Empty Between the Stars (The Songs of Old Sol Book 1)

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘This isn’t good,’ Simenon mumbled after we reached the street outside the palace, leaving our armed escort behind. I noted a long queue of thin wretches had formed outside the main gates, carrying beggars’ bowls, plates, a few old sacks for what food could be spared from the kitchens inside. A regular, event, then, such feedings. Alice Blez meant what she had said about trying to protect her people. And who was to protect her? A rascal such as Sweet William? Poor world. Things weren’t getting better on Hexator anytime soon.

  ‘Singled out for a fair lady’s favour, laddie?’ I tried to smile, putting a good spin on the situation. ‘What’s not good about that.’

  Simenon didn’t buy it. ‘All of it, Master Roxley. This is a tale with no happy ending.’

  ‘We shall see.’

  ‘Ah, well,’ sighed the boy, ‘at least we will be helping the Lady.’ From the tone of Simenon’s voice, I suspected there was only one as far as the locals’ hearts were concerned.

  I sent the boy off to seek out a carriage to take us home. ‘Her old man is dead and in his secrets, we’ll make our bread,’ I hummed while we waited.

  ‘And where we tread,’ sung Mozart, ‘I’m beginning to dread.’

  ‘Rhyming is my thing,’ I said, ‘shaking our enemies about by the scruff of the neck is yours.’

  Mozart grunted. ‘Do you think Lady Alice B. knows the ancient origins of her long-departed deity?’

  ‘I’m not sure how developed the Hexatorians’ sense of the ridiculous is, Moz.’

  The Goddess Inuno might have screwed the humans in this arm of space when she embraced the singularity, withdrawing from mortal affairs, but given Inuno began as one of our most successful love hotel simulacrums, humanity had certainly screwed her mightily, lustily and multiple times, first.

  My turn next? Probably. The universe never lacked for excuses to screw William Roxley.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Trouble. And strife.

  I dispatched Mozart to protect Simenon on an errand. Collecting my surgical case from the Pleiad’s Daughter while I ambled down into our lodgings’ taproom. The venue seemed popular with local merchants. Hexatorian traders from outlying settlements clustered around the counter and filled its wooden benches and tables, discussing harvest bounties and bandit problems on the roads as they drank their problems – and profits – away. Rather them than me. I could imagine the dark spaces between the moon’s pockets of human life. Only the swaying lantern on a carriage to light your way. Wild forests of the strange local flora hidden under perpetual night for deadly forays by Ferals. I fitted in this dive well enough, smoking my pipe and buying the occasional drink for strangers as well as sweetening the bar staff. I could take the pulse of a world from the Sparrow’s Rest in a manner impossible in grander lodgings. Lodgings, where keeping offworld guests’ surroundings familiar and holding the exotic at bay, were the order of the day.

  I had been drinking for a good hour when a tall stranger cut out of the crowd to approach me. He called across a throaty salutation. It took me a second to realize the man was speaking Humanto; I didn’t need to parse his speech using my freshly acquired language skills. A fellow foreign traveller from the look of his obviously foreign purple velvet jacket; the giant’s silk waistcoat embroidered in bright cobalt, helping conceal a sizable gut below. He extended his right hand and I shook it, both of us exchanging sigs in the common Humanitum greeting through our sweat, the brevity of the man’s verified details tumbling out of the chemical encryption string. Varnus Afrique, a freetrader off the private vessel Kybernan, registered out of the Scheherazade Rim.

  ‘Brother Varnus,’ I said.

  ‘Brother William,’ he rumbled, dabbing at his dark black forehead with a handkerchief. ‘I’ve been waiting weeks for you to arrive.’

  ‘You have?’

  ‘Aye. A small charge from Jia to fulfil before I depart. A courier ball for you.’

  ‘Any idea what the ball says?’

  ‘Coded to your DNA, brother, not mine,’ said Varnus.

  The Goddess Jia was obviously as unforthcoming towards her followers as Modd, as well as closely aligned to Modd in matters of theology. There was occasionally chatter of the two gods merging at some point in the future. Varnus rummaged around in the pockets of his long coat. His large hand emerged with a marble-sized blue sphere bearing a glowing emblem in its centre, a single butterfly wing. The half-finished metamorphosis, the best-known symbol of Modd’s holy presence on this plane.

