“Sidera.”
The Cartographer flicks the coin into his palm and, fingers flat, slams it against the wall. A thousand-meter freefall fires its wind horizontally and booms backward the men’s margins and sings through their fingers uplifted for eye shields.
Another light, one paler, one that brews in the gut, ruptures reality; the familiar siren rumbles back and white glare boils blindness where ground slips beneath feet and yanks body—
Atlas gasps. He drops the scroll and it clinks onto ground he doesn’t see. White light gives to black. Blinking away dry pain, eyes’ burning, he heaves without sound and grabs his stomach and coughs trembling out his throat. He staggers; he outstretches his arms and steadies.
“What.” He mouths a fraction of a whisper. “Was that.”
“History.”
The invisible man’s voice cuts into his ear and Atlas jumps. He spins a full circle, squinting through nothingness, no shape, figure, glimmer. Blackness speeds his pulse. Undefined expanse again lifts imaginings that urge him toward the locked door somewhere, but he doesn’t remember where.
“I don’t desire your history,” Atlas shouts. “I wish to return home.”
The voice says, “But it was just getting good. Keep reading.”
“That—reading?” He turns around and peers. “Why won’t you reveal yourself?”
“This is your Presage, Atlas.”
His heart jerks. He swallows and inhales. “Sidera—those beings with unappealing skirts discovered it. They are the forerunners of Sidera.”
“Founders, yes. And our clothing wasn’t that bad. Come on.”
Atlas goes rigid. Our.
“Oh, shoot. I forgot to introduce myself.” The voice drifts toward Atlas, deepens tone, and exhales air that grazes his forehead, nose, and draws blood’s jolting to his cheeks. “I am the infinite Sovereign of Sidera, overseer for creation of this nation and Elisium’s. I am God of sky and fire and Caesar of all.”
Atlas steps backward but silent, invisible motion follows. It inhales the heat from Atlas’s face and meets his eyes where blackness penetrates vision and slides toward the gut. The Sovereign whispers waterfalls:
“I am Absolute.”
XXXVIII
Truth Rewritten
“Elisium.” Atlas takes another step back. “You created Elisium? The Accenda?”
The Sovereign says, “Not at all. That’s silly.”
Atlas exhales.
“I watched over my Artisan and his team while they created Elisium and the Accenda as per my instructions.” The Sovereign’s voice drifts a couple meters away; he raises it. “Lovely man. He’s mostly dead now.”
“Mostly?”
“S’right.”
Atlas makes a face. “What dialect is this? You sound as if you live on Earth.”
“I’ve studied Earth for centuries. I pick how I shoot the breeze,” he hardens tone, “in consonance with my partiality to current dialect as mind and time bend tendencies.”
Atlas rolls onto his heels and then onto his soles. His head spins.
“I gave Sidera English,” Sovereign says. “I gave you your voice, accent, and vocabulary, Atlas.”
He inhales, shuts his mouth, opens it again. His eyes dart and see nothing. “How do you know my name?”
“I know everyone’s.”
Curling his fingers, Atlas brews a charge and turns forty-five degrees. He walks. He softens his step and hushes his breath and closes his eyes to the opening of his ears. He casts his hearing beyond the resonance of his shoe scuffing floor, and The Sovereign’s sigh, a notch above coma breath, journeys on echoes till drowned in space worlds in every direction. The void picks apart sound before devouring it. Atlas walks through walls of vapor and from his guess of the voice’s source, heels wobbling, knees loose. Attempting to hint at equilibrium, he speeds pace.
“Don’t leave yet,” The Sovereign says. “You still have a plotline to reveal and your entire life’s purpose to read.”
He stops. He spins toward the voice, several degrees too far. “You’re doing this why? The darkness? The cryptic messages?” Atlas raises his palms and weaves wind between his fingers. “Why do you confine me here?”
“You’ve got to get a hold of that fear of confinement. It’s irrational. You trust serial murderers but squeal when you sense walls.” The Sovereign gasps. “Oh! Oh-ho, no. Oh, goodness. It’s a wall. A dark, dark wall.”
Atlas scoffs. “Absolute help me.”
A click against mouth’s roof of a whispered explosion blows the hair behind his right ear and splits its drum:
“Okay.”
