Stars & Empire: 10 Galactic Tales

by Jay Allan

  “Power’s been low the past few days,” the revisor said, wiping its nose with a sniff. “Battery problems.” The revisor wore a long white coat with the image of a human brain on it. “Welp, nothing for it then. Have to do you one at a time. Start with you, little lady, I suppose.”

  “Thank you,” she said, and meant it. She wouldn’t have to watch Tanner’s revision.

  The revisor looked at her strangely. “You’re thanking me for doing this? You krub are an odd lot. An odd, odd lot.”

  “I’m a gol, like you.”

  The revisor glanced down at her chest, and lowered the telescopic monocle that was secured to a band around its head. “And so you are. A high ranking one at that. Too bad for you.” The gol pressed a button on the pad beside the chair.

  The machine turned on.

  CHAPTER 36

  Ari stood on a tiny island of sand. There was a palm tree beside her, with a single coconut hanging from the branches. Around her the ocean seethed and boiled, though the massive waves never touched her island. Directly above, the sky was clear, sunny. A few miles off, the horizons on all sides were devoured by swirling, black clouds.

  In the storm she saw her existing memories. They fought and grappled with one another for a chance to bubble to the surface, if only fleetingly. New, foreign memories competed with the old, becoming stronger and more frequent with each moment, so that as she watched, the seething mass of clouds became a potpourri of sights and sounds, tastes and smells, touches and emotions.

  Old memories of triumph, friendship, and ascension. Of service to humankind.

  New memories of loss, beatings, and captivity. Of service to Jeremy.

  Pain spasmed through her body. The pulses of agony originated at her temples, and resounded through the core of her being like the hammer blows of a smith at the forge, refashioning her into a shape designed by another. All that she was, all that she was meant to be, destroyed and changed by a thousand electrical pulses fired into her mind.

  She dropped to her hands and knees in the sand, and then collapsed entirely. Through vision gone red with pain, she gazed at the dwindling portion of open sky directly above, a sky hemmed by ever tightening storm clouds. The palm tree swayed in the wind.

  The palm tree.

  Her eyes fastened on the brown husk nestled in the fan-shaped leaves.

  A coconut.

  Somehow, she knew that hard shell protected the part of her which could never be changed. If she could just reach that coconut …

  She dragged herself across the island. Lift one hand. The other. Haul the knees forward. Again. Pace by tiny pace. The base of the tree seemed so very far away. Sand got into her fingernails. Strings of mucus dripped onto her lips. The sand got into those strings too, and smeared her face with a line of grit. Her head pounded.

  She reached the palm tree and looked up. The trunk had grown, and the coconut was higher now. She was running out of time. Had to climb. Couldn’t wait. Around her, the eye of the hurricane shrank, and the waters roiled with increasing ferocity, eager to drown her being.

  The pain became too much then, and her body betrayed her. She convulsed in sheer agony, involuntarily slamming her knees into her chin. She shuddered, howling like a madwoman.

  The wave of pain passed.

  She regained control.

  She put her hands on the scab-like rinds of the trunk and began to climb.

  But the tree transformed into a wall of stone. A wall that reached the sky.

  The Forever Gate.

  She climbed that wall, and the ocean waves fought her, hurling into her body. She had to hold her breath sometimes when the water submersed her. The rocky surface became slippery, precarious, but she forced herself onward, digging within herself to find an endurance and intensity of focus she didn’t think she had. The mind controls its own reality, wasn’t that what someone close to her had once said?

  The slap of a giant wave nearly tore her from the wall.

  Somehow, she held on.

  But it was hopeless. The coconut kept sliding farther and farther up along the wall, the wall that ran to forever. Her unchangeable essence, all that she was, impossibly out of reach.

  Dad …

  Another wave struck and she was swept from the wall.

  She opened her eyes. Her cheeks were wet, as if she’d been crying. Her throat burned, as if she’d been yelling. Her clothes felt damp, as if she’d been splashed.

