Zarzak says nothing, but shapes itself into an abstract humanoid form, a ball floating above fleshy curves, and it dances.
Aria comes closer. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”
Zarzak dances. Aria tries to read the movements, tries to see an unctuous smirk and a cackle and a speech about being the most desired being in the universe or a pathetic snivel about wanting to be loved or a noble yet misguided diatribe on the mind-killing evils of loneliness. Something. Anything.
But no.
Zarzak just dances.
Beautifully.
Aria does not know who built this place, if it was Zarzak or someone else, if Zarzak is conqueror or prisoner, monster or victim. She comes closer and closer.
It is said that the Sister Ray can kill gods. It is ancient and unknowable, like everything that matters. She points it at Zarzak, and Zarzak dances.
“This sucks,” she says.
She is going to pull the trigger. Totally. In just a second. Just a second. It is just very pleasant being here right now. Aria feels clean inside, not happy exactly, but clean, or maybe healed, and it is a nice sensation, again pleasant. Why not linger a while? It’s not like there’s exactly a time limit. Well, Quark said there was a time limit, but Quark is a doofus. No one ever got hurt by just hanging out. Just for a minute.
Aria begins to dance.
It’s fun.
She offers Zarzak the Sister Ray. It slides a protrusion toward her and takes the Sister Ray..
Aria keeps dancing. She thinks it was probably a mistake to do that just now, and she thinks that she probably should have just shot it. She has never been good at just shooting things. She is too sentimental, too much of a romantic, too inclined toward forgiveness and nonviolent talky times. The Zarzak Contagion is definitely way stronger up close, and she wishes she had considered that in advance.
Zarzak points the weapon at Aria.
“Shit. So you’re, like, definitely a bad guy, huh? Not even a cool bad guy. Just a dick.”
Aria wants to think of a cool thought before she dies, but she can’t really think of anything but how great Zarzak is. Bummer.
But before she can be murdered, the doors of the Spire fly open and T.A.R.C.T.I.L. appears, covered in weapons—laser cannons and glowswords and particle whips extending from compartments all over its body. It charges them, and Aria is unsure which one it is after. Zarzak does not seem to care either way. It fires wildly, dance-dodging an incoming volley of ultra-missiles and laser spray.
Aria does not dodge but somehow manages to avoid getting hit. In the confusion, she leaps forward and reaches out for the Sister Ray. There is a quick tug of war, but Zarzak doesn’t even have real muscles. She takes the weapon and aims.
“You suck, dude. Like really.”
And she fires. Zarzak is hit directly, and Aria holds the beam down on it, causing Zarzak to be rearranged on a quantum level.
It is totally dope.
She stands, dusts herself off. Already, she can feel her mind getting right. Emotions are dumb, she decides. As a way-cool space cyborg, she should know better than to be seduced by a few warm fuzzies. She looks over to T.A.R.C.T.I.L., ready to continue the fight if necessary. It lies on the ground, bleeding from its left side.
Wait.
She puts on her headphones again and presses play, and she sees the braincube there, missing many of its most important atoms. It didn’t get a full blast, but even a taste of the Sister Ray is enough to fuck up one’s shit.
Aria rushes over to the dying cube. And she is like, “Why?”
And the memory rushes in Aria’s mind.
Aria sighs.
“Fuck you,” she says, but she straps the braincube to the back of the jetbike. It is very awkward. She does not like the squishy feeling of the braincube pushing on her back, and its size and shape completely mess up her aerodynamics and balance.
And the braincube shows her all the times it was alone on braincube planet again, and then it shows them traveling and hanging out and playing mind games, and then the braincube dies.
Zarzak’s dance pillar begins to pulse, and the hum turns to a sickly screech. Without Zarzak doing whatever dumb thing he was doing, the equipment is freaking out. Or maybe the Drowning King just wants to get all of this stupid shit out of his eye. Either way, Aria has a feeling shit is about to get real.
She sighs.
