“Liar!”
“Submit to Imperium, reveal your schemes, and we will not beat you to death.”
“—been the insurrectionist. Take him.”
“Insurgent, lawless radical.”
“No, I—” Atlas halfway coughs a guttural objection. “Accenda label me abhorrently subservient. I wouldn’t—”
“Have you not once escaped Sidera?” a male asks.
Atlas leans back. “How do you know of that?”
“He,” the dirt-throwing citizen, on his knees, points at Atlas, “denied Absolute. He is the one spoken of.”
The few of the crowd that don’t fossilize stiffen into animalistic creeping as they backstep. The bulkiest dozen move forward.
“The impulsive, vicious,” the first trembling female whispers, “Atlas.”
Though he wears his traditional citizen garb, strung with sashes etched with identification, char and dirt cake the engravings and the female’s eyes fix a quivering, conscious drill into his. Even if she had perfect eyesight, only local examiners know the name associated with one’s number, generation, and constellation indicated by bands and sashes.
“Who told you that name?” Atlas says.
“Atlas of Taurus—apostate,” she says.
A mound in his throat, he looks between the female and forward ranks and twitches his fingers wide. “Who told you,” he steps toward her, “that name?”
The female recoils and four males, each of similar stature, composition, appearance, lurch forward and grab Atlas’s arms. He flinches. They yank his hands behind his back and crush them between their own. One citizen clutches his neck’s nape. Panting, Atlas pulls against them, bends into himself, but two other males join the four and twist his shoulders to pop and spine to invert its arch. He groans and glimpses the figures circling him: their ashen uniforms, leather bands, secondary shoulder straps into which CONSTELLA CORVI is inscribed, brunette hair of exact cut of exact shade and the hundreds of blue eyes glinting suns that long to nova. Atlas stops and goes rigid. They are his mirror; he remembers his number and forgets his name.
Ice slithers down his spinal cord, rips him scalded, bursts the vault he’d buried deep beneath gut and he hyperventilates. Hands bruise his. A citizen’s rising fist, veins bulging, streaks shadow across his eye that brims tears.
The sixteen-full-cycle-old male lifts his hand and glances between Atlas’s captors. He sharpens tone. “We have received instructions. Do you recall?”
“Yes,” they say.
He nods to the gates. “Yes.”
The hands thrust Atlas forward. They walk and stagger for the constellation’s exit. Atlas exhales air turned fluttering rock chips, watching his, their shadows bob.
“You are taking me where?” he asks.
Stepping sideways, the first female smiles a spasm at Atlas, widens her eyes plastic, and sputters a sentence. “To our Sovereign.”
XXXV
Twenty-One and One Make Five
“-Similar to him but does not—”
“Similar to the Absolute? The heretic appears nothing like—”
“He does. Excluding his unusual nose. At a distance, we could notice the likeness of their jaws and eyebrow shape.”
“Absolute has neither form nor gender. You would not know.”
“But I do. In a dream—”
“You retained those?”
“Always. Analysts have proclaimed my obedience exemplary. I dream of our Sovereign every cycle and he whispers to me the truths of every breath, every immaculate moment.”
“It is transgression to speak so liberally.”
“We transgress even in our unsupervised communication. Such transgressions must surely be forgiven.”
“Then, by that law, I say this foul, disfigured eradicator would disintegrate under the glory and beauty of—”
“I can,” Atlas twists his neck to glare at the two females, “hear you.”
They gasp. Something slams the back of Atlas’s head and, white spots dancing across vision, he grunts. He creaks his head forward. The Siderans grasping his wrists, hands, shoulders quicken pace; one kicks his heel and his stumbling over his own toes extends as he hops a crack in the ground.
“Retain your words, apostate,” says the captor at his back. “You as well, citizen.”
Atlas narrows his eyes. “I’ll speak how I wish.”
“He speaks!”
“The awful one speaks.”
“Hit him again! Hit him again!”