  She sat in a strange seat. There was a strange man opposite her, tied to an equally strange chair. Strange bars of light rotated around his head. He had strange prongs attached to his forehead, and his wrists were clamped in strange bracelets. Like hers.

  Ah, she recognized him now. It was Max! Good old Max.

  A kindly man came over, and she looked at him shyly. He was dressed all in white, and had a bronze tube over his left eye, a tube with glass at the tip.

  “Welp, nice to see you made it back.” The man held up a small stick of metal. “Keep your head still and look to the left.” She obeyed instantly, and he shone a light into her eye from the stick. It made her blink.

  “What’s your name?” the kindly man said.

  “Maggie.”

  CHAPTER 37

  She smiled timidly at the man.

  “Good.” The kindly man pulled the lightstick away. “Looks like the revision took nicely.”

  “You’re so nice,” she said to the kindly man, feeling bashful.

  He gave her a pat on the head.

  “Your name’s not Maggie,” Max said across from her. His voice seemed stern.

  “Who are you talking to, Max?” she said. Max was the only one she was allowed to directly question. “I’m Maggie.”

  “No. You’re not.” She saw the cords in Max’s neck stand out, as if he struggled against the binds that held him. Which made no sense. Obviously Master Jeremy had placed the binds there. Why would Max fight against something Master Jeremy wanted?

  The kindly man unlocked her binds. “Welp, on your feet Maggie.”

  She hopped to it.

  “You’re going to make such a good whore.” The kindly man smiled.

  She felt her heart swell. It felt so good to please.

  Images of Master Jeremy surged into her mind, and she instantly felt bad. The kindly man wasn’t the one she should be pleasing. She lived only to service one man, a man who had been so nice to her, it was heartbreaking. She wanted to make sure he was happy. How she loved having him happy. Master Jeremy Jeremy Jeremy I love you I love you I want you.

  But then the kindly man did something that distracted her. He pressed something on the desk near Max, and the chair that her only friend was tied to began to hum. The bars of light behind Max’s head pulsed faster and faster. Max clenched his teeth, and his knuckles turned white.

  The kindly man was hurting him.

  “What are you—” she stopped herself. She was only allowed to question Max and no one else. Especially not the kindly man who was no longer kindly.

  Max’s eyes seemed to cloud over, his tongue lolled from his mouth, and a stream of spittle oozed from his lips. The skin around his temples bunched up as the dead weight of his head pressed into the prongs. A quiet moan escaped his throat, a moan that slowly rose in volume until it was an all-out scream.

  “Please,” she said to the bad man, but she couldn’t hear her own voice above that scream.

  Max Max Max no no no! Her only friend, the only other person who adored Master Jeremy as much as she did, was dying. And there was nothing she could do about it.

  As she stood there watching the bad man torture Max, a lock broke inside her, and a doorway flung open to the part of her mind that memory and personality couldn’t overwrite. The part of her mind that wouldn’t allow someone she cared about to suffer. No matter what.

  Without really knowing what she was doing, she went to the bad man, and he looked at her in surprise. She slammed her palm into the bronze tube that covered his left eye. The tube
plunged into his skull, and the bad man crumpled to the floor.

  Max’s yell had faded to a gurgle. She struggled to lift the prongs from his forehead, but they wouldn’t move, the ends jammed into the back of the chair. Those bars of light behind Max’s head switched colors faster than ever.

  She went to the pad where she’d seen the bad man work at the desk, and she touched a bunch of different words and pictures. The pad lit up beneath her fingers, and sometimes the contents changed. She recognized a few words on it, but most of them meant nothing to her. Regress. Extract. Resume. Cancel.

  Pressing Cancel did it.

  The hum faded. The lights behind Max’s head went out. His gurgling stopped.

  She tried those prongs again, and this time they gave. The metal slid up his temples, and because all his weight was on them, she etched long red marks across his forehead. When she’d finally lifted the prongs free, his head slumped forward, startling her.

  “Max?”

  She tried to take off the binds at his wrists, and it took her a few moments to figure out the latch that unlocked them. Next she opened the buckle at his waist, and he fell into her arms.

