Kamakie clasped his gloved hands behind his back, looked down at the solid air beneath his boots. “Somehow, their weapons didn’t affect me. I made it outside and I looked up,” he said. “I stared into the sun—into you. I relayed a message then, didn’t I? Because your light went off a few hours later, and it hasn’t come back.” She nodded. “Will it come on again?” She shrugged.
“I still haven’t atoned,” she said. “I still don’t know how.”
Despite the darkness, she could see his smile, in many small frequencies. “I know of a way.”
They climbed in silence for a while, but when they had left the valley, she said, “Why were you out here alone? You came from one of the locksteps, but you awoke off schedule, didn’t you? There are no cities awake on Sagitta; I would have seen them by their heat.”
“My lockstep has another fifteen years before it wakes,” he admitted. “If I was to make it to the meeting, I had to leave now.”
“Meeting? In another lockstep? One that sleeps and wakes on a different schedule?” He nodded. “But if your city’s not awake, neither is any other. Where’s this lockstep?”
“It’s not a city. Just a single ship. I was told it would be waiting in Ariosto Valles.” He pointed. “Over there.”
“Oh.” She hesitated, stopped.
“Come with me,” he said.
“I can’t, if you’re leaving Sagitta,” she said. “Sagitta is my responsibility, my garden to tend. I still have to atone.”
“You can do that by spreading the News.” He started walking again, seemingly confident she would follow. “The fresh News, I mean. All you have to do is tell your Self, up there”—he pointed at the star-crowded sky—“and you’ll have discharged your duty here. Your light will return to this world, and you”—he pointed at her human-shaped avatar—“will no longer be needed. Come with me and you can do far more than atone—far more than you could ever do here.”
She hurried to catch up. “I don’t understand.”
“The News is that however vast the ring of time is, it’s finite. Because it’s finite, we”—he touched her shoulder—“can add to or subtract from the total amount of happiness in the universe. It’s up to us. Now, me, I think the ring of time can contain more laughter than tears—but it’s up to us to make sure that happens.”
“How?”
“By spreading the News, of course!” He laughed. “The ship I’m joining, it’s on a lockstep at a longer frequency than mine. Mine is 360/1—thirty years asleep for every month awake. That schedule lets us travel a light-year or so every ‘month’ of our time. Ours is a pretty big civilization, but it only spans a few dozen stars. But some of the first to hear this News sent messages to other locksteps, and together they decided to create a protocol for spreading the word. This protocol is called the Nests.
“We’ve set a second lockstep in motion. This one’s frequency is 129,600/1: ten thousand years asleep for every month awake. A realtimer lives thirty years between awakenings of my lockstep, and I would experience thirty years between awakenings of this second lockstep. Its people will be able to travel five thousand light-years in one of their years. They can spread the News far.
“That lockstep will have a third within it, and there’ll be a fourth in the third. The third sleeps two and a half million years at a time, the fourth thirty-one million. Their citizens will stride the galaxy, and the spaces between the galaxies, the way we travel between the planets. Their wakings will be synchronized with those beneath them, so communication can flow up and down from realtime to the most immortal. Together, they’ll spread the News throughout the visible universe.
“The lockstep that sleeps thirty-one million years, we’re calling the Maha-Yuga, or Magisterium Lockstep.
“I volunteered to join the Magisterium. Would you like to come along?”
Eos almost tripped. She tried to bluster a reply but then thought of the doll she’d cradled when she last walked these hills. She pictured herself as she and her sisters once had, as a mother casting her children forward in time. To what destiny? She’d believed there were no choices that mattered in that future, because all choices would be made, but in this moment she saw the alternative—a golden path all conscious beings could take.
Kamakie had been dead serious when he’d asked his question in the hibernaculum: how different would her future lives have to be for them to no longer be hers? Could it be she had lived all lives and would live them all again? In which case, even if she were completely selfish—especially if she were completely selfish—she must choose to maximize the happiness of every single one.
