboard their ship. Ascension is outside the normal training of a ship’s doctor, and Physician Lieutenant Bree did not test you for the presence of the holy menites until after Physician General Adel’s transport reached the Prescott System and the Empyreal Physician instructed her to do so.”
Despite the calming influence of Kole’s hands, Jewel’s breathing began to grow more rapid. “What are these menites and how did they get into my body?”
Kole didn’t immediately answer her questions. His hands tightened ever so slightly around hers. “You understand that I am sharing with you the deepest secrets of the Hegemony. You understand that if you share any of this information with anyone other than another Empyreal you are going to trigger the war the Isolationists want and the Expansionists will have to fall in line behind them. We’re—”
“Wait a minute!” Jewel interrupted. His touch was too distracting to her so she let go of him and put her hands in her lap. “This is all too big and you’re telling it to me from too many directions at the same time. No, I don’t understand how this could cause a war. I don’t understand anything at all that you’re talking about. I need a coherent story. And I need you to start by explaining what’s happening to me.”
Kole took a deep breath and began to drum his fingers on the table. The nervous tick startled her. What he was telling her now frightened him more than the implicit threat to his life had when he’d first tried to make love to her. “I’m not really certain where to start,” he admitted. “One of the more experienced Empyreals should be giving you this briefing, but as you could see when they spoke to you, the Empyeals are not in agreement in how to interpret your ascension. Empyreals Adel and Farl see it as a sign of providence confirming—no, that’s not strong enough. They see your ascension as validating, perhaps even mandating, the Expansionist view that worthy allies can be found among the peoples’ of the galaxy. My uncle views things differently. He sees your ascension as a disease—an attack on the Unity brought about not by your purity of spirit but by the corruption made possible by your greed-driven technology. So Adel and Farl made a tactical decision to limit my uncle’s influence by removing all three of them from this star system and giving us a chance to develop as they believe the Unity intends.”
Jewel’s mind spun crazily as she tried to grasp Kole’s explanation, but all she really understood was that her enemies were driven not just by racism but by theological disputes within the Hegemony that frankly no one but an Armenite was likely to understand. “So what does this mean?” Jewel asked.
Kole spread his hands in a gesture of confusion. “I don’t know. It’s Unity politics—that should be a contradiction in terms but unfortunately in this case, it isn’t.” The disgust on Kole’s face could not be mistaken, even through his tattoos—disgust and something very similar to fear.
“I don’t understand what this Unity is,” Jewel told him. “You speak of it as I would the Stars or as other peoples speak of God. Is it your religion? And if so, what is its relationship to the Hegemony?”
Again Kole looked uncomfortable. “You’re asking all the hard questions. The Unity…the Unity is both a way of life and a state of being—maybe it’s a religion too, although we don’t have churches or priests unless you count we Empyreals as such. The Hegemony is an expression of the Unity—an attempt to expand the Oneness implicit within it to the rest of the galaxy. But recent history has demonstrated that the Hegemony is an imperfect expression of the Unity and the divisions within our government are now overtly influencing our interpretation of the Unity. Or perhaps I said that backward—interpretations of the Unity are overtly influencing the divisions within the Hegemony.”
If Kole was this confused about something so obviously fundamental to Armenite society, how was Jewel supposed to come to understand it?
She tried another question. “Okay so the Unity is a great idea—”
“It’s more than that,” Kole interrupted her. “It is a state of being—an internal harmony of purpose shared by all of Armenite society.”
All society including your subhuman loyalists, helots and thetes? Jewel wondered. But she didn’t express this skepticism because she didn’t want to draw Kole into another digression. “I’m not sure how to ask this next question, but you mentioned something called menites. What are they and what do they have to do with the Unity? Come to think of it, what do they have to do with me?”
Kole seemed even more uncomfortable with this question. He actually squirmed in his seat. “The menites are the binding force that holds the Unity together. They inhabit us, strengthening us, giving us purpose and ultimately making it possible for us to harvest the holy armenium.”
Jewel didn’t like the sound of that. He spoke of the menites in spiritual tones, but…
“What do you mean they inhabit us?” Jewel asked. She remembered the cloud of dirt surrounding her as she sank toward the floor of the Northern Sea on Valkyrie and the fear and burning as the water penetrated her all-environment suit.
To his credit, Kole met her stare without flinching. “I mean exactly what you fear I mean.”
Jewel shot to her feet, knocking her chair over in her haste. “You mean they’re physically inside me? Like a parasite?”
Kole was on his feet just as fast as Jewel and he caught her hands again as she began pulling at her clothes, looking for the menites on her person even though logic told her they must be too small to be viewed by the naked eye.
“Jewel,” he shouted. “Jewel!”
“How could you do this to me?” she screamed. “I have to get to a doctor. A real doctor! Look at what they’re doing to my body.”