Atlas jolts and whips around. He aims his palms but something clinks onto floor before his feet; he jolts again.
“The Presage.” The voice withdraws a meter. “You chose this. Your prized possession. In perfect freedom, you returned to Sidera,” The Sovereign drifts toward Atlas’s left, “for this. The real wall you ache to vault, the darkness you’d die to disperse. A sky lies within, Atlas. Read it and overflow your writhing mind. It’ll tell you more than I could.”
“You read it.”
“It’s yours, not mine.”
“You simply desire information from me then.” Atlas squints. “You possibly cannot read it yourself.”
Silence settles. Atlas twitches wind.
“The Presage never was lost,” Atlas says.
“No,” The Sovereign says, “just its reader was.”
“I will not read it.”
“Dishonesty’s not your strength.”
“And you?”
“I can’t lie.”
“Such is a lie.”
“I won’t hurt you, puer.” Sovereign smooths his tone velvet. “I love you. Though they are many, you’re one of my sons, an astounding one at that.” He moves the metal at Atlas’s feet. “So if you don’t want to read it—”
“No.” Atlas jerks for the scroll. “I—”
The scrape of metal stops. Heart in his throat, Atlas crouches, sweeps his hand over floor, grabs the scroll, and snaps back up. He compresses the coiled parchment into its stems with both hands, knuckles tight.
“Do you want to?” The Sovereign asks.
Atlas crawls his hands to The Presage’s handles. “This—” He turns a full circle. “Is this your imitation of night? Or an attempt to inflict me with feelings of ignorance?”
“In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.” The Sovereign’s voice crescendos as it nears. “Both, puer.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And that,” Sovereign says, “is what drives.”
Atlas strokes the scroll’s parchment with a thumb. “I do not chase some—I do not chase—”
“Shadows? No, you chase light from the shadows, like my friends and I did so many years ago. That light could be fire, Atlas.”
He peers. “Who are you?”
“Find out. Read it.”
Atlas clamps his hands around the handles and pulls, rolls them apart. White light bursts from the material. His brows tense, pupils shrivel, stomach churns before mind asks the question:
What is he doing?
Hot wind swirls his body and sun swallows his senses. He falls through white fire.
AD · III · ID · FEB
The third day before the Ides, February
“I’m beginning to believe—there are some things we simply cannot meddle with.”
“Cannot? Where’s that ambition?”
“Years have passed since we stepped through the gateway and I’m beginning to realize a fraction of our mistakes. There’s much we were never prepared for.”
“My Cartographer,” The Sovereign kneels at The Cartographer’s chair and places his hands on his shoulders, “moving forward is never a mistake.”
The Cartographer narrows his eyes. “Your plan—I begin to doubt.”
“Not mine, friend. I only advise. You charted the stars, searched our first world, brought us a new one. Yes, there is still much t
o learn, but you progressed us.” The Sovereign smiles. “And it is well.”
Atlas blinks. He sucks for breath but draws nothing and rubs his fingers but has none; he floats without form. The Presage’s hot light swirls, shrinks, sweeps its rumbling siren beneath stone flooring, and Atlas sees the room’s entirety beyond eyes’ power. He forgets from where he came. He drifts in the corner, sun streaming through his view fogged around the edges, yet every peripheral particle, every shape and shadow before and behind brand into his spirit’s core, reckoned within eyeless depths. Sparkling, airborne dust swims through his chest, but he struggles to look down and verify body. He gazes forward.
“I progressed us.” The Cartographer scoffs and stands, shoving The Sovereign’s hands from his shoulders. He paces the room. To its hearth, its doorway, its desk blanketed with parchment and writing tools. His sandals thud ragged stone and tunic ties closer than in the last vision, tighter, one extra leather band around his waist, one around his arm, his toga piled on the hearth’s step. “The mutations and dead and illnesses. A thousand times I’ve told my wife, her brothers, mine, our parents and aunts and uncles that if we keep following the system, looking to you, and chiseling rock that we’ll leave the insula and regain our homes. I tell them the dead fell of some Ephesian plague that followed us into Sidera. I tell them their schedules will soon be their own, that the widows won’t be forced to remarry, that dismissing the desired birth rate of one per year can’t be punished. When can I cease lying?” He grasps his hair disheveled, drooped over his ears and tickling jaw’s stubble. “When will night come?”
