And then I am in the antechamber, and surrounding me are a hundred solemn faces, many distraught. I feel panic overtaking me, a scream forming in my throat. I search the crowd for Geminii’s face. I find her standing beside the elder midwives. Her eyes bore into me, and I try to remember what she has told me. I know that if I lose my will to live, I will lose the hope she holds for me.
The elder midwives are withered and silent women, all of them warriors. From childhood, like me, they were trained as fighters, seasoned by combat with giant and vicious vermin that stalk our underground world. From middle age they apprentice in the birthing of children and in the esoteric art of reading our star maps. I may have become one myself, but it seems the people who are buried had other plans for me. The elder midwives stare at me without remorse for what they are about to do, but also, curiously, without judgment. It is not vacancy but something else. Anticipation?
The antechamber is wide, high-ceilinged, and, with only a few fires lit, oppressively dark. The witnesses in attendance seem to glow in their ceremonial white robes. The color of death. Like a warrior. Heavy with skulls. Fragments of my naming song find their way into my thoughts. I struggle to remain grounded, to master my trembling. I breathe deeply and direct my attention to the elder midwives.
“Death begets death.” The words of the surfacing. “In return for the life you stole and the vow you have broken, one life you must give.” First one, and then each in turn, raise their right arms and point to the gate. Beyond it are the tunnel, the platform, and the doors to the surface. Breath leaves my body.
Violence begets violence, and the violence I have known in my life derived from something ugly, vile, and jealous: a man filled with hatred, supported by a community so intent on reproduction and survival that it is blind to other ways of loving. He hated me because of who I loved. He hated me because I did not love him. I killed the man who nearly killed me. But now I will die anyway.
I move forward through the gate. I have no choice. It happens so quickly, acted out in silence. In moments, I am through the tunnel, looking at the distorted figures of my community through the glass. It is so surprisingly cold here I almost forget to identify the location of the survival pack. My eyes cast about for a moment, and there it is, directly to the right of the window, tucked in a nook between the edge of the glass and the ornate frame surrounding the tunnel entrance. The pack seems to glow with its own light because the fabric covering the bag is dyed with colors I have never seen before. It is the color I have always imagined the sunset to be. I suppose now I will have a chance to confirm this—if I can survive that long.
I am just beginning to calculate how much time it will take me to reach the pack when the ground heaves beneath me and the platform begins to tremble. The ceiling above me splits in two, and I am blinded, trying to breathe, trying to sense where the window is. I rush forward and slam against the glass, sending shooting pains through my chest. The wind howls through me as I use the window to guide my body along the edge of the platform until I trip over the pack. I pull at it and it jams as the platform begins to rise. I jimmy the pack and yank hard, pulling it free and throwing myself back onto the platform. I struggle to open my eyes and can manage only a flickering of sight. Through the glass, I register movement that I can only interpret as commotion. I try to stand and manage to gain my knees, grasping the heavy survival pack, whipped by wind and light and small rocks that dance in the air around me. The platform is groaning, rising. I open my eyes again, for moments this time, and through the window I glimpse a figure I believe to be Geminii, her hands splayed, mouthing something. I cannot make out what she is saying. She disappears beneath the platform’s edge, and I am alone. A single guttural cry, and I force my body onto my feet, positioning the pack between my legs, assume a warrior stance. In moments, my head will clear the surface doors and I will know what awaits me.
I open my eyes. I stand there looking up.
Technician’s Log A.C. 1019. jun. 35. 20:19
There is a life form moving south through the upper Mideast quadrant. Something different, something with intellect and purpose. It moves with determination more reminiscent of nomadic and migratory patterns of pre–A.C. 650, the point being arrival at any cost, not the aberrant, reactionary motion of the newer life forms. I have tracked its course and used the infraction positioning program to predict its path. Whatever it is, it is coming for me.