She felt weightless. She started to laugh. “I came to atone!” she said. “I wasn’t expecting to be given a gift!”
Kamakie laughed too, in surprise as much as delight.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she said, impatiently taking his hand and pulling him onward.
“We have lives to live.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KARL SCHROEDER (kschroeder.com) was born into a Mennonite community in Manitoba, Canada, in 1962. He started writing at age fourteen, following in the footsteps of A. E. van Vogt, who came from the same Mennonite community. He moved to Toronto in 1986 and became a founding member of SF Canada (he was president from 1996–97). He sold early stories to Canadian magazines, and his first novel, The Claus Effect (with David Nickle) appeared in 1997. His first solo novel, Ventus, was published in 2000, and was followed by Permanence and Lady of Mazes. His most recent work includes the Virga series of science fiction novels (Sun of Suns, Queen of Candesce, Pirate Sun, The Sunless Countries, and Ashes of Candesce) and the YA space opera Lockstep. He also collaborated with Cory Doctorow on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Science Fiction. Schroeder lives in East Toronto with his wife and daughter.
TOMORROW WHEN WE SEE THE SUN
A. MERC RUSTAD
I.
The last wolflord will be executed on the cusp of the new solar year.
II.
Wolflord (title): nomadic, nameless survivors of destroyed warships; those who did not accept ritual immolation during the Decommission. No allegiance to the Principality; outlaws. The antiquated title is self-taken from the first deserter, whose name and memory were erased upon execution; precise origin unknown.
* * * *
Released from its stasis, Mere stretches and glides through the wide atrium wreathed in bionic roses and silk banners. It pauses at the gates that hang perpetually open on the Courts of Tranquility. The sensory matrix on the threshold purrs against its consciousness in greeting.
“What awaits this it?” Mere asks the threshold.
The last wolflord. A great victory.
Mere feels nothing at the announcement, as it should. It is not allowed emotion.
It parades to the pool, proud-arched spine and lifted jaw; autonomous machine-flesh granted scraps of self and mind.
(In the glued and stapled seams, it has painted its own awareness. A taste for Zhouderrian wines fermented in the aftermath of white dwarf stars; the poetry of Li Sin, disfavored master of nanite-barbed words; desire stacked like coiled DNA strands, a tower of cards; a voice etched from grave-silence and forgotten pauses between peace and war. It displays none of itself, for it has also learned fear: It can be taken apart and erased if it deviates from its scripted role.)
Mere crouches at the pool’s lip. Once its function is complete, it will be returned to stasis. Mere dreads its inevitable sleep.
From this vantage, it surveys the Courts of Tranquility, the synaptic-like rainfall of light along the membranous domed ceiling, the living heartbeat of the tamed planet carved and grown to a million fine-tuned specifications and indulgences. And those within, oh yes, it has seen these courtiers often:
—nobles in redolent synth armor; generals and admirals decked in finest military dress; pilots, their faces replaced with the mindscreens of their ships—
—an eleven-souled sorcerer who drinks the breath of h
is favorite nemesis, their words twined together as they spar with tongue and gaze, neither ever ready to destroy the other (for then the fun would end)—
—the Gold Sun Lord, resplendent armored god, ensconced in a hover-throne that drifts about the Courts, omnipresent and untouchable—
And below, in the oblong pool where Mere has spent half of its conscious existence, the last wolflord is bound wrist and ankle, suspended in water as every ancillary world watches the feed. There will be no backup made of the wolflord’s mind, no funerary rites in the Archives of Heaven. Treason unto the Principality is not suffered lightly.
The Arbiter of the Suns steps forward and lifts reedy, sulfur-scorched hands. Smoke-cured breath fills ordained words with harmonies and atonal bass-clef chords. “You are summoned here, dearly condemned . . .”
Mere unbends its body, muscle and ligament stretched along metal bones, and glides into the pool, water slicing to either side of its midriff. It cradles the disgraced wolflord’s head in one splayed hand. The other, fingers knife-tipped, rests along the condemned’s throat. Unseen, Mere spools neuron-thin tendrils into the base of the wolflord’s spine and siphons away pain and fear.