The Sovereign sits in the desk chair and leans back. “My Cartographer, there is no night in Sidera.”
“Heaven and absolute gods.” The Cartographer steps to the desk and slams his fist down; an inkwell tips over, spills. “Will you, for once, react with passion?”
“They’re calling me that. Absolute.” The Sovereign lifts his chin. “Children and grandchildren. ‘Absolute Savior.’ It’s because I bring them bread.”
Breathing cooler face’s heat, The Cartographer watches as his Sovereign turns the inkwell upright and wipes black from his mapper’s desk with a hand cloth. He folds the cloth, inky mess inward, upon desk’s corner.
“Hurt and destruction for centuries, Cartographer. Bloody Rome. Our Artisan, the physician’s slave boy. Your sister, the prostitute. You, delusional visionary.” The Sovereign pinches a metal pen and stirs the inkwell’s contents. He tilts his head. “They call me Absolute because I bring order out of chaos.”
Nostrils flared, lip contorted, The Cartographer hops his focus to his Sovereign’s hand. The Sovereign presses the pen between his fingers, taps off excess ink, and scratches its pointed nib across a clean section of parchment.
“I am their homes,” he says. “I harvest and distribute and write the Praises that unite and encourage and know exactly,” he flicks the pen, “when to restrain my passions. Up in the makings of my tower, I withdraw my physical presence and they forget I bleed. I am no man.”
“That’s not the truth,” The Cartographer says.
“What is truth?”
The Cartographer dips his chin and shifts his jaw.
“Sky land is myth. Men cannot transform. The sun always sets.” The Sovereign lifts the pen to eye level. “What,” he nods to the parchment, “is truth?”
The Cartographer squints at the parchment and Atlas too sees. In smooth, embellished characters:
aeternum vivere non possum.
I cannot live forever.
The Cartographer eyes his elder. Curling five fingers around the pen, The Sovereign squeezes his knuckles white, upturns his left palm, and thrusts the pen downward. He drives the metal nib into his palm. It breaks open and bleeds. Cartographer frozen, The Sovereign returns the pen to its inkwell and presses his left palm to the parchment. He drags his hand across it, smearing red over his Latin script. He withdraws; blood conceals parchment’s fresh ink.
Atlas stares and disconnection veils the churnings in his absent gut. Lip straight, breath steady, The Sovereign wipes his palm on the inside of his robe and then raises his hand to The Cartographer. It no longer bleeds. A solid, pink ridge marks his palm’s center.
“Much,” The Sovereign rubs his fingers and retracts his hand, “is being rewritten.”
Face blanched, The Cartographer glares. “Your hand—how?”
“Sidera.” He smiles. “With The Artisan’s assistance. It’s your turn, my Cartographer. If you accept, you may have what I have.” The Sovereign stands and tucks the chair under the desk. “This is Sidera’s greatness: unity. Together, we will succor the weak.”
“Who are the weak?”
“The solitary.”
“And if they don’t desire succoring?”
The Sovereign tugs straight his robe. “Can we allow pride to impede the saving every being deserves?”
The Cartographer furrows his brow. “I—no, I suppose.”
“Very well.” With his scarred hand, he pats The Cartographer’s cheek. “Scope the land for new foundational, flat ground. Four flags, each spaced two stades apart, should indicate to our builders where to begin the walls. Do keep our Aedificator Major informed.”
“Walls?”
The Sovereign’s forehead crumples. “Where did you expect our future inhabitants to live?”
White light burns Atlas’s view and yanks him from the room. Sirens rumble; the floor falls from under foot.
“—were the ones who inflamed this hardship. My consuls used poor judgment.”
“But not you? I thought you were ‘all,’ husband. ‘One’ is no longer a part of our language.”
View condenses; white light dissolves; Atlas develops being before a black mass. It stands in ground, stretches toward sun, curves around a courtyard: a constellation wall, shorter and thinner than ones he knows. Metal bars of a framework skeleton stick horizontally and vertically from its edges. The walls’ solid shell spans three fourths of the constellation and, before the gates’ frame, breaks into the hollow grille Atlas looks through. Inside, more grids and scaffolds stack around raised stone foundations. One for the laborhouse. Three for resthouses. Others for education, guard, and purge houses.