In Spite of Darkness
Alixa Garcia
Seven Years Ago
Mikra was born on the first day of the war. Ó screamed from simultaneous heartbreak and joy that cracked the sky above her. Unprecedented lightning fractured the heavens to deliver Mikra. What saved their lives that night was not luck but the thunder that roared louder than the guns; and like any movement toward an unfolding future, so thundered down the unknown hand of destiny.
Present
The heat of the fire danced against Ó’s face, while the cold night pressed against her back. Mikra looked up from her seven-year-old hands toward her mother, her question still rattling the air. Ó’s shoulders dropped in defeat. Mikra looked curious. She had never seen her mother slouch. It was as if the weight of something invisible had fallen heavily to either side of her neck and now pulled Ó toward the ground.
“Mama? Why do you keep saying ‘where are our sons?’ when you are sleeping? You have other sons, Mama?” Mikra asked once more.
Ó looked up, feeling suffocated by the blanketed night. This endless night had begun eight years before. Darkness was all they now knew. “What were the Suns is a better question, my child.” Her body shivered. It had been eight years since Ó last felt their warmth over Kempúa, and in all this time she had never talked about the Suns like this, in the past, like a dead memory scraping at the surface of now.
Above: Ó
• • •
“Jaiku! Jaiku! Where are you? We need to get these Sol Gatherers out of here now! The humans are near, they will see our light!” The urgent panic could be felt in Tet’s voice as he stumbled around in the dark. He had stepped outside of the light that emanated from the young Sol Gatherers’ skin.
“Jaiku! Jaiku!” He whispered loudly, squinting, trying to see better.
“Aaaah!” Tet jumped in fear when he felt a hand on his head.
“It’s me,” Jaiku giggled.
“Jaiku! We have to get the young Gatherers out of here now!” he said panting, holding a hand to his chest.
“What’s happening?” Jaiku’s voice turned urgent.
“The humans are near, we’ve spotted their red light cutting through the forest. If we don’t do something soon, the young ones will give our location away. We have them covered with leaves and shrubs, but their fear is making their skin luminous and the light of their Guide is growing brighter. I’m afraid that if we don’t move soon, they won’t be able to contain it!” He urgently walked back toward the glowing mound. The Sol Gatherers were affected by mood—fear and love being the strongest emotions that could make their firelike skin radiate. Jaiku could see his best friend’s silhouette swaying to and fro as if he moved to a slow melody. Tet was Jaiku’s age but half his size and half as fast. He could camouflage himself to any background and become virtually invisible—a trick not so impressive in the dark, but, when the days were long, his tribe, the Okanike, was the most mischievous and playful because of it. Legend has it that they are part Cominó, which gives them their ability and humor. However, few had ever seen a Cominó, and most still considered them myth.
The Okanike had taken it upon themselves to care for the young Sol Gatherers when their parents and elders never returned. Now they looked down at the last hundred surviving Gatherers and the future of Kempúa. Fear rustled the leaves that covered their large bodies. Jaiku could see the red light of the humans coming toward them. If the humans reached the mound there would be a massacre, and the last remaining Sol Gatherers would be captured and disappeared forever.
“Listen!” Jaiku s
aid urgently, “Do you think that you can lie on top of them and camouflage the night? Or will you camouflage the light instead?” The crowd murmured. Some said yes, some no.
“We have to be in agreement if we are to hold this stance long enough to confuse the humans,” one of them whispered loudly.
“But how can we? We always camouflage what we stand against; we would be leaning on them. How will we be able to mirror the night?” another one whispered.
“If we lay our bodies on them so that our backs are to the night and we picture only darkness, we might be able to pull this off,” Tet interrupted. “We have no choice but to try!”
“It’s suicide!” came a voice from the crowd.
“And so is standing here and doing nothing!” Tet rebutted. They could have argued all night, but Jaiku interrupted, “We have no choice, they are upon us!” Realizing that the red lasers were starting to cut through the last bit of forest that stood between them, they took the chance, and Tet’s tribe began to lay their bodies one on top of the other until every inch was covered and, like a trick of the eye, they were gone. Jaiku smiled, quickly climbing a tree above them. He positioned his bow to the ground.
