Lucy A. Snyder is a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author of ten books and about 100 published short stories. Her writing has been translated into French, Russian, Italian, Spanish, Czech, and Japanese editions and has appeared in publications such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Apex, Nightmare, Pseudopod, Strange Horizons, and Best Horror of the Year. She lives in Ohio and is faculty in Seton Hill University’s MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction. You can learn more about her at www.lucysnyder.com and you can follow her on Twitter at @LucyASnyder.
The Eater of Stars
J.E. Bates
Illustrated by Mike Dubisch
Who’s afraid of science? The word means only knowledge. Science is the light of the mind. It is magic you should dread, that boundless infinite beyond understanding and the instruments of our reason. Fear not the unknown but the unknowable.
—The Book That Never Sleeps
Chydi shoved her way up the rolling walkway in silk pajamas, drawing grumbles and stares. She kept on despite every bump chafing her raw skin.
Avoid strenuous activity for six weeks, the medical AI had said. Your body needs reintegration.
“Sorry, coming through,” she said. “Diplomatic emergency.”
“Chydi, stop!” a woman yelled from behind.
She ignored the shout, squeezing between a pair of indigo-robed cultists. They regarded her with beatific silence behind metal-painted faces.
The walkway rumbled past shops and rez blocks toward Central Data. Overhead, kilometer-long tanks of bioluminescent brine illuminated the underground city, flanked by immense skylights giving vistas of deep space. But tension filled the streets. Giant news screens showed footage of unidentified craft raiding a distant world. Crowds gathered in hushed knots.
A beam of red light picked Chydi out of the crowd. It came from a Gi pawn, a metallic cylinder on treads. The pawn also pinged her implant link.
“Please exit the travelator for admonishment,” it said in its tinny voice. “Pushing is prohibited.”
“I have to talk to Gi!” she said. “The network’s jammed.”
Kaldoun caught up, breathless in fleet dungarees. Blaze-orange hair framed a triangular face, the skin a warm jacinth. Black eyes tapered back like her ears. “Chydi, dun do this!”
The pawn’s sensory dome rotated and clicked. “Couples mediation is avail—”
“We’re not fighting!” Chydi said.
“She just outta regen,” said Kaldoun, grabbing Chydi’s arm. “Her da’ dun know. She panic, is all.”
“It’s nothing to do with that. Let me talk to Gi!”
“I have elevated to a supervisory circuit,” the pawn said. “Proceed.”
“It’s . . .” she hesitated.
A cavalcade of faces flowed past on the walkway. Hundreds more ambled along the multi-level esplanade, shopping at kiosks or cavorting in cafés. An intricate variety of transhumanity and mechasentience filled the Circlet from every planet of the Association. Even the occasional xenoform ambled by, non-bipeds within distinctive environment suits.
How to explain?
Every night, Chydi became photons, careening through space with the joyful fluidity of light—but liberation always turned to dread. Like clockwork, an unseen force impelled her toward a vast, red supergiant. The star blazed like a pyre in the awful depths of infinite space. She fought against the gravity well each time, but its grip never relented.
Then flashes rent the further void, mere parsecs away. Three supernovae—a statistical impossibility—crowned the red giant, outshining entire galaxies. Panic always pushed her awake, sometimes with a scream, sometimes with her heart pounding so hard it felt like fists hammering her chest.
“Please.” Chydi hissed in a low voice. “I am a junior diplomatic attaché of the Brakandean Heresy. During regen, I saw terrible things. They’re coming true.”
* * *
News of the attack had arrived that morning.
“Chydi, you awake?” Kaldoun called from the outer room.
“Yeah.”
“Come see this.”
“Skin’s burning. I need a soak.”
“Best see this first.” Kaldoun’s voice lacked its usual flippancy.
A tingle touched Chydi’s spine. Had a star exploded? Absurd. It had to be something else. Her voice cracked. “My father?”
“Worse.”
Chydi tugged on silk pajamas—no indulgence after regen—and stepped into the outer room. “Replay news, mute.”