The wolflord’s body slackens in synthesized, unwanted calm. “Why do this?” the wolflord grinds out, words blocked by auditory and visual firewalls. None in the Courts of Tranquility will witness a criminal’s last words.
By protocol, Mere is granted the same erasure. It could scream and curse, and no one would hear (except its keepers, silent beneath the pool and always watching). “It is civilized,” Mere says with a mocking smile.
“No.” The wolflord struggles to speak. “You. Why do you . . . obey, Mere . . .”
Mere has never heard its name, found upon waking when it was first brought online, spoken aloud. For the first time since it has served as executioner (sixteen hundred rotations), Mere wants an answer from the damned: “How do you know this it?”
The wolflord’s eyelids droop with the sedative. “Loved you . . . once . . . I am so . . . sorry . . .”
“. . . and thus the heavens are cleansed anew,” says the Arbiter, and Mere cuts the last wolflord’s throat.
Blood ribbons out, diluted and sucked clean into vents. The wolflord’s spirit sinks as a glossy pebble to the pool’s bed.
Mere glances up at the Arbiter’s consorts that are ringed about the pool edge. Tattooed jawbones, bared of muscle and flesh, grin with engraved teeth; razored laughter cooks inside skinned throats.
“Where did you net the wolflord?” Mere asks.
They hum a response in chorus, each voice sculpted as a single, distinct, perfect note.
You shouldn’t care for the dead.
A traitor on the rim of knownspace,
seeking paradise in madness.
Spoke of you, of others lost,
begged mercy for crimes
and forgiveness, never granted.
They tip eyeless heads down in regret. The Arbiter’s consorts are hunters and bailiffs, as close to allies—never friends, never close—as Mere has. They bring it trinkets and bits of new poetry, synthesized tastings of wine, scents of uncharted galaxies and the sound of dying stars. In return, Mere slips the consorts filaments forged between its ribs to dull their unceasing pain.
(Sometimes, they share fragments of memory of who they were before they were exulted. Mere has trouble recalling what they have told it.)
Mere unwinds the neural threads from its fingertips, catching final memories and thought-imprints in illegal mods on its palms. It scythes its fingers in the water to wash away the blood.
With duty finished, the Arbiter glides away, flanked by consorts, to join the eleven-souled sorcerer at a table.
The wolflord’s hair fans out in gray strands that brush and twine lifeless about Mere’s wrist. Mere tilts its head, startled by the odd sensation, like it is choking. Is this grief? How can it grieve what it does not remember?
* * * *
Mere is put back in stasis, where it dreams.
The keepers do not watch Mere sleep. So, it unwraps the last wolflord’s stolen memories.
her hair smells of ruined worlds and clover soap
bring my conquests, she says, bring all of them and I will aid you
she whispers a string of coordinates, a planet once called Rebirth
each kiss nettles the tongue with microscopic treason, plague passed mouth to mouth
call forth the Red Sun Lord, champion of the dead
let us live again; let us rebuild; let us redeem ourselves
The rest: lost like unsanctioned souls brewed in a frosted glass kept chilled at zero Kelvin.
Mere aches, a phantom-physical sensation it cannot control.
There remains an early impression in its subconscious: on a barren world, a laboratory lined with glass suspension tanks, cold-filled with other bodies. Mere has no empirical evidence the recollection is its own. It was made, but by whom is unknown.
(It has no desire for a creator.)
Yet, the she with the plague kiss—it feels kinship for her, sharp, embossed on its awareness with sudden heat.
* * * *
The Decommission (event): as a measure of good faith upon the signing of the peace treaty between the Seven Sun Lords, each god decommissioned and executed one thousand of their most powerful warships. Each ship and its pilot self-destructed within an uninhabited system of choice and were granted honor in the eyes of the Seven Suns.
* * * *
Mere wakes without its keepers’ bidding. It blinks back the protective film on its eyes and stares at the lid of its stasis pod. Odd. Mere presses its palm against the lid, and it retracts into the floor.
