“More than anything.”
“Be with me again.” Joy’s hand, proffered and steady.
The rifle trembled in Chu’s hands. It grew heavy. A thousand different ways she’d played the secret fantasy of the life she’d have lived if the Light had never touched Joy. The two of them, joined and as one, always. Never a moment since had Chu not been alone. Even with lovers, even within the shared minds of Grandma’s Gov collective. She’d lost her sister. Twin: the word came to her with all its meaning, togetherness those who weren’t twins could never understand. A loss they could never understand. Chu realized she was weeping. The rifle seemed to aim itself at the floor. Joy reached out. The tips of her fingers brushed Chu’s cheek—
Sister.
The rifle clattered to the floor.
Are you ready?
After a moment, Chu nodded.
Joy took Chu’s hands. Memory and moment joined. Sisters, together as young girls, together as women, the lost time falling away, a history reshaping itself.
The Light came for Chu. She let it.
And everything turned white.
* * *
Zola watched, stunned, as Colonel Chu stood there, began to weep, and let her rifle fall to the floor. Chu’s face went abruptly blank. Joy turned to Zola with one hand out. Chu followed suit, her scarred face going blank, unreadable. Zola hesitated.
She is necessary, Joy said, just as the Light had said of Joy.
It was true. The moment Chu’s hands had touched Joy’s, something changed. The Gov helos had stopped their attack. Chu had dropped her Gov shielding, and through her the Light had penetrated the pilots. No more missiles cut the sky, no more towers came down.
The Light had stabilized in Joy’s presence—it had heartened, gone still.
Zola stepped forward and took the sisters’ proffered hands.
The room disappeared. The Light rolled in, an implacable tide. Zola stood before it, righteous, defiant, ya—
I AM.
Even as the Light rose up in her mind Zola kept herself separate. She thought of Byron, of Latitude, smoke rising from the tower as she’d watched from downstream. She thought of Marco, his body laid out on the bare concrete, alone. With Joy and Chu here, she had the power to squeeze the life out of this thing. The urge tore at her—to suffocate it, send it back down into its darkness. But it would come back. It had no awareness of those who comprised it. It did not feel their joys, or their pain. And it needed to. It could not be left to rise on its own.
No, Zola told it. We. WE are.
Zola looked into Joy’s eyes and the woman’s smile was tranquil, blissed by the Light pumping through her. Chu stared, a hard smile breaking across her face, her desire to control the Light fierce even in submission. Two halves of the same coin.
I AM.
We are . . . Zola’s mind pressed into Joy’s, and then into Chu’s. WE.
I AM.
We—all three of their minds sang in unison. The women pressing their will into the Light, forcing its attention to its constituent parts. The people within whom it lived. People at this moment, dying.
WE . . .
We.
WE. The flash of self-awareness. A child’s grief as it recognized other beings it has hurt. Then, a concern that was almost parental. WE. YES.
They held the Light, let it consider itself, the feedback loop of awareness beginning to reverberate, then stabilize. Zola nodded to Joy, and they released it.
The Light flowed outward, a great flash, the nova that had pierced Zola’s dreams over and over. Wordless gratitude and joy and love and exhilaration.
It was alive. It grew.
An expanding ring burned outward from Old New York, farther and farther. Upriver, across the continent, across oceans. It connected. It drew in new minds, careful now. It didn’t thrash them—it simply incorporated them, and grew, and grew, across the globe, coalescing, taking them all in, everyone, every single mind, and at last, it crystallized.
It knew itself.
WE ARE.
Ten: North and East and Gibraltar by Dawn
FAR TO THE SOUTHEAST, three dozen ships heel into the wind, plowing deep furrows in the sea as they head doggedly north under threat of a summer storm. As one, they adjust their headings a few degrees east-northeast, Mediterranean bound, eager as wolfhounds.
On the high plain of Outer Mongolia, twenty children work in a three-story chicken coop, part of an enormous farming collective. Joined, the synchronized working of twenty pairs of small hands, the gathered eggs warm in their palms as they place them in padded buckets. The sky above the roofless structure shimmers with stars. All twenty pause in their work, looking up, up, up—their hearts beat in time, the cold night air braces them.
Paris. A high tower overlooking the Seine. Fifteen women sit in deep meditation, envisioning the logistics of a solar array in the Sahara, efficient enough to send power across the entire continent. In the afternoon heat, the city below breathes and swells, a life all its own, the Seine molten gold beneath the sun.
These moments steal Zola’s breath—these moments and millions like them, each one a tiny movement, part of a singular thought, points of light in the lattice of an enormous halo. The entire world, coursing with life.