A glass wall activated, bringing holos to life. Burning vehicles smoked in an unfamiliar landscape. Micro-craters pockmarked the asphalt, the edges melted by energy weapons. Mutilated bodies sprawled in the road. Their heads—
Chydi looked away. “What happened?”
“Xenos stealin’ meat on a world called Taral.”
“Meat?”
Kaldoun tapped her skull. “Brains.”
“What? Who even does that?”
“New species. Boffins callin’ them Ktonni ’cuz they come from thataway.”
Chydi froze. “Ktonni as in Kton?”
“Big red star, can’t miss it.” She meant the red supergiant, the brightest star within a thousand parsecs.
“I know what it is,” Chydi said, voice shaking. “I’ve told you about these dreams.”
“That’s coincidence.”
“How could it be?”
Kaldoun shot her a cross-eyed look. “There’s jillions of stars thataway. Taral is only twenty parsecs away. Kton is a hundred! And there’s no supernova, let alone three. That’s impossible.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Chydi frowned.
“Course I is.”
“Activate audio.”
An AI narrated, “. . . with surgical precision and transferred them to cylinders. Stellpax will doubtless send fleet elements to respond.”
“Naddy beasts,” Kaldoun said. “Pax will fry ’em like fish.”
“Hush!” Chydi scowled. A species with exponentially superior technology could burn through the Association like plasma in a vacuum. Everyone in the diplomatic corps knew that—but how did you prepare for the unknown?
Alien traders hinted at coreward sentience as old as the galaxy itself, cosmic forces that crossed intergalactic voids on millennial timescales. Wayfarers whispered of sentient vortices: killers of dreams, eaters of stars. Theorists called them hypothetical macrocosmic entities. Fringe cultists called them the Ungods.
The AI continued. “During the attack, the entities broadcast this message: ‘Sentient lifeforms, we bring the gift of ascension. This is the command of Kton.’”
Chydi froze, the dream-dread returning: three stars blinked and died above a roaring, crimson sun. A sibilant hiss blew across the nape of her neck. Alien words lingered on the tip of recall, a wisp of déjà vu that would not come.
She slapped the comm holo. “Give me Gi.”
“Apologies,” said a subroutine. “No channels available.”
Kaldoun shrugged. “Just wait for people to calm—hey! Where you goin’?”
But Chydi was already out the door, sprinting for the walkways. Gi’s Central Data Plinth lay only a few kilometers away.
* * *
“Unable to establish a direct link to Gi Primary Function,” the pawn said, “even as a diplomatic courtesy. My regrets.”
“Thanks anyway.” They exited the travelator.
“Come, we go home,” said Kal. “Or line up at Central Data?”
“My father has direct access to Gi.”
Kaldoun squeezed her hand. “Bad idea. He wun even recognize you, let alone believe this wild an’ wild tale. He might tweak, even go primal.”
“What else can I do?” She stepped onto an escalator, ascending toward embassy row.
“Lemme ’splain your dream,” Kaldoun said. “You will see the coincidence.”
Chydi scoffed. “You can try.”
“Flyin’ naked through space, that’s the new you.”
“I w
as photons, not naked.”
“No mind. The red supergiant, that’s your da’.”
“Remarkable insight.”
“Sarcasm,” said Kal, “is a club, no a witty needle. You want help or what, pajama lady?”
“Sorry.”
“Falling into the star is fear of your da’ finding out. So get it over with, rip off the bandage, nightmares stop. Simple, no?”
“What about the supernovae?”
Kaldoun grinned. “Orgasms!”
In spite of everything, Chydi smirked. Kaldoun could be so naddy. “Thanks, but believe me, this is real.”
“You dun even have a psi-rating.” Another frown. “You regret regen?”
“Not for a minute.”
“You brave.”
“It’s normal, billions do it.”
“But no on Brakandy.”
Chydi stared at her nails: chewed, unpainted. “No, not on Brakandy.”
“Heretics, technomancers, rebels—but no body changin’. Why so backward?”
“It’s not illegal, it’s—well, how much do you know about the Heresy?”
Kaldoun snorted. “More ’an enough. You dun like change, change is bad.”