“JEWEL!”
Jewel stopped struggling and looked up at Kole.
“I know you’re frightened,” Kole toward her. “The first time our ancestors on Armen survived ascension, they were frightened too. They mistook the menites for parasites, not the blessed symbiots they are. They can’t hurt you now. They’ll keep changing you—make you stronger, heal faster, far better able to handle temperature variations and extreme pressures.”
Kole’s eyes unfocused as he spoke to her and he smiled ever so slightly. “And there’s a lot more that’s hard to explain. I’m still knew to my ascension and it takes decades to fully acclimate to the alterations, but the menites give us new senses, new purpose—you’ll be able to hear them in me and in other Empyreals and I’m told that when they swarm the music is more glorious than anything humans have ever composed.”
Jewel stopped fighting with him. It wasn’t that she felt any less strongly about the need to get some serious medical assistance, but her brain had started working again and she knew that she wasn’t going to get that until she returned to
the Cartel Worlds. Alone as she was on an Armenite ship, that wasn’t going to happen if she didn’t get her game face on and start acting the way that Kole expected.
Still, he probably didn’t expect her to just accept what he was saying. He must know she had lots of questions. “But it’s not all beneficial, is it? The menites must be responsible for your reductions in Empyreal fertility and these markings on your body—the things I thought were tattoos.”
Kole let go of Jewel’s wrists, moved around the small table and slipped his arms around her. “We refer to them as striations. They are the symbol of your elevated status and quite beautiful. We don’t exactly understand why they happen, but some Empyreals have discovered as we did earlier today that the striations confer additional benefits to the purely aesthetic ones. It’s a special blessing of the Unity—a sign of approval.”
As Kole spoke, Jewel began to stare at her hands again, rubbing at the darkening lines, trying to make them go away. “I don’t want to be tattooed,” she told him. She didn’t like the whine of fear in her voice, but it was there and there was nothing she could do about it.
“Jewel, I know this is frightening to you. Our first settlers were frightened too. But the menites saved human life on Armen and helped us to become everything we are. This is a wonderful thing that has happened to you—a magical thing. Try to keep an open mind about it. Give yourself a chance to see the benefits, and to consider the consequences of trying to act against the Unity’s design.”
Jewel froze. “What do you mean by that?”
Kole’s expression was hard; his voice matter of fact. “You’re a Cartelite. By your own admission, your parents have been sculpting and crafting your body since your earliest years. Given that background, you have to be thinking that if you don’t like the striations you can do something surgical to remove them—even to remove the menites themselves if you decide that’s what you want to do.”
Jewel couldn’t think of an appropriate response. He was exactly right. She was already thinking about which hospital she would visit to have the procedure done.
“Right now you’re going over the marriage contract in your mind thinking that there is no clause or provision that deals with ascension—that you are free to act on this in any way you want. It’s your body after all. Now that you’ve been granted your full majority by your parents, no one but you has the right to tell you what to do with your own flesh.”
Jewel nodded. That was also exactly right. Only she could make decisions about Jewel now.
“And you’d be right in a legal sense, but badly in error in judging the response of Armen. Maybe the Unity is a religion, because what you’re thinking about doing would horrify every member of our society. Remember that we spend our lives competing for the chance to obtain what the menites freely gave you. If you cosmetically remove the signs of their approval—or worse yet, manage to kill the agents of the Unity within you…”
He stopped speaking as if he didn’t think he needed to complete the sentence, but Jewel wanted to hear the words.
“They will what, break the armenium contracts?”
Kole looked surprised by her question. “Oh, no, or, perhaps I should have said, breaking the contracts goes without saying. No, what they would do is murder you personally and attempt to wipe out every living citizen of the Cartels for the insult you had just given them.”
Jewel’s mouth dropped open. She couldn’t help it. She simply couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Kole wasn’t through scaring her. “Now if you’re people are at all like mine, you’re probably thinking that at least Armen would fall. With the Hegemony committing genocide in the Cartel Worlds and the flow of armenium being disrupted, the rest of the galaxy would rise up against Armen, overthrow it, and end the monopoly on armenium for all time. You are correct that they would try. It’s even possible that they would succeed, but you aren’t thinking through the consequences. Without Empyreals to do the harvesting, armenium becomes incalculably more difficult and more dangerous to mine. Supply of the fuel would contract drastically and that doesn’t consider the harm to the refinery and distribution networks caused by the war. The price of the fuel would skyrocket, conservatively by more than one hundred fold. The impact on galactic civilization would be…extreme.”
“It would collapse,” Jewel said in her soft voice as she worked her way through the logic of Kole’s words. “It would be a new dark ages. The galactic economy is dependent on the slide drive. Going back to slower-than-light travel would be like losing the internet in the twenty-first century and having to move information by clipper ship and pony express.” The idea boggled the mind. She still couldn’t quite come to grips with it. The armenites would do all of this to protect a parasite?
