The Wrong Stars

by Tim Pratt

  Callie frowned. Liars never admitted they told lies. It was always a misunderstanding or a translation error or someone else telling a lie. This was getting strange. “So stipulated.”

  “Very well. Then you acknowledge that my people are capable of telling truth strategically, when it suits our purposes? So you must consider the possibility that I am telling the truth now. I will tell you something you may already know, as your xenosociologists have noted it often. My people lie about two categories of things: the momentous, and the trivial. We make up stories about our true origins, yes, and our faith, and our culture. We mislead you about our motivations, sometimes – though our ultimate motivation is to thrive and survive. We are like humans in this way. We also lie freely about things that do not matter. Where we were yesterday, where we are going tomorrow, what we had to eat, what we do for fun, and, of course, we are often deceptively boastful. I will tell you why we lie so often: it is because transforming one’s reality through the creation of a narrative takes practice. It is easier for us to believe the big lies we tell ourselves about our past, our origins, and our future, if we are in the habit of confabulating smaller things every day. It makes reality seem more pliable, more plastic, more in our control.” Her limbs fluttered, a sinuous tremble, and Callie wished she knew better how to read Liar body language. “My tribe, my sect, is denied the comfort of those lies. We must remember the truth, and acknowledge it, because only in facing those terrible truths can we hope to safeguard the universe.”

  “Fine,” Callie said. “Then tell the truth now. Admit you destroyed Meditreme Station, and tell me why. You say our theory about your conspiracy is wrong, that you aren’t toying with humanity and keeping us in the dark while you use the rest of creation as your playground. So convince me. Make your confession.”

  The Liar was still for a moment, and then began to speak.

  * * *

  You call us Liars. We have a different name for ourselves. In your language, we would call ourselves the Free.

  I am seven hundred years old, as you would reckon time – young by the standards of my kind. There are some elders yet among us who remember the days of our servitude, though they sleep almost always now, and float in nutrient baths, with little in the way of what you would call consciousness. They live in dreams of their memories, and they are bad dreams.

  My people are capable of physically passing on our memories to one another. This is one of our great secrets. We share memories by extruding neural buds that others of our kind may consume, and so those elders are vital, because they produce the buds that are fed to the highest members of my sect. Such memories can be manipulated, or fragmented, or incomplete, and so we also maintain records, and we save artifacts – we possess an array of ancient documentation proving our sad history. There is a secret museum of our subjugation, and I spent the first centuries of my life there, being inducted into the sect of truth-tellers.

  Later, when my people first met humans, and realized the threat you posed, I was one of the delegation sent to dwell in the Oort Cloud to monitor your solar system. It is considered a very important posting, since it is the system of your home world. Had we found you some centuries earlier, when you were yet bound to Earth, we would have exterminated you, and sanitized your entire planet, as we have done in so many other systems.

  I see the horror on your faces. We have extensively studied the nuances of your kind. Yes, my sect kills, though I myself have never taken part in such an action. I am grateful I have been spared that work. It is a grim and terrible duty. The extermination of sentient life is a cause of great anguish to us, but it has always been deemed better than the alternative. We kill humanely, you see. Those we cleanse die instantly, without suffering. That is better than the alternative.

  By the time we found humans, though, it was too late: you had already sent your goldilocks ships out into the stars, hundreds of ships, each with the potential to start a new human colony. It was too late to wipe you out, so we had to… manage you instead.

  I am sorry. Normally I would extrude a neural bud for my listener to consume, so they would have the background. I would share the emotional content of my story via pheromones, and provide further nuance with chromatic variation in my skin. To transform this story into words, in a language I learned when I was already four hundred years old, is difficult. In this feeble and incomplete way, I will tell you the terrible truth at the heart of my existence, the shadow that lies across the Free:

  There once was an ancient and powerful race, originally from a distant star system in a nearby galaxy. They ranged throughout the galactic cluster, and perhaps beyond, and they ruled absolutely, not for thousands of years, but for millions. Wherever they encountered intelligent life, or life that seemed on the cusp of developing intelligence, they destroyed it. These aliens claimed to be the first life to arise in the universe, and believed the whole span of the stars was theirs by right.