Atlas tenses and closes his eyes but no blow comes. He opens his eyes to receding terrain under black and bronze smudges of blurring shoes. The feet of three figures border his own, the others behind them: an estimated couple dozen citizens haloing his four-person convoy with a few meters’ gap. The majority of Corvus’s citizens stayed within its walls still smoldering.
“Relevate mentem meam,” Atlas whispers. “Why are you so afraid of words?”
Two transporters say, “We are not afraid.”
“Do you see us flinching, heretic?” the leading transporter says.
“Yes.”
“No, that was your faulty vision. You see what you wish to.”
Atlas scoffs. “How can you be so loyal? You’re free. The Imperium has abandoned you. Yet you transport me—a citizen of Taurus who contained your fire in place of administration—into Eos to be judged?”
“And you return to Sidera after deserting it?” the leader asks.
Atlas shifts his mouth.
With both his own, the main transporter crushes closed Atlas’s hands, and in his strength, Atlas combines glimpses of his profile and resonance of his voice’s broad bass into recognition of the loading major of Generation Concidens.
“Your lies flow as breath, ‘citizen of Taurus,’ ” says the major. “How can you be so disloyal?”
“Because I—freedom is—”
“How could your mind,” his spit taps Atlas’s nape, “after cycles upon full cycles of education shifts and affliction withdrawal and labor and Praises among thousands of obedient associates, conjure thoughts of escaping and betraying your own?”
Atlas furrows his brow. His lips frame a whisper. “I don’t know.”
“You were born with a defect, heretic. The Curative Estate will dissect your living brain as soon as the Synod of Magistrates confirms you guilty.”
“Your powers—” Atlas blinks wider vision’s tunnel. “Why do you believe they’re drained from you cyclically?”
“Powers?” The transporter’s grimace sounds. “Do not feign you do not know the reasoning. Our ‘powers’ are affliction our superiors stoop to bear instead of—”
“Why do you believe they’re drained?”
He squeezes Atlas’s hands. “Imperium end your vanity. We are I. The affliction withdrawal heals us.”
“And who told you that?”
A dozen voices say in unison, “Absolute.”
Atlas lifts the steel in his feet and strains the aches in his wrists till they numb. His breaths shorten, the transporter at his right huffing, as they ascend a stepped incline, platforms of island chunks building altitude with each natural stair. A pressure weaves his ribs that remember this gradual climb, one toward Sidera’s peak plateau; only, in times past, it was spanned on the back of a wagon or in enumeration migration. Without arms for momentum, hours from shore from dive from sky’s Earthly floor, this ascent lurches like a waterlogged pail reeling to well’s edge for the first time in decades.
Gaze vague, Atlas says, “Why do you believe you’re not allowed out of your constellations?”
“The raw land could harm and isolate and does not belong to us,” says the convoy.
“Who told you that?”
“Absolute.”
“Why is the penalty for touching another being, outside of reproduction, execution?”
“Touching leads to unhealthy personal affiliation. We must share all.”
“Quite a liberally deployed punishment, deat
h, and still all Curative Estate divisions have yet to cure the most prevalent deadly disease that razes our elders more liberally, a cure that could offset the massive and contradictory reproduction demand.” Expression calcified, Atlas asks the high horizon, “Why not ask why?”
“An inquisitive mind is a mind at war. To quell is to accept, and acceptance is peace.”
“Absolute told you this?”
“Yes.”
Atlas lifts his chin at the next stair and eyes the citizens on his periphery. “Who is Absolute?”
“Our light.” The wide-eyed, twitching female steps around a male and speaks a meter from Atlas’s back. “The Imperium and its citizens. The universe. Its laws and nature and all. He—It is Emperor, Infinite, Sun, and Sovereign, our Absolute.”
“Absolute—he, if he is a he, without once revealing himself, claims reign over all truth proclaimed to you?”
“Yes, through Imperium.”
“Good Impe—” Atlas chokes on residual soot. “The Administrative Citadel stands fifty vaulted stories tall, Imperial magistrates littering every floor, and you tell me the Synod and analysts and scribes simply absorb Absolute’s All through some undisclosed method and refer it to the constellations without an added comma.” His tone ripens from sour to bitter. “Please don’t express you believe Absolute truly exists.”
