by Simon Kewin
As if he could read her thoughts, Ondo spoke from his customary position of the chair beside her. “It's ten days since our last conversation. I needed to keep you in a coma while your natural and artificial neural networks intertwined, but the process is sufficiently advanced now. You should be able to breathe normally, and you will start to gain fine motor control of your new limbs. You should know that in normal use your left arm and leg will behave just as your right ones do, but you must learn to control them. Both are capable of far greater feats of strength and speed: so much so that you could shatter what remains of your natural skeleton if you aren't careful.”
She twisted her creaking neck to find him. “I told you to stop. I told you to let me go.”
“I know. And truly, if that is what you wish, I will respect it. But I also know the way we think about things can change. A different perspective, a little time, and what once seemed intolerable is suddenly small, a minor annoyance. Forgive me, but there are things I would like you to see before you decide you've had enough.”
She had the impression it was a prepared speech, something he'd run through again and again as he watched over her. “Right. This is where you show me a mirror to persuade me I'm not the ruined freak I think I am.”
She saw that wasn't it from the brief look of puzzlement on his face. Maybe the idea hadn't occurred to him. She didn't really know anything about this man. She knew the name, of course. Ondo the heretic, the outlaw, pursued for years across the galaxy by Concordance, always evading capture aboard his ship known simply as the Refuge. She barely understood why he was even with her, what connection there was between them, how it was that Ondo Lagan had been a friend of her father.
“We can do that,” he said, “if it would help.”
She considered. Not, not yet, she wasn't ready for that. Her body was mostly reconstructed, although her artificial skin hadn't been implanted yet, her left half still gleaming black substrate. She wasn't ready yet to see what he'd done with her face.
“What is it you want me to see?”
“I'd like you to come up to one of the observation domes. You haven't left this room since the day you arrived, and now I think it's time. This chair will carry you anywhere you wish to go on the Refuge, until your limbs and body are strong enough to bear you.”
“I'll walk, thanks.”
He stood to manoeuvre the hovering chair so that it was beside her bed. “You're not ready for that. Let me help you.”
“I said, I'll walk!” Her anger flared into life from nowhere. The room lurched around her as she sat upright. She ignored it and forced herself to stand.
Her left leg buckled beneath her immediately, a useless column of flesh that could never support her weight. She flopped to the smooth floor, bashing her forehead before she could persuade her left hand to move and protect her.
She lay there for a moment, cursing Ondo, cursing everything. “What have you done to me? These new limbs don't work. My body doesn't work.”
He knelt to offer her a hand. “You will get stronger. Your tissues are still combining, learning to work together. It will take months, but you will be better, I promise you.”
After a moment, she took his hand and allowed herself to be hauled up and deposited in the chair. Her fury had already burned itself out. She hated to be so weak. She didn't even have the energy to remain angry.
When her breathing had calmed, she looked up at the man standing over her.
“Why did they do it?” she rasped. “Why did they build their shroud and blot out our sun? Why this atrocity? Why such a slow cruelty?”
Her nightmares had been full of the scenes she'd witnessed as the light faded from her planet and it fell into savagery. They could have destroyed intelligent life on Maes Far in a few moments, but they'd chosen to draw out the agony. Loss overwhelmed her, and she felt tears brimming in her right eye. The right, but not the left. The vision of her artificial eye remained unclouded.
Ondo took his time to respond, a troubled expression crossing his features. He sat on the bed so that their heads were on the same level. “There has long been a catastrophist tradition within Concordance, these days led by Secundus Godel. Maes Far may be down to her.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
He seemed content to sit and talk to her at length. He probably didn't get the chance very often. “It's the 'end of days' approach to religious conversion. From what little I know of the founding sect, they believed that the soul flies through a sacred wormhole when a person dies, passing into either a paradise universe or a hellish one, depending upon the individual's actions in life. Omn sits in judgement at the gateway to the wormhole, deflecting each approaching soul into one reality or the other. One tradition within the faith devotes itself to encouraging people to live good lives, and by doing so attain their eternity in the paradise universe. It's a familiar-enough theme in religious belief. But another school – that of Vulpis and now Godel – teaches that people fundamentally can't change, and therefore that their judgement day should be hastened along by all means available. Put simply, Godel wants to wipe out all intelligent life in the galaxy and let Omn decide who is worthy and who isn't. The good get to go to paradise and the bad to their eternal torment. You have to admire its simplicity; it's a convenient way of short-circuiting a whole range of ethical dilemmas.”
Of course, she was familiar with Concordance theology from her upbringing on Maes Far, their teachings and strictures, but she'd never heard their ideas set out so plainly. “You don't seriously believe they could do that?”