  Their powers were incomprehensible. They transformed whole star systems for energy, or for their amusement, or for aesthetic reasons we cannot comprehend. They destroyed worlds for sport, or art, or to make a point, or on a whim. They called themselves – in your language you might say the First, or the Primary, or the Fundamental – but the name we settled on is the Axiom. Because they were not just the most important, not just the first, but self-evidently so, a universal truth that could not be denied, the standard by which all other forms of life must be judged and inevitably found lacking.

  But around fifty thousand years ago, the Axiom did a curious thing. They encountered a sentient species, but they did not destroy it. Instead, they subjugated them. Enslaved them. Altered them. I refer to my species, or the original ancestors of my now very different species. You call us Liars. We call ourselves the Free. Back then, we were neither: we were the Servitors, or the Subjugated, or the Enslaved.

  We originally lived on a watery planet, even more watery than Earth, and we dwelled in the oceans, though by the time the Axiom found us, we’d made progress toward transforming our bodies so we could explore the land, through selective breeding and directed mutations. When the Axiom ships appeared in the sky, we believed them to be gods. We were not wrong. I have witnessed their arrival, in a faded, fourth-hand way, from a neural bud consumed by one who consumed a bud from one who consumed a bud that came directly from a witness to the arrival.

  We speculate among ourselves about why we were chosen, from all the races the Axiom had destroyed, to become their servitor race. Originally, we had seven sexes, and all our sexes could mate with all the others, so we were reproductively robust, and displayed great genetic diversity. We also had the ability, as some bacteria do, to selectively swap genetic material with one another, passing on useful traits to our offspring. The fact that we can share memories easily makes us adept at coordination. Those qualities, and our cleverness, and dexterity, and prowess with tools, made us highly adaptable.

  But not adaptable enough for the purposes of our new masters. The Axiom lifted us up to their laboratories, and began to change us. Some of us were made into war machines, and used to destroy other life; I am told those living weapons were not even granted the peace of mindlessness, but were as self-aware as you or me. We have no memories from that line: all their neural buds were destroyed, long ago, but because of our records, in the museum of subjugation, we know. Others were made more intelligent, or given extra limbs, or altered to survive in various environments – cold, hot, dry, acidic. Some of us were even hardened against vacuum. The Axiom seldom spoke to us, you must understand. Most of us never even saw our rulers in the flesh. Instead the Axiom dominated the minds of certain individuals, through neural implants, and those overseers gave us our orders.

  There was no reward for obedience, only punishment for those who failed to obey, and the punishment was swift and irrevocable: execution. The Axiom was trying to breed disobedience out of us, you see. But we always passed on our knowledge, and if they snuffed out one of our people
for daring to question the Axiom, or for trying to escape, some part of them would survive, to be passed on to others, in secret. We learned to hide our disobedient thoughts, and to plot, and to plan.

  So it was for tens of thousands of years, and many generations. A few of us managed to escape, and stole Axiom technology, and attempted to destroy Axiom outposts and strongholds. To take the cloning factories offline, and to carve out safe systems where our children could grow up, never knowing the yoke or the lash of their old masters. The rebellion grew in strength and the attacks became more and more daring. For a time, we dared to hope.

  But the Axiom found the rebels. They killed them, and destroyed their neural buds. Then, to make sure the rest of us would never rebel again…

  Humans are eager to find the Liar homeworld. You always ask, and we make up stories, and send you along false trails. The truth is, we have no homeworld. Not anymore. The Axiom destroyed our planet. Vaporized it utterly, until only particles remained.