Sometimes it’s too much. It overwhelms Zola. She weeps at its beauty and she thinks she won’t be able to contain it. But the months have made it easier. Integration: this is the intent, her new mantra. Let it all integrate. Today, as she works the oar of her gondola, it all feels part of her, like the midday sweat and the labor of her breath, and this is good.
Ahead, up the canal, the old man waits. Zola feels him, standing with his dog on a pier, marveling as he gazes upward, taking in the changes to this broken city. His thoughts touch her in fragments, words like renewal, resurrection, beautiful. Her gondola slides up beside him, and when she allows it, he sees her.
Bao, she greets him as he steps aboard. He wears slacks and a box-cut shirt, modest, civilized.
“Zola,” he greets her aloud, his smile tentative. “Thank you for seeing me.” His body still bends slightly around the spot where the bullet tore through him those months ago, his movement careful as he settles himself in the bow with the dog in his lap.
Zola leans into the oar, sending them north toward Central Lake. No one looks at them. The eyes of those on the nearby piers, of those on barges passing by, the eyes looking down on the canal from windows overhead, all slip over her, unseeing.
Only Bao does she allow to see her.
“I like your tattoos,” he says after a moment.
Thank you. Zola smiles. These new tattoos, she likes them too. For months she’s been traveling, running the globe on her sleek catties. On one shoulder, a black ouroboros she got in Sao Paolo. On the other, a Shanghai dragon. Across her back, a flaming sun. Will you tell me now, what you want? She asks as a courtesy, even though she already knows. His knowledge is part of her.
At first, Bao doesn’t answer. Instead, he scratches the terrier between the ears and watches the gutted ruins of Midtown pass him by. He watches eyes turn away.
In the past months, he’s reached out many times, asking to meet.
We may always speak, she has told him. You’ve earned that, ya.
In person. Please.
This I don’t do, padre.
She’s denied his requests, but for some reason his persistence touched her. Today, she finally relented.
North and east, her body working the oar in a slow, easy rhythm. Above the canals, work gangs teem through the torn blocks of the old city’s towers. Every day, tons of new materials are barged in, steel and plexi and synthcrete. Architects and civil engineers and city planners have come as well, all of them of a mind, connected.
They won’t build this city anew. It’s too crippled for that. But it was the site of the awakening, and this matters. It deserves memorializing. And more, Zola knows, this is her city. The Light is rebuilding Old New York for her.
Already it’s become a better place, and not merely for the fruits of industry. Proper police now patrol it; proper hospitals now stand, even if they are makeshift. The city is not yet safe—there are still dangerous places, the Luddite enclaves deep in the ruins of Jersey City and Red Hook, full of those who have managed to keep their minds separated. There are dangerous moments as well—the Light is young, still finding its legs. It is clumsy with its power. Sometimes it’s too big for those in whose minds it dwells. People die. But things are getting better. The city is becoming safe. The world is becoming safe. Places that had been abandoned, that had been left to their own decay, considered too desperate and too costly to save . . . they’re coming back.
The Light steers things in this direction, because doing so makes Zola happy. Sometimes the Light is her child, other times her partner. It reads her like a compass.
As the bulk of Midtown slips behind them, Zola asks Bao: What is it you want to know?
So many things, he says. But there is one thing he needs to know above all others, even if it is selfish. “I want to see it with my own eyes.”
Zola shrugs. What’s to see, padre? With her gaze she indicates the workers, the scaffolding.
Bao starts to speak, hesitates, then says, “I only wish to be near to it.”
You are near it. Always.
“You know what I mean.”
No, I don’t. You’ve been hoping for this for decades, ya. You helped usher it into the world, and yet when it stares you in the face, you turn away to speak with me.
“I only wish to know what it was like. What it is like.”
It’s like you, padre. It is you.
“I’ve tried to see.” Bao smiles, but there is sadness in his face, a sadness Zola feels. A man whose life’s work is finished.
What does it matter, anyway? Zola wonders. We are. Whether or not you see us, you are part of us.
“I suppose it doesn’t matter. Not really. Just to me.” Bao looks small in the front seat of her boat. “They call you the Mother. The Mother of Light. What will happen . . .” He smiles again, tact stalling him.
What will happen when I die?
“Yes.”
I don’t know.
“You must know something.”
We’ll never go back to the way we were. That’s what I know. We are what we are, ya, until we are something else. But there is no going back. Isn’t that enough?
