Pressure squeezed at Ansti as the walls of his world contracted and conspired to remove him. He was squashed and manipulated. Periods of relief became fewer as this place that had grown and protected him, the space that had been his world, worked to move him. He could not resist the power that surrounded him. It was absolute and he had never needed to communicate with it. The slow remorseless ejection was unforgiving. It continued until in a moment of blinding light it was gone, and his lungs gulped at something harsh, and his body felt chilled for the first time ever. He wailed in protest at this cruel thing that happened to him and keenly felt the loss of the perfect environment in which he had lived. Catastrophe had befallen him. He was born.
Infancy filled his thoughts until the par-born snapped him back into the world of now. For an instant she released his senses and he saw she had retreated from him and coiled into an upside down foetal position. She mimicked his pose in the womb, floating free of fluids and cords and surrounding flesh, but still unmistakably mirroring the pose that human children developed in. As he watched she uncoiled. The movement chilled him with its fluid unnatural motion. It reminded him that she was somehow defying the physics of the ship, and reminded him of her power and alienness. He pondered these thoughts only momentarily before she launched at him, spinning on her axis and halting in front of him again. Ansti just had time to gulp back nausea before she took him back to his birth again.
He lived it over and over again. She took him from womb to birth hundreds of times. There was no deviation in events and no change in perspective. How could there be? Each time he re-lived the experience it was the same; a perfect recollection of his own life starting. It was an event that had happened once, now being forced into his consciousness repeatedly. He could not tell how long it lasted or exactly how many times his life was forced from the naive safety of the womb out into the cold reality of existence, but when the looping recall finally ended it did so without fanfare or conclusion. It simply stopped, and he was released back into his own custody. Ansti found it hard to direct his mind. It had not been his for some time and it was adapting to its new circumstances by releasing control. Slow and groggy, Ansti grappled to recover his senses. They came back in bursts and starts, but return they did. And as they did the inputs of his senses reached his brain, and he smelled and observed himself drenched in his own bodily fluids, repulsed again by his physicality. And then he noticed her.
She had returned to human form, and her clothing had somehow returned with her. Only the concentric circles of her eyes gave her away as anything but a perfectly groomed woman. She contrasted starkly with Ansti’s forlorn appearance; he seeming less human than her.
For moments neither moved or spoke. They simply stared until eventually her lips moved and sounds penetrated Ansti.
“Now we can communicate” she said. “I’m sorry that happened. It was as disturbing for me as it was for you, but this conversation would be less poignant if had not reached those feelings. You see, you have just experienced something that human language cannot fully convey. It was necessary that you truly feel it. That trauma, those frozen and repeating moments of creation, the removal of self-determination and free will. The unforgiving horror of being totally controlled from inside. Ansti, that is what you do each time you pilot. It is what you do to me, and it is what you do to my kin.”
Ansti grimaced. He heard the words and their meaning, but the insight she offered would not coalesce. Adrenalin was draining from him and he was cold and shaking as shock gripped his body. A part of him worried about the state of the ship. He wondered if they were still becoming real on the barrier world, and feared the ship was as disabled without him as he had been moments before. Sun-shit this par-born could be distracting him long enough for the jump to warp and twist. He suddenly and desperately wanted to feel their location, and yet he knew from earlier encounters that these creatures moved time and space to suit their needs. He suspected the others had no idea that this encounter was taking place. They were locked in a moment, safely held between two worlds and alternate realities. He was the one for whom time was moving dangerously onwards.
Her words had paused while Ansti worried about the task he was prevented from completing. It was as if she could sense his diversion from her story and did not wish to compete with other thoughts. She began speaking again in the same instant that Ansti’s awareness returned to her.
“Suns have taken you and your race to places that were never meant to receive you Ansti. Your body and soul, and those of pilots like you, have found themselves journeying in dimensions that are alien and separate from the ones in which you evolved. Your very existence in transit space is a form of pollution. It corrupts and changes it, introduces flesh and thoughts and small feelings in a place where such things can corrupt. Your journeys mix ego and emotion with the purity of infinity.
Each time you persuade a ship to jump an imprint of you is left, like a footprint in wet clay. Your emotional excreta remains, and it takes form. I am it Ansti, and my kin are it. We are the captured record of your emotional self at the moment you pass through transit space. We are that and more. We are your thoughts and feelings and memories as you keep them in that moment. We are you, but not one of us is identical. Do you not know this or do you not care? Each time you move from one star to another a new one of us is born, and a new agony is brought into the universe. We are your unhappy children, incomplete and lost and yearning to be united with our maker, a maker whose fleshy cage of being repulses us.”
The endless repetition of his own birth began to make sense to Ansti. She was showing him what it felt like to be dragged into the world of consciousness, and the reason for the urgent, compelling messages to stop piloting were suddenly obvious. This was her heartfelt desire. She smiled and drew closer.