The female glares; Atlas doesn’t see but feels it. The others watch with open mouths.
“Have you entirely forgotten your cyclical Praises?” she says.
He coughs on her plastic irrelevance and scans the highland. The sun to his left, east, they climb south for the administrative capital. All hills and trees and mountains on Earth would yawn at Sidera’s vacuous, stepped steppes, its shallow rolls and tepid glow lulling, but no blade of grass can stroke away the itch under Atlas’s skin. Light, sky’s burning sphere locked sixty degrees above land, wraps warmth around his limbs cradling glaciers. His bones shiver and glare throbs his head. Soil’s bronze fur, sapphire upward, the islands compacting indistinct: their perfect, dreamlike composition sears plum spots into his pupils under fluttering eyelids, and Atlas loses count after the first twenty perennial, faintly iridescent buttercups brushing foot and the first two hours since his last sleep.
“And what has Absolute,” Atlas clears his throat, “told you about me?”
The female says, “That you are to be captured if discovered—”
He makes a noise. “Discovered? I returned to Sidera mere moments ago.”
“And that we would have the privilege of escorting you to the Administrative Citadel, where Imperium waits. It is an honor.”
“And such would be, as I understand, for some crime—”
“No more questions, heretic.” The loading major constricting his hands jerks him forward. “We are done with your words.”
“But you’re not.” Atlas smiles stone. “I’m the only outsider you’ve seen, an infamous one at that, the only returned from Earth, a nearly fictitious land, and here we are with no Imperium watch—no guards, guardians, sentries, or vigils, no arbiters, legates, or consuls—and your inquisitive minds sail war’s thick into more curiosity than any cyclical Praise can stifle. I ask again,” he raises voice, “what is my crime?”
“Treason.” The major nods to a citizen’s shoulder strap; the citizen unlatches it and walks around Atlas. “Latch that into his mouth. Imperium would have it.”
A new, somehow familiar, tenor interrupts. “We were instructed that you had been born of Sidera’s forbidden depths.”
“Kraz, do not communicate with the insurrectionist.”
“No, that is not what they told us,” says the captor wringing Atlas’s left shoulder and wrist. “They told us that Atlas first emerged from the core of Earth and crawled his way onto Sidera to set it aflame.”
The citizen holding the leather strap lowers it. The new male, Kraz, jogs ahead of the convoy and slows to a sideways walk as he faces Atlas’s captors. He’s the adolescent, perhaps sixteen, that had impeded Atlas’s beating, hair brunette, irises blue, like the rest. His bangs, though, droop centimeters lower, thicker than the others, his frame thin.
Kraz meets his associates’ eyes. “They told us nothing of the sort. Do you not recall? They truly told us that he is prophesied to soon return, clenching his fingers stained with affliction and the blood of faraway lands as he drags—”
Atlas clenches his bloodstained fingers and drags himself onto the glistening gold of Sidera’s holy ground. Standing, he wipes the deep scarlet from his mouth, upturns his leather jacket collar—an outrageous, Earthen trend—and peers, with his lightless slits of eyes, across the empire from which he fell. He kisses his fist and raises it toward sun he swears to shatter. Because envy pours out his ears. Because of a dark backstory and something about overcompensation for his unattractive qualities—
Atlas gags on a scoff. “You were told this?”
“Quiet, heretic.”
He unsheathes his retractable claws the length of one constellation wall, that is, the length of its entire perimeter, and directs them toward the beautiful horizon with good children and good citizens with good devotion and labor ethics. His fiery armies come forth, sweeping the land in bloodshed and hate and chaos. He divides and inflicts hearts to desire possessions and intimate relations. The young begin to lust after longer resting cycles. Atlas grins. Lava streams from his teeth. A third of Sidera chars under flame while he smiles maliciously because that evil is now spread. Because he believes evil power makes him appear more attractive. But it does not.
Then he slaps an infant. And Atlas strangles an elder and, above all other sin, attempts in crumbling the Administrative Citadel because of jealousy.