“No, I don't, but that doesn't mean they aren't going to try. Partly, also, I think the shroud above your planet was a statement to the rest of the galaxy. A warning. Leave the path and this will be the outcome. Pictures of what is taking place upon the surface of Maes Far are being transmitted to every planet controlled by Concordance. The whole galaxy has watched your people tear themselves to pieces, watched them fight for dwindling supplies of food and water. They've watched, fascinated and horrified, as your civilisation unwinds into barbarity.”
“Maes Far was hardly some wild, rebellious world. It was peaceful. It was dull.”
Ondo nodded. He was trying to work out the best way to tell her something. There was too much she didn't know – about him and about the wider galaxy. Why did she get the feeling he was keeping secrets from her?
“It goes without saying that the people of Maes Far have done nothing to warrant such a terrible fate,” he said. “The shroud wouldn't be justified whatever your people had done. It is a weapon of the cruellest genocide.”
“You're suggesting the planet was chosen at random from all the inhabited planets in the galaxy?”
“No, no, I don't think that either.”
“Then what?”
“Tell me, how much did you know of your father's research?”
What did that have to do with anything? “Not much. He spent his spare time digging around in the ruins of the crashed starship in the mountains. It was what he did. I resented him not being around when I was younger, begrudged the time he spent with his work, but later I stopped paying it much attention. Sometimes I hiked up there to help him, dig alongside him. We never seemed to unearth anything of great interest.”
“Which I think was exactly as he wanted. I think he probably did everything he could to protect you from what he was really doing on Maes Far.”
What did that mean? “He was living his life, raising his family. Existing. You make it sound like he wasn't even from the planet.”
“He never told you? Perhaps that was for the best.”
“Told me what?”
Ondo considered her for a moment, still debating with himself what he could tell her. “I suppose the secret doesn't matter anymore. The truth is, your father wasn't from Maes Far. Your mother was, but both your father and I grew up on a planet called Sintorus, a long way from your homeworld. He and I, and that starship ruin he spent his time excavating, we're a
ll a part of the reason Concordance put their shroud into orbit around your world to blot out your star. Partly, we are to blame.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I will explain as best I can, I promise. You deserve to know everything that I do. But first, can I show you the things I wanted you to see? It isn't far. There will be plenty of time to talk further.”
“I can control the chair without your help?”
“I've taken the liberty of embedding control flecks into your skull. A little practice and you should find you can control the chair with your thoughts.”
“You put wiring in my brain?”
“Some were essential, to control the additions I've made to your body. Some are useful but non-essential. Forgive me, I should have asked your permission for all the alterations I've made, but without many of them you wouldn't have survived to be asked. When you have recovered, we can discuss which, if any, you'd like me to remove.”
She wanted to object but found she didn't have the strength. “Show me the way, and I'll follow as best I can.”
It took several frustrating minutes of jerking backwards and forwards, steering into walls and machinery, before she got the hang of directing the chair. Ondo, always, watched patiently, telling her that she nearly had it each time, saying try again until she wanted to scream. Eventually, she managed to make it through the doorway without snagging the sides. It seemed like a major achievement. The walls of the passageway she found herself in surprised her. When she crashed into them, trying and utterly failing to move in a straight line, she discovered they were hard stone. “We're on a planet? I assumed the Refuge was a ship. The Radiant Dragon's mother ship.”
“That's a story I've fostered, but we're actually in a hollowed-out lone-wolf asteroid.”
“Then, where are we?”
“Again, it's probably best I show you.”
A spiral ramp, the chair gliding up it once she got the right degree of turn, brought them to a round, domed room, the walls and ceiling of which had an opaque greyness. Selene juddered her way around the room. “It's not very impressive. You think this will give me a cause to cling to life?” Her voice echoed with stone hollowness in the enclosed space.
“Before I show you,” said Ondo, “I want to be sure you understand the truth about superluminal travel.”
His words made her suspicious. There were things she and her family had talked about in the safety of their own house that no one ever said in public, and certainly not to a stranger. Maes Far had been a liberal world compared to many, but still the risks of being overheard and having their words relayed to Concordance, watching from orbit, were great.
“What truth?”
Ondo, used to his solitude, was unconcerned about the risks. “I'm talking about the true nature of the universe and the lies people live their lives by. You know what I mean, I think. The notion that moving faster than the light barrier rips your soul from your body is a small lie in the grand scheme of things, perhaps, but it is insidious. These days we have alternative lies, equivalent scientific stories. You've heard them. Moving through metaspace degrades the synapses, causing the brain to malfunction. The different physical constants of the metaspace domain are inimical to our biologies, causing cancers and premature senescence. They're the same lies, so very useful to Concordance, keeping people in their place, keeping them apart, preventing them from learning the truth or combining their ships into fleets. Most people in the galaxy know you can't travel faster than the speed of light and remain yourself. They know it absolutely, even though it is demonstrably untrue.”
Was he testing her? She was suddenly past caring; she had already lost everything. “The ship you rescued me in, it's capable of FTL travel?”