Above: Jaiku
Leaves rustled and twigs broke. The humans were not skilled at being in the dark and often tripped and moaned when they went out like this—in large numbers, on foot, with no large machines in front of them to clear the path with fire and force. Soon Jaiku and Tet’s tribe could hear the army around them—their heavy boots crushing life, their red light pointing in every direction, their dense armor glistening against one another’s lasers. Jaiku could see that the armor was hard and appeared heavy, which was probably why they moved so slowly. They were big, clumsy, moving targets, Jaiku thought. If it weren’t for their weaponry—if it weren’t for their machinery and their numbers—they would have been destroyed long ago. Since the first day of the invasion, they came killing. They killed everything in sight, everything that moved, everything that breathed, everything that felt—except the Sol Gatherers. The humans wanted them.
Jaiku’s heart pounded. He could feel his pulse against the bow. The humans neared, cracking twigs right below the branch he sat on. Sweat formed on Jaiku’s brow. As they were about to trip over the mound, the humans’ armor started to make an alarming sound that pierced the silent night. Red lights flashed inside their headgear. Jaiku looked on as the ghostly faces of roughly two hundred soldiers were washed in red. They made angry and disappointed expressions through the little glass window that allowed them to see. Their appearance, haunting and vacant, created an illusion of floating heads whose missing bodies littered the forest as far as Jaiku could see. In the distance, he heard birds take flight. The alarm was letting the humans know that their machines would soon run out of oxygen, forcing them to return to the darkness from which they came.
Above: Cominó
• • •
The fire danced against Ó’s body, creating shadows along the hard round contours of the turtle-like shell that covered her back. The birds that lived inside the shell shifted with her unfamiliar slouch. Ó’s heart ached as if it were the first time feeling a wound. How could she begin to explain where the Suns had gone? The question ricocheted inside of her like none other in hundreds of years. Mikra, on the other hand, couldn’t find the reason why such a simple question could bend such a tall woman.
“Mikra, it is not sons I mention, it is suns,” she said, picking up a nearby stick and scratching the subtle difference into the frozen ground. Ó stopped and stared into the fire, lost in thought for a brief moment. Mikra knew to wait if she had any hope of getting her questions answered.
“The youngest Sol Gatherers were still too young to fly when their elders were last seen,” Ó began steadily—before the hesitation could creep in. Mikra looked intensely at her mother. “The elders, three thousand of them, took flight into outer space after a long rest of several months. They planned to return after our largest moon had come to the same place in the sky. But, unlike the moon, they never returned. They haven’t yet, at least. It has been about eight years.”
The faith that, for so long, she held like a mirror against the face of crouching maybes, began to crack that night. It was a small opening that allowed just enough doubt to seep into her heart. She began to consider that maybe the Sol Gatherers were now lost in the expansiveness of the universe and with them, she worried, the backbone of liberation. Ó knew in her heart that only the Sol Gatherers were strong enough in numbers to defeat the humans and bring peace, light, and regeneration back to Kempúa. But where were they? It was too much to bear. She swung her shoulders back just to keep from crying.
Above: Sol Gatherer
“You had just been conceived,” Ó said steadily. “I could feel your presence inside of me like I had felt your brother Jaiku’s. It was everywhere. Your life was an open doorway to my beloved, Jaggúa.”
Mikra furrowed her brow. She had never heard of Jaggúa and tried to picture her. Though she could be impatient at times, she was an intelligent seven-year-old, the second of her kind: a mixture of Sol Gatherer and Pattern Keeper.
“I was in love with you. During that time my heart held the hand of joy.” Ó rubbed her hands together. “Jaggúa is a Sol Gatherer. You are half of her and so is Jaiku.” Mikra looked puzzled; she had never seen a Sol Gatherer before.
“For as long as anyone can remember, the Sol Gatherers have gone up into that blackness as one and have come back with light for us all—pieces of sunlight which look much like the fire here, though a thousand times bigger. Jaggúa was preparing to go with them.” Mikra looked up. She couldn’t imagine any light coming from the vastness, not any that could closely resemble the fire that now danced before her and disappeared against the endless night.