  “Max, are you okay? Max?” She tried to open one of his eyelids.

  He snapped awake. “Ari!” He hugged her. “Thought I’d lost you.”

  “Max,” she smiled. “It’s me. Maggie!”

  “Damn,” Max said.

  She heard footsteps, and another man dressed in white appeared at the door. She couldn’t tell if he was good or bad. The eyes of the new man widened when he saw them.

  Max leaped from her arms and immediately tackled the man. Max thumped him on the head until the man sagged like a rag doll. Then he stood up and dashed from the room.

  She wasn’t sure if she was supposed to follow him, and she started to panic. “Max?” She hugged herself, and glanced around the empty room nervously. “Max!”

  He returned, and she nearly cried with relief. She’d never been so happy to see him.

  “I’m scared Max,” she said. “Are we in trouble with Master Jeremy?”

  He grabbed both her hands, and sat her in the same chair she’d awakened in. She obeyed, as was her nature. “We don’t have much time.” He secured the clamps around her wrists, and buckled the belt.

  “Max are we in trouble?” she said again.

  “We are.” Max lowered the prongs over her forehead.

  “It’s cold,” she said, and shivered. For some reason she didn’t think she was supposed to feel cold anymore. “Let’s go back to Master Jeremy. Let’s get the beatings done with. Please Max.”

  Max studied the pad beside her chair. “I’ve only ever read about these in the system archives. Never actually used one.”

  The white-coated man near the door awakened with a groan. Max went to him, and hauled him over to the pad. He wrapped his hands around the man’s throat. “Restore her or I crush your windpipe.”

  The man stared groggily at the pad, then began pressing buttons. Max watched him carefully. “If she doesn’t wake up as the woman I know, I’m putting you in the other chair and giving you the revision meant for me.”

  The man said nothing, but pressed a button on the pad and the chair hummed to life.

  She was scared, more scared than she’d ever been in her tiny, sheltered life. A sudden thought occurred to her.

  “Max?” she said. “Do you love me?”

  Those words got his attention, and he looked from the pad. “I…”

  “Do you?”

  He opened his mouth, but then shook his head. “She’s not herself,” he said quietly. Max glanced at the man, and tightened his grip around that throat. “Do it.”

  The man slid his fingers across the pad.

  “See you in a bit, Ari,” Max said.

  She found herself on a tiny island, surrounded by a vortex of memory. The vortex, and the stormy sea around her, receded, so that the island grew until around her lay only sand—dunes and dunes of the gritty stuff hunching to the clear horizon. Behind her, the Forever Gate climbed to infinity.

  Her father was here. He’d crossed the Gate for her.

  In his hands, he held the twin halves of a coconut.

  “Step through the mirror,” he said, extending the halves.

  She took the broken shells, and sipped the sweet, nourishing liquid inside.

  The sand sprouted grass, trees, and bushes.

  She looked to her father in wonder, but he was gone.

  In his place stood a mirror. The blooming landscape reflected back at her. Round leaves, rich trunks, flowering hedges, everything reproduced in minute detail. Everything except herself.

  She had no reflection.

  She stepped through the mirror.

  CHAPTER 38

  She opened her eyes to see Tanner watching her, holding one of the revisors by the neck.

  “Tanner,” she said.

  Tanner rammed the revisor’s head into the desk, knocking the gol unconscious.

  He freed her from the chair. “Welcome back, Ari.” He turned away without so much as a hug.

  Ari stood. Another revisor lay sprawled on the floor beside her. The tip of the telescopic monocle poked from the gol’s eye, where someone had hammered it in. Blood from the wound plastered the revisor’s face. More of Tanner’s handiwork?

  “Hurry,” Tanner said. Just as if he were blind, he began to slide his hands over the desk that abutted the chair opposite hers. “We have to find the Revision Box.”

  Of course. This room was sourced from a Box, like the Control Room.

  Ari surveyed the desk beside her. “What’s it look like?”