“You’re carbon-based, right?”
She sets the Sister Ray to naviform mode, and she forms the braincorpse into a little ship. Nothing special, just dece enough to get them out of atmo. She really wishes she knew what the braincube’s actual name was, but she just names it the Braincube. It’s sort of cute, she thinks.
She gets into Braincube and flies away just as the Spire explodes. The universe is saved. Hurray. Great job.
As the Drowning King shrinks in the distance, Aria wonders, idly, if souls can attach to atoms or if they are more of a molecular thing. She does not know the answer, but she likes the idea of it.
“Tell me, Braincube. Where is fancy bred? Or in the heart or in the head?”
It is engendered in the eyes, she thinks, and she does not know if she is thinking it herself or if someone is thinking it for her or if she is just thinking about someone thinking it for her because she is a big softie. Is this a kind of love, this inability to distinguish sentiment from sentimentality? Perhaps T.A.R.C.T.I.L’s premise was wrong. Perhaps love already exists in infinite quantities all around us, subtly connecting us all together with little moments of affection and kindness and not attached to freaky alien buttholes.
“Okay. We can be friends now,” she says.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JOSEPH ALLEN HILL is a Chicago-based writer and bon vivant. He has also spent time in Georgia and New Jersey. He has a marginally useful degree in Classics and enjoys making music in his spare time. His previous publication history includes two stories published in Lightspeed Magazine. To learn more, follow him on Twitter @joehillofearth2.
UNFAMILIAR GODS
ADAM-TROY CASTRO WITH JUDI B. CASTRO
The face of the eunuch engineer-priest is an exercise in minimalism. It’s human but possessed of no pores, blemishes, smile lines or any other markers of character. In his all-concealing purple rad suit, a permanent second skin that was grafted to his own on the day he took his vows, only his face is visible, a constellation of eyes, nose and mouth in a square cut-out that is the only gap in rubbery material too thick to permit normal tactile sensation, or even most human eliminatory functions, without divine intervention. Thanks to his weight—typical among his kind, who all tend to the overweight—it also makes him look like a giant grape.
He spreads his hands palms upward, expressing a level of helplessness eloquent in its pious simplicity. “The gods have forsaken us.”
Captain Henryk Fithe regards the little creature with open loathing. Fithe is the engineer-priest’s physical opposite: hard-edged, steel-jawed, battle-scarred, potent, with a uniform pressed until every crease cuts like a sword’s edge. He is also the man’s opposite by nature: a man of action, an advocate of tough decisions, and a champion of the special capacities the brave and forthright use to wrest victory from the moments of most heart-rending despair. Surrender to futility, even a futility mandated by forces greater than himself, has never been in his skill set. “I’ll decide when the gods have forsaken us.”
“Will you, O Captain? Is it not the gods who get to make that decision? Would you not accede to their judgment and withhold your own as the foolishness of a flawed mortal being?”
Fithe rubs the bridge of his chiseled nose between thumb and forefinger. He has never been fond of priests, even the ones whose prayers and sigils have always been necessary, if distasteful, adjuncts to the proper maintenance of starship engines.
It is not, he reflects, just that their rituals are repugnant to him; like most captains, he is as eager to leave matters of faith to their able hands as he is to abandon
the specific mechanics of applied astrophysics to their purview.
Nor is it just that he is personally creeped out by their sexual relationship with the engines they serve, the only form of consummation of which they remain capable after the holy sacrifice of their genitalia. (Though he labors in vain to erase the memory of the several occasions when he’s come down to the engine room on one command errand or another, when the ship had been humming along at multiple times the speed of light and everything had been working the way it should have been working, only to find this inhuman little castrato and his fellow devotees of the Church of Hyperspeed writhing in the orgiastic pleasure afforded them by the throbbing light pulses from the divine host; no longer single grapes, they now looked like entire bunches engaged in acts of auto-cannibalism. Few alien monsters glimpsed on even the most savage backwater worlds had ever struck Fithe as being anywhere close to that repugnant.)