  I rolled the ball about my palm, then pressed tight enough to skim off the transmission details. I didn’t want to interact with the sealed message in public, so I would leave that dubious pleasure for later. But I did grimace as the packet’s origin flashed across my mind.

  ‘I hope I haven’t served you with a lawsuit,’ said Varnus.

  ‘It’s from my wife,’ I replied, tapping the bar counter to order a drink for the trader – showing him I appreciated his seeking me out, if not the courier ball’s contents.

  ‘What, she can’t wait for you to leave this waesucks moon to travel home?’

  ‘Actually, my wife passed beyond the rainbow bridge ten years ago,’ I told him, accepting a beer from the staff and passing it to him.

  He laughed, finding this greatly to his amusement. ‘What, she’s still nagging you from Paradise? Henpecking you from the other side?’ He slapped the knees of his trousers. ‘That’s rich. She doesn’t own avatars of you to scold and boss about in the Merge? I’ve had twenty-six ex-wives and husbands to date … I always make sure they follow faiths far from Jia’s path.’

  ‘I only ever had the one wife.’

  ‘Well, there’s your mistake, Brother William. Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who wants to live in an institution? I always suffer buyer’s regret.’

  ‘When you land a good wife, you become happy; when you land a bad one, you become a philosopher,’ I countered.

  Varnus snickered. ‘Then Varnus Afrique is truly a king among philosophers.’

  ‘A king quitting the field early,’ I pointed out. ‘The spore-spice auctions begin in a couple of days.’

  ‘Pah, spice? A mealymouthed word for what is actually sold here. Drugs. Jia’s path does not countenance narcotics, not even quaintly aboriginal psychedelics … not in the trade nor the taking.’

  I had forgotten the Puritan temperament of Jia’s adherents. ‘Compassion, brother. They don’t have much else to sell out of this world.’

  ‘Anyone who snorts Hexatorian spore-spice deserves their medical bills. Did you know the moon’s psilocybes spray spores out as a defensive reflex when insects attack their flesh? A neurotoxin used by the mushrooms to drive predators insane. That’s just one of a thousand spore pharmacologies sourced here. And this is what so-called connoisseurs want to ingest?’

  I recalled coming across the spores’ origin on the journey here. ‘This is actually my first time on Hexator, brother. Any tips for a new visitor?’

  ‘Sup with a long spoon on this graceless moon of shadows. Do your business quickly and leave with good haste.’

  ‘And your business, brother …?’

  ‘I landed with a shipment of shield rechargers ordered by the Trabbs. Those and a few similar trinkets.’

  Grease for the mailed fist. I wasn’t certain as to the moral equivalence of what amounted to low-level arms-running. But perhaps this disciple of Jia told himself that he was, at worse, merely hastening an end to the locals’ misery.

  ‘Ingrates who complain of civilization’s stifling weight should be transported here and made to live as Ferals in the dirt for a decade. That would be a trade fit for Hexator,’ hissed Varnus. The merchant realized he was starting to rant and attempted to steer the conservation towards a gentler topic. ‘Have you born witness yet, brother?’

  ‘Surely. I popped into a witness booth before I caught my foldship here.’

  ‘I must do so, too, when I return to the Humanitum,’ said Varnus, sounding contemplative.


  As he should. It was a serious matter for an individual’s testimony to be added to the balance of our new empress’s opinions, her attitudes, habits, beliefs, and proclivities. The Humanitum’s current empress’s three centuries-long reign was nearly at an end, the baked in apoptosis of programmed cell death timed to end her rule in precisely nine months. Soon, a beautiful renewed empress would step dripping from the clone banks of Arius, fully grown and entirely wise, the mathematically averaged sum of all of humanity’s hopes and ambitions. She would spend her life in conclave with the gods, the perfect priestess and the purest expression of our democracy. I thought of graceless Hexator. All the upright apes savagely clubbing each to death for dominance of the troop, and couldn’t help but feel a terrible sadness for the bleakness of mankind’s natural devolved state.

  ‘I examined the proposed designs for our refresh’s face before I left,’ said Varnus. ‘The ancient Japanese had a word for the empress’s new features. Kawaī kawaīdesu.’