  Then they gathered us, all of us, in one place, and they seared our minds. They erased our hidden memories of our culture, from the time before the Axiom came, carefully passed down for generations. They erased our memories of home, and our entire collective knowledge, of everything before the day of subjugation. The only reason we know our homeworld was a watery place is because we have that single memory from that world: of the Axiom’s arrival in the sky overhead. We only even remember our rebellion because they left us with the memory of our punishment, as a reminder, and a threat, and a promise.

  If we had gods before the Axiom, it is unknown. If we had art, or music, or rituals related to love or death or war or food or friendship, we do not know. The Axiom had long subjugated us in body, but by erasing our histories, they subjugated our wills, too. We were broken. We ceased to fight. We gave up. We served them for thousands more years.

  And then, ten thousand years ago, the Axiom vanished.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Lantern went silent. Elena dashed tears from her eyes. If that story was true, even partly true, then the Liars – the Free – had experienced unimaginable suffering.

  “May I have water? My suit’s reserves are depleted.” A hatch irised open on top of the Liar’s suit, and everyone jumped back, except Callie. She rose and went to a cabinet, found a drinking bulb, put the nozzle in the hatch, and squeezed out its contents. She removed the bulb, the hatch closed, and the Liar said, “Thank you.”

  “What do you mean, the Axiom vanished?” Callie said.

  “They went away. We believe very few of them had physical bodies at that point, and those who did went into stasis. The rest were machine intelligences, or energy beings. The former ceased communicating with this world, and the latter seemed to dissipate. The Axiom gave us no warning, and no explanations. One day, there simply were no more orders. The overseers wandered around blankly in the absence of further instructions. The Axiom machinery kept running, until it ran down, but they built well, so even now many of their machines are still operational. They left vast projects half-finished, or abandoned on the very cusp of completion. Those facts make us speculate that the Axiom had to leave, that something drove them to an urgent retreat, but who knows? We never understood half of what the Axiom did. Some think the Axiom uploaded themselves into a simulated universe, one they could control more completely. Or they may be in hibernation, waiting for some future moment to return, though we know not why, or for what. Some of us believe that the Axiom learned to create new universes, and that they emigrated to one, with fundamental forces arranged better to their liking.

  “Whatever the reason, our masters were gone, and at first my people were lost and confused and frightened. But then we rejoiced. The universe was ours, you see. Some Axiom technology was mysterious to us, or couldn’t be operated by the Free, but many useful things were left behind. The Tanzer drives. The great power stations, like this star, with its collector-shell. We had resources, and long lives, and expertise. We could survive. We could thrive. We were free, for the first time. But we did not know what to do.” A sigh. “We had no history, you see. No culture. No conception of ourselves as anything but an enslaved people. There were many billions of us, scattered throughout the galaxy, once completely controlled, but suddenly released to make our own way. Is it any wonder that we took our ships and fled to all the distant corners of space? That we began to make up stories about ourselves, to reinvent ourselves in a million different ways, with a million different imaginary histories, all to obscure the shame and horror of our true origins? But a few of us were dedicated to remembering. The truth-tellers held on to the horrible memories and proofs of our reality. Apart from a few thousand truly isolated clans, everyone born in my species is visited by a member of my sect, and offered the opportunity to learn the truth: they are invited to visit the museum of subjugation, to see the data and consume the neural buds, and learn what we truly are. Once upon a time, more than half of our kind chose to find out the truth. Now, it is less than a quarter.”

  “Maybe it’s good to move on,” Stephen said. “Since the Axiom are gone. Perhaps your people can emerge from that shadow.”

  “But they aren’t gone,” Lantern said. “That’s the whole point, don’t you see? They are only sleeping, and they may remain asleep, but only if we do not disturb them. They don’t care about us. They don’t care what we do, or how we spend our time, as long as we don’t bother them. We looted their bases and laboratories and barracks and slave pens, took the ships the Axiom had given us to serve them, and that was fine. But the first time a group of the Free visited one of their cities, one of the planets where the Axiom had lived in isolation, served by machines instead of living slaves, where we thought the true miracles and marvels of their technology might be hidden… The sleeping machines noticed the trespassers, and woke up. The machines killed the expeditionary force, and tracked the clan back to their home, and destroyed that. The remaining Free in that system were enraged, and tried to destroy the Axiom planet, and the machines – and soon the whole system was destroyed. The star was somehow induced to go supernova, and took out all the habitable planets with it.”