She looked hard into Kole’s face and realized that her husband would be in the front ranks of the people attacking her world.
Kole softened his tone, trying to cajole her. “Jewel, you’ve been called to a holy purpose. No one is quite certain what that purpose is yet, but no one doubts that you have one. The Expansionists hope that you will prove that the alliance with the Cartel Worlds—different as you are—is the proper path for the Hegemony. To them it will be self evident—your very existence proves their case. The Isolationists doubtless hope you will provide the excuse they need to propel themselves back into power. Letting you go back to the Cartel Worlds like this is the equivalent of giving you sufficient rope to hang yourself.”
Even with Kole’s explanations, Jewel still didn’t see how any of this made sense. “But didn’t the Physician General just tell us that she and Justiciar General Farl had to prevent your uncle from hauling us back to Hegemony space?”
“I know it’s confusing to have all of this coming at you at once, but try and see things from the Armenite perspective. Empyreal’s rarely have children. Two Empyreals have never had a child before. If you and I produce a child—it changes everything. It is indisputable proof that the Unity favors our marriage. Ordering us home would be an opportunity to kill us before we have a child, or failing that, to control the child and the public’s perception of the situation—especially if I could be driven to commit suicide. I suspect that when my uncle has time to fully consider the possibilities, he will be happier with us in exile than he would be with us at home, but unless we are very careful, matters could work in his favor either way.”
Kole settled his hand on the small of Jewel’s back and encouraged her to sit in her chair again.
Jewel started to sit when a new thought struck her. “This is why your people suddenly want cultural exchange? It’s not just exile for you—they’re seeing me as a sign that the Unity wants them reaching outward.”
“That’s true for the Expansionists perspective, but not for the Isolationists. They’re torn on how best to handle this issue. If they accepted that you have genuinely been adopted by the Unity, they would want to indoctrinate you into becoming a good Armenite—make you over in our image.”
“So there would be no need to learn about my culture,” Jewel said.
“That’s right,” Kole told her. “Since they’re reluctant to concede that the Unity freely chose you, they are looking for you to make a mistake that proves your unworthiness.”
Jewel sank into her seat with her elbows on the table and her head in her hands. “This is too much, Kole. I don’t want these things inside me. I don’t want to be changed.” She looked at the backs of her hands. Was it her imagination or were the striations already becoming more visible—the blue-black lines rising to the surface of her brown skin. “I like who I’ve become. Don’t make me—”
“Jewel,” Kole interrupted. “I’m not making you do anything. I’m simply telling you the way it is. We’ve been given a path. At the end of the path lies honor and hopefully happiness—to the left lies death and dishonor; to the right an unimaginable cataclysm for both our peoples. I didn’t choose you for this, but I’m glad the Unity chose me to help you. I won’t pretend
our path is not difficult, but I promise you will never walk it alone.”
Whatever pretty words Kole said, alone was exactly how Jewel felt right now—totally, unmitigatingly isolated amid a fanatical utterly insane people. A colony of alien creatures was making itself at home in her body and Kole—her husband—told her that if she tried to free herself of them she could provoke the Armenites to attempt intergalactic genocide. She wanted to scream, but was afraid that once she got started she might not be able to stop again.
“It’s a lot to take in,” Kole sympathized.
Chapter Ten
There’s Good and Bad
“Jewel.”
Ana Yang leapt out of her chair and hurried to the door to greet Jewel. She had a good twenty years on Jewel and her ethnically Chinese features showed new worry lines that were enhanced by the severely short cut of her formerly long and beautiful hair. “Oh Stars, look at you. They’ve given you the Empyreal treatment. It looks almost as solid as your husband’s does.”
Erik began to rise almost as quickly as Ana despite his bruises, but Jester Carter caught his arm and pulled him back down in his seat. “She’s married now,” he whispered but the sound carried across the room anyway causing Kole to frown menacingly as he followed Jewel into the room. Jester had had his hair shorn too, as had the rest of them. Even Dawil Kwon with his once long dirty dreadlocks now looked like he was ready to enter boot camp.
Jewel touched her face. “Does it look alright?” The question was not an idle one. She’d gotten a good look at herself after Kole and she left the interrogation chamber and she did not like the results at all.
“It’s striking,” Ana told her before shivering in honest response. “It’s scary too.” She reached out and touched Jewel’s other cheek. “Does it hurt at all?”
Jewel answered honestly. “No, it doesn’t. It feels just like my old cheek did.”
Vega Costa, Jewel’s old roommate aboard the Euripides looked as if she wanted to join Ana, but when she started to get out of her seat, a glare from Kole changed her mind.
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