A she crouches outside, dressed in mirrorsilk armor, visor drawn over her face so all it sees is its own reflection. “Mere?” she says, synthesized voice low.
“You have acquired unauthorized access to this it,” Mere says. “It is curious why.”
The stasis chamber is empty. Unadorned red walls and its stasis pod in the center with a ring of security lights above. Mere notes the disabled alarms and the blinding virus chewing at the keepers’ optic feeds.
The she flicks her visor up. Her eyes are quicksilver, liquid and bright—cybernetic implants that contrast space-dark skin. “I’m Century. I’m here to free you.”
Mere is intrigued. No one has ever wished to free it, not even the Arbiter’s consorts. “Why?”
“I made you,” she says. The smell of the ancient laboratory is etched under her armor. “A crime I cannot undo. But we have no time. You have already been condemned for not reporting this security breach.” Her lips twist in a bitter smile. “Do you want to live?”
Mere has no organic heart (it knows the rhythmic beat of muscle against bone, has read of it in lines of Li Sin’s poetry), yet it still knows fear. It lost any choice when the she broke in.
“It will follow, then.”
* * * *
Century blurs down the maintenance halls, the invisible veins of the Courts, enhanced speed given by her armor. Mere lopes at her heels.
It processes data and sensation in microseconds:
—it is exile, a faulty machine to be unmade—
—this is no coincidence Century broke into the Courts of Tranquility, a feat deemed impossible by the Principality, only hours after the last wolflord died—
—it is exhilarated—
—what will it do now? Its purpose, courtly executioner, has been dismantled—
They slip beneath the cityskin to the spaceport. Vessels of all make and class dock in thousands of bays. Century stops before an eel-ship, coiled in jewel-skinned splendor. Its great eye-ports are open, and Century signals with a hand; the eel extends a proboscis lined with diamond mesh and graphene plates like a ramp. Century leads Mere into the eel’s body.
Alarms klaxon in Mere’s head—its escape is known.
Within the eel’s retrofitted abdomen, synthetic tubes house the mechanics and computerized guts.
Finery for living; oxygen filtration system and water recycling.
“Where will you take it?” Mere asks.
Century does not reply.
Mere crouches, toe-talons locked against the mesh floor panel. The she whispers to the eel-ship, and the great sinuous vessel unpeels itself from the port and scythes into vacuum.
III.
Olinara V (planet, former population: seventeen million): once a thriving colony world settled early in the founding of the Principality, it was destroyed by the Gold Sun Lord when an escaped trinket-slave sought refuge in the Olinarain wilds. Olinara V is now classified as an uninhabitable world.
* * * *
Mere has never been off-world. It taps the gills of the eel-ship, which obliges and unfurls interior flaps of skin to reveal translucent, hardened outerflesh and a view of space.
This odd, unclassifiable sense of kinship with the dead has grown the farther from the Courts they travel—a need (honor-bound) to see the dead to proper rest so they might pass into one of the afterlives in paradise or purgatory, reinvention or rebirth. It has killed so many, it longs to redeem itself. The last wolflord gave it the key.
“Why did you free this it?” Mere asks.
“An old debt.” Century grinds her teeth. “Once we’re out of range of the Courts’ sensors, I jettison you in a shuttle, wraith. You can make your own path.”
Mere pets the eel-ship, grateful for the indulgence, and turns toward the she. “Take it to the Court of the Red Sun first.”
“No,” Century says.
“You will.” Mere flexes its hands. “You forged this exile without consent. You owe this it.”
Century whirls. The she has a plasgun at its jaw, muzzle pressed into soft tissue beneath its chin, and in turn, it rests its fingertips against the back of her neck. It looks down at her. The mirrorsilk burns into its skin, coiling up its wrist and burrowing toward bone.
“I can unmake you far easier than I made you, Mere.”
“It can sever your brainstem through your armor with but a gentle pinch of its fingers.”
Cosmic Powers Page 19