No, what Fithe hates, really, is that theirs is an awfully inflexible creed. They’re always so certain, so superior —and he is not the first to damn the malicious sense of humor the gods had demonstrated by making faith such an integral part of interstellar travel. “Details.”
“We’re crippled,” the engineer-priest says simply. “We can barely maneuver, let alone get up to speed—a useless function, given how far we now are from any star system on or off the map. We’ve been flung an unknown distance at so many multiples past the highest speed any human vessel has ever recorded, into a region of space inhabited by no gods we know, perhaps no gods of any kind. Meanwhile, life support has less than forty-eight hours left. That, good Captain, is as near a definition of death as our scriptures provide. If there is a way out, neither faith nor engineering can provide it. Bless the gods.”
“Bless the gods,” Fithe murmurs automatically. “But no more hopeless talk, hear me? I will not accept that outcome until I have no other alternative.”
“It is the outcome, Captain. The numbers . . .”
In a flash, the cutting edge of Fithe’s ceremonial dagger is up against the most vulnerable part of the little reprobate’s throat. “If you need me to say it, you sackless perversion, then very well. No more hopeless talk, with anyone, or I’ll have you executed for fomenting panic. It’s not like you’re essential personnel any longer, if you can’t fix anything. At the bare minimum, you can remain useful by keeping up appearances.”
“. . . yes, Captain. Your orders?”
“Fix what you can, even if it’s just cosmetic. Make things comfortable. Create the illusion of progress. And”—with a shudder of revulsion as he slips the dagger back in its sheath—“feel free to have one of your ceremonies if you have time. I know it won’t change anything, but the sound of you lot in mid-rut may deter any lower-level crewmen from wandering in here and finding out anything we don’t want them knowing about, just yet.”
“No possibility of that. We’re eunuchs. We can’t perform unless the deities indulge us with miracles. And with the engines inoperative . . .”
“Fake it, then.”
The priest is aghast. “You want us to fake a ceremonial orgy? How?”
Fithe sucker-punches him in the belly. A whuff of air escapes the eunuch-priest’s lips, a thin sheen of sweat appears on his soft rounded forehead, and he sinks to his hands and knees, moaning. The captain places his right boot on the man’s buttocks and, with the slightest of nudges, pushes him over, leaving him on his side, gasping for breath, his oversized eyes shut tight in agony.
Fithe, who has been wanting to do that for years, says, “Imagine twenty of you doing that in a pile. I believe it will be persuasive enough.”
* * * *
A smartly executed about-face and Fithe has left the flesh-pit of engineering behind and is on the way to the bridge.
It is a grim journey. The corridors are hazy. The air distribution system has rendered a fine layer of ash, some human, throughout the ship. He can only wonder if some of what he’s breathing now is Nargill, the ship’s cook, with her ready smile and ever-helpful-manner; Peters, the irrepressible exobotanist, always ready with a kind word or a song; Wu, the cantankerous ship surgeon, whose grumpy exterior hid a core of decency as great as any man Fithe had ever known; or the scribes, any of the faceless young men and women who once accepted the removal of their eyes in exchange for the honor of laboring in the ship’s dank scriptoriums, twelve hours out of every twenty-four, painstakingly transcribing the holy writs of Viriianis, the benevolent deity of humanity’s home system, from one scroll to another. The honor they had done that kind-eyed god, with their labors, was another sacrament without which no engine ever built by man could have ever propelled the Faithful any faster than the smallest fraction of C. But they are dead now, or damned in ways that are worse than dead, and so the ship can only crawl at a mere one-tenth of light speed, fully subject to the cursed time dilation and other results of relativity that now render return to a recognizable human space an impossible dream.
The terrible truth is not just that the Faithful might never make its way back home. It’s that home is on the brink of annihilation.
