She held up her index finger, still not looking up. “Patience, please. Won’t be another moment now.” The intensity of her scribbling increased, a flurry of markings, the stylus scritching on the paper.
Then, suddenly, she dropped the stylus like it was a hot iron, and sat back in her chair, eyes closed, pinching the bridge of her nose with her finger and thumb. A pained look.
“Perhaps I’ll come back later?” I said, starting to back out of the office
She squinted her eyes open, then held up her hand to stop my retreat. “You’re fine, cadet. Come in. Have a seat.” She gestured to the seat across from her desk.
“I’ve never met anyone who still works with paper,” I said, sitting down.
“It’s said that Eledar did all his best thinking on the written page. Not sure if it’s true, but it resonated with me. You should try it some day… what was your name, cadet?”
“Siris. Oren Siris.”
“Thurston,” she called out, “can you pull up Siris’s file?”
There was a whirring sound, and the mobile intelligence floated out from behind the cactus in the corner.
Petra snorted and gave her familiar a look of amused disbelief. “What are you doing back there?”
Thurston glimmered an irritated red, like the color of a rash.
“Oh nevermind. Just come here and find me this young man’s file.”
The heart hovered over us and settled into its dock on her desk.
She turned to me. “He’s an odd heart,” she said, pointing at Thurston, “but I suppose that’s what makes us such a good pair.
The monitor on her desk lit up with my information.
“There we are,” she said, bending down to squint at the readout. “From Verygone, eh Siris?”
“Yes, Petradrumon.”
“You’ve come a long way. And after all those light years, here you are, sitting across from me. Why?”
“I love your lectures, drumon. I always come away with something new.”
“Aren’t you a dear! Isn’t that kind, Thurston?”
Thurston glowed affirmative green.
“But, much as it pains me to say it, you didn’t come just to tell me how great I am, did you, Siris?” She gave me a penetraing look.
“This morning, during your lecture, you mentioned the Causality Labs.”
“And it piqued your interest, did it?”
“Yes, drumon.”
“Well, it never hurts to soften me with compliments, cadet. I’m as much a fool for flattery as any drumon here in the academy — Eledar knows we’ve enough vanity and self-aggrandizement to fill all the archives of Sebedas — but what matters more is your initiative. You’re the first to follow up on it since I mentioned it in class this morning.
“You’re no doubt wondering how a first-year such as yourself can get in on the ground floor of this exiciting research. Good news is, you’ve come to the right place. Frolly owes me a favor - several favors actually. I could put in a word.”
“That would be incredible!”
She leaned back in her chair. “Tell me though, Siris, what else did you take away from today’s lecture?”
She was testing me.
An idea started to take shape in my mind, but I was unsure of how to verbalize it.
“Come on,” she said. “Out with it.”
“Your inisghts about patterns in consciousness… they were beautiful, but…
“You struggled a bit at the end.”
I gave her a look of surprise.
“Who doesn’t struggle with purpose and meaning, Siris? The Eledarian dialogues are designed to explore paradox, and the nature of paradox is one of tension, conflict, and struggle.”
“I guess what I am trying to get at,” I said, “is… am I ‘me’? Or is my sense of self just an illusion created by higher patterns in the universe?”
“Ah! You’re striking at the the heart of the mystery! What is illusion? What is pattern? What is it to be an individual? Or to be part of a whole? Understanding the ‘how’ does not always lead us through to the ‘why.’ And if we had all the answers, I suspect people like you and me would start to get quite bored.”
“I suppose you’re right…”
“But you’re not satisfied. I know. That means I’m doing my job well, because you’re going to keep digging until you are. And maybe, in the process, you will help move the whole of humanity forward with what you discover.”
She swiveled in her chair. “Thurston, take this down: My dearest Frolly. I’ve got a live one for you. Cadet Oren Siris. An eager little dreamer.” She glanced at me. “Actually, he’s not little at all. Quite the hulk, in fact. But he should serve your purposes well. If you can’t think of a way to thank me for this, you should know that I’m running low on that century-aged vysak you obtained for me on your last trip to the highlands.’”
“There,” she said, wiping her hands together. “That should do it. Did you get it all, Thurston?”
Thurston glowed green again.
“Excellent. Send it off to Frollydrumon. He’ll be pleased to have another young blood to do the grunt work while he sits around dreaming up his thought experiments.”
* * *
And just like that, I landed as a research assistant in the Causality Laboratories. My first year was mostly grunt work, but Petra had warned me of this, and I stuck with it. I combed through databanks for hours on end, looking for anomalies, or sat at one of the stations, logging every iteration of an experiment. After two years, the drudge work paid off: Drumon Frolly recommended me for a praxis assignment with Starnet, a colossal project under the leadership of pausha Thol Dren Des.
The aim of Starnet was to replicate the immense lattices that encircled both Appollion and Shugguth like the gossamer webs of some cosmic spider. These webs channeled stellar energy, supplying Forsara with essentially limitless power, and Starnet had already brought the lattice design to nearly a dozen other stars with populous worlds. But we had only just begun to understand the true potential of these stellar energy transformers. What started out as a noble and ambitious initiative to provide an unlimited supply of power to all the central worlds became something even more incredible.