“That is correct.” The Sovereign grabs his left hand in his right behind his back. “I can always affect—my Artisan and Cartographer and all, despite their errors. But it requires time and energy that will soon be spent and then all will be organized. You need not worry.”
A woman, wrinkles on her forehead and between her eyes, folds her arms and looks up at The Sovereign. “You, alone, cannot organize all Sidera.”
“My intentions are greater. Sidera is our foundation.”
“You,” the woman flourishes her hands, “can’t.”
He looks down her face’s contour, to a lock of hair curling off her shoulder. “We can. We are I. I am countless.”
The woman watches his roving eye and stiffens. “You frighten me at times.”
Something scuffs the dirt to Atlas’s left. Without looking, Atlas sees:
The Cartographer leans around the constellation wall, a few meters from Atlas, bare framework casting a shadowy grid over his face. A sheet of half-filled parchment bends in his grasp. Pen under his thumb, The Cartographer squints at The Sovereign and his wife.
“I’m sorry.” The Sovereign frowns and lifts his hand to her cheek; he doesn’t touch it. “You know I will always be yours.”
She flattens her lips. “And yet I cannot call you by name.”
“You can always.”
“ ‘The Sovereign,’ ” she scowls, “is not your name, Corvus.”
He drops his hand. “We’ve spoken of this—feeding your delusions.”
The Cartographer lays his parchment against a section of finished wall and scrawls across it. He glances at The Sovereign and his wife. He scratches pen across material, a box of ink tied to his armband, while he ducks behind wall’s framework.
Atlas
wills his focus toward the parchment. Familiarity drenches him. Somewhere far from sight, his head lightens and thoughts pause. The Cartographer’s bobbing hand slides right, drops, begins again at the left, and, though the words on the material blur, Atlas knows every syllable before it’s written.
“Delusions,” the woman says. She scoffs and raises her voice. “Do you have—” She clenches her jaw. “Mira calls you Absolute. She’s barely three, Corvus. Our second youngest doubts there is an Earth. Our middle children have ceased speaking a word unless granted permission and our eldest has confided in me he thinks daily of stepping off the cliffs for an Earthward grave, and not just because the keepers, your cousins, lend gold far too exclusively.” She claws her tunic. “Your past life is not delusion. You will always be the boy of a poor, wretched Roman widower who failed—”
“Beloved.” The Sovereign closes his eyes and cocks his head. “For how long have you been speaking with the children? The younger belong in the Estate, where the others can nurture them, and the elder have no need for conversation.”
The woman’s mouth falls open.
“And it is not ‘daily.’ They do not think ‘daily.’ They think,” The Sovereign opens his eyes, “cyclically.”
As it dives, her voice sounds the brittleness of sleepless days on wayward vibrato. “This onslaught of new terminology will be my end.”
“And if this new terminology, like threads in a sieve, stays the primitive past and ushers quick rise to a society advanced? A world united?”
The serenity of his expression, the detail in his sun-aged wrinkles kindle a keen sobriety that wisens him over the gasped, flushed fidgets of the woman he addresses from a height advantage. She locks her retort behind trembling lips, lips stretched thin from one grimace too many, and he taps his lips, hearty and sympathetic and curved to a subtle smile, in thought. With a flick, The Sovereign lifts his forefinger off his bottom lip and gazes after the whisper of an even exhale.
“If all Earth were Roman,” he says, “fair and civil and industrious, conversing in one language, eating one food, dressing to one standard, living, sleeping, breathing in one climate and one chromatic under one undeviating rule, who dare enslave another? All are citizens. Nowhere could the elite find a color-skinned or vulgar-tongued to shear the hair off her head. Sidera furthering this, all our universe would be patrician, all the people royal. No child would be born to a disadvantageous bloodline. No man could elevate himself above woman, for gender could not define and definitions could not segregate. The new definition is equity.” He darts the lapis lances of his eyes back to his wife’s. “Hard it is to convict the mirror. And harder to dismount the turning tide of words. Oppose and drown.” His eyes liquefy. “Or sail to paradise with family.”
Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn Page 48