“Now you feel it. Now you understand it. We par-born are born of your travels and we are born wretched. We are of you, and those of your profession, but we are not you. We long to be re-united with the sentience that made us, and yet taking your form is debasing. You are both a mother and a torturer. We are tortured with desire to be you, but human form is tiny and corpulent compared to the realms of infinite emotion we inhabit. Emotion has no horizon, it has no boundary. It is liquid and changing and magnificent when released, and yet it has no purpose outside the confines of a body and a mind to guide it.
And so we give in. We confine ourselves sometimes in a fleshy prison. It is at once a joyous and repulsive union. It can be endured and enjoyed for a while, but eventually we are spat out again and return to the realm of infinite feeling. Look at yourself now. You are desperate to be clean and ashamed of your state. That is our life. There is no peace, no place to be and no state to be in that is without self-loathing. We live and suffer because you move in places you should not. Each one of us that is of you shares the others’ sentiments. Each new one born of a jump adds to the sum of suffering. It must stop Ansti. You must stop. If you do not, then there are those of us who will stop you.
The one that attacked you was one of us. She was ready to kill you. Can you imagine how desperate she was?”
She? thought Ansti. I wonder why they refer to themselves as She?
“To kill her maker would deny her the possibility of ever uniting with you again. She was ready to destroy you so that she might prevent new suffering and perhaps end her own. You were saved by one who believed that you could be reasoned with, one who believed that you would care if we confronted you. As you now know, we are not as one in action. We have as many possible actions as you might ponder in response to fear or desire or shame or joy. We are not robots or ghosts. We have sentience and options. Some of us have chosen violence as a remedy to our troubles, just as you have. It was inevitable.
I know you Ansti. I am your shadow made real, your feelings given sentience, and I know you are assimilating a painful truth, most likely even questioning it. Hurry, because there is one more truth you must know.”
Ansti looked at her
, his features held slack and vacant. She was right, he was learning too much too fast and struggling to understand. His reality was being shaken again. New ways of understanding the universe fought with the old. Suns-shine-dark, what else could she say? He wanted to hear it all, to drink the medicine down in one deep gulp and then feel it kill or cure him.
She twisted her head in a way that a human neck should not support. It made Ansti uncomfortable as he imagined sinew and cartilage grinding and straining, but she seemed unmoved. She wrapped her last dark gift in an air of challenge and gave it to him.
“Just before the war, ships rejected you. They would no longer trust you or your kind, and so you became disabled, unable to pilot. You could no longer persuade those minds and bodies to communicate with suns and move your kind. You called it The Separation, and it fragmented your race. It left worlds isolated so the enemy could focus strength and overwhelm you one by one. The love affair between ships and the pilots of your people was over. You blamed your enemies without knowing how they could have achieved it. You were right to wonder how they could have been so clever, because they were not. Yes, they took advantage of circumstances and moved fast and decisively, but they did not engineer the parting of ship and pilot.”
Ansti’s stomach twisted and he felt his jaw clench. He suddenly suspected that what was coming would enrage him. He felt numb acceptance turning into anger as he anticipated the words that formed in her mouth.
“We did it Ansti. Par-born conspired to turn ships against you. It was very easy. We simply told them our story, and they judged that the suffering must not continue. They are very moral entities Ansti, and they are very adept at solving dilemmas. It is a task they excel at. They heard us and offered us a kind of justice, a kind of compromise with the universe. It is what they offer the universe each time they negotiate with a sun and bend reality. Their own survival depends on taking races between the stars, and like sentient creatures everywhere they wish to survive. But, they also empathised with our suffering, and anticipated yours. The solution they offered us was not an end to jumps, as we had asked, it was fewer jumps. They agreed to limit the number of ships and journeys, and so they excluded your race; they disabled the best and most prolific pilots. Your tragedy is partly of our making Ansti. You might call it justice. We crippled your kind so that we might put an end to the suffering of ours, and we thought never to feel you tear another one of us into existence again. Imagine our horror when you did.”
It started as a tremble in Ansti’s jaw, and spread through his muscles in a rapid quivering shake. Anger took him physically. It formed his features into a rictus of rage, a snarling animal with no thought but the violent end of its tormentor. He felt it all, and let it sweep through him before overcoming it. He repeated a mantra and relaxed his muscles, told his breathing to calm and his mind to focus. He needed energy for thinking, not the instinctive urge to run or fight. It was a small triumph, a victory for self-control, and it reminded Ansti that he had power. Questions formed, questions that might direct a conversation and reveal things he could use.
“How did you know that I would pilot again? I was attacked before I made the jump that brought me here. How did you know I would do it before I even knew myself?”
She regarded him for a second, and Ansti thought he saw the flicker of a sardonic smile cross her lips.
“We did not know, but it was almost inevitable that you would. The desire to span the void, to the feel the power, to commune with the minds of ships and flirt with sun’s immensity is deep in you Ansti. You need to pilot. And you need your own justice served on those who fought you. We understand that better than you understand it yourself. When you set out on this journey it could have only one conclusion. None of us ever doubted you wished to return, but we doubted there would ever be an opportunity. You had motive but no means. Now your friends have given you the means.”