  I chortled. ‘I know what you mean.’ A little too cute, perhaps. ‘But beyond superficial matters, it’s an auspicious time for a renewal. Modern views for a modern age.’

  ‘May our ambrosial new empress prove equal to our new troubles,’ prayed Varnus.

  I raised my beer to the man and gave him the magistrate’s toast. ‘To perfect laws and to perfect judges in heaven to adjudicate them.’

  ‘To perfect laws. Gods, this ale is foul stuff. Aye, I almost forgot…’ Varnus set aside his drink for a second and reached into his pack to yank out a rolled-up prayer mat, offering the mat to me with both his large hands. ‘I had a vision last night during which it was suggested I gift this to you.’

  ‘Are you sure it wasn’t just a dream?’

  ‘I haven’t experienced many visions, brother, but I know the difference between something being unpacked as an encrypt from my m-brain and too much dodgy local insect meat.’

  I unrolled the rectangular mat a little to examine it. Beautiful. Rectilinear circuit patterns and apotropaic symbols in warm reds and browns; a fractal mat, where the geometric weave of billions of transistors folded in on itself, ever smaller, tightening down towards the holy and the subatomic. ‘You actually managed to sneak this beauty past the port’s customs house?’

  ‘Who are the harbour guards to get in the way of an honest man’s worship,’ said Varnus. ‘Especially when he is generous and bringing in valuable arms shipments for the local warlords.’

  So, Jia, too, was extending her protection over me. ‘I’m not certain this is an auspicious coincidence for me,’ I admitted.

  ‘Coincidences are just how the gods hide their love for us,’ said Varnus. ‘Hexator can be a dangerous place, brother. Are you a dangerous man?’

  ‘Alas, just a simple trader.’

  Varnus took a last gulp and set aside his tankard. ‘Well, my friend, I’m off back to civilization. Don’t spend all night arguing with your dead wife.’

  Varnus left for the port and his vessel and I went back to my room to discover just how long I would stay up arguing.

  ***

  I activated the courier ball and it was as though my tavern quarters simply melted and vanished. I was still physically present, of course, but the sphere created a secure virtual chamber inside my m-brain. Nobody spying on my room would see me talking to my dead wife or be able to lip-read me while I was in-virtual. Not that anyone even possessed such technology on this moon. But even sophisticated surveillance wouldn’t be able to pick up magnetic reads from my mind to cue in on what I was thinking.

  I discovered myself rematerialized inside a white windowless room containing a simple table and two chairs. The back wall glowed with the icon of a single butterfly wing. A small white ball floated above the table. The room was divided by a transparent glass wall, close to the barrier of a prison’s visiting hall. This glass divider was as much a symbol as the butterfly wing. A reminder that paradise, life after death, wasn’t just another distant realm that could be reached by foldship. Sadly, it wasn’t the only barrier separating myself from my wife. Rena floated down from the ceiling wearing a long flowing coatigan, striped in three shades of white that still managed to differentiate itself from her pale leggings and ivory stiletto heels. The courier embed of my dead wife’s face appeared sixty rather than her true millennial. Some women went to their deathbed looking like twenty-year-olds, but for all her many flaws, Rena had never possessed an iota of vanity.

  ‘You’re looking good,’ I told Rena.

  ‘And you’re looking tired, William.’ My dead wife reached out and spun the hovering ball so the sphere started rotating. I felt the photon embedded inside our courier ball vibrating, transferring coded data back to a quantum-entangled photonic mirror self stored deep inside the Humanitum’s borders. With such limited bandwidth, our communication wasn’t realtime, but my dead wife would pick up my answers to her simulation’s prodding and probing of me within a few hours.

  ‘I feel tired,’ I agreed. ‘A function of age.’

  ‘Exactly. Which makes it inexplicable to me that you still haven’t yet updated your will to accommodate the grace of transformation.’

  ‘You know my views on that. They haven’t changed.’

  ‘What has changed is that you’re back out in the wilds again, when you promised me your previous voyage would be your last. Never again, those were your precise words.’

  ‘I promised you when you were alive,’ I coughed, knowing my words sounded disingenuous even as I spoke them.