“I don’t like you, Imperium, because you have this kind empire full of polite, dutiful citizens and it’s not mine! Endure the wrath of my fire claws!” Atlas roars with much loudness at the highest spire of the citadel.
“We will combat you,” says the Imperium.
Atlas replies with something stupid. He uses vulgar conjunctions.
“We vow to protect and unite,” Imperium says. “You will never get away with your evil because, as we have said, we will combat you.”
“Ha ha ha! That will be humorous to behold.”
The Imperium army descends on flying chariots, sacred staffs of holiness in hand, smirks of noble confidence on their faces, as they stand against—
Atlas stares forward, the thudding of his, their feet blurring vision, clogging ears. Drool paints his mouth’s corner.
“In summary, such is what was expressed last cycle atop the Praises stage,” Kraz says. “I assumed some of it might be metaphorical.”
The twitching female says, “No, Imperium expressed the infiltrator will destroy a third of Sidera with lies, not fire.”
“No, it was definitely fire.”
Atlas looks past the sun. “For the love of the Imperium, save me, Gene.”
His pupils shrink and drop to horizon’s folds, its final steps. He shuts his mouth. A fresh chill severs his spine.
With a huff, he lifts his foot over highest land’s rim and five spires shoot out of the horizon. Four of similar height stand below a fifth thirty percent taller, twenty percent wider. Each shimmers black, black as saturated as the capital walls they overhang but glimmering a liquid life in Smit’s eyes dungeon-deep. Towers’ onyx extends as far below as it does above the encircling walls, delving foundational supports into soil and rock and bedrock, into Sidera’s cracks and caverns where Eos’s roots crawl moldering mazes of limestone drip. Below ground, Taurus-made steel piles drive as imitation stalactites toward Sidera’s skybelly. Above ground, steel slabs innumerable stack to towers’ five points tearing topsky, common laborer blood their mortar. Hoisting and chiseling and bleeding still metallic on the tongue: a century’s labor forerunners performed until the capital’s central courtyard lay in eternal shadow. Five spires, five decorated, textured, contoured steeples gaze over all the land that has
no curvature under which to hide. Sun on the east, the towers’ west shade lays its five fingers of a hand upon permanently dead grass.
Atlas exhales. His wide eyes dry and open mouth stings his throat traced with ash. He looks to the tallest tower, the Administrative Citadel. Broadest of the five, it digs its foundation and inter-tower tunnels across the entirety of the capital city of Eos. If the tower’s understructure, twisting, knotted oak limbs, were to uproot, the city would with it.
Atlas’s captors herd him toward that city. The five towers creep taller. He swallows and watches the outspoken adolescent through peripheral vision.
And says, “Do I sincerely appear capable of emerging from Earth’s core and destroying a third of Sidera?”
“You blew debilitating smoke from an entire constellation with your hands in a matter of moments,” Kraz says.
Atlas frowns.
“Master of deception, they said.” The twitching female stretches her neck too long as she leans into Atlas’s view. “You would seem feeble and incapable, Imperium said. Do not trust such appearances.”
Atlas grimaces. “Feeble?”
Kraz says, “They expressed you would be prepared for us—”
“And said ‘feeble’ exactly?”
“—that you would execute any heinous act to see us burned.”
A young female, early twenties, whispers something. Atlas whips his head around and peers at her between two captors.
“Yes?” He scowls. “What is it?”
She flinches. “Do they truly speak hundreds of languages and have appearances of all the hues of the flowers on Earth?”
His forehead crinkles.
The major gripping his hands glares at her. “Perhaps you also should be judged at the Citadel.”
She pales and drops her chin to her chest.
“The people are not only all colors, but all shapes,” Atlas says. “So too the land. It’s beautiful.”
The female holds her breath and peeks at the leading captor, then the others. Elbow in, arm rigid, she salutes touching her right fingers to the sash buckles over her left shoulder.
“It is discord,” she says. “I see now how effortless it must have been for the Accenda to overtake a land already in chaos. Praise Imperium for our order.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 44