“I've made metaspace jumps in the Radiant Dragon many, many times. And now you've made several, too. As you'll be aware, your mind is still your own, your soul hasn't been ripped screaming from your body.”
Did she know that? She felt like a very different person from the young woman who'd lived on Maes Far just a few months earlier. The thoughts that dripped through her mind in quiet moments often seemed unfamiliar, alien, like they were intruding from outside. Was she the same? Of course, she didn't believe any of the stories about bodies and souls separating if forced to travel at speeds above the light barrier, but that didn't mean she was still herself. She no longer knew what that meant.
“You're telling me we're not in the Maes Far system anymore.”
Ondo nodded his agreement. “The Refuge is a long way from any system, a long way from any place that Concordance might think to come looking for me.”
“Can't they follow your trail?”
“They try; I take steps to make sure they don't succeed. Multiple metaspace hops to be certain no one is following before I come anywhere near and very careful quarantining before I approach. It's kept me safe for the thirty years I've lived here.”
She'd assumed he'd wanted to show her Maes Far, images of how it now was. The solar shroud would be complete: an opaque, orbiting disk that moved with finely-calculated exactness to stay precisely in front of the sun relative to the planet's surface, cutting off all heat, all light except for the flaring corona. A dark sun to replace the light. But that wasn't it.
“Show me what you brought me up here to see.”
He made no movement, some control fleck of his own sending instructions to the Refuge. In an instant, the walls and domed ceiling of the little room turned transparent. There, above and around her, filling one half of the sky, lay the sparkling mass of the galaxy.
It was a familiar-enough sight, of course. On dark nights on Maes Far it stretched overhead, a shimmering and meandering pathway. Her ancestors had called it the Diamond Road, imagined it as a path you could walk to reach the gods. She knew well the truth of what it was, but still, as a girl, she'd liked to stare up at it and dream about taking that journey.
The galaxy seen from Maes Far was nothing compared to its appearance from the Refuge. Her planet lay in the galactic plane, as almost all systems did, making the stars appear as the shimmering, dust-occluded line across the night sky that she knew so well. The Refuge, however, clearly lay far outside the plane. The entire disc of the galaxy lay tilted before Selene's eyes, with very few stars nearby and its structure clear: the spiralling arms and the bright glow of the central mass.
The sight of it sparkled on her retinas. She studied it for long moments with both her natural right eye, and then with her enhanced left eye, picking out different wavelengths of radiation, the different spectra of the stars, the glowing clouds of nebulae. From the angle they were at, the whole thing looked curiously like an eye itself: the ovoid shape, the rainbow hues and the glowing central mass as the pupil.
“Where is Maes Far?”
Part-way along one of the spiral arms, towards the central mass, a star began to flash. There was nothing remarkable or special about it. Her homeworld's sun was insignificant: one star among billions. She knew well the scale of the galaxy, but the sight of the whole thing laid out before her took her breath away. When you were inside it you couldn't see the entirety.
Her life had been so small. Briefly, she felt the tug of an unfamiliar emotion: a wonder at what all those stars were, at who and what was to be found there.
“And Sintorus?”
Another insignificant light flashed, farther out along the same arm.
Turning away for a moment, she saw that on the opposite side of the dome, away from the galactic mass, there was only darkness. There was the deep void of intergalactic space, with only other galaxies, other islands in the emptiness, to provide any illumination. In its own way that was beautiful, too. Light and dark. With her left eye, she could peer farther and farther into the void, deeper and deeper into time. Wherever she looked there were more galaxies, and more, and more. Distant places she would never and could never visit.
Ondo was still looking at the swirl of their galaxy. “Concordance control almost all of i
t, their Cathedral ships in orbit around every technologically-advanced planet. Somewhere in that central mass lives Omn, if they are to be believed. The God Star; the Light at the Heart of the Galaxy, attended and served by Primo Carious and Secundus Godel and the rest of the Augurs. Of course, it is a place no one can go, a being no one may approach. No one can go anywhere without the Cathedral ships and the Void Walkers intervening to stop them. They cannot allow truth to trouble their mystique. You grasp the scale of what they are, now? How they dominate and belittle us?”
She didn't need his patronising words. He thought she was ignorant of galactic affairs, brought up on her backwater world, but that wasn't how it was. “I've always known what they are; I was raised to understand exactly that. What can you do in the face of such power? The galaxy is beautiful, but the sight of it changes nothing. Concordance are all-powerful and I'm a broken cripple despite all your efforts. You thought showing me this would somehow change my mind? Fill me with some zeal to fight back? I'm fucking exhausted just coming up here, and I'm in a chair that does all the moving for me. My bones hurt.”
He held up his hands as if to fend off her fury. “I wanted you to see this because it's a glorious sight, that's all. I often come up here myself to think; I find it gives me a welcome sense of perspective. I'm sorry if my words offended you.”
He wasn't being intentionally condescending. He wasn't used to talking to people.
“Forget it,” she said.