  ‘Really? That’s your excuse! If you die out there, you will really die,’ Rena accused.

  ‘No energy is ever lost, merely transformed.’

  ‘Transformed without structure, without me. You need to confirm your Merge with Modd.’

  ‘If Modd wanted, he could access my m-brain and copy all my memories, instincts and thoughts into a clone template, before churning out a thousand facsimiles of me. A Legion of William Roxleys. Will they be me, too, or just fake copies of myself?’

  ‘Lover,’ Rena insisted, ‘across a decade every cell that composes you dies and is replaced. In a decade hence, will that regenerated you be any less than your present self? Structure is everything. Pattern is divine.’

  ‘I disagree.’ In truth, I wasn’t certain if the fact I was currently in-virtual, arguing with a compressed simulacrum of my dead wife’s views, proved such points or negated them.

  ‘Sometimes I think you enjoy misery,’ accused Rena. ‘Wallowing in destitution. Sometimes I think you find life more exciting out in The Empty than you enjoy the grace of peace and posterity back home.’

  ‘You tracked me down here, so Modd must have briefed you with the nature of my mission. It’s necessity. The stakes we face. You know I travelled out here much the same way your courier ball did.’

  ‘Don’t blame the gods for your thrill-seeking. You are reckless,’ said Rena. ‘You and your partner-in-crime.’

  ‘Do you mean Modd or Mozart, my love?’

  ‘You know exactly who I mean.’

  ‘You sit with Modd and are merged with Modd, but you aren’t my god,’ I reminded Rena.

  ‘Pour a cup of water into the ocean and wait an hour – where then is your water and where is the ocean?’

  I laughed, but not unkindly. We had enjoyed many such conversations over our thousand years together. Arguing the nature of the Merge. The choice between true death or transfiguration to the in-virtual. ‘Are your suggestions to me homeopathic, then?’

  ‘I’m serious, William. I miss you here. I couldn’t bear to lose you forever.’

  Actually, I think Rena didn’t want to lose any more of herself. For, if I failed to cross the rainbow bridge for the merge, what did that say about the reality of her existence on the other side?

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I placed my hand on the transparent screen and she covered the glass with her fingers on the other side.

  ‘Tell me this isn’t about our son,’ said Rena. ‘Where you are a
nd why you won’t embrace what comes next.’

  Tears filled my eyes. There was more than one way to be haunted … the new way and the old. And unlike dying, I possessed little choice over how I was haunted.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Watched.

  Trouble has a smell. Testosterone and the promise of impending violence. I’d just arrived back outside my tavern after retrieving cellular samples I needed from the Blez palace when I got a good whiff of it. A group of five Watch officers lounging with purpose by a police wagon parked in the street. Was poor old Sweet William their purpose? Mozart perked up at my side. I was glad Simenon was off procuring chemical reagents for me. Locals always got the shitty end of the stick when it came to rough handling from the likes of such goons. They intercepted us before we made it inside the tavern.

  ‘I haven’t done anything wrong,’ I protested towards their hostile faces.

  The biggest cop shoved me against the tavern wall and punched me hard in the gut. I noted Mozart starting to tremble as I doubled up. I urgently finger-signed him not to shift into Extreme Combat Mode. It would be hard to explain away his impersonation of a millennia-old local clunker if we ran his true colours up the flagpole here.

  ‘We get to decide that!’ growled the thug.

  ‘Of course,’ I groaned, trying to placate the man.

  ‘We’re taking you in, moneyass.’ A cop pointed to his patrol’s police wagon, little more than a cart with a wooden cage built on the back.

  I knew better than to ask what his charges might be. Staring at their patrol the wrong way, possibly. They shoved me roughly towards the police wagon and Mozart made to come after me. The officers felt threatened, drawing sawn-off shotguns, flourishing their weapons towards us. Such primitive firearms didn’t really require aiming, more waving at the same compass point as a foe.

  ‘Just you, moneyass. Your ruster can sod off back to your rooms.’

  ‘Mozart assists me when I suffer epileptic fits. You wouldn’t want me to die before I arrive, would you? This kind of stress is very bad for my nerves.’ Their answer to indicate whether we needed to fight them off.