  “God,” Elena breathed.

  Lantern fluttered. “The Axiom do not wish to be disturbed. My order is devoted to making sure the Axiom are not disturbed. Our old masters could create singularities at will, you know. They could move whole systems from place to place. They controlled inertia and gravity – we have access to some of the tools they used to do that, but we don’t know how they work. They could create life, and destroy it, and convert matter to energy and back again with trivial ease. They could alter objects at the molecular level. They dominated everything, from the macro to the micro. They smashed stars together, sometimes, perhaps just to enjoy the resulting light show. What do you think will happen if we bother them again, and they wake from their slumber? What will they do if we cause them the least little bit of trouble?”

  “So the station Elena and her crew found,” Callie said. “It’s an Axiom station.”

  “Yes,” Lantern said. “When I was in the walls, I accessed the record of Elena’s story. Her crew must have found a repair and shipbuilding facility. The station perceived their ship as a damaged Liar vessel, and the crew as damaged or rebellious Liars. The station attempted to implant neural machinery to bring the crew back into compliance, and fitted the ship with what was, once, a standard element of the Axiom fleet: a point-to-point wormhole generator.” Lantern trembled again. “Those are forbidden now. We do not use them. We throw them into suns when we find them.”

  “Why is it so important to destroy the bridge generator?” Callie said. “Even if your story is true, how does that justify murdering fifty thousand people to destroy one piece of alien tech? Is it just a religious thing in your cult?”

  “No. It is a practical reason. I– There is a pest on Earth called an ant, yes?”

  “Sure.”

  “Imagine you are with your family on Earth, at a table,
eating on, what is it? A patio, just outside your house. Humans do this, yes, on your homeworld? It is nice day. You are enjoying your meal. Then you see a single ant crawl across the table. Perhaps you ignore it. But imagine a second ant crawls after the first, and tries to get to the food on your plate. You might feel a flicker of annoyance, and squash this ant, or flick it away. Then imagine a third, a fourth, a tenth, a twentieth ant, a hundredth. What then? You rise from the table. You fear the ants will get into your food, into your clothes, they will ruin everything, make you uncomfortable, spoil things. So you kill the ants. Why not? They are a pest, meaningless and numerous. But the ants keep coming. You begin to think, what if they go into my house? What if they crawl inside my walls? What if they swarm everywhere, crawl inside my electronics, ruin my comfortable existence? So you decide to trace their path all the way back to their nest. You pour gasoline into that nest. You set it on fire and burn them all and destroy them utterly. Do you understand?”

  “We’re the ants,” Stephen said. “If one of us stumbles into Axiom space, the Axiom might ignore it, or think it’s trivial, or settle for killing the invader and then going back to sleep. If more and more of us show up, though, they might grow annoyed, wake up, follow us back to our source, and wipe us out.”

  “It has happened.” Lantern’s voice was leaden. “There was another sentient race, far from your solar system. This was only six hundred years ago. Not long at all. These people… if you are like your monkeys, and we are like some of your sea creatures, they were more like your insects. But they were builders, and smart. When we found their species, they already had slow local space travel, and were exploring their system. Millions of years before that, though, when they were just barely sentient bugs and not a spacefaring civilization, the Axiom built a factory in the heart of one of their gas giants. These insect people, they sent probes, and found the factory, and they were very excited. As you would have been, if you’d found evidence of a vast alien building project deep in the clouds of Jupiter, say. We met the insects soon after they found the installation, and we tried to warn them away. We told them it was our factory, to leave it alone, but they were stubborn and single-minded and they mounted an expedition to the facility. They woke the Axiom.”