The first breakthrough came when Tholpausha and his team adapted the causality research I’d been a part of to convert the lattices into massive, subspace transmitters. The system amplified a star’s energy, enabling us to widen the subatomic gaps in space and send information across vast distances in a virtual instant, bypassing one of Eledar’s most fundamental discoveries about the nature of space-time: that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
It was revolutionary. Sending a message across the immensity of space used to take decades, or centuries, or even millennia, depending on how far it had to travel. Now, we were no longer constrained by Eledar’s cosmic speed limit. As long as there was an active starhub on each end to hold the substratum open, we could communicate without delay. Every connected world now had the chance to progress at the same pace, eliminating the time differential that allowed some civilizations to surge ahead while others stayed rooted in the past. With each new starhub, ideas and information flowed more freely across the Fellowship.
Then we made an even greater discovery.
Working from the same underlying theories, we discovered we could do more than just send information. We could send matter. Or rather, we could send matter as information. This allowed the Fellowship to link the stars and create trans-galaxy lanes for conventional ship travel. We no longer needed to rely solely on the great space voyagers carry people and resources across the void of space. Once two starhubs were active, we could use their energy to jump ships between them, shortening a journey that might otherwise take centuries into just a few months, or even a few days, depending on how close the starhub was to the final destination. Starhubs become gathering points, beacons in the void, and the galactic field widened, spreading the Fellowship’s influence ever further into the
universe.
But, as I would soon learn, that influence was not always a welcome one.
13 Portent
Wake up. The refrain repeats in my head. Wake up. My heart is a fusion core. Wake up. Everything around me is so bright. I squint. Wake up. The light fades. It is twilight. I am home. I move my hands along the wood and packed dirt of this house that I have never seen before, that I have lived in all of my life. Everything is rough-hewn; well made, but crafted by hand.
I step through the front door. A simple wooden fence built from quartered tree trunks circles the tall grass and bushes in the yard. I move through the grass and rest my hands on the fence, tracing the grain of the wood with my fingers. It is sanded smooth. I look up towards the moving star in the sky. It is a ship. Orbiting low, a passing beacon, a reminder that we are more than skin and bones and blood, even in death.
Wake up. I step back and swing my arms. The wooden columns holding up one side of the house splinter and split with the force of my strike. I swing again, knocking down the next wall. The roof collapses on top of me.
I exhale, the detritus of the old house lifting off of me, spinning out in every direction. Wake up. I climb out of the wreckage and exhale again. The rest of the house collapses, crumpling like parchment. I leap into the air, pointing myself towards the trail of the flying star, towards the ship that will carry me out of this place.
Something grasps my neck.
My head wrenches backwards.
I fall to the earth.
* * *
“Oren. Wake up.” Saiara was whispering in my ear. “It’s okay. You’re here with me. This is home.” She kissed me on the forehead, stroking my hair. I pulled her close, and soon she was asleep in my arms.
I lay awake. What planet was that? Where was the ship headed? Why did I want so badly to escape that place? My mind wore itself down with these questions, and eventually, I fell back to sleep too.
The next morning, as we drank guays tea together, Appollion’s silver sunlight filtering through our quarters, Saiara asked me about my dream.
I blew on the steaming tea. “I was in my home,” I told her. “It was so familiar, even though I had never seen it before. There was a ship, leaving the planet, and I knew I was supposed to go with it. But something held me back, trapping me there. That’s when I woke up.”
She wiped last night’s crust from her eyes and yawned. “You’re just nervous. I’d be surprised if you weren’t. Today is a big day.”
I scratched my chin. “You’re probably right.”
“What time do you depart?”
“Afternoon. I have to report to station eleven by midday for the final briefing. A transport riser will take me into orbit when Shugguth crosses the apex.”
She looked at the chronometer embedded in the wall. Appollion was well above the dawning line, with the crimson cusp of Shugguth just emerging.
“Shugguth is already rising,” she said. “Noon will come on fast. You should start getting ready.”
I rubbed my forefingers and thumbs across my eyebrows.
“What is it?”
“Honestly? I’m scared, Saiara.” I couldn’t meet her eyes.
“Oren. Look at me.” She reached across the table and took my hand. “You should be scared. This isn’t a simulation. But you’re in good hands with Tholpausha, and he chose you for a reason. I know you know that.”
I took a deep breath and squeezed her hand back.
“I know,” I said. “I love you.”
“Of course you do. I am extraordinarily loveable.”
I laughed. “And modest too,” I said.
She smiled widely.
“Speaking of modesty,” I said, pointing at her, “you’ve barely said a word about your next assignment.” I placed my hand over my heart. “I promise I won’t be jealous.”
“It’s a great honor,” she said, becoming shy.
“To say the least! Apprenticing with the Farseers of the Coven? You’re actually going to live and work inside the halls of the Worldheart.” I crossed my arms, shaking my head. “I lied, by the way. I’m extremely jealous.”