The terrible battle was only hours ago, the last stage of a war that had ripped across the sky for years. In the end, the entirety of the human fleet and its gods had faced off against the Vferm, invaders who had aligned themselves with pantheons even more powerful. The ships of the Holy Church of the Star Brigade and the ships of the heretical enemy had exchanged missile fire for days on end, each side suffering awful losses, each side being revived just as often by divine whim, each side holding on in the dread knowledge that both had committed all their forces to this battle, and that there was no point in retreat even for ships that were on the verge of destruction.
At the point when the engagement entered its most disastrous phase, the Faithful had lost one quarter of its complement to one hull breach or another, just as many to the forces wielded by the gods of the enemy, who had favored hellfire and random punitive transformations into obscene lesser life forms. Fithe had been standing next to Corporal Karl Nimmitz during one such moment, when the glowing hand of something divine had reached through the hull and brushed the young man’s skin, instantly transmuting a two-meter recruit into his own weight in squirming brown rats; he had seen the ship’s crisis counselor Diadem-Troy become a pillar of flies. The corridors of the Faithful had become a menagerie of such vermin, some still trapped inside the uniforms the individuals had worn as human beings; some of the creatures identifiable, some not.
And that was before the enemy’s most powerful god, a thing that was to humanity’s gods what a savant is to an amoeba, had wandered into the battle, a humanoid figure the size of a small planet, striding through empty space the way a man would walk on solid flooring, sweeping away entire formations with irritated gestures. Fithe did not know the being, did not know what it chose to call itself, did not understand why a being so far beyond the concerns of even most of its fellow gods would choose to ally itself with the hated enemy. But whatever it was, it belonged to a pantheon greater than those that had aided Man’s journeys between the stars. Within minutes of its entering the battle and tearing apart most of the lesser deities arrayed before it like so much tissue paper, most of mankind’s lesser gods had fled or been reduced to ash. The most powerful fleet in the history of mankind had been only seconds from being destroyed completely when the enemy god turned his attention to the Faithful, snatched it out of his sky, and flung it as far as he could, at a speed that none of Man’s vessels had ever come close to achieving. This was in fact the same trick friendly gods employed, upon receiving sufficient tribute, to give human vessels the speed they needed to travel to other solar systems in less than the lifetimes mere technology could manage—but friendly gods honored man by merely providing lift to his wings, and this creature had only wanted to banish the Faithful so far from home that no power would ever be sufficient to pilot her back.
Now even the constellations are strangers.
The astrogators
have been unable to determine the direction in which the doomed Earth sits.
Fithe turns the corner and encounters a vile, asymmetrical creature dragging itself painfully across the deck with a body that no evolutionary process ever intended. It has four legs on its left side and only a series of boneless flaps on its right; it makes hideous cracking noises with every step, as if even the slightest move causes it agonizing fractures. The trail of slime it leaves behind itself establishes that not all of its organs are sealed in flesh. Fithe, who has seen sights like this often in his years as a starship captain—the price of sometimes contending with gods—nevertheless feels a jolt of horror and pity. Oh, poor thing. Who were you?
It is only when he kneels before it and spots an identity badge pinned to a fragment of uniform that Fithe is able to identify the creature as young Samantha Williams, second-level astrogator: exemplary officer, beautiful woman, best friend to everybody and fantasy sweetheart to any crew member whose gender preference permitted. She’s been among the missing until now.
Sadly, muttering a few words of regret, he draws his dagger and puts her out of her misery. It is the seventh such mercy killing he has had to commit since the battle. Not for the first time, he wonders if he will die not knowing if the human race was allowed a chance to surrender, at least; if instead he will choke out his last breath only suspecting that he was part of the failure that led to Armageddon for the children of Earth. Even now, the enemy fleet and their allied gods might be approaching the home system, in numbers great enough to blot out the stars. . . .
No. He needs to heed the advice he gave the repulsive little engineer-priest. Hopelessness is counterproductive. He needs to keep searching for a way out, for as long as even a single breath remains in his lungs.
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