Bao wrestles with the answer to her question while staring at the terrier, scratching its ear. The dog is loving it, oblivious to its master’s troubled mind. “I’ve spotted another trend,” he finally says. “People are migrating. Populations are redistributing. This is the Light’s doing.” He looks at Zola. “Isn’t it?”
It is.
“Why?”
I don’t know.
He blinks. “How can you not?”
I’m only a small piece, padre, just like you. It is, in fact, the best part of being a mother, when her child does something entirely unexpected, entirely its own. Even now, it flickers at the edges of her mind, bound to her and yet not. Bound to Zola but reaching outward, exploring, individuating. She tells Bao none of this.
“I fear for us, Zola.”
You predicted this. You were hoping for it.
“I only knew it would come. Now it’s here, I lay awake at night.” Bao shakes his head. “It frightens me. What I am . . . it’s not what I feel I am. Nobody is what they think they are. We are only part of the greater whole.”
We always were. We were never separate. Not really. And now we’re simply aware of it. Zola smiles, an expression that comes easier for her these days. Is there no love in you, padre, for what we’ve become?
“Yes. I suppose.” Bao thinks on it for a while. “I feel hope. I don’t know if that’s the same thing.”
Then hold on to that. Find that hope within you, ya, and share it.
The gondola slides up along a barge, part of a network of floating docks, and Zola inclines her head—an invitation for Bao to leave. The old man stands.
“It’s good to see you like this, Zola.” By which he means whole.
Zola smiles. In a move that feels strangely foreign, she takes his hand and kisses it. “For all you did, padre, thank you.”
He seems about to say something else, but then turns and steps up onto the barge, the terrier nestled in his arms. He watches Zola go, but as the gondola drifts away his gaze slips past, the same as everyone’s, unseeing.
Zola works the oar, meandering out onto Central Lake. When she reaches its center, she stops. She sits in the gondola, facing east, feeling each of the shallow waves as they kiss the boat’s hull.
For a time, she simply rests. She feels this devastated but mending city, feels other cities beyond it, and more beyond those. She feels all of those who encircle the globe, every single mind, creating a fabric too complex to name. Across the surface of this grand quilt, this thing that never sleeps, plays a symphony of coruscating light. It courses through Zola, a quickening. Her mind encompasses it, feels its living mass.
We are.
Her ships, always part of her now, stride the unseen distance. Salt spray and the joy of movement, the joy of all things working together. A single halo, the world growing smaller, a unified pattern ready to emerge. The greater human process. It reads Zola like a compass. North and east and Gibraltar by dawn.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to William Shunn and Stephen Gaskell for their keen critiques on early versions of The Burning Light. We’re also grateful to Justin Landon and the Tor.com crew, for having the faith and patience to let us take repeated stabs at this story.
About the Authors
Bradley P. Beaulieu
BRADLEY P. BEAULIEU began writing his first fantasy novel in college, but in the way of these things, it was set aside as life intervened. As time went on, though, Brad realized that his love of writing and telling tales wasn’t going to just slink quietly into the night. The drive to write came back full force in the early 2000s, at which point Brad dedicated himself to the craft, writing several novels and learning under the guidance of writers like Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, Tim Powers, Holly Black, Michael Swanwick, Kij Johnson, and many more.
Brad and his novels have garnered many accolades and mentions on most-anticipated lists, including two Hotties—the Debut of the Year and Best New Voice—on Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, a Gemmell Morningstar Award nomination for The Winds of Khalakovo, and more.
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Rob Ziegler
ROB ZIEGLER began writing science fiction in 2008. In November of that year, his story “Heirlooms” won the regional short fiction contest, A Dozen on Denver, sponsored by The Rocky Mountain News. That story proved to be fertile ground, serving as the point of departure for his debut novel, Seed, which was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He is currently working on his second novel, Angel City.
When not writing, Rob spends as much time as possible hiking in the mountains with his wife, Cindy. They reside in western Colorado, where they abide by the tutelage of a large and enlightened cat.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
One: We Want the Vector
Two: I Never Regret You
Three: The Source Doesn’t Miss
Four: Halo
Five: The Light
Six: Loud like a Prophet
Seven: I Am
Eight: Sisters
Nine: We Are
Ten: North and East and Gibraltar by Dawn
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously.
THE BURNING LIGHT
Copyright © 2016 by Bradley P. Beaulieu and Rob Ziegler
Cover art by Richard Anderson
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Justin Landon
All rights reserved.
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-9085-1 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9086-8 (trade paperback)
First Edition: November 2016
Our eBooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, ext. 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
The Burning Light Page 11