“Almost.” Chydi laughed. “Our ethos is resistance to entropy. We oppose decay, chaos, death.”
“You dun fight physics with ideals, even on a planet drowned in fog. Reality is all mist anyway, an illusion.”
“Don’t be daft.”
Mist.
Mist recalled childhood: the villa on the Nithorian headlands, her third-story bedroom, the nightly inspections. Every evening, her toys and athletic gear had to be back on the shelves, each position indicated by an outline and a label. Father scrutinized them like a troop of shipboard marines.
That sparked another, more fleeting memory: a place truly drowned in mist, the roiling unreality of the twin universe—those realms of death where runeships took shortcuts between the anti-stars.
There, shells gleamed like pearls, endless banks of moon-sized entities clinging to shards of foaming timespace. Every so often, one hissed open and a silver tendril shot out, bent on some occult task.
Onkt, Nkto, Kton . . . lancebolts hitting starships in the dark . . . chitinous tongues, whispers from another world . . . figures in vac suits, yawning pits . . . inimical sentience, transmigrating space and time . . . thieves of minds, eaters of stars . . .
The Brakandean embassy loomed ahead, a block of amalgamate on an artificial island, circular at its base, each higher floor smaller in circumference, resembling a vimana.
“I wait outside,” Kaldoun said, “where it safe.”
II.
Father stood hunched over as if his spacious office could not contain his height. Gnarled fingers lifted a tiny teacup to his lips, incongruous, like a storybook giant clutching a rag doll. A flicker of recognition crossed his darting eyes. Yet his dark countenance remained impassive, save for a downward turn of his lips. Did he recognize her—or see just another Brakandean?
Chydi performed a knee-dip, acknowledging rank. “The fundament endures.”
“May permanence guide right action,” he answered in the formal tense, not the familiar. “My time is vital today. They tell me Chedan is back. I say good, send him in. Instead, I find a woman in pajamas. Where is my son?”
“Can you not see?” Chydi closed her eyes a fraction. “I was Chedan. Now, I am Chydi.”
Admiral Chechum Sochum, Plenipotentiary of Brakandy, had gained renown in naval actions by reacting to complex data with speed. He did not stammer or sputter out denials. His grim, lined face turned from surprise to dismay to anger within a second. Just as quick, his hand shot outward, ceramic at the apex of its trajectory.
Scalding hot tea splashed across Chydi’s face. She cried out, rivulets of liquid running down her raw cheeks. “Father!”
“Why?” he demanded. “Why have you performed this entropy?”
She wiped her face before answering, signaling calm by answering in the aristocratic tense. “I experienced a moment of bliss.”
“My son’s bliss is on file with the Audiants. It is this: satisfaction triggered by a panoramic sunset on the evening he received news of his diplomatic sinecure. You mouth absurdities.”
“Doctrine permits additional moments, refinements of first understanding.”
Her father pursed his lips, unable to refute. “What moment?”
“When I first made love to Kaldoun.”
“Bah. Every young fool mistakes lust for bliss. This brothel of a city has corrupted you. I should have vetoed this posting.”
“Do not moments of bliss transcend the ever-changing surface of things to reveal underlying permanence?” She needed to get him past this to the danger of Kton. “Yes, I met Kaldoun in an erotic sensorium. Yes, I lied about why I entered regen. But my moment of bliss revealed myself to me, and now, I am as you see me.”
“I, me, myself—this is narcissism, an illegal orthodoxy.” He grunted. “You haven’t recorded this so-called bliss before an audiant, and thus, it is invalid.”
“I registered it with an accredited audiant in Braktown.”
At that, more anger boiled across his face. She feared he’d go primal and strike her, but he turned away instead, voice cold and distant. “It is my right to disinherit you for cause. I now do so on the grounds of abominable entropism and disgracing your mother’s memory. You are no longer a Brakandean and expelled from the diplomatic corps.”
“Father!” Chydi trembled. She’d expected anger but not loss of clan, career, even citizenship.
“Remedy your apostasy and apply for reinstatement on the homeworld. Or stay here among the hedonists; I understand the machine doles out stipends to its parasites.”
“Am I not your only child!?”