She laughed. “Go,” she said. “Wash up. Today is your day, not mine. I’ll prepare something, and when you’re ready, we’ll break our fast.”
“Thank you, Saiara.”
“Come on now, lover boy. Don’t just sit there making moon eyes. Get moving! Time grows thin.”
* * *
After we ate, Saiara rode with me to the top of our tower where the transport riser was waiting to take me up to station eleven.
The wind sang as we stood in the open air, fluttering our clothes and hair. Saiara picked out the low-orbiting space station with her sharp eyes, and pointed it out to me. “They’re waiting for you,” she said.
We embraced.
Then she stepped back, reached up, and took my cheeks between her hands. “I love you,” she said.
I leaned forward. We kissed. It was over too fast.
“I love you too, Saiara.”
I climbed onboard the transport riser. The ship’s heart registered my biosig, and the riser lifted off the platform. The propulsion was fluid and smooth. I barely felt the motion as I watched the roof of the tower begin to fall away. The door started to close.
“Wait,” I said.
The heart paused the ship’s ascent. The door hung half-open. I stared out at her, searching for something else to say.
“Go, Oren!” she called, waving me off. “And may the spirits of the Scions travel with you!”
I nodded and waved back. “Let’s go,” I said. The door closed and the hopper accelerated, rocketing into the atmosphere.
* * *
During the briefings with pausha Thol, I learned that the Linstar was a decaying star four thousand light years away from Forsara, just at the inner edge of the Nomarion arm of the galaxy. The Fellowship hoped to turn it into a starhub, building a net to harvest the atomic fuel we used to pinch the folds and probe the gaps in space-time.
Unfortunately, the star’s only planet was already inhabited.
Many centuries ago, a group of peaceful separatists had elected to leave the Fellowship. They fashioned their manifesto around the original tenets of Dhao Lin, twenty-third scion of Eledar, and they called themselves the Cendants of Lin. The Cendants aspired to build a society unbound by what they saw as the technology-obsessed strictures of the galactic collective. As with any social change, progress was slow, tense and jagged. But eventually, a non-interference treaty was jointly ratified by the Coven and the separatist leadership.
Cipher YT77006 in the planetary index was identified as an optimal world to make a fresh start. Records showed a planet rich with mineral resources, and a temperate climate well-suited to the heirloom agricultural seeds the separatists had negotiated as part of the treaty. The Cendants named it Lin Den. They set forth to their new home, devoting themselves to simpler living, making their own way towards the future.
Centuries passed, and the Cendants of Lin became another footnote in the Fellowship’s vast and varied history.
Then we discovered that their star was collapsing. A routine stellar survey identified the Linstar as a supernova risk. If the star went supernova, we knew that the people of Lin Den had no means to escape that fate. When the star died, the planet and its people would die with it.
But as the star continued its slow, inexorable decay, it was also generating massive amounts of useable energy, which made it an excellent potential starhub. And in the process of siphoning off the star’s increased energetic output, we could all but eliminate the risk that it would explode.
There was just the small matter of convincing the Linden.
By this time, the Fellowship was probably little more than myth among the Linden. A dozen generations had come and gone since they first made their break from the covenant. All that remained were distorted narratives depicting the Fellowship as a failed techno-fascist society. In their telling, the Cendants of Lin had
done all they could to reform the Fellowship before they were forced to abandon their efforts and start anew.
When our ships appeared in their skies after all that time, our ambassadors were met with surprise, skepticism, and fear in equal measures. But even though this was a society founded on the rejection of advanced technology, they were a thoughtful and complex people, and as new generations were born and took the helm, old mores had mutated, evolved, or slipped away. Over the centuries, they had, in their own unique way, built a marvelously complex society. Their agrarian economy served as the backbone for a culture of inventors, artists, thinkers, and tinkerers.
Early diplomatic efforts were brittle and precarious. Our ambassadors spent years building trust. But once the Linden finally came to understand the dire truth of their situation, negotiations moved swiftly. The Fellowship offered salvation, and in exchange for our knowledge and certain technologies, the Linden agreed to harvest and share the mineral resources of their planet. That made building the starhub significantly more manageable. Otherwise, we would have had to tow some distant asteroid across light years to have the materials at hand.
Things went smoothly over the intervening decades. The Fellowship helped the leaders of the Linden build out the necessary mining infrastructure and teach people the most promising practices for extracting, processing, and refining unwrought metals; practices that were quite familiar to me. It was celebrated as a joyous return to the Fellowship for the Linden, and when all of the conditions were favorable, construction on the starhub began. As the years rolled on, it became just another one of the countless galactic development projects that were always underway somewhere in the galaxy.
But something had gone wrong, and now it was up to us to find out what.
Fringe settlers like me are a relative minority in the Fellowship. Most recruits come from the populous central worlds. When a great voyager ship like Transcendence ends up at a rim settlement like Verygone, a handful of outliers might join the crew, eager for a chance to leave behind their narrow band of mineral or fluid and venture forth into the galaxy. Of those handful, one might wind up at Forsara, willing and eligible to take the oath of the covenant and join the Fellowship.
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