“It was planned that, once the Sol Gatherers returned from this last journey to the Sun, festivities would commence and preparation for the following journey would consume us all, for it was this next journey when the young Sol Gatherers would be shown the path to the star closest to Kempúa.” Her voice dropped. Ó looked up at a pitch-black sky. Billions of little silver holes poked through the darkness but never threatened to break the fabric.
When she began again, she spoke in a low voice. “It was a happier time. The Sol Gatherers would show the map of the sky to their young, would speak the prophecy of their lineage, and their young would experience it for themselves. The magic that has maintained this world in balance for as long as time has been kept would be passed down once again to a new generation of Sol Gatherers. A vital initiation.” Mikra looked at her mother, her gaze not veering for fear of missing too much.
“Sol Gatherers go together everywhere as a tribe and only leave behind their young for the first seven years of their lives here in Kempúa, because they are still too small to fly. Sol Gatherers only give birth every hundred years, and so it is a big celebration when the time comes for the new generation to soar beyond the sky and learn the secrets of their tribe.”
Mikra rubbed her thumb and forefinger together as she often did when excited or anxious. Her large head of curls fell over her sculpted face. Ó continued, “Sol Gatherers fly beyond our galaxy and into another dimension in search of sunlight. The young ones fly with their elders after the initiation ceremony has concluded, and they continue to do so for the next hundred years. Once the young become elders themselves, on that hundred-and-eighth year, they will see their souls move toward ancestry and be reborn in the bodies of a new generation. The Sol Gatherers are an ongoing cycle that never stops.” Ó’s voice trailed off.
Mikra leaned forward. “Where do they find the sunlight? Isn’t it so dark up there? Is Jaggúa up there?” Mikra looked up, letting her eyes focus on the brightest star.
“The Sol Gatherers have a Guide right here,” Ó said, pointing between her eyes, postponing Mikra’s last question. Mikra quickly looked down. “It’s like a map,” Ó continued. “With it, they can feel their way through the da
rkness until they reach the closest star.”
It was rare to hear her mother speak like this. Often she was instructed on how to do this or that, always with a long explanation, but never had the information related to things beyond their survival been relayed to Mikra.
“Like my Guide, mama?”
“Yes, like your Guide.”
“But I can’t see any stars.”
“But you can find your way through the most impenetrable darkness, and it lights up just like yours does, except much brighter once they get close to the Sun.”
The fire was dying down. Mikra got up and walked to the edge of the darkness and was immediately hit by the cold. She wrapped the colorful blanket her mother had made for her around her neck and reached for the ground. She collected a handful of wood and hurried back. The darkness did not scare her—it never did—she simply couldn’t wait for her mother’s story to continue. Once the fire blazed again, she sat next to Ó, gazing at the flames.
After a short silence Ó continued, “The Sol Gatherers also move very fast once they leave our world and enter the infinite darkness beyond. They move so fast that they barely look or feel like what we know them to be. “Jaggúa,” she paused only for a second, “our beloved, told me once that it is as if the speed stretches them out until they are no longer a body but rather circulating energy that feeds off itself, propelling them forward. Jaggúa also said that if it weren’t for the Guide during these journeys, they would be lost to themselves and to each other in the expansiveness of the universe. Because only this map—this reminder of Kempúa—can bridge them between home and that which they were put on this world to do.”
Mikra tried to comprehend all of the information she was being told. She had never gathered information from so many unknowns, except for the war. But even that was now a familiar unknown: the fear and the loud explosions, the screams that sometimes would wake them, set them running. Even in the unknown, her fear had a place and her feet touched the ground with intention. The bullets and explosions were often a part of the background, and they only sometimes came to the forefront, engulfing them with their decibels. This new unfamiliar had her heart racing and her imagination jumping in an attempt to picture such creatures.
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements Page 10