“My son is dead.” He pointed toward the door. “Surrender your implant, and get out.”
“Wait!” She rushed forward, grabbing his arm. “Call Gi.”
“Gi will not intervene.”
“It’s about Taral!”
He gave a textbook-perfect eyebrow raise, a gesture of disdain reserved for low-status strangers. “Gibberish.”
“During regen, they drug you for long stretches. While under, I dreamed of ancient beings.”
“You are not only apostate but insane.” He grabbed her tender forearm, manhandling her toward the door.
“They send their minds through time and space!”
“Consider ascetic therapy.” The door hissed shut. “Perform penance in the salt caves.”
“They crowned Kton with supernovae!” she shouted.
The door re-opened. Her father stared, jaw agape. The door had opened on its own.
“We would hear this,” someone said. Not her father—and not the embassy’s AI.
Governing Intelligence’s voice emanated from circuits embedded in the structure of the building—Gi, Administrator of the Circlet, Adjudicator of the Association. Like any mechasentience, it spoke with the fluid precision of machine intelligence. But only Gi used this particular tone, locked at frequency 176 Hz but with a rich, androgynous timbre. Its voice was so distinct that its use, outside of narrow educational and satirical purposes, violated the law.
“This is Brakandean soil by treaty,” her father grumbled. Everyone knew Gi sometimes eavesdropped. True privacy existed only aboard secure ships.
“Apologies, Admiral,” said Gi. “I employed only passive monitoring as permitted by emergency protocol. Chydi Sochum, please elaborate.”
Chydi blurted out her tangle of nightmares: “. . . killing stars celebrates or even enables their arrival. In a book I’ve seen only in dream, they call this ritual the Crown of Kton.”
“How many supernovae?” Gi asked.
“Three,” said Chydi, voice hollow. “There are three.”
“Just so,” said Gi. “I have called a quorum. Admiral, you will represent the Brakandean Heresy. Chydi, please attend as a witness.”
* * *
The quorum gathered within a secure chamber, an adamant-lined bastion hardened against thanatomic attack and psiotronic espionage. Emissaries from the major Association states sat around a slab of rock crystal. These envoys carried plenipotentiary powers, able to make decisions for their individual governments without waiting the months it took for messages to cross interstellar gulfs.
Chydi had changed into a stylish frock—never before worn in public—but the familiar, bureaucratic routine reassured her. It felt good to get back, even if only as a witness.
A pawn directed her to the Brakandean back-bench, murmuring, “Wait until called upon.”
Like the others, her father looked up when she entered, anger still in his darting eyes. Ignoring the interruption, the dignitaries resumed their debate.
“Everybody wants something,” said the fork-bearded khargi with a brass implant for a left eye. “Find out what these Ktonni want, and we can deal.”
“They want brains,” said a stern Dakoomite, his face a mass of scales. “They shall not have them without reckoning with the puissant arms of the Eightieth Dynasty.”
“Don’t tweak, slick,” said a diminutive Yxean, her periwinkle hair shaved and spiked. She hovered above her chair in a lotus position. “We got technology. Let’s parlay.”
“Ignore this one-time aberration,” said her father. “Allow normality to return.”
“What is normal?” demanded the khargi. “Remember Species XF-59, the plasma beings? They exist on a different timescale, use sensory apparatus we can’t fathom, and treat biological life as undifferentiated matter.”
“But we communicated with the XF-59,” said the Yxean. “In the end.”
“Only by cracking tsar-bombs in prime-number patterns around their gas giant!” the khargi shouted. “How do we ‘parlay’ with brain-thieves?”
“Some creatures you just can’t reach,” said the Herelîta, leader of Kaldoun’s people. “These Ktonni are more than an undiscovered species with deplorable habits.” She touched her earpiece, staring at Chydi. “Or so I’m told.”
Gi’s voice emanated from the ceiling. “This is Chydi Sochum, a witness with extralocal knowledge. Please proceed.”
Chydi stood up. She’d spoken to diplomats before—rooms full of people. Look above their heads, move your eyes around. But never like this.
Ride the Star Wind Page 5