  “You can only see the Box when it’s closed,” Tanner said.

  “Ah.” So she did as Tanner did, and glided her fingers across the desk beside her, and over the strange levers and dials, and above and around the revision chair. She moved forward to search behind the chair, and the toe of her boot stubbed an invisible object on the floor. Like a street mummer she was able to outline the shape of an unseen chest. Made of wood, she thought, judging from the grainy texture. The lid seemed open.

  “Found it,” she said, feeling a swell of pride at having discovered the Box first. She really did enjoy winning.

  She closed the lid.

  Instantly the fabric of reality stretched and folded, and the revision chairs, the desks and everything else warped along that fabric, twisting into the invisible box as if the entire chamber were some tapestry folding in upon itself. The whole room seemed to whip right through her body, and she felt strange inside, unreal.

  Then it was done. Only bare walls, ceiling and floor were left, with not a piece of furniture in sight save for the sealed wooden chest at Ari’s feet.

  That strange feeling of unreality inside her worsened all of a sudden, and she keeled over and threw up.

  “Forgot to tell you.” Tanner came up beside her. “It’s best to close the Box from behind.”

  “Great.” She wiped her hand across her lips, and swallowed the acrid taste from her mouth. She hated throwing up.

  Ari turned the key that sat in the lock of the chest, pocketed it, and scooped the Box under one arm. “Surprisingly light.”

  “Or you’re surprisingly strong.” Tanner smiled ironically. “Like a gol maybe?”

  Ari and Tanner dashed into the adjoining room, which was empty save for two ladderback chairs set against the wall, and the Direwalker with a twisted neck on the floor. Nicely done, Tanner.

  The two of them crossed to the corridor beyond.

  Here the walls were white, and arches embossed with carvings of sea creatures decorated the doorways of the side chambers. A gold-rimmed red carpet ran along the center of the floor. Triple-pronged candelabras were set every five paces.

  “Which way?” Tanner said.

  She ran the blueprint of the house through her mind, this place she’d lived and walked through so many times in her early twenties. Urgent footfalls and shouts echoed from somewhere
ahead.

  “Ari, they’re onto us.” Tanner’s voice cut with impatience. “Which way?”

  When she didn’t answer, Tanner took a step forward.

  Ari shot out a hand and blocked him. She glanced downward, indicating the gold-trimmed carpet. “What’s really a carpet, and what’s something else? This way.”

  Ari dashed forward, taking care to run along the bare floor between carpet and wall. Tanner followed in single-file behind her.

  On the far side of the corridor four Direwalkers rounded the bend at a sprint. They spotted Ari and Tanner and gave a hoot. Two of them held fire swords, their fire swords, and the blades glowed a molten red.

  “Ari…” Tanner’s voice drifted to her.

  She spun into a side hall as flames roared from those blades. Tanner jostled into her, the back of his uniform singed.

  Ari raced down the corridor, and on the right side the hallway opened onto a flight of wooden stairs—the back route the servants used.

  Ari took the stairs three at a time. At the bottom, she turned into the kitchen, and hurried through the hanging pots and pans. There were no cooks here, not at this hour.

  “The back door is just this way,” she said.

  “Why do builders always put the back doors in the kitchens?” Tanner said.

  Ari ignored the comment, because just ahead seven Direwalkers guarded the door.

  CHAPTER 39

  Ari immediately backtracked.

  The other pursuing Direwalkers burst into the far side of the kitchen. The fire swords flared in the grips of the two at the front.

  Ari turned into the pantry, and raced past the foodstuffs and out into the main dining hall. She edged by the blackwood table and out into a hallway that was much the same as the one on the second floor, absent the carpet.

  Tanner kept close to her side, and behind she heard the footfalls of Direwalkers, growing in volume. It was an eerie sound, the clatter of claws against marble, and she knew that some of the Direwalkers had broken ahead of the pack and were running on all fours.

  She and Tanner burst into the empty reception hall. She dashed obliquely toward the sword rack, taking a circuit around the carpet.