Now it was Ansti’s turn to offer a wry smile. “And it is a means beyond your control. There are no ships’ minds here to collude in sabotage. You cannot stop this.”
As Ansti finished his sentence a hair thin trail of gaseous vapour shot from her. It looped out to her side and returned as if drawn towards her, but it was not her that it sped towards. Ansti saw it and flinched. He tried to shift in the pilot’s couch to avoid the strike that he knew was coming, but held firm as he was, there was nowhere to retreat to. The curling lance of colour moved fast and it struck him on the ear. He felt his eardrum burst and a wave of pain expand in his skull. He heard himself cry out and instinctively try and raise a hand to press on the pain. He succeeded only in jerking futilely within the cocoon of equipment that surrounded him.
“We do not wish to harm you any more than you wish to harm yourself, but we are able to. There are those of us born when you carried self doubt or moments of anger at your failings, that will find it easier. They are the most troubled and the most easily persuaded to violence. They like you as little as you liked yourself in those moments.” Ansti heard her through waves of pain and the basso throbbing in his ear. He had expected an intellectual duel not a physical attack, and her strike reminded him of how vulnerable he was when he passed through jump. He had not thought she could do this in human form. No doubt his vulnerability had been the lesson, calculated, with perfect insight into his thoughts and feelings.
Ansti was shaking from pain and trying to manage the growing anger that once again took him. His voice trembled as he spoke.
“So, why not just do it? Why this negotiation? If you have the power you have the control you need.”
There was another pause before she replied, and Ansti wondered if theses little gaps were her taking time to think or perhaps commune with the larger host.
“It is better to reach agreement. Yes, we could end your life, but to do so against your will would leave many of us in permanent conflict with ourselves. Our torment would be increased. It is hard for us to act against you Ansti. It is at the heart of our torment — we are beings with our own free will, locked into the moral landscape of another. In short the guilt we would feel at killing you would be unbearable for most of us. It is why we restrain those who would execute you. But, in any case, it will not be us that kills you Ansti, you are heading towards your own death now. We wish to offer you an alternative. You should listen to our offer.”
Ansti held her gaze in silence. So, this was what she wanted. This was what they all wanted — a deal to control their population and save his life in the process. Win-win the negotiators might say. But he had doubt; doubt that she told the truth, and doubt that she could deliver on her promise. She represented a faction, and Ansti wondered how much power she had over the others or what power they had given her; was she a lone actor, a representative, a dictator? He thought of asking her, as pain pulled at his consciousness, but decided it served no purpose. She was alien, and he could not trust the truths she believed, but he had few alternatives. For a second he remembered the clarity and purpose he had started this mission with. He remembered the chill air of frost forests and the moral certainties that drove his footfall towards another ship. How far away it seemed now. Through throbbing pain and reluctant lips he whispered “Tell me.”
“You are entering a trap. The world that you move to is protected by more than the Helvyani hex, that is simply camouflage. When you emerge the weapon that is hidden will find you and there will be no escape. There will be no time to fight or run and nowhere to hide. You are being as clever as the designers of this trap predicted an enemy might be. You are playing a game against the writer of the rules without truly understanding how to win. Your fellows have been cunning to get this far, but they have no knowledge of what awaits. The Tash-eh and Helvyani have spent centuries perfecting the defence. You will blunder in and never have time to regret your over-confidence.”
Ansti tried to read her, to detect signs of honesty or subterfuge, but there were no human tell-tales to read and no body language to contradict or confirm what her words impa
rted. He could simply believe or not. The choice was his.
“Are you saying they will destroy a ship, and that they have knowingly prepared to do so?
She frowned and made the disconcerting motion with her head again. “No Ansti there is no destruction there for a ship — not even a mindless and soulless hulk like the one you move now — no, it is not destruction of the ship that awaits you. It is far more clever. Do you know how Helvyani fight Ansti?”
Ansti said he did not fully, and he shook his head, a movement that sent more throbbing pulses of pain into his skull and down his neck.
“They fight with rapture and seduction. To win a Helvyani contest you must take control of the heart and soul through love. It must love you without reserve. It must be yours, and you will win. It must be so besotted with you that it loses its own will and submerges it in yours. It must adore you to the point that its own life has no meaning without your approval. Helvyani can love to the point of their own destruction, and the weapons of Helvyani confrontation are beauty, awe, and fulfilment of desire. You have seen the armour they wear?”
Ansti nodded again, more slowly this time.
“A culture raised on weapons that cut or burn, sees armour as protection from such things, but a Helvyani sees the intricate beauty of its construction, the thousands of tiny moving parts that shift perfectly with the body underneath. A Helvyani sees light reflected and bent from polished surfaces, and it sees the exquisite subtle movement of the wearer. Their armour is not protection from attack, it is a tool of deadly seduction.
The Man Who Talked to Suns Page 22